Ad Noctum: Chapter 14

Each day that went by, Volker trusted Telford less. And liked him more.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Violence. Injuries. Torture. Abduction. Anxiety. Panic. Purposefully insensitive discussion of mental health issues. Loss of agency. Thought control. Boundary problems. Manipulation. Gaslighting. References to suicide. Drug use. Death wishes. Indirect references to sexual assault. Blood. Grief.

Text iteration: Early.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 14

Three days after snatching success from the jaws of insanity on Lucia, Volker sat alone in the early-morning quiet of the workroom, the silver wrapper of his finished breakfast on the table beside his laptop. As he whistled the melodic line of Elgar’s Chanson de Matin through his teeth, Mendelssohn twined between his ankles.

With a cup of coffee and fancy headphones, he might have been able to tune out the streaked stars of hyperspace and the low-grade terror that came with working for space pirates.

Mendelssohn put his paws on Volker’s knee, looked him in the eye, dug his claws into Volker’s leather-clad calf and went to work.

Volker let him add a few satisfying scratches to the collection he had going. “I’m only allowing this so I can tell people I won a fight with a wolf.”

“Mraow,” Mendelssohn said.

“Don’t patronize me,” Volker replied. “As soon as we find you a scratching post, my pants are off limits.”

He opened the overnight data drop and scanned through his spreadsheet. Halfway down the screen, in an automatically highlighted row, was a set of numbers that landed like the Real and Genuine Deal.

“What?” he breathed.

After the night at The Little God and his order-of-operations discussion with Rush, Volker had expanded his search territory to the galactic core. When he’d increased the search area to include territory with nightmarish foregrounds, he’d expected he’d delay planetary discovery by a few weeks. At least.

But this planet was at the far end of the galaxy’s central bar.

He traced its position to the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way. It fell in a sweet spot, just outside the Zona Galactica Incognita and beyond the worst of the foreground affecting the galactic core. He checked and re-checked planetary mass, chemical composition, ran the foreground subtraction, and overlaid the dust template.

He sat back. “Huh.”

It was real. It looked good. It—

The door to the workroom swished open. Volker jumped. He got a sharp jolt from his overworked abs and pecs. 

“Hey.” Telford’s gaze flicked to the laptop. “You have something?” When Volker didn’t reply, he said, “You look like you have something.”

Volker made a show of releasing a breath. “No. You startled me. That’s all.”

“Sorry.” Telford grabbed a packet of vy’ta from a bin below the equation-covered window, then sat beside Volker. His hair smelled faintly of LA soap, with notes of cilantro and anise. “Let’s take a look.”

Crap.

He did and didn’t want to show Telford the data. He could tell Rush that Telford had surprised it out of him, and it would even be true, but—

Volker angled his laptop toward Telford.

—but if Telford was loyal to Kiva, if he’d gotten the Faith, if he wasn’t the person he seemed, then admitting he had a planet closed off options. Options Rush might want. Options Volker himself might need.

“Walk me through it,” Telford said.

Screwing up his resolve, Volker shrugged and leaned into his talent for understatement. “Too much spectroscopic shadowing.” He traced a dead-on curve with a fingertip. “It’s common near the galactic center. Even with the interference, the spectral index is too steep for the quantity and purity of naquadria we’re looking for. You get it.”

Ugh. No. He was laying it on too thick.

Telford furrowed his brow, pointed at the screen, opened his mouth, and—

“What happens,” Volker paused, digging for ease with his fingernails, “when we do find a planet? Are we off the ship? Working on site? I’m guessing it’s not all that easy to interface a stargate with geological deposits.” He huffed a laugh. “Don’t tell me I’m on the hook for that.”

“No.” Telford’s attention lingered on the perfect spectral index.

“Is Rush?”

“Maybe,” Telford said. “There are a lot of variables.”

Did Telford have the spectroscopic chops to call out “spectroscopic shadowing” as a made-up term? 

Ugh, for all Volker knew, the man had taken Spectroscopy For Fighter Pilots in his free time at Cheyenne Mountain. He was the type for it. If he hadn’t been an Air Force colonel exploring the galaxy, he’d be a regular at his local Astronomical Society’s star parties, showing up with a Dobsonian telescope and a keg of beer.

“Can we work through those?” Volker turned insistent. “Rush is more than halfway there. Five out of nine, right? I figure the better we control the logistics, the less chance we get shot up with The Faith.”

Finally, Telford’s focus on the data broke. He pushed back in his seat, crossed his arms, and met Volker’s gaze. “The ideal scenario,” he said, “is that our candidate planet has a stargate.”

Volker fought the way his shoulders wanted to let go of tension now that Telford wasn’t staring at the planetary data. “What are the odds of that?”

“Better than you’d think. More than a handful of Goa’uld have dabbled in naquadria refinement. But, if our planet is missing a gate, we steal one, mount it, and update its stellar coordinates.”

“Oh.” Volker rolled his shoulders, banishing his tension on a wave of sarcasm. “Sure. No big deal.”

Telford compressed most of the satisfaction out of his smirk. “The LA have experience with moving gates.”

“What about connecting the gate with unstable geothermal deposits? Do they have experience with that?”

Telford unwrapped his vy’ta. “Fortunately, Stargate Command has already done it.” He took a bite of compressed protein. “The SGC has a mounted gate linked to a huge naquadria deposit at a base called Theseus.” He wolfed down another chunk. “LA insurgency has already stolen the protocol.”

Volker searched for a sliver of pride, a hint of regret; but the words hit like the facts they were. “Theseus, huh?” He tried a different angle. “Do they have to replace parts of the base over and over?”

Telford raised his eyebrows. “Geomagnetic storms fry semiconductors all the time. How’d you guess?”

“Just—the name. You’ve heard of the Ship of Theseus?”

“His ship? No. Theseus the man was badass. Navigated a labyrinth. Slew the minotaur at its heart.”

Volker nodded. “But after he slays the minotaur, Athens preserves his ship in the harbor.”

“Oh yeah?” Telford swallowed another bite of vy’ta.

“That preserved ship becomes the subject of a philosophical debate about identity. If, as each board rots away, you replace it with a new board…is it the same ship?”

“Rings a bell.” Telford put a crisp fold in his empty silver wrapper. “Does anyone care?”

Mendelssohn hopped from floor to Volker’s knee, then from Volker’s knee to the tabletop.

“Science fiction is obsessed with metaphysics for a reason.” Mendelssohn butted his head against Volker’s forearm. “Hey buddy.” He looked back at Telford. “‘Science fiction’ is pretty much your day job.”

Telford’s smile was rueful.

“You’ve never been split into two versions of yourself by a rogue transporter beam, I take it?” Volker asked.

“Not yet.” Telford watched Mendelssohn’s cautious approach and held out his hand for the cat to sniff. “Ship of Theseus gonna help me out if it happens?” Slowly, he threaded a finger beneath the cat’s collar and scratched under his tipped-up chin.

“Well, it might help a jury of your peers consider questions of metaphysical primacy.”

Telford snorted a laugh, still petting the cat. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. You’ve got arguments from continuity of form, you’ve got mereology—”

Volker broke off as the bright streaks of stars backlighting the equation-covered window collapsed to points of light on a field of black. The deep and subtle hum of the hyperdrive dropped to nothing. 

“That can’t be good.” His fingertips tingled with adrenaline.

Mendelssohn meowed at the window, offended.

The dark veldt of vacuum had swallowed up the math on the glass.

Telford tipped his chin up as though scenting the air or listening for the hiss of escaping atmosphere. “I’ll check the bridge.” He caught Volker’s eye, equal parts grim and exasperated. “You bang on the engine room door.”

Volker shut his laptop, stood, and followed Telford along the ship’s central corridor. As he went, he scanned the walls, the lights, the vents. Nothing seemed amiss with internal power or life support.

That was a hopeful sign.

Telford shut the bridge door behind him, mindful of the LA listening device still in place. Volker gave it a beat, then rapped on the engine room doors, not able to break decorum in the absence of a life support problem. “Hey man,” he said. “It’s me. We, uh, just lost our hyperspace window?”

No answer.

“Everything okay in there?” Volker tried.

No answer.

“This’ll definitely go better if you open the door,” Volker said.

And the door swished open.

The walls shone with peach and milk and washed-out gold, spiraling over a backdrop of deep cobalt. The shell-and-sea take on Starry Night spread from the walls to the drive, where blue sloshed up the central column like lapping waves.

Rush lay on the floor, his pirate boots propped on a short stack of two textbooks. His hands were behind his head and his Time Lord coat was open, its burgundy lining rippling with the soft light from the walls. He watched the crystal display wall with a faint smile.

A sensor array, Rush had called this lumino-kinetic art. And Volker had only half believed him, even after the resonance between the wall and his A-corder. But this was the visual equivalent of program music in the best traditions of Strauss, of Berlioz. The walls told a story. 

As Volker watched broken-shell hues tangle with the deep cobalt of Tiamat’s sea, he said, “Vala’s got the Eye.”

Rush dragged a fluid checkmark through the air.

Volker felt the warm glow of indignant pride at a (presumably) correct intuition that wasn’t grounded in anything graspable. The catalog of mechanistic explanations he generated and rejected was full of half-remembered quantum mechanics. Even if he was circling something plausible (entanglement), it still didn’t explain why Rush’s “sensor array” looked like Van Gogh’s take on the Goddess of Love meeting Tiamat’s Overground Sea.

“This is nice, man,” Volker said, hands on hips. “Really nice. Now, uh, I hate to be That Guy…but did you notice your cosmic crystalcam blew out our hyperdrive?”

Rush sighed.

Mendelssohn gave a no-one-is-paying-attention-to-me meow from the doorway, then wandered into the room.

“Telford’s not happy.” Volker watched thick streaks of color swirl over the walls, now more blue, now more seashell. “Can you reboot the drive?”

Rush didn’t seem to register Volker’s question. Mendelssohn approached, sniffed Rush’s hair, then started making biscuits on the mathematician’s injured shoulder.

Volker dropped into a crouch, putting himself in Rush’s line of sight. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes yes.” Rush grimaced as Mendelssohn started kneading his gunshot wound in earnest.

“Okay, good. So, um, it’s a bad idea to mess with drive engines in the middle of nowhere. You know that, right? You’ve seen movies? Read books? We’re a little bottle of air in a gigantic void. So can we turn this off and get back to letting the drive do its thing?”

Rush looked up at him, speculative and languid, like his sanity was running out through an invisible head wound. “Don’t undermine me.”

“I’m not,” Volker said conversationally. “Maybe if you’d trust me enough to—”

“Trust you?” Rush angled his head inquisitively, as though encountering an unfamiliar word for the first time. “Trust?”

Volker rolled his eyes, glanced at the door, then whispered. “You want a demo? I’ll show you how it’s done.”

“Astonish me.”

“I’ve got a planet. Just turned up this morning. Spectroscopically, it looks like the real deal.”

“Does David know?”

Volker shook his head.

Rush arched a brow. “Good. Find out if it’s gated.”

“You find out if it’s gated,” Volker hissed. “Can I go home now?”

Rush smiled faintly. “I hope to eventually offer you that opportunity.”

“Thanks so much,” Volker muttered.

Mendelssohn stopped his low-grade torture of the guy on the floor and relocated to the burgundy lining of Rush’s jacket where he settled himself into a tight calico curl beside Rush’s thigh.

“This is great,” Volker said. “This is just awesome.”

“D’you not find yourself tiresome?” Rush asked conversationally.

“Not really,” Volker began.

In the hall, the door to the bridge opened and closed.

Telford entered the room and stopped just inside the frame of the door. He took in the maritime light on the walls and Rush’s feet-up floor sprawl. Hope and guilt, reverence and apprehension passed over his face.

Volker braced for a fight. One with guns and knives near the heart of the ship’s most critical systems. 

Instead, Telford looked up at the crystals painting the room with watery light. “Explain it to me?”

Blue glints flickered in Rush’s hair, like he was lying on the floor of a sunken cathedral. “No,” he said, crushingly gentle.

Telford looked at Volker. “Scan him.”

“What?”

“With your A-corder,” Telford clarified. “He doesn’t look good.”

Rush levered himself up on one elbow, but Telford stepped in and planted a boot on his sternum, pressing him back to the floor.

Volker looked up at Telford. “C’mon, man.”

“I think a lot about how I’ll kill you,” Rush informed Telford with polite good cheer.

“Oh yeah?” Telford smiled down at him. “Knives? Fire? What are your top three?”

“Can we not?” Volker muttered. He put a shoulder into Telford’s knee and knocked his leg away from Rush’s chest. 

Telford staggered back a step and shot Volker a glare, but backed off a pace when Rush didn’t move.

Volker dropped out of his crouch and settled himself on the floor next to Rush. He unclipped the A-corder from his belt. It flared ocean-blue in his hand, like it was saying hello to the watery light-magic on the walls. Volker pointed the device at Rush. //How’s the crazy guy on the floor?//

It replied with a visual of a heartbeat, accompanied by a block of shimmery text Volker couldn’t read. About as much help as usual. It didn’t seem to be as worried as it had been the time that Rush had been shot, so, good? Probably?

//Can you give me what’s wrong with him in one word,// Volker asked, hoping his rudimentary Ancient was up to the task.

He got two words. Blocky letters. In the privacy of his own mind, he sounded them out.

San..guin..is.

Blood.

He didn’t love that.

“Can you read that thing?” Telford asked.

“Doubtful,” Rush said.

Volker gathered his dignity. “A little.” He moved to the second word. A…miss..io. “Amiss blood,” Volker decided.

Rush swiped the A-corder from Volker’s hand and it exploded into a cycling rainbow of joy in tropical sea tones, running the spectrum over and over. Volker’s heart ached with envy. Rush re-seated his glasses and glared at the happy little device until it calmed down and started showing him iridescent text on a dark background. He scrolled through screen after screen of text that shone with concern, with mechanical love.

“What does ‘amiss blood’ mean?” Telford asked.

“None of your business.” Rush tapped the back of Volker’s hand with the A-corder.

Volker clipped the device to his belt.

Telford offered Rush his hand. “Why don’t you go take a nap in the cat’s Faraday cage while Dale and I figure out what the hell you did to our drive.”

Rush smacked Telford’s hand aside, sat, plucked Mendelssohn out of his curl, and staggered to his feet. He settled the cat over his bad shoulder and studied the light show on the walls. “This does look expensive.”

“In terms of power or money?” Volker asked.

Rush opened his free hand in a gesture that suggested there was no difference, and headed for the doors.

“Not so fast,” Telford said. “What is this, Rush?”

Rush made a courtly flourish. “Cypher six. Stream cypher. You’re fuckin’ welcome.”

Volker, still sitting on the floor, looked up at him in astonishment.

There was no way that was true. 

Right?

Rush had called the walls a sensor array, and Volker had assumed that entangled crystal resonances (handwave, handwave) were signaling one another to pass simple qualitative harmonics that Rush could interpret. Simple stuff. Vala as pretty white foam. Eye of Tiamat as deep ocean blue.

And, based on aesthetics alone, Volker still couldn’t look at the walls and think of anything but the seafoam and shell crystals Rush had given her.

But with Rush claiming a sixth cypher—he probably had it. Bluffing seemed pretty risky in their current circumstances, but if he did have the sixth cypher, when had he cracked it? And how? A stream cypher would take more compute than Rush had available, with Volker using two of their three laptops for his WMAP data. 

“Oh god,” Volker breathed, staring at the walls.

“What?” Telford snapped.

Rush sighed and pressed his cheek into Mendelssohn’s back.

“This is a quantum computer,” Volker said. “You built—but—what’s the—where’s the—?”

“Y’think I’ve been lockpicking the gate network itself with the processing power of three stolen laptops?” Rush smirked. “Think again. The cyphers are physical. Embodied quantum states programmed into the crystals of every Milky Way gate.”

Volker’s mouth was hanging open.

He shut it.

Rattled, Volker turned to Telford. “He can’t just build a quantum computer. Out of, like, found crystal.”

There was a trace of smugness in Telford’s shrug. He glanced at Rush. “Nice work.”

“Yes,” Rush said. “It fuckin’ is, really.”

Telford did not get it.

At all.

If Rush had built a functional quantum computer—first of all, WHAT. But second—if he did have a quantum computer and was using it to demolish keys and mathematically chit-chat with distant hunks of crystal—he most likely had all nine cyphers.

And it made sense, given he spent his days reading about medical physiology and working on the problem of the Faith. Volker hadn’t once seen him cranking on a piece of intractable math. He knew what it looked like. He’d done it. And it had been wholly missing from Rush’s demeanor. For Volker’s entire tenure on this tel’tak.

“Hey, man.” Volker wasn’t sure what he was going to say. He heard the grind of dread in his own voice.

Rush shot him a sharp look, as though he understood the scope of Volker’s belated breakthrough. But all he said was, “Y’can have—” He paused to consider the oceanscape walls. “A day. T’fix this. Then I need it back.”

“What do you mean—” Telford began.

But like Rush had pulled the plug on a living artwork, the walls died.

Under the harsh morning fluorescence, Rush was wax-pale. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Telford frowned at Rush. “Hydrate,” he said. “Eat. Rest. In that order.”

Rush settled Mendelssohn over his shoulder. “Go fuck yourself,” he said, radiating academic machismo and casual poison. “Die in a pit. Rot in obscurity. In that order.” He turned and strolled into the hall.

Elbow to elbow, Volker and Telford opened the drive from the outside in. First came the emitter decoupling, dorsal and ventral nodes that projected the hyperspace field bubble. Then came the uncasing of the central column, the exposure of the crystal matrix: beautiful spars of engineered corundum, sapphire-class regular lattices with deliberately introduced defects in the form of programmable quantum states. Each crystal stored enormous data density in defect-state encoding and performed computation via phonon-mediated state transitions. The spars were radiation-hard, eighteen inches long, and closely clustered. Powered down, they were a palette of pastels: milky red, robin’s egg blue, sage green, smoked topaz, dusty rose, misted lavender.

Galactic history ran through the drive like a musical theme in sonata form. Stolen Ancient crystal converted power from the core into a hyperspace window. The Goa’uld had slapped their branding on the core’s casing, and on its deepest layer—liquid naquadah. They’d thrown raw thermal-electric output into a system designed for something more refined. Between dips into a tech manual series by Rodney McKay and questions to his A-corder, Volker came to the conclusion that the drive was running at no more than 30% of its peak efficiency under normal operations.

“This is wild,” Volker muttered, A-corder in one hand as he studied the Goa’uld’s retrofitted and rudimentary harness between the crystal layer and the drive below. “The heat bleed on this thing is enormous. How are we getting rid of it? Heat dispersal in a vacuum is tricky.”

“One thing I’ll say for the Goa’uld,” Telford said, on his back beneath the spherical naquadah core of the drive, “is they know a good thing when they see one. Take a look at the aft portion of the harness and you’ll see a small field generator.”

Volker craned his neck, looking between the gaps in intact circuitry. “I see it.”

“Opens a one-way channel into a thermodynamic sink in the same submanifold the ship transits through. Heat doesn’t go out. It goes elsewhere.”

“Ha!” Volker said. “Cool. Hope we’re not damaging the fabric of subspace.”

Telford snorted. “Like in Star Trek?”

Let’s be best friends! Volker didn’t say. Instead, with a pang of regret and low-commitment jazz hands, he said, “Speed limit: Warp 5.”

Each day that went by, Volker trusted Telford less. And liked him more.

With the crack-hiss of releasing pressure, the plate below the drive core dropped into Telford’s hands.

Silence.

Volker stopped inspecting the heat-dissipation system and dropped into a crouch. He craned his neck, couldn’t see anything, then dropped lower to try and get a view of the drive itself. He caught a quick glimpse of the underside of a silver ball of liquid naquadah before his triceps, sore from his latest workout, started complaining. Scooting along the floor, he got down on his back and put himself at a right angle to Telford under the circular central column. A few loose crystals shifted past his hip as he slid himself under the drive.

The spherical core was mounted above him, liquid naquadah enclosed in a silver sphere with indicator lights on its underside. Volker had put in enough time with Goa’uld displays that he could tell the power source was depleted. Doornail dead. What that meant exactly on a nuclear physics level—he couldn’t wait to find out.

Only, Telford wasn’t talking. He was staring stone-faced up at the drive.

Volker held his A-corder up to the drive. //Hey buddy,// he thought in its direction. //How does this drive work? In pictures, please?//

The little screen shivered from aquamarine to lavender and back, blazing up happily. On the screen he saw a representation of naquadah, its Z of 126, its N of 184. Neutrons emitted from outer shells, traversed the liquid medium, and were recaptured. At a constant temperature and pressure, a drive like this would operate for decades, if not centuries.

“Huh.” Volker frowned at the diagram onscreen.

When Telford spoke, there was no mistaking the dread in his voice. “Yup.”

“How’d we burn out a drive designed to run for centuries?” Volker asked.

As if in answer, his A-corder lit up with pale blue pictures of emission-capture cycles resulting in contaminating daughter products, destabilizing neutron flux, producing harmonic noise. The liquid naquadah wasn’t gone, it was just too contaminated to sustain the reaction that powered the drive.

“What’s it say?” Telford asked.

“We’ve got contaminants in the liquid naquadah,” Volker said. “The reaction can’t sustain itself. Any chance this drive has been in operation for, like, a hundred years?”

There was a long pause as they stared up at the underside of the drive.

Then, “No,” Telford said.

Volker nodded. He glanced down at his A-corder. //Did Rush do this?//

The A-corder showed him a delighted little rainbow of Rush’s vital signs, wedged into Mendelssohn’s open wall cavity. That probably translated as, “Yes indeed, my favorite human is wholly responsible!”

Volker clipped the device back to his hip and wiped clammy hands on the leather of his pants. 

Telford was quiet.

Volker cleared his throat. “What are you thinking?”

“We’re in trouble,” Telford said.

“Because we’re stranded in the vacuum between star systems?” Volker’s voice didn’t sound like his own.

“No.” And then, staring into the drive without seeing it, Telford asked, “We can get a resupply if we ask for it.”

“I’m guessing it’s the ‘asking for it’ part that you’re worried about? Because we cross paths with Kiva’s people. And she’s gonna ask questions.”

Telford stared up into the drive. “Do you understand what he’s trying to do?”

“I really don’t,” Volker replied.

“If we don’t figure it out,” Telford said, “and either help him or stop him, we’re all gonna get the Faith.” Telford turned his head and shifted his hips, so he could look at Volker. “I think he wants his own crack at the address. He has to. He turned down rescue.”

“Yeah,” Volker said reluctantly.

“If his plan,” Telford said, half his face lit red by the drive’s indicator lights, “is to solve the chevrons and make a run for a naquadah-rich planet—” he let the idea fade. “You gotta respect that.”

Volker shrugged at the underside of the drive.

“But I don’t get this.” Telford pointed at the drive with crisp economy. “I don’t get the obsession with Everett, who he doesn’t know, by the way. At all. Not sure if you realize that.”

“I understood that to be the case, yeah.”

“How does it fit?” Telford asked. “You. The cat. Everett. The drive. He has to understand that burning out our drive is a huge risk. We need a resupply. We’re gonna get called to account for it. We’re going to have to explain to Kiva that he turned it into a quantum computer or whatever the hell he did. Every time he pulls this kind of bullshit, we risk the Faith. As a group. And I know the Faith scares the hell out of him. He’s taking huge, bizarre risks. For no gain. At least no gain I can see.”

“He’s crazy,” Volker said, real regret in his voice. “I don’t think he puts ideas together the way you and I do. Or the way he used to, even.”

Telford stared at the drive. “You know more than you’re saying. And that’s okay. I get that. It’s smart.” He paused. Blew out a breath. “It’s smart,” he said again, almost to himself.

On the second day of the drive repair, Volker and Telford woke with the same alarm. They attacked their morning workout in half the time and with double their usual intensity. Volker ate while Telford showered. Telford ate while Volker showered. And, when it was time to reenter the engine room, they did it together. 

Instead of the dead walls and cracked-open drive cylinder they’d left the previous night, they found the drive sphere lit with the dull red of hungry indicator lights. The connection between the array and the drive column had been respliced, and the walls hummed with crystals strung in series and in parallel, bleeding more power off already contaminated naquadah.

Volker blew out a breath.

“No,” Telford said. “Shut it down.”

Rush, pacing a cleared track of kicked-aside crystal between the wall and the disassembled drive, turned with a flare of his Death God coat and said, “Can’t do that.” The rose-gold lightning bolt stitched across his shoulders caught the light like a gleaming yoke.

Telford’s jaw clenched.

Volker hooked two fingers around the crook of Telford’s elbow. Give me a shot, he asked with the lift of his eyebrows and the pressure of his fingertips.

Telford gave him a go-for-it hand gesture.

Volker cleared his throat. Took a step toward the drive. “I’m guessing that running this array is pretty important, given you’re draining what’s left of our drive.”

Rush paced away.

Volker waited.

Telford waited.

Rush reached into his coat, pulled out a silver lighter, spun it through his fingers, and flipped it open.

“No,” Telford said, like he was disciplining a dog. Immediately, he winced.

With a murderous glare, Rush closed the lighter and killed its flame.

Volker let Rush pace another round, backlit by a field of pastel crystal. Then he offered, “I can think of a few things worth draining the drive for. Solving another chevron, for one.”

A stormy blue broke free and shivered over the wall like light refracting off disturbed water.

Telford picked up the thread. “If you’re close when we call for rescue, we can spin this.”

Rush shot Telford a look of raw contempt. “What’s ‘close’?”

“Seven would be close,” Telford replied. “Eight on the way would be better. The more progress you make, the safer we are.”

“An’ say I did have seven.” Rush’s accent rode high with suppressed irritation. “Would y’let me power the bloody array? Would I have done your work sufficiently well t’do fuckin’ more of it? Would Kiva let me keep my mind intact for—what? Another few weeks?”

“Do you have seven?” Telford’s question drove like an iron spar.

A fan of amber flickered over the wall behind Rush like cloud-to-cloud lightning.

Telford drained the tension from his shoulders. From his stance. When his question came, it was full of quiet sympathy. “Did you poison the drive to buy yourself time?”

Rush stopped pacing. He faced Telford. As though Rush himself was capable of inducing current in his own array, a menacing scatter of smoky red sparks showered over the wall. 

In sunset-hued light, Telford took a step back.

“Where’s my wedding ring?” Rush asked.

Volker turned the question over and over, trying to jam a puzzle piece into a cut-out that wouldn’t fit.

Wedding ring? What wedding ring?

The lights dimmed.

The red crystals in the walls stood out like stars waiting to supernova. The Goa’uld indicator lights on the naquadah core pulsed like guttering embers.

“Hang on,” Volker began. “Can we back up?”

Slender, sharp blades slid from Rush’s sleeves into his palms. Paired flips over the backs of his hands sent them into reverse grips.

“I don’t have it.” Telford retreated another step, and a shard of crystal cracked beneath the heel of his boot.

“Is that what I asked?” Rush kept his gaze locked on Telford.

The red crystals on the wall bled the color from their neighbors. Shone brighter.

“Guys.” Volker heard the fear in his own voice. “We’re in this together.”

“Are we?” Delicately picking his way through strewn crystal, Rush drove Telford, step by step, toward the corridor.

Telford raised his hands, open now, palms forward. Inches away from his usual guard position. “Your ring is in your wallet,” he said, slow and controlled. “Your wallet is with Kiva.”

“You’re married?” Volker’s question burst free before he could think better of it.

Telford shot Volker a look that said, Thanks a lot.

Rush leapt at Telford, driving at his eye with a closed fist.

Telford dodged the thrust of the blow, but Rush’s reversed-grip knife sliced a gash across his cheekbone, millimeters from his lower eyelid.

“Hey!” Volker shouted.

Telford flicked a kick at the knife in Rush’s offhand, but Rush torqued the knife and met the kick with the edge-on blade. It bit deep into the rubber sole of Telford’s boot. Rush wrenched it free.

Telford dived into a sloppy lateral roll through a pile of crystal near the door. He scrambled sideways and came up, guard high, and backed toward the drive.

Blood sheeted down Telford’s sliced-open cheek.

Rush sent a knife flying, spinning the blade end-over-end, aiming for Telford’s eye. Telford ducked, and the blade clanged against the far wall. Instantly, Rush produced another, flipping it into a reversed grip.

With a chill, Volker understood that Rush was trying to drive Telford into the corridor. In a narrow, linear space, Telford wouldn’t be able to use his reach as effectively. The advantage of knives over fists would compound. 

There was a good chance Telford would lose this fight.

“Nick,” Telford said, hands open again. “Cool down. Think this through. I can still help you. You kill me today, I don’t show up on the bridge stalling for time, and Kiva will come for you. And there’ll be no one here to run interference. No one to protect Dale. Just you two, my corpse, and a dead drive.”

“Sounds perfect,” Rush snarled. He feinted with his left hand, Telford dropped his guard, and Rush tried to come in over it with a strike to the neck.

Just in time, Telford caught his wrist, prying the blade away from his own throat.

There was no doubt left in Volker’s mind. Rush was trying to kill Telford.

In a blur of building panic, Volker grabbed the back of Rush’s coat and hauled. “HEY,” he shouted, his eyes on Telford. “We need the array.” He shoved Rush behind him, hoping the mathematician wouldn’t stab him between his shoulder blades, and faced down Telford, palms open.

Telford froze, startled.

No one drove a blade into Volker’s back.

He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw Rush, a defensive hunch to his shoulders. The mathematician flipped a speculative knife over the back of one hand.

“You let us have the array,” Volker said to Telford, “and we’ve got no problem.” He looked over his shoulder. “Right?”

Rush glared at Volker like he might be considering a little biceps-stab between friends.

Telford pulled in a ragged breath, fingers spread. “I can respect that. Whatever you guys need. I will—I’ll make it work.”

Behind Rush, the walls shivered with bolts and fans and broken waves, rendered in firestorm colors.

A drop of blood fell from the underside of Telford’s jaw and tapped against the deck.

Rush flipped his knives. Braced his stance.

“And I am sorry,” Telford rasped like a man stress-testing every word he spoke, “about what happened. To her.”

A tear escaped the corner of Rush’s eye.

The crystals on the wall swirled burgundy and burnt orange, amber and heart-of-flame blue.

“Get out,” Rush said.

“No problem,” Telford breathed, backing toward the door.

“Buddy,” Volker began.

But Rush screamed an animal scream of grief and rage, vocal cords raw, his wet eyes reflecting crystals glowing with the stolen energy of a poisoned drive. His knuckles blanched as he gripped his knives. He bent double with the force of his own fury.

Telford lunged forward, but it wasn’t Rush he grabbed, it was Volker. 

Volker tried not to trip over his own feet as he was hauled toward the corridor.

The door swished shut so fast it clipped the heel of Volker’s boot.

A bolt drove home.

Telford and Volker stared at one another, breathing hard.

There was no sound from the other side of the door.

“And that,” Telford said, “is why we don’t mention his wife.”

Volker stuck with Telford as the man set himself up in the bathroom, staring into the mirror, sterile suture kit open over the gold bowl of the sink. Mendelssohn sat in the hall, tail twitching, watching the motions of the suture thread until Volker shooed him in the direction of the engine room.

The cat padded down the hall and mraowed at the door, but it didn’t open.

Sterile gloves on, Volker held what Telford passed him: forceps, hemostats, sterile gauze, ethanol pads. He passed them back when needed.

For a guy using a mirror and working on his own face, Telford did pretty well.

Volker gave himself time to come down from the adrenaline. When his hands had steadied and his throat had relaxed, when Telford was twelve stitches in, he asked his question.

“What happened to her?”

Telford paused. Steadied his own hands. Drove the needle through his cheek. “She died. Cancer.”

Volker nodded.

Telford drew the suture line through.

“When?” Volker asked.

The pause this time was longer. Telford lined up his skin. With a smooth swipe of the needle, he threw another stitch. “Five or six months ago.”

“Before or after you took him?” Volker asked.

“After.” Telford tugged the suture line taut. “Not too long after.”

Volker watched Telford throw another two stitches.

“You know anything about her?” Volker asked.

Telford glanced at Volker. When he spoke, the words came like he was trying to cushion a blow. “She was a concert violinist.”

“A violinist,” he echoed, and it made her real, somehow.

Memories of his own violin flooded his mind. Kreutzer’s 42 Études. Falling in love with Vivaldi in high school. Flying through counterpoint in the Bach Double. Bruch’s G minor Concerto, played as a senior at his high school’s Concerto Night, the lights in his eyes, his fingers damp, terrified of losing his place, of slipping a peg. And then all that came after: Tchaikovsky in D, Sibelius in D minor, Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E minor. After he’d finished his latest round of grants he’d meant to get serious again, meant to return to Bach. He’d been eyeing the partitas.

Confused, musical grief closed hands on his chest, his throat. Would he ever touch his violin again? Smell rosin? See the LA Philharmonic? They’d sent him advertisements about their spring program, full of Mahler.

Volker’s throat ached. “They were in San Francisco? Rush and his wife?”

“Yeah.” Telford tied a knot in his neat line of sutures and swapped his forceps for scissors.

“Did she play with San Francisco Symphony?” Volker asked softly.

“Probably.” Telford snipped the excess suture line close to his cheek.

“I’ve had season tickets to the LA Phil. Soloists tour through both cities. I might have seen her. What’s her name? Or—what was her name?”

Telford braced his hands against the sink. “Gloria.”

“Not Gloria Whitbourn,” Volker said reflexively. But even as he instinctively shoved the idea away, he knew of course it had been her. She was the right age. British. Long blonde hair that was famous for escaping during cadenzas. A breathtaking, fiery player. A Romantic Era specialist, sparkling with sequins and chromatic harmonies.

“Yeah.” Telford stared into the dry, gold bowl of the sink. “That was her.”

“I’m gonna talk to him,” Volker said.

“Don’t,” Telford breathed.

“I am,” Volker insisted.

“You can’t reason with him,” Telford warned. “You saw what happened in there. He gets upset, the knives come out, and he is not gonna hear a word you say. No matter how well-intentioned.” Telford glanced over at him. “You’re getting better, but you don’t have the skills to save your own eye if he really goes for it.”

“I’m not gonna ‘reason’ with him,” Volker replied. “I’m just—I don’t know. I’ll bring him a snack.”

Telford sighed. “At the bottom of the vy’ta crate there are a few packages of USAF instant coffee. Been saving it for a rainy day.” Glumly, he rifled through his suture kit and came up with some narrow strips of adhesive. “It won’t be good. But maybe he won’t try to dig your eye out of its socket if you lead with that.”

“Thanks,” Volker said softly.

An hour later, a pair of gilded cups full of instant coffee roasting the tips of his fingers, Volker approached the engine room door to find Mendelssohn sitting in a loaf on its threshold.

“Hi,” Volker said.

“Miew,” Mendelssohn replied.

“Still outta luck?” Volker asked.

Mendelssohn swished his tail.

“Hey man,” Volker said to the door. “It’s just me. And, believe it or not, I’ve found some coffee at the bottom of a crate. It’s instant, so, y’know. Keep those expectations low. But it’s probably worth opening the door for.” Volker paused. “What do you say?”

Nothing.

He stood, savoring the aroma wafting from the cups in his hands. Unable to resist, he took a sip. Warm and bitter. Acidic and burnt. Familiar and cheap. It hit the back of his tongue and he recalled the cast of the light in Caltech’s Planetary Sciences Building, the special color of Pasadena sun at ten in the morning, the smell of dry-erase markers and dust and paper and ink.

Volker blinked the moisture out of his eyes. “I just tried it,” he told the door. “As crap coffee goes, it’s good as heck.”

The door slid open.

Mendelssohn scampered into the room and plunged into a pile of crystal near the door, scattering pieces to pounce on. Volker followed more slowly.

Rush had tucked himself into a sad little ball underneath the naquadah drive core. His head was pillowed on an open page of Textbook of Medical Physiology. Volker crouched, set Rush’s coffee on the deck, and carefully slid it under the drive. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of Rush’s face, tear-stained and puffy.

Volker settled himself on the floor, crossed his legs, and set his coffee in front of him.

He lifted it to his nose and smelled it again. If he pretended it was something it wasn’t, he could almost catch notes of caramel and chocolate.

“Turns out you are handy with those knives,” Volker offered.

“Fuck off.” Rush’s voice was thick with weeping.

“Nah,” Volker replied, his own throat tight with sympathy. He sipped his coffee.

Rush dragged his cup closer, but didn’t have the space to sit up and drink it.

“I’m thinking maybe you dropped that bomb on yourself because you didn’t want Telford asking too many questions about timing.”

Rush uncurled and dragged himself from beneath the drive, bringing his coffee with him. He hunched on the floor, a three-quarter turn away from Volker.

“If this is really a quantum computer,” Volker landed the words as gently as he knew how, “then I figure you’ve had all nine chevrons cracked for a while now.”

“Months,” Rush rasped.

“And then,” Volker said, slow and kind, “minutes after a planet drops into my database, you kill our drive. Even if I’d told Telford. Even if he’d gotten it out of me, we wouldn’t be able to go. Because you know there’s a chance that’s Telford’s plan, right? He’s got you, he’s got me, with the planet and the cyphers we don’t need the Air Force or the Lucian Alliance. That’s gotta be what you’re defending against by killing the drive. An independent run.”

Rush took a sip of his coffee. He reseated his glasses. A tear leaked from under a closed eyelid.

Volker gestured at the walls where light swirled between fixed patterns, like mist through trees, like water through rock. “What are you watching for?”

“You’ll find out,” Rush said. “Soon enough.”