Homeward by Night

1.

Clay and Rachel sat in their Ghosts and stared. They took readings. They wasted a good three minutes that way. The corpses floating in their cryogenic coffins looked on, thoroughly frozen and yet observably rotted. They had only been there since the 24th Century.

“So,” said Rachel, when she was sure she wouldn’t puke upon opening her mouth, “thoughts?”

“I think I’ve seen all the dead people I need to for a while,” Clay replied.

“I’d agree with that.” She sighed. “At least these don’t look like they died of hemorrhagic virus. The reefer units just went south. Ready to go for a walk?”

“Sashay bars seem to have been still in the future when they built this thing,” said Clay. “Can’t we mosey along in our fine fighter craft just a little further?”

“Okay,” said Rachel. “On around that corner there should be a central hall. These, uh, people here, would have emerged and somehow they would have gone down that hall to the central hub, where they would have been able to recover and eat something and get a little light exercise before hopping a shuttle to the ground.”

“You have the plans up on your computer.”

“Centaur Project Colony Ship.”

“Okay,” said Clay, “Got it. I see where we are, we’re here.” They continued to hang in the narrow space, gazing upon the dead colonists. Clay could not help think of other colonists, the residents of the Canada, the Egypt, the India, the Argentina, the colony ships that Alpha and Beta and Gamma Wings had successfully escorted all the way to Bluehorse: of Alice Grohl and her constituents, of Jalis with the coffee place, the folks who ran the enchilada place, the assorted scientists, the assorted hotheads, the children, the cats. “So, had they survived, they would have been taken down to the surface—of that? That planetoid?”

“There’s bloody little else in this system that they could possibly colonize,” said Rachel. “Cold is bad, but hot is actually worse. Still. I mean, there was a basic problem with the Centaur Project. I mean, I get that they had to come here, at the time they had no real alternative, they couldn’t even go to someplace like Tau Ceti that’s just a little further, because every light year meant an extra twelve years in space. They had only one shot, they had to colonize here, they didn’t even have fuel to turn around and go back. I get that. Still. It cost so much, Centaur would have cost more in its time than Human Horizon did in the 2330s, and we had redundancy on top of our redundancy. We were picky, we took the fourth system we visited, but we could have settled in the tenth system we went to, the twentieth, as long as we kept the colonists happy. But these guys couldn’t do that, and believe it or not, Earth spent all its savings sending them. Maybe it’s just as well they couldn’t turn around and come home.”

“Maybe it’s just as well?” Clay repeated. “Maybe it was the whole idea. Maybe the people who masterminded the Centaur Project knew they could call it a success as long as they got the dang thing out of the Solar System in one piece.”

“And here they are,” said Rachel. “Not exactly in one piece, but apparently not all dead.”

“Well, unless those really are just computers firing,” said Clay. “But yeah, I don’t think so. Anyway, if this lobe of the cryo section went completely belly up, which is apparently what happened, then this half of the colonists would be dead. There would be the other half, and maybe they died too, but there would also be the ship’s crew, they would have been frozen separately, and they would have been woken up in shifts to make sure things were okay.”

“I wonder when the cryo went down. I wonder when they found out the cryo had gone down. On half the colonists, at least.”

“Don’t know.” They continued to float along at a meter or two per second. “The whole thing’s just so ghoulish. Putting people to sleep. Chilling them like they’re crates of food. Injecting chemicals to preserve them and then more chemicals to revive them. Our colonists just had to deal with time dilation, and you don’t even feel time dilation.”

“Yeah. Weird to think that Park and Vilya got here while this mission was still en route.”

“Weird,” said Clay, “that by the time the Centaur mission got here, at 8% of light speed, we had ships capable of doing 99.99998% of light speed.”

“Ironic.” Rachel did a couple of further scans and said, “So, mosey?”

“You first?”

“I’ll let you go first, Clay, it was your idea.”

So Clay led the way around the corner and down the wide, round hall. In two hundred meters it was blocked by collapsed interior bulkhead, which the two Ghosts sliced through with their lasers. Beyond that, the passage ran forty more meters and ended in a big round hatchway. Rachel had another try at communicating with the station.

“Alpha Centauri station, this is Rachel Andros,” she called. “I believe you might remember me; I left about five hundred messages already. Well, this time I really think you’ll want to reply. Let us through or we start blasting a hole in this hatch. I am not joking. Cooperate or we are going to make the Centaur Project into the lame piece of history it truly is. —Was that appropriate?”

“I don’t know,” said Clay, “but I doubt it will do anything.”

Just as he was saying the last word, a buzzer went off in Rachel’s Ghost. It went off a second time, at a lower volume, as Rachel turned the volume down.

“Hallo, hallo,” came a woman’s voice. “Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” said Rachel. “Going to open up?”

A male voice cut in to say, “How can we tell you’re not sick or something?”

Rachel and Clay exchanged glances on each other’s screens. “They would have seen images from Earth’s demise,” said Clay. “Messages sent at the speed of light would have beaten us here by, oh, a couple of months.”

“So they think we might be infected??” She opened communications again. “All right, we understand your concerns. You will be able to tell we are not sick when you look up and see us standing over you with our lasers ready to slice you into filets. Or, you could open this hatch, and let us through into the next chamber, which we will use as an airlock, and we can all get together and discuss how to adjust your weapons to blow up mouthholes better. Hint: drop the green, up the blue. Details when you’ve gotten over your paranoia.”

2.

In ten minutes, the Ghosts were hooked up in the cryo entry hall and Rachel and Clay were in the station’s control room. It was long and narrow and complicated and messy, and at least five people were working there amid the dangling tubes and floating wires and floating blobs of whatever someone had been drinking or eating. There were screens all over the place, some working and some not, but the biggest display devices were four actual windows, in two pairs, each pair nearly wrapping around a tubular stretch of the control room. These formed two observation tubes, and in the further one, a young man curled up gazing pessimistically out at the stars, a scrawny white cat in his weightless lap. The mouthhole attack had abated for now.

“Uh, welcome,” said the middle-aged, pale-skinned woman sashaying toward them: the interior had bars all over the place. She was the one who had originally greeted them on the comm. Her name was Avery, which was emblazoned on a badge stitched onto her jump suit. Her hair was reddish and cut just long enough to look messy. Beside her a man who looked ten years older than her, and whose badge said LAMARCHE, looked on silently. “Sorry for the confusion. Welcome.”

“Hey,” said Rachel, who stopped herself before saying it was nothing.

“This is Rachel Andros,” said Clay, “and I’m Clay Gilbert, and we came here from the new colony at Bluehorse.”

“We came by way of,” said Rachel, “uh, Earth.”

“Oh,” said Avery. “I’m very sorry, that can’t have been very nice.”

“Everyone was dead,” said Clay. “It was all over months ago, I mean, months before we got there. So I guess it could have been worse. Anyway, what have you got going on here?”

Avery pulled herself back, and Clay and Rachel, their helmets pushed back off their heads, floated in front of the largest working screen, hanging onto curves of pipe. Onscreen, a schematic of the station showed where there was damage and the paths of recent attacks. One of the observation tubes, the one without the young man and the cat in it, was right beside them. Nothing was going on out there now, but they could see debris floating or hanging loose.

“They’ve been coming at us in waves every few hours,” said Avery. “They seem to be off right now.”

“Your settings,” said Clay. “You don’t do them much damage, do you?”

“No,” said Avery. “If we hit them straight on, for perhaps five seconds at a time, we can blow them up, but that hardly ever happens. You being there must have confused that one.”

Another woman, also middle aged but with dark brown skin and frizzy dark hair pulled back in a frizzy pony tail, floated over and said, “Do not forget to get their settings, Avery.” She smiled at Clay. “You blew up more of those things in two minutes than we’ve been able to in a month.”

“Is that how long it’s been?” asked Rachel.

The woman, whose badge read COURT, checked a nearby display and said, “963 hours so far. So look, we gotta have those settings.”

Both women and the man looked at Clay. “Rachel’s the boss here,” he said.

“I’ll input the settings, if you don’t mind,” said Rachel.

“You give me the settings,” said Court, “I’ll input them.”

“We did not begin this relationship with an attitude of trust,” said Rachel, looking from Court to Lamarche and back. “Did we?”

“I have no idea what you mean,” said Lamarche: his was the voice that had been worried about infection.

“You frickin’ shot at us,” said Clay. “Don’t pretend you didn’t. You were shooting at me. And yeah, I take that kinda personally.”

The three Centaurians looked at each other. Avery, the short-haired woman who seemed the friendliest, said, “Actually that was Bardo.”

“Yeah,” said Court. “You want to beat him up or something? You can do that, I’ll help.”

“He the one with the cat?” asked Rachel, looking at the young man with the cat, who did not deign to look at her.

“No, he’s the bald guy. Bardo!” Court called. A bald man working at a station twenty meters down the control room did not look up. “Get over here and take what’s coming to you, Bardo.”

“Mr. Bardo,” said Rachel. He still did not look up.

“Bardo, dismissed,” said Court. Bardo ignored her for one second, then humphed, got up and sashayed out. “Okay,” said Court. “Anyone mind if I let the lady input her own settings?”

They looked around. Avery, Lamarche and the young man with the cat all shrugged. “I don’t think you’re going to get better than that,” said Clay.

“What is it with you guys?” said Rachel. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Well,” said Court, “we’ve been through quite a lot. Especially, oh, these last 963 hours.”

“A thousand,” said Avery. “Those Ngugma came earlier.”

“Ngugma,” said Clay. “Ah. And you saw the video from Earth.”

“Yes, we did,” said Court. She paused, closed her tiny, wide-lipped mouth and set her dark eyes on Clay for a long moment. There was something about Court, or there was something about the way she looked at Clay. There was something about everyone here. It had seemed like Gliese 581, at first, the confusion about who was in charge, the friendly fire, the mess. But it wasn’t at all like Gliese 581. It was like talking to ghosts. The Centaur colony had arrived, half of them already dead, on a world that provided almost no resources, and had limped along to this, and these people were their descendants, the ghost descendants of ghosts.

But they were flesh and blood. Court opened her tiny mouth and went on: “It made quite an impression here. So I think you can see where some of us are coming from. Some of us. So if we could have those settings, it would, you know, put our minds at ease a little.”

“And then you tell us your story?” asked Clay.

“And then we tell you our very fascinating story,” said Court, with a smile rich in sorrow and bright white teeth.

3.

They sat Rachel down at a work station, and they all spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out what to do to input Rachel’s laser settings. Then the controls were largely turned over to the young man with the cat, and Bardo and Lamarche were both sent on leave to the living quarters and told not to come back for a while. Court, Avery and two men showed Rachel and Clay to the lounge that comprised the far end of the control room. The entire control room was very roughly cylindrical, five meters wide and about sixty meters long, with the two narrow spots where the observation tubes were, and another constriction where machinery had been taken apart and not put back together yet. This narrow place cut off the last six meters of the control room, and these six cylindrical meters seemed exactly as if the top end of a large propane tank had been furnished with beanbags and cushions. A couple of tablet computers hung about, hooked up to the walls. The end of the room consisted of a large round hatch with a thick window in the middle, and beside that a refrigerator set back into the wall.

“Make yourselves at home,” said Court.

Clay did so, not asking who was in charge, and Rachel, also not asking whatever was on her mind, settled in next to him. The other four likewise made themselves at ease, propping themselves so that their backs were in cushions and their feet, in soft shoes, were levered against cabinets and handles protruding from the opposite wall.

“So you guys are from what, 581 or something?” asked one of the men, whose badge BING.

“No, no,” said Rachel. “We’re from a system called Bluehorse. We’re a new colony—I guess we’re probably the newest, certainly we’re the furthest human colony. There’s all kinds of aliens out there, by the way, but these Ngugma are front and center and top of my list.”

“You don’t want to be on top of her list,” said Clay.

“She gonna kill them?” smirked the other man, whose badge said RENKO.

“I don’t know how,” said Clay, “but I can’t wait to find out.”

“So where is Bluehorse?” asked Avery.

“Out past Gliese 370,” said Rachel, “about forty more light years. Know where that is?”

“It’s in the direction of Tau Ceti,” said Clay. “Just go seventy or seventy-five light years past that. You can’t see it in the night sky, it’s not bright enough, it’s no brighter than Sol, it really doesn’t stick out. But the third planet has water and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere.”

“Life?” asked Renko.

“Yes, plants, stuff in the oceans,” said Rachel. “It’s had a hard time of it, geologically, it’s no paradise, but it has life. There seems to have been a civilization there, but if so, it was literally hundreds of millions of years ago. It’s mostly desert, but it has water in the rifts. They have decent agriculture going, we only saw the planting, we don’t know how the harvests are going.”

“Our current favorite topic of conversation,” said Clay, “is how big the colony will be when we get back there, what, 175 years later.”

“So it seems to be a going concern,” said Court. “Kudos.”

“But listen,” said Rachel, “right now we need to know what you know about the Ngugma.” She smirked at Clay. “So I can do whatever it is my hubby’s waiting to see me do.”

“You guys are married?” asked Avery.

“Yeah.” She smirked at Clay, who smirked back lovingly. “Hubby and wifey.”

“Cool,” said Court. “And the—what did you call them?”

“Mouthholes,” said Clay and Rachel together.

“Riiiight. Good name.” She looked down, then back up the tubular module, then met Rachel’s eyes. “The first time they came here, the Ngugma,” she said, “it was about twenty years ago. I was already officer of the watch, but I wasn’t on the council then.”

“Now she is the council,” said Renko.

“Oh, I wish,” said Court. She smiled at Clay with a glint of pride. “Be that as it may. That was when Commander Hollek was in charge. These big ships come in here—you’ve seen them, right? You were at Earth.”

“Yes,” said Clay. “Hard to miss.”

“Yeah,” she said. Court spoke slowly but her manner seemed to preclude interruption. “So they came in and had a look at us and they spoke English, and they said, basically, you guys mind if we do some mining in your asteroid belt? Hollek said, okay, what are you gonna pay us? They said, basically, nicer words than this—they picked up our speech from our transmissions, pretty amazing really but not actually that surprising—they said, well, what if we don’t blow the crap out of your crippled station? They did offer to help us with some technical things. They left us some old used up freight pods, we actually hooked them up and stuck stuff in them, so that’s something. And then they proceeded to bore these big holes in some of those outer planetoids, there’s a belt that has a lot of metals in it. Had.”

“Your planet below does not, does it?” asked Clay.

“No, it’s got a whole lot of squat. Quite the surprise to the original colonists.”

“Of whom there were less than expected when you got here,” said Clay.

“Well,” said Court, “we left with a thousand, we got here, oh, two hundred years ago, there were two hundred who weren’t already basically dead.”

“Cryogenics was a nascent science,” said Bing.

“So you’ve had some travails of your own,” said Rachel. “Was it bad?”

“No,” said Court. “It wasn’t bad. When I was a girl, this was quite the spot. I mean, we had a population of eighteen thousand, we’d built out a ways, of course we left the ship there and—!”

“But it’s full of bodies,” Clay couldn’t help saying.

“Yeah, it is,” said Court. She looked at Renko.

“We, ah,” he said, “sort of don’t feel like getting close to them. They, ah, they’ll keep.” He looked back at Court.

She said, “We sort of decided to leave them there. It’s kind of a default memorial.”

“Sure, okay,” said Rachel, putting her hand on Clay’s. “I get it. Go on about the colony.”

“Well,” said Court, “they got here, they couldn’t colonize the planet yet, I think they hoped they’d be able to eventually but it’s no closer now than it was then. It’s just not livable. But we had stuff to build the colony with and they just used it to build the station. We had some pretty nice living sections. You should have seen it oh, a thousand hours ago before the, um, mouthholes got at it.”

“We were too busy avoiding your guns to really admire the place,” said Clay.

“Sorry about that,” said Avery. “Yeah, really sorry,” said Bing.

“It’s,” said Rachel, stopping before she said it was fine. “But how did you ever get to eighteen thousand on an orbital station? 581 doesn’t have that many on the ground.”

“I don’t know,” said Court. “We do know a little about their problems—they had a little war, a civil war, I guess? I don’t know what they did wrong, or what we did right. I bet we reached ten thou the third generation, and we were where we are now maybe a hundred years ago. We really didn’t have any way of making more space, we certainly weren’t going to use the dead parts of the colony ship, they wouldn’t hold that much in the way of living space anyway, and we knew pretty much then that we weren’t going to fit any more on the place, so yeah, actually, when the Ngugma said they’d give us some spare pods, we thought, maybe, just possibly, we could grow some more. The planet below is just way too cold to colonize, and it’s got nothing for resources, and it’s also prone to these weird nitrogen volcanoes, totally unpredictable, but up here, we have hydroponics, we have sunlight, we pretty much have what we need. We’re a hardy breed, right, boys?”

“You got that right,” said Renko seriously. He seemed like a redneck to Clay, in a good way.

“But then,” said Rachel.

“But then the stinkin’ Ngugma come through again.”

“On their way to destroy all human life on Earth?” guessed Clay.

“No,” said Court. “On their way back from destroying all human life on Earth. And they had the, uh, mouthholes with them.”

“So wait,” said Clay, “the mouthholes were with the Ngugma?”

“Hey, want some tea?” suggested Renko.

“Not really with,” said Court. “I mean, the jury is still out on that, I guess. But after, yeah. About fifty hours after. The Ngugma came through—!”

“Just to be really clear,” said Bing, “the first thing that came through was the video from Earth. And that came through like a crap storm.”

“I can imagine,” said Clay. “And you hadn’t seen the mouthholes yet at that point?”

“What did you call them before we came here and told you what we called them?” asked Rachel.

“Spheroids,” said Avery, shrugging and smiling. “Not nearly as descriptive.”

“Motherfucking space bombs,” said Renko.

“We were calling them spaceblobs,” said Bing. “But I think mouthhole is the right name. Cavitas buccae, in Latin, I think.”

“Nice one, Bing,” said Court with a smirk worthy of Alpha Wing.

“So the videos from Earth,” Clay said.

“Well, you can imagine,” said Avery. “We’d had those guys here. We had the impression they’d taken advantage of us, but it wasn’t like we had any way of mining our own asteroid belt, and they did help, a little. We, uh, we have these three pods. Believe it or not, they were the first aliens we ever met. And here they were giving us stuff.”

“Yeah,” said Court. And we used it. Those pods got attached and everything, and there they sit, holding our spare equipment and stuff. There’s a good chance we’ll at least try and make one or two of them over into living quarters. Once this is all over.”

“If it doesn’t end up with us all floating cold and dead in space,” said Renko.

“Look,” said Rachel, “one way or another, we are going to beat these stinkin’ mouthholes. Count on that.”

“You have to understand,” drawled Avery, “they beat the snot out of us.”

“Yeah,” said Court, “we had just about digested the fact that everyone on the home planet was horribly dead. And then here come the perpetrators. And they must have known we knew. This time through, they didn’t contact us at all. They also didn’t attack, though they scared the crap out of us. We just assumed they were going to do something horrible to us. Otherwise why even travel through the system?”

“Bardo went ape doo doo,” said Renko. “He’s still sure there’s some way that disease is going to get in here. He’s not the only one.”

“He has nothing to worry about,” said Rachel. “They had to do a lot of work to infect the humans of Earth.”

“Yes,” said Clay. “He hath no hemorrhagic fever mark upon him, his complexion is perfect blown the heck up in space by mouthholes.”

“What?” asked Avery.

“I think he’s quoting,” said Rachel. “Either Rowling or Shakespeare or Tolkien.”

“Love that Harry Potter stuff,” said Renko. “Gotta reread that when this is all over.”

“Anyway,” said Rachel. “And then they just flew on by?”

“And then they just flew on by,” said Court. “They passed pretty close, but they didn’t stop and they didn’t shoot anything at us. And behind them, practically in their ion glow, were the spheroids. The mouthholes. And they started right in on us. We have twelve sections we live in: well, we had. A through K, and the old ship, we call it Section Zero.”

“That’s where Commander died,” said Renko. “”He thought it’d be a good idea to reclaim the old ship.”

“Yeah,” said Court. She smiled, then shook her head. “Commander Boros. First attack, he gets killed.”

“Balin shouldn’t have returned to Moria,” said Clay to Rachel.

“Yeah, no shit,” said Court. She shook her head. “They chewed the crap out of the old ship, they chomped up E and G and those are a total loss, but when they hit the energy center of D, that was bad. There was a flare-out and the whole section basically caught fire. H and K got evacuated, and we still haven’t evaluated those yet. Heck, we’re not sure we’re going to make it at all. We’ve lost two thousand people and the rest are crowded into half the volume we started the year with, and everything’s stretched, life support can’t give another centimeter or we’ll have people dying of CO2 poisoning. It’s bad.”

“You’ll help, right?” said Avery. “Things are looking up?”

“Yes,” said Rachel brightly and firmly. “We will help.”

The Centaurians gave this a moment of silence. “So you’ve met other aliens?” asked Bing.

“Well,” said Rachel, “the Primoids, they’re an interesting case. But they’re not all bad, although who knows what we’ll find when we get back to Bluehorse.”

“Speaking of aliens,” said Clay, “what about those platinum disks? We found these platinum disks on a planet in this one system we call Holey, we called it that because, uh, it was where we first saw what we now know are signs of Ngugma mining operations, and you know, there were dead trapped mouthholes there, now I think of it.”

“So what, now?” asked Court. “Platinum disks?”

“Yes. Platinum disks. Which maybe someone could try and translate? Our computers didn’t come up with anything, but—?”

“But we have a whole linguistics department here,” said Court. “No, we do. Way back at the start of the colony, when they sent the Centaur Project, they thought we’d need linguistics experts. We haven’t, the only aliens we met spoke great English, damn the hell out of them, but we did maintain the specialty. We’ll have to get with the Lidzeys at some point. So did you get any—?”

A claxon rang so loud it flung all of them out of their cushions, including the locals. Court was the first to recover. During the second five-second round of sirens, she fixed Clay and Rachel with her brown eyes, her mouth tinier than ever, and as soon as silence returned, she said, “Kay everybody, time to find out if the settings work or not.”

4.

The spheroidal metallic vandals were at it again, plunging in and chewing off bits of the old colony ship, of the damaged and abandoned sections, of protruding antennae and other equipment, or what was left of them at this point. A few dozen brave individuals figured, according to whatever neural chemistry was available to mouthholes, that this was a good time to have a go at the control areas in hitherto little-damaged Section C. Whether they knew it or not, breaking through Section C would break the station in half.

It would also, probably, kill Court and her fellow officers; either way, it would more or less doom the centuries-old Alpha C project.

Clay and Rachel were headed for their fighters, pulling themselves down the control room, accelerating past the area where Court was taking command of Renko and three others at the lasers, and passing where Avery was just now occupying the electronic countermeasures chair.

A dull loud noise, between a clang and a thud, came from a spot on the bulkhead just by Avery’s position. Another one: clang-thud, and a dent. Then, just a little further on, another, and then a horrible little noise as a crack formed in the wall.

“Seal up suits!” called Court, who then flicked a switch and started another, different alarm sound, a sort of whine-whistle. Everyone started fumbling for their helmets, which were updates of the old plastic bubble. Clay stopped to pull his helmet over his head.

Clang-thud, and another horrible tearing sound. He looked to his left, and Avery, her helmet not quite shut right, was wrestling with a broomstick. No, she was trying to use a broomstick to beat on a thing, a brown-black-grey thing, and its horrid little invented mouth was chewing up the broomstick, literally chewing it up, pulling the handle into its mouth, dragging, somehow, the gagging Avery toward it.

“Oh crap oh crap oh crap,” Clay found himself shouting.

A blur of light was Rachel, wielding a laser cutter. It possibly made a scratch. The mouthhole pulled back out for a moment. Given its ability to accelerate, Clay supposed it might have dropped back a kilometer to make another run. For a second they could see space: Avery spent the second trying to get her helmet on right. Then the hole filled again and opened wider as the damn space blob practically forced itself into the room.

Rachel was punching and dialing on the handle of the cutter. Clay grabbed a nearby piece of steel and swung it at the mouthhole, whacking it good in what might have been its forehead, to no effect. He gave it another whack, and this went even worse: a second mouth opened in the very spot and took hold of the beam.

“God damn it,” he cried out, wrestling with it, “it’s frickin’ stronger than me, and I’m feeding it chocolate.”

A bright light nearby was way into the blue. Clay supposed it would have been heavy on ultraviolet; bees and butterflies would have loved it. The mouthhole did not. A meter-long gash joined the two mouths, and the thing shot back out of the opening before popping visibly a few meters out in space. Bits of black charred metal shot in through the tear in the bulkhead. Rachel’s laser cutter pulled back and switched off like a mechanic’s version of a light saber, which was exactly what it was. She smirked through her visor.

Then Bing was there with what looked like a big fire extinguisher. Out of its hose came a spray of grey plastic. He got the seal covered, with help from Avery, who had her helmet on at last and was recovered enough to grab another of the extinguisher things. Then she threw herself at the ECM station and began furiously sliding and poking and pushing.

“Let’s go, hubs,” said Rachel. Clay took one more glance and followed: by that time, his wife was nearly to the other end of the control room.

“This way,” called the young man who was still, or again, holding the white cat. Its claws were possibly venting his vac suit as he stood by the impromptu airlock. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Rachel mouthed through her visor. In a moment they were through, and there hung the two Ghosts, looking very good after the station control room.

“Power up,” said Clay, getting his hatch sealed; he heard Rachel say “Power up” at the same moment.

“Attack plan rho,” said Rachel.

“Which is?”

“Rho is for Rachel, sweet thing. Follow me and do what I do.”

They might have had to find their way out to the battle, but here came three mouthholes, bouncing down the long passage from the cryo section. Clay, gritting his teeth, knowing that Rachel was gritting hers, threw himself at them, and they fell to the Ghosts’ ferocity and fully refined frequencies. Then the Ghosts were out in space through new holes in the side of the big passage.

The majority of the mouthholes were going at Section C now, and they were chewing more holes even as the crew was sealing them up. Through the windows, Clay could see more people rushing to help out, still sealing up their helmets. They saw a big hole open at the far end, and two vac suited people came flying out into space. One, then the other, was eaten for their suits’ metal content: those old suits, full of steel and zinc and copper.

Rachel was streaking down the side of Section C, dark and silent as a mouthhole. One came across her path and she opened up, and it opened up like a walnut shell. Three more came after her, and Clay, forty meters behind, put a burning hole in one, then another, then the third. His heart surged. They got to the far end and had their way with a crowd of a dozen or more that had nearly broken the end of the section off from the old ship.

It was work, but they managed to chop their way through the crowd. Six, eight, ten: the pieces flew off like splinters of chopped wood. More came to join the fray—at first, and then the mouthholes seemed to get the idea and scattered.

Clay and Rachel turned back and found the station’s four laser guns, the four that were still functional, working together quite nicely. Eight mouthholes were still trying to get through in the middle, but now they were trapped in a narrow place, surrounded by suddenly lethal beams. Around them, many dents and many bits of mouthholes testified to the violence of the attack: it was the Angle at Gettysburg, and Pickett’s Charge was just about over. The two Ghosts came at them laterally and blasted the survivors without pity.

Just as they reached the spot, Rachel pulled out and headed off into space perpendicular to the station. Clay futzed a bit as he tried to follow; by the time he was on her tail, she was two kilometers ahead. More Sherman than Meade, she was chasing down a knot of mouthholes, but they were accelerating away, and now more were coming in behind her: she hardly seemed to notice them, blasting away at those she was pursuing. The ones behind were closing on her.

Clay’s heart was in his throat. It felt great there. He was on them before they knew it, before they were on her, and one, then another, then another went to pieces under his attack. Then Rachel hit the proverbial brakes and flipped around blasting: three more went under their combined attack. The word FLIP lit up in red on his console.

He flipped. Three mouthholes were on him. One went to pieces. Another took a Rachel shot and blew. The third struck him on the left side, but he toppled away, still grappling with his controls. He pulled it together and found himself in blank darkness. Behind him, he could see Rachel’s Ghost. She was surrounded.

Then she was not. By the time he could get there, the station’s beams had found targets. Four mouthholes blew, then another from his shot, then Rachel stood in space and got off deadly shots on two more as they fled. The field was theirs: Lee was in full retreat.

“You okay?” came Rachel’s voice.

“I’m fine,” said Clay. “You?”

“Oh, I’m just ducky, hunk-a-licious. Let’s go see if they have beer on Alpha Centauri.”

5.

Alpha Centauri did have beer, a spicy orange brew that had never been in the same solar system as a barley plant. The galley, in Section B, was the section least damaged by the attacks, and while dozens of Centaurians swarmed over Section C to effect long-term repairs, Court and Renko and an assortment of gunners, engineers and people who were currently living in the galley showed Clay and Rachel the best time the system had to offer. The decoration was eclectic, bare panel in some places, mural in others, and posters or appliques stuck on the walls at random, screens here and there showing the outside, the inside, and reruns of 23rd Century action movies, 24th Century soccer, and The Golden Girls. The bar was self-serve; the beer came out of the tap into what amounted to sippy cups. Smoke tubes hovered near to provide some sort of cannabis product, unused; they’d already been used plenty.

The mouthholes had evaporated by the time Clay and Rachel were back in the station. They left behind them pieces of dozens of their comrades. The humans had lost four of their own in the last battle, but the whole 950-hour assault had cost the lives of over two thousand, maybe fifteen percent of the population, and at least fifty percent of the liveable volume of the station.

“We’ll fucking fix it,” Court said for the sixth time, over her sixth beer. “What the fuck. We got nothing better to do.”

“We’ll fix it up like it was,” said Renko.

“Maybe it’s time,” said a young man with a ponytail, “to think about moving those dead bodies?”

Renko turned and gave him a long look, then a vigorous shove. The young man lost his hold on a handle on the bar and hurtled backward ten meters into a wall and a poster of a naked man and woman in a jungle. Renko watched him glide away, as if he was watching a golf ball fly.

“Maybe he’s right,” said Renko. He tossed back the second half of his nth beer, tossed it behind him and headed for the door. “G’night, all,” he said.

“There’s a lot we need to fix,” said Court, sipping another quarter of her glass.

“This stuff isn’t bad, actually,” said Clay, sipping his fifth or sixth.

“Yeah it is,” said Rachel. She punched him fondly in the shoulder.

“I think it fucking woke us up,” said Court. “This place was zombie land the last, oh, since we saw the video from Earth. Then the attack by those mouthholes. Commander dead, no one in command. Fuckin’ A, what are you supposed to think about that? This could so easily have ended in us all floating dead and cold.”

Clay met her eyes, then looked away and said, “I’m not gonna say you’re wrong.”

“But you think you guys will wake back up,” said Rachel, who, even drunk, didn’t seem too drunk.

“We have to,” said Court, suddenly grim. “We have to.” She took a drink. “I say that’s just what we needed. I say we were in a dead end. Hollek, bless his heart, he couldn’t get us out of it. Boros couldn’t get us out of it. Flicking Ngugma got us out of it. It’s up to us. And it starts with rebuilding.”

“We need some fighters,” said a young woman, looking up from a doze against the bar, her nth beer in her hand. “Defend ourselves.”

“No shit,” said another young woman. “I volunteer.”

“We’ll share the design specs,” said Rachel. “I don’t know any reason why you shouldn’t be able to build one here. What did you have with the Centaur Project?”

“Stinkin’ exploration pods,” said the first young woman. “They suck.”

“Have you thought of colonizing one of the asteroids?” asked Clay. “Just a thought.”

Court turned around to the other crew. She opened her tiny little mouth with its big lips, but she hesitated. “They’re having such a good time,” she said, looking across the mixture of humans who had somehow come to make their home in the galley module of a beaten-up space station that was the only habitable place within four light years. She smiled and shook her head. She met Clay’s eyes.

Clay put his hand on her shoulder. Just then, someone pushed someone else and the second person slugged the first person. A row erupted, not quite a brawl. With an apologetic shrug, Court pushed herself across the chamber. “Okay, settle down, settle down,” she yelled, pushing drunk people out of her way as she headed for the disturbance.

“Glad they don’t let the pressure get to them,” said Rachel.

“Glad you don’t,” said Clay.

“I damn well do, Clay Gilbert. You know the pressure gets to me. Well, not the pressure—!”

“You’re lying! You’re always so cool.”

“Not pressure,” said Rachel precisely, “no, more like fear.” She took a drink. “Like just this constant dread. I don’t like it.” She laughed.

“No, I know what you mean,” said Clay. “I don’t like it either. I don’t frickin’ like it. I don’t like having it occur to me that if I don’t kill this alien, it is going to chew me up and I am going to be dead in the cold of space. What did Court say? Cold and dead. Dead and cold.”

They looked at each other. “And it’s so frickin’ close,” Rachel said at last, in a low voice. “Cold dead space. It’s just millimeters away. I hate that. I do not like that at all.” She took a drink. “Mister God, Missus Goddess, I do not like space at all. Could you put me somewhere else?”

“Now you’re lying.”

She looked at him. “No, Clay,” she said. “I’m a frickin’ addict. I couldn’t not do space. Could you?” She finished the glass, and, finding herself floating next to the spigot, poured herself one more. “How about a smoke?”

“Okey dokey, Rachel,” said Clay. He took a sip. “Goddess. PTSD much?”

“A lot, lately.”

6.

Clay woke up in a bunk in the station by himself, and realized that what had woken him, from very nasty confused dreams, was the click of the latch closing behind Rachel. He rolled over and drifted back into sleep, but the dreams were no better. He woke again, hung over and with a horrible taste in his desert-like mouth. The same half dozen facts rotated through his worries: humans were dead in great numbers, Bluehorse might be next, the station at Alpha C was iffy at best, he had no idea if they would ever see Natasha and Vera again, H. sapiens did not seem to be covering itself in glory or exhibiting great competence in its fight for survival, and he felt horrible. And humans were dead in great numbers, and on around again.

He sat up and banged his head on the metal ceiling of the bunk. Drifting between ceiling and bedding, he found the latch and opened the door.

“Hey, hubby-licious,” said Rachel, standing there in his favorite of her costumes, holding a handle with her left hand, combing out her wet hair with her right. The image of her naked in the cliff meadow in Greenland pushed the cycle of horrible thoughts out of its groove.

The one thing that ever worried him with Rachel, other than her sheer ability to get mad at him: the one thing he ever worried about, really: how would he be worthy of her?

She kissed him, her hand on his chest. “Shower’s a real treat.”

“They have a shower?” he asked stupidly.

“Right through there.”

When he next caught up with her, she was just sitting down to breakfast with three young women and an older man who could only have been a space mechanic. Clay was quite presentable, even shaven, though his hair was a bit long. His suit normally took care of shaving and cleaning him, but the shower, shooting water at him from all directions, had indeed been a treat. Breakfast was some sort of eggy concoction with things in it that looked like potato. And there was coffee.

“Darling,” said Clay, “I’ll snip your hair if you’ll snip mine.”

“Ar,” said one of the young women. “We got barbers, ya know.”

“I’ll trust them if you do,” said Rachel. “Now Clay, these young ladies want to be fighter pilots. And this gentleman—!”

“Wants to build them fighters,” said Clay.

“It’s more than just that,” said Rachel. “You see, it’s terribly romantic, in a sense. This is Mr. Friedman, and these two are his daughters, they’re Glenda Friedman and Susa Kelly, their mom was named Kelly. She was one of those killed when Section D went up.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” said Clay.

“Well,” said the young woman with the badge that said KELLY, “this is how we would be handling this. It’s all right, Da?”

“It will be all right,” said the old guy. He looked Clay in the eye. “I can build any craft I can take apart, but I have to see its insides before I can build it. You get me?”

Clay gave him a long look, actually quite taken aback once the nature of the request was quite understood. “Well,” said Clay at last, “all right. I am willing to let you make a copy of my Ghost.” He took a drink of coffee. “But,” he said to the wall, “I shall be most ticked off if you can’t get it back together again.”

Mr. Friedman and his daughters, and their friend whose name, apparently, was HELLE, exchanged serious looks. “All right,” said Rachel, “all according to plan. So Clay, if you’re wondering what you’re going to do while Mr Friedman is making copies and I am trying to train these three young ladies—!”

“You have a plan for me. So surprised.”

“I don’t,” she said. “But Court left me a note for you.” She handed him an actual, honest to Goddess little business card.

“Lidzey?” Clay read off the card.

“Husband and wife,” said Rachel. “Linguists.”

The Lidzeys met Clay over more coffee in a room that was a cross between a university library reading room and a grain silo, and the size of his mom’s walk-in closet. They were a well-matched old couple of Centaurians: grey, smiley, and small, not much bigger than Clay. They had the platinum disk floating in space over a table and under a glass sheet, and they projected magnified versions of the same disk on the walls.

“How old did you say these were?” asked Mrs. Lidzey.

“Our estimate,” said Clay, “was 64 million years.”

“Well,” said Mr. Lidzey, “there was a species which rose and fell with the dinosaurs on bloody old Earth.”

“Do tell the story,” said Clay.

“There’s not much to tell, or there’s a lot,” said Mr. Lidzey. “This seems to be a summary of their story, though I can’t say we’ve figured out more than a percent or two of it. We don’t know their history, but we know what they looked like, we don’t know what their world was like, but we do have pictures that look like flora and fauna. And we do know how they fell.”

“What did they look like?”

“This,” said Mr. Lidzey, turning his tablet toward Clay. And there they were, stalky, dressed in loose shimmery robes, with three arms and a good dozen fleshy legs and what seemed like an elephant’s trunk coming out of the top, with sensory stuff on its end.

“Interesting,” said Clay, taking in an image of three of them with arms around each other, looking for all the world like a family on holiday. “How did they fall? Did they destroy themselves?”

“Not really,” said Mrs. Lidzey. “They left a lot of images. We haven’t got the hang of their language, but their image files, we can translate those. And here is what we get.” She hit a button on her tablet and projected on the wall was a picture of space, a space of stars and a nearby moon. The image began to move, things swooping through and chewing and disappearing.

“Goodness,” said Clay. “Mouthholes.”

“There’s no doubt about it,” said Mr. Lidzey. “I don’t know if they could be wiped out entirely by mouth, as you say, holes, but the things certainly seem to have played a central role in their demise.”

A vast spaceship hove into view, a magnificent battlecruiser surrounded by cruisers and shuttles and fighters, and then the swarm of locusts descended on them, and in a few minutes they were reduced to wreckage. Then different spaceships swept in, black and gleaming and non-metallic, and laid low the cities of the planet.

“Most of the disks,” said Mr. Lidzey, “form a sort of encyclopedia. The last one, the last one they made, is a sort of message. A message describing their demise.”

“How sad,” said Clay. “Not a suicide note, a homicide note.”

“It’s their final statement,” said Mrs. Lidzey. “It’s their farewell. The black ships were their enemies. The mouth, um, holes just turned the odds.”

“Any idea who they were, those black ships?” asked Clay.

“Only in a negative sense,” said Mrs. Lidzey. “They aren’t the Ngugma, and from comparison with your data from Bluehorse, lovely, lovely name by the way, we can tell it’s not these Primoids of yours. So however many alien races we think there have been, there’s at least one more.”

“We can only keep studying,” said Mr. Lidzey. “We have historians, linguists, ethnographers. May we keep the platinum disk? We will of course provide you with the full image set.”

“Oh, sure,” said Clay. “It’s fine. You know what, if you send someone to Holey, go ahead and fish out the rest of the set.” He watched the last of the cities on the planet destroyed. Whatever the black ships were, they were not Ngugma: they swept away, leaving the last survivors to die on that mountain where the platinum plates were left. They did not stay and mine the place: no, they settled for mere genocide, whoever they were. The Ngugma came much later: 22,000 ± 5500 years ago. “It’s funny,” he said after a moment. “These black ships. Their people are probably long gone as well. The mouthholes survive.”

“The mouthholes survive,” said Mrs. Lidzey. “What about the humans?”

“That is the question,” said Clay. “But I have a question. When you got here, I mean when the Centaur Project got here, did you find a time capsule or something? Left by another Earth mission?”

The Lidzeys laughed. “Yes, yes,” said Mr. Lidzey. “This is legend here. You must recognize that the Centaur Project has a most peculiar karma, if you will. Nothing’s been easy, and somehow the fault, as you might say, isn’t in ourselves but in our stars, literally our stars. So the mission gets here and here’s a message in a bottle, telling us that we’re not even the first humans to visit Alpha Centauri. We get here with our clunky equipment and hundreds of dead colonists, and it turns out someone came here with shiny new technology, came and left a note and went back home. Wished us well.”

“They did give us their data files,” said Mrs. Lidzey. “It saved us a great deal of effort early on. But it would have been nice to have known it before we left, somehow.”

“And how long—?”

“Had it been from when they left to when we got here?” said Mrs. Lidzey. “Nine whole months.”

Clay laughed, and then he thought about it and said, “How did we not know? That mission would have got back to Earth in, oh, 2326? We didn’t leave till 2334. We could’ve stopped by! Picked you up or something. You would have been here in 2322 or so, right? Didn’t you—?”

“Transmit to Earth? We had damage.” The Lidzeys laughed. “Of course we did,” she went on. “We fixed it, but it was years before we had enough power to transmit across four light years.”

“Well,” said Clay, “um, wow. You guys were really on an island.”

“We were,” said Mrs. Lidzey. “But then we got found. By the Ngugma and the mouthholes. Is that, um, all one word?”

7.

Clay and Rachel stayed at Alpha C for one solid month of 24-hour days. They toured the place (this took about an hour), scouted the system (the really interesting item being an osmium-iridium plaque found on a 10-meter rock orbiting out ahead of a 50-meter rock among the dust of the asteroid belt), helped fix what they could fix (by the time they left, one living module which had been thoroughly holed was sealed up and ready for residents again) and trained three new fighter pilots on simulators. Rachel took the lead on training, while Clay got dirty with the fix-up; Mr. Friedman had Clay’s Ghost back together at least as good as new.

“I like this,” he kept saying, as he flew it around the area. “I like this.” When he got back and found Friedman fiddling with Rachel’s Ghost, he told her she’d like it too.

“I can see you glowing,” she said. “Mr. F must do good work.”

They stood watching as Mr. F, half inside Rachel’s ship, fiddled with something. “Well,” said Clay, “I think this is now a Ghost 204. Remember at Mathilde they called their fighters 204s?”

“Now we have our own,” said Rachel.

Mr. Friedman appeared out of the back end of Rachel’s ship. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I’ve incorporated whatever I could figure out of the stuff they’re doing now at Mathilde. Terrible situation. Absolutely wonderful little fighter. Just wonderful. Blow the shit out of a whole row of Ngugma cruisers.” He disappeared back inside, as Rachel and Clay turned their smirks on one another.

The last day-period they were at Alpha C, everyone was busy fixing something. Clay and Court and a woman named Verill were replacing a wiring node just outside the still-burned-out D module, which involved a brief EVA and hours in a cramped conduit. The technology was either beyond Clay’s knowledge or way too primitive for him to comprehend, but he could do what he was told with his wrench set. Ten hours of that, and he was informed by Verill that he had done enough and she would finish. He put his wrenches away and got himself into the airlock.

Stepping out into the half-repaired D section, he found himself in an observation lounge not unlike the one on Earth’s Moon that he and his fighter pilot buddies had used for meetings. The air was back in the section, and the heat was coming back up.

Court was the only person in the little room: she hung on a sashay bar by the huge round window, lit only by starlight and instrument lights. Clay pulled himself toward her. She turned just as he got there, her brown eyes gleaming in the starlight, her frizzy hair floating around her head.

“Have a drink?” said Court. Clay might have replied in some form, but regardless, she handed him a small glass flask with whiskey in it.

“Thank you,” he said. He sipped. It was way better than his own pee.

They both looked out the window for a minute. She turned and almost said something, then stopped.

Clay cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. Court laughed a tiny laugh. He said, “What?”

She shrugged and laughed again, then turned to look out the window. She said, “You’re leaving soon.” But she didn’t turn from her view. He pulled up next to her.

They could see C Section on their right, mostly repaired, and D Section below them and to the right, looking like the day after a trailer fire. Beyond, Alpha Centauri A itself shone, about the size of Venus as seen from Earth. Beyond that, Proxima was a red dot, and that yellow point, that mid-level star to its left: that might be the Sun. Many suns scattered across the view; the rest was blackness.

They floated there for some time. There was just too much to say, too much to digest, too much they felt exactly the same way about, too much that each knew and the other did not. And there was no weather or sports to talk about.

Presently Clay said, “Are, um, you in charge here? I still don’t—!”

“I guess,” said Court.

There was another silence. Clay felt, all of a sudden, like he was just waking up. The feeling he’d had before, that he was talking with ghosts, came back magnified, as if Court were someone brought back from the dead, a ghost made flesh. Court was physical, but mental too. She was strong and tough and good. She was alive. Her eyes, her dark skin in the dark, the wide lips of her tiny mouth, her strong, delicate body, were all so alive. She attracted him like life.

But he already knew, at this stage of marriage to Rachel, that he would have to consciously remind himself again and again that he was no longer a bachelor. Perhaps he could wear a button that said “Unavailable.” Clay said, “Listen,” but Court interrupted him, as if she had just paused between words for ninety seconds.

“The thing is,” she said, speaking slowly and calmly, “I don’t know what you’re supposed to do. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do if you’re, um, here. You know.” She looked at him. He didn’t feel like he knew, so he waited. “Just over there,” she said, “two hundred and five million people died. And, you know, we’re okay here, we’re self-sufficient, sustainable, all that good stuff. But I guess I didn’t really realize how much I depended on Earth being there, you know? I mean, this sounds stupid, but—!”

“No,” said Clay, “no, I get it.”

“It’s like,” and she paused again for a good fifteen seconds, but Clay knew to wait. “Like when my father died, a couple years ago. My mother was already gone, but when Pop died, it was like—!” Another touchless silence. “I had never been alone in my life, not like that. Not like—!”

“Not like when you lose your last parent,” said Clay. “That one I know all about. My dad died, and I turned around and joined up with Human Horizon.”

She smiled at him. “Yeah,” she said, “that would be what you would do. Because you’re suddenly all by yourself in the big world. The big universe. And losing Earth was like that. Like all my parents died at once.” They stood there, nursing their flasks of whiskey, looking out on the galaxy. Finally Court went on: “And these guys come through and they could just kill us so easily. We could all just be dead and floating tomorrow. They did Earth. It’s a whole damn planet. With sky and oceans and mountains and stuff. What have I got? Fucking modules. Tubes and wires and pipes and panels and stuff. They could kill us off so easily.” She laughed. “They could do it by accident. They could do it and not even notice. Or, they could do us just to clean up a bit. You know, like we were cleaning up the debris in D Section.” She turned to him. She was a wiry woman, not tall: she was perhaps six centimeters taller than Clay. He could see nothing in her dark face except the gleam of those eyes. “You don’t know,” she said, “you can’t know, but you have something like it, you flying through the light years out there just millimeters from nothing.”

“The cold and dead,” said Clay. “Except it’s all moving at practically the speed of light relative to me, that’s different.”

“But you could—disaster is just not that far away for you either,” she said. “It’s just not.”

“No,” said Clay.

Court turned to the window again. “So, yeah, I’m in charge, I guess. Everyone thinks I’m in charge, so I guess I have to be like a grownup or something. Wish me luck.”

“Court,” said Clay. She looked sharply at him. Her tiny mouth was closed, the curve of her cheek set, but there was moisture glistening at the edge of her eye. “Listen,” he said. “You’ll be fine. The cosmos isn’t more dangerous now than it was, it’s just we know it now. We know some of it, at least. We’re on a losing streak, we lost more than we ever thought we could survive losing, but here we are. We’re not gone. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“We’re strong,” she said.

“We can be strong,” said Clay. “We can work for a common purpose. We even have an ally, these rebel Primoids we met, and maybe we’ll get more allies. We’re here.”

Court turned all the way to face Clay. “We’re here,” she repeated. She looked into his eyes, brown into blue. She seemed to be drifting toward him: now they were only a few centimeters apart. Her dark face, her gleaming eyes, her flat, graceful nose, that tiny mouth, those muscular lips. Her eyes held his, while a year passed.

Was this happening? There was a subroutine in Clay’s brain that ran nonstop, analyzing the possibility that whatever woman was in closest proximity to Clay was going to have sex with him. That subroutine was very active. It was bouncing around in his head, knocking things over, while all his conscious mind could do was yell at it to be quiet. Finally she opened her mouth and said, “It’s good to find someone who understands.”

“It’s going to be fine,” he said lamely.

“How do you do it?” she asked. “I know how this works. You’re going off what, forty light years in a jump, you’re never going to be back here, not while I’m alive.”

“We both get full lives,” Clay said. “It’s not like you won’t live as long as me.”

“You know what I mean,” said Court.

“I’ll never see you again,” said Clay. He was pinching himself like mad. He felt as if he’d just woken up from a shameful dream. “I guess you’d say that’s my life. Sometimes I think the only person who’s real is Rachel.”

Court smiled a tiny smile. She put her hand on his arm, which had the effect of pushing them a little further apart. “You’re a good man,” she said.

“And you’re the right woman,” he said, “you’re what this place needs.”

“It’s not like I was going to leave.”

They looked at each other for a long moment. “You’ll be fine,” he said.

“Fine,” said Court. “Love that word.”

Clay laughed and turned toward the door. It opened and in came Rachel, laughing, with a young man, one of the people who had been out fixing things with her little team or whatever. He was muscular, not bad to look at, and extremely tall. Rachel and Clay met eyes, and then Rachel looked at Court, in the shadow by the window, and Clay looked at the young man.

“Well,” drawled the young man, “I’m flat worn down, Commander And-rohh, I’m thinkin’ to hit the sack.” He looked up at Court. “Commander Court.”

Court shook her head, but said, “Take your rest time, Burton.” The young man gave a less than formal salute, turned and went out. The door to the observation lounge shut behind him.

“So,” said Clay, “seems like a nice young man.”

“This a meeting?” asked Rachel. “What’s the agenda?”

“Agenda,” said Clay. “Just how weird things are, what the point is, how to pick up the pieces etc.”

“Oh, that,” said Rachel. She smiled at Court, then turned, holding Clay’s hand. “We need to get a rest time in ourselves, before we take off, hubby-hunk.”

He looked back at Court, a black outline against the round window. “See you in the morning,” he said, mechanically. Court didn’t even laugh.