It wasn’t her problem, and even if it had been, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She turned back to the scatter analysis and the hunt for the Rocinante. There was a greater than 40 percent chance that something had passed into Bara Gaon in the timeframe she was looking at . . .
“Shit,” she said to no one.
She let the Derecho keep crunching its numbers and pulled her screen back to the Sol gate. Watching the trainwreck. The light was growing smaller and brighter now. The drive had almost reached the gate. Without meaning to, she heaved a sigh. A whole lot of people were about to die for no reason other than they’d been unlucky with the traffic patterns. Sympathy plucked at her. It seemed petty somehow, with the universe crashing in all around them, for the enemy to still eat the occasional ship.
“Rest in peace, you poor fucks,” Tanaka said as the drive plume blinked out, lost in wherever it was that the lost ships went.
An alarm chirped, and for half a second she thought it was announcing the loss of the Sol-based ship. But the Derecho wasn’t worried about that. It was worried about everything else. Tanaka looked at the data and her gut knotted. She opened a feed from the external telescopes. The surface of the space between the rings was glowing a pearly gray, with ripples of darkness moving through it in a way that made her think of sharks swimming through cloudy water. Adrenaline flooded her system, and a wave of vertigo so powerful she looked for a thruster malfunction.
“Botton,” she began, trusting the Derecho to know she needed a comm channel open. “We have a problem.”
The surface of the ring space shifted. Bent. Boiled.
The alien station at the center of the ring space flared like a tiny sun.
Something happened to Tanaka that felt like waking up without falling asleep first. Her awareness shifted, opened, became something it hadn’t been a moment before. She was in her crash couch, but she was also in the medical bay with her head in excruciating pain, and in Botton’s cabin with a bulb of whiskey in his hand and the burn of it in his throat. She saw through a thousand sets of eyes, felt a thousand different bodies, knew herself by a thousand different names.
Aliana Tanaka screamed.
A voice as vast as mountains whispered.
It whispered No.
The scattered world paused in its swirls and chaos. The dark threads froze in their places, vibrating and writhing but unable to whip through the clouds and points that were matter. The awareness that had been Kit, drifting and broken and scattered as it was, saw its own pain, its own distress, the still-flashing impulses that had been its child’s neurons as they fired. Something analogous to sound rumbled and roared, and the dark threads thinned. They became black strings, wet as blood clots. Then threads. Then wisps of smoke.
And then nothing.
The paths where the darkness had whipped the scattered particles apart shifted like a video message played slowly and in reverse. Something thought stirring the cream back out of the coffee, and it might have been Kit. The interplay of vibrations that were the atoms and molecules, incomprehensible in their variety, began to segregate. The slow spinning flow like a river past a muddy bank became the air from a vent. Or blood passing through an artery. Density became real.
Surfaces emerged. Then objects, and then Kit was looking into Bakari’s wide, frightened eyes. Kit’s heart fluttered, as confused as a man who’d forgotten what he was saying midsentence, and then it pounded, each stroke so hard he could see the pulse in his eyes. He wrapped his son tight in his arms as Bakari started to wail, and held him close, sheltered against a threat he didn’t understand and couldn’t locate in space.
The other man, the one who wasn’t in the room, slumped in exhaustion and closed his eyes. The cabin door slammed open, and Rohi was there, eyes bright and panic-wide.
“You’re hurting him,” she shouted. “Kit, you’re hurting him!”
No, Kit tried to say, I’m just holding him. He’s only crying from fear. He couldn’t find the words, and when he looked down, he was squeezing too tight. He made his arms relax, and Bakari’s wailing grew louder. He let Rohi take their son. His body was shaking, a deep pulsing shudder.
“What was that?” Rohi said, her voice shrill with fear. “What just happened?”
The Falcon was close to the Adro diamond, and while it wasn’t on the opposite side of the local star, it wasn’t at the point in its orbit closest to the gate either. The light delay was sixty-two minutes, which meant one hundred twenty-four would have to pass before the tightbeam lock was confirmed. Jim could, of course, send out a message on the beam of supercoherent light even before the comms handshake was done, but somehow it seemed rude. By being in the system, they were dropping a great big bucket of uncomfortable decisions in Elvi’s lap. Giving her the chance to refuse to talk to him felt like the least he could do from an etiquette perspective.