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Coward.
    “What is your name?” Caitlin said.
    “Jsutien,” he answered, with a stammer. “Damian Jsutien. I was an astrogator.”
    “Jsutien,” she echoed, to fix the sound of it in her symbiont’s memory. “It’s good you brought the message in person.”
    He nodded.
    She pressed the override shutdown on Arianrhod’s tank. It depressed with a solid click. With her code key, she locked it out. “Watch this,” she said, as status lights began to blink from green and yellow to orange and red. “When the tank is quiescent, give it thirty minutes and mark the contents for recycling. Do you understand?”
    “Thirty minutes after shutdown, mark the contents,” he repeated.
    “Report to me when it’s done.” She smiled and patted his shoulder before she turned away. Though she left, still she carried the feed in her head: Arianrhod drifting in her acceleration tank, eyes closed, skin pale and blue-gray. One by one, the lights cycled to red.
    The short return walk through battered corridors disheartened her. Shredded vegetation browned underfoot and hung ragged from rent bulkheads. Insects scurried in advance of her steps, racing from leaf to leaf, seeking cover. A darter flashed from the tangled vines on the wall to snatch up a wriggling centipede, then vanished again in a flash of indigo feathers. So some of the world’s ecosystem had survived the transition, even unprotected. A little encouragement among the ruins.
    And there were materials for cloning. The world could be rejuvenated. The work was daunting, but it could be done.
    When she emerged into the great Heaven of Engine, she tried to focus her gaze directly forward. The city surrounded her—a great hollow sphere with every surface knobbled with shattered structures. Debris drifted freely and the air was thin and cold. Gravity was a lower priority than oxygen, so even where she floated, the atmosphere was sufficient to sustain Exalted life. The unsecured debris was a threat, but she had no resources now that could be detailed to secure it.
    Caitlin did not regret the decision to Exalt every living thing in the world. Nothing Mean would have survived the acceleration—or the radiation of the supernova that had boosted the world back into flight. Infecting them with symbionts—even new and fragile symbionts that must struggle to become established even as they struggled with the damaged bodies of their hosts—was preferable to watching them all die.
    It had been a fighting chance.
    Failed gravity made it easier to reach Central Engineering. Caitlin spread her hands, sealed her helm, and used the attitude jets to nudge herself gently across the cavernous space, fending off debris with a raised and armored hand. Catch bars on the far side eased her touchdown. She swung her feet through a hatch that opened to her nonverbal command. When the gravity on the far side caught her, she twisted to drop into a crouch.
    Central Engineering was a shambles of broken panels and shattered furniture. In the midst of it stood Benedick Conn, alone, wearing his armor against the potential of a hull breach. He bent over the main navigation tank, hands gliding with assembly-robot grace as he effected repairs. He was assisted by a quiet-eyed toolkit that looked something like a cat and something like a lemur with enormously elongated forelimbs. Its ringed tail twitched; its focus was total. Spotted gold-black fur rippled over its flanks as it reached deep into the guts of the tank.
    Once it, too, had had a name and a personality. It had been a small independent life. Now it was but a thing—obedient, versatile, and consumed in the greater awareness of the world’s new angel.
    Caitlin unsealed her faceplate, thought of Rien, and chose not to wince in front of Benedick. When she stood, pain shot up both legs to the hip, but she would not permit that to show in her face either. She pushed to her feet on fragile bone, half healed, the persistence of her symbiont maintaining