Maya was hardly tall by Rumreign's standards, but she was large, in a way that belied an origin on a planet at least a little more massive than Rumreign. Moreover, she carried herself with a certain guardedness which, when accompanied by a perpetual scowl, made it clear that any amount of whimsy was out of the question.

Which made for a lot of double takes when the rest of the crew would routinely find her sometimes crammed into tiny cubbies, sometimes upside down, sometimes both! throughout the blimp's cabin. Evidently, even if she remembered nothing of her previous life in interstellar space, the habits of confined spaces and inconsistent non-inertial reference frames had not left her.

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It was this image Maya took with her as the Fugue tore itself back into spacetime. The ship’s sensors shuddered away their jump blindness, and the gentle curve of Rumreign’s surface was replaced with a dense field of shimmering light: debris, wreckage—the effusions of the Gate.

“Annette. We’re about to go through the Gate. I thought I’d call you before we left. Even though I know it’ll be a few minutes before you can hear me. Even though by the time you respond we might be gone.

“I’m not sure how much you’ve put together on your own—-but I came through this gate, god knows how many years ago. Floated through space maybe just as long. Fell like a meteor onto Rumreign. The Last Kingdom of Mankind pulled me from cryosleep, couldn’t find a use for me, then threw me back into the wreckage, just like that. From there you know what happened. You were there for all of it.

“And now I’m back where it started, the Gate. Somehow I’d had it in my head that it was just a big old ring in space. Some pylons, some plasma. Thick metal and crude machinery, just like everything else I’ve seen on Rumreign. But I was wrong. It’s beautiful, Annette. It’s blinding.

“Not just one doorway, but thousands, stretching as far as the eye can see—as if into infinity itself. A hundred thousand tears in the fabric of spacetime, crammed together like the facets of a giant gem, each one spitting and sparking as they spit up flecks of jetsam, disgorge whole wrecks untouched. Huge arcs of unloosed plasma; the silent, boneshattering hum of sundered spacetime. And our ship, barely a speck on the surface of this giant insect’s eye, about to plunge into the breach.”

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