In the instant before he could, a light pulsed between them. Surit’s wristband glowed blue in the dark room.

“What’s that?”

Surit looked down. “Oh,” he said. “That’s the ping I set up for the fleet rendezvous. We must have arrived.”

Tennal said impulsively, “Let me see.”

“Ah,” Surit said softly. Tennal got the impression he had asked for something Surit had been waiting to see himself. Almost reverentially, Surit touched his wristband, and the light grew into a projection that filled the room.

Stars rose over the walls. Silver ships wheeled in a tiny cluster in the distance. Clouds of dust glinted in the light from the faraway sun, and above it all, covering the ceiling and walls at a scale incalculably vast, was a churning cloud that made something in the lowest, most unconscious layers of Tennal’s mind leap up like the spray from a breaking wave.

“Chaotic space,” Surit said, his eyes following Tennal’s as Tennal threw himself back on the bed, with stars and the tides of unknown space circling over his head. “We’re here.”

PART TWO

CHAPTER 8

Chaotic space, that vast, churning sea of pressure and distortion, lapped at the edges of normal space like a hungry tide. At the fringe of its massive clouds, dozens of silver specks converged slowly as the new Cavalry fleet formed and gathered its ships. It took days. When the ships reached the rendezvous, they flocked and wheeled around one another like seabirds in slow motion before settling into formation, a stately dance that kept them just out of reach of the disturbance.

This whirlpool was the source of all the disturbed space-time that littered the Orshan sector. At the center of it sat the galactic link: the eye-watering fold that was their gateway to the universe. Only Resolution scouts took ships through the stormy center of it, through the link to distant planets. Even here, far from the link itself, you needed scanning ships to probe the turbulence and avoid being torn apart by its currents.

Chaotic space was never still. The boundaries of it ebbed and flowed, and no map of its interior would stay accurate for more than a few weeks. This had been clear space once. The army had built covert military stations here: it was always useful to have a place where most ships didn’t dare go. But, in the past few decades since this section of chaotic space had started expanding, they’d all been moved or abandoned to the currents.