Perri remained mute, both with his mouth and his nexus. But his eyes were round and watchful, the pretty mouth pressed into a tight line.

“I’m going to introduce you to my son,” Washen promised.

Surprise blossomed.

“Locke’s doing some work for me,” she explained. “A rather odd project, and with your extensive knowledge of the ship—”

“He’ll happily help,” Quee Lee interrupted.

They shared their nexuses, too? How odd and suffocating, and noble, and lovely.

Across the table, Perri said, “I would be glad to help. If I can.”

The other conversations dipped. Then came a low rumble that shook plates and bones for a moment or two. Encrypted explanations were fed to Washen. One wet body of a baby polypond had slipped through the shields and survived the lasers, splashing down on a distant patch of empty hull. Every captain quickly surveyed the damage, finding nothing too alarming. Then their desserts arrived—sweet treats carved from a variety of iced lactations—and as spoons lifted, Julius said, “Madam,” in a soft whisper.

“Yes?”

“I have a question,” the youngster admitted. “About things that I shouldn’t know anything about.”

Pamir turned an ear. Otherwise, no one seemed to notice.

“What things?” Washen prompted.

“I know someone who knows someone, and that soul spoke to a crew member. I don’t know which one—”

“A rumor, is it?”

“If that,” he joked. Then with a sheepish look, he said, “Years ago, in secret, we sent someone into the Inkwell. Alone.”

Washen took a sweet, chilled, happy mouthful of her dessert, then let it melt against her curled tongue.

“A little human woman,” the boy continued.

“What’s your question?” Pamir prompted.

Julius gave a start. But he found the composure to ask both of them, “What has she told us? Has she found anything of use?”

Pamir and Washen exchanged quick glances. At this time, with the secret leaked and running free, where was the harm in small admissions?

“She’s been extremely helpful,” was Pamir’s assessment.

Julius nodded, concentrating on his spoon.

Then Washen swallowed and touched the youngster with her free hand—a light touch on a bare slice of wrist—and with a grim, honest tone, she admitted, “But our friend is late with her reports. Honestly, we haven’t heard anything from her in months …”

Twenty-five

The antenna was the rugged best that Mere could manage—an elaborate tangle of hyperfiber scraps and fullerene filaments lashed together over the last awful weeks, then unfolded slowly, forming a gossamer web trailing behind her battered, mostly dead ship. In better circumstances, she would have sent home volumes of data along with her own ravaged image, giving Washen every byte of data while trying to re-create how she had come to her elegant, awful conclusions. But her antenna had a limited output, and her new course had not only increased the gulf between her and the Great Ship, it had carried her into an unexpected portion of the sky. They wouldn’t be looking for her here, and even if someone happened to glance in this direction, the great swarm of watery bodies had finished surrounding the ship, their crude bulk and the last breaths of rocket plasmas forming a bright loud sphere that looked as big as a cantaloupe held at arm’s length, effectively blinding the captains. Even a significant signal would have trouble pushing through that mayhem. Even an undisguised message—no dancing frequencies or deep encryptions—might go unnoticed. Whatever message was sent, it had to say enough, but it had to be simple, and it had to prove that she was the genuine Mere, and to help make it noticed, she had to repeat her message thousands of times, in slightly different forms, on a prearranged, normally silent channel.

Mere aligned her vagabond antenna, pointing it at the center of that vast orb of life and blistering fire.

She meant to send her message at least a hundred thousand times, but before she reached ten thousand, little impacts cut the web strands, and then a fleck of dust obliterated the central housing, shrapnel slicing through the increasingly tattered remains.

For a full day, Mere attempted to rebuild the antenna.

But the impossibilities refused to surrender, and she fell into a black depression that lasted for another two days, her anguished mind fighting for any answer to what had become an unsolvable technical problem. By dismantling the remnants of the Osmium, she could theoretically build a new antenna and transmitter, but the task would take years and end up being utterly useless. A couple light-months removed from the ship, her new course meant that she could never match its trajectory. Instead of moving parallel to ship, letting it gradually catch up, she was beginning to wander off into other regions of the Inkwell. Her-engine was in lousy condition, but even if it operated at full power, and even if she burned all that remained of her anti-iron fuel, Mere could only make herself into a cold piece of dead debris drifting in the Great Ship’s wake.

She couldn’t throw off any more mass. Nothing left was extraneous, except perhaps her own little body. Whack off the head and throw the rest away? But no, even that sacrifice wouldn’t matter.

What she needed was help.

From the Great Ship?

Maybe they would notice her abbreviated message and measure her course. For a sweet moment, Mere imagined a team of brave volunteers cutting through the surrounding cloud, riding an armored streakship that was dispatched to do nothing but save one of their own.

She had to laugh at herself, shaking the image off.

Then a day later, her navigational AI interrupted her concentration, remarking with a tense little voice, “The polypond cloud is changing, madam.”

Even with her minimal eyes, Mere saw what was happening. The shrouding bodies were on the move again, a few of them killing their own momentum, drifting closer to the ship, vanishing from her view as they allowed those twenty Earth masses to grab hold of them and yank them downward.

Quietly, fiercely, she said, “Shit.”

“Exactly,” the AI replied.

Grief demands time. In this very slender existence, rage and despair were indulgences, and in the next few moments, she forced herself to think about nothing but what was genuinely possible.

“The full sky,” she blurted. “Show me.”

The navigator complied instantly.

“Here. What’s this?”

A fleet of neurological taxis—her term for the big slow starships—were relatively close, pushing toward unseen targets.

“Destination?”

None were apparent.

“What about this mass? Over here?”

A swirl in the dust was visible, significant but relatively motionless.

“What about these infrared signatures?”

They were factories, perhaps similar to the facility investigated earlier. “Do you wish to move closer to them?”

“No,” she replied.

Then, “These! Coming into view here!”

A trivial school of polypond buds—barely five hundred offspring—showed as a faint sprinkling of red pinpricks swimming through a dense bank of silicate dust. They were traveling toward the Great Ship in close formation, yet each possessed its own precise course. Judging distance and trajectories ate up long hours of observation; navigation was never easy in deep space, even for a healthy ship. And even after much careful consideration, nothing was certain. With a confessional tone, the AI reported, “I cannot be sure. But what you want … I believe it isn’t possible—”

“The vectors—?”

“Are not cooperating,” the voice replied. “We haven’t enough fuel, and that assumes our engine absorbs the work.”

“In some reality, it will.”

The comment didn’t earn any reaction.

Mere examined the apparent distances to the buds, the light of their big-throated engines, and the estimated absorption of the intervening dust and gas. Then with a low hush, she pointed out, “They’re late. See? They won’t reach the ship until it’s escaped the Satin Sack, and by then, from what I can tell, the rest of the swarm will have fallen.”