Had something happened?

The light outside the cockpit window was getting brighter and brighter as the sun swelled, waves of radiation blasting off its surface in a massive explosion. This was just the vanguard of the supernova. In who knew how long, maybe as little as seconds, the shockwave would ignite us. The sun-side of the Nameless was probably already starting to burn.

Maybe the Republican soldiers hadn’t obeyed Tamara’s orders, and sent someone to Lab 17 to find out what was going on. Maybe the other Ministers hadn’t believed my pretense, and had returned to Lab 17. Maybe Indigo was dead, and Tamara was finishing the broadcast; maybe both were dead, lying side-by-side on the floor of Lab 17, just like the Dreamer’s nightmares had shown me.

I left the cockpit, went to stand under the docking chute. The oilslick seal gleamed on the other end, but I couldn’t see Tamara or Indigo. I climbed up the ladder and stuck my head out and found that I had punctured through in one of the empty rooms I’d already walked through an hour or two ago, which meant we really had landed quite close to the center of Lab 17. There were torn places in the hull around where I’d punched the docking chute through, but they were sealed off with more oilslick surfaces, keeping the Nameless airtight.

Distance shouldn’t be a problem. Tamara and Indigo should be back by now. Why weren’t they back yet?

If I went to find them and I got lost or they came back before I did, then they might come looking for me, and we’d all be stuck here. I had to wait. But if I waited too long the crash of the sun’s explosion would strike the Nameless and the attached Viper, and then we’d all be dead too.

I held out my hand, scratched palm up. And then I willed every last one of the nanomachines still in my body, every last tiny Dreamer-bot still crawling through my veins or holding little cuts and bruises shut, to leave through my skin. Find Tamara and Indigo, I willed them, find them, and clear a path for them, to make it quickly and easily back here. Bring them back.

It ached, like I was drawing all my blood from my body and leaving my veins collapsed behind; it ached, but I pushed. And one by one the glittering things came up through my skin and hummed off into the ship, swarming, until although I willed, nothing more came free of my skin.

I let myself sag, tired, hanging half-in and half-out through the oilslick sealing the Viper’s docking chute. As an afterthought I reached up to my split throat, which the nanomachines had been helpfully holding shut for me. I met a thick ridge of half-healed flesh: they’d closed up my throat before they’d left.

There was nothing else I could do but wait, as much as I hated to wait. I had no control over this situation, as little as I liked to admit that—Tamara and I, I supposed, had that in common.