“You did and don’t be,” Pamir replied. “Come in.”

The small man stepped inside his mother’s apartment. “I asked where she was. The bridge has standing orders to tell me … and the captain in residence said she was home …”

“She doesn’t expect you?”

“No.”

Pamir nodded. “Must be important.”

“Probably,” Washen’s son replied. “But I could be wrong.”

“Well then,” Pamir allowed. “I’ll track her down. Walk with me?”

“I’d rather wait here, sir.”

Pamir almost laughed, hearing that crisp little “sir” from the man. Obviously, Locke was surprised to find his mother’s lover strolling around her home. Maybe he felt a little miffed not to know. Had they done that good of a job of hiding their relationship? No, probably not. More likely, he simply didn’t pay attention to such matters. Too much time living with the AIs, trying to think in their clean, nonhormonal ways, and this sudden whiff of real life left him unsettled.

Washen’s apartment was neither large nor particularly grand. Narrow hallways connected a series of round rooms. Every ceiling was a neat hemisphere of bright green olivine. Beyond the ceiling and walls, and beneath the stone floor, were more than a hundred meters of rock, and then a great bubble of moderate-grade hyperfiber—the true wall to this little abode that covered barely three hectares of tidy and familiar floor space.

Washen was in her bedroom, slowly dressing.

“You didn’t sleep enough,” he observed.

She was standing in the middle of the room, her uniform pulling itself up her long body and the dangling arms, the mirrored fabric rustling as it covered her small breasts and the beating heart. With a nod, she said, “I promise. As soon as this century is finished, I’ll sleep.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

With an earnest gasp, she said, “Do. Please.”

LOCKE REMAINED STANDING near the front door. Watching his manners and mood, Pamir came to the inevitable conclusions: The onetime Wayward was introspective and observant, smart in ways that the Second Chair could never be, and sweet in ways that Pamir never wished to be. Locke was embarrassed to be in the company of his mother’s private life. Yet his mind refused to let him dwell on those little thoughts. With a shake of the head, he returned to the primary subject. With a tense little smile, he said, “We have a final conclusion for you, Mother.”

“Final?” Washen asked.

“In a sense,” he said mildly, laughing for a moment. “Until we learn something else, of course.”

“This way.”

With her men following, Washen led them through a series of garden rooms—alien habitats each, including a small corner dedicated to Marrow life-forms—then they passed inside a spacious chamber meant for cooking and casual meals.

“Hungry?” she asked everyone.

Then to nobody in particular, she admitted, “I’m starving.”

Enough food for three was delivered. Pamir deferred to the dutiful son, sitting on the far side of the freshly grown table while Locke sat on his mother’s right, staring at a plate of spiced egg whites and lava bread.

The starving woman ate two bites.

“Do you want to hear our conclusions?” Locke muttered.

“First,” Washen said, “I want to hear about you. How are you, son?”

Silence.

The two of them were very much the same person, Pamir decided; they were intensely focused and successful because of it. And because of that intensity, they ended up frail in other ways.

“Okay,” she relented. “Show us what you have.”

“With your house nexus?”

Washen gave him access.

The lights dropped, and the inky ceiling was sprinkled with whiffs of soft light. He began by posing the question, “Is someone chasing the Great Ship?”

Pamir felt his heart kick.

“In these few years, we’ve analyzed the available data pools available to the captains, and private files belonging to passengers. We’ve also gone further, merging the data into a coherent, robust mass that can be used to hunt for traces of anything that might be a second ship or a trailing body, then using the new mirror fields on the ship’s trailing face, watching the Inkwell for any trace of unexpected disturbances.”

In the blackness, a point of light appeared, streaking toward them. Toward the Milky Way.

“We’re a little bit lucky,” Locke maintained. “When the ship was discovered, thousands of species built huge mirrors designed for no purpose other than to watch it.”

The tiny light was the Great Ship, and with a silent grace, it fired its engines, pushing itself into a close rendezvous with a dense white dwarf sun that deftly spun it off into the main body of the galaxy.

“Some of these species became passengers,” he mentioned. “And they paid the captains, in part, with knowledge.”

What seemed like an empty blackness was not. Suddenly the intergalactic realm was rich with objects, each wearing its own private velocity and implied history. Outside the dense swirl of suns were millions more suns—globular clusters of elderly, metal-poor stars, and lone wanderers, and sometimes the shredded hearts of little galaxies swallowed up ages ago by a predatory Milky Way. There were veils of dust and gas, thinner than inside the galaxy, and colder, but spread across a much vaster realm; and there were the scattered worlds without suns or heat, life or meaningful names. And everything baryonic swam through an ocean of scarcely felt particles—the fabled dark matter—all of which drifted comfortably inside the faint, barely perceived ocean of shadow universes and infinite potentials.

“If we assume pursuit,” Locke muttered, closing his eyes for a moment. “A pursuer,” he said as he opened them again. They were his dead father’s eyes, bright and busy, but it was his own voice remarking, “If there was a starship, and if it was larger than ten kilometers in diameter, and if it had a minimal heat signature, and the albedo of old hyperfiber … well, you would see it now. If it followed the Great Ship within a distance of a thousand light-years, give or take … I could point it out to you now, yes …”

Pamir studied the elaborate chart. No vector matched what was necessary, and none would.

“Of course the starship might have been smaller,” Locke allowed. “Or it was darker. But if it possessed any substantial mass, we would see it here.” A slice of the chart pulled closer. “The first probe to reach the Great Ship continued past, and there was a beacon on board. And there still is a beacon, though the signal has degraded significantly over the aeons. If there had been a trailing mass, we would have seen an unexpected course change in our probe. And that’s never happened, which reduces the useful mass down to—”

“Wait,” Pamir interrupted.

Locke paused, the busy eyes regarding him for a long moment.

“This is relatively simple work,” the Second Chair pointed out. “I know you had to marry up a lot of divergent databases, make allowances for different optics and different species, and then solve plenty of infinite-body gravitational problems. But still … how long have you worked on this … ?”

“Several decades,” the young man replied, bristling just a little bit now. “On a part-time basis.”

“I’ve told you about this work,” Washen said.

“Plenty of times,” Pamir agreed. “But you never shared results, and I guess I assumed …”

He abruptly stopped talking.

“Wait,” he muttered. “This is just an introduction. For my benefit, isn’t it?”

“That would be polite of me,” Locke said.

Pamir grinned, saying, “Shut up, old man.”

Locke nodded, an embarrassed smile flickering. “If a pursuer has been chasing the ship for billions of years … well, there are two sturdy conclusions. The pursuing ship has to have a working pilot and trustworthy engines; otherwise, it would have drifted off course long ago. Impacts against the Great Ship have tweaked its trajectory countless times. Multiply a millimeter shift by ten billion light-years, and the gap is enormous. And the second conclusion … if there is a pursuer, it has almost certainly fallen farther behind than a thousand light-years.”