He turned a page.
"Factoring in all variables... Chen Hao's stated purpose in traveling to Pluto, the location of the Heavenly Demon's nest, the timing and intensity of the flash, and the disappearance of Pluto's gravitational field... the probability that this was connected to Chen Hao..."
He looked up.
"Ninety-eight point five three percent."
The president's mouth twitched.
What was the difference between ninety-eight percent and a hundred percent?
"What about debris?" he asked. "Is any of it heading toward Blue Star?"
The NASA administrator took that question. "We've mobilized every near-Earth object monitoring network. New Mexico, Hawaii, and we've obtained the European Space Agency's data as well. So far... we haven't detected any debris, cometary bodies, or high-speed streams of matter moving toward the inner Solar System."
"Where did that planet go?"
"It disappeared." The administrator chose his words carefully.
"It didn't break apart. It didn't explode. It... disappeared. The speed and direction of Charon's orbital deviation indicate that Pluto's gravitational field dropped completely to zero within an extremely short period... no more than five seconds, by our estimate. There was no residual mass."
The conference room was silent.
No residual mass.
A celestial body twenty-three hundred kilometers in diameter. A mass of roughly 1.3 × 10^22 kilograms.
Reduced to zero.
The president set his pen on the table. Picked it up, then put it down again.
"That gentleman..." He paused. "What are his chances of survival?" He no longer dared to address Chen Hao by name.
The analyst turned to the last page.
"Based on the subject's known upper limits, past behavioral patterns, and combat performance in the Taiyin Realm... our combined modeling puts... his probability of survival at eighty-three percent."
The number hung in the air.
Eighty-three percent.
That meant... there was a seventeen percent chance he