I extended the Viper’s gripping arms, opening like a claw as we approached the nameless vessel. All I could see out of my window now was a long horizon of scarred hull, thinned and pitted by a thousand years’ sunlight and debris so that, in places, I could see straight through to the struts and bones. An old and mighty thing. It had been abandoned for a thousand years; no one alive might remember, but this ship must have had a name.

“I’m going to call it the Nameless,” I decided.

“Call it what it is?” Leah asked.

The Viper was close enough now. With a quick command typed into the screen, I closed the gripping arms. They slammed shut, impacts reverberating through the ship as they connected. Success.

“That’s what names are,” I said, while I ran the program that would heat up the connection and open the far side ship’s airlock. “Or what they were, anyway. We—humans, I mean—use a specific set of words as names and names only, taken from the old language. Like Benny or Quint or Leah or Sean.” We could just punch through the Nameless’s hull with the Viper’s docking chute, but when there was an airlock in existence, it was easier to use it. “But originally, names were just descriptions, like Pretty, or Willow, or—”

“Sean,” Benny said, “shut up.”

The Viper was no longer rocking about. I shut its engines off. When I turned around, I found the three of them were gathering up their things, heading for the circular aperture in the ceiling that led to the primary airlock. Benny already stood beneath it, tapping something into the wall computer, handbrace glinting. Benny was an inventor. Necessity was the mother of invention and all that, and he and I had grown up in exile from an occupied homeworld, without supplies or the money to buy anything, so he’d learned the skills to make everything. His one-of-a-kind handbrace was one of his inventions—it contained a small-caliber, single-shot projectile weapon to be used as a last-ditch self-defense.

“Air at close to atmospheric pressure, sufficient oxygen, safe temperature range,” Benny read. “We won’t need the suits.”

He pressed a button, and I heard the airlock aperture hiss open. The air of the two ships began to mix, the breath of the Nameless disturbed for the first time in a thousand years. Then Benny, my oldest friend, the closest thing I had to family, and the last of my hometown left alive, stepped onto the ladder in the wall. His heels vanished as he climbed up and out.

Quint was next up the ladder, but she took a long time about it, her face pale as she stared up into the darkness of the other ship. Sympathy panged through me at the sight of her silent fear. Of all of us, I should feel sorry for her the least. But I knew what it was like to be frightened and alone.

“It probably won’t bite,” I reassured her. “In my experience, spaceships don’t. Not usually.”