PREPARING FOR TRANSIT Alex messaged the full crew. On the external telescopes, the thousand-kilometer diameter of the gate was still almost too small to see. Jim watched it grow slowly until it was almost as big as the nail of his outstretched thumb, and then all the stars in the universe snapped off at once as they passed through it and into the ring space.
The whole bubble with all the gates was a little smaller than the volume of Sol system’s star. A million Earths wouldn’t have filled it. At their speed, they wouldn’t be inside it for very long.
The Roci shifted under him, slewing around in a perfect arc, connecting the Freehold gate and the Adro gate in a logical relationship defined by complex math that the enormous power of the ship’s drive was struggling to convert into physical reality. If the feed of reaction mass stuttered, they’d slip off course. If they missed the Adro gate, everything that came after that would be someone else’s problem. Jim couldn’t tell if his heart was racing from fear or just the effort of keeping the blood supply going to his brain.
To his left, Naomi grunted, and it sounded like dismay. He had the sudden flashbulb memory of medical alarms blaring when Fred Johnson had died in the same crash couch she was in, and his heart found a way to beat a little faster. No alarm sounded, but a private message came onto his screen from her.
TOO MANY SHIPS.
He changed his display again. The traffic pattern in the ring space. A dozen transponder codes spooled out—Tyrant’s Folly out of Sol, Taif out of Hongdae, Forgiveness out of Firdaws—and twice as many pings for unidentified drive plumes. He tried to shift the analysis to include them all, but before he could, another message came from Naomi.
THIS IS INSANE. THEY’LL FAIL THE TRANSIT. WHAT DO THEY THINK THEY’RE DOING???
But she knew what they were doing. The same thing they were. Looking at the risk, and each one individually deciding that it made sense for them to throw the dice. And some had certainly failed. There was no one to keep track of how many ships went in a ring gate and didn’t come out the other side. If the Roci was lost, he didn’t know how long it would be before anyone realized it. Maybe never.
He shifted the system to threat assessment, and the answer came at once. Two ships were going to transit out of the ring space before the Roci reached Adro: a colony ship running without a transponder that was almost at the Behrenhold gate and the Forgiveness, a massive cargo hauler out of Firdaws that would pass into Bara Gaon just a few minutes before the Roci reached the Adro gate. Assuming the rings were at base state, the Roci would survive the transition. Assuming that no other ships came in through a ring gate in the meantime.
Assuming, that was to say, a lot of things he didn’t have any reason to assume.
The stars came back. The same stars as home, if in a slightly different configuration. Ekko let his head fall back into the gel of the crash couch. For a moment, he didn’t say anything, barely felt anything, and then a deep relief rode through him like a wave, lifting his heart and setting him back down laughing.
He became aware that his comms were open from the soft rhythm of Annamarie cursing in French. She wasn’t talking to him or anyone really. Maybe God.
“Little full in there today, yeah?” Ekko said.
Annamarie shifted to English. “Fuck, that was too much, old man.”
Ekko laughed again. The release felt almost postcoital. Here he was, in his ship and in Bara Gaon system, and not in whatever screaming void ate ships that drew the short straw.
“I’m going to quit,” Annamarie said. “I’m going to find an apartment in Bara Gaon and an honest job, and I’m going to retire and have babies and never go through that fucking gate again. God damn.” He could hear the grin in her voice, and knew she didn’t mean it until she sobered. “Seriously, capitán. Someone’s going to fucking die in there if it stays that busy.”
“True enough, but not us. Not today. Get me a tightbeam lock to the traffic authority and the client. Let them know we’re here.”
“That we live to skin our asses off another day,” Annamarie said. “On it. I will let you know when I get the lock.”
The Rocinante screamed. Compression seams touched the inside edge of their tolerances. Massive hull plates of carbon-silicate lace settled deep into their supports. The drive howled and pushed up against the hurtling bubble of ceramic and metal and air. The writhing stars on the far side of Adro gate loomed up, almost hidden behind their drive plume.
This was an absurd way to die, Jim thought.