BECOMING ONE WITH THE GHOSTS

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s novel, Diving Into the Wreck, appeared to great critical acclaim from Pyr Books in November of last year. The next Diving novel, City of Ruin, will be out in spring of 2011. Recently, Golden Gryphon published a collection of her newest award-winning and award-nominated tales, Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories, and the website io9 declared her Retrieval Artist series on of the ten best science fiction detective stories ever published. The author’s eerie new tale from her Diving universe reveals the secret of . . .

They landed smoothly, which surprised the hell out of Coop. The Ivoire had suffered more damage than he ever could have imagined, and yet the venerable old craft had gotten them here—all five hundred of them, mostly in one piece.

For a brief moment, he bowed his head. He took a deep breath and let a shudder run through him—the only emotion he’d allowed himself in more than a week. Then he raised his head and looked.

The walls had full screens, top to bottom, just like he’d ordered. It didn’t matter much when the Ivoire transitioned, but now that the ship had arrived at Sector Base V, the walls told him a lot. A lot that he didn’t understand.

The Ivoire had landed inside the base, just like usual. The ship stood on the repair deck, just like it was supposed to.

The base was cavernous. It had to be. Like the other ships of her class, the Ivoire was large. She housed five hundred people comfortably, providing family quarters, school, and recreation in addition to being a working battleship. Two ships the size of the Ivoire could fit into this base, with another partially assembled along the way. Not to mention the equipment, the specialized bays, the private working areas. The Sector Base was huge and impossible to process all at once.

But what Coop could process looked wrong.

For one thing, no one manned the equipment. Much of it looked like it wasn’t even turned on. The lights were dim or off completely. The workstations—the ones he could see in the half-light—looked like they’d suffered minor damage. But he didn’t know how they could have. Like all the Sector Bases, Sector Base V was over a mile underground in a heavily fortified area. No one could get in or out without the proper equipment.

To his knowledge, no Sector Base had ever been attacked, not even in areas under siege. Granted, his knowledge wasn’t as vast as the history of the Fleet, but he knew how difficult it was to damage a Sector Base. Although it looked like someone had harmed this one. Because it had been fine a month ago.

Before the battles with the Quurzod, he’d brought the Ivoire in for its final systems check and repair. He had known that he wouldn’t get another full-scale repair for a year, maybe more. Particularly if the Fleet conquered the Quurzod and moved on, as planned. Then the Ivoire and the other ships in the Fleet wouldn’t get the full-scale treatment for five years. It would take that long to build Sector Base W, at the edges of the new sector of space.

He hadn’t planned on ever returning here. He certainly hadn’t planned on returning here in defeat. Or what felt like defeat.

And now the base looked wrong.

“You sure we’re seeing Sector Base V?” he asked his First Officer Dix Pompiano. Dix was tall and thin, almost too tall for a bridge command. Yet he could bend himself as if he were made of string, and fit into the smallest of places.

Like his command post. Dix insisted on the station farthest from Coop, in case the bridge got hit. Dix figured that if as much distance as possible separated them, one of them would survive.

Coop had always figured if the bridge got hit, the entire vessel would disappear. The anacapa drive—small as it was—was located on the bridge itself. If the drive took a direct hit, then the drive’s protections would fail. Half the ship would be in this dimension, half in another—if they were lucky. If they weren’t, the entire thing might explode.

Maybe it was the half-and-half dimensions that made Dix want to stay separate from Coop. They’d never discussed it, and they weren’t about to now.

“It sure as hell doesn’t look like Sector Base V,” Dix said. “But the readings say it is.”

“We’re in the right point in space,” said Anita Tren. She stood at her post, even though her built-in chair brushed against her backside. She was small, so small that she had to boost herself into that chair. On good days, she would kid that she needed to stand so that she could be closer to her board.

“Have you confirmed that we’re under Venice City?” Coop asked.

Venice City, the latest settlement. “Latest” was technically accurate, but the location, on the most remote planet in this sector, had been settled fifty years before Coop was born. At his first visit here, on his tenth birthday, he had thought the city old.

His father had laughed at that, telling Coop there were places in this sector that had been colonized for thousands of years. Human habitation, his father said, although no one knew where those humans had originated.

The Fleet, everyone knew, originally came from Earth, but so long ago that no one alive had seen the home planet or even the home solar system. Earth was as much a myth as the Fleet itself, something rare and special and lost to time.

As a young man, Coop had toyed with the idea of going back there. He thought of building a ship, begging, borrowing (hell, stealing) an anacapa drive, and plotting the trip back.

But ultimately, he feared disappointment. He’d seen too many legendary parts of space already and they rarely lived up to their advance billing. He liked the Earth of his imagination. He didn’t want to see anyone or anything spoil it.

Like they had spoiled Venice City. When he’d heard that the settlement was named for an old Earth city that had disappeared into the ocean—an ancient city of canals and tall stone buildings—he had expected the same there.

Instead, he found a haphazard collection of buildings perched in a dry valley, one that got so hot in its summer that he thought he would die. Later, his father had explained to a disappointed Coop that the name had come from a joke, a conversation among the settlement’s inhabitants as the place took shape.

What’s the official name going to be?

Not Death Valley. Names can be prophetic.

Hell, then we probably should call it Venice City. Maybe an ocean will find us then.

Coop never found that funny. Just like he didn’t find this funny.

The base looked dimmer than usual. The equipment seemed smaller in the emptiness. Some lights were on, but not many. And the bulk of the base disappeared into the darkness.

“Is something wrong with the screens then?” Coop asked Yash Zerlengo, his onsite engineer.

She had left her station. She had walked up to the nearest wall screen and was investigating it with her handheld, as well as with the fingertips of her left hand.

She was Coop’s height, broad shouldered, a former athlete raised planetside, which was unusual in the Fleet. But she had her family’s knack for technology. She knew how to repair anything, how to build most things, and seemed to have a sixth sense about anything technical.

“I’m not reading any problems. These images are coming from the ship’s exterior just like they should be,” she said.

Coop frowned and wished, not for the first time, that the original Fleet engineers had thought it proper to build portals into the bridge. He would like to do a visual comparison of what he saw on the wall screens with what he saw out the portal.

But he would have to leave the bridge to do that.

So he snapped his finger at the most junior officer on deck, Kjersti Perkins. She didn’t even have to be told what he wanted. She nodded and exited.

Perkins would have to walk three-tenths of a mile just to get to the nearest portal. The bridge was in the nose of the ship, completely protected by hull. The original engineers had thought portals were for tourists, and didn’t insert any until the ship widened into its residential and business wings

But Coop couldn’t just worry about what was outside the ship. He also had to worry about what was inside the ship. “Give me updated damage reports,” he said.

“Nothing new,” Yash said, which was a relief. Coop had been expecting more damage all over the ship. Normal activation of the anacapa drive often revealed weak spots in the ship, and this activation had been anything but normal. It had been desperate—more desperate than he ever wanted to admit.

Fifteen days of drift—full engine failure, at least on the standard engines. The anacapa worked—it had gotten them there, after all, wherever there was, which none of them could exactly figure out. It seemed like they’d moved dimensions, just like they were supposed to, but something had gone wrong with the navigation equipment, confirmed by scans.

An asteroid field where there shouldn’t be one. A star in the proper position, but not at the proper intensity. A planet with two moons instead of the expected three.

Nothing was quite right, and yet a lot was. Coop didn’t even want to think about the possibilities. He didn’t dare.

Back when he realized they were drifiting, Coop had set up the distress beacon, the one tied to the anacapa, so that it could reach any nearby bases, and prayed for an answer. Which hadn’t come.

So he increased the scans. The Ivoire couldn’t move yet—not with a regular drive, anyway, although repairs were coming along, as the engineers said—but everything else seemed to be working.

They should have gotten a response from two different bases: Sector Base V and Sector Base U, which was at the very edge of their range. Not to mention Starbase Kappa, which—according to the records—wasn’t that far from here.

Nothing. He’d left the signal on, but checked it and asked the science whiz kids in the school wing to work the design for a new signal, something a little less formal, he said, and he told their teacher what he really wanted was for them to build a new signal from scratch.

Just in case the old one had been damaged in the fight with the Quurzod, and somehow that damage hadn’t registered. He couldn’t spare the engineers to do the work. He needed the students more than he ever had before.

He didn’t tell the teacher that, but she had clearly figured it out. She looked grimly determined, and told him the kids would get on the project right away.

They were only half done when Dix caught the edge of a reply.

Automated from Sector Base V: We have heard your distress signal. We are prepared to use our own drive to bring you to us. If that is what you need, turn on your anacapa drive now.

Without a second thought, Coop turned on the drive, and the Ivoire whisked out of the drift, their drive piggybacking on Sector Base V’s.

He’d studied the process in school and hadn’t entirely understood it. Just that something about the two drives linked, locked, and provided extra power, power that could bring a damaged ship from wherever it was to wherever it needed to be.

The Ivoire’s journey had taken half a minute, maybe less. They had been drifting in an unknown part of space, then they were here, in Sector Base V, beneath the mountains that towered over Venice City. They were here and they should have been safe. But they weren’t.

Coop had a sense they were in deeper shit than they’d ever been in before.

Perkins returned quicker than Coop expected. She must have scurried down those corridors.

“It’s the same,” she said, somewhat breathlessly. “The view’s the same.”

He had expected that, and yet hoped for a different outcome. Dix bent over his console. So did Tren. They checked their readings again, probably for the fifteenth or sixteenth time.

Coop took a deep breath. He didn’t need the repeated readings. The equipment said they were in Sector Base V, so they had to be in Sector Base V. A different Sector Base V than the one he had left a month ago.

He ran a hand over his face. The anacapa created a fold in space. The Fleet used it as both a drive and a cloak, although cloak wasn’t the accurate term. If a ship was under fire, it activated its anacapa drive, moving into foldspace, and then returning to the same point in regular space moments or hours later. Sometimes moments were all it took to confuse the enemy ships. Sometimes hours got the ship—and the Fleet—out of a serious dilemma.

That was how the ships continued to travel through hundreds of years. They rarely got damaged in battle, and when they did, they could go elsewhere to repair. The Fleet had learned long ago how to do extensive repair in space, but they had also learned that sometimes parts simply wore out. Repair could only do so much, particularly when spread over hundreds of years, thousands of battles, and countless trips via the anacapa drive.

That was why the Fleet built settlements on hospitable planets, usually choosing a mountainous region, always picking a hard to reach (by ground) location far from the main civilizations (if there were any). The settlements were mostly underground and never considered permanent.

Sector Base N, for example, had been abandoned for nearly four hundred years. No one from the Fleet went back to that sector, so they didn’t need the base.

On every settlement, though, a handful of people chose to stay. Some married into the indigenous population. Some simply liked life planetside better than life in space, although Coop never understood why.

As a kid, he thought about all those lost bases, like he thought about the nearly mythical Earth, and wondered what it would be like to return to them.

His father kidded him, saying Coop was the only child whose adventurous spirit turned backward instead of forward.

Coop let his hand drop away from his face. Then he looked at the wall screens again.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he muttered.

The others were watching him. He wasn’t sure how many of them knew what he was thinking.

And he wasn’t exactly sure what he was thinking. Had someone left the base’s anacapa drive active, even though the base had been under attack? That didn’t make sense, because every commander—on base and on ship—was instructed to shut off an anacapa drive before enemy capture.

Shut off, or destroy.

Even though the Fleet had traveled all over the known universe, it had never encountered another civilization with an anacapa drive. They had encountered other marvelous technology, but never anything as sophisticated and freeing as the anacapa.

Without the anacapa, the Fleet could never have continued on its extensive mission. Without the anacapa, the Fleet would never have left its own small sector of space around Earth. The anacapa had enabled it to travel great distances, carrying its own brand of justice and its own kind of integrity to worlds far and wide.

Had the anacapa drive here in Sector Base V malfunctioned, forcing everyone to leave? He’d heard of malfunctioning drives before. They were one of the most dangerous parts of the Fleet. A ship with a malfunctioning drive sometimes had to be destroyed to protect the Fleet and anything around it.

But that made no sense either. Because the anacapa drive inside all the sector bases was tied to working equipment. Not just working equipment, but equipment that had been turned on and used manually by a human being within the past twenty-four hours.

It was a failsafe, designed by some far-seeing engineer, or, as Coop’s father would have said, designed by a professional worrier, someone who tried to see all the problems and plan for them.

The failsafe had been designed to prevent exactly this kind of problem: A ship could get trapped planetside. Crews would be trapped inside a mountain, especially if the internal corridors had collapsed, and there was no real way out.

The human failsafe was necessary because no one knew—even now, after generations of using the drives—how long an anacapa could survive without maintenance. There were some in the Fleet who believed that an anacapa drive would remain functional long after the human race had disappeared from the universe.

The human race hadn’t disappeared. The anacapa drive still worked. But something had happened in the repair area. Something bad.

“Should we go out there, see what went wrong?” Perkins asked.

No one answered her. She specialized in communication. She spoke fifteen languages fluently, another forty haphazardly, and had a gift for picking up new languages all the time. Combined with the computer database on languages all over the known universe, and her ability to recognize patterns, Perkins was one of the most formidable linguists in the Fleet, and Coop’s secret weapon whenever they went anywhere new.

But so far, except for the disaster with the Quurzod—which wasn’t her fault—she had never been on a mission where something had gone wrong.

“We can’t go out there yet,” Coop said. “We need to know what we’re facing.”

He didn’t want to tell her that if the anacapa had malfunctioned, the area outside the ship might be deadly to the team. Not obviously deadly—they wouldn’t die the moment they walked out there.

There were ways to test this, but he would actually have to look them up. No one had encountered this sort of thing in living memory, and the training for it had slipped, although the warnings had remained.

“You think the base was attacked?” Dix asked.

“Possible,” Coop said. He didn’t want to reveal his suspicions any more than that. He wanted the bridge crew to explore all options. “Let’s figure out what’s going on here before we make any moves.”

“Sir?” Yash sounded strange.

He glanced at her.

She was pointing at an area on the wall screen. A woman walked toward the ship’s exterior. The woman was thin and wore a form-fitting environmental suit of a type Coop had never seen before. She had cylinders and what looked like a knife hilt attached to the belt on her hip.

He could only get a glimpse of her angular face through her helmet.

As he watched, she reached out and put her gloved hand on the Ivoire’s side.

“Is she the one who attacked us?” Perkins asked.

“We don’t know if the base was attacked,” Coop said.

“But it’s been abandoned,” Perkins said.

“There could be a variety of reasons for that.” This time, Dix answered her. But he didn’t elaborate and neither did Coop.

But Perkins wasn’t dumb. Just inexperienced. “So is that woman part of a repair crew?”

“I don’t think so,” Yash said. “I don’t recognize her suit.”

“It could be special hazmat suits from Venice City itself,” Tren said.

Perkins eyes opened wider. “Hazmat? So it’s toxic out there?”

Coop shrugged. “We don’t know anything yet. All we know is that we’re here, nothing is as it was when we left, and a woman is in the repair room. We don’t even know if it’s a woman we’ve met before. I can’t see her face clearly, can you?”

“No,” Dix said.

“But she’s human, right?” Perkins asked.

“What else would she be?” Yash asked with a touch of impatience. The Fleet, in all its travels, had never discovered an alien race, not as the Fleet defined it, anyway, which was a non-standard, unexpected life form of equal intelligence to humans.

“I don’t know,” Perkins said. “That woman looks weird.”

Perkins’ voice held an edge of panic. She’d felt responsible for the Quurzod disaster, even though the fault didn’t lie with the linguists, but with the Quurzod themselves (intransigent bastards). She had held up well during the fifteen days in that unrecognizable area of space, but she must have been clinging to the thought that everything would be fine when they reached Sector Base V. And now everything wasn’t fine. It was enough to break a more experienced officer.

“When was the last time you slept, Kjersti?” Coop asked.

She looked at him sideways, understanding in her eyes. She knew that he had caught the beginnings of panic in her voice, knew that he was about to send her to her quarters. “I’m fine,” she said.

“Go rest,” he said.

“Sir—”

“Kjersti,” he said. “Go rest.”

She straightened, recognizing the order. “Whom should I send to replace me?”

“No one,” he said. “Not just yet. I’ll send for you if we need anything.”

She nodded, thanked him, and left the bridge.

The others watched, knowing they were as tired, as worried, and maybe even as panicked. They just had more experience and knew how to push the emotions away.

“Are we getting any readings on the environment out there?” Coop asked. “Any idea at all why that woman is in an environmental suit?”

“Everything reads normal,” Yash said.

“But that stuff floating around her,” Tren said. “What’s that?”

Coop didn’t see floating material. The entire repair room looked dim to him. Clearly Tren saw something. But she was closer to the wall screen.

“Maybe that’s the hazardous material,” Dix said.

“We don’t know if it’s hazardous out there,” Coop said. “Perhaps the suit is just an excess of caution.”

“Why would she be cautious about a base underneath a mountain?” Dix asked.

“Tunnel collapse?” Tren said.

“Sometimes planets themselves create a hazardous environment. When they built Sector Base S, they encountered a series of methane pockets,” Yash said.

Everyone looked at her.

She shrugged.

“We had to study base building in training,” she said. “Sector Base S is a cautionary tale. We actually learned how to build without exposing anyone to underground surprises.”

“They weren’t building anything here,” Coop said.

“But a groundquake, a volcanic eruption, an explosion on the surface might hurt the integrity underground and cause something like Sector Base S encountered,” Yash said.

“Wouldn’t methane show up in the readings?” Tren asked.

“I’m not trusting anything we’re getting right now,” Yash said. “Some of the damage the Ivoire suffered is pretty subtle. We’ve only been focused on the major stuff. Once we look at everything, we might discover that some of the things we think are minor are more serious than we initially thought.”

Coop had a hunch all of the damage on the Ivoire was major. He had been operating on that principle from the beginning. He had been relieved when the trip through foldspace to here hadn’t completely destroyed the ship.

“Any way to hail that woman?” Dix asked.

Coop had just let his linguist go. He wasn’t going to try to contact strangers without a linguist on deck.

“See what readings you can get off the base’s equipment,” he said to Yash.

“I’ll do what I can,” she said. “A lot of the equipment is still inactive.”

“Inactive?” Coop said, startled. “Shouldn’t it be dormant?”

That was the customary thing to do in leaving a base. If the area was safe enough to leave the anacapa drive functional, then the equipment around it needed to function as well. It had to remain dormant so that the touch of a human being could bring the equipment up on a moment’s notice.

So, theoretically, could the arrival of a ship that traveled to the base on a piggybacked anacapa merge.

“Yes, it should be dormant,” Yash said. “But these things were shut off.”

“And the anacapa remained functional?”

She opened her hands in a how-should-I-know gesture. “Right now, nothing’s working like it should.”

“Is that because of a malfunction in the Ivoire?”

“Honestly, Coop,” she said, dispensing with the “sir” now that Perkins was gone, “I have no idea. I won’t know until I get out there and investigate.”

He looked at the wall screen. “None of us is going out there until we know who these people are and what the hell’s going on.”

“How do you propose we find that out, then?” Dix asked.

“We be patient,” Coop said.

“There could be an immediate threat,” Dix said.

“There could be,” Coop said. “But right now, we’re getting no indication of that.”

“Except an empty base, a stranger in the repair room, and malfunctioning equipment,” Dix said.

“We waited fifteen days to get here,” Coop said, “with a crippled ship and no answers to our distress calls. We were patient. We got here.”

“Where things aren’t good,” Dix said.

“They’re better than they were,” Coop said. “We’re not in an unidentified part of space. In that room, there are things that will help us repair this ship. If we’re patient, we’ll be able to fix the Ivoire and catch the Fleet.”

“If that woman doesn’t attack us,” Tren said.

Coop gave her a sideways look. She wasn’t speaking out of panic. She was just throwing out a possibility.

“One woman? Who happens to be carrying a knife? What do you think she’ll do, Anita, stab the Ivoire to death?”

He hadn’t meant to be that sarcastic. He was tired, too. And a bit worried about what he was seeing here. But no longer worried that the five hundred people in his charge would die on the ship.

They would survive. He knew that much now. But whether or not they would die under Venice City was another matter. He was going to take this slowly, no matter what his crew wanted.

“How are our weapons systems?” he asked Yash. He hadn’t had cause to ask since they’d activated the anacapa to get away from the Quurzod. Nothing had approached them for fifteen days.

“We’ve repaired some of them,” Yash said, “but nothing we can fire down here.”

“Why not?” Coop asked.

“Because the walls are made of nanobits just like the hull of the Ivoire,” she said. The Fleet’s technology was nanobased, with the help of the anacapa drive. The drive powered the technological change on a planet, essentially powering the nanobots that sculpted the interiors of mountains into the best bases he’d ever found in the known universe. “The shots will bounce off. They’ll ricochet until the energy is spent.”

“Damaging nothing,” Coop said.

“Except the equipment,” Yash said, “and anyone who happens to be in the repair room.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“But these weapons weren’t meant to be fired in atmosphere,” she said. “If there’s a methane leak, for example, then we might have another kind of explosion.”

“Or an anacapa malfunction,” Dix said.

“The weapons won’t cause an anacapa malfunction,” Yash said.

“I know,” Dix said. “I meant if their anacapa has malfunctioned. . . .”

“It hasn’t,” Coop said. “It got us here.”

Yash gave him a sideways look. He knew that look. It was one that cautioned him to silence. The two of them had served together since they were cadets, and they had bolstered each other from the beginning.

“You disagree,” he said to her.

“Even a malfunctioning anacapa could have had enough energy to get us here,” she said.

“Great,” he said. “So we’re back to square one. We won’t know anything until we get out there and take some readings. And we’re not going to do that as long as those outsiders are here.”

He walked over to that part of the wall screen and peered at the woman. She was still touching the Ivoire’s exterior, as if she could gather information about the ship through the palm of her glove.

For all he knew, she could.

Her face was barely visible inside the helmet. He couldn’t really make out her features, but he thought she looked intrigued. As if she hadn’t expected the Ivoire. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she knew the Fleet was long gone.

She tilted her head. It felt like she could see him.

But he knew that wasn’t true. She couldn’t see him at all. She probably didn’t even know he was there.

“What’s she doing?” Tren asked.

Coop shook his head. He had a theory—he always had theories, and he’d learned it was never wise to share them, at least not when he led a mission. Always better to gather information.

Behind the woman, he saw movement. Four others, huddled near the exterior door, nearly lost in the gloom.

Only it wasn’t really gloom. She was teaching him that. Particles floated in the air around her. They were coating the exterior of the ship, which was probably why the base looked so damn dark. Apparently he was finally able to see the stuff that Tren had been referring to.

“There’s some kind of substance on the exterior of the ship,” he said. “Look at her hand. It’s clearer than everything else.”

Her gloved hand. She had placed her palm flat against the ship. The glove was white, so tight that he could see the ridges in her palm, the bend of her fingers.

She knew nothing about the vessel. None of the outsiders did. From the way they huddled, they seemed frightened by it.

Of course, he was guessing. But they were human, and their body language wasn’t aggressive. It was protective.

“Do you have a visual of our arrival?” he asked Dix.

“I’m sure we do,” Dix said.

“Let’s see it. Center screen.”

Dix floated his fingers over his console. It took a moment, but the screen in the center of the bridge went dark, replaced by the shimmer created by the anacapa whenever a ship was about to arrive at its destination.

The shimmer looked silver, then slowly resolved into an image of the repair area’s interior. The equipment, looking just as odd, the screens over the command consoles, showing what the ship was seeing just as they’d been programmed to do. Redundant imagery at the moment, but useful most of the time. The repair crew could look and see what a ship saw as it traveled to the base. Sometimes they could even figure out where the damage was from looking at the feed.

So the screens were working, which he hadn’t noticed after they’d arrived. Then he looked at the floor itself. It had yellow lines, outlining the landing area, and Danger! written all across the face, so that no one would accidentally step on the pad. Sometimes the repair crew didn’t know when a ship was going to arrive. A vessel’s anacapa drive could shut off and the vessel would appear on the landing platform, not realizing that the ship had just appeared where a human being had been standing.

Someone had been standing there in the feed. Someone wearing an environmental suit similar to the woman’s.

Similar, but not the same.

So this wasn’t a military team then. Private? They didn’t have matching suits.

The person—a man, Coop guessed just from his general shape—whirled as if in response to someone calling his name. The man hesitated for just a moment—and then he sprinted off the platform, diving toward the main door just as the ship settled.

Coop could barely make out the five people, huddled against the door. All of their helmeted faces were turned toward the ship, but none of the people moved. At the moment, Coop felt relief. While he had been trying to figure out where he was and what had happened, they had been trying to figure out what they were seeing.

Eventually, they must have determined that it was safe enough to approach the ship.

“Thanks,” Coop said to Dix. “That answered a lot of questions.”

And created a whole hell of a lot more.

The woman stood outside the ship for a very long time. The particles swirled around her, but she ignored them as if she expected them or was used to them. Coop watched her as she touched the side of his ship, as she beckoned the others to join her.

One of them, a different man than the one who had nearly been crushed by the Ivoire, found the ship’s main exterior door. The outsiders gathered around it, clearly discussing what to do next.

Coop let them. They couldn’t get in, not without codes and approvals. Or very powerful weapons. And none of the five seemed to have weapons, aside from the woman’s knife.

“Can you get any readings on the atmosphere inside the repair room?” he asked Yash.

“From what I can tell,” she said, “the air seems fine. It seems to be recycling from the outside, just like it was designed to do. But I don’t trust the reading.”

“Because of the environmental suits,” he said.

She shook her head. “Because of the particles. Those things are large, and if they get into lungs, they might do some damage, depending on what they are.”

“Are the particles coming in from outside?” Coop asked.

“Doesn’t seem that way.” Dix was bent over his console. He’d been replaying the entry imagery—Coop had seen some of it as he had walked past Dix’s station. “We’re coated with those particles and we didn’t bring them with us. So they’re inside the base.”

“We need to get that stuff off the ship,” Yash said. “We don’t know what it is and whether or not it’s doing additional damage.”

“We can’t do anything as long as those people are so close,” Coop said. He didn’t want to accidentally kill the outsiders.

“How do we move them?” Dix asked.

“We don’t,” Coop said. “They’re wearing environmental suits. That gives them some kind of time limit. Their oxygen won’t last forever.”

“What if they’re just using some kind of filtration system?” Tren asked.

“Not likely,” Yash said. “The woman has cylinders on her hips. Those looked like extra oxygen to me.”

“You’re guessing,” Tren said.

“It’s an educated guess,” Yash snapped.

Coop glared at both of them. Nerves were getting frayed. He was going to have to relieve this crew relatively soon, even if they didn’t know exactly what was going on.

“What kind of readings are you getting from the particles?” he asked Yash.

“Nothing definitive,” she said. “But I’m not sure how well the ship’s exterior sensors are working.”

“Test the exterior sensors on the woman’s glove,” he said. “Tell me what it’s made of.”

Yash nodded. Coop moved closer to the woman’s image, as close as he could get without pressing his nose against the wall.

“I don’t recognize the material,” Yash said, “although that’s not unusual. It’s composed of . . .”

She listed a series of ingredients, talked about how they combined into some kind of microfiber that had incredible tensile strength, and went on in great detail about how effective such material would be in an environmental suit.

Coop paid only the smallest amount of attention, enough to absorb the important information, but lose all of the details. The upshot, as he understood it, was simple. The environmental suit, while thin, would work in space and be quite effective on short trips. But the suits on the Ivoire were vastly superior.

Yash concluded with, “If that suit’s indicative of this culture, then these people are technologically inferior to us.”

Which meant that they were far behind developmentally—at least, that would be how the Fleet’s playbook called it. Coop didn’t always agree with that. In some senses, the Fleet was far behind everyone else. The Fleet was operating on technology built by generations many years in the past. Yes, the engineers knew how to maintain the technology and how to replicate it, but they hadn’t really developed anything new. At least, not on their own.

They had developed additions to the Fleet based on technology they’d discovered as they’d traveled through the stars.

“You can tell all that about the suit,” he said to Yash, “but you can’t tell me anything about the particles.”

“I can’t tell you why those people are afraid of them,” Yash said. “They seem like flakes off the equipment in the repair room or maybe some nanobits floating free.”

“What would cause nanobits to float free?” Tren asked.

“Serious damage to the base,” Dix said.

“Or some kind of decay,” Yash said. “Something that made the bits’ bonding fail.”

“Some kind of microscopic weapon?” Coop asked.

“I don’t know,” Yash said. “I’m going to have to test with actual particles.”

“So we’re going to need some samples,” Coop said. “Since these folks don’t believe that the particles will hurt their environmental suits, we can assume our vastly superior suits will do just fine out there.”

“You don’t want to use one of the small probes, then?” Dix asked. Clearly that was what he had expected, probably what he would have ordered, if he had been left in charge.

“I want a quick grab,” Coop said, “maybe an airlock test for particulate toxicity, and then I want to explore that room.”

More importantly, he wanted to check the equipment, see the records, figure out what the hell happened here.

“So what are we going to do?” Yash asked. “Are we going to go out there and introduce ourselves to these people?”

Coop shook his head. “They probably don’t even know we’re here—”

“Don’t know we’re here?” Tren said. “C’mon, Coop. That woman’s been exploring the surface of the ship. She clearly knows we’re here.”

“She knows the ship is here,” Coop said. “She doesn’t know that we’re in it.”

“She’d think this thing is automated?” Tren asked.

“Why not?” Coop asked. “The base looks abandoned. That group of five people probably activated the beacon that brought us here. Face it, Anita, if we were all dead, the ship would have come without our guidance. It’s designed that way. We turn on the beacon and the anacapas do the rest.”

It was another aspect of the failsafe mechanism. If the crew was in any way incapacitated, the ship would come here and, if they were lucky, someone would be here to help.

“You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Dix said.

“I certainly am,” Coop said. “That’s why I want some certainty. The sooner we can get out of here and explore that repair room, the happier I’ll be.”

“But you don’t want to meet those people,” Yash said.

“We’re going to wait until they leave,” Coop said.

“And if another crew comes in after them?” Dix asked.

“We’ll analyze the situation then,” Coop said. “We have no other choice.”

* * * *

It took another hour for the outsiders to leave. Four of them spent some time crowded around the Ivoire’s main exterior door, probably discussing how to open it. The woman walked around part of the ship, touching it, and peering closely at any change in the hull. The ship was much too large for her to go all the way around.

She was clearly examining it, and for all the bridge crew could tell, she was probably running some kind of diagnostic on it as well.

Finally, one of the others broke away from the group and loped toward the woman. She shook her head, as if participating in a conversation, and then the other person—one of the men—finally reached her side. He took her arm, gently but firmly.

She shook him off and moved away.

He took her arm again, and this time, she sighed visibly, and walked with him around the side of the ship. They joined the others, and together the group left through the door that led to the corridor.

“Maybe we should lock it,” Dix said.

“Because that wouldn’t be noticed.” That was the second time Coop had used sarcasm. He was as tired as the crew. He sighed. “Send that tester through the airlock.”

Yash nodded. She had chosen a team of scientists to capture the particles, but the scientists would be monitored by the engineering staff—by Yash, really.

None of the bridge crew had gone down to the main exterior doors. Coop wanted the crew to remain on the bridge in case something went wrong. He even insisted that a junior member of the science team take the particle sample. Only two people, wearing their own environmental suits, would be in the airlock. They would take the particulate matter using some method that he didn’t entirely understand, and then they would bring it back inside.

Coop wanted them to open the exterior door, scoop up some particles, close the doors, and get the hell out of the airlock.

Dix protested. He felt they should take advantage of the outsiders’ absence to explore the room.

Coop shook his head. First off, exploring the room was the wrong phrase. It was a cavern, impossible to explore all at once. Besides, they’d all been in that area a dozen times before. They needed information, and they were going to collect it slowly. He thought it fascinating that he wasn’t the only member of the bridge crew who believed the outsiders would be back.

He wondered how long those suits needed to be replenished. He also wondered if the team’s leader was reckless. If the leader was, the same team would be back within the hour. If the leader wasn’t, either a new team would enter soon, or the other team would wait some designated amount of time, maybe a full day, before returning.

Coop was going to try to get as much as possible done in the time that he had.

He didn’t monitor the airlock experiment. He had Yash do that from the bridge. It only took a few minutes. Some of the particles got into the airlock itself, and Coop asked that they be captured instead of expelled.

“We got everything,” Yash said. “It looks like it’s safe to go out there.”

“Do the extensive tests,” Coop said. He wanted to go out into the cavern as much as the others, but he had learned about caution the hard way. It was always better to take precautions.

“I’d like to go monitor the experiments,” Yash said.

“No,” Coop said. “I need you here.”

“What for?” she asked. “Standing around waiting?”

He shook his head. “I was thinking we could scrub the particles off the ship’s exterior now that the outsiders are gone. You think it’s safe to do that?”

Yash shrugged. “The preliminary tests came back that the substance is harmless. Essentially, the particles are the same material as the walls, so far as we can tell. I think it’s a bit of a gamble to scrub the ship, but not a major one.”

“Scrub it,” Coop said.

Yash entered the commands. At least that part of the ship was working. It scaled the particulate matter off its hull in a matter of seconds. More particles floated through the air, but the image on the screens was clearer than it had been just a moment ago.

The repair area was still dim. The lights had faded from their normal brightness to something that looked weak and grayish. Maybe that had something to do with particulate cover on the lights themselves. Coop couldn’t know that without a clearer view.

As the particulate matter settled down, he noted that the equipment closest to the exits appeared to be running. He could see lights and some of the screens above the control panels. But as he looked farther into the distance, farther away from the main door, he couldn’t see anything. The depths of the repair room seemed particularly dark.

“I still can’t get the systems to talk to each other, Coop,” Yash said. “I don’t think the problem is on our end. I seem to be making an exterior request, but nothing is coming back at us.”

He nodded, then folded his hands behind his back. He was going to have no choice, then. Someone was going to have to venture into that room.

* * * *

A second outsider team didn’t come in the doors, at least not immediately. The room remained silent.

The bridge crew had been working nearly twenty-four hours straight. They all needed rest. The ship was here, something was going on, and Coop couldn’t solve the puzzles instantly.

He ordered the bridge crew to take ten hours, but he also ordered them to leave their comm links open. If something went wrong, he wanted this team back on the bridge with just a few minutes’ notice.

He put Lynda Rooney, his second officer, in charge. She was a big-boned woman, raised planetside like Yash, but with more experience on a bridge than Coop had. A screw-up early on in her career had derailed her upward climb for nearly ten years, but she was back on track now, and he was happy to have her on his team.

He also installed the second most competent team that he had on the bridge itself. He made sure Lynda knew that no one was to leave the ship or contact the outsiders if (when) they returned. He wanted to know the exact moment that the outsiders came back, and he wanted their every movement recorded. He didn’t want to be awakened unless the outsiders did something truly unexpected like attack the ship or try to destroy the equipment. He also wanted to know how long the outsiders remained in the room. He needed to know the length of their shift, so that he could adjust the length of his.

Lynda understood all of this. She also knew exactly what he was doing with the experiments, and she promised to monitor the repair work that continued on the interior of the ship.

Both Coop and Lynda knew the repair work would go slower than planned, now that it was clear that they weren’t going to get help from the base. But that didn’t stop the work from proceeding.

Coop needed it done. If those outsiders were hostile, if something had destroyed this base and threatened his ship, he needed to know. They had to be prepared to leave quickly.

“And go where?” Lynda asked him softly as he was about to leave the bridge. She was a bit more anal retentive than he was. If the ship had to leave quickly, he’d figure out where at the time. If the ship was repaired, he could catch the Fleet but he had to know where the Fleet would be.

The Fleet always traveled on the same trajectory. The problem was that the Fleet’s mission determined its timetable. The Fleet’s mission, which it had adhered to without fail since leaving Earth, was to support the underdog, fight the right battles, help individuals, nations, and entire regions of space become self sufficient, able to protect their own peoples without hurting others.

The mission was vague, and sometimes the Fleet ended up on a side it didn’t want to be on, but mostly, it had worked. And when the Fleet felt the peoples, the nations, the regions of space were stable, it moved on, secure in the knowledge that it had done its job well.

Sometimes, to do that job well, the Fleet had to stay longer than expected. Sometimes on a random stop for supplies, the Fleet would encounter a group that needed their help. Sometimes, no one they met needed help, not for years.

So the Fleet’s location along its chosen route would be a suggestion, a hope, rather than an actual schedule. And the stragglers could catch up, because the anacapa worked by folding space and could, with the right calculations, fold the Ivoire within a few years (and a few light-years) from the Fleet itself.

If the anacapa worked. If the Ivoire retained enough power to travel that far. If they didn’t get attacked by those outsiders. If, if, if. The ifs threatened to overwhelm him. That sensation was a familiar one to him. It came when he lacked sleep. So he left the bridge, went to his quarters, and slept.

* * * *

The sleep helped. When Coop returned to the bridge, he was calm, ready to work, and filled with ideas. He wasn’t quite filled with hope, but he knew that his resolution was the next best thing.

Lynda greeted him tiredly. “They’ve been back an hour,” she said. “It looks like the same group.”

He peered at the screens. He only saw the woman, waving her arm at something, particles swirling around her. But it looked like she was gesturing at someone.

At several someones, actually. The rest of the outsiders. If the same group returned, then that might have been the entire team. In fact, it probably was the entire team.

This was welcome news. It meant that he only had to compete with one team for time inside the former repair room.

“They came back exactly eighteen hours after they’d left,” Lynda said.

Coop would wager that they would leave six hours after they’d arrived. Obviously, their suits couldn’t handle much more than that, and they had no back-up team, and, most likely, no back-up suits.

More good news.

He looked at the wall screens. Two of the outsiders were running what appeared to be handheld computers over the built-in equipment. Two more were going deeper into the repair room itself.

And the woman he had seen the day before, along with one other person—a man (the one who had run from the spot where the Ivoire now rested?)—were going over the ship, inch by inch.

Coop wondered what they hoped to find.

He wondered what they thought of all they had seen.

He wondered who they were.

“Are they going to do any kind of damage to that equipment?” he asked Zaria Diaz, this shift’s on-deck engineer. Diaz was a tiny dark-haired woman who often spent her time inside the machinery. She was one of the few crew members who could fit into some of the crawlspaces.

“They shouldn’t damage the equipment,” Diaz said, “so long as they only run their own equipment over it and don’t touch anything.”

“And if they touch it?” he asked.

“I think that’s what turned the equipment back on in the first place.”

“Turned it back on?” he asked.

She nodded. “I think this entire room had been shut down.”

Coop folded his hands behind his back and faced Diaz. “You’re still working on assumptions, though, aren’t you?”

“I don’t have any proof of anything,” she said. “I tried all night to get our equipment to talk with the base equipment. I don’t think it’s going to happen without someone venturing into that mess and seeing what they find.”

He nodded. He agreed.

His bridge crew was filing back on. He dismissed Rooney’s bridge crew, then set up a work schedule for the next few days. He wanted the quality team with him. But he needed good people to cover the other two shifts. And he wanted an exploratory team ready to go into the repair room as soon as the outsiders left. Yash complained about that part of the plan. She wanted to go into the room herself.

But he couldn’t risk his best people, not yet. Those environmental suits the outsiders wore worried him. He didn’t want to lose any of his best staff to surprises. So the first exploratory team was made up of highly qualified junior officers, a few scientists, one excellent team leader that Coop was eyeing for promotion, and a couple of engineers.

The engineers and the scientists should figure out what was wrong with the equipment (if anything). They also had a bit of combat experience, so they could handle a surprise attack if the outsiders returned. And they had the expertise to download any information they could find off the shutdown equipment.

Coop would brief them himself. He wanted them ready for anything. He also wanted them to be careful in another way. He wanted them to leave everything the way they found it. He didn’t want the outsiders to know they’d been there. That meant searching for other recording devices besides the ones inside the repair room. It also meant somehow making the recordings automatically taken by the equipment in the room inaccessible.

He wouldn’t know how to do any of that, but he knew his engineers did. He hoped they would have enough time on their little mission to get all of that done.

* * * *

Coop sent out the exploratory team one hour after the outsiders left. As Coop expected, the outsiders departed exactly six hours after they’d arrived. If the outsiders were going to come back in, if they had forgotten anything or needed to do anything else, then they would have done so within that hour.

Still, the exploratory team had instructions to leave the moment the door to the corridor got activated. With luck, they could all be inside the ship before any outsiders came into the room.

Coop scheduled his team for a little under five hours. That way, he figured, if the outsiders had switched to six-hour intervals, his team would be gone before they returned. Besides, he saw no reason to hurry. The Ivoire could remain in this base for months without opening her doors. By then, he suspected, the outsiders would be long gone. He would take that option if he had to. He just hoped he wouldn’t have to.

Joanna Rossetti led the exploratory team. She was one of the best young officers Coop had ever the pleasure to work with. Had she been just a bit older and a bit more experienced, he would have promoted her to second officer instead of Lynda Rooney.

Not that he had ever had problems with Lynda Rooney.

* * * *

Joanna Rossetti was thin and small, wiry and tough, more suited to space than land-based missions. She could fit anywhere, get into any small area, and often did. She had spent half her life training in zero-g, something a lot of the Fleet never did, and was adept at all kinds of space missions, from those in zero gravity to those in low gravity. Her small size made heavy gravity possible as well; she didn’t feel as crushed by it as someone who weighed more.

She was also a thinker. She solved problems as fast as Coop did, faster than most of the people on his excellent bridge crew. That was one of the many things he liked about her. Coop let her choose the two officers that would go along with her. He figured she needed people she could trust. He hadn’t been surprised when she chose Adam Sharf. Coop had been watching Sharf as well. Sharf was young, agile, and intelligent. He had a spotless record, and was known for stopping fights instead of starting them.

Her choice of Salvador Ahidjo did surprise Coop. As far as Coop knew—and he tried to keep track of all of his officers—Ahidjo had done nothing to distinguish himself throughout his career. Ahidjo was older than Coop and had remained at the same rank for nearly two decades. His work was fine but never outstanding. There was never any reason to promote or demote him. He was simply a solid member of the core, who did his job rather quietly and never rose to anyone’s attention. Except, apparently, Rossetti’s.

Coop didn’t ask her about her choice. He was less concerned with the make-up of the officer level of the team than he was with the scientists and engineers. Here, he had to trust both Dix and Yash. Dix, who knew which scientists had the expertise and could work best in less than optimal conditions, and Yash, who knew her engineering team.

At Coop’s request, she picked engineers who had once worked in a sector base or alongside the sector base technicians whenever the Ivoire was in a base. He wanted someone familiar with the equipment.

As for the scientists, he wanted creativity as well as the ability to work anywhere. He needed open minds, minds that could see alternatives that most scientists couldn’t.

Dix said he knew the perfect three. Yash had more candidates than three, so Coop told her to pick the best, keeping the others on the list for later missions, if necessary.

He looked over the qualifications, tried to remember names and faces (knowing he would fail) and, ultimately, trusted his two senior staff members to make the best possible choices. Then he briefed the team, and sent them into what had once been the repair room of Sector Base V.

* * * *

There were two theories of leadership among the commanders of the Fleet: the first theory believed that the leaders had the most expertise and therefore were the least expendable; the second theory believed that the leaders had the most expertise and therefore had to be first on the ground, to make sure everything was fine. Clearly, Rossetti belonged in the second category.

Her tiny form looked even smaller as she climbed down the ladder from the exterior door and stepped onto the floor. Particles rose around her, thick and heavy, more of them than he had seen before. Some of them came from his cleaning of the ship, but the rest had to be coming from somewhere else.

The particles floated around her like snow. She captured some of them in her glove, and closed her fist, clearly doing a small test of her own.

Coop didn’t say anything. He watched from the bridge, using the wall screens on full. Usually, when the ship was in motion, he kept the screens off or on half power. To have them on full continually made him feel as if only a thin membrane separated him from the repair room outside the ship. That feeling seemed even stronger now. As he watched his team step onto the repair room floor, he felt as if he could take one step through the membrane and join them. After all, he knew what it felt like to be in that room.

The last time he had been there, only a month before, the room had been slightly cold. The equipment functioned better in chilly conditions, so the staff kept the room cooler than the interior of most ships. And, one of the staff explained to him, a newly arrived ship always chilled the air. It still carried some of the cold from space, and that brought the ambient temperature down a few more degrees.

The air also had a metallic tang. The local staff claimed they couldn’t smell it, but he could. Every section base he’d ever been to had a version of that smell. Sometimes the smell was tinged with sulfur, thanks to underground springs nearby, and sometimes it was laced with a chalky smell, one that came from the inside of the mountain itself. Every place was different. He knew if he had to, he could identify the sector bases he’d been to by smell alone.

The team he’d just sent into the repair room wasn’t feeling cold or smelling a metallic tang. They were snug in their environmental suits, suits made of material so strong that the knife the outsider woman had worn wouldn’t penetrate them.

The air filters were built into the suits themselves. The suits looked thin, but they weren’t. They had three layers. The exterior was made of the impermeable material. The middle layer carried the oxygen stores, so that the suit’s wearer didn’t need oxygen canisters like the outsiders had. The interior layer measured and controlled body temperature, and maintained every other part of the environment that gave the suits their name.

These suits didn’t even have separate helmets. Instead, they had full-face hoods with clear material that ran from the ears to the eyes, wide enough not to impede the wearer’s vision, but much more protective than a glass or plastic plate over the face. The only problem with that part of the suit design was that Coop had to intuit mood. He couldn’t see expression, except through the eyes themselves.

Not that it mattered. In this instance, he had told the team to communicate everything, so that he, Yash, and Dix could track what they were doing.

Through a special earpiece, Dix monitored the scientists on one channel. Yash monitored the engineers on another. Coop monitored the leaders on a third. The team spoke among themselves on a fourth channel, using it only when necessary, so that they didn’t clutter up each other’s hearing with needless chatter.

There wasn’t much chatter on Coop’s channel while the team waited on the floor for everyone to emerge from the airlock. He watched them in relative silence. Rossetti updated him with names as each person joined the group.

Once the team was assembled, she gave them instructions. They divided into three groups, each composed of an engineer, a scientist, and an officer. The engineer and the scientist had been assigned to a section of equipment. The officer guarded them and provided advice.

Rossetti’s team stayed closest to the ship. Coop had determined that. He wanted her near that door in case the outsiders returned. He also figured the active equipment up front would have the most information, so he made certain that his best team was on that section, instead of the farthest back.

Ahidjo’s team took the middle section. Sharf’s team took a far section. They only covered about an eighth of the repair room. More equipment faded into the dark. Coop would save that for later missions, if he needed them.

Of course, Rossetti’s team reached their equipment first. They split, the engineer looking at the actual workings, the scientist taking the readings. Rossetti hung back, looking around as if she expected something bad to happen.

“Sir?”

Coop started. Rossetti’s voice had come along a fifth channel, one that went directly into his earpiece. It sounded like she was standing beside him.

He had to change frequencies on the small mike he had placed in his front teeth. “What?” he subvocalized, so that he didn’t disturb Dix or Yash.

“Something’s odd here,” Rossetti said.

He wanted to say, No kidding, but he knew better than to waste precious time talking. He simply waited for her to continue.

She did. “You’ve known me for some time. I’m not superstitious, but something feels wrong here. I can’t quite figure out how to describe it.”

“Try,” he said.

She nodded once. Her head bob made more particles swirl around her. It looked like his team was in a particle storm.

Ahidjo’s team had just reached the second section of equipment. The engineer touched the edge of the console, and lights flickered on.

Coop smiled. He had expected that. It confirmed what he had thought earlier; the outsiders had turned the equipment on when they’d started exploring the room.

On the third channel, he said, “Ahidjo, Sharf. Make sure your teams shut down that equipment before you leave today.”

“Yes, sir,” they said in unison.

Rossetti turned her head toward them, observing their progress for a moment. Then she continued on the fifth channel.

“If I had entered this place without knowing what it was,” she said, her tone measured as if she was choosing each word carefully, “I would think that it had been abandoned long ago.”

“Why?” he asked.

She shook her head, but he didn’t think that was her entire response. It looked more like an involuntary movement, an I-don’t-know kind of reaction. After that, she paused for a very long time.

“I can’t give you a definitive answer to that, sir,” she said. “It’s just an impression.”

Then she fell silent. Coop didn’t expect her to say more. His people were used to quantifying things. The fact that she couldn’t figure out a reason for her feeling probably bothered her more than it bothered him.

It had taken a bit of courage for Rossetti to tell him about that sense of abandonment. Yet she felt it important. She wasn’t sensing lingering violence, the way he had upon entering an area after a battle; she was sensing emptiness.

Coop didn’t like emptiness. He would have preferred the lingering violence. It suited his training so much better.

The third team reached their piece of equipment. The lights come on, but they looked very far away and faded. The particle storm made them hard to see.

Maybe the particle storm gave Rossetti that feeling; maybe it was something else. When the others returned, he would ask them if they had felt something similar. At the moment, however, they worked, updating him periodically, not saying exactly what they found—that was for the return briefing—but letting him know that the work was proceeding, that no one had entered the room (even though he could see that), that the equipment seemed to be working fine.

So far, no one had found any communications problems in the sector base’s equipment, which meant that the Ivoire’s communications array had been damaged, just as Yash suspected. The engineers on his ship had even more work to do than they all initially thought.

The time passed quickly. Yash and Dix monitored their frequencies as well as doing work at their own consoles. But Coop just studied the repair room, unable to shake what Rossetti had said.

He had experienced the feeling of long-abandonment in a place recently vacated just once in his career. He’d been twenty-five. He was at Sector Base T, and he’d accompanied a senior officer as they did a final inspection of a decommissioned ship.

The ship, the Défi, had been badly damaged in an attack. Rather than repair it, the staff at Sector Base T would use it and another badly damaged hulk to build an entirely new ship.

The Défi had been Coop’s home during the last of his education. A lot of cadets went there for officer training. The ship had had a lively, active student community, as well as the usual crew complement and domestic side. He had loved that place.

But it had seemed entirely different on that final walk-through, as if someone had taken the heart out of the ship. Which, apparently, they had. Without the human population, the Défi had become just another junked ship, ready to be torn down into its various parts.

That ship still haunted his dreams. Sometimes, old friends long gone would run down its corridors, laughing as they coaxed him into the Grog, the cadet bar. He didn’t drink much—never had, really—so his presence in the Grog was always an event.

He would wake up feeling sad for something he had lost. Maybe that was what Rossetti was feeling. She had been here just a month ago as well. He had no idea what kind of experiences she had had during their layover. Maybe those were coloring her reaction now.

But that wasn’t something he could discuss with her on Channel Five or Channel Three. He would wait until she returned.

At four hours and thirty minutes, he reminded his team that they had to shut down before they returned, and ordered additional cameras (if there were any) disabled. He wanted the interior to look as much like it had when the others left as his team could make it.

They began their shutdown procedures. In the distance, he saw the lights of the far sector shut off. At least that was working. The middle section went off. If the team returned quickly enough, maybe the particles would have stopped swirling.

He stood near the wall again, hands clasped behind him. His heartbeat had risen just slightly. He wanted the team to move more quickly, although he didn’t say anything. He wanted them out before the outsiders returned. Ultimately, he needn’t have worried. At the end of their fifth hour, they were all inside the airlock. The lights on the far panels had gone out, and the teams had reported that they had altered the feeds on all the cameras they could find.

The particle storm settled, just like Coop wanted it to. If the others worked on six- hour rotations, as he thought, he had built in an hour to spare. They would return soon.

He would let Rooney monitor them.

He would be in the briefing room with the teams, learning what they had found.

* * * *

What they had found was troubling indeed.

The teams had arrived in the briefing room for the meeting with their handhelds. They all had wet hair and loose fitting clothes, having cleaned up after going into the repair room. The white environmental suits looked gray upon their return, and they’d peeled them off in the airlock, but some of the particles still stuck to their clothing, which was why Coop had approved real water showers as well as the standard sonic shower. He’d also made them change in the decontamination area, just in case.

The scientists and engineers sat toward the back of the room. The commanders clustered around one end of the table. Coop, Yash, and Dix sat at the other end.

The briefing room, like the bridge, had no portals. In here, the wall screens were usually off, but someone—probably Rossetti—had turned them on. There were no images, just an occasional multi-colored line through the center to show that the screens were drawing power.

“What’ve you got?” Coop asked Rossetti.

She was the only one of the group that didn’t look tired. She sat, spine straight, directly across from him, her small hands flat on the tabletop.

“First,” she said, “we don’t need the suits. Every test we did says the atmosphere inside that room is fine.”

“And the particles?” Dix asked.

“Harmless,” she said. “They’ve been through more testing than we usually do on anything. They seem to be unbonded nanobits, and we’ve all worked around unbonded nanobits before.”

They had. The bits occasionally got into the lungs, but could be removed with little effort. Many of the Fleet’s crew members had no reaction to nanobits at all, and could, in fact, absorb them. It was, one of the medics once told Coop, a genetically desired trait that seemed to have developed in the Fleet’s population over time.

Rossetti glanced at the others from the teams, then said, “It would be easier to work in the repair room without the environmental suits.”

Her team had clearly asked her to say that. She hadn’t done any hands-on work, so this wasn’t coming from her experience.

“So noted,” Coop said. He would make no promises without consulting with his best people. “What else do you have for me?”

Rossetti took a deep breath, then pressed her hands onto the tabletop. He finally understood why she sat that way; it was a calming gesture, one she clearly needed.

“Do you recall what I told you, sir, when I was on the repair room floor?”

“Yes,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. He hadn’t mentioned it to his team, but he would tell them if they needed to know.

“Apparently, I was right. The sector base has been long abandoned, sir. The mandatory shutdown sequence began one hundred years after we left.” She spoke flatly, as if the news hadn’t bothered her at all. But her splayed hands belied that.

“One hundred years?” Dix said.

Coop’s heart was pounding. “We left a month ago,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Rossetti said. “But the elapsed time in the station is at least two hundred years, maybe longer.”

She hadn’t insulted his intelligence by explaining how such a thing could happen. They all knew. It was one of the risks of the anacapa drive. The drive folded space, which meant that it could (and often did) cause a ship to go out of time.

During those fifteen days stranded in that unidentified part of space, Coop had worried about this aspect of the anacapa drive. He had known that foldspace occasionally caused time alterations. His training taught him not to worry until he was confronted with them. Which he was now.

“You’re certain of this?” he asked.

He looked at the scientists and engineers. What he had initially taken for exhaustion was defeat. And fear.

If their calculations were right, they were at least two hundred years in their own future, in an empty sector base, with a damaged ship.

They saw only catastrophe.

Coop knew that in this instance, time was on his side. If he could repair the Ivoire, he could send her through foldspace to the place where the Fleet might be. His calculations (and theirs) could be as much as fifty years off, but that wouldn’t matter. The Fleet followed a set trajectory. Only battles and meetings with other cultures changed the timeline. Coop’s team could guess the farthest that the Fleet would get on that trajectory, and go there. If the Fleet had already arrived, they could continue until they caught it (which wouldn’t take long). If the Fleet hadn’t arrived yet (which was more likely), they could wait for it to catch them.

The older members of the crew might never see the Fleet again, but the younger members would.

If the scientists were right.

If the Ivoire truly was two hundred years in its own future.

“Two hundred years is manageable,” Yash said softly, clearly mistaking his silence for shock.

“I know,” he said, just as softly, silencing her.

He folded his own hands on the tabletop. He was strangely calm. Now that he knew what was happening, he would probably remain calm until they had a firm plan.

“What kind of evidence do you have?” he asked Rossetti.

She turned to one of the engineers, the only one that Coop had ever interacted with, an older man by the name of José Cabral.

“The equipment itself gives us the timeline,” Cabral said. “The sector base closed one hundred years after we left. A rudimentary staff remained, those who didn’t want to travel with the Fleet to Sector Base Y, which was where this group would be posted. This staff continued to live on the surface, charged with maintaining the equipment at low power levels for the next fifty years.”

Coop nodded. This was standard procedure.

Dix shifted in his chair. The news clearly made him nervous.

“After fifty years without human contact,” Cabral said, “the equipment went dormant. Everything shut down except the touch command.”

Touch command. Meaning that the systems would only reactivate if the equipment was touched by human hands. Coop would have to confirm that with Yash, but he didn’t think some kind of falling debris would activate the system. Just contact from a member of the Fleet. At least, that was what he had been told.

“How long has this base been dormant?” Coop asked.

“Impossible to tell, sir,” Cabral said. “When the system goes dormant, even its internal clock mechanism ceases. Only the anacapa drive continues to function, at a very low level, of course, and then only because it is safer to keep the drive running than it is to shut it down.”

Coop nodded. He had been told that as well.

“If I may, sir.” One of the scientists, a middle-aged woman, spoke up. She was thin, with harsh lines around her mouth and eyes. Coop had to struggle to recall her name, which he had only heard in the context of this mission. “The evidence points toward the machinery being off for a very long time.”

One of the other scientists held up his hand, as if to stop her, but she caught it in her own and brought it down.

“What evidence?” Coop asked.

“The particles, sir,” she said. “Nanobits are durable. They don’t lose their bonding except in a few instances. When they do lose their bonding, it’s usually through a chemical reaction that we haven’t seen here, or the room itself would be toxic.”

“And the other instance?” Coop asked.

“Time,” she said. “Specifically, five hundred to a thousand years, sir.”

“We don’t have proof of that,” said the scientist whose hand she still held. “We just have supposition.”

“And past experience,” she said. “We’ve encountered this before, and by we, I mean the Fleet. Never have the nanobits lost their bonding in less than five hundred years.”

Coop’s stomach flipped. He had to work to keep his hands relaxed, so that his knuckles wouldn’t show white.

“We’ll have to test to be certain,” said one of the other scientists. He wasn’t looking at Coop, but at Dix. Dix, who sat rigidly next to Coop. Dix, who, rumor had it, had fallen in love with one of the chefs on the Geneva.

The Geneva, which was traveling with the Fleet.

If the Fleet was five hundred years distant from them, in no way could Coop plot the Fleet’s course. There were too many variables. Two hundred years was at the very edge of possible. Five hundred years meant that the Ivoire would never rejoin the Fleet.

Coop wouldn’t let himself think of that. He didn’t have proof.

“The equipment itself isn’t damaged,” Rossetti said, trying to take control of the briefing back from her scientist. “It’s just old.”

Coop nodded.

“We should be able to use information in the database to help us fix the Ivoire,” she said.

He nodded again. He wasn’t thinking about that quite as much. He knew his engineers could fix the Ivoire. She had extensive damage, but none of it was catastrophic.

He was more concerned about their current situation.

“The outsiders,” he said and paused. Everyone looked at him. They clearly hadn’t expected him to mention the outsiders at this point. “You told me their suits looked underdeveloped.”

He said this last to Yash.

She nodded. “Ours are technically superior, if that glove is any indication.”

“Oxygen cylinders, knives, inferior suits,” he said. “Their society didn’t develop from ours, then.”

“Probably not,” Yash said.

“So the settlement on the surface is gone,” he said.

She shrugged. “We don’t know that.”

He nodded again. Two hundred years was a long time. They were going to need to know about the history of Sector Base V as well as Venice City, what they had missed, and what they faced.

“I assume that the shutdown was a standard shutdown,” he said to Rossetti.

By that, he meant that the sector base was shut down because the Fleet had moved on, not because of some problem on the planet itself.

Rossetti had to look at her team.

José Cabral nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, answering for all of them. “The shutdown was ordered by the Fleet and completed according to procedure. Staff remained behind. At that time, Venice City was a thriving community, and many people did not want to leave.”

“No indications that anything went wrong on the surface?” Coop asked.

“None,” Cabral said.

Coop nodded. “Clearly, we’re going to need more information. We need to know how much time has elapsed. I’m also going to want to talk with the outsiders.”

“You, sir?” Rossetti said, before biting her lower lip. She clearly hadn’t meant to speak out of turn. The statement had been involuntary.

“Yes,” he said.

“I don’t think we should surprise them,” Yash said.

“We won’t,” he said. “We’ll let them know we’re here.”

Maybe the outsiders had answers. If nothing else, he could get past them and travel up to the surface. Someone in Venice City had to know something.

If Venice City remained.

He shuddered at that thought. Maybe the old-timers had been right. Maybe they should have been careful about how they named their city. They had named it Venice City because the Earth city had been built on canals. But it had eventually disappeared under the water.

What if this Venice had disappeared as well?

He placed his hands flat on the table and used them to push himself to his feet.

“Thank you all for the work,” he said. “You’ll have new orders tomorrow. We’re going to figure out exactly when we are. But know this: we’ll be all right.” He sounded confident even though he didn’t feel confident. He felt as if someone had shut off the ship’s gravity, and he was floating, unfettered, in a world he thought he knew.

The others, though, seemed calmer. Maybe it was the shared knowledge. Maybe it was the fact that they were not in charge of it; he was, and, as their commander, he was the one who needed to solve the problem. But he knew, as a commander—as a human being—that some problems had no easy solution.

Coop had to work on three things at once: He had to repair the Ivoire; he had to download information from the sector base; and he had to approach the outsiders.

He ordered his engineering staff to concentrate on the Ivoire’s repairs. He needed the ship in full working order so that they could leave Sector Base V at a moment’s notice.

He assigned the scientists and some junior engineers to the sector base team. If repairs were needed on the sector base equipment, his senior engineering staff could handle those after they finished with the Ivoire.

He alone was going to worry about the outsiders. His first step: he had to let them know he was here. So, after the outsiders left from their latest foray into the repair room, he sent Rossetti’s team back into the room, with orders to download information and to leave the equipment running when they completed their five-hour mission.

Rossetti’s team didn’t wear environmental suits. The team had no trouble working, and didn’t seem to have any ill effects from the particles. The studies were correct; the room itself was as harmless as it had been two hundred plus years before.

The team worked hard. They left the equipment running when they returned to the ship. They went through decontamination and testing to make certain they remained healthy, and they continued their work inside the Ivoire. They weren’t to contact him unless or until they had processed new information from their downloads.

He was less concerned with that information than he was with the outsiders. He made sure he had control of the bridge when the outsiders returned.

They opened the door at the exact moment he expected them. The woman came in first. She stopped and held out a hand, as if to prevent the others from entering.

Then she took some tentative steps forward. She paused, looked around the room, and then turned toward the ship. For a moment, it felt as if she was looking through the screens directly at Coop. He felt his breath catch.

She had received his message; she clearly knew that someone was in the ship, that it hadn’t arrived automatically without a crew on board. Then she backed toward the door, stepped back into the corridor with the rest of her team, and pulled the door closed.

He wanted to commend her: Good job. You have no idea about the nature of the threat, or even if your team is prepared for it. But you do know that we’ve been observing you. And that we’re here.

He knew she wouldn’t return until she felt ready to do so, and he liked that as well. Still, he watched for another hour, waiting. When she didn’t return, he felt oddly disappointed, and just as oddly pleased.

“I need Rossetti, Sharf, Ahidjo, and Perkins on the bridge,” he said to Dix.

“Yes, sir,” Dix said.

Coop stood, his hands behind his back, and studied that empty repair room. What would he do if he were the woman?

He would have retreated, as she had. He would have briefed his team. Then he would return, with his team ready for anything.

But he would return as soon as possible.

“Sir?” Rossetti had come onto the bridge. Her hair had the flyaway quality of the newly dry, but she wore her uniform—red with black, the sign of the Fleet, the same version of the uniform she had worn on her first trip into the repair room without an environmental suit.

“Sorry to bring you back here so soon, Joanna,” Coop said, “but I need you to go out there and wait for the outsiders.”

Sharf arrived, then Ahidjo, both wearing their uniforms as well. Perkins was only a moment behind them. She wore her dress uniform, the one the Fleet demanded its linguists wear for first contact.

“The three of you will guard Special Officer Perkins,” Coop said. “You will wait near the door of the Ivoire until the outsiders return. Perkins will do all of the talking, even if the outsiders address the rest of you. She knows the protocol. You do not. Is that understood?”

All four of them nodded. Perkins’ eyes were bright. As uncomfortable as she had felt after the failure of talks with the Quurzod, she was clearly eager to get back to work. As young and new as Perkins was, her enthusiasm was one of the things Coop liked about her. She clearly loved this work and wanted to do it.

“If they don’t return, sir?” Rossetti asked.

“They will,” he said.

“But if they don’t, sir?”

She wanted to know how long they would stand out there, waiting.

“Give it three hours, Joanna. If they haven’t come back in that time, we’ll go on as if they’re not coming back. You four can return to the ship and rest.”

“Thank you, sir,” Rossetti said.

“I do need you carrying weapons,” Coop said. “Just in case.”

Rossetti nodded.

“Me too, sir?” Perkins asked.

It wasn’t procedure for the linguist to be armed.

“No,” he said. “But remember that at least one member of the outsiders’ team is carrying a knife. Don’t get within striking range.”

Perkins straightened her shoulders. “I won’t, sir.”

“Good,” he said, sending them out of the bridge. “And good luck.”

* * * *

The communications array still wasn’t repaired. He wouldn’t be able to listen to any conversation that Perkins had with the outsiders, which was probably just as well. He’d listened to such negotiations before, and they had always confused him.

The tangle of languages made easy understanding difficult. Even if he could listen, he wasn’t sure that he would. He didn’t want to let his perceptions get in the way of his linguist.

The team had just stepped out of the airlock when the exterior door opened. Coop felt his heart rate increase.

This was the dangerous moment—the moment when anything could happen. The outsiders could leave. They could feel threatened and attack.

But they did neither of those things. They just froze at the doorway and stared at Rosetti’s team. Then, slowly, the woman reached up and removed the helmet of her environmental suit.

Yash gasped. Coop glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “Problems?” he asked.

“We can handle this environment. What if they can’t?”

Coop shrugged. “She would know what they can and can’t handle.”

But he said no more. He had suspected the outsiders’ leader had forced her team to wear the suits out of an excess of caution. Her willingness to remove her helmet when she saw his crew convinced him he was right.

The woman wasn’t pretty. She was too thin, the kind of thinness he’d seen in professional spacers all over the known universe. Her cheeks were hollow, but her eyes were bright and filled with intelligence. He couldn’t adequately judge her age. Not young, but not old. Maybe his age, maybe not.

She spoke, and Coop instantly changed his mind about the tangle of languages. He would have given anything to hear this conversation.

Perkins stepped forward so that she stood a few feet in front of the three officers. Then she pressed her hands together and bowed, a greeting that the Fleet had learned was acceptable in most human cultures.

Perkins did not speak. Clearly, then, the language that the outsider woman had used wasn’t familiar to Perkins. Coop felt oddly disappointed. He’d hoped that the woman and the other outsiders would be able to clear up the mystery quickly, easily, and with just a few words. Clearly that wasn’t going to happen.

The outsider woman watched, shrugged, and then bobbed her head. Her companions didn’t move. Nor did they remove their helmets. Either she had ordered them to keep the helmets on, or they weren’t as courageous as she was.

Perkins tapped herself and spoke. The woman stared at her. Perkins made the same gesture and spoke again.

The woman nodded once, then tapped her own shoulder. She spoke.

Perkins frowned.

The woman repeated the gesture.

Perkins said something and the woman glanced at the people behind her.

A man removed his helmet. He was younger than Coop, slender but not thin like the woman, with dark hair and eyes that glittered. He spoke to the woman, and then looked at Perkins.

She opened her hands as if to say that she didn’t understand.

The man tapped his own shoulder, then spoke. Then he put a hand on the outsider woman’s shoulder and spoke again.

Perkins tilted her head, then talked for a good minute or more.

The man and woman looked relieved. Clearly they and Perkins had actually communicated. Perkins said something else, the others nodded, and then Perkins bowed again.

She signaled to the team that they were done, and they went back into the ship.

The man said something to the woman, but she shook her head. Then she ushered her team out of the repair room and back into the corridor.

The meeting was done.

* * * *

Coop wanted to run to the airlock and find out exactly what had happened, but he knew better. He waited on the bridge until Perkins contacted him. Then the two of them went into the briefing room.

She looked more excited than he had ever seen her. She had scrubbed down and changed out of her uniform, and wore a less dressy version of it for her meeting with him.

“I captured a lot of their speech patterns,” she said. “They spoke to each other quite a bit, and I captured that, which is good.”

Coop had forgotten this about her. Perkins never gave a report in a linear manner.

“They don’t speak Standard, then,” he said.

She paused and looked at him. Then she gave him a rueful smile. “Oh, yeah. Sorry. You weren’t listening in. I’m not sure what they speak. It sounded familiar when the woman started talking to us, but I couldn’t understand her. I thought at first that she was speaking Standard, but pronouncing it differently, so differently that I had trouble processing it. Then I realized that the words sounded familiar but weren’t familiar.”

“Which means what?” Coop asked.

“Which means they might be speaking a mangled form of Standard or some kind of pidgin language. It might also be a related language with similar sounds. I already have the computer working on it, and I expect to have results before our next meeting with them, which I’m hoping will be tomorrow.”

“Did you set that up with them?”

She shrugged. “As best I could. They seemed pretty startled by us. They seemed even more shocked that we had trouble communicating.”

“Did you understand anything they said?”

“I think so, but I’m not sure.”

Coop frowned. She had never given him that response before. “What do you mean?”

“It’s that sound-like thing I mentioned,” Perkins said. “I gave the woman my name. The woman did the same thing, but I think she gave me her rank.”

“Which is?”

“She’s their leader.”

“That’s clear,” Coop said.

“But I’m not sure that’s what she said,” Perkins said. “I thought we were doing pretty well. I said my name, she responded with her title, and then I asked her where we were. The man stepped forward and introduced himself.”

“I noticed that,” Coop said.

“But his name sounded like an object,” she said. “In our language, his name means bridge. So the woman might have been giving me her name and it’s something other than a title. I got very confused at that point, which is why I called the meeting off. I wanted more information from the computer before I went farther.”

“All right,” Coop said. Then, because he couldn’t help himself, he said, “When do you think I can talk to them?”

“Sir, this could take weeks.”

“Not if the language is related.”

“I said I’m guessing,” she said.

“I know,” he said, feeling a touch of color warm his cheeks. He had vowed he wasn’t going to let the crew know about his impatience, and then he revealed it to Perkins. “Sorry. The sooner we can question them about substantive things, the better off we are.”

“I know, sir,” she said, “but it’s better to understand them than to guess, don’t you think?”

He nodded, reluctantly. He wanted that conversation and he wanted it soon. Just like he wanted the ship repaired. Just like he wanted to know when they were.

“Good work,” he said to Perkins. “Let me know when you have enough of the language to act as a translator.”

“I will, sir,” she said. “And I’ll try to make it sooner rather than later.”

I hope so, he almost said, but didn’t. I really, really hope so.

* * * *

It took Perkins nearly two weeks to figure out the outsiders’ language with any kind of precision. During that time, the engineers managed most of the major repairs on the ship. Coop sifted through much of the information pulled from the repair room’s equipment, but didn’t come up with any more information than his team was finding.

He repeatedly had communications contact Venice City, but didn’t get any response. As the sensors came back online, he mapped the underground caverns around the repair room. The entire complex was much bigger than it had been the month before.

And as the equipment got repaired, he had his team see what the sensors could find on the surface.

There was a city in the narrow valley, just as there had been for decades. But the city was no longer in the same place. Instead, it was scattered along the mountainside, far away from the city center that Coop had visited several times. He knew that cities sprawled, but he had never seen one that abandoned its original site.

All of these pieces of information didn’t add up into anything coherent, not yet, which made talking to the outsiders all the more imperative.

The number of outsiders never changed, and although Perkins asked the woman what their group was called, she never got an answer she understood.

She was understanding more and more, however, partly because of the outsiders themselves. After a few days, one of the outsiders, the man who called himself Bridge, showed an ability to speak Perkins’s language. It took Perkins another day or two to understand him because the man mangled every single word he tried to say. It was almost as if he was familiar with the language in its written form, but hadn’t ever spoken it.

At least, that was Perkins’ hypothesis. Coop wasn’t so certain. If the outsiders could read Standard, then how come they hadn’t heeded the warnings written all over the floor in the repair room? How come they seemed surprised when the ship nearly crushed one of them?

Still, Coop wasn’t the linguist, and he had to rely on Perkins’ expertise to figure out what was going on. In less than two weeks, Perkins decided that the language the outsiders spoke was a form of Standard, but so changed by time and distance, as well as influence from other cultures, as to be practically unrecognizable.

The fact that the man called Bridge could speak her language, though, didn’t bode well, as she told Coop in one of their briefings. “Sir, I think all of this means that we speak an old and possibly forgotten form of their language. One that is no longer active, but lives only in archives.”

He felt a chill run through him, even though on some deep level, he expected her to say that.

“How long does it take for a language to change like that?”

She shrugged. “There are instances of that happening within a few hundred years of no contact.”

“But?” he asked.

“But, generally, it happens over many centuries. Five, six, seven hundred years or more.”

He stared at her. It was within the realm of possibility. They had gotten the ship to talk with the equipment in the repair room, but hadn’t gleaned any more information about the time factor. Some of the scientific tests had come back that the equipment itself had aged several hundred years, but, as the scientists said, some of that could have been due to the proximity of a working (and possibly malfunctioning) anacapa drive.

“They can’t be from the future of Venice City,” he said. “Their suits aren’t as evolved as ours.”

She shrugged. “They’re from our future. Somewhere they acquired our language. Then they lost touch with us, and the language changed, as languages do.”

“It’s time for me to talk to them,” he said. “Can you clearly translate for us?”

“If we do it in the Ivoire,” she said. “I need the computer to back me up.”

He thought about that for a moment. He had always envisioned the meeting to take place inside the repair room. He hadn’t wanted the outsiders in his ship. But he understood Perkins’s point. And he needed the information now more than he needed to protect the ship’s secrets.

Not that it had a lot of secrets from the outsiders. They had access to similar equipment in the repair room, but something prevented them from understanding what they had found.

If they did learn to understand the equipment, they would understand his ship as well.

So there wasn’t much he could hide from them.

He just had to hope that the barrier—whatever it was—would continue.

“All right,” Coop said. “Set up an appointment.”

“Yes, sir,” Perkins said.

“And I don’t want her whole team in here. Bring her and the man who speaks the language—Bridge?—into the briefing room. You and I will talk to them.”

“All right, sir,” Perkins said. She looked relieved. Everyone on the Ivoire was nervous. Everyone wanted answers because, as Dix told Coop, they were making up worst case scenarios the longer this went on.

Coop didn’t have to ask what those worst case scenarios were. He had been making up his own.

Initially they had involved being stranded in Sector Base V forever, but now that the Ivoire was mostly repaired, he knew that wouldn’t happen. Now he just had to figure out where he would take his crew, and when.

And for that, he needed to talk to the outsiders as soon as he possibly could.

He set up the briefing room as if he were receiving heads of state. For all he knew, he was. He had his personal chef make some pastries and lay out various snacks. He set out bottles of wine he had picked up at Starbase Kappa. He also had flavored waters cooling on a sideboard, and various hot liquids on the other side of the room.

He wore his dress uniform. He posted two guards inside the room as a show of force, and had several others standing by. But he still planned to meet the woman and Bridge with only Perkins at his side.

Coop didn’t greet them at the airlock. He had Perkins do that, along with another set of guards. He ordered the areas where the outsiders would walk blocked off, so that they would have no contact with anyone except him and Perkins.

He watched the wall screen as the outsiders stepped out of the airlock. The woman came first, then the man. The woman looked around as if she were trying to take in every detail. She even touched the wall gently with her fingers, as if trying to see what it was made out of.

As they walked through the corridors of the ship, the woman would occasionally reach out and touch a door frame or run her fingers along a wall. Coop contacted Yash and asked if she was seeing all of this.

She was and, she assured him, the woman could do no harm with her naked fingertips.

He wasn’t worried so much about naked fingertips. He was worried about some little nanovirus or something she had attached to her fingertips. Yash promised to have the walls wiped as soon as the outsiders left the corridor, and she would let him know if anything was amiss.

It took nearly fifteen minutes for the outsiders to walk from the airlock to the briefing room. As they stopped by the guards, Coop shut off the wall screen and stood at the head of the table, his hands clasped behind his back.

He was oddly nervous. He checked in with himself. He wasn’t nervous because he thought he might get some answers. He had already figured out that he wasn’t going to like the timeline the woman would give him—if, indeed, she had one. He suspected the Ivoire was much farther than two hundred years away from the Fleet. The evidence kept coming in that the Ivoire was at least five hundred years away.

Coop had been thinking of how to break that news to his crew for more than a week now, the news that they were on their own, stranded in the future, with no purpose, no mission, and no chance of ever seeing the Fleet again. He hadn’t quite come to terms with that, but he was braced for it.

So he wasn’t nervous that the outsiders would tell him a timeline he didn’t want to hear. He was nervous about meeting them. And really, if he was honest with himself, he wasn’t nervous about them. He was nervous about her.

The woman had intrigued him from the start, even before he could see her face clearly. She explored an area that had clearly been abandoned, but she hadn’t looted it. She had treated it with respect.

She seemed to be gathering information. When she saw the ship, she didn’t flee, nor did she use weapons to try to break in. She continued her own explorations, and she also tried to figure out the ship.

Then, when she realized the ship was occupied, she didn’t attack. She regrouped, came back, and did her best to communicate with Perkins. She had shown intelligence, curiosity, and courage, all traits that Coop admired. He felt as if he was going to meet a colleague, not someone who could do him any harm. He straightened his shoulders as the door slid open.

The woman came in first, her movements slow, but not tentative. She was slighter than Coop expected. Her image on the wall screen had distorted her height, made her seem taller than she actually was. But she had presence. He could feel it as she moved toward him, hand outstretched.

“Boss,” she said.

At least, that was what it sounded like. Coop glanced at Perkins.

“That’s what they call her,” Perkins said. “I don’t know if it’s a name or her title.”

“Or both,” Coop said.

The man, Bridge, was watching the conversation. His eyes glittered more than any eyes Coop had ever seen. They must have been artificial. Bridge seemed to be taking in the entire conversation.

Coop decided to ignore him for a moment, and kept his attention on the woman. He took her hand. It was dry and small, warmer than he expected, certainly warmer than his own hand.

“I’m Jonathan Cooper, the commander of this ship,” he said. “People call me Coop.”

Perkins translated.

The woman nodded. She repeated, “Coop.”

He smiled. “Yes.”

He hadn’t let go of her hand. She hadn’t let go of his. She didn’t smile in return, but the skin around her eyes crinkled as if she was pleased.

“Special Officer Perkins here,” Coop said, “isn’t certain if your name is Boss or if that’s your title.”

The man stepped forward. He seemed alarmed that Coop hadn’t let go of the woman’s hand.

“I’m Bridge,” he said, his words barely understandable. “Boss is her name and her title.”

The woman said something to Bridge, and he responded.

“They call you by your title?” Coop asked her, without looking at Bridge or Perkins.

“I prefer it,” the woman said. Or rather, Perkins said. Her translations were a bit slow, but they made Coop feel like he was having a conversation—albeit an awkward one—with the woman.

“Surely you can understand my position,” Coop said. “As commander of this ship, I can’t call someone else Boss.”

The woman shrugged, her hand still locked in his. “Then call me what you will.”

She wasn’t going to tell him anything else, not yet, and he wasn’t going to call her Boss.

Bridge came up beside her. “I’m McAllister Bridge,” he said in very bad Standard. “I’ll do my best to assist your translator.”

Coop reluctantly let go of the woman’s hand, but he didn’t extend his hand to Bridge, nor did Bridge extend his to Coop.

“Thank you,” Coop said. “I think we need all the help we can get trying to communicate with each other.”

He pulled back a chair at the side of the table for the woman. Then he indicated that they both should sit.

He went to the sideboard, held up the carafe of wine, and raised his eyebrows, silently asking the outsiders if they wanted some.

Bridge looked at the woman. So she was in charge, even if this Bridge was a bit pushy.

“Yes,” the woman said, and that word was clear. So she knew some Standard as well.

Coop looked at Bridge. He nodded.

Coop poured four glasses of wine. He set Perkins’s glass across the table from the woman’s.

Then he sat down at the head of the table. “We have a lot of questions,” Coop said. “We would have talked before, but we wanted to make sure we could understand each other.”

The woman finally smiled. The expression pulled her face together, making her seem both younger and prettier.

“That makes sense,” she said.

Coop folded his hands together. “It seems to me,” he said as clearly and slowly as he could, “that you seemed surprised when our ship arrived. Why is that? Didn’t you know that ships could land here?”

Bridge looked at the woman as Perkins translated. Bridge started to answer, but the woman held up her hand. She leaned forward just a little so that she blocked Bridge’s line of sight.

So, they had a few issues about who was in charge. Bridge verbally acknowledged the woman’s authority, by calling her Boss and telling Coop that was her position, but he didn’t seem to like her control.

The way that the woman tolerated Bridge without disciplining him in any way reinforced Coop’s sense that theirs was not a military operation. It was something else.

“This area has been abandoned for a very long time,” the woman said. “No one even knew the equipment was down here. It surprised us. We were just starting to explore this giant compound when your ship arrived.”

Coop hadn’t expected that answer. He’d expected something more concrete, something like, The base has been abandoned for two hundred years, so we didn’t think anyone was using it. . . .

“If you didn’t know the base was here,” he said, “why were you exploring underground?”

Bridge’s hand lightly brushed the woman’s arm, but she ignored him. Clearly he didn’t want her to say something. And, just as clearly, she wasn’t going to listen to him.

“We were tracking the power source,” she said. “We’re familiar with it. We’ve found it throughout this sector. It’s dangerous and it’s causing problems on the surface.”

“The power source?” Coop looked at Perkins, who shrugged.

“I’m not sure of the translation,” she said to him. “That’s what I understand and that’s what the computer gives us.”

“Your stealth drive,” Bridge said. He had to speak the words three times before Coop understood him. Perkins still looked a bit confused.

“Stealth drive?” Coop said.

“The energy signature,” Bridge said. “The thing that allows Dignity Vessels to cloak. It’s still active in this underground area.”

Dignity Vessels. Coop peered at Bridge and then asked him to repeat his words. Bridge did. Coop glanced at Perkins, who nodded just once.

She had caught the same thing Coop had. The words “Dignity Vessels” had surprised them both.

Dignity Vessel was the original name of the ships in the Fleet. The name came from the Fleet’s original mission, to bring peace and dignity throughout the known universe.

The Fleet never did bring peace. They focused more on justice. And they did try to restore dignity where there was none. But they didn’t call themselves Dignity Vessels, although the words were still part of the ship’s identification numbers. That these people knew what Dignity Vessels were gave Coop hope that less time had passed than he feared.

“What kind of trouble on the surface?” Coop asked.

“The excess energy,” the woman said quickly, before Bridge could answer, “creates death holes.”

Or at least, that was what Perkins thought she said. Perkins ran the sentence through the computer as well and got a similar translation. Bridge watched it all with curiosity.

“Death holes?” Coop asked. “Sink holes?”

“A wave of energy blows through the ground, like a geyser,” the woman said, “creating a tunnel. Vaycehn occasionally loses entire neighborhoods to these tunnels.”

“Vaycehn?” Coop asked.

“It’s what they call Venice City,” Perkins said, with an edge in her voice.

Coop didn’t want to explore that edge, not at the moment, anyway.

“You’re convinced these death holes are caused by something down here?” Coop asked the woman.

“We know it. A big hole opened when your ship arrived.”

Coop frowned. Clearly something had malfunctioned. “Why didn’t you contact the Fleet?”

The woman looked at Bridge. He shook his head slightly. She put her hand on his for just a moment, as if to keep him silent.

“Because,” the woman said after a moment, “until your ship arrived, we thought the Fleet was just a legend.”

“What?” Coop asked.

The woman looked a little sheepish. “We’ve found some ruined Dignity Vessels before. I’ve dived some of the wrecks. But I never thought I’d see a functioning ship with a functioning crew.”

“Because we’re a legend,” Coop said.

“No one knows much about you,” she said. “We thought you traveled in large groups, going from section to section, distributing justice.”

“We do,” he said.

“But no one has any evidence of that. What we do know is garbled, lost to time and mythology. Some places claim you exist and that you helped them create their civilizations. Some say you never existed. Others claim you were rogue agents fleeing a dying government, and that you stirred up trouble wherever you went.”

The hair on the back of his neck had risen. How long did it take for the Fleet’s exploits to get lost?

“What do you say?” Coop asked.

“I say that your Dignity Vessels have turned into the greatest mystery of my life.”

“A mystery I can solve for you,” he said.

She shrugged, as if she didn’t want to commit to the idea. “I don’t see a Fleet here,” she said. “You’re just one ship.”

“We were damaged,” he said. “We came here for repairs.”

True enough, but not complete. He didn’t want to give her the full answer—not yet.

“Alone?” Bridge asked.

She put her hand on his again, as if to remind him that she was asking the questions.

“The base should have been active,” Coop said. “We only left a month ago.”

Bridge shook his head. “That’s not possible.”

“Shut up, Bridge,” the woman said. She didn’t seem surprised by Coop’s words. Bridge did. She knew more about Dignity Vessels and the Fleet than she was admitting.

“How long has this base been abandoned?” Coop asked.

Bridge crossed his arms and leaned back, as if he expected to be consulted on the question. The woman ignored him.

“We don’t know exactly,” she said.

“But you have a guess,” he said.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t guess.”

He appreciated that. “What do you know?”

She took a deep breath. Her face was filled with compassion. She turned to Perkins.

“I hope you can translate this accurately,” she said.

“I’ll try,” Perkins said, or at least, that was what Coop thought she said. Some of the words in the outsiders’ language did sound familiar. He understood now why Perkins had been so cautious. Sometimes familiar words led to greater misunderstandings than unknown words.

“What we know is this.” The woman spoke slowly, obviously doing so to make it easier for Perkins to translate. “The city of Vaycehn is the oldest known city in the sector. Vaycehn has been here, in one form or another, for five thousand years.”

“No,” Coop said before he even realized he had spoken. He made himself breathe. Maybe Perkins had mistranslated. “The city above was called Venice. Venice City. It was the first settlement ever on Wyr.”

Wyr was the name the Fleet had given this planet.

“Wyr.” The woman repeated the word without waiting for the translation, and then nodded. “Yes. We’re on Wyr.”

“Venice City,” he prompted.

“The oldest known settlement here is in the area with the worst of the death holes,” the woman said. “It’s five thousand years old.”

“So far as our records show,” Bridge said, “this place has always been called Vaycehn.”

“Bridge, enough,” the woman said. There was warning in her voice, and a toughness to her posture. Coop was beginning to understand why they called her Boss. He wouldn’t want to make her angry.

“There’s no record of Venice City?” Coop asked.

“None,” the woman said.

“Sir,” Perkins said. “The way that language morphs, and the way that these people speak . . .”

Coop looked at her. So did Bridge. No one was translating for the woman called Boss, at least not yet.

“Venice City could be mispronounced, mangled, changed over the centuries through pronunciation errors,” Perkins said. “It could have become Vaycehn.”

“That’s supposition, Perkins,” Coop said. “We’re trying to figure out facts here.”

She nodded once.

But he understood her all the same. She thought—Bridge thought; hell, the woman named Boss thought—that Vaycehn had been here for at least five thousand years. If Vaycehn was a settlement placed on the ruins of Venice City, then Venice City had been built even longer ago.

The very idea made Coop’s mind hurt.

Five thousand years. How did one month become five thousand years?

“Are you sure you’re translating the numbers correctly?” Coop asked Perkins.

“The computer is confirming them,” she said.

“But you programmed it,” he said. “Could you have programmed it wrong?”

Her expression remained impassive. No flashes of anger, no sense of doubt. “Anything’s possible, sir,” she said.

Then she turned to Bridge and said something in his language.

He responded in his bad Standard. “Boss is talking about five thousand years. Fifty one-hundred-year cycles.”

Coop’s stomach clenched. He was glad he had his hands clasped together. He didn’t want the others to see them shaking.

“You’re sure of that?” he asked.

Both Bridge and the woman nodded.

“My God,” he said, and stood up. “My God.”

He walked over to the sideboard, his heart pounding. Five hundred years would have been a disaster. Five thousand was an impossibility.

Except that the anacapa drive in the station was malfunctioning, creating something called death holes. The Ivoire had all kinds of damage as well. Together both anacapa drives—one clearly malfunctioning and one that might be—had rescued the Ivoire from that fifteen-day death float, and brought it here, where it could be repaired.

But it could never ever rejoin the Fleet.

Not even if Coop wanted it to. Not even if he could figure out how to traverse foldspace to reach some point in the Fleet’s trajectory. The errors he would make in a two hundred year timeline would make it just barely possible to catch up to the Fleet. The errors he would make in a five hundred year timeline would make it impossible to catch the Fleet.

He couldn’t even map the distance between the Ivoire and the Fleet with any kind of accuracy. Not over five thousand years. Not even with a working anacapa and foldspace on his side.

The Fleet might as well be a legend.

And the Ivoire had just become a ghost.

He didn’t look at Perkins. He wanted to maintain some kind of emotional control.

He needed his own people on this. Although he knew what they would find. The evidence had been there already: the language, the unbonded nanobits, the condition of the equipment. He made himself focus.

“So you’re from Venice City?” he asked the woman as he turned around.

The woman’s expression was filled with compassion. She had an idea of what he was going through. He didn’t want her to think of him that way. He didn’t want her to feel sorry for him.

“No,” she said. “I’m not from Venice City. I am not from Vaycehn either.”

That surprised him.

“What are you doing here, then?” he asked.

Bridge started to answer but she glared at him.

“We came because of the death holes,” she said.

“Came from where?” he asked.

“The Nine Planet Alliance,” she said.

It meant nothing to him, just as is she had known it would.

“Did Venice City—Vaycehn—hire you to solve this death-hole problem?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Then why are you here?” he asked.

“Because we’re trying to understand your technology,” she said. “It’s littered throughout the sector, and it’s killing people.”

Killing people. Coop shook his head. Killing people.

It was taking a moment for words to get through his brain. He was in some kind of shock. Unexpected harsh news did that. News that led to grieving. And he would have a lot of grieving to do. He had lost not just his friends, but his entire world.

He made himself focus on the woman’s words. He was the commander of this ship, and, in his training, he had learned how to get past a shocking fog. He had learned how to operate even when everything seemed like it had gone wrong.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The technology is killing people?”

The woman nodded. “The energy field. It kills. I know of hundreds of deaths attached to it. I’ve personally witnessed three caused by the field.”

“Such as the field you detected down here,” Coop said.

“Yes,” she said.

“And you came here anyway,” he said.

“That’s my job,” she said.

“What’s your job, exactly?” he asked.

“To find this technology. To figure out how it works. To shut it off. And if I can’t do that, to destroy it.”

Perkins’s eyes widened in shock. She was prone to panic. Or maybe she was already feeling her reaction to the five thousand years news.

Coop had to trust her to translate as best she could, but he couldn’t look at her. Not any longer. “Were you going to destroy this base?” He asked the woman.

“As I said,” the woman said, “we had just found it. I was excited by the equipment, and the fact that it worked. I hoped we might learn more about your technology.”

“Technology.” Coop frowned. “All of our technology is killing people throughout the sector?”

“No,” the woman said. “Just the energy that radiates from this place. We call it your stealth drive. I gather that’s not correct.”

So she saw the look Coop had given Perkins when the term was first used.

“We do use the technology to hide the ships, yes,” Coop said, not willing to lie to this woman, but not wanting to tell her everything.

“Why would you need to hide them down here?” Bridge asked.

This time, his question was clear. Or maybe Coop was just getting used to his terrible accent.

But Coop chose to ignore him. If the woman was in charge, then Coop would talk to the woman.

“I don’t understand,” Coop said. “How does the technology kill people?”

She sighed, then looked at her hands. She turned to Perkins and said something. Perkins nodded and said to Coop, “She wants to tell a story. I’m not going to translate word for word, but I’m going to wait until she’s done and then tell you as best I can.”

Coop nodded.

The woman spoke for about five minutes, her voice rising and falling. As emotions crossed her face, she looked down or turned away. Bridge watched her, clearly as fascinated as Coop. Perkins’s attention was divided between the woman and the translation coming through the computer. Her intense concentration seemed to cause her to miss the emotions flowing through the woman’s body.

But Coop saw them all. He saw fear and deep sorrow. He saw loss and loneliness. He saw anger, anger so intense that the woman’s entire body tensed as she spoke of it. By the end of her tale, she had calmed herself again.

But Coop knew now what drove her. Rage, fueled by a catastrophic loss. He didn’t know what kind of loss and he didn’t know what, exactly, had made her angry, but he did know that those emotions were what moved her forward, what got her through the day.

Finally, the woman stopped. She nodded at Perkins.

Perkins took a deep breath.

“Let’s hope I get this right,” she said.

“Do your best,” Coop said.

“There is a place in this sector called something like the Room of the Missing Spirits. Or the Place of the Lost Ghosts. I’m not certain of the exact translation.” Perkins glanced at Bridge. He didn’t help her. Maybe he didn’t know those words in Coop’s language. Maybe it was one of those concepts that didn’t translate well.

“She thinks it’s an abandoned space station,” Perkins said. “It’s been there from the beginning of recorded history in this sector.”

Coop’s cheeks warmed. Starbase Kappa was in this sector, and it was older than Venice City.

“This place has a low grade version of the energy signature that is here on Wyr. She went there as a child with her family. Her mother died there, becoming one of the ghosts.”

Coop looked at the woman. She was studying him, as if gauging his reaction. He wondered if she understood more of the language than she could speak.

Probably. That was his experience with other languages. He could understand some of them and couldn’t speak them at all.

Perkins continued with the woman’s story.

“She was very young when her mother died. Decades later, she encountered the same kind of energy in an abandoned Dignity Vessel that she was exploring. Only she didn’t realize that the energy was the same until after one of her crew died. She lost another friend when he went exploring the Room of the Missing Spirits. Now she has made it her mission to find this energy and prevent it from killing anyone else.”

That was a much shorter version of what the woman said.

“You’re sure that’s all?” Coop said.

“She used names and dates,” Perkins said. “I felt they weren’t as necessary.”

Coop nodded. He hoped he would be able to hear the woman’s unadulterated version some day.

“How come the energy has killed her mother and her friend but not her?” he asked. “Did they go to the wrong spot?”

Perkins translated the question.

The woman glanced at Bridge, who looked upset. He said something that sounded negative, but the woman shrugged and turned back to Perkins, speaking slowly again.

“Apparently, most people who enter the energy field die,” Perkins said. “But some people are immune. It would take some hefty translation work for me to understand why. She’s using some pretty specialized terms here.”

“She’s one of the people who can survive in the field,” Coop said.

“I guess so,” Perkins said.

“Ask her,” Coop snapped.

“Yes,” the woman said before Perkins could ask. Then the woman pointed to herself and then to Bridge. She swept her hands out, then held up five fingers, probably indicating the others in her group.

Explorers. Scientists. People with an ability to survive that others didn’t have.

That was the dynamic of the group. They weren’t military. They were thrown together for a common purpose. Which explained Bridge’s behavior. He was in charge of things elsewhere and not used to taking orders, although he was trying.

Coop looked at the woman, this Boss. He said, “We’re going to figure out what’s gone wrong with the equipment. We’ll stop it from killing your friends.”

She frowned, then glanced at Perkins, who translated.

The woman spoke. Coop didn’t understand a single word.

“What about your problem?” Perkins translated.

Meaning, what about you being stranded five thousand years in the future?

“We have some studying to do,” Coop said. “Then we will talk further.”

He stood. He wanted the meeting to end. He needed to think about all of these things. He needed to figure out what to do next.

* * * *

Perkins took them back to the airlock. Coop told her and the guards that they couldn’t reveal any aspect of the conversation. Coop stressed that he wasn’t sure the others were telling the truth.

The guards looked relieved at that, but Perkins clearly didn’t believe him.

He didn’t believe it either.

After everyone had left, Coop sat alone in the briefing room. He shut off the wall screens, opaqued the door, and put his head in his hands.

Stranded. Five thousand years from family, friends, the Fleet, his mission, his very life. Stranded. Not drifting, as he had done for fifteen days, but stuck in a new place, a place that didn’t remember much about his people, a place that didn’t even speak the same language.

He had the training to deal with parts of this. He had been taught to go into a new culture, to understand it, and to use that understanding for the betterment of the Fleet and the culture itself.

But the Fleet was gone. It was now the ship. The Ivoire and its crew of five hundred. Five hundred people, who would feel exactly what he was feeling. Lost. Abandoned. Trapped. Helpless.

It took him nearly an hour to realize he had accepted the woman’s version.

He stood, ran his hand through his hair, and went to the bridge. He finally knew what he had to do.

* * * *

He sent the scientists to confirm what the woman had said. They had to test the equipment, test the anacapa drive, figure out the age of the repair room itself, as if it were an alien place.

He sent a small team through the corridors in environmental suits, figuring if most of the others couldn’t come in here, his people couldn’t go out there. But that was wrong.

They could and did go through the corridors, most of them unfamiliar and unmapped. They used handhelds to figure out where the city was—Coop didn’t want them interacting with the locals, not yet—and how long it had been there.

He sent Yash to investigate the base’s anacapa drive.

It was malfunctioning and it had been blowing holes in the surface for a very long time. Energy would back up in the system and come out sideways, making the holes unpredictable.

It took very little to repair that problem. But, Yash said, the problems with the anacapa drive meant that it could have brought them to the right place at the wrong time. They were stranded, and there was absolutely nothing Coop could do about it.

* * * *

After nearly a week, he asked the woman to meet him in the repair room. He asked her to come alone. He carried a handheld with Perkins’ language program downloaded, so that he could get at least a partial translation of the woman’s words. He had been studying her language as well. He had a hunch it would be his language in the future.

He waited for her just outside the ship.

This was his first time out of the Ivoire since it had returned to Sector Base V. The air was chilly and it smelled metallic, as always. The particles brushed his skin as they fell around him, gentle and soft.

He wore a pair of black pants and a short-sleeved black shirt, with black boots. He had decided against a uniform.

He wanted her to take him to the surface.

She came alone. She didn’t ask how he was. She could tell. She would have guessed that he had done his research, and had confirmed much of what she told him. He knew now that she had told him the truth.

Perkins had already asked her to take him to the surface. She had warned him that no one knew that the ship existed. He would have to pass himself off as part of her crew.

He didn’t mind. He needed to know what he was facing.

The woman came up to him and stopped. She gave him a rueful smile. “I’m sorry,” she said in his language.

He wanted to say that he was fine, that it didn’t matter. He was the commander of the Ivoire, one of the best ships in the Fleet, and, as such, he could help her with her problem, shutting down the energy leaks all over the sector.

But he didn’t say that. He would tell her that eventually, but he wasn’t that strong. He wasn’t fine. “Thank you,” he said in her language.

She slipped a hand through his arm, a gesture he had never seen from her, not in all the time he had observed her.

He put his hand over hers. She looked up at him.

“What do I call you?” he asked in her language.

She paused for a moment. Then she leaned her head on his shoulder just briefly before answering.

“Friend,” she said in his language. “I am your friend.”

Friend. It was a beginning.

“Friend,” he said to her. “I like that very much.”

Then they walked through the repair room doors, into the corridor, heading to the surface, to a place Coop had never seen before, a place he had been as a child, as a young man. A place he had once known and a place he had to learn anew.

They walked, and with each step, Coop felt his mission changing. He would represent the Fleet here, in this place.

Once he understood it. Once he knew exactly how he and his new friends fit in.

Copyright © 2010 Kristine Kathryn Rusch