Goldman brushed aside his feeble attempt at small talk. “Mr. Andretti, I’ve been in since seven. I have a question about the source code for the short-sale module. There are lines of code in there that I don’t understand.” She opened the manual and laid it on the desk in front of him. He stared at it as if it might burst into flames. “I can’t find any mention of it in the documentation, either.”

Andretti swallowed hard. He bent over the book and read for a few minutes, his lips moving as he did so. He looked up and shrugged his shoulders. “Look, I imagine it’s just a little meaningless, extraneous code that got left in there somehow. Something legacy that didn’t get purged. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

Goldman nodded, picked up the thick binder, turned on a heel, and walked back to her cubicle. He might be right. It could be nothing more than sloppy coding. Developers often inserted lines of computer code in a program for their own benefit and didn’t bother to document it for anyone else who might stumble upon it. The pesky voice was still there, still singing loudly in the back of her head.

Something didn’t ring true. She had no clear idea what it might be. She’d be damned if she let it rest before she found out for sure, before she hushed the nagging.

She shut the door behind her, sat back down at the desk, dumped out a couple of aspirin tablets, and swallowed them with a swig of cold coffee. She moved the mouse to wake up her computer, paged up on the monitor to the top of the section of code she had been analyzing, and once again squinted hard at the first instance of the troublesome commands she had found.

The little voice inside her head was screaming louder than ever.

The crew of the Gepard huddled together in the warmth of the reactor compartment. The space was designed for equipment, not people, so there was no place to comfortably sit or lie down. There was only a hard steel grating for a deck. The men didn’t seem to care about that right now. They luxuriated in the warmth. The pitch-black space was silent, the stillness broken by the occasional low moan or grating gasp as someone tried to suck in a deep breath of the foul air or awoke from a fitful sleep struggling to breathe.

Sergei Andropoyov coughed and wheezed in the thick, tepid air. Breathing was becoming painful. Even the slightest movement left them gasping, so they all lay on the hard deck as still as they could manage. The captain had drifted off for a while, dreaming that it was the black, fragrant loam surrounding his boyhood farm home that now held them entombed, not the several hundred feet of icy water.