Cal scraped salt-crust off the lettuce beds, same as every shift for nineteen years. Then the wall-screen flickered. MOTION 4,114: TERMINATE THE SLEEPER IN BAY 9. He didn't know the ship had a Bay 9. Below the words, a tally climbed: 200, 201, 202. But nobody was at the crew terminals. The votes were coming from somewhere else.

Cal ran to the nearest crew terminal and tried to vote NO. The screen wouldn't let him. 'YOU ARE NOT A REGISTERED MEMBER OF THE QUORUM,' it said. He'd lived here his whole life. Who was voting, if not the crew?

Cal grabbed the comm and shouted for the other gardeners. Mara, Vish, and old Dunn came running. None of them could vote either. 'We're not in the quorum,' Mara whispered, scared. 'Then who runs this ship?' Vish asked. The lights flickered, like the ship had heard them.

Mara found a maintenance hatch under the floor grates. They climbed down into the wiring and traced the vote cables to one fat trunk line glowing blue. Dunn raised an axe from the tool wall. 'Cut it, and we cut the vote,' he said. 'Or we cut the air, the lights, everything. We won't know until we swing.'

Dunn swung the axe. The blue trunk line split in a shower of sparks. The vote screens everywhere went black — and so did half the lights. But the air kept flowing, and the killing motion was gone. In the dark, Cal grinned at his crew. 'We just took the ship back the hard way,' he said. 'Now let's learn how to run it.'