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gravity they knew was man-made in the rotating wheel-shaped towns that dotted the bright spaces around Virga’s artificial suns. Chaison was acutely aware that these were not the skies of Slipstream, though, because he’d been raised in the city of Rush whose sky was crowded. No town-wheels lit as the light ebbed in this place; the air wasn’t peppered with house-sized balls of water, the diaphanous nets of farms with their drifting galaxies of plant life, or the thousand-and-one vehicles and apparatuses of thriving commerce. There was no firm dividing line between civilization and winter, but if there had been he was pretty sure they’d be on the wrong side of it right now.
    When full dark came, they tried to sleep. Quite unsuccessfully.
    “What an irony!” Richard Reiss said after a while. Chaison started, and a tug at his shirtsleeve indicated Martor had done the same. “What?” he asked testily. He’d thought, just maybe, that he was drifting off.
    Richard sighed heavily. “Months I spent dreaming about getting out of that damned hellhole. Months spent imagining what my first free night would be like. Oh, my fantasies were elaborate, gentlemen! Satin sheets, gentle gravity, warm candlelight. How I miss gravity! And yet, here we are, enshrouded in a directionless dark even more complete than the cells we left. If not for the fact that I can hear you breathing, and you, Martor, incessantly scratching—why, I would think I was still back there. These last hours…seem like a dream.”
    Chaison nodded. During nights in his cell he had sometimes lost the line between dream and hallucination. It was easy to do in weightlessness and dark.
    Martor was lucky to have been allowed to use the prison’s little centrifuge. Without gravity to struggle against even the most iron-willed inmates were doomed to weaken over time. Your bones would become brittle after a few months, your limbs barely able to move much less resist when the guards came for you. The simple omission of weight guaranteed Falcon Formation a quiet, riot-free institution.
    Chaison had refused to succumb to that weakness. Every morning, as light returned the world to him, he would start bouncing gently from wall to wall, stretching out his limbs. The fingers of his left hand would touch concrete and push off, then, moments later, his right hand would touch the opposite wall. He would push with one foot, then the other. He would gradually increase the pace until he was kicking off with both feet and stopping himself with both hands—or failing to stop himself, and rolling into the impact with his shoulder. He had found every conceivable method for exercising against those walls and in the course of doing so had learned the contour of every knob and ridge left by the builders.
    None of this exercise had helped the one part of him whose strength had been sapped over the months: his sense of purpose. Chaison’s life had always been structured around duty and suddenly he had none. Without it, he had been dying inside.
    Now he found himself clinging to these two men not for protection or companionship, but because they gave him a reason to be here.
    He would see them safely home.
    “Tomorrow should be eventful,” he said. Richard scoffed, and Martor growled something at him.
    Then the boy laughed. “Listen to me, complaining! I should be grateful.”
    “And who would have thought,” said Richard, “that you would be grateful to be cold, shivering, and stranded in a cloud in the dark?”
    For some reason this seemed hysterically funny, and they all laughed, a little bit too long.
    “So, Martor,” said Chaison after a while. Then he hesitated. “This is going to seem terribly inconsiderate, after all we’ve been through. Since I’m pretty sure I’m not an admiral anymore, I’d like you to call me Chaison. And I’d be honored if I could address you by your first name…but I’m ashamed to say I don’t know what it is.”
    Martor snorted. “You been