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Kurn twitched, brushing off the crest of his hip. There was nothing there, only an insect of his own imagination. He'd heard somewhere--maybe his grandmother told him once--that his scent attracted pollinators. Maybe that was true; the bug returned, persistent. As he went to smack it away, his hand found instead the terminal hanging off his belt, its internal servos whirring softly.

"Rkax," he called upward. "I'm getting a ping."

The raven stirred, basking and lazy in its second-favorite perch atop their resting boulder. It was where the two of them always stopped to take a break whenever they hiked in the foothills, in the shadow of the mountain they called home. Rkax looked up from his smallish cache of offal and moist grain and he stared at his companion sidelong with a single onyx eye. Kurn felt slightly stupid, his hand still hovering over the face of his matte plastic terminal. His was unobtrusive, self-effacing even, and half the size of a leather-bound paperback journal.

"Who?" Rkax croaked, not bothering to activate his syrinx extensions.

Kurn mentally thumbed through his close contacts, the few he let bother him in such a way. His grandmother, perhaps--she lived on the far side of the mountain, and sometimes asked him to fetch her small things now and then. Mostly as a pretense, he thought, to see him in person. It might be his Go partner with some new strategy, but that seemed unlikely. Lockran's habitat was very nearly antipodal to his, and therefore midnight to his noon. Besides those two, he'd expect anyone else to use an asynchronous channel.

"I'm not sure," Kurn said, "Mind if I check?"

Rkax clucked and pecked at a bit of tripe. That counted as a yes, he supposed. Both he and the raven were sensitive to distractions, and while Kurn was loathe to break the stillness of such a bright, breezy midautumn afternoon, curiosity nipped at him. Indeed, he had already lost focus. The terminal contact ticked under his thumb and the device roused into wakefulness. Fully active, it piggybacked on the bone-conducting transducers under either hoary ear. It sounded like him; he gave it his voice, for he preferred to think of the terminal as an extension and not just another lump of technology. A part of him, not disimilar to Rkax' synthetic larynx.

"Urgent." It said. "Service request, high priority. Fifty hour lifespan." Some other tags followed telling a similar tale, all of which added up to a reason for the Handler's Union to ignore his privacy settings. The last tag gave him a chill.

"Habitat-wide existential risk."

Without the pause a human would have left in, the terminal kept narrating. "Continue briefing?"

Kurn shook his head and stood up, grabbing on to a crevice in the boulder. He brushed off the seat of his coveralls and stretched his broad arms overhead, exhaling deeply. Should he continue? A serious matter should be considered at the zenith of one's cognitive faculties, which he was not precisely. The hike to lunch tired him; the lunch itself sedated him, heavy in his belly. He tried to find more length in his backbone, then twisted his neck this way and that. It was a gesture he had to have learned from Rkax.

"Sounds serious," he said to the raven. "Handler business."

Rkax cawed.

"I could read it tomorrow," Kurn said, "or the day after."

"No worries. Handler business might be important."

Rkax' human voice was a smooth, lazy baritone, an eccentric choice for his kind. In Kurn's experience, they liked borrowing the voices of children or elderly women. Rkax preened himself, showing off the silvery cast of his underwing.

"I'll go hunting. Kurn's food is nice, but poor sport."

"Sorry, Rkax."

"No sorries. Come back later."

With a flap and a flutter, Rkax climbed above the sparse fir trees and made his way downhill, gliding effortlessly. Soon he was no more than a pair of black arcs against a verdant background.

"Continue." Kurn said.

"Request from Peripheral Habitat Ascraeus Mons."

The terminal paused for a moment in case he needed clarification, but he didn't. Peripheral habitats kept themselves apart from the larger cluster of human society. His own habitat, Noctis Labyrinthus, had gone peripheral early in its history only to rejoin (with many others) after the upheaval surrounding the Halfway Mark.

"Unknown generic fault in three hundred ninety-five constructors. Constructor 0C3D: Limited throughput warning. Constructor 0C1E: Unknown specific fault, considered repairable."

It would be a habitat of class twelve, one ring less than his but still around a thousand kilometers in radius. An unremarkable pearl on a string on the neck of Ilmarinen, flung so long ago across the gap between two stars.

"Wait," Kurn interrupted. "Why haven't they duplicated the working sampo?" One didn't need a Handler to fabricate a new constructor from an old one. It was as easy as keying in blueprint quad zero dash quad zero and pressing go.

"Unknown." The terminal helpfully replied.

That explained the message tags. A sampo hooked up to the right material feeds could grind another one out in a week or two. But perhaps Ascraeus Mons' 0F3D didn't have the right inputs. If it had to resort to transmuting hydrogen into heavier atoms, it would take years to finish and tie up the only working sampo for the duration. In effect, it was a one-sampo habitat, an accident waiting to happen. There were thousands of things that could go terribly wrong on a habitat, but also a thousand things a sampo could trivially fix. Without one, the habitat would eventually fail, with fatal or even catastrophic consequences. Or as the terminal put it, "Habitat-wide existential risk."

"How long have they been peripheral?" Kurn asked.

"Two hundred forty-six year, seven months."

"Really?"

"Last recorded contact with Involved Central Habitat Medusae Fossae was--"

"It was rhetorical." Kurn sighed.

Two and a half centuries, though! Year 603 to be exact, which meant... well, his mental chronology was fuzzier than his mental arithmetic. 603 was over a century after the Halfway Mark, the year Ilmarinen spent rearranging itself to decelerate toward its destination. But it predated the reformation of the Althing. The chaotic interval between the first and second Althings did result in many going peripheral; perhaps no one told them it was safe to come back to the fold. Or perhaps they didn't want to. But to spend that long out of contact... well, it raised some questions. Did their ravens talk? Did they still have yaks? He shook his head, trying to gather his thoughts which had scattered like a flock in the wake of a raptor.

"Can I hear the request?" He asked. "As it was received, I mean."

The terminal whirred, letting him know it was polling the habitat's storage and checking access keys. The audio file recorded a young voice, androgynous, clear and calm but hesitant, as if groping in the dark to find the end of their sentences. It could have been a recording of Kurn himself before exams, when he still lived with his grandmother. If he had been a revenant living on the wayback periphery, that is.

That he could decipher the language at all was probably why the request had fallen to him. It was known that Kurn was almost a scholar of Ilmarinen shipspeak, its history and evolution. At first guess, he placed the speaker firmly as expected in the early seventh century, complete with their affectation for stringing together a couple simple verbs instead of trusting to a single precise one. They weren't fluent by any stretch of the imagination, but they were probably the most well-spoken of their peers.

It was a problem with all peripheries, not just those on Ilmarinen. Shipspeak was a consequence of Ilmarinen's stale communications channel with Earth, some fifty light-years distant and receding more every year. Their ancestors understood that the frigid realities of interstellar travel entailed a kind of disconnection with their origins and ultimately with what had been called humanity. They were its Continuation: an end that was not identically the beginning, but one that was like a beginning. While Kurn listened intently to the voice of the speaker, there common ancestry was what he heard.

"Please," the message concluded, "send/convey a Technician to us for the purpose of fixing/healing/repairing our constructing/fabricating device."

The terminal went silent. As his transducers spun down, the whistling of the wind through the pines returned. While listening to his terminal, his eyes closed instinctively; when he opened them again, he found Rkax returned some meters away on the ground, staring at him.

"Thanks for waiting for me." Kurn said.

"All done?" Rkax asked. He pumped his wings and circled around Kurn, landing on a padded bit of vest designed specifically for the purpose. Rkax wasn't a burden, just a couple of kilograms.

"All caught up, at least." Kurn silenced his terminal and packed up their lunch. "If I take the job, you know, I might be away for a while."

"How long?" Rkax asked. It was a hard question to answer, and not just because of Kurn's uncertainty. Ravens had a tenuous concept of time beyond what they could tell from the light in the sky.

"A while." He repeated. "You'll have to get used to hunting for your own lunch again."

Rkax chittered, unhappy. They were creatures of habit and routine, after all. Sticking to a schedule was the easiest way to befriend one, and breaking that schedule was a sure way to get on one's bad side. Kurn hoped Rkax liked him enough to renew their friendship after the job was done. Kurn was never much for the company of humans; from what little he gathered of his little companion's life, Rkax wasn't much of a feather either. On the other hand, he wasn't sure if Rkax only put up with him for the regular source of cheap and lean protein.

"And you have to go?" Rkax said.

"No," Kurn admitted. "There are other Handlers. But they asked me for a reason."

Rkax seemed to consider this for several hundred meters, shifting awkwardly on the perch that Kurn provided.

"I can come with you." Rkax resolved.

"I don't know." Kurn said. He scratched his stomach under his vest, wondering how to explain it to a bird. "We would have to fly there."

"I can fly."

"Not that far," Kurn insisted.

"Farther than you." Rkax said, fluttering. It was a kind of joke, as if Rkax could take off with all of Kurn's one hundred-ish kilograms in tow.

"It's not your kind of flying." He said. "You understand we're on a ship, right? Moving through space?"

"Space..." Rkax trailed off. "That's... the sky, at night. Above the ceiling."

"Yes, sort of." Kurn was surprised that Rkax knew there was a ceiling at all. "And, well, the job is on a different ship. I have to fly through space to get there. It's not like flying through air. Humans do it with lots of extensions. I don't know if there are ones for ravens. I don't even know if any ravens have ever traveled through space. It might be dangerous."

It was dangerous enough for humans. Oh, they'd made safe enough of course, but it wasn't as fool-proofed and fail-safed as staying in the habitat, with a fully-functional sampo only a terminal's summon away.

"Kurn makes extensions."

"Rkax..."

"... Please?" Rkax nuzzled the bristles of Kurn's cheek with his beak.

He hadn't expected that. Kurn didn't normally blush.

"I'll see what I can do. No promises. It might not be possible."

"No worries, Kurn." Rkax chirped a couple times, sing-song. "Kurn makes, Kurn makes."

Rkax was like that most of the way back to the hab. With dinner in the heater and the raven back in his roost, Kurn flopped in his hammock and cracked Snari's journal open, back to the page he had been reading before the request came in. It was not the original journal, but it was the oldest copy he had made. Physical books were annoying even for the most well-fed sampo to grind out. Few people bothered with them at all, relying instead on terminals or screens and whatever media was in local storage. Tying up a sampo for a book might seem wasteful, but as a Handler he had a few privileges. And Handlers were known for a certain eccentricity.

In the morning of this day several centuries earlier, as written in his journal, Snari of Habitat Noctis Labyrinthus obtained news that a relative of his had chosen an early death. It was understandably painful to Snari, and he worked out his feelings on page after page. The book's margin contained a small portrait, even--Snari was skilled at sketching plants, animals and machine parts, but this was the first time that Kurn had seen him draw a human. Apparently he was displeased by the effort; the erstwhile portrait was effaced beyond identifiability. To calm himself, Snari retreated to his workshop beneath the biome layer and experimented with the delicate magnetic metamaterials that he studied and, after his fashion, loved.

The next pages, filled with lab notes instead of narrative, seemed to indicate some improvement in his mood. That afternoon, he took buttered tea with his neighbor, the geneticist Dyat. Kurn thought he understood more or less where Dyat's homestead had been relative to Snari's, but everything changed after the Halfway Mark and there were no clear landmarks that remained. Dyat was only known to the local archive as the propagator of a hybrid citrus fruit that was still in common use in Labyrinthus cuisine. While Snari had not yet confessed this even to his private journal, and thereby had not yet confessed this to Kurn, it was clear the two shared a romantic attraction. This manifested most clearly in the vague tone Snari took regarding his goings-on whenever Dyat happened into the scene. Today's entry, ending prematurely in the late afternoon, was no different.

Kurn laid the book down, open-faced against his bare chest. At first he found this habit of Snari's annoying, but after years of conjecturing their courtship he had come to find himself grinning like a fool at the mention of Dyat's name. He let his imagination pick up where Snari's account left off, under the fir trees where their unfinished tea had no doubt gone cold and clotted. The two recline together on one of Dyat's woolen quilts and gazed up at the habitat's skybox as the day faded into a projection of the habitat's exterior view. Kurn tried to imagine the taste of warm yak butter, smooth and funky, and how it would pair with tea.