The Elsa gated out of hyperspace in the middle of a debris field. A record of the attack that had destroyed these ships was self-evident in the fragments of torn-open cargo holds and scattered shipping containers that littered this sector like flotsam in the waters of a reef.

"Looks like the Gnosis showed up to ambush them as soon as they jumped out of the trade column," said Captain Matthews, scowling at the wreckage drifting across the Elsa's main viewing screen. "Well, you guys know what to do. Take down the usual information and anything that looks unusual, as per Little Master's orders. Oh yeah, and if you notice anything expensive floating around out there, it wouldn't hurt to stick it in your pocket, if you know what I mean." Below the Captain's seat, Hammer started to protest, but Matthews aimed a glare and a boot heel at him, and the threat of one or the other shut him up. "Otherwise it's just gonna go to waste. It's technically Foundation property anyway." Matthews settled back in his chair and tugged his cap down over his forehead. "Now get going!"

"Right," said chaos, who was used to the Captain's rhetoric and remained undaunted by it. He turned and headed off the bridge. Ziggy started after him, and they made their way to the AGWS hangar on the lower deck.

"So, what do you think of working for the Foundation so far?" said chaos over the intercom, when they had both boarded AGWS units and waded a short way out into the debris field. Behind them, the Elsa hung like a model ship against a flat background of stars. The wrecked hull of one of the cargo ships drifted in the distance.

The Elsa had been traveling for several days already, stopping at trade ports along the way to conduct business on behalf of the Foundation. The mission so far had consisted entirely of such routine stops; investigating the Gnosis incident had been tacked on as an afterthought, one of the last points on the Elsa's outbound itinerary. In the meantime, Captain Matthews had kept the rest of the crew, including Ziggy, occupied with mundane assignments. At every stop, cargo and equipment had to be loaded or unloaded, merchandise had to be inspected, repairs and adjustments had to be made. The work left little time for idleness, and when the others took a break and went off for a drink in the Elsa's bar or at a local hangout in one of the trade ports, Ziggy declined and retired to his own quarters to rest. Doing manual labor wasn't physically tiring so much as mentally exhausting. Instead of keeping his mind engaged with strategic problems, it left his thoughts free to wander, and more often lately they seemed to end up in places he didn't want to go.

While he thought about how to respond, he followed chaos' AGWS in the direction of the nearest cargo vessel. The debris became more concentrated closer to the ship, and Ziggy had to focus more of his attention on maneuvering his own AGWS unit around crumpled plates of scrap metal and pieces of ruined equipment as they approached.

"I guess it's been ...." He stopped, noticing a movement at the edge of his sight, and sidestepped to avoid collision with a shipping container crushed in on itself like a giant accordion and still moving with considerable speed.

"That looked close," said chaos after it had tumbled past them. "Sorry, didn't mean to distract you."

"It's all right. I've been a little distracted lately, anyway."

"I thought you might be. I don't mean to pry, but I noticed you seem to be worried about something. Is everything okay with MOMO and Juli?"

"Yes." Although he had no direct evidence to the contrary, he felt dishonest when he said it. MOMO had seemed fine when he saw her a few days ago, but he felt as though an impassable space had opened up between them since their parting on Second Miltia, and even though MOMO begged him to visit her when they were apart and pleaded with him to stay when they were together, he knew she didn't require his protection as she once had. Logically, he knew it was better that she learn how to protect herself, as inevitably she would. But in a dim, irrational corner at the back of his mind--and he stopped there, pushing the thought back before he could make out what it was.

Besides, with the Gnosis attacks still escalating, he was more concerned that MOMO and Juli would need his protection after all--or rather, they would need more than he could provide, because he knew the limits of his own strength and he knew that in the event of a real attack, it wouldn't make much difference whether he was there to protect them or not. He had failed to save MOMO from harm before, so why should he now believe that he could stand as a reliable shield against the Gnosis--or, for that matter, against any other threat? At most he could offer the illusion of security, which was worse than worthless, it was dangerous.

Maybe his doubts about the operation were justified, and the decision to prolong his life really had been a mistake. He couldn't give Juli and MOMO any real peace of mind, and if he let himself get close to them now, he would only risk causing them greater harm. He couldn't even trust himself to stay composed under pressure anymore, not after the incident six months ago. Suppose Voyager found out his attachment to them and tried to use them against him? But that was another thought he didn't want to follow to its conclusion. He already knew the outcome because it had happened before; he still dreamed about it most nights, and woke up with his teeth and fists clenched and a cold, throbbing sensation in the side of his head, an echo of the last thing he'd ever experienced before his life began all over again. He wouldn't make the same mistake this time, even if it meant he had to protect Juli and MOMO by keeping them at a distance.

"This isn't good." chaos' voice came over the intercom, startling him out of his train of thought. He looked up to see the other AGWS unit hovering a short distance ahead, and pushed his own AGWS to catch up with it. "I'm afraid something terrible happened to this ship," said chaos, turning toward him as he approached. "Not just the Gnosis. Look."

chaos' AGWS stood in the midst of a field of debris of roughly uniform shapes and sizes. Ziggy couldn't tell what the objects were at first; they were small, crumpled, indistinct, but then one drifted near his unit's field of view and as it turned he caught sight of a stiff white outstretched hand, grasping at the void for a moment before it went under.

"It's shocking, I know," said chaos, sounding apologetic. "It looks as though the ship's cargo bay and airlocks were left open, so they must have thrown themselves overboard rather than be caught by the Gnosis."

He tried to swallow, but his throat felt frozen solid. "So it was a mass suicide."

"Maybe," said chaos. "Maybe they were just trying to save themselves from a worse fate. Either way, there's not much we can do for them now. Once we get back to the Elsa, we'll have to notify the Foundation so they can take care of the bodies. In the meantime, though, we should have a look at that ship."

"Understood." He turned and started after chaos, and the two moved on through the frozen field of the dead.

After they had returned to the Elsa, he called Juli from the ship's UMN terminal. He had less privacy here than in his room on the Durandal, so he felt somewhat uncomfortable when Juli steered the conversation into personal territory.

"I've spoken with the Foundation about scheduling your follow-up," she said. "I don't know the details yet, but it should be some time after you get back. In the meantime, how have you been?"

"I'm all right." It wasn't exactly true. Seeing the victims of the Gnosis attack had left him with a strange unsettled feeling that hadn't subsided yet, but he saw no need to mention that; the Subcommittee would receive a copy of the Foundation's report on the incident later. As far as his own concerns about other matters, he didn't want to trouble her with those either.

But she must have sensed something was wrong anyway, or else she was upset for some other reason, because she sighed and dropped her gaze from the screen. "I think MOMO wants to talk to you. I'll put her on."

"Juli," he said, but she had already turned away, and he stared through the holographic window into an empty room.

∞

It hadn't been the same since that night--or rather, he hadn't been the same. Their last few conversations on the UMN had been brief and businesslike, devoid even of the hesitant familiarity they had shared before. She sensed him pulling away, but there was nothing overtly impolite about his withdrawal; if anything, it was his sudden, excessive politeness that exasperated her, along with the knowledge that she could hardly find him at fault for it.

Well, maybe he was busy. She couldn't blame him for that either, not when she had pressing matters of her own to worry about. As much as she had missed talking to him lately, his reticence was among the least of her concerns. It took most of her energy just to stay focused on her work amid the throes of whatever daily crisis the SOCE was experiencing.

Even MOMO seemed preoccupied lately. She had volunteered to help one of Juli's associates with a research project that required the use her observational functions, and she spent her mornings and afternoons processing data at a government lab in a different part of the city, returning home early in the evening to do her chores. On nights when Juli didn't have to stay late at the office, they still had dinner together, but more often now she stepped off the elevator onto their floor at 2000 or 2100 hours, and when she got inside found MOMO already in her room and a covered plate waiting by her own place at the table with a note. Sometimes, reading what MOMO had written to her, she felt an ache in her throat and wondered what she had done to earn such unquestioning devotion from a child, especially now that they rarely even saw each other for more than a few hectic minutes over breakfast.

She hadn't mentioned it to Ziggy, and she wondered if she had left him with the impression that she and MOMO spent more time together than they actually did, or that she had long since dismissed whatever doubts she might have had that their present living arrangement would work out. She wanted to believe that it would, but the doubts persisted.

Over and over she thought, I don't deserve this. For months it had kept her awake at night, after she had set aside her work and could no longer block out the thoughts that had crowded at the edges of her mind all day. Even now, she couldn't convince herself that she actually loved MOMO, not the way MOMO loved her. MOMO had no choice; she was programmed that way, designed to make her mother happy. But Juli was human and far from perfect, and had an instinctive distaste for things that glittered too brightly or promised too much. Joachim must have overlooked that when he created the child he thought she would have wanted. In MOMO's eyes Juli was infallible, a perfect mother image. How could she ever live up to that?

Ziggy would probably know how to answer that question--or at the very least, he wouldn't condemn her for asking it. But since that night she hadn't been able to ask, and she didn't know what he would say if she did. After what he had told her about depending on others, it seemed strange for him to leave her to her own devices now, but maybe he had his reasons. In any case, she understood what his silence meant: from now on, she was on her own.

∞

The nightmare ended, as it always did, a moment before the bullet should have hit. He never felt the impact, but his head ached as if the memory was buried in him somewhere, in what was left of his original body, the bone and tissue retaining what his conscious mind tried to forget. He sat upright, blinking away red afterimages as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light in the storage room. Taking note of his surroundings made him calmer; he was still on the Elsa, heading back to the Foundation and the Durandal. They had turned around yesterday after filing a report on the Gnosis attack.

When he had recovered his bearings, he got up and checked the time and the records of his last maintenance session. An error in one of the diagnostic subroutines had shut down the program in the middle of its scheduled run, so that instead of waking up at a set time when it was finished, he had overslept. That might account for the unusual intensity of his dreams, but what troubled him more at the moment was the error itself. Those lapses had been occurring more often lately, and if they were due to a malfunction in one of his internal systems, it should have come up during his surgery. He made a mental note to ask Juli about it the next time he spoke with her.

He rode the elevator to the upper deck and found the crew standing around the UMN terminal, Hammer and Tony jostling each other for a better view of the screen and blocking everyone else's view in the process.

"What's happening now?" said Hammer. "I can't see!"

Tony elbowed him aside. "I can't either with your head in the way!"

"All right, break it up." Captain Matthews strolled in between the two and flung them apart like bar room doors. "No one can see the screen with you two morons standing in front of it." He took a few steps back and noticed Ziggy standing in the corridor. "Well, look who's finally booted up. Good afternoon, sunshine."

"I'm sorry. My maintenance program appears to have malfunctioned. What's going on?"

"See for yourself." Matthews jabbed a finger at the screen, where grainy security-camera footage showed people fleeing down a crowded street, pursued by huge forms that lumbered and swung blindly at them and smaller ones that swam through the air above their heads.

"--all we know at this time is that the attacks took place within hours of each other and that they targeted the capital cities of three Federation planets, leading some to speculate that they were part of a coordinated assault--"

"They're calling it terrorism, can you believe that?" said Matthews, shaking his head.

chaos stood some distance from the others and had watched in silence until now. "It certainly is strange."

"--the Contact Subcommittee is expected to release an official statement later today and has already announced that it will be investigating--"

Ziggy stared at the screen until the images and voices became indistinct, and then he closed his eyes. He had no interest in seeing any more.