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location was a small wardrobe of nondescript clothes.
    Miocene left the clothes untouched for now. During the next hour and over the course of several thousand kilometers, she picked up a pair of sealed packages. The first package contained a small fortune in anonymous credits, while the other opened itself, revealing a scorpionlike robot free of manufacturer's codes or any official ID.
    The robot leaped at the single passenger.
    With a patient concern, the car asked, 'Is something wrong, madam? Do you need help?'
    'No, no,' Miocene replied, trying to lie still on a long bench.
    The scorpions tail reached into her mouth, then shoved hard enough to split modern bone. Her naked body straightened, in shock. For an instant, in little ways, the Submaster died. Then her disaster genes woke, fixing the damage with a crisp efficiency. Bone and various neurological linkups were repaired. But the nexuses that had been buried inside Miocene, part of her for more than a hundred millennia, had been yanked free by the titanium hooks of that narrowly designed robot.
    The robot ate the nexuses, digesting them in a plasma furnace.
    It did the same with the Sub master's elaborate uniform.
    Then the furnace turned itself inside out, and with a flash of purple-white light, what was metal turned to a cooling puddle and a persistent stink.
    A tiny amount of spilled blood needed to be burned away. Once that chore was finished, Miocene dressed in a simple brown gown that could have belonged to any human tourist, and from the attached satchel, she pulled out bits of false flesh that quivered between her cool fingers, begging for the opportunity to change the appearance of her important face.
    Three more times, the car stopped for its odd passenger.
    It stopped inside a major arterial station, then at the center of a cavern filled with bowing yellowish trees and a perpetual wind. And final ly, it eased into a quiet neigh borhood of well-to-do apartments, the resident humans and aliens among the wealthiest entities in the galaxy, each owning at least a cubic kilometer of the great ship.
    Where the passenger disembarked, the car didn't remember, much less care.
    After that, it hurried toward its initial destination. But those coordinates had always been an impossibility, and the AI pilot was too impaired to realize that this was a foolhardy task. Empty and insane, it streaked down the longest, largest arterials, hard vacuums allowing enormous speeds. Circumnavigating the ship many rimes in the next days, the car stopped only when a security team crippled it with their weapons, then burst on board, ready for anything but the emptiness and an utter lack of clues.
    A week later, eating breakfast and watching passersby, Miocene asked herself why now, at this exact moment, was it so important for her to vanish? What did the Master intend?
    The basic plan was ancient and rigorously sensible. After the wars with the Phoenixes, the Master had ordered her captains to prepare routes into anonymity. If the ship was ever invaded, their enemies would naturally want to capture its captains, and probably kill them. But if each captain kept a permanent escape route, and if no one else knew the route - including the Master - then perhaps the brightest blood in the ship would remain free long enough to organize, then take back the ship in their own counter-invasion.
    'A desperate precaution,' the Master had dubbed this plan.
    Later, as life on board the ship turned routine, the emergency routes were kept for other robust reasons.
    As a form of testing, for instance.
    Young, inexperienced captains were sent a coded message from the Master's office. Were they loyal enough to obey the difficult order? Did they know the ship well enough to vanish for months or years? And most impor ta ntly , once they vanished, did they continue to act in responsible, captainly ways?
    Simple bureaucratic inertia was another factor. Once established, escape routes were easily maintained.