Sam’s expression sobered and she put down the bulb. Bull’s belly tightened.

“What’s going on?” he asked. When Gathoni answered, her voice was controlled and calm as a medic calling for more pressure.

“Earth destroyer Seung-Un? It just blew up.”

Chapter Fourteen: Melba

When she’d thought about it, planning the final, closing stages of her vengeance, she’d pictured herself as the conductor of a private symphony, moving her baton to the orchestrated chaos. It didn’t happen that way at all. The morning she went to the Thomas Prince, she didn’t know that the day had finally come.

“Active hands to stations,” a man’s voice announced over the general channel.

“Wish to fuck they’d stop doing that,” Melba said. “Always makes me feel like I should be doing something.”

“Savvy, boss. When they start paying me navy wages, I’ll start jumping for their drills,” Soledad said, her voice pressed thin by the hand terminal’s speaker. “I’ve got nothing on this couple. Unless Stanni’s got it, we got to move down a level, try again.”

“Copy that,” Melba said. “Stanni, what are you seeing?”

The channel went silent. Melba looked around the service corridor at a half kilometer of nothing: conduit and pipes and the access grating that could shift to accommodate any direction of thrust. The only sounds were the creaking, hissing, and muttering of the Thomas Prince. The seconds stretched.

“ Stanni?” Soledad said, dread in her voice, and the channel crackled.

“Perdón,” Stanni said. “Looking at some weird wiring, but it’s not the goose we’re hunting. Lost in my head, me. I’m fine. I’m here.”

Soledad said something obscene under her breath.

“Sorry,” Stanni said again.

“It’s okay,” Melba said. “Did you check the brownout buffers?”

“Did.”

“Then let’s just keep moving. Next level.”

The thing that surprised her, the one she hadn’t seen coming, was how everyone on the Cerisierwas ready to put Ren’s disappearance at the foot of the Ring. It was rare for people to go missing on a ship. The Cerisier, like any other long-haul vessel, was a closed system. There was nowhere to go. She’d assumed there would be the usual, human suspicions. Ren had crossed someone, stolen something, slept with the wrong person, and he’d been disposed of. Thrown out an airlock, maybe. Fed into the recycling and reduced to his basic nutrients, then passed into the water or food supply. It wasn’t that there were no ways to hide or dispose of a body, it was that there were so few ways for it to go unnoticed. Traveling between the planets had never eliminated murder. So many highly evolved primates in the same box for months on end, a certain death rate had to be expected.

This time, though, it was different. It made sense to people that someone would go missing, vanish, as they approached the Ring. It felt right. The voyage itself was ill-omened, and strange things were supposed to happen when people drew too near the uncanny, the dangerous, the haunted. The others were all on edge, and that gave her cover too. If she started weeping, they’d think they understood why. They’d think it was fear.

Melba packed her diagnostic array back in its sleeve, stood, and headed down to the lift. The internal service lifts were tiny, with hardly enough room for one person and the gear. Traveling between decks here was like stepping into a coffin. As she shifted down to the next level, she imagined the power failing. Being trapped there. Her mind flickered, and for a moment, she saw her own storage locker. The one in her quarters. The one filled with sealant foam and Ren. She shuddered and forced her mind elsewhere.

The Thomas Princewas one of the larger ships in the Earth flotilla, the home of the civilian horde that the UN had put together. Artists, poets, philosophers, priests. Even without changing the physical structures of the ship, it gave her the feeling of being less a military vessel and more a poorly appointed, uncomfortable cruise liner. Clarissa had been on yachts and luxury ships most of the times she’d traveled outside Earth’s gravity well, and she could imagine the thousand complaints the ship’s captain would suffer about the halls not being wide enough and the screens on the walls too low a quality. It was the sort of thing she would have been concerned with, in her previous life. Now it was less than nothing.

It shouldn’t have bothered her. One more death, more or less. It shouldn’t have mattered. But it was Ren.

“In position,” Stanni said.

“Give me a second,” Melba said, stepping out of the lift. The new corridor was nearly identical to the one above it. These decks were all quarters and storage, with very little of the variation that she’d see when they reached the lowest levels—engineering, machine shops, hangar bays. Tracking down the electrical anomaly, they’d started here because it was easy. The longer it took, the harder it would get. Like everything.

She found the junction, took the diagnostic array out of its sleeve, and plugged it in.

“Solé?”

“In place,” Soledad said.

“Okay,” Melba said. “Start the trace.”

When it had happened, she’d gotten Ren to her quarters and laid him out on the floor. She’d already felt the crash coming on, so she’d lain down on her bunk and let it come. It might only have been her imagination that made that one seem worse than the ones before. For a long horrified moment at the end, she thought that she’d voided herself, but her uniform was clean. She’d gone then, Ren still on her floor, gotten a bulb of coffee, put Ren’s hand terminal in a stall of the group head, and found the security officer. He was a thin Martian named Andre Commenhi, and he’d listened to her informal report with half an ear. Ren had called her and asked her to consult with him. When she’d gone to see him at his usual workstation, he wasn’t there. She’d been through the ship, but she hadn’t found him, and he wasn’t answering connection requests. She was starting to get concerned.

While they’d done a sweep of the ship, she’d gotten the tubes of sealant foam, gone back to her quarters, and entombed him. His hair had seemed brighter, the orange like something from a coral reef. His skin was pale as sunlight where the blood had drained away from it. Purple as a bruise where it had pooled. Rigor hadn’t set in, so she was able to fold him together, curled like a fetus, and fill the spaces around him with foam. It had taken minutes to harden. The foam was engineered to be airtight and pressure-resistant. If she’d done it right, the corpse smell would never leak out.

“Nadie,” Soledad said, sounding resigned. “You guys got anything?”

“Hey!” Stanni said. “Think I do. I’ve got a ten percent fluctuation on this box.”

“Okay,” Melba said. “Let’s reset it and see if that clears the issue.”

“On it,” Stanni said. “Grab some lunch while it run?”

“I’ll meet you in the galley,” Melba said. Her voice seemed almost normal. She sounded like someone else.

The galley was nearly empty. By the ship’s clock, it was the middle of the night, and only a few officers lurked at their tables watching the civilians as they passed. The terms of the service contract meant they got to use the officers’ mess. She’d heard there was a certain level of distrust among the navy crews for civilians like her and her team. She would have resented it more if she hadn’t been the living example of why their suspicions were justified. Soledad and Stanni were already at a table, drinking coffee from bulbs and sharing a plate of sweet rolls.

“I’m gonna miss these when we cut thrust,” Stanni said, holding one of the rolls up. “Best cook flying can’t bake right without thrust. How long you think we’re going to be on the float?”

“As long as it takes,” Melba said. “They’re planning for two months.”