The idea caught him. “Was there someone transiting? When this happened?”
“No,” Naomi said. “The trigger wasn’t the things inside the gate this time. It was us.”
“That’s my assumption too,” Elvi said. “Duarte or the station or some combination of the two rejected us. Pushed back. I believe that Colonel Tanaka’s drug regimen blunted the worst of the effect. At least for us.”
“Wait,” Fayez said. “At least for us? As opposed to who?”
“It seems like the event may have been broader this time than before. I’ve had reports from five scientific missions that were close to their gates reporting experiences similar to ours. I won’t be surprised if more come in later.”
“How far could it have reached?” Tanaka asked.
“It’s a nonlocal effect,” Elvi said. “Without better understanding how it propagates, I couldn’t make any meaningful guess.”
“I think I have some indication,” Naomi said, and her voice was hard as slate. Her image disappeared from the screen, and a series of tactical maps took its place. Solar systems cycled through, a few seconds of one, and another, and then another. As Naomi spoke, they went on and didn’t repeat. “The underground and its allies are showing that since the event, a hundred and five ships in seventy systems have changed course in ways that will bring them through the gates. They’re a combination of Laconian, underground, and purely civilian vessels. And they’ve also gone silent.”
“Silent?” Jim echoed. He meant it more as an expression of shock than a question, but Naomi answered him anyway.
“No broadcast. No tightbeam. No offers of explanation or filed changes of flight plan. Just all of them turning toward us.”
“Radio silence seems weird,” Fayez said. “Their drive plumes are still visible. What do they think they can hide by running in radio silence? What do they gain?”
“They don’t gain anything,” Tanaka said. “They just don’t need comms anymore. They’re all thinking with the same head.”
Elvi let out a little noise, somewhere between a sigh and a sob.
Tanaka either didn’t notice or chose to ignore her. “I’ve taken the liberty of reaching out to Admiral Trejo. I’m hoping we can get some backup here in time.”
“In time for what?” Jim asked.
“The battle,” Tanaka said as if it had been a stupid question.
“Are we sure that these are enemies?” Elvi asked.
“Yes,” Tanaka said. “We tried to get into the station. We were pushed back. Now an ad hoc flotilla of hive-mind-controlled ships are running toward us. If they’re just rushing here to bring us cake and party decorations, we’d know because we’d be in the station chewing the fat with the high consul.”
“There are eighteen systems we’ve ID’d that don’t seem to have any enemy activity,” Naomi said.
“If we retreat, we’ll never get this territory back,” Tanaka said, leaning in toward her camera. Jim detested and feared the woman, and that made it worse when she seemed right. “Either we get inside now, or we talk to the high consul when he’s inside us and pulling our strings.”
Naomi’s voice was gentler, but just as firm. “Do we know why the experiment failed? Why could Jim get into the station, back before the gates opened, and we can’t now?”
“The station was on a kind of autopilot when you first came here,” Elvi said. “It opened for the bit of protomolecule that stowed away on your ship because it didn’t have anything telling it not to. Now it does. Our catalyst can turn something on, and Cara and Amos can react to it, but Winston Duarte was remade with the protomolecule. It’s part of him now. We aren’t getting in that station because he doesn’t want us to. It’s as simple as that.”
“I can still hear voices in my head,” Alex said. “I mean, real people’s real voices. Is that happening for you too?”
“Yes,” Teresa said.
Around them, the Rocinante’s galley seemed like an impostor of itself. Real and present, but also somehow less authentic than it should have been. Like Jim was there, and also wasn’t.
Teresa looked hollow-eyed with disappointment and grief. He tried to imagine what it would have been like for her to come so close to seeing her father again, to have him back on some level, and then failing at the last obstacle.
“When’s Amos coming back?” Alex asked, and Jim shrugged.
“When they’re done with him,” he said.
“What are we gonna do?”
That was the question. Jim scooped the last of his rice and beans into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. The Rocinante was a good ship. It was a good home. There were millions of people in hundreds of systems who would never have a place like this for as long as he’d had the Roci and its crew. He wasn’t sure why that idea felt so melancholy. He popped his bowl and spoon into the recycler, appreciating how the lid clicked under his hand, how it sealed when he took the pressure away. It was such a small, little elegance. So easy to overlook.
“I’m going to—” he said, and pointed toward the passage to his cabin with his thumb. Alex nodded.
Jim moved slowly through the ship, his mind full. He kept thinking of Eros. Of the way that the protomolecule, let loose, had taken people apart and put them back together according to its own needs, its own program. Here he was, decades on, and it was still the same. Amos, Cara, Xan. They’d died and been rebuilt because an alien drone following who knew what decision tree had come to the conclusion that they should overcome death. Duarte and the ring station were taking all of humanity apart like a caterpillar liquifying in its cocoon to be reassembled into a butterfly.
The war would go on. The builders of the ring gates moving from form to form—primitive bioluminescent sea slugs, to angels of light, then to a hive of mostly hairless primates with billions of bodies and only one mind. The dark things inside the gates and outside the universe scratching and ripping and unmaking the sickness that had intruded on its reality. Maybe someday that battle would be won. Maybe it would go on forever. Either way, nothing that Jim knew as human would persist. No more first kisses. No more prayers. No more moments of jealousy or insight or selfishness or love. They would be taken apart and fit back together like the bodies on Eros. Something would be there, but it wouldn’t be them.
Naomi was in a clean jumpsuit when he got to the cabin. She smelled of soap and fresh water. The light from her screen showed the lines in her face—sorrow and laughter both. She was beautiful, yes, but she’d always been beautiful. When they’d been young together, they’d been beautiful just because youth had a beauty all its own. It took age to see whether the beauty could last.
She narrowed her eyes and laughed. “What?”
“Just admiring the view.”
“You cannot be horny right now.”
“Don’t tell me what I can’t be,” he said, then moved beside her and put his hand on hers. “We aren’t getting out of this one, are we?”
“I don’t see how. No.”
They were silent for a moment. Jim felt a tremendous sense of peace washing over him. For the first time since he’d been taken prisoner on Medina, he felt deeply at ease. He stretched, and it actually felt pretty good.
“You are the central fact of my life,” he said. “Knowing you. Waking up next to you. It’s been the most meaningful thing I’ve done. And I am profoundly fucking grateful that I got that. I think of how easy it would have been for us to miss each other, and I can’t even imagine what that lifetime would have been.”