“Listened to some music, read a few issues of Naka and Corvalis, and went to sleep,” Fayez said. “For all the world like the preadolescent boy he appears to be.”
Elvi pulled herself to a stop at her husband’s side. The data on his hand terminal was the feed from the lab laid side by side with the monitors trained on Xan. She could tell at a glance that there wasn’t a correlation between them. Whatever Cara was going through, Xan wasn’t being subjected to it along with her. Or at least not obviously. She’d still feed everything through pattern matching.
She wasn’t conscious of sighing, but Fayez touched her arm as if she had.
“You heard about Gedara system?”
She nodded. “Lightspeed change. Dark gods banging around in the attic. Feels like that’s happening more often.”
“We’ll need more data points for a good frequency analysis,” he said. “But yeah. It does. I hate the feeling that something vast and angry is scratching at the corners of reality and looking for a way to kill me.”
“It’s only scary because it’s true.”
He ran a hand through his hair. He’d gone silver, and when they were on the float, he tended to look like something out of a children’s cartoon. Elvi’s hair was well on its way to white, but she kept it short. Mostly because she hated the compression fluid in the high-g crash couches, and it took forever to get the smell of it out of longer hair.
“You shut down early?”
“There was some instability when she synced up with the BFE.”
Now it was Fayez’s turn to sigh. “I wish they didn’t call it that. It’s a diamond, not an emerald.”
“I know. Sorry.”
“And anyway, BFD’s funnier,” he said, but there wasn’t any heat to it. Their marriage was a vast tissue of in-jokes, light comic bits, shared curiosity, and common trauma. They’d built it like a code between them over the course of decades. She knew the inflections that meant he had something that was interesting him, and how it sounded different from when he was angry about something. When he was trying to protect her and when he was struggling with something he was seeing but couldn’t understand.
“What’s on your mind?” she asked.
“You didn’t notice the sync?”
“What sync?”
Fayez pulled up the dataset again. On one side, the brain and body of a teenage girl fixed at the age when she’d died and been “repaired” by alien technology. On the other, the particle scatter and magnetic resonances of a vast crystal that—if they were lucky—held the history of a galaxy-spanning species whose tracks they were following toward extinction. She could trace the similarities with her fingers. Fayez lifted his eyebrows, waiting for her to notice something. She shook her head. He pointed to a tiny indicator on the side of the readout: IN-FRAME LIGHT DELAY CORRECTION OFFSET: -.985S.
She frowned.
“We’re point nine-eight-five light seconds from the diamond,” Fayez said. “Matching orbit around the star, neither moving toward nor away from it. The last times we tried this, Cara and the diamond were talking back and forth. Call and response. Now they’re singing in harmony. No light delay.”
Elvi felt the implications running through her mind like water spilling down a creek. They’d always known that the protomolecule was able to do strange things with locality, but they’d thought it was related to quantum entanglement of particles. Cara and the BFE hadn’t exchanged any particles that she knew of, so this pseudo-instantaneous information transfer was something new. One of the fundamental hypotheses of protomolecule technology had just taken a profound hit.
It also meant that their reaching out to the artifact had gotten it to reach back. Her experiment was working.
She’d expected success to feel less like fear.
When Elvi had started working for the Laconian Empire, it had been under duress. Winston Duarte had taken over all humanity with the speed and thoroughness of a plague. When he’d invited her to a senior position in his Science Directorate, the answer was yes. It would have been a dream job, except for the consequences of refusing it.
Then Duarte’s plan to confront the forces that killed off the civilizations that built the ring gates went wrong. Duarte was crippled by it. And Elvi’s immediate boss, Paolo Cortázar, was reduced to a thin, heme-stinking mist. Elvi, who’d wanted the job but not the employer, found herself receiving a field promotion to the head of the Laconian Science Directorate with the understanding that her primary task was to figure out how to stop the attacks that were knocking out consciousness, sometimes in single systems, sometimes all through the empire. Unless her primary task was to find a way to fix Duarte’s scrambled mind. Or maybe to prevent any more ships from vanishing in the transit between the normal universe and the weird nexus of the ring space.