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When you let go, you stare at the bloody handprint.

You lost it all. So close, and you lost it all.

And now what? What are you?

You’ll never have those memories. They aren’t you anymore. You are you. What you have right now, is you. What you do next, will be you. What will that be?

A cold heart and a bloody hand. That’s what you’ve been. What you are.

You turn and go back into the cockpit.

“Is the planet real?” you ask. And look John’s son for any hint, any sign of a lie. You can see pulse, heat, and micro-expressions. Things that help you fight, spot the move. And now, spot intent.

“It’s real.”

“There is another way,” you say.

“And what is that?”

“Take me with you. Get as much fuel as you can, but leave early. Even if it means we only get halfway to where you are going. I killed the Satrap, and everything protecting him. And it wasn’t the first. When we run out of fuel, we’ll dock and I’ll rip more fuel out of their alien hands for you. For you. Understand? I can train more like me. When your fleet passes through, those that stand against us will rue it. I will do this because there is a debt here, understand?”

John looks warily at you. “You were with my father. He didn’t kill the Satrap?”

“There is a debt,” you repeat.

“He helped you?”

“Give me weapons. The non-humans on the station, they enjoy a position of power. They have avoided mostly being in thrall, as we are the new species for that. So even though we have time, they will figure out what we are doing and act against us. You’ll want me out there, buying you time.”

John nods, and reaches out a hand to shake.

You don’t take it. You can’t take it. Not with his father’s blood still on it.

“Weapons,” you repeat. “Before your men start dying unnecessarily.”

Cycled through the locks, deBrun’s men behind you, you walk past the stream of frightened people heading for the ship.

You stand in the large docking bays and survey the battlefield.

This is who you are. This is who you will be. This is who you choose.

A cold heart and bloody hands.

When this is over, when you help deliver them to their new world and repay your debt, you can go home to Earth. Stalk for clues to your past. See if you wander until you find that palm tree on the island you remember.

But for now, you are right here.

Right now.

Waiting for the fight to come to you.

The Sarcophagus

Robert Reed

The object was gray and smooth to the eye and the eye’s first glance gave no clue about its size or mass or its true importance. The second look, a much more careful examination, proved nothing except that almost nothing about the object’s appearance had changed. One very simple sphere was reflecting the light of a million suns. The likely assumption was that the eye had found something close and quite small. Old instincts judged its speed; the object crossed its diameter twice every second. That made for a very slow walk between the stars. Even the laziest eye could follow its passage, and the lazy hand had ample time to reach up, fashioning a bowl of fingers that would catch what was making its gentle plunge.

But no hand remained, certainly none that would ever work, and the eye was not much of eye either. Death had severely degraded its imagination, and worse, slowed its capacity to recognize even obvious mistakes.

Something huge and quite ancient was approaching. The object only seemed to be dumbly simple. The reality was that this was a machine woven out of complications, baffling and enigmatic to every eye. That gray hull was smoother than any polish, and as it grew closer, the eye noticed fierce little lights rising from hull and crisscrossing its face. Between here and there, the vacuum was filled with brilliant sparks and whispery veils. Each glow had its flavor. Every glimmer excited the basic elements of the universe. That eager light held telltale blue-shiftings, and once its old talents were awakened, the eye began to understand how utterly wrong it had been, believing in small sluggish things as insignificant as a child’s ball.

The machine was fifty thousand kilometers in diameter.

Bigger than most worlds, ten seconds would carry this marvel across one million kilometers. That meant it was moving at one-third the sacred speed of light, and what’s more, that eye wasn’t too stupid or too dead to ignore what would surely happen next.

Slashing its way through the galaxy, the Great Ship refused to be slowed and only grudgingly allowed itself to maneuver. Space was a cool vacuum mixed with quite a lot more than vacuum. Gas and dust waited in the darkness. There were also lumps of stone and iron, and little comets and giant comets, and countless sunless worlds, most of them dead but the living worlds still numbering in the millions. The captains had methodically laid out the safest profitable course. But to hold that course meant firing the giant engines, and even a tiny course correction meant a long burn many years ago. There were always obstacles that couldn’t be avoided. Collisions were inevitable, and every impact had to be absorbed. The hull was deep pure hyperfiber, able to endure horrific abuse, but no machine, not even this machine, would survive forever. Without smart help, the hull would eventually erode away, and the soft body beneath would shatter, and how could anyone measure such a loss?

Fortunes were lashed to this wonder.

Monetary fortunes, and the egos of captains and crew, plus the rich long lives of passengers numbering in the hundreds of billions.

The Great Ship had no choice but plunge onwards. That’s why the captains ordered gigantic mechanical eyes built on the bow, mapping every hazard; and that’s why an arsenal of lasers and shaped nukes and other superior weapons had been pressed into an endless, unwinnable war. Comets and lost moons had to be found early and properly shattered. Then the rubble was chiseled to dust and the dust was boiled into gases that quickly mixed with the native interstellar fog. Brilliant, brilliantly stubborn engineers had devised elaborate means to harvest what was useful from the fog. Each tiny fragment of matter was given an EM charge, enough charge to obey magnetic fluxes, and what was valuable and what had no particular value was gathered up in these electric nets, gently guided into traps and fuel tanks.

But not every inbound object could be stopped. Every war had lost battles. Sometimes an asteroid would slip past. Jolting impacts proved spectacular, without doubt. But casualties were few, bearable and few, the damage limited to the hull. Specialists quickly patched every hole. And because any successful voyage can become more successful, the captains deep beneath the hull made plans, acting on some very old questions:

“What if something we happen to want happens to be ahead of us?

“What if we spot a small, enticing treasure?

“What are our options to save that treasure, and what are the costs, and how do we pay those costs, and what lives do we risk?”

For two trillion seconds, the Great Ship had been plunging through the populated heart of the Way of Milk.

That day, one muscular pulse of microwave light was sent ahead, as a scout.

And what returned was a tiny bright echo.

Something peculiar was lurking out there.

AIs aimed city-sized mirrors, and they aimed their curiosity. An otherwise ordinary lump of iron and frost was found spinning around its long axis. No broadcasts rose from the asteroid’s surface or from its interior. There were no heat signatures, no warnings of slumbering, helpless life. The asteroid had an old face, eroded to rubble save for the largest crater—a deep hole riding that narrow equator. The echo came from a slender gray shape tucked at the crater’s bottom. The oddity was gray and otherwise too faint to resolve, and the crater soon turned out of view. But more telescopes were brought to bear, watching the little world spinning, and eventually the crater and its slight mystery swept back into view.

Diagnostic lasers pounded their target with blunt, calibrated fury.

Woven diamond and its various alloys would have boiled along the edges, creating a angry mist of carbon. Polished metals and metametals should have surrendered a stew of elements, each throwing up signals and clean interpretations. But the returning data were simple, simple, simple. Most of the heat was absorbed without effect. The only signatures came from the iron and nickel dust that had presumably gathered on the object’s surface. Hyperfiber was the best answer. What the object was was hyperfiber, which was always high-tech artificial, and until more thorough tests were run, that was the only conclusion worth holding.

An army of AIs helped design the next phase.

Standing on that crater lip, a human witness would have seen stars overhead, but no Great Ship. The Ship was still too distant for small eyes. Then brilliance would arrive, coherent light scorching the crater’s bowl until the iron was red-hot and soft. A second pulse, aimed like a scalpel, vaporized the metal substrates, resulting in an asymmetric blast, and the mysterious object was thrown high, beginning a good hard spin as the lasers quit.

A mysterious, slightly warm object rotated around its own long axis.

Then the asteroid’s faint gravity reclaimed it, letting it settle on the sloppy iron.

Mirrors watched everything while talking to one another, piecing together a definitive image of something still thousands of seconds in the future.

An old protocol was triggered.

More lasers were brought on line, aimed and calibrated but holding their fire, waiting for the prize to vanish.

And with that, the doomed little world began its final day.

The crew was between jobs, physically and mentally. Hundreds of Remoras working with machines and reactors had just finished pouring a large patch on the hull. But while others shepherded the curing, his crew was committed to something smaller and much quicker, and in the end, far more important than a big patch job. Orleans was taking a group of youngsters to an undisclosed location. The old Remora intended to give them a tour of one of the Ship’s oldest patches, letting them learn from the successes and glaring failures of people who died long ago.

The Remoras rode inside a big, nearly empty skimmer. Each of them was genetically human. Each one was also a lifesuit of hyperfiber with a single diamond plate over what passed for a face. Each suit held a tiny reactor feeding the machinery as well as an array of recycling systems that fed what wasn’t quite human anymore. Fourteen youngsters were onboard. But of course calling anyone a “youngster” was a tease. The baby in the group was three hundred standard years old, while the oldest student was over a thousand. But being a Remora—a honorable, trustworthy Remora—involved skills that were mastered slowly, like the layers patiently building an enduring reef. And living like any Remora, exposed to the universe, was a hazardous, often too-brief species of life.

Three thousand years. That was a milestone largely regarded as worthy of celebration.

Ten thousand years. If a Remora could care for the Great Ship that long . . . well, that was one way to define a good, noble existence.

When death came, it did so suddenly, usually without generous warnings. Some dense chunk of asteroid slipped past the lasers and bombs. An old power plant went sideways, and the skimmer blew. Or maybe the Remora became careless, and his or her lifesuit body failed in some spectacular fashion.

Despite endless hazards, a respectable few Remoras reached twenty thousand years.

A portion of those old-timers were destined for forty thousand birthdays.

But Orleans was one of the exceptional few. Like every other Remora, he was born on the Great Ship. But that was eighty thousand years ago. Orleans was one of the final survivors of those very early generations.

As such, he had to be be famous.

And he had to be notorious.

Perhaps no other creature in existence, Remora or otherwise, had Orleans’ spectacular capacity to measure threat and opportunity, while his reservoirs of luck seemed to defy all calculation.

There were times when the people worshipped Orleans for his good fortune as well as his wealth of practical knowledge, and they would repeat every good story about the long odds that their friend had defeated or tricked or at least endured.

But this was not one of those times.

Youngsters in this generation had suffered horrible losses. More comets than usual had slipped past defense systems, impacting on brave smart and very unlucky Remoras. Worse still, early this year an alien reactor detonated unexpectedly, and the blast was in the hundred megaton range. Thousands of their peers had been vaporized. That’s why these fourteen youngsters felt abused by the Creation. They were entitled. And that is why they had embraced some very narrow, exceptionally rigid beliefs, including one simple, well-polished belief was that the oldest Remora was a coward in his heart. How else could Orleans have survived for so long? And with that faith in hand, they were free to look at him as if he were nothing but a contemptible piece of worn-out man.

The youngsters liked to glare at Orleans, snarling on private channels.

As if he couldn’t read their baby faces.

And Orleans rather enjoyed these harsh thoughts. It made him a better teacher by making more determined students, each one of these half-born children hungry to prove the old man’s flaws in front of her peers.

“I know where you’re taking us,” one child began.

Gleem was her name.

Orleans looked at the ugly, almost-human face. “You know where, do you?”

“Yes. And I’m warning you. I know the trick.”

Gleem had a bright gray human face and two white eyes, a crooked nose that couldn’t decide where to grow, and a shiny black-lipped mouth full of black teeth. Being three hundred years and few months old, she was the babies’ baby. According to a calendar full of arbitrary timemarks, she was also the last of her generation, and as sometimes happened with the lastborn, she was something of a prodigy—an expert with machines of every species and every useful job.