From Chapter 1.... When there was something wrong in the Ananke, Althea knew. The Ananke was a special ship. The Ananke was a miracle--a miracle of engineering, a miracle of physics, a miracle of computing. The Ananke was beautiful, its gravity-producing mass nestled in its center, contained by a cage of sparking magnets, with the rest of the ship curling out over that core, the lights of windows studding its black spiral like bioluminescence. When it drifted through black space, it looked like an extinct creature of Terran ocean depths, a creature out of time and into space. The Ananke was Althea's in heart if not in law, and Althea knew her every inch. For that reason, when there was something wrong in the Ananke, Althea knew.