And then it fell.
The Falcon was on a fairly gentle one-third g burn that would put it near Ganymede in a few weeks, and the whole staff—the brightest minds of a shattered empire—were watching the ring gate die, measuring it, collecting data from the corpse. Naomi, sitting alone in the galley with a bulb of tea, just watched it. For decades, it had been fixed in place, one of the farthest objects in the solar system. It didn’t orbit. It didn’t move. Now, it tumbled a little, pulled in toward the sun the way anything would be. The miracle, ended.
Her message queue was like a fire hose. Contacts from the underground, reporters from a hundred different outlets, politicians and Transport Union officials and the local traffic control authorities. Everyone wanted to talk to her, and however they phrased it, they all wanted the same questions answered. What does this mean? What happens now?
She didn’t answer any of them.
The crew of the ship came and went. Some were injured, like her. Some were injured less visibly. She recognized some. It was almost the whole shift before Amos came in. His wide, rolling gait as familiar as her own voice. She wanted to believe it was really him, that her old friend had actually survived Laconia and not just become the raw material of an alien machine. She smiled and raised her bulb.
“Hey, Boss,” Amos said. “How’re you holding together?”
A little weird,” she said. “How’s Teresa?”
Amos went to the dispenser, frowning at the unfamiliar control menu as he spoke. “She’s seen better days. Whatever happened on that station, it fucked her up pretty good. I think she was really hoping she’d get her dad back.” He found the menu he wanted and grunted with satisfaction. “Seems like her and Sparkles are hitting it off, though. I think Little Man’s kind of jealous. I think he wants to be Tiny’s bestie. There’s some brother-sister dynamics. It’ll work out.”
The galley chimed and put out a little silver tube. Amos cracked the top, rolled over, and sat across from her. His gentle smile could have meant anything. He looked at Naomi’s hand terminal. The tumbling ring.
“Fayez says it’s going to fall into the sun,” Amos said. “Says even all the way out here, it hasn’t got enough sideways to it for an orbit. Just boom, right into the fireball.”
“You think that’s true?”
Amos shrugged. “I think a bunch of independent contractors are gonna strip-mine that shit before it gets to the Belt. They’ll be lucky if there’s a handful of dust left to hit the corona.”
To her surprise, Naomi laughed. Amos’ smile got maybe a degree more genuine.
“I think you’re right,” she said. “And if not, someone’ll hire a tug to give it a little lateral impulse. Nothing humans can touch goes unmodified.”
“A-fucking-men. What about you, Boss? What do you think about all this shit?”
He meant, Are you all right? You’ve lost Jim. You’ve lost Alex. You’ve lost your ship. Are you able to live with that? And the answer was that she could. But she wasn’t ready to say it out loud, so she answered the other question instead.
“I think we got lucky. I think we were one little system in a vast, unreachable universe that was always on the edge of destroying itself, and now we have thirteen hundred chances to figure out how to live with each other. How to be gentle with each other. How to get it right. It’s better odds than we had.”
“Even if someone does, though. We’ll never know. The alien roads are gone. Now it’s just us.”
The ring tumbled on her screen, and she looked past it to the stars. The billions upon billions upon billions of stars, and the tiny fraction that had other people looking back toward her.
“The stars are still there,” she said. “We’ll find our own way back to them.”
Epilogue: The Linguist
Marrel expected reintegration to hurt, but it didn’t. It didn’t feel like anything. He didn’t even have the grogginess of waking from sleep, which—thinking on it—shouldn’t have been surprising, as he hadn’t fallen asleep. Somehow, he was surprised all the same.
He had climbed into his transit pod on the crew deck of the Musafir along with everyone else, watched the countdown timer on the reinforced crystal wall in front of him go to zero, and then change to 31:11:43:27 as if that was the number that naturally followed zero.
Thirty-one days, eleven hours, forty-three minutes, and twenty-seven seconds had elapsed for his homeworld while Marrel and the twenty-nine other souls on board the Musafir existed only as energy and intention sliding along the membrane between universes. Thirty-one days as they vanished and reappeared at their destination, nearly 3,800 light-years from home. A long-held breath as they swam through the cosmic foam and re-emerged at a different place in the ocean.