Mere sat alone. Her frail little body had been patched as far as possible, and the confident yet terrified machine had hurried off, giving the excuse, “I have other patients who need me more.” Which was fine. Was best. When hadn’t Mere preferred solitude? But even as she told herself she was fine, a new voice found her. Soft and prickly, it said, “Hello,” then, “I was looking for you.” And Mere couldn’t help but feel genuine relief, turning in her seat, a hundred little aches meaning nothing and the sight of a human face—even this human’s face—winning a small but cherished joy out of her.

“Hello,” he said again, the pale yellow eyes growing larger. “My name—”

“O’Layle,” she interrupted.

He hesitated. For a moment, he glanced at the images on the long wall, and then he forced himself to step closer, asking, “Have we met?”

“Never,” she promised. Then she looked straight ahead again, studying the endless cutting and the vivid colors streaming out of the wound now. “But I studied you and your transmissions from the Blue World—”

“Oh, you’re the one they sent into the Inkwell. In secret.”

She nodded, not looking at him now.

“That’s why we’re in quarantine together,” he continued. “I heard about you. A little while ago, one of the captains explained … that the polypond spat you back at us …”

Already Mere was growing tired of this man.

“We’re much the same,” O’Layle continued, stepping close to her. Staring at the images of carnage, he said with a quiet, awed voice, “Both of us lived with her. As part of her.”

In a fashion, she thought.

Then he knelt, altogether too close. He insisted in pushing his face beside hers, remarking, “Both of us have served the alien. Each in our own way, naturally.”

Somewhere along the narrow lip of the Sword, an ocean was struck. Hydrogen was stripped of its electrons and thrown into space, a vivid white line marking the obliteration of billions of liters. Watching, Mere wished she were blind. Closing her eyes, she felt the ship shaking even harder now. Then the voice beside her named an alien species, and with a low laugh, he asked, “Do you remember them?”

“The !eech?” Mere said, “Yes, I do.”

“You are sure?”

“I studied them. Before they came on board, I went to their world and lived with them—”

“Because that’s what you do. With difficult species, yes.” His voice was happy, almost giddy. “You don’t know me, but I have heard much, much, much about you.”

Shut up, she thought.

Then Mere opened her eyes, concentrating on the wall, on the deepening gouge being chiseled into the heart of the ship. How much longer before the Sword hit the core? Glancing at the new watch that filled her hand, she whispered, “Forty-two minutes.”

O’Layle didn’t hear her, or he simply didn’t care about the time that remained. What he needed to say was, “I knew them, too.”

“Who?”

Then he said the name again. He clicked his tongue in a clumsy fashion, and then said, “Eech,” afterwards. “!eech,” he told her. And with a delight that was boyish, pure and nearly sweet, he boasted, “They once hired me for a task. A very important job. This was aeons ago, of course. But I should have remembered. I guess they must have done something to my mind afterward … some kind of selective amnesia …”

“Why are you telling me this?” she blurted.

But O’Layle wouldn’t answer her directly. More than forty minutes remained until the ship and possibly all of Creation was obliterated, and he invested a full two minutes boasting about the sums of money that he had been given and how he had been fooled. “After I did my job, they convinced me that it was an inheritance,” he offered with a low laugh. “It was so much money that it took me a thousand years to spend it, and all that time, I couldn’t remember that I earned it. I lied even to myself, telling others that it was a gift from a dead old friend—”

“The !eech went extinct,” Mere interrupted.

O’Layle winked at her, nodding.

“On this ship, at least,” she said, struggling to recover the details for herself. “Thousands of years ago, they suddenly vanished.”

“Oh, I know all about that.”

The tone should have scared her, but her soul didn’t have room for any more fear. Mere shook her head, one hand physically shoving at the much larger man. Then with a cracking voice, she asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

“They’ve been asking about it,” O’Layle said. “About the !eech. Asking me these sharp little questions. Prying at my head with fancy memory-enhancing tools. I truly hadn’t thought about that species in the last hundred centuries—it’s remarkable how much I had forgotten—but now it’s pretty much come back to me again.”

“What did you do for the !eech?”

He kept smiling. “They needed someone to help. You see, they had taken some sort of vote and decided … well, as you say … long ago, they suddenly became extinct …”

“You did that?” she spat.

He rolled his shoulders. Like an evil child, he said, “They were desperate. I remember that now.”

“You murdered the species?”

“If a species wishes to die,” O’Layle countered, “then it isn’t truly murder. Now is it?”

With both hands, she shoved at him. But the man refused to move, gazing at her with a look of pride and growing consternation. Finally, with a wounded voice, he asked, “What kind of monster do you think I am?”

Even as the ship fell apart around them, he had to tell her, “I didn’t have to kill any of them. I just had to make them seem dead to the universe. You see? That’s what I’m trying to explain.”

Forty-six

Very little had been brought to this obscure place. Half a dozen brigades of soldiers had brought their field weapons to help with security, and a team of engineers was working feverishly to complete the setup, and there was an ensemble of small machines wrapped around the single object that those machines had been built to serve. The First and Second Chairs also just arrived. There was no point in hiding any longer. What happened here, in a matter of minutes, would determine whether or not the ship survived. Washen and Pamir found themselves standing side by side, hands touching for a moment, then falling apart, and one of them repeated the word, “Improbable,” while the other nodded agreeably, allowing herself a slender smile and a determined sense of genuine confidence.

The facility had no name, only a complex designation describing both its location and purpose. What they stood inside was a few hectares of mothballed controls and warmed air set deep inside the ship, on the brink of the cold iron core. Above them, visible through insulating sandwiches of diamond and aerogel, was a much larger chamber—a spherical volume a little less than a hundred kilometers in diameter. It was one of several dozen auxiliary fuel tanks that had never been used. Each tank was filled with vacuum and darkness, and each lay equally deep inside the ship, but separated from the six primary fuel tanks. It was inevitable that one of these empty tanks would lie directly between the ship’s bow and Marrow. And as such, it became the best last place to fight.

The engineers clustered at one end of the big room, but the bulk of their work happened inside a long piece of adjacent plumbing, robots and AIs moving in graceful blurs, assembling a delicate device from stock parts. There were complications, always: Parts failed to mesh, and little corrections had to be made to plans barely an hour old, and there were constant tremors running down through the ship’s meat, the shaking growing harder by the moment. Aasleen stood among her engineers, asking questions and offering unsolicited advice. Finally, the team leader turned to her, saying, “Madam,” with a sharp voice. “We know exactly what we are doing here. You are not as qualified as I. And if you don’t leave us alone, I will pull off your head and shit in your neck. Madam.”