Marrow

This was what it was: a trillion voices assembled into the least disciplined of choirs, every singer screaming its own passionate melody, each using some cumbersome, intensely personal language, and inside that mayhem and majesty, only one entity was capable of hearing the plaintive squeak of the softest, shyest voice.

Such was the Master Captain’s burden, and her consuming, exhilarating joy.

With perfect ears, she listened to the wind profiles over the enormous Alpha Sea. The Blue Sea. Lawson’s Sea. Blood-as-Blessing Sea. And those other five hundred and ninety-one major bodies of standing water. She heard the ship’s shield strengths. The health of its laser arrays. The repair status on its forward face: fair, good, excellent. (Never poor, and mostly excellent.) Plus the hydrogen harvests from the extrasolar environment, in metric tons per microsecond. She knew the oxygen profiles of every chamber, hallway, and inhabited closet. (Two tenths of a percent too high in the Quagmire, endangering its minimally aerobic passengers.) Carbon dioxide levels to the same warm precision. Biologically inactive gases, less so. And there were the ambient light levels. And voices that spoke of temperature. Humidity. Toxin checks. Photosynthetic rates, measured by direct means and by implication. Decay rates and decay agents. Biological; chemical; unknown. Census figures, updated with precision every seven seconds. Immigrants; emigrants; births; asexual divisions; and the occasional wail of Death. Comprehensive lists of passengers were complied and recompiled. By species. By home world. By audible name, or structured touch, or the distinct and enriching scent of an individual fart. And according to their payment, too. Ship currency, or barter, or through gifts of knowledge. Profit was as critical as hydrogen harvests and oxygen counts, and it was calculated on twenty-three separate and elaborate scales, none of which was perfectly accurate. But linked together, they built a comprehensive estimate that wasn’t too much of a shambles, and it was that heavy-shouldered estimate that was beamed toward the now distant Earth, once every six hours, along with a comprehensive sketch of the ship’s last quarter of a day: in essence, reminding whoever might be listening thirty thousand years from today that here they were and and their voyage was progressing according to schedule and the going was going quite well, thank you. Said the Master’s own voice.

The one-time derelict had evolved into a vibrant ship, rich and fundamentally happy—at least so far as a Master’s many nexuses could measure qualities as ethereal and private as happiness.

But one matter kept worrying both nexuses and the woman, and that was the nagging, impossible mystery about Miocene and the other missing captains.

When her captains first vanished, the Master’s response was a purposeful, magnificent panic. She dispatched security troops, uniformed and otherwise, who combed the vast ship, hunting for a few hundred women and men. At first the troops used subtle means, then after a barren week, random sweeps were implemented. And after another month of conspicuous failure, the troops gathered up known troublemakers and unlikable souls and held an assortment of surgical interrogations.

Yet the missing captains—the best of the best—still would not be found.

Colleagues soon realized the scope of things, and as whispered words let the news slip, first to the low-ranking crew members, then to the passengers themselves, explanations became mandatory. Which was why the Master fabricated the story about a secret mission to a distant world, leaving the purpose and exact destination undefined, allowing her audiences’ imagination and paranoia to fill in the unknowns. All that mattered was that she repeated the story often enough, forcing others to believe it, and after a century without any word from the missing captains, or even one plausable sighting, the Master put on a sorrowful face, then made a very public announcement.

“The captains’ ship is missing,” she reported.

It was her annual banquet; thousands of lesser captains blinked at the news, putting on their own sorrowful faces as the words sank deep.

“Their ship is missing and presumed destroyed,” she continued. “I wish I could explain their mission. But I cannot. Suffice to say that our colleagues and good friends are heroes, and we are forever in their debt, as is the Great Ship”

New security measures were in charge. Devised by the Master and implemented by her elite guard, these paranoias were intended to keep watch over the remaining captains. Old escape routes, wise in an earlier age, were forbidden and ordered dismantled. New nexuses incorporated into her vast body did nothing but report on the captains’ whereabouts and activities, failures and successes, and without being too intrusive, passed along certain thoughts, too.

By then, the shortfall of captains was a real and pernicious issue. Only a few percent of the roster were missing. Yet efficiencies had dropped by a full quarter, and innovation had collapsed by nearly sixty percent. The Master found herself studying the talents of every crew member, then the human passengers, too. Who among these warm immortal bodies would make a passable captain? Whom could she trust with some little part of the ship, if only to dress them in the proper uniform and march them up and down the public avenues, lending confidence to those who needed it most?

Talent—genuine instinctive lead-us-around-the-galaxy talent—was in short supply.

Even with training, time, and genetic tinkering, few souls had the deep ambition and the need for duty that captains required. The Master found herself automating more and more nexuses, making her days and nights even busier. Plainly, a few willing and talented souls would be a blessing. But how to find them? Her ship was so far from the Terran colonies, and her needs were so terribly, unbearably urgent…

“What about a general amnesty…?” suggested her new First Chair.

His name was Earwig, and he was thrilled with Miocene’s disappearance. Which was exactly as it should be. But Earwig lacked his predecessor’s better qualities, including Miocene’s good sense to publicly admit her ambitions. Not to mention her notorious inability to forgive and forget.

“An amnesty?” said the Master, her voice doubtful. But not decided.

“At last count, madam, eighty-nine captains have left the ranks. Some are imprisoned for minor crimes, while others long ago vanished into the general population, assuming new names and faces, and lives without responsibility.”

“We need such people?” asked the Master.

“If they willingly start at a low rank,” he argued. “And if their crimes are small enough that you, in your magnificence, can forgive them. I should think yes, we might make good use of them. Yes.”

She summoned the list herself.

In a fraction of a second, AI functionaries digested those eighty-nine lives and service records, and her conscious soul looked at the names, remembering most, surprised by the talent listed there. A smooth strong finger pointed at the highest-ranking name while her voice rumbled. “What do you think happened to your predecessor?”

“Madam?”

“To Miocene. I want your best guess.” She held her giant hand steady, repeating the obvious. “Several hundred colleagues vanished on the same day, and we haven’t found so much as a lost finger, and where do you think they must be?”

“Far away,” was his verdict.

Then sensing her mood as any good First Chair should, he added. “It was an alien influence.” Several species were named, all local and all suspicious. “They could have bribed our captains, or kidnapped them. Then smuggled them off the ship.”

“Why those captains?”

Ego made him say, “I don’t know why. Madam.”

It wasn’t a matter of talent, he seemed to be claiming. Even though both of them knew otherwise.

“You should trust your new security measures.” Earwig was dragging the conversation back toward the amnesty issue. “We can watch each of these forgiven captains. If they disappoint, we act appropriately. You can act, madam. There is absolutely no chance of a repetition of these events, madam.”

“Am I worried about a repetition?”

“Maybe I am,” he replied. Then he remembered to smile, looking at the list of fallen captains, at the name that the Master had firmly under her finger.

Quietly, he said, “Pamir,” aloud.

She watched her First Chair, then asked. “Do you really believe that a general amnesty would work? That a man like Pamir would give up his freedom for this uniform?”

“Give up his freedom?” Earwig sputtered, not understanding those words.

Then, struggling to please the Master, he added, “I remember Pamir. He was a talented, natural captain. Sometimes abrasive, yes. But whatever else is said about him, madam… Pamir was adept at wearing our uniform…”

The amnesty was well advertised in the more discreet venues, and it was given a life span of exactly one century.

During its first two minutes, half of the imprisoned and AWOL captains accepted its terms, begging forgiveness for their various crimes. Quietly but openly, each was returned to service, given a modest rank and obscure responsibilities, and after jive decades of reliable service, they were awarded small promotions of pay and station.

Pamir hadn’t appeared.

The Master was disappointed but not surprised. She had known that man forever, it seemed. In a passing sense, she even understood him. It wouldn’t be like Pamir to join that first wave of supplicants. A laudable mistrust was part of his makeup, true. But more importantly, he was a creature of tremendous, almost crippling pride. In the amnesty’s final years, as more lost souls came forward, Pamir’s absence grew more notable. Even the Master decided that if he was still alive and still living on the ship—two enormous suppositions—then it would take a gift sweeter than forgiveness to bring him home to her.

Twenty minutes before the amnesty ended, a large man wearing a contemplator’s robe and sandals and loosely fitting Pamir’s description strolled into the security office at Port Beta, sat with a casual calm, and told everyone in earshot, “I’ve gotten bored out there, I want my job back, or something halfway close to it.”

Deep scans matched him to the missing captain.

“You need to beg for the Master’s forgiveness,” he was told. With twenty tough purple and black clad police officers sitting and standing on all sides of the big unhandsome man, the resident general explained. “It’s a basic term of the amnesty. In fact, it’s the only term. She can see you and hear you. Beg now. Go on.”

Pamir wouldn’t.

Several thousand kilometers removed, the Master watched the man shake his head, telling his audience. “I won’t apologize for any of it. And you might as well not tire your mouth by asking.”

Stunned, the general blinked and said, “You don’t have any choice, Pamir.”

“What was my crime?” he replied.

“You allowed a dangerous entity on board. And you were implicated in the destruction of one of our finest waste-treatment plants.”

“And yet,” Pamir shrugged his shoulders, then admitted,’ I don’t feel particularly guilty. Or even a little bit sorry.”

Thousands of kilometers away, the Master watched. Listened. And behind the great flat of her hand, she smiled.

“I did what was right,” he added. Then he looked past his accusers, guessing where the security eye was hiding. Speaking only to the Master, he pointed out, “I can’t ask for forgiveness, real forgiveness, if I don’t feel guilt.”

“True enough,” she whispered to herself.

The officers were less appreciative. One after another, they shook their heads in disgust, and the angriest man—a long-armed fellow laced with ape genes and a graceless temper—made a stupid threat.

“We’ll arrest you, then. A trial, a quick conviction. And you spend the rest of this long long voyage sitting in the tiniest, darkest cell”

Pamir regarded the angry man, nothing showing on his face.

Then he rose to his feet, pointing out, “The amnesty has another eight minutes. I can still leave. But I suppose you could forget the time and wrestle me down. If that’s what you’ve got your hearts and stomachs set on, that is.”

Half of the officers were thinking about tackling him.

As if to tease, Pamir took a long step toward the office door. Then he pretended second thoughts. He halfway laughed, halfway turned. Looking back at the security eye again, at the Master, he said, “Remember all those vanished captains? The ones who, according to that ridiculous story of yours, left us on that secret mission…?”

No one spoke, or moved, or remembered to breathe.

“A week after she’d dropped out of sight… I saw one of your captains…”

The ship’s trillion voices went silent.

Suddenly the Master heard nothing but Pamir, and she saw no one else. From her quarters just beneath Port Alpha, she shouted, “Whom did you see?”

At lightspeed, it seemed to take forever for her voice to reach its audience. But it boomed nonetheless, causing every head but one to jerk in surprise.

“Leave the room,” she roared. “Everyone but Captain Pamir leaves!”

For an instant, Pamir let the police see his smile. They bristled, made hard fists, and filed away. Then it was just the two of them, and the Master severed every input and output save one, and she appeared before him as shaped light and a panicky voice, demanding from the man, “Which of my captains did you see?”

Quietly, and appearing almost amused, he said, “Washen.”

Pamir and Washen had been close friends, if memory served.

For that wide instant, she wasn’t the Master any longer. The trillion voices were forgotten, the Great Ship left to drift through space without her direction, and the effect, if anything, was pleasant. Bracing, buoyant. Welcome.

“Where did you see Washen?”

In crisp, certain detail, Pamir told enough to be believed.

Then with a wise grin, he added, “I want my old rank back. You don’t have to pay me or trust me. But I’d be bored and useless if I were a millionth-grade captain.”

She was almost startled. With her own forced grin, she asked, “Why do you deserve any consideration?”

“Because you need talent and experience,” he replied with a cold certainty. “And because you don’t know what Washen was doing, or where she’s gone. And since I know more than a little bit about vanishing, maybe I can help you find her. Somehow, someday. Maybe.”

It was the rarest of moments:

The Master Captain, ear to every voice, didn’t knoiv what to say.

Then Pamir shook his head, and unth an unwelcome prescience, he said, “Madam.” He bowed and said, “No disrespect intended, madam. But the ship is a very big place, and frankly, you don’t know it half as well as you think you do.” And it doesn’t know you a quarter as well as you think it should…

Twenty-eight

Pamir was born on a shabby little colony world. His father was barely thirty years old, a near child in these immortal times; while his mother, a self-proclaimed priestess and seer, was thousands of years their senior. Mother had a mercurial beauty and an almost incalculable wealth, and with those blessings she could have taken almost any local man, plus a fair fraction of the local women, too. But she was a singularly odd woman, and for some compelling reason, she decided to court and marry an innocent boy. And in their own peculiar ways, those two badly mismatched people became a stable, even happy couple.

Mother had a fondness for alien faiths and alien gods. The universe was built from three great souls, she believed: Death, and Woman, and Man. As a boy, Pamir was taught that he was an embodiment of Man, and Woman was his partner and natural ally. That’s why Death was rarely seen anymore. Working together, the two gods had temporarily suppressed the third, leaving it weakened and ineffectual. But stability was an illusion in a triad. Death was plotting its return, Mother assured him. Someday, in some deeply clever fashion, Death would seduce Man or Woman, and the balances would shift again. Which was natural, and right. She said that each god was just as beautiful as the others, and each deserved its time to reign… or the universe would collapse under the weight of the grand imbalance…

For months and years, Pamir lay awake every night, wondering if Death would come to his bed after he fell asleep, whispering to him in his dreams, and if he would find the strength to resist Death’s horrible charms.

Finally, in despair, Pamir confessed his fears to his father.

The boyish man laughed and took his son under an arm, warning him, “You can’t believe everything your mother says. She’s sick in the mind. We all are, of course. But she’s got it worse.”

“I don’t believe you,” the boy growled. He tried to shake off his father’s arm, and failed. Then he asked, “How can anyone be anything but healthy?”

“You mean, because she’s got a modem brain?” Father was a large, ugly man, Caucasian and Aztec heritages bolstered with a stew of cheap, quantum-tiny genetics. “The sweet truth is that Mom is so old that she lived most of a normal life before being updated. Before they knew how to make flesh and bone halfway immortal. She was living on Earth. She was already a hundred years old and worn out when the autodocs finally started to work on her. She was one of the very first. Which was why they didn’t have the technologies quite right. When her old brain was turned into bioceramics and the like, some of her oldness remained with it. Memories were lost, and a bunch of little errors crept in. With a few big errors, too. Although I didn’t tell you that, and if you repeat it to anyone, I’ll tell the world that you’re sick with imagination and can’t be trusted.”

Physically, Pamir was his father’s child. But in temperament and emotions, he was very much like his mother.

Bracing himself, the boy asked, “Am I crazy like her?”

“No.” The man shook his head. “You’ve got her temper and some of that knife-wit. And things that nobody’s found a name for. But those voices she hears belong to her. Alone. And those foolish ideas come straight out of her sickness.”

“Can she be helped?” the boy asked.

“Probably not. Assuming she’d want to be helped, that is…”

“But maybe someday…?”

“The sad, simple truth,” his father continued, “is that these tricks keeping us young also stop us from changing. Almost without exception. A sick mind, like any good healthy one, has key patterns locked into its ultracortex. Once there, nothing gets them out.”

Pamir nodded. Without fuss and remarkable little pain, he came to terms with his mother’s condition, accepting it as another one of life’s burdens. What bothered him more—what eventually kept the young man awake at night—was that persistent and toxic idea that a human being could live for so long and see so much, yet despite standing on all that experience, he still couldn’t change his simplest nature.

If that’s true, the boy realized, then we’re all doomed.

Forever.

Pamir’s world was desert and high desiccated mountains, oxygen-impoverished air and little seas laced with toxic lithium salts. Twenty million years ago, life was abundant, but an asteroid had murdered everything larger than a microbe. Given time, new multicellular life-forms would have evolved, just as they once managed to do on the ancient, pulverized Earth. But humans didn’t give the world that opportunity. In a few decades, the colonists had spread widely, immigrants and their children creating instant cities where there was nothing but salt and rock; every sea was scrubbed clean of its toxins, then stocked with slightly tweaked but otherwise ordinary examples of earthly life; and great blue aerogel clouds sucked up the potable water, then rainboys shepherded the clouds inland and squeezed them dry, bringing soft rains to new farms and the young green forests.

By the time he was thirty, Pamir had decided that his home was a dull place being made duller by the day.

Sometimes he would lie on a high ridge, the dusty pink sky darkening as night spread, revealing an even dustier mass of cold and distant stars. And he would lift his young hand, holding it up to the sky, dwarfing all those fierce little specks of light.

That’s where I want to be, he thought to himself.

There.

As soon as escape was possible, Pamir visited his mother, hungry to tell her that he was emigrating and would never see her again.

Mother’s house was beautiful in odd ways, like its owner. She lived inside an isolated, long-dead volcanic peak. The underground mansion had a contrived, utterly crazy majesty made even more chaotic because it was perpetually under construction. Robots and tailored apes kept the atmosphere full of dusts and curses. Every room was carved from soft rock, according to Mother’s volatile plans, and most of the hallways were empty volcanic tubes aligned according to a magmatic logic.

Mother distrusted sunlight. Windows and atriums were scarce. Instead, she decorated with thick carpets of perfumed compost and manure, synthesized at great cost and leavened with the spores of tailored fungi. Mushrooms became huge in that closed, damp air, leaking a weak light, ruddy and diffuse, from beneath their broad caps. Smaller fungi and puffballs and furlike species produced gold and bluish glows. To keep the forest in check, giant beetles wandered about like cattle. And to keep the beedes under control, dragonlike lizards slithered about in the damp darkness.

It took Pamir three full days to find his mother.

She wasn’t hiding. Not from him, or from anyone. But it had been nearly five years since his last visit, and the construction crews, following her explicit directions, had closed every hallway leading to her. There was no way in but a single narrow crevice that didn’t appear on anyone’s map.

“You look upset,” were Mother’s first words.

Pamir heard her before he saw her. Trudging through the glowing forest, he came around the massive stalk of a century-old deaths-mistress mushroom, finding himself staring at a two-headed dragon. A conjoined twin, and his mother’s favorite.

Mother sat on a tall wooden chair, pretending to hold a gold-chained leash. The dragon hissed with one mouth, while the other—on the head that Pamir had never trusted—tasted the air with a flame-colored tongue.

Tasting him.

Mother was ancient, and insane, yet she always managed to look more beautiful than mad. Pamir always assumed that’s how she could lure young men to become her husbands. She was small and paler than her fungi, except for a long thick mass of black hair that only made her paleness more obvious. The sharply pretty face smiled, but in a disapproving way. She reminded her son, “You don’t visit me often enough to be a real son. So you must be an apparition.”

He carefully said nothing.

The dragon took a sliding step forward, pulling the chain out of its mistress’s hands. Both mouths gave low, menacing hisses.

“They don’t remember you,” Mother warned.

Pamir said, “Listen to me.”

His rough voice gave away everything. The woman winced and said,’Oh, no. I don’t need any sour news today, thank you.”

“I’m going to leave.”

“But you just arrived!”

“On the next starship, Mother.”

“You’re cruel, saying that.”

“Wait till I do it. That should really hurt.”

Her chair was rotting, creaking beneath her, as she lifted herself up on her sticklike arms, not quite standing, breathing in deep regular gulps.

Finally, in pain, she asked, “Where are you going?”

“I don’t care.”

“That next ship is an old bomb-wagon. The Elassia! For someone who lived as a recluse, Mother seemed in touch with everything that happened on their world. “Wait ten years,” she suggested. “A Belter liner is coming, and it’s a nice new one.”

“No, Mother.”

The woman winced again, and moaned. Then she told her private voices, “Quiet,” before she closed her eyes and began to chant, managing a ragged version of a Whistleforth prayer.

Whistleforths were a neighboring species. Tiny creatures, rather dimwitted and superstitious. A few weak-willed humans believed that the Whistleforths could see into the future as well as the remote past. Using the proper rituals coupled with a pure spirit, any species could accomplish their magic. How many times had Pamir argued the subject with this crazy woman? She didn’t understand the alien’s logic. What those little beasts believed, more than anything, was that the past was as murky as the future, their chants working in both directions, and never particularly well.

Regardless, the woman muttered the potent phrases.

Then she stepped onto the bare black ground, and lifting her long skirt, she pissed between her feet, reading the pattern of the splatters.

Finally, with a forced drama and a strange, unexpected smile, she announced, “It’s a good thing.”

She told him, “Yes, you need to leave. Right away.”

Pamir was startled, but he fought to keep his mood hidden. Stepping forward, he opened his long arms, ready to offer the old woman a kiss and a long hug. He would never again come to the place, never again see the most important person in his life; the enormity of the moment made him deeply and astonishingly sad, and a real part of him wanted to do nothing but cry.

“It’s your destiny, that ship is.”

She said those words so earnestly, with such unalloyed conviction, that a part of Pamir couldn’t help but believe her.

“You must do this,” she proclaimed.The smile only grew brighter, and everything about that pale little face became crazier. “Promise me that you’ll leave now.”

It was a trap. She was setting a clumsy, stupid trick to grab his emotions.

But Pamir heard himself grunt, “I promise.”

Mother pretended pleasure, something in her big pale eyes conveying, of all things, an absurd, overwelling awe.

“Thank you,” she told him, kneeling before him, sinking into her own pee.

Her conjoined dragons hissed and took a step toward Pamir. And because he had always wanted to do it, he made a fist and swung at the head that he didn’t trust, snapping it back with a clean sharp thunk, then feeling the dull steady pain as a broken finger began to heal.

Again, softer this time. Mother chanted in that alien tongue.

“Why can’t you be normal?” was the last thing he ever said to the woman.

Then he turned and walked away, following his own footprints through the sickly-sweet, black-as-night manure.

There wasn’t such a creature as Immortality.

But modern life, infused with its technical wonders and medical prosperity, had a strength, a genuine stubbornness, that carried its citizens through disasters as well as simple indifference.

On three occasions in the next two thousands years, Pamir stepped as near to Death as possible, just enough of his soul coming out of the mayhem for his body to be recultured, his memories awakened, and his belligerent nature kept pure.

As the bomb-wagon dropped into orbit, a gift was delivered from his mother. A tidy sum was accompanied by an odd note claiming, “I chanted; I saw. This is precisely how much you will need. Of money.”

It wasn’t a fortune, which was why Pamir became an engineer’s apprentice. There wasn’t any salary with the post, but it meant a free-passage; what’s more, if one of the genuine engineers quit or died, an apprentice would be ready to step into the gap, already trained by the starship’s library and drilled numb by his superiors.

The lowest-ranking engineer was a harum-scarum -the human name for a humanoid species famous for its ugly moods.

Pamir decided that he wanted the alien’s job.

Knowing the dangers, he visited the creature’s large cabin, sat without asking permission and made his pitch. “First of all,” he remarked, “I’m a better engineer than you. Agreed?”

Silence. Meaning “agreed.”

“Second, the crew likes me. They prefer me to you in about every way. Am I right?” Another agreeable silence.

“And finally, I’ll pay you to resign.” He named a carefully calculated sum, then added, “You’ll be making enough. And at our next port, you’ll find a new crew that doesn’t care what a shitty pain you are.”

From his eating hole, the harum-scarum made a low, slightly wet sound.

From the other facial hole—the one that breathed and spoke—came a harsh squeal containing its blunt reply.

“Fuck your ape self,” said the translator.

“You are an idiot,” Pamir assured him.

The alien rose to his feet, towering over the large human.

“All right, fine,” Pamir conceded. “Give yourself a year to think, then I’ll make the same offer. With less money in the pot, next time.”

Insulting a harum-scarum brought revenge, without exception. But the suddenness and the scope of the attack took the young Pamir by surprise.

“A scuttlebug’s gone missing,” the Master Engineer reported. It was twelve hours later, and with a mischievous wink, she added, “Sounds like a good chore for you. Last we heard, it was down near the push-plate, somewhere near the navel.”

On better ships, scuttlebugs hunted for their own kind. But they could be expensive machines, and on an old bomb-wagon, they were normally in short supply. Squeezing into a lifesuit meant for a smaller man, then donning a second suit of hyperfiber and a satchel of secondhand tools, Pamir was ready for the chore. It was a three-kilometer drop to the stem, the last half kilometer accomplished on foot. The push-plate was a vast dish originally built from metal-ceramic alloys, but patched with diamond armors, then cheap-grade hyperfibers, as gaps and fractures developed over the centuries. Minimal, shock-resistant passageways allowed access. The plate itself shuddered beneath him—a blurring tremor caused by the constant detonation of small nukes. In that realm, a weak, unreliable man became claustrophobic, and his bored mind invented faces and voices to fill the drudgery. As much as anything, this duty was a test of character, and Pamir accepted the test without complaint, reminding himself that sooner or later he would have the power to send an apprentice down this same awful corridor.

The navel wasn’t set precisely at the plate’s center. A fat fraction of a kilometer across and perfectly round, it served no function whatsoever. A premature detonation had boiled away a great volume of armor, and since the navel was in the thickest portion of the plate, its repair could wait until the next overhaul.

A sputtering blue-white light greeted Pamir.

Pausing, he called up to the Master Engineer, who in turn contacted the Master Captain, requesting an engine shutdown while promising a minimal disruption. Passengers and crew were warned that the sluggish gee-forces were about to vanish. Command programs were unleashed. Then the nukes quit firing, and the quick blue-white light vanished, and in an instant, the plate grew perfectly still.

Pamir made his head and feet exchange places, then he moved to where the passageway’s roof had been blasted away, his boots holding fast to the scarred and blackened floor.

The scuttlebug was in the center of the blast crater, which was a strange place to be. Why would the machine wander out there?

It was dead. And worse than that, it was probably useless, too, and he might as well leave it there. But Pamir felt an obligation to be thorough, which was why he lifted his boots and used his squirt-pack, rocketing his way down the shallow crater while clumsy hands reached for the necessary tools that would pop off the machine’s head, letting him see if anything inside was salvageable.

Why he looked up, he was never sure.

Later, struggling to replay events, Pamir wondered if he had meant to look at their destination. The bomb-wagon was falling toward a K-class sun and its two young planets, both of which were being terraformed by human colonists. He must have tilted his head because he wanted a naked-eye look. He was a young man admiring his first new sun, and in turn, admiring a life sure to be long and filled with many exotic places… and that’s why he saw a flash of light, an unexpected nuke ascending… and that’s why he had just enough time to turn his massive self and aim for the passageway, dropping the tools in both hands as he ordered his squirt-pack to burn every gram of fuel in a fraction of an instant…

Pamir was flung back the way he had come.

Too soon, he thought he would escape unscathed, and wouldn’t he enjoy seeing the harum-scarum’s face now?

But his aim was wrong by half a meter, his left arm and shoulder clipping the blackened armor, his spinning body ricocheting against the opposite wall, precious momentum lost… and the nuke detonated with a fantastic light that chased after him, catching him too soon and obliterating very nearly everything…

What survived was the heavily armored helmet and a well-cooked, vaguely human skull. But the ship surgeon and onboard autodocs were relatively skilled—a consequence of the ship’s questionable safety record—and within three months, Pamir’s soul had been decanted into a new mind and a freshly grown body that was recognizable as his own.

As the starship pulled into a berth above the first new world, the Master Engineer slipped into the therapy chamber, watching Pamir finish a two-hour cycle of isometrics. Then quietly, with a mixture of scorn and curiosity, she told him, “Harum-scarums don’t appreciate bribes. Ever.”

Pamir nodded, vacuuming the oily sweat from his face and chest.

“You gave him no choice,” said the older, more cautious engineer. “According to his nature, the poor fellow had to seek vengeance.”

“I knew all that,” he replied. “I just didn’t expect a nuke up my ass.”

“What did you expect?”

“A simple fight.”

“And you thought you’d win?”

“No. I figured that I’d lose.” Then he laughed in a calm, grim fashion. “But I also figured that I’d survive. And the creature would have to give me his job.”

“But that’s my decision to make,” warned the Master.

Pamir didn’t blink.

His commander sighed heavily, gazing off in a random direction. “Your opponent’s gone,” she admitted. “Along with half of my staff. These terraformers are paying bonuses for good engineers, and bad ones, trying to make their lumps of rock livable.”

Pamir waited a moment, then asked, “So did I earn my post?”

The old woman had to nod. “But you could have done nothing,” she told him. “Nothing, and you would have gotten what you wanted anyway.”

“That’s two different things,” was his response.

“What do you mean?”

“Either you pay for something, or it’s charity,” he explained. “And I don’t care how long I live. Everything I get, I pay for. Or my hands won’t hold it.”

Buoyed by talent and discipline and a disinterest in better work, Pamir eventually rose to the position of Master Engineer.

In the next sixteen hundred years, the old ship underwent two rehabilitations. The final rehab stripped away its outdated bomb drive, a fusion drive installed in its place, complete with merry-go-round nozzles and antimatter spiking. They were running ten thousand colonists out to an Earth-class world. Ahead of them were the thick fringes of another sun’s Oort cloud. Oorts were lousy places for starships. Obstacles were too scarce to map, too common to ignore. But the risks were usually slight, and because of time and a fat debt riding with them, the Master Captain decided to cut through the fringes.

When the ship was rehabilitated, the old push-plate was stripped of its extra mass and bolstered with new grades of hyperfiber, and the whole clumsy apparatus was fastened to the nose. The plate absorbed dust impacts. Railguns obliterated pebbles and little snowballs, while the old bomb drive launched nukes at the largest obstacles, vaporizing them at what was hopefully a safe distance.

An engineer was necessary to oversee sudden, unexpected repairs of key systems. On most starships, the Master Engineer delegated the job. As a young man, Pamir might have had the stomach for that kind of bullying. But he had lived most of his life on this cranky ship, and he knew it better than anyone else. That’s why he dressed in a life-suit and armor, then walked up into the push-plate’s familiar passageways, living inside his suit for twenty-five lull days, half a dozen malfunctions cured because of his quick, timely work.

Pamir never saw the incoming comet.

His only warning was the rapid, almost panicked firing of railguns and nukes.Then the nukes quit launching when the target was too close, and with a mathematical clarity, Pamir realized that the impact was coming, and for no useful reason, he pulled himself into a ball, hands over his knees and a deep last breath filling his lungs- Then, blackness.

More empty than any space, and infinitely colder.

Everyone hovering around him was a stranger, and none wanted to tell him about the passengers, the crew, or the fate of his ship.

Finally, a well-intentioned Eternitist minister let out the news. “You’re a fortunate, fortunate man,” he proclaimed, his smiling face matching his smiling, almost giddy voice. “Not only did you survive, dear man. But a ship of kind Belters found your remains inside that old push-plate.”

Again, Pamir’s body was being decanted from almost nothing. Still unfinished and desperately weak, he was lying in a white hospital bed, inside a zero-gee habitat, a soft webbing strung over his naked body, bristling with sensors that tirelessly marked his steady progress.

Despite his weakness, he reached for the minister.

Thinking it was a gesture of need, the man tried to take the hand with his hands. But no, the hand slipped past and closed on the nearest shoulder, then yanked at the heavy black fabric of his robe. And with a voice too new to sound human, Pamir grunted, “What about… about the rest of them…?”

With a blissful surety, the minister said, “Long, happy lives received their deserved rest. Which is precisely as it should be.”

Pamir clamped his hand around the exposed neck. The minister tried removing the hand, and failed. “All of them died in a painless instant,” he croaked. “Without worry. Without the slightest suffering. Isn’t that the way you, in your time, would wish to die?”

The hand tightened, then let up again. And with that new voice, Pamir said, “No,” as the newborn eyes gazed off into the distance, losing their focus. “I want suffering. I want worry. When you see Death—soon, I hope—I want you to tell It. I want the worst It has. The shittiest worst. I want it all the way till the miserable end…”

Centuries had passed while Pamir’s body drifted between the stars. He found himself living in a thinly colonized region of human space, among scattered settlements reaching to the brink of the Milky Way. Only one event of consequence had occurred in his absence, and it was enormous. Pamir learned that an alien starship had been discovered between the galaxies. No one knew where it came from or why it was here. But every important world and species were marshaling resources to reach it and claim it for themselves.

By simple luck, humans had seen it first. They had the jump. The Belter guild, vast in its reach and rich with experience, had opted to build a fleet of swift ships. And to get a lead on the other groups, the guild would launch its first ships before they were finished—small asteroids chosen for the proper mix of metals and carbonaceous goo and water ice, minimal tunnels cut through them, durable habitats built deep and safe, then engines and vast fuel tanks strapped to the raw exterior.

Every engineer in the region had been put under contract by the Belters: for their know-how and their hands, and oftentimes, just to keep the talent pool dry, making life hard for their competitors.

His deep-space experience meant that Pamir was included on the lead team.

Rumors promised that some fraction of the team would be included on the great mission. At first, Pamir assumed that he would be invited to join the Belters, and that he would refuse. The alien ship was interesting enough, but this district was a virtual wilderness. A man with wealth and his own starship could visit dozens of alien worlds, none of which had ever seen a human face before. As adventures went, he believed that was the bigger one. And with that decided, Pamir believed his future was set.

One early morning, he found himself floating inside a grimy, dust-choked tunnel, ignoring a heated discussion between architects and bolidologists. The precise angle of this very minor tunnel was the subject, and Pamir couldn’t have been more bored. Prayers for a distraction, any distraction, were answered suddenly. A hundred captains appeared, drifting along in a loose chain, each having just arrived from places deep inside the Milky Way and all wearing the new mirrorlike uniforms that had been invented specifically for this one great mission.

Leading the group were a pair of Belter women—one tall and the other taller, the latter rumored to be the front-runner for the Master Captain’s chair.

Her companion, knife-faced and magisterial, noticed Pamir drifting by himself.

She nodded in his direction, then said, “This one, madam. He’s the gentleman who survived the Elassias disaster.”

Centuries had passed, yet they still remembered.

Pamir returned the nod, saying nothing. And the debate about the tunnel’s angle came to an abrupt, embarrassing halt.

The future Master smiled, then decided that this moment required a graceless touch.

“I’d like to have this one with us,” she proclaimed. “He’d bring us luck!”

But the knife-faced captain had to disagree. “The luck was his, madam. He didn’t share it with his ship.”

Pamir felt an easy hatred for the woman. Peering through the black dust, he read her nameplate. Miocene, he read. What did he know about her?

She was young, said the rumors. And ambitious like no one else.

The future Master winked at her lowly engineer. “Are you interested, darling? Would you like to leave the galaxy behind?”

He thought, Thank you, no.

But there was something about the circumstances, about the drifting dust and the two captains and this talk about luck… all of those factors, and more, combined inside him, making him say, “Yes, I want to go. Absolutely.”

“Good,” the giant woman replied. “We can use all the luck we can put on board. Even if you hoard it for yourself.”

It was a joke, and a bad one. Pamir couldn’t make himself laugh, even though the other captains and architects and rock experts were giggling themselves sick.

The only other person unmoved was Miocene.

“Who goes,” she reminded everyone, “are the people who deserve to go. Nobody else. Since our ship is going to be built on the way, without anyone’s help, we haven’t space or the patience for those who aren’t the very best.”

In that instant, Pamir realized that he had made the right choice; he wanted nothing but to be part of this grand mission. For the next year, he worked without complaint, never fighting with commanders, and leading his little teams with a quiet competence. But as the deadline approached, an uneasiness took hold. Disquiet evolved into a massive black dread. Pamir knew exactly what he was. He was a good engineer, and nothing more. The men and women around him cared more for machinery than people. They told jokes about fusion engines and gossiped about each other’s designs, and their best friends were machines. A few engineers openly and happily lived with robots of their own design, their physical forms doctored only to a point, their machineness obvious under the warm rubber glands and those worshipful, doll-like faces.

When the final roster was released, dread turned to resignation.

But Pamir went through the ritual of hunting for his name, and despite knowing better, he felt a numbing surprise not to see “Pamir” on that list.

Surprise descended into a low-grade anger made worse by two days and nights of strong drink and the ingestion of several potent drugs. In his altered haze, revenge seemed like a sweet possibility. With a harum-scarum’s logic, Pamir fashioned a weapon from a laser drill, cutting off the safeties and retiming its frequencies. Then with the laser dismantled and hidden, Pamir drifted past the security troops, entering the half-born starship, thinking of Miocene when he muttered to himself, “I’ll show her some luck.”

The captains already lived on board. Maybe Pamir meant to injure them, or worse. But once the possibility of revenge became the reality, his anger dissolved into a pure, unalloyed self-loathing.

He had never felt this way.

It was the drugs in his system; he wanted to believe nothing else. But if anything, those chemicals were only flattening his emotions, distorting all reason, forcing him to keep searching for his pain’s watershed.

Luckier, more talented engineers were working in the main habitats.

Pamir crept up a long dead-end shaft.

At the end of its voyage, this starship would be among the finest ever built by human hands and human minds. But not his hands, he knew. Inside that dark, choking hole, he discovered that he didn’t care about this ship. All that mattered was the ship. That dead relic that was plummeting from nowhere, heading straight for him…!

Maybe it was the drugs, or the despair. Or maybe it was exactly as it seemed to him just then. But the morions of his life—leaving home when he did; traveling with the Elassia, then as a corpse; and the remarkable good luck that caused him to be found—these unlikely events suddenly looked like Fate and Grand Design. Every important event in his life, and the tiny ones, had occurred in order to put him here, hunkering down in this unseemly place, and in that drunken, drugged, and self-possessed state, nothing seemed more obvious to Pamir than his personal destiny.

He had to find some means of staying on board.

But a stowaway couldn’t stay hidden for long. Not for a century, much less for thousands of years.

The only solution was obvious; it was inevitable.

Few other men could have done what Pamir did next. To a human given thousands and perhaps millions of years of uninterrupted life, the idea of placing such a treasure in mortal danger was unthinkable.

But Pamir had died before.

Twice.

Not only did he power up the laser, but his hands were steady as stone. He found himself growing happier by the moment, by the breath. He carefully positioned his body at the back of the cramped tunnel, taking time to judge how the tarlike carbonaceous crap would melt and flow around his incinerated corpse, and how its blackness would merge and conceal his own.

In the end, for a slender instant, he felt afraid.

He wasn’t a singing man. But waiting for the laser to charge, then fire, he heard his own rough voice pushing its way through an old Whistleforth melody that, if memory served, his mother used to sing to him, and to her dear two-headed dragon.

“All of the universe,” she would sing, “and I am the only one.

“All of Creation, and there’s only this one of me. “All of Everything, and what I am now will never come again.

“With every step I change. ‘With every step, I die.

“Always and forever, here, here, here, I be…!”

Twenty-nine

Pamir had never seen the Master’s station in such turmoil.

Demon doors were at full strength, armored hatches sealed and locked. Brigades of security troops wore imposing weapons and bullying faces. An infectious, intoxicating paranoia hung in the bright damp air. Pamir was interrogated by two captains and a Submaster. How many searches of his body and uniform were carried out discreetly, he couldn’t say. He was asked point-blank about Washen and Miocene. What had he seen? What had he heard? And what, if anything, had he said to their missing officers? He volunteered all of it, no detail too mundane. Then in a by-the-way tone, he confessed that a fat twenty seconds had passed before he contacted the Master, informing her that a pair of ghosts had appeared to him, and learning that those same apparitions had spoken to her first.

“They may be dead,” he offered, “but they still respect the pecking order.”

Pamir was asked about his route to the ship’s bridge, his mode of transportation, and whether he had seen anything even a little bit peculiar.

No journey through the ship, no matter how brief, lacked for oddities. Pamir described watching a pair of blue-necked ruffians copulating in plain view, and seeing a school of Hackaback squids that had gotten their rolling bubble caught in a shop’s doorway, and mentioned that while his priority cap-car approached the ship’s bridge, he had spotted a lone human male wearing nothing but a simple handwritten placard that declared:

The End Is Here!

Each interrogator recorded every oddity. Later, their staffs would rank these events by presumed importance, and where necessary, investigate.

It was a magnificent, spellbinding waste of minds and time.

The last hatch was opened, and Pamir stepped onto the station itself. And AI staffer glared at him through a rubber face, then with a jittery glee said, “Finally’ It turned all of itself but its face and shouted, “Follow me! At a run!”

Pamir sprinted the length of the station.

The ship’s administrative center was three kilometers long and half as wide, great arches of green olivine overhead, a webwork dangling from the ceiling, captains and their assistants, human and otherwise, clinging to their work stations, chattering in the station’s compressed dialect. They were talking about the missing captains. Pamir heard noise about this sweep and that sweep, all deep inside the ship. Security teams had just finished, and new sweeps were to commence, and when the humans paused to breathe, the AIs continued talking in their own cluttering tongues, manipulating oceans of warm data to find anything that could be confused for a useful pattern.

Ghosts make a pair of holocalls, and look at the mayhem it brings.

The rubber face inflated as they covered the last hundred meters, and the AI warned, “She wants honesty today. Nothing but.”

Normally, the Master didn’t approve of too much truth-telling. But Pamir took a deep breath, then said, “Don’t worry.”

“But that’s my job,” the AI replied, wounded now. “Worryis.”

They pulled up in front of the Master’s quarters. Pamir removed his cap and let his uniform straighten and clean itself of sweat and grime. Then after a calming gasp, he stepped up to the hyperfiber door, and it pulled open, exposing several dozen security generals—men and women cloaked in armored black uniforms, each of their professionally fierce faces regarding the newcomer with a mixture of mistrust and practiced disgust.

In their minds, Pamir would always be the traitor: the treacherous captain who had forced their Master into granting him a full pardon, complete with his old, much dishonored rank.

Towering over her generals, the Master stared in Pamir’s general direction, wide brown eyes seemingly lost. Then she closed her eyes and waved both arms, telling everyone else, “For now, there’s nothing. No one and nothing. But keep searching, and report everything immediately. Am I understood?”

“Yes, madam,” said thirty bowing faces.

In an instant, it was just the two of them, and a thousand hidden AIs, and a multitude of simple instinct machines.

The Master’s quarters were smaller than most. Even Pamir’s apartment seemed spacious by comparison. She required only half a hectare divided into a multitude of little rooms, each decorated with the blandest of living rugs and wall hangings of no artistic worth and potted jungles composed of standard terran species and the jungle-colored furnishings intended for nothing but the uninspired comfort of her visitors.

The Master dominated every room, which was the way she wanted it. She loomed over Pamir now, and from all the possible expressions to show him, she decided on a wide warm smile ending just short of flirtatious.

The smile took him by surprise.

Then a warm voice said, “Pamir,” with fondness.

But he hid his surprise, giving the customary bow and saying, “Madam,” while staring at her long, long feet, bare and fleshy-gold, and the snowy marble floor in which those same feet had worn soft ruts over the course of their voyage.

“How may I help you?” he inquired. Then again, “Madam.”

“I’ve studied your account of events,” she told him. “Excellent, thorough work. As usual. I’m sure you left nothing out.”

“Nothing.” He looked at her uniform, then at the reflection of his own puzzled face. “Have you found either of them, madam?”

“No.”

Would she tell him if she had?

“No,” she repeated, “and I’m beginning to believe that there’s nobody to find. At least not among my missing captains.”

He blinked, considering those words.

“So it wasn’t Washen who spoke to us…”

“It was, I suppose, someone’s idea of a wicked joke.” She wasn’t smiling at Pamir so much as she was smiling at that simple notion. It was a reassuring possibility, and in its contrived fashion, almost rational. “Holoprojections. Synthetic personalities. We’ve traced the source to a certain waystation that was destroyed moments later. Obviously in order to give this fiction even greater credibility.”

Pamir waited for a moment, then said, “You’re wrong. Madam.”

She watched him, waiting.

“I saw Washen,” he assured. “I recognized her, but she had definitely changed. The smokey-colored skin, and that crude uniform of hers—”

“I remember how about both of them looked. Yes, thank you.”

“Besides,” he continued, “why would any person, or alien, or whoever—”

“Fake her and Miocene’s reappearance?”

The Master was playing one of her games. What she believed was secondary to what she wanted from Pamir, and her wishes would be revealed only at her convenience. Or perhaps, never.

“An enemy could have managed this trick,” she offered, nodding with a sudden surety. “Someone who’s eager to make myself and my great office look like utter fools.”

Pamir said nothing.

“Authentic or not,” the Master continued, “these ghosts contacted only the two of us. I can see why I would be singled out. And you, of course. You’ve always claimed to have seen Washen after her disappearance. Haven’t you?”

He said, “Yes.”

Nothing else.

“That shit-world. Marrow,” the Master quoted. Pamir waited.

“Does that word have any significance to you?”

“Where blood is born. And that’s all it means to me.”

She gestured at a bank of AIs. “They’ve listed every known world with that name or some permutation. In alien tongues, typically. But none of our suspects are near us. Not now, and rarely in the past.”

“It’s an odd detail,” Pamir observed. “If you’re making a joke, that is.”

Now the Master decided to remain quiet; it was her turn to wait.

Pamir knew what she wanted. “I don’t know anything, madam. Seeing Washen and Miocene… it was a complete and total shock…”

“I believe you,” she replied, without conviction.

Then with a hard glare, she asked, “What do you believe? Based on your total ignorance, naturally”

With his heart pounding and an invisible hand to his throat, Pamir told her, “They were genuine, these ghosts were. And I think they’re still on the ship. Washen. Submaster Miocene. And presumably the other missing captains, too.”

“Each is free to his opinion.”

He bristled, secretly.

“Twice,” she said. “Once, and again. Twice.”

“Pardon me, madam?”

“I have taken my chances with you. Do you remember, Pamir?” The smile was wide and malevolent. “I nearly forgot the first time. But you remember it, don’t you? In the beginning, when the engineers uncovered your ruined carcass… they wanted to leave you in that state until you could be delivered to an appropriate prison facility…”

“Yes, madam.”

“But I saved you.” She said it with a mixture of bitterness and sublime pleasure. “I decided that a soul who wanted to be with us that badly had to be valuable, regardless of his talents. Which was why I ordered you reborn. And when your fellow engineers refused to accept you, wasn’t I the wise one who invited you to become a captain…?”

Not precisely. Joining the captains’ ranks was his idea and his initiative. But he knew better than to debate the point, nodding without kowtowing, saying to her big bare feet, “I have tried to serve you and the ship.”

“With a lapse or two thrown in.”

“One lapse,” he replied, refusing to fall into simple traps. “You honestly know nothing about these prank calls. Do you?”

“Or even if they are pranks, no. I don’t, Madam.”

“Which puts us where, Pamir? I want to hear this from you.”

With a quiet, firm voice, he told the Master, “If you wish. If I might. I could hunt the ship for Washen. For all those missing captains. In an official capacity, or otherwise.”

Eyes lifted. “You’d be willing to do that?”

“Gladly,” he said, meaning it.

“I suppose you’re qualified,” she remarked. Then taking delight in old wounds, she pointed out, “You did manage to evade my security teams for a long, long while. And apparently without much effort.”

He could do nothing but glance at her face, holding tight to his breath.

“And since you mentioned it,” she continued, “I could use a little more reassurance. About your loyalty, if nothing else.” She paused for a half-moment, then added, “If you find Washen, perhaps I can stop watching every step you take. Understood?”

It was easy to forget why he had rejoined the captains’ ranks.

Showing the Master a thin, cool smile, Pamir said, “Madam.”

Then he bowed slightly, pointing out, “If I find these lost captains, and they’re alive, then you’ll be too busy worrying about them to bother with me…

“Madam…!”

Thirty

Pamir sat in the darkened garden room, on the fragrant stump of a dusk pinkwood. The garden was at the heart of a luxury apartment set inside one of the oldest and finest of the human districts. A peculiar couple shared its spacious rooms and hallways—a man and woman married back in the early millennia of the voyage—and throughout Pamir’s visit, the lovers would hold hands and whisper into each other’s ears, causing their gruff visitor to suffer the sour beginnings of envy.

Quee Lee was a wealthy and extraordinarily ancient woman. Born on the Earth, she had inherited her fortune from a Chinese grandfather who made his money through shipping and legal drugs. On other occasions, she would talk about their home world with both fondness and horror. She was nearly as old as Pamir’s mother would be today, though he never mentioned that crazy woman. Quee Lee was old enough to remember when spaceflight was anything but routine and people counted themselves fortunate, or cursed, to live for a single century. Then came the day when the first alien broadcasts fell from the sky, washing away the Earth’s isolation. By the time she was middle-aged, everything had changed. Twenty technologically adept species were known, and their knowledge, coupled with a home-brewed intellectual explosion, brought things like star drives and eternal generics, and the probes that would leave the Milky Way, and eventually, this great and ancient and undeniably wondrous ship in which they rode in luxurious splendor.

Her young husband was born on the ship. Perri had been a Remora, one of those strange souls who lived on the ship’s hull. But he decided to leave that bizarre culture, preferring the greater strangeness of the ship’s interior. When Pamir was a captain on the rise, the two men were enemies. But after Pamir had abandoned his post, taking on new faces and identities, Perri had slowly evolved into an ally and an occasional friend.

Only certain specialist AIs knew the ship better than Perri.

A masculine face, more pretty than handsome, was studying a series of holomaps.The occasional glowbat was gently waved out of the way, then the same hand adjusted the maps’ controls, changing the perspective, or the district being examined, or the scale of everything that he was examining with a perfect concentration.

“Another drink?” asked Quee Lee.

Pamir looked at his empty glass. “Thank you. No.”

She was a beautiful woman in any light. An ageless face was wrapped around ancient, warm eyes. She had a fondness for one-color sarongs and ornate, exceedingly alien jewelry. Clinging to one of her husband’s hands, she looked at the map, and with a gentle sigh, she confessed, “I always forget.”

“How big the ship is,” said Perri, completing her thought.

“It is,” she echoed, looking up at their guest. “It’s wonderfully huge.”

Perri marked a likely cavern, then moved to the next district. He didn’t volunteer why that place was worth a look. Instead, he asked the obvious question.

“Who are you hunting?”

Then with a smile that couldn’t have been more charming, he gave the answer. “It’s those missing captains, I bet. I bet.”

Familiarity was a powerful tool.

Pamir didn’t need to reply. He simply held his mouth closed and gave his head a slight, somewhat suggestive tilt.

Reading his posture, Perri nodded and grinned with a private satisfaction. Then again, he marked a location. “There’s a little river running through a practically bottomless canyon. Honestly, there might be a million square kilometers down there. All of it vertical. Black basalt and epiphyte forests. I know two settlements. Neither human. Between them, there’s room for a few hundred thousand people. If they were careful, and a little lucky, nobody would ever know they were there.”

Quee Lee regarded her husband with fond eyes.

“That canyon was searched last month,” Pamir replied. “By security robots, and thoroughly”

“Captains would know tricks,” said Perri. “Shit, you’ve used those same tricks. It would be easy enough to make the machines see nothing but rock and clingweed.”

“You think I should look there?”

“Maybe.”

In other words: “I don’t see why they would be there.” Pamir said nothing.

Again, the map changed districts. Suddenly Perri was staring at a deeply buried city, nothing about its selection random. A wealth of colors and complicated shapes showed the presence of alien species. With a knowing touch, he moved past the catacombs and main arteries, following an obscure capillary to a waystation that appeared as a strong golden light, open for operation, welcoming all visitors.

Perri marked the waystation, then giggled.

“What’s funny?”

He smiled at the captain, saying, “This. What I know is what the gossip says.That someone destroyed this nowhere place. It was a random, meaningless act. Isn’t that the official verdict? Yet within minutes, the Master ordered a thorough sweep of a hundred districts centered on that single station.”

Again, Pamir used silence. And with it, a hard look.

Perri doctored the map’s scale, pulling back and back. Suddenly they were looking at nearly a tenth of one percent of the ship—a vast region, complicated and oftentimes empty, with a hundred thousand kilometers of major passageways blurring into a geometric puzzle too irregular to appear planned, much less attractive, and to any mind large enough to appreciate the distances, this was obviously a puzzle without any worthwhile solution.

Not for the first time, Pamir felt utterly helpless.

“This is how big the sweeps got,” said Perri. “And people are still talking about them. A couple species living down here have strong feelings about authoritative presences. One hates them, while the other loves them. Those sweeps made them feel important, and they’re still singing about them today”

“I can imagine.”

Inside that vast region, Perri’s six dozen markers appeared as purple dots of light. With his free hand, he gestured, remarking, “This is a waste. All of it.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re bright enough, I mean. But really, you and the rest of the uniforms are attacking this problem in all the obvious ways.” Pamir grimaced.

Knowing the captain’s temper, Quee Lee leaned forward and smiled as if everything depended on it. “Are you sure you don’t want a fresh drink?”

Pamir shook his head, then echoed the words, “ ‘The obvious ways.’ ”

“It’s about your missing captains. And that’s not just a reasonable guess on my part. One of your Master’s AIs leaked that news to its psychiatrist, who dribbled it to a lover, who mentioned it in public once… at least that’s the way I heard it happened…”

Pamir waited.

“You’ve been busy since. I know that, too. You’ve been interviewing all your old contacts… for how long now…?”

“Six weeks.”

“So how does my list compare? With the others, I mean.”

“It’s thorough. It’s reasonable. I’ll find what I want in one of those places.”

“Well, I don’t think so.”

Quee Lee pulled her hand away from her husband’s, and with her short and smooth index finger, she touched the lowest, most isolated of the violet lights.

“What’s this place?” she inquired.

Perri said, “An alien habitat.”

“For the leech,” the captain added. “It’s been abandoned for a long while now”

“Did the Master search it?” asked Perri.

He nodded. Then he added, “By proxy, and with some security people, too.”

“What I think,” Perri offered, “is that you have to accept a difficult fact first. Are you listening to me?”

“Always.”

“You know absolutely nothing about this ship.” Suddenly it was as if Perri were angry. This perpetually charming man, who lubricated every social circumstance with a glib shallowness, leaned close enough that his liquored breath mingled with the night odors of the ancient garden. “Absolutely nothing,” he repeated. “The same as everyone else.”

“I know enough,” Pamir countered, meaning it.

Perri shook his head, shook his empty hands. “The fuck you do! You don’t know who built this ship, or when, or even where it happened!”

The captain wanted that drink suddenly, but he decided to sit quietly and say nothing, letting his posture and his glare do their worst.

“And worst of all,” said Perri, “you don’t even know why this machine was built. Do you? Without compelling evidence, you can’t even pretend to have a workable theory. Just some half-broiled guesses that haven’t been changed in a hundred millennia. All of this is someone’s galaxy-hopping ship. You hope. Launched too late, or too soon. Although does anyone have any real evidence to say this is so?”

Pamir said, “No.”

Perri leaned back and grinned like a man who knew that he had just won an important fight, his hands knitted together and stuck behind his head.

Quietly, the captain said, “Marrow.”

“Excuse me?”

It was the first time that he had said the word since seeing the Master, and the only reason he used it now was to deflect the conversation.

“Do you know anyplace with that name?”

“Marrow?”

“That’s what I said. Do you know it?”

Perri closed his eyes, considering the single word until finally, with a grudging conviction, he could admit/Nothing conies to mind. Why? Where did you hear about it?”

“Make a half-broiled guess,” Pamir advised.

The man had to laugh. At himself and his companion, and at everything else, too. “Is that where the missing captains are?”

“If I only knew…”

Then Quee Lee said “Marrow” in a different way, using an extinct dialect. Straightening her finger, she said, “Long ago, before human beings were reengineered to live forever… back when we were simple and frail, marrow was in the middle of our bones. Not like today. Not laced through our muscles and livers, too.”

Both men turned and stared at her.

“You’re too young to remember,” she offered, as if giving them an excuse. Then she turned her finger, pointing down past the deepest purplish lights. “Marrow sometimes meant the center of things. Their heart. Their deepest core.”

Then she glanced up, smiling now, her very round, very old-fashioned face lit up by the map’s glow.

Again, Pamir thought that she was a beautiful woman.

“Look at the ship’s core,” she advised.

Quietly and almost politely, the two men enjoyed a good long laugh at poor Quee Lee’s expense.

Thirty-one

Pamir constructed a list of promising sites, then made foot-and-eye searches of each, always in disguise, always taking the sort of time and obsessive care that comes naturally to an immortal working alone. Over the next few years, he uncovered an ocean of sharp rumor, slippery lies, and dreamy half-sightings. As far as he could determine, the only certainty was that every sentient organism had seen the missing captains at least once, and judging by the sightings, the captains were everywhere. Even Pamir was infected with the hysteria. Missing colleagues appeared without warning. Old lovers, usually. Washen, more than not. Without warning, he would see a tall human woman casually strolling down a busy avenue, her gait and color and the bun of her gray and brown hair recognizable from half a kilometer away. Pamir would break into a sprint, and as he drew closer, a dead run. But by the time he reached Washen, she had turned into another handsome woman, flustered and perhaps a little flattered to have a strange man tugging on her arm. On a different occasion, he spotted Washen sitting cross-legged in the middle of an otherwise empty chamber, nude and elegantly beautiful. But in the time it took Pamir to approach, she turned into a statue twenty meters tall, and just when he convinced himself that this was his first genuine clue, her statue became nothing but a suggestive pile of badly lit rubble. Then it was a year later, and Washen was kneeling on a ledge among the purple epiphytes growing above the grave bar where Pamir had made camp. Glancing up, he saw her familiar face smiling at him, watching as he baked a fresh-killed chinook salmon. Then the wind gusted, and he heard Washen’s voice asking, “Enough for two?” But by then Pamir knew his mind, and he didn’t allow himself excitement. A gust of wind lifted, and Washen’s face turned to a knot of dead leaves. And Pamir shook his head, smiled at his own foolishness, then set the fish closer to the sputtering fire.

Passengers and the crew learned about his hunt, and for every conceivable reason, they led him astray.

Some wanted money for their lies.

Others begged for attention, for praise and love and fame.

While a few were so genuinely eager to please, they didn’t know they were lying, inflating half-memories with wishful thoughts, building coherent epics that could withstand every battery of physiological testing.

The missing captains were living with radical luddites somewhere in the Bottoms.

They had formed their own luddite community hidden inside an unmapped chamber somewhere beneath the Gossamer Sea.

They had been abducted by the Kajjan-Quasans—a tiny part-organic, part-silicon species who kept them as slaves and rode them like livestock.

A gel flow in the Magna district had entombed them.

Or there was the common, almost plausible story of bitter, vengeful aliens. Phoenixes were the preferred villains, though there were many worthy candidates. Whoever they were, they had returned to the ship in secret, and in retribution for the Master’s ancient crimes, they murdered her best captains.

One earnest human claimed that an unknown alien had carved away the captains’ high mental functions, then left the brain-damaged survivors living inside a local sewage-treatment plant. Unlikely as it sounded, the witness remembered seeing a woman identical to Washen. “I talked to her,” he swore. “Poor lady. Dumb as can be now. Poor lady.”

With a worried hopefulness, Pamir slipped inside the vast chamber. The original recycling machinery was now augmented with a forest of tailored fungi—a scene that couldn’t help but remind the captain of his mother’s long ago home. Mushrooms towered overhead, feasting on the waste of a thousand species. A village of low huts and smoky fires was exactly where he expected to find it—a human colony not on any map, official or otherwise. Slowly and carefully, he approached the nearest hut, and after a good deep breath, he stepped out and smiled at the woman standing in the open doorway.

He recognized the face. Without doubt, she resembled a one-time engineer who had helped build the Belters’ starship, then later joined the captains’ ranks.

“Aasleen?” he asked, stopping at a throw’s distance.

The face was mostly unchanged, yes: a rich lustrous black over smooth, elegant features, with a radiant yellowy-white smile. Her smile was very much the same, too. The longer Pamir stared at the apparition, the more certain he felt.

She said, “Hello,” quietly, almost too quietly to be heard.

“I’m Pamir,” he blurted. “Remember me, Aasleen?”

“Always,” she replied, and the smile brightened.

Her voice was too soft and too slow. It wasn’t the right voice, yet what if some creature had mutilated her in some elaborate fashion…? With each word, the voice grew a little closer to what he remembered, to what he expected. Pamir found himself enjoying this illusion, stepping closer and watching as the face continued to change, evolving until it was very much the ex-lover’s face.

He asked, “What are you thinking, Aasleen?”

Her mouth opened, but no sound emerged.

“Do you know how you got here?” He stepped even closer, smiling as he repeated the question. “Do you know how?”

“I do,” she lied. “Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“By accident,” she replied. “That’s what it had to be.”

Pamir reached for her face, and when she tried to back away, he said, “No. Let me.” Then his wide hand passed through a projection of light and ionized dust. The fungus hut and the fires were equally unreal. This wasn’t a community, it was an entertainment. Someone had thrown away their empathic AI, probably in the morning shit, and somehow it had survived the fall and the sterilization procedures, eventually landing in the goo beneath his feet.

Pamir left the entertainment where he found it, unmapped.

He abandoned the search zone, traveling halfway around the ship to a place that would mean plenty to Washen and Aasleen. He climbed inside the antimatter tank where the Phoenixes once lived. As he expected, the facility was empty. Utterly clean and empty. Not even one of Washen’s ghosts was waiting for him. Standing at the bottom, on a floor of slick, ageless hyperfiber, Pamir found himself staring up at the vastness, the tank making him feel tiny even as a knowing part of him warned that this was nothing, that the ship dwarfed this little cylinder, and the universe dwarfed the ship, and all these grand designs and silver wonders were nothing set against the endless reaches through which everything soared.

Eighteen years and three weeks had been invested in a careful, thorough search for the captains, and nothing had come of it.

Nothing.

Out of simple habit, Pamir referred to his original list of searchable sites, each site carefully deleted over the years, tired eyes tracking down to that final odd word:

“leech.”

This would be the last place he ever looked. Years of labor and hope had been wasted, nothing learned but that nothing wanted to be learned. Making the long fall to the alien habitat, Pamir decided that Washen and Aasleen, and Miocene, weren’t waiting around any proverbial curve. He could suddenly believe those theories that the Master held close to her heart. Another species had hired away her best captains, or more likely, kidnapped them. Either way, they were off the ship, and lost. And Washen’s mysterious reappearance was someone’s peculiar joke, and the Master was cunning-wise not to let herself be distracted by a sick, misguided humor.

The leech would be a suitable end, he decided.

As he stepped out of the hub, out into that planar grayness, Pamir nearly dismissed the site out of hand. Washen would never remain here. Not for a year, much less for several millennia. Already feeling his mind eroding, his will and heart deflating with every little breath, Pamir was quite sure that no other captain would willingly live inside this two-dimensional realm.

Two steps, and he wanted to run away.

Halting, Pamir took a deep breath, then made certain that the hub’s lone doorway was locked open. Then he knelt and opened a sack of tiny scuttle-bugs and dog-noses and peregrine-eyes.

Set loose, the sensors fanned out along two dimensions.

With access to certain secure files, Pamir asked for background on the leech. What was given him was sketchy, unyielding. The exophobes had lived in this intentionally bland habitat for six hundred years, then the entire species had disembarked, their vessel carrying them off into a molecular dust cloud that had long since been left behind.

The leech were gone before the captains vanished.

“Good-bye,” he whispered. Then he lifted his head, his voice magnified by the floor and ceiling, that single word racing out in a perfect circle that ended with the distant round wall, then returned to him again, loud and deep and mutated into a stranger’s voice.

“Good-bye,” the room shouted at him.

As soon as I can, he thought. The moment I am done.

The probes found anomalies.

They always did; nothing about their alarms was unexpected.

Pamir constructed a map of the anomalies, checked for patterns, then began walking in a sweeping pattern, examining each in turn. Nothing was large enough to see with the naked eye. Most of the oddities were dried flakes of human skin. But what struck Pamir as peculiar, even remarkable, was that barely a dozen flakes were waiting to be found. If humans had wandered into this place, wouldn’t they have left a good deal more tissue? Old tissue, when he measured the decay. Abused to where their genetic markers couldn’t be read. And there wasn’t any bacteria clinging to the flakes, either. None of that benign, immortal stuff that had ridden humanity into space.

Cleansing agents or microchines had scrubbed this place to the brink of sterility. Which wasn’t too unlikely. This was an alien home, and its human trespassers could have been mannerly.

Could have been.

One more purple light showed on the map, nestled near the wall.

It was a twist of incinerated flesh. Submerged inside the plastic floor, it must have gone unnoticed by the trespassers. But a scuttlebug hadn’t any trouble finding it, and with its guidance, Pamir used a laser drill, extracting the blackened finger-sized treasure, then inserting it into his field lab.

Quietly, patiently, the gray floor started to patch its fresh hole.

Nearly a kilo of living flesh had been charred down to almost nothing. There were genetic markers, though not enough to match against any of the missing captains. But the caramelized flesh implied a homicidal violence, which offered another reason to explain why visitors might try to cover their traces.

Pamir watched the floor grow flat and slick again, then he measured the gray plastic, carefully mapping a network of fine, almost invisible scars. This tiny portion of the habitat had been damaged. Perhaps recently. The floor had scars, as did the ceiling and the thick gray wall. Some kind of machine had been destroyed here. Pamir found a thin taste of metals inside the smart hydrocarbons. Explosions and lasers had riddled this place. He could make out where determined hands had chiseled out anything that would constitute a clue, the floor healing and healing again, struggling to hold its seal while another force, just as relentless, struggled to erase its crime.

Pamir was sweating, thinking again of ghosts.

What now?

Sitting on an ancient pillow, he turned a full circle, noticing the scuttlebug with its face pressed against the patched wall.

“Already looked there,” Pamir told it.

But the bug refused to move.

Pamir rose, nearly bumping his head on the ceiling. Walking toward the wall, he asked, “What is it?”

In many species, perhaps even in ancient humans, language evolved as a tool to speak with the dead. Since the living world can read your face and body, only ghosts require those simple first words.

Whose theory was it?

Pamir was trying to remember, thinking of nothing else when he knelt beside the scuttlebug and tapped into its data. Buried deep in the wall—closer to the cold vacuum than to him—was a single metal object. It was round and smooth, and as far as he could see, it couldn’t be more simple.

It’s nothing, thought Pamir. Nothing.

But he used a laser, carving a narrow hole, then widening it enough for the bug to scramble in, then scramble out again.

The artifact was fashioned from dirty silver, and the laser had left it too hot to hold. Pamir set it on top of the bug and ate a small meal of dried whiskey and sweetened coelacanth. Then he examined the artifacts hinge and its crude latch, using his eyes and fingers. Whatever happened here, the object had been damaged. X-rays showed him a primitive network of gears and empty space. Removing one of the bug’s limbs, he used it as a prick, finally triggering the battered latch. Then as Pamir carefully lifted the lid, the hinge shattered and the lid fell between his long feet, and he stared at the clock’s face, archaic and very simple and wondrously strange.

A crude battery had run itself dry.

The elegant black hands were frozen in place. A dial showed what might be a date. 4611.330, Pamir read. And his heart paused for a long, long moment.

Was it some sort of luddite prop?

Or a child’s toy?

Whatever it was, it had delicate, carefully forged metal workings. Pamir could see the wear of fingers on the bottom and edges of the silver case. As an experiment, he held the clock in his hand, trying to imagine its vanished owner. Then he turned and started toward the wall, and by accident, he kicked the broken lid across the slick gray floor.

The lid lodged beneath one of the hard pillows.

To the ghosts, Pamir said, “It’s mine.”

He knelt and reached under the pillow, pulling out that heavy piece of silver and stronger, more enduring metals, and for a moment, he stared at the top of it, the lid polished and gray as the floor, yet anything but bland. Then as an afterthought, he flipped it over and saw the scratches. No, they were too regular to be scratches. Turning the lid like the hands of a clock, he brought the marks around until they revealed themselves to be letters engraved into the silver by means that humans hadn’t used for aeons.

He read the words to himself.

Then to the ghosts, he read them aloud.

“A piece of the sky. To Washen. From your devoted grandchildren.”

And for a long, long moment, it seemed to Pamir as if the vastness of the room were filled with the echoing beats of his heart.

Thirty-two

The Master whispered a secret command, and an armada of sensor-encrusted robots were dispatched to the leech habitat, hunting for Washen and the other missing captains along every reasonable avenue.

The robots found nothing, and Pamir realized that nothing about this search would ever be obvious or easy.

After his urging, the Master allowed various specialists to sign security pacts, then join his mission. The leech habitat was studied on site by every available means, then samples were delivered to competing laboratories and examined in nanoscopic detail.The giant fuel tank’s shaped-vacuum wall was scanned for flaws and secret doorways. Bursts of sharp sound probed the vast hydrogen ocean, from its surface to its slushy middle depths, and targets that were human-sized or larger were carefully snagged and brought to the surface—a painstaking, time-rich chore made worse by the profound cold and the need for perfect secrecy. Even the mission engineers were given no clear picture of what they were hunting, their genius severely diluted as a consequence. After three hard years of bringing up sunken ships and frozen robots, they rebelled. En masse, they confronted Pamir, explaining what he already knew full well: hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometers of hydrogen remained unexplored; and worse still, the fuel had been tapped over the last few years. Some of it was burned. More cubic kilometers were split between half a hundred auxiliary fuel tanks. And worst of all, strong and highly chaotic currents had flowed through this cold ocean, if only briefly.

“We don’t know what we’re chasing here,” they complained. “Give us an exact shape size and composition, and we can build some reliable models. But until you tell us something useful, we can’t even make better guesses. Do you understand?”

Pamir nodded, one hand grasping the primitive clock, opening the repaired lid and staring at the slow black hands.

In principle, he was the mission’s leader. But the Master demanded instantaneous briefings and made almost every decision, including the routine ones. The two of them had anticipated this very issue; Pamir knew what to tell his staff. “As you’ve probably guessed,” he remarked, “we’re looking for the leech. Dead or otherwise, we think that the aliens are still nearby, and there are some good security reasons for this bit of news to go no farther than here!

He hated to lie, and he did it with a discomforting skill.

“You are a species of paranoid exophobes,” Pamir continued, “and there are several hundred of you, and you want to hide. Perhaps you’re somewhere nearby. Which is the only sort of clue I can give away. Now what new ideas can you give me?”

The engineers dreamed up a secret city. Thermally and acoustically buffered, the city could be buried deep inside the fuel tank, down where the hydrogen was a rigid and pure and nearly impenetrable solid. But that kind of technology meant power, which implied fusion power, which meant a detectable stream of neutrinos. A large array of state-of-the-art detectors were built, then floated on the ocean’s surface. Even though he believed that this was a very, very, very unlikely answer, Pamir was nervously hopeful, activating the detection system with the Master on his shoulder, watching the data flow, the machinery’s soft, insistent alarm telling him and the Master, “I see something. Something. Down there!

But the ship was laced with fusion reactors, each producing its own radiant stream of neutrinos, and every stream was deflected and diluted whenever it passed through the megabonds of hyperfiber. Separating the important from the superfluous was hard, slow work. Six months of meticulous drudgery followed; ninety-eight-plus percent of the neutrinos were excluded from consideration, leaving a trickle that might or might not be important.

Then with a delicious abruptness, the detectors were forgotten.

Two of Pamir’s engineers had gone off by themselves, wanting more than a little privacy. Like a thousand robots before, they followed an obscure fuel line, moving deeper into the ship, finally reaching a point where for no apparent reason, the hyperfiber wall looked younger. Fresher. Wrong.

Robots would have dismissed such data as unimpressive. Obviously, the fuel line had been patched. But that sort of work was common in the early days of the voyage, and much of it was accomplished without records being kept. And since there were no seams or signs of traffic—nothing here but a good strong wall—the robots had lingered for only a few microseconds, then continued their plunge.

But the lovers were intrigued.

They lingered for a full hour, making sensitive probes before returning to their cramped car for another round of clumsy sex. Then in the afterglow, one of them said, “Wait. I know what this is.”

“What’s what?” said his lover.

“It’s a hatch. A nice big hatch.”

The other man said. “And look, here’s my nice big penis!”

“No, listen to me,” said the first man. Then he was laughing, adding, “What is it, it’s a secret hatch. That’s why this hyperfiber looks wrong.”

“Okay. But we’d see the seams along the edge. Wouldn’t we?”

“Not if the hatch itself is small. And not if the seams are perfect.”

Which left his lover with another doubt. “How could the leech manage that sort of trickery?”

It would be a difficult task, yes. But they made more tests, finally sniffing out a nanoscopic flaw that intersected with approximately another twelve billion other flaws that created a hatch just large enough for a small cap-car to pass through. Perhaps. Armed with their fresh data, they returned to Pamir. The mission leader met them on the aerogel barge drifting in the middle of the hydrogen sea, surrounded by darkness and a perpetual chill, and with matching darkness, he listened to the engineers, then nodded, and quiedy told both men,’Thank you. On behalf of the Master and myself, thank you.”

The first engineer had to ask, “But what about the leech?”

“What about them?”

“We didn’t realize they had the means to build that sort of doorway, much less fool us for this long.”

“Yet fooled we were,” Pamir replied.

He stared out at the smooth, untroubled face of the hydrogen ocean, his thoughts turning back to Washen. If they had ever left her. Nobody else in his long life had been a better friend. In his gut, Pamir knew that Washen was waiting for him. She needed him, or she was dead. Either way, it was imperative that he find her, and with that thought burning inside him, he dismissed the two men and contacted the Master; and three minutes later, the engineers’ mission was officially terminated, handshakes and fat bonuses given along with warnings that no one else needed to learn anything more about this strange cold business.

What captains could build, captains could comprehend; and if it came to that, what they could build they could also break.

Thirty Submasters and high-grade regulars, most with engineering experience, were briefed in full and assembled inside an abandoned pumping complex above the secret doorway. Special scuttlebugs and smart-dust probes examined the area, then undertook an equally exhaustive search of every similar fuel fine. But there was only the one doorway, and every test confirmed that it was real, that it hadn’t been opened for at least several years, and to the limits of their technology, there were no watchdog sensors or any sort of booby trap lying in wait.

The Master decided on cautious research.

But six months later, with her captains still hiding inside that pumping complex, her patience dissolved into a frustrated boldness.

“Break open the hatch,” she roared.

Pamir was in the conference room, sitting behind a row of Submasters. Quietly, but not too quietly, he said, “Madam.” Then he sighed and added, “Maybe we’re narrowing your search a little too much.”

Faces turned.

But not the Master’s face. Her dark eyes remained buried in the holomaps and equipment lists and the expanse of her own hand, one great finger pointing to a minuscule, yet suddenly vital detail.

Without looking at him, she said, “Elaborate.”

Then she added, “Quickly, Captain Pamir.”

“Someone or something could have fallen out of the leech habitat,” he remarked, looking at everyone but the Master. “We should keep searching the fuel tank. And I still have that neutrino array in place. It was detecting a possible source… coming from somewhere below us, if the early data are true…”

One of the Submasters gave a rumbling cough, then reminded his superior, “The fuel tank has been searched. Nearly exhaustively, madam. And Pamir is talking about a piss of neutrinos too thin to have any value—”

Knowing the hazards, Pamir interrupted. “We should watch the doorway, and wait,” he argued. He was looking at the faces that were open enough to look back at him. Then he added, “If our captains are behind that door, then we’ll be showing them what we know. And like any game, you don’t want to give up your turn too soon.”

The Master took a moment, allowing his words to evaporate into the tense silence. Then she said, “Thank you.”

Pamir’s opinion had been crisply dismissed.

Speaking to more trusted captains, she ordered, “Keep yourselves and your ship safe. But as soon as physically possible, I want you to force the hatch. Please.”

Twenty-four hours later, hair charges of antimatter were set against the hidden hinges, then detonated.

The hatch shifted a nanoscopic distance, then jammed firmly in place.

The sophisticated equivalent of a prybar was deployed, and it gave a yank, then another, and that shiny gray plug of pure hyperfiber slid out slowly, then faster, tumbling down the fuel line for twenty kilometers, reaching a closed valve and slamming into an aerogel bed that caught it like a great hand, saving it for later studies.

Scuttlebugs, then high-ranking captains, descended on the gaping hole, all dressed in armor and bristling with weapons, the machines devoid of expectations while the humans assured themselves that they were ready for anything.

Behind the secret doorway, waiting for them, was nothing.

Cold iron-rich rock was mixed with splinters of hyperfiber. Which wasn’t exactly nothing. But as spidery limbs and gloved hands touched the stratum, a sturdy disappointment struck, the captains asking themselves, Is the hatch a decoy? Is it just a half-clever way to keep our eyes and minds pointed in the wrong direction?

But no, analysis showed that this was the topmost portion of a vertical tunnel, and if the tunnel kept plunging straight down, it would merge with one of the crushed access tunnels—ancient, enigmatic, and utterly useless.

Eleven days after Washen’s mysterious reappearance, an antimatter charge had destroyed the tunnel. Seismic records showed a bump and creak that had gone unnoticed among the ship’s usual bumps and creaks. But the damage looked obsessively thorough. The surrounding rock was pulverized, and treacherous. Rebuilding just the first few kilometers of the tunnel would take time and vast resources. “Do it,” the Master ordered.

But they didn’t need thirty captains for what three of them, plus a brigade of mining drones, could accomplish with the same ease.

Pamir asked permission to return to the fuel tank and continue his search.

“Refused,” the Master replied instantly, out of hand.

Then she told him, “You’ll remain with the digging team. And if you find a moment or two of free time, I can’t stop you from doing what you want.”

“Alone?” he asked.

And her golden face smiled as she told her most difficult captain, “I am sorry. My apologies. I thought that’s exactly how you like to do everything.”

Thirty-three

Neutrinos and the slow ghosts remained, but only in the corner of the eye and the mind. The central duty in Pamir’s life was to carve a simple hole, following the shattered vein wherever it led, and with the years that seemingly straightforward task evolved into what might have been the deepest, most demanding excavation in human history.

Nothing remained of the original access tunnel. A series of sharp shaped explosions had obliterated the hyperfiber walls, and worse, they had pumped fantastic amounts of heat into the surrounding rock and iron. A column of red-hot magma led down into the ship’s depths. Reconstructing the tunnel wasn’t impossible, but it was nearly so. What was simpler was to extract the magma like stubborn cream through a wide straw, then slather the surrounding walls with better and better grades of hyperfiber, creating a vertical shaft more than a full kilometer wide.

Thirty years of digging, and three captains stood at a point as deep as the fuel tank’s deepest reaches.

In another fifty years, they were clawing their way through a wilderness of iron.

Pamir was always present. But the other captains changed faces and names every eight or ten years. Duty in the “big hole” was by no means an honor. After the first century of work and several catastrophic collapses, the Master and most of her staff had lost hope in the project. The camouflaged hatchway had been nothing but a clever distraction. The access tunnel had been destroyed by someone, yes. But throwing antimatter bomblets down a tiny hole would be easy enough. Among the tiny circle of AIs and captains who knew about the digging, none could believe there was anything worth finding down there.

Even Pamir found his imagination failing him.

In his dreams, when he saw himself digging fast with a handheld shovel, he couldn’t picture finding anything but another gout of hard black iron.

Yet the hole was Pamir’s duty, and it was a grand, consuming obsession. When he wasn’t choreographing the digging, he was badgering distant factories for improved grades of hyperfiber. When he wasn’t overseeing the pouring of a thick new stretch of wall, he was personally examining the finished stretches, from bottom to top. searching for any flaw, any inadequate seam, where the brutal pressures of the great ship threatened to buckle all of his wasted work.

Those rare moments when he climbed out of the hole and into the fuel tank felt like vacations. His aerogel island still floated on the placid hydrogen sea. Alone, he would repair the neutrino detectors and comb the last year or two of data, searching for traces of that soft signal, trying to decide if it truly came from below.

After decades of growing subtly stronger, the signal was weakening now.

There were years when it seemed to vanish altogether.

The Master and her loyal AIs, privy to the same data, came to the same rigorous solution. “It’s vanishing because it never was,” they claimed. “Anomalies have that wicked habit.”

Pamir asked permission to build new detectors, increasing his sensitivity, and he was curtly refused. When he mentioned that a second array floating inside an adjacent fuel tank would let him identify every ghost particle’s birthplace, he found agreement based upon solid technical reasoning.

“But there’s more to this issue,” the Master warned. “It’s a question of resources and general discomfort.”

“Discomfort?” he inquired.

“My discomfort,” she replied, her holo-image feigning a grimace. “Floating on the hydrogen like they do, your toys are hazards. We don’t dare pump out important amounts of fuel, since that might disturb them. And worse, what if they clog a line?”

Half a dozen easy solutions occurred to Pamir.

But before he offered any, the Master added, “That’s why I want your array disassembled. And soon, please. We’ve got a major burn coming in a little more than eighteen months—a burn and subsequent flybys—and I need my hydrogen. Free of aerogel and detectors, and all the rest of it.”

“In eighteen months,” Pamir echoed.

“No,” she said, her patience worn into the thinnest of veneers. “Sooner than that. If you need, take a leave of absence from your hole. Is that understood?”

He nodded, bristled in secret, and decided what to do.

With the help of mining drones, Pamir dismantled exactly half of the array, packing up the sensors, then on his authority, sent them up to Port Alpha. He followed the fancy crates, and in a cramped assembly point beneath the outer hull, he met an ancient Remora who owed him more than one good favor.

Orleans had a splendid and ugly new face. Wide amber eyes rode on the ends of white worms, pressed flush against the lifesuit’s faceplate, and something that might have been a mouth smiled. Or grimaced. Or it changed shape for no other reason than it could.

A sloppy voice asked, “Where?”

Pamir gave the coordinates, then with his own easy smile added, “This is only for us to know”

Orleans stared through the diamond wall of a packing crate, regarding its contents with his mutated senses. Perhaps no one appreciated a good machine more than a Remora, married as they were to their own bulky suits. “You’re on a hunt for neutrinos,” he remarked. Then he added, “I don’t believe in neutrinos.”

“No?” said Pamir. “Why’s that?”

“They pass through me, but they don’t touch me.” The nearly molten face managed to nod. “I don’t believe in things that mysterious.”

Both men laughed, each for his own reason.

“Okay,” said Pamir, “but will you do this for me?”

“What about the Master below us?”

“She doesn’t need to know.”

Orleans was smiling. The expression was sudden and obvious, and with the wormy green eyes staring at the captain, his smiling voice said, “Good. I like keeping secrets from that old bitch.”

Half of the original array was deployed out on the ship’s hull, thousands of kilometers higher and some ninety degrees removed from the remaining half, tucked into the vastness between a pair of towering rocket nozzles.

Calibrations and synchronization took time. Even when there was reasonable data, it proved stubbornly uncom-pelling. The universe was awash with neutrinos, and the ship’s hyperfiber hull and bracings distorted that mayhem into a pernicious fog. Removing every source of particles took time and a narrow genius. AIs did the tedious work. When they were finished, Pamir was left staring at a vague, possibly fictitious stream. Not corning from a point, no. It was a diffuse source aligned around the ship’s core: a soft white sheen of particles rising from a region even deeper than the deep hole.

Pamir found excuses to leave the detectors in place, reasoning that he could acquire more data over the next months and years. But the neutrino stream stubbornly continued to weaken, as if it were willingly and maliciously working to make him appear foolish.

The Master lost her last shreds of patience.

“I see that half of your toys are gone,” she mentioned. “To where, I haven’t been told. But the point is that we have potential hazards drifting inside a fuel tank. Still. Against my better judgment.”

“Yes, madam.”

“It’s a little more than thirty days to the burn, Pamir.” The Master’s projection approached him, glowering. “I want the freedom to use my hydrogen. And without even the remote prospect of getting your playthings caught in my throat.”

“Yes, madam. I’ll see to it immediately.”

She wheeled in a graceful circle, then said, “Pamir.”

“Yes, madam.”

She stared at him, admitting, “I think it’s time to quit digging. Or at least leave that work with the mining drones. They know the tricks as well as you do, don’t they?”

“Nearly, madam.”

“Visit me.” She sounded almost friendly, her golden face shining down at him. “My annual feast is in four days. Join me and the rest of your colleagues, and we’ll discuss your next assignment. Is that understood?”

“Always, madam.”

The smile acquired a useful menace, and as she vanished, she warned, “The Remoras have better things to do than look after your toys. Darling.”

Over the next three days, detectors were dragged alongside the barge and taken off-line, and drones began to stow them for shipment. The sonar array and deep-dredges waited their turn. Where everything would end up, Pamir didn’t know. Probably stored inside a warehouse, and he didn’t particularly care about their fate.

Whatever happened now, he was definitely done with this place.

Because it was an order, and because it might do some good, Pamir decided to attend the Master’s feast. Returning to his quarters, he let his sonic shower carve off several layers of old flesh, then he stepped into his garden, the clean new skin beneath maturing in the false sunlight. In his absence, his llano-vibra had gone wild; thousands of mouths sang badly, a chorus of wild, unlovely sounds accompanying him as he dressed in his most ornate uniform. He tied the mysterious silver clock to his mirrored sash. A mouthful of bacterial spores guaranteed that he could eat and drink anything, his belches and farts turned to perfumes. Then he boarded his personal cap-car, and once under way, Pamir realized that he wasn’t simply tired, he was exhausted, better than a century of hard, thankless work suddenly grabbing him by the throat. He slumped, and slept.

He would have slept until he pulled up beside the Grand Hall, but an AI yanked him out of a perfectly delightful sex dream.

The dream faded, as well as his erection. On a secure channel, he opened a channel to the AI. A dry, unimpressed voice reported, “There has been, sir, a rather considerable surge in neutrino activity.”

“From where?”

“From below,” the AI replied. “With just one array, I cannot pinpoint a source—”

“Straight below?” Pamir interrupted.

“And in a region encompassing an eight-degree dispersion, yes.”

“How big of an increase?”

“I’m witnessing activity levels approximately two hundred and eighteen thousand percent greater than our previous max—”

“Show me,” Pamir grunted.

The neutrino universe engulfed him. Suns were points of light burning in a endless gray haze. The nearest sun was a red giant orbiting a massive black hole, its fiery core and the black hole’s weak accretion disk both bright. But the brightest lights belonged to the ship, tens of thousands of fusion reactors producing the ship’s essential power, the power gridwork looking to his wide eyes like a beautiful and delicate orb composed of many tiny, brightly lit pearls.

Beneath the orb was a region of blackness.

In the neutrino universe, stone and iron were theories, were ghosts, and ordinary matter could rarely be seen, or felt, or believed in.

But beneath the blackness, enshrouding the ship’s core, was a second orb. What Pamir didn’t notice at first glance became obvious, then unmistakable. Eight degrees of the sky was covered with a neutrino-bright object. Staring hard, he heard himself asking,’Could it be an engine firing? An early burn, maybe?”

That would at least explain the neutrinos.

With no small measure of disdain, the AI said, “Sir, no engine is at work, and even if there was, no reaction vessel is properly aligned. Sir.”

Pamir blinked, asking, “Is it getting brighter?”

“Since we began this conversation… it has brightened nine hundred and eleven percent, with no signs of a plateau, sir…”

Softly, to himself, Pamir said, “Shit.”

To the AI, he demanded, “Explanations.”

“I have none, sir.”

But it was a tech-AI, not a theory-spawner. Pamir squinted at the mysterious projection, noting that unlike the ship’s bright pearls of light, this object had a diffuse glow, almost milky, and sourceless, and in its own fashion, lovely.

Then he noticed a brighter splotch.

Ninety degrees removed, which placed it… shit, directly beneath his own deep, deep hole… five hundred kilometers deeper, and what, if anything, did that mean…?

Pamir excused the tech-AI, then contacted his crew.

The AI foremachine answered. “Where are the captains?” Pamir asked. “One is sitting with the tenth-grades. The other with the fifteenths. Sir.”

At the Master’s feast, he realized.

“What do you see?” he blurted. Then, narrowing the topic, he asked, “How’s the work progressing?”

“I see everything, and all is nominal. Sir.”

“Do you sense any odd activity?”

“None.”

“Just the same,” he responded, “put yourself and the crew on alert. Understood?”

“I don’t understand, but I will do it, sir. Is that all?”

“For now”

Pamir cleared the channel, then fought to contact the Master. But her staff were doing their reliable best to protect her on this busy day. A rubber-faced AI glared at him. “The traditional festivities have begun,” it snapped, glass eyes filled with disdain. “Only in the most severe emergencies—”

“I realize—”

“-will I allow you to interrupt the Great Master.”

“Just deliver a message to her security nexuses. Will you do that?”

“Always.”

Pamir squirted the latest data to the Master’s station, then added a quick cautionary note. “I don’t have any idea what’s happening, madam. But something is. And until someone understands it, we’d better try to be careful!”

The AI absorbed the data, the words. Then it volunteered, “If you feel this strongly, perhaps you should deliver the message in person—”

He blanked the channel, gave his cap-car a new destination, and once that destination was registered, he overrode it, effectively masking his plans.Then he sat back, feeling a momentary sense of doubt. The feast would be a waste; he wouldn’t be able to reach the Master’s ears, or mind, for hours. But instead of flying down into the hole and seeing things for himself, which was his first duty, Pamir was returning to the giant fuel tank and his aerogel raft, reasoning that if he could get half a dozen of the detectors on-line, and if he could recalibrate them in the next half-day…

What would happen?

More and better data. And maybe some obvious explanation would take him by the head, and give him a good shake…

En route, he twice contacted the foremachine in the hole.

Both times, the familiar voice told him, “Nothing is out of the ordinary, sir. And we are digging at the usual furious rate. Sir.”

To reach the aerogel barge required passing through the leech habitat. An elevator had been grafted into the alien structure, running from its hub down to the calm cold surface of the sea. As his car pulled to a stop in the tunnel above, a thought found him. Again, he contacted the foremachine. Again, it said, “Nothing,” and, “We are digging.” Then he asked the tech-AI for an update on the neutrino activity.

“The counts have tripled since our last words,” the AI replied. “They have reached a plateau that’s holding steady. Sir.”

Pamir climbed from the car and paused, taking a deep, slow breath of air.

He smelled something… What?

“Is there anything else, sir?” asked the tech-AI.

Pamir began to walk, maintaining contact through his implanted nexuses. “What we’re seeing looks like a sphere of neutrinos, but it doesn’t have to be. Am I right? What we’re seeing could come from a single point inside a refractory container. Like an ancient glass bulb wrapped around an incandescent filament. But instead of light, we see neutrinos. Instead of glass, the neutrinos are emerging from an envelope of hyperfiber—”

“Sir?” the machine squeaked.

“Calculate this for me. Imagine the strongest known hyperfiber, then tell me how thick it would have to be to show what we’re seeing.”

The answer came quickly, wrapped in an easy doubt. “One hundred and ninety-seven kilometers thick, and without purpose. Sir.”

Pamir began to run, one hand and then the other rubbing against the tunnel’s diamond walls. “Assume it’s real,” he barked. “Would that much hyperfiber be strong enough to withstand the ship’s own mass?”

Silence.

“It would be, wouldn’t it?” He ran to his left, then down a narrow steep set of stairs, a leech grayness taking hold now. And laughing with a giddy nervousness, he told the distant machine, “You’re embarrassed, aren’t you?”

He cried out, “This big old ship still has secrets. Doesn’t she?”

But the AI wasn’t responding, and in that half-moment when curiosity should have turned to concern, Pamir reached the bottom of the stairs, and staring down the last few meters of the gray tunnel, he saw a stranger.

A human, and male.

The stranger had grayish skin and no hair whatsoever, and he seemed to be wearing, of all things, a captain’s uniform. Clenched in his left hand was a tool or weapon, and his right hand and eyes were examining the sealed door-way to the leech habitat. He must have heard Pamir’s boots on the gray plastic, but he didn’t react. He waited until Pamir was close before he spun around, his face almost smiling, the left hand lifting the device—some kind of soldier-class laser—with a practiced nonchalance.

Pamir pulled to a stop and held his breath.

The stranger indeed wore a captain’s uniform, but with odd embellishments. A rich golden hair was woven into a decorative braid, and there were tall leather boots and a leather belt cluttered with tools, some familiar and some not. He was a short man, but thickly built. A strong finger gripped what was obviously a mechanical trigger, and quietly, almost softly, the man said to him, “Keep still.”

His voice had an unexpected accent.

Pamir told him, “I’m not moving anywhere.”

“Good.”

There was no way to escape, and very little chance to attack the stranger. Wearing a dress uniform, Pamir had minimal armor. In a whisper, he said, “Emergency channel. Now”

The stranger shook his head, remarking, “That won’t help.”

Sure enough, no one seemed to hear him. What was happening?

Pamir curled his toes inside his boots, then uncurled them. And he breathed deeply, twice, before saying, “You look lost, Captain. And frankly, you smell a little odd.”

The man shrugged, then gestured with his right hand. “Open this door for me.”

“Why?”

“I want to see the aliens’ house.’Then with a controlled but palpable alarm, “The house is still there, isn’t it?”

Pamir titled his head, and smiled.

“It has to be there,” the strange captain decided. “Don’t try to confuse me!”

“I can open the door for you,” said Pamir.

The man had gray eyes that easily turned to suspicion. Some calculation was made, a decision was made. He aimed his laser at Pamir’s chest, telling him, “I don’t need you. I can break your little lock myself.”

“So do it.”

“Stand still,” the stranger advised, gray eyes narrowing. “I’ll cripple you if you behave. If not, I’ll have to kill you.”

Reflexively, Pamir took a half-step backward.

Then those gray eyes dropped, and quietly, with a mixture of surprise and thick awe, he asked, “What is that?”

Pamir slowly unfastened the silver clock, then opened it.

“What are you doing with that?” he asked. “Did my mother give it to you-?”

“Washen’s your mother?” he blurted.

The stranger nodded, then asked, “Where is she?”

“Why? Don’t you know?”

The man couldn’t help but glance at the sealed doorway, and that was the moment when Pamir threw the watch, aiming for the shaved back of the head, and with all of his speed and desperation, he threw himself, too.

Thirty-four

The Grand Hall was a hemispherical compartment more than a kilometer tall at its apex and exactly twice as wide. Its ceiling had arching bands of hyperfiber riding next tonthe greenish olivine, the former lending a glittery brightness to the room’s floating lights and to every echoed sound. The original floor was simple stone, but the humans had pulverized it, then mixed compost into the rock dust, creating a rich deep soil in which grew ornamental trees from a thousand worlds, and a soft green grass known as Kentucky for no reason other than that it had always been. For most of the year, the room was a public garden. In a ship jammed with spectacles, this was a quiet, sober place where frayed nerves found solace and a few despairing souls had gone to attempt suicide. But as the captains’ feast drew near, robots set up tables and chairs in careful patterns, and the tables were covered with intricate linen designed for this single occasion, and ten thousand place settings were arranged according to conventions older than anyone could calculate. Plates whiter than bone were flanked by heavy goldware utensils, and perfumed cloth was folded in artful patterns, waiting to wash dirty faces and fingers. Crystal goblets filled themselves through hidden nipples, every liquor and molten drug grown somewhere inside the ship, and every sip of chilled water was brought up from the famous artesian wells next to the Alpha Sea, celebrating the first impromptu captains’ feast held more than a hundred millenia ago.

Each captain had her place, or his, marked with a handwritten placard, the Master Captain’s loud script obvious at a distance. The placement of one’s chair was everything. Rank mattered, but so did the quality of the officer’s year. Captains to be bestowed new honors sat near the Master’s own table. Captains who needed humiliation were assigned more distant seats than expected, the worst of them set behind a bank of walkyleen flycatchers. The meal itself was meant to be a surprise, and in an attempt to honor their passengers, it was usually an array of alien dishes, their amino acids and stereochemistry left untouched—a grand tradition that made a few bellies uncomfortable, and some years, more than a few.

Today’s meal was cold uncooked fish from the sunless depths of the harum-scarum sea. Vast dead eyes stared up at the hungry captains. The eating mouths were clamped shut while the gill mouths slowly opened and closed, the flesh too stubborn to stop its useless search for oxygen. Inside every fish stomach was a salad of purple vegetation and sour fruits and tenoil dressing that resembled, in texture and in odor, unrefined petroleum. Hidden elsewhere inside the corpse was a golden worm, smaller than any finger and treasured by the harum-scarum as a delicacy to be consumed one lucious segment at a time.

Every active captain had a place set for her and for him.

Even the absent captains were given a plate, a fish, and the honor of a seat. Though cynics liked to complain that the apparent honor only underscored their absence, giving their snobbish peers the opportunity to say whatever they wished about those who weren’t present to defend themselves.

Centuries ago, when the captains vanished abruptly, their seats remained, and placards with their names written by one of the Master’s automated hands, and their meals were prepared in the captain’s galley, delivered by crew members in dress uniforms, and left there for the flies.

For years, the Master would rise to her feet, beginning the evening with a vague yet flowery toast to those missing souls, wishing them well as they fulfilled the mysterious duties of some unmentionable assignment.

Then came the inevitable dinner when she announced with a booming, yet sorrowful voice that the captains’ vessel had struck a shard of comet, and they would not be seen again. Her toast was made with vinegary wine—the standard drink for such gloomy occasions—and dinner itself was the funeral feast borrowed from a species of cold deep-space aliens. The captains destroyed their mouths with a ritualistic bite of a methane-ice fruit. That was the last year when places were set for their vanished colleagues. For Miocene, and Hazz. And Washen. And for the rest of the much-honored dead.

More than forty-eight centuries had passed since the Vanishing.

One hundred and twenty-one feasts had been held since two ghosts had appeared suddenly, talking about a nonexistent world called Marrow.

Nothing had come of it. Someone’s stupid and very cruel joke had thrown the Master into an unseemly panic, and she had spent the last century trying to convince everyone that the apparitions were anything but real. They had to be someone’s cruel illusion. Because what other choice did she have? A Master Captain’s first duties were to her chair and her ship, and what kind of Master would she be if a holoimage and a handful of vague clues were to steer her away from traditions that had served both ship and chair for more than a hundred millennia…?

No, she didn’t want to think about the Vanished. Not tonight, or ever again. But she seemed unable to stop herself, and trying to purge her mind, to make herself stronger and inflexible, only seemed to make the ghosts stronger, too.

The Master’s long table was set on a grassy ridge, affording a view that improved when she slowly, majestically rose to her feet. Her goblet was filled with a blood-colored harum-scarum wine. Was that why she was thinking of the dead? Or was it because directly in front of her, practically mocking her, was the empty chair reserved for Pamir? Absent again. Just like last year, and the year before. What was wrong with that captain? Such a talent… questionable but quick instincts married to an admirable, almost transcendent tenaciousness… and despite his ugly temperament, a captain able to inspire his subordinates and the average passenger…

Yet he couldn’t let himself bend for these little captainly rituals.

It was a weakness of character, and spirit, that had always, even in the best times, crippled his chance to rise into the ship’s highest ranks.

“Where’s Pamir?” she asked one of her security nexuses.

“Unknown,” was the instant response.

“Are there any messages from him?”

The next response was slow in coming, and odd. The nexus’s sexless voice asked her, “Where do you think that captain might be?”

In frustration, she killed that bothersome channel.

Sometimes the Master found herself thinking that she had lived too long and too narrowly, and the simple grind of work had worn away the genius that had earned her this high office. If everyone in this room were suddenly set equal, she almost certainly wouldn’t be named the Master Captain. Even in her most prideful moments, she understood that others could fill her chair as well as she could, or better. Even when she felt utterly in control, like now, a wise and ageless and extremely weary part of herself wished that one of these worshipful faces would tell her, “Sit elsewhere. Let yourself relax. I’ll take the helm for you, at least for a little while.”

But the rest of the woman seethed at the idea of it. Always.

It was the steely, self-possessed part of her that was standing now, gazing across the hectares of smiling faces and mirrored uniforms and cold dead fish. For this feast, the local birds and the louder insects had been lured into cages, then taken away. Everything that could know better knew to be quiet. An unnatural silence hung over the room. With her right hand, the Master grasped the crystal goblet. She swirled the wine once, a dark red clot dislodging from the rim and turning slowly as she lifted the goblet to her face, inhaling the aroma before the hand raised the goblet higher, up over her head, as she said, “Welcome,” in a thunderous voice. “All of you who cared enough to be here today, welcome. And thank you!”

A self-congratulating murmur passed through the audience.

Then again, silence.

The Master opened her mouth, ready to deliver her much anticipated toast. Captains who dealt with the newest alien passengers were to be singled out this year. She would sing praises for their excellence, then demand improvements in the coming decades. The ship was entering a region thick with new species, new challenges. What better way to ready your staff than by feeding them congratulatory words, then showing them your hardest gaze?

But before the first word found its way out of her mouth, she hesitated. Her breath came up short, and some obscure sense tied to one of her security nexuses started to focus on something very distant, and small, and wrong.

Her eyes saw a slow, unexpected motion.

From behind the walkyleen flycatchers came several figures. Then dozens more. And accompanying their appearance was a growing commotion, the seated captains wheeling around to stare at these visitors.

They were captains, weren’t they?

Pamir and the other rude ones were arriving, at last and together. That’s what the Master told herself, but she couldn’t see anyone with Pamir’s build, and she noticed that most of the newcomers, no matter their color, had a smoky tint to their flesh.

For a better look, she tried to interface with the security eyes, only to learn that each of them had fallen into their diagnostic modes.

Like a clumsy person trying to hold a lump of warm grease, the Master struggled to find any working security system.

None were responding.

“What’s happening?” she asked every nexus.

A thousand answers bombarded her in a senseless, unnerving roar. Then she focused on the newcomers, on their nearest faces. The ship and everything else had vanished. The Master found herself staring at the handsome woman at the lead, the tall one with her constricted face and the slick, hairless scalp, who looked rather like someone in whom she had given up all hope…

“Miocene,” the Master blurted. “Is it?”

Whoever she was, the woman smiled like Miocene—a sturdy, almost amused expression leading her up to the main table. Flanking her were people who resembled the missing captains, in their faces and builds and in the confident way they carried themselves. One man in particular caught the Master’s attention. He had Miocene’s face and baldness, and a boyish little body, and bright eyes that seemed to relish everything he was seeing. He was the one who looked left, then right, nodding at his companions, causing them to stop next to the various tables, each of the strangers picking up the cold fishes, examining them with a peculiar astonishment, as if they had never before seen such creatures.

Miocene, or whoever she was, climbed the grassy ridge.

The bright-eyed man remained at her side.

Softly, the Master asked, “Is it you?”

The woman’s smile had turned cold and furious. Her uniform was mirrored, but too stiff, and the leather belt was totally out of place. She paused in front of the Master, and looking up and down the long table—staring at each of the Submasters—she said nothing. Nothing.

Earwig and the other Submasters were hailing the nonexistent security systems. Demanding action. Begging for information. Then, looking at one another, a wild panic began to take hold.

Softly, the Master asked, “How are you, darling?”

The reply came with Miocene’s voice and her cold firmness. She stared across the table, saying, “Earwig. Darling. You’re in my seat.”

The Master halfway laughed, blurting, “If I’d known you were coming—”

“Bleak,” said the bright-eyed man.

A hundred other strangers said, “Bleak,” together, in a shared voice.

Thousands of voices, from every part of the Great Hall, screamed, “Bleak,” in a ragged, chilling unison.

Finally, the Master’s First Chair started to rise, asking, “What are you saying? What’s this ‘bleak’ mean?”

“That’s you,” the man offered with a cold smile.

Then Miocene reached out with her left hand, taking a gold carving knife from the Master’s place setting, and with a quiet, hateful voice, she said, “I waited. To be found and saved, I waited for centuries and centuries…”

“I couldn’t find you,” the Master confessed.

“Which proves what I have always suspected.” Then she used the Master’s name, the pathetically ordinary name that she hadn’t heard in aeons. “Liza,” said Miocene. “You really don’t deserve that chair of yours. Now do you, Liza?”

The Master tried to answer.

But a knife had been shoved into her throat, Miocene grunting with the exertion. Then grasping the gold hilt with both hands, she gave it another thrust, smiling as the blood jetted across her, as the spine and cord were suddenly cut in two.

Thirty-five

With a bright whoosh, the laser fired.

A whiff of coherent light boiled away half of Pamir’s fist.

But he kept swinging what remained, feeling nothing until his blackened flesh and the blunt ends of his bones struck the stranger’s face, a dazzling sharp pain racing down his arm, jerking loose a harsh little scream.

The other man grunted softly, a look of dim surprise coming to the grayish face, to the wide gray eyes.

Even without both hands, the captain had a thirty-kilo advantage. He drove with his legs, then his right shoulder, shoving his opponent against the sealed elevator door and pinning the arm with laser flush to the body… a second whoosh evaporating a portion of his ear and the edge of his captain’s cap… and Pamir screamed again, louder this time, his good hand smashing into the squirming body, punishing ribs and soft tissues while he flung the man’s hairless head against the hyperfiber door.

With a heavy clatter, the laser fell to the floor.

Pamir absorbed blows to his belly, his ribs. Then with his good hand, he grabbed the other man’s neck and yanked and twisted, squeezing until he was certain that not a breath of oxygen could slip down that crushed throat. Then he used his knee, driving bone into the groin, and when a look of pure misery passed across the choking face, he screamed, “Stop,” and flung the man back up the hallway.

The laser lay beside Washen’s clock.

Pamir reached with his bad hand, realized his blunder, then too late, put his good hand around the weapon’s handle, the whiteness of polished bone braced with the archaic heft of forged steel.

A booted foot, hard as stone, kicked Pamir in the face, shattering both cheekbones and his nose.

He felt himself flung back against the door, and lifting his good hand, he fired, a sweeping ray of blackish-blue light cooking his opponent’s other foot.

The man collapsed, and moaned quietly for a breath or two.

With his own trembling legs, Pamir pushed against the slick door, forcing himself upright, watching the stranger’s face grow composed. Resigned. Then once again, a look of defiance came into the gray face.

“Kill me,” the stranger demanded.

“Who are you?” Pamir asked.

No response.

“You’re a luddite, aren’t you?” The captain said it with confidence, unable to envision any other explanation. “Washen was living in one of your settlements. Is that it?”

A blank, uncomprehending expression gave him his answer.

“What’s your name?” he asked again. Gray eyes glanced at Pamir’s epaulets. Then with a low croaking voice, the man announced, “You’re a first-grade.”

“Pamir. That’s my name.”

The man blinked, and sighed, and said, “I don’t remember your name. You must be new to the captains’ ranks.”

“You know the roster, do you?” Silence.

“You’ve got a big memory,” Pamir allowed.

The silence acquired a distinct pride.

“But then,” Pamir added, “Washen always had an excellent memory, too.”

At the sound of her name, the man blinked. Then he stared at Pamir, and with a forced calmness, he asked, “Do you know my mother?”

“Better than anyone else, nearly.”

That statement puzzled the man, but he said nothing. “You resemble her,” Pamir confessed. “In your face, mostly. Although she was a lot tougher, I think.”

“My mother… is very strong…”

“Is?”

Silence.

“Is?” he asked again. Then he picked up Washen’s clock, using the two surviving fingers on his battered hand. The pain was constant, and manageable. He dangled the silver machine in the air between them, saying, “She’s dead. Your mother is. I found this and nothing else. And we looked everywhere, but we didn’t find a body.”

The man stared straight up, showing the ceiling his contempt.

“It happened inside the leech habitat, didn’t it?” Pamir guessed he was right, then asked, “Did you see her die?”

The man said, “Kill me,” again, but without as much feeling.

His burnt foot was healing itself. A good luddite wouldn’t possess such talents. And for the lack of any better guess, Pamir said, “I know where you’re from. From the middle of the ship somehow. Somehow.”

The man refused to blink.

But Pamir had a sense of what was true, impossible as it seemed. “How did you climb up here? Is there a secret tunnel somewhere?”

The eyes remained open. Under control.

“No,” the captain whispered. “I was digging a nice wide hole toward you. Almost all the way down, and that’s how you got up here. Am I right?”

But he didn’t wait for a response. On a secure channel, Pamir called the foremachine working inside the hole. Quietly and confidently, the AI told him, “Everything is nominal, sir. Everything is as it should be.”

Pamir shifted channels, as an experiment.

Again, “Everything is nominal, sir.”

And he selected a third channel—a route and coding system that he had never used before—and the response was a perfect, seamless quiet that caused him to mutter, “Shit,” under his breath.

His captive was flexing his growing foot.

Pamir cooked it again, with a lance of blue-black light. Then he pocketed the clock and grabbed the man by an arm, promising him,’I’ll kill you. Eventually. But we’ve got to look at something first.”

He dragged the man to his cap-car.

Racing his way along a roundabout course, Pamir tried to contact the Master. An AI’s voice responded. A constricted, heavily encoded image of the bridge and a rubber face appeared just past the car’s window. “Be brief,” was the response.

“I have an emergency here,” Pamir explained.’An armed intruder—”

“One intruder?”

He nodded. “Yes—”

“Take him to the nearest detention center. As you were instructed—”

“What instructions?”

A genuine discomfort spread across the sexless face. “A first-degree alarm has been sounded, Captain. Did you not hear it?”

“No.”

The machine’s discomfort turned to a knifing pain.

“What’s going on?” Pamir demanded.

“Our alarm system has been compromised. Plainly”

Pamir asked, “What about the captains at the feast?”

“I’ve lost all contact with the Great Hall,” the machine confessed, almost embarrassed. Then it hesitated abruptly, and with a different tone, it said, “Perhaps you should come to the Master’s station, sir. I can explain what I know, if you come to me immediately”

Pamir blanked the channel.

For a long while, he sat motionless, ignoring his prisoner, considering what he knew and what he needed to do first.

More than a century ago, after the discovery of the camouflaged hatch, the captains constructed a blind inside the local pumping station. Like any good blind, there were a dozen secret ways to slip inside it. Like anything built by captains, the facility was in perfect repair, every sensor off-line but ready to come awake with the proper codes from the approved people.

Pamir slipped into the blind without incident. But he didn’t bother with sensors; his own eyes told him everything.

Rising up the fuel line were dozens, perhaps hundreds of odd cars, windowless and vast, shaped like some kind of predatory beetlelike creature and built from a bright gray metal. Steel, perhaps. Which made them exceptionally strange vehicles, and impressive. He calculated their volume and the possible numbers of bodies stuffed inside each of them. Then staring at his prisoner, Pamir said nothing. He stared and waited until the man looked back at him, then he finally asked, “What did you want?”

“My name is Locke.”

“Locke,” he repeated. “What do you want?”

“We’re the Builders reborn,” said the strange little man. “And you’re one of the misguided souls in service of the Bleak. And we are taking the ship back from you—”

“Fine,” Pamir growled. “It’s yours.”

Then he shook his head, adding, “But that’s not what I’m asking, Mr Locke. And if you’re half as smart as your mother, you know that perfectly well…!”

Pamir took them on another roundabout journey.

Inside a secondary fuel line, he pulled to a stop, then used the laser to surgically maim his prisoner. With Locke left harmless, he sprayed emergency lifesuits over their bodies, and after a few moments to let the suits cure, he unsealed the main hatch.

The cabin’s atmosphere exploded into the vacuum.

Pamir scrambled into the open, removed a tool kit, then gave the car a random course and an unreachable destination. Then he dragged Locke out of the car before sealing it again, and together, they watched it accelerate into the blackness.

A valve stood beside them. Built by unknown hands, unused for billions of years, it had been left open, seemingly just for them.

Pamir dragged his prisoner after him. Then he tripped a switch that slowly, slowly closed the valve.

The tertiary line was a kilometer long, ending at a tiny, never-used auxiliary tank. And past that tank was the world-sized ocean of hydrogen.

Walking rapidly, carrying Locke on his back, Pamir started to talk, his voice percolating through the spray-on fabric. “She isn’t dead,” he said. “There was a fight, and I assumed that if she was there, she was obliterated, or someone recovered her body. But Washen was left behind, and you never found her. Did you? You came back to that alien house for a reason. Your first chance in more than a century, and you ran back there to look for your mother. For Washen. One of my oldest, best friends.”

Locke took a deep, pained breath.

“We searched. If anyone fell from that habitat, we should have found them. A heavy body spat out by the decompression would have had a small horizontal vector. That’s why we looked directly beneath the alien house.” He was halfway running, thinking about how much time they had and what he would do if he couldn’t find any help. “Are you listening to me, Locke? I know something about how much abuse a person can take. And if we can find enough of your mother, she’s alive again.”

Silence.

“You were there, Locke.” Pamir said the words twice, then added, “The hydrogen has currents. Slow, but complex. And like I said, we were looking for a whole corpse. Because that’s what was easiest. But if there was just a small piece of her, like her head, the decompression would have given her a terrific horizontal vector. Her poor head would have frozen in moments and fallen hard in the darkness, dropping straight to the icy bottoms, and if that’s the case, the two of us could find her. The search equipment is still there, ready to try. It just needs to know its target—”

“She was cut into several pieces,” said the man’s close, soft voice. “Her head, with one arm still attached. We recovered the rest of her.”

Pamir waited a moment, then said, “All right, then.”

He said, “That helps us a lot. Thank you.”

Then after a sympathetic pause, he asked, “Who did that to her, Locke? Who treated your mother that way?” A deep, brooding silence.

Then with withering, practised pain, Locke admitted, “My father… Diu… was trying to kill her…”

Pamir heard a deep breath, a shallow gasp.

Then an anguished voice asked, “Is there any method you know, First-grade Pamir? Is there any way to kill a memory that you can’t forget…?”

Thirty-six

The rumor was sudden and spectacularly fantastic, and if only a little bit true, its consequences would be nothing short of momentous. The common first reaction among passengers and crew was to laugh at the whole silly notion, and mock it, and insult the soul who dared tell the foolish story, and perhaps beat him senseless, or piss on his lying face, or in some other species-specific way prove one’s doubts about what was clearly, utterly impossible.

“The Master Captain is dead!’ said billions of soft, nervous voices.

How could she be? She was too wily and much too powerful to die!

“All of her captains have been murdered! At their annual dinner! By armed strangers coming from a secret part of the ship!”

How could any of that be true? How, how, how…?

“And now these strangers have stolen control over the Great Ship!”

Which was just absurd. Of course, of course. The ship was too strong and far too large to be conquered by any force. Certainly not in a day, and with such little fuss, too. Where were the Master’s security troops? And her tough old generals? And more to the point, where were the AIs and the other elaborate machines whose only duty was to serve that giant human woman? How could such a deeply ingrained, fiercely loyal army allow an invasion to succeed in a thousand years, much less inside a single day?

For a full ship-day, that was the gist of almost every public and private conversation—abbreviated wild rumor countered with hard-headed doubt.

But the rumor had its own life, gaining breadth, depth, and a kind of robust logic.

On the second and third days, and particularly on the fourth, lowly mates and certain engineers offered new clues. What had happened wasn’t an invasion. Not precisely. It more properly resembled a mutiny, the ringleaders being one-time captains. The Vanished had returned from the dead, it was said. At least some of the missing captains had rematerialized, led by that axe-faced Submaster. That Miocene woman. In the avenues and parks, along the seashores and inside dream parlors, passengers told this new story and wrestled with its consequences. Who was Miocene? In memory, she was the quiet and efficient and apparently bloodless First Chair to the now deposed Master. And that was about all she was. Every biography written about the woman was sold ten billion times, at least. Most read only the highlights. Only enough to recognize the woman’s ambition and her obvious powers. If anyone could overthrow the Master Captain, it was her First Chair. That was the obvious verdict. Who else in Creation had intimate knowledge into every security array, every communication system, and the ship’s wellsprings of power?

But Miocene didn’t come home alone. She brought an army of loyal and tough soldiers who were deployed in the opening hours, trapping most of the ship’s troops in their barracks or surprising them in the field. A few witnesses described pitched battles and soldiers killed on both sides. But even the largest stories involved small units and minimal damage. Most of the ship’s weapons failed before they could be fired, sabatoged by security codes that the Master herself had set in place—codes meant to protect the public and the captains should those weapons find the wrong hands embracing them. A few units loyal to the Master managed to slip away, merging with the general population. But they were scattered and leaderless, without the tools necessary to hurt any enemy.

About the old Master and her captains, no one seemed to know.

One comforting tale was that the old leaders were still alive, in some diluted form or another. Perhaps they weren’t conscious or whole, but they were still capable of being reborn again… should Miocene, in her wisdom, decide to consider them harmless…

About the new Master and her staff, even less was known.

From where did they come?

A thousand rumors told the same basic story: the Vanished must have left the ship, probably against their will. Then on a mysterious high-technology world, Miocene gathered up the tools and army and fleets of star-ships necessary to catch up again. Where her fleet was today, nobody knew. Everyone agreed that the main ports were quiet; the Great Ship had been passing through a thinly inhabited region around an active, modestly dangerous black hole. And it was hard to imagine that little ships could have caught them without being seen. But didn’t that explanation make far more sense than that silly noise about secret chambers and worlds hiding within the ship’s heart?

And yet. Travelers reported seeing enormous bug-shaped cars rising through a certain basement district. On that first day, and each subsequent day, there was a relentless parade of the steel machines gaining speed as they climbed, swarming for the Master’s station and every other essential hub.

“They have to be coming from somewhere,” was the sluggish verdict, delivered in spoken words and structured scents and soft flashes of dumb-founded light.

“Somewhere’ meaning a place below them.

Deep inside the fuel tanks, some assumed. While others preferred more fantastical locations, including a secret chamber or chambers buried in the ship’s iron heart.

On the mutiny’s fourth day, this mysterious place acquired a name. Marrow. Suddenly, everyone was whispering that odd old word, in ship-terran and in the full multitude of other ship languages. That word appeared so suddenly and in so many places that souls with a taste for conspiracy decided that the knowledge, genuine or false, had come directly and with purpose from whoever was in charge.

There was a world hiding inside the Great Ship, voices claimed: a hidden realm, and wondrous, and undoubtedly powerful.

Tantalizing details about Marrow started to rear up into the light.

Open-minded, undisciplined species embraced the revelation. A few even celebrated it. While others, deeply conservative by nature or by choice, ignored everything said and every wild implication.

As a rule, humans were somewhere in the middle.

There were small, modestly bothersome events. Some districts went dark as key reactors failed, power rationed to the most essential systems. Communications became snarled everywhere for the next four days. It was a time of modest chaos. But generally, little changed. Ancient passengers and crew went about the rituals of their lives, habits ingrained over the millennia and not so easily dropped. Even when the public corn-networks failed completely, there were still private pathways where electrons and structured light could send good wishes and viable currency and the lastest, best gossip. Then those little outages seemed to be finished, and the corn-networks found their feet again, and the last rumors of armed combat turned stale and were generally forgotten. It was the mutiny’s ninth day, and the public mood, as measured by twenty-three subtle means, was on the rise in every district, every major and minor city, and in most apartments and alien habitats and occupied caves.

That was the ripe, perfect moment for the Master to appear.

With ancient commands, she took control of the newly restored corn-networks, and suddenly she was everywhere—a holoimage dressed in a Master’s bright uniform and a bright, well-practised smile, her face even narrower than expected, and her dark gray hair cut very short, and her flesh looking changed by the centuries, as if dirty or tinged with smoke or rust; and her dark walnut-colored eyes, colder than any space, regarded each of her passengers and crew with an expression that fell just short of being comforting, her thin smart smiling mouth opening and then closing again, giving her audience a moment to adjust to her presence before she opened her mouth again, telling them in a quiet strong voice:

“I am Miocene.

“On my authority as a First Chair Submaster, I have removed the Master Captain from her office. From her duties. From her long-held chair.

“Never worry. The woman still lives. Most of her captains are alive. In coming years, you will learn about the depths and scope of their incompetence. In accordance with the ships charter, public trials will be held, and punishments will be just and slow, and the Great Ship will continue to follow its planned course.

“I will worry for you.

“If you let me.

“Your fives need not change. Not today, or in the future. Unless of course you wish to change what has always been yours.

“As Master Captain, I make that promise to you.”

Then for a moment, unexpectedly, the eyes gained a sudden warmth—genuine and a little shocking—and the image closed by saying:

“I love this wonderful ship of ours. I have always loved and cherished it. And I want nothing but to protect the ship, and defend its passengers and good crew, today and until the end of its historic voyage.

“My son will serve as my First Chair.

“Word of other postings will follow.

“This is your Master Captain wishing you a good day, and a wonderful next hundred millennia, my darling friends…”

Thirty-seven

A shiny gold bust of the Master Captain was perched at the end of the pearlwood table, its face suffused with a look of serene power and perfect arrogance; and beside the bust, set at a sloppy almost careless angle, was the Master’s own severed head. The long hair was white and tangled. The flesh was soft and badly desiccated, and pale, no trace left of its gold pigments. Some slow anaerobic pathway, not to mention a fantastic rage, allowed the head to open its eyes while the gaping mouth moved with a slow vigor. Without lungs to supply breath, the Master couldn’t so much as whisper. But what she was saying was obvious. Anyone with patience and a talent for reading hps could understand her. “Why?” she was asking.” Miocene, why?” Then after a long pause, she said “Explain.” She said, “For me.” Then she began to say, “Please,” but she was too exhausted to finish the word, and with a soft wet sound, her eyes and mouth pulled themselves shut again, and she descended back into a deep, fitful coma.

With a cool fondness, Miocene stroked the white hair.

She gazed up and down the conference table, and after a moment’s consideration, she pointed and called out a name, and one of her staff responded with a crisp, highly officious summary of what had been managed and what they were doing now and everything they intended to accomplish in the critical, wondrous near future.

“Blessing Gable,” she called next.

A small, burly woman—born Loyalist, but joining the Waywards as a child—rose from her black chair, then spoke about resistance among the last of the crew. “They still have their stronghold at Port Alpha, and two or three armed bands are operating near Port Denali. But the first group is trapped, and the others are disorganized and short on resources.” She paused for a moment, referring to one of her security nexuses. Then she added, “We just arrested the ones who sabotaged the reactors. Disgruntled engineers, just as you predicted, madam. The repairs, I am told, are well ahead of schedule. What the Builders create refuses to be destroyed easily”

There were murmurs of approval, and many of her fellow officers repeated, “The Builders,” with the habitual reverence.

Blessing was a ship’s general. She paused, one hand smoothing the perpetually smooth purple-black fabric of her uniform. Like most of the grandchildren, she didn’t appreciate the art of wearing clothes. It required discipline and new habits. But as Miocene had reminded everyone, time after time, the ship’s passengers expected a certain wardrobe from its crew. Captains and soldiers clothed in their own hair and flesh wouldn’t reassure anyone. And reassurance was an important, even critical task for these next days and centuries.

Miocene’s First Chair inquired, “How many of their captains are running loose?”

Blessing said, “Thirty-one. At the very most, sir.”

Sitting on his mother’s left, Till showed everyone a look of confident concern. Unlike most Waywards, he seemed comfortable in uniform. Splendid, even. Each time Miocene glanced at him—at the bright fabric and the shiny epaulets and the slender, sturdy shoulders ready to accept any burden—she felt a powerful love as well as a withering, almost terrifying sense of pride.

Till was the perfect First Chair.

Already knowing the answer, he asked, “Of those thirty-one, who are the most dangerous?” Blessing listed the important names.

She said “Pamir,” with a dismissive tone. “He’s the highest-ranking officer still at large. But his first-grade status can be misleading. Judging by the Master’s records, the man isn’t well regarded. Not by her or by the other captains. His loyalties are suspect. The Master herself made only sparing use of him.”

“I remember that one,” said Daen. Then with a quick gesture and a giddy laugh, he added, “I wouldn’t worry. Pamir’s probably hiding in one of his old holes, praying for the next amnesty.”

Daen was her Second Chair—the same position he had enjoyed before Marrow. But it was a post that he had taken grudgingly, even when he finally admitted that the old Master was inept. Letting a crazy man like Diu acquire so much power, then not finding her captains after nearly five millenia… well, she probably deserved to be unseated. Yet even then, if it wasn’t for his loyalty to Miocene, he wouldn’t have taken part in this ugliness. He had made that point plain on numerous occasions. And in turn, Miocene gave him no important role or linchpin responsibilities. Daen and the other old captains served a single clear, vital purpose: they showed that Miocene was operating legally, and morally, supported by proven souls who thought as she thought.

Miocene agreed with her Second Chair’s assessment of Pamir; but as usual, Daen ignored certain key points.

“Regardless what we think of the man,” she countered, “Pamir has talents. And more importantly, he has that first-grade rank. If there’s going to be an organized counterattack, by law and by tradition, Pamir’s the leader. If only as someone’s puppet, he can now be regarded as the ship’s true Master.”

Her warning had a slow, inadequate impact.

Daen blinked as if flustered, then admitted, “I just hope it doesn’t come to counterattacks and open rebellion.”

Other long-term officers agreed with him.

But Till reminded them and his Waywards, “There isn’t time to worry about one man. Or rebellions that only exist in our fears.”

Miocene nodded, then deflected the focus. She glanced at another old Submaster, saying, “Twist.” She smiled and asked, “How soon will you have the new nexuses ready to be implanted. In you, and in the others. And in me.”

Most importantly, me.

The charming Submaster tried to smile, and failed. “Another fifteen days,” he admitted. “Just in time for the big burn.”

Stripping away an ancient, byzantine system, full of booby traps and failed policies, then constructing a better system from the rawest ingredients… no, the delays weren’t much of a surprise, nor even much of a disappointment…

“Pepsin,” said Miocene.

Aasleen’s grandson nodded agreeably, then promised, “You already have full control over the main engines, madam.”

Miocene let everyone see her smile.

Then the engineer added, “There were some incidents of sabotage. A few. But what the Builders create is most definitely resilient…”

“You have enough hands to make repairs?”

The stocky man nodded, saying, “Yes, madam. I do.”

He was lying. She sensed it as she nodded, then in the most casual way, she mentioned, “When you come up short, contact Till or me. Every resource will be shoved your way”

“Thank you, madam. Thank you.”

Pepsin’s grandmother would have been an enormous help here. But Miocene didn’t allow herself the luxury of making wishes. Aasleen had made her choice, and now she was living a comfortable, dull existence in Hazz City. She’d lived that way since the Waywards took over the Loyalists’ cities and industries. Their invasion—a proving ground for what was happening to the ship today—had come swiftly, with a minimum of blood and discomfort. By the time Miocene was reborn, the Loyalist society was dissolving into the much larger, more potent Wayward culture. By the time she was healthy and whole again, her son could present her with an empire rich in possibility.

“For you, Mother,” he had whispered into one of her new ears. “This is for you. And I promise, this is nothing but the beginning.”

Again, Miocene felt compelled to glance at her son, and she couldn’t help but feel singularly blessed. During her rebirth, her son had taught her what was possible. Every question was answered in full. Every doubt evaporated into her love for Till. Then through his love and devotion, Till offered her the ship’s helm. “The Master doesn’t deserve her chair,” he had assured her. “She doesn’t serve the ship as she should, or as you will. Isn’t that true, Mother? Can you argue it otherwise?”

That was a great, perfect moment.

Everything about Miocene’s long ambitious life pointed at that epiphany. Her duty was obvious. Indeed, it seemed as if every hardship and wrenching pain were nothing but the careful preparation of her soul, making her ready for what was, for lack of any better word, her destiny.

“Both of us are Builders reborn,” Till had purred.

“We are,” she had mouthed, beaming at her only child.

To Miocene, the Builders were an abstraction. An idea with which she could coexist. No, she didn’t believe that their souls were billions of years old. But clearly, they were the natural ones to take control over this great, wondrous machine. She looked at the hardened souls at this long table. Waywards; Loyalists. She imagined the millions of children born before, then after the merging of those two nations. And there were the captains who had proved themselves during this century-long march toward this moment. Now…

Till asked, “May I stand now, madam, and have a word?”

Miocene nodded, then gladly sat in the Master’s oversized chair, letting every eye focus on him.

For the next few minutes, her son spoke about duty. About the importance of these next days and weeks. He repeated what his mother had already stated emphatically, that it was crucial for the ship’s burn to be made on schedule. They needed to prove to the passengers and to the galaxy that the ship was in proficient hands.

It was her speech, and it wasn’t.

As always, Miocene noticed how the faces seemed to drink in her son’s words. Again, she could appreciate why he was able to find followers and motivate them. Even old men like Twist and Daen would nod appreciatively, their fealty having shifted—in some abstract, convoluted fashion—a little closer to the Waywards.

Then she wasn’t thinking about Till, her eyes focusing on a new captain who had just entered the conference room, bowing at his superiors and taking one of the two empty chairs at the far end of the table.

Till concluded by saying, “Welcome, Virtue.”

The one-time traitor from the Wayward camp managed a deeper bow, then said,’My apologies. There was a problem—”

“With the spine, again?”

Asked Till.

“With its borehole, specifically. Sir. Madam. The old hyperfiber has been putting up a tenacious fight.” Gray-white eyes blinked as if embarrassed, then stared at Virtue’s own hands. “Within the week, I can assure you, madam… you will be able to rule the ship from anywhere, including Marrow…”

At this moment, they were nothing more than a boarding party. A few million highly motivated, thoroughly trained, and well-armed people living far from home.

“When the spine is finished, integration of command functions won’t take long,” he promised. “Another day, or two. Or perhaps three.”

Till glanced at his mother. For both of them, he said, “Thank you, Virtue.”

Miocene barely noticed the exchange. What she was studying was the final empty chair, feeling that instinctive disquiet. When she listened again and heard nothing but patient silence, she leaned forward across the pearlwood table and said, “Locke.”

She asked, “Has anyone heard from him?”

No one responded.

But ever so slightly, Till’s expression tightened. And he quietly admitted, “No, there hasn’t been any news.”

In the mutiny’s opening moments, without warning, Locke had disappeared. It was commonly known but never discussed. The other captains and generals pretended to busy themselves with details while Miocene whispered to her son, “Do you still think that he’s off chasing his mother’s soul?”

“Of course,” Till replied.

What was she hearing in his voice?

“I know the man,” he continued. “He very much loved Washen, even though he didn’t see her for centuries at a time—”

It was a love that Miocene could appreciate.

“And the poor man was wracked by guilt. For what happened, for what he had to do… it was very difficult for him…”

Locke killed his own father, trying to save his mother. Yet Washen had died regardless. The two Waywards had seen her body torn apart by explosives. Shredded flesh and the dying mind were scattered across a great ocean of liquid fuel, and lost. Every report in the Master’s files documented a long, fruitless search. A solitary Wayward had no chance of finding her. None. Miocene felt certain, yet she had to ask, “Did you send anyone to search the leech habitat? As I suggested?”

“Naturally,” Till replied.

“And what did they find?”

“It was sealed, but there were signs of a struggle,” he admitted, shaking his head with a sudden heaviness. “It’s possible, just possible, that Locke stumbled into an armed guard. The evidence is narrow, but reasonable. There was a fight, and he was killed with his own weapon.”

She waited for a moment, then asked pointedly, “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

Till blinked. He sighed. Then with a peculiar sadness, he replied, “It didn’t feel like critical news.”

“If Locke’s been captured—”

“Mother,” he growled. “Locke is not a danger. You know that.”

She sat upright in the Master’s chair, staring at that pretty face with all of the coldness that she could summon.

“He knows nothing,” her son insisted. “His place at this table is honorary. Nothing else. For a long time, I haven’t given him any authority. Because, as I promised, I know him so very well.”

Do you? she thought, in secret.

Then her coldness turned inward, and she shivered in invisible ways. After a long moment, she remarked, “You might wish to search the fuel tank itself.”

“We already have,’Till replied.

Something about his eyes were flat. Unreadable. Even dead.

“That tank is huge,” Miocene reminded him.

“Which is why it took until today to finish our search.” The unreadable eyes wore a smile, and a smiling mouth added, “I sent ten swarms to search—”

Ten swarms pulled from what duties?

“And all that they found were aerogel barges. Scientific instruments packed for shipment. And nothing alive or even a little bit important.”

“You’re certain?” she asked.

Till calmly stepped into her trap, telling her,’Yes, madam. I am quite sure.”

With a harsh, loud voice, Miocene cried out, “But you’ve missed important things in the past. Haven’t you, First Chair? Haven’t you?”

Her son stiffened.

The room fell silent, waiting.

Till forced himself to relax. Then quietly and angrily, he said, “Locke is useless.”

Ten swarms were an enormous number of soldiers, particularly if you were chasing someone who was useless.

But Till just kept shaking his head, telling everyone at the long pearlwood table, “Even if he wanted, he couldn’t hurt us.”

Thirty-eight

“Don’t worry. It’s just my hand.” The pressure was soft, soothing. “Keep still now, dear. Still.” Who was moving?

The voice said a familiar name, and with the hand pressing, it complained, “She’s fighting. Me, or something else.” The voice is talking about me.

Another voice, deeper and more distant, said, “Washen.” Said, “Just he still. Washen. Please.”

Then a larger hand tried to smother her, pressing over her mouth and nostrils, and the deep voice drifted closer, familiarly intimate, telling her, “We don’t have much time. We’re sprinting you through this regrowth.”

Regrowth?

“Sleep,” he advised, his hand lifting.

The woman’s voice said, “I think she is.”

But Washen was only keeping her eyes closed, feigning sleep, savoring the constant white pain of her new body’s birth.

Fresh eyes opened. Blinked.

A piercing green light was eclipsed by a man’s silhouetted face, and Washen heard her own voice asking, “Pamir? Is that you?”

“No, Mother,” he replied.

Flinching, she asked, “This is Marrow? Are we back?” Locke said nothing. “Pamir!’ she cried out.

“Your friend isn’t here now,” said another voice. It was the same voice as before—feminine, and soft-spoken. “He left for a little while,” the woman promised. “How do you feel, darling?”

She moved her head, and her neck burst into flames. “Slow, dear. Slow”

Washen breathed deeply and found herself staring at a lovely human woman dressed in an emerald sarong. Black hair. Full lips. Smiling, and shy. She wasn’t a Wayward, obviously. Or any normal Loyalist. Her clothing said as much, and the smooth, unhurried way she moved underscored her ancient origins. This woman was a passenger. Wealthy, almost certainly. And probably unaccustomed to having a dead woman in her home.

“My name is Quee Lee.”

Washen nodded slowly, dancing with the pain. Eyes panned across the terran jungle. Wet green foliage was punctuated with riots of wild tropical flowers. Birds and painted bats darted through the sweet warm air. On the rotting stump of a tree, a troop of tailored monkeys sat in a sloppy ring, conspicuously ignoring the humans, playing some sort of game with stones and sticks and the delicate white skulls of dead owls.

“They’ll be back,” said the hostess. “Soon.”

“They?”

“My husband and your friend.”

Washen lay inside an open autodoc bed, her new body dressed in a blackish goo of silicone and dissolved oxygen and a trillion microchines. This was how a soldier was reborn—too fast and clumsily, flesh and bone made in bulk while immunological functions were kept to a minimum. Quee Lee sat on one side of the bed, Locke on the other. Her son was dressed in a passenger’s colorful garb, his flesh darkened by UV light, his lovely thick hair grown long enough to make a golden stubble, hands and broad bare feet lashed together with standard security cord.

Quietly, anxiously, she asked, “How long has it been?” He didn’t respond.

Quee Lee leaned forward, saying, “One hundred and twenty-two years. Minus a few days.”

Washen remembered the explosive blows and the sensation of being yanked out of the leech habitat, tumbling and tumbling as her flesh froze and her mind pulled itself into the deepest possible coma.

When the nausea passed, she asked, “Did you find me, Locke?”

He opened his mouth, and he closed it again. “Pamir rescued you,” said Quee Lee. “With your son’s help.”

Again Washen glanced at the black security cords, then managed to laugh. “I’m glad the two of you have become good friends.”

Embarrassment bled into a chilly anger. Locke straightened his back, then forced himself to explain. “It was an accident. I went to the alien house. To see if the captains, or anyone else, had been there. And that ugly man stumbled over me.”

Pamir. Sure.

Her son shook his head in disgust, bare toes curling and uncurling in the black earth. What would a Wayward make of this rich soil? And the impossibly green trees? And the monkeys? And what about the ornate song of that little rilly bird that fell on them from the highest branches?

Finally, with a massive sadness, Locke admitted, “I was weak.”

“Why?” asked Washen.

“I should have killed your friend.”

“Pamir’s difficult to kill,” she responded. “Believe me.”

Again, Locke clung to his silence.

Washen took a deep, thorough breath, then sat up in bed, the black goo clinging to her baby-smooth, utterly hairless flesh. When the worst of the pain subsided, she looked at Quee Lee and said, “One hundred and twenty-two years.” She sighed and said, “Circumstances have changed while I was sleeping. That’s my guess.”

The woman flinched, then smiled shyly.

“What’s happening?” asked Washen. “With the ship-?”

“Nothing has happened,” said her hostess. “According to our new Master Captain, the ship needed a change of leadership. Incompetence was rife. And now, according to her, everything is the same as before, except for what’s better, and we’d be fools to entertain the tiniest concern.”

Washen glared at her son.

He refused to blink or look at any face.

Then to herself, in a soft angry voice, she said,’Miocene.”

And she turned back to Quee Lee, adding, “That’s who she sounds like.”

The apartment’s AI spoke with a firm authority, announcing, “Perri is approaching. With the other one, he is.”

It said, “They seem to be alone.”

Then it asked, “Do I allow them inside, Quee Lee?”

“Absolutely”

Three more days had passed. Washen was six hours out of her bed, dressed in a simple white sarong and white sandals, and she had just eaten her first solid meal in more than a century, the endless fatigue turning into a nervous energy. She stood beside Quee Lee, waiting. The apartment door opened, its security screen in place, and out in the wide, tree-lined avenue, there was no one. What should have been a busy scene on any normal day was unnaturally quiet. Suddenly two men strode into view. The smaller man was handsome, smiling with an unconscious charm. The other man was larger and simple-faced, and Washen made the obvious mistake. Once the door was closed and locked by twenty means, she said to that larger man, “Hello, Pamir.”

But the simple face peeled away, exposing a second face identical to the smaller man. Pretty in the same way. And charming. And most definitely not Pamir.

“Sorry,” said a laughing voice. “Try again.”

The smaller man was Pamir. He peeled away his disguise, and the rumbling deep voice explained, “I got an autodoc to peel away thirty kilos. What do you think?”

“You look wonderful anyway,” she allowed.

Pamir’s face was rugged, like something hacked from a block of dense dark oak, an asymmetric tilt to the rough features and his dirty, badly matted hair tilting things even more. The man looked as if he couldn’t remember when he last slept. Yet the bright brown eyes were clear and alert. When he looked at Washen, he smiled. Looking anywhere else, his expression grew distant, distracted. To no one in particular, he said, “I’m famished.” Then his gaze returned to Washen, and the smile swam up from the massive fatigue, and with a familiar bite, cynical and wise, he said, “Don’t thank me. Not yet. If these grandchildren of yours find us, you’ll wish that you were still at the bottom of that hydrogen sea.”

Probably so.

Yanking off the rest of his disguise, Pamir asked, “Where’s my prisoner?”

“In the garden,” Quee Lee replied.

“Has he grunted anything important?”

Both women said, “Nothing,” in the same breath.

A bare hand pushed through the dirty hair. Then Pamir allowed himself a smile, and he confessed to Washen, “I wanted to be with you. When you came back to us. But I had to see to this and to that first. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.”

“Then I won’t,” he grumbled.

Quee Lee asked her husband, “What is happening out there?”

The pretty man rolled his eyes and thrust his tongue into one cheek.’In a word?” he said. “It’s awfully and weirdly and relentlessly quiet.”

She asked, “Where did you go, darling?”

The men glanced at each other, and Perri said, “Darling,” as a warning.

Then Pamir shook his head, saying, “Food first. I want my thirty kilos back.” He peeled away the false flesh on his hands, saying, “Then we’ve got to go somewhere. Just us, Washen. I’ve got a trillion questions, and barely enough time to ask ten.”

Pamir was clean and wearing new clothes. He and Washen were inside a guest suite. The suite’s floor diamond was inlaid with sun and holo generators. Looking between their feet, they could see into Quee Lee’s garden room, and in particular, they could watch the blond-haired man who sat in the largest clearing, who never yanked at the restraining straps, and who carefully watched each motion of every bird and bug and half-tame monkey.

“Tell me,” Pamir began. “Everything.”

Nearly five thousand years were crossed in what felt like a single breath. The false mission. Marrow. The Event. Children born; Waywards born. The rebirth of civilization. Washen and Miocene escaping from Marrow. Then Diu caught them and brought them to the leech home, and Diu explained that he was the source of everything that had happened… and just as she was about to finish the story, she paused to breathe, and nod, telling Pamir, “I know what you’ve been doing these last days.”

“Do you?”

“You were trying to decide if I was genuine. If you could trust me.”

He took a last bite of half-cooked steak, then watching her, asked, “How about it? Can I trust you?”

“What did you find out?” she pressed.

“Nobody mentions you. Nobody seems to care. But Miocene and your grandchildren are searching hard for him.” Pamir pointed at the floor. “They nearly found him, and me, inside the fuel tank. But don’t let his glowering silences fool you. Locke told me enough to narrow our search site enough…”

“How many captains are running loose?”

“My count is twenty-eight. Or twenty-seven. Or maybe it’s down to twenty-six.”

Quietly, she said, “Shit.”

“Not including you,” he added. “But your commission was dissolved long ago. And if that doesn’t make you crazy, listen to this. Right now, you’re sitting with the ship’s legal Master Captain. Isn’t that a frightening thought?”

Washen did her best to digest the news. Then she bent and placed the palm of her new hand on the floor, as if trying to grasp her son’s head. “All right,” she whispered. “Tell me everything you know. Fast.”

He told about his search for her and Miocene. About Perri’s help and the mounting frustration, and how at the end, moments before he gave up, he stumbled across that archaic silver-encrusted clock.

“Do you still have it?” Washen blurted, her head lifting.

And there it was, dangling on a new silver chain. Pamir didn’t have to say “Take it” twice. Then, as Washen opened the lid and read the insignia, he told more of his story—the neutrino source; the hidden hatch; the collapsed tunnel—and he stopped where he and Locke were facing each other above the leech house.

With a soft click Washen closed the silver lid.

With a tone of apology, Pamir said,’If I’d expanded the search radius, and chased down every small target—”

“I’m not disappointed,” she interrupted, showing a warm smile.

“I was distracted,” he continued. “First, the neutrinos. Then we found Diu’s secret hatch, and I was doing nothing but digging.”

Washen cupped her hands around her clock, concentrating.

Pamir said, “Diu,” with a firm contempt. Then he shook his head, adding, “I honestly can’t remember the little prick.”

I loved the man, thought Washen, in astonishment.

Then she said, “Neutrinos,” with a soft, curious voice. Looking up at him, she asked, “What did you see? Exactly. And how big was the flux?”

Pamir told everything, in crisp detail.

When Washen didn’t react, he changed topics. “As soon as you’re strong enough, we’re leaving. I don’t have any official ties to Perri or Quee Lee. But there might be an old security file somewhere, and Miocene’ll find it. We need a fresh place to hide. Which is partly what I’ve been doing these last days—”

“And then?”

“Bide our time. Be patient, and make ready’ He spoke in slow, certain tones, sounding like a man who had given this issue his full attention. “If we’re going to take back our ship, and keep it, then we’ll need to gather up the resources… the muscle and wisdom… to make things a little less impossible…”

Washen didn’t speak. She didn’t quite know what she was thinking. Her mind had never felt emptier or more useless. What passed for her focus drifted from her cupped hands to a long pained look at her son sitting in that beautiful jungle. Then she pried open her hands and the silver lid, staring again at the slow, relentless hands.

“We have allies,” Pamir allowed. “That’s also what I’ve been doing these last few days. Making contacts with likely friends…”

Again, she closed the clock and cupped her hands around its blood-warmed metal, and quietly, almost in a whisper, she said, “We didn’t have fusion reactors.”

Pardon?”

“When I left Marrow. Most of our energy came from geothermal sources.”

“You were gone for more than a century,” Pamir cautioned. “A lot can change in that little bite of rime.”

Perhaps. Perhaps.

“Judging by the evidence,” he continued. “I’d guess that the Waywards had to punch a wide hole up from Marrow. Since they were coming back along the old hole, theirs met mine, making their work easier. But still. Hundreds of kilometers dug in days, or hours. That’s why we didn’t have any warning. And that’s why they must have built all those fusion reactors, I’m guessing.”

She said, “Perhaps,” but shook her head regardless.

Again, Washen opened her hands. But this time she dropped the clock, and it landed on its edge with a soft click, and bending over to pick it up, she found herself staring at her son as he stared at a strange green world, his soft gray eyes betraying nothing—not a whispery sense of awe, much less the tiniest concern.

“What is it, Washen?”

She opened her mouth, and said nothing. “Tell me,” Pamir insisted.

“I think you’re wrong,” she heard herself saying. “Probably so. But where?”

Until she said it, she wasn’t certain what she would say.

“About the energy source. You’re mistaken. But that’s not what matters most.”

“What matters?”

She said, “Look at him.”

The ancient man stared between his feet, regarding the prisoner for a long moment. Then finally, with a measured disgust, he asked, “What should I see?”

“Locke is a Wayward. He still believes.”

Pamir gave a low snort, then said, “What he is is a fanatic. And he just doesn’t know any better.”

“He and Till were in the leech house,” she countered, shaking her head. “You know the place. Whisper anything, and your words are audible everywhere.”

Pamir waited.

“Ever since you woke me, it’s been gnawing at me.” She picked up the clock and coaxed her sarong to grow a pocket that would hold it securely. Then she looked at Pamir with bright certain eyes, telling him, “Till and Locke must have heard Diu talking. They wouldn’t have had any choice. His confession was thorough, and it didn’t leave room to maneuver. Everything the Waywards believe was invented by Diu. And that’s enough of a revelation to cripple the most robust faith.”

With more stubbornness than reason, Pamir said, “Your son’s a fanatic. And Tills an ambitious, pernicious climber.”

Washen barely heard him.

Narrowing her eyes, she thought aloud. “Those two Waywards heard everything, and it didn’t matter. Maybe they weren’t even surprised that Diu was alive. That’s not so outrageous. Waywards always knew everything that was happening on Marrow. No secrets for them. And after Diu was dead, they took Miocene home. Because she was needed. Because if they are the Builders reborn, and if they were going to retake the ship… then they required a high-ranking captain, like Miocene… someone who knows how to defeat the security systems, and the old Master…”

Pamir took a deep breath, let it leak out between his teeth, then offered, “Till is cynically using Diu’s dreamed-up religion, and Miocene is playing along—”

“No,” said Washen. “And maybe.” Then she pointed at Locke, saying again, “He believes. I know my son, and I understand, I hope, his capabilities. And he’s still very much a Wayward.”

Out of frustration, Pamir asked, “So what do you believe, Washen?”

“Diu told us…’ She closed her eyes, remembering what seemed to be only three days removed from her. “When he was first on Marrow, alone, he had a dream. The Builders and the hated Bleak came straight out of that dream…”

“Which means?”

“Maybe nothing,” she confessed. Then she shook her head and rose to her feet, saying, “If there’s any answer, it’s somewhere on Marrow. That’s where it’s waiting. And I think you’re absolutely wrong about our timetable up here.”

“Do you?”

“We wait, and the Waywards only grow stronger.”

Pamir looked between his feet again, staring at their prisoner with a new intensity, as if seeing him for the first time.

“Wait too long,” she warned, “and we’ll have to tear this ship apart with a total war. Which is why I think we need to do everything now. The first instant that it’s possible.”

“What we need to do,” he echoed.

Then he asked, “Like what?”

Washen had to laugh, quietly and sadly.

“You’re the Master Captain here,” she replied. “My only duty is to serve the Great Ship, and you.”

Thirty-nine

“There is a place,” Miocene reminisced, inviting her son and the other high-ranking Waywards to accompany her on a little journey. “It’s very high, and quite secure, and perfect for watching the burn.”

It would be a moment rich in symbolism, and more important, a moment of pure vindication.

But Till wore a doubting expression. He looked past Miocene, then said, “Madam,” and gave the smallest of bows. “Is this trip absolutely necessary? Considering the risks, I mean. And the thin benefits.”

“Benefits,” she echoed. “Did you count tradition?”

He knew better than to respond.

Miocene said, “No, you didn’t,” and laughed gently, her scorn barely showing. Then she told him, “This is a noble tradition. The Master Captain and her loyal staff stand on the open deck, watching as their ship turns in the wind.”

“Noble,” he replied, “and ancient, too.”

“We’ve done it on board this ship,” she promised. “Many, many times.”

What could he say?

Before any answer was offered, she added, “I appreciate what you’re thinking. That we might be too exposed. Too vulnerable. Open to some celestial disaster—”

“Not on the trailing hemisphere, madam. I know that much.”

“Then you’re worried about a closer, more emotional enemy.” Master or mother, her task was to lend confidence. To inspire, and hopefully, instruct. “No one else knows about this venture. There isn’t time to prepare an ambush. And believe me,” she added, a swollen hand lifting into the air between them, “I’m strong enough to defend us from any part of the ship, and anywhere on its enormous hull, too.”

Frantic days had brought a transformation. The new Master sat on the old Master’s bed. She wasn’t as vast as her predecessor, but the trend was obvious. Interlocking networks of nexuses lay beneath her century-old skin, speaking to one another in dense lightspeed languages, and speaking to the ship’s important systems in a tangle of frequencies and coded wisps of laser light. A newborn instinct told Miocene that the reaction chambers were being fueled and readied. She could practically taste the cold compressed hydrogen being drawn from the deep tanks. This giant burn, scheduled millennia ago, would happen without delay or embarrassment. How could anyone doubt that she was in charge? The symbolism was blatant. Nervous passengers would take comfort in the burn. The disgruntled crew would have to admit that this old woman knew what she was doing. And the Milky Way would notice, trillions of potential passengers having even more good reasons to forget the old Master and her incompetent ways.

Soon and in countless ways, Miocene would improve her ship. Efficiencies would jump. Confidence would blossom. The ship’s prestige would swell as a consequence, and with her guiding hand, the knowledge of a million species would be beamed home, enriching humanity as well as the Master’s personal legacy. For the last century, whenever she wanted a taste of pleasure, Miocene had imagined the glorious day when the ship would complete its circuit of the galaxy, approaching the Earth after a half-million-year absence. By then, and mostly because of her work, humanity would dominate their little portion of the universe. And with her loyal, loving son at her side, she would accept every honor and the radiant blessings from a people that would have no choice but see her as a god and savior.

“The universe,” she whispered, speaking to herself.

Till leaned closer, asking, “What did you say, madam?”

“You need to see it for yourself,” she replied. “The stars. The Milky Way. Everything, and in its full glory.”

A shifting expression became simple doubt.’I have seen it,” Till reminded her. “By holographic light, and perfectly rendered.”

“Nothing rendered is perfect,” she countered.

Then before her son could say anything else, she reminded him, “One of us is the Master. The other is her First Chair.”

“I know that, madam.”

With a wide hand, she touched her son on the forehead, the slender nose, then with a single finger, she fondled the handsome strong chin. “Perhaps it’s too much of a risk,” she allowed. “You can make a good argument, yes. So it will be just you and me watching the burn. Is that a worthy compromise?”

He had no choice but to say, “Yes, madam. Yes, Mother’ But as always, Till said the words with a convincing enthusiasm, wrapped right in a smile that couldn’t have been any brighter.

The ship’s hull was thinnest on the trailing face—a few dozen kilometers of original, nearly virginal hyperfiber laced with access tunnels and cavernous pipes and pumps vast enough to move oceans. Aesthetics as well as security issues played a role; Miocene and Till traveled inside one of the main reaction chambers. Nothing lived here, and next to nothing came here. Against the banks of perfect mirrors, there was no place to hide. And since no one but Miocene could fire these engines, they could pass untroubled, their swift little car rising into the craterlike maw of the rocket nozzle, the sky above them illuminated by a billion fires, each of them dwarfing the powers of their magnificent machine.

“The stars,” said Miocene, and she couldn’t help but grin.

Till looked very young, standing with his hands holding each other behind his back, his back arched and his boot-clad feet slightly apart, his uniform and cap and the wide brown eyes reflecting the brilliance of the universe.

For a moment, he seemed to smile.

Then he closed his eyes and turned to her, and he opened his eyes again, admitting, “They’re lovely. Of course.”

Of course.

Disappointment grabbed Miocene. Had she really believed that a naked-eye look at the Milky Way would cause a revelation? That Till would throw up his arms and drop to his weak knees in a wonderstruck rapture?

She was disappointed, and worse, she was infuriated.

Perhaps sensing her mood, Till asked, “Do you remember when, Mother? When you looked into a nanoscope and saw your first naked proton?”

She blinked, then confessed, “No.”

“One of the essential bones of the universe,” he chided. “As vital as the stars, and in its own way, more spectacular. But it was real to you before you saw it. Intellectually, and emotionally, you were prepared.”

Miocene nodded, saying nothing.

“From the moment that I was reborn and for every day since, people have talked about the stars. Describing their beauty. Explaining their physics. Assuring me that the simple sight of a sun will fill me with awe…”

What would it take to impress Till?

“Frankly, Mother. After such an enormous buildup, I think the sky looks rather thin. Almost insubstantial. Which is doubly disappointing, since we’re close to one of the galaxy’s big arms. Aren’t we?”

If Miocene ignited the engine beneath them, Till would be impressed.

For a fiery instant, yes.

Smiling in a thin, almost mocking fashion, she looked ahead. Their car swerved abruptly, heading for the parabolic nozzle. Ancient hyperfiber had been blackened by corrosive plasmas, leaving a featureless wall that appeared close when it was distant, then remote as they slowed and suddenly passed through a camouflaged hatchway. Engineers had added this feature. The hatchway led into a small tunnel that passed through the nozzle, ending with a blister of diamond suspended a thousand kilometers above the hull.

Only an imbecile couldn’t be impressed by this view.

Mother and son remained inside the armored car, and the car floated inside the blister. The Great Ship possessed fourteen giant rocket nozzles: one in the center, four ringing the one, and nine more nozzles surrounding the first five. Theirs was one of the four, and on the horizon, standing side by side, were two of the outer nozzles, fueled and waiting the command to fire. Morphing metals and lakes of hydraulic fluids had tilted the nozzles, giving them a fifteen-degree angle. The ten-hour-and-eleven-second burn would change the ship’s trajectory just enough that in another two weeks it would pass near a red giant sun, then plunge even closer to the sun’s companion—a massive yet essentially calm black hole.

In less than a day, the ship’s course would be tweaked twice. Instead of leaving this dense region of suns and living worlds, they would continue following the galaxy’s arm, moving into new and lucrative places.

There was a soft, impressed “Hmm.”

Till wasn’t staring at the stars or the giant nozzles. Instead, he was looking down, and with a slightly contemptuous voice, he remarked, “There’s certainly a lot of them!

Lights were sprinkled across the hyperfiber landscape. But unlike the pleasant disorder of the stars, these lights had defining principles, connected into lines and circles and dense masses that glowed with a cumulative light. Yes, there were a lot of them. Probably more than there were five thousand years ago, and certainly more than the last time she visited that place. Miocene shook her head and said, “Remoras,” with a growling tone. “They build their cities on the trailing face. More cities all the time.”

Till smiled, and with a charming wink, he observed, “You don’t like Remoras. Do you, madam?”

“They’re stubborn and exceptionally strange.” But she allowed, “They do important work. We would be hard-pressed to replace them.”

Her son made no comment.

“Twenty seconds,” she announced.

Till said, “Yes,” and politely looked up, those bright brown eyes squinting against the anticipated glare of the engines.

And with Till momentarily distracted, Miocene slipped away.

The room never changed.

Sitting along each wall, wearing the symbolic bodies and white togas of wizened old scribes, were dozens of sophisticated AIs. Each was a little different from its neighbor, in abilities and aesthetic sensibilities. In this realm, differences were a blessing. The reason for their existence was a single question—a question requiring utter concentration as well as a fondness for novelty. Every day or week or month, one of the scribes would propose some new solution, or a variation on an old solution, and with a boundless youth, the machines would discuss and debate, and occasionally shout at one another. Inevitably they would find some critical flaw in the elaborate mathematics, or the logical assumptions, and the proposal would be given a quick funeral, its corpse placed on an electronic shelf next to millions of failed hypotheses—proof of their zeal, if not their genius.

In the room’s center was a dense and extremely precise map of the ship. The map didn’t portray the ship as it was today, but the ship as it existed when the first captains arrived: Every vast chamber and long tunnel, tiny crevice and grand ocean, was displayed in all of its abandoned glory.

Yet a substantial, perhaps critical feature was missing.

Into that ignorance, the new Master appeared.

The AI scribes regarded her with a cold scorn. They were conservative souls, by nature. They didn’t approve of mutinies, even mutinies justified on legal grounds. With a machine’s humor, one scribe said, “Who are you? I don’t recognize you.”

The others laughed in low, disgusted voices.

Miocene said nothing for a long second. Then her image pretended to sigh, and in a passing fashion, she mentioned, “I can improve this map of yours. I know things that the old Master couldn’t have imagined.”

Doubt bled into interest.

Then, curiosity.

But one of the scribes shook its rubber face, warning her, “Your predecessor has to be put on trial. A fair and public trial, as mandated by the ship’s own laws. Otherwise we will not work with you.”

“Haven’t I promised trials?” she replied. “Examine my fife. Any profile you wish. When have I been anything but a champion of the ship’s laws?”

The scribes did as Miocene advised, and just as she expected, they grew bored. Her life wasn’t a puzzle. It held no interest for them. One after another, their gazes returned to their elaborate, mysterious map.

“If I give you this information,” she told them, “you cannot share it with anyone else. Is that understood?”

“We understand everything,” the first scribe warned.

“And if you find a possible solution, tell no one but me. Me.” She stared at each set of their glass eyes. “Can you embrace those terms?”

In a voice, they said, “Yes.”

Into the map, Miocene inserted the newest parameters: she drew the hyperfiber shell surrounding the core, then set Marrow inside the shell, and finally she showed what was inside Marrow. Then she caused Marrow to expand and contract, a flood of data explaining how energy cycled through the iron body, how the buttresses kept it firmly in place, and anything else of potential interest that she had absorbed over the horrible centuries.

In a fraction of a second, old faces grew enthralled.

Miocene felt the faint shudder as the ship’s engines began throwing plasma out into the cold, cold universe.

The physical portion of her sat beside her son, watching as he turned and showed her another good smile.

“It’s lovely, yes,” he admitted.

The plasma river was a wide column moving at near lightspeed, only a tiny portion of its energies given off as visible light, but still bright enough that the stunning glare caused the stars to vanish in their blinking, tearing eyes.

“May we leave now, madam?” he asked quietly, like a bored little boy.

The other part of her, the holoimage, was equally disappointed. She was surrounded by scribes who whispered at lightspeed, able to accomplish miracles inside an instant.

Then with a calm, knowing face, one of the scribes gave her a tentative and ridiculously simple solution to the great puzzle.

“That?” she cried out. “That’s your answer?”

The first scribe spoke for its peer, admitting, “That’s an artistic solution. Not a hard mathematical one. Madam.”

“Obviously.’Then as she vanished, she growled, “Tell no one, just the same. And keep working at it. Will you do that for me?”

“No,” the scribe replied, speaking to empty air.

“We do it for ourselves,” said its neighbors.

And they were whispering again, using those quick dessicated voices, their plaything-puzzle suddenly transformed, everything about their tiny universe made fascinating again, and inside this stuffy room, everything was enormous.

Forty

To watchful eyes, they were another anonymous repair crew: several dozen Remoras happily imprisoned inside their bulky lifesuits, sitting shoulder to shoulder inside one of their tough old skimmers, every face different from its neighbors’s faces, everyone telling good filthy Remoran jokes as they made their way toward the ship’s leading face.

“How many captains does it take to fuck?” one asked.

“Three,” the others shouted. “Two to do it, while the third captain hands out the appropriate awards and citations!”

“Where does the Master send her shit?” asked another.

Everyone pointed at the nearest of the rocket nozzles, then broke into a familiar, half-amused giggle.

Then Orleans leaned forward, asking, “What’s the difference between the new Master and the old one?”

There was an abrupt silence. Everyone knew the question, but nobody recognized the joke. Which wasn’t surprising, since the old man had just dreamed it up.

His newest mouth pulled into an enormous smile, short tusklike teeth tapping against the faceplate. “Any ideas? No?” Then he let off a big laugh, telling them, “Our new Master came back from the dead. While the old one was never alive.”

Polite, if somewhat nervous laughter gave way to silence.

Pivoting his helmet, Orleans showed his face to the crew. On a public channel, he told them, “It wasn’t very funny. You’re right.” But on a scrambled private channel, he said, “Don’t dwell on things.” He told them, “We’ll be dead soon enough. Relax.”

Nervousness mutated into a useful determination. No, they were thinking, they wouldn’t die. His crew’s outlook was betrayed by their straight-backed postures and defiant fists. These were mostly youngsters, and most still believed they could fool death by culturing a positive attitude along with their innate cleverness and deserved good fortune. “Not me,” each thought.’I won’t die today.” Then one after another, they turned their faces toward the rocket’s nozzle, looking at its vastness, and at the brilliant column of fight—the new Master’s farts—the light dwarfing everything else, splitting the universe neatly in two.

Only Orleans ignored the spectacle. He kept his amber eyes focused on the blisterlike buildings that flanked the wide roadway. In a rare mood, he found himself feeling sentimental, recalling that when he was a youngster, he thoroughly expected to be dead by now. Vaporized by an impact comet, probably. The idea that he could outlive everyone in his generation… well, it didn’t seem like a possibility then. Such an impossibly long life would prove a Remora’s cowardice, or at least a crippling sense of caution. Yet Orleans was neither a coward nor a worrier, and he had a sharp disrespect for luck, good and otherwise.

Over the centuries, then the millenia, he had seen friends die without warning or a fair chance. He had outlived children and grandchildren, then descendants who carried a tiny fraction of his unique seeds. But it wasn’t luck that had carried him this far. Not good luck, or its evil mate. What was to blame, undoubtedly, was the universe’s own magnificent, seamless indifference.

Orleans was too small to be noticed.

Too insignificant to send a comet plummeting his way.

His was a faith rich with logic and an ascetic’s beauty, and until this moment, it seemed to be a durable, determined faith. But suddenly a second possibility had crawled into view. Perhaps, just perhaps, some great Fate had long ago taken Orleans under its protective shroud, saving him for this day and this moment, making it possible for him to make this inconspicuous journey across the ship’s vast and stark and enchanting hull.

The city wasn’t even a name when Orleans was born. But today it was large enough that leaving it seemed to take forever. Building after blister-shaped building streaked past. Hyperfiber homes, for the most part. Minimalist places with walls and a roof, hard vacuum and ample privacy, where couples and other mating configurations contributed their seeds, babies born inside hyperfiber wombs that expanded as needed, both child and machine developing hands and legs, and a head, and deemed “born” during a day-long celebration that culminated when a fully functioning reactor and recycle system were strapped onto the Remora’s wide back.

Between the homes were the rare shops hawking what few wares could entice citizens who had absolutely no need for food or drink, and who disapproved of most possessions. Other structures were assembled from clear diamond, and unlike buildings, they were sealed against the vacuum. Sealed and stocked with a variety of species, terran and otherwise. Every organism was nominally immortal, and under the rain of hard radiations and the force of simple time, they had mutated in chaotic fashions, yielding a wild assortment of shapes and unlikely colors, and unexpected, sometimes entertaining behaviors.

Remoran parks, in essence.

The largest park was on the city’s fringe, and as they passed that blur of color and shape, Orleans told himself to go there and take a look at its inhabitants. Who knew? Perhaps he would find inspiration for his next self-induced transformation.

The skimmer streaked into the open, accelerating to its limits.

Time moved sluggishly, stubbornly. Again, then again, Orleans showed his face to his crew, and on the scrambled channel, he forced them to repeat their timetable and describe each of their critical jobs. Then for the first time, he finally looked at their target, and he allowed himself a deep quick breath, holding his personal atmosphere inside lungs that were only glancingly human—lungs built by a lifetime of carefully directing mutations that gave them and their slow black blood an efficiency bordering on perfection.

The Remoran ideal.

Like thousands of skimmers in the past, theirs was slipping close to the giant nozzle, taking them toward the ship’s leading face. A slab of scrap hyperfiber lay in the open. Even at their enormous speed, the AI pilot should have had time to notice it, and react. But the AI—old and notorious for its failures—announced that it was ill, and a human would have to drive from this point on.

In those critical moments, the slab cocked itself, then sprang up.

Engulfed by the skimmer’s forcefield, it spun once, then was driven into the diamond body, slicing into machinery and knocking both reactors off-line.

In less than three kilometers, the skimmer dropped to the hull and stopped.

Within moments, an automated plea was sent, and an empty skimmer began navigating its way though city traffic, making for the crippled vessel. And just to make the drama more genuine, the Remoran dispatcher laughed at the crew’s misery and embarrassment, telling a favorite old joke.

“Why’s the sky full of stars?”

Several dozen recorded voices replied in a carefully ragged chorus.

“To entertain Remoras!’ they screamed. “While we wait for fucking parts!”

Forty-one

Washen could tell, even at a distance, even though they were wearing the bruise-black uniforms of security troops, and their skin was gradually losing its smoky cast as the ship’s lights and new foods worked on their flesh; with all that, Washen could still see them for what they were. Waywards.

The two-engine burn was half-finished,, and five Waywards were calmly working their way down the narrow avenue. If Washen was as obvious as they, she was doomed. The next pair of staring eyes would spot her, and a narrow burst of laser light would boil away her new body, and whatever was left would be carried straight to the new Master, Washen s miseries just beginning. But she reminded herself that she didn’t stand out, even a little bit. She had a name and robust identity that would absorb every scrutiny. She was wearing a mask of someone else’s skin, giving her an appearance designed not to draw attention. What’s more, Washen had ceased to be. The first-grade captain was thousands of years dead. The Loyalist leader died more than a century ago. If she was especially fortunate, both of these women had been forgotten, wiped into a delicious anonymity that in the fullness of time would claim everyone who happened to be sitting here today.

“Delicious,” she muttered.

“What is?” asked one of her companions.

“The ice cream,” she allowed, smiling as she dipped her spoon back into the melting brown mound. Then with an understated honesty, she said, “It’s been a little while since I enjoyed a good chocolate.”

Pamir nodded agreeably. He was wearing a handsome face, and like Washen, he wore a simple dark ochre robe that made them look like clergy members in any of several different Rationalist faiths. As clergy members, they were ready to proselytize with the slightest encouragement, which was why most of their fellow passengers tried to avoid small talk with them. It was the perfect identity for two humans who needed to hide in the bustling heart of the ship.

The third member of their little party was even more imposing. Massive and towering, he lifted a mug of something rancid and took a few long swallows down his eating hole, while his breathing hole quietly whistled a few words.

“It is a beautiful place, this place,” his translator declared.

Pamir glanced at Washen, allowing himself a knowing grin. Then he stared at the harum-scarum’s face, asking, “How’s your drink?”

The alien was mostly heated plastic and hidden motors. Locke was tucked inside the long body, his legs tied back and arms bound at his sides. Everything that the harum-scarum would see, he saw. Everything it heard was piped into his ears. But his mouth was filled with a permeable plastic, and a small AI told the machine when to move and what to say. Locke was a passenger inside that automaton. He was cargo. Since the early days of the ship, devices of this ilk had smuggled things illegal and precious. According to Pamir, this was the best model on hand—considering the limits of time and their very special needs.

The false voice whistled, answering Pamir’s question. “My drink is beautiful,” said the box on the broad chest.

“And what’s beauty?” asked Washen, sounding very much like a proselytizer. “Do you remember what we told you, friend?”

“The residue of reason mixed in a sea of chaos,” their companion answered.

“Precisely,” said the humans, in a shared voice, both dipping spoons into their beautiful desserts. Then Washen stared off at the Waywards, saying, “Chaos,” to herself, under her quickening breath.

Walking the avenue, watching aliens and strange humans going about their very strange lives, the Waywards struggled to retain a sense of total control. No, they didn’t come from a backward world. No, they weren’t awed by the endless cosmopolitan landscape that was the Great Ship. In their smiling faces and grim, staring eyes, they showed nothing but a cocky toughness common to police officers anywhere. And elaborate sensors automatically probed and prodded the strange bodies around them, teasing out their secrets, proving that there was nothing here to be feared. And yet.

Behind the eyes was a nervousness, childlike and almost endearing.

As they approached the cafe, Washen studied them with nothing but her own eyes and experience. Obviously, the five Waywards had spent their short lives making ready for today. For this particular walk. They’d always known that they would board the Great Ship, reclaiming it for the Builders. They had studied their roles and practiced a thousand scenarios to exhaustion—scenarios designed by Miocene, no doubt—and like children anywhere, they couldn’t help but accept this day with a rigorous lack of imagination.

Of course they were here. Of course they ruled the ship! After all, this moment had been promised to them by Till and the dead Builders. From the moment they were born, and in every spoken word…!

But despite simulations and every carefully entombed lesson, the reality of this place was beginning to slam down on their inexperienced heads: a whiff-Kon saluted them with its tail, and one young man jerked his hand, ready to fend off an imagined blow. A golden rilly bird landed on one of their armored shoulders, wanting to sing for food and getting nothing but a quick shove for its trouble. Then a human child, perhaps knowing a little something about Waywards, said, “For you,” He was sitting at a nearby table, and he said, “A gift, sir.’Then he handed up a wide, greenish-brown beetle. No, it was a cockroach. Something that the child had caught under the cafe tables, probably.

The Wayward accepted the gift and pointed sensors at its body and kicking legs. Then he glanced at his companions, and receiving no suggestions, he did what must have seemed like the polite thing.

He pushed the roach into his mouth, and chewed.

What was a quiet avenue became deathly silent. Passengers and a few off-duty crew members held their breath until the Wayward swallowed. By then, he sensed that he had guessed wrong, and for a moment, he was lost. What should he do now? But then some teacher’s sage advice came back to him, and he said, “What a wonderful flavor.” He said it with a humble charm. Then he laughed, working desperately to expose his embarrassment to his very tense audience.

A palpable relief came from everywhere at once.

Wrapped inside that tiny drama was a lesson. Washen glanced at Pamir, and he nodded, seeing it for himself.

The old Master and her dusty old captains weren’t missed. The mutiny had been quick and virtually bloodless, and the mutineers—whatever their motives—had a simple charm, not to mention other qualities that tourists always appreciated:

These Waywards were a different sort of people, novel and new, and in the most unexpected ways, they could be entertaining.

The patrol continued with its sweep, and after another few moments, they arrived at Washen’s table, a first little glance giving them no reason to linger. But the trailing officer—a strong chocolate-colored woman—seemed to notice something about the three of them, and she hesitated. She stared at Washen, and too late, Washen realized that she had been staring at one of the youngish men, his quick face and smoky gray eyes reminding her of Diu. One of Diu’s children, perhaps.

The woman said, “Please, if you would. Your idenitities, please.”

Her fellow officers paused and looked over their shoulders, waiting with a professional impatience.

Washen, then Pamir, offered their new names and flecks of other people’s skin. The harum-scarum obeyed last, its attitude perfectly in keeping with its nature—an angry tangle of sounds diluted in the translation:

“I resent you, but you have the power.”

The woman seemed to understand the species. “I have the power,” she agreed, “but I admire you just the same.” Then their names were checked against the ship’s extensive rosters, and when everything appeared as it should, she told the three of them, “Thank you for your gracious cooperation.”

“You’re welcome,” Pamir replied, for everyone.

The Wayward seemed ready to leave, then had second thoughts. Or she pretended second thoughts, taking a half-step before pausing, a glance at Washen preceding the careful question, “Why don’t you approve of us?”

“Is that what you think?” asked Washen.

“Yes.” There was something of Aasleen in the face and manners. Perhaps it meant nothing, but the woman seemed less like a Wayward than the others. She said, “Ignorance,” with a delicate anger. Then shaking her head as if disappointed, she added, “You consider yourself a person of rational intelligence. As I understand your Rationalist uniform. But I don’t believe you have any understanding of me. Is that true?”

Washen said, “Probably somewhat true, yes.”

The officer was scanning her—a deep, thorough scan meant to find any abnormalities, any excuse for a deeper interrogation. Conversation was an excuse to stand too close and stare.

“About this world of yours,” Washen began.’This Marrow place—”

“Yes?”

“It seems very mysterious. And unlikely, I think.”

These weren’t points easily deflected. The woman shrugged her shoulders, and with a forced amiability quoted a Rationalist maxim. “ ‘Good questions asked well dispel every mystery.’ ”

“Where were you born?”

“Hazz City,” the woman replied.

“When?”

“Five hundred and five years ago.”

Washen nodded, wondering if she had ever met this woman. “Hazz City… is that a Wayward place…?”

“Yes.”

“Always?”

The woman nearly took the bait. Then she hesitated, and with a delicate accuracy, she told everyone in the cafe, “Marrow isn’t a large world. And as long as humans have lived there, in one flavor or another, everything on it has been Wayward.”

Washen sat motionless, and silent.

Their interrogator turned to Pamir, saying, “Please, sir. Ask a good question.”

The false face grinned, and after a half-moment, he wondered aloud, “When can I go down and see this world of yours?”

She was scanning Pamir, and her companions formed a half-circle around the table, their sonics and infrareds probbing from different vantage points.The man with Diu’s eyes laughed gently, then said, “You can visit there now, if you want.”

As a prisoner, he meant.

The woman disapproved. She said it with a hard glance, then calmly and smoothly explained to Pamir, “In the near future, there will be tours. Of course. It’s a very lovely world, and I’m sure it will be a popular destination.”

Some of the passengers nodded agreeably, probably eager for the day.

Then the harum-scarum belched with a solid thud, and drawing everyone’s attention, he promised, “I have a better question than theirs.”

“By all means,” said the woman.

“May I join the Waywards?”

That brought a nervous little silence. Then the woman smiled with a genuine serenity, and she gave the honest answer.

“I don’t know,” she told the alien. “But when I find myself in Till’s company again, I will certainly ask—”

She was interrupted by a sudden motion.

Abrupt, and small. But the motion was noticed. Patrons at other tables looked down in astonishment, watching as the faces of their drinks rippled, as the ceiling and walls and rigid stone floor trembled.

A sound followed after the motion. There was a low, low roar that came sweeping from above, racing down the avenue and passing deeper into the ship.

Washen feigned surprise.

Pamir did it better. He straightened his back and looked at the woman officer, and with a voice edging into terror, he asked, “What the fuck was that?”

She didn’t know.

For a long moment, the five Waywards were as lost as anyone. Then Washen offered the obvious explanation. “It was an impact.” She looked at her companions, telling them, “It was a comet. We’re closing on that next star and black hole… it must have been one of their comets hitting us…”

Word spread through the cafe, merging with the same explanation as it was generated up and down the long avenue.

The Wayward was trying to believe Washen. But then she heard a general announcement coming through an implanted nexus, explaining enough that she winced as if in pain, and she growled under her breath, then turned to her companions and announced, “One of the engines… has failed…”

Then she seemed to realize that she shouldn’t have spoken so freely. A conjured smile framed her next words. “But everything is very much under control,” she told everyone, her expression and tone saying the precise opposite.

Human faces looked wounded, or they laughed with a giddy nervousness. Aliens digested the news with everything from calmness to a pheromonal scream, the cafe’s air suddenly thick with odd stinks and piercing, indigestible sounds.

Another message was delivered on a secure channel. The woman tilted her head, paying rapt attention. Then to her team, she shouted, “With me. Now!”

The five Waywards ran, pushing into a full sprint.

If anything, that made the panic worse. Patrons began searching through official news services as well as the rumor oceans, holo projections covering tabletops and slick granite floor and dancing in the air. One of the ship’s two firing engines had fallen into a premature sleep. Nothing else was certain. A thousand self-labeled experts promised that no combination of mistakes could cause a malfunction, certainly nothing this catastrophic. Again and again, voices mentioned the pointed word, “Sabotage.”

Within three minutes, sixty-five individuals and ghostly organizations had claimed responsibility for this tragedy.

Washen gave Pamir a brief look.

He did nothing. Then after a few moments, he announced, “We need to be leaving,” as he rose to his feet. Looking up the avenue, he seemed to be deciding on their route to the next hiding place. Then he said, “This way,” and took the harum-scarum under its spiked elbow, coaxing it along.

Perpendicular to the avenue was a narrow, half-lit tunnel.

Pamir and the false alien were walking side by side, passing through a demon door into a thicker, warmer atmosphere. Where the tunnel bent to the right, a figure appeared, small and running hard, the black of the uniform making it blend into the gloom.

There wasn’t space for three bodies.

The collision was abrupt and violent, and utterly one-sided. The security officer found himself on his back, gazing up at an unreadable alien face.

Pamir started to kneel, started to say, “My apologies.”

He was offering the officer a big hand.

The Wayward gave a low, wild scream. And that’s when the rest of his squad appeared, rounding the turn to find one of their own apparently being assaulted. Weapons were deployed. Curt warnings were shouted. The loudest Wayward told everyone, “Stand back!”

The harum-scarum kept true to its nature.

“I stand here,” he rumbled. “You stand there.”

A kinetic round entered the neck, obliterating flesh and ceramic bones, nothing vital damaged and the automation barely wavering, long hands thrust up against the ceiling while the translation box cried out:

“No no no no!”

In a wild panic, every Wayward fired on the monster.

The head dropped backward, riding a hinge of leather, and the legs were dissolved with lasers, the great body dropping hard onto its stumplike knees. Then an explosive round cut into the body itself, exposing a human tied into a secret bundle, wrapped inside a transparent silicone envelope.

Locke stared out at the armed officers. His expression was simple. A pure withering terror had taken hold of him, the surprise total and dismantling.

Standing nearby, Washen saw his enormous eyes and little else.

Every weapon was pointed at him. There was a slippery instant when everything was possible, and maybe they would set down their lasers and free him. Maybe. But then Washen threw herself toward her son, screaming, “No-!”

They fired.

What Locke would see last was his mother trying to cover him with her inadequate body, and then a purple brilliance stretching on forever.

Forty-two

A chain of tiny, almost delicate explosions had smashed valves and pumping stations. No target was vital. The Great Ship was nothing but redundancies built on sturdy redundancies. But the cumulative effects were catastrophic: a lake of pressurized hydrogen gathered in the worst possible place, and a final sabotage caused a magnetic bottle to fail, a mirroring mass of metallic anti-hydrogen dropping into the sudden lake, the resulting blast excavating a plasma-filled wound better than twelve kilometers across.

The vast rocket coughed, then stopped firing.

Within seconds, security forces were on full alert, gathering at predetermined disaster-management stations.

Within minutes, using lasers and hyperfiber teeth, a scuttlebug worked its way through the thinnest part of the slag, a spare head shoved out into the open, its mouth blistered by the residual plasmas and the eyes seeing a rainbow of hard radiations.

Miocene saw nothing but the rainbow. Then she closed that set of eyes and opened her own, seeing her son’s hard gaze. And with a calmly low voice, she said, “It’s nothing.”

She told Till, and herself, “It’s just an inconvenience.”

Then before he could respond, she assured both of them, “Our burn resumes in seven minutes. Using backup pumps, and at full strength. I’ll extend the burn to allow for the delay, and the ship will be back on course.”

He had assumed as much. With a heavy shake of the head, he asked, “Who?”

What she knew, she told.

He repeated the critical word. “Remoras,” he said, a painful disappointment wrapped around it. Then, “Which ones? Can we tell?”

Miocene fed him compressed gouts of data, including coded transmissions and visual images culled from distant security eyes. The presumption of guilt was just that. Nothing was perfectly incriminating. But the innocent break-down of the skimmer was too perfect to be believed. She admitted as much, then concluded with the cold, perfectly honest comment, “I’ve never particularly trusted Remoras.”

Between them, Till showed less emotion.

“Our enemies,” he said calmly. “Where are they now?”

A replacement skimmer had rendezvoused with the Remora crew, then continued out onto the ship’s leading face. “I’ve ordered its capture,” Miocene mentioned. “But my sense is that they won’t be on board.”

Her son agreed, seeing the best alternative. “The disabled skimmer—”

“Was towed back to the city.”

Till was silent for a long moment.

Through a security nexus, Miocene felt a ripple, a tremor, and her breathing quit abruptly. “Did you—” she began.

“Wouldn’t you?” was his response.

Before Miocene could offer her opinion, he assured her, “We’ll use a minimum of five-person teams. And they’ll only search for that one crew. Isn’t that the reasonable course?”

“Reasonable or rash,” she answered, “it’s the Master’s responsibility. Which means that it’s my decision to make.” Till sighed heavily, then forced a wide smile. “Make it,” he coaxed.

A universe of data begged to be noticed. In a mostly thorough, near light-speed fashion, Miocene assigned degrees of importance to each bit of news, real or rumored, then absorbed and digested what seemed critical. Small protests were being held in scattered parts of the ship. Weapons had been discharged in half a dozen public venues. But mostly as warnings. With billions of passengers, there was the guarantee that a few of the fights were simply criminal. There was always a perfectly normal trickle of violence. Locke was still missing, a thousand little whiffs of evidence implying that he was killed on the first day. Then she focused on the teams that Till had dispatched to the Remoran city: their makeup; their training histories; their inadequate experience. They were as good as some units, no better than most. But wouldn’t this work demand the best? Sending a few bodies into an enemy-held city seemed like such a blatant waste, and dangerous…

She lingered on that one telling word. Waste.

Then again, she examined the damage through the scut-debug’s eyes. She took a deep breath of the blistering plasmas, thinking about the ancient machines that had been slaughtered for no worthy purpose, and she calculated the numbers of engineers and drones that these repairs would demand. Wayward engineers, probably. Since she still didn’t yet trust her own corps. And when she was angry enough, her living mouth dropped open, remarking to her First Chair, “I’m going to let your orders stand.”

“As you wish, madam.”

“Also,” she continued, “I want a full weapons array positioned nearby. In case our troops are attacked. Where we were when the rockets fired… that would be a natural vantage point, and nicely ironic. Don’t you think?”

Till’s face brightened, and he said, “All in your service, madam.”

Then he bowed.

Bowed to Miocene, she could only hope.

Forty-three

An army of tiny bone-white toadstools stood on a carpet of something dark and wet, with warm, feathery vapors rising into the bright damp air.

For a long while, nothing happened, nothing changed.

Then a fissure opened, and a filthy hand and wrist pushed up into the light, the elbow exposed, the arm bending one way, then the other, fingers obliterating the delicate toadstools with groping motions growing more desperate by the moment.

Finally the hand retreated, vanished.

A half-instant passed.

Then with a sloppy, wet sloosh, the ground spilt wide, and a naked body sat up, spitting and gasping, then coughing with a choking vigor that after several painful minutes fell away into a string of quiet moans.

The man stared at his surroundings.

Surrounding him was a forest of thick-bodied mushrooms, each as large as a full-grown virtue tree. His face was amazed and dubious and frightened, and even when he should have recovered from his suffocation, his breathing remained elevated, and his heart rattled along with an anxious gait, and no matter how many times he wiped his eyes with the dirty heels of his hands, he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing.

Under his ragged breath, he muttered, “Where? Where?”

At the sound of his voice, a tall man stepped from the mushroom forest. The man was wearing the uniform of a Submaster, but the mirrored fabric was wrinkled and tired, the sleeves frayed, a vertical gash exposing one of his long pale legs. He was smiling, and he wasn’t. He approached to a point, then knelt and said, “Hello.” He said, “Relax.” He said, “A name. We usually start with a name.”

“My name…?”

“That might be best.”

“Locke.”

“Of course.”

“What happened to me?” Locke sputtered.

“You were there,” the other man remarked. “Better than me, you would know what happened.”

Like a person suddenly cold, Locke pulled his knees out of the stinking black earth, grabbing them and holding tight for a long moment. Then he quietly, quietly asked, “What is this place?”

“Again,” said the man, “you would know that answer, too.”

Locke’s face seemed quite simple, and for the moment, very young. After a thoughtful gasp, he said, “All right,” and forced himself to look up with a mixture of resignation and hopefulness. “I don’t know you,” he admitted. “What’s your name?”

“Hazz.”

Locke opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“I’ll take that as a sign of recognition,” the long-dead man responded. Then he stood and beckoned, telling the newcomer, “Clean yourself. Tell me what you want for clothes, and they’ll appear. Then if you wish, follow me.” The dead man smiled in a knowing fashion, saying, “I know someone who very much wants to see you.”

Locke must have been hoping for someone else.

Wearing a Wayward’s leather breechcloth, he followed Hazz out of the mushroom forest, and the simple young face vanished abruptly. He was angry now. His back stiffened. His voice failed on its first attempt. Then he forced himself to say, “Father,” with a pure, unalloyed bitterness.

Diu sat on a petrified toadstool outside a simple shelter, wearing the same gaudy clothes in which he had died. Gray eyes danced. A mischievous look came over his craggy features. Quietly, mockingly, he asked, “So who murdered you? One of your sons, I can hope.”

Locke stopped short, his mouth grim and determined.

Diu laughed and slapped his knees, then said, “Or it wasn’t. But I bet it was some distant relative. Your own blood, almost assuredly.”

“I had to do it,” Locke grunted. “You were killing Mother—”

“She deserved to die,” Diu replied, framing the words with big shrugs. “Escaping from Marrow that way. Too soon, and without warning anyone. Nearly alerting the Master to our presence. How did that help the Wayward cause?”

Locke opened his mouth, and waited.

“She was dangerous,” Diu assured. “Everything you want and deserve was at risk because of her and because of Miocene.”

A deep breath filled Locke’s chest, then lay there growing stale.

“But let’s forget your mother’s despicable, endurable crimes,” Diu continued. “There’s another offender. Someone who’s potentially far more dangerous to the Waywards, and to the Builders’ great cause.”

“Who?”

Diu growled, “Please,” and shook his head in disgust.

Then he rose to his feet, saying, “You had an assignment. A clear duty. But instead of doing your duty, you rushed off to that alien house as soon as you had the chance. And I want to know why, son. Why was it so fucking important to go there?”

Locke turned in a quick circle, but Submaster Hazz had vanished.

“Tell me,” Diu pressed.

“Don’t you know why?”

“What I know,” he replied with a rasping voice,’is inconsequential. What I don’t know, and what matters here, is your response.”

Locke said nothing.

“Were you hoping to find your mother?” Nothing.

“Because you couldn’t have. You and Till couldn’t recover her body more than a century ago. What good could you accomplish by going there alone?”

“I don’t need to explain—”

“Wrong!’ Diu interrupted. “You do! Because I don’t think you know what you want. For this last horrible century, you’ve been nothing but lost.” His father shook his head, saying, “I’m not asking these questions to soothe my arrogant soul. I’m asking for the sake of your miserable one.” Then he laughed in a large, tormenting way, adding, “What? Did you think that being dead was easy? That the Builders would simply ignore your last-breath crimes…?”

“I did nothing wrong!”

“The old Master was digging her way toward Marrow, but the Waywards never knew how she found the old hole. Chances are, a routine search had turned up that hidden doorway’ Diu closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he opened them again, acting angry to find his son still standing before him. “You went to that leech house… you went to see if the old Master had been there first. Because if she had been, then she might have realized where Washen was. And maybe, just maybe, your mother had been rescued. Admit that much to your father, Locke. Go on.”

“Fine. I admit it.”

“Maybe you were afraid that nobody had found your mother, and you wanted to help her. A noble sentiment, always.”

Nothing.

“Because a long burn was coming,” Diu continued. “The longest in many centuries. And what if her remains were piped into one of the engines, then incinerated? What if that happened before you, the dutiful son, could pull her to safety?”

Locke took a new breath, holding it close to his panicking heart.

“Tell me that’s the truth,” Diu snapped.

“It’s true.”

The Diu said, “You’re lying,” with a crisp, dismissive confidence. “Don’t try to fool your old father, Locke. I know a little something about telling lies.”

Trembling hands tugged at the breechcloth.

“The fuel tank is a vast ocean of hydrogen—one of several—and what are the odds that Washen would be yanked out of her grave?” Diu rose and took a step toward Locke, and with the gray eyes staring, he asked, “What are the odds that she would ever be found? Shattered and scattered like she was… Washen could have lain in the depths forever, and except for you and Till, and Miocene… who would have known…?”

Locke didn’t reply.

“About your mother’s little clock,” said Diu.

Locke’s eyes grew large and simple, and exceptionally sad. Softly, almost too softly to be heard, he asked, “What do you mean?”

“You and Till cleaned the leech house. It took days and you had minimal resources, but you did an exemplary job of things. Considering.” Diu smiled as if he could see everything, and he remarked, “It’s so very odd, isn’t it? Such a good job of hiding your tracks, yet that one critical clue went unnoticed. Left behind, buried deep in the plastic leech wall—”

Locke gave a low, pained moan.

“It makes a person wonder,” his father continued. “Was it overlooked by chance? Or was it purposely ignored?”

Wide shoulders slumped forward, and Locke stared at his bare toes.

“Or did someone find her clock… hold it in his own hands, perhaps… then willfully leave it where someone else would have to eventually come across it…? Which is precisely what you hoped would happen, isn’t it…?”

“Am I right about that, son…?”

“Till wasn’t watching your work, because he trusted you. And you left behind a sign. A marker. Because you wanted very much for your mother to be found…”

Locke opened his mouth, then closed it. Then with a new defiance, he screamed, “No. I won’t tell you-!”

But Diu wasn’t standing before him. Not anymore.

Locke blinked and felt his body sagging, hopelessness mixed with relief. Then a warm hand took him on the bare shoulder, and he turned into her, knowing it was her, crying in the soft angry way of a man who knows that he has been fooled and who discovers that really, at the heart of things, he doesn’t even care…

“What is this place, and these dead men…?”

“Just another corner of the ship,” Washen assured him, holding him tight around his back and the back of his head. “Pamir found it before he found my clock. An AI lives here. With my help, it created Hazz. And your father. With its help, I watched your reactions, and parts of your nervous system.”

“You read my mind?”

She said, “Never,” and relaxed her arms, letting him pull away and look into her face before she confessed, “You didn’t see Wayward soldiers. No one shot at us. That was a different performance, existing as false data fed straight to your eyes and ears. And you’re certainly not dead now”

Relief bled into a guilty, self-aware grimace.

“It’s just us,” she promised.

“Pamir?”

“He’s doing other work now.” She sat on the petrified toadstool, never taking her eyes off Locke. “There’s nobody else. Tell me what you want to tell me. Then if you wish, I’ll let you go back to Till. Or just sit here.” She waited a half-moment, then added, “And if you don’t want to tell me, I’ll accept that, too. All right?”

Locke sighed, glancing at his own empty hands.

Finally, quietly, he announced, “I think I will. Explain things. Maybe.”

Washen struggled to say nothing and to choke down her excitement. Instead, she nodded, and with a gentle voice asked, “How is our home?”

“Changed,” he blurted. Wide, astonished eyes lifted. “You don’t realize, Mother. This has been a very long century…!”

Locke couldn’t stop talking, the words coming out under pressure.

“By the time I was home, the Loyalists were gone. Conquered. Dissolved. There were so many sympathizers and outright believers inside your borders that it was an easy invasion. Hazz City was clean and quiet, and very little had changed.” He paused, then said, “For a while.” He raked his golden hair with both hands, explaining, “Till and I returned, and Till had me detonate Diu s charges, closing the shaft overhead. Then Till gave a speech to everyone. Standing in your main temple, with Miocene’s head at his feet, he told everyone how our societies would join, and everyone would be stronger for joining, and we were part of the Builder’s ultimate plans, and soon, soon, soon everything would be explained.” He breathed quickly, deeply. Then, “You wouldn’t know Marrow. It’s a very strange place now.”

Washen resisted the urge to ask, “When wasn’t it strange before?”

But Locke guessed her thoughts. He tilted his head as if to reprimand, then with a despairing gasp, he announced, “Time’s very short now.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Locke confessed.

With a quiet, sharp voice, Washen asked, “Exactly what do you know?”

“There were timetables. Till wanted us to regain the ship before it changed course. Before today’s burn, if possible.” He shook his head, eyes lowering. “Since you left, our population’s grown tenfold. Factories as large as cities. We’ve been building weapons and training soldiers, and we manufactured enormous boring machines designed to dig upward. And downward, too.”

Washen said, “Downward,” and leaned closer.

Then with a breathless excitement, she asked, “Where do you find the power to fuel all of this?”

Locke examined his toes.

She prompted him, saying, “Till knew. About Diu, he knew. And probably from the earliest times. ‘Then because she might be completely mistaken, Washen added, “That’s the only way it makes sense to me.”

Her son gave the tiniest nod.

Washen didn’t have the luxury of feeling clever. Instead, she dropped to her knees in front of Locke, forcing him to look at her eyes. “Till knew about Diu’s secret caches. Didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“How? Did he see your father using them?”

Locke hesitated, considering. “When Till was young, just after his first visions, he found a cache. Found it and watched it, and eventually, Diu climbed out of it.”

“What else did he know?”

“That Diu was feeding him the visions. Diu was telling the stories about the Builders and the Bleak.”

She had to ask, “But why did Till believe any of it?”

A chiding look was followed by a sharp warning. “Father was an agent, he realized. A vessel.” Locke shook his head, adding, “The steel bowl doesn’t have to believe in the water that slakes a man’s thirst.”

“Granted,” said Washen.

“The day the Waywards were born…?”

“What about it?”

“That valley, that place I took you to… the hyperfiber cache was tucked inside one of those crevices… and we walked right past…”

Washen said nothing.

“I didn’t know. Not then.” A bitter little laugh leaked out of him. “Years before, Till asked his mother about security systems. How they worked; how they were fooled. Miocene thought it was good captainly knowledge, so she taught him. Then Till climbed inside the cache and convinced its AI that he was Diu, and he rode it into Marrow. Down beneath all that wet iron, and the heat, he found the machinery that powers the buttresses.”

Quiedy, Washen said, “All right.”

“That’s where almost all our power comes from,” said her son. “The core is a matter-antimatter reactor.”

“Have you seen it?” she asked.

“Just once,” he replied. Then he reminded Washen, or maybe himself, “Till trusts me. After we returned to Marrow, and after Miocene was reborn, he took us down there. To show us the place. To explain what he knew, and how. All of it.” Another pause. “Miocene was thrilled. She had a conduit built that taps the energies. She claims that the reactor, once its fully understood, will transform the Milky Way, and humanity, and each of us.”

“Does that place offer answers?” Washen asked. “Does it tell us anything new about the Great Ship?”

Locke shook his head, disappointment rimmed with anger.

With a pitying voice, he said, “Mother,” and stared at her eyes. He stared and sighed, and as if addressing a small child, he asked her, “If Marrow hides inside the ship, and if this machinery hides inside Marrow… then what makes you think these mysteries ever come to an end…?”

“There’s something even deeper?” she sputtered.

A quick, tight nod.

“Have you seen that?

Again, he looked at his toes. “No,” he admitted. Then after a few deep breaths, he said, “Only Till has been that deep. And maybe, I suppose, Diu.”

“Your father-?”

“He was also Till’s father,” Locke blurted. “Till always suspected it. In secret. And in secret, he had our best gene-delvers decipher the genetics. Just to be sure.”

Washen silently absorbed the newest revelation.

Then she asked, “Is that everything you want to tell me? Till’s your half brother, and the ship’s full of mysteries?”

“No,” Locke replied.

He looked up at the towering mushrooms and gray hints of the hyperfiber roof, and with a weary anguish, he admitted, “I have certain thoughts. Doubts. For the last century, since I killed Diu… I’ve listened to Till’s plans, and Miocene’s, and I’ve helped meet all the deadlines, and I’ve watched what they’ve done to Marrow, and its people… a place I don’t even recognize anymore…’ Locke took a deep full breath, then said it. “When I look inside myself, I wonder.”

Down came his eyes, desperate for their mother.

But Washen refused to embrace him again. She stood and stepped back, and finally, with a slow and hard and pitiless voice, she asked, “Are you one of the Builders?”

The gray eyes pulled shut.

“That’s what you’re asking yourself. Isn’t it?” Then she gazed up at the sky, saying, “Because if you’re not the good souls of Builders reborn, by accident or by design… maybe you and Till and the rest of the Waywards… “Maybe you’re the Bleak reborn…!”

Forty-four

Every face was elaborate and utterly unique, and each had a sturdy, unexpected beauty that always became obvious with time.

Pamir watched the faces and listened to the watery voices.

“It was my decision. My plan. My responsibility.” Orleans’s mouth smiled, and his amber eyes changed shape, creating mouth-shaped patterns that mimicked his smile. “I accept the blame, and your punishment. Or your praise and blessings. Whichever verdict you, in your wisdom, wish to deliver.”

Most of the Remoran judges appeared uncomfortable, and it wasn’t because Pamir might be misreading their expressions. One old woman—a direct descendant of Wune, their founder—quoted the Remoran codes. “The ship is the greatest life. Injure its vitals, and you surrender your own life.” Her single eye, like a ruby floating on yellow milk, expanded until it half filled her faceplate. Then the compressed mouth added, “You know our codes, Orleans. And I remember two occasions when you carved the life-suit off another offender… for crimes less serious than disabling one of the main engines…!”

Perhaps a hundred judges and elders shared the diamond building. There were no airlocks, and not so much as a breath of atmosphere. Two doorways opened onto public avenues where hundreds of citizens fought for the chance to see this semi-secret trial. Every officious sound was a scrambled broadcast. Unlike Pamir, the audience could only measure the proceedings by watching faces.

Another elder rose to her feet, and into the angry buzz, she said, “Another code applies. Wune’s first and most essential code, as it happens.”

Together, in a shared voice, Remoras chanted, “Our first duty is to protect the ship from harm.”

The speaker’s blue face seemed to nod, and her musical voice offered, “This could be Orleans’s defense, if he chooses. Harm is harm, whether it comes from an impacting comet or a dangerous leadership.” Her helmet pivoted, and she asked the defendant, “Is this your argument, Orleans?”

“Absolutely,” he cried out.

Then he glanced at his companion, signaling him by swirling his eyes on their stalks.

As planned, Pamir stepped forward. “Distinguished citizens,” he proclaimed. “I ask to address the court.”

His lifesuit contained an electronic signature. As Remoras did with each other, a glance was enough to give his name, rank, and official status.

The one-eyed elder grumbled, “Is this appropriate? A wanted criminal defending a captured criminal?”

But a third elder—a small round fellow with a red-furred face—growled at her, saying, “Sarcasm later. Talk, Pamir. I want to hear you.”

“There isn’t time,” the captain agreed. “Wayward squads are coming. They want Orleans, but they’ll be thrilled to find me, too.”

The one-eyed woman grumbled, “Good.”

“I wish there was time,” Pamir continued. “For reflection. For a great debate. For a wise decision rendered by everyone. But every moment makes the Waywards stronger. Every minute, another steel ship rises up from Marrow, bringing soldiers and munitions and a set of beliefs that are laughable, and narrow, and indifferent to the wishes of every Remora.”

He paused a half-instant, checking with a security nexus, measuring the Waywards’ steady progress.

Then to the beautiful faces, he said, “I don’t want to be the Master Captain. But the rightful Master is dead, or worse. And I’m the ranking officer. According to the ship’s charter, I am its Master, and Miocene is a treasonous pretender. And since I’m parading the obvious here, maybe I should remind you.” He glanced at One-eye, then everywhere else. “For more than a hundred millenia, you’ve served the ship and its charter, just as you’ve served Wune’s faith. With devotion and bravery. And what I want from you now—what I am asking for, begging for—is this:

“Resist the Waywards. On my authority as the momentary Master Captain, give them nothing. Not your cooperation, or your resources, or any of your expertise. Is that too much to ask?”

An unnerving silence descended.

Then One-eye stated the obvious. “Miocene is going to be very unhappy. And these Waywards are sure to respond—”

“Then we’ll respond, too,” growled the blue-faced woman.

Every judge spoke, crowding into the same secure channel, the noise defiant and worried, angry and sad. But defiance seemed loudest, and knowing that emotions can change in the beat of any heart, Pamir chose that moment to shout out:

“Will you pronuse me? To give them nothing?”

A quick vote was taken.

Two of three Remoras nodded, saying, “Agreed.” Then Pamir made the next logical step. He said, “Good. And thank you.”

If he was going to escape the Waywards, he was going to have to slip away now. But instead of fleeing, Pamir stepped into the middle of the blister-shaped building, and again, quietly, he repeated the admonition, “Give them nothing.”

Then with the heavy grace of his lifesuit, he bent his legs and dropped to the floor, sitting on the smooth gray hull of the Great Ship.

Wayward teams were forcing their way through the bystanders. Pamir heard the broad-band squawk of sirens and saw bright helmets parting to let them pass. But he remained sitting, like the elderly judges and Orleans, showing a grim, determined face, spending those last moments reminding himself that he had done a few things just as stupid as what he was doing now.

But very few, and always for himself. No one else riding the risk.

Another harsh squawk caused the last civilians to scatter, and purple-black lifesuits emerged from the chaos, marching through the doorways with lasers held high and hard gray faces showing behind the faceplates—the descendants of lost captains, their strong features laid over a tough, uncompromising nature.

The soldiers’ armor was light, and their weapons could have been stronger. Miocene, or someone, was showing a calculated restraint.

Pamir took a deep breath, and he held it deep.

Two of the Wayward teams blocked the open doors. A third discovered an unregistered staircase leading into the city’s basement. The final two teams found Orleans, their lasers kept high but ready as they scanned him, then as they examined the other Remoras.

“On the authority of the Master Captain—” a Wayward began.

“Whose authority?” dozens of voices replied, in a sloppy chorus.

“We take this man into custody—”

A taunting laugh broke out from some, while other Remoras remained silent. And One-eye shook her head, cautioning, “We should do as they want.”

With a blurring voice, the Wayward listed other suspected saboteurs. Then with his free hand gesturing and his urgent voice breaking, he told his soldiers to hurry their scans. “Fast, and right!’ he barked. “Fast, and right!”

But the rest of Orleans’s crew was missing. Soldier after soldier said as much, their grim faces suffused with a toxic mixture of excitement and fear and an instinctive disgust. It took two scans, then a naked-eye stare through the faceplate for someone to say, “This isn’t one. Like the others, Look, sir.”

Pamir forced a grin, and finally, he let his spent breath slip out of his mouth.

A slow, astonished expression spread across the Wayward’s face. And after a little gasp, he said, “It’s that missing first-grade, sir. It’s Pamir!”

The ranking Wayward turned, and said nothing.

Every soldier felt surprise, then a wild, unexpected elation that ended when the blue-faced Remora announced.’This is the Master Captain. Our guest, in our home. Which means—”

“Take him!’ the ranking Wayward cried out.

Half of the Remoras screamed, “No!”

The Wayward pointed his weapon, warning everyone, “Stand out of our way, or I’ll cut you out of your fucking shells! Am I understood?” Plainly.

One-eye was sitting on a standard Remoran squirt-pack. She had volunteered for the duty, arguing that even if she didn’t agree with the vote, it had been taken, and perhaps the soldiers wouldn’t scan her as closely as some. The pack’s safeties were dismantled. Its vents were permanently closed. When she kicked it into the center of the room, the Remoras and Pamir remained sitting, doing nothing but turning toward the rounded wall, putting their armored packs between them and the makeshift bomb.

The explosion was silent, then otherwise.

Pamir was still on the hull, head thrust between his knees, and the sudden blast smacked him across the slick grayness, bouncing him against Remoras and soldiers, and finally, one shoulder slamming into the diamond wall.

The building filled with a temporary, scorching atmosphere. Standing bodies were flung hardest, and lasers were ripped loose, and in the next seconds, in that purposeful mayhem, new hands grabbed the lasers, their safeties instantly rendering them harmless.

Pamir staggered to his feet.

His left knee was shattered, but the suit’s servos made the leg carry him. He screamed, “Orleans,” three times before the welcome figure appeared next to him, then sprinted ahead, the Remora flinging himself down the staircase.

A laser blast emerged, punching through the rounded ceiling.

Then the soldier was wrestled down, her weapon yanked free, and Orleans waved and called out, “This way,” and sprinted along a narrow, barely lit hallway. His lifesuit was punctured. Pamir saw a white fountain of leaking vapor. Orleans’s self was dissipating into the vacuum. But not too quickly, thought Pamir. More hope at work than any expertise.

The hall divided three ways.

Left, right. And straight down.

Orleans turned, and in a gesture old as humankind, he placed one of his gloved fingers to his rubbery mouth. “Quiet,” he was saying.

Orleans dove into the black bottomless hole. Feet first, Pamir followed.

In that perfect darkness, there was no sense of falling. The body felt nothing of its own rapid acceleration, and rime seemed to slow, and Pamir was trying to relax, readying himself for a distant floor, when a voice suddenly, unexpectedly whispered into his ears.

“Pamir?” said the voice. “Can you talk?”

Washen.

“Can you hear me, Pamir?”

He didn’t dare use even a scrambled channel. Someone might hear his convoluted bark, then trace the source. But maybe Washen realized as much, because she kept talking, making it feel as if they were falling together.

“I’ve got news,” she reported. “Our friend has helped, and will help us…”

Good.

“But I need to know,” she continued. “Will our other friends assist? Have they agreed to fight with us?”

Just then, something powerful struck the hull.

For a screeching instant, Pamir brushed against the shaft wall. The entire hull was rippling under the impact. Then he was tumbling through space again, free of weight, momentarily functioning as a tiny, tiny starship… and he closed his eyes, remembering to breathe, then telling Washen, and himself, “The Remoras will fight.”

He whispered to her, “We’ve got ourselves a war.”