“The system clocks on the bombs aren’t running backward,” the blonde said. “They’re not quite in synch with our ship clock anymore, they lost a couple of seconds while they were, ah, blowing up, but, no, they didn’t rewind.”

  “So what then?” Callie said.

  “I have no idea,” the blonde said.

  Ashok waved a hand, and the screen froze. “Do you drink, Delilah?”

  “Not often. Now seems like a good time to make an exception.”

  “Come with me to Callie’s ready room. She’s got some real nice bourbon in there. The nice thing about drinking in a simulation is, it tastes great, and you can even get drunk in here if you have the right settings turned on, but you’re sober when you come out, and no hangover.”

  “What if I don’t want to be sober when I come out?”

  “Then I have to be all captainly and say, no drinking on duty.”

  They walked through the frozen scene, down a short corridor, and into a small, neat room with a desk, a terminal, and a comfortable-looking armchair positioned facing a viewport on to scattered stars. “They had to redecorate this whole ship once we got a gravity generator installed,” Ashok said. “You don’t need all the loops and straps and rails and velcro when you can have the same part of the ship be the floor for the whole journey. Here, let me glitch you up a seat.” Ashok lifted the armchair and moved it a few feet away. “Avert your gaze,” he said, and Delilah looked briefly at the ceiling with its warm, indirect lighting. When she looked back, the original armchair was in place, while Ashok sat in its duplicate. Delilah took her place, and Ashok opened a desk drawer and removed a bottle of brown liquor. “Fortunately she has two glasses. No duplication glitch needed.”

  He poured, and Delilah sniffed hers before taking a sip. She mostly drank cocktails with a high fruit-to-rum ratio, and she was prepared for the bitter burn she associated with taking shots. There was an alcohol bite, but mostly the sensation was warmth, and the taste was sort of caramel-apple-y. “This is delicious. Is it this good in real life?”

  “I was never much of a drinker when I had a body,” Ashok said. “In here, I can tweak my virtual taste buds. To be a hundred percent honest, this tastes like a mango lassi to me right now. But yours is probably a pretty accurate simulacrum, yeah.”

  Delilah settled back and thought about what she’d seen. It made no more sense in retrospect. “What happens next?”

  “We head for the inscrutable object, and bring our unique perspectives to bear on the problem of what the heck it is and how it does the things it does.”

  “I don’t know if I have a unique perspective.”

  “You do, everyone does, it’s just a question of whether it’s a useful unique perspective. We’ll see!”

  Now was as good a time as any to broach the subject. “Captain, why did you choose me? It turns out you’re, like, an engineering god out here. You could have had your pick of crew. Why choose me?”

  “Because I had my pick of crew. I have a much bigger brain than I used to, so I made a program to sift through a whole lot of variables and figure out who’d be the best addition to the Golden Spider, in terms of skillset, temperament, and, well, call it philosophy.”

  “Okay. Your algorithm picked me. But why?”

  “Because you’re smart, hardworking, open to new information, eager to have unprecedented experiences, and you can get along with me and Winslow and tolerate Crowbar. Plus… you did your doctoral thesis on maximizing exergy in Tanzer Drives to make their systems more efficient. Basically, you spent years thinking about how to reduce entropy, right? Fighting the good fight against the second law of thermodynamics.”

  “Sure. So?”

  Ashok sipped his mango-flavored bourbon. “Well, that object out there can reverse entropy. I thought that might be the sort of thing that would interest you.”

  “Nothing can reverse entropy.”

  “That’s what I use to tell my mom, but she still made me clean my room.”

  Delilah rolled her eyes. Her legendary engineer captain was sometimes ridiculous, and that was oddly comforting. “Yes, you can increase order, but you have to put energy into the process. Entropy just doesn’t spontaneously reverse itself. That’s the law you can’t violate.”

  “Fair enough. That thing the Axiom built can undo a nuclear explosion, though, which is a reversal of entropy beyond anything thought possible. Much harder even than cleaning my room. If it didn’t happen spontaneously, it sure seemed to happen automatically, which is very nearly just as cool. Remember what I said about Axiom power sources? There must be an awfully impressive one in their sphere if it can do something like that.” He leaned forward, the lenses over his eyes rotating. “Don’t you want to take it apart and see how it works?”

  Delilah was in one of the maintenance shafts, checking a series of relays that Ashok said felt a little “sticky,” whatever that meant; she wasn’t capable of imagining the physical sensations of having a spaceship for a body. Crowbar hung upside down from a pipe on the ceiling by one pseudopod, shining a light on the access panel for her while she methodically clicked switches back and forth. Huh. Some of them did feel sticky. She squirted lubricant where necessary. “Why are you really here?” Delilah asked. “Ashok doesn’t need you to be a pilot.”

  “You are very blunt for a human.”

  “Winslow said I should try to talk to you on your own terms.”

  “I approve. I am here because my kindler thought I would be useful to the mission.”

  “I thought you were always honest? That sounded a lot like an evasion.”

  “When your culture forbids lies, you become gifted at evasion and omission. I will answer more directly, as my kindler says that a proper crew can become like a family. All of my incubation-mates were given gestational training and exposure to various… trades, a human might say. Areas of expertise. Upon our birth, we took a test to determine the true confluence of interest and ability, to determine our… hmm… optimal occupational path of greatest satisfaction?”

  “Your calling?” Delilah had always felt engineering was hers. Figuring out how things worked, and how to make them work better.

  “Yes, good. I have a particular aptitude for and interest in breaking codes and overcoming barriers to entry. That is why I chose the name Crowbar.”

  “You’re good at… breaking and entering?”

  “Physically and electronically. Circumventing security systems, identifying weak points, countering countermeasures. My kindler says I have a mind that looks at systems and sees the places where they will break down. Some who have that ability become security experts, because they take satisfaction in fortifying those weak points. My greatest pleasure comes in exploiting them.”

  “You’re here to help us break into the anomaly,” Delilah said.

  “If it can be entered. If not, I will attempt to overcome its security measures, allowing us to destroy it. I have studied all the footage. I see several possible lines of inquiry and am eager to begin.”

  “I’m pretty nervous about the whole thing myself.”

  “Winslow says anxiety and excitement largely involve the same physical responses in the human body. The resulting sensations are merely interpreted by the mind in different ways. I recommend you interpret your feelings as excitement instead.”

  “I’ll work on that.” Delilah flicked the last relay back into place and activated her comms. “Captain, how does that feel?”

  “Like a cramp just uncramped,” he said in her ear. “Thanks. The haptic feedback from my repair drones can’t compare to the sensitivity of human hands.”

  “Good to know our electronic overlords still have a use for us.”

  “Somebody has to change our batteries occasionally too. We–”

  Ashok’s voice cut out, replaced by wailing klaxons, and the maintenance tunnel was bathed in flashing red emergency lights.

  “All personnel to the observation deck!” Ashok said. “We have a problem.”

  Delilah arrived on deck, Crowbar scuttling along behind her, just as Winslow arrived. “What’s going on?” she said.

  Winslow pointed wordlessly at the viewscreen. The darkness pinpricked by stars was gone. Now they cruised through what appeared to be a graveyard for ships. Just from here, she could see the husks of freighters and gas haulers, small pleasure craft, an asteroid mining vessel (that one was torn in half), and even an old Jovian Imperative battle cruiser.

  “No stars,” Crowbar said, and Delilah looked at him, then back at the screen. She hadn’t even noticed, being so distracted by the dark ships, but he was right – the field of view wasn’t that crowded, and she should have been able to see stars beyond. She saw nothing.

  “Now we know where the Pikeville went,” Ashok said. A ship in the lower right corner of the screen lit up in green. “It went… wherever we did. I sent them a message, but there’s no response, and their engines are off – no sign of activity over there at all. Same with all these other ships.”

  “How did we end up here?” Winslow said. “I think we would have noticed a scrapyard before we flew into the middle of it.”

  “We were transported here through a bridge,” Ashok said. “A rather more active bridge than we’re used to – this one opened out of nowhere, reached out and grabbed me like a trapdoor spider snatching a cockroach, and pulled me in. Apparently the same thing happened to the Pikeville.”

  “Is it part of the anomaly’s defense system?” Delilah asked, then answered herself. “No, that doesn’t make sense, because where did all these other ships come from? There’s no way they were within a million kilometers of the sphere. I see Earth vessels, Jovian Imperative ships, that looks like a royal courier ship from the Asura system–”

  “I’ve scanned these vessels, and identified some of them from local database records,” Ashok said. “They’re all lost ships, presumed destroyed in accidents or taken by unknown hostile forces, or just mysteriously vanished. Some of them are old.”

  “Bermuda Triangle,” Delilah muttered.

  “What’s that?” Crowbar said.

  “Oh, just… an old Earth legend. There was a place in the sea, near an island called Bermuda, not far from where I grew up. Ships and aircraft disappeared there at an unusually high rate.”

  “These ships didn’t come from any one place,” Winslow said. “They’re from all over.”

  “I know,” Delilah said. “People had all kinds of theories about the Bermuda Triangle – one of the wildest ones I read was that the ships disappeared into some sort of dimensional anomaly, and ended up in an unknown realm or alternate universe.”

  “Maybe the Axiom did it,” Ashok said. “Because they certainly did this. It’s some kind of Axiom program, snatching ships from all over inhabited space, for reasons of their own.”

  “Not just ships,” Crowbar said. “I see asteroids, buoys, probes, supply caches, all sorts of uncrewed objects too.”

  “Huh,” Ashok said. “You’re right. It’s like a random sample of artificial stellar objects, isn’t it? I don’t understand what the point of this is, but then, the Axiom don’t always make a lot of sense.”

  Delilah frowned. “If this is really a random process, though, the odds of the Pikeville and the Golden Spider both being snatched, from the same part of space, are pretty low, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe there are fixed collection points,” Ashok mused. “Let’s say the grabby bridges open up at regular spots in various systems, taking whatever passes by. You’d think someone would have seen it happening, since ships often travel in groups, but maybe the snatch-engines are calibrated to only grab ships when they’re alone. Let me run some backtraces…” A moment’s pause. “Huh, well, this doesn’t prove anything, but in those cases where I can determine where these other ships disappeared, I don’t see any duplication of coordinates. None of them came from the same place, or even within ten thousand kilometers of the same place. We also weren’t anywhere near the Pikeville’s scout route when we got grabbed. Which means you might have a point, Delilah. It does seem like a pretty big coincidence that we’d both end up here.”

  “Or maybe there are billions of the collection points, and most of them just don’t catch anything, because nothing ever passes by,” Winslow said. “Since most of space is nothing.”

  “Incomplete data,” Ashok said. “That’s always fun. It’s a mystery!”

  “Do you have any idea where we are, captain?” Delilah said.

  “That would be another mystery. I’m gathering all the data I can. The lack of visible stars and the absence of ionizing radiation makes me think that, strange as it seems, we’re inside something – an immense structure of some kind. I’m stretching my sensors to the limits and bouncing out beams, so I hope to get a better sense of the nature of that place soon.”

  “I assume we are planning to escape?” Crowbar said.

  “We’ll look for an exit,” Ashok said. “Also anybody else who might be alive in here. The crew of the Pikeville could be here, though for these older ships, I’m less hopeful. Worst case, we wait until our bridge generator recharges, and we leave that way. I – huh. There’s a ship approaching us. I guess we aren’t the only ones in here after all.”

  The image on the viewscreen switched, then magnified, revealing an oncoming vessel. “Why does it have… sails?” Crowbar said. “They aren’t even solar sails. They are just painted cloth on masts stuck to the hull.”

  “Why is it decorated like that?” Winslow said. “All striped like a white tiger. And… are those big silver skulls mounted on the front?”

  Delilah stared, then burst out laughing. She couldn’t help herself. “That – it looks like the ship from Hyperion’s Revenge!”

  “The what?” Winslow said, baffled.

  “It’s from this show, not a sim, way older than that, strictly audio-visual, I learned about it in one of the humanities classes I had to take, a history of space in cinema. We started with Le Voyage dans la Lune, and we watched Star Trek and 2001, on through The Liar’s Bridge and Jovian Conquest and all those, but my friends thought Hyperion’s Revenge was hilarious. We only watched a clip in class, part of some documentary, but we looked the show up on the Tangle and we’d watch episodes while we, uh...”

  “Got high?” Winslow said. “It’s fine. I’m a member of the Church of the Ecstatic Divine myself.”

  “Yeah.” Delilah was chagrined, but also mildly alarmed to hear the ship’s first officer and doctor was part of a psychedelic religion considered decidedly fringe on Earth. “Hyperion’s Revenge is from the twenty-second century, I think? It was a show for kids, about this space pirate named Starbeard, who lurked near the moons of Saturn on his ship, appropriately named the Hyperion’s Revenge. He was always fighting with this naval officer, commander Forrest Flood, who was really the villain, you know, he was totally strict, no sense of humor… but that’s thing, it’s what the pirate ship looked like.”

  “I don’t have that show in my database, but I have the same documentary you probably saw in your class, and yeah, that’s the ship,” Ashok said. “Not the same base model, it’s too new for that, but it’s a direct descendant from the same manufacturer, and with the decorations, it’s a pretty good copy. They’re hailing us. Huh. Putting it onscreen.”

  A section of the wall changed from window to screen, revealing a member of the Free. He wore an eyepatch, though that left five eyes uncovered. He wore a large black tricorn hat. A fringe of twenty or so dangling pseudopods, each half a meter long, hung beneath his eyes, and they were dotted with sparkling blue lights, creating the impression of a beard covered in glitter. He lifted one of his primary pseudopods, and shook a curved, broad-bladed sword at the screen. (Delilah had heard that many people preferred old-fashioned weapons for fighting on ships and stations – you couldn’t put a hole in the hull of a ship by accident with a sword like you could with a gun – but still. A cutlass?) The bridge of his ship prominently featured wooden barrels and coils of rope, and aliens clambered on cargo nets and rigging in the background. “Avast, ye human scum!” the alien shouted. “Prepare to be boarded, and to pay with your riches or your lives!” The image went black.

  “That’s… he looks like Starbeard,” Delilah said. “Or an alien doing Starbeard cosplay anyway.”

  “Space pirates,” Ashok said. “Cinematic space pirates. I was not expecting that. Do you think they’re serious?”

  “Costumes aside, there are a lot of dead ships around us that suggest they might be,” Winslow said.

  “Yeah, but none of them are really damaged, which you’d think they would be, if they were fighting pirates. Even cosplay space pirates…” Ashok went hmm. “I’m telling them to stop their approach or we’ll fire. Instead they’re… approaching even faster, okay. I’m going for a disabling shot.” Missiles lit in green appeared on the screen, streaking for the ship. They all hit, striking both sides of what Delilah already thought of as Hyperion’s Revenge, disabling cannons and engines –

  Or they should have. Instead, the missiles unexploded, just like the ones Delilah had seen in the simulation of the attack on the anomaly, and then drifted harmlessly off to either side.

  “Oh,” Ashok said. “That’s interesting. On a related note, a couple of my pings just came back, and they found the edges of our environment. We appear to be roughly at the center of a sphere with a volume of a few billion cubic kilometers. Which is consistent with…”

  “The size of the anomaly,” Delilah finished. “We’re inside the anomaly?”

  “My job was easier than I expected,” Crowbar said.

  “Since we can’t fight, let’s try flight. Taking evasive maneuvers now,” Ashok said.

  “Should we brace ourselves?” Delilah asked.

  “The artificial gravity will adjust to compensate, but you can grab onto something if it makes you feel better.” The image on the viewscreen shifted as they powered toward the thickest conglomeration of derelict ships, Ashok doubtlessly hoping to lose himself among the other vessels.