This time, instead of the alarm, a slow dawning of light drew Kira toward wakefulness.

She opened her eyes. At first no concern troubled her; she lay where she was, feeling calm and rested, content to wait. Then she saw the cat sitting by her feet: a whitish-grey Siamese with ears half-flattened and eyes slightly crossed.

The cat hissed and jumped down to the deck. “Kira, can you hear me?… Kira, are you awake?”

She turned her head and saw Falconi sitting next to her. The skin around his mouth was green, as if he’d been sick, and his face was drawn and hollow-eyed. He smiled at her. “Welcome back.”

With a rush, her memory returned: the Wallfish, FTL, the Jellies, the Staff of Blue …

Kira let out a cry and tried to bolt upright. Pressure around her chest and arms stopped her.

“It’s safe,” said Falconi. “You can come out now.” He rapped a knuckle against her shoulder.

She looked down and saw a featureless sheath of black fibers encasing her body, holding her in place. Let me go! Kira thought, feeling suddenly claustrophobic. She wrenched her shoulders from side to side and let out another cry.

With a dry, slithery sound, the Soft Blade relaxed its protective embrace and unwound the hard shell it had formed around her. A small cascade of dust slid from her sides and onto the floor, sending grey curlicues into the air.

Falconi sneezed and rubbed his nose.

Kira’s muscles protested as she levered herself off the mattress and carefully sat upright. She had weight again: a welcome sensation. She tried

to talk, but her mouth was too dry; all that came out was a frog-like croak. “Here,” said Falconi, and handed her a water pouch.

She nodded, grateful, and sucked on the straw. Then she tried again. “Did … did we make it?” Her voice was rough from disuse.

Falconi nodded. “More or less. The ship has a few service alerts, but we’re in one piece. Happy New Year and welcome to 2258. Bughunt is just ahead.”

“Bughunt?”

“It’s what the Marines are calling the star.”

“Are there … are there any Jellies or nightmares in the system?” “Doesn’t look like it.”

Relief, then, that they’d managed to beat the aliens. “Good.” Kira realized the Bach concertos were still playing. “Computer, music off,” she said, and the speakers fell silent. “How long, since…”

“Since we arrived? Uh, thirty minutes, give or take. I came right over.” Falconi licked his lips. He still looked queasy. Kira recognized the symptoms; recovery after cryo was always a bitch, and it only got worse the longer you spent in the tube.

She took another sip of water. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Okay.… A bit strange, but I’m okay. You?”

He stood. “Like twenty kilos of shit stuffed into a ten-kilo sack. I’ll be fine, though.”

“Have we picked up anything on the sensors, or—”

“You can see for yourself. The system was definitely inhabited at one point, so there’s that. You didn’t send us nowhere. I’m going up to Control. Join us there when you can.”

As he walked to the open doorway, Kira said, “Did everyone make it?” “Yeah. Sick as dogs, but we’re all here.” Then he left, and the door

swung shut behind him.

Kira took a moment to gather her thoughts. They’d made it. She’d made it. Hard to believe. She opened and closed her hands, rolled her shoulders, gently tensed muscles throughout her body—stiff from the past few days of hibernation, but everything seemed to be in working order.

“Hey, headcase,” she said. “You in one piece?”

After a brief pause, Gregorovich answered. Even with a synthesized voice, the ship mind sounded sluggish, groggy: “I was in fractures before. I am in fractures now. But the pieces still form the same broken picture.”

Kira grunted. “Yeah, you’re fine.”

She tried to check her overlays … and nothing came up. After two more tries, she blinked, but she couldn’t feel the contacts Vishal had given her. Nor could she feel them when she touched the tip of a finger against her right eye. “Crap,” she said. The Soft Blade must have removed or absorbed the lenses sometime during the past few weeks of her long sleep.

Eager to see the system they’d arrived in, she dressed, splashed some water on her face, and hurried out of the cabin. She swung by the galley to get some more water and grab a pair of ration bars. Chewing on one, she climbed up to Control.

All the crew was there, and the Entropists too. Like Falconi, they looked haggard: hair tousled, dark circles under their eyes, and a hint of nausea in their expressions. Sparrow looked the weakest, and Kira reminded herself that the woman had gone through surgery before entering cryo.

Everything that had happened in 61 Cygni seemed distant and hazy now, but Kira knew that from the point of view of the crew, they had just left the system. For them, it was as if the last three months didn’t exist. For her, the months were far more real. Even when in her artificial slumber, she’d retained a sense of the passage of time. She could feel the hours and days stretching out behind them, as tangible as their trail through space. 61 Cygni was no longer an immediate experience. And Adra before that even less so.

The inevitable accumulation of time had dulled the once-sharp pain of her grief. Her memories of the deaths on Adra still hurt, and always would, but they seemed thin and faded, drained of the vividness that had caused her so much anguish.

Everyone glanced at her as she entered Control, and then they returned their attention to the holo projected over the central table. Filling the holo was a model of the system they’d just entered.

Kira leaned against the edge of the table as she studied the image. Seven planets nested around the small, dim star: one gas giant and six terrestrial. The rocky planets were crammed in close to the star. The farthest one out orbited at only .043 AU. Then there was a gap and a sparse asteroid field,

and the gas giant at .061 AU. Closer to the star—Bughunt—a second, thinner band of debris occupied the space between the second and third planets.

A chill of recognition crawled down Kira’s spine. She knew this place. She’d seen it before, in her dreams, and more; her other flesh, the Soft Blade, had walked among those planets many times in the far distant past.

With recognition, she also felt vindication. She hadn’t imagined or misinterpreted where they needed to go, and the Soft Blade hadn’t deluded her. She’d been right about the location of the Staff of Blue … assuming it was still in the system after all these years.

The Darmstadt and the Wallfish were both marked in the holo with bright icons, but Kira also saw a third icon, near the Markov Limit, which

—because of the low mass of the star and the compact orbits of the planets

—was about two days’ thrust at 1 g from Bughunt (assuming one intended to slow to a stop; otherwise it would only take a day and a half).

“What’s that?” she said, pointing at the icon.

Falconi said, “The Darmstadt dropped a relay beacon as soon as it popped out of FTL. That way, if something happens to us, we might still be able to get a signal out.”

Made sense, although it would take a long time to get a signal back to the League. The faster an FTL signal, the weaker it was. One strong enough to make it all the way to 61 Cygni in a coherent form would be even slower than a spaceship like the Wallfish. She’d have to check the numbers, but it could be years before the signal arrived.

Falconi gestured at the holo. “We’re picking up evidence of structures throughout the system.”

Even under the Soft Blade, Kira felt goosebumps erupt across her body. Finding the xeno and now this? It was what she had dreamed about when she was a kid; of making discoveries as big and important as the Great Beacon on Talos VII. The circumstances weren’t what she would have wished for, but even so—if humanity survived the war with the Jellies and the nightmares, the things they could learn!

She cleared her throat. “Any currently … active?”

“Hard to tell. Doesn’t seem like it.” Falconi zoomed in on the band of debris between the second and third planets. “Check this out. Gregorovich, tell them what you told me.”

The ship mind answered directly: “The composition of the flotsam seems to indicate it’s artificial. It contains an unusually high percentage of metals, as well as other materials that, based off albedo if nothing else, cannot be natural in origin.”

“All that?” said Kira, amazed. The amount of stuff was staggering. There was an entire lifetime’s worth of study here. Several lifetimes’.

Hwa-jung altered the view of the holo as she studied it. “Maybe it was a Dyson ring.”

“I didn’t think any material was strong enough to make a ring that big,” said Vishal.

Hwa-jung shook her head. “Does not have to be a solid ring. Could be lots of satellites or stations put all around the star. See?”

“Ah.”

Nielsen said, “How old do you think it is?” “Old,” whispered Gregorovich. “Very, very old.”

An uncomfortable silence filled the room. Then Trig said, “What do you think happened to the aliens here? A war?”

“Nothing good, I’m sure,” said Falconi. He looked at Kira. “You’re going to have to tell us where to go. We could spend forever wandering around, looking for the staff.”

Kira studied the projection. No answer jumped to mind. The xeno didn’t seem willing or able to tell her. It had helped them find the system; now it seemed they were on their own.

When she had been silent for a while, Falconi said, “Kira?” He was starting to sound worried.

“Give me a minute.”

She thought. Most of the memories the Soft Blade had showed her of the staff had seemed to take place on or around one of the planets in the system. A brownish planet, with bands of circling clouds …

There. The fourth planet. It had the color, it had the clouds, and it was in Bughunt’s habitable zone, if just barely. She checked: no evidence of an orbiting station. Oh well. That didn’t mean anything. It could have been destroyed.

She highlighted the planet. “I can’t tell you the exact location, but this is where we should start.”

“You sure?” Falconi asked. She gave him a look, and he raised his hands. “Okay, then. I’ll let Akawe know. What are we searching for? Cities? Buildings?”

She continued the list for him: “Monuments, statues, public works.

Basically anything artificial.” “Got it.”

The walls seemed to twist around them as Gregorovich adjusted their course.

“Captain,” said Nielsen, getting to her feet. If anything, she looked worse than before. “I’m going to…”

He nodded. “I’ll let you know if there’s news.”

The first officer crossed her arms, as if cold, and left the control room.

For a minute, no one else talked as Falconi had a one-sided conversation with the Darmstadt. Then he grunted and said, “Alright, we have a plan. Kira, we’re going to feed you images of the planet’s surface. We need you to look at it, see if you can figure out where to land. The planet is tidally locked with Bughunt—they all are—but maybe we’ll get lucky with the side facing us. Meantime, we’re going to head for the asteroid belt. Looks like there’s plenty of ice flying around, so we can crack some hydrogen and refill our tanks.”

Kira looked at Vishal. “I’ll need a new set of contacts. The suit disappeared mine on the way here.”

The doctor pushed himself out of his chair. “Come with me then, Ms.

Kira.”

As she followed him to sickbay, Kira couldn’t help feeling a sense of unease and displacement at how far they were from the League. Not only that, it was alien territory, even if the aliens were long dead.

The Vanished, she thought, remembering the term from the Jelly ship. But vanished to where? And were the makers of the Soft Blade members of the Jellies or the nightmares or some other, older species?

She hoped they would find the answers on the planet.

In sickbay, Vishal gave her another set of contacts, and she said, “Can you print up another few pairs? I’ll probably lose these on the way back.”

“Yes, yes.” He bobbed his head. “Do you still need your nose to be reset, Ms. Kira? I can do it now. Just—” He held his hands parallel and made a short jerking motion. “—schk and it will be done.”

“No, it’s okay. Later.” She didn’t want to deal with the pain at the moment. And besides, she felt a certain reluctance to do anything to fix her nose, although if asked, she couldn’t have said why.