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she queried again.

her oracle finally fired back at her.

All her systems were coming on-line now. Hard data flowed into her mind, buttressing the decohering haze of soft memory. Flesh and silicon, digital and organic systems knit themselves together. Meat and machine recombined in a quantum-faithful replica of the same Major Catherine Li who’d gone into cryo back on Metz.

She accessed her diagnostic programs and ran through the postjump protocols, checking entangled states, troubleshooting the Sharifi transforms, comparing pre- and postjump file sizes. Everything checked out.

Good; she didn’t have time for problems. She had to take care of her people. She needed to put Dalloway in for a commendation and ship him out to a new unit before all hell broke loose over Metz. And there was Kolodny’s family to see. Whatever family she had, which Li doubted was much.

Then she saw the trick her mind had played on her.

Metz had been over for almost three months. She’d taken care of everything: Kolodny’s family, Dalloway’s transfer, her own preliminary statements for the review board. She’d done it all in a manic three-day race against exhaustion and injury, wired to the gills on pain-suppression programs. Then she’d gone into the rehab tanks. And after that there would have been the cold freeze, the transfer to the jumpship, weeks of sublight travel by Bussard drive to reach Metz’s orbital relay and queue up for transfer.

How long had she been under? Twelve weeks? Thirteen?

She felt the old fear rising in her chest, caught herself flipping through directories, cross-checking, fighting to make sense of twisted fragments of soft data.

Stop, she told herself. You know the rule. Stick to this jump, this place. Let the last one go. Let the hard files pick up the slack. Don’t let the fear get you.

But the fear got her anyway. It always did. The fear was rational, reasonable, double-blind tested, empirically verifiable. It waited for her at the boarding gate and rode on her shoulder through every jump, every mission, every sweaty early-morning jump-dream. It asked the one question she couldn’t answer: what had she lost this time?

Decoherence was as slow and subtle as radiation. An unwired traveler could make five or six jumps in a lifetime without losing more than a few isolated dates and names. The real damage was cumulative, caused by the minute drift of spin states over the course of many replications—a slow bleed of information that couldn’t be stanched without sacrificing the quantum parallelism that made replication possible in the first place. It took short-term memory first. Then long-term memory. Then friends and loyalties and marriages. If you didn’t stop in time, it took everything.

Cybernetics could mask the problem. A field-wired Peacekeeper’s hard memory held backed-up spinfeed of every waking moment, on- and off-duty, since enlistment. And provided you didn’t lie to the psychtechs, the files preserved at least reasonably accurate preenlistment memories. Platformed on an enslaved AI and bolstered by psychotropic drugs, the datafiles could provide a working substitute for lost memories. But jump long enough, and everything you knew, everything that was you, flowed out of the meat and into the machine as inexorably as sand slipping through an hourglass. And Li, her oracle on-line, her hard memory fully reintegrated, could now recall that in the fourteen years, two months, and six days since enlistment she’d made thirty-seven Bose-Einstein jumps.

She fumbled for the coffin’s latch, found it at her right hip where it always was, popped the lid. It rose in a smooth whisper of hydraulics. She sat up.

The effort left her wracked with cramps, coughing up thick chunks of mucus. She couldn’t be Ring-side or on Alba, she realized; the Ring and Corps HQ were only one jump from anywhere on the Periphery, and her lungs wouldn’t feel this bad unless she’d been kept under through multiple