Location Unknown

TANIA CAME TO a stand, gazing at her two compatriots. “Well,” she said. “How about that.”

Prumble crossed to her and pulled her into a soldier’s embrace, then held her at arm’s length by her shoulders, then enfolded her in another embrace.

“Good to see you, too,” she said to him, not bothering to fight her tears. “Both of you.”

“Likewise,” Tim said, sounding almost sad. He must have thought he’d lost her. The young man came up beside them and awkwardly added himself to the reunion. “Any sign of Sam or Vaughn?”

“No,” she admitted.

“And Skyler?” Tim asked. “Any idea where he is?”

Tania shook her head, offered a weak, “No.” She was barely able to say the word.

“Vanessa is missing, too,” Prumble said.

“A minute ago I thought I was all alone here,” Tania said. “That the two of you made it safely gives me hope that we all did. Eve did this on purpose, I’m sure of it.”

Tim’s face darkened, and he slowly shook his head.

“Tim?” Tania asked. “You disagree?”

“I…I’m not sure. About all that, I mean. Eve was headed here, on this trajectory I mean, when she exploded. I think she protected us from that, put us in those escape pods, because the alternative was to just let us die. We simply continued on the path. Textbook orbital mechanics. We couldn’t help but come here.”

Before Tania could consider that, Prumble voiced his own disagreement. “Somehow I doubt she’d save us unless she knew we’d have a fighting chance to finish the job.”

“You think she’d kill us?” Tim asked.

“I think we know too much,” Prumble replied. “About how the Builders look for species that can help them. If the Scipios knew what we were tested for, what traits the Builders hoped to find, they’d change their defenses to account for that, would they not?”

Tim said nothing, but the darkness in his expression remained.

“Now,” Prumble added. “How about we get out of the open and figure out what we’re going to do with our second chance.”

—

The big man led the way. Tania fell in behind him, keeping herself just a few meters back, not wanting some bulkhead door to suddenly clap down and separate them, yet wanting to be close enough to help should Prumble turn a corner and run straight into trouble they all somehow knew would come at any moment. This was an enemy that specialized in viruses, and here was an infection of humans in their body. Of course they would react. The question was when?

Tim trailed behind, too far for Tania’s comfort, but he seemed to need some time and solitude to process what had happened. Once she thought she saw him speaking, his mouth moving in silent conversation, comm perhaps malfunctioning. “Repeat?” she asked. “I can’t hear you.”

“Never mind,” he replied, after a few seconds. “I…I was talking to myself. Embarrassing, really.”

“No need to apologize,” she said, only then realizing he hadn’t, actually. Tim let that go, and Tania turned back to following Prumble, feeling slightly embarrassed herself for having brought it up.

The smuggler had found an iris door on the outer wall and pried it open a few centimeters. Machinery in the walls whined as it struggled to outmatch Prumble’s suit-augmented strength. A sign above the circular portal read EXTERIOR [ERROR].

“Look through,” he said, voice strained.

Tania moved up and peered through the narrow gap. A small cube-shaped chamber waited beyond, with another iris door at the far end. “Airlock, I think,” she said.

Prumble grunted. “Help me with this. Tim, get inside and hold it from in there.”

Tania positioned herself opposite the man and heaved against two of the door segments. Once a gap large enough had been made, Tim squeezed through and took her place from the inside, placing his miniature aura shard against one wall. Tania followed him in, guiding her own aura shard to rest beside the other, then added her strength so Prumble could join them.

The door hissed closed with a thin clack.

A palpable silence surrounded them.

“Suddenly regretting this,” Prumble said. “Feels like a cell all a sudden.”

“Or a tomb,” Tim added.

“Go back?” Tania asked.

Prumble shook his head. “Let’s at least peek outside, shall we? Assuming that’s what this is. Be nice to get some sense of the lay of the land.”

The technique for opening the door proved surprisingly easy: a simple handle in a slot that moved horizontally, then rotated ninety degrees. The lights in the chamber changed hue once the handle clicked into its open position. Green to orange. Tania heard a hiss as air was pulled from the room, a detail confirmed by the readouts on her visor display. She held her little aura shard under her right arm, left hand resting across it. They each had one. She wondered if Eve had given them to the entire team, or if only those not immune were the recipients.

Air pressure fell, into the unbreathable red zone, then finally to negligible. Almost immediately there came a series of mechanical taps from around the edge of the outer iris door, and the panels rotated apart to reveal a breathtaking view.

The graceful curve of Carthage’s horizon, kissed by the red-orange hue of the star it orbited. Space stations stretched away from Tania’s viewpoint, bending to match the planet’s circumference, vanishing somewhere beyond the rim of the world. An artificial ring system of floating cities, networked together by physical bridges as well as those made of shimmering laser light, connected to the ground in several places by familiar strands of silk. Space elevators. A strange comfort to see them. For all the alienness of this place and its inhabitants, for all the unknowns that lay ahead, space elevators were something she knew. She thought of Darwin. Of her father.

“Look there,” Prumble said, and pointed.

She followed his gesture and saw nothing out of the ordinary, at first. Certainly nothing to warrant the surprise in his voice.

Then that all changed. On a station a few kilometers away, there was a large indented section, like an artificial canyon. A rectangular depression. It held things, and some part of her mind recognized them, bubbling up the word at the same moment the explosions began.

Ships, her mind said, as the whole place began to erupt.