Tempest rocks, then steadies again. Twosani's eyes are dark holes in a white face. "What happened?" she asks, blankly.
I move to the main science console; the Rigelian officer manning it stands aside. "Attempting to analyse now," I say.
The flash of darkness lasted less than a second - but for night to fall, even for so brief a span, in the eternal noon of the sphere is... unprecedented. I study the readouts and the visuals, and I begin to see how it was done... and at what cost.
Where the Voth ship was, there is now a seething sphere of whiteness, churning and glimmering with a kind of iridescence, at least three kilometres in diameter. Behind it, the spire still stands - but smoke and flames are pouring from several openings in its surface. New openings. There have been explosions within the spire - more burned-out sections, like the one I found, only worse. I can only hope none of the damage was to inhabited areas, and that the spire's self-repair systems can cope.
"Whatever they did," I muse aloud, "it involved channelling the entire energy output of the sun. For a brief period only, but, still, it is a considerable amount of energy."
"What is that thing?" Twosani asks. "It looks like it's.... Is it shrinking?"
"The diameter is visibly reducing," I say. Parts of the white sphere are breaking away, flying off as fragments into the air of the sphere... but that is not the only factor in operation here. I examine the readings from Tempest's sensors. They are... intriguing.
"Fascinating," I say, and raise one eyebrow.
"I think I see something," says Twosani. "Inside the - cloud. Or whatever it is. There's something solid -"
"No," I say, absent-mindedly, as I continue to analyze the data, "not exactly solid."
"It's the Bulwark," Twosani says in a suddenly hopeless voice. "It's coming out of the cloud - it looks like it's still intact -" She stops. Her expression becomes puzzled.
The Voth ship becomes clearly visible as the white substance shatters and swirls away - but it, too, gleams with a strange iridescence, and it takes no action of any kind. "Fascinating," I say again.
"Sir, what happened?" Twosani asks.
"Intense tetryon bombardment. The Voth used it as the basis for a biolytic field... the Solanae have apparently not bothered with that elaboration. Tetryon fields suppress energy - to put matters in simplistic terms. And this one was powered with at least a substantial fraction of the output of a small sun."
Twosani still looks baffled. "So what -?"
"Essentially, the Voth ship and the air around it were reduced in temperature to absolute zero, and subjected to several other energetic factors. A precise analysis will no doubt yield interesting data. The result, ultimately, was to force a phase change on all the material within the field. A phase change we have not previously observed on the scale of actual physical objects." I nod towards the shimmering shape on the screen. "That is no longer a solid object. It is a great deal colder than any solid could possibly be. I believe it to be a fermionic condensate. Or something very similar."
"Fermionic -?" Twosani's brow furrows in thought. "Wouldn't that be... superfluid, or something?"
"One might expect that. I think, though, that the matter, in this state, interacts so weakly with the world around it that there is no disruption of its gross physical structure. There are other factors at work...." I study the console, making sure that every detail is being recorded for future analysis. "Fascinating," I say, once again.
"The Voth," says Twosani. "The Voth are... dead?"
"Oh, yes," I assure her. "Just as quickly as they killed the crew of the Tempest. No possible metabolic functions could take place in that condition."
"So... what happens now?"
"On a practical level, we must contact Admiral M'eioi and arrange for the capture of any remaining Voth forces on the spire. And we should call Joint Command and obtain support. I am sure Subcommander Kaol has by now assembled a battle fleet that he is anxious to unleash. As for that -" I indicate the dead ship on the screen "- we should have no concerns. Random interactions with the normal matter of the air will gradually - warm it, I suppose - until it resumes a normal solid phase. The super-frozen air around it, as we have seen, has already been scattered... I suppose it might constitute a hazard, while it remains in this condition. I would not, personally, care to be caught in that... blizzard."
"And the ship itself?"
"I expect it will resume a more normal material state gradually, diffusing into the surrounding atmosphere one molecule at a time, due to random molecular interactions. It will be interesting to see how long the process takes -"
The viewscreen abruptly fills with an eye-searing white glare. Alarms sound. Seconds pass, and then the Tempest rocks and surges, caught in a blast wave far mightier than her namesake. Status lights flash yellow and red on the deflectors and the inertial dampers, and I cling on to the console as the ship bucks and plunges.
We ride it out, though, and she steadies. I wipe my eyes, and look at the viewscreen. I can see the spire, now, through the slowly cooling fireball. "I forgot a detail," I say ruefully. "Some of those random molecular interactions involved the antimatter in the ship's warp core. And, of course, once even one molecule of normal matter came into contact with that, it precipitated a chain reaction. Among other things, it supplied sufficient enthalpy for any number of phase changes. So much for the fermionic condensate." I shake my head. "Try to raise Admiral M'eioi. We must ascertain the state of affairs within the spire."
No comments:
Post a Comment