“Botton,” she began, trusting the Derecho to know she needed a comm channel open. “We have a problem.”
The surface of the ring space shifted. Bent. Boiled.
The alien station at the center of the ring space flared like a tiny sun.
Something happened to Tanaka that felt like waking up without falling asleep first. Her awareness shifted, opened, became something it hadn’t been a moment before. She was in her crash couch, but she was also in the medical bay with her head in excruciating pain, and in Botton’s cabin with a bulb of whiskey in his hand and the burn of it in his throat. She saw through a thousand sets of eyes, felt a thousand different bodies, knew herself by a thousand different names.
Aliana Tanaka screamed.
A voice as vast as mountains whispered.
It whispered No.
The scattered world paused in its swirls and chaos. The dark threads froze in their places, vibrating and writhing but unable to whip through the clouds and points that were matter. The awareness that had been Kit, drifting and broken and scattered as it was, saw its own pain, its own distress, the still-flashing impulses that had been its child’s neurons as they fired. Something analogous to sound rumbled and roared, and the dark threads thinned. They became black strings, wet as blood clots. Then threads. Then wisps of smoke.
And then nothing.
The paths where the darkness had whipped the scattered particles apart shifted like a video message played slowly and in reverse. Something thought stirring the cream back out of the coffee, and it might have been Kit. The interplay of vibrations that were the atoms and molecules, incomprehensible in their variety, began to segregate. The slow spinning flow like a river past a muddy bank became the air from a vent. Or blood passing through an artery. Density became real.
Surfaces emerged. Then objects, and then Kit was looking into Bakari’s wide, frightened eyes. Kit’s heart fluttered, as confused as a man who’d forgotten what he was saying midsentence, and then it pounded, each stroke so hard he could see the pulse in his eyes. He wrapped his son tight in his arms as Bakari started to wail, and held him close, sheltered against a threat he didn’t understand and couldn’t locate in space.
The other man, the one who wasn’t in the room, slumped in exhaustion and closed his eyes. The cabin door slammed open, and Rohi was there, eyes bright and panic-wide.
“You’re hurting him,” she shouted. “Kit, you’re hurting him!”
No, Kit tried to say, I’m just holding him. He’s only crying from fear. He couldn’t find the words, and when he looked down, he was squeezing too tight. He made his arms relax, and Bakari’s wailing grew louder. He let Rohi take their son. His body was shaking, a deep pulsing shudder.
“What was that?” Rohi said, her voice shrill with fear. “What just happened?”
The Falcon was close to the Adro diamond, and while it wasn’t on the opposite side of the local star, it wasn’t at the point in its orbit closest to the gate either. The light delay was sixty-two minutes, which meant one hundred twenty-four would have to pass before the tightbeam lock was confirmed. Jim could, of course, send out a message on the beam of supercoherent light even before the comms handshake was done, but somehow it seemed rude. By being in the system, they were dropping a great big bucket of uncomfortable decisions in Elvi’s lap. Giving her the chance to refuse to talk to him felt like the least he could do from an etiquette perspective.
He was spending the time until then doing a checkup with the autodoc in the med bay. The medical expert system had been upgraded three times in the decades since the Roci had been a top-of-the-line MCRN ship, and while there was better technology out there now, what they had was pretty damn good. Certainly, it was better than what he’d grown up with.
He let the system check-scan him for little bleeds and tears from the long burn and decant a slurry of targeted coagulants and tailored regeneration hormones. The worst part about it was the weird almost-formaldehyde aftertaste that haunted the back of his tongue for the two days following the treatment. Small price to pay for being 8 percent less likely to stroke out.
Naomi floated in, moving from handhold to handhold with the grace of a lifetime’s practice. Jim smiled and gestured to the autodoc next to his like he was offering her the chair beside his in the galley. She shook her head gently.
He almost asked what was bothering her, but he knew. The high traffic in the slow zone. He almost said it wasn’t her fault, which would have been true, but she knew that too. It didn’t keep her from carrying the weight.
“Maybe Tanaka’s ship went dutchman,” he said.
As he’d hoped, she chuckled. “We should be so lucky. It’s never the ones you want.”
“Probably true.”
“The worst part is that there is an answer, you know? We have a solution. There are probably dozens of solutions. All it would take is people agreeing to one and abiding by it. Cooperation. And I could—”
Alex’s voice came over the ship comms. “Are you all seeing this?”
Naomi frowned.
“Seeing what?” Jim asked.
“The ring gate.”
Jim pulled at his arm, but the autodoc chimed a complaint. Naomi put the wall screen on and shifted to the external scopes. Behind them, the Adro gate had been everything every gate was—dark, spiraling material formed unfathomable eons ago by the strange arts of the protomolecule. Only now, it wasn’t dark. It was shining. The whole circle of the gate was glowing a blue white, with streams of energetic particles radiating from it like an aurora.
Naomi whistled softly.
“It just started doing that a couple minutes ago,” Alex said. “I’m getting a lot of radiation from it too. Nothing dangerous—a lot of ultraviolet and radio.”
“Amos?” Jim said. “Are you looking at this?”
“Sure am.”
“So, you know things you’re not supposed to know. Any thoughts on this?”
He could hear the shrug in the big mechanic’s voice. “Looks like someone turned it on.”
Chapter Twenty-Five: Tanaka
The captain of the Preiss was a flat-faced, pale-skinned man with a stubble-length beard that didn’t hide his double chin. He’d spent two decades ferrying colonists to new worlds, and now he floated in Tanaka’s cabin with a vague look on his face. He should have been frightened. He only seemed stunned.
By force of will, Tanaka kept from tapping her fingers against her thigh. She wasn’t going to show anxiety, even in front of someone who seemed primed to overlook it. After all, this interview and all the others were being recorded.
“I’ve taken,” he said, paused, licked his lips absently, “psychedelics. I’ve been places, you know? It wasn’t like that. Not at all.”
The Preiss was docked to the Derecho, the first of the ships waiting their turn for the Laconians to meet with their crews, copy the data from their sensor and comms systems, and generally go over everything with the finest-toothed of all possible combs. But the Priess was the most important. It was the only ship to ever shrug off going dutchman.
And if Tanaka had held any hope that its captain knew why, she would have been abandoning it right about now. “What is the ship carrying that’s in any way out of the ordinary?”
His focus swam, found her. His shrug and scowl were perfectly synchronized, the result of a lifetime’s practice saying Fucked if I know.