With those words, she had managed to stem the tide of other dissenters after Rand Sorengaard had stormed off. An open rebellion against the Hanseatic League would bring about severe reprisals. The Speaker considered Sorengaard’s raids to be a crime. Worse, she feared his activities would draw too much outside attention to the Roamers. The Roamers were accustomed to living in harsh environments, but not as hunted renegades.

Now, sitting beside Cesca in the space yacht, Jhy Okiah said, “We dare not let the Goose snoop around for fugitives, or they might discover some of the shipyards, colonies, and facilities that our clans would rather keep hidden.”

More than two centuries earlier, after leaving behind the tiny fledgling colony in the rubble belt around the red star Meyer, the generation ship Kanaka had continued on its way in search of a home, passing through nebular clouds and scooping up gases, which the people used for fuel and filtered for other resources. Brilliant scavengers, not only did the explorers make do, they also made progress.

The Kanaka was the last of the generation ships to be retrieved by Ildiran search teams 180 years ago. Instead of remaining on a single vector as the other large ships had done, the Kanaka had wandered, pausing in several places, straying far from the original plan.

The benevolent Ildirans had taken the Kanaka to a hospitable planet named Iawa, a world ripe for colonization and not needed by the Ildiran Empire. Settling on a terrestrial planet was quite a change for the colonists aboard the Kanaka. Iawa’s open skies and broad continents seemed like a paradise, with all the land the settlers could imagine after living for generations within cramped, limited quarters aboard an old ship.

At first, taming an amenable planet seemed a simple matter, but some colonists were concerned that all of their innovation and survival skills were being lost in only a few years. Iawa was such a drastic change that they thought they might have been better off self-sufficient and roaming among the stars.

Within five years, though, just as agriculture began to take off on Iawa, as towns were built and crops were planted on cleared lands, the planet turned against them. In a single season, a horrible native blight attacked all terrestrial plant organisms, wiping out the grains and vegetables and trees they had planted. The Iawan Scourge fed on Earth-based plant matter, developing an appetite for all transplanted species. Suddenly, the isolated colonists had only meager stores of food and little hope that the situation would improve, because this blight was endemic to the native biosphere.

Starvation loomed, but the people had remembered the austerity measures practical aboard a crowded generation ship and had set enough aside to survive. The Iawan settlers finally returned to the derelict Kanaka, the huge empty vessel they had left in orbit. They pulled up stakes and went back to the way that had been successful for them, roaming among the stars in search of other niches and new homes. “We are not a planetbound people,” had been the chant.