She heard Emma’s voice before she reached the ops deck. Her tone was high and rough as a decking saw. Naomi pulled herself onto the deck and grabbed a handhold to stop. Emma was on the float by the comms station, her arms folded and her jaw jutting out. A man with a salt-and-pepper beard longer than his close-cropped hair looked away from her long enough to recognize Naomi, then back at Emma in disgust. His uniform identified him as Captain Burnham. The comms tech was between them like a mouse at a catfight.
“The answer was no before,” Burnham said, then pointed toward Naomi with his chin. “Now that this one is on my deck, the answer’s go fuck yourself.”
“It’s nothing,” Emma said. “Five-minute tightbeam to Medina? No one would even blink at it. It’s trivial.”
“It’s already too much.” He turned to look at Naomi. “Don’t say anything, you. I know who you are, and I know what you are, and I have extended my unrequested hospitality to you out of grandmotherly fucking kindness.”
“You have as much to hide as she does,” Emma said. “Everyone knows about the sealed cabins.”
The comms tech pulled himself down into the gel of his crash couch like he could disappear into it. Naomi considered the captain of the Bhikaji Cama with all the calm and dignity she could manage. “I appreciate that my presence puts you and yours at greater risk. I wouldn’t have chosen this if there were a better way, but there isn’t. If things had gone the way I hoped, you’d never have known I was here. That’s not the way it happened, though. And now I need five minutes with your tightbeam.”
Burnham lifted his hands to her, palms out. Stop. “Ma’am, I am not a partisan, but I know a lot of my crew are. I’m the kind of man that kens when to shut up and mind my own business. I’m not turning you over to the political officer, but don’t mistake that for loyalty. I’m trying to get my ass out of a crack, and I’m getting more and more convinced that locking you in a cabin and welding the door shut might be an easier path than the one I’ve chosen.”
“It’s important,” Naomi said.
“It’s my ship. The answer is no.” His eyes were hard, but it was as much fear as anger. Naomi waited a moment, seeing what her gut said. Push or back down. Emma sighed, and the captain’s beard shifted as his jaw went tighter.
“I understand,” Naomi said. She met Emma’s eyes for a fraction of a second, and then they moved to the bulkhead together. Emma fumed silently until they made the turn into the lift shaft.
“Sorry about that,” Emma said. “He’s an asshole.”
“I did stow away on his ship and put him at risk of a Laconian interrogation room,” Naomi said. “Expecting him to take orders from me along with it might be too much to ask. I’ll find another way.”
“I can help unbox some of those communication torpedoes,” Emma said. Her tone made it an apology.
“I’d rather find another way to use the tightbeam. Time may be important. But Emma, you have to be more careful.”
“He’s not going to fold,” Emma said. “I’ve shipped with that man long enough to tell when he’s at his edge. There’s a thing he does with his lips. I can clean him out playing poker too.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Naomi said. “You said five minutes talking to Medina.”
“They were going to know where the message was going anyway,” Emma said. “They had to.”
“I didn’t know Saba was on Medina Station, and I do now,” Naomi said. “Now if they catch me, it compromises him.”
Emma pressed her lips tight. “Sorry. I assumed that … Sorry.”
“We’ll tell him. I’m sure he has plans to shift locations if he needs to.”
Emma nodded, then muttered fuck under her breath. Even as she thought about other ways to get comm access, Naomi spared a moment to feel sympathy for her.
Emma’s hand terminal sounded at the same moment that hers did. Another chime sounded from down a corridor. A ship-wide alert. Or something bigger. Naomi thumbed the notification open.
ALL UNION SHIPS: TOP PRIORITY. ALL TRAFFIC THROUGH ALL GATES IS SUSPENDED BY ORDER OF LACONIAN MILITARY COMMAND. NO SHIPS PERMITTED THROUGH ANY GATE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. ALL TRANSITS ARE ON HOLD. ALL SHIPS ON APPROACH ARE TO EVACUATE THE LANE TO .8 AU IMMEDIATELY.
Emma was moving through data fast, flipping from one interface to another, and so intent on her hand terminal that she didn’t notice she was drifting. Naomi caught her elbow and pulled her to the wall.
“What happened?” Naomi asked.
“Don’t know,” Emma said, shaking her head. “Something big.”
Chapter Nineteen: Elvi
The hard burn out of Tecoma system without sedation was a slice of hell. The crash couch felt close as a coffin around her. The breathable support fluid was thick in her throat. She tried to tell herself that it was like being in a dream where she could never drown, but every few minutes, she felt an animal panic in the back of her head. Throughout most of human evolutionary history, the watery inside-a-pipe-with-no-way-out view she had would have been the last thing someone saw before they died in pain. It was hard to convince her hindbrain that this time was different.
The monitor, weirdly, was crisper and easier to see than normal. Something about how the fluid did or didn’t scatter light. Or evidence that she needed to look into vision correction, she didn’t know which. But she could track the ship’s progress on its mad dash for the ring and the data still streaming in from the probes. The fizz of miraculous protons kept coming into the system, and the spin of the Tecoma star and the magnetic fields it generated were pulling some of the new matter into a glowing accretion disk. It was almost beautiful except for the part where it could collapse into a black hole and generate the gamma ray burst that killed them as fast as a neuron could fire.
With the adjustable buoyancy in the tank, she felt the burn less as being pressed down and more as being squeezed in a massive and invisible fist. Red flight information data kept her aware of how tenuous her position was. Surviving a sustained thirty-g burn in a conventional crash couch would have been about as likely as living through a free fall drop from orbit onto a pile of knives.
When they hit the midpoint of the flight, the Falcon kicked off its drive, flipped the ship, and started its deceleration in less than a minute. All Elvi experienced was a moment’s vertigo and a bloom of black spots in her vision that cleared away again quickly. The animal panic rose in her again, and she fought to keep it back.
I AM NOT LOVING THIS EXPERIENCE, she sent to Fayez. She hated that she couldn’t say it or hear his voice.
A moment later, a message came back. I KNOW. I CAN’T DECIDE IF I’M PANICKED OR BORED. V. CONFUSING. BEEN READING THE SAFETY GUIDELINES. TURNS OUT MALES ARE SPECIFICALLY DISCOURAGED FROM MASTURBATING IN THE GEL WHILE UNDER BURN. WONDER WHAT THAT TEST PROTOCOL LOOKED LIKE.
The fluid made it hard to laugh. Her husband might not have been a good match for anyone but her. But for her, he was perfect.
Hours later, they passed through the ring gate into what everyone still called the slow zone. The Falcon jounced as maneuvering thrusters took them off the mathematical line defined by the gate and the star. Under perfect circumstances, the couch would have cycled through three sets of progressively thinner fluid before it finally drained, but Elvi was done. She selected IMMEDIATE RELEASE from the system menu, approved the override, and heard the deep chunk-chunk-chunk of the pump as it drew the fluid away and injected oxygen-rich air in its place. She might choke and cough and feel like she was getting over bronchitis for a few hours, but she genuinely didn’t care.