We surged out of the station and punched through local traffic like a speedboat through a flotilla of yachts, leaving them scattered and squawking in our wake—something I knew the ship took a perverse delight in doing. Not that anyone would complain, of course. We were riding under the colours of the House of Reclamation; the next time we set forth at such speed, the lives we were racing to save might be theirs.

On screen, I watched Camrose Station grow smaller and smaller. Behind its interconnected rings and twinkling lights, I could see the rusty continents and blue oceans of the planet Camrose, home to two billion people.

How strange, I thought, that the human race had once been entirely limited to a solitary and similarly fragile planet. It seemed absurd. How could we have survived such confinement? By the time the Multiplicity came calling—in the disreputable shape of a battered old trading vessel from the Goblet Cluster—humanity must have been clawing at the walls of its prison. According to family history, my maternal great-great-grandmother had been born on the Moon, in orbit around a dying Earth. Her name was Sofia Nikitas. She had been sixteen years old when the trading ship set down on the Sea of Tranquility. By the time she disappeared, at the age of forty-five, she had travelled more than a thousand light years and left footprints in the dust and soil of more than a hundred different worlds. And, along the way, she had become the founder of the House of Reclamation.

I had requested no additional advantage in the House because of our connection. I hadn’t wanted to measure my career against hers. But even so, as I sat on the bridge of the Trouble Dog, preparing for the plunge into the wailing nothingness of the hypervoid, I felt I had disgraced her legacy.

* * *

As soon as the stars vanished, giving way to grey mist, I unstrapped from my couch and went aft. We would be in the hole for forty-nine hours and I had no intention of staring at the external view for a moment longer than necessary. The emptiness of higher-space could deceive the areas of the brain associated with visual perception, depriving them of stimulation and inducing visions, hallucinations, feelings of nausea and creeping dread.