Ochida, on the other hand, seemed to have embraced a strategy of almost transcendental denial. His reports and the information flowing through him from the rest of the Science Directorate were absolutely unchanged. On the screen in her office, his smile was bright and genuine, and the data he shared with her showed every sign of being complete, accurate, and unabridged.
The survey team had found what they believed to be the bullet at San Esteban, which was interesting. The bullets—scars in the fabric of space-time according to the most popular theory—seemed to accompany each of the intrusions into reality by the dark gods inside the gates. They were relatively small, cosmologically speaking, though the implications of their existence were a fundamental alteration in humanity’s understanding of the cosmos. Back in what were quickly becoming the good old days, they’d been easier to locate because they appeared in proximity to whatever had triggered them. The hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of experiments by the enemy since then should in theory have produced just as many small, persistent anomalies, but without being tied to a human object, action, or frame of reference, finding them made needles and haystacks look trivial.
On San Esteban, the break in reality was several meters wide, almost undetectable by instrumentation but very apparent to human conscious experience, and floating half a klick above the moon of one of the minor rocky inner planets. The team was turning all its attention to gathering data from it in hopes that variations between the bullets might yield something critical about the mechanisms behind them.
“What?” Fayez asked.
Elvi looked at him, confused.
“You made a noise. You grunted.”
“Oh. I was just thinking. This would have been massive news. Maybe more important than what we were getting out of Adro. But now?”
“Nothing takes your mind off the guy pointing a gun at you like already being on fire,” Fayez said. “San Esteban was the biggest threat we could imagine, until Duarte showed back up.”
“Duarte’s not trying to kill us.”
“You sure it wouldn’t be better if he were?”
Elvi moved on. Ochida’s report on what he was calling “spontaneous alocal cognitive cross-connections” only left her stomach tighter, her jaw aching. The effect was being reported in all systems now. There was a distinctly larger response in places where the ships present during the initial event had gone afterward—Bara Gaon, Nieuwestad, Clarke, Sao Paulo—that suggested an infection-like contact transmission, but there were also suggestions of activity clusters between systems with low physical contact and high communicative load. The greatest predictor of suffering the hive mind effect was having someone who was already affected be aware of you. The epidemiologists were building a model of transmission-by-awareness, and hoped to have a fuller report soon. An intrusive image appeared in Elvi’s mind—a vast, bright, interconnected network like the cells in a brain or the relationships in a city, with one node turning deep bloodred, then the ones around it, and the ones connected to those, and on and on.
The longest chain of connection between any two human beings wasn’t more than seven or eight connections. Even as vast as humanity had become, as far as they’d flung themselves into the universe, they were still too damn close.
“That doesn’t look good for us,” Elvi said.
“We could make an argument that Colonel Tanaka and her whole crew need to be in sensory deprivation tanks as a sanitary precaution. That might be fun.”
Ochida was moving on to a follow-up report on the death reports from San Esteban when a soft knock interrupted them. When Elvi opened the door, Cara was there. Her face was tight and she held her hands in front of her like she was singing in a choir. Elvi knew what had brought her there before the girl spoke.
“I heard,” Cara said. “There’s a dive?”
“We’re going to try using the catalyst to open a path into the ring station, yes,” Elvi said. “But it’s not like going into the diamond. Same equipment, different job.”
“I should go in. You should send me.”
“Amos Burton is going to—”
“I have more experience,” Cara said. “I understand how it works in there better than he does.”
Elvi raised her hands, seeing as she did it how condescending the gesture was. “It’s not like that. This is a different artifact. It’s unlikely to behave in the same way. There’s no reason to think your experience in Adro will translate to this. And the dependency issue—”
The rage in Cara’s expression was as sudden as flipping a page. When she spoke, her voice had a hornet’s-nest buzz. Fayez shifted closer to Elvi.
“Dependency is bullshit. It’s bullshit, and we both know it.”
“It’s real,” Elvi said. “I can show you the data. The serotonin and dopamine levels—”
Cara shook her head once, a movement of controlled violence. A voice in Elvi’s mind said You did this. This is your fault. It sounded like Burton, filled with a flat, matter-of-fact rage.
“I understand the risks,” Cara said. “I’ve always understood the risks. You’re going to save me from addiction by blowing our best chance to survive? Does that make any sense to you?”
Fayez shifted, trying to bring the girl’s wrath away from Elvi. “I don’t think that’s exactly—”
“Look in a fucking mirror, Doc,” Cara said. “You don’t get to tell me how important my health is while you’re spending your own like that. If you don’t matter, why are you pretending that I do? Is it because I look like a teenager? Keep your fucking maternal instinct to yourself.”
“There’s a difference,” Elvi said, “between missing a few exercise sessions and intentionally exposing a research subject to risk. What I do with my own body—”
“I get to pick what I do with my body too!” Cara’s voice was a roar now. The need and hunger in her eyes was feral. “You treat me like a child because I look like a child, but I’m not.”
She could have just as easily said You treat me like a human because I look like a human. It would have been as true. Elvi felt something deep in her chest settle. An ancient instinct, deep in her, told her that showing weakness now was a step toward death. She summoned the coldness of decades in academia.
“I don’t think you’re a child, but I am the lead researcher here, and in my judgment you aren’t the right subject for this test. If you want to try assaulting me into changing my mind, this is your opportunity.”
Cara went still for a moment, and then deflated. “You’re just doing this because you’re scared of him,” she said, but there was no heat behind it. Cara turned and pulled herself away down the corridor. The guilt was a knot in Elvi’s throat, but she didn’t let herself soften. There would be time later to make amends.
She hoped there would.
“This is Tanaka. The girl and I are in position.”
Elvi made one last look around the lab. Amos was in place, strapped into the medical couch. They’d taken his shirt off to place the sensors, and the black, chitinous mass of scar where he’d been shot on New Egypt shimmered in the light like oil on water. A white ceramic feed line had been inserted into a vein in his arm and taped down to hold it in place. His body’s rapid healing kept trying to push the needle back out again.
He seemed at ease and mildly amused by it all.
The technicians and science team were at their stations. Where the readouts of the BFE had been, images of the ring station flickered and jumped. Elvi felt vaguely nauseated. She didn’t remember the last time she’d eaten.
“Understood,” she said. “We are starting the dive now. Stand by.” She dropped the external connection. “Last chance to back out.”