“Would you want to be with them when they come?” Ken’s voice came out of nowhere. She hadn’t realized he was still on the bridge.

It wasn’t clear which of them he was asking. But Derek shook his head. “No. I’ve had enough. I’m not an archeologist, anyhow.” He looked over at her. “Would you want to come back, Hutch?”

“Not really. I’ve seen enough.”

Ken nodded. “I’m sorry it’s turning out this way, Priscilla.”

“We knew this was a possibility before we started.” She glanced back at him. “We’ll be moving in a minute.”

“Oh, sorry. I guess I wasn’t paying attention.” He disappeared into the passenger cabin.

Derek watched him go. Then: “Do you want to start back?”

“Your call, boss.”

“Why don’t we let it go for a while? That was a fairly exhausting few hours. Let’s let everybody get some dinner and a good night’s sleep before we decide. We can talk about it in the morning.”

Hutch understood: They’d relax more easily with a sky full of stars.

•  •  •

They watched an episode of Lost in Berlin, and the full-length film Party On. Both would normally have been received as hysterically funny, but there just wasn’t much laughter that evening. Afterward, Hutch retired to her cabin, where she lay quietly reading for almost an hour. Concentrating on the book, Life and Limb, was a struggle. Its subtitle was Aging in the 23rd Century. It was Ginjer Hudson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the social problems that arrived with reversing the aging process. Under normal circumstances, it would probably have absorbed her, but on that night it barely held her attention. Eventually, she gave up on it, played a couple of chess games with Barry—they split—and turned out the lights. Moments after she’d closed her eyes, Barry whispered to her. “You still awake, Captain?”

“What’s the matter?”

“There’s something else unusual out there.”

“You don’t think we’ve had enough for one day?” He’d probably found a third planet. If so, please, no more cities.

“I cannot determine what it is. But I do not see how it could be an asteroid. Or any other kind of natural object.”

“It’s a ship?”

“I do not know. If it is, the design is different from anything I’ve seen before.”

“Show me the object.”

“I can’t get a good look at it. It’s too far away. It appears too large to be a vehicle. It may be a space station gone adrift. But the design is not right.”

“How do you mean?”

“Length appears to be in the range of seventeen kilometers, but it is relatively narrow.”

“Any indication of activity?”

“Nothing, Captain. There’s no evidence of power.”

Hutch’s heart had picked up a beat. “It’s in orbit around the black hole, I assume?”