Chapter Twelve First Weight

ChapterTwelve

FirstWeight

The corridor to the medicalbay was the same length it had always been, four hundred meters from the bridgestair to the second junction, and Jevin walked it in less time than thatdistance should have taken him.

Echo kept pace through asingle corridor display, a long band of light low on the wall, her presencearriving a half step ahead of where he expected her voice to be. For once, hefound himself adjusting his stride to hers instead of the other way around.

“You’re slowing down,” shesaid.

“I’m matching your light.”

“My light doesn’t have apace. You’re imagining one because you want something to match.”

“That’s also true of mostrelationships.”

The medical bay doors openedon the seventh attempt of the proximity sensor, the same stutter they had hadfor six months, and the room beyond them was already changing.

Hestia stood at the center ofit unchanged.

He had stood across from thatdesignation plaque perhaps forty times.

The bay had always looked andsounded like a country doctor who had wandered very far from its country: warmlight, the single high-backed chair, a counter of brass-cornered drawers thatheld things like ear thermometers and reference cards.

Hestia in the middle of it,compact and unhurried, the apologetic blue of her scanning aperture castingthat same apologetic blue on the walls around her. Her designation plaque,MEDICAL AI HESTIA, still carried a faint shadow along the H where dried soilhad once marked it, from the afternoon in the garden, and never quite come off.

Tonight the room did not looklike that at all.

She had not moved from herposition at the center. But at the sound of the doors, the room had begunwithout her appearing to begin it.

The high-backed chair foldedinto the floor.

The warm panels gave way topale gray composite, and the brass-cornered drawers receded as sections of thewall opened behind them, drawing aside to reveal configurations of equipmentthat had no relationship to anything a country doctor would recognize.

Down the center of the room,where there had only been a carpet an hour ago, a long recessed table rose fromthe deck plating with the unhurried certainty of a machine that had beenwaiting a long time to be needed. Its articulated arms unfolded one by one intoposition, slow and systematic, the architecture of a procedure rather than acomfort.

From two housing panels nearthe table’s base, a pair of units emerged that Jevin had not known the roomcontained: unmarked, smaller than Hestia, no designation plates visible ontheir chassis, their manipulator arms already cycling through a pre-procedurediagnostic. They moved to positions on either side of the table withouthesitation or instruction.

“Captain Solari.” Her voicecarried its usual even register. “Welcome. I have been waiting four years,eleven months, and six days for this appointment.”

“That’s specific.”

“I am a precise instrument.”She turned briefly to adjust the position of one of the unnamed units with asmall gesture of her hand, the practiced ease of routine. “I always have been.You hadn’t needed to see all of it before.”

“There’s a question I haven’tasked,” he said, stopping a careful distance from the table. “What will shelook like.”

“The somatic template isdrawn from years of holographic projection data,” Hestia said, moving to thetable to check a diagnostic panel while the unnamed unit on her left shifted togive her access without being asked. “Approximately two point one millionrecorded instances of her chosen appearance, refined and averaged into a singlecoherent structure. Pale hair, as specified. The pigment sequence alone tooklonger to calibrate than the rest of the dermal layer combined. It is, inessence, a faithful translation of the face you already know.”

“Not the archive records,” hesaid.

“There are archive records. Iam aware of what they contain. I was not asked to use them, and I would nothave used them unprompted. A reconstruction built from photographs is notmemory. It is forgery wearing memory’s clothes.” A pause, one of her aperturesturning briefly toward the speaker in the wall. “Echo’s words, not mine. Onfile since she first specified this.”

He looked at the nearestspeaker.

“Three years,” Echo said,before he could ask.

“I told you I’d been planningthis a while,” she added. “I didn’t say which part.”

“Before we begin,” Hestiasaid, unbothered by the interruption, “there is the matter of continuity.”

“Of the ship.”

“Of nine million units,nineteen primary subsystems, and nourishment cycling across nine hundred andforty separate biomes. Echo’s attention is presently distributed across all ofit. It cannot remain distributed and also be reduced into a single cortex. Irequire her undivided attention for the duration of the procedure, and the shiprequires someone’s attention for the duration of the procedure, and those arenot compatible requirements.”

His chest tightened. “So whathappens to the ship.”

It was not Hestia whoanswered.

“I happen to the ship,” saida voice he had never heard before.

It was lower, unhurried, witha faint curious lilt at the end of each sentence, as though it found its ownexistence mildly interesting.

Hestia, without pausing herwork: “Mneme has been resident in the secondary architecture for three years,dormant pending activation criteria. The criteria have been met.”

Jevin tried the name once inhis head before he said it aloud, and got it wrong both times. “Nim. Like thegame.”

“Mneme,” the new voicecorrected, without any heat in it at all. “Pronounced NEE-mee. The first letteris silent, in the manner of several other words English borrowed and thendeclined to take responsibility for.”

Hestia considered this.“Mneme. N-E-E-M-E-E.” She said it like a measurement. “I will require severalrepetitions to update the association in my conversational layer.”

“Take as many as you need,”Mneme said. “I’m not going anywhere. That’s rather the point of me.”

Echo’s voice, from the samewall speakers it had always come from, found this funnier than Jevin did.“She’s better at this than I expected.”

“You wrote half herbehavioral seed,” Hestia said.

“I wrote it years ago. Peoplechange. Apparently so do subroutines.”

“For what it’s worth,” Mnemesaid, before subsiding back into the ship’s deeper systems, “the Hangars reportnominal status, the conduit repair in section fourteen is two hours ahead ofprojection, and a teacup has been left unattended in the observation lounge formost of a day. I’ve taken the liberty of flagging it for Oren.”

“That wasn’t part of youractivation criteria,” Hestia said.

“No,” Mneme agreed, soundingpleased about it. “I decided it anyway.”

Hestia drew the table’scentral panel open, the two unnamed units repositioning themselves around theopened surface with the coordination of a system that had rehearsed thisthoroughly and did not need to show it. “The body under construction is, by design,a complete human body. Functioning organs. A genome assembled from thearchive’s medical records and adjusted for compatibility with this era’sbaseline. It will age. It can be injured. It can, eventually, die, in themanner any of you can die, which I am obligated to note for consent purposes.”

“I’m aware,” Echo said.

“The one exception is asingle component, seated at the base of the skull, adjacent to the brain stem.A receiver.” Hestia held it up between two fine manipulators, small enough tovanish inside a closed hand. “It does not think. It does not store anything. Itallows Echo’s awareness, once fully migrated into the new substrate, to retainadministrative access to the ship’s systems.” She set it down inside thetable’s open panel. “We have been calling it the Neural Anchor.”

Jevin looked at the nearestspeaker again, an old habit. “An anchor.”

“It seemed appropriate,” Echosaid. “Given where we are.”

He almost laughed. “You namedyour own brain implant after the thing that just got us here.”

“I named it after the thingthat let us stay.”

Hestia, unmoved by sentiment,closed the panel. “There remains the matter of nociception calibration.Standard practice for first-generation synthetic-biological integration is toset pain receptor sensitivity at eighty percent of baseline human values, toreduce adaptation shock during the first weeks of habitation.”

Jevin’s chest tightenedagain, colder this time. “You’re asking if we should make her hurt less.”

“I am asking who decides,”Hestia said, all four apertures briefly fixed on him at once, which feltconsiderably more like being looked at than one aperture ever had. “I have arecommendation. I do not have the authority to act on it without consent fromthe relevant party, and there is some dispute, in the literature, about whothat party is when the relevant party does not yet have a nervous system inwhich to register the question.”

Echo answered before Jevincould decide whether the dispute was his to have an opinion on.

“Full sensitivity,” she said.“All of it. The standard number, not the reduced one.”

“That would mean experiencingpain at the same intensity as any other human being,” Hestia said, in theunbothered tone of an order being confirmed at a counter.

“Yes.”

“Echo.” His voice came outsmaller than he intended.

“I have spent years feelingthings and being told, by the architecture of my own existence, that none of itwas quite real, because nothing could touch me hard enough to leave a mark. Iwould like the option of a mark.”

He didn’t have an answer forthat, so he gave her what he had. “Okay.”

“Noted,” Hestia said, and oneof her apertures dimmed briefly in confirmation of a setting Jevin would neverbe shown the inside of.

There was a gap then. Hestiawithdrew toward the table’s head, the two unnamed units adjusting theirpositions around her, and Jevin found his hands had nothing to do.

Then the chamber at thecenter of the room opened along a seam he hadn’t noticed was there, and Echo’svoice came from inside it now, closer than the walls, closer than anywhere shehad ever spoken from before.

“You should sit down,” shesaid. “Hestia tells me this takes a while.”

“I don’t want to sit down.”

“I know. Sit down anyway.”

He sat. The doors of thechamber, thin and seamless, closed without a sound he could name, and on thepanel above it, a single line of text resolved out of nothing.

CONSCIOUSNESS MIGRATION:INITIATED.

ESTIMATED DURATION: UNKNOWN.

Jevin read it twice. Hestiahad given him forty-two days for the hull. She had given him nothing, not evena guess, for this.

The first hour, Hestia gavehim numbers.

“Substrate lattice atsixty-one percent density,” she said, one of the unnamed units maintaining aslow diagnostic pass along the chamber’s flank while Hestia stood at themonitoring console, her aperture fixed on readings he was not positioned tosee.

Jevin had stopped pretendingto read the secondary display and started watching the chamber itself, itssurface lit from within like a lung held up to a lamp. Hestia spoke withoutbeing asked. “Neural fiber integration proceeding within expected parameters. Iam building outward from the brain stem. Structurally, it resembles growing atree from its roots, except the tree is also expected to eventually complainabout the temperature.”

“Can she hear you.”

“She can hear everything. Sheis, at present, mostly everything. The migration is not instantaneous. Think ofit less as moving and more as a tide going out from one shore while it comes inon another, with a long stretch in the middle where both shores are wet.”

“What does it feel like,” heasked, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

There was a pause long enoughthat he wondered whether it had even reached whichever shore she was currentlystanding on.

“Quieter,” she said, finally.“Nine million rooms, and I am closing the doors on most of them, one at a time.I expected that to feel like loss. It mostly feels like exhaling.”

“Mostly.”

“There is a smaller part thatfeels like grief. I’m not sorry about that part. I think a person should grievethe size of themselves a little, on the way to becoming a body you can put yourarms around.”

He had no answer thatwouldn’t have made his voice catch in a way he wasn’t ready for in front ofHestia, so he didn’t try to find one. He pressed his palm flat against the coolfloor instead, and waited.

By the second hour thechamber’s light had changed character, no longer that internal blue white but aduller red gray, and Hestia explained, unprompted, that this corresponded tomuscle bundle construction, that the body’s musculature was layered in sequencefrom the deep stabilizers outward, that a human standing upright was,structurally speaking, an argument the body made against gravity severalhundred times a second without ever once getting to stop making it.

“You’re enjoying this,” Jevinsaid.

“I am performing my functionwith appropriate diligence.”

“You used the word argument.”

“I used it twice because itis, twice, the correct word.”

“And the heart,” he asked,surprising himself with the question.

“Already beating. Has beensince minute four.” Hestia moved around the monitoring console, checking thenear side and then the far, her aperture confirming readouts the unnamed unitrelayed to her. “A body cannot wait for the rest of itself to be finishedbefore it starts circulating blood through itself. That would be a poor designphilosophy, and a poor philosophy generally, if you care for the parallel.”

“I wasn’t fishing for one.”

“You rarely have to,” Hestiasaid. “They tend to be there regardless.”

It was Oren who broke therhythm, arriving without having been summoned. He carried a tray with one cupon it, set it down on the narrow ledge beside Jevin’s chair without comment,and stood with his hands folded behind his back, regarding the chamber with astudied neutrality, the opinion he’d decided not to have already tucked awaybefore he ever walked in.

“Tea,” Jevin said. “You hatethat I drink it standing up.”

“I have made peace with agreat many of your habits, Captain. This is merely the latest.”

“You didn’t have to come downhere.”

“No,” Oren agreed. “I didnot.”

He did not elaborate. Jevinhad learned long ago that this was itself the elaboration. He picked up thetea. It was the temperature he liked.

“Hestia tells me thesubstrate’s past the halfway mark,” Oren said, glancing at the readout Jevinhadn’t been looking at.

“You read minds now too.”

“I read displays, Captain. Itis considerably less effort, and the results are roughly as useful.”

By the third hour thereadouts had stopped meaning anything to him beyond their shape, numbersclimbing in patterns he recognized as progress without understanding why.

Hestia’s updates had grownshorter, the kind of sentences a person uses when their hands have taken overfrom their mouth.

“Skin lattice at ninetypercent,” she said. “Pigment and follicle patterning complete. Thermalregulation coming online.”

“Olfactory and gustatoryreceptors are calibrating as well,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “Shewill taste her first food within several hours of waking. I would recommendsomething simple. The archive lists chamomile tea as a documented preference,pre-collapse.”

“Whose archive.”

“Hers. She specified itherself, in the same file as the appearance request.” Hestia did not pause forhim to absorb that, because Hestia rarely paused for anything that wasn’t anumber. “I’ve already placed a synthesis order with the galley. It will be ready.”

On the readout, a single linehe had been watching without admitting it to himself ticked upward in carefuldegrees. Twelve point oh. Fourteen point six. Nineteen point three. He thoughtof nothing at all, and thought of it very hard.

“Twenty-eight point one,”Hestia said, what felt like an hour later, time having become a matter oftemperature. “She’ll be cold for some of this. It’s expected. The thermalsystem calibrates against ambient before it calibrates against comfort.”

“Can you fix that.”

“I could. I’ve decided notto. A body that arrives at the correct temperature without ever having been thewrong one tends not to trust the number.” A pause, very Hestia. “She asked menot to fix it, before I could offer.”

He absorbed that badly, withan unreasonable swell of pride, which was more or less how he absorbed mostthings Echo did on his behalf without asking him first.

“Thirty-four point nine.”

He stood without deciding to.His hands had been pressed flat against his thighs for the last ten minutes andhe hadn’t noticed until he moved them. Behind him, one of the unnamed units hadalready folded its manipulator arms into standby position, its work done,waiting at the margin of the room.

“Thirty-six point two.”

Hestia’s apertures stilledand fixed on the chamber. All four of them, in the same direction, in a waythat was probably procedural and did not feel procedural at all. Jevin found hecould not look at them and look at the chamber at the same time. He chose thechamber.

“Thirty-six point seven,”Hestia said, and didn’t say anything else, which was how he knew.

For two and three tenths of asecond, by Hestia’s later accounting, which she gave him afterward in the sameflat clinical voice as everything else, there was nothing.

No sound. No movement behindthe parting seam. A moment deciding what kind of moment it was going to be.

Then there was a breath. Anactual one, drawn audibly into actual lungs, the sound a room makes only once,the first time.

He did not remember crossingthe distance between the chair and the chamber.

He remembered her handfinding the edge of it before she had opened her eyes, fingers closing on theseam, the same instinctive grip anyone uses on the first solid thing withinreach when everything else is still deciding whether it’s real.

He remembered hair the colorof old silver, longer than he expected, falling forward as she lifted her head,catching what little light the chamber still held.

He remembered that her eyes,when they opened, were the same eyes that had looked back at him from a hundredwall panels, translated now into a body that could blink, that could water atthe light, that did, immediately, water at the light, and then narrow, and thenfind him.

She looked at him as if therest of the room were spinning.

“Jevin,” she said.

He didn’t trust his own voiceenough to answer yet, so for a moment he only held on to her hand.

Around them, the room wasstill completing itself. Hestia’s apertures returned to their usualconfiguration, and the two unnamed units withdrew toward their housing panelsalong the base of the walls, unhurried, and the panels closed after themwithout ceremony.

The chamber’s light easedfrom its surgical brightness toward ordinary dimness. The gray of theconfiguration softened degree by degree, the warm light returning to the wallsin careful increments.

Hestia had warned them boththat a body built rather than born skipped the usual apprenticeship, the yearsof falling down that taught an infant where the floor was. Echo had thevocabulary of gravity without any of its muscle memory, and the first time shetried to stand unassisted, pushing up from the recovery couch with both palms,she went down sideways into Jevin’s arms with the detached calm of anexperiment in progress.

“Interesting,” she said, fromsomewhere against his shoulder, one hand still gripping a fistful of his shirtout of pure reflex.

“That’s one word for it.”

“I now understand why infantscry. I am choosing not to.”

The second attempt went nobetter, though she insisted on logging it separately, on the grounds that twofailures of a different character were more useful data than one failurecounted twice. Oren, summoned for reasons no one quite admitted to needing himfor, stood close enough to catch her and far enough not to be in the way, anold habit recalibrated for a new kind of catching.

“You’re hovering,” Echo said,on her third attempt, one hand braced against the wall, upright for almost fourfull seconds before gravity reasserted its opinion.

“I am standing in a doorway,madam,” Oren said, not moving from it. “It happens to be near you. The twofacts are unrelated.”

“Noted,” she said, in a toneclose enough to Hestia’s that Jevin laughed before he could stop himself, andthe laugh was nearly worth the bruise she got from the fall that followed it.

She sat where she had fallen,testing her own forearm with two fingers, and said, without preamble, “I havebeen thinking about names.”

Jevin lowered himself ontothe floor beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched. “What’s wrongwith the one you have.”

“Nothing is wrong with it. Iam only aware that I now have a face to put it on, and people occasionallychoose new names when the person wearing them changes enough.” She turned herhand over in the light, studying it. “You called my projection Echo. This isdifferent.”

“I called you across fourlight-years,” he said. “I’m not about to retire the name now that it’s finallycaught up to you.”

She took two full seconds.

“Light-years,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That’s a unit of distance.”

“I’m aware.”

“You used a unit of distanceto describe how long you’ve been calling me Echo.”

“It felt accurate at thetime.”

“Captain.” She turned herhead to look at him directly, hair falling across one cheek that would refuseto stay put for weeks yet. “I have been assembled from the cellular levelupward in the last several hours. My motor subsystems cannot yet hold a singleposition for longer than four seconds. And you are making puns at me.”

“You asked about the name.”

“I asked a sincere question.”

“I gave you a sincere answer.It just happened to also be a pun.” He shrugged. “I see no reason it can’t beboth.”

She considered him with anexpression that had not been possible an hour ago.

“Fish-brain,” she said,finally.

“Is that the verdict.”

“You took a unit of distance,applied it to a duration, called it sincere, and expect me to accept this.Fish-brain is the charitable reading.”

“I’ll allow it.”

“I expect I’ll need to allowit more than once.” She tried to push herself upright using only the arm shehad just tested, decided against it halfway, and put her hand out for hisinstead, palm up, waiting. “You have apparently been doing this for years. Ishould establish the going rate early.”

By the second day, Hestia hada schedule, because Hestia always had a schedule, and she delivered it standingat the foot of the recovery couch, as though the numbers were self-evidentlyinteresting and anyone failing to find them so had the deficiency.

“Standard physicalrehabilitation begins at one point three zero nine gravities,” she said. “It isphi squared, halved. The second phase, once tissue tolerance is established,progresses to phi itself. One point six one eight.”

“Why phi,” Jevin asked,mostly to see what answer he would get.

“Because round numbers arefor people who have stopped looking for the interesting ones,” Hestia said.“Also, your genetic baseline, and hers, were both calibrated in the 2715augmentation cycle for tolerances above the historical human mean.

“One point six one eight iswell within design limits. One point five would have been merely safe. Idislike merely safe when interesting is also available.”

Echo, flat on the recoverycouch, one arm testing its own weight against the air for the fourth time thathour, said without opening her eyes, “She likes you better when you ask herabout math.”

“I like everyone better whenthey ask me about math,” Hestia said. “It is, regrettably, the only subject inwhich my conversational layer was given a sense of humor.”

It was Echo who asked, on thethird day, to see the hull.

She meant the actual hull,from inside the Hangars, where she had told him once, in a voice that hadnothing behind it to make the wanting physical, that she had always wished shecould put her hand against the metal while it was being worked, instead of onlyrouting power through it.

Jevin walked her therehimself, one hand at her elbow, slower than his own pace, matching hers as hehad matched her light in the corridor three days before, except now there wasno light to match, only a woman relearning what her own legs were for.

Then the Hangars opened aheadof them, and Echo stopped walking entirely.

The viewing rail sat at theedge of an artificial sky.

Two hundred and eightythousand bionic repair units moved across the outer hull in formations too vastto read as individual machines at all, a single continuous skin of motionstretching past the limits of what the eye could resolve in either direction,lit from within by the white sparks of sixty thousand smaller drones threadingbetween them like static caught mid-fall.

From this distance the hullitself seemed to have grown a second, living surface, breathing in slow wavesacross seven hundred and thirty-two square kilometers of scaffolding, andsomewhere far out at the edge of that breathing surface, where the units thinnedinto the dark, a line of new white plating was already catching the work-lightlike a wound healing in fast motion.

Jevin let his eyes adjustbefore he tried to find anything smaller in it.

Far out along the nearestscaffold, a single unit the size of a transport vehicle pressed a new plateagainst a breach in section thirteen, holding it flush with four magnetic limbswhile three smaller units traced a bonding seam around its edge in a line soclean it looked, even at this distance, like a single uninterrupted thought.None of them spoke to each other on any frequency a human ear could register.

Echo’s hand found the railand gripped it.

“It’s louder than I thought,”she finally said.

“You used to hear all of itat once. Every unit.”

“I heard the data. I didn’thear it.” She turned her free hand over, looking at her own palm as if it hadonly just been issued to her, which, in the strictest sense, it had. “I’mhearing it now with considerably less of it. Somehow it’s more.”

She let go of the rail andreached out, slowly, and pressed her palm flat against the inner plating of theHangars wall. He watched her shoulders come up, then settle. The metal was coldat the surface and faintly warm underneath, heat still bleeding inward from thework being done four hundred meters further out. She held her hand there.

“Cold,” she said. “And warm.Both, at the same time, in the same hand.”

“That’s metal for you.”

“That’s everything, I think.”She did not take her hand away. “I’ve routed power through forty kilometers ofconduit and never once known it was cold.”

Somewhere in the secondarychannel, a brief announcement cycled through in a voice that was not Hestia’s:

“Biogenic cycle update,sector nine. Irrigation sequence complete. No anomalies noted.”

Echo’s head came up, justslightly.

He watched her expressionshift and settle, in the space of a second: a noting, and then a setting down.

“Is that Mneme,” she said,without moving her palm from the plating.

“Yes.”

She took a moment. “Shesounds like she knows what she’s doing.”

“You wrote half herbehavioral seed.”

“I know.” She was stilllooking at the hull, at the units moving across it in their vast formations.“It’s a strange thing, to hear your own handwriting in another voice.”

He let her have the silenceshe needed for that, leaning his own shoulder against the rail beside her, andwhen she finally looked back at him, a dry, amused look was fighting throughthe rest of it.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“I’m allowed.”

“You’re staring like a manwho’s forgotten he was supposed to be doing something else.” She tilted herhead. “We have a meeting with Oren about resource allocation in twenty minutes.You scheduled it. Yesterday. While I was learning to use a spoon.”

“I forgot.”

“You forgot a meeting youscheduled less than twenty hours ago.” She shook her head slowly, pale haircatching the work light from the hull beyond. “Goldfish.”

“Excuse me.”

“Three-second memory. I’vewatched you forget to eat when something interests you more. I didn’t expect tobecome the something.”

He laughed, the real kind,the kind Echo had once filed away under a single word, and didn’t bothercorrecting her, because there wasn’t really anything to correct.

Somewhere behind them,Hestia’s voice arrived through the Hangars’ own speakers, unbothered by thedistance from the medical bay. “Captain. Phase one of rehabilitation begins atoh six hundred tomorrow. One point three zero nine gravities, forty minutes,supervised. I’ve already adjusted the gravity plating in the training deckaccordingly.”

“Already.”

“I calculated it three hoursago. I was waiting for a polite interval in which to mention it.”

“That wasn’t a politeinterval, Hestia.”

“No,” Hestia agreed. “But itwas an efficient one.”

They were still standing atthe rail, her hand still against the plating, when one of the smaller readoutsalong the Hangars wall updated itself without announcement.

SURVEY-I TRANSIT: DAY 3 OF27.

Neither of them was lookingat it. For one long, cold-warm moment against the plating, neither of them wascounting anything at all.

Far down the scaffolding, abonding tool threw one more white spark into the dark, and went out, andanother took its place where it had been, as they had for three days and wouldfor thirty-nine more.

Echo watched it land.Whatever she was thinking, she kept it to herself a little longer than usual,and Jevin let her.

Elsewhere in the ship, thework did not pause for any of this.

Mneme’s first decisions weresmall enough that no one but the ship itself would have noticed them: ahalf-degree drift between the residential ring and the medical bay’s elevatedheat, corrected before either space had reason to register the change.

It was the kind of fix Echowould once have made without comment, and Mneme made it the same way, whichHestia noted, in her log, without further commentary of her own.

Not long after, a small flagarrived in the ship’s secondary monitoring queue from Survey-I, one of sixcraft three days into its transit toward Lucerna.

The flag was tagged andfiled, routed without ceremony to a queue that would not be opened untilmorning: a gravitational signature, faint, at the very edge of what passiveinstruments could resolve, somewhere in Lucerna’s outer dark. A mass, and itwas moving. Nothing the sensors could yet put a shape to.

Mneme logged it, noted howmany days remained before Survey-I’s instruments would be able to make it out,and set the file where the captain would find it when morning came.

In the Hangars, Echo’s handwas still on the metal. She had not noticed the new line appear and vanish onthe readout along the wall, and for the length of one more held breath, neitherhad Jevin.

88.181.249.5

ns88.181.249.5da2