Amos had died and been hauled back from the abyss without it changing much about his demeanor, but Jim and Teresa were both wearing the stress of the moment heavily. Jim kept his usual facade of good humor, but now and then, the deep fatigue showed. Teresa, on the other end of the spectrum, had tapped into a nervous energy that couldn’t find an outlet. From the moment she woke, she ran diagnostics that weren’t due for weeks or cleaned filters that had only recently been cleaned or went to the ship gym and pushed herself through the resistance gel. Alex would have put it down to the bottomless reserves of youth if it hadn’t felt so much like fear.
A day before they reached the halfway point and were slated to start their braking burn, he found Teresa in the galley eating a protein bar and watching video of the ring gate they were hurtling toward. Swirls of highly charged particles and light poured off of it like mist.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Alex said.
“We always knew the gates were energy sources,” Teresa said with a shrug.
Alex changed his meal plan. He’d been going to head up to the flight deck and watch his feeds. Instead he had the galley serve him a plate of rice and black sauce, then sat across from Teresa with a fork. She glanced at him, and then away.
“Seems like something’s bugging you,” Alex said. “Or am I making that up?”
She shrugged a sharp, percussive shrug. He wondered if she’d been having dreams about the bright gates too, or if that was just him.
“I keep thinking about the fight,” she said.
“Yeah,” Alex said, thinking she meant the battle against the things that had killed San Esteban.
“He’s different. I knew the repair drones changed him, but so much is the same that I just thought he was him still. But they killed him on New Egypt, and he didn’t die. The girl who was yelling at him? Cara? If she’d hit you or me, she’d have broken our bones. He just took it. Like it was nothing.”
“Amos was always tough as old leather,” Alex said. “That’s not new.”
“He’s just so different.” She stuffed the last of the protein bar into her mouth, chewed for a minute, swallowed. “I think about my father.”
“Because he changed too?”
Teresa leaned forward, her elbows on the table. Her jaw was tight and the brightness in her eyes looked a little feverish. “I thought he was gone. I thought the whole experiment went bad and he was just… People lose their parents all the time. I thought I was one of those.”
“Orphaned.”
“But if he’s only changed, I don’t know what I am. Orphan. Not orphan. Something else.”
“And now we’re going to see him. It worries you.”
“How much can you change and still be you?” she asked, and it took Alex a few seconds to realize it wasn’t a rhetorical. He took another forkful of rice to give himself time to think.
“Well,” he said, “people change all the time. Not changing would be weirder. I mean, look at you. You’re not the same person you were before you came here. Shit, you’re different from when you first came on the ship. Older, more sure of yourself, better mechanic. I’m not the same guy I used to be. Amos… Yeah, it’s more extreme. It’s weirder. Same with your dad. But I think Amos is still Amos, even if it’s a different version of him. I think when we find your dad, he’ll at least be like what he used to be. You know? I mean, I expect he’s still going to care about you.”
“I don’t know that,” she said, and the bleakness in her voice told him he’d cut close to the bone.
“I have a kid,” he said. “I’m a dad, just like your father. And I promise you, the connection between a parent and a child? That’s basic. It’s deep. You look at Amos and see all the ways he’s different. I can see all the ways he’s still the same. Your dad’s going to be different. But if anything about him is what it used to be? That part’ll be how he feels about you.”
“That’s sweet,” Teresa said. “And complete bullshit.”
“You don’t know. Until you have a kid, you won’t. I will plant my flag on that one. The love of a parent for their kid is the last thing to go.”
“Even correcting for socioeconomic status, the rate of parental maltreatment of children is robustly at eight per thousand. Most of those victims are between newborn and three years old. Someplace with a million children—Warsaw, Benin City, Auberon—would expect eight thousand abused, neglected, or maltreated children. That’s a good-sized lower university just of kids whose parents were mistreating them. Sure, humans love their children. They kill them too. Regular as clockwork.”
Alex nodded. They were quiet for a few moments. “I sometimes forget the kind of education you had.”
“When they groom you to rule all humanity, they don’t leave a lot of sentimentality in the curriculum,” Teresa said.
“That’s too bad.”
“I’m scared to see him again,” she said. “I’m just scared.”
With every passing hour, the gate grew closer and brighter, and Alex grew more aware of the uncertainty they were flying into. The reports from the underground and Laconia were coming almost constantly now, and the conversations between the Falcon and the Roci were a permanent background hum—Amos talking with Cara and Xan, Jim and Fayez, Naomi with Elvi and Harshaan Lee. The sense of coming closer to a critical point, of being nearly out of time, permeated everything. His mind kept turning back to Teresa and her father, Amos and the children that weren’t his though they shared his eyes, Giselle and Kit and Rohi and the grandson that he had never seen. He thought about sending out a message, but he didn’t know what he’d say. That was always the problem. Too many feelings and not the right words to wrap around them.
When the time came for the final approach to the gate and Naomi came up to the ops deck, he didn’t think it was anything significant. He kept his attention on their drive and the Falcon’s while Naomi, below him, took the comms. They were close enough to the ring now that a strong broadcast would have gotten through the ring gate interference, even as loud as it had become.
When Naomi announced the tonnage and drive types of the Roci and the Falcon, their expected times of transit and vectors into the ring space, Alex noticed that it was an extra step they didn’t usually take. He just assumed it was something Naomi had worked out with the others. It wasn’t until the reply came back that he understood what he was looking at.
The data that came back was badged from the Spider Webb, a survey ship out of the New Wales system. Alex didn’t know if it had been Laconian or underground before this, but the reply they sent was regimented and clear. It listed the ships in the ring space, their tonnages and drives, their vectors and flight plans. It showed the anticipated incoming and outgoing traffic in a simple, standard format, and indicated that the Roci and the Falcon could transit safely. It was the first and only time they’d used Naomi’s protocol in practice, and it had functioned just the way she’d designed it to.
Alex unstrapped and let himself down onto the ops deck. Naomi was in her crash couch. The light of the screen shone in her eyes and her pale hair. She looked over at Alex, her expression someplace between sour and amused.
“Yeah,” Alex said.
“It would have worked,” she said. “If we’d cooperated, it would have worked.”
“It would have been better.”
“I think about all the things we could have done, all the miracles we could have achieved, if we were all just a little bit better than it turns out we are.”
Chapter Thirty-Six: Jim