…But Babylon was the only home she remembered. Seventy-seven feet, two masts, and a temperamental engine, a patchwork warren of storage and bolt holes decorated with carved moldings and medallions, its hull walls marked in wax-chalk drawings. High above its deck, an indigo flag appliquéd with pink stars.
Generation on generation of skinny ship cats, but now only Panim, the opinionated tortie who slept curled against Yesiko’s chest, chirruping even in her dreams.
A water machine and a back-up water machine, both wired to the solar array; a rank-smelling hydroponic system producing a reluctant handful of crops; a cockpit equipped with sonar and radios and a wildly precious star map computer. Root’s workshop full of half-mended machines and the squat polycarbonate nanite box, the only thing new on board, not fixed a dozen times before. And the Imago, Babylon’s money-maker: a short-range submersible that she used for salvage.
Portia Elan 