Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [145]
But the gravitational backlash from the test wormhole near the soletta array must have surprised Radovas—however briefly—and Soudha. The accident had stopped their research, brought Auditors down upon them, compelled their flight. It made no sense, none, to posit the destruction of the soletta as deliberate sabotage and suicide. If one wanted to blow up Barrayarans, there were much more inviting targets around. Such as the military stations guarding each wormhole exit from Komarr local space. As an imploder lance variant, the device wasn't going to make a very useful military weapon till they figured out how to aim it at someone besides themselves. Though if one could set it up in secret aboard a military station, turn it on, and flee before the blast occurred . . .
Had Soudha figured out what had happened yet? He had data, yes, but his five-space man was dead. Arozzi was only a junior engineer, and Cappell the math man did not show any special brilliance in his academic record. Vorthys had been able to tap the top five-space expert on the planet, not to mention Youell the Wonderboy, who, Miles noted, was just at this moment arguing math with Vorthys and winning. Given the data and enough time, Radovas might have made the same conceptual breakthrough as Riva, but Soudha in his flight was not equipped to. Unless he'd found a replacement for Radovas . . . Miles made a note to tell ImpSec to check for the disappearance of any other Komarran five-space experts in the last weeks.
Soudha's flight, Miles decided, had to be following one of three logic branches. Either they had abandoned all and fled, or they'd withdrawn to hide, painfully rebuild their safe base, and try again another day. Or they had moved up their timetable and elected to risk all on an early strike of some kind. Miles wondered if they'd put what should have been a technically-driven decision to a vote. They were Komarrans, after all, and apparently volunteers. Amateur conspirators, not that it was exactly a licensed trade. Option One didn't feel right, given what Miles had seen so far. Option Two seemed more likely, but gave ImpSec time enough to do their job. The Komarrans might have thought so too.
If you're going to worry, worry about Option Three. There was a lot to worry about, in Option Three. Panicked and desperate people were capable of very strange moves indeed; look at some of the incidents in his own career.
"Professor Vorthys. Dr. Riva." Miles had to repeat himself, more loudly, before they looked up. "So you aim this device at a wormhole, and switch it on, and it starts pumping in energy. At some point, it builds up to a break-point and bounces back at you. What happens if you turn it off before that point?"
"I am not certain," said Riva, "that that wasn't exactly what happened. The backlash may have been triggered by either exceeding the phase boundaries, or by Radovas turning off the pulse source. It is unclear if the phase-boundary deaugmentation is discontinous or not."
"So . . . once activated, the device may become in effect its own dead-man switch? Turning it off sets it off?"
"I'm not sure. It would be a good point to test."
From a suitable distance. "Well . . . if you figure it out, please let me know, eh? Carry on."
After a moment to either digest his question, or wait to see if he'd pop out with any other interruption, the conversation around the table returned to its original polyglot of English, mathematics, and engineering. Miles settled back, feeling anything but reassured.
If Soudha had perfected his device with an eye to using the wormholes as power sources to blow up the military stations that guarded them, as a surprise opening for a shooting war . . . the way to do it would be to blow up all six at once, coordinated with a Komarr-wide uprising on the scale of the ill-fated Komarr Revolt. Miles was not totally pleased with ImpSec's performance in this case so far, but Soudha's had been a small group, running close to the ground. The signs of a massive revolt