on what’s working, so they have to try weirder experiments.”
“Good news, then.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”
Anders appeared in the doorway. Jackson and Beanfield didn’t react at all. “What’d I miss?” Anders said.
“You’re confined to quarters,” Jackson said, not turning. Anders looked blank, like he didn’t know what confined meant. “Twenty-four hours.”
“What?” Anders said. “You can’t lock me up.” He looked at Beanfield. “We’re on a fucking ship! Where do you think I’m going to go?”
“It’s not a discussion,” Jackson said. “Leave.”
Anders didn’t move.
She turned to him. “You want forty-eight?”
“Get fucked,” Anders said.
“Five days.”
Gilly could see Anders’s jaw coming out, the look entering his eyes that meant he was about to do something especially stupid, so Gilly moved toward him, his hands out. “Be cool, Anders. Let’s go.” He reached for Anders’s arm.
Anders jerked away. “Do not fucking touch me, Gilly.”
“Anders.” He thought he could force Anders to see reason, so he tried to take his arm again. Anders socked him in the cheek. It was so fast and shocking that Gilly was on the floor before he realized what was happening.
There was a loud bang. His ears rang. Jackson had her little captain’s pistol pointed at Anders’s face. She had fired it, Gilly realized. She had shot Anders in the face. Anders looked dazed and fell and hit the floor. Some kind of air gun, Gilly guessed. Until this moment, he had assumed it was decorative.
Jackson holstered the pistol. “Intel, you okay?”
“Yes,” he said, embarrassed.
“I’m taking Anders to quarters. Please cancel his door access and comms.”
Gilly nodded.
“Take his feet,” Jackson said to Beanfield. Beanfield didn’t move. She looked almost as stunned as Anders. “We’re at war,” Jackson said. “We’re going to start acting like it.”
* * *
—
Two days passed. The ship performed a series of hard skips, taking them deeper into VZ. Then the walls flushed orange and the klaxon howled and they had a single hive with no sign of life. “Abandoned?” Beanfield said.
“Maybe.” In his harness, he was acutely aware of the absence of Anders. No one had talked about it and he didn’t want to be the one to bring it up. “Hive is unusual.”
“Unusual how?” Jackson said.
“Denser. More composite variation.” He skimmed his numbers. “Much denser. It’s small but heavy.”
“But it’s definitely a hive?”
“It has tunneling and an interlocking substrata. It’s a hive. But a strange one.”
“Are we scanning it right?”
“Hmm?”
“Is there a possibility of concealed hostiles?”
“No. It is a little harder to read, because of the density. But there are no salamanders.”
He felt an invisible force tug at him. He recognized it immediately, but hadn’t felt it for a while.
“Ship is decelerating,” Jackson said. “Hard.”
“Roger that. We’re burning at eighty percent.” He didn’t know what that implied. They always entered engagements at high speed, to maximize the ship’s reaction time advantage.
Beanfield said, “Ship wants to check out the weird hive?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Do we want Anders for this?”
“No,” Jackson said.
Data began to pour down Gilly’s board, the results of scans. “I think you’re right, Beanfield. This could be a discovery. Salamanders manipulate gravity fields in ways we can’t replicate. This could be an opportunity to learn about it.”
“Pulse is warming up,” Jackson said. “Looks like learning time is over.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed.
“Pulsing.”
“Maybe it’s just an old, abandoned hive. We should expect to find a few of those this deep in VZ. They could even—” Something lifted him up and threw him to the left. He lost his grip on his board. His harness grabbed him around the hips and shoulders. “Jesus,” he said. His board bounced back into position but it was an empty slate. His film read:
CONNECTION LOST
“I’ve lost my board,” he said.
He checked the connection. At station, everything was wired, so maybe a