A few decades earlier and about two hundred thousand trillion kilometers from where she currently sat, a tiny node of active protomolecule in a biological matrix had entered the orbit of a planet called Ilus, hitchhiking on the gunship Rocinante.

As the uncanny semisentient intelligence of the protomolecule tried to make contact with other nodes in the gate builders' Inog dead empire, it woke up mechanisms that had been dormant for millions - or even billions - of years.  The end result had been an ancient factory returning to life, a massive robot attack, the melting of one artificial moon, and the detonation of a power plant that nearly cracked the planet in two.

All in all, a really ######## experience.

So when Elvi's team took the catalyst out of isolation in unexplored systems to do a similar if slightly better-controlled reaching out to the artifacts and remains, she made sure they were careful.  They watched what happened, they were ready to put the catalyst back in its box, and they didn't get too close to anything.

"Falcon in position," the pilot said.

If anything went terribly wrong, the pilot or Sagale or Elvi could give a single spoken order - Emergency evacuation, their name, and the delta-eight authorization code - and the ship would take it from there.  Given the Falcon's oversized engine and massive acceleration, anyone not in one of the ship's specially designed high-g couches would be injured or killed, but the data they'd already collected would be preserved.  Laconia had a lot of fail-safe logic like that.  It wasn't her favorite part of the job.

"Thank you, Lieutenant," Admiral Sagale replied.  He was strapped into a crash couch on the bridge too.  Another sign of how seriously everyone took this part of the mission.  "Major Okoye, you may proceed."

"Take her out," Elvi said into the comm.  In this situation, there was only one her.

Elvi sat in her custom Laconian crash couch, surrounded by screens.  The instruments could be yanked away in under a second, and the couch chamber filled with a breathable fluid for high-g burn shortly after.  She was one of the few people important enough that efforts would be made to keep her alive.  It felt like working inside a torpedo.  She kind of hated it.

On one of her screens, a camera tracked the movement of the catalyst as she was wheeled out of her storage room on a high-tech gurney covered in sensors.  Protomolecule communication went both ways.  What happened to their sample was just as important to their study as what happened to the dead system that they might be about to activate.

The catalyst's gurney moved on magnetic wheels down the corridor to a compartment in the skin of the ship, away from all the radiation shielding and whatever high-tech wizardry Cortizar's team had come up with to lock their sample away from the rest back beyond the gate.

Nothing happened.