To make the rendezvous, the streakship had to slow itself.

To land, it followed the traditional course of shuttles bringing passengers and cargo, maneuvering behind the Great Ship to match velocities and course, then using the ship’s considerable gravity to aid its final approach.

The giant engines showed as burnished gray cones tilting starward. They were thousands of kilometers above the hull, and the Inkwell briefly vanished behind the vast round bulk of hyperfiber and stone, water and busy flesh.

Approaching Port Alpha, the AI remarked, “I will miss working with you, sir.”

Pamir nodded, and after a moment’s reflection, he admitted, “The feeling’s mutual, my friend.”

The landing was accomplished in the same way as the mission had been accomplished—professionally, without fuss or disappointment. The fuss began afterward. Nestled inside its old berth, the streakship was surrounded by banners of welcome, written in too many languages to count. Cameras and immersion eyes had been hung in the hard vacuum. As their nexuses reengaged with the ship’s networks, the crew saw just a tiny fraction of the coverage. “Our heroes have returned!” they read. They heard. They heard the proclamations sung and shouted. And then after the obligatory speeches, from Pamir and the Master Captain, the streakship’s crew and both of its passengers were ushered off for a new round of medical and psychological evaluations, and a mandatory quarantine that lasted another ten weeks.

Once cleared, Pamir went straight to Washen’s apartment.

After their usual fun, the two of them lay beneath her domed ceiling, watching the live feeds from the ship’s prow. They had entered the Inkwell in the last few days, or they were still entering it. Definitions were always subject to debate. But the stars were vanishing behind them, and if not for the light of the shields and the obliteration of cometary debris, it seemed that nothing lay ahead of them. Nothing. Not even blackness, the ink was so deep and cold and pure.

“When we were landing,” Pamir began.

Washen waited for a moment, and then asked, “What?”

“I noticed some new mirror fields tucked between the engines.” He paused for a moment, then added, “They must have been thrown together while I was gone.”

“On my orders,” his lover admitted.

“On your orders, what?”

Silence.

But that would be a reasonable precaution. Hazards could come from any direction, and if they were seen while they were still far away …

“It’s my son’s fault,” Washen offered.

“How is Locke?”

“Busy. Happy. Intensely curious.” She switched the view to the aft hemisphere, and with a tone of confession, she admitted, “But I’m the genuine paranoid in the family.”

Pamir said nothing.

Then after a full hour of thoughtful silence, Washen asked, “Do you ever wonder?”

“What?”

“Where is our ship supposed to be going?” she whispered. “And is there anybody else out there … anybody who is chasing after us, maybe … ?”

Seventeen

The vacuum tingled and roared with energies.

Under a boundless black sky, the hull was brightly lit, pools and great blankets of hard blue and faint yellow light marking where the Remoras lived and the fef worked. One of the giant engines would ignite, superheated plasmas rushing out of its towering nozzle, up into the smothering cold. Powerful magnetic fields would surge and spin, grabbing up flecks of iron or iron-dirtied ice, then fade away again into a brief restful hum. Whispered signals danced back and forth at lightspeed, bringing orders and data feeds and fresh gossip and white-hot curses, and buried inside that endless chatter were little secrets wearing encrypted shells and anonymous faces. Gamma radiation from the ends of the universe caught the ship, burrowing into its hull and dying, or battering its way through a Remora’s wet human cells. Billion-year-old neutrinos dove deeper, their trajectories twisted by the hyperfiber’s ultimate bonds; then with the keen urgency of their species, most of the neutrinos escaped, following some slightly changed path through the Creation. Dark matter particles hung like a cold fog in the blackness, occasionally colliding squarely enough with a nucleus to make it rattle for a moment. And always there was the vacuum itself: empty only in name, possessing a Planck-tiny spongelike structure that every moment gave birth to an array of virtual particles, too many to count, every last particle colliding with its mirror image and vanishing before either could be noticed. Before either could be real.

“The forecast is favorable,” Conrad reported. He stood in the vacuum, wearing the lifesuit with its Submaster epaulets on the shoulders and no other trace of his considerable rank. His single eye, wide and oval and black as the sky overhead, stared at his two guests. One of them was tall, and the other was considerably taller. “There won’t be any significant hazards for another eighty hours. Then we’ll cross a debris field. Pieces of a big comet, apparently.” To the taller guest, he said, “A comet that must have splintered when you tried moving it out of our way.”

“I can’t move anything at the moment, sir,” said the Blue World’s emissary. “Except for myself, that is.”

“Sure. I forgot.” The Remora now watched his other guest, his rubbery wide mouth grinning as a warm voice said, “If I’m wrong about the forecast, get into a bunker somewhere.”

“Always,” Pamir promised. Then with a sweeping gesture, he remarked, “You’ve done a lot in these last years.”

Bright diamond domes were rising from the ruins of a different city. The Waywards had swept this portion of the hull bare during the War, but repairing damage was what Remoras did. Of course they had returned to this place. Of course they would honor their dead by spreading cloaks of new hyperfiber over the charred bones and empty shells. With a keen stubbornness, they wouldn’t rest until a million domes reached to the horizon, empty for the moment or for the next ten thousand years … but still, ready for their children to reclaim them with their old numbers as well as their unflinching arrogance.

“Take my personal skimmer,” said Conrad.

“Thanks.”

For a moment, the Remora stared at Pamir’s companion. Then with a calm, unreadable voice, he asked, “Have you ever walked the hull before?”

“No,” she replied.

“Does it worry you?”

“Would that be polite?” she inquired. “To feel worry?”

“It doesn’t matter,” the Remora allowed.

The emissary glanced at Pamir, apparently waiting for advice.

“Walk in that direction,” he suggested. “Our skimmer’s waiting.”

She obeyed, instantly and without hesitation, her lifesuit soundlessly marching across the smooth gray hull.

Following after her, Conrad spoke on a secure channel. “Does your lady know you’re spending time with this beautiful young woman?”

“It was Washen’s suggestion, as I recall.”

“I guess that’s possible,” Conrad kidded. “She’s never struck me as the jealous sort.”

The laughter fell away quickly.

Then with a different tone—a serious, anticipating tone—the Remora asked, “Is it the news from the bow?”

“Sure.”

“Want a closer look, do you?”

The joke had no effect on either man.

Finally, Pamir admitted, “We just want to see her reaction. Walking beneath the Inkwell this way, in the open. And then we’ll show her what the big mirror fields are iinding—”

“An experiment, is that it?”

Not much of one. But since the emissary had been pulled from the fuel tank, thawed out and revived, virtually nothing of substance had been eased free of her. Twenty competing labs had studied her genetics. Her neural pathways and every spoken word had been analyzed to the limits of the available tools. Experts in aliens, sitting on an ocean of experience, had come to the same conclusion: She was a relatively simple creature woven around some scrupulously ordinary DNA. Human DNA, as it happened. And specifically, O’Layle’s own genetics.