Of course, I had known other homes. For an instant, my thoughts turned to Sedge, and the three months we’d spent in that villa on Naxos. Those perfumed nights. Before Trouble Dog, that villa had been the closest I’d had to an adult home. Since my parents died, I’d never really belonged anywhere. My life had been lived out of a suitcase. I spent time in dorms at the Academy, and then on a variety of ships, but I was always passing through. I never put down roots, not until I got here. For the past three years, the Trouble Dog and her crew had been the one constant in my life. They gave me the solitude I craved, and company only when I really needed it. The ship’s cabins and bridge had become as familiar to me as the rooms of the house I lived in as a child, and I couldn’t bear the notion they might soon be destroyed.

I stopped walking, tempted to tell the Trouble Dog to stop, to throw all engines in reverse and flee for Camrose. But, even as the thought formed, I knew I could never give such an order. We could not come all this way only to turn tail and flee. There might be crash survivors depending on us. The least we could do would be to scan the wreck for signs of life, even if we had to fight off a barrage while doing it. By attacking us, the Trouble Dog’s former comrades would implicate themselves in the downing of the Geest van Amsterdam, and thereby implicate the Conglomeration as a whole in an act of aggression against a civilian Outward vessel. Such behaviour couldn’t go unpunished.

And I couldn’t get away from the thought that there had been hundreds of people on that liner. Hundreds of potential casualties. I felt my fists clench, my resolve harden. The passengers and crew of the Geest van Amsterdam had not been military personnel. They were civilian men, women and children, and if they had been unlawfully killed, they deserved to have their killers brought to justice. And if any of them were still alive—still somehow clinging on a week after the attack—I knew in my heart that we had no choice but to do everything in our power to locate and rescue them, even if we died in the attempt.

Part Two: The Marble Armada

PART TWO

THE MARBLE ARMADA

They prepare for death, yet are they not the finish,

but rather the outset,

They bring none to his or her terminus

or to be content and full,

Whom they take they take into space

to behold the birth of stars,

to learn one of the meanings,

To launch off with absolute faith,

to sweep through the ceaseless rings

and never be quiet again.

WALT WHITMAN, “Song of the Answerer”

Forty-Two: Ona Sudak

FORTY-TWO

ONA SUDAK