A weight lifted from her chest. Not until this moment had she been sure that he really would come with her . . . or acknowledged to herself how much she wanted him to. Oh, he’d grow restless in time, like an animal in a cage, deprived of the freedom that the outernet represented to him. But he was strong enough to adapt, just as she had adapted, and Tully, and all the other outriders. It wasn’t an easy adjustment for anyone.
“We may as well start your training, then.” She handed him the envelope. “There are three data chips in there. We need them all printed out. Format doesn’t matter.”
He blinked. “Are we going to hunt dinosaurs after that?”
“No, but we are going to make sure that if something happens to our database while we’re in stasis, we’ll still have the information we need to do our job and get home safely. There’s no such thing as ‘offsite backup’ in deep space. Meanwhile, I need to do a final systems check.” She started toward the bow, then turned back to look at him. “Oh, and . . . by the way . . . don’t feel pressured by the fact that the fate of any future non-Gueran outriders is riding on how well you perform. I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
“No stress at all,” he assured her.
A smile on her face, she went to ready their mothership for launch.
About the Author
An acknowledged master of dark fantasy and science fiction alike, C.S. Friedman is a John W. Campbell award finalist, and the author of the highly acclaimed Coldfire trilogy, New York Times Notable Book of the Year This Alien Shore, In Conquest Born, The Madness Season, The Wilding, The Magister Trilogy, and the Dreamwalker series. Friedman worked for twenty years as a professional costume designer, but retired from that career in 1996 to focus on her writing. She lives in Virginia, and can be contacted via her website, www.csfriedman.com.
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