Bakari yawned, his eyes still closed, and shifted against Kit’s chest. He’d be awake soon, which if tradition held would mean milk and a diaper change. Kit sent a quick message to Rohi: NOT AWAKE, BUT WAKING.
They had formula mixed and ready to go, but Rohi still believed in breastfeeding, and while Kit was able to do a lot to take care of his son, that was a full-on mother-baby thing he was happy to tag out for. Also, he could go to their little gym and get his daily sweating done.
Bakari wrinkled his nose the way he had since they’d seen him in a sonogram, and opened his bright, dark eyes. His focus swam a little, then found Kit’s eyes looking back at him. Bakari made a little bap sound, not even babbling so much as muttering to himself. If he didn’t seem to take any particular joy in seeing his father, it was probably because Kit was almost always there. It made him feel obscurely proud to be so taken for granted.
He was debating to himself whether to message Rohi again or get a round of formula ready when the cabin door slid open. As soon as he saw her face, he knew something was wrong.
“Babe?” he said.
“I’m here.” She gestured to Bakari, and Kit unfolded the boy from his pressure wrap. Bakari slowly windmilled his arms and legs, no distress in his movement at all. As if flying weightless through the air was as natural as anything else. Rohi scooped a hand around him and pulled him close. The baby, knowing what came next, was already plucking at the flight suit over her breast. Like a sleepwalker, Rohi pulled her suit open and guided him to her nipple.
“Babe,” Kit said again. “What happened?”
Rohi took a deep breath, like a diver looking down toward distant water. “There was another blink. San Esteban system.”
Kit felt his gut tighten, but only a little. He’d been through a half dozen rounds of the aliens from inside the rings turning off his mind for him. Everyone in Sol had.
“How bad was it?” he asked.
“They’re dead,” Rohi said. “Everyone in the system. They’re all just dead.”
Chapter Twenty: Elvi
San Esteban system was one of the first wave of colonial settlements, surveyed and studied by her old employer Royal Charter Energy. It had one habitable planet, and a moon around a gas giant with a breathable atmosphere. It had the first parallax station that had mapped out the relative locations of the ring systems through the galaxy. Eighteen million people spread across ten cities, a semi-autonomous aquafarming platform the size of Greenland, and a research station in the stagnation zone of the heliosheath, 110 AU out. It had reached the technical specifications for self-sufficiency three years ago, but it still imported supplies from Sol, Auberon, and Bara Gaon.
Which was why the Amaterasu, a freighter out of Sol system with a cargo of high-purity industrial reagents and refining equipment, risked the transit and passed through the San Esteban gate.
Elvi shifted through the images the ship’s traumatized physician had sent back. She’d seen them all a dozen times before, listened to the recordings he’d made, and read the field autopsies.
The dead man on her screen was in a bag somewhere right now, heading to Laconia and the Science Directorate for a more thorough examination. Elvi tilted her head and considered the wetness along the back of the corpse’s jumpsuit, the tightness where death bloat had pressed the fabric smooth, the way eyes had sunken as they’d given up their moisture to the air. According to his ID and the genetic sample, he’d been an engineering intern at a supply station, and one of the first corpses they’d recovered. He had once been a man named Alejandro Lowry. He was just SanEstebanCadaver-001 now.
The voices that played as she reviewed the dead weren’t from San Esteban. She’d listened to the captain and physician of the Amaterasu enough to know there wasn’t much they could tell her. She’d gone farther to find insight. She was listening to James Holden and a woman with a long, slow accent that Elvi thought of as Mariner Valley but was a kind of Laconian now.
Tell me about the systems going dark, the interrogator said.
It was just one at first, Jim replied. And the . . . group consciousness? Consensus? I don’t know the right word for it. The chorus. They weren’t even particularly worried. Not at first.
Elvi switched to an exterior. An older woman—gray, swirling hair—lying in sunlight. An animal Elvi didn’t recognize lay beside the human corpse. It looked something like a small, insectile pig. Compound eyes on either side of a long skull-like structure. A prey species, then, and it appeared to have died at the same time as the woman. She pulled up an article on the species and what was known of the anatomy and physiology of San Esteban’s tree of life.