"We're taking precautions. We're abandoning all our ships except the ones with ramscoop and coldsleep capability. We'll operate in coordinated nets; no one should be lost for more than a few years." He shrugged. "And if we never find what we seek — " if we die between the stars as our life support finally fails "— well then, we will have still lived true to our name." Aniara. "I think we have a chance." More than can be said for you.

Ravna nodded slowly. "Yes, well. It… helps me to know that."

They talked a few minutes more, Tirolle and Glimfrelle joining in. They had been at the center of something vast, but as usual with the affairs of the Powers, no one knew quite what had happened, nor the result of the strivings.

"Rendezvous Lynsnar two hundred seconds," said the ship's voice.

Ravna heard it, nodded. She raised her hand. "Fare you well, Kjet Svensndot and Tirolle and Glimfrelle."

The Dirokimes whistled back the common farewell, and Svensndot raised his hand. The window on Ravna Bergsndot closed.

… Kjet Svensndot remembered her face all the rest of his life, though in later years it seemed more and more to be the same as Olvira's.

"Tines' world. I can see it, Pham!"

The main window showed a true view upon the system: a sun less than two hundred million kilometers off, daylight across the command deck. The positions of identified planets were marked with blinking red arrows. But one of those — just twenty million kilometers off — was labeled "terrestrial". Coming off an interstellar jump, you couldn't get positioning much better than that.

Pham didn't reply, just glared out the window as if there were something wrong with what they were seeing. Something had broken in him after the battle with the Blight. He'd been so sure of his godshatter — and so bewildered by the consequences. Afterwards he had retreated more than ever. Now he seemed to think that if they moved fast enough, the surviving enemy could do them no harm. More than ever he was suspicious of Blueshell and Greenstalk, as if somehow they were greater threats than the ships that still pursued.

"Damn," Pham said finally. "Look at the relative velocity." Seventy kilometers per second.

Position matching was no problem, but "Matching velocities will cost us time, Sir Pham."

Pham's stare turned on Blueshell. "We talked this out with the locals three weeks ago, remember? You managed the burn."

"And you checked my work, Sir Pham. This must be another nav system bug

… though I didn't expect anything was wrong in simple ballistics." A sign inverted, seventy klicks per second closing velocity instead of zero. Blueshell drifted toward the secondary console.

"Maybe," said Pham. "Just now, I want you off the deck, Blueshell."

"But I can help! We should be contacting Jefri, and rematching velocities, and — "

"Get off the deck, Blueshell. I don't have time to watch you anymore," Pham dived across the intervening space and was met by Ravna, just short of the Rider.

She floated between the two, talking fast, hoping whatever she said would both make sense and make peace. "It's okay, Pham. He'll go." She brushed her hand across one of Blueshell's wildly vibrating fronds. After a second, Blueshell wilted. "I'll go. I'll go." She kept an encouraging touch on him — and kept herself between him and Pham, as the Skroderider made a dejected exit.

When the Rider was gone, she turned to Pham. "Couldn't it have been a nav bug, Pham?"

The other didn't seem to hear the question. The instant the hatch had closed, he had returned to the command console. OOB's latest estimate put the Blight's arrival less than fifty-three hours away. And now they must waste time redoing a velocity match supposedly accomplished three weeks earlier. "Somebody, something, screwed us over…" Pham was muttering, even as he finished with the control sequence, "Maybe it was a bug. This next damn burn is going to be as manual as it can be." Acceleration alarms echoed down the core of the OOB. Pham flipped through monitor windows, searching for loose items that might be big enough to be dangerous. "You tie down, too." He reached out to override the five minute timer.

Ravna dived back across the deck, unfolding the free-fall saddle into a seat and strapping in. She heard Pham speaking on the general announce channel, warning of the timer override. Then the impulse drive cut in, a lazy pressure back into the webbing. Four tenths of a gee — all the poor OOB could still manage.

When Pham said manual, he meant it. The main window appeared to be bore-centered now. The view didn't drift at the whim of the pilot, and there were no helpful legends and schematics. As much as possible, the were seeing true view along OOB's main axis. Peripheral windows were held in fixed geometry with main. Pham's eyes flickered from one to another, as his hands played over the command board. As near as could be, he was flying by his own senses, and trusting no one else.

But Pham still had use for the ultradrive. They were twenty million klicks off target, a submicroscopic jump. Pham Nuwen fiddled with the drive parameters, trying to make an accurate jump smaller than the standard interval. Every few seconds the sunlight would shift a fraction, coming first over Ravna's left shoulder and then her right. It made reestablishing comm with Jefri nearly impossible.

Suddenly the window below their feet was filled by a world, huge and gibbous, blue and swirling white. The Tines' world was as Jefri Olsndot advertised, a normal terrestrial planet. After the months aspace and the loss of Sjandra Kei, the sight caught Ravna short. Ocean, the world was mostly ocean, but near the terminator there were the darker shades of land. A single tiny moon was visible beyond the limb.

Pham sucked in his breath. "It's about ten thousand kilometers off. Perfect. Except we're closing at seventy klicks per second." Even as she watched, the world seemed to grow, falling toward them. Pham watched it for few seconds more. "Don't worry, we're going to miss, fly right past the, um, north limb."

The globe swelled below them, eclipsing the moon. She had always loved the appearance of Herte at Sjandra Kei. But that world had smaller oceans, and was criss-crossed with Dirokime accidents. This place was as beautiful as Relay, and seemed truly untouched. The small polar cap was in sunlight, and she could follow the coastline that came south from it toward the terminator. I'm seeing the northwest coast. Jefri's right down there! Ravna reached for her keyboard, asked the ship to attempt both ultrawave comm and a radio link.

"Ultrawave contact," she said after a second.

"What does it say?"

"It's garbled. Probably just a ping response," acknowledgment to OOB's signal. Jefri was housed very near the ship these days; sometimes she had gotten responses almost immediately, even during his night time. It would be good to talk to him again, even if…

Tines' world filled the entire aft and side windows now, its limb a barely curving horizon. Sky colors stood before them, fading to the black of space. Icecap and icebergs showed detail within detail against the sea. She could see cloud shadows. She followed the coast southwards, islands and peninsulas so closely fit that she could not be sure of one from the other. Blackish mountains and black-striped glaciers. Green and brown valleys. She tried to remember the geography they had learned from Jefri. Hidden Island? But there were so many islands.

"I have radio contact from planet's surface," came the ship's voice. Simultaneously a blinking arrow pointed at a spot just in from the coast. "Do you want the audio in real time?"