by Nancy Kress
The Raptor and the third Landry ship began moving toward the gate.
Scott Berman appeared on the viewscreen. “Martinez, what the hell—”
“Later,” he said, and his comm officer cut the link.
Martinez’s world shrank to seven dots on a mental datascreen: three Landry ships. Sophia’s ship. His own. The larger dot of New Utah. And the gate, a lacy sliver shimmer in the blackness of space.
The Savannah tore through space toward that shimmer. The Eagle pursued it, not closing distance, but not lengthening it either. The other three Landry ships also moved toward the gate. The Skyhawk, closest, reached the gate first and turned to face the oncoming vessels.
“Fire on my command,” Martinez said.
He was going to vaporize Sophia’s ship. Sophia, Sloan’s daughter, whom Sloan had wanted him to marry. Sophia, who had conceived of and manufactured a monstrous bioweapon and was willing to use it not only on the Landry worlds but on her own citizens—Sloan’s citizens, whom Martinez was required to protect. He had no choice; he could not let her escape back through the gate.
And after he vaporized Sophia, the K-weapon aboard the Eagle would vaporize the Skyhawk.
DiCaria said steadily, “Savannah in five units of firing range…four…”
Pettigrew yelled, with none of DiCaria’s steadiness, “Something is happening to space!”
63
* * *
THE ELEVENTH GATE
Consciousness consists of the ability to be influenced by its previous state and to influence its next state.
The Observer can act, or not act. If it acts, it may expend so much energy that it loses all coherence and becomes too diffuse to exist.
If it does not act, these tiny nodes will destroy each other, and perhaps many more.
The ships turn to face each other, in order to fire.
Once, the Observer was as they are now.
The Observer collapses a section of its own field of consciousness.
As always, observation changes the quantum fields. A dense concentration of spacetime forms, created of matter and energy, as waves collapse. It evolves, in a nanosecond, into matter and energy, as the Big Bang once did. It is, and is not, a black hole, made not of particles but of proto-consciousness growing ever more dense. Now it is dense enough to affect space around it, which ripples and twists and squashes.
With the last of its energy, the Observer stops all of spacetime from collapsing into the object. The Observer contains the rippling and twisting and squashing in a bubble, a sharply defined event horizon. Within the bubble, around the still forming object, spacetime obeys the laws of physics. As matter increases, time slows.
The Observer loses all energy, all coherence, and ceases to exist.
• • •
“He’s gone,” Tara said. And then, again, “He’s gone.”
64
* * *
NEW UTAH
A shimmer, almost like a gate. But not a gate, because there was the New Utah-New Yosemite gate apart from…this. The shimmer coalesced, turned dark at its center. Then all around it grew a…a what? A nothing that was nonetheless something, felt rather than seen. And all the data screens went crazy.
Gravity. The thing was generating enormous gravity.
“Retreat!” Martinez said. “Now!”
They barely made it. If DiCaria had not been so good at the conn, they would not have. Martinez felt his ship slow, even as the drive delivered maximum power. He felt the pull in his bones, and in the bones of his ship. Pettigrew said something and his words took minutes to emerge, hours, days.
“Ssssssssssiiiiiirrrrrr…bbblllaaaccckkkk hhhoooo—”
Then the ship gave a tremendous lurch and they were out of whatever it was. A moment later the data screens cleared. Martinez grabbed at a bulkhead to right himself and stared at the viewscreen.
No one, ever, had seen anything like this. No one. Ever.
The four other ships had been caught in the event horizon of whatever this was, the Eagle facing the Savannah, the other two farther off. All four were motionless. From the Eagle, a bright beam of radiation emerged, truncated and frozen in the act of aiming at the Skyhawk. The beam did not move, and neither did anything else within the bubble the new black hole—no, not a black hole, there was no protective bubble around a black hole. Something unknown with some of the same properties. Martinez knew enough physics to realize that the four ships were all falling toward the thing, but so slowly it might take years, decades, centuries to reach it. In a four-dimensional universe, compressing space dilated time.
Jane Landry and Sophia Peregoy would face each other in war until both of them were crushed by one of the primal forces of the universe.
Someone on the bridge gasped, “How…”
All at once, Martinez lurched, falling almost off his feet. The ship had not jerked. But for him the universe had just turned upside down, spilling out everything he thought he knew.
“Sir…?”
Martinez regained his footing. But he heard his voice quaver as he said, “Open comm link to New Utah.”
• • •
The planet was intact. A tsunami hit the continent and the tides were tremendous, swamping several rocky islands. However, Cascade City was far enough inland that it could cope with the backwash coming up the river from the coast. Scott Berman, listening intently to all that Martinez told him, already sounded stronger.
“Send the image,” Berman said. “Our orbital probes are gone, or have stopped transmitting.”
Martinez sent the eerie image: four ships caught in a bubble, the barely discernible dark thing at its center, everything frozen in space and time. Although to everyone on the ships, time was passing normal-to-them—or was it? Ship’s computer said the math did not add up. Not the math for the creation of a black hole, not the math for how much and where it exerted gravity, not the math for the survival of the planet, the gate, and the Skyhawk just outside that bubble. This was no normal black hole, no normal cosmic disturbance, no more than the gates themselves were “normal.” This was inexplicable.
Philip Anderson?
Everything Martinez believed, everything he was, rejected that idea. But he had no other.
No one on the Skyhawk could stop looking at the image. Martinez would be glad when he could finally pass through the gate and leave the image behind.
He said to Berman, “I can’t send the planetary-defense weaponry back to you.” Cascade City was still a colony in rebellion to Peregoy Corporation.
“I know. But we kept enough to defend ourselves.”
To defend themselves against Landry and Peregoys alike.
“Berman, I’ll do what I can for you at Capitol City. But I want you to send up to me one of the PCSS officers, Lieutenant JG Serena Drucker. She’s the sister of my executive officer.”
Berman hesitated before agreeing. “All right. Are you going to infect the other Peregoy worlds with the cowpox option?”
“I don’t have any choice.” Even as he spoke to Berman, Martinez was receiving reports of his crew starting to sicken with the epidemic that had been carried upstairs by DiCaria and his team. A few had gone to sick bay, although the others were carrying on: individual immune-system variations. Dr. Glynn would be kept busy.
Berman said, “Good luck, Martinez.”
“You, too.”
He broke the link, wishing that Scott Berman was not a pseudo-Libertarian rebel but instead an officer serving under Martinez. Although Berman wouldn’t have appreciated the thought.
When he’d seen to everything possible on the bridge, Martinez went to Caitlin’s cabin.
“You look terrible,” she said. “Luis, you’re getting sick.”
“It’s nothing. Just a headache.”
“So far. Sit down before you fall down.”
“I’m not going to fall down.”
“Not if I hold you up. Luis, what happens now?”
“I sit down.”
> The room spun, and a brief vertigo swept over him, shocking him. He was never ill.
“I’m going to call your exec.”
“Don’t…I’m…just…”
“Who’s next in command?”
But he’d passed out, falling from the chair onto the deck and then into the black hole of his own body. He never knew when the Skyhawk passed through the gate to New Yosemite.
• • •
The luck of the genetic draw.
Martinez was the sickest person on the Skyhawk, felled by the cowpox option. He wouldn’t die, but his fever was high enough to cause a brief period of delirium before meds took hold. When Dr. Glynn had finished with him, Caitlin sat by his bedside in sick bay, holding his hand, and to hell with anyone in the PCSS who eyed her distrustfully.
She was hardly ill at all, no more than a heavy cold would have caused. That was true of almost everyone else aboard ship and on New Utah. DiCaria, acting captain, didn’t seem to have any reaction at all to J. randi mansueti. Not that he would have told Caitlin if he had.
“Amy,” Martinez mumbled. “Gone.”
His dead wife. Listening, watching his face, Caitlin knew she was learning more about Martinez than he would have voluntarily told her, this soon. Or perhaps at all. He’d loved Amy. He accepted that she was in his past.
Henderson, who had morphed from dour guard to dour messenger, stepped into the tiny curtained alcove and said, “Message from Lieutenant-Commander DiCaria. Approaching the gate.”
“Thank you,” Caitlin said. “Tell Mr. DiCaria there’s no change in Captain Martinez.”
“Doctor already said.” Henderson left.
Unfriendly coldness was something Caitlin had better get used to. If she stayed with Luis, there would be a lot of it.
Did she want to stay with Luis? Did he want her to? Where? They had different lives, on different planets. However, if Peregoy worlds would be unfriendly to her, Landry worlds might be deadly. Caitlin had helped stop one—maybe two—epidemics. But she had also aided and abetted a wartime enemy to imprison the commander-in-chief of the Landry fleet in a time-dilated, slow-motion attack that might never end.
The viewscreen on the sick-bay bulkhead had remained dark. Caitlin couldn’t bear to look at that frozen tableau in space, four ships caught in an astronomical anomaly that no one could explain. That should not exist. Jane’s—what? You couldn’t call it “death,” exactly—would haunt Caitlin forever.
But the Skyhawk, its radiation weapons now jettisoned, was approaching the New Utah-New Yosemite gate. That would be on the viewscreen now. “On,” Caitlin said, and watched the mysterious familiar shimmer grow larger and larger, until it engulfed the Skyhawk, the ship emerged, and another Peregoy world spun below her.
65
* * *
THE ELEVENTH GATE
It was over now. Rachel had done what she could, everything she could. Whatever had happened, it had occurred far from the eleventh gate, wherever Philip-that-had-been was stopping Jane, or was not stopping Jane. Was stopping Tara’s war, or was not stopping Tara’s war. Had Rachel ever told anyone else what Tara had done, how all this had started? She couldn’t remember.
She was so tired.
But the pain had gone, leaving only the tiredness, and that was not so bad. Tiredness meant sleep, meant restful quiet, and Rachel was ready for that. She was ready to let go. Others must take over now, Annelise and Celia and Caitlin, if Caitlin was alive still…
Caitlin was alive. Caitlin was a little girl, frolicking with Paul in the garden on Galt, kicking a ball to her father and sisters. Annelise shouted, “Here, Daddy, here!” while Jane laughed and dove for the ball into a bed of bright red boli flowers. Paul kicked the recovered ball to Annelise, who missed it, and it went sailing high into the blue sky, so high that it became a speck, a darker blue swoop among the clouds, and then a bird.
“Gran!” someone shouted but it didn’t matter because Rachel, smiling, was the bird, soaring high above everything below, strong and free, swooping out into space itself.
Free.
• • •
Hallie Dunn put her hand on Tara’s arm. “I’m so sorry, Ms. Landry.”
Tara shrugged off the hand and turned her head away. Tears streamed from her eyes, snot from her nose.
Dr. Wexler said, “We can bury her here in space, or on Prometheus, if you prefer. The ship doesn’t have any facilities for long-term storing of—”
“You must be from Polyglot,” Tara said, too harshly. “On Galt, we don’t bury. We cremate.”
“I—”
“We’re taking her back to Galt,” Tara said, “and putting her ashes in the family vault, next to my father’s and mother’s and grandfather’s ashes. That’s what she would want. That’s what we’re going to do.
“Anything else would just be wrong.”
66
* * *
NEW CALIFORNIA
By the time the ship reached New California, Martinez had recovered, or told himself that he had. He woke from a deep sleep to find Caitlin asleep in a chair by his bed. Had she been there before? Dimly, he remembered that she had. Slumped in her chair, head thrown back at a weird angle, snoring faintly, she sent through him a wave of tenderness and desire, strong as a perigean tide.
My life will change.
He linked to the bridge. “Captain Martinez speaking. Status report.”
DiCaria’s voice came from the wrister. “Sir, we’re approaching the New Yosemite-New California gate. Are you resuming command?”
“Yes. Proceeding now to the bridge.” Damn all doctors. He’d slept, probably drugged, through the entire New Yosemite passage. But he found that now, perhaps as a result of all that sleep, he could rise from bed and, shakily, dress himself. As he pulled on his boots, Caitlin woke.
“Luis?”
“Are you all right? Not ill?”
“I’m fine. But you shouldn’t—”
“Yes, I should. I’ll come to your cabin when I can.”
“Dr. Glynn said—”
“I love you,” he said roughly, and left.
DiCaria briefed him. The Green Hills of Earth remained at New Yosemite. The Zeus, still uninfected until ordered to become so, had already departed for New California. There was nothing Martinez could do right now about Sophia’s biolab, wherever it was, but at least he and Vondenberg could protect the Peregoy worlds against the Landry epidemic. He linked with Sean Mueller and New Yosemite Planetary Defense.
This was not going to be an easy explanation.
And at New California, Martinez would have to explain to Sloan what had happened to his daughter.
• • •
“Director, Captain Martinez reporting.”
“Luis?” At the message from his wrister, Sloan rose from the conference table. Fifteen shocked faces swiveled toward him. Why did everyone look so startled? Then Sloan realized it must be because his own face, for the first time in months, looked suffused with joy.
He said brusquely, “Irene, carry on with the rest of the meeting agenda.”
“Yes, sir,” said Irene Silva, Peregoy Corporation Chief Operating Officer, not quite keeping astonishment out of her voice: The director had only just resumed control of the corporation after the unexplained absences of both himself and Sophia, and now, at only his second Board of Directors meeting, he was relinquishing it again?
Only temporarily, Sloan thought as he strode from the room to the privacy of his office. Irene Silva had done a good job as acting CEO, and that was due, Sloan knew, to his own good management. He’d chosen and trained his executives well. They’d kept the corporation’s complex businesses operating throughout Sloan’s self-imposed sequestration, throughout the protests that had now virtually stopped. SueLin had calmed the city enough for Sloan to ease Security even as he repealed Sophia’s arrests and restrictions and censorship. Irene had carried on ably throughout Sloan’s grief as he learned what Sophia had—
No. Don’t
think about it.
“Director?” Martinez said from Sloan’s wrister.
“I’m here.” He activated the wallscreen in his office and there was Luis’s face, thinner and older, dark rings around his eyes, but there.
Here.
Martinez said, “The Skyhawk just cleared the New Yosemite-New California gate. The Green Hills of Earth is in orbit around New Yosemite. The Zeus should have returned to you by now. Sir, I’ll be in Capital City tomorrow and can make a full report then. But first I need to tell you about Sophia, and I’m afraid it’s—”
“I already know,” Sloan said, and now there was no stopping the pain, so piercing that for a moment he couldn’t breathe. He stared blindly at the yellow eyes of the stuffed wolves across his office, and the light glinted off them, back at him. Anguish over Sophia would claw at him the rest of his life. “I sent a scout to New Utah, and it beat you back here.”
Martinez said, “I’m sorry, sir.” His tone was gentle, but Sloan heard, too, the relief that Martinez did not have to be the one to tell Sloan of his daughter’s treachery, attack, or weird and endless imprisonment in a frozen moment.
Sloan said, “At New Yosemite, did you pick up my reports of conditions here on New California?”
“Yes, sir, I did. Both military and corporate reports.”
Reprieved from open emotion, the two men returned to the world of facts and operations, things that could be understood, data that could be put to use. Much would have to wait until they met in person. Then Sloan could tell Martinez of his co-opting of much of Sophia’s intel network and dismantling the rest. Of finding, through bribery and intimidation, the location of her weapons biolab on a station in deep space, and destroying it. Of SueLin, still widely perceived to be the CEO of Peregoy Corporation, a situation that could not be allowed to continue much longer. Of the insulting message that had come back with Sloan’s scout, from the so-called Movement on New Utah. Above all, of the plan that was desperately needed to keep Peregoy Corporation intact and profitable, while restoring peace to the Eight Worlds.