“Like me, it survives perfectly well without you.”

“I need a favor.”

“Then you should ask someone who cares about you. There must be one person in the Commonwealth, surely.”

“Okay, bad approach, I’m sorry. I’m here because I need to get up to the starships.”

“Ozzie!” She grabbed a side plate.

He didn’t think she’d throw it. “I see you kept the memories of us, then.”

Giselle tipped her head to one side as her expression turned menacingly calm. “Oh, yes. Won’t get fooled again. Thank you.”

“I need help, man. Please, Giselle.” He was surprised at how shaky his voice had become. This really was the final throw of the dice; if Giselle didn’t come through it was truly all over. He wasn’t sure he could live in a universe in which such a crime had been committed. “I know what I did before, I kept the memories of us, too; but please please trust me this one last time. I have to get to the starships. You know what Nigel is going to do, don’t you?”

“What has to be done.”

“It doesn’t.” Ozzie thought he caught a tiny flicker of doubt. “There’s a chance,” he persisted. “A small, pitiful, weak chance that I might be right, and genocide can be averted. Let me take that chance. It’s only me that will be at risk. I’m not going to drag anyone else down with me. Just let me do what I have to do. That’s all I ask. Please.”

“God damn you.” Giselle’s free hand thumped the scarlet worktop. “God damn you, Oswald Isaac.”

Mellanie’s smile had been in place the whole drive from Giselle’s house to the gateway. She kept seeing Orion’s face. His astonishment. Delight. Laughing. Awestruck. She looked up curiously as soon as they emerged from the other side of the gateway. The sun on this world hadn’t quite risen yet, a thick gentian light was only just sliding up out of the eastern horizon to diminish the stars. Something moved quickly high overhead. Something huge.

“Oh, wow!” Mellanie exclaimed, pressing herself to the car’s passenger window. The spaceflower traversed the sky, almost invisible it was so dark. “It was so big.”

From the driver’s seat, Giselle made a dismissive sound.

“More secrets locked away in a single molecule here than Newton and Baker ever figured between them,” Ozzie said.

“Really?” Mellanie said, all mock attention. “Oswald,” she sniggered.

Giselle chuckled disrespectfully.

Ozzie folded his arms across his chest, and glowered out at the sterile landscape. Mellanie grinned again. They were following an Ables forty-wheel transporter carrying a big sphere swathed in polythene and orange wrap straps. The truck behind them was laden with standard cargo pods, gray-white cylinders with environmental hoses plugged in to the end. Mellanie had been surprised by how many vehicles were on the road and the size of their loads. The Sheldon Dynasty’s lifeboat project was clearly pitched an order of magnitude above all the others.

Giselle drove them along the unnamed town’s ring road until they approached what appeared to be a medium-sized industrial park. Pylons rose above the highest roofs, floodlighting the whole area. Under the intense blue-tinged light Mellanie could see that most of the warehouses were joined together in a fishbone pattern. She recognized the wormhole generator building at one end, larger than all the others, its dark paneling more substantial. Behind it were four big fusion generators. A circle of concrete conical towers stood guard around the whole area.

The road took them in toward the complex, passing through a broad arch that seemed to be made from silvery scales. “Here we go,” Giselle said in a nervous whisper. “If the RI hasn’t accepted my personnel updates you can kiss your ass good-bye, Oswald. The smallest perimeter weapons here are atom lasers.”

They drove under the arch. Mellanie’s inserts reported a scan that was almost sophisticated enough to detect them.

Giselle held her breath; she was hunched up over the steering wheel expecting the worst.

“I never could figure out that insecurity of yours,” Ozzie said. “Nobody ever questions the boss.”

“The corporate management expert speaks,” Giselle sneered. “Do you have any idea how…oh, forget it.” She relaxed her hold on the steering wheel.

Giselle parked in her reserved slot outside the administration block and led them directly to the locker room on the ground floor. Mellanie pulled on a shapeless green jumpsuit of semiorganic fabric, which then contracted around her. Its knees and elbows puffed out, providing her with protection against knocks in freefall. Giselle handed her a white helmet. Ozzie was already trying to stuff his hair into one. Eventually he gave up and left the straps dangling down.

The wormhole leading to the orbiting assembly platform cluster was a standard commercial model, the type CST used for its train network, with a circular gateway thirty meters wide. Even that was only just large enough to swallow the spherical compartments that rode into it on a broad malmetal conveyor system. Mellanie stood on the walkway at the side of the transfer hall that led to the gateway, and watched two of the spheres slide past. All their polythene and protective webbing had been removed, leaving the silver-white surface exposed. Given that the exterior was designed to withstand the rigors of deep-space exposure, it seemed relatively delicate. She wondered what Paul would give to see this. It was strange thinking these modules were designed to fly halfway across the galaxy, never to return, that the starships which they would form could actually seed a whole new civilization. She’d looked at paintings in the Great Moments history book that showed the colony boats arriving in Australia; this must be the modern equivalent.

The spheres gave way to a whole series of much smaller cargo pods.

“All right,” Giselle said. “We’re on.”

The three of them moved along the walkway to the gateway. On the other side, Mellanie could see the assembly platform’s reception module; first impression was the inside of a globe that had been covered with the raw architecture of factories. It was an intricate orb of girders that seemed to be rippling constantly. She realized that the grid was host to hundreds of bots scurrying about, while on the underside manipulator arms were in permanent motion. Bright scarlet holograms flashed over half of the girders, warning people off the mechanical systems. The spheres and cargo pods passed sedately along branches of the conveyor to disappear down metallic tunnels leading out to various starship bays.

Ahead of her, where the walkway ended at the gateway, people were grabbing on to handhoops that skimmed along an electromuscle rail which took them inside the reception module. “I’ve programmed the system to take us to the frigate dock,” Giselle said. “Just hang on.”

When she reached the end of the walkway, Mellanie imitated what she’d seen Giselle do, and simply grabbed one of the hoops. Its plyplastic handle responded by flowing securely around her hand, and it moved forward along the electromuscle band, hauling her along. Gravity vanished abruptly, and Mellanie clamped her mouth down hard as every instinct told her she was falling. After a minute she got her breathing back under control, and tentatively began to enjoy the ride. The only thing preventing her from the full novelty was her stomach, which seemed uncomfortably queasy. Orion had told her about that sensation when the Pathfinder fell over the water worldlet. She smiled fondly. Crazy boy.

Mellanie was carried around a quarter of the reception module where the mechanical sounds of the bots and manipulator arms reached stadium crowd volume. Then they curved around to travel along one of the big tunnels. It branched, then split into five. The handle carried her down the smallest passage at the junction, only four meters wide.