James Holden, on the other hand, looked exactly like himself, but older. Of course, she’d seen him much more recently on Laconia. She’d had time to adjust to the years in his face and the vague, bemused look in his eyes.
“Naomi, Jim. It’s good to see you again,” she said. The man beside them gave her a friendly smile. She might only have imagined Cara’s near-silent gasp. “And Amos. I’d heard you changed like Cara and Xan. I would really love to do a few medical scans while you’re here. If that’s all right with you?”
“If it helps, Doc. Hey, Sparkles.”
They were all silent for a moment. Criminals and conspirators tasked with saving humanity from itself and the enemies bent on its destruction.
“Well,” Fayez said. “This is just awkward as hell, isn’t it?”
“Please come in. I’ve had a little welcoming party set up, and we have a lot we need to talk about.”
As they passed through the ship, the crew was careful not to notice them. Elvi tried to imagine what she’d have felt in their place. The enemy welcomed into their home. She wondered how many of them guessed that Teresa Duarte was in the ship they were linked to. If she’d tried to design a pressure test to see whether her people would rat her out to Trejo, she couldn’t have done better than this. She hoped that none of them had a back channel out that she didn’t know about. If they did… Well, that would be an interesting problem.
They reached the lab, and she ushered them all in like she was back in college and hosting a party in her dorm room. She went in last, closing the door behind her.
“Welcome to my little world,” Elvi said, gesturing at the lab.
Naomi grabbed a handhold, stopped herself, and looked over the space, approving. Elvi had become so used to the half dozen multifunction workstations, the heavy air scrubber built to capture dangerous chemicals and put out any fires, that having new people looking at it felt like a reminder it was there. It had all become as familiar as her own body and as easy to take for granted. Most of what the Falcon was doing in Adro was medical scans of Cara and geological scans of the diamond, but the ship was built for everything from electron microscopy to vivisection.
“It’s lovely,” Jim said, and he almost seemed genuine, but not quite.
“It’s a fucking prison,” Elvi said with a smile. “But it’s mine.”
She grimaced when she realized she’d just claimed to be locked in a prison to a man who had spent the previous few years being tortured in an actual prison, but the look on his face didn’t change. If he noticed her gaffe he had the grace to ignore it.
“I’m sorry we put you in a hard position,” Naomi said. “I know you’re taking a risk letting us come here.”
Elvi made a shooing motion with her left hand as she pulled a display onto the wall screen with her right. “It was the right thing. You do what you have to when the universe is on fire.”
“Is it?” Naomi asked.
“On fire?” Elvi said. “That’s actually a really interesting question. You know about the new event?”
“We’ve been running dark,” Naomi said. “The only things we know, we heard from you.”
“Well, you were part of it, whatever it was.” She pulled up the ring gate on the wall in its new, bright form. A cascade of analytic data spilled out in columns beside it. “You were part of the trigger anyway. Most of the direct data I have is from Colonel Tanaka.”
“The one who keeps trying to kill us?”
“The same,” Fayez said. “She’s been doing field reports and sending us the raw data while you were on your way here. She had scanners doing live sweeps of the slow zone looking for traces of your passage when the shit hit the fan. And she was even watching the turd in question.”
Elvi gestured and the screen shifted to the familiar bubble of the ring space with its hundreds of gates equally spaced along the surface. She zoomed in on one that was at an oblique angle to the telescope capturing the image, the circle of the gate bent by perspective into an oval. A glimmer of light shone in the center of the ring gate like a firefly. The drive plume of a ship braking before it passed through.
“Sol gate,” Elvi said. “Still almost half the traffic in and out of the ring space goes through there.”
“But there was a lot of other traffic,” Naomi said, grimly. “Including us.”
Elvi shifted her hand, and the glimmer in the gate slowed. A readout said they were watching it several thousand times slower than it had actually happened, but the feed wasn’t choppy. Jim crossed his arms, scowling. Amos and Cara watched with a matching interest and stillness. The glimmer grew brighter, until it was pure white on the screen.
“It was a colony ship,” Elvi said, her words fast, staccato, and anxious. “It attempted transit a few seconds after Tanaka’s ship came in. We don’t know how many other transits had happened before, but that doesn’t matter. Enough to put the threshold up over safety.”
The glow brightened… and it died. Elvi felt a sting of excitement, but only because she already knew that the lives she was watching end, hadn’t. Somehow they’d been saved. The drive plume returned, coalescing inside the ring space like the ship had made its passage after all, even though it had clearly vanished just moments before.
“What the fuck was that?” Naomi murmured.
“The ship went dutchman, and then came back. But that’s just the pregame show,” Elvi said. “Watch how much the ring entities liked it.”
The edge of the slow zone bubbled, brightened, roiled. Elvi had seen that before. The Falcon had been the only ship to survive the last time this had happened. When she spoke, her voice was tighter and higher. “This is what we saw when we lost Medina Station. It’s a direct intrusion across the ring space’s barriers. It killed Medina. It killed the Typhoon.”
“Too bad it didn’t kill Tanaka,” Amos said.
Patterns played across the ring space like malefic auroras, and a darkness moved in the light. Elvi found herself hunching over like she was protecting her belly from a punch. She forced her spine straight.
“And then this,” Elvi said.
As one, the ring gates and station flared white, a brightness that overloaded the telescopes for three long, terrible seconds. When the light faded, like letting out a long, slow exhalation, the ring space returned to itself, with all the drive cones and transponders and traffic that had been there before. Including the colony ship that they’d watched vanish and reform.
“It’s not just the Adro gate that lit up,” Naomi said.
“No, it’s all of them. And when that happened, there was a cognitive effect. Most of the data Colonel Tanaka has been providing has been about that.”
“A cognitive effect like the lost memory?” Naomi asked.
“Nope,” Fayez said. “Very, very different.”
“It looks like it may have been a kind of networked connection between the minds of the people in the ring space,” Elvi said. “All the crews of all the ships. It was apparently fairly overwhelming. But there’s an indication that they all participated in each other’s memories and experiences.”
Amos scratched his chin. “That sounds like what’s been going on with me and Sparkles.”
“It does seem very similar to what you, Cara, reported during the dives into the BFE.”
“BFE?” Amos asked.
“The diamond. The library.”
“Why BFE?” Jim said.
Elvi scowled and shook her head. “The point is, when we saw it with you two”—she gestured to Cara and Amos—“we had assumed it was because you’d been modified by the repair drones. What happened in the ring space, that happened to unmodified human beings. The effect didn’t last very long. Almost instantaneous, really. But the memories have been vivid and persistent. The radiation from the gates is also interesting. Take a look at this.”