Bull took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was what everyone had been thinking, but hearing it spoken in this official setting made it seem more real. The Ring was a way for something to get here. Not just a gateway. A beachhead.

“When the Y Quewent through it, the mass and velocity of the ship triggered some mechanism in the Ring,” Chan said. “The Martians have a good dataset from the moment it happened, and there was a massive outpouring of energy within the Ring structure and a whole cascade of microlevel conformation changes. The entire object went up to about five thousand degrees Kelvin, and it has been cooling regularly ever since. So it took a lot of effort to get that thing running, but it looks like not much to maintain.”

“What do we know about what’s on the other side?” Pa asked. Her expression was neutral, her voice pleasant and unemotional. She could have been asking him to justify a line item in his budget.

“It’s hard to know much,” Chan said. “We’re peeking through a keyhole, and the Ring itself seems to be generating interference and radiation that makes getting consistent readings difficult. We know the Y Quewasn’t destroyed. We’re still getting the video feed that the kid was spewing when he went through, it’s just not showing us much.”

“Stars?” Ashford said. “Something we can start to navigate from?”

“No, sir,” Chan said. “The far side of the Ring doesn’t have any stars, and the background microwave radiation is significantly different from what we’d expect.”

“Meaning what?” Ashford said.

“Meaning, ‘Huh, that’s weird,’” Chan said. “Sir.”

Ashford’s smile was cool as he motioned the science officer to continue. Chan coughed before he went on.

“We have a couple of other anomalies that we aren’t quite sure what to make of. It looks like there’s a maximum speed on the other side.”

“Can you unpack that, please?” Pa said.

“The Y Quewent through the Ring going very fast,” Chan said. “About seven-tenths of a second after it reached the other side, it started a massive deceleration. Bled off almost all its speed in about five seconds. It looks like the nearly instant deceleration was what killed the pilot. Since then, it seems as if the ship is being moved out away from the Ring and deeper into whatever’s on the other side.”

“We know that when the protomolecule’s active, it’s been able toc alter what we’d expect from inertia,” Sam said. “Is that how it stopped the ship?”

“That’s entirely possible,” Chan said. “Mars has been pitching probes through the Ring, and it looks like we start seeing the effect right around six hundred meters per second. Under that, mass behaves just the way we expect it to. Over that, it stops dead and then moves off in approximately the same direction that the Y Queis going.”

Sam whistled under her breath.

“That’s reallyslow,” she said. “The main drives would be almost useless.”

“It’s slower than a rifle shot,” Chan said. “The good news is it only affects mass above the quantum level. The electromagnetic spectrum seems to behave normally, including visible light.”

“Thank God for small favors,” Sam said.

“What else are the probes telling us?”

“There’s something out there,” Chan said, and for the first time a sense of dread leaked into his voice. “The probes are seeing objects. Large ones. But there’s not much light except what we’re shining through the Ring or mounting on the probes. And, as I said, the Ring has always given inconsistent returns. If whatever’s in there is made of the same stuff, who knows?”

“Ships?” Ashford said.

“Maybe.”

“How many?”

“Over a hundred, under a hundred thousand. Probably.”

Bull leaned forward, his elbows on the table. Ashford and Pa were looking around the table at the graying faces. They’d known before, because they weren’t going to wait for a staff meeting to get their information. Now they were judging the reactions. So he’d give them a reaction. Control the fall.

“Be weirder if there wasn’t anything there. If it was an attack fleet, they’d have attacked by now.”

“Yeah,” Ruiz said, latching on to the words.

Ashford opened the floor for questions. How many probes had Mars fired through? How long would it take something going at six hundred meters per second to reach one of the structures? Had they tried sending small probes in? Had there been any contact from the protomolecule itself, the stolen voices of humans, the way there had been with Eros? Chan did his best to be reassuring without actually having anything more that he could say. Bull assumed there was a deeper report that Ashford and Pa were getting, and he wondered what was in it. Being kept out chafed.

“All right. This is all interesting, but it’s not our focus,” Ashford said, bringing the Q-and-A session to a halt. “We’re not here to send probes through the Ring. We’re not here to start a fight. We’re just making sure that whatever the inner planets do, we’re at the table. If something comes out of the Ring, we’ll worry about it then.”

“Yes, sir,” Bull said, throwing his own weight behind Ashford’s. It wasn’t like there was another strategy. Better that the crew see them all unified. People were watching how this all came down, and not just the crew.

“Mister Pa?” Ashford said. The XO nodded and glanced at Bull. Instinct dropped a weight in his gut.

“There have been some irregularities in the ship’s accounting structure,” Pa said. “Chief Engineer Rosenberg?”

Sam nodded, surprise on her face. “XO?” she said.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to restrict you to quarters and revoke your access privileges until this is all clarified. Chief Watanabe will relieve you. Mister Baca, you’ll see to it.”

The room was just as silent, but the meaning behind it was different now. Sam’s eyes were wide with disbelief and rising fury.

“Excuse me?” she said. Pa met her gaze coolly, and Bull understood all of it in an instant.

“Records show you’ve been drawing resources from work and materials budgets that weren’t appropriate,” Pa said, “and until the matter is resolved—”

“If this is about the tech support thing, that’s on me,” Bull said. “I authorized that. It’s got nothing to do with Sam.”

“I’m conducting a full audit, Mister Baca. If I find you’ve been drawing resources inappropriately, I’ll take the actions I deem appropriate. As your executive officer, I am informing you that Samara Rosenberg is to be confined to quarters and her access to ship’s systems blocked. Do you have any questions about that?”

She’d waited until they’d made the trip, until they’d gotten where they were going, and now it was time to establish that she was in control. To get back at him for the drug dealer he’d spaced and punish Sam for being his ally. Would have been stupid to do until their shakedown run was over. But now it was.

Bull laced his fingers together. The refusal was on the back of his tongue, waiting. It would have been insubordination, and it would have been easy as breathing out. There were years—decades even—when he’d have done it, and taken the consequences as a badge of honor. It had been his call, and standing by while Sam was punished for it was more than dishonorable, it was disloyal. Pa knew that. Anyone who’d read his service records would know it. If it had just been his mission, his career on the line, he’d have done it, but Fred Johnson had asked him to make this work. So there was only one play to make.

“No questions,” he said, rising from his chair. “Sam. You should come with me now.”

The others were silent as he led her out of the conference room. They all looked stunned and confused, except Ashford and Pa. Pa wore a poker face, and Ashford had a little shadow of smugness in the corners of his mouth. Sam’s breath shook. Outrage and adrenaline left her skin pale. He helped her into the side seat of his security cart, then got behind the controls. They lurched into motion, four small engines whirring and whining. They were almost at the elevators when Sam laughed. A short, mirthless sound as much like a cry of pain as anything.