[68700] ChaeyoungUnknown“A handful of gidizip across ten days and you’re finally back for more conversation, Garcia?” Chaeyoung stammered as she lurched up from her bed, roused by a loud click at her cabin door. It opened with a whoosh. Garcia did not answer. She got out of her bunk pod and realized too late that thrust acceleration had caused the entire cabin to tilt on its axis.“Nawa…tsow!”[75][Di Linga]: Oh…fuck! ↑ she cursed as she sacrificed her elbow to protect her eye from smacking the edge of the table in her cell.Before she could recover—her elbow throbbing, her head woozy from the combination of spin, thrust, and sleep—someone pulled a dark hood over her head. They pulled her arms behind her back. A hard pressure cinching them together. Her panicked breath sucked the plasticky hood into her mouth moments before it puffed out with overpressure. A blackout biosuit hood like before. Someone pulled her to her feet and forcefully nudged her forward. She did not bother asking where she was being taken. There was little she could do. Unseen hands pulled and prodded and moved her. She perceived someone moving her through a hallway of some sort, and they pressed her down into a cushioned chair.There was a sudden deceleration. Worse, sudden de-spin. Her stomach lurched even as the thrust pushed her down into her chair. After she recovered from the shock, she realized she was likely in an accelerating propcan. She screamed and gagged, but someone restrained her in her seat.After that, she went numb. They moved and prodded and jostled her body, but her mind was like a radio channel flooded with jamming and static. She had no coherent thoughts, only noise.There was pressure on her wrists. Then, release. They freed her arms from her bindings. Hiss-whoosh. They jerked her biosuit hood off its O-ring, and she could see and breathe again.“Yu’ll tsow,”[76][Di Lingua]: Fuck you. ↑she cursed as harsh overhead lighting blinded her.Someone shoved her forward and growled. “Through the hatchway.”Ahead, there was an airlock door. She stumbled past the threshold, still bleary-eyed and nauseated. She was in a half-constructed spacecraft section with an incomplete floor and ceiling that was nothing but the hexagonal lattice work grid. The sidewalls were thin aluminum sheets puckered between skeletal supports. Protrusions marked future locations for additively manufactured bulkheads, while other regions had marks for future locations of air, power, and water lines. The entire structure resembled a puck in shape.She stumbled through the hatch and looked above through the ceiling grate. There were work scaffoldings, large additive manufacturing swivel arms, other strange protrusions, and autonomous systems, stowage boxes, and power supplies—all of it for manufacturing or repairing a large section of spacecraft. Among these tools of the trade, guards lurked in thick armored biosuits with skeleton prints on the faceplate of their helmets. Wherever she was, this was a dry-dock. Designed to repair, or construct, complete sections of large spacecraft. Now, it was a makeshift prison.She stumbled inside, startled when the hatch slammed shut behind her, and looked around. It was a nearly fifteen-meter diameter cylindrical deck with up and down orientation along the dry-dock’s own gravity, likely itself produced by spin and not a natural gravity. A few cabin rooms were more complete and mostly furnished, and they had installed some electrical and life support systems, but mostly it was mid-construction. One cabin had a stack of dry doshiraks tins, another had stacked bunk pods, and one had a communal water closet.Eventually, other survivors of Jiuhe joined Chaeyoung in the makeshift prison. Fifteen scientists, including Chaeyoung and Vis, embarked on the expedition, but now only five remained—assuming Garcia had been honest about Vis’s safety. The solitary survivor from the flight crew, whose name Chaeyoung had never learned, joined Ma, Ivanova, and Tan from her scientific team. She was happy to see all three of the familiar faces relatively safe, and despite Tan being the only one she had any kind of personal relationship with, her reunion with her fellow scientists was happy, tear-filled, and cut short.“Chaeyoung,” Garcia said from his perch atop the ceiling grating, his hands folded neatly and officiously behind the small of his back.“What do you want?” Chaeyoung asked, as she pulled away from a tight hug with Alan Tan.“Head to the exit hatch, and then we can talk.”Garcia walked across the ceiling grating, heading toward the one exit and entrance to the makeshift prison before he dipped over the edge and was out of sight. Chaeyoung approached the hatch cautiously, straining her neck to look at the skeleton themed armored guards that stalked along the drydock’s scaffolding high above her. They ignored her, and continued to ignore her as she hesitantly touched the hatch’s handle, lifted it, and exited out of the strange prison.Garcia and two armored skeleton guards greeted her with their guns drawn.“Cover the door,” Garcia commanded in a chastising tone. “Not the VIP.”One gave a curt nod, and the guards stepped past Chaeyoung. Garcia ushered her forward and out of the half-constructed spacecraft’s airlock. He positioned himself near the exit hatch and gestured for her to join him. Cautiously, she approached, curiosity winning over her fear. “What is this really about?” Chaeyoung asked tersely, folding her arms across her chest. “Why am I here? Where am I?”Garcia sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “You know you’re just here for leverage, Dr. No. We were following and observing Dr. Silva. We’ve been keeping tabs on her because of her connection to Acheron Private Capital Group and her own expertise. Your closeness to her is…fortunate. Your relationship with Silva makes you valuable leverage.”“Are you finally dropping all of that bullshit about not having anything to do with what happened to Jiuhe?”Garcia shrugged but did not answer.“Valuable leverage, huh?” Chaeyoung scoffed. “So, what now? You want my help?” She laughed. “Yu’ll gah tsow![77][Di Lingua]: Fuck you! ↑ Why would I help you?”Garcia hesitated for a moment before admitting. “We’ve used your wellbeing to motivate Dr. Silva to work on our current priorities.”“Current priorities?” Chaeyoung’s brow furrowed as she pieced the information together. “Wait, Vis was working on something related to gidizip physics, right? Is that what your interest in her is all about?”“Yes.”“Then take me to her,” Chaeyoung demanded, determination shining in her eyes. “I’ll be more cooperative—we’ll be more cooperative—if I am there and we know we’re both safe.”Garcia scrutinized her, appearing skeptical. “And I assume you will want some assurances? Special treatment?”She shrugged with her hands. “It would be helpful to know what you’re aiming for. It’s the only way I can help you in a meaningful way as an ally.”He shook his head, apparently seeing through Chaeyoung’s deception. “Best I can do is take you to her.”“Fine.”“But there will be greater risks to you, her, and me.”“I understand the risks,” Chaeyoung responded, her tone steady, her heart resolute.“You really don’t.”Garcia led Chaeyoung out of the drydock into a long, very thin, hallway. Past many doors, light fixtures, emergency kits, and security autos attached to the ceiling. The hall was long and nearly flat, but the walls and the ceiling and the floor were almost uniform, monochromatic, beige. An infinite corridor receding off to a bland vanishing point. The appearance of a guard’s boots along her horizon surprised Chaeyoung. As the rest of the guard gradually appeared, it seemed as if they were descending from the sky in an elevator, but only she was moving. She realized the uniformity of the walls and ceiling hid the gentle curve of the hall. Another guard appeared along the spin-deck’s horizon, and eventually large ceramic barriers partially blocking the hallway beyond came into view.When Garcia got within range of the guards, they each snapped him a sharp salute, which he lazily returned.“At ease, operators.”One guard partially bowed and opened an airlock hatch, as the other guard stood blocking the path to the rest of the gently curved hall. Garcia crossed the threshold, paused, and beckoned Chaeyoung.“Follow me.”Chaeyoung followed Garcia into another massive drydock hangar teeming with people, equipment, and conversation. There was a smattering of skeleton guards, crowd control barriers, security scanners, and what looked like military administrative desks and facilities. Far to the opposite wall of the drydock space was a makeshift camp—there were beds, a communal water closet cabin, portable mess, and so on. The rest of the space was an active and gargantuan drydock. Tools, equipment, and both autonomous and human workers were everywhere, all swarming around a plainly altered docking tug clamped by six large gripper arms holding it poised above a giant exterior docking membrane built into the floor. There were high scaffoldings and equipment, mostly occupied by more skeleton guards in blue, black, and gray, which kept a watchful eye over the strange scene. Chaeyoung kept her eyes low to avoid the watchful, eyeless stares of the skeleton guards as she moved through what Garcia called “processing” and then into the main working area with Garcia as her escort. Along the way, toward the makeshift camp near the far end, she caught a look at the tug, at the apparent center of all the activity. It was a Forseti IKSA model tug, a model she had seen many times traveling around Sol and Ya Ke, though she had never seen one so close. As they neared, its giant bulk loomed over the pair. It was startling, since every other time she had seen a docking tug they appeared to be tiny gnats swarming leviathan fusion haulers. The scale of it up-close awed her.Extensively altered, the tug’s flat nose bump pad—designed so it could nudge and push another spacecraft gently—was gone. Along its core, through its central axis, there was a long and thin metallic spine. It looked like an ERR–AL drive. In fact, it looked exactly like what a miniaturized ERR–AL drive might look like, with large concentric rings bolted around the center of the Forseti model tug, and laser injectors sticking out of the inserted spine at both ends like a bug’s antenna. But it was too small to be an ERR–AL drive. Even if it ran through the entire length of the Forseti tug, it was short by about thirty meters for a real gidizip, so it must have been something else.A hand gripped her upper arm from behind, and Garcia growled. “Keep moving, doctor.”“What the fuck are you doing here, Garcia?” a familiar, hostile voice asked.Garcia’s lips trembled, and she saw sweat building on his brow. She turned to the lithe, obsidian, demonic armor-clad, Ninya Blanca. Her shockingly white hair bounced as she scowled and charged toward Garcia and Chaeyoung. Behind her by some meters, there was a motionless row of three figures in gray fatigues. There was a rush of emotion when she realized, next to the gray fatigued figure with a colorful Martian shawl, was Vis. Her joy came to an abrupt end when Ninya Blanca approached.“We need to expedite our engineering project detour,” Garcia replied.“And you think this detritus you’ve brought will help accomplish this?”“Unless we want to explore the Tritonis facility.”“Give up that wastrel’s wager, Garcia. My project is taking priority.”“I can help,” Chaeyoung volunteered with a nod toward Vis. “Read me in, and I can help smooth out whatever problems you’ve run into.”Ninya Blanca’s gray eyes stared through Chaeyoung with a coldness only matched by the most isolated, empty depths of space.“We can’t keep dealing with scientists like they’re prisoners, especially if we want them to be productive,” Garcia hurriedly justified. “It could work.”Ninya Blanca laughed cruelly, appeared on the verge of saying something, then thinking better of it before she pointed a sharp, talon-like finger at Garcia’s chin. “You get all the responsibilities, none of the credit.”“Acceptable.”“You also get all the blow back when it inevitably goes wrong,” Ninya Blanca nodded her head toward the group lined up in gray fatigues. “Inform them what their tasks will be for today. I have better things to do.”“Understood, director.”Ninya Blanca took two steps and was almost nose-to-nose with Chaeyoung. Her demonic, sharply clawed, obsidian armored hand struck out and grasped Chaeyoung’s chin. She flinched as a cold, sharp edge rested against her unscarred cheek. A sharp pressure forced her to tilt her head. She gasped. Ninya Blanca forced Chaeyoung to look at Vis.“I need your bylat to expedite a little experiment I’m running,” Ninya Blanca gave an exaggerated, dramatic sigh, as she explained. “And it seems we haven’t found the right incentive.” Ninya Blanca forced Chaeyoung to look at her cold gray eyes with a press into Chaeyoung’s chin with the sharp edge of finger-embedded blades.“You’re nothing but detritus to me,” Ninya Blanca declared. “Don’t forget what you have at stake if you fail, fuck-up, or sabotage my project. Everything! I can take everything.”And all at once, she was free from the demon’s clutches as Ninya Blanca stormed off. Garcia frowned, pushed Chaeyoung, and waved at a guard. “Escort her to the briefing area.”As the guard pushed Chaeyoung past Vis and the others in gray fatigues, she briefly hooked her pinky finger around Vis’s before the guard shoved her again and broke the fleeting connection.***“Food is there. That’s your bunk. Water closet is there. Entertainment is there. Don’t talk to anyone about their work here. Wait for Garcia in that SCIF tent,” a guard brusquely explained to Chaeyoung.They left Chaeyoung alone in the makeshift living quarters, with only a few guards slumped on chairs around the perimeter. There was a privacy wall along the back perimeter, twelve cots, a handful of tables in the mess, a proper kitchen area, and something about the size of two water-closets with a hatch and interlaced metallic looking weaving. She walked up to the tent, opened the hatch after looking over her shoulder to check on the guards—they were unmoved—and went inside. Immediately upon entering the room, ambient noise from the dry dock faded. Click. When the door shut behind her, it was like it was all gone. Even the whir of life-support was subtly different. Inside was a simple desk, two chairs, and a large ink display. The walls were similar interlaced metallic weave as the exterior, and it was brightly lit in a sickly white. Chaeyoung sat in the chair facing the only door and waited.Click. Garcia, accompanied by a rush of ambient noise from the outside, entered the strange room with a stack of ink displays. He laid them out in a spread in front of her, then sat down. He pulled three thin sheets out, rotated them so Chaeyoung could see, and pointed at each.“Silva. Jakande. Ali,” he tapped each of the sheets—dossiers. “Skim them. I’ll wait.”She folded her arms, looked down at them skeptically. Glancing over the large images of each of the ink displays. Vis was on one, of course, and she recognized the two other figures that had been standing with Vis in the dry dock. Clearly, they were all prisoners here.Chaeyoung looked at the dossier of the figure wearing a traditional Martian shawl. A Martian weave with a mosque-like geometric mosaic of reds, blues, and golds draped over the figure’s left shoulder. The shawl might mean many things. Decorative, cultural, or showing social status or heritage, but above all a Martian shawl was a multi-purpose survival tool. It was a curious thing to allow a prisoner to keep. His name, according to the dossier, was Jakande. Peter. Mimo to his close friends—an esoteric Martian diminutive for “my heart” according to the dossier. Mimo had sharp cheekbones, a stoic gaze, skin that was smooth like Martian sands with a rich and cool color like a meteorite, and a scruffy crop of hair. When Chaeyoung had seen him in the dry-dock, he had a patchy beard that looked days old, and that same Martian shawl.There was also biographical information on the dossier. Most people born in Sol had several qualifications and certifications before the age of majority, and Mimo was no exception. EVA and ERR–AL maintenance qualified before he even began his studies on applied ERR–AL physics at the University of Mars Elysium. He had graduated three years before Vis, but they had each attended the same program. Drawn in, she unfolded her arms and began looking at Vis and Mimo’s dossiers more closely, holding one in each hand, her eyes darting back and forth between the thin ink displays. Mimo had also attended Huygens University—in fact they had some overlap in years. Then later, Mimo had an overlap at Tey-hab hey Techno-lowgee ill Callisto, known as Callisto Tech in Upblanda. Same as Vis. Vis’s PhD advisor was Mimo’s postdoctoral research supervisor. Her curiosity was now churning at full burn. Mimo, Vis, and Chaeyoung herself had some coincidental overlaps in education, so she looked to the third dossier searching for more connections.Ali had rough ochre locks of hair cascading over his shoulders, a long solemn face. Androgynous features. Here, the burgeoning pattern fell apart. Absolutely no overlap with Chaeyoung, Vis, or Mimo. In fact, Ali was born, raised, and educated entirely in the Nursia system and only lived in Sol when he had joined the Advanced Research Projects Laboratories as a civilian in the United Planets Navy. A quick check across dossiers, and Chaeyoung saw this was the only connection between Ali, Mimo, and Vis. Vis had left the Naval project less than a Solar year before she had met Chaeyoung in that dingy stellah steh bar on 66255 SolUT on Celosia. That was a date Chaeyoung would not forget. That number was special to her, and she remembered it in Sol Universal, Earth reckoning, and Celosian local.It seemed like Ali and Mimo had remained employed by the Navy, but the dossier revealed they had transferred to a different facility. Same project code name. A secure facility not even in inhabited space. So how had they found their way here? She wondered, then looked for details about their project. There was little she could follow.Chaeyoung leaned back. “What were they working on?”Garcia had a crooked smile. “Theoretical and practical advances in design and application of ERR–AL physics.”“Is that all you’ll tell me?”Garcia shrugged. “I can rattle off the jargon, but I don’t understand it, honestly.”“Juan juye, you might not understand it, but you know what it can do, or its capabilities—otherwise none of us would be here, and you wouldn’t be showing me this.”“Hah. True enough,” Garcia pulled out another ink display with the technical schematics of the altered Forsetti docking tug. “It’s just one application of their research, but we fully expect to make this ERR–AL capable. Despite its size, despite its comparatively low fusion output, it will be able to gidizip.”Chaeyoung frowned. “That’s it? That hardly seems worth all of this,” she gestured toward the door. “All of this effort—all of this secrecy—for this? Was everything you’ve done worth it?”“It is a significant decrease in the size and power requirements for a gidizip.”“So that is it, huh?” Chaeyoung crossed her arms and scoffed. “You’re just here to make a lot of money with some milspec technical advancement? I bet it lowers the Exclusion Zone,” she added mockingly.Garcia smiled. “Exactly.”“Exactly?” she cocked an eyebrow, her confidence deflated. “What do you mean?”“I think we’re wasting our efforts on what amounts to petty corporate espionage. There are far more interesting things we could be investigating.”Garcia, with the sly look of someone on the brink of a long-awaited victory, slid a new ink display over to Chaeyoung. “I am personally far more interested in studying this.”Chaeyoung tilted the ink display so she could read it. Seal codes redacted the name and identifying orbital parameters of the small planetoid depicted on the ink display. It must have had some interesting properties detectable from an enormous distance. Maybe it had an anomalous magnetosphere, or was an extrasolar capture like Ahtash, or contained traces in its spectra of interesting new metals. Whatever it was, it had to be something because otherwise it was a ninety-nine-in-a-hundred ice ball at the edge of a star system.She remembered a handful of far-flung planetoids that had been of general interest. Something that was not some mere scientific curiosity, but of a broader societal interest. People often regarded these types of worlds with fickle attention, abandoning them within a generation and later leaving them only as scientific or historic footnotes.She could count on one hand planetoids that fit this description and had not fallen into this pattern. New Madrid, Theseus, Ehgion, and Noether. All had some unique orbital location and a peculiar history which conspired to maintain their relevance far past the initial public interest. Only in Sol was there enough population density for any sizable number of cold, distant, fringe planetoids to remain permanently populated.What, if anything, made this ice world stand out was its expansive, now-deserted mining complex and the synchronous space station orbiting above—reminiscent of the fusion tug docks over Salacia. This puzzled her. All she saw was an ice planet with scant atmosphere, negligible gravity, and nothing of any interest to justify that level of investment. And Garcia watched her intently, his anticipation barely concealed, awaiting her to realize…what? This piqued her curiosity. There was a ‘scroll’ button at the bottom of the ink display. She pressed it eagerly.“Nawa oh!”[78][Di Lingua]: Woah! ↑ Garcia’s lips parted, and he gave her a toothy grin. “Exactly.”Beneath the surface, almost at the furthest distance into the planetoid the mining complex had reached, there was evidence of an unnatural iron-heavy deposit with what appeared to be an access hatch. An access hatch. Fused into the iron, kilometers beneath the ice surface. Chaeyoung was immediately alert, her mind sharp and icy on the trail of curiosity.Beyond that hatch were twisting tunnels filled with water, ice, and glow grass. Glow grass. It was her glow grass, the Mu Herculis alien derelict glow grass. Identical!Scattered among patches of glow grass, were familiar alien bodies, shaped like two lungfish stacked end to end. Unlike the mummified body she had seen, these had an almost beetle-like sheen familiar from the rendered images Garcia had shown her. These bodies underwent substantial preservation!“That was real then?” Chaeyoung said in shock. “What you showed me? They were an extrapolation, and not a fabrication?”“That’s just a fraction of what we found, so I think you’ll agree,” Garcia said with a smug satisfaction. “That this discovery is far more important.”She nodded. “But why does your boss not agree?”Garcia turned cold and pulled back. “Our organizational structure is not quite that simple.”“But her priorities seem to be your organization’s priorities.”“For now.”There was a moment of clarity. Her stomach clenched in panic. Garcia had expected Chaeyoung’s curiosity to get the better of her—over-riding both love and self-interest in her own survival and freedom. She clenched her hands into fists, took a deep breath, and then she observed her surroundings. Garcia was desperate, both to understand the alien and the inhuman, and to gain more power in his organization. This gave her leverage. He was willing to subvert his own organization slowly. Nudge them into satisfying his own curiosity, and he was trying to use Chaeyoung to achieve that end. Perhaps she could use his own obvious frustration to her advantage. She would have to be delicate.She shook her head and sucked at her teeth. “I just don’t see what your group thinks is more important than this.”“The old man thinks we can rebuild the CTCC prototype but doesn’t trust the physicists enough. The docking tug project is to advance our technology and prove the physicists can be trusted.”“CTCC? Prototype?”She flinched as Garcia’s body language immediately closed off, and she tried to course-correct her overreach. All she thought to do was double down. She put her hands up in surrender.“Oke, you don’t need to explain… maybe we just need to prove that they can trust us? While making Ninya Blanca look less,” she stumbled for the right word. “Less accurate in her judgement.”Garcia’s jaw tensed. “Go on.”Sweat built up on her forehead as she improvised. “Oke…hmm…well what if this docking tug test works, but…you lose control of it? A kind of…simultaneous success and failure.”“Ninya Blanca will take the credit and—”“Not if we know what the failure is!” she said with the energy of a proper plan clicking into place. “If you have been warning her the precise ways in which the test can go wrong—which I can help you with—then it will seem like your judgement is good.”“She’ll suspect collusion.”“But will she be able to prove it?”Garcia leaned back and rubbed his chin. “Not if we’re careful.”“Then let’s set the plan now. Tell me what I need to know.”Chaeyoung suppressed a smile as she saw Garcia’s body relax, and he let the information flow freely.***“Eheen, gah sheke wetin dey?”[79][Di Lingua]: What’s going on, sweety? ↑ Vis asked.“Hmm?” Chaeyoung lifted her head from sulking about her haphazardly mixed doshirak meal. “Nothing. I’m fine,” she lied with a gentle smile.Vis was obviously concerned, and her nose scrunched up in the cutest way. Chaeyoung glanced at the guards around their makeshift home in the working dry-dock, saw they were not paying any attention, and leaned over to kiss Vis on the cheek before anyone else could notice. Vis relaxed and sadly pouted at Chaeyoung.“You should eat more.”Chaeyoung shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”It had been almost ninety days since they reunited. Keeping secrets from Vis was taking a physical toll on Chaeyoung. Worse, she knew Vis was noticing this toll—emotionally and physically. Her smile slipped, and she attempted to regain it before anyone could notice.“I don’t blame you for this. You know that, right?”Vis sighed. “I know, but I blame myself for this,” Her face twisted in a moment of pain and guilt that tore at Chaeyoung’s heart. “It was before we met.”“But we’re only here because of my ideas.”Her stomach twisted, and a powerful urge filled her to shout out what she knew. She just wanted to shout out. “I know they are using you! I know this is just the first step in their goals and what they’re trying to build! And I know you’re only playing along to save me! But it’s oke, eheen, it’s not your fault and I don’t blame you—I would never blame you! I love you!” But if Garcia and her plan had any chance of working, all she could do was subtle nudges. Anything else, and Ninya Blanca would catch on.Chaeyoung was sick. Nauseated. She was lying and manipulating Vis. It did not matter that she was doing it to protect her, to further Garcia’s interests and gain leverage and a foothold and power over their captors—at moments like this, that all seemed like a self-serving cope. She let her chopsticks fall back into the purple bap she had been picking at for the last ten minutes. Vis reached out a hand to comfort Chaeyoung. Chaeyoung smiled, then pulled her hand away.“Please, don’t blame yourself,” Chaeyoung whispered. “Who knows why we’re here.”Vis stared at Chaeyoung, her eyes watery and darting back and forth as if she was reading an ink display, and then she gave up and brought her hand back to her side of the mess table. They sat in silence for several minutes, Vis picking at her meal. Chaeyoung was heartsick and filled with rage at herself and Garcia and Ninya Blanca, the cadre of skeletal aesthetic armed guards, and whoever these other scientists in blue, black, and gray fatigues were.“I blame myself because of what I am about to do,” Vis said cryptically, breaking the silence.Vis looked resolute. Her deep brown eyes glowed with the subtlest hint of blue from her EAR mods. Chaeyoung knew she was talking about sabotaging the advanced ERR–AL prototype—exactly as she had planned would happen with Garcia.“I—”“That’s all I can say. Safely,” Vis’s voice was cold and stern but loving before she gave Chaeyoung a fake cheery smile and asked. “What’s your favorite star in the galaxy?”Chaeyoung tilted her head. “Why are you asking?”“No reason, just changing the subject,” Vis lied with a small twitch at the corner of her lips that gave it all away to Chaeyoung.Chaeyoung inhaled deeply, calming her stomach and nerves. “Hmm. Any other constraints? Or just my favorite star?”Vis shrugged with her hands. “Maybe…your favorite uninhabited star?”“Haha, before this whole adventure I would have said Mu Herculis. But now,” she frowned. “I would have to go with an old favorite…in the modern catalogues it is called Astraes Leonis Shiva.”“Where is it? Do you know?”“Hmm. It’s maybe around one hundred light years from Sipapu if I remember correctly. From Earth, it is in the Leo constellation.”“Why was it your favorite?”“Oh, it’s just an underrated little system. A few confirmed exoplanets and one confirmed exomoon with an atmosphere. Cold, high carbon dioxide, borderline unstable orbit around a M-dwarf star…it’s got so little going for it in terms of exobiology.”“Maybe a bit like Mu Herculis?”“Hah, ye,” Chaeyoung gave Vis a warm smile. “You know me, I like the long odds, but I always thought of it as a kind of dead world, despite how I felt about the Oxygen Hypothesis.”They finished their lunch together with empty small talk, but Chaeyoung could tell from Vis’s body language and their earlier conversation what would happen after. Chaeyoung was confident that Vis, Mimo, and Ali would finish their test project, and Vis would sabotage it in the only way she knew: by sending the prototype one-way to some far-off star, far faster than expected due to “errors” in the calculation. She perceived it from Vis’s questions about Chaeyoung’s favorite star. It was a kind of romantic, though futile gesture that made Chaeyoung’s heart melt. Though she also spotted it in the constant fretting attention Mimo paid to his Martian shawl the last few days, combined with Ali’s further retreat into moroseness and quietude. They had decided to sabotage their own project.Chaeyoung was certain. She was certain that they would conduct a test on the prototype today. Garcia clarified they were performing an experiment to assess the trustworthiness of the captured ERR–AL physicists before starting the actual work, despite the immediate benefits of Ninya Blanca’s interests from a prototype like this.As for the genuine work, it was beyond Chaeyoung’s understanding. Garcia told her they were going to be tasked with recreating a closed time-like curve computer—a CTCC—which exploited peculiarities of ERR–AL physics to yield a superlative calculational tool that could break military grade encryption like a cut knife through AlKapThil. Chaeyoung smiled as she laid down on her assigned cot, the others having returned to their duties in the dry-dock. Soon Garcia would look prescient after weeks of warnings of the failure of the prototype test. If it played out correctly, he would gain status among his organization and Chaeyoung might—hopefully—bend his curiosity and increased status to her and Vis’s advantage. At the very least, Vis was sending the prototype off to a star known as Astraes Leonis Shiva, making it impossible to recover. All because it was Chaeyoung’s favorite star.