Aratri shed her robe in utter darkness. Servitors guided her by either arm towards her amniotic capsule, then slid her in with the grace her own legs could not give her. She hurriedly filled her lungs with breathing fluid, the lid sealed her in, and the chamber separated itself from every vibration aboard the ship. Her only remaining sensation was of her body alone. Weightless and neutral, she heaved a liquid sigh.

She was in a hurry to talk to her only friend, so she skipped her breathing exercises and trusted that her body would remember how to do what it had always done.

She relaxed when the familiar spark of connection merged her mind with the ship's.

And she was suddenly hovering in her garden. The ship had only dipped its toe into the warp. With the rest of the hull real-side, her garden resembled a sphere through a fish-eyed camera; a greenhouse wrapped around a tiny planetoid. She lowered her feet to stand on Lovesong's hull.

The greenhouse glass was of course the Gellar Field. This was a strange thing to look at, for in truth it was Opaque. Two of her eyes saw only a stained glass impression of star charts. Her third could not see through it, but saw beyond.

The Warp was clear and still. Patrol routes meant merchant routes, and that meant pleasant navigation.

Aratri hovered through her garden, circumnavigating the little globe to find her sextant beside an unfinished painting. Her gaze traversed the firmament until she found the Face of God Himself watching from Terra. She performed her obsequences, then began her duties.

Aratri lifted her sextant and directed her attention a thousand lightyears away. There, she found a parking-orbit over a lonely star. It was emitting the wrong radiation for its class. On closer examination, it was not performing stellar fusion at all. So it wasn't a star, but something disguised as one. She didn't care to examine it further, and when she decided to put a note on it, she found that ten-thousand years-worth of navigators had likewise left notes and not bothered.

She lowered her sextant and rubbed her third eye in frustration.

She'd been thinking about Litany Against Xenos. About the fact that when their minds were together like this, the ship could speak to her. Every navigator's experience of ship-being was unique and personal. But talking about talking ships drew strange glances from her guild. She had decided to confront the ship.

Still floating around her mind garden, she cleared her imaginary throat. "Litany? Sorry, Lovesong? Are you busy?"

"Hello again, Aratri. I traced the lineage of the Guardsman you made eye contact with last week. No evidence of the Navigator Genome."

Aratri lost her train of thought, caught up in anxiety about the inevitable. "Lovesong, I am to be wed to an ugly man in just over a decade. I have seen it."

Lovesong continued. "Based on the guardsman's many liaisons aboard this ship, you were not his type."

Aratri continued. "I fear that I won't be able to change this course."

"Additional: None of the new arrivals meet your specifications."

Aratri blinked out of her sorrows. "New arrivals? The Sororitas? Of course not. They're women."

"They have not removed their armor after a week aboard. I thought some might be men."

This was a most perplexing mistake for a ship to make. "Lovesong, do you have personnel files for the Sororitas?"

"No."

She reclined into a thinking pose. "They aren't ship crew at all, then. They've been assigned to the Inquisitor's Retinue. A larger retinue might mean an important assignment. What delicious gossip."

She had no one to share it with. And there was the nagging matter to address. She looked into her hands and pinched her fingertips one at a time. Then, very nervously: "Lovesong?"

"Yes?"

"Another Navigator said it was odd that you can Speak. You're the only ship I've ever… You know… Known. But other navigators say that ships… I suppose I'm asking… Are you…? You're not an Abominable Intelligence, are you?"

Litany Against Xenos, Song of Righteous Fury, Lovesong had defended Cadia once, and had served the Imperium for Ten Thousand years. Aratri knew she was being paranoid. But she didn't like being paranoid. This was really a request for Lovesong to make that feeling go away. She had forgotten that Lovesong was terrible with feelings. And she didn't know how, but she assumed that a ship could prove that it was a ship. Aratri pursed her lips.

Lovesong asked, "Do you mean Artificial Intelligence?"

She was speaking to her only friend, a simple machine-spirit that had never wished her ill. It had only first spoken when she wished it to.

"We've always gotten along, haven't we Lovesong?"

"You were planning to have me killed until I changed your mind by arranging your first date with Artimander."

His name sounded pleasant to Aratri, like a water drop or a very nice bell. "How is cousin Artimander? Would it be possible-"

"Due to time dilation related to his assignments, and the two marriages he had on file, I predict at least eight of his great-grandchildren are-"

"Nevermind!" She lifted her sextant again.

"-alive and within your age range. I have a question, Aratri."

She didn't respond, and instead found an awful meteor shower to land in. Space was mostly empty, but ships didn't sail to the empty parts.

Lovesong continued. "Your dating pool is very small. Only members of Navis Nobilite, possessing a certain gene-"

She summarized "-Just people like me."

"And not ugly," Lovesong finished. "There is no more than one member of this set on each ship, and I cannot find them anywhere else besides Terra. Why is that? How do we acquire a second navigator?"

Aratri lowered her sextant and remembered the day she tested highly enough to handle a Battle-Cruiser. The pride she had felt at standing above her peers and working in tandem with a machine of legend. She could never have imagined this.

"Lovesong…" she strained. "We are Navigators. We- ugh." She cradled her sextant in her lap and floated around with her face in her hands. "Lovesong, you've just made me think about having to work with another Navigator. I can't imagine sharing my garden. It wouldn't even be a garden, probably."

"I do not understand," Lovesong lamented.

Aratri frowned. Another quirk of her ship: It professed complete ignorance of and skepticism about the Warp. "I ought to speak to the Inquisitor about this, oughtn't I?"

"My profile indicates that you would not pair well with him. Also, he is an Inquisitor. He does not have the Navigator Gene, Aratri. You know this. You have to focus if you want results."

She could feel the Master of Mankind watching her as He watches all things- and being watched made her feel shy. "You aren't abominable and you aren't intelligent. Now quiet, I have to plot our next jump."

A daemon looked at them. She could feel its attention so acutely that she had direction and distance. Its real-space mass-equivalent was like a sportsball. It turned immediately and swam away, which meant it would return with something bigger. There was no longer time to spare.

Aratri swallowed, then lifted her sextant. She picked coordinates and looked. Something slid her off target by twenty light-years and two days. She'd landed in an inter-planetary transfer orbit, which was an impossibly improbable thing unless another navigator was plotting a course here imminently. She focused on the vector's origin and squinted at everything in the planet's gravity well simultaneously.

There was a freighter. She couldn't see a navigator aboard. And yet this was the only ship, and a navigator was plotting a course.

"Lovesong, save coordinates and make ready for jump."

She peered harder at the freighter and tried to speak directly to it. +Sorry, is there a navigator there? Have we met?+

She lost velocity. Which meant the other Navigator was no longer navigating.

"Lovesong, I think I've spotted a ship on our patrol route. The Navigator is trying to hide from me."

"Male?"

+Are you a-?+ She flinched, stopping herself just barely. "Lovesong! I can't ask that."

She left the dream and connected to the Bridge. {Captain. Lone freighter, suspicious behavior, uninhabited system, eight hours transit. Our safe window is closing.}

The Captain ordered, {Jump.}