4
IZRAMITH STRUGGLED to get through the remaining visitors and then spent the rest of her shift standing at the booth staring into the darkness. Because Hedron was such a long way from the other settled worlds on an outlying and ancient arm of the galaxy, arrivals always happened in batches, because the Exchange network needed to line up eleven jumps from most other destinations and that happened at most twice in a shift so it got very busy for a short time, and the rest of the shift was mindlessly boring.
So she stared at the sky and counted the gas clouds that people called moonwhirls, since they were disturbances in Hedron’s gas cloud cloak caused by the planet’s many moons. She counted twelve today. There were seventy-two in all, and the path they described through the sky was called
