"Dim," Brooks said.

The lighting in his study faded, leaving only general shapes visible.

He liked the dark. It was more comforting than the light. Perhaps it was another reason he liked being in space.

Darkness hid things; like how he'd overloaded the sensors in the hall that Tred had been concerned about. Poor man - he did his best, and in this case almost too good a job. But Tred would not discover that Brooks had done it; he had hidden his tracks well.

He did not want anyone to know just what he had done there; what he had said.

Brooks put on some music, but the sound was only another wall against external intrusion.

It was an old Jazz song, from the Classic Antarctic era of the mid-2200s. He did not know its name, but his system had noted his reaction on hearing and brought it into a playlist.

The machine knew him, he thought. As he knew the machine.

He was off-duty and should be sleeping now, but he did not want to do that. Instead, he took a stim and stayed up.

He was more comfortable in his study than his cabin, anyway.

It wasn't that his cabin wasn't nice, but he did not like it and no amenities could change that. He was always more at home in his working environment.

It reminded him of old memories; as a younger man, how his duty station on the dusty and creaky old freighters had become more his home than his bunk. Shipmates he got along with would joke about it - he was a packrat, a station hobo, a workaholic. People he did not like did not dare to say anything.

But his study was sparse. It was better to keep things packed away, and even better to just get rid of them. Only keep what you need, and most of that was in your head.

He flicked an annoyed finger over his HUD to bring up his messages.

His system sorted them all into categories that were useful to him - ones mirroring his thought process. One was Annoying Ship Problems - the sort of minor task that he was required to solve that he always felt more on the clumsy-side with, or ones that had no good answer. Yet not things that were ultimately of great importance.

Then there were Good Problems. The sorts of ones he actually found himself enjoying solving.

He hadn't created the categories. The system had just created - and even named them - on its own, based on its study of his reactions.

Kind of funny to think about, when Good Problems could be true existential crises. He was the machine, and he knew himself.

Glancing through the important ones, he found that there was nothing urgent. Urle was on-duty and the ship was cruising smoothly, the Agricultural Station far behind them.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

But then he saw the small notification he'd set up secretly. It was designed to not catch attention from code-trawlers or anyone who somehow managed to get into his personal system.

He brought it up, and saw a message from Nadian Farland.

He read over it; they had stayed in contact since the Relic Station. Information-sharing - Brooks on his personal experiences with things Tenkionic-related, and Farland with the same, plus what he heard at the fringe.

Farland had been in dire financial straits since the Relic Temple, with the loss of his ship and crew. The Union had not been under financial obligation to the man, and he had not inquired in any way about compensation. Thus he was simply floundering.

Not that he'd said as much; it was Union intelligence that had informed him of that. Farland only spoke to him of what was important.

Brooks saw that his latest research mission to an unnamed world on the fringe had been canceled - his investors were citing cost-to-risk ratio.

So we're not going to be the first to get to the temple site, and confirm or deny it may have a connection to the X.

X, for Xanagee. Nadian had explained that the sound was best transliterated that way in Galactic Phonetic Alphabet.

I don't suppose you can get one of your teams out there? I've got a bad feeling about this one.

Brooks read through the rest; Nadian had not heard any rumors about the vessel of the X that they had seen right before they'd left the Relic Temple. It had not then appeared in any other nearby system.

The lack of any rumors at all was disconcerting. While a lot of people saw crazy things on the fringe of space, it felt logical to assume that anything actually weird that was big and noticeable would have some related rumors.

That they hadn't meant that the Xanagee had only just returned - or were so secretive that they gave no sign of their presence unless they wanted to.

Nadian had not heard from Vermillion Dawn, either - our mutual friend as he called her - not even through any of her lesser contacts.

Nor had he. Brooks did not like that - it was deeply unsettling to feel that all she had said to him on their last encounter had been more out of love or pity than because she actually wanted to bring him into her larger world.

If she wanted him to stay irrelevant in the schema of this deeper reality, though, she was wrong. He had left her to join the Voidfleet, but that did not mean he was giving up on making a difference. He would not be content to remain on the sidelines.

He closed his messages, a reminder being set up automatically to have him reply to Nadian in a little while. He could not keep the man waiting, though he could not also think of any pressure he could apply in the right places to get a team out to that unnamed world right now.

Probably Dawn already had it, he mused, but the thought felt sour.

He was not immature enough to let his old love fall into hate. That was far too easy and simple a calculation, and a harmful one. Dawn had her reasons, and he had his. She did not make decisions on whims.

Damn it all, though, he thought, allowing himself to feel his irritation.

He rotated his chair, gesturing at the wall and watching it turn into a perfect view of space.

He still liked a real window better, but he had to admit that if he did not know this was a screen, he would not have been able to guess it.

The starfield beyond was his true angle to the galactic disk. The Craton was moving slightly coreward, which meant that the arms of the galaxy were above his head. He glanced up and his HUD filled in the Milky Way's core and arms with again perfect clarity.

Nothing moved, though they were, in fact, moving. They were light-years from any star, so any noticeable change would take millenia.

They would be diving into zerospace soon, and the feed would no longer be live.

God, how small they were, he thought.