“It was a colony ship,” Elvi said, her words fast, staccato, and anxious. “It attempted transit a few seconds after Tanaka’s ship came in. We don’t know how many other transits had happened before, but that doesn’t matter. Enough to put the threshold up over safety.”
The glow brightened . . . and it died. Elvi felt a sting of excitement, but only because she already knew that the lives she was watching end, hadn’t. Somehow they’d been saved. The drive plume returned, coalescing inside the ring space like the ship had made its passage after all, even though it had clearly vanished just moments before.
“What the fuck was that?” Naomi murmured.
“The ship went dutchman, and then came back. But that’s just the pregame show,” Elvi said. “Watch how much the ring entities liked it.”
The edge of the slow zone bubbled, brightened, roiled. Elvi had seen that before. The Falcon had been the only ship to survive the last time this had happened. When she spoke, her voice was tighter and higher. “This is what we saw when we lost Medina Station. It’s a direct intrusion across the ring space’s barriers. It killed Medina. It killed the Typhoon.”
“Too bad it didn’t kill Tanaka,” Amos said.
Patterns played across the ring space like malefic auroras, and a darkness moved in the light. Elvi found herself hunching over like she was protecting her belly from a punch. She forced her spine straight.
“And then this,” Elvi said.
As one, the ring gates and station flared white, a brightness that overloaded the telescopes for three long, terrible seconds. When the light faded, like letting out a long, slow exhalation, the ring space returned to itself, with all the drive cones and transponders and traffic that had been there before. Including the colony ship that they’d watched vanish and reform.
“It’s not just the Adro gate that lit up,” Naomi said.
“No, it’s all of them. And when that happened, there was a cognitive effect. Most of the data Colonel Tanaka has been providing has been about that.”
“A cognitive effect like the lost memory?” Naomi asked.
“Nope,” Fayez said. “Very, very different.”
“It looks like it may have been a kind of networked connection between the minds of the people in the ring space,” Elvi said. “All the crews of all the ships. It was apparently fairly overwhelming. But there’s an indication that they all participated in each other’s memories and experiences.”
Amos scratched his chin. “That sounds like what’s been going on with me and Sparkles.”
“It does seem very similar to what you, Cara, reported during the dives into the BFE.”
“BFE?” Amos asked.
“The diamond. The library.”
“Why BFE?” Jim said.
Elvi scowled and shook her head. “The point is, when we saw it with you two”—she gestured to Cara and Amos—“we had assumed it was because you’d been modified by the repair drones. What happened in the ring space, that happened to unmodified human beings. The effect didn’t last very long. Almost instantaneous, really. But the memories have been vivid and persistent. The radiation from the gates is also interesting. Take a look at this.”
The display shifted into something that looked like an impossibly complicated spiderweb. With a gesture, Elvi rotated it, then looked over at Jim.
He nodded and said, “I have no idea what that is.”
“Communication between the gates,” Elvi said. “We think the patterns in the radiation set up handshakes between the gates similar to the one we saw here between Cara and the . . . diamond.”
“The gates are talking to each other?” Naomi said.
“We’ve been using them as a matter transport system, which they are. It makes sense that they’re also a communication network.”
A tickling sensation crawled up Jim’s neck and he shuddered. “Amos said something about there being a kind of light that can think.”
“Yes,” Elvi said. “One model that goes pretty well with this architecture is a neural network. A really small one, but the signal processing between them has some real similarities. If it’s a fully meshed network with each connection acting like a synapse, that’s a little shy of a million. So about a tenth as smart as a fruit fly. If they’re making connections between gates with different frequencies acting as distinct connections, they’d need something on the order of ten million different frequencies just to get as smart as a house cat—”