They didn’t make it that far before Ashok said, “Multiple impacts aft. They’re shooting harpoons at me!”

  “That’s what they used to do on the show,” Delilah said.

  “These are attached to some kind of incredibly strong wire, though, and I can’t shake them,” Ashok said. “They’re reeling themselves in – I think they’re planning to get their ship close enough to board. They’re in for a surprise when they do. The Golden Spider has plenty of countermeasures–”

  Ashok’s voice cut off just as the viewscreens and all the lights on the ship went dark. Delilah cried out as her feet left the floor. The artificial gravity was off, and in the total darkness, she felt lost in space.

  “EMP,” Crowbar’s voice drifted up from the vicinity of the floor. “They disabled the ship’s systems.”

  “I can’t believe they’re going to make me take my shirt off,” Winslow muttered. Delilah heard a zipper. “All right, I can see you, I’m coming toward you.”

  “What do you mean?” Delilah said.

  “Our first officer can see in the dark,” Crowbar said.

  “How–” A hand gripped hers. “Is that you Winslow?”

  “Yeah, let me get Crowbar.”

  “We’re supposed to be hardened against that kind of attack,” Delilah said. “I don’t understand how an EMP affected us.”

  “We – wait, there’s someone else in here!” Winslow said.

  “You aren’t hardened against attack from inside the ship, me pretty,” an unfamiliar voice said from somewhere in front of her.

  “Pirates!” Winslow cried, and then a burst of something damp and sweet-smelling hit Delilah in the face. The darkness around her became even deeper, and she lost herself.

  Delilah groaned and opened her eyes, staring at the smooth gray of an unfamiliar bulkhead. Something was trapping her, some kind of net, and she thrashed wildly, only tangling herself further, until Crowbar said, “Calm yourself. You are in a hammock.”

  She blinked around, then realized he was right. She’d slept in quite a few hammocks during her space journey, because they were practical bedding in microgravity. She carefully extricated herself from the hammock and crawled out, taking in her surroundings. They were in a storage room of some kind, probably on a ship, just a dull cube of a space strung with a few hammocks. A distressingly damp curtain in one corner was pulled aside to reveal a toilet, and shelves behind sliding plastic doors on the wall held various sorts of freeze-dried foodstuffs and bulbs that probably contained water.

  There was one door, closed. Crowbar was floating next to it, pulling wires out of the wall. That was promising, at least.

  Winslow was in another hammock, apparently unconscious, and – there was something wrong with his chest, his unzipped jumpsuit revealing a slice of skin covered in… blisters? Welts? Odd bulges and lines and folds of skin. Maybe he’d been hit by shrapnel at some point, and it had healed over.

  He groaned, looked over at her, then zipped himself up before getting out of the hammock. “Ugh.”

  “Where are we?” Delilah said.

  “Good question,” Winslow said. “I’d guess we’re in whatever the pirate equivalent of jail is.”

  “Dungeon,” Crowbar offered.

  “Yes, thank you,” Winslow said.

  “By dungeon standards it is not so bad,” Crowbar said. “I have been conscious for ten minutes, and have examined it thoroughly. This cell has had other inhabitants – there are hash marks scratched on the wall there. Someone kept count of the days. There are other markings as well. I like the graffiti in the bathroom that says ‘Starbeard sucks like vacuum.’” Crowbar twisted some wires together. Delilah wondered how he’d pried a panel off the wall. Her tool belt was gone, and she couldn’t imagine the – space pirates! – had left them anything useful in here.

  “Have you seen our captors?” she asked.

  “No,” Crowbar said.

  Winslow gazed around. “Their captain must really call himself Starbeard, if the graffiti says that. So. They somehow boarded our ship and set off an EMP on the inside, then gassed us with a sedative. I wish I knew how they’d boarded.”

  “Personal teleport,” Crowbar said. “Axiom tech, used sometimes by the truth-tellers, but highly restricted and rare. Makes a sort of… personal wormhole. Short range, but useful for infiltration. It makes sense the pirates have such technology. We know they are good at building bridges.”

  “Is there any other nature-of-reality-altering technology you know about that I don’t?” Winslow said.

  “Probably,” Crowbar said. “Cannot be sure. Do not know the full extent of your knowledge.”

  “Winslow,” Delilah said. “Is Ashok, ah…”

  “Dead? Or the AI equivalent? I don’t think so. Offline, probably. If we reboot his systems, he should wake up again.”

  Crowbar said, “There. Door open.”

  The door slid into the wall, revealing a corridor, and Delilah gave a silent cheer.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Winslow said.

  He led, followed close by Delilah, and then Crowbar, who, she noticed, seemed to be fashioning a garrote out of wall wires.

  A human in a stained Jovian Imperative military jumpsuit drifted in the corridor a few meters away. She smiled at them, her eyes bloodshot, hair a mass of messy braids. She held out an unlabeled glass bottle of murky liquid, magenta in color. “You got out of your cell in record time!” she said. “Have a drink in celebration.” She sailed the bottle toward them, and Delilah plucked it from the air to keep it from banging into her.

  “Who are you?” Winslow said.

  “Lieutenant Grigsby, late of the Pikeville,” she said. “Welcome to the Rathole.”

  “The Rathole?” Delilah said. “That’s what the pirates called their asteroid dungeon on the show, it was riddled with miles of tunnels, full of people they’d captured. There was a whole episode set there once, with characters you never saw before or after – there was a whole society in the place.”

  “What show?” Grigsby said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Maybe we can answer some questions for each other,” Winslow said.

  “Sure,” Grigsby said. “There’s not much to do here except talk, unless you count waiting to die of old age as an activity.”

  “We will not die of old age,” Crowbar said. “We will escape.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Grigsby said. “Pretty much all of us escape every once in a while. You have to pass the time somehow.”

  There were five other prisoners, gathered listlessly in some sort of common room. Grigsby introduced the newcomers around. A pair of black-haired androgynous people who might have been twins were Rahmah and Jabir–”They make the prison wine. It’s mostly canned fruit and sauerkraut, but it’s got a little kick.” The two nodded coolly at Delilah and Winslow and narrowed their eyes at Crowbar, but said nothing. “They were asteroid miners in the Netjer system, and they’ve been here about four years.”

  A woman with a shaved head, wearing a bright orange environment suit sans helmet, was stacking cans in an alcove. “That’s Guðríður. She ran a salvage operation out by Catequil, in Hanan Pacha? They’ve got those big gas giants, full of storms, so there are lots of wrecks to play around in. She’s a ten-year veteran of the Rathole, and our procurement officer.”

  “Don’t call me that,” she muttered. “I’m not in the military. Neither are you, anymore.” She glanced over at them. “I just go out to the other ships and scavenge supplies as needed. Maybe one of you can go with me to your ship later, and show me what’s worth bringing back here. The pirates only take shiny things and alcohol. They leave food and medical supplies, fortunately.”

  “Let me finish making the rounds before you get into all that,” Grigsby said, steering Winslow toward the other side of the room. “That’s Every, my co-pilot on the Pikeville.” The woman didn’t even look up from the magnetic chess board fixed to a table. “The old guy beating her to death at chess is Vane. He’s been here – how long, Vane?”

  “Twenty years, if you aren’t lying about what year it is.” He had white hair and appeared to be wearing pajamas.

  “How many times have you escaped?” Grigsby said.

  “About thirty,” he said. “I used to do it a lot early on. Now it’s just an annual thing, on my birthday.”

  “You can come and go freely to other vessels?” Delilah said.

  “I found it kind of shocking myself, at first,” Grigsby said. “Me and Every couldn’t accept what these folks told us, you know? We broke out, made our way back to the Pikeville, and tried to fly out of this place. After a while, we hit a wall. We’re inside some kind of big sphere.”

  “We’re inside the anomaly,” Winslow said. “The thing you came to destroy.”

  Grigsby brightened. “You know about our mission?”

  “We’re the rescue crew,” Delilah said. “In theory. We were looking for you when we got snatched.”

  “I appreciate the effort, anyhow.” Grigsby gestured around. “These people all came from such distant places, they thought us ending up here was just another random event. The way the pirates are indestructible though, just like the anomaly, had us wondering.”

  Delilah expected one of the others to express curiosity about “the anomaly,” but they paid no attention at all. They’d had all the curiosity sapped out of them, it seemed.

  “We aren’t sure how it works, yet,” Winslow said. “But yes, based on our measurements, it checks out.”

  “Huh. We didn’t cover every bit of the inside of the sphere, but we did a random sample, and there were no openings, which makes sense, if it’s the anomaly. That thing was impossible to enter, so naturally it’s impossible to escape.”

  “The pirates really just let you fly around?” Delilah was stuck on that point. The ones in Hyperion’s Revenge hadn’t been so lenient… but then, this version of the Rathole wasn’t the prison. The whole anomaly was.

  “They don’t seem to care what we do after they board, pillage, and stick us here,” Grigsby said.

  “Where do the pirates live?” she asked.

  “There’s a station not far from here, where they dock their flagship.”

  “And you haven’t fired up one of those old battleships and destroyed their station because it’s indestructible, I guess,” Winslow said.

  “They’re gods,” the old man said. “We tried that, when I first got here. Mounted a full assault. Threw nukes at them. We even had a railgun. The bombs exploded, then unexploded. The railgun smashed in their hull, but then it unsmashed. The pirates can control time, or something.” He looked up at them and grinned, and there was something glassy and faraway in his eyes. “Sometimes I think this is all a complicated hallucination, and that you’re all imaginary. I like that idea.” He moved a chess piece while still staring at them. “Checkmate,” he said.

  Every sighed heavily and started resetting the board.

  “It’s not just the ships and the station,” Grigsby said. “Every and I did an infiltration on their station. We snuck in, and I shot one of the pirates with a sidearm. Or I tried. The gun wouldn’t even fire. Just made a sort of puffing sound, like the gases inside were expanding, and then contracting again. The pirates didn’t even take the gun away from me. They just tied us up and brought us back to the Rathole. I tested the gun later, and it worked fine.”

  “We can’t leave,” Every said, studying the board. “We can’t fight. So… we sit here.”

  Delilah glanced at Winslow, and he furrowed his brow. Should we? she mouthed. He was the first officer, and she didn’t want to make a decision about sharing intel without his approval, especially about super-secret technology.

  But Crowbar didn’t share her hesitation, “We have a way out of here. We have to wait a few days for our systems to recharge, but then we can take all of you home.”

  Delilah expected pandemonium, but no one seemed very interested.

  “Our ship has a portable wormhole generator,” Winslow said. “Brand new tech. It works… well, a bit like whatever the pirates used to bring you all here.”

  “Of course,” Grigsby said. “You must, if you made it out here. Like the one on captain Machedo’s ship?” Every looked up with something like interest.

  “It takes longer to recharge between uses, but yes,” Delilah said.

  “Huh. That might actually work. Though tech is… kind of unreliable in here.”

  “They’re gods,” Vane said. “They won’t let us leave. Your… thing, won’t work. Starbeard won’t let it work. Even if we escape, they’ll rewind us, bring us back.”

  “Vane, come on,” Grigsby said, but the old man interrupted.

  “Show them!” he said. “Show them the bone room!”

  “I don’t want to–” she began, and Vane spun and pushed himself off toward them.

  “Come on. New people. Follow me.” Vane dragged himself out of the room, and after exchanging glances and shrugs, Winslow and Delilah followed. He led them down half a dozen corridors – they were in one of the big ships, apparently – until they finally reached the cargo bay day. He slammed his hand into a red button, and the door rose up.

  The space beyond was full of bones. Skulls, femurs, pelvises, spines, ribcages. They floated in the air, some still with bits of flesh clinging to them, many charred or stained with soot. Speckles of gray ash floated in the air like flakes in a monstrous snowglobe. Delilah tried to count the skulls to get a sense of the number of remains – numbers had always acted as insulation from horror, for her – but stopped when she got to fifty.

  “Someone, a long time ago, rigged it up so that room is a giant crematorium,” Vane said. “Only it doesn’t run quite hot enough to break down the bones, just burns away most of the flesh, so the skeletons bounce around in there. Sometimes people go in there when they don’t want to be alive anymore. There’s no getting out of here, do you understand? This is your future. This is what waits.”

  Winslow put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. “I… lived in a terrible place too,” he said. “In a lab, run by people called the Exalted. They made me help them with their experiments. They experimented on me, to make me better suit their purposes. Look.” He unzipped his jumpsuit, revealing the blistered flesh she’d noticed before. As she watched, some of those blisters opened, blinking, revealing eyes of various sizes and colors. Some of them can see in the dark, she thought, and shivered. Vane gaped at him, open-mouthed. “I did a lot of diagnostic work,” Winslow said bitterly, zipping back up. “I was one of their successful experiments. They had a room sort of like this, though. A place where they put their failed experiments and ‘sanitized’ them. I knew that was where I’d end my life, Vane, as soon as my usefulness ran out. The Vanir system had been that way for centuries, and the enemy was so much stronger than us – they might as well have been gods, too. But Vane...” He stared into the old man’s eyes, and Vane stared back. “We beat them. The balance shifted. We escaped. I escaped. I found a new life. And I do not intend to spend the rest of my life in another prison.”

  The old man licked his lips, then squeezed his eyes shut and pulled away. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he muttered.

  “They do have a point,” Crowbar said. “The pirates may be able to prevent the working of the bridge generator. We do not know their full capabilities. I can attempt to infiltrate their headquarters and disable their equipment, however.”

  “Do you think you’d succeed?” Winslow said.

  “The likelihood is low,” he said. “If they simply send their prisoners back here upon capture, however, the risk of trying is minimal.”

  “I wonder if we’d have a better chance if we joined the pirate crew,” Delilah said.

  “How would we do that?” Winslow said. “I doubt they’re taking applications.”

  “Well, there was this one episode of Hyperion’s Revenge,” Delilah began.

  “Was that true, what Winslow said, about being a prisoner?” Delilah and Crowbar were in one of the Rathole’s shuttles, cruising toward the pirate’s station.

  “Yes,” Crowbar said. “The Exalted were biological experts. They performed experiments, combining human physiology with that of my people. The resulting chimeras were used as forced labor, or sometimes they became willing collaborators. Some had obvious alterations – their arms replaced with pseudopods, for example – while others had more subtle internal changes.”

  “What did they do to Winslow?”

  “It is not my place to say,” Crowbar said. “Spend enough time with him, and you will see eventually. Or you could ask him yourself.”

  “Okay. Fair enough. I hope he can wake up Ashok.”

  “The assistance of a hyperintelligent AI would be welcome,” Crowbar said. “Do you think your plan will work?”

  “I have no idea. It depends on how insane these pirates are. But like you said, it sounds like if we fail, they’ll just send us back to the Rathole, so where’s the harm in trying?”

  They made no particular effort at stealth, and since they approached straight-on, Delilah had a long, clear look at the station at the center of the sphere’s interior. It was composed of several overlapping rings arranged around a small globe. “Killbot Bay,” Delilah said.

  “Explain.”

  “That’s what the pirate base was called on Hyperion’s Revenge. I bet that’s what they call it here, too.” She peered through the screen. “Is that… a crow’s nest?” A long pole extended up from the top of the station’s center, sliding between a gap in the rings, and it looked like there was a small perch of some kind at the tip.

  “Crows do not thrive in vacuum,” Crowbar said. “I should know.”

  “Was that a joke?”

  “It was a very funny joke.”

  “A crow’s nest is like, a lookout on old sailing ships, there’d be someone stationed up there, either a young person with good eyes or someone with a telescope, to see what was coming over the horizon.” The crow’s nest lowered again. “I think they know we’re coming. You should get ready.”