“The buds started from a greater distance,” the AI offered.

“And they’re smaller than most,” Mere added.

“They had to throw off more of their bodies as a reaction mass,” her companion reported with an easy conviction.

“Or,” she said.

“Madam?”

“The Sack is a nursery,” she reminded her companion.

The point was absorbed, and appreciated. “These could be younger buds,” the AI replied. “Smaller of mass, perhaps earlier in their development.”

Mere’s big eyes narrowed, her mind racing.

Finally, she allowed, “That’s part of the answer, I think.”

“Help me, madam.”

“Look here.” She pointed to a string of examples. “There is a gradient here. Total mass, acquired velocity—”

“Agreed.”

Despite endless care and the ingestion of every reserve of organic matter, Mere was an even tinier version of herself. She was physically exhausted, and she had been exhausted for so long she could imagine no other state. She was a trembling tired whiff of something barely alive. Her fingers were like spider legs. Her flesh had a transparency that let a cage of pale yellow ribs show beneath a breastless chest. Even her blood was miscolored and sluggish, pink turning to purple as a feeble heart pushed it through her tiny body. But her voice had a clarity, even a strength, and with her loudest voice in ages, she said, “Could there be slower, smaller buds somewhere behind this school? Stragglers behind those stragglers that we can see?”

“It is possible,” her companion allowed.

“Assume it,” she said. “What can you give me?”

The navigator offered a new course and a little blue vector drawn across the sky.

“No,” she said. “That uses up all our fuel. Since we don’t have a target, we’ll need to maneuver.”

A new blue line barely managed to intersect with the imagined stragglers.

“How soon do we have to burn?” Mere asked.

“Now,” the AI replied. “Although yesterday would have been better—”

“Align us and fire,” she commanded.

“We will be obvious,” he warned. “With so many eyes close to us—”

“Do we have a choice?”

None, apparently. “But we need to make a crush-web for you, madam. In your physical state, the gee forces will—”

“Align us and fire,” she repeated, the voice cracking. Moments later, the engine began fighting their momentum, flinging Mere against the wall, yellowed bones splintering and the big eyes collapsing as her present velocity was bent into another, even more enormous velocity—a blaze of radiation spewing out into the blackness, a tiny cylinder of near nothingness made warmer, and perhaps warmer than anytime since the Creation.

MERE WAS FINALLY noticed. Unless she had been seen earlier, of course, but judged not to be a worthwhile threat. She woke from her latest crippling to find three separate machines tracking her. Two were distant, and, judging by the output of their engines, they would never catch her, while the third machine was more distant but traveling on a more useful line. Her course change was finished for the moment, her velocity bent and boosted just enough; the engine had failed several times, but never totally and never at the worst possible moment.

“Not in this existence, at least,” the AI began to chant.

The approaching vessel was minimally organic. Mere studied a jellyfish-like body that had collapsed as its hydrogen burned. There was a good high-yield fusion engine but minimal hyperfiber, and judging by her observations and old data, she recognized a general sort of scout craft—the same species that had discovered O’Layle drifting between the stars.

Obeying elaborate instructions, the jellyfish avoided moving too close. From twenty thousand kilometers, it could see enough to send thorough reports across the sky. What it saw was the last incarnation of the Osmium: Mere had carefully pulled her hyperfiber armor into a sphere, lending strength in all directions. Only eyes and the exhausted engine remained on the exterior, plus a tiny surprise that she had managed to piece together during the last long week.

Lasers played across the Osmium’s surface.

Using one of the local languages, and with a weak jury-rigged transmitter, Mere announced, “I am a Tilan scholar.”

Hopefully the language was familiar. But the lasers brightened, moving from play to abuse, carefully testing the armor’s resolve.

“I am the last of my kind,” she reported. Then she sent off the image of her long-dead husband, adding, “I have come seeking you. I know what you know. I know this.”

A string of dense equations jumped across the tiny gulf.

“This is the truth. Is it not, my colleague?”

The lasers diminished. Then another burst of light was sent off in the direction of the nearest polypond buds—one of the undersized babies that had already passed through this stretch of space—like a finger poking its superior in the rear end, begging for help with its next little move.

The reply wouldn’t arrive for a full day.

With that wealth of time, Mere studied the machine as thoroughly as possible, occasionally telling it more stories about the lost Tila and the meanings of All.

“I love you,” she lied.

“We have the same truth,” she lied.

Then when she was ready, at least an hour before any reply could arrive from the buds, she used her jury-rigged surprise. Separate from her ship was a sliver of her remaining fuel. The anti-iron was no larger than a fingertip, but after it was released from its magnetic jar, with a slight momentum, it had the density and color of ordinary iron. Traveling in the wake of the jellyfish-shaped ship, it touched nothing of substance, then it touched the ship’s hull, striking within a few meters of where she had aimed, the soundless blast carving out its heart.

FIVE DAYS LATER, Mere managed to acquire a useful target.

It was a tiny body, as these things went. Barely three kilometers across and composed of water and organics, metals and a whiff of hyperfiber, the polypond bud was the smallest she had ever seen, and it was burning off much of the rest of its body in a desperate attempt to help what mattered.

Nothing mattered but the Great Ship.

With the last bits of fuel, Mere matched velocities with her target. Her momentum was too much, and the impact would kill her again. But her little ship would retain its shape and integrity, and with a bit of luck, she might even recover one last time.

“In this existence, at least,” someone muttered.

Did she say that, or did the AI?

Then with a final laugh, someone asked, “Why? Does it matter?”

Twenty-six

Armed and armored, the skimmer sat on a magnetized rail, temporarily at rest in the middle of a barren and gray and perfectly smooth stretch of the hull. Inside its tiny cabin, three passengers watched the farthest shields brighten and swirl, EM curtains grabbing hold of charged ions, hydrogen and hydroxyls and carbon monoxides and phenols dragged bodily toward filters and collection bunkers that were already choked with gaseous treasures. But the shields kept finding the strength and integrity, surging to meet each onslaught; wild purple flashes and blistering UV bolts made the five eyes blink and tear up. Then in another instant, ten thousand columns of laser light punched upward through the shields, each bolt calibrated to boil away an ocean, exposing an enemy’s organic heart. Lasers were followed with tritium bombs and experimental toxins. Explosives and poisons were followed by a second wave of lasers, and the next ten thousand polypond buds were cooked and splattered into hot clouds of vapor, all dead but still plunging, inert and mindless but still bearing down on the fierce ship.