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reached out and took her hand. "Yes, dear. It's—" He looked at the screen again, ducking to see past one of the heads blocking the way. Mum, Indica, was holding Jeremy, facing the screen: she had her hands on his shoulders. "It's not dangerous," he added. "The really bad stuff is all concentrated in the shock front, which is only a couple of light days thick.
    Our shielding can cope with anything else; otherwise, Captain Mannheim would be taking us around the explosion. But that would take much longer, so—" He fell silent. A heavily accented voice echoed from the screen.
    "Attention. This is your captain speaking. In about one minute we will commence jump transit for Septagon Central. We have a series of five jumps at seventy-hour intervals except for the fourth, which will be delayed eighteen hours. Our first jump takes us inside the shock front of the supernova: religionists may wish to attend the multifaith service of remembrance on G deck in three hours' time. Thank you."

    The voice stopped abruptly, as if cut off. A stopwatch appeared in one corner of the wall, counting down the seconds. "What will we do now?"
    Wednesday asked quietly.
    Her father looked uncomfortable. "Find somewhere to live. They said they'd help us. Your mother and I will look for work, I suppose. Try to fit in—"
    The black-jeweled sky shimmered, rainbow lights casting many-colored shadows across the watchers. A collective sigh went up: the wall-screen view of space was gone, replaced by the most insanely beautiful thing she had ever seen. Great shimmering curtains of green and red and purple light blocked out the stars, gauzy shrouds of fluorescent silk streaming in a wild breeze. At their heart, a brilliant diamond shone in the cosmos, a bloodred dumbbell of light growing from its poles. "Herman?" she whispered to herself. "Do you see that?" But there was no reply: and suddenly she felt empty, as hollow as the interior of the baby nebula the ship now floated in.
    "All gone," she said aloud, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes: she made no protest when her father gathered her in his arms. He was crying, too, great racking sobs making his shoulders shake: she wondered what he could be missing for a moment, then caught its palest shadow and shuddered.
    OUT OF THE FRYING PAN
    "May I ask what I'm accused of?" Rachel asked for the third time. Don't let them get to you, she told herself, forcing her face into a bland smile: One slip and they'll hang you out to dry.
    The daylight filtering through the window-wall was tinted pale blue by the slab of dumb aerogel, the sky above the distant mountains dimmed to a remote purple. Behind the heads of her inquisitors she focused on the contrail of a commuter plane scratching its way across the glass-smooth stratosphere.
    "There are no charges," the leader of the kangaroo court said, smiling right back at her. "You haven't broken any regulations, have you?" The man next to her cleared his throat. "Well, none of ours," she added, her exaggeratedly dyed lips curling minutely in distaste. Rachel focused on her hairline. Madam Chairman was dressed in an exaggeratedly femme historical style—perhaps to add a touch of velvet and lace to her S&M
    management style—but a ringlet of hair had broken free of whatever chemical cosh she used to discipline it, and threatened to flop over one razor-finished eyebrow in a quizzical curl.
    'The excursion to Rochard's World was not my initiative, as I pointed out in my report," Rachel calmly repeated, despite the urge to reach across the table and tweak Madam Chairman's hairdo. Damn, I'd like to see you manage a field operation gone bad, she thought. "George Cho got the run-around from the New Republican government, the idiots had already decided to violate the Third Commandment before I arrived on the scene, and if I hadn't been in position, there wouldn't have been anybody on the ground when the shit hit the fan. So George sent me. As I think I've already stated,