Phoenix had never used an X-3 Spacesuit before, but as with flying the ship, he found himself more than knowledgeable about how it worked. The streamlined suit was the latest design from NASA, form fitting and easy to maneuver in, maintaining pressure and atmosphere. And by latest, the Research and Development Division had yet to release the X-3 version to astronauts traveling from the Earth to the moon, or even to Mars. But Admiral Jax, with his top-level connections, had acquired the spacesuits for this mission.

Phoenix twist-locked the gold helmet with white trim onto the neck of his suit and did the same for the gloves. The gold and white theme held true for the entire pressurized outfit, making the suit easier to locate in the event of a spacewalk emergency. Under the glow of floodlights, and even the sun, the gold would sparkle. The face shield spanned from ear to ear, allowing for a wide peripheral view. He checked a system display on his left wrist. Selected a tab for Air Supply. The screen showed seven full cartridges. Based on normal exertion, he had seven hours of oxygen to breathe before having to reload. That meant walking, talking and light work detail. Anything heavier than that and he would burn through his air faster. The system automatically updated, recalculating oxygen usage continually.

That was reassuring. But then he thought about leaving the safety of the ship.

He surveyed the rest of the crew, all awake and accounted for.

Across from Phoenix, Callisto appeared preoccupied with his surroundings, ducking to look through the hatchway into the bridge. Jupiter had his attention. That was good for now, but Phoenix was sure Callisto would find the time to blame him for Nova's death and resurrection, and, likely, her amnesia at some point.

As for Nova, she seemed to gravitate toward Sarah—a.k.a. Dr. Lawson—looking to her for answers, asking her questions about hibernation, the space station, and the grand question of why they were there. Apparently, she'd had enough of Phoenix's queries about what she remembered regarding their past.

Luna looked like she couldn't care less about petty domestic issues. She seemed curious about what was going to happen next, yet a little cautious. Since Phoenix had met her on the cargo plane after their abduction by the robot Navy SEALs, he had grown accustomed to her suspicious eyes and pinched brows. She hated being kidnapped, drugged, and transported into deep space. Come to think of it, Phoenix couldn't think of anyone who would like such a thing.

As for Dr. Ariel Fairhaven, after waking up from cryo sleep, she seemed more concerned about Phoenix and Nova, since they had gone through the trauma of waking up too fast from hibernation. Phoenix's body still quaked on the inside because his core temperature hadn't stabilized yet.

And then, of course, there was their leader.

Phoenix might be the highest-ranking member of the military onboard, but he was smart enough to know who was really in charge, at least for now.

"So, what's next, Doc?" Phoenix said, an edge in his voice. "We're suited up and ready to storm the Death Star. Any encouraging words you'd like to tell us?"

Sarah peered at him through the spacesuit's visor, her lips pursed together like a teacher showing disapproval of a pupil. Without replying, she disappeared through the hatchway leading to the bridge. "Get ready," she said, her voice sounding clear and calm through Phoenix's helmet comm system.

"For what?" Ariel asked.

"Zero g's."

Phoenix's boots released from the floor, and he rose like he was full of helium.

Sarah returned, gliding, angling for the airlock. "There's no gravity in the station for the time being, so we might as well get used to it." She extended her arms and stopped at the top hatch.

"You've done this before," Phoenix said, attempting to launch himself, but to no avail. He drifted, his feet kicking at nothing but air.

"Every action has an opposite and equal reaction."

Luna pushed off from the wall, reached Sarah, halting her advance when her hands met the ceiling. "Objects in motion remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force."

Sarah studied a light bar on the airlock door. It emitted red, then yellow, and then green. She twisted a handle, and the passage opened to a dark tunnel leading into the station. She entered with Luna close behind her. Then everyone else followed, except for Ariel and Phoenix.

"What do you think about this?" Ariel asked, her face a tight mask of concern.

"I'd like to know what I'm getting into. It's my nature. I prefer a game plan."

Ariel bent her knees and pushed off, sailing upward through the open doorway. "The redhead has the playbook," she said as her legs and feet disappeared into the airlock chamber.

Phoenix found a foothold on the wall behind him and used it for leverage, and like everyone else, vaulted himself into the airlock.

As soon as he was inside the dark tunnel, Sarah shut the hatch to the ship and turned a handle. A similar bar of light changed to green, signaling she had locked the passage and readied the air to be expelled. Hovering, she pivoted to a control display, cycled through several screens, and then made a selection.

An alarm blared like a foghorn, on and off, on and off, and then a vacuum-like hiss sucked the air out, lasting seconds.

It was eating a hole in Phoenix. He had to know how in the name of Jupiter did she seem to know how to do everything? How did he and Nova know how to maneuver the ship? He found it hard to believe that Sarah was an astronaut, or that she had visited this dormant chunk of metal before, this far out in the solar system.

A memory surfaced from the moments before Sarah had put them into cryo sleep. She told him she was ninety years old. If that was the case, two and half years in hibernation would make her ninety-two. Of course, Phoenix had no way of verifying her story. She looked closer to twenty years old than she did a hundred.

Everyone flowed toward the station door. As before, Sarah used a nearby display screen and went to tapping away. Within ten seconds, the door clanked ajar. She pushed her way in, and like lambs led to a slaughter, Callisto, Luna, Nova, and Ariel followed in her wake.

Once again, Phoenix lingered behind, not so eager to drift into the unknown.

Sarah appeared in the doorway. "Come on, we have to seal the hatch."

"Just considering my options." That was all he could think to say.

She reached toward him, took his hand, and pulled him into the station. "I didn't think pilots had second thoughts."

This time, he ignored her as he hovered between the floor and ceiling of a corridor that stretched in both directions. The odd thing was the floor seemed to be above him and the ceiling beneath him. From his previous orientation, it felt disorienting, but then he remembered how the laws of gravity worked in space. When the station rotated, the force of motion would push them toward the top, or outer, upper wall. That would become the floor of the corridors in the outer wheel. He would have to get used to it, at least until the station started moving.

He set his gaze on the hall laid out before him. Evenly spaced auxiliary lights struggled to illuminate small sections of the interior walls, reminding Phoenix of lights on a runway at night.

"Follow me." Sarah propelled herself down the corridor by shoving off from a control box on the wall.

The entire Titan X crew obeyed her order without question, even Phoenix this time. He doubted anyone wanted to be separated from the group in this lifeless tin can.

As they made their way through the space station, objects floated by. A shoe, a wrench, and a coil of electrical wire, followed by a glove.

No wait. That was not a glove.

It was a severed hand, and it glistened under his helmet's side-mounted lights. Crystallized. Frozen solid.

Phoenix imagined it falling to the floor and shattering into fragmented shards of glass. It drifted along as if caught in a gentle underwater current; the scene reminding him of a dark and lonely vessel at the bottom of the ocean. It blew his mind that they were in a space station orbiting the gas giant Jupiter.

A vision flashed across his mind, the great white's serrated teeth slicing through his flesh. Phoenix clamped his eyelids shut, resisting the images and the torment. He saw bits of seaweed drifting in the water mixed with a cloud of his blood. A tremor shook his body, but he fought harder, with more grit and determination. He hadn't talked to a doctor about the shark attacks, about how it had affected his mind... how losing his arm and losing Nova affected his brain, but he felt confident of his self-diagnosis. Post traumatic stress disorder. PTSD. He squeezed his eyes so tight that it hurt. The physical pain seemed to help, and soon enough, the memories faded to black.

"Are you alright?" Ariel asked. "We're falling behind the others."

"I'm fine. Couldn't be better."

Judging by her penetrating stare, Phoenix doubted she bought his shallow reply.

The hand passed between them, and Ariel twirled the severed appendage with her fingers. It spun like a fan as it continued its course through the corridor. She glanced at Phoenix from behind her helmet's visor. He couldn't help but feel there was something deeper to the woman, the same quality that drew him to Nova. Maybe it was authenticity. Nova was out there, in your face, if need be, but she was real, and in their relationship, she gave a hundred percent. Ariel seemed more reserved, yet just as genuine in caring for people. The more he was around her, the more he leaned toward liking her as a person. He assumed she had that effect on others as well.

"Something bad happened here," Ariel said, her resolve not shaken.

"Any thoughts as to what?"

"I can only imagine, but I'm sure the red head knows."

Sarah cut through the airwaves. "I can hear everything you say, unless you opt for a private conversation on your display screen. What's got you two so stirred up, anyway?"

Phoenix told Sarah about the hand. "How did you guys miss it?"

"There's a lot of debris floating around. Maybe we mistook it for a glove."

"A what?" Callisto's voice intruded.

Nova blurted, "You're kidding me?"

"There's more to this station than what you're letting on, Doctor," Luna said, ratcheting up the tension. Phoenix could tell she was addressing Sarah.

"Calm down, everyone," Sarah said. "It doesn't matter how someone lost their hand. It has nothing to do with our primary objective. We must keep moving. That's the plan and we're sticking to it."

"You heard the doc." Phoenix allowed the edge to return to his voice. He waited for someone to complain, but no one did. Someone had to maintain order among the ranks. If they were going to stay alive, they would have to keep their heads.

As the group moved on and the mood leveled out, Phoenix pressed a tab on his wrist panel. Selected, Conversation. Tapped, Private. Then locked onto Ariel's icon. "You read me, Doctor?"

"You can call me Ariel. Since we're the only people here, there's no need to be formal."

"Gotcha. Ariel, it is. Wanted to test the private line in case we need to talk later, without eavesdropping. I don't want to alarm anyone unnecessarily if I come across something."

"That may be a good idea."

"I thought so. Switching back to the open channel." Phoenix switched off the private mode.

He glided by a conduit line that connected to a power box. Further down, a rectangular window filled the outer wall of the station. The darkness of space gave it a tinted appearance. Beyond the viewing port, a pair of stars shined in the distance. Moons of Jupiter reflecting sunlight, he suspected.

Five minutes later, they came to a sector with a hole in the ceiling beneath them. He had to remember the floor was above them, at least with their current orientation. On the far side of the hole, Sarah gestured toward a ladder mounted on the inside of the opening that descended into the darkness. Of course, if the gravity was activated, it would ascend instead of going down.

"This way," she said.

Callisto, who hovered near Nova, asked, "How about giving us more to go on? You've been extremely vague so far."

"Our mission is classified as top secret. You are on a need-to-know basis only." Sarah's jawline hardened, her blue eyes ablaze.

Luna glided over to her and stopped inches away. "I don't have the patience for this. I see it like this. We all got cleared for this mission the minute you gassed us and put us in cryo. We all have an extreme case of the need-to-knows." A fog of rapid breath spotted her face shield. "Anything you can tell us will be much obliged, comprende?"

Sarah surveyed all of them, her demeanor calculative, apparently weighing her options. "Down there," she glanced at the hole, "is the station's central hub, or core. The ladder leads into one of the spokes you saw from the ship. The station was designed with motion detectors. The moment we climbed aboard, we should have triggered a reboot, but we didn't."

"So, we have to restore the power manually for lights and heat," Nova said.

"For air and gravity as well... to simulate Earth-like conditions. I told you we had to bring the station back to life."

"Lead the way then, Doc," Phoenix said, hand open toward the ladder.

"I will, if there are no further questions." Sarah shot her gaze around the corridor at each of them, especially Luna, still inches away. "You mind?"

Luna glared at Sarah like she could drill a hole through her, but then backed off.

With a frustrating wince, Sarah used the top rung of the ladder to pull herself into the hole headfirst, like diving into a pool. Luna was close behind, followed by Ariel and Phoenix, then Nova and Callisto. They moved through the tunnel with ease, passing electrical panels, conduit, faint auxiliary lights, and even side sections which looked like control rooms.

Phoenix toggled back to a private conversation with Ariel. "Hey?"

"Yes?"

"This might be nothing really, but I have a feeling I can't shake."

"Go on?"

Phoenix kept his attention ahead on the bottom of Ariel's boots. "This place is sick."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Just a premonition."

"Space stations don't get sick, people do. I think you're letting your imagination run wild."

"You're right, I know you are." He breathed deep and exhaled. "Maybe the darkness is getting to me."

"I think some light would help for sure."

"Maybe."

Everyone halted their advance in a sealed passageway as Sarah approached a keypad set in the wall. "We're outside the core. Once we have power and gravity, I'll explain everything I can. Trust me, it will be easier to do so when we're out of these suits."

"I'd like to know what happened to this station," Phoenix said.

Her eyes glazed over, appearing to be lost in an unpleasant thought, staring beyond them into the deep recesses of the tunnel they had traversed. "I'll tell you about the station, and what happened to the astronauts and scientists who perished here almost thirty years ago."

Her face tightened, jaw twitching as if haunted by a memory. Then she spun and entered the access code on the keypad... and the door slid open.