When the outbreak was still happening, something had first disrupted, then completely ended, outgoing transmissions from House of Wisdom. SPEC and Orbital Control had always assumed it was because of system damage or a cascading error due to the medical quarantine interacting with any number of unpredictable, uncontrolled shipboard actions. But what the system was telling us now was that the final silence had been intentional. Captain Ngahere had shut down shipwide communications, and she had done it on purpose.

“How do we shut down a command override?” Baqir asked.

Xiomara was frowning at the screen. “Why is there a command override? Why would the captain do that?”

“Maybe to stop people from causing too much damage? If they were delusional and hallucinating, it may have been the only way she knew how to keep the systems protected.”

I shook my head, although I had no idea if Baqir was right or not. We had no way of knowing what Captain Ngahere had been thinking at the end.

“Look,” Xiomara said, indicating the screen. “The ship’s still accepting incoming messages. I wonder if we can . . . There’s an active transmission.”

Baqir leaned over to look. “Is that SPEC? What are they saying?”

Xiomara opened the radio channel. The voice of Adam Light boomed from the terminal.

“. . . as though you expect us to tuck our tails and flee! As though we are as cowardly and weak as you are! But we aren’t. We are not weak. Every man on this ship is a thousand times stronger than your Councils servants in their uniforms, spitting empty threats at us, hoping to use our love for our family against us. But we won’t let you. We will not let you.”

“Not SPEC, I guess,” Baqir said quietly.

“You ask for surrender and offer nothing but a life of drudgery in return. We will not toil our lives away to feed your pampered children. We will not surrender our freedom to enslave ourselves to your goals! We will not send our families to become insects in your anthill of empty industry! We reject your offer!” There was the low roar of a cheer; he had to be speaking before a large group aboard Homestead. “You cannot imagine our strength! You cannot accept that we would rather die than surrender to the cruel yoke you call responsibility! You will not indoctrinate our children! You will not put the seeds of rot into their minds! Our wives and our children will not fall into your hands!”

“He’s disgusting,” Xiomara said. She had sucked her own beverage tube flat already. “Wives and children? Does he think he’s a warlord from the Collapse?”

More cheers, wild and raucous. I lowered the volume. Adam Light continued with more of the same. No surrender. No capitulation. Courage. Cheers.

“They must be in contact with SPEC,” I said. “He wouldn’t be refusing to surrender if nobody had asked him to surrender.”