There were no old levels in the station, because there was no old. On Ceres, there were neighborhoods built in the excavations where the great engines that had spun the asteroid up had been housed. On Ganymede, there were levels of tunnels that had been abandoned in the war and never recovered. On Earth, there were cities built on the ruins of the cities before them, layer after layer back through millennia. Auberon was a theme park version of itself. A prefabricated culture that could have been assembled anywhere with equal cheerfulness. It didn’t feel human.
The Whimsy Enterprises office was a closet-sized door between an ice cream shop and a land claims lawyer. Inside, the air smelled like hydroponics tanks and fresh plastic. A woman her own age with close-cut hair stood at the kind of desk Naomi expected to get takeaway food from.
“Hello,” the woman said with a barely repressed grin.
“I have a ship I’ve brought back,” Naomi said.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” the woman said. “Not your fault. It was a long time ago. I crewed your ship.”
“My ship?”
“The Rocinante, under Captain Holden. Back in the bad old days, when the rocks fell. You were busy at the time, sa sa que? With that fucker Inaros. Looked like you’d been through a recycler when we pulled you off that racing pinnace.”
Naomi’s brain stripped away the years, filled in the woman’s cheeks, undid the gray of age. She was a pilot. She’d worked for Fred Johnson on Tycho. “Chava Lombaugh?”
“Welcome to Auberon,” Chava said. “You can talk freely in here. I sweep for surveillance every other day, and I made a special pass when I heard you were coming.”
Naomi walked to the desk and leaned against it. “Thank you for that. Do you know what’s going on?”
“Not in specific,” Chava said, “but I can say that the Laconian security forces have been shitting themselves boneless since that first no-transit alert came. We haven’t been able to decrypt their feeds, but the volume of traffic has been huge. Governor Song was pushing like hell to get every ship she could out of the slow zone before the gamma bursts, and now she’s not letting anyone in or out.”
“Do you have a way to reach Saba?” Naomi asked.
“The Laconians have been updating the security on the repeaters,” Chava said. “I still have a couple back doors, though.”
“Are you sure they’re secure?” Naomi asked, and her voice echoed strangely, like she was hearing more of it than usual. Undertones and overtones rippling against each other as the vibrations touched the hard surfaces of desk and floor and wall and rebounded to make new complexities. She stepped back as Chava’s eyes widened. She could see the wetness in them, the tiny dark dot of her tear duct, the river pattern of blood in the whites of her eyes like a map of an unknown world.
“Fuck,” Chava said, and it was a symphony. Overwhelming and complex. Naomi felt herself falling into the sound and the wide, full, complicated air—
When she came back to herself, her head was pressed against the abrasive industrial carpeting. Chava was still at the desk, her face bloodless. She looked around the room, trying to focus, trying to find Naomi. It took a few seconds.
“What . . . ,” Chava said. “What was . . .”
“It’s the same thing that happened in Sol system when they killed Pallas. How long have we been unconscious?”
“I . . . don’t . . .”
“Do you keep logs? Security tapes?”
Chava nodded, working up from barely a tremor until she was bobbing her head so much it seemed like it would be hard to stop. She opened a screen on her desk display. Nothing inside the room, but a view of the front door from outside. As she rolled it back until Naomi appeared, an alert tone came over the station’s public speaker loud enough to hear even inside the office. This is a public security announcement. Please remain where you are. If you are in need of assistance, use the emergency alert on your hand terminal, and government responders will come to you. Do not seek help on your own. Do not leave your homes or places of business.
“Three minutes,” Chava said. “It’s like time just blinked out.”
“Is there a Magnetar-class battleship in Auberon? That’s the only thing I know that does that . . . or almost the only thing.”
“No, nothing like that.”
“We have to risk your back doors on the repeater. We have to get a message to Saba. Something’s going on here, and if it’s related to whatever happened that got Laconia worried, he may need to know about it.”
Chava gestured for Naomi to come around the desk. “Follow me,” she said.
Chava’s office was small, with white, generic furniture of ceramic and steel, but it was well equipped. Naomi sat at the other woman’s desk and built a short message, typing fast and not worrying about errors. The Auberon gate had a fifty-five-minute light delay from the planet. Even if Saba wrote back at once, it would be two hours before she heard, and it might take him longer.
In the long wait, Chava made them chamomile tea from the office supplies. The sweetness cloyed, but Naomi drank it anyway. It was something to do. The security alert came off an hour and thirty-five minutes after it started. The station is safe and secure. Please return to your normal activities. It seemed optimistic to the point of being naive.
Chava Lombaugh’s system chirped ten minutes shy of the two-hour mark, and she slapped open the new message like it had stung her. As she read it, she bared her teeth.
“What is it?”
“It’s nothing,” she said, and shifted the monitor for Naomi to see. TRANSMISSION ERROR. REPEATER NOT RESPONDING. MESSAGE QUEUED FOR LATER DELIVERY.
“The repeater’s down?” Naomi said.
“Theirs is,” Chava said. “The one inside the ring. The Auberon-side repeater generated this message, but the two aren’t talking to each other. We might be able to do something else, though. Ring gate interference is a bitch, but it’s not impossible to punch through. I have some ships in the rental fleet with tightbeams, and if I got one close . . .”
Naomi shook her head. “No. Nothing obvious. I want him briefed, but not at the risk of exposing the organization. Saba can get the message when he can get the message. He knows how to find us once he does.”
Chava made a frustrated sound at the back of her throat and slammed down the last of her tea. “Let me take you to the safe house, then. At least we can chew our nails someplace comfortable. Laconia takes the repeaters seriously. Whatever the issue is, getting the communications network back up will be high on their to-do list.”
“Thank God for the efficiency of the enemy,” Naomi said, making it a joke. Chava even laughed at it a little.
But a day later, the repeater was still down. And the day after that. It was almost a week before a high-speed probe made the long journey to the ring gate and through it, and sent back the images that even the censor’s office couldn’t keep a lid on.
Auberon system—Naomi and Chava and the crew of the Bhikaji Cama included—saw the swirling colors that had replaced the darkness between the ring gates. They found out why the repeater on the slow zone side of the gate wasn’t responding. It was gone, and so were all the other repeaters like it. And the Eye of the Typhoon. And Medina Station and all the ships that had been quarantined inside the ring space. Only the alien station at the center remained, glowing bright as a tiny sun.
Naomi looked at it all until she was on the edge of vertigo, then looked away and had to go back to check that it was real. Over and over again, locked in a cycle of disbelief.
All human existence in the small artificial universe between the gates had been wiped away as if it had never been there at all, leaving no sign of what had killed it.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Bobbie
The bar was worse than shitty. Shitty had character. The place was generic. Fake stone meant to echo a tunnel on Ceres or Pallas marked with graffiti to make it look edgy until you noticed that the pattern of it repeated every couple meters. The appearance of counterculture as churned out by a corporate designer. The food wasn’t bad. Vat-grown ribs in a hot marinade and vegetable kibble that hadn’t been cooked to a mush. The beer was decent, if a little hoppy for her taste. A screen at the back usually played highlights from football games around the system. Now it was playing a newsfeed. And while most of the time the screen was a background for the conversations and drinking, today everyone was watching it.
“The event mirrors the one experienced when the Tempest was forced to employ its magnetic field generator against separatist forces on Pallas Station,” the woman on the screen said. She was pale skinned, with long, dark hair and a serious expression. Bobbie thought the broadcast was out of Luna, but it could as easily have been Ceres or Mars. They all looked the same these days. “But while the previous effect had a clear trigger and was restricted to Sol system, the few ships that have made the transit into Sol since the event report that this was much more widespread, possibly affecting all known systems.
“The loss of Medina Station and the Typhoon along with all civilian ships in the ring space is assumed to be related, but no official report has been released at this time to confirm that.”
Caspar made a low sound, something between a cough and a chuckle. Jillian, across from him, lifted her chin as a question.