Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling and World Fantasy Award winning author. His novels and almost one hundred stories have been translated into nineteen different languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, and Astounding Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He currently lives in Ohio.

BY THE WARMTH OF THEIR CALCULUS

Tobias S. Buckell

Three ships hung in the void. One sleek and metallic, festooned with jagged sensors and the melted remains of powerful weapons, all of it pitted by a millennium of hard radiation and micro-impacts. The other two, each to either side, were hand-fashioned balls of ice and rock, flesh and blood, vegetation and animal, cratered from battles and long orbits through the Ring Archipelago where the dust had long battered their muddy hulls.

Koki-Fiana fe Sese hung in the air inside a great bauble of polished, clear ice in the underbelly of her dustship, and looked out at the ancient seedship as the sun’s angry red light glinted across nozzles and apparatus the purpose of which she could only guess.

There was the void between the two ships. And when she looked past that, she could see the small sparks of light that were the outer planets where her people could not reach as they were far out of the dust plane. And then beyond the outer planet came the stars, where the priests said people traveled from on their seedships. Though artificiers couldn’t believe that, as it would have taken millennia to cross distances that vast, and seedships were just fragile metal buckets.

And angry, dark things waited in the dark between the stars.

Then she saw something that chilled her more than the ice just an arm’s length away, or the void beyond it: a sequence of lights, some flickering and dying away, appeared all down the center of the ancient ship’s hull.

Another, lone light began winking furiously on the hull of the seedship. It was battle language. Fiana pushed away from the clear, window-like ice and grabbed a handhold near the airlock. There was a speaking tube there. She smacked the switch for Operations. There was a hiss, and a click as pneumatic tubes reconfigured.

“Mother here,” she said quickly. “I see incoming communication.”

Fiana didn’t have the common words and their sequences memorized anymore. It had been twenty years since she’d had her eyes glued to a telescope, watching for incoming while hoping she wouldn’t have to page through a slim dictionary floating from a belt. She was the Mother Superior now, the heart of the ship.

She wished she still had the aptitude, waiting for the message to get passed on was taking too damn long.

“Mother Superior!” The response was tinny, and they weren’t following their training to throw their voice well. “Sortie Leader Two says the Belshin Historians tried to recover data from the seedship. They turned on a subsystem, and that triggered another power up somewhere else.”

Ancient circuits were coming online just across the void.

“Floating shit,” Fiana whispered.

“Please repeat?” Ops sounded terrified. Their voice had cracked.

They were all floating next to a giant beacon. They were like a raw hunk of meat hanging outside at sunset back on Sese, and the sawflies would be coming to chew them apart any second now.

“Call for all riggers to stand by the sail tubes,” Fiana ordered. “Every available pair of eyes not in Figures and Orbits needs to be on a telescope, and if we run out of scopes, stand next to someone with one. Cancel all watches, muster all minds. Sound the alarm, Ops.”

A moment later, a plaintive wail filled the rocky corridors of the dustship.Commands were shouted, echoed, and hands slapped against rails as people rushed to their posts.

“Tell F&O to begin plotting possible escape vectors,” Fiana added. “All possibilities need to be in the air for us to consider.”

“Urgent from Sortie Two: they’re under attack.”

“Attack? From what?” Fiana looked back at the ice, but all she could see was the silver metal of ancients. She could see the wink wink wink of communication, but nothing else betrayed what was happening.

She felt helpless.

The other dustship’s hull rippled, as if something inside was pushing at the skin from the inside to get out. Then the Belshin ship cracked open. It vomited water and air slowly into the void as Fiana watched in horror.

“Sortie Two have warned us not to signal back,” Ops said.

“Is there an F&O rep there?” Fiana asked. “If so, put her on, now.”

“Heai-Lily here,” came a strong voice.

“I want full sails out, and a vector away from here. Pick the first one out.”

Lily hesitated. “There are Hunter-Killer exhaust sign reported. We’re plotting them against known objects in this plane. We need to work the figures, but, most of F&O is guessing we’re surrounded.”

“It was a trap.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“We can’t deploy the sails, they’ll spot the anomaly.”

“I think so, Mother.”

They should have swung by and left the ship alone when they found the Belshin dustship arriving at the same time. Archipelago treaty rules gave them both genetic exploration rights, and Fiana had wanted to get in and pull material out. She’d assumed the Belshin were after the same thing. It wouldn’t have been the first time multiple dustships from opposing peoples had to work on an artifact together. There were rules for this sort of thing.

But the Belshin had been greedy and violated those rules.

The Hunter-Killers had left something in the seedship for them. And now Belshin were paying the price. And Fiana’s entire ship might well pay it as well.

“Ops is telling me to tell you that Sortie Two is free of the hull and returning.”

The team would be jumping free of the seedship, eyeballing their own trajectories back to the netting on that side of the dustship. They’d pull it in after them. They wanted nothing that looked made by intelligence on the outside of the dustship.

“Lock down all heat exchangers and airlocks once they’re in. We’re running tight from here on out.”

Fiana wanted to curl up into a ball near the speaking tube, but instead she forced herself to kick away, grab a corner, and flip into the corridor. She flew her way down the center, using her fingertips to adjust her course.

Ops, the hub deep in the ship, was packed with off-watch specialists, their eyes wide with fear but plugging away at tasks and doing their best to pitch in. Everyone hung from footholds, making Ops feel like a literal hive of busy humanity.

There was an “up” to the sphere that was Ops, but many of the stations were triplicated throughout. This was so that the crew could let the ship orient however it needed, and also to give engineering two failsafe command stations for every primary. Watches rotated station placements to make sure everything was in good order.

But in an all-call situation like this, everyone was at a station. Once Fiana had an acceleration vector ordered, if it became safe to do it, they’d reorganize Ops so that everyone was at a station on the “down” part.

For now, they were drifting slowly away from the seedship. But with Hunter-Killers arrowing in toward them, she doubted they would get far enough away not to be of interest when the damn things arrived.

Sortie two gave their report right away. The all-male team floated nervously in a ready room in front of Fiana and Odetta-Audra fe Enna, one of the Secondary Mothers.

“There were two Hunter-Killers on board,” Sim, the sortie leader said. “They lit up the moment the Belshin Historians got the engine room powered up. I think it was a mistake though, they were just trying to get the ancient screens to talk to them.”

“Treaty breakers,” Audra spat. She’d been simmering with fury since Fiana first saw her in Ops. She was concealing her fear, Fiana knew, covering it up with anger to fuel herself. Most times, it made her a fast, decisive leader, though it often led to intimidation and some distance between Audra and the folk she needed to lead. Right now, it was making the sortie men nervous.

They’d been in a dangerous situation and their nerves were already rattled, so Fiana gently tapped Audra’s wrist. A warning to let her Mother Superior lead the questions for now. They’d worked together long enough for Audra to get the signal.

“It’s a temptation all librarians and historians struggle with,” Fiana said. “Particularly peoples on the far side of the Archipelago. A wealth of knowledge from the ancients and their golden age of machinery. A piece of that could give them the ability to draw even with us.”

Nations had, after all, been built on the success of daring raids on old ships, with historians writing down what they saw in ancient script as fast as they could before making a dash for it. Only one of ten missions would make it out alive, though.

“We asked them to wait until we were done with the collection mission,” Sim said. “But one of their team told us they were low on consumables because they were so far from home. We focused on doing what we came to do as quickly as we could and getting away. We did not think the historians already knew a power-up sequence or we wouldn’t have stayed.”

They had thought they had time to work on carefully cracking the glass pods open enough to slip a needle through without triggering any of the seedship’s alarms.

But Sim had kept his head and captured what they could. Seven samples, ancient DNA that would be uncorrupted by radiation and genetic drift or the tight bloodlines of the small worldlets of the Archipelago.

The Great Mothers of the worlds wouldn’t invest in these missions without that payoff. When their ancestors built the Archipelago, they’d suspected that background radiation and cosmic rays would wreak havoc over time. Whatever the world was like that people fled from, it was well shielded, and the people who ran before the Hunter-Killers hadn’t had time to invent a biological solution.

So these missions, these long loops out of the safety of the great dust planes to the drifting seedships for their frozen, protected heritage, was necessary for her people to continue to survive. These ships had shielding they did not understand and could not replicate. Not without the kind of industry that would bring the Hunter-Killers screaming toward them.

“Did you see—” Fiana started.

“Yes.” Sim looked down and shivered slightly. “It looked like a spider. When we heard the alarm, we did as trained. Stripped down, no artificial fibers, no clothes, no tools, no weapons. We let it come.”

“That couldn’t have been easy.” Fiana reached out and squeezed Sim’s hand, the poor thing was shivering as he thought back to what happened on the seedship they were still within jumping distance of.

“It ran past us to the Belshin. They had weapons. They fought it. They died. It broke out the airlock they came through and went for their ship.”

And Fiana had seen what came next. The Hunter-Killer had detonated itself, destroying the Belshin world ship.

Heai-lily came with a bundle of flexies two hours later. Her strong hair joyously sprung out around her head, as if holding compressed energy inside like springs. Her eyes, though, were tired and red.

She carefully hung the transparent sheets in the air of the ready room around Fiana.

“We have trajectories,” she said. The clear rectangles had been marked up with known objects in small, careful dots from one of the navigation templates.

In red, nine X marks with arrows denoted velocities and directions. From where Fiana hung, she could get a sense of the three-dimensional situation they were in.

“They’re converging on us.” Fiana had suspected as much but hearing it from Lily still made her stomach roil slightly. “With options for covering any chances at escape if we run.”

“So you have no solutions for me?”

“Right now, we have a farside that is hidden from their instruments. We could vent consumables that would match the profile of an icy rock getting heated up. It’d be suspicious, but not completely outside of the realm of naturally occurrent activity.”

“That’ll get us up to a walking pace away from the seedship,” Fiana said.

“Over time. We’ll have to randomize the jets, and it’ll eat into our water and air.”

And that would be dangerous, as right now they needed to drift in place to avoid attention.

“What does that drift get us?” Fiana asked.

“Further above the dust planes,” Lily said. “Until we re-intersect.”

“That’s not good.” They would be unable to maneuver with sails. The hundreds of dust rings around the Greater World, separated by bands and layers, would be too far away for them to shoot their sails out into. Fiana’s dustship had hundreds of miles of cable they could use to guide a sail far out into a pocket of faster or slower moving dust, or even to grapple with a larger object. But above it all, they would be helpless until they’d swung all the way back around the Greater World and hit the dust planes again.

“We have a good library of discovered objects and their trajectories. If we can swing out and back in, there’s a collision zone we can disguise our trajectory with.”

It just meant weeks above the dust. Above everything they were comfortable with.

But what was the alternative? Stay put and wait for the Hunter-Killers? Fiana wasn’t a historian, but even she knew that the Hunter-Killers tore apart everything in an area that registered electrical activity.

Her ancestors had tall, black steles scattered around their world with old pictograms carved into their sides that warned them about the Hunter-Killers. Told stories about how the alien machines followed shouts into the stellar night to their source and destroyed them. And despite those proscriptions, Hulin the Wise had experimented with crystal radio devices in the polar north of Sese. An asteroid impact had cracked the world, almost revealing the hollow interior her people had hidden inside since the ancestors first arrived. Those had been years of children dying as air fouled, and great engineering projects struggled to do the impossible: fix a cracked world.

“How fast can we get out of here?”

“Using consumables, it’s dangerous, Mother. We need to coordinate with Ops. The margin will be thin, if we want to get out of here before the Hunter-Killers.”

Fiana swept the transparent sheets around her away. “I’ll get Ops ready to follow your commands.”

To stay put would be to wait passively for death, and she wasn’t ready to welcome the Hunter-Killers onto her ship.

Within the hour, the far side of the dustship was venting gases as crew warmed the material up (but not too much, or the heat signature would be suspicious and hint at some kind of unnatural process), compressed the water and hydrogen in airlocks through conduits of muscular tubes that grew throughout the ship, and blasted it out in timed dumps at F&O’s orders.

Slowly, faster than the natural differential drift already there, Fiana’s dustship began to move away from the seedship. It trailed a tail behind, gleaming like a comet.

The dustship was a living organism. Its massive hearts pumped ichor around webs of veins that exchanged heat generated by the living things inside the rock and ice hull, both human and engineered. The great lungs heaved, and the air inside moved about. Its bowels gurgled with waste, and its stomach fermented grain to feed the people.

Sese’s people had worked hard to create a biological, living shell that could move through the rings around the Greater World. And they had found the other worlds the ancients had created, some of them dead hulks. Because the Hunter-Killers were ever on the prowl and not just myths to scare children with that had been passed down through the mists of prehistory.

Figures and Orbits, down in their calculatorium, worked away at the reports of Hunter-Killer movements, tracking them as they arrowed in toward the seedship. And other telescopists watched as the seedship dwindled away, until it became a glint among the other points of light in the busy sky.

And Fiana hung in Ops, watching as the activity of the ship passed on through the watch stations and crew.

It was tense, the first few full rotations. No one slept. There were tears that hung in the air. Salty fear, exhaustion, tension. The idea that the killers of the Ancients were chasing them could unnerve anyone.

Yes, they’d escaped the initial trap, but that didn’t mean they were safe yet.

Fiana broke the tension when she ordered watches to resume a standard staggered watch rotation again. Even if she wasn’t so sure she wouldn’t need all-call, she needed the crew to function. Any more than three shifts and a person could not function under a constant press of fear, watchfulness, and readiness.

So she took the pressure for herself.

Fiana was inspecting the crew shaving ice from the outer walls, using one of the many burrowed tunnels in the hull, when Lily caught up to her.

“May I have a moment, Mother?” she asked softly.

“They keep sending you to brief me,” Fiana noted. “You are a subordinate, not a superior. Why is your team doing this?”

“The more experienced calculating seniors need to be in the calculatorium at all times. We are at capacity, Mother, and this is not a time for anyone who needs work verified.”

Lily wouldn’t meet her eyes.

Well, she was either ashamed to admit she was the weakest calculator in the ship, or the F&O mothers were using her as a firewall in case Fiana got angry with them.

Or, if the F&O mothers were smart, and they were the elite of void-faring peoples, the answer could be both things at the same time. Maybe it didn’t hurt that Fiana would be less likely to be angry with a young, nervous Lily. And maybe they needed the best to stay in the room and work the problem.

“What’s the emergency, Lily?”

“We’re moving slower than expected, Mother. It has orbital and schedule implications. We can’t vent heat because we didn’t quite get where we thought we’d be to have cover of several larger rocky objects blocking us from Hunter-Killer view.”

Fiana batted aside ice shavings and tried to focus over the hammering of pick axes and scrape of shovels.

“F&O made a mistake?” she asked. This could cost lives. No wonder they’d sent the almost childlike Lily to stare over at her with wide eyes. “Are you sure? The signal crew could have made a sighting mistake.”

A bunch of boys with astrolabes at the telescopes doing their best astronomical sightings. F&O took the averages of repeated sightings.

“The math is strong,” Lily protested, her voice firm with trust in her colleagues. “And junior F&O took sightings to confirm. The signal crew were accurate.”

“But we’re off track?” There was no room for that kind of error. If they didn’t arrive at the right place at the right time, they wouldn’t be able to tether off the right large rock, or hit the right dust plane to adjust their path.

They’d end up running out of air, or water, slowly dying, out of reach of any other dustship or world that could lend aid.

Lily gave her a summary report, written in small and careful handwriting, filled with diagrams and area maps. Fiana would have to crawl over the details later in her quarters, poring over the equations and running checks with her own slide rule. A Mother Superior of a dustship was required to know the math, Fiana had been an F&O staffer herself in her youth.

But it was going to be slow work to make sure she understood everything in the report.

Tight was the crown of leadership, Fiana knew. It would be a headache she had to bear.

Fiana cursorily looked through the report until she found the summary. She bit her lip. “F&O thinks there’s more mass than we accounted for?”

“About sixty chipstones worth of mass.”

Sixty chipstones. About ten people’s worth of mass. Had they known their audit was off, they could have thrown out non-essential material from the inside to balance the ship. They could have hidden it away in the ice and consumables they’d blown.

It shouldn’t have been off, though. They’d based their lives on the audit run before maneuvers.

“There was an audit,” Fiana said. And everyone on board knew how important an audit was before a maneuver.

“F&O is not accusing anyone of anything, we are merely reporting the math. It doesn’t lie, Mother. You can check it yourself.”

She would. But for now, Fiana was not going to assume her specialists were wrong. She had to trust that her team was doing their best work. “I will check it, but I will wager it agrees with you. I’ll call another mass audit. Something isn’t right. We’ll see if we can solve for the mystery yet.”

Even though she hung in the air, Lily visibly relaxed as tension drained from her body.

“Of course, Mother. We will put our second shift at your disposal and keep only a core team running calculations.”

The heat began to build. Crew took to wearing just simple wraps when off shift, and then Fiana gave permission for everyone to strip to just undergarments.

Globes of salty sweat hung in the stultifying air and sunken eyes made everyone look like tired ghosts.

The ship’s Surgeon, Lla-Je fe Sese kicked his foot against the door to the captain’s quarters in the middle of an off-watch. Fiana was startled to find him hanging in place, face flushed and worried.

“Mother, we are all in danger of heat stroke,” Je said, without apologizing for waking her. The red emergency light in the doorway glimmered off his shaved scalp. It was the way of the surgeons to shave, though Je was male and used to shaving. For surgeons it was ritual demonstration of control of a razor, a tradition hundreds of years old. A surgeon with a nick on her body was not to be trusted, or so the saying went. Je said it was actually done for hygiene, but it helped that men were expected to be fastidious about it as well. Fiana always imagined it must have been weirder for the regular surgeons to hew to the tradition, given expectations. “How much longer will we be containing our waste heat?”

They’d been drifting for days now, moving further away from the seedship. The thick wall of ice around the hull that they mined for air and water had been scraped down, warmed, and vented. In some parts, the hull was down to only rock and mud.

“Fifteen full shifts before we reintersect with the dust fields.” One orbit around the Greater World. They would have to deploy full sails on return, but the higher orbit would let the area the Hunter-Killers were infesting move ahead under them. They would plunge back into a different part of the Archipelago with barely any water and air left.

“Crew will be dying from the heat long before then,” Je said somberly.

“What should we look for?” Fiana asked wearily. Die of heat now, or miss their chance to get to safety when they reintersected with the dust planes and the Archipelago. Floating diarrhea, those choices.

“Confusion, irritability—” Like Fiana’s irritability at being woken? Though, to be fair, she’d been sleeping slightly, dozing as she bumped from the wall to the hammock. “Dry skin, vomiting, panting, and flushed faces.”

“We’re out in the void, Je. The Hunter-Killers can move out here without needing sails or tethers, but we’re helpless until we intersect with the dust rings again.”

“Then all that our people will find will be a ghost ship,” Je said seriously. “If they are able to find us at all.”

He was so serious. Always worried. And it wasn’t his place to look this long in the face. It was Fiana’s. But Je had always been high-minded. He wouldn’t have fought so hard for a place in the Surgeons’ Academy without a certain amount of hard pushiness.

“What do you recommend, my surgeon?”

“Daily internal thermometer checks for every crewmember,” Je said.

“Internal? Is that what I think you mean?”

“It is.”

“Je . . . ” Fiana trailed off. Then she took a deep breath. “I can’t have your team sticking tubes up everyone’s ass once a day.”

Particularly not if some male surgeon was doing it. Her team of commanding mothers trusted that Fiana valued Je, but a lot of them were old-fashioned and uncomfortable with having large, awkward hands on the handle of a blade.

“Then draw up a list of essential crew that you can’t afford to lose, and they will be tested once a day. We’re risking lives, understand?”

“I’ll have the list drawn up, but we don’t start taking temperatures until people start passing out,” Fiana said. “The DNA samples are in lead cases in the ice rooms with our food. We can put anyone in danger there for now.”

But it would be a temporary solution.

It was enough to mollify Je. For now.

But the decisions would become tougher as this went on.

The mass audit came back from a sweaty, tired Audra, who tracked Fiana down in the galley hall. The Secondary Mother had sheaves of clear flexies filled with accounting tables.

“There’s unaccounted for mass. We did the audit. We tested the ship’s acceleration profile. The amount of mass they estimated is dead-on: there’s sixty chipstone worth of something somewhere. Manifests can’t account for it. We’ve checked everything we can think of.”

Fiana offered her a pocket of cooled water, which Audra took and sucked on gratefully. Fiana used that as a moment to capture her own thoughts and continue nibbling at a basket of grapes.

“We’re going to have to search everyone’s cabins, verify personal allowances,” Audra said, before Fiana could even speak.

“No.” Fiana shook her head. “There are just over a hundred crew. And yes, split, that could be enough.” And when they sailed out from Sese, they did not have to consider how true their mass was; they just deployed sails into the appropriate dust plane until they had the speed and vectors needed.

“We only did a rough manifest and mass account before leaving,” Audra noted.

“I’ve sailed the dust planes of the Greater World all my life, Audra. I’ve been F&O, then Secondary Mother, and now Mother. I’d sense it in my bones the moment we left if the sails were straining, our vessel heavy.” Fiana said. “No, this has only been a problem since that seedship.”

Audra, her legs looped around an air-chair, straightened. “What are you thinking?”

“Take the survey teams, the men, out onto the hull. Use airlocks facing away from the dust to keep cover. Full Encounter rules. Do you understand what I am asking you? Can you do that?”

Audra looked past Fiana, out into a personal darkness and into fear as she considered her own death. Fiana was asking her to go out an airlock, seal it with ice and rock once the team was out, and then they would search the hull.

If they encountered Hunter-Killers, they would jump off into the vacuum and scatter to their deaths. They would not, under any circumstance, return to any known airlock, lest they lead the enemy inside. Maybe the Hunter-Killers wouldn’t buy that. Maybe they would. It was still a hard thing to ask of a person.

Audra would know that if she turned this down, Fiana would honor her choice. But it would be a blow to her standing.

“I will lead a team,” Audra said in a low, determined voice. “We need to find out what may have killed us.”

Fiana held her hand and squeezed it. Such bravery. She had no doubt in Audra. It’s why she had chosen the strong mind from her old F&O cohort to join her when the World Mothers had given Fiana a command of her own.

For an entire watch, the ship went about its business in a pre-funereal silence, with crew jumping at every bang and creak in the empty air.

Je came to report on two crewmembers who had passed out. An older F&O calculator and one of the survey men. He had given them fluids and put them in a freezer to let them cool down.

“The ship is suffering too,” he told her. The ship’s heart had an infection, he judged. Some kind of pericarditis inflaming the sac around the great muscle. They were pumping it full of antibiotics and hoping for the best.

“We can’t dump heat, not yet,” Fiana told him.

“I know,” Je said softly. “I know.”

The warble of airlock alarms echoed. Je twisted in the air to look down the corridor. “They’re coming back inside.”

Crew streamed through the air toward the doors. They weren’t carrying weapons. There was nothing that would stop a Hunter-Killer, there was no point.

But they still came, determination on their faces, fists clenched. They would have thrown their bodies against the deadly machines to buy their sisters another minute of life, Fiana knew, with a tight knot in her stomach.

Voidsuits came through instead of gleaming, spidery balls of death. Fiana relaxed slightly.

And then more suits struggled through.

And more.

Despite herself, Fiana said aloud, “There are too many of them!”

Ten other suits that hadn’t piled into the airlock on the way out.

Ten.

That could be sixty chipstones. If they were . . .

They removed their helmets, and the confused crew gasped.

Belshin men. Ten Belshin men.

Ten Belshin males had maybe doomed them all. It was something that Fiana kept rolling around her head for all its strangeness as she stared at the ten foreign faces hovering before her.

It was the math. The simple math. The massive ball of rock and ice looked substantial, but orbital mechanics were precise and unforgiving. Their weight had slowed them down enough to throw off the maneuver.

Fiana pointed at them. “You activated the seedship, you unleashed the Hunter-Killers on us all, and then you fled to our hull to hide! You have the audacity to hide on my ship?”

“They don’t speak Undak,” Je said. “Do you want me to translate? They’re expecting that you will throw them out of the airlock. They’re terrified.”

Fiana saw it on their faces. Resignation, fear, some defiance.

Audra crossed her arms. “We should slice off their balls, put them in the fridge with the seedship DNA, and then shove the floating shits out the airlock.”

“Don’t translate that,” Fiana said to Je.

“Engage the Lineage Protocol,” Audra said. “We need to initiate it now. While we still have some sort of chance.”

Fiana could hear Je suck in his breath. She looked over at Audra. “We’re not going to talk about the Protocol right now. These are human lives you’re talking about.”

Audra glanced at Je. “Mother, he knew the risks when he agreed to join the ship.”

“Lives,” Fiana said slowly. “All of the lives on this ship are important.”

Je was only half listening. Several of the newcomers were chattering to him.

“They know you’re angry,” Je reported, cutting Audra off. “They’re expecting you to kill them. They’re gastric plumbers. Belshin slaves. They fled when their ship was attacked.”

“We cannot afford the increase in consumables,” Audra hissed. “We’re far out into the void. We’re off orbit and schedule. You know what needs to be done, and it needs to be done quickly. Your crew is depending on you.”

Fiana raised a finger. “Audra—”

Audra pushed herself back away from the room. “As one of your secondaries, I have to remind you: every moment those males remain on board is a moment stolen from our own future. It’s math. It means cold, hard decisions. But that is what leaders do: they make the hard choices.”

Fiana took Lily into one of the observation ice bowls.

“I wanted to show you something,” Fiana said, drifting out toward the polished ice.

The young F&O calculator hung next to her. “Mother?”

Fiana pointed out at the dark. “Look out there, Lily. All those small points of light. That’s something few, if any people from the Archipelago ever get to see.”

From here, they could see the entirety of the dust plane. The multitudes of the rings, the rocky moons.

Lily held up a thumb. “All of our people out there. Hiding away from Hunter-Killers.”

They stared at the dust band for a long while.

Lily cleared her throat. “Even if you sacrifice the Belshin, we can’t fix the orbit.”

“I spent two whole nights running the figures,” Fiana said. “Audra ran them as well. Fifty people can survive a full braking maneuver and a loop by object IF-547, then 893, and a second all-sails slow that you and F&O have given me.”

“So, it’s Lineage Protocol.” Lily turned her back to the dust plane. “They tell you in the Academy not to get too attached to the men aboard.”

“People I trust are all telling me it’s time.” Fiana rubbed her forehead. The headaches were getting more and more intense. “We only have enough for fifty people to survive until we reintercept the dust plane.”

Protocol said it was time to take donations from all the men, store the material, and then ask them all to do the honorable thing. The noble thing. If they balked, then it was the Mother Superior’s job to enforce the choice.

Only women could bear the next generation. Fiana needed to act to secure futures.

And yet . . .

“The ideas that fix this situation, they won’t come from just one person dictating them. It’s going to have to come from everyone working the math. And being cross-checked.”

Lily’s eyes widened. “You’re not going to engage the protocol?”

“Hard choices. The other mothers keep telling me to make hard choices.” Fiana pushed away. “But the people who tell me that don’t have to bear the consequences of those choices, and don’t see the whole community, just the part of it that they identify with. It’s easy to make a ‘hard’ choice when the price is paid by someone else.”

“This won’t be a popular decision,” Lily said. “And I won’t tell Audra you called her unimaginative.”

“Thank you.” Fiana patted her shoulder. “I need you to work out the problem, talk to anyone who might have ideas, and to lean on your peers.”

“We’ll keep running ideas through the team,” Lily promised. “There are things the engineers have proposed in the past. More non-essential mass that could be jettisoned. It could help.”

Because there was math. And then there was math. Math was a tool, wasn’t it? A tool to be wielded or mastered.

And Fiana wasn’t going to give it blood.

Four crew passed out and were found floating in the corridors. Je came to Fiana, his face pinched and ruddy, to give her an update.

“Mother, we should have off-duty crew switch to a three-person cross-check system so that no one ends up alone.”

“I’ll send out orders.” Fiana was hooked into the ‘top’ of her room, which was laced with foot-webbing. She’d been holding a position in front of an air vent, letting the rush of air bob her back and forth.

“And I need to check you over,” Je said.

Fiana waved a hand. “I’m fine. There are others who need your attention, Je.”

“You’re the Mother Superior,” Je insisted.

Fiana wiped a fat bead of sweat collecting behind her ear. The air was getting so thick she felt like she couldn’t breathe anymore. They’d stopped venting and the heat, the moisture from shaving the ice, and the dust in the air had turned the ship into a swamp.

“I will endure,” Fiana said. “If I feel I’m at risk, I’ll let you know.” Je didn’t look happy, but he couldn’t really do anything about it, so he nodded. He had floated his way back to the entryway, and he paused there, hands and feet in an X and gripping the door’s lip.

“Mother, may I ask you something?”

His voice had softened, and Fiana could hear the worry.

“Lineage Protocol?” she asked him.

“Such a dry name for something so horrific,” Je said as he nodded.

“F&O is working hard on a solution. I’ve asked all for ideas. But, in a nutshell, we need to breathe less, surgeon. We used too much as a simple rocket to get us away from the Hunter-Killer area. The math is simple and hard to escape. We only have so much air and we know how many people are onboard.”

“The equation is simple,” Je said. “So we change the assumed inputs. The air-use rate is based on an assumption created by surgeons for average crew with average activity.”

Je had her complete attention.

“Can you actually get the crew to breathe less?”

“The more you move, the more you breathe. So, we freeze crew shifts. Everyone bound to their room and webbed in. No one moves until rescue. The command room shift stays in place and sleeps in place.”

“You’re asking the entire crew to stay in bed for twelve full shift rotations?”

“And to focus on breathing slowly and deeply. And that is not all. We have drugs for surgeries. The larger ones that use more air, we will need to drug them.”

“And what will that get us, Je? Will that get us to the dust plane? Will that halve the air we use?”

“This isn’t math, it’s biology. Messy, imprecise,” Je said.

“Give me an estimate,” Fiana ordered. Because she couldn’t risk lives based on messiness.

“I think we can reduce our air usage to two-thirds. Maybe to a half. We won’t know until we start the experiment and monitor the impact.”

Two-thirds still left a ghost ship. A third was an unblinking gulf that still couldn’t be crossed.

But it would mean fewer lives that needed chosen for sacrifice.

“Ready the drugs,” Fiana said. “We’ll run the experiment and get a shift’s worth of data.” It wouldn’t get them there by itself. It wasn’t the solution. But it was something they could test.

Audra appeared at the door and shoved Je aside. She had a bandolier strapped tight across her chest and had changed into her dark black sortie uniform. Her pistol was in its forearm holster.

“Mother, we have a mutiny!” Audra said. “The men heard that Lineage Protocol will be called for. Some of them released the Belshin prisoners and broke into the armory.”

The mutiny spread quickly. Panicked men took weapons into common areas which they barricaded with decoration panels ripped from the walls. Many of them were on sortie parties, so were familiar with in-ship combat and knew where to find the weapons.

“We have the numbers,” Audra said. Few could match her well-trained cadre. “My sisters are fast and are the best hall-grapplers in the fleet.”

Audra and her team would fight bitterly. They were Sortie Three, rarely sent to other ships, but trained to protect this one. They were backed up by members of engineering and women from the stays and tether teams, with their arms muscled from handling spider-silk ropes.

They raced down corridors to the heart of the mutiny where the chanting men were making their demands heard.

“Stop here!” Another woman in black held out a hand near a turn in the rock-ice corridor. “Mother, they’re shooting anyone who tries to approach the barricade.”

They all grabbed rails and stopped. Fiana listened to the shouts, the men trying to keep each other roused to bravery with their too deep voices. No raising them to neutral-sounding tones now because they were speaking to mothers or sisters around the ship.

“We should have expected this,” Audra said, acid in her voice.

Je said nothing but shrank back as if trying to hide against the wall.

Fiana looked around again at the nervous, but anticipatory sortie crew all watching Audra, waiting for the command. Then, she quickly peeked around the corner.

“Mother!”

The men shouted at her but didn’t shoot. Fiana took that as a good sign and stopped to look at the crudely hammered together door leading to the common rooms and the forms that she could see through the gaps nervously flitting around.

“Get Lily from F&O,” Fiana ordered.

“And?” Audra also looked ready to go.

“It’s the heat,” Fiana said. She was panting from the race over here. “It’s affecting our minds. Leading us to mistakes.”

“My mind is tempered well,” Audra hissed. “They are traitors to Sese, and foreign agitators from the other side of the Archipelago.”

“What are their demands?” Fiana couldn’t tell from all the yelling.

“They want the chance to live through lottery,” one of the tether women with a simple club in her hands said.

“That’s treason,” Audra said. She leaned forward. “If we fight them, we can take care of the dilemma we face.”

“Death makes traitors of many,” Fiana said. “And the heat addles their minds. All our minds. Wouldn’t you say, surgeon?”

Je did not look happy about being addressed. “Mother . . . ”

But Fiana saw Lily coasting toward them and waved her over. “My calculator! We have a tricky situation.”

Fiana pulled the last of her wrap off, stripping herself naked, and then gently tapped the wall so that she would float out into the center of the corridor before Audra could react.

She could hear the sudden murmurs of surprise, the repeated low whispers of “Mother.”

They began to shout their demands through the barricade, but she held up a hand.

“It is too hot for a fight, but if we have to, you are outnumbered. And you know this. So we are going to talk about this instead, because I did not come out here into the void to do the Hunter-Killers’ work for them. Not when our ancestors risked so much to create the Archipelago and dust planes for our survival. I will not spit on their memories.”

They quieted.

“I don’t have the answer to our situation. But we, together, do.Come out to me, Je, Lily. Tell them what you’ve been telling me.”

Fiana looked back. She gestured at them both.

Slowly, the surgeon and the F&O calculator bobbled out to join her.

“F&O found our mass problem. They saved us from the Hunter-Killers. Je is keeping us alive as best as he can in this heat. I don’t have the solution to how we can make it back to the dust plane alive, but the two of them, with all of our help, might. There is no one answer here, but if we piece all of their ideas together, and add in some new ones, they could add up to enough to get us back home.”

Lily stared at the men, then bit her lip. “We need to shed mass once we’re at the apoapsis. Everything we can imagine we can do without and things we can’t. We need to pare the ice and rock to the bare minimum, down to nothing but air, sails, and our own bodies.”

“And the rest of us must strap in and not move until rescue. The biggest among us must be drugged,” Je said.

The men protested. That would surely impact them the most.

But Je argued with them. “These are the realities,” he insisted. “We have to breathe less . . . or not at all.”

“We could thin the air more,” one of the male voices on the other side suggested. “I’m in gastric, we can change the recirculation mixes.”

As the suggestions continued, Fiana relaxed.

“We are not separate from the civilization that birthed us,” she said to Audra. “We do not have to fall into murder and blood. Not this time.”

The great dustship calved at apoapsis, the very height of its orbit. Fiana would have liked to have seen it and the entire dust plane glinting its encirclement of their Greater World. But she had to be in her cabin. No one moved about, not even her. Surgeon’s orders.

It was not unusual for objects to break apart. Hopefully, anything watching would assume it was a normal event, a weakened body splitting apart and becoming two.

Now they would begin to gain speed, to dump off heat and more consumables to alter their trajectory just enough. They were speeding up, every tick as they dropped lower and lower.

“Why would you want to go back out there?” Je had once asked her, when they were on Sese’s interior walking through the botanical gardens. He raised a hand to encompass the whole world in all its lushness. She had been trying to recruit him as surgeon. The first male surgeon to fly the Archipelago void. “Why not stay and enjoy this world?”

“The only difference between them is scale, Je.Come see all the worlds. It reveals us for who we really are, to go out there.”

Fiana lay strapped to her webbing, in a drugged stupor, breathing slowly. There were many more full shifts ahead to endure before they would come screaming back into the dust and throw out the sails to chatter and bite and shake.

But they would get home, she thought dimly.

The math was there.