His jaw hurt and he kept losing little bits of time. Alex had the drive plume of the Roci pointed out toward the Adro gate, bleeding off as much speed as they could, making their transit a few seconds later in the unmeasurable hope that it would make the difference. Across the ring space, the Derecho would be coming close. There were so many ways for all of it to go wrong, and then what?
Mother Elise’s little boy would have arced up from Montana through wars and alien solar systems and love and despair and died slamming into the one danger he’d known for decades was right fucking there. It was too stupid to even qualify as irony.
A message appeared on his screen from Naomi—ARE YOU OKAY?—and he had to keep himself from turning to look at her. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to turn back under this burn. The blood was pooling in the back of his skull, and the uncomfortable electric fizz of the juice was, he was sure, the only thing keeping him from having several strokes at once. He started to answer her, then forgot what he was doing. The gate approached, growing larger first slowly, then quickly, then all at once.
The burn started to trail away, shifting slowly down toward the float to avoid reperfusion injuries that came when blood flooded too quickly into tissues it had been wrung out of. His hands and face tingled. He saw Naomi’s message again and remembered that he hadn’t answered.
He tried to say I’m fine, but it came out as a croak. He massaged his throat for a few seconds, moving cartilage and muscle back closer toward their right places, and tried again.
“I’m fine,” he managed. “I’m good. You?”
“I am very proud not to be sitting in a puddle of something unfortunate right now,” she said, but the joke sounded angry. The Roci’s burn dropped under a g, then under a half. He looked over. Her mouth was a profound scowl.
“They’re not following protocol,” he said.
“I should have taken Trejo’s offer. This isn’t going to work without someone enforcing it. There’s not enough cooperation.”
“Isn’t now. It doesn’t mean there can’t ever be.”
“They’re people,” Naomi said, exhaustion in her tone. “We’re trying to do all of this with humans. Shortsightedness is coded in our DNA.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. A moment later, the comms went live, and Amos and Teresa reported in on the post-burn maintenance they were doing, Alex started getting a tightbeam lock on the Falcon, and Naomi checked to see whether the ship had grabbed any waiting communication packets from the underground during their passage through the ring space.
Jim followed along, chiming in where he could help, but the thing that stuck in his mind like a catchy, bleak melody was Naomi’s voice. We’re trying to do all of this with humans.
The Derecho passed through the Freehold gate and into the ring space, the drive pushing a braking burn at the limit of the ship’s tolerance—which was the same as saying the limits of the crew’s. The Derecho could pour enough gs into its maneuvers to crush the skin-bound sacks of salt water in it. Tanaka was willing to spend a few lives if it meant catching her prey. If that made her bloodthirsty, so be it. She’d always been thirsty for something. It might as well be blood.
As soon as the gate distortion was gone, and even as she struggled to draw breath, she set the ship to scanning the vacuum at the edges of the more than thirteen hundred gates. The Rocinante’s drive plume might be gone, but the cooling cloud that had been its reaction mass was still there, slowly diffusing into the soft mist of hydrogen, oxygen, ozone, and water vapor that made up most of the physical mass in the ring space. In time, the particles would all drift into contact with the edge of the space and be annihilated, but until then, the information was there. A subtle finger, pointing the way her enemy had gone.
If only she’d made it through before it had dispersed too far to find it . . .
The Derecho’s drive kicked off, the ship went into freefall, and a wave of nausea rolled through her. She ignored it, pulling up her tactical display. The ring space was ridiculously full. It was still fewer ships than she’d seen in the average approach pattern to the naval base on Callisto, back in the day, but Callisto had never had to worry about extradimensional horrors eating some of the ships as they tried to land. Context was everything.
The Derecho had already scanned and dismissed all of them— none was the Rocinante. She pulled up the visual profiles and drive signatures anyway. Recognition algorithms were brilliant, but they weren’t the human eye. What could fool one often couldn’t fool the other.