House of Wisdom had been named for one of the ancient world’s great centers of learning, the name a promise of the discoveries and advances that would be made during its explorations through the solar system. Like its namesake, the ship had no equal. At the time of its launch seventeen years ago, it was the largest and fastest ship in existence, propelled by Amita Bhattacharya’s Almora engine—named for the Himalayan town where she had decades ago dreamed up the propulsion system that would secure her legacy. House of Wisdom was designed to glide through the solar system as the sail ships of ancient times had crossed Earth’s oceans, bringing the bold and curious to places they had never been before. It was meant to be a living laboratory of long-term scientific research and space exploration, an unmatched step forward in modern humankind’s reach for the stars. It was the ship that had established the research stations at Europa and Io, intercepted the probe UC33-X when it returned from its centuries in deep space, and rescued the miners of Ceres when a cascading failure had damaged the station’s water recycling system. It had traveled the solar system for seven years, and during those years there was not one person on Earth who did not gaze at the sky and imagine themselves aboard the great vessel, soaring among the planets. The day my father was invited to join House of Wisdom as part of the team studying the ancient probe UC33-X was the happiest day of his life.

House of Wisdom had once been the pride and joy of the Space and Exploration Commission. Now it was a crypt.

And we were flying toward it on a broad, gentle arc.

In the front row M’Baga reached for his harness.

“We need you to stay in your seat, Professor,” Panya said. She was still smiling, but her voice had hitched up a notch, taking on the breathy, little-girl pitch she used when she most wanted to appear nonthreatening. “If the shuttle has to accelerate suddenly, you could be injured.”

“Is there something wrong?” M’Baga asked mildly. “We seem to be well off the usual course.”

“There’s nothing wrong. We’re taking a detour, that’s all.”

But the fellows knew by now that Panya was lying. No ship should pass close enough to House of Wisdom to see it with the naked eye. For ten years it had waited in orbit maintained by occasional, automated thruster fire, trailing the Moon on its orbit by some two hundred thousand kilometers, and protected by a ruthless security net of high-powered drones. To discourage daredevils or scavengers from nosing so close that they would put themselves in danger, SPEC maintained a strict no-fly perimeter of fifty thousand kilometers, with severe punishments for even accidental breaches.