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opened the food slot, and Althea saw the two men staring at each other through the narrow opening.
    “Go,” Ivanov said, and Althea watched Gale hesitate, looking up the hall to where he must have known pursuit would come. “Go,” Ivanov urged when Gale still knelt there and looked in at him, and Althea felt a curious uncomfortable churning in her gut.
    Domitian and Gagnon would catch Gale soon, she told herself, but somehow that did not help the churning, which felt almost like the beginnings of guilt.
    Finally Gale seemed to decide.
    “This is for Europa, Scheherazade,” he said, and let the food slot cover fall, clanging shut. Then he rose to his feet and started to run just as Gagnon and Domitian came into sight, still far distant.
    In his cell, Ivanov leaned his head against the door across from where Gale had been, and Althea closed that window and instead focused on following Gale as he ran down, down, down to the very base of the ship’s spine. She watched him pull up short at the downward curve of the ceiling that terminated the hall, looking around as if for some way out. Farther up the hall, still quite distant, Domitian and Gagnon still pursued. Gale had nowhere to go.
    All throughout the
Ananke
there were computer interfaces in the hallway, separated by about thirty feet. Such frequent access to the computer was necessary in a ship so large with a crew so small, but it meant that there was a way to access the computer at any point on the ship, including at its very base.
    Matthew Gale bent over the computer terminal nearest to him and began to type.
    “What?” Althea said aloud, and rose to her feet without anywhere to go. “No, no, no,” she muttered, and looked to see where Domitian and Gagnon were—they were there, they were running, they were getting closer but weren’t close enough yet—and then back at Gale, who was frowning with concentration and still typing. If Althea could connect to the specific interface he was working from, she could try to stop whatever he was doing, but first she would have to find out which one it was. The interfaces weren’t numbered in order, and she’d have to force access; he’d probably stop her, but if she could just delay him from doing anything, Domitian and Gagnon could catch up to him and stop him—
    Before she could do anything, every screen in front of her—the hundred video feeds, her connection to
Ananke
’s bowels, the still-open files on Gale and Ivanov—went black and still, dead with the lights, leaving Althea blind in the dark.
    —
    When the
Ananke
came back online a few minutes later, the lights flaring on with a suddenness that nearly blinded Althea again, she knew that something was wrong in the computer.
    “Damn it, damn it, damn it,” she muttered as the screen brightened slowly and the videos from the cameras blinked on and off, black spaces in the grid of video. “Come on, Ananke.”
    The screen glowed featureless, white.
    There was a screen in the corner of the room that played System official news at all hours of the day. It could not be turned off, but Althea had long since muted it, finding that it interfered with her concentration. Even when it was muted, subtitles streamed across the bottom of the screen endlessly.
    Now, jolted by the sudden shutdown and restart of the ship’s systems, the screen blared to life.
    “Twelve insurgents were caught this morning in a residential home on Triton,” said a beautiful woman with emotionless eyes and a crisp Terran accent; the volume was too high, and her voice slammed into Althea’s head like a physical blow.
    “God
damn
it,” said Althea, and briefly abandoned her post to dash the few steps across the room and lunge for the mute button.
    “Surveillance in their residence recorded discussion of treasonous sympathies,” said the screen.
    “Althea!” It was Domitian’s voice on the intercom.
    “I’m
coming,
” said Althea, though she knew he could not hear her, and punched