“Maybe it doesn’t think we’re safe yet,” Stephen said over the PA. “What’s the point in an emergency escape protocol if it allows us to return immediately to a dangerous area? Perhaps there’s a cooling-off period.”

“It could just be recharging,” Ashok said. “With the bridgehead out by Jupiter, and all the others we know about, you have to bombard them with radiation to get them to open. You blast them with the right energy and they activate. This thing, though, it’s totally different. I have no idea where it even draws power from – not from the ship, anyway. I assume there’s some kind of power source inside the black box. Maybe it’s a battery that gets drained and has to recharge. Or maybe it’s a disposable two-use item, designed to get you where you’re going and back again and nothing else. I genuinely have no idea.”

“So we might be stuck here?” Callie said.

“I am not helping to repopulate the human race,” Janice said. “Fuck y’all.”

“We’re stuck here for now,” Ashok said. “Shall and I will keep working on the box, see if we can figure out how to run diagnostics, try to decipher these messages. In the meantime, I dunno. You guys should look out the window at the amazing strange new vistas or whatever. Sights ne’er glimpsed by human… whatevers.”

“Assuming this is temporary, our situation is not yet dire,” Shall said. “We are amply provisioned. We have plenty of fuel, and there are icy asteroids in the vicinity we can harvest for hydrogen if we do run low. We have plenty of ammunition, even after our abortive struggle with the Liar vessel.”

“So we’re looking at a slow and comfortable death. That’s nice.” Callie wanted to pace back and forth, but the cockpit was small, and anyway, it was annoying to pace when you had on magnetic boots in a weightless environment. She went back down the ladder to the forward compartment, where she usually ran the tactical board and otherwise used as an observation deck. She’d spent a lot of time standing here, watching space go by, on the way from one place to another, in pursuit of money or bad guys.

Now she stood and looked at a strange dark planet and thought furiously. She needed to be doing something, because if she stopped doing things, she’d start thinking about Warwick and Herm and all the others who’d died on Meditreme Station, and the dark waters of despair would rise around her, and she would drown.

“Hey, Callie,” the ship said, speaking just to her, through her earpiece. “Back there, that thing I said, I know you told me to never say it again. I wanted to apologize. I just–”

“It’s OK. We thought we were going to die. It’s understandable. I’m not angry.”