For a terrified moment he thought that his implants were going to kick in and expose him to the kami of Colossus. If the kami of Dis had whispered Michael's insignificance, those of this place would bellow it. They would snuff him out by sheer indifference.
But he didn't need the implants to feel time stretching out into a long, impossibly vivid moment. Michael felt balanced on the rim of eternity here, in the presence of vast forces it would have been presumptuous for him to capture and name as kami. The moment seemed overflowing with power and import, and he suddenly heard Rue's quiet voice saying, "How would you have to feel, to want it all again…?"
In seconds he might die, incinerated on Colossus— yet after infinite time maybe he would come round to exist again, and he would be here again, balanced on this moment. Even as he had in the fathomless past, an infinite number of times.
Everything— every instant— was infinitely significant. Even the most fleeting moment, he realized, was permanent.
And then a new voice spoke, calm as an angel.
"Prepare for transfer."
And an instant later the crushing pressure was gone and the swirling orange was replaced by the calm blackness of FTL travel. Michael floated freely in his straps.
Beside him Herat was laughing. Unsure of what he had just experienced, Michael started laughing too— and he was surprised to find as he laughed that a great weight had somehow lifted from his heart.
LEAVING FTL HAPPENED without drama. Suddenly the inscape window Rue had positioned by her g-bed showed stars. The pilot turned around in his seat, grinning, and gave a thumbs-up.
"Here come the others," he said. Rue looked, but could see nothing. She cloned the radar display he had in front of him and sure enough, one by one tiny needle shapes were popping into existence around them. One, two, five, eight, eleven… She held her breath while the call signs came in and let it out in a whoosh when Mike's ship signalled its presence.
Twelve, thirteen, fourteen… And no fifteenth. They waited tensely for almost half an hour, but the last ship didn't appear. Finally the pilot turned to her and said, "Ma'am, I don't think they made it."
She had been thinking this, but hearing him say it made Rue feel sick anyway. She let out a ragged sigh and said, "Bring everyone in. If we're secure, we'll inflate a balloon-hab and hold a ceremony honoring them."
Sola, the tactician, nodded. "Good idea."
"Meanwhile, unfurl the telescopes. We need to know where the hell we are. Passive sensors only— no radar yet, please."
She waited while the scopes came on line, then started them scanning. These instruments were infinitely better than the one Max had bought for their first trip to the Envy. Thinking this reminded her of him and his endearing fallibility. She felt a sharp pang of loss, which threatened to blossom into worry about what had happened to Rebecca and the others.
After meeting Mike's kami, Rue no longer believed she had to let her emotions lead her. She still loved her emotional life and had great sympathy for her own feelings; but it had become clear to her that she needed to be unsympathetic to the urges that came with many emotions.
Worrying meant that she cared about her people; but right now, worrying would not help bring them back. She returned her attention to the view.
Even though they gave no light, there was no missing Apophis and Osiris. Their convoluted magnetic fields swept the black sky like invisible hurricanes. Rue's ship felt those fields, though they were millions of kilometers from the Twins. Noise from the fields made the dwarfs the brightest radio emitters for light-years.
She soon had a visual fix. The dwarfs must be ancient, for they gave no visible light at all— not the gold of Colossus nor the coalred of Erythrion. These worlds were older than the Lasa; they appeared in her scope as round holes in the starscape. They orbited one another at a distance of fourteen million kilometers; unbelievably close, considering each had a diameter of a million and a half kilometers.
No— they did give light, she realized, as she turned up the gain. Both dwarfs sported crowns of flicking auroral light around their poles.
Rue had never thought of the halo worlds as lonely before, but the Twins were different. This was a forbidding place, like a frozen tomb. The feeling reminded her of the fractured plain of Dis.
"Ambient temperature is six kelvin," said the pilot. "The Twins register at about three hundred K. But… we're picking up pinpoint infrared sources. Lots of them!"
"Show me one." She waited while the telescope realigned.
What swam into view was a long thread of light. In infrared and speckled with dimness and distance as it was, it looked to Rue like a road, winding gently through space to infinity.
"A tether." She and the pilot had spoken simultaneously. Rue laughed. "It's a power tether." It was strange to see something so familiar and homey in this place— especially knowing that humans had not created it. Then again… "How many are there? Are they broadcasting standard position data?"
"It's like… a whole galaxy of them in orbit. Around both Twins. Thousands. Tens of thousands. But no signals. I don't think they're ours."
"Well. Not a Cycler Compact colony, then… But that's probably their energy source for launching cyclers. Where are they beaming the power?"
But she could already see the answer. As the light-enhanced view pulled back, she saw the dwarfs as gray cutouts encircled by Saturnian rings composed of thousands of tiny scintillas of light. Both dwarfs were surrounded by such rings.
And right in between the dwarfs, at the fixed but empty point in space about which they both orbited, a brilliant flare of infrared shone.
Dr. Herat's voice came over the radio. "Of course! The only stable place in this system, other than low orbit around the dwarfs, is at their orbital center. It's like the axle of a wheel, gravitationally speaking. There might even be asteroids or a moon there. Let's take a look."
The telescope zoomed dizzyingly in to that bright spot. Things swam in and out of focus for a second. Then Rue saw everything she had hoped to find here— and everything she had feared to see.
THE INTERCEPTORS WERE clustered in a wall formation, pointing at the distant Lasa construction site. Behind them, a balloon habitat had been inflated and inside it Rue held a ceremony honoring the pilot and gunner whose ship had not made it through from Colossus.
As a cycler captain, she was the traditional choice to perform such a memorial. She had learned, on the Envy and in the depths of Oculus's ocean, that she was truly a captain when she forgot to doubt herself. Today, she could let the voice of tradition and centuries-long purpose speak through her. The authority was not originally hers, but it became hers through her acceptance of the role.
"We see before us the reason why sacrifice is necessary," she told the assembled fliers, who were clustered in a loose ball in the center of the habitat. "This is the origin of Jentry's Envy. It may be a Lasa colony or a machine intelligence, or something else entirely new. It appears that resources are being skimmed off the Twins and shunted to that central point— whether to build a new cycler or to feed an alien civilization, we don't know. But the starship Banshee is moored there. The men who have made themselves our enemies have come to steal from us the prize that Jentry's Envy hinted was here. If this is truly a construction shack for new cyclers, then this system is infinitely precious to us. Such new cyclers may be our last chance to restore our civilization to the greatness it once had. Our comrades, Julia Daly and Harald Siever, fell in the course of trying to guarantee a future for their children and ours. They exist now as part of the kami of this place. We will remember them, always."