“The hosts. And everybody else on board. Each section has a system for venting the air for fire suppression.” He was speaking quietly, with a heavy tiredness that dragged on every word, but without shock, without horror, only a bleak sort of acceptance. “It replaces the oxygen with carbon dioxide or a nonreactive gas. They set them to all engage at the same time. The system eventually reset and recovered, so we have air now, but it took long enough that nobody could survive.”

All over the ship there had been people who did not die violently. In the garden, in the mainframe, in corridors and doorways, alcoves and labs. That was the alarm Dr. Summers had heard while recording her final message. She had known what was coming.

“Does SPEC know?” I asked.

Bhattacharya looked at me then, really looked at me. “No,” he said. “Are you serious? They have no fucking idea. They think it’s a virus, not a—whatever it is. Not something from space.”

“I don’t know what they know,” I reminded him, “because everything they’ve made public has been a lie.”

He shrugged slightly. “Well, they don’t know this. They don’t have the full message from the probe. The research team was supposed to be reviewing the fragments Dr. Lago had kept from them.”

That meant Dr. Summers, Dr. Chin, maybe others. Summers had known UC33-X set something free aboard House of Wisdom. More than that, she had known it had to be destroyed. She had killed the man in the Deep Space Archaeology lab. He had been infected, he attacked her, and Dr. Summers killed him in self-defense. The first try didn’t work, she had said. For the second she used a canister of liquid gas.

“Venting the air wasn’t enough,” I said. “They had to make it cold too.”

“Oh, fuck,” Bhattacharya said. He sat forward suddenly, almost pushing himself out of his chair. “Fuck. Yeah. That’s right. That’s why it’s so bloody cold aboard.”

“But space is always cold,” I said, my voice rising uncertainly.

“Yes, but spaceships aren’t, and something this big has a lot of trouble shedding heat in the vacuum. It should be warm in here. It should have been fucking obvious from the second we came on board.”

It had been to Malachi, to Dag, both of whom had remarked on the temperature. They had known something was wrong. I hadn’t listened. I had not wanted to be distracted.

Bhattacharya ran his hands through his hair. “But the cold didn’t work either. All it did was put the parasite in a dormant state. It’s traveled through space for who knows how long. It probably likes the cold.”