“You’re welcome, crewman.” Ndan looked at Marce’s rucksack. “You’re traveling light.”

“My other bag got boosted.”

Ndan nodded. “Sucks. When you get squared away go to the quartermaster and get new kit. You’ll be charged extortionate rates but that’s your problem. You got marks?”

“A few.”

“If you’re short, come find me. I can lend.”

“That’s very kind.”

“No it’s not. It’s business. My interest rates are also extortionate.” Ndan pointed out of the lobby to a bus waiting outside. “Get on that. We leave in about five minutes. Do you still need a head?”

It took a second for it to register that Ndan was talking about a bathroom. “I’m fine.”

“Off you go, then.” She turned to see who else she needed to process.

It took five seconds for Marce to get from the lobby door to the bus and he felt exposed the entire way. But he managed to get on the bus without incident, find a seat, and wait. He looked up through the window at the House of Lagos building and wondered if Vrenna was looking down. He felt briefly sorry for Ghreni Nohamapetan, whom Vrenna was likely to thump the crap out of sometime soon. Then in the distance there was a brief thump that sounded like a shell hitting a building, and Marce remembered there were other things Vrenna and their father might still have to worry about first.

From the bus to the port he went, through another paper check and thumb scan at imperial customs, then up the beanstalk, which was disappointing to Marce because there were no windows and the video screen in the cramped passenger cabin showed nothing but informational customs videos and ads.

At a certain point in the trip up the beanstalk, Marce was aware that his (fake) hair felt like it was being pressed down onto his scalp. He mentioned this to his seatmate, who nodded but didn’t look up from whatever he was reading on his tablet. “Push field,” he said, then went back to his reading.

Marce nodded to himself. Push fields were humanity’s best approximation for artificial gravity, in which objects were pushed on from “above”—whatever “above” was in any particular scenario—rather than pulled on from below, as gravity was generally understood to work. The physics of push fields were discovered accidentally. Researchers back on Earth had tried to work out the problem of shaping a small bubble of local space-time around a starship in order to take advantage of the then newly discovered Flow, and ended up taking a lot of side detours in the math. Most of these detours offered nothing of any benefit, but one of them did, and it was pressing on Marce’s hair.