A rumbling alert sounded, three quick blasts like a horn; signifying a jump alert.

‘Jumping in just a minute,’ Nancy finished with a grin. ‘Then we can go out.’

Ty nodded, relieved at the fortuitous change of conversation.

When they finally got outside, several specialized spider-mechs were already waiting for them, with toolkits attached, floating a few metres above the hull. The Hyades Cluster now hung in the void far behind the frigate, a distant burst of fireworks caught in one eternal instant.

Ty found he wasn’t feeling as nervous as he had expected. In fact, being outside the hull felt no worse than standing on the surface of some clade-world. All he had to do was make sure he didn’t make the mistake of thinking of the ship as a huge metal tower with him clinging to its—

Whoops. Vertigo hit Ty, and he focused hard on the hull itself, taking several deep breaths and holding on to them.

Flat ground. That’s flat ground underneath you, he told himself, over and over.

Once the attack subsided, he gazed back along the hull, towards the flat dome of a shaped-field generator, only a few metres away. Apart from defensive purposes, these devices were primarily used to deflect interstellar debris that might otherwise tear through the hull. If he relaxed his eyes just a little, he could even pick out the faint sparkle of the combined energy fields surrounding the entire frigate.

Just beyond the field generator rose the first of a forest of drive-spines, curving up and outwards from the hull itself.

‘Will you look at that,’ said Willis, his voice sounding flat and close inside Ty’s helmet. ‘All that way in less than a second.’

‘It’s not such a big deal,’ Nancy replied. ‘Coreships did it all the time.’

‘Well, yeah, but . . .’

But Ty knew what he meant. You didn’t see or feel anything when inside a coreship; it was the same rocky sky held up by pillars you looked at, wherever in the galaxy you might actually happen to be. Being able to step outside and see where you were could be an awe-inspiring experience.

‘All right,’ said Nancy, suddenly all brisk efficiency. ‘I had to lead a bunch of repair crews the last trip out, so just follow my lead and do what I tell you, and it’ll all be fine.’

‘What about the spiders?’ asked Willis. ‘Couldn’t we just run them from inside the frigate and get them to do the work?’

‘We tried that,’ Nancy replied, ‘but there’s always something finicky that needs a pair of hands to deal with. But, with any luck, the spiders will still end up doing most of the work. Now check your HUDs for the schedule.’

Ty dutifully brought up his suit’s display, which indicated a list of repairs to be made, ordered by priority.