I look through the controls of the Radar panel to see what other features it has. After some digging through preference dialogs, I find what I’m looking for: the proximity-warning parameters. Currently set to 100 kilometers. Fairly reasonable. You would expect things to be millions of kilometers away. Tens of thousands at the very least. So if some rock is within 100 kilometers of you, that’s a major problem.

I change the setting to 0.26 kilometers. I worry it’ll reject the setting as too low, but it doesn’t.

I stretch my back and float out of the pilot seat. The Blip-A is 271 meters away. If they get closer than 260 meters, or if they send another present that gets within that range, the proximity alert will go off. I don’t have to sit here and stare at the screen anymore. The control room will blare a warning when the Blip-A does anything interesting.

I float down to the dormitory.

“Food,” I say.

The arms pull a box out of their little stash in the ceiling and stick it to my bunk. Someday I should look around in there and see what’s available. For now I kick off the ceiling and float down to the food. The box, labeled DAY 10—MEAL 1, has a Velcro-like strip on the bottom that helps it stay in place on the bedsheet. I open it up and see a burrito.

Not sure what I expected, but okay. Burrito it is.

Turns out it’s a room-temperature burrito. Beans, cheese, some red sauce… all pretty tasty, really. But room temperature. Either the crew doesn’t get hot meals around here or the machine doesn’t trust a recent coma patient not to burn himself on hot food. Probably the latter.

I float up to the lab and put the burrito in the sample furnace. I leave it in there for a few minutes before pulling it out with tongs. The cheese bubbles and a cloud of steam slowly emanates out in all directions.

I leave the burrito to float in the air and cool.

I snicker. If I really wanted a hot burrito, I’d turn on the spin drives, do an EVA, and hold the burrito in the light emitted from it. That’d get it hot really quick. As in: It would get vaporized along with my arm and whatever else was in the blast range, because—

“Welcome to Little Russia!” said Dimitri. He gave a theatrical wave at the aircraft carrier’s lower hangar deck. The whole space had been repurposed into a bunch of labs full of high-tech equipment. Dozens of lab-coated scientists toiled away at their tasks, occasionally speaking Russian to one another. Dimitri’s Denizens, we called them.

We probably put more effort into naming stuff than we should have.

I clutched my little sample container like Scrooge with a bag of coins. “I’m not happy with this.”

“Oh, hush,” said Stratt.