Puck swallowed.
“Adequin,” Mesa said quietly. “I know this is difficult, but there is nothing more we could have done.”
Adequin stared at the Savant, furious at her composed demeanor. But also envious. That should’ve been her. Calm and cool under pressure. An unwavering beacon of logic amidst the fucking impossibility of this situation.
She took a few deep, slow breaths and tried to shut off the part of her mind that seethed. The part screaming about Griffith and Jackin and Lace and Bray and the two hundred soldiers who relied on her for their safety, whom she’d just completely and utterly failed.
A commotion erupted in the other room. Light sparked across the ground.
Adequin looked down as it flashed again, masked on the floor in the long, narrow shape of the observation window. Erandus laid his fingers over his lips and approached the glass. Adequin stepped back to the window and Puck followed. She had to squint as the flashes grew more intense.
When the flare ebbed, she could finally see the Argus clearly, but it was not right. Not whole. Like a clean slice had split the ship in half, chopped off with a sharp blade. Yet no debris flew free, no chunks of aerasteel sparked and shot off in every direction. There was no implement with which the destruction had been caused. One half of the Argus was simply not there anymore.
It was surprisingly slow.
In some dark recess of her mind—a part that allowed her to conceive such atrocities with unhindered wonder—she’d imagined it’d be fast. It moved at thousands of kilometers per hour, gaining speed every minute. Why did it take so long?
But she knew it wasn’t that simple. The Divide was a singular beast, governed by a set of laws even the Viators had never been able to fully understand. She imagined it had to do with some kind of dense mass or dark energy—or lack of mass or dark energy. Forces playing against one another that hadn’t come into effect since the universe stopped its expansion millennia upon millennia ago.
She knew one thing for certain: whatever the cause, there was nothing beyond the edge, and could be nothing beyond the edge, and thus as the edge encroached on the Argus, the Argus became nothing as well.
As for the speed, she couldn’t reason it out. Maybe they were seeing it in segments—partly in the future and partly in the present—a series of ripples laid atop one another to create the illusion of a slow-motion slice from existence.
She squinted at a new burst of light—the familiar trails of a thousand blue-white bolts converging into a colorless orb. A ship had dropped from warp speed and landed between them and the Argus.
“There’s another Hermes!” someone called from the other room.
“Shit.” Puck pressed closer to the glass. “Is that North?”
Adequin could only nod in response. The SGL slowed as it sped forward, silhouetted by the sparking static lights of the Divide as it continued to consume the Argus.
She waited. Waited for more familiar flashes that would indicate more ships decelerating from warp speed—Legion ships come to their aid. But there was nothing.
And Jackin was too close. He’d landed too close. He still sped toward the Divide.
“I need them on comms yesterday,” Adequin barked, peeling away from the window and storming into the other room. She didn’t look at the faces of the too-few crew members in the common room as they split before her on her march to the cockpit.
“Got them!” someone said.
Whoever’d taken the helm slid away and disappeared as she sat into the pilot’s seat. She pressed the comm link.
“Jack.”
“Boss.” Jackin’s voice cut through, full of static and distortion, but audible. “What the—”