12. AwakeningSelene sent a call to Ondo on the Dragon as the lander powered up, relayed via the nanosensors she'd strung around the moon. “Come get us now. The hell with the locals.”
The reply came with the frustrating multi-second lag: “Are you under attack?”
“Not just at the moment. Are there ships waiting for us in local space?”
“None at all. There's been no sign of any incursion.”
“Well, they got to the planet somehow. Rendezvous with us at the first possible intersection point and we'll make an immediate run up to metaspace.”
“Okay. And Selene?”
“Yeah?”
“Who's us?”
She took the lander away from the city and under the surface of the river for a mile, weaving around muddy sand banks, beneath the hulls of flat-bottomed barges. The debris of thousands of years of civilization, rot
