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the next years, the humans helped their lovers in ways that were at first questionable, then illegal, and finally, treasonous.
    Along a thousand conduits, forbidden machines entered the prison.
    Under the watchful gaze of AI paranoids and suspicious captains, weapons were designed and built, then stored inside the floating bladders — invisible because the captains' sensors were sabotaged by the sympathizers.
    When it came, the rebellion gave no warning. Five captains were murdered, along with nine hundred-plus mates and engineers and young humans, including many of Washen's one-time friends. Their bodies and bioceramic brains were obliterated by laser light, not a memory left to save. The Great Nothingness had reclaimed a few of its weakest children — an accomplishment that must have made Manly intensely proud - and for a moment in time, the ship itself seemed to be in peril.
    Then the Master Captain took charge of the fight, and within minutes, the rebellion was finished. The war was won. Unrepentent prisoners were forced back into their chamber, and its ancient machinery was awakened for the first time in at least five billion years.The temperature inside the great cylinder dropped. Frost turned to hard ice, and numbed by the cold, the Phoenixes descended to the prison floor, huddling together for heat, cur sing the Master with their beaut iful songs, then with their next labored breath, their flesh turned into a rigid glassy solid, undead, and with an accidental vengeance, they were left glancingly immortal.
    Millennia later, as the Great Ship passed near Phoenix space, those frozen warriors were loaded into a taxi like cargo, then delivered home.
    Washen herself had overseen the transfer of the bodies. It wasn't an assignment that she had requested, but the Master, who surely possessed a record of the young woman's indiscretions, thought it would be a telling moment.
    Maybe it had been.
    The memory came like a rebellion. Stepping through her apartment door, she suddenly remembered that long-ago chore, and in particular, the look of a certain male Phoenix caught in mid-breath, his gills pulled wide and the blackness of the blood still apparent after thousands of years of dreamless sleep. Still lovely, Manly was. All of them were lovely. And just once, for an instant, Washen had touched the frozen feathers and the defiant beak with the sensitive glove of her lifesuit.
    Washen tried to remember what she was thinking as she touched her lost love.There had to be some leftover sadness and an older person's acceptance of things that would never change, and there had to be a captain's genuine relief that she had survived the assault. The ship was a machine and a mystery, and it was filled with living souls who looked on her to keep them safe . . . And at that instant, stepping into the familiar back hallway of her apartment, her thoughts were interrupted by the apartment's voice.
    'Message,' she heard.
    The entranceway was footworn silk-marble, its walls curre ntly wearing tapestries woven by a communal intelligence of antlike organisms. Before Washen could take a second step, she heard, 'A priority message. Coded. And urgent.'
    She blinked, her attentions shifting.
    'Black level,' she heard. 'Alpha protocols.'
    This was a drill. Those protocols were intended only for the worst disasters and the gravest secrets. Washen nodded, engaging one of her internal nexus links. Then after several minutes of proving that she was herself, the message was decoded and delivered.
    She read it in full, twice. Then she sent away for the essential confirmation, knowing this was an exercise, and the Masters office would thank her for her timely and efficient response. But the unthinkable occurred. After the briefest pause, the word 'Proceed' was delivered to her.
    She said it aloud, then whispered the rest of those incredible words.
    'Proceed with your mission, with utmost caution, begin ning immediately.'
    It took a lot to astonish an old