"Come on," said Max. "Let's get to the monastery before those goons come back." They left the courtyard and began marching up the road to the distant, open doors of the giant building.

Blair matched his pace to Rue's. "So, you'll give me another interview before you leave?"

Rue laughed. "I'll do better than that! How would you like to be the official chronicler of the adventure?"

"You mean…"

"I mean crew! I mean come with us. We haven't got all our crew together. You too, Ms. Chandra."

Blair looked stunned. "I… I yes, that would be… Rue, this story would make my career."

Corinna Chandra appeared to be thinking. Finally she smiled. "I would be honored," she said.

"Then it's settled."

Blair had seemed calm staring down the barrels of a dozen guns. Now he looked dazed. "Blair Genereaux, author of The Chronicles of—" He frowned. "Chronicles of what?"

"Huh?"

"Rue, haven't you even named your cycler?"

Rue pretended to think about it, but a name for the cycler had popped unbidden into her head the instant Blair asked and she knew it was right. "You want a name? How 'bout Jentry's Envy?"

Max laughed. "If you want. You're the captain."

Yes, I am, Rue thought and then she had to stop and sit down for a while.

RUE KNEW ALL about cyclers.

She had read cycler romances, watched movies about cycler captains, participated in sims about them ever since she could remember. They were a matter of practical fact in her life. They were also unbelievably romantic.

In sims, she had walked the decks of interstellar cyclers that were more like grand hotels, some even modelled on old Earth styles, with sweeping staircases and statues in niches and stained-glass windows that looked out on Mother Night. Only the richest, most important, or most talented could afford to travel between the stars: delegations of diplomats, eccentric billionaires, mad scientists, and artists from many different worlds were thrown together here and asked to get along for months or years at a time. Naturally, there was intrigue.

How you got to and from cyclers was itself a study in legend. So when Rue awoke on her last morning on Treya, grabbed her carefully packed bag and dumped it in the back of Max's aircar, she had all kinds of embarkation stories in mind. You rode particle beams or microwaves, or used a pion drive to rendezvous with passing cyclers; that was the trite truth. But there were thousands of gripping tales of how that rendezvous might be accomplished. One that was on her mind as she waved away the column of midges flittering above Max's car and watched him lock up his house, was a movie where some bad guys inserted their magsail into the beam behind the hero's. This cut off his acceleration and boosted theirs; they had stolen his beam and would reach the cycler while leaving him stranded. This kind of piracy was known as beam-stealing and it had been known to happen. The monks couldn't turn off the beams if it happened without dooming both crews to die adrift.

The various envious powers of Erythrion— ranging from Max's mom to the government— seemed to have decided on letting them go, which considering recent events seemed very suspicious. As they flew out to the orbital elevator she constructed frightening scenarios for herself about the government secretly beam-stealing their power and riding out to claim Jentry's Envy while they died in interstellar space.

She had barely shaken hands with the last member of their crew, a shy man named Evan Laurel, before they were all shooting to orbit. Her dark fantasies had no time to properly germinate.

As they rode up the elevator, Rue stayed glued to the window, watching the people, then the streets, buildings, and towns, dwindle below. The world resolved itself as a giant sunlit disk with blackness beyond it, and they ascended the center of a well of light that descended from impossibly far above. Clouds drifted to the wall of this well, faded and vanished. Beside Rue, Blair was doing a report, describing the crew and their impending adventure. He seemed so serene and engaging when he talked, it both calmed and infuriated her. Did he not realize what they were getting themselves into?

They managed to avoid several ships' worth of other newshounds and made it to her modified cycler shuttle. She barely recognized it; Max had removed nearly everything made of metal, even the hull, replacing it all with lightweight alternatives. It was a testament to his fanaticism that what little metal had been in the shuttle before had been lightweight beryllium alloys; even that was too much for him in his determination to cut mass. The hull was now a balloon-skin coated with shipfur, pale against the black sky. Several windows gleamed in the short cylinder; that was all. Nearby, Max's second shuttle hung like a brooding cloud. That one held life-support stacks and supplies. It was all they could afford to bring— and the total mass of both shuttles was under sixty tonnes.

The shuttles had small nuclear power packs which doubled as maneuvering engines. They had no other drive source, but coiled around their waists were some kilometers of superconducting cable. Charged, they would spring out to form rigid magnetized rings attached to the ships by tethers: plasma sails, they were called. Rue knew the principle, but wouldn't get to see the famous acceleration aurora those wire sails would kick up; she would be asleep in a life-support tank when the million or so particle-beam accelerators orbiting Erythrion turned their baleful gazes on these two little ships and pushed them at three gravities' acceleration on their way. For a few weeks, a significant portion of Erythrion's immense magnetosphere would be tapped and transmuted into these beams and yet those tens of trillions of watts were barely sufficient to boost sixty tonnes up to relativistic velocity. Halo worlds like Erythrion had power to spare for their colonies, but couldn't afford to launch something so gigantic as an interstellar cycler. Only the lit worlds could muster that kind of energy, and the lit worlds had abandoned the halo. Since its colonization, Rue's world had maintained its tenuous contact with the rest of the universe only through cargo packets and the rendezvous shuttles that met passing cyclers. The cyclers were gone; only the occasional packet came and went. Hers would be the first passenger shuttle to rendezvous with a cycler in twenty years.

Beyond the halo, millions of FTL ships of the R.E. might be winging to and fro between the lit stars. Perhaps— but no one at Erythrion could know, except from the evidence that there was less contact with the lit worlds every year, as their economies shifted away from launching expensive cyclers. As existing cyclers were decommissioned, they were not being replaced. It was becoming impossible for humans to travel between the halo worlds. It was this fact that made Jentry's Envy priceless.

They cycled through the airlock; when the inner door opened, Rue said, "Shit," very quietly. She had been expecting the familiar, cozy interior of the shuttle— but the interior had been gutted.

"We've got everything we could possibly need," said Max, waving expansively. "Even a few kitchen sinks thrown in for thoroughness."

Corinna Chandra and Evan Laurel were the least known of Rue's new crew. She watched them as they settled in; they had similar appraising looks in their eyes as they went through the supplies, occasionally tossing questions back at Max. Rebecca had gone to put her luggage in her little stateroom; Blair drifted around, recording everything.

In cycler romances, the key figure was always the captain. The cycler captain was the prime mover of many stories; he or she was the epicenter of intrigue, the judge, jury, and executioner of villains. He was frequently a rogue, or a perfect gentleman— but the captain in his jet-black uniform was always in godlike control of events.