Free Indigo Squad by Tim C. Taylor

blackout.
    Instinct drove Indiya to glance behind at her experimental black box equipment stowed against the bulkhead. Immediately, she chided herself for the lack of a cool head: her experiment ran on separate power. That was the whole point. No need to worry about her work getting fried by a power surge.
    What she ought to be worrying about, she told herself, was why the blackout had happened at all. All their systems were hardened to cope with power loss. They trained on backup systems and simulated blackouts and power surges, fires and endless emergency situations. But when it came to genuine, unintentional power loss, she’d never heard of one happening before.
    The conclusion left her feeling numb: the power loss was intentional.
    Thinking of power sources kept bringing her back to her black box equipment.
    She glanced back at her black box and grimaced. That bakri chodding McEwan had gotten to her more than she realized. She should have been cross-checking the Beowulf feeds with what her black box could tell her.
    Five minutes later and once again Indiya was replaying the moments leading up to Bonaventure ’s fiery end, the explosion that would have killed her if not for Arun. This time several of the screens were showing feeds from her black box recording.
    Both the ship’s official records and her unofficial black box had been fed by the same sensor inputs. So it wasn’t surprising to find both showing an identical version of events.
    That all changed when the recordings had advanced to about five minutes before the explosion.
    Her body began to tremble once again, simultaneously shot through with the heat of discovery and the chill of fear.
    In the black box version of events, a green smudge appeared a few hundred meters away from Bonaventure, and then whatever it was had moved in to… dock. It moved like a ship. After five minutes, the ghost ship began moving away for a few seconds before vanishing completely at the same instant Bonaventure exploded.
    Her black box recording was synchronized with Beowulf’ s standard sensor feeds. But on the official record… no ghost ship. Nothing at all. No matter how closely she looked.
    This mystery ship was fuzzy, as if a superimposed image that wasn’t fully opaque. An echo, perhaps, of an image not in this universe.
    That was insane.
    But as good a hypothesis as anything.
    She stepped through the recordings before the explosion, one millisecond at a time.
    At one millisecond before, she paused the replay, her jaw open, staring at the display in disbelief.
    She moved the recordings forward, and then backward in tiny time increments. It was always there. In that one instant, the ghost ship revealed itself. Fully opaque. Enough for her to extract a slew of readings about power distribution, hull materials and radiation sources. The next instant – the ship was a ghost again and Bonaventure’s explosion already underway.
    It wasn’t a ship design she recognized, but in hull composition, shape, and some of the externally mounted equipment, it appeared to share a distant common ancestor with Beowulf .
    Was this connected in some way to McEwan?
    If it was, she couldn’t see the link yet. More pressing was the question of what to do about her discovery.
    If she showed the output of her black box, she might have to reveal how it really worked. And that involved knowledge no human should possess.
    “Indiya, it’s me,” came a voice through one of the softscreens.
    Indiya smiled, grateful for the distraction. “Hi, Furn. Any idea where that blackout came from?”
    Furn, pointedly, chose not to reply directly. “We need to meet,” he said carefully. “All of us. 23:00 hours in the Freak Lab.”
    “Okay.” She paused. “Convention dictates that by this point you should explain why.”
    “It’s a surprise.”
    Now she knew for sure something was up. Furn had a pathological need to control everything and everyone around him. There was no one on the ship who hated