While I was window-shopping through the lieutenant’s weapons collection, I realized something else. Her vast and terrifying array of weapons, like her store of rations, had been arranged very precisely by type.

This lieutenant had all but alphabetized her knife collection. I was starting to suspect she was a little bit neurotic.

A solid-sounding thud behind me caught my attention; Lantern-Eyes had closed the door we’d come through and was now locking it. There were locks all up and down the door, and locks on the top and bottom, plus a long bent pipe that seemed to function as a bar. There had to be like twenty locks, and the hinges were on the inside. The apocalypse couldn’t break down that door.

“Where’s the rest of your team?” I asked. “Or did the Republic send you alone?”

Lantern-Eyes slid another bolt into place. “Dead.”

The little room we were in with its one cot felt suddenly a lot lonelier. “I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t kill them. Monsters did.”

“Yeah, those manikin things,” I said. “They were chasing us before.”

Lantern-Eyes closed the last lock and squinted at me, a judgmental little look. That was the Republic for you, though: judgmental. And condescending. “‘Manikin things’? Species 019? Those are only one of the things living on this ship that will kill you.”

She headed for the back corner behind the tidy stacks of rations. Her gun had vanished again, probably back in the holster she had hidden beneath her jacket. There was a massive black square in the corner, which I recognized as a particularly powerful relativistic radio, strong enough to make it through the hull of the ship and past the interference of the dying star. It would send messages in packets faster than the speed of light, too. Otherwise it would take longer to send messages between planets than it would to fly between them. You usually only saw radios that powerful in the engine rooms of starships. “How long ago did your team die?”

“Not quite two years.”

And she’d been alone all that time. “Why didn’t you radio for reinforcements earlier?” That superpowered radio of hers would definitely get a message back to Terra Nova, easy.

Lantern-Eyes ignored me. She bent down beside the massive black transmitter, picked something up, and extended it towards me.

It was a computer tablet—a few years’ old technology, but definitely modern, unlike the crystal-based decaying things that filled the Nameless.

“Translate that,” Lantern-Eyes said, and I looked down at the tablet to see that the screen was full of Ameng.

CHAPTER TWENTY:

Mara Zhu’s Experiment

“I appreciate the rescue, but I was sort of hoping you could answer me a few more questions before I got put to work,” I said, the pad in my hand. That was a lot of Ameng. I loved a good translation, and you wouldn’t get a better translator in either of the Sister Systems or any of the independent colonies, but translating that much Ameng would take hours and was guaranteed to give me a headache.