“Picks sensible routes, doesn’t he? Guidance Lights” came over the comms in Istara’s sharpest tones. Then, unconvincingly: “Sorry, sir, didn’t mean for you to hear that. Is this our retrieval? Some kind of ship?”

Surit’s skin was tingling. It was hard to form normal words. “Yes.”

The officer part of his brain, the part he’d carefully trained over the years, noted Istara was due a commendation for taking a risky action in support of an officer, that his unit would be wondering where he was, and logical concerns like that. The rest of Surit was entirely disconnected from it. He drew his tug toward the broken ship, anchored it to the side with the tug’s spindly crane arms, and attached his tether like someone in a dream.

He vaguely registered Istara following procedure and anchoring next to him, floating out of their pod in their suit. It didn’t seem important.

He didn’t know what he’d expected to find. This was not a whole ship: it was an unsettling piece of carcass, like a detached limb. Only a quarter circle of the hull remained. Wires and insulation and fragments of flooring trailed out where it had snapped off.

The airlock was broken. It hung half-open.

When Surit let himself down through it, heaving it aside like a manhole cover, the gravity inside had given out as well. Surit floated down a dark corridor at the wrong angle. The only light was the built-in flashlight of his suit.

As he pushed himself down into the bowels of the ship, catching handholds on doorframes and ceiling fixtures, his beam of light illuminated a bare military corridor. Disappointment bit into Surit’s stomach. This wasn’t the living quarters, or a bridge, or anywhere that looked like it might have something for him. He recognized doors to energy and recycling systems. This was the functional heart of a ship. It could have been any aging Orshan vessel. No trace of Marit’s unit remained.

But the last door, on the fractured upper level, was familiar.

That was a flag chamber.

Surit’s heart beat painfully as he clambered into it and shone his flashlight around. He was at 90 degrees to the floor. Chairs, anchored to the ground, stuck out on the vertical floor like strange growths. There were no personal effects, no traces of people—everything ephemeral had been sucked out by the depressurization.

“Surit?” Tennal said in his ear. Surit ignored him.

Caught in the ruins of the wall below his feet, only a few strides away, was a strongbox slapped with an emergency seal. It was covered with Marit Yeni’s twin-star mark. This one was her personal design.

A manual seal. Whoever had shut the box—his mother—had touched this with her own hand.