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reached into her kit, took a vid sheet, and stuck it into a corner of the mirror. It was a sales brochure for the Princess when she was new—years before Meriel was born.
    “It’s not fair,” she whispered. Without the Princess , her dream would die, and her promises to her mother would die with it. Without their ship, the kids would dissolve into the billions of anonymous spacers, lost to each other and without a future or family to help them.
    She had been content to keep the Princess on a low priority at the edge of her attention while she worked out the funding and legal issues. Sometimes, she could even go a few weeks without thinking about her, hoping that things would eventually work out. Not anymore.
    “Acknowledge,” she said, and a reply to Jeremy opened in the send queue. “Jeremy, I’ll try to see you on Lander. But how in hell can we clear her in twenty-one days? We tried for years to prove a negative. See ya. Send,” she said, and the message went into the send queue where it would wait until the Tiger could synchronize with the next communications beacon .
    Meriel touched the vid sheet, and the Princess’s brochure displayed a white ellipsoid stretched on the long axis. It was sleek and featureless as a polished river stone—a shape that would be welcome in a closed palm.
    According to the ship’s clock, her shift would not start for hours, but she dressed for work regardless. She was cargo chief now with a logistics-5 rating, and checking the cargo lashings before and after jumping was her responsibility.
    She went to the cabinet and took out the pack of meds her contract obliged her to take for the nightmares and grumpy moods. She took out a pill and held it between her fingers. One pill and the nightmares and flashbacks will disappear for a few days, she thought, no cold sweats, no anxiety attacks. And I won’t have to wait until Lander to get boost. One pill and I’ll forget about the attack and freezing and…what I did.
    She rolled the pill between her fingers. But if I do, I’ll also forget about Elizabeth and the Princess and stop caring again.
    No, never again. I promised. She crushed the pill and sprinkled the dust directly into the toilet, just as she had done every morning for seven years.
    She zipped up the high collar of her shirt to cover the long scar that crossed her chest and then flipped her hair to cover the white tip that ran behind her ear. The visor that fixed her hair in place included an embedded link that was much safer than an implanted link and made it less likely that a brief moment of stupidity would command a bot to take a shortcut through the hull and space the entire cargo.
    ***
    “Crap,” Meriel said and walked to the cargo bay. There’s nothing I can do about the Princess now. She scanned the Tiger’s roster on the heads-up display of her visor. Let’s see. Maybe twenty-five crew and another twenty-five passengers.
    A crewman in blues with silver bars on his lapels caught her attention. He’s a nav-4 , she thought and scrolled the roster for photos. Let’s see…medium tall…brown hair. What’s his name? Smith, John. As she walked up to introduce herself, the view through the window caught her eye, and she stopped.
    The window ran the length of the passageway and overlooked a sea of pearlescent green with red filaments of hydrogen weaving through towering pillars of black and gray.
    “Makes you want to suit up and go EVA,” she said to break the ice.
    “Uh-huh,” he murmured and just stared out the window. After a few moments, he  noticed her reflection in the window and turned to her.
    “Say, aren’t you the new cargo chief?” he asked, and Meriel nodded. “I’m John Smith.”
    Meriel folded her arms and leaned against the bulkhead. “So where are we, Mr. Navigator?”
    “Well, we jumped from Sector 48, so judging from the show outside, that should put us somewhere between Ross and Lalande.”
    Meriel looked him straight in the eyes.