rriving at the Ring was a political fiction, but that didn’t keep it from being real. There was no physical boundary to say that this was within the realm of the object. There was no port to dock at. The Behemoth’s sensory arrays had been sucking in data from the Ring since before they’d left Tycho. The Martian science ships and Earth military forces that had been there before the doomed Belter kid had become its first casualty were still there, where they had been, but resupplied now. The new Martian ships had joined them, matched orbit, and were hanging quietly in the sky. The Earth flotilla, like the Behemoth, was in the last part of the burn, pulling up to whatever range they’d chosen to stop at. To say, We have come across the vast abyss to float at this distance and now we are here. We’ve arrived.
As far as anyone could tell, the Ring didn’t give a damn.
The structure itself was eerie. The surface was a series of twisting ridges that spiraled around its body. At first they appeared uneven, almost messy. The mathematicians, architects, and physicists assured them all that there was a deep regularity there: the height of the ridges in a complex harmony with the width and the spacing between the peaks and valleys. The reports were breathless, finding one layer of complexity after another, the intimations of intention and design all laid bare without any hint of what it all might mean.
“The official Martian reports have been very conservative,” the science officer said. His name was Chan Bao-Zhi, and on Earth, he’d have been Chinese. Here, he was a Belter from Pallas Station. “They’ve given a lot of summary and maybe a tenth of the data they’ve collected. Fortunately, we’ve been able to observe most of their experiments and make our own analysis.”
“Which Earth will have been doing too,” Ashford said.
“Without doubt, sir,” Chan said.
Like any ritual, the staff meeting carried more significance than information. The heads of all the major branches of the Behemoth’s structural tree were present: Sam for engineering, Bull for security, Chan for the research teams, Bennie Cortland-Mapu for health services, Anamarie Ruiz for infrastructure, and so on, filling the two dozen seats around the great conference table. Ashford sat in the place of honor, another beneficent Christ painted on the wall behind him. Pa sat at his right hand, and Bull—by tradition—at his left.
“What have we got?” Ashford said. “Short form.”
“It’s f**king weird, sir,” Chan said, and everyone chuckled. “Our best analysis is that the Ring is an artificially sustained Einstein-Rosen bridge. You go through the Ring, you don’t come out the other side here.”
“So it’s a gate,” Ashford said.
“Yes, sir. It appears that the protomolecule or Phoebe bug or whatever you want to call it was launched at the solar system several billion years ago, aiming for Earth with the intention of hijacking primitive life to build a gateway. We’re positing that whoever created the protomolecule did it as a first step toward making travel to the solar system more convenient and practical later.”
Bull took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was what everyone had been thinking, but hearing it spoken in this official setting made it seem more real. The Ring was a way for something to get here. Not just a gateway. A beachhead.
“When the Y Que went through it, the mass and velocity of the ship triggered some mechanism in the Ring,” Chan said. “The Martians have a good dataset from the moment it happened, and there was a massive outpouring of energy within the Ring structure and a whole cascade of microlevel conformation changes. The entire object went up to about five thousand degrees Kelvin, and it has been cooling regularly ever since. So it took a lot of effort to get that thing running, but it looks like not much to maintain.”
“What do we know about what’s on the other side?” Pa asked. Her expression was neutral, her voice pleasant and unemotional. She could have been asking him to justify a line item in his budget.
“It’s hard to know much,” Chan said. “We’re peeking through a keyhole, and the Ring itself seems to be generating interference and radiation that makes getting consistent readings difficult. We know the Y Que wasn’t destroyed. We’re still getting the video feed that the kid was spewing when he went through, it’s just not showing us much.”
“Stars?” Ashford said. “Something we can start to navigate from?”
“No, sir,” Chan said. “The far side of the Ring doesn’t have any stars, and the background microwave radiation is significantly different from what we’d expect.”
“Meaning what?” Ashford said.
“Meaning, ‘Huh, that’s weird,’” Chan said. “Sir.”
Ashford’s smile was cool as he motioned the science officer to continue. Chan coughed before he went on.
“We have a couple of other anomalies that we aren’t quite sure what to make of. It looks like there’s a maximum speed on the other side.”
“Can you unpack that, please?” Pa said.
“The Y Que went through the Ring going very fast,” Chan said. “About seven-tenths of a second after it reached the other side, it started a massive deceleration. Bled off almost all its speed in about five seconds. It looks like the nearly instant deceleration was what killed the pilot. Since then, it seems as if the ship is being moved out away from the Ring and deeper into whatever’s on the other side.”
“We know that when the protomolecule’s active, it’s been able to… alter what we’d expect from inertia,” Sam said. “Is that how it stopped the ship?”
“That’s entirely possible,” Chan said. “Mars has been pitching probes through the Ring, and it looks like we start seeing the effect right around six hundred meters per second. Under that, mass behaves just the way we expect it to. Over that, it stops dead and then moves off in approximately the same direction that the Y Que is going.”
Sam whistled under her breath.
“That’s really slow,” she said. “The main drives would be almost useless.”
“It’s slower than a rifle shot,” Chan said. “The good news is it only affects mass above the quantum level. The electromagnetic spectrum seems to behave normally, including visible light.”
“Thank God for small favors,” Sam said.
“What else are the probes telling us?”
“There’s something out there,” Chan said, and for the first time a sense of dread leaked into his voice. “The probes are seeing objects. Large ones. But there’s not much light except what we’re shining through the Ring or mounting on the probes. And, as I said, the Ring has always given inconsistent returns. If whatever’s in there is made of the same stuff, who knows?”