“You should thank Tubal Last for that,” Dabry said. Then, cruelly, “Or yourself. Perhaps if you had pleased him better, your race would have survived.”

At those words, Petalia seemed to shrivel in on themselves. They stepped backward a few steps, their eyes enormous and wide as they stared at Dabry. Their robe swirled as they turned and fled in a flash of blue.

“Dabry, that was cruel!” Atlanta protested, but he stood adamant.

“They hold the captain to impossible and illogical standards,” he said. “If that is the garment’s measure, see how well they wear it. They want to leave the ship? Then good riddance to them and their grudges. We don’t need such attitudes poisoning our ship.”

“How would I be poisoned?” the ship asked with interest.

He frowned up at the ceiling. “Attitudes are contagious,” he said. “A negative person makes more negative people around them. Imagine if you carried around someone who was sad or angry all the time. You would grow tired of it, but more than that, you would become sad or angry yourself.”

“I do not understand,” the ship said.

“This is ephemeral, like flavors,” Dabry said. “I have raised hundreds of recruits in my time, but the challenge of explaining such matters to you, Thing, is the greatest I have ever known.”

“Should I thank you?” the ship said uncertainly.

Both he and Atlanta laughed at that. The ship joined in, recording the moment and filing it away under friendship.

The ship tried to speak to them more than once. Petalia seemed to encompass so many complicated emotions, combinations of three or four or sometimes even more, but any attempt to press them on definitions and sensations led to abrupt declarations that the conversation was over.

Of all of them, Petalia seemed to find the company of Gio the least objectionable, and the two of them were often found watching Q-space and conversing quietly about the life of plants and herbs and the elaborate theory of spices that Gio had learned from a practitioner of Washen.

As time passed and the wait to find out whether they would be successful wore on, the pattern of interaction between Niko and the Florian grew more intense. They would be cordial one moment, and then Petalia would be savaging the captain verbally the next. It was as though they could not control themselves, as though the words had to emerge, as surely as a chemical reaction causing an explosion. It was painful and embarrassing to be around.

Niko refused to respond, simply looking more and more stolid and solemn, driving Petalia into increasingly vicious words.

Atlanta used the Thing’s medfacility to regrow her fingers. The fresh-grown ones were tender and sore at first, but she practiced her combat skills, fine-tuning them. An Empress needed to be able to protect those around her, she told herself, and nothing her internal advisors could say could convince her otherwise.