“Seems to be. I’ll see if I can get her out of this box and into an environment suit. Shouldn’t be too hard. I did it for you that time you got blackout drunk after the divorce and they threw us off that asteroid.”

“It was supposed to be a recreation station. It’s not my fault they couldn’t cope with my level of recreation. Besides, I’ve been on the wagon ever since.”

“We drank whiskey together last night, Callie.”

“I had one. That’s not drinking. That’s medicinal. I thought you were supposed to be a doctor.”

Callie went looking for Ashok and found him in the cockpit. When she told him the sleeper had shouted about first contact with aliens, he laughed so hard he almost choked. “Oh, she came a long way to deliver yesterday’s news, didn’t she?”

“How’d you like to be the one to break it to her?”

“Why not? You always say I’m tactless. Might as well use that to your advantage.”

“Actually, if she sees your face, she might think she’s meeting a whole other set of aliens.”

“My beauty is unconventional,” Ashok said. “She’s going to survive getting thawed out?”

“Stephen thinks so. We’re taking her back to the Raven. Will you be OK over here by yourself?”

“All alone on a disabled ship millions of miles away from where it’s supposed to be, with mysterious engine modifications, missing crew members, and a hold full of rotting pig embryos?” He gave one of his lopsided grins, mouth partially obscured by his hardware. “That’s my kind of party.”

Callie looked over the array of dials, switches, and readouts in the control room. They hadn’t yet developed proper AI when this ship was launched – they’d barely even had expert systems worthy of the name. The controls looked hellishly complicated, with thousands of points of failure. Her ship had many points of failure, too – but they were watched over by an intelligence faster and more nimble than any human’s. “How far did our sleeper come to bring us the good news about the aliens, exactly? Were you able to access the ship’s computer?”

“It’s barely even a computer by our standards, and it was all torn up in here, too. The coffee maker on the Raven is smarter than this thing.” Ashok wiggled a cable that ran from the wrist of his artificial arm into an open panel spilling colored wires. “The data must be corrupted. The navigational system says two days ago this ship was fifty light years away from here. The ship traveled from there to here in the space of about half a minute, and it’s been floating right here since then.”

Callie frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. Maybe if they found an undiscovered bridgehead out there on the way to their colony world…”