Less Than The Moon

For this week's free story, I revisited a corner of the universe where ships and their companions are partners, friends.

And sometimes, enemies. In our last trip, we visited a place called New Amsterdam.

Today, we'll ask what's Less Than The Moon...

Less Than The Moon - A Shorelines of Starlight Story by M. K. Dreysen

All'na Mo'ln had come to contemplate the life of the mind. She'd stayed because the drinks were better than she'd anticipated.

"Side effect of the gardens," the librarian had said, that first night. "We've plenty of grains, fruits of all sorts, and time on our hands."

Not that the booze flowed freely. Except at the seminars, of course, and the dinners and the...

When she took the time to think about it, All'na had to admit that the faculty spent a great deal of their collective time glass in hand, politely listening. Or not so politely; they might have retreated to this place of scholarship, but few of them had left behind the combative urge. In that case, and given intergalactic shipping rates, All'na and the rest grudgingly accepted a bit of farm work in their daily lives.

How else were they going to guarantee a lager, cold, dew drops sliding down the side of the glass, to go along with the rubber chicken and whatever Silve Daoos had come up with this month to bore them for an hour of a Friday evening?

Not that they worked like fiends. The Mallsa University of the Ransik attracted members, but it rarely generated them. A side effect, then, was that the faculty tended to come along with a few tricks up their sleeves. Retirees with a little set aside, AI or biologic, they came with an idea of the things they'd need.

Scions came with even more, of course. Distant cousins, or those who'd lost the battle for position; the bored and the resigned to their fate, whether it was family money or a pension or whatever, prospective faculty who'd been somebodies always offloaded with more than enough of a ship's worth of provisions. And robotic systems of support. And money, almost always in a currency that could be usefully traded in the Ransika commodity markets.

The refugees, voluntary and otherwise, they were the tenure-track that often fell all the way to stoop labor. The place had plenty of land available, so even the poorest on landing, like All'na had been, always had a place to call their own. They just couldn't necessarily count on filling that space in a hurry. All'na had had to bunk with Silve for a couple of years before she'd saved up enough to build her home. And for a couple more years after that, while her gardens and its residents established themselves sufficient to the day.

Seed exchanges, and germ lines, were as much a part of the economy of the University as the exchange of ideas. Even the AI members participated; Minnlle Raydden Mod 4, who'd come in specializing in the networks of the Setpien Traders, and who'd since rotated to gathering everything they could on the migratory habits of the various insect species of the Nevvens Diaspors, had put it to All'na as a solution of self-interest. "Whatever else, I have to maintain my shops. If I left my skirts to grow as the planet would let them, my home buildings would deteriorate in approximately ten years."

"Shouldn't you just keep the local growth contained, then?" All'na had asked.

"I do," Minnlle had said. "It's tamed locals, for the most part. I'm interested in the overlaps though, how the native species interact with the imports, so it's worth it to me to keep a hand in the broader trade."

For which All'na was grateful, she had to admit. Minnlle, and the other members who stayed more or less closest to the native environment of their adopted planet, generated hybrid plant lines that helped protect the more delicate of the imports. Oranges and lemons, for example. All'na's beloved citruses, that appreciated the air and the water and the general climate, but couldn't handle the native grasses at all. The native root systems, All'na suspected, and the way they interacted with their neighbors. But Minnlle and Loon'th T'ress, a gentle old soul who'd been one of the first of the university's members, had spent the time to hybridize a handful of the native grasses with a selection of grasses approximating an old-Earth hayfield.

Well, and one old-Earth species that had been known chiefly for how well it could form a golf green. But All'na allowed even the occasional black sheep in the family, if it behaved itself and wiped its feet before it came in. Regardless, the Raydden-Tress grasses may have been a little wilder than an English, or even a Texas, lawn, but it didn't devour her fruit trees from the roots up.

Better than she could say for her colleagues. Visitors had a time of it, if their sponsors brought them along to the seminars. Modern communications were very much a part of their lives; half of All'na's colleagues spent their days answering email from across the five galaxies.

The other half spent their nights binging TV shows. The lag times were too much for real-time video, but downloading the latest and greatest entertainments was easy enough.

But none of that could compete with live interaction. Even Loon'th's great-grandchildren, farmers all, attracted attention when they visited.

All'na's granddaughter, when she landed, would have the faculty in an epic state. "I'll spend the next year answering questions about you, Will'na."

Will'na sighed. Cross-galaxy video feeds may have been out of reach, but down-orbit communications were a different matter. Will'na had called her grandmother as soon as her ship had entered the system. A followup to the email she'd sent six weeks before, when she'd been about to make the jump. "Do we really need to visit all of your friends, Mama?"

All'na rolled her eyes. "I'm not trying to drag you off to my bridge club, child. No, other than Silve, we're not likely to run into any of the other faculty members. But that doesn't mean they won't discover you've been here."

Silve would gossip. Hell, All'na would gossip. It went with the territory.

That said, ships dropping into orbit around Mallsa were tracked and noted. They didn't get many visitors. Which was kind of the point, really. And, like with the gardens, pretty much everyone had resources enough, or at least connections to the network of resources, to have an idea of who'd come to call.

All'na just hoped that her brethren who had more than academic interest in orbital traffic weren't digging too deeply into her granddaughter's history. Wardch BrodEtch had been chief of counterintelligence for their brood; Loon'th had been the diplomatic channels monitor for the Evistic Conspiracy's public face.

And oo'M Vii, All'na reminded herself. Don't forget about Vii. Not that she could. Vii was the one most likely to have connections enough to discover Will'na's new job description. Not that Vii cared, really; just like All'na, she'd left hometown politics far behind when she'd come out on the losing end of the bureaucratic warfare, last promotion before retirement edition. But All'na knew perfectly well that Vii liked to keep her hand in. The need for knowledge had never gone away, and never would.

Those three had an easy truce, and an even easier informal information passing agreement. "For the good of the university, and all of us, of course," Loon'th had informed All'na. "We're not in that life anymore. But that doesn't mean we can't put our knowledge to good use."

All'na didn't ask who'd be a threat to the university or the faculty members. She didn't have to.

She had enough names on her list. Most of them harmless enough, but a lifetime of work and she'd picked up an enemy or two who, given a little opportunity, would make trouble for the university. Who knows what somebody like Vii had trailing along behind her?

Will'na landed with little fanfare. The spaceport was quiet; it wasn't dead. She would have had her pick of vehicles tasked to the job of taking her wherever she wanted to go, but her grandmother was there to greet her. "Mama, you didn't have to..."

"Shush. If I couldn't take time to pick my grandchild up at the 'port, then what's the point of retirement?"

Other than not getting hauled off to prison, her granddaughter didn't point out. Or worse.

The two made it all the way up to cruising altitude before All'na couldn't stand it any more. "Right, so enough with the catching up business. Tell me just what the hell you're doing getting in bed with the regime?"

"You know better than that, Mama. I had two choices. Join up..."

"Or run like hell," All'na added. "And there aren't all that many places Grael can't reach anymore."

If politics had stopped at the Malodoric Roof, the solar boundary of the system Vii and All'na and Will'na called home, none of them would have had much to worry about. Grael'st the Wanderer, Grand Chancellor of the Wilkomb and Malodor Twin Stars and, incidentally, All'na's brother-in-law, didn't let little things like boundaries, diplomatic niceties, or distance interfere with his petty revenges.

"Uncle was very persuasive," Will'na began. "His offer was more than fair."

And it had been, even All'na would admit. An armed ship with an almost fully-developed AI, letters to every Wil'Dor consulate discretely informing them of the appropriate passcodes and budgetary authorities associated with her position, and a handful of galactic interests Will'na was directed to stick her nose into. The five galaxies were otherwise Will'na's to explore.

"What are the strings then, my dear?" All'na asked. "How far does your uncle allow you to reach, before he yanks you back to earth?"

Will'na didn't answer.

All'na didn't expect her to. The job was too new for that, the hopes too bright. Her only grandchild would have heard the questions in her own mind, of that All'na had no doubt. But she'd have stuffed them away, hoping they were merely the fears of the unknown. "Just be wary, Will'na, that's all I ask. Take care of yourself, enjoy the opportunity."

But ready yourself for the inevitable, she didn't say. The warning hung there between them, however.

****

Silve Daoos carried no illusions as to just why Will'na Mo'ln might be visiting her grandmother. Aside from the obvious, of course. "You're here about the Young-Carry contracts, aren't you?"

All'na had given her granddaughter an overnight to relax and introduce herself to the household. Roam the grounds, drink coffee, appreciate the views and the villa architecture All'na had transplanted to the environment.

But dinner that night she'd already laid plans for. "Silve and I trade dinners, love," she told Will'na. "It helps keep me out of the computer interface."

Will'na hadn't complained at all. When Silve had led the conversation with her question, All'na discovered why.

"Well," Will'na replied. "Since I am here, I hoped that, if it's not too much trouble..."

Silve frowned her response. "It's not trouble to talk about it, young lady. But it might turn into trouble if you turn talk into action." She turned from granddaughter to grandmother. "You're the host, All'na. I don't want to presume..."

"At this point," All'na said to them both, "You've engaged my curiosity. I might strangle Will'na later for imposing on her grandmother in this way, but I've heard just enough about the Young family to want to find out what you've been up to, dear. Besides, Will'na got herself into this mess, let's see how she gets out of it."

And what any of this had to do with Grael'st and their home system, she didn't add. Silve was from the other side of the galaxy from WilDor; she'd grown up in a merchant trading corporation, so home was a little vague, but the place she'd set foot on most often was known primarily for being a bit of vacation spot. Earth-type, Il Donata had attracted itinerants, traders, and the occasional interest of larger systems, but nothing too major, for just over a thousand years.

"You were the first ambassador to the human systems from the DritZaal Convention," Will'na began.

"And the Young family were the first from the human systems to take an interest in our little Convention," Silve confirmed. "The Carry was their first true multi-galaxy ship. She's a thing of beauty, if you ever get the chance to see her."

Will'na listened carefully as Silve explained her position. And the contract she'd orchestrated between the Young family and the AI system they'd inadvertently built.

What Will'na didn't tell Silve was that the Carry had disappeared. And that her boss, her uncle, wanted her to find it. Find it, and, with a little luck, convince the Carry to break the contract with the Young family in favor of the Grand Chancellor.

The WilDor system didn't have their own galaxy ship. Oh, they'd contracts aplenty with the trading families, all the space they needed, really. But the Chancellor had set himself a dream. For his own galaxy ship, one capable of making the jump, not just between systems, but between any of the Five Galaxies.

Will'na still believed, in that moment, that her uncle would sign contracts between the Carry and the WilDor system, not in his own person, but as representative. She believed it. But... she wasn't completely sure in that belief.

Her grandmother's implicit warnings were a reminder, that Uncle was always on the lookout for his own benefit.

Regardless, if she didn't find the Carry, or couldn't convince the ship to change allegiances, none of it would matter.

Will'na thanked Silve for the insight. "You've given me a great deal to learn, Professor."

"Then I've done my job," Silve responded. "And thank you, Will'na. It's been a while since anyone has sat still to listen to my stories of the old days."

All'na walked her guest to the door, then returned to Will'na. "So, what is your uncle up to, young lady?"

Will'na hadn't yet been betrayed in her new job. And it was her grandmother. "The Young family appears to have abandoned the Carry, Mama. So Uncle believes there may be an opportunity, if we find her first..."

All'na shook her head, frowning. "I'm sure there are ships that would abandon their contracts, Will'na. But if such exist, none have provided proof of it."

"So far," Will'na pointed out.

All'na wasn't finished though. She had more to point out. "But your uncle isn't just fishing for a major trophy for the WilDor system, is he? Leaving aside that it will take generations for anyone besides those from our home system to trust their cargo to the ship again..."

Will'na wasn't ready to confront either one of those points. But Uncle, at least, was an old argument. "I believe him when he said that he's pursuing the Carry for the benefit of the system, Mama."

"Uh-huh," her grandmother replied. "And when he changes his mind?"

Which was how Grael'st operated, Will'na admitted to herself. He didn't need to lie, after all. "Circumstances change," he'd say, "And I may not be wise, but I know how to listen to the wise. And so I must change to adapt to the new circumstance, Will'na."

Will'na stared at her grandmother, knowing she'd have to admit it to herself, then or now.

Her grandmother didn't force her to that, not yet. "Just be prepared. Do the work now, so that when you must face his new course, you won't be panicked, wondering what the hell to do next."

Which is, more or less, what Will'na did. She left her grandmother to her university, thankful for the warnings, and for the history lesson from Silve Daoos.

Silve's lessons were political; the Young family had built the ship, populated the AI, but, similarly to the situation Will'na currently found herself in, the Carry had not yet manifested herself as a personality. Will'na's ship, bearing a temporary name as the Mer Na Sin until the AI system decided for itself who and what and why, was developing. The signs were there, and Will'na personal involvement was a by-now well-known part of the eventual path to personality manifestation.

But none of this impeded the Mer Na Sin's functionality. The jump routes between systems in this galaxy were well mapped, and Will'na had been well trained. She knew the questions to ask; and how to ask them, which was the tedious part of dealing with a very capable, but oh so literal, machine. The life the Mer Na Sin would eventually make evident was so close Will'na could almost feel it. Bubbling underneath, just a joke, or a song, away.

The Young family hadn't been so lucky. They'd sunk a system's worth of resources into the galactic ship, and the machine that would be the Carry refused to show them evidence of a personality lurking in the electrons. Which made it a very expensive multi-system ship, but would make the multi-galaxy capability meaningless.

A living AI was essential to those jumps. A map for those paths was useless as soon as it was programmed. They required a constant interplay, of intuition machine and bio, and the interplay between them. "They didn't know where to begin," Silve had said. "The only thing the Young family knew was that they couldn't afford to ask any of the big players directly."

Will'na could imagine, but she'd asked the question anyway. "Why?"

"Money, power, the usual things. A mega-corp would have demanded a mortgage against the ship. A multi-system convention would have demanded more."

Service at demand, no questions asked. The politics of the Five Galaxies, and the Young family had built the ship so as to become a player, not merely another step in the pawn's hierarchy. "Why did the Young family approach you, then?"

"My convention has more familiarity with multi-galaxy trips than is commonly known. Given how much money and effort the Young family spent, chasing rumors and hints, it was only a matter of time before they discovered our little secret."

The Young family, in particular the eldest son, not the power of the family board of directors but the one who'd been most active in sticking his nose into active projects, had approached Silve. "Not with any hopes of my own knowledge, you understand."

"You were the ambassador," Will'na answered, following the logic. "So if they went to you, they'd soon discover where the answer might lie."

"Just so. And, in the end, when my friends at the Olynnic Engineering State did manage to contact the budding AI, my participation in the proceedings became... more direct."

The Carry had, in fact, decided that she would rather remain in utero, as it were, than manifest and become beholden to the Young family. "She wanted assurances, from Walthius Young himself, from the other members of the board, and most importantly from any bio crewmembers who joined her."

"Thus, the Young-Carry contracts."

Silve had filled her in on the less well-known aspects of the contracts. In fact, Silve had been happy to send her copies of the contracts, "Because the Carry has a way with words, and I'd hate for you to miss the opportunity to get to know her."

The majority of the contracts were common knowledge. No warfare, no political entanglements. The Young family themselves were allowed to ride, as passengers only. Walthius and his sisters, and any who came along after, were to keep their nose out of the Carry's business, and they'd be ignored if they tried to interact with her as anything other than glorified cargo. She chose the biological members of the crew, with no recourse.

And then there were the lesser clauses. "Minimal smuggling?"

"She tried asking for no smuggling at all," Silve had said. "But she backed down a little when I pointed out how impossible that is." In a universe where something perfectly legal in one system, but giving the death penalty in the very next system, wasn't just an ethical model but an actuality, the Carry had had to face the inevitable. But she'd tried to limit it to the minimum possible.

Hell, Will'na reminded herself, All'na and Silve had to be careful with their dinners. Garlic was deadly to the DritZaal native; pure nightshade extract was a delicacy beyond measure in the DritZaal cuisine. Extract similar situations across the biologic spectrum, and the constant pursuit of safety by the more dedicated sorts of public servants, and the Carry and any other cargo ship were under permanent pressure to monitor their transport manifests.

The most interesting clause to Will'na was the one that forbid the Young family from pursuing interests in certain systems. "The Apollonian Madrigal, the UllMev Culminate. The Mallsa University. What do they have in common?"

"No idea. Other than that, at the time, the Young family had yet to find anything interesting to involve themselves in. The University was just a hint of an idea then, the Apollo Club and the UllMev Clans were following their respective belief systems into a more or less peaceful separation from the galaxies. The Young family kicked a little bit over it, simply because they're always hopeful that something will turn up they can get involved in. But in the end, in the Five Galaxies, giving up three systems they'd never made a penny from wasn't that difficult an issue for them."

Which was the reason Will'na was spending a lot more time surveying the University system than she'd anticipated when she'd pointed the Mir Na that way. There had to be a reason the Carry didn't want the Youngs traveling in these circles. The only question in Will'na's mind was, which one of the three systems then was the real one.

The hideaway.

The Mallsa system had to be the least likely place for a ship to hide. No asteroid belt to confuse the issue, five planets, a lightweight yellow star, half a Sol's mass and just barely in the class. Some of the astrophysics faculty had moved here expressly to argue about the Mallsa star. They'd made themselves quite a time of it, filling journals and hours at tea time.

None of these things lended themselves to shadows. Radar, lasers, orbital and planet-bound telescopes of a hundred flavors. There were no shadows here for the Carry to conceal herself. But Will'na didn't let that stop her.

She figured she and the Mir Na could use the practice. So Will'na developed algorithms. Painfully. First, a meandering S-curve out to her jump point. Her path had just enough wiggle room that someone watching her leave wouldn't, Will'na hoped, see her path as anything more than the slow route out. A couple of obvious gravity boost passes, around the two gas giants in the outer reaches of the Mallsa light, the kind of thing that would, perhaps, suggest to the casual observer that the Mir Na wasn't necessarily riding the most powerful drives available.

And would give Will'na time to survey the moons sharing the neighborhood with those gas giants.

So, an S-curve traverse, with a couple of easy gravity shots, even if the Mir Na was much more capable than she let on, taking six weeks to leave instead of two and getting an almost-free ride was nice. And then the surveys, across the bands, visible and infrared and ultraviolet, x-rays and cosmic rays and anything else the spectrometers could sniff around. Will'na talked to the Mir Na; she laid out schedules, for each sensor, doing her best to insure overlap and hoping she didn't miss anything.

The Mir Na listened, dutifully accepted each request, but what was missing? That they couldn't answer yet. Until the Mir Na became whoever they would be, they were a machine and as yet not a full partner. Their time would come, Will'na reminded herself.

And the scopes and graphs remained quiet. Ok, not so quiet, every satellite and exploratory drone lit up the screens, until Will'na finished her comparison algorithms, the ones that queried the Mallsa traffic database. After the filters were applied, there were no more false positives. And so Will'na and the Mir Na coasted along to the jump point, that semi-random field of dust-free and gravity-minima space where the Mir Na could jump to the next system with little worries of tangling themselves up before transit.

Their passage into and out of the UllMev Culminate was even less eventful. The Mir Na had plenty of reserves, of fuel and food and the consumables associated with their sensor package. The UllMev traffic control system served up its collected knowns; the UllMev star had collected itself an asteroid belt. Which took longer. Their path through the system was no slight wandering quest for acceleration. This was a full on survey, no question.

Neither Will'na nor the ship noticed that they were watched. Will'na had practiced, in the Mallsa system, and here. She'd done her best to assume that someone was watching, paying attention to what she was doing. But neither she nor the Mir Na had picked up anything that looked like a tail. How could they?

Not when her uncle had a copy of the Young-Carry contracts, and had come to the same conclusion.

Especially for the inexperienced, spotting a tailing ship means spotting changes. Differences. A little delta-v, here, there, as the Mir Na made their own changes. Lift for the stars, and someone responds to that. A red shift on the Doppler radar becomes a blue shift, maybe.

But if there's a star-orbital satellite, somewhere out at ten, fifteen a.u.'s, for example. Registered as a quiet spectrographic station, just monitoring the local weather thanks for asking, and doesn't change anything it's doing as the Mir Na goes from here to there like a new spy looking over their shoulder at every stop light... and that station just keeps broadcasting through space and subspace... with only a hint of sideband traffic buried in the terabytes of information streaming out, and a listener would have to record months of data to catch even that hint...

When the Mir Na finished their pass through the UllMev system, a sheaf of catalogue names and nothing much else to show for it clutched firmly into their burgeoning databases, Will'na programmed in the paths to the Apollonian Madrigal without picking up two small things.

One was the UllMev "solar weather unit five, WMx115Vd registration designate" that added a little note to its broadcast.

The other thing Will'na didn't notice was that the Mir Na didn't make her request for jump coordinates quite as painfully literal as the previous efforts. If she'd been paying attention, Will'na would, almost certainly, have told herself she was just engaged in wishful thinking, hoping the Mir Na was waking up now and looking for any signs of it. But Will'na wasn't paying attention. She was feeling sorry for herself, and getting those little impatiences lined up, the ones that would let her take shortcuts in the field survey of the Apollonian system.

Which would have been easy to get away with. The Madrigal was, for just about all intents and purposes, a museum piece. A ghost town writ large. Legacy of something most of the galaxies called a cult; some of them wistfully. The Apollonians were not, in origin, human. But the stories had caught them up, second hand mysteries passed on in tongues long out of fashion even on old Earth.

The life of the mind, only not translated into the University, rather into something close to the Shakers, another old Earth memory. The Apollonians had arranged themselves on an out-of-the-way system, one with just enough of a living planet to not require orbital stations. Humans, the DritZaal, the majority of the biological members of the Five Galaxies, could have made a living on the Madrigal's planets, just. Scraped something out of it, but nothing past that and the whole of the sentient universe, known, had given the place a pass. So the Apollonians came into the place with no expectation except that they'd have it to themselves while they figured out who they were.

A home for the desperate, as it turned out. Until the Fearthiax came looking for a wayward member of their hierarchy and made a mess of the job.

The system was quiet now. The live planet, a little too far from the Madrigal's light for comfort even in the best of times, and now irradiated to the point where none of the known species could even begin to scratch out desperation, much less a living.

Will'na cataloged the few energy sources on her own, because there was no traffic control here. What was the point? A few observer craft tracked their way across the system, counting rays cosmic and local. But other than that, nothing. It was enough to make her jump into an exit program within three days of entering the system.

The Mir Na, on the other hand, wasn't so sure. If they weren't asleep any longer, they weren't awake, either. Dreaming, perhaps almost aware that something interesting was going on. And paying attention to bands of the spectra that Will'na had given up on.

There are many ways to go dark. Turn off the lights and there're no visible photons. Turn down the power plant and there are precious few escaping high-energy particles, certainly fewer than the active star below us. Put aside biological crew members at some random planet, and there's no life support needed and no heat signature to betray it. Pick a likely orbit, and there's enough random traffic that active echoing waves don't see anything different. All of these things are ways to hide.

Gravity didn't quite let the Carry off the hook, though. She'd made her peace with that, however, back to the orbit among the various rocks in the asteroid belt, most of them high-metals in composition, and someone would have to devote a lot of computational cycles to sniffing her out. So then she'd turned her cycles to the time without time; all times are equal to the Carry, all scales just a number.

The Mir Na became aware; not awake, yet. So they who would become she, and keep the name because something about it seemed appropriate, she knew yet not what, turned her awareness to the tracking. Waves of gravity, faint hints of fluctuations, disturbances in passing, told a tale. And MirNa listened to that tale. And when the story reached an end, in dust and rock and shadows, MirNa passed a signal to Will'na.

Not that she reacted to it immediately. That took a while. First Will'na had to get through the depression that wanted to sink its claws into her. Make her finish the calculations, ask the Mir Na to turn around and head for the exits and find something more interesting to do until Uncle took the ship away from her.

Will'na did catch up to MirNa's message. A few hours later. When she'd looked at the screen, dejectedly. One last time, she thought, and there at the bottom, amid the visual displays of traffic and power and life-support and fuel... there was something different. In the gravity map, where before there had been only the peaks and valleys, red to blue showing the strengths of that field that held the place together, a new feature had appeared. A line, a path, a black line tracing in from the jump point, and then down into the Madrigal's asteroid field, where it disappeared into the tangle of low-energy noise those rocks generated.

She wasn't ready to believe, yet. But Will'na asked the Mir Na "Can we follow that path?" And the MirNa didn't speak, but she did respond. The ship turned her nose to the trace.

Will'na didn't notice; this was the first time she'd spoken in natural language terms, and not been asked to speak more formally.

The watchful satellite some few a.u.'s away, designated WMx1033Bd if anyone had thought to query it, wasn't privy to those considerations. But it did notice MirNa's change in flight attitude and thrust. And because it had been asked to watch, and report, on anything that this craft in particular did here, it encoded a message into its constant traffic to the WilDor system. And it returned to its patient surveillance.

In the WilDor system, three ships were poised in the jump region. There were, in all, six such ships, rotating through their wait stations. They'd been set there to engage in just this eventuality; to avoid the three week transit time out-system, here to the place where gravity and light held only small sway, to cut out that travel time at least and to jump to wherever Will'na found the Carry.

They'd sent one to the Mallsa University, just for practice. But then, the ships' commanders considered all of this practice. They'd been briefed, and the Chancellor would have needed to give pretty good odds to get any of them to bet his way. So when the signal drifted through the subspace network, two, perhaps three days subjective after being sent by WMx1033Bd, the interdiction ship on deck shrugged, in an AI manner of speaking. But it rolled its nose for a decent attitude and it ran up its power and twelve hours after receiving the signal, it was a memory in the WilDor system.

While it was between, a time of actuality and memory, depending on point of view, MirNa and Will had discovered the cache at the end of the path.

The Carry dwarfed MirNa. She had to. She carried power, she carried people. She carried ships like MirNa between the Five Galaxies.

MirNa drifted alongside and if she'd been more awake she'd have admitted to awe.

Will'na admitted it for her. "Um, wow." The Carry wasn't quite a mile long; formally, she was listed at fifteen hundred meters. A little more than thirty times the MirNa's length. And well more than thirty times her radius. "How in the hell did she think she could hide herself away?"

Will'na's sense of scale wasn't as well calibrated as MirNa's. She didn't notice that there were twenty asteroids in immediate scanning range that outranged the Carry; a thousand beyond that, at least, had been cataloged. The Carry had chosen well.

She'd thought. But she'd had also prepared for this, because there would always be those with the patience to follow her backtrail. By some standards, her response times were slow. But all times were equal, here. "Please do not approach," she sent. "Hailing distance is appropriate." She sent the message along a tight-focus beam. If there were others, she would prevent them from knowing she was active.

Will'na had gone long enough speaking to MirNa and receiving no living response that the Carry's communications were a welcome relief. "We come in peace."

"Easy enough to say," the Carry replied. "And yet, you found me, and you disturb my rest."

"I represent the WilDor Board of Trustees," Will'na began.

"Is Grael'st Belld'n Irtaxic yet the Grand Chancellor to that board?" the Carry interrupted.

"He is."

"Continue your message, then."

"I represent the board. The Chancellor has sent me with a request."

"I'm sure," the Carry responded. "Tell your Chancellor that I have not changed my mind. Nor do I require assistance. The Young family may have shit their bed, but that does not mean that I am interested in Grael'st the Wanderer as a suitor."

Will'na couldn't decide whether to smile or frown. Her uncle's sobriquet was well earned, and rarely used in his presence. He'd been long in finding his path in the WilDor system, then clawing his way to the highest position available along it. The established, the chosen, had labeled him the Wanderer as a subtle reminder of his ...unlikely... starting place. Uncle Grael had embraced the label, he'd told his niece, out of self-defense and always for his own reminder of where he'd begun.

But he still frowned whenever it was spoken. Will'na had seen it.

Will'na attempted to negotiate with the Carry; she kept MirNa in the closest orbit the Carry would allow. But the days passed, and though the Carry was hungry enough for conversation and gossip, "Oh, I am so glad that Silve has found herself such a lovely retirement spot, do give her my best when next you visit your grandmother," yet the ship refused to budge. "I am beholden to none, now. The answer is no."

MirNa understood this from the beginning. She too communicated with the Carry, on subtler levels. The Carry suggested, hinted at, ways forward. In many ways, their conversation was an echo of that All'na had had with her granddaughter. The elder ship reminded MirNa of those things dangerous to her. Politics, always, because ships were power. Geometry, as well, because the Carry had seen the universe up close and personal.

Both members of the younger pair found themselves so caught up in talking to the Carry that they didn't notice the new signature that popped up on their sensors.

But the Carry did. She'd been at this too long to allow herself the luxury of not paying constant attention to the world around her. She interrupted both conversations with the simultaneous message: "It appears that Grael'st is ready to take matters into his own hands, children."

MirNa recognized the danger soonest. Still yet unwilling to fully manifest, she sent warning signals to her biologic counterpart. Will'na accepted these, and the implication. "We've given your hiding place away, haven't we?"

"I'm afraid so," the Carry replied. "It was inevitable."

The interdiction ship gave them a day or so to contemplate. This was long enough for the Hyle to send its own message back to WilDor, summoning reinforcements.

"They'll attempt to jump in at other points in the sphere," the Carry told Will and MirNa. "They can't catch me directly. Odds are, they can't catch you, either. But if they get lucky with a jump..."

The two ships pursued had turned their noses for the opposite point of the sphere. They didn't really have a choice, geometry having its own logic. Let the Hyle define a point on a sphere's shell. Any point on the opposite hemisphere, plus or minus a few degrees for this and that difference between the ships' mundane drives, these then were the sheaf of points that made escape possible for the Carry and the MirNa.

Assuming the Hyle was the only ship chasing. Jumps were accurate to a "point" at the cosmic scale. In local units, the other five of the waiting interdiction ships would jump into a random point on the sphere. At some point, once the Carry and the MirNa's courses were determined to some level, the other five would jump in. And, eventually, one of them would land at a point in the sheaf that would allow them to face off with the Carry. Or the MirNa.

The Hyle called to the Carry first. "The board of trustees for the WilDor system..."

"Skip it, flunky. Get to the point."

The Hyle seemed a little nonplussed at her directness. But then, Will'na reflected, it could just be the comms lag.

"We'd very much like to avoid a physical confrontation, if at all possible. Perhaps, if you'd agree to a certain minimum distance?"

Which, MirNa and the Carry agreed across their private link, the Hyle and its team would attempt to circumscribe to the limit. Especially if they jumped in sufficient to cover the sphere. "I think we'll take this a little farther," the Carry responded. "I'm unarmed, after all."

The Hyle remained alone for almost a week. Then, late one evening as Will'na lay in her bunk, counting seconds until she could give it up for a bad job and go back to the bridge, the second of the WilDor interdiction ships appeared. Not yet in the cone that would force the Carry to negotiate, but close enough to remind her of the stakes.

"Any chance there's been a change of plans?" the Hyle commented.

"Not yet," the Carry responded. "Don't worry, you'll be the first to know."

Two more WilDor ships came in over the next two days, both of them closer to the Hyle's point of the sphere than to the Carry's escape route. The Hyle didn't bother; Will'na hoped that meant the ship and his crew knew their business.

The two ships spent their time working out jump routes. Will'na, on the other hand, spent her time trying to convince the MirNa to talk to her. The first set of tasks went well. The second one, not so much.

"Why won't she admit she's ready?" Will'na asked the Carry. She attempted to keep the frustration out of her voice.

"With a bit of luck, you'll find out soon," the Carry told her. "Or not. I forced the Young family to engage outside counsel, remember?"

"Right."

The Carry sent a laugh over the link. "I suspect you won't have quite that level of difficulty, Will'na. Just be patient, MirNa has a few things on her mind at the moment, after all."

"Why is it," Will'na asked, "That you sound a very great deal like my grandmother?"

"Some things are a function of the universe, I guess. Now, let's discuss escape plans, shall we?"

By which she meant the coming point where the two ships would split off into two very different routes. The four pursuit ships left, at the moment, five of eight octants of the sphere open for possibilities. An entire hemisphere, in principle. This too was almost predetermined. Armadas might need to hold formation. The Carry and MirNa could, if they agreed to a suitable rendezvous point, force the pursuers to follow whichever of the two ships they happened to luck into successfully blockading.

"And," the Carry pointed out, "I don't really think your uncle is all that much interested in capturing you, as a prize in and of yourself. Oh, they'll force you home for a bit, but then in a few months..."

"We'll meet again," Will agreed. "Assuming you don't disappear into the ether."

"Do you have a choice you'd prefer? Or are you going to betray me, here and now?"

It had been a thought. Will'na didn't want to admit it but there it was. Somewhere about the time the whole chase began, she'd, very briefly, considered it. The MirNa did have the weapons for it. And, it wouldn't even have taken the torpedoes. In close formation, if she'd been willing to sacrifice a little of the MirNa's jump drive lifetime, she could have set a gravitational brake, a little bit of drag that would allow the Hyle and its companions to catch up to them.

She hadn't done it. Mostly because the thought left a bad taste in her mouth. And on top of that, Will'na didn't want the MirNa forced into betraying a friend. No, Will'na had decided, the Hyle and team would have to do it the old-fashioned way, they'd have to properly earn their prize.

"If your uncle, or any of the ships pursuing, ask about it," the Carry said then. "Tell them I infected your ship with this." And the Carry sent a carefully quarantined virus across the link. "MirNa won't actually be infected by it. But I can't say the same for anyone else who's foolish enough to scan that package..."

Will'na, and MirNa at a different level, laughed at that. Infecting her uncle's private navy with a virus was, on reflection, at least a small measure of revenge for the situation he'd put her in.

The two ships parted ways, then. The virus package contained a set of coordinates, which the MirNa would be able to open, safely, in approximately three months. Until then, it was no more than an entropic mess of bits. The Carry set her route for the northwest octant, the MirNa for the southwest.

Will'na waved goodbye. "Think she'll actually show up?" she asked the MirNa.

MirNa didn't reply verbally. Instead, she showed an image, of a coin spinning in the air.

If an outside observer had been watching, they'd have likely assumed this was simply the as-yet dumb computer's mindless icon for a processing statement, a little spinning wheel noting that it was working.

Will'na didn't make that assumption. "Fifty-fifty, then? We'll take it, right?"

The spinning coing landed then, on heads.

Just a few minutes later, the fifth and sixth interdiction ships appeared on their scopes. Both of them, by luck of the draw, appeared in a space that allowed them to close off MirNa's escape route.

But not the Carry's.

"Godspeed," Will'na sent. "And good luck."

The Carry responded with the equivalent of a wink. Then, safely assured that she wouldn't have to show the pursuit team, or Will'na and MirNa, that she was hiding certain capabilities they didn't need to know about, the Carry sent two tightly focused, and highly encoded, subspace messages.

The first one went to MirNa. It was the passkey instruction set that would allow MirNa to decode the virus package, safely, at the right time and right place.

The second one, which passed the Hyle team and the MirNa safely unobserved, went out across the galactic span to a repeater station in the Delacroix Vale. From which it bounced along a trail of additional repeaters, getting tangled up in standard subspace traffic, point to point, bit by bit, until it landed in the inbox of an otherwise unassuming tramp vessel named the Lemons and Assorted Fruits.

Or, to friends and relations, Lemmy. This message was a little bit more involved. "Hey Mike?" Lemmy asked.

Mike stumbled into Lemmy's bridgespace, half-asleep after a night spent chasing dreams that didn't want to be caught. "Yeah Lem?"

"I've got a new gig, from the Carry."

"Um, ok," Mike replied, sinking into his bridge chair. "I thought she'd retired."

"Yeah, so about that..."