So you’re the big expert on cryocapping now, are you?

She isn’t—her entire previous experience comes down to three test decantings and the one real deal at journey’s end on the voyage out, whence, she supposes, the dйjа vu. But still…

…more than three…

…it is not more, it is not…

The vehemence in the retort has a ragged edge on it that she doesn’t like. If she’d heard it in another person’s voice, a test subject’s voice, say, she’d be thinking sedatives, maybe even a call to security. In her own thoughts, it’s suddenly, intimately chilling, like the realization that there’s someone in the house with you, someone you didn’t invite in. Like the thought out of nowhere that you might not be wholly sane.

This is the drugs, Ellie. Let go, ride it out.

Gleaming stee—

The autogurney bumps slightly as it takes a right turn. For some reason, it sets off a violent jolt in her pulse, a reaction that, drugged, she labels almost idly as panic. A tremor of impending doom trickles through her like cold water. They’re going to crash, they’re going to hit something, or something’s going to hit them, something massive and ancient beyond human comprehension tumbling endlessly end-over-end through the empty night outside the ship. Space travel isn’t safe, she was insane to ever think it was, to sign up for the contract and think she could get away with it, there and home again in one piece as if it were no more than a suborbital across the Pacific, you just couldn’t—

Let go, Ellie. It’s the drugs.

Then she realizes where she is. The autosurgeon’s folded arachnoid arms wheel past in one quadrant of her vision as the gurney slots into position on the examination rack.