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  Delicious wine, thought Washen.

  Again, the captain said, “Bravo.”

  She looked at him now.

  “Diu,” he said, offering a hand and a wide smile.

  She balanced her mug on her plate, then shook his with her free hand, saying, “We met at the Master’s banquet. Twenty years ago, was it?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  Like most captains, Diu was tall for his species. He had craggy features and an easy charm that instilled trust in the human passengers. Even dressed in a simple gown, he looked like someone of consequence.

  “It’s kind of you to remember me,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re quite welcome.”

  Even when he stood still, Diu was moving. His flesh seemed to vibrate, as if the water inside were ready to boil. “What do you think of the Master’s taste?” he inquired, gray eyes brightening. “Isn’t this a bizarre place to meet?”

  “Bizarre,” Washen echoed. “That’s the word.”

  For the moment, they looked at their surroundings. The ceiling and floor ended with a plain gray wall punctuated with a very rare window.

  Bracing herself, Washen asked, “Whatever happened to the !eech? Does anyone remember?”

  “They leaped into the sea below,” said Diu.

  “No,” she muttered.

  “Or we got them to their destination.”

  “Which was it?”

  “Both,” he reported. “Or something else entirely. They’re such a strange species. Apparently, they can’t take any course without pretending to go a hundred other places at the same time.”

  To confuse their imaginary enemies, no doubt.

  “Wherever they are,” Diu assured her, “I’m sure they’re doing well.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Washen replied, knowing what was polite. In the face of ignorance, a captain should make positive sounds.

  Diu hovered beside her, smiling as his flesh shivered with nervous energy.

  Twenty-five years since they met … and what, if anything, did Washen remember about the man…?

  Her thoughts were interrupted.

  A sudden voice, familiar and close, told her, “You were nearly late, darling. Not that anyone noticed.”

  Miocene.

  Turning with a respectful haste, Washen found a face that she knew better than most. The Submaster’s face was as narrow as an axe blade and less warm, and every bone beneath the taut flesh had its own enduring sharpness. Amused, the dark eyes had a chilly brightness. The short brown hair was streaked with snow. Taller than anyone else, Miocene’s head brushed against the ceiling. Yet she refused to dip her head, even for the sake of simple comfort.

  “Not that you know any more than the rest of us,” said the tall woman. “But what do you believe the Master wants?”

  Others grew quiet. Captains held their breath, secretly delighted that someone else had to endure the woman’s scrutiny.

  “I don’t know anything,” said Washen, with conviction.

  “I know you,” Miocene reminded her. “You have a guess, or ten.”

  “Perhaps…”

  “Everyone’s waiting, darling.”

  Washen sighed, and gestured. “I count several hundred clues here.”

  “And they are?”

  “Us.”

  Their group stood near one of the rare windows—a wide slit of thick, distorting plastic. Nothing was outside but blackness and vacuum. The ocean of liquid hydrogen, vast and calm and unforgivably cold, lay fifty kilometers below their toes. Nothing was visible in the window but their own murky reflections. Washen glanced at herself, at her handsome, ageless face, her raven-and-snow hair pulled back in a sensible bun, her wide chocolate eyes betraying confidence as well as a much-deserved pleasure.

  “The Master selected us,” she offered. “Which means that we are the clues.”

  Miocene glanced at her own reflection. “What do you see, darling?”

  “The elite of the elite.” Washen began singing off names, listing bonuses and promotions earned over the last millenia. “Manka is a new second-grade. Aasleen was in charge of the last engine upgrade, which came in below budget and five years early. Saluki and West-fall have won the Master’s Award more times than I can recall—”

  “I bet they remember,” someone called out.

  The captains laughed until they ran out of breath.

  Washen continued. “Portion is the youngest Submaster. Johnson Smith jumped three grades with his last promotion. And then there’s Diu.” She gestured at the figure beside her. “Already an eleventh-grade, which is astonishing. You boarded the ship—correct me if I’m wrong—as a passenger. An ordinary tourist. Is that right?”

  The energized man winked, saying, “True, madam. And bless you for remembering.”

  She shrugged, then turned.

  “And there’s you, Madam Miocene. One of the Master’s oldest, most loyal and cherished assistants. When I was a little girl living in By-the-sea, I’d see you and the Master Captain sitting on the rocks together, planning our glorious future.”

  “I’m an old hag, in other words.”

  “Ancient,” Washen concurred. “Not to mention one of only three Submasters with first-chair status at the Master’s table.”

  The tall woman nodded, drinking in the flattery.

  “Whatever the reason,” said Washen, “the Master wants her very best captains. That much is obvious.”

  With an amused tone, the Submaster said, “But darling. Let’s not forget your own accomplishments. Shall we?”

  “I never do,” Washen replied, earning a healthy laugh from everyone. And because nothing was more unseemly in a captain than false modesty, she admitted, “I’ve heard the rumors. I’m slated to become the next Submaster.”

  Miocene grinned, but she didn’t comment on rumors.

  Which was only right.

  Instead she took an enormous breath, and with a strong, happy voice, she asked everyone, “Can you smell yourselves?”

  The captains sniffed, in reflex.

  “That’s the smell of ambition, my dears. Pure ambition.” The tall woman inhaled again, and again, then with a booming voice admitted, “No other stink is so tenacious, or in my mind, even half as sweet…!”

  Five

  ANOTHER TWO CAPTAINS arrived to applause and good-natured abuse. No one else was coming, though there was no way to know it at the time. Some hours later one of the last-comers was using the !eech latrine—little more than a dilating hole in a random, suitably remote part of the room—and peering off in an empty direction, he noticed motion. With eyes sharper than any old-styled hawk’s, he squinted, finally resolving a distinct something that seemed to be growing larger, moving toward him from a new, unexpected direction.

  With both decorum and haste, the captain ordered his trousers back on and jogged back to the others, telling the ranking officer what he had seen.

  Miocene nodded. Smiled. Then said, “Fine. Thank you.”

  “But what should we do, madam?” the young captain blurted.

  “Wait,” the Submaster replied. “That’s what the Master would want.”

  Washen stared into the distance, ceiling and floor meeting in a perfect line. After a long while, the perfection acquired a bump. A swollen bright bit of nothing was moving toward them, covering distance with a glacial patience. Everyone stood together, waiting. Then the bump split into several unequal lumps. The largest was bright as a diamond. The others spread out on either side, and that’s when the captains began to whisper, “It is. Her.”

  Saying, “Finally,” under their breaths.

  An hour later, the undisputed ruler of the ship arrived.

  Accompanied by a melody of Vestan horns and angel-voiced humans, the Master crossed the final hundred meters. While her officers still wore civilian disguises, she had the mirrored cap and sturdy uniform that her office demanded. Her chosen body was broad and extraordinarily deep. Partly, that body was a measure
of status. But the Master also needed room to house a thoroughly augmented brain. Thousands of ship functions had to be monitored and adjusted, without delays, using a galaxy of buried nexuses. As another person might walk and breathe, the Master Captain unconsciously ruled the ship from wherever she stood, or sat, or found a spacious bed where her needy parts could sleep.

  A vast hand skated along the oyster-gray ceiling, keeping the Master’s head safe from being unceremiously bumped.

  She had soft bright golden skin—a shade popular with many nonterran species—and fine white hair woven into a Gordian bun, and her pretty face was so round and smooth that it could have belonged to a toddler. But the radiant brown-black eyes and the wide grinning mouth conveyed enormous age and a flexible wisdom.

  Every captain bowed.

  As was custom, the Submasters dropped farthest.

  Then a dozen low-grade captains began dragging the hard !eech cushions toward her. Diu was among the supplicants, on his knees and smiling, even after the great woman had strolled past.

  “Thank you for coming,” said a voice that always took Washen by surprise. It was a very quiet voice, and unhurried, perpetually amused by whatever those wide eyes were seeing. “I know you’re perplexed,” she assured, “and I trust that you’re concerned. A good sensible terror, perhaps.”

  Washen smiled to herself.

  “So let me begin,” said the Master. Then the child’s face broke into its own smile, and she said, “First let me tell you my reasons for this great game. And then, if you haven’t been struck dead by surprise, I’ll explain exactly what I intend for you.”

  * * *

  ACCOMPANYING THE MASTER were four guards.

  Two humans; two robots. But you never knew which were the machines dressed as humans, or the humans with a machine’s sense of purpose—an intentional ruse making it more difficult for enemies to exploit any weakness.

  One guard released a little float-globe that took its position beside the Master.

  The gray glow of the ceiling diminished, plunging the room into a late-dusk gloom. Then the amused voice said, “The ship. Please.”

  A real-time projection swallowed the float-globe. Built from data channeled through the Master’s internal systems, the ship reached from the floor to the ceiling. Its forward face looked at the audience. The hull was slick and gray, cloaked in a colorful aurora of dust shields, a thousand lasers firing every second, evaporating the largest hazards. On the horizon, a tiny flare meant that another starship was arriving. New passengers, perhaps. Washen thought of the machine intelligences, wondering who’d meet them in her absence.

  “Now,” said the Master, “I’m going to peel my onion.”

  In an instant, the ship’s armor evaporated. Washen could make out the largest caverns and chambers and the deep cylindrical ports, plus the hyperfiber bones that gave the structure its great strength.

  Then the next few hundred kilometers were removed.

  Rock and water, air and deeper hyperfiber were exposed.

  “The perfect architecture,” the Master declared. She stepped closer to the shrinking projection, its glow illuminating a grinning face. Resembling an enormous young girl with her favorite plaything, she confessed, “In my mind, there’s no greater epic in history. Human history, or anyone else’s.”

  Washen knew this speech, word for word.

  “I’m not talking about this voyage of ours,” the Master continued. “Circumnavigating the galaxy is an accomplishment, of course. But the greater adventure was in finding this ship before anyone else, then leaving our galaxy to reach it first. Imagine the honor: to be the first living organism to step inside these vast rooms, the first sentient mind in billions of years to experience their majesty, their compelling mystery. It was a magnificent time. Ask any of us who were there. To the soul, we consider ourselves nothing but blessed.”

  An ancient, honorable boast, and her prerogative.

  “We did an exemplary job,” she assured. “I won’t accept any other verdict. In that first century—despite limited resources, the shadow of war, and the sheer enormity of the job—we mapped more than ninety-nine percent of the ship’s interior. And as I could point out, I led the first team to find their way through the plumbing above us, and I was the first to see the sublime beauty of the hydrogen sea below us…”

  Washen hid a smile, thinking, A fuel tank is a fuel tank is a fuel tank.

  “Here we are,” the Master announced.

  The projection had shrunk by nearly half. The ship’s main fuel tanks were emerging from the frozen mantle, appearing as six tiny bumps evenly spaced along the ship’s waist—each tank set directly beneath one of the main ports. The !eech habitat was beneath the Master’s straightened finger, and on this scale, it was no larger than a fat protozoan.

  “And now, we vanish.”

  Without sound or fuss, another layer of stone was removed. Then, another. And deeper slices of the fuel tanks revealed great spheres filled with hydrogen that changed from a peaceful liquid into a blackish solid, and deeper still, an eerily transparent metal.

  “These hydrogen seas have always been the deepest features,” she commented. “Below them is nothing but iron and a stew of other metals squashed under fantastic pressures.”

  The ship had been reduced to a smooth black ball—the essential ingredient in a multitude of parlor games.

  “Until now, we knew everything about the core.” The Master paused, allowing herself a knowing grin. “Clear, consistent evidence proved that when the ship was built, its crust and mantle and core were stripped of radionuclides. The goal, we presumed, was to help cool the interior. To make the rock and metal still and predictable. We didn’t know how the builders managed their trick, but there was a network of narrow tunnels leading down, branching as they dropped deeper, all reinforced with hyperfiber and energy buttresses.”

  Washen was breathing faster now. Nodding.

  “By design or the force of time, those little tunnels collapsed.” The Master paused, sighed, and shook her golden face. “Not enough room for a microchine to pass. Or so we’ve always believed.”

  Washen felt her heart beating, a suffused and persistent and delicious joy building.

  “There was never, ever, the feeblest hint of any hidden chamber,” the Master proclaimed. “I won’t allow criticism on this matter. Every possible test was carried out. Seismic. Neutrino imaging. Even palm-of-the-hand calculations of mass and volume. Until some fifty-three years ago, there wasn’t one sane reason to think that our maps were in any sense incomplete.”

  A silence had engulfed the audience.

  Quietly, smoothly, the Master said, “The full ship. Please.”

  Again, the iron ball was dressed in cold rock and hyperfiber.

  “We pivot ninety,” she said.

  As if suddenly bashful, the ship’s leading face turned away from her. Rocket nozzles swung into view, each large enough to cradle a moon. None were firing, and according to the schedule, none would fire for another three decades.

  “The impact, please.”

  Washen stepped closer, anticipating what she would see. Fifty-three years ago, passing through the Black Nebula, the ship collided with a swarm of comets. Nobody was surprised by the event. Brigades of captains and their staff had spent decades making preparations, mapping and remapping the space before them, searching for hazards as well as paying customers. But avoiding those comets would have cost too much fuel. And why bother? The swarm wasn’t harmless, but it was believed to be as close to harmless as possible.

  Gobs of antimatter were thrown at the largest hazards.

  Lasers evaporated the tumbling fragments.

  The captains watched the drama play out again, in rigorous detail: off in distant portions of the room, little suns flickered in and out of existence. Gradually the explosions moved closer, and finally, too close. Lasers fired without pause, evaporating trillions of tons of ice and rock. The shields brightened, moving from a dull blanket
of red into a livid purple cloak, fighting to push gas and dust aside. But debris still peppered the hull, a thousand pinpricks dancing on its silver-gray face. And at the bombardment’s peak, there was a blistering white flash that dwarfed the other explosions. The captains blinked and grimaced, remembering the instant, and their shared sense of utter embarrassment.

  A mountain of nickel-iron had slipped through their vaunted defenses.

  The impact rattled the ship. Gelatin dinners wiggled on their plates, and quiet seas rippled, and the most alert or sensitive passengers said, “Goodness,” and perhaps grabbed hold of something more solid than themselves. Then for months, Remoras had worked to fill the new crater with fresh hyperfiber, and the nervous and bored passengers talked endlessly about that single scary moment.

  The ship was never in danger.

  In response, the captains had publicly paraded their careful schematics and rigorous calculations, proving that the hull could absorb a thousand times that much energy, and there would still be no reason to be nervous, much less terrified. But just the same, certain people and certain species had insisted on being afraid.

  With a palpable relish, the Master said, “Now the cross section. Please.”

  The nearest hemisphere evaporated. In the new schematic, pressure waves appeared as subtle colors emerging from the blast site, spreading out and diluting, then pulling together again at the stern, shaking a lot of the ship’s plumbing before the waves met and bounced, passing back the way they had come, back to the blast site where they met again, and again bounced. Even today, a thin vibration was detectable, whispering its way through the ship as well as the captains’ own bones.

  “AI analysis. Please.”

  A map was laid over the cross section, everything expected and familiar. Except for the largest feature, that is.

  “Madam,” said a sturdy voice. Miocene’s voice. “It’s an anomaly, granted. But doesn’t that feature … doesn’t it seem … unlikely…?”