“Boudicca—the pilot on the shuttle. The woman with the red hair.” It hurt to say her name and remember the confident rasp of her voice as she told her own truths around the fire at the center of the homestead. “When Breton crashed, she was the pilot of the first ship to respond to the distress signal. She told me that when they got to the crash site and inside the wreck, they couldn’t even find the crew. The bodies. SPEC told the families the conditions were too dangerous to retrieve the bodies, but really they were so badly burned most of them were just—dust. Debris.”

“We didn’t learn that in school,” Jas said. “But it makes sense. It was a horrible accident.”

And, prior to House of Wisdom, it was the single greatest loss of human life in space since the Collapse. Afterward, SPEC and the Councils had declared never again, never again would space travel be so dangerous, never again would so many perish. But, Boudicca had told me, they only changed what public outcry clamored for them to change, and when she tried to demand more, when she spoke up about what failures had led to the disaster, they had shunted her aside again and again, assigning her to routes a trainee could have flown, passing her over for higher positions and better ships, censuring her every time she spoke up. SPEC had made its point: they did not want her anymore. And without SPEC, without access to space, Boudicca had no reason to remain loyal to the Councils that had treated her so poorly.

All because of a single horrifying crash. Because she had wanted to keep it from happening again. Because she wanted those whose carelessness had lost lives to admit what they had done.

“She said there was—was it something wrong with the atmosphere filtration system?” I asked, trying to recall the details. “It made the crew sick, so they didn’t notice the air was getting toxic, and they lost control? And it was some flammable gas?”

“I think so.” Jas rubbed his hands over his face and inhaled sharply, as though trying to wake himself up. “I remember it now. They thought it was sabotage at first, because as far as anybody could tell there were never any alarms or warnings. The atmospheric control system was supposed to have an automatic limit for high levels of—I think it was carbon monoxide buildup. That’s what incapacitated the crew. It wasn’t sabotage after all. There was a glitch in the computers that had shut down the warning system and not restarted it.”

“They asphyxiated before the fire started?” I asked.