Old Newfoundland Four, Portal Station Eleven, was the last remaining sovereign territory of the Federal Republic of Moscow. They’d hauled down the flag in the hub concourse four hours ago, sounded the last retreat with a final blare of brass trumpetry, and marched slowly to the docking hub. Game over, nation dissolved. There’d been a misunderstanding, and Dresdener warships had impounded a freighter from Moscow. Pistol shots fired across a crowded docking hub. Then someone — to this day, the successor Dresdener government hotly denied responsibility, even though they’d executed their predecessors just to be sure — had hit Moscow Prime with a proscribed device.

Wednesday didn’t remember Moscow very clearly. Her father was a nitrogen cycle engineer, her mother a protozoan ecology specialist: they’d lived on the station since she was four, part of the team charged with keeping the life-support heart of the huge orbital complex pumping away. But now the heart was still. There was no point in pretending anymore. In less than a day the shock front of Moscow Prime’s funeral pyre would slam past, wreaking havoc with any habitat not shielded by a good thirty meters of metal and rock. Old Newfie, drifting in stately orbit around a planetless brown dwarf, was simply too big and too flimsy to weather a supernova storm at a range of just over a parsec.

Wednesday came to a crossroads. She stopped, panting, and tried to orient herself, biting back a wail of despair. Left, right, up, or down? Sliding down to the habitat levels of the big wheel had been a mistake. There were elevators and emergency tunnels all the way up to the hub, and all the way down to the heavy zone. The central post office, traffic control, customs, and bioisolation were all located near the maintenance core at the hub.