After leaving the embassy, I wandered the dockyard at Camrose Station. I had no need to hurry back to the Trouble Dog. The ship was more than capable of interfacing with the station to take care of her needs, and would alert me when she had been serviced and was ready to depart. In the meantime, I walked. The people I passed—those walking rather than taking one of the travel tubes—seemed drawn from every world and faction of the Generality. The locals affected loose, ankle-length kimonos, while visiting space crews wore fatigues or uniforms. Dressed in the regulation blue overalls of the House of Reclamation, I passed unnoticed.

To either side of the dockyard concourse, windows opened onto vast bays, some holding ships. I saw a scout craft similar to the Hobo, sitting on the floor of one of the hangars like a moth on the floor of a gymnasium. In the next bay along, mechanics were in the process of reassembling a bulk cargo hauler fully a kilometre and a half in length. Maintenance drones flew through its superstructure, pausing here and there to weld a patch or install a new component.

Ship minds were assembled in virtual nurseries according to strict regulations intended to prevent the emergence of machines capable of upgrading or replicating themselves. The more sociable were assigned to cruise ships; those with a tendency towards curating were assigned to manage orbital stations like Camrose; and the loners with the most solitary and reclusive personalities were installed on scout ships and long-distance cargo haulers.

If questioned, the Trouble Dog would try to convince you she had become a battleship because of her strict morals and scholarly demeanour. She saw herself as a kind of warrior poet in the vein of a seventeenth-century Japanese samurai; however, having captained the beast for two years, I regarded her personality as being more akin to that of an exceptionally smart Alsatian: loyal, energetic and prone to snapping at strangers. The ship wasn’t supposed to have a refined sense of right and wrong. Heavy cruisers couldn’t afford to be crippled by remorse, nor Reclamation Vessels preoccupied with failed rescues. Both had to be able to make instantaneous life-or-death judgments, and live with the results. However, an unintended side effect of using cloned human cells in the construction of ship minds was a tendency for unwanted emotions to seep into their personalities. Hence the Trouble Dog’s decision to resign her commission and enrol with the House.

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