“This is all assuming Ashok can get the bridge generator going again. If so, we’ll pop back to our solar system, send out a message detailing everything we know and suspect about the Liar conspiracy, and then open a bridge to the station where your friends are being held. In the meantime, though… we have to do the hardest thing of all. We have to wait.”

Ashok’s voice crackled over the PA. “Cap, could you come down here? I think I figured out a thing.”

“Is it a good thing, or a bad thing?”

“Definitely one of the two,” he said.

Chapter Thirteen

“Come on,” Callie said. “At this point, I don’t feel a need to hide good or bad news from you.” Elena was pleased to be included. This was such a tightly knit crew, it was hard not to feel like an outsider all the time, and she was already an outsider in so many other ways.

They went down to the machine shop, where Ashok waved them over with great swooping gestures. “So, in digging through the various messages this thing is producing, I found something that looks a whole lot like a countdown. Assuming it stops at zero, which is kind of a big assumption, and assuming its rate remains constant, which is also a big assumption, then we’ve got about six hours and fifteen minutes before it’s done.”

“What happens when the countdown is finished?” Callie said.

Ashok shrugged. “Maybe the bridge generator works again? Either because it’s all recharged, or it deems us safe after our emergency exit? Or maybe it explodes. No reason to think it will, except for the way a lifetime of consuming fiction makes me associate countdowns with things exploding.”

“Let’s assume it’s the former, because if it’s the latter, we have to jettison the generator out of the airlock, and then we’re definitely stuck here forever.”

Ashok nodded. “I can keep poking at stuff here, or I can do an EVA and give the Raven a once-over to make sure everything’s ship-shape.”

“Is there any reason to think it’s not?” Callie said. “The Liars didn’t manage to blast us, and the ship’s computer would have mentioned if there were any issues.”

“Sure, but we passed through a new kind of bridge, so maybe stuff is, you know, all weird out there.” He waggled his fingers – there were a lot of them to waggle – in a way presumably meant to illustrate weirdness.

Callie sighed. “You just want to be the first person to do an EVA in an uncharted system, don’t you?”

“It’s definitely a good addition to my life list, cap. Even cooler than visiting all twenty-nine colony systems. Give me a little joy on a sad day?”