Sagale’s head came back a degree, as if the thought had surprised him. His voice when he spoke was clear. “Understood. Thank you for this, Jae-Eun.”
“If we live through this, you owe me a drink,” the governor of Medina Station said. “The ship ahead of you is the Plain of Jordan through Castila gate. Please monitor that and match to your plan. Godspeed, Mehmet.”
Sagale turned his attention to the controls, and a moment later the gravity warning sounded. Not that anyone else on the ship would hear it. Elvi had to fight the urge to shout the emergency evacuation command and let all the other ships figure out how to be safe about it.
“How long do we have?” Elvi asked, and then laughed. It sounded like she was asking how long they had to live, and since she kind of was, it seemed funny. Sagale didn’t join in.
“We’re going to be at a quarter g for a while if you want to stretch your legs,” he said. “Then you have to be back in the couch. Once we make the transit, I’m making a hard turn and burning perpendicular to the ring to get us away from it.”
“In case of overspill,” Fayez said.
“From an abundance of caution,” Sagale said. He passed the back of his hand over his eyes, and Elvi realized that for all his stoic reserve, he was weeping. The drive kicked on, and she drifted to the deck. Fayez put a hand on her shoulder and drew her away.
“This is bad,” he said softly.
“I know.”
He nodded. “I just felt like I needed to say it out loud.”
She took his hand and kissed it. It still smelled like breathable fluid. “If this is all we get . . . Well, then shit.”
“With you on that one, sweetheart,” he said, and folded his arms around her. “This whole thing really was a terrible idea, wasn’t it?”
“Couldn’t have seen it coming,” she said. “I mean, unless . . .”
Something moved in the back of her head. Something about the Magnetar-class ships and the way the Heart of the Tempest had annihilated the rail guns on the alien station during Laconia’s first incursion. The way it had killed Pallas Station. The way the enemy had reacted differently.
“You’re thinking something,” Fayez said. “I can hear the gears turning.”
“I don’t know what yet,” she said. “But yeah. I am.”
A new voice came from the bridge. The comm channel still open on Sagale’s controls. This is Plain of Jordan confirming transit in two minutes. We are go, no-go in ten seconds.
Another voice answered. Medina control here. You are go for transit. Sagale was muttering something under his breath. It might have been profanity. It might have been prayer. The volumetric display showed a single red dot in the vastness moving toward the pinpoint white of a gate.
“We better get back in our cans,” Fayez said.
“Yes,” Elvi said, but she didn’t move. Not yet. “It was designed, right? Tecoma system was designed. To . . . to do this?”
Fayez smoothed a hand across her head. The fluid was dry enough now to be tacky, but the touch felt good anyway. “Elvi, you are the light of my heart. The woman I love and know better than I know anyone, and I can’t get through the day without being dead wrong about what you’re going to say or want. The protomolecule engineers were some kind of quantum-entangled high-energy physics hive mind thing. I don’t know what they were thinking.”
“No,” Elvi said, shuffling back toward her couch in the gentle quarter g. “It was designed. There was an intention.”
“Does that help us?” he asked. “Because that would be great, but I don’t know that I see how that helps us.”
This is the Plain of Jordan transferring our status now. We are on approach to—
The display stuttered and threw up an error readout. The lights went out and the gravity dropped away.
“Brace!” Sagale called out from the blackness.
Elvi reached out in the blackness, trying to find a wall and a handhold. “What happened?”
An emergency light stuttered on. “Sensor arrays overloaded,” Sagale said. His voice was shaking. “They’re resetting now. I have to get us stopped until we can . . .”
He didn’t finish the thought. The handhold buzzed gently with the vibration of maneuvering thrusters, and the Falcon swung up around her, lifting her feet off the deck. Fayez helped her reorient as the gravity alert sounded again and up and down returned. The volumetric display came back up with a warning at the edge that said NO INPUT—ESTIMATED POSITIONS ONLY. Sagale gunned the drive for a few seconds, and the Falcon felt like an elevator lurching toward some upper floor. Then he killed it and Elvi drifted up again.
The three of them were silent for a long moment while the backup sensor arrays lurched to life. The comms clicked once, rattled with strange, fluting static, and filled with the gabble of panicked human voices. Sagale killed the channel and opened a private one.
“Medina Station, this is Admiral Sagale of the Falcon. Please report status.”
Elvi pulled herself to Travon’s station. She didn’t know if it took the ship a fraction of a second longer than usual to recognize her and put her data on the monitor, or if it was just the adrenaline throwing her perceptions off. The main sensor arrays were dead. Burned out in a fraction of a second. Backup systems slowly hauled themselves to life. Cameras and telescopes all around the Falcon unpacked themselves from hardened compartments and deployed. More of them were damaged than she’d expected. But not all. She opened a window and fed the data from the Falcon’s skin to her screen, and in the darkness, there was light.
“This is Governor Song, Falcon,” the woman’s voice came, trembling like a violin. “We have sustained some damage to the ship and crew. We are still assessing.”
The space between the rings was filled with whiteness. The station at the center—the alien control station that seemed to carry the rings with it like the center of a dandelion surrounded by seeds—was brighter than a sun. And some nebula-thin gas or dust cloud caught that light and shimmered. It was everywhere. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.
“It’s going to be all right, Governor,” Sagale said in a tone that almost made it plausible. “I need to know the status of the Plain of Jordan. Did it make transit?”
“Mehmet, I don’t—”
“It’s important. Did the ship make it through?”
Since the first time she’d seen it—the first time anyone had seen it—the boundary of the ring space had been a dark and featureless sphere, like a black bubble seen from inside. Now there was a twisting rainbow of energy or matter on it, like an oil slick on water. The darkness of it had always let Elvi imagine it to be infinite before. A vast and starless sky. Now it felt close and finite. It made everything seem more fragile. A wave of nausea passed across the edge of her awareness like it belonged to some other body.
“No,” Governor Song said. “They were too close to the gate to shift back when the blast came. The energy through Tecoma gate would have . . . They didn’t make the transit.”
“Please confirm, Medina. You’re saying the Plain of Jordan went dutchman.”
“Yes. We lost them.”
“Thank you, Medina. Please advise traffic control that all transits are suspended until further orders. No one comes into this space, and no one goes out. Not until I say so.”
To her left, Fayez was at Jen’s station, seeing—she assumed—all the same things. Feeling some version of the awe and terror and wonder that she felt.
“Understood,” Governor Song said. “I’ll see to it.”
“Thank you, Jae-Eun,” Sagale said. “We have some work to do. We’ll need reports from the other systems. I’m guessing that there’s been some damage from the far sides of the gates too. It may take some time to—”
“Gates moved,” Fayez said in the same tone he used for trivial information. Laundry’s dry. Dinner’s ready. Gates moved.
“What?” Sagale said.
“Yeah,” Fayez said. “Not much, but a little. And all of them. Look for yourself.”
Sagale shifted the main screen. The slow zone bloomed. And with it corrections on each of the gates. The ships were all in place, all matching their expected vectors and positions. But a little yellow error code hung at the gates to show where they were expected to be, and where they were instead. Sagale’s face was ashen. Elvi felt herself wondering how many more shocks the man could take. Or, for that matter, many how many she could.
“Yeah, so,” Fayez said. “Pretty sure I see what’s going on. They just reordered. Because there’s not as many of them now. Equal distance between them got a little bigger. Tecoma gate’s gone. And . . . Oh yeah. Look at that. Thanjavur gate was pretty much straight across from it. And it’s gone too. We just lost two gates, Admiral. And one of them had an entire world filled with people behind it.”
Chapter Twenty: Teresa