The drive bank died three days ago and the Sable Wren is still limping on the reserve coils at a quarter of her rated speed, which is why you are awake at 02:40 with a torch, a clipboard, and a crew that has stopped sleeping in shifts.

The tender is still out there, tethered off your port side: the Kestrel Nine, dark, warm at the vents, dead in the water for eleven months by the log you pulled off her bridge. You sent two boarding parties across. Both came back. That is the part you keep turning over.

Bram Oyelaran's voice comes out of the wall speaker flat and fast, the way he talks when he is trying not to alarm anybody.

You take the ladder two rungs at a time. Number four is cold enough that your breath hangs. The cargo cages are empty. The deck plates are wet, and the wet is not water.

Then the light finds it, and it finds you.

It is folded into the corner between two cages, longer than a man and lower, chitin going from black to brown where the torch catches it, four joints on each limb, and where a face should be there is a seam of cold blue light that widens when it looks at you. It has no eyes. It does not need them.

Bram says, in your ear.

The seam brightens. It lifts one limb, slowly, and taps the bulkhead twice — the ship's bell pattern, the one for all-hands. Then it speaks, and the voice is yours, borrowed whole:

It unfolds to its full height, and then it folds back down to yours, deliberately, the way a man takes off his hat.

it says.

The seam dims and holds.