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former brotherhood of Pilot Masters. Last year he’d refused their offer to be reinstated to the Line as the full heir of his father. In honor, it had been the only choice he could have made. But regret at that refusal was still a secret grief, one he hoped Linnea had never guessed.
    By comparison to the ordered, deeply traditional Line, the new pilots he and Linnea had helped to train seemed less disciplined, raw. They could pilot, they could fight; but they had no binding tradition, no honor beyond the individual. It had comforted Iain to deal with the Line at Council meetings, or to work with former brothers as training instructors. He shared with them an unspoken language that he had learned in childhood and still loved, but that no one now close to him could understand. Not even Linnea. Soon he would be far from anyone who knew it.
    At last Linnea’s voice spoke in his ear, giving her name and her ship’s call sign to Paradais Ground. “Checklist complete. We’re ready for scheduled launch. Destination radius plus ninety, down-orbit.”
    “Acknowledged,” the deep voice of the duty controller said. “Launch when ready. Travel safely, Pilot Kiaho.”
    “Thank you, Ground,” Linnea said. Her voice sounded steady. They had been careful to rest as much as they could, the past few days, and in that quiet time alone together the physical bond between them had deepened further. They had never been so close, she had never been so openly loving, as in those few days. And now it was all to be put at risk.
    But he heard no doubt in Linnea’s voice. This was what she wanted. What she must have: to travel so far, he had thought in his bitterness, that her homelessness no longer mattered even to her.
    Launch. They had chosen a conventional trajectory, conservative of fuel—not Linnea’s style at all, or even his own, but they must waste nothing. So it seemed to take forever to reach jump radius, time when Iain could do nothing, could not even speak to Linnea. Then she chose to make the first jump at once.
    The initial jump was a short one, to a point just beyond the edge of the Paradais system; it took barely an instant in otherspace, the merest flicker of nothingness. Arrived, they floated in silence, surrounded by the pale, starry folds of the clouds of gas and dust that had concealed the Hidden Worlds for so long. Through their joint neural link to the ship, Iain felt Linnea’s presence clearly. In otherspace, this link would make it possible for him to communicate with her, if she allowed it; or at the least to let her sense his presence.
    Finally, she spoke, through their connection. “I’m ready, Iain.”
    He had to ask, once more: “You’re sure of this?”
    “As sure as I can be.” He sensed no fear in her, saw no agitation in her physical readouts.
    “I’ll be with you,” he said. On so long a jump they would both probably spend much of the time drugged into unconsciousness; even in the jump, where much less time passed than in the outer world, they would be helpless in otherspace for weeks, maybe months, and only drugs brought sleep to a mind there. “Reach out to me if you need me.”
    “I will,” she said after a pause. Then, “Iain, I love you.”
    The words she would never say. “And I love you,” he said, feeling tears sting his eyes. He took a last breath in normal space, feeling the air move into his lungs, feeling the softness of the shell around his body. Any second now—
    Flick.
    First came the familiar time of blindness, deafness, isolation, when nothing could penetrate. It took longer, he remembered, to reach through to otherspace when one was flying as a passenger rather than as pilot. He had not jumped as Linnea’s passenger since the last of her training runs, more than three years earlier.
    So, when otherspace found him, and he stretched out his distorted senses to touch it, he gasped. He had never experienced this sense of headlong flight. Flight under tight direction, masterful