“Did you find something?” Kira asked.

Hwa-jung held up a small black object: a rectangular box the size of two fingers side by side. “This,” she said with a tone of disgust. “Bah! It was clamped to the circuits leading into Gregorovich’s sarcophagus.” She shook her head. “Stupid. I knew something was off when the lights glitched like that in Control when I pulled the breaker.”

“What is it?” Kira asked, moving closer.

“Impedance block,” said Hwa-jung. “It stops signals from traveling through a line. The UMC must have installed it to help keep Gregorovich from escaping. None of my checks showed it when we came back on the Wallfish.” She shook her head again. “When I pulled the breaker, it caused a surge in the box, and the surge ran into Gregorovich.”

Kira swallowed. “What does that mean?”

Hwa-jung sighed and looked away for a moment. “The surge, it burned the little wires going into Gregorovich. The leads are not connecting properly to his neurons, and the ones that are, aish! They are firing wrong.”

“Is he in pain?”

A shrug from the machine boss. “I don’t know. But the computer says many of the broken leads are in his visual cortex and the area of language processing, so Gregorovich, he may be seeing and hearing things that are not there. Ahhh.” She shook the small box. “Vishal will have to help with this. I can’t fix Gregorovich.”

A sense of helplessness unmoored Kira. “So we have to wait.” It wasn’t a question.

Hwa-jung nodded. “The best thing we can do is put Gregorovich into cryo. Vishal will look at him when we arrive, but I do not think he can fix him either.”

“Do you want me to tell Falconi? I’m going to see him.”

“Yes, tell him. I want to get Gregorovich frozen. Sooner is better. I will go into cryo after.”

“Okay, will do.” Then Kira put a hand on Hwa-jung’s shoulder. “And thank you. At least now we know.”

The machine boss grunted. “What help is knowing, though? Ah, what a mess. What a mess.”

They parted, the machine boss pulling herself into the ship mind’s holding room while Kira returned to Control. Falconi wasn’t there, nor was he in the ship’s now-defunct hydroponics bay.

Slightly puzzled, Kira sought out the captain’s cabin. It didn’t seem like him to be in his room at a time like this, but …

“Come in,” he said when she knocked on the door.

The pressure door creaked as Kira pushed her way in. Falconi was sitting at the desk, strapped into his chair to keep from floating away. In one hand, he held a drinking pouch that he was sipping from.

Then she noticed the bonsaied olive tree pushed to the back of the desk. The leaves were tattered, most of the branches broken, the trunk tilted against the side of the pot, and the dirt around the roots looked as if it had been overturned: small clumps floated loose under the lid of clear plastic that covered the top of the pot and surrounded the trunk.