“Cap,” Amos said again. There was something in his voice. “We need to go see the doc.”
Jim didn’t want to do it, and he wasn’t sure why he didn’t want to. No. That wasn’t true. Elvi was their last hope against the darkness, and if he saw that she’d failed, he wouldn’t even have that anymore. It wasn’t a good enough reason to stay away.
“Alex, plot the fastest transit you can for Adro system.”
Kit woke. The harness beside him was empty. At first he thought Rohi was feeding Bakari, but that wasn’t it. The baby was in his own little sleeping harness, eyes closed and arms floating forward like he’d never left the amniotic sac. His son looked utterly at peace. Which, good on him, because nobody else was.
As quietly as he could, Kit undid his restraints and synced his handheld with the cabin’s system. It would keep its electronic eyes on Bakari and alert him if the baby so much as burped. Then as near to silent as he could be, he slipped out of the cabin and into the common galley.
The lights were dimmed to night mode, so Rohi’s handheld lit her face from below. The flag of their future home was a shadow over her right shoulder. Her eyes were fixed on the little screen, and her expression was empty. He didn’t need to ask. He knew what she was looking at. Footage from San Esteban system.
He pulled himself to a stop beside her, his magnetic boots off and floating in air. She glanced up at him, made a rueful smile. Rueful and maybe a little resentful.
“We’re almost at the gate,” Kit said. “A few more hours.”
Rohi nodded, but the feed on her handheld cut to something new, and it held her gaze. The horrors of a systemful of dead people, replayed again and again, with commentary in ten languages and a hundred political orthodoxies. The science feeds about the manner of death. The religious feeds about its spiritual meaning and what it said about the will of God. The political feeds about why it was some other ideology’s fault. She watched all of them like she was looking for something in the images of the corpses. Meaning, maybe. Or hope.
“You should get some sleep,” Kit said. “Baby’s going to be up before long, and he’s not as impressed with me as he is with you.”
“He doesn’t see there’s anything wrong with you,” Rohi said. “He’s a baby, and he already knows I’m stressed.”
“Between the two of us, we are his universe.”
“What if we aren’t supposed to do this?”
“Do what, babe?”
“All of this? Going to other planets. Going to other stars. What if God didn’t want this?”
“Well, then they should have spoken up sooner, I guess. It’s late in the game to turn around.”
She chuckled and shut off the handheld. He was relieved. He didn’t know what he’d have done if she refused to look away from the feeds. Go back to the cabin by himself, probably.
“How do we do this?” she murmured. “They all just died, and everyone just keeps doing what they were doing anyway.”
“No options. We go on because we go on.” He wiped away the film of tears building up around her eye. “It’ll be all right,” he said, hearing how little weight the words carried. How little he believed them. “Come to bed.”
In one way, the chase looked simple. The Roci was braking, still hurtling toward the Freehold gate but more and more slowly. By the time it passed through, it would be going slow enough that it could deflect its flight path the thirty-four degrees it took to slide out the Adro gate, or any of hundreds of others. The Laconian destroyer Derecho had a greater velocity and was only now starting to brake. It would slide through Freehold gate moving faster, braking harder, running its high-powered Laconian drive hot enough to risk the deaths of some percentage of its crew. Maybe it would be able to find the gate the Roci had gone through. Maybe it would guess wrong. Maybe it would make a killing burn to shed all its velocity and come to a stop in the ring space so it could search for traces of the Roci’s passage. Or, hell, maybe it would malfunction, spin off into the non-surface of the bubble between the ring gates, and be annihilated. Jim had been lucky before.
In another way, the chase was impossibly complex. With a flick of his eyes, he could turn the display to a probabilistic three-dimensional map that showed all the possible flight paths the Roci could take, the complex decision points where an equation with values like time, vector, delta-v, the elasticity of a human blood vessel, and the ship’s position in space defined the moment when a possible future slipped away. Jim moved between the two views—the curve of the Roci’s intended path and the swooping, lily-shaped cone that was the Derecho’s possible paths. Then over to the intricate web of things that could happen but hadn’t yet, as it narrowed second by second and left a thin thread called history behind it. His jaw ached from the deceleration. No one had spoken for hours, and his headache was probably just a headache. Strokes didn’t take that long.