Anna nodded and sipped her milk. If the boy had singled her out because she was a minister of his faith, then he wanted to talk to her as a member of the congregation. She mentally shifted gears to become Pastor Anna and said, “What can I do for you, Chris?”

“Love your accent, ma’am,” Chris replied. He needed time to build up to whatever it was that he’d approached her about, so Anna gave it to him.

“I grew up in Moscow,” she replied. “Though after two years on Europa I can almost do Belter now, sa sa?”

Chris laughed, some of the tension draining out of his face. “That’s not bad, ma’am. But you get those guys going at full speed, I can’t understand a word the skinnies say.”

Anna chose to ignore the slur. “Please, no more ‘ma’am.’ Makes me feel a hundred years old. Anna, please, or Pastor Anna if you have to.”

“All right,” Chris said. “Pastor Anna.”

They sat together in companionable silence for a few moments while Anna watched Chris work up to whatever he needed to say.

“You heard the alarm, right?” he finally said. “Bet it woke you up.”

“It’s why I’m here,” Anna replied.

“Yeah. Action stations. It’s because of the dusters— I mean, Martians, you know.”

“Martians?” Anna found herself wanting another glass of the delicious milk, but thought it might distract Chris, so she didn’t wave at the waiter.

“We’re in weapons range of their fleet now,” he said. “So we go on alert. We can’t share sky with the dusters anymore without going on alert. Not since, you know, Ganymede.”

Anna nodded and waited for him to continue.

“And that Ring, you know, it’s already killed somebody. I mean, just a dumb as sand skinny slingshotter, but still. Somebody.”

Anna took his hand. He flinched a bit, but relaxed when she smiled at him. “That scares you?”

“Sure. Of course. But that ain’t it.”

Anna waited, keeping her face carefully neutral. The pretty civilian girl across the room got up suddenly, as though leaving. Her lips moved, talking to herself, then she sat back down, put her arms on the table, and leaned her head on them. Someone else scared, waiting out the long watches of the night, all alone in a room full of people.

“I mean,” Chris said, breaking into her reverie, “that ain’t all of it anyway.”

“What else?” Anna said.

“The Ring didn’t put us on alert,” he said. “It’s the Martians. Even with that thing out there, we’re still thinking about shooting each other. That’s pretty fucked up. Sorry. Messed up.”

“It seems like we should be able to see past our human differences when we’re confronted with something like this, doesn’t it?”

Chris nodded and squeezed her hand tighter, but said nothing.

“Chris, would you like to pray with me?”

He nodded and lowered his head, closing his eyes. When she’d finished, he said, “I know I’m not the only Methodist on the ship. Do you, you know, hold services?”

I do now.

“Sunday, at 10 a.m., in conference room 41,” she said, making a mental note to ask someone if she could use conference room 41 on Sunday mornings.

“I’ll see if I can get the time off,” Chris said with a smile. “Thank you, ma’am. Pastor Anna.”

“It was nice talking to you, Chris.” You just gave me a reason to be here.

When Chris left, Anna found herself very tired, ready to return to her bed, but the pretty girl across the room hadn’t moved. Her head was still buried in her arms. Anna walked over to her and gently touched her on the shoulder. The girl’s head jerked up, her eyes wild, almost panicked.

“Hi,” Anna said. “I’m Anna. What’s your name?”

The girl stared up, as if the question were a difficult one. Anna sat down across from her.

“I saw you sitting here,” Anna said. “It looked like you could use some company. It’s okay to be afraid. I understand.”

The girl jerked to her feet like a malfunctioning machine. Her eyes were flat, and her head tilted a degree. Anna felt suddenly afraid. It was like she’d gone to pet a dog and found herself with her hand on a lion. Something in the back of her head told her, This is a bad one. This one will hurt you.

“I’m sorry,” Anna said, standing up with her hands half raised. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You don’t know me,” the girl replied. “You don’t know anything.” Her hands were clenched into fists at her sides, the tendons in her neck quivering like plucked guitar strings.

“You’re right,” Anna said, still backing up and patting the air with her hands. “I apologize.”

Other people in the room were staring at them now, and Anna felt a surge of relief that she wasn’t alone with the girl. The girl stared at her, trembling, for a few more seconds, then darted out of the room.

“What the fuck was that all about?” someone behind Anna said in a quiet voice.

Maybe the girl had woken up from a nightmare too, Anna thought. Or maybe she hadn’t.

Chapter Thirteen: Bull

Arriving at the Ring was a political fiction, but that didn’t keep it from being real. There was no physical boundary to say that this was within the realm of the object. There was no port to dock at. The Behemoth’s sensory arrays had been sucking in data from the Ring since before they’d left Tycho. The Martian science ships and Earth military forces that had been there before the doomed Belter kid had become its first casualty were still there, where they had been, but resupplied now. The new Martian ships had joined them, matched orbit, and were hanging quietly in the sky. The Earth flotilla, like the Behemoth, was in the last part of the burn, pulling up to whatever range they’d chosen to stop at. To say, We have come across the vast abyss to float at this distance and now we are here. We’ve arrived.

As far as anyone could tell, the Ring didn’t give a damn.

The structure itself was eerie. The surface was a series of twisting ridges that spiraled around its body. At first they appeared uneven, almost messy. The mathematicians, architects, and physicists assured them all that there was a deep regularity there: the height of the ridges in a complex harmony with the width and the spacing between the peaks and valleys. The reports were breathless, finding one layer of complexity after another, the intimations of intention and design all laid bare without any hint of what it all might mean.

“The official Martian reports have been very conservative,” the science officer said. His name was Chan Bao-Zhi, and on Earth, he’d have been Chinese. Here, he was a Belter from Pallas Station. “They’ve given a lot of summary and maybe a tenth of the data they’ve collected. Fortunately, we’ve been able to observe most of their experiments and make our own analysis.”

“Which Earth will have been doing too,” Ashford said.

“Without doubt, sir,” Chan said.

Like any ritual, the staff meeting carried more significance than information. The heads of all the major branches of the Behemoth’s structural tree were present: Sam for engineering, Bull for security, Chan for the research teams, Bennie Cortland-Mapu for health services, Anamarie Ruiz for infrastructure, and so on, filling the two dozen seats around the great conference table. Ashford sat in the place of honor, another beneficent Christ painted on the wall behind him. Pa sat at his right hand, and Bull—by tradition—at his left.

“What have we got?” Ashford said. “Short form.”

“It’s fucking weird, sir,” Chan said, and everyone chuckled. “Our best analysis is that the Ring is an artificially sustained Einstein-Rosen bridge. You go through the Ring, you don’t come out the other side here.”

“So it’s a gate,” Ashford said.

“Yes, sir. It appears that the protomolecule or Phoebe bug or whatever you want to call it was launched at the solar system several billion years ago, aiming for Earth with the intention of hijacking primitive life to build a gateway. We’re positing that whoever created the protomolecule did it as a first step toward making travel to the solar system more convenient and practical later.”