Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance. True to his word, Caldswell had taken us through a series of short hyperspace jumps followed by a long stopover at Sevalis Station Seven, an enormous dual-gate station in orbit above a planet so built-up you could barely see the ground. But station docks followed the same rules as planetary layovers, which meant Rashid and I were on duty from the moment the Fool latched in.
Honestly, I was relieved work kept me from going straight to the doctor. Admitting to yourself that you’re not well is nothing compared to a doctor officially pronouncing you bonkers. After all, a bad mental evaluation could ruin my chances with the Devastators forever. I knew I’d have to face the music eventually, but for now, I was more than happy to procrastinate. Especially since I was procrastinating in such an interesting place.
Sevalis Station Seven was the biggest space station I’d ever seen, and it was packed floor to rafters with birds. I’d never even realized so many creatures could live in one space, but just as Mabel said, the aeons seemed perfectly happy living packed in together. They came in every sort, too: big, beautiful males like the ones Basil and I had had our run-in with on Ample, rust-colored females who stayed together like their lives depended on it, even aeon chicks. The latter moved through the station in huge groups of peeping yellow puffballs shepherded by sharp-looking gray females, and they were probably the cutest things I’d ever seen. If it wouldn’t have caused an international incident, I would have grabbed one and hugged it.
But interesting as the packed station was, the planet below was even crazier. I’d thought Wuxia was dense, but the Terran core world was nothing compared to what the aeons had built here. Every bit of land on the planet had been taken over by huge cities. They’d even built out into the oceans, creating huge floating complexes that bobbed on the tides. It was so overbuilt, I thought for sure this must be one of the aeon core worlds, but when I asked Basil about it, he’d laughed in my face and told me this was just a fishing colony.
“A fishing colony?” I cried, staring down at the cities that were so large and vertical they acted like mountain ranges, creating rain shadows behind them as they turned back the clouds. “How is that a fishing colony?”
“This is nothing,” Basil replied. “I mean, you can still see the water in places, and the icecaps haven’t been utilized at all. The colonies closer to the Seval are much bigger.”
I didn’t see how that was possible, but the captain agreed with Basil.
“Aeons like to nest in piles,” he said drolly, leaning back in his chair. “Ample was open because they needed the space to farm. Most other aeon colony worlds are like this.”
I shook my head in wonder. I simply could not fathom living like this when there was a whole universe out there to expand to. I was about to ask Caldswell how much longer he was planning on docking when I heard the bridge door open.
I glanced back through my camera, expecting to see Rashid. But it wasn’t my fellow security officer. It was Ren.
The cook was right behind her, but I ignored him. Actually, I’d been ignoring him since his stunt last night, but even if I hadn’t, Ren would have won. The captain’s daughter never came to the bridge. She was here now, though, walking with more purpose than I’d ever seen in her as she strode down the steps to whisper something in her father’s ear.
Caldswell’s face had gone suspiciously blank when his daughter entered the room. That didn’t change as she talked, but I could see his fingers tightening on the worn arms of his chair. Whatever she had to say didn’t take long, and the moment she was done, Caldswell burst into action.
“Basil,” he ordered, swinging his chair around to the console in front of him. “Get me the gate commander, emergency channel. Then call over to the dock office and tell them I want immediate takeoff clearance.”
Basil stared at the captain for a second, which was a second too long for Caldswell. “Now!” the captain snapped.
The aeon jumped and grabbed his headset, whistling into it frantically. But the captain wasn’t done. “Nova,” he said, hitting the com. “Have these coordinates ready for the gate when it patches in for the jump: 34H-3848-A998-22K7-8801.”
Nova wasn’t even on the bridge. Last I’d checked, she’d been meditating in our room. But when the captain finished reciting the string of coordinates, all Nova said over the com was, “Yes, captain.”
By this point, I’d already started for the door, signaling Rashid to meet me in the cargo bay. You never went anywhere good when your captain changed course this quickly, and I wanted us ready to roll out. The cook and Ren were already gone, thank the king, so we didn’t have to worry about noncombatants. I was messaging Mabel to seal up engineering when Caldswell called my name.
“I want you and Rashid to scramble,” he said, looking at me over his shoulder. “This won’t be a long jump.”
“Way ahead of you, sir,” I replied.
Caldswell actually grinned at me. “That’s my Morris.”
I wasn’t above giving him a superior smile as I jogged out into the hall, passing a running Nova on the way.
I have no idea what massive handful of strings the captain pulled, but despite the posted four-hour line for the gate, we jumped ten minutes later.
I spent them in the lounge, prowling back and forth in front of the windows like a caged animal. Rashid waited with me, fully loaded out just as I’d ordered, but as soon as he’d secured the jump, Caldswell had inexplicably left the bridge and gone downstairs. I had no idea why the captain would terrify his crew and then go down to his room, but I could hear the building freakout in Basil’s voice over the com, so I sent Rashid up to the bridge to keep order. It was a cruel thing to do to my fellow security officer, but other than the times he’d snapped at the captain about Ren, Rashid was calm as a placid lake, and if anyone needed placid right now, it was Basil.
Tactically, I should have waited in the cargo bay, but I wanted to see myself what we were in for, so I stayed in the lounge by the windows. It wasn’t like I was going to go crashing out the door the moment we left hyperspace anyway, and besides, I still had no idea what all this was about. I couldn’t begin to think what Ren could tell her father that would precipitate this kind of scramble, but as the minutes ticked by, my feeling of impending doom got worse and worse. It was like that moment when you step on a rotten board. You haven’t started falling yet, but you know it’s coming, just as you know there’s nothing you can do to stop it. All you can do is brace.
I was braced so hard my muscles ached. I stalked back and forth in front of the lounge windows, glaring at the blank gray-purple wall of hyperspace outside as I waited to see just how hard this fall would hit me. I was working on wearing a rut in the floor when the cook walked into the lounge.
As always, he entered silently, his footsteps like shadows. I kept my eyes off him out of habit, though I would have loved to glare at him when I said, “Why are you here? Get back downstairs.”
“The captain is watching his daughter,” he replied. “He ordered me to come and work instead.”
I didn’t believe that for a second. The cook hadn’t even glanced at the kitchen. Instead, he walked to the cargo bay stairs and leaned on the door like he wanted to be first in line to get out when we landed.
I couldn’t argue with a direct order from the captain, though, so I decided to ignore him. I put my back to the cook and stared out the window, double- and triple-checking my equipment. But hard as I tried to focus on not looking, I kept catching glimpses of him through my rear camera. I was this close to ordering him out anyway when the jump flash rolled over the ship, signaling our exit from hyperspace.
I was glued to the window the second the jump finished, my suit checking in with the Fool’s computer to look up where we were. Unity was the answer that came back, another overpopulated aeon colony world much like the one we’d just left. There was even a picture of a built-up planet so covered in city I couldn’t see the oceans.
But something wasn’t right. Even though my suit was insisting there should be a colony stuffed with birds right in front of us, I didn’t see anything out the window, not a planet or a moon or a gate station, not even any other ships. All I saw through the lounge windows was a bunch of floating rocks and dust glittering in the light of the system’s sun.
“Did the jump team mess up the coordinates?” I asked over the com. “This isn’t a planet.” It looked more like an asteroid belt.
My only answer was dead silence. And then, very quietly, Basil replied. “There’s no mistake. This is Unity.”
“This is nothing,” I protested.
“You’re both right,” Nova said. “These are Unity’s coordinates, but there’s nothing here. The jump gate, the traffic control, the moon, the planet—they’re all gone. I can’t even get a signal.”
Her voice became higher pitched with every word, and cold began to sink into my bones. It was a dark day when Nova panicked.
“It can’t be gone,” I said in my most authoritative voice. “Planets don’t just—”
The ship lurched under my feet, cutting me off. My stabilizer took the bump nicely, but I braced on the window anyway, craning my neck in an attempt to see what had hit us. With so many rocks around, that should have been an easy call, but I hadn’t heard anything hit the hull. I hadn’t felt a crash either. It was more like we’d bumped into something. I was about to ask Basil what that could be when the aeon’s voice whistled over the com.
“Oh, what now?”
The words were barely out before the channel collapsed into static. At the same time, my cameras began to short out, the picture obscured behind a rain of thin white lines that crackled as they fell. I shook my head hard, smacking my helmet on the side that held my receiver, but that didn’t clear the interference, which was so bad now I couldn’t even see my diagnostic screen to figure out what was wrong.
I ripped my helmet off with a curse and turned it over, running my finger over the neuronet feeds just to make double sure the problem wasn’t on my end. It was only by chance that I glanced back up at the window. When I did, what I saw hit me so hard I dropped my helmet on the floor.
There was something outside the ship. Something huge.
In my shock, all I could think was that it looked like a squid. A gigantic squid glowing like the moon with its own blue-white light. It was so big I couldn’t even see all of it from the Fool’s window, so big that the asteroids that dwarfed our ship looked like grains of sand floating around it. It had no eyes I could make out, no mouth or nostrils or any other opening. Just two huge clusters of tentacles, one at either end of its tubelike body, waving slowly through space like the thing was treading water.
There were so many tentacles I couldn’t begin to count them. They started out enormous where they attached to the creature, but then they tapered off, finally ending in a delicate point that was still twice as big around as the Fool. I knew that last bit for a fact, because there was one right next to the ship. The thing we’d bumped into earlier.
“Devi!”
I jumped. I’d been so wrapped up in the monster outside, I’d actually forgotten about the cook until he yanked me away from the window.
“The coms are down,” he said, his voice calm and serious as he turned me toward the hall door. “I realize this is frightening, but I need you to go to the bridge and tell them to prepare for another jump. The system should be coming back up in just—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I shouted. I was too freaked out to care that the cook was trying to give me orders. I tore away from him and ran back to the window, stabbing my finger at the glass. “Don’t you see that thing?”