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  “Is that actually what it is?” Dahl asked.

  “Sure,” Collins said, and handed the vial to Dahl. “Put this in the Box.”

  Dahl looked at the vial and took it. “Don’t you want me to prepare the sample?” he asked.

  “Normally, yes,” Collins said. “But this is the Box, so you can just put it in there.”

  Dahl inserted the vial into the Box, placing it in the center of the ceramic disk at the bottom of the inside space. He closed the Box door and looked at the outside instrument panel, which featured three buttons, one green, one red, one white.

  “The green button starts it,” Collins said. “The red button stops it. The white button opens the door.”

  “It should be a little more complicated than that,” Dahl said.

  “Normally it is,” Collins agreed. “But this is—”

  “This is the Box,” Dahl said. “I get that part.”

  “Then start it,” Collins said.

  Dahl pressed the green button. The Box sprang to life, making a humming sound. On the inside a light came on. Dahl peered inside to see the vial turning as the disk he placed it on was rotated by a carousel.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Dahl said, to himself. He looked up at Collins again. “Now what?”

  “You said Abernathy and Q’eeng said you had six hours,” Collins said.

  “Right,” Dahl said.

  “So in about five and a half hours the Box will let you know it has a solution,” Collins said.

  “How will it tell me that?” Dahl asked.

  “It’ll go ding,” Collins said, and walked off.

  * * *

  Roughly five and a half hours later there was a small, quiet ding, the humming sound emanating from the Box’s carousel engine stopped and the light went off.

  “Now what?” Dahl said, staring at the Box, to no one in particular.

  “Check your work tablet,” Trin said, not looking up from his own work. He was the only one besides Dahl still in the lab.

  Dahl grabbed his work tablet and powered up the screen. On it was a rotating picture of a complex organic molecule and beside that, a long scrolling column of data. Dahl tried to read it.

  “It’s giving me gibberish,” he said, after a minute. “Long streaming columns of it.”

  “You’re fine,” Trin said. He set down his own work and walked over to Dahl. “Now, listen closely. Here’s what you do next. First, you’re going to take your work tablet to the bridge, where Q’eeng is.”

  “Why?” Dahl said. “I could just mail the data to him.”

  Trin shook his head. “It’s not how this works.”

  “Wh—” Dahl began, but Trin held up his hand.

  “Shut up for a minute and just listen, okay?” Trin said. “I know it doesn’t make sense, and it’s stupid, but this is the way it’s got to be done. Take your tablet to Q’eeng. Show him the data on it. And then once he’s looking at it, you say, ‘We got most of it, but the protein coat is giving us a problem.’ Then point to whatever data is scrolling by at the time.”

  “‘Protein coat’?” Dahl said.

  “It doesn’t have to be the protein coat,” Trin said. “You can say whatever you like. Enzyme transcription errors. RNA replication is buggy. I personally go with protein coat because it’s easy to say. The point is, you need to say everything is almost perfect but one thing still needs to be done. And that’s when you gesture toward the data.”

  “What’ll that do?” Dahl asked.

  “It will give Q’eeng an excuse to furrow his brow, stare at the data for a minute and then tell you that you’ve overlooked some basic thing, which he will solve,” Trin said. “At which point you have the option of saying something like ‘Of course!’ or ‘Amazing!’ or, if you really want to kiss his ass, ‘We never would have solved that in a million years, Commander Q’eeng.’ He likes that. He won’t acknowledge that he likes it. But he likes it.”

  Dahl opened his mouth, but Trin held up his hand again. “Or you can do what the rest of us do, which is to get the hell off the bridge as soon as you possibly can,” Trin said. “Give him the data, point out the one error, let him solve it, get your tablet back and get out of there. Don’t call attention to yourself. Don’t say or do anything clever. Show up, do your job, get out of there. It’s the smartest thing you can do.” Trin walked back over to his work.

  “None of this makes the slightest bit of sense,” Dahl said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Trin agreed. “I already told you it didn’t.”

  “Are any of you going to bother to explain any of this to me?” Dahl asked.

  “Maybe someday,” Trin said, sitting down at his workstation. “But not right now. Right now, you have to race to get that data to the bridge and to Q’eeng. Your six hours is just about up. Hurry.”

  * * *

  Dahl burst out of the Xenobiology Laboratory door and immediately collided with someone else, falling to the ground and dropping his tablet. He picked himself up and looked around for his tablet. It was being held by the person with whom he collided, Finn.

  “No one should ever be in that much of a rush,” Finn said.

  Dahl snatched back the tablet. “You don’t have someone about to liquefy if you don’t get to the bridge in ten minutes,” Dahl said, heading in the direction of the bridge.

  “That’s very dramatic,” Finn said, matching Dahl’s pace.

  “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Dahl asked him.

  “I do,” Finn said. “The bridge. I’m delivering a manifest for my boss to Captain Abernathy.”

  “Doesn’t anyone just send messages on this ship?” Dahl asked.

  “Here on the Intrepid, they like the personal touch,” Finn said.

  “Do you think that’s really it?” Dahl asked. He weaved past a clot of crewmen.

  “Why do you ask?” Finn said.

  Dahl shrugged. “It’s not important,” he said.

  “I like this ship,” Finn said. “This is my sixth posting. Every other ship I’ve been on the officers had a stick up their ass about procedure and protocol. This one is so relaxed it’s like being on a cruise ship. Hell, my boss ducks the captain at every possible opportunity.”

  Dahl stopped suddenly, forcing Finn to sway to avoid colliding with him a second time. “He ducks the captain,” he said.

  “It’s like he’s psychic about it,” Finn said. “One second, he’s there telling a story about a night with a Gordusian ambisexual, and the next he’s off getting coffee. As soon as he steps out of the room, there’s the captain.”

  “You’re serious about this,” Dahl said.

  “Why do you think I’m the one delivering messages?” Finn said.

  Dahl shook his head and started off again. Finn followed.

  The bridge was sleek and well-appointed and reminded Dahl of the lobby of some of the nicer skyscrapers he had been to.

  “Ensign Dahl,” Chief Science Officer Q’eeng said, spotting him from his workstation. “I see you like cutting it close with your assignments.”

  “We worked as fast as we could,” Dahl said. He walked over to Q’eeng and presented the tablet with the scrolling data and the rotating molecule. Q’eeng took it and studied it silently. After a minute, he looked up at Dahl and cleared his throat.

  “Sorry, sir,” Dahl said, remembering his line. “We got ninety-nine percent there, but then we had a problem. With, uh, the protein coat.” After a second he pointed to the screen, at the gibberish flying by.

  “It’s always the protein coat with your lab, isn’t it,” Q’eeng murmured, perusing the screen again.

  “Yes, sir,” Dahl said.

  “Next time, remember to more closely examine the relationship between the peptide bonds,” Q’eeng said, and punched his fingers at the tablet. “You’ll find the solution to your problem is staring you right in the face.” He turned the tablet toward Dahl. The rotating molecule had stopped rotating and several of its bonds were now highl
ighted in blinking red. Nothing had otherwise changed with the molecule.

  “That’s amazing, sir,” Dahl said. “I don’t know how we missed it.”

  “Yes, well,” Q’eeng said, and then tapped at the screen again. The data flew off Dahl’s tablet and onto Q’eeng’s workstation. “Fortunately we may have just enough time to get this improved solution to the matter synthesizer to save Kerensky.” Q’eeng jabbed the tablet back at Dahl. “Thank you, Ensign, that will be all.”

  Dahl opened his mouth, intending to say something more. Q’eeng looked up at him, quizzically. Then the image of Trin popped into Dahl’s brain.

  Show up, do your job, get out of there. It’s the smartest thing you can do.

  So Dahl nodded and got out of there.

  Finn caught up with him outside the bridge a moment later. “Well, that was a complete waste of my time,” Finn said. “I like that.”

  “There’s something seriously wrong with this ship,” Dahl said.

  “Trust me, there isn’t a damn thing wrong with this ship,” Finn said. “This is your first posting. You lack perspective. Take it from an old pro. This is as good as it gets.”

  “I’m not sure you’re a reliable—” Dahl said, and then stopped as a hairy wraith appeared before him and Finn. The wraith glared at them both and then jabbed a finger into Dahl’s chest.

  “You,” the wraith said, jabbing the finger deeper. “You just got lucky in there. You don’t know how lucky you were. Listen to me, Dahl. Stay off the bridge. Avoid the Narrative. The next time you’re going to get sucked in for sure. And then it’s all over for you.” The wraith glanced over to Finn. “You too, goldbrick. You’re fodder for sure.”

  “Who are you and what medications aren’t you taking?” Finn said.

  The wraith sneered at Finn. “Don’t think I’m going to warn either of you again,” he said. “Listen to me or don’t. But if you don’t, you’ll be dead. And then where will you be? Dead, that’s where. It’s up to you now.” The wraith stomped off and took an abrupt turn into a cargo tunnel.

  “What the hell was that?” Finn asked. “A yeti?”

  Dahl looked back at Finn but didn’t answer. He ran down the corridor and slapped open the access panel to the cargo tunnel.

  The corridor was empty.

  Finn came up behind Dahl. “Remind me what you were saying about this place,” he said.

  “There’s something seriously wrong with this ship,” Dahl repeated.

  “Yeah,” Finn said. “I think you might be right.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Come on! We’re almost to the shuttles!” yelled Lieutenant Kerensky, and Dahl had one giggling, mad second to reflect on how good Kerensky looked for having been such a recent plague victim. Then he, like Hester and everyone else on the away team, sprinted crazily down the space station corridor, trying to outrun the mechanized death behind them.

  The space station was not a Universal Union station; it was an independent commercial station that may or may not have been strictly legally licensed but that nonetheless sent out on the hyperwave an open, repeating distress signal, with a second, encoded signal hidden within it. The Intrepid responded to the first, sending two shuttles with away teams to the station. It had decoded the hidden signal while the away teams were there.

  It said, Stay away—the machines are out of control.

  Dahl’s away team had figured out that one before the message was decoded, when one of the machines sliced Crewman Lopez into mulch. The distant screams in the halls suggested that the second away team was in the painful process of figuring it out, too.

  The second away team, with Finn, Hanson and Duvall on it.

  “What sort of assholes encode a message about killer machines?” Hester screamed. He had brought up the rear of his away team’s running column. The distant vibrating thuds suggested one of the machines—a big one—was not too far behind them at the moment.

  “Quiet,” Dahl said. They knew the machines could see them; it was a good bet the machines could hear them too. Dahl, Hester and the other two remaining crew members on the team hunkered down and waited for Kerensky to tell them where to go next.

  Kerensky consulted his phone. “Dahl,” he said, motioning him forward. Dahl sneaked up to his lieutenant, who showed him the phone with a map on it. “We’re here,” he said, pointing to one corridor. “The shuttle bay is here. I see two routes to it, one through the station’s engineering core and the other through its mess hall area.”

  Less talk, more decision making, please, Dahl thought, and nodded.

  “I think we stand a better chance if we split up,” Kerensky said. “That way if the machines get one group, the other group might still get to the shuttles. Are you rated to fly one?”

  “Hester is,” Dahl heard himself say, and then wondered how he knew that. He didn’t remember knowing that bit of information before.

  Kerensky nodded. “Then you take him and Crewman McGregor and cut through the mess hall. I’ll take Williams and go through Engineering. We’ll meet at the shuttle, wait for Lieutenant Fischer’s away team if we can, and then get the hell out of here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dahl said.

  “Good luck,” Kerensky said, and motioned to Williams to follow him.

  He hardly looks liquefied at all, Dahl thought again, and then went back to Hester and McGregor. “He wants to split up and have the three of us go through the mess hall to the shuttle bay,” he said to the two of them, as Kerensky and Williams skulked off down the corridor toward Engineering.

  “What?” McGregor said, visibly upset. “Bullshit. I don’t want to go with you. I want to go with Kerensky.”

  “We have our orders,” Dahl said.

  “Screw them,” McGregor said. “You don’t get it, do you? Kerensky’s untouchable. You’re not. You’re just some ensign. We’re in a space station filled with fucking killer robots. Do you really think you’re going to make it out of here alive?”

  “Calm down, McGregor,” Dahl said, holding out his hands. Beneath his feet, the corridor floor vibrated. “We’re wasting time here.”

  “No!” McGregor said. “You don’t get it! Lopez already died in front of Kerensky! She was the sacrifice! Now anyone with Kerensky is safe!” He leaped up to chase after Kerensky, stepping into the corridor just as the killing machine that had been following them turned the corner. McGregor saw the machine and had time to make a surprised “O” with his mouth before the harpoon the machine launched pushed into him, spearing him through the liver.

  There was an infinitesimal pause, in which everything was set in a tableau: Dahl and Hester crouched on the side of the corridor, killing machine at the corner, the harpooned McGregor in the middle, dripping.

  McGregor turned his head toward the horrified Dahl. “See?” he said, through a mouthful of blood. Then there was a yank, and McGregor flew toward the killer machine, which had already spun up its slicing blades.

  Dahl screamed McGregor’s name, stood and unholstered his pulse gun, and fired into the center of the pulpy red haze where he knew the killer machine to be. The pulse beam glanced harmlessly off the machine’s surface. Hester yelled and pushed Dahl down the corridor, away from the machine, which was already resetting its harpoon. They turned a corner and raced away into another corridor, which led to the mess hall. They burst through the doors and closed them behind them.

  “These doors aren’t going to keep that thing out,” Hester said breathlessly.

  Dahl examined the doorway. “There’s another set of doors here,” he said. “Fire doors or an airlock door, maybe. Look for a panel.”

  “Found it,” Hester said. “Step back.” He pressed a large red button. There was a squeak and a hiss. A pair of heavy doors slowly began to shut, and then stalled, halfway closed. “Oh, come on!” Hester said.

  Through the glass on the already closed set of doors, the killer machine stepped into view.

  “I have an idea,” Dahl said.

  �
��Does it involve running?” Hester asked.

  “Move back from the panel,” Dahl said. Hester stepped back, frowning. Dahl raised his pulse gun and fired into the door panel at the same time the machine’s harpoon punctured the closed outer door and yanked it out of the doorway. The panel blew in a shower of sparks and the heavy fire doors moved, shutting with a vibrating clang.

  “Shooting the panel?” Hester said, incredulous. “That was your big idea?”

  “I had a hunch,” Dahl said, putting his pulse gun away.

  “That the space station was wired haphazardly?” Hester said. “That this whole place is one big fucking code violation?”

  “The killer machines kind of gave that part away,” Dahl said.

  There was a violent bang as a harpoon struck against the fire door.

  “If that door is built like the rest of this place, it won’t be long before that thing’s through it,” Hester said.

  “We’re not staying anyway,” Dahl said, and pulled out his phone for a station map. “Come on. There’s a door in the kitchen that will get us closer to the shuttle bay. If we’re lucky we won’t run into anything else before we get there.”

  * * *

  Two corridors before the shuttle bay, Dahl and Hester ran into what was left of Lieutenant Fischer’s party: Fischer, Duvall, Hanson and Finn.

  “Well, aren’t we the lucky bunch,” Finn said, seeing Dahl and Hester. The words were sarcastic, but Finn’s tone suggested he was close to losing it. Hanson put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Where’s Kerensky and the rest of your team?” Fischer asked Dahl.

  “We split up,” Dahl said. “Kerensky and Williams are alive as far as I know. We lost Lopez and McGregor.”

  Fischer nodded. “Payton and Webb from our team,” he said.

  “Harpoons and blades?” Dahl asked.

  “Swarming bots,” Duvall said.

  “We missed those,” Dahl said.

  Fischer shook his head. “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “I just transferred to the Intrepid. This is my first away team. And I lose two of my people.”