“Oh,” Travon said. “Sorry.”
“I remember when I was just a scientist,” Elvi said. “I liked that. It was nice.”
Five minutes later Sagale came on the bridge, floating toward his station like none of them were there. Elvi remembered seeing him in the same place, still damp from the crash couch and weeping. He was a different man now. For a moment, against her will, she admired him. Sagale considered the display in silence. The loudest sounds were the hush of the air recyclers and the flutter of Travon’s right thumb and middle finger.
He considered the energy graphs as Jen explained them again. Sagale took it in impassively. When Jen had finished, he floated quietly in his crash couch restraints. His gaze flickered to Elvi’s, and she thought there was something in them. Gratitude, maybe.
With a gesture, he opened a comm channel.
“Admiral Sagale,” Governor Song’s voice came. “How can I help you?” It had a hint of Mariner Valley drawl. Elvi wondered if it was the mark of a Martian working for Laconia or a Laconian who’d carried her accent out into the alien worlds and back again. Whether this obedience was peculiar to Duarte’s people or if it had been part of the Martian character all along.
“My eggheads came up with an analysis I’d like your eggheads to take a peek at, Governor. It may be nothing, but I’d recommend we hold action on the bomb ship until we know what we’re looking at.”
There was a long pause. “You have my curiosity, Admiral. Send over what you have.”
“Thank you,” Sagale said, and the governor cut the connection. “Share that with the Typhoon and Medina, Dr. Lively. Let’s see if they share your concerns.”
“Yes, sir,” Jen said, and started packaging her information like she’d been given an extra five minutes on her final exams.
Fayez touched Elvi’s shoulder and said, almost too softly to hear, “Do you think we just got away with—”
The universe exploded.
If it had been a sound, it would have been deafening. Elvi put her hands over her ears just the same. A reflex. An approximation. Jen was screaming. Elvi tried to sink to the deck, but only managed to pull her legs up so that she was floating in a fetal position. The curve of the handhold before her was ornate and beautiful. The smudge of darkness where the oil from the crew’s skin hadn’t been cleaned away was like a map of a vast coastline, fractal and complex. She was aware of Fayez beside her, of the waves of pressure passing between them, touching, and reflecting away as they both screamed. The air was a fog of atoms. Sagale was a cloud of atoms. She was a cloud.
You’ve been here, she thought. You’ve been here before. Don’t get distracted by it. Don’t lose yourself.
The cloud that was her hand, vibrations in emptiness, slipped through the void and clatter to the cloud that was the handhold. Fields of energy between her atoms and the bulkhead’s atoms turned into a dance of pressure, and the surge sent lightning up her arm, so complicated it was hard to keep track of. She was aware that she felt it, but there was so much happening it was hard to keep the sensation in mind.
Elvi found that she could see right through the suddenly vaporous ship, and right through the other ship clouds around it. Medina was a vast but wispy thunderhead at the center of them all.
Something was moving through the clouds, dark and sinuous as a dancer slipping between raindrops. And then another. And then more. They were everywhere, sliding through the gas and liquid and solid, scattering the clouds with their passage. They were solid. Real in a way the clouds of matter were not. They were more real than anything she’d ever seen. Tendrils of darkness that had never known light. That could never know light. You’ve seen this absence of light before. A darkness like the eye of an angry god… You said that to someone.
One darted and swirled, off to her left if left meant anything now. It furled like a question mark, and the pattern of atoms and vibrations swirled around it and into it. The beauty of it, the grace, were hard to look away from. Clouds mixed and swirled together in its wake, colors so pure they were only colors. It took effort to recognize they were blood.
She’d been here before. It had been overwhelming the first time. It was overwhelming again now, but at least she knew what it was. That made holding her mind together possible. At least for a moment.
You’re doing great, kid. You’re doing great. You can do this. Just a little more. But do it now …
She tried to remember what her throat was. Tried to imagine that the dots of matter and emptiness had said words before. That they still could. They were her body, the air she breathed. She tried to make it all work together long enough to scream.
Emergency evacuation. Major Okoye authorization delta-eight. A tendril of darkness darted toward her…
… and dropped away. All of them slid away, falling like black snowflakes through the cloud of vibrations that was the deck. Everything swirled, one form folding into another. If she unfocused her eyes, she could just recognize them. Jen’s body, rolling as maneuvering thrusters made the deck into a hillside. Someone’s arm from fingers to elbow, and even a few centimeters of flesh beyond. The glow of the main display, too much itself to hold any meaning beyond the simple elegance of photons caught in air. She was aware of her own pain like it was the sound of a distant waterfall. She fell through it and into something like sleep.
And a blink later, she was back. Thrust that could have been a third of a g or five gs pulled her down. When she forced herself to sit up, blood glued her cheek to the deck. The air stank, but with too many different volatiles to make sense of. Alarms were sounding, echoing off each other in a meaningless cacophony. Everything had gone wrong at once. She hauled herself up to standing.
The bridge was a thing from a nightmare. Swaths of the bulkheads, decks, equipment were gone. Like an artist had come in with an eraser and taken away bits of it at random. And the others too.
Sagale was still at his post, a long loop of his head and right shoulder simply vanished. Jen lay in a still pile where the deck met the wall, covered in blood that might have been her own. Travon’s arm lay beside his station, but where his crash couch had been, there was a soft-edged hole down to the next deck and the one below that. It was like seeing a coral reef made from her ship and her friends and—
“Fayez!” she screamed. “Fayez!”
“Here,” his voice said behind her. “I’m here. I’m okay.”
He was in two-thirds of a crash couch. The fluid in the reservoir had all poured out and down and away.
“I’m okay,” he said again.