“There doesn’t, sweetheart.”
Jen looked up from her station monitor. Her lips were thin, her gaze restless. “Eighty thousand people in Thanjavur system,” she said. “One habitable planet with three cities, and a moon base on its major satellite. And they’re … I just can’t get my head around it. They’re just gone.”
“They might be fine,” Elvi said. “Just … out of contact. They may be better off than all of us at this rate.”
“Unless their sun exploded. There are stories about that, aren’t there? The protomolecule engineers burning whole systems?”
Travon fluttered his finger and thumb together again as he worked his station’s monitor. “Thanjavur’s only eight and a half light-years from Gedara. If there’s a big flash in eight and a half years, we’ll know what happened.”
“I don’t like this,” Jen said.
“None of us do,” Fayez said. “Honestly, I think old Sagale would skip this part if he could.”
“What?” Jen said. “No, not that. I mean yes, I don’t like that. But this too.”
She threw a dataset Elvi didn’t recognize onto the main monitor. The Myron’s Folly blinked away and a series of energy graphs took its place. Jen turned to look at them as if the significance were obvious.
“I’m a biologist,” Elvi said.
“We’re seeing radiation coming from in between the rings. We’ve never seen that before. There hasn’t been anything there to radiate. This little pocket universe just ends at the rings. Anything that went out was gone like it passed an event horizon. Now, since … well, since us? Something’s coming through.”
“Something’s knocking around in the attic,” Fayez said. “That’s not reassuring. I’m not reassured.”
“What do you make of it?” Elvi asked.
“I don’t know. I just have data, and it says something’s happening that didn’t happen before. And it’s not calming down.”
A voice in her memory said the words as clearly and distinctly as if they had been spoken: Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook. She let her breath out slowly from between her teeth.
Elvi opened a connection request to Sagale’s office. To his credit, he accepted it immediately. “Dr. Okoye.”
“Admiral, could you join us on the bridge? There’s some incoming data I’d like you to look at.”
She heard the hesitation while he decided whether it was a ploy to stop the bomb ship plan. Just because the data was real didn’t mean it wasn’t a ploy.
“I’m on my way,” Sagale said, and cut the connection.
“We could always mutiny,” Fayez said brightly.
“We wouldn’t stand a chance,” Travon said. “I did the nav analysis. Even if we took control of the ship, the Typhoon could blow us to dust before we got out a gate.”
“Jesus, Travon,” Fayez said. “I was joking.”
“Oh,” Travon said. “Sorry.”
“I remember when I was just a scientist,” Elvi said. “I liked that. It was nice.”
Five minutes later Sagale came on the bridge, floating toward his station like none of them were there. Elvi remembered seeing him in the same place, still damp from the crash couch and weeping. He was a different man now. For a moment, against her will, she admired him. Sagale considered the display in silence. The loudest sounds were the hush of the air recyclers and the flutter of Travon’s right thumb and middle finger.
He considered the energy graphs as Jen explained them again. Sagale took it in impassively. When Jen had finished, he floated quietly in his crash couch restraints. His gaze flickered to Elvi’s, and she thought there was something in them. Gratitude, maybe.
With a gesture, he opened a comm channel.
“Admiral Sagale,” Governor Song’s voice came. “How can I help you?” It had a hint of Mariner Valley drawl. Elvi wondered if it was the mark of a Martian working for Laconia or a Laconian who’d carried her accent out into the alien worlds and back again. Whether this obedience was peculiar to Duarte’s people or if it had been part of the Martian character all along.
“My eggheads came up with an analysis I’d like your eggheads to take a peek at, Governor. It may be nothing, but I’d recommend we hold action on the bomb ship until we know what we’re looking at.”
There was a long pause. “You have my curiosity, Admiral. Send over what you have.”
“Thank you,” Sagale said, and the governor cut the connection. “Share that with the Typhoon and Medina, Dr. Lively. Let’s see if they share your concerns.”
“Yes, sir,” Jen said, and started packaging her information like she’d been given an extra five minutes on her final exams.
Fayez touched Elvi’s shoulder and said, almost too softly to hear, “Do you think we just got away with—”
The universe exploded.
If it had been a sound, it would have been deafening. Elvi put her hands over her ears just the same. A reflex. An approximation. Jen was screaming. Elvi tried to sink to the deck, but only managed to pull her legs up so that she was floating in a fetal position. The curve of the handhold before her was ornate and beautiful. The smudge of darkness where the oil from the crew’s skin hadn’t been cleaned away was like a map of a vast coastline, fractal and complex. She was aware of Fayez beside her, of the waves of pressure passing between them, touching, and reflecting away as they both screamed. The air was a fog of atoms. Sagale was a cloud of atoms. She was a cloud.
You’ve been here, she thought. You’ve been here before. Don’t get distracted by it. Don’t lose yourself.
The cloud that was her hand, vibrations in emptiness, slipped through the void and clatter to the cloud that was the handhold. Fields of energy between her atoms and the bulkhead’s atoms turned into a dance of pressure, and the surge sent lightning up her arm, so complicated it was hard to keep track of. She was aware that she felt it, but there was so much happening it was hard to keep the sensation in mind.
Elvi found that she could see right through the suddenly vaporous ship, and right through the other ship clouds around it. Medina was a vast but wispy thunderhead at the center of them all.
Something was moving through the clouds, dark and sinuous as a dancer slipping between raindrops. And then another. And then more. They were everywhere, sliding through the gas and liquid and solid, scattering the clouds with their passage. They were solid. Real in a way the clouds of matter were not. They were more real than anything she’d ever seen. Tendrils of darkness that had never known light. That could never know light. You’ve seen this absence of light before. A darkness like the eye of an angry god … You said that to someone.
One darted and swirled, off to her left if left meant anything now. It furled like a question mark, and the pattern of atoms and vibrations swirled around it and into it. The beauty of it, the grace, were hard to look away from. Clouds mixed and swirled together in its wake, colors so pure they were only colors. It took effort to recognize they were blood.
She’d been here before. It had been overwhelming the first time. It was overwhelming again now, but at least she knew what it was. That made holding her mind together possible. At least for a moment.
You’re doing great, kid. You’re doing great. You can do this. Just a little more. But do it now …
She tried to remember what her throat was. Tried to imagine that the dots of matter and emptiness had said words before. That they still could. They were her body, the air she breathed. She tried to make it all work together long enough to scream.