The magnetic boots caught the hull with a clunk that traveled up through Pell's shins and into his lower back. He set his weight, felt the magnets bite, and took his first step away from the Cinderhawk's airlock. Forty meters of dead air between him and the Meridian's Wake. Forty meters of nothing, black as a coalmine at midnight.
"Cranks tight," Lieutenant Jael Orin said from behind him. Young voice, too bright for the void. "Boots reporting nominal."
Pell grunted. His visor display ticked through pressure, oxygen, magnet strength. Green across the board. He leaned into the next step, and his boots rang against the plating with a sound that carried further in vacuum than any man-made clatter ought to.
Below them, the Cinderhawk held station with thrusters firing in a slow, patient pulse. Her running lights blinked green and white, a heartbeat against the dark. Behind her, the gas giant Saturnine turned its banded face to the sun, and the rings threw a thin gold arc across the black. Further out, the Helion Belt glittered like a thousand broken mirrors, each shard catching starlight and throwing it back.
"Pell, you copy?" Orin again. Closer now. The lieutenant had unclipped from the umbilical and was moving up alongside him, his mag-boots making small precise taps.
"Aye," Pell said. "I copy."
"Your read on the breach?"
Pell did not answer immediately. He studied the Meridian's Wake ahead, her hull a long dark splinter against the stars. The breach was on the starboard flank, level with what would have been the cargo bay. Metal peeled back in long, jagged curls, as if something had taken a great bite and spat it sideways. No scorch marks. No projectile scoring. The edges were clean as torn paper.
"Something opened her up," Pell said. "Weren't weapons."
"Or a micro-meteorite cluster," Orin said. "Prolonged exposure, low probability..."
"You don't get a bite that size from rocks."
Orin went quiet. His visor turned toward the breach, and Pell could imagine the young face behind it, jaw set, thinking through possibilities.
Behind them, Petty Officer Crane clumped along in his heavy engineering rig, tools clanking at his belt in slow motion. Crane had been aboard the Meridian's Wake six years back, when she was hauling water miners from the Belt. He had not asked to come on this walk. Pell had watched him strap in without a word.
Further back, Vex drifted, her mag-boots barely touching the hull. Vex did not chatter. Vex watched everything with those dark, wide-set eyes and said nothing until there was something worth saying.
"Twenty meters," Pell said. "Orin, you have the ship's transponder?"
"Affirmative. She's dead in the water. No emissions. No life signs. Hull pressure holds at half-standard, breathable but thin."
"And the crew?"
Orin's voice shifted. Younger. "Eight souls aboard at last check. Registry says three of them were passengers. The rest, merchant crew. They sent a distress pulse eleven days ago. Then nothing."
Pell grunted again. He did not like the arithmetic. Eleven days in a dead ship with a hull breach and no power was a long time. A long time for any soul to hold on.
The four of them crossed the final stretch in silence. Pell's boots found the Meridian's Wake's airlock rim, and he stopped. The outer hatch was open. Not blown, not torn, just open, drifting on its hinge with a slow, patient sway. Beyond it, a corridor stretched into dim emergency lighting, the amber strips still holding breath on the half-charge of whatever battery remained.
"Inside," Pell said. He unclipped his safety line from the Cinderhawk's umbilical and clipped it instead to a rail inside the airlock threshold. Crane did the same. Orin. Vex.
Vex moved last. She was aboard before any of them, her small dark frame slipping past Pell's shoulder with a whisper of mag-boots on metal. Her hands were already reaching for the inner airlock door.
"Half pressure," she said. "Oxygen seventeen percent. Nitrogen balance okay. Trace organics in the mix. Recent atmosphere."
"Recent," Pell repeated.
"Within the hour. Someone was here."
The inner airlock opened with a sigh. Cold air rolled over them, biting through suit insulation. Pell felt it in his teeth, in the backs of his hands. The corridor stretched ahead, its floor buckled upward as if something had lifted it from below and let it fall back. Cargo straps had torn loose from their tie-downs and floated in lazy arcs, frozen mid-drift.
"Mag-grav still drawing," Crane muttered. He was studying a console by the inner hatch, its screen cracked across the middle but still glowing a faint, sickly green. "Some kind of residual charge. They were running on backups when it happened."
"When what happened?" Orin asked.
Crane only shrugged.
Pell took point. His mag-boots found purchase on the buckled deck and he moved forward, stepping over a loose cargo strap. The amber emergency strips gave just enough light to make out shapes: a coffee cup, shattered. A paperback left open on a side table, its pages rippling faintly in the residual gravity. A child's toy, stuffed, faded, its button eye loose in a drift of condensation.
A child. There had been a child aboard.
"Captain's log," Orin said, pointing. A wall screen still flickered, cycling through a stuck frame. "Last entry eleven days ago. Audio only."
He reached for the playback, and a voice filled the corridor. Female, hoarse, exhaustion in every syllable.
"All hands, all hands, this is Captain Lisle. We have lost main power. We have lost comms. Repeat, we have lost comms. Hull breach on three decks. Sealing now. If anyone receives this, the Meridian's Wake is going dark. We are not abandoning ship. Repeat, we are not abandoning. God help us. God help..."
The recording cut.
Silence. The amber strips hummed.
"No trauma," Crane said. He had knelt beside a console, his gauntleted fingers tracing a readout. "No blunt force. No burns. Nothing on the readouts suggests violence. They just stopped."
"What do you mean, stopped?" Orin asked.
"I mean the bodies in the crew quarters, in the galley, in the rec room. Eight souls. Sitting, standing, lying down. No wounds. No marks. They just went still."
Pell moved past the captain's quarters. The door hung open. Inside, a bunk was made neatly, a book on the pillow. Another bunk, the same. A third, blankets pulled up to a chin that wasn't there anymore.
"Eight souls," Pell said. "Where's the ninth?"
"Ninth?" Orin asked.
"The child." Pell pointed at the toy. "That's a young'un's toy. Someone brought a child aboard."
Orin checked his datapad. His face, behind the visor, paled.
"There was no child listed. Three passengers, all adults. Registry holds no minors."
"Then someone's keeping secrets," Crane said. He had moved to the next compartment, the galley. Inside, two figures sat at a table, helmets off, visors up. They had been drinking something, coffee or broth, and they had stopped mid-sip. Their hands still held the cups. Their eyes were open. Their faces were calm, almost peaceful, the way the dead sometimes looked when the dying had been quick and quiet.
Pell stepped closer. He did not touch them. He had seen enough dead in his years, and he had learned not to touch what he did not have to.
"Systemic failure," Vex said from the doorway. Her voice was low, musical, an odd undertone like wind through reeds. "I have read eight such cases in the medical database. No trauma. No toxin. The body simply ceases."
"Ceases how?" Orin asked.
"As if a switch were thrown. All at once."
"That's not how bodies work," Orin said.
"No," Vex agreed. "It is not."
Pell turned away from the galley. He moved down the corridor, his mag-boots clanking with each step, and stopped at the breach. The hull plating curled back like the petals of a vast metal flower, and beyond it the stars wheeled in their slow, indifferent arcs. He could see the gas giant from here, its bands bright against the black, and further out the glint of the Helion Belt.
"What opens a ship like this?" Orin asked. He had come up beside Pell, his young voice pitched low, almost a whisper. "No weapons. No rocks. What does that?"
Pell looked at the breach a long moment. Then he looked at the floor, where a child's small handprint, dusted in condensation, marked the deck near the torn metal.
"I don't know," he said. "But I know what it ain't. It ain't nothing."
Behind them, Crane's voice carried down the corridor. "Pell. You need to see this."
Pell turned. Crane stood in the doorway of what had been the captain's quarters. Inside, the bunk was still made. The book was still on the pillow. But on the small fold-out desk, a hand-drawn chart had been laid out with care. It showed the Helion Belt, the Cinder Zone, and a series of small, precise marks indicating something Pell did not at first recognize.
"Coordinates," Crane said. "Drawn by hand. The captain was mapping something."
"Mapping what?"
"Dunno. But look at the dates." Crane pointed to a column of figures down the right side of the page. "The entries go back eleven days. Each day, a new mark. Each mark closer to the same point."
"Which point?"
Crane tapped the center of the chart. The mark there was circled three times in red ink.
"Right here. Where we're standing."
Pell stared at the chart a moment longer. Eleven days of marks, each one closer to the same point. Eleven days the captain had been alive, plotting something, while the ship broke open around him.
"Keep it," Pell said to Crane. "And tell no one else until the commander sees it."
Crane nodded and slipped the chart into her jacket with the care of someone handling evidence. Pell turned and found Orin watching him, the young lieutenant's face pale in the corridor's dim emergency lighting. The boy's breath came out in small clouds. The air had grown colder the deeper they moved into the ship.
"You thinking what I'm thinking?" Orin asked.
"I'm thinking the captain knew something was coming," Pell said. "And I'm thinking we should find the commander before it finds us."
They moved aft through the vessel. The corridor narrowed, the walls pressing close, and Pell could smell old coolant bleeding from a cracked conduit overhead. Beneath it was something else, something sweet and wrong that he did not mention to Orin. The boy was nervous enough. Pell had buried two crews. He knew when a ship was holding its breath.
Orin's comm unit crackled. Kain's voice came through, clipped and precise: "Pell. Orin. Stowaway report to medical bay three. Now."
"Medical bay three?" Orin said. "There's no medical bay on the schematic."
"There is now," Kain said, and cut the channel.
They found the commander standing before a sealed bulkhead, its surface unmarked except for a small placard that read STASIS BAY - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY in faded block letters. The paint had begun to peel. Kain looked at Pell with an expression he did not like. She looked like she had already seen what was behind the door and wished she had not.
"Found it on the ship's internal schematic," Kain said. "It's not on the crew manifest. Not on the cargo logs. Not anywhere in the records we pulled from the bridge."
She pressed her palm to the access panel. The door sighed open on old hydraulics, and the smell hit them first. Cold, sterile, the sharp bite of cryo-gas, and under it the unmistakable musk of human decay, sweet and heavy in the still air. Pell felt his stomach turn. He had smelled that smell before, on ships that had lost their people to bad air and worse luck.
Inside, the room was small and lit by a single strip of amber emergency light that buzzed faintly overhead. Three cryo-pods stood against the far wall, their fronts fogged with a thick layer of frost. Pell counted them slowly. Three. Two had their indicator lights dark. One pulsed a faint, steady green, the color of life in a place built for death.
"God," Orin whispered.
Kain stepped forward. Her boots crunched on the frost-covered floor, the sound loud in the enclosed space. She placed her bare hand on the first pod's frozen faceplate. The frost began to recede under the heat of her palm, blooming outward in a small circle, revealing a man inside. His eyes were closed. His skin was waxy and grey, the color of old candle wax. He had been dead a long time. Months, perhaps. Long enough for the cryo-fluid to have taken on the cloudy hue of decay.
The second pod. A woman, older, her hair floating in the suspension fluid like drowned seaweed. Also dead. Also grey. Also past saving.
The third pod. Kain hesitated. The green light pulsed in a slow, steady rhythm. She wiped the frost away with her sleeve, and the glass cleared.
A woman's face looked back at her. Young, perhaps thirty, with dark hair cut short and features that might have been beautiful before the cryo-sleep had carved shadows beneath her eyes. Her chest rose and fell in the slow, mechanical rhythm of induced hibernation, her lips slightly parted, her breath misting the inside of the glass.
"Get Senna up here," Kain said, her voice very quiet. "Get her up here now."
Pell commed the engineering petty officer. While they waited, Kain did not move from the third pod. She stood with her hand on the glass, watching the woman breathe, and something in her posture made Pell uneasy. He had seen Kain angry. He had seen her cold. He had never seen her still like this.
"You know her?" Orin asked.
"No," Kain said.
But Pell could hear something in her voice. Not recognition. Something worse. Anticipation, like a man watching a door he knew was going to open onto something he did not want to see.
Senna arrived in seven minutes, grumbling about the cold and the dark and the things people asked her to do in derelict hulks at the edge of nowhere. She looked at the pods, grunted, and set to work on the third one with a scanner and a set of manual override codes.
"Power's still good," Senna said, her Boston drawl slow and laconic. "Someone's been keeping it warm. Recently."
"How recently?" Kain asked.
Senna checked a readout, her eyes narrowing. "Fourteen hours. Give or take."
The pod began to defrost. Fluid drained with a low hiss into the floor grates. The woman's eyes fluttered beneath lids that looked paper-thin. Kain stepped back, her hand dropping to the sidearm at her hip, and Pell saw Orin's hand move to his own weapon.
The woman's eyes opened.
For a long moment she simply stared at the ceiling, breathing in shallow gasps, her pupils dilating in the amber light. Then she turned her head and saw Kain. Recognition flared in her face, then fear, then something carefully blank that settled over her features like a mask being put on.
"You're Hegemony," Kain said.
It was not a question. The woman wore a uniform beneath the cryo-suit, dark blue with silver piping, and on her chest was a badge that caught the amber light. Silver, with the stylized starburst of the Hegemony Science Division. Pell had seen that badge before, on holos, in briefings. The enemy. The other side of a war he had spent his whole life losing.
Pell saw Kain's face. The commander, who had not flinched when the breach tore open, who had not blinked when Crane reported the dead crew, who had walked through this dead ship with the steady pace of someone who had seen worse, went absolutely still. Her eyes locked on the badge, and something behind them went very quiet.
"Where did you get that uniform?" Kain asked, her voice smooth and even and utterly terrifying.
The woman in the pod coughed. Her voice, when it came, was rough from cryo but carried the lilt of old Earth, a Sicilian music that did not belong in this dead place. "You know where," she said. "You're standing in it."
"Sir," Orin said softly. "Her credentials."
Kain did not look away from the woman. "I see them, Lieutenant."
"They're current," Senna said, reading the pod's diagnostic display. "Updated eighteen months ago. Dr. Mira Tasso, Hegemony Science Division, level nine clearance. Research specialty: xenobiology and anomalous energy signatures."
Kain's jaw tightened. She said nothing. Pell had served with her long enough to know what that silence meant. It meant she was calculating. It meant she was remembering something, or someone. It meant someone, somewhere, had lied to her, and she was deciding what to do about it.
"Get her out," Kain said finally. "Carefully. And get her to the shuttle. Now."
"Sir," Orin said, "if she's Hegemony-"
"I know what she is, Lieutenant." Kain's voice was ice over iron. "I know exactly what she is. Move."
Pell and Senna lifted the woman from the pod. She was lighter than she looked, and colder, her skin like something left out in the void. Her teeth chattered as the warmer air hit her. Her eyes never left Kain's face.
"You have to listen to me," Dr. Tasso said. Her words tumbled out, fast and bubbling despite the cold, tripping over each other in her urgency. "I know what's in this ship. I know where they went. I know what the captain was mapping. Please. Please. I have waited eighteen months for someone to find me."
Kain said nothing. She turned and walked out of the stasis bay, her boots loud on the metal floor, each step measured and deliberate.
Pell looked at Orin. The young lieutenant's face was white beneath his dark hair.
"What do we do?" Orin asked.
Pell looked at the two dead in their pods, their faces peaceful in a way the living never are. He looked at the woman shivering in Senna's arms, her badge catching the light. He looked at the door where Kain had disappeared.
"We do what the commander says," Pell said. "And we pray she's wrong about whatever she's thinking."
They moved through the corridor, Dr. Tasso stumbling between them. Behind them, the amber light flickered and died in the stasis bay, leaving the two corpses in the dark, and the ship's secrets one layer thinner.
In the shuttle, Kain waited. She did not look at Dr. Tasso, who sat wrapped in a thermal blanket on the rear bench. She looked out the viewport at the breach in the ship's hull, the petals of metal still folded back, and the stars beyond, cold and indifferent.
"Sir," Orin said, settling into the pilot's seat. "Where to?"
Kain did not answer for a long time. Her reflection stared back at her from the glass, overlaid on the void.
"Back to the Cassius," she said finally. "And put Dr. Tasso in the brig. Full security. No one speaks to her without my permission."
The shuttle lifted on a whisper of thrust. The derelict fell away below them, its breach still open to the void, its captain still dead in his bunk with his book on his pillow and his chart in Crane's jacket.
And somewhere in its belly, in a stasis bay that should not have existed, two corpses floated in their pods, waiting for someone to find them.
The breach held its breath, and Pell held his.
He had counted the seconds since the boarding party crossed the threshold into the captain's quarters of the derelict, one thousand four hundred and twelve of them by the beat of his old heart, and the airlock had not once felt right. Too still. Too cold. The kind of quiet that happens right before a man dies, or right after.
Kain went in first, sidearm up. Crane followed with the cutting torch sheathed. Orin covered the corridor, sweating through his skinsuit despite the chill. And Pell, with thirty years of standing watch on dying ships, planted his boots at the threshold and watched them disappear into the dark.
The captain's quarters of the Barnaby Sweeting had been a good room once. Pell could see that. A hardwood desk, scarred and burnished. A brass lamp, green with verdigris. A pillow on the bunk still bearing the dent of a head. A book open, spine cracked, pages yellowed to the color of old bone. The captain had died reading. You could tell by the angle of the lamp, by the spilled tea on the rug.
"Lights," Kain murmured into her helmet pickup.
Crane slapped the wall panel. Nothing happened. She slapped it again, harder.
"Power's dead to the deck," Crane said. "I'm reading residual charge in the headboard, but the rest is cold. I'll need ten minutes to bypass the lockout on the office safe, maybe five on the wall unit if you want me to crack it open."
Kain did not answer. She was standing in front of the desk, staring at something Pell could not see from the doorway. Her helmet light moved in a slow arc.
"Boatswain," she said.
"Sir."
"Come here. Tell me what you see."
Pell crossed the room. His knees complained, as they always did on alien decking. He stood where she stood and looked where she was looking, and for a long moment he saw nothing. Then he saw it.
Beneath the desk, half-hidden behind a wadded ship's jacket, there was a flat shape wrapped in foil. Not emergency foil. Not thermal foil. Counter-surveillance foil, the kind Pell had seen once on a smuggler's tender out beyond Callisto, the kind that turned active scans into static snow. The black gleam of it caught his helmet light and gave it back dulled.
"That's not regulation," he said.
"No," Kain said.
She crouched, slowly, the way you approach a sleeping animal. Her gloved hand hovered over the foil. The ship's metal groaned somewhere deep, a sound like ribs under pressure, and Pell's stomach dropped.
"Don't touch it yet," Crane said from behind them. Her voice had gone flat in the way voices go when the body knows something the mouth has not yet admitted. "Commander. Don't."
Kain looked back. Crane was staring not at the foil but past it, at the deckhead overhead, where a thin line of indicator lights had begun, faintly, to blink.
"Chief," Orin said, his voice breaking upward at the end as young voices do. "Chief, the deck is warming up."
"Then someone wake the ship," Crane said, "because I didn't."
The lights came on.
Not deck by deck, the way a proper reactor start cascades. All of them, everywhere, all at once. The amber wash of emergency power dropped away and the white eye of main lighting slammed into every corridor of the Barnaby Sweeting, and somewhere below them, at the bottom of the ship's belly, something that had been sleeping for two years rolled over and stretched.
Pell felt the vibration through his boots first. Then through his teeth.
"Reactor," Kain said. "It's cycling."
"It's not just cycling," Crane said. Her hands were on a portable diagnostic sleeve she had pulled from her satchel, fingers flying. "It's spooling. It's spooling up. Like someone just keyed the main ignition."
"Autonomous restart sequence," Orin said, and his face had gone the color of old milk. "Fleet survey protocol. If the ship sits dormant for two years, the AI starts a self-check cycle. And if the self-check fails, "
"It doesn't matter," Kain said. She was already moving. Her hand closed on the foil-wrapped shape and pulled it free from beneath the desk. It came away with a reluctant hiss, as though it had been waiting. "Crane, get the door sealed behind us. Pell, get Tasso's pod moving. Orin, with me. We are leaving this ship in ninety seconds."
"You don't understand, sir," Crane said, and her voice had the peculiar calm of a woman who had decided she was already dead. "If the reactor's spooling up after a cold start, the magnetic containment will be unstable for the first ninety seconds. If there's a containment failure in ninety seconds, this whole deck goes."
"Then we will be gone in eighty-nine," Kain said. "Pell."
"Aye, sir."
He moved.
The way Pell moved across the deck of a dying ship was the way water moves downhill, around obstacles, by instinct, by thirty years of running away from things he did not want to see. He hit the corridor outside the captain's quarters at a pace he had not managed in a decade. Crane was three steps behind him. Orin's boots rang against the deck plating as the young officer kept up the rear guard of a man who had never before rear-guarded in his life.
Along the corridor, doors were opening on their own. Cryo-bays he had not seen in his first walk-through were sliding open as the reviving ship's systems went through their housekeeping. He glimpsed shapes inside, glass coffins, faces obscured by frost and time. He did not stop to count them.
In the main hold, the cargo was already gone. Crane's rigging team had taken everything they had come for, loaded onto the second shuttle, and gone. But in the corner where they had secured Dr. Mira Tasso, unconscious on her stretcher after a blow to the head from a falling fixture, the stretcher still waited.
Pell hooked his hands under the stretcher's lift handles.
"She still breathing?" Orin asked, coming up beside him.
"She will be," Pell said, "if we move."
They moved. The stretcher bumped and rocked across the deck. Crane was ahead of them, working the cargo lift controls by hand because the ship's reviving AI had not yet given her the codes. The lift doors parted. The shuttle bay yawned below them.
And then the ship spoke.
It was a sound like nothing Pell had heard in thirty years at sea. A subsonic moan that came up through the deck and into the chest and sat there, a sound that said the Barnaby Sweeting had woken enough to notice it had been robbed. Alarms began to chime in sequence, ascending pitches, the color-coded language of a vessel in distress. Through the shuttle bay's open maw, Pell could see the void spinning beyond the lip of the hull, and stars he did not recognize.
The lights flickered. Came back red.
"In," Kain said.
Crane went over the lip first, dropping onto the shuttle's lower deck. Orin followed with the comm unit, bleeding static. Pell walked the stretcher to the edge of the bay, swung it around, and lowered it over the side on its tether, hand over hand, while Crane caught it from below. His shoulders screamed. He ignored them. He had been ignoring his shoulders since the Leonid Belt.
He dropped onto the shuttle deck. The ramp was still up. The cockpit lights were cold.
"Pilot her out, Pell," Kain's voice came over the internal. "I'm sealing the bay."
He dropped into the pilot's seat. Hands found the ignition studs by feel. The engines coughed, caught, coughed again, then bit down on the void. The shuttle shuddered. Pell fed it thrust, more than was wise, more than was safe, and the small craft leapt from the Barnaby Sweeting like a rabbit flushed from a hedge.
Behind them, through the closing ramp, Pell saw the derelict's bay lights surge and die. He saw a shape in the corridor, dim, moving, not one of the bodies in the pods. He did not look long enough to identify it.
"Distance," he said.
"Four hundred meters and holding," Orin replied, voice tight.
"Hold it."
The reactor light on the diagnostic panel, the one he had been watching because he had taken to watching things instead of sleeping, spiked from amber to white to a hot angry color that had no name in any lighting manual he had ever read.
"Brace," he said.
The Barnaby Sweeting came apart at the seams.
The flash was not fire. Fire needs air, and the Barnaby Sweeting had been breathing vacuum since the captain set her down. The flash was light released from the magnetic bottles that had held it for two years, the contents of a working reactor venting to hard vacuum all at once. A sheet of white, then a long deep silence that Pell felt through the shuttle's hull as a pressure rather than a sound.
The ship did not explode. It unfolded.
Pell watched through the rear monitor as the elegant old survey vessel broke into four pieces along her keel, each section drifting away from the others like petals falling from a stem. He saw, briefly, in the second before the flash blinded the camera, two shapes tumbling out of a corridor in the foredeck. They drifted a long time. The camera lost them against the stars.
He turned the shuttle away.
The engines hummed. The cabin smelled of ozone and old sweat and faintly of the tea he had not finished an hour ago.
"Status report," he said into the intercom.
"Commander has the core," Orin said from behind him. "Secure. Wrapped. She's got her hand on it like she's afraid it'll run."
"Crane?"
"Alive. Asking me very politely if I am okay, which means I'm not."
"Tasso?"
Orin paused. "Still out. Vitals stable. The doctor's going to have a hell of a story for the infirmary."
Pell grunted. He oriented on the Cassius. The patrol ship hung in the black, a slim bright splinter against the deeper black, her running lights patient as always. She had been waiting for them. She had always been waiting for them.
"Kain," he said into the intercom.
A pause. "Boatswain."
"The captain's body. We left him."
Another pause, longer this time.
"Yes," she said.
Pell nodded at the empty air. He had known she would leave the captain, and he had known he would not. There was no good in saying so. There was no good in any of it, only what was done and what was not, and the count of those things in Pell's ledger, after thirty years, was a sum he had stopped trying to add.
He pushed the throttle forward. The shuttle answered. The stars wheeled by, distant, indifferent, the same they had always been. He thought of the captain with his book, and his tea, and his face at peace in the lamplight.
He thought of the shape that had been moving in the corridor, that he had seen and not seen, that he would not talk about over drinks.
He thought of the foil-wrapped shape in Commander Kain's hands, and what Admiral Drax Karn would do when she learned what was on it, and what she would do if she ever learned the cost of it.
"Boatswain to Cassius," he said into the comm. "Boarding party returning. One casualty, contained. One... package. Request priority dock and a hot pot of tea."
The Cassius answered, steady as a heartbeat, steady as the grave.
Pell flew on.