“It was that Erica, she let them get free.”

“Easy mistake to make when you can’t read the directions.”

“She could’ve asked her Aspects!”

Erica had mistakenly let the self-warming vial of frozen soil-tenders escape years ago, but their daily irritations reminded everybody and brought her name up like a curse.

Toby was sympathetic. Who could have known that the ugly squirmers would pop out of their container, all ready to start eating?—which was, after all, their job. They startled poor Erica into dropping the vial. Who could guess that then they’d get into all the grain crops? The worms belonged among the vegetables and apple trees, just as the inscription said, in some dead language. Just Erica’s bad luck—and theirs—that she was in the grain dome when she opened the cylinder. He shrugged. “She’d been working hard seeding.”

“I think the Cap’n should’ve whipped her for it.”

“He doesn’t like whipping.”

“What a Cap’n likes and doesn’t like, that doesn’t matter,” Besen said stiffly. “What’s good for the Family, that comes first.”

“Sure. And a smart Cap’n gets his crew all fired up about what he wants.”

Besen blinked. “Oh, so you’re saying Cap’n’s got us dancing his dance, only we’re hearing different music?”

“Could be.”

“And you don’t want to say anything in public? Out of loyalty?”

“I don’t like to go against him.”

“Well, you’d sure be unpopular.”

“Yeasay—and I got to admit, everybody’s spirits are running pretty high.” He gestured around at the cafeteria, jammed with animated faces. There was an electric smell of skittering excitement. People so long on the run greeted a hard pursuit with elation; the thrill of familiar danger.

Besen’s lips pursed with concern. “You really don’t think this is just a way of getting away from the mechs, do you?”

“I don’t know what it’s really about.” Toby rapped his grain cube angrily. Another weevil fell out onto the table. With relish he squashed it with his thumb. “Pays to be careful, is all.”

Besen smiled. “Look twice for weevils?”

“Weevils can be anywhere.”

Besen gathered herself visibly and tried to shift their mood. “Let’s go up to observation, see if we can spot any.”

“Great.” He tossed aside the grain cube, then thought again, rapped it a third time—no more weevils—and bit in. “Umm, not bad—when you’re starving.”

“You’re always starving. And since the sail-snake and the rest, we have plenty to eat.”

“Let’s go.” Toby was grateful to her for giving him an exit from an uncomfortable conversation. He didn’t like his brooding to color the mood of the ship, not when his father had pulled everybody together so well, had them putting in long hours of grunt labor and smiling about it.

They made their way up the broad helical ramp at Argo’s core. All crew were working harder now, dealing with the agro domes. The level of radiation from outside was climbing by the hour. Smoldering infrareds, sharp ultraviolets, unseen spectra biting at the crops. They had polarized the domes to the max, but stinging energies still got through. So it was a relief to forget all that, to slump into the netting of an observation chamber and watch the stunning brilliance outside.

In the cool, dim core of the ship the observation room was crowded and Toby could not get a good clear view. The field of glowing stars was confusing, crisscrossed by eerie splashes of radiating gas. Then the Bridge switched to a Doppler-shifted frequency, and details leaped out. Going to blue-rich frequencies picked out things moving toward Argo and dimmed everything else.

And there they were: brilliant pinpoints of blue, eight of them evenly spaced around a circle.

“Impossible to miss,” Toby murmured.

“The mechs must not care whether we notice,” Besen said.

“Or else they really want us to.”

“Why would they? More effective to sneak up, I’d think.”

“Maybe they want to spook us.”

“Into doing what?”

“Maybe just what we’re doing,” Toby said grimly.

“Hey, we’re gettin’ away from them!” a big, hawk-nosed woman protested on Toby’s left, gouging him with a sharp elbow. She was an Ace, from the wastelands of Trump. Trained to follow her Family leader.

“Yeasay, throwin’ dust in their faces,” a man joined in. A Fiver.

“We can outrun any damn mech,” another woman announced proudly. Her accent was of Family Deuce, so thick Toby could barely understand her.

Toby gritted his teeth. “Yeasay, yeasay. I was just wondering—”

“Not right, Cap’n’s son goin’ on like that.” The hawk-nosed woman’s elbow poked him again.

“Sorry, brothers and sisters,” Toby said, though he was getting irritated. “Uh, ’scuse me.”

He got up and worked his way out of the press of bodies. Everybody seemed to be looking at him, sour-faced. Or else avoiding his eyes. Besen followed, whispering, “That old bag, she’s a flap-mouthed gossip. All those Trump Families are.”

Toby was already feeling bad about the incident, and he stopped before leaving the room to catch another glimpse of the screen. Family Bishop members were murmuring, speculating, even laughing—and not just among the Snowglade folk, either. They argued and elbowed and laughed with the Trump Families, too. An electric smell came from the crowd, a fidgety excitement.

It struck Toby that the room was jammed not so much because they wanted to see the gaudy pictures, but to provide a place to gather, gossip, and grumble. All to sharpen their sense of themselves as a fragile human Family in the face of the abyss outside.

That was essential—holding together. Argo held mostly Bishops, from Snowglade, but also Families of the planet they had just left, which its natives called Trump. Those Families had names Toby didn’t understand—Aces and Deuces, Jacks and Fivers. There were Queens, though, which by logic should have had the same customs and history as the Family Queen of Snowglade. But they didn’t.

Killeen called these Trump Families the Cards. They were fiercely loyal and prone to follow hot-eyed leaders. Back on Trump some had obeyed the crazy man who called himself His Supremacy, a fierce-faced type the Bishops had finally had to kill. Somehow this had meant that the Cards then transferred their loyalty to Killeen.

It made no sense, but then, not much about Trump did. Toby flatly disbelieved the idea that the Cards had gotten their names from some ancient game. Maybe a game had been made up using those names, sure. But Families were ancient and hallowed and not the stuff of trivial matters.

Still, the Trumps were a bit hard to take, butt-headed and ignorant. But the Snowgladers were no prize, either, when you looked close.

Rooks liked to blow their noses by pinching the bridge of the nose and letting fly into the air. They laughed if anybody was in the way. The hawk-nosed woman was a Rook, true to form.

On the other hand, Pawns saw nothing wrong with taking a crap in full view of anybody who happened by. A perfectly natural function, they said. What’s to be embarrassed about?

Knights burped and farted at the most formal occasions—they didn’t even seem to notice doing it.

Bishops spit whenever they felt like it, which was pretty often.

Rooks preferred to pee on plants, maintaining that since this was part of the Great Cycle of Life, it must be good for them.

And Kings would cough smack in your face, smiling after they did it. Some said that in the old Citadel days the lost Family of Queens had even made love in public, feet pointed at the ceiling, rumps thrusting in the air free as you please. They had some sort of theory about doing it as a show of demented social solidarity. Toby didn’t really believe that, it was utterly fantastic—but who could truly say what people of the deep past had believed and done?

Still, the Snowglade Families overlooked these differences, acts that seemed to others like gross social blunders, and held together. And aside from minor incidents, they extended the same hand to the Trumps, even if they were butt-stubborn and ate with their mouths open. The Family of Families.