Leviathan Falls

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Lighthouse and the Keeper

Tanaka almost hadn’t gone into active service. There had been a point when she was sixteen years old and the star student of her cohort in the Imahara Institute’s upper university program when she’d seriously considered committing to a career as an art historian. She’d taken three tutorials and courses, and she’d been good at it. Knowing the history surrounding an image made both the art and the history more interesting.

One of her last essays had been about a painting by Fernanda Daté called The Education of the Third Miko. It had been of a thin woman looking directly out at the viewer. The oil paint that Daté used had given an eerie impression of direct eye contact. The figure had been seated on a throne of skulls, and a single pale tear streaked her left cheek. Tanaka had written about the context for the image in Daté’s life—the nonresponsive cancer that the artist was struggling with when the painting was made, the threat of war between Earth and Mars that she’d grown up with, and her admiration for the Shintofascist philosophies of Umoja Gui. The distress of the third Miko depicted the aftermath of her self-revelation and acceptance of her own compromised nature.

Tanaka hadn’t thought about that painting in decades, or about what a very different life she would have lived if she’d made a few different decisions at the start.

The captain of the Derecho was a gaunt man named Botton. The ship shuddered under them, and the high-g burn made her a little light-headed. But she wasn’t getting in a crash couch yet, and so neither was he.

“If we are not sincerely trying to catch the enemy…” Botton said, and then lost his train of thought. Not enough blood to the brain.

She waited to reply until he came back to himself. “We won’t catch them before they transit the ring. We won’t catch them before they transit out of the ring space either. We are setting their expectations as to our speed of pursuit to maximize the time they feel comfortable staying in the ring space. Once they’ve gone through the Freehold gate, we’ll accelerate to an even higher burn. Near the maximum the ship can handle. Our aim is to reach the ring space before their drive plume has fully dissipated. That’s how we’ll determine which gate they escaped through.”

“If we could… slow our present approach…”

“It would mean a harder burn later.”

Botton started to nod, but thought better of it. Standing free in a hard burn meant keeping the spine very carefully stacked. Tanaka suppressed a smile.

“My concern, Colonel,” Botton said, “is that the supply of high-g drugs may not me… may not be sufficient.”

She pulled up the allocation chart that showed the reservoirs of juice for the crew. While Botton watched, she dropped her own to zero. The pull of thrust gravity made his distress look like a sorrowful dog’s.

“I wouldn’t ask anyone to take a risk I won’t take myself,” she said. It wasn’t true, but it made her point. She was stronger than him, better than him, and tired of hearing him whine.

“Yes, Colonel,” he said. He braced, turned, and walked out of the office that had been his, careful to place his weight so that it wouldn’t blow out his knees. Tanaka waited until he was gone before she let herself ease back into her crash couch. Or her throne of skulls.

The Forgiveness began its life as a colony ship built at Pallas-Tycho in the years when the Transport Union had ruled the ring gates. With almost two billion square meters of cargo space, and living quarters that were the same size as an in-system shuttle, the Forgiveness was about freight, not passengers. Ekko had signed on when he was fifteen, and apart from a year he’d stayed behind on Firdaws to work on his command certification, he’d pretty much been there ever since. His stint as captain had outlived the union that had certified him. It had outlasted the traffic control authority on Medina Station. It had outlasted the iron fist of the Laconian Empire, more or less.

The major shareholder in the Forgiveness, on the other hand, seemed like she’d be plaguing Ekko until the day he died. Mallia Currán had financed the ship’s overhaul with a private loan backed by the governing council, and while she didn’t have a greater than 50 percent stake in the ship, she could get a coalition that did by making two calls and a coffee date. And she was Komi Tuan’s niece, so anything semilegal she did was played down by the magistrates. Like the old gods of Earth, most of the time she ignored Ekko and the Forgiveness, and the days she didn’t were almost always bad ones. She’d asked for a status report five hours before, and he’d been thinking about how to answer ever since.

He arranged himself in his office, checked his image on the screen, and started recording.

“Always good to hear from you, Magistra Currán. Everything’s five by five with the ship. We have a full load of ore and samples for Bara Gaon, and I’ve had assurance that the return cargo is going to be ready when we get there. We’re just waiting on the passage protocol before we make transit.” He tried an insouciant smile, but it came off forced. “You know how it is with taking large cargoes through. Want to make sure we’re doing it by the book and all. I will check back as soon as we have confirmation.”

He saved the message and sent it before he could second-guess himself. Four hours back to Firdaws, and maybe it would reach her while she was sleeping. That would give him a few more hours before she worked herself up into an excoriating mood. Which she would.

He already knew the arguments she’d make: The underground’s protocols were guidelines, not law; the infrastructure to support them was only partly in place; what the fuck was he going to do if the okay didn’t come through? Just sit there on the float waiting for consensus flight permissions while someone else bribed the supply officers in Bara Gaon for the soil and fuel pellets and fabrication printers that Firdaws needed?

She wasn’t all the way wrong, either. A cargo ship that didn’t move cargo wasn’t much of anything.

“Fuck,” he said to nothing in particular and everything in general. He opened a channel to the pilot’s station two decks below. “Annamarie? You there?”

“Am,” his pilot said.

“Give us a quarter g toward the gate, yeah? We’re going to have to do this, clearance or no clearance.”

“Understood. On it,” she said, and dropped the connection. A few seconds later, the thrust correction warning went on. If no one answered him, he’d have to decide whether to put on a braking burn or pass through the gate without clearance, knowing that there was an armada of independent freighters out there making the same calculations as him.

But what the hell, really. Life was risk.

“She’s getting pretty close,” Jim said. “We’re sure about this?”

“We can keep ahead of her,” Alex said from the comms and the deck above. “She knows it. If she gets too close, we’ll speed up, then she’d have to speed up. Or we’ll decide to make a break for it, and she’ll know how close we’re willing to let her get. Right now, she’s willing to dump reaction mass and I’m not. If that changes, it’ll change.”

“You sound very philosophical about it.”

He could hear the smile in Alex’s voice. “I’ve always admired this part. Don’t much care for the killing each other at the end, but there’s a poetry to this part of the conversation. And there are some decisions we’re going to need to make.”

Jim turned his head. Naomi was already looking at him. Teresa and Amos were on the comms from the machine shop.

“Nuriel system is only a ten-degree deflection from our present course,” Naomi said. “We wouldn’t need a braking burn. It has some underground resources.”

“But Tanaka would know we didn’t need a braking burn,” Alex said. “We could pop through the ring space from one end to the other in a few minutes if I get the angle right, but it’ll be like drawing an arrow to where we went. Going in slower means we have a wider range of systems that we might have headed into.”

The ship hummed and rang, the resonances of the drive playing their long, familiar music. On his screen, the Laconian destroyer ticked forward, closing the distance between them. The intercept would still come well after they’d passed through the ring gate and out through some other one. The panic clearing its throat in the back of Jim’s head wasn’t based in anything but itself.

“We also don’t want to go through so fast we dutchman ourselves,” he said, more thinking aloud than to tell the others something they hadn’t already thought. “And there might be other Laconian ships in the slow zone. We can’t be sure there aren’t.”

“I don’t know how to control for that,” Naomi said. “But we can aim for the systems where there are likely to be fewer eyes on us. It’s the best we can manage.”

There were so many risks. If Laconia had a spotter ship in place, they’d be found. If the enemy was watching from the sunward side of whatever gate they passed through, the way the Derecho had in Freehold, they’d be caught. If Tanaka, breathing down their necks, had some trick he hadn’t thought of, they’d be caught. If they made the transit too fast or with too many other ships, they’d be dead. If they stayed too long in the slow zone and the things inside the gate boiled out from beyond the ring space again, they’d be dead. And if it all worked out… then what? Dead or captured were the failure states. He wasn’t sure what success looked like.

The next step, maybe. It didn’t matter if he knew how it all ended, as long as he always knew what was next. You can drive a thousand klicks if you’ve got one good headlight. Mother Elise used to say that when he was a kid. He hadn’t thought of her in a long time. Having her voice come to him so clearly right now felt like an omen, but he didn’t know what of.

“Cap?” Amos said.

“Yeah?”

“We need to go see the doc.”

He was quiet for a second. “Adro system?”

“The only ships there will be Laconian,” Naomi said.

Teresa answered. “But they’ll all answer to Dr. Okoye. And there’s nothing else there. Colonel Tanaka won’t expect it.”

“We did just gas up,” Alex said. “If we’re going someplace for a long, quiet float, this is the time for it.”

“Cap,” Amos said again. There was something in his voice. “We need to go see the doc.”

Jim didn’t want to do it, and he wasn’t sure why he didn’t want to. No. That wasn’t true. Elvi was their last hope against the darkness, and if he saw that she’d failed, he wouldn’t even have that anymore. It wasn’t a good enough reason to stay away.

“Alex, plot the fastest transit you can for Adro system.”

Kit woke. The harness beside him was empty. At first he thought Rohi was feeding Bakari, but that wasn’t it. The baby was in his own little sleeping harness, eyes closed and arms floating forward like he’d never left the amniotic sac. His son looked utterly at peace. Which, good on him, because nobody else was.

As quietly as he could, Kit undid his restraints and synced his handheld with the cabin’s system. It would keep its electronic eyes on Bakari and alert him if the baby so much as burped. Then as near to silent as he could be, he slipped out of the cabin and into the common galley.

The lights were dimmed to night mode, so Rohi’s handheld lit her face from below. The flag of their future home was a shadow over her right shoulder. Her eyes were fixed on the little screen, and her expression was empty. He didn’t need to ask. He knew what she was looking at. Footage from San Esteban system.

He pulled himself to a stop beside her, his magnetic boots off and floating in air. She glanced up at him, made a rueful smile. Rueful and maybe a little resentful.

“We’re almost at the gate,” Kit said. “A few more hours.”

Rohi nodded, but the feed on her handheld cut to something new, and it held her gaze. The horrors of a systemful of dead people, replayed again and again, with commentary in ten languages and a hundred political orthodoxies. The science feeds about the manner of death. The religious feeds about its spiritual meaning and what it said about the will of God. The political feeds about why it was some other ideology’s fault. She watched all of them like she was looking for something in the images of the corpses. Meaning, maybe. Or hope.

“You should get some sleep,” Kit said. “Baby’s going to be up before long, and he’s not as impressed with me as he is with you.”

“He doesn’t see there’s anything wrong with you,” Rohi said. “He’s a baby, and he already knows I’m stressed.”

“Between the two of us, we are his universe.”

“What if we aren’t supposed to do this?”

“Do what, babe?”

“All of this? Going to other planets. Going to other stars. What if God didn’t want this?”

“Well, then they should have spoken up sooner, I guess. It’s late in the game to turn around.”

She chuckled and shut off the handheld. He was relieved. He didn’t know what he’d have done if she refused to look away from the feeds. Go back to the cabin by himself, probably.

“How do we do this?” she murmured. “They all just died, and everyone just keeps doing what they were doing anyway.”

“No options. We go on because we go on.” He wiped away the film of tears building up around her eye. “It’ll be all right,” he said, hearing how little weight the words carried. How little he believed them. “Come to bed.”

In one way, the chase looked simple. The Roci was braking, still hurtling toward the Freehold gate but more and more slowly. By the time it passed through, it would be going slow enough that it could deflect its flight path the thirty-four degrees it took to slide out the Adro gate, or any of hundreds of others. The Laconian destroyer Derecho had a greater velocity and was only now starting to brake. It would slide through Freehold gate moving faster, braking harder, running its high-powered Laconian drive hot enough to risk the deaths of some percentage of its crew. Maybe it would be able to find the gate the Roci had gone through. Maybe it would guess wrong. Maybe it would make a killing burn to shed all its velocity and come to a stop in the ring space so it could search for traces of the Roci’s passage. Or, hell, maybe it would malfunction, spin off into the non-surface of the bubble between the ring gates, and be annihilated. Jim had been lucky before.

In another way, the chase was impossibly complex. With a flick of his eyes, he could turn the display to a probabilistic three-dimensional map that showed all the possible flight paths the Roci could take, the complex decision points where an equation with values like time, vector, delta-v, the elasticity of a human blood vessel, and the ship’s position in space defined the moment when a possible future slipped away. Jim moved between the two views—the curve of the Roci’s intended path and the swooping, lily-shaped cone that was the Derecho’s possible paths. Then over to the intricate web of things that could happen but hadn’t yet, as it narrowed second by second and left a thin thread called history behind it. His jaw ached from the deceleration. No one had spoken for hours, and his headache was probably just a headache. Strokes didn’t take that long.

PREPARING FOR TRANSIT Alex messaged the full crew. On the external telescopes, the thousand-kilometer diameter of the gate was still almost too small to see. Jim watched it grow slowly until it was almost as big as the nail of his outstretched thumb, and then all the stars in the universe snapped off at once as they passed through it and into the ring space.

The whole bubble with all the gates was a little smaller than the volume of Sol system’s star. A million Earths wouldn’t have filled it. At their speed, they wouldn’t be inside it for very long.

The Roci shifted under him, slewing around in a perfect arc, connecting the Freehold gate and the Adro gate in a logical relationship defined by complex math that the enormous power of the ship’s drive was struggling to convert into physical reality. If the feed of reaction mass stuttered, they’d slip off course. If they missed the Adro gate, everything that came after that would be someone else’s problem. Jim couldn’t tell if his heart was racing from fear or just the effort of keeping the blood supply going to his brain.

To his left, Naomi grunted, and it sounded like dismay. He had the sudden flashbulb memory of medical alarms blaring when Fred Johnson had died in the same crash couch she was in, and his heart found a way to beat a little faster. No alarm sounded, but a private message came onto his screen from her.

TOO MANY SHIPS.

He changed his display again. The traffic pattern in the ring space. A dozen transponder codes spooled out—Tyrant’s Folly out of Sol, Taif out of Hongdae, Forgiveness out of Firdaws—and twice as many pings for unidentified drive plumes. He tried to shift the analysis to include them all, but before he could, another message came from Naomi.

THIS IS INSANE. THEY’LL FAIL THE TRANSIT. WHAT DO THEY THINK THEY’RE DOING???

But she knew what they were doing. The same thing they were. Looking at the risk, and each one individually deciding that it made sense for them to throw the dice. And some had certainly failed. There was no one to keep track of how many ships went in a ring gate and didn’t come out the other side. If the Roci was lost, he didn’t know how long it would be before anyone realized it. Maybe never.

He shifted the system to threat assessment, and the answer came at once. Two ships were going to transit out of the ring space before the Roci reached Adro: a colony ship running without a transponder that was almost at the Behrenhold gate and the Forgiveness, a massive cargo hauler out of Firdaws that would pass into Bara Gaon just a few minutes before the Roci reached the Adro gate. Assuming the rings were at base state, the Roci would survive the transition. Assuming that no other ships came in through a ring gate in the meantime.

Assuming, that was to say, a lot of things he didn’t have any reason to assume.

The stars came back. The same stars as home, if in a slightly different configuration. Ekko let his head fall back into the gel of the crash couch. For a moment, he didn’t say anything, barely felt anything, and then a deep relief rode through him like a wave, lifting his heart and setting him back down laughing.

He became aware that his comms were open from the soft rhythm of Annamarie cursing in French. She wasn’t talking to him or anyone really. Maybe God.

“Little full in there today, yeah?” Ekko said.

Annamarie shifted to English. “Fuck, that was too much, old man.”

Ekko laughed again. The release felt almost postcoital. Here he was, in his ship and in Bara Gaon system, and not in whatever screaming void ate ships that drew the short straw.

“I’m going to quit,” Annamarie said. “I’m going to find an apartment in Bara Gaon and an honest job, and I’m going to retire and have babies and never go through that fucking gate again. God damn.” He could hear the grin in her voice, and knew she didn’t mean it until she sobered. “Seriously, capitán. Someone’s going to fucking die in there if it stays that busy.”

“True enough, but not us. Not today. Get me a tightbeam lock to the traffic authority and the client. Let them know we’re here.”

“That we live to skin our asses off another day,” Annamarie said. “On it. I will let you know when I get the lock.”

The Rocinante screamed. Compression seams touched the inside edge of their tolerances. Massive hull plates of carbon-silicate lace settled deep into their supports. The drive howled and pushed up against the hurtling bubble of ceramic and metal and air. The writhing stars on the far side of Adro gate loomed up, almost hidden behind their drive plume.

This was an absurd way to die, Jim thought.

His jaw hurt and he kept losing little bits of time. Alex had the drive plume of the Roci pointed out toward the Adro gate, bleeding off as much speed as they could, making their transit a few seconds later in the unmeasurable hope that it would make the difference. Across the ring space, the Derecho would be coming close. There were so many ways for all of it to go wrong, and then what?

Mother Elise’s little boy would have arced up from Montana through wars and alien solar systems and love and despair and died slamming into the one danger he’d known for decades was right fucking there. It was too stupid to even qualify as irony.

A message appeared on his screen from Naomi—ARE YOU OKAY?—and he had to keep himself from turning to look at her. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to turn back under this burn. The blood was pooling in the back of his skull, and the uncomfortable electric fizz of the juice was, he was sure, the only thing keeping him from having several strokes at once. He started to answer her, then forgot what he was doing. The gate approached, growing larger first slowly, then quickly, then all at once.

The burn started to trail away, shifting slowly down toward the float to avoid reperfusion injuries that came when blood flooded too quickly into tissues it had been wrung out of. His hands and face tingled. He saw Naomi’s message again and remembered that he hadn’t answered.

He tried to say I’m fine, but it came out as a croak. He massaged his throat for a few seconds, moving cartilage and muscle back closer toward their right places, and tried again.

“I’m fine,” he managed. “I’m good. You?”

“I am very proud not to be sitting in a puddle of something unfortunate right now,” she said, but the joke sounded angry. The Roci’s burn dropped under a g, then under a half. He looked over. Her mouth was a profound scowl.

“They’re not following protocol,” he said.

“I should have taken Trejo’s offer. This isn’t going to work without someone enforcing it. There’s not enough cooperation.”

“Isn’t now. It doesn’t mean there can’t ever be.”

“They’re people,” Naomi said, exhaustion in her tone. “We’re trying to do all of this with humans. Shortsightedness is coded in our DNA.”

He didn’t have an answer for that. A moment later, the comms went live, and Amos and Teresa reported in on the post-burn maintenance they were doing, Alex started getting a tightbeam lock on the Falcon, and Naomi checked to see whether the ship had grabbed any waiting communication packets from the underground during their passage through the ring space.

Jim followed along, chiming in where he could help, but the thing that stuck in his mind like a catchy, bleak melody was Naomi’s voice. We’re trying to do all of this with humans.

The Derecho passed through the Freehold gate and into the ring space, the drive pushing a braking burn at the limit of the ship’s tolerance—which was the same as saying the limits of the crew’s. The Derecho could pour enough gs into its maneuvers to crush the skin-bound sacks of salt water in it. Tanaka was willing to spend a few lives if it meant catching her prey. If that made her bloodthirsty, so be it. She’d always been thirsty for something. It might as well be blood.

As soon as the gate distortion was gone, and even as she struggled to draw breath, she set the ship to scanning the vacuum at the edges of the more than thirteen hundred gates. The Rocinante’s drive plume might be gone, but the cooling cloud that had been its reaction mass was still there, slowly diffusing into the soft mist of hydrogen, oxygen, ozone, and water vapor that made up most of the physical mass in the ring space. In time, the particles would all drift into contact with the edge of the space and be annihilated, but until then, the information was there. A subtle finger, pointing the way her enemy had gone.

If only she’d made it through before it had dispersed too far to find it…

The Derecho’s drive kicked off, the ship went into freefall, and a wave of nausea rolled through her. She ignored it, pulling up her tactical display. The ring space was ridiculously full. It was still fewer ships than she’d seen in the average approach pattern to the naval base on Callisto, back in the day, but Callisto had never had to worry about extradimensional horrors eating some of the ships as they tried to land. Context was everything.

The Derecho had already scanned and dismissed all of them—none was the Rocinante. She pulled up the visual profiles and drive signatures anyway. Recognition algorithms were brilliant, but they weren’t the human eye. What could fool one often couldn’t fool the other.

“Colonel Tanaka?” Botton’s voice asked from her comms screen.

“What?”

The Derecho flagged a burst of light and high-energy particles coming through the Sol gate. The first tickling drive plume of some other ship about to transit through that ring.

“We have medical emergencies with…” Botton paused, caught his breath. “With several crew members. If we can pause long enough to remove them to the medical bay…”

“Do it,” Tanaka said.

“Thank you, Colonel,” he said.

“Where are you, you little fucks?” Tanaka muttered.

The Sol gate fluttered with light.

Bakari was fussing because he was frustrated. The pediatrician had warned Kit about this before they’d started the journey. The time in lower gravity would weaken Bakari’s muscles and bones a little. Not so much that he wouldn’t recover once he was in consistent gravity again, but enough that during the higher burns on the trip the child would find himself unable to do things he had previously done. The braking burn into the ring space had been noted in their first meeting as a place that children Bakari’s age would be likely to struggle. At the time, it hadn’t seemed too onerous.

Now it seemed onerous.

“Come on, little bear,” Kit said, smiling down at the small face that looked back up at him in rage. “It’s okay. Listen while we sing, yeah? Listen to us sing.”

It was the third hour since Bakari had woken from his nap. Rohi had taken the first two. Now she was in the commissary buying spicy curry for the brothers from Breach Candy as an apology for the screaming and crying. The other passengers were kind enough not to complain and also kind enough to accept their peace offerings gracefully. Afterward, Rohi had promised to spend an hour in the gym. Neither of them had been good about keeping to the exercise schedule, and they’d pay for that when the Preiss reached Nieuwestad.

“Listen,” Kit sang. “Little boy, listen. Listen to your tired daddy sing.”

He made a trill in the back of his throat, something he remembered his own father doing, back in the ancient days before the divorce. Bakari started, focused on him like Kit had grown a second head.

“Oh. You like that?” Kit cooed, then trilled again.

The little mouth unknotted, and like a miracle visited upon the faithful, the baby laughed. Kit grinned down at him, and Bakari grinned back.

“The burn is almost over,” Kit sang, improvising the glide and skip of the melody. “Soon we’ll pass the gate.”

Bakari shifted his back from side to side, and reached up an arm the way he had since he’d been in Rohi’s belly. He’d be asleep soon, and Kit felt a surge of anticipation. When his son slept, he’d nap too. God, he needed to sleep.

“Close your eyes and rest, son,” he sang, and gently rocked the little crash couch. He pulled the vowel sounds long and soothing. “Nothing here you need…”

Bakari’s eyes fluttered closed, then open again. There was something odd about the way the light caught the roundness of his cheek, and Kit lost his own tune, fascinated by the texture of his son’s skin. The light showed so much detail, the folds of baby-smooth skin, the sheen of the oils, and Kit was somehow falling into it, descending into the fractal complexity. By the time he realized something was wrong, it was too late.

Bakari was there, as close as he had been before, but what had been his boy was a complexity of vibrations—molecules and atoms in clumps and patterns too baroque to show where one thing began and another ended. Kit fell what would have been forward onto what would have been his knees, and the pain of it was like watching dominoes fall, tiny electrochemical sparks passing from nerve to nerve. The shimmering in the air was Bakari screaming. And Kit screaming too. The feeling of the air abrading his throat was a cascade of rushing razor-sharp atoms.

Something more solid and real than they were slid through the jumble of atoms that was the wall. A thread of conscious darkness that had never known light, was the antithesis of it. Kit tried to move the clouds that were his arms around the cloud that had been his son, knowing distantly that it couldn’t matter. He was no more solid than the wall had been.

The darkness whirled toward him, scattering him. Scattering his son.

A voice as vast as mountains whispered…

The alarm caught Tanaka’s attention. Something was going wrong at the Sol gate. It took a few seconds to understand what she was seeing. The influx of fast-moving particles had just dropped to zero. It would have meant the incoming ship had cut its drive, except there were still photons getting through. Whatever ship was coming in from Sol wasn’t going to make it. They were already starting to go dutchman, and they didn’t even know it yet.

It wasn’t her problem, and even if it had been, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She turned back to the scatter analysis and the hunt for the Rocinante. There was a greater than 40 percent chance that something had passed into Bara Gaon in the timeframe she was looking at…

“Shit,” she said to no one.

She let the Derecho keep crunching its numbers and pulled her screen back to the Sol gate. Watching the trainwreck. The light was growing smaller and brighter now. The drive had almost reached the gate. Without meaning to, she heaved a sigh. A whole lot of people were about to die for no reason other than they’d been unlucky with the traffic patterns. Sympathy plucked at her. It seemed petty somehow, with the universe crashing in all around them, for the enemy to still eat the occasional ship.

“Rest in peace, you poor fucks,” Tanaka said as the drive plume blinked out, lost in wherever it was that the lost ships went.

An alarm chirped, and for half a second she thought it was announcing the loss of the Sol-based ship. But the Derecho wasn’t worried about that. It was worried about everything else. Tanaka looked at the data and her gut knotted. She opened a feed from the external telescopes. The surface of the space between the rings was glowing a pearly gray, with ripples of darkness moving through it in a way that made her think of sharks swimming through cloudy water. Adrenaline flooded her system, and a wave of vertigo so powerful she looked for a thruster malfunction.

“Botton,” she began, trusting the Derecho to know she needed a comm channel open. “We have a problem.”

The surface of the ring space shifted. Bent. Boiled.

The alien station at the center of the ring space flared like a tiny sun.

Something happened to Tanaka that felt like waking up without falling asleep first. Her awareness shifted, opened, became something it hadn’t been a moment before. She was in her crash couch, but she was also in the medical bay with her head in excruciating pain, and in Botton’s cabin with a bulb of whiskey in his hand and the burn of it in his throat. She saw through a thousand sets of eyes, felt a thousand different bodies, knew herself by a thousand different names.

Aliana Tanaka screamed.

A voice as vast as mountains whispered.

It whispered No.

The scattered world paused in its swirls and chaos. The dark threads froze in their places, vibrating and writhing but unable to whip through the clouds and points that were matter. The awareness that had been Kit, drifting and broken and scattered as it was, saw its own pain, its own distress, the still-flashing impulses that had been its child’s neurons as they fired. Something analogous to sound rumbled and roared, and the dark threads thinned. They became black strings, wet as blood clots. Then threads. Then wisps of smoke.

And then nothing.

The paths where the darkness had whipped the scattered particles apart shifted like a video message played slowly and in reverse. Something thought stirring the cream back out of the coffee, and it might have been Kit. The interplay of vibrations that were the atoms and molecules, incomprehensible in their variety, began to segregate. The slow spinning flow like a river past a muddy bank became the air from a vent. Or blood passing through an artery. Density became real.

Surfaces emerged. Then objects, and then Kit was looking into Bakari’s wide, frightened eyes. Kit’s heart fluttered, as confused as a man who’d forgotten what he was saying midsentence, and then it pounded, each stroke so hard he could see the pulse in his eyes. He wrapped his son tight in his arms as Bakari started to wail, and held him close, sheltered against a threat he didn’t understand and couldn’t locate in space.

The other man, the one who wasn’t in the room, slumped in exhaustion and closed his eyes. The cabin door slammed open, and Rohi was there, eyes bright and panic-wide.

“You’re hurting him,” she shouted. “Kit, you’re hurting him!”

No, Kit tried to say, I’m just holding him. He’s only crying from fear. He couldn’t find the words, and when he looked down, he was squeezing too tight. He made his arms relax, and Bakari’s wailing grew louder. He let Rohi take their son. His body was shaking, a deep pulsing shudder.

“What was that?” Rohi said, her voice shrill with fear. “What just happened?”

The Falcon was close to the Adro diamond, and while it wasn’t on the opposite side of the local star, it wasn’t at the point in its orbit closest to the gate either. The light delay was sixty-two minutes, which meant one hundred twenty-four would have to pass before the tightbeam lock was confirmed. Jim could, of course, send out a message on the beam of supercoherent light even before the comms handshake was done, but somehow it seemed rude. By being in the system, they were dropping a great big bucket of uncomfortable decisions in Elvi’s lap. Giving her the chance to refuse to talk to him felt like the least he could do from an etiquette perspective.

He was spending the time until then doing a checkup with the autodoc in the med bay. The medical expert system had been upgraded three times in the decades since the Roci had been a top-of-the-line MCRN ship, and while there was better technology out there now, what they had was pretty damn good. Certainly, it was better than what he’d grown up with.

He let the system check-scan him for little bleeds and tears from the long burn and decant a slurry of targeted coagulants and tailored regeneration hormones. The worst part about it was the weird almost-formaldehyde aftertaste that haunted the back of his tongue for the two days following the treatment. Small price to pay for being 8 percent less likely to stroke out.

Naomi floated in, moving from handhold to handhold with the grace of a lifetime’s practice. Jim smiled and gestured to the autodoc next to his like he was offering her the chair beside his in the galley. She shook her head gently.

He almost asked what was bothering her, but he knew. The high traffic in the slow zone. He almost said it wasn’t her fault, which would have been true, but she knew that too. It didn’t keep her from carrying the weight.

“Maybe Tanaka’s ship went dutchman,” he said.

As he’d hoped, she chuckled. “We should be so lucky. It’s never the ones you want.”

“Probably true.”

“The worst part is that there is an answer, you know? We have a solution. There are probably dozens of solutions. All it would take is people agreeing to one and abiding by it. Cooperation. And I could—”

Alex’s voice came over the ship comms. “Are you all seeing this?”

Naomi frowned.

“Seeing what?” Jim asked.

“The ring gate.”

Jim pulled at his arm, but the autodoc chimed a complaint. Naomi put the wall screen on and shifted to the external scopes. Behind them, the Adro gate had been everything every gate was—dark, spiraling material formed unfathomable eons ago by the strange arts of the protomolecule. Only now, it wasn’t dark. It was shining. The whole circle of the gate was glowing a blue white, with streams of energetic particles radiating from it like an aurora.

Naomi whistled softly.

“It just started doing that a couple minutes ago,” Alex said. “I’m getting a lot of radiation from it too. Nothing dangerous—a lot of ultraviolet and radio.”

“Amos?” Jim said. “Are you looking at this?”

“Sure am.”

“So, you know things you’re not supposed to know. Any thoughts on this?”

He could hear the shrug in the big mechanic’s voice. “Looks like someone turned it on.”