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Clemantine quieted Griffin’s reef to minimize its interference while the gravitational sensor felt the void all around, seeking for the faint signal of Lezuri’s dormant reef. She scanned with cameras and telescopes. But there was nothing.

More hours passed.

Time enough to reflect that worlds could be lost in the dark between the stars.

“What if we’ve miscalculated?” she asked the Pilot. “What if Lezuri was decelerating when we thought he was still accelerating? Maybe his goal isn’t to get away. Maybe it’s to linger and wait for Dragon to close the distance, come near enough to try his needles again.”

“Or to wait for us,” the Engineer pointed out. “We’re vulnerable to his needles too.”

If Clemantine had existed in human form, that thought would have given her chills.

The Pilot dismissed these concerns with a contemptuous wave of his hand. “I did not make such a mistake. I cannot pinpoint Lezuri’s exact location but I know his last course adjustment took him away from the trajectory of the fleet, and that his velocity is greater than ours, and that he has used his reef hard. He will not have the power to return, not for some time. And he cannot be hunting us in the same way we’ve been hunting him. His vessel is too small to carry a gravitational sensor. So we are hidden from him, as long as we remain silent and dark.”

“I think there is very little chance now that we will find him,” the Astronomer said. “He won’t give us any more signals to follow. He’ll coast for years before he uses his reef again.”

“It’s what I’d do,” the Pilot agreed.

This assessment brought both guilt and relief to Clemantine. Abandoning the hunt felt wrong, but she longed to return to Dragon, to offer her help, and to learn how much of the ship and its company had survived.

“All right,” she said. “We stay dark, and we go home.”

<><><>

No easy task to catalog all the damage—especially with the Apparatchiks gone.

Clemantine kept to her post on Dragon’s high bridge. What choice? There was no one else to do it. From there she sent out an army of DIs to search the network, the library files, the archive, seeking for any sign of the predator… and of Urban.

In the library, she approached Vytet. “I know you’re angry over this—”

Vytet transformed, looming larger than life, features exaggerated, amber eyes now glinting red. “Angry over what? The fact you decided, on your own, to risk all of our futures? That you destroyed any chance of a peaceful coalition with a great being? Or that you blew the ship apart?” She gestured at a projection of Dragon showing the known damage, with vast tracts of the ship still to be surveyed. “You did this.”

“Yes. I made the choice. But we’re still alive, and the ship is ours.”

“At what cost?” Vytet demanded to know. “You have no idea what’s been lost or if we can recover.”

“I think I do know what’s been lost,” Clemantine said. “But we will recover, though I’m going to need your help.”

Tempers were even more heated in the warren, where she quickly found herself in a shouting match with Naresh:

“You had no right to launch an assault on your own!”

“We had no choice but to do it that way!”

“No! You did have a choice.”

“Success required secrecy!”

“You call the wreck you’ve made of this ship success?”

“I do.”

“Does Urban consider this a success? Did you even consult with him? Where is he anyway?”

Grimly, she said, “I don’t know.”

They were in the forest room, and by this time, more than twenty people had gathered around, drawn by the heat of their argument, drifting one above another in the absence of gravity. Kona was among them. He’d been busy in the warren, organizing people and assigning tasks, setting some to grow resurrection pods to restore those too badly injured to heal on their own, and others to organizing meals and quarters, while encouraging as many as he could to retreat to cold sleep, to reduce the draw on the ship’s resources.

Now he looked at Clemantine. “What do you mean? Are you saying you can’t find him? If you can’t find him, wake his ghost from the archive.”

“The archive’s been wiped,” she told him. “Nothing is left there. I think the predator attacked that first, when it emerged.”

This announcement drew gasps and cries of horror.

She turned again to Naresh. “It’s why I came to talk to you. I’m giving you the task of re-establishing an archive, and making sure everyone posts a fresh copy there.”

“Urban will have a ghost safe aboard Griffin,” Kona said.

She forced herself to meet his gaze. Held it. Not so much to prepare him, but to give herself time to gather her courage. “Urban didn’t keep a ghost on Griffin. He kept his backups on the outriders, in secured archives that only he could access.”

Kona gave a firm nod, as if this answer satisfied him. “We’ll find him on the outriders, then.” His confidence a veil pulled over a terrible fear—a fear she shared.

The data gate kept a log of traffic. It showed Urban had sent a submind to Elepaio, with Riffan’s corrupt ghost following close behind him.

“Where is Riffan?” she asked, aiming the question at no one in particular.

Tarnya emerged from the crowd to answer her. “He was hurt. We had to put him in a resurrection pod. He’ll be out in a day or so.”

“No. Leave him there. He may be the source of a security issue. Leave him locked down until I say so.”

She faced more questions, arguments, and accusations, as subminds cycled in and out. Eventually, she retreated alone to the gee deck.

It was a shambles. Dust and debris drifting everywhere, confused birds fluttering in panic at her approach. At the same time, she listened to Vytet in the library, reporting that an initial inspection of the deck had found the rotation cylinder cracked and the gearing shattered.

Shoran appeared, gliding from beneath the upside-down canopy of a small uprooted tree, its branches bearing withered leaves and faded flowers. “Hey,” she said. “Personnel map’s down, but I heard the flutter of bird wings and thought someone might be here.”

“The guilty party has arrived.”

“Guilty of saving our asses.”

“No, it was Pasha who designed the defense. I only made sure it was implemented.”

“I’ll thank her later.” Shoran gestured over her shoulder. “Some of the generative walls are still working. I started to do some initial cleanup, shoving debris back into the system to be recycled, but I think the vats are full.”

“Or the deck’s circulatory system has stopped working.”

“Or that,” Shoran conceded. “So tell me, where do we really stand? I’ve heard a lot of chatter in the warrens, but what’s the real situation?”

“It’s not so bad,” Clemantine said. “Dragon is broken, incapable of both acceleration and self-defense. We’re estimating a loss of nineteen percent of our mass and a greater percentage of the philosopher cells. There hasn’t been time to complete a survey, but I can tell you there is extensive damage to the internal transport and communications systems. The ship will have launched self-repair routines, but that activity will rapidly drain core reserves. I’ll be using up more of our limited resources when I start repairing severed filaments of the neural bridge. Oh, and there’s an excellent chance all the repair work will stimulate molecular disputes along all Chenzeme-Human boundaries. But from what I’ve seen so far, it looks like Lezuri is gone.”