Ashby scratched his beard and thought. What did he want it for? After he’d first left home, all those years ago, he’d sometimes wondered if he’d go back to the Fleet to raise kids, or if he’d settle down on a colony somewhere. But he was a spacer through and through, and he had the itch for drifting.

But with the last of her savings running thin and her bridges burned behind her, ther was no margin for error. The price of a fresh start was having no one to fall back on.