“I want your reception tugs holding right outside of the worm cage. The second you can get a good approach, move in and get a latch on her. I think we might have a rogue barge coming through. Barge Control!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You heard what I just said to Tugs. The instant that brute is out of trans-state, get me a full diagnostic. If she seems to be clearing the perimeter grid on her own, let her drift out. Do not attempt active control until she’s in open space.”
“Understood.”
“Director! There she is. She’s coming through!”
On the main display, the ultradark of the wormhole event horizon bulged. Cherenkov radiation played in spectral lavender waves around the extrusion, hydrogen atoms and solar wind particles from another star system reintegrating into conventional space.
Rippling shadow slowly peeled back from the blunt bow of the cargo carrier revealing steel that shimmered with residual inconsistency.
“Come on, old girl,” Marta found herself murmuring. “Not far now, just a little more.”
“Barge exit velocity one point five meters per second… No! One point four… point three!
She’s decelerating!”
Marta’s world was turning on edge. “That’s impossible! Barge control, could we have a retro burn or an out- gassing event underway?”
“Negative! Negative! Her systems haven’t reintegrated from trans-state and I’m not detecting anything venting! This has to be an outside influence!”
“It’s the magnetic field of the perimeter grid!” Rocardo yelled from his station. “It’s reacting with the ferrous metals in the cargo and hull structure. She’s coming through so far below velocity she may not have the momentum to carry her clear.”
“Damnit, Estiban don’t give me ‘may’! Yes or no!”
“Computing now!”
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.”
“Why don’t we try and shove the barge out of there? I could send one of our big Miki T-5s into the hole. I know all of its systems would go down as it crossed the event horizon, but we could back it off and run it in at full thrust with a load of momentum built up. It’d wreck the tug, but it might be enough to knock the barge out the other side.”
Marta turned the suggestion over in her mind examining it from all angles, then shook her head. “No, that might work under simple Newtonian physics but we’re operating quantum here. While we know individual atoms can maintain momentum in trans-state, nobody can say if momentum can be kinetically transmitted.
“If we ram a tug into the hole, it might just pass right through the barge’s dimensionally irrational form and go right out the other side. On the other hand, there might be enough nuclear forces interaction for the barge’s mass to not only absorb the tug’s momentum but its physical structure as well. The two vehicles could merge with an overlap on the subatomic levels. Two objects can’t occupy the same space, in the nonquantum universe at any
