Wilson took three quick steps, bringing him right up to the interloper, and swung a fist. His knuckles connected with a satisfactory crunch and a burst of pain.

“Fuck!” Nigel Sheldon tumbled backward, landing on his ass in the dry grass. Two CST security personnel stepped smartly out of the wormhole, arms pointing at Wilson. Their suit sleeves rippled slightly. An annoyed Nigel Sheldon waved them back. “It’s okay,” he said, then grimaced and brought a hand up to his jaw. “Damn, that hurt.”

Wilson glowered down. “It was supposed to, you little shit.” The children came running up, stopping in confusion at the tableaux.

“Wilson!” Victor yelled. “That’s…”

“I know who it is,” Wilson said sharply.

“Oh, this is great,” Nigel grunted indignantly as he struggled to his feet. “Three hundred and thirty goddamn years, and you’re still pissed at me?”

“Three hundred. Three thousand. Nothing changes what you did.”

Nigel was poking a forefinger into his mouth. “Ouch. I think you loosened a tooth.”

“You hurt my knuckles.” Wilson shook his hand; the damn thing was, it really did hurt. He hadn’t been in a brawl since his Air Force Academy days; the streetwise how-to had evaporated over the intervening centuries.

“Are you going to do that again?” Nigel asked.

“Are you?”

“Okay, okay, so this entrance isn’t supremely tactful of me.” Nigel eyed Wilson’s grazed hand warily. “But I wanted to make an impression.”

“You did that back at Schiaparelli.”

“This is important, damnit.”

“What is?” Wilson was having to work hard at not being impressed. The fact was, he hadn’t heard of a wormhole being used like this before, not to touch base with an individual—unless you counted the rumors about Ozzie. Gateways were hugely expensive links between worlds with a very long payback time, not personal transport machines, even if that person was Nigel Sheldon. Wilson supposed he was using the CST exploratory division gateway back on Augusta to open this tunnel across interstellar space. He didn’t like to think of the cost. “I do have an e-butler address code if there’s anything urgent, you know. You could use the unisphere like the rest of the human race.”

“We both know I’m not on your e-butler acceptance list, and I needed to talk to you urgently.”

“Why? What the hell is all this about?”

“I need a favor.”

Wilson started laughing.

“Yeah, all right,” Nigel said sourly. “Very funny. Now try this on for size. We’re building a starship to go to Dyson Alpha.”

“I heard. There’s been nothing else in the unisphere news for over a month.”

“So, but you didn’t join the dots too well, did you? We can build a ship, but the kind of experienced astronauts we need to crew it, and especially captain it, are kind of in short supply in this era.”

Wilson abruptly stopped laughing. “Son of a bitch.”

“Oh. Do I have your attention now?”

“Why me?” Wilson was surprised by how weak his voice had become.

“There’s no one else left, Captain Kime. You’re the last space cadet left in the galaxy. We need you.”

“This is bullshit. You’ve got tens of thousands of people in your exploratory division.”

“We do indeed. Good kids; great, even. Not one of which has ever been out of contact with the unisphere in their first, second, or even sixth life. You, on the other hand, you know what it’s like to be shut up in a metal bubble for months on end, you can handle the isolation, the stress; you can keep command of people under those circumstances. It’s a lot different from issuing orders down the corporate chain, and having some middle management jerk leap to it. Experience is always valuable, you know that. No false modesty, Wilson, we both know how successful you’ve been. I mean, look where we’re standing right now. There aren’t many of us even today who can re-create an eight-thousand-square-kilometer chunk of a France that never really existed outside romantic literature. You’ve got that, what did you used to call it: the Right Stuff?”

“Old phrase,” Wilson muttered as the really ancient memories began their inevitable replay. He always swore he’d dump them into deep secure storage at every rejuvenation, clear them out of his brain along with all the other irrelevant clutter so there would be space for the new life. Each time, he never did. A weakness for nostalgia. He’d so nearly been a contender for true greatness rather than the corporate chieftain he’d actually become. Even today a lot of people knew who Neil Armstrong was. But Wilson Kime? Not a chance.

“Well dust off your copy, man, because it’s about to become fashionable again.”

Wilson stared at the edge of the open wormhole, the dark shimmer of nothingness that very few people actually got to see firsthand. “Is this a serious offer?” he asked quietly.

“Absolutely. It’s your gig if you want it. I hope you do. I mean that sincerely. The more I think about Dyson Alpha, how strange it is, the more I want someone I can really trust in charge out there.”

“Grandpa?” Emily gazed up in newfound awe at her ancestor. “Are you going to fly the starship, Grandpa? Really?”

“Looks like it, poppet.” Wilson patted the girl’s head. He hadn’t even needed to think about it, the response had been automatic. “Give me a few days,” he told Nigel. “I’ve got to sort things out here.”

“Sure thing, man.” Nigel smiled broadly, and stuck his hand out. “Welcome aboard.”

Wilson considered it, but not shaking would just be churlish. “Just so we’re completely clear on this, you’re not thinking of joining the crew yourself, are you?”

“No. We’re clear on that.”

…

Anshun was on the very edge of phase two space, two hundred seventeen light-years from Earth, and almost directly between the old world and the Dyson Pair. That location had been quite a factor in CST siting its new phase three exploration division there. Boongate, sixty light-years away, already had a second gateway leading to Far Away, and its government had been hopeful that CST would follow that up with the exploration station. It was not to be. Far Away was a dead end. Anshun would help extend the human frontier toward the Dyson Pair.

Not that much expansion had been notable in the eight years since the division had been established at the CST planetary station, a mere two planets had been opened up. But Anshun now possessed a quiet confidence about the years to come. It was going to be the junction for this entire new sector of space. Over the next century its economy and population would rise until it matched any of the successful phase one worlds. Its future was secure.

Wilson Kime grinned privately at the peculiar sensation of déjà vu as the passenger express from Los Vada slipped smoothly into the CST planetary station in Treloar, Anshun’s capital. The outside air here was hot and muggy from the nearby coast, just like Houston used to be. He could remember arriving at the NASA Space Center for his first day of training, the sun prickling his exposed skin with its heat. The uniform government-issue buildings of that campus had looked surprisingly shabby in the bright light, especially given what happened inside them. Somehow he’d expected the structures to be a little less industrial, a little more grandiose.

It was the same here on Anshun. Two members of CST’s exploration division were waiting for him on the platform. They showed him to a small station car, which drove through the vast empty area contained inside the perimeter fence that was destined to become the junction yard, where dozens of gateways and hundreds of busy tracks would route transport out to the new stars at some unspecified date. Right now, the landscape around him was almost ironically post-industrial. Long strips of enzyme-bonded concrete laid out long ago were now slowly buckling, roads for a mini city that never existed. The soil between them supported dispirited clumps of local grass and spindly weeds, cut up with curving tire ruts of baked clay that would form puddles after every downpour. Abandoned heavy-duty vehicles were scattered about, metal sections molting flakes of rust, composite bodywork bleached to a bland off-white, window glass smashed in, car-sized tires flat and calcified. Big fornrush birds glided above the area in wide spirals as their black wings captured the thermals. They were sleek scavengers, hunting down smaller rodents; though their catch was poor out here.