One earnest human claimed that an unknown alien had carved away the captains’ high mental functions, then left the brain-damaged survivors living inside a local sewage-treatment plant. Unlikely as it sounded, the witness remembered seeing a woman identical to Washen. “I talked to her,” he swore. “Poor lady. Dumb as can be now. Poor lady.”
With a worried hopefulness, Pamir slipped inside the vast chamber. The original recycling machinery was now augmented with a forest of tailored fungi—a scene that couldn’t help but remind the captain of his mother’s long ago home. Mushrooms towered overhead, feasting on the waste of a thousand species. A village of low huts and smoky fires was exactly where he expected to find it—a human colony not on any map, official or otherwise. Slowly and carefully, he approached the nearest hut, and after a good deep breath, he stepped out and smiled at the woman standing in the open doorway.
He recognized the face. Without doubt, she resembled a one-time engineer who had helped build the Belters’ starship, then later joined the captains’ ranks.
“Aasleen?” he asked, stopping at a throw’s distance.
The face was mostly unchanged, yes: a rich lustrous black over smooth, elegant features, with a radiant yellowy-white smile. Her smile was very much the same, too. The longer Pamir stared at the apparition, the more certain he felt.
She said, “Hello,” quietly, almost too quietly to be heard.
“I’m Pamir,” he blurted. “Remember me, Aasleen?”
“Always,” she replied, and the smile brightened.
Her voice was too soft and too slow. It wasn’t the right voice, yet what if some creature had mutilated her in some elaborate fashion…? With each word, the voice grew a little closer to what he remembered, to what he expected. Pamir found himself enjoying this illusion, stepping closer and watching as the face continued to change, evolving until it was very much the ex-lover’s face.
He asked, “What are you thinking, Aasleen?”
Her mouth opened, but no sound emerged.
“Do you know how you got here?” He stepped even closer, smiling as he repeated the question. “Do you know how?”
“I do,” she lied. “Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“By accident,” she replied. “That’s what it had to be.”
Pamir reached for her face, and when she tried to back away, he said, “No. Let me.” Then his wide hand passed through a projection of light and ionized dust. The fungus hut and the fires were equally unreal. This wasn’t a community, it was an entertainment. Someone had thrown away their empathic AI, probably in the morning shit, and somehow it had survived the fall and the sterilization procedures, eventually landing in the goo beneath his feet.
Pamir left the entertainment where he found it, unmapped.
He abandoned the search zone, traveling halfway around the ship to a place that would mean plenty to Washen and Aasleen. He climbed inside the antimatter tank where the Phoenixes once lived. As he expected, the facility was empty. Utterly clean and empty. Not even one of Washen’s ghosts was waiting for him. Standing at the bottom, on a floor of slick, ageless hyperfiber, Pamir found himself staring up at the vastness, the tank making him feel tiny even as a knowing part of him warned that this was nothing, that the ship dwarfed this little cylinder, and the universe dwarfed the ship, and all these grand designs and silver wonders were nothing set against the endless reaches through which everything soared.
Eighteen years and three weeks had been invested in a careful, thorough search for the captains, and nothing had come of it.
Nothing.
Out of simple habit, Pamir referred to his original list of searchable sites, each site carefully deleted over the years, tired eyes tracking down to that final odd word:
“leech.”
This would be the last place he ever looked. Years of labor and hope had been wasted, nothing learned but that nothing wanted to be learned. Making the long fall to the alien habitat, Pamir decided that Washen and Aasleen, and Miocene, weren’t waiting around any proverbial curve. He could suddenly believe those theories that the Master held close to her heart. Another species had hired away her best captains, or more likely, kidnapped them. Either way, they were off the ship, and lost. And Washen’s mysterious reappearance was someone’s peculiar joke, and the Master was cunning-wise not to let herself be distracted by a sick, misguided humor.
The leech would be a suitable end, he decided.
As he stepped out of the hub, out into that planar grayness, Pamir nearly dismissed the site out of hand. Washen would never remain here. Not for a year, much less for several millennia. Already feeling his mind eroding, his will and heart deflating with every little breath, Pamir was quite sure that no other captain would willingly live inside this two-dimensional realm.
Two steps, and he wanted to run away.
Halting, Pamir took a deep breath, then made certain that the hub’s lone doorway was locked open. Then he knelt and opened a sack of tiny scuttle-bugs and dog-noses and peregrine-eyes.
Set loose, the sensors fanned out along two dimensions.
With access to certain secure files, Pamir asked for background on the leech. What was given him was sketchy, unyielding. The exophobes had lived in this intentionally bland habitat for six hundred years, then the entire species had disembarked, their vessel carrying them off into a molecular dust cloud that had long since been left behind.
The leech were gone before the captains vanished.
“Good-bye,” he whispered. Then he lifted his head, his voice magnified by the floor and ceiling, that single word racing out in a perfect circle that ended with the distant round wall, then returned to him again, loud and deep and mutated into a stranger’s voice.
“Good-bye,” the room shouted at him.
As soon as I can, he thought. The moment I am done.
The probes found anomalies.
They always did; nothing about their alarms was unexpected.
Pamir constructed a map of the anomalies, checked for patterns, then began walking in a sweeping pattern, examining each in turn. Nothing was large enough to see with the naked eye. Most of the oddities were dried flakes of human skin. But what struck Pamir as peculiar, even remarkable, was that barely a dozen flakes were waiting to be found. If humans had wandered into this place, wouldn’t they have left a good deal more tissue? Old tissue, when he measured the decay. Abused to where their genetic markers couldn’t be read. And there wasn’t any bacteria clinging to the flakes, either. None of that benign, immortal stuff that had ridden humanity into space.
Cleansing agents or microchines had scrubbed this place to the brink of sterility. Which wasn’t too unlikely. This was an alien home, and its human trespassers could have been mannerly.
Could have been.
One more purple light showed on the map, nestled near the wall.
It was a twist of incinerated flesh. Submerged inside the plastic floor, it must have gone unnoticed by the trespassers. But a scuttlebug hadn’t any trouble finding it, and with its guidance, Pamir used a laser drill, extracting the blackened finger-sized treasure, then inserting it into his field lab.
Quietly, patiently, the gray floor started to patch its fresh hole.
Nearly a kilo of living flesh had been charred down to almost nothing. There were genetic markers, though not enough to match against any of the missing captains. But the caramelized flesh implied a homicidal violence, which offered another reason to explain why visitors might try to cover their traces.
Pamir watched the floor grow flat and slick again, then he measured the gray plastic, carefully mapping a network of fine, almost invisible scars. This tiny portion of the habitat had been damaged. Perhaps recently. The floor had scars, as did the ceiling and the thick gray wall. Some kind of machine had been destroyed here. Pamir found a thin taste of metals inside the smart hydrocarbons. Explosions and lasers had riddled this place. He could make out where determined hands had chiseled out anything that would constitute a clue, the floor healing and healing again, struggling to hold its seal while another force, just as relentless, struggled to erase its crime.