Dellian and Yirella were among the last to arrive on board, which won them a knowing wink from Janc and smiles from the rest of the squad. The Morgan’s crew was assembled in the main auditorium. Dellian was still getting used to the relatively fast gravity spin of the toroid, so he had to hold the back of the seats as he made his way down the row to his squad. Captain Kenelm walked onto the stage just as Dellian sat down. Sie was tall, though not as tall as Yirella, wearing a smart gray-and-blue uniform that had a single star on its epaulet. Dellian gave the uniform a curious look as part of his brain categorized it as a sad and silly historical throwback. It wasn’t that the crew hadn’t worn their uniforms before, but seeing the captain standing there in the flesh ready to give hir departure speech was a hard reality strike. He’d been operating within a hierarchy for his whole life, but this—being on a warship about to launch into the galaxy—this made it suddenly very tangible. They were going out to fight, and there was a good chance they might actually die.

His hand fumbled for Yirella’s. Even the melancholic humor she’d shown a few minutes ago in the garden had now vanished. He knew she was just as nervous as he was.

The screen at the rear of the stage came on with a live feed showing a battleship accelerating slowly away from its skyfort berth. Dellian’s databud identified it as the Asher. Three advance seedships accompanied it.

“I wish Alexandre was here,” Yirella whispered. “I miss hir.”

“Me too. But sie did see you reunited with the rest of us before hir traveler generation ship left. I think that made hir happy at the end.”

Yirella nodded, a glint of moisture in her eyes. “I wanted hir to come with us.”

“Sie couldn’t. Sie was too old. Sie knew that right from the start, when sie left her own family behind to raise us.”

“I know. I’m being selfish.”

He squeezed her hand. “Me too.”

Up on the screen, the Asher and her escorts were closing on the clump of coiling fronds, barely a hundred meters across, that was an interstellar portal. The loops began to glow a dark blue. Then they were blossoming, expanding out as if a circle of the planet’s midnight-blue sky was spilling across space. The cerulean haze faded to black, and the portal was indistinguishable from the rest of the star field above Juloss. The Asher slipped through the hole first, quickly followed by the seedships. As soon as they were all through, the portal closed up behind them, its constituent fronds shrinking back to a seething clutch of insubstantial energy folds.