The Klaxon sounded and Sauveterre settled into his couch, the sensation of weight returning over the course of seconds. The transit to the Laconia ring was short. The space between the rings was almost claustrophobic compared with the vastness of real, open vacuum. And dark. Starless. The physics wonks said that there wasn’t any space on the other side of the rings. That whatever bubble they all existed in ended not in a barrier, but in some more profound manner that he couldn’t picture. He didn’t need to.

The Laconia gate drew closer, a handful of stars burning solid and clear on the other side of it, and growing as they came near. The exhaust plumes of the fleet vanguard glowed brighter as they passed through. There would be new constellations there. A different angle on the galaxy, like a whole new sky.

“Approaching the ring, sir,” Keller said from the navigation controls. “Passing through in three. Two…”

Keller fell apart. No, that wasn’t right. Keller was where she had been, sitting as she had been sitting. But she was a cloud now. All of them were clouds. Sauveterre held up his hands. He could see them so perfectly: the ridges of his fingertips, the spaces between the molecules, the swirl and flow of his blood beneath them. He could see the molecules in the air – nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide all bouncing madly against each other, obscuring some more profound space between them. A vacuum that penetrated them all.

I’m having a stroke, he thought. And then, No. Something else is wrong.

“Kill the drive!” he shouted. “Turn about!” And the waves of his words passed through the visible but invisible air in an expanding sphere, bouncing against the walls, shuddering where they intersected with the cries of fear and a blaring Klaxon. It was beautiful. The cloud that was Mister Keller moved her hands and miraculously didn’t slip through the vast emptiness of her control deck.

He saw the sound coming in the rush of molecules before it reached him and he heard the words. “What’s going on? What’s happening?”

He couldn’t see the image on the screens to know if the stars were there. All he could sense were atoms and photons of the thing itself, not the pattern they made. Someone was screaming. Then someone else.

He turned and saw something move. Something else, not another cloud like himself, like the others, like matter. Something solid but obscured by the emptiness of material like a shape in the fog. Many shapes, neither light nor dark, but some other thing, some third side of that coin, passing through the spaces between the spaces. Rushing toward them. Toward him.

Sauveterre did not notice his death.

Acknowledgments