Fleet training covered getting spaced. She’d run the scenario until she was sick of the word. But, hey, here she was, and the training took over just as intended. Exhale everything you’ve got, and pray.
At least her leg wasn’t weighing her down anymore.
CHAPTER 78
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
NOT ENOUGH
Fifteen seconds.
The longest anyone’s ever stayed conscious in a vacuum before blacking out, for sure, is fourteen seconds. But they weren’t sure about the timing, the exposure was accidental, and so they came up with fifteen: That’s all the time you’ve got in the void. Fifteen seconds, to say goodbye.
Fourteen seconds.
She’d been blown out backward, facing Bero as he raced away to an unknown future. Dents marred his body, long scrapes stretched along his once pristine paint. A survivor of a war he didn’t want, didn’t understand. Sanda couldn’t bring herself to hate him for spacing her. He was beautiful to her, with all his scars. She hoped he found peace.
Thirteen seconds.
Grippy was cold in her arms. Metal gives up heat faster than skin in the void. His little LED lights winked at her. He didn’t beep. Like her, he probably didn’t know what to say.
Twelve seconds.
Bubbles burst along her tongue. They should hurt, but they just tickled. The pain should be immense, all-encompassing. She’d already evacuated herself, a sordid mirror of her awakening on Bero. But the pain wasn’t coming. Nerve damage. That was never a good sign.
Eleven seconds.
Her trajectory locked in. She was headed back-first toward the hangar that’d trapped Bero. She’d never make it there in time. There was nothing out here to change her direction with. All she could do was turn her head, crane it over as hard as she could to get a look at the world she was leaving.
Ten seconds.
Ada Prime’s Casimir Gate filled the sky. Only from this position, she thought, can one truly appreciate the gate’s beauty. It was massive beyond her ability to articulate—even Keep Station, so large it housed hundreds of thousands, barely managed to eclipse a small stretch of the ring that was the frame of the gate. The light of it had always been Ada’s guiding star.
Nine seconds.
The gates were humanity’s greatest accomplishment. The bastions of their civilization. She thought of Lavaux, his leg, his words. The Keeper chip lurking in her skull hiding a secret not of the Keepers. She hoped Tomas would follow this thread. That he’d use his Nazca connections to discover what lay beneath the surface of a mystery she was only now glimpsing the edges of.
Eight seconds.
A gleam lay stationary in the space before her. A ship, a missile, a failing of her retinal system. Maybe this was the light, the narrowing of the tunnel, which many claimed to have seen before they died.
Seven seconds.
Vision began to go. She tried not to think about what that meant.
Six seconds.
How unfair, that she should not get the full fifteen.
INTERLUDE: ALEXANDRA
PRIME STANDARD YEAR ONE
PLUTO’S ORBIT
Alexandra Halston gripped the handle attached to the wall of the sleep pod and shoved, shooting herself “up” through the central body of the Reina Mora to the viewing room. Five years of travel, and the ship was bleeding the last of its velocity as it prepared to enter orbit around Pluto. When she’d been back on Earth drawing up plans, she’d wanted to orbit Pluto’s moon Charon to be closer to the gate. That argument had been intense, but eventually cooler heads—mostly Maria’s—had prevailed, and she’d acquiesced to getting as close as the Pluto orbit would let them.
All bitter feelings fled the second she’d woken that “morning” and gotten visual on the construction of the gate. Any closer would have been pointless, unable to see the full scale of the project. From this vantage, the gate—a Casimir, she was calling it, as a cheeky wink to the science she still did not understand—dominated the single viewing window of the Reina Mora.
It would be invisible to the naked eye, a thin line of black against the endless dark of space, if it weren’t for the construction bots lighting it up. Most of the building payload for the gate she’d sent in anticipation of her own journey had arrived in only a few short months. Light packages riding massive solar sails flung out from the Elequatorial lift and, as the world eventually discovered, the Lunar elevator as well.
While Lex had stewed in the slow, but safer, transport, the bots had gotten to work, following the piecemeal instructions programmed into them to create the object described by the Sphere in full glory. They had been finished for weeks, now, all preliminary checks cleared. Waiting while the Reina Mora bled velocity, and the governments and journalists of Earth drove themselves mad demanding she explain herself.
A whisper of war hounded her heels. Larger nations rattled sabers at the smaller nations—Puerto Rico had declared its independence—that housed her facilities. Nukes were rumored to be pointed at the Elequatorial lift. At the moon. The nations of the world promised to arrest her the second her feet were back on terra firma. They, of course, hadn’t a clue she had no intention of striding upon that blue marble once again. How could they?
They would see, she thought, as she kicked around, her short hair drifting in the zero gravity, that everything was about to change. That the petty squabbles of Earth would soon lose meaning.
“Ready?” Maria propelled herself into the room with a shove and gently play-collided with her, pressing her full lips against Lex’s as they bumped into the window. They turned together, both stuck to the spectacle outside the window like glue. Lex traced her finger across the scar tissue on the back of Maria’s neck, revealed by the lack of gravity lifting her hair, and smiled as she shivered.
“Yes. We only have so much time before we lose the view. It has to be now.”
Maria squeezed her hand and flipped with the ease of a gymnast, pushing off the wall to clear the view for the cameras. This moment would be Lex’s alone. Maria shifted around, adjusting the articulated arm that held their video camera in place. For the past five years, they and the crew of the Reina Mora had made Lex’s location ambiguous. Many suspected she was on the Reina Mora, but they had never been able to confirm.
This time, Lex forwent the ties she’d used to keep her hair corralled, the tight clothes she’d worn to make sure nothing drifted. She faced the camera down, the Casimir Gate lit up in the window over her shoulder, and let her hair drift. Her clothes bunch. Whatever happened next, the subterfuge was over.
Maria flicked the broadcast button. Lex began.
“People of Earth”—and she flashed that charming smile—“I bid you hello from the orbit of another world. Behind me”—she gestured to the gate—“the fruits of my, and all of Prime’s, long labor. You have questions, I know. But now is not the time for such things. Now, I bid you only: watch.”
Perfectly concerted, the lights around the ring intensified, Lex turning so that her profile could be seen—but not obstruct the view—as the Casimir Gate began, slowly, to power up.
Her heart thundered so hard in her head she could hear nothing else. As the light increased, the rings began to spin, looping one inside the other, until they’d dissolved into a blur of grey light—something brighter, crackling and blue-violet barely discernible in the center.
“Bring up the POV feed,” she demanded.
On a tablet Velcroed beside the window, the camera view of bot one snapped to life. A maelstrom of the visual spectrum assaulted the camera at first, a violent lash of color and chaos, and then, in a breath—calm. Serenity. The gates must be moving, power poured into them, but everything snapped into peace. Frozen in place, unmoving.
“Push it through,” Lex said.
Behind her, the hesitant voice of Erik, “The readings aren’t—”
“Now.”
The bot’s view shuddered as it was commanded to deploy its rockets. It flung toward
the center of the gate in a burst of speed, its camera flickering as it got closer and closer to the gate. Then—grey—not the blue of a cut feed, but visual snow, mottled and crackling. Lex held her breath, pressed her palm against the plex window.
The image resolved. Space, black as anything, shot through with stars in an arrangement that tickled at her memory. She knew that system. She just didn’t know it from this angle.
“Where is it?” Maria asked.
“Tau Ceti,” Lex said, and burst into happy tears.
CHAPTER 79
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
DAY FORTY-THREE
Get that damn robot out of here,” Papa Graham said.
His voice jarred her out of unconsciousness. Sanda tried to open her eyes, but they were swollen shut, an unsettling liquid dribbling along her cheeks. Her tongue filled her mouth, cutting off air. She tried to take a breath through her nose but that was nearly swollen shut, too. She jerked, gasping, arms spasming as they tightened around the rigid body of Grippy.
“Forget the robot,” Tomas said. Strange, that she would hallucinate Tomas hanging around with Graham, the grumpier of her dads. “Do you have a pressure chamber? A suit we could throw on her? If all else fails, we could stick her in the airlock halfway chamber.”
“What kind of racket you think I’m running here? I’ve got real medical facilities. NutriBath.”
“Then stop jaw-wagging and go prep the fucking thing,” Tomas growled. The voices were muted, as if they were speaking through mouths stuffed with marshmallows. A tinny ringing persisted in her ears.
Someone stomped off hard enough to vibrate the floor she lay on. A mask was pressed over her face, hard plastic digging into the tender flesh of her bruised cheeks, and then a gust of cold, pure O2 rammed itself up her nose.
“Easy,” Tomas said. Grippy was pried from her arms. She fumbled, reached for the robot, the only thing she knew was real in her half-wakened state. Tomas took both of her hands in his. He didn’t squeeze, but she didn’t need the pressure to realize what was wrong with her hands. Her fingers were swollen, massive sausages with dried and peeling skin. Everything was cold. That realization came to her slowly. Not painfully cold—no, she’d gone beyond pain again.
She tried to part her lips to ask what had happened, if Tomas and Graham were real or the hallucinations of a dying mind, but her mouth was already opened. Her straining cracked her lips. Warm blood trickled along her chin.
“Hey, don’t try to talk. We’ve got you. You’re safe. I’ll explain later. Just don’t die on me, okay, Major?”
Safe. Hah. That was definitely a dying mind trying to comfort her, keep her from panicking. Funny thing, a mind trying to keep itself calm. It’s not like it mattered. If she were going to die anyway, maybe she wanted to go out a screaming, gibbering mess. She settled on calm. It wasn’t like she had the strength to try any other method.
Footsteps vibrated back toward them. “Gotta get her to the thing, it’s a built-in.”
“That’s a shit design.”
“Work now, complain later.”
They lifted her. No, no, no, she wanted to scream. Her skin stretched to its limit, every limb and cavity a sloshing mass of fluid. She was a balloon set to burst, every slight jostle threatening to be the one to break her.
Okay. Maybe she wasn’t dead yet. But she sure as shit felt like she would be any minute now.
“Take it easy,” Graham growled.
“Likewise, old man,” Tomas said.
Good to know the men in her life were getting along. Her head lolled, someone’s hand darted in to support it, fingers brushed the incision Lavaux had made.
“Shit,” Tomas said, “someone tried to crack her head open.”
“Someone? We know it was Lavaux. I’m going to rip that bastard’s testicles out through his ears and choke him to death with them.”
She wanted to tell them not to bother, Lavaux was definitely dead. Unless they’d picked him up, too, he’d been spaced right alongside her. But then she remembered the flesh knitting back into place around his bone, and her head hurt too much to figure out if the vacuum was enough to kill a cockroach like Lavaux.
Her body shifted. A different kind of cold seeped up beneath her, around her, flooded over her and into her, soothing aches and cuts she didn’t even know she had. Her head went under, the O2 mask was taken away. Gel flooded over her face, seeped beneath her sealed-shut eyelids, crept into the cracks in her lips, swirled around her bloated tongue, and ventured up the broken paths inside her nose.
The human survival instinct was a good few thousand years behind technological advancements. She thrashed, tried to take a breath but sucked down NutriGel. Luckily, the medis who’d made the stuff had prepared for human folly. Sedatives washed through her. Consciousness slipped away.
CHAPTER 80
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
A DAY TOO FAR GONE
He’d watched her go. He’d stood up there, beaming smiles upon a crowd of sycophants, and watched her take Cepko in hand and disappear into the garden. Into the night—into an uncertain future that had resulted in her battling for her life while he tried to keep too many in the crowd from wondering where she was, from noticing that she—their hero, their star of the hour—had fled into the black.
He should have been there.
Over and over again, the images replayed themselves. Plastered all over the news, there’d been no possible cover-up this time. Bero tearing the station’s dock apart as he lurched for freedom. Sanda falling, falling, unprotected into open space, and then Graham’s cargo hauler swooping in to snatch her out of the end of everything. Thank everything that ever was for Callie. She’d gotten through. She’d kept her promise. Underneath the table, he tapped out a quick text to her: Anaia Lionetti. Look.
He hit send.
Had Graham succeeded? Biran didn’t know. Didn’t want to know—because if Graham contacted him now, it would be to say he was coming home, or hiding out somewhere until things calmed down. There would be no good news in that call. In that call, Sanda was dead. There was no point in hiding, in secrets.
And so he prayed for silence. For unknowing. Because in uncertainty, Sanda had survived that fall.
What he knew—knew for certain—was that in her flight, Sanda had given him what he needed to survive his fall, too.
Big sisters. Couldn’t help but look out for him, even when she was fleeing for her life.
“Are you listening?” Olver snapped.
“No,” he said, truthfully. He’d been replaying that scene—Sanda’s fall, the hauler’s desperate flight—over and over and over again. Nothing the director had to say could ever be half so important.
Olver slammed his fist onto the table, making everyone gathered jump. The Protectorate, together again with General Anford. But not Lavaux. Never again Lavaux. Slatter had been right, there would be an opening on the Protectorate after all.
“God-fucking-damnit, son, I’m telling you you’re dying. Do you understand? Do you understand what you’ve done?”
“Oh, yes.” He held up a hand and ticked off the points one by one on his fingers. “Allowed unauthorized access to a Keeper miniMRI. Contributed to the destruction of the station’s dock. Contributed to the escape of The Light…” He hmmed. “Am I missing anything?”
“Accessory to the death of Keeper Lavaux,” General Anford said. She had the look of a woman who hadn’t slept in days. Biran felt guilty about that. It was the only thing he felt guilty about.
“Ah, right.”
“Murder, Biran. Murder.” The director sat heavily, his shoulders slumping as he raked a hand through his hair. “Lavaux was a good man. He didn’t deserve to be spaced.”
“He attacked Sanda. She defended herself.”
“That’s not what the security footage says,” Vladsen cut in.
Biran met his gaze steadily. “Such things can be doctored.”
“Who would do such a thing?”
“I’ll come to that,” Biran said, and turned away from Vladsen, ignoring the concern pinching that man’s face. He’d lost his leader and tried to cover up what his leader had done in his final moments. Biran would fix that, would set it all to rights soon enough. But now he needed to fix his situation. “But first, none of you are asking the right questions.”
“We have all the information we need,” Olver said.
“What questions?” Anford said, leaning forward.
“Whose chip?”
“What does that even mean?”
“You know my sister accessed my miniMRI and scanned herself. What you don’t know is the nature of the data she recovered. I don’t know that, either. But I know whose chip it was.”
“A fake crafted by Icarion, no doubt,” Olver said, waving a dismissive hand. “We pulled the data she accessed. It was a garbled mess. Meaningless.”
“I doubt that.” From inside his coat pocket, Biran pulled out an old manila folder. Sanda had always had a love for the old-fashioned nature of paper, and he was grateful for the feel of it now. The tactile, solid, truth in his hands. He laid it down upon the table, turning it so they could all see the name written on the front tab. “Rayson Kenwick. The chip was his.”
“Impossible,” Olver said, his face creasing with real confusion. “I know that name. Unremarkable man, died ages ago.”
“Not exactly. He faked his death and fled. Did you know he was a participant in the Imm Project?”
“A botched affair.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. The point is, he fled because the chip in his head wasn’t a Keeper chip—it hid something else. Something we can’t access, and something Lavaux knew about. Lavaux was looking for The Light, yes, but only because he believed it the last known location of Kenwick’s chip. He switched gears when he realized the truth.”
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