<Girl, you are just incorrigible. What about our man Tarrant? I saw the way he looked at you, first time he set eyes on you.>

<Tarrant?> She was surprised at how flustered the suggestion made her. <I hadnt noticed.>

<Bullshit. Hes a good-looking devil we can both agree on that, cant we?>

<I guess so. But Im sure hes not really interested.> The words sounded lame even to her own ears.

<Like you said, its going to be a long journey there and back.>

<Any more scintillating insights youd like to share with me?> sent Megan.

<Well, there is one thing. Tarrant uploaded a bunch of data about the Wanderer to the ship. Did you check any of it out yet?>

<No, not really. I had a quick glance at some of it before I fell asleep, but thats all.>

<Well, go take a look now, before you take over from me in the chair. It aint light reading, but its a hell of a story.>

Over the following days, the constellations visible aft of the Beauregard shifted and morphed with each successive jump until they had become very nearly unrecognizable. They were travelling spinwards, following the direction of rotation of the Milky Way. Megan spent the first weeks of their voyage poring over all of the data related to the Wanderer; there was, she quickly discovered, enough material there for a lifetime of study, much of it highly academic in nature. She downloaded a variety of specialist-knowledge sets to her implants, so she could at least have some kind of idea just what it was she was looking at whenever it came to any of the more esoteric information.

Most other machine-heads Megan had met dreamed of buying into an expedition that made a big find, much as the Schellings had achieved with Alyeska. The Wanderer seemed to represent precisely such an opportunity, and yet the more she dug into the data, the more she had the sense that some of the information was missing. As if, she surmised, it had been deliberately omitted.

She left it alone for a while and tried to concentrate on her shipboard duties. There were replacement drive-spines to be manufactured and manoeuvred into place on the Beauregards hull, along with a thousand other tasks involving general maintenance and life-support that would normally be taken care of by a full crew. But with just the four of them on board, they were having to do triple, even quadruple, duty in order to keep things running.

All this work had the added advantage of distracting her from the strangeness of being on board this familiar ship without its usual complement of crew. In her imagination, the passageways and drop shafts seemed to echo with the voices of those who had accompanied her on previous trips. She regularly found her thoughts drawn back to those faces, and wondered when she might see them again, if ever.