Hutch was the daughter he’d have liked to have. But Margot had not wanted children, and he’d spent too much time away from her, so she’d refused to renew. In the end it was just as well. But if he’d been granted a child, he would have opted for another Priscilla.

The meat loaf was finished. He put it onto a serving dish, added his own potato salad and red cabbage, and covered the dish. He next picked up the Black Forest cake, inspected it, informed Bill it looked good, and laid it carefully in a cake dish.

He placed everything in a box he’d brought for the occasion and started out. “Good night, Bill,” he said.

Bill did not reply.

He stepped into the passageway and the ship shuddered. It wasn’t a bang, or an explosion, but rather it felt as if a wall of water had washed over them. While he listened, the lights failed. They came back on, blinked a couple of times, and went out again. The emergency lights came on, pale and gloomy. A Klaxon began to blat.

What the hell is going on? “Bill? What’s happening?”

Still nothing.

The hatchway behind him, the one through which he’d just passed, blinked its warning lamp. Then the hatch slid smoothly down from the overhead and closed, sealing him off from the bridge. Elsewhere, throughout the ship, he heard dull metallic thunks as more hatches shut.

AFTER KURT LEFT, Tor got down out of the shuttle and went looking for a washroom. There was one in the shuttle, of course, but it was a trifle cramped, and he’d seen one back in one of the storage bays.

He found it without difficulty, used it, and began strolling casually among the cabinets and lockers while he waited for Kurt to return. He opened one storage bin, and was startled to find a stone insect face looking back at him. It was bulbous, oversize, with stalked green eyes and both antennas broken off. It looked like a mantis. There was a tag, identifying it from a ruined temple on Quraqua.

He listened for footsteps, heard none, and opened another bin. It held several pieces, a couple of jars, a small statue, a couple of chunks of wall with engraved ideographs. All were labeled with place and date of discovery.

He’d wandered back into a corner and was looking at a drinking cup, running his fingertips across its enamel surface, when something threw him off-balance. Had the ship changed course? Begun to brake? He wasn’t sure, but the sensation passed quickly.

Hutch always warned them in advance when she was planning any kind of maneuver, and he was sure Kurt would have followed the same procedure. He thought about contacting the captain but decided against it. He wouldn’t want a story going back to Hutch about how a course adjustment had provoked a panicky call from her passenger. Ha-ha.

He was looking around, wishing Kurt would come back, when the lights dipped. The sounds of the life-support system, the persistent humming of fans somewhere in the bulkheads, went down, too, and finally stopped. A bank of dull yellow lamps switched on. The fans tried to start again, and finally caught. It didn’t take an expert to figure out something wasn’t right. He decided the best thing for him was to go back and wait in the shuttle.

A Klaxon went off overhead somewhere, startling him and leaving him trembling. He closed the bin door. The electronic gabble in the bulkheads had changed, gotten quieter. The chamber had gotten quieter. The fans quit again. For good. And suddenly he realized he wasn’t standing on the deck. He’d begun to float. The artificial gravity was off!

More lights blinked at him. Red. And he heard a slushing sound, metal moving across an oiled surface. It took a moment to realize what it was, and the certainty sickened him. A hatch was closing! The only one he knew about sealed him off from the passageway. And the shuttle.

He grabbed hold of a cabinet, tried to get his feet on the deck. Finally, he gave up and propelled himself by pushing off on a bench. He wasn’t good at zero gee and crashed into a bulkhead and bounced off. But he got to the hatch and saw that it was indeed shut.

But there was always a manual panel. He hadn’t looked during the flight, hadn’t paid any attention, but he’d seen them in the sims. The power goes out, and you open a small door and push down a handle. He didn’t have much light, and was forced to search with his fingertips. In the rear of the chamber, the Klaxon continued to whoop and yowl.

The panel was there. He fumbled at it, pressed on it, first the top, which did nothing, and then the bottom. It popped open.

And there was the handle.

He yanked it down. It went almost halfway and stopped. Another red lamp, at the base of the handle, commenced to blink. He didn’t care about that, but the handle wouldn’t go any farther, and the hatch didn’t move.

You’re supposed to open, you son of a bitch.

The Klaxon died at last.

The problem was that without gravity he couldn’t put any weight behind the effort. He pushed down, and all that happened was he floated up.

He let go and hit his commlink. “Kurt,” he said, “I’ve got a problem down here. Where are you?”

KURT HAD NEGLECTED to close the box. The cover floated off the food tray and the meal that he’d prepared so carefully began to drift away from the plate. The meat loaf came off in a piece and began to fragment. The potato salad formed a single mound in the middle of the corridor, about belt high.

Something moved above him.

He looked up and saw that the overhead was becoming dark. The backup lights were growing dimmer.

He remembered a sim he’d seen years before, Devil in the Dust, in which a character looks up to see a white ceiling growing damp, becoming red. And blood begins to leak out of it.

As he watched, a stain spread across his own overhead, and the metal began to peel away. Small flakes of it drifted down and mixed with the red cabbage and the meat loaf.

“Bill!” he said. “Will you answer up?”

But the AI was gone, disabled, dead, whatever. There was nothing in the overhead that could leak through. So what the goddam is happening?

Whatever it was, he had to get out. He pushed himself along the passageway to the midship airlock. Somewhere, somehow, the ship had been breached. That would take a meteor. But surely he’d have felt a collision. He’d never been in one, during all these years had never banged into a rock, but he assumed it couldn’t happen without your knowing it.

He opened the manual panel on the hatch and pulled the release.

He got a red lamp. That meant air pressure loss on the other side. Maybe vacuum. My God. He was about to call Tor, find out if he was okay, warn him to stay in the shuttle, close the doors and sit tight, but the moment he opened the circuit, he saw that the overhead had begun to bend inward, curving down like a canvas flap full of water. Impossible. Hulls don’t behave that way. They simply don’t. He opened the channel, got Tor’s name out, knew exactly what he had to tell him, Launch the shuttle, go to manual and launch the shuttle, get clear, but going to manual required a few steps, simple enough but he wasn’t going to have time to explain them. “Tor,” he said again. Something was coming through the overhead and his flesh crawled, he half expected to see a pair of devil-eyes looking in at him. A blast of cold hit like a sheet of iron. His lungs exploded and the passageway, the airlock, the commlink, Tor, and the meat loaf, all blinked off.

“HUTCH! SOMETHING’S GONE wrong over here. We need help.” Tor tried to sound calm. Professional. Keep a level voice the way they do in the sims. Tell her what he thought, that this is probably what happened to the Condor, it’s probably going to explode, and it would be helpful if you could pop by and pick us up. “Kurt just tried to call me, I heard his voice on the link but now he doesn’t answer.”

He was trying to keep calm, and the only way he could do that was to refuse to think about his situation, forget that he couldn’t get the door open, that the lights were dim and were probably going to get dimmer, that the captain seemed to have gotten lost. Tor was scared, frightened that he might not be able to get out of the room, that something might have happened to Kurt, that maybe something was about to happen to him. He thought maybe something was loose in the ship, something that was smashing things, that had smashed the power circuits and maybe had smashed the captain. And he was also scared because he knew that Hutch would see his fear.