The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

Night Passage ^{ALASTAIR REYNOLDS}

If you were really born on Fand then you will know the old saying we had on that world.

Shame is a mask that becomes the face.

The implication being that if you wear the mask long enough, it grafts itself to your skin, becomes an indelible part of you—even a kind of comfort.

Shall I tell you what I was doing before you called? Standing at my window, looking out across Chasm City as it slid into dusk. My reflection loomed against the distant buildings beyond my own, my face chiselled out of cruel highlights and pitiless, light-sucking shadows. When my father held me under the night sky above Burnheim Bay, pointing out the named colonies, the worlds and systems bound by ships, he told me that I was a very beautiful girl, and that he could see a million stars reflected in the dark pools of my eyes. I told him that I didn’t care about any of that, but that I did want to be a starship captain.

Father laughed. He held me tighter. I do not know if he believed me or not, but I think it scared him, that I might mean exactly what I said.

And now you come.

You recognise me, as he would not have done, but only because you knew me as an adult. You and I never spoke, and our sole meeting consisted of a single smile, a single friendly glance as I welcomed the passengers onto my ship, all nineteen thousand of them streaming through the embarkation lock—twenty if you include the Conjoiners.

Try as I might, I can’t picture you.

But you say you were one of them, and for a moment at least I’m inclined to give you the time of day. You say that you were one of the few thousand who came back on the ship—and that’s possible, I could check your name against the Equinoctial’s passenger manifest, eventually—and that you were one of the still fewer who did not suffer irreversible damage due to the prolonged nature of our crossing. But you say that even then it was difficult. When they brought you out of reefersleep, you barely had a personality, let alone a functioning set of memories.

How did I do so well, when the others did not? Luck was part of it. But when it was decreed that I should survive, every measure was taken to protect me against the side effects of such a long exposure to sleep. The servitors intervened many times, to correct malfunctions and give me the best chance of coming through. More than once I was warmed to partial life, then submitted to the auto-surgeon, just to correct incipient frost damage. I remember none of that, but obviously it succeeded. That effort could never have been spread across the entire manifest, though. The rest of you had to take your chances—in more ways than one.

Come with me to the window for a moment. I like this time of day. This is my home now, Chasm City. I’ll never see Fand again, and it’s rare for me to leave these rooms. But it’s not such a bad place, Yellowstone, once you get used to the poison skies, the starless nights.

Do you see the lights coming on? A million windows, a million other lives. The lights remain, most of the time, but still they remind me of the glints against the Shroud, the way they sparked, one after the other. I remember standing there with Magadis and Doctor Grellet, finally understanding what it was they were showing me—and what it meant. Beautiful little synaptic flashes, like thoughts sparking across the galactic darkness of the mind.

But you saw none of that.

Let me tell you how it started. You’ll hear other accounts, other theories, but this is how it was for me.

To begin with no one needed to tell me that something was wrong. All the indications were there as soon as I opened my eyes, groping my way to alertness. Red walls, red lights, a soft pulsing alarm tone, the air too cold for comfort. The Equinoctial was supposed to warm itself prior to the mass revival sequence, when we reached Yellowstone. It would only be this chilly if I had been brought out of hibernation at emergency speed.

“Rauma,” a voice said. “Captain Bernsdottir. Can you understand me?”

It was my second-in-command, leaning in over my half-open reefersleep casket. He was blurred out, looming swollen and pale.

“Struma.” My mouth was dry, my tongue and lips uncooperative. “What’s happened? Where are we?”

“Mid-crossing, and in a bad way.”

“Give me the worst.”

“We’ve stopped. Engines damaged, no control. We’ve got a slow drift, a few kilometres per second against the local rest frame.”

“No,” I said flatly, as if I was having to explain something to a child. “That doesn’t happen. Ships don’t just stop.”

“They do if it’s deliberate action.” Struma bent down and helped me struggle out of the casket, every articulation of bone and muscle sending a fresh spike of pain to my brain. Reefersleep revival was never pleasant, but rapid revival came with its own litany of discomforts. “It’s sabotage, Captain.”

“What?”

“The Spiders…” He corrected himself. “The Conjoiners woke up mid-flight and took control of the ship. Broke out of their area, commandeered the controls. Flipped us around, slowed us down to just a crawl.”

He helped me hobble to a chair and a table. He had prepared a bowl of pink gelatinous pap, designed to restore my metabolic balance.

“How…” I had too many questions and they were tripping over themselves trying to get out of my head. But a good captain jumped to the immediate priorities, then backtracked. “Status of the ship. Tell me.”

“Damaged. No main drive or thruster authority. Comms lost.” He swallowed, like he had more to say.

I spooned the bad-tasting pink pap into myself. “Tell me we can repair this damage, and get going again.”

“It can all be fixed—given time. We’re looking at the repair schedules now.”

“We?”

“Six of your executive officers, including me. The ship brought us out first. That’s standard procedure: only wake the captain under dire circumstances. There are six more passengers coming out of freeze, under the same emergency protocol.”

Struma was slowly swimming into focus. My second-in-command had been with me on two crossings, but he still looked far too young and eager to my eyes. Strong, boyish features, an easy smile, arched eyebrows, short dark curls neatly combed even in a crisis.

“And the…” I frowned, trying to wish away the unwelcome news he had already told me. “The Conjoiners. What about them. If you’re speaking to me, the takeover can’t have been successful.”

“No, it wasn’t. They knew the ship pretty well, but not all of the security procedures. We woke up in time to contain and isolate the takeover.” He set his jaw. “It was brutal, though. They’re fast and sly, and of course they outnumbered us a hundred to one. But we had weapons, and most of the security systems were dumb enough to keep on our side, not theirs.”

“Where are they now?”

“Contained, what’s left of them. Maybe eight hundred still frozen. Two hundred or so in the breakout party—we don’t have exact numbers. But we ate into them. By my estimate there can’t be more than about sixty still warm, and we’ve got them isolated behind heavy bulkheads and electrostatic shields.”

“How did the ship get so torn up?”

“It was desperate. They were prepared to go down fighting. That’s when most of the damage was done. Normal pacification measures were never going to hold them. We had to break out the heavy excimers, and they’ll put a hole right through the hull, out to space and anything that gets in the way—including drive and navigation systems.”

“We were carrying excimers?”

“Standard procedure, Captain. We’ve just never needed them before.”

“I can’t believe this. A century of peaceful cooperation. Mutual advancement through shared science and technology. Why would they throw it all away now, and on my watch?”

“I’ll show you why,” Struma said.

Supporting my unsteady frame he walked me to an observation port and opened the radiation shutters. Then he turned off the red emergency lighting so that my eyes had a better chance of adjusting to the outside view.

I saw stars. They were moving slowly from left to right, not because the ship was moving as a whole but because we were now on centrifugal gravity and our part of the Equinoctial was rotating. The stars were scattered into loose associations and constellations, some of them changed almost beyond recognition, but others—made up of more distant stars—not too different than those I remembered from my childhood.

“They’re just stars,” I told Struma, unsurprised by the view. “I don’t…”

“Wait.”

A black wall slid into view. Its boundary was a definite edge, beyond which there were no stars at all. The more we rotated, the more blackness came into our line of sight. It wasn’t just an absence of nearby stars. The Milky Way, that hobbled spine of galactic light, made up of tens of millions of stars, many thousand of light years away, came arcing across the normal part of the sky then reached an abrupt termination, just as if I were looking out at the horizon above a sunless black sea.

For a few seconds all I could do was stare, unable to process what I was seeing, or what it meant. My training had prepared me for many operational contingencies—almost everything that could ever go wrong on an interstellar crossing. But not this.

Half the sky was gone.

“What the hell is it?”

Struma looked at me. There was a long silence. “Good question.”

You were not one of the six passenger-delegates. That would be too neat, too unlikely, given the odds. And I would have remembered your face as soon as you came to my door.

I met them in one of the mass revival areas. It was similar to the crew facilities, but much larger and more luxurious in its furnishings. Here, at the end of our voyage, passengers would have been thawed out in groups of a few hundred at a time, expecting to find themselves in a new solar system, at the start of a new phase in their lives.

The six were going through the same process of adjustment I had experienced only a few hours earlier. Discomfort, confusion—and a generous helping of resentment, that the crossing had not gone as smoothly as the brochures had promised.

“Here’s what I know,” I said, addressing the gathering as they sat around a hexagonal table, eating and drinking restoratives. “At some point after we left Fand there was an attempted takeover by the Conjoiners. From what we can gather one or two hundred of them broke out of reefersleep while the rest of us were frozen. They commandeered the drive systems and brought the ship to a standstill. We’re near an object or phenomenon of unknown origin. It’s a black sphere about the same size as a star, and we’re only fifty thousand kilometres from its surface.” I raised a hand before the obvious questions started raining in. “It’s not a black hole. A black hole this large would be of galactic mass, and there’s no way we’d have missed something like that in our immediate neighbourhood. Besides, it’s not pulling at us. It’s just sitting there, with no gravitational attraction that our instruments can register. Right up to its edge we can see that the stars aren’t suffering any aberration or redshift… yes?”

One of the passengers had also raised a hand. The gesture was so polite, so civil, that it stopped me in my tracks.

“This can’t have been an accident, can it?”

“Might I know your name, sir?”

He was a small man, mostly bald, with a high voice and perceptive, piercing eyes.

“Grellet. Doctor Grellet. I’m a physician.”

“That’s lucky,” I said. “We might well end up needing a doctor.”

“Luck’s got nothing to do with it, Captain Bernsdottir. The protocol always ensures that there’s a physician among the emergency revival cohort.”

I had no doubt that he was right, but it was a minor point of procedure and I felt I could be forgiven for forgetting it.

“I’ll still be glad of your expertise, if we have difficulties.”

He looked back at me, something in his mild, undemonstrative manner beginning to grate on me. “Are we expecting difficulties?”

“That’ll depend. But to go back to your question, it doesn’t seem likely that the Conjoiners just stumbled on this object, artefact, whatever we want to call it. They must have known of its location, then put a plan in place to gain control of the ship.”

“To what end?” Doctor Grellet asked.

I decided truthfulness was the best policy. “I don’t know. Some form of intelligence gathering, I suppose. Maybe a unilateral first contact attempt, against the terms of the Europa Accords. Whatever the plan was, it’s been thwarted. But that’s not been without a cost. The ship is damaged. The Equinoctial’s own repair systems will put things right, but they’ll need time for that.”

“Then we sit and wait,” said another passenger, a woman this time. “That’s all we have to do, isn’t it? Then we can be on our way again.”

“There’s a bit more to it than that,” I answered, looking at them all in turn. “We have a residual drift toward the object. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be a problem—we’d just use the main engines or steering thrusters to neutralise the motion. But we have no means of controlling the engines, and we won’t get it until the repair schedule is well advanced.”

“How long?” Doctor Grellet asked.

“To regain the use of the engines? My executive officers say four weeks at the bare minimum. Even if we shaved a week off that, though, it wouldn’t help us. At our present rate of drift we’ll reach the surface of the object in twelve days.”

There was a silence. It echoed my own, when Struma had first informed me of our predicament.

“What will happen?” another passenger asked.

“We don’t know. We don’t even know what that surface is made of, whether it’s a solid wall or some kind of screen or discontinuity. All we do know is that it blocks all radiation at an immeasurably high efficiency, and that its temperature is exactly the same as the cosmic microwave background. If it’s a Dyson sphere… or something similar… we’d expect to see it pumping out in the infrared. But it doesn’t. It just sits there being almost invisible. If you wanted to hide something, to conceal yourself in interstellar space… impossibly hard to detect, until you’re almost on top of it… this would be the thing. It’s like camouflage, a cloak, or…”

“A shroud,” Doctor Grellet said.

“Someone else will get the pleasure of naming it,” I said. “Our concern is what it will do. I’ve ordered the launch of a small instrument package, aimed straight at the object. It’s nothing too scientific—we’re not equipped for that. Just a redundant spacesuit with some sensors. But it will give us an idea what to expect.”

“When will it arrive?”

“In a little under twenty-six hours.”

“You should have consulted with the revival party before taking this action, captain,” Doctor Grellet said.

“Why?”

“You’ve fired a missile at an object of unknown origin. You know it isn’t a missile, and so do we. But the object?”

“We don’t know that it has a mind,” I responded.

“Yet,” Doctor Grellet said.

I spent the next six hours with Struma, reviewing the condition of the ship at first-hand. We travelled up and down the length of the hull, inside and out, cataloguing the damage and making sure there were no additional surprises. Inside was bearable. But while we were outside, travelling in single-person inspection pods, I had that black wall at my back the whole time.

“Are you sure there weren’t easier ways of containing them, other than peppering the ship with blast holes?”

“Have you had a lot of experience with Conjoiner uprisings, Captain?”

“Not especially.”

“I studied the tactics they used on Mars, back at the start of the last century. They’re ruthless, unafraid of death, and totally uninterested in surrender.”

“Mars was ancient history, Struma.”

“Lessons can still be drawn. You can’t treat them as a rational adversary, willing to accept a negotiated settlement. They’re more like a nerve gas, trying to reach you by any means. Our objective was to push them back into an area of the ship that we could seal and vent if needed. We succeeded—but at a cost to the ship.” From the other inspection pod, cruising parallel to mine, his face regarded me with a stern and stoic resolve. “It had to be done. I didn’t like any part of it. But I also knew the ship was fully capable of repairing itself.”

“It’s a good job we have all the time in the world,” I said, cocking my own head at the black surface. At our present rate of drift it was three kilometres nearer for every minute that passed.

“What would you have had me do?” Struma asked. “Allow them to complete their takeover, and butcher the rest of us?”

“You don’t know that that was their intention.”

“I do,” Struma said. “Because Magadis told me.”

I let him enjoy his moment before replying.

“Who is Magadis?”

“The one we captured. I wouldn’t call her a leader. They don’t have leaders, as such. But they do have command echelons, figures trusted with a higher level of intelligence processing and decision-making. She’s one of them.”

“You didn’t mention this until now?”

“You asked for priorities, Captain. I gave you priorities. Anyway, Magadis got knocked around when she was captured. She’s been in and out of consciousness ever since, not always lucid. She has no value as a hostage, so her ultimate usefulness to us isn’t clear. Perhaps we should just kill her now and be done with it.”

“I want to see her.”

“I thought you might,” Struma said.

Our pods steered for the open aperture of a docking bay.

By the time I got to Magadis she was awake and responsive. Struma and the other officers had secured her in a room at the far end of the ship from the other Conjoiners, and then arranged an improvised cage of electrostatic baffles around the room’s walls, to screen out any possible neural traffic between Magadis and the other Conjoiners.

They had her strapped into a couch, taking no chances with that. She was shackled at the waist, the upper torso, the wrists, ankles and neck. Stepping into that room, I still felt unnerved by her close proximity. I had never distrusted Conjoiners before, but Struma’s mention of Mars had unlocked a head’s worth of rumour and memory. Bad things had been done to them, but they had not been shy in returning the favour. They were human, too, but only at the extreme edge of the definition. Human physiology, but boosted for a high tolerance of adverse environments. Human brain structure, but infiltrated with a cobweb of neural enhancements, far beyond anything carried by Demarchists. Their minds were cross-linked, their sense of identity blurred across the glassy boundaries of skulls and bodies.

That was why Magadis was useless as a hostage. Only part of her was present to begin with, and that part—the body, the portion of her mind within it—would be deemed expendable. Some other part of Magadis was still back with the other Conjoiners.

I approached her. She was thin, all angles and edges. Her limbs, what I could see of them beyond the shackles, were like folded blades, ready to flick out and wound. Her head was hairless, with a distinct cranial ridge. She was bruised and cut, one eye so badly swollen and slitted that I could not tell if it had been gouged out or still remained.

But the other eye fixed me well enough.

“Captain.” She formed the word carefully, but there was blood on her lips and when she opened them I saw she had lost several teeth and her tongue was badly swollen.

“Magadis. I’m told that’s your name. My officers tell me you attempted to take over my ship. Is that true?”

My question seemed to amuse and disappoint her in equal measure.

“Why ask?”

“I’d like to know before we all die.”

Behind me, one of the officers had an excimer rifle pointed straight at Magadis’s head.

“We distrusted your ability to conduct an efficient examination of the artefact,” she said.

“Then you knew of it in advance.”

“Of course.” She nodded demurely, despite the shackle around her throat. “But only the barest details. A stellar-size object, clearly artificial, clearly of alien origin. It demanded our interest. But the present arrangements limited our ability to conduct intelligence gathering under our preferred terms.”

“We have an arrangement. Had, I should say. More than a century of peaceful cooperation. Why have you endangered everything?”

“Because this changes everything.”

“You don’t even know what it is.”

“We have gathered and transmitted information back to our mother nests. They will analyse the findings accordingly, when the signals reach them. But let us not delude ourselves, Captain. This is an alien technology—a demonstration of physics beyond either of our present conceptual horizons. Whichever human faction understands even a fraction of this new science will leave the others in the dust of history. Our alliance with the Demarchists has served us well, as it has been of benefit to you. But all things must end.”

“You’d risk war, just for a strategic advantage?”

She squinted from her one good eye, looking puzzled. “What other sort of advantage is there?”

“I could—should—kill you now, Magadis. And the rest of your Conjoiners. You’ve done enough to give me the right.”

She lifted her head. “Then do so.”

“No. Not until I’m certain you’ve exhausted your usefulness to me. In five and half days we hit the object. If you want my clemency, start thinking of ways we might stop that happening.”

“I’ve considered the situation,” Magadis said. “There are no grounds for hope, Captain. You may as well execute me. But save a shot for yourself, won’t you? You may come to appreciate it.”

We spent the remainder of that first day confirming what we already knew. The ship was crippled, committed to its slow but deadly drift in the direction of the object.

Being a passenger-carrying vessel, supposed to fly between two settled, civilised solar systems, the Equinoctial carried no shuttles or large extravehicular craft. There were no lifeboats or tugs, nothing that could nudge us onto a different course or reverse our drift. Even our freight inventory was low for this crossing. I know, because I studied the cargo manifest, looking for some magic solution to our problem: a crate full of rocket motors, or something similar.

But the momentum of a million-tonne starship, even drifting at a mere fifty meters a second, is still immense. It would take more than a spare limpet motor or steering jet to make a difference to our fate.

Exactly what our fate was, of course, remained something of an open question.

Soon we would know.

An hour before the suit’s arrival at the surface I gathered Struma, Doctor Grellet, the other officers and passenger delegates in the bridge. Our improvised probe had continued transmitting information back to us for the entire duration of its day-long crossing. Throughout that time there had been little significant variation in the parameters, and no hint of a response from the object.

It remained black, cold and resolutely starless. Even as it fell within the last ten thousand kilometres, the suit was detecting no trace radiation beyond that faint microwave sizzle. It was pinging sensor pulses into the surface and picking up no hint of echo or backscatter. The gravitational field remained as flat as any other part of interstellar space, with no suggestion that the black sphere exerted any pull on its surroundings. It had to be made of something, but even if there had been only a moon’s mass distributed throughout that volume, let alone a planet or a star, the suit would have picked up the gradient.

So it was a non-physical surface—an energy barrier or discontinuity. But even an energy field ought to have produced a measurable curvature, a measurable alteration in the suit’s motion.

Something else, then. Something—as Magadis had implied—that lay entirely outside the framework of our physics. A kink or fracture in spacetime, artfully engineered. There might be little point in attempting to build a conceptual bridge between what we knew and what the object represented. Little point for baseline humans, at least. But I thought of what a loom of cross-linked, genius-level intelligences might make of it. The Conjoiners had already developed weapons and drive systems that were beyond our narrow models, even as they occasionally drip-fed us hints and glimpses of their “adjunct physics”, as if to reassure their allies that they were only a step or two behind.

The suit was within eight thousand kilometres of the surface when its readings began to turn odd. It was small things to start with, almost possible to put down to individual sensor malfunctions. But as the readings turned stranger, and more numerous, the unlikelihood of these breakdowns happening all at once became too great to dismiss.

Dry-mouthed, I stared at the numbers and graphs.

“What?” asked Chajari, one of the female passengers.

“We’ll need to look at these readings in more detail…” Struma began.

“No,” I said, cutting him off. “What they’re telling us is clear enough as it is. The suit’s accelerometers are going haywire. It feels as if it’s being pulled in a hundred directions at once. Pulled and pushed, like a piece of putty being squashed and stretched in someone’s hand. And it’s getting worse…”

I had been blunt, but there was no sense in sugaring things for the sake of the passengers. They had been woken to share in our decision-making processes, and for that reason alone they needed to know exactly how bad our predicament was.

The suit was still transmitting information when it hit the seven thousand kilometre mark, as near as we could judge. It only lasted a few minutes after that, though. The accelerational stresses built and built, until whole blocks of sensors began to black out. Soon after that the suit reported a major loss of its own integrity, as if its extremities had been ripped or crushed by the rising forces. By then it was tumbling, sending back only intermittent chirps of scrambled data.

Then it was gone.

I allowed myself a moment of calm before proceeding.

“Even when the suit was still sending to us,” I said, “it was being buffeted by forces far beyond the structural limits of the ship. We’d have broken up not long after the eight thousand mark—and it would have been unpleasant quite a bit sooner than that.” I paused and swallowed. “It’s not a black hole. We know that. But there’s something very odd about the spacetime near the surface. And if we drift too close we’ll be shredded, just as the suit was.”

It reached us then. The ship groaned, and we all felt a stomach-heaving twist pass through our bodies. The emergency tone sounded, and the red warning lights began to flash.

Had we been a ship at sea, it was as if we had been afloat on calm waters, until a single great wave rolled under us, followed by a series of diminishing after-ripples.

The disturbance, whatever it had been, gradually abated.

Doctor Grellet was the first to speak. “We still don’t know if the thing has a mind or not,” he said, in the high, piping voice that I was starting to hate. “But I think we can be reasonably sure of one thing, Captain Bernsdottir.”

“Which would be?” I asked.

“You’ve discovered how to provoke it.”

Just when I needed some good news, Struma brought it to me.

“It’s marginal,” he said, apologising before he had even started. “But given our present circumstances…”

“Go on.”

He showed me a flowchart of various repair schedules, a complex knotted thing like a many-armed octopus, and next to it a graph of our location, compared to the sphere.

“Here’s our present position, thirty-five thousand kilometres from the surface.”

“The surface may not even be our worst problem now,” I pointed out.

“Then we’ll assume we only have twenty-five thousand kilometres before things get difficult—a bit less than six days. But it may be enough. I’ve been running through the priority assignments in the repair schedule, and I think we can squeeze a solution out of this.”

I tried not to cling to false hope. “You can?”

“As I said, it’s marginal, but…”

“Spare me the qualifications, Struma. Just tell me what we have or haven’t got.”

“Normally the ship prioritises primary drive repairs over anything else. It makes sense. If you’re trying to slow down from light speed, and something goes wrong with the main engines at a high level of time-compression… well, you want that fixed above all else, unless you plan on over-shooting your target system by several light years, or worse.” He drew a significant pause. “But we’re not in that situation. We need auxiliary control now, enough to correct the drift. If it takes a year or ten to regain relativistic capability, we’ll still be alive. We can wait it out in reefersleep.”

“Good…” I allowed.

“If we override all default schedules, and force the repair processes to ignore the main engines—and anything we don’t need to stay alive for the next six days—then the simulations say we may have a chance of recovering auxiliary steering and attitude control before we hit the ten thousand kilometre mark. Neutralise the drift, and reverse it enough to get away from this monster. Then worry about getting back home. And even if we can’t get the main engines running again, we can eventually transmit a request for assistance, then just sit here.”

“They’d have to answer us,” I said.

“Of course.”

“Have you… initiated this change in the schedule?”

He nodded earnestly. “Yes. Given how slim the margins are, I felt it best to make the change immediately.”

“It was the right thing to do, Struma. You’ve given us a chance. We’ll take it to the passenger-representatives. Maybe they’ll forgive me for what happened with the suit.”

“You couldn’t have guessed, Captain. But this lifeline… it’s just a chance, that’s all. The repair schedules are estimates, not hard guarantees.”

“I know,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “And I’ll take them for what they are.”

I went to interview Magadis again, deciding for the moment to withhold the news Struma had given me. The Conjoiner woman was still under armed guard, still bound to the chair. I took my seat in the electrostatic cage, facing her.

“We’re going to die,” I said.

“This is not news,” Magadis answered.

“I mean, not in the way we expected. A clean collision with the surface—fast and painless. I’m not happy about that, but I’ll gladly take it over the alternative.”

“Which is?”

“Slow torture. I fired an instrument probe at the object—a suit stuffed full of sensors.”

“Was that wise?”

“Perhaps not. But it’s told me what we can expect. Spacetime around the sphere is… curdled, fractal, I don’t know what. Restructured. Responsive. It didn’t like the suit. Pulled it apart like a rag doll. It’ll do the same to the ship, and us inside it. Only we’re made of skin and bone, not hardware. It’ll be worse for us, and slower, because the suit was travelling quickly when it hit the altered spacetime. We’ll take our time, and it’ll build and build over hours.”

“I could teach you a few things about pain management,” Magadis said. “You might find them useful.”

I slapped her across the face, drawing blood from her already swollen lip.

“You were prepared to meet this object. You knew of its prior existence. That means you must have had a strategy, a plan.”

“I did, until our plan met your resistance.” She made a mangled smile, a wicked, teasing gleam in her one good eye. I made to slap her again, but some cooler part of me stilled my hand, knowing how pointless it was to inflict pain on a Conjoiner. Or to imagine that the prospect of pain, even drawn out over hours, would have any impact on her thinking.

“Give me something, Magadis. You’re smart, even disconnected from the others. You tried to commandeer the ship. Your people designed and manufactured some of its key systems. You must be able to suggest something that can help our chances.”

“We have gathered our intelligence,” she told me. “Nothing else matters now. I was always going to die. The means don’t concern me.”

I nodded at that, letting her believe it was no more or less than I had expected.

But I had more to say.

“You put us here, Magadis—you and your people. Maybe the others will see things the same way you do—ready and willing to accept death. Do you think they will change their view if I start killing them now?”

I waited for her answer, but Magadis just looked at me, nothing in her expression changing.

Someone spoke my title and name. I turned from the prisoner to find Struma, waiting beyond the electrostatic cage.

“I was in the middle of something.”

“Before it failed, the suit picked up an echo. We’ve only just teased it out of the garbage it was sending back in the last few moments.”

“An echo of what?” I asked.

Struma drew breath. He started to answer, then looked at Magadis and changed his mind.

It was another ship. Shaped like our own—a tapering, conic hull, a sharp end and a blunter end, two engines on outriggers jutting from the widest point—but smaller, sleeker, darker. We could see that it was damaged to some degree, but it occurred to me that it could still be of use to us.

The ship floated eight thousand kilometres from the surface of the object. Not orbiting, since there was nothing to hold it on a circular course, but just stopped, becalmed.

Struma and I exchanged thoughts as we waited for the others to re-convene.

“That’s a Conjoiner drive layout,” he said, sketching a finger across one of the blurred enhancements. “It means they made it, they sent it here—all without anyone’s knowledge, in flagrant violation of the Europe Accords. And it’s no coincidence that we just found it. The object’s the size of a star, and we’re only able to scan a tiny area of it from our present position. Unless there are floating wrecks dotted all around this thing, we must have been brought close to it deliberately.”

“It explains how they knew of the object,” I mused. “An earlier expedition. Obviously it failed, but they must have managed to transmit some data back to one of their nests—enough to make them determined to get a closer look. I suppose the idea was to rendezvous and recover any survivors, or additional knowledge captured by that wreck.” My fingers tensed, ready to form a fist. “I should ask Magadis.”

“I’d give up, if I were you. She’s not going to give us anything useful.”

“That’s because she’s resigned to death. I didn’t tell her about the revised repair schedule.”

“That’s still our best hope of survival.”

“Perhaps. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t explore all other possibilities, just in case the repair schedule doesn’t work. That ship’s too useful a prize for me to ignore. It’s an exploratory craft, obviously. Unlike us, it may have a shuttle, something we can use as a tug. Or we can use the ship itself to nudge the Equinoctial.”

Struma scratched at his chin. “Nice in theory, but it’s floating well inside the point where the suit started picking up strange readings. And even if we considered it wise to go there, we don’t have a shuttle of our own to make the crossing.”

“It’s not wise,” I admitted. “Not even sane. But we have the inspection pods, and one of them ought to be able to make the crossing. I’m ready to try, Struma. It’s better than sitting here thinking of ways to hurt Magadis, just to take my mind off the worse pain ahead for the rest of us.”

He considered this, then gave a grave, dutiful nod. “Under the circumstances, I think you’re right. But I wouldn’t allow you to go out there on your own.”

“A Captain’s prerogative…” I started.

“Is to accept the assistance of her second-in-command.”

Although I was set on my plan, I still had to present it to the other officers and passenger-representatives. They sat and listened without question, as I explained the discovery of the other ship and my intention of scavenging it for our own ends.

“You already know that we may be able to reverse the drift. I’m still optimistic about that, but at the same time I was always told to have a back-up plan. Even if that other ship doesn’t have anything aboard it that we can use, they may have gathered some data or analysis that can be of benefit to us.”

Doctor Grellet let out a dry, hopeless laugh. “Whatever it was, it was certainly of benefit to them.”

“A slender hope’s better than none at all,” I said, biting back on my irritation. “Besides, it won’t make your chances any worse. Even if Struma and I don’t make it back from the Conjoiner ship, my other officers are fully capable of navigating the ship, once we regain auxiliary control.”

“The suit drew a response from the object,” Grellet said. “How can you know what will happen if you approach it in the pods?”

“I can’t,” I said. “But we’ll stop before we get as deep as the suit did. It’s the best we can do, Doctor.” I turned my face to the other passenger-representatives, seeking their tacit approval. “Nothing’s without risk. You accepted risk when you consigned yourselves into the care of your reefersleep caskets. As it stands, we have a reasonable chance of repairing the ship before we get too close to the object. That’s not good enough for me. I swore an oath of duty when I took on this role. You are all precious to me. But also I have twenty thousand other passengers to consider.”

“You mean nineteen thousand,” corrected Chajari diplomatically. “The Conjoiners don’t count any more—sleeping or otherwise.”

“They’re still my passengers,” I told her.

No plan was ever as simple as it seemed in the first light of conception. The inspection pods had the range and fuel to reach the drifter, but under normal operation it would take much too long to get there. If there were something useful on the Conjoiner wreck I wanted time to examine it, time to bring it back, time to make use of it. I also did not want to have to depend on some hypothetical shuttle or tractor to get us back. That meant retaining some reserve fuel in the pods for a return trip to the Equinoctial. Privately, if my ship was going down then I wanted to be aboard when it happened.

There was a solution, but it was hardly a comfortable one.

Running the length of the Equinoctial was a magnetic freight launcher, designed for ship-to-ship cargo transfer. We had rarely used it on previous voyages and since we were travelling with only a low cargo manifest I had nearly forgotten it was there at all. Fortunately, the inspection pods were easily small enough to be attached to the launcher. By being boosted out of the ship on magnetic power, they could complete the crossing in a shorter time and save some fuel for the round-trip.

There were two downsides. The first was that it would take time to prepare the pods for an extended mission. The second was that the launcher demanded a punishing initial acceleration. That was fine for bulk cargo, less good for people. Eventually we agreed on a risky compromise: fifty gees, sustained for four seconds, would give us a final boost of zero point two kilometres per second. Hardly any speed at all, but it was all we could safely endure if we were going to be of any use at the other end of the crossing. We would be unconscious during the launch phase and much of the subsequent crossing, both to conserve resources and spare us the discomfort of the boost.

Slowly the Equinoctial was rotated and stabilised, aiming itself like a gun at the Conjoiner wreck. Lacking engine power, we did this with gyroscopes and controlled pressure venting. Even this took a day. Thankfully the aim didn’t need to be perfect, since we could correct for any small errors during the crossing itself.

Six days had now passed since my revival, halving our distance to the surface. It would take another three days to reach the Conjoiner ship, by which time we would have rather less than three days to make any use of its contents. Everything was now coming down to critical margins of hours, rather than days.

I went to see Magadis before preparing myself for the departure.

“I’m telling you my plans just in case you have something useful to contribute. We’ve found the drifter you were obviously so keen on locating. You’ve been going behind our backs all this time, despite all the assurances, all the wise platitudes. I hope you’ve learned a thing or two from the object, because you’re going to need all the help you can find.”

“War was only ever a question of time, Captain Bernsdottir.”

“You think you’ll win?”

“I think we’ll prevail. But the outcome won’t be my concern.”

“This is your last chance to make a difference. I’d take you with me if I thought I could trust you, if I thought you wouldn’t turn the systems of that wreck against me just for the spite. But if there’s something you can tell me, something that will help all our chances…”

“Yes,” she answered, drawing in me a little glimmer of hope, instantly crushed. “There’s something. Kill yourselves now, while you have the means to do it painlessly. You’ll thank me for it later.”

I stepped out of the cage, realising that Doctor Grellet had been observing this brief exchange from a safe distance, his hands folded before him, his expression one of lingering disapproval.

“It was fruitless, I suppose?”

“Were you expecting something more?”

“I am not the moral compass of this ship, Captain Bernsdottir. If you think hurting this prisoner will serve your ends, that is your decision.”

“I didn’t do that to her. She was bruised and bloodied when she got here.”

He studied me carefully. “Then you never laid a hand on her, not even once?”

I made to answer, intending to deny his accusation, then stopped before I disgraced myself with an obvious lie. Instead I met his eyes, demanding understanding rather than forgiveness. “It was a violent, organised insurrection, Doctor. They were trying to kill us all. They’d have succeeded, as well, if my officers and I hadn’t used extreme measures.”

“In which case it was a good job you were equipped with the tools needed to suppress that insurrection.”

“I don’t understand.”

He nodded at the officer still aiming the excimer rifle at Magadis. It was a heavy, dual-gripped laser weapon—more suited to field combat than shipboard pacification. “I am not much of a historian, Captain. But I took the time to study a little of what happened on Mars. Nevil Clavain, Sandra Voi, Galiana, the Great Wall and the orbital blockade of the first nest…”

I cut him off. “Is this relevant, Doctor Grellet?”

“That would depend. My recollection from those history lessons is that the Coalition for Neural Purity discovered that it was very difficult to take Conjoiners prisoner. They could turn almost any weapon against its user. Keeping them alive long enough to be interrogated was even harder. They could kill themselves quite easily. And the one thing you learned never to do was point a sophisticated weapon at a Conjoiner prisoner.”

For the second time in nine days I surfaced to brutal, bruising consciousness through layers of confusion and discomfort. It was not the emergence from reefersleep this time, but a much shallower state of sedation. I was alone, pressed into acceleration padding, a harness webbed across my chest. I moved aching arms and released the catch. The cushioning against my spine eased. I was weightless, but still barely able to move. The inspection pod was only just large for a suited human form.

I was alive, and that was something. It meant that I had survived the boost from the Equinoctial. I eyed the chronometer, confirming that I had been asleep for sixty six hours, and then I checked the short-range tracker, gratified to find that Struma’s pod was flying close to mine. Although we had been launched in separate boosts, there had been time for the pods to zero-in on each other without eating into our fuel budgets too badly.

“Struma?” I asked across the link.

“I’m here, Captain. How do you feel?”

“About as bad as you, I’m guessing. But we’re intact, and right now I’ll take all the good news I can get. I’m a realist, Struma: I don’t expect much to come of this. But I couldn’t sit back and do nothing, just hoping for the best.”

“I understood the risks,” he replied. “And I agree with you. We had to take this chance.”

Our pods had maintained a signals lock with the Equinoctial. They were pleased to hear from us. We spent a few minutes transmitting back and forth, confirming that we were healthy and that our pods had a homing fix on the drifter. The Conjoiner ship was extremely dark, extremely well-camouflaged, but it stood no chance of hiding itself against the perfect blackness of the surface.

I hardly dared ask how the repair schedule had been progressing. But the news was favourable. Struma’s plan to divert the resources had worked well, and all indications were that the ship would regain some control within thirteen hours. That was cutting it exceedingly fine: Equinoctial was now only three days’ drift from the surface, and only a day from the point where the suit’s readings had begun to deviate from normal spacetime. We had done what we could, though—given ourselves a couple of slim hopes where previously there had been none.

Struma and I reviewed our pod systems one more time, then began to burn fuel, slowing down for our rendezvous with the drifter. We could see each other by then, spaced by a couple of kilometres but still easily distinguished from the background stars, pushing glowing tails of plasma thrust ahead of us.

We passed the ten thousand kilometre mark without incident. I felt sore, groggy and dry-mouthed, but that was to be expected after the acceleration boost and the forced sleep of the cruise phase. In all other respects I felt normal, save for the perfectly sensible apprehension anyone would have felt in our position. The pod’s instruments were working properly, the sensors and readouts making sense.

At nine thousand kilometres I started feeling the change.

To begin with it was small things. I had to squint to make sense of the displays, as if I was seeing them underwater. I put it down to fatigue, initially. Then the comms link with the Equinoctial began to turn thready, broken up with static and dropouts.

“Struma…” I asked. “Are you getting this?”

When his answer came back, he sounded as if he was just as far away as the ship. Yet I could see his pod with my own eyes, twinkling to port.

“Whatever the suit picked up, it’s starting sooner.”

“The surface hasn’t changed diameter.”

“No, but whatever it’s doing to the space around it may have stepped up a notch.” There was no recrimination in his statement, but I understood the implicit connection. The suit had provoked a definite change, that ripple that passed through the Equinoctial. Perhaps it had signified a permanent alteration to the environment around the surface, like a fortification strengthening its defences after the first strike.

“We go on, Struma. We knew things might get sticky—it’s just a bit earlier than we were counting on.”

“I agree,” he answered, his voice coming through as if thinned-out and Doppler-stretched, as if we were signalling each other from half way across the universe.

At least the pods kept operating. We passed the eight thousand five hundred mark, still slowing, still homing in on the Conjoiner ship. Although it was only a quarter of the size of the Equinoctial, it was also the only physical object between us and the surface, and our exhaust light washed over it enough to make it shimmer into visibility, a little flake of starship suspended over a sea of black.

There would be war, I thought, when the news of this treachery reached our governments. Our peace with the Conjoiners had never been less than tense, but such infringements that had happened to date had been minor diplomatic scuffles compared to this. Not just the construction and operation of a secret expedition, in violation of the terms of mutual cooperation, but the subsequent treachery of Magadis’s attempted takeover, with such a cold disregard for the lives of the other nineteen thousand passengers. They had always thought themselves better than the rest of us, Conjoiners, and by certain measures they were probably correct in that assessment. Cleverer, faster, and certainly more willing to be ruthless. We had gained from our partnership, and perhaps they had found some narrow benefits in their association with us. But I saw now that it had never been more than a front, a cynical expediency. Behind our backs they had been plotting, trying to leverage an advantage from first contact with this alien presence.

But the first war had pushed them nearly to extinction, I thought. And in the century since they had shared many of their technologies with us—allowing for a risky normalisation in our capabilities. Given that the partnership had worked for so long, why would they risk everything now, for such uncertain stakes?

My thoughts flashed back to Doctor Grellet’s parting words about our prisoner. My knowledge of history was nowhere near as comprehensive as his own, but I had no reason to doubt his recollection of those events. It was surely true, what he said about Conjoiner prisoners. So why had Magadis tolerated that weapon being pointed at her, when she could have reached into its systems and made it blow her head off?

Unless she wanted to stay alive?

“Struma…” I began to say.

But whatever words I had meant to say died unvoiced. I felt wrong. I had experienced weightlessness and gee-loads, but this was something completely new to me. Invisible claws were reaching through my skin, tugging at my insides—but in all directions.

“It’s starting,” I said, tightening my harness again, for all the good it would do.

The pod felt the alteration as well. The readouts began to indicate anomalous stresses, outside the framework of the pod’s extremely limited grasp of normal conditions. I could still see the Conjoiner ship, and beyond the surface’s black horizon the stars remained at a fixed orientation. But the pod thought it was starting to tumble. Thrusters began to pop, and that only made things worse.

“Go to manual,” Struma said, his voice garbled one instant, inside my skull the next. “We’re close enough now.”

Two hundred kilometres to the ship, then one hundred and fifty, then one hundred, slowing to only a couple of hundred metres per second now. The pod was still functioning, still maintaining life-support, but I’d had to disengage all of its high-level navigation and steering systems, trusting to my own ragged instincts. The signal lock from the Equinoctial was completely gone, and when I twisted round to peer through the rear dome, the stars seemed to swim behind thick, mottled glass. My guts churned, my bones ached as if they had been shot through with a million tiny fractures. A slow growing pressure sat behind my eyes. The only thing that kept me pushing on was knowing that the rest of the ship would be enduring worse than this, if we did not reverse the drift.

Finally the Conjoiner ship seemed to float out of some distorting medium, becoming clearer, its lines sharper. Fifty kilometres, then ten. Our pods slowed to a crawl for the final approach.

And we saw what we had not seen before.

Distance, the altered space, and the limitations of our own sensors and eyes had played a terrible trick on us. The state of decay was far worse than we had thought from those long-range scans. The ship was a frail wreck, only its bare outline surviving. The hull, engines, connecting spars were present… but they had turned fibrous, gutted open, ripped or peeled apart in some places, reduced to lacy insubstantiality in others. The ship looked ready to break apart, ready to become dust, like some fragile fossil removed from its preserving matrix.

For long minutes Struma and I could only stare, our pods hovering a few hundred metres beyond the carcass. All the earlier discomforts were still present, including the nausea. My thoughts were turning sluggish, like a hardening tar. But as I stared at the Conjoiner wreck, nothing of that mattered.

“It’s been here too long,” I said.

“We don’t know.”

“Decades… longer, even. Look at it, Struma. That’s an old, old ship. Maybe it’s even older than the Europa Accords.”

“Meaning what, Captain?”

“If it was sent here before the agreement, no treaty violation ever happened.”

“But Magadis…”

“We don’t know what orders Magadis was obeying. If any.” I swallowed hard, forcing myself to state the bleak and obvious truth. “It’s useless to us, anyway. Too far gone for there to be anything we could use, even if I trusted myself to go inside. We’ve come all this way for nothing.”

“There could still be technical data inside that ship. Readings, measurements of the object. We have to see.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing would have survived. You can see that, can’t you? It’s a husk. Even Magadis wouldn’t be able to get anything out of that now.” My heart was starting to race. Besides the nausea, and the discomfort, there was now a quiet, rising terror. I knew I was in a place where simple, thinking organisms such as myself did not belong. “We failed, Struma. It was the right thing to attempt, but there’s no sense deluding ourselves. Now we have to pray that the ship can slow itself down without any outside help.”

“Let’s not give up without taking a closer look, Captain. You said it yourself—we’ve come this far.”

Without waiting for my assent he powered his pod for the wreck. The Conjoiner ship was much smaller than the Equinoctial, but still his pod diminished to a tiny bright point against its size. I cursed, knowing that he was right, and applied manual thrust control to steer after him. He was heading for a wide void in the side of the hull, the skin peeled back around it like a flower’s petals. He slowed with a pulse of thrust, then drifted inside.

I made one last attempt to get a signal lock from the main ship, then followed Struma.

Maybe he was right, I thought—thinking as hard and furiously as I could, so as to squeeze the fear out of my head. There might still be something inside, however unlikely it looked. A shuttle, protected from the worst of the damage. A spare engine, with its control interface miraculously intact.

Once I was inside, though, I knew that such hopes were forlorn. The interior decay was just as bad, if not worse. The ship had rotted from within, held together by only the flimsiest traces of connective tissue. With my pod’s worklights beaming out at full power, I drifted through a dark, enchanted forest made of broken and buckled struts, severed floors and walls, shattered and mangled machinery.

I was just starting to accept the absolute futility of our expedition when something else occurred to me. There was no sign of Struma’s pod. He had only been a few hundred metres ahead of me when he passed out of sight, and if nothing else I should have picked up the reflections from his worklights and thrusters, even if I had no direct view of his pod.

But when I dimmed my own lights, and eased off on the thruster pod, I fell into total darkness.

“Struma,” I said. “I’ve lost you. Please respond.”

Silence.

“Struma. This is Rauma. Where are you? Flash your lights or thrusters if you can read me.”

Silence and darkness.

I stopped my drift. I must have been halfway into the innards of the Conjoiner ship, and that was far enough. I turned around, rationalising his silence. He must have gone all the way through, come out the other side, and the physical remains of the ship must be blocking our communications.

I fired a thruster pulse, heading out the way I had come in. The ruined forms threw back milky light. Ahead was a flower-shaped patch of stars, swelling larger. Not home, not sanctuary, but still something to aim for, something better than remaining inside the wreck.

I saw him coming just before he hit. He must have used a thruster pulse, just enough to move out of whatever concealment he had found. When he rammed my pod the closing speed could not have been more than five or six metres per second, but it was still enough to jolt the breath from me and send my own pod tumbling. I gasped for air, fighting against the thickening heaviness of my thoughts to retain some clarity of mind. I crashed into something, collision alarms sounding. A pod was sturdy enough to survive the launch boost, but it was not built to withstand an intentional, sustained attack.

I jabbed at the thruster controls, loosened myself. Struma’s pod was coming back around, lit in the strobe-flashes of our thrusters. Each flash lit up a static tableau, pods frozen in mid-space, but from one flash to the next our positions shifted.

I wondered if there was any point reasoning with him.

“Struma. You don’t have to do this. Whatever you think you’re going to achieve…” But then a vast and calm understanding settled over me. It was almost a blessing, to see things so clearly. “This was staged, somehow. This whole takeover attempt. Magadis… the others… it wasn’t them breaking the terms of the Accord, was it?”

His voice took on a pleading, reasoning tone.

“We needed this intelligence, Rauma. More than we needed them, and certainly more than we needed peace.”

Our pods clanged together. We had no weapons beyond mass and speed, no defences beyond thin armour and glass.

“Who, Struma? Who do you speak for?”

“Those who have our better interests in mind, Rauma. That’s all you need to know. All you will know, shortly. I’m sorry you’ve got to die. Sorry about the others, too. It wasn’t meant to be this bad.”

“No government would consent to this, Struma. You’ve been misled. Lied to.”

He came in again, harder than before, keeping thruster control going until the moment of impact. I blacked out for a second or ten, then came around as I drifted to a halt against a thicket of internal spars. Brittle as glass, they snapped into drifting, tumbling whiskers, making a dull music as they clanged and tinkled against my hull.

A fissure showed in my forward dome, pushing out little micro-fractures.

“They’d have found out about the wreck sooner or later, Rauma—just as we did. And they’d have found a way to get here, no matter the costs.”

“No,” I said. “They wouldn’t. Maybe once, they’d have been that ruthless—as would we. But we’ve learned to work together, learned to build a better world.”

“Console yourself. When I make my report, I’ll ensure you get all the credit for the discovery. They’ll name the object after you. Bernsdottir’s Object. Bernsdottir’s Shroud. Which would you prefer?”

“I’d prefer to be alive.” I had to raise my voice over the damage alarm. “By the way, how do you expect to make a report, if we never get home?”

“It’s been taken care of,” Struma said. “They’ll accept my version of events, when I return to the Equinoctial. I’ll say you were trapped in here, and I couldn’t help you. I’ll make it sound suitably heroic.”

“Don’t go to any trouble on my account.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t. But the more they focus on you, the less they’ll focus on me.”

He rammed me one more time, and I was about to try and dive around him when I let my hands drift from the thruster controls. My pod sailed on, careening into deepening thickets of ruined ship. I bounced against something solid, then tumbled on.

“You’d better hope that they manage to stop the drift.”

“Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. I don’t need the ship, though. There’s a plan—a contingency—if all else were to fail. I abandon the ship. Catapult myself out of harm’s way in a reefersleep casket. I’ll put a long-range homing trace on it. Out between the stars, the casket will have no trouble keeping me cold. Eventually they’ll send another ship to find me.”

More thruster flashes, but not from me. For an instant the sharp, jagged architecture of this place was laid stark. Perhaps I saw a body somewhere in that chaos, stirred from rest by our rude intrusion, tumbling like a doll, a fleshless, sharp-crested skull turning its blank eyes to mine.

“I’m glad you trust your masters that well.”

“Oh, I do.”

“Who are they, Struma? A faction within the Demarchists? One of the non-aligned powers?”

“Just people, Rauma. Just good, wise people with our long-term interests in mind.”

Struma came in again, lining up for a final ram. He must have heard that damage alarm, I thought, and took my helpless tumble as evidence that I had suffered some final loss of thruster control.

I let him fall closer. He picked up speed, his face seeming to swell until it filled his dome. His expression was one of stony resolve, filled more with regret than anger. Our eyes must have met in those last strobe-lit instants, and perhaps he saw something in my own face, some betrayal of my intentions.

By then, though, it would have been much too late.

I jammed my hands back onto the controls, thrusting sideways, giving him no time to change his course. His pod slid into the space where mine had been only an instant earlier, and then onward, onto the impaling spike of a severed spar. It drove through armour, into Struma’s chest, and in the flicker of my own thrusters I watched his body undergo a single violent convulsion, even as the air and life raced from his lungs.

Under better circumstances, I would have found a way to remove his body from that wreck. Whatever he had done, whatever his sins, no one deserved to be left in that place.

But these were not better circumstances, and I left him there.

Of the rest, there isn’t much more I need to tell you. Few things in life are entirely black and white, and so it was with the repair schedule. It completed on time, and Equinoctial regained control. I was on my way back, using what remained of my fuel, when they began to test the auxiliary engines. Since they were shining in my direction, I had no difficulty making out the brightening star that was my ship. Not much was being asked of it, I told myself. Surely now it would be possible to undo the drift, even reverse it, and begin putting some comfortable distance between the Equinoctial and the object.

As my pod cleared the immediate influence of the surface, I regained a stable signal and ranging fix on the main ship. Hardly daring to breathe, I watched as her drift was reduced by a factor of five. At ten metres per second a human could have outpaced her. It was nearly enough—tantalising close to zero.

Then something went wrong. I watched the motors flicker and fade. I waited for them to restart, but the moment never came. Through the link I learned that some fragile power coupling had overloaded, strained beyond its limits. Like everything else, it could be repaired—but only given time that we did not have. The Equinoctial’s rate of drift had been reduced, but not neutralised. Our pods had detected changes at nine thousand kilometres from the surface. At its present speed, the ship would pass that point in four days.

We did not have time.

I had burned almost all my fuel on the way back from the wreck, leaving only the barest margin to rendezvous with the ship. Unfortunately that margin proved insufficient. My course was off, and by the time I corrected it, I did not have quite enough fuel to complete my rendezvous. I was due to sail past the ship, carrying on into interstellar space. The pod’s resources would keep me alive for a few more days, but not enough for anyone to come to my rescue, and eventually I would freeze or suffocate, depending on which got me first. Neither option struck me as very appealing. But at least I would be spared the rending forces of the surface.

That was not how it happened, of course.

My remaining crew, and the passenger-representatives, had decreed that I should return to the ship. And so the Equinoctial’s alignment was trimmed very carefully, using such steering control as the ship now retained, and I slid back into the maw of the cargo launcher. It was a bumpy procedure, reversing the process that had boosted me out of the ship in the first place, and I suffered concussion as the pod was recaptured by the launch cradle and brought to a punishing halt.

But I was alive.

Doctor Grellet was the first face I saw when I returned to awareness, lying on a revival couch, sore around the temples, but fully cognizant of what had happened.

My first question was a natural one.

“Where are we?”

“Two days from the point where your pods began to pick up the altered spacetime.” He spoke softly, in the best bedside manner. “Our instruments haven’t picked up anything odd just yet, but I’m sure that will change as we near the boundary.”

I absorbed his news, oddly resentful that I had not been allowed to die. But I forced a captain-like composure upon myself. “It took until now to revive me?”

“There were complications. We had to put you into the auto-surgeon, to remove a bleed on the brain. There were difficulties getting the surgeon to function properly. I had to perform a manual override of some of its tasks.”

No one else was in the room with me. I wondered where the rest of my executive staff were. Perhaps they were busy preparing the ship for its last few days, closing logs and committing messages and farewells to the void, for all the hope they had of reaching anyone.

“It’s going to be bad, Doctor Grellet. Struma and I got a taste of it, and we were still a long way from the surface. If there’s nothing we can do, then no one need be conscious for it.”

“They won’t be,” Doctor Grellet said. “Only a few of us are awake now. The rest have gone back into reefersleep. They understand that it’s a death sentence, but at least it’s painless, and some sedatives can ease the transition into sleep.”

“You should join them.”

“I shall. But I wanted to tell you about Magadis first. I think you will find it interesting.”

When I was ready to move Doctor Grellet and I made our way to the interrogation cell. Magadis was sitting in her chair, still bound. Her head swivelled to track me as I entered the electrostatic cage. In the time since I had last seen her the swelling around her bad eye had begun to reduce, and she could look at me with both eyes.

“I told the guard to stand down,” Doctor Grellet said. “He was achieving nothing, anyway.”

“You told me about the prisoners on Mars.”

He gave a thin smile. “I’m glad some of that sunk in. I didn’t really know what to make of it at the time. Why hadn’t Magadis turned that weapon on herself, or simply reached inside her own skull to commit suicide? It ought to have been well within her means.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked her.

Magadis levelled her gaze at Doctor Grellet. Although she was still my prisoner, her poise was one of serene control and dominance. “Tell her what you found, Doctor.”

“It was the auto-surgeon,” Grellet said. “I mentioned that there were problems getting it to work properly. No one had expected that it would need to be used again, I think, and so they had taken no great pains to clear its executive memory of the earlier workflow.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“The auto-surgeon had been programmed to perform an unusual surgical task, something far outside its normal repertoire. Magadis was brought out of reefersleep, but held beneath consciousness. She was put into the auto-surgeon. A coercive device was installed inside her.”

“It was a military device,” Magadis said, as detached as if she were recounting something that had happened to someone else entirely, long ago and far away. “An illegal relic of the first war. A Tharsis Lash, they called it. Designed to override our voluntary functions, and permit us to be interrogated and serve as counter-propaganda mouthpieces. While the device was installed in me, I had no volition. I could only do and say what was required of me.”

“By Struma,” I said, deciding that was the only answer that made any sense.

“He was obliged to act alone,” Magadis answered, still with that same icy calm. “It was made to look like an attempted takeover of your ship, but no such thing was ever attempted. But we had to die, all of us. No knowledge of the object could be allowed to reach our mother nests.”

“I removed the coercive device,” Doctor Grellet said. “Of course, there was resistance from your loyal officers. But they were made to understand what had happened. Struma must have woken up first, then completed the work on Magadis. Struma then laid the evidence for an attempted takeover of the ship. More Conjoiners were brought out of reefersleep, and either killed on the spot or implanted with cruder versions of the coercive devices, so that they were seen to put up a convincing fight. The other officers were revived, and perceived that the ship was under imminent threat. In the heat of the emergency they had no reason to doubt Struma.”

“Nor did I,” I whispered.

“It was vital that the Conjoiners be eliminated. Their cooperation was required for the existence and operation of this ship, but they could not be party to the discovery and exploration of the object.”

“What about the rest of us?” I asked. “We were all part of it. We’d have spoken, when we got back home.”

“You would have accepted Struma’s account of the Conjoiner takeover, as you very nearly did. As I did. But it was a mistake to put her under armed guard, and another mistake to allow me a close look at that auto-surgeon. I suppose we can’t blame Struma for a few slips. He had enough to be concentrating on.”

“You were worried about war,” Magadis said evenly. “Now it may still happen. But the terms of provocation will be different. A faction inside one of your own planetary governments engineered this takeover bid.” She held her silence for a few moments. “But I do not want war. Do you believe in clemency, Rauma Bernsdottir?”

“I hope so.”

“Good.” And Magadis stood from her chair, her bindings falling away where they had clearly never been properly fastened. She took a step nearer to me, and in a single whiplash motion brought her arm up to my chin. Her hand closed around my jaw. She held me with a vicelike force, squeezing so hard that I felt my bones would shatter. “I believe in clemency as well. But it takes two to make it work. You struck me, when you thought I was your prisoner.”

I stumbled back, crashing against the useless grid of the electrostatic cage. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you, Captain?”

“Yes.” It was hard to speak, hard to think, with the pain she was inflicting. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have hit you.”

“In your defence,” Magadis said, “you only did it the once. And although I was under the control of the device, I saw something in your eyes. Doubt. Shame.” She relinquished her hold on me. I drew quick breaths, fully aware of how easily she could still break me. “I’m minded to think you regretted your impulse.”

“I did.”

“Good. Because someone has to live, and it may as well be you.”

I reached up and nursed the skin around my jaw. “No. We’re finished—all of us. All that’s left is reefersleep. We’ll die, but at least we’ll be under when it happens.”

“The ship can be saved,” Magadis answered. “And a small number of its passengers. This will happen. Now that knowledge of the object has been gathered, it must reach civilisation. You will be the vector of that knowledge.”

“The ship can’t be saved. There just isn’t time.”

Magadis turned to Doctor Grellet. “Perhaps we should show her, Doctor. Then she would understand.”

They took me to one of the forward viewports. Since the ship was still aimed at the object all that was presently visible was a wall of darkness, stretching to the limit of vision in all directions. I stared into that nothingness, wondering if I might catch a glimpse of the Conjoiner wreck, now that we were so much closer. They had asked me very little of what happened to Struma, as if my safe return was answer enough.

Then something flashed. It was a brief, bright scintillation, there and gone almost before it had time to register on my retinae. Wondering if it might have been a trick of the imagination, I stayed at the port until I saw another of the flashes. A little later came a third. They were not happening in the same spot, but clustered near enough to each other not to be accidental.

“You saved us,” Doctor Grellet said, speaking quietly, as if he might break some sacred spell. “Or at least, showed us the way. When you and Struma used the cargo launcher to accelerate your pods, there was an effect on the rest of the ship. A tiny but measurable recoil, reducing some of her speed.”

“It’s no help to us,” I said, taking a certain bleak pleasure in pointing out the error in his thinking. “If we had a full cargo manifest, tens of thousands of tonnes, then maybe we could shoot enough of it ahead of the ship to reverse the drift. But we haven’t. We’re barely carrying any cargo at all.”

Another flash twinkled against the surface.

“It’s not cargo,” Magadis said.

I suppose I understood even then. Some part of me, at least. But not the part that was willing to face the truth.

“What, then?”

“Caskets,” Doctor Grellet said. “Reefersleep caskets. Each about as large and heavy as your inspection pod, each still containing a sleeping passenger.”

“No.” My answer was one of flat denial, even as I knew there was no reason for either of them to lie.

“There are uncertainties,” Magadis said. “The launcher is under strain, and its efficiency may not remain optimal. But it seems likely that the ship can be saved with the loss of only half the passenger manifest.” Some distant, alien sympathy glimmered in her eyes. “I understand that this is difficult for you, Rauma. But there is no other way to save the ship. Some must die, so that some must live. And you in particular must be one of the living.”

The flashes continued. Now that I was attuned to their rhythm, I picked up an almost subliminal nudge in the fabric of the ship, happening at about the same frequency as the impacts. Each nudge was the cargo launcher firing another casket away, the ship’s motion reducing by a tiny value. It produced a negligibly small effect. But put several thousand negligibly small things together and they can add up to something useful.

“I won’t sanction this,” I said. “Not for the sake of the ship. Not murder, not suicide, not self-sacrifice. Nothing’s worth this.”

“Everything is worth it,” Magadis said. “Firstly, knowledge of the artefact—the object—must reach civilisation, and it must then be disseminated. It cannot remain the secretive preserve of one faction or arm of government. It must be universal knowledge. Perhaps there are more of these objects. If there are, they must be mapped and investigated, their natures probed. Secondly, you must speak of peace. If this ship were lost, if no trace of it were ever to return home, there would always be speculation. You must guard against that.”

“But you…”

She carried on speaking. “They would accept your testimony more readily than mine. But do not think this is suicide, for any of us. It has been agreed, Rauma—by a quorum of the living, both baseline and Conjoiner. A larger subset of the sleeping passengers was brought to the edge of consciousness, so that they could be polled, their opinions weighed. I will not say that the verdict was unanimous… but it carried, and with a healthy majority. We each take our chances. The automated systems of the ship will continue ejecting caskets until the drift has been safely reversed, with a comfortable margin of error. Perhaps it will take ten thousand sleepers, or fifteen thousand. Until that point has been reached, the selection is entirely random. We return to reefersleep knowing only that we have a better than zero chance of surviving.”

“It’s enough,” Doctor Grellet said. “As Magadis says, better that one of us survives than none of us.”

“It would have suited Struma if you butchered us all,” Magadis said. “But you didn’t. And even when there was a hope that the repairs could be completed, you risked your life to investigate the wreck. The crew and passengers evaluated this action. They found it meritorious.”

“Struma just wanted a good way to kill me.”

“The decision was yours, not Struma’s. And our decision is final.” Magadis’s tone was stern, but not without some bleak edge of compassion. “Doctor Grellet and I will return to reefersleep now. Our staying awake was only ever temporary, and we must also submit our lives to chance.”

“No,” I said again. “Stay with me. Not everyone has to die—you said it yourselves.”

“We accepted our fate,” Doctor Grellet said. “Now, Captain Bernsdottir you must accept yours.”

And I did.

I believed that we had a better than even chance. I thought that if one of us survived, thousands more would also make it back. And that among those sleepers, once they were woken, would be witnesses willing to corroborate my version of events.

I was wrong.

The ship did repair itself, and I did make it back to Yellowstone. As I have mentioned, great pains were taken to protect me from the long exposure to reefersleep. When they brought me back to life, my complications were minimal. I remembered almost all of it from the first day.

But the others—the few thousand who were spared—they were not so fortunate. One by one they were brought out of hibernation, and one by one they were found to have suffered various deficits of memory and personality. The most lucid among them, those who had come through with the least damage, could not verify my account with the reliability demanded by public opinion. Some recalled being raised to minimal consciousness, polled as to the decision to sacrifice some of the passengers—a majority, as it turned out—but their recollections were vague and sometimes contradictory. Under other circumstances such things would have been put down to revival amnesia, and there would have been no blemish on my name. But this was different. How could I have survived, out of all of them?

You think I didn’t argue my case? I tried. For years, I recounted exactly what had happened, sparing nothing. I turned to the ship’s own records, defending their veracity. It was difficult, for Struma’s family back on Fand. Word reached them eventually. I wept for what they had to bear, with the knowledge of his betrayal. The irony is that they never doubted my account, even as it burned them.

But that saying we had on Fand—the one I spoke of earlier. Shame is a mask that becomes the face. I mentioned its corollary, too—of how that mask can become so well-adapted to its wearer that it no longer feels ill-fitting or alien. Becomes, in fact, something to hide behind—a shield and a comfort.

I have come to be very comfortable with my shame.

True, it chafed against me, in the early days. I resisted it, resented the new and contorting shape it forced upon my life. But with time the mask became something I could endure. By turns I became less and less aware of its presence, and then one day I stopped noticing it was there at all. Either it had changed, or I had. Or perhaps we had both moved toward some odd accommodation, each accepting the other.

Whatever the case, to discard it now would feel like ripping away my own living flesh.

I know this surprises you—shocks you, even. That even with your clarity of mind, even with your clear recollection of being polled, even with your watertight corroboration, I would not jump at the chance for forgiveness. But you misjudge me if you think otherwise.

Look out at the city now.

Tower after tower, like the dust columns of stellar nurseries, receding into the haze of night, twinkling with a billion lights, a billion implicated lives.

The truth is, they don’t deserve it. They put this on me. I spoke truthfully all those years ago, and my words steered us from the brink of a second war with the Conjoiners. A few who mattered—those who had influence—they took my words at face value. But many more did not. I ask you this now: why should I offer them the solace of seeing me vindicated?

They can sleep with their guilt when I’m dead.

I hear your disbelief. Understand it, even. You’ve gone to this trouble, come to me with this generous, selfless intention—hoping to ease these final years with some shift in the public view of me. It’s a kindness, and I thank you for it.

But there’s another saying we used to have on Fand. You’ll know it well, I think.

A late gift is worse than no gift at all.

Would you mind leaving me now?