The dead man on her screen was in a bag somewhere right now, heading to Laconia and the Science Directorate for a more thorough examination. Elvi tilted her head and considered the wetness along the back of the corpse’s jumpsuit, the tightness where death bloat had pressed the fabric smooth, the way eyes had sunken as they’d given up their moisture to the air. According to his ID and the genetic sample, he’d been an engineering intern at a supply station, and one of the first corpses they’d recovered. He had once been a man named Alejandro Lowry. He was just SanEstebanCadaver-001 now.
The voices that played as she reviewed the dead weren’t from San Esteban. She’d listened to the captain and physician of the Amaterasu enough to know there wasn’t much they could tell her. She’d gone farther to find insight. She was listening to James Holden and a woman with a long, slow accent that Elvi thought of as Mariner Valley but was a kind of Laconian now.
Tell me about the systems going dark, the interrogator said.
It was just one at first, Jim replied. And the… group consciousness? Consensus? I don’t know the right word for it. The chorus. They weren’t even particularly worried. Not at first.
Elvi switched to an exterior. An older woman—gray, swirling hair—lying in sunlight. An animal Elvi didn’t recognize lay beside the human corpse. It looked something like a small, insectile pig. Compound eyes on either side of a long skull-like structure. A prey species, then, and it appeared to have died at the same time as the woman. She pulled up an article on the species and what was known of the anatomy and physiology of San Esteban’s tree of life.
Then there were more. Just a few. I mean, like three or four. Even then, it wasn’t more than a curiosity, Jim said.
What was left in the system? Were there bodies? Did the aliens just disappear? the interrogator asked.
It wasn’t like that, Jim said. The systems just went dark. Like losing a comm channel.
Then how were they certain the systems were dead?
They were all connected. If someone cuts off your hand, is it dead? So yeah, the systems were dead.
Because, Elvi thought, the builders or the Romans or the space jellyfish—the beings of light—hadn’t known what it was to be alone since they’d learned to glow in that ancient, freezing ocean. They were individuals and they were a unity. A superorganism, connected as intimately as she was with her own limbs and organs. She found a paper speculating about the internal signal transfer in the bug-pig animal and let her eyes flow over it, catching the gist without diving down on details.
But they decided based on just that to destroy whole systems? the interrogator asked.
It was like cutting mold off a block of cheese. Or a clump of cancer cells on your skin. There was a bad spot, and so they burned it off. They didn’t need it. They thought it would stop.
What would stop, exactly?
The darkness. The death.
“Hey,” Fayez said, and Elvi stopped the recording just as the interrogator started her next question.
“Hey,” she said, making it a sigh.
He floated in the door of her office. He looked tired. He looked fragile. Everyone did now. Everyone was.
“The relief drone from Laconia just popped through the gate,” he said. “Another couple weeks for it to match orbit, and we’ll be eating pretty much the same thing we’re eating now, but with different atoms in it.”
“Good. Hope we’re here when it is.”
She’d meant it to be funny. A morbid joke. The words tasted like chalk. The distress in her husband’s eyes was brief, and after it, he chose to smile.
“What’re you listening to?”
Elvi looked at the speakers mounted in the cloth of her office walls as if it would help her remember. “Um. James Holden. Some of his debriefing from when he was on Laconia. I’m trying to get the recordings from after the gates opened too. I know there’s an archive of them at Alighar Muslim University, but I haven’t gotten an answer from them yet.”
“Something in particular you’re looking for?”
“Memories change over a few decades,” she said. “I just want to see if what he says here matches what he said then.”
“See if you can figure out why we aren’t all dead already?”
“I have a couple theories on that.”
He pushed himself across the room, grabbed a handhold, and settled at her side. Pale stubble dusted his cheek like light snowfall. She took his hand in her left, and pulled up the water purification data from San Esteban with her right. The efficiency graph wasn’t subtle.
“What am I looking at here?” he asked.
“An uptick in salt precipitates that matches when everyone died,” Elvi said. “It looks like the mechanism the dark gods figured out is to make ionic bonds just a tiny bit stickier. It lasted just long enough to shut down neurons. The local fauna are also using ionic channels for signal propagation even though it’s more like vacuum channels than nerves. It would still mess them up pretty good. You can tell it’s not taking out the microbiota, though.”
“How can I tell that?”
“Bloat,” she said. “The trapped gasses are microbe farts.”
“I find that story horrifying, but since it ended in a fart joke, I’m not sure how to react.”
“Not a joke, but as soon as the event was done? Water recycling started up again. And the Amaterasu transited in just a few hours after the event. All the decay in these images happened while they were getting to a landing pad.”
“Which says?”
“I don’t think the enemy knows it worked. Listen.” She found the tagged audio and played it.
It wasn’t like that. The systems just went dark. Like losing a comm channel.
Then how were they certain the systems were dead?
They were all connected.
She stopped it. “The builders didn’t go look. They didn’t have to. They were already connected. When they lost a system, they knew there was no one there anymore. They used the gates to shove matter around when they needed to, but that was like us moving food through our guts. It was barely even conscious for them anymore. It wasn’t something they scheduled or had trade routes for. So if there was nothing in a system to support, there’s no traffic to support it.”
“Traffic?”
“Like the Amaratsu,” she said. “The enemy did a thing, and then the traffic stopped. What if that’s how the enemy knew the thing worked. But with us? The traffic didn’t stop. I think we may be as hard for them to see and make sense of as they are for us. So part of what we can do is dirty up their data. All our random, uncoordinated transits are what they’re feeling. It’s like hearing rats in your walls and putting out different poisons until the noise stops. The noise stopping is how you know what worked. And since we’re still making transits in and out of that gate? As far as they know, their poison didn’t work.”
“That’s a hell of a theory.”
“Yep. Or.”
“Or?”
She popped to another audio mark. It was just one at first.
“Or this is inside the error bars for how they work, and they’ll be murdering us all shortly.” She couldn’t keep the despair out of her voice. Even if she had, he would have heard it. They’d known each other too long for secrets. “We have to push harder for answers.”
“Harder than we have been?”