“They’ve got power down here. There’s no question about it. This asteroid has been involved in everything we’ve seen so far,” Yili said.

“So why didn’t they maintain fire against Argent?” Zony asked, examining the discharged little alien device she had used to teleport herself and Curtiss to the battle station.

Yili suddenly stopped and stared at the control systems. They were part of an out-of-the-way valve control console: Unremarkable in virtually every respect except for the information they were conveying to Argent’s Chief Engineer.

“That’s impossible,” she half-whispered. Zony looked up. Unable to interpret whatever Curtiss was seeing, she turned instead to trying to decipher the pale look on Yili’s face. She stood.

“What is it?”

“They’re not using power the way we do,” Curtiss replied, coaxing as much information out of the relatively underpowered little terminal as she could. “Look at this.” A colorful chart with undulating bands displayed across it appeared.

“That’s a frequency map,” Zony said. “Why would they need that in the power grid for a battle station’s weapons?”

“Because they’re using pico-frequency communications to drive a matter-energy conversion field. Somehow they’ve found a way to synchronize the EM waveforms with the energy field they are maintaining.”

It rapidly dawned on Zony what the implications were. “The Dunkerque.”

“Exactly. We had to generate our own energy field with the SRS emitters. Once we synchronized it, we opened a gateway to wherever the Captain ended up and brought him and the out-of-phase ship back to our space. This “Ithis’ Daysmith was shouting about must use this as the whole basis of their technology. They can project energy or matter through ultra-high-frequency transmissions.”

“Hold on a second,” Zony replied, pointing at the frequency map again. “Those wavelengths are so short we can barely pick them out at ranges of a few feet. Getting a pico transmission across the room would take a couple hundred watts. Getting one from Argent to here would take tens of millions. Where are they getting the power? They only had enough for one shot from this gun!”

“The theory is that once you synch the communications frequency with the energy signature, you get a hyper-efficient field density. It’s like the opposite of a scattering field. If you plug in the right numbers, the field stabilizes at a given frequency, which means you don’t use power at one end to “jump’ to the other, because–”

"–because you draw power from the energy field itself. Like an electric train.”

“Exactly, lieutenant.” Yili switched the display back to the asteroid’s energy system. “And now that we know what to look for, we won’t make the mistake of thinking this–” she pointed at one of the large structures in the schematic "–is some kind of energy production node instead of a life support processor. Everything they’ve got down here is designed to keep humans alive. I’ll bet you a steak dinner they set up that gun to draw energy from the exact same field that weird little teleporter uses.”

Zony was already busy fiddling with the device’s controls. Now that they had a working hypothesis, she was only a step or two away from proving it. “I’m pretty sure I know what they did,” she muttered as she turned the object over and over. A few moments later, it lit up again, bathing the room in a soothing yellow glow.

“That thing just ties in to the same field signature, doesn’t it?”

“As long as you’ve got the right frequency,” Zony replied. “They can’t change the energy signature of the field once it’s established. They would have to create a new field from scratch. That probably takes more energy than they have access to, so that limits the number of available frequencies for getting matter, energy and information from one point to another.”

“But we already used the obvious one and it went dark. They switch them on purpose, don’t they?” Lieutenant Curtiss was starting to get the hang of Signals.

“Harmonic.” Zony grinned. “Give me a week, and I’ll have the whole rotation mapped out. Either way, we’re back in business and now we’ve got the advantage.”

Yili raised an eyebrow.

“Now that we know what to look for, this thing will lead us to every interesting place we need to go.”

“I think we should be careful about teleporting all over the place.”

“We don’t need to. We know this device can map the energy field to physical space, otherwise it would be like a water pipe with caps on both ends. All we have to do is use its method of mapping the energy field to physical locations and it becomes a homing beacon to whatever we’re looking for, including–”

“Including every last enemy soldier on this base.”