The picture tore into gray blocks right over Mags Ferro's face.
Eli leaned toward the side screen as if that would help. The feed was stolen, bounced off a dead relay buoy, and it came in the way stolen things usually came: late, cold and in pieces. The blocks settled into a corridor on Port Piazzi's second ring.
Mags was walking down it between two uniforms with Belt Authority badges.
She wore her yard jacket, the green one with the torn pocket and the parts stamps on the sleeve. Her gray hair was pinned up the way she pinned it when she meant to yell at a supplier. One badge had a hand on her elbow. The other carried a slate and the expression of a man who'd been told to look sorry for the cameras.
The caption crawled along the bottom of the screen. Port Piazzi parts broker detained. Charge: financing a deserter.
"Financing," Eli said. "She lent me the money for a tug. The tug's scrap now, and she never once asked me for it back."
Nobody on the bridge had an answer for him.
His breath hung in front of the screen in a small white cloud. The Marrow had been running dark for eight days, and dark meant cold: the heaters off on every deck but the cryo bay, frost along the bottom edge of the plot glass.
On the screen, somebody off camera shouted a question. Mags stopped walking. The badge on her elbow tried to keep her moving and found out what everybody on Ceres already knew, which was that Mags Ferro moved when she decided to.
She looked straight into the lens.
"Tell my yard boys the crane bearing on number two's going," she said. "And tell the Belt Authority they can kiss the cracked end of my coolant line."
The picture broke up again. The blocks slid over her mouth, her jaw, the badge's hand on her arm.
Eli's hands had closed on the armrests. He made them let go.
"I can't do a thing," he said. "I'm sitting on a ship that could flatten that whole ring, and I can't do one thing."
"No," Ysolde said behind him.
She'd come up while he watched. Ysolde Varn rarely sat on a bridge. She stood behind his chair at her full height, six and a half feet of executive officer, and watched the feed over his head.
Her hand came to rest at the back of his neck.
Her palm was cool. It settled there the way a hand settles on a rail it trusts. Neither of them looked at the other. On the screen the badges walked Mags past a noodle stall he'd eaten at a hundred times. Her hand stayed where it was. Neither of them said anything about it.
He found he could breathe again, a little.
At the engineering console, Pell Ondra drummed on the panel edge, four fingers and then the second thumb, a hard little click. His chief engineer was Kiri, with two thumbs on each hand. Then she said something in her own language that sounded like a wrench thrown down a ladder.
"Translate that," Eli said.
"No. It is about their mothers. It does not translate."
"Try."
"It is about their mothers and a reactor vent." She shoved her fringe out of her eyes. "Your language is too polite for it."
The feed cut to the yard gates, chained. A Belt Authority notice was glued across the sign that said FERRO PARTS & SALVAGE, and somebody had already drawn a rude shape on the notice.
Eli almost smiled at that.
"She's going to charge them for the chain," he said. "Rental. By the hour."
It came out flat, and nobody picked it up. Ysolde's thumb moved once against his neck.
"Hang on, Mags," he said quietly.
Bosun spoke from the overhead. The ship's mind had kept the Marrow for four centuries, and it used the same even voice for reactor figures and the names of the dead.
"A routine notice. The Main Battery has held through two test cycles this afternoon. It remains jury-rigged. Strain is zero of three."
"Good," Eli said. He couldn't feel it. The battery was the ship's big gun, patched together by his own hands; jury-rigged meant it ran at half strength and took strain each time it fired, and at three strain it failed.
The second feed was cleaner, because nobody had to steal it.
Gateway Station wanted the whole system watching: a briefing room with tall windows and the blue curve of Earth behind them. You didn't stand in front of the home planet by accident.
The woman at the podium was sixty or so, silver-haired, in a gray suit that had cost more than his tug. She had a grandmother's smile and a pair of reading glasses she took off when she wanted to look sincere. The caption said Ines Haldane, Director, Belt Authority.
"I want to be very clear," Haldane said. "Nobody here wants anyone hurt. Not the young man who found this vessel. Not the people of the belt who've been frightened by rumors. That's exactly why the United Earth Assembly asked me to act today."
She took the glasses off.
"The vessel formerly held at Locker 4417 is the property of the United Earth. Its contents, including any non-human persons aboard, are alien assets of strategic value. They will be protected. They will be treated with every courtesy. And they will be brought home."
Formerly held. Haldane thought the ship had left its rock. They were still inside it, a three-kilometer lump of carbon and ice called Locker 4417.
"Home," Pell said. She had stopped drumming. Her copper fringe had fallen over one eye, and she didn't push it back. "Whose home?"
"Earth's," Eli said. "Hers."
A man stood at Haldane's shoulder, with the kind of stillness lawyers learned in their first year. Eli had last seen that face on a salvage-court screen on Ceres.
"That's Hadley-Okuma's counsel," he said.
"The mining company," Ysolde said. "Their suit for the ship."
"Folded into hers now." Eli watched the lawyer not blink. "They couldn't take it in the salvage court. So they gave the claim to someone bigger."
Eli muted Haldane.
"Bosun," he said. "Show me the net."
"Passive plot only, Provisional Commander. We are not transmitting."
Bosun had called him that since the Locker: a stopgap captain, the best the ship could do with no officer of its own above Ysolde. To everyone else aboard, the commander meant her.
Bosun had built it from eight days of listening. A ring of red marks hung around the Scatter, the field of loose rock the Locker drifted in: six Belt Authority cutters, fast boats with big sensor masts, and two Navy frigates out at the edge like dogs waiting on a porch. And one, larger than all of them, held station sunward.
"The Resolute," Ysolde said.
"Repaired," Eli said. "Already."
"Repaired and on station since Day 49," Bosun said. It counted the days from the morning Eli's grapple had bitten into this rock. "The cutters are sweeping inward. They illuminate each rock with active sensors and log it clear. They have cleared four hundred and eleven so far."
"How many left?" Pell asked.
"Between the edge of the sweep and Locker 4417, roughly two thousand. Their rate is improving."
"They're not hunting," Eli said. "They're inventorying. That's worse."
"Why worse?" Ysolde asked.
"Hunters get bored."
On the muted feed, Haldane put her glasses back on and smiled at a question.
"Provisional Commander," Bosun said. "May I report something not requested?"
"Go ahead."
"When the Ceres feed named the woman arrested, I checked my list for the watch-change. The names of the dead." It paused. "The name Mags Ferro is not on it."
"No," Eli said. "It's not."
"I would like it to stay so."
Pell pressed her lips together and looked away from the plot.
"So would I," Eli said.
He turned his chair away from the plot. He'd been not asking this for eight days.
Eight days ago he'd sent a distress call on the old navy band, and two things had answered.
"Ysolde. The second answer. The one from Saturn."
She didn't answer right away. She looked at the comms panel, where eight days ago a sound had come out of the speakers that wasn't a voice and was trying to be one.
"You knew what it was," Eli said. "I saw your face. You've had eight days. I've let you have them."
"You have," she said. "That was generous."
"I'm done being generous. What answered us?"
Ysolde drew herself up.
Her shoulders went back, and the bronze-dark horns that swept back from her temples squared toward the panel like she meant to meet it head on.
"We called it the Hollow," she said. "It did not have a name for itself. It did not need one."
The bridge went so quiet that even the cold seemed to hold still.
"It is what took the line," she said. "The ships of the line, at the Third Narrows. All of them. We never saw what it was. We saw what it did. It took ships. Not destroyed. Took. And then it spoke to us with their voices." Her voice stayed level and low, the way she always got when something mattered. "Captains we knew. Calling on fleet channels, asking for help, giving the right codes. We sent help."
"And it took the help," Eli said.
"Yes."
He thought of the sound from the speakers, rising and falling. Almost words.
"The second answer," he said. "Was that it?"
"I do not know." She held his eyes as she said it. "I was never on the line. I heard it once, on a relay, in the last week. Before the freeze." Her jaw tightened. "It sounded like that. Like something that had heard voices and was learning the shape of them."
Pell had gone silent at her console.
Pell swore at pumps and at couplings and at Eli, fluently and often. When she stopped, it meant she'd run out of words that were big enough. She sat with both hands flat on the panel and looked at nothing.
That frightened him more than the plot did.
"How far does it reach?" he asked.
"I do not know that either," Ysolde said. "Mister Navarro, I am telling you everything I know. It is not very much. It was never very much. That was the problem."
He stood up and stood beside her.
"Then we know two things," he said. "Earth wants the ship. And something out there knows we called."
"Three things," Pell said. Her voice was rough. "You forgot that we cannot leave."
"Then let's talk about leaving," Eli said. "Can we run?"
"Not past that," Ysolde said. "Not cold."
"Not hot either," Pell said. "Light the drive, and every sensor in the ring sees a star. They would have us in an hour."
"So we go cold. Drift out. Slip a gap."
"With what pilot?" Pell turned her chair to face him. "You fly like a tug. Good for a tug. I have seen you. Horns flies like a commander, by the book, steady, a very fine book. That net needs someone who flies like a crime."
Ysolde didn't argue with that, which said everything.
Eli looked at the pod monitor on the side screen. Pell wouldn't take it down. R-4 and R-5 lay steady and flat. R-3 rippled. The trace rose and fell, slow, a wave that never quite broke, the way it had since the fight with the Resolute.
"Then we wake her," he said.
"No," Ysolde said.
He'd expected that. He turned to her and waited.
"The medbay is dead," she said. "Without it, any wake is an emergency wake. Emergency wakes kill. Not often. Often enough. I signed for twelve of them in the last war, and I buried one." She did not look at the pod readout. "I will not wake an officer into a ship that cannot treat her, to fly a run that may not work."
"That's fair," Eli said. "That's a real number. Pell?"
"The heat." Pell held up four fingers. "A wake draws forty power for six hours, out of the two hundred and fifty the reactor gives us. That is a lot of heat in the cryo bay, in a ship that is supposed to be a cold rock. A cutter with a good mast reads one warm spot on a cold rock, and it comes to look."
"Can you hide it?"
"I have not said I cannot." Her chin came up. "I have said it is a problem."
He nodded. That was Pell for yes, if you asked her right.
"Here's mine," he said. "We can't fly that net. Either we sit in this rock until a cutter shines a light on us, or we wake somebody who flew the line." He looked at the ripple. "She's been climbing for eight days. Maybe she knows something we don't."
"Or maybe she is dreaming," Ysolde said.
"Then she's dreaming about flying."
Ysolde stood very straight beside the plot. The horns stayed squared, a soldier's stubbornness, while her eyes rested a long second on the pod readout. He watched her want it and refuse to say so.
"Your decision," she said at last. "Your command. I have stated my objection."
"You have. It's a good one. It's going in the log."
He turned to Pell.
"I'm deciding that we wake her," he said. "I'm not deciding how. That's yours. Can you plan the power so the heat doesn't show?"
Pell looked at him.
It was the look she gave a coupling before she decided whether to fix it or throw it out an airlock. Then she pulled the hull schematic up and stabbed it with one finger.
"Here. The cryo bay sits against the side buried deepest in the rock. I run the wake heat into the bulkhead, not the air. Three meters of carbon and ice drink it. A cutter would have to be standing on us to see it."
"How long?"
"Two hours to reroute. Maybe three." She was already pulling up the cryo bay's heat map, her fingers moving fast across the board. "I will need you to hold a junction plate while I swap the feed. And do not touch anything else."
"I never touch anything else."
"You touch everything else. You are a monkey with a torque driver."
She was smiling, a little, at the screen. It was the first time in eight days.
On his wrist unit, under the engineering menu, a file had sat for some time with a small blue mark beside it. He'd seen it go blue when she started to trust him. He'd never opened it.
"Pell," he said. "Your file. In the log. It's open to me."
Her hands stopped on the board.
"I know it is," she said.
"Can I read it?"
She turned in her chair, and the silence went on a long time.
"Ask me what you want to know," she said.
He thought about all the things that file probably held. Her service number, her postings, her commendations, the word married and a date and a second date after it.
"Nothing right now," he said. "When there's something, I'll ask."
He left the file closed.
Pell turned back to her board. She didn't say anything. But she drummed once on the console edge, four fingers and the thumb last, and his wrist unit chimed.
```status CONFIDENCE LOG · Lt. Pell Ondra · 59 → 64 Filed for: Deferred to her expertise ```
The confidence log was old navy procedure: each officer's own rating of her commander, out of a hundred, filed by her and nobody else, and no commander could change it.
"I did not file it for the file," she said, without looking around. "I filed it for the plan. You asked me how. Most captains only tell me when."
"Most captains are idiots."
"Yes," Pell said. "That is also in my file."
The reroute took her two hours and fifty minutes.
He held the junction plate for forty of them, flat on his back in a crawlway, while Pell swore at the four-hundred-year-old Kiri technician who'd bolted it in upside down. When she finished, the cryo bay's heat map showed a fat orange bloom pressed against the rock side of the hull and nothing at all on the open side.
"That will hold," she said. "Six hours. Then I want a drink."
"There's nothing to drink."
"Then I want to complain about it."
At 22:00 the three of them stood in the cryo bay in front of pod R-3.
The bay was the warmest place on the ship, which meant it was only cold. Frost rimed the pod's lid. Through it Eli could see the shape of the woman inside: long-limbed, still, gold-brown skin gone gray with cold. A slate-blue crest ran from her brow back over her skull, folded flat. Under the frost it shifted very faintly, then lay still.
"She will wake angry," Pell said. "Pilots always do. They think they missed something."
"She did miss something," Ysolde said.
"Then she will be right to be angry. That is worse."
Eli put his hand on the pod's control plate. It was cold enough to ache.
"Bosun," he said. "Wake order. Pod R-3. Emergency protocol."
"Acknowledged, Provisional Commander." A pause. "A wake order requires the officer's name in the log. You will recall that I do not give out an officer's name. Her name is hers to give. This is the one exception the protocol makes. I am sorry to make it for her."
"Go ahead."
"Flight Lieutenant Sarai Tevel," Bosun said. "Wake order logged. Thaw begins."
The pod hummed. Somewhere under the deck, a pump came up to speed, and the cryo bay's lights shifted from blue to amber. The frost on the lid began, very slowly, to run.
Eli's wrist unit chimed.
```status CRYO BAY · Pod R-3 · Flt. Lt. Sarai Tevel · Thaw 0 of 6 hours · Power +40 ```
Pell stepped closer to the glass. She stood with both hands at her sides, and the fingers of her right hand tapped against her leg, four and then the thumb, over and over, like a clock she couldn't stop.
Ysolde stood on the pod's other side with a folded blanket over her arm. Nobody remarked on that.
For eight days the readout had rippled, a sleeper climbing toward a surface she couldn't reach.
As they watched, the ripple stopped.
The trace went flat and steady, a long clean line across the screen, the way a sleeper's does just before she opens her eyes.
