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By Root 530 0

five minutes away at the speed of light, vastly longer at the mere speed of sound—would arrive as a long, rumbling roar, bringing winds gusting up to ninety kilometers per hour. They would gust for six days; but the Darwin had already endured far worse, she told herself. // means that we will live!

“What lake is this?” asked Lieutenant Jee. “What sea?”

“No lake, no sea,” Captain Dalen said thoughtfully. “It’s a river whose west bank lies more than fifteen hundred kilometers to starboard, and whose delta is a hundred million klicks astern. You’ll find its source another hundred million in the opposite direction.”

“Then, it could take lifetimes to find all the hidden coasts, all the people.”

“Horta lifetimes,” the captain said, and felt the warmth within her that was the Horta equivalent of a smile. She looked downstream, down a stream longer than the distance between most planets, and she contemplated the feeling that the universe outside had been swelling, just before the Balboa and the Enterprise disappeared. She wondered what “quantum dimensional folds” and “baby universes” really meant, and realized that she already knew. She and everything around her was smaller than a virus, smaller than a proton, and more ghostly than a neutrino … from a certain point of view …

“So much to see,” she continued. “So much to do.”

“I want to see the place where the old world rolled,” Jee sang excitedly. “What must the land look like there?”

“I believe we will be able to find out,” said Captain Dalen. “I have been reviewing the maps, and I have found that one of this river’s tributaries feeds from the lake over which the planet slid.”

“And the hole in the Great Scott Sea?” Jee asked. “What must it look like, up close?”

“We have no choice but to find out,” the captain said. “We seem to have inherited the Enterprise’s mission, whether we like it or not. We’ve got this ship, and we’ve got unexplored light minutes through which to creep, and we’ve got a faith to keep.”

“A faith? With whom? With the Federation?”

“Yes, and with ourselves—and with …” She swept her gaze up the sky, again—up the river in the sky—again. She turned her back on her lieutenant and slid uphill, toward the bridge.

“With whom?” Jee called after her. “With whom?” she insisted.

“Let’s go somewhere,” Captain Dalen replied to her shipmate. “Thataway.”

Table of Contents

Epilogue