Elena shrugged. “I’m a scientist. I can observe without audibly gasping.”

“I’m sure you can. He won’t care if you gasp though. He’ll assume you’re just impressed. After that I’ll take you to meet Drake and Janice. They’re… a little more sensitive.”

Elena followed Callie down the corridor. The captain walked with an easy bounce in her step, moving with a self-assurance and confidence that Elena envied. It would take her some time to get her bearings properly in this new world… if she lived long enough.

Callie went down a ladder, and Elena followed, and then they wound through a narrow corridor and emerged into the machine shop, a square room full of workbenches covered in clamps and inscrutable equipment, with diagnostic information spooling across screens on the walls. Webbed nets on the walls and ceiling held tools and parts, and neatly labeled drawers under the benches promised more of the same. The room smelled of oil and hot metal and, Elena had to acknowledge, farts.

The bridge generator sat in the middle of the biggest table, a fat cable emerging from its top spliced into a cable of a different color that snaked off into the wall. A short, stocky man stood with his back to them. He was dressed in a dirty gray coverall, the back of his head half bare brown scalp and half shiny metal plate, curved to fit the original contours of his skull. Elena wondered what kind of accident he’d been in, and why they couldn’t have disguised the repair better. Cosmetic surgery had been capable of that kind of correction even in her day.

“How goes it, Ashok?” Callie said.

“Just doing a few last checks, cap.” Something about his voice was strange, like there was a buzz under the words. She’d heard it before, over the comms, but had assumed it was an artifact of the communications system. Apparently not. “More emulations and simulations and all that. I’m pretty sure I’ve got the generator’s travel history figured out, so we should be able to bounce back to wherever it came from.” He turned around and paused when he saw Elena.

She kept her face perfectly blank. She’d seen all sorts of injuries in the bad old days on Earth – assorted deformities, mutations, and teratogenic anomalies treated with varying levels of success or failure.

She’d never seen anything like Ashok, though: most of his face was a curved silver metal mask, and instead of eyes he had an array of lenses, and instead of a nose he had a brass thing shaped a little like a nose, but more like a dolphin’s dorsal fin, with no visible nostrils. He wore a sort of thick metallic collar around his throat, the color of brass, covered in small holes, like a speaker grill.