Nah, the person isn’t asleep; someone or something is causing the ship and its bots to malfunction, and those two phenomena are related. That is, unless these problems have been scheduled, programmed to happen at this time, in this place. Or unless the killer isn’t human and doesn’t require anaesthetics or Dreamstate. Is Ragtime itself the killer? If personhood can be contemplated, why not malfunctioning personhood? Humans have killed each other from the start. Uncomfortable thought, though. A murdership reduces the probability of survival considerably.

They really need to find those missing bodies. Body parts.

They have the raw data from all the IFCs, which is just a file dump right now since Salvo has to work on survival. Usually, like Shell insisted, nobody alive has to reveal IFC data, but the deceased data can be mined under certain circumstances. Murder is one such circumstance – or, it should be. Fin is not sure.

He muses that they haven’t even thought about jurisdiction. Convention dictates that crimes committed in space be judged by the laws of the place of origin of the criminal. It’ll be a nightmare, but luckily one that does not concern Fin. He dictates out a preliminary progress report in his IFC, sets it to send as soon as a transmission pathway is available. It’s full of conjecture, but they’ll see what he was thinking and follow the threads.

That done, he pulls out of the pod and into the bridge, pulls down a flat velcroed surface as a table, and lays out collected fragments from the destroyed robots. Explosive bullets seemed to do the trick. The robots in question were not hardened for combat. He checks the stash of rounds and sends a note and a CAD file dump to Salvo to get the printer working on more.

Don’t we need all the power and materials for survival?

What he means, of course, is the humans do, not him.

It doesn’t help us to breathe and eat if robots are going to slit our throats while we sleep.

All right.

One other thing: I need to do an IFC dive.

Now?

After the antenna thing.

I’ll keep it in mind.

Chapter Sixteen

Ragtime: Shell

In the spartan cosiness of her sleeping bag, Shell wakes from a dream about blood-drenched fairies and Fred, her fiancé, her previous fiancé, asking her, “Why go to space?” “Because it is there.” Shell quoting Kennedy quoting Mallory. She has had that speech memorised since she was twelve, to the delight of her father. It was her party trick to deliver it in JFK’s exact cadence and diction.

Shell remembers a conversation about Bloodroot, about the efficiency of ferrying new colonists and the practicality of having a geostationary space station with space elevator. She distinctly remembers being told this was on the cards.