His radio crackled, waking him up. "Colonel Young, come in?"

He reached for it, feeling the bedclothes against his back, the faint tremor of the sublight engines and cold like a wire through his chest.

Brody's voice came again. "Colonel Young, this is Brody in the Control Interface Room. Please respond."

He reacted out of habit, out of lead-heavy sleep, while some part of him already knew what was going on, was already at some fundamental level repulsed. "This is Young. Go ahead."

"We've got a bit of a situation here."

And OK, no. His brain felt sluggish, as though he was sedated, but memories were coming back on line. The hiss and slide of the pod door as it came down in front of his face. Eli's cheery smile and then the spike of cold through the lungs. He was in suspended animation right now. In cryo-sleep. And in that sleep, what dreams might come? Well, it looked like Destiny had the answer to that one.

He put his dream jacket on and folded his arms, raising his gaze to the ceiling for lack of anything more specific to address. "No."

Silence, and then the sound of heavy weapon fire impacting the shields. With a tearing sheer of metal, the wall of his quarters was sucked outward, all the air with it. Dream or not, he fought death in panic, holding on to the side of the door until an energy bolt smashed into it and seared his hands down to the bone. The flesh sloughed off – every instant of agony exquisitely rendered The experience of dying of explosive decompression was no more pleasant this time than the last.

He woke up again. Sharper this time, echoes of phantom destruction all over his body, and his breathing choked with loss.

"Colonel Young, come in?"

Three years of this? At least three years, if not three thousand, of failing everyone and dying over and over in hideous detail? Yeah, that sounded like his usual luck.

Sighing, because anger never seemed to help, he tried again. "I said no. Listen, Destiny? Whatever the hell this game is supposed to teach me, I'm not playing."

A long pause. The radio did not crackle in his hand. He rubbed at his chest above the heart, where it still felt as though he'd been stuck through with a spear of ice. Cautiously, he took the fact that he wasn't dying again as a positive sign. Was the ship actually listening to him? Wouldn't that be something? "So why don't you just tell me what you want me to know?

Consciousness slipped sideways out of his hands, as though either he or the ship itself had de-coalesced. When it came back, he was in the control interface room, with fifteen alien ships surrounding Destiny and the stink of fear rank in the air. Brody and Eli close to panic, looking to him to figure it all out and save them.

And yeah. It didn't work like that. It never had. He swiped a hand through the holographic screen and watched the swirls of light try to reform around his fingers, while he thought this through. Maybe Destiny wasn't so much trying to teach him something as it was trying to learn about him. If so, it was a piss poor way of going about it, but it was also something he could empathise with. After all, Destiny's crew had been trying to understand her since they got here. It would make some sense for that to go both ways.

"Do you actually want me to solve this, or are you just messing with my head?"

Eli's expression changed, his posture shifting from nervous diffidence to something smoother. "What makes you think it isn't both?"

It was like someone new coming through on the stones, the visceral sense that whoever looked out from behind the eyes had changed. Except that if he was reading this right, Eli had never been Eli at all.

Hilarious. Wasn't it always both? He smiled faintly. "Destiny? It's good to meet you. Don't you have an appearance of your own?"

He didn't spot the transfer, the bleed from one thing to the next, although he thought he hadn't taken his eyes off her. But now she was Emily, with Emily's beautiful slanted eyes and Emily's self-contained grace and an expression on her face that he had never seen from his wife before and didn't want to see now.

"No!" the word snapped out like a punch to the throat. He hadn't meant it as an act of aggression but it rose from the same place, instinctive and pure, unmixed with thought. He turned his back on her, rather than risk frightening her with the violence of his outrage and shock. "You don't get to wear her face. Take it off."

She sounded heartbreakingly like herself, when disapproving and hurt. "This is how I was made. It is important that my crew love me, so I-"

"Hijack the loves we already have?"

The Ancients, with their chairs that promised the knowledge of the universe and delivered brain-damage, with their communication stones that promised community and delivered the terrible certainty that you had never been further from home... the more he learned of them the less he liked. So familiar in many ways and yet so subtly wrong.

But it was hardly Destiny's fault that she was what she had been made to be.

He breathed in and out, letting go of the anger, and then turned back. She was Eli again when he did, Eli looking puzzled and hang-dog – a child wrongly rebuked.

She had killed Young four times by now – he still had the phantom pain of the last shuddering through his muscles. She had chosen the point when he was barely holding himself together to push him under water and hold him there until he drowned. She had broken him and in the process she had broken herself, giving up with him, refusing to go on without him.

He still hadn't quite worked out whether he should resent her or thank her for that.

What had been the point of it? To finally overpower and overwhelm him? Or to convince the crew to stop fighting him? Was the end of the sedition and backbiting what she intended all along, or was it only the ironic result of Rush's pragmatism, making it look as though Young had been chosen to lead, when actually he had failed?

"You're not really Eli either," he said, because he hated all these ambiguities and half truths and evasions. There wasn't any need for it. "Yeah, I'm fond of Eli, but that belongs to Eli. Can't you give yourself your own face, so I can figure out how I feel about you?"

"I am," Eli's image flickered rapidly between single frames in which she was every one of the crew, expanded out into something wireframe and crystal. He had time to worry that he had contradicted some fundamental Ancient programming tenet and this was her equivalent of a software crash. Time to think 'fuck' and wonder how he could get himself out of stasis to wake Rush and get him to fix this.

Then she stabilized on a frankly disturbing combination of Eli and Emily. "I am designed to take the form of someone you know. I cannot choose a form that does not exist."

"No, that's good," he smiled, acknowledging the effort, the fact that she had tried. "Maybe you could include a couple more? Add in TJ and Greer and Scott, and the composite won't look like any one person at all."

"It will not resemble me any closer than the others." She morphed as she spoke, adding faces, smoothing out to the average – to something androgynous and beautiful, dark skinned and dark eyed, both familiar and utterly new.

"I know," he said, impressed. "You're a spaceship. I get that. But we tweaked the interface to something we can both live with, so that's progress."

He had also gone a good (subjective) half hour without being tested to destruction. The aftershocks of violent death had mostly worked their way out of his system by now and he was not going to knock that either.

"You want me to solve this puzzle, you gotta give me my crew." He perched on the edge of a console, no longer used to the lack of seats. She hadn't adjusted the simulation to take account of the bridge and he wondered what would happen if he set off for it now. Maybe went via the simulations of the stasis chambers and 'woke' some of the simulated people there. How far down the rabbit hole could he go before he lost track of what was real at all?

"It must be you."

"No. See it doesn't work that way. You need – what – your databases and your processors and your sensors to make a decision? Well that's what my people are for me. I got people to give me ideas and different people to give me facts and other people again to give me moral guidance, and I need them all. That's how the team works."

Her smile had TJ's gracious melancholy and Greer's triumph all at once. "I am aware. I was designed to be operated by a crew. I understand synergy."

He found that fact disproportionately reassuring, having somehow expected her to be as fiercely isolationist and independent as her greatest supporter, Rush. Folding his hands in front of him he returned the smile. "Well then."

"No." She circled him, and the walls dissolved around him, leaving them both standing in the depths of space, no barrier, no walls between them and the round red mouths of a fleet of alien ships. "You are the one who solves this. I have looked into all your minds. I have studied my crew. You solve this."

Soundlessly in the vacuum of space, a warning shot seared over their heads, painting the deck beneath them red. He felt the charge of it raise the hairs on his arms, make his skin burn and crawl as it passed.

Young looked up at the fleet above him, around him. She had denied him weapons now, left him – left them – utterly helpless, adrift in space, out numbered, out gunned and staring death in the face.

Maybe that was the point?

"A no-win scenario" Eli had called it.

"Always with an unfortunate outcome," Rush had said. And Rush had interrupted it by force, stopped the endless cycle from the outside, pragmatic as always, focussed on moving forward.

Helpless, useless, letting everyone down, in the centre of overwhelming force, with no ideas how to help and just enough time to fully appreciate the totality of his failure? Young knew this feeling intimately. He breathed in sharp, making connections.

She'd been sent out alone. She'd been alone for millions of years, attacked by aliens, beaten by debris and the unimaginable hazards of deep space. She had the hopes of a whole species riding on her back, and now she was also responsible for a crew of brief, fragile, quarrelsome, strange little creatures whom she had to protect.

Not a test for him to solve, so much as a demonstration that she knew how he felt. That she too ran the endless anxious loops that kept him awake at night, that she couldn't see a way out either. That she was afraid.

His despair twisted within him into sympathy. "You want me to tell you how to live with it?"

"I want you to make it stop."

"Yeah," he had to laugh. "It doesn't work like that either. There's no fix. You just have to remember that it can't all happen at once and go on regardless."

The technical term for her expression, he thought, would be 'creepy'. But hell, she was an alien spaceship, she was entitled to occasionally look not entirely human. "I want there to be an end."

He gestured at the overkill overhead, "I always found it a comfort, to know that if they do kill you, it all stops."

"But I don't want to die either."

No, OK, but that was funny. How easy it was to define the problem. How hard it was to solve. "It's shit, right?"

She looked away, pressing a fist to her mouth just like TJ, when she didn't want to risk letting out a sob, and he felt bad for the flippancy. He reached out to try and touch her arm reassuringly, but his hand passed straight through. Pity wrung him again. There were many advantages to being embodied that the Ancients had chosen to strip from themselves – the animal comfort of hugs and sex and food, the distractions of pain and exercise and panic and sleep. Even the last-ditch resource of drinking yourself out of your misery, for a little while, so that you could come back renewed.

As far as he knew, she didn't have any of that.

"All these things you tell yourself might happen," he offered, "only one of them can actually do so. And the chances are that while it's happening you'll be too busy reacting to it to really feel the impact. It's not the stuff that kills you that really hurts. It's the stuff you have to suffer through and then live with afterwards."

The surrealism of the conversation hit him at once. Was he really giving life tips to a million year old spaceship? He stuffed his hands in his pockets and cut to the chase. "You've been coping with this for millions of years. What's changed now to make it unbearable?"

"I was alone," she faded at the edges as she spoke, ghostly and faint. "For millions of years. Without my crew parts of myself were dormant, waiting. Those parts woke when you arrived, and now... Now I don't want to be alone again. I don't want to die alone."

Humanity - he couldn't help but smile - complicating things all over the universe without even trying. "Well, that's no problem. Something happens while we're in stasis that you think might be the end, you wake me up and we'll go together."

He reconsidered. "Actually, wake Rush too. For one, he may be able to find a way out of it, for two, he loves you most out of all of us. He would want to be there for you."

She smiled, a smile too bittersweet, too mature for her youthful face. "It is not the solution I would have preferred."

"Tell me about it."

"You do not like dying."

"No. But you've given me plenty of practice. I figure one more time's not going to be that hard."

Silence for a long moment, and then she looked up and one by one the spaceships that surrounded them winked out. Blue green northern lights of FTL gave way to the gold of shields, and then the walls returned, cradling them like cupped hands.

"You'd do that for me?"

He let all of his residual resentment go for the test, for kicking him when he was down. Rush's commitment to the mission had seemed perverse to him right up until the guy had finally bothered explaining to him what it was. Equally, he had not understood Rush's obsession, affection for the ship until now, until it became clear she was no more just a machine than he was just an animal. "Sure I would. You're one of my people now, Destiny."

The arrogance of it made him smile. Taking responsibility for the welfare of a creature so ancient, so powerful, like a mayfly taking charge of a man?

But hell, she needed him right now, and right now he was here. What more was there, after all?