She shifted her connection to the catalyst’s chamber.
“Are you good to go?”
“We are,” Fayez said. “The chamber is going to be a little tight for Cara and Xan both, but I think we’ll be all right. As long as no one starts getting claustrophobic.”
“All right then. Take out the catalyst.”
She could have pulled up a video feed, watched Fayez and his techs open the chamber, wheel out the catalyst, and usher the two not-quite-children into the place it had been. She kept her attention on Amos and the station instead. She heard when the chamber closed.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Harshaan Lee said, “by the numbers and by the book.” And then, more quietly, “If any book applies.”
Gently, a technician fed the pale cocktail of sedatives into Amos’ thick, ropy arm. The black eyes closed.
“Catalyst is out,” Fayez said, but she could already tell. The activity on the ring station shifted like an eye turning toward them. Magnetic fields reached out where none had been before, and the rhythm of seismic and energetic activity changed. The activity in Amos’ brain shifted as well.
“Look for a matching pattern, please,” Lee said. “If this is similar to our green friend in Adro, we should find an echo of the subject.”
But the technicians weren’t listening. Every head was bent to a screen, every hand on the controls. The Falcon seemed to hum with raw human attention. Elvi’s heart tapped impatiently at her breastbone.
“I’m seeing . . .” one of the geology group said, then stopped.
Time became very slow. On the screens, pattern-matching systems fed the intimate signals of Amos Burton’s brain and body into one input and the data from the ring station into another, fitting one to the other a million times a second and looking for a match. Cascades of green and yellow flickered as the man and the artifact fell in and out of synchrony. Amos sighed once, like a commentary on something just a little disappointing.
“I have something that resembles the handshake,” the woman at the informatics station said. Her tone was artificially flat, trying very hard to hide her excitement. “It began twenty seconds ago from . . . mark.”
“Confirmed. They’re talking.”
Elvi pulled herself to the medical couch. Amos’ face was empty as a mask, his muscles slack, his eyes closed, his lips the powder gray that his altered blood created. She wanted to touch him, to make sure he was still warm. That he was still alive. His eyes shifted under their lids, left and then right and then left again. He took another breath.
One of the medical technicians made a soft noise. “I’ve got some activity in the dorsal posterior insula that I can’t—”
Amos’ eyes shot open and he screamed. The rage and pain in the sound were a punch in Elvi’s face. She reared back, spinning as she missed her handhold. He took another breath and shrieked.
“We have a cardiac problem,” one of the medical technicians said, his voice high and tight. “I’ve got an arrhythmia here . . . I don’t know what I’m looking at.”
“Elvi?” Jim said.
“Not now,” she snapped back.
Amos raised his arms, the muscles standing out under his skin. His left bicep—as thick around as Elvi’s thigh—began crawling with spasm. He made a deep hiccuping sound, struggling to breathe.
“Pull him out,” Elvi said. “We’re done here. Pull him out.”
“You heard the lead!” Harshaan shouted. “By the numbers and by the book!”
Lee moved in, fixing a syringe to the feed in Amos’ arm. The cocktail of revival medicines seemed to resist going into the vein. Elvi waited for the spasming to stop. Jim, out from his corner, floated at her side, his face ashen.
“He’s not coming up,” he said. “Why isn’t he coming up?”
Amos’ head bent back, baring his neck. The veins in his throat stood out in a way that made Elvi think massive debilitating stroke. His eyes were open, black pits without any clear focus.
“I can give him another dose,” Lee said.
“Do it,” Elvi shouted.
Another cocktail went into the big man’s arm. Alerts were sounding all through the lab; machines and monitors panicking at what they saw.
The medical technician’s voice was an island of professional calm in the chaos. “He is not coming up. We are moving into GTCS with ventricular fibrillation. We’re going to lose him.”
Jim was murmuring a string of quiet obscenities like it was a prayer.