Torch of Freedom

properly blasé—or, at least, professionally detached—but he wasn't doing a particularly good job of it, and Jordin Kare chuckled.

'You do, do you?' he inquired.

'We've got the locus' central focus nailed, we've got the tidal stresses, and we've got the entry vector,' Wix replied.

'Which is all well and good, Doctor,' Captain Zachary put in, 'except for that other little problem.'

'We been over that and over that,' Wix said, as patiently as he could (which, truth to tell, wasn't all that patiently). 'I don't see any way a gravitic kick that weak is going to have any significant impact on efforts to transit. We compensate for kicks like that every day, Captain.'

'No, T. J., we don't, actually,' Kare said. Wix glowered at him, but Kare only shrugged. 'I'll grant you that we routinely compensate for kicks of its magnitude. For that matter, we've got a kick several times this strong on the Manticore-Basilisk transit, and it's never been a problem. But you know as well as I do we've never seen one like this—one whose strength and repetition rate vary this sharply and unpredictably.' He shook his head. 'If you can show me what's causing it—a model that explains it, one that lets you predict what it's going to do for, say, a twenty-four-hour duration—then I'll agree with you that it's a matter of routine compensation. But you can't do that, can you?'

'No,' Wix admitted after a moment. 'I don't think it's powerful enough, even at the strongest reading we've recorded, to seriously threaten a ship transiting the terminus, though.'

'I agree with you.' Kare nodded. 'That's not really my point, though. My point is that we're looking at something we've never seen before: a kick—and let's not forget, TJ, that what we call a 'kick' could just as accurately be called a 'spike'—that doesn't seem to be associated in any way with the routine stress patterns of the locus.'

'Exactly how significant is that?' Zachary asked. Kare cocked an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged. 'I'm nowhere near the theoretician the two of you are, of course, but it looks to me like Dr. Wix does have a point about the relative strength of the kick, or 'spike,' or whatever we want to call it. There's no way anything that weak is going to pose any kind of threat to Harvest Joy's hyper generator or alpha nodes, so I don't see its significantly impacting our transit, either. Obviously, something about it bothers you a lot more than that, though.'

'What bothers me is that there's not another single instance anywhere in the literature of a gravitic spike like this one that wasn't somehow connected to the observable patterns of the locus associated with it,' Kare said, his expression thoughtful. 'People tend to think of wormhole termini as big, fixed doorways in space, and in gross terms, I don't suppose there's anything wrong with that visualization. But what they actually are are fixed points in space where intense gravity waves impinge on one another. On the gravitic level, they're areas of immense stress. It's a very tightly focused stress, one in which enormous forces are concentrated and counterbalanced so finely that they appear, on the macro level, to be stable. But it's a stability which results only from keeping enormous amounts of instability perfectly balanced against one another.

'That's always been the really tricky point about surveying and charting wormholes, of course. Nobody could possibly build a ship tough enough to survive even momentarily if it tried to power its way through that interface of balanced instabilities by brute force. Instead, we have to chart them, much like I suppose oceanographers chart currents and winds, to determine the precise vectors which let ships . . . well, 'shoot the rapids,' as a friend of mine likes to put it.'

He paused until Zachary nodded, and to the captain's credit, he noticed, there was no apparent impatience in her nod. He flashed her a quick smile.

'I know none of that came as any great surprise to you, Captain,' he told her. 'But restating it may help to put my current concerns into context. You see, every other 'kick' or 'spike' we've ever encountered has been linked directly to a stress, or an eddy, in those patterns of focused instability. In fact, more often than not, when we find a kick, it leads us to a stress pattern we might not have noticed otherwise. In this case, though, it appears to be totally unrelated to any of the stress patterns in this terminus. It comes and goes on its own periodicity and with its own frequency shifts, completely irrespective of anything we've been able to observe or measure from this locus. I'm not saying it doesn't have a regular periodicity; I'm simply saying we haven't been able to determine what that periodicity may be, and we haven't been able to find any aspect of the terminus which is associated with it. It's almost . . . almost as if what we're observing here doesn't really have anything to do with the terminus at all.'

Wix snorted. Kare looked at him, and the younger hyper-physicist shook his head at him.

'Oh, I can't disagree with anything you just said, Jordin. But whatever else this maybe, it's clearly a hyper wall interface spike, and the only two things we've ever seen produce wall interface spikes are hyperdrive alpha translations and wormhole termini. One way or another, it's associated with a terminus!'

'Maybe.' Kare said. Wix arched a skeptical eyebrow, and Kare grimaced. 'All right, it's definitely associated with a terminus. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to establish how it's associated with this terminus, have we?'

'Well, no.' Wix frowned as he made the admission, then shrugged. 'It's almost like it's coming from somewhere else,' he said.

'But what I seem to be hearing both of you saying, is that even in a worst-case scenario, based on what we know at this point, Harvest Joy could safely transit?' Zachary asked.

'Pretty much,' Kare admitted after a moment.

'Then I think it's time we talked to Queen Berry and the Prime Minister,' she said.

* * *

'So, let me see if I have this straight,' Berry Zilwicki said. 'We know enough, we think, to send Harvest Joy through the wormhole—sorry, through the terminus— but we've got this 'kick' thingy, and we don't know what's causing it. And because we don't, Dr. Kare,' she nodded courteously to the Manticoran, 'is worried that we may be dealing with something no one's ever seen before.'

'That's pretty much it, Your Majesty,' Kare agreed. 'It's not the strength of the kick that worries me; it's the fact that we can't explain what's causing it. The hyper-physicist in me is intrigued as hell by the discovery of a new phenomenon. This is the kind of thing we look for all the time, you understand. But the surveyor in me is more than a little unhappy because of the hyper-physicist in me's inability to explain what's going on before I go venturing off into the unknown.'

'But you don't see any physical danger to the ship in making the transit?' Web Du Havel asked.

'Probably not,' Kare said 'Almost certainly not, in fact. But given that we're dealing with something I ought to be able to explain and can't, I can't make any sort of categorical guarantee. I'm perfectly willing to make the transit aboard her, you understand, and I'm not exactly in the habit of sticking my neck out unless I'm pretty sure I'm going to be able to pull it back in safely afterward. But the bottom line is that we're dealing with an uncertainty factor no one's ever dealt with before.'

'What about getting back again?' Thandi Palane asked. Everyone looked at her, and she shrugged, hazel eyes intent. 'If there's anyone in the galaxy who knows less about surveying wormholes than I do, I've never met her,' she said. 'On the other hand, I've been doing my best to bone up on the subject, and I've been watching those of you who do know what you're doing for the last three T-months. It occurs to me that you've been paying a lot of attention to charting the patterns, and what I'm wondering about is whether or not you think this 'kick' is enough that we should be worrying about how well we'll be able to chart the patterns from the other side for the return trip.'

'I don't see any reason it should make the charting exercise significantly more difficult from the other end,' Kare replied. 'Despite my own concern over the kick's unpredictability, it didn't keep us from getting a surprisingly quick fix on the terminus' basic patterns. I don't see anything about it to suggest that it's going to significantly scramble patterns at the other end of the bridge, and having made transit once, Harvest Joy's sensors will have given us a huge head start on analyzing them, anyway. I suppose it's theoretically possible we'd have a problem, but it seems extraordinarily unlikely.'

'Forgive me, Doctor,' Palane said with one of her dazzling smiles, 'but 'extraordinarily unlikely' doesn't exactly sound like 'no way in hell' to me. And I can't help thinking the Star Kingdom might just be a little ticked off