“Enough!” howled Parma.
“Not enough, not enough at all,” countered Marada. “How could you allow this?”
“How could
I
allow it?” the father repeated incredulously, beginning to rise.
Chaeron stepped in front of him. “Better me than you, defiler of children. Beware the man who mocks justice while in its pursuit. Shebat was there, at slipside. You looked right at her, and did not know her. I was watching. You could not have hurt her more thoroughly if you had blinded her like the Justice you purport to serve.”
“It has . . . been . . . nearly a year since I have seen her. That tall girl in black-and-reds was she? I confess I saw you two together and thought it just more of your cultivated bad taste, that you would bring—”
“Marada, Chaeron—
sit down!
”
After a long pause during which all realized that things had gone too far, the sons obeyed the father.
“Thank you. Now, let us get these matters into some tentative perspective, even if later such is found to be spurious. With your permission. Arbiter? Consul?”
“Proceed.”
“As you will.”
“Thank you, gentlemen. Marada, I must congratulate you on initiating hostilities between ourselves and the Labayan bond. This, and only this, should currently concern us— Wait until I am done.” That to Marada, who made a wordless sound. “It is the only thing that need concern us because I am about to declare a state of war, retroactive to your arrival in Draconis. Thus, I am solving the problem of your precipitous investigation, and whatever it might uncover. I need the guild, right now. I am not allowing any weakening of my force in this time of marshal law. You can pluck the hairs out of our warts later.”
Chaeron Kerrion could not hold back an admiring chuckle, a wondering shake of his lion-maned head.
Marada was also incredulous: “
You congratulate me
?”
“Indeed. You have assured the elections in our favor, relieved me of what was becoming an improportionate concern as regards them. You have stymied the guild’s agitation against us, in that matter and any other, for the nonce. War is the most fortuitous development possible at this moment. If you were not an arbiter, I would show my gratitude more materially. By your expression, Marada, you are under the misconception that war is necessarily malefic. I refer you to an ancient, Heraclitus of Ephesus, on the matter.”
“And I refer you to reality: no one has ever benefitted from war.”
Chaeron snorted something unintelligible.
“It is impractical,” Marada thundered, then lowered his voice: “The ships will never fire upon each other. . . .” Parma and Chaeron exchanged glances. “. . . You have no idea what you are asking.”
“Do I not?” silked Parma. “What you told Baldy about this new shortcut to Shechem—the Hassidic Corridor, I believe you called it—makes it eminently practical. Not to say desirable, since we did not start it, and cannot be censured by the Consortium for retributive action.”
“You do not understand, I—”
“I think I understand perfectly well. Under martial law, I am drafting you: you are now a proconsul under Chaeron, attached to the strategy arm of Kerrion space forces. Chaeron will sublet your expertise to Baldy, whom you will familiarize with all the specifics of this Hassidic Corridor, and whatever else your inimitable experiences with that half-mad cruiser has caused you to discover, intuit, or even conjecture. Do you understand?”
Marada’s acquiescence could barely be heard through Chaeron’s delighted whoop and appreciative applause.
“Do not gloat,” advised his father severely. “When all this is done, we are going to have to go after the guild. And I had hoped to wait until we had enough of these new-type cruisers to make the pilots expendable.”
“We can afford to build a gross of them, with what we will gain from the destruction of Labayan space.”
“Hold your enthusiasm, Consul. It’s just a little spanking I’m about to give them, as I must to save face. And to bury forever the rumor that my son is incapable of siring a healthy child.”
Marada Seleucus Kerrion shivered as if struck, but would not be diverted from the thing Parma had said which most concerned him: “New-type cruisers. The Marada is not an anomaly, then?”
“If you had not been so determinedly avoiding the mainstream of civilization, you would have known that long ago. I do not particularly want to advertise it; there is no need to make the guild more paranoid, and hence more active, than they already are. The pilots will sever themselves from us eventually, we have long known that. It was only necessary to develop the cruisers further, so that when the stopgap measures of sacrificing potency and sanity for mobility are no longer supportable, we will no longer need to demand them. Such heavy costs . . . I would like another twenty years, but I am obviously not going to get them.”
“You gave that juggernaut to Shebat, a child, not even a member of our society? Why?” shuddered Marada.
“To see what would happen, of course. So far, I am reasonably pleased.” Looking around him, from one son to the other, Parma could see that neither shared his enthusiasm. In Marada’s stricken eyes he saw revulsion, despair. On Chaeron’s emotionless, unsmiling countenance he read the towering brickwork of the wall of betrayal. Still, to have told the one and not the other prematurely would have lost him his hold on both. And who could have foreseen such a circumstance, in which he would find it needful to reveal so much of his thinking as it projected into the future?
Parma sighed deeply, rubbed his brow and pulled his palm down over his face. “You see, gentlemen, the time has come for you both to grow up. I expect and
I will have
perfectly harmonious cooperation from you both toward our common goals of maintaining Kerrion space unsullied in expanse and in reputation, as the premier consular house of the Consortium. To that end, I am going now to convince Guildmaster Baldwin that my brats are outspoken, but harmless. It should not be too hard, after the spectacles you both made of yourselves. I hate to think that I have to warn you that none of this must be spoken of in less-discriminating company, but we all do what we must: I will take harsh action against either one of you, should you fail to fulfill my brightest expectations.” Parma rose, stretched, and walked rapidly out of the control room without another word being spoken.
The two half-brothers eyed each other until a tone indicated that Parma was off the
Hassid
, and security reinstated.
Chaeron raked fingers through his auburn curls. “You might as well come with me. Even arbiters have to eat; my suite is as safe a place as
this
to discuss whatever we might choose.” It was difficult to offer even that much.
The length of the pause before Marada’s reply indicated a similar difficulty in his acceptance: “I suppose I must. Wait until I power
Hassid
down. Two ships are plenty to lose in one day.”
“You are sure, then, that
Bucephalus
and
Marada
are lost to us?”
“You are not?”
“I would hate to think that I went to all that trouble to find Shebat, only to lose her so quickly.”
“My condolences. But the alternative is that the
Marada
is mad, and that I know to be untrue. Perhaps you have not lost her. We will consider it over a meal.”
“Shall I take that as an affirmation that you accept Parma’s dictum? Have we a truce?” grinned Chaeron ingenuously.
“I would be a fool to take you at face value. But we have, temporarily, a truce.” He waved a hand and all but the standby lights in
Hassid’s
control room winked out.
It was not until the pair had ensconsed themselves in the consul’s tower that word came up that Julian Antigonus Kerrion was not anywhere in Draconis.
The mighty
Bucephalus
sped toward those inter-fenestrations in spacetime which opened into sponge at a hundred fifty million meters per second, half the speed of light.
Effortlessly, but not happily,
Marada
followed, an exact half-kilometer behind, in
Bucephalus’s
evacuated wake. No solar wind tickled his skin; they had passed from the valley of its mastery. No hunched, crunched, recurved magnetic fields slowed them with treacherous topography: they were headed away from the sun/black hole pair and its rigorous spacetime, into the gentler void.
Though the sparkling sea surrounded, though all his sensors reveled,
Marada
was not content: Shebat Kerrion was not aboard him, but preferred the company of
Bucephalus
, yet. The
Marada
craved his pilot, craved the freedom to drive point into eternity, rather than ignominiously following along behind the
Bucephalus
, who all knew was ill with the compromises his pilot had forced on him, was in fact no longer the command cruiser he once had been, though the outboards refused to recognize that truth. Or could not recognize it . . . could that be true? Could the outboards not know? Could they not care? Spry certainly cared for
Bucephalus
: a part of him rocked like an old woman keening beneath an ashen shroud, deep in his cavernous emotions so that when his mind touched the cruiser’s, echoes of it rebounded screeching through the
Marada’s
soul.
Marada
felt a certain empathy for Spry, but less for
Bucephalus
, knowing that in the end the ability to survive catastrophe unscathed tested the individual.
Bucephalus
had survived the intrigues of his pilot somewhat less than unscathed. All of Spry’s remorse could not put back even the tiniest increment of what had been lost.
Bucephalus
, facing inarguable evidence of his senility, had taken on its burden. Irresolute, he pondered himself endlessly, wondering what it was he might have forgotten. Like the desultory stirrings of an invalid on the first day of spring,
Bucephalus
would sigh, then He back once more, either unable to take hold of himself, or unwilling. Tentative, endlessly maundering, quadruple-checking every order and redundantly relaying them back to
Marada, Bucephalus
sailed point toward sponge.
Marada
was hard put to believe that Softa Spry was actually intending to lead him into sponge behind lame
Bucephalus
when he himself was sound, and Shebat Alexandra Kerrion was sitting idle beside Softa while
Marada
must make do without a pilot.
He was considering what sort of emergency he might concoct to jog the outboards’ wits enough to secure him his Shebat’s company through sponge, when he realized with crackling discomfort that he
was
considering it: no cruiser had ever spoken what was not, since the arcane beginnings of their shared consciousness.
Self-respect,
Marada
knew, was without seat in his circuitry; yet without it, he would face dolorous evils as did
Bucephalus. Marada
was not frightened, but his newly acquired selfness was unique and he highly prized it. It, also, had no seat of materiality anywhere that he could discern. Therefore, those dangers to it might also be without substance, yet have substantial effects. Therefore, he did not search through his probabilities for one with which to frighten the outboards. Rather, he reached out to Shebat in a way he had not hazarded previously, a function of his determination to keep his actions within known referents for cruiser-consciousness until Shebat was safe within his protections.
In the
Bucephalus
, Shebat Kerrion dropped her stylus from numb fingers.
“Softa!” came out of her on a gasp.
“He’s in the head,” a voice from behind reminded her, “dream dancer.” It was Julian’s sneer that brought back time and place to her. Spry had set the youth on an optical tracking monitor to watch for pursuit ships, with a wink to Shebat to forestall her mentioning the obvious: they had achieved a measurable fraction of the speed of light within four minutes of clearing Draconis; time dilation shielded them from pursuit: should a cruiser come after them, they had merely to accelerate, then turn, and it would seem to the pursuing ship that they had disappeared. As for Draconis-controlled guidance, like a cloak of invisibility, time dilation intervened. Its sum, that of the difference of the square of the sums of an angle whose base was distance and whose height was the time elapsed, obscured all, could be cast off only by the mechanism of entering and exiting sponge. Should they not choose, or not be able to do so, they would be forever stranded in Draconis’s future, drawing farther and farther ahead each second they remained in normal-space acceleration. Shebat shivered, rose up in the semidark of the control room.
Julian’s head was white-gold in the indicator spill, bent to his task, not knowing it useless.
Marada, Marada,
echoed in Shebat’s mind, so that she could find no retort for Julian, so that she could not have said which “Marada,” man or cruiser, she meant.
She passed by Julian without a word, into the corridor where Spry must be, leaving the youth to his own devices. Spry could have used the elimination facilitator in his command console. He had not. Therefore, something else had drawn him out of their company.
She found him press-sealing the wrists of a three-mil suit in the corridor, ghostly with the luminescent white suit throwing back the half-light the pilot preferred. The helmet bulked between his boots, a pale spheroid. He reached down and picked it up, spied her, and instead of donning it, shifted it under his arm.
“Seems like I’m always camping on disaster’s periphery with a picnic lunch and a pair of field glasses.” In the shadows pierced by running-lights, his flat face was unreadable.
“So you have been watching me all this time? Voyeur!” she accused, teasing.
He chuckled humorlessly, “You caught me, dream dancer. Don’t give me any trouble.”
“The
Marada
wants me, not you. He is my cruiser; this is my responsibility.” She inclined her head to indicate his form readied for space. “Softa, he
called
me. Not by
Bucephalus’s
aegis, but despite it. He spoke in my head as if I were not within another cruiser!”
“Smart ship. Shebat, I’m going to—”
“You are not surprised!”
“I told you before: that cruiser is too much for you. I’m going to put a tow, glass-line with a laser substrate, into effect between the two of them.” Such was done only when a cruiser’s ability to execute tandem maneuvers was suspect; or when one cruiser was powered down; or if the course included an entry into sponge.
“No you are not.
I
am. You cannot leave Julian alone with an ex-apprentice in
Bucephalus
!”
Spry shook his head sharply, as if he could silence her by that means, and stepped back through the open hatch into his cabin, Shebat following.
There, in a less diffused illumination which showed her a spare and depersonalized habitat, she realized that something was wrong with Spry’s face. Something as artificial and colorless and blank as the pilot’s billet had come to reside on his countenance.
“David—”
“Shebat, I am sorry.” He stopped, just within the portal. Behind her back, the doors smacked shut. They stood an arm’s length apart. “I am sorry for all the mendacity of which your husband doubtless accused me. Everything you have heard about me is true. But I—”
“Softa,” she demurred, taking a step closer, then another, until she could count the pale hairs bristling his chin, “do not apologize. You have secured me my freedom.”
“Shebat, let me finish. Though I took money from Jebediah, Parma’s secretary, to deliver you into dream dancers’ hands, you were never in danger from me. I used the money I got from it to pay your way into Harmony’s troupe, who are friends of the guild and not Labayan sympathizers. I have not in any way abrogated my responsibilities as our mutual oath delineates them—not until now.”
She put out a hand, felt it land upon his shoulder. She could not take her eyes from his, brown as deepest earth and as endless. There was something wrong behind his eyes, something cornered and desperate. Her hand squeezed his shoulder, her lips said all was well, that she was here upon her own initiative.
“Are you? It did not sound like it when you ran in crying that you could not leave.”
“
Marada . . . Marada
wants me to come aboard, David.
David!
”
But Spry was not listening. He spoke on: that her time with dream dancers was not the scandal her family must proclaim it; that he would have gotten her out and safely on her way to space-end, regardless of difficulty, this very week; that—
“David, what is the matter?” she interrupted in a coldly controlled snap. “I know all of this. So do you, and you know I know.”
“I—” he fell silent, bit his lip, looked away.
Shebat moved another step inward, letting one hand slide to touch his face, bringing the other up to parallel it. Somehow, she had become almost as tall as he. With gentle pressure she forced his head up, until his eyes met hers. “Softa, it is obvious that since I have come this far, I have forfeited second thoughts. I must have no regrets; you must help me.”
He reached up and drew her hands down, holding them in his own. “Shebat, I can barely help myself.
Bucephalus
. . .” Horror spat from deep in his pupils, biting her volition, numbing it. “
Bucephalus
has suffered greatly. He is . . . this is . . .
may be
his last flight.”
“We will retire him at space-end,” Shebat soothed, not understanding. “He can train pilots, tell tales . . .”
“I am not at all sure that he, or I, will make it that far. And it is for that I apologize, in advance. For taking you from small peril into great danger. But I did not know . . . I did not realize, you must believe me—”
“I believe you, Softa,” she assured him, crooning to mask her fear. “I believe you. We’ll be safe and sound at space-end—”
Softa David Spry shook his head very slowly, unblinking. “Shebat,
Bucephalus
and I have a deep bond. So deep that his—difficulties—are to some degree my own. . . . Things are vacuous, at times. It was that second investigation that convinced the cruiser it was malfunctioning. I could not tell him . . .
it,
” he corrected himself savagely, “the truth. Larger things were at stake than the sanity of one cruiser and one man. Now, with the guild safe from incrimination by what we,
Bucephalus
and I, knew and what we have done, there comes the accounting.
Bucephalus
is in no shape to enter sponge. I could not assess the damage, earlier: I had to do this. Do you see? I risked your life in the bargain. Now, I cannot promise that
Bucephalus
, or myself, are going to make it; or making it, continue to resemble in any way the personalities you have known. . . .”
“Oh, Softa, no. No! You are wrong; I mean, you are all right . . . just sit.” She pulled at his hands, entwining hers. They seemed frozen in her grip, like dead things.
“Oh, Softa, yes!” He laughed abruptly, then swallowed, then said:
“I dare not point out the various proofs of what I am saying; I do not want to look so closely. I will do the best I can. I am going to secure the tow, I am not sure why . . . I would be better off to get you two aboard
Marada
and take the
Bucephalus
to a more fitting end. We’ve both always wondered where that black hole off Draconis’s star comes out. . . . Ssh, ssh. I’m drifting a little, but I know it. . . .”
Shebat reached out to him another way. Some hybrid, fear inspired, built half of dream dancing, half of what was left of her enchanter’s gift, she found and hefted and cast over him. He calmed. His hands released hers. His short nose wrinkled at the tingle of ozone upon the air. Into his roiling thoughts she thrust with a dream of well-being and surety, a scene built of the memories she found in him to resemble space-end’s port and him standing there, before
Bucephalus
, with a smile and an outstretched hand. . . .
“I have one thing left to try,” he admitted after an interval, when the dream was gone. “I shall replace what I may of the stolen memories, explain to the cruiser what occurred, and why. I could not, before, lest they probe him and come upon it.”
“You do that,
I
will take the towline out and secure it.”
“Sorry.”
“I am a pilot, am I not? You have so declared me. It is my place. Yours is with
Bucephalus
, who needs you. We must hurry, you well know.” She turned to go.
“Shebat, I cannot allow it.”
“Softa, you are in no shape to disallow it. You yourself have said it.”
He grunted, a soft guttural, half a moan, half a challenge.
She walked deliberately toward the threshold.
“I am coming with you,” he said, as the doors drew back. “Suit up, little one, while I slow us down a bit. No use testing a three-mil suit at these speeds.”
She hugged him, a spontaneous expression of fellowship that slid into something more, stretching time with its own pall of forgetfulness, so that her lips found his and all her flesh flared where she touched him.
He pushed her away abruptly. “Don’t revenge yourself upon Marada with me,” he muttered, as from behind in the empty corridor a pair of hands clapped thrice in hollow applause.
“Good for you. Pilot,” Julian approved. “And now, if you two are quite finished, there is something I think Spry should see.” The casual tone was belied by Julian’s posture when Shebat whirled to regard him: straight and tense, with his belly sucked in tight.
Then the three of them dashed the ten meters to the control room at sprinters’ pace.
Bucephalus
looked like a creature aflame, all his displays humping and bucking from yellow to red. That no alarm had sounded, that no word had been whispered from cruiser to pilot, was a measure of the ship’s debility. Alone and friendless,
Bucephalus
fought the demons of silicon nightmare.
Shebat sat at her console only a moment after Softa, who cursed and ordered in an undifferentiated tone, so that Shebat found herself squinting at nothing, concentrating on the sense of his words, while her hands of their own accord took David Spry’s direction:
“Ready Mode B, autosynchronous phasing. Sponge entry ten seconds from NOW!”
“What about me going aboard Marada? The towline? There’s no sponge-way here!”
“No time to explain. Magnetic grapples, on! Marada’s path-coordinates on your scope,
now!
”
An insane, impossible torus of a course blipped on Shebat’s screen, a hole to be carved from spacetime at nearly light-speed. She had time only to draw a breath before B-mode lit and the
Marada
began to institute his programmed functions in perfect accord with
Bucephalus
, to whom the empty cruiser was welded by invisible grapples which made of him the inner wheel of an axle whose path only the
Hassid
had ever dared describe before.
“But—”
Shebat cried, objecting equally to the course and the grapple-mode, proscribed for entering sponge.
Then there was the
Marada’s
shiver/touch/reassurance. And there was sponge.
If Spry had not been the most underrated pilot in the guild while holding first mastership,
Bucephalus
would have been lost in those initial instants. With all his years and all his might Spry fought to bring his irrationally struggling cruiser under control. In so doing, he had to dive deep into the paranoid deluge of unassignable data flowing forth from its every sensor. The
Bucephalus
was not built to handle multiple paradoxical inquiries simultaneously. Spry was not built to exist in the subconscious of silicon-based intelligence. During that time, when both systems exceeded their tolerance, identities melted, evaporated, blew away on gravity’s wind.
Shebat Alexandra Kerrion sat straight up in her couch: all the red was gone from her copilot’s instrumentation. She had turned her head, smiling, then frowning, then vaulting from her seat to prove with her hands what her eyes knew to be true and her mind knew to be true, what even Julian, hovering helplessly behind Softa’s head, knew to be true so that his skin was pale as his hair:
Softa David Spry was insensible; consciousness was gone from him; his head lolled when Shebat stroked it. Softa was as empty as the helmet cast without notice on the deck beside his feet.
“Well,” said Julian, exhaling like Chaeron did when he sought composure. “Now what, Lady Pilot?”
Though it had been
Bucephalus’s
console Shebat’s hands had touched, it was to
Marada
their commands had gone; it was
Marada’s
solace she needed, his communion that
Bucephalus’s
plight had interrupted. She said:
“I must get to my ship.
Bucephalus
cannot be trusted: he cannot trust himself.”
Julian’s face worked. Then with an obvious effort, he stilled it, saying: “Of course, I understand,” in a fatalistic murmur that made her know he read her heroism as perfidy.
Shebat turned the bracelet on her wrist, that Chaeron had given her, seeking composure in the coolness of its stones. It was difficult, more difficult than Softa’s proficiency had ever whispered it might be, to speak and move and think about fleshly affairs while half of her resided in the cruisers’ realm of consciousness. She remembered Marada’s warnings, when she had sat for the first time in a cruiser and prattled to him unknowing of what she did. So it was that she snarled at Julian, hoping to make a quick end to his martyr’s posturing:
“
You understand?
I truly doubt it. All you understand is your overriding concern for your own skin. You bravely sigh and say to me, ‘Of course’! Of course I will maroon you in sponge in a helplessly crippled cruiser, you think! Well, I might have, were it only you, or were I a Kerrion in nature as well as name. But I am not: I cannot leave
Bucephalus
adrift in sponge: Spry’s identity is too completely fused with his cruiser’s.”
“The trollop with the nerves of steel.”
“Quiet, catamite. We are going to see if you are good for more than looking pretty and keeping your mother company. As I was saying, I cannot leave Softa, or
Bucephalus
, lost in sponge.”
“Lost?” said Julian, his mobile lips taking a blue tinge.
“Lost. Softa was suited up because he did not dare use magnetic grappling while entering the sponge-way: its effects have never been determined. Then, when
Bucephalus
malfunctioned, he feared
not
using it, lest the ships be separated. Now, because of the grapples, not even
Marada
is sure where we might be. I have to go out there and secure a towline. Then I can control both ships from
Marada
. Leaving
Bucephalus
in command when he might any moment initiate irrational action—” her voice lowered, as if the
Bucephalus
slept some fevered sleep out of which he might abruptly wake, “—is impossible, as is switching him over to manual with half of Softa’s mind fused with him.
“So you see, I am going to give you a crash course in copilotry and then I am going to suit up and . . .” Shebat found difficulty even speaking those next words, which described an action never undertaken in all the years of sponge-pilotry. . . . “And then I am going to jump over to
Marada
.”
Even Julian knew what she was saying. “Through sponge?”
“If it is possible.”
“And if it not?”
“Who knows? I will leave your link with
Marada
punched up until I have successfully made the crossing. If I do not make it, it is up to you and
Marada
to bring Spry to space-end.”
There followed a mutual survey of the exigencies they might face; a hurried construction of contingency plans made over the copilot’s console in the light of scintillant indicator spill; a deep and awkward pause when all things were done and said and a confirmation came to Julian by eye and Shebat by mind that the
Marada
had matched velocities with the
Bucephalus
and awaited. . . .
Press-sealing the final tab on her suit, Shebat sighed. “You know what to do?”
Julian’s eyes were paler than Chaeron’s, like winter water, so light that from the side they seemed to have no color at all. “Not really. But let us proceed.” He, too, had donned a three-mil suit; its helmet lay beside Softa’s on the deck: one could in no way foresee what
Bucephalus
might be likely to do. One could only prepare for the worst. So armed, he straightened his shoulders and raised his head high and smiled the smile with which Kerrions had faced the task of surmounting impossible odds for more than two hundred years. “You have my best wishes. May you have also the Jesters’ favor. . . .” He leaned close, as if he might kiss her, noted her barely perceptible flinch, clasped her hand instead. When he released her, she went to Softa, brushed her lips against his forehead, straightened his head against the padding, and turned away.
In what seemed like an eyeblink, she was in the outer hatch, alone in her suit with a coil of glass-line over her shoulder and her helmet on her head, sensing rather than hearing the air being drawn out of the little cubicle. She had no gravity-sled: its results in sponge could not be foretold. It was the slim glass-line cable which must be her life preserver in this awesome sea. One end of it was clipped to the suit’s utility belt; the other she must secure to
Bucephalus
before diving into sponge. . . .
The port slid back, and she faced
Marada
, sixty meters away, port open welcomingly, and all the sponge between.
Shebat blinked, and blinked, and blinked again, her suited fingers going to her helmet as if she might brush away the prickling mist beyond it. Sponge’s green was not the green of verdant earth or fecund sea, but that retina-tickling curtain that comes over all things when a sun-bather enters a darkened house after lying long in brightest day.
Her hand, doing no service scratching at her helmet, went to the clip on the coil of glass-line, fastened there. With the other, she grasped the rungs spaced along the portside, and swung out beyond supergravity’s tenuous field. Dangling amid numinous mists which no star’s light seemed to penetrate, she felt for the recessed socket she sought in
Bucephalus’s
outer hull.
Finding it, she clumsily secured the cable. Her left hand, on the port handgrip, was grasping it so tightly she was afraid the ache would turn to numbness and she would find herself dangling at the end of the glass-line like some dinghy in
Bucephalus’s
wake.