Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [144]
"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 rate. 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 a 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 back along the initial path. I don't know if Radovas committed suicide, but I'm very much afraid he may have shot himself."
"My word," breathed Vorthys. "And the ore ship—"
"If their test platform was indeed aboard the soletta array, the involvement of the ore ship was sheer bad luck. Bad timing. It blundered into the gravitational pulse and was ripped apart, then was funneled toward and struck the soletta array and thoroughly confused the issue. If the device was aboard the ore ship—well, same result."
"Including the confusion," said Vorthys ruefully.
"But . . . but there's still something very wrong. You have presumably calculated most of the energy vectors involved in the soletta accident?
"Over and over."
"You trust the numbers you gave me?"
"Yes."
"And you've put limits on what energies the device can have transferred, over various lengths of time."
"There are some fairly strict and obvious engineering limits to its potential peak power output," agreed Vorthys. "What we don't know is how long they could run it."
"Well," the five-space physicist took a deep breath, "unless they were running it for weeks, and Radovas and Trogir were seen downside much later than that, I think you've got more energy out of the wormhole than went into it."
"From where?"
"Presumably from the wormhole's deep structure. Somehow. Unless you want to posit that Soudha has invented perpetual motion as well, which is against my religion."
Vorthys was looking wildly excited. "This is wonderful! Miles, call Youell. Call D'Emorie. We must check those numbers."
When D'Emorie returned with Youell, all the tech folk were too entranced with the breakthrough regarding the novel device to broach any embarrassing questions about where the fast-penta had gone. D'Emorie would doubtless think to ask later; Miles would be bland and uninformative, he decided. Riva clearly didn't want to waste time and mental energy on anger when there was physics to be had, but if she decided to be pissed at him later, he would grovel as needed. For now, Miles sat back, watched, and listened, feeling that he understood perhaps one sentence in three.
So did Soudha now imagine that he possessed a wormhole collapser—or a giant imploder lance? He had stolen much of the technical data from the accident investigation; he had a lot of the same numbers Vorthys did, and the same amount of time to look them over. While simultaneously managing a complex evacuation of some dozen persons and several tons of equipment, Miles reminded himself. Soudha had been rather busy. Of course, he hadn't had to waste time