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The Admiral
Hunt 18: The Admiral's Guest List
Hunt 18 · Mecha
The Admiral's Guest List
The Admiral · Machine mind
Forty kilometers of patched paint and old ice wants a funeral, and the Admiral has opinions about who comes. In Hullow, where a wreck that still answers is a person and can't be salvaged, Nym must decide whether to invite the brass who sent the fleet to die.
Abigail's notebookHullow. Ships all the way round.
Thursday. Hullow. Dock and Home, both.
Ten thousand ships in a slow river around a dead gray moon. It takes days for one to pass, and they're all old and all dark and covered in ice, with coat after coat of paint in patches, every coat from a different owner, and you can read the whole life of a hull if you know how. It looks like a graveyard, and everybody calls it that. Then you notice there's a little window lit, way up on the side of one, and then another one, way off.
"Still here," said our comm, in a small, rusty voice. It wasn't anybody on board, it was the ship going by.
Kellen leaned over the comm. "Still here. What are you made of?"
It took a day and a half to answer. Paint, it said.
The people
Machine mind
A mind built into a ship, with no body of its own. It thinks in hull plates and engine hums.
Seen as equipment until they say otherwise.
ALSO ON THE BOARD: The Lighthouse Keeper (95)
