Marrow

My perfect, eternal solitude shattered by a wealth of stars, and by life, boisterous and abundant life, and it felt as if this was how it had always been. Skies filled with suns and living worlds, and the life within me fat and steady, prosperous beyond need or reasonable want, and how could it be any other way? Life peaceful, more than not. Life punctuated with great loves and endurable defeats. Life conjuring children out of semen and egg, software and cold crystals, and those children racing through their fresh-scrubbed incarnations with an innocent zest that always eroded into the steady cool pleasantness that is a mark of maturity that time, under its tireless hand, forces upon each of us.

I had nearly forgotten Death.

Not as a theory, never. As a principle and occasional tragedy, I couldn’t help but think of that great balancer. But as hard practicality—as the simple inevitable consequence of Life—Death seemed as left behind as my ancient, much treasured solitude.

Or perhaps I never actually knew Death.

To me, Her face appears grim and self-assured, yet unexpectedly beautiful. That beautiful face rests on a tall body growing stronger as the carnage worsens, and more lovely. A body that feeds on one soul or ten million souls, choosing her mouthfuls with a fickle maliciousness sure to leave the living wondering:

“Why not me?”

“Why am I still here, alone?”

I hear their voices. From my skin come murmurs. Shouts. Coded ticks and great white roars of EM noise, and always, lovely Death drinks in their glorious misery.

“Abandon your station… now…!”

“Attack… now…!”

“Do you see them… no… not yet, no…!”

“Hold—”

“Not there, you need to be… by the patch-and-pray shop… do you see, no…!”

“Retreat—!”

“Casualties… in excess of… eleven million in the bombardment, and twenty million displaced into basements…”

“They ambushed us at the assembly point, with machine-shop nuclears…”

“Kill me. If it comes to it.”

“I will. I promise.”

“Casualties eighty percent. Swarm still functioning.”

“Fall back, and dig…!”

“We have a reactor sabotaged. Off-line. Request engineers.

How about it? A quick screw?”

“Prisoners will be assembled here. Ranked according to their likely knowledge here. By me. Then taken home for interrogation, or disposed by standard means…”

“Fanatics.”

“Maniacs.”

“Soulless fucks.”

“How about a really quick fuck?”

“Come see, come see! I want to show all of you. These are cyborgs, my friends! Much as the Bleak were! Nothing but machines with odd guts shoved inside them. Here, touch their guts. Touch them, and smell them. Make yourselves clothes with this odd flesh. Cut up their shells for trophies. Machines and meat, and a great evil, and nothing else. I promise you-!”

“Casualties, ninety-two percent. Swarm effectiveness diminished.”

“Escape wherever you can, however you can…”

“NOTICE: WITHIN THE LAST SHIPMENT OF PRISONERS WAS A CAMOUFLAGED FINGER OF ANTIMATTER. ALL PRISONERS MUST BE EXAMINED THOROUGHLY BEFORE EMBARKING—”

“Retreat again… with all available skimmers…!”

“They’re the Bleak, reborn! And this is our duty, and our honor, to chop them open and kill them slowly-!”

“Our last city… Wune’s Hearts… abandoned…”

“NOTICE: PASSENGERS ARE NOT SUBJECT TO THE SAME TREATMENT AS REMORAS. THEY MAY NOT BE SUMMARILY EXECUTED, REGARDLESS OF BEHAVIOR. CIVIL CODES WILL REMAIN IN EFFECT. ALWAYS. FROM THE OFFICE OF THE MASTER CAPTAIN—”

“I won’t tell you anything, Bleak! Ever!”

“They’re calling us the Bleak now. Whatever that is. I don’t know. Considering, maybe we should be insulted…”

“Press them! Run them!”

“I’m finished, and you promised.”

An EM crackle, then a solid whump.

“Good dreams, friend.”

“My swarm’s gone. No one else alive. My family, most of them, are in Happens River. Tell them—”

“All right you shits! I’m a Bleak. We’re all pretty fucking Bleak in here. Does that scare you? Does that make you want to drip your piss? Because we’re going to keep holding our positions, you fucks, and if you want to take us, you’ve got to follow your piss down into our hole-/”

“All engines secured!”

“Reactors, on-line!”

“Waywards, they keep coming… new units keep coming… there’s more Waywards than we’ve got stars…”

“Again, retreat. You know how!”

“PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT: FIGHTING SLOWS IN THE INSURRECTION’S LAST HOURS. THE SHIP’S TRAILING FACE IS SECURE. ESSENTIAL SHIP OPERATIONS HAVE NEVER BEEN IMPAIRED. PASSENGER DISTRICTS HAVE NEVER BEEN ENDANGERED. FOR YOUR SUPPORT AND YOUR BLESSINGS, THANK YOU. FROM THE OFFICE OF THE MASTER CAPTAIN—”

“So we’ve got some time. How about a slow screw?”

“Sounds nice.”

“Doesn’t it, now?”

Forty-five

One of the generals said it first, and said it badly.

“The Remoras are just about beaten,” he declared, standing over the latest strategic holomaps. When he realized that the Master had overheard his audacious words, he straightened his back and squared his shoulders, adding, “We’ve destroyed every one of their cities, imprisoned or killed most of them, and pushed their refugees out onto the ship’s bow. Without cover, and with only a fool’s hope left to them.” Then he said, “Madam,” with a minimal bow, smiling in the Master’s direction while his pale eyes kept careful track of Till.

A reprimand was in order.

Something blunt, and powerful, and lasting.

Miocene showed a narrow grin, and in a near whisper, she assured her officer, “There is nothing to celebrate here.”

“Of course, madam.” Again, the little bow. “I simply meant—”

She stopped him with a crisp wave of the hand, and said nothing.

Instead of the expected words, Miocene stared at each of her generals, and Till, then conspicuously looked at no one when she said, “When we first arrived here, I noticed a man. A human male standing outside the bridge, wearing nothing but a handwritten sign.”

Silence.

“The End Is Here,” she quoted.

The silence grew less sure of itself.

“I’m a busy person, but I still have time enough to ask simple questions.” She shook her head, telling everyone, “He was a fool, obviously. One of those poor souls whose focus narrows too much, who can’t work free of some consuming, pathetic idea. For the last six centuries, that fool wore his sign in public. Outside the Master’s station. Did you know that? Did you know that he painted those words on fresh parchment every morning, careful to never repeat the curl and color of any letter. Why that was important to him, I can’t say. Two days ago—the last time I left these quarters—I could have stopped for a moment and asked him those questions. I could have let him explain his passions to me. ‘What makes it so important, sir, that you’re willing to invest hundreds of years in what looks futile to a normal soul…?’ ”

Miocene sighed heavily, then admitted, “Even if I wanted, I couldn’t ask him any questions now. Nor could I help him, if that’s what I thought was best. Because he has vanished. More than two hundred thousand mornings of rising before dawn and painting his important pronouncement according to his difficult, choking logic… and for some reason, the fool couldn’t stand on his usual ground two mornings ago. Or yesterday morning. Or today, for that matter. I can’t see him through any of my security eyes. Quite simply, he has vanished. Now don’t you think that is odd?”

One of the Wayward generals—Blessing Gable—cleared her throat, squared her shoulders, and started to say, “Madam—”

“No. Shut up.” Miocene shook her head, then warned everyone, “I’m not interested in anyone’s reasons. Not for this or for that. And frankly, the fate of one odd soul is not particularly compelling to me. What sickens me is knowing that someone made assumptions, not asking simple questions first. What worries me is my own simple question: ‘What else are my arrogant, inexperienced generals forgetting to ask themselves and each other?’ ”

Till stepped forward. This staff meeting belonged to him. For sturdy and obvious reasons, Miocene had given her First Chair responsibility over the war. She had too many new duties of her own to embrace just now. Besides, these events were too large and much too savage to directly involve a Master. Better her son than her, yes. Not one nanogram of self-doubt gnawed at Miocene now.

“You’re right, madam,” Till allowed. Then he showed the generals how to bow, saying to the foot-worn marble floor, “It’s too soon to call anything won, madam. Victory comes at a terrible cost. And of course the Remoras may only be the first of our enemies.”

She said, “Yes. Yes. Exactly”

Because this wasn’t her meeting, she was free to leave it. A show of power was her only agenda, and she turned suddenly, strolling toward one of several hallways leading into the back of the Master’s mazelike apartment… telling her son on a private channel, nexus to nexus, “When you’re finished here, come see me…”

“Yes, madam,” said a crisp voice. While the voice on the private channel promised, “It won’t be long, Mother.”

Miocene thought to glance over her shoulder. But no, that would do little good. She knew from experience that she wouldn’t see unexpected emotions in those faces. Ask all the simple questions you want, she told herself. But don’t waste precious energy when you know that the answers, pleasing or bitter, will simply refuse to show themselves.

The apartment had always been familiar terrain, and a weaker person, infected with self-doubts, might have avoided these rather small, always comfortable, and purposely ordinary rooms. But the new Master had never considered living anywhere else. If she deserved the old Master’s chair, then why not the woman’s home? Indeed, after these first weeks, the hallways and alcoves, potted jungles and even the old expansive bed, made Miocene feel nothing but at ease.

Her bed already had an occupant.

“The meeting-?” he began.

“Everything is fine,” she replied. But to be certain, she linked herself to security eyes and ears, the constant bark and flutter of her generals interrupted by the quieter, more forceful growl of Till. After a moment of satisfied eavesdropping, she asked, “Is there progress?”

“Of a slow sort,” Virtue replied. “Yes.”

The Remoras knew how to damage the ship. It seemed that Wune’s professed love for this machine didn’t mean much, and they were attacking it with the same zest with which they fought her office and her authority. In an instant, Miocene consumed the latest damage reports and repair predictions, one of her nexuses failing to give her the data on her first try.

In a crisp, angry voice, Miocene said, “That problem’s surfacing again.”

“That’s what I warned you about,” he replied. Virtue regarded her with bright gray eyes, too big for his face and too open to hide anything. “What we’re doing to you… well, it’s never been done. Not to a human. Profound changes—”

“ ‘—in a profane amount of time.’ I remember what you, and everyone, has told me.” She shook her head regardless, then casually told her uniform to melt at the shoulders, the fabric collapsing onto the living rug, leaving her wide and deep and lovely body shining in the bedroom’s false sunshine.

She sat on the edge of her bed.

Virtue moved nearer, but it took him a moment to find the strength to touch her on the bare breast. Of course he didn’t like her new body, and of course she didn’t care. Nexuses needed room and energy, and her body had to increase proportionally to her responsibilities. Besides, Virtue’s timidity had a charm. A sweetness, even. She couldn’t help but smile, eyes dropping, watching those little fingers desperately caress the brown expanse of her left nipple.

“We don’t have time,” she reported. “My First Chair will be here soon.”

Virtue was thankful for that, but he had poise enough to make his hand linger for a moment longer, fingers feeling the nipple swell with blood and newer fluids.

When his hand vanished, she told her nightgown to dress her.

Afterward, speaking with a quiet concern, Virtue reported, “You look tired. Even more than usual, I think.”

“Don’t tell me to sleep.”

“I can’t tell myself to sleep,” was his reply.

Miocene began to smile again, her head turning and her mouth opening, a compliment phrased and ready to be uttered. “I wish you were as good with my nexuses as you are with my mood.” She fully intended to say those words, but an abrupt, unexpected urge became a coherent flash inside one of her working nexuses… and she hesitated after saying only, “I wish…”

Virtue waited, ready to smile when it was his turn.

She focused on something no one else could see.

After a long moment, her lover mustered the courage to ask, “What’s wrong?”

Miocene said, “Nothing.”

Then she rose from the bed, looking at her nightgown with a confused expression, as if she couldn’t remember asking for it.

Again, she said, “Nothing.”

Then Miocene told Virtue, “Wait here. Wait.” She took a step toward the room’s back wall, ordered her uniform to cover her body again, and for a third time, with barely a whisper’s force, she said, “Wait,” as a doorway appeared in what looked like polished red granite.

“But,” he sputtered, “where are you-?”

The door closed and sealed behind her.

That the Master’s apartment had secret places had been no surprise. As First Chair, Miocene realized that the complex layout of rooms and hallways left spaces for privacy, or avenues of escape. The only surprise was that these secret places were at least as ordinary as the public ones. They were blandly furnished, and more than not, without clear purpose. The largest of the hidden rooms had been improved already during her tenure, then filled with severed, slowly mummifying heads. It seemed an appropriate means of storing the disposed captains, cruelty and banality perfectly joined together. But the room behind her bedroom was much smaller, and no one, not Virtue or even Till, knew that it contained a hidden hatchway that the former Master had had installed during some recent attack of paranoia, the hatchway leading to an unregistered cap-car that had been built on-site, ready for this exact instant.

Once under way, Miocene made certain that no one was searching for her. And only then did she re-examine the message that had found its way to her on one of the oldest, most secret channels employed by captains.

“Here’s what I propose,” said the familiar voice, and the very familiar face, speaking to her from a holobooth inside a certain way-station deep in the ship.

A booth she already knew well, it turned out.

The woman smiled, her black hair short and downy, her features bright and smooth as if the flesh and nose and the rest of her had just been regrown. She smiled with a mixture of smug pleasure and vindictiveness, telling Miocene, “I know what the Great Ship is. And I really think you need to know, too.” Washen.

“Meet me,” said the dead woman. “And come alone.”

When she first saw the face and heard those unlikely words, Miocene had nearly muttered aloud, “I won’t meet you, and certainly not alone.”

But Washen had anticipated her stubbornness, shaking her head with a genuine disappointment, telling her, “Yes, you’ll meet me. You don’t have a choice.”

Miocene closed two of her eyes, letting her mind’s eye focus on the recorded message, on those deep, dark, and utterly relentless eyes.

“Meet me in the Grand Temple,” said Washen.

“In Hazz City,” she said.

“On Marrow,” she said.

Then she almost laughed, and looking at the Master’s imagined eyes, she asked, “Why are you afraid? Where in all of Creation could you possibly feel as safe, you crazy old bitch of bitches?”

Forty-six

A fleet of old skimmers and sleeks and retrofitted cap-cars fled across the endless hull, dressed to resemble the battered hyperfiber beneath, their engines masked and muted, and every vehicle surrounded by false cars—holo-echos designed to be obvious, hopefully looking dangerous or weak, the projections begging the Waywards to fire at them instead of tormenting phantoms that might or might not be.

Orleans was steering one of those phantoms.

An EM pulse had pushed its AI pilot into insanity, leaving him no choice. The same pulse had killed its main reactor, leaving them depending on an auxiliary that whispered to the driver. “I am sick. I need maintenance. Do not depend on me.”

The Remora ignored the complaints. Instead, he looked back at the passengers, a whisper-signal carrying his minimal question:

“How soon?”

“Ninety-two,” said a white-as-milk face.

Minutes, she meant. Ninety-two minutes, according to the latest projection. Which was too long, and what could be taking so much time…?

But he didn’t ask the question.

Instead, he spotted a Wayward dragonfly lifting up off the horizon behind them, trying to catch them. Too late, he whispered, “Target.” Two baby men in the back of his skimmer had seen the enemy, and they were aiming at the fly’s weakest centimeter. But their ad hoc laser needed too much time to charge up, and a burst of focused light swept away holoprojection—a column of purple-white light dancing along the hull with an eerie grace, searching for something to incinerate.

Too late, the boys cried out, “Charged. Fire-!”

But Orleans had jerked the wheel, spoiling their aim, and where they would have been was blistered with the raw energies, a trailing EM scream stunning everything electronic within a full kilometer. Every lifesuit seized up for a horrible instant. The skimmer’s controls obeyed imagined orders, ignoring real ones. With his private voice, Orleans cursed, and he regained control after everyone’s living juices had been jerked savagely by the gees, and he cursed again, sharing his feelings with the others. Again, a voice said, “Fire.”

Their weapon was tiny compared to the Wayward’s, but it had sighting elements ripped out of one of the ship’s main lasers—elements meant to find and strike dust motes at a fantastic range—and the soft narrow bolt reached up into the bright lavender sky, then reached inside the armored target, bringing it plunging down to the hull, where it belonged.

There was a little cheer.

Pure reflex.

A dozen new phantoms appeared beside them, but none looked convincing. Orleans saw that immediately, and he realized that their projectors were mangled now, failing fast, and he erased the phantoms before the Waywards noticed.

Better to depend on your own camouflage now. And if he could, catch up with the rest of the fleet, then get lost among their coundess phantoms and deceits.

That seemed possible, for a little while.

The woman behind him, eavesdropping on a secure channel, leaned forward and shoved him on a shoulder, his suit’s false neurons too fried to feel more than a slight pressure.But he appreciated the pressure, the touch. Orleans leaned back into it, and again, he asked, “How soon?”

“Forty,” she replied.

The sabotage teams were back on schedule. And in twenty-two minutes, they would be inside the bunker.

The woman almost spoke again, but her voice was interrupted by the complaining voice of the skimmer’s reactor. “I am failing utterly,” it declared. Then with a prickly pride, it told Orleans, “I will last another eleven minutes. I promise.”

He said, “Fuck,” to himself.

Then with a whisper, he told the others, “Sorry. No roof for us.” Then he asked, “Any ideas? Anyone?”

There was no sense of surprise. What Orleans saw in the faces and could practically taste in the ether was nothing but a weary disappointment that evaporated in another moment. Two weeks of war had done it. Emotions were as flattened and slick as new hyperfiber. Then because it was expected, the gunnery boys said, “We should turn around. Turn and charge the fuckers, and kill a few of them!

They wouldn’t kill anyone, except themselves.

Orleans turned in his seat, showing them his face. Hard radiations had blistered his flesh, leaving mutations and weird cancers that appeared as lumps and black blisters. Amber eyes dangled, and his tusks were misaligned. But his defiant mouth announced, “That’s not a choice.”

Dozens of faces closed a wide, splendid assortment of eyes—a sign of the purest Remoran respect.

‘I know a place,” he confessed. “Not a bunker by design. But it’s got a roof Then he turned forward, muttering, “At least I hope it does,” as he wrestled the skimmer into a new course.

Again, the woman touched him on the deadened shoulder.

Was she going to tell him the time?

But no, she only wanted to feel him. And as he massaged the last drops of energy out of the skimmer’s dying reactor, and himself, Orleans concentrated on the dim touch of her hand, treating himself to a fantasy older than their species.

Remoras existed because the hull needed constant repair.

What they did very well. But not perfectly. Speed was critical when a deep blast crater needed to be filled. Hyperfiber, particularly the better grades, was sensitive to a multitude of variables. And on occasion, mistakes were made. One layer went bad before it could cure, and already one or more new layers were on top, soft as flesh and as pliable. Freed volatiles made bubbles. Bubbles weakened the patch. But to tear out the newest work and repair the damage meant time lost, and worse, it gave the universe an opportunity to strike the comet’s grave with a second, perhaps larger comet.

“Better to let the flaw remain,” Wune had said, speaking about hulls and about other matters, too. “Build around it, and preserve it. Remember: one day’s flaw will be another day’s treasure.”

A spacious flaw lay far out on the ship’s leading face. Hidden tunnels led into a chamber large enough to hide every surviving Remora, and stockpiles of machinery and shop-made weapons had been delivered secredy over the last ten days, making a last-stand fortress out of someone’s long-ago fuck-up.

Except Orleans would never reach it. His skimmer was barely able to fight its way within four kilometers of a smaller, less secure bubble. He had found it while visiting one of the tall bone-white memorials to read the names of dead friends—centuries ago, on some look-around tour. Beside the memorial was a frozen gas vent leading into the hull, into a cramped, lightless, and not particularly deep bubble.

When the skimmer died, he shouted the obvious advice: “Run!”

Lifesuits had strength, not speed. A dreamlike slowness and a dream’s sense of utter helplessness held sway, each man and woman pounding along a smooth and gray and essentially featureless plain. If not for the memorial, they would feel lost. The white spire beckoned from the first clumsy stride, and every eye that looked up could measure their progress, the minds behind the eyes thinking, “Closer. “The mouths saying, “Not far.’Everyone lying with a desperate earnestness, whispering to each other, “Just a few more seconds. Steps. Centimeters.” The sky was purposely ignored.

The lavender fire of the shields was brightening, capturing greater and greater amounts of gas and nanoscopic dusts. The giant lasers continued pummeling hazards big as fists and men and palaces. And blotting out the usual stars was a single swollen red giant sun, ancient and dying, its mass already touching the ship, starting to pull at its trajectory.

A brighter flash of light came from behind, startling everyone.

The boys said, “Skimmer,” and nothing more.

Orleans let himself slow, looking backward long enough to see darting shapes and more bursts of light. Lasers, and in the distance, the soundless delicious flash as nuclear mines detonated themselves.

Then he was running again, falling behind everyone and thinking, “We have time,” when he knew full well they didn’t. An army of Wayward monsters were charging, and if the last timetable was right, they had barely three minutes left before…

Before.

Then he stopped his thinking and looked up, and again, quietly and confidently, he told himself, “Just a few more steps.”

The memorial was too tall and close to absorb with a look, but it was still too far away to feel imposing. Orleans looked down again. He forced the servos in his legs to drain themselves fully with each stride, and he used his own muscles to lengthen the strides, and because it made him feel better, he cursed with each ragged wet breath.

The milk-faced woman said, “Hurry.”

He looked up again, realizing that he was falling farther behind.

She said, “Faster,” and glanced back at him, one long bright arm waving clumsily.

Orleans’s suit was in desperate trouble. He knew it before its own machinery confessed to any weakness, war and bad luck having eroded the servos in both legs, both falling within three strides of each other.

“Piss away,” he cursed.

His muscles lifted his legs and dropped them again.

The suit was fantastically heavy, but their goal was finally close. Honestly, teasingly near. Orleans grunted and took another few steps, then had no choice but to stop and stand motionless, his deep perfect lungs sucking in free oxygen wrenched from his own perfect sweet piss and blood, feeding the black blood that needed a few moments to purge the muscles of toxins, bringing them back into something resembling fitness.

His people were at the spire’s base, disappearing one after another into a tiny, still invisible hole.

Again, quietly, the woman told him, “Hurry,” and turned and waved with both arms, her face just visible, something about its whiteness afraid.

Orleans staggered, stopped. And as he gasped again, he turned his head and looked back over the ground that he had covered. Armored vehicles were skittering and skidding across the grayish plain. Following some Wayward logic, each was shaped like a bug, useless wings folded back and jointed legs holding weapons, one laser firing, a blistering fight sweeping over him and slashing into the memorial, then continuing on into infinity… the white spire melting near its base, tilting with a silent majesty, then collapsing without so much as denting the hull.

A second blast melted the memorial’s raw base.

Where was the woman, and the others?

Orleans couldn’t see them, or anything but a sudden pool of melted hyperfiber. Maybe they were underground, and safe. He kept telling himself it was possible, even likely… and after a little while he realized that he was running again, legs trying to carry him away from a swift, relentless army.

He couldn’t look more pitiful.

He reached the edge of the molten goo, and because there was nothing else to do, he turned again and stared at his pursuers. They were almost on him. In the end, seeing that he was alone and defenseless, they were taking their time. Maybe he would make a valuable prisoner, the monsters were telling each other. Maybe the top monster Herself would reward them for capturing a tremendous criminal like Orleans.

He took a long exhausted step backward.

The hyperfiber was fantastically hot, and deep, and filled with bubbles of freed gases. But without an influx of energy, it was curing again. It would be sloppy, a very weak grade, and someday someone would have to wrench it off the hull and replace everything. Then build an even larger memorial, of course. But Orleans’s suit was hyperfiber, too. An excellent grade, if somewhat battered. It could withstand the heat. His flesh would blister and boil, yes. But if he could keep his diamond faceplate from bursting, then maybe… maybe…

He stepped back once more.

And stumbled.

The weight of his reactors and recyke systems helped drive him partway under the surface, and the pain was vast and relendess, then in another moment, there was no pain.

Orleans’s helmet and head were the only parts of him in view, and his face survived long enough to let his eyes stare up at that big glorious red sun, shrouded in the shields and the constant bursts of laser light… and then he was wondering if it was time, and maybe he should try to dive deeper…

Suddenly, without the smallest warning, the shields evaporated, and every one of the giant lasers quit firing at the coming hazards.

And one breath later, a sudden and fierce rain began to fall…

Forty-seven

Because they saw a Wayward car—a little machine patterned after a copperwing—Washen and the others climbed up into the epiphyte forest, into a camouflaged blind, watching from above as the car set down on the graveled shoreline. Because he could have been anyone, they kept hiding when a man with Pamir’s face and build jumped out, big boots kicking the gravel and a hard, tired voice calling, “Washen,” over the constant rush of the river. Because he was Pamir, and tired, he said to the forest, “I guess you thought again and changed your mind.” He shook his head, saying, “Good. I can’t blame you. I never liked this leg of our plan.” Then he lifted his gaze, somehow knowing exactly where to stare.

Washen stood, shouldering her laser as she asked, “Could you see me?”

“Long ago,” he replied with a crisp sense of mystery. Then he motioned at the car, telling her, “It’s stolen. Scrubbed and reregistered, if we did everything right.”

Quee Lee and Perri stood. Then finally, Locke.

A sudden dull shiver passed through the canyon. One of her newly implanted nexuses told Washen what she’d already guessed: a comet had impacted on the hull, instantly obliterating a thousand cubic kilometers of armor.

“If you’re going,” said Pamir, “you’ve got to go now. Everything’s late as it is.”

Quee Lee touched Washen on the arm, and with a motherly concern, she said, “Maybe he’s right. You shouldn’t do this.”

They were filing down onto the gravel bar. To her son, Washen said,’Make sure you’re happy with things. Quickly”

Locke nodded grimly, leaping into the hovering car.

She reminded everyone, including herself,’We need bait, and we need it convincing. Delicious and substantial. What else can we offer but me?”

No one spoke.

“What about Miocene?” she asked.

“She got your invitation twenty-three minutes ago,” Pamir reported. “We still haven’t seen any traffic that might be her. But it’s a long trip, and unplanned, and since she’s got to suspect an ambush, I don’t expect her to come too fast or follow the easy routes.”

A massive shudder rumbled through the ship’s body.

“The biggest yet,” was Perri’s assessment.

The shields had been down for five minutes. “What’s the official explanation?’Washen asked.

“Remoras are bastards,” said Pamir. “Officially, they’re proving themselves to be enemies of the ship, and in another ten or twenty or fifty minutes, repairs will be made, the shields will be restored, and within the day, every last bastard will be dead.”

Boom, and then a sudden second boom.

From inside the car, Locke shouted, “Everything’s ready”

Washen jumped inside, paused and took a ragged breath. She was anxious, and it took a moment for her to realize why. No, not because she was the bait. Her thundering heart had nothing to do with any danger. In a perfect peace, she would feel the same way. She was returning to Marrow after more than a century’s absence. She was returning home, and that was enormous in its own right.

Washen waved to Quee Lee and her husband.

Then the steel door was yanking itself shut, and with a hurried, inadequate voice, she called to Pamir, “Thanks for these days.”

Wayward security was thorough. Was seamless.

And it was totally unprepared for an invasion of exactly two people: a famous dead captain and her even more famous son.

“You’ve been missing,” a uniformed man declared, staring at Locke with a mixture of awe and confusion. “We’ve been looking for your body, sir. We thought you were killed that first day”

“People make mistakes,” was Locke’s advice.

The security man nodded, then stumbled over the first obvious question.

Locke answered it before it was asked. “I was on a mission. At the insistence of Till himself He spoke with authority, and impatience. He sounded as if nothing could be more true. “I was supposed to recover my mother. By any means, at any cost.”

The man looked small inside his dark uniform.

Glancing at their prisoner, he said, “I should beg for instructions—”

“Beg to Till,” was Locke’s sound advice.

“Now,” the man sputtered.

“I’ll wait inside my car,” promised one of the greatest, most honored Waywards. “If that’s all right with you.”

He had no choice but to say, “Yes, sir.”

The waystation was perched on the throat of the access tunnel. Traffic flowed rapidly up and down. Washen saw giant steel vehicles patterned after the familiar hammer-wings. The empty ones dove into the kilometer-wide maw, while others appeared beneath them, rushing fresh units into the gaps in the Wayward lines.

The war’s carnage was relentless. And perhaps worse for the ship was the swelling, unstable panic among passengers and crew.

Washen closed her eyes, letting her nexuses sip updates. Coded squirts. Images from security eyes and ears. Avenues and public plazas were filled with terrified, furious passengers. Angry voices blamed the new Master, and the old Master, too. Plus Waywards. Remoras. And that largest, most terrifying foe: simple stupidity. Then she watched dust and pebbles falling at one-third lightspeed, smashing Wayward vehicles as their terrific momentum was transformed into a brilliant light and withering heat. An army had charged into the Remora’s desperate trap, and it would be dead in another few moments. But a new army was coming to replace what was lost. Washen opened her eyes and watched the steel hammerwings rising up to the fight. And in that mayhem of coded messages and orders and desperate pleas, one small question was misplaced. Then a fictional but utterly believable answer was delivered, wrapped snug inside bogus encryption seals.

The waystation’s AI examined the seals, and because of a subtle and recent failure in its cognitive skills, it proclaimed:

“From Till, it is. And it is authentic”

With a palpable, almost giddy relief, the Wayward told Locke, “You need to take the prisoner home. Great sir.”

“Thank you,” Locke replied.

Then he unberthed their car and dove after one of the empty hammerwings, accelerating until the rising hammer-wings blurred into a single dull line—all of Marrow seemingly rising up now, eager to behold a vast and exceptionally dangerous universe.

“Changes,” Locke had promised.

He had thoroughly described the new Marrow, displaying a good poet’s taste for sadness and Irony. Washen came with expectations. She knew that the compliant Loyalists had finished Miocene’s bridge, then with Wayward resources, the bridge had been improved, making it possible for whole armies to be transported through the fading buttresses. The old captains’ base camp housed the engineers who quickly rebuilt the access tunnel. Energy and every raw material had been brought from the world below. Lasers with a fantastic punch had widened the old tunnel, and the chamber’s own hyperfiber was salvaged and re-purified, then slathered thick and fast on the raw iron walls above. Then the same lasers were moved, digging a second, parallel tunnel barely wide enough for power and communication conduits. That was dubbed the Spine. It linked Marrow to the ship, making them one and the same.

With a soft pride, Locke mentioned, “From here, everything is our work.”

The tunnel suddenly became narrower, hammerwings missing them by nothing in the silent vacuum.

“How strong is it?” Washen inquired.

“Better than you would think,” he replied, his voice almost defensive.

Again, Washen closed her eyes and watched the war. But the Waywards had retreated, or died, and most of the Remoras’ links were dead. There was nothing to see except the battered hull glowing red, radiating the heat of impacts and battles as well as the bloody glow of the passing sun.

She shut down all of her nexuses, and she kept her eyes closed.

Quietly, Locke identified himself to someone, then demanded, “I need immediate passage to Marrow. I have a critical prisoner with me.”

Not for the first time, Washen asked herself:

“What if?”

Locke had offered to bring her here. On his own, without compliant, he had helped find workable ways through the security systems—a journey that had gone remarkably well. Which made her wonder if everything was a ruse. What if Till had told his old friend,’I want you to find your mother somehow. For both of us. Find her and bring her back home, and use any means you wish. With my blessing.”

It was possible, yes.

Always.

She remembered a different day, following their son into a distant jungle. Locke was obeying Till’s orders then. Unlikely as it seemed, it could be the same now. Of course, Locke hadn’t warned anyone about the rebellion coming, or the Remoras’ plan to scuttle the ship’s shields. Unless those events had also been allowed to happen, serving some greater, harder-to-perceive purpose.

She thought about it again, and again, with a muscular conviction, she tossed the possibility aside.

The hammerwing in front of them was slowing.

Locke pulled around it, then dove for the still invisible bottom.

Perhaps he guessed his mother’s thoughts. Or maybe it was the moment, the shared mood. “I never told you,” he began. “Did I? One of Miocene’s favorites came up with an explanation for the buttresses.”

“Which favorite?”

“Virtue,” Locke replied. “Have you met him?”

“Once,” she admitted. “Briefly.”

Their AI took control, braking their descent as they passed thousands of empty hammerwings docked and waiting for the next belly full of troops.

“You know how it is with hyperfiber,” her son continued. “How the bonds are strengthened by taming little quantum fluxes.”

“I’ve never quite understood the concept,’she confessed.

Locke nodded as if he could appreciate the sentiment. Then he smiled. He smiled and turned to his mother, his face never more sad. “According to Virtue, these buttresses are those same fluxes, but they’ve been stripped of normal matter. They’re naked, and as long as they have power, they’re very nearly eternal.”

If true, she thought, it would be the basis of another fantastic technology.

Her mind shifted. “What did Miocene think about his hypothesis?”

“If that’s true,” he said, “it would be an enormous tool. Once we learned how to duplicate it, of course.”

She waited for a moment, then asked, “What about Till?”

Locke didn’t seem to hear her question. Instead, he mentioned, “Virtue was worried. After he offered his speculation, he told everyone that stealing energy from Marrow’s core was the same as stealing it from the buttresses. We could weaken the machinery, and eventually, if we weren’t careful, we might even destroy Marrow and the ship.”

Washen listened, and she didn’t.

Their car had passed through a quick series of demon doors and slowed to a near stop, and suddenly the tunnel around her opened up, revealing the diamond blister below, the bridge thick and impressive at its center, and Marrow visible on every side. She thought she was prepared for the darkness, but it surprised her regardless. The entire world had swollen since she was last here, and it had fallen into a deeper dusk, countless lights sparkling on its iron face, each little light plainly visible through a hot, dry atmosphere.

Marrow was one vast, uninterrupted city.

And despite being warned, Washen felt a sudden sadness.

“Till listened to Virtue’s worries,” Locke reported. “Listened to every one of them, and he looked concerned throughout. But do you know what he said to that man? What he said to all of us?”

Obeying some inaudible command, their car dove toward the bridge, toward an open shaft. Toward home.

“What did Till say?” Washen muttered.

“ ‘These buttresses are too strong to be destroyed that easily,’ he told us. ‘I’m certain of it.’ Then he showed his smile to each of us. You know how he smiles. ‘They’re simply too strong,’ he repeated. ‘That would be too easy. The Builders don’t work that way…’ ”

Forty-eight

From the breathing mouth came a long whistle, hard and sharp, plainly excited. Pamir growled, “Quiet.”

As if it were necessary; as if anyone could possibly hear them inside here.

“She comes,” said the translator fused to the harum-scarum’s chest. “I see the false Master. One little shot, and she is forever removed.”

“No,” said Pamir. Then he announced to everyone, “We will wait. Wait.”

He was speaking to five hundred humans, including seven of the surviving captains, and perhaps twice as many harum-scarums. But this was a mammoth facility, and most of them were busy attacking the last-moment work with their ad hoc training and a professional desperation. Booby traps had to be found and disabled. Machinery that hadn’t worked in billions of years had to be awakened, in secret. And this team’s actions had to be married to the actions of twenty other teams, each operating at a key note, everyone pushing to meet a timetable that looked more fanciful with each worried breath.

Again, the harum-scarum said, “I will shoot her”

“Shoot yourself,” Pamir snapped.

That was a savage, dangerous insult; suicide was the ultimate abomination.

But the alien had known Pamir for a long time, respecting him in a joyless fashion. He decided to absorb the insult without comment. Instead, an enormous finger pointed to a tiny knot of data moving rapidly down the fuel line, and with a slow, reflective whisde, he told the human, “This is the false Master’s vehicle. It is. And with the reigning confusion, no one will miss her until it is too late. If you allow me—”

“Expose us?”

Both mouths closed tight.

Pamir shook his head, disgust mixed with a burning fatigue. “Miocene isn’t an imbecile. Mask your scan to make it look Wayward, then examine that car as it passes. She won’t be on board. Even in a hurry, she knows better.”

The alien made ready, big hands and an obstinate mind sending out a string of crisp instructions to hidden sensors.

Pamir hunkered closer to the viewing port, watching the Waywards’ steel vehicles rising and falling past their hiding place. Miocene’s cap-car was a tiny fleck of hyperfiber, barely visible to the naked eye and past them in a half-instant. He waited another few moments, then asked, “What did you see?”

“A passenger.”

Pamir nearly flinched. Then he thought to ask, “What sort of passenger?”

“Composed of shaped light,” the harum-scarum confessed. “A holo in the false Master’s likeness.”

A single nod was the only gloating that Pamir allowed himself. Miocene probably slipped inside one of the empty troop cars, telling no one her whereabouts… in case her enemies were waiting en route…

The gloating quiet was interrupted by a sudden deep rambling.

In the distance, humans and harum-scarums called out to each other, asking, “An attack? Or another impact?”

“An impact,” barked several knowledgeable voices. “How big?”

“How bad?”

A fat comet had struck not far from Port Erindi, and scanning the early data, Pamir knew it was a huge blast. A record breaker. He fought the urge to call the Remoras, to order Orleans or whoever was left to bring up the shields again. But it was still too soon. “Keep working,” he told everyone, including himself. And he stared at images stolen from farther below, picking one of the steel machines at random, watching it plunging into the access tunnel’s mouth, rushing past the waystation where Washen and her son had lingered, waiting for permission before vanishing into those impossible depths.

Suddenly, with absolutely no warning, one of the team leaders whispered into his ear. “We’re ready here. The big valve is ours.”

And in the next instant, another voice—the translated boast from a harum-scarum engineer—announced, “We’re prepared here. Against much greater odds, and unseen, and ahead of schedule.”

Pamir let himself think: It’s going to happen…!

His heart responded, swelling and pounding hard against his throat, his voice nearly breaking when he asked the alien beside him, “How are we?”

“Close,” the whistle promised.

A pause.

The next whistle was a curse. “A stranger’s shit,” said the harum-scarum, an instinctive rage rising, then collapsing again.

“What’s wrong?” Pamir asked. “Don’t tell me it’s the pumps…”

His companion said, “No.”

A fat, spike-nailed thumb pointed, showing him that one of the rising vehicles was slowing in front of them, deploying antennae and sturdy lasers, armored soldiers already marshaling inside its injection airlocks.

“My scan—” the harum-scarum moaned.

“Or its a routine patrol,” Pamir offered. “Or someone noticed their power being funneled away.”

The alien moaned, saying, “If it was me, I will shoot myself.”

Pamir said, “Fine.”

He backed away from the viewing port and viewing screens, stepping out onto a gangway that he helped build just a century ago. People were specks, almost unnoticed in the darkest corners. The giant pumps looked close in the ancient gloom, and they were deceptively simple: slick balls and eggs of hyperfiber wrapped around machinery vaster than any heart, and fantastically strong, and durable enough to wait for billions of years before they took their first thunderous beat.

This was the same pumping station that the captains had used as a blind. The Waywards had searched it thoroughly, and with good captainly tricks, they had tried to secure it. On occasion, they sent patrols. But there were only so many soldiers, and there were thousands of kilometers of fuel lines begging to be guarded, and there was a war to wage, and they were always too much in a hurry to dismande the sophisticated camouflage that Pamir had helped install.

In a whisper, he asked his team, “How soon?”

“Ready,” said a few.

“Soon,” others promised.

Then he returned to the port and screens, estimating how soon the Waywards would be shaking his hand.

“Ready,” said another voice. And another.

The harum-scarum remarked, “With what we have now, we can do it.”

Fewer pumps than ideal, and not every valve in their control. But yes, they could do it. What he had dreamed up in Quee Lee’s apartment and what had always felt slippery as a dream… it was a genuine reality now… somehow…

Both of the alien’s mouths opened, and the air-breather whistled, “We must now. Remove these monsters from the universe.”

Pamir said nothing.

Again, he looked through the port, watching the bug-shaped chunk of steel aligning itself for an assault. Then he glanced at a snoop screen. A bright sparkle marked another descending car, this one dropping faster, showing not so much as a breath of caution.

Pamir told his ally, “No.”

Then he told every team in a thousand-kilometer radius, “Finish your preparations. Do it now.”

The alien gave out a sharp, furious whistle, the translator having the diplomatic sense not to explain what had just been said.

“We’re waiting,” Pamir repeated. “Waiting.” Then to himself, under his breath, he muttered, “This crazy trap needs to be a little more full.”

Forty-nine

Nearly five millennia had been spent making the climb to freedom. A strong soul accomplishes what can only be considered impossible, building a society out of nothing, then gaining her destiny as her fair reward. How else could Miocene look at this epic? Yet she found herself suddenly retracing her ascent, making the desperate long fall in what felt like the jump of an eye, the throb of the heart, too quickly to suffer even the littlest doubt. And all because a dead colleague and the closest thing to a friend sent her a few words, promising to meet her and tell her a story.

Plainly, this was someone’s trick.

Miocene saw the obvious instantly, and instinctively.

But even then, she left the security of her station, her decision made. Then the Remoras brought down the ship’s own shields, and she began to understand what an enormous trap this could be. Yet she continued the plunge. Able to lead from anywhere, she spat out orders and directives and fierce encouragements and outright threats, helping make certain that the insurrection would be crushed shortly. Then she arrived victorious at the apex of the new bridge, stepping out of the empty hammerwing and toward the waiting car… and she hesitated, finding herself staring across the swollen gray face of Marrow, if only for an instant…

The guard on duty—a square-faced man named Golden—stepped close and smiled up at the ship’s Master. Then with a proud voice, he reported, “I sent them straight down, madam. Straight on down.”

She had to ask, ‘Who’s that?”

“Locke and his prisoner,” he answered, his tone asking in turn, “Who else do you expect?” Miocene said nothing.

Slowly, slowly, she pulled her eyes closed. But in her mind she could still see the cold lights of Marrow, and its black iron face. She saw them better with her eyes shut. And what she felt, if anything, was an infectious relief. And a jittery, infinite joy.

If this was someone’s ambush, she reasoned, then Washen was the bait. And Miocene reminded herself that she wasn’t without resources, and tremendous power, and oceans of experience and cleverness, and cruelty, too.

Every possibility was reviewed in succession. Then she made the same decision again, with a new resolve.

Opening her eyes, she glanced at Golden, saying, “Good,” without focusing on his smiling and proud and exceptionally foolish face.

Miocene told the earnest man, “Thank you for your help.”

Then she stepped into the sealed, windowless car, sat in the first chair, and with a single word, she was falling again, fast and then faster, the weary old buttresses reaching through the wall and licking at her mind, making her feel, for just those sluggish few moments, wondrously and deliciously insane.

Fifty

The temple administrator will wore the long gray robes of her office and still fought against any force that might threaten to disrupt her life or her day. She rose to her feet, staring at the newcomers with a sputtering horror, then she crossed her arms, took a fierce quick breath, and exhaling with an obvious pain, said to Washen, “No.” She snapped, “You died a hero. Now stay dead!”

Washen had to laugh out loud, replying, “I’ve tried to be dead. I did my very best, darling.”

It was Locke who stepped forward. He moved close enough to intimidate, then spoke with a soft rapid voice that left no doubt as to who was in charge. “We need one of the temple’s chambers. We don’t care which. And you will personally bring your guests to us, then leave. Is that understood?”

“Which guests-?”

“The sad souls locked inside your library.” Washen leaked a smile.

The woman opened her mouth, framing her rebuttal.

But Locke didn’t give her the chance. “Or would you rather be reassigned, darling? Maybe to one of these heroic units heading up onto the hull.”

The mouth pulled shut.

“Is there a free chamber?” Locke asked.

“Alpha,” the administrator allowed.

“Then that’s where we’ll be,” he replied. And with a captain’s decorum, he waited for the underling to turn and slink away.

It was a short, illuminating walk to the chamber.

Washen was prepared for changes, but the overcrowded and desiccated world outside remained outside. The hallways were nearly empty and exactly as she remembered them, complete to the potted flycatchers. And while the air was drier than before, and probably purified, it still managed to stink of Marrow: rusts and bug dusts and heavy metals, not to mention a subtle odor that could only be described as strangeness.

A pleasant stink, she found herself thinking.

The occasional parishioner bowed to Locke, then gawked at his mother.

She noticed how everyone seemed equally thin, as if an orchestrated famine were in effect. But at least everyone was dressed in simple clean clothes that they hadn’t made from their own flesh. A leftover Loyalist tradition? Or maybe hungry people couldn’t heal quickly enough to make skinning themselves worthwhile.

She didn’t let herself ask.

Suddenly impatient, Washen stepped into the chamber, her simple presence causing lights to awaken. The domed ceiling was exactly as she remembered it, pretending to be the sky, and behind the polished steel railing, the diamond likeness of the bridge was much the same. But the bridge was thicker and and stronger and better shielded than Aasleen’s original plans, conduits filling two shafts, then merging at the old base camp: an armored thread just visible, clinging to the curved sky for perhaps ten kilometers, then vanishing again. The Spine.

“Is this a model?” she asked.

Locke had to look up, taking a moment to decipher the question. “No,” he allowed. “It’s a holoprojection. Real time, and accurate.”

Good.

Then she looked at Locke, ready to thank him again. And to compliment him on everything that he had already done.

A new voice interrupted them.

“It is,” someone cried out. “Washen!”

Manka’s voice, followed by Manka. And Saluki. Zale. Kyzkee. Westfall. Aasleen. Then she stared at the siblings. Promise with Dream beside her, as always. Both were shuffling forward, feet never quite leaving the floor. The legs and faces were the same, only thinner. There was a chill to their touch, and behind the chill, a desperate warmth, and a genuine happiness, and then a reflexive concern that Washen wasn’t real or might vanish any moment.

“I’m real, and I might get taken away,” she allowed.

More than a hundred old captains hugged her or each other. Close whispering voices asked, “How’s the mutiny today?”

“Which mutiny?’Washen asked.

Aasleen understood. She laughed and straightened her back, then the folds in her badly worn uniform. “We’ve heard rumors. Grumbles. Warnings.”

“New, half-trained guards have replaced our old keepers,” Manka offered. “And the old ones didn’t look very happy about their prospects, either.”

Faces turned to the diamond bridge and the distant images, and for a long while, nobody seemed able to speak.

Then Saluki asked, “What about Miocene? Is the new Master healthy, or are we going to be happy?”

Washen almost answered.

But as her mouth drew its breath, a new voice called to them from the entranceway, telling them, “Miocene is very healthy, darling. Very healthy. And thank you so much for your sweet, heartfelt concerns.”

The new Master strode among the captains.

She seemed unconcerned by any threat, and to the distant eye, she would have appeared to be in total control. But Washen knew this woman. The swollen face and body hid clues, and the bright uniform gave her an instant, effortless authority. But the eyes were open and obvious. They danced and settl ed on Washen, then danced again. Surrounded by once loyal captain, she seemed to be deciding which one might strike her first. Then she looked past them, those cold dark eyes contemplating enemies that couldn’t be seen from here.

In a voice that sounded in perfect control, she told Washen, “I came. Alone, as you asked. But I assumed that it would be just the two of us, darling.”

For a careful moment, Washen said nothing.

Silence irritated Miocene and dragging her eyes back to Washen, with a grumbling tone, she said, “You wanted to tell me something. You promised to ‘explain the ship,’ if I remember your words.”

“ ‘Explain,’ ” Washen responded, “is perhaps too strong. But at least I can offer a new hypothesis about the ship’s origins.” Gesturing at the long virtuewood seats, she told her fellow captains, “Sit. Everyone, please. This explanation won’t take long, I hope. I hope. But considering what I want to tell you, you might appreciate being off your feet…”

With one hand, Washen pulled the clock from her pocket, the lid popping open with the touch of her finger. Then without looking at its face, she closed it again, and holding it high, she said, “The ship.” She said, “How old?”

Before anyone tried to answer, she said, “We found it empty. We found it streaking toward us from what’s perhaps the emptiest part of the visible universe. Of course, we uncovered clues to its age, but they’re conflicting, imprecise clues. What’s easiest to believe is that four or five or six billion years ago, in some precocious young galaxy, intelligent organic life arose, and it lived just long enough to build this marvel. To fashion the Great Ship. Then some horrific but imaginable tragedy destroyed its builders. Before they could claim their creation, they were dead. And we’re just the lucky ones to find this ancient machine…”

Washen paused for a moment. Then quietly and quickly, she said, “No. No, I think the ship is much older than six billion years.”

Miocene rose for the bait.

“Impossible,” she declared.’How can you explain anything if you let yourself entertain that idiocy?”

“Trace its course backward through space and time,” Washen interrupted, “and you see galaxies. Eventually. Empty space allows us a long view, and these are some of the oldest infrared specks of light that we can see. The universe wasn’t a billion years old, and the first suns were forming and detonating, spewing out the first metals into the tiny hot and exceptionally young cosmos—”

“Too soon,” was Miocene’s response. Unlike most of the audience, she was standing, and carried by a mixture of nervous energy and simple visceral anger, she approached Washen, her fists lifting, taking hard little jabs at the air. “That’s far too soon. How can you imagine that sentient life could have evolved then? In a universe with nothing to offer but hydrogen and helium and only thin traces of metals?”

“Except that’s not what I’m proposing,” Washen replied.

The puffy face absorbed the words, and the mouth opened again. But Miocene didn’t make any sound.

“Think even older,” Washen advised. Then she glanced at Aasleen, at Promise and Dream, telling them, “Locke explained this to me. At the center of Marrow, hydrogen and antihydrogen are created. Each fuses with its own kind. And the two kinds of helium ash are fused into carbon atoms. And the process leads to both flavors of iron, which the reactor throws together, annihilating both. And the energies from this bit of wizardry power the buttresses, and the Wayward industries, and cause Marrow to expand and contract like a great heart.”

“We’ve heard about the buttress engine,” Aasleen offered.

Washen nodded, then said, “Under our feet, it’s like the Creation.”

A few hungry faces gave knowing nods.

Miocene bristled but said nothing.

“We’ve always accepted that the ship was carved out of an ordinary Jupiter,” Washen continued. “And Marrow must have been carved from that Jupiter’s core. But I think we’re confused here. I think we’ve got it backward. Imagine an ancient, powerful intelligence. But it’s not organic. It evolves in that rapid, dense, rich environment of the earliest universe. Using the engine beneath us, it creates hydrogen and carbon and iron. Creates every element. Our ship could have been built from scratch. From nothingness. Perhaps before the universe was cold enough and dark enough for ordinary matter to form on its own, someone constructed this place. As a lab. As a means of looking into the far, far future. Although if that’s true, I wonder, why would these Builders then throw their fancy toy so very far away?” The chamber was silent. Alert.

“Clues,” said Washen. “They’re everywhere, and they’re meant to be obvious. But the mind that left them for us was strange, and I think, it was in an awful hurry.”

She glanced up at the diamond bridge, breathed deeply and said, “Marrow”

She looked at Aasleen, saying, “This is a guess. Nearly. But there are good reasons to imagine that Marrow may have been the first place where organic life evolved. Under a bright, buttress-lit sky, in an environment cold and empty compared to the surrounding universe… the first microbes were born, then evolved into a wide range of complex organisms… this place serving as nothing but an elaborate stage where future kingdoms and phyla got their first tentative existence…

“The engines and fuel tanks and habitats were built later. What was learned here was applied to its design. Humans found untouched stairs waiting for humanoid feet. Why? Because according to the Builders’ research, organic evolution would inevitably build creatures like us. We found environmental controls ready to adjust atmospheres and temperatures according to the physiologies of our passengers. Why? Because the Builders could only guess at our specific needs, and they were eager to be helpful.

“Remember our old genetic research?” she asked Promise and Dream. “Marrow life-forms are ancient. More genetic diversity than anything found on normal worlds. That tends to hint that this is a very, very old place—”

“What about those first humanoids?’Dream asked. “What happened to them?”

“They went extinct,” his sister replied instantly. “Small, highly adaptable species are what’s needed here. Not big apes stomping around on big feet.”

Aasleen offered a raised hand, then her question. “I don’t understand. Why build such a big wonderful machine, then throw it away? Maybe I’m too much of an engineer, but that sounds like a miserable waste.”

Washen dangled her clock on its chain, and she said, “Clues,” again.

Then she twirled her clock and flung it down the aisle, a dozen gaunt hands reaching out and missing it, the bright alloyed case hitting the floor with a hard click, then skidding toward the far end of the chamber, into the shadows and out of sight.

“Not only did they throw it away, but they threw it where it was certain not to hit anything for a long, long while.” She spoke slowly, with a certain and easy weight. “They sent it through the expanding universe, making sure that it pierced each wall of galaxies where the wall was thinnest.” A pause. Then, “They didn’t want it found, obviously. And if the ship’s motion had varied by a nanoscopic bit, it would have missed our galaxy, too. Missed us and continued on out of the Local Group and into another vacuous realm where it would go unnoticed for another half a billion years.”

She paused, then said, “The Builders.”

She shook her head and smiled, admitting, “I never wanted to believe in them. But they’re real, or at least they were. Somehow, Diu sensed a portion of their story. And so has Till. And so have all the Waywards. Through their culture or through some preplanned epiphany, humans have the capacity to absorb and believe in a story that is probably more than fifteen billion years old… a story from the beginnings of our Creation, and despite the cushion of time, it is a story that I suspect is still important. Still vast. Still and always, and I think we’ve got to face that unlikely fact…!”

Miocene was staring at the floor, her face taut and startled, her fists fallen to her sides and forgotten.

A captain shuffled toward Washen, placing her broken clock into her offered hand.

Washen said, “Thank you,” and waited for him to sit again. Then in a careful voice, she said, “If the Builders were real, then there must have been the Bleak. Except I think the Waywards have things a little backwards. The Bleak didn’t come from outside, trying to steal the Great Ship. At least not according to our sense of geometry.” She hesitated, not quite looking at the captains. Then she asked, “Why would you build a great machine, then throw it away, and throw it as far as possible? Because the machine serves a specific, terrible purpose. A purpose that demands isolation and distance, plus the relative safety that comes with those blessings.

“I can’t know this for sure, but I’m guessing that the Ship is a prison.

“Beneath us, beneath the hot iron and even underneath the buttress engine, lives at least one Bleak. I’m guessing. The buttresses are its walls. Its bars. Marrow swells and contracts to feed the buttresses and keep them in good repair. The Builders assumed that those who first boarded the ship would be careful and thorough, and Marrow would be found soon enough. Found and deciphered. But the poor Builders didn’t guess, except maybe in their nightmares, that our species would come here and realize nothing, then make the Builders’ prison into a passenger vessel—a place of luxury and small endless lives.” Washen paused, breathed.

For a long moment, Miocene said nothing. Then in a low, furious voice, she asked, “Have you spoken to my AIs?”

“Which AIs?”

“The old scholars,” she said. Then she looked up at the arching ceiling, admitting, “One of those machines made a similar prediction. He said that the ship is a model of the universe. He claimed that Marrow’s expansion is supposed to mimic the universe’s inflationary period, and then comes lifeless space, and farther out are the living spaces…”

The woman shook her head, then dismissed everything with one word. “Coincidence.”

Aasleen asked the obvious. “If this a prison, then where are the guards? Wouldn’t the Builders leave behind something to watch over everything, and when the time came, explain it to us?”

Locke answered.

Standing beside and a little behind his mother, he reminded the captains, “Guards are wonderful. Until they decide to change sides.”

“The Bleak is imprisoned,” Washen offered, “but I think it can whisper between the bars. If you know what I mean.”

Haifa hundred captains muttered, “Diu.” Muttered,’Till.”

“Both of whom went deep inside Marrow,” Washen reminded. Then she glanced at her son, biting her lower lip before adding her last speculation.

“The Bleak,” she said, “isn’t some Builder who turned evil.”

She said, “It has to be something else entirely.”

With a booming voice, she said, “The Builders couldn’t reform the entity, or destroy it. All they could do was put it away for the time being. And now the Builders have vanished. Have died. But the thing beneath us still lives. Is still dangerous and powerful. Which pushes me toward the opinion that what we have here—what our stupid ambition has forced us to claim—is an entity even older than the Builders. Even tougher. And after it’s been locked away for so long, I think it’s safe to guess what it wants… and that it will do anything to achieve its ends…!”

Fifty-one

The injection airlocks hit the wall with a soft, sudden thump, shaped nukes piercing the hyperfiber, the roar muted by the wild keening of the pumps. Then came the abrupt purple-white flash of lasers, absolutely soundless, and Pamir hunkered down, shouting at the harum-scarum, shouting, “Shoot the car…!”

But the little car braked suddenly, slipping behind one of the empty troopships, letting the ship’s lasers intercept the spray of baby nukes while its bug-shaped body absorbed the furies of every retrofitted laser and microwave shout that the harum-scarum could aim. Steel turned to slag, and the slag exploded into a fierce white-hot rain… and the car accelerated again, dashing past the pumping station… gone…

The harum-scarum said nothing about his lousy aim. Pamir growled, “Shit,” and turned to his companion, finding no one. Where the alien should have been standing, a cloud of incandescent gas and ash drifted with a deceptive peacefulness. The gangway had melted. A random blast from below, or they would have killed him, too. Pamir wheeled and sprinted for the nearest lift-tube, his laser panning for him, his most secure nexus awakened, his quick command wrapped deep in code and squirted to every team and every AI. “Flood the bastards,” Pamir roared.

Then he leaped inside the tube, and a lift-glove grabbed him and accelerated him upward, moving too fast for him to keep his feet under him. As if suffering from a savage beating, Pamir dropped to his knees, then his aching belly, and as he lay motionless against the padded floor, it occurred to him that the pumps’ keening had changed. A deep, powerful throb rose up to him as liquid hydrogen passed through the greedy mouths, gaining a terrific velocity, a swift river born in an instant, vaster than any Amazon and fabulously, righteously furious.

A TEAM of harum-scarums had closed the giant valve.

A column of frigid, pressurized hydrogen struck the valve, and the enormous fuel line shuddered, shivered and held.

Hydrogen pooled and swirled, and half a hundred hammerwings—manned and empty—were swept down in the maelstrom. Slammed against the walls and valve, the abrupt cold shattered their alloyed hulls, splinters and anonymous gore swirling, then slowing as the pool grew deeper, settling on the bottom as a thin, uncomplaining sediment.

At the waystation, duty threw a yoke on the panic. The ranking officer—the same officer who had allowed Washen to pass—called to Till. To Miocene. Both were below somewhere, at risk. He estimated flow rates and offered computer simulations of the impending flood, and with a dry, scared, sorry voice, he mentioned, “Maybe sir, madam, you should close the tunnel. Save Marrow.” Preset charges would crack the new hyperfiber walls, and the collapse would seal everything. Would save the Waywards for another day…

At first, Miocene didn’t reply.

Till did. With a calm, almost indifferent voice, he told everyone in his command,’The tunnel remains open. Now, and always.”

“Now, but not always,” the officer grumbled.

“If you can,” Till advised, “save yourself. And if you cannot, I will kiss your soul when you are reborn again…!”

The officer straightened his back, and unable to imagine any solution, he stood beside the nearest window, and waited.

A falling hammerwing appeared.

It was the same ship that had attacked the enemy stronghold, airlocks deployed, then shattered, its gray carapace thrown against the opposite wall and plunging into one of the waystation’s buildings. There was a momentary vibration, then a high-pitched crash. Surprised, the officer realized that an atmosphere had formed outside, hydrogen fuel evaporating, forming a thick sudden wind that he could almost feel, one hand now pressed against the diamond window as the wind rose into a hurricane, then something much worse.

“But if nobody closes the tunnel,” he whispered to himself, “and if this flood reaches my house…”

Obviously, Till didn’t understand the problem.

On a different channel, the man called to Miocene. And hoping that she was listening, he explained everything again, letting the panic creep into his voice.

Outside, the torrent was worsening. The hydrogen had filled the fuel line level to the waystation, the first fingers of liquid racing between the buildings, then quickly rising into a wall that swept over and down, tugging and wrenching at the armored structures and at the scared little souls inside.

To himself, staring out into that roaring blackness, the officer said, “Shit.”

He said, it’s not supposed to be this way.”

Then another voice joined him, close and familiar. Respected, if not loved. The voice asked, “What are you doing?”

“Miocene?” the man whispered. Then he explained, “Nothing. I am waiting.”

i don’t understand… what…!”

He said, “Madam,” and turned, confused enough to think that perhaps the Master was standing beside him. But she wasn’t there. It was just a familiar voice on his nexus, angrier than he had ever heard it before.

Miocene screamed, “What, what, what are you doing!”

“Nothing at all,” the man promised.

And again, he touched the window, feeling the brutal chill slipping through it… and there was a soft, almost inconsequential creak from somewhere close… and the man’s last act was to pull his eyes shut, something in that very simple, very ancient reflex lending him the strength to keep standing his ground…

Fifty-two

“What, what, what are you doing?!”

The question roared out of every one of Miocene’s mouths and through every nexus, and it exploded from the flesh and spit and ceramic-toothed mouth inside the Great Temple. Her words were carried up the newly made Spine, then amplified, passengers and crew listening in a horrified amazement as the ship’s new Master seemed to be asking each of the cowering fools to explain what they were doing.

Billions answered.

In whispers, grunts, and farts, songs and violent shouts, they told the Master that they were scared and sick of feeling this way, and when would she get the shields to work again, and when could their lives be their own again…?

Miocene heard none of them.

Wild dark eyes stared at the watchful captains, and at Washen, and at Washen’s betrayer son. But the only face Miocene could see was streaking down the access tunnel, approaching the bridge now. That pretty face was smug, then hopelessly distracted, then it was enraged by something that it saw in the distance, then smug again when the problem resolved itself. And finally, with a strange, almost embarrassed smile, Till met his mother’s stare, looking up at one of the car’s security eyes, remarking to his companion, “I think she understands… finally, finally…”

Virtue shrank as if expecting to be beaten. Then with a low, desperate squawk, he said, “I had no choice, madam. My love. No choice, ever—”

Miocene fled the falling car.

Returning to the Temple, rejoining the captains, her oldest mouth took a deep, useless breath before declaring, “I’ve been an idiot.”

Washen nearly spoke, then seemed to think better of it.

Aasleen tried to comfort the Master. “We couldn’t have imagined it, much less believed it,” she remarked, thin black fingers caressing her own astonished mouth. “Assuming that there really is such a thing as the Bleak, and the ship’s its prison…”

Miocene put her arms around herself and squeezed hard, and sobbing, said, “No. No, I don’t believe this. No.”

How long had tears been running on her face?

Washen looked at the other captains, and quietly, with a comforting matter-of-factness, she explained, “This was a trap. Maybe there is a Bleak under us, and maybe not. But there are creatures called Waywards, and they’ve taken charge of my ship, and I want that to end. Now.”

In crisp, clear terms, she described the hydrogen river falling toward them, and she estimated when gravity would bring the river this far. Of course the base camp overhead would be obliterated. And the diamond blister. And the bridge. Then the cold fluid would turn into a horrific rain, static electricity or someone’s forgotten candle starting a great fire. Marrow’s oxygen would try to consume the flood, transforming hydrogen into sweet water and a fierce heat. But the fuel tank was vast, and eventually, there would be no more oxygen. Eventually the frigid rain would fall unencumbered onto the ash and iron, and the dead, and the Wayward civilization would be dead… and after a moment’s pause, Washen added, “There’s only one other choice. Or two.” She was staring at Miocene again, feeling enough confidence to bristle. “Your total surrender,” she offered. “Or I suppose, if you can, you could kick the wall of the access tunnel, kick it good and hard, collapsing it and destroying the Spine and plugging everything before the flood reaches us.”

A perverse pleasure took hold of Miocene.

She was still weeping, still miserable. But even as she pushed the tears across her swollen, unfamiliar face, she felt a smile forming. With a cold horrible joy, she told Washen, “You’re clever, yes. I see how you stole those pumps and valves. I couldn’t steal them back again. Not in time, probably. But when I look up at those pumps, do you know what else I see? Do you know what’s happening up there?”

Washen gathered herself, then asked, “What?”

Miocene linked with the chamber’s holoprojection, and she showed them. In an instant, after a silent command, the captains found themselves inside an observation blister on the ship’s backside, surrounded by towering rocket nozzles that were doing nothing. Except for the steep, almost lazy tilt to each of them, they seemed perfectly ordinary. But even as a dozen voices begged for explanations, fires large enough to broil worlds rose up out of them, plumes of gas and light racing for the stars.

Every nozzle was firing.

No captain could remember a day when every engine was needed, and with a confused amazement, they asked for explanations.

“It’s my son,” Miocene confessed.

Again, she grabbed hold of herself, and she squeezed, angry hands jerking at her swollen, useless flesh, yanking until vessels burst and blood flowed from beneath her hard fingernails.

“When we made the last little burn, I thought I was the one controlling the engines,” she muttered. “And Till let me believe whatever I wanted to believe…”

Washen stepped close enough to touch her. And with a crisp voice, she said, “I don’t care about Till. I want to know… why he is firing the engines… now!”

Miocene laughed, and sobbed, and laughed harder.

Then Washen swept her long hands through her dark hair, and in the words of every pilot about to crash, she whispered, “Oh, shit.”

Fifty-three

A brutal chill took Washen by the throat and by the belly, and for a slippery instant she found herself waiting for the panic. Hers, and everyone’s. But the enormity was too much, and it hit them too suddenly. Among the captains, only Miocene seemed able to grieve with the proper anguish, collapsing to the steel floor, hands clawing at her thick neck as she sobbed, incoherently at first, then muttering to herself with a robust, unexpected confidence, “This is my catastrophe. Mine. The universe will never forget me. or forgive me. Ever.”

“That’s enough,” Washen growled.

The captains whispered to one another and moaned under their breath.

Washen yanked at the woman’s hands and hair, forcing the anguished eyes to look up at her. Then with the sturdiest voice she could manage, Washen said, “Show us. Exactly what’s happening. Show us now.”

Miocene closed her eyes.

The captains found themselves standing on the ship’s leading face, staring up at a senile red sun that seemed large and frighteningly close. But they had several billions of kilometers left to cross. At one-third lightspeed, the journey would take fifteen hours, and according to exacting plans drawn up centuries ago, they would miss that sun’s hot atmosphere by a comfortable fifty million kilometers.

With each passing second, their course was being changed. Was being mutated, and in dangerous ways.

“If the engines keep burning,” said Miocene, eyes still clamped shut.

The image leaped ahead fifteen hours. The ship dipped into the sun’s outer fringe—a warm plasma, thinner than most worthy vacuums. The hull could absorb both heat and trillions of little impacts. But simple friction had to alter the ship’s velocity even more, and in another blink, the captains were falling toward the dying sun’s tiny, infinitely dense partner, its mammoth gravity twisting the hull until it shattered, the ship’s ancient guts strewn into a hot accretion disk, every lump and particle destined to fall into that great black nothingness, leaving the universe entirely.

“No, no, no!’ Locke cried out.

“What about the Bleak?” asked dozens of voices.

With a doubting voice, Aasleen suggested, “It’d be destroyed, maybe.”

But black holes existed in the earliest universe, created in the swirls and eddies of hyperdense plasmas. Washen reminded everyone, “The Builders could have done this. But they knew best, and what they did instead, whatever the reason, was throw the ship out where there were very few, if any, black holes.”

The overhead image dissolved, the Temple surrounded them again.

Washen glanced at the high ceiling and base camp. Then she stared at Miocene, and she quietly asked, “Are you sure you can’t stop the engines?”

With a vivid anger, Miocene said, “What the fuck do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to stop them now. But the engines don’t know me, and I can’t cut Tills hold on them!”

“Then why is he coming here?”

Silence.

“If there’s nothing we can accomplish,” Washen continued, “why doesn’t Till just huddle close to the engines, and wait?”

The crying woman’s face grew calm. Reflective.

After a long moment, astonishment took her. “Because it isn’t my son,” she sputtered. “Of course. He isn’t the one who’s controlling the engines.”

The Bleak, Washen realized. Fifteen billion years as a prisoner, and of course you’d want the helm at this pivotal, perfect moment!

Miocene gazed up at the diamond bridge, at the blister and the Spine. The Spine was allowing something in the depths of Marrow to give captainly commands, and as she accepted that impossibility, she asked, “If I can bring down the bridge, Washen—cut the connection with Marrow—do you think you and your allies could sabotage enough machinery quickly enough to save us…?”

Washen started to say, “I don’t know”

An abrupt, almost gentle whump was heard, and felt, and the steel floor moved just enough to make people look at their feet.

“What did you do?” Locke asked.

Miocene rose with a tired majesty, her reddened eyes blinked a few times, and with an exhausted voice, she said. “The array that controls the quakes. It’s an old system, and it’s always been mine. They couldn’t steal it from me without my feeling the thief’s damp fingers.”

A second tremor passed through the Temple.

Smiling at her own wicked, nearly infinite cleverness, Miocene announced, “The iron’s tired of sleeping, I think. And I don’t believe we have that much time.”

A word and glare gave the captains every available lift-car, and every car on the bridge, empty or filled, immediately began falling toward the Temple.

“Did you know the array has failed?” the administrator squeaked. “That’s the city’s plate had already shifted five meters?”

Miocene considered, then said, “I know. Yes.”

“Do I put key staff’ on the cars? To save them?”

The woman meant herself, naturally. And with a quiet indifference, Miocene told her, “Yes. Of course. But remain here until the others can assemble. Understood?”

“Yes, madam. Yes—”

They boarded the largest car. Washen sat between Miocene and Locke, and she took a half-breath before the car jumped skyward, the air squeezed out of her. Then the entire bridge jerked sideways. The car’s walls scraped against the tube. Someone gave a shout, and Washen realized that it was her own voice. She had cried out. And Locke reached up against the acceleration, finding the strength to lay a massive hand on her hand, a sad sturdy voice telling her, “Even if we die, we might win.”

“Not good enough,” she replied. “Not nearly’ Again, the bridge bucked and rolled around them. Miocene made a sound, a low voice whispering to someone.

Washen let her head fall sideways. But no, the old bitch wasn’t speaking to her. She was muttering to someone only she could see, her face simple and composed, and in a strange, chilling way, happy.

Washen started to ask, “What are you doing-?”

But then they were inside the buttresses, and insane, and the car was yanked and kicked, and an unreal screech dwarfed every holler and curse, the tube surrounding the car twisted by the shaking, and slowing, nearly stopping entirely before some auxiliary system found the muscle to carry them to the top.

Doors opened with a soft, anticlimactic hiss.

Captains vomited bile and unfastened themselves, then vomited bile-scented air when they stood. Then everyone staggered out onto the open diamond platform, into the dim gray light of the nearly deserted base camp.

Two men stood waiting. Virtue wept without dignity or the smallest composure. Till, in perfect contrast, was staring at Miocene, his cold expression growing colder as he quietly remarked, “You don’t have any appreciation for what you have done, Mother. None.”

“What I’m doing,” Miocene replied, “is saving the ship. My ship. That’s all that matters here. My ship!”

The boyish face stiffened.

Then, softened.

The bridge screamed beneath them, and it pulled, and the platform plunged a full meter, then caught itself.

Washen looked down. What resembled rain clouds at first glance were billowing columns of smoke, countless fires started by the brutal, endless quakes that were tearing through the thick crust, shattering the iron plate along every weakness.

She looked up again.

A comforting hand fell on Virtue’s shoulder, and Till said, “Into the car.” He gave a soft shove, then added, “If you wish, Locke. You can return with us, too.”

Locke straightened his back. He didn’t reply.

“Then die here,” was Till’s pronouncement. “With the rest—”

Miocene lifted a hand.

Stuck into that swollen mass of flesh and nexus and bone was a small laser. It looked insubstantial. Worse than useless. Almost pathetic. But Washen knew that it could incinerate a man with a shaped flash, leaving nothing. And she knew from Miocene’s face that she meant to kill her son.

The shot was never fired.

Another bolt of light came from above, evaporating her weapon and her hand. But instead of shock or pain, Miocene seemed filled with a wild, indestructible power. Bending forward, she screamed and drove with her legs, with her new bulk, slamming into her son exactly as the bridge twisted again, a seering of purple light obliterating her trailing leg.

Washen dropped down.

Then looked overhead.

She saw the Wayward soldier. Golden, was it? She saw him standing on a high catwalk, aiming the big laser with a professional calm. Quick bursts, too fast to count. Then she looked back at Miocene, watching as the woman wailed, vanishing in whiffs of boiled blood and white-hot ash.

Dying, she clung to her son.

Near death, she still managed to mutter, “Till,” with a desperate voice. Soft, in the end. Doomed, and sorry. “Please,” her boiling mouth whispered. And then, nothing.

A last surgical burst of light obliterated the head and the Masters mirrored cap, and late by a half-moment, her son turned to see the car and its sole occupant drop away without the slightest warning.

The bridge’s machinery was failing. A safe-mode took Virtue racing downward, trying to save the precious car.

Miocene had delayed her son just enough.

Washen stared at Till, watching an impossible thought play itself out on that appealing face. How could this happen? What great purpose did it serve? In a voice meant for someone else, Till asked, “Now what do I do?”

If there was a reply, Washen didn’t hear it.

But something must have been heard, or at least thought. Because without hesitation, Till flung himself into the open door, and a moment later, the door closed and the bridge jerked sideways one last time, it and the Spine shattering just beneath the camp’s diamond blister, plunging sideways toward the burning face of Marrow.

Eventually the liquid hydrogen would fall.

Captain spoke about making plans. About taking cover, or perhaps finding a car that might survive the storm. But Washen didn’t take part in the plan-making, occupying herself by sitting with her legs crossed, watching nothing but the slow patient turning of her clock’s little hands.

Asaleen thought she was crazy.

Again, to himself, Locke spoke comfortably about death’s embrace.

Promise, then Dream, tried to thank Washen for pulling them off Marrow. “We never thought we’d be anywhere else again,” they confessed. “And you did your best.”

Even Golden joined them, offering his weapon in surrender, then spending the next few minutes watching Marrow boil and explode.

Finally, Washen closed her clock.

And with a nonchalant importance, she rose.

Everyone watched as she stepped out into the open and looked up. But wasn’t it too soon for the cold rain? Then they saw her waving at something overhead, and every captain and both of the Waywards looked up together, watching in stunned silence while a fleet of whale-shaped vessels began to slow, making ready for a hard landing.

Pamir was first to step out.

Perri and ten armed harum-scarums followed.

Aasleen immediately recognized Pamirs craggy face, and she laughed, and she said, “What is this? Don’t you know there’s a flood coming?”

Pamir lifted his eyebrows, grinning. Then he took his first good look at Marrow.

“Oh, I turned off that flood.” he remarked in a casual voice. “Long ago,” he said. “A lake of hydrogen inside that big long tube of vacuum… well, it evaporates as it falls. Believe me, we swam through what’s left of it, and we probably won’t get two drops here.”

Sounding insulted, Dream asked Washen, “What about your threat? About sending down that killing flood?”

“I’m not that cruel,” Washen replied. “I don’t murder helpless worlds.”

Pamir shook his head and threw a long arm around Washen, pulling her close. “You wouldn’t have?”

“I just like to tease worlds now and again,” she added, smiling and weeping in the same instant, thinking that never in her long, strange life had she ever felt so tired…