“HOW LONG WILL IT take?” I asked.

Valka’s words hung in the bridge’s air like fading thunder. I knew I could not have heard her properly. The silent stars hung in blackness beyond the Ascalon’s forward windows. We had come out of warp while we slept, alone in the dead Dark light-years from any star, safely lost. Valka had spent the better part of an hour working the navigation system, getting our bearings and charting a course to Colchis.

“Twenty-eight years, five months, thirteen days,” she said, hands between her knees.

Perfectly precise. The machine in her brain had answered for her, I did not doubt, and held her glowing eyes with mine. The revelation moved me to near-catatonic stillness. I should not have been surprised by the figure—wherever Eue was in all the black galaxy, it could not have been near to any human world. Whatever journey we might make was bound to be a long one, but to hear the figure spoken plain, stated so flatly by the iron part of Valka’s brain, was a kind of horror and fresh torment.

Twenty-eight years.

A lifetime for many, and four times the time I languished in the dungeons of Dharan-Tun.

Twenty-eight years alone, just the two of us, in that metal prison of a ship.

After a stretched minute, I found my tongue. “Can we make it?”

Valka thought about her answer for several seconds—never a good sign. Her neural lace processed faster, far faster—if less flexibly—than her ordinary neurons. She was seldom slow to reply, save when tact checked her tongue, and that was rare enough. “We have the fuel,” she said. “Containment held all those years, and Corvo kept her full. Some of the comms are damaged—in the escape, maybe. The tightbeam maser’s gone. I’m not sure about the radio. Couple of the antenna clusters got knocked off.”

“So no datanet access?”

“ ’Twould do us little good in any case,” Valka said. “We’re so far out, the nearest datanet relay must be a thousand light-years out, maybe more.” She turned the navigator’s seat, fiddled with the starboard-side console a moment. “We could telegraph the Imperium. The QET’s undamaged. They might have a scout ship somewhere not far. We could sit and wait for—”

“No!” The vehemence in my tone surprised even me, and raised Valka’s eyebrows. I put a hand on the circular arch that led back into the ship’s main cabin, fingers gripping the padded wall. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. Why should I be so afraid? Valka did not interrupt, waited me out instead. I was a while finding my words. “If we wave the Empire, they’ll never let us go to Colchis.”

The wooded halls and dark greenery of Maddalo House rose up in my mind, the wind in the pencil cypresses whistling as through the bars in the door of my cell. With my maimed hand, I tugged the knit blanket I’d draped over my shoulders tight about myself. Another prison, I thought. “Just another prison.”

Valka seemed to understand. “ ’Tis the rations I’m worried about,” she said, and massaged her temples with long fingers.

I shuffled onto the bridge, lowered myself into the copilot’s seat opposite her, turned the bucket to face her across the empty space beneath the black bubble of the holography well embedded in the ceiling.

“We have enough bromos protein to get us through . . . about half that time. Some of the bars went bad, but the bouillon . . .”

“Will outlast the stars, yes.” I drew one knee to my chin, gasping as the taut muscles cried out at the stretch. I did not fancy the prospect of boiling protein paste with salt water and seaweed from hydroponics for years and decades, but I didn’t see that we had any other choice. Even if we did telegraph the Imperium, there was no guarantee they could reach us in any reasonable amount of time. It behooved us to make for Imperial space in any case. “What about hydroponics?”

“You saw what ’tis like,” Valka answered. “We’ll have to purge the beds. Everything’s rotten. Some of the seed banks are still good. We can salvage it. Some of it.”

“But the algae’s good?”

“We’re not running out of air if that’s what you mean,” Valka said. “Those systems run themselves, more or less. But they should be cleaned, and we’ll need to replant the vegetable beds. I can’t do it all alone.”

My ruined hands twisted in my lap, scars shining in the console light. I did not answer her, but turned to look out the window.

What good was I? I asked myself, flexing my back until my shoulder squealed white fire. If the pale stars beyond the glass had an answer, it was in some language strange to me. The pain was a kind of answer, a brutal, wordless one.

No good. No use.

The thin sound of exhalation escaped Valka’s nose then, and she said, “I need your help, Hadrian.”

“I know.” I shut my eyes to drown out the pitiless stars. That was a mistake, for without the stars to distract my mind, I saw once more the plain of Akterumu all too clearly, felt the torn bodies and chewed limbs of my men give beneath me as I struggled to rise from the charnel heap at the base of the temple stairs. Syriani Dorayaica—the Shiomu-Elusha—loomed over me, its face painted silver with its own blood, its glass teeth bared in a rictus of inhuman delight. Shaking myself, I opened my eyes. “I know.”

I had wallowed long enough. Too long. For all that I had suffered, I had not died. Quiet though the ship was, it was not the quiet of the tomb. I was alive, and Valka was alive, and living meant work. The Ascalon might run with only one man awake to maintain her, but that was when she was in top working order—and a crew of at least three was preferable even at the best of times.

Ours were not the best of times. Valka needed me. The algae tanks needed to be flushed, she’d said, and the food beds replanted. No doubt there were other troubles aboard our long-neglected vessel. The Ascalon had languished in the Tamerlane’s holds for eleven years, forgotten for the entire journey from Padmurak to Eue. It was a miracle the damn thing had flown at all.

“Hadrian?”

I blinked around at Valka, found her standing over me, looking down at me with such pity in her yellow eyes I could hardly stand it. I did not want her pity. I wanted never to have needed her pity. “I know,” I said a third time, and looked away.

She caught my maimed hand and raised it to her lips.

“Eleven years,” she breathed, not letting go. Again she kissed my fingers, pressed my palm to her face. “It took eleven years to get you back. I need you now.”

Were those tears?

I brushed them away with my thumb. Though she had not suffered the pits and the lash as I had, she had suffered. I tried to imagine what it must have been like, trapped in some Lothrian starship, her and Corvo, Pallino and Crim—sleeping in shifts, praying the Cielcin would not find them, unable to move with their ships at warp.

“I need you, too,” I said, and smiled that broken—twice broken—Marlowe smile.

She gripped my ruined hand, and leaning down kissed my brow. I wrapped my arms around her, and there we remained a countless moment.

“I should set course,” she mumbled. “If we’re going to go, there’s no sense waiting. ’Tis a long way to Colchis.”

Aching, I let her go, watched her swing back into the navigator’s seat. As she tapped at the controls, I pulled myself to my feet and crossed the short distance between us, steadied myself against the back of her seat. “Where are we, exactly?”

Voice husky with emotion, Valka replied, “About fifteen thousand light-years north-northwest of the core, as far up the Sagittarius as it gets.”

“North of the Commonwealth,” I said. We were well beyond the limits of human-settled space then, at the headwaters of the Sagittarius Arm, at the joint where its spiral met the throbbing heart of our galaxy. We would have to cross back through Lothrian space and the Rasan Belt to reach the Upper Sagittarius and the nearest Imperial frontier.

“More than twenty-five kilolights,” Valka said. “This ship’ll do just over a thousand C, but ’tis a long way.” She continued ministering to the controls.

“Sagittarius . . .” I rolled the word on my tongue, shook my head. Human civilization had expanded to fill most of the southern half of the galaxy, had pressed forward until the Cielcin pressed back, pushing at us from the east in the Norman Expanse—which was lost and overrun. But the arm of Sagittarius spiraled west around the core—whose stars and dark stars are too numerous and close to risk warp travel through. My fingers tightened on the back of Valka’s chair as I imagined the new-made Prophet-King’s legions pouring around the core of the galaxy east and west to pincer all mankind. “They must control half the galaxy.”

Valka stopped keying in our course. “They don’t control anything. You know that. They just go where they please. Our ships and colonies must have been passing them in the Dark for centuries before Cressgard. Space is big, Hadrian.”

I knew she was right. Have I not said the map of the human universe is one filled with inner edges? Though our worlds are strung across half the galactic volume, we could never claim every star—only those worlds kind or kind enough to human life were ours, and certain places we could not do without: trade posts along strategic routes, lifeless systems rich in mineral wealth. The Cielcin might cover half the galaxy, but they did so with as thin a blanket as we. Perhaps thinner.

“That doesn’t change what’s coming,” I said, darkly. “Did you see how many ships there were in orbit above Eue? There must be thousands—tens of thousands! How many trillion Cielcin do you think there are?”

“I don’t know,” Valka said, sitting very still.

After a moment’s silence, she stiffly stood and brushed past me for the copilot’s seat, leaned over the console, her braid hanging from her shoulder—another reminder of the long years she’d spent herself in solitude. I heard the ticking of switches. “They’ll come for Forum, if they can. If they have the coordinates. Avalon. Nessus. Goddodin. Earth, if they’re able.” At the thought of Earth burned again, annihilated by those demons, I choked, pulled my blanket hard about my shoulders. I was not a religious man, but the thought was still a blow and a blasphemy.

Distantly, I felt the warp core thrum to life, felt it through my feet and in the way the air seemed suddenly charged. It was always strange watching a ship prepare for warp. We were not moving, unless it was to drift across the trackless void. The sublight engines did not fire—they did not have to. It it is not the ship that moves at warp, but the space around it, an envelope of night against the night. We would go from still darkness one moment, to violet lambency the next.

Valka ignored my words—or perhaps she only had no reply for them. “You’ll want to hold onto something. There may be a shock.” The suppression field ought to minimize any shock from the jump to warp, but she was right. I resumed my seat in the copilot’s chair. We were both silent then as Valka finalized the sequence that would take us to warp. Far behind us, at the very rear of the slim vessel, an oscillating hum intensified. I gripped the stumps of my missing fingers, bowed my head, and waited.

How many times had I stood upon the Tamerlane’s bridge and listened as Koskinen and White prepared for warp? As Corvo and Durand barked their orders, and Lorian and Pherrine relayed their information?

The memory of Corvo’s last words on the comm echoed in my mind.

See it done.

Valka’s hand gripped the yoke then—course set—and pressed it forward. The Ascalon whined, and for a moment I imagined we rode upon the point of an arrow loosed across the stars. Numberless sparks turned to smears, turned from white to azure, from azure to indigo. To violet.

We were on our way.