Komarr

Lord Auditor Vorthys, who'd been watching with slit-eyed disapproval, sat slowly upright, his eyes widening, his lips moving.

The last time Miles had felt his stomach behave like this, he'd been on a combat drop from low orbit. Wormhole collapsing technique? Does this mean what I think it does?

'Wormhole collapsing technique,' he repeated blandly, in his best fast-penta interrogator style. 'Wormholes collapse, but didn't think anything people could do could cause them to. Wouldn't it take an awful lot of power?'

'They seem to have found a way around that. Resonance, five-space resonance. Amplitude augmentation, you see. Shut down forever. Don't think it would work in reverse, though. Can't be anti-entropic.'

Miles glanced at Vorthys. The words obviously meant something to him. Good.

Dr. Riva waved her hands dreamily in front of her. 'Higher and higher and higher and—boop!' She giggled. It was a very fast-penta'ish sort of giggle, the disturbing sort which suggested that on some other level, in her drug-scrambled brain, she was not giggling at all. Maybe she was screaming. As Miles was. . . . 'Except,' she added, 'that there's something very wrong somewhere.'

No lie. He walked over and picked up the hypospray of antagonist, and glanced up at Vorthys. 'Anything you want to add while she's still under? Or is it time to go back to normal mode?'

Vorthys still had an abstracted, inward look, his mind obviously ratcheting over everything he'd learned during the investigation in light of this new, revolutionary idea. He glanced up and over at the goofily grinning Riva. 'I think we need all our wits about us.' His brows drew down in something like pain. 'One sees, of course, why she hesitated to confide her theory to us. In case it is right …'

Miles walked over to Riva with the second hypospray. 'This is the fast-penta antagonist. It will neutralize the drug in your system in less than a minute.'

To his astonishment, she threw up a restraining hand. 'Wait, had it. I could almost see it, in my mind . . . like a vid pro-action . . . energy transfers, flowing . . . field reservoir . . . wait.'

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back; her feet tapped gently and rhythmically on the floor. Her smile came and went, came and went. Her eyes popped open at last, and he stared briefly and intently at Vorthys. 'The keyword,' she intoned, 'is elastic recoil. Remember it.' She glanced at Miles and held out a languid arm. 'You may proceed, my lord.' She giggled again.

He applied the hypospray over the blue vein inside her proffered elbow; it hissed briefly. He gave her an odd little half-bow, and stepped back, and waited. Her loose limbs tightened; she buried her face in her hands.

After about a minute, she looked up again, blinking. 'What did I just say?' she asked Vorthys.

'Elastic recoil,' he repeated, watching her intently. 'What does it mean?'

She was silent a moment, staring at her feet. 'It means . . . I compromised myself for nothing.' Her lips thinned bitterly. 'Soudha's device doesn't work. Or at any rate, it doesn't work to collapse a wormhole.' She sat up, and shook herself out, stretching, the sense of her body doubtless coming back to her as the last of the antagonist chased through her system. 'I thought that stuff would make me sick.'

'Reactions vary wildly from subject to subject,' said Miles. Indeed, he'd never seen one quite like that before. 'A woman we interrogated the other day said she found it very restful.'

'It had the strangest effect on my internal visualizations.' She stared at the hypospray with speculative respect. 'I may try it on purpose someday.'

I want to be there if you do. Miles had a sudden exciting vision of using the drug to augment his own insights—instant brains!—then remembered to his extreme disappointment that fast-penta didn't work like that on him.

Riva glanced at Miles. 'If I ever get out of a Barrayaran prison. Am I under arrest now?'

Miles chewed his lip. 'What for?'

'Isn't violating loyalty and security oaths treason?'

'You haven't violated any security oath. Yet. As for the other . . . when two Imperial Auditors say they didn't see something, it can become remarkably invisible.'

Vorthys smiled suddenly.

'I thought you were sworn to tell the truth, Lord Auditor.'

'Only to Gregor. What we tell the rest of the universe is negotiable. We just don't advertise the fact.'

'That, alas, is true.' Vorthys sighed.

'How will you explain the missing drug doses to ImpSec?'

'One, I am an Imperial Auditor, I don't have to explain anything to anyone. Least of all ImpSec. Two, we used it experimentally to enhance scientific insight. Which I gather is the truth, so I return to Go and collect my tokens.'

Her lips twisted up in a genuine, if wryly baffled, smile. 'I see. I think.'

'In short, this never happened, you are not under arrest, and we have work to do. For my curiosity, though, before I call our junior colleagues back in—can you give me a quick synopsis of your chain of reasoning? In nonmathematical terms, please.'

'It's only in nonmathematical terms so far. If I can't run some real numbers in under this—well, I'll just have to dismiss it as an interesting hallucination.'

'You were convinced enough to dry up on us.'

'I was stunned. Not so much convinced as breathless.'

'With hope?'

'With … I don't quite know.' She shook her head. 'I may yet be proved wrong, and it wouldn't be the first time. but you are familiar, I assume, with examples of positive feedback loops in resonant phenomena—sound, for example?'

'Feedback squeals, yes.'

'Or a pure note that breaks a wineglass. And in structures– you know why soldiers must break step when marching across a bridge? So that the resonance of their steps doesn't collapse he structure?'

Miles grinned. 'I actually saw that happen once. It involved a squad of Imperial Junior Scouts, a flag ceremony, a wooden footbridge, and my cousin Ivan. Dumped twenty really obnoxious teenage boys into a creek.' He added aside to the Professor, 'They wouldn't let me march with my squad that evening because, they said, my height would mess up their symmetry. So I was watching from the back benches. It was glorious. I think I was about thirteen, but I'll treasure the memory forever.'

'Did you see it coming, or did it take you by surprise?' asked the Professor curiously.

'I saw it coming, though not, I admit, very far in advance.'

'Hm.'

Riva's brows twitched; she licked her lips and began. 'Wormholes resonate in five-space. Very slightly, and at a very high state. I believe that the function of Soudha's device is to emit a five-space energy pulse precisely tuned to the natural frequency of a wormhole. The pulse's power is low, compared to the latent energies involved in the wormhole's structure, but if properly tuned it might—no, would, gradually build up the amplitude of the wormhole's resonance until it exceeded its phase boundaries and collapsed. Or rather, I think Soudha's group thought it must collapse. What I think actually happened is more complex.'

'Elastic recoil?' Vorthys prodded hopefully.

'In a sense. What I think happened is that the pulse amplified the resonance energies until the phase boundaries recoiled, and the energy was abruptly returned to three-space in the form of a directed gravitational wave.'

'Good God,' said Miles. 'Do you mean to say Soudha's found way to turn an entire wormhole into a giant imploder lance?'

'Mmmm …' said Riva. 'Er . . . maybe. What I don't know is if that was what he meant to do. The first theory made more political sense to me … as a Komarran. It quite seduced me. I wonder if they were seduced as well? If he did mean the wormhole to act as a sort of imploder lance, I don't see that he's found a way to aim it. I think the gravitational pulse was returned