At what their Clan had accomplished.

A Potemkin–class WarShip, the Poseidon’s original specs pegged her at a hair over 1,500,000 tons displacement and a length of just over 1,500 meters: a giant, round-tipped cylinder, with a slight flaring of her sides near the massive intersystem drive, and a plethora of docking rings dotting her midsection, where she held her twenty-five DropShip capacity like a clutch of possum young on her back.

Now, like a fungus fed to bursting, she’d grown and morphed well beyond the wildest imaginations of the original contractors who put pencil to paper and laid her keel. Though he did not have specifics, Petr felt sure she pushed almost a million tons more, and both her length and width had increased by more than fifty percent.

Beautiful did not come to mind. She had long ago lost her elegant lines to such growth, but the enormity of it still flabbergasted. With a gargantuan capacity of fifty DropShips, dozens of them Behemoth s permanently attached and turned into habitats or food repositories, she housed almost a half million inhabitants.

Beautiful did not come to mind. Magnificent did.

“You never answered my question.” Irritation flared, as Jesup’s words pulled Petr back from his contemplation of greatness.

“Because we already have had this conversation. Several times, in fact.”

“Then what is once more time, aff?” His laughter held a brittle quality Petr had never noticed before. He launched for the door.

With his usual grace, he grasped the edge of the hatch—Jesup had not dogged it upon entering—and smoothly twisted through, flinging himself down the long corridor, as though to escape Jesup’s words. Why did it so often feel like he fled his aide’s words?

“Why will you not answer?” The words came and Petr realized Jesup followed.

“Why will you not stop badgering me?”

“Me, badger you, oh great one? My obsequiousness would never allow it.”

Despite everything, Petr smiled slightly, unsure what that meant, but confident Jesup made some point.

“Neg, ovKhan, I do not badger. This lowly one simply asks.”

“Then ask a different question.”

“But a different question would seek the same information.”

Petr checked for traffic at a corridor intersection, then passed through. “For all your accusations of obsessiveness on my part, you manage a fair imitation yourself. Why can you not leave this alone?”

“Because you will not let me.”

Petr glanced over his shoulder at the slightly strident tone, saw a look of determination hiding behind the light smile Jesup forced on his face. “I will not let you? That makes no sense. Do I force your hand, Jesup? Do I hold a Gauss pistol to your skull?”

“Are you not my ovKhan?”

His words could be taken to mean any number of things. But Petr did not have time to try to untangle the complicated weave of his aide’s questioning.

Petr grabbed a stanchion and pulled himself to a stop, causing Jesup to almost overshoot him. “I need to speak with the saKhan about Sha.”

Once again, Petr discerned more of Jesup’s true emotions than at any time he could remember. Have you allowed your mask to slip, finally revealing your true face, the clown’s paints missing? And what is that truth?

“ovKhan, can you not let it go?”

“What?” Petr actually averted his eyes, than pulled them back to Jesup, furious at his subconscious attempt to shy away from a simple question.

“Nothing has transpired that you both cannot forgive. Take a surkairede and let your oaths wash away the years of differences.”

Petr held himself rigid. His anger was an inferno ready to incinerate Jesup for his audacity. He could not respond, not here. With the confrontation with saKhan Sennet looming and his growing certainty of Sha’s guilt, he simply would not have this conversation. Not now.

He turned abruptly and began moving forward again. Like a mantra, Petr responded, “I hope to convince the saKhan that Sha is dangerous.”

“How?”

Even more questions! An angry retort aborted on his tongue; his anger centered on himself, not Jesup.

I do not know how I will convince him.

The thought set his scalp itching and the phantom pain in his shoulder surging. As he reached the final intersection and began the descent to the docking station between the Ocean of Stars and Poseidon, he could not stop the thought from repeating within his head like the hammering of autocannon shells into ’Mech armor.

I do not know.

The thrum of humanity ( his humanity) felt good after so long downside, among spheroids.

Petr moved with swift grace, swimming along the giant main thoroughfare of the Poseidon, parallel to the craft’s mammoth K-F drive. Around him skimmed a school of humanity, in a rainbow of colors and shapes. With unobtrusive handholds and lines spaced at easy intervals on almost every available surface of the corridor, Fox Clansmen seemed to dart in and out of the main current, taking side shunts into each perpendicular deck, with amazing speed and grace.

Ahead, what had been Primary Cargo Hold A so many decades ago, Alpha Community Prime now filled to brimming—almost fifty thousand civilians. And four more communities half that size occupied other former cargo holds. Not to mention the dozens of DropShip communities.

Magnificent.

The word once more resonated in his head as he slipped into the hold and beheld the beehive of activity, as literally thousands of people made their way on various errands. Much as he wished to linger and take it all in, he could not delay his own mission.

Surprisingly enough, saKhan Sennet did not command Petr to meet him on his command DropShip, or even his command stateroom. Instead, saKhan Sennet had taken up a secondary residence in Alpha Community Prime (he said it reminded him of his responsibilities to the civilian castes, but Petr believed otherwise), and it was to this secondary residence that Petr now traveled.

Having been on this vessel numerous times, he moved with certainty, reading the jumbling confusion of directions printed in symbols on every corner of every block of residences. Before long he found the appropriate block, moved to the right hatch and rapped smartly, while holding on to one of the bars on either side of the entrance.

Several long seconds passed before the hatch undogged and swung inward; a head came into view and seemed to fill the entire hatchway.

saKhan Mikel Sennet’s stature created a legend all its own. A giant brute of a man, he stood 2.4 meters tall, with large, pale features and dirty brown hair and eyes; his opponents whispered his mother must have been an elemental.

Only in a whisper.

“Enter.” The deep voice perfectly matched such physical size.

Petr glided through as Mikel moved away from the door and pulled himself down into a seat at a small table. Petr closed the distance to the other chair and sat down as well; the static device in both chairs automatically activated to hold them to the surface. In microgravity, the decorum of waiting to be asked to sit had long since been done away with.

Glancing around, Petr approved of the Spartan accommodations. A place for everything and everything in its place, with little in the way of extraneous accoutrements—a simple, straightforward mind, with greater goals than to collect worthless knickknacks. Focusing on Mikel, he waited for an invitation to speak. Sitting was one thing, talking out of order another thing entirely.

He met the saKhan’s intense stare with one of his own. Mikel gave no notice to Petr’s disfigurement; he wore his own badges of honor, though none so large, or colorful.

Finally. “How does it progress?”

“Slowly.”

He quirked an eyebrow; Petr took the rebuke. Did not respond.