As soon as the gate distortion was gone, and even as she struggled to draw breath, she set the ship to scanning the vacuum at the edges of the more than thirteen hundred gates. The Rocinante’s drive plume might be gone, but the cooling cloud that had been its reaction mass was still there, slowly diffusing into the soft mist of hydrogen, oxygen, ozone, and water vapor that made up most of the physical mass in the ring space. In time, the particles would all drift into contact with the edge of the space and be annihilated, but until then, the information was there. A subtle finger, pointing the way her enemy had gone.
If only she’d made it through before it had dispersed too far to find it…
The Derecho’s drive kicked off, the ship went into freefall, and a wave of nausea rolled through her. She ignored it, pulling up her tactical display. The ring space was ridiculously full. It was still fewer ships than she’d seen in the average approach pattern to the naval base on Callisto, back in the day, but Callisto had never had to worry about extradimensional horrors eating some of the ships as they tried to land. Context was everything.
The Derecho had already scanned and dismissed all of them—none was the Rocinante. She pulled up the visual profiles and drive signatures anyway. Recognition algorithms were brilliant, but they weren’t the human eye. What could fool one often couldn’t fool the other.
“Colonel Tanaka?” Botton’s voice asked from her comms screen.
“What?”
The Derecho flagged a burst of light and high-energy particles coming through the Sol gate. The first tickling drive plume of some other ship about to transit through that ring.
“We have medical emergencies with…” Botton paused, caught his breath. “With several crew members. If we can pause long enough to remove them to the medical bay…”
“Do it,” Tanaka said.
“Thank you, Colonel,” he said.
“Where are you, you little fucks?” Tanaka muttered.
The Sol gate fluttered with light.
Bakari was fussing because he was frustrated. The pediatrician had warned Kit about this before they’d started the journey. The time in lower gravity would weaken Bakari’s muscles and bones a little. Not so much that he wouldn’t recover once he was in consistent gravity again, but enough that during the higher burns on the trip the child would find himself unable to do things he had previously done. The braking burn into the ring space had been noted in their first meeting as a place that children Bakari’s age would be likely to struggle. At the time, it hadn’t seemed too onerous.
Now it seemed onerous.
“Come on, little bear,” Kit said, smiling down at the small face that looked back up at him in rage. “It’s okay. Listen while we sing, yeah? Listen to us sing.”
It was the third hour since Bakari had woken from his nap. Rohi had taken the first two. Now she was in the commissary buying spicy curry for the brothers from Breach Candy as an apology for the screaming and crying. The other passengers were kind enough not to complain and also kind enough to accept their peace offerings gracefully. Afterward, Rohi had promised to spend an hour in the gym. Neither of them had been good about keeping to the exercise schedule, and they’d pay for that when the Preiss reached Nieuwestad.
“Listen,” Kit sang. “Little boy, listen. Listen to your tired daddy sing.”
He made a trill in the back of his throat, something he remembered his own father doing, back in the ancient days before the divorce. Bakari started, focused on him like Kit had grown a second head.
“Oh. You like that?” Kit cooed, then trilled again.
The little mouth unknotted, and like a miracle visited upon the faithful, the baby laughed. Kit grinned down at him, and Bakari grinned back.
“The burn is almost over,” Kit sang, improvising the glide and skip of the melody. “Soon we’ll pass the gate.”
Bakari shifted his back from side to side, and reached up an arm the way he had since he’d been in Rohi’s belly. He’d be asleep soon, and Kit felt a surge of anticipation. When his son slept, he’d nap too. God, he needed to sleep.
“Close your eyes and rest, son,” he sang, and gently rocked the little crash couch. He pulled the vowel sounds long and soothing. “Nothing here you need…”
Bakari’s eyes fluttered closed, then open again. There was something odd about the way the light caught the roundness of his cheek, and Kit lost his own tune, fascinated by the texture of his son’s skin. The light showed so much detail, the folds of baby-smooth skin, the sheen of the oils, and Kit was somehow falling into it, descending into the fractal complexity. By the time he realized something was wrong, it was too late.
Bakari was there, as close as he had been before, but what had been his boy was a complexity of vibrations—molecules and atoms in clumps and patterns too baroque to show where one thing began and another ended. Kit fell what would have been forward onto what would have been his knees, and the pain of it was like watching dominoes fall, tiny electrochemical sparks passing from nerve to nerve. The shimmering in the air was Bakari screaming. And Kit screaming too. The feeling of the air abrading his throat was a cascade of rushing razor-sharp atoms.
Something more solid and real than they were slid through the jumble of atoms that was the wall. A thread of conscious darkness that had never known light, was the antithesis of it. Kit tried to move the clouds that were his arms around the cloud that had been his son, knowing distantly that it couldn’t matter. He was no more solid than the wall had been.
The darkness whirled toward him, scattering him. Scattering his son.
A voice as vast as mountains whispered…
The alarm caught Tanaka’s attention. Something was going wrong at the Sol gate. It took a few seconds to understand what she was seeing. The influx of fast-moving particles had just dropped to zero. It would have meant the incoming ship had cut its drive, except there were still photons getting through. Whatever ship was coming in from Sol wasn’t going to make it. They were already starting to go dutchman, and they didn’t even know it yet.
It wasn’t her problem, and even if it had been, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She turned back to the scatter analysis and the hunt for the Rocinante. There was a greater than 40 percent chance that something had passed into Bara Gaon in the timeframe she was looking at…
“Shit,” she said to no one.
She let the Derecho keep crunching its numbers and pulled her screen back to the Sol gate. Watching the trainwreck. The light was growing smaller and brighter now. The drive had almost reached the gate. Without meaning to, she heaved a sigh. A whole lot of people were about to die for no reason other than they’d been unlucky with the traffic patterns. Sympathy plucked at her. It seemed petty somehow, with the universe crashing in all around them, for the enemy to still eat the occasional ship.
“Rest in peace, you poor fucks,” Tanaka said as the drive plume blinked out, lost in wherever it was that the lost ships went.
An alarm chirped, and for half a second she thought it was announcing the loss of the Sol-based ship. But the Derecho wasn’t worried about that. It was worried about everything else. Tanaka looked at the data and her gut knotted. She opened a feed from the external telescopes. The surface of the space between the rings was glowing a pearly gray, with ripples of darkness moving through it in a way that made her think of sharks swimming through cloudy water. Adrenaline flooded her system, and a wave of vertigo so powerful she looked for a thruster malfunction.