Pile on two more such orb-squares, repeating the twist each time. Now you have sixteen orbs in a stack a little more than two miles high and a little less than two miles across. Running up the center of the stack is an empty space, a chimney about half a mile in diameter. Pack that chimney with all of the good stuff: all of the complicated, expensive, exquisitely designed praxis that we have long associated with space travel. Much of it is nothing but structure: steel trusswork to grip those orbs and hold them securely in their places while the entire thing is spinning around at one revolution per minute to create pseudogravity, maneuvering to dodge incoming bogeys, managing the resultant slosh, accelerating under atomic power, or all of the above.

Once you’re satisfied it’s never going to fall apart structurally, weave in all of the other stuff: a storage magazine capable of holding tens of thousands of nuclear propulsion charges. Reactors to supply power when the ship is far from any sun. Inconceivably complex plumbing and wiring. Pressurized corridors along which Urnudans, Troans, Laterrans, and Fthosians can move from one orb to another. Trunk lines of optical fibers to pipe captured sunlight from the exterior of the icosahedron to the orbs, to shine on their rooftop farms.

The orbs themselves are comparatively simple. Inside of them, the water’s free to find its own level. When the whole construct is spinning, the water flees to the outside and settles into a curve on which “gravity” is always equal to what it was on the home planet. When the ship is under power, the water settles into the aft part of the sphere and levels out. People live on the surface of the water in houseboats linked by a web of stretchy lines and held apart by tough air-bladders; when the shape of the water changes, there’s always a bit of jostling. Like any proper boat, though, these are rigged for that; the cabinets have latches so that they don’t fly open, the furniture is attached to the floor so it doesn’t slide around. People live as their ancestors did on the home planet, and may go for days, weeks, without thinking very much about the fact that they’re sealed in a metal balloon being spanked through space by A-bombs—as their families back on Urnud, Tro, Laterre, or Fthos might never think about the fact that they live on wet balls of rock hurtling through a vacuum.

This construct—the Orbstack—is a nice piece of work, but vulnerable to cosmic rays, wandering rocks, sunlight, and alien weaponry. So, frame walls of gravel around it, and while you’re at it, hang the walls on a network of giant shock pistons. The Orbstack is suspended in its middle, webbed to it. Anything that relates to the rest of the universe—radar, telescopes, weapons systems, scout vehicles—lives on the outside, attached to the thirty shock pistons, or the twelve vertices where the shocks join together. Three of the vertices—the ones down around the pusher plate—are naked mechanisms, but the other nine are all complex space vehicles in themselves. Some are pressurized spheres where members of the Command float around weightless. Others have wide tunnels bored through them so that small vehicles, and space-suited persons, can pass between the interior of the icosahedron and the remainder of whatever cosmos the ship happens to be in. And one is an optical observatory, better than any on Arbre because it enjoys the vacuum of space.

All of this had been modeled, in more or less detail, by the minds of the Antiswarm during the days that my cell-mates and I had been assembling space suits and playing video games in Elkhazg. The model lived in our suits now. We could fly through it using the same controls—the trackball and the stick—that we had earlier used to steer the monyafeeks. From a distance it seemed impressively complete, with a kind of organic complexity about it; as I flew in closer, though, to explore the core of the Orbstack, I found hovering, semitransparent notes that had been posted by diffident avout, writing in perfect Orth, informing me, with regret, that everything beyond this point was pure conjecture.

Fraa Jad finally got his wish: a sextant. We had been supplied with a device consisting of a wide-angle lens, like Clesthyra’s Eye, that was smart enough to recognize certain constellations. So it could know our attitude with respect to the so-called fixed stars. That in combination with the positions of the sun, the moon, and Arbre, and an accurate internal clock and ephemeris, gave this thing enough information to calculate our orbital elements. Fraa Jad seized this tool as soon as its presence was made known, and devoted hours to mastering its functions.

Now that our adventure had turned into an obvious do-or-die proposition, Jules had given up on trying to conserve what remained of his food, and was eating freely. So his energy level sprang back and his mood improved. Whenever he was awake, several others were jacked into his suit, asking him questions about internal details of the ship that had not made it into the model: for example, what the doors looked like, how to operate the latching mechanisms, how to tell a Fthosian from a Troan. I learned that the Geometers had a particular dread of fire in the zero-gravity parts of the ship, and that one could not go more than a hundred feet without encountering a locker stocked with respirators, fireproof suits, and extinguishers.

That still left a lot of free time. Two days in, I made a private connection with Jesry and told him what I knew of the Everything Killers. Jesry listened attentively, as in a chalk hall, and didn’t say much. By watching his face on the speely screen I could tell that he was thinking about it hard—talking himself into why it made sense. It had been obvious to him that there was something we weren’t being told. Otherwise, the mission made no sense on the face of it. I had given him something to think about. Until he’d thought about it—until he’d had a thought that wasn’t obvious—he’d have nothing to say.

Text messages trickled in from Cell 87 and appeared on my screen. The first few were routine. Then they started getting weird.

Tulia: Settle an argument down here…what is your head count up there?

I pecked a message back: Pardon me, but are you asking me how many of us are alive? Then I fired the message off. Only after brooding over the exchange for a few minutes did I realize that I hadn’t answered her question. By that time, though, we’d lost contact with the ground.

I called a meeting. We all jacked in.

“My support cell doesn’t know how many of us are alive,” I announced.

“Nor does mine,” Jesry said immediately. “They claim I sent them a message a few hours ago implying that two of us were dead.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“My support cell sent me no messages at all for quite a long time,” said Suur Esma, “because they were convinced I had perished in the launch.”

“It makes me wonder if something has gone wrong with the Antiswarm,” I said. “All of these cells should be talking to each other on the Reticulum, right? Comparing notes?”

We looked at Sammann. New body language was required. Since faces could not be seen directly, we had gotten in the habit of shifting our bodies toward the interlocutor to let them know we were paying attention. So, nine space suits aimed themselves at Sammann. Fraa Jad, though, didn’t seem interested. He had already jacked out of the meeting and was clambering to a different part of the space frame. But he had scarcely uttered a word since we had reached space, and so we paid him no mind. I was even starting to wonder if he had suffered brain damage.

“Something has gone wrong,” Sammann affirmed.

“Did the Geometers find a way to jam the Reticulum?” Osa asked.

“No, the Ret—its physical layer, anyway—is working fine. But there’s a low-level bug in the dynamics of the reputon space.”