The report unfolded into two windows. One displayed text data, the other, the raw video of the starfield that lay ahead of the fleet.
Urban summoned all six of the Apparatchiks. They manifested in a curved row behind the report, each confined within its own frameless window.
“Analyze it,” Urban ordered them, wanting opinions from them all.
The simulation of a faint vibration alerted him. He looked to the right as Vytet’s ghost popped into existence beside him.
Vytet had never sought the refuge of cold sleep. “I think there are never enough minutes in the day,” she’d explained when Urban asked about it. “I want to monitor the progress of the gee deck, of course, but I could spend a millennium in the library and not reach the end of what there is to do and to learn.”
Since that time, Vytet had shifted gender and updated the envelope of his appearance. His nose had become more prominent, the pelt of his hair had shifted from white to dark red, and his eyes were darker, deeper-set beneath a heavier brow. “What happened?” he asked in a calm masculine voice as he scanned the report.
Urban told him, “I’ve lost Pytheas.”
“Lost?”
Bitter admission: “I saw it explode.”
Clemantine and Kona ghosted in, lagging several seconds behind Vytet—the time it had taken their personal DIs to summon their dormant ghosts from the archive.
Clemantine met his gaze. She’d been away a year and a half, but he’d adapted his time sense to match hers. It felt to him as if she’d been away only hours, while she perceived the time as a sequence of discrete intervals when her ghost had wakened only long enough to assess the status of the ship. That left no awkwardness, no alienation in their reunion.
“Pytheas hit something and blew apart,” he said to ensure that she and Kona understood that basic fact. He indicated the frameless window containing the starfield. “This is video from Lam Lha.”
It didn’t look like a video. There was no visible motion. The stars were much too far away for their movement to be perceptible, and Pytheas was too small, dark, cold, and distant to be captured by Lam Lha’s array of cameras. Only the digital clock streaming through fractional seconds in the window’s lower right corner indicated this was not a still image.
A hiss from Clemantine as a spark of blue-white light burst into sight. Flared, and disappeared.
Now the stars moved, the entire field rotating together through a narrow arc.
“Lam Lha is repositioning itself,” Urban explained. “Aiming its prow at the point of the explosion, to minimize its profile and reduce the odds of impact from any surviving debris.” His ghost hand closed into a fist, his temper finally escaping. “By the Unknown God! We are not even four years out of Deception Well!”
“You’re sure it was an accident?” Kona asked. “You’re certain we’re alone out here?”
“Yes. I’m sure of that much.”
“But can you be sure it was a collision?” Vytet asked. “Or might it have been caused by instability in the outrider’s reef?”
“The reef is monitored. If there was a problem, it would have been detected and addressed.”
“I’ll check the data anyway,” Vytet volunteered. “In case something was missed.”
Urban ignored this. Nothing had been missed. He turned to Kona and Clemantine. “This happened before,” he told them. “It’s not complicated. The outriders are fragile. They don’t have the mass to absorb the energy of a high-speed impact. The concern now is secondary effects.”
He gestured at the starfield. “Lam Lha, Artemis, Khonsu, Dragon. All four ships were following Pytheas. All four are at risk. It’s going to take time, but eventually each ship will intersect the trailing edge of the debris field and when that happens, there’s a real chance of another impact.”
“Surely not,” Vytet objected with a puzzled frown. “Given the distances between the outriders and the low relative delta V of the debris, the field will have time to disperse across an immense volume of space before the next outrider reaches its perimeter. That will work to minimize any risk of collision.”
“I used to think so too,” Urban answered. “But remember the reef. It doesn’t behave like normal matter.”
As if summoned by his warning, tiny points of blue-tinged light blossomed in a cluster at the center of the video. “There,” Urban said, feeling vindicated. “That’s the debris field. That blue light is generated by remnants of the reef, energized by the explosion. The fragments will try to coalesce, and as they do, they’ll warp the surrounding space, affect the trajectory of the debris. Some of it will gather and fall into their fields.”
They watched for several seconds as the blue light brightened. Specks shifted relative to one another. A few merged, brightening again when they made contact. Others drifted away.
Clemantine spoke quietly. “Can we use the gamma-ray gun to target the visible debris? Vaporize it?”
Given her history, it surprised Urban to hear her propose the use of the gun. Such monstrous Chenzeme weapons had taken so much from her. But she regarded him now with a hard pragmatic gaze.
As he hesitated, the Engineer took on the task of answering her question, explaining, “The tactic is impractical at this time. The debris is over four light-hours away and tumbling in an unpredictable manner—and the beam is narrow. It’s unlikely to find a target.”
“Then we modify our course,” Clemantine said, her gaze still fixed on Urban.
This time, the Pilot responded: “Course adjustments are being undertaken. Instructions are already outbound, directing the fleet away from the debris.”
Of all the Apparatchiks, the Mathematician looked the most like Urban, even dressed like him in dark, simple clothing—not as any kind of acknowledgment of common origin, but because he just didn’t care about appearance and could not be bothered to modify it. In personality he was reserved and reticent, but he spoke now, explaining, “Shifting the fleet’s course and slowing its momentum will reduce the danger, but not eliminate it. The debris field will have inherited Pytheas’s momentum. It will continue to coast on the fleet’s original heading, even as dispersive forces contend against the exotic physics of the reef. It might be years before the threat is left behind.”
Urban nodded agreement. Like he’d said, he’d been through this before.
On the video, the blue sparks dimmed. After several more seconds, they disappeared, leaving nothing visible to mark the shattered remains of Pytheas.
“Gone dark,” Kona said. “But still a threat. Can we implement a radar system to try to map the debris?”
“As the distance decreases we should be able to track the larger fragments,” the Engineer said. “But fragments too small to be detected can still cause critical damage to the outriders.”
The danger was unseen and would remain unknowable, but it was all too real. Urban envisioned the lost outrider as a revenant spray of kinetic projectiles hurtling through the void, with some small but critical percentage of them speeding along trajectories that would inevitably take them toward the trailing ships in the fleet.
Clemantine duplicated her ghost.
She sent one version to the high bridge where she listened to the braided conversations of the philosopher cells as they analyzed the loss of Pytheas and debated the value of different mathematical models meant to predict the dispersion of debris.