The ring space was full. Fifty-six ships floated in the eerie brightness of the gates, and instead of burning from one place to the other, they were still. Jim watched them all on a volumetric display. There were more science ships than anything else, but freighters and colony ships were among them. Their drives were pointed in every direction, depending on where they’d come in from and how they’d burned off their velocity. It took him a while to figure out what was unnerving about them.
For decades, the ring space—the slow zone—had been the hub between systems. Especially since the death of Medina Station and the Typhoon, ships came in and out as quickly as they could, minimizing the time spent in the starless non-sky. Now they’d come here. It was only the closest ships, the ones most easily deployed, but for the first time in his living memory, they had arrived. A few maneuvering thrusters fired now and then to correct some tiny drift, but their Epsteins were dark. The fleet had come to Naomi’s call. To Trejo’s. To Elvi’s. They weren’t locked in battle. They weren’t traveling to some more human, more comprehensible space. They were a few slivers of ceramic and silicon lace in a bubble the size of a million Earths.
They looked drowned.
“Okay, we have the ship on visual,” Elvi said from the Falcon. Even as close as they were, the tightbeam had the flatness and distortion of signal loss. Not enough to make the connection unclear, but enough to make it feel claustrophobic.
“The alleged ship,” Jim said, reaching for a joke.
“The egg-shaped thing. We have the egg-shaped thing on scopes. So the good news is that it’s still there.”
“Have there been any signs of movement or activity?” Naomi asked from the Roci’s ops.
“No,” Elvi said. “Not on the station anyway.”
“Other places?” Naomi asked.
“Everything’s more active than it was before. The amount of radiant heat in this place is orders of magnitude greater than it was before. More light, more radiation. Some of the ships that got here first, we may need to get them out into normal space soon to give them a chance to lose some of the excess. The heat exchangers are collecting more energy than they’re shedding. I’ve got every spare sensor taking in data and looking for useful patterns.”
“First order of business,” Jim said.
“Direct inspection of the station?” Elvi replied.
“I was going to say make sure that all the people who spent the last few years trying to kill each other are okay putting that aside,” Jim said. “We’ve got a couple dozen ships from each side, and you have to figure all of them have crews with some hard feelings about the whole war thing.”
“Already on that,” Naomi said. “I’ve been trading messages since we passed the gate.”
“How bad is it?” Jim asked.
“Grumbling, but nothing to raise an alarm. Not yet.”
Jim looked at the little drowned flecks again. They weren’t trying to kill each other. That was worth celebrating. “All right. We should go see if anyone’s at home on the egg-shaped thing.”
Elvi’s voice managed to be tired and resolute at the same time. “The Falcon’s set course, but I don’t want to use the Epstein for braking anywhere near the surface. It’s going to take a while.”
“You know that thing sucked down a gamma ray burst and still exists, right?” Jim said.
“I’m not worried about the station,” Elvi said. “I’m worried about not breaking things before I understand what they are. If Duarte’s still in that egg and I burn him to a crisp before we can talk, I’ll feel silly.”
“Fair point,” Jim said. “We’ll set to rendezvous.”
He dropped the connection. Moments later, the Roci shifted under him as Alex changed their course. Jim closed the display and sat in his crash couch, feeling the walls around him, the vibration of the ship, the sense that occasionally struck him of being a tiny organism in a vast universe. His jaws ached, but they did that a lot these days, and if he paid attention, there was a tightness at the base of his skull that never went away, even when he was sleeping. He was used to it. It was how he lived.
Once, there had been a focus to the tension, even if the focus changed sometimes. Fear of the Laconian Empire rolling through and crushing anyone that didn’t agree with it under its heel. Or fear of the apocalypse he’d seen in the ring station, back before the gates had even opened. Or the constant, nagging threat of Duarte withdrawing his protection and having Jim thrown in the Pen. The near certainty that by trying to find out whether the things on the other side of the ring gates were conscious and capable of change, Duarte would start a war he couldn’t win. And now, that his individual life—the self that was James Holden—would be lost in a sea of consciousness, a vast single mind built from human beings but not human. He could take his pick, and his body was just as ready to ache for the cause.
Or maybe it was just a habit now. Maybe the weight of history had ground him down because he didn’t know how to shrug it off. Didn’t know that he would choose to, even if he had been able. Two ways of saying the same thing.
“Is this going to be a one-shot,” Alex asked from the flight deck, “or are we expecting we’ll want to chew the fat some once you’re done?”
“I don’t understand the question,” Jim said.
“If we’re just popping you out to work with Elvi’s crew, I’ll park us close. If you think we’re going to want to be in the same room, you can pop out the cargo lock, and I’ll put the bridge back up.”
Before he could answer, Naomi did. “Put the bridge up. It will be good for the other ships to see it, even if we don’t use it.”
“Copy that,” Alex said. “I’m taking us in.”
Jim unstrapped and headed for the cargo airlock.
Teresa was already there. She was wearing a vac suit, testing the seals at the boot and glove and the charge on the mag boots. Jim paused and steadied himself as the ship drifted under him. Her hair was back and tucked into a tight cap that emphasized the shape of her eyes and the roughness of her skin. She lifted her chin in a gesture that might have been a greeting or defiance or both.
“Going somewhere?”
“If my father’s there, you’ll want me there.”
Jim shook his head. “If we find something, I will let you know. And if we need you, I’ll get you. I promise.”
The girl shook her head, left then right, no more than a few millimeters. Her expression was hard. “It’s my dad,” she said.
Jim felt a wave of emotions that rose and fell in him in seconds. Frustration, sorrow, guilt, fear. And, almost randomly, a deep nostalgia. He remembered being in school and coming home to find Father Anton in the back of the house building a firepit. It had been a moment of no significance. He hadn’t thought about it in years, and then there it was, as present and powerful and filled with love as if it had happened a moment before. It’s my dad.
“You understand the risks?” Jim asked.
“No, I don’t,” Teresa said. “Do you?”
Jim shrugged. “Make sure you check your helmet seals.”
When they were ready to go, he cycled the cargo airlock. The air pumped out, and as it grew thinner, the sound in his suit changed, growing softer the way it always did. Leaving him feeling more isolated, or more aware of his isolation. His breath, the gentle whir of the fans, the creaking of the suit, it all came to fill more of his senses. It felt almost like falling asleep. Then the vibrations came through the deck as the outer doors unlatched, and the cargo bay opened. Light spilled through the cracks like it never had before, and it took him a few seconds to understand why it was strange. Normally, the light that a ship like theirs opened to was worklights or a star—strong, harsh, and directional. The milk-light that diffused into the hold now came from every direction. It was soft and shadowless as a hazy afternoon on Earth. Like a child’s simplistic imagination of heaven.