“Lander, rover, lifeboat, escape pod, all that,” Callie said. “The White Raven isn’t built to fly around in atmosphere, and certainly not to drive around in it, so we take this when we go down gravity wells or need to jaunt to someplace with docking facilities that can’t accommodate our larger ship. Or when we need to be sneaky. The canoe doesn’t have much but a rudimentary guidance system, basic maneuvering thrusters, and a ton of heat shielding so we don’t burn up when we land. It’s got enough fuel to get out of a gravity well and back to orbit, but not much beyond that. Should be fine for our purposes, though. It’ll get us there and back again, at least.” Callie flipped switches and checked dials and gauges. Everything looked good. No surprise. She always made sure her ship and the little ship tucked under her ship were well maintained. “Open the bay doors, Shall.”

The doors swung open, the canoe dropped into space, and the Axiom station twinkled before them like the world’s ugliest snowflake.

Chapter Twenty

“Just so you know, I can’t see anything,” Shall said over the comms. “I wasn’t blessed with squishy organic light receptors, and the station is invisible to me. I’m beginning to think this is all an elaborate prank.”

“I can only see it when my lenses aren’t deployed,” Ashok said. “So weird.”

“I can’t see because humans are enormous and the captain’s chair is blocking my view.”

“I can see just fine for all of us,” Callie said.

Elena chuckled softly. She was in the seat behind and to the left of Callie, so she did have a decent view through the front window. “What happens next?”

“We put a helmet on a stick and poke it up over the edge of the trench and see if anybody shoots it,” Ashok said.

“Launch the probe, Stephen.”

A moment later, a low-slung triangular drone with solar panel “wings” shot out of the Raven above them and zoomed toward the immensity of the Axiom station. “I might crash into this thing,” Stephen complained. “I’m steering while staring at the drone through a window, since the station doesn’t show up on its sensors.”

“Just stick to the telemetry that Shall specified,” Callie said. “That should be a pretty good guess about the distance.”

The drone shrank, and vanished, and after a few minutes, Stephen said, “All right, the drone hit its mark and I’ve got it hovering. The sensors still don’t see anything – but there is now a large swath of the sky where no stars are visible. The station isn’t visible directly to the cameras, but it’s not using any sort of active camouflage or magical transparency – it doesn’t shift to match the background. It’s just blank.”

“The drone is acting normally?”