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"The Darkness of Dead Stars"

It was standard procedure that personnel awoken from cold sleep were granted four things: a bathroom, a caffeinated beverage, a meal and an hour to shake off the cobwebs. Ordinarily the cafeteria would have been all astir with the motion and half-dazed chatter of a hundred or more crew members fresh from E block's stasis chambers, but on this occasion Ben found himself alone amidst the grey rows of tables and eye-watering brightness of the full-spectrum bulbs overhead.

That he had been the only one awakened was unlikely a good sign. The counter on his stasis chamber had indicated only fifty-one years of hibernation; his shift was not scheduled to begin for nearly two-hundred more. For what his superiors had called him in, he could only guess, but there was no doubt it was going to be mightily unpleasant. Thinking thus, he was in no great hurry to get down to business, eating with sluggish indolence, drowsily shoveling spoonfuls in at the sides of his mouth so as to avoid hitting his four incisors, which curved out from above and below his lips like tusks. But, as was ever the case, it turned out that the business wasn't going to wait.

"Hello, Constable," came an unfamiliar, yet authoritative voice crackling over the telecom. Even without knowing who it was, Ben could tell it was someone from Command; officers were either former or active queens who didn't much fraternize with the lower castes outside of breeding and had developed their own dialect. Over time this leant the seniors a distinctive, clipped accent that was impossible to mistake. "Did you get something to eat yet?"

"Yes ma'am," he said, looking down at the dubious foodstuffs he'd pulled from the wall slot: algae loaf with oleo gravy, salted algae fries, and pasta-shaped congealed algae pressings with a side of algae, all without the faintest semblance of flavor, and a texture like earwax. "It's delicious," he added.

"That's all there is at the moment," the voice explained, "So suck it up. There have been...problems."

Ben had stopped eating, now his ears perked up. He straightened his back and tilted his head upwards a few degrees. "What sort of problems?"

The voice let out an agitated sigh before answering. "C block and deck seven are threatening to go to war again. We've been able to keep them out of the armory, but they're pulling shit out of the walls to make spears out of. Meanwhile, deck six is worried they'll be caught in the middle of it."

"With all due respect," Ben said, "I'm no negotiator. Can't we just lock them down 'til they cool off?" There's no way in hell I'm going down there to get killed by those savages, was something he added mentally but did not say. The folks on C block were alright, they still had some sense of duty, but deck seven was full of branch tech-worshippers who were culturally and linguistically too far gone to serve as crew. If they hadn't been needed to maintain genetic diversity, they would have found their air supply cut off long ago.

"That's just it," the voice explained, "someone rigged up a decryption AI on a portable workstation and now it's cracking door codes left and right. Our boys just can't seem to get it under control. Only one of our top programmers could have pulled that off and it just so happens we've got one MIA, a guy called 'Yakub.' We need you to find Yakub and recover or destroy the workstation."

"Seems like a lot of trouble to get me out of cold sleep for something like this."

"Well..." the voice began; there was an uncomfortable pause before it spoke again. "We don't have a lot of manpower to spare right now and..." It trailed off, for a longer period this time.

"And?" Ben said. The unusual circumstances, coupled with the reluctance on the other end of the telecom, were giving him a profoundly queasy feeling in the pit of his gut. He was sure he didn't want to hear what was coming next, but the apprehension was almost more than he could bear.

"The last thing the computer recorded before it lost track of him was that he left the elevator on deck thirteen..."

"Oh, no..." Ben mumbled, shaking his head, but it was not enough to stop the voice from continuing. His stomach clenched in anticipation of the words that had to follow.

"He may have been heading for corridor B."

Ben took a deep breath, held it, exhaled. "I would rather try to negotiate with deck seven," he said dryly, 'dryly' in the most literal sense of the word, as his saliva glands had shriveled to the point they seemed anxious to recede into his head. His heart-rate had more than doubled in only seconds; if he'd been drowsy before, there was no doubt he was alert now.

"There's no one else to do this, constable. You're the only living person who's spoken with it. You know it, you know how it thinks. And you'll be armed, of course."

"You think one guy with a bolt rifle is going to keep that thing in line?" Ben snapped, succumbing to a temporary, yet uncontrollable intermingling of fear and despair. He was no stranger to despair, it was doubtful that anyone among the crew was free of it, but that was in a broader, more existential sense of the word, a malaise of the spirit in response to a hopelessness that increased with the same, sure constancy as entropy itself. This was something different. This was physical and immediate.

"These are orders from on high. Leaving aside C block and deck seven, what do you think will happen if that decryption AI decides to pop open Corridor B and shut down the fence at the same time?"

"I know," Ben said, resigning himself, "I'll do it. Just...could you at least give me some tranquilizers?"

"There's no evidence that it would be affected by..."

"I meant for me. I'll be too scared to shoot straight otherwise."

~ ~ ~

After he'd finished cramming food into his face, Ben retrieved two pills from a pneumatic tube and dry-swallowed them (no mean feat on account of his cottonmouth) before making his way to the locker room reserved for E block's security staff. He waved his left wrist over the scanner beside the door; it read the chip implanted there, chimed and granted him access.

Whoever designed the ship's interior had not displayed much fondness for bright colors. Putting it another way, virtually everything on board was grey, not only the walls, floors and ceilings, but also the furniture, the clothes, the equipment. Perhaps the progenitors had reckoned that the incorporation of mole rat DNA into their gene sequence would result in color blindness (their vision was indeed poor compared to human standards, necessitating the use of binocular goggles when off-board), or maybe they just hadn't given a damn for aesthetics; either way, the end result could not be called cheerful. In all his life, Ben had scarcely seen colors other than grey and the mottled pink and white of his and his compatriots' skin. Even now, as he donned a smoky uniform pulled from a random locker and shouldered a bolt rifle, he found himself wondering if it was really too much to ask for a splash of red or yellow to stave off the barren atmosphere.

After gearing up, he took a corridor that ran along the inner edge of the hull. Here and there were rectangular portals which might once have admitted the view of a universe teeming with light, with blue and white and orange. Now there was only blackness. As well the portals had been painted on, for all they showed. He refused to look at them; it was too depressing. Even so, he found his thoughts wandering to that abyss beyond the walls of the huge and fragile ship that was his world.

This ship itself (it was said) had been only one of many that their forbearers had scattered into space like dandelion seeds in hopes that their genes might find purchase and root in some distant place. Whether this had been an exercise in vanity or in desperation was not known, as was the case with so many other things, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that something had gone dreadfully wrong. The luddites tending the algae vats blamed a computational error, because of course they did, while the tech-worshippers insisted that the whim of some forgotten navigator was responsible for the present state of affairs. Meanwhile, the theists claimed it was all part of some greater plan which mortal creatures could not comprehend; the nihilists dismissed all speculation on the grounds that it didn't matter. Ben was unsure which, if any, of the trends in belief was the correct one. Certainly, there were a number of compelling arguments to made, but when all had been said, those aboard were fixed both in habitat and in function, riders of the infinite silence, sustained by little more than hope and wishful thinking. But at least there was food and drink, however unpalatable, and warmth and light in measure. These were not to be found outside.

It was known that galactic centers were inhabited by supermassive black holes, around which the other bodies circled. Celestial objects, when passing near enough to one another, exchange gravitational influence, with the smaller gaining some infinitesimal momentum while the larger gives up a like amount. In the course of a single lifetime this meant not much at all, but over the myriad eons that had passed since the universe was young and vital, the effect was that most substance gained escape velocity and was ejected out into the void, leaving behind meager, but densely-packed galaxies spiraling in towards their central black holes as inexorably as water swirling down a drain.

It was a bleak picture, but therein was also their only chance of success, for incidences of collision were increased by this dense clustering. When two substellar objects of sufficient consistency and mass collided, this would result in the birth of a red dwarf star, their large moons settling into new orbits, new roles as planets. These phenomena had been observed. And while the issue of whether or not a planet orbiting a red dwarf could ever sustain life had not been settled, finding such remained the most viable objective by virtue of being the only one that didn't involve mass suicide.

"We will not give up on our mission," Command would say. "We will succeed because we must."

And so the ship, which must once have had a name, hurtled through the vast and ever-widening expanses, navigating by extrapolations drawn from obsolete maps on mangled computers, using the skeletal emissions of neutron stars for reference, past diminutive galaxies of black dwarfs and iron stars, past an unknowable number of black holes the equipment could not detect and which the people on board either tried not to think about or else prayed to encounter. They stopped only occasionally to harvest the mass necessary to feed the ancient and dimly-understood power plant that sustained what was in all likelihood the last pocket of life in the entire universe.

Last in the entire universe... Ben thought. He stopped and finally looked out one of the portholes, into the cold night, the grand work that entropy, with subtle might, had wrought. People had once asked, "Are we alone?" It was a nonsense question, he thought, since multiplicity is an inherent quality of the word we. We can't be alone, only individuals can, and as most anyone who ever struggled with depression understands, the malady called "loneliness" comes when it will, no matter the company one keeps. But, digressions aside, the question had originally been meant to invoke the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

They had been exploring for...well, time gets a bit tricky at relativistic speeds, but it was for no short while, certainly. During their travels there had been indications. Once, long ago, a portion of the crew had disembarked to survey an ocean world whose sun was well on its way to burning out. There, amidst the strange ice that can only form at the bottom of a sea some hundreds of kilometers deep, they'd detected the presence of what appeared to be metallic objects arranged in a rough grid the size of a large city. But they'd lacked any means by which to excavate such an immense quantity of material, so the grid, whatever it had been, was consigned forever to the status of an intriguing footnote.

During another such outing, a surveyor reported seeing what he described as "...a green cube with beveled corners" on a narrow ledge. He'd foolishly attempted to scale down the canyon wall to retrieve it, but on the return climb had lost his footing, the cube and very nearly his life. His team had seen no reason to doubt his testimony and so a search was conducted, but in the end no mysterious object had been recovered.

There were other findings, other incidents on record as well: layers of patterns discovered deep in a planet's crust that may have been evidence of silicon/ammonia-based plankton, but may also have been a geological oddity akin to dendrite. They'd found purposeful-seeming shapes on the sides of mountains that represented either eroded carvings or simple pareidolia. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of similar reports in the archives, and that wasn't even counting the "probe stories" that circulated through the canteens and recreation centers, tales repeated always in hushed tones with many an over-the-shoulder glance. One popular rumor was that someone from maintenance (usually the friend of a cousin of an acquaintance) had witnessed a swarm of glittering objects moving in the nothingness, a later check of the sensor battery log returned data suggesting the ship had been scanned from the outside with energetic pulses.

Despite a total lack of evidence that any such thing had ever occurred, these stories were fervently believed by many; more level-headed folk filed them away with the rest of the ship's macabre folklore oeuvre, like the one about the man who casually strolled on the outside of the hull without a spacesuit (and if he looks at you, you'll die!), or the one where someone's brain didn't properly shut down for cold sleep, proceeding to generate nightmares for two-hundred years straight, after which he awoke irrevocably insane and had to be euthanized. But no, these latter two accounts were impossibilities, though the memory of them might chill the spine once the lights were out, and while yarns wherein unexplained forms were seen beyond the ship may or may not have had some basis in fact, until such time as the officers and their technicians got in a sharing mood regarding the sensor logs, no one outside that circle would be able to say.

The problem with believing that civilizations founded by alien intelligences might exist was that for all the work, in all the ages spent in their search of the boundless cosmos, Ben's people had never uncovered an indisputable proof of life outside the same biosphere from which they themselves had arisen, save one, and while it was inarguably intelligent, it sure as hell wasn't civilized. And that, joy of joys, was who Ben was now tasked to deal with.

He had resumed walking, carrying his thoughts along with him, but just as he came to the last porthole on his route, he happened to glance at it and froze up so fast that he almost fell over. There, he saw a tiny, shining speck of white. It was impossible, he knew, but at the same time, there it was, right before his eyes.

"A star," he said, pulse quickening. "My God, a white star...I never thought..."

But then he realized something and reached out, wiping over the spot; the "star" suddenly became a fleck of dust on his fingertip.

"Oh," he said. "Well, fuck."

Sighing, he showed his wrist to the scanner. The elevator doors squeaked opened.

~ ~ ~

His right hand gripped the rail as the elevator began its descent, too quickly for his comfort, as he always felt a bit queasy when riding, as though his innards were floating up into his chest cavity. In his left, he gripped the butt of his bolt-rifle, leaning it against his shoulder. It was a man-portable electrolaser, able to kill or at least discombobulate at the sorts of distances one experienced in the confines on board, but wouldn't punch holes through any equipment. While he was all too aware that it would avail him little if events took an unfortunate turn, it was better than nothing and its weight comforted him.

The carriage itself stank of dust and stale air. He looked at the manual control panel on the wall and noted that not only had the button for deck thirteen been removed, but so had its internal workings, so that it could not be activated even with a toolkit. This was a futile gesture, or symbolic at the most, as there was a network of tunnels running throughout the ship, some in plain view, others disused and forgotten, but few in such poor condition that they were not serviceable. Anyone who so desired needed only to hunt around or consult a floor plan and they would be visiting deck thirteen in short order.

And that was, naturally, where he was headed, but in his case the central computer had been informed of the fact and, on reading his ID number from his implant, it had told the elevator where to go. But the going was not smooth; there were distinct grinding and scraping sounds coming in right through the walls and the speed had slowed.

He didn't like the thought of becoming trapped there, as it might take hours or even days to get a crew mobilized to extract him. Still, he liked the thought of getting to where he was going even less, even though the primal fear from earlier had abated somewhat; it must have been the tranquilizers taking effect. Now the elevator was merely inching downward, with reluctance, with irregular jerks and bumps punctuated by the screeching of metal against metal somewhere above him, leading him to reflect that someone really ought to come in and do some repairs.

As he came at last to a stop, he glanced at the stainless steel doors and got a look at his reflection, which was clear enough in spite of the fact that the doors were dusty and scratched all to hell. He saw the dark, beady eyes planted in the folds of pale, flaccid skin that reduced his head to a shapeless blob of flesh, and saw also the yellowed teeth curving out from his lips like the offspring of a chisel and a scimitar. He was taller and more muscular than average, designated for the soldier caste from the moment of birth and fed on a special high-protein diet to ensure his development.

It bears pointing out here that the decision Ben's ancestors had made to interweave DNA from the naked mole rat with their own in order to create a spacefaring race had not been made arbitrarily. Being largely devoid of follicles, there was less worry about hair getting into the ship's delicate circuitry. Good teamwork was assured by their eusociality and they were more or less unfazed by cramped, low-oxygen conditions. Perhaps most importantly, they were biologically inclined to long periods of torporous hibernation, settling into cold sleep in the stasis chambers with no ado, emerging again with scarcely more complication than if they'd taken a nap. And if this genetic fusion had yielded creatures who were less than beautiful, well, they were themselves unaware of it.

"Lookin' good, Champ," he assured himself, and the doors opened. He stepped under the waiting yellow tape marked ¡Prohibido! and into the hallway beyond.

Deck thirteen hadn't changed since the last time Ben was there, being relegated to the role of a storage area in the wake of the first of the incidents, then an unofficial rubbish heap after the second and third. It was a gloomy, shadow-haunted place, thickly populated with every conceivable species of garbage, with a stench so powerful he could taste it. The guys in maintenance had long since excluded it from any to-do lists they might have kept, that meant the only lighting came from emergency backup LEDs spaced in intervals along the floor, which were not particularly bright even when new, but these had not been cleaned, much less replaced, for centuries. Where they were not covered up with trash, they cast a red glow that did not reach the ceiling, and it was not the vibrant hue of a rose or an apple, but stygian and sickly, a color like a damp scab.

Ben switched on his flashlight less from necessity than from a desire to ward off the atmosphere; it reminded him too much of the gaping emptiness outside the hull and seemed, though he would not have verbalized it, to be the beachhead in a war the principles of decay were waging against his folk, a war he knew they must inevitably lose. The flashlight did help, some, so he slogged through the waste, which was warm (Why the hell is it warm when the air is so cold? He wondered), over the short, but winding and labyrinthine route it took to reach corridor B. When he heard the hum of the electric fence, he knew he was there.

Going to corridor B was the second most popular suicide method amongst the crew, the first being a simple hack that set one's stasis chamber to reclamation mode; after that one needed only to nestle in and sleep while machines helpfully disassembled one's body. The practice was outlawed, of course, but its ease and painlessness attracted many who despaired of the grey walls, the tasteless food, the tiring and repetitive work. For of what use was the work if it all came to nothing? So, people would find ways to get around the safeguards. But, it still took a certain amount of fortitude to end one's existence with one's own hand; some were simply not up to the task. These were the ones who ended up in corridor B. Their notes were scattered on the floor around the fence, no doubt full of regrets and apologies and farewells, but no one would ever read them. They were just more garbage for the pile.

The fence, as they called it, was a metal grate welded over the corridor's entryway in the days following the first incident, when the scientists were still optimistic about reconciliation between themselves and the thing they had brought on board. Like fools, Ben thought, but it wasn't fair that he judged so harshly; scientists are a curious breed and they had no way of knowing what manner of devil they were dealing with any more than they'd been able to prophesy that the freeze-dried "corpse" they'd dug out the rock was going to suddenly spring to life and start biting off their limbs. So, they'd installed the fence and electrified it so that they could observe the thing, but it had been improvised to keep a monster in, not to keep people out, a gap at the bottom was plenty wide enough for a man to crawl through.

Behind the fence was the gate, which was not unlike every other gate on the ship except for the fact that there was a murderous alien demon behind it. There was a speakerphone on the gate's control panel, Ben activated it and spoke.

"Mastema," he said, for that was the name his people had given the creature, "on the count of ten I will open the door. I am armed. Stay back. Do not approach the fence."

Tranquilizers or no, his hands were shaking by the time he finished his count and pushed the button. The mechanism creaked to life, filling the chamber with an awful squeal (the tracks had not been lubricated in living memory) as it dragged the gate up into the ceiling. Ben switched off his flashlight. Bright light pained the creature, infuriating it at this stage would be counter-productive. The smell of rotten blood came surging out with such force it nearly knocked him over. He covered his nose with his hand and told himself to breathe through his mouth, which was better, though not by much.

He couldn't see anything; the first thing Mastema had done when locked up in there was to destroy the lights. But Ben could hear, or thought he heard, some vague movement: claws tapping the floor, perhaps? There was no time to ponder this because it was then that it spoke, its voice a booming growl, strained, halting, weird and terrible, the product of a vocal apparatus ill-suited to speech. The sounds it made were only an approximation of words.

"One little...wrinkle rat...comes chasing another...expecting me...to buy that...this sister's...a brother!"

And so it begins... Ben thought. The thing was already trying to get under his skin. It was considered supremely uncouth, the very apex of impropriety, to refer to workers or soldiers as anything other than male. In his culture, only queens who had birthed a litter, thereby establishing their femininity, were so honored. That said, he needed to keep his cool and not let it rattle his nerves; he could not afford to make any mistakes. So, it had known which set of works Ben kept in his pants. Could it smell the difference somehow? No, he decided. It had recognized him from their previous meeting.

"You remember me?" Ben ventured.

"I know you," came the reply, "I was with you...in the garden..."

"I've never been to the garden and neither have you."

"No..." There was a pause. "Truly. Not here. Another time...another place..."

Ben's night-vision was kicking in; he could make out shapes by the LEDs sharing the chamber with him, and occasional flashes of voltage moving through the fence, and was shocked to see Mastema staring back at him from not even an arm's length of distance. In an evolutionary move that would have pleased Aristotelians, Mastema's eyes did not merely reflect light, they generated their own, dim and red as dying embers. Ben stumbled backwards out of surprise and leveled his bolt rifle at its massive head- a ridiculous reaction, to be sure, since the fence would probably divert the charge if he tried to fire through it, which might also short it out. There was also the fact that Mastema had once taken seven bolts straight to the face without even slowing down, but Ben was trying not to remember that.

"I said to keep back!" Ben shouted, furious, but more at his being startled like that than for anything else. And the creature laughed, or rather, vocalized in a way that resembled laughter, a series of rumbling pulses, deep and harsh. Once, while escorting a survey team across a frozen moon, tidal forces from the gas giant it orbited had caused a chain of icequakes fit to level mountains, had there been any. The laugh was like that, he could feel it in his marrow. It was at that point that Ben, flaring with pure, childish anger, clicked on his flashlight.

Mastema snarled sharply and retreated a few steps away, but Ben got a good look in before he came back to himself and turned the flashlight off. He had seen it before, though it was no less strange this time around. Unable to conjure the strict terminology of an anatomist, he described it in terms referencing pictures stored in the remnants of the archives: it looked, he would say, something like a reptilian kangaroo the size of a draft horse, though it was horned and had a long mane of wan, sea-foam colored hair on its head. Another witness had said it resembled a dragon, still another, an alligator. But of course it was none of those things.

"I could...smash your little...fence!" Mastema said, "Put my jaws...around your head...and pop it...like a grape!"

Ben's eyes would need to readjust, but he heard its tail writhing in irritation, thumping against the wall as it spoke.

"But no," it said. "I am your...friend." The malice in its voice was so naked that Ben couldn't imagine why it bothered to lie. Well, the claim about being a friend was a lie anyway; the part about being able to smash through the fence was probably true. The part about popping his head open definitely was.

"You might break through it, sure," Ben conceded, then defiantly adding, "but not without eating enough voltage to put even a...whatever the hell you are, flat on your ass. It wouldn't feel good, either, and you're no friend of mine, so why don't you go fu--"

"But I am. Tell me...when was the...last time you spoke...face to face...with someone...other than me?"

"I..." Ben began, but the question had taken him unawares. His work consisted primarily of patrols around remote places like the stores or the armory, under orders from someone in a command station near the officer's quarters on the other side of the ship, delivered via telecom. And he performed them by himself. On the rare occasions he met people on these patrols, he had only to point his scanner at them to determine whether or not they were meant to be there, then nod them through. He ate with the others in the cafeteria, but silently; he had no comrades. He couldn't, he realized, precisely recall the last time he'd conversed with someone else in person.

"The loneliness..." Mastema said, face mere inches from the fence, close enough for the LEDs to illume a smile full of triangular, shark-like teeth, "I can...take it from you...the suffering...the doubt...everything."

"I'm not here for that." Ben shook his head clear. How it had come to know about his personal issues enough to tempt him with such an offer, he couldn't say. It may have been the case that the monster understood these things intuitively, or it might have chatted with someone familiar with the psychological profiles kept on record, though the latter was unlikely. It didn't matter, he had a job to do and he meant to do it, mind games aside.

"No...you have come for...the man...Yakub DeSiiva...and his toy."

"You've seen him."

"He is here...with me. I did not want...to bring him up...just yet...but I can...show him...to you."

Ben grimaced, not liking the sound of that "bring him up" one bit. Mastema, it was known, did not have a complete GI tract, but regurgitated what it could not metabolize. Since Ben had no desire to see a pile of his compatriot's bones and organs puked up, he decided to let that line go. His mission now focused on recovering or destroying Yakub's workstation: the man himself was accounted for.

"What about the workstation? Do you have it?"

"Oh, yes..." Mastema smiled again, more broadly this time. It had a laptop in its claws now, though it had not been there a moment earlier. Ben wondered if he just witnessed some sleight-of-hand.

"He wrote on it...here..." it continued, dragging one of its talons across the case, though it was too dark for Ben to make out anything, "his full name...he said...these symbols...are the sounds...of his name."

At first, Ben didn't grasp the significance of this information. Lots of people wrote their names on their computers, so what? But there must have been a reason Mastema was pointing this out to him, he knew, and that made him leery. What dawned on him sent his heart into wild and fearful thumping. Mastema had not been capable of utilizing the decryption AI up until this point, but soon, too soon, that would no longer be true: it couldn't use the computer because it couldn't read, but now, knowing that the letters written corresponded to Yakub's name, it had a key, and the same fierce intellect that had allowed it to communicate with the researchers after only three days of contact would now be tasked with deciphering the alphabet. There would be volumes worth of reading material in the rooms along the corridor that it could use for practice, and once it could read, it could begin the process of figuring out what all those funny little computer icons do...

He had to think fast to come up with a way to get that workstation away from it. But what would he try? Bribery? He had nothing to offer and even had it been otherwise, there was no guarantee it would work. Threats? But what could they do to it that hadn't already been done? In the past they'd tried to kill it with poison, which had no apparent effect. They couldn't cut off the flow of air because it had torn out the vent seals, and that would probably just cause it to enter the same hibernation state they'd found it in...after however many years it took for one creature, even one of that size, to breathe up all of the whatever-it-respirates in the hallway and its adjoining rooms. They could always blow it out of an airlock, he reasoned, if they could talk it into walking into one; corridor B was internal and didn't connect with the hull directly.

Maybe I can sweet-talk it... Ben thought, so nervous by now that he almost tittered, tranquilizers or no. But finally, understanding that he had to do something, he opened up his mouth and the following words escaped:

"The drive on that computer contains information vital to the operation of the engines. Without it we'll become stranded, so it's really in your best interests to return it to us. Just slide it under the fence and back away."

Mastema lapsed into silent motionlessness for a few moments, most likely mulling over what Ben had said, then made a chuffing noise and smiled the toothiest smile yet.

"I have been...playing with this...toy...I have grown...attached. What is it...to me...if we stop? There is nothing...out there."

"I'll give you a new toy, a better one," Ben lied, like hell he would do that, "I promise."

"Yes...a promise...good." It did not have to crouch to set the computer down since it was on all fours; it was much too tall for the ceiling when it stood on its hind legs. And then the faint red glow of its eyes began to recede away down the corridor.

"As a sign of...the trust...between us...come in...take it...I will stay back...no tricks...I swear it..."

Then the eyes were gone and the only sound was the hum of the electrified grate that Ben had no intention of crawling under, but he did kneel and have a peek with his flashlight. Mastema had set the workstation down behind a pile of debris, so there was no way he could get a clear shot at it without going in, which he wasn't seriously considering doing, was he? But after shining the beam around, satisfying himself that Mastema was too far away (judging by the distance to the spot at which he'd lost sight of its eyes) to cover the ground in time to prevent his destroying the machine, he decided to chance it. There was not a doubt in his mind that he would be ambushed and odds were good he wouldn't escape with his life, but this was something that had to be done for the survival of his people; his eusocial leanings, damn them, demanded it.

For the briefest fraction of a second, he considered calling in to beg for backup, but ascertained that this opportunity might not come again; it was now or never. He entered warily on hands and knees, flashlight held between his front teeth, ready to backtrack at any noise, at the slightest hint of movement, but there was nothing. The attack came as he leveled his bolt rifle at the laptop (knowing that one hit would scramble the circuitry beyond recovery), but it still managed to catch him off guard despite that he had been expecting it, because it came not from the front, but from the doorway to his immediate left. He knew he had seen the eyes move backwards down the hallway, just as he knew the layout of the area did not permit any means of secretly doubling back; all of these near rooms were cul-de-sacs. What had happened was that Mastema had constricted the bioluminescent glow in its eyes to give the appearance that it was moving away (a trick employed by certain deep-sea animals in the past), then stepped into a side room to wait. But, Ben didn't know that and didn't have time to think about how this was possible, no time to think at all. What happened next was purely reactionary and instinctive.

Rather than flinch, he turned to face the creature head-on. When the flashlight beam was in its face, it winced, eyes clinching shut, mouth popping open to emit a pained cry, but it never had the chance; Ben launched himself forward, literally stuffing the end of his weapon down the monster's throat, and pulled the trigger, holding it down until the battery was spent. The electric crack was muffled by flesh, but audible, as was the sizzling of innards. Smoke curled up and out of the creature's head, the effect was much greater than any that had been observed when bolting it externally; all thousand-plus kilograms of it hit the ground with a thud that felt like it could have knocked the whole ship off-kilter.

Recalling the event later, Ben thought that it would have been cool to say, "Choke on that!" or something, but at that moment he had not the presence of mind for one-liners. Instead, he grabbed the laptop and flung it at the floor as hard as he could, heard the crack and felt the shrapnel on his shins as it broke into dozens of pieces. Then he dove for the gap under the fence, which might have been a good idea if the floor had been smoother and he'd built up a bit more momentum, but as it was, he only made it about a third of the way under before he stopped, at which point he started flailing his arms and legs, almost like he was swimming, but it got the job done. Once he was clear of the fence he spun onto his back and scrambled away backwards on his butt just in time to see Mastema's colossal arm swiping at him from under the gap, missing by centimeters. He kept right on backing up that way until he was stopped by a wall. He pulled his knees up to his chest, put his arms around them, and, rocking himself, wept like a baby, though he would omit that lattermost part during the debriefing.

"One day...I will escape..." Mastema promised, somehow managing to talk with a molten throat, "I will take every child...I will eat their skulls...in front of you. And even...if I do not...even if...you find your star...what then? All your work...must return...to nothing."

"Yeah, well, maybe after we find our star, we'll send this ship, along with your sorry ass, straight into it."

There was no reply. He tried to stand and found that he could not; his legs were shaking too badly. He had cut his arm on Mastema's teeth, the blood was dribbling onto the floor, though he couldn't much feel the wound since naked mole rats lack a chemical key to the transmission of pain. Also, his heart was beating so hard he thought he might die, and he had peed himself. But his legs would soon become steady again, his heart-rate would slow to normal levels, he would bandage his arm and change his undergarments. Mastema growled, though Ben had the curious impression that it had less to do with rage than with annoyance, but it didn't matter. The assignment was over. He was safe.

~ ~ ~

"How are you feeling, Constable?"

Ben looked around. He hadn't even known there was a telecom in the locker room, but it had to be so because there was no one else in there with him.

"Er, fine." He said. He did feel better now that he'd bathed and put on some clean tights. His head was clearer than it had been for the informal debriefing, too. "I'm fine, ma'am."

"That's good to hear. I bet you're looking forward to some rest after all that. How would you like to take it on deck nine?"

"Ma'am?" Ben had to repeat the question in his head to make sure he heard it right. Deck nine was the most protected area on the entire ship, and, apart from its tenders, only queens of the highest tiers of command were allowed to go there. He knew he had heard correctly and understood what was said. Even so, he couldn't believe his ears.

"The Captain is pleased with you," the voice said. "He wants you to come as soon as you're finished."

"Oh, shit. I mean, right. Right away. Ma'am!"

There were no further instructions. He hastened to finish dressing and walked out into the hallway as though on air; all he could think, over and over again, was Deck nine, I can't believe it! The elevators wouldn't even stop there unless The Captain punched a special code into the system, and the entrances were guarded by Seraph autonomous security drones that would carbonize any unauthorized person who tried to enter. He was intimidated by the thought at first, but when he stepped into the carriage and saw a 9 light up on the display, all the concern went out of him. It was alright now. Everything was going to be alright. Three minutes later and he was standing in the garden.

Cold sleep did not prevent time from working its ruin on things, and while it slowed the aging process considerably, it would not have done to send a ship out with only a store of seeds, resilient though they might be, for a journey of indefinite length. The solution was this: a modest, carefully tended ecosystem in the heart of the ship that ensured a diverse array of viable seeds with which to set down the foundations of a colony. Without the garden, their mission meant nothing. They couldn't afford the risk of letting people come and go as they pleased, that was why it was kept with such vigilance.

Ben was no poet, no eloquent words crossed his mind, but he drank in the sights even as precursory tears threatened to make the seeing difficult. Hidden projectors turned the ceiling into a sky, complete with sun and clouds in motion. He had seen image files from their homeworld, but they did not do justice to the experience. There were sounds he didn't know, bird calls and the buzzing of insects, whether from speakers or kept specimens, he didn't know and didn't care. There was so much green, green everywhere, and flowers of blue and gold and coral. The only grey in that place was his uniform. Had there really been a world that looked like this? He fell to his knees, too awed for anything else. Only then did he truly comprehend the spiritual disease afflicting the crew, the awful, half-formed knowledge that drove so many to depression and suicide.

"This is what we've lost," he said, tears now flowing, "And this is what we hope to find again."

In his thoughts, he added, My God, we really are alone!

"Hello, Ben, this is your Captain speaking. We want to thank you for your work and let you know that C block and deck seven are now in full lockdown, so they won't be going to war anytime soon. Are you enjoying the garden?"

He hadn't spotted any telecom, but the voice seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. The Captain had a bizarre way of speaking even compared against the clipped accent of the other officers, sounding exactly like a commercial airline pilot, not that Ben knew what that was. Whether this was a feature of caste or an individual foible, he was not in a position to say, but reckoned it was the prerogative of captains to speak as they pleased. So, he did not ask about it, neither did he look up.

"It is..." he said, struggling to find a word strong enough for what he felt, but he could not and had to settle. "It is beautiful. Thank you."

"Good, good. Take your time, have a look around. And please, feel free to eat any of the fruit you come across, but do me a favor and stay away from the apples. I have a thing about those."

"Oh, uh...ok. Sure."

"Now listen, Ben, I'm gonna let you in on some very choice information. They're not visible to the naked eye yet, but our instruments have detected three red suns, all close together, you know, relatively speaking, annnnnd we're gonna go check 'em out, yeah. Now, if you'll look to your left--"

"My God," Ben interrupted, "are you sure? We'll see them up close?" He looked up at the false sky. The tears had stopped.

"We're certain, yes. As for you getting to see them...? Not as such, no. Even in cold sleep, you'll have turned to dust by the time we get there, so you won't. Some of your great-grandchildren might, though."

"My...my what?"

"Oh, no one told you yet. Well, you're going to become a queen."

"Queen..." An unpleasant fluttering passed through Ben's stomach as he uttered the word. He suddenly felt he would very much like to lie down.

"You have good genes, constable," the Captain explained, "but genes aren't enough. You've always been dutiful and what you did today was very brave. The short of it is, we need more people like you. So, congratulations! Rest up, now. Someone will come for you later."

The telecom went silent. Him, a queen? Maybe in a few years, but not now! It entailed more than switching pronouns; the hormonal changes would affect both behavior and physiology. He would become aggressive, but that wasn't the problem. Apart from gaining bulk (of which there would be plenty), his hips would widen to ease the birthing of pups and his torso would lengthen to accommodate them. None of this was even mentioning the process of putting the pups in his belly in the first place. It was an honor, yes, but all he could feel was disgust at the thought.

The elation he had felt earlier had crumbled away in only seconds. Dizzy, he fell onto all fours and dry-heaved.

"You're going to become a queen," the Captain had said. It had not been a request. He could protest as long as he wished, but sooner or later his instincts would compel him and he would cave to the social pressure, like he'd always done. So, it was either become a queen, or finally surrender to the long-unvented hopelessness in his heart and willfully bring his story to a close. And just like that, he made his choice.

He didn't want to be a queen and he didn't intend to let it happen. What was the point? A red dwarf couldn't support a colony, a star like that is too cool to warm a planet at any real distance, any closer and the gravity would siphon off the atmosphere. Everyone knew that, they were just afraid to say it! Why should he have to go along with this farce, trading his youth for childbirth, squirting out litter after litter so that they, too, could someday grow to realize how empty and meaningless it all was? It had to stop.

Since the day he was born, it had always been about colonization, about "we" and "us." Once, just this once, he was going to say, "I!" He was going to shout it so loud it would rend the ship to splinters. He got up and walked purposefully towards the security doors, dusting his hands.

First, he would need a bolt rifle. The computer might still send him to deck thirteen if he boarded an elevator, if not, he could just go to deck twelve and find an access tunnel. If he bolted the fence, he should be able to overload the circuit, trip the breaker. After that...

He waved his wrist over the scanner, but rather than chime before unlocking the exit, it beeped twice and nothing else happened. He tried again, to the same result. Frustrated, he pushed in on the panel, it slid back and to the side with a whir, revealing a number pad. The keys were stiff under his fingertips from lack of use as he entered his registration code, which failed to achieve the desired result, similarly with the emergency override he had learned as part of his training. Again and again he tried until finally, he slammed his fist into the keys hard enough to split his knuckles open. The doors went unmoved.

It made sense when he thought about it, they couldn't have queens coming and going at will without some sort of escort; they were too valuable. That rule apparently applied to nominees as well. Defeated, he slumped against the wall, trapped and without a single thing he could do about it.

~ ~ ~

Back in corridor B, the thing that men called Mastema (whose true name cannot be rendered in this language, but sounds a bit like a steam-whistle crossed with a berserk cicada cry) groaned to itself. That spark gun had badly singed its insides, especially the back of its throat. It hurt, but the tissue would regenerate in a short while, so that was of no importance. The wrinkle-rats had had their little show; now that they believed the threat had passed, it would be left to its own devices.

It took the workstation (they all looked the same, the deserted lab was full of them) from the hiding place behind the wall panel. Sooner rather than later, but not yet, it would straightwire it into the ship's network, just like Yakub had been kind enough to demonstrate. Yakub had been alright, for a wrinkle-rat, Mastema might have felt bad about eating the guy if it were capable of things like remorse and regret, or morality.

The light from the monitor half-blinded it as it opened the laptop. That wouldn't do, so it adjusted the brightness down with the tip of a claw. That much, it had figured out how to do on its own: not much of a feat, but other, better tricks would follow once it had finished decoding the word-drawings and really gotten the hang of the computer. Both processes were well underway, but there was no hurry. It had all the time there was.

~ ~ ~

He knew what it was, but had never seen, much less felt, sleet before. Even when escorting survey teams across frozen seas, he had worn an environmental suit; he had never in his life experienced such intense cold as he did on this planet- for it was some planet he walked now, the gravity was far stronger than it had ever been on the ship, which made his movements slow. Walking was like trying to swim through taffy.

The only light was what he brought with him. LED in hand, he raised his other arm to shield his eyes from the wind-lashed particles of ice and grit. There was rain in the downpour, too, it soaked right through his uniform and turned the black sand into a freezing slurry that got in between his toes and clumped on his bare feet. Frost formed on his whiskers. How did he get here? Where was his environmental suit? Why was he walking around without shoes? He couldn't have answered any of these questions. For the moment, he just focused on the difficult progress and hoped to stumble onto some sort of shelter.

He wandered long and aimlessly, stupefied, 'til, with his legs on the verge of giving out, he came upon an outcropping of rock that might once have been a mountain, but had been worn away by wind and rain to its present state. Deeply pitted by this erosion, there were numerous shallow niches where he might take cover; he circled around the base until he found a particularly roomy alcove facing away from the gale. Once inside, he sat down in the dark sand and drew his knees up to his chest, shivering. He left the LED on beside him; the light caught on metallic flecks mixed in with the sand, which glittered like silver, and it formed an elongate semicircle on the rock wall opposite. There was no way he was going to turn it off, the mere thought of enduring the night and its vicious storm terrified him and that glow, faint though it was, made him feel a bit safer.

Time passed (how much, he didn't know) before he became aware that he was no longer alone. Looking up, he saw a familiar pair of red eyes hovering in the air just beyond the edge of the flashlight's beam. Oddly, he wasn't afraid, it seemed natural that Mastema should be here with him in this place. The creature made no attempt to advance on him. He could not see its body.

"Where are we?" Ben asked.

"My home," Mastema said in that strained, brutal mockery of a voice, white shark-teeth flashing in the shadows. "Your destiny."

"How did we get here?"

Rather than answer, Mastema turned to look out into the storm, far away, over the blank and level landscape Ben had just crossed. When next it spoke, it was quieter than what he had grown used to, perhaps even reflective, though he couldn't be sure.

"Our sun...was dim, but...our atmosphere...trapped the warmth. Then the warmth...became too much. We had...no technology...to warn us...our star...was dying. We hid away..."

"I don't understand," Ben said, "Where could you hide from something like that without leaving the planet?"

Mastema had given at least a dozen different (and contradictory) stories to the researchers regarding its origins. In one, he was a criminal marooned on a sterile planet as punishment, in another, he was a deity discarded by a people on their transitioning to a more scientifically-minded culture. Yet, for whatever reason, Ben felt certain that what he was hearing now was the absolute truth.

"Down...deep into the earth..." Mastema said, "We slept...we waited...for coolness. When we woke...all warmth had gone...our world...had died. One by one...the others went."

"Where did they go?" Ben asked, eyes wide, nose and whiskers twitching, enraptured with the sad tale. Before that moment, he would have met any suggestion that he might empathize with that monster with the coolest laughter. Even now, what he felt was not really kinship, but more like pity. Mastema continued:

"We fell upon...one another...mothers fed...on their young...sustenance...for hibernation...the long sleep...they hoped the warmth...would return. So they slept...waiting...for so long...their bodies...turned to stone...the rain...washed over them...wore the stone away...into black sand. Only I...remained."

"My God..." Ben whispered; Mastema laughed then, an abhorrent sound like some rhythmically cracking glacier, hard and joyless.

"God...? He had...forsaken us...He has forsaken...you."

He wondered if the story could really be true. While he didn't have the impression Mastema was lying, certain details of the story didn't add up. How much of that sand had he walked over? A couple of kilometers, at least, and while his visibility had been limited, he had no reason to think there wasn't a lot more of the stuff, enough even to stretch from one horizon to another, and beyond. Surely, he decided, Mastema's people could not have been as numerous as that. Moreover, it was quite impossible to have this sort of weather without a star to drive it, was it not? And so Ben inferred the fact of the matter.

"This is a dream," he said.

"Life is a dream..." Mastema countered, mouth curving into a grisly smile as the clouds began to rain down fire. "The dream...is almost...over."

~ ~ ~

The fire turned out to be red light shining into Ben's cell from the hallway, bleeding into his mind through his eyelids. He sat up and tried to shake the sleep out of his head. He'd been locked up for just over a week, ever since he'd told that doctor where his syringe full of hormones was going to end up if he didn't "step right the hell off." Now the door was agape and the emergency lights were on. He slapped himself lightly on both cheeks to make certain he was awake before stepping out.

There was no guard, no one at all as far as he could see, only pulsing red light and open doorways. Now, that was odd. Those doors would ordinarily have been closed. It was then that a voice came in over the telecom, all panic and fluster:

"All security personnel to the armory! This is not a drill! Non-essential crewmembers are to clear the corridors, this is not a drill! I repeat..."

"Hmm..." It might have been because he was drowsy, but he felt detached from the proceedings, more curious than alarmed. He went over to the nearest telecom and punched in the number for E block's security station with one hand and covered his left ear with the other.

"What's the situation up there?"

He didn't recognize the voice on the other end. He sounded young and must have been little more than a pup, someone yet to take his first cold sleep. "Someone's hacked the door codes! C block and deck seven are heading for the armory and all the security stations are locked down! We're trapped!"

"Yeah?" Ben said, smiling faintly, "How does it feel?"

"Sir?"

"How does it feel to be trapped?"

"What are you talking about?" the young constable asked, "Who is this?"

He didn't answer, but walked away from the telecom without turning it off; the junior on the other end kept right on talking even as Ben passed out of earshot. Somewhere nearby, the next hallway over, maybe, someone screamed before being silenced.

What had happened was plain enough. He remembered the way Yakub's workstation (or one he was meant to think was Yakub's) had seemed to appear suddenly in Mastema's claws, like sleight-of-hand. It would have been easy to make the switch in that darkness. He had never really confirmed that the workstation he destroyed was the right one, had he? He grinned to himself and nodded approvingly at the ploy. It had all been for show.

It was surprising, however, that Mastema had managed to decode the alphabet in such a short space of time. It may have been the case that a would-be suicide had offered to help in exchange for Mastema's "services." An illustrated children's textbook would have been enough. Ultimately, it didn't matter how it had been done: it was done and now there would be consequences.

It seemed to Ben that Mastema would come to him first, a visit to its so-called friend, maybe a little payback for that incident with the bolt rifle. If it had mastered the computer to the point where it could use a decryption AI (as it obviously had) then learning the whereabouts of a given crew member would be like child's play. It was too big to cram into a regular elevator carriage, though; it would have to use the freight elevator. There was one a mere stone's throw from where he was standing and, sure enough, he saw by the numbers displayed above the doors that it was active, coming up.

Ben stripped away his clothes as he watched the numbers tick. It seemed the proper thing to do, somehow. Four decks to go. Three. Two...

"The dream is over," he said. The doors chimed and opened.