There were separatist groups and communities all over the world who, for whatever reason, did not wish to join the United Councils of Earth. Usually they retreated into the North American deserts or pieced together nomadic islands in the Pacific, forming small enclaves of their own design, with their own governments and their own rules. They wanted nothing from the Councils, they claimed, except a chance to live as they pleased. For most that was enough.

But not for all. Others looked to the sky and wondered why only Councils citizens could dream of frontiers beyond Earth.

It was a yearning I understood. I knew what it felt like to turn toward the stars because it was easier to gaze into unknowable darkness than to look at the painful wreckage of the life that surrounds you. I knew what it meant to take the knot of hopes and hurts and fears from inside and hurl it into deep space, across voids and galaxies, through dust and light. There were persistent rumors of some group or another plotting to seize a Martian habitat dome or a mining colony in the asteroid belt. My aunt always found those plots amusing; none had ever amounted to anything and, she believed, none ever would. SPEC had absolute control over space travel, and only Councils citizens were permitted aboard SPEC ships.

My aunt had never told me about any separatist group attempting to overtake a spaceship, but it did not seem likely these were the first people to have tried. Before the Collapse thousands of people had decided that Earth was no place for them, looked to the stars, and sailed into the dark. Only one of them had ever sent back any evidence of having reached its destination, the ship Mournful Evening Song, which had returned a single, lonely, unmanned probe after hundreds of years of resounding silence. But still people dreamed, and surely they dreamed outside the Councils as much as within them. House of Wisdom was a massive ship designed to be self-sustaining for an indefinite period of time. It could support hundreds of people. And it was, for all intents and purposes, abandoned.

They weren’t seizing House of Wisdom to achieve a political goal. They were seizing it because they wanted to stay, and there were three hundred people coming to join them.

I pressed my lips together and breathed steadily. I could stop them. I could contact SPEC and the other ship could be diverted. I only needed to get away.

“Zahra is right,” Dag was saying. Their discussion had gone around in circles. “We have our mission. We have to get control of the ship.”

“And to do that we need to access the computing mainframe,” Malachi pointed out. “I wish we didn’t, but I can’t work around it. We need it to access the primary systems before we can even begin to make this place safe.”