She tried to say What happened?, but all that came out was, “Wa appa.”
“Don’t try to speak yet,” her med tech said. A likable young ensign named Calvin with dark skin and features that made Elvi think his ancestors might have come from the same region of West Africa as her own. She’d never asked, because he almost certainly wouldn’t know. Laconians did not share the Earther interest in ethnic origins. His face seemed to swim in and out of focus, and her mind felt weirdly disconnected from her body.
“Wa—” she said, ignoring his advice, and then she vomited again.
“Stop it,” Calvin said more forcefully. “You had a reaction to the sedative mix while you were under. We had to run some tests and a procedure before we revived you to make sure we didn’t do any damage.”
Calvin pulled a medical cuff off her arm that she hadn’t even noticed was there. The needles stung as they retracted. Several tubes ran from the cuff to a drug-dispensing monitor nearby. Elvi tried to read the screen to see what they’d been pumping into her, but her eyes couldn’t focus. The words remained a mysterious blur.
“What—” she managed to get out without vomiting, but before she could finish, Fayez burst into the room.
“You woke her? Why didn’t anyone call me!” he yelled at Calvin. “Let me see her chart!”
Fayez grabbed her hand and squeezed a little too hard. Up close, she could see that his eyes were a little red and puffy. Had he been crying?
“Sir,” Calvin said. “She woke because the procedure had finished. All her scans are clean. No brain damage. There should be no loss of function.”
“Brain damage?” Elvi croaked out. “Were we thinking brain damage?”
Her throat felt raw. Fayez grabbed a plastic bottle of water with a straw and held it up to her lips. She drank greedily. Apparently she was thirsty. Good to know.
“There was some concern that your breathing had been depressed,” Fayez said as she gulped down the water. “We just wanted to be sure.”
“It was unlikely,” Calvin added. “But we wanted to take every precaution.”
“What happened?” Elvi finally managed to say once her thirst was quenched.
“You didn’t tell her?” Fayez shot at Calvin. “Els, honey, you had a reaction to—”
“No,” she cut him off. “I know that. Where are we? I feel gravity. Are we through the transit?”
As she spoke, Calvin began putting his instruments away. It looked like whatever had happened to her, the treatment for it was over.
“Yes,” Fayez said. “We’re in Tecoma right now. We’re finishing our deceleration burn.”
“I’ve been out that long?”
“I was scared to death, Els. I’m getting a full battery of tests run to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
“Sagale’s schedule won’t—”
“Sagale agreed with me. I was surprised too. I think the prospect of losing Duarte’s pet biologist had him pissing his uniform.”
Calvin snorted at that. “I’m done here. Do you need anything else?”
“No,” Elvi said. “Yes. When can I go back to work?”
“Now, if you feel up to it.”
“Thank you, Calvin,” Elvi said.
Calvin gave her a salute and a smile. “My pleasure, Major,” he said, then left the compartment.
“Maybe you should rest,” Fayez said. He was frowning at her. Elvi laughed. He almost never frowned, and with his baby face it made him look like a petulant child.
“I’m fine,” she said. And then, “Okay, I’m not fine. I’ll be fine. It’s just travel.”
“I don’t like it,” Fayez said. She took his hand. Her skin felt sticky. She was going to need a real shower.
“So, Tecoma system,” she said. “The probes said it was a neutron star?” She tried sitting up. Her head swam a little, so she stopped there.
“It is,” Fayez agreed, putting a hand on her back to help steady her. “But, you know, weirder.”
The dizziness passed, and her eyes were focusing better as well. The text on the screens around her became actual letters and numbers.
“Help me up,” she said, then dropped her feet to the floor. Fayez put an arm around her waist as she tried standing. Her legs were a little weak, but the gravity felt like they were only burning at a quarter g or so, so it was easy to stay upright. Fayez gave her a look, then took his arm away, waiting close by to grab her if she fell. She didn’t.
“I’ll need some clothes,” she said. Fayez nodded and opened a nearby storage locker. “Weirder how?”
“Emptied,” Fayez said, then tossed her uniform and some clean underclothes on the couch. “Massive rapidly spinning neutron star, no planets, planetoids, asteroids, nothing.”
Elvi pulled off the thin smock she wore in the submersion couch and headed to the shower. Fayez followed her in, carrying a towel. The blast of hot water made her dizzy again, but one hand on the wall and some deep-breathing exercises cleared it up in a few seconds. Fayez watched closely, but once he was sure she was all right, he relaxed. As she washed the last of the goop off her body, Elvi said, “They cleared everything out to make a diamond backup drive too.”
“This is more than that. I don’t mean no planetary bodies. I mean no nothing. No micrometeors. No dust. No spare protons floating around. The vacuum here is as hard as it can get.”
“That’s . . . Okay. Weirder.” Elvi turned the water off, and Fayez tossed her the towel. “I mean, is that even possible?”
“No. Not unless there’s something keeping it clean. We’re still in the Milky Way. There should be some spare crap floating through now and then. So not only is the system cleaned out, something’s actively keeping it cleaned out. And—get this—the gate is five times farther out from the star than any of the other gates. And it’s above the plane of the ecliptic. Ninety degrees. Don’t even get me started on the star.”
“What’s going on with the star?”
“It’s massive. I mean, like, spit-on-it-and-it’ll-start-to-collapse-into-a-black-hole-level massive.”
“Good that there’s no spit around, then.”
“Right? It turns out neutron stars aren’t much to look at. Unless you can see magnetic fields, they’re just . . . underwhelming. I mean the densest matter possible, forces so powerful as to break space-time? Sure. Bright as hell, you bet. But I was expecting a light show or something. It just looks like another sun, but smaller and kind of angry about it. This one is spinning fast enough to land in the pulsar range. We’re far enough away to avoid the worst of the magnetic disturbance.”
She took a deep breath. She could hear the anxiety in his words. She knew what they meant.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You aren’t. You could have died.”
“I didn’t, though. And now, I’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
Elvi finished drying off and stuffed the towel into the recycler. Fayez pulled a jar of scalp cream out of a cabinet and began rubbing it into her short, tight curls with his fingertips. It felt wonderful to have him massaging her head. When you find a man who takes pleasure in helping you avoid dry scalp, Elvi thought, you keep him.
“You can do that all day if you want,” she said.
“If we had all day, my attentions would begin moving south,” he replied with a grin. “But we’re killing our burn in about two hours, and I don’t believe that you’re going to wait one more second to start working.”
He closed up the cream jar and put it away while she started pulling on her clothes.
“So what were they thinking?” Elvi said.
“Hmm?”
“Making a neutron star so big it’s hovering on the edge of collapse, and then clearing everything out of the system so that it doesn’t. Moving the ring out of the ecliptic.”
“You think they made a neutron star? Seems more likely they just built a gate to a dud system.”
“How? There had to be life here for them to hijack, or the gate wouldn’t have been built. This was a living system like Sol that got turned into . . .” She waved her hand.
“Yeah,” Fayez agreed. “I don’t know. Honestly, this miracles-and-wonders thing feels like drinking from a fire hose sometimes.”
Elvi finished with her uniform, then brushed her teeth as Fayez waited and watched her. She gave herself one last critical look in the mirror, then said, “Let’s go see the boss.”
Fayez grabbed her and undid her careful uniform straightening with a hug. “Thanks for not dying, Els.”
Forty-eight hours later, they’d gone through the drill. The ship’s system had analyzed the telescopic data. Elvi had gone to pay her respects to the catalyst the way she always did, and then performed the experiment. The protomolecule reached out, and the data streamed in. The Falcon searching for any change, any effect. This time, Elvi actually let herself sleep in between. Near-death experiences wore her out, apparently, even if she hadn’t been aware of them at the time. In addition to which, this time, there wasn’t much to see.
When they’d finished their analysis, Sagale came to the bridge and braced himself on one handhold and one foot-hold. His eyes shifted from one screen to the next, taking in the data streams with an air of pleasure.