“You’re thinking something,” Fayez said. “I can hear the gears turning.”
“I don’t know what yet,” she said. “But yeah. I am.”
A new voice came from the bridge. The comm channel still open on Sagale’s controls. This is Plain of Jordan confirming transit in two minutes. We are go, no-go in ten seconds.
Another voice answered. Medina control here. You are go for transit. Sagale was muttering something under his breath. It might have been profanity. It might have been prayer. The volumetric display showed a single red dot in the vastness moving toward the pinpoint white of a gate.
“We better get back in our cans,” Fayez said.
“Yes,” Elvi said, but she didn’t move. Not yet. “It was designed, right? Tecoma system was designed. To… to do this?”
Fayez smoothed a hand across her head. The fluid was dry enough now to be tacky, but the touch felt good anyway. “Elvi, you are the light of my heart. The woman I love and know better than I know anyone, and I can’t get through the day without being dead wrong about what you’re going to say or want. The protomolecule engineers were some kind of quantum-entangled high-energy physics hive mind thing. I don’t know what they were thinking.”
“No,” Elvi said, shuffling back toward her couch in the gentle quarter g. “It was designed. There was an intention.”
“Does that help us?” he asked. “Because that would be great, but I don’t know that I see how that helps us.”
This is the Plain of Jordan transferring our status now. We are on approach to—
The display stuttered and threw up an error readout. The lights went out and the gravity dropped away.
“Brace!” Sagale called out from the blackness.
Elvi reached out in the blackness, trying to find a wall and a handhold. “What happened?”
An emergency light stuttered on. “Sensor arrays overloaded,” Sagale said. His voice was shaking. “They’re resetting now. I have to get us stopped until we can…”
He didn’t finish the thought. The handhold buzzed gently with the vibration of maneuvering thrusters, and the Falcon swung up around her, lifting her feet off the deck. Fayez helped her reorient as the gravity alert sounded again and up and down returned. The volumetric display came back up with a warning at the edge that said NO INPUT—ESTIMATED POSITIONS ONLY. Sagale gunned the drive for a few seconds, and the Falcon felt like an elevator lurching toward some upper floor. Then he killed it and Elvi drifted up again.
The three of them were silent for a long moment while the backup sensor arrays lurched to life. The comms clicked once, rattled with strange, fluting static, and filled with the gabble of panicked human voices. Sagale killed the channel and opened a private one.
“Medina Station, this is Admiral Sagale of the Falcon. Please report status.”
Elvi pulled herself to Travon’s station. She didn’t know if it took the ship a fraction of a second longer than usual to recognize her and put her data on the monitor, or if it was just the adrenaline throwing her perceptions off. The main sensor arrays were dead. Burned out in a fraction of a second. Backup systems slowly hauled themselves to life. Cameras and telescopes all around the Falcon unpacked themselves from hardened compartments and deployed. More of them were damaged than she’d expected. But not all. She opened a window and fed the data from the Falcon’s skin to her screen, and in the darkness, there was light.
“This is Governor Song, Falcon,” the woman’s voice came, trembling like a violin. “We have sustained some damage to the ship and crew. We are still assessing.”
The space between the rings was filled with whiteness. The station at the center—the alien control station that seemed to carry the rings with it like the center of a dandelion surrounded by seeds—was brighter than a sun. And some nebula-thin gas or dust cloud caught that light and shimmered. It was everywhere. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.
“It’s going to be all right, Governor,” Sagale said in a tone that almost made it plausible. “I need to know the status of the Plain of Jordan. Did it make transit?”
“Mehmet, I don’t—”
“It’s important. Did the ship make it through?”
Since the first time she’d seen it—the first time anyone had seen it—the boundary of the ring space had been a dark and featureless sphere, like a black bubble seen from inside. Now there was a twisting rainbow of energy or matter on it, like an oil slick on water. The darkness of it had always let Elvi imagine it to be infinite before. A vast and starless sky. Now it felt close and finite. It made everything seem more fragile. A wave of nausea passed across the edge of her awareness like it belonged to some other body.
“No,” Governor Song said. “They were too close to the gate to shift back when the blast came. The energy through Tecoma gate would have… They didn’t make the transit.”
“Please confirm, Medina. You’re saying the Plain of Jordan went dutchman.”
“Yes. We lost them.”
“Thank you, Medina. Please advise traffic control that all transits are suspended until further orders. No one comes into this space, and no one goes out. Not until I say so.”
To her left, Fayez was at Jen’s station, seeing—she assumed—all the same things. Feeling some version of the awe and terror and wonder that she felt.
“Understood,” Governor So