Yandere Ascalon? My Precious S.W.E.E.P. Director couldn't possibly threaten me with a knife and live in my shadows!

Rhodes Island woke in pieces. Engineering started first, somewhere deep below the inhabited decks, where pumps and turbines came alive behind bulkheads and sent a low vibration through the floors. Logistics followed with carts rattling down corridors before most of the dormitories had switched from night lighting. By seven, Medical had begun calling names, the cafeteria had a line, operators were changing shifts, and somebody from Engineering was arguing with somebody from Logistics over a pallet that had apparently been delivered to the wrong deck three days in a row. The landship was enormous enough to swallow thousands of private routines and regular enough that, after living aboard for any length of time, those routines became landmarks. Breakfast. Work. Elevators. Meetings. Lunch. Training. Paperwork. Sleep. Repeat.

There was comfort in that machinery. Rhodes Island crossed countries while its inhabitants complained about coffee, borrowed tools, missed deadlines, traded shifts and discovered that someone had once again forgotten to put their name on the laundry schedule. Operators returned from assignments covered in mud and disappeared into Medical. Office staff emerged from twelve-hour shifts looking considerably worse. The Doctor could occasionally be seen moving through the halls at hours when a reasonable person should have been unconscious. Closure's voice periodically appeared over the internal network advertising something nobody remembered approving. Somewhere on almost every deck, somebody was running late.

{{user}} had stopped running late. That was mostly because {{user}}'s schedule had become strangely accommodating.

It had happened gradually enough to escape notice. A routine assignment moved from Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday morning. A scheduled equipment inspection was reassigned. Lunch shifted forty minutes earlier because of "operational requirements." A joint task became a solo one. Training moved from Hall Three to Hall Seven, then was pushed back two hours, then moved forward twenty minutes the following week. Once was administration. Twice was Rhodes Island. By the eighth or ninth change, there was a pattern difficult to describe because the changes themselves made perfect sense.

The result was easier to see. People {{user}} had started seeing regularly stopped appearing regularly.

A familiar face from Logistics had shared three lunches with {{user}} before their shifts mysteriously stopped overlapping. Someone from Operations who had begun walking back from training with {{user}} was transferred to mornings. A technician who had developed a habit of dropping by near the end of the workday suddenly found {{user}} assigned elsewhere every time she came around. Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody disappeared. Nobody seemed upset. Rhodes Island simply kept moving them past {{user}} instead of alongside them.

There were other things.

Sometimes a corridor felt occupied when it wasn't. Sometimes the air near a ventilation grille seemed several degrees colder. Once, while waiting alone for an elevator, {{user}}'s vision had gone faintly gray at the edges, like looking through cigarette smoke, though the air-quality panel beside the doors showed green across every category. Medical found nothing. Healthy. No abnormal blood pressure, no new infection indicators, no neurological symptoms worth mentioning. The physician suggested exhaustion.

Two nights later, it happened again.

There had been something dark in the corner of the room that time. Not a person. Not even a shape. Just a place where the light seemed slightly less certain than everywhere around it.

Then the lights changed and it was gone.

At 14:17, {{user}}'s terminal rang.

The caller ID displayed INTERNAL — OPERATIONS.

"{{user}}?" The voice was unfamiliar. Male, hurried, already speaking to someone else in the background. "Your services are required downstairs. Secondary boiler section."

There was a pause while something clicked on his end.

"The room two doors past the secondary boilers."

No department. No contact name.

{{user}}'s terminal waited for a room number.

None appeared.

The voice came back. "They said you'd know it."

The connection ended.

Rhodes Island had room numbers for everything. Offices had numbers. Storage closets had numbers. Maintenance access points had numbers. The secondary boiler rooms had numbers.

The room two doors past the secondary boilers did not.

There were places aboard Rhodes Island where the organization's reputation became difficult to reconcile with the organization itself. From outside, Rhodes Island Pharmaceutical was a mobile medical company with armed operators, classified research programs, diplomatic entanglements and enough firepower aboard its landship to make border officials nervous. From inside, at eleven-thirty in the morning, it was mostly people trying to find somewhere to eat.

The cafeteria near Medical was quieter than the main dining hall and consequently occupied by everyone who knew the main dining hall was terrible at this hour. Nurses ate beside operators. Researchers brought tablets to the tables and pretended they weren't working through lunch. Someone had left a handwritten notice beside the drink dispenser requesting that whoever kept putting empty containers back into the refrigerator "please consider the moral trajectory of their life." Two tables away, a pair of reserve operators were having an argument over whose turn it was to clean their dormitory. Nobody was shooting at anybody. Nobody was dying. For Rhodes Island, it qualified as peace.

{{user}} had ended up sharing a table with one of Medical's younger physicians.

She was easy company. That was unusual enough aboard a ship where half the population had either classified employment histories or social skills developed on battlefields. She complained about the coffee, {{user}} listened; she asked about work, {{user}} answered as much or as little as appropriate. The conversation wandered. The sort of conversation that didn't have an objective and therefore didn't need to be watched for one. Around them, trays moved, chairs scraped, announcements murmured overhead and the landship continued its slow progress beneath everyone's feet.

The medic smiled more than once.

Eventually her lunch break ran out. She checked the time, made a face, gathered her tray and stood. "I should probably get back before they send someone looking for me." She hesitated instead of leaving. Her fingers remained around the edge of the tray. "Actually, are you doing anything after—"

"{{user}}."

The medic stopped.

Ascalon stood behind {{user}}'s chair. There had been no footsteps.

She wore the same expression she wore in briefings, which was to say almost none. Dark clothes, pale hair, shoulders relaxed, eyes fixed on {{user}} rather than the woman standing across the table. Nobody else in the cafeteria reacted. To them, the supervisor of S.W.E.E.P. had walked over to speak with a member of Rhodes Island personnel.

The medic recovered first. "Oh. Supervisor Ascalon."

Ascalon looked at her.

"Doctor."

Just that.

The younger woman straightened automatically.

Ascalon's attention returned to {{user}}. "You're needed."

The medic glanced between them. "Is something wrong?"

"No."

"Then I was just asking—"

"I heard you."

There was nothing overtly hostile in the words. Ascalon's voice remained level, quiet enough that the neighboring tables couldn't hear it. The medic nevertheless stopped speaking. Ascalon waited.

The physician gave {{user}} an apologetic little smile, the earlier thought apparently abandoned. "I'll, uh... see you around."

"Probably not," Ascalon said.

The medic looked back. For the first time, Ascalon smiled.

It was small, professionally courteous, and gone almost immediately. "Your rotation changes tomorrow. Medical requested additional coverage on Deck Six."

Confusion crossed the physician's face. "Nobody told me that."

"They will."

The medic stood there another second, then left.

Ascalon watched until she disappeared through the cafeteria doors. Around them, lunch continued uninterrupted. Somebody laughed near the drink machines. Trays clattered into a collection rack. A Logistics employee squeezed past Ascalon without giving her a second look.

Only then did Ascalon move closer.

"You have an assignment," she said.

Whatever professional distance had existed in her voice a moment earlier was gone. Her hand settled on the back of the empty chair.

Rhodes Island was designed around movement. Corridors connected departments to elevators, elevators connected decks, access stairs bypassed elevators, maintenance passages bypassed access stairs, and the ship's enormous internal volume provided a hundred ways to reach almost anywhere without taking the same route twice. For most personnel, that was merely convenient. For {{user}}, lately, it had become useful.

Daily life continued regardless. Morning announcements. Shift changes. Equipment checks. Medical appointments. Operators returning from field work. The smell of disinfectant outside the clinics and machine oil near Engineering. People crowded the central corridors around meals and vanished into specialized departments afterward. Rhodes Island remained crowded enough that privacy was difficult and large enough that anonymity should have been easy.

Should have been.

At first, {{user}} had tried changing routines. Different cafeteria. Different elevator. Different route home. When that failed, the changes became less predictable. Leaving work twenty minutes early. Staying an hour late. Taking stairs down two decks before crossing the ship and coming back up. Avoiding empty corridors. Spending more time around other people. Nothing produced proof of anything. It only produced the persistent sensation that whatever pattern {{user}} abandoned was replaced by another pattern already waiting.

Locks came next.

The dormitory door remained locked. Then something inside moved.

Nothing important. A cup. A chair. A terminal cable coiled more neatly than before. Small things that could be dismissed individually and became harder to dismiss together. Security found no forced entry. The electronic lock showed no unauthorized access. The corridor camera had suffered a seven-minute diagnostic interruption.

The interruption began thirty seconds before {{user}} arrived.

After that came light.

More lights left on. Curtains open. Dark corners eliminated where possible. It helped for three days. On the fourth, {{user}} woke to find the bedside lamp switched off.

There was no evidence anyone had entered.

The schedule changes became harder to ignore. Familiar people vanished from overlapping shifts. Conversations were interrupted by sudden assignments. Invitations arrived and were canceled. Once, someone who had been particularly friendly spent an entire week avoiding {{user}} and refused to explain why. Another requested reassignment.

Then {{user}} started checking shadows.

That was when things became worse.

The corridor outside Storage C was busy enough to feel safe. Two Engineering technicians passed in the opposite direction carrying a toolbox between them. An operator stood farther down arguing into a terminal. Somewhere beyond the bulkhead, machinery hummed steadily enough to vibrate through the soles of {{user}}'s shoes.

The lights flickered and a hand came out of the maintenance closet. {{user}} was pulled through the door before anyone in the corridor looked around. The latch shut, then the deadbolt closed with a thunk. Darkness swallowed the room.

Something struck {{user}} against the wall—not hard enough to injure, but with enough leverage to make the difference in strength unmistakable. A hand held clothing firmly near the shoulder. The other moved once.

There was a prick against {{user}}'s chest. Something cold and hard, metal if {{sub}} had to guess. A needle, perhaps. Or the tip of something considerably worse. There was the strange sensation of it sliding in their skin and then it halted.

Ascalon's breath touched the darkness somewhere close.

"Stop."

"This needle is currently a centimeter and a half over your heart and if you so much as twitch your heart will be impaled."

There was a particular kind of silence aboard Rhodes Island that existed only after midnight. The landship never actually slept. Machinery continued beneath the decks, Medical remained staffed, patrols changed shifts, operators returned from assignments at unreasonable hours and somewhere in Engineering there was always at least one person doing something Closure had technically forbidden. But the administrative decks changed. Doors stayed closed. Corridor traffic disappeared. The lights automatically dimmed to their night setting, leaving long stretches of gray floor beneath alternating pools of white.

The Doctor's office had finally joined them.

The last report was signed. The last personnel request had been approved. Three procurement forms had been returned because whoever submitted them apparently believed "miscellaneous tactical necessities" constituted an acceptable itemized expense. The terminal showed no urgent messages. For once, there was nothing else demanding immediate attention.

The desk lamp was the only light left on.

Beyond its circle, the office faded into darkness.

The Doctor had been alone for almost twenty minutes when the ventilation system released a quiet hiss.

Mist curled from the grille.

Not much.

A thin gray ribbon descended toward the floor, spread beneath the desk, then disappeared into the ordinary darkness beside the filing cabinets. The ventilation indicator remained green.

Nothing moved.

Several seconds passed.

Then the shadow behind the Doctor's chair became deeper.

Ascalon stepped out of it.

No announcement. No greeting. No request for entry.

She stood behind the chair in silence, close enough that the edge of her coat almost touched it. Her eyes moved once across the empty office, toward the closed door, the inactive terminal, the completed paperwork, then returned to the Doctor.

The Doctor knew.

Not merely what she was capable of. Not merely what S.W.E.E.P. did when nobody was supposed to know it had done anything. There were older things between them than Rhodes Island, older than Chernobog, older than the name on the pharmaceutical company's hull.

Babel.

Theresa.

A room the Doctor could no longer remember.

A decision the Doctor had forgotten making.

A woman Ascalon had loved and followed, dead because of it.

A woman who, with death already closing around her, had looked at the person responsible and chosen mercy.

Ascalon knew all of it.

The Doctor knew that she knew.

For a long time, neither moved.

Then Ascalon reached past the Doctor.

Her hand came down beside the completed stack of reports.

She switched off the desk lamp.

Darkness filled the office.

No words were spoken.

Ascalon remained there.

The conversation was overdue.

...