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came was an ugly lump of technology stowed away somewhere on this vessel, a store of the memory and trickling thoughts that comprised his artificial personality. He was a creature who, with his two “brothers,” locked deep in high-technology caverns on the Earth, had exerted real power over all humanity for decades.
    And he’d told her his true name, or one of them: Robert Braemann. He’d known Beth would understand the significance, for her.
    All her life, and especially since being brought to Earth against her will, she’d been reluctant to get involved in her parents’ past: the muddled old Earth society from which they’d emerged before they’d come to the emptiness of Per Ardua, planet of Proxima Centauri, where Beth had been born, her home. Nothing had changed in that regard now. She could see Earthshine was still waiting for some kind of reaction from her. She turned away from him, deliberately.
    McGregor, swiveling in his command couch, surveyed them all with a kind of professional sympathy. “I know this is difficult,” he began. “It’s only days since we fled what was apparently a catastrophic war in the inner solar system. We feared—well, we feared the destruction of everything, of the space colonies, even the Earth itself. We had no destination in mind, specifically. My mission, mine and my crew’s, was essentially to save you, sir,” and he nodded to Earthshine. “That was my primary order, coming from the UN Security Council and my superiors in the ISF, in the hope that you could lead a rebuilding program to follow.”
    â€œAnd the rest of us,” said Penny Kalinski drily, “were swept up in Earthshine’s wake.”
    McGregor faced her. He was still handsome, Beth thought, despite his years, and he had a charisma that was hard not to respond to. He said, “That’s the size of it. Of course you, Ms. Jones, are here because—well, because I owed a favor to your mother. Ancient history. However, whatever the fates that brought us together, here we are in this situation now. As to what that situation is . . .” He glanced at his juniors.
    Responding to the prompt, the young woman raised a slate. Age maybe twenty-five, Beth guessed, she was solidly built with a rather square face; her blond hair was tightly plaited. A tag stitched on her jumpsuit read ISF LT MARIE GOLVIN, alongside the ISF logo. Beth noted absently that she had a small crucifix pinned beside the tag.
    Tapping at her slate, Golvin summarized quickly. “Sir, we accelerated for a full gravity for three days. We shut down the drive, but we’re still cruising, at our final velocity of just under one percent lightspeed.” She glanced around at the passengers, evidently wondering how much they could understand of the situation. “We set off from lunar orbit and headed directly out from the sun. We’re currently three astronomical units from the sun—that is, deep in the asteroid belt. And still heading outward.”
    â€œBut now we’re looking back,” Earthshine said. “Now that the drive exhaust is no longer screening our ability to look, and listen. And, instead of news from a shattered Earth, we’re receiving—”
    â€œMessages, all right,” Golvin said. “But messages we don’t understand.”
    She tapped her slate, and fragments of speech filled the air, distorted, soaked by static, ghost voices speaking and fading away.
    â€œTo begin with,” Golvin said, “these are all radio broadcasts—like twentieth-century technology, not like the laser and other narrow-beam transmission methods the ISF and the space agencies our competitors use nowadays. In fact we picked them up, not with the
Tatania
’s comms system, but with a subsidiary antenna meant for radio astronomy and navigation purposes. The messages don’t seem to be intended for us—they’re leakage,