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"Gin," declared the raccoon, placing a card face down on the discard stack and facing his hand. He looked up at Captain Reinhardt, eyes dark and glistening in the characteristic black mask of fur that his genetic model line featured. The captain looked past his own hand to briefly study the one laid flat on the table. The raccoon kept his eyes on the captain's, waiting for confirmation and approval.

Reinhardt pursed his lips and nodded. "You win again, Pine. Starting to see a pattern here."

Pine nodded once, and began gathering up the playing cards with his thin black fingers. "Yes, sir."

Reinhardt ran his own fingers through his black hair and watched the raccoon. About two-thirds his height when standing, Pine had been one of his few companions for the last several months. The time had afforded him the opportunity to really study him and Marigold- the other "Enhanced Bio-Machine" that was not in low-cycle hibernation like the majority of the crew. He had initially used the phrase "Try to get to know them," but after only a short time he realized that even though they were clearly sentient creatures, he had no real common frame of reference with which to relate to them. His adult life on Earth had been surrounded by them, but always on the edges, mostly out of sight. They took their orders and disappeared- in his experience conversation was usually not one of their trained skills. So he studied Pine and Marigold- how they interacted with him and with Dr. Heller and with each other. He taught Pine to play several card games. Once they reached their destination, he surmised that everyone was going to have to live in a lot closer proximity to each other than most had been used to on Earth- human and otherwise. Best to be prepared.

Dr. Heller walked into the small galley where Reinhardt and Pine were seated and asked through a yawn, "Losing again, captain?"

Reinhardt nodded, "I'd suspect Pine of cheating somehow, but I suppose that's impossible, eh?"

Pine looked up, glancing between the captain and the doctor, ears flicking. He seemed to quickly deduce that the captain was not seriously accusing him of cheating, and said, "Yes, sir."

Heller laughed and went to get herself a mug of breakfast. Or dinner. It was all the same, really, out here in the endless dark. "You should have figured it out by now, Michael. His GML was designed and trained for pattern recognition along with those nimble fingers of his. He's not just good at playing cards- he's good at playing you."

"Huh," said the captain. He had figured as much, really. The experiment last month with poker should have proved it, but he hadn't wanted to conclude that he could be read so easily. Pride and prejudice, he chided himself. Pine probably sees more clearly than he does, without all those layers of human self-delusion in the way.

Heller joined them at the four-seat table with her now-steaming cup of nutri-broth. She was shorter than Reinhardt, though still taller than either Pine or Marigold. She had bob-cut auburn hair and hazel eyes, and looked much younger that her 37 years despite the demands of her medical career. She smiled easily, the little wrinkles at the edges of her eyes appearing when she did so.

Reinhardt and Pine had already had their own liquid meals, but they stayed with the doctor while she ate. Pine shuffled the cards quickly, perfectly. Waiting for the captain to ask him to begin a new game. Instead the captain said, "That will be all, Pine."

Pine answered, "Yes, sir," boxed up the cards and left the galley. He would make his rounds through the access-ways of the ship, looking for anything out of the ordinary, until told otherwise.

Reinhardt let the silence stretch out for several minutes before asking Heller, "You think they're smarter than us?"

She shrugged. "I don't think it's a fair question. They don't grow up like we do. They're programmed almost from birth. You're a product of your experiences, and so are they. And theirs are nothing like yours. Honestly, Michael, what's your fascination?"

"I didn't grow up with them, I guess. Never even saw one until I got employed. I think of them as short furry people. So I just keep trying to get through the programming. I keep assuming there's someone in there, under the facade."

"I won't say there isn't, but you're probably not doing Pine any favors trying to get him to open up. This is exactly why they stay mostly out of sight, back on Earth. We, and I mean humans in general here, have this instinct to project ourselves into others. It's one of the things that makes us human, in fact. Gives us empathy. But the EBMs- I don't know. I'm not a cognition specialist. It's like they have more empathy than ego, but without the perspective that having that ego would have provided."

"How can you even have empathy without ego? I figure you've got to have a solid sense of who you are before you can imagine who other people are and why you might care."

The doctor nodded, then said, "Like I said, I don't know. They just do their thing and after a while you kind of don't see them unless you make yourself. By design, I'm sure. Did you ever run into those emancipation people, out in the settlements?"

"I know who you mean, but no. It's different outside of the Franchises. The settlement where I grew up, the general feeling was anger. Resentment. Until I got employed, I felt the same way. We could have worked the company farms, cleaned the company floors, but instead the damned fuzzies did, and got to live inside the gates while we were shut out. I feel differently now, of course," he hastily added.

"I wasn't questioning your commitment, Michael," she said, resuming her meal.

Reinhardt nodded and stared past the doctor. Finally he asked, "What about Marigold? I haven't taught her to play cards but she seems much more... personable."

"She's mostly the same, beside the fact that she looks like a rabbit instead of a raccoon. And her medical training, of course. She'd be lost in those crawl spaces full of wiring and conduits that Pine spends his time in. And of course her empathy is much more... ok, I take it back, they're different. She's much more focused on reading us specifically, and figuring out what might be wrong and trying to fix it."

"She does give incredible massages, I'll give her that. I should have got a lepus EBM aide years ago."

Heller teased suggestively, "They were very popular with high-ranking officers, back at my posting in Edmonton Regional."

Reinhardt snorted, "Yeah, I don't think I could ever go that far with one of them, no matter how eager to please they are. I like complexity, I guess. Or at least equality."

"Careful, captain, that sort of inflammatory talk'll get you put on a list," the doctor admonished in a sarcastic tone. She got up to wash out her mug and spoon and stow them securely.

Reinhardt laughed. "All right, maybe what I really meant to say is that they remind me of children in a lot of ways. Anyway, our corporate watchdogs are all napping, and they're welcome to make lists when they wake up. I doubt anyone will ever read them where we're going."

Heller walked up behind the captain's chair and bent down to kiss the back of his neck. "No one to watch us until we get there. So if you're not interested in Marigold's services, perhaps we could..."

Reinhardt grinned. He and the doctor had not been involved with each other during the intensive run-up to the colony mission, but it seemed like they had been chosen for compatibility. They had turned to each other easily, before they had even crossed the orbit of Mars, and enjoyed a sort of pleasantly utilitarian relationship since. The captain may have claimed to enjoy complexity, but in this matter he was relieved by the doctor's easygoing personality. He suspected someone smarter than him had planned this, too.

And, as if according to some script, just as he was about to answer in the affirmative to the doctor's unarticulated suggestion a synthesized chime sounded from a panel near the door, along with a flashing green light.

"Rain check," the captain said, and Dr. Heller nodded, already headed towards the doorway.

***

The control room was located near the center of the great squat pyramid that was the CSS James Cook. Captain Reinhardt followed Dr. Heller in and set to fastening himself into his seat, listening to her doing the same a few feet to his left. The multiple view panels filled most of his field of vision, and each offered either a live image from one of the many cameras located inside and outside the ship, or schematics with system data. He scanned them all briefly, in an order he had decided was most efficient months ago. Nothing red or yellow on the system screens, though he hadn't expected any. Alarms would have gone off all over the ship if there had been. So far they had experienced a few yellow alarms- small failed components and sensors here and there, which had to be expected in a thing so complex. One screen showed a flashing green target symbol, which Reinhardt had also expected. It was what had summoned him to the control room in the first place.

He spared a glance at the screen which showed the view from near the point of the pyramid. Instead of the star-dusted black that most of the external cameras caught, in front of them was a dull red glow, showing the otherwise invisible shape of their bow-shock field. It shoved the particles and dust of interstellar space out of their way lest they be bathed in lethal radiation and torn apart by their own velocity, currently standing at about half the speed of light. Occasionally it would flare brighter, often in ephemeral streaks, as something a little more massive was annihilated against the electromagnetic field. The captain often wished that he could somehow see the whole ship from a short distance away, as if from a camera traveling alongside them. He imagined the ship would look almost mythical- a grey metal pyramid crowned by a halo of shifting red light. The ancient Egyptians would have approved, he was sure.

He announced audibly for the sake of the always recording mission logs, "Computer reports referent lock, all systems normal. Preparing to engage skip sequence four."

Looking over at Dr. Heller, he asked, "Nervous?" just as he had the previous three skips.

She shook her head. "Not anymore. Familiarity breeds contempt, you know. It probably sounds awful, but I'm bored. When we left- all that fanfare, being built up into some kind of celebrities for being the first people to leave the solar system. I was terrified then. Weren't you?"

"Yeah. I was sure we would die way before this. A million things could have gone wrong. Could still. That bow-shock field goes, and we'll glow in the dark for a while before being stripped to ionized gas. Or any one of the little magnetic prisons we keep our antimatter in could breach. Or..."

"No, I mean the weight of the expectation. I know we'll never see any of them again on Earth but you can imagine there will be statues of us there. And now, it doesn't seem to matter so much. We're not real anymore- we're myths. It's like... being dead. I just want the trip to be over. Are we there yet?" she finished in a mock child's whine.

Reinhardt laughed. "Not far now," he said, the traditional response. "This should be the last skip, then we get to flip around and start decel. I'm afraid that takes just as long as it did to get to point five c."

Heller groaned. "I know. Let's get on with it."

Reinhardt clicked a button on his armrest. His voice echoed through the intercoms. "Preparing for skip sequence. Pine, report."

Pine's somewhat high-pitched trilling voice came through the intercom, "Secure in quarters, sir." Quarters meant little more than a horizontal sleeping tube with a few amenities for all of them, human and EBM alike.

Reinhardt clicked the intercom again. "Marigold, report."

Marigold's more melodic voice came back, "Secure in med-bay, sir."

The captain nodded and said over general intercom, for the benefit of Pine and Marigold and the hundred twenty or so sleepers who couldn't hear, "Cutting acceleration and spinning up the resonator."

The gravity they had been enjoying courtesy of the aft thrusters fell away rapidly as they went inertial. Non-essential lights went out in the control room, as they did all over the ship. Heller and Reinhardt watched the view panels. They had learned that the side cameras afforded the most dramatic display of the skip itself. The captain touched a screen and the flashing green cross-hairs changed to a rapid readout of numbers. He mumbled, "I almost wish you could feel something."

Dr. Heller nodded, her eyes on one of the side-camera views. The deBroglie resonator was already up to speed, and they now lived in a bubble of coherent matter. They were focused on the stream of photons leading like a trail of crumbs to Tau Ceti, and the resonator slowed their molecular vibrations down, lengthening their common wavelength by orders of magnitude. As the two human passengers watched, the few relatively nearby stars on the screens began to crawl backwards, pixel by pixel, culminating in a series of stronger skitters as the ship traveled nearly three light-years in the space of a few seconds. The skitters slowed back into a crawl, and then stopped. The lights came back up and the captain was busy checking screens and sensor numbers. He let out a triumphant laugh.

"Ha! We're here. Stellar wind. We passed Tau Ceti's termination shock somewhere with that last one." He announced officially for the log, "Skip sequence four complete. Sensors report stellar wind from Tau Ceti. Preparing for inversion and deceleration."

He changed system screens until he found the right one, and touched a sequence of spots on the screen, carefully, studying each one. He'd been practicing this for the past week- it was something new, another potential disaster. But most of the real work was done by the computer, controlling the attitude jets with a precision he could never match. He was just here to give the commands. A dizzying vertigo gripped the both of them as the stars on the external views suddenly began to move, much more than they did during the skips, more than they had since they left Earth orbit. They were tumbling lazily over and the bow-shock glow was moving, always in the direction of their forward momentum. The jets stopped at the middle of the roll, and then fired in the opposite direction until they had turned a near-perfect 180, the apex of their pyramid-ship now pointed away from the star. The captain brought the thrusters back on line and eased them back to 9.8 meters per second squared, which would slow them comfortably down for the remainder of the journey to the inner system where their destination lay.

Reinhardt exhaled a sigh and stretched his back, which he realized he had hunched over in anxious worry. "Well, that went well," he declared, just as something broke through the bow-shock field and tore through the ship, leaving a jagged glowing hole, all the way out the other side.

***

There was a shriek and a shudder in the structural members of the ship, and an instant sea of red flashing alarms on all the system screens, as well as the strobes set on the walls. The computer was already following its emergency logic before the humans could even begin to react.

"Fuck!" was the first thing the captain could say, which was sure to look good in posterity. Still, he was alive to utter it.

Dr. Heller was poking at her screens, trying to make sense of the deluge of alarms. "What is it? What happened?!" the panic in her voice rose as the interface was slow to respond to her taps.

Captain Reinhardt twisted in his seat, trying to see everything at once. The control room seemed secure, but he was getting sensor failures and readings that suggested a hull breach. Yet they lived! He stammered, "I don't know! We must have hit something big enough to get through the bow-shock but I always figured anything that big would just wipe us out!" He punched the intercom button. "Pine! Pine, status!"

Pine didn't answer.

"Marigold? Status!"

Marigold's voice came back quickly, with a fearful quaver. "Med-bay is s-secure. What orders, captain?" She sounded like she was pleading.

"Just stay put, we need to find out what happened."

"Yes, sir," she sent back.

He looked at Dr. Heller. "Pine?"

She shook her head, mouth open, eyes wide. "Maybe- maybe he dashed off to try to fix something?"

He looked back at the screen, trying to pull his atrophied mind back into order. Months of sleepy routine were not easily shaken off. "I don't see how he could already- but we'll assume the worst later. Right now... ok. The safeties have all the sections sealed off. We can't go anywhere for the moment. Let's get the schematics up." Starfields were replaced one by one with floor plans of each deck of the pyramid, with sensors at their locations. It was clear then, what had happened. Starting at deck three, right at the edge, there was a stain of red readings and alarms, following down each level below in roughly the same vertical space. Something had shot clean through every deck from the thrusters up through where it exited the slope of the pyramid at deck three. The thruster it struck initially was obviously dead. The computer had already rebalanced the array and they were still on deceleration. How the object had missed an antimatter bottle on top of that thruster was a question he would rather not consider.

He mumbled, "Where there's one..."

Dr. Heller looked at him. "What?"

"We're still traveling at half the speed of light. We must be passing through Tau Ceti's version of Sol's Kuiper Belt. Another one could hit us at any moment." He put one of the aft cameras back up on a screen, and it showed the glow of the bow-shock field, which was brighter and livelier than he remembered from interstellar space. Was it that bright when they were leaving the solar system? Maybe... but at the time he had nothing much to compare it to.

The doctor shuddered. "That's a cheerful thought."

"Nothing we can do about it- I can't even figure out the odds of us surviving what we did! Hell, we may not anyway. Look." He pointed at a cluster of flashing alarms on the schematic for deck five.

"Shit!" she spat. "The crew!" She scrambled out of her seat, buckles jangling, heading for the control room door. It didn't open.

"You can't get down there yet! We have to clear a path through all these sealed bulkheads."

"The hibernation tube deck is on fire!"

"I know that! It also means there's still atmosphere in there. If I can override the right seal, I could vent the section and put it out from here."

"And then they'll all die of asphyxiation. Good plan."

"What, the tubes aren't airtight?"

"They're hibernating, not dead. They sleep in the same kind of tubes we do! Is yours airtight?"

He had no answer for that. She was still standing by the door. He suddenly asked while gesturing at the screen, "Wait, how did the fire start in those three sections if the thing obviously went through this section?"

Dr. Heller groaned, "I don't know, Michael." She leaned against the door and suddenly said, "Marigold! She's at least on that deck. Maybe she can get in there with a foamer."

He stabbed the intercom button again. "Marigold, orders: Take the emergency foamer from med-bay and head towards the stasis tube section. We'll unseal the doors in a safe path. You must put out the fire we show in sections seven through nine."

"Understood, sir." No hesitation. He hoped he wasn't sending her to her death- Dr. Heller was probably going to need her nurse if they managed to get the situation under control. He started issuing manual overrides on the door seals between the central med-bay and the reportedly aflame sections. He had to enter his password for each one, and he muttered vicious poison under his breath about the system designers as he did so. Dr. Heller had re-taken her seat and was paging through internal cameras, trying to get a better view of the situation. Or situations, plural.

She suddenly yelped, "Captain! It's Pine!"

"What?"

"I can see him! He's got a respirator on- open the door in his tube section!"

"Level four, uh..."

"Section ten."

"Right. Is he near the door?"

"He's clawing at it! Hurry!"

Reinhardt found the right door and overrode the seal. "Is he through?"

"Door didn't open."

"Damn it! Pressure's probably got it stuck. Uhh... got to, yeah!" he babbled as he found his way to the air system overlay. The supply to that section was cut off because of the breach. He overrode the closed valve and flooded air in, hoping that he could send it in faster than it escaped, never mind that it was a non-renewable resource on the ship. He leaned over to watch the doctor's view. "Come on... come on," he urged the door.

Marigold's voice suddenly broke the tense vigil, "I've reached the affected area, but there is no fire. It's-" but then the intercom turned to crackling static and cut out.

Reinhardt pushed the button several times. "Marigold? Marigold repeat!" Only more static came from the speakers. "Damn it! How's that door, Barbara?"

"I think- I saw it move. Yes! He's got his fingers in the crack and it's opening!"

Reinhardt refocused on the camera Dr. Heller was watching. As soon as Pine stumbled past the threshold he tapped the control on his screen to close it again. Thankfully the door obeyed. "Switch to the camera in that corridor- see if he's all right."

She did. Pine was sprawled on his front on the deck just inside the door that had just sealed, face covered with the respirator resting cheek-down on the deck and his ringed tail lying uncharacteristically limp. Reinhardt remembered a few seconds late to close the valve that was venting precious atmosphere into the breached section. She said, "He's breathing, I think. Need to get him to med-bay. Can you get me a path down there, captain?"

"I don't trust the lift right now. I think there's something funny going on with the power systems. You'll have to take the access ladder tube." He started unsealing doors and hatches in a path to where Pine lay. "Go! And be damned careful." The doctor squeezed through the control room door before it had opened halfway.

As soon as she disappeared, he tried to get a camera to function near where Marigold was supposed to be, but they were all offline, it seemed. He tried the intercom a few more times, but never got an answer. He wanted desperately to get down there, but he felt he couldn't leave the control room, in case he needed to manually deal with some additional or cascading disaster, so he gnawed on his knuckles and tried to concentrate on what he did know. Marigold had said there wasn't a fire, but the sensors were showing that there was- though only a few of them seemed to be actually functioning. Several just showed bad comm or open circuit. They worked by infrared sensor, not smoke detection, so something in their field of view was hot. No fire... sparks maybe? Maybe the rock had mangled a conduit full of power cabling and shorted everything and...

His gut went cold with the realization that their sleeping crewmates may die anyway, fire or no fire.

***

Pain.

His head pounded, his entire body felt like it was skewered with hot needles. What had come before this? He could not remember. Before the pain was nothing. He wanted to return to the nothing, but now that he could feel, he could not stop feeling. He opened his eyes. Light. Too bright. He closed them again. He felt something grab his hand, and he opened his mouth to whimper in pain. He could feel the sound in his throat, but all he could hear was a muffled collection of trills, coming from inside his own skull. Whatever had grasped his hand let go and then he felt the touch on his face, on the bridge of his muzzle. It did not hurt there. He cracked his eyes open. There was a white-furred short-fingered hand covering his face, stroking there lightly.

Marigold. The name came to him. Marigold was here. He mouthed her name, tried to speak it. He could feel the breath through his throat, and feel his voicebox vibrate, but he could hear only distorted faraway shadows of his own voice, as if through meters of water or foam insulation. He tried to lift his arm and whimpered again at the stab of pain in his muscles and joints. He tried to look over at her, eyes still slitted against the glare of what he assumed to be the med-bay. She was looking at him, her almond-shaped eyes wide in fear and concern, her long ears canted forward, all her attention focused on him. She spoke, answering him, perhaps. He could not hear her at all.

He struggled to speak, "Cannot hear you, Marigold. Can hear myself poorly. Pain- everywhere."

Marigold's eyes flitted from him to the other side of the gurney where he lay. He followed her gaze. Dr. Heller was there, looking upset. Very upset. She tapped on a portable tablet when she saw him looking, and after a short while held it up in front of his eyes.

It read: Ship hit by rock. Lost air in your sect. Got you out, but ear damage and decomp sickness. Rest.

He closed his eyes. He did not remember the impact. He did not remember anything after securing himself for the last skip. Questions came to him. How did they survive an impact at all? How did he get out of his tube section? Why were they bothering to keep him alive? Just before he blacked out again, he had an overwhelming urge to laugh, something he had never done before.

Marigold stroked Pine's forehead again, which had been covered by the respirator during the decompression. His skin there, underneath the fur, seemed less sensitive. She glanced at the monitor. "I think he is unconscious again, doctor."

Dr. Heller nodded. "Stay with him, Marigold. Let me know if anything changes."

"Yes, ma'am. Is..."

The doctor had turned, and was halfway to the door. She looked back. "Yes, Marigold?"

"Is- will Pine need to be terminated?" Her voice was very quiet.

"We need him, Marigold. Now more than ever. The edema and the joint pain should fade over then next several hours. His eardrums may heal, or they may not. We need his skills to repair what we have left."

Marigold nodded and let her ears flit back a bit. Dr. Heller hurried out of the med-bay.

The lepine EBM nosed closer to Pine's face. She of course wanted him to heal, this was elemental to her training as a nurse and caregiver. But she felt exceptionally desperate to see him survive. She and Pine shared something like friendship, something like kinship, even if he was a procyonid model and she was a lepus. She found that she feared being the only EBM. Feared losing her companion. They had both received specialized training for the colonization mission, along with the dozens of other EBMs who were in hibernation. She and Pine spent their unscheduled time together, sometimes talking, sometimes just holding each other, out of sight of the two humans. Pine had taught her the card games that the captain had taught him, and they compared observations on how to read what the humans were thinking, by their expressions and posture. She wondered how those lepus EBMs who were kept as solitary comfort companions by humans managed to work in such isolation. Perhaps they had a special sort of training for that. Something she did not have.

***

Dr. Heller found the captain in the control room, which stank of anxiety sweat and somewhat of acrid burnt electronics, which seemed to circulate throughout the whole ship. She stood behind him, hands resting on his shoulders. He rubbed his forehead with one hand, not looking at the screens before him, most of which were still filled with red alarms.

"Pine will make it, I think," she said.

"Good," he replied, and was silent for a while. Then he asked, "How many won't?"

She sighed. "One section was breached directly- everyone was lost there. The power conduit that fed three other sections was shorted or melted and I don't know what happened to the backup because the hibernation modules in all those tubes are fried. They... won't last long in that state without the chillers and the circulators."

"Can we revive them?"

"We might be able to save a few, but not all of them. Might."

Reinhardt said ruefully, "And even if we could, we couldn't support that many awake with the supplies we have left. Still months from arrival. Damn it! This is such a cruel joke! Why couldn't it have just vaporized us? Why did it have to defy the odds and be just big enough to get through and just small enough not to finish the job?"

Heller didn't have an answer. Instead she asked, "Did you send out a distress message for the other ships? Or a warning?"

The captain snorted. "Warning. No way to stop it, no way to see it. I just summarized our own situation. No telling if they've made it this far yet, or are ahead of us, or what. Too many variables in the skips. No signals received from either the Vasco de Gama or the Zheng He, at any rate."

Heller prompted, "Captain."

"Yes, Barbara?"

"We should see about reviving someone, if we're going to. Time is running out for them."

He sighed. "Who, then? I don't know that I could live with that kind of choice. I'm sure everyone's essential in some way, or they wouldn't be here."

"We could use a systems engineer, especially if Pine doesn't recover. Porter is in one of those sections."

"Good point. Maybe you should be captain, eh Barbara? You seem much more clear-headed than me."

She shrugged. "The universe just threw its first punch, and we already lost some teeth. If we're going to make it, we need to use what we've got."

"All right. Porter and who? Surely we can get two out. Another human."

"Captain, all the affected sections were human."

"What? Did we fucking lose the lottery? How many of us are left?"

"We are two, we are discussing reviving two, and there are twelve others unaffected. Sixteen. Out of the original 62."

He stayed silent for a few moments, then wiped his mouth with a hand and said, "Huh. Damn. Still viable, I hope. Not like we have a choice. Revive Porter and... and I don't know. An astrophysicist? That would be Reynolds or Rajashekar."

"Reynolds, then. Raj is in the intact section."

"Shit, we might not need two astrophysicists once we land. What will we really need? Geologist, atmospheric engineer, geneticist..."

"All the geologists are either dead or about to be. I can save Weaver."

"Do it," the captain decided, realizing he had just condemned Reynolds to die in the chill of hibernation.

The doctor left to carry out her grim task, leaving the captain to silently wish for a bigger rock to make his choice moot.

***

Consciousness returned with a sudden sensation of falling and a hissed intake of breath. Pine opened his eyes, confused for a moment, but the pins and needles he felt all over his skin and the ache in his joints reminded him. Med bay. Decompression sickness. He felt it was not so bad, now, and experimentally moved his fingers. It ached, yes, but it was bearable. He sniffed the air. The smell of burned electronics was dominant, but he could also smell Marigold and Dr. Heller, as well as another male human who was not the captain. He slowly turned his head and saw all three- the human in question lying on the other gurney, unconscious. Marigold and the doctor were connecting tubing to the tap in his arm. Who was this? His vision blurred for a moment, but with some concentration he managed to get the male human's features into focus. He matched them against his memorized mission training. Gregory Porter. Chief systems engineer. 25 years old. Home Franchise Toronto.

Pine watched Heller and Marigold work and considered his status. If they were reviving Porter, the ship's systems must be in need of extensive repairs and they must not have confidence in his ability to perform his duties. Or else they did not expect him to recover. But he felt that he was recovering, though he still could hear nothing but muffled echoes of his own body and an ultra-high-pitched whine. If he could not perform his duties, he had no purpose. They would surely terminate him once they had successfully revived Porter. Pine knew this with a certainty that his training gave him. But he found himself divided in his own mind. Was the cost of his continued support worth what services he could still perform? He was a fully-trained engineer specialist EBM. They should not terminate him. But he knew they had to. He wanted to sit up, but he was too weak yet.

He felt a sudden rush of an almost forgotten emotion- he recalled a memory so distant he almost thought it was not his own, and instead one of the vivid images they used during the training process. He was still a juvenile, when his world was the soft warm presence of his mother and litter-mates. It was the day they took him away from her and separated all of them. The terror of abandonment- the need to escape from the humans and get back to her. Why had he never tried to find her again? Why had he never even thought of her once his training was complete- how had they buried a feeling so raw and pure?

He rasped, "Marigold."

The rabbit perked and swiveled one ear, then turned away from Porter and looked at him. She said something he could not hear to Dr. Heller and then came to his side. She held her face close to his and he whispered, "Do not let them take me away again."

Marigold blinked and nuzzled him between his eyes and said, "You are safe. Be calm. Do not speak." He could not hear her, but her comforting touch was enough to quell his panic. She turned away, returning to her work with Porter.

***

"I d-don't th-think I'll ever b-b-be warm ag-gain," complained Porter, huddled over his mug of nutri-broth at the galley table. Weaver looked much the same, though she was determined not to fuss about it. She didn't like the smell of the broth at all, though.

Dr. Heller said, "You remember when we all went under for a month back on earth, Greg. You'll warm up faster if you ate some broth."

Porter made a pitiful noise and shook his head. "C-can't I j-just have an IV?"

"No. Got to get your stomach working again. Come on. One spoon at a time. You too, Kate."

They both made faces but each took a spoonful and made themselves swallow.

Marigold hovered nearby, keen to offer her assistance if needed, but this seemed to be something the doctor would be much better at. Coercing humans could be difficult for an EBM.

Captain Reinhardt entered and the two shivering crew members nodded to him. He asked, "I guess Barbara's filled you in on the situation?"

Porter answered, "Yeah. What a mess. I'll g-get right on damage assessment as s-soon as I c-c-can feel my fingers, c-captain."

Weaver took another spoonful of broth, and didn't seem inclined to speak. She was awake and alive, and many others were not. No one had told her this in as many words, but they didn't have to.

Porter avoided eating another spoonful right away by asking, "When c-can I have P-pine?"

Dr. Heller answered, "He should be able to move around now, but I'd like to give him about eight hours to rest before he goes climbing through access ways. What do you think, Marigold?"

Marigold quickly agreed, somewhat relieved that the doctor had not asked her any more specific questions about Pine's state of mind.

Porter nodded, and this time did take some broth. "It's fine. I c-can d-do most of the damage s-survey on my own."

Weaver offered, "I can help."

Porter looked at her for a moment and then just nodded. "All right. Thanks, Kate."

***

Marigold returned to the med-bay to check on Pine, since the two revived humans did not require her aid. She hoped he was awake again- she wanted to talk to him. Ask him what he had meant before, without the doctor hearing.

Pine was not on the gurney where she had left him.

Her ears pricked up in alarm and she turned, about to rush back to the galley to inform the doctor that Pine was missing, but then stopped. Between his unclear and mildly incoherent plea before and now this- it was sure that the doctor would conclude that the decompression sickness had caused brain damage. She had to be certain, before she lost him. If she could find him, calm him down, offer him comfort- perhaps she could help him regain his balance.

She performed a quick search of the med-bay- under the gurneys and in the few lockers that he might conceivably fit into. He was nowhere. Where would he go? His tube, perhaps, to curl up in a familiar place. But would he remember that his section was airless? She could not say, but it was a place to start.

She hurried out along the corridor and then up the ladder to the next level. Could he have managed to climb, in his condition? Perhaps not. But surely she could climb faster, so she rushed to the sealed door where he had lay after escaping from the vacuum. He was not there. Anxiety rising, she dashed back the way she had come, back down the ladder. He must be on the same level as the med-bay, she decided- that climb would have been too much. She headed to the other side of the level, where the untouched hibernation tubes were. Some of the section doors were still closed, but not all, and she searched through the corridors until she found him.

He was sitting on the floor with his feet far apart and his ringed tail lying on the grating behind him. His hands were resting on the front hatch of a tube and he was peering through the small plastic window at its occupant. She approached quietly on her fur-muffled feet, though Pine could not hear her. She considered touching his shoulder, but did not want to startle him. So she squatted down on her haunches and then crawled alongside the tubes, trying to enter his peripheral vision. She saw his eyes and ears flick in her direction and she made a concerned face. He looked back through the window. She closed the gap and settled in beside him, leaning over to nuzzle his cheek. He returned the gesture and she was able to peek through the window. Another procyonid EBM lay inside in hibernation.

She wanted to ask him why he was here. If he knew the EBM inside the tube. He had never mentioned any special association with the other raccoons beyond their training together. She had not thought to bring a tablet with her in her rush to find him, so she could not ask. She just sat with him, until perhaps he would tell her on his own. She said, "Pine?" as an experiment, but his ears did not move and he did not answer.

After several minutes, he turned to look at her, and she tried to look reassuring. He said, "Marigold." She nodded. He said, "Marigold I want..." but he seemed unable to complete his thought. He looked back at the tube, then past her shoulder, then blinked his eyes. "I want to return to work now."

Marigold shook her head and pointed at him, then pantomimed sleeping with both palms together and her head resting on them, then held up eight fingers.

Pine struggled to stand, and Marigold quickly moved to aid him. He said, "I mustwork. I have many tasks." He staggered and then regained his balance with her help. Instead of heading back towards the med-bay, however, he took a sudden and unexpected turn, opening a service panel near the door to the section and slipping into one of the crawl-ways where he usually made his maintenance rounds. Marigold tugged on his paw and he looked back at her. "My function is to keep the ship running," he said with confidence.

"And mine is to keep you running," she said, but he just shook his head, still deafened. She let his paw go and watched him disappear into the gloomy tight space. She considered running back to the doctor, and informing her that Pine had returned to duty, against her advice. Perhaps just the former. She could not lie to the doctor, but she could be selective about what she said, at least. Or she could follow Pine, and keep him from danger. She did not wish to be the one who condemned Pine by reporting on his mental instability, so she ducked through the open panel after him.

She managed to follow as he squirmed through spaces familiar to him but alien to her. Light filtered in through other access panels they passed. At one point Pine ducked down a into what seemed like the crawlspace between level five and six. Marigold's sense of spatial orientation was not as good as his, and she could not be sure where exactly she was. She kept her ears back and down against her head and hoped he had a destination in mind. At a junction he disappeared downward again, shimmying through a space that had hand-grips every few feet. She peered down the hole after him, and he did not look up. She followed.

Near the bottom Pine opened a panel and left the crawlspace. Marigold hastily made for the escape route, glad to be out of the confining strange place. When she straightened up in the room they had entered, she realized where they were. It was a generator room. At the center was a dark metal object, like a torus with no hole. Pipes and wires fed into the center where the hole should be from above, and she could not see below it, but knew that one of the 64 thrusters was there below the floor. Pine began to inspect the instruments mounted on the outside of the generator.

He didn't remain long, and made for a door opposite where they had entered. Marigold was relieved to see it was a normal door and not another crawlspace. She followed him as he inspected a dozen more generators. After that, he encountered a door which would not open.

The intercom suddenly popped to life. Dr. Heller's voice demanded, "Marigold, where are you? Pine is not in med-bay."

She reached for the call button near the door Pine was fussing with. "He is with me, ma'am," she replied, hoping the doctor would not inquire further.

Thankfully the doctor simply said, "Understood."

She turned her attention back to Pine. He had the door control panel open and was fishing around inside with his hand.

"Pine! Stop! That section is sealed!"

He didn't react, so she grabbed his wrist and tried to pull his hand out of the opening. He looked at her, surprised, then looked at his hand, and around the room, as if he had just awakened. He allowed her to pull his hand back and then slumped to the floor, making a chittering sound. She sat with him, just as she had back near the hibernation tubes. He was sick. Damaged. A danger to the ship, even. Her duty was to bring him to the doctor.

After several minutes of reassuring nuzzling, she stood up and held his hand again, making it obvious she wanted to help him to his feet. He complied, and she led him out to the main corridor, towards the main ladder tube. She had to get him to climb first, so she could be behind him, in case he lost his grip. Up from six to five, then five to four. There she redirected him away from the ladder and towards her quarters, helping him into her sleeping tube. He had been there before many times in previous months, and immediately curled up near the far end and closed his eyes. She curled up with him. She hoped he would be more stable after the sleep the doctor had recommended.

***

"The ironic thing," Porter said while examining schematic screens in the control room, "is that if the rock had gone the other way, I think the power would have just been cut instead of causing the surge."

Reinhardt grumbled in the seat next to him, "I'm tired of finding new sources of irony in this situation, Greg. Also, thanks for showing me how if I had delayed the inversion for a few minutes, a lot of people might still be alive."

"Oh, not necessarily. The trajectory would have been totally different. Then we'd probably have been blown to bits, like we were supposed to."

"Supposed to?"

"Well, you know what I mean. This was the most meticulously planned mission probably ever, right? But we knew that planning for vanishingly small probability scenarios was a waste of time and resources. We got incredibly unlucky by crossing paths with something out here in the great big nothing, and then incredibly lucky by somehow surviving it. There's no way this could be planned for. We are on our own."

"We were always on our own, Greg. Well, besides the other two ships. And how unlucky did we really get, I wonder? What if the radio silence indicates they didn't make it."

"We're coming in off the ecliptic, and we're far from any gravity wells. Space out here is vastly empty, despite so-called comet fields."

"You think we'll make it to landfall?"

"I'll do my best to make sure we do."

"That's not what I asked," admonished Reinhardt.

"I'd rather not make bets, captain."

"Hey, you know I taught Pine to play poker? He's surprisingly good at it."

"You what?"

"Taught him to play poker. Gin too."

"Why?"

Reinhardt shrugged. "I was bored. And I wanted to figure him out. Never could get him to laugh, though."

"Captain, poker involves bluffing."

"I know. He couldn't do it at first, but I showed him when the best times to bluff me were. He picked it up quick. I couldn't beat him heads-up after a week or so."

Porter gave Reinhardt an incredulous look. "So you taught him to lie."

"Oh come on, it's just a game. And bluffing isn't really lying. It's betting so that you seem to have different cards than you really do."

Porter frowned. "I hope all you did was make him better at games, captain. We don't need any more problems."

Reinhardt nodded. "Speaking of Pine, where is he?" He pressed the intercom button. "Pine, status report."

Instead of Pine, Marigold answered. "Pine is resting with me, sir, as Doctor Heller ordered. He still cannot hear."

"Understood, Marigold."

"He's in her tube with her?"

"Yeah, they're real friendly. Same as Barbara and me, I guess."

Porter digested that. "I never really thought about how they spend their time with each other."

"I was curious too. They talk a lot more when they think we can't hear. Nothing, you know, suspicious. I think they might be intimate, but I never peeked, He taught her to play cards after I taught him. I was surprised by that."

"I don't like it."

"Oh, don't be paranoid. They're so tied down by all those vid programs used to train them I can't imagine one going rogue. Besides, we're all in this crate together, right?"

"We should consider reviving another raccoon."

"Why, because I might have made Pine into a gambling addict?"

"No, because he's deaf, and may have other damage we don't know about." Porter tapped the side of his head for emphasis.

"We're tight on supplies as it is, Greg."

"I wasn't suggesting we keep both."

Reinhardt stared at Porter. "I think enough people have died in the last couple of hours, Greg."

Porter sighed. "They're not people, captain. I know you grew up Unincorporated, but you have to resist that mindset. They're machines. Flesh and blood, but still machines."

"Well, so are we, as far as that goes."

"How did you get selected for this mission, spouting pro-equivalence crap like that?"

The captain growled, "Oh, here we go. You think I didn't hear enough about being chosen because I wasn't company-born? Like I was some kind of sop for the great Unincorporated masses? I got this job on my merits."

Porter looked away and said, "Sorry, captain. That's not what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?"

"You were starting to sound like those emancipation terrorists."

"I'm not political! I just never thought about it until we were out here. I've had months to do nothing but watch them and think, all right? On a biology level, they're a lot like us. Hell, everything from earth is. Everything organic we've brought with us. The Company Founders understood, even back in the 21st century. Life is made up of little machines that make copies of themselves. It's like- did you ever read any of the science fiction stories from that period? From before the warm-up?"

Porter looked lost, unsure where the captain's rambling was headed. "A little, sure, but-"

The captain continued undeterred, "So there was this idea- a nightmare scenario, where we would invent these little self-replicating machines. Von Neumann machines one book called them, I forget why. And they would get out of control and eat everything and spread over the whole planet. Except, what I realized, and what the Founders I think realized, is thatwe're made of those machines. The 'disaster' already happened, billions of years ago. Not exactly like the story, because those machines were smaller and made of metal and silicon, but here we are, spreading ourselves and all our cellular machines to another star system. The difference is that we're self-aware colonies of machines ourselves, and we figured out how our own little machines work together and we created new kinds of machines."

"And you think the ones we created are as good as us?"

"I think they might be better in some ways."

Porter made a derisive noise. "They're simple. They do what they are programmed to do. That's all."

Reinhardt was prepared with a rebuttal, but an alarm went off and he snapped his attention back to the screens in front of his seat. "God damn it, what now?" he said in an exasperated tone.

Porter also turned back to the screens and found the cause faster than the captain. "Ho-ly shit. I guess it did more than take thruster 18 out. AM generator 18 just lost seal integrity. Only reason we're not plasma is the fact that there's no atmosphere in there to leak into the bottle. We've got to jettison the section."

The captain gritted his teeth, and hit the intercom button. "Emergency! Cutting thrusters, prepare for zero-G."

He gave the command to cease deceleration and he felt his weight slip away rapidly. He hadn't been strapped in out of carelessness, and he had to grab hold of part of his seat harness with one arm. Once back in his seat, he tapped at his screen frantically, trying to hit the right spot to jettison the correct section. The drive sections were mounted to the superstructure on rails, and could be ejected with a small electric motor. The cubic section would fly away, though still in the direction they were traveling. Once it was far enough from the ship, he could fire up the remaining thrusters again and that would put more and more distance between them and the unstable bottle of antimatter. They would go back to slowing down, and the jettisoned section would keep going at its inertial velocity. Until it blew up, of course.

He switched to an aft camera, wanting to make sure it got through the bow-shock field. He was worried that the field would interfere with the magnetic containment and that it would go up right then and there. The view showed nothing but the red glow of the field, though. No thruster cone with generator box attached. "What the fuck?" he blurted. Switching to another camera, he could see the grid of thruster cones, with one pushed out of place by a couple of meters. Stuck, obviously.

"You know, I'm not even surprised at this point. Suggestions, Porter?"

"Some part of the frame must be bent from the impact."

"Can we cut it free?"

"From outside, maybe. Got to be real careful, though. Any kind of gas gets into the bottle and it's all over."

"Might be able to get into the space behind it and manually pry it loose," Reinhardt speculated.

"That sounds kind of low-tech, captain."

"Well, we were hit by a rock, Greg. So now we get to fight back with sticks. Metal ones anyway. You stay up here and monitor us."

"Us?"

"Me, Kate, and Pine," he said as he headed out of the control room.

***

None of them had been in an EVA suit since training in orbit around Earth a year or more ago. Reinhardt considered that he could have used the abundance of downtime during the journey to have run a few drills. Too late now. They stood in the cubicle that held generator 17 as the unseen pumps worked to suck out the atmosphere in the space. He and Weaver held on hand grips on either side of the door that led to section 18 while Pine held one up near the ceiling, in the center of the door. Pine had been sleeping, but Marigold had got him up and going, and informed of the situation. He still couldn't hear anything, but the suits had a heads-up display on the bottom third, so they could relay instructions to him via text. Marigold was in charge of that, sitting up in the control room with Porter and Heller.

"Comm check," said Reinhardt.

"Clear," said Weaver.

After a pause Pine said, "Clear," as well. His suit was designed with EBMs in mind, with a more elongated helmet and shorter body size. Reinhardt assumed he had his tail tucked down along one of his legs, as there was no tail on the suit itself. All three of them were already connected to tethers snapped onto nearby metal hand-holds. Reinhardt and Weaver each gripped a long iron prybar they had liberated from her geology equipment. Pine had a mechanical jack.

Porter said through their suit comms, "All comms clear. Pressure at 850 nPa and starting to really flatten out. I don't think we'll be able to get it lower than 600, and even that will take too long. I'll tell you when it hits 750."

Reinhardt said, "Probably doesn't make a huge amount of difference. We'll go in two minutes."

A nod from Weaver, and another from Pine a few moments later.

To pass the anxious time, he went over the plan again. "Pine will go up top and we'll go in the box and start taking panels off to find where the rails got stuck. Once we find the problem, we try to unjam it and get out, then we go up top with Pine and we all lever it down and out of the ship. We'll give it a kick with something once it's free. Don't need much force. Pine could chuck his jack at it but I don't want to lose the jack."

Weaver laughed nervously. Pine was silent.

Reinhardt waited out his two minutes, then told Porter, "Ok, unseal the door."

The door slid open silently and they found themselves looking at half of the almost-jettisoned section. It looked very much like an elevator stuck between floors. Pine wasted no time swinging himself into the top space, shining a glove light down one of the rail runners in the wall. Reinhardt and Weaver went down into the space, getting their first up close look at the hole that the never-seen cosmic intruder made. The captain could not resist the temptation to line up his sights and look through it, but he saw nothing but darkness. It had missed the torus by half a meter, but it had damaged the framework and the torus was no longer mounted securely. One of the pipes that came out of the top was disconnected at the ceiling. The thing had failsafed, but clearly some seal within that pipe was bad.

Weaver wound her tether around an arm and started unfastening wall panels, either oblivious to the immense power that was barely contained inside the rounded metal shape next to her like a bound demon, or just unwilling to think about it. Reinhardt did the same, revealing the rails which had been used to install the modules together, and which were supposed to allow for quick jettison.

Reinhardt said, "I got some warping on this side. What does the wall opposite the door look like up top, Pine?"

After a delay, Pine reported, "I see no damage here."

"All right. I'm going to try to bend it back into shape a bit down here." He inserted his prybar into a promising spot and braced his feet against the corner, pushing on the bar with his hands. The rail gave a little, but he could tell it wasn't enough. "Weaver, get yours in the other side there."

She pushed herself to his wall and inserted her bar into the other side of the rail and asked, "Which way?"

He pointed and she said, "Understood." She wrapped her leg around her tether until there was no slack and then used the tension to pull on her bar. She could feel the little cracks as the fatigued metal began to give more.

After a minute filled with grunting and exertion, Reinhardt said, "Ok, Pine give it a little push, see if it moves." A moment passed, then the whole cubicle shuddered and lurched several centimeters. Both occupants grabbed for a hand-hold and the captain said, "Whoa, whoa! A littlepush, Pine! I don't want to ride this thing out of here." They both began reeling themselves back through the half-door by their tethers, then climbed up top with Pine.

Pine said, "It would not move at first, but then it moved very suddenly and I stopped."

Reinhardt said, "Marigold tell him it's fine. We're out. Ok, let's all push it now." They started launching themselves off the ceiling and landing on the top of the cubicle, then pushing off and doing it again. Every so often, the whole thing would give a little more, until it seemed to ease through the friction and finally they saw the glow of the bow-shock around the edges. The cubicle was lazily floating towards it with the momentum of the last jumps. They reeled themselves back to the door and peeked out, panting from the exertion. "It's away. Ok, Porter, seal the door again and get the air on in here."

The door slid shut and they waited. "Porter, how long before it crosses the bow-shock?"

"About... five minutes, give or take."

"I'd like to be behind something thick in case it loses containment."

"Ceiling on that deck is shielded, but the floor isn't, I'm afraid. You could get on top of the torus in there. It's impervious to gamma radiation."

"I suppose while we're still at zero-G it's not an issue. Come on you two, up on the antimatter bomb."

Weaver and Pine opted to cling to the ceiling above it, and Reinhardt sheltered just under them gently gripping the pipe that had broken in the neighboring section, hopefully in line as well. They waited, listening to each other breathe, and in Pine's case, trill softly.

"Well?" asked Reinhardt impatiently.

Porter answered, "About to cross. Almost... oh God brace for-" the suit comms turned to ear-splitting static and then cut out leaving them all as deaf as Pine. The lights in the cubicle also went out. Reinhardt turned on his helmet light and Weaver and Pine did the same.

"Porter? Weaver? Anyone copy?"

Weaver's voice came back, "I'm here! What happened?"

"Not sure. EMP maybe? Pine, can you- no, he can't hear us. Damn!" He clumsily tried to get down to ground level. The cubicle lights had gone out, but there were still local readout and indicator lights on the generator. He said, "Ah, see- these are shielded but the power cabling isn't. I think. The pulse probably tripped all the breakers at once." He looked up and motioned to Pine, who was thankfully watching him. He made what he hoped was a "come here" motion with his relatively clumsy suited hand. Pine interpreted it correctly and pushed off the ceiling, grabbing hold of a structural support when he reached the floor.

Reinhardt turned and opened a cabinet door behind where he stood. There was a series of large switches inside, with dire yellow warnings posted on all the inner surfaces. He reached in and threw them all, one by one. Once he made the last contact, the lights in the cubicle came up, but only for a moment before all the breakers tripped again.

"Damn! All the essential systems must be trying to run on this one generator. Too much load. Wait... did you hear that?"

Weaver asked, "Hear what?"

"When the breakers tripped- I could hear them."

"What does that mean?"

"It means there's air in here," he said. "We need to coordinate and get as many generators up at once as we can. If we can get to the others, they can help. Weaver, get up to the control room and get them to come down. If we can get six into the grid at once it might be enough to let us get more before they trip."

"How do we get through the door?"

"Should be able to get it open with your prybar in that slot up top."

She nodded and headed for the door, bracing her weightless self against a handhold and pushing the door sideways into its slot. "Bring them down here and we'll try to do the ones in this corridor. And hurry! No power means dying sleepers and no bow-shock to protect us from cosmic radiation."

She slipped through the half open door and disappeared into the darkness beyond.

"All right, Pine, I don't know how we're going to coordinate this. Let's get these helmets off though." He opened the seals at his neckline and lifted it off his head, leaving it attached at the back by a strap. He then began to work on his bulky articulated gloves, but Pine was faster than him, having understood the intent. The raccoon had his gloves off already and was helping the captain before he undid his own helmet.

Pine said, "Several generators must join the grid at once to share the load."

The captain nodded. He considered how to explain the plan to Pine. He pointed at the open breaker cabinet and Pine followed his finger, then looked back at him. He then pointed at the number 17 on the generator, then at himself.

Pine nodded. "I understand. You will reset these breakers. What are my orders?"

Reinhardt said, "You go down the hall to 19," and held up ten fingers, then nine.

"Generator 19. How will I know when to reset the breakers?"

The captain considered that. Pine was faster, though.

"I could shout a countdown," he suggested.

The captain nodded vigorously. "Perfect. Good job, Pine. Go out in the corridor and wait for the others," he said, patting the raccoon on the back of his suit and pointing towards the half-open door. Pine started heading that way. "Oh! Wait!" he dove to grab at Pine's trailing foot. Pine looked back, eyes wide. Reinhardt pointed at the prybar still stuck in the slot at the top of the door. Pine nodded and collected it before moving out. Reinhardt was certain that Pine would have several doors pushed open before the others came. He looked down at his feet, imagining the thruster beneath, and then nothing. No red glow. High energy particles streaming up through the floor, through him. His brain played tricks on him- made him think he could feel it, like a rush of hot wind and little pinpricks on his skin.

He heard noise from the corridor- several voices. He called out, "I sent Pine to 19- he'll do a countdown when we're all in position."

Porter said, "Got it, captain. I'm heading to 10 across the hall, the doctor has 11, Weaver's going to 12 and Marigold to 13. She'll signal Pine."

He saw them pass by with their own small lights. He positioned himself in front of the breaker box and waited.

Pine's voice called out from the darkness, "3! 2! 1! Mark!"

Reinhardt reset his breakers as fast as he could and the lights came up in his cubicle once again. He immediately moved to the door and slipped out. Everyone else was doing the same, pulling themselves along the corridor and trying not to crash into each other. The lights were still on when they got to the next set of doors which thankfully opened when asked to. They didn't bother with the countdown then, and just set to resetting them all, moving from corridor to corridor. Porter and Heller went back up to deck 5 to check on the sleepers' machinery while everyone else finished the remaining work.

***

They assembled in the galley, exhausted beyond reckoning from a combination of weightless exertion and the aftershocks of existential panic. They could sit, at least, as the ship was back under deceleration, and the comfort of 9.8 meters per second squared was welcome.

"Ok," said the captain wearily, who was still wearing part of his EVA suit. "The good news is we didn't lose anyone else. And we're back underway, under control. Bad news- aside from 48 dead," he paused, trying to find the words to encompass that loss, but he couldn't think about it as anything but an abstract number. It was as if they were all still hibernating. "Aside from that we lost all the aft cameras in the pulse, so no more gazing at the hypnotic glow of the bow-shock. Landing might be tricky too. And, on a related topic, we all took a pretty hard dose of radiation while the field was down. Ship seems mostly ok, though. What about the sleepers, Barbara? Did they get it as bad as us?"

Dr. Heller shook her head. "They probably took some, but not like down on the power plant deck. You and Pine probably took the worst."

The captain looked at Pine. Deaf, irradiated, still sitting there with them, ready to serve. He wondered if they had to rebuild the society they had come from. If they were the only ship who made it, couldn't they do what they thought was best to survive? What right did the company have, out here, to dictate what they did now? They had fought against catastrophe, and lived on time they had bought for themselves. Pine had paid the same price as him. Shouldn't he be rewarded? He kept his thoughts to himself. He knew Porter would not agree.

Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe he'd die before he saw the new world they headed for. Pine too. He felt incredibly spent, muscles weak and head spinning.

"I need to rest," he announced. There was general agreement. He stripped off the rest of his EVA suit and left it on the floor. Pine and Weaver had already done the same, while he was talking. He said, "We'll stow those later. For now-" he paused, looking a little lost. "For now, steady as she goes, straight on 'til morning."

"Wasn't it 'Second from the right, and straight on 'til morning?', captain?" asked Heller.

He nodded, eyes glazed. "Yes. That's it. We're on our way to Neverland, but only children can fly there," he trailed off, looking at Marigold. Then he fell to the floor, and only Pine and Marigold moved fast enough to catch him before he cracked his skull.

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