Chapter 3

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Once, when Avery and Jules were busy and Cass waited alone in a dark hangar, she had watched Terran clips of their sea creatures. She loved the whales and their eerie songs, the fish in their shimmering shoals, and the octopi who slithered along the silty ocean floor in much the same way as the folna moved around, but with tentacles instead of rhizomes. Her favourites by far, though, were the dolphins. She loved listening to them. Their chatter was beyond even the reaches of Lexicon, but she knew there was intelligence deep in their black eyes.

When the Phoenix made its journey between stars, flitting from Starbridge to Starbridge and guided only by Erri's steady hands, she liked to imagine that she was a dolphin. In those brief moments when the ship would rear its head above the currents of hyperspace, Cass pictured herself leaping out of the water and laughing with joy before plunging back into the depths.

Even if it was just a distraction from the knowledge that the only thing protecting Jules from the cold vacuum of space was her hull and decades of multi-species engineering, it passed the time.

"Exiting hyperspace," came Erri's voice over the comm. He had his pilot voice on, the one that was all cold and detached, almost like he was an AI too. Cass much preferred it when she could hear the smile in his voice. Not that ghraals could smile with their mouth like a human, but Lexicon was clever like that.

Now she floated, suspended in the curved arms of the Capital System's Starbridge. On her right was Kha'err, the gas giant lit up in stripes of turquoise and green and white by the star Irimoy. Kha'err meant guardian in Liy'ghraal and irimoy meant cradle in Suriy, the main language of the folnas, but the Capital System made Cass feel anything but protected and safe. The Hub was a tiny white speck locked in orbit just beyond Kha'err's furthest moon, nearly indistinguishable from a distant star.

Erri gently nudged the Phoenix into open space. The sight of the Hub drawing nearer made her cooling fans whirr, and all of her internal sensors felt a little more sensitive, almost in a prickly way. Was this what humans called feeling sick to the stomach?

As it was, the Phoenix's living quarters may have felt a few degrees warmer. Beyond that, there was nothing to notice of her discomfort.

Avery would notice, though, if she were here. Avery always noticed those things. It was a connection on the level that she ached to have with Jules, one day. In a world of techs who saw her as nothing more than another dumb AI, Avery and Jules were her sun and moon. Avery gave her the warmth and light she craved, and when she hung in the empty space of the Sol system, it was Jules who lit up that never-ending night. She loved both of them, even if they did not love each other.

The Hub drew closer. Cass was always in awe at how simple distance could make such a colossal structure seem nothing more than a speck. Five rings hugged the central column, where the essential sections were kept. The University of the Commonwealth, the Central Market, the Centre for Medical Care and Research, the Quays, and the Control Centre, all crowned by the Spire which housed the Council offices, lined with so many windows it could be blinding at the wrong angle, had the glass not been engineered to avoid reflecting light.

At the centre of the central column, the Hub branched out into four slimmer arms that housed the living and recreational quarters for each species. Ghraals, folnas, mu'kas, haunas, even humans. At the moment they lived in a single ring at the bottom of the hauna arm, but there were rumours that construction was soon to begin on their own. Cass wondered what the Hub would look like in fifty, a hundred, five hundred years' time, how many more species would have their own arms. The structure was already starting to resemble a willow tree.

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