Shell straps herself into the vertical sleeping bag and rests for seven hours because she knows that whatever happens, she needs her wits, and a rested brain functions better. All the yammering of her thoughts fades away as she works her phantom worry beads. She dreams of being on Earth, of being a child, of playing with her brother, her younger brother, on a swing. A few yards away her mother looks on with that vague smile she wears. She has a book from which she looks up every few minutes to be sure the kids are safe, regular as a cuckoo clock. Shell is trying to go higher than her brother. She cannot remember her brother’s name in the dream and feels embarrassed about it. She wants to get off the swing and ask her mother, but she also wants to go higher. Shell is happy and wakes up abruptly, instinctively sure an alarm has gone off. She’s wrong.

She feels a breeze against her right forearm and looks down.

There is a wolf right outside her sleeping pod, nose centimetres from her skin, hackles up, ears flickering. The breeze is the rhythmic breathing that matches the rise and fall of the wolf’s belly.

Shell screams and recoils as much as she can. The wolf looks up into her eyes and launches away, floating as if it has lived in low gravity all its life. It flows aft. Shell releases herself from the sleeping bag but stays in the pod, hanging on to a rail, peeping out.

“Ragtime,” says Shell, looking from fore to aft and back again.

“Captain.”

“What is a wolf doing on board?”

“Captain, can you repeat your request, please?”

Damn. Backup AI. Simple instructions, simple queries.

“Ragtime, playback corridor cams, five minutes.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Nothing. Empty passageways, some floating lint, sickly jaundiced low-power light.

“Ragtime, get a medbot over here.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Nightmare?

Seizure?

Hallucination?

Am I ill?

Just what I need.

Fin

Fin watches Salvo and maintains comms with Campion. She sounds so contained and controlled that if not for the background file Fin would have thought her an Artificial. Salvo stares intently at the crosshairs from the periscope camera, trying to align for docking with the Ragtime. The distance counters rapidly fall to zero.

“Contact,” says Salvo. “Confirm capture, please.”

“Capture confirmed,” says Campion.

“You should be on your way to the hatch,” says Salvo to Fin.

Fin half expects something to go wrong, but the hatch opens, and there she is framed in the circular airlock.

They shake hands as is customary. Quarantine on both sides guarantees contagion-freedom. Small, dry hand, firm grip, fleeting. All business. Fin scrambles a bit and soon floats aboard the Ragtime, with Salvo scant seconds behind him. The ship smells of nothing. They must have excellent cleaning bots.