“For all we know that thing has a countdown clock ticking away in its heart. Put it into the canoe. We’ll pick it up later. We can discuss whether we want to risk our own lives, as a crew – I’m not risking the whole station.”

“Oh captain, my captain,” Ashok said, which was his usual way of indicating he’d obey and order even though he didn’t like it. Callie cut their connection.

Elena groaned and made another attempt to rise. This time she lurched completely upright in bed and stared at the far wall without seeming to see it. “I remember.” Her voice sounded rough and sand-scoured. “I remember what we found. The station. The creatures.”

“We know what the Liars did to your ship.” Callie’s voice didn’t shake. All those years of captaining and testing the iron of her will against smugglers and fugitives and pirates were paying off now. “The changes they made. This technology… it’s like nothing we’ve seen before. The Liars you met must be far more advanced than–”

“They weren’t Liars.” Elena’s voice was cold and without inflection, her facial expression that of a corpse freshly laid out on a slab. “They weren’t anything like the creatures you described. Child-sized octopuses? No. The aliens we found were something else. Something… bigger.” She moved her head slowly and met Callie’s eyes. Those flashes of bleakness Callie had seen in Elena before were mere shadows. This was a black hole. “Something terrible.”

She took a deep breath, and told Callie what she remembered.

Chapter Six

Elena was the last of her crew to wake. Uzoma was there when Elena’s pod slid open and she sat up, gasping, a cocktail of strange drugs coursing through her, making everything shimmer and effervesce at the edges. She thought of grizzly bears, and how they awoke from hibernation, hungry and furious and dripping with ice. An alarm howled shrilly elsewhere in the ship but then abruptly cut off, and Elena’s ears rang with silence.

“Are we there?” Elena said.

Uzoma’s impassive face gave nothing away. “No. We have encountered an… anomaly. A structure.”

The drugs that jumpstarted Elena’s cognition spared her from any dull moment of incomprehension. “An alien structure?”

Uzoma sniffed. They were a physicist and, more importantly, an empiricist. Their only god was data. “I draw no conclusions. Perhaps the structure is of human origin. We have no idea what might have changed in terms of Earthly technology during our voyage. We have been traveling for nearly five hundred years. It is possible humankind developed sufficiently advanced modes of space travel to reach this part of the galaxy before we did.”

“Aren’t we going something like ten percent the speed of light? How did we encounter anything without being vaporized by the impact?”