Джеймс Кори - Leviathan Falls

“They aren’t responding,” Alex said.

They were both on the ops deck. The lighting was low, though she noticed that Alex had started keeping even the low settings a little higher than he had when they’d both had younger eyes.

“Could be good, could be bad,” Naomi said.

“Sure wish I could tell which it was.”

“If they start chasing us with their guns blazing, then it was bad.”

Alex nodded. “Yeah. That makes sense. I just wish they’d say ‘Hey, we decided not to chase you down and kill you.’ Just out of courtesy.”

“At this range, we’ll have plenty of time to watch violent death barrel down on us. You won’t miss anything.”

“Well, thank God for that.”

With every minute the Black Kite didn’t answer and didn’t turn its drives in pursuit, Naomi felt the fear of capture or destruction fade, and the fear of transit grow. It was hard to believe that there had been a time when her life hadn’t been moving from one trauma to the next like walking on stepping-stones in an ornamental garden. There had been whole decades when passing through the ring gates hadn’t been more than a passing unease. Yes, if there was too much traffic, the ship could go dutchman—quietly vanish from existence for who-knew-where or no place. But it had been the same scale of threat as anything. They could hit a micrometeor that broke their drive. The magnetic bottle could fail and spill a free fusion reaction into the body of the ship. She could have a stroke.

Once, there had been rules about how the gates worked. Human rules about what traffic was allowed through. Inhuman rules about how much matter and energy could pass through in a certain period of time without angering the dark, ship-eating gods.

All of that was gone now.

“How many ships you think they have looking for us?” Alex asked.

“You mean how many ships do they own, or how many are in the specific hunt group tasked with trying to find us?”

Alex was silent, then made a soft clicking sound with his tongue. “Probably wouldn’t like either answer, would I?”

“How long until we reach the gate?”

“If we don’t brake before the transit, about eighteen hours.”

Naomi unstrapped from her crash couch and stood up. The deck rose up under her, thrust gravity at just over half a g. “I’m going to get some rest. Call me if someone decides to kill us.”

“Will do,” Alex said as she headed for the lift. And then, “How’s Jim?”

Naomi looked back. Alex’s face was tinted blue by the light of his screen. The thin white stubble of hair clinging to the side and back of his head reminded her of pictures of snow on rich soil, and the gentleness in his eyes told her the question hadn’t really been a question.

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “But what can I do?”

She made her way down to the crew decks, listening to the reassuring hum of the ship around her. After so many years in close company with the Roci , she could judge the health of the ship by its sounds. Even if she hadn’t known already that they were running the drive just a little out of balance, she’d have been able to pick up on it from the way the decks muttered and creaked.

When Jim had been taken prisoner by Laconia, Naomi had mourned him. Mourned the version of herself that had him at her side. When, against all odds, he’d come back, she hadn’t really been ready. It was something she hadn’t let herself hope for, and so she hadn’t thought deeply about how it would be.

The crash couch was rigged up for the two of them to share. For extended hard burns, one or the other of them might take one of the spare cabins or—more often—a couch on the ops deck. The doubled couch wasn’t built for optimum function so much as quality of life. The pleasure of waking up at someone’s side. The intimacy of watching them sleep, feeling them breathe. Knowing on a cellular level that she wasn’t alone.

Jim was sleeping when she came into the room. He still looked thinner than she remembered him being before his time in prison. Before her time in self-exile. It might only have been the graying of his hair, but the skin of his eyelids seemed darker than it had been before, as though he’d been bruised in a way that wouldn’t heal. Even in sleep, there was a rigidity to his body, like he was braced against an attack.

She told herself that he was recovering, and that was probably true. She could feel the passing days and weeks changing her too. Letting her expand a little bit more into a place she hadn’t had access to when they had all been apart. It was different than it had been. Bobbie was gone. Clarissa was gone. Amos was transformed in ways that made her skin crawl if she let herself think about it too much. And Teresa and her dog were there, half permanent passengers and half threat. Even so, this was closer to the life she’d had than she had any right to expect. A version of her family, back together. Sometimes that was a comfort. Sometimes it was just a way to be nostalgic for what hadn’t returned.

If they could stop, recover, decompress, who knows what else they might have been able to salvage, but they couldn’t.

She lay down beside him, her head pillowed on one folded arm. Jim shifted, yawned, cracked open one eye. His smile was the same—boyish, bright, delighted to see her. This time is a gift , she thought. And she smiled back.

“Hey, sexy lady,” Jim said. “What did I miss?”

Years , she thought. We missed years. Instead of the truth, she smiled.

“Nothing critical,” she said.

“I really want to slow us down,” Alex said.

Naomi, in the galley, was putting the remains of her meal into the recycler. They had cut thrust, and the whir of the vacuum sucking the stray bits of food into the system was almost as loud as Alex’s voice over the comms. On the wall screen, the Kronos ring gate hung against a wide field of stars, the weird dark, twisting mass at its perimeter visible only because of the Roci ’s enhancements. With each passing second, the magnification dropped. The ring was a thousand klicks across, their transit was counting down from twelve minutes, and it still would have been invisible to the naked eye.

“You can tap the brakes if you want to,” Naomi said. “But if there’s unfriendly company in the ring space, it’ll just make us easier to hit.”

“I want to charge up the rail gun,” Alex said. “But you won’t let me, so I’m sublimating.”

“You could recheck the torpedoes and PDCs.”

“Amos and Teresa are doing that already. I don’t want to seem like I don’t trust them.”

“You could arm the hull charges and be ready to blow the disguise plates off.”

Alex was silent for a long, slow breath. Across the little room, Jim gave her an approving thumbs-up.

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Alex said. “Really want my rail gun up, though.”

“When we’re on the other side, you can charge it to your heart’s content,” Naomi said.

“Promises, promises.” A click said that Alex had dropped the connection. The magnification on the ring gate continued its slow fall. Naomi called up a little inset window pointing back. The noise from their drive cone made the image blurry, grainy, and approximate, but even so, she could see that the Black Kite wasn’t moving toward them.

“I’m not seeing a repeater,” Jim said. “They blew ours up, but it doesn’t look like they dropped one.”

“I noticed that. They aren’t worried about coordinating with anyone on the other side. So there’s at least a chance we aren’t burning straight into a trap.”

“Yay!”

Ten minutes remained.

“Ready?” Naomi asked. In answer, Jim pulled himself to a wall handhold and pushed off toward the central lift. Naomi opened a connection to Amos. “We’re taking stations on the ops deck. Not that we’re expecting any trouble, but if there is some…”