In a brief ceremony, she christened her new ship:

The Osmium.

Old husbands needed the occasional honor, she felt. And she knew that the harum-scarum would appreciate the gesture when he learned about it.

Her new trajectory and the diminishing velocity set her on a collision course with the Great Ship. But that assumed both that the ship and the Osmium would successfully cross the Inkwell, neither changing its present velocity in any significant way.

Like all good plans, this plan failed soon after it began. Polypond eyes were supposed to see Mere as a cold empty fuel tank jettisoned centuries ago from a distant streakship. Her ion drive was too sluggish and slight to be obvious, and if necessary, she could kill the engine for days at a time, doing no lasting damage to her trajectory. But what no one predicted was what her own eyes would see. And that her ears would hear things that piqued her curiosity. And that, given the chance, she would take enormous risks to earn a better look and a closer listen.

In quiet, coded voices, the polyponds spoke endlessly to one another.

And using massive slow ships, they constantly sent little pieces of themselves from one warm world to another.

The ships were minimally armored. Nothing inside them seemed to be valuable enough to shroud in hyperfiber or protect with lasers. She focused on a transmission from a ship moving in the blackness ahead of her, unleashing all of her quantum code-breakers in a bid to make sense out of its dense, Gordian-like signal. Then at one point, the signal changed its nature. The coding sputtered abruptly and failed, and in the next millisecond, a lone voice sadly told its audience, “I have found unfortune—”

The ship exploded into a cloud of hydrogen gas and tiny fragments.

Mere replayed the collision a thousand times, measuring the spreading cloud’s progress through the endless dark. And after considering various possibilities, she sent home her new flight plan and began rebuilding the Osmium once again.

Every pretense to being only an empty fuel tank ended. The new configuration was sturdy and purposeful if not particularly large. Inside the new engine, tucked inside a magnetic cask, was a substantial mass of anti-iron. The new engine was as advanced and expensive as anything known, and astonishingly efficient, and it had a kick and raw arrogance about it. To hide herself, the best Mere could manage was to fire up the engine whenever the shrouding dusts were thicker than normal. And she used it in hard brutal bursts, shoving herself into a slower, slightly different trajectory that eventually took her through the ruined ship.

With whispering lasers, she studied the scattered pieces. Nanosecond bursts of energy pushed her closer to the interesting bits. With magnetic nets, she collected what was nearest and electrically charged, eventually pulling in a caramelized block of organic material a little smaller than one of her tiny hands.

Death is never a simple state. Not to philosophers, nor to a determined if rather limited biologist.

In a laboratory no bigger than a closet, Mere reached inside the burnt and blasted chunk of matter, finding neurons built along some alien logic. If this had been a human mind, she could have reanimated and interrogated it. If it belonged to any known alien, she might have managed the same trick, with patience. But despite similarities to a dozen known species, there was no easy path to progress. This was a sliver of a mind. There was no telling how large the original brain had been, or what its function had been, and if anything important had been filed away in this tiny corner of Self. But what else did Mere have to do today? What else was half as important as studying this prize? That was her attitude every morning, waking from a dream-rattled sleep for the next four thousand mornings, the same first thought bubbling out of her

“Today I’ll make sense of you, my friend. My fellow survivor.”

THE OSMIUM CONTINUED plunging deep into the Inkwell.

At random intervals, Mere received updates from home—encrypted and cleverly disguised, each containing highly summarized accounts of what the captains saw and what the resident experts believed, at least a few years ago. The data were cut to the bone; information meant noise, and any noise, no matter how well hidden, increased the chance of discovery. That was why the Inkwell charts were updated only occasionally, and even when limited to the changes from past charts, the updates were fantastically complicated—hundreds of cubic light-years full of threadlike rivers of ionized ice, many thousands of warm-moon and Mars-mass bodies, plus banks of dense black dust and clouds of frigid hydrogen that were gathered at their densest inside the Satin Sack. Each of those features had been carefully named, and all moved in relation to their neighbors as well as the rest of the Inkwell. Each river flowed with its own velocity while the masses of dust and gas gradually acquired new shapes, spinning on some grand axis or holding perfectly still, features gaining mass or losing their substance according to some thoroughly choreographed scheme that felt natural and planned, and at all times, deeply beautiful.

Mere had been pushing through the Satin Sack for several months, far ahead of the Great Ship but gradually drifting closer to its course. One evening, just as she was rising into sleep, an update arrived inside the much-diluted beam of a navigational laser. The newest charts were included, along with an upbeat message from the Master Captain. “I can’t express how thankful I am to have your good eyes and mind serving us,” the golden face declared. “And don’t be a stranger, please.”

“Call home,” was the message’s true intent.

It had been more than a year since Mere had taken that risk, and then only to offer a minimal description of her latest trajectory. For many smart reasons, she had no intention of revealing her existence now, or for years to come, if necessary. When she had something to offer, of course she would speak. But despite twenty-hour workdays and a wealth of observations, nothing seemed quite urgent enough or peculiarly odd.

Nine days later, again at bedtime, a far-off laser caressed the Osmium, its infrared beam too diffuse to be noticed by the casual observer.

Embedded inside the beam, wrapped within a package of photons too weak to melt a snowflake, were great volumes of new information. It was too soon for any message from the Great Ship, much less another complete chart update. The random schedule of transmissions had been decided ages ago, known only to the captains and her, and this was an entirely unscheduled event.

Someone was playing a game, Mere suspected.

But the encryptions were proper, and a hundred predetermined cues added to the authenticity. She stored the transmission, isolated it, then asked for a volunteer among the resident AIs. “Examine it,” she told one of the semisentient entities. “And tell me what you think.”

The AI was thorough and exacting, and it was very slow. Mere had time to eat a tiny, cold-blooded dinner—a taste of sugar and a bite of fat giving her refrigerated body the energy necessary to survive the night. Then instead of sleeping, she continued working on a project that had consumed the last few hours of this particular day.

She had recovered more than just that neural mass from the polypond vessel. Twists and slivers of plastic and alloyed metals, diamond shards and low-grade hyperfiber gave subtle clues about their collective purpose. Even their pattern in space was important. By replaying the collision and matching it with the debris field, Mere had built a reasonably accurate model of both the polypond ship and its death: simple fusion engines and big tanks full of liquid hydrogen, plus a minimal shield protecting a spherical compartment quite a bit larger than her own ship. The bolide—probably a chunk of cometary ice—had torn through the shield before delivering a glancing blow to the ship’s heart. The resulting blast had scattered debris across billions of kilometers, and everything made perfect sense except for the problem of what the ship had been carrying.