‘Oh, you still get the usual gamut of fringe loonies and revivalists, but for the most part, the UN is a completely secular society. That’s the way it should be and that’s the way it will stay.’
Former UN President Lauren Plouton
‘Well, that was a fucking disaster,’ Lyra said as Yano exited, thoroughly humiliated, into the ‘Kurwenic’ sun.
‘Shut up,’ Yano snapped, pushing past her, the wretched feeling of failure and embarrassment total. Lyra fell into step behind him as he melted back into the hot, bustling midday streets. Was it her imagination or were the other kaygryn looking at them?
‘Kilo One, what the hell was that?’ Smith’s voice crackled over the comlink. Seka’s cackling laughter followed.
‘I panicked, obviously,’ Yano snapped, pushing past a few of the slaves loitering by the roadside. Lyra grabbed his arm and pulled him back to a walking pace before they garnered any more unwelcome attention.
‘I really hope he doesn’t suspect anything,’ Smith was muttering.
‘It’s fine,’ Lyra soothed, ‘it’s just one provincial priest. Worst comes to the worst, he thinks Yano is a weird, awkward off-worlder.’ Another cackle from Seka trilled across the wideband, and Lyra’s muzzle twitched irritably. ‘We’ll just have to try something else.’
‘All right,’ Smith said wearily, ‘have a look around and see what you can learn. We’ll debrief tonight on the LCS.’
‘Copy,’ Lyra said.
They spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the settlement, trying to glean what they could from simply observing them, but they made slow, frustrating progress. It was like trying to learn another language simply by listening to it. The culture was so different, so alien, and yet so maddeningly familiar all at once—and it was impossible to know if these kaygryn were even representative of the society at large. In the UN, often the only thing that marked two different planetary colonies as common members of the Hegemony was a shared Terran language. Human customs varied wildly thanks to a hugely diverse Earth-bound provenance. If Myaxomon was analogous to cosmopolitan Vargonroth, this place could be distant Bospen, or industrial Voga City, or some yokel Outer Ring EXM mining colony.
By the time it was evening, they had managed to enter into two communal areas they deemed safe to do so, one a public, unisex bathing house where they had been forced to strip naked and step into a freezing pool of water lest their behaviour mark them out as outsiders, and the second a debating chamber, where two teams of toga’d kaygryn argued about matters too abstract for either Yano or Lyra to follow.
‘We’re heading back to Gremlin,’ Lyra sighed as they traipsed past the large, rectangular lake they had walked past that morning.
‘Roger,’ Seka said, bored. It was understandable. She had been sitting on a refraction-shielded space plane all day, unable to plug into the sync in case Lyra and Yano required rapid extraction. Lyra thought the woman jealous, too, of her and Yano, though the very idea of it was preposterous. She was amazed that their relationship, whatever that now entailed, had survived Yano being turned into a kaygryn. Perhaps they were all simply ignoring the obvious truth of the matter: that whatever happened, Yano was going to stay as he was for the rest of his life—however long or short that was going to be. Logically speaking, it made Lyra a much better prospect than Seka for a lover. She shook her head. Given the state of intergalactic affairs, she could do without the soap opera.
‘Wait,’ Smith said, breaking Lyra from her reverie.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Something’s happening, something back at the temple. There are troops leaving.’
Lyra felt adrenaline course through her body. ‘Shit,’ she muttered. They were not completely out of the city yet, and there were still kaygryn and slaves around them. A few hundred metres away, a pair of soldiers started looking around. One of them had a pair of fingers pressed to its ear.
‘They’ve been told something, to look out for someone,’ Lyra said. Her pulse was spiking. ‘Shit,’ she repeated.
‘Calm down,’ Smith said. ‘We’re not scrubbed yet. I’m sending you a new route. You’ll have to go back into the city for a while, but it’s clear of soldiers.’
‘Okay,’ Lyra said, forcing herself to feel calm, utilising her UNIS training. A set of turquoise chevrons appeared on hers and Yano’s IHDs a few moments later, taking them back into the settlement. ‘Come on,’ she said to Yano.
‘Right,’ he replied, apprehensive.
They turned back and walked as casually as they could—which was not very casually—back down the road they had just come from.
‘Wait,’ Smith said, his voice strained. ‘No, scratch that. The new route is no good.’
‘Get us out of here, Orbital,’ Lyra said in a sing-song voice. There were other soldiers moving in their direction now, the hafts of their laser halberds tapping against the flagstones of the wide, dusty boulevards.
‘Christ, this is my fault,’ Yano babbled. ‘What the fuck was I thinking?’
‘Can it,’ Lyra snapped, looking for a way out, but it seemed like every available exit—of which there were only three or four—took them past a pair of guards.
‘Seka? I mean Gremlin, or whatever your name is,’ Yano said.
‘Yes?’ Seka said.
‘No,’ Lyra and Smith said simultaneously.
‘Are you kidding me?’ Yano asked.
‘We’re clocked,’ Lyra said matter-of-factly, seeing one of the troops point them out to his companion. They always seemed to appear in pairs. It was a piece of information she made a note of.
‘Clubfoot?’ Yano practically shouted.
‘Smith?’ Seka asked.
‘Stand down!’ Smith shouted. ‘Just see what they want first, for God’s sake.’
‘Copy,’ Lyra said, and she turned to Yano. ‘Just relax,’ she said, putting a hand on him.
‘Fuck,’ Yano breathed. The soldiers were only twenty metres away now, their expressions neutral.
‘Excuse me,’ one of them said. It hadn’t really occurred to Lyra that they would be polite, but it made sense. All day the locals had ignored the soldier caste, treating them with indifference or disdain. It could well be that they didn’t actually have the power to arrest them.
‘Yes?’ Yano said.
‘Please accompany us to the presidence.’
So much for that, then, Lyra thought.
‘We keep hearing this word, “presidence”,’ Smith spoke quietly over the comlink. ‘Must be some kind of local government oversight.’
‘Have we done something wrong?’ Yano asked innocently.
‘Please accompany us to the presidence,’ the same guard said again. He did not sound intelligent. ‘The High Priest of Kurwen would like to speak with you.’
Lyra swallowed. Yano, you have truly fucked us. She gambled. ‘We do not answer to the likes of the soldier caste,’ she said haughtily. ‘You cannot ask us to do anything without a good reason.’
Yano turned to look at her, his mouth agape.
‘I speak with the High Priest’s authority,’ the guard said patiently, as if used to being spoken to rudely. ‘It is the High Priest who commands an audience, not me.’
‘Go with him,’ Smith whispered over the comlink. ‘We can pull you out at any time. Let’s follow the trail for now, see where it leads.’
Easy for you to say, Lyra thought. ‘All right,’ she said to the guard, her heart pounding. Her voice, however, was level enough.
The guard nodded. Something flashed visibly in its corneal implant. A few moments of uncomfortable silence passed while Lyra became suddenly, viscerally aware of how alone they truly were, before an open-topped cruiser appeared, a floating platform in the vague shape of an old sailing boat made from ultra-modern materials. The underside of it glowed and hummed with a smooth, liquid data sound, and two more kaygryn guards stood aboard, one sitting, one holding on to a railing that ran the circumference of the platform at waist height. They were drawing a significant amount of attention now, from both the kaygryn around them—who struck Lyra as that particular strata of society which thrived on gossip—and the slaves, who were themselves clearly frightened of the cruiser and its capabilities. Lyra guessed that the fear had been hard learned through experience.
‘Please,’ the guard gestured, and Lyra and Yano boarded what was to all intents and purposes a police cruiser. Within seconds, they were pulling away from the ground, the unpleasant sensations of G-forces tugging her head towards her belly and the hot afternoon air blowing through her fur.
The presidence turned out to be a large tower, tan-coloured, cylindrical, and pulsing with turquoise altitude lights. A band of windows encircled it near the top, easily five hundred metres from ground level, and Lyra could see kaygryn moving inside it even from a kilometre away. Large sky-blue and purple pennants hung from perpendicular flagpoles and ran for most of the length of the building.
Their flight had taken a little over ten minutes, and Lyra had tracked their progress from the settlement thanks to an orbital topographic overlay surreptitiously provided by Smith. The presidence lay at the heart of a large complex of structures, most of them large tents made out of a heavy brown fabric—the kind Lyra was used to seeing in kaygryn countries with UN borders—though there were a few solid buildings too, conical stacks of hewn sand-coloured stone that reminded her of termite mounds. Beyond the settlement and the complex, there was little except wide swathes of dry tropical forest, occasionally interspersed with those rectangular artificial lakes with no discernible purpose.
They spent the journey in silence while Smith quietly fed them pertinent information. One of the guards sat behind them in one of three rows of chairs, and the other stood at the front of the cruiser like a captain on the prow of an ancient sea ship.
They pulled on to a landing pad three-quarters of the way up the side of the presidence and debarked, and Lyra and Yano were led through a doorway and into the corridors beyond. The interior of the building was cool, and the corridors seemed to be made from a lightweight polymer, a blank tan colour unadorned with anything except signage. The corridor was curved both overhead and in a circle, and Lyra got the impression that every floor in the structure was the same torus shape, like a stack of hollow doughnuts encased in a tough composite shell.
The guard led them for five minutes. Lyra could see rooms branching off, many of them empty and dark, though occasionally the flash of a window would hint at a hollow core, an atrium flooded with natural light that spanned the full half-kilometre of tower. There were few other kaygryn here, only the familiar background hum of computers, and she wondered whether the rest of the tower was as empty—or whether they had been brought to some kind of interrogation suite.
‘We have drone cover. I’m seeing about a hundred floors,’ Smith whispered into her earpiece. ‘A thousand warm bodies, most of them below you… and engines. I think that this thing was once a ship. It explains the structure and materials. Lightweight carbon polymer… heat shields… blast struts… I mean, the force it would take to lift that thing off the ground… It’s like a flying office block.’
‘Please, in here,’ the guard said. A circular door irised open to their right, revealing a simple cube-shaped room with a low ceiling, its far wall clear and slightly polarised so as to afford them a view of the green countryside beyond without blinding them with sunlight. An ornate set of chairs and a table sat in the centre of the room, carved from a local hardwood, topped with plush cushions. The walls were decorated with old frescoes that reminded Lyra of the interiors of Christian cathedrals that still sprung up in the UN every now and then during another religious revival fad.
Lyra entered, but Yano was prevented from following. Before she could protest, the door shrank shut like a pupil exposed to bright sunlight. It wasn’t too much of a problem; Lyra could hear Yano and vice versa, and Smith and Rutai could hear both of them thanks to their micro-comlinks. It at least meant that they could get their story consistent. What was worse was the fact that they were obviously being held under suspicion of something. Why else separate them in this way?
Here for less than a day and we’ve already been arrested, she lamented.
‘They’re taking him to another room a few down from you, Kilo Two,’ Smith said, ‘sit tight.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ Lyra breathed. She walked up to the window—or rather the floor-to-ceiling retina-definition holo—and tried futilely to spot Smith’s high-altitude CODOR drone currently saturating the building with LRIS.
‘All right, someone’s coming,’ Smith said. ‘Looks important, like some kind of official—probably a priest like the guy in the temple, judging by his clothes. Both of you: better to say nothing than to make something up. The more you say that we can’t corroborate, the more likely they are to suss you out. Don’t worry about torture; Gremlin will extract you long before that happens.’
‘Damn right,’ Seka said, though her voice was, for the first time, laden with concern.
Lyra sucked in a few deep breaths before the door opened, and an impressive-looking kaygryn stepped in, all rich purple and sky-blue robes, golden hoops, rings and bangles. He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t read.
‘Sit,’ he said tersely, gesturing to the chair facing the window, and Lyra did as she was told. The kaygryn sat down opposite her with a sigh. There were two sets of arm rests on each chair, offset vertically, and the kaygryn rested its four arms on them accordingly. Lyra unconsciously mimicked him. Her whole body was trembling, and her buccal mucosa was hot and flaccid, a deeply uncomfortable feeling which was akin to having been confronted on a particularly obnoxious lie.
‘Calm down,’ Smith whispered, evidently monitoring her telemetry. The response she would have loved to voice went unspoken.
‘I am Anick sa’Vah, the High Priest of Kurwen, the voice of the shen’ah in this overpresidence. I understand that your companion spoke with one of my colleagues in the temple at Hayisa earlier today. Do you know what he said?’ The kaygryn’s tone was stern and uncompromising, but there was something else she was picking up, an undertow of emotion that was difficult to place. Excitement was the wrong word… perhaps intrigue?
Lyra shook her head. Judging by the silence on the comlink, Yano had not been joined by anyone yet. She hoped he was paying attention to her conversation.
sa’Vah took a moment to size her up. She had no idea how to act; was she being petulant? Obnoxious? Respectful? Obsequious? She and Yano could understand most Argish thanks to an odd conflagration of her human and kaygryn neural pathways, but beyond that, she didn’t know what to do. Things like folding her arms, or scratching her nose, might be unfathomably offensive. Suddenly her respect for Yano and the Xeno Division of the Exigency Corps increased tenfold.
‘How did you come to be on Kurwen?’ sa’Vah asked.
Lyra wracked her brain, using her UNIS training to recall Yano’s conversation with the priest earlier that day. The priest had asked him if he’d come to Kurwen as part of the ‘season’.
‘We’re here for the season,’ she said as offhandedly as she could. ‘Just passing through.’
‘You and the rest of the gormana,’ sa’Vah muttered irritably. ‘What is your skarlpresidence? You’re from the core worlds, I can see that.’
Lyra was sure that she would be dripping with perspiration now had she been back in her human body. Once again, she delved into her UNIS Mind Map and pulled out Ven’Ya as the world that the priest had guessed Yano was from.
‘Ven’Ya,’ she said simply. For all she knew, the planet could have been wiped off the face of the galaxy by a supernova.
The priest frowned. ‘But your accent tells a different story. I would have guessed the very upper circles of Myaxomon, but even the shen’ah do not speak as formally as you; not in this day and age. Where on Ven’Ya? I have visited. Perhaps I know it?’
Trust me, you don’t fucking know it, Lyra said inwardly. ‘I…’ she fumbled. What on Earth could she say? The priest didn’t look like he was wired up to any kind of net, but that meant nothing. What if he could fact check her with a thought? ‘I’m from… Ar…Wan.’
The priest looked baffled for a moment. ‘What an odd name,’ he said.
‘It is a very small place. Presidence. Only a few hundred people.’
‘Who is the skarl?’
‘I… don’t recall his name.’ She was falling off a cliff now, snatching at the last few blades of grass hanging over the edge of the precipice.
The priest drummed his fingers, all sixteen of them, against the arm rests of the chair. After a short and dismally uncomfortable silence, he said, ‘I don’t believe you.’
Lyra’s heart sank. She felt like crying. It would have been one thing to resist interrogation as a human, with all of her skills and training intact. But to do it here, in this alien place, while trying to mimic an alien… it was impossible. The stress was driving at her skull, pounding on it like an angry fist on a door.
‘Keep it together, Kilo Two,’ Smith whispered. ‘I can lid him from here if needs be. Don’t shit yourself. Use your training.’
‘I don’t know what I can tell you,’ Lyra said, trying to pull herself together. It was almost impossible to do given that her body language was probably completely betraying her.
The priest didn’t look angry. ‘I know why you seek to protect him,’ he said softly.
That threw her. ‘I’m sorry?’
A ghost of a smile played across the priest’s lips. ‘He is precious, no? Our most sacred saint. It is possible that perhaps even he does not know who he is.’
‘Is he talking about Kilo One?’ Smith asked, more to himself than anyone else.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Lyra said. It was the truest thing she’d said in a long time.
‘The priest at Hayisa had an inkling, of course, and I’d have never believed it, but…’ sa’Vah paused, composing himself. He had been working himself up. ‘Tell me where you are really from. It is all right; I think I know the answer already.’
Lyra’s heart pounded.
‘Obviously don’t tell him,’ Smith whispered in her ear.
Obviously! ‘I am from Myaxomon,’ she said.
The priest looked briefly disappointed. ‘Perhaps you do not recall,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you did not travel with him from the Zecadach.’
Lyra’s body exploded with adrenaline, and she stared at the priest, mouth agape.
‘Oh shit, did he just say the Zecad?’ Smith said.
‘You know?’ Lyra said, involuntarily. She immediately regretted it as sa’Vah’s eyes gleamed with pleasure and triumph.
‘Gremlin ready to make extraction,’ Seka said tensely.
‘Standby, Gremlin,’ Smith replied.
‘I know, child; it is all right. The College of Prognosticators foretold of this. They predicted the end of the crusade fleets and the return of our holiest prophet. He is here, now, returned to us at our time of triumph. We will reclaim his ancestral homeland across the Anohat with the great Fleets of Reclamation already pouring into the Home Galaxy.’
Realisation, like a cold, dawning sun, slowly seeped through Lyra’s brain. She delved back into her UNIS Mind Map, searching back through countless briefings, until she recalled gan’Seke’s retelling of the history of the provar and the kaygryn and the rise of the Ascendancy. The priest was talking about vos’Shan. The provar had imprisoned him in the Zecad.
‘Wait a second,’ said Smith, his voice full of doubt.
The provar had downloaded them into two Imperial Kaygryn bodies—bodies that had been kept in stasis for centuries, since the dawn of the Ascendancy.
‘Oh shit,’ Smith said as he reached the same conclusion.
They had downloaded Yano’s consciousness into the body of Anmet vos’Shan.
‘What?’ Seka asked.
‘Kilo One. They’ve put him in the body of the kaygryn equivalent of Jesus Christ. This moron thinks it’s the Second Coming.’
‘Oh shit,’ Yano said, in his first breach of comms protocol, ‘they think I’m vos’Shan!’
‘He is confused,’ Lyra found herself saying to the priest. ‘He cannot remember how he came to be here.’
‘What are you doing, Lyra?’ Yano snapped.
‘Shut up!’ Smith snapped back.
The priest nodded knowingly, excitedly. ‘It is to be expected. How long have you both been here?’
‘I… I don’t know. There was bright light and then… this. Here. Kurwen… I do not remember it as part of the Empire. We found ourselves in the woods nearby, with no memory of how we got here. The last thing I remember is…’ She pretended to think, squeezing her eyes closed. ‘The last thing I remember is cold temple walls, black stone and then… oblivion.’
‘All right, don’t oversell it,’ Smith said dryly.
But sa’Vah was leaning forward excitedly. ‘The Prognosticators were right… by the saints; it is vos’Shan, returned to us on the eve of Reclamation! I must speak with him. Bless you, child, bless you!’
The priest stood, gathering his robes up about him, and hurried out the room.
‘Keep it nice and vague, Kilo One,’ Smith was saying to Yano. ‘You don’t remember anything. You’ve just been washed up out the sea. Let’s keep it prime-time holodrama amnesia all the way, until we can glean more.’
‘Fuck you both,’ Yano hissed.
‘Focus!’ Smith snapped in reply.
*
Jesus Christ on a bicycle, Yano thought as he searched the room for any kind of escape. Suddenly, the air seemed stifling and hot, his fur a thermal cloak in the height of summer. He missed good old-fashioned human sweat.
Seconds later, the priest was there, gingerly stepping across the threshold, displaying an exaggerated deference which in other circumstances might have been amusing. Yano was just thankful for the micro-comlink. If he had not heard the priest’s conversation with Lyra, he would have been baffled beyond measure.
Provincial idiot, Yano thought, eyeing the kaygryn with disdain. This might work for the yokel god-botherers out on the fringe, but I’ll bet the high priests on Myaxomon won’t be so easily fooled. Damn it, Staerck! We should have just lidded this idiot and bugged out.
‘I am—’
‘Anick sa’Vah, High Priest of Kurwen and voice of the shen’ah,’ Yano said in a hammy, theatrical voice. ‘I have seen it.’
‘Goddamn it, Kilo One, take this fucking seriously!’ Smith shouted over the comlink.
The priest’s eyes widened. ‘How could you know?’ he asked breathlessly with the same wonder as a child witnessing its first magic act. ‘It is you, isn’t it? Ashan returned on the eve of Reclamation!’
‘I don’t remember,’ Yano said, forcing back his incandescent rage and concentrating on all the lives that depended on him not being a petulant git. ‘All I remember is the Zecadach… and then being here, in this place. It’s been so long… I do not recall Kurwen.’
‘Nor would you, Ashan,’ the priest said sympathetically. ‘It has only been part of the Empire for a century, whereas you… you have not been with us for a thousand years!’
Yano had to stop himself rolling his eyes. If a kaygryn had attempted this trick in the UN, they would have found themselves in an EFFECT substrate on Pinnacle wired up to Clairvoyant with a data sponge needle hovering above their left eye socket within ten minutes flat.
Pious morons. These creatures do not deserve our galaxy.
‘I am frightened,’ Yano said, drawing on his best acting abilities. Being a member of the diplomatic corps had helped. ‘Everything seems so different. My memory… I cannot recall anything.’
‘Good,’ Smith said, ‘good. Let the information come to you.’
‘The priest from Hayisa said you spoke like our forefathers… your accent and dialect; both are so old, so archaic… Forgive me, Ashan, I do not wish to speak out of turn, but… we have been waiting for you, searching for you since the Prognosticators predicted you would return.’
‘It is OK,’ Yano said, trying to enhance his mystique without sounding like one of Smith’s prime-time holodrama bimbos. It was surprisingly difficult. ‘I think—ah!’
‘What is it?!’ sa’Vah asked, hands outstretched, his face a rictus of concern.
Yano inspected his thumb. He had contracted a large splinter from one of the wooden chairs. It protruded from the end of the fat brown digit, and he winced as he extracted it. Clear fluid—which Yano quickly realised must have been the perfluorocarbon blood substitute they had imbued the revived kaygryn bodies with—welled from the wound and trickled down his thumb.
sa’Vah’s gaped, astonished, any lingering doubts obliterated by the apparent miracle. ‘This is too much for me,’ he said, wringing both pairs of his hands. ‘The shen’ah must be informed. We must go to Myaxomon! This is a glorious moment—the Prognosticators were right, just as they were about the end of the crusade fleets! The Conclave Ascendant must speak with you, and, and… the Emperor himself!’
‘Bingo,’ Smith said.
Oh buggering shit, Yano thought.
With a reverence that bordered on embarrassing, a phalanx of laser-halberd-wielding guards escorted Yano and Lyra back through the building and out on to the landing pad from which they’d arrived. Instead of the functional military/police cruiser, however, there was now a floating barge, a sleek, ornate space plane that reminded Yano of the extravagant diplomatic yachts they used to fly around the galaxy.
There was a second honour guard waiting for them on the embarkation ramp, this collection of soldiers having foregone the halberd in favour of sub-machine-gun-sized flechette rifles—the apparent intergalactic standard of counterboarding weaponry. Their polished armoured pressure suits gleamed white in the hot evening sun, and their white cloaks fluttered gently in the breeze.
Impressive, but dismally impractical in zero-G, Yano thought wearily.
‘Try and look around as much as you can,’ Smith was saying in his earpiece, ‘get a sense of the technology.’
But there was little opportunity. The interior of the ship was much more spartan than the exterior, and Yano was given the impression of a panicking crew yanking off dust covers and firing up engines for a ceremonial craft that they’d had no cause to use for years.
sa’Vah ushered them both aboard and into comfortable chairs, and they strapped themselves in. Yano had already expressed a strong desire not to speak for the duration of the journey, and the High Priest of Kurwen had thus far honoured that wish, despite his clear preference to the contrary.
‘All right, we’re going to lose you on comms shortly,’ Smith said. ‘Gremlin is back with me now. There’s a ship waiting for you in orbit. We’re going to piggyback off its trajectory and follow you to Myaxomon. We’re confident that we can follow you, but in the event that we lose you, continue with the mission and assume we’ll not make contact again—’
‘You,’ Yano clicked two hands’ worth of fingers at a waiting member of their honour guard.
‘Yes, highness?’ the kaygryn bowed, clearly overawed at being summoned.
‘The galactic co-ordinates for Myaxomon. Show me.’
Yano ignored the looks he received from both Lyra and sa’Vah, and gazed intently at the holo produced by the soldier. A string of numbers and letters appeared as well as astrographic diagrams of local zodiacs.
‘Yes…’ he said distantly, smiling. ‘I remember… I remember home.’
‘Nice touch,’ Smith said, ensuring the images were captured from Yano’s corneal implants.
‘Be careful,’ Seka added.
The doors closed and sealed with a hiss, and the engines rumbled into life. A few moments later, the familiar feeling of G-forces pressed Yano into his seat—followed by, a few minutes after that, the even more familiar feeling of free fall.
‘Okay,’ Smith said, his voice crystal clear now that the intervening atmosphere of Kurwen was out the way. ‘We’re going to be right behind you. Don’t panic, all right?’
Yano gripped the chair arm rests as their space plane docked with the larger ship.
Here we go, he thought.
‘All right,’ Smith said. ‘Going dark. See you on the other side.’