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been followed by the calls of the survivors, for at least a few hours. And when I reviewed the news channels for the weeks and months before the final recorded transmission in year forty-seven, there was no hint of concern about a disaster of global proportions. I couldn’t imagine anything big enough to take out an entire planet that could strike without any warning at all.
    The problem had to be on our end.
    But then, after another fruitless day—another day of trying to solve a problem that, from all I could tell, didn’t actually exist—I awoke from three hours of sleep with a key realization. Stark naked, I logged into the database from the screen in my room.
    Cassiopeia ’s five modules had all been built from the same designs at the same time by the same contractors. It wasn’t completely astonishing that a subsystem had failed in the same way on all three surviving modules. But I hadn’t seen that kind of triple failure in any other subsystem. For that matter, I hadn’t seen even one other failure big enough to take out an entire critical subsystem on even one module, and the long-range receiver was certainly a critical subsystem.
    I’d inspected all the pieces and they were all working. The only thing that could have caused the same failure in all three modules was a systemic integration or design problem, but I couldn’t imagine how a problem that widespread could leave no other symptoms.
    So I looked to see if there were any other differences in the three databases that might tell me what had gone wrong. But I soon discovered that Cassie ’s merged database didn’t record the source of each individual record—I had no way to tell whether any given piece of data had been recorded by Beta, Gamma, Epsilon, or a mix of the three. There was a field for that information, but it was inexplicably blank in every relevant record. And when I went to check the original, separate databases...
    They weren’t there.
    I ground my teeth in frustration. Cassiopeia had capacity for at least thirty years of data—there was absolutely no reason to have deleted those databases after the merge, no matter how redundant they may have seemed. But they weren’t in the primary store, they weren’t in the backup, they weren’t in the archive, and they weren’t in the redundant array.
    And we sure as heck didn’t have any off-site backups.
    I floated, staring at the screen, feeling the sweat cooling on my flat belly and worrying at the things I wasn’t seeing. The missing data indicated a serious problem—I wasn’t yet sure if it was software, hardware, or human error. The word “sabotage” tickled at the back of my head, but I brushed it away. No need to be paranoid. Yet.
    I threw on a coverall and headed off to Bobb’s room, in Gamma module.
    We didn’t all keep the same schedule, but there was a rough consensus ship’s “day” and “night,” and this was the deepest part of the night. Most of the lights were off, and I drifted past static monitors and stowed equipment that loomed like reefs in a darkened ocean. My sleep-deprived brain saw movement in corners where no movement should be.
    I paused at Bobb’s door. No light was visible behind it, and I heard a faint rumbling snore. I asked myself if this problem was really urgent enough to justify waking him.
    But just as I raised my hand to knock, a raucous klaxon sounded throughout the ship. At the same moment the emergency lights slammed on, blinding me with harsh flat whiteness.
    Impact alarm.
    I spun in place, blinking in the sudden light and momentarily disoriented. Where was the nearest brace point? The nearest vacuum shelter? The nearest hull repair kit? Before I could regain my bearings, a hammer blow of sound punched my ears, followed by a harsh, high-pitched whistle.
    That wasn’t good.
    Bobb’s door burst open, seemingly silent against the whistle of air and the klaxon’s repeated blasts, and Bobb tumbled out, struggling into his coverall.
    Matt