family. I’m almost getting used to this irregular effervescence of memory. I wonder if she’s the same or similar to the “tall female” in my book.

“This is where we’ll do our work,” she says. “My people put us in orbit and bring the hulls together. That’s got to be the reason I’m here.” She looks back at Big Yellow and the girl—then at me, fiercely demanding confirmation.

“Makes sense,” I say.

“Damned right. I know what I am, if not who I am.”

The little girl has wrapped herself around a control pylon, watching as the bigger folks try to make sense of the arrangements.

Big Yellow grabs my shoulder as we hand-over-hand. “Where’s Tsinoy?” he asks. The Tracker seems to have vanished after saying something about nebulae.

The spidery woman, eyes flashing, is absorbed by the panels, making her second circuit with fluid ease from one rank to the next.

We’re not much use here—for the time being, anyway. “Let’s go back and look for it,” I suggest.

We pull our way aft, then transit the illuminated entry. We are slowed by mist drifting through the hatch from the staging area. We keep back but move around to peer out. No sign of the Tracker—of Tsinoy.

“Why would it leave?” Big Yellow asks. “It’s pretty loyal to the gray lady.”

I see movement near where we first entered the staging area, a shifting patch of paleness—unfamiliar in silhouette, but then, the Tracker excels at never looking the same twice.

“Is that it?” I point. The mist pushes me back into fresher currents of air. I can hardly see.

Big Yellow stretches his upper torso into the acrid gloom. “Yeah,” he says finally, withdrawing. “This damned fog stings.”

I pull another empty gray bag from the cinch of my pants and hand it to him. He wipes and dabs. “It’s coming this way.”

“You’re sure it’s the Tracker and not—”

But then it’s upon us, pushing us aside in its haste. Its touch—even its near approach—makes me groan deep in my throat. Big Yellow grabs a long, knotted arm to slow it.

“Stuff coming up the pipe,” it announces. “Bad stuff.”

“Human?” Big Yellow asks.

“Shit no. Like me, only mean.”

“How soon?” Big Yellow asks.

“A snap. Get them out of the dome. It’s bad up there, anyway. Bright nebulae, all wrong. Pull them back here. We missed a door—in shadow. Might be a way out.”

“Show me,” I say. Without hesitation, it grabs me—hard enough to hurt. We launch into the darkness. I’m helpless to do anything about it. Everything’s a whirl.

Then, with astonishing deftness, Tsinoy grabs a surface and slows, bringing us both to a smooth halt, and positions me before a round depression rimmed in slowly pulsing red.

A hatch opens.

Still shaking, I break loose from its paw-claws but drift out of reach of anything that would allow me to make a move one way or another. I start flailing, cursing in a frantic whisper, and then the spidery woman is beside me. She tugs me to the side, where I seize a cable.

“You shouldn’t do that,” she softly admonishes the Tracker, as if speaking to a child. The Tracker grunts and rattles ivory spines. “What’s this?” she asks.

Big Yellow swings himself through the hatch. “More dead folks,” he says from inside, his voice muffled. “Pretty far gone.” He tosses out three corpses, dry as husks. I don’t check to see if I’m one of them. I pull up to the hatch, then in, somersaulting slowly until my hand grabs a net.

We’re in a craft moored just aft of the control chamber. The small cabin is shaped like the inside of an egg, narrow tip near the hatch. It’s equipped with fine netting that reacts to our presence. Two more husks hang at the back, curled in each other’s arms. Big Yellow dislodges the pair, not bothering to disentangle them—just shoves them past me, past the spidery woman, through the hatch. Out and away.

The air is dry, with a touch of the scent of death. Still much better than the drifting fog outside. Big Yellow suggests we shouldn’t leave the hatch open for long.

The netting wants to serve—protect—guide. It pulls away from a pale blue hemisphere, then reveals a clear port about a meter in diameter. Again, we see the stars—and fifty or more kilometers away, the bow of another hull.

“It’s a transfer egg,” the spidery woman says. “Tsinoy, you’re a marvel. I missed this completely.”

“No time,” Tsinoy says. “Stuff coming.”

“But I need to remember how to use it,” she says.

The girl peeks in. “I hear a fight back there,” she says. “At least three more. They’re all going to die.”

Big Yellow shoves out of the netting. The girl leans aside with quirked lips as he flies through the hatch. The Tracker, however, is stuck—the netting doesn’t seem to know how to let loose of those ivory spines. Tsinoy squirms and rips and finally tears its way out, then follows. The girl gives it a wide berth.

“We could run the hull from that forward position,” the spidery woman says. She gives me a defiant look, well aware of her contradictions from a few hours before.

The girl looks on in concern as I exit. She wants me to stay—out of danger. The mist hits me full in the face as I follow Big Yellow’s swatch of color through the staging area. He’s fairly flying through the wreckage, the framework that holds the ruined ships, toward our former residence, and points aft.

Spin-up begins right now, of course, just to add to our joy.

A BRAWL

I’m surprised by how adapted I’ve become to low-weight conditions. What little intellect I can manage between my leaping and vaulting consists of calculations on how hard I’d slam into something if I don’t grab this beam or that broken piece of frame and slow myself, how fast I can spin around a cable or a rail and deflect my trajectory—long, quick curves that get longer and more demanding as spin-up reaches maximum.

Of course, I’m not lucky enough to escape without slams and bruises—and a particularly bad miscalculation near the hatch to the wide domicile. I strike the wall and bounce away, stunned, then slowly fall outboard, until the spidery woman grabs my sleeve and, with surprising strength, hauls me to the hatch—a stretch of at least four meters.

“The girl’s right,” she says. “Hear that?”

I don’t. I’m not that sensitive. In awe and embarrassment, I thank her, and we follow Tsinoy and Big Yellow across the domicile, a quick enough trip—then back into the cap that covers the forward end of the gigantic water tank. We bound along the outer wall, great leaps barely planned, all adrenaline and ill-shaped instinct.

This time, the spidery woman flips herself in one bound and flies against the tank’s huge eye. The water is in full slosh mode, waves majestically spiraling, peaking, breaking off around the slowly rotating tube. Bubbles crack and smack against the eye’s inner surface, creating a cacophony I don’t remember from my first visit.

How anyone can hear anything is beyond me. Before I have much time to regret any of it, all for one and one for all, pain and stinging skin and eyes, we’ve passed through a series of hatches and one long tube, back to a large, cluttered spherical space outboard of the water tank—not any part of the Ship I’ve passed through before, I’m willing to swear.

This looks more like a ruined forest ball. I close my eyes tight, then spit on my sleeve and rub to clear my vision. Now I hear voices—faint, fading. Dead vegetation hangs limp and brittle from the crisscross of cabling, and a slow, stately rain of leaves and broken limbs and branches falls around us, kicked up by something half buried in an accumulation on the inboard side.

A mangled body glides by from where it briefly snagged on dead branches. A beaded trail of blood from a severed leg dutifully follows in its wake. The body’s head turns, eyes blinking, and I realize it’s still alive—a

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