“If the gate is gone,” Jillian said slowly as if trying to work out a difficult logic problem. “Why hasn’t Pittsburgh returned?” She pointed at the quarantine zone just a block from the hotel’s parking lot. “Shouldn’t it be right there?”
They stared at the dark Elfhome forest in silence.
* * *
Jillian chanted a litany of “This is bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Really bad. We’re totally screwed.”
“Don’t say ‘screwed.’” Louise murmured as she struggled to be calm and find a satellite that caught the accident.
“There’s nothing we can do!” Jillian cried. “Nothing. There’s huge ginormous hunks of stuff falling out of the sky that we can’t change or stop or anything.”
Louise locked down on a scream until she could say calmly, “We will find a way to deal with this. First, we need to know what exactly we’re facing.”
Within a few minutes, she found a Russian spy satellite that had been launched while the Chinese started the construction of the hyperphase gate. Over thirty years of silent observation with nothing more to report than occasional spaceships jumping to another star system. The spy satellite showed a confusion of metal pieces drifting where the gate had been. Louise scanned backwards through the satellite’s memory, watching the accident in reverse. The debris coalesced down then vanished, replaced by the gate, wreathed in violent greens and reds.
“It’s never looked like that before.” Crow Boy leaned over her shoulder. “Is that Rim fire?”
“Maybe,” Louise said. There had been no explosion, just one moment the large round gate had been there, and the next debris, all seemingly too straight to ever have been part of the circular structure.
Jillian snorted with contempt despite the fact she didn’t know any better than Louise. “Rim fire is simply an aurora effect caused by the collision of energetic charged particles in the field that holds Pittsburgh on Elfhome.”
But normally Rim fire only appeared on Elfhome. Why was it suddenly wreathing the gate? And was the debris even from the gate?
“The crew on the gate sent out a distress call,” Jillian reported on the results of her research. “They reported strong vibrations before Earth lost contact with them.”
Louise stepped back through time and gasped as the gate flickered in and out of existence. There. Gone. There again. Gone again. While the gate winked in and out, the rim fire continued to mark the gate’s location. “I don’t think anything hit the gate. I think something went wrong with the field.”
Louise scanned the footage to check her theory. Nothing seemed to interact with the gate until the last moment when the mystery debris appeared. Nor did the debris seemed to come from the gate but just flickered into existence as the gate vanished. The rim fire appeared first and then, detected only by zooming in tightly, the reported vibrations started. The aurora grew for several minutes before the gate started to blink in and out. The question was: “in and out of where?”
She locked onto the falling debris. It looked like a jigsaw puzzle thrown into the air and caught on film before raining onto the ground. Judging by the speed it flashed out of camera range, it had a vastly different orbit than the gate. It appeared only in a dozen frames of film.
Space limited the number of possible sources. It wasn’t like Earth where “machine” could run from anything airplane to mining equipment to submarine. She linked a recognition program to “known space objects” database and fed it the dozen frames of film that showed the debris.
“I don’t understand,” Crow Boy said. “The gate in orbit generated the field that kept Pittsburgh on Elfhome. If the gate is gone, what happened to the city?”
“We don’t know!” The twins and Nikola cried.
The recognition program found a match. The largest piece of debris was an odd glittering mass that looked like an iceberg growing out of a medusa of silvery tubing. The iceberg was spinning as it rocketed away. In frame number nine, it showed its smooth underbelly. There were three small ports and the start of a Chinese letter in red. The recognition software filled in missing pieces and the ghostly outline of the colony ship Minghe Hao took shape. Part of the ship’s hull had been peeled back by some unknown collision, laying bare the water treatment plant. The ship’s vast store of water formed the glimmering iceberg blooming out the shattered remains. The constellation of smaller debris was identified as pieces of the ship’s orbital maneuvering system. Burn marks indicated that the rocket engines had been fired prior to the ship’s destruction. It would explain the speed and angle of the wreckage. But Minghe Hao had jumped out of Earth’s orbit six years ago.