Izairis shoved Patton aside and pushed the holograms around until she found the ship’s specifications. “Oh, she’s a big girl. She can put out as much as we need by herself, but she’s plugged into Aszerat as well.” She rotated an ethereal dodecahedron navigating through the other menus. “Back there,” she said, pointing to a bank of ports along the far wall where custom features might be added to the ship. “Access points.”

Patton went along and opened the electrical ports. Naecia rolled the Switch Drive into position. “Couldn’t you have stolen the dock key as well, so we didn’t have to move the entire city?”

“I didn’t know I was stealing a key at all,” Patton said defensively. He held up the fob. “This was just a souvenir.”

“Well,” Naecia huffed, yanking a heavy cable from one of the ports, “now you get to take an entire city and a couple ten million people as a souvenir instead.”

Izairis transferred the navigational profile from the Odiat to the Stellarcade and projected the map over the deck just in time to watch the Timelance disappear from her screen.

“It’s in–”

“Bulkspace,” said Naecia. “I know.”

“It took them a quarter cygment to get out there. So that’s how much time we have left.”

“Great,” said Naecia, forcing connections yet again, all the while going through the same mental observations she’d had before. The likelihood of catastrophic death, needing to pee. The suit wasn’t equipped for it. Maybe Mother had had the bladder of an urplorp heifer.

Izairis expanded the map so the local region of the Dasma Arm showed across the deck. Then, surprisingly, they were ready. The Timelance was on its way but had yet to appear.

Naecia broadened the field of stars with a series of gestures that at first let them see the entire Dasma Arm of the Galaxy, then the Galaxy itself, then clusters of galaxies and so on, until the deck was filled with a chunk of the Universe a few billion gilleys wide. “I guess we could go anywhere,” she said.

“We’re not going to get Ben?” asked Patton. “If the Timelance is headed here, we can leapfrog them now and go get him.”

“Patton,” said Naecia. “This–” she gestured to the drive with its ad-libbed electrical connections and gargantuan power requirements, “–setup is not good. To get wherever we’re going, we’ve got to engage it twice without blowing ourselves up. Adding a trip to go get Ben means two more hops. It’s just... we’re talking about the survival of everything.”

Izairis was at the com. “I’ve hailed the Silent Child over and over, Patton. It’s there. The coms are on. No one is answering. It’s in free float. The Timelance had it. Ben isn’t there any more…”