Space Stations

The answer came from another source. “Velocity point five meters per second… point three… Relative velocity zero! I say again, we have zero velocity… Velocity now negative point one!”

Half the length of the cargo barge protruded from the unstable, quivering sphere of the gate mouth but only half. Then, slowly the expanse of metal hull began to shorten.

“My God,” someone spoke in an appalled whisper, “she's falling back into the hole.”

“Tugs!” Marta called desperately. “Can you get a lock on her!”

The Tug Controller was already shaking his head. “No room. No time! She's going!

She's going! She's gone!”

Lane's thumb flipped aside the guard on her console and smashed down on the alarm key. Throughout the Worm Gate complex the Rash Red disaster klaxons began their harsh bray.

“She's still in there!” Narisara cried. “The raft is still inside the channel! She did not exit!”

“That's impossible,” Tarrischall snapped back. “She had to clear!”

“She hasn't,” the Voice-of-Physics replied impatiently. “I am still registering mass inside the channel. Movement rate null. The raft must be caught between the magnetic lobes of the channel mouths.”

On the far viewer, the black sphere of the channel event horizon continued to hover blandly at the center of the web-work tube of the perimeter grid. Invisible within that sphere, however, the cargo raft was still present, coexistent dimensionally not only within River-'Tween-Worlds but at the Earth Worm Gate as well.

“Voice-of-Physics, what happens if we can't clear the channel? What happens when we have to reduce the power flow?”

“I don't know,” Narisara replied. “We have never attempted such a simulation.”

“Guess!”

“Tarrischall, I can't! The matter inside the channel is dimensionally unstable. I cannot project how it will react to a channel contraction. Possibly as a quantum material.

Possibly as tridimensional. I can't tell!”

“Differentiation!

“As quantum material it may disperse out along the residual thread of the channel, leaking back into tri-space as a few extra ultimotes per lype of interstellar gas.”

“As trimaterial?”

“You will be compressing a hundred and eighty thousand kyhar of mass down to a point you could balance on a pup's claw tip.”

Tarrischall felt his whiskers bristle. “To say more simply, POOYGH!”

Narisara gave an affirmative toss of her shapely head. “A mass explosion such as no one has ever imagined. We would burn brighter than the Life-Fire-of-All-Things.”

“Where's my power!” Marta called in a half-scream to her Energy Boss.

“They're trying to get authorization from the Ces-Lunar Grid Authority now, ma'am,” the thoroughly unhappy techno yelled back over his shoulder.

“Damn it, I'm the authority! Tell those idiots to check their disaster protocols. A Worm Gate emergency has absolute priority over everything except basic life support, and we are declaring a gate emergency! Tell them we could lose the wormhole and the whole bloody L-2 complex if we don't get that power shift immediately!”

“Doing it, ma'am!”

“L-2 traffic control on red command channel, ma'am,” Communications cut in. “They acknowledge your crisis declaration and are standing by for instructions.”

“Tell them to initiate immediate dispersal of the complex by Plan Red Roger. Clear all nonessential manned vessels and platforms out of this traffic block with all speed and keep them out until we can get a handle on this thing.”

“Aye, ma'am.”

On the big display, the city in the sky was already disintegrating, its component stations leaving their formation within the Lagrange point. With attitude control thrusters and docked tug engines blazing to haul them clear, the awkward voyagers were drifting outward in a slow motion bomb burst that left the Worm Gate and gate control wheel alone in a growing volume of empty space.

“We're starting to get some power supplementation from Ces-Lunar already, Marta,”

Rocardo reported, “but we are still trending negative on our accumulator reserves. Can we fade back a little? Let the hole contract a bit to conserve power.”

Lane shook her head, eyeing the sphere of blackness hovering within the perimeter grid.

“We have sixty thousand metric tons of mass out there locked in trans-state, Estiban. If we try altering the variables on that much malleable matter, I don't know what will happen. Nobody else does either.”

“Headquarters has triggered a net crisis conference,” the Assistant Director replied, sounding hopeful. “They're bringing in every physicist in the field to work the problem.”

“And maybe they'll come up with some answers in six months or so. We don't have that much time. Power levels?”

“Down to twelve per on all reserves.”

“Dr. Lane, I have an idea,” the tug controller spoke up.

“Go, Fred.”