by Don D’Ammassa

Don D’Ammassa is the author of seven novels and three reference books and over 100 short stories split evenly between science fiction and horror. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife, two cats, and 55,000 books. Don’s last story for Asimov’s, “Curing Agent,” appeared in our July 2003 issue. He returns to our pages with a poignant tale about why, for some love stories, there is . . .

The sky went on forever. Once upon a time, that might have been a figure of speech, but today, for Jason Tallant and his companions, it was literally true. Except that it wasn’t really the sky, even though it was blue, sort of, and speckled with clouds, sort of. What he was actually seeing was the way in which his mind interpreted part of the external reality of the hyperspatial plane. Which really was a plain, in both senses—and spellings—of the word.

The interstellar transport Rollaway had stopped briefly to allow its passengers to enjoy the panoramic view. The retractable-wheeled vehicle was perched on the top of a comparatively steep and completely featureless hill, overlooking what might almost have been a river valley, except there were no rivers in hyperspace, which meant it wasn’t properly speaking a valley either. The declivity twisted slightly and disappeared as it turned around a cluster of broccoli trees, which weren’t trees at all. Nothing was alive in hyperspace, except during those short periods when ships were traveling through its indecipherable vastness.

A voice came from behind him. “Quite a view, isn’t it?” Jason was en route to his new assignment on Dropout with Mira Harris, recently promoted to manager of the corporation’s branch office on that colony planet. Mira had been offered the position previously but had refused the assignment until Dropout had built its own translation station so that she could return expeditiously if she so desired. Following the death of his wife, Jason no longer felt tied to the earth or anything on it and in fact had been actively planning to end his life before deciding to first accept a transfer to Dropout. He was only mildly curious about conditions there, but, more importantly, Kathy had been full of romantic ideas about traveling to other worlds and he felt an intense need to see that she achieved them, even if posthumously. Her ashes were carefully packed in his luggage, a surprisingly small bundle to represent a person who had made up such a large part of his world.

“Too bad we can’t take pictures.” Mira’s voice was flat, and Jason suspected she was saying what she felt was appropriate rather than what she was actually feeling.

One of the other passengers made an amused sound. “Well, you can if you want, but they won’t show anything.” Humans perceived hyperspace as an infinite plain dotted with features that were almost always interpreted consistently from individual to individual. Many of these features had been named, like the broccoli trees, which were not living creatures at all, but they looked like trees and they looked like broccoli and everybody saw them as pretty much the same thing. Having no objective physical reality, however, they could not be recorded by photograph or holograph, although artists had been able to render recognizable images.

An older man crowded closer to look out through the observation bubble. “I don’t understand how the captain can find his way through this. I understand the landscape is different every time they translate out of normal space.”

Jason felt moved to reassure him. “Each of the colony worlds extrudes a beacon into hyperspace. We’re homing on the one from Dropout. The landscape may change but the absolute locations don’t.” Jason’s wife had been fascinated by the concept of hyperspace, obsessed with the idea of emigrating to one of the colony worlds, and Jason had picked up a lot of technical knowledge by osmosis. “Even if we just take a short term assignment, Jason. I want to be able to say that once in my life I stood on the surface of another planet.” She had regaled him with fresh nuggets of knowledge about hyperspace and the various colony worlds as quickly as she gathered them. He could, had he been so inclined, have lectured on the history and reliability of the colonial beacons at considerable length. But Kathy had never realized her ambition, although she had still been making plans up to a week before her death. Now she would never stand on an alien world, but at least in one sense he would ensure that she fulfilled her dreams.

“But what if the radio breaks down, or we run into some kind of interference? How do we know we’re on the right course?” The man sounded nervous and for some reason Jason found that irritating. He recognized the mercurial nature of his own moods, knew that his calm demeanor masked a cauldron of turbulent emotion, but he didn’t care.

“Actually we don’t. The fact that it has always worked in the past doesn’t mean it always will. We could conceivably wander around out here until we ran out of air.”

The other man paled and turned away to rejoin his party. Mira gave Jason a slight, mildly puzzled smile. “That was cruel.”

“He’s a jerk.”

“Even so.”

Harris would not be his immediate superior on Dropout, but while Jason knew that it would be politically wise to defer to her, he really didn’t care and compromised by not responding at all. He did not expect to be around long enough to be affected by her displeasure.

* * * *

Captain Emilio Ventras sat back from the control board and glanced at his backup, unofficially his Shotgun, Shelly Paris. “How’s the signal?”

She shrugged. “Same as always. How are the passengers?”

“The usual motley crew.” The exchange was a ritual between them. This was their fiftieth trip together and Paris was probably going to get her own command when they got back. Ventras would miss her.

“Well, at least we have some nice scenery this time.” He glanced out across a variegated landscape of gently rising and falling hills, mottled with broccoli trees and a few of the comparatively rare crystal towers, which were neither crystal nor towers.

“If we get too bored, we can play cards.”

Boredom would not be one of their problems on this trip.

* * * *

The engines became audible again and the massive wheels began to turn as the Rollaway resumed its journey, descending toward a lowland as flat as anything on Earth. Captain Ventras had considerable latitude in picking a course because there were no maps to guide him. He could detect his end point, but the territory in between was terra incognita. In fact, it could change while they were traversing it. Just because a hill happened to be facing the valley now didn’t mean the same would be true in an hour. The Conestoga had nearly been wrecked when a ravine opened up under its wheels a few years earlier, and more recently the Prairie Schooner had almost run out of air after it had been overturned by a sudden massive upheaval. In both cases, subsequent investigation had suggested that one or more of the passengers had been experiencing extremely ambivalent attitudes toward emigration or had been undergoing some other form of unusual stress. Successful completion of more probing psychological tests had been added to the criteria for subsequent passenger applications.

Jason was a corporate psychologist and had easily avoided revealing his inner turmoil. He felt no guilt about doing so. He very much wanted to complete the trip to Dropout. It was the last thing he could do for Kathy, and while it wasn’t much, it would have to suffice. And then he could lay down his own burden as well.

He glanced around the cabin. There were about thirty passengers, but only one obvious family, a young couple and their daughter. The parents were excited or nervous or both; the daughter—about twelve—was bored. The rest consisted of parties of two to four people, probably on short term assignments, and a handful of solitary individuals of both sexes, most of whom kept to themselves. A few of these might be emigrants as well. There were two cabin stewards, one of each gender, both inconspicuously armed with tranquilizer guns. Despite the best efforts of the screening boards, a few people each year broke down when faced with the para-reality of hyperspace. The most frequent manifestations of HTD—Hyper Transit Disorder—were hallucinations and agoraphobia. Everyone so afflicted had recovered quickly after their return to normal space, but they were routinely drugged if they displayed any extremes of behavior en route. Emotional upheaval by even a single individual could have tangible effects on the communal interpretation of the exterior environment, making navigation more difficult.

Mira returned to her seat and began studying the screen of her PDAX but Jason remained where he was, watching the pseudo-landscape flow past the observation bubble. There had been a time when he would have joined her, more interested in the world of profit and loss, numbers and arrays, connections and financial opportunities than he was in the external world—what Kathy used to call the “real” world. Jason allowed himself a hint of amusement. Whatever existed on the other side of the Perspex bubble wasn’t the real world either, whatever that meant. Scientists and philosophers alike were still trying to decide just what it was.

They had reached the flat land and were moving forward more rapidly now. When he closed his eyes, Jason could not sense movement. The irregularities of the surface, such as they were, were more than compensated for by the pressure and shock absorbers beneath him. One theory held that vehicles in hyperspace didn’t actually move at all. They became immobile relative to the rest of the universe, which then rearranged itself to bring their destination to them. This made no sense to Jason. There might be as many as a dozen vehicles in hyperspace at any given time. The universe couldn’t simultaneously cater to all their needs, could it?

Their route took them in an arc around a low butte, and as they turned Jason could just see a hint of their trail dust. It wasn’t dust, of course, but the interaction of material from the “real” universe with the hyperspatial plain resulted in a temporary darkening of the latter, as though the ship’s wheels were bruising the surface across which they moved. The phenomenon, like most aspects of hyperspace, had gathered lots of theories but few facts.

Jason still wore an old fashioned wristwatch, a family heirloom, but it was of limited utility aboard the Rollaway. Transit times between the same two points could vary dramatically; the Bigwheeler had been forced to resort to recycled air during a trip to Upstart when the normal eight to twelve hour trip consumed an unprecedented thirty hours. They’d run into no natural barriers requiring detours, but it had still taken longer for reasons that remained a mystery. As with most other ships, the Rollaway had been refitted to increase its air supply and the maximum passenger limit had been reduced.

They passed so close to a copse of broccoli trees that a frond almost brushed the bubble’s exterior surface. Kathy would have loved this, he thought to himself, and felt a wave of despair and loss so great that he had to put out a hand to steady himself. Only the knowledge that he would not have to live with his grief for much longer kept him from shouting his pain aloud.

Jason felt weary, in spirit if not in body, and leaned to one side against the cool plastic. He didn’t quite doze off, but he became less aware of his surroundings, lost in the landscape of his inner mind, and when he finally noticed that the view had changed rather dramatically, he had no idea how much time had passed until he glanced at his wrist again. More than an hour. They should be not quite halfway to their destination given an average transit time.

They were no longer traversing a relatively featureless plain. They had slowed so that the captain could pick his way across an expanse of broken ground. Narrow defiles zigzagged in random directions, none big enough to seriously endanger the ship, although the captain was obviously taking no chances. In the distance, Jason could see shadowy shapes like canyon walls, although the ridgeline was smooth, a succession of gentle curves. There were broccoli trees as well, smaller than usual, but much more numerous than before, a virtual forest.

Mira slipped into the seat beside him. “Didn’t you say your wife knew a lot about hyperspace?”

Jason suppressed a twinge of painful memory. “She was obsessed with it. My greatest regret is that she didn’t live to see this.”

Mira paused automatically as a nod to his grief, but her body language was alert and possibly even tense. “Did she ever mention reading about anything like this? We’re practically surrounded.”

Jason made a show of looking outside again. “Not specifically. There’s quite a range of possible landscapes, you know. Some of it is the result of fluctuations in the underlying energy structure, or at least so the experts think, and some of it depends upon the mental state of the people perceiving it. None of this is objectively real, you understand?”

“Sure. Sure. But we’ve been going slower and slower for the last half hour and I heard the attendants talking about possibly backtracking to find an alternate route. I was just wondering if that meant something was wrong.”

Jason considered his answer. Everything was wrong, of course, in a universe that no longer contained Kathy, but he didn’t think that answer would satisfy Mira. “It’s unusual but not unprecedented. It may be that there’s some kind of flaw or fault blocking our original course and our minds are interpreting the approach as impassable terrain. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Mira was obviously not entirely satisfied, but she nodded and went back to her seat. Jason was considering following her, but before he could bestir himself, the Rollaway came to a complete stop.

There was a murmuring from the passengers, some of whom looked around curiously, with just a hint of concern. The two stewards maintained their blank masks of amiability and reassurance, but Jason thought he detected a hint of tension in the way they held their bodies. They were just a shade too attentive, as though they were expecting trouble.

The intercom buzzed and the captain’s voice filled the cabin. “There’s nothing to be alarmed about, folks, but we’re going to have to retrace our steps a bit. The way we’ve been coming looked pretty clear a while ago, but the surface is getting rougher. Just to be on the safe side, we’re going to try to find a little smoother way. In the meantime, we still have plenty of beverages and snacks and the scenery outside is more interesting than usual.” Jason decided “interesting” was a euphemism, but he wasn’t sure what other term it was standing in for.

After another few minutes, the Rollaway began to reverse course. The body of the ship was roughly a cylinder, with the pilot module set on a track above them. The drive train was fully reversible following a short realignment, while the captain’s module slowly ran along the track to the opposite end. Then they were in motion again. The attendants assured everyone that backtracking, while unusual, was not unheard of. Most of the passengers had already returned to their work or their conversations and clearly could not have cared less.

They picked up speed for the next few minutes, but Jason was still at the observation bubble and he was one of the first to notice when their pace began to slacken again. Half an hour later they came to another stop.

This time there was noticeable concern among the passengers. Mira and another man Jason hadn’t met joined him. She was sweating slightly even though the cabin was as comfortable as when they had departed. “Any idea what’s going on, Jason?”

He shrugged. “Probably another course change. The captain knows where the beacon is, of course, but he has to pick his specific route by line of sight.” He gestured toward the exterior. “He’s probably having some trouble finding a good vantage point.” The broccoli trees were denser than ever. It was as if the ship was passing between two dense stands of forest.

“What if he can’t find a way?” The other man moved his eyes in jerky, frightened jumps.

Jason shrugged. “Then he either radios back to our base beacon for a relief ship or he waits until the landscape changes again. We have food and supplies for at least four days. There’s a lot of safety margin built in.”

He expected the ship to start moving again fairly shortly and it did, but it halted once more, after only a few minutes this time. Jason wasn’t surprised. He had watched the landscape roughen, ridges rather than hills that almost formed before his eyes. This was obviously something unprecedented and he was fascinated, immune to the apprehension spreading among his fellow travelers. Jason had nothing to fear from death any longer.

Captain Ventras addressed the passengers again, explaining that they had run into a denser patch of obstruction than he had expected. “There’s nothing to worry about. We’re perfectly safe where we are and we can just wait for things to shift again. As a precaution I’ve asked that a relief ship be placed on standby, so even if we’re stuck here for a while, we can be resupplied or, if absolutely necessary, there are enough environmental suits for us to evacuate to the relief vehicle.”

His voice was calm, clear, and professional, but people were frightened anyway. The attendants suggested card games or other distractions but with little success. Passengers began to watch each other, or tried to nap, or simply stared at the floor. Very few looked toward either of the observation bubbles, and Jason had his all to himself.

There were no formal sleeping arrangements aboard the Rollaway, but the seats all reclined. Several people asked about sleeping aids, but the attendants couldn’t help them. “We’re not allowed to bring any psychoactive agents aboard a ship except as cargo,” they explained. Jason knew that already; minds affected by drugs—even alcohol—had unpredictable effects on the hyperspatial terrain. He also knew that they weren’t telling the entire truth; the weapons on their belts fired darts filled with a powerful tranquilizer that suppressed most mental activity, though they would only be used in an emergency.

Jason ate and napped for a while, then returned to his seat in the bubble. No one had usurped his place in his absence.

Time passed. Twice the ship began to move and twice it stopped almost immediately. The captain told them he was just topping up the charge on the batteries, but no one believed him. They were sure that he was trying to find a way out, and failing each time.

A full day passed before one of the passengers—an older man—created a disturbance. He began shouting at the attendants, demanding to see the captain, and their attempts to calm him only provoked a more animated outburst. They were forced to subdue him physically and restrain him in his seat until his terror-fed anger burned out and he wept quietly. Jason was surprised that they hadn’t tranquilized the troublemaker, but they seemed off their own game, less attentive than usual, occasionally talking in whispers when they thought no one was watching. The distraught man subsided, but several other passengers had become visibly disturbed.

The weeping man became uncommunicative later that day. One of the stewards went aloft to speak to Captain Ventras directly for a while, after which the captain announced that he had requested that the relief ship make as close an approach as possible so the troublesome passenger could be evacuated. Anyone else who preferred to return to Earth station could do so if they were willing to suit up and make the short trek that would obviously be necessary. A half dozen people indicated their wish to take advantage of the opportunity, but as it happened, no one ever left.

The relief ship couldn’t find them.

Radio works in hyperspace, which is why the beacons function. Ship to ship is a little trickier, apparently because ships aren’t anchored in the “real” universe the way station beacons were. In the past, rescue ships had always been able to home in on a distress signal, but this time they failed. Ventras insisted these were minor technical difficulties, but the female steward was having trouble maintaining her composure and Jason overheard snatches of conversation between the woman and her co-worker from which he was able to guess a part of the truth.

The relief ship could not find the Rollaway, could not even find the patch of overgrown terrain where they were stranded.

* * * *

“How are the passengers holding up?” Ventras had wakened from a deep sleep, checked his instrumentation, and ascertained that nothing significant had changed externally.

Paris shook her head. “No further disturbances, but it’s only a matter of time if we don’t give them some good news pretty soon.” She wiped the hair back from her forehead. “For that matter, I’m going to be a little upset if something doesn’t happen. What do you think the problem is?”

She’d asked that question twice before, and he still didn’t have a good answer.

* * * *

More time passed.

Jason had more or less taken up a permanent position in the bubble. He stood up and walked around occasionally, ate with the others, sometimes napped in his assigned seat, but he no longer felt as though he was a part of the company. At times he had trouble assigning sense to what they were saying, although in his defense, sometimes there wasn’t a great deal of sense there to start with.

Halfway into the third day, he saw something moving outside, which was impossible.

At first he thought he had slipped into a daydream, or that he’d misinterpreted the fall of a shadow. But there were no shadows in hyperspace because there was no light source, and he’d been completely alert. One of the other passengers had noticed his start and wandered over curiously. “See something?”

“No. I just drifted off for a moment.” He was impatient for the man to be gone and when he finally turned away, Jason pressed his face close to the Perspex and stared outside. Nothing moved. He watched for a long time before reluctantly deciding that just maybe he’d fallen asleep after all.

And then he saw it again. Or almost saw it. There was just a flicker between two broccoli tree trunks, or stalks, or whatever they were. As though something had moved from concealment behind one to the next. It was cautious rather than furtive, although he could never have explained how he recognized such a subtle difference.

He stared intently at the same spot while trying not to give away his interest to anyone else in the cabin. If there really was something out there, its discovery was his and his alone. If he couldn’t share it with Kathy, then he wasn’t going to share it with anyone.

But nothing happened for long minutes and once again his certainty began to waver. The scene outside had in fact changed over the course of the past several hours. The distant ridgeline was a lot less distant now, and if it had been actual rock and sand instead of an artifact of human perception, he would have been able to pick out striations or irregularities, had there been any. The broccoli forest had thinned out a bit, although he’d never actually seen any of the individual specimens disappear. He just happened to notice that there were fewer, although still far too many to allow the Rollaway to pass through. Some of the passengers had insisted that the captain try to force his way, but he had declined. Experience had already demonstrated that humans were incapable of altering their environment in hyperspace, at least by physical means. Lasers, acid, cutting tools, brute force, even a nuclear detonation had all been tried.

Jason fancied that the air was getting a little stale, but it was probably his imagination. They were good for forty hours even before they went to recycling. He wasn’t really sure how long they would last after that.

He did fall asleep then, slumped in the less than comfortable seats provided for sightseers. He dreamed of Kathy, not surprisingly since he did so almost all the time now. They were back at the house and he was working in his den. She was outside, wearing a bathing suit and playing in the spray from the sprinklers as though she was a child. He was watching her when she turned, smiled, and came over to the window, rapped on it and gestured for him to come out and join her.

His head snapped up and he stared into Kathy’s eyes. They were there just for a second, then they were gone. And they’d been on the other side of the Perspex dome. He was absolutely certain of it.

“Is anything wrong?” Mira was standing to his left. Her voice had picked up a slight tremor and her head moved in sudden, birdlike twitches.

“Just a dream.” He stood up and stretched. “Did I miss anything while I was out?”

“There are two rescue ships out now, but they still can’t find us.” She gave a nervous laugh. “I was told this assignment might be an adventure, but this is a bit more than I was expecting.”

For just a moment, perhaps because Mira’s mouth twisted into a half smile that reminded him of Kathy, he felt a twinge of empathy. “We’ll be all right. There’s someone watching out for us.”

Mira gave him an appraising look. “I didn’t realize you were the religious type, Jason.” She would have read his personnel files, of course.

“I’m not, really.” He looked away, already regretting his minor indiscretion.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” He kept his eyes fixed on the exterior, and it was several minutes before he realized he was alone again. The rest of the passengers had drawn physically closer to one another, seeking mutual comfort. Jason felt no temptation to join them. He had been alone constantly for the past year. He was used to it.

He saw Kathy several times during the course of the next hour. There would be a flash of movement and he’d spot the shape of a head drawing back into the fronds, or spot an arm or leg just as she moved from one point to the next. There was no continuity. She might be to his right one second, to his left the next. She was never in view long enough for him to focus, and certainly not long enough for him to call someone else over to confirm what he was seeing. Technically, he supposed, it might not be Kathy at all as far as objective evidence was concerned. But he knew it was her, particularly when he caught a glimpse of her eyes.

Most of the others were sleeping when she finally revealed herself fully. Jason had been on the verge of nodding off when movement attracted his attention. A shape emerged from behind one of the closer broccoli trees. He thought it would be just another fleeting glimpse, but then she stepped out into the open, hands on her hips, and looked directly at him. She wasn’t wearing an environmental suit and he knew that was impossible, but he didn’t care. This was his Kathy. She hadn’t abandoned him after all.

She raised one hand and beckoned to him and he knew what he had to do.

The two stewards were taking turns sleeping. The woman—Jason had not bothered to learn their names—was currently snoring softly. Her partner was sitting in the second observation dome, supposedly watching over the passengers, although his eyelids were drooping. Jason stood up slowly and stretched, surreptitiously watching to see if the steward would react. He did not. Jason began walking around the cabin, careful not to disturb anyone, and took a drink from the dispenser. He was almost within reach of the second attendant now, who had turned partially onto one side. Her holstered tranquilizer gun was facing in his direction.

He felt no trepidation when he lunged for it. His mind was filled with absolute certainty that this was right, inevitable even. The weapon slid out of its holster and he fired down into the woman’s thigh as soon as his finger slipped inside the trigger guard. He turned and saw that the male steward had gotten to his feet but had yet to reach for his own weapon. Jason shot him. The woman was already out and the man followed with a strangled shout of surprise. He fell to the floor.

Jason retreated to one corner as the passengers began to rouse. He didn’t wait for them to get organized. “Everyone stay calm. I’m not going to hurt anyone, but there is something I have to do.”

Mira separated herself from the others, walking directly toward him. “Put that thing down, Jason. Don’t make a fool of yourself.” Her voice was steady, expecting obedience. He shot her without a second thought and she crumpled to the floor, a look of complete amazement on her face. The twelve-year-old began to scream.

“Keep your distance,” he warned.

One of the other men thrust himself forward. “He can’t get us all, and that thing just knocks you out for a while. Let’s take him down.”

Jason shot the speaker, then the two men who had been flanking him, then another for good measure. “I’ll shoot you all if I have to.” He wasn’t sure that he could, though. He had no idea how many anesthetic darts were available. Still covering the others, he edged around to the supine male attendant and quickly confiscated his weapon. It had never left its holster.

“You!” He gestured toward the burly man who’d introduced himself as Bert Ralston. “Open the emergency locker.”

Ralston hesitated. “Do it or it’s sleepy time.”

The man did as he’d been told.

“Now take out one of the environmental suits and bring it to me.” That took a while. The suit consisted of several components that were assembled around the user rather than worn. The helmet came last and Ralston tried to use it as a club. Jason shot him.

“You’re being very foolish, Mr. Tallant.” The voice came from the intercom. Captain Ventras and his team had obviously been monitoring the passenger deck. “Please put down your weapons and return to your seat. We understand that you’re frightened, but this isn’t going to help.”

Jason was elated, not frightened. He ignored their instructions and very carefully began to climb into the lower module of the environmental suit. It was difficult because he also had to keep one weapon pointed at the others, but he managed. Captain Ventras addressed him several more times, cajoling, soothing, promising, threatening. Jason continued to ignore him.

The suit was almost completely assembled when a half dozen passengers came at him at once. He dropped three of them with darts and a fourth stumbled over one of his fellows and landed heavily. The other two reached him but the environmental suit augmented his strength adequately. He brushed them aside, tossed down the tranquilizer guns, and sealed his suit.

No one tried to stop him after that. They didn’t even bother to retrieve the discarded weapons, which could not have penetrated his suit in any case. He strode to the emergency airlock, moving rather awkwardly, and activated the inner seal. No one pleaded with him not to go. They were probably glad to be rid of him.

She was waiting for him outside. Jason was surprised at first to see that she didn’t need an environmental suit. He turned on his radio but the only sound was Captain Ventras demanding that he return to the ship. After a few seconds, Jason clicked it off. He and Kathy had never needed words to communicate. He took her hand and let her lead him away.

The broccoli trees had retreated ahead of him, forming a pathway that led off into the distance. They walked directly up the center and Jason felt light-headed and joyful for the first time in more than a year. “It should be yellow bricks,” he told her, knowing she couldn’t hear him. But she turned her head and nodded and he almost fancied that the surface under his feet had shifted color slightly, the palest of yellows that turned darker where his feet had touched. Not trail dust, he told himself. Fairy dust.

* * * *

“We have clearance, Captain.” Paris turned and waited for instructions.

Ventras had been trying to direct some of the passengers to restore order within the ship. It was physically possible for one of the command officers to descend into the passenger module, but it was a time-consuming process and in any case he wanted Paris with him on the bridge. Now he turned and did a quick visual survey to confirm what he’d heard. “Engage engines.” If there was an opportunity to escape, he would take it, even if that meant abandoning the wayward passenger.

Within seconds, the Rollaway was in motion. A short distance forward, he saw the figure of a man in an environmental suit turn from the open path into a smaller one, too small for the Rollaway to follow, and he knew that this was the last he would ever see of Jason Tallant. And he saw something else as well.

Jason’s path was only faintly visible from the top of the Rollaway, but the discoloration of the surface created by his passing formed a distinct, continuous line that disappeared beneath the ship and extended, presumably, back to where he had disembarked. That was not at all surprising. But Ventras had a great deal to think about during the balance of the trip to Dropout, because parallel to that track had been another, slightly smaller but no less distinct.