I heard the click of a harness and snapped my attention to the front of the cabin. M’Baga hadn’t moved. There was a collective gasp, the passengers inhaling in fear—

A young man surged from his seat. The one in the middle row, who had been flirting with Panya, who had first spotted House of Wisdom. He grabbed the seat in front of him and propelled himself upward with so much force he struck the ceiling with his shoulder and bounced back. Panya and Dag swung their guns toward him. M’Baga took advantage of their distraction to unfasten his harness.

“Panya!” I shouted, but she was already reacting. She turned her weapon to M’Baga again, the muzzle only half a meter from his face.

“Please,” she said softly. “Sit down, Professor.”

But the young man, that stupid young man, he kicked the window behind him, foot skidding on the smooth surface, and launched himself toward Panya and Dag. He twisted in the air, his arms flung out, grasping clumsily for Dag’s weapon. He let out a yell—wordless, pathetic. There was a sharp pop. His head vanished in a pink mist.

My finger released the trigger.

Dag reached out to stop the body on its forward trajectory.

One of the women screamed, and once she started she didn’t stop. Her shrieks filled the cabin. Where there was frightened quiet before, now there was only noise. Shouting, screaming, crying, demanding answers and expecting none, a suffocating crush of sound. We were going to lose control of our hostages. They were panicking, and they needed to be cowed.

I pressed my weapon to the head of Bhattacharya’s friend.

“Don’t move,” I said.

Somehow, through the screams, he heard me. I couldn’t see his expression; I was looking at Bhattacharya. That face I had studied in news reports and stolen SPEC files so many times, as familiar to me as that of my own brother. He looked at his friend, looked at my gun, looked at me. Above their heads the red mist coalesced into larger droplets, the droplets into globules, coming together like the beginnings of a solar system, gathering around the bits of brain and skull. A molecular cloud forming a star.

“You’re going to do what we say,” I said to Bhattacharya, my voice just loud enough to carry over the whimpers and pleas, “or I’ll kill him too.”

Fragment

The Earth our ancestors left behind was dying. They named this ship Mournful Evening Song because they could not see their way through the darkness. But if you can hear this, if humanity survives even now, we want you to know we have found our dawn. Soon we will sink our roots into the soil of a new world. We have nothing but hope in our hearts.

—FRAGMENT 1, MOURNFUL EVENING SONG VIA UC33-X