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Galenka used an epoxy-tipped sucker to extract the fist-sized sample, which already seemed to be in the process of fusing back into the main structure.
    “Well done.”
    She grinned at me. “Let’s take a few more while our luck’s holding, shall we?”
    She pulled out of the waldo controls, disengaged the sticky anchors and applied translational thrust, shifting the Progress to a different platelet.
    “You sure you don’t want to take a break? We can hold here for hours if we have to, especially with the anchors.”
    “I’m fine, Dimitri.” But I noticed that Galenka’s knuckles were tight on the joystick, the effort of piloting beginning to show. There was a chisel-sharp crease in the skin on the side of her mouth that only came when she was concentrating. “Fine but a little hungry, if you must know. You want to do something useful, you can fetch me some food.”
    “I think that might be within my capabilities,” I said.
    I pushed away from the piloting position, expertly inserting myself onto a weightless trajectory that sent me careening through one of the narrow connecting throats that led from one of the Tereshkova ’s modules to the next.
    By any standards she was a large spacecraft. Nuclear power had brought us to the Matryoshka. The Tereshkova ’s main engine was a “variable specific impulse magnetic rocket”: a VASIMIR drive. It was an old design that had been dusted down and made to work when the requirements of our mission became clear. The point of the VASIMIR (it was an American acronym, but it sounded appropriately Russian) was that it could function in a dual mode, giving not us only the kick to escape Earth orbit, but also months of low-impulse cruise thrust, to take us all the way to the artifact and back. It would get us all the way home again, too—whereupon we’d climb into our Soyuz re-entry vehicle and detach from the mothership. The Progress would come down on autopilot, laden with alien riches—that was the plan, anyway.
    Like all spacecraft, the Tereshkova looked like a ransacked junk shop inside. Any area of the ship that wasn’t already in use as a screen or control panel or equipment hatch or analysis laboratory or food dispenser or life-support system was something to hold onto, or kick off from, or rest against, or tie things onto. Technical manuals floated in mid-air, tethered to the wall. Bits of computer drifted around the ship as if they had lives of their own, until one of us needed some cable or connector. Photos of our family, drawings made by our children, were tacked to the walls between panels and grab rails. The whole thing stank like an armpit and made so much noise that most of us kept earplugs in when we didn’t need to talk.
    But it was home, of a sort. A stinking, noisy shithole of a home, but still the best we had.
    I hadn’t seen Yakov as I moved through the ship, but that wasn’t any cause for alarm. As the specialist in change of the Tereshkova ’s flight systems, his duty load has eased now that we had arrived on station at the artifact. He had been busy during the cruise phase, so we couldn’t begrudge him a little time off, especially as he was going to have to nurse the ship home again. So, while Baikonur gave him a certain number of housekeeping tasks to attend to, Yakov had more time to himself than Galenka or I. If he wasn’t in his quarters, there were a dozen other places on the ship where he could find some privacy, if not peace and quiet. We all had our favorite spots, and we were careful not to intrude on each other when we needed some personal time.
    So I had no reason to sense anything unusual as I selected and warmed a meal for Galenka. But as the microwave chimed readiness, a much louder alarm began shrieking throughout the ship. Red emergency lights started flashing. The general distress warning meant that the ship had detected something anomalous. Without further clarification, it could be almost anything: a fault with the