And at each step, in the instant after the girls had vanished, two clouds of silvery dust could be seen suspended in the air, pale and transparent, still showing the forms of the two sisters. But in the ship’s artificial breezes these chimeras of abandoned matter quickly dispersed.

In one last mighty Skim the girls leapt all the way out of the Nord itself.

Alia felt the tautness of the vacuum in her chest, the sting of hard radiation on her face as delicious as a shower of ice water on bare skin. With her lungs locked tight, and the Mist of biomolecules and nanomachinery that suffused her body eagerly scouring for damage, she was in no danger.

There were stars all around the sisters, above, below, to all sides; they were suspended in three-dimensional space. In one direction a harder, richer light came pushing through the thick veil of stars. That was the Core, the center of the Galaxy. The Nord was some fifteen thousand light-years from the center, about half the distance of Sol, Earth’s sun. Only ragged clouds of dust and gas lay before that bulging mass of light, and if you looked carefully you could make out shadows a thousand light-years long.

Alia looked down at the Nord, her home.

The ship beneath her feet was a complex sculpture of ice and metal and ceramic, turning slowly in pale Galaxy light. You could just make out the vessel’s original design, a fat torus about a kilometer across. But that basic frame had been built on, gouged into, spun out, until its lines were masked by a forest of dish antennae, manipulator arms, and peering sensor pods. A cloud of semi-autonomous dwellings, glowing green and blue, swam languidly around the ship: they were the homes of the rich and powerful, trailing the Nord like a school of fish.