Cold Iron Stars: The Ledger of Ghost Ships

The first casualty list came up at 0347 shipboard hours, and the name on it was a child.

Imara Solis watched the data scroll across the scarred face of the command console. The screen was old, a veteran of three engagements, and the amber text crawled across it with the slow deliberation of something that had learned not to trust the light. Lyra Ennis sat to Imara's left, her fingers moving with the quiet certainty of a woman who had spent years coaxing truths out of dead formats. Cassian Vorn stood behind them both, a silhouette against the warm wash of the tertiary displays, and said nothing for a long time.

The list was from the Resettlement Authority's outbound manifest for Keth-4. Forty-seven passengers, all civilian, all cleared for agricultural resettlement on the southern continent. The file header read STANDARD TRANSPORT, COMFORT CLASS. Inside, the timestamps told a different story. The transport had diverted twice before clearing the inner system. Its transponder had gone dark for eleven hours somewhere near the Veil. When it resurfaced, the manifest had been amended. The new figure was forty-four.

Three names deleted. No explanation. No correction notice.

"Pull the Authority's follow-up," Cassian said. His voice was the kind of cold that lived in old stone, the kind that had been cold so long it had forgotten what warmth was for. "If there is one."

Lyra's fingers moved. The screen blinked. The follow-up did not exist.

"There never is," she answered. Her accent softened the consonants, gave even her quietest words the lilt of a question she had stopped expecting anyone to answer. "I have pulled twelve hundred of these amended manifests since we started the cross-build. The follow-ups are simply not written. They are not redacted, not misplaced. They are never composed."

Imara leaned forward. The recycled air of the Inheritor's intelligence deck pressed against her skin, faintly tasting of copper and the old wiring that ran behind every wall of the ship. The Inheritor smelled like its history: burnt ozone from the engagement at Solis, the ghost of coolant from a dozen repairs that had never quite been finished, and beneath it all, the mineral tang of the recycler itself, working its quiet way through the day's worth of breath and sweat. Below her boots, somewhere in the lower decks, a pump shuddered and resumed its rhythm. She had been aboard four days now, and the sound had become a kind of clock. She measured her shifts by it.

"How do we know which ones to trust?" she asked. "If the manifests themselves are falsified, what is our baseline?"

Cassian turned his head. In the low light, the lines of his face looked like they had been cut there by a tool, or by decades of a particular kind of attention. "There is no baseline," he said. "That is the point. We are not verifying. We are counting the absences."

Lyra brought up a second window. The left column held the falsified reports she had been pulling for three weeks from the intelligence caches her old contacts still fed her. The right column held the casualty lists she had painstakingly reconstructed from refugee testimony, port authority logs, and the slow, grudging scraps the Compact had released under legislative pressure. The two columns should have matched. They did not.

"Look here," Lyra said, and pointed with the knuckle of her index finger, the way one points at a wound. "Transport Keth-4-219. Authority report says forty-seven passengers, all accounted for at destination. Refugee testimony from the Vellon drift says eleven of those passengers were diverted to a black site in the Tartarus shoals. No transport record of the diversion. No arrival record at the black site. Eleven people erased from the official geography."

Cassian's jaw tightened. The muscle moved once beneath the skin, a single small motion that might have been a swallow or might have been something older. "Names," he said.

"I have six," Lyra said. "From a survivor who was disembarked before the diversion. She remembered three of her cabin mates and two of the children. The sixth is a crewman who came back alone. He refused to speak to the inquiry board. He refused to speak to anyone until he reached the Drift, and then he spoke to me."

"Three of the children," Imara said. Her voice came out quieter than she had intended. The word children felt strange in her mouth, too small a word for the scale of what they were looking at, and too heavy for the room.

Lyra glanced at her. There was something careful in the look, the way one checks a wire before trusting it with weight. "Yes," she said. "Children. Twelve, nine, and six. The survivor was their tutor. She had been hired by their families to keep them occupied during the voyage. She was disembarked at a waystation because she had developed a fever and the medical officer did not want it spreading through the cabin. She was not aboard for the diversion. She has spent the last nine months trying to find out where they went."

Cassian did not look at either of them. His gaze stayed on the screen, where the six names hovered in pale amber text. The pump below the deck thudded once and was still. Somewhere in the corridor beyond the sealed hatch, a junior officer coughed and walked away, the footsteps fading into the hum of the ventilation.

"Enter them," Cassian said. "Cross-reference against every falsified manifest in the cache. Every transport. Every black site reference. Every amendment filed after the seventh hour of the voyage."

Lyra was already typing. "That is a forty-three hour build at current indexing rates," she said. "I can reduce it if I partition by route."

"Do it."

She partitioned by route. Imara watched the progress bar crawl across the bottom of the screen, each percentage point a small blue notch against the black. The deck smelled of warmed plastic from the console housing, and beneath that, faintly, the mineral tang of the coolant Cassian had ordered cycled through the intelligence bay to keep the processors from overheating. He had told her, on her first day aboard, that the processors were the only honest thing on the ship. She had not yet decided whether he had been joking.

"What is the largest gap we have found so far?" Imara asked. She did not really want to know. She asked anyway.

Lyra hesitated. The hesitation was answer enough, but she gave the number anyway, because Lyra Ennis was not a woman who left the numbers unspoken. "The Tesseron convoy. Four transports, two hundred and eighteen passengers listed at departure. The Compact's final accounting has one hundred and ninety-three. Twenty-five unaccounted. But the refugee testimony from the Deep Shoal camps has at least sixty survivors from those same four transports. Which means the official number is wrong in both directions. The ships carried more people than they were cleared for, and fewer of those people reached the camps than the Authority is admitting. Some of them reached nowhere at all."

Cassian's hands, which had been clasped behind his back, separated. He placed one palm flat on the console, beside the keyboard, and did not type. The gesture looked almost like a vow. "Then the system is not merely falsifying departures," he said. "It is falsifying arrivals as well. The number of dead is being inflated. The number of survivors is being reduced. The two falsifications run in opposite directions, which is why no one has noticed. Each lie cancels the other in the aggregate."

"Why inflate the dead?" Imara asked.

Cassian looked at her then. His eyes were the pale, washed-out grey of old slate, and they held no warmth. They held something colder than warmth, and something heavier, the kind of cold that had once been called dignified and was now simply called tired. "Because dead people do not ask questions," he said. "And because a transport listed as lost at sea cannot be cross-examined by a refugee tribunal. Inflating the dead is the cleanest form of erasure. There is no address to send the inquiry to. There is no one left to receive it."

Lyra made a small sound. It was not a word. It was the sound a person makes when they have been building a case for weeks and someone else names the shape of it for the first time, and the naming hurts because it makes the case real.

"Add it to the schema," she said, and her voice was steady again, or steadier. "A new column. Cause of erasure, if known. Estimated survivorship deviation. Source of the deviation."

"Source?" Cassian asked.

"The camp testimony. The port logs. Anything human."

Cassian nodded, once. The movement was small and precise, the nod of a man who had signed death warrants by the thousand and understood the weight of a single additional column. "Do not include anything from the Compact's own audit office. The audit office is one of the falsifying bodies."

"I know," Lyra said. There was an edge in it, faint but real, the edge of a woman who had spent years inside the very machine she was now dissecting. "I used to work in it. I wrote two of the amended manifests myself, before I understood what they were. They will be in the database. I will find them. I want to find them."

The first cross-reference completed at 0412. A name from the Keth-4 manifest appeared in a refugee log from the Vellon drift. The refugee log was dated six weeks after the transport had officially been declared lost. The survivor had reached Vellon on a courier ship that had not been cleared to carry passengers, and had been processed under a transit code that did not exist in the Compact's registry.

"She was on the Keth-4," Lyra said quietly. "And she is not in the official manifest at all. Not even in the amended version. The Authority has removed her entirely. The forty-four names they left behind do not include her. They did not amend her out. They wrote her out of existence at the point of departure."

"What is her name?" Cassian asked.

"Dael Murenne. She was seven."

The silence after the name lasted longer than it should have. Imara Solis counted the seconds in the soft hum of the archive unit's cooling fans, one through seven, before she trusted herself to breathe.

Lyra's hands had stopped moving. They rested on the edge of the console, fingers pale against the dark metal, the knuckles sharp. Cassian stood behind her, his reflection a smear of grey in the dead screen of the secondary terminal. He did not look at Lyra. He looked at the data.

"Seven years old," Cassian said. The words had the cadence of a man confirming a number in a ledger. Not a question. A weight laid down.

"She would be nineteen now," Lyra said. "If she lived. The Vellon transit log has no departure record. She entered the system and then she was nowhere."

"Removed," Cassian said.

"Removed," Lyra agreed. "Twice. Once by the transit authority at Vellon, and once by whoever edited the manifest at origin. Two different offices. Two different hands. The same result."

Imara rose from her chair without deciding to. The room was small, the air stale and tasting faintly of the polymer dust that fell from the overhead conduit every time the Inheritor's spine rotated. A single strip of work-lighting ran above the console, the colour of weak tea. It threw their shadows long against the wall and made Lyra's face look carved.

She crossed to the secondary terminal and pulled up the sector-wide failure index that Yara Kell had forwarded from the maintenance guild two cycles ago. The index was a sprawl, thousands of entries, every mechanical incident reported in the Drift since the first Compact census. Imara had read it twice. Now she entered a command she had been building in her head for the last hour.

"Isolate failures occurring in vessels more than fifteen years out of refit," she said. "And cross-reference with the contractor field."

Lyra turned her head. The motion was small, careful, the way a woman turns toward an unexpected sound in a dark house.

"Contractor field?" Lyra said.

"Every major refit is signed off by a registered yard or a private contractor. The field is buried in the maintenance annex. Most people never look at it."

Cassian had moved. Imara did not see him move. One moment he was behind Lyra. The next he was at her shoulder, close enough that she could smell the faint iron-and-paper scent of the man, the scent of old wool and the recycled air of a warship's officer deck.

"Do it," Cassian said.

Imara's fingers moved. The index parsed. A column of names scrolled up the screen: registry tags, dates, station signatures. Most of them were yards she recognised, Compact-licensed, audited, dull. Herdsworth of Kerren. Dantine and Reeve. The Mercier Combine on Almach.

And then, three entries from the top of a longer list, a callsign she did not recognise.

MERIDIAN.

"There," Imara said. She pointed with the tip of a stylus she did not remember picking up. "Same contractor across six incidents in the last four years. Out-system hullwork. Drive coupling replacements. They are all listed as black-budget. The auditor flagged them and then closed the file."

Lyra leaned in. The light caught the faint freckling along her cheekbone. "Black-budget," she said. "Meaning the Compact paid for the work outside the normal appropriations."

"Meaning no one outside a small circle knows it was done," Cassian said.

The list grew. The console parsed faster than Imara's hand could follow. A seventh entry appeared. An eighth. The contractor signature was the same. The dates spanned eight years. The systems upgraded were not random: drive couplings, reactor governors, inertial dampeners. The parts of a ship you do not think about until they fail.

"How many vessels?" Imara asked.

Lyra's mouth moved silently as she counted.

Lyra's mouth moved silently as she counted. Her finger tracked down the index, pause by pause, each touch a small precise pressure against the glass.

"Seventeen," she said. "Across eight years. Five different shadow drydocks. The contractor signature is the same, but the shell companies rotate."

Sevren Holt let out a breath through his teeth. The sound carried the particular weight of a man revising a probability in real time. "Seventeen vessels modified in ways that cannot be inspected. Seventeen hulls in the Compact fleet that someone wanted hidden."

"Seventeen," Lyra repeated, softer. "And the work was always the same. The bones of the ship."

Yara Kell had gone still near the doorway. Imara could hear her breathing, the careful rhythm of someone holding herself in place. When she spoke, her voice came out lower than usual.

"Kitty," Yara said. "The contractor is based where?"

Imara parsed the metadata. The answer crawled up in fine print, redacted in places, present in others. A port authority stamp. A navigational beacon signature. The kind of record that no one thought to scrub because no one ever looked.

"The Drift," Imara said. "Transhipment hub on the Kenmar terminus."

Something behind Yara's eyes shifted. She did not look surprised. She looked like a person who had been carrying a suspicion for years and had just felt it lock into place.

"The Drift," Yara said. "Then this contractor knows Jex."

"Jex Aldari," Sevren said, with the weary precision of a man who had been hoping the name would not surface. "Naturally."

Cassian turned from the viewport. His face had the particular stillness of expensive machinery between cycles. "Who is Jex Aldari."

Yara answered first. "An information broker. He runs small parcels through the Kenmar lanes when he is not brokering. He owes me a debt from a thing that happened in the Pallisades. He can be trusted to do exactly what is profitable for Jex Aldari and to betray everyone else if the price is right."

"Can he be reached," Cassian asked. It was not a question.

"He keeps a courier relay at every Drift berth. Three questions in the right tone and he answers inside the hour."

"Then we ask three questions."

Sevren stepped forward, one hand rising. "Admiral. If we light a relay on a Compact vessel from this dock, even a fake registry, we are announcing our position to anyone watching the lanes."

"Anyone is already watching the lanes," Cassian said. "We are hunted. The question is whether we are also blind."

Lyra looked at Imara. The look had weight. Imara understood it and looked away before answering it.

"I can spoof a civilian courier band," Imara said. "It will hold for one exchange. Maybe two. After that the falsity is visible."

"Do it," Cassian said.

Imara's hands found the console again. The fleet cipher wheel turned in her mind without prompting; her fingers moved before she had decided what to write. She composed the message in three lines, each line a coded phrase arranged so the first letters spelled a word only Jex would catch.

LINE ONE: Request berthing consultation at Kenmar terminus for three pallets of antique linen. LINE TWO: Will compensate at standard rate plus gratuity for old acquaintance. LINE THREE: Will my old acquaintance be available for tea? The pot is heating.

She encoded and transmitted.

The relay band went live for four seconds. Then dead air.

"Tea," Yara said, almost to herself. "He will understand."

"He will understand we are alive," Sevren said. "That is not nothing."

The cabin settled into the particular stillness of people waiting on a signal. Imara watched the band meter as if she could read intent inside the static. The vinegar-and-brass scent of the warship seemed to thicken. She could hear Sevren breathing near her shoulder, and the soft pad of Yara's boots as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and far below the hull, the deep mechanical breath of a reactor that had been running for longer than she had been alive.

Seven minutes passed.

Then the band meter twitched. The return signal was on a frequency Imara had not expected, and encoded in a cipher she did not know. Yara saw it and smiled without warmth.

"His private lane," Yara said. "He is feeling cautious."

"Translate," Cassian said.

Yara's fingers moved across her handheld, parsing. Her face tightened line by line as the message unpacked.

"He says hello," Yara said. "He says he hears we have been busy. He says there is a thing we should know, but he wants us to know he wants something in return."

"Name it," Cassian said.

"He wants a seat on whichever ship leaves this dock second."

Sevren made a small sound. It might have been a laugh in another life.

"Tell him he has it if the information is worth the chair," Cassian said.

Yara typed. The wait this time was longer. Imara's pulse climbed in slow increments she could feel at her wrist. She thought of her father at the comms desk in their flat on Grimrock, the way he used to hold a hand over the receiver as if he could keep a conversation in place by pressure alone. She put the thought away.

The return came back in three short packets, spaced by deliberate pauses.

Yara read aloud.

"Friends," Yara said. "The Compact has been busy too. Internal Security flagged an anomaly on the Arcturus ledger two cycles ago. They have not told anyone above deputy director what they are looking at, which means they know what they are looking at, which means they are about to look very hard at the right people."

She looked up from the screen.

"Arcturus Station," Yara said. "Drift terminus. Where most of those black-budget hullwork orders were filed. Where Jex keeps his relay. Where the contractor does business."

"How long," Cassian said.

Yara read the next packet.

"They are sending an audit team within the week," Yara said. "Jex does not know which day. He says the courier traffic through Drift has doubled since the flag went on, and three of his regular contacts have stopped answering his pings."

"Stopped answering," Sevren repeated.

"In Drift parlance, that means they have been paid to be somewhere else or they have been put somewhere else by people who do not leave witnesses."

Cassian walked to the center of the cabin and stood with his hands at his back. The way he held his shoulders told Imara he had already moved past the information and into its uses.

"If Internal Security audits Arcturus, they will find the contractor trail," Cassian said. "They will find the seventeen vessels."

"And whoever ordered those modifications," Lyra said. "Will know we are close."

"The order came from inside the Compact," Cassian said.

Lyra nodded. The freckling along her cheekbone caught the light when she moved. "That is what the Cold Iron Stars were warning us about. The corruption is not in the frontier. It is in the books."

Yara set the handheld on the table with the care of a person placing a loaded weapon down.

"So we have a choice," Yara said. "We can run to the Drift, get to Jex, and try to get ahead of the audit by pulling the records before Internal Security lands. Or we can run the other way and let the audit happen and see who panics first."

Sevren turned toward the viewport. Outside, the salvage field drifted, hull fragments turning slowly against the dark.

"If we run to the Drift and the audit team is already there," Sevren said, "we walk into their hands."

"If we run the other way," Lyra said, "we leave the only copy of those orders in a place that will be sealed and never seen again."

Cassian's hand found the back of the chair beside Imara. He rested his fingers there for a moment, and the gesture was so human that it startled her more than any of his silences had.

"The Cold Iron Stars were hidden in the science annex," Cassian said. "Because whoever placed them there believed a day would come when someone would need to find them."

"That someone was me," Lyra said.

"That someone was you," Cassian repeated. "And now you have read them. And now you can read what is in Arcturus. The only person in the sector who can connect the two."

Lyra closed her eyes. The lashes cast a faint shadow on the freckles. Imara watched her and understood that the choice before them had narrowed to a single point, and that point was Lyra, and that Lyra knew it, and that the knowing hurt.

"Yara," Lyra said. "Tell Jex we are coming to Arcturus. Tell him to have the relay standing by for a physical handoff. Tell him his seat is on my word."

Yara typed. The screen glowed against her face.

"Done," Yara said.

Cassian straightened. He looked at Imara for the first time since the list had begun to unspool, and the look held something that might have been approval or might have been recognition.

"Plot Arcturus," Cassian said. "Best speed."

Imara put her hand to the helm. The console warmed under her palm. Outside, the salvage field began to turn with the ship as she brought the bow around, and the stars shifted in the viewport, and somewhere ahead of them, in a Drift port that would soon be full of auditors and conspirators and old debts, Jex Aldari was waiting with a seat he had bought at the cost of everyone else's secrets.

She set the heading and held it, and the ship began to move.

The Arcturus Drift opened like a wound in the dark.

Imara watched it spread across the viewport as the ship came about, a seam of amber and grey stitched through the black where regulatory buoys hung in long chains. The beacons blinked at her in patient morse, their light smearing across the glass each time the hull rolled. Somewhere in the spacing between the pulses she thought she could hear the relay frequency breathing, a low hiss that never quite resolved into signal.

"Drift Control, this is the chartered vessel Penitent requesting berth," Sevren said from the comms cradle. His voice had she'd the tremor it had carried since Cassian had entered the room. He sounded almost bored, which was Sevren's version of professional. "Four souls, two pallets of unmarked cargo, no declared manifest. Berth preference: Dock Six, eastern arm."

The crackle that came back was bored too.

"Dock Six is open, Penitent. Welcome to Arcturus. Local time fourteen hundred. Watch your step on the gantry, the second plate from the customs post sticks."

Sevren killed the channel. Yara was already unbuckling.

"I will go down first," she said, and did not wait for permission. She pulled her collar up, tugged the brim of her cap lower, and stepped out into the corridor. Her boots made a sound on the metal stairs that Imara listened to until it faded, and then the ship felt suddenly larger and more empty than it had a moment before.

Cassian had not moved from the chair. Lyra sat across from him, the silver case open in her lap, one hand resting on the stacked leaves as though she meant to keep them warm.

"Imara," Lyra said, without looking up. "When we dock, you stay aboard."

Imara's hand tightened on the helm.

"He asked for me."

"He asked for someone," Lyra said. "He asked for the person whose signature he trusts, and that person is me. You stay aboard because you are the one thing on this ship that Cassian cannot replace if the Drift decides to make an example of us, and you are also the one thing he cannot predict."

Cassian turned his head at that. The light from the relay strip caught the deep lines beside his mouth.

"The woman reads me well," he said. "It is the only useful thing the Compact ever paid her for."

"That is not fair, Cassian."

"Fairness," Cassian said, "is a tax levied on the living by the dead. I stopped paying it at Meridian."

The ship trembled. The clamps took hold somewhere far below, and the vibration ran up through the deck and into the bones of Imara's wrist where it lay on the console. Arcturus had them. The viewport filled with the grey and rust of the docking arm, the bolted plating, the long throat of the airlock that would now begin its slow cycle to atmosphere.

She watched Lyra descend. She watched Yara's silhouette already waiting in the customs pen. Somewhere past the docks, in one of the crooked merchant offices that clung to the lower decks like limpets, Jex Aldari was sitting with the relay ready and the seat he had bought with every secret that had ever passed through his hands.

She wondered, idly, whether he was afraid.

She decided he was not.

---

Yara returned first. Her face was the colour of the bulkhead behind her, and she set a small black chip on the navigation console as though she were placing a coin on a grave.

"He is waiting," she said. "Dock Six, Office Twelve. He says the relay is warm."

Cassian stood. Lyra closed the case.

"Stay aboard," Cassian said to Imara, and the words had the weight of a sealed order. "Watch the dock traffic. Watch the customs feed. If anyone boards without announcing themselves, you lift without us."

"And if I lift without you?"

"Then you will know what Jex Aldari is worth," Cassian said, and went down the stairs.

Lyra paused at the threshold. Her hand rested on the rail.

"I will bring it back," she said. "All of it. The leaves, the relay, the man if he can be carried. I will bring it back to you, Imara."

She did not say thank you. She did not say goodbye. She went down the stairs after Cassian, and the corridor closed around her, and the ship was quiet except for the hiss of the dock and the small sounds Yara made as she sat down beside the console and began to type without speaking.

Imara watched the customs feed. Names and serial codes scrolled past. The dock clerk yawned on camera two. A freighter offloaded a crate of something that the manifest called miscellaneous science. The second plate from the customs post still stuck, just as the controller had warned.

Twenty minutes passed.

The ship was very still. The cargo bay doors were sealed. The vents cycled air that smelled faintly of coolant and the wool of Cassian's coat, which he had left hanging on the back of his chair when he went down.

Forty minutes.

Yara's fingers paused.

"He is on his way back," she said. "Three of them. Cassian first, then Lyra, then Jex. The office door closed behind them."

"Jex is with them?"

"Jex is with them," Yara said, and resumed typing.

Imara watched the customs feed. She watched the corridor camera that Yara had spliced into before they had boarded. She watched the stairwell. She watched the airlock indicator pulse from red to amber to green.

Cassian came through first. He was carrying the silver case. His face was unchanged.

Lyra came through second. Her hand rested on the case as though to steady it. Her freckles stood out on her skin the way they had in the Inheritor's shuttle bay, but the colour of her eyes had changed. She looked at Imara the way a person looks at a door they have just walked through into a room they had not known existed.

Jex came through third.

He was smaller than Imara had pictured. He had warm brown skin and quick clever eyes and the kind of mouth that smiled before the rest of the face had decided what to do. He carried a satchel under his arm that he set down on the deck with the deliberate care of a man who knows that what is inside it cannot be replaced. He straightened, dusted his palms against his trousers, and looked around the hold as though he were pricing it.

"Crew of the Penitent," he said, and his voice had the lilt of an old bazaar, of a market on a planet Imara had never visited. "I am told you have a seat for me."

"We have a seat for you," Yara said, without turning from the screen.

"Then I will take it," Jex said, "before the auditors find out I am standing in it."

Cassian set the silver case on the nav console. He opened it. The leaves were inside, undisturbed. The relay was inside too, a small black chip nested in a recess cut into the velvet. Lyra had not exaggerated its importance. Jex had not exaggerated what it had cost him to hold it.

"Mr. Aldari," Cassian said. "You will now tell us what is in Arcturus that the Compact has been so careful to misfile."

Jex looked at the case. He looked at Cassian. He looked, briefly, at Imara, and the look held something that was not quite assessment and not quite gratitude.

"What is in Arcturus," Jex said, "is a name. And the name belongs to a person who is alive. And the person is sitting, at this moment, in a Drift office that does not appear on any chart, writing a letter that will reach the wrong hands before the right ones can intercept it. We have approximately nine hours before that letter arrives, and approximately three hours after that before the Compact decides who is to blame for the Hollowing."

He unslung the satchel. He set it beside the case. He sat down in the seat Yara had indicated, and he folded his hands in his lap, and he waited.

The ship held its breath around him. The dock creaked. Somewhere far below, the second plate from the customs post finally gave way under the weight of a freight loader's boot, and the sound travelled up through the hull and into the deck and into Imara's hand on the console.

She set the heading.

She held it.

The ship began to move.