She glided past Winters, who had been on his way to let her know lunch was ready. Cathcart was securing a large covered dish to the wardroom table.
“Lunch,” said the embarrassed ensign.
“You made this?” She was nonplussed. “I thought all you could make was four variations on squashed, burnt hot dogs.”
“My mother taught me to cook many of her country’s dishes.” He seemed to be at a loss for words. “What I know how to cook, not everyone has a taste for.”
The sticky dish of chicken and sausage, spiced rice and vegetables quickly disappeared. There was little small talk. After the meal, Winters gave his report as Cathcart cleared the table.
“I cut into the starboard hydroponics dome from the galley and recovered the body of Nicola Sutherland. From the roster you gave us, ma’am, that leaves Donovan, Ångstrom and Guerrera unaccounted for. I got a pretty good PSR shot into the reactor module the day . . . the other day and I didn’t see any of them in there.
“I also brought back the AI ROM. I took the liberty of installing the chip in one of Kestrel’s auxiliary CPUs and we have it running. Assuming I understand the interface, Bug One is on its way here now.” Winters gestured towards Cathcart. “We talked about it a little and unless you object, Cathcart will take Bug One and use it to bring in Bug Two. He’s a better small craft pilot than I am.”
Cathcart returned to the table. It was obvious that he was still having trouble with his new captain, but he spoke anyway. “Winters said you know what happened.” It was a question, a request. The omission of any indication of her rank or status as his superior officer felt deliberate, but not disrespectful, a bit like a child asking a stern parent if there were really no monsters under the bed. He’d been hit hardest by Parker’s death and that death, coming in the reactor module he was already afraid of, left him emotionally raw.
“After a fashion, yes, I believe I do.” She unstrapped from the wardroom chair and pushed off towards the console she’d been working at the day before. “Forgive me for being pedantic, but I do not know where to begin except at the beginning.” She inserted a data key. “I have been working on the console in quarters. I could not sleep anyway.” She keyed commands and the screen blossomed with a sphere. “You probably remember one rule from plane geometry about three non-colinear points defining a circle.” Both ensigns nodded. “There is a similar rule about four points and a sphere. There are parallel rules for many shapes and many spaces. 2-D, 3-D, 4-D, 5-D spaces each have analogues of circles and spheres.” Again the nods, although with a bit less enthusiasm.
She keyed another command and the sphere on the screen changed, twisted or warped itself into a different shape. That shape rotated on the screen and as it did, the shape seemed to change subtly. “This is a sphere projected into four spacial dimensions.” No nods this time, but she still had their attention. “I will not explain why, but it is called a three-sphere or a three-manifold hypersphere.”
Winters asked, “Did the points you plotted from the aft supply module map to that?”
“No. Not quite.” She keyed another command and the original sphere reappeared and began its transformation into the hypersphere. It stopped before it finished. “This is what it mapped to, a transitional shape.” Now she’d lost them.
“I don’t understand what this is supposed to tell us,” said Cathcart.
“Two things. First, that the area of effect of whatever destroyed Howard has its roots in a 4-D reality. Second, whatever it was had its effect and withdrew in a vanishingly small amount of time, an almost immeasurably small interval.”
Winters this time. “How do you know about that second point?”
“Because this shape cannot exist.” She keyed the first sequence to loop forward and backwards. “The transition from the two-manifold sphere to the three-manifold hypersphere is supposed to be instantaneous.” They were both looking skeptical. “I will come back to this. Just file it away for a bit. It will all connect.”
She keyed a new command sequence and the PSR video from the reactor module appeared on the screen. Parker’s body was visible on one side. She zoomed in on the manifestation above the reactor and took him out of the frame. “Sorry, I should have edited this first.” A few more keystrokes and she had a loop of the video running. “What do you see?”
Winters looked at his watch and the screen both. Cathcart just stared at the screen, transfixed. Winters spoke. “A cube and . . . something else. Alternating in the same position approximately every fifteen seconds.”
“Very good.” Natalia seemed pleased that she was getting through. “That ‘something else’ is a tesseract, a cube in four spacial dimensions.” She still had Winters, but Cathcart was lost to her right now. “These shapes are the physical manifestation of the origin and terminus of the conduit that is the heart of Howard’s current experiments.” She keyed a command that slowed the PSR playback. “There is a problem, however.” She looked at Winters, a prompt.
He studied the video closely. “They’re not transitioning from one shape to another, are they?”
“No. Both shapes are stable and unchanging.”
“So what are we seeing?”
“A three-space and a four-space reality are intersecting at this point.”
“What would cause that?” Winters was genuinely curious. “Forgive me, I’m a hobbyist in many areas, but three-space is a special case intersection of m-brane structures, four-space is a different special case intersection of m-brane structures. I don’t understand how those two spaces can intersect.”
Natalia was impressed, but unsurprised. “You are a very well informed hobbyist. And you are correct. Theory says they cannot.”
“So what are we seeing?”
“Something outside of theory. Something important.”
Cathcart roused himself. “How does this explain Howard and what happened to Matt?”
Natalia keyed another command. “There is more to the puzzle.” A sensor image of the station appeared. She zoomed in on the connection between the BQ habitat module and engineering. “In infrared.” The image changed to shades of green with one isolated bright line. “The command circuitry is overheated. That is where the power drain is making its way forward.” Now Cathcart was interested. He’d seen these images before but hadn’t studied them closely.
“Just how hot is that cable?” he asked.
“About five degrees Celsius below the melting point of the individual wires,” replied Natalia.
“What’s the power loss looking like?” Cathcart knew where this was going and was in a near panic over it.
“Steady at sixty-two percent. Has been for several days.”
“Then it’s not just a short. It’s a controlled tap of the reactor’s power.” Cathcart lost control for a moment. “Aw shit, you’re telling us that there’s something alive in there, aren’t you?”
Natalia keyed a last command. A still from the reactor module video appeared and morphed as the image shifted from one recording spectrum to another, stopping when it got to an image produced by inferred proton interference. There was an umbilicus between the reactor and the shifting shapes above it. Several amorphous pseudopodia reached out of the reactor chamber, some extending beyond the bulkheads of the module into cold space beyond. Her reply was unequivocal. “Yes.”
Natalia awoke in an autodoc. Ensign Winters was looking down at her. “Shhh,” he said. “Don’t try to talk. Your jaw is broken. The ’doc’ll have it fused back together in a few minutes.” Her eyes widened in a querying look. “Cathcart has been chemically restrained, and we’re on our way back to Howard.” She hadn’t noticed before, but one of Winters’ eyes was partially swollen shut and he had a gash over his left ear that had been adhesively sutured. “Your revelation was too much for him. He disabled both of us and was piloting Kestrel for home when I came to and subdued him.” Winters touched the gash over his ear. “He’s not entirely sane. But I’d guess you’ve figured that out for yourself by now.”
The autodoc chimed. The chemicals that immobilized her so her jaw could be repaired were quickly flushed out. “How long. . . .” She paused and worked her jaw. “Damn, that is sore. How long before Kestrel is back at Howard?”
“He burned out of there at three g on thrusters. I’m bringing us back at one g. We’ll be back on station by breakfast tomorrow.”
“We have work to do. You understand?”
“I think I do. The three-space/four-space intersection, that’s the problem, right?”
“Da. It has the potential to destabilize the entirety of the m-brane intersection that is this universe, and probably that of the four-space universe as well. It has got to be undone.”
“I guess you weren’t quite as much ‘in the middle of nowhere’ as you’d hoped,” Winters smiled. It wasn’t an accusation.
“This is not the result of Howard’s experiments. Not directly, anyway. That . . . that thing, that entity, is likely responsible.” She climbed out of the autodoc’s chamber. “You should get in there.” She gestured at the chamber.
“Cathcart can’t relieve me.”
“It will take an hour, tops. I can watch the ship for an hour.” He hesitated. “Consider that an order, Ensign Winters. I need you whole.”
While Winters’ wounds were properly treated, Natalia resumed the briefing that Cathcart had so violently interrupted earlier that day. “There