The link, in all its star-spanning bulk, moved like spiraling water. Tennal couldn’t tell how he knew, since it was so enormous and so far away that its pale clouds looked static. But if you looked long enough, the eye fell into it like a painting of windows within windows, spiraling into an unseen center where all sense of distance and time disappeared. Tennal felt pain, a sharp throb into his temple, and, at the same time, a stab of terrified awe like an animal emerging from its burrow and seeing, for the first time, the endless sky.

He wanted to get closer than the glass would let him; he wanted to launch himself into the void. He wanted to drown in it.

“It does take some people like that,” a dry, amused voice said from behind him. “Welcome to Archer Link Station, Sen Tennalhin.”

Tennal came back to himself slowly, feeling the coolness of the glass under his palms and the softness of the carpet beneath his feet.

He turned.

Governor Oma stood in front of her desk. Her bright, blue-eyed gaze was a bit like being pinned by a sudden searchlight; Tennal fought the urge to step back. Her office suite was a wide, open-plan affair that could have held dozens of people. One curved corner of it was taken up by the golden drapes and formal broadcasting setup Tennal had seen over the comm.

She looked at something on her desk and sighed. Tennal might have imagined the searchlight gaze, because when she looked back up and smiled, she looked trustworthy, the sort of kindly authority you saw on the newslogs, the sort that annoyed Tennal instinctively. She came across to him and made a gesture of greeting, her hand touching her throat. “I should have covered the windows; it seems to be worse for readers,” she said. “Welcome anyway. I’m so glad you’re safe.”

“Governor Oma.” Tennal touched his own throat in return. He had to focus. “Thank you for the concern. I’m also glad I’m safe. Such a pleasure that neither side of my own military killed me in a horrible misunderstanding over territory. Why, did you think they would? Am I a prisoner, by the way?”

He idly reached out with his reader senses and nearly swallowed his tongue.

Oma blazed white in his vision. Her presence wasn’t a soft light; it was a controlled, white-hot furnace. Tennal had never felt anything like it; his half-formed intention to try to read her died on the spot. His hindbrain urgently informed him, like a mouse in front of a mink, that there was a narrow series of choices he could make to survive the next handful of seconds, and attempting to read her wasn’t one of them. He didn’t think he could.