My father had been thrilled by the arrival of UC33-X. To him, it was a gift. He had devoted his life to studying Pre-Collapse space travel, picking through ruins of shipyards, skeletons of dead satellites, fragments of records, echoes of transmissions, all the different ways an archaeologist peering across a catastrophic divide in human history might learn about what had passed. He idolized the founders of the Councils who had survived the Collapse, and to him UC33-X was proof that at least some of the humans who had fled Earth had not only survived, but they had also cared enough about the world they had left behind to send part of themselves back as a message. My father had come to House of Wisdom to recover and decipher that message, corrupted as it was by centuries in the harsh environment of space, and learn what he could about the people who had sent it.

SPEC claimed my father had been concealing data and results from his fellow scientists. They said he had grown selfish with the prospect of making a grand discovery and sabotaged the research of others to keep the glory for himself. They said that when he was caught and dismissed from the ship, he was so furious he massacred the ship’s entire population in revenge—a plot he must have held in reserve for months or years, perhaps since his long-ago research on Pre-Collapse biological weapons, just waiting for the right target. They said he had always been unstable. They apologized for not realizing it sooner.

They did not care that my father loved humanity so much he spent his life searching for proof of its survival in deep space. They did not care that he loved the Councils, too, because he saw them as proof that humanity could do better than it had before. That humankind could drive itself and the Earth to the brink of destruction, look upon the ruins of their violence, and choose to rebuild a wiser, kinder world had always been, to him, a source of pride and reason for optimism. The Councils, with their accusations, cared nothing for the truth about who Gregory Lago was.

Certainty about my father’s innocence had carried me for ten years, driving me even when all else seemed hopeless. But now, faced with the dim red lights casting ghosts on a wall of glass, I needed more. Somebody had released the virus aboard House of Wisdom, and they started in this laboratory.

“I want to see their logs from right before they got sick,” I said.

Malachi was moving toward the workstations before I finished speaking. I pulled myself up to the glass wall for a better look into the laboratory.