3.

Rommie opened her eyes suddenly from a deep dreamless sleep to find herself staring at Trance and Seamus. Trance was smiling her mysterious smile while Seamus was looking, for once, rather subdued, in fact almost embarrassed. Rommie glanced quickly around and saw they were on the Eureka Maru, but things seemed subtly different. "Good morning, Trance. Good morning, Seamus."

"Actually, it's afternoon, Rom-doll." Harper seemed to snap instantly out of his odd reverie. "How do you feel?"

"I feel fine. So..." (she consulted her internal clock) "it's been... two years!" She sat up. Trance caught the falling sheet and gave it back to her. "Is Dylan all right?"

"Yes and no," said Trance. "He's alive, and he will recover. But he used up almost all of his reserves to survive." As Rommie stepped down from the bed, Trance deftly tied the sheet behind her in a toga style, following her the short distance to where Dylan lay.

He was still unconscious. If Rommie had been a breathing creature she would have gasped. There was not an ounce of expendable weight left on his body. His muscles were utterly wasted, his cheeks and eye sockets so hollow and sunken that they revealed his skeletal structure. His skin had a dry, papery look to it, and his lips were thin and cracked. Rommie looked wordlessly to Trance.

"He'll need months of rehab," Trance said softly. "And he won't be able to go back on regular duty for a very long time."

"He needs to be put into a nutrient bath," Andromeda said, recovering swiftly from the shock. "Don't revive him until his body has sufficient stores to withstand the process."

"I know," said Trance. "But I will have to speed up his metabolism slightly to get things going. Don't worry. It'll be all right."

"Thank you for rescueing us." Andromeda embraced Trance and Beka warmly. "Trance, you put us out on that mining drift, right?"

"Yes. Actually, I wasn't certain where I put you, only that you were definitely out of harms' way. I'm very, very sorry we took so long to find you."

"How did you do it? Was it a tesseract?"

She nodded and sighed, looking resigned. "Yes."

"Trance, I realize that you have your secrets, and I respect them. When I theorized that it was a tesseract, Dylan agreed, but he refused to say anything more. What I would like to know is, why did we end up in such a desolate place? But it looks like even you can't answer that. It was full of ghosts."

"I'm sorry about the ghosts, but they turned out to be a gift from the Divine. Your low-level signal beacon was clearly visible from several AUs away. There were all sorts of scavengers after you, and pirates too. The ghosts guarded you, and they drove every trespasser away."

Andromeda's eyes went so round at hearing this that Beka Valentine burst out laughing. "Rommie, I've never seen you so flummoxed!"

"I will never think of ghosts in the same way again," she said.

"It's quite a story." Beka sat down in a nearby chair. "Trance was frantic-- well, we all were. But the first thing we had to do was to beat Rahu. Did you see Ryan when he came slipping in? It was incredible!"

"Yes," Rommie said quietly. "I saw him."

Beka tempered her enthusiasm a little as she realized that the friend now standing before her had actually died in the battle. "Uh... Anyway, he and the Maru, working together, got Rahu turned away from the Andromeda and Shivaloka. A little too late, but we did it. The Maru's slipcore was damaged in the fight, naturally, but we led that thing a very merry chase. We ended up way out in the Moon Clouds. Ryan made a slip point, lured the thing in and lost it there. It's very unlikely it will ever find its way back to that planet.

"Then we had to return to Shivaloka and rescue the rest of your crew, and then fix the slipcore. Harper had some spare parts stowed away as ballast, but it took him a month to do that repair. Trance was ready to scream." She glanced at Trance, who smiled and rolled her eyes. "I hate to interrupt," she interjected, "But can you and Rommie please help me with Dylan? I've got his core temperature up now and he needs to go into the nutrient bath."

"Sure thing."

Beka and Rommie lifted Dylan's wasted body and carefully maneuvered it into the mechanical womb Trance had prepared. When he was safely in and the system had begun its work, Beka continued her story. "Once the slipcore was fixed, we went looking. Of course, we'd sent dozens of couriers on search already, but space is big!"

Trance leaned against a bulkhead, arms crossed. "I knew I'd put you somewhere in my home region," she admitted, "But that is such a wide area, I hardly knew where to begin. We wandered for almost two years from system to system. When we ran out of money, we had to take a job with an interplanetary shipping company and that interfered with our search for you. Still, I knew when we were finally getting close. Then we ran into the pirates."

"Actually, it was Rox Nara," Beka said. "She was incredibly rattled, full of stories. She told us all about the beacon on the asteroid, and how, when she went to investigate, she was scared out of the area by an army of ghosts!" She nodded at Trance to continue the story.

"I'm always attracted to ghostly manifestations," Trance said. "Their very existence is a desperate cry for help. So we headed for the coordinates Rox gave us and when we got close enough, we picked up the beacon and realized it was you. When we landed on the surface, we couldn't find a way into the mine. The old airlocks were too fragile to use without taking the chance of depressurizing the entire complex. That's when Harper saw the old Mirabaian."

"That's what they were?" Rommie asked. "From the Mira cluster? Dylan thought they were Ceylonese."

"Nope, Mirabaian," Beka said. "They're much taller, and their bones are made of borosilica."

"That's interesting."

"Anyway," Trance continued, "Harper saw the ghost and of course he ran screaming in the opposite direction. It was quite funny."

"Hilarious," corrected Beka, grinning.

"He finally was stopped when he ran right into a big glass wall. It was a window onto a huge room, and when he looked in he saw the ore cart, Dylan, and you. So you see... the ghost had anticipated Harper's reaction and sent him in the right direction."

"We pulled a modular airlock from the Maru and brought it to the surface," Beka continued. "Believe me, it was a real challenge to get Harper to do anything useful down there! We attached the airlock and cut our way through ten feet of solid rock to get into the mine."

"Harper and Beka got you and Dylan back here," Trance added. "I stayed behind to communicate with the ghosts and found out it was a slave colony. There had been a civil war back on the homeworld, and the losers were sent to these mines for the rest of their lives."

"Not an uncommon practice," Rommie said.

"But it's terrible! I told the ghosts that I can help them find their path to freedom, but I had to see to Dylan first. Now he's safe, so I have to go back there and keep my promise. Would you like to come with me?"

"Yes," said Rommie. "You see... I had no compassion for the ghosts when I first saw them down there. I need to learn it."

"So does Harper," Beka added. "He's going, too... even if I have to drag him."

Trance smiled. "I need to go and get ready. I'll meet you on the bridge in a minute." She cast one last glance at Dylan's vital signs, seemed satisfied, and left the medical bay.

"Beka, where is Harper anyway?" Rommie asked. "Is he avoiding me for some reason?"

"Harper's a little freaked out right now. Rommie..."

"What? What's wrong?"

"Well... nothing's wrong, actually. But-- oh, hell. Rommie, when we rescued you, Harper ran a scan of your systems." She leaned forward, lowering her voice to a near-whisper. "He found Dylan's DNA... inside your body?" It was less a statement, more a question.

Rommie replied factually, but quietly. "Yes."

"I mean... That kind of DNA? Inside... That part of you?"

"Dylan's mind was affected by the stasis drugs."

"What about your mind?"

Rommie looked at the floor. "Beka, I..." But Beka interrupted her, laying a hand on her shoulder. "It's all right. It really is. Just a little surprising, is all."

Andromeda looked up at the Maru's captain. "Is it really?" she said, and was startled by the note of pleading in her voice. Just then the Maru interrupted. Trance was waiting. Beka patted her shoulder again. "Well, maybe not so surprising. Come on, Rommie."

----

Beka piloted the Maru back down to the surface of the asteroid, maneuvering to within a few yards of the airlock they'd left before deftly swinging the ship around for a perfect docking. "The Maru's AI couldn't have done that better," Andromeda said. Beka shrugged with false modesty.

Trance led the way into the deserted station, with Rommie and Beka dragging a howling Harper between them. They'd found him hiding in the hold. "Be quiet!" Trance said, turning toward him, a finger on her lips. "Harper, you're going to scare them away!"

That got his attention. "Scare the ghosts?" he said.

"Of course." Trance led them to the center of the huge room. The moon was just past its zenith, and cold light cascaded in the great window. The breaths of the little group created a cloud of thick mist that was slow to fade in the dead air. "All right, people," said Trance. "This is where the slave ghosts gather when the moon goes down. As I already told you, they lost a huge civil war back on their homeworld and were exiled here forever. But there was a horrible accident several levels down. Thousands of them were buried alive. They had no hope of rescue then, and as ghosts, they have had no hope of rescue for many centuries. I was informed by their elder that just before Dylan went into suspended animation, he asked them what he could do to help them. His concern moved them so much that they have gone out of their way to protect him and Rommie for the last two years. In return, I can and will help them regain their freedom."

The moon was slowly sinking away from the window side of the room. The shadows began to quickly grow longer.

Rommie stood silently, the only member of the group who was not blowing plumes of frosted breath. She was trying to fine tune her brainwave cycles. As she was shutting down in Dylan's arms two years before, she had noted that when her brainwaves reached a certain level-- about forty cycles per second-- she had suddenly been able to see those ghosts. Though her physical structure did not allow for her to actually cycle her brain so slowly-- her design never having anticipated such an unlikely need-- her autonomic software was extremely flexible, even allowing her alpha waves if she chose. She let the little-used pattern kick in, experiencing the odd sensation of waking sleep, and as her perception slowly shifted, she began to be aware of a massive presence. "I see them," she said. "They're all here."

"Omygod," Harper squeaked.

The moon went down and black night fell over all. The stars glimmered frostily in the window. And all around, the half-seen figures of the avian miners could be sensed. But they seemed a little different than Rommie remembered them. Now their heads were held high, their tails flagged with pride, and she saw them for what they had been-- a proud and beautiful people.

Trance stepped a little apart from the Maru crew. "Their elder has told me where their kind normally go after death. It's a beautiful world full of light. I know it very well. It resides on the highest and most advanced astral planes. I will open a gate to that world now."

Rommie blinked sleepily, amazed not by the crystal clear images that were coming through to her, but at what Trance had said. There was, in fact, a destination to be sought after organic death? This was unimaginable in the AI world. Were the Tarn Vedrans right after all? She would have to discuss this with Trance...

... Who at that moment somehow created a great rift in spacetime using no technology anyone could see.

A brilliant, blinding light flooded through the gate, which had appeared as a narrow vertical anomaly stretching from floor to ceiling and, Andromeda suspected, beyond in either direction. And the ghosts marched into it, one at a time, vanishing from the universe.

Rommie thought suddenly that there was something familiar about the light into which the ghosts were fading. It made something in her chest tighten and ache. She thought of Dylan, sleeping on the Maru. She thought of the deepest shadows in the universe and her job fighting the Abyss. All these thoughts, triggered by a certain spectrographic pattern of light, shining from beyond the mortal world.

It took three hours for them all to pass through. Trance stood stock-still, holding open the gate. Her eyes were closed and her face was peaceful, though Rommie detected ever-increasing strain. Beka never moved from where she stood. Harper had collapsed to his knees on the floor.

At last, when the sky had begun to lighten again, the ancient elder was the only spirit remaining. Trance opened her eyes, communing for a moment with the misty figure before it, too, passed through, and the gate collapsed with the sound of thunder, shaking the onlookers out of their collective reverie.

Trance heaved a huge sigh, staggering a little. Beka ran to her, grabbing her arm.

"No, Beka, I'm all right."

"Trance," said Rommie, shifting up from alpha wavelength to her normal speed, "What did the elder say to you?"

"He said that we have allies in his people, and that if I make the portal, they will come back to help us in our hour of need."