He rotated the triangle and aligned an edge with the flat part of the casing. “Rotate 120 degrees, this face of revolver with Astrophage stuck to it now points out the back of the ship. Increase strength of IR light inside. Astrophage now very excited, push very hard toward IR light! Their thrust—Petrova-frequency light—leaves back of ship. This pushes ship forward. Millions of little Astrophages pushing on back of ship make it go, yes?”

I bent down for a look. “I see… this way no part of the ship has to be in the blast area of the light.”

“Yes, yes!” said Dimitri. “Astrophage force limited only by the brightness of IR light attracting it. I did very much math and decided best is to make Astrophage exhaust all energy in four seconds. Any faster and force will break revolver.”

He rotated the revolver another 120 degrees and pointed to the remaining third of the casing. “This is cleaning area. Squeegee wipes dead Astrophage off revolver.”

He pointed to the cleaning area, then the fueling area, and then the open face. “All three areas active at same time. So while this area cleans dead Astrophage off this face, fueling area adds Astrophage to that face, and other face is pointed out back of ship, providing thrust. This pipelining means the part of triangle pointed out back of ship is always thrusting.”

Dimitri opened my vial of Astrophage and set it in the fueling chamber. I guess since the Astrophage will find their way to the triangle face, no special handling was required. He could just… let the fuel see the IR.

“Come, come,” he said. “Experiment time!”

We left the vacuum chamber and Dimitri sealed it off. He yelled something in Russian, and all the Russians started repeating it. Everyone made their way to the far side of the hangar deck, including us.

They’d set up a folding table. It had a laptop on it with Cyrillic writing on the screen.

“Ms. Stratt. How far is carrier from closest land?” Dimitri asked.

“About three hundred kilometers,” she said.

“This is good.”

“Wait, why?” I said. “Why is that good?”

Dimitri pursed his lips. “It is… good. Time for science!”

He pushed a button. There was a muffled whump from the far side of the bay, followed by a hum, and then nothing.

“Experiment done.” He leaned forward to read the screen. “Sixty thousand Newtons of force!”

He turned to the other Russians. “60,000 ньютонов!”

They all cheered.

Stratt turned to me. “That’s a lot, right?”

I was too busy staring slack-jawed at Dimitri to answer her. “Did you say sixty thousand Newtons?”

He pumped his fist in the air. “Yes! Sixty thousand Newtons! Maintained for one hundred microseconds!”

“Oh my God. From that little thing?!” I started to walk forward. I had to see this for myself.