“Ah. Well, perhaps you’ll find this woman is you, or the part of you that you feel is missing. You could even combine, the two of you, into a third distinct person, and all three go on with separate lives. The physical barriers to that sort of thing were all broken years ago; imagination really is the only limit.
“Hmm.” She mulled that over, nodding slowly. “You are wise, in a way. Nobody else has suggested any of this. I’ll consider it; I really will. And meanwhile, I do have my work to keep me busy.”
“Ah, yes. Your work.”
She thrust her chin out. “I do enjoy it, you know. Nobody will play games with me anymore, but an inspector’s role is a game. Even if everyone does insist on treating me like a grown-up, I find the mental challenges stimulating. Take that brick over there.” She pointed at one as it drifted through their beams a few meters ahead. “It tells a whole story, if you know how to read it. Marble, right? But it’s darkened; it looks foamy and waxy and brittle. Something’s happened to it.”
“To all the stone,” Bruno agreed, looking around. “It’s probably secondary radiation. The energy beam struck a channel through solid matter from one side of the house to the other, presumably vaporizing it, and the vaporized matter re-released some of that energy in a different form.”
“Different how?” she asked, her face growing more animated, more interested.
“I don’t know,” he said, attempting another shrug. “Something charged, I’d expect. That wreaks chemical havoc with most materials. There’s no measurable radiation now, so it’d have to be something with a very short half-life, like maybe pions. Actually, that makes sense: neutrons decaying into protons and pions would transmute some of the calcium to scandium, the oxygen to fluorine, and the carbon to nitrogen. Some of the protons, stripped away by the impact of high-energy pions, simply become hydrogen atoms, and finally the whole mess recombines at high temperature, creating… what? Fluoroapatite, scandium formates, and tar? Is that consistent with what we’re seeing?”
Vivian’s eyes glittered. “What would cause that? What would make those particles act that way?”
“A nasen beam,” Bruno answered, feeling the hairs prickle up on the back of his neck. “It’d have to be a powerful one; the overwhelming majority of neutrinos wouldn’t interact at all.”
“I see. And weren’t you looking for a nasen beam projector already?”
“Indeed,” he said. “Indeed. It needn’t be large, just an oblate, monocrystalline diamond with wellstone emitters at either end, and a very good heat sink attached. You could easily fit one in your police cruiser, although the energy to fire it would have to be stored somewhere. A superconducting battery holding… what? A petajoule? That would be substantial. Larger than this house, I think. A little larger. So you’d need a big ship, or a ground base somewhere. Tracing from Shiao’s reconstruction we might…”
He realized he was talking to a dead channel; Vivian had just jabbed the frequency controls on her forearm, and while she was nodding and looking right at him, she was suddenly speaking to someone else, in a voice Bruno couldn’t hear. After a moment, she took out a wellstone pad and studied it.
Bruno tried Police One. “Something interesting?”
She looked up and nodded. “Yeah. I’ve relayed your deduction to Shiao. He’s backtracking to the time of impact. Is there any way to know how far the beam traveled before arriving here?”
Bruno again tried to pinch his chin, and was frustrated by the invisible barrier of his helmet dome. “How far? Let’s see. Nasen beams focus tightly, but disperse over large distances. Six meters wide at the impact site? Is there a difference in diameter from one hole to the other? I suppose we don’t know which is the entrance wound and which the exit, but if one is wider than the other—by a very small amount, you understand—the resulting cone should point straight to the source. Well, coupled with the exact impact time and rotation rate.”
“Shiao?” Vivian prompted.
“Processing,” Shiao replied. A Shiao. His voice was deep, and if not completely humorless, then at least solidly professional. His tone made a promise of the word, a reassurance to the many victims of this crime. Light beams swept and flashed the ruins as evidence techs—apparently communicating on some channel of their own—swarmed to take the appropriate measurements.
“Patience is the hard part,” Vivian remarked, with a sidelong glance at Bruno.
But it was Shiao who replied. “Of course, Commandant-Inspector. I apologize for the delay. I’m refining the reconstruction, and should be finished right… now. I have the position: three AUs distant, in the asteroid belt. Referencing ephemeris data. Confirmed: no charted celestial object would have been in that location at that time.”
“A ship, then?” Vivian asked.
“Most likely, Commandant-Inspector. I’ll send out an all-points. Do either of you have suggestions regarding a description?”
“A solid battery somewhat larger than this house,” Bruno answered. “Either moving very slowly, or carrying an even bigger tank for tritium fuel. It should be fairly unmistakable, actually.”
And then Marlon’s voice came through. “Hello? Did we miss something? I believe we’re looking for a spaceship carrying large batteries, and a nasen projector.”
Chapter Twelve
in which a strange creature is discovered
After that there was a great deal of radio traffic with Earth and Mars and a number of space traffic control stations, as the police sought a ship of the appropriate dimensions speeding— or drifting—away from the appropriate coordinates. But it was slow traffic, light-lagged, some of it routed the long way around the sun, to receivers way off on the other side. Bruno began to appreciate how the Bureaucracy, painfully efficient in so many other regards, could finally chafe against this barrier— the speed of light—that no persuasion or fiat or veto could soften for them.
It was as if Mars and Earth existed in a different time, in some parallel universe whose clocks ran perpetually behind. How distracting, when one’s work demanded prompt coordination! Hence the Ring Collapsiter, first link in a network of supraluminal conduits that might finally join the disparate worlds together in a single moment. Or an entirely smaller span of moments, at least.
“While they’re settling this,” Tamra said to Bruno, with an offhand wave at Vivian and Cheng Shiao and the evidence technicians, “would you please go have a word with the press? They’re massed outside by the thousands, understandably curious. I think a word from you at this point would be reassuring.”
Bruno opened his mouth to protest, to point out how generally poor he was at that sort of thing, but the words didn’t form. He couldn’t convey the idea, because in fact he didn’t believe the idea. How surprising! Yes, he was the expert here, the person who could best explain what had probably happened. Any claims to the contrary would go beyond modesty, into simple cowardice and obstruction. And anyway, the police were busy and Tamra herself was still consoling Marlon, while Bruno had no obvious duties just now.
Finally, he nodded. “Of course, Highness. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He dithered for a moment, wondering where exactly he should go, until he spied starlight through the one of the gaping holes the nasen beam had left. He strode toward it, crunching over dust and rubble and swaths of bare metal hull, swinging wide around the now barely visible foundations of a couple of structures. The dissolution of Sykes Manor was still ongoing, the remaining bits and pieces slowly losing cohesion and joining the nebula of floating debris. As he approached the hole, he saw there was a good deal of garbage floating outside as well, slowly leaking from the hull’s double wound, forming expanding clouds that would, eventually, become rings encircling the sun itself, like a kind of miniature, invisibly diffuse asteroid belt.