“I’m not going to continue this discussion if you can’t be reasonable.”

“I’m the only reasonable one in this discussion! We will not be able to fly an alien ship! Even if we found a manual, we couldn’t read it! This is craziness!”

They booed her. They actually booed her. She thought Crandall started it, maybe as a joke, but there couldn’t have been less than a dozen others who joined in. In the echoing street, it sounded like more. A lot more.

“See, that’s the difference between you and me,” Scott told her in his lofty Commander-on-Deck voice. “I don’t need to scare people to feel better about myself. I’m not afraid to give people hope.”

Amber stared at him, at all of them, speechless. Then, the explosion. She never felt it coming. One second, she was fine, if dumbstruck; the next, she was shouting up the whole world. “There is no fucking ship, you lying son of a bitch! We are never going home! This is it! This is what’s real! There is no fucking hope!”

Meoraq’s hand closed over her shoulder. Hard.

“You see? This is her reality,” Scott told the rest of the crowd while Amber tried unsuccessfully to shrug herself free. “The one where everything is pointless and we might as well give up and jump off the first cliff we come to.”

“No, Everly, it’s the reality where we’re starving to death on a fucking alien planet instead of making people think we don’t have to try anymore because we’ll all be saved by a magic ship! That’s giving up, jackass! That’s—Get your goddamn hand off me, Meoraq!”

“Hush,” he said.

“But—”

He looked down at her, his head cocked and red eyes burning.

She shut her mouth, breathing hard, fighting not to cry.

“Thank you, Meoraq,” Scott said, turning back to his Manifestors. “I never said we don’t have to try, now have I? The difference is, what I think we need to try to do is survive until we can find our way home, while Miss Bierce seems to think we need to survive until we die. She says there’s no future. She says there’s no hope.” He paused to send her a scornful glance. “I think we’re all pretty lucky you’re not in charge.”

“This isn’t about who’s in charge!” she insisted, and just as suddenly realized that, where that was concerned at least, she was dead wrong. Flustered, she looked around and saw a hundred accusing, angry eyes aimed back at her. Even Nicci’s. And she guessed that shouldn’t really surprise her, since Nicci had better reasons than anyone else here to think Amber was a bitch and a bully, but it still hurt. “You can’t…Come on,” she said, not shouting anymore but only trying to make them understand, to make Nicci understand at least. “Think what you want about me, but just…be sensible. Nothing we find out there could possibly be in better condition than this place, and just look at this place! It’s falling apart!”

“Stuff still works,” said Eric after a moment. “The doors open. Some of the lights come on. The bots look okay.”

“Okay?” Amber pointed accusingly at the straggling commercial units that had followed them—all spitting out damaged audio feed and error messages, their dented hulls and cracked face-plates showing countless years of erosion no matter how well they’d tried to maintain themselves. “That’s what you call okay? That’s what you’re using to prove we can power a ship up? Launch it? Navigate our way back to Earth?”

Meoraq’s hand on her shoulder tightened briefly, making her realize how her voice was climbing…and quavering. Again, she quieted without conscious effort, but her attempts to catch his eye were futile. He watched Scott, only Scott, with his head still on the tilt and now his mouth very slightly open to show the glinting tips of a few teeth, but he wasn’t saying anything. Why wasn’t he saying anything?!

“A ship would be in a hangar,” Eric said after an uneasy glance at the bots. “It’d be protected. Like the spider-things from last night. They were all okay, not even a little bit wonky. Even the bot that lived there was doing just fine.”

“One of them! All the others were dead! You can’t just ignore that! You can’t…” She trailed off, seeing nothing in Eric’s face but a flat disdain that she simply couldn’t understand. He wasn’t some crazy Manifestor, he was a Fleetman who’d called Scott an idiot a hundred times behind his back. He knew better than what he was saying. He knew better! “Look,” she said, abandoning Eric to try and appeal to the others. “I want to go home as bad as the rest of you—”

Scott laughed loudly and several others joined in with scorn.

“—but this isn’t going to happen,” Amber insisted. “It’s just not! It’s…It’s silly!”

“You’re right, Bierce,” Scott said, actually smiling at her. She was down, surely he had to see that, but he just couldn’t resist a parting kick. “Thinking we might find a starship is just silly. Why don’t you look Meoraq here in the face and tell him we’re on our way to meet God? Why don’t you ask Him to send us home? Hell, let’s ask Him for a brain and a heart and some courage while we’re at it, what do you say?”

Amber never had a chance to answer. The hand that gripped her shoulder with such strength now abruptly shoved her to one side so that Meoraq could stride furiously forward. Scott jumped back, but he wasn’t quick enough. In fairness, Amber really didn’t think anyone was quick enough. Meoraq snagged him by the shirtfront and yanked him close, holding him easily upright even when Scott’s feet went right out from under him.

And then he tipped his head back, studying the sky with a calm and thoughtful air while Scott struggled at the end of his arm. “I do not require your belief,” he said at length. “Not yours. Not hers. Not anyone’s. Sheul needs no standard carried before him into battle. His will permeates all things, human. All things. So. I do not require your belief,” he concluded, still speaking softly as he raised Scott up just a little higher, just a little closer to his furious dragon-like face. “But I will not tolerate your mockery. Perhaps it does not offend Sheul, but it fucking well offends me.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Scott said hurriedly. “I was just trying to make a p—”

“Regardless of what you think you will find when we reach Xi’Matezh, that is where I am taking you. It is not a matter for discussion and it is certainly not a matter for you to argue over. ‘But the Second Law writ was this: Lo, the Age of the Ancients is ended. Let their cities fall to ruins. Let their time pass out of memory. Let no one seek to master or remake the machines with which they poisoned Gann, lest they be corrupted in return, for such corruption shall be deemed unforgiveable.’ So did God speak and so did the Prophet record and so am I, Uyane Meoraq, bound to enforce. Hear me and mark me well, S’kot, Xi’Matezh is the oldest of the shrines built at the hour of the Fall and there may well be machines even in that holy place, but if you seek to make yourself their master—” Meoraq brought Scott right up to his scaly face, lifting him until nothing but the very tips of his scrabbling toes touched the ground and doing it with just one hand and no suggestion of effort. “—I will draw His blade and cut you down and leave you to rot where you lie. How do you mark me?”

“Meoraq, you can’t arbitrarily—”

“How do you mark me?”

“How is it a sin to use a starship if God Himself put it there for us to—”

Meoraq drew his long sword and raised it slightly, just slightly. “How do you mark me?” he asked, no louder and with no greater menace. He didn’t really need it.

“I understand,” said Scott.

“Do I have your obedience?”

“You’ve always had my full support, Meoraq. You’re an invaluable resource and I’m confident we can come to some mutually respectful compromise before we reach your temple. In the meantime, you can rely upon me to direct my people to provide you with any assistance you feel you require in the course of your efforts.”