“Here we fucking go,” said Schneider.

“No, wait.” This was Wardani, a soft gleam in her voice that could almost have been pride. “Wait and see.”

The cables seemed to be having trouble getting a grip on the material the gate was made of. They lashed down, then slid off as if oiled. I watched the process repeat itself a half dozen times, and then drew a sharp breath as another, longer arm erupted from the sand, flailed upward a half dozen metres and wrapped around the lower slopes of the spire. If the same limb had come up under the Nagini, it could have dragged us out of the sky comfortably.

The new cable flexed and tightened.

And disintegrated.

At first, I thought Sun had disregarded my instructions and opened fire again with the ultravibe. Then recollection caught up. The nanobes were immune to vibe weapons.

The other cables were gone as well.

“Sun? What the fuck happened?”

“I am attempting to ascertain exactly that.” Sun’s machine associations were starting to leak into her speech patterns.

“It turned it off,” Wardani said simply.

“Turned what off?” asked Deprez.

And now I could hear the smile in the archaeologue’s voice. “The nanobes exist in an electromagnetic envelope. That’s what binds them together. The gate just turned off the field.”

“Sun?”

“Mistress Wardani appears to be correct. I can detect no electromagnetic activity anywhere near the artefact. And no motion.”

The faint hiss of static on the induction rig as everyone digested the confirmation. Then Deprez’s voice, thoughtful.

“And we’re supposed to fly through that thing?”

Considering what had gone before and what was to come on the other side, zero hour at the gate was remarkably undramatic. At two and a half minutes to zero, the dripping blobs of ultraviolet we’d seen through Wardani’s filigree screen became slowly visible as liquid purple lines playing up and down along the outer edges of the spire. In the daylight, the display was no more impressive than a landing beacon by dawn light.

At eighteen seconds, something seemed to happen along the recessed foldings, something like wings being shaken.

At nine seconds a dense black dot appeared without any fuss at the point of the spire. It was shiny, like a single drop of high-grade lubricant, and it appeared to be rolling around on its own axis.

Eight seconds later, it expanded with unhurried smoothness to the base of the spire, and then beyond. The plinth disappeared, and then the sand to a depth of about a metre.

In the globe of darkness, stars glimmered.

I don’t like hard space. It fucks with your head.

It’s not anything physical. You can make more mistakes in space than at the bottom of the ocean, or in a toxic atmosphere like Glimmer Five’s. You can get away with far more in a vacuum, and on occasion I have done. Stupidity, forgetfulness and panic will not get you killed with the same implacable certainty as they will in less forgiving environments. But it isn’t that.

The Harlan’s World orbitals sit five hundred kilometres out and will shoot down anything that masses more than a six-seater helicopter as soon as look at it. There have been some notable exceptions to this behaviour, but so far no one has been able to work out what caused them. As a result, Harlanites don’t go up in the air much, and vertigo is as common as pregnancy. The first time I wore a vacuum suit, courtesy of the Protectorate marines and aged eighteen, my entire mind turned to ice and looking down through the infinite emptiness, I could hear myself whimpering deep in the back of my throat. It looked like a very long way to fall.

Envoy conditioning gives you a handle on most kinds of fear, but you’re still aware of what scares you because you feel the weight of the conditioning coming online. I’ve felt that weight every single time. In high orbit over Loyko during the Pilots’ Revolt, deploying with Randall’s vacuum commandos around Adoracion’s outer moon, and once, in the depths of interstellar space, playing a murderous game of tag with members of the Real Estate Crew around the hull of the hijacked colony barge Mivtsemdi, falling endlessly along her trajectory, light years from the nearest sun. The Mivtsemdi firefight was the worst. It still gives me the occasional nightmare.

The Nagini slithered through the gap in three-dimensional space the gate had peeled back, and hung amidst nothing. I let out the same breath we’d all been holding since the assault ship began inching towards the gate, got out of my seat and walked forward to the cockpit, bouncing slightly in the adjusted grav-field. I could already see the starfield on the screen, but I wanted a genuine view through the toughened transparencies of the assault ship’s nose. It helps to see your enemy face to face, to sense the void out there a few centimetres from the end of your nose. It helps you to know where you are to the animal roots of your being.

It’s strictly against the rules of spaceflight to open connecting hatches during entry into hard space, but no one said anything, even when it must have been clear where I was going. I got a strange look from Ameli Vongsavath as I stepped through the hatch, but she didn’t say anything either. Then again, she was the first pilot in the history of the human race to effect an instantaneous transfer from a planetary altitude of six metres to the middle of deep space, so I suspect she had other things on her mind.

I stared forward, past her left shoulder. Stared down, and felt my fingers curl tight on the back of Vongsavath’s seat.

Fear confirmed.

The old shift in the head, like pressure doors locking sections of my brain up under diamond bright illumination. The conditioning.

I breathed.

“You’re going to stay, you might want to sit down,” said Vongsavath, busy with a buoyancy monitor that had just started gibbering at the sudden lack of a planet beneath us.

I clambered to the co-pilot’s seat and lowered myself into it, looking for the webbing straps.

“See anything?” I asked with elaborate calm.

“Stars,” she said shortly.

I waited for a while, getting used to the view, feeling the itch at the outer corners of my eyes as instinct-deep reflexes pulled my peripheral vision backwards, looking for some end to the intense lack of light.

“So how far out are we?”

Vongsavath punched up figures on the astrogation set.

“According to this?” She whistled low. “Seven hundred and eighty-odd million klicks. Believe that?”

It put us just inside the orbit of Banharn, the solitary and rather unimpressive gas giant that stood sentinel on the outer edges of the Sanction system. Three hundred million kilometres further in on the ecliptic was a circling sea of rubble, too extensive to be called a belt, that had for some reason never got round to coalescing into planetary masses. A couple of hundred million kilometres the other side of that was Sanction IV. Where we’d been about forty seconds ago.

Impressive.

Alright, a stellar-range needlecast can put you on the other side of so many kilometres you run out of places to put the zeroes in less time than that. But you have to be digitised first, and then you have to be downloaded into a new sleeve at the other end, and all that takes time and technology. It’s a process.