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  She had learned that trick from Dix.

  Bastard.

  And then she made herself focus, and returned to work.

  She got deep into the data, only dimly aware that Coop had moved away from the console to the main navigation console. Then the floor hummed beneath her feet, catching her in a familiar vibration.

  He was starting up the ship. Of course he was. It was the only smart play.

  If Dix had rigged the anacapa drive to overload and cause a cascade effect with the other anacapa drives nearby, then the best way to handle the crisis was to make sure only one anacapa drive exploded.

  Theirs.

  Coop didn’t need the anacapa drive to move the ship. The standard engines would be able to get the Ivoire far away from the space station in a matter of minutes.

  Yash tapped the console, making sure that there was no change in the anacapa drive as Coop started the ship. If the readings on the console were correct—and she had to assume they were—then the anacapa drive was just fine, at least at the moment.

  She was banking a lot on the fact that Dix was using a trigger and not a timer. But to Dix, who wanted to make a point, a trigger made more sense.

  A trigger guaranteed that someone found his body, saw his protest or whatever the hell this was, and had a chance of understanding his point.

  A timer would make sure the anacapa explosion occurred, but if it occurred at the wrong moment and obliterated everything, then no one would ever know about Dix’s suicide and his damn message.

  She needed to concentrate. Because what she knew and what she guessed were two different things. There were no real studies on what happened to a ship when an anacapa overloaded. There were theories, not true knowledge.

  The Ivoire would probably be destroyed, but there was a chance it would travel, damaged and unusable, into foldspace.

  And then there was the chance that the Ivoire would explode, and all of its pieces, including its human crew, would be forced into foldspace. The crew would die, unprotected and alone, in the vastness of space.

  Right now, its human crew numbered two—herself and Coop.

  There was no way to protect her and Coop, except to find the problem and disarm it. She wasn’t even going to put on an environmental suit. If the ship exploded and she and Coop were thrust into foldspace—alive—all an environmental suit would buy them was two or three days of agony, waiting for a rescue that would never come.

  If Coop ordered her into an environmental suit, she would put it on. Otherwise, she was just going to continue working.

  The air shifted, adding just a bit of oxygen like it always did when the ship was in motion, designed to keep the crew alert. The extra oxygen was a bit excessive, designed for a full crew compliment.

  Instead, Coop was piloting the Ivoire alone. The ship was designed for that, but it wasn’t recommended. And he almost always used a copilot.

  Instead, he let Yash work.

  So she did until he spoke up.

  “We’re clear of the space station and the shipping lanes,” he said. “If we blow, we go alone.”

  In more ways than one. But she didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything.

  Instead, she nodded.

  “And,” he said, “I don’t know if you heard what I was doing, but I managed to finish the scenarios you asked for.”

  Perfect timing. She had done just about all she could with the bits of the data that Dix had touched. All she had been able to figure out was that he had come into this bridge with a clear plan. Dix might even have had a list—do this to misdirect here; do that to misdirect there—because none of what he had done, in the order he had done it, made sense otherwise.

  Of course, she was following the trail of a crazy man who had ended up committing suicide. There was always the chance that he had done all of this out of order because he had been out of his mind.

  She wasn’t going to assume that. He had seemed rational enough the night before.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s give those scenarios a go.”

  She needed to listen first, see if there were similarities in the scenarios, things that Dix could have predicted. And then she had to correlate those similarities to whatever he had done—even though he had done those things out of order.

  She nodded to Coop, and cleared a small screen before her, ready to listen.

  Six

  Scenario One.

  Coop’s voice, rich and methodical, filled the bridge. Coop had a screen up as well, and he was making notes, just like Yash was. Only he was probably looking for different things.

  After we left the bar last night, Yash, I went to the space station. I wouldn’t have returned to the Ivoire for two days or more. That’s important. That’s one of my patterns.

  She hadn’t known that. Had Dix? Maybe. If he had been focused on Coop.

  So I would have entered the bridge, and I would have assumed—and Dix probably assumed—that no one else had entered since he had.

  After a minimum of two days, this bridge would stink. The environmental system would scrub the smell as much as it could, but a human body, particularly the size of Dix’s, has an overpowering stench that challenges even the best environmental system.

  It sounded like Coop was speaking from experience. Yash wasn’t sure why he had that kind of experience. But she didn’t know his entire history, any more than he knew all of hers.

  The bridge environmental system is on minimal, so I’m sure I would have smelled him before I saw him. That would have immediately put me on alert. I would have known something was wrong, and I would have investigated—slowly.

  I would have cursed myself for coming alone, for no longer wearing the standard uniform, for not carrying a weapon as a matter of routine. I’ve gotten pretty lax, Yash. I’ve become too comfortable in this place.

  She hadn’t expected Coop to be so honest. She glanced at him over the console. He shrugged, and toggled something, pausing his voice.

  “I figured you needed to hear those things as well,” he said. “Dix would know what I would be wearing. He would know what I am capable of.”

  She nodded. Coop was right. Dix would know all that. That was one reason Dix had become first officer—his ability to predict Coop’s behavior.

  Coop gave her a small smile, half sheepish, half rueful, and then he toggled his voice back on.

  It doesn’t take long to examine the bridge, and Dix’s body is hard to miss. I would have found it fast.

  By then it would have been in an obvious state of decay. I would scan the rest of the bridge, but I would assume, from what I saw of Dix’s body, that there was no immediate threat, that the threat had been days ago, when Dix had died.

  Coop’s voice had gotten sad. There was an implication in his tone, something she felt as well: it was entirely plausible that Dix could have been dead for two days and no one would have noticed.

  Dix had to know that as well. He’d been left alone a lot. That one detail alone made the trigger scenario the most plausible—that and the fact that nothing else had happened yet.

  I would have gone to the body. I would have examined it the way I had done when you pointed the body out to me.

  In other words, he would have crouched, looked, and examined.

  I would not have touched him or anything near him, including that knife. I would have seen it. I would have assumed, from its presence, the fact that his carotid artery had been severed, and the way he was lying, that he had done this to himself.

  I would have assumed that, as he died, he put his hands on the container, and I would have assumed he had done so for a reason. That reason would have been to send a message to me: that I should have listened to him about using the anacapa drive to get us home, and since I refused him, he killed himself. Like a damn petulant child who wasn’t getting his way.

  Yash smiled. Exactly.

  I would have been angry first. I am angry. I suppose, even in that scenario, the one in which I did not
suspect Dix of doing anything malicious, I would have been angry for days. Maybe afterward, I would have mourned. Maybe.

  Coop’s voice had trembled as he said that. There was more in his tone than he realized. A little devastation lurked beneath it.

  Yash hadn’t realized until today just how much Coop had cared about Dix.

  The first thing I would have done, even as I crouched down to look at Dix, is contact the medical team. I wouldn’t have asked for a specific person, because I have no idea who is on the ship at any given point. I do know that we always have a medical team on board.

  Then he chuckled on the recording, which surprised her. She glanced over at him. Coop definitely was not chuckling now. He looked very serious.

  Except right at the moment, I guess.

  The scenario paused there, as if Coop had contemplated what he was going to say next. Or maybe he had been thinking about the risks he and Yash were taking.

  Anyway…the medical team. I would have taken whoever was here. There would have been no reason to bring in a specialist that I would have seen, and Dix hadn’t been close to anyone in the medical core. Or anywhere, for that matter. Which, I suppose, was part of the problem. His entire support system had been left in the past.

  Yash started. She hadn’t thought of that. She wondered how many others on the Ivoire crew had the same issue. She had never asked.

  The medical team wouldn’t have arrived immediately. I wouldn’t have asked them to act like it was an emergency. So I would have had to wait, and while I waited, I would have tried to find out why the bridge itself hadn’t notified me when Dix started bleeding. It should have.

  Yash had looked for that as well. But she hadn’t gone at it directly. She had cycled through the various systems, looking for something awry. She had found the command shutdowns that Dix had ordered, specifically the way he had shut off bridge notifications to senior staff members.

  Dix hadn’t tried to hide the shutdown commands, then. Because he expected Coop to look for them, and for nothing else?

  I would have started with the environmental system, because it was the part of the bridge that would have noticed the blood first. If I didn’t find anything there, I would have moved to the notification system itself, as well as the entire security system.

  I have no idea how much I would have gotten done, because I can’t factor in how long it would have taken the medical team to arrive. I also have no idea what I would have found.

  But Yash did. She had found tampering in the notification system first, not the environmental system.

  So Dix hadn’t foreseen everything Coop would have done, in the order in which he would have done it.

  Once the medical team arrived, I would have turned the investigation and the handling of Dix’s body over to them. I would have supervised his removal from the area of the anacapa container, making sure the team didn’t touch anything they shouldn’t have, but that would have been the extent of my focus.

  You’ll have to look up what their procedures are for the dead body of a known bridge member, and with an easily discernable cause. I don’t know that.

  This time, Yash toggled the scenario playback off.

  “What did you mean, ‘a known bridge member’?” she asked Coop.

  He frowned at her. He tilted his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe the question. Clearly, whatever he was thinking about was fairly obvious, at least from his perspective.

  “It’s the ‘easily discernable cause’ that’s the important part of the sentence,” he said. “Not the known bridge member.”

  “Okay,” Yash said. “Talk me through that. You clearly know more about it than I do.”

  He blinked in surprise, then nodded.

  “We do a training exercise, several dozen of them, in fact, designed for all sorts of scenarios—”

  “We who?” she asked.

  “Anyone on the leadership track,” he said. “When you make it to be considered as captain material, they run all kinds of holographic and hypothetical scenarios. Several of them have to do with a dead body on the bridge.”

  “Several of them,” she repeated. She had never heard of this.

  “Yes,” he said. “If the ship has been breached by person or persons unknown who then murder a member of the bridge crew and leave the corpse on the bridge. Or an enemy, with malicious intent, leaves a body on the bridge.”

  “Malicious intent?” Yash asked. “What does that mean?”

  Coop gave her a guarded look. “There are a lot of ways to destroy a ship, Yash. One way is to take out its command structure.”

  She nodded. She knew that.

  “The body could be a Trojan horse. It could be filled with toxins or with a virus or some kind of plague. It could be rigged to explode—”

  Coop stopped talking as Yash whirled, and looked down at Dix. She hadn’t thought of that at all. Did he have explosives on him? Was he rigged to explode, not the anacapa drive?

  Coop cursed. “That’s what he did, isn’t it?”

  “It’s certainly safer and easier than messing with the anacapa drive,” she said. But it still bothered her that Dix had done a bunch of other things on the control panel.

  Coop had already moved to the supplies locker. Inside that locker was containment clothing as well.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m going to check him out.”

  “He’ll have set it up so that if you move him…” She stopped. She didn’t know that either.

  She picked up a hand scanner and took several small steps over to the body.

  “Don’t touch him,” Coop said. “We don’t know if he used the entire ‘body on the bridge’ playbook.”

  She turned the scanner on, keeping it as far from the anacapa container as possible. The scanner was useless to examine an anacapa drive, which was where her focus had been. She had figured the medical team would eventually examine the body.

  But the scanner could interact with a damaged anacapa drive. Anything with energy could. She couldn’t worry about that.

  “Yash,” Coop said. “Don’t—”

  “I’m not touching him,” she said.

  She held the scanner near his face, not sure what she was looking for. The scanner showed Dix was still in rigor. Then it delved into his entire bone structure, the soft tissues, all of the biological details. She moved the scanner slightly, saw that, indeed, the carotid had been cut all the way through. The artery looked flat and useless, probably because it wasn’t filled with blood.

  Information, flowing along the side of the scanner, actually listed the rate of decay and was pinpointing the time of death.

  She didn’t look. She roughly knew when that was.

  Coop joined her, crouching beside her. He wore an environmental suit, which surprised her.

  “You need to suit up,” he said.

  She nodded. He was right. If they touched the body and anything got released, they could die horribly.

  She handed the scanner to Coop, stood, and headed around the other side of the console, to the supplies locker. Lots of weapons in there. Dix could have used any one of them to kill himself.

  Instead he had used that bone knife.

  Maybe he already knew he didn’t have access to the locker.

  But that hadn’t stopped him from finding a back door into the console, and tampering there. He would have been able to tamper with the locker door as well. The lock there wasn’t nearly as complicated as the system on the control panel.

  She pulled out an environmental suit sized for her. Her regular suit was in her cabin on the lower deck. She hadn’t even bothered to move that suit to her apartment on the space station, which said something about her attitude.

  She slipped the suit on, and pulled up the hood. Then she glanced over her shoulder to see if Coop had done the same with his.

  He was leaning over the body, the scanner just above it. She felt her breath catch. She hadn’t warned him about staying a
way from the anacapa drive. He should have known that, of course, but still. She always preferred to err on the side of caution.

  “Yash,” Coop said. “There is something here.”

  She made her way back, feeling restricted in the suit. She usually didn’t wear them. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she had worn one.

  “Come see this,” Coop said. “Double-check me.”

  She crouched beside him, the material stretching over her clothes, pulling on it. She hated that feature of environmental suits in real gravity. The suits felt looser in zero-g, although it was arguable about whether or not they were.

  She flicked on the suit’s data stream, letting it run along one side of her clear hood. She also set the suit to alert her should anything toxic reveal itself in the atmosphere around her—toxic or potentially dangerous.

  Then she took the scanner from Coop.

  “His back and his left side,” Coop said.

  She brought the scanner as close as she dared, saw nothing obvious in the shape of his body, his clothing, or his skin. But the scanner read nanobit activity near the armpit and shoulder blade.

  She enhanced the scanner, saw that the nanobits had become a coating over him. The chemical analysis made no sense to her, so she had the scanner explain it.

  The scanner told her that the coating was made of a touch explosive developed in the same culture that had developed the bone knife.

  “Did you see what that was?” she asked Coop, then thrust the scanner toward him.

  She couldn’t see Coop’s expression through his hood. The light near the anacapa drive caused a weird reflection on the clear material.

  But she didn’t have to see Coop’s face to know how he felt.

  He felt like she did.

  Dix had left the damn knife as something that would mislead them, and as a clue. Bastard. What had he been playing at?

  She shook her head a little.

  He hadn’t been playing at all.

  She moved the scanner across the rest of his body, looking for more coating or a variation on it. She found it near his left hip.