When he picked himself up he saw by the orange flames that people were huddled around a big pile of smoky corn husks and popping dried branches. But the blaze was young, under control. Bright eyes danced with reflected firelight and they all laughed at his surprise. “Siddown! Take a load off,” someone called.

He knew the fire would leave sooty stains on the ceiling, as others had in innumerable nooks of the ship, but he saw the need. The Families were vagabonds. A communal fire took them back to the one shelter they trusted, even when surrounded by a threatening night.

He let himself slide into it, too. It was restful, remembering the long treks of his boyhood, the biting cold nights beneath a brilliant sky. Smoke licked at his eyes. The crackling yellow spirits danced. Shadows played on faces staring moodily into the unending mystery of flame.

“You look tired, Toby-lad,” Cermo said from nearby.

Toby was surprised to see Cermo here, and even closer, Jocelyn. Usually the highest ship’s officers kept a certain distance from the others. But here Cermo was settled onto his beefy haunches, the age-old posture. It left you always ready to jump and move, if surprised. Useless here, of course, but a warming reminder of their shared past, their wary vulnerability.

“Been working the fields,” Toby answered.

“Good crop?”

“Asparagus. Lost most of it.”

Jocelyn said mildly, “Time was, we just picked the food and moved on.”

Cermo nodded sadly. “We hunted, we gathered, hit the mech centers for whatever extra we wanted.”

Answering murmurs came from around the shadowy circle. Toby grinned. “Come on—I was there. It was living by our wits, the mechs on our backs every minute. It could be worth your life to take a breather.”

Cermo shook his head, thick muscles working in his neck, catching the gleam of the snapping flames. “At least we didn’t just dig in the dirt. Sure, some gardening in Citadel Bishop—but we weren’t hardscrabble clod-busters. We were free. Nature was the only farmer, and we just picked.”

Toby knew where this was coming from. People were forever getting nostalgic for a rosy past they made better than it ever was. And they did it when the present was tough and tight. “Jocelyn, you remember—always looking over our shoulder for mechs, eating scraps, on the run morning to night—”

“How’s it different now?” she shot back.

Another woman’s voice called from the murk, “Mechs got us trapped.” A Fiver accent.

Toby nodded. “But we’re in a human ship, fighting our way through them.”

“We’re running,” Jocelyn said. “Those big bugs, they did the fighting. But now they’re way behind us, holding off some of the mech ships—and we’re running.”

Toby snapped, “Hey now, that’s what the Myriapodia want. Quath’s in touch with them, and she says they’re fighting a rearguard. So we can figure out what’s so important in here. Just give us a little time and—”

“Time’s what we don’t have,” Cermo said solemnly, his eyes tortured. “We’re heatin’ up already, and we haven’t even reached that galactic jet.”

“Give the Cap’n a break, huh?” Toby said. “Maybe the jet’s what we want.”

Jocelyn laughed dryly. “That? It’s just a column of cooling gas. Refugee junk that got away from the black hole.”

Toby didn’t like to argue his father’s case, but something made him speak out against this aimless, hang-mouth talk. “Hey, give him time. We’re moving, we’re in good shape, and—”

“He brought us here with no more idea of what we were getting into than a camp rat.”

An older man snickered. “I’d say he don’t know enough to pour piss outta a boot with a hole in the toe and directions writ on the heel.”

This got a good hearty laugh.

“Look, we all like to air our lungs,” a Trump-accented voice said. “But where I come from, we had to stick with the Cap’n.”

Toby nodded vigorously. “I won’t honeyfuggle you about how tight things are. But yeasay—we got to keep true.”

Voices came pelting in from all directions now, some objecting, others backing him up. Trump Families for Killeen, firm as steel. Bishops dog-mouthing the Cap’n, even though he was one of their own.

The sooty flavor of the air and the brooding dark made it easy for people to speak out, let fly with a few hard-edged words, sharpen the air. The corncobs gave forth their sweeter smoke, cracking and fizzing. Slowly their talk turned more meditative, lost its harshness as people got their inner fears out, saw them for what they were, and stuffed them back into the mental pouches where everyone had to keep the dark moments. So the fire did its work, and its spreading blue fog made the nook a warmer, more human place.

When a call came on comm for Toby, he was reluctant to leave. But it was the Bridge, and he hurried.

He passed by a wall screen on his way. The soft blue jet hung before them now, its shimmer working upward, away and against the iron reds and burnt golds of the virulent disk, far below. Dry heat stirred the air. An odd humming sounded through the ship, like a bass note sounded far away. It made Toby jittery. By the time he reached the Bridge he was not surprised to see his father looking weary and gray, his uniform wrinkled from long hours.

“Toby! You’re needed.”

“Uh, why?” Everybody seemed worked up, but there was nothing new on the wall screens.

“That.” Killeen gestured at long filaments of rosy gas that trailed alongside the jet. The Argo was cruising hard through the immense, glowing filigrees. They had passed through such “weather” before, though these luminous strands twisted with restless energy.

“So? More fireworks.”

“Not quite. I’ve spoken with these before.”

“Spoken?” His father had been on duty too long.

“Not for years, and maybe you don’t remember. The voice from the sky.”

“Huh?” Toby shook his head. So much had happened, and they understood so little of it.

“The Magnetic Mind. This is it.”

Now Toby remembered.

—Years before, standing in a rocky valley while skittering veins of green and yellow played through the sky like searching fingers. Striations that worked the furious air and finally had found them. Hot filaments had vibrated like angry breezes, speaking through the sensorium input each person carried in the back of the skull.

An intelligence that lived, somehow, in silvery radiances. It had spoken to Killeen—though the entire Family could overhear, witnesses as a colossal intellect delivered a message in the sky. Toby recalled that childhood memory in an instant, the way a warm kitchen smell can bring a vibrant mother’s voice to life long after . . .

He shook himself. The memories of far childhood, back in the happy closeness of the Citadel, could come flooding through him at any time.

But this was not the right moment. Those were a boy’s recollections, and he had to stop thinking like a boy.

He refocused on the huge, stringy luminescence that grew steadily before the Argo, and made himself ask, “How do you know? I mean, this could be just some kind of lightning or something.”

Killeen smiled without humor. “I guess it is, in a way. Vital lightning, the same as you and I are really walking heaps of controlled burning. That’s what keeps us going, thinking, doing. Oxygen burns our food, one of my Aspects says. This thing uses electricity, generated by that disk down below.”

“How?”

“I dunno. But energy is energy, and the way I figure it, this thing has learned how to stack magnetic fields, build them up into something like a body.”

Toby liked to appear capable and savvy in front of ship’s officers, but the striations before Argo didn’t look like anything he remembered. “Huh?”

Killeen shrugged. “I’ve been getting prickly feelings, like something probing at me.” He shook his head. “Hard to explain, but it’s like before. The Magnetic Mind glues itself together with magnetic fields. Or maybe it just is magnetic fields, period. And it lives somewhere here, so . . .”