For decades, the ring space—the slow zone—had been the hub between systems. Especially since the death of Medina Station and the Typhoon, ships came in and out as quickly as they could, minimizing the time spent in the starless non-sky. Now they’d come here. It was only the closest ships, the ones most easily deployed, but for the first time in his living memory, they had arrived. A few maneuvering thrusters fired now and then to correct some tiny drift, but their Epsteins were dark. The fleet had come to Naomi’s call. To Trejo’s. To Elvi’s. They weren’t locked in battle. They weren’t traveling to some more human, more comprehensible space. They were a few slivers of ceramic and silicon lace in a bubble the size of a million Earths.
They looked drowned.
“Okay, we have the ship on visual,” Elvi said from the Falcon. Even as close as they were, the tightbeam had the flatness and distortion of signal loss. Not enough to make the connection unclear, but enough to make it feel claustrophobic.
“The alleged ship,” Jim said, reaching for a joke.
“The egg-shaped thing. We have the egg-shaped thing on scopes. So the good news is that it’s still there.”
“Have there been any signs of movement or activity?” Naomi asked from the Roci’s ops.
“No,” Elvi said. “Not on the station anyway.”
“Other places?” Naomi asked.
“Everything’s more active than it was before. The amount of radiant heat in this place is orders of magnitude greater than it was before. More light, more radiation. Some of the ships that got here first, we may need to get them out into normal space soon to give them a chance to lose some of the excess. The heat exchangers are collecting more energy than they’re shedding. I’ve got every spare sensor taking in data and looking for useful patterns.”
“First order of business,” Jim said.
“Direct inspection of the station?” Elvi replied.
“I was going to say make sure that all the people who spent the last few years trying to kill each other are okay putting that aside,” Jim said. “We’ve got a couple dozen ships from each side, and you have to figure all of them have crews with some hard feelings about the whole war thing.”
“Already on that,” Naomi said. “I’ve been trading messages since we passed the gate.”
“How bad is it?” Jim asked.
“Grumbling, but nothing to raise an alarm. Not yet.”
Jim looked at the little drowned flecks again. They weren’t trying to kill each other. That was worth celebrating. “All right. We should go see if anyone’s at home on the egg-shaped thing.”
Elvi’s voice managed to be tired and resolute at the same time. “The Falcon’s set course, but I don’t want to use the Epstein for braking anywhere near the surface. It’s going to take a while.”
“You know that thing sucked down a gamma ray burst and still exists, right?” Jim said.
“I’m not worried about the station,” Elvi said. “I’m worried about not breaking things before I understand what they are. If Duarte’s still in that egg and I burn him to a crisp before we can talk, I’ll feel silly.”
“Fair point,” Jim said. “We’ll set to rendezvous.”
He dropped the connection. Moments later, the Roci shifted under him as Alex changed their course. Jim closed the display and sat in his crash couch, feeling the walls around him, the vibration of the ship, the sense that occasionally struck him of being a tiny organism in a vast universe. His jaws ached, but they did that a lot these days, and if he paid attention, there was a tightness at the base of his skull that never went away, even when he was sleeping. He was used to it. It was how he lived.
Once, there had been a focus to the tension, even if the focus changed sometimes. Fear of the Laconian Empire rolling through and crushing anyone that didn’t agree with it under its heel. Or fear of the apocalypse he’d seen in the ring station, back before the gates had even opened. Or the constant, nagging threat of Duarte withdrawing his protection and having Jim thrown in the Pen. The near certainty that by trying to find out whether the things on the other side of the ring gates were conscious and capable of change, Duarte would start a war he couldn’t win. And now, that his individual life—the self that was James Holden—would be lost in a sea of consciousness, a vast single mind built from human beings but not human. He could take his pick, and his body was just as ready to ache for the cause.