The chances were good that at least some of the passengers and crew of the Geest van Amsterdam had survived. Most ships were designed with failsafe pressure seals to close off damaged sections and trap as much air as possible in the remaining structure. Some larger vessels were even capable of fragmenting into smaller “lifeboat” segments. Occurrences of single micrometeorite strikes emptying an entire ship of its air were mostly confined to history books and entertainments. In reality, the possibility of such events had been taken into account across centuries of ship design and, even if a missile or a speck of interstellar detritus did manage to evade the anti-collision cannons carried by most modern craft, it would be highly unlikely to knock out more than handful of internal compartments. Space travel would always be a dangerous undertaking but very few ships were now lost with all hands.

Hanging over the wild ocean, the Trouble Dog raised her pointed snout to the evening sky. Sensor arrays retracted into the hull. Power built in the engines. All the readouts tripped into the red, and the old warship threw herself at the firmament.

Five: Trouble Dog

FIVE

TROUBLE DOG

When we were far enough from the planet’s gravity well, I began to oscillate, skimming the membrane of the universe like a pebble flicked across the clear waters of a tropical bay. I could feel the faint touch of raw starlight on my hull, and hear the tortured howls of the solar wind. I heard the faint overspill of comms chatter from other ships in nearby systems, the echoes of their signals cast across the intervening light years by the peculiar physics of higher-space. Some of these ships were from the Human Generality, some from the other races of the Multiplicity. My hull rippled in response to each of those distant data bursts as—now free from the drag of the atmosphere—my sensor suites stretched outwards to glean more intelligence, and long-disabled weapons systems swung into place, impotently tracking potential threats.