Half a dozen other figures in Laconian vac suits moved around the egg, swirling out in what Jim realized slowly was a search pattern. “Any sign of him?”
“You’re thinking of something convenient like an airlock or a door?” Elvi said. “No. Nothing. The artifact’s here, but the surface of the station is totally unmarked.”
“Have we tried knocking?” Jim said, more than half joking.
“If I can help,” Teresa said. “I could broadcast that we’re here.
If he can hear my voice, he might come out. Or let us come in.”
“Worth trying,” Elvi said, motioning them on.
Beside the egg-shape, a collection of boxes were badged as equipment: sensor lines, power supplies, biological sampling kits. The figure floating beside them like a mother hen over its brood turned out to be Harshaan Lee. Jim watched the man’s mouth move as he spoke on some other channel that Jim wasn’t listening to. Then a click of static and he was on with them. “Give me a moment, and I will connect the young lady’s suit output to our system. We can broadcast on a wideband directly on the station with contact vibration as well.”
“Humanity’s largest subwoofer,” Jim said. Elvi chuckled, but no one else seemed to think it was funny.
“How did you get in before?” Elvi asked.
Jim shook his head. He wasn’t sure she saw it, so he shook his fist like a Belter. “I just came down toward it, and it opened up. I didn’t do anything.”
Nothing except follow a ghost who could open all the doors inside the haunted house, he thought. Memories of the horrors and wonders he’d witnessed inside threatened to overwhelm him, and he needed to pay attention, so he forced them away.
“The protomolecule was directing it,” Elvi said. “It was trying to figure out what had happened to the systems it was supposed to report in to. You were a way to do that.”
“Because I had a body,” Jim said. The only things inside are ghosts now. Having a body in there means something. “It told me that. Being able to access matter wasn’t standard, I guess.”
“I’ve heard your debriefings,” Elvi said. “The terms you used? Or it used, I guess. Pleroma, fallen world, substrate. They’re human terms.”
“Everything I was doing got strained through human minds,” Jim said. Lee connected a bright red retractable wire from a dark, circular shape that was resting against the surface of the station and connected it to a slot in Teresa’s suit arm. “I wasn’t really driving, you know. I just got carried along by what it was doing.”
“Well,” Elvi said. “I think someone’s driving now.”
Lee gave a thumbs-up. Teresa looked from Jim to Elvi to Lee and back, suddenly anxious. “What should I say?”
“Just let him know we’re here,” Elvi said.
Teresa nodded, gathered herself. “It’s me, Dad. It’s Teresa. I’m here on the outside of the station. We want to come in and talk.” She paused for a moment, and when she spoke again, there was a note of longing in her voice that broke Jim’s heart a little. “I want to see you. I want to come in.”
They waited. Jim turned in a slow circle, watching for anything on the surface of the station—a ripple, a hole, a sign of something emerging. Nothing came.
“Try again,” he said.
“Father? If you’re in there, this is Teresa. I’m on the outside of the station. I want to come in.”
The seconds stretched as the hope in the girl’s expression slowly died. Lee gestured to her, pulled her close, and unhooked the line. “We have other avenues to explore,” he said. “We have several kilometers of contact sensors. We were using them on the Adro diamond, but they could be quite informative here as well.”
“We’ll help you string them,” Jim said.
“If you see anything different from the last time . . .” Elvi said.
Other than me? he thought, but didn’t say.
For the next four hours, the science team laid the sensor filament out along the station until Jim had the vivid memory of rolling endless skeins of yarn into balls during Father Dimitri’s knitting phase. Elvi stopped an hour into the process, heading back to the Falcon. Lee said it was so that she could oversee the data collection end of the process, but Jim was pretty sure she just needed to rest.
At first, the work was wearying, but as the time passed, Jim found himself falling into the rhythm of it. Running a line, then holding it in place while the others checked the connection between the sensors and the surface of the station. Teresa helped too, her many months of apprenticeship on the Roci showing in the way she asked for clarifications and announced her actions to the team before she took them. By the time their bottles were edging toward empty and Jim turned them back toward the ship, Teresa seemed to have shrugged off the first bitterness of her disappointment.