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feel of what it looked like; glass. The spin they’d given the hull produced what felt like about a quarter gravity. He patted the fastenings securing his bulky backpack.
    He looked up and around. The hull’s interior surface looked hardly damaged. There were various indentations and a scattering of holes, some circular and some elliptical, but all quite symmetrical and smooth and part of the design; none went all the way through the hull material and none looked ragged. The only aperture which led to the outside was right in the nose of the craft, seventy meters away from where he stood, more or less in the center of the spoon-shaped mass of floor. That two-meter-wide hole had been cut in the hull weeks ago to gain access after the hulk had been located and secured. That was how he had gained entry.
    He could see various discolored patches on the hull’s surface that didn’t look right, and a few small dangling tubes and wires, up near the newly emplaced lights. Part of him wondered why they had bothered with the lights. The hull’s interior was evacuated, open to space; nobody would be coming in here without a full suit, so they would have the concomitant sensory equipment that made lights unnecessary. He looked down at the floor. Maybe the technicians had been superstitious, or just emotional. The lights made the place seem a little less forbidding, less haunted.
    He could understand that wandering around in here with only ambient radiations to impinge upon the augmented senses might well induce terror if you were of a sensitive nature. They’d found much of what they’d hoped to find; enough for his mission, sufficient to save a thousand or so other souls. Almost certainly not enough to fulfill his hopes. He looked about. It appeared they had removed all the sensory and monitoringequipment they’d been using to inspect the wreck of the privateer
Winter Storm
.
    He felt a shudder through his boots. He glanced up to the side, as the sliced-off bow of the ship was put back in place. Enclosed, in this ship of the dead. At last.
    ~
Isolation established, it says,
said a voice in his head. The machine in his backpack produced a faint vibration.
    ~ It says the proximity of the suit’s systems are interfering with its instruments. You’ll have to switch your com off. Now it’s saying, Please remove the pack from your back.
    ~ Will we still be able to talk?
    ~ You and I will be able to talk to each other, and it’ll be able to talk to me.
    ~ All right, he said, slipping the pack off. ~ The lights are all right? he asked.
    ~ They’re just lights, nothing else.
    ~ Where shall I put—he started to say, but then the pack went light in his hands and began to tug away from him.
    ~
It wants us to know it has its own motive power,
the voice in his head informed him.
    ~ Oh, yes, of course. Ask it to work fast, would you? Tell it we’re pressed for time because there’s a Culture warship braking toward our position as we speak, coming to—
    ~ Think that’ll make any difference, Major?
    ~ I don’t know. Tell it to be thorough, too.
    ~ Quilan, I think it’ll just do what it has to do, but if you really want me to
—
    ~ No. No, sorry. Sorry, don’t.
    ~ Look, I know this is hard on you, Quil. I’ll leave you alone for a bit, okay?
    ~ Yes, thanks.
    Huyler’s voice went off-line. It was as though a hiss right on the boundary of hearing had suddenly been removed.
    He watched the Navy drone for a moment. The machine was silvery gray and nondescript, like the pack from an ancient space suit. It floated silently across the near-flat floor, keeping about a meter off its surface, heading for the near, bow end of the ship to start its search pattern.
    It would be too much to ask, he thought to himself. The chances are too remote. It was a small miracle we discovered anything at all in here, that we are able to rescue those souls from such destruction a second