The courier chip sat on the galley table, still warm from decryption.
Kira Vasquez turned it over with one calloused thumb, watching the Dominion seal pulse a sullen amber in the dim recycled air. The chip had arrived bundled with a standard survey packet, the kind the orbital cartels pushed to every indenture-fleet captain foolish enough to check the freelance boards. Buried beneath the routing metadata, in a cipher only her network recognized, sat a single string of coordinates and a contact code. The sender's identifier had been scrubbed, but the phrasing was unmistakable: a buyer, not a broker. Someone with credits to move and cargo that needed to vanish before Dominion auditors finished their quarterly sweep.
Across the galley, the hull of The Halcyon ticked and groaned as the freighter absorbed another thermal shift. Somewhere aft of the engine room, pipes shuddered. The sound traveled through the deck plates and up through the soles of her boots, a rhythm she had learned to read the way sailors once read the sea.
"Rook." She did not raise her voice. The ship carried it well enough.
A clatter from the corridor. Rook Tindale shouldered through the hatch, wiping black grease from his knuckles onto a rag that had given up being white sometime before either of them were born. He was broader than the doorway, though the doorway had been widened twice already to accommodate him, and he navigated the galley with the practiced ease of a man who had lived too long in too many cramped spaces.
"Captain." He eyed the courier chip. "We taking the work?"
Kira set the chip down precisely in the center of the table. "Tell me about Callisto Prime."
Rook settled into the opposite bench, the frame protesting beneath him. He did not answer immediately. Instead, he pulled up a console from the table's recessed port, and the battered screen bloomed with the blue-white smear of the Jovian system's navigational overlay. Callisto Prime hung at the edge of the display, a small bright node circling the outermost Galilean moon.
"Lagrange point debris field," he said, drawing a thick finger across the screen. The path he traced curved through a dense constellation of frozen dots, each one representing a derelict or fragment large enough to ping a transponder. "Salvage tugs hunt crashed colony pods out there. Dominion doesn't patrol it much because the tugs do their dirty work for free." He glanced up. "Course through that mess saves us two days on the standard lane. Also saves us from any official noticing we skipped the checkpoint at Ganymede."
"And if we miss a fragment?"
"Then we miss a fragment." Rook's mouth twisted. "Halcyon's not what she was. Half my port maneuvering thrusters are jury-rigged from a Y-class scow I stripped on Titan. The inertial dampeners run hot enough to fry an egg on the housing. But she holds together."
Kira studied the overlay. The debris field was a graveyard of broken colony pods, fragments of habitats abandoned when the outer settlements failed, the frozen detritus of a hundred evacuation attempts. Somewhere in that graveyard, a buyer waited with cargo the Dominion wanted counted. The coordinates on the chip placed the rendezvous inside a hollowed crater on Callisto Prime's far side, well away from the official port.
"Plot the course," she said. "Through the debris field. Maximum throttle the couplings can take without throwing a rod."
Rook nodded once and was gone, his boots ringing on the deck.
Kira remained seated. She listened to him descend toward engineering, listened to the faint percussion of him dragging out the magnetic coupler spares, listened to the old familiar symphony of a ship being woken for another run. Her hand moved to the chain at her throat. She did not draw the locket out. She had learned, years ago, that the weight of it against her collarbone was enough.
Mira Okonkwo's voice came over the ship's intercom, warm and measured, with the unhurried cadence of a woman who had learned to govern a fragile community through patience.
"Kira. The water recycler's output dropped twelve percent in the last hour. Either we have a biofilm clogging the membranes, or someone in section four is running an unauthorized still."
"Add it to the list." Kira reached for the intercom panel. "Mira, I'm taking a job. High margin, short window. Callisto Prime, two days out if Rook can keep us off the rocks."
A pause. Mira's response arrived wrapped in the careful diplomacy of a community organizer weighing the cost of every word. "The colonists?"
"They eat whether we take the work or not. But the credits buy membranes, and membranes buy them a week without having to boil snow."
"Then I'll have the manifests updated within the hour." Another pause, shorter this time. "Kira. Whatever this buyer is moving, it isn't medical supplies."
"I know."
"The Dominion has started sweeping independent freighters at Ganymede. Random audits. If they catch us with the wrong cargo, the colonists lose their ship."
"I know, Mira."
"Then why are we doing this?"
Kira pressed her palm flat against the courier chip, feeling the faint warmth of the decryption process still bleeding off. "Because someone on Callisto Prime is paying enough to make the risk worth taking. And because the alternative is watching a hundred people boil snow for the rest of their lives while we pretend the system isn't rigged against them."
Mira's silence was not agreement. It was the particular quiet of a woman calculating whether her captain had finally miscalculated. Then: "I'll have the manifests updated."
The intercom clicked off.
She rose from the bench and crossed to the narrow viewport that dominated the forward bulkhead of the galley. Beyond the glass, the slow drift of the outer system wheeled in its ancient patterns. Jupiter hung enormous against the black, banded in storms the size of continents, its pale glow painting the interior of the ship in shades of bone and ash. Three of the Galilean moons were visible tonight, tiny and bright and utterly indifferent to the small troubles of human cargo.
The Halcyon's drives spun with a rising pitch, the vibration climbing through the deck until it settled into the steady thrum of a ship under hard burn. Rook was pushing the old freighter to the edge of her tolerance. Kira watched the navigational overlay reflected in the viewport glass, the course threading through a graveyard of frozen metal, and felt the old familiar mixture of dread and resolve settle into her chest like ballast.
She had not always run cargo through Dominion-monitored space. There had been a time, not so long ago in calendar years but a lifetime removed in every other measure, when she had been a colony technician with a steady posting and a younger sister who wrote letters full of small jokes. The letters had stopped on the day the Dominion raid had swept through her sister's settlement. The official report had listed the casualties as twenty-three. The unofficial count, whispered among the survivors, had been higher.
Kira had learned to organize, then to lead, then to run. The Halcyon had been a means of escape, then a means of survival, then, somewhere along the way, a means of resistance. The colonists in her care had been gathered one ship at a time, one desperate family at a time, from the ruins of settlements the Dominion had deemed insufficiently productive. Mira had been among the first. The community had grown in the years since, fragile and quarrelsome and stubbornly alive.
Now a buyer on Callisto Prime had work that paid enough to keep them all breathing for another season.
Kira turned from the viewport. The galley was empty. The courier chip sat on the table, its amber seal pulsing with the patient rhythm of a deal waiting to be honored or betrayed.
She crossed to the intercom and keyed the engineering channel. "Rook. Status."
"Port couplings are singing a pretty note," he replied, his voice carrying the particular satisfaction of a man who enjoyed pushing machinery past its rated tolerances. "We've got maybe six hours before I need to cool them down or they walk themselves out of alignment. After that, I can give you another burst. We can thread the densest part of the field on maneuvering thrusters alone if we have to."
"Do it. And wake me when we hit the first navigation marker."
"Aye, Captain. Get some sleep."
She did not intend to sleep. She intended to sit in the captain's chair and watch the debris field approach on the overlay, to feel the weight of the choice she had made settling into her bones one minute at a time. There would be no sleep tonight. There rarely was, on the eve of a run that mattered.
Kira Vasquez walked out of the galley, through the corridor where the colonists' quarters lined both sides, past the mess where someone had taped a child's crayon drawing of a ship with too many wings, past the medbay where Mira was already beginning the quiet work of inventory and triage that preceded every voyage. The Halcyon sang around her, every strut and panel vibrating with the effort of hard acceleration, and she let the sound fill the spaces where doubt might otherwise have crept in.
Ahead, the Jovian Lagrange debris field waited in its frozen patience, full of the wreckage of a hundred failed colonies and the salvage tugs that profited from them. Somewhere on the far side of Callisto Prime, a buyer waited with cargo and credits and questions she had not yet thought to ask.
Kira settled into the captain's chair and watched the stars wheel slowly past the viewport, each one a possible destination and a possible trap, and she thought, as she always did on nights like this, of her sister's letters and the silence that had followed them.
The Halcyon burned hard toward Callisto Prime, and the old freighter carried her small cargo of stubborn lives into another gamble.
The Halcyon shuddered through the outer markers of Callisto's monitored space, and Kira felt the first prickle of attention on her skin.
It came as a tightening in the air, a barely there frequency that hummed behind her molars. She had felt it before, on the long approach to other Dominion outposts, the sense that something vast and patient had begun to note her presence. Most spacers called it the Watch. Kira called it the price of doing business in human space.
The debris field thinned as the freighter's nose swung toward Callisto's frozen crescent. Below, the moon's face resolved from grey smudge to scarred geography, its cratered highlands catching the distant sun in pale, cold fire. And there, rising from the limb like a fang of glass and iron, the Callisto Spire grew.
The Spire was less a city than a statement. Its gravity-rail spine climbed forty kilometers from the equatorial ice, anchored to a basalt shelf that groaned beneath the weight of a hundred thousand souls. Strata of hab-modules clung to the rail like barnacles on a passing hull: industrial levels at the base, their faces stained with mining residue; trade levels above, lit with the amber glow of commerce; and at the apex, in a crown of tinted glass that caught the sun and threw it back as fractured rainbows, the administrative and research levels where Dominion license hung like a smell in the recycled air.
Kira had been to the Spire twice before. Both times, she had left with less than she came for.
"Approach corridor is open," Mira's voice came from the bridge speaker, warm even in clipped operational cadence. "They're waving us into Bay Seventeen, lower ring."
"Seventeen?" Kira frowned at the comm. "That's salvage tier."
"It's what they offered, Captain." A pause, weighted. "Word travels. They're curious about our cargo."
She had told no one what the shard was. She had told no one what it could do. But Mira Okonkwo did not need to be told. She read people the way she read stress fractures in hull plating, by the lines that betrayed deeper weakness.
"Then we'll give them curiosity," Kira said. "And nothing else."
"Aye." The line held a smile in it. "I'll have the children secured before we dock. The ones who sleep light."
She signed off and rose, her boots ringing on the deck plate. Through the forward viewport, the Spire loomed larger, its gravity-rail visible now as a glittering thread strung between the stars.
Dr. Aleksander Vance met them at the end of Bay Seventeen's umbilical, and his first impression was wrong in three small ways that Kira catalogued without thinking.
He was younger than she had expected. The buyer profile in her packet had listed thirty-four standard years, but the man waiting beside the customs kiosk looked older, his face carrying the particular weariness of someone who slept with one eye open. He wore a Dominion research tabard over a civilian sweater, a small breach of protocol that suggested either carelessness or a private statement. And his hands, when he raised one in greeting, were trembling.
"Captain Vasquez." His voice was smooth, precise, the vowels rounded with an education expensive enough to be invisible. "I am Dr. Aleksander Vance. I believe we have an appointment."
"We do." Kira did not take the offered hand. "You wanted to inspect the cargo personally."
"I did." He lowered the hand without apparent offense, his gaze drifting past her shoulder to the sealed crate that two of her people were wheeling from the Halcyon's hold. "I prefer to verify provenance when the items are... unusual."
"Unusual how?"
He hesitated. It was a small hesitation, a breath held a half-second too long, but Kira had survived a decade of negotiation by watching the spaces between words.
"The acquisition order specified an item of possible xenoscience interest." He chose each word with the care of a man defusing ordnance. "I am the closest qualified researcher to this sector. The Spire administration asked me to assess."
"And what do you assess, Doctor?"
He met her eyes then, and she saw something in his expression that she had not expected. It was not greed. It was not scientific hunger, that bright and feral thing she had learned to spot in the men who came for Lattice artifacts. It was closer to grief.
"I assess," he said quietly, "that I would very much like to see it in a shielded laboratory, before any transaction is finalized."
Mira had appeared at her shoulder, a solid presence in the recycled chill of the bay. The engineer's gaze swept Vance and dismissed him in the same motion, her attention settling on the customs kiosk, on the bored Dominion inspector shuffling data chips, on the cargo handlers who lingered too close to the sealed crate.
"A shielded lab," Mira repeated. Her voice was rich, measured, a low cello note beneath Kira's taut strings. "That would be inside the Spire. Away from our people."
"From your ship, yes." Vance inclined his head. "I understand the concern. I would be willing to accompany the specimen personally, and to remain in your company for the duration of the inspection. My credentials will vouch for the legitimacy of the request."
"Credentials vouch for the paper they're printed on," Kira said.
"Then perhaps my reputation will vouch for me."
"And what reputation is that, Doctor?"
A flicker of something passed across his face, there and gone. "I am told I am a man who does not lie about science. Even when the truth is inconvenient."
The customs inspector had finished his shuffle and was waving them through, his eyes sliding past the sealed crate with the practiced disinterest of a man paid not to see. Kira watched Vance's hands. They had steadied, but the knuckles were white.
"Show me the lab," she said.
The gravity-rail carriage that carried them up the Spire's spine was a coffin of brushed steel and tinted polymer, its seats molded to accommodate the standard range of human and near-human frames. Vance sat across from her, his knees not quite touching hers, his eyes on the tiered lights of the ascending levels.
Mira had remained at the dock with the children, a fact that sat in Kira's chest like a swallowed stone. She had brought Vance's credentials up on her personal reader before the doors closed, running them against the cipher she kept for Dominion records. They were clean. Too clean, in the way of things that had been scrubbed for presentation.
"You are the sister," Vance said.
She looked up from the reader.
"Of Elena Vasquez." He did not phrase it as a question. "The incident at Meridian. I read the report. I am sorry."
The carriage hummed. Below, the industrial levels fell away, their stains and rivulets replaced by the orderly amber of the trade rings.
"What do you know about Meridian, Doctor?"
"Only what the report allowed." His voice was even, but she heard the strain in it now, the effort of measured speech. "I know the casualties. I know the official classification of the action. I know that the woman listed as a secondary incendiary device was, in fact, a water purification technician with no record of political activity."
"You read that in a report."
"I read between the reports." He met her eyes. "My brother was a lieutenant in the garrison that conducted the raid. Lieutenant Casimir Vance. He did not survive the engagement."
The carriage passed through a service junction, its lights flickering in a stuttered rhythm. Kira watched the man's face in the strobed half-dark. The grief was there, older than the moment, worn into the lines around his mouth.
"And what do you want from this conversation, Doctor?"
"Nothing." He looked down at his hands, still steady now, still white-knuckled. "I wanted you to know who you were meeting. I wanted no pretense between us. The Dominion took your sister. It took my brother in a different way. Perhaps we are both here for reasons that are not in the official paperwork."
"Perhaps."
The carriage slowed, its magnetic brakes singing a thin descending note. Through the tinted window, the upper levels of the Spire resolved into a forest of glass and transplanted greenery, hydroponic towers rising between the administrative blocks. The air inside the carriage changed, became wetter, colder, carrying the faint mineral tang of processed water and the ghost of something green.
"The lab is through here," Vance said.
The shielded laboratory occupied a converted observation deck at the Spire's crown, its walls lined with a grey polymer designed to dampen exotic emissions. A faint static charge prickled across Kira's skin as the doors closed behind her, the air sealed and cycled and scrubbed. The room smelled of ozone and old coffee and the particular mustiness of a space that had not been properly ventilated in too long.
In the center of the deck, on a slab of black basalt that had been hauled up from the moon's surface at ruinous expense, the sealed crate waited.
"You can open it," Vance said. He had moved to a console across the room, his fingers hovering above the controls. "The shielding is active. Whatever is inside will not propagate beyond these walls."
"You've used this room before."
"I have used it many times." He did not look at her. "For specimens that required discretion."
She crossed to the crate and unsealed it, her hands moving through the familiar choreography of latches and pressure seals. The lid hissed open on counterbalanced hinges, and the Lattice shard lay before her in its cradle of suspension gel.
It was smaller than she remembered. In the dark of the hold, it had seemed a thing of menace, a fist of frozen lightning. Here, under the cold lab lights, it was almost delicate, its facets catching the illumination and throwing it back in colors that had no names in any human tongue.
Vance made a small sound. It was not a word. It was the involuntary noise of a man seeing something he had long feared and long desired.
"May I?" he asked, and his voice had lost its precision, had become the voice of a child asking for something precious.
She nodded.
He crossed the room in three long strides, his hands hovering above the shard but not touching it, his breath held, his eyes moving across the facets with a hunger that had nothing of the collector in it. This was a man looking at a patient. A man looking at a wound.
"It's intact," he whispered. "The primary substrate is intact. They didn't fracture the matrix."
"Does that matter?"
"It matters." He looked up at her, and his face was pale. "Captain, do you know what this is?"
"I know what I was paid to bring."
"No." He straightened, his hands falling to his sides, and for the first time she saw him as a man who had made a decision he could not take back. "Do you know what the Dominion intends to do with it? What they intend to do with the Lattice itself?"
The static in the air shifted. Somewhere in the walls, behind the shielding, something vast and patient turned a fraction of its attention toward the room. Kira felt it on her skin, in her teeth, in the small bones of her inner ear.
"I know they've been taking artifacts from every dig site they can reach," she said. "I know they've been pulling people out of the colonies. I know something is coming."
"Something is here." Vance's voice was very quiet. "It has been here for longer than humanity has had a name. The Lattice is not a species. It is not a network. It is a process. A consciousness that exists in the spaces between the things we can measure."
"And the shard?"
"Is a piece of that process. A thought, if you will. A memory." He turned back to the basalt slab, his face lit from below by the shard's impossible colors. "The Dominion believes that if they can gather enough of these pieces, they can map the process. Replicate it. Weaponize it."
"Weaponize a memory."
"Weaponize the attention of something that has no use for us beyond the patterns we make when we die." He looked at her again, and the grief in him had become something sharper. "My brother died at Meridian because the garrison was told there were Lattice artifacts in the colonists' possession. He died because someone in the administration believed that the pieces were worth more than the people who carried them. And now I sit here, in this room, and I am asked to do the same."
The shard pulsed. A slow, deep throb of light that moved through its facets like a tide, and the static in the walls answered it, rose and fell in sympathy. Kira felt the attention sharpen, focus, and she understood in her bones that what lay in the cradle on the basalt slab was aware.
It had heard everything Vance had said.
It had heard, and it had answered, and in the answer was a question that had waited longer than humanity had names.
The lights in the shielded lab dimmed, and the shard began to sing.
The sound that rose from the shard had no source she could locate. It seemed to come from the stone of the room itself, from the metal of the cradle, from the thin air between the molecules of the lab, and it was not music. It was older than music. It was a vibration so low it lived below hearing and emerged only as a pressure in the sinuses, a tremor behind the eyes, a sudden and unreasonable awareness that the universe had a back wall and it was closer than anyone had guessed.
Kira's hand went to the sidearm she no longer wore and found only the rough weave of her jacket. She did not move. Neither did Vance. They watched as the light inside the crystal deepened, shifted, and resolved.
A hologram bloomed above the cradle. Not the crude blue wireframes the Dominion used for tactical displays, not the flickering ghosts of long-range probes, but a thing rendered in colors the basalt room had never held. It rotated in the air with the slow dignity of a planet turning toward its star, and it was a map.
Kira leaned forward. Her breath came short.
The map showed a star. A red dwarf, dim and ancient, smaller than the one that warmed the colony's failing farms, its surface mottled with storms that had blown for billions of years. Around it, at distances that made the numbers in her head stumble, hung a structure. A shell, or a swarm, or something in between. Panels the size of continents drifted in careful orbits, catching the thin light and bending it inward toward the star in patterns too regular to be natural. The whole apparatus turned with a slowness that felt like patience, and as it turned, Kira saw that the inner surface of the shell was not solid. It was perforated by openings so vast that whole solar systems could have fallen through them and been lost.
The shard's voice in her skull rose a half tone. The hologram pulsed in sympathy, and Kira understood without being told that what she was seeing was not a blueprint. It was a memory. A record of attention, fixed in crystal, carried across distances that would have taken a Dominion fleet ten thousand years to cross.
Vance had gone very still. His hands were clasped behind his back, his shoulders drawn in, his face lit from below by the rotating ghost of the megastructure. He looked like a man watching a door open onto a room he had always suspected was there.
"A Dyson," he murmured. "A partial Dyson. Incomplete, but functional. The inner mantle is missing on the polar axes. It is harvesting, not enclosing." He tilted his head, calculating. "The stellar output of an M-dwarf is a fraction of a Sol-type. For a civilization to build on this scale around such a modest star, it would have had to commit resources on a generational order. Tens of thousands of years. Perhaps longer."
Kira watched the shell rotate and felt the old anger stir, then quiet. Anger was too small a thing to bring to this. She thought of the colony, of the failing hydroponics, of the children who would never see a sky full of stars because the Dominion had decided that the rocks of this world were worth more than the people who lived on them. She thought of her sister, dead in a corridor on Meridian, and of the lieutenant who had given the order, and of Vance's brother who had carried it out, and she felt the pattern tighten. Cause and consequence, loss and loss, all of it feeding a machine that had never cared what it ground.
"Where," she said. Her voice came out rough. "Where is it."
The hologram obligingly drew a line. A vector, traced in pale fire, running from the colony's star outward through the void. It passed through a dust cloud she recognized from navigator's charts, skirted the edge of an uncharted nebula, and ended at a point so far from the colony that the number, when it appeared in the air in Dominion glyphs, had more zeroes than she had ever seen in one place.
Vance read it. His lips moved without sound.
"Forty-one light years," he said. "In standard measure. The journey at subluminal speeds would take roughly six centuries. At the velocities the Dominion's new drives can achieve, perhaps eighty years. Less, if the rumors about the prototype are accurate."
Eighty years. Kira did the math she had learned to do when she organized resistance, the math of lives and what they were worth. A child born today would be an old woman when the first ship arrived. The shard had been carried in the pocket of a man who had walked this colony's streets, and he had come from forty-one light years away, and he had done it in something close to a single lifetime.
"How," she said.
The hologram answered. The vector line thickened, became a tube, and inside the tube a shape moved. A ship, perhaps, or the ghost of one. It was small against the scale of the journey, and it was fast. Faster than the Dominion's drives. Faster than anything she had heard of. The shape moved along the tube and the tube brightened as it passed, and where it had been the stars bent slightly inward, as though the void itself had been persuaded to make room.
"A metric drive," Vance said softly. "A manipulation of spacetime geometry. The theoretical models were considered fantasy when I was a postgraduate. They were not fantasy. They were, it appears, engineering." He looked at the shard with something close to reverence. "The civilization that built the shell around that red star taught its ships to fold the distance."
The hologram dimmed, steadied, and then changed again. A second shape appeared beside the megastructure. Smaller. Moving. A ship in orbit around the inner surface, harvesting something from the gaps in the shell. The shape grew larger as the hologram brought it closer, and Kira saw that it was not one ship but many, working in concert, and the things they harvested were shards. Pieces of the Lattice, lifted from the structure's inner surface, packed into holds, and carried away down the long bright tubes toward stars she had never heard named.
The shard had been one of those pieces. It had been cut from a structure older than nations, and it had been carried across the dark by hands that were not hands, and it had ended up here, in a basalt room, in the pocket of a man who had tried to give it away.
The hologram pulsed once more, and a sound rose from the cradle. Not the song this time, and not the static. A tone, pure and sustained, climbing slowly from the lower registers into a register that human ears were not built to follow. Kira felt it pass through her, felt the bones of her skull vibrate in sympathy, and she understood that the tone was not a sound at all. It was a count.
Numbers appeared in the air beside the hologram. They were not Dominion glyphs. They were not any script she recognized, but the shard was courteous, and the numbers translated themselves into a format she could read. They counted down from a value she could not see, ticking lower with each pulse of the tone, and the interval between pulses was exactly one second.
Vance stared at the numbers. His mouth opened, closed, opened again.
"It is a timer," he said.
"For what."
He did not answer. He was watching the numbers fall, and his face had gone the color of old plaster.
The tone continued. The numbers continued. Kira watched them count down a value she could not see and tried to imagine what could be measured in units so vast that the interval between one tick and the next was a single second of a human lifetime. She thought of the structure around the dim red star, of the tubes that bent the void, of the ships that had carried shards like this one to systems she would never see, and she felt the shape of an answer assemble itself in the back of her mind. She did not want the answer. She asked anyway.
"Vance."
He turned to her. His eyes were wet.
"The shard is a piece of a greater whole," he said. His voice had lost its academic cadence. It had become the voice of a man delivering news he wished he did not have to give. "When a piece is separated from the whole, the whole does not forget it. The attention that constitutes the Lattice follows the piece. It waits. It listens. And if the piece is not returned, the whole eventually comes to collect."
"How long."
"The countdown appears to be measuring the interval between two events. The event that began it, and the event that will follow." He swallowed. "I do not know what the first event was. I do not know what the second event will be. But I can estimate the scale."
He gestured at the numbers.
"The interval is approximately four thousand years. The countdown began roughly three thousand nine hundred and ninety years ago."
Kira looked at the numbers falling in the air. She thought of the colony, of the children, of the basalt room and the shielded lab and the garrison that held the perimeter. She thought of the Dominion fleet that would arrive in a year to strip the world, and of the prototype drive that could cross forty-one light years in eighty years, and of what would happen if the Dominion learned that a piece of the Lattice was in human hands and that the whole was coming to reclaim it.
"Then we have ten years," she said.
"If we are fortunate," Vance said.
The tone rose higher. The numbers fell. The hologram of the megastructure continued its slow, patient rotation above the cradle, and the light it cast on the basalt walls of the shielded lab was the color of a star that had burned alone for longer than humanity had stories.
The shard pulsed, and the static in the walls rose to meet it, and the basalt room became for a moment a single instrument tuned to a frequency that would not be heard again for ten years, or perhaps never.
Kira looked at Vance. He looked at her. The countdown ticked in the air between them, and outside the shielded lab, in the corridors of the colony, the sound of boots on metal announced the arrival of the garrison, and the sound of running announced the arrival of Rook Tindale, and somewhere in the space between those two sounds the future forked into a thousand possible shapes, and only one of them led through the door that the shard had opened.
She did not know which one. She stepped through it anyway.