“As did I,” Tanaka said.
“Yes, Colonel. I feel as though understanding what happened might better help to put the experience behind me. And I would very much like to put it behind me.”
Tanaka tilted her head. There was an echo of her own fear in his voice. It occurred to her for the first time that she wouldn’t be the only one who had felt the gestalt as a violation. For all she knew, Botton had secrets of his own to nurture and protect. It left her liking Botton a degree better.
“I’m sure the Science Directorate will be better equipped to make sense of this than we are,” she said. “How long before we can be underway?”
“Transferring our crew back from the ships could take several hours.” It sounded like an apology. She liked that too.
“As soon as they arrive, inform the remaining ships that they are to stay here until the survey ships arrive and debrief them.”
“They aren’t going to like that. Several of the captains have expressed a strong preference to leave the ring space as soon as possible.”
“Any ship that leaves before being given permission will be labeled a criminal vessel and destroyed on sight by Laconian forces,” Tanaka said.
“I will make sure they understand.”
She took a deep breath. At the workstations, the other crew could have been living in different dimensions for all the reaction they showed to her conversation. On Botton’s screen, the ring gates flared white. And the alien station at the ring space’s heart matched them. The Derecho’s sensor arrays lowered their sensitivity to keep from whiting out. When the image returned a second later, the rings were glowing points all around the surface of the slow zone.
I’m missing something. The words were like a whisper in her ear. Something the captain of the Preiss had said. Or something about the newly glowing gates. Or had Botton accidentally said something that would unlock the mystery, or better, give her control over it?
“We have evidence that something made a transit to Bara Gaon system in approximately the right time frame,” Botton said. “Shall we proceed there?”
“Yes,” Tanaka said. “Alert me when the full crew has returned.”
She clicked on her mag boots, used her ankle to turn her body and to stop it, then launched herself back toward the lift. Behind her, someone let out a long, stuttering breath as if they’d been holding it the whole time she’d been there.
Bara Gaon was an active system. If the Rocinante had fled there, it was because they hoped to use contacts in the underground to cover their passage. Any data she got from the official sources, she’d have to double-check herself in case it had been corrupted. Her mind ran forward along the path of the chase, and it was a relief.
She needed to go to the ship’s gymnasium and punch a heavy bag. I used to be a boxer when I was young. The thought wafted through her mind like she’d heard someone say it. It wasn’t her voice. She ignored it. She needed to eat. She needed to report back to Trejo. She needed to track down the Rocinante. She needed to find Winston Duarte or whatever he had become. She felt duty sliding in around her mind like blinders, cutting away the distractions.
She had a mission and a score to settle. Unthinking, she scratched her wounded cheek.
She was missing something.
Chapter Twenty-Six: Jim
Jim couldn’t sleep. He lay on the crash couch, the gentle one-third g of the burn settling him into the gel, and tried to will himself into a sense of peace and rest that wouldn’t come. Naomi, beside him, had curled onto her side, her back toward him. There had been a time when he’d slept with the lights entirely off, but that had been before Laconia. Now he kept them low—less than a single candle would have been but enough that when he woke from a nightmare, the familiar outlines of the cabin would be there to ground him. He hadn’t had a nightmare. He hadn’t slept at all.
Naomi murmured something in her sleep, shifted, and settled. Years of experience told him she was sloping down into the deepest levels of dream. Another few minutes and she’d twitch once like she was catching herself from falling, and after that, she’d snore.
This was the life he’d dreamed of during his imprisonment. This was what he thought he’d lost forever: suffering a little insomnia while his lover of decades rested at his side. That the universe had given it back to him after he’d given up hope flooded him with a profound gratitude when it didn’t frighten him. This was so small, so precious, and so fragile.
They were both mortal. The one thing he knew for certain was that this couldn’t last forever. Someday, there would be a last meal with Naomi. Someday there would be a last sleepless night for him. A last moment hearing the Roci’s drive humming around him. He might know when it came, or it might only be clear in retrospect, or it might end for him so quickly that he never had time to notice all the beautiful, small moments that he was losing.
Naomi jerked, went still, and then the low, soft rumble of her snore began. Jim grinned through his weariness, counted her breaths up to two hundred to give her time to fully commit to slumber, and then pulled himself up out of the couch and dressed in the gloom. When he opened the door to the corridor, Naomi turned to look at him. Even though her eyes were open, she wasn’t awake.
“No troubles,” he said. “Keep sleeping.”
She smiled. She was beautiful when she smiled. She was always beautiful. He closed the door.
They’d made it almost three-quarters of the way to the Falcon, and were in the earliest part of their braking burn. Elvi’s messages to them—that they could dock, that she’d see to it that there wasn’t a security problem, that they were welcome—had a sense of normalcy that didn’t match the situation at all. Even as Naomi had responded with their flight path and expected intercept coordinates, Jim had been struck with the absurdity of treating it like popping over to someone’s apartment for dinner, when in reality it was more like conspiracy to commit treason. But the Derecho hadn’t followed them through the gate, and there was literally no place else for a ship to hide. At some point, Adro had been a solar system capable of sustaining life. Now it was a star, a green diamond the size of a gas giant, the Falcon, and the Rocinante.
Jim reached the lift and rode it slowly up through the quiet ship until he reached the ops deck. Alex was standing beside a crash couch, a bulb in his hand and the bright gate on the screen in front of him. They were far enough from it now that, if he’d gone outside, Jim wouldn’t have been able to distinguish it from the billions of stars. On the scopes, it radiated swirling waves of aurora-like energy.
“Hey,” he said.
Alex looked over his shoulder. “What’re you doing up?”
“Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d see if you wanted me to take watch.”
“I’m fine,” Alex said. “I’m shifted over. This feels like midafternoon to me. You want a beer?”
“A midafternoon beer?”
“I didn’t say it was morning,” Alex said, and scooped another bulb off the crash couch. Jim caught it, broke the seal, and took a long swallow.
“I’ve never understood people who like beer without gravity,” Alex said. “That’s not a drink. That’s a vaguely alcoholic kind of foam.”
“No argument,” Jim said, then nodded toward the screen. “Anything?”
“Nothing new, but…” Alex gestured at the bright ring. “I don’t know. I keep looking at it. Wondering what the hell it’s doing.”
“Well, it hasn’t killed us. That seems like a good start.”
“Could definitely be worse. But… You think you know something, right? Then it turns out you were only used to it. It does something, and it does something, and then after a while, you think that’s what it does. Then it turns out there was this whole other thing, maybe.”
“Using a microwave as a lamp, because it has a light in it,” Jim said. He tried to remember where he’d heard that analogy.
“Yeah, exactly,” Alex said. “You thought you knew it, but you were only familiar with it.”
Jim took another sip of the beer. The hops tasted like mushroom, for good reason. “I’m hoping that Elvi has figured some things out. I mean, she’ll know better than we do.”
“We can hope,” Alex agreed, then squeezed the last of the beer out of his bulb and tossed it into the recycler. His belch was deep and satisfied.
“How many of these did you have?” Jim asked.
“A few.”
“Are you drunk?”
Alex considered the question. “A little, I guess.” He lowered himself into the crash couch. “There was this time when I was a kid, I had a really crap babysitter. I was maybe nine? She was sixteen. And we watched this monster film. A huge cat monster that lived underground, and it got pissed off by some seismic surveys. Came to the top and started tearing up cities and collapsing tunnels. Scared the shit out of me.”
“Weird the things that get to you when you’re a kid,” Jim said.
“I knew it wasn’t for real. I was young, I wasn’t dumb. But it still scared me, and the thing my dad told me that actually got me past it? He showed me how it wouldn’t scale.”
“Wouldn’t scale?”
“Volume goes up by cubes. A cat big enough to crush a city wouldn’t be strong enough to stand up, even at Martian gravity. Its bones would break under its own weight. And that did it for me. I was all right, because I saw it couldn’t work. This is like that cat, it doesn’t scale.”
Jim sat with that for a second. “Either you’re too drunk or I’m not drunk enough. I don’t get it.”
“The gates. The systems. It’s bigger than us. It’s bigger than we can be. I mean, have you ever thought about what it would be like to see every system there is now? To see just the places where we are? There’s thirteen hundred seventy-three gates—”
“Seventy-one. Thanjavur and Tecoma are gone.”
“Thirteen hundred and seventy-one,” Alex agreed. “Now let’s say you plot it so that you don’t have to slow down when you get to the ring space. Accelerate all the way to the ring gate, brake all the way back to the goldilocks region at wherever you’re going. Maybe take you a month to do it.”
“You’d run out of reaction mass.”
Alex waved the objection away. “Pretend you could stock up in flight. All the reaction mass and fuel and food and everything. And liquid helium to boil off the waste heat.”
“So ignoring every actual constraint that makes it impossible?”
“Yeah. Five billion klicks a month, every month. No time on the float. No time at the planets. Just—” He threw his hand forward, a gesture of speed.
“All right.”
“Hundred and fifteen years. Start it the day you’re born, and finish it an old man, and never see anything but the inside of your ship. Take a week at each planet—not each city, not each station, each planet—to play tourist? Add another twenty-eight years. A hundred forty-some years old. That’s a solid lifetime, just to take a peek. Get the lay of the land. Never see the same place twice.”
Jim thought about that. Between working for the Transport Union back in the day and fleeing with the underground, he’d been to more systems than most people ever would, and it was still probably under three dozen. He knew how many more there were, how many he’d never see, how many Naomi was trying to coordinate. Alex was right. It was daunting. Maybe more than daunting.
“And that’s not the worst of it,” Alex said. “By the time you’re done, there’s been a century of change at the place you started from. It won’t be the same. All the places you visit start changing into new ones the second you leave.”
On the screen, the bright gate shifted and muttered. The false-color map showed radio waves and X-rays pouring out of it. Jim couldn’t help imagining it as a vast eye looking back at them.
“This is all too big for people,” Alex said. “The things that built it? Maybe they could handle it, but we’re not designed for this scale. We’re trying to get big enough we can make it work, but we’re breaking our legs just standing up.”
“Huh,” Jim said. And then, a moment later, “You got any more beer?”
“Nope.”
“Want some?”
“Yep.”