Then, she saw a face.

She saw her.

“Mere,” said a tangle of voices, surprise and amazement mixed with a thousand flavors of doubt.

YET EVERY TEST claimed the same result.

“As far as I know,” said the tiny creature, still naked and dripping, “I am she. And nothing more.”

Mere had appeared at Port Gwenth, emerging inside the chamber where the imprisoned and now-enhanced polypond mind had recently met with its long-lost Ooloo sister. Mere and the mind were at the room’s far end, still isolated by a series of demon-doors and sniffers and sleepless tools that killed everything dirty or suspicious. The polypond mind had fallen into what, for lack of a better word, looked like sleep. The woman needed rest, but she insisted on standing as close to Washen as possible. She was in pain, but it wasn’t just the misery of her wounds that made her wince.

“You need engines,” she muttered.

An autodoc was examining her flesh and broken ribs, measuring her against an ocean of data reaching back thousands of years.

“You have to dance,” Mere said, then she broke into a hard, aching cough.

Her immortal genes had been stripped away, or she had died and been recanted with just her human genes. Washen nodded, and with a genuine satisfaction, she told the creature, “We have an engine now.”

“Yes?”

The First Chair explained what had happened, but only to a point.

“That’s not enough,” the woman interrupted.

Was this Mere? Really?

“It’s not close to enough,” the tiny woman gasped.

Washen straightened her shoulders, and with a stiff, almost offended voice asked, “Why not?”

Mere told her.

And Washen quietly absorbed the news, always reminding herself that they didn’t know if this was truly her old friend or if any of these terrible words could be trusted. This drama might well be nothing but a calculated deception, the polypond throwing a trusted face and voice at the First Chair, trying to illicit some wrongheaded reaction.

“Did you hear me?”

Every word, yes.

“Washen?”

That was who I am. But who are you?

Then in a dead language, in Tilan, the little creature said, “Kill this body and look at my brain. If you doubt me—”

“No,” Washen said.

The First Chair stepped backward, and paused.

To nobody, she said again, “No.”

Pamir was standing beside her now, as a projection. And the Master Captain had appeared, along with Aasleen and Conrad and Osmium, and in another moment, the rest of the surviving Submasters. She ignored them. Consciously, she searched the available nexuses, finding the correct eye—one of the security eyes sewn into this chamber’s wall—and she looked herself from that narrow vantage point.

Aasleen looked tired, but Washen looked considerably worse.

Where that woman was thin, the First Chair was thinner. And with a voice that couldn’t sound older, she whispered, “All right then. I believe you. I believe.”

Forty-three

When Pamir was more criminal than captain, this had been one of his favorite haunts: Port Denali. The place had always worn a delicious reputation, boisterous and crude yet unexpectedly beautiful, rich with obscure species and dangerous humans who went about their little business with minimal supervision from the Powers-on-High. But change was the basic currency of the universe, and now Pamir was one of the greatest Powers, and his old friends and lovers had been scattered about the ship, the pure selfishness that had infused the port with its purpose now replaced by more impressive, infinitely more focused energies.

Brigades of harum-scarums were scattered across the glassy gray floor, and between them and hanging high above were starships. Tired old vessels from alien worlds, mostly. Machines just swift enough and durable enough to carry their wealthy passengers to the Great Ship. Each was being dismantled and the best of its pieces were being reassembled, then hoisted up into the lacework of hyperfiber being cobbled together far above. In another few weeks, with luck, this could have become the ship’s second ad hoc rocket. Or with a little more work, and with the harum-scarums at the helm, this peculiar fleet of scrap and inspiration could have taken the war back up to the surface again.

But weeks might as well be forever, Pamir reminded himself.

Osmium stood in the shadow of one tiny ship. Eyes like black glass stared off into the distance, while an internal eye watched the latest news. “The probes launch in another moment or two,” he reported.

Pamir climbed off the little cap-car.

Osmium closed his glassy eyes. Then the eating mouth made a vulgar sound, and the breathing mouth said, “I do not know.”

“What don’t you know—?”

“She is my old wife, or she is something else.” Mentioning Mere, he touched his groin through his mirrored uniform—a gesture fond and honest. “She is telling the truth, or she is lying. Or perhaps the truth lies somewhere between.”

As they spoke, a series of little probes were being shunted along several converted hallways leading to Port Endeavor. The probes had been prepared in advance, and then in a final frantic moment, they had been reconfigured. Their missions were narrowed, and every sensor was given the same small portion of the sky to study. But they were ready now. Hatches were thrown open, and finger nukes shoved both probes and their jackets of low-grade hyperfiber out into the maelstrom, and even as the hyperfiber began to shred and turned to dust, the machines were lifted, spinning out-past the polypond’s boiling self, streaking away from the ship and into the quiet and the cold.

The first data would arrive in moments.

Pamir felt his stomach tighten. A long hard look at his half-built fleet made him want to scream, giving a voice to his rage.

Osmium made a hard, injured sound.

Then with an almost human ache, he said, “She might not be my once-wife. But the little creature is telling the truth.”

“NOW WE KNOW,” Aasleen declared.

And then she fell silent.

Once again, the Submasters joined the Master on the auxiliary bridge—each one of them an image made real enough to capture their mood and infect their neighbors. The mood was worry and resignation and anger and determination, and running beside every other emotion, a genuine curiosity. Now they knew what was coming, but what did they know? Washen interrupted Aasleen’s concentration, saying:

“Details.”

In a breathless rush, Aasleen explained what they were seeing. Some of the probes had failed, and others were destroyed by the polypond’s weapons. But thousands of images were descending from the survivors, showing what looked to be a ribbon—a lovely silvery ribbon of lace, thin but opaque, and a little bowed at one, two, no, three points along an outer edge that never ended. The ribbon was more than a thousand kilometers wide and probably not much thicker than a hand, and it formed a perfect ring that was a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter—larger than the Great Ship by a factor of two—and it was a circular structure that was sturdy enough to spin, making a full rotation in just under ten seconds.

It was rotating at a tenth the speed of light.

In a breathless rush, Aasleen said, “This is something you design in school, as a baby engineer. This is the kind of machine every good student dreams up and assembles in the mind and as a simulation, and your teacher gives you a passing grade, nothing more, and she tells you, ‘But of course no species has time or the need for this sort of contraption.’ And you put your plans in a drawer somewhere. If you even bother to keep them. There are probably a trillion drawers in our galaxy filled with these kinds of ridiculous dreamy schemes, and honestly, I never believed I’d ever see any one of them made real.”