Of course, I had not told Captain Konstanz my motives for defection. We had been on opposite sides during the long, brutal attrition of the Archipelago War. She had commanded a medical frigate for the Outward, spending much of the war in orbit above Pelapatarn. We had both been present at the final massacre, but had never discussed it. In the House of Reclamation, former enemies worked side by side for the benefit of all; former criminals redeemed themselves through acts of self-sacrifice. To join the House of Reclamation was to renounce your past and place yourself at the service of your species—or in my case, the species that had constructed my sisters and me.

I relished the unsympathetic squall at my back, the almost imperceptible friction of the grey mist against my leading edges. There were risks in diving through the higher dimensions but, as with base-jumping, the thrill of it soon became addictive. When I had been a warship, the anticipation of conflict had always heightened the experience of these flights; now I was an angel of mercy, it was the knowledge that each second saved might in turn save another life.

Eleven: Ona Sudak

ELEVEN

ONA SUDAK

I stumbled back to consciousness on the cracked tiles of the ruined gym. Time was missing. For a moment, I let myself drift. Nothing seemed real, my aches and twinges simply the after-effects of enthusiastic lovemaking, followed by a strenuous hour at the gym. Then my nostrils filled with smoke, my ears with cries. I realised with nauseating vertigo that something dreadful had occurred.

I sat up and the world churned.

My legs stuck out of my robe and my left arm hung awkwardly. I felt flayed, exposed and crisped, like the survivor of an atomic blast. The teenage couple from the sauna had gone, scythed away by crashing junk, their bodies mashed and broken by the force of the collision.

I had been in the swimming pool.

I remembered… missiles.

The floor rose in a slope behind me, tilted to an unusual degree. The pool had lost some of its water, and the remainder sat at an angle to the deck. Whatever had happened to the ’dam, we were canted oddly, which meant we’d lost our artificial gravity.

“Ship?”

Taking hold of an open locker, I pulled myself up. My left arm flared with every movement, but I was almost certain it wasn’t broken. My bones had been augmented to the point of virtual indestructibility. The surrounding muscle might be pulped, but the humerus would have held.

“Ship, are you there?”

Somewhere down the corridor, a hoarse voice shrieked itself into a crescendo of ragged, agonised silence.

“Ship?”