Quint gave me a look like she thought maybe the factory had assembled me wrong, and climbed up after Benny.

“How the hell did someone like you end up here with us, anyway?” Leah asked me, but not in a way that cared. She followed Quint up and out.

That left me alone. The Viper was coffin-quiet, like it had been abandoned as surely as the Nameless had. I hurried after the others.

Frost limned the rungs of the ladder where they joined at the seam of the Nameless’s hull, exposed to the vacuum for hundreds of years and cooled almost to absolute zero before the Viper had come along and heated it up by a couple hundred degrees Kelvin. I climbed through the cold and emerged out of the floor and into dim red light. One wall of the room was a floor-to-ceiling window—or it had been, before age and decay had filmed the window over. The result was a semi-opaque piece of plastic through which nothing could be seen except the diffuse firelight of the dying star that the Nameless orbited.

That was the only light in the room. The Nameless’s computers might be—partly—functional, but the lights had burned out long, long ago. The room itself was long and hushed and dark and empty, like the antechamber to a tomb. The walls were splotched and crumbling, decay creeping dust through the flaws in their build. I coughed.

“Remember,” Quint said loudly as I emerged, “we have only a week before the sun goes nova, and we have to search this whole ship first. Our boss will let you take whatever you find on the way, but we have to find the data.”

Or else consequences, terrible consequences, fatal consequences, etc. We knew the score, Quint. I ignored her, scanning the room for anything useful, and my flashlight beam fell upon something carved into the far wall.

I hurried to the wall and fell to my knees, running my fingers over the uneven, ancient scratchings in the metal. I knew that they were letters, though they were not written in the script that I had learned as a child, nor was it written in any of the languages anyone spoke now—not my native tongue, Kystrene, or the Sister Standard that was the only language I regularly spoke anymore. This language was gone, dead, had been dead for a thousand years: Ameng. Real Ameng, right here in front of me.

I trailed my fingers over the letters, carved here a thousand years ago by someone whose dust I was probably now breathing in. A message undisturbed for a millennium until I’d come along, like it had been left specifically for me. I felt out the letters, pieced together the words.

IT IS TRUE

Something scraped to my right, probably Benny or Leah, trying to pry salvageable metal out of the decay. I bent closer to the wall and those long-forgotten letters.

WE SHALL BE MONSTERS

That scraping sound grew louder.