Every moment brought little impacts and endless damage.

Mere was dying in countless other existences, but not here. Here she remained healthy enough, if only for the next little moment.

And the moment after.

And for another nine excruciating, inevitable minutes.

The Osmium slid past its first target without incident. Full-spectrum images were taken, samples of dust and vacuum were absorbed, and a sudden burst of radio noise was recorded in full. Even at 5 million kilometers—Mere’s closest approach—the object’s mass pulled her ship’s pieces farther apart. Then she was past her target and free to glance at the results, at the data and the first instinctive declarations of her AIs. They had danced with some kind of machine or factory. The mass of the large asteroid had been compressed and elongated, caked with hyperfiber and powered by a trailing necklace of fusion reactors. The energy production was impressive, and it was nothing. Each of the next six factories were larger, each fed by still more reactors. The cloud’s hydrogen was the fuel. The cloud’s dust was the raw material. Both were being collected by vast electrostatic baleens and drawn inward into the first of the cylindrical factories, separated by composition and charged again, then ushered along on parallel magnetic rivers.

Suddenly Mere’s habitat absorbed a clean sharp blow.

Worry blossomed. Not about death, since that wouldn’t allow time enough for worry. No, she was afraid that she might be discovered. Every impact, tiny or major, produced a fountain of plasma. Plasmas were bright and obvious. Mere’s sturdiest hope was that if she was seen, she would be regarded as nothing special. Debris from lost polypond ships occasionally had to drift through this space, and if someone was watching, and if he could feel any emotion that resembled suspicion, hopefully his mind was elegant enough or lazy enough to grab on to this most ordinary explanation.

The next factories were more distant and considerably more massive. Despite its enormous velocity, the Osmium rippled with the tides, its pieces slowly pulled even farther apart.

Mere let them wander.

She gazed at the data, listening to the first impressions from the AIs, and with a tiny voice asked, “What next? Each of you, make predictions.”

There was no consensus, thankfully.

And none of the self-taught experts zeroed in on the truth.

“The dust?” she asked.

They could taste atomic hydrogen and molecular hydrogen, plus buckyball carbons with ordinary elements riding at their cores, from lithium to iron. The entire cloud was as regular and pure as any product spat out by a competent factory. Judging by the cloud’s fluid dynamics, it was a recent feature, built within the last century or two, and perhaps created as a whirlpool in one of the electromagnetic rivers that recently weaved their way through the Sack.

“Total mass of the facility?”

Equal to a substantial moon, so far.

“Energy production?”

An assortment of voices hesitated.

“What?”

The navigator AI answered, whispering into her mind, “There’s a new mass. A body. Ahead of us now.”

“Show me.”

In the blackness was a deeper blackness. In the bitter cold lay a superchilled realm rimmed by an army of elaborate machines, and until this moment, no one had suspected its existence.

The mystery lay 20 million kilometers from Mere.

At her closest, she would pass within 8 million kilometers.

“Mass?”

A small moon.

“Looks larger,” she noted. Then, “Composition?”

Hyperfiber, at least on its surface.

“Grade?”

High.

At the frigid center of the cloud was a perfect gray-white sphere. The surrounding machines resembled any of a hundred familiar pieces of equipment, and they resembled none of them. They were alien devices built to serve some clear engineering purpose, each wrapped around an alien aesthetics. Mere found herself staring at the array, trying to twist her mind until she could see beauty in it. Beauty and elegance were reliable routes into the unknown mind. But after several minutes of hard concentration, nothing changed. She was examining a minimal arrangement of pragmatic tools, and nothing mattered but their capacity to do their exceptionally narrow work.

“Question,” she said.

The AIs had been talking among themselves. Now they fell silent, and the navigator whispered, “Yes, madam.”

“Is there any trace of organic organisms?”

Silence.

“Look for habitats warm as tropical water,” she advised.

“We have been, madam.”

“And leakage from closed biosystems.” Because there were no large polyponds here, and small biosystems often leaked a thin rain of water and carbon dioxide and other rich clues about metabolisms and catabolisms.

“Nothing here, madam.”

Except the machines, she realized. Nothing but machines.

As the Osmium charged forward, the little impacts of iron and lighter dusts began to lessen. Apparently the local space had been mined out, or it had been made safer for delicate instruments. Either way, she was relieved. For the next fifteen minutes, Mere found herself daydreaming about passing out of the cloud safely, then reconfiguring her ship again. Once it was pulled back together, she had important things to show to the captains. To show Washen. She got as far as imagining that tall woman sitting beside her, their faces temporarily eye to eye, and with an appreciative wink, the First Chair would tell her, “Thank you.”

The frigid sphere vanished behind her.

Another necklace of factories stretched into the distance, bending off to the right and ending with a great glowing baleen.

Mere called up her best eyes, but she used none of them.

When the bolide struck, she was daydreaming again. She was sitting with half a dozen old husbands at a table in some wide avenue on board the Great Ship, and she was listening while the six of them, each from a different species, happily exchanged stories about their little one-time wife.

THE BOLIDE WAS iron and nickel flavored with an assortment of sulfur and rare earths. Watching the impact, a sensor positioned on one of the distant portions of the Osmium took careful note of the plasma signature, and with a calmness born from simplicity, it checked the data against a carefully compiled library of known signatures. Sometime in the not-too-distant past, that particular bolide had lain inside the solid core of a Mars-class world—presumably one of the worlds that drifted inside the Inkwell and which the polyponds had dismantled.

After the impact, the ship immediately began reassembling itself. Following long-established protocols and measured doses of inspiration, the pieces moved along electrostatic threads and with tiny breaths of nanorockets. Five full months were required to gather around the battered habitat and reattach what remained of the main engine.

Long ago, the Osmium had left the factory cloud.

Using the shards and existing systems, a new craft was assembled. It was inelegant and unlovely and barely able to operate in any meaningful fashion, but a new habitat was constructed, nearly five cubic meters of space partly filled with the vacuum-baked and deeply dead body of its pilot.

An atmosphere was fabricated.

The main engine was repaired to a point, recalibrated as well as possible, and left untouched.

The mummified body was slowly fed liquids and salt and sugars, plus amino acids, both old-fashioned and modern. But the damage was severe, the wounds achingly slow to heal. Consciousness came in slow steps with long plateaus and occasional backfalls. To save energy, Mere was kept in complete blackness. To minimize demands on the fragile life-support system, her metabolism remained at the lowest possible level. Even when she was conscious, she couldn’t move or see, communicating with her surviving AIs through new implants delivered by machines not originally designed to serve as autodocs.