As far as I could tell, human beings were only really capable of thinking about two or three different things at once, half a dozen at most. My attention swathed the entire structure of the ship, encompassing and supervising the functionality of power circuits, plasma chambers, navigation systems, backup generators, cryogenic fuel containment systems, long- and short-range sensor packages, and the other million or so components essential to my continued operation. I also monitored the human quarters. I watched my inhabitants grieve for their lost comrade and searched my own feelings for a corresponding reaction. However, I struggled to locate anything more acute than passing regret. George Walker had served as a member of my crew for many years, but I wasn’t built to mourn. I could be concerned about the welfare of my inhabitants, but not crippled by their passing. I had lost personnel before. Their ghosts walked the empty corridors of my barrack decks. During active service, I had been home to three hundred and seven men and women of the Conglomeration Fleet. Now, with the loss of the medic, my remaining complement (not counting the two survivors from the Hobo) consisted of Captain Sally Konstanz, Rescue Specialist Alva Clay, and the engineer, Nod. Three people rattling around a ship designed to hold a hundred times that number.

Konstanz and Clay were fairly ordinary humans, although they hailed from different cultures within the Generality, and Clay still carried a number of augmentations left over from her days as a marine. Nod, on the other hand, was a blue-skinned hermaphroditic Druff from the planet Lestipidese.

Short, solitary, cantankerous and apolitical, the Druff possessed a natural aptitude for mechanical and electrical engineering that placed them in high demand across the Multiplicity, and, in the last two hundred years, few ships—human or otherwise—had flown without numbering at least one member of the species among their crew.

A tingle in my ventral and dorsal antennae informed me that, during the last oscillation, fully three-quarters of my mass had dipped into the howling void of higher-space. The time had come to make the full transition. Captain Konstanz was at her station on the bridge, so I signalled my readiness and she assented to the immersion.

The jump alarm echoed through the rooms and corridors of the crew’s accommodations. In the infirmary, Alva Clay checked the survivors were securely strapped to their beds, and then fastened herself into the nearest chair. In the cramped, ill-lit and complicated depths of the engineering decks, Nod curled into a makeshift nest of plastic tubing and copper wire.

They all knew this would be rough.