Like a kaleidoscope made from other people’s intimate lives, his memory was bright and shining and fragmented. It left him a little dizzy just thinking about it too much.
“So,” Elvi said, “I think we can agree that Colonel Tanaka’s reports were accurate.”
Tanaka, on the wall screen, nodded. Naomi was on the screen beside her, the Roci’s ops deck around her like a frame. Jim and Fayez floated in Elvi’s office. All of them together, and all of them scattered.
Amos, along with Cara and Xan, was being scanned by the medical team. As was everyone else on the crew. The hours that had passed since the failed dive had been a whirlwind of activity. The science teams checking and rechecking their data, searching for any patterns that might shift and fade before they were quite erased. Jim didn’t doubt that they’d find all the same things Tanaka had found the first time, when the Preiss had been saved.
The idea caught him. “Was there someone transiting? When this happened?”
“No,” Naomi said. “The trigger wasn’t the things inside the gate this time. It was us.”
“That’s my assumption too,” Elvi said. “Duarte or the station or some combination of the two rejected us. Pushed back. I believe that Colonel Tanaka’s drug regimen blunted the worst of the effect. At least for us.”
“Wait,” Fayez said. “At least for us? As opposed to who?”
“It seems like the event may have been broader this time than before. I’ve had reports from five scientific missions that were close to their gates reporting experiences similar to ours. I won’t be surprised if more come in later.”
“How far could it have reached?” Tanaka asked.
“It’s a nonlocal effect,” Elvi said. “Without better understanding how it propagates, I couldn’t make any meaningful guess.”
“I think I have some indication,” Naomi said, and her voice was hard as slate. Her image disappeared from the screen, and a series of tactical maps took its place. Solar systems cycled through, a few seconds of one, and another, and then another. As Naomi spoke, they went on and didn’t repeat. “The underground and its allies are showing that since the event, a hundred and five ships in seventy systems have changed course in ways that will bring them through the gates. They’re a combination of Laconian, underground, and purely civilian vessels. And they’ve also gone silent.”
“Silent?” Jim echoed. He meant it more as an expression of shock than a question, but Naomi answered him anyway.
“No broadcast. No tightbeam. No offers of explanation or filed changes of flight plan. Just all of them turning toward us.”
“Radio silence seems weird,” Fayez said. “Their drive plumes are still visible. What do they think they can hide by running in radio silence? What do they gain?”
“They don’t gain anything,” Tanaka said. “They just don’t need comms anymore. They’re all thinking with the same head.”
Elvi let out a little noise, somewhere between a sigh and a sob.
Tanaka either didn’t notice or chose to ignore her. “I’ve taken the liberty of reaching out to Admiral Trejo. I’m hoping we can get some backup here in time.”
“In time for what?” Jim asked.
“The battle,” Tanaka said as if it had been a stupid question.
“Are we sure that these are enemies?” Elvi asked.
“Yes,” Tanaka said. “We tried to get into the station. We were pushed back. Now an ad hoc flotilla of hive-mind-controlled ships are running toward us. If they’re just rushing here to bring us cake and party decorations, we’d know because we’d be in the station chewing the fat with the high consul.”
“There are eighteen systems we’ve ID’d that don’t seem to have any enemy activity,” Naomi said.
“If we retreat, we’ll never get this territory back,” Tanaka said, leaning in toward her camera. Jim detested and feared the woman, and that made it worse when she seemed right. “Either we get inside now, or we talk to the high consul when he’s inside us and pulling our strings.”
Naomi’s voice was gentler, but just as firm. “Do we know why the experiment failed? Why could Jim get into the station, back before the gates opened, and we can’t now?”
“The station was on a kind of autopilot when you first came here,” Elvi said. “It opened for the bit of protomolecule that stowed away on your ship because it didn’t have anything telling it not to. Now it does. Our catalyst can turn something on, and Cara and Amos can react to it, but Winston Duarte was remade with the protomolecule. It’s part of him now. We aren’t getting in that station because he doesn’t want us to. It’s as simple as that.”