The command deck was in trim. Everyone in their couches, the displays freshly cleaned, the controls polished. The Barkeith would arrive at Laconia Station as smart and sharp as she had left Mars. And they wouldn’t be wearing bracelets. He drew himself down to his command station and strapped himself in.
“Mister Taylor, sound the acceleration alert. Mister Kogoma, inform the fleet and Medina Station that we are proceeding.”
“Sir,” the tactical officer said, “permission to open weapon ports.”
“Are we expecting action, Mister Kuhn?”
“Not expecting, sir. An abundance of caution.”
Kuhn didn’t trust the skinnies either. That was fair. They were a bunch of thugs and cowboys who thought that because they had guns, they had power. Sauveterre thought it was early for the Free Navy to start double-crossing Duarte, but they were stupid and impulsive. It didn’t do to assume an amateur force would make the same decisions as a professional. “Permission granted. And warm up the PDCs while you’re at it. Mister Kogoma, please advise the fleet to do likewise.”
“Yes, sir,” Kogoma said.
The Klaxon sounded and Sauveterre settled into his couch, the sensation of weight returning over the course of seconds. The transit to the Laconia ring was short. The space between the rings was almost claustrophobic compared with the vastness of real, open vacuum. And dark. Starless. The physics wonks said that there wasn’t any space on the other side of the rings. That whatever bubble they all existed in ended not in a barrier, but in some more profound manner that he couldn’t picture. He didn’t need to.
The Laconia gate drew closer, a handful of stars burning solid and clear on the other side of it, and growing as they came near. The exhaust plumes of the fleet vanguard glowed brighter as they passed through. There would be new constellations there. A different angle on the galaxy, like a whole new sky.
“Approaching the ring, sir,” Keller said from the navigation controls. “Passing through in three. Two…”
Keller fell apart. No, that wasn’t right. Keller was where she had been, sitting as she had been sitting. But she was a cloud now. All of them were clouds. Sauveterre held up his hands. He could see them so perfectly: the ridges of his fingertips, the spaces between the molecules, the swirl and flow of his blood beneath them. He could see the molecules in the air – nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide all bouncing madly against each other, obscuring some more profound space between them. A vacuum that penetrated them all.
I’m having a stroke, he thought. And then, No. Something else is wrong.
“Kill the drive!” he shouted. “Turn about!” And the waves of his words passed through the visible but invisible air in an expanding sphere, bouncing against the walls, shuddering where they intersected with the cries of fear and a blaring Klaxon. It was beautiful. The cloud that was Mister Keller moved her hands and miraculously didn’t slip through the vast emptiness of her control deck.
He saw the sound coming in the rush of molecules before it reached him and he heard the words. “What’s going on? What’s happening?”
He couldn’t see the image on the screens to know if the stars were there. All he could sense were atoms and photons of the thing itself, not the pattern they made. Someone was screaming. Then someone else.
He turned and saw something move. Something else, not another cloud like himself, like the others, like matter. Something solid but obscured by the emptiness of material like a shape in the fog. Many shapes, neither light nor dark, but some other thing, some third side of that coin, passing through the spaces between the spaces. Rushing toward them. Toward him.
Sauveterre did not notice his death.
Acknowledgments
While the creation of any book is less a solitary act than it seems, the past couple of years have seen a huge increase in the people involved with The Expanse in all its incarnations, including this one. This book would not exist without the hard work and dedication of Danny and Heather Baror, Will Hinton, Tim Holman, Anne Clarke, Ellen Wright, Alex Lencicki, and the whole brilliant crew at Orbit. Special thanks are also due to DongWon Song and Carrie Vaughn for their services as beta readers, Ben Jones and Jordin Kare for their help figuring out what happens when a thruster misfires, and also to the gang from Sakeriver: Tom, Sake Mike, Non-Sake Mike, Porter, Scott, Raja, Jeff, Mark, Dan, Joe, and Erik Slaine, who got the ball rolling.
The support team for The Expanse has also grown to include Sharon Hall and Ben Roberts, Bill McGoldrick, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, and Naren Shankar among many, many others at Alcon Television, the Sean Daniel Company, and Syfy. Especially Alan for the Boom Coffee and Kenneth for essentially everything else.
And, as always, none of this would have happened without the support and company of Jayné, Kat, and Scarlet.