with the emperox to introduce chaos into the plans of Nadashe Nohamapetan?”
“That’s what the emperox told me, yes.”
“Then I assume that is exactly what she is doing.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“As do I, Lord Marce. In the meantime I will pretend in public to grieve over my daughter.”
“That might be wise,” Marce said. “How long do you plan to stay in-system?”
“Indefinitely,” the countess said. “I have my business to attend to. I am led to believe the Imperial Navy wants to have a meeting with me about a task force they wish to assemble in Ikoyi space. And beyond that, whatever is happening with the emperox and my daughter, I want to be here for. I can’t imagine it will be anything less than spectacular when it finally plays out. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
* * *
And then there was the Rupture data.
From it, Marce learned two things. The first was that the scientists of the Free Systems, the loose confederation of star systems that occupied the same space as the Interdependency did today, were enormously advanced, at least in their understanding of the Flow and its dynamics. Marce could spend the rest of his natural-born life exploring the data that Cardenia had, with great reluctance, surrendered to him, and still not have scratched the surface of what it had to show him.
There was so much data here, so much understanding of the nature of the Flow that had previously been hidden to Marce, that he was genuinely angry at it. Observations and structures that his father had spent thirty years gathering data to describe were sketched out here in appendices—so well-understood as to be almost trivial. The idea that all of this information, all of this knowledge, had been flung down a memory hole for fifteen hundred years briefly brought Marce to a state that could only be described as existential despair.
But only briefly, because, after all, he had the data now. What he wanted to do was wallow in it, luxuriate in it, follow the threads of the data at his leisure to see where they led and what they meant. But there was no time for that. Right now, Marce still needed to save billions of people, or at least to see if it was possible. With great reluctance, he put aside nearly all the data to focus on the material that he could see was relevant to the problem at hand.
The second thing he learned was that the scientists of the Free Systems were not nearly smart enough.
For example, they understood that the Flow vibrates, but they didn’t understand that it’s a liquid.
Well, approximately. Trying to describe these underlying mathematical realities of the Flow into human language was like trying to describe the contents of a dictionary through dance. The Flow in fact neither vibrated nor acted like a liquid in any way that the human brain understood either of those two concepts. It was more accurate to say that across several dimensional axes, some of which nested inside others and still others which expressed themselves fractionally, there was a resting frequency to the Flow that could be manipulated locally by adding energy to it—and in doing so Flow shoals and streams could theoretically be induced to expand or contract or move in conventional space-time. This is how the Free Systems had collapsed the Flow stream out of their part of space; they’d created a hyperspatial equivalent of a resonator, chucked it into the Flow stream and set it off, collapsing that particular stream. That was the Rupture.
What they hadn’t understood was that dynamically, the Flow doesn’t act like energy, it acts like a liquid, propagating Flow analogues to pressure waves and generating low-pressure voids in turn. In setting off their resonating bomb, the Free Systems scientists didn’t just amplify the Flow, they cavitated it, setting off multidimensional voids that shook the Flow when they collapsed.
The reverberations of the Free System’s resonator eventually dissipated, affecting nothing more than the Flow stream it collapsed. The effects of the cavitation propagated—across the Flow, destabilizing the portion that correlated to the Interdependency and more besides. As far as Marce could see, the math suggested it was still propagating, echoing across the inexpressible terrain of the Flow as it did so.
All the math was there to see it: the cavitation as well as the vibration. Either the scientists involved in creating the resonator that collapsed the Flow stream out of the Free States missed it, or they saw it,