Free The January Dancer by Michael Flynn Page A

that related that probability to the local properties of space, and the number of disappearances exceeded the expected value at the five percent risk level.
    The Dao Chettians had exiled their defeated foes with deliberate disregard for cultural homogeneity. A Babel of exiles could not combine and conspire if they could not even understand one another. Like all the others finding themselves far from home in the company of strangers, Ngozi’s grandparents had tried to maintain the old country customs—but there were too few compatriots and they were scattered too widely and over too many worlds. “The center cannot hold,” an ancient poet had written, and so things had flown apart. Ngozi herself had lived at just the right moment in history and could look back upon her grandparents’ struggles to maintain the old, and forward upon her grandchildren’s struggles to create the new.
    How to explain the excess in the number of lost ships? Those of Name had become decadent—Fir Li had seen this for himself—and they had forgotten many things; but they had not forgotten how to be cruel. The code that had allowed them to disperse whole peoples, to dissolve living cultures into artfully re-created and inward-looking archaisms, would not forbid the seizure of an occasional ship for no better reason than the joy of it.
    And so each faculty of his attention came to rest upon the same object. From settlement days on the Old Planets to the disappearance of ships in the present to the sight of the starless abyss, the menace of the Confederation ran like the drone note of a bagpipe.
    “Yes, Pup,” he said, for three channels did not exhaust his paraperception. “What is it?”
     
    Greystroke always stumbled a bit when he entered his Master’s quarters. It was not so much the three-fourths’ gravity as it was the sight of the Rift. The span of the wall screen played with one’s peripheral vision and so it seemed as if the ship’s hull had been stripped off and the emptiness without had poured within. Fir Li’s quarters were deep within the vessel—no architect was so foolish as to put a commander’s suite at the very skin of the ship—but the illusion always caught some part of a man’s mind off-guard, and no one ever entered the suite when the screen was active without a sudden and unwitting hesitation in his step.
    Greystroke was no exception, and the momentary stumble was a source of great vexation to him, for he tried to school himself against it. It irritated him that an illusion would catch him up.
    He was a young man the color of his name, so average in appearance and demeanor that he had achieved an operational sort of invisibility. This could be advantageous for a journeyman Hound. When he desired so, he could remain unnoticed for a very long time. “Cu!” he said.
    Fir Li scrolled a page on his viewer. “Something unusual.” Fir Li’s voice was a bass rumble, something between a growl and the grinding of rocks.
    “Aye, Cu.”
    “But not an emergency at the crossing, or I would have been summoned by the alarms.”
    “Aye, Cu.”
    The Hound scrolled another page on the reader. “Traffic control, then. A ship on our side of the Rift approaching the Interchange, but not a typical merchant or you’d not disturb my rest at all.”
    “Cu, the pickets have detected the bow waves of a large fleet coming up the Palisades.”
    The Hound was about to turn another page, but paused in thought for a moment. “A fleet,” he said. “How many ships?”
    “The swift-boat counted twenty. All corvette class.”
    The Hound bobbed his head side to side. “Too small for a colony fleet; too many for a survey expedition. A war has started somewhere.” He turned off his viewer and stood gracefully from his chair. “I will be in the command center shortly. Such a grand fleet, I must dress for the occasion.”
     
    The command center in the heart of Hot Gates was a broad, ovoid room, the dome of which was a display screen