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rapid turnaround of ships and crews, and predictability of the process, made the operation of the various hotels and hostels run like clockwork. I could have gotten a bunk in a transient hostel at about a quarter of the cost of the hotel room, but knowing I’d be shipping out again soon, and having gotten used to my privacy on the Ellis , I decided that I could afford to splurge on a few nights of relative luxury. As a third mate, I was probably going to be sharing a cramped stateroom with another of the junior officers.
    Within three stans of docking, I was settled in my room, had my trunk stowed, and my civvies hung in the closet. I’d worn my own shipsuits on the way out, and I was ready to get back into civvies. I took a few moments to double check my accounts and go over my paperwork, just to make sure I hadn’t confused any of it in my head.
    My tablet linked into the StationNet without any problems, so I could access ship movements, station events, and the normal access to message traffic. I didn’t know anybody in Diurnia to send a message to, so that function was rather moot. I dropped a quick “I’m on station” message to let Diurnia Salvage and Transport know I’d be keeping my appointment on the fifth.
    So I sat there, remembering my first day off the Lois McKendrick , sitting in a hotel room paid for by the ship on the Dunsany Roads Orbital. The feeling of “I’m alone now” returned. The memory of it, even so many stanyers later, threatened to overwhelm me. The feeling of rootlessness and unconnectedness was a cold hand in my guts.
    I shook myself and muttered, “Get a grip!”
    Remembering a small packet in the bottom of my trunk, I went to the closet and pulled it out. The small zippered pouch held all I had kept of my mother’s things. When she’d been killed back on Neris, much of her stuff went away—either to charity or trashed. Some small amount of her writing, and her ashes, had gone into storage. The storage agreement had expired while I was at the academy, and the company forwarded her effects to me at Port Newmar. I got rid of most of her books and almost all of her papers. I scattered her ashes at sea off shore at Port Newmar. She’d have liked that, I thought.
    I’d kept only a few pages and photos. I didn’t look at them often, but I’d riffled through them a few times in the three stanyers since they’d been forwarded to me. The papers contained her marriage license—dated March 3, 2328—and divorce decree—dated May 21, 2335. Both were issued here on Diurnia. My father’s name was there on both of them: Franklin Prescott Wang. Talk about non-sequitur monikers. I had only vague recollections of my father from before we’d left Diurnia and went to Neris, but in the papers there was a photo of a young man sitting at what appeared to be a restaurant table, smiling into the lens of the camera. He looked something like me, I suppose, but that young man was my father, apparently when he was courting my mother. The time stamp on the back read “Feb 2327” and had faded almost to illegibility over the years. Mother had never displayed this picture. But she had shown it to me when I was young and asked the “Where’s my daddy?” question.
    Theoretically, he was here in the Diurnia quadrant. At least that’s where Mother had always said we’d left him. Looking at the official Diurnian documentations of marriage and divorce, that seemed the most likely scenario. I wondered if he were still alive. I paged through the thin packet once more, looking for anything that might provide a clue as to his whereabouts. On a whim, I fired up the tablet and looked up Franklin P. Wang in the local data repository.
    No hits.
    I looked up Franklin Wang and got no hits.
    That didn’t mean much. He could have changed his name or just removed it from the public directories. After twenty-odd stanyers, the trail was rather cold. I took one more long look and shrugged. Without his id number, any