The room hung silent. Firenze offered, "Stadium sized, and-"
Berenson cut him off and pushed the question, "How much power was needed to run them?"
"Dozens of reactors-"
"Precisely." Berenson agreed, terminating the dialog, "The first drives were massive, ungainly behemoths, starved for power and unable to achieve sustainable n-mass. Yet now we can fit them inside a car. What changed?" He did not wait for a reply. "Strand. Deus ex." He let his words echo in the room, gave his audience just enough time to taste the leading edge of a begged question, and then pressed on, "Like those ancient stage-gods, it comes as called, and delivers as we demand. Did you ever wonder at our good fortune? When the first Massive Bore punched through the blackened Phobos skies, what did they draw out? When man ripped the fabric of spacetime and drew back the reality curtains, what did they find? Strand. Perfect in every way and just where we needed it." Berenson snort-laughed, amused by a joke only he understood.
He continued, relishing every word and driving the sharpest syllables like a hammer, more performance than conversation. He said, "With enough negative mass, spacetime will crumple. From that collapse, you can draw strand. With a stable borehole, you can touch the base math of the universe. If you feed it power, it will resonate and return manifold. The thinner the fabric - the wider the bore - and the more strand within your grasp? All the more powerful that resonance. This is no free lunch, no impossibility, but a cosmological dine and dash. We dip into a power-store so massive, so incomprehensible that we are as ants before it. We steal heat from the noonday sun and worship it as God." He paused, gave a sly glance towards Firenze, and added, "But we are rational men and no longer given to such superstitions. All of our gods come in chains and are bent to serve our purpose." Something in his tone hinted at an unspoken coda: 'for now'. Firenze felt the ice reforming in his gut.
Berenson concluded, "It gives us power. It gives us light. Through its awesome lens, all shall obey as we command. Batteries that can power cities. Cities that fly! Ours is a time of miracles."
Firenze mustered his strength, glanced towards Clausen for backup, and countered, "But we don't use it like that." He ran through his mental catalog, tried to scavenge memory from every random article he'd ever browsed on a late-night info-benders, and said, "No terrestrial drive uses a self-sustaining bore. We don't harvest on-planet."
Berenson replied, "Only because you are frightened of the god you leashed." He chuckled again, and a perverse twinkle shone in his eyes as he surveyed the room. "You are children, dancing about the well, never daring to look in and tempt the fall. You spin and chant at the edge of the abyss but never confess and beg it to rise. Are you dishonest in your craving, or are you scared?" He turned back to Firenze, and Firenze couldn't turn away. Berenson said, "Because you should be."
For the moment, his spell hung, and the room stood silent and still. Again, it was Clausen who broke the requiem. The sergeant demanded, "Alright, nice speech. This is your last chance to make it relevant."
"They have access to a potent tool, sergeant. You must consider what a depraved opponent might do with such a resource. The drive field of the ARC950 is sufficiently powerful to drive through an n-matter bore and harvest strand, given adequate modification."
For a moment, Firenze thought he saw Clausen flinch. The sergeant demanded, "Are you telling me this isn't about hostages?"
Berenson nodded, sagely, and with feigned regret, "They did give quite a list of demands, did they not?"
"They did." Clausen growled.
"Yes. Those lists were quite well constructed - balanced perfectly on the far-side of acceptability. The Authority will never release those prisoners, sergeant. The men of power will never concede to those political dreams. All the wealth demanded in those manifestos is but a smokescreen, an additional service provided the mercenaries. It is protection through deception, and their client could not care less for their side-show. He wants the strand, not the politics." Berenson stopped, Puck-like, and threw a casual aside to his audience, "Perhaps he wants to build a bomb?"
The numbers ricocheting through Firenze's head formed into a terrible outline. He spoke as he thought, hazarding, "If strand's probability manipulation multiplies an energy release, then a bomb derived from the ARC950-"
Clausen finished the statement, "-would be all sorts of bad."
Berenson held out his hands, open-palmed, in a gesture halfway between a shrug and a congratulation. He offered, "And would that not make far greater leverage than twelve-hundred corpses?"
"But why?" Firenze demanded.
"Symmetry. You have heard of the Waste?"
"Of course we have." Clausen snapped.
"Think hard, sergeant. Our opponent thinks himself a poet. What ties these two topics?"
Firenze answered first, "The Waste was made when the Path carrier broke drive containment. They were using a bore-through strand cascade, and when they lost control, it scoured half the continent."
Clausen summarized, "Two billion dead, the Path decapitated, and our entire Seventh Fleet - gone. Hell of a day, and we're still paying the price."
Berenson agreed, "That cascade won the war. That fortuitous disaster changed the course of human history. Without it, we would still be wracked in the throes of an unending war on a dying world. That reaping sun gave us the mortal clarity to see our way from the Collapse. We should be grateful to those men and their idiot schemes."
Clausen looked like he might fire back some response at Berenson's flippant commentary, but Firenze was distracted by a thought-thread, dangling from earlier. He followed it and asked, "Are you claiming that the Path caused the
