“Here,” said Hwa-jung, pointing at the side of the sarcophagus.

Kira fit the headphones over her ears. “I’m going to try talking with Gregorovich first. Just to see if I can check with him.”

Vishal shook his head. “You can try, Ms. Kira, but I could not speak with him before. The situation will not have improved.”

“I’d still like to try.”

The instant Kira plugged in the headphones, a whirling roar filled her ears. In it, she seemed to hear snatches of words—shouts lost in an unrelenting storm. She called out to the ship mind, but if he heard, she could not tell, and if he answered, the roaring obscured his response.

She tried for a minute or more before pulling the headphones off. “No luck,” she said to Vishal and Hwa-jung.

Then Kira sent the first tentative tendrils from the Soft Blade into the access port. Careful: that was the directive she gave the Soft Blade now. Careful and do no harm.

At first she felt nothing but metal and electricity. Then she tasted Gregorovich’s enveloping nutrient bath, and metal gave way to exposed brain matter. Slowly, ever so slowly, Kira sought a point of connection, a way to bridge the gap between matter and consciousness—a portal from brain to mind.

She allowed the tendrils to subdivide even further, until they formed a bristle of monofilament threads, each as thin and sensitive as a nerve. The threads probed the interior of the sarcophagus until at last they chanced upon the very thing Kira was seeking: the caul of wires that lay atop Gregorovich’s massive brain and that penetrated deep into the folds of grey and formed the physical structure of his implants.

She twined around each of the tiny wires and followed them inward. Some ended at a dendrite, marking where non-living merged with living. Many more ended in a bead of melted metal or a neuron that was dead and withered.

Then, delicately, ever so delicately, Kira began to repair the damaged connections. For the melted leads, she smoothed the bead at the tip to ensure a proper connection with its target dendrite. For the leads that stopped at a dead neuron, she repositioned the wire to the nearest healthy dendrite, moving the wires infinitesimal amounts within the tissue of Gregorovich’s brain.

With each wire that she reconnected, Kira felt a brief shock as a small amount of electricity passed from one to the next. It was a sharp, satisfying feeling that left her with the faint taste of copper on her tongue. And sometimes, she thought she detected the ghost of a sensation from a neuron, like a tickle in the back of her mind.

Despite the microscopic scale she was working on, Kira found connecting the wires relatively easy. What wasn’t easy was the scale of the task. There were thousands upon thousands of wires, and each one had to be checked. After the first few minutes, Kira realized it would take her days to do the work by hand (as it were). Days they didn’t have.