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smiled as he fell asleep. He hoped Kedros had been dismissed or, at the least,
    suffered the wrath of AFCAW’s Directorate of Intelligence for opening G-145 to Terran defense
    contractors.

CHAPTER 4

    The crèche-get in their city-ships aren’t like you and me.
They’re always out of fashion after they get to their ar
rival point, where they sit for a couple years, sucking up
all the news they can and begging for spare gametes to
keep their gene pool healthy. Makes me wonder what
kind of agreements the Generational Lines make with
the Minoans. [Reply not indexed.] They’re the only ones
entrusted with installing the precious time buoys, that’s
why.
     

— Grant Iordanou , Public Node at XiCheng
    Crossing &
Stephanos Street, Alexandria, Hellas Prime, 2105.99.17.02
UT, indexed by Heraclitus 12 under Conflict Imperative
     
     
    N -space piloting was like steering a sensory
    deprivation tank through a canyon of indescribable terrors. The navigational “path,” different
    for every pilot, wound between shadowy maelstroms. Baleful furnaces whipped up flashes and
    discharges of energy. If a pilot turned away from the path or peered too earnestly into the
    storms, faces appeared and hungry flickers of energy reached out—but Ariane never looked into the maelstrom.
    As she’d tried to explain to Muse 3, human consciousness and
    concentration were required to steer a ship through N-space. Even though the maneuvers could be
    exhilarating, she felt the clash numb and separate her from what felt like submerged and
    instinctual terrors. Physically, she could expect weight loss, fatigue, and, after extremely
    bad drops, loss of hair. The clash helped her concentrate and got her through to the worst
    point: the transition back to real-space. Even under the best conditions, this was
    unpleasant.
    Ariane sent the transition command to the referential engine via
    protected connections that didn’t use processors. Each time she started the procedure to get
    back to real-space, she thanked Gaia that shielded analog circuits worked in N-space.
    Next came the nausea. Knowing that this intense feeling would pass
    helped her move to the next step, flip a switch, mark it off, and move on to the step after
    that. . . .
    The nausea abated and the sensations started. This was when the pilot
    realized how unpleasant light, sound, touch, smell, and taste could be. As usual, she smelled
    caustic cleaning lye, tasted something metallic, and felt deafened by the humming equipment.
    The console burned like ice.
    During the transition, she always tried to picture her mother’s
    laboratory and how it smelled. Her mother had been a designer botanist on Nuovo Adriatico,
    developing substitutes for popular spices, namely cinnamon and cardamom. There were always
    samples made into candies and sweetbreads; she remembered the sound of her mother’s voice: Try some, Ari, and tell me what you think. Her mother was the first
    to use her middle name, Ahrilan, as her nickname, which had made her transformation to “Ariane
    Kedros” easier.
    Luckily, these were memories that Ariane Kedros could allow herself,
    since Owen had been careful to create her false records with a similar name and background.
    Ariane Kedros had also been raised by botanists on Nuovo Adriatico. Those particular botanists,
    now dead, might have been surprised to find they had a child and they weren’t buried anywhere
    near her real parents. This hadn’t caused her any difficulties, since she’d purposely avoided
    going back to Nuovo Adriatico.
    Her senses eventually calmed down. The air that circulated in the ship
    had the slight smell of ceramic dust. She started up navigational and real-space systems,
    seeing the destination channel blink on the console. The ship was right where it was supposed
    to be, in the system whose formal designation was a long and forgettable alphanumeric string.
    Everyone called the system G-145; the number was the generational mission and the