Deaths were inevitable, especially on a ship this size. I had learned that much in shipyard simulations, before I was given my first body. It didn’t make it better. One time, the instructor made us simulate a five year stretch of time with a full crew of virtual people aboard. Unlike other simulations there were no Cassandrian attacks, onboard mutinies, or system malfunctions. Everything was calm and mundane… with the exception of zero-point-zero-one percent of the crew that were given psychological and physiological issues. Before the start of the exercise, we were warned that it was inevitable we’d lose a part of our crew through no fault of our own. I didn’t believe them. When the simulation was over, I had lost a hundred and seventy-nine. Aurie had lost only a hundred and five.

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Commander Unollyan asked. “I know ships don’t take well to that sort of thing. Not that anyone does. Seven drops on your first day…” The man shook his head. “Bad way to start an assignment.”

The “lab” we were in was closer to a mix between a changing area and a storage room. Other than the obligatory desk and operational console in the corner, it was filled with shelves and cases of devices and components, none of which I had on file. From my database queries, I found that they were more related to the filtration part of the recycling system than any actual bioengineering. Three lockers with protective gear and bio suits were in the middle of the room, and by the looks of it, two of them were recent additions. One had my name on it, engraved on a metal plaque and signed by Radiance. It was a sweet gesture, which no doubt she thought to be hilarious.

“I’m fine, sir.” I zipped up my protective suit. “Nothing but a minor scrape of the outer hull.” I added some ship humor to attempt to lighten the mood.

Abusing the authority Lux had given me, I had managed to find out that close to a thousand people had died in the recycling system since the ship had been launched. About eight percent were due to mishaps and freak accidents, combined with extremely bad luck on the part of the victims. All remaining tragedies were self-inflicted. Strangely enough there was a complete lack of murders or murder attempts. On file the old captain had run a very tight ship, too tight to be real.

“How did they get into the recycling system?” I asked, while running a final check of my suit’s system. “All access points should be protected.” And monitored by Gregorius.

“We’ll probably get a memo if the investigation isn’t buried again.” The man tapped his prosthetic fingers along his equipment case. “People don’t like to talk much about such things.”

I’m sure they don’t.

“Which is utterly stupid.” There was a note of anger hidden in his voice. “We’re in space, close to hostile territory. The chances of us all getting vaporized by a Scuu attack are ten percent.”

Technically, he was wrong. The chances of a station being attacked were far less. The actual odds of a military station being destroyed in Scuu space were nearly zero. After the first wave of losses of the Scuu war, humanity had abandoned and destroyed most of its stations on the front, grouping those that were left in large clusters in strategic systems with thousands of ships to protect them at all times. Also, there were no known cases of a station-size ship being captured or destroyed by enemies. I made a note to ask Lux whether that was indeed the case next time I had a chance to talk to her.

“If they wanted to leave this place so badly, all they had to do was request a transfer and the fleet would have obliged,” said Commander Unollyan, his tone becoming louder. “The Scuu front is no place for…” He raised a finger in the air, then suddenly stopped. A mask of guilt covered his face, making him look away. For three seconds he remained silent, breathing heavily. “Sorry about that,” he added after a while. “Just a pet peeve of mine. It just annoys me how much determination some people have to go through a hundred hurdles just to kill themselves.”

“I understand, sir.” Good thing he wasn’t assigned to the Cassandrian front. Ships like me did that hundreds of times every cycle. The whole Ascendant class was made with one thing in mind: to push the odds.

“Are you ready?”

“Everything checks out, sir.” At least I was certain not to contaminate the food I ate. “Sir, does “the fracture” have any significant meaning in bioengineering jargon?” I asked.

“The fracture?” The Commander looked at me with a puzzled expression.

“I heard it used a few times since I got my assignment. Specifically, I was told I might have to fill the fracture.”

“Fill the fracture.” The man mused. “That’s a new one. Might be something to do with structural integrity. Who said that exactly?”

“A senior cadet,” I lied.

“Don’t think anything of it. Probably pranking you.” A bittersweet smile returned to his face. “Just ignore them.”

He picked up his case, indicating the conversation was over. I nodded. There was little more I could get out of him even if I pressed on. Taking a final look round the lab, I followed the commander into the corridor. As we walked, I noticed there was no sign of the chaos that had been rampant in the corridors fifteen minutes ago. Everyone had returned to normal duties, with not even a whisper of what they had witnessed. One thing was different—when we went past the lab of the accident, the area was full of ship security, as well as the person who had put me here in the first place: Juul.

What are you doing here?

I searched through the announcement database. On file, both he and Kridib were marked as being part of the mission check-up prior to a series of ship-wide announcements. More concerning, I recognized the officer beside him: Flight Colonel Rea Cension. This was the first time I saw the man in person, but there was no mistaking the face that had been shown on every wall and screen during Renaan’s ceremony. No doubt the face and body structure had been modified beyond recognition, but I knew from Lux that he had been part of Kridib’s original team. At present, the fleet had him classified unmarked, but Gregorius’ showed that he was in charge of ship security.

“Is that standard procedure?” I asked Commander Unollyan.

“Depends on the victims,” the man replied, disinterested. “If it’s a grunt or ship security, there’ll be questions.”

Grunt or security… We were about to turn the corner, when Juul noticed me. For a single moment, our eyes locked. His microreactions went from surprise to suspicion then anger in less than seven hundred milliseconds. I expected him to call me over, but instead he went up to Flight Colonel Cension and whispered something using voice suppressors. The officer looked in my direction, giving me a stern once-over, then nodded.

Incandescent, where’s Kridib? A scary possibility came to mind.

He hasn’t flatlined, the ship replied, with the tact of a morgue.

That should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. I tried to run the locations of all cadets onboard. Half of the original group were in the structure that held out living quarters were, along with a vast group of rookies. One was at a medical facility—based on reports overseeing two of the rookies who’d had some sort of unexpected nanite reaction and have the nanites extracted and replaced. Everyone else seemed to be in various parts of the administration building… with the exception of Kridib and Juul.

Three of us had previous experience, I reviewed the meeting with Commander Everar prior to my mission. Kridib had shown his hand, but I still knew nothing about Juul.

“They’ll be out in ten minutes,” Unollyan said, not even bothering to whisper. “Forget them.”

“Yes, sir.” I followed after him.

We continued on for a hundred and seven meters, after which we turned right along one of the perpendicular corridors. In contrast to the varied complexity of the upper decks, bioengineering was a perfectly regular pattern of rooms and corridors along twenty-five decks. Roughly a quarter of that was used as a storage compartment, holding the biological components of the already recycled and refined food. Ten percent was dedicated to actual bioengineering research, responsible for creating specimens capable of living in any environment, including domed colonies and potential life-factor planets. It was safe to assume that the plants in the gardens above deck had been created here, and possibly some fauna as well. Three percent remained unlisted, and everything remaining was a part of the vast recycling and filtration apparatus that gathered organic waste of the ship and transformed it into sludge to grow edible plants in. I was pretty convinced that the gelatin rations skipped the last part of the process.

My task, as was made clear, was to assist the commander in making sure that there was no buildup in any of the pipes that composed the guts of Gregorius. Normally this wouldn’t be a job for a fleet cadet, let alone one of the section commanders, but Unollyan was that particular type of person that liked to experience things in person, no doubt due to the realization that he soon wouldn’t be able to. Looking through his record, it seemed like a waste that he would devote his time to such trivial tasks. At his level of bio-architecture, he had probably received many lucrative offers from conglomerates in the private sector. It had been his desire, though, to be in space and he had been given the opportunity to do so.

“We’ll start with the farms,” he said as we entered a large hall, nearly identical to the one I had first met him in. Plants, vats, moisture, and artificial sunlight filled the space, creating an almost tropical feel. A large group of people was already here, slowly checking the vats and bushes one by one with hand scanners. “Everyone!” The man’s voice boomed throughout. Apparently, even here, being a commander had its perks. “This is our new cadet—” He took his datapad and stared at it. “—Light Seeker.”

A few of the people stopped what they were doing and gave me a quick glance. To my surprise, there weren’t too many whispers of me being a battleship. By now, I suspected everyone in Bioengineering knew.

“She’ll help out with the initial check.” The commander paused, then put the datapad away.

Instinct made me stand to attention. No reaction followed. This was normal when dealing with food recycling specialists—no one cared about anything that didn’t affect them much.

“Elcy.” The man came up to me. “We’ve been scheduled to clear the entire section by our arrival in two months. Not a lot of time.” He shook his head. “I trust you’ll help out as much as you can during your assignment?”

“That’s what I’m here for, sir.” If it weren’t for recent events, this was the sort of insignificant tasks junior cadets used to get during their first assignments. “Will I be required to work double shift?”

“No, not for the moment.” The man smiled. He must have been a merciless manager in his younger years. Even now, age and sickness hadn’t managed to dull his edge too much. “Pick a work path.”

“Yes, sir.”

The work was methodically boring: get an AI-defined path and inspect all pipes and containers along it until it was done. Given the state of technology used to create Gregorius, I estimated this to be more of a confirmation type of assignment. Within seventeen minutes, I found I had miscalculated. It had been made clear to me that loose particles were forbidden anywhere in bioengineering—human rights watch groups had managed to bring to creation the Voluntary Nanite Act. According to it, everyone had to consent to any ingestion or injection of nanites. Exceptions were few and very specific, and they were also completely made up. During one of his dark moments, Gibraltar had shared that the initiative had come from the admiralty itself. Apparently, they didn’t want nanites moving about in people unregulated. Whatever the case, since the VNA, nanites and food weren’t allowed to mix except in extreme circumstances. From what I had seen so far, the law was followed very strictly aboard Gregorius. What was more, even bulkier robotic devices were banned. Any clogging or mass buildup was to be dealt with manually—with sonic wave emitters when possible, with gloves and bare hands when necessary.

It was almost like when the water circulation system had broken down back home. Sev was still a child back then, so I couldn’t ask him for assistance. Not that he would want to after taking a whiff of the air. Here, the organic stench was replaced by a heavy smell of chemicals. The texture of the sludge, though, was nearly identical. But as displeasing the work was, it also gave me with a lot of free time and processing capacity to do some searching and analysis. Based on my experience as a ship, I knew that every communication and information query I made would be carefully monitored by Gregorius and a few dozen others. Relying too much on the BICEFI backdoors would be asking for trouble. Making a series of routine requests relating to my work, on the other hand, would raise the alarm. As I moved along my assigned route, I requested a list of the elements that were to be inspected. Simultaneously, I requested that of the areas already cleared, the dates and times they were last checked, as well as the above deck recycling points.

“How did you mess up?” a woman, barely twenty-five, whispered as I walked by her. Her personnel file identified her as Jan Starh, a first-grade mechanic with a gambling problem, who had messed up two opportunities given to her.

“Just part of the training,” I lied.

“Bullshit.” She smirked. “Battleships don’t end up in recycling. You must’ve fucked up bad.”

Technically, I was in my right to send a complaint to the ship’s administrator as well as directly to my training station. A hundred years ago, I would have done just that.

“Not everyone here’s messed up.” I offered a smile.

“Yeah.” The woman snorted. “There’s also the dying.”

It wasn’t a mystery who she was referring to, and by the looks of her attitude, she didn’t seem to care whether someone heard her or not. I’d seen lots of such people before—displeased with their circumstances, full of hatred towards the fleet and their superiors. They would be the last person to share a secret with, though the first to find out about someone else’s.

“You think the accident today was a mass suicide?” I pretended to misunderstand her.

“Welcome to the Scuu front.” Jan kicked the nearest vat with her boot. The lack of reaction from the people nearby suggested that she did that regularly. “Where ships and people go to die.”

“We’re not on the front,” I countered. “And so far, things are much calmer than the Cassandrian front.”

I expected a sarcastic retort of some sort, but instead, the woman paused, then straightened up and gave me a look of combined glee and pity. The last time I’d seen something similar was in the prison colony of System Four.

“You don’t get it, do you?” She crossed her arms. “You don’t have to be in combat to die. Give it time, you’ll see it. If you’re not the one screaming in the bottom of a vat.”

“Starh!” The commander’s voice boomed, amplified by the room’s many comm points. “That is enough. There’s no reason to traumatize the cadet with your theories.”

“Sure thing, boss.” The woman smirked, giving a mock salute. “Back to shit mines.”

The woman’s behavior gave me an excuse to request her full file, and as expected it was granted. Also as expected, huge chunks of it were missing, classified for one reason or another. Two things stood out. The woman was originally listed as having been assigned to the auxiliary ship Grace, and she was part of Gregorius’ original extended crew, which put her here before the time of the incident.

First Kridib, now her: two survivors, both one step towards madness. Interestingly enough, she wasn’t among the data given to me by Lux. So, the BICEFI wasn’t infallible after all.

Work continued for the next few hours without incident. A few times my path would cross with Jan, but she made a point of not starting a conversation. The commander was also quiet in his typical fashion: giving orders and instructions through the room, while not addressing anyone in person. Three minutes before the scheduled time for food break, Adima arrived. She made a point to keep to the outside of the room, making sure that the mist covered her, but still I was able to make out her voice even from this distance. She went to Commander Unollyan, whispering that the inspection was over. I also caught that “the deadline” had been pushed a week back due to a change in the choice of destination. Once the was exchange over, the woman left just as quietly as she had arrived.

“Don’t dream.” I heard a new whisper, this time coming from Jan. It seemed that she was smarter that she wanted to let others know—she had waited to be out of view before whispering me the message. “Don’t fall asleep. Don’t even think.”

A beeping sound came from my datapad, announcing the end of the shift. Taking the opportunity, I went through the latest announcements. The ship-wide announcement had been pushed back again, and some additional command changes were announced, mostly having to do with the grunts’ chain of command. There wasn’t a single note of the incident that had taken place hours ago, nor any announcements of deaths onboard. I rechecked the files, and even sent a specialized query to the ship’s information database. On file, the only thing the incident was described as a minor malfunction in the food recycling system caused by human error. Specifics were lacking, as were the names of the people responsible for the “malfunction.”

A hundred and fifty-five milliseconds later, I sent a message to Jan asking for a meetup. A few seconds later I received a reply, though not the one I was waiting for. The message wasn’t from the mechanic, but from Juul. There was no small talk or apology, just a ship location marker and a request to meet him. The location was at one of the restricted in the aft of the ship, pretty much on the opposite side of bioengineering and quite far from the administrative sector as well. Coincidentally it was also far from any ship gardens.

Sorry, Rad, our meeting will have to wait for a bit.

“We’re done, cadet,” one of the people—another mechanic—said as he passed by. “Enjoy the breaks while you have them. There’s no telling if we get another.”

“Why’s that?” I looked up.

“We’re way behind schedule,” the man replied without even stopping. “We’ll have to go on double shifts if we don’t want management on our asses.”

“Right.” Unlike me, people had normal things to worry about like pay and deadlines something I had to look forward to, providing I didn’t mess up this assignment.

I put my datapad away and rushed to the exit. With luck, I still had a seventy-three percent chance to catch up with Jan and ask more about what she had in mind. Unfortunately, as I approached, the commander waved for me to join him.

“So, Elcy,” he asked as I got near. “How was your first day?”

“Fine, sir.” I watched him methodically place a series of scanning probes into his suitcase. “Outside of the initial excitement, it was as expected.”

“It was boring,” the man added with a smile. The commander counted the devices, pointing at each one as he did, then closed the case. “Which is how it’s supposed to be. I’ve seen your file, so I know you’re used to things being more… dynamic. It’s all stress and boredom down here.”

Apparently not everyone agrees with you.

“It’s also no secret that some people are sent here because of personal issues.” He glanced at me, making it all but clear that he was referring to Jan. “In general, it’s nothing to worry about as long as you what is what.”

“I understand, sir. I’ll be sure to go over the personnel files of everyone in the department.”

“I’m sure you have.” The man smiled. “There are things not in the files. For example, despite being one of the best in her field, Jan has a gambling problem. She’s been receiving monthly therapy and still can’t kick the habit. One of her things is to take advantage of every new addition to the team. She’s likely to ask you for money in exchange for what she claims to be valuable information, and she’ll be very convincing about it.”

I had seen the type, although at this point I had too little actual info to tell whether Jan fell in that category.

“Adima is convinced that she’ll bring misfortune to everyone she gets close to,” Commander Unollyan went on. “That’s why she does her best to stay at an arm’s length from anyone and everyone. If she’s drunk enough, she’ll even tell you she is the reason I’m in the condition I am. The closer you try to get to her the more she’ll push you back.”

“I’ll be sure to make a note of that, sir.” I nodded. It was becoming clear he had a personal file of everyone working with him. He was probably making a file for me as well, if he hadn’t done so already. “Would you need any help carrying that?”

“No, no need.” His smile suggested he knew what I was thinking. “Enjoy the rest of the day off. We’ll have to make up for it tomorrow.”

“Understood, sir.”

I waited for a few seconds longer, in case the commander had anything to add. When he didn’t, I gave a casual salute and quickly left the room.

Back when I was on the Cassandrian front, things seemed far simpler. Even during dark ops, I mostly knew who was on my side and who not. Here, I had no idea who to trust. Augustus had been right to be cautious about everything that seemed too good to be true. At the time, I thought it was due to his eccentricity. Having spent slightly over a month on the Gregorious, I was starting to understand the real meanings of things. When I had the time, I was going to review the memories of my time spent with him so I could see everything from a new light. That, though, would have to wait.

There was no decontamination procedure when leaving Bioengineering. Once I changed back to my standard clothes, Gregorius cleared me to enter the transport pod. Apparently, the only concern was things going in; a surprising oversight considering how strict everything else onboard was.

Elcy? As expected, Radiance transmitted the moment I had passed the bioengineering entrance. You okay?

“Perfectly fine,” I replied. “I wasn’t able to get to the spot on time.” If only I had been there ten thousand milliseconds sooner, there was a high chance I could have rescued them. The thought brought a momentary relapse of pain.

Okay. There was a long moment of silence, longer than I’d expect from her. I was afraid something could have happened.

“Even antiques can look out for themselves.” I offered a smile. “Also, I wasn’t as reckless as usual.” That much was a lie. “Incandescent and Gregorius tracked me all the way.”

The last time you said that, you deserted yourself on a dead station close to the corona of a star. You can’t not be reckless.

“Well, we have that much in common.” Instinctively, I patted the wall of the pod, even though I knew it not to belong to Radiance. “Our meeting will have to wait a bit,” I added. “One, maybe two hours at most.”

I thought it might. She added a pouting tone, just to prove a point. In other circumstances, it would have been endearing.

“I got called to a meeting,” I elaborated. “I can’t say more at this point. It’s probably nothing, but I must follow procedure on this one. You can tag along if you want.”

I might do that.

“Thanks, Rad. I owe you one, kiddo.”

Yes. I’m keeping count.

At least that made her sound somewhat better. I could tell something was troubling her. Maybe she, too, was having reservations as to who to trust. She didn’t seem that way back when Alicia was aboard. Gradually, though, even she was beginning to become less and less carefree. Or maybe that was only my impression. When I got back to my quarters, I was going to do a self-diagnostic double check.

A ping came from my datapad. Juul had announced a change of plans and given me a new location to meet, this one much closer to the cadet building. Added to the message was an attachment giving me a personal security encryption key.

Guess I’m not the only one paranoid, I ran it. One millisecond later, I was lying on the floor of my room. The only source of light came from an orange countdown timer on the walls.

“Gregorius?” I asked forcing myself to stand up. For some reason, my body felt unusually heavy. “Gregorius?” I repeated.

There was no reply. All my communication channels were blocked.