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A heartbeat later, her sympathetic thoughts were shattered by the sight of a guard passing by on his rounds behind him. An armed guard. It reminded her that Kào’s people were dealing with the sloppy aftermath of war; that their enemy consisted of a bunch of psychos who got off keeping slaves and worse, practicing their perversions on them. An enemy that, apparently, hadn’t been completely defeated, making the prospect of a real abduction a horrifying possibility for Jordan and her charges.

Her chest constricted with apprehension. Kào wasn’t their problem, she wanted to say. The Talagars were. But few were ready to hear the news that Kào and his people were all that stood between getting to a resettlement port safely and capture by aliens who’d make them slaves.

She prayed that Kào was right about leading by gut instinct, because that was what she was doing.

“I can’t ask him to leave,” she whispered back to Ben. “He’s the only intermediary between his crew and us. If he
goes away, who’s going to take his place? Frankly, I don’t want anyone else.”

Ben’s breath brushed her ear. “So you trust him already?”

“Not completely. But he hasn’t done anything to make me suspicious, either.” As for Kào’s kindness . . . well, Ben had no proof of that, only what she’d told him and the rest of the crew. “I agree that he’s not exactly Mr. Cheerful. But that’s no reason to make him a scapegoat. What happened to us isn’t his fault.”

“How do we know?”

In truth, they didn’t. At that thought, her stomach plummeted. The passengers were straining to hear what she and Ben were saying. She lowered her voice further. “Look at them—do you want mass panic? It’s a miracle everyone’s as calm as they are. Don’t screw with it, Ben. Don’t scare them.” She clenched her teeth together. “Or me.”

Ben raked his jet-black hair away from his forehead. “Didn’t mean to. I’m not myself right now,” he said under his breath.

I hope not
, she wanted to say, but somehow she dug deep and acted civil. That’s what leaders did, right—acted civil? They didn’t strangle their second-in-command.

She returned her attention to the others. “Sorry,” she called loudly, for the room was large and her voice was growing hoarse. “The purser and I wanted to compare notes. We want to make sure we cover everything.”

“Take your time, Captain,” a Good Samaritan shouted to her from the middle of the crowd.

She smiled, appreciative, and inspiration seemed to come out of nowhere. “For now, though, we’ll postpone the rest. Our main concern is just to survive. All of us. No giving up. We have to force ourselves to face tomorrow, and the next day, and all the days after that, even though many of us feel like we’d rather have died with our loved ones. I know it’s going to be a difficult path, but we’ll endure. We
have to. We owe it to those we lost at home and here on this ship to keep their memory alive.” The faces of her family flashed in her mind, and her throat constricted as the passengers hung on her words with teary eyes and sympathetic nods.

Go numb
. She brought the pad closer to her face in the guise of scrutinizing her messy handwriting. Who was she to think she could give a pep talk when she so desperately needed one herself? Who boosted the
captain’s
spirits, for crying out loud?

Courage is mustering the strength to stand up when it’s easier to fall down
.

She could almost hear her father’s voice as his advice came to her, boosting her. “Are there any questions?” she asked gruffly.

“When will our stuff get here?” someone called out. “I have medication in my suitcase.”

Ah, the grassroots concerns—those she could handle in the state she was in. “The luggage is on its way to us. Plus anything they find in the cabin. The shipboard medical staff is synthesizing medicine for those they determine need it. But keep taking what you have with you until you hear otherwise.”

Natalie asked her, “Do you want me to go around and see what other immediate needs there are? I’ve got a spare pen and paper. I can find out the details of everyone’s medication. What they take and how much.”

Jordan nearly fainted with gratitude. “Yes. Do that.”

Another passenger raised her hand. A middle-aged woman. “We’re sleeping in dorm rooms.”

“That’s right.” Jordan was the only one with a private room, small as it was.

“My sister’s not in my area. I want to sleep near my sister.”

More people called out with their personal preferences for sleeping arrangements.

“Tell me this is a good thing,” Jordan muttered to Natalie. “That they are more concerned about roommates than Earth being vaporized by a comet.”

“I think this is only the tip of the iceberg.”

An iceberg sank the
Titanic
. Jordan sighed through clenched teeth. “We’ll work everything out tomorrow,” she assured the crowd.

“Our food, too?” a man wearing a skullcap queried in a Middle-Eastern accent. “I have special dietary requirements.”

“Tomorrow.” She lifted her hands, fingers spread, as if she were calming a room full of Boo’s play-pals. “Your flight crew is working overtime. Everything will be solved soon.” To the rest of her flight attendants, she said, “We’ll meet later, after we all have some time to recover.”

Natalie stayed behind after the rest walked away. “How are you doing, hon?” she asked.

Jordan was afraid to admit how upset she was. “It’s too surreal to grasp . . . that we’re here and Earth’s gone. It doesn’t seem possible.”

“Because it’s nothing we could ever imagine,” Natalie said, sounding a bit husky herself. “Like when the World Trade Center towers collapsed . . . only a million times worse.”

Jordan took the translation glasses out of her pocket. Staring at them, she didn’t really see them. “Yep.”

Natalie’s dark eyes radiated sympathy. “And you had a kid, too.”

Jordan’s laugh was clipped and false. “Now I have two hundred and eighty-six kids.”

But the flight attendant saw her joke for what it was: an attempt to cover up the pain. She rubbed Jordan’s arm in a caring caress. Then her chin jerked up.

“You’ve got company coming, and I’m outta here. Call if you need me.” With her braided ponytail bouncing behind her, Natalie strode off on her assigned mission.

Jordan shoved on her glasses and turned around. Kào’s own glasses glinted in the soft overhead light. So did the nubs of his beard on his chin and above his upper lip, but not where the scar sliced across his face. She tried not to think too hard about what Ben had asked:
How do we know?

“It is time for me to take my leave,” Kào informed her in a careful tone, the way he’d sounded in the commodore’s briefing room. His voice took on a certain husky quality when it deepened like that. She swallowed. How much had he heard, and understood, of her conversation with Natalie? She hoped little. As it was, he saw too much of what she tried to keep hidden.

Suddenly her voice was tight from too much talking and a throat thick with the unrelenting need to bawl her eyes out. She didn’t like the way the guy was able to get under her skin like this. Ben was right—Kào
was
dangerous. But in a way that the purser never imagined. “I’ll see you at our meeting tomorrow,” she responded crisply.

“Only after you take your much-needed rest.”

She tempered her tone. “You look like you could use some oblivion yourself.”

For a moment, he looked as if he bore the weight of the world on his shoulders. “Oblivion,” he agreed bleakly. “One of the few things in life that is not overrated. If the chance presents itself today, in any form, take it.”

Leaving that uncomfortably true statement echoing in Jordan’s head, Kào turned on his heel and left.

Later, alone in her quarters, Jordan took his advice. But oblivion turned out to be elusive. And the sobbing session she’d expected never came. The next day and the ones afterward were a blur of shock and mourning for everyone
on Flight 58. The crew and passengers asked little of her, respecting her sorrow as they nursed their own. If ever there was a time to fall apart in the privacy of her room, those first days were it. But the pain never broke her.

She couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or bad.

After that, she busied herself keeping up with everyone’s requests, complaints, and questions. Kào returned every day, once a day, as they’d decided. He declined to enter the refugee quarters unescorted, and she’d overheard him instruct Commodore Moray’s aides, Rono and Poul, to adhere to the same code. Now, when those red-eyed assistants came around with their administrative questions—“Is anyone ill? Do you have enough bedding?”—they waited until Jordan met them at the door and spoke to her there.

She wanted to believe that it was Kào’s way of respecting Flight 58’s sovereignty over this small area. But he might only be using caution. Despite her efforts to create a climate of understanding, many, including Ben, the chief purser, inexplicably focused their bitterness on the aliens for what had happened to Earth—and shot Kào the dirty looks to prove it.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, Kào showed up with two handheld computers. “Hi-tech, palm-sized language converters made from an improved database that transforms speech to text,” he began without preamble. “Handheld translators, we call them. There are too few pairs of conversion-glasses onboard, so we will use these now.”

He thrust out his hand. She removed her glasses and dropped them into his huge palm. In exchange, he gave her the new translator. It fit perfectly in the hollows of her cupped hands. “How does it work?”

“Read the text scrolling across the screen.”

Like before. Only now all the letters were correct, whereas some had been mirror images or upside down
when using the glasses. “I thought I’d miss the glasses. But this is better. Much better.”

“You can thank Ensign Pren. She programmed three hundred of these devices, enough for all of your people, with leftovers to spare.”

Jordan sensed a tensing in his demeanor whenever he mentioned the ensign’s name. He didn’t like her, she guessed. But there was something else, too, hidden from her, hidden by this man whose face revealed little. Her eyes searched for and found the terrible brand on his neck, the puckered tip of which peeked above his collar. When it came to secrets, she’d bet that his issues with Trist were only the tip of the iceberg.

“Contained in the translator is an educational database, as well,” he explained. “Alliance history, language, science—it is all there. Study it. The more you know, the better off you will be. Extensive information can also be obtained at the workstation we provided.”

“Yeah. Dillon’s new best friend,” she said wryly.

Even as she spoke with Kào, the charming Irishman was struggling to learn the ropes of the new computer mounted in the wall. He’d lunged at the machine as soon as it was installed, his hunger to see what it contained comparable to a starving dog’s. “When are we going to get our own computers back? People are asking for them.” While the luggage had been returned, there had been no sign of the laptops and walkmans, or of any of the electronics.

“Now that the language database is complete, I see no reason why you can’t have the items returned,” he said to Jordan.

The crew and passengers straggled back from the dining area, where meals were dropped off three times a day. The chatter was louder today. Some were beginning to feel more like themselves, she guessed. The children certainly were, weaving between the adults in a rowdy taglike game,
the rules of which only the kids could understand.

Kào watched them with curiosity and longing. “Your people remind me of a large, noisy family.”

His wistfulness told her that he was homesick. She imagined that life on a starship was similar to a navy man’s life, being at sea more than at home. “You must come from a big family. Or have one.”

He appeared taken aback by both observations. “I’ve no life-partner, or mate—
wife
, in your language.” To her shock, he’d used the English word. “As for being from a large family . . . if I am, I have no memory of it. I was orphaned when I was not quite three Earth years of age.”

Jordan’s hands clenched. For a moment, she forgot her own sorrow. Kào hadn’t been much more than a toddler when he’d lost his parents.

“My situation wasn’t the tragedy it might seem, Jordan.” He had the strangest way of answering questions she hadn’t asked. “I had a solid upbringing, although not a conventional one, by any means. I was adopted by a widowed but well-to-do military officer, and I grew up aboard star-ships, a series of them. They were Perimeter vessels, like this one, tasked with patrolling the border areas. At times, it was treacherous duty, and no families were allowed aboard. Thus, I found myself the only child among hundreds of adults: one father, who was busy for three thirds of the day—and then some—and more self-appointed parents than I could count. I never had to learn what it was like to compete for attention as one of many siblings.” His eyes unfocused, as if he were searching for memories. A flicker of deep sorrow brought clarity back to his gaze and his attention back to her.

“Do you want to sit down?” she offered quickly. Everyone she’d encountered all day had desired direction, or had complained, or had been needy of support. Kào asked nothing of her. Suddenly she found she longed for a few moments
of quiet conversation, of simple, undemanding companionship. “I constructed a briefing room today. Would you like to see it? We can meet there from now on, instead of here in the middle of Town Square.”

“Town . . . Square?” He scrutinized his translator.

“We’ve dubbed it that, yes. It means a central place. And while we’re at it, I might as well welcome you to New Earth.”

He nodded, his eyes dark, unreadable. If his mouth hadn’t softened, she wouldn’t have known he approved. “New Earth it is, then.”

With soldierly formality, Kào followed her to a corner she’d blocked off from the rest of the expansive room by a movable divider. There she’d dragged a table and enough chairs for all the flight attendants. Office supplies had been gathered from those who had them, and stored. The activity had given her an hour or so of distraction. “It’s working out well,” she said with satisfaction. “Less noise, and much more private.”