With twelve hours still to go before the dive began, Fayez came to the lab. There was a tightness he got around the corners of his eyes sometimes when he was tense. She put the potentiometer back in its case to calibrate later and launched herself over to him, lifting an eyebrow when he met her gaze.
“New briefing came in from Ochida,” he said.
“Want to go see if he’s figured it all out for us?”
“Hope springs eternal.” Fayez turned and led the way back to her office.
Since Naomi had accepted Trejo’s offer of cooperation, Elvi hadn’t heard from the admiral. She wasn’t sure what her status was with him or with Laconia, but she was very aware of having humiliated the de facto military dictator of the empire. It wasn’t the sort of thing that ended well for people, historically speaking. It still wasn’t in her top five biggest worries.
Ochida, on the other hand, seemed to have embraced a strategy of almost transcendental denial. His reports and the information flowing through him from the rest of the Science Directorate were absolutely unchanged. On the screen in her office, his smile was bright and genuine, and the data he shared with her showed every sign of being complete, accurate, and unabridged.
The survey team had found what they believed to be the bullet at San Esteban, which was interesting. The bullets—scars in the fabric of space-time according to the most popular theory— seemed to accompany each of the intrusions into reality by the dark gods inside the gates. They were relatively small, cosmologically speaking, though the implications of their existence were a fundamental alteration in humanity’s understanding of the cosmos. Back in what were quickly becoming the good old days, they’d been easier to locate because they appeared in proximity to whatever had triggered them. The hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of experiments by the enemy since then should in theory have produced just as many small, persistent anomalies, but without being tied to a human object, action, or frame of reference, finding them made needles and haystacks look trivial.
On San Esteban, the break in reality was several meters wide, almost undetectable by instrumentation but very apparent to human conscious experience, and floating half a klick above the moon of one of the minor rocky inner planets. The team was turning all its attention to gathering data from it in hopes that variations between the bullets might yield something critical about the mechanisms behind them.
“What?” Fayez asked.
Elvi looked at him, confused.
“You made a noise. You grunted.”
“Oh. I was just thinking. This would have been massive news. Maybe more important than what we were getting out of Adro. But now?”
“Nothing takes your mind off the guy pointing a gun at you like already being on fire,” Fayez said. “San Esteban was the biggest threat we could imagine, until Duarte showed back up.”
“Duarte’s not trying to kill us.”
“You sure it wouldn’t be better if he were?”
Elvi moved on. Ochida’s report on what he was calling “spontaneous alocal cognitive cross-connections” only left her stomach tighter, her jaw aching. The effect was being reported in all systems now. There was a distinctly larger response in places where the ships present during the initial event had gone afterward— Bara Gaon, Nieuwestad, Clarke, Sao Paulo—that suggested an infection-like contact transmission, but there were also suggestions of activity clusters between systems with low physical contact and high communicative load. The greatest predictor of suffering the hive mind effect was having someone who was already affected be aware of you. The epidemiologists were building a model of transmission-by-awareness, and hoped to have a fuller report soon. An intrusive image appeared in Elvi’s mind—a vast, bright, interconnected network like the cells in a brain or the relationships in a city, with one node turning deep bloodred, then the ones around it, and the ones connected to those, and on and on.
The longest chain of connection between any two human beings wasn’t more than seven or eight connections. Even as vast as humanity had become, as far as they’d flung themselves into the universe, they were still too damn close.
“That doesn’t look good for us,” Elvi said.
“We could make an argument that Colonel Tanaka and her whole crew need to be in sensory deprivation tanks as a sanitary precaution. That might be fun.”
Ochida was moving on to a follow-up report on the death reports from San Esteban when a soft knock interrupted them. When Elvi opened the door, Cara was there. Her face was tight and she held her hands in front of her like she was singing in a choir. Elvi knew what had brought her there before the girl spoke.