Opening the book…
Chapter 1 — First Berth
The Dawnward was smaller than Wells expected, and she loved it at once, which she knew better than to say out loud and said anyway, to the docking clerk, who had heard it before.
“She’s beautiful,” Wells said.
“She’s over quota by nine tonnes and she’s leaving in a day,” the clerk said, not looking up. “Berth’s that way. Mind the loaders.”
Highreach hung the ship against the whole bright face of Earth. From the gantry the planet turned under them, the terminator crawling west across an ocean, cities coming up like spilled sugar along the dark edge — and above and around it all the traffic of the richest place anyone had ever built. Lighters and yard-tugs and the long ceramic spines of the deep-range ships, everything moving, everything lit, the great turning wheel of a species that had won and knew it. Wells had grown up watching this on a school wall in a town where the weather still came in off a real sea. Now the wall was gone and the cold of the true thing came up through her boots, and she had to stop on the gantry with her kit bag on her shoulder and just look, because if she didn’t, something in her chest might come loose.
Somebody bumped her from behind. “You’re in the road,” a rigger said, and grinned when she flinched, and went past with a spar of hull plate on one shoulder as if it weighed nothing.
She went the way the clerk had pointed, past a customs post where a Nhál in survey grey was having a slow, patient argument with a manifest officer, past a noodle stall doing hard trade at a shift change, past a wall-sized public ledger where a knot of people stood watching the routes resolve, and a child kept tugging a father’s sleeve to show him one that had just gone gold. It was the busiest, brightest, most ordinary place in creation, and Wells wanted to belong to it so badly her teeth ached.
The Dawnward wore her name in worn survey blue along a hull patched and repatched until it read like a map of everywhere she’d been. Loader rigs crawled the gantry seams, feeding crates through the aft hatch faster than she’d known crates could move, and a woman with a manifest board argued with two dock-hands in the flat, tired voice of someone who had been arguing for hours. Nobody was ceremonial about any of it. That surprised her; she had imagined more of a moment. The moment was hers alone, apparently, and she decided to keep it.
“You Wells?”
The man came down the ramp wiping his hands on a rag that was making them dirtier. Fifties, broad, grey stubble, a coverall with the sleeves shoved up and a burn scar on one forearm gone silver with age. He looked at her like a part that had arrived and might be the wrong one.
“Jae Wells,” she said, and put out her hand, and then wasn’t sure that was right, and held it out anyway. “Junior survey. Reporting aboard.”
“Silva. I keep her flying.” He shook the hand, one pump, let go. “You’re early. Everybody’s early. That’s the problem.” He was already turning. “Come on, I’ll walk you in. I haven’t got the time to walk you in.”
She followed him up the ramp. Inside, the Dawnward smelled of hot metal and coffee and the clean ozone bite of a ship being woken up, and the passages were narrow, and the light was warm, and this is the best day of my life, she told herself, and had the sense to keep it behind her teeth.
“She’s a good ship,” Silva said, ducking a conduit that had been pulled down and left hanging, “which is not the same as ready. We are not fuelled to spec. We’re carrying a survey mast rated for a bigger frame, and I have got maybe thirty hours to make her behave when I was promised sixty. Somebody moved the window.” He said somebody as another man might spit. “Mind your head.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s a conduit there.”
“No — why’d they move the window?”
Silva stopped. It was only for a moment, and then he went on as if he hadn’t, but she caught it: the little hitch of a man deciding not to answer, and then deciding how not to answer. “Above my pay,” he said. “And yours. You’ll draw the receiver checks.”
“The — sorry?”
“Deep-field receiver. The mast. It’s the one thing on this ship I can’t wire up with my own two hands, and the tech who was meant to run it through got pulled to another berth this morning, no notice, and here you are, fresh off the Academy with the theory still warm.” He handed her the rag as though it were a commission. “You did receivers at Cole?”
“Top of my flight,” Wells said — and there it was, out loud, and her face went hot. “I mean — yes. I did receivers.”
“Top of your flight,” Silva said, with no weight on it at all, which was worse. “Good. Then you can tell me if the mast’s lying to me before we’re somewhere I can’t do anything about it.”
They came out into a compartment stacked to the ceiling with stores, and Wells had to turn sideways to get through and loved that too. Two crew were securing a pallet, talking low, and when Silva and Wells came in they stopped. Not sharply. Just — finished, the way you finish a sentence early. One of them, a man with a first-contact patch and a kind, tired face, smiled at her.
“New?” he said.
“First berth,” Wells said.
“Sethi. You’ll like it out here — it’s the best thing there is.” He meant it — it was plain in his voice — and it landed on her like sunlight. Then the other one, a woman with a cartographer’s flashes, gave Sethi a look, and Sethi’s smile went careful, and they turned back to the pallet, and under the warmth came a first small draught of something she had no name for.
She had no time to name it either, because a voice from the forward passage said, “That the new hand, Silva? Bring her up, I want to say hello before she decides we’re all mad,” and Silva rolled his eyes where the voice couldn’t see and steered her forward.
The captain was younger than she’d pictured and easier, a big plain man with a working-yard way of standing, and he came out of the cramped forward office with a slate under one arm and put out his hand before she’d worked out whether she was allowed to offer hers.
“Locke,” he said. “Aidan Locke. Welcome aboard the Dawnward.” He didn’t say it like a captain saying it. He said it like a man who was actually glad. “Wells, is it? Jae Wells. Silva steal you already?”
“For the mast, Captain.”
“Then you’ll be more use than me by dinner.” He looked at her a moment, and it was a good look, unhurried, and then he asked her the first real question — before anyone senior, before he’d told her a single thing about himself. “What’s the one part of a receiver everybody gets wrong?”
“Phase floor,” Wells said, too fast, and then, because he was still listening, slower: “Everyone chases the signal. The floor’s where the lies live. If your noise floor’s dishonest, everything above it is too.”
Something moved in Locke’s face — approval, and under it something else, something that had been sitting there before she came in. “The floor’s where the lies live,” he said. “I’ll remember that. Go find mine.” And he smiled and turned back into the office, and as the hatch drew to, Sethi was already inside it, close, and the captain’s voice dropped right down out of its welcome — three low words she didn’t catch, and Sethi’s answer just as low, and neither of them glad any more.
Then the hatch closed, and Silva’s hand was on her shoulder pointing her aft, and the ship was warm and narrow and hers, and she chose, deliberately, to keep the best of it and set the rest aside.
The receiver mast ran up the Dawnward’s dorsal spine like a nerve, and Wells spent the next hours inside its base with a diagnostic slate and a headset and a growing, private joy.
It was real work — that was the thing nobody at the Academy could give you, that Wells understood now, wedged in a maintenance well with the whole warm weight of the ship around her. At Cole the receiver had been a problem on a slate. Here it was a live thing under her hands, half-tuned and complaining, forty-year-old array plumbing that somebody had upgraded twice and never quite documented, wire she had to trace by feel where the schematic gave up, and it was hers to make honest. She talked to it under her breath. She skinned a knuckle and didn’t care. Twice she caught herself grinning at nothing and made herself stop, and failed.
Silva checked on her twice. The first time he grunted at her numbers and left. The second time he stood over her a while, one hand flat on the mast housing the way you’d rest a hand on a horse.
“You’ve done the phase pass,” he said.
“Twice. It’s clean.”
“Do it a third time.” Silva wasn’t looking at her; his eyes stayed on the mast. “She reads high on the aft quarter. Has done for four years. Every tech tells me it’s the array, and every time I open the array it’s fine, and I’ve stopped believing the array.” He took the hand back. “So. Third pass. Tell me it’s nothing, and I’ll believe you and not the ship.”
He went. Wells did the third pass.
It was the array. Almost. There was a warmth on the aft quarter, a fraction of a fraction, right down at the floor of what the mast could feel, and it sat exactly where Silva said it would. She looked at it a while. Then she wrote within tolerance, because it was, and because that was the answer, and because a small vain part of her wanted to bring Silva a clean report on her first day and not a mystery she couldn’t close. The floor’s where the lies live. She looked at the warm quarter again, and left the note as it was, and told herself the captain hadn’t meant anything by it.
On the compartment’s main plate, the ledger was live.
She had read it a thousand times and never once from a ship about to go somewhere new. Out past Ceres a supply run resolved — a thread of gold closed between two junctions and a fresh mark held there, steady, proven — and a hundred more sat around it, every route on the plate authenticated: unforgeable, and open for anyone to read, the whole reachable network laid out in light. It was the most beautiful thing Wells had ever been paid to look at.
And along its far edge, where the Dawnward was bound, there was nothing at all. Not darkness — just blank, unwritten. A whole reach the map didn’t cover, because no one had ever stood inside it and made a mark hold true, and in a day she was going to be one of the ones who did.
“You’re smiling at a wall,” the cartographer said.
She had come in quiet. She stood with a slate of her own and a stillness that made Wells straighten without deciding to.
“Sorry — ma’am. I’m—”
“Vale. Cartography.” A glance at the blank edge, then back at Wells, and something in it revised itself, as if an estimate had come in low. “That empty piece is the Sable Reach. That’s where we’re going.”
“I know. It’s—” Wells stopped herself, and then didn’t. “It’s the best job alive.”
Vale considered this without hurry. “Ask me in a month,” she said, which was not a no, and nodded at the slate in Wells’s hands. “Silva’s mast. You closing it out?”
“Almost. There’s a warm quarter, aft, but it’s within tol—”
“Show me.”
It should have taken ten minutes.
Wells brought the aft-quarter warmth up on the slate, and Vale looked at it the way Silva looked at the housing, and asked for the raw feed instead of the summary, and got it, and did something to the display that Wells hadn’t the seniority to know how to do. The warm smear resolved a little. A little more. Stopped being a smear.
There was structure in it.
Wells’s joy changed temperature without leaving her — the moment a thing you’re looking at turns out to be looking back. “That’s not thermal,” she said. “That’s not the array.”
“No,” said Vale.
“It’s carrying.”
“Yes.”
They pulled it up out of the floor of the mast’s hearing together, the junior with the fast hands and the cartographer with the slow certainty, and it came grudging, out of four years of being logged as instrument error and shrugged away, and when it came it was faint and patterned and it was, past any argument, a signal.
Then, for less than a breath — because the mast was tuned and the ship was quiet and the Reach happened to be turned the right way — it was a voice.
It was human.
Wells knew it the way you know a footstep in your own house. Not the words; the words were half torn off, worn thin by however far they had come. She knew the shape of a human mouth making them, the rise and fall of a person meaning something to whoever might be listening, and she had the sudden and total conviction that she was hearing someone who had spoken this a long time ago and hoped very hard that it would land somewhere.
“…to whoever opened the road,” the voice said, out of the blank part of the map, out of the reach no one had ever reached. “…we are still here.”
Then the mast lost it, and the aft quarter read high, and within tolerance, and forty years old, and on the plate the ledger went on filling with gold — mark after proven mark, and none of it anywhere near the one edge that wasn’t there.
Vale had gone very still. She reached out and, without asking, saved the feed to her own slate, and then she looked at Wells, and Wells understood that whatever the woman said next, she was choosing it with great care.
“Nobody’s ever been there,” Wells said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. “That’s the whole reason we’re going. Nobody has ever been there.”
“No,” Vale said.
“Then who’s already speaking?”
Vale looked at the blank edge of the map, at the place the Dawnward would open in a day, and had no answer to give her.
Someone was already out there, speaking Earth’s own language into a road no one had opened. The voice had been waiting four years for a road that did not exist.