it.”

That, in conjunction with the delay on maintaining my hardsuit, made me sit upright. It’s a good thing we weren’t in free fall, because I dropped my spoon and nobody likes oatmeal floating into their hair. Things did not slip Sally’s mind.

“I think I better have a look at this,” I said, trying to ignore the chill of unease I felt.

“Get Loese to show you,” Sally said. “She looked at it yesterdia.”

I got Loese to show me.

She was around in the control cabin, which is mostly where we congregated when we weren’t sleeping, eating, or working. I had to make a halfway circuit of Sally’s circumference to get there, so it took me a whole two minutes. Maybe ninety seconds. Sally is big for a starship, but that doesn’t make her big.

Loese had black hair and unusually pale skin and a butch presentation. I found her bent over panels, her afthands immersed in their interface while she worked course calculations. Loese is a spacer by upbringing, and has the usual spacer mods: it must be seriously irritating to her to be stuck on Sally with her constant simulated spin gravity.

On the other hand, maybe it’s fun to zip around the galaxy on an ambulance. No speed limits for us, except for physics. And nobody makes Loese buy her own fuel.

“Hey,” I said when she looked up. “When you get a break, can you take me to see whatever went wrong yesterdia? Sally said you hadn’t fixed it yet.”

“Sure,” Loese said. “We can go right now. Just let me pause this. And since we’ve got functional coms back, I wasn’t going to fix it until we got back to Core. To preserve the evidence.”

“The evidence,” I said, startled enough that it didn’t register with me that I ought to be asking a question. I was repeating the words that didn’t make sense, in an experimental fashion.

Loese looked at me. “Sally didn’t tell you.”

“Sally told me it was an equipment failure and sent me to bed. What didn’t Sally tell me?”

“Come see for yourself,” Loese said. “Sally?”

“Here, Loese.”

Loese led me farther around the ring, and aft. We opened a hatch that led to a little room too small for both of us to enter at once. It was an equipment access and storage space, and we wound up unclipping and moving a few duffel crates of things we used too regularly for it to be worth printing them every time we wanted them before we got to the back of it.

When they were out of the way, I could see scorch marks in the ship’s grippy interior sheathing. Somebody had scored the material and peeled it back to expose the workings underneath. Sally was supposed to be self-healing, but either she’d shut it off or that function was compromised.

“You opened this?” I asked Loese.

“There’s a superconductor path under here,” Loese said. “A lot of electricity wound up going places it shouldn’t have.”

“How is that possible? It’s not live, is it? And why isn’t it healing?”

She moved back so I could step past her. “Sally can’t find it. Based on what you told me, it sounds like she can’t even remember what’s wrong.”

“That sounds like brain damage,” I said, and had a sudden unsettling memory of Helen talking around the programmed blocks that didn’t allow her to see what a part of her own… self… was doing. “But how—”

“Sabotage,” Loese said, succinctly and reluctantly.

“The docked ship?” I asked. “Wait, Helen?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing out here. It must have been in progress before Sally made any contact with Helen or the machine on Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

She seemed to realize that her revelation would trigger a whole cascade of questions, because she continued, “And I don’t think any of you did it: I think it must have been put in place back at Core. I think somebody hid a device with a timer or some other kind of trigger in Sally, so that she lost coms with you and Tsosie while you were outside. And then put some kind of worm or logic bomb in her code so she would not be able to tell what was happening.”

I stared at her. There were words in my head, but they all seemed to get jammed in the pre-verbial door trying to get out at the same time. She’d only been our pilot for a few standard months, but I’d come to rely on her skill and calm. And the nervous twitchiness I was picking up from her was… deeply worrying.

Loese, watching my expression, shrugged. “If Rhym hadn’t sensed smoke… well, their tendrils are a lot more sensitive than a human olfactory system. We could have been in much more trouble by the time we were found.”

But how could she be sure that none of us were behind it?

“This was sabotage.” I had to hear it in my own voice to internalize it, I suppose.

“Yes,” Loese said. “I am confident in that assessment.”

“But how could Sally not notice? How could she not detect the damage before it happened? How could she not feel the device?”

“That troubles me as well; thus my theory of the logic bomb. Sally is running a self-diagnostic, and we’ve been unable to find signs of any other time bombs ticking away, but a definitive cyberpathology report will probably have to wait until we get home again.”

“Should we abort? Run for home?” I asked.

Her lips pressed together. “We’re not in any more danger here than we are running home, really. We can do the diagnostics perfectly well right where we are. Our patients need us. And if something were to go catastrophically wrong, the next wave of rescue vehicles has a better chance of finding us here than they do somewhere in white space. I also wonder what the purpose of it was. It wasn’t enough damage to really endanger Sally. It just left us out of contact with you for a while.”

“Tsosie and I have been replaced by predatory, shapeshifting aliens,”

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