“What are they waiting on?” she asked her mom. “Why don’t they attack us or just move on to someplace else?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re just being methodical. Or perhaps they’re waiting on something. I know as little of the Bern as you do.”

Molly looked down at her lap; her Wadi was stretched out along her thigh, its gleaming scales catching the first rays of dawn. She stroked the animal’s back, right between the two nubs rising from its shoulder blades, and fretted over her mounting concerns.

“Between the Bern up there and news of the Drenard invasion, even if we do get to hyperspace, will there be any reason to come back? I mean, will there be anything left to come back to?”

“We need to plan as if there will be,” her mother said.

“And you’re sure this Cat person can help?”

“She knows the people who can. She’ll remember me.”

“You, the ship? Or the old you?”

Molly still had a difficult time separating the experiences of her mothers—the personality copied to the ship’s computer and the husk of a woman she’d met, virtually, on Dakura. Somehow, the former had become more real to her than the latter. And that was true even before she found out Walter and Cole had pulled the plug on her mom’s physical body.

“She knows of the old me, not as I am now.”

“And she was part of the group you and dad were sent to investigate? The source of the illegal fusion fuel?”

“She did some work for them, yes. It took your father and myself a long time and a spot of luck to get an introduction. Unless we go through her, it’ll take just as long if not longer to make contact again. Especially with everything else that’s going on.”

“You mean the Bern?”

“Partly. More the elections, though. Callites are tolerated seven out of eight years. Ignored, really. But come polling time, their numbers—the amount of votes they can wrangle together—it creates tension. Contacting and dealing with the Underground would be easier any other time.”

Molly sighed and looked back to her lap. Her new reader rested on her other thigh, opposite the Wadi. The creature pawed at the device playfully, almost as if it knew Molly was about to redirect her attention away from scratching its back and return to the letter she was writing Cole. She patted the animal’s head and looked over the first line of the note, wondering why she was bothering with writing it. It wasn’t like she could send it to him, or even be sure he was still alive. Her thoughts drifted to her father—and the same nagging doubts arose for him as well.