“Hold on,” said Rene, his head still spinning from the rapid turn of events, “What exactly is your plan here?”

“I say we hightail it to the landing bay and use what’s left of shuttle’s fuel to escape," Exar supplied.

“And go where?” the pathfinder scoffed, “Back to Arachnea?”

“Not a bad idea, that,” Zildiz pitched in.

“We don’t have to enough chemical propellant to make planetfall on an object that massive,” Exar said, immediately scuppering the option.

“We’re open to any suggestions you might have,” Rene said.

“This base isn’t the only one still operational. The Commodore has multiple tight-beam transceivers aimed at specific areas in the asteroid belt. These areas match the coordinates of known dome farms. I’ve calculated low-energy transfers that can take us to them.”

“In plainer language, please,” Rene said, grinding his teeth. Now that he was aware of it, he hated his ignorance and how it impeded his grasp of current events. Exar was quick to dumb it down for him:

“The Commodore has prepared fallback positions out in the belt in case this lunar base was compromised. Hollowed-out asteroids that the dome-settlers converted into farms. I’ve mapped routes to each one that require only the bare minimum of fuel,” the sphere explained, “These habitats are probably fully stocked, capable of full pressurization, and run on renewable energy sources like solar power.”

“Probably?” Rene seized upon the word and held onto it for all he was worth, “We can’t make decisions of this scale on just a ‘probably’. Do you have a shred of evidence that proves that he committed all these murders?”

“What, so my word’s not good enough all of a sudden?” Exar said, sounding hurt. Rene had to remind himself that the sphere was a soulless machine before giving his curt reply:

“I’m sorry, Exar, but no. This time I need to see your receipts.”

“Why are you so keen on staying here?” Neroth asked Rene, “Doesn’t this place drive you crazy?”

“I just think we should consider all our options before we commit to anything rash,” Rene said evasively, still endeavouring to keep the Commodore’s counterattack a secret from the others. The mass catapult represented the Fleet’s best chance of surviving the coming onslaught. He was loathe to give up the only weapon that might actually hurt the Vitalus, just as he was reluctant to betray the man who had made its use possible.

“I’m with the slave on this one,” Zildiz decided, “This current state of affairs is nothing more than a stay of execution. There’s nothing left to consider.”

“Goddammit, can’t a fellow catch a moment to breathe in here?” Rene sat down heavily, feeling decidedly lightheaded, “Exar, has the Commodore been alerted to your presence here?”

“Not yet. But it’s only a matter of time before he notices. I’ve interrupted the power supply to the surveillance cameras and am currently jamming the signal to these improvised combat robots.”

“Disable the rest of the base like you did with these toys, and he will pose no further threat to us,” Zildiz said.

“I can’t. I’m a product of Exodus Industries. The royder communes who built this place were our subcontractors, but they designed their own security systems to be independent from ours. All I can do is provide short-range signal jamming and access to public servers. Anything more audacious than that would risk activating the system’s inbuilt countermeasures.”

Rene pushed the jargon aside and cleaved to the matter at hand:

“Exar, is there any way for you to buy us a few more minutes?”

“Way ahead of you, boss. I’ve rigged one of the substations to blow. That should interfere with the Commodore’s control over this sector of the base and help us make our getaway.”

“Are these charges you set on a timed fuse?” Rene demanded, wondering where the sphere had found explosives and how it could set them without the benefit of opposable thumbs.

“It’s not an IED. I’ve just set things up to look like an accidental overheating in the transformer. I can trigger it remotely—”

“Perfect. Then do it.”

“What, right now?”

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“Yes. That should give us enough time to review your evidence.”

“What, so my word isn’t good enough for you all of a sudden?” Exar exclaimed. Rene felt a stab of shame at that. He had to remind himself that the engrammatic intelligence was incapable of having its feelings hurt. The warm and chatty personality was just a facade. According the scripture, thinking machines were merely tools fashioned by the ancestor-gods to serve their grand designs. Exar’s creators were dead and gone, but the question remained: whose tool was he now, and what purpose did he serve? Why was he forcing them into this situation?

“Sorry Exar, but not this time. The stakes are too high. This time I need to see the receipts.”

“I really don’t think we—”

“Now!” Rene growled, scooping up some of his turnip cake and flinging it at the sphere.

“Alright, don’t get your pantyhose in a twist. And after all I’ve done for you,” Exar grumbled. They felt a slight tremor through the walls and the lights blinked out, Cosmonaut Carl abruptly winking out of existence. Exar emitted a wide cone of illumination, projecting a series of moving images upon the blackened screen. It was a grainy view of Po Chai’s frozen surface, pure white set against the limitless velvet of space, Brahe glaring down at them from above like the red-rimmed eye of a jealous Creator. The recording was partially obscured by swarms of greyed dots crackling in the foreground.

“What are we supposed to be looking at here?” Rene squinted.

“File’s corrupted,” Exar said, “This is the best we’ll ever get. There! See it?”

There was movement off the shoulder of Brahe, an arc of gold moving against the planet’s russet bands of dust. The screen recentred itself on the moving object, which morphed into cluster of blurry squares as Exar magnified the area.

“Can’t you enhance this image somehow?” Zildiz asked.

“Nope. What you see is what you get.”

Exar lessened the magnification slightly and the image became clearer.

“It’s a ship,” Rene murmured, his realization tinged with a sense of confusion. The vessel had more in common with the seagoing vessels of the Fleet back home than it did to the shuttle sitting in the landing bay. The arc of gold was a billowing sailcloth, full and swollen with the breath of some heavenly wind.

No, that couldn’t be right. There was no wind in space, the Log was very clear on that point. Riding on the coattails of this golden sail was an improbably narrow spindle structure that made up the main body of the craft, flanked on either side by a long array of glowing blue panels.

“Was it Exodian?” Rene asked.

“Company property, you mean? No,” Exar said, “Could have been a pleasure yacht previously owned by a private individual, but my money is on her being manufactured inside this system. No indication of fusion or bubble drive. She was incapable of superluminal travel.”

“Any idea where was she going?” Rene couldn’t take his eyes off her—even at this distance and despite the marred state of the recording, hers was an undeniably beautiful design.

“I don’t know. But whatever her destination was, she was getting there as slow as molasses in January. Even if her makers had knowledge of cryofugue, she had to be a generation ship—that means a vessel designed for centuries-long voyages, with the successive generations of crewmates all descended from the first crew.”

“I know what it means, slave,” Zildiz said with impatience.

A voyage spanning whole centuries. Rene could scarcely imagine the psychological toll such a mission would take on the society condemned to live and die aboard their drifting prison.

And yet he could envision it, because that was the exact scenario implied within the Log of the Voidtrekkers.

But the Commodore denied being one of my ancestor-gods, Rene thought. And the ships described in the Log had tails of flame, not sails. Surely the scriptures would have mentioned that crucial detail.

“Of course, she would’ve had to have used other means of propulsion to reach escape velocity,” Exar went on, “Solar sails could never have done it alone.”

“You’re presupposing that she was gestated planetside,” Zildiz argued, “She could have been conceived in orbit.”

Rene found it interesting how Zildiz used overtly biological terminology to describe starships. It was as if it was the only framework she through which she could make sense of such concepts. At any rate, she was having an easier time keeping up with such concepts than he was.

“Maybe,” Exar conceded, “We don’t know the circumstances of her creation. But we do know how she died.”

As they watched, a tiny, oval fragment of the main body detached from the side of the ship, drifting down to the lunar surface. The larger vessel spat a rapid stream of glinting needles after it.

“That’s an emergency skiff,” Exar commented, “The first to launch, and under a hail of fire from its mother ship. Moments later...”

A series of magnesium-bright flashes strobed down the length of the spindle. Tongues of blue and yellow plasma licked greedily out of the rents that had appeared in her side panels. Rene spied motes of dust spilling out of the middle section, saw them struggling and flailing with a desperation that was all too human.

Another batch of skiffs set off from the sides of the ship in a belated broadside. Too late. In the next moment the golden sail went floating into the void like a peach petal shaken loose from its branches, the unseen tethers binding it to the ship cut by a secondary explosion that engulfed all the departing vessels in an expanding cloud of debris.

All save for one. As the tragedy above reached its spectacular conclusion, the first skiff made a controlled descent into one of Po Chai’s jagged crevasses. Exar delivered the grim tally:

“I counted 49 skiffs total. Double that number, and you get 98.”

“Is that supposed to be significant somehow?” said Rene, perplexed.

“Yes,” Neroth said, piping up from underneath the table, “49 is the mathematically and biologically determined minimum ideal number of breeding pairs in a generational ship.”

The pathfinder stared at him. Zildiz saw the slack-jawed look on his face and shrugged, saying:

“He’s right. While the cislunar project was in full swing, our helixeers were laying plans for biovessels that would go onward and outward. Generational ships were the next logical step towards our reconquest of the galaxy.”

“Fascinating,” Exar dryly remarked, “How’s about we save storytime for another day, eh? Right now, it’s crunchtime.”

The sphere rolled up to Rene’s foot and gave it a nudge.

“So what’s it going to be, chief?”