Cassandane insisted on Sam getting herself down from the balcony. Fortunately, they left early enough that her hesitance to jump didn't interfere with their timeline. It took Sam two minutes before she could steel herself to make the leap of faith. She used animas to lighten her body as much as possible and then climbed over the railing to hang and drop. Sam pushed herself directly up, which slowed her descent significantly, but neglected to account for the spinning of the Angelship, which resulted in her rushing down the street so that she had to run on contact to avoid falling over.

After that, they walked to the nearest spindle and climbed up. Long before the artificial gravity faded into an illusory suggestion, Sam began using her kinetic talent to fly up the spindle behind her protector. They moved through the corridors in the zero G portion of the ship until they were blocked by a balding man with his arms crossed. He wore a uniform and seemed determined to intimidate Cassandane.

"Have you received my note, Captain?"

The man harrumphed. "Are you sure you want to play this game with me, Centurion? Threatening to resign if I don't allow your English understudy to shadow you?"

Cassandane didn't respond and the man continued. "Resigning during a critical period is desertion."

"The penalty of which is incarceration until a court martial determines whether death is necessary," Cassandane said.

"Are you certain you wish to attempt such a thing with me?"

"Are you threatening me, Centurion?"

"I will of course follow your commands, Captain. Though if I resign, that will no longer be the case. I advise you not to be part of any group who comes to arrest me."

The captain's jaw worked as if he was chewing something. "Watch yourself, Centurion."

"It would be wise to remember who and what I am."

"You're an uppity Aoleyen who doesn't know her place," he said.

"I'm what the rest of you named a savior. Maybe my race makes me politically unviable, but my strength cannot be denied. Marius has deserted, Wilson is Earth-side, and Hafnym was never my equal. I cannot be opposed if I am named an enemy of the people. I know how you got your position, Captain, and I cannot claim to respect someone whose best leadership quality is political loyalty. Keep that in mind the next time you feel that I am beneath you in any way."

Cassandane's chin dropped a hair. "Now move, Captain."

The man pulled himself to the side using a railing, nostrils flared and jaw clenched.

Sam followed Cassandane through a double door airlock and into the interior of a shuttle. They floated up to the ceiling and entered a cramped room through a circular hatch. Sam claimed one of the two seats as Cassandane went through a complex procedure of checks. Fifteen minutes later, the clang of the outer doors closing and sealing sounded. Lights on the control console changed color and a head poked through the hatch. "We're ready to depart, Centurion."

Cassandane spoke into a microphone. "Traffic control, shuttle A2 requesting an undock."

"Undocking," came the response.

The ship rocked around them. "Traffic control, shuttle A2 requesting departure."

"Granted, A2."

Sam felt an immense force from Cassandane reach out and latch onto the structural braces around them. The shuttle began to move. She watched the various video feeds on the screens. There were a total of ten docks around them, half of which had shuttles in them. The circular bay stood open to space on one side, the direction they were going. As they exited the embrace of the Angelship, Sam studied the immense vessel. It gleamed like brand new steel, bright where all the other ships of the fleet were dull and pock-marked. From a distance it looked like a spinning wheel connected to a thick hub by a multitude of spokes.

Cassandane pointed to a metal strut beside Sam's armrest. "That is your contact point."

"Okay . . . ."

"I want you to push on it with your corona."

"Corona?"

"Your kinetic field."

"Oh. So . . . I'm helping you fly the ship?"

"You can think of it that way if you like." Cassandane's smile took some of the sting from the words. "You are not strong enough yet to assist in any meaningful way. This task is more like weight lifting. Does your Earth have weight lifting? It's an exercise where people lift up heavy weights to grow stronger."

"Yes," Sam said. "We have a lot of meatheads on my planet."

"Push straight ahead on your contact point as hard as you can. I will match your thrust to keep us straight."

For a time, Sam lost herself in the job she had been given. She pulled free precursor and used the animas to push the strut through what Cassandane called her corona. After perhaps twenty minutes, Sam had to stop. She felt Cassandane take over for her without a word.

"Why is it so hard?"

Cassandane's expression didn't change. "A paragon needs to balance out the three precursors. Pull too hard at a single one and you create a deficit on the other two. Before you can continue using animas, you will have to draw forth gravitas and nous."

Sam found the other two precursors coming to her easily. She let them fill her until she felt ready to burst, then was able to once more tease free a thread of animas. "You could have told me ahead of time."

"You learned the lesson better this way," Cassandane said.

"Are we picking up more Americans on this shuttle run?"

"They don't often assign me to passenger duty. My assignments tend to involve heavy lifting. In this case, I believe copper wire, permanent magnets, and ball bearings. Replacement parts for generators and motors."

Sam turned her attention to the screens as the Earth expanded to fill the entire view. Their rate of descent slowed considerably. "You're probably not worried about your ships being attacked."

"Not particularly," Cassandane said. "Your weapons probably couldn't reach geosynchronous orbit. Even if they did, the

Angelship is impervious to damage. Our other vessels could be maneuvered out of harm's way before a rocket got close enough to be a problem. We thoroughly inspect everything sent up, so there is no chance of a surprise attack there. The sole concern of my people are the talents spreading among the local population."

"You call them your people, but they talk about you like an outsider. They call you an owl-eh-an."

"Angmari is both a national identity and a linguistic group. Following the destruction of my world, it also tends to be conflated with the majority ethnic group, the Koltnar. My identity as an Aoleyen is a bit different." Cassandane glanced her way before turning back to the screens, an unreadable expression on her face. "The history of my Earth . . . involved some questionable practices. In particular, Gotaki Vonger was an emperor obsessed with the idea that society should function like a machine. To him, human subjects were cogs ill suited for their roles. He created three programs to improve the match between individual and career. The Marnken program bred together the strongest, most aggressive subjects to create a race of warriors. The Lentaran program bred the least assertive and most agreeable to create a class of obedient servants. And the Aoleyen program took the most intelligent and temperamentally rational to create peerless bureaucrats.

"Those programs continued on for centuries. They outlasted the end of the empire and the transition to democracy. By law, no one with more than one eighth heritage of any breeding line could become an elected official, so everyone felt safe having fierce warriors to protect them, brilliant knowledge workers to advance their society, and child-like servants to handle every menial chore. The end came when the Marnken rebelled. They were systematically slaughtered. In the aftermath, society decided that breeding people was deeply unethical. The Lentaran were forcibly sterilized. They sought to do the same to the Aoleyen, but my people . . . my real people . . . were not so easy to overcome. Through various means, they resisted these attempts. Legal challenges in the court system. Bribery of public officials. Media campaigns. Record falsification.

"Eventually, forced sterilization fell out of favor. But the Aoleyen race never became popular. As a group, we had too much money, too much influence. The commoners resented the existence of a people superior to them. And so my status within the fleet suffers. The Angmari consdier any achievements I have made due to my heredity. They fear my every foray into public policy as a potential takeover plot while Hafnym plays the lot of them for fools." Cassandane sighed. "I apologize for my rant. I am bitter about my circumstances."

"It sounds like you have every right to be," Sam said.

"It's a pointless response. Becoming emotional won't alter my circumstances. The way forward is to manipulate events from the shadows. The Angmari need to recruit additional talents. So I am going to force them to come to terms with that reality." A smirk touched the corner of Cassandane's lips, there and gone in an instant. "Perhaps I will even succeed in creating another full paragon."

"Full paragon?"

"You attuned to all three precursors, which makes you a paragon, capable of using the three talents and the seven synergies. But to my knowledge, there have only ever been six paragons capable of generating their own precursor. My teacher and his five surviving students. I wouldn't mind having the distinction of being the first Angmari teacher to raise a full paragon. Not even if the entire fleet dismissed my achievement as a product of my breeding."

As the ground became visible in the screens, Sam asked another question. "What is a synergy?"

"A topic for another day," Cassandane said. "For now, just know that it is possible for a talent to be enhanced by using small amounts of other precursors. Make sure you are ready to work as soon as we land. I want you lifting cargo to spare the kinetics on board unnecessary exertion. Do not, under any circumstance, drop something."

On the screens, a vast field covered in quonset huts came into view, surrounded by chain link fence with a single, new blacktop drive leading out into the distance.