Song without End

Location: Blackscar Base, Mara, The Beacon System

Date: 71PE

The cockpit of the Chanreid Geoharvester Series II was a hot hell.

William Abulafia sat, nestled in between blinking monitors, and blanketed by loose wires as he navigated the hollowed-out lava tube, the lights of the screen his ain source of light. And heat.

The radiators on the bucket were scrap, deliberately so, because abrasions on the tunnel wall often left them damaged. That same tight fit also meant that the whole vehicle was liable to cracking open and Will, already cramped and uncomfortable by the claustrophobic terminals closing in had the additional burden of completing the run while wearing a pressure suit.

The sweat had been trickling down his face for so long, that Will no longer felt it, while he carefully watched the nav data tick down… fifty klicks, twenty-five… The display expanded a few decimal places. Five-point-nine-nine. Will killed his speed slowly, relaxing into the deceleration.

In the moment that Will had first stepped into the harvester, Will had felt a strange sense of nostalgia. Most of the other guys were less careful with the rigs but Will lived in mild, incessant anxiety at bashing against the walls of the tube. He found he could vividly imagine the feeling, and the sick sense of fear at hearing the hull ring like a bell.

Two-point-zero-five… The navdata continued its decent, and Will’s machine had slowed to a crawl. Minus-zero-point-one, the readout said. Practically perfect, or close enough as to not matter, Will thought as he began to type at one of the consoles.

The external cameras activated and Will could see the glittering field of the rockface illuminated white by the harvester’s lights. The field overlaid with a yellow grid and Will selected a quadrant, beginning the harvester’s automatic drilling protocol.

The hull of the craft vibrated with mechanical whirring followed by a metallic hammering sound that consumed the cramped cockpit as the drills began to work at the surface of the tunnel.

Most people hated the hot work, the constant rising heat, and the cramped conditions. The solitude made Will feel secure, and there was a cosy intimacy being wrapped in the pod alone. More than that he could focus, in a controlled way, on the energy he sensed flowing from the harvester.

It felt blue, like prickly electric energy, but the sensation never rose above a slight tickling feeling in his brain, at least not here in the depths beneath Blackscar Base. He could feel it, emanating from somewhere in the back of the harvester, and it connected his suit and handterminal and all the way back to the surface. As a child he had made the mistake of telling a friend, who told a teacher, which had gotten him a few months in therapy as the doctors in Nupolis debated a diagnosis, pre-pubescent psychosis or a problem with his anti-epileptic chip or even damage from the childhood seizures that had plagued him.

In the end, Will lied and said the experience had gone away.

Over time, he realised, that the feeling was the relay network. He could feel its presence… Sometimes, when he had the chance to really focus on the sensation, he could almost perceive the information carried, invisible in the air on strings of electromagnetic radiation. Up there, the threads of information were deafening, but down here, Will had respite.

Another connection joined Will’s harvester, and he checked the comm relay on one of his displays. The next shift was beginning as more harvesters began to crawl into the tube. Will grunted with annoyance as he realised his solitude was over.

“Abulafia, what the fuck is taking you so long?” The voice was crackling down the comm in his ear and was still barely coherent under the rhythmic drilling sounds. It was the shift super, Josef Hoff.

“Probably tugging on himself in there,” laughed another onto the comm who he recognised as Lewis Tomaski.

“I was just lining up the rig,” Will called down into the comm. He could sense the presence of the other two harvesters on the network, upsettingly intrusive.

“Get your sack full and get the fuck out of this tunnel,” Hoff ordered, and Will could feel his anger flaring to match the supervisors. He had no appreciation for the craft of the job, Will thought, and would be happy to smash his rig all over the tunnel.

Will checked his intake, while his drill arms broke apart the rockface. His sack, really a tank at the back of the harvester, was half full of bing and his time would run until it was full. Will increased the flowrate to near maximum.

“Fucking pick up the pace,” Hoff ordered again.

“I’m near maximum safety,” Will pleaded, trying to keep his voice even while the whole rig shook threateningly.

“I don’t care,” was the angry reply.

Fine, Will thought for the first time feeling hot inside the cockpit. The network felt close, burning under his skin. He increased the intake, even as he felt, both through his connection to the relay and on the screens in front of him, the protests from the harvester. The machine was operating at the limit of its safety parameters.

Stop, Will ordered in his mind, and the preprogramed limits on flow rate were removed. There was a voice in Will’s ear, but the sound was inaudible over the harvester trying to tear itself apart. He watched with angry determination as the red bar, indicating his tanks progress, began to shoot towards completion.

Warning, a calm voice called, just beneath the din. Critical Systems Failure… In Will’s periphery, the blue light of the screens had been replaced by red flashes. Warning, critical systems failure. A siren called out, either from within Will’s own skull or from somewhere distant. Or was it a trick of the sound.

Watching the red bar, Will felt alone. Truly alone, bounded between spacious bulkhead, rather than the small walls of his cockpit. No, not alone. He shared the room, with the dead. So many dead, as he floated in space. His ship was dying, he knew it with the certainty of a dream. His ship was dying, so many were already dead and so many more would yet die. He was the commander of his ship. The captain was dead.

Panic rose in his chest, gasping and claustrophobic. Don’t panic. The voice was not Will’s own, though he knew it in his marrow. He didn’t know where he was. Who he was. Don’t panic, the voice fought deep inside Will. Don’t panic, you’ve been here before.

Warning, the words finally caught Will’s attention, flashing on the screen. Suddenly he was pulled back to reality, back to the small enclosed cockpit with Hoff’s angry voice blaring in his ear.

“Stop!” It yelled. “Stop, you’re going to fucking kill us all!”

Will saw the warnings on his array of screens. The intake was broken, and his bucket was full beyond safe limits. Any more volume could have split the harvester wide open, sending debris all through the tunnel. Will wanted to be sick. Visions of that dark, red room were still playing out over his vision as he gasped the plastic-tasting air.

“You’re a fucking danger, Abulafia,” Hoff screamed. They were in the wide-open bay, built into the dark, glittering rock of Maya. Banks of old, battered harvesters, vast machines that were part truck, part tractor and part tank stood in their bays.

“You told me to go faster,” Will shot back angrily. Other miners had begun to take an interest in the argument and were milling about in their pressure suit liners. Will was shaking with the adrenaline. “It’s your fault,” he accused the supervisor.

“I didn’t tell you to break the fucking rig,” he screamed. Hoff’s pale face reddened, and a blue vein had appeared under the man’s buzzed blonde hair.

“No, you told me to finish up and move out of the tunnel,” Will yelled back. He could feel the heated anger rising. Up here, the energy of the relay was stronger. Hand terminals, Harvesters in their bays, even the freight lift down into the tunnels and the personnel elevators were networked. He could feel the station alive with it. “So I did!”

“You’re fired,” Hoff said. Will barely heard the words, over the blood pounding in his ears. The voice inside his mind was trying to speak, but to Will it was like it was speaking a different language. The network was so close, flowing like a river of energy right through the chasms of his brain. “What-“

The lights in the bay were flickering, and the assembled crowd of miners, in their pressure-suit liners, looked around in fear as the rigs began to blare their alarms. Will shared their fear, but it came from the image of a blackened and broken core, inside of which, nestled like eggs in a metal nest were a handful of silvery darts heralding the destruction of mankind.

Behind the image, Hoff’s face seemed puzzled, almost concerned. A voice was talking, over the alarms and flashing lights. Will realised it was his own.

“Well, I suppose it’s a comfort that aliens go to war.” Hoff’s expression was a mixture of puzzlement and disgust. Fear suddenly bubbled alive in the pit of Will’s stomach. “You’re not Reid,” he said as recognition suddenly returned and Will realised that he was looking up at the cavernous grey roof, crisscrossed by supportive girders. “Fuck, you weren’t supposed to know that.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Hoff demanded, while Will, sick with the shame, and elated that Hoff was too stupid to comprehend Will’s mistake, watched as the ceiling plunged into darkness.

Location: Maya Orbital Station, Maya Orbit, the Lantern System

Following the incident Will had been taken from Blackscar up to the Maya Orbital Station for treatment. The doctors seemed to think that Will had suffered some kind of seizure and had scanned his head, looking for damage to his implant but had found none.

His room was small, but not claustrophobic and after his time in the harvesters, any sized room could seem threateningly big. He had a bed, recessed into one wall, a kitchenette walled off by a counter and even a table-desk bolted to the wall. All in all, it was a nicer room than most he had lived in.

Despite the pleasantness of his surroundings, however, Will found everything was too well ordered. Additionally, he was unsettled by the discovery that everything in the room had been designed with an eye towards stopping its occupant from killing themselves. The desk, bed and counters all had padded, rounded edges while the lights above were recessed deep into the ceiling and the doors slid open lest he hang a sheet from the handle and sit down. Even if he had been so inclined, and there had been a surface from which to hang himself, Will saw that the bedding was woven in such a way as to come apart easily when pulled.

The one aspect of the room he really enjoyed was the large porthole running the length of his sleeping nook. Looking out of the window, in his too-safe room, Will could see the glowing blue and white surface of the gas giant Lantern. When the lights were automatically dimmed for night shift, the light of the planet would bathe the room and give everything a calming blue tinge.

Will felt at peace looking down on the swirling mists of the world. It was difficult to get any peace on the station which, as the main port of the Lantern System, was a hive of relay activity. Even worse, the main relay station, which handled the bulk of traffic around Maya, was built into the station itself. The network roared like waves breaking on the shore inside Will’s mind.

Even as the doctors puzzled over a diagnosis, Will felt that he had confidently, rationally, come to a reasoned conclusion. Half forgotten memories eddied and whirled like the sands on a desert in his mind, and in them Will saw a man, his friend and advisor Morgan Reid. Reid wanted to push forward with expansion out into the solar system while Will had wanted to focus on building up the colony on Nupolis.

“If they come back,” Reid had warned, “We can’t have all of humanity bottled up in this valley.” That had won the argument, and Will had ordered the opening of the Creche on Deyga. One million children born a year, and raised by the state, to build a sustainable population in Ionad in under a century.

The memory was old and belonged to a different Will. The voice he had spoken with, came through a different throat and his world was displayed through different eyes. Education had bored Will, the history of Terra and the long burn. The classes had gotten so much wrong about what it had been like in the colony ships and the teachers simply had failed to listen when Will had told them what he knew.

Despite his schooling, even Will knew the name of Gudmunder Singh, who had saved the colony fleet and then guided humanity through its first shared endeavours on the planet Deyga. The terraforming, The Creche, the Fundamental Laws, the colonies, they had all been designed by Singh and Will could remember making each of those decisions.

He remembered looking out at the Council House on Deyga, the representatives seated in a semi-circle behind benches recycled from pieces of the colony ships in the space that was once the cargo bay of the colony ship Deyga.

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“This planet,” Will had told them, “has everything we need for life.” The text of the speech rolled down the datapad placed on the lectern. “But it is dangerous. We can not grow food in the fields. The soil itself, is poisonous and the fauna a threat to our continued existence.” There was some uneasiness in the chamber. “And that is why, we must endevour to replace this ecosystem, as fully as possible, with our Terran one.”

That had been the work of generations, Will knew, for it still continued. The plan he had set in motion for Deyga was only now beginning to come to fruition as poison forests had been cut down to be replaced with Terran trees suited to the climates, and armies of insects had been shot from the sky to pollinate plants in soil transformed by bacterial wash.

It was vandalism on a scale not visited on an ecosystem since early industrialisation, and yet Will had known it to be necessary to develop the Ionad system into something humanity could truly call home.

In the face of his memories, only one conclusion was logical. No buzzbrain drop out from Neaifu had ever been inside the Chamber of Delegates, or the Council Hall nor had one ever lived in the presidential residence. Yet, Will could have navigated the Deygan capital building in his sleep. Will knew he was Gudmunder Singh, somehow reborn.

The doctors had not liked this answer.

For Will, it was a simple truth, and he felt that somehow the implant in his skull, initially placed to keep his childhood epilepsy in check, had something to do with his relay sense and the memories.

Reid would have known, Will sensed, wishing the old advisor were still alive, to guide him. So lost in his speculations, Will failed to hear the chiming of his next appointment, and only came back to his present with a metallic knock on his room door.

Will opened the door, weary at the pointlessness of it. For high-risk patients, as Will had erroneously been categorised, the staff could have entered regardless. Doctor Marcus Fulani walked into the room, alone. He was a kindly looking old man, with a fat face and skinny physique under his crumpled white lab-tunic. Will relaxed, knowing how to play the man.

The strategy for Will was cooperation. Since the doctors were unable to see what to Will was clear, the best strategy for escape was to simply lie about how he felt. He had done it before and knew that if he was compliant, then they had no reason to hold him.

“Please, Will, sit,” Fulani gestured at the empty chair opposite as he sat at the small table near the kitchenette.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Will replied, doing as he was bid.

“I wanted to speak to you about your latest results,” Fulani began, his voice even. Will nodded, unconcerned. Whatever he needed to say, whatever he needed to do to get out of the complex. “There’s no simple way to explain this, so I’ll come out and say it, but we believe your implant is malfunctioning.”

“Malfunctioning how?” A spike of anxiety jammed its way into Will’s ribs.

“Seizures,” Fulani explained, “are caused by synchronous activity in the brain.” The information was not new. Will knew two types of doctors; the arrogant ones who would never condescend to explaining anything to their stupid patients or those who were nothing but condescending. “These devices work by… detecting this activity and disrupting the seizures before they begin.”

Will had spent his entire life hearing this explanation but tried to keep the frustration from creeping into his placid expression. Fulani continued.

“We believe, somehow, that your implant is influencing activity in a different way and has resulted in your…” Fulani paused to think of a neutral term, “your disordered thoughts.” Like most doctors, he failed, but disordered thoughts was not the worst insult hurled at Will. Buzzbrain, he could hear the children yell.

“But Doc,” Will started, “my thoughts are better now.” He leaned forward, trying to project an air of earnest honesty. “I don’t believe all that stuff anymore, and I don’t want to have seizures again.” If Will was honest, the seizures that had plagued his chilhood were a distant memory, as distant as his memories of the Valkyrie or of Earth. The implant had gone in when he was barely a toddler.

Fulani shifted, looking uncomfortable. The chairs had been moulded from one single piece of plastic, making them harder to break and use as a weapon.

“The problem is, Will, is that you have made these claims before,” Fulani stated plainly. Fingers of sick dread crept through Will’s innards. “I examined your previous records, and I noted similar claims were made during sessions in the clinic in Nupolis. I’m sorry to say that your previous doctor failed you, and failed to notice key details of your case, otherwise this issue with the implant could have been explored much earlier.” Fulani paused and leaned back as far as he could in the chair. “The good news is, we could fit you for a new implant relatively quickly.”

Fulani’s voice was far away, the words absent of meaning echoed around Will’s mind.

“A… new implant?” Will asked.

“Well, of course,” Fulani smiled sweetly. “Doctor Mishubi is on her way from Valya – the very best epileptologist in the system – we’ll have the implant out and get it tested in order to confirm our suspicion but while you’re under anaesthetic we will just put a new one in.” Fulani had a proud expression on his face. “The whole operation should take a few hours.”

“You can’t take my implant,” Will’s voice was flat, unyielding. It would be like a lobotomy, and the way Fulani casually talked about just taking a piece of him like it was nothing poured anger through Will’s body. “I refuse.”

“But Will,” Fulani began, eyes wide with surprise, “This implant could be making you ill. At the very least we need to rule it out as a factor and the best way to do that would be-“

“I don’t care,” Will replied, cutting off the doctor, any pretence of playing the cooperative patient was now gone. “I have a gift. I can see things that you people can’t.” The strands of the network drew close within the room, from the door to the handterminal to the relay nodes in the walls. Will could feel them and follow them to the central relay as traffic screamed around the network to the other stations and ships around Lantern. He could feel the nexus of the station’s control room and all the systems that were controlled through it.

“Will?” Fulani’s voice held a note of cautious anxiety. Will was straining, trying to keep his swirling memories in check. The doctor’s handterminal, left breast pocket, blazed like the sun.

“You don’t know what is coming for us,” Will barked through gritted teeth, trying to stop the visions. Everything was heavy, like a torched ship burning at maximum gravity. Vague anxiety at what he would find when the ship stopped curled its tendrils around his body, paralysing him. “I am the only one who can save us. I was chosen for this and I can not allow you to stand in my way!”

Calm, Will’s distant voice pleaded. Be calm.

Will breathed and some light came back into the small room. Will realised the terminals and stations he had barely perceived against the walls surrounding them were just a figment as reality asserted itself.

“Very well, Will,” Fulani said, shaken. There was another expression that puzzled Will. Sadness? “You have the right to refuse treatment, of course.” Fulani nodded, as though confirming it to himself. “We will work together for an alternative care programme.” The doctor stood and walked towards the door. Two large men in padded, red lab-tunics were loitering sheepishly. One held a device, gripped in a white fist, that Will recognised as an injector.

“I would ask you to think on what we have discussed, however,” Fulani straightened his tunic. “I do believe this is the best course of action for your health.”

The doctor and the orderlies left, closing the door and leaving Will alone.

The network was deafening to Will and growing louder with each passing day. Laying in his bed, bathed in the soothing pale blue of Lantern he found, with some concentration, he was able to allow his mind to expand down the silvery threads that bound the station.

In the strange in-between of half-sleep, Will found himself focussing on the relay node in the top corner of the room, glowing blue in his mind. If he allowed it, Will knew he could surf the network all the way out back to the inner planets, or out to the distant suns, bound only by the light-delay, which could stretch for hours. Thinking about how he could perceive that made his brain ache and so Will, on his night-time voyages, limited himself to the nexus around Maya Orbital station.

As he followed the network on to the central relay and the servers, he found he could pick up snippets of information. Protests on Gaius… Gang violence on Pavel… A contractor had started a fire on Lamplight… A girl on Maya Station was looking for her lost cat… The Djinn Mining Board was looking for Council representation… Pirate flare-up around Beacon…

The news flowing through the system was the least of it. Will, as he floated through the relay could see the plain, messy, mundane, fantastical jumble of human misery and joy. Break-ups, hook-ups, promises to never leave, promises to never return… Flashes of tearful video messages and pictures of baby bumps… People spilling their darkest secrets and confessing their love for one another.

A snippet of the almost infinite stream caught his attention… William Abulafia… Psychotic Delusion Syndrome… A parcel of messages that crept, like some shadowy monster, closer and closer. Malfunctioning Anti-Epileptic Implant… Danger to himself…

Uncooperative…

The door to his room flared on the network in his mind, an incoming request to open… Will denied it instinctively.

Removal…

There was a hammering on the door, and the network fizzed in Will’s mind, dropping in and out of his perception. There was too much noise in his environment and for once in his life, he found himself wanting to concentrate on the network.

Sedate… bring for surgery.

Will gasped. Fulani had decided that consent was not necessary and wanted to remove the implant regardless. In the shock of his discovery, Will’s concentration wavered and the door to his room swept open to reveal two orderlies waiting in the hall.

Acting by instinct, Will leapt at the two, larger figures, landing on one of them only to be promptly pulled away by the other and sent sprawling into the room. He tried to duck past the nearest and out into the hallway. Afterwards was irrelevant.

The first part of the plan succeeded, and Will dashed past the thick tree-trunk legs of his attacker only to be plucked out of the air by the strong hands of the second orderly. Will flopped and twisted like a fish on land in the grasp of the orderly but was held too tightly.

The network was drawing close again as they carried Will, each man holding an arm and a leg, towards the door and the node just above it. He focussed on the door, using his mind to send requests through the network. Open… Closed… Open, as quick as thought and as sharp as a guillotine.

Under normal circumstances, the doors on a station were simply a way to get from one room to another as they were anywhere else in the System. But Will, and every spacer, knew that in a decompression situation the doors of a station were entirely without mercy, slamming closed with enough force and mechanical brutality to cut through almost any obstruction.

Will’s mind jumped into the sea of network, with a head-first kind of recklessness. He could sense all the doors in the station. His own, the other rooms in the complex, the complex’s entrances, the Rehabi District, the wide-open market space, the access lifts the docks and the heavy airlocks out into space.

Screaming with fury, Will willed them to open, every single one.

Will was through the door, as was one of the orderlies, when the decompression alert sounded throughout the station. The lights of the hallway flashed bright, like on dayshift as the door to Will’s room slammed shut.

The other orderly’s hand was still grasped tight on Will’s wrist as he hit the floor in a shower of warm blood. The rest of the orderly had still been on the other side, leaving a Rorschach test spatter of blood on the walls and door.

“Argh- What-“ The remaining orderly cried out in fear and disgust as the alarms continued to blare.

Will threw the hand onto the floor and stood up, calm, grinning at the Orderly’s fear, and blazing with righteous anger.

“Run,” Will barked. Even faced with this bizarre occurrence, and the sudden decompression warnings, the final orderly looked as though he might argue. Definace flickered across his face for a moment before the man’s courage dissolved and he set off running down the white and grey station hall at such speed he almost collided with a corner.

Will followed at a leisurely pace and, as he rounded the corner, he could see the orderly sobbing and banging on the door.

“Help,” he yelled, frantically, his voice cracking under the fear. Such fear warmed Will’s heart. “Please! Let me out.”

Life was cheap, Will reasoned. Millions had died after the long burn, miners died in their hundreds down on Maya, people were gunned down all the time in the outer systems and haulers traversing the Rim and Beacon might expect to pay with their lives. Micrometeroites, pirates… Decompression and violence were just facts of life in the system.

Will set his own life at an even lower cost. Buzz-brained, no education, miner and lunatic. His life had been very different from Gudmunder Singh’s. Besides, he had an inkling of a suspicion that he might be preserved. That somehow, this would not be the end.

“Please,” the orderly begged. “Someone, please open the door.”

Will smiled. The words he had been waiting for.

The hallway door swept open with a metallic woosh. The orderly escaped into the depressurised hallway ahead of the hiss of air, as the last molecules of oxygen followed him. Will chose not to be present. Instead, he dove back into the network, following the chaotic warning alarms and confused traffic shooting all around the Lantern System. Messages of a catastrophic decompression, airlock doors opening on their own. The only survivors were those who happened to be in pressure suits already.

Will listened and watched as messages flew back and forth, requests for help and promises of aid as ships diverted towards Maya Station. Eventually, the messages grew faint and fragmented as William Abulafia lost awareness and simply faded away.

Location: Outside Arcadius, Lepidus

Date: 83PE

Anton Barres sat at the desk in his mother’s library, looking out the tall bay window into the garden. The bioluminescent vines on the row Lepidan trees at the far end of the lawn had begun to glow with a soft blue light illuminating the high white compound walls and the deep red leaves of the native trees.

Anton loved this spot, at this time of night. He found the soft blue glow oddly soothing and something about it reminded him of the planet Lantern, although he had never been there. Recently, he had found that he needed something calm and soothing to take his mind off the horrible dreams. The pale blue bookshelves of Deygan wood that lined the elegantly furnished library were no longer enough.

Glancing down at his datapad, which displayed mathematical formulae and quadratic equations for the test next week, Anton guiltily turned the device off. Now he had thought about the dreams, he knew further study would be pointless.

As the device’s screen settled to black, Anton sensed the life blink out of the pad but a small ember of its connection to the relay remained, like silvery thread running between it and the node buried deep in the smooth, pale walls. He rubbed his eyes, tiredly and started along the minimalist hallway to get ready for bed.

The dreams had started around his thirteenth birthday, fragmented and broken-up into larger dreams about school or, more pleasantly, Emma Braham, but they broadly came in two flavours. Either he was alone on a dying spaceship or he was angrily stalking a blood-splattered man through the halls of a station.

Over the next three years, the dreams had expanded to include being confronted with difficult decisions about the Ionad System or being stuck in a cramped cockpit bustling with network but, as Emma and school faded, they always centred around two figures… More than that, Anton could feel the emotions through the dreams, regret at not fighting to save Redcar and the guilt at venting Maya Station, as though he had been responsible for them himself.

With the relay-sense, the strengthening dreams and memories of silver darts in a nest of metal, Anton was also becoming aware of the voices. They were more like presences in his mind, two distinct personalities and they often disagreed when called to mind at the same time. One was calm, judicious with a cautious decisiveness, while the other was quick to anger, proud and mired in guilt. They both agreed, however, and Anton felt it deep in his bones, that all these feelings should be a deep and closely guarded secret.

Maybe, as Anton had read, he was experiencing a Delusional Psychotic Syndrome. The symptoms were compelling, he thought when he considered these experiences dispassionately, but the voices were not dangerous. Besides, there was one final proof that had convinced Anton that he was not undergoing a psychiatric break with reality and that was that he knew they were real people who had really lived.

The whole system knew the name of Gudmunder Singh, of course. He had founded the Councillate and although the system-wide government had seen better days, his was perhaps the most well-known name in Ionad’s history.

The second voice was much more obscure, and it had taken Anton hours of research to verify his existence. The Councillate Enquiry into the accident had been dense, and the words had slipped through Anton’s mind but in the end it had been worth it for the discovery.

Will Abulafia had been named in some of the reports on the Maya Orbital Station disaster as an inpatient at the clinic there. His name had been found in meta-data all over the relay system, from airlock requests and even in personal handterminals recovered from Maya. The report suggested he may have had a hand in the disaster, although everything Anton had read regarding that aspect had been inconclusive to investigators.

The incident remained a mystery.

Only Anton could remember the truth.