She leaves the bridge for the main truss. She works her way to the first torus and inspects the passenger pods herself. Most are fine. She doesn’t look at the empty ones, the ones for the dead. One door bothers her. It looks different from a distance, but not radically so. It’s got a dot, which, close up, looks like a smudge.

“Ragtime, lighting increase, fifteen per cent.”

The corridor becomes brighter. It’s not a smudge. It’s a hole.

The hell is that?

Shell pushes closer and holds a handrail, inches nearer. Paint layer peeled away, no flecks on the floor, but they would have floated away in the microgravity and collected at air vents. No hesitation marks – maybe not a tooled hole? But how could anything get through the alloys without tools? The hole is an inch across, the walls corrugated. As much as she wants to, Shell resists sticking a finger in there. She looks through and can see the pod interior but not much else. Maybe a wall.

“Ragtime, status of pod 308.”

“Status nominal.”

“Bullshit.”

“Repeat command, please.”

“Seal integrity on pod 308.”

“Seal integrity nominal.”

“Ragtime, is there a hole in the door of pod 308?”

Silence. This is nonsense. The ship can’t just decide not to respond. Shell feels disquiet starting at the edges of her being, like something pulling at a loose thread of sanity. She will not unravel, though. Or, she will unravel on her own time.

Rest on your own time, Mission Specialist.

Yes, Commander.

“Ragtime, is the passenger in 308 still alive?”

“Affirmative.”

Yeah, right. I’m going to need more than that.

“Respiratory rate?”

“Twelve per minute.”

“Blood pressure?”

“110/72.”

“Pulse?”

“Sixty.”

She looks at the hole. Was it there before? Is it machine-drilled? She rolls her phantom beads.

“Ragtime, replay video, last twenty-four hours.” She gives the code and a video file shows the spot she is examining. “Speed up. Times sixteen. Double. Double.”

It isn’t clear enough to see if the hole was already there, but no person came through the corridor in the entire runtime.

“Ragtime, open pod 308.”

“Cannot comply. Action forbidden.”

“What?”

Silence.

“Ragtime, this is Captain Michelle Campion. Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Open pod 308.”

“Cannot comply. Action forbidden.”

“Open pod 309.”

“Cannot comply. Action forbidden.”

“What is—”

She is interrupted by the shrill tones of an alarm.

Chapter Seventeen

Ragtime: Lawrence

An alarm, flashing lights.

Lawrence rises to investigate.

Twenty minutes earlier, silence, tranquillity and stale warm air – the complements of enforced rest. It’s not truly silent, of course, but you learn to cancel out the hum. True silence would be alarming. Lawrence knows of an experimental engine used in a spaceship once that was utterly without sound. The crew didn’t go crazy, not exactly, but the anxiety levels were through the roof. The engineers had to pipe a low-volume engine vibration through speakers.