Tiamat's Wrath

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

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

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

“And?” Fayez asked.

“And her team is crunching the numbers,” Sagale said, biting each word off individually. He was scared. He was right to be. She was too.

“Where’s Jen?” she asked. There was a sharp pain in her chest. More fluid coming loose.

“The others are sedated,” Sagale said. “There was no reason to keep them awake.”

“She could have monitored the data coming in from Tecoma,” Fayez said. “I mean, I can look at it, but Jen’s the one that understands.”

“I’d rather focus on keeping her alive so she can make sense of it later,” Sagale said.

“It’s going to hit the station, isn’t it?” Elvi said. “The star, the gate, and that alien station that runs the ring space. They’re all in a line.”

“Yes,” Sagale said.

Fayez raised a hand over his head like a kid in a classroom. “Um. Point of clarification? Do we really want to make a transit right before that happens? Because if I recall correctly, the whole reason that we have a Magnetar-class ship here at all is because hitting that little ball there with a massive energy burst makes an exponentially larger plume of gamma radiation pop out of all the gates.”

“We have been able to use that effect to guard all the gates simultaneously, yes,” Sagale said. “The cannons-on-the-cliffs strategy.”

“And don’t we want to be on this side of those cannons when they go off?” Fayez was talking too fast. Elvi took his hand, squeezing his fingers, hoping it would calm him. “I’m just asking, because the thing where we rush through to safety just in time to get cooked by the aftermath seems unpleasant.”

“It’s a calculated risk,” Sagale said. “We aren’t certain that the station will survive the blast. Or what will happen if it doesn’t.”

She watched new vistas of catastrophe unfold in her husband’s eyes. The station might break. The slow zone might collapse. It had been unthinkable right up to the moment he thought it.

“Okay, yeah,” Fayez said. “That’s a fair point.”

Governor Song’s voice came over the comm channel. “Admiral Sagale?”

“Yes?” Sagale said, then remembered he’d turned off the mic. He enabled it again. “Yes, Governor. I’m here.”

“We have slotted the Falcon for priority transit through Laconia gate. I am sending you the traffic control data now. Do not rush your transit. We’re cutting it as close to the limit as we can here. I don’t want anyone going dutchman.”

Sagale’s head came back a degree, as if the thought had surprised him. His voice when he spoke was clear. “Understood. Thank you for this, Jae-Eun.”

“If we live through this, you owe me a drink,” the governor of Medina Station said. “The ship ahead of you is the Plain of Jordan through Castila gate. Please monitor that and match to your plan. Godspeed, Mehmet.”

Sagale turned his attention to the controls, and a moment later the gravity warning sounded. Not that anyone else on the ship would hear it. Elvi had to fight the urge to shout the emergency evacuation command and let all the other ships figure out how to be safe about it.

“How long do we have?” Elvi asked, and then laughed. It sounded like she was asking how long they had to live, and since she kind of was, it seemed funny. Sagale didn’t join in.

“We’re going to be at a quarter g for a while if you want to stretch your legs,” he said. “Then you have to be back in the couch. Once we make the transit, I’m making a hard turn and burning perpendicular to the ring to get us away from it.”

“In case of overspill,” Fayez said.

“From an abundance of caution,” Sagale said. He passed the back of his hand over his eyes, and Elvi realized that for all his stoic reserve, he was weeping. The drive kicked on, and she drifted to the deck. Fayez put a hand on her shoulder and drew her away.

“This is bad,” he said softly.

“I know.”

He nodded. “I just felt like I needed to say it out loud.”

She took his hand and kissed it. It still smelled like breathable fluid. “If this is all we get … Well, then shit.”

“With you on that one, sweetheart,” he said, and folded his arms around her. “This whole thing really was a terrible idea, wasn’t it?”

“Couldn’t have seen it coming,” she said. “I mean, unless …”

Something moved in the back of her head. Something about the Magnetar-class ships and the way the Heart of the Tempest had annihilated the rail guns on the alien station during Laconia’s first incursion. The way it had killed Pallas Station. The way the enemy had reacted differently.

“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

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 Song said. “I’ll see to it.”

“Thank you, Jae-Eun,” Sagale said. “We have some work to do. We’ll need reports from the other systems. I’m guessing that there’s been some damage from the far sides of the gates too. It may take some time to—”

“Gates moved,” Fayez said in the same tone he used for trivial information. Laundry’s dry. Dinner’s ready. Gates moved.

“What?” Sagale said.

“Yeah,” Fayez said. “Not much, but a little. And all of them. Look for yourself.”

Sagale shifted the main screen. The slow zone bloomed. And with it corrections on each of the gates. The ships were all in place, all matching their expected vectors and positions. But a little yellow error code hung at the gates to show where they were expected to be, and where they were instead. Sagale’s face was ashen. Elvi felt herself wondering how many more shocks the man could take. Or, for that matter, many how many she could.

“Yeah, so,” Fayez said. “Pretty sure I see what’s going on. They just reordered. Because there’s not as many of them now. Equal distance between them got a little bigger. Tecoma gate’s gone. And … Oh yeah. Look at that. Thanjavur gate was pretty much straight across from it. And it’s gone too. We just lost two gates, Admiral. And one of them had an entire world filled with people behind it.”