She felt sharper now. The old Skade was still there; she just needed to be dusted off and honed now and then.
[Skade, you will be careful, won’t you? It’s clear that something very peculiar has happened to this ship.]
The voice she heard was quiet, feminine and confined entirely to her own skull. She answered it subvocally.
I know.
[Have you identified it? Do you know which of the two it is, or was?]
It’s Galiana’s.
Now that she had swept around it, a three-dimensional image of the ship formed in her visual cortex, bracketed in a loom of shifting eidetic annotation as more information was teased out of the hulk.
[Galiana’s? The Galiana’s? You’re sure of that?]
Yes. There were some small design differences between the three that left together, and in as much as this matches either of the two that haven’t come back yet, it matches hers.
The presence took a moment to respond, as it sometimes did. [That was our conclusion as well. But something has clearly happened to this ship since it left the Mother Nest, wouldn’t you say?]
A lot of somethings, if you ask me.
[Let’s begin at the front and work backwards. There is evidence of damage—considerable damage: lacerations and gouges, whole portions of the hull that appear to have been removed and discarded, like diseased tissue. Plague, do you think?]
Skade shook her head, remembering her recent trip to Chasm City. I’ve seen the effects of the Melding Plague up close. This doesn’t look like quite the same thing.
[We agree. This is something different. Nonetheless, full plague quarantine precautions should be enforced; we might still be dealing with an infectious agent.