Callie shrugged. “You said it yourself. Space is big. The ship was just overlooked. What’s the alternative?” The idea of this enigmatic ship breaking down centuries ago was comforting, in a way, because failure was common, plausible, and non-threatening, unlike most of the other possible explanations.

Ashok wasn’t having it. “I don’t know what the alternative is, but there’s something else going on here. Who made all those modifications? Space vandals drifting by with buckets of epoxy and loads of sheet metal? Outsider artists among the asteroids?”

“Seems unlikely.”

“And what about the energy readings? Parts of the ship are still warm.”

“I know. They were made to run a long time, the goldilocks ships. Some of them are still completing their journeys. Could just be some old systems ticking along in the midst of critical failures.”

“Nah, these readings are weird, cap. The whole thing is weird.” Ashok sounded quite chipper about it, as he did about most things. “It’s a mystery. Mysteries are great. Let’s peel it open and see if it’s wrapped around an enigma.”

“I hate mysteries,” Callie said, not entirely accurately. “You always think it’s going to be a box full of gold, but usually it’s a box full of spiders.”

Ashok made a noise that might have been a snort in a baseline human. “And yet you always end up opening the lid, don’t you?”

“What can I say?” Callie unhooked her feet and pushed off toward the doorway leading deeper into the ship. “I like gold more than I hate spiders.”

“Launching magnetic tethers.” The voice in Callie’s headset had the clipped tones of someone who’d grown up under Europa’s domes, which meant it was the navigator Janice, and not the pilot Drake – he was from one of the Greater Toronto arcologies, populated mostly by the children of Caribbean immigrants, and his accent was a lot more melodious to the captain’s ear.

Watching from the window in the airlock, her angle was wrong to see the metal tethers bursting from the side of the White Raven, but seconds later Janice said, “Contact. Connection secure.” Janice didn’t have a particle of romance in her soul, which was a good quality in the person who was supposed to tell you where you were going and where you’d been.