The Widening Veil

The Epsilon line came back wrong at the top of the middle watch, and Nigel ran the sweep again before he let himself think about it.

The monitoring bay was his at that hour. Officially it belonged to the station — a converted stores compartment with a wall of relay returns, two consoles, and a ceiling of conduit that three generations of techs had taped up three different ways. One of the consoles had its faceplate off and had had it off since before he came. Unofficially it was the quietest room on the outpost, which was why he'd taken the middle watch in the first place and kept taking it. The work asked almost nothing of him. The pickets strung out along the frontier routes swept their stretch of dark, the returns came home, and Nigel confirmed that nothing had changed. He'd been confirming it ever since the directorate decided the crew were worth more working than locked up. The whole job stood on nothing changing.

The place had filled up around them. When the crew first came off the pod it had been a garrison spine and not much else — a few dozen riggers and techs rattling around a forty-year-old ring built for a busier stretch of frontier, and Kate the only child on it. Then the routes began closing, one and then another, and everything that used to move through this sector started arriving instead. Survey crews in off the lanes. Reinforcement drafts, and the families that came with them. The residential ring was opened deck by deck. Somewhere in it a school started. There were forty children on the station now, by the roll the quartermaster read out on Tuesdays. He walked past the school hatch twice a night on his way to the middle watch.

The second sweep matched the first.

He put his cup down and brought the Epsilon returns up side by side — tonight's against last week's, last week's against last month's. The veil out on the Epsilon line was older than the crew's time on this station. A thin place. A smear on a dead route where the signal came through wrong and ships learned not to go. The survey teams had measured its edges the year the empire found it. The edges held through every sweep since. The file on it ran to four pages, six years old.

It read wider than last week.

Not by much, but by enough.

"Do that twice more," he said to the empty bay, "and we'll talk."

He queued a third sweep and made himself work the rest of the board while it ran. That was discipline, and it lasted four minutes. The Tau line read clean and the near routes read clean. Then the long route toward the coreward relays came up, and Nigel went still. That lane had never carried a veil in the life of the watch. There was a smear on it now, small and new. It sat in the middle of a stretch that read empty every night for two years.

He checked the picket's diagnostics first, because he wanted it to be the picket. The picket was healthy. He checked the relay chain behind it. Healthy. He checked his own consoles, which he'd rebuilt with his own hands and trusted further than he trusted most people.

Everything worked. That was the bad news.

He stood up, walked the length of the bay, came back, and sat down again. The cup was cold. He drank it and set the empty back on the console shelf, on the ring already there.

***

By the end of the watch the count was six.

Two known veils, wider. Four new ones, on routes that had been clean — one so faint he'd have called it noise a year ago and slept fine. He didn't call it noise. He'd spent two years learning exactly what nothing looked like, and none of this was nothing.