Babylon's Ashes

Her back ached. Her eyes hurt. She didn’t really notice. Here was a dataset built of high-traffic periods with and without mysterious disappearances. Here was one mapping the energy output and mass of the missing ships and trying to fit that curve against ships that had sailed through safely. The full encrypted dataset sent to Luna announced it was complete, which seemed awfully fast until she checked how long she’d been sitting there.

Five variables—preceding mass, preceding energy, mass of the ship, energy of the ship, and time. No single-point solution, but a range. A moving system of curves, rising with preceding mass and energy, falling with time, and, where the mass and energy curve of the other ships intersected it, disappearances. It was as if traffic passing through the gates created a wake, and when something large enough and energetic enough struck that wake, it vanished.

Her hands were trembling as she pulled her terminal out of her pocket. She didn’t know if it was emotion or exhaustion or if the noodles and mushrooms had been so long ago she just needed to eat. Jim picked up the connection almost as soon as she requested it.

“Hey,” he said. “Are you all right? You didn’t come back to the ship last night.”

“No,” she said, meaning no she hadn’t gone back to the ship, not no she wasn’t all right. She waved the imprecision of the word away. “I think I have something interesting here. I need someone to look at it for me in case I’m just hallucinating from exhaustion.”

“I’ll be right there. Should I grab anyone else? What sort of ‘interesting’ are you looking at?”

“It’s about the missing ships.”

On the little screen, Jim’s eyebrows rose. His eyes went a degree wider. “Do you know what’s eating them?”

She blinked. On her monitor, two equations, five variables. Years of traffic logs to draw from. It was a perfect fit. Surely Luna would be able to confirm it.

But Do you know what’s eating them?

“I don’t,” she said. “I know something better.”

Chapter Fifty: Holden

“It’s not a huge dataset,” Naomi said, turning as she reached the edge of the room and pacing back toward him. “I mean, it’s the largest there is. There’s not more out there we could get.”

“Is that a problem?” Holden asked.

She stopped, stared at him, her hands wide and hard in a universal gesture of Of course it’s a problem. “It may not scale. There may be other variables at work that just haven’t come into play in these instances. If you wanted me to build an engine based around data like this, I wouldn’t do it. Shit, an engine. I wouldn’t trust a ladder based on this. Except that…”

She started pacing again and chewing at the nail of one thumb. Whatever her exception was, she’d already moved on in her mind. Holden folded his arms, waited. He knew her well enough to recognize when she needed a little mental space. He looked down at the graphs on her screen. They reminded him of a heart monitor, but the shapes of the curves were very different. He was pretty sure that with an EKG, the initial spike went back down under the baseline. With this, there was a rapid rise, then a slow, sloping falling away.

No one else had come to the security station yet. Probably, they were all still on the Rocinante, eating breakfast in the galley. Or maybe stopping at one of the little kiosks in the docks where the locals still took their scrip.

Naomi stopped beside him, her gaze on the screen with his. Her lips twitched like she was talking to herself, having a heated conversation no one else was welcome to. Not even him. She shook her head, disagreeing with herself. She’d seemed calmer when she’d first called, but the more they talked about it, the more agitated she became. The more frightened, even.

It looked like she was starting to hope.

“So this thing. Is it a thing we can use?”

“I don’t know what it is. The mechanism? I’ve got no idea. All we have is this pattern, but it looks so consistent.”

He tried again. “Is this a consistent pattern we can use? And specifically, is there something here that maybe gives us a third alternative in that ‘stay here and be slaughtered versus run away through one of the gates and be slaughtered’ conversation?”

She took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly between her teeth. He’d kind of hoped she’d laugh, but she didn’t. She sat at her workstation again, pulled up a complex equation that Holden couldn’t follow.

“I think,” she said, “we can simulate a high-traffic interval. Load the Giambattista with as much junk as we can weld on it. Overload the reactor a little so it’s generating more energy. Then, when we run it through a gate”—she tapped the spike-and-decay curve—“we should get one of these. Not a big one, though. Even a massive ship is only one ship…”

“And one of these is what?”