Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

“We’ll tell him. I’m sure he has plans to shift locations if he needs to.”

Emma nodded, then muttered fuck under her breath. Even as she thought about other ways to get comm access, Naomi spared a moment to feel sympathy for her.

Emma’s hand terminal sounded at the same moment that hers did. Another chime sounded from down a corridor. A ship-wide alert. Or something bigger. Naomi thumbed the notification open.

ALL UNION SHIPS: TOP PRIORITY. ALL TRAFFIC THROUGH ALL GATES IS SUSPENDED BY ORDER OF LACONIAN MILITARY COMMAND. NO SHIPS PERMITTED THROUGH ANY GATE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. ALL TRANSITS ARE ON HOLD. ALL SHIPS ON APPROACH ARE TO EVACUATE THE LANE TO .8 AU IMMEDIATELY.

Emma was moving through data fast, flipping from one interface to another, and so intent on her hand terminal that she didn’t notice she was drifting. Naomi caught her elbow and pulled her to the wall.

“What happened?” Naomi asked.

“Don’t know,” Emma said, shaking her head. “Something big.”

Chapter Nineteen: Elvi

The hard burn out of Tecoma system without sedation was a slice of hell. The crash couch felt close as a coffin around her. The breathable support fluid was thick in her throat. She tried to tell herself that it was like being in a dream where she could never drown, but every few minutes, she felt an animal panic in the back of her head. Throughout most of human evolutionary history, the watery inside-a-pipe-with-no-way-out view she had would have been the last thing someone saw before they died in pain. It was hard to convince her hindbrain that this time was different.

The monitor, weirdly, was crisper and easier to see than normal. Something about how the fluid did or didn’t scatter light. Or evidence that she needed to look into vision correction, she didn’t know which. But she could track the ship’s progress on its mad dash for the ring and the data still streaming in from the probes. The fizz of miraculous protons kept coming into the system, and the spin of the Tecoma star and the magnetic fields it generated were pulling some of the new matter into a glowing accretion disk. It was almost beautiful except for the part where it could collapse into a black hole and generate the gamma ray burst that killed them as fast as a neuron could fire.

With the adjustable buoyancy in the tank, she felt the burn less as being pressed down and more as being squeezed in a massive and invisible fist. Red flight information data kept her aware of how tenuous her position was. Surviving a sustained thirty-g burn in a conventional crash couch would have been about as likely as living through a free fall drop from orbit onto a pile of knives.

When they hit the midpoint of the flight, the Falcon kicked off its drive, flipped the ship, and started its deceleration in less than a minute. All Elvi experienced was a moment’s vertigo and a bloom of black spots in her vision that cleared away again quickly. The animal panic rose in her again, and she fought to keep it back.

I AM NOT LOVING THIS EXPERIENCE, she sent to Fayez. She hated that she couldn’t say it or hear his voice.

A moment later, a message came back. I KNOW. I CAN’T DECIDE IF I’M PANICKED OR BORED. V. CONFUSING. BEEN READING THE SAFETY GUIDELINES. TURNS OUT MALES ARE SPECIFICALLY DISCOURAGED FROM MASTURBATING IN THE GEL WHILE UNDER BURN. WONDER WHAT THAT TEST PROTOCOL LOOKED LIKE.

The fluid made it hard to laugh. Her husband might not have been a good match for anyone but her. But for her, he was perfect.

Hours later, they passed through the ring gate into what everyone still called the slow zone. The Falcon jounced as maneuvering thrusters took them off the mathematical line defined by the gate and the star. Under perfect circumstances, the couch would have cycled through three sets of progressively thinner fluid before it finally drained, but Elvi was done. She selected IMMEDIATE RELEASE from the system menu, approved the override, and heard the deep chunk-chunk-chunk of the pump as it drew the fluid away and injected oxygen-rich air in its place. She might choke and cough and feel like she was getting over bronchitis for a few hours, but she genuinely didn’t care.

Admiral Sagale hadn’t either, because the first thing she heard when her crash couch popped its seals and slid open was his phlegmy voice.

“—for immediate evacuation. We have data that the high consul specifically mandated.”

Elvi pulled herself up. Her muscles ached like someone had beaten her with a hammer. She floated to the bridge. Stopping herself on a handhold felt like it was going to bend the joints in her hand the wrong way. Sagale’s couch was in its open configuration, but a film of fluid still clung to his hair and arm. The smell of it was too complex for her mind. Her brain kept reaching for comparisons and then abandoning them—grape jelly, cinnamon, acetate, nutmeg—over and over. Behind her, Fayez groaned. Sagale looked over at them, scowling.

“You shouldn’t be out of your couch, Major Okoye,” he said, and before she could respond, the comm channel did.

“Your request is noted,” a familiar voice said. Elvi knew she should recognize it. The sustained high gs might have compromised her more than she’d thought. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Governor Song,” Sagale said. “The Falcon is on a scientific mission critical to the empire. If we busted our asses to get here so we can die waiting in line—”

The penny dropped for Elvi. Jae-Eun Song. Governor of Medina Station. She’d heard of the woman often, though they had never met.

“Admiral Sagale,” the woman said. It was strange to be close enough to another ship that the light delay made interrupting him possible. “I had no warning about this. I had sixty-four ships in the zone, including Medina Station and the Typhoon. I’ve gotten it down to twenty-eight, even with you screaming through my gate and screwing up my queue. You can give my team a minute to run the numbers.”

Sagale’s expression landed somewhere between annoyance and rage, but his voice was professional. “Understood, Governor. Didn’t mean to step on your toes.” He turned off his microphone with a gesture like a punch.

“What’s—” Elvi said, then braced herself and coughed up a thick wad of breathable fluid. Fayez appeared at her side with a towel. She spat into it. “What’s going on?”

Sagale put a volumetric display on the main monitor. The alien station hung exactly in the center of 1,373 gates evenly distributed around the surface of a sphere that had nothing outside it. Icons marked the repurposed generation ship that was the oldest station in the space between worlds and the Magnetar-class Laconian warship that was the newest. Along with them, a scattering of ships in a space barely smaller than the Earth’s sun. If the icons had been to scale, they’d have been less than motes of dust. Fewer than a hundred bubbles of air in a space the volume of a million Earths.

“Governor Song is trying to evacuate the ring space per my recommendation,” Sagale said. “She is also trying to move Medina Station further out of harm’s way in case a gamma burst does come through Tecoma gate. But preparing the station is proving difficult, as it means stopping the spin drum and turning on drives that haven’t been used in seve

ral decades. In that context, I have asked for a priority transit to Laconia.”

“And?” Fayez asked.