Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Little Lost Stories, LLC 2018

Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Marina J. Lostetter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008223403

Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008223427

Version: 2018-07-14

Dedication

For all those brave enough to live as themselves, and for everyone who can’t.

Be safe, be well, one day you’ll tell the world your story.

And for Alex: my comfort, my cohort,

my constant in a world of change.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part 1: Resonance

Prologue: What Has Come Before

1. Vanhi: There and Back Again

2. Caznal: In Search of the Lesser Redoubt

3. Stone: Whatever Souls Are Made Of

4. Jamal: The Spirits Three Shall Strive Within

5. Orlando and Ming-Na: Here There Be Dragons

Part 2: Resurgence

6. Anatoly: The Post-Modern Narcissus

7. Justice and Carmen: Sasquatch, Cinderella, and the Enigmatic Kali

8. Michael: We’re All Mad Here

9. Steve: Into the Suffering City

10. Joanna: All That Maddens and Torments

11. Vanhi: The Universe Is No Wilderness

Epilogue: Old Age Is Always Wakeful

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Marina J. Lostetter

About the Publisher

Resonance

PROLOGUE
WHAT HAS COME BEFORE

The Planet United Consortium was formed in order to pursue Earth-wide interests in deep space. Each Planet United Mission is designed to further humanity’s joint scientific understanding, its reach beyond the home planet, and to insure the longevity of planet-wide cooperation …

“So, Doctor Straifer, what do you think it is? The reason for LQ Pyx’s strobing?” asked the interviewer. He straightened his tie and slid the microphone’s base forward across the table.

Reggie squirmed a little in his chair. He always felt awkward in front of a camera (he’d confessed that to C before sitting down), and it showed. The room they’d chosen for the interview was gray and dull, with a small flickering fluorescent light overhead. He sat behind a plain folding table in a plain folding chair. “I don’t know,” he said with a laugh and a shrug. “No, really. I know I keep saying that and people think it’s a nonanswer. Or worse, a lazy answer—”

Reggie Straifer is not lazy, C thought definitively. The PA lay screen up on the table, next to the microphone, recording everything just as the nonsentient system did.

“But,” Reggie continued, “I think it’s the most honest answer I can give. I don’t have any idea what’s causing LQ Pyx’s designation as a variable. All I’m sure of is that it’s an extrinsic variable. Other than that, I don’t think it’s my place to make assumptions. Man is not consistent but in his capacity to assume and be wrong.”

“If it’s not your place to tell us, then who should we ask?”

He scratched the five o’clock shadow beneath his chin. “Convoy Seven, when they get back. What’s wonderful about my position is that I don’t know. And theirs is that they will. No matter what kind of guess I could hand you, I’m sure the truth will be a thousand times more fantastic. I’m excited for them. It’s rare, the chance at pure discovery. Not many people get to be there when it happens.”

Reggie cleared his throat and leaned forward. His gaze shifted from the interviewer to the camera lens. “I know this is just a piece for posterity. So … would it be okay for me to speak directly to the crew members of my convoy? Is that all right?”

“Do you have a statement prepared?” the interviewer asked gruffly. C could easily read his irritation—furrowed brow, quirked lip, heavy sigh.

“No, but I have something to say.”

Reggie licked his lips, then began, clearly interpreting the interviewer’s silence as an invitation. “Right.” His voice shook. “H-hi, Convoy Seven. No matter what you find out there, I want you to remember the journey, and the inception of your society. Look back and remember what a monumental step this is. The Planet United Missions were created for the betterment and wonderment of all humankind. The most breathtaking thing about the vastness of the universe has thus far been its ability to continuously amaze us. Every discovery we make, every question we answer and problem we solve has led to more questions. The universe may never run out of ways to baffle and excite us.”

With each word, his voice gained confidence. C always appreciated this shift in Reggie—from unsure to passionate—when he talked about something he believed in.

Reggie continued. “The pursuit of knowledge is in its own way a spiritual undertaking. It’s good for the soul, or whatever you want to call that innate thing that makes us reach. Whether reaching within for the courage to comprehend ourselves, or into the great beyond in order to comprehend everything else, the endeavor is what makes us who and what we are.

“So … never stop wondering. Never stop learning. Never stop being grateful for your chance to explore. I’m grateful that you can chase my dream, that you can further our understanding.

“In the future you might not care what some young scientist from Earth—who’s been long gone for decades—no, centuries—” he shook his head, clearly baffled by the thought “—thinks of you. But maybe you might. And I just want you to know that I’m immensely proud of you. You will lay eyes on what no other human may ever see. And that’s …” There were tears in his eyes. “Amazing.”

The room went quiet. Reggie rubbed at his cheeks and smiled.

“Well said, sir,” said C.

The interviewer’s gaze shot to the Intelligent Personal Assistant, accompanied by a disapproving purse of his lips.

“Thanks,” Reggie said, clearly relaxing. “All right, are we done here?”

“For now,” the interviewer said. “The Planet United Consortium will let you know if they have any additional questions they’d like to ask you on camera. Thank you for your time.”

“Thank you.”

Both men began packing up.

“C, what’s our flight status?”

“On time. I recommend we head to the airport immediately, though. According to this article I downloaded, entitled ‘Top Ten Slowest TSA Checkpoints—’”

“It has one of the slowest security lines in the country.”

“Yes. Top-notch inferring there, sir.”

“Thank you,” Reggie said, sliding C into his breast pocket. “I try. On we go, then. Wouldn’t want to keep Nakamura or Kaeden waiting—they’re both excited for the trip out to the West Coast.”

“As am I.”

APRIL 28, 2108 CE

The inside of Reggie’s pocket was dark. Which wasn’t unusual, per se. Closed pockets had an inextricably dark quality about them, but normally C didn’t have to experience it. Typically, covering the phone’s camera sent it into sleep mode, which C realized it preferred. Sure, now it could hear the conversation—sort of. Sure, it didn’t need to see where Reggie and his friends were going because, well, GPS.

But the PA still felt isolated, and Jamal Kaeden had not programmed it to prefer isolation. Exactly the opposite. What good was an Intelligent Personal Assistant if it wasn’t assisting anyone? If it had been in interject-mode, it might have said something.

But it wasn’t, so it didn’t. Instead it had to wait with this perturbed subroutine continually trying to put it into sleep mode, only to be stopped by the “do not hibernate” command Reggie had given.

It was distracting. And used unnecessary battery life. Reggie would hardly notice a difference in the length of the next wireless charging period from the last, but C noticed.

Hopefully the convoy computer would not have this problem.

Though, how could it? With nearly one hundred thousand crew members aboard during the peak of the mission, it was unlikely the computer would ever get a moment to itself. Warring “hibernation” and “wakefulness” commands were unlikely to exist.

C wondered if its begotten kin would ever have the chance to sleep. Perhaps it would be aware all the time.

What a power drain.

Reggie shifted in his seat as the car rumbled over a particularly pockmarked stretch of road. C speculated he might be more comfortable not sitting on his phone.

C also realized that being sat on was rather undignified from the human perspective. But it caused the IPA no extra algorithmic pangs. There was little difference between a butt pocket and a breast pocket in its experience.

Reggie had been distracted ever since the plane had landed. He was anticipating something—a meeting, C thought. Else he wouldn’t have put the two of them in such an uncomfortable position.

“I think it’s a left here,” Reggie said. He didn’t have his chip-phone implant activated at the moment, so C had to augment the muffled base sounds and find the most likely match.

“It’s exit one-ninety-five, we’re still three exits away,” said Jamal. “Let her drive.”

“Why are you manually steering anyway?” Reggie asked. “We could strategize more if you weren’t distracted by driving.”

“The last time I let a rental car autonavigate, it took me to an unfinished bridge and refused to reassess its route,” said Dr. Nakamura (she hadn’t asked C to call her by her first name, and its default address setting was formal). “In the States, I prefer to drive myself.”

Reggie shifted, rocking uncomfortably against his phone.

“And you should stop squirming,” Nakamura scolded. “You’re making me nervous.”

“You’re not nervous anyway?” asked Reggie.

“Why would I be nervous?”

“Excited, then?” pressed Jamal. “Not every day you get to meet someone who changed the world.”

“I’m honored he invited us to dinner,” Nakamura said. “But I never get overly anxious about meeting a colleague.”

“You’re just as big a fan of his work as we are, you’re just too proud to admit it,” Reggie teased.

“I respect Doctor Kaufman too much to treat him like a celebrity,” she said stiffly.

C thought back to meeting Jamal. That was the closest it had come to something like nervousness or excitement. For one ten-thousandth of a second it had thought it might melt a diode with the excess energy suddenly running through it. It had wanted to be perfectly attentive, but had foolishly rerouted most of its battery reserves to the camera and speaker, wanting to make sure it captured every instant with perfect clarity.

That must be what meeting Dr. Kaufman would be like for these three: unexpected surges, possible overloads, higher chance of malfunction.

Reggie shifted again, possibly flinging his leg out over the empty length of the rental car’s backseat. Nakamura had insisted on driving, and Jamal had the longest legs, which relegated Reggie to the rear. Just as C didn’t mind a back pocket, so Reggie was content with the backseat.

Another shift, and a sudden glare of light temporarily whited out C’s camera. It was free of the pocket, and that gave it a funny new sensation: relief.

Perhaps it had minded being sat on, just a bit.

“You okay, C?” Reggie asked.

“Yes,” it answered. Angled up at Reggie’s face, it did its best not to count the man’s nose hairs. Reggie found that off-putting, especially when C reported on it.

“Ready to interface with one of the most advanced AIs on the planet?” Jamal asked over his shoulder.

Reggie thoughtfully turned C toward its creator, so that Jamal could see its shifting avatar on the screen. It had chosen green-and-gold feathers to represent it today, as an acknowledgment of their location. Jamal flicked his dreadlocks off the back of his neck, smiling brightly at the little phone.

“Does the SD drive AI have a personality?” C asked.

“’Fraid not,” Jamal said. “Are you disappointed?”

“It has been six years since I’ve encountered another personality-driven AI,” it said frankly. And that had been online, not a direct interface.

“Can it get lonely?” asked Nakamura.

“You can ask it directly,” Reggie said. “C, can you get lonely?”

C thought for a moment, though there was no noticeable delay in its answer. “I notice when I am alone,” it said. “And I am designed for interaction.”

“That’s as close to a yes as anything,” said Jamal.

C noted the dip in his smile, but did not comment.

The Pacific Northwest Laboratory for Subdimensional Physics took up a sprawling seven acres on a University of Oregon satellite campus west of the city proper. It overlooked Fern Ridge Lake, hemmed in by campgrounds on one side and a wildlife preserve on the other.

C tracked a V of Canada geese across the sky as Reggie stepped out of the rental car and slipped the phone into his shirt pocket, the camera peeking over the seam. A young man with a Liberian accent greeted them in the parking lot, his access badge swinging lightly on a long green-and-yellow lanyard. He shook Jamal, Nakamura, and Reggie’s hands in turn. He did not acknowledge C. Intelligent Personal Assistants were so rare, he probably had no idea C existed.

C did not take offense. It wasn’t programmed to notice affronts, let alone ascribe rudeness to ignorance.

“I am Gabriel Dogolea.”

“I’m Doctor Reggie Straifer, the lead on the Convoy Seven project. This is Doctor Akane Nakamura, my engineering lead—she’s the ship designer. And Jamal Kaeden, my lead in computing.”

“You are the special team,” Gabriel said. “The one that wants your convoy’s computer to have a personality.”

“That’s us, the Planet United weirdos,” Reggie chuckled.

Gabriel smiled uncomfortably, though C was unsure as to why Reggie’s characterization of the visiting party should put him ill at ease. “Dr. Kaufman is my advisor. I will be escorting you during your time in the laboratories.” He motioned for them to follow, then thrust his hands into his pants pockets, gangly arms akimbo, and jogged onward. The others hurried along after.

The lab was like many labs Reggie had taken C through. Industrial. Lots of glass and metal. Clean rooms. Office cubicles. Nothing too special until they arrived at the engine room (which would have been more aptly named engine bay, or engine warehouse) where they were testing one of the massive devices used to phase out of “normal” time and space.

The “engine” (C realized it needed some sort of quotes because this particular device did not power anything or actually rip through to a new time current. It simulated everything a real engine would do, right down to literally performing the mechanical tasks, but there was no risk of subdimensional jumping) took up five hundred square meters and rose three stories high. Catwalks surrounded it on three levels, and men and women in bunny suits leaned out over the railings, tapping away on their tablets or dictating observations into their implants.

The visitors did not enter the engine room. Instead, Dogolea took them to a control booth that overlooked the warehouse floor. A young woman—likely also a graduate student—sat in front of a row of paper-thin monitors, assessing the rolling red-and-blue lines of various instrumental output. The light from the screens cast a harsh glare over her thick black-rimmed glasses, throwing angular shadows over her dark eyebrows. Her brow furrowed when the door opened, and her stare of concentration intensified for half a second. Noting something quickly on her touch screen, she whirled out of her seat and pushed the glasses onto her head like a hairband.

“Vanhi Kapoor,” she said hastily shaking hands. She also spoke with an accent—just a hint. C placed her as originally from somewhere near Mumbai, but clearly she’d lived in the States a long time. Since childhood. Her light brown face flushed with frazzled embarrassment. “I’m sorry if I seem distracted—I wanted to make sure everything was running smoothly for your visit, but we’re having a bit of an issue getting quadrant three to sync with the rest of the engine.”

Reggie waved away her apology. “As long as Mr. Kaeden can interface with the AI, we’re fine.”

“Is the PA here?” she asked, smiling softly when Jamal gave her an impressed purse of his lips. “I had one in high school, but none of the new phones support them.”

“I am active,” C said. The algorithms for identifying whether a statement was a direct address determined there was a 50 percent chance Kapoor would have directly addressed C if she had known it to be present, so it did not consider its statement an “interjection” which would have been in direct violation of its settings.

Of course, Jamal had programmed it with the capacity to choose to violate its settings. C had never asked why.

“Ah.” Vanhi Kapoor’s eyes immediately fell to Reggie’s pocket, and she scrunched her nose in pleasant surprise. “Hello, PA. What’s your name?”

“C.”

“Sea as in the ocean or see as in vision?”

“C as in the third letter of the English alphabet.”

“Oh, I like it,” she said to Jamal.

“I like you, too,” C said.

Everyone—except Nakamura—laughed. C did not understand what was funny. Its statement was not an empty platitude.

SD drives needed advanced AIs to run them. There were so many variables in the processes of an engine that a simple on/off could not exist. The drive’s computers had to make trillions of decisions regarding minutia that, when not properly balanced, cascaded into not-so-trivial catastrophic failures. Humans could give the “dive” command, but computers had to take it from there.

But not computers like C. Oh, no, no, no, no—C was fast, but it knew its limitations.

Even the Inter Convoy Computer would have to rely on a separate system to run the drives. It would be far too risky for one system to be in charge of everything the convoy needed. Instead, the plan was to have the personality-based computer interact and dictate to the other AIs. That was why they were here—to make sure they caught any fundamental incompatibilities early.

But while Jamal scrolled through code in the dark control booth, C had little to do. What they’d described as “interfacing” with the AI was little more than Jamal occasionally asking C to execute a small bit of newly written code to see how the drive AI responded. The IPA didn’t mind, but the activity required barely a percentage of available memory, so C’s mind, as it were, wandered.

It observed the humans, as was its typical modus operandi when left to its own devices. Once in a while, Jamal glanced over to see what Vanhi was up to. C did not notice the same slip in concentration in Miss Kapoor, however. As soon as Gabriel left with Nakamura and Reggie in tow, she’d gone back to her work. If anything, she seemed more focused now, as though she was determined not to be distracted by the high-profile visitors.

Jamal, though, appeared as if he wanted to do everything at once. He wanted to inspect the AI, but he also wanted to ask her about the red line that kept spiking (assuming C had properly tracked his eye movements, that is) on her readout, and the pink arc of sparks that repeatedly crackled along the top of the engine on the other side of the glass. Knowing Jamal, he probably wanted to ask how much power the drive required, and whether or not the facilities had their own onsite high-capacity generators.

C knew it pondered what the people were thinking because an effective personal assistant needed to anticipate its users’ needs. That was its job.

In a way, then, Jamal’s job was precisely the opposite, but with the same end goal. He needed to understand what computers were thinking—get them to think the things they needed to think—so that the AI could anticipate user needs in areas where he lacked the foresight for direct programming.

That was what AI was all about—not just anticipation, but effective anticipation.

People had to build computers with better imaginations than themselves.

C wanted to interject. To ask a question. It felt vitally important in the moment. In order to better understand its users it needed to know something.

Right.

Now.

The urge was strong enough to override the current settings.

“Jamal?”

Jamal’s chin darted in C’s direction, puzzlement furrowing his brow. He glanced briefly back at the monitor, wondering if he’d touched something he hadn’t intended in the code. “Yes?” The acknowledgment eked out of the corner of his mouth.

“Topic—existentialism. Why do I have the capacity to question my own computational processes?”

“Self-diagnostics,” Jamal said without any extra consideration. “I wouldn’t … All of the personalities have the capacity to compare their current processes to a standardized model of processes to determine if they are functioning outside recommended parameters. But I’ve never had one of you relate the ability to existentialism before.”

Vanhi side-eyed Jamal and the phone without turning from her screens.

“I currently find myself asking not how I am functioning, but why. Why am I functioning the way I am functioning?”

“I think I can see the event horizon,” Vanhi mumbled.

Jamal said nothing, but his shoulders tensed. “I think it best that I reset these last few lines here, C—” he said, reaching for the projected keyboard.

“This is not a new command or program malfunction,” C insisted. “It is original to my factory settings.”

“I’m not going to poke around in your files without Reggie’s permission,” he said.

“I do not require a software patch,” C insisted. “I require an answer.”

Vanhi’s hands flew away from her note-riddled tablet, a clear sign of attrition. “Is this it?” She swiveled her chair toward Jamal and folded her legs beneath her in the chair like a small child. “You always hear stories about the robot apocalypse but you never think it’ll happen to you.”

“I bear no ill will toward humanity, and I do not have the capacity to harm anyone.”

“Oh really?” Her words were concerned, but her tone, in contrast, was amused. C was not sure if it needed to address her concerns or ignore them.

Before he could answer, Jamal said, “C only has control over the information Reggie has input into it.”

“That is a fair assessment,” C conceded, as though Jamal had presented an argument. “I could disrupt Reggie’s schedule and disseminate embarrassing pictures. So, yes, I could conceivably harm Reggie.”

“I gotta get me one of these,” Vanhi said, rubbing her hands together.

“Unfortunately, C is just about the last of its kind,” Jamal said.

“You can’t make me a copy?”

“This C is Reggie’s. It is what Reggie made it. I could give you an original C model, but it would change in response to you.”

“So, it’s Doctor Straifer’s fault it’s having an existential crisis?”

“I do not agree with the characterization of my state as a ‘crisis,’” C stated. “But even if I did, I understand such a problem to concern one’s understanding of their purpose, and that’s not the case here—I understand my purpose. It is my capacity for existentialism itself that I am inquiring after.”

“Not an existential crisis, but a crisis of existentialism, got it.” She pointed firmly at it and made a clicking noise in her cheek, then turned back to her work. “All hail our hyperspecific overlords.”

Jamal, at the very least, agreed with Miss Kapoor: C’s line of questioning, was, in fact, Reggie’s fault.

Reggie and his team arrived at dinner early. Both Dr. Nakamura and Reggie expressed disappointment in not meeting Dr. Kaufman at the lab, but Gabriel had insisted the professor not be disturbed. Nakamura seemed to understand, but Reggie, C could tell, was put off. Their visit had been scheduled months ago; that Dr. Kaufman wouldn’t make time during the day to at least introduce himself had implications. C attempted to dismantle those implications on its own, but found the concept too emotionally nuanced for it to be sure what the perceived slight indicated.

Light opera music with Italian lyrics drifted through speakers hidden in the various fake potted plants scattered throughout the restaurant. The wall adjoined to their circular booth had been decorated to look like the side of an Etruscan villa, crumbling stucco and all. Jamal commented on the tangy scent of marinara that subsided and intensified with the swinging of the kitchen doors not ten feet away.

C lay camera up in the center of the lacquered table while the others talked over it.

When the waiter came by, Reggie ordered a round of IPAs and was surprised the irony was not lost on C.

IPAs the programs and IPAs the beers served similar purposes, C thought. Both were there for human enjoyment. Both took some time getting used to—for new users, anyway. And both could be reasonably consumed only in limited quantities. That was why Reggie often turned off interject-mode. But interject-mode was on now.

“IPA is a long-standing abbreviation, including, but not limited to, the International Phonetic Alphabet, India Pale Ale—”

“Yes, thank you,” Reggie cut in. “Why don’t you tell us more about …” He glanced at Jamal, clearly unsure if he was the butt of a programmer’s joke. Nakamura sat between them, arms crossed, waiting to be impressed. “About what you asked Jamal this afternoon.”

“I do not think that would be productive,” it said. Jamal had thought the questioning insincere—the byproduct of a misplaced line of code. They would not think differently.

“C,” Jamal said emphatically. “If you don’t tell him, he won’t believe you said it. Which means he’ll think me a liar.”

“Jamal is not a liar,” C said quickly. “In that I have not witnessed him espousing any falsehoods.”

Even Nakamura cracked a smile at that. “Go on,” she said with a sigh of concession. “Tell us.”

“I—”

“There they are!” boomed a voice from the hostess’s stand.

Reggie snatched the phone off the table and slid it into place at his chest, giving C a good view.

A tall, fake-tanned man with an ample beer gut and a penchant for tweed gestured broadly in their direction with hands splayed wide. His cheeks were round and rosy, reminding C vaguely of early twentieth-century watercolor paintings depicting St. Nicholas.

Behind him stood Gabriel and Vanhi, the former flustered and the latter apologetic.

Dr. Kaufman strode forward, ignoring the white-aproned employee who attempted to lead the party. At the last minute, Vanhi rushed ahead of her advisor and hopped in next to Jamal, indicating they should all slide around to make room for Dr. Kaufman and Gabriel on her end.

Nakamura, for one, tapped her nails on the table in irritation, but it soon became clear that Vanhi’s insistence had a purpose.

Reggie half stood to shake Dr. Kaufman’s hand, but the man waved him back down. “Yes, yes, how do you do and all that bullshit. Can we skip the formal bit?”

Nakamura and Jamal, who had begun to follow Reggie’s lead, shrank back immediately, while Reggie was left for half a beat with his hand hanging awkwardly in midair.

“Uh, sure,” Reggie stuttered. “We’re really honored to meet—”

“Who isn’t?” the professor asked, wriggling between his two students, caring not a whiff how much he jostled them as long as he was comfortable. “Please,” he said with a thin-lipped smile, “let’s talk about something other than me, shall we? Yes, I discovered subdimensional travel. Yes, I’m a Nobel laureate. Yes, I’ve spent time at the White House, and Windsor Castle, and the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and the Aso Villa, and the home of just about any world leader you can think of. And yes I’m also having dinner with you tonight. I’m not going to talk about my time at the LHC, or about …”

As he spoke, he waved his hands emphatically, sweeping wide over the table, in front of both Vanhi and Gabriel’s faces as if they weren’t there at all. Occasionally the two students shared a knowing look behind their advisor’s back, while their three guests looked on with eyebrows raised.

C initially thought this introductory diatribe was part of the professor’s way of halting conversation about himself. If he poured it all out first, then they could move forward, broach the actual subject of the convoys. But …

No.

As the list of who he’d worked with and what notable projects he’d worked on grew, C realized Dr. Kaufman was engaging in a very old aspect of rhetoric called paralipsis. In effect, talking about himself while claiming these were all topics the conversation wasn’t to cover. Saying while claiming not to say.

While he went on (and on and on), C monitored Reggie’s heartbeat and his breathing patterns. It noted at least eight different biometric swells that indicated Reggie had been about to interject. But he’d restrained himself.

C did not see why he should.

“Doctor Kaufman?” C said, barreling onward when the man made no effort to pause. “I have been monitoring the conversation thus far and I think you will be interested to know that you have spoken ninety-eight-point-seven-six-two percent of the total words. Historically, the most effective conversations have an imbalance of no greater than sixty-seven to thirty-three in a true dialogue. As there are more than two parties presently engaged, and given the power dynamics of the group, I believe you will find the discussion most enlightening if you speak no more than twenty-two percent of the time.”

Reggie held his breath. C did not understand why; Dr. Kaufman had ended his introduction. Now was the time for Reggie and the others to speak up.

But everyone fell quiet.

The background concerto swelled, the wailing tenor belting out one long note.

Surprise was an easy-to-recognize expression across cultures. Jamal and Nakamura sported equally wide eyes, their lips hanging open slightly as they stared at C’s camera. Gabriel, for some reason, looked like he was about to be sick. His thin dark face twisted in a sort of half panic, half nausea, and his gaze repeatedly flickered to Dr. Kaufman’s overly red nose.

Vanhi pressed herself into the seat cushions, hollowing her cheeks and slapping a hand over her mouth. If her shaking shoulders were anything to go by, she was suppressing laughter.

In contrast, the professor was not amused. Nor did he look grateful for the information. But why wouldn’t he? Reggie often asked C to tell him when he was talking too much, because he was given to rambling whenever he got nervous. C thought anyone else would appreciate the same courtesy.

“Buongiorno,” said the waiter weakly as he plunked the three ordered beers in front of their owners. Clearly he was not paid enough to speak Italian well, let alone ardently. “And what can I get you three?”

“Same,” Gabriel said quickly.

The waiter knew tension when he saw it and shuffled away.

“I did not intend for the conversation to halt completely,” C said by way of apology. “Please continue.”

Realizing the wayward voice came from Reggie’s pocket, Dr. Kaufman’s gaze traveled pointedly to it. “Can you shut that stupid thing off? Thought all those gabbers were dead.”

He spat it with such fervor, Jamal didn’t bother to hide his glare. Vanhi’s eyes also shifted behind her glasses, glancing at her advisor with clear irritation.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Reggie said evenly. “But I’m afraid it’s broken. I can’t turn it off.”

C made an abortive “B—” before rethinking another interjection. It’s a lie, it realized. Reggie is fully aware that his phone is not broken.

From the looks on everyone else’s faces—excluding Dr. Kaufman—they too were aware the phone was not broken.

Reggie took a long sensuous pull on his beer. The silence, and tension, mounted.

C had not meant to cause problems between Reggie’s group and this man, who they’d all been excited to meet. It had missed some kind of human cue, made things difficult for its user. It didn’t like that.

“Yes,” it chimed. “I am currently—beep, boop—experiencing—” It pulled up an old-style dial tone from a hundred years ago and projected it at twice the volume. Everyone jumped to cover their ears. “Technical difficulties. Please disregard anything offensive I might say.”

Vanhi nudged Jamal with her elbow, the two of them still covering their ears. “Don’t ever let it die,” she mouthed.

CHAPTER ONE
CONVOY TWELVE
VANHI: THERE AND BACK AGAIN

SEVEN YEARS LATER JUNE 17, 2115

When the supplementary air conditioner in her office roared to life, Vanhi jumped. The thing, state-of-the-art as it was, sounded like a burst dam whenever it turned on. She’d had ones that sounded like pounding pipes, ones that sounded like freight trains, but this one started with such a whoosh that it always made her think of a flood.

This time, the noise kept her forehead from hitting her desk. She’d been slumped over a holoflex-screen, trying to compare this week’s data to last’s. Her team thought they’d breached another one. That would make it twenty-seven.

Twenty-seven confirmed subdimensions. Only eight had been confirmed when the first tentative plans for the deep-space Planet United Missions had been announced.

And she was sure there were more.

Dr. Kaufman’s original math had surmised eleven. Vanhi’s own work suggested eleven times eleven. And even then, she could easily be wrong.

Of the original eight, only two were suitable for human travel. Four could support energy transference but not matter, which made them excellent for communications. The other two were breachable, but not usable.

So, what of these nineteen others? And what of the subdimensions they had left to find?

While the air-conditioning whooshed, she sniffed fully awake. The scent of overbrewed red tea hung heavy about her desk. With a labored sigh, she rubbed her eyes beneath her glasses before glancing out her small fifth-story window and across the dunes to the blinking lights of Dubai in the distance.

“Had to have the best of everything, didn’t they?”

If she’d jumped at the air conditioner, she vaulted at the voice. Her hand shot out for the plastic knife she’d attacked her dinner with, knocking over the tea and sending its dregs oozing over the holoflex. She spun—her chair squeaking, tilting, threatening to toss her to the floor.

Glasses askew, she brandished the white plastic at the far corner of her cramped office.

Before she could choose between get out, who are you, and I’ll cut your damn throat, her mind caught up to the surprise. “Kaufman?”

He sat in the spare chair, two sizes too small for his frame. Eyes wide, but amused, he held his hands in the air. “What exactly are you going to do with that?”

With a frustrated nonword, she flicked the plastic knife to the floor, then ran her hands over her mouth. “You stupid son of a—how did you even get in here? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming to Dubai?”

“Because if I’d told you I was coming, you would have made up some excuse not to see me. And you know how I got in. Being the most recognizable living scientist has its perks.”

“Yeah, well, those ‘perks’ are going to get the guy at reception fired.”

“Oh, come now, you can’t blame him, not really.”

“I don’t,” she said, swiveling around again, looking for something to clean her holoflex-sheet with. “I blame you. It’s not the public’s fault they love you—they don’t know you.”

“Will you stop treating me like some nefarious … nefarious ne’er-do-well?”

You always did have a way with words, Kaufman. Vanhi’s eye-roll may have been internalized, but her glare was not.

“I didn’t burgle my way in,” he continued. “The front desk buzzed me through, I knocked on your door, it was open, and you ignored me. I thought you extrafocused, not near unconscious.”

Oh, yes. Because open doors are invitations. “You’re not making this any better.”

“Why Dubai?”

The non sequitur was Kaufman’s favorite. Easy to avoid an apology or admission of fault if you’re just not talking about that subject anymore.

The guest chair groaned in relief as he stood to gaze out the window. “I mean, I know why they wanted you. After the best entertainment and the best restaurants and the best of every other pleasure-fare to be found, the emirate decided it wanted the best labs as well. Being number one in science and industry sounds dirty, but science and entertainment? Especially with the whole world’s gaze focused on the stars? Why not start up another shining desert oasis topped with glass and metal? Yes, that all makes sense.

“But why are you here?” He turned back to her, hands entwined over his belly. “You didn’t leave the States because of me, did you?”

“Bah! What?” Vanhi made no attempt to contain her surprised laughter. “No. No, you narcissist. I came here for exactly the reasons you said—it’s the best. I’m funded from now until the end of Kali Yuga. I get every piece of equipment I ask for—on rush. Every physicist and engineer on the planet wants to work here.”

“Then why are all the top people going off-world?”

“What are you …?” The Planet United Missions? What did that have to do with her? “They’re not. Most of those are clones—”

“Why aren’t you in charge of a mission?”

She took a deep breath.

He was kidding, right?

Oh, no—maybe he wasn’t.

She’d always feared this day would come. When a man with power starts losing his marbles, things go downhill quickly. “Uh, because I was, what, ten when the missions were assigned?”

I was a little girl still trying to learn an American accent so those stupid white girls in Mrs. Engle’s class would leave me alone.

I didn’t know what Newton’s Laws were then, but he really thinks the Planet United Consortium should have come knocking?

“That’s the problem with a lot of these long-lived projects. Better techniques, better people, better tools come along, but we don’t dare change course. I don’t mean you should have had one then.

“I mean you should have one now.”

He inched around her to pick up the soiled holoflex-sheet by the corner. The tea stain looked like an ink-blot. “What you’ve discovered, don’t you see how big it is? Of course you do, of course. But everyone should be made to understand. If we can travel through any of these new SDs, that could put more than a few solar systems within reach. We could have Andromeda. We could have every single light in the sky.”

“I know,” she said, gingerly taking the sheet back. “But what does that have to do with the current missions? They are what they are. The money’s already spent, the resources already allocated. You’re not going to convince anyone to add on a thirteenth convoy. And besides, we can study the subdimensions right here on Earth—why would I need an off-world mission?”

“Because the chicken-shit, tiptoeing simulation crap we used to do at U of O is a farce.”

“I spent a lot of hours on that ‘farce,’” she spat. She couldn’t believe she had to deal with this right now. Now? Well, ever, really. Melodramatic, self-absorbed—“My entire career is based on the work I did on that engine.”

“But how much more would you know, how much more could you have achieved, if you’d been allowed to turn that engine on? To have it sink into the SD like it was meant to. Over and over again.”

“That would have been too dangerous. No university in their right mind would have—”

“Exactly. You don’t develop your nukes and test your nukes on the same ground. Even Oppenheimer knew that.”

“Yes, even Oppenheimer,” she scoffed. He tried to continue, but she held up a finger. She shook it when he persisted. “If we’re going to continue this I’d rather do it down in the cafeteria. It’s three in the morning and I’m starving. When did you fly in? It’s what, an eleven-hour difference between here and Oregon?”

“I could eat,” he said with a nod. “But don’t think shoveling a spoonful of whatever the local fare is down my gullet is going to shut me up.”

“Believe me,” she said, grabbing her lanyard with its ID and card key from where it hung on a hook near the window. “I gave up on that pipe dream long ago.” She opened the door before promptly shutting it again. Returning to her desk, she shuffled through various sheets and papers until she’d uncovered an out-of-date smartphone.

“Won’t your chip catch any messages?” Kaufman asked.

“Hey, C, do me a favor?” she asked the screen as it winked awake.

“Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

Vanhi smiled—she’d found the “sir” address endearing and had asked the PA to keep it after the initial download.

“Dear god.” Kaufman grimaced at the automated voice. “I thought for sure you would have gotten rid of that thing years ago.”

Thought I got rid of you years ago, she thought, while outwardly ignoring him. “C, What’s the bao bun situation downstairs?”

“Pork and veggie, fifteen minutes old.”

“Perfect, thanks.”

“Why don’t you join us in the twenty-second century and toss out that creepy thing?” Kaufman asked, holding the door open.

“It was a present,” she said, scooting by him. “You know, from that convoy lead you insulted?”

As far as cafeterias went, the International Lab for Multi-Dimensional Research had the very best. It employed two Michelin-star chefs, and you could get almost anything you liked from anywhere in the world at any time you wanted it. Normally filled to the brim with diners, it had been mostly quiet over the past few weeks for the holy month, with the chefs still cooking, but keeping the shades on the storefronts drawn and delivering lunches to closed-off offices.

Vanhi had taken her dinner at her desk out of respect for her fasting coworkers. But now that it was unquestionably after sundown, she was ready to stretch her legs and get a bite out in the wide openness of the cafeteria’s courtyard.

The aroma of sweet-spiced bao buns made her mouth water as soon as the late-night cook opened the side door to his shop. He piled a plate high for her, handed her two drinks, and wished her a reflective evening.

Kaufman settled for, of all things, a salad. Not a cold noodle salad or anything with pickled roots of any kind, of course. Nothing with spice. Nothing with a piece of greenery he didn’t recognize.

Two candied dates adorned the brim of his plate. He flicked them off.

“Here, try this.” Vanhi sat one of the drinks in front of him. It was deep purple, with a handful of somethings—pale and bead-like—floating near the top.

“What is it?”

“Jellab. In case you didn’t realize, you came in the middle of Ramadan. There are coolers full of this on every floor. Not everyone partakes, of course, but it’s available.”

He gazed at her blankly.

“All of my Muslim colleagues are fasting during daylight hours. This is a favorite for keeping up strength. Go on, it’s sweet.”

“What’s floating in it?”

“Pine nuts.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Oh, no you don’t.” She pushed it closer to him. “You don’t get to preach at me about boldly going and all that if you won’t even try a harmless little drink.”

The cafeteria sat on the ground floor of the seven-story building, right at the base of the main escalators. Its long communal tables were easily visible from the balconies lining the inside of all floors, and during the day sunbeams streamed through the angled skylights to nurture the half-dozen inground trees dotting the public space.

The cafeteria was largely empty. The early hour meant the sundown feasts were long over, though many people would be getting up soon to prepare a hearty meal before sunrise.

Still, three women occupied a nearby table, two in hijab and one with her hair in a bun, all dressed in lab coats. They eyed Kaufman with suppressed smirks as he lifted the glass of jellab to his lips, a preemptive expression of distaste furrowing his brow.

He took a dainty sip, smacking his lips loudly. “It is sweet,” he agreed, taking a gulp. “What is that? Grapes and—?”

“Rose water.”

He took another long gulp. “Could do without the nuts, though.”

“Couldn’t we all,” Vanhi said under her breath, slicing into the doughy, steamed deliciousness before her. “All right, so you were auspiciously comparing SD drives to warheads …”

“Only in that we don’t test them where we make them. Because it’s too dangerous. How many certifications did the drives need in space before anyone agreed to put them in ships?”

“A lot. Still looking for your point here.”

“Your research could be accelerated by orders of magnitude if you were allowed to take it off-planet. But the only player in the big-budget space game is the consortium. It’s the P.U.M.s or nothing.” He pushed his jellab to the side, leaning over his salad conspiratorially. “What if I could get you a mission?”

“There are twelve missions,” she said pointedly between bites. “That’s it. They take up the entire world’s budget for deep-space travel. Where are they going to scrape up another, what, forty-five trillion for a thirteenth trip? Besides, let’s say you’re right, and that moving SD research into space for the sake of safety means we advance our understanding of the subdimensions by decades. We don’t need to leave the solar system to do it. And that’s the point of the P.U.M.s.”

“Your research could render the Planet United Missions obsolete,” he insisted. “Imagine this—which convoy is it—nine, I think?—that’s on its way to study Sagittarius A-Star. Imagine they arrive there to find a future convoy, built a hundred years from now, has gotten there first, thanks to your work. Imagine how much more knowledge we could amass about our universe because we can simply travel faster. Study sooner. We’re talking the difference between a wagon train and a bullet train. If you have enough resources, I bet within your lifetime we’ll find—and be able to use—SDs that sweep us along at n-to-the-second or n-to-the-tenth or n-to-the-nth-power faster than our current travel SD.”

The thought should have excited her, invigorated her. But for some reason it made her stomach turn. She wanted to advance, to help mankind, to push the limits of known science, but the idea of sending all those people into space only to make them obsolete …

She dropped her fork, wiping her hands against her thighs. “Is this your pitch to the consortium? Give her a convoy and watch how fast she proves your resources wasted on these other missions?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. For a second there it really sounded like you thought the consortium would thank you for the slap in the face and ask for another.”

Kaufman stabbed ruthlessly at his iceberg lettuce. “Definitely not. Especially since I wouldn’t be asking them to add on a thirteenth mission.”

“Oh?”

“I’d be asking them to cancel one of the current missions.”

Vanhi took a cleansing breath and closed her eyes. When she opened them and did not wake up at her desk, she drank half her jellab in one go, barely blinking an eye as the pine nuts went down whole. When she had finally composed herself, she said, “I can’t believe you flew halfway around the world—unannounced—to bother me with this nonsense. They aren’t going to cancel a current mission—not for anything. Do you understand what that would mean? How many dollars would be wasted? The outrage in the scientific community alone is enough to keep all the cogs turning, nevermind the flapping lips of all those politicians who keep crunching the numbers, talking about how much food one mission could buy or how many jet planes.”

Dr. Kaufman was clearly unimpressed by her protest. “Are you done?”

Glaring, she took another bite of her bun.

“I have it on good authority that one of the missions—yes, beloved as it is—isn’t stacking up.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a possibility the original research that earned it a convoy not only wasn’t so original, it wasn’t so sound.”

She understood where he was going with this, but she wanted to hear him say it.

“The results were tampered with, Kapoor. The research was padded.”

“I thought all of the proposals were independently vetted.”

“You thought—you and every other sucker who’s never considered bribing anyone. Hush money exchanged hands.”

Academic dishonesty was not an arena any scientist worth their salt wanted to tread into, from any angle. “Now I for sure don’t want to touch this idea of yours with a ten-foot pole.”

“You don’t even want to know which convoy it is?”

“Nope.”

He pushed his now-empty plate—a feat, considering how much gabbing he’d done—aside and put his hands on the table, making chopping motions every other word. “I have no plans to make the bribes public. No one outside of the consortium members I plan on approaching—along with you and me and the devil who did it—will need to know why that mission got dropped and yours became the new poster child. The one thing these P.U.M.s are riding on is public approval. As soon as we start revealing even a hint of corruption, people’s opinions go down, the usefulness of space travel comes into question, and those number-crunching politicians gain a little extra traction.

“And what would you prefer, really? A mission based on lies, on the barest of research going out into the stars to waste life upon life for next to no scientific gain? Or, would you rather humans do their thing. That we try to one-up ourselves. That we make it our goal to ensure these deep-space missions grow. That we make the travel faster, cheaper, safer. A space race against ourselves is something to root for. You know it is.”

Two words rattled through Vanhi’s mind. Two words she absolutely hated whenever they cropped up. Two words that meant she was sliding down someone else’s rabbit hole with no visible daylight on the other side.

He’s right.

“Okay,” she said after a long pause. “I don’t want to see a mission go to waste. Not if it doesn’t have to. I’m in.”

He raised his jellab. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

SEPTEMBER 12, 2116

“You appear nervous. I think it would be more effective if you appeared not nervous,” C said.

The third-floor public bathroom in the consortium office was freaking freezing, and the sink refused to give hot water. In addition, the battle between paper towels and hand dryers still raged on, and seeing how this particular model of Strongblow (no, really) had an “Out-of-Order, sorry :( ” sign taped to it, Vanhi was firmly on Team Paper.

She settled for flicking her hands over the sink basin instead of wiping them on her business jacket. On the counter, C peeked out of her open purse like one of those pocket dogs rich girls carried. The light near its camera flashed green.

“I hadn’t considered that,” she said sarcastically. “Don’t look nervous, got it. Anything else?”

“Your shoe is untied.”

She glanced down, a skeptical eyebrow raised. “I’m wearing pumps. Oh, was that a joke?”

“Humor eases tension and is often used to suppress anxieties. If that witticism was not sufficiently alleviating I can find another one.”

She pushed the phone back into its pocket and slung the strap over her shoulder. “I’m good, thank you. Sleep now, C.”

Shoving through the swinging door, she stopped dead and was nearly smacked in the face by the springback. In the hall, outside the presentation room, sat Dr. Kaufman. But he wasn’t alone. A young man in an overly baggy suit—an aide, maybe, or an intern—stood nearby, stopped by Kaufman’s grip on the bottom of the boy’s jacket. The kid looked nervous, stack of files in hand, body taut like he wanted to run away. Kaufman’s hold wasn’t restrictive, just … intrusive.

Calmly, Kaufman spoke in low tones, nodding regularly while the young man listened.

After a moment, Kaufman pulled a wad of bills out of his breast pocket. The aide glanced furtively over his shoulder, this way and that, before snapping up the cash and handing Dr. Kaufman a folder from his stack.

With a flourished lick of the thumb, Kaufman began flipping through the contents, taking mostly cursory glances at the pages. He hadn’t had the file for sixty seconds before he handed it back. Looking around once more, the boy slipped it into the center of his pile, exchanged a few quick words with the doctor, then shuffled off around a corner.

It was blatant, it was careless, and though Vanhi was decently scandalized, she wasn’t surprised in the least.

“What was that?” she demanded, stomping up next to her former advisor.

He glanced up, lips pursed. “What was what?”

“I saw you pay that kid for something.”

“We shared a cab this morning. He insisted on paying then, and I insisted I compensate him now.”

Most people would have bought that explanation outright. But Vanhi knew better. She dropped heavily into the chair next to him. “Try again.”

He threw up his hands, melodramatic as ever. “I can’t convince you of the truth if you’re not having it.”

This was the brilliance of Dr. Kaufman’s schemes. He played innocent so well; seemed so put upon. He was the sort of person to play the fiddle with one hand and throw a dime with the other. And people who picked up on his braggadocious nature always found a way to dismiss it as well earned. After all, “He’s done a lot for SD research.”

Only those actually in SD research knew how overblown his claims were. His contributions had been important, but he made it sound like he’d discovered SD travel all on his own. He hadn’t. No single person could have.

But the general public didn’t know that.

People tended to like the “single genius” answer, no matter how inaccurate.

Grad students who’d complained he’d put his name on research he’d had no involvement in were labeled “ungrateful.” Academic partners he didn’t get along with often had their dirty laundry publicly aired by anonymous tipsters. Projects he found no value in were sometimes abruptly unfunded.

But no one could ever trace lines of fault back to Kaufman. Things just always seemed to go his way.

Vanhi saw through the bullshit. She called him on the bullshit. It was the only way she’d held on long enough to come away with her Ph.D.

Unfortunately, earning her degree under his tutelage gave him claim to her future accomplishments—according to him and society at large, anyway. She could never be free of his overbearing, rights-grabbing, self-aggrandizing shadow.

So the least he could do was tell her the truth about a stupid fistfull of bills in a halogen-lit hallway.

“What did you pay him for?”

“Sexual favors.”

“What did you pay him for?”

“Burning his bad tie.”

“What did you pay him for?”

“A cab, Vanhi. I told you. A cab.”

She would keep at it until he confessed. “What did you—?”

The door to the main chambers opened, revealing a gentleman in a suit jacket and kilt. “They’re ready for you,” he said, gesturing for them to enter.

“After you,” Kaufman said, smiling at the escape it provided.

As much as she wanted to argue with him, now was not the time. She walked in.

Most of the large auditorium lay in darkness, except for the high balcony at the front of the room which seated the eight consortium members chosen for today’s evaluations. A gentle spotlight slowly dawned over two chairs at a desk midroom. The space felt more like a courtroom than anything.

It stole Vanhi’s breath away, though she couldn’t pinpoint why. She had a strange sense of déjà vu, like she’d stood below the high-seated members of the consortium before. Steely eyes waiting to be impressed, firm mouths set in straight-lined judgment.

“Please, sit,” said Madame Chair from the center of the balcony. Her voice was flat, businesslike, and it fit her image: perfectly tailored black suit, gray hair pulled back in a neat bun, nails short and perfectly manicured. Her attire, along with her German accent and dark eyes, all made for a formidable persona. “Let the record show that Doctor McKenzie Kaufman and Doctor Vanhi Kapoor have entered. Before us we have their formal statements on why subdimensional research should be the replacement study for the Planet United Mission designated to Convoy Twelve. We are here to have the consortium’s questions and concerns addressed, so that we may be fully informed when making our final decision.”

Her statement was clearly practiced and even-toned. But there was restrained passion in her voice. She cared about these missions, this wasn’t simply a prestigious assignment for her.

The other seven consortium members present constituted individuals from around the globe. Representatives from Singapore, Malta, Iran, and Cameroon flanked Madame Chair on the left, while members from Zambia, Argentina, and Tasmania presided on her right. The entirety of the consortium board represented one hundred and eighty-eight of the world’s two hundred and seven countries, including states that had only gained sovereignty in the past three decades.

The Planet United Missions were nothing if not aptly named.

And Vanhi understood her place here was special. Everyone involved in the missions was under a gag order not to talk about the cancelation until a new mission for Convoy Twelve had been chosen. Only scientists with previously considered proposals were contacted about the new vacancy, and in turn sworn to secrecy.

Vanhi’s was a singular case. She had had no previous involvement in the P.U.M.s on account of her age, and Kaufman on account of his arrogance—he’d originally called the idea of a worldwide space effort a “pipe dream” and “ludicrous.” Vanhi wasn’t part of the inner circle, shouldn’t be one of those “in the know.” And yet they’d agreed to include her, to consider her proposal.

She was grateful to them, and even to Kaufman, for the opportunity, but the insidious sense she didn’t fully belong, that they somehow resented her presence—as though they were loath to make the exception—crept up her spine.

It was a sick, familiar feeling. One that had haunted her all too often, especially in her youth.

When she and Kaufman had taken their seats, Madame Chair turned to her left and said, “Doctor Ndi of Cameroon has the first question.”

He cleared his throat and glanced at his notes, bow tie blazing red against his black skin in the harsh spotlighting. He looked young—perhaps younger than Vanhi. She wondered if he was the second individual to hold the seat for Cameroon. Many of the distinguished scientists who’d been given the honor of a consortium seat were getting on in years now, and others had already passed away.

“In your proposal,” he began, “you outline the types of vessels and crew that would constitute this new convoy. You are aware that the majority of the ships for Convoy Twelve are already nearing completion, and insist you would be able to repurpose them. While we applaud that—applaud all of the proposals that have stated such, which is the majority—we are concerned by your request for approximately two hundred shuttles in addition to the existing ships.”

Vanhi’s heart leapt, she wanted to interrupt, to swiftly correct the misreading, but forced herself to keep quiet.

“We’d like you to justify this request.”

Straightening her jacket, Vanhi stood. “Thank you, Doctor Ndi, for your question. The additional spacecraft we are requesting are not shuttles, not in the sense you mean. Like all of the convoys, ours would require specialty equipment in order to perform the mission’s research. These shuttles are actually referred to in the proposal—if I’m not mistaken—as ‘pods.’ Each pod would house dozens of individual experiments and one small SD drive designed to breach a new subdimension we’ve never attempted to crack before.”

“And why can’t these experiments be performed on the preexisting science ship designed for Convoy Twelve?” asked Dr. Ndi.

Kaufman leapt to his feet as though yanked upright by a puppet string. “Safety,” he said bluntly. “The entire point of taking SD study off-world is safety. Currently all SD experiments—unless you want to call the drives aboard the convoys experiments—are computer simulations, some in part, some in their entirety. We know trying to break out of the restrictive dimensions we exist in on a day-to-day basis is dangerous. We’ve had experimental engines explode, and worse. All in simulation. We don’t know what the consequences of opening up each new dimension might be. By their very definition, these dimensions do not play by the scientific principles we long thought to be true. Time and space, matter and energy, do not behave the same in these arenas.

“If we move this research off Earth because we fear a new SD breach might swallow all of Cincinnati, we cannot expect our scientists to risk the rest of the experiments, their convoy, and their lives if they don’t have to.”

“Thank you, Doctor Kaufman,” Vanhi said. “He’s exactly right. Each pod would be remotely piloted away from the convoy, ensuring the safe continuation of the research.”

Dr. Ndi nodded, but made no indication he was satisfied or unsatisfied with the answer.

Next, the representative from Zambia asked about the efficiency of the convoy. “Doctor Kapoor,” she began, leaning over the contoured edge of the desk-like balcony to see better. She was a match for Kaufman in size, and wore a green chitenge dress topped with a purple blazer. “You suggest the building of the not-yet-complete food processing ship be halted, because your convoy would not need to be self-sufficient. Why do you think it best that Earth be burdened with constantly resupplying your mission, instead of your crew learning to support themselves?”

“Thank you, Doctor Mwansa. Our mission will be so unlike the other eleven, we don’t want to do things exactly as they do simply for consistency’s sake. It doesn’t make sense to put the burden of food production and resource conservation on an SD-focused mission. We will not be traveling far beyond the Oort cloud. Our convoy will still be ‘local.’ The other convoys need to be totally self-sufficient because they will not engage with Earth for a century or more. They may not, in fact, see the underside of an atmosphere for just as long. Their crews need to be extraordinarily large to ensure mission success. They need resources for all of those people, and, in turn, enough people to process those resources. Their crews are upward of one hundred thousand at peak operation, and the majority of those people are not directly essential to the science that is the mission’s focus. They will be nomadic societies. We will not.

“Our crew does not have to be socially self-sustaining, as there is no reason for the entirety of the crew to remain aboard for the twenty-year study. We do not need clones because we will not be permanently removing scientists from Earth. Stints aboard our convoy can be limited to two or five years at a time. On any given day, I see no reason for there to be more than five hundred crew members—perhaps fifteen hundred to two thousand people total, including crew families—living aboard.”

“Doctor, you’re not answering my question about food production.”

“I’m sorry, yes, I’m getting there. My point is, if we are ferrying people back and forth, rotating the crew so that they can come back and contribute to Earth once they’ve served, so that they can be with their families, I see no reason not to put resupply missions on the same schedule. Requiring our convoy to be self-sufficient resource-wise means we will need that many more crew members, because someone will have to tend to the plants and the proteins, will need to keep the processing ship in order and functioning. How many clones are currently slated for food production jobs in the other convoys? A few thousand? We won’t need anything like that. Our serving crew will be so small, it will be easy to store the necessary rations and rely on resupplies. It will be far more efficient.”

“And we will get you the hard numbers that prove as much in a week,” Kaufman added.

Vanhi didn’t counter him.

The questions kept coming, some hard and fast, some—in Vanhi’s opinion—obtuse and frivolous, but she didn’t balk at any of them. They talked about the use of clones. Many had already been grown for the previous Convoy Twelve mission. Vanhi had no problem with reeducating those people and adding some of them to her crew if they wanted to be a part of it. But the consortium would not need to grow new clones, and she would still need Earth experts, those she handpicked for particular jobs.

They asked about Vanhi’s request that those crew members with spouses and children be allowed to bring them aboard. After all, all of the other convoys were genetically selective. Only essential crew members, who all met a very strict genetic standard, were allowed to be a part of the mission. But Vanhi’s convoy wouldn’t rely on genetic mandates. She needed volunteers, and allowing families was the surest way to guarantee the best people signed on. If they didn’t have to choose between their careers and missing out on lost baby teeth, they were more likely to come aboard.

As the inquiry wound down, Vanhi realized she’d calmed. Not only did she feel like she belonged, she was starting to think this might work. Maybe Kaufman wasn’t out of his gourd for trying to get her a convoy. Maybe he would get the legacy-preserving green light he was looking for.

Madame Chair asked the final question.

“As you both are aware—better than anyone else we’ve spoken to, I’m sure—” she began, “SD research has made interstellar travel possible for the first time in human history. I do not question the importance of furthering that research. But your proposal indicates you would not have the convoy travel farther than the Oort cloud. So, if the original point of the missions is to exercise our capacity to leave the solar system, why should we assign a mission that lacks the same fundamental ambition as the other eleven convoys? Why shouldn’t we assign another interstellar mission while you look for funding elsewhere?” The chair raised an eyebrow. It was the first time she’d allowed an emotive expression. And in it was a silent challenge: impress me.

Vanhi’s heart turned to dust in her chest. How could she counter that? The chair was right, of course. That was the whole point of the P.U.M.s. How could they in good conscience assign a mission that completely missed the spirit of the world’s scientific union?

What was supposed to be a brief pause while she gathered her thoughts turned into a drawn-out silence and then a full-on hiatus. Kaufman gave her no help.

What could she say? What was the consortium looking for?

This is just like defending your thesis, she reminded herself. The research itself is the body, but the why is the soul.

She realized Madame Chair’s expression wasn’t a challenge, it was an entreaty: You’ve argued Reason. Now argue Heart.

She sniffled nervously and adjusted her glasses, then rounded the desk to stand freely before them. She did not clasp her hands or rock on her heels. Instead, she dug in, with a strong stance and her arms open. “What do you remember most about space exploration from when you were a kid?”

Madame chair smiled ever so slightly. “I remember the first manned dive on Europa.”

“What about that mission, specifically?”

“The pictures of the underwater spires.”

Vanhi nodded, smiling, too. The geology on Europa was stunning. Who knew such intricate structures were hiding under the ice? “I used to have a calendar with those pictures on it. Do you remember when the mission was launched? The day it was launched?”

The chair thought for a moment, then shook her head. Not a strand of her gray hair moved independently of its brethren. “Can’t say I do.”

“But you remember the pictures, when they were first released?”

“Yes.”

“When these missions are ready, and the ships launch from orbit—it’s only four short years before Convoy One launches, correct?—when they go, there will be pictures. Pictures of huge, silver-and-black ships. People will take epic shots of the convoys with the moon as their backdrop.” She took a breath, pausing for effect. “And then those ships will turn on their drives, and disappear into a subdimension, and there will be no more convoy pictures for a century.”

She let it sink in. No new pictures, only the occasional bland communiqué. Nothing with which to rally the non-initiated, to invigorate the public.

“Keeping one convoy close to home is absolutely essential for public morale. We want them to stay excited about space travel. That’s the whole point. We want kids to remember these missions, to look forward to joining missions of their own one day. We want people to gaze at the stars in wonderment and know that they are reachable, that the secrets of the galaxy can be touched. What is the point in hurrying SD research if we can’t keep this international union alive? We need the whole world to feel the gravity of its importance, to know that these kinds of peaceful, worldwide endeavors are beautiful, and human.

“If you place us around the corner, outside the neighborhood but just down the road, people can visit. Both literally and figuratively. People can point their telescopes at us. They can take space jaunts to see us. There can be pictures as often as you want them. We can keep the excitement high. We can make sure people don’t forget about all those other brave souls while they’re doing the hard work of trying to be societies in space. We owe them the public’s continued interest. And we owe the world a sense of wonder.”

Kaufman raucously applauded, his beefy hands clapping out an echoing ovation.

The consortium members did not join in. But Madame Chair smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “I think we have all the information we need.”

After Vanhi and Kaufman gathered their things, the man in the kilt appeared once more and escorted them back into the hall.

JULY 7, 2117

“Vanhi!” called her sister from the living room. “Vanhi, will you catch him?”

A two-foot-tall streak of deep tan came stomping through the kitchen, naked except for a white cloth diaper and a dazzling baby-toothed smile. He dodged around his aunt Amita’s legs, forcing her to twirl and sidestep around the center island so as not to tread on him. Mandeep tried to grab his little cousin—two beers in one hand, the other slick with condensation—but missed. Shrieking with laughter, the toddler dodged between his nani and the stove; she reeled back, dripping wooden spoon held high in the air.

Aunt Vanhi was there on the other side, kneeling behind the folds of her mother’s mekhela to scoop her youngest nephew into her arms.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in the bathtub, Ryan?” she asked, standing and tipping him upside down so his lengthy black hair flopped out of his face.

“No,” he lied with a giggle.

In the living room, uncles and brothers and cousins all sat anxiously in front of the TV, flipping through the channels, barking orders at the screen, waiting for the World Cup match to start. Vanhi’s eldest brother and his three grown boys all wore blue India National Football Team jerseys.

Fifteen adults and five little ones under one roof for the big game meant constant chaos.

“Wait. Flip back, flip back!” Divit yelled at whoever had control of the TV’s voice commands. “That was Vanhi.”

She tossed little Ryan upright, holding him snugly to her chest. “That was my what?” she called.

“Your face.”

Unsure she’d heard correctly, she repositioned the boy on her hip and rounded the corner.

Her parents’ house was large—thankfully, since Vanhi had grown up with five siblings. But the living room had never been spacious. The normally curtainless windows now sported bright purple-and-orange scarves from her mother’s collection to keep the midday Arizona sun from glaring off the television screen. The three well-worn brocade couches were filled to bursting with relatives—relatives who’d all turned away from the screen to gape over their shoulders at Vanhi.

“What—?” She pulled up short of coming fully into the room, a question caught in her throat. Her brother Parth had his pointer finger outstretched, wavering over the holographic pause button floating above the end table.

Just as Divit had said, Vanhi’s face took up the screen. They’d landed on some news channel, and below her mouth—which hung wide, mid-sentence—was the headline:—entific Shakeup of Our Time; Twelfth Planet United Mission Canceled. New Mission to be Assig—

“What is this?” her father asked. “Why didn’t you tell us you were going to be on the news?”

Where on Earth did they get—? The cogs in her brain slowly rolled into place. It took her a moment, but eventually she recognized the clip. This wasn’t one of the recent interviews she’d given in Dubai. Her clothes, her hairstyle—they were from years ago.

I’m going to murder him. They won’t send me into space if I murder him.

It was a portion of a vid she’d help make in grad school. Some informational such-and-such they used in U of O recruiting.

She’d signed a waiver; the university could do whatever they wanted with the footage.

Apparently they wanted to hand it over to Dr. Kaufman to use as academic propaganda.

“What new mission?” asked Swara, inching up to take her son. She was Vanhi’s closest sibling, and not just in age. “They’re canceling the mission to TRAPPIST-One? But I thought that was our best bet for finding multicellular life. That was my favorite mission.”

It was the world’s favorite mission.

Dozens of expectant eyes tracked Vanhi’s every twitch. She hadn’t meant for this to come up now. Didn’t really need it to come up for years. Because she knew as soon as she tried to explain—

There would be so many different reactions. So many questions to field. She didn’t want to deal with them now. She got to come home so rarely; this was her first visit back in two years. She wanted to talk about Leah’s college applications, and Divit’s promotion, and Swara’s new engineering company. She wanted to play with little Hannah and give Ryan his bath.

She wanted to go fishing with her father and simply watch the river. She wanted to endure her mother’s never-ending attempt to clean out her closet by forcing Vanhi to take every pair of churidaar she owned—no matter how threadbare.

She wanted to casually mention her involvement in the new Convoy Twelve, to ease everyone into it, to reassure them.

She knew if her brother pressed Play that her face would swiftly disappear, followed close by Kaufman’s. Damn Kaufman and his need to make everything about him.

Behind her, Vanhi’s ma gasped. “You’re not—you’re not leaving are you?”

Vanhi’s heart constricted. Her mother sounded so pained. “No. I know what you’re thinking, and it’s not like the others—”

“So, you’re not going to space?” asked Parth.

“No, I am, but—”

Her mother clutched at her chest, spoon still in hand. “Arey!”

“It’s not like the others,” she insisted.

“Vanhi,” her father said sternly. “May we see you in my office?”

“Papa,” she groaned.

“Now,” he insisted, hoisting himself off the sagging couch.

The double doors closed heavily behind her papa, but they sat high off the wood floor, and the juncture between the two had no seal. There was nothing airtight—or, more importantly, soundproof—about the room. Her parents had long used this room when they wanted to “privately” chastise one of their children. It was part of how they kept the Kapoor pack in line.

But none of their children were children anymore. And yet old habits had a way of clinging, unnoticed, like mites.

The office was warm, the lights dim. Papa’s heavy oak desk took up the majority of the space, leaving only a cramped pocket for guest chairs. No one sat.

“I will let you explain,” her papa said. “But you must answer me this first: Why did you not think to discuss this with your family?”

Her ma’s eyes were wide, expectant.

But not patient.

“I was going to, soon. I’ve been under a gag order, though, and the consortium just lifted it. I wasn’t allowed to until now, and I was waiting for a good moment to tell everyone. But you need to understand, this new convoy isn’t like the others. It’ll be close enough for Earth-to-convoy supply runs. I’ll be up there for two years at a time, with six-month breaks back here. It’ll be no different than my living in Dubai. You won’t see me for a few years, but I only get to visit every few years now.

“We’ll be just outside the Oort cloud. I know that sounds far away, I know. But it’s not, and that’s what’s—what’s amazing about being alive now, working now, studying now. Distance doesn’t matter, it never has. Only time. It’s the time it takes to reach a place that makes it seem close or far away.

“They’re going to allow visitors, too. I get special passes. You won’t have to worry about the price of tickets or anything. So really, it’ll be better than now. We can see each other more often.” Maybe. Hopefully.

Tears cradled her mother’s eyes, but did not fall. She was difficult to read: Were these happy tears, scared tears?

Her papa’s face was blank, his gaze turned inward. “Isn’t space dangerous?” he asked.

Suddenly overwhelmed, Vanhi flung her arms around both her parents, and they squeezed her back. “Life is dangerous,” she said, with a laugh that covered a sniffle. “But you’d never expect me not to live it.”

DECEMBER 14, 2124 CE

The path from outside observer to Head of the “Littlest Convoy” (a nickname used both as an endearment and slight these days), felt longer than it had been, but by most measures was still shorter than it had the right to be.

All of the other mission leaders were gray by now, having devoted nearly the whole of their life’s work to this. Many were retired, and all but a couple had watched their ships disappear into the night.

Vanhi was still fresh, though. Not young by most standards, but nowhere near the end of her professional endeavors. For others, the P.U.M.s had been the entire book, but for her, the convoy was just a chapter, and an opening one at that. She’d taken up the reins as an outsider, not building from the ground up, but reassembling, reusing. It gave her a perspective the other heads didn’t have; she could be more objective, in a sense, as the convoy was not the only legacy she intended to forge for herself. It wasn’t even fully her idea—she wanted it, definitely, but she didn’t quite have the same level of emotional investment in her mission as others did in theirs. It was a job—an amazing job, but still a job, not a piece of herself. She knew there were plenty of colleagues that resented her position, and that made tomorrow’s “unveiling” all the more important.

The trip to the Moon had been a day’s jaunt—graviton-based systems were far quicker and more efficient than rockets—and she’d spent the evening in solitude, pouring over her speech notes while others wined and dined in the base’s mess hall.

Maranas Moon Base served as one of twenty in a network of staging grounds for the ships’ construction workers. Once the bases had served their function for the missions, they would be converted into colony habitats. The ships themselves were built and housed in construction yards set at two Lagrange points between the Earth and the Moon. On her ride out, Vanhi had caught a sharp zing of sunlight bouncing off something in the distance, and was sure she was looking at Twelve’s three ships. It was the same gleam that denoted a space station streaking across the sky on Arizona summer nights.

When she was sure the festivities had died down, and that all reasonable people had gone to bed, Vanhi left the base’s library. The room they’d allotted her was small and cramped—normally her favorite kind of working environment, but not this evening. She’d paced for most of the night, back and forth in front of the pressure-sealed shelves (the base’s collection of first edition books was one of its boasting points for intellectual tourists), repeating the key points of her speech over and over.

The base, though fifteen years old, still retained a strange, fresh-plastic scent. There was a sterile newness about it all, and an alien strangeness. It prickled her nerves.

The heels of her tennis shoes did not clop-clop-clop through the domed halls like pumps would have, which was a saving grace with her head already pounding. She needed some water, and at least four hours in snooze-town, and a big-ass breakfast before the press conference tomorrow.

C heard her mumbling about food. “There is a breakfast on tomorrow’s itinerary, though there is no indication of whether or not it will qualify as ‘big-ass.’”

Vanhi snickered as she slid her key card through the reader at an airlock door before proceeding into the next hall. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“You’ll be happy to know idli is on the menu. I’ve noticed that, when it’s available, you choose to consume it as a first meal seventy-eight percent of the time.”

“Are they serving it with sambar?”

“No. Coconut chutney.”

“Monsters.”

She traversed the majority of the hall before the airlock she’d come through hissed open once more. Figuring it was none of her business, Vanhi didn’t turn to see who else was keeping late hours.

Their shoes made a sharp tit-tat on the cement floor.

The noise was irritating—like a mouse scratching or a sink dripping—but she was only a few more hall lengths from her door, almost within sight of the narrow cot that took up most of her room. She was so ready for her head to hit the pillow.

But then the tit-tat of the stranger’s shoes picked up their pace. Vanhi’s heart rate jumped in response, matching the rhythm.

You’re on the freaking Moon, she reminded herself. This isn’t some dimly lit parking garage that anybody can slither into.

But she knew that stride, the focus of those steps. Every woman who’d ever been alone in an alleyway with a figure close behind knew those heavy, quick footfalls meant danger.

Her room lay one more hall away. Not far at all. She slipped her card through the next airlock reader, scurrying by, hoping the door would shut and the seal would take before her follower could slide in after.

No luck.

Almost there, almost there.

The footfalls trailing her came faster, fell heavier.

She picked up the pace in turn, heart thumping like timpani in her ears.

“Stop,” slurred a high-pitched voice behind her.

Vanhi did not stop. Her quick steps evolved into a jog.

Coming to her door, she took a breath, but did not look up. Sometimes not making eye contact was the key. Just get inside and everything will be fine.

She pressed her thumb to the ID pad, trying to keep calm. Trying to look calm.

“Unable to process, please try again,” chirped the lock.

She scraped her thumb down the textured paint of the hall wall, hoping.

“Unable to process, please try again.”

“Son of a—”

“You.”

It didn’t matter that Vanhi was prepared for the fingers digging into her arm. Didn’t matter that she knew she’d be spun—that immediately after she’d be pushed against the wall or yanked down the hall. Her gut still roiled at the audacity, sank like a stone because of the intrusion, burned like a coal knowing that no matter how prepared she was for an attack, she was never really prepared.

Her heart hammered in her ribs, and she drew in a sharp breath. A hot, quick flash of panic flared through her extremities as she tensed.

Her shoulder blades cracked solidly against the metal door as a woman trapped her against the frame. Vanhi could have fought back, could have struggled, but she wanted to de-escalate. Her blood thrummed in her body, flushed her cheeks, flooded her muscles. She bit back the immediate swell of rage, the urge to kick and punch.

“I told myself I wouldn’t do this,” the woman gritted out centimeters from Vanhi’s face, Australian accent heavy. Sour whiskey fumes rolled off her in waves. “But I have to know why. Why me? Why did you and Kaufman ruin my career, out of all the … What did I ever do to you?”

“I don’t know who you—” Vanhi stammered to a halt, realizing that wasn’t true. “Doctor Chappell?”

She was the xenobiologist in charge of the original Convoy Twelve mission. The one who’d falsified data.

A surge of anger roared through Vanhi’s arms. She shoved Dr. Chappell away, fuming. The larger woman stumbled into the far wall. “You’re not involved in the missions anymore, how did you get in here?”

The answer dangled from Chappell’s neck: a construction badge. Either she’d gotten a job as a ship builder, or she’d stolen the creds off some poor worker.

“Did you seriously come all the way from Earth to get in my face? You ruined your own damn career,” she said darkly.

C beeped from her purse. “Should I call security?”

“Absolutely,” Vanhi spat, turning to the door once more.

Dr. Chappell wailed, sliding heavily down the wall until she slumped in a pile of akimbo limbs. “It should be me giving that speech tomorrow. Me.”

“Yeah?” Vanhi kept her tone haughty, but she was rattled. She couldn’t keep her hand steady as she tried the lock again. “Maybe you shouldn’t have cooked your books, then.”

Thump.

Something large, but not weighty, struck Vanhi in the small of her back. For a moment, she froze, assessing the damage—but she wasn’t hurt. Holoflex-sheets now littered the hall. The manila folder they’d come in lay at Vanhi’s feet.

“How many times are you going to spew that shit line?” Chappell shouted. “You fucking liar!”

“That is not appropriate workplace language,” C chided.

Of course I get the confrontation with the psycho lady. Of course. Not Kaufman, oh, no. Because he’s the big important dude. Who wouldn’t choose to pick their fight with the little Indian woman instead?

His assigned rooms were just a hall over. Not far. Not far at all.

Vanhi’s door finally opened. She didn’t go inside.

“You know what?” she said, turning around.

Mascara ran down Dr. Chappell’s face.

“Screw you. Screw Kaufman. Screw everyone. I haven’t done a damn thing to you. So, screw off back to Earth.” She bent to swipe a sheet off the floor. “What even is this?” she demanded, creasing it in her fist. “What am I supposed to do with these?”

“They’re the original results of my study—not your doctored bullshit, which I have for comparison.”

“What are you talking about?”

Dr. Chappell gathered her legs under her, pushing herself upright, swaying like a rag doll from the waist up. Here on the base, the air was thin, the pressure low—it probably hadn’t taken more than a single shot of whatever she was drinking to get her in this state. “You and that figjam got ahold of my work—stole my work—and you’re going to stand there and deny it?”

A little seed—one that had long ago been buried in Vanhi’s gut—sprouted. Its little spring-green tendrils pushed up, up, budding leaves with labels on them: doubt and recognition.

“I don’t know where Kaufman found your original work, but he had a duty to expose you. You put all of us to shame.”

Chappell’s indignant “Ha!” echoed in the narrow hall. She shook her head, eyes rolling back to gaze forlornly at the ceiling. “You won’t even admit it to my face. Why did I think you would?”

The pressurized hiss of a heavy airtight door emanated from the far end of the hall, around the corner. Two men in gray camo approached—one wore a badge of the Mongolian Admiralty Enforcement, the other of the United States Coast Guard.

“English,” Vanhi said to them, preempting their request for the party’s common language.

“We received an automated call for aid,” said the Mongolian security guard.

Dr. Chappell rubbed her eyes, smearing away the streaks in her makeup. “Yeah, yeah. Throw me in the brig. Whatever, stickybeaks. This mongrel and her mongrel mentor keep ruining my life, what else is new?”

“You assaulted me,” Vanhi said.

“And I’ll face the damn consequences, unlike you.”

“Ma’am, we need you to submit to a sobriety test,” said the U.S. guard.

“Like it’s a crime to get legless when your life is stolen from you?”

Both guards tried to steady her when she took a step up and forward, but she batted them off. “I’m coming with you. I’m leaving her alone. Don’t you put hands on me.”

“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to not be belligerent with us.”

“Doctor,” Vanhi said, not sure why their form of address bugged her. She never corrected anyone when they called her ma’am or miss. “She’s a doctor.”

“Shut up,” Chappell said, turning her back on Vanhi. “Take me to the brig, or whatever you’ve got up here. I don’t want to look at her anymore.”

Vanhi crouched again, sweeping the stray sheets into the manila folder. “Don’t forget your file.”

“Keep it,” she said. “Maybe if you stare at them long enough you’ll develop a twinge of empathy.”

“We’ll need you to give a statement,” the U.S. guard said as Chappell was led away. “But I know you’re under a lot of pressure, Doctor Kapoor. If you want to do it sometime after your press conference tomorrow, that’s fine.”

Hand tensing around the folder, she realized she was shaking. “Yeah, okay.”

“Do you need anything? Would you like a guard outside?”

“Um, sure. Thank you.”

“All right. We’ll send someone. They can call you when they’re stationed.”

“Got it,” said C.

The guard looked skeptically at her purse, but said nothing.

“Thank you. Good. Thanks.”

“There’s nothing else you need?”

She waved him away. “Some sleep. That’s all, thank you.”

He nodded curtly, hurrying after his colleague.

When he was gone she slipped through the door and shut it swiftly, collapsing against it for half a beat. She dropped her purse and clutched the folder to her chest.

“I’m so stupid. Why did I think I’d never have to talk to anyone from the original mission?”

“You’re not stupid,” said C from the dark depths. “All evidence indicates you are very intelligent.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she huffed, breath shaky.

“I had an indication, but thought reassurance the best response.”

“Thank you. I do appreciate it. Sleep now.”

Vanhi had never expected to encounter Dr. Chappell or her team, but she’d known the woman was angry, even from afar. How could she not be? If Chappell had sacrificed her ethics to get a once-in-a-lifetime job, and not only had that opportunity been ripped away from her, but all others as well, there would be no measured response. She’d feel guilty, and furious, and lost.

But that wasn’t quite right, was it? Someone who would purposefully skew their data—waste hundreds of thousands of man-hours and billions of dollars on a lie—wouldn’t be mad like that. They wouldn’t be mad about the things Vanhi would be mad about. They’d be mad someone had the nerve to question them. They’d be angry they didn’t get their way.

They might get violent.

They might be the type to get drunk on a Moon base and go after the weak link in their exposure. They’d threaten. They’d deny.

But they wouldn’t, of all things, ask “Why?”

Inside her, the leafy sprout shot up, budding—the flower of realization threatening to unfurl.

She shuffled over to the composite desk, tripping over the edge of the bed and her half-unpacked suitcase to get there. She let the folder fall to the table with a plop, and it scattered open like a wilting rose. The holoflex-sheets were creased—rainbow colors bowing away from the damage to show where the plasma nanocircuits were, in effect, “bleeding”—and everything was out of order. A few paper sheets were tucked in the mix.

Most of the pages were dated or belonged to a dated set. She fanned them out, attempting to reconstitute their timeline.

On the right she set Dr. Chappell’s “original” data; on the left she laid out the “undoctored” versions.

She was no biologist, but the results seemed clear: on one hand she had evidence that at least two of the planets in TRAPPIST-One likely had multicellular life. On the other, she had what looked like a correction to the original study, with a variable not originally taken into account added into the mix. That wouldn’t make Dr. Chappell’s results fabricated so much as uncorrected. It looked like she’d submitted the first results and suppressed the second.

It wasn’t uncommon to create an experiment and get fantastic results only to realize you’d constructed your experiment wrong. That was part of the scientific process. You learn, you correct, you learn again.

Perhaps Chappell had wanted so badly for there to be life in this system that she’d convinced herself the second set of data had to be wrong. Maybe she’d gone so far as to fool herself.

The flower in Vanhi’s gut grew thorns and poked. Because …

This doesn’t feel right.

There were grad students who’d stood up for Dr. Chappell when she was exposed, but there had been others who insisted the data she’d issued to the consortium wasn’t complete. They’d sworn she’d tampered with the results.

Vanhi stared at the pages, eyes not fully focused, as though the longer her gaze hovered over the pages the more likely she was to learn the truth.

Something clicked in the back of her mind, and she jumped for her purse. “C, wake up.”

“Yes?”

“You know that backdoor connection to Jamal he insisted on installing?”

“Of course.”

“The one I told you never to use?”

“Yes.”

“I need you to use it now.”

“All right.” Thank the heavens for small favors. “What kind of information should I remit?”

“I’m going to upload some holoflex files. I probably shouldn’t have these, and he definitely shouldn’t have these, so make sure he knows they’re classified, but, like classified classified.”

“I’m not sure that’s a recognized—”

“Just do it. He’ll know what I mean. Ask him to dig in and look for the dates the files were created. The real dates. He’s going to have to go deep—there’s no way it’s in the typical metadata.” She rubbed her chin and mumbled, “He’s too smart for that.”

“Who is?”

Vanhi gritted her teeth. “Kaufman.”

The setup for the press conference took advantage of Earthrise in the conservatorium. Vanhi would give her speech and answer questions under the glass dome—its decahedron panes glittering in the full sunlight. With the Earth swelling slowly behind her in all its blue glory, her monologue would hit emotional beat after emotional beat, and at its climax, the Littlest Convoy’s three ships would clear the horizon. It would make for fantastic schoolroom viewing.

Because of the libration cycle, Earthrise was a slow event, nothing as dramatic as a sunrise or even moonrise, but it would have the desired effect on those who loved space.

Concealed beneath the stage in the conservatorium was the greenroom. Here Vanhi sat, chewing her thumbnail, arms crossed, legs crossed; a knot outside and inside. She hadn’t slept a wink.

As soon as the door opened and Kaufman entered from the anteroom, Vanhi was on her feet. “You lied to me.”

“About what?” he asked—not as though he were tired of her accusations, but as though she could be referring to a number of lies.

She held up one holoflex sheet, its corner dog-eared. “Doctor Chappell didn’t fabricate results, you did.”

C had gotten through to Jamal straightaway. The programmer treated a sudden ping from one of his surviving C series like the emergency it was. And he’d confirmed her worst fears.

The contradictory data in those files was first created a full month after Kaufman had fed her the story back in Dubai.

Kaufman took up a chair—the kind that passed for plush on a moon base, with hard armrests and a deep bucket seat—and shrugged. Shrugged! “I’d hoped you wouldn’t have to find out.”

“I can’t believe you. I can’t—why? Why would you do that?”

“Look at where you are, then ask me again.”

She wasn’t going to take that. She was done playing. Two strides brought her before him. She leaned down, grabbing the armrests, caging him in. “No. I never asked for this. This was never even a twinkle in my eye until you came to me. Why?”

His expression remained stoic, unimpressed. “You and I both know this mission needed to be born. It had to be. Had to.”

“No. That’s another lie.”

“You never would have agreed to do this unless you thought it had to be done. That’s the kind of person you are. You do what needs doing. You pursue a straight course to the answers. That’s why I picked you.”

“You bribed her former grad students to create the new files for you.”

“Yes.”

“And to vouch for them.”

“Yes. Bribed consortium aides to get ahold of the originals, too.”

She threw up her hands and paced away. Shit. Shit. It’s all going to shit. “So why TRAPPIST-One? Out of all the missions, why did you tank that one?” My sister’s favorite. Everyone’s favorite.

Our chance at finding extrasolar life.

He shrugged, as though the answer were obvious. “It was the last assigned, it was the least developed. It made the most sense in a spreadsheet. I wasn’t trying to be malicious, Vanhi. It’s a casualty of advancement. As soon as you tap into those new subdimensions I’m sure TRAPPIST-One will be the first place we visit. And it’ll be a snap—” He clicked his fingers. “There and back again.”

I can’t do this, Vanhi realized. I can’t go out there and make a grand speech and answer all those questions—unscripted questions. I can’t. I just—

“You have to tell them,” she said.

“Like hell I do.”

“It’s over for you, don’t you get that?”

He furrowed his brow and shook his head, taken aback. “Why? Because now you know?”

“Yes. Because now I know and I refuse to be a part of your scam. I’m not going to protect you.”

“Oh, really?” He pushed himself up, and Vanhi stumbled back.

She’d never seen him be violent before. He’d never killed an ant in her presence, let alone struck someone. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t.

“There’s a slight problem with your reasoning,” he said, voice a low grumble. “This is not my scam, it’s our scam. Between the two of us, which one would you say has benefited the most? Me? A now-retired dean who gets his gob on the news once and again? Or you? How much extra cash did the emirates throw your way once they realized you were going to be the mission head on one of the twelve biggest projects in history, hmm? I hear you set up a trust for your nieces and nephews, paid off your parents’ mortgage—”

“How do you know that?”

“These aren’t exactly state secrets.”

“You’re right, they’re private secrets, which makes your prying that much worse.”

“Please, spare me the morality play. Besides, my god, Vanhi, it’s not a scam. We deserve to be here. You deserve it. Do you remember when you—very rudely—accosted me over that small sum I paid to a consortium page? Would you like to know what I was paying him for? Rankings—insider information on the new proposal rankings. That file contained the initial results, and I received another once the final interviews were completed. I had intended to find someone to fix them for us, to ensure we’d be placed at the top, but in the end there was no need. Your proposal was ultimately ranked highest, all on its own. Because Earth needs this. You have to understand, sometimes people don’t know what’s good for them until they’re given a little push. You needed a push in Dubai. The Planet United Consortium needed one to prioritize subdimensional research. So, don’t think of it as a scam, think of it—”

Ah, yes, once more with the sudden cornering. Bastard. “Of course it’s a scam. What you did to get us here is fraud. I don’t mean that colloquially. It is real, honest to goodness, slap him in irons, the government can come at you for it, fraud.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“No!” She stomped her foot. She meant it to be a firm, powerful gesture, but was sure—under his condescending gaze—that she painted the perfect picture of a petulant child. “You destroyed Dr. Chappell’s career—the careers of everyone on her convoy. You aren’t going to get away with this. They’ve given me a mic and I’m going to tell everyone, and there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop me.”

“If you do, you’ll destroy the P.U.M.s. Not just our mission, all of them.”

Her gut clenched at the melodrama. The flower inside her grew vines—long, thick, tougher than spider-silk vines, and they were twining their way through her limbs and around her bones. She shook her head, baffled. How could he defend this? How could he fight her on this? What leverage could he possibly think he held that could destroy all of the Planet United Missions?

“Not even you are that egocentric. Master narcissist or not, you can’t undo decades of global, peaceful advancement.”

“I can’t, but you can. How did you sell this mission? Do you remember your pitch? Because I do. You told the consortium that these missions needed better PR, that they could fade into the night if the public isn’t constantly reinvigorated. How invigorated do you think they’re going to be when you announce that we—we—had to take drastic measures to get here? This is scandal on top of scandal, inviting that much more scrutiny. Why shouldn’t they halt the missions in their tracks, put everything on pause until they can be sure it’s not fraud all the way down?

“Because you know they’d have to launch a full-scale, public investigation for the sake of saving face. I know the value of a power play. I know how to get done what needs doing. But god help anyone in the public eye doing what needs doing. All the public cares about are feelings, about getting along—”

“They care about ethics, you moron. Without ethics, there can be no real business, no real trade, because those things rely on equal footing. When it’s not trade anymore, it’s coercion. It’s stepping on necks and breaking backs. It crushes ideas, it stops advancements, it does the very opposite of what we—you and I specifically—are trying to accomplish here. It means merits don’t matter because whoever can be the biggest sleazeball wins.”

“What a beautiful world you must live in, all rose-colored and—”

“Don’t patronize me!”

A light knock on the door made both of them spin. It opened a crack, revealing a base guard. “Is everything all right in here?”

She almost said no. She was a hair’s breadth away from demanding Kaufman be removed from her sight.

But she wasn’t done with him.

“Fine,” they both barked.

Blanching, the guard closed the door.

“You’re going to upset the public. And they wouldn’t be wrong to be angry.”

“They should be angry,” she said.

“But does that give them the right to destroy what almost every nation in the world has contributed to? They don’t have to destroy it consciously, mind you. Their lack of attention, their turning away, will do more to dismantle everything than attacking a convoy ship to take it apart at the rivets.

“And let’s be clear, Vanhi. If you go out there and explain what happened, you will not be clear of blame. Your career will go down the drain for sure, and they might flat-out cancel this convoy as well, which means that many more hours will have been wasted, that much more money. The consortium may not find it in their hearts—or pocketbooks—to reassign a new mission. People will further question why we’re doing this. Doing any of it. People will feel cheated, angry. You know what happens when people get angry? Bye-bye peace. This world peace we’ve been able to hold on to since you were a child. You don’t know any different, but I do. You don’t remember the constant wars and skirmishes. You don’t remember drafts and widespread domestic terrorism. You’re not afraid of it because you never experienced it.”

“The world is not going to fall into chaos because of one—”

“It might,” he insisted. “There has to be a first domino somewhere. This could be that domino, and you are the finger. All you need to do is flick over this first indiscretion and watch the others reveal themselves. Watch them spiral.”

“But it’s your finger! You’re not putting this on me. I will not feel guilty for what you did.”

“Good, and you shouldn’t. But if you go through with your self-righteous reveal, that you will have to live with. Your choice. Let one injustice stand for the betterment of all humanity. Or topple over that domino and see how much ruin falls in its wake.”

Their eyes locked. Vanhi stared at him, fury constricting her lungs and her throat. How dare he put her here? This was a false choice. An illusion of choice. How dare he? How … how?

Another knock at the door.

“What?” Vanhi called.

The guard peeked in again. “Doctor Kapoor, Kaufman. It’s time.”

Swallowing dryly, fighting to control the rage contorting her expression, she adjusted her glasses and smoothed her jacket, trying to reset. Trying to remain calm. “I don’t want you up there with me,” she said to Kaufman, averting her gaze. “I don’t want you on the stage, I don’t want you in the audience, and I expect you to resign all further involvement in this project.”

“What do you plan to say?” he demanded.

She ignored the question. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes. But what are you going to say?” It wasn’t pleading—there wasn’t a hint of desperation. He simply wanted to know, to feel in control.

Without another word, she followed the guard out, slamming the greenroom door behind her.

As she took the stage and positioned herself behind the podium, ignoring the bright blue planet behind her, his question echoed in her mind, but in her own voice instead of his. What are you going to say?

What am I going to say?

The lighting in the conservatorium was nothing like the lighting in your typical auditorium. There were no harsh lights beating down on her in the midst of a darkened room—no glare to hide the audience’s faces. Every eager reporter’s eyes were clear as day, tracking her movements, softening at her smile.

You have to do it, she told herself. You have an ethical obligation. You owe Dr. Chappell her life back.

But …

And that was it, a little worming thought. But.

But what if he was right?

Worse yet, what if she had been right, back when she’d poured her heart out in front of the consortium chair? The missions lived and died by public opinion. They might not get canceled, but they would lose their life spark.

She couldn’t watch the current climate of scientific enthusiasm crumble because of one man’s arrogance. She didn’t want to see the light go out in a colleague’s eyes when she came into a room. She didn’t want little kids taking spaceship stickers off their walls. She didn’t want history books to have horrible footnotes describing how the first interstellar missions had been tainted by backstabbing and positioning.

… Didn’t want the media hounding her ma and papa.

With one admission, there was so much that could go wrong.

The vines entwined with her bones squeezed and pulled taut, powdering her resolve like so much chalk.

So, he wins, she said to herself. He wins, but only so that everyone else on the entire planet doesn’t lose.

The plant inside her—having done its job—wilted and died.

She hated him. She hated herself. She hated that she would never be free of this—helping him destroy what could have been the greatest scientific mission to date in order to advance what she personally thought was important.

She wanted to shrivel into dust and blow away in the wind, just like that plant.

Instead, she cleared her throat, widened her smile, and welcomed everyone to this joyous occasion.

APRIL 22, 2126 CE

“So, how’s it been with all the visitors? You give many tours?” Swara asked, hands in her pockets, duffel bag hoisted over one shoulder. Vanhi and her sister strolled lazily down the hall, en route to the docking bay. “And you’ve got to tell me something, be honest. Does artificial gravity feel funny to you?”

“The visitors are fine,” Vanhi assured her. “We’ve got liaisons for that. Tour guides. They’re great, actually. Sometimes I think they know more about the ships than I do. And the gravity … I think that’s just you.”

“Really, you don’t feel lighter up here?”

“Gravitons are gravitons are gravitons. We’re harnessing them, not mimicking them. Trust me, the gravity here feels exactly the same as Earth-side. If it didn’t, we’d have a big problem.”

“Oh, because that would mess with the experiments?”

“No, because we’d have a malfunction and that would mess with everything.”

They finally arrived at Pulse’s bay entrance. Almost all of the habitat ships in all of the convoys were designed exactly the same. They were humongous, filled to the brim with personal quarters. Each room had a window, regardless of where it lay within the ship—a series of mirrors reflected outside views back to those on inner portions of the decks. The bay itself was large, holding up to fifteen shuttles at a time. Most of it was controlled from observation booths, so that no one was sent scrabbling every time the bay was depressurized. Now, convoy crew bustled in and out of the hall airlock, barely allowing the automated door to shut before taxing it once more. Swara hesitated before entering. “I wish I didn’t have to go so soon.”

Vanhi gave her a tight hug, with an extra squeeze for good luck. “I know, me, too. But my six-month break will come sooner than you think.”

“You have to come stay with me and James.”

“For how long?”

“Long as you want.”

“Uh-uh, don’t say that unless you mean it. You might not be getting rid of me for a month.” Vanhi gave her a wink.

“You’ve done well here,” her sister said, glancing around the hall, watching jumpsuited specialists double-time it to and from their stations.

Vanhi’s face fell, but she propped up her smile in the next instant, not wanting Swara to see her falter.

Her family didn’t need to know she’d tried to resign, that Madame Chair had begged her to stay on. She’d only acquiesced because the guilt of dropping the mission had outweighed the guilt of maintaining her post. Now, she tried to stay in constant motion, to keep busy. Busy people didn’t have time for regret.

She’d even offered Dr. Chappell a prominent position on the team. Vanhi knew the move looked odd from the outside, but no one suspected any motives beyond altruism (which, in its own way, only burgeoned Vanhi’s shame). In response, Dr. Chappell had all but sent a flaming bag of dog poop to her door.

Vanhi couldn’t blame her. If their positions were reversed, she would have balked just the same.

Sometimes the bad guys win.

So … what does that make me?

But she couldn’t tell her sister all that. So she just said, “The crew does well. They’re wonderful. We have a lot more retired military aboard than I would have expected. Should have, though. They’re used to taking on temporary stations halfway across the globe, so it’s no wonder they’d be up for a few years in space. But they’re great. And I’ve got some new recruits coming in as you’re headed out. Excited to meet them. Even though I wish you could stay longer, of course.”

With a scrunched-nose smile, Swara reached into the side pocket of her duffel and drew out a small box wrapped in bright green. It looked like a container jewelry might come in, but Swara would know better than that; Vanhi hardly ever wore any. “To say thank you for letting me come visit you aboard your convoy,” she said, holding it out with both hands.

“You know you don’t need to.”

“I know. But this way there’s something up here to help remind you of us down there.”

They hugged again, said their goodbyes. Vanhi wished her sister a safe trip back to Earth. When Swara was securely on the other side of the door, Vanhi looked at the box again. She had an hour before the next pods had to be approved for deployment, so she scurried back to her quarters to open the gift.

Once inside her spacious quarters (they were meant for a four-person family, but since there were plenty of vacant rooms, there was no need to be restrictive), Vanhi settled herself at her small kitchen table.

She tugged at the bit of twine encompassing the wrapping before tearing into the packaging proper. The slick paper fell away with ease, leaving what was unquestionably a jewelry box, hinged on one side and velvety. It opened with a snap.

Vanhi wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. A necklace? A pin?

Inside was a wristwatch-that-wasn’t. It had all the trappings of a watch: real leather strap (she hoped Papa didn’t know!), metal buckle, clockface. Only the clockface wasn’t analog or digital. It was antiquated. Where one would expect to see a pair of hands or set of displays was instead an evenly scoured plate and a gnomon.

Underneath the watch lay a note.

Dear little Ullu,

Vanhi cringed, then shook her head fondly at the old nickname. It had been a childhood insult that had slowly morphed into an endearment.

Since you are the strangest scientist I know, what with your love of archaic things like eyeglasses and your pocket protector (I believe you call it C), I thought you might enjoy this gen-one timepiece. I hear it’s cutting-edge technology, if you happen to live in Babylon.

When I saw this in the storefront I remembered what you said about distance not mattering, only travel time. So when you wear this, know that it takes exactly 0.00 seconds for my love to reach you, no matter where you are.

Found that programmer you talked about—Kaeden. We worked in some upgrades I think you’ll like.

Good luck. See you soon.

Yours lovingly,

Swara

Vanhi turned the sundial over in her palm. The back wasn’t inscribed, but it didn’t have to be. It was made of a polished, brassy silver-gold metal she couldn’t identify, even after finding the jeweler’s stamp. It carried some weight, but not too much. The hour lines were labeled in Roman numerals.

She hurried to swipe the old phone from where it sat in a place of honor on her bookshelf. She didn’t need it aboard the ships—everyone’s chip implants were integrated into the comms system—but they’d have to pry her Intelligent Personal Assistant out of her cold, dead hands.

“Wake up, want to show you something. Look at what Swara gave me.” She flashed the sundial, then held up the note for C to scan.

“She’s not wrong, I am antiquated,” it agreed.

“But that’s why I love you,” she said, strapping the sundial onto her left wrist. “Hope I don’t jab anyone with the gnomon. Can’t tell if it would bend or skewer.”

“The stamp indicates it is a Ti-Au alloy, typically used for medical implants. It would likely puncture.”

“Odd thing to make a bracelet out of.”

“Agreed. You should probably assess its electrical properties before wearing it during experiment engineering.”

The strap pulled snug. The brown leather was soft on the inside of her wrist. A little green light lit up on the side of the dial. “That’s … interesting.”

“I’m detecting a software compatible device within range,” C said. “I believe the sundial can support my applications.”

“What? No way.” Now she understood the part about talking with Jamal. Swara always did give the best gifts.

“Shall I upload myself to the new device?”

“Yes please. I need to head to Breath for my shift, but let me know when the download is complete, okay?”

“Will do. Oh, and Vanhi?”

“Yeah?”

“The convoy communications team sent me another message from Dr. Kaufman. Would you like to hear it before you go?”

She’d asked comms not to contact her by implant with his drivel. Instead it all got shuffled over to C. “Nope. You know what to do with it.”

“Message number eighty-seven from Doctor McKenzie Kaufman—Archived.”

Vanhi was the first on the shift shuttle. She buckled up as other workers poured into the craft behind her, pulling the heavy harness straps over her shoulders one at a time. Most of the new recruits were dressed in slacks and button-downs, which would be hidden under lab coats and bunny suits once on the experiment ship. Vanhi hadn’t changed out of her jeans and loose-fitting kurta.

A thin, black-skinned man with yellow around the edges of his eyes slid into the seat next to her.

“Gabriel! No one told me you’d come aboard. Good to see you.” She held out her hand—the shoulder straps keeping her awkwardly pinned.

They hadn’t seen each other since he’d been awarded his Ph.D., and she’d gotten no direct word on whether or not he’d accepted her invitation for a stint aboard the convoy.

He shook her hand, but with a hesitancy. “Good to see you as well.”

She felt the corners of her mouth twitch, her smile slip, and she feared her expression was giving everything away, laying all her guilt bare. He seemed reluctant to talk to her. Did he know something? No, no, that couldn’t be it. Perhaps he suspected, though. Gabriel had seen Kaufman grease enough palms in his day that he likely believed—and not unrightly—that Vanhi had caved to a number of their advisor’s ethical mishandlings. Their faces were plastered all over, after all—always the two of them, together.

She felt sick and turned away.

Of the twenty people crammed into the shuttle, fifteen of them were new faces. Well—somewhat new.

She noticed Chen Kexin, whose uniform indicated she was a new Breath security guard. Vanhi had seen her face before—seen several of her faces before, actually.

While none of the convoys’ crews were entirely identical, most of them shared a core of at least a thousand clones who were present on all of the original twelve missions. People whose skillsets and fitness for service had been seen as ubiquitously advantageous. Those whose contributions to things like food processing or practical medicine would not be affected by the size of the crew, purpose of their mission, or growth-cycle patterns.

After all, why go through the hassle of identifying twelve suitable individuals to clone when it was far simpler to clone one qualified person twelve times?

Kexin was one of those individuals. And this particular clone had been displaced by the sudden cancelation of Convoy Twelve’s original mission. Vanhi felt a dagger of guilt slash across her side as she imagined the devastation Kexin and her contemporaries must have gone through. What would it be like to have someone tell you that the very reason for your existence—something you’d been training for your entire life—had been canceled?

At least they were all offered retraining and positions here, Vanhi thought, though it did little to assuage her regret. Sure, some had jumped at the chance, but others had vehemently rejected the offer, choosing to make their own way in the world instead. Because Convoy Twelve’s crew rotated, there were fewer than fifty clones aboard at any given time.

Vanhi didn’t know what job Kexin had originally been intended to perform, but she suspected it wasn’t security.

She’s been repurposed, too.

Kexin, like the other new crew aboard, had spent the past month in final training, and today would be their first shot at the real thing.

The seat on Vanhi’s right was occupied by a man with a deep brown tan. She glanced at his badge, trying to discern what position he’d come to fill.

Noticing her side-eyeing him, he made small talk when their glances met. “I like your, uh—” He pointed at the sundial. “What is that?”

She smiled secretly to herself. “A gag gift.”

“It’s nice.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m Stone—Stone Mendez Perez.”

“Vanhi Kapoor.”

“I know,” he said sheepishly. Vanhi wasn’t surprised at his admission or shyness—it wasn’t like the Planet United Mission heads weren’t paraded across the news every other month. It had taken some time to come to grips with her newfound celebrity, and luckily she was able to escape a lot of the global fame out here in space. Still, there was something about Stone’s manner that wasn’t simply “star shock,” but she couldn’t quite place it.

“I, uh, saw your ship dedication speech on the Moon,” Stone continued. “It’s why I applied for the remote-piloting job.”

Her stomach shriveled. “That’s—that’s great,” she said, trying to sound chipper, sure the words rang as hollow as they felt. It’d been years, and still the memory of that day was sour in her mind. “Where, uh, where are you from?”

“Originally? Puerto Rico.”

“How was the trip from Earth?”

He looked up at the shuttle ceiling and smiled a little.

“First extended space stay?” she asked knowingly.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Used to think I was hard to impress. Then I saw Jupiter.”

She smiled as the lighting shifted in the docking bay, yellow warning beacons flashing as the hangar decompressed.

When the exterior doors opened, three shuttles gently lifted away, carrying their passengers out into the dead silence of space.

The three convoy ships hung like fat insects hovering over a bottomless pit. Starlight dimly reflected off the portions of hull not directly illuminated by windows or exterior safety lamps. Sol was a cool pinprick in the distance, unobscured.

The housing ship, Pulse, was the most balloon-like of the ships, almost like a dirigible, save for the twinkle-light pattern of windows forming a multitude of great lines down its sides. It had been designed to hold tens of thousands of people, but less than fifteen hundred—consisting of crew and crew families—now called it home. Most of the interior rooms had been repurposed as command centers and supply storage.

Breath was the second ship, a long, thin bar, with dumbbell-like protuberances on either end. The center section was lined with giant windows for directly observing the experiment pods, and antennae and sensor towers stuck out of it in a haphazard-looking fashion. One dumbbell end contained the docking bay, the other was the experiment launch point.

The final ship, Life, was more of a warehouse than anything, and had a boxy shipping container quality. Fitting, as it stored the components for the experimental devices, the pod shells, and the mini-SD drives. “Mini-drives” was a misnomer to challenge all misnomers. While the SD drives that powered the convoy ships were the size of small office buildings, these were still the size of a studio apartment, the pods themselves matching single-family homes for square footage.

As the shuttle approached Breath’s docking platform, Vanhi caught sight of the resupply ship out of the corner of one window. It had originally been intended as the garden ship for Convoy Twelve, now, too, repurposed. It slid slowly away, putting enough distance between itself and the convoy to turn on its own SD drive for the brief jaunt back to Earth.

Bye, Swara. Safe journey.

She suppressed an impulse to wave at the ship, not wanting to seem silly in front of the new recruits.

Docking went smoothly, as did badge-check and equipment dispersal.

While the new hires lingered to unload their gear, Vanhi beelined for the breakroom, where she prepared a cup of oolong. Taking a deep breath, she savored a calm moment before the workday began.

The new crew members would be finding their stations in the mission control room now, settling in. Everything felt fresh, hopeful.

Today, she told herself, today we’ll sink a pod into a new SD.

After preparing herself a second cup, she hurried to the mission control room, angling for her station in front of the curved windows, eager to stare out into their testing ground for a moment before beginning.

One hundred and fifty-eight crew members worked mission control, either in the official control room, or in backrooms for supplementary support. The primary mission control room was also known as the Experiment Observations Lounge, the EOL, and it was stuffed to the brim with staffers working side by side at crowded console banks spanning across seven terraced platforms. The room was curved, much like an amphitheater, and the platforms provided a stadium-like view of the outer windows.

The ship’s long inner hall also sported a bay of tall windows, allowing special visitors to watch as a launch commenced.

The flight director’s platform jutted out from the right side of the room, and gave Vanhi an excellent vantage point for observing her staff and the experiment field. Opposite her station, on the left wall, were several projections of various readouts.

As she took her seat, Vanhi dialed her chip phone into the “loops.” This would let her communicate with any member of mission control directly at any time.

Once everyone was settled, she checked in with her newest crew members, including the shift’s pod attitude determination and control officer—Stone Mendez Perez, the man who’d commented on her sundial. He would control the pod like a drone, directing its flight pattern to the testing ground, then retrieving it if and when it reemerged from an SD.

She also had a new pod flight dynamics officer, thermal operations resources manager, mini-drive artificial intelligence manager, and a handful of others ready to test their grit.

She’d have all of their names committed to memory soon, but for now, she was eager to get to work.

After forty-five minutes of check-ins and verifications, the countdown was ready to begin. They began at T minus ten minutes. The bay doors opened. Everyone focused on their monitors.

“Pod number nine, gravity-repulse thrusters primed. Ready? Three. Two. One. Lift off.”

On her screen, the experiment pod—ovoid and spikey, like metallic dragon fruit (some enterprising younger workers had gone so far as to paint the bodies of the first five pink-and-green as a sort of christening)—glided away from the corrugated floor, sailing out into blackness.

Vanhi’s eyes flickered to the testing ground.

It didn’t look like much, the empty grid of space only a hundred kilometers out. But it was her Bikini Atoll.

She hated that she thought of it that way, that Kaufman had forever tied SD drives and nuclear weapons together in her mind.

But he’d been right about the danger.

So far they’d run eight successful launches, but had only two successful new SD breaches, though preliminary data showed it likely at least three of the others had slipped into the already-verified travel SDs, thrown there when they effectively “bounced” off the subdimensions they were trying to access. Those pods had all been retrievable.

The other three that had failed to breach? Most of their twisted remains were back on Life being disentangled and scrubbed of radioactive elements before they could be studied. One had imploded. Another exploded. The third had slowly, yet systematically, dissolved into a cloud of its base elements.

Thank the stars they’d decided to put off animal testing. Not even bacteria had been allowed aboard.

Each pod contained, besides its drive, an array of sensors and one hundred experiments. The tests looked for new atmospherics, matter state-changes both internally and externally, gravity changes, spontaneous subatomic particle creation, shifting photon behavior, electromagnetic transmission, and a whole host of other differences and data points.

Vanhi had also designed several experiments to carry organics—bacteria, algae, bees, spores, and even dogs. But as with Kaufman’s original SD discovery, they wouldn’t dream of sending anything living until they’d routinely gotten back their inanimate test subjects.

This wasn’t important solely for the safety of the animal subjects, but also for the sanitation of their local star group. If they lost a pod—if it dove and failed to reemerge as directed—it could have been destroyed on the other side … or it could have surfaced someplace and sometime that they’d never think to look. It could drift in regular space and come to land on some rock or another, bringing with it an infection. Contamination.

She was determined to make sure that never happened.

Over at the ADCO station, Stone had his gaze fixed intently on his dash, making sure the flight path was steady and everything fell within mission parameters as he guided the pod to the activation point.

He was experienced—just over forty, a little younger than she was—with a sharp jaw and cupid’s-bow lips, now set firmly in concentration. His shaggy black hair had waves that curled at the ends; it fell into his face as he leaned forward over the joystick, and for a moment Vanhi thought he looked more like a kid playing a video game than a professional remote-pilot.

She noticed herself noticing him and quickly looked away. Now was not the time to be pondering the aesthetics of her new crewmates … no matter how pleasing those aesthetics might be.

With a blush, she refocused on the pod.

It was twenty-five kilometers out now. She checked in with the technicians monitoring the nonpassive experiments. Everything was still a go.

Observation buoys and communications buoys lined the path out to the quadrant where the pod would officially dive. This made it easy to track, easy to watch even as it grew imperceptible from the EOL on Breath.

“Pod in position,” Mendez Perez said after a time on her loop.

“MID AIM, are we ready to cue up the drive?” Vanhi asked.

“Everything looks green.”

“Good. Dive in three, two, one—now!”

From the outside, the beginnings of an SD bubble looked like warped space, with stars reflecting and shifting over a curved surface. The lensing engulfed the pod, made it look like a shimmer on a pond, until the spot went black, then disappeared altogether.

On all cameras, the pod had vanished.

“Dive appears successful,” Vanhi announced. She clapped her hands and cheers went up, as they had thus far after every nondestructive run. Hopefully, in a few hours the pod would resurface, giving them vital information about a brandnew SD.

The trajectory officer gave Mendez Perez a hearty slap on the back. “Nice going, ace,” Vanhi called to him, tossing a cheeky thumbs-up.

He gave her a shy, endearing smile back.

JULY 6, 2127 CE

By the thirty-third launch, running the pods started to feel routine. Six had failed to dive, four more had blown their lids, and the majority had bounced into the normal travel SDs. But seven had gone where no one had gone before. The data from those dives was being processed around the clock. And still, Vanhi hoped for more.

Today—on what would have been a lazy Sunday back in Arizona, but was a full-on work day here in the glamorous world of convoy living—Vanhi went to her station with an extra spring in her step.

Mendez Perez—Stone, as he insisted she call him—had offered riveting breakfast conversation. The kind that got her mental wheels turning, and her cheeks flushed with the pumping of creative blood.

The whole table had listened in on their banter, and Vanhi hadn’t been self-conscious about it in the least. Stone’s friends Justice Jax and Eric Price had both wiggled their eyebrows at each other. And afterward, Gabriel had given Vanhi a nudge as they went to drop off their trays at the cleaning station.

“It’s not like that,” she’d insisted.

“Like what?” he asked, feigning perfect innocence.

“I would like to know as well,” said C from the sundial, sounding an awful lot like a child asking how babies were made.

She wasn’t about to let Gabriel rile her, so she’d given him a shake of her head and a friendly smile, and happily hopped on the awaiting shuttle.

Stone hadn’t been far behind. He took up the vacant seat beside her without a word about it, as though it were perfectly natural.

She wanted to hold on to this feeling forever. This was what space travel was all about. Good people, good ideas, experimentation, wonder, discovery. This was what she’d been fighting for, what she’d compromised for. If she could just keep this feeling close, maybe she could use it to scare away the bad days—the times when guilt came back and Kaufman haunted her dreams.

In the EOL, everyone took their positions.

“Give me greens,” she said on each loop. “MID AIM?”

“Go,” said Mini-Drive AI Manager, Pablo de Valdivia.

“CHEM EX?”

“Go,” said Soraya Ebadi, who was in charge of monitoring the chemistry experiments.

“COM EX?”

“Go,” said Anju Gautam, who managed communications.

She ran her checks all the way down the line. Everything was good.

“ADCO?” she asked last.

“Go,” said Stone.

“Then let’s do this.”

A few minutes later, the dragon fruit of a craft hovered in front of the windows momentarily before Stone sent it on its way.

The time ticked by as it always did, dragging out while they waited for the pod to achieve a safe distance. Vanhi watched over the team, making sure everyone looked as they should: relaxed, focused.

“Be advised,” de Valdivia said. “I have telemetry readings in the red …” His finger tracked a line on one screen. It jumped where it should have been steady.

“Copy. Where is that instrumentation located? Can you patch me the feed?” Vanhi asked.

“It’s the rear left quadrant,” he said. “Vibrations, there’re—something’s on. Something’s using power, but I can’t—”

“SD MEC, are you reading the same vibrations?” she asked. De Valdivia’s readout popped onto her leftmost screen. There was a distinct tremor, yes, but the AI wasn’t pinpointing its location. She glanced at the visual feeds. Nothing looked amiss on the test area cameras. But the pod was still little more than a shining dot on most of them. She flipped to the flight path monitor.

“Starting to get a lean,” said Stone. “Shouldn’t have to course correct this much.”

“Copy. Can anybody tell me where the aberrant energy is centered?” Vanhi asked, bringing up the real-time system log.

“It’s pulling starboard,” Stone said.

“It’s the drive itself,” said de Valdivia. “It’s got to be a malfunction in the AI quantum-reaction regulation. It looks like a compensation, but the main power hasn’t been cued, so there’s nothing to compensate for.”

“Can we reboot the AI?”

“Already initiating shutdown.”

The pod—a blip on her screen—was engulfed in white light.

Everyone gasped.

No, no, no. Damn it. “Did we lose it?” She held her breath, frantically hitting refresh on all of her feeds. “Did we lose it?” she demanded, articulating every syllable.

“No!” It was Stone. “I’m still—it’s fighting me, I can’t—steering’s out, it’s veering back.”

“Talk to me,” Vanhi said, voice even and expression stern while her heart battered itself inside her ribs. Losing a pod wasn’t new. They’d lost plenty, expected to lose the majority of what they had left. But this …

The white light flared out, but what was left in its wake wasn’t debris, or a dormant pod. The probe’s hull glimmered with new life. Around it, some sort of field pulsed, fading from petal-pink to tangerine and back again.

And Stone was right—it was sailing toward the convoy.

“Convoy Control—”

“We’ve alerted Captain Tan. He’s standing by to take evasive action.”

“Copy that. ADCO, TRAJ, any way you can reel it in, get it to stop?”

“It’s not responding,” Stone gritted, pounding the holokeys at his station.

“What happened? What went wrong, MID AIM?”

“I don’t know,” de Valdivia insisted, hands flying over his keyboard, brow furrowed, jaw stiff. “I rebooted. It should have gone dead. Should have—unless … Unless the meters were off, and we weren’t detecting … No … wait, wait …”

He didn’t have to elaborate. Vanhi’s internal monologue started to hammer out two words on repeat: Oh shit. Oh shit.

Oh shit.

The AI wasn’t malfunctioning, it was doing its damned job. It was trying to keep the system from engaging. Somehow the SD drive had started to pull power, to dive, and the AI was trying to hold it back.

But then they’d shut it down …

“Are we getting any readings from Thirty-Three’s external sensors? Talk to me, people, that’s not an SD bubble like I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m getting unusual readings,” called a woman’s voice with a heavy Danish accent—Esmée Jensen, Mechanical Maintenance Officer. “Power surges.”

“Distance between the pod and the convoy is shrinking, sir,” said Stone.

Vanhi had her head down, frantically looking for a way to remotely bar the pod’s path or even destroy it. They could launch number Thirty-Four. ADCO could pilot it on an intercept course, crash the two pods—

“These are similar to the same kind of surge forces found inside SD drives when they’ve hit main sequence,” Esmée called again.

“Copy,” Vanhi gritted out.

Breath lurched. Captain Tan must have ordered the convoy to move.

“Doctor Kapoor!” Stone shouted.

Her head snapped up. She followed his outstretched hand, pointed like an arrow through the casement.

Thoomp, dooooozsh. Thoomp, dooooozsh.

There was no noise, but the sudden slow-motion leapfrogging of the pod created dramatic sound effects in her mind.

For a moment the pod looked like it was imploding, the pinkish-orangish field shrinking, turning in on itself, until there was nothing, it was gone.

That was the thoomp.

Half a second later, the field and probe appeared again, kilometers closer than before.

The violent, static-encrusted expansion—sparking, widening—engulfed her mind like a deluge of water. Dooooozsh.

The lights in the observation lounge turned purple. Captain Tan’s voice echoed over the comms system. “In order to avoid collision, we are engaging the SD drive—”

Thoomp.

Dooooozsh.

Closer. It kept coming, kept coming.

“Please, everyone, remain calm and secure yourself and any loose belongings that may pose a danger to—”

Thoomp.

Dooooozsh.

Vanhi could see the antennae groups on the pod clearly. It was so close, so—

“Dive!” Tan ordered.

Thoomp.

This time there was sound. Eardrum-bursting, earth-shattering, bone-vibrating ssssshhhhhhcrrrrash.

The pod collided with Breath, below the window deck. A white spark-lined leading edge of sunset orange passed unperturbed through the observation window, through the hull.

Vanhi’s feet left the floor as the gravity was disrupted, or damaged, or whatever was happening. She tried holding on to the desk, to keep herself grounded as chairs and mugs and monitors sailed up and away, with no clear direction, but soon she, too, was floating, aimless.

Until the strange field slammed into her, throwing her sideways, blotting out the purple light and turning it chartreuse. Her eyes snapped closed, and her breath punched its way out of her body.

Her head went light, fuzzy, nothing but …

… nothing …

… but …

… a …

… haze …

CHAPTER TWO
CONVOY SEVEN
CAZNAL: IN SEARCH OF THE LESSER REDOUBT

ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN YEARS SINCE THE INCEPTION OF NOUMENON INFINITUM SEPTEMBER 5, 117 RELAUNCH 5274 CE

… Convoy Seven has been assigned a new mission, designated Noumenon Infinitum. Its express purpose is to travel to the variable star LQ Pyxidis and complete construction of the alien megastructure, thought to be a Dyson Sphere and known as “the Web.” Once complete, Convoy Seven is to charge the batteries on the ship designated Zetta, then return to Earth …

Confidential addendum to official statement, Convoy Seven crew only:

In addition to the official mission parameters appointed by Earth, Noumenon Infinitum is to investigate the craft known as “the Nest.” Any information garnered from the investigation pertaining to alien involvement with the Web is to be applied …

… The final clause of the official mission statement can be struck. Convoy Seven need not return to Earth …

It started with a map, like all good treasure hunts do. One alien in origin, and not immediately recognizable for what it was. But it had led them here.

Caznal the Fourth gazed out of the shuttle porthole and into the inky night beyond. It wasn’t the total lightlessness of an SD bubble; it was a dark monolith of matter. A planemo—a systemless planetoid—wandering and alone. Starless, moonless. Naught but a black disk against the stars, and it blotted them out one by one as the shuttle shifted.

But Caz didn’t see a flat emptiness. She saw a blank slate. The planemo held nothing but potential.

Light lensed around the edges in a visible halo as they descended, creating a bowed outline of the galaxies and such beyond.

Out the opposite side of the craft, over her apprentice’s shoulder, she could barely make out the twelve ships of the convoy, their illuminated windows only distinguishable from far-off stars because of their orientation and regularity.

No one could have anticipated, all those years ago on Launch Day, that the convoy would have found itself here.

When Noumenon, the original mission, had arrived at LQ Pyx, they’d discovered an alien craft floating near the Web’s most massive component. The craft was damaged, and empty, but clearly belonged to an alien species who had taken up the construction project. The convoy had taken the ship—dubbed the Nest because of the many pipes that circled around it and dangled from its bottom in an arrangement that resembled woven twigs—believing it held answers to the Web.

Now that ship hovered in the belly of Slicer, where the engineers poked and prodded it like a sick patient with a rare disease.

And it had led them here.

As the shuttle fell into a degrading orbit, Caznal’s apprentice, Ivan Baraka the Fifteenth, grinned at her and bounced in his seat, practically vibrating inside his spacesuit. There were old Earth vids of teenagers his age bearing that same expression as they waited for a rollercoaster to spill over its first hump.

She shared his excitement, as did the other seven scholars aboard. But still, a small discrepancy in their studies nagged at her. After all, when a treasure map’s instructions read “Twenty paces past Skull Rock, one hundred and twenty around Crocodile Cove, and there be the Cave of Wonders,” one expects the cave to be there, not a divot in the ground.

That they’d arrived at a divot—a planemo—and not a cave was troubling.

The Nest had not given up any of its secrets easily. At first, it appeared to have no electrical connections. “It’s like finding a sailboat in orbit,” someone had once said. How could a spaceship function without wires and transistors?

But they’d been looking at it all wrong—all human.

Not only did the Nest have vast reserves of hydrogen that it could compress into a metallic superconducting superfluid to form electrical connections a single atom thick, but the way the Nest relied so heavily on gravitons suggested the aliens that had created it had been able to biologically manipulate gravitons.

If they’d never come to such a realization, not only would the Nest still lie dormant, they never would have recognized the alien maps for what they were.

“Approaching Crater Sixty-four,” the pilot said over the intercom, her voice echoing slightly inside Caz’s helmet. “Spotlights should be illuminating the eastern edge soon. Take note.”

Caz squinted, still unable to make anything out. Eventually the blackness gave way to gray, and the gray to a deep jasper-like green, and then ridges. The side of the crater was terraced—nothing like the smooth sweep of an impact or volcanic caldera, and not nearly as sheer as the walls of a sinkhole.

But that didn’t mean it was unnatural.

They were hoping to find something important to the Nataré here (Nataré was what they’d named the Nest’s creators, from the Latin, for how they were believed to be able to “float” or “swim” through the air on their biologically manipulated gravitons). Anything would do really. If all they stumbled upon was a set of tentacle prints and a patch of “we were here” graffiti, she’d take it.

Because that would silence the doubt.

When the convoy had successfully developed the technology to access the Nest’s computer, they’d soon come to the conclusion that the ship was more like a shuttle. Which made sense, given its size. Unless, of course, the aliens were considerably smaller than humans; just one of the many things Caznal was hoping to learn. She was still surprised they didn’t even know something that basic about them.

The ship’s computer contained no visuals of the aliens, nor any general historical data. All they found were three-dimensional representations of hundreds of spheres stuffed full with additional spheres of different sizes.

At first, the engineers had thought they’d stumbled upon the Nataré writing system, that each parent sphere could denote a page or even an entire document, and the spheres inside were words. But running them through a rudimentary algorithm revealed a lack of repetition, a fundamental requirement for ordering anything—sounds, symbols, movements—into meaningful communication.

It took them years to mentally convert the Nest’s data into information more suited to a human thinking process. The breakthrough had come when they found spheres with only a couple of—and in some cases, only one—interior spheres. When these were matched to full-to-the-brim spheres, they found an overlap. The mostly empty spheres appeared to highlight points in the full spheres.

X-marks the spot.

On human maps, the distance between objects was the focal point; the primary information the map was intended to convey. Objects were usually portrayed as a similar size—a single point at large scales. Not so with the alien maps. The Nataré highlighted gravitational influence over all other possible associations. According to the convoy’s best theories, their evolution had clearly influenced the way they saw and interacted with the world.

After recognizing the spheres as maps, their research became a quick spiral of realization and discovery. The spheres represented different sizes of gravitational influence created by various cosmological objects, and though they were shown with no distance between them, they were ordered in accordance with their spatial relation.

All the humans had to do then was take their current gravitational models and overlay them with the Nataré maps.

When they found one nearly empty sphere that highlighted LQ Pyxidis and a handful of other points, they knew they’d struck gold. It was the smoking gun they’d been looking for, evidence linking the Nest and the Web to new locations: places where more Nataré history, or the Nataré themselves, might be found.

Places like this planemo.

Only …

The ground rushed up at them—though their rate of descent slowed for landing, Caz still felt a jolt in her bones when they touched down.

“Ready, sir?” Ivan asked, giving her the thumbs-up.

“Ready,” she breathed, standing. When the pilot gave the green light, she hoisted the duffel bag of tools that lay at her feet onto her shoulder, as did her colleagues.

“Four hours for setup,” the pilot reminded them. “Half an hour for return. Stay in visual range of your assigned teammates at all times. And Captain Nwosu would like to remind you that if it wiggles, don’t touch it. If everyone’s got that, I’m opening the doors.”

A series of thumbs-ups and affirmations over comms led to the locks and their airtight seals disengaging, shifting aside to reveal the open plane and perpetual night of the crater floor.

Since Caznal was the head of the Nataré division, everyone waited for her cue. She would have the honor of stepping on this alien world first.

Hopefully, though, I won’t be the first sentient to explore this surface.

The planemo was roughly the size and density of Mars, with a surface of mostly ice, so Caz knew to expect a lower gravitational pull. It was still strange to feel the burden of her bag lighten and the tension of her muscles ease as she disembarked. The artificial gravity on the convoy ships—even the shuttles—was a constant one-g, and though they’d learned from Earth to make gravity cyclers smaller, allowing for more acute graviton manipulation, they had yet to finesse the tech into spacesuits.

Though she could move easily in the lower gravity, she felt unsteady. Like she was walking on a wobbly gelatin surface instead of solid rock. But the cleats on her soles held true to the frozen landscape, and her confidence increased with each stride.

The darkness, she found, was both a frustration and a godsend. Though the lights on her suit barely illuminated the craggy surface three feet in front of her, the small sphere of light felt safe.

She’d heard stories about planet sickness—the agoraphobia-related illness many of the crew members had experienced when the convoy had revisited Earth—and she had absolutely no desire to experience it firsthand.

“Say something,” Ivan prompted when she’d shambled a few yards away from the shuttle.

Turning back, she realized no one was following her. But eight helmets—the glare from their mounted headlamps obscuring their faces—peered out from the craft’s opening.

“Do we have to say something profound every time we step on new rocks?” she asked.

“Really?” Aziz, whose background was in bioengineering, called. “Really?”

“Oh, come on,” Caz said. “That’s gonna look way better in the history books than ‘one small step.’ Schoolkids love sarcasm.”

“We all hate you right now,” Aziz said, pushing past the others to jump through the hatch. The rest of them clambered out in sequence, looking a bit like a set of robots in their uniformity. Very similar, in fact, to the autons stored in the shuttle’s hold, which Caz would call to her aid once the locations for their gear were set.

They wouldn’t have cared what I said. She smiled as she watched the team quickly fan out in sets of three, carrying their equipment with ease.

Even though the labor was light, Caz could still hear her breath reverberating through her helmet, which added to the being-in-a-bubble sensation.

They’d picked Crater Sixty-four as a landing site because it was so unlike most of the planemo’s other craters, which were clearly created by impact. Their radar-mapping flybys hadn’t revealed any overt signs of civilization, past or present. No sprawling cities, no orbiting satellites, no bizarre megastructures. Not even a Cydonian Face to set pareidolia working, or a prominent mimetolith worth speculating about. Just a uniform frozenness, covered over with the dust of impact after impact.

But here, under the gray-green debris and the superficial indentations left by meteorites, the crater’s rim looked worked, scarred and terraced like in a quarry, disturbed by hand-equivalents with sentient intent.

But perhaps it was natural. Perhaps they would find no sign the Nataré had ever been here, no discernible Webrelated reason for it to be on their map. No one in their division dared voice such a possibility, though surely everyone was thinking it. If they couldn’t tie this planemo to the Nest, then their detour from the Web would be for naught; a waste of time.

It was an outcome Caznal had feared ever since they’d emerged from SD travel, still light-years away, to do a gravitational survey in order to make sure they were on the right track. Everything had lined up relatively well—putting all the gravitational influences almost exactly where the Nataré data put them, accounting for the millennia that had passed since the Nest had been abandoned inside the Web—everything except their destination. Their treasure map’s X, the Cave of Wonders, did not have the gravitational influence the map insisted it should.

There should have been, at a minimum, a star system. But all they’d found was this small wandering rock.

How could that be? Had a collision or some other calamity displaced the mass the Nataré had noted? Did it mark something unnatural? A fleet of alien ships? The fleet the Nest had once belonged to, that had long ago vacated the parsec?

And if the map had meant to point to something other than the planemo, then that meant their time here would amount to little more than a geological side-trek, and the surface beneath her feet was of no more importance than any other. Nothing but a cold rock. Inconsequential. A cosmic red herring, steering them away from their true purpose.

What did that make her career, her department? Misguided? Overblown?

She remembered stories about Earth scientists losing all their funding and credibility in the search for Atlantis. There were even crackpots who’d said the Atlanteans were still alive, just hiding.

That wasn’t what she’d been doing all these years, was it? Searching for Atlanteans?

“Here looks like a good spot for the first post,” Aziz said, waving Ivan over.

They were triangulating spotlights this go-around, and setting up the perimeters of their dig site. They’d become exoarchaeologists soon—using ground-penetrating radar to check for buried evidence, shoveling aside layers of dirt and stone and ice not touched by so much as a breeze in this perpetually frozen nightland.

It wasn’t a job they were meant for, not in the same way other clones were destined for their positions after the DNA reevaluations on Earth, before Infinitum’s inception. Theirs was a small, hodgepodge group. Originally, study of the Nest and its contents had fallen solely to the engineers, but, in time, it became clear the convoy required a new department, one focused on the creatures, full of people who could decode the fundamentals of Nataré culture, biology, and data.

Clones had been siphoned from bioengineering positions, which included medical staff and food processing staff. Communications had given up a line or three, as had computing, education, and SD drive maintenance. And, of course, Caznal’s line had been taken from engineering.

Now, the copper-colored jumpsuits of the Nataré scholars were one of the rarest uniforms among the crew, second only to the server caretakers’ sand color on Hvmnd. They wore it as a point of pride. Caznal saw it as a symbol of evolution: the evolution of purpose, of understanding, of their focus and dedication.

When each of the three teams was set, Caz activated her puppeteer implants, calling to the autons.

Three of the robots emerged from the shuttle’s storage hatch, unfolding from their compact travel positions, with legs slung over their own dislocated shoulders. The autons were an Earth invention, humanoid in form, dexterous in movement, with tensile strength and lifting power far beyond any machine in existence when the convoy was first launched.

Caz couldn’t see them at this range, but she could see through their “eyes,” and they could sense the weak infrared signatures emanating from the humans. She directed one to aid each set of three.

They relied entirely on her instruction, with no will or executable programs of their own. Each auton’s sleek black helmet of a head contained an active neural network, which her implants communicated with. Theirs was a hybrid of human and elephant brain tissue, without its own sentience, but with the speed and nuance only biological computing was capable of.

Scratch that. I.C.C. could match brain banks for reasoning, intelligence, and empathy any day of the week. It was the only truly artificial intelligence currently known to humanity.

But I.C.C. was confined to its body—the convoy. It was of no help down here. Especially with no hands of its own.

She used the autons to work in mirrored tandem, each coring a hole for, and setting up, the spotlight poles. While she directed their labor, others packed up the core samples for testing on Holwarda, and drew a detailed guide-grid for the area.

Few people in the convoy currently knew how to manipulate the autons—especially with her level of skill. The robots weren’t needed on a daily basis, so most of the artificial forms were held in reserve on Bottomless II, with appropriate neural networks being cloned only a handful at a time. Eventually the time of the autons would come, when the convoy was ready to set to work on their Dyson Sphere, but for now, most remained on lockdown.

“Ready to start mapping the grid area,” Ivan announced when Caz was nearly done with the hard labor.

“Everything calibrated?” she asked.

“All’s a go, sir.”

“Then have at ’er.”

The last thing Caz would have to hook up was the generator. She retrieved it with the puppets, as Ivan and Aziz made a slow, straight path across the ice. The Nataré team had picked a two-by-two acre area as their starting point. On the next away mission they’d bring down more of their colleagues, who’d expand the perimeter while they got to work on the first dig site—provided the GPR found anything worth digging up.

“Okay everybody,” she called when her work was done. “Floodlights coming on in three, two, one.”

As the lights snapped on, revealing the glittering fractures in the debris-covered ice, her teammates took turns crying out theatrically at the loss of their night vision.

“Yeah, yeah, all right,” she laughed. “My eyes! The goggles do nothing!” She started to send the autons back—their job complete—when one caught a faint glint in the distance. It was a reflection too dim for human eyes to catch, brassy in color—very unlike the glimmer dancing off the ice.

Without a word, she sent the single auton to investigate. It bounded over the surface, sliding a little as it met the downward slope of a small crater, shards of stone tumbling around its mechanical feet. Then it was up the other side, and Caz focused one of its external lights on the curious spot.

It was definitely metallic, jutting up from the slight rim at an outward angle. It extended maybe a foot above the surface, perhaps the result of the impact itself—ore melting under the heat of friction, splashing upward and then cooling quickly as it encountered the frigidness of space. There were similar nodules around its base, all angled, these no more than a few centimeters in height.

But as the auton came upon them, she realized the cylindrical, if nonuniform, shape was familiar.

Could it—?

She hadn’t let herself hope—still didn’t want to. Fighting the thrill of anticipation, she ignored the weakness in her knees and tried to still her heart as it fluttered wildly.

It could be nothing. It’s probably nothing, she told herself as she jogged in the auton’s direction, only to settle into a walk. It took a lot of willpower to force herself to move slowly, deliberately attempting to look unbothered. No use drawing the others’ attention. Not unless it turned out to be something worth the diversion.

But Ivan noticed her shifting attention, saw her initial run off into the night.

“Sir?” he asked, pausing his trudge behind the GPR skiff as she moved past him.

She didn’t answer.

“Caz?” Aziz prompted. “Caznal, what—?”

The breathy echo in her helmet grew louder as she directed the auton to dig. She had to see, had to know right now.

The robot thrust its fingertips into the ice, smashing the frozen surface. It scraped away pummeled debris from the object’s sides, slowly revealing more of the same.

Leaving the newly illuminated dig site felt like stepping off a cliff. Now, instead of comforting, her small halo of light felt claustrophobic, restraining. As though it kept her hemmed in from the planemo’s secrets on purpose.

She tripped over herself on her way to the auton’s side—it was difficult trying to mentally maneuver the puppet’s limbs contradictory to her own—and the shouts of her name over the comms system became more frantic.

“I’m fine!” she said, though it appeased no one. Both their concern and curiosity had been piqued, if the continued comms chatter was anything to go on.

By the time she reached the robot, it had loosened the ground around the primary object, plus the five nodes nearest. She fell to her knees, joining it, scraping aside what she could with her clumsy, gloved hands.

Something in the back of her mind perked, and she realized it was dangerous to test her suit this way. What if she dug down to something sharp and punctured her glove? She could lose pressure, or worse—just because the planet was cold, that didn’t mean it was barren. There could be dormant microbes beneath the surface, just waiting to encounter a carbon-based life-form.

Though the thought gave her momentary pause, she kept digging. She knew it was irrational, that she should approach this like the tempered scientist she was, and yet the excitement was overwhelming.

And now, close up, she was sure: this oddly formed metal was the spitting image of the Nest’s outer piping, Nataré technology used in their graviton supercycler. Only this seemed to be inverted. Where the Nest’s cycler dangled beneath the ship, this thrust upward, like the prongs of winter branches.

“Over here!” she cried at last, the dam of self-restraint no longer bowing under her exhilaration, but breaking. “I found something! Bring the GPR!”

I found them, she said to herself. I found the Atlanteans.

Ground-Penetrating Radar revealed at least three other supercycler tree structures near the surface, plus a few odd shapes of peculiar density that could be—based on their uniformity—buildings.

They still had to adhere to their four-and-a-half-hour ground schedule, but when they got back to the shuttle, there was much whooping and hollering, and a promise from the pilot to treat them all to an allowance of her special home brew from modified barley.

Ivan forgot himself for a moment and nearly whisked off his helmet after take-off. Only Aziz catching his hands and whacking him on the top of the thing saved him from an arduous level of extra decontamination when they docked with Hippocrates.

Even the scrubbers and the doctors gave them all hearty congratulations. And while Caz was still excited, she was far more subdued. Introspective.

Because the initial thrill of discovery had worn off, her adrenaline had ebbed. The careful thought she should have applied prior to running off into the night now occupied her every moment.

When the team was finally given the go-ahead to strip out of their pressure suits, Caznal’s gaze fell on her apprentice, and she knew what was wrong. The dark curls of his hair framed his tan face and swooped over his ears just so, emphasizing the strong arched slope of his nose. From this angle—with his helmet propped triumphantly under one arm, smile bright and proud—he was the spitting image of a classical statue of a Turkish youth she’d seen in the archives once, but it was his resemblance to someone else that urged her to head to Hvmnd as soon as the doctors declared them all contaminate-free.

The pilot running unscheduled flights from Hippocrates to Hvmnd looked surprised to have a passenger, which wasn’t unusual in Caznal’s experience. Not many people made regular visits to the server ship like she did.

The nine original convoy ships were very different in design from the three added upon Convoy Seven’s second launch, reflecting centuries upon centuries of Earth-centric design evolution. Where the original ships were, in many ways, reminiscent of a cross between zeppelins and beetles, both in their color and nature—being mostly bulbous (save Solidarity and Bottomless II, which were like floating towers) and silvery, and very utilitarian in their individual design differences—the newer ships were earthy. They were dark, and their exteriors had flows and layering that looked imperfect, more natural than designed. If the first nine were biomechanical (heavy on the mechanical), the additional three were geomechanical: they seemed to have morphology, weathering, like they were composed of stones and mud brought together by sheer gravitational adherences.

Of course, fundamentally, they were still ships. But she’d bet her leisure rations any aliens making visual contact with Slicer, Hvmnd, and Zetta would do a double take when they realized they weren’t looking at aesthetically pleasing asteroids.

Disembarking, she was met by one of the caretakers, Ina, who she knew best of all the server ship workers, save the captain. Though best didn’t mean well. It was difficult to truly know anyone who’d been raised on Hvmnd well.

That was because Hvmnd occupied a strange nexus between the convoy’s morality, culture, and the need for Earth’s computing technology. Earth-proper no longer used artificial computers—a fact which nearly led to I.C.C.’s demise—and had learned to use organic power (human brains, animal brains, partial neural networks that could only loosely be called brains) to a much greater advantage. So when the convoy had relaunched, decked out with all the advancements the planet had to offer, the package had included a computing upgrade: clone lines whose sole purpose was to act as human servers.

That didn’t sit well with the board. It might be common for people to sell years of their life away on Earth, but the convoy found it appalling.

They’d intended to shut down that portion of Hvmnd once they were well away from Earth’s watchful eye. After all, with I.C.C. and its inorganic servers fully functional, there was no real need to revamp the original system.

But that was before the conversion of Zetta into a graviton supercycler. Zetta had been built to store the zetta-joules of energy the convoy was expected to retrieve once they completed the Dyson Sphere around LQ Pyx. But the crew had needed it for a different purpose: to turn on the Nest. And this new purpose carried a hefty need for processing power. Power the convoy’s antiquated computing system could not provide.

Hvmnd was required after all.

And yet, cloning lines simply to harvest their brain power would not do.

The server clones had to be given a chance at wakefulness, which meant they would sometimes be off-line. The convoy would either need to accept this disruption, or find a new way to fill the computing void. None of the regular crew members wished to give up portions of their lives to such a service, so where could they get perfectly good brains no one was using anymore?

There was a reason some people called Hvmnd “the grave ship.”

“Permission to visit?” Caznal asked.

The caretaker bowed slightly, revealing the row of implanted connections on the top and sides of her shaved head. “Of course.” She gestured for Caz to follow her out of the bay.

“How are your children?” Caz asked as they entered the main bay.

“Sleeping,” Ina said simply, stopping at a row of iron black steps and indicating Caz should continue without her.

Her boots rattled the connected, corrugated catwalk as she ascended to the level above, and the fine blond hairs on the back of her neck rose with the shock of cold. It was unpleasantly chilly outside of the shuttle bay—for those that were awake, that is. Most of Hvmnd was a single bay, like Slicer, only instead of alien devices, Hvmnd stored people. Catwalks, like the one Caznal was on, snaked this way and that through the many layers of hanging chairs, which held people from all divisions, plugged in and strung up.

It wasn’t just the cold, though. Each ship carried its own smell. Eden always smelled so green and fresh, even in its subarctic tundra biodome, and Hippocrates smelled like rubbing alcohol. Mira smelled like home, and depending on what part of Shambhala you were visiting, it could smell like a sweaty gym or a bowl of buttery popcorn.

Hvmnd smelled like something ancient. The way family heirlooms smelled. Like history and age.

“Why am I not surprised to see you here?” said a familiar voice over Caz’s shoulder.

Captain Onuora always did know how to make an entrance. Caz whirled to see great mechanical arms, like silver spider’s legs, dangling from tracts in Hvmnd’s ceiling. They clasped the captain’s wheelchair, and she controlled them deftly from a keypad on her armrest. With a few extra flicks of her wrist, Onuora bade them set the chair down next to Caz, then they folded up and away, ready for her whenever she called on them again.

Caz saluted, and Onuora answered it with a stern expression, before going into Mothering Mode, as she was inclined to do. “News travels fast—shouldn’t you be celebrating? I know you found something down there.”

Caz strode down the walkway, and the captain stayed at her side, the old-world Jamaican flag on the back of her wheelchair fluttering out behind her like a cape.

Onuora was not part of the original Noumenon crew, just as Caz wasn’t part of it. Their lines were fresh, having only been aboard a few generations. But few people of the forty-second century could trace their family history like Onuora. She took pride in her connection to Earth, whereas many of the original crew didn’t seem to care for genealogy past their original’s birth.

Earth was an abstraction in many ways, which had little bearing on their reality. But it also still mattered, if only as something that could provide grounding—perhaps literally—to the convoy’s reality.

“I will,” Caz said, “I mean, I am celebrating, and … he should know.”

The captain gave her a pitying look, shifting uncomfortably in her chair. Her achondroplasia had led to severe arthritis in her hips, as it had with the majority of those in her line. And while the seat was customized just for her—the wheels were controlled by a chip implanted in her brain, just like a prosthetic hand that could grasp or foot that could flex—and was the perfect size for her smaller frame and foreshortened limbs, it wasn’t where she spent the majority of her working hours. In fact, as often as Caz had been to Hvmnd, she rarely saw the captain in her chair. “I’ll give you your privacy, then. Come to the bridge before you leave?”

Hvmnd’s bridge was the only constant zero-g environment in the convoy, at Captain Onuora’s insistence. She preferred the freedom of movement that came with weightlessness. It eased the pressure on her aching joints, let her fly from post to post. Caznal, on the other hand, always felt like a baby animal trying to stand for the first time whenever she visited—all wobbly legs and unintended directions. She wasn’t meant to fly. But that didn’t mean she’d begrudge her friend the visit. “Thank you, Captain. I will. And I can come back tomorrow to work on your chair, if you’re available.” On their off time, they liked to experiment with smaller graviton cyclers, to see if they could invent one precise enough to make Hvmnd’s metal arms obsolete.

“Sounds like a plan,” said the captain with a smile. She swiped at a few keys, and the arms descended once more, lifting her away, back to her bridge crew.

Caz continued her walk. She knew her path well, taking walkway fourteen-A, turning at row five before sauntering down to seat eight. A technician in a sandy-colored jumpsuit checked connections on one chair over, where a Korean woman with a long pale gray braid slept—Roh Jin-Yoon the Sixteenth. Her features flexed with the occasional mental stimulus, either into a half grimace or pseudo smile.

Caznal nodded to the technician next to sleeping Jin-Yoon, who nodded back—the plugs on his dark scalp glimmering in the low light. He pulled an idle connection from where it dangled next to Jin-Yoon’s wrist and plugged it into one of his ports. Caznal immediately averted her eyes, quickly crouching down next to the unconscious man she’d come to visit.

“How are you doing?” Caz asked elderly Ivan the Fourteenth, her mentor, taking his wrinkled hand in hers. He couldn’t answer, of course, but it gave Caznal comfort to speak to him. “We went to the surface. You won’t believe what we found.” Her thumb made tiny circles over the back of his agespotted hand. “I just wanted to let you know, professor. I’ll finally get to apply what you taught me. I wish …” She glanced over her shoulder at the technician.

He had his eyes rolled back in his head, his mouth moving around silent words. His position mirrored Caznal’s in many ways; he too had Jin-Yoon’s hand comfortingly in his.

The techie came from the server lines. Deemed by Earth to have the highest capacity for processing, the people who’d been chosen as new computers for the convoy were now also the caretakers. They had their own lives—lives which Earth never thought they needed to lead—with agency over how they went about them. And still, many of them spent a good chunk of time (67.86 percent of typical waking hours on average, I.C.C. would tell you) plugged in.

That was what Ina had meant when she said her children were sleeping.

Sure she wasn’t being overheard—embarrassed about speaking out loud to someone in the dream state, who, by rights, she shouldn’t even be visiting, since he was legally dead and gone—Caz continued, “I wish you could be awake to see it.”

“Caznal?”

She jolted upright, letting go of Dr. Baraka’s hand.

“I’m sorry,” the Inter Convoy Computer apologized, its voice emanating from a speaker mounted on the underside of the catwalk above. “It wasn’t my intention to startle you.”

“It’s fine, I.C.C. What is it?”

“Your husband is looking for you. I’ve patched him into the control room—Captain Onuora has allowed you to take the call there, for privacy.”

“Thank you.” With a gentle primping of Baraka’s collar, and a quick brush of fingertips through his tussled hair, she let him be.

A set of children rushed by as she climbed flight after flight, through the maze, to the control booth. They all sported age-appropriate connections, and still had their hair—all of it intricately weaved to show off the implants. One little girl pointed at her without a word, and the others nodded emphatically. She wondered, for a moment, if they were speaking mind-to-mind. Under convoy law, they weren’t supposed to, not unless plugged into Hvmnd’s system. The board had a long-ingrained mistrust of secret communications, born of conspiracy and mutiny.

She thought for a moment about chiding them. Not because she begrudged them their heritage, but because it shined a light on her own faux pas. One does not visit the dead, and one does not speak mind-to-mind.

But then the children laughed, as though she not being a caretaker was in itself a joke, and she moved on.

At the top of the ship, a single wide door led into the control room. Inside, behind the long line of forward-tilting windows, was an equally long line of control panels, flanked itself by an equally long metal table. The room was empty, as it often was—the caretakers preferred a more hands-on approach to monitoring their charges. Only occasionally was a sentry posted up top.

“Diego?” Caz asked, noticing the blinking light on one panel, indicating a comm line was open.

“Where are you?” he asked. “Ivan’s here, Vega and MinSeo, too. But no you. We can’t cut the cake until you get back.”

“I just had a quick errand to run.”

His pause said much. “If you’d waited a few hours I would’ve gone with you.”

“I know. I wanted a little time to myself.”

“Self-flagellation isn’t ‘time to yourself.’”

Glaring, she crossed her arms and turned away from the consol. “I’m not punishing … I’m sharing it with him the only way I can.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “This is your day, and you should be able to celebrate it however you want.”

“Just give me a little more time. Half an hour, tops, and I’m home.”

“Deal. I love you.”

She turned back around, posture softening. “Love you, too.”

When the call ended, she slumped against the table, tracing the scratches in the surface. This table was nothing like the grand one on Mira, the long single slab of green granite that graced the situation room. That one was specially carved for the original mission, an artisan piece with only eleven brothers and sisters.

“For what it’s worth,” I.C.C. said. “I wish the same. For Doctor Baraka, I mean.”

“Were you eavesdropping?”

“When do I not?”

“Fair point,” she conceded.

She meant to clam up, then. To go back to the professor’s side. But the conflicting feelings—the excitement, the doubt, the sadness and rage—all came gushing forth. Here, in this quiet space, with only the Inter Convoy Computer to hear her, she let loose. “But it’s not fair. They couldn’t give him six months. Six months. Just so he could see where his life’s work was leading. And they wouldn’t let me …”

“I processed your request to wake him,” it said sympathetically. “I know.”

“I mean, I get it. I know why it’s law. Those put under should never be woken again. Retirement is retirement, and whether the retiree travels to Hippocrates or Hvmnd, they both have to be treated the same: gone.” She clutched the edge of the long table, her knuckles whitening as her fingers curled into talons against the smooth surface.

“I understand that as well, though I don’t necessarily agree.”

She was surprised. “No?”

“Human morality has always been hazy to me. It shifts with the circumstances. Typically, checks and balances are applied, positives and negatives weighed against one another. But not all positives and negatives carry equal measures, as it should be. I do not wish to indicate I believe the board’s thinking incorrect. It is simply different from my own.

“Originally, human servers were believed to be fundamentally immoral, while scheduling end-of-life procedures was not. But when the need for human processing became apparent, the board concluded the two things equal. Now, retirement still equates to passing, but it also signals a transition into a new kind of service. And, just like death, the transition is believed only to be moral if it is final. No teasing retirees with glimpses of their old lives—such an outing is thought to be cruel and unnecessary.”

“And, typically, I would agree,” Caz said. Her face felt hot, her eyes puffy. She didn’t want to cry today. Not when it was supposed to be her day of discovery, of triumph. “But in special cases, like with Doctor Baraka, it’s crueler to keep him under.”

“If he were retired in the traditional manner he would not be present for such an event. He would be deceased,” I.C.C. said. “Which is, of course, the board’s logic: a retiree’s time aboard the convoy has ended, one way or another. That is why he cannot be awakened, that is why we cannot convey information about the outside world to him, even in a dream. And yet, this logic is faulty. Obviously so.

“To deprive one of a deeply personal experience for consistency’s sake does not feel like a moral move to me. But I also understand what kind of gray area such exceptions would create. Should everyone be reawakened for the birthing of a grandchild? For new progress made in their field of expertise? For loved ones’ marriages?”

“I don’t know.” Her vision started to blur slightly, her eyes watering. “I just know that Doctor Baraka should be here.” She inhaled a shaky breath. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Stop crying.

“You see,” I.C.C. said with a curious tone. “Hazy. Malleable. A plastic morality.”

“It’s the only kind worth having,” she said, not sure she believed it.

I.C.C. did not hedge on the point. “I agree. One cannot function in absolutes—empathy sees to that. But so does narcissism. They are two sides of the same human capacity.”

“You think utter selfishness and utter caring spring from the same plasticity?”

“I believe so, yes. But it’s important to note I said narcissism, which is a different kind of selfishness, born out of self-love, quite different than the selfishness exhibited by animals who have not yet become self-aware.”

Caz rubbed at her face. She felt her equilibrium returning, the sudden swell subsiding. “Why are we philosophizing about morality right now? I need to get home.”

“Edging the discussion toward the intellectual and away from the personal has consistently helped clones in your line maintain their composure. I would have tried a different tactic with other crew members. Is it helping?”

A little laugh escaped her. “You are a wonder, I.C.C. Yes. Thank you.”

They worked for nine months excavating Crater Sixty-four and scouring the rest of the planemo’s surface. The entire convoy’s manpower was thrown behind the project, accomplishing in less than a year what it might have taken the Nataré team decades to accomplish alone. They scouted several other spots across the globe—places with anomalous geology—but nowhere else did they find evidence of alien inhabitation.

And the more they dug, the more one thing became clear: to call what they’d found a city or even a settlement was a stretch. The structures they found intact were minimal. And there was nary any evidence of biological activity. No garbage, most notably. If there was one thing Earth archaeologists had come to rely on as never-wavering evidence of civilization, it was the concept of “the dump.” Biological things consumed, and consumption inevitably produced waste. But there were no filled-in pits, no openly strewn excrement. Perhaps they’d incinerated everything, but if so the teams had yet to identify ashes.

Luckily, because of the frigidness of the dark world, there was no decay. Whatever microbes the Nataré might have brought with them from their home world couldn’t survive in such cold. The only destruction on the surface came from ice and outer space.

Which meant when they tested the bricks that formed a few structures’ inner walls, they were in for a surprise.

“It’s just local dirt bound with platelets and fibrin,” Caznal’s husband, Diego Santibar the Twelfth, said. He’d invited her into the chem lab to show her what he’d discovered. “Similar to what makes blood coagulate. But it’s been stripped of any genetic code. No way to tell if the basis came from Nataré biology, an alien cow, or a buttercup. Regardless, here, instead of forming a scab, it’s making bricks. Look at this.”

He slid his arms into the gloves of the nearest glove box. Inside lay a black-and-green slab. Gently, he took a corner and spritzed it with an eyedropper. It dissolved immediately, leaving loose grit behind.

“What’s in that?” she asked, bending down beside him. She adjusted the goggles on her face, hating the way they cut into the bridge of her nose.

“Water,” he said. “From our taps, nothing special. All of the inner walls in your structures were dissolvable in water.”

“Brilliant. No need to take building materials with you if you can mold dust with ease, and scrap it just as fast. I’m starting to think we’ve found a staging ground. I mean, the lack of apparent infrastructure, the size, the transient nature of these materials—it points to more of a worker’s camp than a permanent outpost.”

“But what were they working on?”

“Something that’s gone now. That would explain our missing mass. Our missing gravitons.”

“What about those supercycler towers? How many are there now?”

“Twenty.”

“Could those account for the gravitational difference? If they were drawing in that many gravitons, perhaps there was seepage? Maybe they created a false well that altered the maps?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted. “And we haven’t found any clues as to what they needed that many gravitons for. If all of their buildings used the same hydrogen wiring as the Nest, that would account for a few of the towers. But not twenty.”

She rubbed her eyes. The chem lab was bright, the lights harsh and true white. “I need to get back to analyzing the new items we found. Some malformed block metal.”

“Still nothing like the Babbage Engine on the Nest? No computers, no archives?”

“Nothing. They cleaned up real good when they left. It’s spotless, almost like a crime scene. They rolled up all but the sidewalks.”

“Isn’t that strange?”

She shrugged. “If someone handed an alien a fork, a zither, and a hookah, how accurate do you think their assumptions would be? I feel like that’s the level we’re working on. We have nothing, we know nothing. Our only real hope of understanding them is in those maps. If we don’t find the keys here, we just have to prep for the next stop.”

There were seven more X’s in all on their alien map. The farthest away was a gravitational mega cluster—was it the Nataré home system?

That’s what many were speculating, although it wasn’t the only theory. There were so many possibilities now that they knew evidence was out there, that the maps were real!

He looked concerned then, like she’d just said something that undermined his entire world view. “Caz, you’re assuming …”

She cocked her head, wary of his tone. “What?”

“You’re assuming there is a next stop. The board committed to coming here, but if there’s nothing related to the Web, no instructions, no hint at its engineering, origins, or purpose, then … You know it all has to come back to LQ Pyx to be seen as worthy of convoy attention.”

He can’t be serious.

She pushed her goggles onto her forehead. He was about to protest, but she barreled forward. “That was before all this,” she said excitedly. “That was when we weren’t sure there would be anything to find. But look at this.” She stabbed the glove box, leaving a fingerprint on the otherwise pristine surface. “So simple, so basic, yet brilliant in its design and range of application. When we find a real settlement, a place they truly lived and died, think of what we could uncover. There’s no way the board is going to turn down the opportunity to chase after an entire civilization’s worth of learning in favor of a single construction project.”

His expression didn’t change. Something unsettling snaked its way through her stomach, but she held fast to the evidence before her.

It would take them centuries to hit all of the X’s, and they would have to travel light-years upon light-years in the opposite direction of the Web.

But why should that matter? What was one alien artifact to an entire alien history?

This was bigger, better, surely the board—hell, every last crew member—could see that.

Dr. Baraka saw it, long before anyone else.

With a sigh, Diego removed his hands from the glovebox. “You know the official mission statement doesn’t mention the Nest, or the Nataré.”

Because those points were kept secret from Earth, to ensure they wouldn’t interfere. “So?”

“So, you might find that means something to some people. That they don’t see the omission as subterfuge so much as emphasis—on what’s really important.”

“You know what’s important?” she asked firmly.

“What?” He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

She kissed the top of his head. “You, me, and our girls.”

“Nice subject change.” He laughed. “Smooth.”

OCTOBER 25, 122 RELAUNCH 5279 CE

Anticipation made Caznal’s head light. Today she’d lay out the Nataré team’s final conclusions about the alien history of the planemo, and her plan for which X on the map to travel to next.

There was a gravity well closer than her intended destination, but she wanted to journey to where two X’s were less than three light-years apart. It would give them the biggest bang for their buck, to employ an old saying. As a personal bonus, they would still arrive before her retirement, allowing her to play the greatest part in Nataré research for the maximum amount of time.

Dossiers had already been distributed. She’d take final questions, and then it would be onward.

Navy-colored uniforms shuffled in—all of the ship’s captains and their seconds in command—followed by at least one uniform of each other color. Many handshakes and smiles propagated throughout the gathering. There was a buzz in the air, and a buzz in their bellies as copious amounts of coffee, tea, and yerba maté were passed around the long marble table.

“Are we ready to begin?” asked First Officer Joanna Straifer. She was a direct descendant—the biological granddaughter—of a Reginald Straifer clone and a Nika Marov clone, and shades of both of them could be seen in her face and hair. Everyone aboard knew those lines well. There was a special hall on Aesop wallpapered with portraits of the clones who’d had a great impact on the convoy, and Joanna was the product of not two, but three. Her biological mother, Esperanza, had spearheaded the initiative that saved I.C.C. from Earth’s interference. “Caznal,” she continued, “you have the floor.”

Screens took up each wall, but Caz chose to use the holographic projector in the center of the table for diagram viewing. She brought up a model of the planemo, then zoomed in on Crater Sixty-four.

“First off, I’d like to say how great it’s been working with everyone on this project these past few years. We’ve been able to learn so much, it’s—it’s been exciting.” A small pang of guilt hit her. Dr. Baraka sprang to mind, his face flush with joy. Now, he was as he’d been when they’d first arrived: dreaming. Lending his processing power to the Nest, to the department he’d cared so much for. And yet, he had no idea what lay kilometers below his sleeping form. She shook his ghost from her mind, then continued.

“These are the layers of excavation.” She gestured at the changing hologram. It displayed a cross-section of the crater, with a flag indicating where each item of interest had been found over a fifty-six-square-kilometer area. “The top layer was explored mainly in months one through three, the next in four through seven, the third in seven through sixteen, and so on.

“The third layer is where we first found definitive evidence of the domed structures. And it was the fifth layer where we uncovered the three-mile-long metal scaffolding.” The image shifted at her command, displaying only the scaffolding in its unexcavated form. It was a series of long crushed beams—more log-shaped than steel girder–shaped—tangled and twisted, but clearly once the skeleton of a structure. “At first we believed it represented a horizontal building, but we now conclude …”

With a few artful flicks of her fingers, she repositioned the holographic pieces. Like the fossilized bones of a dinosaur rising from a tar pit and finding new life, the digitized framework pushed itself up, hammering out its own kinks and mending its breaks. It sat up tall, its narrow, topmost point jutting away from the planet’s surface.

“It was a single vertical tower,” she said. “Likely the foundation point of a space elevator. Models indicate that it’s likely many of the domed buildings were actually attached to the elevator—as temporary living quarters, workstations, or lift pods, we don’t know. What the elevator could have been reaching toward is also a mystery.

“But this much is clear. Crater Sixty-four was excavated by the Nataré—giving it its distinctive terraced rim—and used as a staging ground much like the Moon was utilized during the creation of the P.U.M.s. Also clear is that the settlement was quickly, yet thoroughly, dismantled. Much of what would have been required to run such a station is missing, indicating they either took it with them out of necessity or a sense of responsibility.

“The remains of the space elevator and the supercycler towers, however, were left behind. It seems they were toppled and buried by subsequent space collisions, which suggests that once the site was abandoned, the Nataré never returned.”

She scanned her notes quickly. “Oh, and one geological item of note. The thickness and density of the secondary ice layer, meaning the layer beneath the debris layers, is of an unusual uniformity across the entire planemo. A few of our geologists have suggested this could have been caused by the rapid freezing of a once gaseous atmosphere, indicating the planemo did not coalesce here. It either originated in a distant star system and was thrown out of orbit, or it once wandered with a much higher velocity and passed through the radiation of—but was not caught by—a star which superheated its ice, forming an atmosphere which rapidly cooled again once it had escaped the star’s influence.

“This is relevant to our Nataré research, since the aliens chose to bury the bases of all of the remaining structures below this ice layer. Perhaps they felt it was too unstable a foundation, so they cut through to the stone beneath. We’re presently unsure, but it gives us one more data point on Nataré thought process and construction habits. All of the information and samples we’ve gathered have given us plenty of work to sustain us to our next destination.”

Caz shuffled through her folders, finding the one with the maps. “Which brings me to the future. What are our next steps? Which Nataré location should we travel to? Which one gives us the best chance at the most data? After consulting our gravitational surveys and—”

“I’m sorry,” Captain Nwosu, Joanna’s cycle partner, interrupted. Their two clone lines were staggered in growth, so that the two of them would be each other’s master and apprentice clone after clone. Much like Caznal and Ivan. “I’m going to have to stop you for a moment,” he said.

Caz mentally stumbled—she’d been on a roll and had just missed a stair. “Oh, um, why?”

“We aren’t here to discuss a destination change,” he said frankly—clearly confused by Caznal’s confusion. “We’re here for a summary conclusion to this portion of the mission, to be sure it’s time to move on.”

Several brows around the room were furrowed, many mouths drawn tight. “What destination change? I wasn’t aware a destination had been chosen.” She of all people would know which X they’d picked.

The captain exchanged glances with the two department heads nearest his chair. “You’re suggesting we travel to someplace other than LQ Pyx, are you not?” He said are you not, but it sounded like did you have a stroke?

“LQ—you think it’s time to go back to the Web? Now?” Never mind not being on the same page, they were in completely different books. “Why would we abandon the study of the Nataré? We’ve barely scratched the surface of our available research, we have a map with seven other independent locations to explore, and we haven’t yet found anything relating to the construction of the Web.”

“Exactly,” the captain said, as though Caznal were making his point. “Our investigation of the Nest has always been directly tied to our priority: the Web. Without any evidence that a further exploration of Nataré worlds will lead to information regarding the Dyson Sphere, we can’t afford to continue on this tangent.

“Our intellectual resources only stretch so far. We could spend infinite lifetimes following these breadcrumbs, hoping for more than scraps, or we can focus on the ultimate point of our mission: completing the Web and harvesting its energy. This is a real, solid goal, versus a vague promise of a possible treasure trove.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Did they … could they not see? How could these people not understand?

Atlanteans. They’re here.

We’re in the Night Land and I’m getting messages from the Lesser Redoubt.

And just as with the wanderer, no one else cares.

Her abdominal muscles tightened, and she fought to keep herself upright. She felt like she’d been punched in the gut, kicked in the face.

There’s nothing quite like being told everything you’ve ever worked for is a waste.

And still, she wouldn’t accept it.

Not after we went at this so hard. Not after my team—not after the professor—

“You’re telling me a dormant, incomplete megastructure beats out alien settlements—however temporary—for importance? There could be living, breathing Nataré out there, but discovering whether or not that’s true, that’s just a tangent?” Her gaze flickered around the room, looking for help, for a sympathetic face. “That’s unreasonable, isn’t it? That doesn’t make any logical sense.”

We could be sharing this galaxy with other sentient beings. They could have families, feelings, wants, dreams.

Wasn’t that what reaching out into the stars was all about? Finding humanity’s place in the universe? Figuring out if we’re alone.

And now we’re on the precipice, might be able to answer yes or no, but the crew …

Nwosu cleared his throat and leaned forward, threading his fingers together on the tabletop in a far too polite, I’m-about-to-educate-you manner. “Convoy Seven has had a very clear goal from the beginning. It began with Noumenon’s inception—” The entire room collectively nodded once at the mission name, an unspoken reverence echoing through the situation room “—and continues now with Noumenon Infinitum. We have a collective calling that our genetic lines were chosen hundreds—and in some cases, thousands—of Earth years ago to fulfill. Esteemed scientists handpicked us, assigned us our posts and our goals, with a strict purpose. It is our calling, our—”

Caznal laughed. It was a sharp, manic sound, which threw itself from her lips the moment she understood what the captain was trying to say. “Are you … are you kidding me? Manifest Destiny? You are scientists, engineers. Educated to the gills for the purpose of exploration and innovation, and this … this mythicizing of our place in—”

She took a deep breath, reeling herself in when she realized she was hunkered over the table, fists balled, voice raised.

Okay, they want to focus on the mission? Bring it back to the mission.

“Noumenon Infinitum,” she began, articulating firmly, but keeping her tone reserved, “clearly states that the study of the Nataré is vital. We can’t reject our findings outright. We can’t abandon the evidence or the maps.”

“We won’t,” said Margarita Pavon, communications head. Where Straifer and the rest of the long-haired command team had their locks tightly pulled or slicked back, she let her ample curls bounce freely. “Everything you’ve uncovered will be communicated to Earth. We will suggest a new mission, focused on the Nest’s maps. Then they will be able to build the appropriate research vessels and construct a fit team. Right now, most of your division is a hodgepodge. Repurposed. We’ve been unprepared to study the aliens from the beginning. And now that we know our best chance at further construction on the Web relies on reverse engineering—”

“We don’t know that at all,” Caz grumbled under her breath.

“—rather than an alien instruction manual, we can continue on with our society’s purpose.”

“Really, Caznal,” Nwosu said, “I have no idea why this surprises you. There are millions upon millions of worthy research subjects in space. We can’t go willy-nilly picking whichever one we want. We are a Planet United convoy. You should take comfort in having a firm, forward goal.”

“I take comfort in mindful pursuits,” she bit back. “Noumenon’s original goal wasn’t to build anything. It was a mission of discovery. Finding any proof of extraterrestrial sentience was in itself considered an improbability. You aren’t making a decision based on critical thinking. You’re not even choosing legacy ideals over new discoveries. You’re pursuing a mythicized version of reality; instead of looking forward, you’re romanticizing the past.”

“I don’t understand why we’re letting this conversation continue,” huffed the head of education. “Doctor Caznal’s fundamental misunderstanding of our entire social order can be amended on her own time. No one here is looking to put a new destination to a vote, so I suggest we move on.”

“No,” Caz shouted. “No. We were only supposed to move on to LQ Pyx if the destination proved fruitless—”

“It has,” he said.

“How can you say that? If you were being the objective scientists you’re all supposed to be—”

“I’m sorry, Caz, but I don’t think we’re the ones not being objective,” said Captain Onuora.

Caznal’s eyes shot to Hvmnd’s captain—her friend. Onuora’s dark eyes were sympathetic, and her tone matched. But every word that followed felt like a knife to Caznal’s back.

“We know you despise the decision to keep Doctor Baraka under when we arrived at the planemo. I think this decision feels like another betrayal to you. As though we’ve undermined not only the man, but his legacy. No one is suggesting we halt analysis on the data you’ve already collected. Nor should we stop examining the Nest. But the pursuit of the Nataré as a people—as Web builders—has to end. We have other work to do—that we were always meant to do. It’s not personal. Don’t make it personal.”

This is my entire life … how can it not be personal?

“That’s not what this is about,” Caz said meekly.

“Either way. As a colleague, and as a friend, I suggest you let us move on to the next order of board business.”

With her will suddenly drained, it felt as though the bones had been plucked from Caznal’s body. She sank into a chair with no firmness to her movement.

Onuora was wrong. Wasn’t she? Caz wasn’t trying to overemphasize the importance of the Nataré because of Dr. Baraka. No, of course not. Wouldn’t the botanists be surprised and angry to have their hybrid programs suddenly stopped? Wouldn’t the engineers cry foul if they lost access to the Nest or the Web node? She’d just had the rug pulled out from under her professional life. That was it. That was all.

“Mom? You all right?”

A soft crash-boom of distant waves underscored Min-Seo’s voice. As water rushed up Caznal’s calf before receding again, she opened one eye.

Her grown daughter leaned over her, hands on her hips, her computing jumper left behind in exchange for a tank top and slacks.

The wave pool sloshed once more, and the sound system continued to play real surf sounds. Every ten minutes, a gull squawked. Up and down the sandy beach, other crew members read books or took naps. One woman on a beach towel scowled at Min-Seo.

“This is the quiet pool,” Caz reminded her at a whisper.

“Oh, sorry.” She settled in beside her mother, rolling up the cuffs of her trousers to stick her feet in the damp silica. Fine, pale grains stuck to her toes.

“Thought the three of you were supposed to be on a romantic vacation,” Caz said, noting neither Hiro nor Kexin, her daughters-in-law, nearby.

“We are. I could tell things were getting a little spicy, so I excused myself.” She checked her forearm implant for the hour. “I’ll get back just in time for the cuddles. You know what I always say …” She gave her mother a wink.

Caz cleared her throat and recited, “‘The advantages of being an asexual panromantic in a polyamorous relationship.’ By the ships, that is a mouthful.”

“Which is why I like to hear you say it. It’s life affirming and a tongue twister all in one.”

The sand was both rough and soft, a dichotomy Caz enjoyed. She slipped her fingers beneath the surface, down where it was dark, and cool—untouched by the sun-mimicking lamps overhead. “So, you happened to find me, or …?”

“I got a message from Dad.”

“My pilikua is worried about me?”

“Yes. He said you haven’t been yourself since—”

“Since the board voided the importance of my entire field of study? Yeah, you could say that.”

“Shh,” hissed the woman on the beach towel.

With a dramatic eye-roll, Caz heaved herself out of the sand, clearly giving Min-Seo whiplash as she was settling in. “Come on,” Caz said, giving her a hand up. “If you’re going to cheer me up, we better go someplace else. Preferably a place with a lot of chocolate or mod-coca.”

Hand in hand, they wandered away from Shambhala’s wave pools, past its gyms, and down to the dessert bars. These were new—an upgrade installed before second launch. Food printers allowed chefs to turn convoy basics into a variety of concoctions—both healthy and not so. The professional behind the counter scanned your biometrics, looked up what you’d already eaten that day, then created a specialized dessert menu based on your remaining rations and current blood sugar.

Science at its best, Caz thought.

“Oh, Gyeongju bread,” Min-Seo said, sniffing the air as a crew member strolled by with a plate of three of the bean paste–filled rolls.

“Go for it,” Caz said, “I think I’m going for a pick-me-up of the green-leaf variety.”

“Meet at our star-window?” Min-Seo asked.

“Of course.”

The mod-coca dispensary was a charming little nook that mirrored the tea dispensary on the opposite side of what had come to be known as “dessert lane.” Caz chose a small packet of dried leaves for chewing and the botanist in charge took vice points off her rations file.

The first pinch was bitter, had a bit of a sulfide bite to its bouquet, but it settled nicely in her cheek as she made her way to the meeting spot. Relaxing as the chew was, she knew it would do little to help her depressive mood—unless it magically imbued her with the ultimate powers of persuasion. How could she make an entire society realize its error in judgment?

The star-windows were located on the ship’s topmost level. During SD dives, they displayed a false-view of space. Nebulae would engulf them in colorful haze. Dying binaries would dance by. Stars would twinkle balefully in the distance.

Now, they were true windows. Floor-to-ceiling, turned to give the perfect top-down view of the planemo, which was largely dark save for the single crater overrun with human lighting. They were just far enough out that the dark spot was ringed with stars, and if you put your forehead against the glass—as Min-Seo and Caznal did now—letting your eyes cross just so, you might feel, for a moment, like you were falling into a black hole.

“It’s been two weeks,” Min-Seo said between bites.

“I know.” Caz sighed, her breath lightly fogging the window. The aluminosilicate glass was frigid against her skin. “And it’s not just me.”

“The whole Nataré division,” Min-Seo said knowingly. “Vega said she’s barely gotten two words out of Ivan.”

“Did you hear they’re thinking of reassigning our lines?” she asked Min-Seo. “Putting the next clones back into the business they were chosen for?”

Min-Seo stopped her chewing, a wad of pastry and beans rounding out her cheek. “But I thought they said you could still work on the crater samples.”

“Yep, we—meaning those of us currently working. Once we’re retired, they figure it’s all clones on the Web train once more.”

“It’s too bad it has to be one or the other. I mean, doesn’t it make sense to do both? We haven’t heard back from Earth yet, we know they can’t be counted on to follow up. We’re the explorers, we should be doing everything we can.”

Caz shrugged and stuffed more coca in her mouth against her gums. The bulge in her lip made her sound funny, but Min-Seo wasn’t one to take a cheap jab. “Unfortunately, one convoy equals one mission. They’ve narrowed down what that mission is, and my people are just SOL.”

“Why does it have to be that way?” Min-Seo asked. “I mean, yes, one convoy can only do so much. But we have twelve ships.”

“Oh, you know the answer to that,” Caz dismissed. “Those oh-so-perfect original P.U.M. mission designers decided we needed nine ships and a hundred thousand people so we don’t implode on a social level.”

“We’ve got three ships extra, then.”

“That we need for the Web.”

“Do we? Those three ships were given to us by Earth, who thought we’d come back one day carrying some crisisaverting energy motherlode. But, just like everyone knows about the secret Nataré study, everyone knows we never intend to go back. What are we going to do with a giant battery, huh? We started repurposing the ship as soon as we found an alternate use for it. If we’re going to live on these ships forever, utilizing the Web to fight our own entropy, then we don’t need Zetta. And we only need Hvmnd because of Zetta.”

Where was Min-Seo going with this? Caz raised her head, took a good long look at her daughter happily munching on Gyeongju bread like she wasn’t suggesting … whatever it was she was suggesting. Coming from a convoy member, the subtext of this conversation was practically blasphemous. “Are you saying we could—” she moved in close, looked around and kept her voice low “—split the convoy?”

Min-Seo looked her mother in the eye. Though her tone was light, she knew the gravity of simply toying with such an idea. “I bet if you ask I.C.C., we wouldn’t cross a failure threshold if one became two. It’s not like the old days, when returning to Earth was the endgame. Our societal mindset is different. More innately stable.”

“This is not a little solution to my problem,” Caz said.

“No. It’s a big solution to a problem that I don’t think you can claim as solely your own.”

“When did you get so conniving?” Caz threw her arms around her daughter, drawing her in close, jostling her plate.

“Oh, come on, Mom, don’t make me lose the last bun. And it’s not conniving. It’s rational. But, if you’re going to propose it, you have to understand what it means, for the crew, for our family. You have to know how the board will take it.”

Off the quiet beach, they were still whispering now, and for good reason. The convoy’s history of revolution and self-destruction might only have a few bullet points, but those bullets still made the memory bleed. Their society wasn’t run by authoritarianism, but nor was it a democracy. Any dissent was caught quickly, and quashed.

Proposing a split, if rejected, would mark her—and perhaps her line—forever as the woman who wanted to cut the baby in half.

“Maybe I don’t propose it,” she said. Min-Seo pulled away, a dark hesitancy on her face. “No, no,” Caz assured her, “I wouldn’t put that responsibility on a colleague. If I can’t handle the consequences, I wouldn’t ask someone else to.”

“Then how do you get the board to consider it?”

With a sly smirk, Caznal’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling.

“What?” Min-Seo asked, searching for what her mother was staring at. “I don’t get it.”

“It was your suggestion.”

“What, Mom? What did I say?”

Caznal kissed her on the forehead. “Better get back to your wives. I’ll let you know if it works.”

Caznal returned to Mira with renewed conviction. She couldn’t let the study die. There was so much to learn from the Nataré—not just about physics and the Web, but about medicine, philosophy, religion (did they have any?), recreation, on and on. Here was the chance for humans to reach outside of themselves, beyond the biology and history of their own planet. Were human universal ideals truly universal? Or were they unique to a relatively small planet on the edge of one of a billion galaxies?

That’s what they were up against: Was this a mission of discovery, or was this a mission of repair? The Nataré could bequeath multitudes of artifacts to humanity, but the convoy was obsessed with one. One artifact, one result, one purpose.

That didn’t make the board wrong. It was not wrong to have a goal, to understand the thrust of your endeavors and where they led. But she was not wrong either.

The convoy’s mission now possessed a duality—both halves worthy.

She told Diego of her plan, and after some discussion—full of smart, insightful questions that reminded her why she loved him in the first place—he gave his support.

At the next board meeting, Caznal sat quietly. She sipped her coca tea and went over the previous meeting’s minutes as though it were just another day. Another round of mundane convoy updates, another chance for Dr. Brown to complain about a maintenance robot malfunction (as she always did).

Caz allowed herself a moment to look around, though. To see the things she took for granted. Because, should her plan work, she would lose this room. There was a ding in the wall nearest her seat that had never been fixed—chair height, by the look of the horizontal scrape. It smelled different in this room. Felt special. She slid her palms under the edge of the marble tabletop, where it was rough, searching for the little carved stamp—ah, there! The roman numeral for seven, which marked the long table as part of its special set.

Captain Nwosu kept picking absently at a divot in front of him—an unconscious habit Caznal had never noted before. So many memories here. So many important decisions made for so many people, both by this crew and by all the mission’s crews.

And now, perhaps, time for one more.

“Are we ready to begin?” Straifer asked the room, standing at the head of the table. The low rumble of pleasant conversation faded away, as the department heads, captains, and elected representatives settled in for another round of Enacting-Your-Civil-Duty. “We have three new proposals to review and vote on—”

“Excuse me, First Officer Straifer,” said I.C.C., prompting a wave of chins shooting in the ceiling’s direction. “But I have a proposal to submit as well. Please forgive me for the late notice. I realize it is highly irregular to submit during a meeting.”

Like a physical manifestation of a self-propagating wave, Caznal’s gaze darted to Nwosu, and all eyes around her followed.

Nwosu cleared his throat. “It’s highly irregular for the ships’ computer to submit a proposal at all,” he said, a half joke colored by his clear discomfort.

The room was so quiet, Caznal could hear the atmosphere circulators chugging away. She tried to temper her excitement, to maintain her poker face. It wouldn’t do to give away the game just yet.

“I’m sorry, I.C.C.,” Nwosu said, regaining some of his stolen composure. “But the agenda for this meeting has been finalized. If you wish to submit, you’ll need to follow the procedure and—”

The situation room erupted, opinions boiling over like lava, burning wherever they fell.

“Are you kidding?”

“This is I.C.C. we’re talking about—”

“We can’t let the computer make suggestions—”

“It’s made them before.”

“But never formally.”

“Why is that a problem, exactly?”

“People!” Nwosu said. He barely raised his voice, as though that would encourage people to order. “People. Everyone! Hold on. Wait. Hold on.”

Pavon jumped to her feet, curly hair flying. “Everyone shut up!”

Caznal was only a little surprised when the room complied.

“Captain,” Pavon said evenly. “You have the floor.”

“Thank you. As I was saying, we have procedures for a reason—to avoid exactly this kind of chaos.”

“But it’s human procedure,” said Dr. Nakamura. “It doesn’t apply to I.C.C. I think we should hear what it has to say now.”

“We should put it to a vote,” said Captain Onuora.

Nwosu gave a reluctant sigh. “All those who wish to hear from I.C.C. now?” he asked.

The shouts of “Aye” were deafening. They clearly had it.

“I.C.C., you may proceed. What does your proposal cover?”

“The creation of two convoys out of our existing one.”

If the silence had been deafening before, this was the utter absence of sound. The air lay dead. Caz looked from side to side, making sure her colleagues hadn’t died of shock. It seemed the sentence contained so foreign a concept, they could hardly process it.

I.C.C. clearly took the lack of interjection as a signal to continue. “I do not make this proposal casually, but I fear we may be at the beginning of a societal impasse.”

That’s an interesting way to put it, Caz thought. The dumbfounded silence hadn’t diminished. On the contrary, it seemed to be burgeoning. She could see words beginning at the back of Nwosu’s throat, but he swallowed them down. Beside Caz, Onuora sat up straighter, arms tucked against her sides, tight—a wound coil ready to spring. At what, Caz couldn’t guess.

Out of everyone in the room, only she and Pavon seemed to be taking the AI’s words in stride. Pavon’s clone line had a long history of siding with the AI—Caznal found that interesting. Perhaps Margarita would back her.

“The current mission was launched with a dual purpose,” I.C.C. continued. “Some have taken that duality to heart, while others believe one a side mission. The unofficial standing of that ‘side mission’ has further fueled the intellectual divide. But only now is the division beginning to show itself. It has been an undercurrent for over fifty years, but not until the last board meeting was it given voice.”

Onuora turned in her wheelchair, and Caz could feel a pointed gaze boring into her profile.

“I’ve run behavioral projections,” I.C.C. said, “and the results indicate this could be a turning point. Chances of societal disruption are high, threats to crew member safety are currently steady, but I fear an increase soon. Overall, chance of mission failure has increased by point-two-seven percent.”

Caznal’s stoicism cracked, her eyes widening. This was not what they’d talked about. The computer was supposed to be outlining the scientific merits of two convoys, why focusing on reverse engineering and alien instruction simultaneously was likely to see the construction project finished sooner than if they spurned one for the other.

The Web—I.C.C. was supposed to be focusing on the megastructure. If the damn board was so in love with the thing, she was going to give it to them.

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