“You screwed somebody else. You wanted a divorce. I disagree with everything you do. I don’t even understand how you feel about me.”

“Yeah. But you’re here. And as long as that’s true I know I haven’t yet lost my soul.”

She pulled away from him; her face was a pool of shadow, her eyes invisible.

Emma Stoney:

In the last hours Cruithne swam out of the darkness like some deep-ocean fish. Malenfant despun the O’Neill, and all of them — even Michael — crowded around the windows and the big light-enhanced softscreen displays to see.

Emma saw a shape like a potato, a rough ellipsoid three miles long and a mile wide, tumbling lethargically, end over end. Cruithne was not a world, neat and spherical, like the Earth; it was too small for its gravity to have pulled it into a ball. And it was dark: so dark she sometimes lost it against the velvet blackness of space, no more than a hole cut out of the stars.

The O ‘Neill crept closer.

Emma began to make out surface features, limned by sunlight: craters, scarps, ridges, valleys, striations where it looked as if the asteroid’s surface had been crumpled or stretched. Some of the craters were evidently new, relatively anyhow, with neat bowl shapes and sharp rims. Others were much older, little more than circular scars overlaid by younger basins and worn down, perhaps by a billion years of micrometeorite rain.

And there were colors in Cruithne’s folded-over landscape, spectral shades that emerged from the dominant grayish black. The sharper-edged craters and ridges seemed to be slightly bluish, while the older, low-lying areas were more subtly red. Perhaps this was some deep-space weathering effect, she thought; eons of sunlight had wrought these gentle hues.

Cruithne’s form was a dark record of its long and violent gestation. Cruithne had been born with the Solar System itself, shaped by the mindless violence of impacts in the dark and cold, and hurled around the system by the intense gravity field of the planets. And now here it was, drifting through the crowded inner system, locked into its complex dance with Earth.

Emma’s own brief life of a few decades, over in a flash, seemed trivial compared to the silent, chthonic existence of this piece of debris. But right now, in this moment of light and life, she was here. And she was exhilarated.

Malenfant pointed at the asteroid’s pole. “The methane plant is there. So that’s where we’re heading. We’re closing at forty feet per second, three feet per second cross-range, and we’re still go for the landing. Time to check out the hydrazine thrusters.” Though immersed in the detail of the landing procedure, he took time to glance around at his motley crew. “Everything’s under control. Remember your training.”

After endless rehearsals in the weeks out of Earth, they all knew the routine for the next few days. They would land close to the methane plant, make the O ‘Neill secure, then seek supplies to replenish their life support — principally water, nitrogen, and oxygen. Then they would refill O ‘Neill’s fat fuel tanks with asteroid methane to ensure they had an escape route, a fast way off this dirty rock. Once that was done, they would be free to pursue the main objectives of the mission, and—

And a golden droplet erupted from the surface of Cruithne.

They stood and watched, as if stunned, in the ticking calm and fluorescent light of the zero G deck. Emma could see how the droplet’s shape deformed as it rose from Cruithne’s shallow gravity well, oscillating like a jellyfish, and complex waves crisscrossed its surface, gleaming in sunlight. Emma glimpsed movement inside the translucent golden surface: small, strong shapes, darting in shoals, blurred and gray.

It was quite beautiful, a soundless ballet of water and light, utterly unexpected.

And it was growing, blossoming like a flower, heading toward O’Neill.

There was a jolt, a groan of torn metal. Red emergency lamps started to flash, and a harsh buzzing klaxon roared rhythmically.

“Master alarm,” Malenfant shouted. He was clutching Michael against his chest. “Everybody grab something.”

Emma looked around. The deck was spinning around her. She reached for a strut, but it was too far away.

“Emma!”

The open-mesh floor swept up to meet her.

“… Earth. Tell those fucking squid we’re from Earth. God damn it, Cornelius.”

“I told them. I just don’t think they believe us.”

Emma found herself lying on a mesh partition, loosely restrained by a couple of strips of bandage around her waist and legs. Michael’s face was hovering over her like a moon, small and round, split by white teeth, bright eyes. He seemed to be mopping the side of her face—

“Owl”

— -where something stung. She could smell the sharp stink of antiseptic ointment.

Am I in my office? What happened?

Here came Malenfant. Michael backed away.

She remembered it all: I’m in the spacecraft, in deepest space, not where I should be. Reality seemed to swim around her.

Malenfant braced on a strut and peered down at her. “You okay?”

She touched the side of her face. She felt open flesh, warm blood, a couple of elasticated bandages taped in place, slippery ointment. She lifted her head, and pain banged through her temples. “Shit.”

She tried looking around. The lights were dim, maybe half-strength. The master alarm lamp was still flashing — its pulsing hurt her eyes — but at least the siren was switched off.

There were starbursts in her eyes, explosions of pain in her head. The colors were washed out; she felt numb, her hearing dulled. She was like a ghost, she thought, only partially here.

Malenfant reached down and removed the loose ties around her waist. She felt herself drifting up from the partition. “You’ve been out for fifteen minutes. You were a hazard to shipping so we tied you up. Michael has been nursing you.” He glanced at the boy. “Good kid, when his head is in one piece.”

“Unlike mine right now. What happened, Malenfant?”

“They shot at us.”

“Who?”

“The squid. The damn squid. They fired a ball of water at us, hit the starboard solar panel. Ripped it clean off.” Which explained the dimmed power. “Took some work with the attitude thrusters to kill the spin, bring us under control.”

She heard the subdued pride in his voice. It was Malenfant’s first deep-space emergency, and he’d come through it; he was proud of himself. Even in the depths of peril there was a little boy buried deep in there, a boy who had always wanted to be a spaceman, under all the sublimation and rationalization of adulthood.

“So where does that leave us?”

He shrugged. “Things got more complicated. We can’t make it home on one panel and the nuke reactor. Maybe we can get more photovoltaic material from the surface, rig something up—”

“Or maybe not.”

He eyed her. “Right now we’re a long way from home, Emma. Come see the view.”

Michael, with his sharper eyes, had been the first to see, on Cruithne’s surface, the drops of gold.

The habitats were snuggled into the cups of deep craters, squeezed into ridges, lying in shadows and sunlight. It was as if the asteroid’s black, dusty surface had been splashed by a spray from some furnace: a spray of heavy, languid, hemispherical drops of gold. And sections of the asteroid were coated in what looked like foil: sheets extending from the droplets that clung to Cruithne’s wrinkled surface or hanging suspended in space from great ramshackle frames.

Malenfant pointed at the Cruithne image. “I think that must be the original Nautilus.” It was a bubble bigger than the rest, more irregularly shaped, nestled into a crater. The droplet’s meniscus was bound together by a geodesic netting, and the whole thing was tethered to the asteroid’s dusty surface by cables. There was a stack of clumpy machinery near the bubble, abandoned; perhaps that had once been the rest of the ship.