Beneath the hull, one group of humans cursed wildly.

“Remoras,” she said to them, and to everyone. “You helped defeat the Waywards, and you suffered horribly for your courage and valor. And now, this. This insult. This new disaster.”

The Remoras had been pulled inside the ship. For the moment, they had been given quarters inside a hyperfiber cavern filled with a hard vacuum.

“But you will soon return to the hull,” she promised.

Did she mean it?

Honestly, there was no way to gauge her sincerity. Even the Master couldn’t be sure if she believed those words.

The fef were back inside their deep old homelands now.

To them, she said, “The hull is solid, because of you. Because of you, my friends, we can weather almost any abuse this rain can deliver.”

There. A lie.

But she covered the lie with an unprecedented admission. “I will not tell you everything I know. My friends. My colleagues, and my passengers. Because our enemy is at our door, listening to us with every available ear, and that’s why I will occasionally and purposefully lie to you, and I will lie to her, too.”

Pamir gave a tiny snort of approval.

Washen let her back straighten, as if trying to shrug off a small, stubborn ache.

Looking straight ahead, the Master could gaze up the length of the bridge. For the last time, captains stood at their posts. But that was a secret, of course. She didn’t let the thought linger, in the unlikely case that the polypond had some unsuspected talent. But if the monster could read minds, what chance did they possess?

None at all, she knew.

The captains wore their best uniforms as well as practiced, purposeful expressions, and obeying a discipline honed over the years, they hid every fear and raging doubt. The stakes were enormous, but for the far-flung audience, what mattered most was the sense of control—a normalcy clinging to places familiar and reliable. What mattered was the swagger of these uniforms, while the bodies inside were very nearly inconsequential.

The Master smiled at her billions.

In an instant, she measured their collective mood.

More than anything, what heartened her was the genuine peace that had emerged over the last few days. The polypond had arrived … and it was just one organism, they had finally realized. One enemy, and the enemy had brought war to the ship, and it was natural to bury old feuds for the moment, and forget recent arguments completely. The, Master presided over what suddenly resembled a kind of nation—a body of organisms possessed by a horrible sense of shared fate—and she couldn’t help but smile, and she couldn’t stop the smile from emerging on her radiant round face.

“And now, for each one of you, I have a personal message.”

This was something new.

“Over these last decades,” she began, “we have made ready for every possible contingency. We have envisioned every type of attack as well as the possible responses. That the polypond would genuinely wish to destroy the Great Ship … well, in our ranking system, obliteration was not deemed one of the more likely scenarios. But we made ready for it anyway, and being ready includes sculpting a message meant for each individual on board the Great Ship.”

The smile swelled, filling everyone’s vision.

Then a trick never used before was unleashed, and the Master, falling out of view, could sit back in her chair abruptly, almost trembling with a mixture of excitement and nervous fatigue.

The image of Pamir faltered, then faded away.

Then Washen gave the golden hand a touch, fingertips, then the thumb, caressing the dry smooth flesh.

“Go,” the Master commanded.

She wasn’t speaking to her First Chair. Washen didn’t need encouragement, nor did the other captains in the bridge. Except for a few hundred bodies, the entire facility had already been abandoned. Five other, equally capable control centers had been built over the last few years, in secret, and were already fully staffed and operational.

“Go,” she said again, to herself.

Washen was standing, offering a steady hand to the Master.

“With dignity,” the giant woman added. Then she gazed the length of the bridge, possibly for the final time, watching the captains calmly slip away to other places. And with tears flowing down her face—genuine and warm and glistening tears—she said again to her stubborn self, “Go please, darling. Now, and with dignity. Run.”

DATA BANKS RELEASED bottled images of the Master.

She appeared everywhere at once, as a multitude of convincing holos. Voices woven from her voice said billions of names, each pointed at the proper soul, and then with a familiarity that was artificial but impressive, and with a precision that couldn’t help but awe, she told each of her crew and every last passenger what he or she should do now.

Six harum-scarums were sitting at a table in a popular public avenue.

“Go home and stay,” the Master told two of them.

“For what good?” one woman asked. She was the woman who once pretended to eat that human, that very odd Mere creature, and with the same reliable obstinacy, she made a vivid sound with her eating mouth, while her breathing mouth asked, “For how long do I stay in that little place?”

“Years,” the Master promised. “If that’s what is necessary.”

Her companions were receiving their instructions, too. Like her, one man was to return home and remain there. Two more were ordered to travel to an entirely different portion of the ship, while the final harum-scarums had to hurry, taking their position inside an unused fuel line.

“Why there?” the woman snarled.

With a gesture, Osmium told her to mind her own narrow business.

In a great stew of languages, images of the Master were telling passersby to return home or to move to other, unexpected places. What the captains wanted quickly became obvious. Passengers were to scatter and then remain still. At every table and inside every species’ homeland, souls were being sent in entirely different directions. But even when she could see the obvious ugly answer, the woman found it difficult to accept.

For ages, nearly half of the harum-scarums had lived inside one of three districts. “But we’re being put everywhere,” she complained.

Quietly, Osmium said, “Yes.”

“If we are scattered like this—”

“Yes.”

He wanted her to be silent, but she couldn’t help herself. One hand reached across the tabletop, landing as a mailed fist. It was an image of strength and endurance for her species, while there was a contrary image of resignation and weakness. One after another, she straightened her fingers, her palm naked to an artificial sky that was already filling with winged creatures racing for the cap-car stations.

“We are weak, this way,” she muttered.

It was now just the two of them sitting at the table.

“Diffused,” she cursed. “Diluted.”

Osmium grabbed one of the diamond-bladed knives, wrenching it free from the struggling remains of their last meal.

“Weak,” she repeated.

He drove the blade into the tabletop, as a lesson.

She watched as the keen edge clipped one of her middle fingers.

“Make a fist,” he said.

“But I understand,” she countered. “We disperse so that all of us don’t die together.”

“A fist. Now!”

She jumped a little bit, and then to cover her fear, she sat forward and found the courage to ball up her fingers and palm.

Osmium reached high with the knife, aimed and thrust hard.

The woman felt a pain born entirely from her own mind. The hand had been missed, and by plenty.

Why?

“Because if we are dispersed, and diluted, and thin,” Osmium explained, “then not only will that help keep the harum-scarums from being decimated. It is also the very best way of ensuring that every species, small or large, will bear his share of the suffering.