Again he was cold. Chen tried to stir, but his eyes were clamped shut, glued shut. A bar of ice sat on his forebrain, smothering thought. A voice? Did he hear a voice? Chen struggled. Had his suit heater failed? Chen had worked his way around such a breakdown before.

Where were his hands? He tried to move them. Felt nothing. Chen thought to himself, I'm Chen Anderson, and the bar crushing his consciousness became a broader weight.

Sleep took him.

Chen stirred. He was cold. Had the cover slipped from his shoulders? Was the heat out? Up in the Grand Tetons, if the heat went, you knew about it right away. Where were his hands? Were they themselves asleep while he waked? Would they turn to pins and needles if he shook them like so much frozen meat on the end of his wrists?

Chen tried lift his head, open his eyes. Pain arced from the base of his neck, down his back, and all the way to his left heel. He grunted, then, and was pleased to hear something he knew to be his own.

At least his voice worked.

Chen worked at his eyes, stretching his face to open them, but they stayed stubbornly shut.

"There, there," said a voice. Something warm and wet sponged his face. Chen opened his mouth to speak, but a splash of something that failed to register a taste stopped his tongue. He sputtered.

Memory came rushing out of nothing. Chen remembered. He'd been put into cold sleep on the Pan Asia as she crossed the Oort threshold. Now he was waking. He slept again.

He felt as if he would creak if he moved. Chen lay still, absorbing sounds. There was a swish. And another. Water in a bowl? Breathing. A hum. No, two hums, one quiet and electric, another like a fan.

Air did pass gently over his face. And there was light beyond his lids. Chen moved a finger, carefully. He half-remembered pain, but none came. He moved his hand. It felt as if he had...arthritis. That was the ailment. He'd read about it.

Time to wake up. Chen opened his eyes. A ceiling. Rough-hewn beams of wood with strange blue veins. A light fixture, turned off. Some kind of light from the left.

The swishing sound stopped. A footstep. Chen craned his head forward and up, desperate to see. His heart pounded while he tried to reassure himself. Something must have gone wrong with the freeze, he thought. I'm in a hospital at the colony, he reassured himself.

It was the only possible explanation.

There was an old man coming out of a washroom. He wore a simple tunic, and had a high tech collar around his neck. Odd jewelry, Chen thought. The man jumped a bit, and his eyes widened.

Afraid? Chen wondered, but his head was too heavy to hold up, and he let if fall back to his pillow.

"Who are you?" he managed to croak. His throat was sore, roughened as if by a bad cold with a cough.

In response came the sound of wheels on tiled floor, and then the metal-on-metal of a door unlatching. The man departed, taking some kind of cleaning cart with him.

Weariness almost claimed him, then, but he fought it off. In a moment he was rewarded with heavy steps and the door opening once again.

Chen tried to turn his head, but found he could not. His muscles were impossibly sore, worse than the time he'd tried to learn how to chop wood with a real axe in the Grand Tetons after a month in low-G.

"Well?" said a voice, bass and impatient and tinged with an odd accent Chen couldn't place.

"He's awake. You're awake, aren't you?" This voice was reedy, and the man speaking leaned over Chen. His thin face was furrowed with concern. He wore a white smock with a circular gold symbol sewn into the shoulder.

Chen managed to nod. His neck still hurt, and he grimaced.

"There, there," said the man, and Chen remembered a voice from a dream. "Don't be moving about quite yet. You've had quite a sleep, and we haven't yet reconstructed all the damaged muscle tissue. An Amalthean might have done better, but not much, I warrant."

"Can he talk?" said the other voice. The heavy step moved around Chen's bed, and he twitched with annoyance. If only he could move!

Another face leaned into his field of view. A jowly man in need of a shave looked at him with a frown. He wore an odd shirt, what looked like the top of a black robe. Chen couldn't turn his head to look, but he wanted to. A heavy gold chain hung from around the man's neck, and it carried an odd symbol, a circle with three points at the cardinal directions pointing into the middle and a flame breaking the circle at the top, in place of the north point.

It reminded Chen of the mouth of a lamprey, except for the flame.

"Can he talk?" the heavy man repeated. Chen decided to answer for himself.

"Where...am I?" he said.

"You're in my care," said the thin man. "I'm Chief Physick.. You've..."

"Now that you can talk, you're all mine," interrupted the heavy man. The technician frowned at those words.

Chen realized he still wasn't thinking properly. All he could do was react, but a niggle of fear grew deep in his mind. Where was he? Who were these people?

The large man stood up straight. Chen could barely see him out of the corner of his eye. "Get him walking," he said to the technician. "Soon." Heavy steps receded.

"Well?" Chen croaked, but all the thin man did was offer him some water before sleep took him once again.

Chen woke and discovered he was strapped into his bed. Stronger, he looked around his room. The rough beams of the ceiling were matched by a natural decor which would have been very expensive on Earth, Chen knew. Here, he wasn't so sure. There was no window.

Was he on a spacecraft? The wood decor made him think otherwise, but minor touches screamed "ship." The air ducts. The compact size of the room. The door looked to be pressure-proof.

The...cleaning man, as he thought of him, entered once again and emptied a trash can made of the same blue-veined wood. Or was it plastic?

"Who are you?" Chen asked. The man straightened, took a sponge from his cart, and entered the washroom. Chen heard swishing noises.

"Why don't you talk to me? Is this a spacecraft?"

The man reappeared. Chen took a closer look, guessed again at his age. Brown-haired, of average height, the man was younger than he looked. His skin was seamed as if by weather, and lightly tanned. He was at the oldest thirty, Chen decided, though he had the worn, tired look of a farmer in his sixties.

The man went on with his work and soon left. Chen leaned back into his pillow. He felt much stronger, and the pain in his joints and muscles seemed to have abated. What, he took time to wonder before he drifted back to sleep, had happened to the Pan Asia?

"Wake up," said the heavy man. Chen opened his eyes and turned his head. The man did indeed wear a robe, dead black, of some heavy coarse material. The symbol he wore around his neck drew Chen's eye. What did it mean?

"You will speak when spoken to," said the man. "And speak in proper Urthish."

"Urthish?" asked Chen.

"Just so," replied the man, nodding. He exuded a oily smell, a thick cologne.

Chen struggled against an impulse to complain. He felt clearer-headed, and caution seemed the wisest course.

"First, what is your name?"

"Chen Anderson," said Chen. "And you?"

The man glared. Chen was taken aback. It was a simple enough question, wasn't it? Fear crept back into his mind.

"You may call me Brother Paul. I am on the Bishop's staff."

Chen remembered what Bishops were. Religious authority figures. There were supposed to be a few left, in...Rome? And didn't Catholics have Bishops? He resisted the impulse to answer "so?" Clearly, religion here carried more weight than it did back on Earth.

What could possibly have happened while he was asleep?

"What was your function on the spacecraft we rescued you from?"

"The ship? What happened to the Pan Asia?"

"Answer my question!"

Chen throttled a fuming response. He sighed. "External maintenance." Chen had spent years of his life in vacuum suits and one-person jitneys, patching this and re-calibrating that. Even a menial job was worth having on the Pan Asia.

He tried not to think of the many things that could have gone wrong. Clearly, something had gone wrong. But what?

"What's that?"

Chen explained some of his usual tasks. It wasn't easy, as he was a jack of all trades. There wasn't a part of the Pan Asia exposed to vacuum that he didn't know how to fix. Or at least swap out the part. It was that knowledge and ability that had won him his berth on the first great colony ship to leave Earth.

Sometime while he was talking the thin man arrived and gave him a plastic cup of water. It was room temperature, but it still tasted good to Chen, especially since there seemed to be somthing wrong with his voice. It was rough and scratchy, even after the water.

Brother Paul had other questions, and some of them were repetitious. Chen soon tired of the routine and tried to work in a few questions of his own. The response was always the same.

"I'll ask the questions!"

Finally, Brother Paul seemed to finish his...interrogation. Then he asked, "Is your vessel armed?"

Chen shook his head. He had no stamina, it seemed, and once again he was dead tired.

Brother Paul's slap rocked his head back against the pillow. Chen's face stung, and to his shame a tear appeared and ran down his cheek.

"Liar! There are lasers mounted on the prow and stern of your Pan Asia! What other weapons does your spacecraft carry?"

Chen shook his head from side to side. "Not weapons," he mumbled. The moron. "Used to communicate, stern lasers. Bow lasers," Chen paused. Now that he thought about it, they could be used as weapons, he supposed. "Bow lasers are tasked to vape debris, rocks, dust particles, that sort of thing. Not meant to be offensive."

This talk of weapons left Chen cold inside. Clearly, it was the most important aspect of the Pan Asia to Brother Paul. But there was so much more!

Then the interrogation took a stranger turn. "Did you dream?"

"What?"

Brother Paul raised his hand once again and Chen flinched. Never before had he felt so helpless, so trapped in nightmare. "Not that I remember. In cold sleep you're not supposed to be able to dream...brain activity too low..." it wasn't an area Chen knew a lot about, and he let his voice trail off.

Brother Paul left him, then, to stew in his worries about the rest of the crew and the colonists. Last Chen knew, they were in cold-sleep, awaiting revival by the ship's systems when they entered the target system. More immediately, Chen pondered Paul's haughty attitude: he seemed to think Chen was below him, inferior in some way.

When sleep came it was full of cold stone and shadows that whispered words too faint to hear.

It was dark when he woke again. Someone was grasping his foot underneath the blanket. A faint green glow was coming from the headboard of his bed. In the light, he saw a woman.

"Shhhh," she said. "Keep your voice low. I hear Brother Paul has been rough with you."

"That asshole!" said Chen before he could catch himself. His mother, a mainland Chinese, would have been horrified to hear her son speak so.

The woman laughed, an easy, musical laugh that Chen instantly liked. She, too, wore a robe, and a symbol around her neck. Much like Brother Paul's, this had additional ornamentation. It had a fourth point in place of the flame, and had spidery symbols at the four points and in the center.

"Who are you?" asked Chen, sitting up in bed. Each day he grew stronger, and the pain grew less, but he was still not allowed to get up on his own.

"Eva. I am an initiate of the Eskatonic Order. That means nothing to you." It wasn't a question. Chen shook his head anyway.

"Brother Paul is of Temple Avesti. He is very concerned about you and what you represent."

"Who am I? What do I represent?" Chen asked. The oddness of asking a stranger these questions struck him.

"You might be one of the most amazing discoveries of our time," said Eva, sitting on the side of the bed. Unlike Paul, who smelled of a heavy flowery oil, Eva smelled clean. Chen instantly remembered his Susan, gentle Susan, and he wondered how she fared, whether she was still in cold sleep on the Pan Asia, or whether she was being questioned by her own version of Brother Paul.

"Our time..." Chen had asked a hundred times what the year was. No one would tell him, nor would they tell him why they were so reticent.

"In Church reckoning, 4996. That is the Holy Terra reckoning. If the rumor I have heard is true, this measurement means something to you." She paused in order for Chen to absorb the news.

Something was horribly wrong. The voyage was to have lasted several hundred years, not several thousand! Chen's head swam. It was a miracle he was alive at all! The technology wasn't meant to keep a human being viable for anything like a thousand years!

So what of the others? He turned to Eva. "What about the others? On the Pan Asia?"

Eva smoothed the robe over her knees. "I am merely a passenger, one Eskatonic among many Avestites. But I have heard rumors. They say you are the only...passenger they've awakened. It's said they found the equipment on the ghost ship unable to revive the sleepers."

Chen tried not to think who they had killed finding that out. Probably an officer or one of the crew, he decided, those ranked for earliest revival.

"Any clue about what went wrong?"

Eva shook her head. "But you'll soon have a chance to see yourself. You're going to your ship. Possibly tomorrow or the next day."

"Why?"

Eva sighed and moved to the door as if to listen. "Technology is one of the Church's concerns. There is much history between now and the time you were put into cold sleep. Your departure date?"

"2205," said Chen. "We were the first of several colony ships. Pan Asia, Pan America, Pan Europe, Pan Africa."

"That knowledge, and where those ships were supposed to be going, is itself one of the things that makes you a valued commodity, Chen. This is ancient history to us. There are no reliable records of the time. For each recorded truth there are five lies spun by one Lord or another meant to...but I digress, Chen."

It touched him, her saying his name. He realized belatedly that no one he'd spoken to had called him by name. It was if he were an animal, unimportant save for what he could tell them. Not for the first time, anger made his pulse hammer.

"For example," said Eva, "and most important to our history, is the discovery of the jumpgate at the rim of Holy Terra's solar system."

Holy Terra? Chen wanted to ask, but again he kept silent.

"This jumpgate allowed instantaneous travel to Pentateuch, Sutek, and Artemis. Similar gates there allowed travel to dozens of other stars. The people of the First Republic are said to have colonized the stars--"

"First Republic?" asked Chen. "What's that?"

Eva paused to consider. "Those who came before the Second Republic. All history before the Prophet's coming is unclear, however."

"But..." struggled Chen. What about libraries? Digital storage? When he had departed Earth, the Pan Asia had contained the most complete record of human history and accomplishment ever gathered in one data storage. Wouldn't this have continued in the future?

Eva shrugged. "We don't have much time. History is long and dark to us now. I can tell you of the past thousand years, if it will help."

Chen nodded. He needed some anchor, some understanding of this time.

She came around to Chen's side and looked him in the eye. "Some 996 years ago, Chen, the Second Republic fell. Noble families came to rule, and an Emperor sits on the throne. Nine-tenths of humanity lives on the land with only the barest of technology to aid them in their daily work. The servant who cleans your bathroom is such a person, a peasant."

As are you, he could imagine her saying, for while her attitude wasn't the same as Paul's, there was a certain condescension in her oddly inflected English.

Chen held his head in his hands. He felt a headache coming on. It was too much! Peasants, an Emperor? Instantaneous travel between the stars? Where did the jumpgates come from? His brain hummed with questions, but he kept silent, for the fear was still there, and caution. He took a deep breath, settled on the most basic questions, and asked them.

"Why won't they tell me anything? And why have you chosen to do so?"

Eva sat on the bed again and looked at her hands. "Those of my order are seekers after truth, Chen. I must say that Brother Paul and his Avestite brothers do not seek so much as they suppress."

"What do they suppress?"

"Technology, for one. It is a distraction on the path to the light."

"And?" Clearly, the inexorable progress of technology had faltered, perhaps more than once, while he slept. Chen felt like an Egyptian mummy suddenly come to life, only to discover that Ra was no longer abjectly worshipped.

Eva turned away. "Some say there are shadowy beings, Chen, that swallow the light, who wish all mankind ill. The Avestites who control this ship feared you were such a being, until you were cleansed and found to be only human. Now they search your ship."

"That's...that's..." crazy, he wanted to say. It sounded like rank superstition, the kind of mummery even his great-great-great grandparents had been above. Finally, he struggled to another question. "What do you mean, swallowing the light?"

"The suns," said Eva, standing. "The suns are fading. It is the central truth of our time, Chen. Their light decreases with each passing year. Not much, but a measurable amount. The Church stands in the way of such decrease, but even our faith isn't enough."

Chen was silent for a moment as he digested her words. For a moment he considered her statement about the suns to be a metaphor: religions and cults were supposed to have been big on metaphor, he recalled.

Then he decided she was serious, and that somehow the suns were fading.

And who flitted about space, seeking answers? Church authorities? He began to laugh, then, quietly at first and then more loudly. These maniacs thought he had something to do with the suns fading? Just because he came from ancient times?

The future was mad, very mad.

Eva backed away from him, then snatched a black box from his headboard. A green light turned to red. "You fool!" she hissed. "If I'm caught here..." she backed out the door and was gone.

But Chen didn't care. All his caution and care were for nought. He was in the hands of madmen--and women--and nothing he had ever thought about tomorrow had come to pass. There would be no colony. It might be that he was the only survivor of the Pan Asia.

It was so crazy, it made him laugh. And laugh. And laugh.

They came for him and took him to a shuttle bay. Chen was fascinated to see what the ship looked like outside of his rooms. It appeared that the wooden walls were confined to the passenger quarters. The ship itself was made of some kind of metal.

The contrast made his head spin. Hand-hewn wooden timbers installed in a spacecraft that travelled between the stars? Intelligent but seemingly superstitious men and women with technical skills dressed like medieval revivalists?

Launch was a casual affair: the pilot checked to see that everyone was strapped in and then lit the torch. Chen had been feeling pretty healthy up to that point: they had unhooked him from the catheter and he had been able to walk around his small room without falling over for a full day before this trip.

Eva hadn't returned, and Chen had many questions he no longer bothered to ask Brother Paul. Chen knew talking to the dour faced young men Brother Paul brought along would be fruitless. They certainly didn't talk to him.

Weightlessness took over, and Chen felt at home. Two hours worth of maneuvering later, they docked softly, and rotation hit as the shuttle locked in. Chen didn't want to know the superstitious reasoning between keeping such a distance between the two ships. He was eager to see alien stars, but there were no ports in the shuttle.

Pan Asia. Chen knew the rotational gravity like no one else. He'd worked at every level and at every exterior point on the converted asteroid. They were mid-ships, on or near the docking band.

They debarked. Pan Asia felt dead. The fans weren't working, and the emergency lights weren't on. Clumsy add-on lights on poles and stands were parked here and there, and the patchy light gave his vessel a spooky, shadowy cast.

"Well?" said Chen. He was beyond caring now. He had questions, it was true, and he was especially curious about the nearly three thousand years of history he'd missed, but Brother Paul no longer frightened him.

Brother Paul looked a bit frightened, while Chen felt bold. He was home, or at least as near to home as he was going to get. The once gleaming corridors were dull with impossible age, he saw. An open access panel showed dead lights, neither red nor green. Chen was tired from the trip, but excitement kept him on his feet.

He noted chalk marks here and there on the deck, strange symbols made up of rings and figures that almost seemed like mathematical formulae.

Chen waited.

"You will tell us about this technology," said Paul.

"Why, so you can hide it from everyone else?"

Brother Paul's eyes narrowed. Chen had revealed that he knew more than he was supposed to, but he didn't care.

"This way to the COA," he said, and began walking. No one stopped him.

"Coo-ah?" asked Brother Paul.

"Central Operations Area," said Chen. His hair had finally grown enough that it itched as he broke a sweat. "Those of us who liked a good space yarn always called it the Bridge." He ran a hand across his head. It felt as if he had a long crew-cut, but he had no idea what he looked like. There hadn't been a mirror in his bathroom.

The pressure doors were open--had been pried open with power tools, it looked like--and the Bridge was also lit haphazardly. More symbols were chalked and even painted, he saw, on the walls and ceiling. What had these vandals been up to? he wondered.

Chen went to the maintenance console and pushed some buttons.

"Don't do that!" said Paul. He, too, was sweating, but Chen didn't think it was due to the walk.

"No power. Let me talk to one of your techies," Chen said, putting his request into action by stepping over to a woman in coveralls. She glanced up. Ordinary glasses covered her eyes, and she was the most normal looking human being Chen had met since he'd woken up.

"Hey, I bet you're a grease-monkey just like me..." Chen's blood ran cold when the woman pulled her arm out of the panel she was working inside. Instead of a hand, she had a small suite of electronic gizmo tools.

Chen shook it off. "What kind of electrical generation equipment you have here?"

She smiled. "I am no grease-monkey. I am highly skilled in both volt and comp redemption. As for our generator..." she let her voice trail off as Brother Paul's assistant's grabbed Chen and moved him bodily backwards.

Chen acted without thinking. He dug his heels into the floor, stopping his backward progress for a moment. Dropping his center of gravity, he windmilled his arms, forcing his captors to release him or risk a broken finger or two.

They let him go. Chen bolted back down the hall, slapping the emergency close on the Bridge access door. Nothing happened. Behind him, Brother Paul bellowed at his assistants.

They would catch him, eventually. There was only one place for Chen to go. He set off down the central corridor. The crew area was quite small: the bulk of the interior was given over to storage, shuttle vehicles, and colonist cold-sleep bays.

The breath wheezed out of him. Chen felt like an old man.

"Damn, I am an old man," he said to himself as he rounded a corner. Thousands of years old, he thought to himself. Thousands. The lift was obviously out, so it had to be the stairs and ladders access, the path he remembered best from lights out fire drills during pre-flight training.

Grasping that memory, he pulled at the makeshift light fixture. It came crashing down. Darkness.

He heard cursing behind him as he made his way to the first core access hatch. Then he was through and making his way down the stairs. His fatigue lifted as the rotational gravity wore away. Soon he was slapping his way down one ladder after another, into the nearly zero-g core bays.

Where everyone slept.

The darkness was absolute, and childhood fears came back to him.

Chen tried to shake them off, but he couldn't help but think that just beyond his skin, just centimeters away, something awful lurked. His skin prickled with goose bumps, and he paused in his descent to orient himself.

"Steady, relax, it's just the dark," he said to himself. "It's just a little chilly here..." he was two flights from the first sleep bay, the level where Susan slept. Or was she dead from the extended time in cold sleep?

His voice didn't echo as it should, and Chen's heart pounded. Light, he had to have light! Hurrying, he made his way to the bay.

Lights ahead made him pause and move more slowly. Voices marked an area of activity. He panted, and wanted to blame it on his sudden exertion, but a small part of him knew it was near-panic.

"Mark this one.

"Are we protected, Brother Daniel?"

"I would not lead you here otherwise, initiate. Soon you, too, will learn the protective ritual. Mark this one, also."

Another robed brother with an assistant was walking the long row of sleep caskets. The assistant took a marker and wrote "CLEAN" in large red letters.

Here, amazingly, Pan Asia systems were still functioning, though his practiced eye spotted numerous trouble and fault indicators. The external solar arrays were still piping power to internal systems.

It seemed the good Brothers were interested in reviving few if any of the crew and colonists. This "clean" and "unclean" must have to do with the brother's superstition. Chen clenched his hands into fists until they ached.

A faint sound from behind suggested his pursuers were on his trail despite the darkness. Chen took a deep breath, then another. Then he held his breath and ran to the fire station. The brother shouted with alarm, but it was too late. Chen opened the case, reached in, and pulled the manual override.

Ceramic seals thousands of years old opened. Inert gasses flowed into the cold-sleep bays. Chen ran for all he was worth. It was two hundred yards, all without a breath, then a hundred. Breathing this stuff was a quick way to pass out, he knew.

His heard pounded. The edges of his vision grew little black speckles. Behind him came shouts of anger, then fear. Then there was silence. Lungs burning, legs throbbing, Chen made it to the maintenance access hatch, the big bounds and leaps he'd taken in the low gravity leaving him no choice but to slam into it with his shoulder.

He grabbed the handle before he could bounce away and opened it. Inside, he locked himself in and let his breath out explosively.

That would slow down the good brothers, he thought to himself. And kill them in about five minutes, he mused.

Chen made his way aft. He moved without conscious thought to the sleep bay where Susan slept. He shivered in the cold air. Her pod was functioning, if on multiple backups. He scraped the frost from the plastic shield and peered in, but saw nothing but his reflection.

He pulled back. Chen had seen his grandfather, a white-haired old asian man. After a moment, he leaned in again and took another look.

No, it was only himself. Aged by the long sleep. Chen nodded to himself: the process didn't stop aging, only brought it to a very slow rate. Many of the red lights he saw weren't equipment failures, but death due to the long, long sleep and inexorable time.

Suddenly he wanted to cry: with frustration, with grief, with anger. There was no way to wake Susan. She and the rest of Pan Asia's complement were as good as dead, save for the few the likes of Brother Paul would bring to life for their questions and contempt.

Movement caught his eye. Was there something in the pod? Curiousity fought with disgust. If something were moving in there, it certainly wasn't Susan, he thought to himself. But his rational mind wasn't enough to keep him from looking again.

Nothing. Chen wiped at his face with his frost-chilled hand, then moved farther aft and then in to the center. Had the extended sleep driven him insane?

No, he reassured himself mentally.

Aft. What was aft? A vague purpose formed in his mind as he continued, moving away from his imagined pursuit..

Soon the ladders changed back to stairs. And once again it was dark, pitch black. He couldn't see his hand before his face. Once again his hackles rose, as if there were something there in the darkness that he couldn't see but could almost reach out and touch. Shivering, Chen moved on.

He imagined his breath fogged in the cold air. There was atmosphere, for which he was grateful, and it was obviously rich enough in Oxygen to keep him from passing out, but while the brothers had filled Pan Asia with breathable air, they hadn't heated this section.

Once again, Chen was cold, and sweat beaded on his skin. A slight lurch announced a shuttle's arrival or departure, he couldn't tell which. It was a familiar sound from his many years outfitting the Pan Asia before departure, and Chen stopped for a moment and wished fervently that he could wake from this nightmare.

Finally, teeth chattering, Chen arrived at his destination. Tiny trouble lights were functioning here, bright enough for his light-starved eyes to see perfectly. A catwalk lead him into the aft section of the ship devoted to the fusion engines that had driven it out of the solar system and achieved a humble percentage of lightspeed. They hadn't fired in...what was the word? Millenia? but as Chen recalled, they had remarkably few moving parts. Even so, it was unlikely they would work.

But working wasn't necessarily what Chen had in mind.

There was yellow plastic tape, marking consoles. Chen imagined the techs had been back here and figured out what wasn't safe to operate. He pulled the tape aside and began flipping switches.

There was power to the sleep bays. If only the conduits were intact to this console as well....

Green lights. Red lights. Red blinking lights. A sputter from a speaker long unable to speak.

But enough green lights, yes indeed. A faint noise reached him, and he looked back. Robed figures were making their way along the catwalk.

"Resourceful bastards," Chen muttered. They wore some kind of breathing gear, maybe the atmosphere portion of a vac suit. They were seconds away.

Chen hit overrides, then opened a panel and picked a block of plastic inside of which were protected circuits. He pulled it.

Power surged along conduits. Some melted. Others held. Inside the fusion engines magnetic bottles formed, spun erratically due to deformations in their holding chambers. A few thousand years did matter, Chen knew.

Behind him, voices, shouts, but no fear.

Chen straightened. It was over. Just to be sure, he found the main command router for the panel and gave it a kick. More smoke, more red lights.

"You there! Away from those controls by Order of the Church!"

From beneath his robes, a brother masked by his breathing apparatus brought forth an archaic looking pistol. Chen raised his hands.

"Far as I can tell," he said calmly, "if the suns are fading, it's dickheads like you who are to blame." Chen felt light-headed. His chest hurt, his legs ached, and his shoulder was sore from slamming into the hatch.

Time, time, there was almost no more time....

The brother ripped off his breathing gear. It wasn't Paul, but Daniel, the brother who had been busy marking lives out of existance in the midships sleep chamber.

"Blasphemy! Utter Blasphemy! Would that I could burn you where you stand! Hands over your head! Kneel on the deck! And what have you done with this console? You do poorly to stand against an Inquisitor!" Chen saw his eyes dart to the yellow plastic tape coiled on the floor.

"Inquisitors, huh? I should have known you medieval simpletons would reinvent them." A tell-tale rumble beneath his feet told Chen what he needed to know.

"Hands up! What was that?" Techs moved past the brother to the console. They flipped switches, confered amongst themselves.

"It's not good, Brother Dannel," said one.

"This fusion technology...it's pre-Second Republic, Brother Daniel. Not reliable..." said another.

Another rumble, and Chen knew it was time. "I don't know what kind of hell you've made of the future, Daniel, but my ship and I are checking out." While it was awful that this Church would decide not to revive the living sleepers, Chen feared more what might happen to those they did bring back to life.

One of the techs yelled in alarm and began to run back down the catwalk.

Chen waited for Daniel to shoot him with the pistol, but the gun barrel lowered to the deck. "Oh, my son," Daniel said in kind tones. "You do not know what you do. Evil has claimed your heart, clouded your mind. Yet this may be for the best."

The remaining tech muttered under her breath and frantically worked over the console, but Chen knew it was too late. The holy man's words troubled him. "The best? Why don't you shoot me? I've killed you, I've killed her," he gestured at the tech, who slumped to the deck in defeat. "I've killed everyone aboard. We have only seconds to live."

Brother Daniel nodded. "That we be devoured by fire is best for humanity. Know that the light within you drove you to this, that in this you do the Prophet's work. We should have destroyed your vessel when it appeared on our scanners from beyond the jump gate, but in our pride..." Daniel let his voice trail off.

"I can't say I believe any of that," said Chen. "But I do believe this: it's gonna be a cold future...soon as we stop burning."

The engines blew. Chen knew fire for a millisecond, then he was consumed. The stern of the Pan Asia became as bright as a sun, brighter, and the bows splintered and burned and were lost in the heated shell of plasma and streamed out from the huge fusion bomb that had been the main engine of the Pan Asia.

From the bright light of the explosion, shadows fled.

"Losses?" asked the Bishop.

Brother Paul looked to his notes. "Brother Daniel, thirteen trained technicians, the shuttle Ardent Redemption."

"Your escape was fortuitous."

"I sensed his purpose. He was a madman."

"Subsequent problems?"

Paul knew what his Bishop meant. Only he knew Chen had had some contact with another. If he did not admit it, it would not be a black mark on his spotless record. Paul liked his record clean: only the purest rose to the rank of Bishop.

"None. Chen had no meaningful contact while on this ship. While he may have spoken with a tech on his ship...."

"Yes, of course. And our story?"

"An old space weapon, detonated purposefully to avoid future problems."

"Will such a tale be believed by those who pick up the explosion and debris on their scanners?" The Bishop frowned. It would not do for dark rumors to fly about the system they had just spent months cleansing.

Brother Paul smiled, lay his finger alongside his nose. The Bishop nodded after a moment. "I see. Thank you, Brother Paul. As always, you have served well. It shan't be forgotten. See that I receive a full report so that I might warn our fellow Avestites about other such...ships visiting from the void."

Paul nodded, kissed his Bishop's ring, and withdrew.

"Just as well," he muttered, thinking of the explosion. The superheated plasma had purged all. Try as he might, he could only be thankful those so-called First Republic souls had been sent along the path of redemption. Never before had he witnessed such appalling lack of belief in a man.

What possibly could have been the benefit of rousing thousands of such heathens?

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