For what seemed like minutes on end I heard nothing but the sound of the other two getting their breath. I suspected Enid and Angharad were too intimidated by everything that had just happened to offer the first word, but Enid destroyed that theory.

“I need . . . a drink,” she said.

I turned around and got my first look at them since we’d crammed ourselves into the Vajra. Enid looked haggard, but intact: sweat had run down from her face and streaked her hair, and had made the hollow of her throat into a shiny little bowl. Angharad looked calm, but her eyes had the slightly-too-wide look of someone doing their best not to fall right to pieces where they sat.

“By ‘drink’, do you mean ‘alcohol’?” I said. “Because I think we all could use a shot after that. —Okay, maybe not you, Your Grace.” I remotely undid everyone’s seat cushions and let them move a little more freely. They were still belted in, but they could undo that if they wanted to.

I heard a strange choking noise from somewhere, over and over. I looked up and realized it was Enid. She was giggling. Hand over her mouth, she was giggling—and then she pressed her hand down hard when she started to laugh full-tilt.

Angharad raised a hand, made her trademark gesture of welcome and peace, and matched it with a limp smile.

Enid was trying to say something, but it wouldn’t come out between her laugher. Finally, the sibilants and fricatives she was trying to puzzle together into something like speech started to make sense: “Y-you s-sure . . . sure earned your d-driver’s fee with that one!”

She put her hand back over her mouth and kept on quaking in her seat. There’s gonna be tears any moment now, I told myself. That’s how it works: first you’re numb, then you laugh, then you cry.

I undid my straps, toggled on the gravity by setting the crew area of the ship to rotating, and got up. The protomics in most people’s footwear would automatically link with the flooring and keep them from floating around like so many goldfish in a pond, but with guests it’s always good courtesy to give them a proper 1G field anyway.

I stood next to Angharad to get a better look at her. She looked a little dazed, but for all I knew she could have been keeping in a dozen times the fear and trembling Enid was letting out.

“This is the . . . fifth? The fifth time I have been attacked,” she said, her voice sounding rather rusty from the gauntlet she’d just run. “But there was never a loss of life before. Mimu and Wani, and all the rest who died . . . I will need to pray for their spirits. There were twelve in my retinue when I arrived, and now it seems there are none.”

“I’m sorry.”

It never sounds sincere to my own ears when I say that, but when she met my gaze after a moment, it looked to me like she thought I was sincere. That’s gonna take getting used to, I thought.

“Mimu and Wani were never meant to be my honor guard,” she went on. “They were originally hired as only my personal assistants, but in time they . . . they demanded that they take on that role. They trained themselves for it. It was not something I had demanded of them. They gave it freely . . . and both they and I knew that meant there might come a day like this.” She cupped her hands at her navel and lowered her eyes.

Enid’s morbid giggling had died down, and she was now wiping at her eyes and the sides of her face with an extrusion of her sleeve. “Yeah,” she said a moment after Angharad finished speaking, “but . . . don’t ever ask me to watch you leave someone behind again, okay?”

“When people are shooting at you, you don’t always have that option.”

Me saying that only seemed to make Enid angrier, but at that point I figured she needed to choke it down. She’d had the nerve to charge the guards herself, to risk her own neck, and whether that was due to NKF or real-life training or just plain youthful brass, it hardly mattered. None of those things give you anything to deal with the psychological (let alone social) consequences of what you do with it, any more than a gun gives you a way to plug a mistaken bullet hole. There was a reason people said NKF was short for “Never Killed Flesh.” If she hadn’t learned that yet, it was high time.

I popped open one of the little storage cubes in the cabin’s port wall, took out a couple of syringe-sized-and-shaped one-shots of Killeen Double Malt (aged 14 solar years), placed one in Enid’s free hand and wrapped her fingers around it. “You being emancipated,” I said, “I figured offering you the stiff stuff wouldn’t be a mistake.”

Enid looked at the bottle, then put the end in her mouth and chased it all down in one go. She let out a long enough breath after that to fill three of any one of my own lungs.

Angharad raised her head at last. She didn’t look rattled anymore—no blind stare, no shaky fingers. She was even smiling again, the same small but serene smile she always seemed to have in reserve.

“Thank you,” she said. “I neglected to say it earlier, but . . . thank you. You and Mimu and Wani risked more than I would ever dare ask from anyone. I am in their debt, but I am in your debt by far more.”

I downed a mouthful from my own bottle of Killeen—I was tempted to follow Enid’s example, but if someone here had to remain sober and functional, it was me—and folded myself in half in her direction as a kind of an in-place bow.

“I take it you’re looking for a way to pay back that debt,” I said.

“Whatever payment there could be for such a thing, yes.”

“Okay.” I leaned forward, not a bow this time but as a way to show her my I-mean-business face. “Just be honest with me. Did you have even the slightest inkling you were going to go out on stage and then have all planetwide hell break loose?”

Even with a full dose of Killeen in her, Enid still seemed capable of feeling enough surprise to twitch like a poked bird. Angharad, when I looked back at her, had gone back to looking into her loosely-clasped fingers, but she retreated into that only for a moment.

“That threat has always been a possibility for me ever since I chose to travel freely and leave Kathayagara behind all the more,” Angharad said. “We—my retinue and I, and some of the other Achitraka members—we had discussed the issue before, without formally resolving anything. I did not want to hide the way my predecessors have, to wall myself up behind privilege and protection that others could not afford. The Achitraka was of the opinion that I was risking too much for the sake of making a point. I was of the opinion that to risk nothing at all was to make an even worse point.”

I’m with you on that, I thought. I just don’t know how far.

Out loud I said, “And I take it protection from the IPS was out of the question.”

“On that issue they were adamant, yes.”

I didn’t blame them. Ever since its inception, the Achitraka had done everything in its power to keep the fine folks of the Interplanetary Protectorate Service out of their business, up to and including hiring and training their own bodyguards. The Achitraka cared more about its sovereignty than the fact that any one IPS officer could provide better protection than any dozen of their own home-grown men. Judging from the hesitant tone in Angharad’s voice, I wasn’t the only one mulling the long-term value of this stance.

“So . . . ” Angharad’s voice fluttered a bit. “This was, in some ways, the culmination of something I had myself started some time ago. Now people are dead because of it—because of me. You are right in that the fact they were aware of the dangers does not make it any less regrettable.”

Enid had her hand tight enough around her empty bottle that I worried she was going to try and give her pitching arm some close-quarters exercise, with someone’s forehead as the target. Probably Angharad’s. I decided to give Angharad a sanded-down version of the excoriation Enid was most likely hatching.

“Look,” I said. I almost gestured at her with the bottle but stopped myself. “Nobody’s going to think you’re happy about what happened.” I let my mouth form a cracked smile. “And if they do pull anything that dumb, then Enid here has my permission to kick in their teeth.”

“I don’t need your permission to do that,” Enid giggled back.

It was comforting to know that Angharad wasn’t immune from ripping herself up as badly as any of the rest of us were. Especially me. But it was even better to see Angharad smile again and nod agreement to both of us.

“We’re lucky, you know,” I added. “The biggest reason we got out of there was because we got lucky. Next time, you can count on the other guys being a little more competent and our luck not being anywhere nearly that profitable. And as long as you’re alive, Your Grace, there’s always gonna be a next time.”

A lot of uncomfortable silence followed my words, so I changed the subject.

“The first thing we should do is get you back to Kathayagara and sort things out there,” I said. “The sooner people know you weren’t either kidnapped or killed, the better. Especially if it’s you being the one to bring them the word.” And we might as well do it in person, too, I thought. Sending a message somewhere via the entanglement relay network (the “jumpnet”) was only incrementally faster than going there yourself in the first place. After all, the whole way the jumpnet worked was via a bucket brigade of entanglement-engine-equipped drones, which leapt between worlds to synchronize the contents of the different planets’ networks with each other. If you were headed somewhere on your own, the only reason the jumpnet was faster than you was because it was unmanned.

“I agree.” Angharad looked towards Enid. “And I have not forgotten about your father, either.”

Enid blinked and realized she was on the spot. Still want to go it alone? I almost said, but held it in and let her cobble together an answer.

“I did promise you that much,” Angharad went on.

“Damn straight you did!”

Oh, you spacebrats, I thought. When the whole universe is your hometown, you don’t think twice about, oh, saying things like Damn straight to the Kathaya Herself. Who was it that said the reason spacebrats don’t have tact or manners is because they don’t fit in a single-unit cargo bin? But that petulance only made Angharad look all the more heartened.

Enid looked at the bottle, probably checking if there was anything left she could pour down her throat before saying what came next. “But if there’s something more important you have to do—I mean, there’s probably two hundred other more important things you have to do—far be it from me to get in the way, right?”

“This is what’s important.”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, no. There is no ‘have to’ here. I would go with you because I choose to.”

I dove in before Enid had a chance to get even more petulant. “Let’s check in with home base first,” I said. “Not just for the sake of figuring priorities, but also getting straight any story we’d want to tell the rest of the universe.”

“I imagine the truth will more than suffice.”

“It’s not just that. If anyone takes too close a look at this ship, they’re going to start asking some deeply nosy questions about what I was doing on Cytheria, and whether or not I was taking advantage of the chaos to do other things, and all the other paranoid stupid questions that are the stock-in-trade of law enforcement.”

“Then let me ask: were you attempting any such thing?”

“No.”

“Good grief, no,” Enid declared.

“Then consider the matter settled; they must take my word about your good intentions on face value. Although I must ask: what precisely was it that prompted you to involve yourself?”

It was my turn to sit under her gaze and say nothing for long seconds, something Enid looked like she was enjoying. The only answer that came to mind was the one nobody alive would believe: that sometimes you find yourself facing a situation from which there’s no turning away, and in those moments you act because the prospect of not doing anything would eat you alive.

No, nobody would believe that if I said it—except maybe the one person asking me right now, I thought. And she’s asking because she wants to see if her instincts about me are spot-on.

“There are some things you just don’t . . . not do,” I finally said. “You know I’m an apostate, but that doesn’t mean I can pretend you’re disposable.”

Enid put the bottle, empty as it was, to her mouth. “You’d sure get a beating from someone for it if you did.”

Angharad shook her head. “For all of those who believe I am indispensable, there are just as many—if not more—who are indifferent or hostile. I will let the truth of me be found in the actions of others—such as yourselves.”

Enid handed me her empty bottle instead of, thankfully, flinging it somewhere. “Half the time, you make it sound like you don’t even exist.”

“In some ways you are entirely correct.”

The left half of Enid’s faced scrunched in disbelief. I bet she has no idea how unintentionally amusing she looks when she does that, I thought, and then immediately dragged myself back into line.

“The Supreme Kathaya is a role to be filled,” Angharad went on. “Others filled it before I was here and others will fill it after I have left. I knew as soon as I took this role, there would be nothing left of ‘me’. People would no longer see ‘Angharad’, but only ‘Her Grace the Supreme Kathaya’. I expected this. In fact, I welcomed it. I welcomed it because I knew there would be no other way to properly express the Old Way except by such an embodiment. Every Kathaya before me has been an embodiment of the Old Way—a living incarnation of what it means to be such a thing. We have any number of writings that defend the Old Way, but citing them is not the best defense of it. The best defense of the Old Way is in living it, and living it well. In the position I am in, I have no choice but to live it completely—even perhaps if that leaves nothing of the old ‘me’ behind. And I do not shrink from it. I welcome it.”

There was no debating any of that, especially given the source. Who argues the alleged wetness of water with a fish?

“As far as being labeled as criminals go,” Angharad went on, “there is something I can offer you that should help, entirely at your discretion. Any vessel that carries the Kathaya is automatically by law—both planetary and interplanetary—protected by diplomatic sanction and is immune from search, seizure, confiscation, impound or restriction of movement.”

“Any vessel?” That was Enid, beating me to it.

“Any vessel.”

I shook my head. “Your Grace, that loophole’s not gonna last forever. What happens when you step off?”

“It’s not a question of remaining on board. If I designate this vessel as mine, officially, that is all that’s required. Its designation remains until I choose to revoke it.”

She looked at my face and didn’t need even two seconds to see that I was struggling with the weight of what she was offering.

“You did save my life,” she insisted. “With this you might well save someone else’s. Hers, for instance.” She nodded at Enid, who looked like she was about to say: Since when did I need saving?

“I need to think about it,” I said, wincing at the words. Some part of me felt downright irresponsible for not simply telling her Yes! or No! right then and there.

“Think about it as long as you need.”

“Well, I can’t think about it for too long. We need to make planetfall pretty quickly or our version of what happened won’t mean squat.”

Enid swung one foot over the side of her couch, set it on the floor, and stood up. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” she said, “but I’m starving.”

Nice way to back out of the discussion, I thought, but now that I let myself notice, my own stomach was folding in on itself pretty hard. I stood up and allowed the galley to emerge from the starboard wall.

Even after all these centuries, spaceship convenience cuisine is still nothing you want to eat regularly. Sure, you can put together reasonably healthy meals with the latest versions of what’s designed for long-term storage in a ship, and you won’t die of either malnutrition or obesity. But after a week you’ll be bored, and after a month you’ll be sucking at the corners of fixtures for a taste of something different.

I’d had the foresight to keep the Vajra well-stocked, and so there were enough convenience meals to feed all three of us on a schedule of five meals every two days for about a solar week. After that, though, we’d have to park somewhere—and since it took anywhere from one to three solar days to put in planetside after making an entanglement jump, we needed to decide where we were going now. I did a little more math and figured I could go down to one meal a day if need be. You could cheat gravity with a ship’s repulsor field, and you could (sort of) cheat the speed of light itself with the entanglement engine, but you couldn’t cheat your own body for long—and you sure couldn’t eat the furniture or the hull. The only real way to cheat your body was to become the highest of Highend and do without a body in the first place.

On the plus side, it wasn’t as if anything I could offer Angharad had ethical implications. All the meats, from the chicken breast gumbo and beef teriyaki bread bowl to the tri-fowl meatloaf selections, were all lab-printed and -grown. Not like convenience cuisine would ever include live-harvested meat in the first place. No one with blue-ribbon Old Way credentials would come near a meal for which a living (thinking, feeling) creature had been slaughtered. The only ones who did such things were the Highenders who were only too happy to know they could fill hectares of land with life forms that would go nowhere but into their mouths.

Call it spurious guilt, I guess: sitting there in front of the Kathaya, I couldn’t even bring myself to reach for anything but the barley stew with tomato sauce. Guilt, or maybe atonement of a kind for the indifferent way I’d eaten these past few years, where I had in fact dined on genuine meat from time to time. But then I saw Angharad take the pork ravioli, and Enid snapped up the barley stew before I could reach for it anyway. I settled down with mahi salad and crackers instead, and set to work getting us on course. The Vajra had been able to triangulate our position without delay, and so Kathayagara was seven jumps from Cytheria. We could shave that down to five if we were desperate.

Traveling via entanglement engine was a great way to beat the speed of light, but it had some annoying pitfalls. You could only jump so far at any one time without running the risk of the entanglement lock from your target star decohering on you—something planet-side gravity also had a nasty tendency to exacerbate, along with many kinds of cosmic phenomena. That also meant anyone who’d tried to go beyond an irregularly-defined corridor within the galaxy, or leaping to a star that might not be even there anymore, was punching a one-way ticket. The obvious effects of radiation even far below the threshold for endangering life, or the unexplained effects of voids between stars larger than a certain space, both proved to be deal-killers. And most crucially, with each jump you made, you always arrived at some random point within a sphere a few light-seconds across (they don’t call it quantum entanglement for nothing), with your final destination at its center. There was no known way of shrinking down the minimum volume of space required for the spontaneous manifestation of the virtual particles needed to complete the jump. Call it the trillionth-mile problem: we’d mastered flipping ourselves halfway across the galaxy, but it was still a pain in the ass to get into and out of the garage.

The universe had looked down on our brave attempts to buck the odds, smiled, and said, That’s nice. But enough already.

On the plus side, that last limitation made all those feverish interplanetary war scenarios all but impossible. Those who’d tried it quickly found the lack of accuracy, plus the distances and speeds involved, made spaceborne attacks impractical. What few wars that had erupted had been about whoever had the most to throw at an enemy, and those battles all ended with everyone left over realizing how dumb and wasteful the whole enterprise had been. Hence, the mutually-agreed-on charters of the IPS to keep the peace; hence, the shift from full-blown shooting war to subtler, more inevitable means—like blackmail, or sabotage, or just the slow slide of the Old Way worlds into irrelevance at the hands of the Highend. Why blow your so-called enemies up when you could just outlive them, or wait for them to become you?

 I brought my attention back to the map. Assume an hour or so between jumps for re-triangulation, and we’d be within the stellar neighborhood within half a day easy. No danger of us starving, and there seemed little risk of Enid going for Angharad’s throat again.

But the way their last conversation had trailed off continued to bother me for no reason I could single out. Something about the way Enid looked at the other woman now—it was like a dialed-down version of her original anger and disappointment. Maybe she’d shucked off the largest and most dangerous incarnation of all that emotion, but under that there’s something else which smolders longer and runs deeper.

Well, if we were lucky, we wouldn’t have to stay cooped up for too much longer. We’d put in at Kathayagara, let Angharad do the talking, and take it from there. I’d probably never be able to go back to Cytheria, even if the coup did fail, but it wasn’t as if I’d been planning to retire there. The way I was going, I strongly suspected I’d be just as nomadic as Angharad had flirted with being. If I was lucky I’d die of extreme old age right here in this acceleration couch. Comforting thought.

If I was less lucky, I’d be caught in a conflagration like the one I just ran from. And I might even take other people with me without trying.

I finished my meal and tuned back in to what everyone else was saying.

“Well, it’s not like most of us can afford to eat real meat anyway,” Enid had been saying, whilewiping her hands at the little extrudable sink in the galley. “Unless something changed since I left home?”

“’Nothing that drastic,” I said, still looking at the course panel. I’d run a bunch of different possible routes, but I never got more than a one-hop improvement, and I didn’t see a strategic benefit in avoiding any particular space.

“The fact of the choice has always mattered.” Angharad had finished her meal and placed everything in the reclaimer. “The first scions of the Old Way eschewed meat to show their respect for sentient beings, but never insisted others follow that stricture. The Sixth Kathaya ate no genuine animal products, but those in his Achitraka still did, out of habit. Eventually they changed to a diet that matched his. My understanding was they did this because they kept feeling like they were being glowered at when they sat at the table!”

That brought a laugh out of the two of us.

“On the whole,” Angharad went on, “there is no reason why men should eat animals except out of habit. We recreated the experience of doing so synthetically, but there are many who still long for the ‘real thing’—not the meat itself but the cachet it carries with it. And that, too, has been borne of our unexamined habits. Each time we started anew on a planet, we were not really starting anew. We brought with us a great deal of baggage we could not see, the baggage of our assumptions about what it means to be human. To be human, we tell ourselves, is to defy the natural order in some manner. Some of that is required for life, of course: there is nothing ‘natural’ about cutting a fingernail, is there? Or shaving? But still, over the centuries we have convinced ourselves a great many things are required, or desired, when they are nothing but the residues of our prejudices.”

She wasn’t trying to sound preachy, and I knew it, but I felt myself squirm anyway. I tried pretending to be busier with the map than I really was, but I wound up looking back over my shoulder at them.

“Sure.” Enid closed up the sink. “But you could say that about a lot of things, couldn’t you? There’s a lot about the Old Way that’s like that, isn’t it? It’s what you choose to do, because you think it’s the right thing. And then one day you stop thinking it’s the right thing . . . or you realize there’s nothing that kept you there in the first place.” She put her back to the wall where the sink had been. “And so you stop doing it.”

“There is nothing that says you must believe anything.” Angharad didn’t look ruffled. “If belief is cultivated in the absence of choice, then it is not belief. You chose to leave the Old Way in your own life and from your own circumstances. There is nothing dishonest, or dishonorable, or even undesirable in that. Is it not better that those who follow, follow freely?”

“So you’re saying you don’t need people like me around, is that it?”

“Enid,” I said, and turned around all the way, “what are you doing?”

Angharad held up one hand. “Mr. Sim, it’s quite all right. The girl’s questions may not sound sincere, but I know they are. After all,” and here her smile became downright playful, “it’s not often people have the opportunity to remain cooped up with me for any length of time and ask questions so uninhibitedly.”

Well, I thought, as long as she’s okay with it.

I turned back around and decided to dig through the last news feed that the ship had snagged before we left planetside, just to see if I was missing anything. More of the usual stuff. The Rollain terraforming project was still running at least fifty years behind schedule, meaning at least two generations of Old Way emigrants wouldn’t be able to set up shop there. More crowding, and that many more worlds with plenty of space (like Cytheria) finding that many more excuses not to let people settle, or taking payoffs under the table to let them do so off the map. Belmas and Fatimai were bitching at each other again over which of their worlds had the right to negotiate first-look deals with a couple of systems with mineable rocks floating around at the periphery of Continuum space. And Cioran had announced he was going to make random planetfall “somewhere very inappropriate” in a couple of days for another of his on-the-spot concerts.

All of it was at least a day old, since data feeds between planets took days to propagate across the network—and I couldn’t get the most recent updates while floating out in the middle of nowhere, with no repeater anywhere in sight. Nothing in the headlines about us, as you might imagine, but I was dead sure that would change once we put into port and got updated.

I reopened my ears and found Enid was at it again.

“—which is what I don’t get. When you prayed for your two friends, Wana and Mimi—”

“Mimu and Wani.”

“—Anyway, when you prayed for them, was that for them or was that for you? Because if they’re dead, and dead is forever, I don’t see them being able to hear any of that. What’s the point?”

“I prayed for all of us. I prayed through my memory of them, if that is a suitable explanation. Praying for them is not a wish that they come back to life, but a way to remember their importance.”

“Fair enough.” Enid pushed away from the wall and eyed the bathroom niche. “Mind if I clean myself off?”

“Sure.” I got up and marched her over to the niche’s door. “Let me show you how it works; there’s a trick to it.”

I used that as my excuse to crowd her into the far corner and mutter into her ear: “Will you quit needling her?” (I didn’t care too much about being overheard. In fact, I preferred it that way.)

“Why?” she muttered back. (So did she, apparently.) “You don’t think she can take it?”

“No, I think she takes it just fine. But she shouldn’t have to take it.”

“What are you on her side for, all of a sudden?” She wasn’t muttering anymore; she was doing something a whole lot louder than that. I flinched and sh-sh’ed her, and was on the verge of just saying cosm take it and going to CL, but I stood my ground.

“I’m not . . . taking sides.” I lowered my hands slowly and kept my voice low. “I’m just trying to make the time we’re forced to spend cooped up in here pass as easily as possible. And you’re not helping. So do me a favor until we put into port: stop baiting her. Even if you think you can get away with it because she’s a nice person. And yes, even if you think she can take it. She just put up with more shit in a day than you’ve put up with in your whole lifetime.”

She dilated the shower door and stuck her face right into mine. “Like you would know how much I’ve put up with!”

“You went to some length to tell me, remember? Let’s face it—you’ve got a ways to go before you’re in her league.”

She did a good job of almost shutting the door on my neck. I sat back down and told the Vajra not to let her use more than five liters of water.

Angharad’s voice wasn’t much louder than the drizzling sounds coming from the shower unit. “She still aims so much of her frustration at me.”

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, still pretending to be busy with the news.

“You mustn’t apologize. None of this is truly aimed at me personally. And I . . . how to put this? I find it refreshing to wrestle so directly with someone, after spending endless amounts of time with heads of state and diplomats who never speak their true minds.”

“Yeah, but since when is that an excuse for her to be a sullen little brat?”

“You mustn’t stand between us for either of our sakes, Mr. Sim.”

“Well, you want an honest answer? It’s more for my sake, because I can’t concentrate when one of my passengers is taking cheap shots at the other.” Especially when that other passenger is one of the galaxy’s living cultural treasures, I wanted to add, but I kept that to myself. “If she was my daughter, I’d smack her. —Then again, maybe not. She fights back.”

Angharad put her fingertips over her mouth and covered up her laugh.

“I know. It is funny, isn’t it?” I said, shaking my head. “You know how we met? She more or less waltzed up to me in broad daylight and started ingratiating herself. That’s how she ended up tagging along for my audience with you. Somewhere along the way I got it into my head that it would be more trouble getting rid of her than letting her stick around and burn herself out, but look how well that turned out.”

“You must be a very lonely man,” she said after a long moment.

I turned all the way around in my seat and spent a good ten seconds trying to spit something back out at her. I ended up turning back around with my mouth still closed, which was a giveaway all by itself.

She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t look all that remorseful either. I turned back around, cleared the panel in front of me, and set the entanglement engine up to engage after a mandatory ten-minute self-test countdown. I’d stalled enough.

For the most part, space travel is dull stuff. That’s the good news. It’s almost entirely automated, and it consists mostly of sitting and waiting for the entanglement engine to find a lock with your target—typically a star, since they’re big and unambiguous. Once that happens, the jump takes place, and you then either very slowly close distance to your final destination via conventional repulsor propulsion or set up for the next jump.

It’s all about as dramatic as watching clouds go by. And in many cases, about as interactive. Most ships of any size are designed to give the crew and passengers as much to do in the interim as possible, since these days the single greatest hazard of space travel is dying of boredom. I was obliquely grateful for the company, contentious as it could be: when you’re alone there’s only so much reading you can get caught up on, only so much thinking you can do by yourself.

The Vajra had been patterned after one of my own personal-class luxury ships, with a default passenger complement of four and a malleable hull. Add more protomic substrate to the hull and you could expand it to about twice that without overtaxing either the null-g or entanglement systems. I’d chosen to not mess with it too much, at least not outwardly. I had a few mods that only showed themselves when needed, like the self-defense extensions that we’d put into effect when leaving Cytheria. A casual inspection of the hull’s protomics wouldn’t turn up anything illegal—the illegal extensions were themselves designed to be annoyingly difficult to detect—but I also had a protomic “deprogrammer” extension also tucked away. A dose of that and within an hour or so all the illegal programming in the hull would be burned clean out, leaving nothing but a factory-stock product . . . which I would then need to replenish on the black market, that being something I really didn’t want to deal with at this stage in my life. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to rely on that before we docked, but the possibility loomed very large in my mind.

“May I rest?” Angharad asked, after Enid had started the shower.

“Absolutely you may. You want me to wake you up when we’re down to the last jump?”

“Please.”

I set her seat to sleep mode: it flattened out, lengthened a bit, softened up and grew a privacy canopy that could be tuned to various translucencies. She stretched out on her side and was asleep by the time Enid came out of the bath, fluffing out her still-slightly-damp hair.

“Did I use up all the water or something? It just cut out on me all of a sudden.”

I was tempted to lie; I compromised with half of one. “It’s set to five liters a person.”

“Well, I got most everything done. I was just surprised, that’s all.” Her clothes were also damp; she’d probably rinsed them out and programmed them to dry themselves off. “Are we already on the way?”

“Made the first jump a few minutes ago. It’s taking a bit longer to do the next triangulation than I thought, but that happens sometimes. Worst case, we add another one or two hours to our trip. You wanna read the news? I got what there was to read before we split.”

“Sure.” She eyed Angharad in her cocoon. “She OK?”

“Just resting. After all that I’m sure she could use it.”

“You really do like her, don’t you?”

I had to look at her after she said that, given the vaguely accusatory tone she used. She did indeed have a skeptical look to match.

“There’s not enough people out there who walk it like they talk it,” I said. “You’re on that list too, you know.”

“Yeah, but compared to her—”

“Nobody’s comparing you to her. It took some nerve to do what you did—confronting her like that, and then sticking your neck out for her when they had guns pointed at it. The good kind of nerve. The kind of nerve I wish more people had. If I didn’t say it before, it’s only because I was still a little ticked off. But beyond that, I’m impressed. I’m not blowing sunshine up your nose, I mean it. Even if you do drive me crazy.”

Her smile was small, but still held plenty of triumph. “Does that mean you’ll stop treating me like a tadpole now?”

“As long as you don’t act like one, sure.”

She took that without flinching, which to me was a good sign.

“The real question mark,” I went on, “is what happens when we bring Angharad back home. We could be received as heroes, or IPS could come knocking and we could end up in jail.” I saw her swallow. “Well, to be scrupulously honest, it’s me that they would come after hardest. I was the one flashing around a lot of protomic contraband down there. They might grill you a bit but I don’t think they’re going to look at you with one-tenth the suspicion they would bring to bear on me. So don’t freak out. And let’s face it—given the circumstances, I’m betting they’re not going to do more than give me the limpest of wrist-slaps. It’s more how it’ll look for her.”

“I’m not freaking out. I’m . . . okay with all of it, really. It means for the first time in a long time I’ve made my own mistakes.” She was looking at a spot somewhere over my shoulder, her eyes distant with surprise. “I wanted something crazy to happen, something really crazy.”

“Yeah but were you expecting something of this magnitude?”

She pressed her mouth down into a little line, trying hard not to look too rueful. “Well—it’s not like I can go back, right? I’m stuck with you now.”

I think she’s savoring that, I thought. She’d gotten her way, and in big part because I let her. I’d been in situations before where I’d wondered whether or not I had the wherewithal to pull off the things I had in mind, but most of them had involved a) violent deaths or b) a long period of cooling-off in an isolation ward. None of them had ever involved c) a fifteen-year-old girl attaching herself to me as a would-be chaperone while d) escorting home the Sixteenth Kathaya. And if people kept shooting at us, we’d have the luxury of experiencing those a) and b) scenarios after all.

But again, I thought: whose fault is that? You went and stuck your neck out for these people—not just once, but over and over again. And you liked it, dammit. You felt something while doing it that you don’t get anywhere else. You felt the rush that comes from doing something that you know only you can do in the moment you’re in. You savor that, too, the same way Enid savors how she allegedly roped you into making you her “bodyguard”, and the way you actually did live up to the role. You were waiting all this time for something like this to come along and smack you in the face—something to justify having ditched your old life. Now you have it, and you aren’t even sure what to do with it.

I looked over at Angharad, still asleep in her cocoon-seat. Next to her, Enid had nodded off too; her chin had touched her chest and her eyes were closed. The earlier chaos, the shower, the drink and the meal had all done their work on her. They both looked like they needed someone to watch over them.

If that someone is me after all, I thought, then we’re all in real trouble.

The entanglement drive’s countdown had long since expired and had been waiting silently for me to approve the next jump. I gave the word and imagined for the thousandth time that the little tug I felt in the pit of my stomach was the feeling of being thrown across thousands of light-years. It was always fun to pretend that.