Angel Stations by Gary Gibson

talk?’ Vincent asked him. ‘It’s kind of public.’
    ‘If anybody really wanted to listen in to our conversation, they’d have bugged your office. If they’ve bugged you personally, we’re screwed anyway. But here we can just sit and talk and nobody will pay much attention.’
    Vincent nodded, not really thinking about how he had gone all the way from greeting an old friend to worrying about surveillance in the time it took to drink a cup of coffee. ‘Okay,’ he said carefully.
    ‘Okay, first your research.’ My research? thought Vincent. ‘How’s it going?’
    Vincent blinked. ‘Are we talking about the important thing now?’
    Eddie wore a very patient look. ‘Yes.’
    ‘Fine, I guess,’ Vincent said with a shrug. ‘Most of it’s just librarianship, keeping up with the data coming in from the other deep-space arrays, collating and cross-referencing it all, comparing it with other information gathered by other people over the centuries since they found the first couple of Angel Stations.’
    ‘Discovered anything interesting?’
    ‘Lots,’ Vincent said immediately. ‘The most important finding would involve fluctuations in levels of gamma radiation on a galaxy-wide basis. The Angel Stations aren’t spread evenly enough to provide a truly accurate picture of how the galaxy’s evolved over the past couple of hundred million years, but, using the Array here, and at the moon, along with the Arrays they’ve re-established out at the other Stations now, what you get is pretty remarkable. Sudden surges of gamma radiation, separated by huge periods of time. More than might be accounted for by typical burster activity.’
    ‘Big surges, right?’
    ‘Yes,’ Vincent said carefully, wondering where all this was leading. Eddie maintained an intense expression, while Vincent kept talking. ‘Big surges – more like explosive.’ Explosive? That was the word he’d been looking for. ‘That’s what you basically have. Maybe some kind of a super-burster. Evidence seems to suggest there are regular explosions of lethal gamma radiation, emanating from the core region of the galaxy, and spreading outwards from there over periods of thousands of years.’
    ‘Lethal?’
    ‘Sure, almost certainly. But it’s hard to be accurate. We found the first Angel Station out in the Oort Cloud at the end of the twenty-first century. Now, that let us jump to other Angel Stations at different points throughout the galaxy. Some are closer to the galactic core, others are further away. The one in the Kasper system is the closest to the core. So that gives us several vantage points from which we can measure these fluctuations.’ Vincent beamed at him.
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘Okay,’ said Vincent. He could feel himself slipping comfortably into lecturer mode. ‘When the Oort Angel Station failed three centuries ago, we lost contact with all the other Stations and their associated human colonies for two hundred years.’
    ‘The Hiatus.’
    Vincent nodded. ‘Observations from those other Angel Stations resumed a century ago, when the Oort Station’s singularity was successfully reactivated. Now, the Hiatus made for some big gaps in our knowledge. I’ve been correlating data gathered before the Hiatus along with data obtained since we re-established contact. It’s long been thought that similar surges or explosions might have been responsible for mass extinctions here on Earth. The geological evidence is there, in the rock. That’s also part of my research.’
    ‘And how certain of that are you?’
    ‘Pretty certain. Can’t test it out, obviously, but I’d say all the evidence is strongly in favour.’
    ‘I’d agree.’ Eddie nodded. ‘I’ve got something you should take a look at. No, make that have to look at.’ He reached inside his jacket and brought out a smartsheet with bright red edging. He rolled it up and put it in Vincent’s hand. ‘I want you to take a good look at that. But, before you do, I want to ask you