“I thought we could only go to places in the bridge generator’s history, though? You can adjust the coordinates now?”

“Thanks to my new buddy Lantern here, yeah. The Axiom used a really weird coordinate system, but I wrote a program to translate their inputs into something that makes more sense to me. One thing I can pretty easily do is figure out an offset – like, ‘take us to this prior location, but this many klicks away in this direction’. So I can get us within sensor range of the station, without getting so close it reels us in.”

Callie nodded. “If that works, it solves one of my big worries, which is maintaining any kind of plausible escape route. Do you think we’ll be able to track the crew of the Anjou when we get over there, ship?”

The computer said, “We have Elena’s vacuum suit. The comms are primitive, but compatible with our own, so if her crew is still alive we can call out to them. Their suits all have transponders, which we can locate, too. Assuming there aren’t countermeasures in place to prevent such things.”

“Like Lantern said, it sounds like a repair and ship-building station, not a prison camp,” Ashok said. “Once upon a time it was full of Liar workers, but now it’s just automated systems, and bio-drones like the kaiju that ate Elena’s guys. Maybe there won’t be crazy security in place. The crew communicated freely with one another while they were in there, so we can probably talk to each other too.”

Callie nodded. “Just so everyone’s clear, the plan is: we scan the station as well as we can from a distance. We try to find any survivors. We board the station in the canoe, which is such a no-frills low-tech thing I’m hoping the station won’t even recognize it as a ship, but we’ll see. We locate the missing crew, get them on the canoe, bring them back to the Raven, and retreat to a safe distance until the generator recharges. Then we run back home and figure out what happens next.”

“I should go with you to the station,” Lantern said.

“I don’t tend to go on missions with prisoners. Not even ones who seem to be cooperating.”

“Lantern can actually understand Axiom systems,” Ashok said. “She reads their language. Me, I’ve picked up a few things, and hey, give me a week and I could maybe puzzle out how to make the station open its doors or turn on the lights. But if you want to get anything done over there in a timely fashion, I think Lantern should go. If she wanted to hurt us, she could have done it a lot more easily when she was crawling around in the walls.”