The Roci shifted under him, slewing around in a perfect arc, connecting the Freehold gate and the Adro gate in a logical relationship defined by complex math that the enormous power of the ship’s drive was struggling to convert into physical reality. If the feed of reaction mass stuttered, they’d slip off course. If they missed the Adro gate, everything that came after that would be someone else’s problem. Jim couldn’t tell if his heart was racing from fear or just the effort of keeping the blood supply going to his brain.
To his left, Naomi grunted, and it sounded like dismay. He had the sudden flashbulb memory of medical alarms blaring when Fred Johnson had died in the same crash couch she was in, and his heart found a way to beat a little faster. No alarm sounded, but a private message came onto his screen from her.
TOO MANY SHIPS.
He changed his display again. The traffic pattern in the ring space. A dozen transponder codes spooled out—Tyrant’s Folly out of Sol, Taif out of Hongdae, Forgiveness out of Firdaws—and twice as many pings for unidentified drive plumes. He tried to shift the analysis to include them all, but before he could, another message came from Naomi.
THIS IS INSANE. THEY’LL FAIL THE TRANSIT. WHAT DO THEY THINK THEY’RE DOING???
But she knew what they were doing. The same thing they were. Looking at the risk, and each one individually deciding that it made sense for them to throw the dice. And some had certainly failed. There was no one to keep track of how many ships went in a ring gate and didn’t come out the other side. If the Roci was lost, he didn’t know how long it would be before anyone realized it. Maybe never.
He shifted the system to threat assessment, and the answer came at once. Two ships were going to transit out of the ring space before the Roci reached Adro: a colony ship running without a transponder that was almost at the Behrenhold gate and the Forgiveness, a massive cargo hauler out of Firdaws that would pass into Bara Gaon just a few minutes before the Roci reached the Adro gate. Assuming the rings were at base state, the Roci would survive the transition. Assuming that no other ships came in through a ring gate in the meantime.
Assuming, that was to say, a lot of things he didn’t have any reason to assume.
The stars came back. The same stars as home, if in a slightly different configuration. Ekko let his head fall back into the gel of the crash couch. For a moment, he didn’t say anything, barely felt anything, and then a deep relief rode through him like a wave, lifting his heart and setting him back down laughing.
He became aware that his comms were open from the soft rhythm of Annamarie cursing in French. She wasn’t talking to him or anyone really. Maybe God.
“Little full in there today, yeah?” Ekko said.
Annamarie shifted to English. “Fuck, that was too much, old man.”
Ekko laughed again. The release felt almost postcoital. Here he was, in his ship and in Bara Gaon system, and not in whatever screaming void ate ships that drew the short straw.
“I’m going to quit,” Annamarie said. “I’m going to find an apartment in Bara Gaon and an honest job, and I’m going to retire and have babies and never go through that fucking gate again. God damn.” He could hear the grin in her voice, and knew she didn’t mean it until she sobered. “Seriously, capitán. Someone’s going to fucking die in there if it stays that busy.”
“True enough, but not us. Not today. Get me a tightbeam lock to the traffic authority and the client. Let them know we’re here.”
“That we live to skin our asses off another day,” Annamarie said. “On it. I will let you know when I get the lock.”
The Rocinante screamed. Compression seams touched the inside edge of their tolerances. Massive hull plates of carbon-silicate lace settled deep into their supports. The drive howled and pushed up against the hurtling bubble of ceramic and metal and air. The writhing stars on the far side of Adro gate loomed up, almost hidden behind their drive plume.
This was an absurd way to die, Jim thought.
His jaw hurt and he kept losing little bits of time. Alex had the drive plume of the Roci pointed out toward the Adro gate, bleeding off as much speed as they could, making their transit a few seconds later in the unmeasurable hope that it would make the difference. Across the ring space, the Derecho would be coming close. There were so many ways for all of it to go wrong, and then what?
Mother Elise’s little boy would have arced up from Montana through wars and alien solar systems and love and despair and died slamming into the one danger he’d known for decades was right fucking there. It was too stupid to even qualify as irony.
A message appeared on his screen from Naomi—ARE YOU OKAY?—and he had to keep himself from turning to look at her. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to turn back under this burn. The blood was pooling in the back of his skull, and the uncomfortable electric fizz of the juice was, he was sure, the only thing keeping him from having several strokes at once. He started to answer her, then forgot what he was doing. The gate approached, growing larger first slowly, then quickly, then all at once.
The burn started to trail away, shifting slowly down toward the float to avoid reperfusion injuries that came when blood flooded too quickly into tissues it had been wrung out of. His hands and face tingled. He saw Naomi’s message again and remembered that he hadn’t answered.
He tried to say I’m fine, but it came out as a croak. He massaged his throat for a few seconds, moving cartilage and muscle back closer toward their right places, and tried again.
“I’m fine,” he managed. “I’m good. You?”
“I am very proud not to be sitting in a puddle of something unfortunate right now,” she said, but the joke sounded angry. The Roci’s burn dropped under a g, then under a half. He looked over. Her mouth was a profound scowl.
“They’re not following protocol,” he said.
“I should have taken Trejo’s offer. This isn’t going to work without someone enforcing it. There’s not enough cooperation.”
“Isn’t now. It doesn’t mean there can’t ever be.”
“They’re people,” Naomi said, exhaustion in her tone. “We’re trying to do all of this with humans. Shortsightedness is coded in our DNA.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. A moment later, the comms went live, and Amos and Teresa reported in on the post-burn maintenance they were doing, Alex started getting a tightbeam lock on the Falcon, and Naomi checked to see whether the ship had grabbed any waiting communication packets from the underground during their passage through the ring space.
Jim followed along, chiming in where he could help, but the thing that stuck in his mind like a catchy, bleak melody was Naomi’s voice. We’re trying to do all of this with humans.
The Derecho passed through the Freehold gate and into the ring space, the drive pushing a braking burn at the limit of the ship’s tolerance—which was the same as saying the limits of the crew’s. The Derecho could pour enough gs into its maneuvers to crush the skin-bound sacks of salt water in it. Tanaka was willing to spend a few lives if it meant catching her prey. If that made her bloodthirsty, so be it. She’d always been thirsty for something. It might as well be blood.