“At least fifty light-years,” I said. “That’s what my father thought. Why don’t you want SPEC to help?” He didn’t answer right away. “Bhattacharya. Why don’t you ask them for help? Why are you still here?”

“Jas,” he said.

“What?”

“You might as well call me Jas.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Jas exhaled slowly. “I’m not telling them because they won’t agree to what I want to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Kill it,” he said simply. “I want to kill it. Every trace of it. It’s the first sign of advanced alien life that humanity has ever discovered, and I want to fucking kill it.”

He sounded so tired, so resigned, it took a second for the full impact of what he was saying to sink in. I had not thought of it like that. I had seen it only as a threat to be eliminated. Not contact from an alien civilization. Not proof of advanced alien life. Not the thrilling, brilliant grail for which humankind had been searching for centuries. Humankind was not alone in the universe. We had proof. I hadn’t thought of it like that at all.

But I should have. I would have, if I had been thinking about what I’d learned in the Councils schools, or at my father’s side. My father would have been first in line to argue that proof of alien life, however destructive, should be preserved, studied, cherished. There was a part of me, the part that still ached with grief, that wanted to take his position, to argue as he would have argued, to speak up for the sacred nature of curiosity, the never-ending joy of discovery.

But from the corner of my eye I could still see the blood and mangled corpses. I could still hear Panya’s screams and Malachi’s final words. I felt no revulsion about what Jas wanted to do. I understood why he did not want to place that choice in anybody else’s hands.

In my mind I retraced the route we had taken from the docks to the bridge, how long the journey had felt, how darkly it stretched behind me. The parasite was everywhere. There had been corpses all the way. Gathered in forlorn groups and scattered in lonely ones and twos, bodies ravaged by their self-inflicted wounds, every one of them desiccated into husks.

“If cold doesn’t kill them,” I said slowly, “maybe heat would?”

He thought for a moment before answering. “The electric shock did affect it. It wasn’t permanent, and it didn’t work the second time, but it is conductive . . . Heat would increase the electrical resistance of its metal parts. Who the fuck knows what it’s made out of, but if it’s designed to travel through space, high temps might make it malleable or even melt it?”

“Where are the incinerators on the ship?” I asked.