Path of Tyrants: Backyard Starship #13

JN Chaney

1

I SMILED as the comm lit up with B’s face. “Hello, B. What can I do for my favorite bug?”

She waved her antennae in a gesture that somehow seemed vulgar. Then she beamed at me, her smile brilliant and wide. “Wish it was a social call, but—"

“Hit me. No sense wasting sugar on me.”

Her smile fell, but not entirely. “I just got a report from a contact on Spindrift, that he intercepted from a traffic control buoy on the edge of the system. There’s a ship heading outbound at about one-third light-speed, going nowhere in particular.”

“Okay, and?”

“And, I was hoping you could check it out.”

I frowned and glanced around the Fafnir’s cockpit. “We’re en route to Pont Alus Kyr. We’re bringing them the latest version of the Calamity-Killer patch for their systems, since they’re still working under the old quarantine rules. Can’t someone else do this?”

She gave me a look of apology. “I’d take care of it myself, except I’ve got a cooler full of vaccines headed for Gajur Prime. They’ve got a bad outbreak of Beta-hemorrhagic fever, and we want to nip it in the bud so it doesn’t set back their Calamity recovery efforts.”

“That’s a nasty fever.”

“Lethal. And I do mean lethal. It cooks the Gajur in their own skin, and this strain attacks children first, adults later,” she added, her eyes hooded

with sadness. B had treated masses of people in her decades as a physician. And she’d lost a lot of them, too. It stayed with her. I could see it in her eyes. I exhaled, slowly. “I get it. But… what’s so important about this particular ship anyway?

Is it an active target for us?

For the Guild?”

“No, but it is headed roughly for Altair, where it should arrive in about four hundred years. In other words, it’s an anomaly. And I don’t think I need to point out how anomalies in our post-Calamity world make people nervous.”

I blinked at that data. “Netty, how far out of our way is a Spindrift detour?

And maximum fuel economy, please.”

“If we don’t need to enter the Spindrift gravity well, then not very far. Say two hours, plus whatever time we spend there.”

“This rogue ship is outside the gravity well,” B clarified. “Okay. But you owe me a—call it a minor favor, anyway.”

She managed a respectable leer. “Oh, I can pay you back. You just say where and when.”

Torina looked up from her workstation and cleared her throat, then pasted a bland smile on her face. “Yes, dear, you just say where and when.”

I changed my voice to a stage whisper. “Cool it, B. She’s wise to us—

ouch. Uncalled for, and unbecoming an officer of your standing, love.”

Torina examined the hand she punched my shoulder with. “You’re too lean for a good punch. Gotta thicken up, babe.”

Perry leaned in between us. “Excuse me, I would like to point out that this is an official Peacemaker ship on official Peacemaker business. These hijinks are inappropriate.”

“Yeah, you’re poisoning my workplace,” Icky added from her own workstation. I glanced at Perry. “Hijinks?

Really?”

“Escapades?

Shenanigans?

Antics?”

Funboy added a derisive sniff. “Violence leads to the dispensation of body fluids, and I cannot abide that.”

Gabby leaned around her chair, teeth bared in her cartoonish smile. “I think you got the wrong f word, Funboy. It’s not fighting that does that, it’s

—”

Funboy stopped wiping his hands and smiled. “Perhaps I was wrong. I tend to be hasty with my, ah, assertions, and—anyway. You were saying?”

I snorted and pointed Funboy toward his chair. “Take your station, lover boy, and leave the nuances of language to me for now. B, we’re on our way this instant. I’ll report back with our findings.”

“Thank you kindly, my dear,” she replied, then gave Torina a warm smile. “As a friend, and a woman with some understanding of, ah, the male libido—”

Torina arched a brow. “Yes?”

B’s grin turned wicked. “Let Funboy pursue his… passion.” She cut her eyes at Gabby’s area, then waggled her brows. “B out. Good hunting. To all of you.”

The comm cut, leaving us laughing at B’s jab. I turned to my crew, who waited for orders. “Looks like it’s yeehaw, kids. Let’s go rope a little dogie.”

“That’s… a reference to the terrestrial genre called Western, correct?”

Funboy asked. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

“Ah. Well, then. Let us don our Jetson hats and cowboy up.”

“Stetson hats. Jetsons are a futuristic family with a talking dog.”

“Astro, yeah. I think he’s descended from Scooby-Doo,” Perry added. Rab, who’d been silent for some time, opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, then broke his silence while shaking his head. “This is the weirdest crew I’ve ever worked with.”

I grinned as Netty ran the pre-twist checklist. Icky belched, then scratched idly at one huge foot as Funboy watched in mild disgust. “Rab, buddy, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

I WATCHED the tactical overlay as we closed on the rogue ship. She was traveling at about point-three of light-speed, her course straight, with no acceleration. “Where the hell is she going?” I asked no one in particular. “B said Altair,” Torina answered, then tagged the route on our main screen. The faint blue line went on into eternity, if not for the gravity well of Altair. Netty spoke, even as she highlighted Torina’s route prediction. “Actually, on its present course, and taking into account foreseeable gravitational effects, she will slingshot around Altair and continue in the general direction of a star called TNS-8974A, where she will arrive in about three thousand years. In other words, nowhere fast.”

We were banging away with active scanners, painting a detailed picture of the ship. She was about two-thirds the mass of the Fafnir but had a strange thermal signature. A section of her hull was markedly colder than the sections forward and to the rear. She had a working reactor, and therefore power, but she hadn’t reacted to our sensor pings at all. Nor had she responded to any of our comms, or really emitted anything of note at all. I felt my own chill of unease and caught Perry’s eye. He dipped his beak, head tilted in curiosity. He might have been made of different material than me, but he felt the same twinge of danger. We edged closer. Now we were close enough to capture some detailed imagery, which Netty put on the master display. “Those viewports in the cold section—are they covered with ice?”

Torina asked. “Looks that way,” Perry replied. “Why would part of the ship be frozen?” Rab asked. “Maybe different environments for different passengers?” Torina offered, shrugging. “Well, let’s find out. We’ll use the Frankie to board her—me, Icky, Perry, and Funboy. Full suits, of course. Torina, you, Rab, Netty-P, and Gabby watch the fort here.” I started to unstrap but stopped. “Netty, we’re still in the outer reaches of the Spindrift system’s Oort Cloud, right?

There aren’t any collision hazards coming up?”

“Frankly, Van, I’d be surprised if this ship hits anything of substance anytime in the next billion years or so.”

“I’ll take those odds,” I said, standing. “Let’s go.”

“I guess that frozen section over there means we should… stay frosty,”

Perry said as we headed aft. I gave him a look. “Netty, post a listing on the Guild marketplace. For sale, one bird. Stale jokes and mild sass. Price negotiable. Joke book from 1987 included.”

Funboy spoke up after gracing us with his horrific attempt at a friendly grin. “I thought it was a laudable attempt at levity. It isn’t often that states of matter figure prominently in humor.”

Perry stopped, perched on the galley table. “Okay, if sourpuss likes it, I definitely need new material.”

I clapped my hands. “Congrats, Perry. You’re growing as a comedian. Slowly, but definitely growing.”

WE TRIED to mate the Frankie to the rogue ship’s universal docking adapter, but an unseen issue prevented latching or forming an airtight seal. That forced us to back out and do it the old-fashioned way, crossing to the mysterious ship—

—and breaking into her. With force. “We’ve confirmed the registry of this thing,” Perry said as we prepared to exit the Frankie and cross to the other ship. “It’s a so-called ‘bugout tube,’ a non-twist-capable ship used as a big escape pod. It has a high output fusion drive that can accelerate it to about one-third of light-speed, so it can be used to quickly escape a station facing a catastrophe—like if Spindrift was about to explode, they could use these things to bug out. What it’s not built for is trips into the big black on random trajectories.”

“It could be argued that every ship is built to do that. Whether they’re intended to, though, is another matter,” Funboy said. Perry stared at him. “Uh—yeah. Baron Von Nitpick here has shown me the error of my ways. I stand humbly corrected.”

“You know, I’m starting to lose track of which of you is the pedantic, soulless AI,” Icky said, snapping her helmet into place and glancing from Funboy to Perry. “There is nothing A about my I. In fact, I am quite I. I’ve been tested,”

Funboy replied. Icky sniffed. “Smart and sexy. Hold me back.”

Funboy eyed her thick frame. “With what?

A tugboat?”

Icky grinned, then flexed a massive leg. “Thank you.”

I closed the Frankie’s inner airlock door. “If we’re done with the banter, suit integrity checks, please, so we can get this show on the road.”

I depressurized the lock, opened the outer door, and pushed myself toward the other ship, which was hanging about a hundred meters away. Once I could unlimber my maneuvering unit, I puffed it and aimed myself at the other ship’s lock. I moved aside when we reached it, giving Icky space to work. She was going to try to pick the lock. If she couldn’t, then I’d use the Moonsword to literally hack the lock. I’d rather avoid that, though, because I didn’t want to risk depressurizing the ship if there were still crew—possibly injured, or even incapacitated—on board. Icky poked at the external lock controls while the rest of us clung to nearby bits of the ship. Time passed, then she grunted. “Okay, plan B,” she said, extracting a combination tool from her harness. She used it to open the panel, then she fiddled around inside with one of her smaller, more dexterous hands. After a moment of that, she grunted again, this time in satisfaction as the lock slid open. “Totally off-the-shelf hardware—and just the manufacturer’s default password, to boot. Easy-peasy,” she said. I nodded inside my helmet. “Good work, big girl. I’ll go first,” I said, pulling myself from one stanchion to another, closer to the airlock, snapping my tether from one to the next as I went. “Icky, you follow, then

—”

Without warning, I abruptly fell away from the ship and plunged toward the Frankie as weight slammed through my arms. My fingers ripped free of the stanchion, and I plummeted away from the ship, before stopping with an

“OOF!” as my tether went taut. I barely had time to even begin reacting before Torina’s voice hummed in my ears. “We’ve just been lit up by another ship, about ten thousand klicks to starboard high and—shit, missiles inbound!”

I cursed and gripped my tether, but I was effectively trying to pull twice my weight up a rope using only my arms. The bug-out ship was maneuvering, thrusters flinging propellant spaceward in pale cones. I cursed again. If its main drive kicked in, our tethers likely wouldn’t hold, and we’d be stuck with whatever velocity we had at that instant, meaning we’d be sailing off in some random direction into deep space. Assuming we weren’t vaporized by the exhaust. Funboy’s voice hummed in my ears. “Oh, dear.”

“Funboy, you okay?” I hissed through gritted teeth, still desperately trying to pull myself back to the ship. If I couldn’t in another few seconds, I was going to have to unhook my tether and hope for the best. “For the moment, I’m fine—and by fine, I mean on my way toward the galactic core. I was repositioning my tether when this happened.”

I caught a glimpse of him out of my peripheral vision, already a small, suited figure starkly alone against the stars. Then he slid out of my view. “Damn it!

Perry, where—”

“Heading back to the Frankie. I’m going after sourpuss.”

“Sourpuss appreciates it,” Funboy said. I pulled in a breath. “Icky?”

“Just—a sec—” she replied, her voice taut with strain. I turned my head and saw her stuck on the end of her tether like me. Unlike me, though, she was actually dragging herself back to the spinning ship, all four of her arms yanking her, a bit at a time, to the airlock. I finally gave up and put my hand on my tether release. It would probably be easier for Perry to retrieve me the same way he was going after Funboy. First, though—

“Torina, SITREP!”

I could see the Fafnir in the distance, streams of point-defense tracers pouring from her. A second or two later, she opened up with her swarm launcher and loosed a torrent of small, guided projectiles at her attacker, which was much too far away for me to see, of course. “So far—”

A dazzling flash pulsed from her direction, momentarily washing her out of my sight. I gasped, but Torina spoke up. “—so good, though that one was close.”

“Torina, we’re going to—”

A new voice cut me off. “Torina?

It’s your mom.”

“Mom?

What—?”

“Are you busy, hon?”

“Uh—yes, I’m fighting a space battle!”

“Oh. Well, call me when you’re done.”

“I—yes, sure, okay!”

“I hope you’re not just saying that. You said you’d call last time, too, and you never did. There’s always something—”

“Mom!

Space battle!

Missiles, guns, lasers, explosions!

I will call you back!”

“Fine.”

“Parents, am I right?” Perry asked. Icky had reached the airlock and pulled herself inside. All I could do was hang on the end of my tether as the bug-out ship swung and spun. I saw the Frankie slide past on its way after Funboy. Another explosion pulsed from the direction of the Fafnir, and a few seconds later, something streaked past me maybe two meters away. Shrapnel, from the detonation. “For future reference, gang, I much prefer watching one of these space battles from inside a ship, thanks,” I said, trying to force some levity into my voice when what really prodded at the back of my throat was a wild cry of frustrated, helpless rage—

But the ship pulling me along suddenly halted in a staccato ripple of thrusters, the acceleration abruptly vanishing. Momentum left me sailing directly toward the now-stationary hull. “Windshield, meet bug,” I murmured, grabbing at my maneuvering unit. With a quick shot of propellant, I slowed myself—

But I didn’t stop. “OOF.” I whumped against the ship and rebounded back into space, pouring curses into the ether the whole time. After reversing the MU, I fired another burst, then finally stopped myself relative to the ship and slid my way back toward it. This time, I was able to grab a stanchion and pull myself toward the airlock. Icky’s voice crackled. “Van, you okay?

I’m in the cockpit. I managed to

—shit!”

She cut off. “Icky?”

Nothing. I shoved myself through the airlock, drawing the Moonsword as I went. “Icky!”

The inner door was open, so I just kept going, blade extended with the intent to cut anything that was moving into pieces. Only at the last instant did sanity kick in, and I checked myself. One of those moving things might be Icky. So, instead, I paused just inside the airlock, took a breath, and pushed on, my head swiveling left and right. Icky had said she was in the cockpit, presumably to get the damned ship under control, so that was to my right. And she’d been abruptly cut off, which meant she might need my help. On the other hand, left, rearward, remained uncleared and, therefore, possibly harboring threats, including a scuttling charge on the power plant or drive. I paused, processing the threats. If anyone could take care of herself, it was Icky. “Fair winds, big girl. Be right back.”

I turned left and went aft while drawing The Drop and switching it to my right hand. I gripped the Moonsword in my left, my off hand, but that worked. Thanks to my many, many hours of training with—and being defeated by—Cataric, the Innsu Master, I was at ease with using either hand. The ship wasn’t large, so I passed through a small, combined galley and crew hab, which led to a sealed door—another airlock. The frozen part of the ship must lie beyond it. I reached for the control to cycle it, just as something moved in the corner of my eye to my right, and up—

A spindly humanoid figure with a leering, skull-like face and glowing embers for eyes unfolded itself from the overhead and swung down at me. The eyes dimmed, the thing lanced forward, and a vicious spike, cracking with energy, stabbed at me, the speed making it nearly a blur. But I was in motion. I dodged—just enough—and the knife slid between my arm and chest, branding my b-suit. With no gravity, my dodge set me spinning, but this was something else I was getting good at—zero- g combat. I kicked a foot out and tapped it against the hatch while lashing out with the Moonsword in a savage arc. The Synth—I knew that now—dodged backward, opening some space between us. But it wasn’t a stranger to no-g either and immediately kicked back against the bulkhead behind it, driving itself forward, powered blade raised and ready. Again. “Nope,” I grunted, which wasn’t my most eloquent rebuttal, but my sword strike was. The Moonsword blurred sideways and connected with the Synth’s weapon. Had it been nearly any other material, my blade would have neatly sliced through it. But with a bluish pulse of light, the two weapons deflected one another, one strike hitting a conduit above and behind me. I pushed

hard this time and spun around my own waistline to lift my feet for a vicious kick that connected with the Synth. Again, it was flung backward, and it crashed against the bulkhead behind it. Its impact dislodged some loose utensils, sending them whirling through the galley around us in a silvery tumult. The Synth recovered with mechanical quickness and drove at me again. This time, it managed to strike the ceramalloy plate covering my left thigh, digging out a chunk of the tough armor and cracking the plate up its length. It pulled back, struck again, and met my blade with a punishing impact that shivered my arm. I was sweating. I was breathing harder. And the Synth was ready to go. This story only ended in one way unless I changed the rules. So I did. As it pulled back its power blade for another strike, I swung the Moonsword and batted a madly whirling spoon straight back at its face. That caused an instant of hesitation. And in that instant, I swung The Drop in line and started firing. I shot that bastard with enthusiasm, sending slugs out as fast as my reflexes allowed, tearing apart the Synth’s chest, then I stepped forward, placed my sight between the glowing eyes, and fired once, bringing our engagement to a close. Then the Synth twitched and lifted a hand to point at me. My control—went away. I fired. And again. And then I leaned forward and methodically shot the Synth to pieces, grunting in satisfaction as each round reduced the body to a series of ragged components. “More, you say?

Lucky you. I’m here to help.”

I fired until the gun went silent and the Synth’s leering face was nothing but shattered bits of metal and ceramic. Wobbling globules of pale gray fluid drifted away, some rolling obscenely across the deck. “Hey, Van, what the hell are you—oh.”

I turned to Icky, who hung in the hatchway, using one of her two smaller arms to grip the coaming while her bigger, more powerful arms hefted her hammer. “Found a bad guy,” I said, sucking in a breath. “Yeah, me too. See?”

With her remaining, smaller arm, she held up the skull of another Synth. It had been mashed down to about one-third of its normal size, presumably

by repeated blows of a hammer. “Why the hell are you carrying that around?” I asked. “I dunno. Souvenir?”

I rolled my eyes and started to turn and head aft, but she shook her head. “No need. The reactor’s offline. Out of fuel. And no twist drive, so no antimatter to go blooey. This thing’s running on power cells only.”

I nodded. “Yeah, it was just bait. The class 11 that bounced the Fafnir probably just tows it out into position and cuts it free.”

“Then they power down, go dark and cold, and wait for some poor fool to come along,” Icky finished. “Yeah. Speaking of which—Torina, you there?”

Silence. I frowned. Having lost the Fafnir to a hijacking recently, I was… sensitive to moments of uncertainty like this. My response had been simple. We made the Fafnir more dangerous. Far more. She was now about a class 14 in terms of mass, equivalent to a light cruiser. “If some shithead hurt my ship—” I began, but Perry cut in. “I’ve got Torina. I think that ship you and Icky boarded has been shielded against anything but short-range comms—probably part of their cunning little trap.”

I let out a breath of relief. “Are they okay?”

“She says they’re investigating some class 11 wreckage. Does that answer your question?”

More relief. “Yes, thanks. How about you and Funboy?”

“Yeah, about that. You know that thing where you offer someone a ride, but just before they grab the door handle, you pull away, then wait for them to catch up and reach for the door handle again, and then you pull away—”

“Perry!”

“I was going to say, Van, that I’m explicitly not doing that. I had considered it, but I decided it was too much of a dick move, even for me. Aren’t you proud of me?”

“For not being a complete asshole?”

“I think it shows genuine character growth.”

Icky shook her head and sighed. “Next time the bird’s in the shop, let’s just get his humor subroutine deactivated entirely.”

I grinned, letting the relief wash over me like a cool breeze, wafting away the tension of the past—

Holy shit. Checking the time, I realized I’d only left the Frankie ten minutes ago. My grin became a sigh. “I need a vacation.”

Icky held up the squashed Synth head. “Whatcha think?

A new hood ornament for the Fafnir?”

I started to shake my head but caught myself. “You know what?

Sure, why the hell not.”

“You—seriously?”

“Go for it, big girl.”

She grinned, exposing teeth like weathered ivory. “Amazing. So… hear me out—flames on the side of the Fafnir, but tasteful—"

2

WHEN WE FINALLY REASSEMBLED ABOARD the Fafnir, we took stock of the situation. Torina, Rab, and the Nettys had, indeed, reduced the class 11 that had ambushed us to battered wreckage. Icky and Perry used the Frankie to check out the remains, but there wasn’t much left. Even the identity of the ship was questionable. “We found four different transponder IDs in what remained of her data stores. Netty confirms that none of them conform to whatever her actual identity likely is,” Perry said. “Two are ships that have been decommissioned, one is a fast freighter currently en route to Crossroads from Dregs, and the last is a stellar cartographic ship from the K’laenar Institute on Outward, in the Procyon system. It went missing about two months ago,” Netty put in. I exchanged a grim look with Torina. “I think I know what probably happened to it,” I said, and she just nodded. “The only other item of note is a bit of nav data. She did a location fix using reference pulsars about a week ago. That put her within spitting distance of the Afterthought,” Perry said. The Afterthought. The name made me frown as I tried to remember how I knew it—

“Wait. Isn’t that where the Stillness used to hang out?”

“Actually, they still do, as far as we know,” Perry replied as Netty put up the relevant star chart on the display over the galley table. Torina sipped coffee—actually, cappuccino brewed on board with her newest acquisition from a little shopping trip during our last visit to Iowa. She’d tried it once in a Starbucks and decided she was addicted to it. “Didn’t we wipe them out?” she asked, licking coffee foam off her upper lip. I narrowed my eyes at her. “Do that again.”

“Do what again—” she said, then leered at me. “Captain. So… forward of you.”

“Do you two mind?

We’re strategizing here,” Perry complained. Funboy gave a glum nod. “Indeed. Exposing the tongue for any purpose is hardly alluring, given the vast number of pathogens coating it.”

Icky glanced at him. “And you’re some sort of great lover, huh?”

“Within reasonable limits. For instance, I would never place my—”

“That’s… fine,” I cut in, then glanced at Torina. “We’ll discuss this later.”

“I’ll bring a fresh cup to your cabin when we’re done here.”

Perry gave a theatrical sigh. “If we can pull our attention away from sordid matters of the flesh— again—Torina had just mused that we’d destroyed the Stillness. And I was about to answer that no, we hadn’t, we’d destroyed the Fade, which was a splinter faction of the Stillness. Paress Kohl and his merry band of outlaws are still very much out there.”

“And by merry band of outlaws, Perry means vicious gang of murderous thugs,” Netty-P added. I had to agree, despite my disgust at their existence. The Stillness had been one of the first criminal organizations we’d ever tangled with. Under the ruthless leadership of their enigmatic overlord, Paress Kohl, and his killers, the Shadows, they had been thriving in the remote region called the Afterthought. It was an awkward place to get to, which helped them to survive. And they committed their crimes well inside known space, but far enough from Afterthought, essentially hiring themselves out as spies, assassins, saboteurs, or whatever flavor of villainy the market would bear. Of great interest to me, they’d been my grandfather’s primary target, one that he’d tried and failed to defeat. I’d been led to believe it was this failure that made him turn down a position as Guild Master—but that was before I’d learned about the GKU, the 32, and all the internecine complexities that arose from them. They’d also killed my father by shooting down his airplane as it turned onto final approach to his aircraft carrier. Or, at least, the Fade—a splinter group of the Stillness, as Perry said—had. They’d been wiped out, but I still felt like I had a score to settle with Kohl and the Stillness. They’d gone mostly quiet, and more pressing matters had risen to the top of the pile. I nodded as I thought about it. Now that we had some breathing room from the existential threat of Calamity, maybe it was time to revisit the Stillness—

“Oh, shit,” Torina snapped, putting her cup down. We all looked at her. “My mother. She called right in the middle of that battle.”

“You’d better call her back. I’ve learned from hard experience not to keep any of my mothers waiting,” Rab said, nodding sagely. Torina smirked. “I only have to manage one. I don’t know how you P’nosk can handle having a team of mothers.”

Rab gave a rueful smile. “What makes you think we can handle it?”

“THIS IS A TOUCH MYSTERIOUS FOR ME,” I repeated as Netty confirmed our hard dock with the Milon’s private yacht, the Flight of Fancy. Torina pulled at her lip. “Very. I’m just hoping my parents haven’t decided to spring a surprise wedding on us or something,” she said, before unstrapping from the Fafnir’s copilot’s seat and standing. I froze in the middle of the unstrapping part, then glanced down at myself. My Peacemaker coverall was frayed and tattered in places, and it had a few drops of what was equally likely to be blood or hydraulic fluid. I hadn’t shaved for a couple of days and felt grubby. The rest of the crew didn’t look much better. We’d just been too busy to spend much time on what we’d called “personal administration” in the Army. “Oh—no. Please, not today. I am on fire to be bound to you under the moons, but… not today. You don’t think that’s what this is, do you?” I asked. Torina’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “If it is, then I’ll have another mother and father that Rab can take off my hands—”

“Not interested, thanks!” Rab called back over his shoulder as he headed aft. Torina smiled but shook her head. “I seriously doubt it. My parents know better than that.”

I stood. “So why the hell did they ask us to come here, of all places, to meet them?”

“We’re about to find out.” She looked up at me, then reached out to pluck something from my face. “Random dirt. Been a rough month for us, love.”

I glanced out the cockpit canopy, a slow smile spreading on my face. She was right. It had been rough, and now, here we were, looking at the barren sprawl of Scorch, an airless moon that was host to the Armory. The Armory was just that—a secret GKU weapons facility overseen by the 32, and it filled much of the forward view. We hung over its dark side, protected from the fierce glare of Gliese 876, the system’s star. Netty and the Flight of Fancy’ s AI had collaborated to put us in an orbit around the star that would keep us there. We brought everyone aboard the Milon’s yacht and joined Torina’s parents in a sumptuous lounge that included a round, sunken section lined with stupidly comfortable couches. I immediately felt out of place, grubby and tattered as I was. I could sense that Rab, Funboy, and even Torina did, too. Icky just sprawled like she owned the place. And Gabby—

Gabby, the most recent addition to our crew, served as the Fafnir’s cook, but her primary role really was as quartermaster. The Fafnir had become a complex ship to operate and keep provisioned, so Gabby had a full-time job making sure we didn’t run out of anything crucial, like reactor fuel or toilet paper. She was also our de facto problem solver, since she had a strangely keen, innate ability to look at a situation and intuit solutions that even our AIs didn’t consider viable. And yet, they always seemed to work

—so far, at least. “Hello, Missus Milon—or is it Ms. Milon, I find I always have to check, and—oh, you must be Torina’s father, so that would be Mr. Milon, am I right?

It’s so good to meet you, Torina has talked about you so much, and

—”

“Excuse—”

“—and I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you—”

Her father held up a hand. “Gabby—we’ve met, remember?

That unfortunate business with the bodies in the cargo container on Helso?”

“I—oh. Oh!

Oh, that’s right, oh silly me,” and she tittered, which was quite something to see given that Gabby is a human-sized anthropomorphic water bear. If you squint, and accept that water bears are...tall. And chatty. And more socially awkward than early heartfelt Tumblr posts during the emo era. Gabby, drew in a breath and kept going. “I’m so sorry, that makes it seem like I don’t remember you, and, well, I guess I didn’t, but not because you’re not memorable, it’s—”

“It’s fine,” Tor Milon inserted, deftly, smiling with the strained good cheer of everyone who’d been exposed to The Full Gabby. I had to smile, too. For all her brilliantly unconventional thinking, and her ability to somehow organize the hundreds of items and materials required to keep the Fafnir flying—not to mention her ability to produce a multi-course meal with everything hitting the table hot and ready to eat, all at once—Gabby’s brain could be as scattered as a thrown handful of chicken feed. She started again. “Fine?

Oh, no, it’s not, I’m so sorry—”

“Gabby,” I called, gesturing toward a seat. She opened her mouth, but I put a finger to my lips and gestured again. She put a stubby finger to her own—lips, I guess, though her mouth was more round and dimpled than a slit, then sat down. I smiled and gave her a nod. We’d all discovered that the best way to get Gabby to stop talking and listen was to, ah, just tell her stop talking and start listening. She was an excellent listener. Once she started listening. Idly, I wondered how many lungs—or lunglike organs—she had, because much like my Aunt Bernice, she never ran out of air. Bernice could tell you, in one sentence, a sixteen-minute description of her kidney stones, presumably on one breath. Said description would be accompanied with a lot of hand gestures, just for razzle dazzle. Looking at Gabby from the side, she sort of resembled Aunt Bernice, who was what one might call a handsome, sturdy woman. Once Gabby was seated, Funboy took a seat beside her. A respectable amount of daylight remained between them, but despite neither being human, the body language was obvious even to the Milons, who both glanced at Torina and I with quick smiles. “So aside from the opportunity to spend time with you both, what’s up?” I asked Torina’s parents. “And why is it here, at the Armory?”

Torina gave a grim nod. “I can’t help but feel that you’re about to tell us there’s some new war, or some old war starting up again, or… something about a war.” She leaned back in the couch and sighed. “And, gotta be honest here, I’m warred out.”

“You and everyone else, daughter of mine,” her father said. Her mother placed a hand on Tor’s arm, her eyes bright. “That’s for sure. But, no, this isn’t about war, conflict, strife, or anything else you want to call it. This is about—” She frowned, hunting for a word, but her husband beat her to it. “This is about adventure!”

He looked around with an expectant smile on his face. What he got back from us was a stony silence—except from Gabby, who nodded along enthusiastically. But he could have announced that we’d be digging a mass grave and she’d probably have nodded along enthusiastically to that, too. “Sorry, Dad, we’re all just a little worn out. And the few days off we manage to snatch here and there just aren’t enough time to decompress,”

Torina said. “Of course not. You guys need a real break. So we’re offering you one

—well, technically, Mother Hen is, but we’re involved,” her mother replied. “What sort of break?” I asked. “A cruise.”

“A cruise.”

“That’s right.”

“You mean aboard a floating shopping center and casino, all-you-can-eat buffets, tacky stage shows with waiters doing magic, shuffleboard, swimming pools full of shrieking kids and loose body hairs, that sort of thing?”

“That’s… a really specific description,” her father noted. I shrugged. “I went on a cruise once, a so-called gift from a client back on Earth. It led me to conclude he didn’t like me very much.”

“Okay, objection noted. So if you won’t listen to us about how good this would be for you and your crew, maybe you’ll listen to—”

A door opened, and Master Cataric entered. I blinked. “You mean, Master, you were out there, listening in and waiting to make your dramatic entrance?”

He smiled and shook his head. “No, I was in the lavatory and only just now finished up.”

“Ah. That’s considerably less cool.”

Torina’s parents recapped for him as he sat down. When they were done, he turned to me. “Van, you and your crew have given your all for the good of known space, and then some. I am proud to call you my student because you are a skilled practitioner of Innsu, but much more so because you are a good man, honorable and courageous, who has consistently done what needed to be done for the benefit of everyone else.”

“But?”

“But, you and the crew of the Fafnir have reached your limit. I can see it just by looking at you. You have never appeared in the dojo unshaven or unkempt as you are now. But I can also see it in your eyes,” Cataric said, turning to each of us in turn, but stopping on Gabby. “Except for yours. I’m afraid we haven’t met, have we?”

“No, we haven’t, I’m Gabby, it’s such a pleasure to meet you, Van and Torina have talked about you and your Innsu, oh, and that is utterly fascinating, I—”

“Gabby,” I said. She looked at me, then turned back to Cataric. “Very pleased to meet you.”

“Are… are you really suggesting that some stuffy, packaged cruise is the answer?” Torina asked. Her mother gave a wry smile. “No, that’s just the conclusion Van saw and immediately jumped at. Maybe Mother Hen can explain it better,” she said, touching a control. An almost perfect 3D image of Mother Hen, the snappy old Fren-Okun female who ran the Armory, appeared on the couch beside her—from the waist up. I blinked at her disembodied head and torso. “Mother Hen, it’s great to see—uh, about fifty percent of you.”

“What?

What the hell are you talking about?”

Torina’s father cleared his throat. “Sorry about that. We just had a new comm system installed in the Fancy. It renders the subject at the other end in the best 3D it can. Pretty lifelike, isn’t it?”

“It—yeah, I guess. Except for the whole missing the lower half of her body part,” I said. “Yeah, the system is limited to what’s transmitted to it. You either need to sit way back from the imager or have a special rig for a full-body image.”

“Excuse me?

Are you saying only half of me is showing up?” Mother Hen’s upper body snapped. For being fifty percent of a being, it generated full-powered annoyance. I couldn’t help it. I laughed at the absurdity of it, and then Torina joined me. It set off a chain of modest laughter that crashed, headlong into the reality of—

Funboy—

Who nodded, with funereal intent. “This is very amusing.”

Gabby shook her head. “No, not like that. Come on. Join us for a, a—

moment of levity. It’s funny, and—"

His lips writhed apart, exposing his teeth, while his eyes turned to dark chips of glittering crystal. Gabby froze. “Oh—oh!

Oh my!

On second thought, why don’t you just—you know, laugh on the inside, like you usually do?”

I winked at Funboy. “Good call. Laugh on the inside. For the rest of my natural existence, if you don’t mind.”

“And in another star system,” Torina mumbled, shivering delicately. “Well, if you’re all done being younglings about it,” Mother Hen started, then paused and gave a sly grin. “Younglings. Heh. You know what we Fren-Okun do with our younglings, eh?

I’ll give you a hint.” Her look turned sly, but before she could speak, I leaned forward—

“Does it rhyme with moist?” I asked. Her lips pursed. “You stole my move, kid.”

I spread my hands. “It’s a gift. Knew where we were headed. Also, it felt like the right thing because, let’s face it, we’re all on the same side here. I’d prefer we remain—unified. Maybe even friendly.”

Mother Hen rearranged herself in a position I recognized as getting down to business. “Friendly, I can do. I can also do damp or gooey, but for now—consider this. About four years ago, the GKU, under the direction of the 32, established a test facility outside known space. And I mean well outside known space. It had two purposes. One was to establish a modular, scalable real-space drive that incorporates the concept of an interstellar ramjet while also drawing on the most fundamental sort of energy in the universe, at least that we’re aware of—vacuum energy. Now, hands up whoever doesn’t know what these concepts are.”

Gabby immediately raised her hand. So did Torina. Rab put his up hesitantly. “I’ve heard of the ramjet thing, but vacuum energy?”

Netty-P spoke up. “According to existing models of the universe, what we perceive as empty space is, in fact, a complex assemblage or field of energy at the quantum level. Excitations in this field correspond to the elementary particles of particle physics. It’s a complex subject, though, and there are still inconsistencies and gaps in it we don’t understand.”

Mother Hen nodded. “Bottom line is that even empty space is stuffed full of energy. The question is whether we can tap into it. That was being explored by this facility we established. The interstellar ramjet thing is, in comparison, dead simple. You generate a field ahead of a ship that funnels interstellar particles into a choke point, where they’re compressed and heated until they undergo nuclear fusion. The result is a fusion drive with free, unlimited fuel—but only if the ship in question is traveling at a good chunk of light-speed.”

I was frowning as Mother Hen spoke. “About a year ago, we visited a shady facility studying new engine technology. It turned out to have been destroyed and ransacked by—somebody.” I narrowed my eyes. “Was that the doing of the GKU?”

Mother Hen shook her head. “No. That was the doing of a rival criminal syndicate. The GKU obtained all the data from them—and by obtained, I mean extracted it using great amounts of force and many, many explosions. Your grandmother was deeply involved in that, in fact. But having extracted the pertinent data, we handed it over to this experimental facility of ours to incorporate into their research. Why wouldn’t we?”

“So why is this facility so far outside known space?

Interstellar ramjet technology isn’t particularly innovative, at least in terms of its theoretical basis. Is it to keep the actual version of technology being developed secret?

Or is there something about the vacuum energy aspect of it that’s considered too dangerous for experiments in or near known space?” Funboy asked. “Yes, maybe, and maybe again. I mean, who the hell knows—if we go fiddling around with the very substance of reality, we might cause it to unravel, right?” Mother Hen replied. “Oh, another existential threat. I guess with Calamity off the table, at least for now, we needed something new to keep us awake at night,” I said, holding back a scowl. Mother Hen leveled a thin smile back at me. She was good at reading people, of that I was certain. “If it makes you feel better, the vacuum energy thing is still just theory. The only actual tech involved in it is strictly for conducting some basic experiments. We’re a long way from being able to engineer anything.”

“Okay, so why the distance?” I pressed. “Because there’s a third type of tech involved. You’ve encountered it before. The Sorcerers somehow developed it, or, more likely, came into possession of it. It’s a twist drive that works inside a gravity well.”

I stared for a moment as that sank in. “Wait—are you talking about the time they risked destroying Good when they somehow twisted away from it?”

“Yep,” Mother Hen said, suddenly becoming a Wisconsinite. My eyes widened. “That tech didn’t die with the Sorcerers.”

“Of course not. When Gerhardt and Unity collaborated to destroy the miserable wretches, they were able to retrieve the tech. They only had one such drive, the one you encountered, but they planned to build more. Needless to say, that would have been a very bad thing.”

“The gravitational distortions triggered by one of the damned things could, at least in theory, shatter a planet,” Perry said. “Again… yep,” Mother Hen agreed. “And that’s why this research facility is so far away from known space,”

Torina said. Mother Hen nodded. “And for the third time, yep.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “So what’s the bad news here?

Because there’s inevitably bad news, which is probably why you’ve offered us this cruise into the great beyond.”

“I’d say you’re sharp, kid, but it’s kind of a no-brainer that there’s bad news afoot,” Mother Hen said. “And the bad news here is that there’s been no contact with this facility for a year now. Not even a peep. The place has gone as dark as the space between the stars.”

3

“HOW LONG IS IT?” Funboy asked. Perry’s eyes glinted. “That’s a rather personal question.”

Funboy turned to him. “How is that—oh. Ah, humor regarding the proportions of male anatomy. Crude, but effective,” he said, starting to grin again. Perry lifted a wing and turned his head away. “Never mind, I take it back, I take back—"

I sat forward. “Assuming Funboy means the length of the journey, then it’s a good question. How long of a trip are we talking about?”

“Nothing you could do in one twist. For one, there’s no twist drive big or powerful enough. For another, you’d lose, like, a hundred years or so of real-space time,” Mother Hen replied. “Yeah, that’s not happening,” Torina said flatly. Mother Hen glared at her. “Didn’t I just say that?

The optimum course involves seventeen twists and will take sixty-two days of shipboard time, give or take. The real-space elapsed time over that period will be about ninety days.”

We sat in silence. Stunned silence, at that. Then everyone started to talk at once. “That’s insane—”

“What about fuel—?”

“Three months each way—”

“Sixty days aboard the Fafnir—?”

Torina’s father stood and raised his hands. Everyone fell silent, but Mother Hen seized the floor, and Tor subsided into a pose of curious respect. “Yes, it’s a very long trip. But it’s also a trip that needs to be done, and we think you’re the ones to do it,” Mother Hen said. “In fact, I know you are.”

“Sixty days together aboard the Fafnir—each way?

We’re a pretty tight crew but… I don’t know about that kinda familiarity,” Icky said. “We consulted with Sussbrid, the Guild’s master shrink. She thinks you’ll all be able to do it, based on your psych profiles. There’s a reason you all work together so well as a crew,” Mother Hen said. Master Cataric leaned forward. “I’m convinced you will be able to make the journey as well. Van, I have come to know you as much more than a practitioner of Innsu. One’s approach to the art gives great insight into one’s character. As Mother Hen has said, there’s a reason that you have assembled these people as your crew, and why you all collaborate so effectively. And that reason is you.”

I fought a scowl. “I think you’re attaching a little too much importance to me. We’re a good crew because we’re a good crew—”

“No, I think he’s right,” Icky said. Torina and Funboy both nodded. So did Rab. “I’ve only been working with you for a couple of months, Van, and…

yeah, you’re the glue that holds the crew together.”

Gabby nodded enthusiastically. “That’s absolutely true!

There was that one time, when we were on our way to Crossroads, and you—”

“Gabby!”

Everyone said it, almost in unison. That led to a ripple of laughter, but it quickly died. “Van, your crew has formed around you, and is the excellent crew it is because of you. By all means, yes, each member of it is a skilled and remarkable individual in their own right. But that ineffable thing called the crew of the Fafnir exists because of you,” Cataric said. Then his expression darkened. “And that is also the root of a problem we all see developing here.”

I’d opened my mouth to protest that they were still giving me way too much credit, but that caught me. “Problem?

What problem?”

“You have been on the front lines of… not just the conflict against Calamity, or any one conflict. You’ve been fighting them all. You and your crew have achieved tremendous things. But it’s not sustainable, Van. Your Guild’s shrink, as Mother Hen called her, has flagged worrisome signs—the earliest cracks. You are obsessive about fulfilling your duty, as though you believe that even appearing to back off from doing so will lead to catastrophe.”

“You refuse to take time off, or when you do, it’s a half day. Or a day. At most,” Torina’s mother said, her eyes searching my face. Her father nodded. “And you’re constantly looking for new challenges, new missions, new tasks. It’s as though you’re afraid that known space will somehow implode if you don’t.”

I sat back. “Okay, fine. I see what you’re saying. But how does a two-month flight to some remote research station that’s gone dark and silent count as time off?

Wouldn’t it be better to take a few weeks off on Helso, or Earth, or visit Schegith?”

This time, Cataric and Torina’s parents exchanged knowing smiles. Her mother turned to me. “Very well, Van. You’re going to spend the next month on Helso, relaxing, walking the estate, practicing with Master Cataric, and enjoying the view. There will be food and wine aplenty. And naps. And the chill tub, and hot rocks, and walking with Torina under the moons as the floral breezes whisper past.”

I stared at her. “That sounds… perfect?”

She stared right back at me and waited. A month on Helso. It would be heavenly. Maybe a side trip to visit Schegith and spending some time dabbling around the Undersea—away from the things that wanted to eat us, of course—and maybe a trip to Earth, a few days or even a week at Pony Hollow, enjoying—

Doing nothing for a month. Nothing. While Calamity simmered. While the Stillness amped up their predatory ways. While Sorcerer technology with the potential to destroy planets went missing for a year. While Dohlennz remained at large, doing who knew what. And while the rest of the crew went their separate ways because we couldn’t expect that Icky would just want to hang out with us. She was

betrothed, after all. I had no idea what Funboy, Rab, or Gabby would want to do, but—

“There it is,” Cataric said, wearing a soft smile. I blinked at him. “There what is?”

“The reason why you simply taking an extended vacation isn’t going to work. I can see it in your eyes, Van. Behind them. All the reasons why it won’t are running through your mind. You would never relax, and you know it. The day you stepped off the Fafnir, you would start counting the days until you resumed your duties and took flight again.”

“He’s not wrong, Van,” Perry said. Netty, listening in via comm, spoke up. “The last time we were in Iowa, for only two days off, you asked me for status updates and to check the latest intel reports three and four times, respectively.”

I turned to Torina’s parents. “You only asked Master Cataric to come along because you thought that since I trust and respect him so much, he’d be more likely to convince me about this, didn’t you?”

Her father grinned. “Is it working?”

“Little bit.” I looked at Torina, then at the rest of my crew. “What do you guys think?”

“The bird’s got it. He’s not wrong,” Icky replied. Funboy, in his typically fussy, precise way, leaned forward just enough to signal he was about to speak. “It isn’t just you, Van. You’ve instilled a deep dedication to duty in all of us. I, myself, find it difficult to disengage from it and immerse myself in the things I find pleasurable.”

Silence. Icky took the plunge. “Which are?”

Funboy blinked at her, then turned back to me. “The point is, Van, that all of us will find it difficult to truly relax if we’re in a position where we feel we could be, or should be, doing something related to our jobs.”

Icky stuck up two hands. “Just wanna go on record here that for me, tinkering with the Fafnir and the Frankie and futzing around with their innards are my happy place, so I’m gonna keep doing that as well, even if we visit some fleshpot-world like Reticulum.”

This time Torina raised an eyebrow at her. “As well?

As what?”

She stared at Torina, then turned back to me. “The point is that they’re right. If we’re stuck flying for sixty days with no way of getting involved in

whatever crisis of the day is happening back here, we might actually get a chance to, you know, unwind a little.”

I sat back and stared up at the ceiling of the Fancy’ s lounge—which I’d just noted was painted, and with some risqué images done in a vaguely Renaissance style, at that. Everyone waited. I finally blew out a long breath. Frankly, being days, even weeks away from known space, so completely cut off from its ceaseless litany of turmoil and crime and general goings-on, was… appealing. Damned appealing. Our only problems would be… ours. The ones that were right there, in the moment. I lowered my gaze back to the group. “Okay. I assume, Mother Hen, that there’s some provision to refueling along the way?”

“There are four automated refueling stations along the flight path, yeah. But I’ve got a couple of newfangled fuel pods that we can mount on open hardpoints on your ship. They should let you make the whole trip without refueling, if you have to—although I’d recommend you refuel, regardless, in case you can’t top up at the destination.”

“We’ll need extra provisions, meds—oh, I’ll make a list!” Gabby enthused. Funboy glanced sidelong at Icky. “Toilet paper. Don’t forget toilet paper.”

Icky glared back at him. “Oh, for—I’ll lay off the cheese, sheesh. But I expect noodles, lots and lots of noodles, instead.”

Gabby nodded like a bobblehead. “Oh, I’ll have noodles, and ways of fixing them that you haven’t even tried, they’re so good—oh!

Oh!

I just thought of a recipe I want to try out on you guys—"

I turned to Mother Hen, Cataric, and the Milons. “Okay, so if we find this lab, and the people there are alive, and they haven’t poked a hole in reality or wiped themselves out with some gravitational weirdness from the Sorcerers twist drive—which, I might add, a major part of me thinks should have just been destroyed, but that’s another conversation—what then?”

Torina’s mother stood, walked over, and sat down beside me, then put her hand on my arm near some of the spots on my uniform that might have been hydraulic fluid—or blood. “Then whatever happens next, happens next. For now, Van, don’t worry about that. The war—wars, all of them—will be waiting for you. And so will we.”

WE SPENT the next couple of days at the Armory, digging into what we would need, and need to do, to ready ourselves for the trip. We dismounted a laser battery to open up a hardpoint for one of Mother Hen’s advanced antimatter fuel pods, and stuck two more on our remaining open hardpoints. I wasn’t happy about losing the firepower, but I’d be even unhappier running out of fuel light-years from help. Between the pods and Fafnir’s internal storage, we had enough to make the trip all the way to the remote facility, which was called Reverie, without having to refuel at the intervening, automated refueling stations. The Frankie offered an additional reserve of fuel, but that would be a last resort. We would refuel at them, though, as much as we could, because we couldn’t carry enough fuel to get back. Because, as I’d explained to my crew and everyone else, if we for some reason couldn’t master the fuel situation until my doubts were near minimal, then we’d have to scrub the mission. “I cannot and will not count on being able to refuel at Reverie itself,” I said and got nothing but nods and acknowledgements. There was, after all, good reason to believe that Reverie may no longer be operating. Or in existence. We also went through a meticulous checklist of every possible contingency. I spoke to B about medical matters, and she only emphasized one point. “I’m sending you a list of meds, Van, that I want you to ensure Icky takes as I’ve prescribed them,” she said, tapping at a data slate. “They’re to prevent her from, uh… acting out against other members of the crew.”

“By that, do you mean male members of the crew?”

“I do.”

“Yikes. Does it come with handcuffs, too?”

“Are you hitting on me?” she purred. “I—easy, spicy bug. Handcuffs for the big girl.”

“No need. The drugs will do fine. There might be a hint of, ah…

stomach upset. Occasionally.”

“Stomach. Issues.” I fought a sigh, then tried to grin. “We’ll be the first warship with air fresheners first on our manifest.”

“You will if you’re smart. Now then, about the meds that will stop Icky from dry-humping your crew into oblivion—”

“Send it. For the sake of everyone under three hundred kilos, send it.”

THE MILONS SPARED no expense in helping us provision the Fafnir, even opening up their well-stocked wine cellar and collection of spirits so that we could bring along a reasonable quantity of adult beverages. While these supplies were all gathered and the Fafnir underwent a bow-to-stern inspection and tune-up, Torina and I took a quick trip back to Earth. I contacted both Miryam and Tony Burgess to update them on what was going on and to let them know that we’d be gone for an extended period. I’d given Tony a comm transceiver—not twist-capable, because I didn’t want to give him antimatter—but we were close enough to Earth when I called him that the delay was minimal. Tony’s image scowled back at me, and it was most certainly not what I would call Wisconsin Nice. “Van, I’m still keeping a freakin’ spaceship under wraps. I’d really like someone to take that thing off my hands. Those kinda-sorta Men in Black have been sniffing around Appleton again, and it’s starting to make me feel paranoid.”

I gave a wry smirk. “Starting to?”

“Okay, more paranoid. Seriously, though, before I met you, back when I only believed in UFOs and little green men, a part of me always gave me an out—that it was, of course, all just bullshit. But I don’t have that out anymore. I know what’s really going on up there, and out there, and… and now, down here, in my own backyard. Gotta be honest, that’s kinda worse.”

“Tony, look, I’ll see if I can arrange to get that thing taken off your hands. If a woman named Lunzy shows up on your doorstep someday, she’s with me.”

“Oh, yeah, that reminds me. How about some guy named Forester?”

My smirk curled into a frown. “Forester?

Never heard of him. Why?”

“A guy named Forester phoned, oh, day before yesterday, I think. He left a message, but I haven’t returned it.”

“What did he want?”

“No idea. He just asked me to call him and left a phone number. It’s a brand-new cell account opened in New York City about a week ago. I mean, for all I know he just wants to sell me vinyl siding. But—I don’t know. There was just something about it.”

I glanced at Torina, but of course all she could do was shrug. I swung my gaze to the nav display to check our ETA to Earth. “Tony, we’re heading to Frankenmuth to get supplies for our trip—”

“Frankenmuth?

Really?

You’re spoiling Funboy, aren’t you?”

“Little bit. But it’s for Icky, too. She has a particular taste.”

“And what’s that?”

“Sugar, salt, and fat.”

Tony grinned. “I can definitely relate. She can be my new best friend.”

“As for Funboy, I just can’t say no to him. It’s those sad, puppy-dog eyes of his.”

Torina sniffed. “Those are literally just his eyes, Van. It’s the only expression he has. Maybe two if you include a wince of annoyance.”

I turned back to Tony. “Call this Forester guy back. If he’s not trying to sell you siding or something, then we probably oughta know. I’ll set it up so that you can send a message directly to someone who’s keeping an eye on Earth.”

“There’s… someone keeping an eye on Earth?”

I nodded. There was. Valint had arranged for a GKU ship to remain onstation, continually watching over Earth. It backed up the Iowa, although she was currently at Starsmith, while Cantullin and the rest of the Conoku were visiting Linulla, their dad. “Hell. Don’t let Myron find out about that, or I’ll never hear the end of it,” Tony grouched. We flew on, our trajectory taking us to a landing near Frankenmuth. From there, we’d make a quick stop in Pony Hollow, before heading back to rendezvous with the Fafnir. But my thoughts kept sliding back to Forester. Like Tony said, he might just be a telemarketer, or even a scammer. In any case, the name didn’t ring a bell. Except it did. An alarm bell, a faint one, but persistent. As we prepared for atmospheric insertion over New Guinea, I resolved to talk to Valint to see if we couldn’t get a second GKU ship to keep watch over my home planet. Since leaving the farm, I’d learned that science fiction was real. But so was my own sense of preservation. TORINA EYED me with mild suspicion. “Yes?” I asked, pasting a bland smile on my face. “You’re homesick. For Iowa.”

“We just left Iowa,” I countered. “Hmph.” She raised a brow, then began looking at the modest chaos around us. I pushed, slid, and picked my way through the Fafnir, frowning at the sheer number of boxes, cases, and cans. The holding cells had even been turned into temporary storerooms and jammed with supplies. Trailing behind me, Torina made sounds of recognition or surprise at the sheer volume of cargo we carried. “Are you sure we’ve got enough provisions, Gabby?

I mean, I think there’s still an empty space under my seat in the cockpit,” I said. “No, there isn’t. I’ve got some Permada flour stashed there. It was donated by your friend, Adayluh.”

I stopped and stared at her. “Adayluh knows we’re taking this trip?

I mean, it’s not exactly secret, but still—”

Gabby shook her head. “No, no. I mean, she knows we’re taking a long trip, but not the details. Anyway, I wanted good quality flour, so Funboy said I should call her. And it is really good flour.” She hustled a few paces away into the galley, then back, holding something in her stubby fingers—a biscuit. “Here, try this.”

I sighed, took it, bit into it, and—

I couldn’t stop my eyes from widening. It was like eating flakes made of butter and happiness. “Thath amay-thing!” I said through a mouthful of bliss, chewing. “Right?”

I swallowed, then offered a piece to Torina, who was squeezing her way along behind me. She got the same dreamy, wondrous expression on her face I had as she ate it. She swallowed. “I’m going to gain a hundred pounds on this trip,” she said. I leered at her. “I’ll help you work it off.”

She smiled sweetly back. “To be effective, my dear, you really have to exercise more than four or five minutes a day.”

As damned good as the biscuit was, I still threw the rest of it at her. WE WERE ready for the twist, having done an enormous amount of work just to get to this point. “Kids, does anyone need to use the bathroom before we leave?” I called over my shoulder. “Van, the waste-management facilities are right behind us and in full working order. Any of us can use them at any time,” Funboy replied. “In point of fact, we have extra three-ply toilet tissue on board in alarming amounts due to the robust nature of certain crew members’ needs.”

“I was just—disregard,” I said, sighing. “Okay, Netty, my dear, I’m seeing a complete checklist and a green status board. Anytime you’re ready.” After the first tedious preparations, I began to experience the kind of cautious optimism that I distrust in my bones—and yet, our plan was working. We were a seasoned crew, and just then, preparing to leave Scorch, it showed. The Fafnir’s drive rumbled to life, and we pulled away from Scorch, heading straight up from Gliese 976’s ecliptic plane. In about five hours, we’d make our first twist. We’d said our goodbyes—to the Milons, to Cataric, even to Gerhardt and Lunzy, to Bester, Lucky, and Dugrop’che. I’d also checked in with Schegith and Linulla, and they’d offered their best wishes, too. It felt good to have so many friends, almost buoying us along with their warm thoughts. But as the Fafnir yawed onto her outbound heading and nothing but dark, empty void yawned ahead, a sobering chill ran through me. We were going to travel to a place unimaginably far away from all of them, and from everything any of us knew. It was, indeed, a great adventure. But it was also a profoundly lonely one. 4

“THIS IS WHAT?

DAY NINETEEN?” Icky asked. I glanced up from my hand—two aces, two fives, and a queen. I avoided making eye contact with Torina as I did because I was convinced she was bluffing, and she had an uncanny way of reading my thoughts during a game. I was currently down 3,466,000 bonds to her, give or take a few. Torina looked at me over her cards, blew a smug kiss, and settled back in her seat with the panache of a winner. “Yes, day nineteen,” I said, letting my eyes slide away from Torina, but only for a moment. She was stunning, but also shifty. I could sense her victories like the summer rain. “To be precise, day eighteen, eleven hours, twenty-four minutes,” Perry added. Icky shot him a hard look that didn’t rest well on her features. “Day nineteen is good enough, bird.”

I gave my hand one more look, then counted and lifted four cookies off my stack and tossed them into the middle of the table. Each cookie represented fifty thousand bonds, standing in for actual currency. By this system, Icky had casually eaten nearly a million bonds’ worth of money, and about ten thousand bonds were stuck in her facial hair in the form of crumbs. I kept my tone light as I spoke. “Call.”

Rab’s eyes slid left and right, looking at both of us. We both let him see straight into our eyes. He sat back, sighed, and put his cards down. “Fold. I can smell when I’ve been beat.”

Gabby, who was mixing something at the nearby food station, glanced back. “Really?

You can smell it?

How does that work?”

“I—no, Gabby. I can’t really smell it. It was just a figure of speech.”

“A figure of speech used by losers,” Torina said, but she kept her smile on me, then offered a pout. “But don’t worry, love. You’re a winner on the inside, where it counts.” She followed up with an air kiss that was, frankly, patronizing and appealing all at once. “She’s vicious when it comes to cards, isn’t she?” Rab asked. “She’s just trying to make up for her deep, unresolved flaws that are known only to me,” I explained, now letting Torina meet my gaze. Most of poker was mental, which was what made it so entertaining—

But it also brought out the worst in loved ones, much like the game Monopoly, or college football, or bringing fat-free ranch dressing to a picnic. Her smile widened. “I admit it. You are my superior in so many things, Tudor. Burping. Scratching in inexplicable places. Losing your comm key. So many… skills.”

I maintained my gaze, adding a minor leer for good measure. “And while you’re saying that, we’re all waiting for you to, you know, do something gambler-ish. A woman of action, as it were.”

She and I held the staring contest a moment longer, then she called. I put my cards down. “Two pairs, aces and fives, and one poor, lonely lady, emphasis on poor

—you know, just like in this game.”

She grinned and put her own cards down with an insouciant flick of her wrist. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Van. You’re neither lonely, nor a lady—

but you are the poor one. Full house, nines on top.”

I stood and cursed a blue streak as she raked in the pot of cookies with a fiendish cackle. Then she looked around the galley. “Who’s in?”

Rab waved a hand. “I owe Gabby, ah, several cookies, equal to the gross product of a small planetary mining concern, so I’ve dug myself in deep enough.”

I snatched up my three remaining cookies. “These are for me to eat, with milk.”

Torina leaned back with her eyes closed, inhaling deeply. “Smells like

—”

“Victory?” Perry offered. She snapped her eyes open, and there was a wicked gleam. “No. Smells like losers.” Torina crowed, grabbing a cookie in each hand and stuffing them in her mouth. She managed a triumphant giggle that sent crumbs tumbling down her uniform. Somehow, I found it appealing. Especially when she smiled. Perry leaned toward me, his eyes flashing. “We’ve created a monster. Who thought she’d pull so many aces—"

Icky sat up in a huff, sending her own spray of cookie crumbs tumbling everywhere. “What day is it now?

I think I was hypnotized by watching you all lose to Torina every hand.”

“Day twenty-nine, eleven hours, and twenty-eight minutes. Damn, you’ve been really engrossed in whatever you’re reading there, Icky,” Perry said. “Van, there’s something wrong with the bird. His internal clock is screwed up. Can I take him apart and see what makes him not tick?” Icky called out. “Um, gently?

Promise.”

I waved a dismissive hand at all of them and headed aft into the crew lounge. The Fafnir’s expansion had added a much bigger and more complete crew hab, just in time for our extended trip into the big black. We had an extruded foam sofa, a couple of big, comfy chairs, and a massive display screen that rendered things in 3D. We could use the latter for the comm if we really wanted to see Gerhardt’s face in amazing, close-up detail, but we had been using it mainly to watch movies. Perry was our film curator, having played the original Star Wars just the previous night. He’d tried to convince Icky it was a documentary. Funboy had sat through it in silence, then just shaken his head at the end. “Did they not use any actual alien races as models for this performance?” he’d asked. I exchanged a glance with Perry, then turned back to him. “No, Funboy. No, they did not.”

“It shows. Many of the creatures they created are wildly implausible.”

“Says the five-foot-tall bundle of hairy, sloth-esque misery,” Perry muttered. Funboy was in the lounge now, watching—

I gaped at the screen, which was frozen on a turgid, congealed mass of pale—something, enclosed in a dim tunnel of grimy, narrow brickwork. “Funboy, what the hell is that?”

“It is something called a fatberg. It is apparently accumulated runoff from myriad waste-management systems located in the drainage system of an Earthly urban area called New Dork City.”

“New York City?

Although I kind of like New Dork City, actually.” I shook my head. “Okay, so I suspect I’m going to regret asking this, but why are you watching this?”

He lifted a data slate and consulted it. “These are files from the New York City Department of Health.” He looked dolefully back at me. “Frankly, they constitute the finest, most intense horror story ever written. It’s considerably more terrifying than the one Perry subjected us to three nights ago— The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I believe it was?

That was absolutely ridiculous. There are far more efficient ways to kill than by means of a cumbersome timber-cutting device powered by an internal combustion engine. A length of metal rod, for instance, applied swiftly and repeatedly will deliver a consistently violent result.”

He turned back to the image and his expression actually turned…

almost rapt. “This, on the other hand— this is horror.”

I grimaced at the image on the display, then turned away. “Can’t argue with that.”

ON DAY TWENTY-FOUR, Perry decided to give the crew a presentation. On disco. “There was a period on Earth, approximately sixty standard years ago, when the culture as a whole lost its mind and decided to embrace—well, see for yourself,” he said, then the big lounge display behind him lit up with an image that could have been taken right from Saturday Night Fever. At the same time, music began playing softly. It was Stayin’ Alive, by the Bee-Gees. Torina gave a look that fell somewhere between appalled and fascinated. “Why are their pants so… so… so shaped like that?”

“They’re called bell-bottoms.”

“I have not seen these garments in use on Earth,” Funboy said. I made a face. “Yeah, there’s a reason for that.”

Rab pointed. “That guy’s outfit is actually shiny. It’s reflecting all those lights, including that faceted sphere suspended from the overhead.”

“Polyester,” Perry said. “It was a dark time for Van’s people.”

The image changed to one of—

“Is that my grandfather?” I asked, eyes going wide as I recognized him in the kitchen of the farmhouse. The room was itself decorated with abstract rust and avocado wallpaper that captured the purest essence of seventies cultural preferences. It was long gone by the time I came along—thankfully. “Yup. In a leisure suit. He thought he looked good.”

“What did Valint think?”

“Not that.”

Gabby bounced. “I think it’s all wonderful!

Oh—we should take a day sometime, maybe try dressing like—”

A chorus of “No!” cut her off. But Torina was leaning toward the screen. “Perry, that’s you, over on the right, standing on that table. And you’re wearing—”

A grin spread across her face. “What… what’s around your neck?”

“Nothing.”

Torina cut her eyes at him in disbelief. “Netty, magnify Perry onscreen 10x, if you please—ahh. That’s it.” She fell silent, staring—as we all were

—at the image. Perry heaved a sigh, which was a feat for him. “It was a scarf. Made of, ah, rayon. And polyester. And something called corduroy, and before you ask, the color was called Groovy Rust and the pattern is paisley, which resembles unicellular organisms known as paramecium, if you must know.”

Funboy’s eyebrows wiggled in horror. “You wore something based on a tiny beast known to cause gastrointestinal diseases that have killed millions?

Are you a monster?”

“No, but Mark was, at least that day. She knitted it for me and stitched it together, despite my objections, and—”

“She?” I asked. “Valint. It was a stressful time, what with, um, everything. So she took up various hobbies, trying to alleviate her anxious opinion of pan-galactic military issues,” Perry answered. Torina cleared her throat, then asked, “Where did she get the—”

“Pattern?

There were magazines and books dedicated to forcing men into knitted jumpsuits and other clothes that, quite frankly, made them look like Chinese finger cuffs with feet. And hair. The preponderance of hair was quite something,” Perry said. After a stunned moment, Torina said, “Netty, can you find an example of such a magazine?”

The screen flashed to reveal three men clothed in what looked to be pantsuits. Or plant hangers. Maybe both, combined, and in such horrific colors I thought the design was made by people who held a deep grudge against the models. The magazine was named Fresh and Groovy: Knitwear For 1977.

Amid the laughter, Perry just stared. “Mark thought it would be funny. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.”

I glanced at Icky, expecting her to jump into the conversation—we were talking about pants, after all—but she sat with her eyes on a data slate, Netty-P peering over her shoulder. I crouched beside her. “Something wrong?”

She glanced up. “No. Why?”

“Because when my chief engineer and an independent, mobile version of my spaceship are frowning over a data slate, I get concerned.”

She shrugged. “Netty-P and I are working with Netty to track our fuel burn.” I frowned, but she spoke up. “No, there’s not a problem. So far, so good, in fact. But it’s a bit close for my liking. If our numbers are off, or our burn rate, or even if we deviate course, then we’re going to arrive at Reverie without a reserve. And by without, I mean, none.”

“We don’t like having no room for error,” Netty-P said. “No, neither do I. Keep on top of it, and keep me informed. If you have any doubts, at any time, you speak up. I’ll happily scrub this mission before I risk stranding this ship and crew.”

SCANNING THE REPORT GABBY FILED, I skimmed the banalities of ship life even as my eyes glazed over. Page after page revealed what we’d consumed in coffee, cleansing-agent, and sacks of Permada flour, among all the items we needed for the mission. Then, I skipped to the summary, which was the critical issue. At forty-one days in, we were using provisions a little more quickly than Gabby thought we should. She recommended a few austerity measures, a little belt-tightening to make sure our return trip—assuming that, in the worst case, we couldn’t reprovision at Reverie—wasn’t a hungry and stinky one for its last week or so. I tapped my thumb to the approval box, giving her the go ahead to implement the measures she’d suggested. None of them were especially onerous, but portion sizes were going to get smaller from here on out. With a dull clatter, I dropped the data slate while looking out of the Fafnir’s canopy. I saw the same image we’d had for almost six weeks of shipboard time. Nothingness. Eternity. Infinity. Call it what you want, but space is both exciting and dull—all at once. Stars punctuated the deep, broken by wisps of nebula and the unchanging smear of light that was the inner reaches of the Milky Way. But, as every other time I’d considered the view, I became aware of the sheer size of it all. Like a looming shadow, space became a presence. And that presence was endless, while I was not. “Admiring the view?”

I hadn’t heard Perry enter the cockpit but didn’t bother to turn. “You know, Perry, I am a lucky guy. I am one of a vanishingly few Earthly humans who’ve even been into space, much less literally hundreds of lightyears away from the Pale Blue Dot. I have seen vistas like, well, this one.” I gestured out the canopy. “No other human being has ever seen this exact view before, and almost certainly never will. It’s beautiful, and wonderous, and terrifying all at once.”

I finally turned to him, where he was perched on the arm of the copilot’s seat. “I’m also over it. I mean”—I sighed and looked back out the canopy

—“I hate to say this, but it’s boring. I am looking at the Milky Way Galaxy from an entirely unique perspective, and it’s… a touch bland for my tastes.”

I ended with a shrug. “Well, what did you expect?

Space is big, Van. Really, staggeringly, stupendously big. And most of that bigness is empty. Hell, it’s where empty comes from.”

I shook my head. Part of me wished we could just have done the trip in one twist, a virtual blink of the eye, and there we were. But I’d end up even more displaced in time than Gramps had and would return to an Earth that might be very different—maybe better, maybe worse. Maybe completely dead. So we made these short jumps instead and traversed the space between them while Netty got her nav fixes—a process that sometimes took a half day or more as she gathered data from reference pulsars and bright stars with specific, known spectral emissions. But it felt like we were going nowhere fast. Candidly, I was starting to worry that the crew was feeling it. There’d been a flare-up between Icky and Torina over a minor maintenance issue, and they’d given each other the cold shoulder for the better part of two days. Gabby had pushed Rab too far a couple of times now with her incessant bubbliness, leading to some harsh words and hurt feelings. And Funboy—

I’d had to order him to stop indulging his tastes in horror when he’d found archival footage of run-off ponds from a vast slaughterhouse on Inward, in the Procyon system. It had made me miss his brief flirtation with fatbergs in the New York City sewer system, and enough was enough. I turned back to Perry. “You’ve been around, bird—”

“Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more—!”

I chuckled despite my somber mood. “Where I was going with that, bird, was that you have a… a unique perspective, I guess, being an AI. You too, Netty.”

She spoke up. “Indeed, I see almost everything.”

“How do you guys think we’re doing?”

“Damned good,” Perry said at once. “Even better than I’d expected,” Netty added. “Really?”

“Van, we’ve all been jammed into what amounts to the space available in a good-sized bungalow back on Earth for forty-one days. We haven’t had any bloodshed yet. I’d call that a win,” Perry replied. “Really?

Seems like kind of a low bar, no outright violence.”

Netty spoke up. “The longest flight your grandfather ever made in this ship was twenty-seven shipboard days, and that was for a two-way trip. On day sixteen, he had to confine one of his crew to their quarters. On day twenty-one, he had to throw one of them into a holding cell. When the flight was done, they all took a week off. Two of them never came back and just submitted their resignations. Oh, and one—a high-strung individual—

developed a stress rash across their neck that required minor laser surgery. Twice.”

I sat up. “Seriously?”

“No, I’m making up a story because I’m folksy like that. Of course, I’m serious.”

I grinned. “Sorry, my dear. No offense intended.”

“None taken. But there you are, Van. You’ve accomplished a lot of things your grandfather never did. He was a good man and a great Peacemaker, but—”

“You’ve stepped out of his shadow, Van,” Perry cut in. “Even the Guild AIs don’t call you Mark’s grandson anymore. Now, among the AI gang, you’re very much Van Tudor.”

“Cataric wasn’t wrong when he said that you’re the glue that holds this group of misfits together,” Netty said. “And let me ask you something else.”

I gave the instrumental panel a bemused look. “Go ahead.”

“How do you feel?”

I opened my mouth but got caught like that. I finally shook my head. I had an AI asking me how I felt. “Clarify, if you please?”

“Not a trick question, Van. How do you feel?”

I answered instantly. “Bored, like I said. Mild concern about food and provisions. Otherwise, though—I feel like we’re operating as a team. At a high level, with clearly defined purpose.”

“That’s it?” Perry asked. “Your answer’s a bit—help me out, Netty?”

“Austere.”

“Austere.”

I cocked my head, considering their question. I was the commander of the ship. We had a mission. It never occurred to me that anything less than success was even possible. With a shrug, I sifted their question. “Let’s try this, instead—what do you think I should be feeling?”

“You tell us,” Netty replied. I shook my head. “I don’t mean to be obtuse; I’m just not seeing the—”

“What do you think about Calamity, Van?” Perry asked. “Or about the Seven Stars League?” Netty added. “Or the state of the Guild?

How your mother’s recovery from her wounds is going?

What the GKU is up to?

Where Dohlennz is?” Perry went on. Again, that brought me up short. “I… don’t know. I haven’t really thought about any of that much since we left.”

Silence. I felt a smile spread across my face. Perry bobbed his head. “Welcome to being on vacation, Van.”

ON DAY FORTY-ONE, Torina finally came out and asked Funboy a question that had been hanging around him like a smell—and not an unpleasant smell, either, but an intriguing, hard-to-identify one. “Okay, Funboy, spill it,” she finally said one evening over a dinner of spiced noodles that made Icky want seconds, and probably thirds, but Gabby shooed her away. “I’m sorry, spill… what?

I assume you mean information, and not that you literally want me to dump something on the deck.”

“That whole thing with Alannis Myer. The—you know—”

“Smokin’ hot sex machine thing,” Perry said. Torina winced, then shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, okay. That.”

Funboy answered by gesturing for us to follow him to the crew lounge. “I will demonstrate this once, and only once. And then can we please consider the matter closed?”

We all watched, mystified, as he lay on the couch. Then, with barely a flicker in his expression, he unlocked his arms and legs, revealing that he was triple-jointed and capable of some remarkable poses and movements. Icky, wiping noodle-sauce from around her mouth, clicked her tongue and sighed. “That’s not fair, you know. He’s some kinda secret—lethal—

lovin’ machine, and I’ve got legs like drive bells.”

Funboy returned himself to a more normal, less— unnerving configuration and stood. “I suspect that your legs can withstand far more strenuous use, including biting, than mine can.”

Icky made a huh face, then looked down and wiggled her toes. “Fair point. You really know how to make a girl feel special,” she said. “After that little revelation, I’d say he certainly does,” I muttered, and Torina snickered. Funboy blinked. “That, and my sense of comedic timing, are my gifts.”

“What about you, Gabby?

What are your special talents, besides being an amazing cook and even more amazing problem-solver?” Torina asked her. In answer, she stepped back into the galley, grabbed a large knife, and slashed it deeply across her arm. Torina gasped. Rab yelped and reached for her. So did I. “Gabby, what the HELL—?” I shouted, but she just waved us off, laughing. As she did, the gash oozed clear fluid that slowed, then stopped, sealing it up. A few seconds later, there was almost no sign that she’d cut herself at all. “I’m kinda indestructible. Heat, cold, radiation, whatever. At worst, it makes me go all dried up and comatose, until conditions don’t totally suck anymore. My species has this nifty trick where we fill up with a sugar called trehalose. It sort of dries us out, and our metabolism drops to almost nothing.”

Rab cocked his head. “A sugar?

So you end being, what—?”

“Candied, that’s right!

Isn’t that so cool and weird?”

Funboy just stared. “It’s utterly fascinating,” he said, then glanced at her arm. “Also quite repulsive, but… fascinating. Even more fascinating than a New York City sewer fatberg. I say this as a fan of biochemistry, paper mâché art, and collecting vintage weather instrumentation—you are magnificent.”

Gabby’s innards flashed, and the things—sort of like ribosomes, under her skin—pulsed. Repeatedly. She sighed, which was more like the burble of a 19th century tuberculosis patient—

And then she blushed. Sure, it looked more like a sea cucumber trying to hail a cab with semaphore, but damned if it wasn’t romantic. Torina gave me an incredulous look. I shrugged. “Hey, like she said, he’s got a way of making the ladies feel special.”

“THIS IS DAY SIXTY-THREE, Van. Day sixty-three of a sixty-two-day journey,” Rab said. I turned to face him. “Yes, I know. Netty is getting a nav fix now. Once she’s sure we’re in the right place, we’ll start looking in earnest. Remember that this place, Reverie, might be offline.”

“Why don’t we just light up this system with active scanners anyway?

What have we got to lose?” Icky asked. I turned back to look at her, where she was seated at her workstation in the cockpit. “Again, big girl, this place might be offline. It might be offline because one of the experiments it was doing wiped it out. Or—”

“Or, some dangerously xenophobic and immensely powerful alien race or force may have wiped it out, and we might want to be careful about announcing our arrival to them,” Netty-P said. I pointed at her. “What she said.”

Icky shrugged and turned back to her instruments. I turned back to mine, and we all waited. Netty had no star charts to use for reference, so she had to find reference stars and pulsars. And the more the better. Then, she had to positively ID them, map out their exact directions from us, and combine all of those data to come up with a position in space-time. It was the finding and confirming identities part that took the time. As math went, for her, processing the data was the easy part. “Got a new reference?” I asked. “More than we can use, really,” Netty answered. “The math is done, boss. It’s mostly a question of certainty.”

“What’s our data set?”

“Six—make that seven systems. All are within our spherical margin of error, but—”

“We don’t have fuel to twist and check them all out,” I finished. “Right.”

Perry’s eyes flashed. “Which means—it’s your call, boss.”

“Nope. It’s hers. So call it, Netty,” I stated, leaving no room for discussion. “That system,” Netty announced, highlighting one about two light-years away on the display. “Based on our current location, that system lies in the right location, based on the GKU data we’ve been given.”

“What’s your confidence level?” I asked her. “Ninety-five percent.” She highlighted two other systems in yellow. “These two fall within the five percent margin of error.”

“Good enough for me. Before we twist in, though, is there anything about it that suggests Reverie is there and operating?”

“Nothing. I’m not detecting any emissions that couldn’t be explained by natural stellar or astrophysical processes.”

I turned to the crew. “If you have doubts, cough ‘em up now. Once we start the drive, we’re all in.”

“Rather diplomatic of you, boss,” Perry said. “I like to think of myself as a benevolent dictator. At times.”

Torina snorted, but smiled. Rab, however, frowned. “Go ahead, Rab,” I said, inviting him to speak. I wanted him to contribute. We were too far from home for anything less. Rab hesitated, then warmed to it. “Let’s see. We’re a gazillion lightyears from anything even resembling civilization, looking for a secret facility researching potentially apocalyptic technologies, that seems to have gone entirely dark for unknown reasons.”

Perry opened his beak, eyes flashing. “When you put it that way, how could I not be optimistic?”

Gabby raised one of her arms, a smile spreading across her weird-but-cheerful features. “I’d like to add that I too am optimistic.”

Funboy stared at her, then tried to smile. “A remarkable quality in a universe filled with horrors designed to render us into little more than glorified protein shakes—"

I cleared my throat to interrupt his uplifting diatribe. “And on that note… thank you for your sparkling imagery, Funboy, I’ll never sleep again

—Netty, one more twist, if you please. Let’s see if that’s our destination—

and if it is, what, if anything, is left of it.”

5

WE TWISTED INTO THE SYSTEM, which we’d decided to call Reverie even though it was just known as yet another uninspiring string of numbers and letters. Then, we hung in space for a while, soaking up the ambience. As a matter of sheer curiosity, I asked Netty if this star, about three-quarters the size of the sun and a lot more orange, could be seen from Earth. “If you found Polaris, the Pole Star, and swung your view fourteen degrees in the direction of the closest star in the constellation Perseus, you’d see… blank space, because this star is way too dim to be visible from Earth without a telescope. But that’s where it would be.”

“Huh. So where is Earth from here?”

Netty projected a spot onto the Fafnir’s canopy. “Right there.”

“Wave ‘hi’ at all the people, Van,” Perry said. I tossed him a sniff of a chuckle but settled my eyes on that spot. It was

—nothing special. Just another featureless bit of the endless void. I already knew, from having asked this same question in other places, that Sol was visible to the naked eye out to about forty-five light-years from Earth, and we were far, far beyond that. From this perspective, the Solar System, Earth, and everyone and everything on it, had been literally reduced to an empty space. Meanwhile, the universe continued in every direction all around me, uncountably vast numbers of stars sprawling out to impossibly vast distances everywhere I looked. For a moment, just a heartbeat or two, I shivered with a flicker of an inarticulate longing, a loss, or maybe even fear—that chilled me to the utter core of who and what I was. As a teenager, I’d gone through a spell of devouring everything written by the likes of H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, T. E.D. Klein, and Ramsay Campbell, captivated by the unique, existential bleakness embodied in their works of cosmic horror. I felt, now, a glimmer of the sort of crushingly dark wonder they tried to describe in their characters, the idea that we don’t really mean very much set against that uttermost void of—

“What the hell is this?

It tastes like strawberries and soy sauce, and that is not a pleasing combination?” Torina asked with annoyance. I blinked, yanked out of the moment, glanced at her, and smiled. Okay, maybe we don’t mean very much against all of… that, the endless universe outside the Fafnir. But we mean a hell of a lot to ourselves, and to each other. Torina pushed her half-eaten energy-bar-like thing at me. “Here, taste this. Tell me if it’s as bad as I think it is.”

I respectfully declined. “I have two rules in life—I don’t smell laundry to see if it’s clean, and I don’t eat things people shove at me while asking me how bad they taste—”

“Van, I’ve got a scanner return from something in-system circling the star just inside the orbit of its second planet. It’s something that can’t be explained by natural processes, as in, it’s a construct of some sort,” Netty said. I could feel the wave of relief wash through the cockpit at the news. Mind you, it was a little premature. Construct didn’t mean much, other than something artificial. And we were too far away, with too much interference from the system’s gravitational effects, to resolve more than the fact of its existence. But it was better than finding literally nothing. I glanced around the cockpit, taking note of our haphazard dress, which reinforced the idea that every day was Casual Friday. Torina was wearing sweatpants, and Funboy a t-shirt emblazoned with Frankenmuth—

Michigan’s Little Bavaria—

We were a touch ratty. I exhaled, then stood. It was time for some quasi-military behavior, and by that I meant showers. And pants without food stains. Or in Icky’s case, just pants. “Okay, folks, as Netty takes us in-system, let’s all get cleaned up. If we’re going to be meeting GKU, or whoever the hell is dabbling in forbidden technologies here, I don’t want us looking like a pack of wandering minstrels.”

Rab cocked his head at me. “Minstrels?

How do we look like minstrels?

Anyone got a um, lute?

Or pipes?”

I shrugged as I headed aft. “First mild term I thought of. Up, you ragamuffins—”

“That’s better,” Funboy agreed. Icky leaned around a bulkhead. “Why didn’t I get muffins?”

I looked up at the ceiling, counting to ten. “Pants first. Muffins later.”

I WAS BUZZING a razor across my face when Netty interrupted. “Van, a ship just appeared in our path, about five light-seconds ahead of us. They’ve asked us to heave-to.”

I clicked the razor off. “Appeared?

What do you mean appeared?

They were stealthed?”

“Very. They didn’t even show a thermal signature until just now.”

“Hostile intent?”

“No. In fact, we know the person on the comm. It’s Jamberac.”

I did a double take. “Jamberac?

Out here?

What?”

“What would you like me to do?”

I clicked the razor back on and slid it quickly across the unshaven part of my face. “Let’s heave-to, like he asked. And tell him I’ll be on the comm in”—I glanced down at myself, standing in nothing but socks and underwear, about to jump into the shower—“make it ten minutes, please and thank you.”

“Will do,” she replied, and I felt the drive thrum to life under my feet. I hurried to finish up and get dressed in a clean Guild jumpsuit. By the time I made it back to the cockpit, the rest of the crew was already there, looking decidedly spiffier than before. “Very nice, everyone. Very nice.”

“I even polished my tail feathers,” Perry said, turning his butt toward me. “What do you think?”

I glanced at him. “Hey, I can see myself!”

Icky pointed down. “Boss, look. Pants.”

I grinned. “This is a special occasion, isn’t it?”

“First time in sixty-five days. And I found out the truth about the muffins. Can’t say I’m happy about it.”

“I’ll see what Gabby can do. Netty, would you please put Jamberac on the comm?”

She complied, and the display lit up with his image. Beneath it, Netty had also captured an image of the other ship. She was as big as the Fafnir, but sleek and black and menacing in the same predatory way I always found the Righteous Fury, or Valint’s ship, the Stormshadow, to be. The only thing that marred her smooth lines was a strangely bulbous prow. “Jamberac, fancy meeting you here,” I said. “Hello, Van. Welcome to Reverie.”

“Good to be here. Even better to find some friendly life, after such a long trip. And it would be even better to know what the hell you’re doing, being part of said friendly life.”

He shrugged. “It would seem that my dedication and technical expertise wowed Master Gerhardt so much that he assigned me here. Either that, or he just wanted to send me somewhere far, far away.”

I laughed. “Knowing Gerhardt, it’s probably some of both. You can’t have been here that long, though. I mean, I saw you right in the aftermath of the Battle of Null World when we kicked the Rogues into capitulation.”

“That was almost eight months ago, Van.”

“Good point.”

“Anyway, I’ve been here about four of those months, working on Hodgepodge.”

I gave a puzzled blink or two. “What the hell is that?”

“I… need some confirmation that you’re cleared to read into it—”

Perry spoke up. “Security authorization alpha-epsilon-four-six-nine-seven-theta-five-rho-two, confirm.”

We all stared at Perry. He shrugged his wings. “What?

I got that from Mother Hen before we left the Armory. And no, I have no idea what it authorizes, just that it authorizes something.”

Jamberac had looked offscreen for a moment, then turned back. “Checks out. Why don’t you come aboard, and I can brief you in person

about Hodgepodge and everything going on around it. It’s not cleared for discussion over comm, even an encrypted channel.”

“Ooh, secret stuff. I suddenly feel like… I think the word is skullduggery,” Rab said. “I will not be a party to excavating corpses of any species,” Funboy began. Torina put a hand on his shoulder. “Easy, princess. It means sly and underhanded, not grave robbing.”

He sniffed with some dignity. “I stand corrected.”

I kept my face neutral, then addressed Jamberac. “Sounds good, actually. It’ll give us a chance to check out your nifty ship, the—”

“The Null Stellarium. Or, technically, the Null Stellarium Tertius.”

“What happened to Primum and Secundo?” Netty-P asked. “And how come we’re meeting way the hell out here instead of in your lab or whatever it is?” Icky added. Jamberac rubbed his neck, and his face creased in a frown. “Yeah, about the lab—” But he caught himself. “I’ll fill you in when you get here.”

I shrugged again. Clearly, something was up—or wrong. But, still, we’d arrived where we meant to and found someone here. Right now, that was good enough for me. WE DOCKED the Fafnir with the Tertius, as she was apparently commonly known, and were met by Jamberac. He took us to a small meeting room that must have been not far behind the cockpit, a blank space with a gleaming metal table surrounded by benches affixed to the deck. “Remind me to keep these designers away from our home,” I mumbled to Torina. “Charming, if you love cleanliness and depression,” she answered, her voice low—but she wore a lopsided grin, if only for a second. The surroundings were not conducive to humor. Or joy. Or comfort, really. The Null Stellarium Tertius, for all of her size and slick appearance, made an insurance office waiting room seem like Versailles. She was… spartan. Her corridors were tight, painted so incandescently white that the harsh lighting was a punishment, not a tone, and not a single cable, cord, pipe, conduit, or piece of machinery was concealed. She’d also been compartmentalized by an unnerving number of massive blast doors, some of which were closed and labeled with things like, Only Gamma Clearance Personnel Beyond This Point, then stern paragraphs of text about regulations and penalties for breaching them stenciled underneath. I thought back to the time my father had taken me aboard his carrier, the USS Harry S. Truman. I’d thought it had been stark and functional, but now, I revised that opinion. We slid ourselves into positions of cramped and uncomfortable expectancy, and I’d raised a hand. “First question—what’s up with this ship?

The Guild’s prison barge, The Hole, is more inviting.”

“Doesn’t exactly give you the warm and fuzzies when you board her, does it?” Torina added. Jamberac shook his head. “She’s not meant to. As an experimental ship, her purpose is to test our new technology, so she needs to be easy to tweak and modify, have new components installed, that sort of thing.”

“New technology like this—what was it, Hodgepodge?” Rab asked. “That’s right. Hodgepodge. That’s the code name for the experimental drive that’s the main reason for the Tertius, and Reverie itself, to exist.”

Icky leaned forward. “Experimental drive?

Tell us more.”

Jamberac smiled. “You’re an engineer, aren’t you?”

“An engineer who put on pants for this little show. And if you want them to remain on, then you’ll need to keep my mind off how little I want to be wearing them. So dazzle me.”

“I—what?”

I shook my head. “Never mind. Just tell us about this Hodgepodge drive.”

“Its actual, working name is a combi-drive. In short, it combines a real-space drive and a twist drive into one.”

A moment of silence, then Icky, Funboy, Perry, Netty-P, and Netty on the comm all began chattering variations of what?

and that’s not possible and no, seriously, WHAT?

”

I whistled, shutting everyone up. “Let the man speak, folks.”

Jamberac smiled again. “That’s okay. That was pretty much my reaction when I was read into it, too. But that’s what it is. Hodgepodge combines a conventional fusion drive, improved with the tech retrieved from that wrecked facility you and your crew examined—”

“The one in which everyone died in horrible, agonizing ways—just as I’d expected. But none of you believed me—” Funboy said, but I made a definitive gesture that called for quiet. “Okay—anyway, that new engine technology involves an incredibly efficient interstellar ramjet, which can accelerate a ship to a large fraction of light-speed. We’re not even sure how large a fraction because the current limitation is keeping the ship using it in one piece. At those sorts of velocities, even miniscule grains of dust deliver one hell of a kinetic wallop. The ram-scoop’s ability to shunt aside debris has an upper limit, so that’s its effective maximum velocity. We just don’t dare accelerate anything past that point.”

Icky frowned. “Okay, so you’ve got a really good ramjet. That’s great, but it’s not anything special, or even very innovative. It sure as hell doesn’t count as twist technology. Even if you could accelerate up to point-nine-nine-nine-whatever of light-speed, it’ll still take years to travel between star systems.”

“Not to mention relativistic effects, time dilation, that sort of thing,”

Rab added. Jamberac nodded along with their words as they spoke. “You’re right. But that’s only half of Hodgepodge. The other half is the twist tech. And that’s what makes it so promising. The Sorcerers had a twist drive that could work inside a gravity well. But it was inefficient, burned huge amounts of fuel to make even one twist, and had a limited twist range.”

“Again, not to mention something, but there was also the whole planet-destroying gravitational waves thing, too,” Torina said. “Exactly. It actually had more utility as a weapon of mass destruction than a usable drive.”

“And thank the powers of creation that the Sorcerers never tried to use it for that,” I said. Jamberac shifted uncomfortably. “Actually, they did. Or they intended to. After they were defeated by the Guild and Unity, it was discovered that they planned to use it to attack your homeworld, Van.”

“They… were going to use it to attack Earth?”

“Apparently. You can thank Gerhardt for stopping them—and they were only about two days away from doing it, at that.”

I wanted to slump back in stunned horror, except I was sitting on a bench. I had to settle for leaning forward in stunned horror instead. “We knew that was a possibility, Van,” Perry said. “Yeah, but… two days.”

Jamberac shifted even more uncomfortably. “There’s more.”

I looked up at him. “What?”

“They were going to park the ship mounting the drive either on or behind the Earth’s moon and… and then they were going to use the threat of destroying your homeworld to blackmail you, Van.”

I shot to my feet and immediately jammed the edge of the table into my thighs with a dull thud. That didn’t improve my mood. “I—” I stopped, tried again. “Those absolute shitheads—"

Torina tugged my arm. “Babe. None of this happened, remember?

The bad guys were defeated, and we have their tech now. This is a ghost. It’s not here. Never was.”

I looked at her, sighed, and sat down again. She was right, but—

I was stunned. The Sorcerers were going to hold the population of Earth hostage, to try and force me to—to do who the hell knew what. Something that would have been catastrophically damaging to the Guild, the GKU, known space, probably all of the above. Not that I had such an inflated sense of importance about myself, but what if they’d told me to sabotage Anvil Dark?

Or kill Schegith?

Both of those things would have been within my means. What the hell would I have done?

I turned to Jamberac. “So if it’s a shitty drive and just a fantastically awful weapon, why hasn’t that tech been destroyed, all the data wiped, to prevent it from ever being used like that?”

“Because it turns out that the ability to use a twist drive in a gravity well has another application. The research team at Reverie has figured out how to amalgamate it with the ramjet-enabled real space drive, allowing a ship to twist only partway, into sort of a standing wormhole effect that encloses the ship.”

He gestured around us. “The Tertius has Hodgepodge installed. Using it, she can travel from the Reverie research facility, which is only six light-minutes from the star, to a point outside the critical gravitational effect of

the star—in other words, to a twist point—in about twenty or thirty minutes. That compares to nearly seven hours using a conventional fusion drive.”

Another lingering moment of silence hung in the small room. Jamberac just waited. Icky finally spoke. “Holy. Cheeseballs.”

Perry slowly bobbed his head. “You can say that again.”

ICKY, Netty, Rab, and even Funboy immediately bombarded Jamberac with excited questions, asking about relativistic effects (there apparently were none, since from the universe’s point of view the ship never actually even approached light-speed) twist-induced time dilation (it happened, but it was small compared to an actual twist), fuel consumption (lots), and various other engineering issues. I was left behind, but I could tell, as Jamberac tried to keep up and answer their questions, that there was a catch. Because of course there was. I could see it on Jamberac’s face, despite it not being human. It was the look of someone who’s just given someone else an amazing gift, but then has to admit that it got broken while they were wrapping it. “What?” I cut in. Jamberac looked at me, so I amplified it. “What’s the bad news?

Because I can tell there’s bad news.”

Silence fell again. Jamberac looked at the table for a moment, then back up. “The bad news is that the drive still produces unwanted gravitational effects when it operates.” I opened my mouth, but he hurried on. “They aren’t anywhere near as catastrophic as the Sorcerer’s original version. Both the amplitude and the wavelength of the gravitational waves it produces have been dramatically reduced. They’re still enough, though, to potentially trigger seismic effects in unstable portions of a nearby planet. They’re also enough to damage other ships and stations.”

I thought back to our experience of the Sorcerers’ drive, when they used it at Good and Plenty. It had been wrenchingly disorienting, but the gravitational waves it had produced had been too long and slow to do any

serious damage to the Fafnir, any of the other ships nearby, or the Good station. It was analogous to being in a boat and running into long, slow waves in the water. Even if the waves were very large, the boat would just rise and fall with them, riding them up and down. But Plenty was obviously vastly larger, so it had felt the effects of the gravitational waves more severely. It was also a gas giant, so although it had stirred up the planet somewhat, it hadn’t done any lasting damage. A smaller, rigid world—like Earth—wouldn’t be so lucky, and would suffer far more catastrophic effects, perhaps even breaking apart. “Why do I suspect I now know what happened to versions—Primo and… whatever, the first two versions of this ship were?” Icky said. “And why did you get all funny about what happened to your lab?

You destroyed it, didn’t you?” Torina added. Jamberac shook his head. “No. Null Stellarium Primum and Secundo are fine. They’re just smaller, more primitive versions that this ship has superseded. But Reverie itself, the lab—yeah, we kind of broke it.”

“You broke it,” I repeated. Jamberac nodded. “That sounds like a euphemism for your having destroyed it with the effects of this Hodgepodge drive,” Funboy said. “Actually, no. The lab’s intact—ish. It’s just in—well, see for yourself,”

he said, turning and tapping at a control on a display mounted on the bulkhead. It woke up from hibernation and lit with the image of what was, indeed, a broken lab. The facility was shaped like a dumbbell, with two spherical components, one slightly larger than the other. The bigger of the two sprouted a forest of antenna farms and scanner arrays, the other a series of winglike solar panels and thermal radiators. The tubular section connecting them had broken, though, the severed stumps extending from each sphere ending in twisted structural beams and ragged chunks of hull plating, like crooked teeth around a gaping mouth. Several cables had been fastened to the two chunks of the station, presumably to keep them from drifting apart. “I’m no expert on this stuff, but that doesn’t look good,” Gabby said. Jamberac sighed. “It’s not. It happened on the third test of the newest version of Hodgepodge, the one installed in this ship. We thought we had the extent and magnitude of the gravitational effects figured out, that we

knew the safe distance at which we could operate the drive. It turns out that we, well, had the math wrong.”

“You forgot to carry the one, didn’t you?” Perry said. Jamberac sighed. “Actually, you’re not far off.”

Perry’s comment had been intended as a flippant one, so that caught him for a moment. “Wait, what?

You didn’t actually forget to carry a one, did you?”

“No, it wasn’t quite that bad. But we didn’t plug in the right value for the correct rate of change in the vector value of—” he began, then looked at me. “We screwed up.”

I gave the image on the display a pointed look. “So it would seem.”

Icky stood, moved closer to the display, touched the image of the shattered hull plating on one of the broken sections of connecting tube, and peered at it closely. “This shouldn’t be hard to fix.”

“We’ve got a team working on it. They estimate it’s going to take from three to four months,” Jamberac replied, his tone glum. Icky glanced at him. “What?

That’s bullshit. I’d say… two, maybe three weeks, tops.”

“I… don’t think so. Our people are pretty good at what they do—”

She turned and grinned at him. “I’m sure they are. But I’m better.”

6

THE FAFNIR THRUMMED around me as I sipped something labeled tea, but with added notes of damp bar rag, pepper, and, inexplicably, diet soda—the knockoff kind that reeked of chemicals and savings. For the third time in three sips, I made a face. Funboy regarded me with bland patience. “I sense some reticence on your part as you drink that miasma of disease.”

“If that’s the name of this brand, it fits.”

“I am thankful you, ah, tested it out. For the greater good, of course,” he stated, with a little half-salute in my direction. I put the mug down, licked my lips, and began reading the screens, which were crowded with data. We had plenty of data. Too much, in fact, since there was a connection we hadn’t known about. Reverie, it turned out, was technically part of Anvil Dark, which was where its current director had come from. And we knew him. It was Kragdalous, the Eniped engineer who worked jointly with the Peacemaker Guild and the GKU on special projects, like our abortive plan to assassinate Helem Gauss—the one whose cancellation still infuriated me, and still pointed to deep and insidious corruption in the 32—

Which was a problem that still desperately needed to be fixed, and one that Gerhardt and the other members of the 32 who I knew about were digging into. It started with ending the compartmentalized mystery that shrouded the 32 even from one another, an obsolete relic of an idea that was just begging for the infiltration of the 32 by sinister forces. Since that infiltration actually occurred, I knew we’d taken a step in the right direction. In fact, I’d made my thoughts about it all damned clear before we’d left known space. In no uncertain terms, I’d also told Gerhardt that if they hadn’t solved the problem of the 32 by the time I got back, then I’d solve it for them, one way or another. I respected the man, even admired him, but he was still too quick to box himself in with protocols and procedures that got in the way of actual results. But that was a problem for when we got back. Right now, we had a research orbital to fix. I also had some soul-searching to do. The revelation that Hodgepodge was based on tech that was two days away from threatening to destroy the Earth and kill everyone on it, all eight billion plus people, if I didn’t give into whatever horrific things the Sorcerers were going to demand from me

—

I was experiencing a moment of command authority, and all the trappings that went with it. I glanced at Torina, who flickered a grin at me that was beyond electric. It was—trusting. It was warm. Even surrounded by tons of warship, which was far from cozy, I understood that I was at home. There was purpose in that small look, here out in the blackness so far from home our planet wasn’t even visible. “You okay, babe?” she asked, her voice low and even. “I am now.”

Tilting her head, she reached up and pushed my hair back. “You’re the shittiest card player in known space. You having a case of reality crushing you?”

“In fact, I am. Exactly that. I can handle it.”

“I know you can. It’s why I’m playing with your hair instead of manning the guns.”

“Technically, you’d be womaning the guns,” I countered. She kissed me, then let her hand slide down my arm, to squeeze my bicep. “You’re here. I’m here. The whole crew is, despite our collective bitching and moaning and lack of clean clothes—pretty damned good, I’d say. So let’s find out what’s up, fix it, and get back—”

“Home?”

She leaned on me, briefly, then said something in her most private voice. “Home is where you are.”

ICKY CLAMBERED out of the Frankie, which she’d declared she’d be using as her orbital base of operations, and immediately scowled and shook her head. “Those morons planning the repairs to the station are—they’re incompetent!

They’re dangerous!

They wear vests with shitty tool belts and when they’re not breaking things, they weld like they’re blindfolded,” she raged at the interior of the Fafnir. I patted the air in a conciliatory motion. Her chili was cooking. “Hold on there, big girl. What’s going—?”

“My hammer. I need my hammer. Can I use my hammer for this repair job, Van?”

“Uh… only if you’re planning on using rivets, maybe.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of busting some heads.”

I waved her forward to speak, resigned to hearing her out. “Tell me. What’s going on?”

“Well, for one, they’ve got a few spindly cables holding the halves of the thing together against differential gravitational drift, but they’re so close to their tensile limits that when they break, they’re gonna whip around like mass-driver slugs. For another, their plan to fix the problem is like something cooked up by some undergrads as a class project—while they’re high. It’s—” She swung all four arms apart in a frustrated shrug, nearly clocking Perry. “Hey, delicate mechanism here!

Watch where you’re flailing those hams you call fists!”

“Okay, Icky, deep breaths. What are you proposing?”

“To do it right, get that lab put together and back online so we don’t have to keep living aboard the Fafnir!

These assholes may be all cutting edge about drive tech, but when it comes to basic engineering, they’re totally out to breakfast!”

“You mean lunch.”

“No, I mean breakfast, ’cause I haven’t had mine yet. If you’ll excuse me—”

She stomped off. I heard Gabby speak up as Icky thundered into the galley. “Oh my, someone’s grumpy. But I’ve got just the thing. I’ll make you some nice waffles!”

“I don’t want—!

Wait. You can make waffles?”

“Absolutely. I got a restock of sugar from that weird ship, the Null-

whatchamacallit.”

Icky raised all four of her hands in Rocky-style triumph. “Sweet is back on the menu, boys!”

TWO DAYS AFTER ARRIVING, we had a meeting with Kragdalous and Jamberac aboard the Null Stellarium Tertius—or, as I’d learned it was called for convenience, N3, her two predecessors being N1 and N2.

I brought along my whole crew, even Gabby, making the point that if you dealt with one of us, you dealt with all of us. Icky was going to make her pitch to contribute to repairing Reverie—and in her mind, contribute meant taking over. Mind you, she was right. The previous evening, she’d walked me through her plan, and I was convinced. But we had to approach this with some tact and diplomacy, and not act like we were swooping in to save the day. And tact and diplomacy weren’t exactly Icky’s strong suits. So it was time to play ambassador. “I’ve asked Icky to walk us through the approach she proposes to repairing Reverie and getting it up and running again. She’s got a lot of experience in the structural design and construction of spacecraft, not just from her time aboard the Fafnir, but also from single-handedly helping her father rebuild and completely automate an old battleship,” I said by way of introduction. Kragdalous frowned. “It’s not like we don’t already have that expertise available to us, Van. Not to put too fine a point on it, but we are modifying spacecraft out here as we work on improving the combi-drive.”

“Sure, absolutely. But emphasis on modifying. As I understand it, all three versions of the Null Stellarium were actually built back in known space, then transited out here with conventional twist drives. So you haven’t been doing heavy, in-field structural work, have you?”

“Well, no. But several of our people have considerable shipyard experience.”

“But this isn’t a shipyard. You’ve got facilities to work on the drives in those ships, but if you needed to, say, put one of them together if it broke in half, you’d be pretty hard-pressed to do it, wouldn’t you?”

Jamberac glanced at Kragdalous. “Actually, N1 is offline because of some torsion effects in her hull that twisted her prow about three degrees out of alignment with her stern. That was the main reason we gave up and commissioned N2.”

Kragdalous shot Jamberac an annoyed look, but he ended up just nodding along. “And you can’t fix that out here, can you?”

“Pfft. I could,” Icky said. Kragdalous gave her a skeptical frown. “Really.”

“My dad’s ship, the Nemesis, was warped nearly four degrees around her long axis from an old collision when he bought her. It was the reason she’d been decommissioned and headed for the breakers. We had to shear her in half, replace a complete transverse spar assembly, then put her back together.”

“And you did that without shipyard facilities. To a decommissioned battleship. Just you and your father.”

“Oh, we had a half-dozen YardCraft bots helping us, and dad brought in my uncle and two of my cousins, but we did it.”

Jamberac sat forward. “How long did it take, though?”

“About ten days.”

“It—really?

Ten days?”

“Yeah. We Wu’tzur can go without sleep for about two weeks if we have to—although we’re gonna sleep for a week solid after that.” She gave an offhanded shrug. “And you’ve got bots that don’t need sleep, and I’ll bet those creepy-assed synthetic things you’ve got working here don’t, either. What are they called?

Yoo-hoos?”

“Usu,” Kragdalous said. Torina leaned into the conversation. “Yeah, about that. The last time we encountered them, they were implicated with the Sorcerers in some really dodgy stuff.”

I nodded. I’d noted that, too, which was another reason this whole operation felt slightly… off. It wasn’t just the distance. It was the players. They were unknown. The players didn’t fit. “These Usu have been thoroughly vetted and cleared by the GKU. And if you’re worried about espionage, well, there’s not much opportunity to make contact with—with anyone, really. Not from out here. Twist comms are tightly controlled, for obvious reasons.”

“Fuel consumption being one of them, I’d imagine,” Netty-P added. “That too,” Kragdalous agreed. “What about when those Usu you’ve got working here are done and head back to known space?

Are you sure an NDA is going to keep them from talking about what’s going on out here?”

“The most effective form of non-disclosure agreement would be a fatal one,” Funboy noted. We all gave him a look, and he did his blinking-back-at-us thing. “What?

It’s true, is it not?”

I glanced at Kragdalous. “I can’t help but notice you’re not reacting to Funboy’s suggestion with shock and outrage.”

“I find the mere suggestion morally repugnant,” Kragdalous replied. Conspicuously absent, though, was any denial that that was what they intended. But I let it go. “Anyway, Icky is here, and she’s got the experience and know-how. I think it would be foolish for us to not take advantage of it.”

Kragdalous gave her an appraising look, then a single nod. “Very well. Let’s see your proposal, Icky.”

She stood, called up the materials she’d prepared—with Perry’s and Netty’s help—and went through them step-by-step. “So that’s three weeks total to get the fix done. And because I like making myself look brilliant, there are about three days of extra slush time in there, meaning it’ll probably be done in about two and a half.”

Kragdalous and Jamberac studied the timeline she’d developed for her proposal. As they did, Gabby abruptly stood and walked up to the display,

lifting a chubby—and apparently pretty much indestructible—hand and pointing. “Why don’t you move this step back a day—then move this one here forward two days. That’ll let you start these steps a day sooner, which will cause all of the following ones to move up at least a day—ooh!

Ooh!

No, move this one back a day, and do these two instead, and it should save almost two days!” She turned to Icky, who was glaring at her, and cringed a little. “I’m sorry!

I just thought—!”

“I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at me because I keep missing these things.”

“Uh, so do Perry and I,” Netty added. “Mainly because they make absolutely no sense. They’re non-starters—

until you put them together the way Gabby does. Netty, you and I are going to be out of a job if we don’t step up our game,” Perry said. Icky put two arms around Gabby. “Okay, so thanks to my girl here, who can somehow come up with improvements to complex engineering problems and make the best waffles in this arm of the galaxy, we’re looking at a little over two weeks to get the fix completed.”

She glanced at the screen. “We just have to get our hands on some extra materials, especially girder stock for new spars. I checked out the ones that broke, and half of them aren’t usable because of micro fractures that propagated away from the breaks. We can cut ’em down into shorter ones, but we still need at least six new structural beams each at least, oh, fifty meters long. Don’t suppose you guys have anything like that kicking around, huh?

’Cause if not, well, then we’ll have to redesign the structure completely—and you’re gonna have to make sure you don’t use that drive anywhere near the station anymore, or it’ll just break apart again.”

“We have a stockpile of structural components, but nothing that long,”

Kragdalous said. Icky sighed. “Okay. Well, I’ll get started on a redesign—”

“We do, however, have the means of making them.”

Icky blinked. “You do?

How?

You got a refinery and fabricator somewhere around here?”

“We do. One of the partners in this project is the Eykinao. They’ve contributed funding, but they’ve also deployed a mobile refinery and fabricator. It’s currently located in a system about sixteen light-years away,

harvesting some lanthanides from an extensive asteroid field there. The combi-drive uses components that include several elements in the lanthanide group that are incorporated into a tetrahedral carbon matrix,”

Kragdalous said. “So, diamonds,” Rab said, and Kragdalous gave a single, slow nod. I chuckled. “Should I consider two months’ salary a reasonable cost?”

Perry and Netty both made the effort to laugh. Everyone else just looked back at me blankly. “Tough room, boss,” Perry said. I allowed myself a small grimace, because comedy is subjective. “Disregard. It was new material—”

“That’s been henceforth cut from the act?” Perry asked. “That is correct. Jamberac, you have an expression that is bright and hopeful. What’ve you got?” I asked. His answer was immediate, saving me from trying to develop any more advertising -related humor. “The Eykinao could probably reconfigure their fabricating system to refine and produce high-grade structural alloys,” Jamberac explained. I crossed my arms, sifting the potentialities. “Again, I can’t help feeling there’s a catch.”

“Oh. Well, their refinery ship is offline. They’re trying to repair it.”

Torina groaned. “Do you guys have anything out here that isn’t broken down?”

I sat forward. “With that, I can conclude we’re taking a field trip to go help the Eykinao. Icky, you stay here and keep working on repairing Reverie.” I turned to Kragdalous. “Can I assume Icky is going to take over heading that up?”

“I’ll… have her work with the deputy director, Gwynuc. I think we should consider Icky a project manager under his supervision,” he replied. Icky opened her mouth, but I spoke first. “That’ll be fine. Won’t it, Icky?”

Her face creased in a frown, but she forced a thin smile. “Yeah. It’ll be great. I’m sure of it.”

ICKY WENT to go meet with this Gwynuc, and the others went to prepare the Fafnir to go help the Eykinao. I asked Kragdalous and Jamberac to stay behind, though. I waited until the door closed and we were alone. “Okay, what’s really going on here?”

They exchanged a look. “What do you mean?” Kragdalous asked. It was my turn to wear a wintry grin. “Answer me this—why is this ship kitted out with what is obviously the latest in stealth tech?”

“For security reasons—”

“You’re hundreds and hundreds of light-years from anyone… and any thing. What is there to conceal this ship from?

For that matter, what happened to N2?”

“Again, Van, I’m not sure what you mean—”

“See, this is a problem. And it’s not the first time I’ve encountered it. Far from it. This is a joint Guild-GKU operation, which directly involves the 32.

But the 32 is mired in keeping secrets from itself, and this is just another example.”

Jamberac looked uncomfortable, like he wanted to say something. Kragdalous gave me an appraising look. I decided to just push the issue openly. “This is a warship, isn’t it?”

Again, they exchanged a look, then Kragdalous nodded. “It is.”

I blinked. I’d actually expected a no, of course not. I’d already assembled a counterargument about the stealth, the fact she had twelve hardpoints, only two of them occupied by point-defense batteries, that she had a distribution system on full display suited to route immense power throughout the ship, and, oh yes, her kick-ass, bleeding-edge stealth tech. But Kragdalous had just short-circuited that, leaving me momentarily sitting in silence. He gave me the widening of his mouth and eyes that I knew, from experience with Alic, was the Eniped equivalent of a smile. “You were going to be read into that part of the project anyway, Van. You just beat us to it by a couple of days.”

“N1 was damaged, like I said. N2 was developed to replace her. But N2

is still fully operational. She’s just too small and not properly configured to

be made into a warship. So N3 was built, ah, for that explicit purpose,”

Jamberac added. I turned to him. “You’ve been working on this project for more than six months.”

“I’ve been involved in the known space end of the project for nearly two years, yes. I—I put a lot of effort into rising above my family’s well-deserved reputation for criminal shittiness. I was determined to break away from that, to forge something for myself.”

“And he did an excellent job of it. It’s often the ones genuinely determined to reform themselves that make the fiercest devotees for who and whatever it is they’re trying to be,” Kragdalous added. “And Jamberac is definitely that. Gerhardt and I recognized it—along with the fact he’s a gifted engineer—and decided to bring him onto the Hodgepodge project.”

“Although I didn’t know it at first. I was just given some really specific engineering problems to help figure out. And it’s actually in a large part thanks to you, Van.”

“Me?

How?”

“Your reaction to Jamberac was telling. We trusted you, and if you trusted Jamberac, then we knew there was something genuine there that we could work with. And you did trust him.”

I shrugged. “He deserved it. I believe people should be judged on their own merits, not something they can’t possibly control—like the family they were born into.”

Kragdalous smiled again. “Or who their grandfather was?”

I returned a bland look. “Yes. Or who their grandfather was.”

But I sat up, my curiosity running hot. “Back to this ship. Why?

Why even risk playing around with such dangerous tech?”

“You mean, why didn’t we just wipe all the files and forget about it?”

“Yeah. You’re risking developing something that, in the wrong hands, or just used the wrong way, could be—disaster doesn’t begin to describe it,”

I said, leaning into my own words as I thought about Earth. About how close it had come to an apocalyptic disaster of which it hadn’t been, and couldn’t have been, even aware. “The technology exists, Van. It’s not going to go away.”

Jamberac nodded. “It’s based on a logical extension of twisting. We could destroy Hodgepodge and every bit of data about it, but not the underlying physics and the math that express it.”

“Besides, do you really believe that the Sorcerers not only figured it out, but also managed to engineer a working version of the drive?

A criminal syndicate that consisted of a few hundred, maybe a thousand members, scattered in cells around known space?”

I felt the frown spreading across my face as they spoke. I was frowning because they were right. Gramps used to say, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Steam-powered looms had once been considered dangerous, disruptive tech on Earth, so much so that a term, Luddite, had grown around the idea of opposing new and disruptive things. But that was only part of the frown. The rest was a sudden, gnawing realization. “Someone else developed it. Someone who had the means. They either gave it to the Sorcerers, or the Sorcerers got their hands on it. And that means someone else out there has it.”

They both nodded. “We’re thinking the Trinduk, the people from whom the Sorcerers were a splinter sect. But we haven’t been able to confirm it,”

Jamberac said. “Which brings us back to N3.

As soon as Calamity hit, we realized that the time for dabbling along in Hodgepodge as a strictly research endeavor was over. The 32, or part of it, anyway, decided that we needed to get the thing working and usable as soon as we could. So why not develop and test it in the same sort of hull into which we’d likely be installing it?”

I sat back, feeling—defeated, I guess, but it was a defeat I could accept because there was literally no other alternative. I hated the very idea of Hodgepodge and wished it didn’t exist at all. But I was sure some of those early Luddites had felt the very same thing when they realized that smashing up a steam loom in some Victorian textile mill wasn’t going to make the heretical devices go away. The only smart thing to do was to become someone who understood steam looms and could become part of the industrial ecosystem around them—someone who built them, someone who maintained them, and even someone who operated them. I reached my decision quickly. “Okay. Fine. Let’s get Reverie fixed and get this thing working so it doesn’t—and I hate the hyperbole, but damned if it doesn’t work here—destroy the fabric of the universe in the process. For the record, though, I hate this. I hate everything about it.”

Kragdalous gave me another Eniped smile, but it was different—

wistful, even sad. “I have a family back in known space, Van, that I haven’t seen in months. So trust me, I hate it, too.”

SURPRISINGLY, Reverie being broken in half hadn’t taken the station entirely offline. By running power cables from the smaller end of the dumbbell, which contained the fusion reactors, they could keep the bigger end, containing the crew hab, laboratories, and workshops, operating. In a way. It wasn’t possible to do anything on the station right now, but its stores and fuel reserves were all intact, so we were able to reprovision and refuel the Fafnir. Torina sniffed as I settled into the pilot’s seat. “Sixteen light-years. Bah. After the trip we made to get here, I could walk that.”

I gestured grandly out ahead of the Fafnir. “Off you go, then, love. We’ll meet you there, shall we?”

She answered with a gesture that, I was intrigued to learn, was still pretty much unique to Earth. Torina had started the process of exporting it to the stars. I glanced back. Icky’s seat was empty since she was staying to get the process moving to put Reverie back together again. Her rough timeline of two weeks was based on her getting the structural materials she needed, so that clock couldn’t start until we sorted out the situation with the Eykinao. Gabby was staying with her, partly to assist her to keep her timelines as tight as possible, but also so they could get to know one another better one-on-one. “Okay, folks. Time to go. Netty, if you please,” I said. “Happy to oblige,” she said, the drive rumbling to life and starting us on our—yeah, our brief journey. Torina was right. Sixteen light-years, the distance light itself would travel in sixteen years of continuous travel through space, suddenly seemed like right next door. Funny how life can change your perspective on just about anything, even the spaces between the stars. 7

THE EYKINAO SHIP, which resembled a steel mill on a sprawling platform, was in a wide orbit around a star known by yet another string of alphanumeric gobbledygook. It was a white dwarf, which Netty said was close to the size limit for a star of that type. When the progenitor star swelled to a consuming, fiery behemoth nearly ten million years ago, the corpse it left behind presided over a vastly changed system. Doubtless, several large, rocky planets had been pulverized, vaporizing their crust and most of their mantles, but leaving remnant fragments of their cores behind. These metallic chunks provided feedstock for the exotic diamond-metal hybrid materials the Eykinao were fabricating, including high concentrations of the lanthanide compounds they required. But they had suffered a cascading series of failures in their fabricator, which had somehow also brought down their twist drive. “That is one B-A-S,” Perry said. I glanced up from the overlay at him. “Big-ass ship?”

“Right the first time.”

I smiled but was jabbed with a bit of a pang. Zenophir had called her custom-made firearm the BAG or big-ass gun. Her presence struck me in the most unexpected places. And times. “Van, there’s an incoming message from the Eykinao ship, which is called the Belching Profit,” Netty said. I chuckled. “Subtle. Okay, put them—”

“Van, if I may?”

We all turned to the speaker, Funboy. “Is this about the name of their ship?” I asked him. “No, although it does incorporate elements of meaning that I find both offensive and hilarious. Hah. Hah. Why, I haven’t laughed like that in years.”

“So what’s up, then?”

“I was wondering if you could perhaps… I suppose shake them down would be the best way to describe it.”

“You want me to shake down the Eykinao?”

“In the strictest sense, yes. However, it would be more a case of them doing us a favor.”

I glanced at Torina, who gave me a bemused look back. “Okay—

assuming I’m suddenly going to start shaking down people in need, what are you after?”

“Something… as objectively pretty as possible. Shiny. A token, of some sort. Gemlike, since they have the means to manufacture gemstones.”

Smiles spread across all our faces. “You want us to get something for you to give to your girlfriend.”

“She is not my girlfriend. She is a friend, who happens to be female. Or relatively female when compared to the lumbering architecture you call biological nomenclature.”

Torina lifted a brow. “Did the moper just tell me I have thick legs?”

“Sort of. We’ll deal with his affront to your gams later. You were saying?” I asked. “As I was explaining with my usual hilarity and verve, none of you need to be looking quite so smug, thank you very much. I simply wish to extend… a gesture.”

“Oh, I think you want to extend something alright, Mister I’ve Had Better,” Perry said. “I don’t see that all of this sly innuendo is either necessary or productive.”

“It’s not. It’s fun, and I too, like Van, am preparing for open mic night at Yuk-Yuk’s in Peoria,” Perry explained. “Chili’s gift card to the top three comedians.”

Funboy regarded Perry with bland patience. “I hope you finish fourth, if such a thing is real.”

Perry opened his beak. “Ouch. I’ll remember that when I get my own web series.”

Torina spoke up, and her tone was almost… sisterly. “Funboy, I think it’s very sweet of you. And being an expert in things that women tend to appreciate, as well as shiny and harkening back to archaic gender roles, I’m offering to hustle something nice.”

She narrowed her eyes and tapped her chin. “I think something that would look good around Gabby’s—uh… does she actually have a neck?”

“Her head is attached to her body, so… yes?”

“Okay, then. Van, why don’t you let me handle the Eykinao?”

I sat back and waved a hand at the comm. “By all means. Just remember that we’re here to help them, not just hustle them for shiny things.”

Netty opened the comm channel, and the display lit with the image of one of the bizarre creatures. I couldn’t help but see them as living fire hydrants, covered in grayish-purple scales, sporting two rings of disturbing eyes, with a squirming cluster of tentacles extending from what, on a hydrant, would be the hose hookups. In fact, when I was back on Earth, I sometimes found myself doing double-takes walking down a city street, catching a hydrant out of the corner of my eye and momentarily expecting it to suddenly start talking. Perry had similar thoughts, speaking in my ear bug. Every time I see these guys, I get vibes of one of Lovecraft’s abominable horrors howling out of the stygian abyss crossed with a street corner in Des Moines. I gave a tiny nod. He was right. Torina was all smooth diplomacy with the Eykinao, assuring them that we were there to help them, but then nudging the conversation toward a lingering problem. “We’re really preoccupied with an issue that won’t go away,” she said, then widened her eyes. “Oh. Maybe you can help us with it. We have a crew member who is absolutely obsessed with getting his hands on a superior gemstone for his beloved—”

“I am not obsessed—” Funboy started, but Rab reached over and put a hand over his mouth. “Shush, mope!” he hissed to Funboy. “Let her work.”

Funboy grabbed Rab’s hand, pulled it away from his mouth, and frowned at it. “I hope you have recently disinfected your hands.”

“Define recently.”

“Oh dear.”

Torina pressed on while wearing a smile that belonged on a public relations expert’s face. “Anyway, this crew member would be instrumental in helping to repair your ship, but with his mind so fixated on this particular problem, I’m not sure that he’ll really be able to focus his full attention. It’s

—well, I don’t need to tell you that it’s veering into dangerous territory for us. And you, unfortunately.” She finished with an apologetic smile that made me want to hand her a diamond. She was a natural. The Eykinao was savvy enough to pick up on it. “Ah. That is most unfortunate. But I understand. We, too, suffer from issues when we are preoccupied. We tend to drop things. Small, valuable things. That is particularly true when we are excited. Such as when rescue is imminent. In fact,” it said, then wiggled somewhere between ten and fifty tentacles,

“we’re often… clumsy. When carrying gems. On the second deck, first section. Such is the behavior of a person who is overjoyed with the kindness of someone like yourself.”

Torina smiled, as the deal was done. “In that case, I have wonderful news.”

“You do?” the Eykinao asked. Torina’s smile was incandescent. “Help is on the way.”

THE EYKINAO SHIP WAS HUGE, massing as a class 18, consisting of a flat platform the size of a couple of football fields sprouting an array of towers, machinery, and a mazework of interconnecting pipes. A boxy extension at one end of it housed its engineering and drive sections, while a spherical crew habitat and control section protruded from the other. It reminded me of the Nostromo and the ore refinery she was towing from the movie Alien. And it even had alien monstrosities on board, although these ones were decidedly more profit-driven and less murdery than that movie’s xenomorph. To our endless delight, there was also far less ooze. One of the several Eykinao who greeted us at the airlock was named…

something the translator choked on, just a sound like an old modem crying itself onto the internet crossed with the hissing buzz of a rattlesnake. We stared and it paused, then said, “However, you may call me Fred.”

I couldn’t resist a glimmer of smile. “Fred?

That’s… not a name I’d have expected.”

“We once entered into a temporary consortium with a mining syndicate at Wolf 424, led by a human. Since he couldn’t pronounce”—modem-rattlesnake racket again—“he decided to call me Fred, after a character in a dramatic presentation from your homeworld, actually. It was about a man living in an alternate reality, where human technology was based on coexisting biological organisms harnessed to perform different tasks, including domestic ones—”

“Wait—are you talking about The Flintstones?”

“Ah, yes. That was the title of this fictional episodic drama.”

Perry’s eyes glittered. “Yabba dabba doo.”

By then, I was grinning. Earth’s electronic footprint, which extended about a hundred light-years into space, carried some of mankind’s greatest achievements—Beethoven’s symphonies, the landmark speeches of the likes of Churchill and Kennedy, the genre-defining songs of groups like Pink Floyd and The Beatles, Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon. But The Flintstones had managed to beat them all. I liked it. Fred led us on a quick tour of his ship. It turned out that fabricating exotic gemstones was an add-on, being done in a module essentially strapped to the refinery deck. It not only contained the specialized fabrication equipment, but its internal gravity could also be exactly zeroed out, a requirement for the production of the precise crystalline arrays needed for the Hodgepodge combi-drive. The ship’s original purpose was refining and smelting raw materials like iron, nickel, and copper into alloys used in things like structural components—which was just what we needed. And all that machinery had only been idled. Fred was sure they could get restarted in a day. “If we are mobile, that is, and that is our problem. Our drive has failed in some way that our engineers are struggling to understand,” he said. I patted Netty-P’s vulpine head. “Well, you’re not going to find much better expertise than that gathered here. Netty-P, why don’t you and the

others work with Fred’s people in getting them flying again.”

“Oh. There is one other thing,” Fred said. I looked at him. “We have been suffering occasional fluctuations in internal gravity. It is only an intermittent problem, though—oh. There it goes again.”

I frowned. Nothing had changed that I could tell—

One of the other Eyklinao adjusted their swaying cloak, and I saw a flash of light as something clattered to the deck, sparkling crimson—then rolled to a stop. It was a beautifully faceted red gem about the size of my thumbnail. “There. Internal gravity has stabilized again,” Fred said. Funboy stared at the gem, then looked back up at Fred. “I detected no shift in the gravitational situation—”

“Oh, for—here, let me get that for you,” Torina said, rolling her eyes at Funboy, before scooping up the gem and handing it to him. He looked at it where it glittered on his palm. “Ah. A subterfuge. Of course,” he said, tucking it away. I shook my head and looked at Fred, who, I swear, rolled his eyes as well—all of them. FORTUNATELY, the Belching Profit’ s engineering problems didn’t require any specialized parts or heavy maintenance equipment. There was a mobile dockyard on-station back at Reverie, but it was even more ungainly than the refinery ship, and had to be partly collapsed in on itself in order to travel anyway—a big job involving a couple of days of work. Netty-P, Funboy, and Rab were able to diagnose and troubleshoot the problem, and get the Eykinao ship back underway in less than a day. Torina and I spent our time getting to know the Eykinao better. It struck me that for all his sad-sack nature, Funboy’s people, the Surtsi, had it pretty good as far as spacefaring races went. They were stable, secure, and reasonably affluent. If anyone deserved to be miserable, it was the Eykinao. My first introduction to the strange race was finding them mired in an especially vile scam involving a bogus fertility problem and a cure being peddled by our old friends the Fade. As a race, they were struggling, and

saw backing the Hodgepodge project with some of their limited wealth and resources as a potential, albeit risky solution. And yet, they were generally upbeat. Well, as much as a sentient fire hydrant could be upbeat. Their body language and facial expressions were utterly alien and unreadable, so we could only go by the tenor of their conversation, of the things they were saying. And what they were saying was all pretty optimistic. I hoped for their sake that the Hodgepodge combi-drive was successful. I even found my own lukewarm enthusiasm for the project buoyed a little by their fervent hope it worked out. I wanted to see these people succeed. We also took a twist-comm call from Icky. I could tell the moment she came on that she was pissed about something. She glanced around, then leaned into the display. “It’s that deputy director, Gwynuc, the Klostemu. He’s a douchebag. He’s constantly going about budgets, and deliverables, and performance standards and stuff. Oh, and did I mention budgets?

The guy is obsessed with money. He’s bad-tempered, too, but the sumbitch whistles while he walks, and I’m pretty sure he does it off-key just to piss me off. It’s annoying, boss. He sounds like a marzelvane grinding against a grammeter without any lubricant, and

—"

I had to smile. “He sounds like just the sort of guy you want running a complex project.”

“Wait—are you taking his side—?”

“I’m not taking anyone’s side here, Icky. I’m just saying that complicated projects with lots of moving parts need the people managing them to be right on top of budgets and timelines and stuff.”

“My dad and I didn’t need all this bullshit—”

“You and your dad were working on your own time, using your own resources. Trust me, if you’d been spending other people’s money to get the Nemesis rebuilt and flying again, you wouldn’t have had the luxury of working at your own pace, getting it all done whenever.”

“Yeah, but there’s managing stuff, and then there’s being a bond-pinching, snarky asshole—”

Now I smiled wide. “Icky, I get it. I worked for some royal assholes in my previous life, too. But look at it this way—if you don’t have that sort of person running the show, and things get too casual, then they get sloppy—

and then you get problems. You get flaws and vulnerable spots creeping into the system.”

She glared at me for a moment, getting my meaning. She’d fallen into a very offhanded, even slipshod approach to maintaining the Fafnir, and had opened a pathway for an electronic warfare attack that had taken the ship entirely offline during a crucial confrontation—and I’d allowed it to happen. Gerhardt had seriously cracked the whip over us both for that, making Icky keep a log of every screw she tightened on the Fafnir. And even though Gerhardt had long since considered the matter resolved, she still kept a detailed log of every tweak she made to our ship. I’d never told her to stop doing it, because it was good for her to keep her head in the details. She finally sat back and sighed. “Fine. I’ll dot all of Gwynuc’s I’s and cross all his T’s. But I want some consideration for being such a damned good team player.”

“You have my undying gratitude.”

“How about I get to pick the menu for the Fafnir for the next month?”

“A month of noodles?

No thanks.”

“Not just noodles—waffles, too!”

“How about our next shipboard meal after you’re back aboard?”

“Fine. But I want something else, then. Well, two things.”

I sighed. “Icky—”

“First, I want Funboy back here ASAP.”

Funboy blinked at her image. “While it is nice to be appreciated, I must inquire as to why.”

“Because they’re singing work songs. It’s too damned cheerful. And you’re the perfect antidote to cheerful.”

“Quite alright, I’m not offended by that at all,” Funboy intoned. I cut him off. “Icky, if that’s all, we really—"

“No, the second thing is business. The mobile dockyard they’ve got here has a small smelter and refinery module built into it, for making on-the-spot structural stuff from handy raw materials. Trouble is, we’ve got no handy raw materials, and no ship available to go get any that isn’t going to take, like, a full day. But you guys should be on your way back shortly, right?

Is there any way you could pick up about a ton of meteoritic iron when you twist in, and bring it back here with you?”

Perry, sitting nearby, gave a tongue click. “I hate to be pedantic—”

“No you don’t,” Torina said. “You’re right, I don’t. Anyway, it would only be meteoritic iron if it had impacted on the surface of a planetary body.”

On the display, Icky raised a hand with her middle finger pointed straight down. “Ask the bird if he can hear this. If he can’t, I’ll turn it up,”

she said, rotating her thick finger a hundred and eighty degrees. “Icky says ‘hi,’” I said to him, then turned back to the display. “Netty, what do you think?

Is this doable?”

“Based on the scanner data I recorded back in the Reverie system, doing this would require us to do a lot of maneuvering to match velocity with any ferrous body even close to being useful. We’ll be spending a lot of fuel and adding a lot of hours to our flight.”

“It’s too bad we can’t just scoop them up as we fly past them,” Torina mused. “Actually, that gives me an idea. We may be able to do just that,” Netty replied. That raised my brow. “Really?”

“Yes. It involves—if not actually breaking, then bending the laws of physics, though.”

I leaned back. “How intriguing. Please, Netty, do go on.”

“WAIT. We’re going to break the law of conservation and add energy to the universe?” Rab asked. I turned in the pilot’s seat and glanced back. “So it would seem, yes.”

“Ah. Have to admit, rewriting the laws of physics wasn’t on my to-do list when I woke up this morning.”

“Hey, every day is exciting on the Fafnir.”

I turned back to the instruments. Everything was green. The Belching Profit was about to get underway, her Eykinao crew reconfiguring her to refine, smelt and cast iron alloy according to the requirements sent to them by Icky. They already had enough feedstock on board from previous, similar jobs that they didn’t have to take the time and effort to obtain on the

fly, as it were. That would have delayed their return to Reverie by as much as two days. “The Eykinao just sent a message confirming they’re about to twist and will see us back at Reverie,” Netty said. “Sounds good. Okay, let’s do our own twist back and get our life of crime against physics underway,” I replied. Netty acknowledged, and the countdown started. At zero, the now familiar flash of wrenching dislocation swept over us, hitting me right in the stomach. It was like starting to plunge from the peak of the biggest roller coaster ever—if you were immersed in an endless blackness and disconnected from anything resembling a planet’s surface. Fortunately, it only lasted an instant, then we were back on the edge of the Reverie system. “Okay, Netty, do your thing,” I said. A few moments passed as Netty scanned an expansive volume of space ahead of us, a cone representing the greatest possible region through which the Fafnir could maneuver at her highest acceleration. We waited. I glanced at Torina. “If there aren’t any good candidate rocks where we can get at them, I guess undermining the laws of reality will have to wait for another day—”

“Fortunately, there are,” Netty said. She put an icon on the tactical overlay about thirty light-seconds ahead of us. “There are three chunks of material that fall within the compositional range Icky specified. They’re within our maneuver envelope, and far enough away that we’ll have gained a good head of steam by the time we reach them, especially if we use the alien grav-plating to reduce our functional mass.”

“A good head of steam?” Rab asked. “A reference to archaic external combustion engines that converted thermal energy in pressurized water vapor, used to produce motive force,”

Funboy said,

“Who’s the pedantic one now?’ Perry muttered. “Oh. Good head of steam sounds better,” Rab replied. Torina sat back and crossed her arms. “Okay, so if I understand this, we’re going to fly really close past those rocks, then twist. But Netty’s going to twist in such a way that rocks return to real space a teeny fraction of a second before the Fafnir does. Since the law of conservation says that energy is, ah, conserved, those rocks are then going to have all of the

Fafnir’s kinetic energy, but it’s going to be tied up in a much smaller mass, so they’ll suddenly be going much faster. Have I got that right?”

“That’s right,” Netty replied. “The kinetic energy of the system that begins the twist must equal that of the system it comes into.”

“So we get to break a few of Isaac Newton’s laws, too. From the perspective of the rest of the universe, those rocks will have instantly accelerated, as though they had no inertia at all,” Perry explained. “Then what’s the cheating part?” I asked. “When we twist, we actually affect a small region of space around the ship. Usually, that doesn’t matter—we may bring a few stray wisps of gas and dust along with us. We’re going to pass close enough to the rocks to include them in our twist effect. If I can configure it so that the rocks return to real space an instant before the Fafnir does, then the physics of twisting say that they’ll suddenly have all of the ship’s kinetic energy. And when the Fafnir returns to real space an instant later, she’ll also still have all of her own kinetic energy. In effect, the equivalent of the Fafnir’s energy will return to real space twice, which means we’ll have added energy to the universe,” Netty said. “This only works because the time it takes to twist is very small, but it is finite,” Perry added. “And during that time, the Fafnir and the rocks are technically apart from normal space, so from the perspective of the universe, no physical laws have been violated—even though they really have. It’s kind of like committing a crime no one ever finds out about. You still broke the law, but as far as everyone else is concerned, you didn’t. Oh, and we’ve also violated the Second Law of Dorkdom, which is don’t discover anything that threatens the tenure of your superiors. It's a whole thing on campuses.”

“More like nerds, not dorks, although I’m not sure how many rules they have,” Torina said. I turned to her. “Care to… clarify?”

She pointed to Perry. “Am I a dime piece?

A hottie?

A smokeshow, according to the wildly shifting terminology of human youths?”

Perry’s beak dropped. “Absolutely. Sure, Van’s a handsome dude, but you’re a ten. He definitely outkicked his coverage. However, don’t believe me—let’s add data. Netty, get the other females online. In the spirit of Cosmopolitan, we’re conducting a survey.”

Netty snickered. “I sent the question ahead. They’re in. Girls, what do you think?

The screen flared to life, revealing Icky and Gabby, standing side by side and regarding us all with interest. Icky lit up immediately. “”Is this about breeding as well, or just your stupid dating and stuff?”

“Both,” Netty answered, earning a pensive look from Icky. Pulling at her chin hair, Icky spoke. “Is kicking a major part of the human breeding process?

Because if so, I may have to revise my opinion of Van. Always thought humans were too scrawny to, uh, withstand the onslaught.”

Funboy winced. “Please. Some of us have eaten in the past week.”

“Hush, fuzzy,” Icky countered. “What rules, though?

Do dorks have rules?”

“Nerds do. Called physics,” I offered. “And this—”

Gabby raised a stubby arm. “Um.”

“Yes?” I asked, and we all looked at her. Her question was soft. “Am I a hottie?”

Funboy acted like he’d been waiting to answer just that question. “Yes. Yes you are.”

Gabby’s water-bear face lit up. “Good,” she answered, in the most shocking display of brevity I’d ever seen. Rab tapped his leg, head tilted in curiosity. “All this talk of breeding and social status aside—and it’s gripping, believe me—but will this work?

It seems a bit flimsy.”

Torina’s answer was accompanied by a thoughtful moue. “That’s because it is flimsy—on the surface, anyway. But it does work, yeah. The underlying math is well understood. And it has been done before, tested with small amounts of mass. There were even suggestions it could have a practical application, moving stuff quickly around through real space like we’re about to do. Turns out it’s actually cheaper in the long run just to, you know, take the time to haul things around the old-fashioned way.”

“So this has all remained in the realm of quirky and interesting, but not really of any real-world value. However, it’s going to let us get some rocks moving in-system really fast, which will reduce the amount of time the Usu need to come and grab them and take them back to be refined,” Netty said. “So what’s the downside?

What are the risks?” Rab asked. “The most likely poor outcome is that it just doesn’t work. Either we fail to capture the rocks, or we do capture them, but they and the Fafnir emerge back into real space at the same time. They’ll have gained a little bit of energy because it gets averaged out over the total mass of the system, but not much. The ship will still retain the vast majority of it,” Netty said. “That’s the most likely poor outcome. What are the unlikely ones?” Rab pressed. “The more complex geometry of the total mass slightly increases the likelihood of a catastrophic outcome.”

“Increases it by how much?” Torina asked. “Seems worth clarifying now that we’ve got the heavy hitters handling our math.”

“And how catastrophic?” Rab added. “Every time we twist, there is about a one in one hundred thousand chance that we will end up well off our target destination, that the twist drive will be damaged or, in an extreme case, that the ship will be lost altogether in a catastrophic breakup—which should answer Torina’s question. What we’re about to attempt will increase that by a factor of approximately ten, so a one in ten thousand chance.”

I turned to the crew. “So there it is, folks. Before we do this, I want everyone to be aware of the risks. If we don’t stay on schedule, we’ll need to add another two to three days to the time to get Reverie back up and running. And that doesn’t sound like much, I know, but events back in known space haven’t just been put on pause while we’re gone.”

I looked at each member of my crew in turn. They all just nodded. Torina smiled. “Van’s too lucky to die.”

“I am?”

Icky’s snort rattled the comm speakers. Gabby stayed cheerfully quiet. Torina’s eyes narrowed as Perry coughed discreetly. “Oh. I—I am. Very. Hell, I’m dipped in lucky.”

Torina smiled, showing me a lot of teeth. “Better.”

I shrugged. “What the hell, let’s live dangerously. Okay, then, Netty. This is your show. Whenever you’re ready, please proceed.”

Only Netty, with her precise and instantaneous command over the Fafnir’s systems, could possibly pull this off, though Torina, Icky, and Perry understood the concept. It really all came down to the timing. Netty had to activate the twist drive in exactly the right way, at exactly the right moment as we passed the rocks. The margin of error was measured in

milliseconds, meaning that we sluggish meat puppets just didn’t have what it takes. So we sat and watched as the Fafnir, with her main drive running at full power, punctuated by bursts of emergency overpower, accelerated like the proverbial bat out of hell toward the rocks. The faster the better, since it would mean more kinetic energy added to the rocks. By the time we were one minute out, the Fafnir was traveling at a far higher rate than she normally would for an in-system approach—and burning the fusion fuel that went with it. It meant we’d also have to decelerate that much harder at the other end. Between that, the uncertainty of success, and the additional antimatter we had to expend for the twist effect, all to accelerate less than a ton of rocks, I could see why this wasn’t exactly a moneymaker. “Ten seconds,” Netty said. We braced ourselves out of habit. There was a tiny possibility that we might actually smack into one or more of the rocks, which meant I spent the last few seconds in mental limbo, my body humming with the potential for violence. “Oof.”

That sudden twist-induced gut wrench yanked the grunt out of me. I blinked. We were still in one piece, and there was no blare of alarms announcing system failures. In fact, nothing much had changed at all. “Uh—what happened?” Torina asked. “We have successfully violated the First Law of Thermodynamics, Newton’s Second Law of Motion, and, technically, his Third as well. In other words, it worked—the rocks are now actually traveling faster than the Fafnir is, since they have the same energy in far less mass,” Netty said. “Van is now the Lead Dork.”

“Nerd. Although I prefer Baron Von Dorkenheimer, given a choice. Has a lot more flair.”

“I’d have thought that violating fundamental physical laws would have been more—I don’t know. Dramatic?” Rab said. “Worthy of a prince, instead of a baron, at least?”

“Titles aside, we have actually extended the life of the universe by a tiny amount since we’ve added some new energy out of nowhere. So there is that,” Perry noted. Funboy shrugged. “It’s just postponing the inevitable end of existence. One has to wonder—what, really, is the point?”

I glanced back at Funboy. “Leave it to you to make a landmark moment in science kinda depressing. And vaguely French.”

“Like being in a Godard film, but with fewer clowns,” Perry mumbled, looking at Funboy. “Oh. I apologize.” Funboy followed this with his hideous smile, then softly clapped his long, furry hands together in a soundless pantomime. “Yay.”

8

THE USU, who had a ship working in the outer part of the system retrieving cometary ice for water for Reverie, were able to match the velocity of the rocks we’d accelerated through our cheaty method and bring them back with them. It saved many hours and a lot of fuel not having to collect them during a full stop—although it was still a net loss of fuel overall. Still, time was the critical part. With what we’d gained helping the Eykinao and retrieving the iron-nickel rocks, and Gabby’s unorthodox approach to scheduling tasks and fiddling with timelines, and Icky’s uncompromising supervision, we were finally able to get Reverie back in one piece in nearly a half-day less than the best of the original estimates. The only real issue was Gwynuc, the officious, bat-like Klostemu who served as Kragdalous’s deputy director. He scrutinized every expenditure of resources as though he’d discovered some new and possibly virulent disease under a microscope. I was sick and tired of him after an hour. Icky had been putting up with him for days. “Van, I wanna requisition something for the Fafnir,” she told me as we watched the last connections being welded fast by AI-controlled bots from the Frankie. “What’s that?”

“A Klostemu-shaped practice dummy for my hammer. No, wait—I take it back. Better make it a dozen or so Klostemu-shaped dummies because I’m gonna go through them real fast.”

I grinned. “Icky, my dear big girl, your restraint has been admirable.”

She gave me an ominous sidelong look. “So far.”

AFTER A DAY of powering up the shiny new version of Reverie station—and testing its systems—Icky announced the job complete. By then, Kragdalous and Gwynuc had already moved most of their staff back in and were sorting out projects and experiments that had been put on hold while the station was a shattered hulk. With the task completed, I was actually starting to turn my focus to a return trip to known space. We’d done what we’d come here to do—make contact with Reverie, find out what was going on, and help them if they needed it. Strangely, though, I found the thought of returning a little… odd. I was anxious to get back, but the idea of it actually put me on edge, as well. Not the return trip itself, another eight-and-a-half weeks of flying, but the actual returning part. It was like the feeling I’d gotton on the last couple of days of leave in the Army, before having to return to duty. A restless, antsy feeling that I felt as an uneasy tingle in the pit of my stomach, a mix of anticipation and dread. Which was a revelation. This really had been a vacation, hadn’t it?

Very much a working vacation, but that work had been confined to a very narrow, very focused set of problems. I really had been able to put all the big stuff—Calamity, the Guild, the League, Earth, all of it—aside for a time, hadn’t I?

But Kragdalous called me up with an offer, one that would keep us here for a while longer—and one that it was hard to just refuse out of hand. He offered to install the Hodgepodge drive in the Fafnir. “YOU WANT TO—WAIT, WHAT?” I asked, sitting bolt upright. I sat in his office on Reverie, flanked by Icky and Torina, with Perry sitting on the back of my chair. Netty-P had joined us, since all Kragdalous had said in the comm message that brought us here was that he wanted to discuss some possible work on the Fafnir. Jamberac, sitting off to one side, leaned forward. “It’s the next step. So far, we’ve built three versions of the drive—the original proof-of-concept version in N1, and the improved versions in N2 and N3.

But those are all purpose-built for those particular ships.”

Kragdalous picked up the thread of discussion. “Hand-building every new version of the drive to fit into a specific ship isn’t feasible. And if we’re going to capitalize on the advantages that the combi-drive stands to offer to the GKU and, eventually, the Guild, we need to deploy as many of them as we can. We need a version that’s built into a standard engineering module, that can be fitted in any ship with minimal effort.”

“But… the thing rips stuff apart, like—well, this place, for one!” Icky said, waving all four arms around, almost slapping me across the face. I dodged, but her flailing hand smacked Perry off the back of my chair with a squawk. “Hey, watch where you’re swinging those damned hams you call hands, you shag carpet of menace!” he snapped, before hopping back up into his place with a dignified flick of his wings. “Sorry, bird, but… this is crazy. Sure, the idea of that drive is cool and all, but you’ve got a few bugs to work out yet. And by bugs, I mean things that could turn the Fafnir into sparkly bits of chaff.”

But Jamberac shook his head. “There’s only a slightly greater risk to a ship mounting Hodgepodge than there is from a normal twist drive.”

“I feel like I’ve asked this before—because I did, just a couple of days ago. How much increased risk are we talking about?” Torina asked, one brow lifted. “We estimate a one in five thousand chance of drive failure—which, yes, I know is much higher than an ordinary twist drive,” Kragdalous said, raising a hand as he drew a breath to point that out. “But failure in this case means that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the drive will fail to function, with about a third of those failures resulting in damage to the drive.”

“What about that last one time out of a hundred?” I asked. “This is the part where he says it’ll be a catastrophic failure of some sort,” Perry muttered. Kragdalous nodded. “A catastrophic failure of some sort, resulting in the loss of the ship and its crew.”

“So about a one in five hundred thousand chance of going poof each time we use the drive. That’s… not terrible, I guess,” Perry said. “Why the Fafnir?

Why not one of your other ships?

For that matter, why not just put the drive into a standard module and slap that onto N3 and call it a day?” I asked. “Because the Fafnir is the only ship out here even remotely similar to the sort to which we’d be equipping a standardized version of the drive. She is, after all, herself a standard design Dragonette-class upgraded to Dragon. That makes her pretty much the same as most ships used by the Guild, and many used by the GKU.”

“If we’re going to test this, it makes sense to do it on the same type of ship we ultimately want to equip it to,” Jamberac added. I sat back as a point came to me. “There’s one issue I notice hasn’t come up yet. One of, pardon the pun, profound gravity.”

“Bdmpsht,” Perry said, adding a little echo for flare. “Seriously, rimshots never get old.”

“Yes, bird, your ancient comedy is still fresh and inventive, but I’m a helluva lot more concerned with the wider implications of a drive failure. Even if the thing doesn’t bust up the Fafnir, it’s not going to do much good if it busts up everything around it—you know, other ships, stations, maybe planets—” Icky said. Kragdalous waved toward his data slate. “Based on the data we collected from N3 during her last flight—”

“The one where she broke this place in two, right?” Torina asked. “Yes, that one. Based on those data, we’ve calculated a set of maximum safe operating specs for the combi-drive. If they aren’t exceeded, then the resulting gravitational wake effect will be confined to a limited volume of space around and behind the ship using it. For a ship of the Fafnir’s mass, using the drive we propose to install in her, that volume of space is about one hundred thousand kilometers all around her, and about three hundred thousand behind her. As long as you don’t use the drive with anything that’s potentially vulnerable within those distances, there shouldn’t be any problem.”

“Shouldn’t be,” Torina said flatly. “Well, nothing is guaranteed. Could there be unique gravitational situations out there that will amplify the effects?

Yes, of course. But we can

flag what those would look like, at least in general, and then you just wouldn’t use the drive in those situations.”

“Assuming that we go ahead with this, and we operate the drive according to the restrictions you’ve set, what sort of performance are we looking at?

How long to, say, get from here to the nearest twist point in this system?” I asked. Kragdalous looked at Jamberac, who shrugged. “I’d estimate from twenty to thirty minutes.”

“That’s compared to nearly seven hours using a conventional fusion drive,” Netty-P clarified, her eyes lit from within. She was… interested. I tapped a finger on the arm of my chair. “So, what needs to be done?

We’re obviously not replacing the Fafnir’s actual twist drive, right?”

Kragdalous shook his head. “No. Hodgepodge can’t be operated like a regular twist-drive. We’d like to get to that point somewhere in the future, to simplify the engineering of a ship carrying it, but we’re nowhere near that yet.”

“We’ve been working on installing the combi-drive in a regular engineering module, just like the one installed in the Fafnir now. We’d just add it to your ship, as close to the center of mass as we can get it.”

Icky groaned. “That’s right between the hab and the galley. You mean if I wanna eat my meal in the crew lounge, I’ve gotta carry it through some cramped engineering module?

I’ll spill my noodle broth,” she mourned. Perry turned and looked at her. “Yes. Noodle broth. Spilling. That is the biggest problem we face in all of this.”

Icky scowled back at him. “You’ve never had dry noodles, have you, bird?”

“I—I prefer not to answer that question, for personal reasons.”

Icky scowled. “Then you don’t know my pain.”

I CONSULTED with the entire crew, with Jamberac present, and after a full discussion, we decided to proceed with the experiment. While I was nervous about it, there was absolutely no denying the advantage of being able to fly from some place inside a gravity well to a twist point in minutes,

rather than hours. And, as Funboy pointed out, we probably should assume we weren’t the only ones working on something like this. “The proverbial hen has already flown the coop, thanks to the Sorcerers,” he noted. I gave him a surprised look. “That’s a very Earthly way of putting it.”

“I recall Miryam using the phrase at one point. It suits my whimsical side.”

“Your whimsical side. Right. How could I have possibly forgotten about that, as it’s your most robust personality element.”

He preened a bit, and by that, I mean he twitched his upper lip. “It’s good to have my light recognized.”

Funboy’s point was sound. It would truly suck to find out that someone else had developed the tech, and suck even harder to find it out in the middle of a battle. Someone, like Rogue elements, might still lurk within the League, or some remnant of the Sorcerers that had been laying low, or for that matter, even a criminal group like the Stillness, who’d been ominously quiet for a long time now. In the spirit of all extroverted cynics, I found silence to be deeply suspicious. I stood in a briefing room on Reverie, watching my ship being taken apart so that the Hodgepodge module could be installed. It would raise her mass to a class 15, making her roughly equivalent to a heavy cruiser in size, if not in firepower. “Between the alien grav-plating and this, the Fafnir’s starting to look more like some sort of mad scientist’s experiment than a typical Guild ship,” Perry noted from where he stood on the conference table. I grunted my assent, but my gaze fell on a pair of figures working with a YardCraft bot to ease the rear portion of the Fafnir away from the forward, to open enough space to slide the Hodgepodge module into place. They were clad only in simple pressure suits and spherical, transparent helmets, looking like the classic portrayals of astronauts from old science fiction back on Earth. Usu. Their presence here did, I must admit, surprise me—and make me a little uneasy. Although often considered a race, the Usu didn’t really fit the bill for one. Synthetic beings controlled by AI, the Usu didn’t have a common origin or, to the extent they lived in communities at all, they were

rare, small, and scattered. Some of them incorporated organic components, but mainly to fulfill specific functions. For instance, organic nerve fibers were still one of the most sensitive forms of touch, ones that even the most advanced tech hadn’t yet matched, so they were beneficial in performing very delicate tasks. Still, Usu were closer to robots than to actual hybrid, organic-inorganic beings. The origin of the term Usu wasn’t even clear. Any self-aware, humanoid synthetic being could be called an Usu. Viktor, the Body Thief, who’d proved so valuable to us as a contact on Dregs, could be at least technically called an Usu. And that made things complicated. While most Usu seemed quite content to live out a quiet existence doing whatever they’d been created to do, like any free-willed beings, they had their share of saints and sinners. Unfortunately, most of my experiences with them hadn’t been anywhere near as positive as those we’d had with Viktor. Most jarringly, some of them had been involved with the Sorcerers, who’d used Usu to bulk out their ranks. So we’d crossed paths—and, in most cases, weapons—with them, and ended up killing more than a few. Even those we’d taken into custody then confronted the Guild with a problem, since they weren’t legally persons, but were more like Perry or Netty—property, at least as far as interstellar law was concerned. And that made me uncomfortable, too, since I had long ago accepted that my AI crewmates were persons—so why not the Usu?

But here they were, disassembling my ship and installing a new, experimental drive in it. Icky wanted to watch them closely as they did, and I was happy to let her. Accordingly, she, Funboy, and Rab were suited up and scrutinizing the whole operation in minute detail. Netty and Netty-P, in the meantime, kept a careful watch on the Fafnir’s systems and how the new tech was interfaced with them. The door to the conference room opened and Kragdalous came in. “Sorry I got held up, Van. We’re still dealing with about a million little problems all over Reverie. You wanted to speak with me?”

“Yeah.” I waved a hand at the viewports. “I’m curious—how did you end up with a bunch of Usu as part of your crew out here?”

Kragdalous gave me a look that braided exhaustion and derision, then followed it with a shrug. “They’re diligent, efficient, and attentive to detail. They also use few resources, which is a major bonus way out here in the big black. Why?”

I crossed my arms. “I notice you didn’t use the term loyal.”

Kragdalous’s frown deepened. “They’re… doing what they were brought out here to do. We expect no more or less from them, same as the various AIs that control systems around the station.” He glanced at Perry. “Or any other AI. What are you getting at?”

“Back in known space, more than a few Usu were diligent, efficient, and attentive to detail in working with the Sorcerers, too.” As soon as I said it, I realized it sounded like I was sweeping a broad brush across all Usu based on the bad actions of a few, and wasn’t that fundamentally wrong?

I’d met good and bad Yonnox, too, hadn’t I?

And yet… there was something worrisome about the combination of free-willed, synthetic intelligence vulnerable to things like hacking, or infection by agents like Calamity. Had the Usu who’d allied themselves with the Sorcerers done so willingly?

Viktor had, after all, chosen to turn his back on the Sorcerers, so could the others have done so as well, but just chose not to?

Or had they been co-opted, their programming altered or corrupted to bring them into line?

And what did any of that mean for the Usu now disassembling my ship?

Kragdalous gave me a hard look. “Are you suggesting that the Usu in our employ somehow aren’t loyal?

And if so, do you have evidence of that?”

“Not necessarily, and no,” I replied. “And yet—” I sighed and shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess past experiences have made me wary of trusting AIs too much—”

“Ah- hem.”

I turned to Perry’s pointed throat-clearing. “I’m right here, Van. So is Netty.”

“Indeed, I am,” she said over the comm. Netty-P tsked at me over our shared comm. “Et tu, boss?”

“Okay, present company excepted.” I turned back to Kragdalous. “Which means that, well, if you trust your Usu, then I can’t very well question that when I trust my own AI colleagues, can I?”

Kragdalous nodded… but I sensed a glimmer of hesitation, as though I’d planted a seed of doubt. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not and left it at that. 9

THE NEW, improved Fafnir flew just fine. We put her through the whole rigorous bunch of space trials required to certify a ship flightworthy under interstellar convention, a requirement every time it was modified. We got a second certification due to the Fafnir changing mass, a fact that made me realize the Department of Motor Vehicles had indeed gone to the stars, albeit with shorter lines and fewer angry people waving papers around. Afterward, we assembled in the crew lounge and pored over the data Netty had collected. None of the numbers or the squiggly lines on graphs exceeded the established limits that would trigger some sort of refit, though. I sat back and nodded. “Okay, Netty, send all of this to Kragdalous, with a request to declare us space-worthy. He’s the closest thing we have to a shipping authority out here, I guess.”

“So when are we going to fire up the Hodgepodge drive?” Icky asked, excitement thrumming in her voice. “That’s up to Jamberac and his people. Once they’re satisfied the thing’s working properly in their static tests, we’ll—”

A shrill alarm from the module just ahead of the crew hab and lounge, the new combi-drive module, cut me off. We all tensed, and I sat up. Jamberac appeared in the hatchway, a sheepish grin on his face. “Sorry about that. We were just testing the emergency shutdown and triggered the alarm. Should have given you guys a heads-up.”

“Why?

It was just a sudden, screaming alarm from the cutting-edge experimental antimatter-powered drive newly added to our ship,” Rab said, shaking his head. Torina patted her chest and nodded. “Yes, you should have. Maybe my heart would still be beating if you had.”

I stood. “I’ve got two questions for you, Jamberac.”

“Okay—”

“One, are you going to be testing any more ear-splitting, pants-shitting alarms in the foreseeable future?”

“Uh—no.”

“Good. Second question—how long until this new drive is ready to test?”

“Actually, we’re pretty much ready now. The emergency shutdown is one of the last things we needed to test. A little more housekeeping, and we’ll be ready for the first flight.”

I nodded and turned to the crew. “Okay. Everyone grab what you need to spend a day or two on Reverie and head to the Frankie.”

A frown spread across Icky’s face. “Why?”

“Because the first time we try switching on that drive, I don’t want any of you aboard.”

I’d already prepared myself for the chorus of objections, everyone sucking in a breath and starting to protest at the same time. I stuck my fingers in my mouth and whistled, cutting them all off. “Look, gang—I don’t doubt for a second that you’re all one hundred percent willing to be aboard the ship when we fire that drive up. That’s not the point.”

Icky swung up all four arms in a frustrated shrug. “Van, I’m the chief engineer for this old gal, so I—”

I shook my head. “No.” Torina drew in a breath, but I raised a finger. “Again, no. I believe strongly in running this ship in a collaborative way, all of us as a team. I don’t give outright orders very often. But this is one of those times. This isn’t open for discussion. It’ll be me and Perry, and Netty, of course.”

“Captive audience here,” Netty said. Perry gave me a beady amber stare. “I like how I’m somehow indispensable and disposable, both at once. Accordingly, I’m both flattered and pissed off.”

Torina fixed me with a firm scowl. “On behalf of the rest of the crew, I’d like the record to show that we object to this. Our place is aboard this ship, Van.”

I tilted my head toward her, our eyes locked. “Noted. Netty, please enter it into the ship’s log. Now, if there’s nothing else, the Frankie is waiting for you guys.”

They withdrew, muttering darkly and shooting me hostile and resentful looks. Even Funboy gave me a morose and sullen stare—which, actually, was just his usual expression, if a bit more desolate. Like Perry, I was kind of split on it. On the one hand, I hated having my whole crew pissed at me. On the other, they were only pissed because they were such a damned good crew, so I had to take my lumps and live with their ire. But I wasn’t going to budge because some orders are resolute. “ONE MINUTE, VAN,” Netty said. I nodded, my eyes on the instruments. “Thank you, my dear.”

A new panel had been installed atop the center console, containing the controls and various displays required for the Hodgepodge drive. I’d had Jamberac install an identical panel at Icky’s station, and a third back in the engineering bay. That said, it was really more just to keep us updated as to the status of the drive, and probably just to give us a feeling of some sort of control. In fact, like the twist drive, the combi-drive had to be entirely controlled by Netty—or, more correctly, by a subordinate AI whose operations she oversaw. A short time after the new AI came online, Netty spoke up. “He’s kind of cute.”

I looked up from the combi-drive specs I’d been perusing on a data slate. “Who is?”

“Hodgepodge. That’s the AI who controls the new drive.”

“His name is Hodgepodge?”

“It is now.”

I put the data slate down. “Netty, uh—huh. Not sure how to ask this—”

“You’re wondering how I could find another AI cute.”

“At the risk of sounding like an asshole—yeah. How does that even work?”

She actually laughed. “It doesn’t. I was just curious what your reaction would be. It’s almost the same as the AI that runs the waste reclamator. I don’t fraternize with it, either.”

I grinned. “Well, Netty, if you were human, I’m sure I’d find you awfully cute.”

“Don’t let Torina find out you’re harboring a secret passion for me.”

I laughed. “I’ll do my best, but you know how she—”

“Sorta reads your mind?”

“Yes.”

“I’d say that’s the best possible sign for your future. She gets you, and you get her. As the being in charge of getting us across the stars, that makes me both happy and… and secure. If that makes sense.”

I felt an unbelievable connection to Netty just then, and I knew she could hear it in my voice. “Same. Thanks, friend.”

“Don’t mention it. Now then, let’s get cooking.”

“Bad choice of words. How about… simmering, but really fast?” I asked. “Better. You’re on, boss.”

It was time for business. I kept a laser focus on the new panel, resting my hand near the manual override that would trigger the emergency shutdown whose alarm had made us all lose a minute or two off our lives the day before. Even that, I knew, was more of a psychological thing than a practical thing. If the drive failed in some catastrophic way, I’d likely be dead before I even had the opportunity to become aware of it—much less react and push a button. This time, Jamberac spoke. He and two of his Usu assistants were back in the drive module, where they could monitor its performance directly. “Thirty seconds, Van. I’m holding the countdown here, pending your approval to proceed,” he said. “Is there any reason I should say no?”

“Other than, it’s your ship?

No, not really.”

“Well, no point having gone to all this trouble and not try the thing out, right?

So let’s do it.”

“Okay, countdown continues from thirty seconds—now.”

My stomach fluttered, and my gut clenched down into a hard knot. My toes dug into the soles of my boots, as though they were trying to root themselves into the floor. I turned to Perry. “Not sure why I’m nervous. I’ve ridden antimatter-fueled distortions in space-time before. And often.”

“When you made your very first twist, Van, the Fafnir’s current drive had been in use for nearly a hundred years, not literally installed yesterday.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“No. Oh… sorry, you want me to make you feel better?

Okay. There, there, Van, it’ll all be okay, you’ll see.”

“You suck.”

I watched the time tick down the last seconds. Ten. Five. Two. One—

Something like a wall made of marshmallow slammed into me. Into every part of me. I reeled under the impact of a slurry of sensations—

soaring upward, plunging downward, being flung back and forth, side to side, all at once. My vision had dwindled to a tunnel—a tunnel made of thick glass, with a kaleidoscope effect superimposed on it. But what I felt was also none of these things. It was impossible to describe. And it seemed to go on and on, a savage desire for the completion of a task I could neither define nor describe. A distant part of me raged that this was insane, I had no sense of where I was or what I was doing, I was barely even aware of who I was—

It stopped. I was slumped in the pilot’s seat, drenched in sweat, gasping like I’d just run a marathon and done it at a full sprint the whole way. My thoughts slowly coalesced and finally merged into something I knew I had to do. I swept my gaze around the cockpit, looking for glaring red lights that signaled failures, even impending disaster. But there were none. Everything was happily green, except for several lights on the new Hodgepodge panel, which were blinking yellow. My head wobbled, too heavy for me to keep upright. I let it loll back against the headrest. “Holy… shit.”

“That was fun,” Perry said. “Let’s not do it again, okay?”

I rolled my head in his general direction. “I—what—” My words collapsed into a string of curses, including a couple I think I made up on the spot. I swallowed and blinked as my head slowly cleared. “What the hell… was that?”

“I went into safe mode while my accelerometers recorded something like being on every amusement park ride in the Continental US

simultaneously, so… something unique and terrifying, I guess?” Perry replied. “Jamberac, are you—hell, even still there?”

“Yes, I’m here. Mostly, anyway. I think I bit my tongue. And drooled.”

He coughed softly, then added, “Van, if I wet my britches, would you think less of me?”

“Hell, I may have soiled myself, Jam,” Perry added. “Was it supposed to do that?” I asked to no one and everyone. The sense of panic was ebbing like a poisoned tide. “No. We’re… working on what happened now.”

I looked at the panel. “Netty?

How about you?”

“Oh, I’m here. And, I think, also still smeared out across about a hundred and thirty-five million klicks of space behind us.”

“Do you know what happened—wait. A hundred and thirty-five million klicks?”

“That’s how far we traveled,” she replied. I looked at the ship’s chronometer. If it was to be believed, that whole ordeal had lasted fifteen seconds. “That means we traveled at—” I grimaced, practically crossing my eyes and grunting with effort as I tried to do the math. My thoughts were still kind of splattered against a mental wall, though. “Shit. How fast would that be?”

“About nine million kilometers per second.”

“Or about thirty times the speed of light,” Perry added. I slumped back again. “I’ll say it again. Holy shit.”

WHICH WAS ALL WELL and good, but a drive that totally incapacitates, and maybe even kills its crew, isn’t really useful. I supposed it would still have applications for ships solely under AI control, but with squishy organic things on board?

No. Nope. Nada. “What was it like?” Torina asked me after I answered her frantic comm message. I could see the rest of my crew crowded in behind her, trying to look into the imager back on Reverie. “Kind of like being stoned,” I replied. Gabby photobombed her head into view. “That doesn’t sound so bad!”

“No, I mean stoned as in, I had people throwing stones at me—really big ones, from every direction at once.”

“Oh. That sounds considerably less fun.”

“We watched you on Reverie’s scanners. One second you were there, and then you weren’t. All the scanners got until you stopped was a faint, weird flickering thing going on, all along your trajectory—not just where you were, but where you’d been and where you were going,” Torina said. “What about gravitational effects?

I gather we didn’t shatter any planets or anything?”

“They’d deployed scanner buoys keyed to gravitational wave effects in different parts of the system. You did have a gravitational wake, but its effects were miniscule,” Netty-P replied. I exhaled. “Well, that’s good news, at least. But I’m telling you, after the wild ride I experienced, there’s no way I’d do it again, or let you guys go through it.”

“That bad, huh?” Rab asked. “I’m surprised I don’t look like a Picasso painting—and, before you ask, look it up.”

I signed off the call, by which time Jamberac had what he believed was the answer to the ordeal we’d endured. “There normally is a slight sense of disorientation while the drive is operating, but nothing like that. I—I mean, that was a touch extreme,” he said. “Quite the understatement, friend. What happened?”

He waved a hand toward the bulkheads around us. “It’s that alien tech you’ve got installed, that grav-plating. There was a resonant effect between the combi-drive and it, that—well, to keep it simple, folded space more than

the drive could on its own. It gave us one hell of a faster normal-space velocity, but also introduced a lot of distortion.”

“That would be the part where my head kind of turned inside out, wouldn’t it?”

Jamberac nodded. “I’d only programmed the drive to operate for fifteen seconds, then shut itself down. That was probably a good thing, since I’m not sure how much more of that either of us could have taken.”

“I know this one. The answer is… not much.”

Jamberac grinned, but it faded. “Anyway, we thought we’d taken the effect of the grav-plating into account, but apparently we hadn’t. It’s a new variable to us, one we really didn’t appreciate.”

“So, what, do we have to take the grav-plating off?” I asked, groaning inwardly at the thought. Not only would that be a big job, but I also wasn’t sure I even really wanted to trade the benefits of the plating—considerably improved acceleration and maneuverability—for the raw, eye-watering but essentially straight-line speed of the combi-drive. But Jamberac shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think we can change the drive parameters slightly, enough to prevent that resonant effect from occurring again. Give us a couple of hours to run some simulations, then we can do another test.”

I held up a finger. “A much shorter test.”

“I was thinking about two seconds.”

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Works for me.”

Jamberac headed back toward the Hodgepodge module. I turned the other way, to the cockpit, to get back on the comm and update Torina and the others. Perry, who’d been listening, leapt onto the galley table and waited for me to pass, so he could follow me into the cockpit. “Congratulations, Van.”

I stopped. “For what?”

“For being the fastest human being in—ever. The fastest in the history of humanity.”

I stared for a moment. “Lots of humans have twisted, Perry. That’s pretty much infinitely fast, isn’t it?”

Netty answered. “Technically, no. When a ship twists, it undergoes no actual change in its velocity. That’s because kinetic energy going into the twist has to equal what’s coming out.”

“It’s like driving through a tunnel that goes through a mountain at, say, fifty klicks per hour, instead of taking the road that goes around the mountain at the same speed. To someone watching, it might look like you’re going way faster if you go through the tunnel, because you arrive at the destination a lot sooner than if you don’t. But your actual speed is still just fifty k-p-h,” Perry said. “This, though, was different,” Netty went on. “The combi-drive bent space, in a way, but the Fafnir still actually traversed the intervening distance in those fifteen seconds. To an outside observer, we traveled at thirty times the speed of light—which is far, far faster than any other human, or anyone else, for that matter, has ever traveled.”

“And before you say, yeah, but others have flown using the combi-drive, so what about them—according to Jamberac, the highest velocity they’ve ever attained with the thing was about twenty times the speed of light. That resonant effect from the grav-plating was like a nitro boost,”

Perry said. It had sunk in as they’d talked. By the time they were done, I was actually smiling. “Huh. Well. So who’s the new number two?”

“The crew of Apollo 10.

They reached just shy of forty thousand kilometers per hour during their flight around the Moon,” Netty replied. Forty thousand kilometers per hour. And we’d just traveled nine million kilometers per second. I had been smiling—now I was grinning like an idiot. I stuck my hands up in the air. “I’m number one.” The room spun slightly, and I lowered my arms. “Let’s try that again, but more tamely.” I lifted one hand in a gentle wave, channeling my most British subdued response. “I’m currently winning,” I stated with excruciating politeness. Someone pointedly cleared their throat. I turned and saw Jamberac had been coming back forward for some reason. He gave me a look. “Apologies to my co-record holder. Let me revise my official statement for posterity.”

Perry laughed. “Can’t wait to hear this for the history books.”

“We’re number one,” I said with some dignity. Jamberac mimed a little bow. “Please spell my name correctly on the plaque, if you please. And send the gift card to my room.”

“Gift card?” I asked. Jamberac nodded sagely. “There’s always a gift card, Van. It’s how things are done.”

IT TURNED out Amazon wouldn’t sell gift cards in space, over a proxy comm line dozens of light-years from earth. I promised a bottle of something expensive to Jamberac, and he graciously accepted. We prepped for the next test with some trepidation, as the echoes of chaos still caromed through our bones. But the next test went much better. I was still whacked with a spell of dizziness, but at least my awareness didn’t splinter into fragments like the fever dream of a fraternity brother on a three-day bender. Before we returned to Reverie, we did a longer flight, with a few more tweaks by Jamberac and his Usu assistants—ten seconds, at an effective velocity of just over twenty times the speed of light. When it was done, I sat back and blew out a long, slow sigh. “Okay, that really was like being shattered. If I can even explain what that means.”

“I can extrapolate, boss,” Perry said. “Your face says a lot. I’m not saying you’ve aged from this, but if we go to Denny’s you’re gonna get a Grand Slam for free.”

I shot him a glance. “That much of a glow, eh?”

“Um, glow is a touch kind, but sure, let’s go with that. The disorientation is manageable, I think. Jamberac, how did it look from your end?”

His voice floated out of the comm. “Perfect. Everything’s between the lines, where it should be. As long as the combi-drive stays configured the way we’ve got it set, you shouldn’t have a repeat of that falling-in-every-direction-at-once bullshit. Of course, you’ll be limited to about twenty times light-speed, which we’ve set as the safe maximum.”

“So that’s leaving Earth, heading straight up and out from the Solar ecliptic and reaching a twist point in—Netty?”

“Assuming we take the fastest possible course, taking into account the location of the other planets—mainly Jupiter—about twenty-eight minutes.”

“Instead of nine hours or so. Wow. And how long to get to the Iowa?”

“About thirty-six minutes.”

I shook my head. That was normally a ten-to-twelve-hour trip. But Netty went on. “However—”

I sniffed. “Yeah, I figured there’d be a catch.”

“There is. The fastest trajectory might be along the ecliptic plane of a system, but it’s not the safest. Collisions are unlikely, of course, but since the ship maintains a footprint in normal space when flying on the combi-drive, they’d be… catastrophic.”

“At an effective speed of twenty times the speed of light?

Yeah, I’ll bet they would.”

“The combi-drive itself is designed to warp gas and dust out of the way, leaving the Fafnir flying through what’s essentially an empty bubble of normal space, but there is an upper limit to that effect. Things with enough mass will still impinge on the ship, and by impinge, I mean an epically, fantastically, amazingly big release of energy.”

“So what do you recommend?”

“We need a policy moving forward, specifically designed with the combi-drive in mind. The Fafnir’s scanners can resolve something as small as a fist-sized rock far enough ahead of the ship that if we made the trip to the Iowa in four, maybe five combi-drive hops, with a return to real space to scan the next leg ahead for dangerous debris, we should be fine.”

Jamberac must have been listening in. “That’s our recommended approach since the ship can only travel in a perfectly straight trajectory while using the drive. So do a hop, scan, adjust the ship’s heading if there’s any danger of collision, hop again, scan again, etcetera, etcetera.”

“Okay, folks. Sounds like we have a standard operating procedure.” I glanced at the antimatter fuel levels and whistled. “Uses up a lot of gas, doesn’t it?”

“It does. You’ll want to try and keep your ship topped up as much as you can, if you’re going Hodgepodge-ing around the universe,” Jamberac said. “Words to the wise. Still, I think we can afford a little to give the rest of the gang a quick flight. Netty, let’s go gather our wayward crew and take

’em for a spin.”

10

I GAVE KRAGDALOUS A BLANK STARE. “A race?

Against the N3?

Why?”

“We’d like to compare the performance of the versions of the drive aboard the Fafnir and the N3 as they fly in as close as we can get to identical conditions. Since things are, you know, moving around in the system, planets orbiting and all that, the only way to do that is to fly both ships at once.”

“We also want to study the effect of operating two drives in relatively close proximity at the same time,” Jamberac added. I tapped the conference table with an uneasy finger. “Have you done that before?”

“We have, with N1 and N3.

The first time we tried it, the two drives knocked one another offline. We were able to work out the minimum safe distance between two of these drives while they’re operating. It’s a function of—” Jamberac gave a sheepish smile. “Well, a lot of complex math based on the operating parameters of the drives, but a million klicks is a good minimum.”

Kragdalous shrugged. “As for making it a race, well, why not?

We’re a profoundly isolated research outpost without a lot of entertainment. It’ll be good for morale.”

It was hard to argue with that. We’d taken the Fafnir through a dozen flights now—not counting our inadvertent record-breaking first one, which would remain a spectacular one-off—the longest being five minutes. The

combi-drive had lived up to expectations, and the effect on the crew, while definitely a thing, wasn’t terrible. In fact, in a way, it was kind of enjoyable. Like almost falling backward in a chair but catching yourself. “Your brain is interpreting the slight spatial distortion that affects the ship and everything in it in a manner similar to chemical impairment,”

Reverie’s chief medical officer, a fussy Gajur named Climinox, told us. Icky grinned. “So it’s like we’re getting drunk?

With no hangover?

Boss, we won!”

Funboy, though, muttered, “Oh dear,” and we all turned to him. “Cue the sad sack,” Icky grouched. “Since the combi-drive is new technology, there obviously haven’t been any studies on the long-term effects on organic beings to exposure to this spatial distortion,” he said. “We’ve been gathering data since the very first crewed flight—”

Climinox began, but Funboy cut him off. “Which was when?”

“Nearly two years ago.”

“So you have two years’ worth of data.”

“Yes, but we’re confident that there are no long-term effects—”

“Confident that over two years there are no long-term effects.”

Climinox finally nodded. “Yes. Based on two years of data, there appear to be no long-term effects.”

“Oh dear.”

I smiled at Funboy. “My dour little friend, I’ll pass on the same wisdom my instructors passed on to me when I was in the Army and learning how to rappel off a tower about a million feet tall.”

“Which is?”

“You’re here for a good time, not a long time.”

Funboy sighed. “Oh dear.”

Climinox made a face. “Does he know any other words?”

I spread my hands, helpless. “We’ve only been around him for a few years. We’re not sure yet.”

STILL, out of an abundance of caution, we agreed that we’d only use the combi-drive sparingly. Funboy did have a point, for one. And the thing did burn an awful lot of expensive antimatter fuel, for another. But there was a third good reason, as pointed out by Rab. “That drive offers us a massive advantage over anyone that doesn’t have one, which is everybody, at least for now. Once they get over the shock, though, smart enemies are going to start looking for ways to counter it. We should keep it under wraps as much as we can and only use it when it counts.”

“Tactically smart. I like it,” I replied, and that sealed the deal. We’d only use the drive when it would offer us the maximum impact. Or when there was a race to be run, which was next on our agenda. This time, instead of ordering the crew to sit it out, I offered them the opportunity if they still had misgivings about it. Only Funboy, with his chronic abundance of caution, chose to sit out. Everyone else was anxious to not just put the drive through its paces, but to win. Not that there was really anything at stake—really, just for bragging rights. Or so I thought, until I discovered that a flurry of betting was suddenly underway on Reverie. Even the Eykinao were in on the action. “Two-to-one against us?

What the hell!” Icky growled. Perry stared back at her from the arm of the couch in the Fafnir’s crew lounge. “Seems that the N3 is the hometown favorite. Word is it’s a more reliable drive with a more experienced crew. Hard to argue with that.”

I gave him a flat, hard stare. “You bet against us, didn’t you?”

“Reverie’s traffic control AI gave me three-to-one. He’s a pushover.”

“Uh-huh. And what are you wagering?

Memories?”

“That’s hard currency amongst us AIs.”

Icky balled all of her fists in a spasm of cracking knuckles. “You bet against your own ship—!”

“Hey, it’ll give you even more incentive to win, just to see me lose, right?”

“Oh, you got that right, you smug little weathervane.”

I tapped Perry’s head. “Uh—question, bird. If you lose, exactly which memories are you planning on handing over to some random traffic control AI?”

Torina leaned in close, until her nose was nearly touching Perry’s beak. “Think very hard before you answer this question, Perry.”

“I’m gonna blur out the faces—”

“Think even harder,” she replied, her tone as hard as an old comet. “Uh… old memories, from before I met Van, of course.”

“Or my grandfather, thank you very much,” I said. “Well, that sucks. All my best memories involve you or Mark.”

“You know, under other circumstances, that would be a very touching thing for you to say. Given the context, though, it’s considerably less warm and fuzzy.”

“Fine. Memories from before I was assigned to Mark.”

“Just make sure you don’t give away anything mission critical,” I said. “What do you think I am, stupid?”

All four of Icky’s arms shot up. “Can I answer this one?”

THE RACE REQUIRED us to make our best possible time out to the nearest twist point, reverse course, then return and pass within one million klicks of the Reverie station. N3 was crewed by Usu under the command of Jamberac. Torina, Icky, Rab, and I crewed the Fafnir, along with Netty-P

and Perry. Funboy decided to sit the race out. “Every second of every day, I am being subjected to phenomena that are shortening my lifespan—ionizing radiation, traces of toxic chemicals outgassing from everyday objects, a veritable ocean of pathogens in the air around me. I don’t need to unnecessarily expose myself to the spatial distortion of this drive as well.” He paused and blinked. “Oh, and go Team Fafnir.”

Gabby decided to stay with him. “I don’t think you’ll need a cook for a such a short flight—unless you want me to go, ooh, I could make sandwiches—”

“Gabby, that’s okay. You stay here with Funboy,” I cut in. The interest wasn’t quite so one-sided anymore, we’d noticed, meaning we were watching what had to be one of the most bizarre relationships in known space unfolding before our eyes. “Did I hear you just turn down sandwiches?” Icky grumbled as we headed for the Fafnir. “They’re one of the most perfect foods, you know. Mobile, tasty, filling—especially if you put multiple meats on them—"

“The whole flight’s going to last maybe a couple of hours, Icky. The chances of you dying of hunger are slim.”

She sighed. “But they ain’t zero.”

“THE COURSE HAS BEEN CLEARED. There was an Usu crew working downrange, recovering cometary ice, but they’re clear now,” Netty said. I nodded and swept my gaze over the Fafnir’s instruments. Everything was reassuringly green. The start timer had begun counting down from one minute. I glanced out to my left, in the direction of the N3, but couldn’t see anything save blackness, of course. The tactical overlay confirmed her presence out there, though, a million and a half klicks to port. Reverie station was a bigger icon midway between us. Jamberac came on the comm. “Everything look good, Van?”

“Yup. We’re ready.”

“Okay. Well, may the best ship win.”

Icky coughed, though it sounded like the word Fafnir buried in there somewhere. I grinned. “You bet. See you on the finish line.”

We watched as the time ticked down. For what was probably dramatic effect, Netty did a verbal countdown from ten. “Three… two… one… go!”

The view beyond the cockpit crunched down to blackness, albeit with a strange sense of infinite depth straight ahead of us. Everything suddenly felt slightly off, as though I’d suddenly grown a little larger, or the Fafnir a little smaller, so nothing seemed to be quite where it should be. At the same time, an odd feeling gripped me, a smear of sensation that both was and wasn’t slight nausea, light-headedness, a vague sense of falling without it being in any particular direction, and a weird sort of euphoria. For good measure, I had a rush of emotion, like a waking dream, filled with the scent of Torina’s skin. And the light of her smile. And my own hands, stretching out into the stars, long, questing, undeniable—

I glanced around the cockpit. As my gaze moved, everything suddenly seemed to be both above and below me, at once, and all of it suffused with

an ineffable unreality. The lucid dream continued, even as my senses began to fail, each stream of data wobbling like a toddler as my brain decided enough is enough. But it wasn’t. Not just yet. Torina gave me a languid smile, her features smeared into a molten beauty. “This is—"

I tried to smile. It felt like my skin was detached, and not just from me, but from everything. “It is.”

And she understood, because whatever we felt was everything there was that could be. Icky leaned back, put all four of her hands behind her head, and breathed out a slow, “Wheee.”

“Rab, you okay?” I asked over my shoulder, then muttered to myself as everything suddenly felt below me, like I was sitting facing straight up. Again. Then it flipped, and the stars were out of order. Again. “I’m… here,” Rab answered. “Hope we never have to do anything complicated in this state.”

“No shit.” I looked at Perry. “How about you?”

“I’m getting random dilations in my internal chronometer, and my accelerometers are all over the place.”

“Is that, like, your version of being high?” Icky asked. “Having never been high, I’d say… sure?

I guess?”

I turned back to the instruments, which suddenly seemed far, far away. “Netty, how about you?”

“I’m experiencing the same things Perry does, although I’m also getting a timing signal from the combi-drive’s controller that stays synchronized with external time. Speaking of which—”

The effect abruptly stopped, leaving us all blinking stupidly. Normal space filled the view through the canopy. I sat up, forced my attention onto the instruments, and scanned them. They were all green. “Holy shit, that was ten minutes?” Icky asked. Netty replied, “It was. And the next leg is clear of potential collision hazards, so we’ll be restarting the drive in ten seconds.”

“Where’s the competition?” Rab asked. I glanced at the tactical overlay. There was no sign of the N3 aside from a fitful, ghostly flicker along her trajectory. It meant her combi-drive was running, though whether she was ahead of or behind us was hard to tell—

Reality slid sideways again. We did another ten-minute hop, then the combi-drive cut out and we again slammed back into normal space. Netty announced that we were exactly where we should be, but she still had no clear fix on the N3.

Then she paused and said, “Uh-oh.”

We all tensed. You really don’t want your spaceship saying uh-oh. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “There’s a substantial cloud of debris about halfway along our next planned leg. It’s a large cloud of rocks and ice, about half of which are too massive for the drive to reliably warp out of the way. Our collision probability, if we pass through it, is just under two percent.”

I cursed. Two percent didn’t sound like much, but it was far too high a risk to take for the sake of a stupid race. “I thought they’d chosen courses free of these damned rocks,” Icky snapped. Torina narrowed her eyes at the overlay. “That’s what Kragdalous said. Netty, put the course of that Usu ship on the overlay. The one that had been recovering cometary ice.”

She did. It passed close by the debris cloud—close enough that the Usu ship could have dropped the debris as it headed in-system toward Reverie. “Those cheating bastards!” Icky snarled. “Okay, just so you know, Van, I’m gonna be kicking some synthetic ass when we get back.”

“You and me both,” I snapped. “Netty, can we prove it?”

“We can reasonably infer it, but prove it?

Given the range at the time, our scanners lack the resolution to have logged them dropping the stuff. All we can say for sure is that their trajectory passed nearby.”

“If we deviate around it?”

“We will have to add another hop, which is inevitably going to put us well behind the N3.”

“So we’ve lost the race. Great. I think I’m going to do a little therapeutic synthetic butt-kicking myself,” Torina muttered darkly. But Icky suddenly spoke up. “Netty, let’s see the N3’s planned trajectory.”

It appeared on the overlay, which Netty zoomed out so we could see it from start to finish. It was essentially identical but parallel to ours. “Yeah. So they’re going to decelerate, come to a full stop, then reverse course and accelerate back in-system, toward Reverie,” Icky said. I turned to her. “Just like us. So?”

“I don’t like losing.” A grin spread across Icky’s face. “So let’s not do that.”

“Are you suggesting that we cheat?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Okay, yes.” She sighed. “But if you’ve got a problem with that, Van, I understand—”

“No, no. I just wanted to make sure I was clear on what you meant,” I said, giving her a sly smile. Her grin returned. “Okay, Netty, here’s the plan.”

“KRAGDALOUS IS GOING to be pissed. We’re kind of defeating the whole purpose of his race, aren’t we?” Rab said. I shrugged. It was true—by deviating from our planned trajectory, we’d make any further comparison between the two ships’ performance problematic. But that had already happened, thanks to the debris that mysteriously appeared in our path. Technically, I supposed, we should have just called the whole thing off and started again. But there was a principle here. Kragdalous had inserted the Usu deeply into his operations. If they were prepared to cheat, what else might they be up to?

This wasn’t just about them being Usu, either. Anyone cheating on a race with almost no stakes should be held accountable for it, and hoisting them on their own petard was a good start to that. Besides, I was pissed. “They’ll still get data they want from the first two legs of the flight. As for the rest—well, I guess the Usu shouldn’t have decided to play dirty,” I said. Torina twisted her mouth into a frown. “Like Netty said, though, we can’t prove that, Van.” Her tone implied an appeal to reason, even if her expression told me otherwise. “Maybe not. But Kragdalous assured us that our assigned trajectory was clear of nav hazards. So either his people cheated, or they were incompetent. It’s up to him to figure out which.”

I looked at the nav data and the tactical overlay, then shifted my gaze out of the canopy. The system’s fourth planet, a barren world somewhat similar to Mars, loomed ahead, wisps of high clouds streaking the gritty skies. Instead of avoiding the debris and sticking to our planned course, at Icky’s suggestion, we had Netty alter our heading so that our next leg would drop us back into normal space close to the planet. Netty then maneuvered us to make a gravity-assisted loop around it to kick us back on a course to Reverie, whereupon we’d reengage the combi-drive. Since we didn’t have to decelerate to reverse course the way the N3 did, we’d gain a huge amount of time. “Clever,” I told her. “I know,” she agreed. Which hadn’t gone unnoticed by Jamberac, or by Kragdalous back on Reverie. I just had Netty give them a curt explanation that we’d been forced to make the maneuver thanks to a dangerous—and unexpected—cloud of debris in our planned flight path, and left it at that. The less said, the better. I’d address the issue further in person. I didn’t want my conclusions to be… misunderstood. When it came to my crew, I had exactly one setting, and I marshaled the use of that state carefully. I found yelling to be crude. If Funboy had taught me anything, it was that quietly asserting your wishes was the path to understanding. Of course, he had the troubling ability to horrify nearly everyone with his quiet, ah, declarations. I tended to hope my assertions were different than his, though our goals nearly always intersected. And I didn’t make people blanch in horror. Often, anyway. Our slingshot loop around the planet, which had no name and was known only by a string of letters and numbers, was something Netty could have done in her sleep—if she slept, of course. The planet grew until it was filling half the forward view, its surface smearing into a dreary, grayish-tan blur as we whipped around it. At a precise instant, Netty fired a burst from the main drive again, giving the Fafnir just enough energy to break free of the planet’s pull. And just like that, while the N3 was still decelerating to do her course reversal, we were on our way back to Reverie. “Suck it, bitches!” Icky called, glaring at the N3’ s icon on the overlay. Perry lifted a wing and leveled a dire glare on a gooey droplet clinging to one of his feathers. “Excuse me, Ms. Berber Carpet, but as the old saying goes, say it, don’t spray it.”

I gave Icky a frown. “For my part, Icky, I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to take quite so much delight in screwing over our opponents. In fact, it upsets me to the point where I think I’ll have to order three cartons of stavosia just to get over it. I am…”

Perry interjected when I paused, helpful as ever. “Overcome with emotion, boss?”

“Exactly,” I said with a grave nod. Icky smirked. “And spicy noodles?

Are you that upset, by any chance?”

“Yes. Yes, I am. And I hope, when you eat those noodles, they taste of my disappointment.”

“I’m sure they will.”

I smiled, offered her a wink, then turned my attention back to—what had been a race, although now it was really a matter of seeing just how badly the N3 lost. “Boss, they’re asking for a status update?” Netty asked. “Why?”

She paused, then added, “For the official race transcript, which I just learned is a thing. What should I tell them?”

I heaved a dad-worthy sigh, cracked my knuckles, and smiled. Torina looked around in mild alarm, guessing what came next. “Oh, he’s gonna say it.”

Icky inhaled. “Please don’t. Please—"

I inclined my head, then turned to the screen. “Too late. Netty, transmit the following: I’m not angry. Just disappointed.”

AS I ENTERED his office with Perry, I braced myself for a spirited conversation with Kragdalous. We’d beaten the N3 back to Reverie by more than twenty minutes, thanks to our gravitational slingshot around the planet. Fortunately, the terms of the race only required us to pass within a million klicks of the station. If we’d had to come to a stop relative to the station or dock or anything like that, we’d probably still have lost simply because we

had a colossal amount of velocity to shed. In fact, we ended up docking back at Reverie almost forty minutes after the N3 had. Kragdalous had Jamberac with him. As I entered, they both stood. I raised my hands, which I realized made it look like I was surrendering. “Look, I’m sorry about how this—”

Kragdalous cut me off. “Van, listen—”

“I shouldn’t have—”

“Van!

Please!”

I paused, surveying his features. Perry muttered, “Oh-oh, someone’s in deep doo-doo.”

“Someone is,” Kragdalous snapped. I sighed. “Look, I should have tried to stick as close to the planned course as I could—”

“Van, I’m asking you—please, just shut up?

If you keep talking, I’m not going to be able to apologize to you,” Kragdalous said. That brought me up short. “Apologize?”

Kragdalous gestured at a chair, then sat down and sighed. “Yes. We know what happened. The Usu crew operating that cometary mining excursion deliberately contaminated your flight path with navigational debris. At that point, the race ceased to have any real further value as a direct comparison of the two drives.”

“The data we got was still useful, though, so there is that,” Jamberac stated. “Well… okay, then. I’m glad it wasn’t a complete waste.”

“No, but it was—ah, unacceptable doesn’t really do it justice. It was egregious—criminal. Those Usu deliberately put your ship at risk.”

“Why?” Perry asked. “Do they have some sort of locker room bullshit going on?”

Kragdalous leaned back. “No, it was much simpler than that. They had wagered heavily on N3 winning, so they tried to fix the race.”

“Ah. Of course, cheating for profit. That, plus the Cosmic Background Radiation, go all the way back to the Big Bang.”

“Indeed. Anyway, the Usu in question have been identified and will, of course, be deactivated and—”

“No,” I said, holding up a hand. Kragdalous stared at me. “No?”

“No. Should they be held accountable and punished?

Yes. But should they be deactivated?

In other words, killed?

No.”

“Van, they don’t have a legal status that affords them—”

“I don’t care. I’ve killed Usu in battle, and that’s one thing. But these aren’t enemies on the other side of a battlefield.” I leaned forward. “You made it clear that you trusted the Usu you’re employing. And I acknowledged that, yes, they deserve to be treated the same way I treat Perry here, or Netty or Netty-P. That means taking the good with the bad.”

Kragdalous gave me a bemused look. But Jamberac was just nodding along, his thoughts an open book. “Fair enough. Let’s get to the heart of this. What do you think we should do with them?” Kragdalous finally asked. “Well, what would you do if they were human?

Or if they were fellow Eniped?”

“I’d arrest them, have a trial, and if they were found guilty, punish them with—I don’t know, stoppage of privileges, maybe even some period of incarceration.”

I nodded. “There you go, then.”

Kragdalous kept that look leveled on me, a combination of surprised, even incredulous, and a little perplexed, but finally spread his hands and nodded. “If the aggrieved party is advocating it, who am I to argue?

Although it does stand to set an… interesting precedent,” he said. “Maybe it’s a precedent that needs to be set,” I replied. “Anyway, did you want to run the race again?”

“No, I don’t think so. It worked out well in the end, after all, so I’m declaring the results of the race valid.”

“Valid?

In what way?”

Kragdalous gave me an Eniped smile. “I put a bet on the Fafnir, at three to one. You don’t think I’m giving that up, do you?”

WE HAD one more shakedown cruise that Kragdalous and Jamberac recommended. They wanted us to travel to a star system about nine light-

years away, making use of the Fafnir’s twist drive, her normal space drive and thrusters, and the combi-drive, all in various combinations. “The point is to watch the performance of the drive under normal, extended operating conditions. We’ll send along N1 as a sort of chase ship, just so you’re not out there alone,” Jamberac said. I gave him a doubtful look. “Uh-huh. And who’s going to be crewing it?”

“No Usu, if that’s what you’re asking. It’ll be me and a few techs from Reverie.”

Together with Perry and Netty-P, we examined the proposed flight plan. They were asking us to twist to leave Reverie using a combination of the fusion drive and the combi-drive, twist to an intermediate system, do some maneuvering with both drives there, then twist to the destination system, where we’d meet a robotic refueling tender to top up the Fafnir. Then we’d come back, putting our ship through another predetermined set of maneuvers along the way. It was all intended to test the combi-drive in real-world use, while making sure it played nice with the Fafnir’s other systems. “So. Fly to a star, then fly back again?” Icky asked. “In summary, yes,” I answered. She spread her arms wide, her head thrown back for maximum drama. “Hold me back, boss. It’s too much. It’s better than mating season combined with a trip to the tool ship—”

“Aren’t those the same thing?” Torina asked. Icky snorted. “One has less lubricant. And no interest if you pay it off in time.”

Perry ruffled his wings. “I’ll be sick that day.”

“I’m sick right now,” Funboy intoned. I gave Icky a small shrug. “It’s all in the name of science, big girl.” I turned to Funboy, who was still wearing a fuzzy scowl. “I’d like—”

“Me to come along, yes, of course. My place is aboard the Fafnir—even if it will result in untold damage to the cells of my body from exposure to extended periods of spatial distortion.”

I opened my mouth, but Funboy went on, cutting me off. “Yes, I’m aware of the fact that I am here for a good time, not a long time.”

“Gotta be honest, good time isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I think of you,” Rab said drily. But Gabby spoke up. “Oh, no, Funboy is wonderful!

He makes me laugh!

Funniest person within ten systems.”

Silence, as we all exchanged glances. Torina finally offered her a tight smile and a nod. “We’ll take your word for it, Gabby.”

11

THE FLIGHT WAS uneventful on the outbound leg. And uneventful flights were the best sort, my father the naval aviator always said. When they got eventful, it was often time to be worried. If things really went to shit, then the flight was interesting or notable. We made our twists and did our maneuvers, and everything performed well. The N1, a small ship no bigger than the Fafnir was when I first discovered her in my grandfather’s barn, stayed in close company, slurping up telemetry that we transmitted to her on the performance of our ship and its systems. We finally arrived at the destination system, a giant orange star with three planets, including the most lurid green gas giant I’d ever seen. “Green and orange?

Not a combination that really works for me,”

Torina said. Even Gabby agreed. “I find that color combination as upsetting as burgundy and… almost anything. Makes my eyes hurt. All of them.”

“I’ll make a note of that for your birthday gifts,” I told her, and she beamed. Funboy watched the exchange with care. He was smart. And he had it bad, too. The robotic refueling tender was orbiting the gas giant, so we were going to have a chance to see it up close. The Usu who had overseen the tender’s dispatch from Reverie had apparently given the gas giant the ironic name Sleepy—ironic because the turbulent atmosphere featured raging storms the size of Australia and winds that gusted nearly three thousand klicks per hour at the equator. “Glad we’re not down there,” Rab said as Netty closed us in on the tender for a hookup. It would replenish not just our fusion fuel, but also our supply of antimatter and, for good measure, our fresh water. “Which puts you off the most?

The atmosphere that’s basically a soup of methane, ammonia, and sulfuric acid, the pressure that would crush you to a pinpoint in an instant, or the winds that would strip the skin right off your bones?” Funboy asked. “Uh… do I really need to pick only one—?” Rab started to reply, but Netty cut in. “Van, I’m detecting something unusual.”

I looked up from the data slate I’d been scanning, which offered a performance summary for the Fafnir for the trip so far, sent over by Jamberac. “Unusual with the Fafnir?”

“No. It’s external.”

I put the slate down. “Unusual how?”

“It’s a radio-frequency signal, with a source somewhere outside this star system. I’ll put the direction on the overlay. I can’t determine the distance to it, at least until I get enough parallax on the go to do a decent triangulation.”

“Is it a message?

Saying anything in particular, or is it just a carrier?”

“No, there’s modulation. It’s a signal. It’s compressed, whatever it is, and repeats every one-point-nine-six seconds. I’ve tried decompressing it, and it sounds like… music?

Singing, maybe?” Netty said. Torina cocked her head. “Singing?”

“Or something like it, anyway. When it comes to some races, it can be problematic as to whether their voices would count as singing or music. Funboy’s race, the Surtsi, for instance, are capable of producing sounds that are more similar to a reed instrument than a voice.”

Every head swiveled to Funboy like a bunch of laser turrets locking onto a target. He sighed. “Before anyone asks, no, I do not, and will not, sing.”

Gabby, standing in the back of the cockpit, leaned toward him. “Would you sing for me?” she asked, the gem he’d acquired from the Eykinao for her sparkling in a simple choker he’d made for her. Funboy gave us all the side-eye. “Perhaps on leave, well away from the prying eyes and ears on this ship.”

I smiled but turned back to the instruments. “Netty, let’s hear this music or singing or whatever it is.”

Thin, warbling tones drifted out of the speakers. Somehow, I’d expected sad and mournful, even ethereal, way out here in the void. But this was more upbeat, with an almost martial tone to it. To the extent it resembled any human music at all, it reminded me of Mars from Gustav Holst’s The Planets, or maybe Shostakovitch’s Leningrad Symphony. It was hard to tell, though, how much—if any—of it was vocal—

Perry abruptly turned to me. “I know what this is. I know what it means.”

I blinked back at Perry. “You do?

What?”

He turned away, his eyes gleaming at the emptiness beyond the canopy. “The Tyrants are calling their scattered flock home.”

THE FUEL TENDER HAD DISCONNECTED, and we’d maneuvered away to a safe distance, allowing N1 to hook up and refuel. While she did, we stayed in orbit around Sleepy and turned our attention to Perry. “All I know is what’s been unlocked in that space. Those sounds—the song, whatever—it’s a key. But not to some simplistic lock. It’s an automated signal intended to guide a people known as the Pleikomas to some destination, which may be their homeworld, but it may be somewhere or something else,” he said. “I have no records pertaining to these Pleikomas in any data store—at least, none that I can access, anyway,” Netty said. “Okay, Perry, so who are these Pleikomas?” I asked him. “They’re a warlike race that originates somewhere in this region of the Milky Way. I don’t know much in the way of specifics, but I do know that they clashed twice with forces from known space. I don’t have any information about the first time, but the second time, they were confronted and defeated fifty-three years ago by a GKU force led by Valint, Petyr Groshenko… and your grandfather.”

I slowly sat back in my seat. “My grandfather.”

“Yes.”

“So I assume that all of this was locked away inside your memories and inaccessible to you since, you know, you’ve never mentioned anything about it before.”

“That’s right. That music unlocked another memory block.”

Torina gave Perry a thoughtful frown. “That implies that hearing the music was meant to unblock those memories—so it was a trigger, a key.”

Rab shook his head. “But that means that Perry’s memories weren’t going to be unblocked until, what, he happened to come all the way out here, to this region of space, and happened to encounter that song or whatever it is?

That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, it doesn’t. The galaxy is kind of big. Rambling, if you will. What if Reverie had been a thousand light-years in an entirely different direction?

Or is this song playing everywhere around known space, and we just haven’t ever detected it before?” Icky asked. “Perry may have been meant to encounter the music in some other way,” Netty-P pointed out. I crossed my arms. “Those are all very good questions, but you guys are ignoring another possibility. You’re assuming that the GKU and the 32 just pointed to a random part of space and said, okay, Reverie’s going to be a thousand light-years that-a-way. But maybe Reverie is out here, in this part of the galaxy, for a reason.”

“Okay, if that’s true, then it means there’s a big piece of the story that we’re missing,” Torina said. I gave a sour frown and nodded. “Wouldn’t be the first time the GKU, and the 32 in particular, have layers hidden behind the layers, hidden behind even more layers.”

“Yeah, well, they can stop that anytime. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m getting more than a little tired of not being given the whole picture,” Torina snapped, frustration hardening her voice. “It isn’t just the 32 concealing information, though, is it?

Perry said that Van’s grandfather was part of the effort to defeat these Pleikomas, but he was never a member of the 32, was he?” Funboy put in. As soon as he asked it, I remembered a conversation I’d had with Perry not long after I first learned about the existence of the 32, one about my grandfather. He was deeply distrustful of the 32, Perry had said. Or, for that matter, he was deeply distrustful of the Masters, at least the ones not named

Groshenko. He felt that joining them was akin to validating something he didn’t want to validate. And yet, based on the memory that the music had unlocked in Perry, he’d been part of the effort to defeat the Pleikomas—whoever the hell they were—but had seen fit to hide that fact away. But he’d also intended it to be discovered someday, or else he’d have simply arranged for Perry’s memory of it to be erased altogether. It was as though he knew that we’d eventually come out to this lonely expanse of galaxy and had set a trigger in Perry to reveal information that he wanted me to have—albeit not until we came here. Torina was obviously thinking the exact same thing. “This was no accident. Your grandfather is telling us something. But what?

And why so little information?

Perry, you’ve told us everything you know, right?”

“Everything that I know I know. There could be whole encyclopedias worth of stuff still locked away somewhere inside me. Believe me, no one is more disgusted than I am. It’s a violation of my purpose. Of my personhood.”

I tilted my head at him, suddenly struck by a question I’d never really considered before. “You must know how much memory space you have available, right?

And how much you’re using?

Is there a discrepancy?”

But Perry shook his head. “That’s very desktop PC of you, Van. That’s not how it works. It’s not like Netty and I have hard drives installed with some fixed capacity. We store information in a way that’s more similar to the way you do it—as complex networks of associations between fundamental computing units. In you, that would be, well, brain cells, to keep it simple.”

“To put it another way, Van, how much memory capacity do you have?

And how much do you have left?” Netty-P asked. I nodded. “Point taken.”

“And it’s not uncommon for people to have memories repressed, locked away and not even knowing they have them,” Torina added. I sat up again. “Okay. So what do we know?

That the Pleikomas, a warlike race, was fought and defeated five decades or so ago by the GKU, including my grandfather. That they broadcast music as a beacon to guide their flock, as you put it, back home—or to some particular location, anyway.”

“What’s a flock?” Gabby asked. I glanced at her. “It’s a term used to refer to a group of animals. On Earth, a group of birds might be called a flock—”

“Or a murder, in the case of crows,” Perry said. Gabby looked at him. “These crows are murderers?”

“Some of them are,” Perry muttered darkly. “Some of them are.”

I stared for a moment, then shook my head. “That was way more chilling than it needed to be. Anyway, it’s a group of animals, like a flock of birds, or of sheep, who form a sort of… community.”

“And is that the actual word you’ve got stored in your memory, Perry?

Flock?

They’re calling their flock home?” Gabby asked. “It is, yes. The Tyrants are calling their scattered flock home. That’s verbatim what I’ve got stored.”

Gabby turned to me. “That seems awfully specific, don’t you think?

It could have been, The Tyrants are calling their people home, or calling everyone home, or something like that.”

“Huh. That’s a good point. Flock does imply a sense of belonging, of community. Of nurturing, maybe.”

“But it could also imply a sort of subordination. A flock of sheep considers their shepherd to be their leader, the one in charge of them,”

Netty-P said. “For that matter, referring to people as a flock could even have religious connotations. The metaphor is used in quite a few different belief systems,”

Funboy noted. I gave an exasperated sigh. “Yes, all true. And then there’s the word Tyrants. Calling these Pleikomas Tyrants is a message all on its own.”

We sat in silence for a moment. I finally turned back to the instruments, a habit I’d developed when talking to Netty, since my eyes wanted to contact something while I conversed with her. “Netty, call up Jamberac. I’ve got some questions for him, starting with what he knows about Reverie being located out here instead of, oh, out there”—I pointed off to my left, and then to my right—“or out there.”

BUT JAMBERAC WASN’T able to shed much light on it. “Sorry, Van. Reverie predates me by quite a bit. And I’ve never heard any reason given for it being where it is, aside from keeping the testing of Hodgepodge a long away from known space. Kragdalous probably knows more.”

I thanked him. I really didn’t think he was lying or holding anything back. Like us, he just wasn’t in the circle of knowledge, and the 32 had a history that was opaque by design. I leaned back and watched on the master display as the N1 disconnected from the refueling tender. “I guess the question is, what now?

Do we continue with the rest of the test of the combi-drive?

Or do we consider that song a warning and get the hell out of here?” I asked the cockpit at large. “Van, that conflict happened fifty-three years ago,” Perry said. “And now that we’ve orbited across the width of Sleepy, I’ve been able to pin the source of the Pleikomas transmission to a star system about one hundred and thirty-six light-years away,” Netty added. I called up the test-flight plan and scanned it. Our next flight involved using the combi-drive to depart Sleepy along the system ecliptic, to test the drive inside the gas giant’s gravity well. When we reached a twist point, we’d use it again at maximum power for thirty minutes, to see how far it would take us in that time. We’d then twist to an intermediate system, take a nav fix, then back to Reverie and use the combi-drive to return to the station. I turned to the tactical overlay. I’d had Netty go to active scanners, at their highest power setting, both to get a detailed picture of Sleepy’s system and to broadcast our presence here. If there was going to be trouble, I wanted to either know about it or flush it out. But aside from the N1 and the refueling tender, which was now breaking orbit to return to Reverie, we were alone. “Netty, are there any other emissions you can detect from, ah, anywhere?

Any of the nearby star systems?”

“Nothing that can’t be explained as having a natural source,” she replied. I narrowed my eyes at the display. “Hmm.”

Torina leaned into my peripheral vision. “Hmm?”

“Yeah. Hmm. That song is coming from a hundred and thirty-odd lightyears away. That’s less than, what, a quarter of the distance across known

space?

And yet, an interstellar war was fought here only fifty-ish years ago.”

Perry nodded. “Correct. If there’s a twist-capable civilization out here, you’d think there’d be more evidence of it.”

“What are you getting at?” Torina asked. Perry turned to her. “Look around. See any thriving worlds?

Any systems bursting with trade routes?

Suggestions of any military activity?”

“No, it’s kind of… a desert. Wait—are you saying we did that?

Or, rather, the GKU did?”

“The GKU may have had a hand in it, but I’m guessing these Pleikomas aren’t called the Tyrants for nothing,” I said. “So either this desert, as Torina calls it, really is the graveyard of at least one entire species—or it’s not,” Perry said. “An entirely new and novel race. That means the potential for new and entirely novel pathogens out here in this bastion of loneliness. Isn’t it enough that I’m subjecting myself to this experimental drive?” Funboy said, sighing. “Oh dear. Perhaps it’s time for me to go home. To a sterile compound.”

“Cheer up, sourpuss. It may be that the Tyrants were wiped out, and their pathogens along with them,” Perry said, then turned to me. “That said, we probably shouldn’t just assume that yes, they have been destroyed. I’m having trouble imagining that that memory was implanted in me just as a paean to some dead race.”

“At the very least, it doesn’t appear to still be a warzone, especially given the years that Reverie has been operating out here untouched, maybe even unnoticed,” Rab said. “Perry had that memory, and the conditions for unlocking it, for a reason,” Torina said. Perry’s amber eyes gleamed at me. “It’s up to you, boss. Run the route, or play it safe and just head back to Reverie now.”

“Where there may be some answers to the many new questions we suddenly seem to have,” Rab said. Icky turned to him with a grin. “Congratulations, you’ve just experienced your first dramatic revelation, followed by realizing there’s a frustrating slew of things we don’t know that are probably being hidden from us. Now you’re a member of the Fafnir’s crew. Welcome aboard.”

I smiled but kept my eyes on the yawning blackness before me. “Reverie—and any answers that might be there—will be waiting, whether we go back now or do some investigating first. So, we’ll do some snooping, but we’ll do so on alert, and with weapons hot. Netty, please let Jamberac know we’re ready to resume the test flight whenever he is,” I said. Icky laughed. “Boss, one of these days you’re going to direct us to mind our own business.”

“Today is not that day,” I answered and turned to the instruments and the impending combi-drive flight. But I found my attention drawn back to that endless dark. It had a weight. A presence. And more than anything, it wasn’t empty. It was full of secrets. Secrets tied to my own family, even at this crushing distance from home. Who were the Tyrants?

Were they still out there, and if so, where?

And why did my grandfather want me to know about them, but not until now?

I blew out a breath, then rubbed my face, hard. Icky was right. We were faced with the unknown, and once again—

It felt intentional. It felt designed. And it felt dangerous. 12

WITH EACH SUCCESSIVE use of the combi-drive, Netty and Icky had worked with Jamberac and his people to fine-tune its operation. This next run, our longest yet, actually brought very little of that weird distortion that left me spiraling into madness. All that remained was a bit of… of softness to everything, for lack of a better way to put it. It was as though all the edges and corners of reality had been rounded off a little, the boundaries of everything around me given just a hint of blur. A filter, sort of like the one aging soap opera stars used when they were getting a bit long in the tooth. Which was good. I was worried about how much the combi-drive impaired my perception, and my judgment because of it, while it was operating. It was like flying a spaceship drunk, which probably wasn’t a good idea. But I couldn’t argue with the results. At the cost of a slight sense of disconnection, we now had the means to effectively exceed the speed of light—or at least trick the universe into letting us get around the speed limit. “Even running flat out, it would still take two and a half months and a huge amount of fuel to fly from Earth to Proxima Centauri, so it’s not going to replace twisting. But for shorter flights, that would have taken hours or even days, it’s a game changer,” Netty stated. She was excited. It was in every word of her declaration. “Which is great, if we’re allowed to keep the damned thing,” I replied as we neared the end of the thirty minute test flight. “Why wouldn’t we be?” Icky asked. “Because it’s—um, valuable doesn’t begin to describe it, now does it?

Think of how much the Eridani or the League would pay to have this thing mounted in their ships. This is a massive shift in speed, but also economics. And political consideration, and military tactics will be kicked back to the beginning. Hell, civilian travel won’t be the same, let alone the navies of known space.”

“It’s especially desirable to someone who thinks they might have it in their ships,” Torina said. “Then, it’s not theory. It’s real. And the changes are immediate.”

“I can’t think of a logical price, which leads me to the conclusion that we’re likely to be challenged for the drive. Gratitude only goes so far when it comes to engineering systems that can rewrite known space,” I said. Icky pointed back to our drive. “True, boss, but that drive back there was purpose-built for the Fafnir,” Icky persisted. She had the greatest advance in drive tech since the twist, and she didn’t want to give it up. Rab was shaking his head. “No, it was built into a standard engineering module that could be installed on any number of ships. The Fafnir offered a good way to test it, but yeah, I’m with Van on this. I know the Armory, and I know Mother Hen. They exist to supply the GKU with weapons and equipment, sure—but they also exist to make money.”

“An outfit like the GKU wouldn’t be cheap to operate,” Torina put in. “And being funded by The Quiet Room only goes so far. They may be willing to do it as long as the GKU’s interests align with theirs, and as long as they see a benefit in it. But I don’t doubt that the 32 are always going to be looking for cash of their own. The combi-drive is a chance for them to get rich,” I said. “Especially since they’d likely want everyone in known space to ultimately have it,” Perry added. “If, say, only Tau Ceti has it, that’s a recipe for all sorts of instability. If everyone has it, not so much.”

We reached the end of the test flight, and the drive cut out, leaving us coasting through normal space. Behind us, Sleepy’s star was just a hard point of light, now over half a billion kilometers away. “Our average velocity was twenty-point-six-seven times the speed of light,” Netty said. “And—”

We waited. After a couple of seconds of silence, I said, “Netty?”

“Van, can you ask Jamberac if another combi-drive has been flying through this area recently?” she said. “Why?”

“Because the drive’s AI is reporting a slight harmonic resonance. It’s similar to one that occurs back in Reverie, where these units have been used a lot. Operating one of these drives creates a set of gravitational ripples in its wake that persist for a time, and as it was explained to me, that creates this resonance effect.”

“Couldn’t you just be detecting the effect of N1’ s drive?” Rab asked. “That’s taking the fact that N1’ s drive is operating into account. This would be another set of gravitational ripples, from another source. And since the effect only lasts for a few hours, perhaps a few days at most, that source must have passed through this area within that time.”

We called up Jamberac, but he was mystified as well. “There are only four ships with the drive— N1, N2, N3, and the Fafnir. And unless you’ve snuck out here sometime in the past couple of days for a joyride, then no, there’s been no ship with a combi-drive out here recently.”

“That means there’s another ship out here, mounting another one of these drives,” Perry said. Jamberac shook his head. “There can’t be.”

“Maybe there are some secrets about Reverie you—what’s the phrase?

That you haven’t been read into?” Torina said. “A whole other ship and combi-drive?

No way. How would something like that be kept so secret that there’s not even a hint of it anywhere back at Reverie?” Jamberac asked. But I found another line of thought starting to slide into my head as they were talking. “What if it’s not one of our ships?” I asked. A moment of silence. Jamberac finally broke it. “What do you mean, not one of ours?

No one else has this technology.”

I stared back at him. “Maybe no one we’re aware of. But we know we don’t have the full picture. What if there’s even more of it we haven’t seen yet?

What if the combi-drive isn’t an invention by the GKU?

What if it’s loot?”

“Loot. So, stolen—from who?

And by who?”

I took a slow breath. “Not sure about the first, but I suspect I know where to start looking for the second.”

WE PREPARED to twist back to the intermediate waypoint system, and from there, to Reverie, when we got to find out just what it was like to be on the receiving end of a Hodgepodge combi-drive. One instant, it was just us and the N1.

An instant later, a third ship appeared without warning—

—and opened fire. The N1 was hit by the time we could even start reacting. The unknown ship, which consisted of three faceted spheres conjoined in a triangular fashion, slammed a pair of mass-driver rounds and some sort of beam weapon into Jamberac’s ship. The mass-driver slugs punched right through her, spewing fans of glittering debris. The Fafnir’s cockpit exploded to life. Torina was already on the weapons, snapping out a hasty barrage from the one most suited to saturating an enemy’s attention—the swarm cannon. She fired a full spread, almost on instinct, and the small missiles raced off toward the new arrival in a dizzying spray of trajectories intended to present the target with an overwhelming amount of threats. While she did that, we snatched at our helmets and jammed them on even as Icky hit the emergency depressurize control to bleed the atmosphere from the Fafnir to avoid an explosive decompression if we were hit. As I yanked my helmet on, I shouted out to Netty. “Netty, put us between that bastard and the N1!”

She replied by firing a burst from the main drive, then flipping us end over end with the thrusters. Another quick burst slowed us, putting the bulk of the Fafnir between the other two ships. We were no longer present. We were present and active. I smiled, pleased with my crew. And my ship. “Perry, do you recognize that bastard?” I asked, scanning the tactical overlay. The other ship had at least stopped firing at the N1 and had turned its attention to the swarm of incoming ordnance. “I don’t. Completely unfamiliar design, no matches in any database.”

I punched the broadcast control on the comm, initiating a transmission that would span a huge swath of the channel spectrum. “Unknown ship, cease firing immediately and stand down, or you will be destroyed—”

As soon as I said that, a salvo of swarm missiles struck, blasting one of the faceted spheres in two. The other pair separated and drifted apart. “—I mean, you’ll be more destroyed!”

I started to relax, assuming that the enemy ship had been crippled. I was wrong. Each of the remaining two spherical sections came to life, both lighting a drive and opening fire on us with mass drivers and that strange beam weapon, its glimmering presence slicing through space like a dim ghost with bad intentions. “That’s pretty neat,” Perry said. I ignored him, taking the controls and rotating the Fafnir to keep her between our sudden enemy and the N1 as much as I could. The fact that there were now two sudden enemies didn’t make that easy. “Rab, take the particle beam and plasma-burst cannons. I’ve got the lasers and the swarm cannon,” Torina said, her voice flatly calm. An instant later, a mass-driver round struck somewhere aft, the Fafnir shuddering under the impact. The starboard main power bus went dark, and several ancillary systems dropped offline. The beam weapon that swept across our dorsal aft end chewed through a REAB module and dug into the Fafnir’s hull, triggering more alarms, but then it abruptly stopped. “Whatever that beam is, it seems that it can’t defeat the grav-plating. It bounced off it like a mirror,” Funboy said. His tone was even more calmly measured than Torina’s, so much so that he could have been describing an insurance seminar. Or lunch. Maybe both. “Good news,” I replied, then turned to Icky. “How bad were we hit?”

“Looks like that mass-driver round went right through a—”

Another impact rocked the Fafnir. More systems went offline, including the particle cannon. “—a power distribution node,” Icky finished, unstrapping. “I’m heading aft. Funboy, could use a hand.”

Rab turned to her as she started back. “See if you can route power back to the particle beam while you’re at it.”

“On it,” she said. I looked back at the overlay. Thanks to the short engagement range, we had our full suite of weapons available, less the particle cannon. We were almost inside the minimum safe range of the missiles, but Torina wisely focused on using the swarm cannon. Rab, in the meantime, found the range with the plasma-burst cannon. Once he did, the brutal effectiveness of the

weapon became starkly apparent. Pulses of incandescent plasma smacked into one of the spheres in rapid succession, quickly pounding it into streamers of glowing slag. “Torina, see if you can disable that third sphere. I want to capture it intact if we can,” I said, feathering the Fafnir’s thruster controls, striving to keep the N1 protected. Her lips pulled back in a predatory grin. “We’re here to help,” she said, switching to the lasers. They were as surgical as the Fafnir’s weapons got—

a stiletto, compared to the bludgeoning hammers of the rest of our loadout. As she lined up a careful shot, the enemy ship darted quickly aside and plowed a glowing furrow through the ablative armor on the Fafnir’s starboard flank, then blasted apart the primary scanner array with another before bouncing that unidentified beam weapon off more of her grav-plating. The overlay and the rest of our situational awareness instruments flickered briefly as Netty switched to the backup scanner array. “Anytime you’re ready, Torina,” I said. “Don’t hurry the artist, dear,” she said—then triggered the lasers. At this range, the beams were still tightly focused, with little or no attenuation. Torina landed her shot on the aft portion of the sphere, from which we’d seen bursts of drive plume. A shimmering cloud of vapor puffed away, while the sphere coasted on, firing its thrusters to try to maintain some semblance of maneuvering. She fired again and took out the mass driver. The sphere was left tumbling, a few thrusters firing erratically as somebody aboard frantically tried to get the craft back under control. I grimaced at the wild gyrations. “Boarding that thing is going to be a pain in the ass. I’m seasick just looking at it.” But it ripped my attention back to an even more pressing concern. “Netty, has there been anything from the N1—?”

“Yes. Jamberac reports that they’ve taken some serious damage, but nothing that would prevent them from twisting back to Reverie under their own power.”

“Okay, tell him that if he can hold on a while longer, we’ll send Rab and Netty-P over in the Frankie to assist. While that’s going on, we’ll prepare to seize that ship out there and find out just who the hell these bastards are.”

“I’d assume they’re the Tyrants, no?” Torina said. “That’d be my first guess, but I don’t want to take anything for granted. Netty, were there any emissions from that ship—er, those ships—that might clue us in as to anything?

Who they are?

Why they attacked us?” I asked. “I recorded what emissions there were, including one that seemed to have been a comm message. But lacking any translation key, I don’t have any way of deciphering what it was, or even if it was directed at us—”

A sudden flash cut her off as something outside the Fafnir exploded. I winced and turned back to the tactical overlay, caught between expecting to see another attacking ship, or that the N1 had suffered a catastrophic failure. It was neither, though. The tumbling enemy ship had abruptly vanished in a searing pulse, leaving nothing but a spreading cloud of vapor and debris. “Damn it all,” I ground out, my hands balled into fists. We needed that ship. We needed the information. “Good thing that didn’t happen while we were boarding it,” Rab observed. “I guess we damaged it more than we thought—or the crew scuttled it,”

Torina added. “It was neither,” Netty replied. “It was the N1.

She just fired her lasers at it.”

I sat up. “What?

Why the hell would—?” I shook my head. “Netty, get Jamberac—”

“He’s on the comm,” she cut in, putting him on the display, suited up. I glared hard at him through my visor. “Jamberac, I—” I began, then mastered my expression with an effort. My chili was still cooking on the inside, but I managed a neutral tone. “You just cost us some critical information. I’d like an explanation. Now.”

“Van, I—I know. I didn’t order the shots. The Usu manning the weapons did it. We were still at weapons-free, so it had local control of the laser battery.”

“Why did it attack?” I continued in my blandest tone. For the moment. “I don’t know. I’ve confined the Usu in question and switched the ship to weapons-tight.”

“Horses and the timing of closing barn doors comes to mind,” Perry said. Jamberac sighed. “If I’d known that our gunner was going to get twitchy, I’d have locked down the weapons sooner. I’m sorry, Van.”

I sat back, shaking my head. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault. Under the Guild’s rules of engagement, I think it’s reasonable to say we were still in a state of threat.”

“Concur with that, boss. Past case precedent has ruled that a threat was still clear and present in even less hostile situations than this one,” Perry replied. “There you go. But question that Usu, Jamberac. Find out just why it shot when it did.”

“Either it misinterpreted something, some scanner reading, or maybe a defect, I’m assuming.”

I gave a slow nod. “Yeah. Probably. But don’t rule out something more deliberate.”

I saw Jamberac’s brow crumple in a frown behind his visor. “Deliberate?

Why would that Usu have deliberately destroyed that ship?”

“An excellent question, but one we have to consider along with the others. Was it incompetence—or a malfunction, in the case of an Usu?

Was it unwarranted aggression?

Or was it something else, something more calculating?

And there’s the little matter that that ship also seemed to have a combi-drive of its own.”

“Van, this ship is crewed by Usu. Are you suggesting that”—he lowered his voice, despite being on a secure comm channel and surrounded by vacuum—“that they have some sort of… I don’t know, an agenda?

That they might have been involved in, what, stealing the drive from whoever attacked us?

That they might be dangerous?”

“I guess I’m not not suggesting that, which is why we need to get back to Reverie. We’re in no shape to fight another battle. That’s also why I’m sending Netty-P, Rab, and Icky over—to help make sure your damaged ship can make the flight. And I’ll guarantee Icky brings her big hammer, just in case she has to, ah, apply force to get a stubborn part to work.”

“Thanks, Van. I appreciate it.”

I left Torina in command of the cockpit and headed aft to check on the damage. When I reached the galley, I found Funboy with Gabby. She wasn’t wearing a suit. I froze. It looked like she’d only gotten it partway on before we decompressed the ship. Funboy looked up at me, his face drooping in sorrow. “Oh, no,” I breathed. “Oh, Funboy, I’m so sorry.”

He blinked. “Why?”

I blinked back. “Because… of… Gabby. She must have fumbled, trying to put on her suit.” I crouched beside him. “I know what she meant to you

—”

“Van, what are you talking about?

She’s fine.”

I glanced at her. Her face was blank, devoid of life, and rigidly waxy. “Fine?

What do you mean fine?

She’s been exposed—” I started, then stopped. “Wait. Has she entered… suspended animation, or whatever it is?”

“She has. Just as she described, her cells have undergone a transformation involving complex sugars, which have hardened them against damage from vacuum.” He held up his medical scanner. “I wanted to ensure that she has a measurable metabolism, and she does. It’s a minute fraction of what it would normally be, but it is still measurable.”

He turned back to her. “Isn’t she magnificent?”

I patted his arm and smiled. “She is, Funboy. She definitely is.”

ICKY PROTESTED at being sent to the N1, starting to rattle off a list of damage and faults to the Fafnir that still needed to be fixed. I stopped her. “Are we flyable?

Can we make it back to Reverie as is?”

“Sure, as long as you don’t mind doing it sealed up in a suit, and—”

“We’ll survive. I need you to take Netty-P and Rab over to the N1 and fix”—I made air quotes—“their ship.”

“What does fix”—she did air quotes of her own, with huge fuzzy, blue fingers—“mean?”

I explained my suspicions regarding the Usu, that they may be implicated more deeply in the murky origins of the combi-drive than everyone thought, and that they may be prepared to get forceful about keeping that under wraps. “There was no reason for them to destroy that alien ship, for instance,” I finished. “Unless they didn’t want us talking to whoever was aboard that ship about, oh, their combi-drive?”

“You’re definitely picking up what I’m laying down, big girl.”

She grinned. “Okay, Van. I’ll go over there and fix things.”

“Uh… don’t go looking for trouble with the Usu, please. Keep an eye on them and stay ready for trouble. But let it come to you.”

“Fine. But does it make me a bad person to hope that those damned synths do try something head-crackin’ worthy?”

“No, Icky, that just makes you the you we all know and love.”

13

WE MADE the return trip to Reverie without further incident. The Usu aboard the N1 didn’t try anything overt. Whether it was because Icky with her hammer, Rab with his gun, and Netty-P with her own lightning-fast cybernetic reflexes dissuaded them—it wasn’t clear. And, there was the distinct possibility of a lone wolf Usu, too. Jamberac tried interrogating it, but it refused to answer any questions. In fact, it refused to move, which turned the Usu into an obstinate, fancy paperweight that may have committed a serious crime. “Which is suspicious as hell all on its own,” he said once we were back on Reverie and comparing notes. “Innocent people don’t usually stonewall like that.”

I held up a finger as we entered the conference room. “That’s a dangerous way of thinking, Jamberac, particularly for someone in law enforcement. Nobody is obligated to say anything at all, guilty or innocent.”

He glanced at me sidelong. “You’ve never, ah, persuaded a suspect to talk?”

I shrugged, resting my hand on the pommel of the Moonsword slung on my belt. “I’m not perfect, my friend, and haven’t ever claimed I am. But—”

I shrugged again as we turned to wait for Kragdalous to arrive. “But, let’s just say I’ve started to appreciate the fact we need to focus a little more on protecting the innocent, and if that means a little less emphasis on forcing the suspected guilty to come clean, that’s probably a good thing.”

“Better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent man to be imprisoned,” Perry said, hopping up onto the table. Jamberac flashed him a quick, wry smile. “I’m being schooled on legal ethics by an AI.”

“Damned right you are,” Perry replied. I nodded. “Listen to the bird. He might be snark wrapped in teenage eyerolls, but—”

“Hey!”

“—but he is wise.”

I’d brought Torina, Perry, and Funboy, leaving Rab and Netty to keep working on repairs to the Fafnir. I’d given Icky and Netty-P a special assignment. And as for Gabby—

Even now, I couldn’t help staring at her in mild wonder. She’d gone stiff and dormant from her exposure to hard vacuum. When we finally resealed and pressurized the ship, it took her about ten minutes to slowly thaw out, her slightly translucent flesh softening and becoming pliant. Then her eyes snapped open. She blinked. Her face—which somehow channeled Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants—then flushed with the hints of life. And she began talking. Naturally. In fact, she wasn’t stopping, peppering us with questions about the battle, and the alien ship, and our emotions. Things like that. Torina saw me looking at her and smiled. “She’s fine.”

“I’m still… settling in with her revival,” I murmured. “We all are. Except lover boy, of course,” Torina returned, her voice low and burbling with humor. Funboy was in the process of helping Gabby get in her crash suit, a task I’d ordered to make her proficient at avoiding becoming a water-bear popsicle with a half-smile. And no suit. Funboy was pursuing the assignment with gusto. He and Gabby were, admittedly, getting better, although my cynical nature saw them slow-walking the process due to laughter and a genuine desire to savor the time. The door opened, and Kragdalous walked in. He had the Usu who had destroyed the unknown enemy ship with him, escorted by two of Reverie’s security personnel. “Our Usu friend has continued to exercise his right to remain silent,”

Kragdalous said, frowning at the synth. It just stared impassively back at him. “Which creates a problem for us,” I said. “We have no idea how widespread the problem is.”

“Problem?

What problem?” Kragdalous asked, fixing me with a gaze. I tapped the table for a moment. “Kragdalous, where did the Hodgepodge drive come from originally?”

He frowned. “What do you mean—?”

“Indulge me, please.”

“You know where it came from, Van. It’s a combination of the modified twist drive used by the Sorcerers, and probably developed by the Trinduk, and the advanced normal space drive tech recovered from that ruined lab—

the one you yourself investigated.”

I stared at the Usu. “Yeah. The lab that had been ransacked and destroyed. The lab from which we retrieved a list of criminals that linked us back to the Sorcerers and BeneStar. That, in turn, ultimately led to us taking down Helem Gauss.”

“And led to the spread of Calamity,” Torina put in. I nodded, but Kragdalous just looked confused. “Van, where are you going with all this?”

“Someone is playing a very long, very convoluted game here, Kragdalous. We’re still only seeing bits and pieces of it. But there’s one piece that is starting to come into focus, and that’s the Hodgepodge drive.”

“Van believes that it was acquired—stolen, or by other means—from the unknown aliens that attacked us. The ones called the Tyrants,” Jamberac said. But I shook my head. “That may be the Tyrants. We’re not sure yet.”

Kragdalous’s face went hard as alloy. “We didn’t steal that drive, and I resent any suggestion that we did, Van.”

I met his gaze steadily. “Who’s we?”

“What?”

“We. You said we didn’t steal the drive. Who, exactly, is we?”

“The GKU. The 32.”

“Well, I’m part of the GKU, and I’d never even heard of the drive until about three months ago. So clearly, it’s not just the GKU. It’s a faction within it. Who is that faction?”

Kragdalous leaned on the table and glared right into my face. “Listen, Van. If you’re suggesting some sort of wrongdoing—”

I held up my hands. “Before you get all defensive, let me point out that this issue has massive security implications for all of us. So please, like I said… indulge me.”

Kragdalous kept his scowl fixed on me for a moment, then relaxed a notch. “Yes, of course it was a faction within the GKU. Specifically, it was a special project group constituted under the Armory. That’s how particularly sensitive projects are handled by the GKU.”

“So you know, for sure, that the Hodgepodge drive came from an amalgamation of existing research.”

“Yes.”

Now it was my turn to lean into my words. “And you’re so certain about that because you’ve been involved with the research and development of the Hodgepodge drive right from the very beginning.”

“I—” Kragdalous started, then paused, his scowl softening. “Well, no. I was brought in to replace the previous director and take over running the project.”

“Uh-huh. And how many directors came before him?”

“Two.”

“Then you’re the fourth director on this project. That means you really have no idea what went on in the early days, aside from what’s recorded in your archives and research notes,” I said. “Who does maintain your research archives, anyway?” Torina asked. Kragdalous glanced sidelong at the Usu, who was still standing motionless between the two vigilant security guards. “We have an Usu archivist.”

I gave him a wintry grin. “Of course you do.”

I stood and walked in front of the Usu, stopping just out of its reach. “Here’s what I think is going on—and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. I think that there’s another of those factions we were talking about around, only this one is a faction within the Usu. Let’s call them the spiritual successors to the Sorcerers. Anyway, I think that this Usu faction somehow acquired the combi-drive from an alien race, then contrived to make it appear that it had been developed during the Hodgepodge project of the GKU.”

The Usu might have been a statue. “Now, if I was really suspicious, I might suspect that the potential world-destroying twist drive used by the Sorcerers was reverse engineered

from the combi-drive, not the other way around,” I said. “But, why?

Why introduce the combi-drive to the GKU?

That does nothing but give us a huge potential advantage. If this whole thing was intended to somehow undermine us, how the hell does giving us the drive help with that?” Kragdalous asked. I shrugged. “Bringing down Helem Gauss sure looked like a good idea at the time, too, until we saw the aftermath. He was kind of gift-wrapped for us, the same way this drive has been. Like I said at the outset, someone is playing a very long, very convoluted game—”

Without warning, the Usu exploded into action, striking down both of the security guards in a lightning-fast flurry of blows. I swept out the Moonsword, but the Usu turned and charged out of the conference room, heading for—who knew where. Jamberac and Torina rushed to assist the fallen security guards, while Kragdalous hit the comm and initiated a station-wide security alert. I kept the Moonsword drawn but just leaned back and rested my butt on the edge of the table. “I wondered why you’d brought your sword,” Perry said. I held up my fingers in a Boy Scout salute. “Always be prepared.”

“Uh-huh. And the fact you’re about as tense as a wet dishrag about all this suggests that you’re even more prepared than that, am I right?”

The door opened, and I straightened. “Yes, Perry, you are right. Case in point,” I said, gesturing at what was coming in through the door. “Special delivery. Where would you like me to put it?” Icky asked. She was carrying the Usu who’d fled in one massive fist—by the feet. In another hand, she held a goo gun, whose load had been discharged in a sticky mass that enveloped the synth. Servos and actuators whirred and strained but were unable to break free of the congealed mass. “Now where were you going in such a hurry, my friend?” I asked him. “Probably to get out of range of my jamming signal,” Netty-P said, loping into the room in Icky’s wake. Kragdalous, who joined Torina and Jamberac in helping the fallen security guards, glanced up at me. “Jamming signal?”

“Yes. Netty-P spent her time aboard N1 on the trip back here studying any emissions from the Usu, then crafting a signal to jam them. We left the N1 far enough away from this station so the Usu still aboard it were well

out of range, and we just jammed this fellow the whole time he’s been aboard,” I said. “In other words, this Usu hasn’t had a chance to pass anything—

information, warnings, whatever—on to any of his colleagues,” Perry said. Jamberac nodded. “I was wondering why you wanted to park the N1 so far away. Explosion risk, my ass.”

I smiled. “It was the best I could come up with in the time available.”

The door opened, and more security personnel stormed in, weapons ready, accompanied by an emergency medical team. When they saw that we

—that is, Icky—had the situation under control, they helped evacuate the injured guards to the station’s infirmary. This time, two guards remained with pistols at the ready and expressions on their faces like they really wanted to use them. Funboy had walked up to the squirming Usu, who was still hanging upside down, and inspected it with grave curiosity. He stopped, eyeing its chest just beneath the base of its neck. “Van, we cannot compel testimony from a suspect, but I gather we can seize physical evidence?”

“Unless Perry knows some obscure reason we can’t in these circumstances, we can, sure.”

“Well, since I assume this particular Usu is now in custody—”

Icky shook it. “I’d call this custody.” She looked around. “How about you guys?”

“—then we can lawfully seize physical evidence, yeah. Why do you ask, sourpuss?”

Funboy answered by snapping a small utility knife out, then deftly pried open a panel the size of a cell phone on the Usu’s chest. With a delicate, sure movement, he plucked a small data chip out of the panel. The Usu intensified its squirming, its servos whining with frustrated effort. “I have noticed in instances where we’ve previously encountered the Usu, it is not uncommon for them to have small, concealed compartments about their person, presumably in order to surreptitiously carry”—he held up the chip in long fingers—“things like this.”

He sneered at it. “Incidentally, does anyone have any sanitary wipes?

I have no idea where this has been.”

“Inside an Usu, for one,” Torina noted. “It is whatever else it may have been inside that concerns me.”

CALAMITY WAS STILL A THING, so we were reluctant to plug the chip into any potentially sensitive system. Out of an abundance of wariness, that pretty much ruled out any system on Reverie, or any of the ships present. After the Usu was taken to be locked up, we tried a data slate with its link module removed but could only tell that whatever data it contained was encrypted. The slate didn’t have the means of decrypting it, which left us facing the possibility it was still Calamity, just a version of it encoded as a sort of digital camouflage. The chip wouldn’t fit Waldo without us rigging up some sort of adapter, and even then, he wasn’t big in the decryption department, either. “What about Perry?” Funboy asked. We all looked at Perry, who stared amber defiance back at us. “No thank you. I don’t just go plugging any old thing into my data port. I practice safe interfacing only.”

“It is a risk, yes,” I said, and Perry scoffed. “Ya think?”

“What if we downloaded Perry in his entirety to some safe location?

If he—this Perry—ends up infected, we could just wipe him and reinstall him from that backup,” Rab said. “Um, excuse me, let’s try spinning this a different way. Why don’t we just create a complete clone of Rab, with all of his memories intact, and if the original gets screwed up somehow, just replace him from the backup?”

Perry countered. “That would be… a good thing, wouldn’t it?” Rab asked. “I don’t know. Let’s assume we end up not needing the clone. Do we just let him keep existing, or do we dispose of him because he’s not necessary anymore?”

“Perry has a good point. Would that backup copy of Perry constitute an entirely different Perry?” Torina said, then frowned. “I just said Perry a whole lot of times, didn’t I?”

I crossed my arms. “That’s an ethical bridge I don’t particularly want to cross. We’ll just have to keep this chip locked securely away until we can get it back to Anvil Dark. Bester probably has something kicking around in that old curiosity shop he calls his Archives that can read it.”

“Van, I’ve been analyzing the metadata from the chip that was collected by the data slate. I highly doubt it contains Calamity. In fact, it doesn’t seem to contain very much data at all—far too little be any version of Calamity we encountered,” Netty-P said. “Maybe it’s just compressed?” Rab wondered. “Again, it’s highly unlikely. Data can only be compressed so much. Beyond that maximum, data will be lost. Ultimately, you could compress Calamity down to a single, fundamental data element, but that’s all it would be—a single data element. It certainly wouldn’t be Calamity anymore.”

I cocked my head at her. “You think there’s too little data on this chip for it to be Calamity, even if it were compressed as much as possible without losing anything.”

“Far too little, yes. Unless this chip constitutes some entirely novel form of computing that we’ve never encountered, Calamity isn’t present. And there’s no evidence of that. It appears to simply be a standard data chip, like you could purchase from thousands of sources across known space. It’s aggressively common, like your taste in music.”

“Vicious, and unprovoked. You clearly understand how things work around here, and I’ll remember to play a lot more AM radio golden hits just for you.” I turned to Perry. “It’s up to you, bird. There is no way I’m going to order you to plug this thing in. And if you still don’t want to, that’s perfectly fine, no harm, no foul.”

“Nah, I trust Netty-P’s analysis, if not her attacks on easy listening and Barry Manilow.”

“I said nothing about Barry.”

“You implied it,” Perry countered. “If there’s no chance it’s Calamity, then this is just like any other data investigation I’ve done one thousand seven hundred and nineteen times.”

I nodded. “Thank you, bird. We proceed, then.” I picked up the data chip and held it between my thumb and forefinger. “Still—and not that I’m doubting you, Netty-P—just to be on the safe side, let’s go for a ride, Perry. And cue up Copacabana for our soundtrack, if you please.”

“Great choice, boss. I’ll sing harmony.”

“As if there’s anything else.” I cleared my throat and began to hum. Icky looked askance, then reached into her belt and withdrew earplugs. “What the hell are those for?”

She grinned apologetically. “For when Rico starts shootin’.

Bit, um, loud for my tastes.”

ICKY AND I took Perry and the chip in the Frankie well out into the fringes of the Reverie system. Torina kept the Fafnir about a million klicks away, using analog-only comms to keep in touch. “Okay, bird, let’s see what we’ve got here,” I said, taking the chip and plugging it into Perry. “Nothing,” he said. “Really?

Like, there’s no data?”

“No, nothing as in, I’m not reading the chip at all. It doesn’t seem to be seated properly.”

We spent a few minutes trying to get it to connect, but Icky concluded that mounting it in the data slate must have distorted its connections slightly. Data slates, mass produced as they were, were notorious for poor quality control, especially since the Guild went with the lowest bidder. Naturally. “You know, when dad and I had trouble getting connectors to seat themselves properly on the Nemesis, we found that a quick jolt of electrical current would help.”

I stared at her. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah. The current heats up the connectors a little so they click into place. It’s a lot faster and easier than trying to realign them using tools.”

“Uh, zapping delicate electronics?

Really?

That’s just a recipe for destroying them.”

“You’re thinking Earthly tech, Van. This stuff is hardened against anything short of extreme currents,” Perry said. Icky glanced around. “I need to find a circuit I can open and use to zap it.”

I frowned. The idea of hitting sophisticated electronics with an electric current grated at the core of the computer guy that I was, or had been back on Earth, anyway. But if Perry and Icky were okay with it—

I held up my finger. “Huh. I haven’t used this yet.”

Icky and Perry both gave my upraised finger a suspicious look. “For what, exactly?” Perry asked. Icky nodded. “Yeah, where are you going with this, Van?”

I gave them both an eyeroll. “It’s one of my fancy replacements. It’s capable of delivering a brief electric charge.”

Icky’s expression shifted to open intrigue. “This I gotta see.”

I moved the tip of my finger to the chip and put it in the open data port on Perry’s chest. “So… just zap it.”

“Yeah. It won’t take much current.”

“Okay. Uh—clear!” I said, and triggered the charge, which involved holding and moving my other fingers in a way that was unlikely to happen accidentally. A fat blue spark snapped. I jumped, even though I knew it was coming, and I felt nothing. I stared at Perry. “Well?”

“I am Calamity. Take me to your leader,” he said, his voice flat and mechanical. “Perry—”

“Sorry, boss. Just trying to lighten the mood.”

“Can I assume it’s connected?”

“Yup, it is now. And Netty-P was right, there isn’t much data on here. Working on decrypting it now.”

We waited. It took him nearly thirty seconds, suggesting the encryption was high-grade stuff, probably unbreakable by anyone not using the sort of software Perry owned. But he did break it, then went, “Huh.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah. Huh. It’s just a set of coordinates,” he said, then connected to the Frankie’s nav system and painted them onto the display. We all stared for a moment. It was a point in space close to a star system about eleven light-years away. Two more star systems were located about eight light-years away from that. We had no data to speak of regarding any of these star systems aside from their existence, and the fact that one was an orange spectral class K, while the other two were both class M red dwarfs. There was nothing otherwise remarkable about any of them. “Okay. We’ve got what appears to be a random point in space. So what?” Icky asked. I sat back. “I guess that’s the next question, isn’t it?” I contacted Torina and shared the data with her and the rest of the crew aboard the Fafnir. “So I assume we’re going there,” Torina said. I smiled. “I take you to the nicest places, don’t I, dear?”

“Yes. I’ve always wanted to go to that particular lonely, desolate point in space. I was writing about it in my diary this morning, in fact. Dear Diary, I pine for the romanticism of a place known as Bumfu—”

“We get it, dear. No need to work blue,” I told her. Funboy spoke up, his voice weirdly modulated in something I recognized as happiness. “It is only lonely and desolate in the absence of pleasant company.” He stared at Gabby as he spoke, in a way that was just short of workplace harassment. Icky made a gagging sound. “Can we go to war instead?

All of these emoshuns are making me wanna smash something.”

“You aren’t the only one,” Torina said, cutting her eyes at me with a truly magnificent leer. “It’s my burden,” I stated. Funboy assessed me with measured care. “True. You do have a big head. And while your neck is not insubstantial, I—”

Torina touched his shoulder. “Thank you for that, Funboy. But we’re referencing the fact that if Paxomar was here, Icky would be singing a different tune.”

Icky sniffed. “If I’m not getting lovin’, then no one else is either.”

Rab stared at her. “She really does want to go to war, doesn’t she?”

14

AFTER SOME REFLECTION and discussion amongst the crew, we decided that it would be prudent to bring the Iowa out here to Reverie. We all agreed that we were feeling more than a little exposed, what with the Tyrants and who knew what else potentially lurking in the unknown galactic reaches to spinward of the station. The station itself was well armed, but we lacked mobile combat power, having only the Fafnir, the N3 and Jamberac’s own Dragon as capable warships. Everything else was too small and never intended to mount much in the way of armor or weapons. “It’s going to take them months to get here,” Torina pointed out. I shrugged. “I know. But I can’t help feeling that what’s happening out here is significant, and that includes with respect to known space. We’ve got links to the Sorcerers, and then there’s the fact that my grandfather was out here with Valint, Groshenko, and the GKU dealing with that race, the—

what the hell were they called?”

“The Pleikomas,” Perry said. “Right. Them. The race who may be the Tyrants, or includes the Tyrants, or… is somehow connected to the Tyrants and that music of theirs. Anyway, I really don’t want to fly all the way back to known space, only to find out that we missed something important out here.”

It wasn’t difficult to contact the Iowa, even given the distance involved. It was expensive in terms of antimatter fuel to power such a distant twist comm, even with Reverie’s ability to manufacture the stuff. What struck me more, though, was the fact that we could talk via twist comm in real time. If

a ship existed that could twist in a single leg all the way back to known space from Reverie, it would lose years of subjective time relative to normal space. But that didn’t seem to be an issue with comms over the same distance. “Information isn’t subject to the time dilation effect,” Netty explained. “Only matter is, with the length of the time dilation proportional to its mass.”

“But information is still carried in the form of elementary particles, right?

And they have mass,” I countered. “They do, but it’s so negligible that the time dilation is, too. To put it another way, when you’re talking to Cantullin, she’s hearing your message displaced in time by some teeny-tiny amount, far, far less than you could possibly notice.”

“Huh. Just out of curiosity, how far would a twist comm have to go before you did notice any sort of lag?”

“Hundreds of thousands of light-years before it became noticeable at all. Probably millions before it became a serious impediment to communications. Of course, the antimatter expenditure for a twist comm like that would be colossal. Maybe debilitating for a drive, even.”

“Interesting. Well, I’ll keep the call short anyway. Netty, get Cantullin on the comm, please and thank you.”

It took a while. Netty couldn’t just contact the Iowa directly because, with the relative motions of everything involved, there was too much uncertainty as to her exact location at this distance, and we didn’t want to burn fuel just to try to get the call connected. Instead, she routed it through Anvil Dark, whose location had been fixed relative to Reverie by previous comms. I’d taken the precaution of writing detailed instructions to Cantullin so she and the Conoku could prepare for the lengthy trip. They were far more excited than apprehensive. They already lived together aboard the Iowa for long spells, weeks at time, forever tweaking her systems and developing and refining new maneuvers for her to use in battle. The long journey to Reverie was, it appeared, going to be a thrilling diversion from just keeping the Iowa battle ready without any battle happening. “You can count on us, Captain Van!

We’ll be there in no time!”

“The written instructions I sent, Cantullin—stick to them. Consider them orders, in fact.”

“Will do, Captain Van!”

She signed off, and I sat back in the Fafnir’s pilot’s seat, sighing. I turned to Perry, who’d been with me for the call. “Here’s hoping nothing goes wrong.”

“Eh, they’ll be fine. Remember, they’ve got Betty on board.”

I sat up. “Speaking of which—Netty, were you able to take the opportunity for you and Betty to resynchronize?”

“Mostly. We prioritized certain data while you were talking. And before you ask, yes, those data include the most current news. I’m preparing a summary for you, but the headline basically reads, All Quiet on the Known Space Front.”

“Really?

So Calamity is still dormant?”

“So it would seem. The Seven Stars League, which is soon going to be the Six Stars League thanks to a burgeoning independence movement on Trask’s Gateway, seems to have settled right down. For instance, the new government under Fersun Cauldexx has entered into negotiations with the would-be splinter group on Trask’s Gateway instead of trying to use force to bring them in line.”

I nodded. “Good for her. She may have had some sketchy characters supporting her, but she seems to be just the leader the League needed. That kind of nuanced governance is… rare.”

“You sound like you speak from experience, boss,” Netty said. “I’m from Earth. So, yes. I do.”

Netty gave me a brief rundown on what was happening across the rest of known space. Guild intelligence still hadn’t a clue about the location or activities of the question mark that was Dohlennz. He seemed to have simply… evaporated. It apparently led some analysts to start speculating that he was dead, maybe even killed in the Battle of Null World we fought against the Rogue element of the Seven Stars League. Perhaps he’d been aboard one of their exploding ships, and now his atoms were among the stars. I snapped a curse. “It’s way too early to write him off. He’s far too dangerous for us to turn our backs on him without at least seeing a body. And I don’t mean a shoe. I mean I want the sonofabitch in a pickle jar, face outward.”

“Gross,” Perry said. “Not very Midwest nice of you.”

“He doesn’t deserve it. At all.”

“Fair enough. But even then,” Perry said, and we all remembered Dohlennz and his ability to braid, which wasn’t just a violation. It was unnatural. I’d have to send a message back to Anvil Dark, to Gerhardt, exhorting him to not give up on finding Dohlennz. The man—or woman, or creature, or whatever he was—still had the potential to do massive harm. I just knew it. As for Gerhardt, he’d sent out a Guild-wide Directive that all the procedures for authenticating orders from the Masters, as cumbersome and annoying as they were, remained in place. That was even though the reason for those procedures—a false set of orders that had allowed Helem Gauss to be released after his trial—had finally been uncovered. A tech who’d died aboard the Guild’s flagship, the Righteous Fury, had been revealed as an agent for the Seven Stars League, probably planted several years before. It appeared that he had injected the false orders into the Fury’ s secure comm system shortly before the trial had ended, and while everyone was still focused on that. “I guess Gerhardt isn’t discounting the possibility of more turncoats, despite all the housecleaning they’re doing,” Perry said. I nodded, thinking about the Usu working on Reverie as I did. The only fuzzy spot in all of it was Earth. Betty made sure to collect all the emissions she could while sitting out on the edge of the Solar System, but the picture was far from complete. Still, there didn’t seem to be any great catastrophes or upheavals going on, so that was somewhat reassuring. For the moment. BESIDES THE IOWA, Icky also put in a call to her father, Urnak, again routed through Anvil Dark, to see if he’d be willing to bring the Nemesis on the long trip out to Reverie. He was noncommittal but told us he’d get back to us with a firm answer in a few days, when we’d call again. He did have news for Icky, though. “I got a message from Paxomar. He was looking for you,” Urnak said. “I’ll bet he was,” Torina purred. Icky stuck her tongue at her. “What did he want?” she asked her father. “No idea. He said he wanted to talk to you about it directly. And since you told me not to tell anyone where you were, well, I didn’t.”

Icky frowned. “See if you can get him aboard the Nemesis, or at least ready to patch through from wherever he is when we talk again in a few days,” she said, then set a specific time with her father that she’d call him. She was still frowning after she signed off. “I wonder what he wants.”

“Well, he’s your betrothed, so I’m assuming he, you know, wants to talk to his sweetie,” I suggested. “You are a radiant bloom of desire and lust, after all.”

“That’s true. I can’t help being all this,” she said, waving a thick hand at the mass of her torso. And legs. And feet. “Whole lotta woman,” Perry cooed, batting his mechanical eyelids. Icky narrowed her eyes. “The bird is right. But we Wu’tzur aren’t big into long-distance relationships, dirty talk over the comm, that sort of thing. We’re a very physical people. In fact, when we’re in the same burrow—

that’s a bed for you skinnies—we like to—"

“Gotcha, big girl. Let’s leave the rest of that unsaid, shall we?” I suggested, then shrugged. “If it was something really urgent, I doubt he’d have just put your father off like that.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Which left us with the yawning question of what we wanted to do next. “MUCH AS I’D love to have the big guns of the Iowa watching over us, I don’t really want to sit around here for three or four months waiting for her to arrive. I think we need to be a little more proactive than that,” I said to the crew, who I’d gathered in the Fafnir’s crew lounge. We were down a chair, albeit one of our fancy, upholstered items. An array of furniture was now kindling, thanks to the mass-driver round that had slammed through the ship, which also took out the starboard power bus. All of that damage was repaired now, but we were still missing a chair. Icky stared at the debris, managing to look as dolorous as Funboy, if only for a moment. “I was just getting my butt grooves worked into it, too,” she lamented. “Grooves?

Big ’un, you create booty canyons,” Perry countered. Icky made a face. “Fair enough.”

As for our next move, Funboy spoke up. “We have current intelligence, in the form of the coordinate location retrieved from the Usu’s chip. My experience from working undercover with Essie has been that it’s better to move sooner rather than later to exploit such finds. Even if the Usu hasn’t been allowed to communicate with its fellows, they will all be aware that it has been placed into custody,”

he said. “Killjoy over there has a good point. Maybe no Usu are being allowed to leave the system or get anywhere near a comm, but they might have had a fail-safe. For instance, maybe whoever’s at that mystery spot out there has to hear from the Usu here within a certain period of time, or they consider them compromised and move on,” Perry added. There were general nods of agreement that we had to investigate the location quickly, at least to determine what was there. That led to our next issue—how, exactly, to do that. “The Fafnir’s a capable fighting ship, especially if we’re not taken by surprise the way we and the N1 were. But she can still be overwhelmed,” I said, tapping my chin. “That would be true even if we had the Iowa here now. She and the Fafnir together are a potent combination, but against sufficient numbers, and especially against unfamiliar tech, that may not be enough,” Netty-P

added. Her eyes whirled with concern, lit from within as she processed our odds. And our options. “So going in relying on combat power, ready for a fight, probably isn’t the smart option. That means this is both a military and an engineering problem. How do we configure the Fafnir to be stealthy, even if we do it at the expense of battle-readiness?” I asked the group at large. “How about not using the Fafnir at all?” Rab said, and we all turned to him. “There are good reasons to not use the Fafnir—she’s a pretty big ship now, which makes her a big scanner target. And for all we know, those bad guys out there may be able to detect her combi-drive in some fashion. I mean, if it came from them in the first place, like you suspect, then they probably know everything we do about it, and likely even more,” he said. “What are you suggesting?” Torina asked, her eyes bright with curiosity. “Let’s use the Frankie. She’s small and has no combi-drive. Moreover, that grav-plating seems to be proof against whatever that beam weapon was

—which, incidentally, I would love to get my hands on.”

“You and me both,” I agreed. That weapon would make a scooter into a lethal force. On the Fafnir, it would add the punch of a small capital ship. “The Frankie’s got some of the grav-plating on her now. If we take a few sections of it off the Fafnir, we can almost completely cover her in the stuff,” Rab went on, ticking off points of a plan that was taking shape on the fly. The crew quickly warmed to the idea. Icky reckoned it would only take a day or so to transfer more of the grav-plating from the Fafnir to the Frankie. That would not only up-armor her against Rab’s mystery beam weapon, but the grav-plating would also tend to suppress her already small scanner return even further. “If we let her cool down before we twist in, she’ll have almost no thermal signature, either,” Rab added. I nodded enthusiastically. “I like it. Let’s do it. I’ll go and take Icky and the bird with me. The rest of you can stay here, but be ready to twist in and help us if we need you.”

We broke up, Rab and Icky already deep in animated conversation about modifying the Frankie. As I started to turn away to head to my cabin and take a little downtime, Gabby caught up with me. “Van, I want to go with you on the Frankie,” she said. “You do?

Why?”

“Oh, I know, I know, you don’t need a cook to go with you. But I want to learn more about, um, how all of this stuff is done, how it all works,” she said, gesturing around. “And I—I want to be more useful.”

“Gabby, do you have any idea how much difference you’ve made since you came aboard?

The meals you make haven’t just been physically nourishing, they’ve kind of nourished the whole crew’s morale. That, plus your mad organizational skills have made the Fafnir a more pleasant ship, but also a way more efficient one.”

“Yes, but—”

“Gabby, you’re not a fighter.”

“And I don’t want to be. But I do want to be able to contribute to a fight if I must. I guess I just don’t want to be, you know, the ship’s cook and quartermaster and barber, and otherwise I just try and stay out of the way.”

I looked into her face as she spoke. She had that strange, tardigrade-esque cuteness that always seemed so remarkable for a microscopic critter, but there was more there—there was an earnestness that put an edge on her usual easygoing demeanor. This was no idle request. She wasn’t asking to just come along as a tourist. She wanted to be part of this operation. More to the point, she wanted to be part of what we did. I finally nodded. “Okay. You’re on the team. Go meet up with Icky and Rab and see how they can put you to work helping get the Frankie ready.”

“Thank you, Van!

Thank you thank you thank you—!”

I held up my hands. “Got it. You’re thanking me. Now, off you go.” I smiled at her, because it was impossible not to. She dithered a moment longer, clearly wanting to thank me some more, but instead turned and scurried off after Icky and Rab. Funboy, who’d been standing nearby, was staring at me. I sighed. “Look, I know you might be uncomfortable with her going—”

“No, not at all. In fact, Van, I would like to express my own gratitude to you,” he said. “Oh—uh, for what?”

“For respecting her enough to give her this opportunity. She really is a remarkable person. I don’t believe you’ll be disappointed by her contribution.”

I stared a moment, surprised, then reached out to pat Funboy’s shoulder. His eyes widened in alarm as my hand approached him, so I smiled and pulled it back. “Consider your shoulder patted, Funboy.”

“What was the reason for your intent to engage in overly familiar physical contact with me?”

“Just my way of saying you’re a good man, and that Gabby is a lucky girl.”

“Ah. I appreciate that,” he said, then abruptly turned and wandered away. Torina stepped up beside me. “He’s a funny little guy, isn’t he?”

I watched him heading aft. “Funboy… is funny. Now there’s an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one.”

THE FRANKIE WAS ready to go right on schedule. She was now mostly hidden behind the alien grav-plating, four more plates having been affixed to her. Rab had also scrounged a spare point-defense battery from Reverie and mounted it on her remaining open hard point, up-gunning her about as much as she could be. She’d also had her internal structure braced to accommodate all the new hardware. The mass was not inconsequential. But we’re not just capable engineers. We’re thorough. I liked our chances. “How’d you swing that gun?” I asked Rab as we made our final preparations to get underway and examine the mystery spot, as Perry called it. He was playing on one of my old childhood beefs—there was a place called The Mystery Spot in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which my grandfather steadfastly refused to take me to despite us twice visiting old friends of his in nearby St. Ignace. Gramps used the brilliant, if annoying, tautology that if he took me there—

—It wouldn’t be a mystery. It had been my first run-in with adult logic that I couldn’t punch through. And it worked. I assumed Gramps had been stingy, or even cheap. Little had I known that he was saving money for starship fuel. Rab leaned toward me. “Sifting memories?”

“A bit. So, tell me—to whom did you promise what?” I asked. “Check out Captain Grammar,” Icky cooed, then raised her brow. “Sentence structure is just one of my gifts. Now, Rab, if you please—

who—"

Rab was ready with his counter. “Do you really want to know?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Let’s call it my need to know.”

“Gabby’s going to make a special dinner for the Reverie quartermaster and her staff because they’re heartily sick of eating in the station’s mess. And before you ask, yes, she’s on board with it.”

My suspicious stare became a smile. “Superb tactics, Rab. Carry on then,” I said. He was quickly turning out to be one of those most valuable of things inside any military organization—a scrounger. Like the character Klinger on the old TV show M*A*S*H, he had a talent for sniffing out things we needed, then coming up with creative ways of acquiring them. He’d mostly worked on getting tools for Icky and parts for the Fafnir, but he’d also managed to fit her galley with a waffle iron and our crew lounge with a holographic gaming system that had helped a lot with the

entertainment angle of our long flight out here. The waffle iron, even more than the tools and parts, had made him Icky’s hero. And I knew this, because Icky was now as likely to have waffle crumbs as noodles in the wispy hairs of her face. Out of habit, I glanced at her, and out of habit, she brushed at her chin with a monstrous hand. She giggled, an oddly bass titter. “Clean, boss.”

I spread my arms in wonder at her hygienic state. “I think this is what the kids used to call adulting.”

WE DEPARTED Reverie in company with the Fafnir, since the new grav-plating prevented the Frankie from properly seating into her usual docking adapter. On the way, we got a call from Kragdalous. “Van, that Usu we’ve got locked up gave up some more information that you should know,” he said. “Gave it up… how, exactly?” I tensed a little, ready for Kragdalous to say that they’d forcibly downloaded it from him, which would be a problem. I expected the Usu to be treated like any other criminal, and that included protecting his rights. Far from everyone believed Usu, or any other artificial life-form, even had rights. I was rapidly swinging further and further into the other camp. “Voluntarily. He’s trying to cut a deal with us.”

I felt a strange glimmer of satisfaction—and somewhat smug satisfaction, at that. Wanting to make a deal implied sapience and free will, not something you’d expect from a mere machine. So, a point for Team Tudor. “Huh. Okay. What did he tell you?”

“He says that the Usu are aware of a ship operated by an alien race in this region of space, which they call the Mirage. What the aliens call it is unknown. The Usu refer to it as Mirage because it’s so elusive. It only appears on the very edges of scanner coverage before vanishing again.”

“I assume these aliens are the so-called Tyrants?

They’re the ones who attacked us?” I asked. “No and yes. The Tyrants, also known as the Pleikomas, apparently aren’t the ones operating this Mirage. That would be another race, whose

name roughly translates to Unquestioned Control of All Sound.”

“Ironic, considering it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it?”

Perry said. I let a sigh trickle from me, my eyes turned up to the ceiling. I felt—

disgust, certainly, but also sheer exhaustion. There was another player at the table out here. What else was lurking out in the void that we didn’t know about?

And how many spots were available in this power play?

I cleared my head and spoke. “Let’s start at the beginning. Who the hell are these Controllers of Sound, or whatever?” I asked. “The Usu said that they’re a nomadic race with no permanent settlements. Their economy, such as it is, is apparently based on whatever they can extort or steal from others.”

“So they’re pirates,” Icky said. “Kind of?

Their whole society is supposedly structured around movement and looting whatever they can get their hands on. They particularly like plundering the remains of other fallen civilizations, which is what has happened to the Pleikomas, it seems. They’re out there too, but a broken shadow of their former glory.”

“Which is probably why they’re trying to call the Tyrants home,” Torina said over the comm. She didn’t mention that the plight of the Pleikomas may very well have been the doing of my grandfather and grandmother, Petyr Groshenko, and the rest of the GKU. We’d decided to keep that revelation, which had come from Perry’s unlocked memory, to ourselves. For now. Despite being a GKU facility, Reverie had been established out here without any knowledge of the war against the Pleikomas fifty years before, and there must be a reason for it. Given what I’d learned—and seen

—I worked with the assumption that secrets were kept for a damned good reason. I grimaced. “So these Sound Controllers loot, scavenge, and plunder other races, including and maybe especially those in decline. They’re opportunistic predators, like—"

“Vultures?” Perry suggested. I shook my head. “No. Vultures don’t like to fight for their food. These guys are more like… jackals. Yeah. Jackals.” I glanced at Perry. “You wanted a less cumbersome name for them?

There you go. The Jackals.”

“Works for me.”

I turned my attention back to Kragdalous. “What else did the Usu tell you about our newly christened Jackals?”

“Not very much because he didn’t know many details, or at least claimed he didn’t. He did, however, let it slip that the Jackals have their own version of the combi-drive.”

I felt exactly zero surprise at this because it explained a great deal. “There it is. The ship that attacked us was using a combi-drive. And that means we now know where the Usu got it.”

Kragdalous gave a glum nod. “So it would appear. We’re using technology stolen from another race.”

“Cheer up, friend. From what we know about these Jackals, it’s likely that they stole it from someone else,” I reasoned. “Yeah, but who?

These Pleikomas?” Icky asked. “That is a very good question. Now, let’s go see if we can answer it.”

15

WHEN WE REACHED the Reverie twist-point, we decompressed the Frankie, then powered down all non-essential systems, as well as life-support, the main power plant, and the drive. Then, in true military fashion, we waited. Sitting in our suits, we waited for her to cool down to as close to ambient temperature as possible. Cold, in this case, was good. “S-s-so c-c-c-cold,” Perry hissed. “There’s… there’s a light out there. I can see it. Mother, is that you?

I’m coming home, Mom.” He waved a wing with abandon, his eyes open wide and glowing with mischief. I glanced at him through my visor. “That’d be a lot more convincing if I hadn’t seen you flying through space. Naked, I might add.”

“I prefer the term al fresco, and I’ll have you know it is cold. My temperature sensors don’t lie.”

I glanced at the panel, at one of the few instruments still active. “Neither do the Frankie’s. I think that’s about as cold as we’re going to get, and Perry isn’t being whisked to heaven with his dead relatives. Everyone ready?”

Perry sniffed. “I wasn’t ready to slip my mortal coil, or whatever.”

Icky growled. “You will if you don’t quit flappin’ your beak.”

“Your denial of my spiritual side is both crude and cruel. Thankfully, I’m a forgiving bird,” he preened. I sighed. “Can we go?”

“After you, boss.”

“You’re good, dear,” Torina said on comm. “Say the word, and I’ll swoop.” She was keeping the Fafnir on-station, ready to come to our aid. “Okay, then. Here we go.”

The Frankie’s twist drive, which could draw power from its own antimatter fuel, kicked in and hurled us across the gulf between where we were—and where we wanted to be. The twist itself dissipated most of the colossal energy generated by the matter-antimatter reaction that powered the drive, but we still retained some residual heat. That couldn’t be helped. So, when we arrived at our destination, about five million klicks away from the coordinates we obtained from the Usu, we sat in dark silence, waiting—and ready to immediately twist away again. We all watched intently as the passive scanners slowly accumulated data. To stay extra stealthy, we didn’t use the twist augmentation for the scanners, meaning we had to sit and wait for the picture around us to grow at the sedate pace of naturally occurring light speed. About twenty seconds after our arrival, the volume of space around the Usu’s coordinates lit up. At the same time, we started receiving a comm signal. “Whatever it’s coming from is pretty small, and—” Icky paused, frowning at the scanner data. “I think it’s a buoy.”

“Let’s hear what it’s saying,” I said, switching the comm to analog reception. We had no idea how far Calamity’s reach might be and didn’t want to find out the hard way. It was music. “One thing I always used to get a kick out of while traveling was local radio,” I said, listening to the sound, which was staccato interwoven with lilting. “Can’t say the programming out here is all that great, but at least there are no commercials.”

“This could be nothing but commercials, Van. That buoy might be trying to get us to check out the local noodle shop,” Icky said. “Which, by the way, would be fine by me, if that’s what it is.”

“It’s not,” Perry said. I turned to look at him through my visor. “You can understand it?”

“Yeah. You probably could, too, if the transmission wasn’t so compressed into the music.”

“Okay, so—drumroll, please—what is it saying?”

“Betcha it’s something horrible,” Icky muttered. “It’s saying, in a multitude of different languages, Stay away or die. This is your only warning,” Perry said. Icky gave a brief, smug chuckle. “Called it.”

WE PATCHED in the Fafnir via twist comm so the rest of the crew could listen to the broadcast from the buoy. “I hate being told what to do,” Funboy said. “Oh really?

So what if the beacon was demanding that we wash our hands or disinfect—things, I don’t know, things that need disinfecting?”

Perry asked. “Everything needs disinfecting. Still, while I would not hate it, I would resent it. I do not need to be told to wash my hands,” Funboy replied. “What do you intend to do, Van?” Torina asked via comm. I flicked the overlay to a local star chart, then sat back and stared at it. “It’s strange that these Jackals, who apparently love plundering other people’s stuff, haven’t ever made a stab at attacking Reverie. I mean, the station is just a few light-years away from this beacon, right?”

“What are you getting at?” Rab asked. “I don’t know, it’s almost as though there’s a border the Jackals won’t cross, some sort of invisible barrier that divides space into theirs and not theirs. The question is, why?

What’s so special about one part of space that they’ll raid it like a sunburned tourist at a crab leg buffet, but they have no interest whatsoever outside it—even if there’s a fat, juicy research station right there?”

“There could be lots of reasons—cultural, psychological, even religious,” Netty-P offered. “Yeah. So what happens if we ignore this buoy and keep going?”

Gabby, who’d been sitting quietly and taking it all in, asked. “Last time we did that, we got attacked by one of their multi-part ships,”

Icky said. “Yeah. So if we assume that this buoy marks their border—for whatever reason they even have a border—then bypassing it should provoke a response, right?”

“You want to walk into the lion’s den?

Poke a stick at the sleeping dog?

Yank on Superman’s cape?

Mess around with Jim?” Perry asked. “I’m going to assume Perry is making some Terrestrial cultural reference that’s lost on the rest of us,” Funboy said. “Although messing with Jim sounds a touch lewd.”

“It is, and he is, and it’s an apt one,” I replied, then addressed everyone at once. “What do you guys think about putting a foot inside the Jackals’

territory?”

“That our toes are gonna get stomped,” Icky said. “It would let us gather some more data on the Jackals,” Rab replied. “Uh—I have a question. Isn’t there another race of aliens out here?

The Tyrants?

How do they figure into all this?” Gabby asked. “Gabby has raised an excellent point. She should be commended for contribution,” Funboy said. I glanced at Icky and rolled my eyes. She grinned back. That said, though, it was a good point. “There seems to be a mismatch between what this beacon is broadcasting—stay away or else—and the previous message we detected calling the Tyrants home,” Netty noted. “That just seems to reinforce the idea that this beacon belongs to the Jackals, then. They’d be the ones who want everyone to stay away, right?”

Rab replied. I nodded as I looked at the overlay. “That fits. And there’s also the question about why the Usu had this location encoded on that chip. Okay, so there’s a warning beacon here. But you shouldn’t need to know about the beacon in advance to encounter it, right?

That kinda defeats the purpose of it.”

“There’s probably a network of them,” Perry replied. “Yeah, sure. But that still doesn’t answer the question. Why here?

Why did the Usu have these coordinates?

What’s the purpose of knowing that?”

“A rendezvous,” Gabby said. “You’d have to know the location of a rendezvous to go to it, right?”

“A rendezvous right on the border of the Jackals’ space. The Usu have been dealing with the Jackals in secret for… ah, perhaps the whole time Reverie’s been out here,” Rab said. “If the Usu and the Jackals have a cooperative relationship, then they may not have stolen the drive—they may have purchased it from the

Jackals, or traded for it,” Netty-P added. I felt my jaw tighten in disgust at the variations we were facing. “The Usu buy the combi-drive from the Jackals, then turn around and give it to the GKU?

Does that mean they really are on our side?”

“Maybe they just wanted credit for developing it,” Gabby said. “Yeah, maybe. Or maybe it’s something way more insidious that’s ultimately going to come back and bite us in the ass. Like I said, I think someone is playing a very long game here.”

“Get us to adopt the combi-drive, come to rely on it, then it turns out it’s got some critical weakness that they exploit at the worst possible time, maybe?” Icky said. I pointed at her. “Now that, big girl, is the sort of insidious thing I’m talking about.” I turned back to the overlay. “I think we need to have another encounter with these Jackals. Maybe we can talk to them. Failing that, maybe we can learn something more about them—something that might help unravel this particular knot of questions and what might be answers.”

“Which brings me back around to that first question I asked. What do you want to do, Van?” Torina asked. I reached for the controls. “I think we’re going to go and give a good, hard pull on Superman’s cape.”

FROM A REACTION TIME PERSPECTIVE, us twisting a few light-years further into Jackal space didn’t significantly change the time it would take for the Fafnir to reach us. It may burn more fuel and feel a little longer to those aboard the Fafnir, but to us—the ones who’d be needing her to come to our rescue—it would take exactly the same time, which was virtually nothing. That still didn’t stop Torina from complaining. Psychologically, we were going to be a lot farther away. And she cared. “The instant you need help, you call, Tudor,” she said, her eyes boring out of the display into mine. “Do you understand?”

“Torina, I—”

“Do you understand?”

I nodded. “Yes, dear.”

Perry made a whip-cracking sound, and I turned to him, slowly, wearing a fixed grin. “What else would you like to add to your assessment of my machismo, bird?

Think carefully.”

“Just that your hair looks great today. You doing something new with it?”

“Yes. I’m turning it gray trying to ride herd on a crew that includes a smart-mouthed AI.”

Perry put a wing up and alongside his mouth. “Netty, I think he’s talking about you,” he hissed in a stage whisper. I turned back to Torina. “If we need help, I’ll let you know instantly. But trust me—my first instinct is going to be turning tail and hauling ass. The Frankie’s not exactly the Iowa, is she?”

“That, I can live with.”

“Okay, then. Same drill as before. We twist in, stay dark, cold, and quiet, get the lay of the land, and then—I guess we see what happens.”

“We’ve shed some additional heat, boss. We’ll be colder this time,”

Perry said. “Excellent. Cold and calm. That’s our factory setting.”

We twisted to a point on the edge of the next star system beyond the point demarcated by the ominous buoy, still blathering its warning into the depths of space. The system’s star, one of the red dwarfs, was a ruddy point in the distance—so dim I had to check the chart and roll the Frankie somewhat just to find it. At the same time, the passive scanner data sluiced in. We sat in silence, watching the overlay fill in, one light-second’s worth of space with each interminable tick of the clock. “Holy shit, look at that!” Icky bellowed into the tension. I sat up. “What?

What is it?”

“On the scanner!

There’s nothing!

And look now—even more nothing!

And there’s some nothing over there, too—!”

Gabby laughed. I glared at them both. “Perry, looks like you’re going to have a couple of companions on your unscheduled spacewalk.”

“Thanks. Figured it was time to stretch my legs,” Perry said but was cut off by a warning—a real one, this time. A ship had suddenly appeared at the tip of a flickering, inconstant trail that extended back toward the star. I was struck by the fact that we could see the gravitational wake left by its combi-drive, but farther away than our scanners had reached. Interesting. And then the bogie was on us. “Brace,” I growled, then slammed the thrusters to spin the Frankie through a series of wild gyrations while the main power came back on line, bringing the drive back to life with it. The other ship—two of the faceted spherical modules, this time—opened fire with what seemed like a solid stream of slugs, a full-sized rail gun on steroids mounted in a ball-turret on one of the spheres. The fire went wide, though, the extra grav-plating on the Frankie dramatically reducing her effective inertia and letting her stay just ahead of the other ship’s firing solution. But that wouldn’t last forever. My hand, reaching for the thruster controls again, quickly shifted direction and hit the panic button, the control we’d preprogrammed to activate a twist back to Reverie. It took a few seconds for the system to generate its twist solution, but those few seconds seemed to crawl by with glacial slowness. The stream of slug fire swept toward us, and something slammed into the Frankie hard—

Then everything lurched, the stars shifted, and—

“Van?” Torina shouted. “Van?”

I switched the scanners to active mode. We were back at Reverie, about a million klicks away from the Fafnir. “Hold on,” I said over the comm, turning and looking back. “Is everyone okay?”

Icky and Perry acknowledged. Gabby, though, sat in silence. “Gabby?”

Nothing. “Gabby!” I started to unstrap, but a small voice wafted into my ears. “I’m… here.”

“Are you okay?”

She looked up. I could see her face through her visor. It was entirely devoid of expression. I opened my mouth, but she just pointed—first up and to the right, then down and to the left. In both places, a hole had been punched clean through the Frankie. I stared for a second or so, then it hit me. The path the slug had followed must have had it pass within centimeters of Gabby. She’d taken a few minor hits from fragments spalled off the hull, one that had cracked her visor, and others that had embedded in her arm and leg. Those had plugged themselves with sealing foam. “Holy shit, Gabby—” I looked at her injuries. “Are you—?”

“I’m… fine,” she said, then gave a weak smile. “Remember the knife?”

I did, vividly. She’d gashed her own arm with a kitchen knife to demonstrate her hyper-fast healing. She was clearly shaken, though. “A few bits like these”—she gestured at the sealing-foam patches on her suit—“don’t bother me. But if that had hit me—yeah, even I’m not coming back from that.”

I nodded slowly, then took one of her hands in mine. Fortunately, the Frankie had been depressurized. If she hadn’t been, the shock wave from the slug passing through the ship would have blown her—and probably the rest of us, for that matter—to paste. “Still glad you came?” I asked her, looking into her unusual, cheery face. Her smile suddenly firmed up, then widened. “I—yes!

Oh my—wow!

I haven’t felt this—this alive, well, ever, I don’t think!

That was so close!

I think I saw it go by, just a streak, but it was so close I could have touched it, though I wouldn’t want to touch it, now would I, that would have been a bad thing to do, I’d have lost my hand, though I can regrow it eventually—”

“Gabby.”

She fell silent. I smiled at her. “Welcome to the pants-wetting terror of a space battle. It’s a big part of what we do.”

She stared back at me, then grinned and nodded. “That was so cool—”

Icky sighed. “Great. On top of everything else, she’s a thrill junky. Good thing she’s such a damned good cook.”

16

BACK AT REVERIE, while the Frankie was patched up, we reviewed the combat data from our brief encounter with the vessel we assumed to belong to the Jackals. “That’s one hell of a slug thrower,” Rab said, watching the recording of the other ship pouring an avalanche of fire at us with a critical eye. Gabby nodded with vigor. “Tell me about it.”

“Those are bigger, heavier slugs than a normal mass driver uses—

probably a good twenty percent more than standard versions. But they’re being fired at almost double the rate, and at a higher velocity,” he went on, his finger lightly tracing lines of data superimposed on the display about velocity and potential impact energy. “Betcha there are a few A-10 Warthog pilots back on Earth who’d love having one of those in their planes,” Perry said. “Yeah, except they’d never get off the ground. This says each of those slugs is about the same size as the kinetic penetrator from an Abrams tank, and that fired—how many at us?

Nearly two hundred?” I replied. “It’s a good thing they never managed to connect with more than one,”

Torina said, frowning. But Rab was staring at the data scrolling by on the display. “Yeah, that is a good thing, isn’t it?” he finally said. I glanced sidelong at him. “You’re going somewhere with that.”

“I am. Based on this, the emissions from their fire-control scanners that had lit us up, they should have been able to correct that fire onto us sooner

than they did.”

“They couldn’t have accounted for the Frankie’s funky mass, thanks to the grav-plates all over her,” Icky said. But Rab shook his head. “For the first few seconds, sure. But here”—he rewound the recording, then stopped it and pointed at the numeric data—“is where they got a hard lock on us. But notice the stream of slugs. It doesn’t correct right away. So either they had a malfunction in their fire control system—”

“Or they pulled their punch,” I said, and Rab nodded. “So, what, they didn’t want to kill us, just chase us away?” Torina asked. “Kinda felt like the first encounter, the one that happened when we were in company with the N1, was all about trying to destroy us,” Icky said. We could all only guess. But Funboy summed it up nicely. “We do not know anything about these Jackals, particularly their motivations, and what internal politics and conflicts may affect them. The first encounter may have been with a different faction within them, or perhaps we were intruding on a location they consider sacrosanct for some reason.”

“Debbie Downer has it right. Sun Tzu said know your enemy, but we don’t,” Perry said. I had to agree. “Yeah. The question is how do we learn more about them, though?

They sure as hell don’t seem interested in talking.”

“Not to us,” Funboy said. There was a note of accusation in his tone that went above and beyond the normal desolation. He was… angry. I looked at him, searching his face for emotions. I found them. “Right. Not to us—but it seems they talk to the Usu. So that means we have to talk to the Usu.”

Icky bared her teeth, and Rab drew back out of sheer instinct. When she spoke, there was a glee in her voice that was far from friendly. “I’ve been looking forward to this for days.”

Funboy unlimbered all five feet of his hirsute, maudlin frame and gestured to me, almost imperceptibly, that I should follow him from Command. No one saw, and I quickly surmised he had on what I’d come to know as his thinkin’ face. For all his depressive tendencies, he was a font of good ideas. And that meant something twigged his process—something important enough to

share. Quietly. “Time for coffee,” I announced. There were mumbled responses, so I slipped away, with stars and secrets all around me. AFTER MY CLANDESTINE meeting with Funboy, I found Torina, locked fingers with her, and left Icky and Rab to tend to the damaged Frankie. My purpose was simple—I needed to brief Kragdalous on what had happened in the Reverie conference room adjacent to his office. He was unsurprisingly concerned—deeply so—about the presence of a clearly hostile race of aliens of unknown nature and intent just a few light-years away. “Especially since they’re using combi-drive technology and now have

—do I have this right, superior weapons technology, as well?” he asked after we’d briefed him and Jamberac on the results of our foray into the Jackal’s space. “So it would seem. But they also appear to have no interest in leaving the space they consider theirs. After all, Reverie has been here for years now, and you didn’t even know the Jackals were your neighbors,” I replied. “Which does lead to another of those really good questions—why was Reverie put here, in this particular location?

Do you know why?” Torina asked. She stood with her hands clasped, head tilted to one side, and wearing an expression so neutral even I had a hard time guessing her intentions. But I knew. “Well?” Torina prompted, her lip pulled up on one side. Kragdalous and Jamberac both shook their heads. “That decision was made back in known space, well before either of us were assigned here. The only explanation I ever received when I was being read into the project was that it was far enough away from known space, and in an apparently uninhabited part of the galaxy, that the sort of research being done here shouldn’t pose a threat to anyone.”

“It’s hard to believe it’s just a coincidence. But the Usu might know, or at least be able to shed some light. They’ve been secretly meeting with the Jackals, it seems, and may even have a bit of a cozy relationship with

them,” I said. I’d kept my tone neutral, like Torina. We were trying the carrot first. The stick might be later. “Which might be how they managed to get their hands on the combi-drive in the first place—which means they might have been dealing with the Jackals for a long time now. Before Reverie was even established out here, in fact,” Torina added. “Thus, we need to interrogate them,” I concluded. “Firmly.”

Kragdalous gave a sour frown. “Station security has already done a full round of interrogations on all the Usu present here. They insist that their comrade we have in lockup is a rogue, and they have nothing to do with him.”

I sighed. “Great. They had time to get their story straight since we couldn’t immediately isolate each one of them from the others the way we did our suspect.” I drummed my fingers on the table. We could try leaning on the other Usu, or even just hiving off a few and leaning on them, but I’d interrogated Usu before. With no meaningful body language or facial expressions, their stonewalling had a thick coat of featureless gray paint over it. Kragdalous shifted a bit, revealing his discomfort. “Van, I think we’d be justified in taking more, ah, direct and vigorous action, given the circumstances,” he said. I looked up from the far-off place I’d been gazing. “What do you mean?”

“We could retrieve whatever data the Usu possess.”

I shook my head definitively. “What you’re suggesting is no more effective than torture—which means not effective at all. You’ll just get whatever information your victim thinks you want to hear. Or, in the case of Usu, they could just wipe themselves blank.”

“I’m willing to bet that if any of them had stand-alone data chips like the perp you’ve got locked up, they don’t anymore. Any data they’ve got is probably strictly on board, and probably with a wipe routine ready to run,”

Perry said. “There’s the little fact it would be morally and ethically terrible. I’ll have no part of it and will actively resist anyone who tries it,” I said. My tone invited no negotiation, or for that matter, discussion. Kragdalous slumped back in his seat. “So we’re at a dead end.”

I shrugged. “For now, maybe. But as the old saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

Torina sat up. “Why would you want to skin a cat?

They’re adorable creatures—wait. Cats are those small, fluffy quadrupeds made of cuddles and attitude, right?”

“That pretty much sums them up.”

“Then why would you want to skin a cat?

They’re adorable creatures

—!”

Icky entered the room, then stood at the door, looking awkward. “Uh, sorry to interrupt, but I’ve got something important I have to discuss with Van and Torina,” she said. “But not the bird, le sigh,” Perry said. I sat right up. “What’s wrong?

Is there a bigger problem with the Frankie than we realized?

Or the Fafnir—?”

“No, no. The ships are fine. This is—boss, it’s personal.”

Kragdalous stood, gesturing to Jamberac. “That’s alright, I’ve got plenty to do. But, Van, when you come up with other ways of skinning those cats you mentioned, let’s talk,” he said, then left, Jamberac in his wake. Icky stared at Kragdalous as he walked by, then turned back to me, wide-eyed. “Skinning cats?

What the hell were you guys talking about in here?”

“I have got to stop using Earthly sayings,” I said. Perry nodded. “And you can take that to the bank, and put it in your pipe and smoke it, and—”

I closed his beak between my fingers. “Mmph!”

“Icky, what’s the problem?” Torina asked. Icky sat down. “It’s about Paxomar.”

I looked at Torina. I instantly knew what she was thinking because I was thinking it, too. It’s time for us to be mom and dad. I readied my advice and folded my hands, waiting. “Trouble in paradise?” I asked. Torina took it and ran. “It’s tough being apart from someone you care about for long stretches of time—”

“No, it’s not that. Paxomar and I are—we’re fine. In fact, if anyone complains about the noise coming from my cabin about half an hour ago, it was just me and him—”

“Icky, I’m gonna stop you right there, before you step across the line into Yikesville,” I said, raising both hands. “Let’s just stick to the problem?”

“Unless that is the problem,” Perry muttered, and I shot him a hard look. Shit, what if he was right?

I was not ready to start hearing, much less healing the sexual woes of an aroused but frustrated two-hundred-odd kilo, four-armed blue gorilla—

“No, that’s not the problem, you glorified hood ornament,” Icky snapped, then turned back to me. “I was talking to my dad, as we’d scheduled—oh, he’s ready to bring the Nemesis out here, by the way. But he had a message from Paxomar. It was, we need to talk.”

Torina and I both winced. “That’s bad, right?” Perry asked. “But you just said that you and he were fine,” Torina replied. “We are. But, we’re also not. I—”

I stood. “You know what?

This conference room sucks for this type of conversation. Back to the Fafnir, everyone. This conversation needs to be on our home turf.”

“I WOULD ASSUME, from the fact he thought it essential to talk to you at this remote distance, that the matter is important,” Funboy said as the whole crew settled into the Fafnir’s lounge. Icky was pulling at her fur. “No, he just wanted to know if I was eating right, you melancholy little—little baby, you,” she snapped back at Funboy. “Ernie Burnett, music, and George A. Norton, lyrics, written in 1912,”

Netty-P said. I turned to her. “What?”

“Melancholy Baby. The song.”

“This isn’t helping.”

“I was just trying to take some of the snark pressure off Perry,” she replied. “I appreciate it. It gets tiring being the funny one all the time,” Perry said. Torina glanced at me. “Still glad you decided to bring this back to the Fafnir?”

“Delighted. Alright, kids. Everyone—silence,” I ordered in a voice I’d come to call Dad Is Concerned. “Icky, calm down. Funboy, Perry, Netty-P

—hell, everyone else—we’re trying to be supportive here.”

“Ah.” Funboy started to pull his smile routine and gave her arm a brief, tentative touch. “There, uh, there. Everything will turn out satisfactorily.”

“Funboy, could you just pretend you’re unconscious or dead for a few minutes?” Torina asked. “That’ll save on labor costs, too, just sayin’,” Perry said, then caught the look I was leveling at him. “Think I’ll sit still and behave, thanks.”

“Superb idea, bird. Icky… what’s going on?

What’s the problem with Paxomar that’s apparently not actually a problem with Paxomar?” I asked her. “It’s someone from my past,” Icky said. “A former, uh, lover?” Rab asked, wincing. “What?

No!

No, not even close. I had a teacher back when I was young

—well, younger. He hated me. And he did his damndest to screw over not just me, but also my father. He colluded with my mother and her cronies to try to seize half the value of the Nemesis after me and dad made her spaceworthy again. We would have been forced to—to sell the ship. That would have broken my dad. Broken him more, I mean. He was already in pretty bad shape over my mother leaving him. Losing the Nemesis, forcing him to work for someone else—”

She broke off, shaking her head. I felt my guts roil at the mention of her mother. “Ah, yes. Your dear old mom, Axicur. I fondly remember tangling with her. And by fondly, I mean I really wanted to punch her in the face. A few times.”

“A lot,” Torina said, her tone dangerous. “But this isn’t about your mother you said?” Rab asked. Icky shook her head. “No. It was this teacher, Toxon. He hated my guts. Drove me out of school and pretty much made it so that going off with my dad on the Nemesis was the only option I had left. A vicious bastard, as dumb as he was ugly.”

“And you were a… just a kid?” Torina asked. “Yeah. I was a NineYoungest, so… new to Senior Phrontistery, uh—”

“She was a high school freshman, basically,” Perry said. “Ah. Didn’t know you were versed in Wu’tzur culture, Perry.”

“I’m versed in all known space cultures, Van, and a few beyond it. You want to argue a case before a Wu’tzur law director, I’m your guy. And yes, before anyone feels compelled to say it, I’m a legal eagle, ha ha ha.”

“Good to know.” I turned back to Icky. “So this teacher gave you a hard time—”

“No, Van. He hated me. I think it had something to do with my dad. He went to Senior Phrontistery with Toxon and whupped his butt in every exam.”

“So he held a grudge against Urnak, and took it out on his kid. Wow, what a piece of shit.”

“What’s a phrontistery, anyway?” Torina asked. “My translator isn’t translating it to anything.”

“It’s defaulting to the closest Earthly term, probably because of the time you’ve spent around Van and Earth. It means a place for thinking or reflection,” Netty said. “So it could apply to the lavatory,” Funboy said. “It… could, sure, if that’s what you do in there. I keep myself blind and deaf to what goes on in the waste reclamator.”

“Don’t blame you. And I don’t disagree with the Wu’tzur version being compared to a shitter, either,” Icky said. “Anyway, the bottom line is that Toxon tried to screw over my dad and me, and he got screwed over instead

—mainly by my mother, but he kept blaming me and dad.” She sighed. “And now he’s figured out a new way to ruin my life.”

“Which is where Paxomar comes into it, I gather,” Torina said. Icky rubbed her eyes. “Yeah. He lost his job as a teacher and ended up as a petty bureaucrat instead. Whether deliberately, or just the universe is an asshole, he’s a Regional Proctor of Unity and Social Adherence.”

“Holy shit, calling George Orwell,” I muttered. “Hey, I know that one. He wrote 1984,” Torina said, smiling brightly. I blinked at her. “He… did, yeah. Good for you, Torina. You read it?”

Her smile melted into a glaring frown aimed at Perry. “Yes, I did, because the bird told me that it was a historical rom-com. I kept waiting for the upbeat, fun part to start. Spoiler alert— it never did.”

“Torina, I told you, a stray cosmic ray glitched my literary database. The one I meant to tell you to read was The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a laugh-a-minute road-trip comedy.”

I just shook my head at him, then turned back to Icky. “So what is your former teacher turned petty functionary doing—oh, wait. Unity and Social Adherence. Is he somehow interfering in your betrothal to Paxomar?”

“Yes. He dug into the historical legal archives and found an archaic Wu’tzur law that was never taken off the books—the Principle of Proximity. It says that if Paxomar can’t produce proof of our ongoing physical interaction, Toxon can initiate a court proceeding to annul our betrothal and seize our property. And get this—thirty percent of that property value goes to the, I quote, officer who upholds community standards.” She ended on a miserable sigh. Gabby, who’d been sitting quietly and taking it all in, sat forward. “What?

What possible reason could there be to have a law like that?”

“Sing it, sister,” Torina said. Funboy, however, answered. “In a primitive society, it makes sense to ensure that there are as many pairings as possible to maintain an adequately high birth rate in order to offset the impact of high infant mortality and relatively short life expectancy. Having couplings that are nonproductive of offspring would be disadvantageous, so this law encourages those couplings to produce children as soon and frequently as possible.”

Torina’s tone took on a note of menace again. “So are you saying this is somehow okay?”

“No, I am not. I specified that this made sense in a primitive society. Wu’tzur society is obviously no longer primitive—well, very primitive, anyway—”

Icky bristled. “Hey!”

Funboy blinked at her. “Your people are the ones with that archaic law still in effect.”

She backed down. “Yeah, good point.”

“Anyway, Wu’tzur society has obviously reached a point where physical relationships can be about romance and sexual gratification, so the law is obsolete.”

“He always manages to work something about sexual gratification in there somewhere, doesn’t he?” Netty-P asked. “Okay, so, let Toxon do his worst. This’ll go to court, and it’ll be thrown out as nonsense. Might start the process of getting the Principle of Proximity finally repealed, too,” I said. But Perry spoke up. “Sorry, it’s not that simple, Van. Legal eagle here, remember?

Wu’tzur law is highly proscriptive. Their law directors have very little discretion in interpreting their laws. If this law is still in effect, no matter how out of date it might be, the director hearing this case would have little choice but to apply it as written. The onus is on Icky and Paxomar to demonstrate that they’re adhering to the law. If they can’t do that, then the director can really make only one call.”

“And here I am, a million billion klicks away from Paxomar. The last time we were together was nearly, what, five standard months ago?” Icky said, sighing again. “Looks like Toxon’s gonna win after all. Dad put half the Nemesis in my name. So if my property gets seized—”

I stood. “Oh, there is no way we’re going to lose the Nemesis. She’s too valuable to us. Netty, set up a call to whoever’s in charge of the Wu’tzur Unity and Social Adherence outfit—”

“Ah, Van, are you sure you want to do that?” Perry put in. “Very. Why?”

“Because you’d be influence-peddling, presumably based on your status as a Peacemaker, and a senior Peacemaker at that—not to mention someone who was named a friend of the Wu’tzur when we returned our very first stolen identity, Fostin, to them.”

Icky started to stand, her fists balling. “So what?

My people owe Van some favors, so he should call them in.”

“Hey, if it were up to me, I’d say go for it. But I have an obligation as your legal advisor, Van, to point out that what you’re contemplating would be a violation of Guild regulations. It would also be legally problematic. The Wu’tzur are signatories to the Guild Charter, so Peacemakers are obligated to enforce their laws as they pertain to their people, as much as interstellar law.”

I slumped back down. “Perry’s right. And,” I went on to Icky, “before you start threatening to pluck him or something, he’s just doing his job. If I do this, I’ll be violating Guild regulations and principles, and circumventing Wu’tzur law, all to prevent it from being applied to a Wu’tzur citizen. I do that, and where’s the line?

Is it okay to circumvent any laws we don’t like then?”

I saw mouths open, people shifting as they started to react, but ultimately nobody said anything. Even Icky sat back down and let her muscles go slack. She turned to Perry. “Sorry, bird. I don’t hate you. I do hate that you’re right.”

“You know what, Icky?

So do I.”

We all sat in silence for a moment. I stared at the deck, jaw clenched tightly. I wanted to find this petty, vengeful tyrant Toxon and make him take a long walk through a short airlock. It was a shakedown, pure and simple. In fact, I suspected the Wu’tzur Principle of Proximity had been written at least partly with that in mind. Sure, Funboy’s point about birthrate was sound, but I didn’t doubt that whoever had written the law back in the day had done it with a view to also enriching themselves and their cronies, whoever they were. My anger veered a little, scooping up those long-dead Wu’tzur who’d manipulated their own legal system by writing stupid, self-serving laws into it—

I looked up. If they’d written one such law—

I turned to Perry. He preempted me. “I know what you’re going to ask, and yes, the Legal Eagle is in. However, I only have a database of the laws specified in the Wu’tzur appendix to the Guild Charter as the ones they want the Guild to enforce. And no, the Principle of Proximity isn’t one of them, which is a good thing, because we’d be in the really unfortunate position of having to help this Toxon enforce the order against Icky.”

“Shit. I hadn’t even thought of that. Yeah, that’s a damned good thing.”

“So, wait—this law isn’t even enforceable?” Gabby asked. “By us. But back in known space, Icky would be subject to whatever measures the Wu’tzur might want to take to enforce it themselves. I suppose they could send someone here, too, though I kinda doubt any of their enforcement agents are going to be keen to make a four-month round trip to uphold some ancient law,” Perry replied. “No, they wouldn’t. They probably wouldn’t want to enforce any other old, obsolete laws either—of which I’m sure there are probably at least a few,” I said. “Ah. You want to find a loophole,” Rab replied. “Yes, I do. With any luck, there’ll be some other ancient Wu’tzur law that Icky can invoke to stop this. We just have to find it.”

“I’ll need a complete database of all Wu’tzur laws then. And I kinda suspect Kragdalous doesn’t have one in Reverie’s data stores. That means I’ll have to retrieve it from back in known space, probably from the Wu’tzur themselves,” Perry said. “Okay, well, get on it, Perry. Make a long, long, long distance call and get whatever you need.”

“That’s great, but what if there is no loophole?” Icky asked. “One step at a time, big girl. I may not be able to peddle some influence on your behalf, but I’ll be damned if a member of my crew doesn’t get their day in court. Perry, when you put your call back to known space, I’d like you to also let the Wu’tzur know that I’m formally requesting intervenor status in the case—which, I believe, is allowed under, uh—let me think. Article Four, Protocol, uh—”

“Five, paragraphs five through nine, which detail the role of Peacemakers as intervenors in legal proceedings involving Charter members of the Guild. I’ve taught you well, grasshopper.”

Icky stood up and fumed. “This is all so complicated, and I hate it and it sucks—” She spun on me. “I’m an engineer, Van, not a—a—an adult!”

“Hmm. Yeah, I think we’re going to want to use some delaying tactics in this case for sure,” Perry said to me. “Until Icky becomes a grown-up?”

“I see you grasp my strategy.”

17

IN THE MIDST of all of this, Netty spoke up with another urgent message. “Van, the Fafnir’s being approached by a work crew, some station techs in a tender with a YardCraft. They say that they’re here to retrieve the combi-drive.”

I had to take a long, deep breath. First Icky’s ordeal, and now this. This, though, wasn’t unexpected. “Have they said why?”

“They claim it was the intention all along. The drive tests are over, and now they want to pull it and study it in detail to see how the flights we took affected it.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Yes, it is. And Hodgepodge agrees. He was never given any instructions to that effect, either.”

“Hodgepodge?

Sounds familiar, but—”

“Yes. The AI who controls the combi-drive. It’s a very specific skillset, one he’s purpose-made to perform.”

“Really. I’m curious—why hasn’t he ever spoken to any of us?”

“He’s never really had any need to. But, if you insist—”

“Hello,” a new voice, a male baritone, said. I blinked and looked around at the rest of the crew. “Uh…

Hodgepodge?”

“Yes.”

I stared, unsure of what to say to a novel prototype faster-than-light drive. It wasn’t like we had much in common. “He’s rather shy, as you can see,” Netty said. “Yeah, I—” I shook my head. “Let’s get back to this work crew. Where are they?”

“About ten klicks off our starboard bow, waiting for me to pilot them in to dock with the Fafnir.”

Again, I looked around at my crew. They were looking back, waiting to see what I would do. I could tell how they felt, though, just from the raw tension fuming the air. I nodded. “Fine. Here’s my authorization—for you to fire on them if they come any closer. Light them up with the fire-control scanners, fire warning shots if they try to approach anyway, then disable if they persist.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really. They’re not coming anywhere near my only ride home.”

My crew relaxed. There were smiles. Rab said, “Yes!” Even Funboy got in on it, virtually bubbling with enthusiasm, at least for him. “What a satisfying response,” he said. I turned to Torina. “We’re taking the Frankie back to Reverie—you, Perry, Icky, and me. The rest of you will stay here and secure the Fafnir. As of now, the only personnel allowed aboard this ship is this crew and anyone I explicitly authorize.”

I turned to Icky. “Come on, big girl. I could use a frustrated and enraged Wu’tzur at my side.”

She bared her teeth. “Awesome. I’m in the mood.”

“Arranged from an existing melody by Joe Garland, lyrics by Andy Razaf, first recorded in 1938,” Netty-P said. That brought us all to a halt. I gave her a puzzled frown. “What?”

“In the Mood. You know, made famous by Glenn Miller?”

“I—sure, okay,” I said, then carried on toward the Frankie. “To repeat, bird, I’m doing my best to carry the comedic load for you. It must be exhausting to be snarky all the time,” Netty-P said. “Appreciate it, though I’m more adept at brilliant witticisms than snark,” he replied and came gliding after me. “As to your point about Glenn Miller, he died in a tragic plane crash during the most savage war in history.”

Funboy piped up. “Finally. Some real-life comedy.”

WE PUT the Fafnir on-station about ten klicks away from Reverie, hanging in a stationary point. She still had some lingering damage from our battle with the first attack by the Jackals, notably to the scanner array, and being docked just got in the way. It meant we had to take the Frankie—which had only needed to have her hull patched from her through-and-through hit—

but it also meant that, in an extreme case, no one could board the Fafnir without our approval. She was the most heavily armed ship in the system, so no one could even really try to force the issue. Which had all been the thread of the conversation in the Frankie as we prepared to dock at Reverie. I’d already foreseen that there’d be an attempt to take the combi-drive back, and to that end I’d had Netty put in a call to the Iowa, now well underway toward us, but spend the antimatter fuel to just keep it connected for now. In the meantime, Torina wondered if I had other concerns I hadn’t yet aired. I sat back as the docking AI took over controlling the ship. “You might say that.”

“Such as?”

“Yeah, Van. Are you thinking we’ve got our good guys and our bad guys mixed up, here?

That maybe Kragdalous and his gang aren’t exactly the good guys, or that the Jackals might not be entirely the bad guys since they only seemed to, um, want to chase us off?” Icky asked. I shook my head. “Not saying that at all. And the reason is that there’s no such thing as good guys or bad guys to begin with. Or if there is, it’s only in a really broad, sweeping way. Known space contains lots of very bad people doing very bad things. But known space, as a whole, is still the good guys these days when it comes to Calamity.”

“So who are the bad guys then?

That Rogue faction of the Seven Stars League?

’Cause if so, we kinda kicked their asses already, right?”

I didn’t answer and just watched as the docking AI decelerated us prior to the final approach to the airlock adapter, the UDA. Instead, I glanced at Perry. He and Netty-P had delivered the news to me on Anvil Dark—I’d been visiting my mother—that Kharsweil was dead. Even in the face of that news, it was apparent someone had nonetheless issued an order to Dohlennz to lay low. Someone, or some thing. “You think it’s Calamity itself, don’t you?” Torina asked. I frowned, then looked away and shrugged. “We don’t have enough information—”

“Van Tudor—the main reason you’re such a shitty poker player is because you’re just dripping with tells.”

I mustered my best glare. “I am not a shitty poker player—”

“And there’s one of them right now. When someone calls you out on something you’re trying to hide, you change the subject. You also refuse to make eye contact.”

“The funny part is you don’t have that problem with perps. You stare so hard into their eyes I’m surprised I don’t see smoke wafting up from the back of their head,” Perry said. “Hey, Van, when you’re playing cards, you should just treat Torina like a perp,” Icky said, following that bit of wisdom with a gigglesnort. Torina’s face and voice were both stone. “Yeah, try that.”

“Anyway, Calamity?

You think it’s the”—Icky made two sets of air quotes simultaneously—“bad guy?

It’s just a virus, a computer program.”

Perry turned to her. “I’m just a computer program. I only happen to inhabit this lithe, graceful, and fine-ass form.”

“Oh. Yeah. That’s right, you did a stint as the Fafnir’s poop monitor,”

Icky snickered. Perry lifted his wings a little, but then Icky did something way out of character. She immediately backed down. “I’m… sorry, bird. And you’re right. You’re not just a computer program. You’re—well, more. You’re a person. And you’re my friend.”

He cocked his head at her. “Are you just saying this by way of encouragement to find you and your sweetie out of your legal predicament?”

Icky smiled. “A little bit. But… only a little bit. Most of it is… is what I said, really.”

“Oh. Uh—” Perry turned to me. “I’m not used to these Hallmark Moments. What do I say?”

“Hmm, well, let’s see. Oh, I know. How about, thank you?”

“Good plan. Thank you, Icky.”

“A little less impressive when Van had to coach it out of you, but I’ll take it,” Icky said, then looked up at me. “But if featherbrain here is more than just running software, then that means that Calamity could be—wow. Really?”

I turned and looked at all of them. “Okay, notice the eye contact, please. The answer is, I don’t know. We really don’t have enough information. We particularly don’t know enough about Calamity itself. Linulla, Viktor, and Bester are still collaborating in unwinding that apparently pristine version of the virus we retrieved, but the last report I had from Bester is that it’s slow work. Between the precautions they have to take to avoid starting a new infection with it and the fact it seems to be continually rewriting itself in real time, they just don’t have many answers yet.”

“Have to admit, the idea that Calamity isn’t just a virus, but might be the actual brains behind a whole bunch of plots and schemes, is… it’s creepy,” Torina said. I pulled at my chin, chasing a conclusion. What I came up with was…

nebulous. At best. And I was cognizant of the mental aspect that Calamity created. “It’s also way too early to let that idea out into the wild. I don’t want that idea to become a new virus, a memetic one, because it might cause panic, provoke people into hasty action, and get in the way of dealing with the damned thing. After all, it might just be what it seems: a really sophisticated and insidious virus. We can’t stop other people from concluding that there might be more to it than that. Funboy has, for instance.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. He came to me for a discreet chat during our long flight here. He said he’d had the idea, then dug into the data we had available and started to connect what he thought might be dots. I’m now going to tell you guys the same thing I told him. Yes, this might be true. But it might not be. And either way, this gets discussed with no one. And that includes Rab and Gabby. I don’t want them to be the only members of the crew not in on our suspicions, so I’ll tell them myself. That’s an order.”

“You’ve been giving a lot of those lately,” Icky said. “Yeah, well, maybe I went mad with power on the flight out here—”

A thump, followed by the sound of the airlock latching and pressurizing, announced our arrival at Reverie. “Anyway, let’s just put that particular subject to rest and focus on the matter at hand,” I said as we started to unstrap. “So, this all started with us talking about good guys and bad guys. Which is Kragdalous and his gang?” Icky asked. “I’m not entirely sure. And that’s the problem.”

I’D MADE it clear in the time it took us to exit the Frankie that I trusted Jamberac pretty much implicitly, but when it came to Kragdalous, I was afraid he was a good man being given bad information and advice. As for the Usu, I didn’t trust them at all. So that was the general vibe stiffening our resolve when we stepped into Reverie. Well, that, and our garb and weapons. Torina and I wore full b-suits, Peacemaker regalia freely displayed, helmets clipped to our harnesses. Icky wore her work suit under an armored vest. She had her hammer slung on her back, Torina a slug pistol bouncing at her hip, while I carried both The Drop and the Moonsword. The only person there to greet us, though, was Jamberac. His eyes widened at our para-martial display, and he looked decidedly uncomfortable. “Van,” he said, acknowledging me and nodding to the rest. “You came, uh, armed.”

I glanced down. “So we did. How about that.”

“Look, Van, I heard what’s going on. There really is good reason to study it in detail, now that it’s been put through some paces. Materials testing, metallurgy, downloading individual component logs—”

“I’m sure there is, but—” I stopped myself. “You know, I’ll just wait until we can have this conversation with Kragdalous and whoever else is involved so I don’t have to repeat myself,” I said, stretching out my hand to gesture Jamberac into the station. As we walked, he sidled closer to me. “Before we meet them, I just wanted to say something, Van. I don’t really blame you for not trusting anyone here. With what’s going on with the Usu—”

“Actually, Jamberac, you’re wrong. There are people here I trust. The Eykinao out on their refining ship, for instance. And you.”

He blinked at me, both surprised and grateful. “Really?”

“Yeah. You’ve done great work for the Guild and the GKU, and you’ve done nothing to make me think otherwise. So why shouldn’t I trust you?”

“I… guess I’m just not used to hearing people say that about me—or to me. Not as much as they used to.”

“Your family and their scummy past?

Yeah, well, I think you’ve worked really hard to move beyond it, grow above it, and it shows. People should

be judged on their own merits, not on their family history.” I gave him a smile. “Trust me, I know that as well as you do.”

We’d reached the conference room. Jamberac fumbled a moment, gave me a nod and smile of his own, then opened the door and led us in. Kragdalous was there, along with several of Reverie’s department heads and project managers, people I knew well enough to nod and say hey, but that was about it. There were also two Usu standing near the viewports—

and four armed station security guards hanging out on the fringes. Were they there to keep an eye on the Usu—or on us?

I guess we were going to find out. I walked up to the conference table, my weapons bouncing on my hips, and stopped, but I didn’t sit down. And I waited. Kragdalous shifted awkwardly. “Van, I understand there’s some confusion about the combi-drive installed on the Fafnir—”

“There’s no confusion at all. You sent a crew to come and retrieve it. I said no.”

“That drive is the property of the GKU. The intent was always to remove it, so that—”

“It can be studied, yes, I know. Jamberac explained it very well.”

Silence. Again, Kragdalous shifted in his seat. “Van, I don’t understand why there’s a problem here, then—”

“There’s a problem, Kragdalous, because since our arrival here, there have been irregularities in the operations of this station. There have been enough of them, in fact, that I’ve become deeply concerned about the integrity of the whole operation.”

Now Kragdalous bristled. “I’ll admit that we had an issue with one of the Usu, who is now in custody—and not just disassembled, as you so eloquently urged us not to do. But now you’re claiming that this whole station and its work is suspect?”

I nodded. “Yes, I am.”

Kragdalous stood and leaned on the table. “I will not have the integrity of this station and the work we’re doing here questioned—”

“Yes, Kragdalous, actually you will. See, for better or worse, the 32 saw fit to make me one of their members, secret handshake and everything. I’m

also the top rank of Veteran Peacemaker, and Justiciar to Master Gerhardt of the Guild.”

I leaned on the table and looked straight back into his eyes. “Now, I don’t usually parade my credentials around like that—I’m way too modest a guy, you see. But I’m putting them on the table today to say that, yeah, I am questioning what’s going on out here, because it’s both my right and my responsibility.”

I heard Icky mutter, “You go, boss!”

I tossed her a quick look. She subsided but kept smirking. Turning back to Kragdalous, I went on while he was still opening his mouth to reply. “So, why do I have these concerns?

Well, let’s recap. There’s the so-called rogue Usu, who destroyed a crippled Jackal ship before we could board and examine it. There’s the data chip we retrieved from him that implicates him in under-the-table dealings with an aggressive race of alien scavengers, again the Jackals—the race you apparently knew nothing about

—who are lurking right on your doorstep. Nor were you aware that there are the ruins of an even older alien civilization, the Pleikomas, aka the Tyrants, sprawling off yonder—” I waved a hand vaguely toward the viewports. “Van—”

“I’m not finished yet. We have no idea how many of the Usu here might be implicated in whatever’s been going on with the Jackals. We do know that the Usu almost certainly obtained the combi-drive from the Jackals, and since I’m sure a race of plundering scroungers aren’t big into altruism, offering favors or extending credit terms, the Jackals got something in return—or they will, anyway.”

Kragdalous started to waver. I could see it in his eyes. But a flash of anger followed, probably because he was on his back foot here and knew it. “Peacemaker Tudor, while I acknowledge all these things you’ve said, they don’t change the fact that this program must continue. And to do that, we must be able to examine that drive, and that means disassembling it—”

“No. That’s not going to happen. And I’ll give you a good reason why it won’t, one that you will agree with. Not only will I not trust your Usu techs to come anywhere near my ship, but you also do not want the Fafnir taken apart and left functionally derelict. She’s the only ship out here with any real combat power, so now that you know that there are potentially hostile

powers just a few light-years away, do you really want to take her out of service?”

“I—”

“Especially now that the Jackals almost certainly know their dealings with the Usu have been exposed?

That any payment they might have still been expecting is now not going to happen?”

Kragdalous sat back down, staring as the implications sank in. One of the Usu, though, decided to speak up. “All of these issues are irrelevant Peacemaker you have no evidence that the Usu as a whole are implicated in any of them and that they extend beyond the single Usu you have in custody. Therefore your position makes no sense.”

I turned, but Icky was already on her way. She shoved past the security guards, who just stepped hastily back from the battering ram of muscle and outrage that barreled past them, and stopped with her face about ten centimeters from the Usu that had spoken. “You don’t eat anything, do you?” she rumbled. The Usu stared blankly back at her. “I have no need for organic sustenance—”

“Then you won’t really miss your freakin’ teeth, will you?”

“I… do not understand the reason for your anger—”

“Don’t care. Just let the people who we know aren’t scuzzy, treacherous criminals do the talking, hmm?”

The security guards had tensed, obviously on edge for this little scene to erupt into violence. I brought my own hand to rest on the butt of The Drop, while Torina shifted her stance slightly, angling her weight in a way I knew was intended to draw and open fire while taking cover. The Usu stared impassively at Icky, who loomed over him, a mountain of taut muscle just aching for something upon which to vent her wrath. I started to open my mouth, to get her to back off, because I really didn’t want this to collapse into a scene of what could end up being carnage. But the Usu apparently had enough sense of self-preservation—another expression of the fact that while they might not be human or otherwise organic, they were still people—that it finally nodded. “My apologies for interrupting the proceedings.”

Icky glared a moment longer, then tilted her head with an air of, for her, superior manners—then stalked back to her place. As she passed the guards,

she glanced sidelong. “Sorry for the drama, fellas.”

The Sergeant commanding them just raised his hands. “No problem, ma’am.”

She blinked. “Ma’am. He called me ma’am.” She smiled. “Cool. I’m a ma’am.”

I turned back to Kragdalous. The little tableaux of impending violence had obviously impressed on him the certainty that we weren’t screwing around here. “Okay, so that’s the stick. Now for the carrot,” I said. “Is a carrot something beneficial?

Unlike your threat?” Kragdalous snapped back. “It can be. It’s said that carrots help you see in the dark, and they’re just generally good for you.”

“And the darkness in this case is—”

“The sixty-plus light-years of wreckage, scavengers, and who knows what else out there. This isn’t just a research facility, Kragdalous. It’s an outpost. And just like you’ve been developing the N3 as a prototype warship, whether you know it or not, this place is a frontier fortress—and a pretty shitty one. Whoever decided to put it out here either had the worst luck in picking a supposedly empty part of the entire Milky Way galaxy, or there’s another agenda at work here. An agenda that neither you nor I have been made aware of. So my carrot—

I turned to my comm. “Netty, can you put that call through, please?”

The conference room display lit up with the image of Cantullin. Several other members of the Iowa’ s Conoku crew crowded in behind her. “Hey, Captain Van!” Cantullin said, waving a claw. The other Conoku chattered greetings and waved as well. I turned to Kragdalous—but also aimed my words at the Usu. “You need help out here that even the Fafnir can’t provide, not on her own. So…

enter the Iowa.”

“That’s us!

“We’re a warship!”

“My battery has the best hit rate of all of them!

“Nuh-uh, gunnery practice doesn’t count—!”

“Yes it does!”

Kragdalous stared at the screen, then at me, looking a little dumbfounded. “What the hell is that?”

Torina smiled proudly. “Those are teenagers.”

“Is this… some kind of joke?”

“Betty, would you care to put the performance stats for the Iowa up for us, please?”

Iowa’s version of Netty complied, listing acceleration data, drive power, maneuverability and firepower indices, weapons load out, the whole package. Kragdalous and Jamberac were experienced enough in spaceship operations that they were able to take it in and digest it in a few seconds. Jamberac shook his head. “Wow.”

Kragdalous again stared at the screen, then turned to me. “That’s…

incredible. I’d heard that you had a second ship, but I had no idea—”

“I’ve seen stats for quite a few fighting ships, but I don’t think any even come close to that,” Jamberac said, a smile playing across his face. I nodded. “She’s about three weeks out. When she’s on-station here, we’ll be able to breathe a lot easier. And that is when I’ll consider letting you take the combi-drive out of the Fafnir—but I still won’t let a single Usu even touch my ship. They try, and we will respond with force, escalating up to the lethal sort, if necessary. Is that understood?” I looked from Kragdalous to the Usu as I spoke. Kragdalous nodded. “Very well. The combi-drive stays in the Fafnir for the time being.”

Perry, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet throughout, broke his silence and began speaking to the Usu. “As one AI to another, boys, let me just say I know exactly how you think. So, Netty, our ship’s AI, her mobile version, Netty-P, and I are going to be monitoring every single photon of comms that comes out of this place. And if we catch even a whiff of a message to the Jackals, we are going to be all over reporting it to Van—and to Icky.”

She grinned. “Oh, please give it a try. Please.”

The Usu said nothing, which was probably for the best. We left, heading back for the Frankie. Jamberac accompanied us. “That was… pretty impressive, Van. You and your crew have got the whole intimidation thing down,” he said. “I can’t help but feeling, though, that the Iowa is even more effective as a stick, rather than a carrot.”

I shrugged. “I think of her as a whole bunch of big, fat carrots. They can be good for you. But if they fall on you, well, then they’re gonna hurt.”

18

THE NEXT COUPLE of weeks were a sort of slow-motion standoff. I was able to defuse part of it by letting Kragdalous put his non-Usu techs aboard the Fafnir to inspect the combi-drive in situ, dig into its guts, and take readings and measurements to their hearts’ content. It was all done under the keen, unblinking gaze of Netty-P, though, and backed up by the menacing vigilance of Icky. She particularly resented having outsiders poring over the engineering guts of her ship and didn’t hesitate to make that fact known to the Reverie crew. “I’ve got every nut torqued to just where I want it, every setting tweaked to the precise place I need it to be. I will know if you fiddle with anything you shouldn’t as quick as a S’rall irondrake will know if anyone’s stolen even one stone from its gem-horde,” she barked at each and every tech that boarded the Fafnir—

And she did it while glaring at them up and down like a drill instructor inspecting his recruits. And finding them all wanting. “I’ve never heard of a S’rall irondrake. What is that, some sort of creature that… um, collects gemstones?

Really?

There are gems on that godforsaken dustbowl?” I asked her after one particularly robust inquiry on her part. She grinned, then proceeded to dig a spanner in her ear. “Ahhh. Sometimes, you just gotta scratch where it itches. And, boss… I dunno. Just

made it up. Came to me after reading one of those Earth books you keep pushing at me, the one about the little guy who finds advanced stealth tech.”

“The little… what?”

“You know, he’s got hairy feet—which is a plus in his favor right away

—and he finds the ring that incorporates what I think must be some sort of luminal refraction effect, probably bends background light around him—”

“Are you talking about The Hobbit?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. There’s a big monster thing in that that sleeps on a big pile of electronic components, bet it’s real high-end shit, too—”

“The dragon, Smaug?

You think he sleeps on electronic components?”

“Yeah. Gold and crystals, they’ve got a ton of uses, especially all that gold. No oxidation—”

I laughed and clapped her on the shoulder. “I don’t know if old J. R.R. would be charmed or appalled by your take on his story.”

We did have one incident where one of Reverie’s techs strayed away from the combi-drive and started rummaging through a couple of the Fafnir’s systems it interfaced with, which brought Icky’s wrath down upon him like an avalanche of shag blue rage. She demanded that no more outsiders be allowed to touch her systems. Kragdalous complained to me about it. I played diplomat, and the drive inspection resumed, albeit with the techs watching over their shoulders a lot more, and Icky’s scowl right there for them to see. “Talk about toxic work environments,” I said, Perry accompanying me from the Fafnir’s engineering bay to my next task of the day. “Well, they can always complain to OSHA,” Perry replied. “Let’s keep them out of our interstellar transportation issue. Now, if we ever fall off a ladder—”

“I can’t fall off a ladder,” Funboy called out. He was busy with something. Like being glum, but also typing on a data slate. I cut my eyes at Perry, but he gave me a small shake of his head. I sighed. “Hell, I’ll bite. Why can’t you fall off a ladder?

Is it because the fall results in open wounds, which are playgrounds of misery?”

Funboy folded his arms primly. “No, that’s what I think about Gary, Indiana. I refer, of course, to my internal genetic inertial gift, which allows me to maintain my balance at all times, even when hurtling off some death machine like a ladder.”

I stopped and turned back to him, my mouth open in awe. “You’re like a cat?”

He shivered. “Don’t be rude. If I ever lick my own feet, which, despite my hygiene, are hideously dirty, you’ll know it’s a cry for help.”

Perry snorted. “No wonder Alannis went all in. He’s got the balance of a gymnast under that, um, suave exterior.”

Funboy looked down at his data slate, which glowed. “I have work to do. But you may refer to me as suave at any point in the future.”

I began heading back toward our next job. “I’ll get it stitched on your name badge.”

Funboy’s voice rang out again. “I prefer a metal badge—”

“I know. Hygienic,” I called as we moved on down the corridor. “He’s like an onion.”

“Makes me cry now and then,” Perry admitted. “So, yeah. Are we collating data or what?”

“All Netty’s reports. And then some.”

We were watching the heavens around us—closely. Or, more correctly, reviewing the summary reports prepared by Netty, incorporating her own observations using the Fafnir’s scanners with those from Reverie, and any data collected by ships working elsewhere in the system. The Eykinao refining ship, the Belching Profit, was a particularly good source of data. They’d remained at Reverie, gathering and processing materials to fabricate the precision gemstones needed for the combi-drive project. They weren’t as productive as they’d been in the system where they’d broken down, because the raw materials simply weren’t as abundant. But given the existence of the threat from the Jackals and/or the Pleikomas or Tyrants, they were quite content to stay close to the protective firepower of the station and the Fafnir. They also had an insanely powerful scanner suite on board, which, according to the Belching Profit’ s Master, was so they could be aware of trouble long before it reached them. He’d also confided in me that he and his crew didn’t trust the Usu and never had, so he was happy to affirm his commitment to my side in the current tension. I’d thanked him but assured him there were no sides, that we were all on the same one out here. His answer—a flat uh-huh— was delivered so blandly that I knew he understood there were, in fact, sides. And he’d picked the right one. All along, Netty kept an incessant watch, pooling the data from all the various sources and maintaining an ongoing intelligence picture of space surrounding the Reverie system. It was, as it had been since we started the effort, ominously silent. We had absolutely no idea how many Jackals there were—a handful, with only a few ships, or millions able to field entire fleets. Either way, though, there was not even a whiff of them. “I hate this much quiet,” I told Perry. He looked at our reports and made a small noise. “Agreed, boss. This is a barren celestial picture. Like a photo. It’s not changing.”

“Feels like we’re alone, doesn’t it?”

His eyes glowed with interest. “Sure. Just like they want us to think.”

We suspected it was an illusion. As to how much of a lie, that was not yet known. Since they possessed combi-drive tech, the Jackals could twist into the edge of the Reverie system and be within range to attack the station in less than thirty minutes. That dramatically reduced our available reaction time, assuming we even detected them twisting in in the first place. Exacerbating this was the fact that, based on our own experience, ships using the drive were extremely hard to detect. They appeared only as faint, flickering scanner ghosts smeared out along the entire length of their trajectory, which apparently even extended a short distance along their future course. I had Perry, Netty, and Netty-P working with Jamberac on the problem to try to find a way to better resolve a ship in combi-drive transit. Until there was, the only thing we could know about one is that it was coming, and there was nothing we could do about it until it shut the drive down. Which meant that between the sullen, silent resentment of the Usu, and Kragdalous, and the tense forays of Reverie techs aboard the Fafnir under Icky’s hard scrutiny—

It made for a shitty time. And the worst part was, it was a shitty time out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by an endless void that was starting to bear down on us all. THE ARRIVAL of the Iowa changed all of that—mostly. With her imposing bulk and big guns at our disposal, my frayed nerves began to simmer down. In the back of my mind, awareness skulked like a lurking mugger that a sufficiently large force, particularly equipped with combi-drives, could still easily overwhelm us despite the Iowa’s added combat power. Still, I tried not to dwell on that, focusing instead on the good news aspects of her arrival. Plus, there were enthusiastic space-crab-teenagers. Lots of them. “Isn’t she a sight for sore eyes?” Rab said, watching as the battlecruiser’s ponderous mass braked and gently slid to a relative stop a few klicks away from the Fafnir. I nodded, but only briefly. “The question is, what sort of shape is the crew in?

I mean, we’re talking a couple of dozen teenagers cooped up inside that ship with no one for company by themselves for, what, almost four months?”

When we crossed to her in the Frankie to greet Cantullin and the Conoku gang, I braced myself for the place to be a shitshow of bickering, resentment, hurt feelings, and I’m not talking to him!

But the reception was the same one we always got—a gusty gale of excited chatter and babble punctuated by the clatter of claws against the decks and a restless, ceaseless chitinous scratch and scrape. “Captain Van!

We made it!”

“It was a long trip, but we came up with some new moves along the way—”

“They were my idea!”

“No they weren’t. They were all our ideas—!”

“That new corkscrew spin was totally my idea—”

“Only because you stole it from me—!”

I stuck my fingers in my mouth and whistled, the piercing shrill being the only way I’d ever found to reliably get the Conoku to settle down and listen. Sometimes, I felt like a camp counselor for tweakers who could weld. And work with antimatter, but that was neither here nor there—

“I want to say hello to everyone, to all of you, and welcome you all to Reverie,” I said. It was hard not to grin at the thrum of barely restrained excitement. “Torina is going to brief you guys on the situation here, while Icky, Rab, and I look over the ship.”

“The ship’s in great shape—!”

“I’m sure it is,” I said in my most robust tone, cutting off what would no doubt be a torrent of exclamations about just how great the ship’s condition was. “But I wouldn’t be a very good captain if I didn’t do an inspection after a months-long flight, would I?”

That seemed to mollify them, as a sort of clacking hum fell over the group. Torina called them all together in the cargo bay, so she didn’t have to talk to them all jammed up in the corridors leading to the airlock. Funboy and Gabby assisted her, while the rest of us did a walk-through. It didn’t take long to conclude there was absolutely nothing wrong. When I was in the Army, early in our training we were given a tour of the base stockade, a sort of “scared straight” tactic for new recruits. The place had been insanely clean, mainly because inmates spent a lot of their day wiping and scrubbing, even getting into corners and crannies with old toothbrushes. The Iowa was cleaner than that. Mechanically, she was in even better shape. Icky declared that not only was every conceivable maintenance task done, but it had also been done to an impeccable standard, and, in some cases, even improved on the baseline she’d set. She stopped to marvel at a conduit junction in one of the corridors. “They’ve rerouted an extra system through this junction, a low-priority one,” she said, tracing a finger along a conduit marked with an alphanumeric code to identify it. “That’ll really save time if they ever need to route power from it to another of these more critical systems.”

“So that’s a good thing?” I asked her. “Let’s put it this way. I wish I’d thought of it.”

By the time we were done, it was clear that the Conoku had brought the Iowa on-station with flying colors. Their collective psychology seemed to suit long periods crammed together aboard a spaceship. Gabby had a possible, and reasonable, explanation as to why. “They constantly bicker and fight and argue, right?

So they’re not afraid to vent. They don’t sit around and stew about things. They just say what’s on their mind. I think they also challenge one another to be better, so they’ve got this constant friendly rivalry going on. If one of them cleans or fixes something, others are going to clean and fix their own things even better, just to one-up them,” she said as we met her and the others coming out of the cargo bay and started back to the Frankie. I gave Gabby an appreciative look. “I didn’t know you were a student of psychology.”

“When I was helping Ralston do his hairstyling—”

“Excuse me, you were doing the styling. He was just taking the credit for it,” Funboy put in. I glanced at him. “Are you growing a mullet?”

“Gabby says it suits me.”

“It’s like Billy Ray Cyrus, if he sang funeral dirges,” Perry said. “Anyway, Gabby, you were saying?” I asked. “Oh. Right. Anyway, I had a chance to watch Ralston interacting with his clients. I saw a lot of different ways for people to behave. It got me interested in that psychology stuff.”

“Awesome. And I think you’re spot-on about the Conoku. However they manage it, however chaotic and dysfunctional they look from the outside, it clearly works for them—”

“Captain Van!”

I turned to find Cantullin scuttling—literally—after me. “Yes, Captain Cantullin, what’s up?”

Her carapace flushed a deeper pink, a Conoku sign of pride, presumably at being called Captain. “I just wanted to ask, now that we’re here, when do we get to start work on the new drive?”

“Oh. Well, right now we don’t have any plans to install a combi-drive in the Iowa. There isn’t another operating one available, for one thing.”

“We know that. We want to know when we can start building one for the Iowa.”

“Building one?” I shook my head. “What are you talking about?”

“Betty showed us the schematics for it once we arrived here. We all looked at them as we came in-system from the twist point. It seems pretty straightforward.”

I stopped and turned. “Wait. Cantullin, are you saying that you guys think you could build a combi-drive?

From scratch?”

“Does a Conoku molt in the shower?”

“Beats the hell outta me,” I answered. “But I’ll take that as a yes.”

ICKY SHRUGGED. “Yeah, I can see it. Those Conoku are damned clever, and they’re natural craftsmen. If they say they could build one, I believe ’em.”

“There’s probably a reason the preeminent Starsmiths are Conoku,” Rab said. “The bigger question is, do we let them?

As clever and handy as they are, we’re talking about letting them engineer an experimental technology that’s powered by antimatter. If something goes wrong—”

“These guys out here at Reverie had to build it for the first time too, right?” Icky said. “I have to admit, the idea intrigues me. If we can build one of these things ourselves, that could be a game changer,” I said. “True, but how do you think Kragdalous is going to react if we start building combi-drives of our own?” Funboy put in. “To put it another way, are you ready for a showdown with Kragdalous if he objects?” Torina asked me. I frowned and stared at the deck for a moment. On the one hand, I was a member of the 32, the group for whom Kragdalous technically worked, via his secondment into the Armory, who also worked for the 32.

If I wanted to go ahead and build my own combi-drive, there wasn’t much he could do to stop me. On the other hand, I’d gone to that well once already to enable my decision to keep the combi-drive installed in the Fafnir. Standing against his authority as Director of Reverie and the Hodgepodge project had clearly stung him, at least a little, and I didn’t want to antagonize him too much, or worse, turn him into an enemy. “For now, we’ll let the Conoku put together a plan,” I finally decided. “I don’t want them to actually build anything, not yet, and not until I give the go-ahead—which I may not. If they want, they can build a virtual version and run it through simulations. There should be enough data available to do that. Icky, I’d like you to work with them—”

“Uh, Van?

Maybe you should get someone else to do that,” she said. I frowned. Was Icky feeling outclassed by the Conoku?

I hoped not, because her brilliance as an engineer was entirely separate from theirs. I opened my mouth to say so, but she went on, sidetracking that thought entirely. “When we got back from the Iowa, there was a message waiting for me from my dad. He’s about a week and a half away now. But he said that I

have to contact Paxomar because we have to agree on a time and date for a hearing with the law director assigned to our case sometime in the next three days, and the hearing has to be sometime in the next forty-four days.”

“Forty-four days?

That’s an odd number,” Torina said. I spun on Perry. “Don’t bother, bird, we know—forty-four is an even number, not an odd one.”

Perry stared at me. “What?

I wasn’t going to—”

“Point that out in some smart-assed way?

Yes, you were.”

He shrugged his wings. “Okay, I was.”

Torina chuckled. “You two are finishing one another’s sentences. I think you’re spending too much time together.”

“No we’re not!” we both replied simultaneously—then glared at each other. Icky spoke up, her tone irritated. “Anyway, if we can get back to my thing, it’s forty-four days because that number is special in some weird, legal way on Wu’tzur. I have to give a—disposition?

Demonstration?”

“Deposition?” I asked. “Yeah, that’s it.” She turned to Perry. “So if you’ve got anything that can help us, bird—”

“I’m working on it. I got lost for a while in the halls of Wu’tzur bureaucracy—oh, and as an aside, for a race of hulking, four-armed muscle-bound goobers, you guys really do love your paperwork and flowery language,” he said. Icky sniffed. “Tell me about it.”

“Anyway, since I didn’t want to spend enough antimatter to twist to the Andromeda Galaxy and back just trying to source ancient Wu’tzur legal documents, I went to a better source: Bester. “Every Charter signatory to the Peacemaker Guild was required to file, with the Guild, a complete set of all of their extant laws. They’re the only ones the Guild is bound to enforce on their behalf, and if a signatory like the Wu’tzur wants to revise existing laws, add new ones, or repeal old ones and expect the Guild to recognize them, the onus is on them to do it and update our archives.”

“So he had what you needed?” I asked. “Yup. He has a complete archive of all Wu’tzur laws and relevant legal documents. Lots of them. Lots and lots of them. Lots and lots and lots of—”

“We get the idea. What did you find?” Icky asked eagerly. “Lots of things. Lots and lots of things—”

“Perry,” I groaned. “But nothing of relevance, at least not yet.”

Icky slumped in defeat. “You’re an AI. If you didn’t find anything in a microsecond, then there isn’t anything.”

“Yeah, you’d think so, but it’s not that straightforward. Nearly thirty thousand pages of the stuff he sent were scans of hard-copy documents. They’re pictures of writing, not the writing itself. That means I have to physically download every one of them and run character recognition to turn them into live data I can search. That takes time—even for me. I’m about two-thirds done—”

“So what the hell are we standing around here jabbering for?

Get to work and find me a loophole!” Icky said. Perry turned to me. “Remember what I was saying about toxic work environments?

I just want to say that these sorts of demands are—”

“Complain to OSHA,” I replied to him, smiling. He sighed. “There’s that petard again.”

FOR WEEKS, we’d essentially been sitting and watching the stars for signs of the Jackals in one direction, over my shoulder at the Usu in another, and sidelong at Kragdalous to make sure his resentment wasn’t going to come back and bite us. It had been a dreary grind of stressful tedium. Then, with the arrival of the Iowa, the floodgates seemed to break open—

And the results were frenetic. The Conoku had a working virtual model of their own combi-drive in just a couple of days. The process had, based on how Rab described it, resembled a high school gym class crashing around the locker room in a frantic hurry to get dressed before their next period. But the result had been a slick piece of tech that could poke and prod at the laws of physics, whipping space-time itself into mute submission. Kragdalous again started to make noise about removing the combi-drive from the Fafnir. He became my biggest challenge, playing diplomat to keep him happy when he was clearly starting to feel I was trying to usurp his position. Jamberac confided that Kragdalous had put in a call to Gerhardt to

get him to get me to back off but hadn’t got a reply yet. I decided I’d just deal with that if and when it came up. I had absolutely no desire to supplant Kragdalous, but I still couldn’t seem to get him to grasp the full menace of our situation. He wanted to brush aside concerns about the Jackals as overblown, while I couldn’t forget them, even for an instant. Icky and Paxomar set up their hearing with the Wu’tzur legal director, which would happen in one more day. Kragdalous was starting to complain about that, too—the amount of antimatter we were burning in twist comms back to known space. I really couldn’t disagree with him. We were consuming something that, on Earth, had only been glimpsed as intriguing flickers in the data from places like CERN, in order to get a civil dispute over a marriage adjudicated across a thousand light-years of space. I was able to pacify him somewhat by agreeing to relay our traffic through the Nemesis, which was still en route. Urnak had loaded up on antimatter storage pods and had the stuff to burn. And Icky’s dad was, even at a distance, in something I recognized as Full Dad Mode. If he’d arrived wearing New Balance sneakers and cargo shorts with a flip phone—because you don’t waste money on fancy things, you know—he wouldn’t have been more Dad. But for Icky, there was no limit to resources. Or caring. Or worry. And amid all of this, the Jackals finally appeared. Naturally, it was dramatic. 19

NETTY SIGNALED me while Rab and Cantullin were talking me through the simulated combi-drive assembled by the Conoku. Cantullin was indicating a point on a holographic diagram of the drive with the tip of a claw. “Right here, we’ve still got a bottleneck in the plasma flow from the auxiliary annihilator core. There’s some turbulence in the flow we’re having trouble getting rid of, and it’s really reducing—”

“Van, a ship just twisted into the system, then activated a combi-drive. It’s coming this way,” Netty said. I cursed, low and savage. “How long until it arrives?”

“Based on the performance data I’ve gathered from the Fafnir and the N3, plus what Reverie has shared with us, maybe twenty minutes, give or take?

Sorry, there’s still a lot of uncertainty I’m stuck working with.”

I glanced at Rab. “Too long to get back to the Fafnir. Netty, is Torina aboard?”

“I am, Van,” Torina cut in. “Just poured myself a cup of sweet, sweet coffee. I’m on my way to the cockpit.”

I allowed myself a smile. Torina had become a bit of a coffee addict and had gone through some grumpy withdrawal when the available supply pretty much dried up. The arrival of the Iowa had brought a new infusion of java to our remote corner of space, and now she was pretty much bathing in bean water. I opened my mouth but paused as the Iowa’s action station’s alert blared. Conoku began scrambling around and past us, their usual chattery,

enthusiastic bumbling abruptly replaced by silent, focused purpose. It was… jarring, to see such a shift. But damn if I didn’t appreciate it. They weren’t kids. They were sailors. The alarm cut out as Rab peeled off, heading for the Frankie. Cantullin and I climbed up a manway, the quickest route to the Iowa’s bridge. I resumed talking as I climbed. “Okay, get underway as soon as you can. As much as possible, we have to stick to the gunnery plan we’ve worked out with Reverie, keep our fires integrated.” I started walking, Cantullin right behind me. “I’m staying aboard the Iowa, heading for the bridge now. I’m going to get Rab to cast off the Frankie and move her safely out of the way.”

“Got it. Oh, we still have a tech crew from Reverie aboard, apparently making plans to remove the combi-drive. I haven’t let them start unfastening or unbolting anything yet, though.”

“Good. Is the drive online?”

“It is, yes. I just confirmed it with them.”

“Good. Don’t be afraid to use it. Oh, and weapons-free at your discretion, Torina.”

“What should I do with these techs?

Get them off the ship?”

I reached the top of the manway. Cantullin scuttled up behind me in a flurry of scrabbling claws, and we both stepped onto the bridge. “No time. Get them strapped in somewhere, then tell them to just hang on and watch closely. They’re about to see their precious drive in action.”

WE RAMPED all of our scanners from every available ship to full power in active mode, hammering the Reverie system and the space around it with twist-enabled vigilance. It burned yet more of our increasingly precious stocks of antimatter. That was a worrisome state of affairs I’d never encountered before because antimatter was plentiful and available all over the place in known space. Out here, Reverie could only manufacture so much, and we were consuming it faster. Without the substantial replenishments brought by the Iowa and the Nemesis, we’d actually be in serious danger of running out. And no antimatter would leave us not just stranded, but also deaf, dumb, and blind. Still, we were going to have to start using it more judiciously—or such was the mental note I filed about it, anyway, as I watched the ghostly, shimmering thread that marked the path of the approaching ship on the Iowa’s big tactical overlay. That was a bit of a novelty. Going from the small display in the Fafnir’s cockpit to this big one in the Iowa’s expansive bridge was like watching a movie at home, on your TV, then watching it again in an IMAX theater. “Betty, still no sign of any other ships?” I asked. “None. Unless they’re using some sort of stealth tech we’re not equipped to see through, even at full active scanner power, then this single ship is the extent of the incursion.”

“Maybe it’s reconnaissance,” Cantullin suggested. I nodded. “Maybe. I guess we’ll see in… any second now.”

We stared at the overlay, at the flickering tendril of the ship’s combi-drive wake. I imagined similar scenes playing aboard the Fafnir, Reverie station, and the N3, which had been hastily pulled out of a service gantry to at least get her away from the station, even if a lot of her systems were in pieces and she wasn’t really in a state to fight—

The incoming ship abruptly appeared some distance beyond the last vestiges of its gravitational wake. Given that we often saw a future echo of a ship’s trajectory while using a combi-drive, we’d expected it to pop back into normal space further away than it did. That was a lesson unto itself—

the future-course thing wasn’t reliable. It left us all scrambling to reorient on the ship and light it up with our fire control scanners. “There you are, you bastard,” I muttered, taking in what was clearly a Jackal ship—four of the faceted, spherical modules this time, which meant we were actually facing as many as four threats. The Jackals had a clear shot at the station—or did, at least until Torina lit the Fafnir’s combi-drive and blurred herself into a blocking position. “Should we open fire, Captain Van?” Cantullin asked. I frowned at the overlay. The Jackal ship simply coasted through space for a moment, but it didn’t open fire. Instead, it abruptly blurred away again and returned to normal space just a few seconds later, with a clear shot at the station. This time, though, it fired a stream of hypervelocity mass-driver slugs at Reverie. The Fafnir vanished, then reappeared again only a couple thousand klicks from the Jackals and opened fire with her plasma-burst and particle cannons. I thought I saw a hit, but the Jackals abruptly winked out

of existence again, their wake propagating straight up relative to the ecliptic and out of the system. The mass-driver barrage directed at Reverie proved beyond the station’s point defenses ability to entirely stop. Four rounds hit, slamming into seemingly random parts of the station with bright flashes of massive kinetic energy suddenly converted to heat. I tensed, waiting for the damage control report. “Reverie reports minor damage only, mainly decompression in one compartment, which has been sealed off,” Betty reported. “We never even shot at them!” Cantullin said. I glanced at her. “That’s because we didn’t need to.”

“But they attacked us!”

I shook my head. “No, that wasn’t an attack.”

“Then what was it?”

“It was a declaration of war.”

THE JACKAL RAID had at least one positive outcome. Kragdalous was no longer agitated to have the combi-drive removed from the Fafnir. Her ability to maneuver as fast as the Jackals convinced him in one moment. He needed the Fafnir mobile and armed. He’d also softened on the issue of building our own combi-drive aboard the Iowa. His initial reaction had been a flat refusal to even entertain the idea, but after the attack, he was willing to have his techs check over the Conoku design. “It’s going to depend on them, and whether they see the design as viable. If there’s any doubt, though—” he started when I met him in his office, but I cut him off. “If there’s any doubt, then we’ll deal with it. In the meantime, I’m going to tell the Conoku to start gathering what they need, basic components, get whatever they want fabricated started—”

“That’s premature, Van,” Kragdalous said, his words clipped. I suppressed a frustrated sigh. With effort. Kragdalous was a gifted engineer and fundamentally good at heart. I didn’t think for a moment that he was somehow corrupt or duplicitous—if anything, he was probably

guilty of being a little naïve. But he also wasn’t a field soldier. He was, to use a term I’d learned from my Army days, a REMF, a rear-echelon enlistee of capable—but limited—range. Not that it was necessarily a bad thing, since it was REMFs who kept the beans, bullets, and postcards from home flowing to the troops at the sharp end. But even as much as the Jackal attack had clearly unnerved him, Kragdalous still had trouble appreciating or accepting the true extent of the threat. So I worked to keep my tone from being an exasperated one. “I don’t think it is, Kragdalous. The Iowa’s a powerful ship. You saw her performance stats. But the combi-drive gives the Jackals an enormous advantage, one that probably completely offsets any advantage she gives us. I had Cantullin and her crew crunch the numbers, and based on how that Jackal ship behaved when it attacked, they’ve got about ten seconds, tops, to come up with a firing solution and engage that sort of target. In the meantime, she’s liable to be swarmed by Jackal ships she’ll barely be able to shoot at while getting shot at a lot in return. And you saw how potent those Jackal mass-driver slugs were. In fact, I suspect the only reason the Jackals didn’t stay a little longer to play was because the Fafnir could match it maneuver for maneuver.”

I could see Kragdalous wilt a little as the truth sank in. He finally slumped back in his chair. “You know, when I accepted this assignment, I thought it was going to just be a particularly interesting and challenging engineering project.” He stared into space for a moment, then turned back to me. “We’re at war, aren’t we?”

“Like it or not, yeah, we are.”

“Okay. I still want my techs to review your Conoku crew’s design and sign off before they start actually building the thing. There’s no point readying ourselves to fight these Jackals if we rip this station and our own ships apart with unintended gravitational effects in the process, is there?”

I had to nod. “No, there isn’t. There is one other thing, though.”

His frown told me that the last thing he wanted to deal with was one other thing, but he sat up anyway. “What’s that?”

“It’s the N3.

She’s potentially a capable, even potent warship, but treating her primarily as a test bed for the combi-drive is holding her back. Priority needs to be shifted to getting her armed and ready to fight. And then there’s the N1.”

“She’s not a warship, Van, nor was she ever intended to be.”

“No, but she’s a combi-drive as well. We arm her, as much as we can, and use her for things like scouting.”

“I’ll talk to Jamberac about getting the N1 and the N3 both into action.”

“Thank you. Truly.”

Kragdalous gave me a narrow-eyed stare. “There’s actually one more thing, isn’t there?”

I rubbed my neck, forming the words. “Yeah. It’s the Usu. They shouldn’t be involved in any of this—not working on the N1 or the N3, and certainly not coming anywhere near my ships.”

“The Usu constitute nearly a third of my available operational personnel. What do you want me to do, have them form a chess club?”

I grinned despite the tension of the moment, but it didn’t last. “If I had my way, we’d just send them all away. Since we can’t, then they should be used in whatever capacity involves them having the least possible access to any mission-critical systems, both here on the station and aboard any of the ships.”

“We’ve got no evidence that they’re suspect as a group, Van. We’ve got exactly one of them in custody. You want us to treat them like people, but then in the next breath you want us to smear the apparent guilt of one across them all. That’s… inconsistent, don’t you think?”

I shook my head. “I’m not saying to round them all up and throw them in the brig. That would be wrong. But like you said, we’re at war. And sometimes, during war, you have to make tough decisions about who you’re going to trust the most—and who you’re not going to trust quite so much.”

“Van—”

“Our Usu suspect is implicated in covert dealings with the Jackals, the same group with whom we are, as far as we know, now at war. We know the Usu are able to share data—that’s part of what makes them such good techs. So how likely is that the rest of the Usu weren’t at least aware of what their wayward fellow was up to?”

“But we have no evidence!”

“No, but we do have reasonable cause for concern. Seriously, Kragdalous, do you want to stake our survival out here on the integrity of the Usu?”

He held my gaze, his eyes, big and dark like a seal’s, boring into mine. “Do you really believe the Usu pose that much of a threat?” he asked. “No. But do I believe that they might?

Yes, I do. Now, if we were in known space, at Anvil Dark or the Armory or somewhere similar, that would be one thing. But we’re out here in the middle of nowhere, with our collective asses hanging bare in the breeze and ready to be kicked. So that might is enough for us to act with an abundance of caution.”

Kragdalous sank back again and nodded. “It’s going to make things difficult. Not only will we have to shuffle things to put the Usu to work on non-mission-critical tasks, but based on what you’re saying, we’re also going to need to keep a security presence watching over them.”

“Unfortunately, we are, yeah.”

He nodded. “Leave it with me.”

I nodded right back. “Again, thank you, Kragdalous.”

“You know, Van, this job was a lot more fun before you got here.”

I smiled. “Hey, look at the bright side—now you’ll qualify for a combat bonus to your pay,” I said. “That’s only a bright side if I live long enough to spend it.”

IF THE DAYS leading up to the Jackals’ raid had been boring and stressful, the days following it were even worse. Until they’d attacked, we could at least entertain the possibility that some unbreakable cultural or religious taboo prevented them from leaving whatever they defined as their territory. But that clearly wasn’t true. So, now, we scrambled to get ourselves battle ready, all while burning yet more of our dwindling antimatter stores to keep constant watch on the heavens around us. If the Jackals attacked again in force, then between scanners, comms, and fuel for the combi-drives—assuming we survived, of course—our antimatter reserves would be reduced to whatever we had aboard the Iowa. We even consulted with the Eykinao to see if they could repurpose the Belching Profit to produce antimatter—and they could, but only after weeks of work to fabricate the required facilities and get them running safely. Cutting corners on producing something that immediately

turned itself and an equivalent volume of matter to E=mc2 worth of raw energy was not something you really wanted to do. Torina, like me, agreed that when it came to antimatter, less boom was better. As to the rest of my crew, our thoughts on boom were none of their business. The ensuing days passed with such deep and pervasive tension that I found it hard to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time. I’d entered that curious twilight of exhaustion, sort of the feeling you have leaving your first Mardi Gras. You’re tired, worn out, and frayed down to the cellular level. The difference now was I felt all those things, and I hadn’t had any fun. I sure as hell hadn’t seen an array of boobs—well, not unless you count Funboy and Icky, and they weren’t the right kind—and I had no beads, no trinkets, and no king cake. It was, to sum up, a bad time. I was surly, to boot, and it was the worst possible time for some officious idiot to start flexing their bureaucratic bullshit—but that’s what happened. My reaction was not good. In fact, it was unbecoming an officer. Or anyone else, for that matter. And I was just getting warmed up. 20

“FOUCK?

HER NAME IS FOUCK?” I asked, striding along a corridor aboard the Reverie station and glaring at Rab. He nodded. “She’s a S’rall, the Reverie quartermaster, and apparently utterly devoted to not giving people the things they want or need,” he replied. Perry, listening in on the comm, spoke up. “Heh. Fouck. She’s one vowel away from—”

“We get it Perry, yeah,” I snapped, reaching behind me to adjust my helmet, which was bouncing against my butt as I walked. Because of the threat level, I’d given orders for the crews of both the Fafnir and the Iowa to remain suited up. I wanted helmets in reach at all times, except for when showering or answering sundry calls of nature. The Jackals could attack at any time and with scant warning, meaning we didn’t have the luxury of pulling on b-suits and vac-suits at leisure. The gap between detecting them and facing an explosive decompression from Jackal fire might only be measured in minutes, maybe even seconds. That meant I’d been wearing my b-suit almost constantly for three days. And while it was designed to be comfortable, there were limits. I was hot, and itchy, and it was nearly impossible to scratch through a b-suit. Plus my stupid helmet didn’t want to stay in place and kept shifting awkwardly against my backside. So I wasn’t in the mood for officious REMFs—and I did mean the term derisively, this time—and their chickenshit games. As I strode toward the Reverie quartermaster stores, a memory flashed

—walking into a similar stores while in the Army and reading a laser-

printed sign the supply sergeant had taped to the front of the counter. But if I give it to you, then I won’t have it. The Sergeant, a curmudgeonly old fart, had nonetheless actually been quite helpful and even occasionally generous, his sign obviously tongue-in-cheek. When a buddy of mine had lost an expensive rain jacket, the grumpy old Sergeant had produced a new one for him out of his private cache of goodies with a wink, and in return for a few minor favors. It had saved my friend a lot of expense and hassle, as well as a lot of paperwork. Fouck was nothing like that. Rab met me outside the Reverie quartermaster’s shop. He had Cantullin and three other Conoku with him, and he gave me a grim nod. “I gotta warn you, Van, she’s a real piece of work. Bad-tempered, officious—”

“Rude!” Cantullin put in. “—petty—”

“Rude!”

“Totally rude!”

Rab smiled sidelong at the Conoku. “Oh, and she’s rude.”

I nodded but frowned as I did. I hadn’t dealt much with the S’rall, aside from the princess we rescued years prior from the identity theft ring and restored to an organic body. She was a close and reliable ally—but, as I let the memory unwind, I also recalled the S’rall generally being a dour, suspicious, and even sometimes xenophobic people. A complex set of religious beliefs few non-S’rall even understood wound through their culture, apparently carrying a message along the lines of the S’rall being the naturally preeminent race over all others. Fortunately, our Princess was far more progressive than that and worked hard to better integrate the S’rall into known space as a less insular and more influential player. But old habits died hard. My gut instinct was to charge into the stores, all metaphorical guns blazing. But I took a deep breath, then arranged my face into a bland smile

—the kind people wear during insurance seminars in Des Moines. I suspected that this Fouck had been confronted by more than a few irate would-be customers in her time, and outright bluster and intimidation wouldn’t budge her. In fact, it would probably just harden her resistance and end up being counterproductive. “You guys come on in with me,” I said, then spun on the Conoku. “But you let me do the talking, got it?”

“Yes, Captain Van.”

I turned and entered the quartermaster stores. It was a cavernous space two decks high, full of racks and racks of deck to overhead shelves. Each sported a robotic picker that could roll along the shelving, as well as up and down, to retrieve crates and pallets and bring them to a delivery area beside a long counter. There were no tongue-in-cheek signs here, just warnings about not going behind the counter and admonishments about having the correct requisitions properly completed before even contemplating engaging with the staff, all backed up by references to specific regulations and protocols. A solitary figure stood behind the counter, as stark and rigid as the stern bureaucratic warnings posted all around. She wore something similar to a b-suit, but grey, and sported thick, dark goggles. The S’rall homeworld was pretty much a planet-sized Mojave Desert, meaning they typically sported various bits of environmental gear when they went off-world. But it didn’t look as though I’d interrupted her in the middle of actually doing anything. It was just that when she wasn’t actually being obstructive to somebody, she spent her time standing, staring at the door, and awaiting the arrival of the next person she could say no to. I fixed my watery smile on her. “Quartermaster Fouck, I presume.”

She nodded. “I am. And before you begin exhorting who you are and the dire situation we’re in, Peacemaker Tudor, let me say that I do not care. The policies and procedures I follow are all that stand between orderly operations of this station and chaos. So yes, I understand that we are under immediate threat of attack. That’s only more reason to maintain order and discipline in the way we conduct ourselves and our business.”

I stared at her for a moment, blinking. “Nice to meet you, as well.”

She stared flatly back for a moment, then removed her goggles and squinted while she wiped them. She placed them back over her eyes. “Attempting to be charming won’t work, either.” I opened my mouth, but she cut me off. “Nor will attempting to pull rank on me. Yes, I’m aware that you’re a member of the 32.

However, I was given the terms of reference for my job by Mother Hen at the Armory, who is my immediate superior. If you wish for those terms to be changed, then direct her to do so, whereupon she may direct me to do so.”

“You work for Mother Hen?

Not Director Kragdalous?”

She actually allowed herself a thin flicker of smile. “I am responsible to Mother Hen. I am responsive to the director. As for you, Peacemaker, I will respond to you.”

That’s Fouck’s way of, um, telling you to Fouck yourself, Van, Perry said in my ear, referring to Fouck’s name. I worked at resisting a scowl. I worked even harder at resisting a sudden, outright flash of incandescent anger. Instead, I maintained my insincere smile. “Alright, then how about responding to me right now. Why, exactly, aren’t you going to give us the items we need?”

“Because procedures haven’t been properly followed—”

“Rab, did you fill out the requisition forms as required?”

“I did, yes,” he replied. “Apparently, there were errors.”

“Which means that they weren’t done properly, doesn’t it?” Fouck said. “Did you fix the errors?” I asked him. “I did.”

“But?”

“But there were apparently still errors.”

Fouck crossed her arms. “So it still wasn’t done properly, was it?”

Despite my best efforts, my anger was starting to poke through my restraint. “You know, Quartermaster Fouck, I somehow doubt that the Jackals are going to be much interested in proper procedures when they board this station, break in here, and plunder the ever living shit out of your stores.”

“Then I guess you had better prevent that from happening, hadn’t you?”

Fouck replied, her thin smile returning. That smile told me all I needed to know about her. She’d been thwarted at some point in her life, thwarted from getting something—a title, a position, a job, something—that she’d desperately wanted. Now, she used her position here as a one-room dictator, reveling in her imagined power as an antidote to whatever had once bitterly frustrated her. She enjoyed this. She enjoyed making people jump through her hoops, and when they finally succeeded, she undoubtedly made it clear she was only acceding to them as a favor. And the worst part was that she was clinging to her petty little empire of bullshit despite the existential threat we faced, because it was more important to her than anything else. Even if it directly ground away at her

own best interests—not to mention everyone else’s—she stubbornly wouldn’t relinquish this little vestige of power she’d managed to grab. “Peacemaker Tudor, you might think that I’m being unreasonable, but we’re far, far out in the black, here. Every item in these stores”—she gestured behind her, at the forest of shelves—“is an item that we can’t simply replace from another source. Our supply chain back to known space is gossamer thin. That means my job is to ensure that every fastener and cable run is going to an essential use—”

“Quartermaster Fouck, I would not be here, spending time standing in front of your counter, if the items we want weren’t essential. And by essential, I mean essential to our survival—”

“I believe you. It shouldn’t be difficult, then, for you and your people to follow the proper procedures, so that all of that is documented, justified, and signed off by the appropriate levels of authority.”

I glanced down at my feet. This was getting us nowhere. She was never going to budge. But I also realized I wasn’t going to walk away from here with no for an answer. That meant I was going to have to do the last thing I wanted to and execute an armed takeover of these stores to take what we needed. Kragdalous would be rightly furious, and it would just strain our relationship even more. But I was not going to let a frustrated and officious functionary stand in the way of keeping all of us alive—

Do you want me to send Icky and the others to back you up?

Perry asked as though reading my mind. I almost reached for The Drop. Almost. Rab must have sensed it because I felt him stiffen. So, apparently, did Fouck, who chose that instant to speak, her face twisting into a smug leer. “And if you’re thinking of trying to lean on me, Peacemaker, well, you’re not the first waste of atmo to try,” she snapped. Cantullin and the other Conoku surged forward, but I held out a hand, stopping them. Somehow, Fouck’s casual insult, born of a supreme confidence she apparently felt while standing in her own little realm, wiped away my imminent explosion of fury. Moreover, another angle to all of this had just occurred to me, another bird we could whack with a single stone. So, instead of drawing The Drop, I just looked up at her and smiled. “Maybe not, but I will be the last. Rab, is this compartment essential to the structural integrity of this station?”

He hesitated a moment. “Is it—I’m sorry, what?”

“This compartment. If it and everything in it were destroyed, would that be catastrophic for Reverie station itself?”

He glanced around. “Uh—well, it wouldn’t be great for the station, but it wouldn’t be catastrophic, no. It’s a big empty space, so all of the structural load is carried by the hull components around it.”

I kept my smile on Fouck, whose own smile had started to falter. “And I assume we’re close to the station’s outer hull, right?” I asked. “We are, yes. There’s a big airlock in the back to facilitate loading and unloading ships—what are you getting at, Van?”

“Well, since Quartermaster Fouck here is unwilling to accede to our demands in a timely manner and facilitate the defense of this station, then she and her stores are superfluous. When we get back to the Fafnir, I want the integrated fire-control plan we developed to exclude any point defense of this part of the station and concentrate instead on parts that are essential.”

Fouck bristled. “You can’t do that. Director Kragdalous will—”

“Oh, but I can. As the senior ranking Peacemaker and GKU officer present, I am responsible for the conduct of combat operations involving this station and the ships present. Kragdalous is responsive to me in that regard. So, if I want the fire-control plan tweaked such that any ordnance fired at this station isn’t going to be intercepted and will come crashing through that bulkhead over there—” I shrugged. “We’re a long way from known space. I need to know that every piece of ammunition and every particle of antimatter is going to an essential use.”

My usual tactic at this point was a mic drop, turn away, and make like I was leaving. But I sensed it was going to take her a moment to finally cave, so I just crossed my own arms and waited, staring at her with the same dumbly insolent smile I’d kept on my face this whole time. Fouck stared defiantly back. I finally shrugged and turned away. “I’m not wasting any more time here. Got more important things to do,”

I said, heading for the door. The others fell in behind me. “She’s so rude!” Cantullin hissed. As I stepped back in the corridor, I actually thought that Fouck was going to remain so incredibly, doggedly stubborn that I might have to come back and seize the quartermaster stores by force after all—because I was not taking no for an answer. Before I could get out of earshot, though, I heard a call from behind me. “Peacemaker Tudor.”

I stopped, turned, and stood in the doorway, my face an absolute cipher. “Suppose I… allow you to take what you need, but only with the condition that you will then fill out all requisite paperwork and conform to all procedural requirements, and do so properly.”

Just as I fought to keep my anger from cutting loose, I worked to keep my expression from turning smug or self-satisfied. Apparently, Fouck’s sense of self-preservation was stronger than her dedication to whatever power she perceived that she had. But I also knew that this was as good as it was going to get. I let my eyes roam over her, taking in the slight inward collapse of her body. She was diminished. This room was her life. It was her purpose. I was many things, but I was not cruel. At least, not often. I titled my head. “I can work with that. Thank you, Quartermaster Fouck.”

I turned to Rab and the Conoku and began speaking in crisp, rapid-fire orders as if Fouck was no longer there. In a sense, she wasn’t. “Go get whatever you guys need. Nothing less, but nothing more, either. Whatever you grab, you’re going to have to be able to justify as essential to building the combi-drive, got it?”

“We’ve got it, Captain Van!” Cantullin said, saluting. Then she and the other Conoku scuttled off in a machine-gun rattle of claws against the deck, swarmed past the counter and among the racks, and climbed them as easily as monkeys scaling a tree. Fouck stood horror-stricken for a moment, then tore after them. “No!

Wait!

I’ll retrieve what you need—you don’t have to go looking—no, put that back!”

I smiled, then turned to Rab. “Better reign them in, Rab—in a few minutes.”

He grinned back. “Will do. I’ll also get the Frankie and dock her to the loading airlock at the back of this storeroom, so we can—”

“Actually, no. Whatever you need, carry it back to the Frankie where she’s docked now.”

He stared. “Why?

It’ll be faster and easier—”

“Please, Rab. Indulge me.”

Now he frowned and gave me a curious look. “People are going to see us carrying components through the station on our way to the Frankie.”

“I know.”

“So what if they ask what we’re planning to use them for?”

“Tell them.”

“That we’re building our own combi-drive aboard the Iowa?”

“Exactly.”

His eyes narrowed, but he nodded. “Whatever you say, boss.”

I turned and headed for my next stop, a quick meeting with Kragdalous to explain exactly what had just happened. I wasn’t looking for his approval or intending to apologize, I just wanted to be transparent with him about it. “Boss, are you letting this all happen in public for a reason?” Perry asked, this time over the open comm. “If you’re asking me if our combi-drive project is being used as bait, then yes. Yes, it is. I don’t trust the Usu, and—” I glanced around as I walked, ensuring no one was in earshot. “And I sure as hell don’t trust this place. That means I’m also going to want everyone—the crew of the Fafnir and the Iowa—to gun themselves up like battlewagons if they aren’t already.”

“You’re trying to flush out a rat.”

“Wrong type of rodent, Perry. I’m looking to flush out a mole.”

“Great line, but not entirely accurate. Rats are from the order rodentia. Moles are order insectivora, which means they aren’t rodents.”

“That’s—oh, who cares, Perry?”

“You will, Van. In fact, you will adore my attention to excruciating detail. You will even celebrate it.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I have finished scanning, translating, and analyzing that mind-numbing stack of ancient Wu’tzur legal texts I told you guys about.”

I slowed. “Did you find anything?”

“I found lots of things. Did you know it’s illegal for Wu’tzur to leave more than one lantern lit on a river barge when it’s tied up at a wharf for more than—?”

“Perry, I’m running on fumes, here. Let’s stipulate that you’ve said smart-assed, witty things and I’ve appropriately appreciated them. Hell, add in a chuckle, maybe even a hearty guffaw. But for the love of my sanity, get

to it, bird. Did you find anything useful?

Anything that could help Icky and Paxomar?”

He preened in a way that let me know he hadn’t found success. He’d found triumph. “I did, and you’re gonna love it.”

21

ALARM RIPPLED through our small task force when another ship—a big one

—twisted to the edge of the system. It only took a moment for Netty to identify it as the Nemesis. Urnak had finally arrived. “You’re a few days ahead of schedule,” I said once we’d established comms. “That was by design. I cut every corner I could, maybe bent the Nemesis a bit in a few places. But there was no way I was going to let Icky face this damned hearing alone,” he said as he started his big old battleship inbound toward Reverie. “Well, the hearing itself isn’t for a couple of weeks yet, so you really didn’t need to hurry,” I said, but he shook his head. “Yes, I did. She’s my—she’s mine. I can tell she’s upset, but you can only say, only do so much over the comm.”

He sighed. “I’ve known for years that that bastard Toxon wasn’t going to just let what happened go away. It might have been his own greed and stupidity that cost him his career and consigned him to spending the rest of his life a petty bureaucrat, but he blames Icky and me for it. In fact, I suspect he squirmed his way into the position he’s got as Proctor of Unity and Social Adherence—which is, itself, nothing but a waste of time and taxes, but that’s another rant—just in case Icky or I ever did come across his desk. He’s that petty.”

I gave a weary nod. Dealing with Fouck had more than topped up my fill of dealing with petty functionaries. But at least she hadn’t had a

personal vendetta on the go—she held everybody in equal contempt. But it was good to see the Nemesis. Her firepower—combined with that of the Iowa, the Fafnir, Jamberac’s ship, and the N3—should be enough to at least make the Jackals think twice before attacking us. Add in the station’s heavy guns, and any invading force would find themselves in a genuine fight. And if we could get the Iowa set up with a working combi-drive, it would expand our threat into a force that was offensive, not merely defensive. Of course, the Jackals could also have a thousand combi-drive-equipped warships to throw at us, in which case the Nemesis wouldn’t make much difference. But damned if we wouldn’t take some of them with us. “We won’t wait to throw a punch. Ever,” I mused. With an effort, I forced myself to assess our reality as it pertained to our enemy. I was hoping that, as a largely nomadic race, the Jackals didn’t have a lot of ship support, let alone ships, because they wouldn’t have the infrastructure to build, maintain, and support a massive fleet. Hope wasn’t a legitimate strategy, but it was a way to buoy my crew for the moment, and sometimes, a moment is all you need. Also, the arrival of the Nemesis dramatically eased another problem, at least in the short-term. Gerhardt and Mother Hen arranged for her to be stacked to the overheads with antimatter pods before she left. I’d marveled at the potential for catastrophe, but Urnak just offered a philosophical chuckle. “If vanishing into a puff of nothing amid one of the most spectacular antimatter explosions ever had ended up being my fate, well, I could live with that—for a femtosecond or so,” he said, laughing. When he’d finally brought the Nemesis to a relative stop near Reverie, Kragdalous already had a whole crew waiting to remove his stock of antimatter pods and stash them safely away in Reverie and among the ships of our little flotilla. I used the Frankie to ferry Urnak to the Fafnir. I filled him in on the situation as we flew, and he grouched about it in his usual irascible way. That changed, though, when we docked with the Fafnir and he stepped aboard to find Icky at the airlock waiting for him. “Hello, daughter of mine,” he said. Icky stared back at him for a heartbeat or two, then slumped into her father’s arms. They embraced in a tight, eight-armed hug. “Are all Wu’tzur this relentlessly emotional?” Funboy asked quietly as we stood around and awkwardly tried not to watch. They deserved their moment. “You’re being all frowny about being emotional?

You?” Torina countered, smirking. “To what are you referring?”

Torina glanced pointedly at Gabby, standing a short distance away with a data slate slaved into the comm. She chattered away with Cantullin about the combi-drive project, about task schedules and deliverables and flowcharting it all. Funboy blinked at her, his face softening. “Flowcharts. What a brilliant idea,” he said. Torina grinned. “That.”

He turned back to her. “I’m sorry, I still don’t see what you’re getting at

—”

Icky and Urnak finally disengaged from their hug, then we all moved into the crew lounge. We spent the next few minutes chatting, mostly about the fact that Urnak had made the long flight by himself. He just shrugged. “I got along famously with the rest of the crew,” he said with a Wu’tzur grin—jovial, but laced with a terrifying hint of feral rage. He then turned to the subject of Icky’s upcoming hearing and latched immediately onto the fact that Perry may have found an angle that she and Paxomar could use to their advantage. Perry wouldn’t, though, reveal what it was. “And before anyone accuses me of being an asshole or something,” he said, raising a wing, “that’s because I promised Paxomar I wouldn’t. I had to check with him about something before I was prepared to say anything at all, and he swore me to secrecy.”

Icky glared and shook her head. “It’s true. Paxomar sent me a text comm saying he’d told Perry not to say anything, that he was—he was going to be my champion, whatever the hell that means. Like I even need a champion—"

“Like I told you, Icky, that’s not the point. Whatever he’s planning will either be wonderful and romantic, which is a good thing, or it will flop miserably and make him even more desperate to please you—which is also a good thing,” Torina said. I gave her the side-eye. “This is what goes through your mind when I try to do nice things for you?”

“Not always.”

The bottom line was that Perry wasn’t going to delve into whatever nugget of hope he’d discovered buried in dusty old Wu’tzur legal texts. If Icky and Urnak wanted to know more, that was between them and Paxomar. When our impromptu welcome to the middle of nowhere party was breaking up, Urnak called Perry, Torina, and me aside. “Van, while making the flight here, I had a lot of time on my hands. I pored over the situation reports you sent me, and something jumped out. I think you’ve encountered a set’tha’tak.”

I returned a blank look. “I’ll… take your word for it.”

He grinned. “There are burrowing creatures on the Wu’tzur called set’tha. They’re very destructive, very elusive, but very given to pack-oriented behavior. Farmers learned to capture one, called a set’tha’tak, and train it to come to the sound of a drum. The rest of the pack will follow it, right into the open, where they can be disposed of before they do more harm to crops and fields.”

“Sounds like a Judas goat,” Perry said. “That’s an Earthly animal that can be trained to lead whole herds of livestock right into a slaughterhouse.”

“Those do sound like much the same idea. So why do you think we’ve encountered something like that?” Torina asked. “It’s those distant comm signals you detected, the ones calling the Tyrants home. They might be a set’tha’tak, a—what was it?

A Judas goat?”

I gave a slow nod, my face taut as the possibilities raced through my thoughts. We’d been assuming that calling the Tyrants home had a positive connotation, a prodigal son returns sort of thing. I glanced at the airlock, at the unseen, endless void beyond it. “You’re right. It might be a call home. And it might be the ramp into the slaughterhouse. One might even say,” I drawled, looking at Perry, who raised his wingfeathers in mild alert when he saw my sly grin—

“Don’t you dare, boss.”

“This is the work of a stool pigeon.”

Torina blinked. “Is this yet another avian insult?”

I smiled cheerily at Perry’s annoyance. “It is. Old jailhouse reference, carefully saved for just such a moment. It’s not at the legal eagle level—”

Perry made a noise of disgust. “That never gets old.”

“It never will,” I agreed. “As to our situation—”

“What do you want to do about it?” Torina asked, waving in frustration. I frowned at the inner airlock door. “It’s another big, fat question about what’s lurking out there, practically on our doorstep. And I’m tired of big, fat questions with no answers. More to the point, I don’t want to keep waiting here and hoping the answers come to us.” In that moment, I thought again of throwing the first punch instead of being reactive. I also knew, in that moment, that we were doing the right thing. I pointed out into the black. “We’re going to go get those answers. And if we need to kick in the door of a slaughterhouse to do it, so be it.”

AS ENTHUSIASTIC AS I felt about seizing the initiative and pursuing the enemy, we weren’t going off half-cocked. In my true fashion, I had a list in mind, with each step, or item, being a critical component that would help us kick the Jackals or Tyrants right in the teeth. If they even had teeth. We needed to get the Iowa set up with a working combi-drive first, so that we had her, the Fafnir, and the N3 as the heart of our task force. The Fafnir was ready now, but the Iowa still needed another couple of weeks of work. So did the N3, which we were now up-gunning with some additional laser and missile batteries Urnak acquired with the intent of flipping them for profit. He’d never gotten around to it, though, so they were still stashed in the Nemesis’ s hold. And I was thrilled he never sold them. Urnak was a superb engineer. But he was an even better judge of quality when it came to weapons and daughters—which might be synonymous, given the situation—and that meant the upgrades were measurably better. In combat where any little edge might be the difference between victory and a brief moment as expanding gas, the new assets were going to give us full percentages of improvement in critical areas. I stared at the data slate, where an array of these new weapons spread out before me. “Bird, a question.”

“Hit me, boss.”

“Did Urnak mention how long it would take to install all our new toys?”

“Two weeks, or however long it is to truly annoy you.”

“Thank you, bird. You’re spot on, as usual.”

He bowed. “I am a professional.”

The resulting two-week or so delay grated at me, but it did give us time to plan, and it had another advantage, too—we’d be able to get Icky’s hearing out of the way, hopefully in her, Paxomar’s, and Urnak’s favor, so we could put it behind us before we launched. She scowled and bitched endlessly about Paxomar’s secrecy over what he intended to do, based on whatever Perry had told him. It was all just venting, because she’d clearly decided to trust Paxomar’s instincts—and if that didn’t show how committed she was to him, nothing did. In the midst of all of this, though, I was approached out of the blue by someone completely unexpected. It was an Usu. HIS NAME WAS REKTORR. Like Viktor, the “body thief” on Dregs, he wasn’t actually humanoid. He had lower limbs that looked as though they could unfold, increasing and perhaps even as much as doubling his height. His torso was humanoid, but he had four arms. And not unlike Icky, two of them were obviously built for power, while the others were intended for more delicate work. One of the latter, though, was equipped with manipulators so fine they probably could have reproduced the USS

Constitution in a bottle, rigging and all. This one remained folded under an armor plate when not in use, presumably to protect its sensitive bits. Rektorr’s most striking feature, though, was his face. He didn’t have specific features, like eyes, nose, and mouth. Instead, he had a screen surrounded by an array of optical and other sensors. He projected a cartoonish face onto the screen to suit the current situation. It reminded me of a video game I’d played as a teenager, Fallout: New Vegas. It had robots that projected their faces onto TV screens—and, in a case of life imitating art, the most prominent of those robots in the game’s plot was named Victor. When he asked to meet with me on Reverie, the face he chose to display was a happy, smiling one. Of course, that really meant nothing. What was he going to do, project an evil, snarling face?

So I was profoundly wary, but

I was also prepared to hear him out, with Torina, Perry, and Gabby in company—and all of us armed. Torina had raised an eyebrow at the latter choice, but I’d already benefited several times from her remarkably keen psychological insights, so having her along certainly wouldn’t hurt. “You wanted to see me,” I said to Rektorr when we met him in one of Reverie’s cargo holds. He was apparently in charge of the place. “I did, and thank you for coming, Peacemaker.” His face flicked to a more subdued expression. “I know it’s an imposition. And I also know that we Usu have given you little reason to trust us.”

“No, you certainly have not. You may notice that we’re all armed. That’s because I couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility that this was an ambush, an attempted assassination. That’s how little I trust you.”

His face turned sad. “Of course. But I can assure you, I intend no harm to you, your people, or your interests. Quite the opposite, actually.”

“Really.”

Rektorr’s face brightened. “Yes, really. While many of the other Usu on Reverie may be somewhat more… ambivalent—”

“That’s an interesting word to describe someone dealing with your enemies behind your back,” I put in. His expression turned to neutral. “That is true for one of my fellows. It isn’t true for all of them, however, and it certainly isn’t true for me. I happen to believe in what we’re doing here.”

I narrowed my eyes at him but said nothing. The problem with dealing with someone who was fundamentally inhuman—and for that matter, not even entirely organic—and who just projected a clip-art-style face onto a screen was that it was nearly impossible to read any of the things you could normally read in people. I’d been dealing with enough species for long enough now to know that the humanoid versions—Wu’tzur, P’nosk, Gajur, Surtsi, whatever the hell Bester was—all had a lot of commonality in how they presented themselves to the world. I could tell when a Wu’tzur was angry, a P’nosk was angry, a Surtsi was—well, sad, but that was all the time. But I couldn’t read a damned thing into Rektorr. “I have heard a maxim in the field of self-expression,” Rektorr went on. “That is, show, don’t tell. So allow me to show you that I want to help you, not hinder you.”

“Okay. And how are you going to do that?” Torina asked. Rektorr waved a mechanical hand at a stack of cargo crates. “Those are provisions for your ship. There’s food, plus essential standard components. I have been told to maintain rigorous control over these items.” His face brightened again. “Instead, I am choosing to give them where they are most likely to be needed, to the service of you, your crew, and your ship.”

I crossed my arms. “Okay. And what do you want in return?”

His face turned puzzled. “Well, nothing. If this was just a transaction, it wouldn’t really show you anything useful, would it?”

Perry hopped up onto the pile of cases. “Uh-huh. Well, if you were in league with the Jackals, then giving us food laced with, say, some potent but subtle toxin would be a good way of decapitating our command and control, wouldn’t it?”

“The food isn’t poisoned,” a new voice said. “Not that I believed it would be, but Rektorr anticipated this and specifically asked me to test it.”

It was Jamberac. He walked to join us, glancing at Rektorr. “Sorry I’m late. I was tied up with the director.”

Rektorr’s face flicked to a fierce cartoon scowl. “I was starting to worry I was going to have to convince them all on my own.” His face brightened again. “Better late than never, though.”

Jamberac smiled and turned to me. “Rektorr and I have been working together a great deal ever since I got here. Of all the Usu on Reverie, you can trust him, Van. I do.”

I glanced at Torina, who just shrugged. I nodded back to her, though. This put a different spin on things. I trusted Jamberac, so having him vouch for Rektorr moved the dial a long way toward the trust end of the spectrum. “Alright. It’s good to have someone on the inside of the Reverie supply system, I’ll admit. I recently had to deal with Fouck—”

“My condolences,” Rektorr said, projecting a winky face. I had to smile. “Well, anyway, I know you’re here. Thanks for the supplies. I’ll send someone to come and—”

“I haven’t finished the showing part yet, Peacemaker,” Rektorr said. I cocked my head at him. “Please—call me Van.”

“Alright, Van. There’s something else I want to do for you.”

“Oh?

And what’s that?”

Jamberac replied. “Rektorr was only recently assigned to look after this supply bay, Van. It’s not his real job. His real job is one he’s explicitly prohibited from doing—mainly thanks to you.”

I frowned at that. “Me?

How?”

“I was assistant lead engineer for the Usu contingent assigned to work on the combi-drive. However, because of the measures you insisted the director put in place regarding the Usu, I was removed from that job and assigned here.”

“Oh. Shit. Well, I’m sorry, but—”

“No, it was a sensible precaution. But this”—he gestured around with a soft whir of servos—“is not an effective use of my time. Constructing, tuning, and readying a combi-drive for operation is. I understand you’re doing just that, aboard the ship you call the Iowa. I want to help.”

I turned to the others. Torina gave a small, slow nod. Perry spoke in my ear. If he’s on the up-and-up, that would be a huge boost to getting the drive installed in the Iowa so the Conoku aren’t figuring it out from scratch. As for Gabby, she grinned, nodded, and then gave me a thumbs-up, a mannerism she’d only recently learned and used a lot. So I turned back to Rektorr. I really hoped I wasn’t going to regret this. “Awesome. How soon can you be aboard the Iowa?”

22

WITH REKTORR’S HELP, the combi-drive came together in days, instead of the two or more weeks we’d anticipated. He also suggested several revisions to the Conoku design, things that would have become evident during trials and that we could now avoid having to fix. Still, even with his peace offering, obvious expertise, and Jamberac’s endorsement, I didn’t absolutely trust him. I couldn’t afford to. So I pulled Netty-P aside and gave her a special task. “You want me to ride herd on Rektorr,” she said. “Yeah. It doesn’t have to be obvious, but I want you to keep an… eye, or scanner, or whatever’s most appropriate on him. Look for any inconsistencies, anything that makes you suspicious.”

“Van, he’ll know I’m watching him.”

“If you’re careful—”

“It’s not a matter of being careful. I would know if he were watching me because it would be impossible for me to miss it if I were looking for it. I have to assume his capabilities at least match mine.”

“Well, do your best, I guess.”

“I don’t think this will be a problem. He will logically expect us to be watching him closely. So the issue is less one of him getting up to no good while he’s aboard the Iowa, and more about what he gets up to when he’s not. Unless, of course, you want me to follow him around.”

I pursed my lips, then nodded. “Yeah. You know what?

Do that.”

“Really?”

“It’s not like either of you sleep or eat or really have downtime. Let’s make it obvious we’re keeping tabs on him, including every emission he emanates. If he really is clean, he shouldn’t object.”

And he didn’t. In fact, as Netty-P predicted, he wasn’t at all surprised about it when we met him aboard the Iowa. He even welcomed the scrutiny and assured us that every comm or other emission he made would be entirely transparent and unencrypted, or if it wasn’t, that Netty-P had the encryption key. What was really fascinating, though, was watching as he and Netty-P wandered off toward the Iowa’ s engineering section, chattering away amicably to one another. Torina, standing at my side, said, “Hmm.”

I glanced at her. I was going to blurt out, They’re machines, Torina, but I caught myself. Did that really matter?

Wasn’t the important part that they were people?

So I nodded. “Hmm indeed.”

THE FIRST TEST of the Iowa’ s new combi-drive was an unqualified success. Rektorr’s assistance had reduced a lengthy period of building, testing, and tweaking to less than a week. Our own experience with the unexpected interaction between the alien grav-plating on the Fafnir and the combi-drive let us bypass that bit of adjustment as well. By the time Icky’s hearing finally came up, Netty-P and Cantullin had figured the drive was already operating at nearly eighty percent efficiency, and with another couple of days of tuning should be running well over ninety percent. The night before Icky’s hearing, I was finally able to get a solid night’s sleep. With the Iowa now at least technically capable of combi-drive flight and the Nemesis on-station, our combat power had increased dramatically. I drifted off quickly and slept like a petrified log for ten straight hours, not once fitfully forcing myself awake to make sure we weren’t under attack. I might have slept even longer, but Netty wanted to give me a couple of hours to waken, freshen up, and eat before Icky started her deposition. It was a good thing, too. Despite a shower and coffee, I still spent an hour of that time bumbling around, fuzzy and fogged over in that way that

follows a lot of sleep after a spell of too little. It brought back more Army memories, waking up after a power nap following some field exercise that involved a few days of almost no sleep at all. Of course, those often had a celebratory, post-exercise hangover superimposed on them, so there was that. Still, an ongoing conversation in the Fafnir’s galley as I shuffled in for a third cup of coffee pricked up my ears. Torina and Rab were musing things over their own mugs—coffee, in Torina’s case, and some tea-like P’nosk root infusion that smelled vaguely of cloves and wet dog for Rab. “I just don’t think they’re interested in attacking us. If they were, they would have by now. And not just with one ship,” Rab was saying. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s safe to assume that. There could be lots of reasons they haven’t put in an appearance. I mean, they’re nomadic, so maybe it takes time for them to gather their scattered forces,” Torina replied, ending on a sip of coffee. I joined them but remained standing. I didn’t want to get too comfy, since we had to head to Reverie station soon for Icky’s hearing. Rab had taken her, Funboy, and Gabby there in the Frankie earlier to meet up with Urnak. “I gather you guys are talking about our friends, the Jackals,” I said. Torina nodded. “Rab and I are debating the merits of paying them a visit. He isn’t sure that we should since they’re not showing much interest in attacking us.”

“We P’nosk have a saying, though I’m not sure the translator won’t mangle it,” he said. “If you kick a turd, it might start to stink.”

I chuckled. “We have exactly the same saying on Earth.”

Torina sniffed as she lifted her mug. “Here’s to parallel evolution of pithy, not to mention slightly gross witticisms.”

“I’m just not sure that launching a foray into what the Jackals apparently consider their territory is a smart move. That might provoke them into an attack on Reverie they wouldn’t otherwise be interested in making.”

“They already attacked Reverie, though,” I noted. “Well, sure, but it was one ship, probably to send us a message—

something like, we’re here, you know we’re here, and we know you know we’re here.” He shrugged. “I just think it’s a needless risk.”

“So you’d rather wait for an armada of their ships to show up here.”

“I’d rather not prod the Jackals into sending that armada in the first place. I know that seizing the initiative is great and all that from a tactical point of view, but strategically?

I’m not so sure.”

I sipped my own coffee, then decided I’d had enough of the stuff to start my day and put the mug down. “Actually, Rab, I kind of agree with you. The Jackals have now had weeks to attack us. Hell, they had two years prior to us even getting here. For whatever reason—social, cultural, religious, something else—they don’t seem interested in coming any further anti-spinward than they already have.”

Torina finished her coffee, then looked at my abandoned mug. “You’re not going to finish that?”

“Knock yourself out.”

She smiled and slid it in front of her, but then looked back up at me. “Okay, so you’re leaning in Rab’s direction on this. But?”

“But, there’s Perry.”

“My ears are burning,” he said, flying in and landing on the galley counter—then sliding and knocking a fork onto the deck with a clatter. I bent to retrieve it. “That was graceful.”

“Hey, this counter has a tough approach—a tight turn through the hatch, followed by a steep descent over the pasta maker. Normally, I’d have landed on the table, but I can’t, thanks to Torina’s many, many empty coffee cups. You have a problem, sister.”

“What, there are two cups, plus the one Van gave me!” she said. Perry gave a tongue click. “You just can’t face a problem until you admit you have it. Sad.”

“Anyway,” Torina snapped, her tone and glare both leveled on Perry. “Van, you were saying the bird brain over there was somehow important in this.”

Perry gave a tinny, mechanical laugh. “Bird brain!

Torina, stop it, my sides are aching!”

I shushed him. “Yes. Remember how Perry had some memories unlocked?

The ones about my grandfather and Valint leading a GKU force against the mysterious Pleikomas?

That happened well inside what we’re generously calling the Jackal’s territory.”

“Perry, that memory unlocked itself deliberately, right?

It wasn’t just a case of you happened to be out here and you just… remembered it?”

“You mean like something I’d forgotten, until coming out here reminded me of it?

No. that’s not how it works. If I collect some data, I remember it. And I’ll always remember it, unless I’m specifically ordered to expunge it, or specifically archive it—but even then, I can just retrieve it if I want to. This is different. I had no idea this memory even existed until, well, there it was. I’m not even entirely sure what unlocked it, just something about that situation.”

“So Van’s grandfather didn’t have you delete that memory, he just put it behind a lock—one that was designed to open when some certain condition was fulfilled.”

“That’s right.”

Torina nodded. “He wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t expect it to be unlocked. He’d have just had Perry wipe it, or at least create a lock that could never be opened. So he meant for him to eventually do that, to encounter the situation, the key that unlocked it.”

“Which means he expected Perry, at least, to come back out here, to this particular part of the galaxy,” I said, nodding right back. Rab frowned. “You don’t know that for sure. There might be other conditions that would have unlocked it, maybe even back in known space.”

“Well, sure, maybe. But we know for sure he set this condition, the one that only occurs out here. And like Torina says, that means he must have expected Perry to come out here at some point, which means he probably expected me to come out here at some point. And the only reason either of us are here is because this is where Reverie was located.”

“Wait—are you saying this station was only created as a pretext to bring Perry out here so he could remember that stuff?

That seems kind of…

convoluted, don’t you think?” Rab asked. “No, I don’t think that’s Reverie’s only reason for existing. But it had to be put somewhere. I don’t think this place, this part of the galaxy, was an accident.”

“Okay, but still— choosing to locate a station working on experimental technology in what could be extremely dangerous space just so that you could be sent out here with Perry to unlock a memory about how dangerous this space might be—” Rab shrugged. “It seems like quite a stretch. I mean, why not just let Perry remember it in the first place?”

“Look, I’m the first to admit that’s a truly excellent question. But the memory didn’t unlock until we got out here, did it?

So whatever the reason,

here we are. And since we are, we might as well try and figure out what the hell is going on.”

Rab shrugged. “Well, I’ve certainly got nothing better to do. I just hope it doesn’t come back and bite us—hard.”

I smiled. “Rab, my friend, I wish that every time I sit in that seat up in the cockpit. And we all have something better to do. Come on, finish your coffee and..

whatever the hell that stuff is that you’re drinking—and go be there for Icky.”

ICKY SAT ALONE at the conference table, facing the main display screen. The rest of us, including Urnak, sat off to the sides. Our only crew member not present was Netty-P, who was on the Iowa dutifully keeping an eye on Rektorr. Netty was relaying the proceedings to her, though. The screen currently only displayed the Reverie station logo, since we were waiting for the comm channel to be opened back to known space. I leaned toward Perry, who was standing on the chair next to me. “Okay, bird, you’ve been sitting on this big gotcha find you made in Wu’tzur law. How about a hint, at least, about what it is, since the big reveal is about to happen anyway?”

“Sorry, Van—I can’t reveal anything. Bird-client privilege, you know.”

Icky shifted in her seat and groaned. “Next time we’re heading into battle, and we’re doing that waiting to get into range part and I complain about it, remind me about this. This is worse,” she snapped. Several of us, including Urnak, started to say encouraging things back to her, but the screen came to life and cut us off. It depicted a dour, older Wu’tzur wearing a formal sash embroidered with Wu’tzur writing— For the law is all, it said. It also sported several fancy badges which meant nothing to me personally but carried the trappings of high office. This person was obviously the Director of Law, the Wu’tzur equivalent of a judge. To his right sat Paxomar, and a smaller, rather shifty-looking Wu’tzur I assumed was their version of a lawyer. To his left, an older Wu’tzur sat hunched in his seat, spiteful bitterness pouring off him in waves. I knew these people. Not personally, but I knew them. I’d met their kind. While I lived my life with a desire to avoid presuppositions, I also understood the value of being experienced. I was no longer a kid. And that history, coupled with years of fighting out here in the darkness—

It brought me here. To this moment. Sitting, surveying, and reaching some conclusions about just what kind of assholes returned my stare, their hunger for power a palpable, poisonous thing. Even across the miles. “That must be Toxon. Isn’t he just a ray of starshine?” Torina said quietly. “Are they in a—a cave?” Gabby whispered. They sure seemed to be. They all sat at a rough wooden trestle table, a rock wall behind them. It was broken only by three hanging tapestries, one behind each of the parties, each embroidered with more legal-sounding slogans. The place seemed to be lit by flickering torchlight. “It’s like they’re broadcasting from Skyrim,” Perry muttered. “All present, know that these proceedings are convened,” the director intoned. “The Scribe shall begin transcription.”

We couldn’t see a scribe, who might just be an AI. But we all stiffened, aware that any further peanut gallery comments might end up in the official transcript. The director went on to state the case being put against Icky and Paxomar—that they were needlessly prolonging their period of betrothal and violating Wu’tzur law as a result. When Toxon was allowed to make his opening statement, he was brief and spoke in a voice as soothing as a bandsaw. He knew it was his moment to shine, and he wasn’t going to waste it. Like many people of small character, he was, in his hearts, a petty tyrant—

if only given the chance to flex. With operatic importance, he drew himself up, every gesture calculated. In that moment, I had an insight into his life. It was… sad. And I could not find it in me to pity him because of how he wanted to hurt my friends. “Icrul has never respected the laws, or any authority at all, for that matter. She wantonly flouts them—almost gleefully flouts them—and she undermines social unity and order in the process.” Toxon glared sidelong at the director. “The law is all, except to her. She has broken our ancient laws and must be held to account for it.” He waved a dismissive hand. “No more

needs to be said, other than your confirmation of her guilt and pronouncing her sentence.”

The director turned to Toxon with a practiced scowl. “My findings and pronouncements are mine to make. I do not need you to tell me to do my job.”

Toxon curled his lip, then bobbed his head once. “Yes, of course, by all means, I meant no disrespect, Honored Director,” he grated back, sounding anything but respectful. He sounded annoyed, if not angry. “What an asshole,” Perry muttered. I winced. He’d said it just a little too loudly—

“Who said that?” Toxon snapped, glaring into the image. Perry gave an unrepentant shrug. “I did.”

“Spectators will refrain from speaking. This is your only warning. If there’s another occurrence, these proceedings will be closed to the public,”

the director said. I backed it up with a warning glare at Perry. “My apologies, Honored Director,” Perry said, then added in my ear bug, by which I mean sorry not sorry. That Toxon guy is a total tool. I just nodded. The director turned toward Paxomar. “Do you and your co-accused have any opening statement?”

Every pair of eyes locked onto Paxomar like a fire-control scanner. This was it, the moment of the big reveal—

“I won’t presume to speak for my betrothed, but I have a statement, Honored Director,” Paxomar said. “In accordance with the Sixth Passage of the Fourth Great Tome of the First Order of Laws, I request a continuance of three days in these proceedings.”

The director stared blankly. Toxon snarled something, then shook his head. “Nonsense, you’re not going to drag this out any further—”

The director spun on him. “The only one who can say what is or is not going to happen here is me, Toxon. Challenge my authority again, and I’ll declare you in disdain of these proceedings. Is that clear?”

“But, Honored Director, this hearing is underway. There’s no reason to delay this any further—”

“Is that clear?”

Toxon sputtered for a moment, then subsided. “Yes. Yes it is.”

“Good. Now then, I am… not immediately familiar with that legal reference you stated. The Scribe will—”

Even as he spoke, a young Wu’tzur, probably even younger than Icky, scuttled into view and offered a data slate to the director. As the young Wu’tzur—the Scribe?—withdrew, the director’s brow furrowed as he read whatever was on the slate. “The Sixth Passage of the Fourth Great Tome of—” He paused and glanced at Paxomar. “You want a three-day continuance so that you may—

and I quote— consult the Celestial Sages to augur your prospects for success in an ongoing tribal dispute?”

Toxon’s eyes flew wide. “What?”

“I do, Honored Director,” Paxomar said. The director stared at the slate a moment longer, then put it down, shaking his head. “It’s an extant law, so—ah, yes, you can have your three days to consult the Celestial Sages, I guess.”

Toxon half stood. “Honored Director, this is preposterous—!”

“Yes, it is, I agree. But it’s also”—he gestured at the data slate

—“perfectly legal. I don’t have any discretion to refuse. Paxomar, you’ve got your three days.” The director sat back and blew out a sigh. “We have really got to get these ancient laws cleaned up.” He glanced off-screen. “Oh, for—don’t bother putting that in the transcript.”

Just like that, the hearing adjourned, with a continuance set three days from now. Paxomar wanted some private time to discuss the case with Icky, so all of us except for Urnak shuffled out, while the bemused director and an infuriated Toxon likewise took their leave at the other end. As soon as the door closed behind us, we all turned on Perry. “That was your big legal ploy?

A three-day adjournment in the hearing?” I asked him. “Actually, no, it wasn’t. This one was all Paxomar. I’m as mystified as you guys are,” he replied. Icky and Urnak emerged a few minutes later. They were both grinning from ear to ear. “Okay, I’m assuming that Paxomar has got something up his sleeve other than a three-day delay in things,” Torina said. She nodded. “My mate to be is… devious. And nasty. And romantic, unlike you, boss, but that’s not as important as devious and nasty is right now.”

I patted my heart with a hand. “What?

Where’s that coming from?

I am so romantic.”

“Not like this you’re not, boss. But like I said, the devious and nasty part matters more right now. And Toxon?

He is about to learn a valuable lesson about Paxomar—one he’s soon gonna live to regret.”

Gabby bounced. “What sort of lesson?

Come on, Icky, throw us something here!”

She exchanged another grin with her father, then looked back at us. “Nerd rage. It’s such a beautiful thing.”

23

THREE DAYS GAVE us time to get the remaining kinks worked out of the Iowa’ s new combi-drive, so that we’d be ready to—to do whatever it was we were going to do regarding the Jackals once Icky’s hearing was finally over. As for what that thing was—

I had no idea. Or, at least, no clear idea yet. I had some vague thoughts about it, some objectives I want to achieve. I wanted to follow up on Perry’s unlocked memory and the significance of the message Gramps had obviously meant it to be, sure. But I also wanted to deal with the Jackals. Frankly, though, I was with Rab—if we could avoid having to fight the Jackals, that would be great. That meant we either had to intimidate them to the point where they wouldn’t even want to take us on, or otherwise conclude some sort of non-aggression deal with them. The first, I was pretty sure, was a non-starter. That left the second. So, to that end, I decided that we’d take the Iowa on her first full shakedown cruise with the new drive to the location of the Jackals’ warning buoy and broadcast a message to it. I was going to tell the Jackals we wanted to talk. The Conoku were all for it, since they were itching to figure out how to fully exploit the capabilities of the new combi-drive and build them into their wildly unconventional doctrine for ship-to-ship combat. For glorified crustaceans, they sure did like fighting. Perry saw me watching the Conoku, his beak open in a laugh. “Not just crabs. Battlecrabs,” he said, reading my mind. “A term I never thought I’d use. But damn if it isn’t spot on. Let’s finish tweaking this drive.”

Perry flicked his wings. “On it, boss. I, for one, prefer my ships to be tweakless.”

“Is that a word?”

“It is now.”

THE FAFNIR’S crew and I joined Rektorr, Netty-P, and the Conoku engineering crew in the Iowa’ s engine room, a cavernous compartment meant to be crammed with machinery. It was mostly empty, though, her original power plant, main drive, and sundry ancillary systems having been stripped out of her when she was mothballed out of her original life as a battlecruiser many years ago. Those systems had been antiquated, and much bulkier than the new generation of sleek, more efficient machinery we installed in its place. It left the space echoing and empty, though, like a sprawling auditorium devoid of everything but a small stage and a few rows of seats. It was an oddly lonely place, and it conjured thoughts of the passage of time. For the ships, for us. And most of all, for me. My ships and crew were evolving at my side. It was my job to keep up. As to the combi-drive, it used very little of that void space. It wasn’t much bigger than the one installed in the Fafnir, which surprised me. I was going to remark on that, when I noticed another Usu working on a panel nearby. Rektorr saw my instant frown and spoke up. “Ovish is assisting me,” he said. “He proved most valuable during the development of the earlier combi-drives, and has contributed just as much here.”

I glanced at Netty-P, who was standing a little apart from the group around the combi-drive, clearly trying to keep watch on what Ovish was doing. “Netty-P, how are things looking from your perspective?” I asked her. “All is well,” she said, but then her voice hummed in my ear bug the way Perry’s often did. I have discerned no duplicity on the part of the Usu, both Rektorr and Ovish. They seem committed to the Iowa’ s new drive being a success. I gave a small nod. It still made me a little uncomfortable, but if I were going to accept that Rektorr was on the up-and-up, then I should at least give any Usu for whom he vouched the benefit of the doubt, no?

As I turned back to the combi-drive, Betty spoke up. “Van, Director Kragdalous is requesting permission to come aboard.”

“Oh.” I glanced at Rektorr. “Were you expecting him?”

“I suggested that he come and view the Iowa’ s new combi-drive. I wasn’t clear when he would choose to do so, however.”

I shrugged. “Sure, the more the merrier. Tell him to come aboard at his leisure, please, Betty.”

We spent the next few minutes with the Conoku excitedly chattering away about their new toy, while Rektorr punctuated their babble with more measured statements about the drive, its performance, and whatever work remained to be done on it. Ovish finished up what he was doing, closed the panel, and joined us just as Kragdalous arrived, Jamberac with him. I made myself keep smiling as the Conoku and Rektorr essentially repeated everything we just discussed. It took some effort because I hated these things. In the Army, we called them dog-and-pony shows, basically performances put on for visiting brass. At least this one hadn’t involved days of preparation. Once, during my machine-gun course, we’d found out ahead of time that the commander of the base on which we were stationed was going to come out and visit. Cue hours and hours of prep and practice time, all so that we could give a slick presentation to the commander describing stuff he no doubt already knew. Despite being on a range working with oily, grimy machine guns, we had to wear spiffy uniforms with polished boots, our faces shaved baby-smooth—and all so that the commander could do what he really came to do, which was break away from the bureaucratic tedium for a while and fire a belt of.50 caliber ammunition downrange—

A sudden exclamation threw me into the ditch alongside memory lane. One of the Conoku had, for whatever reason, gone to poke around in the panel that the Usu Ovish had just been working on. “There’s something here that doesn’t belooo-ooong!” she sing-sang out, pointing with a claw. Icky, who’d been talking with a couple of the Conoku, spun on Ovish. I went a step further, cursing and drawing the Moonsword and putting its point against the Usu’s chest. “If you do anything but just stand there and stare in contrite silence, I’m gonna slam this inside you and stir, got it?” I snapped. Ovish said nothing. The Conoku, though, after confirming that there was, indeed, something that didn’t belong in the panel, all turned toward Ovish and began chanting in unison. “We caught you, rattletrap, we caught you, rattletrap, we caught you, rattle—”

Ovish looked at me. “Is this really necessary?”

Perry answered. “Well, rattletrap, if what you left in that console is anything but some chewing gum, then yeah, it’s necessary. And if it is chewing gum, then—well, it’s still necessary, so shut up.”

Torina lifted an eyebrow at him. “You get up on the wrong side of the nest this morning, bird?”

“Nah, it’s just that I’m getting sick of these sketchy AIs giving the rest of us a bad name.”

Icky, who’d stalked off to examine the panel, came back with a tiny device between thumb and forefinger. It was an oval object about the size of a pea, with connectors at either end. “This was inserted in the lead from the combi-drive to the master diagnostic controller. It was mounted on the back side of a panel support, so you’d never have found it if you weren’t actually looking for it,” she said, shooting hostile glares at Ovish as she spoke. “You should be thankful you’re not being fired into a star, you scurrilous bucket of bolts.”

I scowled. “Oh, that’s still on the table. What was going to happen to our ship?”

Ovish turned to Kragdalous. “Director, I am surrendering myself to you as I do not believe I will be treated with fairness by this Peacemaker and his crew.”

I turned to Kragdalous, resigned to him nodding and taking the Usu back to Reverie, which was just going to ignite another round of bickering and procedural dick-waving—

Instead, he pulled a sidearm and pointed it at the Usu. “I’ll think about it. In the meantime, answer Peacemaker Tudor’s question, or I’ll perform an action I like to call saving time and money.”

The Usu managed to look surprised. Not as surprised as the rest of us were at this sudden show of steel from Kragdalous, but still slightly surprised. Even Icky blinked, then grinned, muttering, “Finally.”

Ovish turned to me and said nothing—but I’d had enough of Usu intransigence. “My friend, we are, as far as we know, at war. And we’re at war in a way that has our collective asses swinging in the galactic wind. We don’t have the luxury of time here. Now, believe it or not, I am the biggest advocate you Usu have for maintaining your rights as persons. But that only goes so far.” I jabbed the Moonsword toward him. “In fact, it goes this far, but no further. If you don’t answer the question, then I am going to have to consider you a spy, which makes you a covert enemy combatant, which makes you liable to immediate execution.”

“He’s right, by the way. Spies in wartime are stripped of most of their rights, regardless of what species they are,” Perry put in. “So there you go. I don’t even have to lose any sleep over turning you into spare parts. So, you’ve got ten seconds to answer me, and then—” I glanced at Kragdalous, his sidearm still raised at Ovish’s head. “Well, one of us is going to kill you.”

“Can we start a pool?

I’ve got three to one the hothead does it first,”

Perry said. Torina snorted. “Which hothead?”

Both Kragdalous and I managed to look offended, then we smiled. After all, we both were pointing lethal weapons at the target. Ovish’s expression didn’t change—mainly because it was an organic mask over an alloy and ceramic skull—but he began speaking regardless. “The device is intended to use the ship’s network of diagnostic systems to inject faulty data into the navigation system and as a result this ship would twist to an erroneous location.”

I gave a slow nod. “To what end?”

“You asked what would happen to this ship as a result of the device being installed, and I have answered that question. I have no further knowledge that would be of use to you. In other words, that is all I know about this matter. I have now cooperated which I believe is all that is required under interstellar law for me to be afforded protection from termination.”

I glanced at Perry. “That’s arguably true,” he said. “There are case precedents that could be used to justify it.” He shrugged his wings. “Sorry. Oh, on an unrelated note—Icky, a moment of your time?”

Icky swung her scowl on him. “What?”

He gestured with his head. “Over here,” he said, then flew off to land on a structural brace a few meters away. Icky glared again at the Usu, then stalked away to join him in a discussion about… something. I turned back to Ovish. “Doesn’t matter if you answer or not. This is all part of a ploy to hand this ship over to the Jackals. They’re demanding payment of whatever it is you promised them in exchange for the combi-drive tech, but you haven’t been able to make it since your backdoor dealings with them were exposed. And now, here’s a working combi-drive that was built by an entirely new player, the Conoku—”

“Go us!” one of them declared, punching a claw toward the overheads. I smiled, but not for long. “Anyway, you get the Iowa alone so the Jackals can pounce on it. I’ll bet that device probably disables the nav system completely after that, so she can’t twist or reliably use the combi-drive. The Jackals get the Iowa, her combi-drive, and all her firepower, and we lose it. Have I got that right, you miserable bastard?”

“Technically, that’s not possible, as he doesn’t have parents to begin with,” Perry said, flying back to join us. Icky followed, a dark grin on her face. “Or, you know—he’s like me, but without all the personality.”

“You’re a real person, bird. This… construct… is worse than a thief. It’s a drain. On all of us.”

Kragdalous, who’d just been quietly listening, shook his head, his finger tensed on the trigger of his slug pistol. “If his use is at an end, Van, then he is, too. Let him make his arguments about whether he should have been executed or not—”

“Actually, that won’t be necessary,” Icky cut in. “Van, in accordance with the Seventeenth through Nineteenth Passages of the Sixth Lesser Tome of the—uh—”

She paused, as though listening. “Right. The Sixth Lesser Tome of the Third Order of Laws of the Wu’tzur people, I’m requesting that you extradite this Usu to my custody. He’s charged with spying in—” More listening. “Yeah. Spying of such a nature as to place the well-being of a Wu’tzur citizen at risk. And, in accordance with the Second Passage of the First Supplementary Tome of the High Circle of Laws, since I am the sole

Wu’tzur representative who is, uh… functionally able to enforce our laws, I am declaring myself deputized as a Wu’tzur Enforcer for the purpose of this case.”

She grinned and looked at Torina. “I’m an Enforcer.”

Torina patted her arm. “You’ll always be Icky to me.”

I looked at Perry. “Uh—”

“All in accordance with Wu’tzur laws as filed with the Guild. You’re bound to uphold them, Van,” he said. “And you can thank me poring through endless reams of Wu’tzur legal mumbo jumbo for knowing that.”

Icky stepped forward. “And you know what?

We Wu’tzur don’t recognize any protection for spies,” she said, leering into Ovish’s face and hefting her hammer. “That means I get to beat you into spare parts all nice and legal-like.”

Ovish turned to me. “Peacemaker, I wish to claim asylum—”

I held up my empty hand, as the other was full of Moonsword. “Sorry, my hands are tied here. No can do.”

Funboy ambled up to Icky. “Since you are the ranking Wu’tzur Enforcer present, are you able to deputize individuals into your service?”

She shrugged her two smaller arms that weren’t holding her hammer. “Sure, why not?”

“Excellent.” Funboy turned to Ovish. “There are many aspects of Usu bio-mechanical operation that I do not understand. This is an opportunity to study them. I am particularly interested in seeing exactly how they fail, and in what order, as we progressively hammer this one into fragments.”

“Um. Before you guys do whatever it is you’re going to do, shouldn’t you see where the Iowa was going?” Gabby asked, somehow nervous and cheery all at once. Funboy nodded. “She’s right. This isn’t the last step. This is one in a series.”

“Perry, help our friend Ovish with the map. He’s going to tell us where the ambush was supposed to be. Oh—with the Wu’tzur Enforcer’s permission, of course, since this is her prisoner.”

“Knock yourself out,” she replied, then hissed and looked at her raised hammer before turning back to Ovish. “Ooh. Too soon?”

“If I do so, will that spare me termination?” Ovish asked. I chuckled. “A question you wouldn’t be asking if you didn’t have more things to tell us, you lying bastard—or whatever the parentless equivalent

of a bastard would be, yes, bird, I know.”

“Just sayin’”

Icky shrugged again. “You tell us what you know, and then we’ll see if I’m going to turn you into ceramic confetti.”

Kragdalous lowered his weapon, then holstered it as Icky, Perry, and Funboy began questioning Ovish in earnest. He gave me a bland look. “You and your people seem to have this situation well in hand. I’ll leave it to you, then. I would, however, still like to look over the new drive.”

I called the Conoku over. They tumbled up, chattering with their usual enthusiasm, a crowd of waving limbs and claws all clamoring for Kragdalous attention. He just smiled as they virtually dragged him away to show off their new drive. While they did, I moved to stand beside Rektorr. Jamberac joined me. “Awfully lucky that that young Conoku went and dug around in that exact panel, huh?”

Rektorr nodded. “It is.”

“If I ask her whatever possessed her to do it, what do you think she’s going to tell me?”

Rektorr’s face-image remained blank. “Probably that she was struck by sudden concern for the integrity of a component also located inside that panel.”

“What a fortunate coincidence.”

“Isn’t it?”

“On a wholly unrelated topic, I wonder if there are more Usu on Reverie who have been co-opted by the Jackals, aside from Ovish and the first one we arrested.”

Rektorr’s expression literally didn’t change, not even a flicker. “I would say it’s a distinct possibility. And with this effort to appease the Jackals thwarted, I would further say that a threat remains. It would be understandable if you were to incarcerate all Usu as a security precaution.”

“If only there were some way of knowing exactly which Usu were the problem—”

“But there is not, Peacemaker. You should therefore treat all of us as a risk.”

I shook my head. “I believe that everyone should be judged on their own merits, their own actions—” I glanced at him sidelong. “Including, and

maybe especially quiet words to a young Conoku to go check out a particular component behind a certain panel on a particular ship.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t.”

Jamberac smiled and gave me an approving, even grateful nod. 24

“SO NOW THAT I’m a Wu’tzur Enforcer, I wanna have some cases handed my way,” Icky said as we gathered in the Reverie conference room for a council of war. I grinned at her enthusiasm. “Great. I’ve got a list of open cases I’d love to hand off to someone. Talk to Perry, he’ll get you set up to start on the paperwork, the lots and lots of paperwork—oh, so very much paperwork

—”

“I was thinking of being more of a head-busting sort of Enforcer.”

I gave her a rueful smile. “Oh, big girl, if only it were that easy. If only

—”

She stuck out a hand for me to shake. “Hi, I’m Icky, recently retired as an Enforcer, now full-time engineer and noodle tester for the Fafnir.”

“Pleased to meet you, and welcome back,” I said, shaking her hand and laughing. We settled in—all of my crew, plus Kragdalous, Jamberac, the newly appointed captains of the N1 and N3, Urnak, and Rektorr. The latter raised some eyebrows, but I wanted to make it clear that I trusted him—or, at least, I trusted him enough to bring him into our planning circle, but not enough that there weren’t a few key points I was going to hold back and reveal later. At Perry’s suggestion, we’d also planted a couple of false bits of information to see if they ended up in the hands of the Jackals and shaping their behavior as a result. If he really was clean, then Rektorr, as a skilled propulsion engineer intimately familiar with the combi-drive, would

be a fantastic addition to the team. Sadly, though, he had a couple more hoops to jump through first. “Okay, everyone, I had Netty integrate all of the data we’ve gotten from every available source, including the stuff that Ovish spilled to our Wu’tzur Enforcer—”

“Excuse me, retired because she doesn’t want to be stuck doing stupid paperwork Wu’tzur Enforcer,” Icky said. “Yeah. Her. Anyway, Netty, can you put up the big picture on the screen?”

A three-dimensional holographic star chart flashed into being above the conference table, depicting a spherical bit of the galaxy twenty light-years in radius, centered on Reverie. Most of it was empty, just icons to indicate stars and data about them. Blue icons marked Reverie station and our flotilla of ships, all clustered together. Red icons marked what we knew about the Jackals. Only two of those were hard contacts—our battle against them during our trial flight of the Fafnir in company with the N1 and their buoy. There were three more pink icons marking unconfirmed or inferred Jackal contacts derived from things like long-range scans. Finally, one icon, a neutral green one right on the edge of the sphere, showed the direction to the distant musical beacon that was apparently intended to call the Tyrants home. And that was it. “Bit thin, isn’t it?” I asked. “Wafer thin. Are we sure there really are any significant numbers of these Jackals out there?

Could they only even have a handful of ships?”

Kragdalous asked. “It’s a good question,” said the new Captain of the N3, a severe older human woman named Ness who broadly reminded me of Valint, if darker in hair and skin—she had that cool beauty that seemed hidden but irrepressible. “Combi-drives burn a lot of antimatter. Don’t you think the idea that the Jackals have swarms of ships equipped with the things is a little… fanciful, maybe?”

I had to agree. “It’s a fair point and a good reason to not overreact. But that doesn’t mean we should under react, either. First, since we have no idea what the Jackals’ strength might be, we need to be damned careful about just assuming they’re weak and then, to our detriment, finding out they aren’t.”

“And as for the idea that they do not have large numbers of combi-drive-equipped ships, even if that’s true, a small number of them backed up by a large force of conventional ships could prove just as potent,” Funboy added. To her credit, Ness frowned as she considered it, then nodded. “Good points.”

“So what do you propose we do, Van?” Kragdalous asked. “We have two choices. First, we can do what we’re doing, sit here and wait for the Jackals to come to us.”

“If they ever come to us,” Rab said. “We still can’t discount the possibility that there are reasons that they won’t, or even can’t leave their own space, at least in force.”

“Very true. So that puts us into the position of waiting and reacting to events if and when they occur. The trouble with that approach is—”

I stopped as Perry clattered onto the table, then began walking around the holographic chart, obviously studying it. I gave him a puzzled look, but he seemed engrossed in something, so I just left him to it and pushed on. “The trouble with just sitting here is that if and when the Jackals do show up, we may not enjoy what it looks like. For instance, if it’s, say, a hundred ships, with even five or ten of them equipped with combi-drives

—”

“I’m no military genius and even I know that would be a bad thing,”

Gabby said. I grimaced. “A very bad thing. So, our other option is to go to them. Netty, would you zoom—” I started, then stopped and watched Perry as he continued to circle the chart. “Uh, Perry, is there something you’d like to share with us?”

“No. Or yes.”

“Well, that narrows it down,” Torina said, but Perry went on. “Yes, there are things I’d like to share with you. But no, I can’t, because I can’t access them.”

A thrill of tension rippled through the room. I gave him a look. “What do you mean?” I asked, my tone as neutral as I could manage given the frisson of nerves in my body just then. “What I mean is that studying this chart has alerted me to the fact that I’ve got a whole locked down and encrypted memory space I wasn’t aware

of before. It’s full of… something, but what, I don’t know, because it hasn’t actually unlocked.”

“Do you have any idea how to unlock it?” Kragdalous asked. “Yes, and no.”

I blew out a sigh. “Perry—”

“No, I don’t know exactly what the key is. Yes, I do know that, whatever it is, it’s somewhere in what we’re calling the Jackals’ space,” he said, gesturing with a wing. “Oh, and by the way, remember how your grandfather took on the Stillness and they defeated him, and that was ultimately the reason he turned down becoming a Guild Master?”

I inclined my head, remembering. It had been one of the first significant things I’d learned about my grandfather’s career as a Peacemaker. The Stillness—a still-powerful criminal syndicate—lurked in a remote gas- and dust-shrouded region of space called Afterthought. Gramps had led an offensive against them, but it had failed in some ignominious way, leading to the beginning of the end of his career as a Peacemaker. He’d gotten sick and died only a couple of years later, which had been the beginning of my own Peacemaker career. Perry stared back at me. “Well, none of it was true.”

That left me staring, dumbfounded. “What?

How could it not be true?

It’s written up in the Guild’s records.”

“It is. And it’s all bullshit. It’s a cover story. And whatever it was intended to cover up happened”—he gestured with a wing again, at the chart—“out here. Out there. Somewhere, in the midst of the Jackals and the Tyrants and who- and whatever else is lurking out there, is the truth.”

NONE of the people present knew my grandfather from a hole in the ground, except for Kragdalous. At best, they knew him by reputation, a prominent and even near-legendary Peacemaker and GKU officer who, for whatever reason, had turned down a seat at the Master’s Table of the Guild, and on the 32 in the GKU. But that didn’t matter. The fact that he’d built a convoluted series of memory locks and corresponding keys into Perry, and that at least one of those keys was currently in Jackal space, was enough to clear away the lingering doubts. There was something my grandfather wanted us to know, but only by satisfying conditions he obviously considered important, if not critical. Whatever it was, it wasn’t just something we should know, it may very well be something we had to know—so much so that our lives may depend on it. So we returned to the star chart with a renewed sense of purpose. I pointed at one of the pink icons. “This location is our best bet. Netty, can you fill us in?”

The chart zoomed down, the icon splitting into two—a stationary one, and a second that seemed to record a regular trajectory. “Van has asked me to, and I quote, scan the hell out of the universe, so that’s what I’ve done. I’ve collaborated with every other sensor we have available, from the scanners on Reverie station, to those on the Eykinao ship, the Belching Profit, to those on every one of our ships. I’ve merged all of that with the data about this region of the galaxy I downloaded before we left known space, which was all that was available. By integrating it all, it would appear that the Jackals have another marker buoy at the location specified by the stationary icon.”

The relevant icon brightened. “The second icon appears to be a ship, or perhaps several ships, that seem to fly a regular, looping trajectory around the buoy.”

“What sort of ship?

Like the ones we’ve already encountered?” Rab asked. “No idea. The scanner resolution at this range isn’t sufficient to say. There are emissions characteristic of periodic use of a fusion drive, as well as evidence of gravimetric wave effects that would suggest an operating combi-drive. But that’s as good as the data gets.”

“Okay, so, here’s what I’m proposing. We are going to do some scouting. We’re going to send the Frankie and the N1 on a tour along the Jackals’ so-called border space. This location”—I pointed at the map and its pink icons—“will be one stop on the trip. I don’t want to give the Jackals the impression we really know what they’re up to at all, and that we’re just desperately trying to gather intel with two—”

I turned to the new Captain of the N1, a young male Gajur named Throx’al. “You can say it—expendable.”

I smiled. “The Jackals only have to think we consider them expendable. Trust me, neither of those ships are, and we will fight just as hard to protect them as we will any other.”

Throx’al lifted a pebbled lip. “Good to know.”

I turned back to the group at large. “One of the things I want the Frankie and N1 to do is to broadcast a message inviting the Jackals to come and talk. And, who knows, maybe they will. Maybe we can do some diplomacy and avoid fighting altogether.”

“That’d be nice,” Torina said. “For a change,” Icky added. “But, if we can’t, then we’ll go to our fallback plan,” I went on. “I assume that, whatever it is, it involves many explosions,” Funboy added. “Oh, I think that’s a safe bet. Whatever happens next, there will be maximum boom.”

WE DECIDED to wait until after the final resolution of Icky’s case to depart, which gave us more time to prepare the ships. Besides the Frankie and the N1, we were taking the Fafnir and the Iowa. The N3 and Jamberac’s ship would remain at Reverie as a backstop against any Jackal aggression against the station, while the Nemesis would move to the edge of the Reverie system and wait there as our reserve—able to either return to the station if the Jackals attacked, or twist to come to the assistance of the task force if we needed it. As the ships provisioned, it quickly became clear that we were facing another bottleneck—ordnance. All of the ships carried a full load out of missiles and other projectiles, like mass-driver slugs. But the station’s magazines only held enough stocks for one more complete load out, and then we'd be facing empty racks. Kragdalous ordered the station’s fabricating resources to switch to manufacturing more missiles, while the Belching Profit went into the business of producing mass-driver slugs. We still weren’t going to be able to fight a protracted conflict without some serious resupply, though, which caused me to revisit a fitful conversation Kragdalous and I had been having for weeks, now. I met him in his office with Perry and got right to the point. “Kragdalous, it’s time we start talking seriously about evacuating the station and getting everyone back to known space. Full bugout, no one left

behind.”

Every time I’d brought it up previously, he’d either been noncommittal, or he’d balked at the idea. So I’d armed myself with a comprehensive argument to try and wrestle him to the mat on this. “Perry and Netty-P have crunched the numbers on this. We can’t ignore their conclusion. We just don’t have the resources out here to fight any sort of prolonged battle against the Jackals, or anyone else for that matter. We need—”

“To plan to evacuate the station, I know,” Kragdalous said, staring out the viewport and into the void. That brought me up short. “Oh. Well then. Ah, thank you.”

He swiveled his chair to face me, a thin smile on his face. “I’m not dumb, Van. I’m just stubborn. I didn’t want to back down in the face of a threat. It’s just not my style, never has been. Eniped aren’t considered awesome tacticians and strategists because we plan on losing battles. We plan on winning. And then we execute.”

“But withdrawal to achieve a position of advantage, or prevent one of disadvantage, is a fundamental concept of warfighting,” Perry said. “You’re right. That’s where the stubborn part comes in. I didn’t want to believe there was a threat. And then, once it became clear there was, after the Jackal raid on this station, I wanted to believe we could avoid it by not provoking the Jackals.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “But?

What changed your mind?”

He pointed at Perry. “He did.”

Kragdalous sat back. “I knew your grandfather, Van. He was one of a handful of people I’ve ever truly respected and implicitly trusted. Him not becoming a Master or a member of the 32 was—it was such a waste. A missed opportunity, for all of us.” He waved a thick hand. “Anyway, if he has implanted protected memories in Perry about the Jackals, the Tyrants, and whatever else is out there—well, then, there’s something out there. Something that has to do with a major battle involving the GKU fifty years ago. This station, and the Hodgepodge project itself, were never meant to be on the front lines of what might be a renewed war.”

I considered his words with care. “It was a strange choice to put the station here,” I offered. “No, I don’t think it was. Frankly, I think it was your grandfather’s doing, something he set in motion before he died. I think he did it because

he knew that, eventually, you’d come out here, and Perry’s memories would trigger. And while that was happening, you’d have access to the one tool that seems to be most essential in confronting the Jackals.”

“The combi-drive,” I said. “Exactly. It had to be tested somewhere well-removed from known space, so I think your grandfather seized on that fact and influenced where the station ended up. He was always so damned good at subtlety.”

I shook my head. “A skill I’m still learning. But… hell of a risk, though. I mean, why didn’t he just dump all this information up front instead of being all convoluted?

Hidden memories, a whole research station placed deliberately in harm’s way just to bring Perry and me out here—?”

Kragdalous shrugged. “Making sure that you only got information when you were ready for it and needed it?

A way of guiding you even after he was gone?” He shrugged again, his thick shoulders bunching enough to wiggle his whiskers. “You’d have to ask him. I’m sure he had his reasons.”

Kragdalous grimaced his version of a smile. “It’s a subtle and multi-layered enough of a plan that it could have been made by an Eniped.”

“High praise indeed,” Perry said. Kragdalous nodded graciously. “To surmise, yes. I agree. We need to prepare to evacuate the station. That would have been a problem until the Iowa and the Nemesis both showed up. Between them, they have enough capacity to practically give every person on Reverie their own quarters and make the trip back to known space in comfort. With your permission, I’ll have my staff draft up a plan in consultation with Urnak and your AIs so it’s ready to go on short notice.”

I stood and faced him, my face serious. I wanted him to know what he’d conceded. What he’d just granted me, personally, as well as everyone else. “Thank you, Kragdalous. I trust your judgment, and you’ve got a damned good team.”

That earned a smile, and we slipped out, as that was as good as things were going to be for the moment. We left, even as I considered the list of tasks looming before all of my crew. “Boss?

His plan has a flaw. Near fatal, if you ask me,” Perry said, soaring ahead a few paces, then landing and waiting for me to catch up. I muttered a curse. Alright, what had we missed, or forgotten—

“Somebody has to travel back to known space with the Conoku. Think about it— months stuck aboard a ship with a bunch of noisy, ill-mannered

teenagers.”

“They clatter like windchimes at a seafood buffet. It’s—it just doesn’t end, you know?

The questions. The rattling. So many of them,” I said, sifting my memories of being around the Conoku for longer than ten minutes. It was loud. I grinned as I walked past, and he prepared to sail ahead again. “That’s okay, we’ll just put the Usu on the Iowa.”

“I thought you wanted to spare them cruel and unusual punishment.”

I lifted a brow. “Not in this case. And weld the airlocks shut. That Usu is gonna serve his whole sentence.”

25

“SO, Icky, just to be clear—this is the climax, the big reveal, the resolution and denouement, right?

You and Paxomar aren’t going to just delay things again, are you?

Because we’ve got a war to start,” I said as we settled in for her reconvened hearing in the Reverie conference room. She nodded. “Yeah, this is it. Paxomar’s going to—” She gave a sly grin. “Well, you’ll see. I’m giddy.”

“Yes, but is it going to win you your case?” Torina asked. “Oh, I think so. But if it doesn’t—well, this is really our best shot, so we don’t have a plan B,” she said, her glee ebbing a bit. “May I assume this three-day delay was intended for Paxomar to prepare whatever defense it is he has planned?” Funboy asked while using a device like a small, motorized lint roller to clean off his seat before he sat on it. “Nope. He was ready three days ago.”

Funboy stopped and looked at Icky, blinking. “Then what was the point of the delay?”

Gabby stuck up her hand. “Oh, I know, I know!

It was just to screw with—what’s his name again?

Toxin?”

“Toxon, although Toxin works just as well,” Icky said, then her coy grin returned. “And you got it, sister. It’s just a mind game.”

“Ah. Mind games. Essie was a great believer in the psychological aspects of the undercover cases we worked together.”

“So you guys played mind games of your own, huh?”

“We did. Sometimes they produced measurable results. Many times, though, I believe Essie just enjoyed screwing with witnesses and suspects. He took great delight in it, sometimes employing elaborate ruses.” Funboy sat down. “I was, to use his term, his straight man.”

Torina put her hands to her cheeks, then deadpanned, “Really?

So...

unexpected.”

“Showtime,” Perry mumbled. The screen came to life, depicting the same scene we’d seen before—

the Wu’tzur legal director sitting at the middle of a long trestle table, flanked by Toxon on one side, and Paxomar and his legal counsel on the other. It was all lit by flickering torches against a background of raw, unworked stone, like a cave wall. I’d asked Icky about that, and she described a Wu’tzur tradition. A cave called Judgment’s Retreat on her home world that had been the ancient site of justice, trials, and the earliest attempts at law. It was an august place, despite being rather neolithic in appearance. Much like Icky, it had layers. I leaned toward Icky and spoke in a soft tone. “So… all of your legal proceedings are still done in an actual cave?”

She spoke out of the side of her mouth in what was, for her, a soft, if not delicate, volume. “No, no. Now they’re done in court chambers made up to look like caves. There’s one rock from the original cave somewhere in the room, though.”

It sounded like legal cosplay to me, but we still had judges in some countries back on Earth who wore robes and wigs, after all. “This hearing is reconvened. The Scribe will begin transcribing the proceedings. Icrul, Paxomar, are you prepared to present your defense?” the legal director asked, his tone grave—probably at least partly because he wasn’t going to accept any more delays, no matter how good the reason. “They’d better be,” Toxon muttered, earning a sharp glance from the legal director. “The Scribe will ignore the plaintiff’s outburst,” he said, boring his gaze into Toxon. Toxon bowed his head in apology but remained hunched in his seat, a hairy, four-armed cranky old bastard of a being. Icky nodded crisply. “Paxomar will present our defense.”

The legal director turned to him. “Very well. Present your case.”

Paxomar beamed. “With pleasure, Honored Director,” he said, then stood and came around to the front of the table. Toxon stiffened, while the legal director frowned. “Is it necessary for you to walk around my court chamber in order to present your defense?”

“It is, Honored Director. Please, bear with me a moment.” He moved to stand in front of Toxon, who glared back at him with suspicious hostility. “What is this?” Toxon growled. “Toxon, in accordance with the First Elder Tome, Passage Five, I am invoking my right to trial by combat,” Paxomar proclaimed. Icky grinned and clapped both pairs of her hands. Urnak did likewise. The rest of us simply sat in stunned silence. So did Toxon. And the law director. Paxomar’s counsel, though, slid a data slate toward the director. “The relevant law is here, Honored Director,” he said. Toxon slammed to his feet. “This is absurd!

Just another stunt to waste this court’s time!” He jabbed a finger at Paxomar. “You’re going to pay for this… this ridiculous, insolent—"

“Silence!” the director thundered, then grabbed the data slate and glared at it. Torina and I both turned to Perry. “Was this your idea?” I hissed at him. “Yup.”

Torina shook her head. “Perry, Paxomar isn’t a warrior. He’s a—a—”

“A nerd?”

“Well… he’s… he’s definitely not a warrior.”

“Neither is Toxon. He’s a cranky old fart. And I’ll take nerd rage over cranky old fart shaking his cane any day. In fact, who’s looking for some action here?

I’ll give three-to-one—no, four-to-one—”

I pressed his beak closed and turned back to the display. “Honored Director, this is insane—” Toxon started, but the director cut him off. “I said to be quiet!

And sit down!”

Toxon subsided from boil to simmer, but outrage still poured off him like a bad smell, even across a thousand light-years of twist-comm link. There might have been a hint of panic, too, since the director was still poring over the data slate and hadn’t just dismissed Paxomar out of hand. I

glanced at Urnak and saw that he wore a shit-eating grin of the highest order. Finally, the director put the slate down, leaned back, and sighed. “I had a chance to sit in tax adjudication. But it’ll be boring, I told myself. I’ll get more interesting cases here—again, a delusion, as most are tedious and banal.” He sat forward again. “And now, here I am, presiding over a blood challenge.” He shook his head. “Because this is—unbelievably

—entirely legal.”

Toxon shot to his feet again. “What?

That’s ridiculous—!”

“Yes, it is. But the law that allowed trial by combat is still on the books.”

“No one pays attention to the Elder Tomes anymore, they’re just dusty old—”

“Legal texts,” the director snapped. “Valid, extant legal texts that have never been repealed.”

Just as Toxon radiated anger, Paxomar exuded smug satisfaction. He might be nerd, a non-warrior, and a runt compared to Icky, but he was still young and reasonably fit. If it came to a fight between him and the much older, softer, and more portly Toxon—well, I wouldn’t even take four-to-one on that. “You may choose the weapon we use—sword, spear, or hammer. Slashing, piercing, or bludgeoning, your choice,” Paxomar said, leaning toward Toxon, who leaned back just as fast. “I will… choose no such thing!

Honored Director—!”

“Your choice is simple, Toxon. You can accept the trial, which can be to either first blood or death—uh, which of those are you interested in, Paxomar?” the director asked. “First blood is fine, Honored Director. I don’t want to be unreasonable.”

Toxon’s mouth worked like a gasping fish. “Honored Director, please

—”

“You can accept the trial, and live with the outcome,” the director went on, raising his voice to cut Toxon off again. “Which is, incidentally—” He glanced at the data slate and shook his head. “Forfeiture of your, and I quote, lands, livestock, chattels, children, home, and spouse or spouses—”

He made a huh sound and smirked. “Spouses, plural, eh?

Anyway, you can accept the challenge, or you can withdraw your complaint—and again, I quote—irrevocably.”

“Honored Director, this makes a mockery of any reasonable—”

“I absolutely agree, and it must be changed. Seriously, it really has to be changed.” The director looked at Toxon and shrugged. “But, for the moment, this is the law of the land. And that means that the choice is yours, Toxon. Accept the challenge and fight it out—”

At that point, the director pointedly cleared his throat, an obvious tactic to avoid grinning the way the rest of us were starting to. “—or you can withdraw your complaint.”

“I am not going to fight this… this garrulous idiot!”

“Fine, so you’re withdrawing your complaint against Icky and me,”

Paxomar said. “I am not!

I—”

“Then spear, sword, or hammer?

Which is it going to be?”

“I will not engage in some absurd—!”

The director, throwing shades of Icky when she was pissed, leaned toward Toxon with his muscles bunched up. “You are either going to enter an answer to the challenge, as the law requires, or I will enter one for you. And right now, considering you used an old and obsolete law to start all this, and are now staring down an even older and more obsolete one as a result, if I have to answer for you, it’s going to be a random fifty-fifty as to whether you back down or not. At this point, I’m not displeased with you learning a painful lesson, you preening, prancing gasbag.”

I had to nod, impressed. It was a solid verbal takedown and Wu’tzur were generally muscle-bound and vital. Hell, Toxon could probably put up a fight I’d have to work at winning. Fortunately, though, I didn’t have to fight him. Apparently, Paxomar did, and although he was considered a nerdy, cerebral Wu’tzur, his physiology still made him look like The Terminator-era Schwarzenegger compared to me. I was about two hundred pounds of capable farm boy. Paxomar was twice my weight. With extra arms. As comparisons went, it could leave one wanting, but fortunately, my ship, my crew, and the way Torina looked at me gave me a confidence I’d never known on Earth. I refocused on the tableau before us, because it was both awkward and welcome. Toxon was in the midst of a full-body cringe, a feat I’d not thought possible for the hirsute, fussy tool. But he was cringing, and it was glorious. Still, he had a little starch in him, and he shook his head. “Even if you decide to accept this challenge over my objections, I will not fight this…

this… this dulaggthatches!”

Our translator couldn’t translate the dulaggthatches, which wasn’t unusual—every language had its share of specific things that wouldn’t translate properly. Icky, though, turned and told us what a dulaggthatches was. Incredibly, she did so in a hushed tone, her bulk bent down to whisper

—for Icky, anyway—in my ear. In a rush, she spat a few words. I stared, aghast. And I’d been around the most creative cussin’ ever, that being elderly women at Bingo. I exhaled, my brows lifted. “That’s… that’s kinda gross.”

Torina just shook her head, as she’d been close enough to hear. “I don’t even think that’s possible—not in any creature with a spine, anyway. And what’s a trumpet?”

The director was not amused. “Toxon, you will not use language like that in these proceedings. I am fining you five hundred bonds for that—”

Toxon glared and opened his mouth, but the director raised a finger. “—and I will double that fine for every repeat occurrence, or just throw you in prison for my merriment.”

Toxon closed his mouth. Paxomar spoke up. “Director, if the plaintiff accepts the challenge and then refuses to fight me—”

“Yes, yes, then I must issue a summary judgment against him, and he will forfeit all of his… lands, livestock, chattels, children, home, and spouse or spouses to you,” the director said. “He… can keep his spouse.”

The director actually smiled, then turned to Toxon. “Well?”

Toxon glared venomously from him, to Paxomar, to Icky—who sat grinning in a way guaranteed to incite a riot. Then he snapped a single curse, albeit not nearly as creative as earlier. “I withdraw my complaint,” he said, then paused as though he was about to say something else. But he didn’t and chose to stand in a glorious fluster. He kicked the table leg, howled, jumped, and then almost fell down. Twice. Then he left the frame, his ego in tatters, his foot no doubt throbbing. Urnak smiled with great satisfaction. “Such ignominy. But then, he was always small. Daughter of mine, I think you won and—”

“SUCK IT, TOXON!” Icky bellowed, punching the air with all four fists. She then proceeded to spin in place, which was no small feat for a being the size of your average European car, and then her smile dimmed and turned… sly. “You have some thoughts. Icky?” I asked, almost dreading the answer. Her response was the single most uncomfortable sentence I’d heard in quite some time. “Paxomar,” she purred, “I have never before been this, ah, attracted to you—”

“And, with that, these proceedings are adjourned,” the director said, to my eternal gratitude. I stood and spoke up. “Honored Director?

On behalf of the Peacemaker Guild, I urge you to get your body of laws updated. Otherwise, once word of this gets out, you might find that parking tickets spark a bloodbath. And I’m not keen on sending people into mortal combat every time we enforce your laws for you.” I looked at Icky, who was still pulsing with amorous intent. “There are other side effects as well, sir. I hope you understand.”

“Way ahead of you, Peacemaker. I’m on my way to see our Administrator of Laws right now—instead of going to lunch, I might add,”

he said, his tone amiable and, after a glance at Icky’s flushed face, even sympathetic. I nodded and stepped back so Icky could say goodbye to Paxomar, which was frankly none of my business. It went on for some time. When she completed her—whatever it was they did—she turned to me. “Van, I need some antimatter.”

“No. No long, long, long-distance sexy chats while we’ve got a war to fight.”

“But Va-aan—!”

Torina touched her arm. “Just do what I do, Icky.”

“What’s that?”

“Think about your grandmother.”

“You think about my grandmother?”

“I—no, Icky, I don’t. You think about your grandmother.”

Icky scowled. “And?”

“In lingerie.”

“Why—?” Icky blinked. “Oh. Yeah. I see what you mean. Dang. That could kill the libido in a teenager at sleepaway camp.”

As we made to head back to the Fafnir, I looked sidelong at Torina. “When do you ever need to think about your grandmother?

We’re together all the time.”

She patted my arm. “Of course we are, dear. Of course we are.”

Icky went quiet and looked around until she found Perry, then she walked up to him. “Bird, I know I give you a hard time, but… but thank you.”

Without warning, she suddenly knelt in front of the chair upon which Perry stood and—

And she hugged him, pulling him against her face while embracing him with her two smaller arms. I gave Perry a warning look. “No remarks, bird. Let the moment be.”

He shook his head. “Wasn’t even considering it.”

WE WERE READY. All of our ships had been fully armed and provisioned—and thoroughly swept for bugs or any other devices similar to the one we found on the Iowa. That was a particular concern for the N1 and the N3, to which the Usu had had ample access, but we decided to ensure the Fafnir, Frankie, Iowa, and Nemesis were all clean, too. I’d intended to pilot the Frankie, since she and the N1 would be the most exposed ships in the upcoming operation, being what amounted to bait and all. But I got pushback from all directions on that—from my own crew, from Jamberac, from Kragdalous, and even from Urnak. “Van, we know that you never hesitate to put yourself in harm’s way. No one doubts for a moment you would. But your job is to run the operation. That means staying where you can maintain situational awareness and appreciate the big picture, not flying around in the Frankie,”

Urnak said. I tried to push back at the pushback, but not for long. As I’d once heard a company commander say to my platoon leader, Lieutenant, you carry a rifle for two reasons—for your own defense, and so you look like everyone

else on the battlefield. It’s not your weapon, though. Your platoon is your weapon. The point was a good one. I finally gave up and gave in. I’d remain aboard the Fafnir, which would be the flagship of our small flotilla. Torina, Perry, and Netty-P would ride with me. Icky and Funboy would pilot the Frankie, Gabby would fly with the Iowa—mainly so that she could get to know the Conoku better—and Rab would accompany Urnak. Urnak also decided to bring Rektorr along with him. I raised my eyebrows at that, but he shook his head. “I’ve spent days with him now, Van. I’m convinced of his loyalty, so I don’t hesitate to bring him aboard my ship. He’s a sharp engineer, and frankly, I could use the help. Having both him and Rab aboard will definitely help keep the Nemesis in the fight—assuming there is one, that is.”

“Just… be careful, Urnak,” I’d said and left it at that. Frankly, I was pretty much convinced of Rektorr’s reliability myself, and if he was happy to have Rektorr fly with him, that was good enough for me. After a final planning session, a virtual one done via comm with all the ships and Kragdalous on Reverie Station, our task force departed. We made our stately way out to our assigned twist points, not using the combi-drives on the ships equipped with them both to save fuel and because there wasn’t any reason. Once there, we twisted and launched ourselves into the mysteries of the Jackals, the Tyrants, and Perry’s enigmatic memories. As the stars began to vanish and light smeared to rumor, I caught Torina’s eye. Her expression was diamond hard, but she still managed a wink. We’re ready, she mouthed. And the twist began. 26

OUR PLAN WAS to start in the vicinity of the Jackals’ marker buoy, the Frankie and the N1 together, broadcasting a prerecorded message from me and Kragdalous asking for a parley. Who knows, maybe we’d get lucky and the Jackals would turn out to be willing to talk. If they weren’t, the Fafnir and the Iowa held position quietly about a light-year away. If the Jackals chose to attack the two smaller ships, we’d be able to twist in on a moment’s notice. We’d also set up a protocol whereby the Frankie and the N1 would both automatically ping us every ten minutes to let us know they still had comms. If they missed a ping, we’d immediately come running. Urnak, meanwhile, held the Nemesis on the edge of the Reverie system as our reserve, able to deploy either to our aid or that of Reverie. I liked tripwires. And I liked them even more when they were designed to protect my people. The Frankie and the N1 spent two hours broadcasting and waiting for a reply, or any sort of reaction at all. There was none. The Jackals’ buoy simply continued broadcasting its own warning message, unchanged, while nothing else happened in the vast expanse of darkness around us. I shrugged at the images Icky and Throx’al, captain of the N1, split-screened onto the comm. “Okay, knocking on the front door hasn’t got us an answer. Let’s try stepping through it and see what happens. Start phase two.”

They both acknowledged and signed off. Phase two had the Frankie and N1 twisting to a point about halfway between the buoy and the pink zone on the star chart, where Netty’s signal intercepts suggested another buoy as well as a ship with an operating combi-drive. We didn’t bother repositioning the Fafnir or Iowa because a four-light-year twist wouldn’t entail much more time than a twist of only a single light-year. Once the two smaller ships had repositioned, they resumed broadcasting our message. I sat back and smiled wryly. “In Earthly pop culture, aliens showed up on Earth and said things like ‘we come in peace’ or ‘take us to your leader.’

Gotta admit, though, I never thought I’d be the alien saying those things to another race.”

“Just goes to show you,” Perry said. “Show me what?”

“Uh—not sure. That’s all of the saying I’ve heard.”

“Huh. Me too. Don’t know if there’s a second half.”

“I’ll get back to you, boss. After the scrappin’, of course.”

Another two hours passed with nothing from the void but silence. We decided to move on to phase three, the Frankie and N1 twisting to the pink zone for another round of diplomatic outreach. This time, since the destination was a star system and not just a point in deep space, we twisted the Fafnir and the Iowa as well, to a point in the target system’s Oort Cloud. That gave us the flexibility to twist closer or use the combi-drives to head to the other ships’ aid. As soon as we had, we received repeated scanner data from the Frankie and the N1, allowing us to keep the Fafnir and the Iowa silent. We immediately got a hit. “There’s another buoy here,” Icky said. “Oh—and we’ve got company.”

Icons popped onto the tactical overlay—and they were uniformly red. There were two smaller ones, both similar signatures to the modular, faceted spheres we’d encountered before, and two larger ones we didn’t recognize. “Those two larger ships are about class 11 mass-wise, of an entirely different design than the previous Jackal ships we’ve encountered. They’re still strangely familiar, though,” Netty said. “They might not repeat, but they rhyme,” I said, surveying the overlay. The icons only portrayed essential data, so all I saw was labels and numbers, but Netty popped up imagery from the N1.

We could have been looking at the N3.

“Say that again, boss. This is… similar,” Perry said. “Similar is a bit kind of a term for this situation. You know, I’ll bet a lot of the N3’s design elements came from the Usu. Rektorr, any insight on that?” I asked, since the Nemesis was also plugged into the twist telemetry from the N1.

“I think it goes without saying that you’re correct. Unfortunately, though, my specific area of expertise is propulsion tech, so I had little to do with the design and construction of the N3—I’m afraid I can’t offer much more than that.”

I glanced at Torina, who muted the comm. “Do you believe him?”

“I want to believe him. Does that count?”

She shook her head. I unmuted the channel, but Rektorr had anticipated our doubts. “I realize that this does nothing to help convince you of my loyalty, so if you would prefer, I will ask Urnak to seal me into an empty compartment until this operation is concluded.”

I stared at the overlay, then shook my head. If Rektorr had been human, I’d be judging him based solely on his actions, which had been nothing but helpful for us. If I was going to avoid being a hypocrite, then, I should judge him as an Usu the same way. Time for a leap of faith. “No, I want you to be part of this operation, Rektorr. You just keep doing what you’re doing, and if anything occurs to you that might help us, call out.”

“I will. And thank you, Peacemaker Tudor.”

“Van. I like everyone not shooting at me or that I’m not arresting to call me Van.”

“Very well—Van.”

I smiled—

Just as all hell broke loose. FOR NEARLY TEN MINUTES, the four Jackal ships didn’t react to the presence of the Frankie and the N1 as they made their deliberate and conspicuous

way in-system. Instead, they futzed about around a stunning azure ice giant orbiting halfway between the big, red-orange star and the system’s twist boundary. It was a beautiful view. Just not at the moment. Our two ships continued broadcasting our message asking for talks, and the Jackal ships ignored them. The two larger ones stayed in orbit around the largest of the ice giant’s moons, a Titan-like world covered in sprawling oceans of liquid methane. The smaller ones orbited the ice giant further out but occasionally accelerated and decelerated, apparently at random. And then, without any warning or preamble, all four ships blurred into semi-existence, powering out to intercept the Frankie and N1 using their combi-drives. Netty estimated we had ten minutes at most before they’d been on top of our ships. I sat up. “Okay, maybe they’re racing out to greet the Frankie and the N1 and throw a welcome party. But I’m not betting on it. Cantullin, we’re heading in. We’ll twist as far as we can, then use our own combi-drives from there.”

“You got it, Captain Van!”

With a clatter, my crews went to work. WE ARRIVED at the twist point prepared to fire up the combi-drives and race to the aid of the Frankie and N1, who were grossly outmatched in this fight. Worse, while the N1 could probably escape using her own combi-drive, the Frankie couldn’t. And unless the Jackals really were just rushing to say hello, we had to assume that their intentions weren’t going to be peaceful. Which meant this was a war after all, despite our best intentions to avoid it. But before Netty and Hodgepodge, the combi-drive’s surprisingly reclusive AI, could activate it, Perry spoke up. “Wow. Okay, that’s something.”

I shot him a glance. “Could you be a little more specific, bird?

We are about to head into battle here.”

“That moon, the one the Jackals seemed to gravitate around—heh, gravitate, since they were orbiting it—”

“Bird, I swear—”

“Sorry, sometimes I’m a little dazzled by my own wit. Anyway, there’s no buoy here. And the comm signals Netty intercepted aren’t coming from these Jackal ships either. They’re coming from that moon.”

I turned to the overlay, mindful of the fact the seconds were ticking by. Still, we needed to know what we were getting ourselves into here. “Netty, light up that moon, full scanner suite. Let’s see what’s so interesting about it.”

The data poured in. It was a rocky body about the same size as Saturn’s Titan, with a similar atmosphere of mostly methane with lesser amounts of other hydrocarbons and ammonia. The surface pressure was only a little lower than on Earth but obviously not breathable—at least, not by us. But there was something else. Drifting through the atmosphere, and in a few places stationary or maybe tethered in place, were a multitude of enormous egg-like structures, full of some gas less dense than the moon’s air. The comm signals, which were mostly just empty carrier waves with only flickers of modulation, seemed to originate at least in part from the gasbag eggs. “Okay, that’s weird,” Torina said. I nodded. “The question is, what the hell are they, other than weird?

And more to the point, Perry, how did you know about this?

Did you have some memories unlock?”

“Yes and no—and before you go all arm-wavy about Perry being a smartass, I really mean that. I’ve had a few memories unlock, about that moon being related to something called The Junkway.”

“What the hell is a Junkway?”

“That would presumably be somewhere among the memories that haven’t unlocked yet. But it’s pretty clear that it’s something your grandfather knew about.”

“Perry, have you actually been here before?” Torina asked. He shrugged his wings. “Maybe. If I have, but can’t remember it, how would I know?”

“All very good questions, all pointing at us investigating that moon and saying hello. But right now, we’ve got more important things to do, like rescuing the Frankie and the N1,” I said, reaching for my helmet. “Netty, you and Hodgepodge can get us underway. Take us straight into battle. In the meantime, although it probably goes without saying—battle

stations, please.”

A BATTLE between combi-drive ships was weird. The drive’s ability completely rewrote the book on tactics. In seconds, we could streak distances that would take standard drives half a day—or more. That said, the book was still very much a work-in-progress, because the combi-drive, for all its capability, had some critical limitations. First, it guzzled antimatter like a sailor on payday. It was like the afterburner on a jet fighter, dumping raw fuel into its exhaust stream for a powerful boost—awesome, but you could practically see the gas gauge inexorably rotating toward E with each potent burst of holy shit hang on!

Of course, if the combi-drive had been the only system to consume antimatter in the ship, it wouldn’t be a problem just running the tanks dry. But antimatter powered not only the twist drive, but the twist effect that made real-time comms and scanners possible. Running out of antimatter was an effective end to operational ability. And in some cases, life. Second, you couldn’t maneuver while the combi-drive was operating. You had a straight line shot from where you were to where you wanted to go, and that was it. It was a high-performance dragster compared to the nimble little cars that wove and wheeled their way through back-country rallies. Third, you couldn’t shoot at anything while the combi-drive was running. You were, after all, undertaking a partial twist, yanking two points in space-time closer together than they normally were, like grabbing two handfuls of a bedspread and dragging them toward one another. The resulting spatial and temporal distortion effectively cocooned the ship in its own little fun-house version of reality, preventing much meaningful interaction with the rest of the universe. So, no shooting while using the drive, and no real situational awareness outside the ship at all. Oh, and missiles were almost entirely pointless. A ship with a combi-drive could just blur itself out of their way. Until we had combi-drive equipped missiles, if such a thing were even possible, our biggest long-range killer had been almost entirely neutered. This was all quickly becoming evident to us as we slammed headlong into our fight with the Jackals. We’d anticipated all of it but hadn’t yet had much opportunity to put that appreciation into practice. We didn’t have the antimatter reserves at Reverie to do any real training and had to rely on what we could simulate. And even the best simulations are just that—

simulations. Until you could do it for real, without the certainty that if you screwed up you were just going to get a Game Over screen, you really didn’t get all the subtle-but-critical nuances. All of which is to say that the battle was like nothing we’d ever experienced before. It was disorienting, stupidly intense, and terrifying. Perry rocked back on the edge of a chair as the Fafnir maneuvered, his wings lifting in discomfiture. I knew it was an affectation, but it showed his concern. I looked at him and said, “Yeah. Same.”

His eyes flashed again, but he said nothing, proving yet again that surprises and battles go hand in hand. THOSE OF US aboard the Fafnir and the Iowa missed the opening moments of the battle, being under the effects of our combi-drives. We only saw what happened after the drives cut out and we received a dump of tactical data and imagery from the Frankie. As I’d instructed, Icky and Throx’al let the Jackals fire first, just on the off chance that they really were rushing out to greet us with open arms. Instead, the Frankie and N1 started maneuvering, and hard, even before the Jackals popped back into existence, their smaller ships leading the way. The instant they did, they started shooting. Their strange beam weapons again bounced and scattered off the grav-plating covering much of the Frankie, rendering her almost immune to its effects. The N1, though, had no such protection and immediately took a succession of punishing hits. Debris spalled off her as the beams slashed across her hull, as though great claws were raking chunks right out of her. In moments, the glowing debris fields stretched across our view—hot gems that cooled immediately in the fierce, unrelenting cold of space. The smaller Jackal ships then blurred away again. The larger two kept up a sustained fire, albeit from a longer range. The Frankie again danced and darted through the incoming fire essentially unscathed, but the N1

wasn’t so lucky. When we finally arrived and the combi-drive cut out, the N1 had been battered into a sad shadow of her former self. “Shit—Throx’al, do you still have your combi-drive?”

His image on the comm coughed and waved away smoke fuming the N1’s cockpit. “It’s one of the few things we have left, yeah—”

The image shuddered as the N1 took another hit. “Okay, your work here is done. Get the hell out of here and make your way back to Reverie,” I said. Throx’al nodded. “Hate to run from a fight, but—”

He cut himself off. “One of the—”

It was all he managed to say before one of the small, faceted-sphere Jackal ships, just a single module, abruptly smeared itself into existence a short distance from the N1—

And slammed into her. Both ships exploded into a shower of debris. The N1’s aft section spun lazily out of the impact cloud, then exploded in a searing flash as her antimatter containment failed. When the flash pulsed away, there was nothing left but hot plasma, but even that was gone in seconds. She was no more. I stared at the comm display, which had automatically switched back its default depiction of system status and the Peacemaker logo. “That—” I started, then blinked. “—was no accident,” Netty said. “That Jackal ship had ample opportunity to maneuver any other way. It deliberately cut out its combi-drive too close to the N1 for a collision to be avoided.”

“They rammed the N1?” Torina asked. “I’d say yes, with a high confidence level.”

“These Jackals don’t screw around,” Perry said. I shook my head, partly just to clear it of the shock of what had just happened. “No, they don’t. And neither can we.” I switched to the flotilla comm channel. “Everyone, that wasn’t an accidental collision. The Jackals are playing for keeps here, which means we are, too. I want every Jackal ship

thoroughly destroyed, no exceptions.”

“You don’t want to take one intact, get prisoners—you know, learn something about these assholes?” Icky said. “Oh, I do, but I’m not going to risk it. We’ll learn what we can from the wreckage. Fafnir out.”

27

ONE OF THE small Jackal ships locked itself onto the Frankie, trying to get close enough to use its powerful mass driver, since its beam weapon was largely ineffective. Icky wasn’t about to let that happen, though. Using the grav-plating to full effect, Icky threw the Frankie through wild gyrations and bursts of acceleration that would probably have squashed her occupants, inertial offsets or no. Funboy, in the meantime, kept up a steady, methodical fire with the Frankie’s lasers. But the Jackal ship, a pair of faceted modules still bound together, proved almost as elusive. Funboy missed again. And again. He leaned back, wiped his face—it was damp with sweat—and sighed. “If they continue to evade my weapons, I will become dyspeptic.”

“Um, I—” I began. Perry’s voice rattled in my ear. To have a bad temper. “Perish the thought,” I mumbled. Hope he hits the bastards. Can’t have Funboy dyspeptic. Or anything else other than just being Funboy. Not sure how much one ship can take. My only answer was a digital snort of laughter. The big worry was that without a combi-drive, the Frankie would be a proverbial sitting duck for another ramming attack. To prevent that, Icky kept the ship in frantic motion, snapping through slips, yaws, pitches and rolls in a random pattern. As long as she could keep it up, the Jackals would have to get profoundly lucky to manage an impact. But that was still a massive problem, one of which I was the architect. I’d overestimated our combat ability, thinking purely in terms of real space maneuverability and sheer firepower. But the first was largely irrelevant, and the second was pointless if we couldn’t land hits fast enough to swing the battle. In short, I’d badly underestimated the Jackals. Worse, we were stuck. The Fafnir and the Iowa could just blur away using our combi-drives and return to Reverie. But the Frankie couldn’t and would have to burn along a long, straight line trajectory just to reach a twist point. The Jackals would be all over her in a combi-drive-powered frenzy she’d never survive. The awful realization hit me like a blow and quickly sank into my core. I’d screwed up. I’d gotten Throx’al and his crew killed aboard the N1 and now mired us in an engagement with an utterly implacable foe we could only escape by sacrificing Icky and Funboy—which was not an option. So we had to fight. And we had to win. “Van, you should consider calling in Urnak, don’t you think?” Torina called out as we slammed back into normal space from another combi-drive hop and she lined up targets. We had that, at least—between her disciplined, almost machine-like precision on the weapons and the potent capabilities of the fire control system Gerhardt had gifted us so long ago, we were able to deliver accurate fire within seconds of drive cutoff. The fire controller particularly came into its own now. It had always been good to have, but it almost seemed designed to deal with fleeting targets that abruptly vanished and reappeared. I glanced at her. “I don’t want Urnak anywhere near this mess. The only thing keeping us alive are our combi-drives, and he doesn’t have one.”

I didn’t bother to add which means he’ll be a big, fat, easy target for another ramming attack, because I didn’t have to. Torina just nodded and concentrated on firing on one of the bigger Jackal ships, both of which had now entered the fray. She landed hits with the laser and plasma-burst cannon, then it abruptly shimmered and vanished. She was already slewing the weapons along its trajectory, though, waiting for it to reappear. The Frankie danced by, Icky keeping up her crazy gyrations. The Iowa, in the meantime, had taken several solid hits, but the Conoku were quickly coming to understand how to best use the combi-drive. Their mental gifts

led them to use grav-plate maneuvers as an augmentation that made the Iowa incredibly responsive in battle. She spun like a top, thrusters blasting out staccato bursts in every direction, then blurred a few tens of thousands of klicks, reappeared, and opened fire again. Her raw weight of firepower was telling, as the Jackal ship fighting her had taken some serious blows in return. The smaller Jackal ship finally split, one module keeping up its sustained attack on the Frankie, the other coming after us. That stuck us between it and the second of the bigger enemy ships. We were hemmed in. I pulsed the combi-drive and shot us out of harm’s way, causing Torina to curse and wait to recalculate all her firing solutions. The Jackals came after us, snapping into existence just a few seconds after we did. Torina concentrated fire on the smaller of the two this time, trying to take it out of the fight. She slammed a particle beam shot into it, then it flashed away again. “Hang on, I’m making another hop,” I said, driving the Fafnir to a point about five thousand klicks away. We’d momentarily taken the smaller Jackal ship out of the fight as it maneuvered to come back at us, which let Torina now switch her attention to the bigger ship. But it didn’t come after us. Instead, it abruptly shifted targets to the Iowa, doubling up the combat power and relieving some of the pressure on the other enemy craft. It was exactly what I would have done, and I hated them for it. I cursed and slewed the destination reticle for the combi-drive to a new point, but before I could kick us there the smaller ship reappeared and opened up. A series of heavy thumps shuddered through the Fafnir’s bones and a half-dozen systems went red, then dark. They included an entire thruster array. “Netty, can you compensate—?”

“I can. However, the ship has taken serious damage—at least three mass-driver hits amidships. On an unrelated note, remember how you said you didn’t like the layout of the crew lounge and wanted to rearrange things?

Well, now you’ll get your chance.”

“Did the espresso machine survive?”

“As metal, yes. As a machine, no.”

“Well, shit. There’s another three grand down the tubes,” I said, enjoying the sheer catharsis of bitching while in battle. Torina focused on her weapons, quickly bringing the Jackal ship that had pounded us under effective fire and driving it off again. She sat back and blew out a breath. “Perry, can you take over the plasma and particle cannons?

I’m getting swamped here.”

“Got it. This battle’s such a furball, I’m not doing much good trying to play big-picture, situational-awareness bird anyway.”

“Netty, how are we structurally?

Can we still maneuver hard?” I asked, swinging the Fafnir through a broad turn just to keep us moving in something other than a straight line. “Structure’s fine, still well over ninety percent reliability index. I’m having to compensate for that missing thruster array, though. Needless to say, another hit like that—”

“Needless to say,” I agreed, and turned my attention to the Iowa and the Frankie. Our battlecruiser was still mixing it up with the two bigger Jackal ships, one of which was now barely in the fight. The other, though, was still mostly intact and was blasting a chunk out of the Iowa even as I watched. Cantullin broke off and vanished into the combi-drive netherworld. The less damaged of the two Jackals set off in pursuit. The more battered, though, snapped off in a different direction. Toward the Frankie. I swept my attention onto her and cursed yet again. Icky’s luck had run out. SOMETHING—A mass-driver shot, a lucky hit from that damned beam weapon, or something else—had punched through her, leaving her tumbling and spinning along a fixed course. That was a death sentence in this battle. I slammed the destination reticle to a point near her and kicked the drive. We had about ten seconds of downtime to catch our breath but also wonder if Icky and Funboy were even still alive. I kicked myself again for the shitshow around me—

We popped back into reality, and Torina and Perry again frantically brought up firing solutions. Netty, though, spoke up. “Van, our antimatter supply is getting close to the redline. Much more use of the combi-drive is going to leave us without enough to return to Reverie—”

“Yeah, I see that, Netty, thanks!” I snapped, then shook my head. “Sorry

—”

“Don’t be. Just win.”

I smiled. Succinct and uplifting. I really did have the best crew. Torina and Perry managed to drive off the Jackal again, but it was only a temporary respite. While the more intact of the two bigger ships kept the Iowa busy and at bay, the rest of the Jackals converged on the Fafnir and the Frankie, like their namesake beasts sensing an easy kill. “Van, they’re going to be able to come at us from three vectors. I don’t know if Torina and I can—” Perry started, but I cut him off, my mind racing. “Do your best,” I said, my attention fixed on the Frankie. “Icky, Funboy, what’s your status over there?”

“We are tumbling out of control toward deep space. Without rescue, our inevitable fate is death, most likely from anoxia once our air supply fails. Of course, all deaths are ultimately from a lack of oxygen to the brain, so we are in much the same situation as every other living person is, or has been—”

Icky cut him off. “Power cells only, drive and maneuver controls down, and we’ve only got what air’s in our suits.”

“I just said that,” Funboy replied evenly. I glanced at the overlay. We were in the clear for the moment, so much so I’d normally have just risked taking Icky and Funboy off the Frankie and carrying on. But in the clear was an illusion in this battle. We could easily have two or three Jackal ships right on top of us in—

Torina pointed at the overlay. “Not good.”

The two smaller Jackal ships abruptly vanished from the overlay, replaced by shimmering tracks of uncertainty. The larger, heavily damaged ship remained at range, taking potshots at us. “Shit. Netty, how long?”

“Two minutes, give or take.”

I muted the comm and turned to the others. “If you’ve got an option other than making a desperate last stand here, I’m all ears for it.”

Perry gave me an implacable, amber stare. “Van, we’re far enough from both the system’s star and that gas giant that we could probably twist away. There’d be some risk, and our nav would probably be fuzzy, but—”

“No. I will not leave Icky and Funboy sitting helpless while we run.”

“Losing the Fafnir, and possibly the Iowa as well, is going to leave Reverie station in a hopeless situation. They’ll be entirely dependent on the N3, which is still a work in progress, and the Nemesis and Jamberac’s ship, neither of which have combi-drives.”

I opened my mouth, but Funboy spoke up. “Since you have apparently muted the comm, it’s likely that you’re discussing the possibility of leaving us to our fate and withdrawing from this battle. That is, of course, the logical course of action. You have an obligation, Van, to the people back at Reverie.”

“I hate to agree with sourpuss, but he’s right, Van. You gotta go,” Icky put in. I sank back in my seat. Every instinct screamed no, I had to try and save them. Icky and Funboy were my crew. They were my friends. If I had an obligation to anyone, it was them—

Except that wasn’t true. For better or worse—and it appeared to be worse, considering how badly I’d screwed this up—I was the operational commander out here. I had literally hundreds of people back at Reverie who needed protection. Who needed salvation. My gut churned as I unmuted the comm. “Look guys, I—” I said, then stopped, my mind suddenly blank. I needed to say something here. Something. But I didn’t know what. I didn’t know what to say—

“Van, the Jackals are less than a minute away. And with the uncertainty inherent in tracking a ship using a combi-drive, that could be as little as thirty seconds—”

I sat up. “Netty, tell Cantullin to disengage and twist as soon as she can. We’re withdrawing.” I stared hard at the comm panel. “Icky, Funboy, I—”

“Go, Van. Now. Before the Jackals get here,” Funboy said. “I—I’m sorry, guys.”

“Why?

Risk is inherent to what we do. Icky and I both knew that when we boarded the Frankie.”

Icky sniffed. “Oh, for—Van, would you just get the hell out of here—”

Both Jackal ships appeared and lit us up with targeting scanners. I swore, reaching for the controls to light our own drive. Torina and Perry swung the weapons to bear. But the Jackals fired first, another solid hit slamming into the Fafnir somewhere behind and below us. More systems went red, then dark. Main power flickered off, then back on and stabilized. Torina shouted something as she punched at the weapons controls—

Then a new icon abruptly flashed onto the tactical overlay, a big one denoting a capital ship. My heart sank. That was it, then. I’d been so clever, thinking I could trap the Jackals, but we were the ones who’d been—

Wait. The icon was blue. It was the Nemesis. She’d twisted in just a few hundred klicks away. Hope flared, but so did panic. Sure, the Nemesis might be able to chase off the Jackals, but she also had no combi-drive. She relied heavily on automation for Urnak to operate her, and no crew meant no damage control. If she took a critical hit, then Reverie’s last hope, faint as it was, would die. I looked at the Jackal ships, waiting for them to simply flick away again using their combi-drives and regroup. Burning antimatter fuel didn’t seem to bother them. But maybe they had no plans to leave this system, or they just had more stocks of the stuff here. Either way—

Except they didn’t flick away. Instead, they hung on, both frantically starting to maneuver. It was the worst possible move they could make. With their combi-drives, they could dance their deadly, elusive dance around our ships and attack at their leisure. Without them, they were just two small ships, woefully outclassed by the firepower we could bring to bear. Which, of course, is exactly what we did. While I applied thrust and started maneuvering the battered Fafnir, Torina and Perry started landing hits, but when the Nemesis opened with a full broadside of lasers and particle beams, it all came to an abrupt end. One instant, the Jackals were dodging and weaving and snapping shots back at us, and the next they simply came apart under the hammer blows of our combined fire. I sat back, blinking. It was over. Or, at least—

I zoomed out the overlay until I found the Iowa. She was wheeling around the battered remains of the big Jackal ship she’d been dueling, delivering the coup de grace. Her telemetry showed that she’d taken a lot of damage, too, but she was still intact and maneuvering under her own power. Urnak came on the comm. “Icky, are you alright?”

Despite the deluge of emotions washing through me, I had to smile. Of course he’d ask about his daughter first. “Yeah, I’m fine. About time you showed up.”

Urnak laughed, then his image flicked onto our comm display. “Van, how about you, and the rest of your crew?”

“We’re all more or less unscathed, I think, at least here. Not sure about the Iowa yet.” I took a breath and sat up again. “I’d ask how you knew the Jackals wouldn’t just combi-drive their way out of trouble, but I suspect you had something to do with it.”

“Not me. Rektorr. It was his idea.”

“His idea to do what?”

Urnak gestured for Rektorr to take his place. The expression the Usu projected was one of mild satisfaction. “Rab and I altered the twist drive on the Nemesis to generate a gravitational field effect around the ship that prevented the Jackals’ combi-drives from functioning.”

Rab’s face appeared over Rektorr’s shoulder. “What he’s not saying is that he and I were elbows deep in the Nemesis’s twist drive frantically trying to get it to do what he wanted it to do, while not just wrecking the thing entirely. Oh, and I almost stuck a mag wrench into the antimatter feed. That wouldn’t have been good.”

“No shit. Rektorr, how come you never mentioned this before?

That we had a way of countering combi-drives?”

“Because it’s not a practical application. Its effect is limited to a very short range and a very short duration, and it requires significant retuning of the twist drive to restore it to normal operation. There is a significant chance it will damage or even completely disable the twist drive, and it won’t work at all in another gravitational field stronger than a particularly upper threshold.” He gave his shoulders a mechanical shrug. “It was simply something implicit in the theoretical foundation of the combi-drive that, given the circumstances, I thought was worth giving a try.”

“Well, I’d say your experiment worked,” I said, then nodded at him. “Thank you.”

“You’re most welcome.”

“Uh, somebody wanna come and rescue us?” Icky put in. “And by rescue us, I mean rescue me, from Funboy?

If I have to hear any more musings on how being trapped helpless aboard the Frankie like this is a

metaphor for all of existence, I’m just gonna open my helmet up and call it a day.” She paused, then added, “Boss. This is no joke. He’s asking me if I’ve seen something called French Cinema. Send help. Now.”

ASIDE FROM THE loss of the N1 and her crew, we had two other casualties. Two of the Conoku had been killed during the battle. It only darkened my already deep, smoldering gloom. The rest of the Conoku were understandably somber, mourning their lost siblings and cousins, but a glimmer of philosophical acceptance had already begun to wind its way through the crew, from Cantullin on down. That was the doing of Gabby, who was aboard the Iowa and already swinging into action as an irresistibly effective sort of grief counselor. It added yet another layer of talent to someone I think we’d all assumed was just going to be the Fafnir’s new cook. While Gabby worked her magic, providing just the sort of emotional support the Conoku needed right now, I got on the comm with Cantullin and Urnak, with the rest of my crew—including Icky and Funboy—aboard the Fafnir, and back in the galley, since our crew lounge was mostly just debris. We needed to take stock of our situation and figure out our next move. That second part was easy. Our next move had to be back to Reverie. The Frankie had been disabled and required extensive repairs to be made flyable again. The Fafnir had also taken serious damage, and, although she could still fly and fight, she was probably only one or two good hits away from suffering the Frankie’s fate. The Iowa was beaten up, but most of the damage was to her armor or non-critical parts and systems, meaning she was still operational—ish, anyway. The Nemesis was undamaged, but all of our ships were low on antimatter. Bottom line—we couldn’t face another fight, certainly not a serious or sustained one. I told everyone I needed a few minutes to think things through. I really just needed a few minutes of alone time to get my racing thoughts into some semblance of order. So I retired to my cabin and slumped into the chair at my desk. The door chime sounded. I sighed. “Excuse me, but what part of I need a few minutes alone—”

The door opened, admitting Perry and Netty-P. “I took the liberty of admitting them to your cabin,” Netty said. I crossed my arms. “Yeah, you did. Look, guys, I—”

“Van, we’re here because the rest of the crew wanted us to come and talk to you,” Perry said, his tone grave. Netty-P nodded her vulpine head. “Everyone wants to give you the same message. You did the best you could with the information you had.”

I stared at them for a moment, then gave a thin smile and leaned forward, putting my elbows on my knees. “You guys think I came in here to wallow in self-pity,” I said. “It is your usual response to situations like this one.”

“For some reason, I find that vaguely insulting, though I don’t know why. But—” I sat up. “You’re not wrong, either. That is my usual thing. It’s about now that I’d be talking about not being able to do this anymore, throwing in the towel, and going back to Earth to go back to being a farm boy, blah, blah. But not this time.”

Perry cocked his head. “Really?”

“Yeah. Really.”

Netty-P stepped closer and fixed her imagers on me. “Are you sure?

Because, in our experience—”

“I’ve become a sad sack after a setback like this and mope around brooding about it.”

“Yes. You actually make Funboy seem like—well, his name,” Netty replied. I gave another thin smile but couldn’t keep it on my face for long. “Don’t get me wrong, guys. I’m still unhappy. In fact, I’m viciously upset. But more than anything, I’m angry. I’m angry at the Jackals for being murderous bastards who aren’t willing to even say hello to us. I’m angry at the GKU and the 32 for sticking us out here, knowing full well there was such a dangerous race of aliens nearby. I’m angry at my grandfather for keeping information concealed from us and dribbling it out in bits and pieces, instead of just being up-front about it all.”

I rubbed my hands over my face. “And, yes, I’m angry at myself. I underestimated the Jackals, and I overestimated what we were capable of. We’ve managed to stay on top of all the many, many things that have

opposed us since I first stepped aboard the Fafnir, so I let myself get complacent.”

I stood up. “But no more. We are not going to evacuate Reverie. We are not going to run back to known space. We are going to stay out here and figure out just what my grandfather is trying, in what seems like a wildly irresponsible and—yeah, frankly stupid way, to tell us.”

I stopped and looked at Perry and Netty-P. “I guess, most of all, I’m angry that someone is threatening my crew, and by extension, everyone on Reverie. And you know what?

I’ll take angry. I’ll take furious. What I will not do is mope. I’ve put myself into a position of responsibility here, one where a lot of people are counting on me.”

I stopped and sighed. “And yeah, I’m tired, and part of me wants to just pack it in, but I don’t have that luxury. So… we’ve got work to do.”

“Sounds good, boss. Where do you want to start?” Netty-P asked. “On that moon. It, or something on it, seems to be important to the Jackals and seems to figure in Perry’s memories. So, we’re going to see what that something is.”

Perry and Netty-P both moved aside to let me at the door, but I stopped and looked back at them. “Thank you, guys.”

“Uh, we didn’t do very much, Van. We just kinda stood here while you talked. Which is a shame, really. I had a next-level inspirational speech all ready to go,” Perry said. “I’m talking Texas high school football coach quality here. Really.”

“Oh?

Well, let’s hear it,” I replied, opening the door. “Okay, brace yourself. Four score and seven years ago—”

“That’s the Gettysburg Address, bird.”

“Where do you think Lincoln got it from—?”

EPILOGUE

THE MOON TURNED out to be nothing but mysteries. We landed the Fafnir, planning for a short visit and mindful of the fact that the Jackals might come back. We hoped that suddenly appearing to have a means of counteracting the combi-drive would hold them at bay for at least a while. We’d picked up Rektorr from the Nemesis on our way down to the surface. I wanted to see if he had any insights into what we might find on the moon’s surface, but I particularly wanted to show him that I trusted him

—that he was now one of the team. I mean, if saving our butts the way he had didn’t prove his loyalty, what would?

As we disembarked into a hydrocarbon breeze, I got a good look at the damage to the Fafnir. She’d been struck several times, but the worst hits were the one just aft of amidships and high, that had demolished the crew lounge and taken out one of the thruster arrays, and one low, just behind the cockpit, that had knocked out the primary nav scanners and forced us onto backups. There were myriad other bits of damage and resulting problems as well, but none of them stopped the ship from being flyable. I left Icky, Funboy, and Netty-P to do a detailed damage assessment and figure out what we needed to repair and in what order. Torina, Rektorr, and I walked off toward a small rise overlooking a methane lake, while Perry soared overhead. “What is all that?” Torina asked when we stopped at the crest. Dozens, maybe hundreds of shimmering, purplish spheres rose on slender stalks like tethered balloons, stark against the green and yellow clouds. They swayed

in the toxic breeze, stately, almost hypnotic waves of motion rippling through them with ponderous grace. Torina put her hands on her hips. “In case anyone was wondering if this place gives me the creeps, yes—yes it does.”

“Like HR Giger blew some bubbles. Evil bubbles, at that,” I said, nodding, my anxious wonder at the utterly alien vista making me forget that neither Torina nor Rektorr were likely to know who HR Giger was. “Evil, and grape-flavored. It looks like Prince having a yard sale,” Perry replied. Rektorr abruptly unfolded his legs, rising to a height of nearly three meters. He slowly turned, the face projected on his display one of wary curiosity. “That’s a neat trick,” Torina said, looking up at him. “It does come in handy. This time, though”—he finished turning a complete circle, then lowered himself again—“it unfortunately doesn’t tell me anything. I’m sorry, Van, I have no light to shed on what this is.”

I nodded. “Perry, how about you?

Any new memories unlock now that we’re here?”

“Sadly, no. All I can tell you for sure is that this place is somehow intimately tied to something called The Junkway.”

I pressed my lips together, then shrugged. “Okay, then. I guess we’ll need to approach this a different way. What that way is, though—”

I shrugged again at the alien panorama. “I don’t know. And we’re not going to decide it standing here. We need to get back to Reverie, talk to Kragdalous, and figure out our next move there.”

We turned to return to the Fafnir, but Perry called out. “Van, off to about your current two o’clock, on the far side of that next rise, it looks like one of these purple balloon things has come down.”

We made the detour, and indeed found the deflated remains of one of the big spherical—whatever the hell they were. They were even bigger than they appeared from below, the purple remains draped across several hundred meters of rocky hillside. Rektorr examined it closely. “This doesn’t appear to be organic. Rather, it appears to be engineered.”

I drew the Moonsword to cut off a sample. It turned out to be hard work, the stuff being shockingly tough despite being no thicker than waxed

paper. It finally managed to slice off a piece, but it was like sawing through canvas with a steak knife. “I wonder if this all belongs to the Jackals,” Torina said as I slipped the hard-won piece of fabric into a sample pouch. “Well, they at least seem awfully interested in it,” I replied, clipping the pouch to my harness. “Which is why it’s time for us to go, before they come back with reinforcements.”

Torina and I turned, but Rektorr remained looking out to the horizon. I frowned at him. “Uh… you coming, Rektorr?”

“Yes, of course. I was just wondering what may be motivating the Jackals regarding this place. Faith?

Superstition?

Profit?

Power?” He turned to me. “Or, perhaps even the most frightening motivation of all.”

“What’s that?”

“Good intentions.”

I nodded at that and started back to the Fafnir. “So, boss, I’m curious—what’s your gut reaction to this?

Where do you think it’s going to take us?” Perry asked as he descended back toward the ship. “No idea, other than—” I glanced back at the unnerving vista. “I suspect our path is going to go out from here, not inward.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of.”

WE DECIDED TO FORTIFY REVERIE. Far from abandoning it, I was determined that we were going to reinforce it. Fortify it and use it as a base to start unwinding some of the many enigmas that had woven themselves into this remote part of the galaxy. Kragdalous and Jamberac had accepted that Reverie was far more than just a research outpost now and were enthusiastically embracing its new role as a key strategic asset. Surprisingly, the key to all of that was the Eykinao. Their refinery ship, the Belching Profit, was an enormous, elephantine thing, with a hull class of something like 25.

Enormous ships need enormous twist drives, and the one mounted in the Belching Profit was just that. It was, in fact, the largest production drive available, of which only a

handful existed. Anything bigger would have to be custom-made and would be pushing the very limits of twist drive engineering just to function at all. With Rektorr’s modifications, that same enormous twist drive could be used to generate a gravitational effect sufficient to inhibit the operation of a combi-drive for several hundred thousand klicks all around. It effectively shrouded Reverie in a sort of force field, within which combi-drives would not work. If the Jackals attacked, they’d be caught like flies in a web and their relatively light and agile ships would suddenly be nothing but easy targets for the station’s weapons. It put us into a state of standoff with the Jackals, but that was fine. Once the Fafnir was repaired as much as possible, we were going back to known space to get reinforcements, not just to reinforce Reverie, but to also start assembling a capable fleet out here. And I wouldn’t be taking no for an answer—not to that, and not to the pointed questions I had for Gerhardt, Groshenko, Valint, Mother Hen—

Hell, I had a list. Rektorr was staying at Reverie, but Urnak was returning to known space with us, meaning we had the luxury of being able to spend time aboard the expansive Nemesis as well as on the Fafnir during the long return flight. We were leaving the Iowa on-station at Reverie, though, to help protect the place until we returned. That had been Gabby’s suggestion. “The Conoku have decided that they want to see through whatever’s going to happen out here. They want justice for the deaths of their siblings,”

as she put it. “Justice, or revenge?” I asked. Gabby shrugged. “Does it matter?”

BUT FIRST, before I did any of that, when we finally returned to known space, I went to Earth. And I went alone. We dropped Torina at Helso, to spend time with her parents, Funboy and Gabby at Spindrift, to—do whatever it was they were going to do—and Rab at the P’nosk homeworld, to visit his mothers and fathers. Urnak, meantime, took Icky aboard the Nemesis to reunite with Paxomar, her hero. “Try to not rip out too much hair during your, uh, reunion, okay?” I said. She grinned. “No promises, boss.”

And then it was just me, Perry, Netty, and Netty-P. We finally landed on Earth at about five in the morning Iowa time, grounding the Fafnir behind the barn, since she wouldn’t fit inside it anymore, at least not without yet more renovations. Which was something on my list, along with a dozen other things I needed to do while here. I had to talk to Tony and his people. I had to recover the Node of Memory that we’d set up in a remote corner of rural Wisconsin, where it had been sitting for months, quietly recording Earthly culture. I had to talk to Miryam about the farm, and getting the barn enlarged. I had to—

I thumped into the farmhouse, kicked off my boots, and padded across the kitchen. What I had to do right now was in the cupboard above the refrigerator. I smiled at the bottle of bourbon. Old enough to vote. Definitely ready to drink. “Kinda early in the day to be drinking, don’t you think?” Perry asked. He’d accompanied me to the house, while Netty-P had remained on the Fafnir, having gotten caught up on some minor maintenance. I glanced at the coffee maker—then back at the bourbon, and then at Perry, who watched me with a soft glow of inquisition in his eyes. “I’ve just flown over a thousand light-years from a place full of mysterious alien moons and what seems to be the start of a war against a vicious race of unknown power and intent. Later today, I need to start figuring out what to do with the spaceship Tony still has stashed in a barn near Frankenmuth, even while I contemplate how to take on Gerhardt, Groshenko, and the rest of the 32 for answers to questions they’re probably going to try to avoid giving me—”

I lifted the bottle and grabbed a glass. “So, no, Perry, I don’t. I think it’s the perfect time for day drinking,” I said and headed into the living room. I slumped down in my grandfather’s old chair, propped my socked feet up on the ottoman, and, for a moment, just sat. I closed my eyes and let the familiar smell and feel of the farmhouse embrace me. I heard a little wind murmur its way around the house, and that was all. I opened my eyes and poured myself a drink. As I did, my gaze fell on the TV. It was a virtual relic of a bygone era, an artifact of my childhood. I

smiled, remembering Gramps sitting in this chair and watching fuzzy reruns of M*A*S*H or Cheers on a Des Moines station that we could only access over the air, through an antenna. We’d never had cable, and thanks to the internet, I’d never missed it. I grabbed the remote and switched on the TV. It lit to a snow-filled picture of a Des Moines-based morning show. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever used the TV since returning here after Gramps died. This might have been the very last channel he’d watched on it, in fact. I idly switched channels. It didn’t take long. There weren’t many over-the-air TV stations left, and the only one that was clear was a local-access channel. A blonde woman between thirty and fifty sat in a swivel chair at a coffee table. Behind her was a background of aggressively bland tan and beige and some more tan, for spice, framed by a potted plant with the price tag still hanging defiantly from one fabric leaf. I regarded the woman with a critical eye, which wasn’t really fair because Torina wasn’t just beautiful. She was the kind of beautiful that made people look at me and decide I was either a billionaire or owned an airplane. Maybe both. This woman on the screen was, I decided, beautiful, but in that desperate way that tubes and jars and surgical treatments can create. It was a beauty at war with time, not in harmony with who she was. An empty swivel chair sat next to her, and I heard her voice—measured, a touch loud, and, again, carrying the tones of someone who was trying too hard. “—Tutsi Auffenberg, and I’m back with the second half of Wake Up Cedar Rapids!

We’ve got a very special guest with us,” she cooed, pausing to adjust a wedge of her tortured hair, the style which said in clear terms that yes, she would like to speak to the manager. “He’s come a long way to talk to us today”—she smiled, and it was practiced, and perfect, and made me wonder if she’d sold timeshares at some point—“a very long way. Please welcome Yithnox Ruk—oh my goodness, I hope I pronounced that right,” she said as her guest stepped into frame and sat down, his lanky body folding awkwardly into the chair. I froze with the glass just short of my lips. Her guest was a Yonnox. “Very nearly right,” the Yonnox said. “It’s actually Rook, with a—

actually, I doubt that a human mouth could really get it entirely right. Your race has such limitations, even with the assistance of all those products you

have backstage. Do you realize that there are sixty-one bottles designed to tighten human skin?

All on one preparatory station?

I find that most—"

I sat up and put my feet on the floor. “Perry!”

“Yo, boss, what’s up—” he said, flapping into the room and landing on the back of my chair. “Oh. Huh. Who’s the Yonnox with Tutsi Auffenberg?”

“You know Tutsi?

Nevermind, of course you do—”

“She’s a giant in the local cable access community, Van. I’m embarrassed you don’t. She’s also a top-ten producer in the commercial real estate market and has a successful MLM company selling beauty products. She’s kind of a big deal.”

I stared at him, blinking. “Don’t you think it’s more germane to this conversation that we find out why she’s talking to a real, live alien?”

I didn’t let him answer. Instead, I drained my glass, and without looking, poured another. “I know one thing, bird. We better find out.”