“Well?” Falconi asked.

Vishal shook his head and held up a finger. Not saying a word, he marched to the back of the galley, got himself a pouch of instant coffee, drained it, and then, and only then, returned to stand in front of the captain.

“That bad, huh?” said Falconi.

Nielsen leaned forward. “How is Gregorovich?”

Vishal sighed and rubbed his hands together. “His implants are too damaged for me to fix. I cannot remove or replace the broken leads. And I cannot identify the ones that end in a dead neuron. I tried rerouting signals to different parts of his brain, where the wires still work, but there aren’t enough of them, or Gregorovich could not pick out the signal from the disorganized sensory information he’s receiving.”

“You still have him sedated?” Falconi asked.

“Yes.”

“Is he going to be okay, though?” Nielsen asked.

Sparrow shifted in her seat. “Yeah, is he going to end up impaired or something like that?”

“No,” Vishal said slowly, cautiously. “But, we will have to take him to a proper facility. The connections are continuing to degrade. In another day, Gregorovich may become completely cut off from his internal computer. He would be totally isolated.”

“Shit,” said Sparrow.

Falconi turned toward the Entropists. “Don’t suppose there’s anything you could do to help?”

They shook their heads. “Alas, no,” said Veera. “Implants are delicate things and—”

“—we would be reluctant to work on an ordinary-sized neural net, much less—”

“—that of a ship mind.” The Entropists appeared smug at the smoothness of their exchange.

Falconi made a face. “I was afraid of that. Doc, you can still put him in cryo, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’d better go ahead and put him under, then. He’ll be safer that way.”

Kira tapped her fork on her plate. Everyone looked at her. “So,” she said, feeling out her words, “just to be clear: the only thing that’s wrong with Gregorovich are the wires going into his brain, is that right?”

“Oh, there’s a whole lot more wrong with him than just that,” Sparrow quipped.

Vishal assumed a long-suffering expression as he said, “You are correct, Ms. Kira.”

“He doesn’t have large amounts of tissue trauma or anything like that?”

Vishal started to move toward the door, obviously eager to get back to Gregorovich. He paused at the threshold. “No. The only damage was the neurons he lost at the ends of some wires, but it is a negligible loss for a ship mind of his size.”

“I see,” said Kira. She tapped her fork again.

A wary look came over Falconi’s face. “Kira,” he said in a warning tone. “What are you thinking?”

She took a moment to answer. “I’m thinking … I might be able to use the Soft Blade to help Gregorovich.”

A babble of exclamations filled the galley. “Let me explain!” said Kira, and they quieted down. “I could do the same thing I did with Akawe, back at Cygni. Connect the Soft Blade to Gregorovich’s nerves, only this time, I’d be hooking them back up to the wires in his neural net.”