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A
“Love your accent, ma’am,” Chris replied. He needed time to build up to whatever it was that he’d approached her about, so A
“I grew up in Moscow,” she replied. “Though after two years on Europa I can almost do Belter now, sa sa?”
Chris laughed, some of the tension draining out of his face. “That’s not bad, ma’am. But you get those guys going at full speed, I can’t understand a word the ski
A
“All right,” Chris said. “Pastor A
They sat together in companionable silence for a few moments while A
“You heard the alarm, right?” he finally said. “Bet it woke you up.”
“It’s why I’m here,” A
“Yeah. Action stations. It’s because of the dusters— I mean, Martians, you know.”
“Martians?” A
“We’re in weapons range of their fleet now,” he said. “So we go on alert. We can’t share sky with the dusters anymore without going on alert. Not since, you know, Ganymede.”
A
“And that Ring, you know, it’s already killed somebody. I mean, just a dumb as sand ski
A
“Sure. Of course. But that ain’t it.”
A
“I mean,” Chris said, breaking into her reverie, “that ain’t all of it anyway.”
“What else?” A
“The Ring didn’t put us on alert,” he said. “It’s the Martians. Even with that thing out there, we’re still thinking about shooting each other. That’s pretty fucked up. Sorry. Messed up.”
“It seems like we should be able to see past our human differences when we’re confronted with something like this, doesn’t it?”
Chris nodded and squeezed her hand tighter, but said nothing.
“Chris, would you like to pray with me?”
He nodded and lowered his head, closing his eyes. When she’d finished, he said, “I know I’m not the only Methodist on the ship. Do you, you know, hold services?”
I do now.
“Sunday, at 10 a.m., in conference room 41,” she said, making a mental note to ask someone if she could use conference room 41 on Sunday mornings.
“I’ll see if I can get the time off,” Chris said with a smile. “Thank you, ma’am. Pastor A
“It was nice talking to you, Chris.” You just gave me a reason to be here.
When Chris left, A
“Hi,” A
The girl stared up, as if the question were a difficult one. A
“I saw you sitting here,” A
The girl jerked to her feet like a malfunctioning machine. Her eyes were flat, and her head tilted a degree. A
“I’m sorry,” A
“You don’t know me,” the girl replied. “You don’t know anything.” Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides, the tendons in her neck quivering like plucked guitar strings.
“You’re right,” A
Other people in the room were staring at them now, and A
“What the fuck was that all about?” someone behind A
Maybe the girl had woken up from a nightmare too, A
Chapter Thirteen: Bull
Arriving at the Ring was a political fiction, but that didn’t keep it from being real. There was no physical boundary to say that this was within the realm of the object. There was no port to dock at. The Behemoth’s sensory arrays had been sucking in data from the Ring since before they’d left Tycho. The Martian science ships and Earth military forces that had been there before the doomed Belter kid had become its first casualty were still there, where they had been, but resupplied now. The new Martian ships had joined them, matched orbit, and were hanging quietly in the sky. The Earth flotilla, like the Behemoth, was in the last part of the burn, pulling up to whatever range they’d chosen to stop at. To say, We have come across the vast abyss to float at this distance and now we are here. We’ve arrived.
As far as anyone could tell, the Ring didn’t give a damn.
The structure itself was eerie. The surface was a series of twisting ridges that spiraled around its body. At first they appeared uneven, almost messy. The mathematicians, architects, and physicists assured them all that there was a deep regularity there: the height of the ridges in a complex harmony with the width and the spacing between the peaks and valleys. The reports were breathless, finding one layer of complexity after another, the intimations of intention and design all laid bare without any hint of what it all might mean.
“The official Martian reports have been very conservative,” the science officer said. His name was Chan Bao-Zhi, and on Earth, he’d have been Chinese. Here, he was a Belter from Pallas Station. “They’ve given a lot of summary and maybe a tenth of the data they’ve collected. Fortunately, we’ve been able to observe most of their experiments and make our own analysis.”
“Which Earth will have been doing too,” Ashford said.
“Without doubt, sir,” Chan said.
Like any ritual, the staff meeting carried more significance than information. The heads of all the major branches of the Behemoth’s structural tree were present: Sam for engineering, Bull for security, Chan for the research teams, Be
“What have we got?” Ashford said. “Short form.”
“It’s fucking weird, sir,” Chan said, and everyone chuckled. “Our best analysis is that the Ring is an artificially sustained Einstein-Rosen bridge. You go through the Ring, you don’t come out the other side here.”
“So it’s a gate,” Ashford said.
“Yes, sir. It appears that the protomolecule or Phoebe bug or whatever you want to call it was launched at the solar system several billion years ago, aiming for Earth with the intention of hijacking primitive life to build a gateway. We’re positing that whoever created the protomolecule did it as a first step toward making travel to the solar system more convenient and practical later.”