“He’s barking about something.”
“Are you sure?”
She stopped the report playback and stretched.
“When the Tempest destroyed the defenses on the alien station in the ring space,” Elvi said, “the enemy didn’t respond. When it destroyed Pallas Station, everyone in Sol system lost consciousness, and one of the bullets showed up on the Tempest. Trujillo thinks it shows that the ring space isn’t part of our universe.”
Fayez relaxed, the bands pulling him back against the wall. He pushed out again, grunting. “I didn’t know there was an option.”
“The field generator uses antimatter as a primer, but there’s not enough power in a couple handfuls of antimatter to spaghettify a station. The design was developed based on the half-built ship or whatever it was that was in the construction platforms when they were turned on.”
“The one they called the Proteus?”
“Basically, it makes a tiny, transitory ring gate, which releases just a lot of energy for free. And apparently, it’s violating entropy. Which means time.”
“Entropy only runs one direction. Primary school physics requires three hours of barking?”
“He’s saying wherever it’s getting that energy from doesn’t play by our rules.”
“We knew that, though.”
“We suspected it.”
“Do we know it now?”
“We suspect it harder,” Elvi said. “We’re scientists. We only know things until someone shows us we’re wrong.”
Fayez chuckled, strained, relaxed. He was waiting for her to laugh with him, but she didn’t have it in her. Worry bloomed on his forehead and the angle of his lips. “Are you all right?”
“There were two more.”
He stopped, looked at her, and shrugged off the straps. “Two more what?”
“Events. Galbraith system saw a transitory change in lightspeed.”
“How long did it last?”
“Literally an unanswerable question, but about an hour. Bara Gaon lost consciousness for eighteen minutes. The people who went through it said there was no halo effect, no visual disturbances, just”—she snapped her fingers—“eighteen minutes later.”
“That’s new.”
“It’s all new. It’s all experiments, and none of them are mine. And those are just the ones we know about. If the poking and prodding wasn’t someplace we know to look for it, it could be happening much more often. It could be happening right here, right now.”
He pushed off through the cabin. She was ready to bristle at his touch, too tense for the extra burden of physical contact. He only braced beside her and looked at Trujillo’s face, paused on the playback.
“How’s Cara?” Fayez asked.
“Fine. She seems fine. I’m a little concerned about these others she’s talking about. I know she and Xan are connected somehow at the back, and there are other things back there. Amos Burton went through the same thing they did, and if she’s connected with him through the same bridge that’s… That man’s head isn’t a place I’d want to live. But…”
He didn’t push. He let the silence do it for him. Elvi sighed.
“I’m getting a picture,” she said. “I’m starting to understand what built the rings, and how their minds worked. Or mind. Even when I don’t understand how their technology works, I’m starting to see the obstacles they were trying to overcome, and that’s actually a pretty good starting point. But…”
“But you’re wondering how that can be good enough, when the thing they were fighting against killed them and is coming for us.”
“There’s so much about that I don’t understand. What the bullets are.”
“Scars where their attempts to break us permanently fuck up part of reality?”
“Sure. Maybe. But how? What does it do? How do they work? Can we use them to get back to wherever these things are? And how come sometimes they black out one system at a time, and then other times, it’s everywhere? Why do they blow off locality and then leave a scar or bullet or whatever it is that’s in a place and tied to a local frame of reference?”
“And how do you stop them?”
Elvi wiped away a weary tear. “And how do I stop them. Everything’s riding on this. Earth, Mars, Laconia, Bara Gaon, Auberon… They all die if I don’t solve this.”
“If someone doesn’t solve this,” Fayez said. “We’re one ship, and we’re on a very promising track. But we’re not the only ones looking.”
They were silent together, only the hum of the ship around them. She shifted, putting her head against his arm. He curled toward her, kissing her ear. “When was the last time you slept?”
“What’s this sleep you speak of? Sounds nice.”
He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her gently through the cabin to the sandwich board where she slept when a sack against the wall wasn’t enough. She didn’t undress, just slipped between the slabs of gel and let them clamp gently down on her, holding her in place like a giant hand. It was the closest analog to climbing into bed under a pile of blankets, and as soon as he dimmed the lights to a sunset red-gold, she felt sleep rushing up for her like she was falling. Like she was capable of falling.
“You need anything?” he asked, and his voice was soft as a sand dune washed by a breeze. Despite everything, Elvi smiled.
“Stay with me until I fall asleep?”
“My mission in life,” Fayez said.
She let her eyes close and her mind wander. She wondered what it would be like to have Fayez in her private mind the way Xan and Cara, and maybe Burton, were in each other’s. It had to have some physical element, some center or locus of control that used the same alocal effects that let the gate builders stay connected, neuron analog to neuron analog, through whatever strange dimensions they’d traveled. Maybe if she compared brain morphology, she could find it. Real-time communication between systems would change everything. Assuming anyone was still alive to talk.
She was on the edge of dream, half convinced that the Falcon had a university campus in it and that she was preparing to give a lecture, when she roused and chuckled.
“Yes?” Fayez said, still there.
“Lee wants me to give the crew a pep talk. Help shore up morale. I told him I would.”
“Any idea what you want to say?”
“No clue,” she sighed.
Chapter Fifteen: Teresa
Time was a problem. Time was always a problem.
It started, she had learned, with the fact that simultaneity was an illusion, and “the same time” on different planets in different systems was mostly an accounting convenience that only functioned because most people were moving relatively slowly compared to lightspeed. But beyond that, the measurements of time were embedded in history. An hour had sixty minutes because mathematicians in ancient Babylon had worked in a sexagesimal system. A year was the time it took Earth to make a full transit around Sol, and that mattered even though Teresa had never been to Earth and almost certainly never would. Like the number of minutes in an hour, the width of a centimeter, the volume of a liter, the length of a year was the marker by which humanity told the story of itself.
And so, because an old planet in another system was in more or less the same position relative to its star now as it had been during the siege of Laconia, Teresa Duarte was going to wake up sixteen years old instead of fifteen. And because of how quickly that same planet spun on its axis, it was still early morning, and she was in her quarters on the Roci, drifting between wakefulness and dream.
One of the things she’d grown to like about living on the Rocinante was the way it made the cycles of daylight and darkness arbitrary. If the crew had decided that every day lasted thirty hours, then it did. If night and day cycled through six hours at a time, then that was true. That they didn’t was a choice, and the fact that it was a choice was strangely wonderful. It would have been easy to become unmoored, and it turned out she liked being unmoored. The ability to drift was delicious. Now, lying on a couch in thrust gravity a fraction of what she’d felt growing up, she was aware of the cool gray walls, the almost-dark lit only by her handheld’s standby light. At the same time, she was also on Laconia, in a secondary machine shop that opened off her old bedroom and didn’t really exist, building something that changed every time she roused a little and slid back down. Dreams of other spaces—secret rooms, hidden passages, forgotten access shafts—had become common for her in the last months. They were probably symbolic of something. She was just fitting a wire lead into a vacuum channel adapter when the dream changed, shifting under her like she’d switched to a different feed.