The Final Frontier: Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

THE MIND IS ITS OWN PLACE ^{CARRIE VAUGHN}

^{Carrie Vaughn is best known for her New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. Her latest novels include a near-Earth space opera, Martians Abroad, from Tor Books, and a post-apocalyptic murder mystery, Bannerless, from John Joseph Adams Books. The sequel, The Wild Dead, will be out in 2018. She’s written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of eighty short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.}

Professional fingers pried open Mitchell’s left eyelid, and white light blinded him. The process repeated on the right. He winced and turned his head to escape. The grip released him.

“Lieutenant Greenau?”

He lay on a bunk in an infirmary. It wasn’t the Francis Drake’s infirmary. The smell was wrong; the background hum of the vessel was wrong. This place sounded softer, more distant. Larger. With effort, he shifted an arm. His head hurt. He felt like he’d been asleep for days.

“Lieutenant Greenau? Mitchell?” The figure at the side of his bed gave him something to focus on. A middle-aged man in a white tunic, with a narrow face and a receding hairline, frowned at him. “How are you feeling?”

“Groggy.” He struggled for awareness.

“You were sedated.”

“Can you give me something to clear it up?”

“I’d rather not put anything else into your system just yet.”

He wished he didn’t have to ask: “Where am I?”

“You’re at Law Station, Lieutenant.”

Law Station was a Military Division forward operating base and shipyard. It would have taken the Drake days to get here, and he didn’t remember the trip. Law also housed an extensive medical facility.

Softly, as if afraid of upsetting a fragile piece of equipment, he asked, “Why am I here?”

“What do you remember?”

He’d arrived on the bridge for his shift. He’d checked in with Captain Scott. Then he assumed he’d taken his place at the navigator station. He must have done his job as he had a hundred times before. He checked in with the captain, the duty log scanned his thumbprint—

“I was on the Francis Drake. On the bridge. I said good morning to the captain. Then—I don’t remember.” He kneaded the sheet draped over him, cramping his fingers. He was wearing a patient gown, not his uniform.

“That’s all right.” The doctor smiled, but the expression was shallow, artificial, a forced attempt at bedside manner. “I’m Doctor Dalton, one of the supervising physicians here. If you need anything, a pager is at the side of the bunk.”

“Doctor—” Mitchell forced himself up, rolling to his side and leaning hard on his elbow. The effort left him gasping. “What happened?”

Dalton’s manner was implacable, as if he’d had this conversation before, with other patients, over many years. “This is the neurophysiology ward. Are you familiar with what we do here?”

His heart pounded; his tongue was dry. “Yes.”

“You were brought here because you have OSDS.”

Among themselves, in private, the navigators called it Mand Dementia. The condition was degenerative and incurable. It was one of the risks of the job. An acceptable risk.

“But I feel fine. I don’t feel—” Except for the sedation—why had he needed to be sedated? “I don’t feel sick. I’m not—” I’m not crazy.

“I know, Lieutenant. I’m sorry.”

Mitchell slumped back against the mattress.

He kept a close count of the time. It seemed important, to prove he wasn’t sick. Everything he did had to be normal and healthy. He wasn’t sick, and the doctor was wrong.

Halfway through his first waking day cycle, he heard voices coming from the office next to the infirmary. Doctor Dalton was one, and he brightened to hear the other: Captain Crea Scott.

Dalton said, “He didn’t exhibit any symptoms before?”

Scott answered, her normally brash voice hushed and brittle: “He didn’t. I know what to look for. He was fine at the start of the shift, and an hour later he was screaming about flying monkeys to starboard—”

Mitchell lay very still.

“He hasn’t exhibited any symptoms since he’s been here. He also doesn’t remember anything that happened. We won’t know the extent of the damage until we run tests.”

“Could there be a mistake? Could it be something else?”

“I reviewed the log myself, Captain.”

“May I see him?”

“That should be all right.”

Mitchell lay with his back to the door and didn’t see them enter. He waited to turn when Scott said, “Lieutenant Greenau?”

Scott stood a few feet away from the bed, her petite frame tense, her arms crossed. Her face was drawn; she looked ten years older than the last time he’d seen her—when?

He sat up and smiled, relieved. Like she was going to rescue him or something. “Captain Scott. It’s good to see you.”

She didn’t return the smile. “How are you feeling, Lieutenant?”

“Still groggy from the sedative. But I’m okay. I feel fine.” He glanced at Doctor Dalton to make sure he heard.

“That’s good.”

“Captain, I don’t understand why I’m here.”

“That’s okay. Just rest. Don’t worry about it.” After putting a hand on his arm, she bowed her head and turned away.

“I did something, didn’t I? What did I do?”

Scott didn’t turn around. Her voice was painfully steady. “Just take care of yourself, Mitchell. Don’t worry.”

Dalton followed Scott out of the room, and Mitchell heard his captain say, “He’ll be safe here?”

“Yes. As safe as we can make him.”

Then Scott said, her voice low and angry, “Make sure he never remembers what happened.”

A door slid open, then closed again, and the captain was gone.

He pressed his thumb to the duty log, he said good morning to the captain, he went to his station—

He only knew that much because it was the routine, what he’d done over and over for years. Was he remembering some other time, or that time?

Compared to his quarters aboard the Drake, the room he was given here was spacious, an eight by eight square with a bed, desk, computer console, and private washroom. For the whole of his adult life, Mitchell had slept in closets, with a narrow bunk and a cupboard for his belongings. He’d shared washrooms with other junior officers. Who needed more? Who ever spent time in their rooms? He’d always been so busy.

The door to the room locked from the outside. He couldn’t leave without escort. Orderlies brought meals and returned to take away the trays. Mitchell counted two of them, Baz and Jared, working in shifts. They were polite. Mitchell said thank you, and they smiled at him. He had a change of clothing—pale blue hospital-issue jumpsuits—every day. He could read or watch entertainments at the console to pass the time, when he wasn’t in therapy.

That first night he didn’t sleep, but lay back on his cot and stared at a bubbled security monitor in the ceiling, wondering if this was a test.

The second doctor he encountered had an unflappably optimistic professional demeanor, and Mitchell distrusted her for no good reason except that nobody was that genuinely enthusiastic about anything. In spite of himself, Mitchell shook her hand after Baz escorted him to her lab.

Her space was a bit more inviting than other areas of the hospital. Handheld terminals lay strewn across the desk among forgotten drink bottles and writing implements. A sweater hung over the back of a chair. Photos shone from wall displays: image after image of human brains, parts color-coded and labeled.

A dark-skinned woman with short hair and an eager smile, she came around the desk. “Lieutenant Greenau? I’m Doctor Ava Keesey. I’ll be starting your therapy today.” She offered her hand.

“Not Doctor Dalton?”

“I’ve requested your case. I hope that’s all right?”

He didn’t know what his choices were to be able to make one, so he said nothing.

“Have a seat right over here, Lieutenant.” She guided him to a reclining chair surrounded by unidentifiable equipment. Gingerly, he climbed in; its cushions molded under him, supporting his body. The chair tipped back until he was horizontal.

“Any questions before we start?”

“Is the Drake still in dock?”

“I don’t know. I can check for you.”

Her smile was fake; he didn’t think she would check.

“What happened? Why was I brought here?”

“It’s better if you remember on your own, rather than construct false memories based on anything I tell you. If you can please keep your head back, I’d like to start the scan.” Her cool hand on his forehead eased him back against the headrest. “You’ve been through a cortical mapping session before, yes?”

“Yes.” Every navigator had one done at the start of their career. A baseline.

“Then you know all about this. Just relax.”

Machinery closed over his crown, sensors pressing against his scalp, tickling the fuzz of his hair. He looked straight up to off-white ceiling.

“Can you hear me?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’d like you to move your left thumb. And again. Left index. And again. Left middle. And again.”

And so it went, through the range of motor skills, then across the range of sensory input. Keesey played music and noises, offered him tastes, put sandpaper and cotton into his hands, recording the results with straightforward efficiency.

“Now I’m going to show you some colors, each one for a few seconds. Pay attention, please.”

A screen swung into view over the chair and flashed to life, displaying solid blue, then green, then yellow.

He went to the navigator station, slid into his chair and belted in. Ready for the jump in three, two—the monitor showed a swirl of color. The wrong colors, circling like predators—

Orange, red, purple. Mitchell blinked. Solid squares appeared in sequence on the screen. Harmless.

“What is two plus two, Lieutenant?”

“Four.”

“Two times two?”

“Four.”

“Four times four?”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen squared?”

“Two hundred fifty-six.”

Yellow, orange, red.

“Thank you.”

The wrong colors. They were the wrong colors.

Keesey moved away, her footsteps clicking on the hard floor of the lab. He remained locked in the chair, unable to turn his head.

“Can I sit up?”

“In a minute, Lieutenant.”

He wished he could see what she was doing. He heard clicks, movements, maybe fingers tapping on a keypad, or machinery shifting into place. All the sounds were inexplicable.

Mitchell waited a painful, silent minute before saying, “Doctor?”

“Patience, Lieutenant. I want to get a little more data.” Did her voice sound stressed? Uncertain?

She went through the entire sequence again, generating a second cortical map. Finally, she released him from the equipment.

“What’s wrong?” he said, sitting up.

Her smile didn’t seem any different than the one she gave him at the start of the session. “How much do you know about OSDS?”

Occupational Synaptic Dysfunction Syndrome. It was the bogeyman, the monster in the dark. The price they paid for crossing the void. Some people said M-drive propulsion violated the laws of physics, and the Universe took the cost of that somewhere else: in the minds of the navigators who plotted courses through the unreal. Their minds became… nonlinear.

“It affects the neural organization of the brain,” he said.

Keesey said, “It develops when some neurotransmitters don’t reach adjacent neurons but instead stimulate neurons in distant parts of the brain. Reducing the stimulation our patients receive can prevent the damage from getting worse by keeping faulty connections from developing. That means sheltering patients, perhaps more than seems reasonable. I’ll have some instructions for you once I’ve had a chance to study the scans.”

“You made two maps. Is that normal?”

“Just confirming the data, Lieutenant.”

She hadn’t believed what she saw the first time.

“But I don’t feel sick.” If he were really well, he wouldn’t have to keep saying it.

“And we want to keep you that way.”

She escorted him back to his quarters herself. He would never be allowed to just wander, would he? He was curious about every door, every branch in the corridor. Every place he couldn’t go. And where was the Drake now?

They’d almost reached his quarters when a scream rang out and echoed along the walls. The corridor curved to match the curve of the station; the scream came from ahead, just out of sight.

Keesey’s practiced demeanor slipped. “Stay here.” She gripped his arm and pushed him against the wall, as if she could stick him there.

When she trotted ahead, Mitchell followed her, to where Baz was half-helping, half-dragging a thirty-year-old man in a hospital jumpsuit through an open door. Mitchell couldn’t tell if they were trying to enter or leave what must have been the man’s quarters. Baz held the man’s shoulders, as if he were simply guiding him, but he stumbled, his legs buckling as if he couldn’t support himself. Disheveled brown hair hung around his shoulders, he held his hands over his ears, and his face was twisted in an anguished cry. He screamed again.

Keesey knelt by the patient and tried to take hold of his face.

“Morgan, look at me. Morgan! Focus!”

The man, Morgan, squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.

Keesey said, “Baz, I can’t look after him now. Take him to the infirmary, and I’ll be there in a minute.” She pulled something out of her pocket—a patch—and slapped it on Morgan’s wrist. His struggles subsided; his moans continued.

The orderly nodded and lifted his burden, guiding Morgan along the corridor, past Mitchell, stopping every few steps as the man doubled over, then raising him up and continuing.

Keesey quickly took Mitchell’s arm and steered him back to his own room—just a couple of doors down from Morgan’s. She keyed it open with her wristband, and she urged him inside. He was being put away in a box.

“What’s wrong with him?” Mitchell asked.

“Get some rest, Mitchell. We’ll talk later about your treatment.”

“But—”

“He has OSDS, Mitchell.”

He sat at his tiny desk and pretended it was the Drake’s navigator station, the self-contained compartment located through a hatch at the fore of the equipment-laden bridge. Here, isolated from the bustle at the heart of the ship, he monitored the calculations that allowed the M-drive to fling the ship from one point to another across folded space. It was a mind-boggling journey, possible through a complex quirk of physics, comprehensible through advanced mathematics. Nevertheless, Mitchell was a romantic, and he could imagine the journey—not an instantaneous manipulation of space-time, but a race across the galaxy, stars flying past in a Dopplered rainbow of colors, the gas of nebulae swirling in his wake. The stuff of children’s adventure stories.

If this were the chair in his station, the computer console would have been here, the screen here, the proximity monitor here, the holo-maps there. Where had they been going? Had the blank space in his memory happened before or after they’d jumped? He would have located departure and arrival matrices, he would have generated equations describing those endpoints in real space, converted the holography…

He thought some part of the process would jog his memory. He calculated a dozen iterations of the same equation, variations in the matrices, imagined the graph they would plot, imagined traveling along that shape. The Universe and all its paths could be described this way.

The path made a swirl of colors—gases inflamed by cosmic radiation, distant starlight—and the colors made him nervous. They never had before.

The computer had to be connected to Law Station’s network. The Drake had docked here, so the station database would have some record of it. The Drake’s logs might even have been uploaded.

From this terminal he was only supposed to have access to entertainments, but with a little hunting, he found that the library’s reading material included the station’s daily news feed, which listed a record of dockings by interstellar ships. Mitchell found the records from a couple of weeks before and worked forward.

A week ago, the M.D.S. Francis Drake had docked for temporary repairs. It was scheduled to continue to the Mil Div Sol shipyards for more extensive repairs. That hadn’t been on their schedule; the Drake had years of operation left before it needed an overhaul. Unless something had happened. And something had happened, or Mitchell wouldn’t be here. The logs, he had to find the logs—

The screen went blank, the computer shut down. Its power had been cut off. Standard procedure for any terminal being used for unauthorized access.

He stared at his hands, flattened on the surface of the desk. They weren’t even shaking.

“Lieutenant, I’d really appreciate it if you not work on any math.” Keesey said.

He had started physical therapy—work on a treadmill, standard weightlifting. It was very boring, but the doctors watched him closely. Maybe in case he started singing when he only meant to move his leg.

He stopped walking. The treadmill powered down. “What?”

“You have books to read, vids to watch. You should avoid mathematics problems.”

He laughed. Navigational math lived in his brain like his own heartbeat; he didn’t even think of it.

Keesey explained: “The mathematics involved in navigation instigated your injury. I don’t want you making it worse.”

“Doctor, what was wrong with my cortical map?”

She consulted her handheld, donned her pleasant demeanor. “I think you might benefit from some social time. Meet some of the other patients so you can realize you’re not alone here.”

He knew he wasn’t alone. He’d seen Morgan.

The common room where stabilized patients were allowed to socialize was carpeted, comfortable, and round. It gave an impression of nest-like safety. There were no corners to cower in. A few upholstered chairs occupied one side, some tables the other. The lighting was soft. An orderly stood watch inside the doorway.

Three people wearing hospital jumpsuits sat in the room, all apart from each other. Only one, a shorthaired woman curled up in one of the easy chairs, reading a handheld, looked up when Mitchell and Keesey appeared in the doorway.

The other two, a man and a woman, sat at different tables. The woman’s eyes were closed, and she nodded in time to some tune all her own. The man held a stylus and bent over a handheld datapad, which he marked now and then. There was something odd about him, something small and shrunken. Maybe because he wore a helmet shielding him down to his ears. Mitchell expected him to start banging his head against the table at any moment.

Mitchell whispered to Keesey, “What’s the point of socializing if no one talks to each other?”

“Have a little patience.” She gestured to the man and woman at the tables. “Communication is difficult for Jaspar and Sonia, so they’ve isolated themselves. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t spend time in proximity with others. But here—this is Dora.”

No ranks, no surnames. Their old lives had been thoroughly erased here. He wanted his uniform back.

She led him to the side of the room where the woman watched them expectantly. “Dora? I’d like you to meet our new resident. This is Mitchell.”

“Hello, Mitchell.” Dora, head propped on her hand, smiled up at him.

Mitchell gave a mental sigh of relief. She sounded normal. Friendly, even. Not prone to screaming.

Keesey said, “Baz will come fetch you in half an hour.” She left them alone.

Dora gestured at the chair next to hers. “Sit. You look uncomfortable.”

“I am uncomfortable. I don’t think I belong here.”

“Because you’re not crazy. Because you’re not like them.” She nodded at the others.

“I’m not. I’m not.” Dora smiled a thin, cat-like smile. “What made them send you here?”

Dora smiled a thin, cat-like smile. “What made them send you here?”

“I don’t remember.”

She tapped her nose and grinned wider.

“So why are you here?” he asked.

She gave a demure tilt to her head. “It was a conspiracy. Captain didn’t like me. Some of the crew didn’t agree with the decision to lock me up. They’ll come back for me, break me out of here.”

And to think she acted so normal.

“Ah,” she said. “You’re giving me a look like now you think I’m crazy, too.”

“They break you out? Then what? You become pirates?”

“Hm, that sounds like fun. Didn’t you dream of that when you were a kid? Being a pirate, blazing across space having all sorts of adventures.”

“I was going to save innocent starships from the bad pirates. Kids never dream about being bad pirates; it’s always good pirates.”

“There are no good pirates.”

Mitchell gestured toward Jaspar and Sonia. “Do you know anything about them?”

Dora sat back in her chair. “Jaspar doesn’t do anything but work puzzles—for six-year-olds. Sonia will talk to you, but she won’t make any sense. Go try it.”

He half-expected this to be some sort of initiation—humiliate the new kid by making him try to find something that wasn’t there. But he crossed the room to Sonia anyway. She was pretty, if ragged. In her thirties, like all of them were, because that was when Mand Dementia tended to strike.

“Hello,” he said, sitting in the chair across from her.

She looked up. Her eyes were swollen, shadowed, tired. Her light-colored hair needed brushing.

“I’m Mitchell. I’m new, so I thought I’d introduce myself.”

She sat very still, in contrast to her previous nodding.

“Dora says you’ll talk.”

“Glass. Concerto for Violin,” she said in a hesitating voice.

Mitchell blinked, startled. “What does that mean?”

Her eyes glistened. There was a spark of something there, a flicker. Understanding. Sentience. Something that wasn’t insane. Like she was staring through the bars of a cage.

“Chopin. Opus 28, Prelude Number 6.”

Composers. Music. She was speaking pieces of music like they meant something. He stared at her, wishing he could understand, and it was like staring into his own future.

“Chopin. Opus 28, Prelude Number 6,” she called after him when he turned to leave. Her gaze pleaded, but he didn’t understand what she wanted. Except maybe out of here, like him.

He tried talking to Jaspar next, but the man turned his back on him, filling Mitchell’s sight with the off-white mound of his helmet—that was protecting what, exactly?

He returned to Dora, who explained, “She was a musician. The dementia crosswired music and language. Keesey thinks there’s some correlation between the mood or situation and what song she says. You know, ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ means ‘pissed off.’ I think it’s a smokescreen and she’s just hiding from everyone.”

“She looks like she’s listening to something.”

“The music in her mind. The doctors won’t let her listen to actual music. They’re afraid it’ll ‘reinforce faulty neural pathways,’” she said. She did a pretty good impression of Dalton’s flat tone. “I knew her, before. She associated every step of navigating to different songs. She said the sound of an M-drive powering up matched the opening measures of the overture to ‘The Marriage of Figaro.’ Then it all went to hell, I guess.”

If someone locked you in a room full of crazy people, was there any chance that you weren’t crazy?

She said softly, “You know, everyone here commits suicide sooner or later. The whole place is a futile attempt to keep us from killing ourselves. But everyone manages it. They can’t help us. This isn’t a hospital, it’s a hospice.”

Quietly he said, “How do you stand it?”

She spread her hand over the handheld in her lap. “I’m looking at this as a chance to catch up on my reading.”

“Lieutenant? It’s time to leave.” Baz stood at his shoulder. Mitchell hadn’t been aware of his approach. Meekly, he let the orderly guide him away.

Back in his room, he listened to the piece of music Sonia had named, the Chopin. A sad piano melody wafted gently from his terminal, like a ghost. He wondered what it meant to her.

Dora was wrong: This was not a place where navigators killed themselves. Keesey was wrong: he was not ill. He kept trying to remember what happened on the Drake. The thing Scott didn’t want him to remember, that the doctors didn’t want him to think about.

He’d signed in, said good morning to the captain, went to his station. We have an hour until we need to jump, Lieutenant. The first step to initiating a jump was identifying the arrival matrix and locking in coordinates. The next step: convert the holography of local space from manifold to loop representation, another computerized operation that nonetheless required monitoring.

Ultimately the navigator, the human element, confirmed the optimum departure matrix generated by the navigation system, or chose an alternate. Then the M-drive would push the ship through it to emerge across interstellar space at the desired arrival matrix. At some level, even if only intuitively, he had to understand the mathematics that connected the two ends of the ship’s journey.

By remembering routine, he forced himself through his breakdown, moment by moment.

He confirmed the departure matrix—and it was wrong. The colors swirled around it like light bursting to its death, and the space through which the ship should have been traveling was a mouth waiting to devour them. It wasn’t a departure matrix but a black hole. The colors were wrong, the math was wrong, the computer was broken—

“Mitchell! Look at me.”

Keesey leaned over him. Her cool hand touched his cheek. His skin was clammy, and his heart was racing. He couldn’t control his breathing; air rasped roughly through his throat. He was on the floor of his quarters; some alarm must have summoned the doctor.

“What is it, Mitchell? What happened?” Her concern was professional, unemotional.

“I-I think I remembered something.”

“Can you describe it?”

He had to speak very carefully. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing. He had to say the thing that would explain all this away. “I saw colors. They were wrong.”

He winced and turned his head, or tried to, but Keesey held him in place. Baz stood behind her. A vent fan hummed somewhere.

“Make your mind a blank, Mitchell. Let the images fall away until you see nothing.” He obeyed her psychiatrist’s calm, and the colors faded. Baz came closer with a bottle and urged him to drink. Mitchell was obedient. The rehydrating fluid somehow made him feel weaker. He shouldn’t need all this attention, this treatment. He wasn’t sick.

“There was something wrong with the computer,” he tried to tell them. That would explain everything.

Keesey wrote on a handheld as she spoke. “Your cortical map shows a faulty connection within your visual cortex. You can’t trust your eyes, Mitchell. I know this is going to be hard, but I’d like you to limit your visual stimulation over the next couple of days. I can give you a blindfold if you’d like.”

Blindfold? Like taking away Sonia’s music.

“What are you writing down?” he asked. Maybe he shouldn’t be looking. Is this what she meant by visual stimulation?

“Some exercises we’ll try at your next session. We need to stabilize the dysfunctional area of the visual cortex. Please, rest your eyes if you can.”

If they could reduce his world to a tiny, thoughtless box, then nothing at all could damage him. They could blindfold him. But he was still going to try and remember.

“I overheard Dalton and Keesey talking about you,” Dora told him. He was sitting in his usual chair with his eyes closed. It didn’t help. If he could just figure out what was wrong with the computer…

She continued, “You’ve got the piss scared out of Dalton. He seems to think you should be locked up and tied down full time. You must have done something spectacular. On the other hand, Keesey thinks you’re the key to the holy grail that’s going to save us all.”

Dora was wrong—this wasn’t a hospice, this was a laboratory. A hundred years of interstellar travel and they hadn’t figured out how to prevent or treat Mand Dementia. That was why they were here; they were data points.

“I don’t know why either of them should think that.”

“Let me ask you a question. What is Mand navigation? Is it the math, or is it the mind of the navigator? See, the math alone isn’t enough. Otherwise the computers could do it all. But no—they need us to process it. Not just anyone can be a navigator. A navigator has to understand what the computer is doing when it crunches those numbers. All those aptitude tests—they’re measuring us, making sure we have the right kind of brain. We’re the key. So why does the Trade Guild have this place?”

She leaned over the arm of her chair and lowered her voice to a bare whisper. “The Guild doesn’t put us here because we’re crazy. They put us here because they’re afraid of us. It’s not that we’re sick. It’s that they can’t control us. We’re too powerful, and this hospital, this so-called disease, all the sedatives, it’s the only way they can keep us under control.”

Powerful? He was a navigator. Part of a crew. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt anyone. “We’re not that special—”

“Mitchell, what do we do?”

“We review the M-drive navigation system, confirming departure and arrival matrices—”

“Do we confirm them? Or do we create them?”

He stared at her. He had to squint against the light, and the colors seemed wrong.

Her eyes grew even wider. “What if some of us have learned to manipulate the process without M-drives, without starships? What would that make us?”

His voice was small. “Powerful.”

“It drives some of us crazy.” She nodded at Jaspar and Sonia at their same places at the table, absorbed in their same tasks. “But some of us are the next step in evolution. It’s not God that makes the Universe, it’s math. Know the math, and you are God.”

Mitchell found Baz and asked to be escorted back to his room. He flinched, though, when Sonia walked smoothly to intercept him before he reached the door.

She touched Mitchell’s arm. “Prokofiev. Prokofiev.”

He could only stare and wish to understand. Bowing her head, she stepped aside and let them pass.

“What did that mean?” Mitchell asked Baz.

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

They passed far enough along the curve of the station that the common room door was out of sight when a buzzer sounded, and Baz brought his wrist comm to his face. “Yeah?”

A desperate voice—Mitchell thought it belonged to the other orderly—replied. “Morgan knocked out Dalton and sealed himself in the decompression chamber.”

Baz ran, shouting, “Damn! Damn, damn—”

Running after him, Mitchell’s slippers skidded a little on the floor. This was what rebellion looked like in the Mand Dementia ward; he wanted to see it. Baz rounded a corner, flashed his wristband to open the door, and Mitchell followed him into the infirmary.

Jared pounded on the control panel of the decompression chamber and called Morgan’s name over and over. Baz joined him, pushing at the chamber’s sliding door as if he could open it with brute force. Impossible, of course, with the difference in air pressure. Mitchell had stopped in the doorway; Keesey pushed him aside.

“Oh no,” she breathed, her voice thick with despair.

Jared said, “He locked up the controls and pumped out all the air. I couldn’t do anything. I tried, but I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t.”

Keesey’s face was twisted into an expression that might have been a comforting smile, or suppressed grief. She rested her forehead against the window. “Where is Doctor Dalton? Is he all right?”

Jared pointed back to where Dalton was sitting on the floor holding a cold compress to his head.

Mitchell’s feet were leaden as he moved toward the chamber door. He’d come this far. He had to see.

The chamber was a gray room, large enough for a stretcher. Morgan lay on the floor, curled in fetal position, naked. His hospital jumpsuit was tangled around his feet. The half-light that entered the chamber through the window cast weird shadows over him. His skin looked silver, painted with the dark splotches of burst blood vessels. His brown hair, haloed around his bent head, looked silver. He was hugging himself, as if this was what he’d wanted.

“Why?” Mitchell asked, his hand on the door, like he could reach through, reach him. Keesey said, “The air against his skin was screaming. He felt the air and heard it as screaming. He was trying to get away from the screaming.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. All people had to do to kill themselves in space was let the air out. It was so easy.

“Good,” Keesey said.

“What is he doing here?” Dalton said from across the room, pointing at Mitchell.

Keesey went over to him and commenced a hushed conversation, but at the last exchange Dalton’s voice carried.

“It’s cruel giving them hope, Ava!”

“Hush!” she hissed back.

Baz stayed with Mitchell, who stared through the window at the man lying curled in the gray shadows.

Morgan turned his head. His eyes opened and met Mitchell’s gaze. He blinked, and movement trembled along his arm.

“He isn’t dead.” Mitchell pressed both fists to the door and lurched forward until his nose touched the window. “He moved, he’s alive!”

Baz looked. “He hasn’t moved.”

“He did!”

Morgan brushed his hand along his cheek, tugging open his mouth, which was dark, bottomless and dark, like a black hole. “Open the door! He’s alive!”

Baz took hold of his shoulders and pinned him to the wall next to the hyperbaric chamber. Keesey stood in front of him. Mitchell hadn’t seen her approach.

“Mitchell, what did you see? Tell me what you saw.”

“There isn’t time, we have to save him, we have to—”

“It’s too late, Mitchell.” She held his cheeks in her hands. “Tell me what you saw.”

He wanted to pull away from them, their oppressive touches. He wanted to put space between them, because he didn’t trust them. But Baz held him firmly against the wall, and Keesey immobilized his face so he couldn’t look away. His throat tightened, and a primitive voice inside him tried to whimper.

“What did you see?”

He swallowed to clear his throat. “He turned his face. He looked at me. I saw his eyes; there was life in them.”

“Baz, are his eyes open?”

“No, doctor.”

“Mitchell, think about it. Does that seem possible? There’s no air in that chamber.”

Logic said no. Common sense said no. He swallowed again, this time to quell a growing nausea. He saw what he saw. She was asking him to deny the truth of his own observation. He said, “The M-drive isn’t supposed to be possible. But it is.”

Keesey held one of his arms, Baz held the other. Their grips were tight; he couldn’t get away from them. If he could just get to Morgan, he’d show them. He lurched, writhed, strained to escape. Keesey pinned his upper arm between her arm and body, pulled up his sleeve, and slapped a patch on his wrist. Immediately a flush like warm syrup flowed up his arm, to his heart, to his head. His knees buckled. She and Baz lowered him to the floor.

A Keesey-shaped shadow knelt by him. She brushed her hand over his face, touching his eyes, closing his eyelids for him, and the world was dark. “Go to sleep, Mitchell. Just go to sleep.”

Mitchell worked to move his lips, to say something, to scream, to curse them. To curse them for being right.

… an hour later he was screaming about flying monkeys to starboard…

Space could be described in terms of numbers and colors. Hydrogen burned orange, helium glowed red. But when the colors were wrong, he—

He couldn’t remember.

He awoke in his quarters, his cell, lying on the bed. When he sat up, his belly lurched sickeningly, and he lay back down. He had seen a dead man move, and it hadn’t been real.

At least, they told him it hadn’t been real.

A navigator told the captain what departure matrices to use. They were invisible, regions in space identified only by the navigator. The captain trusted him to know the way. Captain Scott had always trusted him. He was used to being trusted. He was used to seeing what others couldn’t. To doubt this, to doubt that he could see what others couldn’t—he could never trust himself again.

Morgan had been trying to tell him something. That last look he had given him, those wide-open eyes. If Morgan had wanted to kill himself, there were easier ways.

He wondered what was under Jaspar’s helmet. How had he tried to kill himself?

But what if Morgan hadn’t been trying to kill himself? He’d gone to that specific place, like it was one end of a set of coordinates of a journey he’d plotted. That was the matrix he’d found; he’d needed to launch himself from there to get to the place he really wanted to be—away from here. The jump hadn’t worked. That happened sometimes.

Morgan had tried traveling without a ship, and he’d sent Mitchell a message. Looked in his eyes and told him, it almost worked. They could see what no one else could.

The door opened, and Keesey appeared, smiling and happy, as if nothing bad happened, ever. She had the attitude of a doctor about to give a child an injection.

“Hello, Mitchell. How do you feel?” She’d been watching for the moment he woke, he was sure.

“Numb,” he said flatly.

“The sedative’s still wearing off.”

“What difference does it make?”

He didn’t know what was worse—being treated like a sullen teenager or discovering that he was acting like one. He didn’t have any dignity left.

She continued. “I’d like to help you figure out what’s going on inside your head. The kind of things a cortical map can’t tell us.”

He turned his head toward the wall and shut his eyes, because tears threatened to fill them. He was trapped on so many levels he’d lost count. On the station, in the ward, within his own mind.

“Nobody will ever let me on a ship again. And I don’t know why. I just want to go back to the Drake.”

After a moment of thoughtful silence, she asked a question that sounded genuine and not like a scientist fishing for answers. “If you hadn’t become a navigator, what would you be?”

He’d joined Trade Guild and applied for shipboard duty because he loved space. He’d become an M-drive navigator because he could, he had the aptitude, and the Trade Guild had gladly taken him and assigned him to Mil Div. Being a navigator had seemed as close as a human being could ever get to the stars. The math was the language he used to understand space.

“Maybe mathematics. Cosmology.”

“The theoretical side of M-drive navigation.”

“I suppose.”

He’d always visualized his journeys through space. They happened quickly, leaping over real space, but he always imagined stars, gases, nebulae soaring past him in a blaze of color.

Keesey said, “I’ve observed—in a completely unscientific fashion, mind you—that there are two kinds of navigators. There are those who are tested, identified as having the proper aptitude, and recruited. For them, it’s a job, like any other. Then there are those who love the work, who couldn’t think of doing anything else. They live for the distances between the stars. I’ve observed that everyone who ends up in this ward falls into the latter group.”

So, those who loved navigation would eventually be destroyed by it.

One glimpse of the Drake. To say goodbye, to have one more chance to try and remember. If he could see the Drake again, he might remember. If he could see anything besides these corridors, the lab, the walls of his tiny room. A longing overcame him, a physical pain settling in his gut. He refused to wipe away tears, because if he brought his hands to his face, Keesey would know he was crying.

Careful to steady his voice, he said, “I’d like to see outside. The station has to have an observation area near the docking ports. I want to see a ship again. Any ship.”

Spoken aloud, the desire sounded vague and childish.

“I’m not sure that’s feasible. The sensory input might trigger another episode.”

How many patients had she watched kill themselves, and still she smiled. Such blind dedication was its own insanity, but Keesey wasn’t the one locked in a cell.

“Then when can I leave my quarters? I’d like to go to the common room.”

“So you can talk to Dora some more? I know what she says, what she thinks. She’s paranoid, in a clinical sense.”

He tried sitting up again and managed to keep his stomach on an even keel. He stared at the gray rubberized floor instead of Doctor Keesey and her pitying, patronizing face.

“Dora says that all the patients here commit suicide.”

“Dora says a lot of things.”

I’m going to die soon. Being here, that was the only conclusion Mitchell could draw.

“She says Dalton thinks I should be locked up. Why would he think that?”

“I think you shouldn’t listen to everything Dora says.”

He looked up, glaring. “I don’t have anyone else to talk to.”

“I’m sorry, Mitchell, but we need to stabilize your neural—”

She didn’t need to do anything. It was all about him, his brain; he was the one who had to live with it. He’d lost his rank somewhere. Wasn’t Lieutenant anymore, just Mitchell.

“Doctor, I need to know what happened on the Francis Drake.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think you should.” She paused a moment, her mouth open in mid-sentence. Then changed her mind. “We haven’t been able to do much about controlling OSDS, much less curing it. The physicists who understand the M-drive don’t know anything about physiology, and the doctors don’t know anything about the M-drive. Sometimes I think we’re just waiting for the genius who’s an expert in both to come along and tell us what we’ve been doing wrong.”

Mitchell took a deep breath, ignoring the pressure of the headache that threatened to build whenever he tried to think too hard, to dig in those places in his mind. His own body was telling him to leave it alone.

“The colors were wrong. I remember looking at the monitor, and the colors were wrong.” Something was wrong with the departure matrix. He’d chosen a course correction, an alternative that would avoid the wrongness he was sure was there. He’d announced the course correction, he’d entered the course correction—

Frowning, he touched his temple and shook his head. It was gone, what happened next was gone from his mind, and the pressure was building.

Keesey gripped his wrists. Startled, he flinched back.

“Mitchell,” she said, her voice stern. “Stop. Stop trying to remember. The more you do, the more you’ll exacerbate the problem. That’s where the damage started, with those memories. So just—just stop.”

She let him go and went to his desk computer, typed in a few commands. Music started, something slow and classical.

“I’ve disabled the screen on your computer. You only have audio output now. I’d like you to just listen for a while. All right?”

Who was he to argue? He didn’t say anything, didn’t even nod or shake his head. She wasn’t giving him a choice, no need for him to respond.

She left, and the door shut and locked.

M-drives pushed ships between coordinates in space dozens of light-years apart. Dora insisted some navigators—the elite ones, the crazy ones—could create jump points themselves. Mitchell had never heard of such a thing. Wouldn’t someone have tried it by now?

Maybe they had and ended up here. Sedated in a featureless room, like him.

Everything that could be done could be described by mathematics. Sometimes the equations took years to discover, and M-drive mechanics were only a hundred years old. What if the technology could be scaled down to the size of an individual human body? It was a nice idea to think about, so Mitchell did.

The room could be described in terms of dimension and volume. His chair, his position on it, his distance to the door, graphed and defined.

If a memory could be delineated by the laws and structures of mathematics, then the equations defining it could be discovered, reconstructed, remembered. And he could escape from this.

The point on the middle of the plane of the door had a set of coordinates in space, identifiable along a standard set of recognized coordinates. Or he could define his own system, with that point on the door as zero-zero-zero. Any location Mitchell could wish to find himself, from any place on Law Station to, say, the bridge of the Drake, had another concrete set of coordinates. He had only to identify those coordinates, describe those coordinates. In those terms the entire Universe was finite, concrete, describable. In the end, those numbers defined what one could know, what one could manipulate.

That was all navigation was, identifying two points and traveling the most likely route between them. The math, the ships, the drive, were only tools that enabled people to travel more easily. But what if, what if… What if they’d been missing something all along?

He put his hand flat against the door that would not open for him. Given this point in space had a finite value, and some other point in space also had a finite value, and an equation could be found describing a relationship between them, and the path between them could be collapsed, the distance between them could be made into nothing. He could step through the door.

He’d done this a hundred times, sitting in the navigator station of the Drake. He knew the process so well, his training had ingrained it in him so thoroughly, it was part of his mind, second nature, as unconscious as dreaming.

Captain Scott said, “Greenau, do you have our heading?”

“Yes, sir. Transferred to your monitor.”

And the matrix was there. He could touch it. He could put his fingers inside it, work it open wider, stretch it open, and he could climb through and out, away from here. He dug with his fingers to make the area wider, to make a doorway. He should have listened to Dora. People would be able to travel across the galaxy with a thought. No more ships, no more danger. When he stepped through the door, he’d find Keesey and show her she was wrong, that there was more happening here than a neurophysiological disorder. Humanity was on the cusp of learning something it couldn’t yet control. The navigators who were patients here were only the first pioneers, sacrificed for the pursuit of knowledge. Mitchell felt proud to be in their company.

Only a little more, and the point would be wide enough for him to climb through.

“Lieutenant!”

The sound was a shockwave rattling his ears.

“Lieutenant Greenau! Mitchell!” Baz appeared out of nowhere. No—he’d opened the door, and he shoved Mitchell back, grabbing his hands.

Mitchell tried to explain. “No, it’s all right. I know what I’m doing. It’s all in the mathematics.”

“Mitchell, focus on me. Focus.”

That was what Keesey had said to Morgan. Mitchell looked at Baz, the cleanshaven face lined with worry. Mitchell’s gaze furrowed with confusion.

“Mitchell, look at your hands.”

He did, as Baz lifted them to hold before him.

They were bleeding, the fingertips shredded, bits of torn flesh dripping red. Mitchell lurched, trying to get away from the vision, but they were his own hands, and they followed him.

He fell against the wall, breathing hard, his arms rigid before him.

Baz touched the door controls. The door shut, revealing a red stain, blood smeared across the metal from the point through which Mitchell had been trying to escape. He’d rubbed his hands raw and bleeding against the door. Where he’d seen a jump matrix, there’d been nothing.

So what had there been when he directed the Drake to those coordinates, the ones he’d been so sure were safe?

“Come on, Mitchell. Come on, buddy.” Baz manhandled him off the floor, got him to stand, and walked him, puppet-like, to the infirmary. He murmured condescending encouragements. Mitchell heard them only distantly. He kept staring at his hands, which were the wrong color.

This time when he woke up, he was restrained. His hands, still stiff and sore from treatment, rested at his sides. He couldn’t move his legs. He lurched up anyway, thinking he must have been imagining it, that he couldn’t really be tied to the bed. He got his shoulders off the padding, then had to stop, because no matter how much he pulled and strained, he couldn’t move any farther.

He rattled his hands to make the bindings rub and squinted against the searing light that lanced pain through his mind. His whole head throbbed.

“Please,” he said, clearing a hoarseness from his throat. “Turn the lights down, please. They’re too bright.”

“The lights aren’t on, Mitchell,” said Doctor Keesey’s voice, but he couldn’t see her, couldn’t even tell where she was. She might have been close by and whispering. He winced. He knew he was in the infirmary. It smelled like the infirmary. He didn’t know anything else.

“I don’t understand.” The rich tone of despair in his own voice startled him. The voice came from another place, far from here, a place he hadn’t yet arrived.

Someone touched his arm, and he let out a startled yelp, because he hadn’t heard anyone approach the bed, but someone must have. Another dose of sedative warmed his blood, soothed his muscles, and he fell asleep gratefully.

Another voice woke him, this one speaking very close by.

“I don’t have much time, Mitchell. But I wanted to talk to you. You did it, didn’t you?”

He opened his eyes and was more relieved than he could have imagined to see the beds, supply cupboards, and equipment of the infirmary around him, gray and lurking in the dimmed to near-nothing light.

Dora was leaning on the bed, speaking close to his ear.

“Dora.” His mouth was sticky, his throat dry. His wrinkled jumpsuit scratched against his skin, his scalp itched, and he suspected he smelled ripe. He felt like an invalid, too sick for the luxury of a shower.

“Easy.” She rested a hand tenderly on his arm. “Mitchell. You have to tell me how you did it.”

“Did what?”

“Saved Morgan. You saw him—the orderlies were talking about it. You saw his soul pass on. That was what you saw, wasn’t it? He jumped to the next phase, and you saw it, and you’re getting ready to follow him. I want to know how you did it.”

Mitchell stared at her, meeting her wild-eyed gaze. Her fingers clenched on his jumpsuit, like she expected him to help her somehow, even though he was the one strapped to the bed. One of her hands had a fresh white bandage wrapped around it.

“You aren’t supposed to be here, are you?”

“I cut my hand. I did it so they’d bring me here.” She displayed the bandage. “I had to talk to you. You have to tell me what you saw.”

“I don’t know what I saw, Dora. I don’t know.” His visual cortex was damaged…

“But you do. You’re special. You are, Dalton says so. Tell me about Morgan. Tell me.”

Baz or one of the doctors must have been in the next room, distracted while Dora stole in to speak with him. Dora’s urgency must have meant she didn’t have much time until they discovered her and returned her to her quarters. Which meant Mitchell didn’t have much time, either.

He had to learn to the truth.

“Dora, untie me. Undo the straps, please. Then I’ll tell you.”

Nodding slowly, she touched the straps, studied them a moment, then moved to a control panel at the head of the bed. She tapped a couple of keys, and the tension on the straps released. He could move his feet, and by wriggling his hands he freed his wrists.

Dora held his hand and pressed something flat into the palm.

“I took Baz’s wristband. He didn’t notice. You’re going to follow Morgan, aren’t you?”

“Maybe, maybe—”

“Dora!” Keesey called, reprimanding, from across the room. “Dora, I asked you to wait in the chair.”

Mitchell wrapped his hands around the loose straps and hoped the doctor didn’t examine him too closely. Dora didn’t move until Keesey called again.

“Dora.”

Slowly, Dora stepped away, her gaze still on him, not wavering, until she reached the doorway where Keesey was waiting. The doctor was a shadow, indistinct in the room’s dimness, but he recognized her shape, her posture.

“Mitchell?” she said. “Are you all right?”

He swallowed back a laugh. “Not really.”

“I know this is difficult.” She sounded sympathetic, but it was the sympathy of a person who didn’t really know what she was sympathizing with. “I’ll come back to talk with you in a little while, all right?”

“Sure.”

When she was gone, he slid off the bed to his feet, and his head swam and vision wavered. He was still tired and woozy; whether from the remnants of the sedative or his rebellious senses, he didn’t know. He was ill. He could admit that now. It only meant he had to be a little more careful. He slipped Baz’s band around his wrist.

The corridor was empty. He reached the first bulkhead door. He showed the wristband to the scanner.

The door slipped open, an escape portal, and a weight lifted from his mind. Free. He could run if he wanted.

You’re going to follow Morgan.

If he could only see space again, see ships traveling against the backdrop of stars, he’d remember, and everything would be all right. He’d remember and tell them what really happened.

He passed the common room. Only Jaspar was inside, which was too bad. If Sonia had been there, he might have asked her if she wanted to go with him. It didn’t matter what she replied; the words that came out of her mouth didn’t matter, as long as she went with him.

Still working on impulse, he crossed the room and took hold of the man’s helmet. Jaspar looked up at him. If he had looked at all confused or scared, Mitchell would have left him alone. But the man looked resigned. So Mitchell took off the helmet. His stomach spasmed with shock.

Jaspar was missing about a third of his skull, a great bite taken out of the right side, from his temple to the top of his ear and disappearing around to the back. A jagged edge of bone showed under his skin, which stretched to cover the remains of his head, dipping like a sinkhole into a concave space where the right half of his brain should have been. Looking at him from the left side, one might never guess he had anything wrong with him. From the front, he was a ruin.

Mitchell carefully set the helmet back in place. It protected whatever was left.

“What happened to you?” Mitchell breathed. Jaspar looked back and couldn’t say.

Everyone here commits suicide.

Whatever Jaspar had done hadn’t been successful. Mitchell turned and ran.

He coded open the next bulkhead door and left the ward. He could tell by the smell, which turned industrial instead of antiseptic. The corridor branched ahead, and Mitchell guessed which one would lead him to the center of the station, to the docking area. Other people he encountered struck him as strange-looking, as if he were traveling in a foreign country. He took calming breaths and tried not to look out of place. He knew the formulae that could take him from one end of the galaxy to the other. There ought to be formulae, equations, to do anything. He should find a way to turn invisible, so no one would see him. Visibility was all a matter of light and color. Space was color, the color of numbers. He could make himself transparent.

The corridor he followed now was straight, not curved, indicating he was walking along one of the spokes, toward the center of the cylindrical station. The gravity should be lessening. Mitchell stretched, lengthening his stride, to see if he could fly yet.

He keyed himself through two more bulkhead doors. Other corridors branched off to different levels, other departments, other wards. Mitchell’s heart lurched at the sight of blue Mil Div uniforms. He almost stopped to study the faces of those who wore them to see if Captain Scott was among them, if he recognized any of his crewmates. But that was unlikely. Surely the Drake had left the station by now.

Mitchell’s steps developed spring, but he wasn’t yet weightless. Ahead, the corridor opened into a wider thoroughfare, large enough for mechanized carts to travel. Equipment lockers lined the walls, vacuum suit closets in place between airlock doors. He could just go through the airlock and fly away. He could follow Morgan into an airless world.

He turned right and looked for an observation area.

“Mitchell! Mitchell, stop!” Both Keesey and Dalton appeared at the intersection of the corridor.

Mitchell ran.

“Stop him! Somebody stop him!”

He hunched his shoulders and kept on, grimly staring ahead, anticipating obstacles. Station personnel stared after him, shocked, or looked back at Keesey and Dalton pounding after him. Ahead, the corridor bulged outward. In most station designs, this meant there was some kind of work area, often with view ports that would let him see the ships in the dockyards. He was almost there. He just needed a glimpse of a ship’s running lights in space.

Somebody tackled him. A man half a head taller wearing a Mil Div uniform enclosed him in a bear hug and slammed him against the far wall. Mitchell’s head rang with the impact. He couldn’t hope to escape. He tried anyway, bucking and thrashing against his captor.

“Mitchell, look at me! Look at me!” Sweaty hands pressed against his cheeks. He shook his head, trying to break free of their grasp. “Mitchell!” Keesey shouted, pleading.

You’re going to follow Morgan.

He begged, “Let me look! I just want to look! I’m not going to kill myself, I’m not going to do anything! I haven’t done anything! Let me go!”

Multiple grips pinned his arms to the wall now. Others had come to help, he didn’t know how many. The more he struggled, the harder they held him. When he felt his sleeve being pushed up, he knew it meant somebody wielded a sedative patch.

Mitchell screamed in defiance; his voice echoing in the steel corridor startled him. “Mitchell!” Keesey managed to make herself heard over his noise. He clamped his mouth shut.

In the sudden quiet, the scene paused for a moment. Dalton held the patch ready but hadn’t yet pressed it against his arm.

Softly, Mitchell said, “Let me look. Just let me look outside one more time. Please. Please trust me. Please.”

This was his last chance at life.

He saw his desperation clearly reflected back at him in Keesey’s gaze. He thought he knew: She wanted to cure all her patients, and she kept failing. In him she was failing again.

He whispered, “You’ve never tried giving us what we want. What can it hurt? I’m already dead. Let me look.”

Dalton released him first. Then Keesey said, “Let him go.”

It had taken two others besides the doctors to restrain him. They all stepped back, tense, even Keesey, like he was a wild animal and they couldn’t predict what he’d do next. He moved deliberately, brushing his sleeves back into place. He would give them no cause to capture him like an animal and drag him back to the cage. Keeping a shoulder to the wall, he moved toward the observation area. The others followed, forming a half-circle around him, penning him in.

At last he rounded the corner, entered the darkened observation area, and his knees almost buckled. He leaned against the wall, and his eyes stung with tears.

The windows looked out over the edge of the dockyards where Law Station opened into space. A trio of ships was in dock and there was a scattering of light from the hull of the station—traffic guides, lights shining out of other view ports. The rest of the view looked into the black and the points of light of distant stars.

The Universe opened before him. This was seeing home after a long, impossible journey.

He put his face close to the window and cupped his hands around his eyes to cut out reflections.

Ships, bulging lengths of steel, drifted in the open. The blisters of modular sections—decks, sensory apparatus, weaponry, docking space—made their silhouettes uneven, monstrous, confusing. The shapes distracted the eye, which looked for the streamlined profile of something that might swim through water but only found these accreted, inartistic objects. Yet they moved so gracefully. The eye could not judge their scale against the backdrop of shadow and gray steel. He was watching a scene impossibly distant. Yet the lights threatened to swallow him.

One of the ships was a Research Division cruiser, probably returned from a frontier mission for a refit. The other two were Mil Div. The far one—his heart fluttered, because it was a courier class, a sleek, minimalist ship built for speed, blockade running and dodging firing lines. The Francis Drake was a courier. They were the prettiest ships in the fleet. It might even be—hard to tell from here.

His brow furrowed, he pulled away from the window. “Is that the Drake in dock?”

“Yes,” Keesey said.

“She should be long gone by now.” He turned back to the window, rubbed his sleeve over it when his breath fogged it.

“Look again.”

He watched for a long time, as long as he needed. The ship was locked into longterm docking, not simply linked by umbilical and airlock tubes like the other ships. She’d been damaged, a hole blasted into her starboard side as if a great monster had taken a bite out of her. Lights moved around her like fluttering insects: repair drones, suited workers on maneuvering platforms. A search light happened to run over the name written in bold cursive: M.D.S. Franc—. The remaining letters were charred.

The ship looked a little like Jaspar’s skull.

His mind formed the question, what happened, but he did not speak the words. A neural pathway that had been ruptured rebuilt itself when offered the proper bridge.

He pressed his hand to the window.

He put his thumb on the duty roster scanner inside the hatchway to the bridge.

“Good morning, Captain.”

Captain Crea Scott spared a glance over her shoulder. “Lieutenant. We have an hour until we need to jump. That enough time?”

“Yes, sir. The arrival matrix data’s on the console?”

“Ready and waiting.”

After two years together on the Francis Drake their routine was well practiced. He passed along the bridge’s upper walkway, paying only cursory attention to the displays and consoles that monitored the ship’s systems, nodding to the crewmates who looked up from their work, and arrived at the hatchway leading down to the navigator station.

M-drive navigation was a one-person booth isolated from the rest of the bridge. He settled into the couch, belted in, and activated the console. Monitors, scanners, processors lit up, casting a cool glow and humming comfortably. It was his own realm—quiet, secure, and powerful. Here, he controlled the equipment that could propel the ship light-years across space.

He clipped his comm piece over his ear and called up the navigation data, destination, and optimum window of arrival. With the ease of habit, he started the process that would identify the departure matrix for the most efficient jump to the designated arrival matrix.

Departure matrices flashed on the holographic display in unfamiliar hues. He frowned, reviewed the data, then cleared the equations. He had time; he’d simply run the calculations over again.

If he weren’t entirely clear on which matrix they left from and where they were arriving, the ship would break apart as it tried to make the crossing. An anomaly in the possible departure matrices made him pause. If he wasn’t certain about a matrix, he rejected it.

He’d never failed to find a departure matrix before. The Universe was massive and diverse; a solution could always be found. But this time they were all mouths, ready to swallow him, spitting out the wrong colors. The numbers cycled and showed him a void.

Except one. There it was, the solution. The matrix that would carry them safely away from this hole in space. He entered it, and the numbers flashed red.

Captain Scott said over the comm, “Greenau, do you have our heading?”

“Yes, sir. Departure matrix data transferred.”

A silence answered him. The workings of the ship hummed and murmured.

“Greenau, send those coordinates again, please.”

He did, with a touch of frustration.

“We can’t follow that heading, Lieutenant. Those coordinates are inside the hull of the ship.”

Of course not, the M-drive would push the ship into itself, making for one hell of an explosion. But Mitchell couldn’t ignore the numbers.

“It’s the only one, Captain.” All the other colors were wrong.

“Mitchell, are you all right?”

“There aren’t any other matrices. The space here is wrong. The colors are wrong.”

“Oh my God—”

They didn’t know it, they couldn’t see what he saw. He had to save them.

He’d fought as every crewmember on the bridge tried to stop him, because he thought he was saving them. That he could see something no one else could see. It never occurred to him that he’d gone mad. They’d seen it instantly—everyone knew what could happen to navigators, they all knew the symptoms. Still, he’d managed to get to the helm and punch in the drive protocol with the faulty departure matrix still entered—

They should have killed him before letting him get that far. They stopped short because he was theirs.

Parts of three levels ripped open instantly, spilling the ship’s guts to the void. Captain Scott managed to cut all the ship’s power, deactivating the drive before the ship was destroyed completely. The ship’s medics sedated Mitchell. The accident had killed twenty people, a third of the crew. Through sheer, stubborn heroism, Scott and the remaining crew patched up the ship and managed to fly to Law, the closest outpost. There, Lieutenant Mitchell Greenau could be deposited with people who might be able to explain what had gone wrong with his mind.

Head bowed, Mitchell knelt on the floor below the window as Doctor Keesey explained.

“The dysfunction usually develops gradually. The patient experiences memory loss, synesthesia, schizophrenia, dystonia, ataxia—any number of neurological anomalies. The captain of the ship will take a navigator off duty at the first signs. A sudden, catastrophic episode like yours is very rare.”

Who had died? He wanted to ask, but he doubted Keesey would know. Twenty names were too many to remember. But Mitchell would have to learn someday who among his friends and colleagues he had killed.

“You saw the right numbers, like you always saw,” Keesey said. “But your mind showed you something else.”

“Captain Scott didn’t want me to know what happened.”

“Because she knew it wasn’t your fault. It’s a terrible memory. I’m sorry.”

A memory that, for all he had struggled to reclaim it, now felt pristine, nestled in the center of his mind.

Mitchell felt calm now. Dalton stood nearby, and Keesey knelt beside him; both were watchful, like they expected him to break, or burst, or something, with the knowledge he had found.

Keesey finally said, “Mitchell, how do you feel?”

He despised that question.

He chuckled a little. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—”

“Mitchell—”

He could look up, and even at this awkward angle he could see lights on the opposite curve of the station, the blackness of the shadows. The beauty was an ache in his gut. That he could still feel that beauty startled him. “Don’t isolate us from what makes us happy. We kill ourselves trying to get back to it.”

“Are you ready to come back to the ward?”

He climbed to his feet, using the wall as a prop. He looked out the window again to the stark vastness of even this little corner of space. “Just another minute, Doctor.”

They waited for him.

When Mitchell finally returned to the common room, Dora wasn’t there. She’d made an escape attempt and had been sedated.

Jaspar was at his usual table, working his word puzzles on his handheld. Mitchell found what had happened to him: he’d tried to close his head in a bulkhead door. No one knew why. The trauma team got to him quickly, and he’d survived, somehow. People were resilient.

Sonia was also present, humming, her eyes closed. Mitchell sat across from her.

He placed a player with earpieces in front of her. She stopped humming. She looked at him, her gaze narrowed and confused.

“It’s yours.”

Her hands trembling, she reached for the headphones. They skittered away from her fingertips the first time, but she caught them, slapping her hand to the table. Then she hooked on the earpieces.

Mitchell had gotten Keesey to give him records of Sonia’s musical vocabulary, all the pieces of music she’d been known to speak of. He convinced the doctors to let her have the player.

She touched the play key. Her face tightened, an expression of anxious disbelief. Then tears slipped down her cheeks. Mitchell heard the music, a faint buzzing through the earpieces, and his fists clenched nervously. He thought she would smile. He wanted her to smile.

Then she did smile, though she still didn’t relax, and Mitchell realized that she was concentrating on the music with every muscle she had. She met his gaze, and he thought she looked happy.