He was spending the time until then doing a checkup with the autodoc in the med bay. The medical expert system had been upgraded three times in the decades since the Roci had been a top-of-the-line MCRN ship, and while there was better technology out there now, what they had was pretty damn good. Certainly, it was better than what he’d grown up with.
He let the system check-scan him for little bleeds and tears from the long burn and decant a slurry of targeted coagulants and tailored regeneration hormones. The worst part about it was the weird almost-formaldehyde aftertaste that haunted the back of his tongue for the two days following the treatment. Small price to pay for being 8 percent less likely to stroke out.
Naomi floated in, moving from handhold to handhold with the grace of a lifetime’s practice. Jim smiled and gestured to the autodoc next to his like he was offering her the chair beside his in the galley. She shook her head gently.
He almost asked what was bothering her, but he knew. The high traffic in the slow zone. He almost said it wasn’t her fault, which would have been true, but she knew that too. It didn’t keep her from carrying the weight.
“Maybe Tanaka’s ship went dutchman,” he said.
As he’d hoped, she chuckled. “We should be so lucky. It’s never the ones you want.”
“Probably true.”
“The worst part is that there is an answer, you know? We have a solution. There are probably dozens of solutions. All it would take is people agreeing to one and abiding by it. Cooperation. And I could—”
Alex’s voice came over the ship comms. “Are you all seeing this?”
Naomi frowned.
“Seeing what?” Jim asked.
“The ring gate.”
Jim pulled at his arm, but the autodoc chimed a complaint. Naomi put the wall screen on and shifted to the external scopes. Behind them, the Adro gate had been everything every gate was—dark, spiraling material formed unfathomable eons ago by the strange arts of the protomolecule. Only now, it wasn’t dark. It was shining. The whole circle of the gate was glowing a blue white, with streams of energetic particles radiating from it like an aurora.
Naomi whistled softly.
“It just started doing that a couple minutes ago,” Alex said. “I’m getting a lot of radiation from it too. Nothing dangerous—a lot of ultraviolet and radio.”
“Amos?” Jim said. “Are you looking at this?”
“Sure am.”
“So, you know things you’re not supposed to know. Any thoughts on this?”
He could hear the shrug in the big mechanic’s voice. “Looks like someone turned it on.”
Chapter Twenty-Five: Tanaka
The captain of the Preiss was a flat-faced, pale-skinned man with a stubble-length beard that didn’t hide his double chin. He’d spent two decades ferrying colonists to new worlds, and now he floated in Tanaka’s cabin with a vague look on his face. He should have been frightened. He only seemed stunned.
By force of will, Tanaka kept from tapping her fingers against her thigh. She wasn’t going to show anxiety, even in front of someone who seemed primed to overlook it. After all, this interview and all the others were being recorded.
“I’ve taken,” he said, paused, licked his lips absently, “psychedelics. I’ve been places, you know? It wasn’t like that. Not at all.”
The Preiss was docked to the Derecho, the first of the ships waiting their turn for the Laconians to meet with their crews, copy the data from their sensor and comms systems, and generally go over everything with the finest-toothed of all possible combs. But the Priess was the most important. It was the only ship to ever shrug off going dutchman.
And if Tanaka had held any hope that its captain knew why, she would have been abandoning it right about now. “What is the ship carrying that’s in any way out of the ordinary?”
His focus swam, found her. His shrug and scowl were perfectly synchronized, the result of a lifetime’s practice saying Fucked if I know.
“We were just going through, same as always. The drive plume, it always hits first. But we couldn’t see that anything odd was going on. Drive plume was in the way, you know?”
“I do,” Tanaka said. Her jaw ached. “But there must be something. Something different this time? Had anything changed on this ship recently?”
“Got some new air scrubbers out of Ganymede. Charged graphene with crosshatching. Supposed to last twice as long as the old kind, and you can wash ’em with distilled water. Reuse ’em five or six times.”