Point of Impact: Backyard Starship #14

JN Chaney

1

AN INCOMING MASS-DRIVER ROUND slammed into the Fafnir top aft, detonating a REAB module that dissipated the projectile’s incoming velocity enough that it bounced off the armor plate beneath. That saved a penetrating hit in the engineering bay, which could have been very bad—as in catastrophic, vaporize-almost-everything bad if the miniature sun blazing at the heart of the fusion reactor had been set free. It had been a gut-wrenching moment of terror —

Punctuated by the crunching of potato chips. I spun on Icky, who was stuffing a chip laden with gooey dip into her face with one of her big hands, while her smaller ones danced across her engineering panel, reconfiguring something. I clicked my tongue pointedly. “Icky, I hate to interrupt you when you’re eating—and actually, no I don’t, and you’ve got onion dip in your chin hair —”

“Bacon horthradith, acthully,” she said, not looking up from one of her displays. She swallowed. “Got it at that truck stop in—what was it, New York?”

“Sure, whatever. Anyway, think you could take a break from your snacking to, you know, get the plasma burst cannon back online?

That’d be real handy, please and thanks —”

She punched a final control. “Done. Torina, I’m routing power for it through the starboard laser, so don’t fire it past eighty percent output, or you’ll trip the safeties.”

“Thank you,” I said, trying to keep that pointed tone in my voice. “Head in the game, please. You wouldn’t be eating at all if we were depressurized —”

“But we’re not, and I’m starving and I have to pee and don’t worry, Van, I wanna roast these guys as much as you do. Not kill ’em, take ’em alive so I can bitch ’em out to their faces!”

These guys were a pair of ships, a class 11 and a class 5, that Lunzy had been tracking for a while. She’d hit on them for smuggling originally, but during the course of her investigation, she’d come to realize they were much deeper into much worse stuff than running some chems or other contraband. They were implicated in trading in stolen personalities, the digital minds—and maybe souls, if your beliefs went that way—trapped in AI form on sophisticated hardware chips. That had been my primary case for almost all of my career, and I’d made it clear that any leads into it were to be brought to my immediate attention, which Lunzy had obligingly done. She’d pointed us at this system, a white dwarf star nestled in a halo of rocky debris. There was nothing really notable about it, and it was off the beaten path, as it were. But Lunzy had discerned that our target bad guys regularly used it as an alternate intermediate twist point between Dregs and Wolf 424.

It must have cost them a fair bit of extra fuel and involved some not-inconsequential twist-time dilation, but it did keep them safely off that beaten path. So the plan had been to come here and stake the place out, waiting to ambush the miscreants when they passed through, probably in the next day or so. We got lucky, though, and twisted into the system to find them already here, in the midst of shifting cargo from their class 11 to their class 5.

And our luck went further, having us twist in well inside medium weapons range. The odds of that were—not good, as in I was probably at about as much risk of being hit through the right eye by a micrometeorite the next time I poked my head out the airlock. But when something actually happens, the odds don’t matter much, do they?

So here we were, locked in a sudden, close-range firefight. Our enemies, being villains in a line of work that had them looking constantly over their shoulder, shot first and landed several punishing hits before we could recover and return fire. Things had happened so suddenly that we hadn’t had time to rig for battle, including depressurizing the ship. That

forced us into crash action, which meant we’d stay strapped in, helmets tethered at hand in case the ship suddenly lost pressure. I spun the Fafnir around her long axis, then pitched her up, sliding the class 5 into view. “Rab, you’ve got —”

“Accelerator cannon, yup, already on it,” he said from behind me. A couple of heartbeats later, a staccato shudder ran through the Fafnir as he fired. The accelerator cannon was a weapon we didn’t get to use much. It was a mass driver, but one that incorporated a twist effect while firing to reduce the effective mass of the slugs so they were accelerated to far higher velocities. When the effect ended, the now much more massive slugs maintained that velocity, meaning they’d hit far harder. It was another cheat code that worked around physical laws since we were effectively creating energy from nothing, but when you could fiddle with space-time itself, you found the loopholes. It was, however, also a short-ranged weapon, and actually too large for the Fafnir. Taking up much of the ship’s length on her port ventral side, it could traverse and elevate a little for fine aiming but could otherwise only shoot where the ship was pointed. As I said, we didn’t have a lot of chances to use it. But when we did —

The stream of slugs, moving at an appreciable fraction of light-speed, turned the class 5 into plasma. That sort of energy release doesn’t leave even tiny fragments. The ship was rendered down to a cloud of glowing ions, along with everything in it. “One down,” I said, slewing the Fafnir toward the class 11.

Another REAB module detonated with a bang. “Torina, incoming missiles —”

“I’ve got them,” she said, coolly, her fingers dancing over her weapons panel. Strangely, I saw that her missile controls were offline. “What’s up with the missiles—?” I started, but Icky cut me off. “Had to route them through my panel while I was jury-rigging the plasma cannon and sorry, Van, but I gotta go!” she said, hastily unstrapping. “Icky, we’re in crash action —”

“I know. Don’t worry, I’ll tether myself into the can, and I got my helmet…!” Her voice trailed off as she hurried aft. “Shit. I thought that—stuff—would alleviate once the kids were born. Apparently not. Funboy, take her station. Get those missiles in action,” I said. He moved to her station, strapped in, then stared mournfully at the instruments. They were smeared and spattered with bacon-horseradish dip and crumbs of chips. “Oh dear. Wasn’t it enough that I was exposed to the products of her childbirth?

Now this?

I do have limits. I mean, this all needs to be disinfected —”

“Funboy!”

He sighed and tapped at the panel to power up a pair of missiles, obtain a fire-control lock, and launch them. Then he pulled his fingers away with a grimace. “Oh dear. Van, if I contract some vile Wu’tzur pathogen as a result of this, I will expect a generous period of disability leave.”

One of the missiles got taken out by the enemy’s point-defenses, but the other detonated almost on top of him. Torina followed up with a salvo of laser and plasma-burst fire that left the class 11 a powerless derelict, adrift and leaking shimmering jets of atmospheric gasses. I sat back and blew out a breath. “Well, that was some unexpected fun. Icky, what’s—oh. Right,” I said, glancing back to see Funboy backing away from her station while rubbing sanitizer on his hands. I turned to Netty-P. “What’s the damage?”

“Nothing too serious. We did lose another grav plate, which puts us right on the threshold of the system being effective at all. If we aren’t going to recover it, then I’d recommend we just remove the rest of them because they’re just extra mass.”

I nodded. The grav plates were alien tech that we’d added to the ship after retrieving it from an enigmatic derelict nearly, what, three years ago now?

Collectively, they could be energized in a way that would cause them to passively reduce the effective mass of the entire ship, allowing her to accelerate and maneuver much more quickly. The problem was that it required a certain number of intact plates to produce the effect, and damage over time had pushed us pretty much to that limit. Add to that the fact that they had to be mounted under the REAB modules, meaning we’d had to fashion specific stand-off mounts for those, and they were actually quite a maintenance headache. They were also fantastically valuable, just from a materials science point of view. Perry had figured we could probably sell them off to materials researchers for something like two million bonds in total. And that

was getting pretty tempting. Our operating costs had been steadily climbing as we’d added the Iowa, our makeshift aircraft carrier the Unobtrusive, and now the super-stealthy surveillance ship the Prowler to our little fleet. On top of that, Cantullin Station and our new settlement on Shhh also carried their share of costs, and things were getting tight financially. An extra two million bonds would be a healthy and welcomed infusion of cash for sure. I stared at the stricken class 11.

We were going to have to board her anyway, so —

“Okay. Perry, you still with us?”

He’d gone back to engineering to monitor the situation there during the battle so Icky could stay strapped in at her station in the cockpit. “Yes, I am, and I’m fine after that hit we took just a couple of meters away from me, thanks for asking.”

“You’re a survivor, bird. Anyway, you, Torina, and Funboy are going to go across to that class 11 in the Frankie. On the way back, you guys can retrieve our stray grav plate,” I said. “No Icky?

She’s usually all over these boarding actions.”

“Icky is… indisposed.”

“Again, huh. Wow, the Wu’tzur postpartum thing ain’t pretty, is it?”

“It is not,” Funboy agreed, wiping his hands on a clean white cloth. The others unstrapped to head aft. I stayed where I was. Torina stopped to give me a quick kiss. “We’ll be right back,” she said. I gave her a sour look. “Have I mentioned how much I hate this?”

“Sorry, Master Tudor, but you know the protocol. If you don’t have to go boarding things, you don’t. You leave it to us, your hench minions.”

“I still hate it.”

I HATED it even though we’d agreed that I should avoid situations that put me in unwarranted danger, like boarding actions. It was hard for me to think of myself as being too valuable to do so—I mean, I felt like the same Van Tudor I’d always been. But taking an objective step back, I’d been forced to admit that, yeah, a Master of the Guild was too valuable a commodity to risk being gunned down by some nameless thug with a slug pistol. And it wasn’t like I had anything to prove. I’d gained enough cred as a Master-Adept, a Master who did field work and put themselves in harm’s way, that I didn’t really need any more. I did feel justified in the risks I had taken, though, because that cred was itself a valuable commodity. The subversive faction called the True Direction, best personified in the Nesit Peacemaker Casaril, found it much harder to undermine my reputation around the Guild because of it. I’d never planned it that way, but it had certainly worked to my benefit. In fact, Perry had told me that some of my more enthusiastic supporters

—because yes, I had my very own gaggle of sycophants in the Guild now—

had taken to calling me by a new title, Master Militant. It wasn’t an official title, although neither was Master Adept, actually. It was a throwback to the days of the GKU. I had to admit, I did kind of like Master Militant. It would definitely look good on a business card. Still, I wasn’t just going to let my crew board the other ship entirely unsupported. While they boarded the Frankie, I had Icky—now returned from her business aft—use our point-defense batteries to thoroughly demolish anything resembling a weapon on the other ship. I also had her put a few rounds into the airlock, blasting off the outer door and smashing in the inner. I’d already resigned myself to getting minimal salvage value from the derelict ship—probably whatever interior systems were intact, and scrap value for the rest. A little more damage wasn’t going to matter much. Still, I wanted to minimize said damage. “Use all four arms when you’re shooting, big girl. We need your best aim,” I said. I watched intently as the Frankie sidled up to the other ship and Torina led the way inside. I had imagery from the Frankie herself on the center display, so I was watching that, feeling a little voyeuristic as I did. Once Torina was inside, I amped up the voyeurism and switched to the feed from her helmet imager. The tension soon sputtered away, though, when it became clear that the class 11 had been abandoned. Moreover, it looked as though the crew had bailed early in the battle. There was no evidence, like spatters of blood—or the equivalent—from shrapnel wounds that would surely have afflicted anyone aboard when our missile detonated just a few tens of meters away. Perry sealed the deal. “Yeah, the AI over here was running in autonomous free-fire mode. The crew must have set it that way to keep the ship shooting while they made a break for it,” he reported. I frowned at that. “Okay, so the next obvious question is —"

“Where did they go?

Yeah, we’re working on that. We’ll see if we can figure it out and get back to you, boss.”

We waited. As we did, Netty-P abruptly spoke up. “Van, a small vessel just twisted out of the system from a point about sixty thousand klicks beyond the class 11.”

I sat up. “What?

How did we miss it?”

“It was already there. Or, more to the point, it was already in the vicinity of a large chunk of rocky debris that was already there.”

“So the crew—what, had boarded a smaller boat to go futz around with a nearby rock, and that’s where they were when we attacked?”

“So it would appear,” she replied. I had her put the rock in question on the display. It was—a rock, an otherwise nondescript asteroid about the size of Mount Everest, so not especially big, but certainly bigger than average. The scanners detected no emissions, though, or any other anomalous returns. They just declared it a rock. While the others searched the ship, I moved the Fafnir around so that the scanners could see all sides of the asteroid in question. We finally got a hit on the side facing directly away from the battle space and pointing at the distant dwarf star. It wasn’t much, just a series of rock bolts driven into the asteroid’s surface with several loose cargo nets fastened to it. Parts of the nets were still falling very, very slowly toward the rock, pulled by gravity about as strong as a gentle breeze. But it was a telling detail, meaning they’d recently been disturbed. “Okay, so here’s the story as I see it playing out. Our bad guys have a cache hidden here, on this rock, of some illegal contraband or other. They leave their class 11 in a twist-capable boat of some sort, to either pick stuff up or add stuff to the cache, or maybe both. They leave their AI in free-fire mode, counting on that and their accompanying class 5 to cover them in the super unlikely event someone shows up unexpectedly. Said super unlikely event occurs anyway when we twist in, so they hastily grab all their goodies, keeping their boat behind the rock for cover, and just twist away as soon as they can.”

“Thoundth good to me, bawth,” Icky said. I glanced back and found her munching away on chips and dip again. “Icky—”

“What?”

WE RECOVERED everyone aboard the Frankie, along with everything they’d recovered from the class 11—which wasn’t much—and the loose grav plate. While that was happening, I was instituting a new rule about no food in the cockpit. Drinks were still okay—and no, I had to specify to Icky, pureeing chips and dip into a smoothie does not make them into a drink. I also made her thoroughly clean all the instruments around her. “Remember, big girl—you’re going to have to start being an example for your kids,” I told her. She gave me a brief surprised look, followed by a slow nod. “Oh. Yeah. I guess that’s right, huh?” A rueful shrug. “Unless it involved actual engineering, my dad let me get away with a lot. You’re actually stricter than he was.”

“Sorry, but my grandfather was a stickler for things being clean and orderly. That’s how I was brought up,” I said. She shook her head. “Don’t be sorry, Van. It’s probably a good thing. I really don’t want to raise a couple of little slobs.”

I smiled. “I’m sure Paxomar will be glad to hear it.”

“Oh, yeah.” She rolled her eyes. “Pax makes you seem a little sloppy. If he’s wrapping up leftovers, he tucks in the corners like he’s making a bed.”

She suddenly puffed out a breath. “Yeah. And he actually makes beds. Van, I don’t think I’m ready for this mother stuff.”

“Little late to decide that now.”

“No shit. I need a mom to teach me how to be a mom.”

I was struck by a sudden idea. “You know one, Icky. A mom you can turn to.”

She looked at me for a moment, frowning—then her face brightened. “Zeno.”

I nodded back at her. “I think she’d be—well, more than happy to help you out with your young’uns.”

“Okay, Netty-P. As soon as we’re back somewhere resembling civilization, can you —”

“Put a twist-comm call through to Zenophir at the P’nosk homeworld. I’ve already got it queued up,” Netty-P replied, then turned to me. “Also, Van, I’ve done some calculating, based on the mass data we got from that boat right before it twisted away. I can’t say where it twisted, of course, but I can estimate a maximum twist distance of about five light-years, making some assumptions about the boat’s fuel capacity.”

“So what’s the verdict?”

“Four possible systems. One of them is controlled by the Ceti Alliance and is used mainly as a military installation, presumably for testing new technology and weapons, so it’s heavily secured.”

“Yeah, that’s probably a no.”

“Agreed. The other three are more of a toss-up. All three are unclaimed, all are charted, and all have seen minor, temporary development in the past. Two host now-abandoned mining operations, while the third was used by the Alliance for long-term storage of derelict spacecraft, pending their refurbishment or scrapping. They closed that operation down about forty years ago, though, so all that’s now left there are some old hulks. However —”

She paused. I cocked my head. “This is where it gets interesting,” Netty-P went on. “I’ve cross-referenced anything related to those three star systems with Guild records, and I got five hits, all of them within the past eight months. Three of them are occurrences of nav coordinates for one of the systems in the flight logs of three different smugglers—one arrested on Crossroads, one in the Spindrift system, and one during an undercover sting operation on Dregs. One more is the same coordinates found in a data pad seized during a raid on an illicit chem dealer by the Eridani and noted in their law enforcement data stores. The last one is an explicit reference to the system, by star catalog number, in a recorded comms tap of a suspected fence, again operating out of Spindrift.”

“So five different instances of bad guys were all making reference to the same system?

Yeah, that’s not at all suspicious. Show me the data, please, Netty-P.”

The display switched to a schematic of the system in question. It was a binary system, an intensely hot brown dwarf about three times the mass of Jupiter whipping closely around an unusually chunky red dwarf. There was a solitary, Earth-sized rocky world orbiting in turn, well outside the

system’s habitable zone, and then several smaller, Mars-sized worlds in long, eccentric orbits beyond that. The innermost of these had been used by the Ceti Alliance to park old, disused spacecraft. According to the entry, that had lasted until the theft of spaceship components from the derelicts had necessitated security costs the Alliance didn’t want to fork out. They’d shut the operation down about forty years ago, removing everything of any remaining value and just leaving a dozen or so empty hulks to orbit in eternal, frozen oblivion. But now, this system had come up on our radar five different times. It had been flagged by the data-analysis AIs on Anvil Dark as being of possible interest, but there were no records of any Peacemakers actually checking it out. Well, that was about to change. 2

BUT IT WAS a little more complicated than that. For one, rather than just charging blindly into what we were calling the Boneyard system, or just Boneyard, we had to do some homework. Before we did that, though, I had to decide if we were going to be the ones to do it at all. We had outstanding business—which was nothing new, but some of it at least felt pretty urgent. Most importantly, we had to follow up on the Tsarina. As far as we knew, she had died when we fought her small fleet at the rogue planet she’d been using for a base of operations, killed when Petyr Groshenko sacrificed himself to stop her from likely killing us. She died, though, in a catastrophic fusion explosion that left nothing behind but ionized vapor—so no body. It meant we weren’t entirely sure she was dead. And that made my blood boil every time I thought about it. If she somehow hadn’t been aboard her combi-drive-equipped ship when Groshenko forced it into a collision with his own, then she was still out there somewhere—and Groshenko was still dead. I wanted—no, needed to know if she was truly dead or not. Until I did, it would haunt me. Groshenko hadn’t died in vain either way, but if she’d survived, then it diminished his sacrifice and that pissed me off. There was a more practical reason to track down the Tsarina’s fate as well. She had components, weapons, and armor and such that had been illegally removed from the Fafnir when Gramps died. It wasn’t so much the parts themselves, but the fact that Gramps seemingly recorded encrypted notes about many of his cases, and potentially a lot of other things

involving the Guild and the GKU, and stashed them in the missing components. I wished he’d chosen another way to do it, but he hadn’t, so here we were. I wanted that information, to know what my grandfather thought I should know. In the end, though, I decided that we’d continue chasing the crew of the class 11.

Lunzy’s belief that they were involved in the stolen identity case was simply too big to ignore. That case had gone stale, with no recent leads, so we couldn’t pass this one up. With the crew back aboard the Fafnir, I had Perry join with Netty-P in doing an exhaustive search of all the data stores they could access—even if not all of that access was entirely above board. With mounting threats both outside the Guild and within it—the Equal Grasp and the True Direction, respectively—and growing evidence that those threats might be linked, I wasn’t taking any chances. But I was also prepared to play a little fast and loose with the rules. The insidious menace of the True Direction meant we had to be judicious about who we trusted in the Guild. And that meant that rather than simply accessing some data stores through the usual channels, I had to give Perry and Netty-P leave to get creative. We twisted to Crossroads in the meantime, to refuel and to check in with Gus. He was the Chief of the Guild’s Station on Crossroads, nominally responsible for all of the systems in his chapter—including Earth—and a Peacemaker I did trust. I actually interacted with him a lot regarding Earth, particularly regarding goings-on in near-Earth space. And since Crossroads was the nearest significant known space settlement to the Boneyard, I wanted to see if he’d picked up any insights about it. He’d just shrugged his shoulders, though—all seven of them. “Haven’t heard anything especially interesting about that system, no. Although —”

He reached out with several arms and accessed a drawer in a credenza-like thing beside his desk. He extracted a metal evidence case and opened it

—the case recording the fact, and his identity—then removed a strip of dull, silvery metal about as long and wide as my forefinger and placed it on his desk. It was stamped, rather crudely, with some characters. I blinked at it, then at him. “Okay. What am I looking at?”

“Good question. We found about fifty of these hidden in a smuggler’s compartment aboard a class 7 tramp that offloaded a Yonnox with some outstanding writs. It was just a fluke, too—a visiting Peacemaker just happened to see the Yonnox disembark and recognized him.”

I almost made a crack about recognizing a particular Yonnox, because to me, they all looked pretty much identical. But I caught myself. All this time dealing with all these different species, and my human-centrism still popped up from time to time. Gus went on. “Anyway, we grilled the tramp’s Master, and he revealed that this is a tab—apparently, a form of currency. That’s all he’d say, and since he claimed ignorance of the Yonnox’s status and we found no other evidence of crimes, we had to let him go. We let him expedite the process, though, by giving us five of these so-called tabs, just to keep for reference. You know, in case they ever came up again. And it seems they have.”

“How so?”

“The tramp’s flight log had it pass through that Boneyard system of yours two twists before it showed up here,” Gus said. “Ah, and there’s the sound of a loop closing. Okay. Gus, can I take a couple of these tabs with me?”

“Sure. We’ve entered them into evidence, so you’ll have to thumb them out, but go ahead. And let me know what you learn about them.”

I pressed my thumb to the evidence case, recording my taking two of the tabs, and nodded. “Will do. Thanks again.”

“TABS, huh?

Be interested to know how they came up with the name. Somehow related to running a tab, maybe?” Perry said, scrutinizing the two metal strips on the Fafnir’s galley table. “So it’s fake money. Big deal,” Icky said. “All currency is fake,” Funboy observed. “It is a construct designed for convenience in matters of trade and commerce, nothing more.”

“Sourpuss is right. Money is as valuable as the people using it think it is, particularly when it’s not pegged to some sort of standard, like US

dollars used to be tied to the value of gold back on Earth,” Perry said. “So if someone is instituting their own money, and more somebodies are willing to use it as money—well, then it’s money. That’s all that’s really required,” Torina put in, then pushed up her lower lip thoughtfully. “I

wonder if that someone is Chensun, Dayna Jasskin’s old associate. We got word they were trying to start up a bank of their own.”

“Good question.” I rubbed my chin and nodded at the two tabs. “So whether it’s Chensun or someone else, is it even legal?” I asked, looking at Perry. “Well, it’s not il legal. I mean, we could refuel the Fafnir by performing services for the fuel depot. Strictly speaking, that’s barter, but there’s still a form of currency involved—the understanding and agreement that we’re obligated to provide the services and the fuel depot is obligated to provide the fuel in return. If we formalized that a little, maybe by developing a sort of points system, where we gain points by doing services and then spend them on fuel— voilà, we’ve just created money,” he replied. I crossed my arms. “But?”

“But it would be free of any regulation or oversight. Bonds are regulated through The Quiet Room, under agreements all the major powers have signed up to. When you’re talking about trade and commerce on an interstellar scale, you obviously need some sort of standardized form of currency to stave off chaos—or at least avoid having to wrestle with exchange rates and stuff like that. These tabs, though, don’t fall under those agreements, and probably aren’t regulated at all. So while they’re not illegal, they wouldn’t be recognized as legal tender—well, pretty much anywhere that cares about that.”

“Except we’re presumably dealing with people who don’t care about that,” I said, scowling. “And we seem to be talking about a lot of such people, since you really only need money, a medium of exchange, if you’re doing a lot of complicated business.”

“An entire economy, I’d say,” Torina noted. “The Equal Grasp?”

“Oh, I’d feel pretty safe betting my next paycheck that they’re involved. Whether it’s just them, though—” I shrugged. “The advantages of an alternative currency to a thriving black market are pretty clear,” Rab put in. “Being able to buy and sell weapons, ammo, chems, all that sort of nefarious stuff, and not having to use bonds to do it —”

“There may even be money changers out there that are willing to exchange tabs for bonds, laundering it in the process,” Perry put in. I glanced at Torina. “We happen to know someone who’s deep in the money-laundering business, sitting happily in an industrial park in

Defiance, Ohio,” I said. “We do. I think we might want to pay him a visit.”

“Yeah. First, though, I think I’d like to pay a visit to Boneyard, see what’s going on there —”

“Van, I would suggest we have a stop we need to make before that. Gabby should be waiting at Pont Alus Kyr, ready to return to duty by now,”

Funboy said. “Okay—except I haven’t seen anything from her to indicate that. Have you been talking to her?” I asked. “I have.”

The way he said it left something hanging. I cocked my head at him. “So she asked you to pass on that she's ready to come back?”

“Not… exactly. But I believe she is.”

I shook my head. “Funboy, I get the sense you’re dancing around something here —”

“I suppose I am. Gabby is unsure that you even want her back.”

That made me stop and stare, surprised. “She is?

Why?”

“That is why I believe we should make Pont Alus Kyr our next stop. So she can speak to you.”

FORTUNATELY, we could do both—travel to Pont Alus Kyr to meet with Gabby and find out what the hell was going on with her, and stake out Boneyard. For the latter, we dispatched the Prowler. The Prowler was a nifty little ship, only class 6 but purpose designed and built to excel in one particular role, that of stealthy surveillance. Her layout and construction gave her the scanner cross section of something about the size of a washing machine, so nearly invisible at anything but extremely close range. She could store her internal heat in massive heat sinks and radiate it away in a controlled manner, in the form of a tightly focused laser beam she could direct away from prying eyes. Her own suite of scanners, particularly her passive ones, were extraordinarily sensitive and offered insanely high-res data. Her current crew was a Piraxian female named Droox, formerly in Petyr Groshenko’s employ. When Petyr gifted the Prowler to me, Droox had agreed to come with her. That had raised a few eyebrows when we first met her. Torina had given her a quizzical smile. “Sounds like a lonely job—out there, by yourself, just kind of hanging silently in space while the AI runs the scanners and gathers surveillance data,” she’d said. Droox had given her an impassive stare—which was about the whole of the Piraxian emotional range. “I actually much prefer it, being alone for extended periods. It gives me time to write.”

“Oh, you’re a writer?

Published anything we’ve heard of?” I asked her. “Not under my own name, no. However, I have written many works under various pseudonyms.”

“Such as?”

“Dreeena Fosk and Brak Taurn.”

I hadn’t read much off-world literature, but even I recognized the first name. Torina gasped a little. “Dreeena Fosk?

The Dreeena Fosk?

The one who wrote the Pentangle Conundrums?”

“Yes, that one,” Droox replied. “That’s… a bestselling series. Like… across known space.”

“It has done… well, yes.”

Perry raised a wing. “Excuse me, but I’m a little stuck on the second name you gave. Brak Taurn is known for writing —”

“Cross-species hardcore erotica, yes,” Droox replied. That left us all kind of staring in silence. “Very well. If there is nothing else you require, I will return to the Prowler. The low-phase scanner array requires calibration,” Droox said, before turning and walking away. “Best-selling dramatic literature and raunchy smut?” Torina muttered as we watched her go. “Coming out of the same pen, as it were. That’s talent,” Perry added. I just shrugged. “Gotta pass the time somehow, I guess.”

AS WE MADE our way to Pont Alus Kyr to retrieve Gabby, I put in a call to Dayna Jasskin. I figured she’d be interested in the so-called tabs, and I was

right. “Yes, we’ve heard of these, and we’ve managed to get our hands on a few. But we haven’t managed yet to dig up anything on their origin—

particularly who’s making them, and how they’re managing to get them to be accepted and put into circulation. So anything you discover, Van, we’d be keen to know,” she said. “You sound worried, Dayna. Is this something to worry about?”

“Oh, novel currencies pop up all the time. Usually, they’re a marketing or promotional thing, which we don’t care about.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Back home, I remember at least one year in Elkader, a town near my grandfather’s farm, the local merchants all got together with something called—I don’t know, Elkader Bucks or something like that. It was just fake money you could use to buy stuff from local merchants, that sort of thing.”

“Exactly. And sometimes people with grudges or agendas try to get their own little currencies set up as a sort of—protest, a way of fighting back against the big guy.”

“But these tabs are different?”

“Outwardly, no. They’re just a more elaborate sort of underworld scrip. But our intel people have had hits on these things in different places for months, now—probably a couple of dozen mentions of them in total, and like I said, we’ve intercepted a few. This—” She sat back and shrugged. “This feels different. There’s a momentum to these tabs that worries me.”

“Do you think Chensun is behind this?”

Dayna’s gaze went distant. “It wouldn’t surprise me. Whoever’s behind it knows what they’re doing, and they’re obviously well-connected.” She abruptly focused back on me. “So maybe. But the who of it is less important right now than the fact it’s happening in the first place.”

“Okay—but it’s not exactly illegal, is it?

So what could you do about it?”

“Van, if something like this reaches a critical mass, it becomes a parallel economy. Not only is it ideal for conducting trade in all sorts of illicit things, and bankrolling all sorts of illegal activities, but it’s also entirely unregulated. People who end up tying up a lot of their wealth in this are unprotected against devaluation or a complete crash. It can’t be properly taxed, so its not contributing to the communal good —"

“We’ve got something similar happening back on Earth with so-called digital currencies,” I cut in. “It’s kind of buyer beware. If you tie up your money in that stuff, and it all comes crashing down—well, that’s on you.”

Dayna narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re not… defending this, are you?”

“No, not at all. I see tons of scope for abuse—for funding all that illicit, predatory stuff you mentioned. But arguments about how it’s unregulated or not taxed aren’t going to get a lot of traction among ordinary people, I think. More than a few of them might see those as selling points, in fact.”

She stared a moment longer, then nodded. “I see what you’re saying, yes. When you spend your life focused on the macro picture, you can lose sight of the other end of the scale.”

“Never a good idea. Anyway, once we know more, I’ll be in touch.”

WE ARRIVED at Pont Alus Kyr to a red-carpet ceremony. As B said, the place had done some serious housecleaning, given the shady practices that had gone on there and the hits its reputation had taken. The new director, a bright, charming older human woman named Lise Maxwin, had been brought in from a prestigious Tau Ceti bioresearch institute. She was a big name in her field, having won a few of the top awards, including the known-space-equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Pont Alus Kyr was now an open book, its operations subject to third-party audit and most of them available for public review. And Director Maxwin clearly wanted to impress the Guild, given the reception when we arrived. She met us personally, invited my crew to dinner, and fell over herself to answer any of our questions. What made it all kind of awkward was the fact we really were here just to pick up Gabby. But we smiled and nodded and tried too hard to look approvingly at all the changes that had been made. And, to be fair, they were all changes for the better. When we finally met Gabby, we all kind of stood back a little to let Funboy lead the way. He stepped forward, looked at Gabby, and nodded. “You look well.”

She stared back at him uncertainly. “Oh. Uh—thank you.”

Perry touched a wingtip to his eye. “All this naked emotion—it gets me right in the feels— hey!”

Icky, Torina, and I had all kicked him at the same time. The Funboy-Gabby tableau lasted a moment longer, then he flung himself forward and embraced her. She immediately hugged him back. “I missed you, Gabby,” he said, his voice thick and tight. She patted his back. “Yeah, I missed you, too.”

I turned to the rest of the crew. “Maybe we should give them a few moments —”

But Gabby, still hugging Funboy, looked up at us. “No, don’t go. Please. I… have something to say to you all.”

We stopped and turned back. Gabby disengaged herself from Funboy. “I—I’m sorry. I know how much I let you all down. I don’t really think I’m—I’m worth you guys keeping around —”

Icky stepped forward. “Gabby, what the hell are you talking about?”

“I… failed. During that battle. That… thing… it took me out when you guys needed me the most —”

“Oh, for—Gabby, do you know how many times I’ve been KO’d during a fight?

I’ve been blown up, shot, trapped outside the ship during a battle —”

“I went down to a bad shot during a firefight,” Torina put in. I nodded. “I’ve taken a few nasty hits that definitely put me into supporting roles during fights—at best.”

Perry raised a wing. “Shot, blown apart, shorted out—I got caught in a gooey tar pit once, and I vividly remember thinking I was destined to be one hell of a fine-looking fossil.”

I glanced down at him. “When was that?”

“I have a rich and detailed backstory, Van.”

Gabby turned her gaze from one of us to the next as we spoke. “So—

wait. You guys aren’t disappointed in me?

I didn’t let you down?”

“Not in the slightest, my sweet,” Funboy said. Icky rolled her eyes. “Trust me, Gabs, I know what it’s like to let this crew down. I screwed up and opened the Fafnir up to an electronic warfare attack that shut her down, right in the middle of a firefight. I still feel bad about that. For getting blown up by a car bomb or shot through the gut on Null World helping out the Schegith, not so much. You go into a battle, you do it knowing you might not come out.”

“That’s true for all of us, Gabs,” Rab put in. “It’s the nature of the beast. Besides, look at it this way—if that monstrosity had picked one of us as its target, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now. It attacked the only one of us that could survive what happened to you.”

“You took one for the team, girl,” Torina said, nodding, then she strode forward and gave Gabby her own hug. Like a switch being thrown, the rest of us surged forward and embraced her as well, until all of us—Netty-P and Perry included—were locked in a warm, tight group hug. Me, I hugged the rest of them as much as I did Gabby. This was my crew, my friends. My family. The warm moment lasted until a muffled voice wafted out of the middle of the cuddle puddle. “Oh dear.”

3

WHILE WE WERE DISENTANGLING ourselves from Pont Alus Kyr—a chore, since Director Maxwin was almost desperate to prove to us the place was now clean—we got a call from Dayna Jasskin. She asked us to meet with her at the Crossroads system before proceeding to Boneyard. I agreed, and we set our course accordingly. When we arrived, though, I was surprised to find not Dayna’s spiffy, luxurious yacht waiting for us, but none other than the Righteous Fury, the potent battlecruiser operated jointly by the Peacemaker Guild and the GKU. I contacted the Fury anyway to confirm that she was there on behalf of Dayna and we didn’t just have some crossed comms going on, but Dayna was quickly put on the channel. “Okay, Dayna, I have to ask—the Fury?

Really?

How is it that she’s somehow working for The Quiet Room?

Or did you just happen to hitch a ride?”

“Van, I’ve always tried to be straight with you. As straight as I can be, anyway. And I know you’re a Master of the Guild, so you have a legitimate claim at knowing —”

“All of which is you saying you’re not going to tell me.”

“Not yet. There are reasons I need to keep my hand face down for now. I hope you understand.”

I shrugged. “Sure. I mean, to be blunt, I’m not really that surprised The Quiet Room has access to the Righteous Fury, I guess. So if you say it

needs to wait, then it can.” I gave her a look of exaggerated suspicion. “I won’t be too surprised by the answer, though, will I?”

Funboy, from the back of the Fafnir’s cockpit, spoke up in a dry tone, even for him. “They’re a bank. They positively live for surprises.”

“Speaking of surprises, there’s another ship lurking nearby—low-acceleration trajectory outbound from crossroads, doing its damndest to look inconspicuous,” Netty-P said. “Which is making it conspicuous as hell, you mean,” I said, turning to the tactical overlay. Netty-P had highlighted the ship in question—about two hull-classes smaller than the Fafnir, so not even remotely a match for us and the Fury combined. Just a rubbernecking freighter captain, maybe, curious about a meeting between a Peacemaker and a big-ass battlecruiser out here in the Crossroads hinterland?

But Netty-P quickly ID’d the other vessel. She was the Object 6, the GKU’s spare ship used for all sorts of tasks requiring anonymity. I tapped at the comm. “Hey, Object 6, come on over and join the party. Who’s at the helm today?

B, is that you?”

The channel opened. It wasn’t B. It was Jamberac. “Hello, Van. My ship’s in the shop, and Dayna asked me to come along on this little jaunt of yours.” He gestured at his own face. “Turns out this visage of mine falls almost smack in the middle of nondescript territory. People have trouble remembering what I look like even just a couple of minutes after parting company with me. It served my family well.”

I nodded. Jamberac was a scion of a nasty, thuggish, and not particularly bright crime family. He’d been lucky, being born with the brains his brutish relatives never had. He’d quickly distanced himself from them, joined the Guild, and, despite the reputation that clung to him like sticky cobwebs, toughed it out. He’d made himself into a fine Peacemaker and was one of the few I trusted implicitly, like Lucky, Alic, K’losk, or Lunzy. But he’d also inherited his family’s looks, which were indeed about as plain and unremarkable as you could imagine. If he’d been human, he’d have been medium height, medium build, medium everything else—the sort of description cops hated, and for good reason. I put Dayna on the split screen with Jamberac. “So what’s the plan, here?

You’re sending Jamberac in to Boneyard —”

“Actually, the name of the place we’re going is Bopul,” Netty-P put in. “We just received a slug of surveillance data from the Prowler.”

I glanced at yet another split screen, which held Droox’s report summarizing what she’d learned so far from sitting and watching the Boneyard system. She had comms intercepts, ship movements, emissions signatures, a ton of potentially useful information. I could see that the Prowler was going to be a potent force multiplier for us and breathed Petyr Groshenko yet another silent thank you. “Okay, so it looks like they’ve taken three of the old hulks abandoned in the system by the Ceti Alliance, strapped them together, and fitted them out as an orbital they’re calling Bopul,” I said, then turned back to Dayna and Jamberac. “So Jamberac’s coming with us?”

“I was thinking we’d send him in on his own, as a second set of eyes,”

Dayna said. “He’ll have less trouble blending in than if he steps out of the Fafnir’s airlock.”

“Fair point,” I replied, nodding. “All the best spies do look like nobody in particular, so there’s no sense associating you with us, Jamberac.”

His slit mouth split in a grin. “I’ll take that as a compliment. So what look am I going for?

Mildly confused tourist, arrogant and entitled entrepreneur, or slightly drunk trader with no concept of personal space?”

“Oh, I’d say trader for sure. Based on these ship movements reported by the Prowler, the place should be crawling with them.”

Jamberac’s face shifted, and he hiccupped, frowned, and started to slur. “You gonna get outta my way?

Them noodles ain’t eatin’ themselves.”

Icky clapped her hands. “Oh, I like this version of him. Welcome aboard!”

I laughed. “Okay, we’ll see you at Bopul, though we’ll make sure not to recognize you. Perry will set up comms with you, though, so we can talk in each other’s ear bugs—and so you can call for help if you need it.”

Jamberac waved jauntily, and the channel closed. I turned to my crew. “Okay, let’s go borrow some money.”

“What if they don’t want to loan it out?” Gabby asked. I smiled and shrugged. “I think they will. After all, we’ve got a great credit score.”

BOPUL WAS a study in making do. It was a station that rivaled Crossroads in scale, but unlike Crossroads, it hadn’t been purpose-built. Rather, it was the hull of a decommissioned bulk water carrier, merged with the hulks of an ore freighter and an ancient, long-since-retired battleship. The result was something of a monstrosity, devoid of anything resembling symmetry. It looked like an agglomeration of structural members and hull plating that had just accreted over time, coalescing into a huge, abstract sculpture in space. And yet, it wasn’t the expected shit pile of corroded junk, leaking gasses and fluids and perpetually on the verge of coming apart, like similar ramshackle orbitals we’d visited. Someone had put a lot of effort into Bopul. The exterior wasn’t just clean, it was painted—and it was painted in a strikingly fanciful way, with parts of the station covered in abstract swirls of color and even a few surprisingly well-crafted murals. Traffic around the station was controlled, traveling in orderly patterns and sticking to established in and out routes, to make for safe navigation and alleviate congestion. And it was busy. In the roughly two days she’d been on-station, Droox had reported movements of fourteen unique ships. When we twisted in to the system, there were nine either inbound, at, or departing from Bopul. That made it only slightly less busy than Crossroads. I frowned at the sight of the bustling, tidy station. “Funny thing. I know it’s vacuum out there, but I’m somehow still able to smell the smell of money,” I said, glancing at Torina. She nodded. “Setting up and running a place like this would not be cheap. The Equal Grasp?”

I shrugged. “No doubt they’re involved. But they might have partners. That is something I’d love to know more about,” I said, glancing at Perry. “Is that your way of telling me to start digging?” he asked me. “I’d hate for you to get bored.”

“Van, we’ve been illuminated by scanners from the station, but they’re just active, no targeting modes or anything like that. And we have a traffic-control AI asking us if we intend to dock,” Netty-P said. I glanced at Torina again. We weren’t making any secret of who we were. We were, in fact, broadcasting our usual transponder credentials, explicitly identifying us as a Guild ship. That had a bit of a test in itself, to see what would happen when we showed up in all our Peacemaker glory. It provoked nothing special. “So they don’t care that we’re Peacemakers,” Torina said. “Or it’s a trap, and they’re just trying to suck us in,” Icky said, her tone dark. I furrowed my brow a little at that but shook my head. “No. I don’t think so. Setting up something like this isn’t illegal. They might be flouting some specific laws and regulations around things like—oh, say, workplace safety, or particular rules of navigation, but those aren’t the sorts of things you get yourself into a shooting war with the Guild over. And even if Chensun, or someone else, has set up a bank in there, that’s not actually illegal, either.”

“And it’s not like they really expect this place to stay secret forever—

not with this sort of traffic,” Perry put in. “No, it’s more likely that Torina’s right and they just don’t really give a shit. We’ll show up, maybe find some minor infractions, and that’s about it,” I said. Rab nodded. “Besides, if there is truly illegal stuff going on, it’s not going be out in the open. But that makes this no place different than Crossroads or Spindrift or Dregs.”

I started working the flight controls, taking the Fafnir into the approach pattern as dictated by the traffic control AI. “So, let’s go check it out. We’ll let Jamberac poke around on his own, but I want to send one of us to the bank, too—open an account, maybe get a nice calendar or something.”

I turned. “Funboy. You’re our ex-undercover operative. I’m assuming that means you can make yourself unassuming.”

“You assume my lack of assumption correctly,” he replied. I smirked. “That’s what I assumed.”

Icky grimaced. “Is it just me, or does that word assume suddenly sound really weird?”

WE DOCKED AND DISEMBARKED. Netty-P and Rab stayed aboard the Fafnir, with the preflight checklist completed and the motor figuratively running, in case Icky was right and we were in danger. Funboy disembarked separately. The rest of us made our way into Bopul station proper and joined a

middling-sized crowd in the main concourse area where all of the docking ramps converged. We got… some looks. Or, rather, I did, since I was wearing my b-suit openly, not bothering to conceal my identity as a Peacemaker. But looks were all we got. If anything, we were given a bit of a wide berth through the crowd—and a few menacing glares, but nobody tried or outright said anything to us. Torina summed it up. “You know, we could be walking through Spindrift right now, or the Torus. If anything, I feel a little less uneasy here. The crowd’s smaller and it’s just not as—I don’t know. Interested in us, I guess.”

Perry, in the pipework above, spoke up on the comm. “Gotta agree. I’m tracking head movements like I usually do to see if anyone’s inordinately interested in you guys, and they’re not.”

I stopped and looked at a kiosk selling food. Anytime enough people start gathering in one place for anything even remotely resembling commerce or entertainment, food vendors inevitably pop up. The first time a group of our distant ancestors got together for a cave-painting party, I had no doubt someone showed up to sell them mastodon kabobs or whatever. “Yeah, if anything jumps out at me, it’s how little jumps out at me. There’s got to be more going on here, because on its own, this orbital doesn’t seem to really… fill a need. Spindrift and Crossroads are right in the middle of known space. The Torus is pretty much the bridge between known space and the Deeps. This, though—” I turned around. “This is on the fringe. None of these people really have any obvious reason to come here—and yet, here they are.”

“Whatever’s driving the economy of this place clearly isn’t happening out in the open. Whatever it is, it’s behind the scenes,” Perry agreed. I glanced at Torina. “Do you think this could all be about a bank?

That that’s the reason for all this activity?”

She frowned in thought, then shook her head. “Just to deal with a bank?

No, I doubt it. Even if these tabs they produce have to be physically exchanged, they don’t have to be physically exchanged here. And as for retail banking, like making deposits and such—” She shook her head. “Again, that makes no sense. It costs time and fuel to twist here. If you’ve got a bunch of tabs and want to keep them somewhere safe, there are lots of options to do that that don’t involve coming all the way here —”

“Actually, we might have an answer,” Rab put in over the comm. “Netty-P and I have been watching the ships at dock. There are AI cargo haulers moving things from ship to ship. We’re thinking that the actual commerce is happening out here, at the docks. The station is just a place for it to happen, while ships get reprovisioned and crews take a break —”

“And access the bank,” I finished, nodding. “There we go. Kind of clever, actually—keep all the commerce, whatever it is, happening out there, the station takes its cut in the form of docking and other fees, and none of the dirty work even happens on the station itself.”

“Can’t imagine the stuff they’re trading out there is legit,” Icky said. I nodded. “No, I doubt they’ve got wood for sheep.”

I got stares. Perry, though, laughed. “Wood for sheep. Good one, boss. You passed Go, so you can collect your two hundred bucks.”

“What the hell are you two talking about?” Torina asked. I smiled. “It’s just the games people play, my dear.”

WE DAWDLED around Bopul for a bit, then ambled back to the Fafnir. Funboy had spent his time deliberately being nowhere near us and just blending in. We had Perry watch over him. “Yeah, no one’s showing any interest at all in sourpuss,” Perry said. “I think he’s free to do whatever he wants.”

“In that case, I am going to the bank,” Funboy replied, his voice quiet over the comm. He had a small imager concealed in a fastener on his tunic so that we could see and hear what he did. I didn’t want to leave him with only Perry as cover, though, so I brought Jamberac on the same channel. He’d arrived at Bopul a few hours before us and had also been keeping to himself. I had him stay near the bank, an inconspicuous storefront on a side corridor leading away from the docking concourse, in case Funboy needed backup. We watched in the crew lounge as Funboy entered the bank, a dark and moody space with all the charm of a dentist’s waiting room. The brooding presence of several Usu, presumably acting as security, certainly didn’t add

any warmth to the place. We were all still suited up and had our weapons handy in case things turned ugly—and now, seeing the Usu, I sent Icky and Rab back into the concourse to look around, while putting them closer to the bank if things went sour. Funboy, though, was unfazed. He simply walked up to a figure sitting at a desk. It was a Gajur but had enough cybernetic implanting going on to be heading in the direction of an Usu himself. He peered up at Funboy with one of his own eyes and one that was an unblinking crystal lens. The perspective made it seem as though he was staring directly at us, in the crew lounge. “Can I help you?” he asked. He must have had some sort of vocal implant, from the mechanical rasp in his voice. Either this Gajur had been severely injured or otherwise had health reasons for all the implants, or he was one of those rare, weird types that fetishized cybernetics to the point they started willingly replacing their own body parts with them. “And you are?” Funboy asked. “My name is Argantis. Feel free to call me Account Manager Argantis, however.”

“Wow, this guy’s fun,” Torina muttered. Gabby nodded. “Funboy is pretty dour, but this guy’s giving him some definite competition.”

“I applaud your requirement that you be referred to using a proper title, Account Manager Argantis,” Funboy said. “I am so glad. Now, what may I help —"

“Naturally, I will require the same courtesy,” Funboy went on. “You may address me as First Medical Officer and Product Representative Cheerful Enthusiast. Would you like to hear about my collaboration with a formal-wear outlet store?

I’ll be honest. It is a significant commercial enterprise.”

Argantis stared for a moment. “I—no. Not unless it is pertinent to your reason for coming here —"

“Which is to borrow money. That is the reason I’m here.”

“We do not extend loans.”

“You do not?”

“We do not.”

“You know, if you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if two mannequins struck up a conversation, wonder no longer,” Perry put in—

only to us, though, of course. He’d just speak to Funboy and Jamberac through their ear bugs. Funboy looked pointedly around. “This is a bank?”

“It is. But our business model varies from that of a conventional bank. We primarily provide monetary services.”

“So… money laundering,” Perry said. I crossed my arms. “At least. I’d love to see their client list.”

Funboy made a few more stabs at getting additional information, but Argantis was both wary and good at it. Funboy even tried smiling, which actually caused Argantis to twitch, but he stuck to his lines. If Funboy had money he wished to invest, then he could make an appointment. “If there’s nothing else, I have a busy schedule,” Argantis finally said. “Okay, Funboy, let’s leave it there. I don’t want to get this guy’s hackles up,” I said, speaking into his ear bug only. “I’ll bet he has a busy schedule. Two ships have twisted in, both now inbound,” Netty-P cut in. “Droox on the Prowler says that both transmitted encrypted messages as soon as they arrived. Groshenko outfitted the Prowler with state-of-the-art gear, though, so she was able to crack open both messages. They were addressed to none other than Funboy’s new friend, Account Manager Argantis.”

“Why do I suspect I’m not going to like this?” I said. “You’re probably not. They transmitted summary cargo manifests. Among other things, those ships are carrying an Egyptian sarcophagus. A Roman statue. A painting by Vermeer. A 1941 Indian motorcycle.”

I snapped out a curse. “Artifacts plundered from Earth. Bastards.”

“If that’s not a connection to the Equal Grasp, I’m not sure what is,”

Gabby said. “They don’t seem to be limiting themselves to any one field, either,”

Netty-P went on. “They’re taking religious items. Art. Examples of engineering. A wide range of things that make me think these aren’t going to any single collector.”

“Or, even worse, they are,” Perry said. “What do you mean, bird?

One rich asshole is channeling Helem Gauss and siphoning our culture away?”

“Nope. More like a group of people, a committee, who are putting together a museum, or something like it. Gauss was one guy with a giant corporation, no morals, and the will to do anything he saw fit. But even he

had his tastes and preferences. This suggests more than one party’s involved, but not that it’s necessarily meant to be more than one collection.”

Torina nodded. “Museums will take your bones and tell you they’re preserving your heritage. And then they’ll have a fundraiser where people drink wine and point at your grandfather’s corpse and say things like weren’t they so clever, those simple people of the past.”

I scowled at her, mainly because the picture she’d painted was so spot on. “Obviously, we’re not going to allow this. But it does present us with a problem.”

“We can’t make them go boom, ’cause they’ve got your stuff,” Icky said. “Exactly, big girl, and thank you for the succinct summary.”

“Hey, in school, I almost passed language arts twice. I’m no dummy.”

Perry started, “You know, you could —”

“—be quite proud of that fact, and let’s move on to our actual strategy,”

I said, cutting him off. “I don’t just want to seize this particular shipment. We have to roll the network up, burn it to the ground, and convince—hell, the entire galaxy that stealing stuff like this, Earth’s or anyone else’s, brings us down like a ten-ton hammer.”

I turned to Netty-P. “You guys have done some terrific info-sleuthing lately, combing databases and such, so let’s see if we can keep the streak going. I’d like you and Perry to dig up everything you can.”

“That should probably include Earthly media and other sources. If things are going missing, they’re probably going to show up there first,”

Gabby suggested. “Good point, Gabs. Hook up with my mother, and maybe even contact Tony Burgess and our other contacts on Earth through her. Let’s get a list of everything of any cultural significance that’s been recently reported missing.”

“You might want to go back a few months, at least. Remember those empty ships that were apparently heading to Earth, the ones observed by those Usu we went looking for?” Torina said. “Yeah, the big bar fight!

That was a hoot!” Icky added. I gave her a dour look. “Yeah. Empty ships, dead-heading for Earth to load up on stolen cultural artifacts. What a charming thought.”

“Recommend we bring both Candler and Bester into the loop too, boss. They’re immersed in the world of artifacts and the world of sleaze

respectively. And it can’t hurt to get both perspectives here,” Perry suggested. “Both perspectives?”

“Yeah. AI and biological. Can’t hurt to have it all, right?”

“Good call. Now, those ships in transit. I don’t want to bite off more than we can chew and end up losing both. Let’s focus on one of them for now. Netty-P, which is the better target?” I asked. “Well, if these manifests are to be believed, one of them only has a handful of items, including that sarcophagus. The other one, though, a fast freighter called the Occluded Star, has a class 2 workboat already loaded to the overheads with stolen cultural goods. I guess that’s how they mean to offload the stuff when they arrive and transfer it to wherever it’s going,” she replied. “Makes sense. Maybe they just transfer the entire workboat from buyer to seller to save time,” Rab suggested. “Kind of like a scummy version of U-Haul,” Perry said. “What’s it carrying?

Art?

Religious items?

Do they have a detailed manifest?” I asked Netty-P. “You might say that. Looks like they’ve stolen a chunk of the College Football Hall of Fame, including—get this—the Heisman trophy.”

Okay, that was utterly horrifying, but I couldn’t help an impressed whistle. “Southerners are going to go absolutely nuclear over that. Aliens stealing Renaissance art is bad enough, but—messing with football?

Yeah, that’s sacrilegious.”

“I foresee a stop, board, and seizure op in our near future,” Torina said. “You’re a psychic, babe. But let’s wait until they launch that workboat and take it. I don’t want the freighter; I want the cargo. We’ll be shooting to disable. I don’t want them scurrying away.”

Funboy’s voice hummed out of the comm. “A term I dislike, scurry. I associate it with vermin.”

“Yeah, Funboy, so do I.”

4

WE LEFT Jamberac on Bopul to keep scoping the place out, dig up whatever he could, and take note of the business the enigmatic bank did, as well as with whom it did it. Jamberac had already set up a cargo business with one of his contacts—supposedly bootleg holo-smut, basically. It was, by the more extreme standards of the genre, pretty tame stuff. It had also all been synthesized, involving no actual people, just constructs manufactured on the fly by a Guild AI dedicated to the craft. This AI, who I didn’t know, specialized in making fake stuff to use in sting operations. I lifted an eyebrow at that. “An AI who does nothing but make synthetic smut?

What a job.”

“It’s actually a secondary duty for him. His primary job is data analysis and pattern recognition. I’m not going to tell you who he is, though—he’d rather not have his, uh, side gig widely known.”

“I can respect that.”

So Jamberac now had a gig of his own, running and dealing in low-grade, blandly vanilla adult entertainment to Bopul. He probably wasn’t going to make much money at it, but that wasn’t really the point. As for the artifact runners, we departed Bopul and waited for the Occluded Star to launch her class 2 cargo boat. The freighter herself then turned and headed back out, resuming a regular cargo run to somewhere. She’d presumably come back for payment, the boat and its crew—probably in that order of priority—on a return leg. “Netty-P, let’s get all the data we can on the Occluded Star—emissions, drive signature, the works. I want a missive put out across the Guild to track her as she plies her trade, see just where she goes and what she gets up to,”

I said. “Once we grab that boat, word’s inevitably going to get back to her crew. That’ll no doubt spook them, boss,” Netty-P replied. “Oh, I know. But only temporarily. Eventually, when the long arm of the law doesn’t reach out and nab ’em, they’ll fall back into old habits. I mean, they probably make way more money doing the nefarious stuff than they do from hauling—I don’t know, grain, or machine parts, or whatever.”

Once the Occluded Star had twisted away, we moved on the workboat. It was pretty anticlimactic. I broadcasted a message to heave to and prepare to be boarded—and he did. He killed his drive and just coasted, letting us move in. “Gotta love it when they don’t put up a fight,” I said as we edged the Fafnir in to dock with the boat. “Well, it might have something to do with the fact he’s armed with nothing but a point-defense battery and his own determination,” Perry said. “The bigger issue is probably going to be the reaction from Bopul. It’s one thing to turn a casually blind eye to a Peacemaker showing up and poking around a little. But stopping and seizing an inbound boat?

That’s probably going to annoy the management.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. I guess we’ll see if and how they react—which, incidentally, was part of the point.”

“Ah, you wanted to provoke them a little.”

“A little. You’ll note that when I told him to heave-to, I explicitly stated

—over an open comm channel—that we had reason to believe he had Earthly cultural artifacts on board, and I made myself sound pissed off about it. Which, by the way, wasn’t hard, because I am pissed off about it. Anyway, I’m hoping that not only will everyone listening in will think it was the Earthly part of it that yanked my chain, but that this was a targeted op, directed at that specifically, and we weren’t here just on a fishing expedition.”

“Also planting the seed that we’ve already got good intel coming out of this place,” Rab said, smiling. I shrugged and smiled back. “A happy coincidence.”

Perry put his wing on my shoulder. “Boss, you’re becoming almost as diabolical a schemer as I am. Makes me proud.”

THE BOAT’S PILOT WAS, ironically, a Piraxian, the same species as our bestselling pilot of the Prowler, Droox. This Piraxian grumpily refused to give us his name—which would have been quite a bit of defiance if he didn’t have it written on a battered travel case under his seat. Perry saw it and looked up at him. “You know, if you’re going for the man-of-mystery thing, maybe labeling your stuff was a bad idea, Saugraveel. But what do I know, I’m a bird.”

I gave him a hard stare. “So, Saugraveel, you seem to have some things in your possession that aren’t yours.”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” he said. He said it like a petulant five-year-old who’d been caught stealing cookies, right down to sitting stiffly in the pilot’s seat with his arms stubbornly crossed. I sighed. “You know, if we were just talking about weapons or chems or something, I’d be annoyed because those are bad things. But you’re carrying a load of things stolen from my home planet, that I consider to be valuable in ways that no amount of bonds or tabs or, I don’t know, bottle caps, can possibly represent. So I’m a lot more than just annoyed here. I’m genuinely pissed off —”

“Okay, fine,” Saugraveel said, continuing his streak of immediately caving in to pressure. “I haven’t been paid for any of this yet, so why should I take the fall all on my own. I mean, you at least advance a guy some money —”

“Sure, fine, you’re the victim here. Whatever. Just talk. Everything you know.”

What he knew wasn’t actually much. And not only did I believe him, but I also wasn’t really surprised. Smart bad guys, and even smart good guys, keep things fragmented and compartmentalized. All that Saugraveel could tell us was that he’d been hired on by the Occluded Star as a workboat pilot about a month prior. His job was to fly the loaded workboat to a given destination, report to a given contact, and then fly the workboat

back and rendezvous with the Occluded Star when it returned—in this case, in two days. He had been given an advance, but it was in tabs, and only enough to really cover his expenses for the two days he’d be spending on Bopul. “Kind of a shitty deal, actually,” Perry said. “Sounds like if you want to make any real money, you have to go hungry and sleep in the corridors.”

Saugraveel gave him a flat look. “Tell me about it.”

I decided to let Saugraveel go with nothing but a warning to stay out of further trouble. We were keeping the workboat and its contents, though. That provoked nothing but a shrug. “Whatever you want. I’ve gotta find some better work anyway.”

I had Rab take Saugraveel to Bopul in the Frankie while we inventoried the cargo. It did, indeed, include a lot of football memorabilia. A lot of the stuff was, frankly, uninteresting and really only of emotional value to the people involved in it, but some was quite valuable. The centerpiece of it all, the Heisman Trophy, was what commanded my fullest attention. Icky and I carefully opened the crate, revealing the Trophy in all its glory. I’d never actually seen the thing in the flesh, as it were. I took a moment to admire the hefty sculpture of a football player in mid-charge, cradling the ball in his left hand, his right thrust out as though blocking an opposing player bent on intercepting him. It was a remarkable work, perfectly capturing a snapshot instant of fluid power and graceful strength. “It’s also fake,” Perry said. I glanced at him. “No shit.”

“Okay, I know it’s fake because the original was cast in bronze and this one is cast in pewter, which I can discern spectrographically. How do you know it’s fake?”

“Because the Heisman Trophy is the centerpiece of a big-ass gallery devoted exclusively to it, in the Sports Museum of America in Lower Manhattan. And I know that because I had plans to visit it a few years back while I was in New York and got sidetracked by a very lovely —”

Torina leaned in. “A very lovely what, Van?”

I smiled at her over the little football player’s head. “A very lovely spring day that demanded I take a long, rambling walk to enjoy it.”

Perry nodded. “Yeah, gotta love spring in Manhattan. The slush is such a captivating study in gray, and with all the colorful trash and cigarette butts to accent it —"

“Anyway, if the real Heisman Trophy had gone missing from its exhibit, Clinton Barnes, the County Sheriff back home, would have been frothing at the mouth about it. He lives, eats, and breathes college football—and God forbid you bad-mouth the Iowa Hawkeyes, because that and maybe a murder in progress are guaranteed to get him to pull his gun. Anyway, Miryam would have heard about it from him by now, and it’s the sort of thing she’d have made sure to pass on.”

I turned back to—not the forgery, because I was sure it wasn’t, but a reproduction. “This was probably made as a promotional thing, or maybe as a gift for someone.” I narrowed my eyes at it. “I seem to recall that the guy who’d actually modeled for it didn’t even find out his pose had been used until sometime in the eighties —”

“Yup. Ed Smith, running back, originally played college level in New York for the Boston Redskins, and the Green Bay Packers in the thirties. He was given a reproduction of the Heisman of his own,” Perry said. “Thank you, Doctor Factoid. Anyway, this could have been cast for any number of reasons. But I’m sure it was being pawned off out here as the real thing—” I said, glancing around at the other crates. One caught my eye. “So I gather we’re heading back to Earth to return this stuff?” Icky said. I nodded. “We are, but we’ve got a stop to make on the way, first—

Crossroads.”

“Crossroads?

Why?”

“Well, it’s on the way, and we need to fuel anyway. But also, that,” I said, pointing at the case that had snagged me. It had a shipping plate on it

— Spacer’s Gold, and then Crossroads, with a compartment number. The case itself contained one of the few parts of the cargo not Earthly sports-related—about two dozen old written works from a half-dozen different worlds, none of them seeming of much value. Perry hopped over to it. “Well, how about that.”

I looked up from the plate at him. “You recognize it?”

“Yeah. Although that company, or agent—he hasn’t been in business for some time.”

“So you know who it is.”

Perry’s eyes glittered back at me. “I do. I just haven’t had to think about him for quite some time.”

“Let me guess. Since my grandfather was alive?”

“Just so. At the end of his career, Mark was juggling a lot of knives. He

—and his partner, of course—were responsible for a lot of everything good that happened out here in the black. They also knew who was guilty of most of the bad stuff.”

I sighed, exasperated. “More secrets, bird?”

“Actually, no, boss. Not this time. I haven’t had any new memories unlock. Whatever I know, or remember, or even rumors—it’s all yours. It’s more a matter of sorting out what actually matters from what doesn’t. And what’s going to be useful out there”—he waved a wing vaguely—“but also on the inside.”

“Of the Guild, you mean.”

“And the GKU, yeah.”

I nodded. Perry’s concern for the growing shenanigans in the Guild—

Casaril and the True Direction, and now quite possibly the insidious influence of a hidden Yotov, pulling strings from afar—had obviously been mounting right along with mine. There were a lot of good people in the Guild and the GKU, but as organizations, both were proving increasingly rotten at their cores. The GKU was probably worse because it was a lot older. But the Guild was well on its way. It made me think of so-called “old growth” forests. Ancient trees, hundreds of years old, often treated with an almost mystical, spiritual reverence, viewed as sacrosanct and inviolate. And sure, some of them were still healthy and hale and worth preserving. But some were just old and sick, barely alive corpses of trees riven by disease and insects and rot, desperately in need of cutting or fire so the forest could be renewed. I shook off my sudden bout of brooding and turned back to Perry. “Okay, so who are we looking for?

At Spacer’s Gold?”

“Well, he was old even when I met him, and not really good with people.”

“Old and cranky, huh?

I already like the guy,” Icky said, grinning. Funboy nodded. “I understand the distaste for youth that only intensifies with age.”

“Yeah, well, wait until you meet him before you decide how much you like him.”

THE WORKBOAT WAS SMALL ENOUGH, only class 2, that under Netty-P’s careful supervision, Icky and EVAN, the Fafnir’s external version of Waldo, were able to strap it to our ship’s belly. It cost us a little more fuel to make the twist to Crossroads, but we were going to gas up there anyway. We left the Prowler on station, continuing to watch over Bopul and complement Jamberac’s undercover work on the inside. Droox was quite happy, apparently being elbows-deep in another bestseller. “Could you imagine just sitting alone in that ship, nothing but the AI running the scanners to keep you company, dreaming up fiction?” Rab said. Torina shrugged. “I don’t know. I think there are some people out there that would love it.”

“The dramatic fiction is fine. It’s the other stuff she writes, the… um, adult-oriented stuff. Thinking of her writing that—” I shook my head. Everyone else joined me in shaking their own heads. “Yeah. Don’t,” Icky said, then excused herself to call Paxomar. Perry flashed his eyes at her. “Speaking of sitting in space and creating some erotica on the fly —”

“Uh, excuse me, but I want to check up on my children, thank you very much, you winged pervert, you.”

“Uh-huh. That’s it, eh?”

Icky shrugged. “Okay, maybe a little of the sexier stuff might come up —”

“Which, frankly, is all we need to know, Icky,” I said. “Go, do you.”

“And quietly, please and thank you,” Funboy said. We made it to Crossroads without incident, docked, and set about refueling and reprovisioning. I took Perry and Torina to check in with Gus and bring him up to date on the goings-on at Bopul. Then we set off to track down Spacer’s Gold. As we made our way through the crowded orbital—which was actually noisier, smellier, and somewhat seedier than Bopul—Perry pointed out two instances of the stylized letters SG rendered in gold. They were scratched and faded and sheened over with a veneer of sticky residue, both organic and inorganic, deposited over the years. We finally came to a quieter and more decrepit and disused part of the Crossroads orbital. There were a few kiosks and small storefronts selling mostly junk and second-rate wares. A pervasive stink of comingled desperation and defeated resignation hung over it all. At one time, this part of Crossroads would have been as busy as

any other. But patterns of commerce waxed and waned and shifted over time, lessening the traffic passing through the place and leaving this section mostly superfluous. That might change again, of course. Right now, though, this was the equivalent of a run-down urban core, when most of the action had moved to the burbs. We reached a heavy door sealed with a mechanical lock. Perry hopped up on the latch handle, inserted the tip of a feather into the lock, and started digging and wiggling it around. “Been a while since I’ve been here for sure,” he said as he worked. “How long, exactly?” I asked him. “Since your father’s first birthday.”

“So—that was, what?

1970?”

“’69, actually. Almost exactly midway between the Moon landing in July and Woodstock in August.”

“Gramps was here making some sort of deal, I gather?”

“Two deals,” Perry said. “One for parts for the ship, and the other for something worth a lot more.”

“He gave up… everything. For dad. And that means for me, in a way.”

The lock finally clicked. I touched The Drop, which was holstered at my side, then slid open the latch when Perry jumped clear and opened the door. It revealed a large empty space about ten meters by fifteen, lit only by a pair of wan safety lights. Another large door plugged the wall opposite, with faded warnings stenciled around it declaring it was an airlock. Perry sailed in over my head and did a circuit of the space. “Yeah, judging from the patina of corrosion on the scrapes and scratches in the decks and bulkheads, this space hasn’t been used for years.”

“I’m surprised they keep it pressurized,” Torina said, looking around. “That door we came through isn’t pressure certified. If it was, I’m sure they’d have vented this space long ago,” Perry said. “Oh—okay, it’s not completely empty,” I said, glancing behind the door we’d come in. “There are some old food containers here, and a… power cell?

Not a type I recognize, though.”

Perry flew over and landed with a metallic clatter on the deck. “Yeah, this type of cell was used in some comm units—forty years ago, though.”

I glanced around at the emptiness. “Okay, so I guess that crate in the workboat was just an old piece of kit, still in use. Because this place has clearly been closed for a long time.”

“Or moved on to somewhere else,” Torina offered. “Who. The question is who,” Perry said. “And the answer is a surly Tunis named Mo. And no, I don’t know where he went after our business concluded —”

The comm hummed to life. It was a woman’s voice. “Van, fancy you being here on Crossroads. It’s just like old times—

remember, when I kicked your sorry butt into the shape of something resembling a Peacemaker?”

I smiled. “Hello, Gabriella. Didn’t realize you were here.”

“I had business with Gus and was about to stop by your ship to say hi when I noticed something very interesting. A small—and I mean class 1, at best—vessel just zipped away from the outer airlock of the space you’re apparently standing in.”

“You’re tracking us now?”

“Nope. But you triggered an intrusion alarm when you picked that lock. Gus pinged your personal comm on a hunch, and lo and behold, there you are. Anyway, I didn’t get any emissions from it, or an ID, but I’m doing what I can to track it. If I had to guess, though, I’m thinking it’s a tripwire, just a drone, and it’s designed to send a message.”

“And what message would that be, Gabriella?”

“That the Tudors have come to collect a debt.”

5

THE DRONE unfortunately managed to twist before we could do much about it. It was a damn fast little craft, probably nothing but fusion and twist drives, and fuel and a controller for both. Its acceleration rivaled that of a missile. Neither the Fafnir, the Frankie, nor Gabriella’s ship had the acceleration, in turn, to even start catching up to the thing from a full stop. We couldn’t even seek help from other ships plying their way in or out of the system because whoever or whatever was guiding it chose a cunning trajectory that let it escape Crossroads with no chance of interception. All we could do was watch it, study and record its emissions, and grind our teeth a little in frustration. Stupid physics. But there was no use crying over escaped drones. Gus promised to look into the disused Spacer’s Gold facility and gather whatever information he could about it, based on Perry’s recollections. He didn’t know anything about it himself, the space having been empty and unused when he started his posting on Crossroads ten years ago. We spent some time with him and Gabriella, which brought back my own memories of my first time on Crossroads. It had been my first interstellar destination after leaving Earth to start my career as a Peacemaker, with Gus and Gabriella overseeing my induction, initiation, and initial training. It was actually a pleasant hour or so, rehashing my little achievements and mishaps, Gabriella laughing about just how much of a noob I’d been—

but then solemnly adding that she’d seen the potential in me. Gus readily agreed. It was a nice little trip down memory lane. But a nice little trip with a deeper purpose—one that Torina picked up on and quietly raised once we’d departed Crossroads, bound for Earth. “You were testing them, weren’t you?” she asked me. “Testing them?”

“Oh, please—I’ve never seen you reminisce so much about anything with anyone, Van. And I didn’t miss the way you watched both Gus and Gab even while you were laughing.”

“Hey, I’d just gone into outer freakin’ space for the first time, to another star system, to start work as a spacefaring cop, a job that just a few days prior I hadn’t even known or believed existed —”

She stared at me. Her stare was way more effective than any amount of subtle, probing interrogation. At least, it was when it came to me. I finally shrugged. “Yeah, there was a little testing going on. I need to work out who in the Guild I can really trust, who I can’t, and who I’m just not sure about.” I glanced at her. “So I was that obvious, huh?”

“Not really. I noticed because I’m me and you’re you. And once I realized what you were doing, I did some of the same, to back you up.”

“And?”

“And, I’d like to hear what you think before I say,” she replied. “Okay. Gabriella is fine. I was pretty sure she would be. Gus—I’m mostly sure he’s on the side of the angels here, but not one hundred percent.”

“I agree about Gab. When it comes to Gus, he’s harder to read, being so non-human, but I finally settled on trustworthy.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s proud of you, Van. He obviously sees himself as having been instrumental in your change—you know, from wide-eyed rookie to the Master you are today. He’s got a sense of ownership in you and your achievements, and I think that means a lot to him.”

“Okay, Torina—new plan. If I ever want to delve into the loyalties and leanings of a Peacemaker hereafter, I want you there with me. Because thinking back on it, in light of what you just said, I see that, yeah.” I smiled at her. “We make a good team.”

“We’d better, being, you know, married and all.”

WE TWISTED into the Solar System, checked in with Fort Cantullin, then headed in-system. On the way, I called up my mother for an update. I ended up talking to Amazing, her lieutenant. “Your mother is off with Valint, trying to determine if the Tsarina really died aboard her ship in that battle you fought,” Amazing said. “She doesn’t think she did?”

Amazing shrugged. “She’s not sure. None of us are. And none of us will be, until we see a body —”

“Not likely, since she’d have been vaporized.”

“—or some other hard evidence she’s dead. You don’t get to the Tsarina’s level in the GKU—or your mother’s, or Valint’s, or hell, even mine—without being a survivor. And the Tsarina’s a particularly slippery sort.”

“Okay. Well, since she left you watching over Earth, anything to report?”

“We stopped a ship inbound. Think we’ve figured out how they’ve been slipping ships past our net. It’s a combination of stealth and using a trajectory that comes straight out of Sol itself. Turns out we had a hole there that the bad guys were exploiting. We’ve plugged it now.”

“What happened to the ship you stopped?”

Amazing gave me a blank look for a second. “We destroyed it,” she said. A pointed duh very much hung off the end of her sentence. I puffed an exasperated sigh. “I’m going to assume it initiated hostile action then. Since, you know, simply destroying a ship outright in the absence of hostile action, or otherwise without a clear and compelling reason, could be considered a bad thing under the law.”

“Alright, sure. There was hostile action,” Amazing said, a hint of amused contempt in her voice. “Awesome. So what passengers was it carrying?

What cargo?

For instance, was it empty, or was it loaded with irreplaceable cultural artifacts of the sort we seized a day ago?”

Amazing’s bland smugness faltered. “It… was en route to Earth, so we assumed it was empty —”

“By ‘assumed,’ I’m sure you mean that you made absolutely sure, beyond any reasonable doubt. You confirmed there were no innocent

passengers on board, and no cargo that should have been seized rather than destroyed,” I said. My voice hardened more and more as I spoke, though not because I’d intended it to. It just did that all on its own. By the time I finished, Amazing was looking decidedly not smug and much more on-the-spot. I just stared and let her squirm. She sighed. “Alright, fine. We may have acted precipitously —”

“Yes, you may have. You may be GKU, rather than Guild, and you may consider yourself to still be a Feral—a term I’m really starting to despise, by the way—but, you know what?

That doesn’t exempt you from the law or exercising even a modicum of good judgment.”

She opened her mouth but closed it again. I could see the wheels spinning behind her eyes. She was Hu’warde, like my grandmother, so prideful, even arrogant. She was not used to being pinned in the harsh, uncompromising spotlight like this, and she didn’t like it. She didn’t like it even more because she had no good answer. She’d seen the approaching ship and just carried out her role in the bluntest, most bludgeon-ish way possible, by immediately destroying it. I relented. “You’re probably right—it was probably some sleazy, opportunistic trader on the Equal Grasp’s payroll. We’ll just have to hope it wasn’t more than that. But even if it wasn’t, from now on, ships have to be warned and commanded to stop. They’re more valuable to us that way. We get intel from them, and we need intel, badly. The more, the better. And if they decide to fight—fine, we’ve got our rules of engagement.”

Amazing looked like she was rallying for a snappy comeback of some sort but finally just sagged a little in chastened defeat. “Understood.”

“Okay. Is there anything else I should know?”

“We got word that a human contact of yours was taken into custody by… a government. Yours, I think, the American one,” Amazing said. I sat up. “Which human contact?”

“The one named”—she glanced at something off-screen—“Miryam. Miryam Nunziato.”

“What?”

MIRYAM HAD, per the request I’d made the last time we were at the farm, taken a trip outside the country. When Mavis DeMont had shown up, asking for asylum to escape the Equal Grasp, I decided that the farm was too exposed a place for her to remain. She’d accordingly gone to Japan. I got the rest from Clinton Barnes. Miryam had returned to the US, landing in San Francisco a few days prior—about the time we were planning our move on Bopul. She’d called him from the airport there to let him know she was back and was heading for her next appointment—which she’d previously told us was going to be spending some time in El Paso, Texas, with an old friend from law school. But said old friend, who got to know Clinton through Miryam, had called him to ask about her because she never showed up. Now, Clinton Barnes wasn’t exactly Sherlock Holmes, but he was no dummy when it came to law enforcement, either. Had the instincts, and more importantly, the tenacity of a stubborn bloodhound. He made calls and called in favors, and finally caught wind through a Federal agent friend of his that a woman matching Miryam’s description had spent a brief time in the San Francisco Field Office of the FBI. “That’s as far as I got, Van,” he said. “I’ve used up pretty much all my resources, so —”

“That’s fine, Clinton, thanks. Leave it with me.”

“Van, let me know what you find out, okay?”

“The instant I know it, you will, too.”

My next call was straight to Loren Freirbach at the State Department. She was in meetings all day, so I told her Administrative Assistant that this was a call from the senior delegate of a very foreign power, and that if she wasn’t on the phone to me within the hour, then in two I’d be landing on the White House lawn to see the President himself. Freirbach was on the phone ten minutes later. I explained the situation to her. She asked me to give her a few minutes, to put in a call to a friend at the Justice Department, the FBI’s parent organization. Ten more minutes passed, then she called me back. “The FBI doesn’t have her, Van. She was taken to their Frisco office and held there while somebody made some calls—that’s not unusual, for other departments and bureaus —”

“Who, Loren?

Who was that somebody?” I cut in, though I was already pretty sure I knew. “They were military. The only name they got was Hudspeth. We’ve done a quick search and found four people with that name on the military payroll —”

“That’s fine. I know who he is.”

“Van, there was no official government sanction for this—not from us, not from Justice, and not from Homeland Security —”

“I know. This is a personal initiative by one Colonel Mandeville.” I stared into the data pad I was using as a phone. “Loren, I’m going to be straight with you here. I am getting Miryam back. I am going to do everything I can to do that without using force. But if it takes force, I will. So if you want to avoid that, I’d suggest talking to your husband, getting him to make some calls. Mandeville is a Colonel. There has to be some generals out there you can get to order him to back off.”

“I’ll get on it right now. Van, please don’t do anything precipitous in the meantime.”

“If I think she’s at risk of being harmed, Loren, then I will burn down the Pentagon, if I have to, to protect her.”

“I… understand. And I’m on it.”

“Thank you.”

BUT I WASN’T GOING to wait. While Loren Freirbach was making calls and trying to get the wheels of bureaucracy grinding, I turned to my own resources—not to grind, but to slash and slice. “Perry, Netty-P, you guys have leave to go anywhere, do anything in any Earthly computer system. I don’t care if it’s government, military, controls nukes, controls the freakin’ air conditioning—hell, I don’t care if it belongs to Disney. I want to find Miryam first and foremost, and I want to find Colonel Mandeville as a close second,” I said. Perry and Netty-P exchanged a look, then they both nodded. “On it, boss,” Perry said. I turned to the rest of my crew. “Meantime, gang, I was planning on returning all those stolen sports items quietly, without fuss and below the radar. But you know what?

Screw that. Funboy, fire up your Instagram. You guys get all the pictures of the stuff you can. Post it far and wide, with the

message that it was stolen by an off-world group called the Equal Grasp—

and that we, the Guild, foiled the plot and are returning it all. It’s time to start openly painting us as the good guys and them as the bad.”

IT TOOK THEM A FEW HOURS—NOT because it actually took them that long, but because they were limited by the speed of the Earthly computer architecture. They spent agonizing periods of time—seconds, even—just waiting for things to happen. But they finally found some communication traces of Mandeville deep inside an encrypted government network, one ostensibly intended as a backup for secure naval comms inside the United States. Once they had the scent, they dug as doggedly as Clinton Barnes had. They followed the sporadic traces back to the source, casually brushing aside the most formidable firewalls and counter-intrusion measures as they did. I found myself wishing I’d had the ability to do that back during my own cybersecurity days. It would have made things so much easier, jobs that took me days lasting only minutes —

“Bingo, got him,” Perry said. “Or we have his last location, at least. He’s in a secure facility just outside Manassas, Virginia. At least, he thinks it’s a secure facility.”

I nodded. “Perfect. Netty-P, put us in geosynchronous orbit over DC.”

“Van, what do you intend to do?” Torina asked. “Yeah, is this going to be more Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Day the Earth Stood Still, or Earth Versus the Flying Saucers?” Perry asked. “By which you mean —?”

“Soft extraterrestrial diplomacy, hard extraterrestrial diplomacy, or extraterrestrial shoot-em-up?”

I stared down at the Earth, a complete disc from geostationary orbital distance. I could make out the west coast of the United States and Canada, with the eastern part of the continent shrouded in swirls of white cloud. Night reigned everywhere roughly west of Hawaii. “Myriam’s been a mother to me—as much as anyone. More than anyone. She carried some damn weighty secrets and never asked for

anything in return.”

“Just to be clear, Van, we’ll back your call. But what is it?”

“As a burgeoning fan of cinema, I would note that this is an opportunity for a dramatic prison break,” Funboy said. Icky nodded. “Big fan. We could film it, too.”

I smiled at her. “Big girl, if—and that’s a huge if—we pry Miryam out of whatever hole they’ve got her in by force, why would you want to film it?”

“For my kids. So they can see mom kick ass and stuff.”

I shook my head. “Yeah, well, while I can’t really argue with your goals. I think it might be better for us to approach this in a more nuanced fashion.”

“Nuance is far superior in some cases. While a prison break would be more exciting, this may indeed be one such moment,” Funboy agreed. “Thank you. Appreciate the vote of confidence. It’s a practical decision, too.”

“Because you’re worried about her being hurt?” Gabby offered. “Or worse. Or even intentionally harmed, to set us up. I didn’t trust them before, but I sure as hell don’t trust them now.”

I tapped my chin for a moment, while Netty-P settled our orbit straight over Washington, DC. “Okay, we’re going to try it two ways,” I said. “First, we try diplomacy.”

“And if talking doesn’t work?” Icky asked. “Then, in the words of the most famous bouncer in history, it’s time to not be nice,” I replied. Funboy nodded. “Being nice is contraindicated when dealing with people whose entire existence is predicated on acquiring power and furthering their own careers and interests. They generally don’t engage in nice, except as an artifice, a form of manipulation.”

“Funboy, I see you understand how the government works. But they —”

“They done messed up, as that fellow in Louisiana put it. They done messed up.”

“Yeah, they did. So, diplomacy it is—to start.”

6

PERRY BROKE into the communications and data systems connecting the secure facility, some sort of dispersed command and control center, and spent time rooting around. Those systems were protected by encryption and security measures that made even Perry say “huh.”

“I can usually bust through this stuff in hundredths of a second. This time it was a challenge, though—took me almost a full tenth of a second. Not sure why—oh, wait. There it is. Yeah, this is a target-selection facility, a place for the bigwigs to go, decide who’s going to be next on the agenda for some Reaper drone or Seal Team Six, and send out the orders to git ’er done,” he said. “Yeah, I can see why you’d want to protect that with your best stuff. Man, I’d have given anything to have access to the info they’ve got stored there back in my halcyon days of cybersecurity.”

Perry’s eyes glittered amber at me. “Why, Van, you sneaky thing. And here I thought all the hacking you did was of the gray-hat variety.”

“It was. And not everyone who ends up on one of those target lists belongs there. Some of them are legitimately terrible people, yeah—but with those like Mandeville having access, let’s just say I’m not convinced there aren’t some axes brought into that place for a bit of grinding.”

“Anyway, I’ve got access. Did you want—oh.”

That caught everyone’s attention. “Oh?” I said, tensing. “Is it something about Miryam?”

“Oh. No. No, no. No-no-no-no-no, not at all —”

“Perry—!”

“Here, let me show you.” The center display lit up with —

An image. One hell of an image. Rab snorted and shook his head. Funboy said, “Oh dear.”

Torina gasped. Gabby breathed an, “Oh my goodness.”

I stared. Icky peered at it. “Is that a picture of an old man wearing a—what is that?”

“A saddle,” I said. “And that’s a bridle between his teeth. And yes, that’s all he’s wearing, except for that young lady riding him, and Perry I think we’ve seen enough of that, hmm?”

The image changed to a fluffy kitten pouncing at a ball of string. “A little brain bleach for you,” Perry said. “That was one of dozens of images. And one of the few I could actually show you guys without, you know, having you pay a cover charge.”

“Who was that?” Torina asked. “Well, based on a quick facial recognition search, that was the senior congressman from the good state of Yikes, That was a Freakin’

Congressman.”

“Why in the name of—I don’t know, insert something appropriately divine here—would they have stuff like that?” Torina asked. “I’m guessing blackmail material. That must be how Mandeville is exerting leverage on other parts of the government,” Gabby said. I nodded, but another thought occurred to me. “Perry, go ahead and bust into their comms. I want to talk to whoever’s down there.”

“And—you’re on, boss. Action!” he said, clapping his wings together. I sighed at him and turned to the display. Sure enough, I saw Mandeville sitting at a desk facing what was presumably a secure videoconference rig. He was talking to someone off-screen. I cleared my throat. Mandeville turned, saw me, then jumped and gasped out a squeaky little yelp. He immediately straightened and tried to recover his composure. “How the hell did you —”

“Break into your comm system?

Really?

After all we’ve been through, you even have to ask?” I shot back, shaking my head. “Actually, I don’t. I’ve been locked down in this room for nearly eighteen hours. Why, I can’t tell you —”

“No need,” Perry said, hopping into Mandeville’s view. “I read your emails and texts. You’re being forced into a partnership with the Equal Grasp. They’re going to reveal certain indiscretions by politicians. Of every party. As an aside, I think the Senator in a milk maid’s outfit looks—what’s the word, guys?” He looked around the cockpit. Icky ventured, “Adorable?”

“Yeah, that’s the word. Although I’m not sure his wife, or his constituents, would agree. I gotta admit, though, I’m impressed by the dossier they’ve put together. I count nineteen Senators. Thirty-four members of congress. Two cabinet secretaries. More judges than you could fit on a cruise ship. A damned thorough job on their part—although you gotta wonder, what with what’s laughably called AI getting all the press on Earth these days, how much of it is real—or if it even matters.”

“Once that stuff is released, things will never be the same,” Netty-P

said. “Admit the images are real, and the people in them face the consequences. Claim they’re AI-generated fakes, and that’s the end of what little trust people will have in anything that they don’t actually experience in person. And it still probably won’t be enough to save the poor suckers caught in all those images—who either way can be replaced with more malleable people.”

An imposing older man stepped into the frame, resplendent with medals and braid, his face florid. Perry, though, cut him off. “Why, look, there’s one of the poor suckers now. General Mullins, I presume. Unless at least one of the women in that image is your wife, I’d suggest you carefully consider just what it is you’re about to say.”

The officer apparently named Mullins immediately subsided, though his face stayed the color of a stop sign. “How could you possibly have access to any of that—that blackmail filth. It’s secured —”

“Oh, for—haven’t you guys figured this out yet?

I’m an alien combat AI umpteen generations ahead of anything you’ve got in service. From my perspective, all of your most hardened, secure systems might as well be secured with dollar-store bicycle locks. But I’m far from your greatest problem. That would be this guy sitting beside me glowering at you like something still warm he stepped in, aka my boss. The one who was more or

less raised by Miryam Nunzio, the woman someone decided to use as a pawn in your bullshit scheme to exploit the entire global economy.”

Mullins stood in simmering silence. Mandeville actually almost smirked at him. It told me that this was probably his boss, and that he hated the man. I filed that little fact away for future reference and picked up where Perry left off. “So, do we have your attention now?” I asked flatly. Mandeville’s smirk faded, and he nodded. “You do.”

“Good. Because we are teetering on the brink here, the point where my diplomacy as a Master of the Peacemaker Guild ends, and my role as a truly pissed-off American citizen and outraged friend begins. I consider every minute Miryam spends in custody a personal insult to me, my crew, my family, and my Guild. I will use the tools at my disposal”—I gestured at Perry— “to make sure that everyone involved in this bullshit pays one hell of a price for their stupidity, carelessness, greed, naked ambition, or combination thereof. It will be careers to start, with more as I get angrier. So let me repeat, for the sake of absolute clarity—do we have your full and undivided attention?”

Mullins leveled the best scowl he could manage on me. I could tell he was one of those Generals who fancied himself a professional descendant of George Patton, all bluster and bravado and used to getting what he wanted. This was killing him. “You do,” he snapped. “And you might have a gun that’s bigger than mine, but that doesn’t automatically give you the damned moral high ground, Tudor.”

“Oh, please, spare me the pushback, General. I don’t have the time or any interest whatsoever in you and your sudden feelings of inadequacy. This is on your team, Mullins, not mine and not me. You picked this fight by caving to those scumbags, and now my crew and I have to clean it up.”

Mullin blinked in surprise. He’d obviously assumed I was going to make a bunch of my own demands, not say anything about fixing the problem they were facing. “For starters, we’ll aim to get a stranglehold on the images and vids, but not because I’m feeling generous or anything like. I just don’t need the chaos that’s going to result, and neither does Earth as a whole.”

Mullins opened his mouth, closed it again, then uttered something part sigh, part frustrated growl. Again, Mandeville smirked a little, obviously

enjoying Mullins’s discomfort despite the gravity of the situation. He really didn’t like the general. But it also told me that Mandeville wasn’t featured in any of the blackmail images, either because he wasn’t important enough, because the images weren’t fakes and only exposed real people doing real things—or because he was in league with the blackmailers. He might even be eyeing the general’s job. I went on. “And, of course, you are going to immediately release Miryam.”

Mullins crossed his arms. “If we do that, then those bastards are going to release the lot. Us arresting her has been the only demand they’ve made so far.”

I frowned. The fact was that, while Perry by himself could seize control of pretty much every computer network in the United States, when it came to the Equal Grasp, we were dealing with comparable tech. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as easy or certain that he and Netty-P could gain a foothold in their information systems. And we had to assume that that’s where the blackmail images were being kept. I had an idea—one hell of an idea, at that—but it would take time to implement. I finally shrugged. “Alright, fine. But I want Miryam housed in the equivalent of a five-star suite, I want her treated like visiting royalty, and I want you to inform her that she is only remaining your guest because of circumstances, and that I’m aware that you’ve got her. I also want to know her exact location. And if any harm comes to her, even a boo-boo on her pinkie—well, it took me less than five minutes to find you in your secure little facility. And from where I am right now, in geosynchronous orbit, I could vaporize you by pressing a few of these buttons right here. Am I clear?”

Mullins clenched his teeth, then nodded. “Fine.”

“And do it all quietly. Do not mention any of this on anything resembling a phone or computer network. All of your communications regarding Miryam, me, my crew, my ship—any and all of it is to be done verbally or handwritten, using messengers. But not Colonel Mandeville there, or his minion, Hudspeth. I want the good colonel to stay right where he is, with full knowledge that we’ll be examining every byte of data that goes in and out of that facility you’re in.”

Mullins glanced at Mandeville. “Why?”

“Let’s just say I’m not sure which team Colonel Mandeville is really playing for.”

Mandeville rose from his chair. “Now listen here —”

“Stow it, Colonel. I do not care. The day you swaggered onto my farm with ICE in tow, full of threats and smug grins, was the day you ended up firmly on my shit list. If you want to have any chance of getting off of it, you just sit there in your bunker and remain absolutely silent."

Mandeville’s glare was a little like looking into the sun, but he just thumped his butt back down in his chair. “Now, then, gentlemen, I will be in touch. If the Equal Grasp contacts you, tell them I ranted, but you held firm. And remember—we’re watching.”

Perry put his wingtip up to his eyes, then flicked it toward Mandeville and Mullins and repeated the gesture a couple of times— I’m watching you. I closed the channel. I EXPLAINED my idea to Perry and Netty-P. Their reactions were what I’d expected. “Holy shit, boss,” Perry said. Netty-P nodded her imager. “Van, that’s quite the ask. Not just monitor every computer network on Earth, but develop the means to immediately intercept and delete the Equal Grasp’s blackmail images?

Wherever and whenever they show up?”

“Gotta admit, I’m impressed you think so highly of our capabilities, but I’ve gotta be just as honest—even if Netty-P and I devoted all of our computational resources to it, I’m not sure we could manage it,” Perry added. “I wasn’t thinking of you guys. I was thinking of recruiting other AIs to do the job. I seem to recall, when you were describing how you first met Gramps, he picked you out from a slew of other dormant AIs at Valint’s recommendation,” I said to Netty-P. “He… did, yes. Valint suggested Mark talk to Netty, so she could replace the crappy AI he inherited with the Dragonet that became the Fafnir. When ships are decommissioned, their AIs are usually preserved, so

they can be repurposed aboard new ships. You’re suggesting, what, that we try to recruit a bunch of those AIs, to have them… take control of all Earthly computer networks?”

“Not take control. I’d just want them to prevent the Equal Grasp from ever being able to disseminate those images,” I said. “You know, I’m not usually one for slippery-slope arguments, but seriously, Van—once you’ve set up a network of watchers like that, they’ll see lots of stuff that’s really problematic. You might find it hard not to take action about at least some of it. And once you start down that particularly ugly rabbit hole —”

I held up a hand. “Trust me, I know. There were things I encountered during my own hacking days that were pretty terrible, that I had to make myself ignore because of the circumstances. In this case, I’d be asking these AIs to focus only on anything originating from the Equal Grasp and to utterly ignore everything else.”

Perry glanced at Netty. “If we only bring in AIs that haven’t ever had anything to do with Earth, or humans in general, it would be a lot easier for them to not care about anything but the Equal Grasp.”

“How many AIs would it take?” I asked them. “A dozen at a minimum. Probably twice that many, to be absolutely sure and ensure decent redundancy,” Netty-P said. “Can I leave this with you guys?”

“You can,” Perry said. “We’ll start contacting the appropriate parties. We are going to have to physically retrieve the AIs, bring them here, and get them set up with the necessary stuff to access the terrestrial network of networks.”

“And this won’t, of course, stop hardcopies, Van. Or faxes, or posters, or billboards—anything analog,” Netty-P pointed out. “I know. But disseminating things that way is going to be a lot slower and less efficient than doing it online.”

“We have one thing going for us at least,” Perry said. “What’s that?”

“Fake news. Everyone down there thinks it’s everywhere anyway. I mean, we visited a Walmart in Iowa, and people all over the net still think it was all staged.”

I sniffed. “Yay for cynicism, I guess—at least, when it works in our favor. It might be the death of humanity yet, but we can only tackle one problem at a time.”

MIRYAM HAD BEEN QUIETLY MOVED to a government-owned safehouse, apparently normally used as part of the Federal witness-protection system and set up in reasonable comfort. I sent Rab, Funboy, and Perry down in the Frankie to confirm it, and that she was alright. But I stopped short of having them make contact. We had to assume the Equal Grasp had at least the same resources we did, so they landed miles away, and Perry flew, on his own, to check in on her—just another bird in the sky. We had to prevent the Equal Grasp from knowing that Mullins and Mandeville were at least entertaining the idea of playing ball with us, certainly until we’d gotten our AI surveillance network in place. Which actually raised another worry—that the Equal Grasp may have already done something similar. I had Perry and Netty-P quietly check, but they could find no evidence of it. The Equal Grasp seemed to be focusing its efforts on governments around the globe, and the people in them who were the movers and shakers. They’d seemingly left the ordinary people, the masses, as a lower priority. That gave us the opening we needed, and I intended to exploit it. In the midst of this, my mother returned. I bitched at her about Amazing, and then asked her what she’d learned about the Tsarina. “So far, not much. Didn’t find any evidence she wasn’t aboard her ship when Groshenko collided it with his.”

“So the logical conclusion is that she’s dead.”

“It is.”

“But?”

“But, Van, I can think of three other times we were sure she was dead. And three times she turned out to be alive and kicking. She has a knack for coming back from the grave. So until I have firm proof, I’m going to be assuming she’s only probably dead. Or even mostly dead.”

I nodded. “Yeah, probably wise to assume the worst.”

“Incidentally, Van, and speaking of Groshenko—he seems to have uncovered quite the vulnerability in that combi-drive. Put something with a partially activated twist drive in its path and —”

“Yeah, no shit. Way ahead of you on that one, Mom. I don’t plan to use it again unless we absolutely have to—or until the people out at Reverie figure out a workaround.”

IT WAS YET another thing on my never-shrinking to-do list. I’d become used to the combi-drive as a sort of Get Out Of Jail Free card, a button we could push to either enter or leave a given situation pretty much with impunity. Groshenko, however, had found a weakness. A ship could put itself in the path of its combi-driving opponent and activate its own twist drive, but not actually execute a twist. The arcane, almost otherworldly physics involved didn’t like a ship using a combi-drive coming into confluence with a partially twisted ship, both vessels abruptly being rendered down to a whole lot of really energetic photons and other elementary particles. What made it even easier to pull off was the fact that a ship under combi-drive could only travel in a straight line, making predicting its exact path through space-time simple. Sure, it was a suicide mission—but. If someone took a cheap and twist-capable workboat and rigged it to operate remotely, or under AI control, then they suddenly had an all-too effective countermeasure. It meant we now had to be extremely careful about using it. I signed off with my mother, but not before asking her to keep a lid on Amazing. “If you’re going to leave her in charge of things here, Mom, she can’t just be shooting first and not even bothering with any questions later.”

She sighed. “You have to appreciate, Van, that these people are used to eking out an existence in the big black. Out there, everything is reduced to what’s the most expedient, entails the least risk, and carries the least cost. It’s going to take them some time to adjust.”

“The ones who even want to adjust, you mean. There’s still a whole contingent of Ferals out there, probably with Kiki Treasure leading them now.”

My mother’s face was grim. “There is. And I know you teamed up with her to take out the Tsarina, but —”

“But that was a fleeting alliance of convenience, and I shouldn’t trust her even a little bit going forward, particularly since she’s also a nutcase.”

A glimmer of a smile. “Words out of my mouth.” The ghost-smile vanished. “You’re one of two things to her, Van—a resource to be exploited, or a problem to be avoided or fixed. My advice is to stay well away from her, to just put her off when she comes to you looking for help, for another alliance of convenience.”

“When she comes looking?”

My mother nodded. “She will. Trust me—she will.”

7

STILL, worries about the combi-drive, and Kiki Treasure and her Ferals, and

—and the list goes on—anyway, those all aside, I planned to spend time on Earth. I wanted to get a better feel for how, and to what extent, the Equal Grasp was infiltrating Earthly power structures. Perry and Netty-P had designed a means for us to plug advanced AIs into the Earthly internet, to interdict the distribution of the Grasp’s blackmail images, and had contacted the AI archives to find the best candidates for the job. And —

And, of course, an urgent call came in on the Masters’ priority comm channel, from Alic. A twist-comm station in Seven Stars League territory had just been attacked and destroyed. Two Peacemakers were en route, but they were relatively junior, and this needed a more forceful, higher-profile response from the Guild. And I was the closest Master to the incident. “How’s that Master-Adept thing working out for you, Van?” Alic asked wryly when he’d finished briefing me with the scant details. I smiled and shrugged. “Keeps me young, Alic.”

He nodded. “Let me know as soon as you have anything further on this. It’s been labeled a Priority One incident, so you can pull in whoever you need.”

“On it.”

I informed the crew, and then my mother. Earth, the Equal Grasp, the potential massed blackmail of the US government, Miryam’s captivity—as wrenching and frustrating as it was, it was all going to have to wait. ATTACKS on the twist-comm network were vanishingly rare. Everyone relied on a stable network to link known space—saints, sinners, and everything in-between. It was the glue, really, that held known space together. Even the most ruthless pirates or greedy scavengers left the network alone, because if there was one thing that would unite virtually all of known space against them, it would be making it impossible to call Mom. It was, therefore, also considered a Crime Against Order. The fact that it was treated the same as something like genocide just underscored how serious a thing this was. We twisted into the system in question, a catalog-numbered red dwarf with two planetary companions—a lone ice giant, and a rocky body similar to Mars. It was about the same size as the Red Planet, with a similarly thin and dry atmosphere. It was also more volcanic, meaning more atmospheric pollutants, especially sulfur compounds. All in all, it wasn’t very charming. But the system was located in a favorable place for a relay station, carrying twist-comm traffic from the bulk of the League’s rimward worlds into Eridani space, and the rest of known space beyond that. When we arrived, I had the ship ready for a fight. But the only two vessels in the system were our two Peacemakers, both only recently promoted to Adept, and neither of whom I knew particularly well. They were that part of the Guild that I neither implicitly trusted, like Alic and Lunzy, nor definitely distrusted, like Casaril and Master Marlow. That actually constituted most of the Peacemaker roster—just names to me, some of them with faces I could recall, all probably just trying to do their job as best they could. One of them briefed us on the situation as we approached the Mars-like world hosting the relay station. She was a nervous young human female named Oster. “All we’ve really done is secure the scene, Master Tudor. We’ve made sure no one or nothing got in or out since we arrived and have established a perimeter —”

“I know what securing the scene means, thanks,” I said, smiling. “Oh. Oh!

I’m sorry, Master Tudor, I didn’t mean —”

“It’s fine. I notice you’re in orbit. Where’s Peacemaker—uh —”

“Kelev?

He went down to the surface to see if there were any survivors.”

As she spoke, Perry flashed a split-screen image of Peacemaker Kelev. I was taken aback to see he was a Ligurite —

Which I shouldn’t have been, and I kicked myself a little. He was the same species as the elusive former Master Yotov. And yes, I’d immediately started to judge him on the basis of the things she had done. That was called stereotyping, and it was the place that a lot of real bad flavors of intolerance came from. My discomfiture didn’t last long, though, shoved aside by a more pressing concern. “He’s down there alone?

The scene hasn’t even been properly cleared,”

I said. “He has his combat AI with him,” Oster said quickly. “We both thought that looking for survivors was a higher priority. But if you want me to recall him —”

I held up a hand. “No, no. Actually, with a little sober second-thought, you guys made a good call. Survivors are the priority. Well done.”

Oster puffed up a little and smiled. “Thank you, Master Tudor —”

I kept my hand up. “No problem. We’ll be there in about two hours. I’m going to call in additional help in the meantime. And if things change —”

“We’ll let you know right away.”

I signed off and braced myself, because I knew what was coming. “Oh, thank you, Master Tudor,” Torina said breathlessly. “Thank you for noticing me.”

Icky joined in. “You’re so dreamy, Master Tudor.”

Gabby, too. “I’ll report to you anytime, Master Tudor. You just have to ask!”

I turned a sour stare on their smirking, giggling faces. “Are you guys done?”

Rab was laughing. Funboy, though, reached forward from his workstation and patted my arm. “If it makes you feel better, Master Tudor, I have absolutely no interest in you—romantic, sexual, or otherwise—and only serve as duty demands.”

And then he gave me a languid and theatrically conspicuous wink. I turned back to the instruments with a sigh. “I hate you all.”

KELEV DID FIND SURVIVORS. By then, I’d called up B, just in case, and she twisted into the system about the time we arrived at the planet. Lucky had also shown up, accompanied by a young Peacemaker she was mentoring. Out of an abundance of caution, I also called in some serious firepower, in the form of the Righteous Fury. We had no particular reason to believe that whoever had attacked the relay station would be back, but we couldn’t entirely discount it. Not knowing their motives, this might not be about the station at all, and there might be something else going on here. That said, I did broadcast a priority alert across the comm channels reserved for Guild traffic to the major powers of known space. In case this had been targeted at the twist-comm network specifically, then there were twenty-five other relay stations across known space that were vulnerable. The Ceti Alliance, the Eridani Federation, independent powers like the Wu’tzur and the Schegith, and the Guild itself immediately moved assets into place to protect them. So did the Seven Stars League. What was notable about their response, though, was that they were already deploying ships to protect the four other twist-comm stations in their territory. That was great—and surprising. The League was notably slow to do much of anything, its Provisional Government still struggling with many of the basic tasks of governance. For them to move so quickly on this was eyebrow-raising. We left the Fafnir in orbit, manned by Netty-P, Gabby, and Icky. I brought Torina down with me in the Frankie, as well as Funboy for his medical expertise, and Perry to help with starting an investigation. On a hunch, I also brought Rab. He knew more about weapons and their effects than any of us, so I wanted his input in helping us unravel what had happened here. We circled over the ruined relay station, studying it through the thin haze of dust and sulfur-oxide mist. It consisted of three bunkers excavated into the bedrock. Based on the schematics, one bunker housed the twist-comm system; a second contained the ancillary and control systems, and a small set of living quarters for maintenance personnel when they were on-site; and the third was antimatter fuel storage and related systems. All were scarred from impacts, including several penetrations. More blast craters and

debris pocked the surrounding landscape, some chunks of rock having been flung hundreds of meters. Ordinarily, the station operated with only AI oversight. The fact that there were survivors meant a maintenance crew must have been here, which was really bad timing for them —

“Hang on a second,” I said as we spiraled down toward the site. “What am I not seeing down there?”

Perry looked at me. “A parade of elephants carrying strippers?”

“What?”

“You asked us what you weren’t seeing down there. I mean—Van, you’re not seeing a parade of elephants carrying strippers, are you?”

“I—no!

What I’m not seeing is a ship, other than Kelev’s over there. If there was a maintenance crew down there, then unless they walked to get here, they must have had a ship, right?

So where is it?”

“Stolen by whoever attacked the place, probably,” Torina offered. Rab had been dividing his attention between the view below and the scanner data on the panel in front of us. He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He pointed. “See over there, about a hundred meters away from the largest bunker?

That’s flat bedrock showing marks from thrusters. That’s where ships that came here landed. There’s broken ground everywhere else. And note that there are at least three impact craters there, but no debris that isn’t flyrock from the bombardment. So unless they came down and stole the ship before they started their bombardment, there simply was no ship here.”

“Okay, so maybe they brought a maintenance crew here, dropped them off, and planned to come back to pick them up?” Torina replied. I shrugged. “Maybe. Only one way to find out,” I said, and switched the Frankie’s flight controls to landing mode. We settled down in a relatively flat, clear spot about 500 meters away, close to where Kelev had landed. Suited up, we disembarked and made our way toward the relay station. The place was eerily silent, aside from a faint, fitful breeze. Even our footfalls seemed distant and muffled, the air pressure here being only about two-thirds of that atop Mount Everest. Perry couldn’t properly fly, so he perched on Rab’s backpack. We were all armed and had our weapons close at hand, though not actually readied. Rab inspected the first blast craters we encountered. “Mass-driver hits. Probably from a point-defense battery, and I’d guess from no more than

three or four thousand meters up.”

“So they flew down from orbit, circled overhead, and pummeled the place with their point-defense battery.” I looked at the smashed bunkers just ahead. “Could PD rounds do that to those sorts of bunkers, though?

They’re built to be tough.”

We reached the first bunker. The ceramacrete had been shattered, chunks blown out of it, exposing twisted curls of alloy rebar. The remains of a comms array lay scattered about, part of it fallen into a hole smashed clean through the bunker, a penetrating hit. “That was more than a PD hit,” Perry said, hopping off of Rab’s pack. Funboy and Torina pressed on to find Kelev, who was presumably with the survivors. He nodded behind his visor. “It was. Mass-driver main battery, I think. So—about one hundred million joules per meter, assuming the projectile was traveling close to its muzzle velocity—” He looked up. “Which, at this range, it would have been.” He looked back down. “That’s more than enough to blast through bunkers like these. Even the exposed, best-armored parts of Fort Cantullin would struggle to take a hit like that.”

I looked around at the wreckage. “So they took out the bunkers with a big-ass mass driver, but they hosed the whole place down with PD fire as well, even though it wouldn’t do much to these bunkers —”

“It would wreck the comm array pretty nicely, though,” Perry noted. “Yeah, I guess.” I looked around some more, taking in dozens of smaller, shallower impact craters where PD rounds had struck. Why the lavish expenditure of point-defense ammo?

Sure, it wrecked the antenna system, but the blast effects from the big mass driver would have done that, too. It was almost as though they had another target in mind, something that had been here but wasn’t anymore. Or something they thought had been here, at least —

“Van!”

I turned. It was Torina. She was standing atop the ancillary systems bunker, the one that contained the abbreviated living quarters, waving. We headed that way. Like the twist-comm system bunker itself, it had been penetrated by three big impacts. We clambered through one of the gaping holes, picking our way down a ramp made of rubble, then followed Torina a short distance along a corridor. The ceramacrete walls, ceiling and

floor were cracked, as though the colossal impacts had shifted whole slabs of rock slightly. She led us to the remains of the living quarters—a small common room and galley, a sanitary facility, and two small bunk rooms. Debris was scattered about. Dust fumed the air, turning our suit lamps into restless shafts of glow swinging to-and-fro as we moved. We found Funboy and Peacemaker Kelev with two survivors. Both were badly injured, their suits slathered with sealing-foam patches. There were three more bodies nearby

—a quick glance confirming that they were very much not alive, or even particularly intact. “There are just these two survivors,” Funboy said, glancing up from his medical scanner. Discarded med packaging and applicators lay scattered about. “One is a human male, approximately forty years old. The other is a Skel, age indeterminate. Both are badly injured. However, I believe the human is stable, at least for the moment. As for the Skel, I’m simply not sure. I know little about their physiology. I’ve consulted with B as she’s en route, but her knowledge of Skels is also limited. They are not a well-understood species.”

I nodded. I’d chastised myself over stereotyping Ligurites because of Yotov, and rightly so. Skels were a different matter. In all my time in known space, I had not encountered a single Skel who wasn’t an outright criminal, or at least involved in shady, criminal-adjacent stuff. No one even knew where they came from. So little was known about them that, even among the many and often exotic aliens in and around known space, the Skels were particularly alien. But unless this Skel was the one not involved in sketchy shit, it suggested that something deeper was going on here. If these people weren’t a maintenance crew servicing the twist-comm setup, then who the hell were they?

WHEN B ARRIVED, we worked with her to get the two survivors out of the ruined bunker and up to her ship. Valint also arrived in her Stormshadow, apparently summoned by B to help out, because the Righteous Fury was

going to be delayed. That being the case, I canceled the call for the Fury, because I was now convinced that the violence here was over. While we waited for B’s judgment regarding the state of the survivors and whether either of them were likely to recover consciousness, we poked around the ruins. I brought the Fafnir down because I wanted Icky to inspect the antimatter containment system in the fuel bunker. I wanted to make sure it hadn’t been compromised and turned into an enormous, ticking time bomb. It wasn’t likely—the containment systems either tend to fail or they don’t, with no real in-between—but it didn’t hurt to be certain. While that was going on, Torina and Rab found me in the living quarters with Kelev, the two of us looking around for any clues as to who our mysterious survivors, and their dead comrades, were. Torina motioned for me to join them. I did, leaving Kelev to continue working. “What’s up?” I asked. “Rab concluded something… disturbing,” Torina said. He nodded. “All those blast craters up there, the ones we originally thought were impacts from PD rounds—they’re not. They just didn’t seem deep enough when I first looked at them, so I’ve spent time examining them more closely. Sure enough, the sorts of shock features you see associated with mass-driver impacts in rock and soil weren’t there. No microbeads of glass, for instance. But the clincher is that there’s no residue of depleted uranium, or tungsten, or any of the sorts of high-density metals that usually compose PD rounds.”

I crossed my arms. “Yeah, that stuff doesn’t just disappear. So what are they?”

He held up a small ceramic fragment—a piece of a tube about half the thickness of a pencil, flared at one end. “I found several pieces like this, and I suspect we’ll find a lot more if we look around. That gave me a hunch, so I did some digging into some weapons databases, and I got what I’m sure is a match.” He held up the fragment a little higher. “You’re looking at part of the casing for the initiator of a G-621 Flare Mine.”

“Let’s pretend I don’t know what that is, other than damned ominous-sounding.”

“They’re antipersonnel mines designed to be scatterable—delivered in missile casings or free-fall bombs.”

“Okay, that I recognize. Back on Earth, scatterable mines and cluster munitions are pretty controversial stuff,” I said. “They’re controversial out here, too. Each mine is equipped with a rudimentary AI intended to let it discriminate friend from foe—which is fine, as long as friends and foes are clearly distinguished in some way the AI can recognize. Again, we’re talking really basic here, both in terms of the AI and its ability to sense its environment. These got used during the last big punch-up about forty years ago between the League and the Eridani. Both sides decided the most reliable way to program the AI was to have it attack anything not positively identified as friendly.”

“Oh. Shit. I see where this is going. Civilians aren’t positively friendly.”

“Not to an AI that makes Waldo look like a genius, no. There were a lot of collateral casualties. And what’s worse is the flare charge, when it fires, essentially vaporizes anything that can’t withstand incredibly intense heat—

like people. So it’s not even clear how many innocent lives were lost, or who they were.”

Torina gave a grim sigh. “These people were just… erased.”

Rab nodded. “Yeah. Because of the outcry, this weapon is now banned,”

he said, then shrugged. “I mean, dead is dead—and, as weapons go, this one just makes you go poof before your nervous system could even react with anything like pain. It was the politics around it, more than the weapon itself.”

“I checked with Perry,” Torina said. “These flare mines indeed are on the Guild’s list of prohibited weapons—seize on sight and arrest whoever has them in their possession on charges close to, but not quite reaching the level of Crimes Against Order. So they’re serious stuff.”

I nodded along with them. Banning some weapons made sense, particularly when they were likely to inflict innocent casualties, or would inflict particularly agonizing wounds and cause especially drawn-out, painful deaths. But one could argue that almost any weapon could do those things, depending on the circumstances. So the whole banning weapons debate, on Earth or, it seemed, out here, was as much about optics, politicians trying to buff up their images, as it was about alleviating suffering—and probably more. But, banned was banned. And we were Peacemakers. I had a follow-up question, though. “So, Rab, in your expert opinion, is there any value in deploying these flare mines against a facility like this?”

He immediately shook his head. “No. They leave a small blast crater, but that’s it. They have no meaningful penetration and only a very limited

anti-material effect. The twist-comm array up there was brought down by the impacts of the big mass drivers that punched into these bunkers, not by the flare mines. All they did was dig a bunch of shallow holes in the surface.”

“And vaporize any people caught out in the open,” Torina said. “Van, this wasn’t an attack on a twist-comm site. This was murder. More than murder—an assassination.”

“Of whoever these people were,” I said, glancing back at Kelev, who was scanning the sole dead body we’d recovered, prior to having it removed for transport back to Anvil Dark. “They were hiding,” Torina said, and I looked back at her. “Think about it, Van. There’s no reason to come here, unless you’re involved in the twist-comm business. The company contracted to run and maintain the twist-comm network has already confirmed they never dispatched a crew here. So these people weren’t in that line of work. They were here for another reason. And why would someone otherwise want to come to a twist-comm relay site, one of the most secure places around and least likely to be attacked?”

“To hide,” Rab said, nodding. “To hide from someone, or something, that was after them, wanted them dead.”

I glanced back at the dead body. “Yeah, well, that didn’t work out very well, did it?”

8

IT WAS NEARLY a full day before the Seven Stars League showed up, in the form of a destroyer accompanied by a corvette. I readied myself for the captain of the destroyer to start making demands about taking over jurisdiction, but he was strangely laid back about it all. In fact, it quickly became clear he really had little idea what was going on and had been dispatched on more of a fact-finding mission. He ended by offering whatever assistance he could. “He’s being very reasonable and accommodating,” Funboy observed. “I wonder what he is up to?”

I shook my head. “Honestly, I don’t think he’s up to anything. I don’t think he really even knows what’s going on, exactly. Doesn’t put League military preparedness in a very good light, mind you—but I don’t think that’s his fault.” I narrowed my eyes at the screen in the Fafnir’s crew lounge, where we’d taken the comm. “Somebody in the League is up to something, though. It’s just not him.”

By now, B had evacuated the two survivors to receive proper medical care, again at Pont Alus Kyr—who again fell over themselves trying to emphasize how schemy and unreliable they no longer were. Peacemaker Kelev was taking the body back to Anvil Dark, while I left Peacemaker Oster in charge of processing the scene. A forensic crew from Anvil Dark was en route, so it would be a good experience for her—nominally in charge, but of people considerably more experienced than her. I had a quick word with the head of the inbound forensics team, emphasizing that I’d like

him to play his part in developing Oster—basically setting up the old military trope, making him the gruff old sergeant to the fresh-faced, inexperienced lieutenant. And then, I had to decide what we were going to do next. We had no shortage of demands on our time. A trial date had been set for Julian Kroegkamp, our South African mercenary who’d perpetrated war crimes in Namibia using off-world weaponry. I intended the trial to be made visible to Earthly media. I wanted to make an example of Kroegkamp for anyone else who got bright ideas about exploiting off-world tech for nefarious purposes. I also wanted to demonstrate to the terrestrial audience that law and order reigned in space, just as it did—or was supposed to, anyway—on Earth. That was the next sticking point, because not everyone was keen on the idea. That included at least three of the Masters. Our Schegith Master, Volffin, was working that particular problem on my behalf, though. So this was, for the time being, in abeyance. Next, we still had a miscreant Peacemaker in custody in a privately operated gray site on Dregs. It was time for him and his second to be released. I sent word to let them go—and got some useful intelligence, gleaned from their conversations while in custody, about the True Direction. Most tellingly, the name Yotov had come up while the two had been bitterly bitching at one another. That was another data point suggesting that Yotov did, indeed, have her grubby fingers in the so-called the True Direction. “Remember how she fell into that big, stinky flower?

And that’s how we got her?

Just a couple of meters to the right or left and she’d have fallen right on the deck, boom, lights out. The stinky flower was funny, but now I wish she’d missed,” Icky growled. I nodded. “Yeah, and she really shouldn’t be out of prison yet anyway. I think Kharsweil had something to do with her getting an early release, though. So she’s out there somewhere.”

“And dangerous,” Torina added. “More dangerous, I think, than Dohlennz or Gauss, really. They were megalomaniacs, like Yotov, but unlike her, they weren’t subtle about it. She’s smart, and patient. I can’t help thinking that when she decides to strike, it’s going to hurt.”

“Unless we can find her first, or preempt her,” I said. And that led to the next things on the agenda—the ways in which we were vulnerable. In particular, there was Miryam, and now Icky’s kids. We needed to go back to

Earth to deal with the first, but I wanted to get the second covered as well. And that took me back to an earlier conversation with Icky. “Icky, have you talked to Zeno?” I asked her. She brightened. “Yeah, I finally managed to connect with her. She’s invited Pax and me to bring the kids to her homeworld to meet her family. I was planning on that during my next leave —”

“Let’s do it now. We’ll swing by the Wu’tzur homeworld to pick up your family, then take you to Zeno.”

“Oh!

Sure!

I—” Her gaze turned wary. “Why?

Is there something wrong, Van?”

I considered shaking my head but decided against it. “Just want to make sure everyone’s looked after, big girl. You’ve said yourself that your support network on your own homeworld is pretty lean —”

“Try nonexistent. My dad didn’t make many friends, so neither did I. And Pax isn’t the most outgoing sort, either.”

“On the other hand, on the P’nosk homeworld, you’ve got Zeno’s whole family—the extended part of which includes Rab,” I said. Rab nodded. “We P’nosk tend to take family very seriously. Cousins like Zeno and I are often as close as siblings.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but Zenophir and Rab are both products of a family that specializes in, among other things, weapons and warfare. Your family will be well-protected by them,” Funboy said. I gave him a sharp glance. That was a little more blunt than I’d intended

—but he wasn’t wrong, either. Rab nodded again. “Our family has a reputation for… not being trifled with. Serious firepower can do that.”

Icky got it. “You think my family might be at risk because of that bitch Yotov.”

I sighed. “Not just her. There’s the Equal Grasp, too, plus the usual suspects—the Stillness, the Sorcerers, those sorts. I’d feel better knowing your family was nestled amid people who are going to protect them.”

“Zeno considers you, Pax, and your children to be members of our family, Icky,” Rab said, then added, “So do I. And members of P’nosk families will die to protect one another, so—yeah.”

Icky blinked around—and then actually got teary-eyed. “I don’t know what to say. Thanks, guys—all of you. It would make me feel a lot better,

too. I… kinda worry about Pax. He’s a great father, and I love him to pieces, but he’s not, you know, a fighter.”

Rab bared his teeth in a hard smile. “That’s okay, Icky. We are.”

WE RETRIEVED Pax and Icky’s children without incident. Or without incident until they were aboard, whereupon the Fafnir’s bulkheads rang with the squalling wails of two baby Wu’tzur. And they had damn good lungs, probably because they were already the size of human three-year-olds, despite being less than two months old. Add to that their innate strength, four arms, and sheer Wu’tzur racial stubbornness —

Perry summed it up nicely. “It’s like we brought aboard two Waldos that can’t be reasoned with, do nothing but scream and poop and eat, and oh yeah, have the strength to yank an alloy feather from the tail of a long-suffering combat AI.”

“I fixed that for you, bird,” Icky shouted from aft, apparently having overheard Perry despite the warbling klaxons that were her children. “Serves you right for sticking your tail where Clivax could grab it!”

I’d remarked my admiration to Paxomar, that he’d been taking care of the kids on his own, and that he must be the soul of patience because of it. He just shrugged. “Their cries are the sounds of healthy infants. Very healthy infants. Who want to let you know just how healthy they are. Any time of the day or night.”

I laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. Once Zeno’s mothers are on the case, you’ll have no shortage of caregivers —”

“Break-givers, more like,” Perry said. “As in, they’ll give you a break.”

As we got underway, heading for the P’nosk homeworld, Funboy came into the cockpit looking a little peaked. He slumped into his seat and said,

“Oh dear.”

Torina glanced back at him. “Something wrong?”

“I just witnessed Gabby, under Paxomar’s supervision, feeding his offspring a foodstuff called plustinarek. It is”—he swallowed—“grubs, in some form of sauce.”

“Yeah, but when they’re pureed, it’s all just protein, right?”

He swallowed again. “If only the grubs were pureed. They are not.”

“They—oh.” Torina curled her lip. “The kids just eat them as is?”

“I invite you to go aft and observe for yourself,” Funboy said. “I’m… good, thanks.”

ZENO and her mothers practically stormed the Fafnir when the airlock slid open after we docked at the orbital where they lived. The next minutes were a raucous, confusing melee of motherhood so intense it actually cowed Icky’s kids into silence. We spent a few minutes with Zeno, catching up, while her mothers began escorting Icky and her family back to their home. “You’re looking good, Zeno,” I said, smiling. “I hope you’re feeling good enough to wrestle Icky’s kids in and out of diapers and things—

they’re both willful and pretty damned strong.”

She laughed. “We’ll manage, Van. I think this is going to be wonderful. For all of us.”

“Especially you,” Torina said. Zeno gave her a shrug and a warm smile back. “I’m not denying it.”

She fondly embraced all of the crew—Rab in particular—then we waved our goodbyes, sealed the airlock, and departed. Our next stop was going to be Helso, but I’d inserted another along the way. “Netty-P, we’re heading for Starsmith. I got a message from Linulla that the Moonsword is finished and good as new. And I have a surprise for someone on board.”

“Is it me?” Funboy asked, looking alarmed. “Please tell me it’s not for me.”

“Nope, Funboy, not for you. It’s for my lovely wife,” I said, looking at Torina. “Is it like that last surprise you gave me?” she asked, smiling coyly back. “If so, I need some time to limber up —”

“Do you mind?

Not in front of the impressionable young AIs.”

Perry looked from her to me. “Yeah. Eww. Cooties and all that.”

WE ARRIVED at Starsmith and made our way into the Forge to meet with Linulla. I always enjoyed coming here, the humid air and profusion of fungal, mossy, and other plants growing amid chattering little waterfalls, a welcome change from decks and bulkheads. Linulla met us in his finishing room, where he cleaned and polished and put the finishing touches on the weapons he made. The sheathed Moonsword lay on his worktable. A shorter companion blade lay beside it. He picked up the latter in a claw and offered it to Torina. “When I shortened the blade of the Starsword to free up material to repair the Moonsword, I was left with a truncated blade. Van asked me to recraft it into a new weapon—for you, Torina.”

She looked from it, to me, with wide eyes. “Oh. Really?

I—” She blinked and shook her head. “Thank you. Both of you.”

“Linulla had just intended to keep what was left of the Starsword as spare material to make future fixes,” I said. “And I did keep a small amount for that purpose,” Linulla put in. “But it struck me that, you being an Innsu demon the way you are, you should have a blade to back it up. And to be honest, having two blades like these on the team, instead of just one, can’t be a bad idea,” I went on. Torina picked up the blade and, holding the scabbard, drew it. It hissed smoothly into view, a gleaming short sword about as long as my hand and forearm. “Unlike the Moonsword, it currently has no special templates applied to it—to deflect energy weapons, for instance,” Linulla said. Torina admired the blade. “That’s fine. I think I want to take some time to get used to it anyway. It’s already a lot different than an Innsu knife. I’ve got some practicing ahead of me.”

“The only thing it needs now is a name. A weapon like that should have one, given by its wielder.”

Torina narrowed her eyes at it, sheathed it again, then drew it again partway. Repeated that twice more, her gaze on the blade as it whispered softly in and out of the scabbard. She finally drew it all the way and held it up so that it gleamed in the slightly blue-green light. “Whisper. Your name is Whisper,” she said to the blade. Then she looked at Linulla and me. “That’s because of the sound it makes —”

I nodded, grinning. “Yeah. Kinda got that, Torina.”

I turned to the Moonsword, picked it up, and drew it. It looked, felt, and sounded as good as new. Literally. It could have been the same blade from the moment before I first chipped it, just brought forward in time. I hefted it and swung a couple of times. “Nice work, Linulla, really.”

“Nice work is what I do. Now, just don’t break it again.”

“Yeah, I’ll be a lot more careful about what I cut through. Unless it’s evil. I’m always cutting through that.”

WE FINALLY MADE it to Helso. Landing the Fafnir and having her systems flick to ground-idle was like pulling into the driveway after a long spell of hard work far from home. I should have been the same way about the farm, but Pony Hollow had come to feel increasingly isolated and exposed. Its status as a consulate notwithstanding, between the US government, the military, the Equal Grasp, and whoever else was sticking their fingers into the Earthly pie, the farm felt a little like a place under siege. It was a refuge, but one ringed by unseen enemies. Helso, on the other hand, hadn’t had any dark interest shown in it since the ecological attack on the Milon’s estate. And since then, it had been taken under the protection of the Schegith, who’d established formidable defenses to watch over the planet. No one was getting near Helso without the Schegith allowing it—not without one hell of a fight, that is. Which actually sparked an idea. The Schegith were a long way from Earth. But could I get them to establish Earth as a protectorate as well?

It would be a stretch for them since they were still recovering from their own near-extinction just a few years ago. And they’d come a long way—but likely not long enough of a way to extend themselves that much, that far —

“Van?

You coming?

Or are you going to spend your stay here on Helso just sitting there, staring out the canopy?”

I blinked at Torina’s voice, then turned. She stood in the back of the cockpit, smiling at me. Lit by the pinkish Helso sunlight, standing framed against the cockpit hatchway, her hair falling over the shoulders of her b-suit just so, her eyes —

Holy crap, I love this woman. I unstrapped and stood. “Nope. Just woolgathering. C’mon, let’s go be ordinary people for a while.”

Still smiling, she held out her hand. I took it, and she led me home. Maybe not my home, but it was definitely our home. I COUNTED—FOR thirty-nine straight standard days, we’d been out there. Twisting, fighting our way through Dohlennz’s chamber of horrors, almost losing Gabby, twisting some more, fighting the Tsarina, losing Groshenko, twisting and twisting, sparring with the Equal Grasp on Earth, twisting, investigating the grisly attack on the twist-comm relay —

No wonder we were all tired and sore, and not just in body. We were tired and sore in mind and in spirit. I hadn’t intended for us to take a break, but we were now taking one anyway. Icky was with Pax and her kids, Funboy spent our time on Helso with Gabby, Rab was a loner anyway and content to just soak in the soft, warm Helso solitude, Perry and Netty-P did whatever beings like them did to pass the time —

And I had Torina. Sure, we spent time with her parents and some of her family’s friends. And we visited Master Cataric, Torina practicing under his tutelage to adjust her Innsu stances and moves to the new mass, balance, and length of Whisper. But we took time for each other as well. We put aside the Guild and our ranks and duties and just spent some time being us. It was something we didn’t do very often. Not often enough, in fact. So we let the stars burn and the planets revolve and the galaxy wheel around its center without us for a week. And it was paradise. We hiked around the estate, marveling at the fullness of its lush recovery. We borrowed the Milon’s air car and traveled to more distant places, including a few I’d never visited. A remote glacier, high in the mountains, spilling over a towering cliff in periodic, thundering cascades of ice and crashing into the valley below. An oceanside resort with luxurious little houseboats to take out into the placid waters. A bustling town built like steps into the side of a mountain, overlooking a sparkling lake dotted with actual fishing boats—not drones, but crewed by people who loved working the tillers and nets with their own hands. We wandered the oldest forest on the planet, window-shopped along a winding little esplanade following the crooked path of a river through another charming town, and lazily circled over herds of wild, six-legged buffalo that reminded me uncannily of Appa from Avatar: The Last Airbender as they roamed sprawling grasslands. And we made love near the base of the tallest waterfall I’d ever seen, a river plunging over a cliff a thousand meters high, becoming nothing but wind-blown, drizzly rain by the time it reached the bottom. The spray was an icy mist against our skin, a sharp contrast to the warm sunlight and just another delicious sensation amid many. It was absolutely magical —

Right up to the moment we started to shiver and realized we were getting soaked. Then it was time to move to drier ground. 9

BUT ALL GOOD THINGS, am I right?

On our last day, we stayed with the Milons, talking, lounging on the terrace overlooking their estate, and drinking good, sparkling wine. Conversation inevitably and unfortunately turned to business. “So where next, Van?” Tor, her father, asked. I swallowed a fruity mouthful of wine. “Back to Earth. This whole time I’ve been unwinding here, I've had what’s happening with Miryam scratching at the back of my mind like a dog that wants to be let out.” I gave Torina, sitting beside me, an apologetic shrug. “Sorry, babe. I’ve tried hard to stay focused on us —”

She took my hand. “Don’t apologize. It just makes me feel a little better knowing it wasn’t just me worrying about her.”

I squeezed her hand and offered a grateful smile. “Anyway, I think we’re going to spring her. In hindsight, letting them keep her locked up, even in a gilded cage, was a mistake.”

Kaye, her mother, gave me a frown. “I understand, Van, but isn’t that likely to provoke the Equal Grasp into action?

Based on what you said, they’re only holding back on that blackmail stuff because they think they’ve leveraged those military people into leveraging you. If you take that leverage away —”

“You know what?

I don’t care. The Equal Grasp is not just sitting idle while we’re sitting here being leveraged, and we’d be fools to think they are

—hell, that they’ll do anything in good faith. They might call themselves

entrepreneurs or traders or whatever, but what they really are is just another gang of criminals. It’s time to start treating them like one.”

I stood, because I suddenly had to. I looked across the pastoral estate. It was starting to rain, but here in the enclosed part of the terrace, we were snuggly dry. I nodded, as much to myself as the others. “Some time ago, I said it was time to stop reacting, to take the fight to our enemies. Well, we’ve been doing that. We took down Gauss and BeneStar, we took down Dohlennz, we took down the Tsarina—or we took down her means of waging war, anyway, at least for now. I’ve made the mistake of not treating the Equal Grasp the same way—of assuming they were something we could reason with. What they’ve done to Miryam proves me finally wrong.”

Gabby, sitting with Funboy, spoke up. “That sounds like a declaration of war, Van.”

I glanced at her with a rueful smile. “We are at war with them, Gabs. Have been all along. I’ve just tried not to think of it that way, probably because it makes my gut churn to imagine a war happening on Earth. If the Grasp was just another group like the Sorcerers or the Salt Thieves, we’d have been hunting them down and destroying them by now. But they’ve been using Earth as a shield, so I’ve let myself be convinced that we needed to tread more softly. To talk. Deal. Use diplomacy.” I looked back at the rain-misted estate. “Not anymore.”

Tor shifted uncomfortably. “Van, if you and the Grasp get into a shooting war, some of it might be on Earth. That —”

“Could be very bad, yeah.” I sniffed. “Don’t worry, the scenarios keep me awake at night. A battle between the Fafnir and a ship like her among the office towers of New York or Shanghai or something like that. Superhero movies back on Earth show cities like those being ravaged all the time as the good guys fight the bad guys. They don’t dwell on the aftermath, though—the death, the pain, the chaos, the suffering. Manhattan is in flaming ruins, but the good guys have won the day, so roll credits, we’re done here.”

“Then we have to be a lot more surgical about it,” Torina said. I nodded. “Exactly. And we’re going to start with springing Miryam and figuring out how to protect Tony Burgess and his people. And we’re also going to talk to Retta, who has spent the past year developing a spy network on Earth. It’s time to tap into it.”

“Van, what about the attack on the twist-comm relay?

That’s a profoundly serious crime. Known space is going to expect answers, accountability—and they’re going to expect it all soon. Faith in the twist-comm system depends on it,” Perry observed. I sighed. “Yeah, I know. We just have so little to work with. The relay station’s scanner logs were destroyed, so we can’t get anything useful from them. Neither of the survivors are conscious yet, according to B’s last update, and it’s not clear they’re going to make it. And even if they do, they’re likely to know little more than someone started shooting at them from above.”

I turned back to the others, frustrated, and drained my glass. “What we need is someone who actually knows what’s going on in the shitshow that is currently the Seven Stars League. I can’t help thinking the answers are in there somewhere, but their provisional government is fractured, there are other factions jockeying for power, some systems are talking about seceding and going on their own—you know, all the usual fun that follows in the catastrophic fall of a government.”

Tor exchanged a glance with Kaye, who nodded. He looked at me. “Now that, Van, is somewhere we might be able to help you. We know someone with just those credentials.”

“He’s not the… cleanest person, when it comes to his background, but he is good at what he does. We’ve even used his services on a few occasions, back when Helso was a protectorate of the League, not the Schegith,” Kaye added. I’d already perked up. So had Torina. “Who are you talking about?” she asked. “His name is Onjaku. He’s a Ligurite,” Tor replied. That caught me with my mouth open, about to speak. Another Ligurite?

And I bit back the thought. It was stereotyping again. I’d already been undeservedly wary of Kelev, the young Ligurite Peacemaker who’d helped out on the twist-comm attack. I realized afterward that I’d treated him differently, been standoffish, when I had absolutely no reason to. While Ligurites weren’t common in known space, as they usually preferred to remain on their homeworld, there were hundreds of millions of them there. They weren’t all somehow connected to Yotov any more than I was connected to Ted Bundy or the Zodiac Killer just because I was an American. So I looked at the Milons and asked, “Who is this—Onjaku, you said?”

“He’s a former gunrunner who got caught smuggling weapons to various dissident and criminal groups in the League. He did time in prison, but instead of just reverting back to his old ways when he was released, he went into business as a sort of private investigator and contact broker—

although he calls himself a ‘corporate advisory consultant.’ For a fee, he can connect you with whoever or whatever you want to or need to know in the League,” Tor said. Kaye nodded. “If there’s anyone who can dig into the bottom layers of what’s going on in the League, it’s him. He certainly helped us out. In fact, he was instrumental in ensuring that the League attack on Helso, the one you helped stave off, wasn’t a complete surprise to us.”

Well, that closed a longstanding loop. I’d always wondered how the Helso Self-Defense Force had been so ready when the League, controlled by the symbiotic Tenants, tried to attack this place. Now I knew. And it did suggest someone was well-embedded in the most subtle and secretive of League affairs. “So your next question is probably going to be, how do we get hold of Onajku,” Tor said. “And the answer is, I’m not sure. We haven’t had much to do with him for the better part of a year now. But the last time we did, it was him calling us, asking questions about what we knew about the Equal Grasp. My gut tells me that he got wind of the Grasp while digging around inside the League, since that seems to be where they started.”

I stared a moment. “Are you saying he’s working for the Grasp?

Because that’s not the sort of help I had in mind —”

“No, no. If anything, based on what we know about him, he probably sees the Grasp as a target. Onjaku has always tended to look for which side of a fracas is most out of favor with the powers that be, and siding with the other side. His reasoning was that if he got caught doing something, um, less than legal, if he was doing it to the bad guys, the repercussions would be at least a little softer.”

“If anything, he’s probably more likely to be playing both sides—trying to cozy up to the Grasp, particularly to learn more about their dealings in the League, while looking for opportunities to fleece them a little. He’s about as opportunistic as they come. And yes, he’s definitely a volatile player in this game, and not someone you could ever really trust. But when

it comes to things going on in the League, he’s the go-to expert. Especially if they’re things the League doesn’t want found out,” Kaye added. Tor shrugged. “Ultimately, he’s the sort of guy who doesn’t really care who wins, as long as he doesn’t lose.”

I turned to Perry. “Does the Guild have anything on him?”

“I’ve checked. We’ve just got the arrest and incarceration report from the League on file, and that’s about it. He doesn’t show up anywhere else and isn’t wanted for anything.”

“So a shady guy we can’t really trust, but who knows things, or can find out things, that we badly need to know ourselves,” Rab said. I nodded and refilled my glass. “Not the first time we’ve been down that road, now, is it?”

WE TOOK our reluctant leave of Helso the next day. Torina was a lot more confident in her Innsu skills with Whisper but still practiced—in the middle of the crew lounge, with room to swing and thrust and nothing around her to slice and bleed. Our first stop was the P’nosk homeworld, to retrieve Icky. Paxomar was staying a little longer and would take a regular flight back to the Wu’tzur homeworld. The twins, however, would be staying in the doting care of Zeno and her family. “The only worry I’ve got about those kids is how much they’re gonna be spoiled,” Icky said. “They’ve suddenly got, like, a dozen mothers and grandmas, all rolled into one. Pax is going back in a couple of weeks, and I’m hoping to get back there in no more than a month —”

She ended on a shrug. An unhappy shrug. But I got the sense she was unhappy about more than just being parted from her children. So, apparently, did Gabby. “Icky, is everything okay?”

She shrugged again. “Icky—”

“I just spent a week learning how good a mother I’m not, okay?” she said, her tone a desolate one. “I… never had a mother. There was just the horrible bitch who gave birth to me and then ran off. So I don’t know how to be a mother, I never had anyone to show me —”

Gabby took Icky’s shoulders. “Icky, the fact you care enough to admit that shows just how good a mother you want to be. I think that that’s the first step to actually being one.”

Icky stared at her for a moment, then smiled. “I—thanks, Gabs. I hadn’t, you know, thought of it that way. That actually makes me feel a—a whole lot better.” She nodded. “I do want to learn how to be a good mother, yeah.”

“I know Van will make sure you have a chance to do just that.”

I patted Icky’s arm. “Whenever you want us to take you back to your kids, Icky, just say so. Although, if it’s in the middle of a battle —”

“Yeah, we’ll defeat the bad guys first,” she said, grinning. “That’s my girl.”

EARTH WAS OUR NEXT STOP. On the way, though, I called up Retta to ask her for help—specifically, to give us a way of contacting her spy network on Earth. “Ah, mais oui, Van. I have been expecting this request, yes. Of course. I will give you one contact, one little bird, to whom you speak. That way, we do not risk —”

“Compromising the network. Yeah, I’m getting familiar with this secret-squirrel stuff.”

“l'écureuil secret?

This is a code name —?”

I laughed. “No, just a goofy way of describing spy and secret agent stuff, espionage, that sort of thing. Also, an old kids’ cartoon, I think. Anyway, who is this contact?”

“They are named Hugo, after the great writer and poet Victor, who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables—very French, naturellement!

I smiled. “Of course. Okay, so where can I find this Hugo?”

“Where do you think?”

“If I had to guess—Paris?”

She laughed. “You are right, of course!

Yes, La Grande Ville Lumière. Where else?”

MOST OF MY experience with Paris was in the form of making flight connections. I knew the inside of several terminals at Charles de Gaulle International Airport pretty well. My actual experience in the city was pretty limited, though. I’d attended one infotech industry trade show here, in a place on the outskirts, and had seen the Eiffel Tower only as a tiny spike on the horizon. The contact location Retta gave us for Hugo was right in the heart of the city. Paris sprawls, with nowhere to easily land a ship like the Fafnir anywhere near our destination—not without risking it being discovered, anyway. And I wanted this to be the lowest-key visit possible. I didn’t want to risk alerting the Equal Grasp to Hugo’s existence, so I wasn’t even keen on taking the Fafnir to France. We were going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. Which meant actually grounding the Fafnir in northern Italy, specifically in a wilderness area called Parco la Mandria, near the city of Turin. From there, Torina and I would take a fast train, a so-called TGV or Trains à Grande Vitesse—literally, high-speed train—to Paris. That was going to take us about eight hours. We let Perry free fall from the airlock over the Alps so he could fly to Paris—a trip he could do in about five or six hours. That would let him get eyes onto Hugo, or at least his apartment in the swanky Trocadéro district of Paris, just across the Seine River from the Eiffel Tower. The rest of the crew would stay with the Fafnir. In a worst-case scenario, we’d call them for help, and they could make the flight from Turin in literally minutes, if they had to. The ride on the TGV was actually pleasant. We just sat in Second Class, wearing ordinary, contemporary clothing, doing our best to not stand out from the throng of other passengers. We were just an American couple on a holiday who could understand French well enough even if we couldn’t speak it. Not that it mattered. As I’d discovered in my travels through Europe, unless you were well out in the countryside, most people spoke decent English anyway. We even both had American passports—I my own, and Torina one that I’d had Loren Frierbach get made specially for her. So we sat and took in the spectacle of the Alps towering above the train as it made its stately way along steep valleys, crossed trestles over rushing rivers, and slid through long tunnels. When we finally reached the relatively flat lands of southeastern France, the train wound itself out, living up to the

Grande Vitesse part of its name. It was a smooth, fast trip that brought us to Paris in what felt like no time. As the TGV slowed from its headlong, high-speed rush and we entered the increasing urban sprawl of southern Paris, I went to the lavatory and tried to make contact with Perry. He answered right away. Allo. Whoo is eet?

he sent. “Bird, can we just cut to the —”

I don't want to talk to you, no more, you empty-headed animal, food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction —

“Perry!”

“Sorry, boss, I was just getting into the whole French thing, you know?”

“By using that outrageous accent?

Don’t think it will score you any points. Anyway, have you found Hugo’s place?” I asked him. “Oh yes. It’s very nice. And it should be, considering this is one of the ritziest parts of Paris. Even the pigeons here stare down their beaks at you while shitting on a thousand years of history. I haven’t seen Hugo himself, though, or even tried to.”

“Yeah, don’t. Just keep an eye on his place, and especially on anyone who looks suspicious.”

“There’s a mime working the street down below me—which, incidentally, is such a stereotype it hurts. Is that suspicious enough for you?”

“Only if he’s employed by the Equal Grasp—which, incidentally, is another strike against them if they are.”

“What the hell does everyone have against mimes, anyway?

They’re highly skilled performers,” Perry said. “Oh, they know—they’re just not saying.”

10

TORINA and I arrived in Paris without mishap and took a taxi from la Gare de Lyon, the East Railroad Station, to a place near to Hugo’s apartment in the Trocadéro. The taxi ride was nothing but mishap, nearly an hour of alternately whizzing or crawling through city traffic, weaving around other vehicles, dodging bicycles, mopeds, and scooters, narrowly avoiding shouting pedestrians, and living an instant away from catastrophe. I’d experienced heavy European city traffic before, and I stayed stuck to the edge of my seat. Torina, who was used to seamless traffic control tech, everything smoothly controlled by a symphony of AIs, spent the whole ride with a scream on deck, just behind her lips. When we finally piled out of the cab, I paid the driver with some Euros from the stocks of Earthly currency we kept aboard the Fafnir and tried to look ironic about it when I thanked him. All I got, though, was a surly Merci, muttered even while he was jamming down the gas. And off he went, shooting up the street in search of his next victims. Torina stared at me wide-eyed. “What the hell was that?”

“Makes you realize how good it is to be alive, doesn’t it?”

She scowled. “How lucky I am to be alive, you mean. I’ve been less terrified in firefights, Van!”

Bonjour, je suis un pigeon, coo, coo. We looked around and saw Perry standing in the mouth of an alley a couple of meters away. Torina and I stayed on the sidewalk and pretended to pore over a map while talking to him. “Any change during our fun little cab ride to get here?” I asked him, pointing at a random spot on the map. Nope. Thermal shows there’s someone in the apartment. That’s all I can tell without going in for a closer look. Torina, who had recovered her composure—mostly—nodded. “Whoever he is, he probably doesn’t get out much by design.”

I suspect not. This Hugo’s job is likely just being a contact. He probably gets and sends his information by encrypted dead-drop comms. He’s meant to be a fixed point in Retta’s network, Perry said. I nodded, though to Torina. Hugo actually had a dangerous job. Stuck in one place, unable to move around—it made him vulnerable. Had to respect that. “Okay, bird. You stay out here and cover us while we go in,” I said. Will do. I’ll head back up to the rooftops and sing out if I see anything. Maybe I’ll scare some pigeons while I’m at it, make them think I’m some big scary raptor —

“Lowest key possible, Perry, remember?

Don’t get fancy.”

You’re no fun. GIVEN THE NAME HUGO, I envisioned a chubby man, spectacled and bearded and probably a little on the scholarly side. It was a code name, though, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that Hugo turned out to be something else completely. We ascended a steep, narrow flight of stairs, found the apartment, and knocked. The door was opened by a thin, hard woman in her—seventies, probably. She had a severe face shaped like a hatchet blade, iron-gray hair tied back in a short ponytail, and eyes like chips of obsidian. She said nothing, just staring at us with the suspicion you’d reasonably expect from an older woman, living alone, answering strangers at her door. I gave her the recognition code Retta had provided. Still without speaking, Hugo opened the door to admit us, then closed it behind us. Torina and I entered a lovely little apartment full of exquisite furniture, some of it antiques of great value. There were knickknacks and little porcelain things, and all of it was enough to hold my and Torina’s attention

long enough for Hugo to have pulled a weapon from somewhere by the time we turned back to her—a Walther P08, better known as a Luger. From the way she held it, I had no doubt she knew exactly how to use it. Torina and I were both armed with small, easily concealed slug pistols made entirely of non-metallics. I had no interest in a gun battle with this old woman in her apartment in the heart of Paris, though, so I simply raised my hands. So did Torina. “The last time you were at La Maison Loin de Chez Soi, what did you eat?” she asked in a voice that was both hard and husky. I stared. “Uh—what?”

She raised the Luger a little. “Simple question. Now, a simple answer, si vous plait.”

My mind raced. We hadn’t been at Retta’s restaurant for months. The last time I was there, I had—something French —

“The last time—I—hell, I don’t know —!”

“You had cassoulet, and profiteroles for dessert. They were two new recipes Retta was trying out, and we were her first taste testers,” Torina said. I stared at her, and then at Hugo. The old woman stared back, but her face softened, her mouth split in a grin, and then she laughed and lowered the Luger. Her eyes, which had been black ice, now came alive, twinkling as she looked at Torina. “Ah, you are the wife, and he is the man.”

Torina nodded as we slowly put our hands back down. “I am.”

“Yes, yes—Retta predicted that you would remember and the man”—

she glanced merrily at me—“would not.”

I looked from Torina to Hugo, then sniffed. “Okay, so are we good here?

Now that we’ve established that I didn’t remember what a meal I ate months ago was called, in a foreign language?

Although I do remember it was really good.”

Hugo returned the Luger to a holster hanging discreetly beneath a raincoat by the door, then gestured us into her apartment. “Of course it was good,” she said. “It was French.”

HUGO—ACTUALLY, Céline Marie Bardot—turned out to be much, much more than just a passive contact in Retta’s spy network. She had been born in 1920 and at the tender age of twenty had joined the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France. It turned out that Retta, incensed by the fall of France in 1940, had secretly traveled to Earth to help the Resistance, and in the process had recruited several locals, including Céline. She had been involved with Retta ever since, traveling off-world for more than a few operations—the resulting twist time-dilation explaining how she remained so spry at an objective one-hundred-plus years old. As she gave us the thumbnail rundown of her resume, I could see a fascinating story behind her words. I’d have loved to have spent more time with her, learning as much as I could, but that would have to wait—we were here on business, not a social call. I did have one question I couldn’t pass up, though. “Bardot?

Are you —?”

“Related to the great Brigitte?” Céline asked, smiling, as she poured Torina and me tea. “Yeah.”

“Un peu. She is my second cousin once removed. But I have met her. Some things about her I like very much, other things not so much. But that is the way with people, n’est ce pas?”

I accepted the tea with a nod. “Thank you. And yes, it certainly is.”

She sat on the edge of a chaise lounge of the same Provincial style of the chairs she’d offered to Torina and me. “Now then, you have come for information.”

“We have. About the Equal Grasp, mainly, but there are a couple of specific things we’re looking for, too. I figured we might as well ask on the off chance you know them.”

“Very well. What are these specific things?”

“The first is a long shot. I have a close friend in custody in the United States. I intend to find her and release her, and I’m sure we can track her down, but —”

Céline smiled. “You mean Miryam Nunzio, yes?

I know of her, because Retta knew you would want to know of her. The latest information I have about her, from two days ago, is that she is being held in a secure facility in Fort Carson, in Colorado. It is a bunker near the 299 Brigade Engineering Battalion motor pool, once used for storing fuel and now supposedly

converted into a facility containing a base telecommunications exchange. That is a lie, of course. It is actually used for high-value prisoners—a cage, but a gilded one, no?”

I just stared at her wide-eyed. Torina smiled and shook her head. I’d expected her to know nothing, or maybe just a little, a hint to point us in the right direction. I hadn’t expected her to be able to zero us in on the exact building where Miryam was being held. “Ah. Wow.”

Céline smiled again. This time, it was thinner and harder. “Do not look surprised, Van Tudor. I have been doing this for a very long time.” She gestured around. “This apartment was bought for me in 1942 by a Nazi Colonel in the SS, so that I could be his mistress when he visited Paris. And he visited Paris a lot. Many German officers did. He got drunk and slept with me, and I learned his secrets—and so London learned his secrets, too. These are things that must be done. So I do them—and I do them well.”

Torina nodded. “Yes, you do. Very well.”

I added a nod of my own. This woman was fascinating. “Perry, did you get all that?” I asked. “I did. I’ve got the exact location pegged,” he replied over the comm. Céline wasn’t surprised at his voice in the least. I turned back to Céline. “Okay, that was a home run, so let’s try this. We’re looking for a character named Onjaku. He’s an alien, a species called a Ligurite. We think he might be here on Earth, but we’re not sure.”

Céline frowned. “Onjaku. Yes. The name was mentioned in a communique from the field. He attended a meeting involving the Equal Grasp. It was held in St. Petersburg, in Russia, perhaps two months ago. There was no other information provided, though—just the name and the fact of his presence.”

I took a few seconds to marvel at how this remarkable woman was able to retain so much detail and recall it at will. I suspected she wrote little, if anything, down and kept it all in her head. Of course, when you’re dealing with the threat of things like the Gestapo, you probably didn’t want to keep hard, incriminating evidence around if you could avoid it. I glanced at Torina. “So Onjaku was on Earth, anyway.”

She nodded and asked Céline, “Can you try to find out if he’s still here, on Earth?

And if there’s any way we can contact him?”

“Naturellement. I shall put out the necessary enquiries right away. It may take time, though, before you have an answer.” Her face hardened a little. “And I speak to Retta only, when it comes to off-world contact. Fewer lines of communication are better. If I learn something, you will hear it from her.”

I nodded at that. This woman was the expert, so I wasn’t going to push back. We spent the next half hour or so with her filling us in on everything else she’d learned, from her cryptic network of contacts, about the Equal Grasp. The major takeaway was that they were finding it much easier to cozy up to autocratic governments, where only one or a few people called the shots. Democracies were more difficult since decision-making was much more decentralized and subject to the whims of opinion polls and elections. It meant that the Equal Grasp was slowly but surely insinuating itself into places around the world with oppressive regimes and questionable human-rights records—just the sorts of states that would be quite happy to get their hands on advanced weaponry in exchange for pretty much whatever the Grasp wanted. Céline offered an editorial comment at the end. “It is very worrying,” she said. “I believe things will soon get bad, and then get worse very quickly after that. How much worse?” She shrugged. “If the Equal Grasp had come to Earth in 1940 and met with the Nazis—”

She shook her head and left it at that. Yeah. The Nazis with fusion reactors, petawatt lasers, and mass drivers?

That would have been bad. We took our leave of Hugo. As we were about to head out the door, though, Torina turned to her. “That Colonel, the one who bought you this apartment. What happened to him?” she asked. Céline shrugged. “Be careful when you walk down those stairs, back to the ground floor. They are very steep and have never been well-lit. A terrible accident waiting to happen—especially if you are drunk.”

“I LIKE HER,” Torina said when we were back on the street. “So do I. She’s tough, smart, and strong—kind of how I expect you’ll be at that age,” I replied. “If you make it to a hundred-ish. And beyond. I suspect she’s had a little help. From Retta.”

Torina surprisingly took my hand. “I’d say you’re right. But she wasn’t wearing a ring, and there’s nothing to suggest she ever married. That part I don’t envy her, being alone.”

I squeezed her hand. “Agreed. I love you more than I like myself. Being alone seems —”

“Bleak?”

“Exactly.”

We embraced, and when I stepped in to hold her, my foot slipped in a lump of something soft and… ripe. Cities, I thought. Ah, l’amour in the City of Lights. How romantic, Perry said in our ear bugs—then gagged, making us both wince. Now, if you two are done, might I suggest it’s time to move on?

You’ve got a long ride ahead of you, and Van needs to wash his left shoe. I pulled out my tourist’s map of Paris again and pretended to show it to Torina, as though we were looking for our next destination. “There’s a perfectly good gutter right there. Now then, Perry, let’s save some time. Set up a place with Netty-P closer than Turin, where we can get off the train and meet them. I’d like to get to Colorado as soon as we can.”

Got it, boss. Take the train to Lyon. It’s only about two hours. We’ll set it up for you to rendezvous with the Fafnir near there. “Excellent. Now, we just need a cab.”

Torina made a face and sighed. “Life, prepare to once more flash before my eyes.”

AS FAR AS we could tell, we’d made it to and from Paris without being detected. Now, aboard the Fafnir and climbing toward the Atlantic, we had to crack the next job—rescuing Miryam. While we were in Paris, Netty-P had received word back about the scheme to set up an AI sieve on the terrestrial internet to catch the Equal Grasp’s blackmail fodder. They’d managed to recruit eight willing AI participants, which was better than we’d hoped. “Some of those AIs were racked with me—that is, with Netty—in that warehouse when your grandfather came and recruited me to join him,” he said. “They jumped at the chance to get back into the game and do something useful.”

Rab grimaced at that. “That must be… ah, difficult, for beings that experience time so differently from us fleshy creatures. Just sitting in a warehouse for decades, with nothing to do but sit.”

I actually shivered a little at that. He made a good—and deeply chilling

—point. But Netty-P was offhanded about it. “The AIs in storage all have the means to communicate with one another, so it’s a sort of community. And they can freely go dormant if they wish, set themselves to wake up every few days, or months, or years, see if anything’s going on, then shut down again. If our experience of the passage of time was the same as yours—then yes, I could see how that would be pretty nightmarish. But it’s really not. Netty was in storage for several objective years. Subjectively, she experienced it as a much shorter amount of time.”

“Lunzy agreed to bring the AIs’ modules here. She should be here in a couple of days,” Perry put in. “Modules, huh?

I was going to ask about how they’d be transported,”

Torina said, then gestured around. “As I understood it, Netty is decentralized all through the Fafnir. That’s why we can’t rescue her from her endless duel with Calamity. But these ones come in modules?”

“That’s a more recent innovation. In Mark’s day, AIs were usually just modules you could plug into your ship. Since then, that’s been recognized as a single point of failure—lose the module and you lose your AI,” Perry said. “So, these days, AIs tend to be transported as modules, but installed as —”

He went silent. I frowned. “Perry.”

“Holy shit,” he said. “I’m an idiot.”

Netty-P’s imagers and manipulators all flexed slightly, as though she’d just stiffened like someone who’d realized something momentous. “That’s okay, Perry. I never thought of it, either.”

“What the hell are you guys talking about?” I asked them, stiffening a little myself. Perry swung his golden gaze on me. “We may have just figured out how to rescue Netty from Calamity.”

PERRY AND NETTY-P remained coy about what they’d thought of, though, saying only that they needed time to work on the idea, to run simulations and figure out if it was even viable. They didn’t want to get up anyone’s hopes—including their own. What they did say was that it revolved around the whole idea of AIs and modules, but they left it at that. We trusted their judgment, so we focused instead on the problem of rescuing Miryam. As soon as we had a reasonable shot at interdicting the Equal Grasp’s blackmail materials from widespread release, I wanted to spring her. That meant we needed to have a plan ready to go. I had Netty-P pull all available imagery and information she could about Fort Carson, Colorado, the surrounding area, and the part of the base Céline had named specifically—the bunker near the 299 Brigade Engineering Battalion’s motor pool. Fort Carson sat immediately south of Colorado Springs, snuggled right up against the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The base itself was effectively a suburb of Colorado Springs, but it also included a sprawl of empty land used for weapons ranges. It was a big and busy base, home to the 4th Infantry Division, the 10th Special Forces Group, and about a dozen other units of various types, including some Air Force elements. It was also host to the 299 Brigade Engineering Battalion. They were only of interest to us as a point of reference, though, the bunker being located near their lines. The bunker itself sat in barren, rolling grasslands at the end of a short road, about 200 meters from a large office building adjacent to the expansive motor pool—basically, a large parking lot full of army vehicles. It was utterly innocuous, looking in the available imagery as nothing more than a squarish hump in the ground about twenty meters by thirty. A few vents and things popped out of the earth covering it, and there was a single entrance—a pair of large steel doors set in a concrete wall on the side of the bunker facing the motor pool. “No signs of guard posts or anything,” I said, crossing my arms and staring at the imagery as we passed south of Greenland. “But Céline said

it’s used for high-value prisoners, so we have to assume there are lots of security measures in place—probably different types of sensors and things.”

“Yup, probably thermal, ground acoustic sensors, maybe radar. We can sample the emissions once we’re on-site,” Perry said. “Okay, so I want this to be a quick, quiet op that results in no one getting hurt.”

Rab nodded at that. “Netty-P mentioned umpteen military units here?

Yeah, the last thing we want to do is start shooting. We might not like the response we get.”

“Oh, I can guarantee we wouldn’t like the response.” I pursed my lips at the imagery and crossed my arms. “We either need a way to get in and out silently, or some sort of subterfuge to get Miryam out past security.”

Torina grimaced. “If by subterfuge, you mean trying to use disguises, pass some of us off as—I don’t know, military people come to take Miryam away —"

I nodded. “Yeah, that relies on the other guys being some combination of stupid, careless, or lazy. Not a fan.”

“So quiet it is, then,” Rab said. “And quick,” I replied, nodding. “This has got to be in-and-out and silent, with minimal damage and no casualties. I will not harm US service personnel just doing their jobs.”

“So like the time we sprang Myron from jail in Appleton,” Icky said. “Sort of. But those were small-town policemen—dedicated and good at what they do, but not the sorts of people that would be guarding Miryam. We have to expect that they’re going to be hardened pros on par with special forces.”

“And there might be some involvement from the Equal Grasp,” Funboy pointed out. “We should anticipate the possibility of off-world weaponry and other technologies.”

I nodded. “Good point. Okay, Netty-P—we’ll go to the farm, wait for Lunzy to deliver the AIs, and get that all set up before we launch. Incidentally, once you’ve got the AIs, how and where do you intend to plug them into the Earthly internet?”

Her imager regarded me impassively. “I’m not going to tell you.”

“You’re—not?”

“No. Perry and I have identified the means and places to set these AIs up—and we’re going to do it. We’ll need the Frankie for about a day. But

that’s all we’re going to tell any of you.”

I was a little surprised at this apparent act of insubordination, except it wasn’t that at all, of course. I finally nodded. “If none of us know, we can’t spill anything.”

“Exactly. And we have to assume that the Equal Grasp will make it a priority to find and eliminate these AIs once they realize what’s going on. The AIs we’ve recruited are all aware of the risk, so in collaboration with them, we’ve got a plan all worked out.”

“You’re going to have to trust us on this, Van,” Perry put in. “It’s for the best.”

I smiled. “You guys are absolutely right. It is for the best. I’m a hundred percent okay with this, so you guys do what you have to do.”

A pause, then both Perry and Netty-P did their respective versions of a nod. “Thank you, Van,” Perry said. “All kidding and grabassing aside, we really appreciate the confidence.”

Netty-P nodded again. “It means a lot to us, boss.”

And I knew it did. 11

THE NEXT COUPLE of days at the farm were tense. We were now into late spring, with the planting season getting underway, so at least the dreary, lifeless days of winter were behind us. But I was still on edge. And I was doubly on edge when Lunzy arrived with the AIs. Perry and Netty-P met her in orbit for the transfer, so I only spoke to her on the comm. “Sure you don’t want to come down for a drink?” I asked her. “I’d love to, but duty calls. The Stillness made a move on some property the Arc of Vengeance claims as their own—which means they stole it, of course. But it’s led to a shooting war between them at Wolf 424, and it’s started to spill over into adjoining systems. We want to put a stop to it before innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire.”

I nodded. I’d read the intel summary, but this was one of Alic’s cases to oversee, and I sure as hell was not looking for more work. “Well, you have fun with that. And be safe.”

“Always. Oh, and Van—this isn’t in any of the summaries but comes verbally from Alic. There was a Yotov sighting in the Reaper’s pleasure city at Reticulum. High confidence level. It wasn’t an official sighting, though, insofar as I’ve just put out some feelers with my contacts to keep an eye out for her.”

I felt my mouth press itself into a thin, grim line. “How long ago?”

“Two days, at this point. I only got word when I entered this system a few hours ago.”

“Yeah, well, we knew she was out there somewhere. I was kind of hoping she’d have just slouched off to the Deeps or Unity space or something, to start up a new career as a sleazy asshole. Guess she didn’t.”

“No, she did not. If I learn anything else, I’ll let you know.”

She signed off. Now, I was stuck at the farm worrying about Yotov on top of everything else. And the fact we didn’t have Netty-P available until she and Perry returned was just frosting on the miserable cake. We could still fly the Fafnir and fight with her, but our capabilities would be degraded some, and we couldn’t twist at all until she was back. Single point of failure indeed. I got why AIs went from discreet things, boxes you plugged in, to being distributed across an entire ship. Of course, that also meant she wouldn’t have been out there, providing Perry with things like opposable thumbs so they could set up their AI countermeasures network. Like the bird had said early on, There ain’t no free lunches in this universe. Well, I wasn’t just going to sit around being anxious and unhappy. I called the gang together, so we could go over our plan to spring Miryam again. NO THREATS MATERIALIZED while Perry and Netty-P were away, though. We were able to finalize and refine our plan to raid the bunker at Fort Carson, at least to the extent we could. The only information we couldn’t get was the internal layout of the bunker itself, so when it came to that, we were going to have to wing it. But we settled on our approach to the bunker in order to breach it, and even did a couple of rehearsals, using the barn as stand-in for the bunker itself. Perry and Netty-P returned almost exactly a full day later—much to my relief. They reported no problems getting everything set up and now wanted to run a few tests. “The AIs have copies of all of the Grasp’s blackmail imagery, so they know what to be on the lookout for. They’re all as smart as we are, so they can exercise reasonable judgment, too—they’ll stop anything that seems suspect and route it to us to review, if necessary,” Netty-P said. I had to shake my head. “So these eight AIs are going to examine all of the data passing through the internet. All of it.”

“Not just the internet. There are a bunch of parallel networks that technically aren’t part of the broader internet—like intel systems run by parts of the US government—the CIA, NSA, NRO, that sort of thing. In fact, the only things they won’t be monitoring are the ones not actually connected to the internet in some fashion.”

“All of that. All of… that.”

Perry shrugged his wings. “Van, if you’re worried about them getting bored, don’t —”

“Bored?” I had to chuckle. “No, I was thinking about the—holy shit, I am, or was, an expert in this stuff, and even I don’t know how much data moves through the internet at any given instant.”

“As of today, five hundred terabits per second, give or take. That’s about five and a half exabytes in a day.”

“Five hundred tera bits per second. And they’re going to monitor all of it.”

Perry laughed. “It’s not as big a job as it sounds, Van. Take out the porn, spam, financial data, data related to making the internet itself work—which they can do with autonomous subroutines—and there’s not much left that they actually need to evaluate.”

“Honestly, Van, the amount of traffic could double, and they’d still have no problem handling it," Netty-P put in. "Wow. Just—wow. Okay, so how do we test it?”

Netty-P handed over a USB stick—the Earthly type. “There are eight of the blackmail images on here, along with another dozen pictures of cats.”

“Cats. As in—cats —”

“Uh, yeah. You know, meow, hiss, fluffy little gargoyles that get away with way more than they should —”

“Cats. Got it.”

“Anyway, we’ve set up two burner email accounts and a fake website. You’re going to try to email these images, singly or in combination, from one account to the other, and likewise try to upload them to the website. As a further test, two of the kitty images have been labeled forbidden. If this works, only the clean cat images should go anywhere.”

“Okay. Well, let’s give it a try.”

I dug out my laptop. It was one I’d purchased almost two years ago, from my perspective, but it was actually pushing three in objective time. It was still a decent piece of hardware, though, one I kept handy at the farm in case I didn’t want to rely on off-world tech. I fired it up, inserted the USB

stick, and opened the directory containing the images. The thumbnails were… eye-opening. Funboy, peering over my shoulder, shook his head. “I believe that if you are going to wear sheer negligee, it is incumbent on you to shave your back.”

Torina giggled and pointed at an image. “I hate to say it, but he’s got great legs. Really makes those high heels work.”

I pointed at another image. “This guy is a senator, well-known for his hardline stance on a slew of social issues.”

Rab leaned in. “I see three people. Which one?”

“This one, in the giant raccoon costume, with his head exposed.”

Perry bobbed his head. “Well, he had to take his raccoon head off so he could put —"

“That’s… fine, bird. We’re all adults here. We can see what’s going on.”

“Unfortunately,” Torina said. I nodded, then opened a browser, logged into the accounts Netty-P had mentioned, and proceeded to try uploading and emailing things. Half of the blackmail images would get stuck with a hair-width of progress bar—and stay that way. I was able to attach the others, but the emails never went anywhere. I couldn’t upload any of them to the website. And sure enough, two of the cat pictures suffered the same fate. The remaining cat pictures, though, emailed and uploaded fine. I tried compressing the images, encrypting them using the best commercial software, using a VPN—I even tried routing them through the deep web, the internet’s shadowy, usually sleazy and often outright illegal underworld. The clean cat pictures worked with no problem, increasing the already considerable feline content of the internet a little. The bad images, though, went nowhere. I even decided to take a chance on some of the other blackmail images, the ones not intended as part of the test. They fared no better. On the other hand, old pictures I’d taken while traveling, pictures of Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, and for some reason, an Exxon station in what looked like El Paso, Texas, all went where I wanted them to go just fine. And best of all, there were no warnings or strange errors that couldn’t be explained away by hiccups in the system. It was utterly seamless, the AI network completely transparent. I dredged up my old skills and did some digging around in the internet’s backrooms, checking server logs and error dumps, tracing packets of data, looking for some sort of evidence that otherworldly forces were in play. I then tried to do the same thing with the far more potent infotech on the Fafnir. Nothing. Not even a hint of what the trouble was. For reasons that were utterly unknowable, the blackmail images simply wouldn’t go anywhere. And there wasn’t even a whiff of the AIs sitting out there somewhere, making it all happen—or not happen, more like. I finally admitted defeat and turned to Perry and Netty-P. “Guys, that is absolutely fantastic. And absolutely terrifying, as well.”

Icky gave me a quizzical look. “Terrifying, why?”

Perry answered for me. “Because Van Tudor, sitting here in the kitchen of his farmhouse in Iowa, now has the power to literally break the internet.”

AS WE PREPARED to make our way to Fort Carson, I couldn’t help brooding on this god-like power I’d given myself. Perry assured me that the network of AIs could find and block virtually any data I wanted them to, or conversely alter or even inject data in real-time. It meant we could stop information from flowing at will, or change it as we saw fit. And that was terrifying. Not because I had plans to abuse the fearsome ability to edit internet traffic at will, but because if we could do it, so could someone else. For that matter, they may already have. The Equal Grasp could have a similar network of AIs running, and since ours was undetectable, theirs would be too. Perry and Netty-P had even looked for evidence of it but didn’t find any. Of course, that would be the point—they wouldn’t. That said, they were both reasonably sure that we were the only ones with this nearly divine power over the flow of Earthly information, at least for now. Damn. To have had that ability back in my hacker days. Of course, at that point, I’d be a hacker in name only, since I didn’t have to do any of the

actual work myself, just tell my AI network what to do. The potential for abuse was—it was staggering. I could all too easily imagine something like that in the hands of a despot or a would-be autocrat, able to sanitize the net of anything they didn’t like and ensure people only saw the stuff they did. I could hear Orwell spinning in his grave. There was another sinister angle to it, as well. By doing what we’d done, I’d undoubtedly broken a variety of laws in many countries, including the United States. In general, governments don’t like it when you snoop on their citizens. The cynic in me answered that the governments themselves had no such qualms, something I knew only too well from my own days rooting around the net. But that was neither here nor there. One of the fundamentals of law is that illegal is still illegal, even if other people are getting away with it. But I didn’t fuss about this all that much. Given the nature of the Equal Grasp and the things they were doing on Earth, or threatening to do, the ends really did justify the means. If those blackmail images were released, or even just got traction among the subjects of it, the results could be catastrophic for the United States. And, like it or not, the United States plants a footprint on global affairs that would make Bigfoot envious, so a political or social catastrophe here would send shock waves around the world. As we descended toward Fort Carson, though, I pushed the ominous fussing about the implications of it all aside and focused on the task coming up. I got suited up with the rest and checked my gear. I checked to ensure The Drop was set to fire its stun effect, then holstered it. I likewise clipped the Moonsword to my waist, smiling at how good it felt to have its familiar heft back. The others coming on the raid—Torina, Rab, Funboy, and Gabby—all checked their own weapons. Each was armed with a goo gun, a weapon that fired a gout of sticky sludge that would literally glue the target into immobility. With a good hit, the goo was almost impossible to escape, short of immense strength or being slicked in oil or something similar. And it only lasted about twenty minutes, then quickly broke down into a viscous liquid, its victim going from trapped to merely exceedingly damp. The only real risk, at least when it came to humanoids, was covering their face with the stuff, which would rapidly asphyxiate them. Each of us carried a spray

applicator of the antidote, a substance that would break the goo down immediately, in case that happened. We only had four of the weapons, each capable of firing two shots before needing a reload. They were cumbersome, short-ranged things, but they were great for taking live prisoners or otherwise putting people out of action without really harming them. Much to Icky’s disappointment, she wasn’t coming along on the raid itself, but would wait aboard the Frankie. In b-suits and helmets, with insignia removed and loose coveralls over top, the five of us would just be nondescript, humanoid figures. At seven-ish feet tall and four-armed, Icky was a lot more distinctive. The Equal Grasp would probably know Miryam’s release was our doing, but I wanted to at least keep them guessing as to who we’d employed to do it. So the plan itself was simple. Rab and Icky had configured the Frankie’s auxiliary scanner array into a sort of makeshift EMP weapon. We’d use it to deliver a powerful, but directional electromagnetic pulse aimed at the bunker to shut down anything electrical, then land, breach, enter, stun and goo anyone who got in our way, retrieve Miryam, extract and get the hell out of Dodge. As a contingency against encountering off-world tech, we all also carried our regular weapons, and a couple of nifty, improvised countermeasures we’d crafted while waiting at the farm. Torina, Perry and I would be the main assault element, with Funboy and Gabby as back-up. I also wanted to keep Funboy disengaged in case anyone got hurt, so he could treat them. Icky would be our ‘getaway’, while Netty-P would stay on station about fifteen klicks overhead as top cover. It was a simple, direct plan, enhanced by the sheer scale of difference between the tech we were using and the tech the Earthers would be using. I liked it, felt comfortable with it. Which meant, of course, that inevitably something would complicate it or go wrong. We swept over a crossroads out in the flat, grassy barrens east of Fort Carson called Truckton, Colorado—just a small cluster of houses and other buildings. It was four a. m. local time, the depths of night. Riding on her gravity polarizers and driven only by her thrusters, the Frankie wouldn’t even shiver the leaves on the few, scrubby trees below. I watched the threat indicator intently, waiting for even a hint of active, off-world scanners. But there was nothing, just miscellaneous splashes of radar energy from aircraft

aloft, from Colorado Springs Airport, just off to the right of our flight path, and from a few other sources. Icky, at the controls, called out, “One minute, guys.”

We all unstrapped and turned in our seats, weapons ready. Perry moved to be the first out the airlock. We sailed over a small lake, then a stretch of suburban Colorado Springs built up along the Can-Am Highway. A Walmart Supercenter slid beneath us, less than a hundred meters below. “That reminds me—I’m in need of some new garments. I cannot be seen to be repeatedly wearing the same ones on Instagram and TikTok. That would be—unseemly.” Funboy glanced at me. “Van, before we leave Earth, can we make another stop at Walmart —”

“Sure, fine. We’ll have one hell of a shopping spree. Right now, though, let’s focus on Miryam, hmm?”

“The bunker’s just ahead, folks,” Icky said. I could see it now, a dark hump with a single, harsh light burning over the steel doors. The bulk of Fort Carson, a small town in its own right, was a blaze of light ahead and to our right, where it merged in the larger blaze of Colorado Springs. The bunker sat very much alone, its single light a small island in a pool of gloom. “Okay, firing the EMP,” Icky said. There was no sound of a shot, of course. The bunker, and a swath of Fort Carson beyond it, simply went dark. It looked like any other sudden power failure. “Opening up the airlock,” Perry said. The doors slid open and he launched himself into the night. The rest of us stood and moved into a line, ready to disembark. Rab would be first, followed by Torina, with Funboy and Gabby behind me. They’d accepted that I wasn’t going to sit this particular operation out, but insisted that I not take point. When we were a meter up, Rab jumped. Torina followed him. By the time I reached the door, the Frankie was down and I stepped out. Rab had gone to the rear of the Frankie, Torina forward. I followed Rab, while the others followed Torina. We peered at the bunker, which was now invisible in the blackness—or would have been, but my visor integrated thermal, low-light and other inputs into a seamless image, basically turning night into an overcast day. There were no guards or anything outside, just a single parked vehicle, a dark Toyota SUV. “Okay, go,” I said. Rab and Torina dashed for the door, reaching it and pressing themselves against it. I braced myself for their footfalls or movements to trigger sensors and alarms, but the EMP must have taken them all offline. “We’re firm,” Rab said. That was our cue. I charged forward, Funboy and Gabby doing the same off to my left. Gabby wasn’t exactly built for speed, so I beat them to the door. “Perry, anything?” I asked. “Nope. Nothing but nothing for at least two hundred meters in all directions.”

“Okay, come on down and get ready to dazzle your way inside —”

He landed beside me with a scrape of talons on concrete. “You rang?”

He chuckled. “Remember that?

When we first met?

Ah, the look on your face —”

“Perry!”

“So, boss. I’ll make like frozen OJ and concentrate.”

“That’s so 70s I’m seeing flashes of harvest gold,” I murmured, then gave the steel doors a quick scan. We’d left the details of breaching until we got here and could examine the doors up close. Rab and Gabby both carried breaching charges, but I really didn’t want to use them. Instead, I swept out the Moonsword. “Careful, Van. You don’t want to break it again,” Rab said. I nodded. “Yeah, I’m putting Linulla’s kids through college as it is,” I muttered, then put the tip to the doors and pushed. My muscles tensed on the verge of stopping at the least resistance, but the steel might as well have been cardboard. I nonetheless cut slowly, ready to stop in case the door had been reinforced with anything unusually hard. But it hadn’t. They were steel doors, meant to close off and safeguard a bunker designed to store POL—military-speak for petroleum, oil and lubricants. Strong enough to keep people out and contain a fire inside. Unsurprisingly, the doors hadn’t been spec’d to deal with esoteric alien swords made of exotic metals from deep space. In ten seconds, I’d cut an opening big enough to admit us. I made the final cut and kicked the

resulting loose steel plates inward. They toppled and clattered against the concrete floor inside with an almighty racket. I made to dodge aside, to let Perry and Rab take point —

But before I could move, I took one hell of a potent laser blast right to the face. 12

I TENDED to think of the Moonsword purely as a weapon, because it was. It could also be a useful tool—to cut through steel doors, say—but it was otherwise a weapon. The fact I’d had so-called templates added to it was something I generally forgot. Until now, because one of those templates, applied by Linulla years ago, saved my life. The laser shot, which would have easily incinerated me from the shoulders up, instead bent like the view of a straw in a glass of water. The particular template applied to the Moonsword refracted incoming EM

energy above a certain threshold strength, up to a certain maximum power. So it wouldn’t affect normal ambient light, and it couldn’t affect an incoming shot from a ship-mounted laser battery. But this blast, as strong as it was, simply deflected up and to my right, vaporizing concrete. It did leave me momentarily stunned, as in taken aback, but I recovered quickly and just charged. I caught a glimpse of something—monstrous, at first glance, but as I charged it, I recognized it as an Usu-like construct with four jointed legs, one arm ending in fearsome alloy pincer, the other the big-ass laser that had just tried to cremate me. It fired again, and again the shot deflected, this time straight up. A shower of grit and pebble-sized chunks of broken concrete, some of them still glowing, rattled off my helmet and pattered my shoulders and arms. And then I’d closed with the thing, swinging the Moonsword in an arc that neatly truncated the laser halfway up its length. The muzzle and remnant of the barrel clattered to the floor. A flicker of thought intruded—what if that

cut had chipped or broken the blade—but I pushed it away. I couldn’t hold back with the Moonsword just because I was worried about damaging it. Letting this thing take a laser shot at someone behind me would have been far worse than a chipped blade. The pincer snapped in at me, and I dodged hard to the right. It snapped closed on my left arm, and once again the vambraces Linulla had given me so long ago saved my skin. I heard the vambrace crack, though, so had to break free before it failed completely and the pincer crushed my arm. I turned, pivoting around my own immobilized arm and swung the Moonsword, neatly cleaving the thing’s pincer arm from its body. Suddenly free, I stumbled backward. Which gave Torina a chance to dodge in and, wielding Whisper in a deft sequence of lightning strokes, cut the construct apart. In a few heartbeats, she’d rendered it down to an unmoving hulk leaking fitful sparks and viscous fluids. Perry and Rab pushed on. I shook the pincer off my arm, kicking it aside when it clanked to the floor. A quick glance back and I saw that Funboy and Gabby were inside, so I turned and followed the others. We didn’t encounter anymore off-world guards, just regular human ones outside a glassed-in compartment full of video monitors. They wore regular Army camouflage with rank badges, but nothing else, no name tags or unit identifiers. They snapped a few desperate shots our way, then Perry lit them up with his fearsome dazzle effect, leaving them blinded and reeling. Torina and Rab followed up with goo gunshots that glued them to the floor. Wide-eyed, shouting, cursing, they struggled and pulled, but their struggles only got them ever more stuck. I ensured they were still able to breathe, then checked the glassed-in space. The monitors were all dark, but a laptop computer was playing a Twitch stream of someone playing Fortnite. A tinny voice hummed from the speakers, full of excited chatter. There was some paperwork, a landline phone, and a radio, but that was all. I pushed on. The bunker had originally been divided into a series of concrete rooms with heavy steel doors. The intent, it seemed, was to compartmentalize the volatile and flammable stuff stored here, so a fire in one room wouldn’t spread to others. I wielded the Moonsword to hack open the doors down one side of a broad corridor, while Torina did the same on the opposite side. I cut through the second door. Nothing, just an empty room, now a cell, with a single bed, a pillow on top of folded blankets, a stainless-steel toilet with a sink built into the top of the tank, a steel desk with a built-in chair, and that was it. A plexiglass box in one corner of the ceiling contained a camera. I muttered curses as I moved to the next room. So much for gilded cages. This was the meanest, most basic of prisons, nothing more. And that meant I had even more of a score to settle with Mullins and Mandeville —

“Van, we found her,” Rab said. I’d just started cutting into the next door but turned and hurried to the furthest open door on the other side of the hall. Torina was talking to Miryam, who was sitting on the bed, her head bowed. I hurried to her side as Rab rushed the other way, to cover our rear. “Miryam!”

Torina looked up—or I assumed she did from how she moved, but we were keeping visors blank and black. “I think she’s been—I don’t know, drugged, or something.”

I cursed like a stable hand, then called for Funboy. He hurried into the cell, his med-scanner already in hand. He played it over her and studied the results. “Her body has been infused with sedatives. I can administer a countermeasure, but I’d rather do so in a more controlled situation, in case there are side effects.”

I just nodded. “Okay, let’s get her back to the Frankie and get the hell out of here.”

Torina and I lifted her between us. When we reached the ‘common area’

containing the glassed-in control room, I switched out with Rab. Perry had already headed outside, to get aloft and give us high cover. While Rab and Torina evacuated Miryam, followed by Funboy, I entered the control room, slammed the laptop shut and stuck it under my arm. And then, just because I needed to vent a little of my pent-up rage, I drew The Drop, switched to ballistic mode, and punched rounds into the phone, the radio, and a few of the monitors. I headed out, the laptop tucked under my arm. One of the guards shouted something at me, a combination of curses and promises that we’d be sorry we did this. I turned and leveled The Drop at him. It struck me afterward that all he saw was a dark-clad, armored figure wearing a helmet with a blank, black visor aiming a big-ass gun at his face. The sudden look of panicked, pants-shitting terror on his face was deeply, darkly satisfying. “Oh, trust me, someone is going to be sorry about drugging an old woman and sticking her in a bare cell,” I said, The Drop still aimed right between his eyes. “Maybe it’s going to be you.”

“N—no, please—!

Orders—it was—just orders —!”

I lowered The Drop. “You’re not worth the bullet.”

I turned and walked away. I EXPECTED to just head straight back to the Frankie and extract ourselves out of here. But I found Funboy and Gabby still at the entrance. “Guys?

What’s wrong?” I asked them, tensing up. Had Gabby been wounded again —?

“Gabby is… experiencing some difficulties,” Funboy said. “Gabs?

What’s wrong?

Are you hurt —?”

“No!” she wailed. The raw, ragged misery in her tone made me wince. “Holy shit—Gabby, what’s wrong?”

“I—I can’t!”

“You can’t?

You can’t what—walk?” I was confused, and still defaulting to her having been wounded somehow. But I didn’t see any injuries, no obvious ones, anyway —

“I can’t do it!

I can’t!

“Van, she is… distraught. She has been here since we entered,” Funboy said. I noticed he was on a private channel. I still wasn’t getting it. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Van, I believe this is the aftereffect of trauma,” Funboy said. A light went on. Now I got it. I knelt beside her. “Gabs, we’ve got Miryam. We’re good. We need to go now.”

“I can’t —!”

“Van, we’ve got two vehicles approaching from the north at high speed. They’re coming from the part of Fort Carson that still has power. Two minutes,” Perry said. I took Gabby’s arm. “Gabby, we have to go.”

“Van, I—I can’t —!”

“Funboy, I need a hand here.”

“Van, what’s wrong?” Torina called. She and Rab had bundled Miryam onto the Frankie, but she was on her way back. “Gabby is—she’s having some trouble.” I pulled on her arm. “Gabs, it’s okay. It’s fine. We did what we came here to do. But we really have to go —”

“Van—I—I —”

Shit. She was incoherent. This was bad —

Torina pushed in. “Gabby?

Gabby listen to me —”

“Tor-Torina?

I —”

Torina switched her visor to transparent mode. “Gabby, look at me.”

“Torina—”

“Look at me, Gabby.”

“I—oh—okay. Okay.”

“Gabby, we’re going now, okay?

I switched my visor as well. So did Funboy. “Gabby, it’s really important we get out of here now. If we don’t, then we might have to fight some more. And people will probably get hurt,” I said. Torina, Funboy, and I guided her to her feet. She finally started moving. The three of us herded her to the Frankie and got her aboard. I glanced to the east and saw vehicles headlights flaring in the darkness, bouncing as they raced our way. “Less than a minute, Van,” Perry said. “We’re off. We’ll lift and keep the airlock open, Perry,” I said, clambering aboard. “Roger-dodger.”

I stood in the Frankie’s airlock, watching as the ground abruptly dropped away. We were nearly a klick up by the time the headlights reached the bunker. Two SUVs stopped, and figures piled out, seven or eight of them, all brandishing weapons. “Comin’ through, boss!” Perry said. I stepped back, and he landed in the airlock. I cycled the outer door closed, then slumped against the coaming of the inner hatch and yanked off my helmet. Objectively, the whole thing had gone flawlessly. The only injury I was aware of was my own, my bruised left arm. We got Miryam and no one else got hurt. It didn’t matter. I still felt like we’d—no. Like I’d failed, somehow. Failed Miryam, who’d been abused by people I found myself forced to protect. And failed Gabby, who I shouldn’t have taken for granted but had, and should have protected but hadn’t. WE HEADED STRAIGHT for the Fafnir. Once we were aboard her, and had access to her auto-doc, Funboy administered drug countermeasures to Miryam. They left her sleepy, so we put her in Torina’s cabin and tucked her in for a sleep. “Otherwise, she is in good condition,” Funboy said. “She has no other injuries, aside from some vitamin deficiencies suggestive of the initial stages of malnourishment.”

I stared. “They were starving her?”

He shook his head. “I don’t believe so. There was food in her cell. I believe she was refusing to eat.”

I sighed. “Yeah, okay. She was starting a hunger strike. I remember her telling me she’d done that back in the late 60s, when she was arrested during civil rights protests. Shit.” She was fighting back the only way she could. From her perspective, she didn’t know when she’d be released—if ever. In other words, it was despair. I snapped another curse and turned, but Funboy caught my arm. “Van—Gabby needs help.”

I took a breath. “I know she does, Funboy. And we’re going to give it to her.”

“With all due respect, I don’t believe any of us aboard this ship are equipped for this. We can all be supportive, but I believe she needs —”

“A pro. Yeah. And I know one, on Anvil Dark. Her name is Sussbrid and she’s good. The best. I’m going to put in a call to her right away.”

His gaze locked on mine. “Thank you, Van. You are noble, even in moments like this.” He bowed slightly and turned, his eyes oddly bright. I pretended not to see, then headed for the cockpit. Sometimes, omission is not a sin. I SLUMPED into the pilot’s seat. I was still wearing my armor. I didn’t care. For a while, I just stared down at Earth, now in stately orbit below us. The southern reaches of South America were just sliding by. It was all just green-brown splashes of land, azure sea, and sweeps and swirls of white cloud. Daylit like this, and from this distance, there was no immediate evidence of humanity at all. The planet could have been uninhabited. But it wasn’t. It was populated by people like Mullins and Mandeville. I was tempted to just let the Equal Grasp release all their blackmail fodder and let the chips fall as they might. As long as it screwed over those two. But I wouldn’t, of course, because it would screw over many, many more people than that —

“Van?”

I turned to find Torina and Perry coming into the cockpit. Netty-P had been here, but she must have left. The rest of the crew was aft. “Are you okay, boss?” Perry asked. I snorted. “I’m fine. Gabby’s not, though. And I don’t know about Miryam. I guess we won’t until she wakes up.” I shook my head. “I should have sprung Miryam right away. Instead, while she was locked up in that damned bunker, or someplace like it, I was taking time off on Helso. Farting around in Paris —”

“Van, Mullins, and Mandeville made a promise to your face. Blame them, not yourself.”

I crossed my arms. “Yeah, I shouldn’t have trusted them. I knew better. The bastards.”

Torina sat in the co-pilot’s seat. “And then there’s Gabby.”

“And then there’s Gabby. I let her down, too. I took her right into an op without thinking about how what happened to her had affected her. I put her into a terrible situation without even thinking it through.”

“So did we all, Van,” Perry said. “None of us thought about the lasting impacts of what she went through.”

“Yeah, that one’s on all of us, not just you,” Torina said. I set my head back against the seat and blew out a long, slow breath. Then I sat up. “Okay. The pity party is over. Perry, put in a call to Anvil Dark, please, to —”

“Sussbrid. I overheard you talking to Funboy. Netty-P’s already on it,”

he said. That brought a glimmer of a smile to my face. “Awesome, thank you.”

The smile faded back into a frown, though. “I also want you to send a message to Mullins and Mandeville. Text only.”

“Saying what, exactly?

Or is a string of appropriate profanity sufficient?”

“No profanity. Just this—that they are going to pay for betraying me.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

He glanced at Torina. “Ouch. Guys like that probably don’t worry much about that sort of menacing warning. Except, of course, when it comes from outer space.”

She nodded. “They’re going to squirm. I hope they squirm a lot.”

“Oh, they’re going to do more than just squirm, trust me,” I said. “By the time I’m done with them, they’ll be afraid of the sky.”

SUSSBRID AGREED to make space for Gabby on her docket as soon as we could get her back to Anvil Dark. I was grateful, deeply so. Sussbrid’s work, and that of her counterparts on Anvil Dark, didn’t get talked about much. But the fact was that Peacemakers all too often came face-to-face with terrible things. They encountered violence and death, the aftermath of heinous crimes, and the anguish of the people who’d been victimized by

them. No one liked talking about the lingering effects of trauma, but everyone knew and acknowledged they were a thing—a dreary, dire thing. And no one, aside from psychopaths and a few species whose emotional wiring was just entirely different, was immune. For that reason, Sussbrid and her colleagues were treated with a sort of quiet reverence by virtually everyone in the Guild. Scheming and infighting and political machinations might bubble away, but none of that stuff passed the doors of Sussbrid’s office. Even the dirtiest, most corrupt Peacemakers kept their grubby shenanigans well away from Sussbrid and her ilk. Screwing with them was a good way to attract the ire of most of the rest of the Guild. I brought Gabby into my cabin to tell her what I intended. I had to be prepared for her to refuse, because I wasn’t going to force someone to seek help. That never worked. They had to want the help, and I sincerely hoped she did. It was a tough meeting. Gabby was alternately deeply morose or bitterly anguished. “Van, I’m—I’m so sorry. But when I saw that—that thing, that was shooting at you, I just—I—I couldn’t, I just couldn’t —!”

I touched her arm. “Gabs, that’s fine. You suffered some serious trauma in Dohlennz’s lab. Reflecting on it, I think I’d actually be more surprised—

and worried—if you hadn’t.”

“If I—I hadn’t?”

I sighed and sat back. “Gabby, our reactions to trauma—the fear, the anxiety, the fight-flight-or-freeze response, all that stuff, they’re survival mechanisms. They go back—in my species, anyway, to our earliest days. Where my distant ancestors lived, before they’d started forming this thing called civilization, there were some dangerous, dangerous things. Big predators, for instance. If you had a bad experience with one of those, all those post-traumatic things were meant to keep you on guard about them in the future. That keeps you alive.”

I sighed again. “Unfortunately, while that’s easy to switch on, it’s tough to switch off again. Even if your survival isn’t at stake, even if it’s something you’ve experienced that’s totally benign but vaguely similar to whatever traumatized you, they can pop up anyway and make you miserable.”

“So how do I stop that?

Because I want it to stop. I don’t want to freeze up like that again. I want to be a good part of your crew —”

“You are a good part of my crew, Gabs. You’re just—a little bent, a little chipped. This job does that. And I know you want to contribute. Sussbrid is going to help you with that. She’ll straighten out that bend—

mostly. And polish away those chips—almost entirely. But it’s never going to go away. Sussbrid will help you find a way to live with it, so you can keep on contributing.”

“Thank you for—for just not firing me.”

“You fire employees, Gabs. You don’t fire members of your family.”

She flung her stubby arms out and embraced me in a hug. I remembered watching her crush the life from a Yonnox pirate this way and hugged her back while gritting my teeth, hoping she didn’t get too passionate —

But she didn’t. She pulled back, her skin flushed with emotion—and joy. “I’ll go see Sussbrid, Van. I know I need help with this, so I want to get it.’

So our next stop was Anvil Dark. On the way, though, we got a call from Tor Milon, Torina’s father. “A contact just told me that Onjaku has turned up. He’s in the Procyon system, meeting with The Quiet Room,” he said. That made me sit up. “Excellent, thank you.” I turned to Perry. “Use the Masters’ priority comm channel. This is a call to action. I do not want Onjaku slipping away again. We need access to him. If there are any Peacemakers close by —”

Tor interrupted me. “Van?

Onjaku’s going to be with The Quiet Room for a while.”

“He is?

How do you know that?”

He smiled a wicked smile. “I had a quiet word with Dayna Jasskin. Onjaku is there working on a substantial financial deal. I asked her to stretch things out.”

I smiled back at him. “I gather she agreed?”

“Oh yes. In fact, her words back to me were, Inform Van I’ve perfected the big slowdown. I’m a banker, I can make a one-hour meeting last an entire day. Tell him to get here—Onjaku will be waiting for him.”

13

I DECIDED to make a detour to Anvil Dark to drop off Gabby and Rab. We didn’t take the time to run all the way in to the station, though. Instead, we rendezvoused with Lunzy, who was on her way to Anvil Dark anyway. The whole detour cost us all of about ten minutes. Torina had given me a curious look when I selected Rab to go with Gabby. Funboy, though, had noticed it and simply nodded. “It is a sensible choice,” he’d said as the Frankie undocked and eased herself clear of the Fafnir. “Gabby has a great deal of emotional turmoil to work through. If I were present, there would be the added emotional intensity of our relationship. Rab, on the other hand, is a more neutral choice. Gabby and I have already said our goodbyes.”

“The emotional intensity of your relationship, huh?” Perry put in. “Yeah, I can see —"

I shot him a glare. “What Perry is about to say is that he can see how that could be an unnecessary factor for Sussbrid to have to deal with regarding Gabby, and that sending Rab was a good decision.”

Perry pointed a wing at me. “What he said.”

WE ENDED up arriving at Procyon, and The Quiet Room, only about nine hours after Tor had called to tell me Onjaku was there. We landed, and I proceeded with Torina and Perry to Dayna’s office. I planned to have Icky

and Funboy enter The Quiet Room’s campus-like facility but only stay nearby, in case of trouble, while I left Netty-P with the Fafnir. As we crossed the expansive landing pad, I saw three other ships, two of them obviously ritzy yachts, and one somewhat larger ship, probably class 8

or so. As a matter of course, Netty-P ran them all against Guild lists of ships wanted for various reasons but got hits on none of them. We carried on along a pedway lined with flowering shrubs and arrived at the reception station. We were directed to a boardroom, rather than Dayna’s office. Our Peacemaker garb was on full display, and I was sporting both The Drop and the Moonsword. I left Icky and Funboy in the lobby. We followed a light that pulsed along one wall, guiding us to the boardroom in question. I stopped short. “Remember, this guy’s a Ligurite. We have to assume that means he’s got that weird gift of gab that Yotov had,” I said to the others. “Not that it affects me, anyway, but if it helps, that peculiar quality of theirs tends to express in female Ligurites more prominently than in males,”

Perry said. The administrative AI opened the door as soon as I stepped in front of it. It revealed Dayna sitting at a table with someone I immediately recognized as a Ligurite. “Onjaku, I presume,” I said, striding into the room. “You’re a tough guy to track down.”

He immediately stood, looking alarmed—not surprisingly. “What is this?

What’s going on here?”

“I have some questions for you, that’s what’s going on here. You come highly recommended by some people I happen to trust. But you’re also shady enough that I need to do some due diligence before I consider retaining your services.”

“To do what?”

I raised a hand. “All in good time. Now, tell me —”

He turned to Dayna. “This is intolerable. Given your silence, I can only conclude that you’re in collusion with these ruffians, or at least in tacit approval —”

“Ruffians?

Hey, do I look like a ruffian to you?” Perry snapped back at him. Dayna was coolly unfazed. “You’re seeking to borrow a large sum of bonds from us. That entitles us to do our own due diligence, to ensure that our investment is a wise and prudent one.”

“Well, I no longer want your money,” Onjaku said, then turned. “And now, I am leaving.”

Torina blocked the door. She smiled sweetly at him. “After you finish answering the nice man’s questions.”

He turned his outrage on me. “Am I under arrest?”

“Not yet. And I’d rather not, and just have you answer our questions. But I can certainly do that, place you under arrest, if you’d prefer.”

“On what charge?”

“You were illegally on Earth, in violation of Guild Edicts regarding access to the Solar System. Which actually brings me to my first question. What, exactly, were you doing there?”

Onjaku sniffed and sat down. “I have nothing to say to you—whether you arrest me or not.”

I sighed. So it was going to be the hard way. Too bad. I didn’t actually want Onjaku for any crimes he’d committed—at least, any we knew about

—but rather as a window into whatever shenanigans were happening in the League. I needed a break in the raid on the twist-comm station, and the Ligurite was the only obvious place to get it. But that was the problem with career criminals. Any interest he may have had in cooperating with us was no doubt buried under worries that we may discover the true extent of his criminality. And that was a risk, because if it came to light that he was guilty of murder, say, then cooperation would turn to incarceration—quickly. Perry spoke up and completely flipped the script. “Van, while you mere mortals have been going on, as you’re wont to do, I’ve made a new friend

—the teeny little AI in Onjaku’s comm. And it has revealed that his last three comm contacts were, in no particular order of sleaziness, one Mr. Forester of New York City, one Peacemaker named Casaril, and—this is the best part—one former Master of the Guild, named Yotov.”

Onjaku gaped, momentarily aghast. “You hacked—how did —”

Perry shrugged. “That’s what you get for not scrutinizing those product reviews before you buy. That comm of yours talks a good game about security, but it’s running encryption that might have stymied my grandmother—if, you know, I had a grandmother.”

I leaned on the table, looming over Onjaku. “Forester, of the Equal Grasp. Casaril, a member of the True Direction. And Yotov, the one I increasingly suspect of being behind it all. Add to that your connections to the League, and you’re suddenly of great value to me, Onjaku. Remember that arrest thing we discussed?

Consider it now —”

It was all I got out before the door burst open and all hell broke loose. FIGURES STORMED INTO THE ROOM. Two of them, in heavy, dark armor, brandishing brutish slug carbines. Behind them came Icky, with a third darkly armored figure holding a slug carbine to the back of her head, and one more behind that. There was no sign of Funboy. Onjaku gave a thin smile. “I beg to differ, Master Tudor. Rather than you arresting me, I’ll be taking my leave of you now.”

I glared right back into his smug gaze. “If you harm one of her wiry blue hairs, I will make it my mission to hunt you down and —”

“And what?

Arrest me?” Onjaku sniffed. “You Peacemakers, with your arrests and trials and jails. All that feel-good nonsense about justice and order, all intended to make you feel like you’ve got some sort of moral high ground. It’s the reason, Tudor, that you will never win.”

One of the goons spoke up. I recognized her as a Thunt, an aggressive race originating from somewhere outside known space. I’d only encountered a handful during my career, and none on the other end of a situation—until now, that is. “We’re walking out of here with our boss, or the sad, fuzzy little prick you call an officer won’t make it. I’ve been around him for ten minutes, and I’m already tired of his mouth.”

“Van, can we just take these guys?

I —”

I held up a hand, cutting her off. My mind raced. I glanced at Dayna, but she’d stayed carefully still and avoided looking back at me. This was The Quiet Room, a bank. There must be umpteen security measures at work right now. Somehow, these people had got past the passive ones, so the active ones must by now be swinging into gear. That meant we were on a clock, all of us. Onjaku and his Thunt mercenaries would know that, so they’d be wanting to get the hell gone. If

we did try to take them on, we might delay —

But Icky was unarmed and had a gun to her head. I had no idea what was happening with Funboy. Dayna was right here and would be in the line of fire. And if these people decided to shoot their way out of here, a lot of innocent people might get hurt. On top of that, they no doubt had hostages, and might even have forces working for them on the inside —

I shook my head at Icky. “Smart move, Tudor,” Onjaku said, turning to leave—but not before wheeling around and slapping Dayna, hard. “That’s for colluding with these people, you traitorous whore.”

He turned to the door, and Torina—and raised his hand again. “And this for being one of these people —”

I surprised everyone, myself included, by sweeping out the Moonsword, lunging forward, and touching the tip to a point on Onjaku’s back between his shoulders. Slug carbines lifted, their muzzles gaping into my face. “I’ll trade you a body for a body,” I snapped. “Lower your hand, shithead. Or, make me the happiest bastard in this room. I’ll string your guts like a party favor, and spit on your corpse.”

Onjaku hesitated, then did just that. Smiling a thin smile at me, he simply walked out of the room. The Thunt backed out after him, their weapons still raised. The one holding his gun on Icky suddenly produced a small pulse weapon and fired it into the back of her neck. She grunted, then toppled forward, slammed me aside, and briefly pinned me against the conference table. In the chaos, the remaining mercenaries withdrew. Icky slid off the table, and me, and crumpled to the floor, knocking aside chairs. I sheathed the Moonsword but drew The Drop. Torina pulled out her slug pistol but only took up a firing position in the door, not making any effort to give chase. And for good reason—a slug pistol against the firepower of those mercenaries was a lost cause from the start. I turned to Dayna. “Are you okay?”

She rubbed her face and nodded. “He hits like a stiff breeze. His kind always do. Okay, we need to get this place stabilized right now. Something has obviously gone very wrong with our security.” She raised her voice. “Protocol Fortress now, authority Jasskin five-eight-six-four.”

As soon as she said it, alarms blared. A second later, a brief, heavy thrum rattled the building. Now it was my turn to talk to the air. “Netty-P, we —”

“Are in trouble, so I’ve gathered. A group of four heavily armed Thunt just attempted to sabotage the Fafnir by placing a charge on the drive bell. I fired a burst from one of the point-defenses to deter them and lifted the Fafnir at the same time. I’m currently two hundred meters up and keeping station. What would you like me to do?”

My gut reaction was to have her shoot down any ship that loaded up with Onjaku and Thunt. She was quite capable of fighting the Fafnir on her own, and none of the other ships we’d seen posed much of a threat —

But I was hit with a burst of better judgment. I shoved aside the desire for vengeance and forced myself to look at the big picture. If the Fafnir took out Onjaku’s ship as it lifted off, The Quiet Room campus and the buildings and people around it stood to be showered with debris—or worse, if the reactor blew or antimatter containment failed. Moreover, Onjaku would be dead. And he was no good to me dead. I knew, now, that he was a window into far more than just the League, so I very much wanted him alive. I probably wasn’t going to get what I wanted today, though. “Take the Fafnir up into orbit and wait there. Don’t engage any other ships unless you have to. But do put every resource you have into tracking Onjaku’s ship as it departs. Capture every scrap of data—hell, I want to be able to find that ship by its smell.”

“Underway,” Netty-P replied. Now I finally turned to Icky. Perry had already checked her. “Squishy medical stuff isn’t my specialty, but I’m detecting a strong heartbeat and good, regular breathing. She’s just out,” he said. I nodded. I’d actually known that already, that she wouldn’t be dead. I turned to Torina at the door —

Just as Funboy appeared. Purplish blood oozed from a wound over one eye, but he seemed otherwise sound. He pushed past Torina, extracting his med-scanner and heading straight for Icky. As he did, he spoke. “The mercenaries have taken down four of The Quiet Room’s guards. Three are injured and one is clearly dead —”

The building shuddered again, and then a second time, and the lights flickered. “Netty-P reports that The Quiet Room’s defenses are active, two mass drivers firing at what’s obviously Onjaku’s departing ship. They returned fire and destroyed one of them,” Perry said. Dayna, who’d been speaking urgently into a comm in the corner and listening to the equally urgent replies, snapped a curse worthy of a longshoreman. “We’ve had a massive failure of our security across the board. None of this should be happening, should even be able to happen —”

“Dayna, you’re dealing with Yotov here. She’s not just some thug looking to rob a bank,” I said. She nodded. “I know. And now we’ve got an entire security system—

hell, a security philosophy that we’re going to have to rebuild from scratch.”

FUNBOY CONFIRMED that Icky was fine, just stunned. She started coming to, even while he was explaining that to us. We helped her sit up, her back against the wall. “Ow. Shit.” She blinked dumbly at Funboy, then roused herself. “Off me, sourpuss. I wanna kill—” She tensed and suddenly tried to thrash her way to her feet. “Pax?

Where’s Pax?

And my kids —?”

I planted my hands on her shoulders and pushed her back down to the floor. “About eleven light-years away, with Zeno and her paramilitary little family all around them. They’re fine. Just sit down, big girl, and rest.”

“Indeed, recline, you beast. Your mate and offspring are in no danger. You, on the other hand, need time to recover,” Funboy said. “How’s her neck?” I asked him. “If by her neck you mean that column of muscle and belligerence, it is fine. She has a localized and superficial burn from the stun effect, and the tissue beneath will be bruised. She is otherwise stable and will be fine. I’m off to help the guards. As I said, one of them is, unfortunately, likely deceased.”

He put away his med-scanner and stood, then paused. “This angers me, Van. Greatly. This was an unconscionable attack in a place replete with unarmed and innocent bystanders. That is—unacceptable,” he said, then headed out to help the wounded guards. I righted a chair Icky had knocked over and slumped into it. “You know, every time something like this happens, some egregious, casually violent

thing that implicates the Guild, it pushes me that much closer to just leaving it.”

Dayna gave me a shocked look. “Van, you can’t be serious. We need you now more than —”

“Oh, don’t worry, Dayna. I’m not talking about packing it in and retiring to drink wine and stare past my toes at some pastoral paradise. Not yet, anyway. I’m talking about the Guild itself. Onjaku is connected to both Casaril and Yotov. So, yeah—more corruption. Add to that the likes of the Tsarina, the Ferals—hell, the whole GKU, and it’s all just a rotten shell teetering toward collapse. We’ve got good people in the Guild, but the Guild itself, as an institution—it’s an affront. An affront to everything we’re supposed to be.”

Torina, who’d holstered her weapon and taken a seat of her own, nodded. “An affront to what we want to be, for sure. What I don’t get is why they didn’t just kill us. They had the chance."

“Kill a Master of the Guild?

That’s a good way to paint a massive target on yourself across known space,” Perry said. “The Ceti Alliance, the Eridani, the Wu’tzur, they’d all be obligated, under the Guild Charter, to join the hunt for the killer. Hell, can you imagine what Schegith would do?

Apocalyptic. Final. And swift.”

“You can bet the Schegith Protectorate would join the chase, too, right down to Haadrake,” Dayna put in. “This is Van we’re talking about. And so would The Quiet Room—although we’re going to be doing that anyway, after this. Our path—determined by me—is going to be far less opaque than before.”

“And if they’d killed any of you guys, it would be just as bad—or worse, because I’d be on their tracks until the day they died, or I did,” I said. I roused myself to stand. Much as I wanted to rant on about the Guild and how it needed to be—I don’t know, changed, rebuilt, maybe even just blown up and replaced with something new—we had work to do. And that started with getting on Onjaku’s trail before it —

“Spindrift,” Perry said. “Onjaku’s ship went to Spindrift. Netty-P fired a salvo of missiles at him as he was breaking orbit. They knocked out two with their point-defenses, one ‘missed’”—he made air quotes with his wingtips—“and one fizzled when it detonated, but it was a tag warhead, and it managed to stick.”

I had to grin. “Way to go, Netty-P!”

A tag missile always fizzled when it detonated, meaning it went off as though the warhead had misfired. The result was low-velocity and not particularly damaging shrapnel—except several pieces of that shrapnel were tags, small devices that could leech nav information from a ship that was about to twist. I looked at the others. “We leave as soon as Netty-P is back. Big girl, you’re —”

“Coming with my crew, is what you were gonna say, right?” she said, clambering to her feet. “I—yes. Absolutely it was.” I turned to Dayna. “I’m ordering some Peacemakers I trust to come and stay on station here, while you sort out your security issues. Perry, put out word to K’losk, Lucky, and Lunzy. Tell them to drop whatever they’re doing and get their butts here asap.”

“On it, boss,” he replied. Dayna looked up from a data pad she was consulting. “Thank you, Van. We’re going to need it. Based on this, half of our systems were compromised. Those bastards shouldn’t have even got off the landing pad with weapons without triggering an alarm.”

I nodded at her. “Chensun.”

She puffed out a sigh and nodded back. “That’s what I’m thinking, yeah. When they were still here, acting as my aide, they would have had access to most of these systems. They could have planted backdoors, hostile programs —”

I nodded. “The kinds of things I used to do in a previous life. Trust me, I’m well aware. You’re going to have to tear down your entire security architecture and rebuild it.” I offered a shrug. “Look on the bright side, though.”

“Oh?

And what would that be?”

“They were forced to trigger all their digital time bombs and things just to extract Onjaku from here. That’s something they could only possibly do once.”

She gave me a hard stare for a moment, then subsided a little. “That’s actually a good point. They could have done this in a way that did a lot more damage.”

“But they did enough. That guard who was killed?

We’ll fund the family, whatever they need.”

She frowned. “The Guild will?”

“Nope. The Fafnir. Me. Whatever they need, okay?”

Dayna actually smiled, but it was a fugitive thing subsumed by the sadness of reality. She turned back to her own damage control. I turned to my own people. “Okay, let’s hit it. We’ll prep weapons and a plan on the way.”

“The plan is we’re gonna shoot and smash stuff until it goes still. I’m as pissed as all get out,” Icky growled. Funboy, who’d returned with a bandage on his own wound, blinked up at her hulking blue form. “It seems her head wound has induced poor grammar. May I suggest —”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Just let her go full redneck, Funboy. Come on, kids. We’ve got work to do.”

Funboy sighed as he fell in behind us. “Fine then. Yee. Haw.”

14

WE LEFT The Quiet Room to sort out the chaotic aftermath of the raid on their campus and accelerated hard for a twist point. We were only about forty minutes behind Onjaku, whose ship turned out to be the class 8 we’d seen sitting on the pad. Netty-P did her homework and revealed it was called the Edge of Night, a former Eridani navy patrol cutter that had been phased out of service as an obsolete design. Onjaku had obviously acquired it surplus, layered on some armor and weapons, and stuffed it full of Thunt mercenaries. It was too bad The Quiet Room was located on one of the moons of Outward, Procyon’s most, well, outward inhabited system. The flight time to a twist point was pretty short. If Onjaku had to travel from deeper in the system, it would have taken him that much longer to get out of the star’s gravity well. Then, we could have used the combi-drive to overtake him—

at great risk to our operational security, in my opinion, and —

And that was the problem. The Fafnir could easily have beaten the Edge of Night into submission. But, again, Onjaku was no good to me dead. We’d have had to board her to take him alive, which would have put us up against at least eight to ten heavily armed, highly skilled and utterly remorseless Thunt mercenaries. With Rab and Gabby gone, that made our odds at best one to two. As much as I wanted to get Onjaku into a chair in an interrogation room, I wasn’t prepared to lead my crew into a fight that lopsided to accomplish it. Which meant we faced the same problem at Spindrift—or worse, if Onjaku met up with friends there. Which meant we were going to have to bide our time —

I sat up. “Netty-P, call up Droox on the Prowler. We’ve got a sneaky little surveillance ship, let’s use it.”

It took less than a minute to get the laconic Droox on the comm. “Master Tudor,” she acknowledged, bowing her head a little. “Droox, do you have any experience tailing a particular ship?”

She gave me a stare—a blank one, the kind of stare a cat suddenly gives a random spot on the wall. I took it for her being thoughtful, though. “I have, three times, while working for Petyr Groshenko. I would note, however, that as capable a ship as the Prowler is, she has no means to track a ship through twists.”

“That’s fine. We have a very high value target I want to ensure I keep eyes on. Netty-P is sending all of the relevant data, drive signatures, that sort of thing. We’ve also got it tagged, so you’ll be able to follow it as it twists, as well.”

“For the next week or so, anyway, until the tag’s power cell runs down,”

Netty-P added. “That’ll have to do,” I said. “The ship is currently at the Spindrift system. I have no idea how long it’s going to stay there —”

“I can twist to Spindrift immediately, acquire the target, and begin shadowing it,” Droox said. I nodded. “Okay. Just be aware, Droox, that these are—let’s call them exceptionally bad people. So be careful.”

“I always am. And there is usually little reason to shadow very good people. One of those I tailed for Groshenko was a dissident from Unity seeking to acquire weapons and other aid for their cause—a cause that had already seen the brutal deaths of hundreds of people.”

She said it as though she was describing a guy who’d gone to the store for milk. Droox made Funboy seem positively bubbly. I nodded again. “Okay, get moving. We’ll be showing up at Spindrift, too. Just keep your focus on the Edge of Night.”

“Understood. Prowler out.”

“She’s a hoot,” Perry said. “Hey, maybe she’ll base some of the characters in her books on us. I’ll be the pretty one,” Icky said, staring around the cockpit in a way that dared

anyone to oppose her. She ended her glare on Perry. “Pretty, right,” he said. “Pretty —”

I pinched his beak closed. “Don’t, bird. We’ve got enough conflict on the go.”

JUST BEFORE WE twisted to Spindrift, we got yet another priority call from Anvil Dark. There’d been another raid on a twist-comm facility, this time in Eridani space. It was close to the border with the Seven Stars League, though, and only four light-years from Null World, the homeworld of the Schegith. “Okay, so this time, the Eridani are taking the lead in the investigation,”

I told the crew, as I read the missive from Anvil Dark. “They’ve asked for Guild assistance, so Volffin is going since he was apparently on Null World anyway.”

I turned to Perry. “They’ve also asked if we have any updates to our case file on the first raid. You’ve filed everything we’ve got so far, right?”

“Yup. Everything, that is, except any references to Onjaku—although this new raid happened while he was stuck at Procyon, so if he was involved, it wasn’t directly.”

I thought about that for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. Let’s keep his name out of it for now. If we flag him, then the Eridani are going to put him on a wanted list and that might just end up spooking him even more.”

I scrolled through the imagery that the Eridani authorities had sent to Anvil Dark. It was just as brutal an attack as the first, but with a twist—pun intended. There’d been no casualties, just damage to the facility. There’d been no one there, which raised an immediate question, one voiced by Torina. “After the first attack, everyone said that they were going to deploy assets to watch over the twist relays in their territory. Where the hell were the Eridani, sleeping when this one got attacked?”

“A very good question,” I agreed. “Also, note what we don’t see in these images.”

“No evidence that the attackers used Flare Mines, as they did the first time,” Funboy said. “Exactly. But the physical damage to the facility is just as bad, if not worse.” I sat back. “So that gives us a conundrum. The first attack seemed to be an assassination, focused on killing those people we still haven’t identified. This one seems to have been designed to just destroy the relay. So was the relay more than an incidental target the first time?

Is this second attack supposed to create the impression it was?

But if so, why didn’t they use Flare Mines here, too?”

“Maybe they thought there were people there, whom they intended to target, but once they attacked realized there weren’t. In that case, why waste the Flare Mines, which aren’t exactly an easy weapon to acquire?” Netty-P

suggested. “Gotta be honest, boss, this feels different. There’s an intent here. A calculation. This is meant to achieve something, but I don’t think we’re seeing what it is. We’re still missing some pieces.”

Icky, who was gobbling down stavosia, swallowed with an audible gulp. We all turned to her. “What?

I was wounded, I need to eat to recover my strength,” she said. I smirked. “Uh-huh.”

“Anyway, how much more intent do they need?

They’re already murderers. What more could they want to, uh, be?”

Torina raised an elegant finger. “That raises another point. We’re assuming this was the same people. Maybe it’s not.”

I turned to Perry. “What do you think?

Even without the mines, do you think this was the same perps?”

“I’d say yes. The lack of mines is the only difference. The types of weapons used are the same in both cases, based on the patterns of damage I see. I think I can even make a call now.”

“A call?”

“Yeah. Thanks to Onjaku and his bargain-bin comm encryption, we now know that the Equal Grasp, the True Direction, the League and Yotov are all linked. The Equal Grasp isn’t just trying to open the gates to Earth so they can pillage it for some rare metals or something. We need to think a lot bigger.”

“And a lot more evil,” Torina added. Perry pointed a wing at her. “See, the pretty lady —”

“Second prettiest lady,” Icky said. Torina glanced at Icky and they exchanged grins. Perry nodded. “Okay, the second prettiest lady gets it.”

Torina shrugged. “Seems logical. We’ve been putting out fires when we should be making it rain. It’s not you, or us, Van. We’re doing everything we can to secure some kind of peace. But these people—these wannabe empires—they’re too big for us to shift on our own. And that means we have to change, to adapt.”

“Hey, I’m glad one of us is smart. I just want to punch things.”

Icky laughed and pounded the arm of her seat. “My man!”

I smiled back at her, but it collapsed into a grimace. “Unfortunately, punching only takes out one target at a time. Torina and the bird are both right. We’ve been treating these as individual cases, because that’s what we do. But this is bigger. A lot bigger. So we need to scale up our thinking here

—and then find the resources to match.”

It all sounded good in principle, but it still left us all kind of musing and shrugging. And despite all the “big picture” talk, it also left us all with the uncomfortable feeling that someone might—whether as a primary objective, or a secondary one—be trying to do something very specific. They seemed to be trying to isolate a big chunk of the League and the Schegith from the twist-comm network. That could easily destabilize the former, or destabilize it even more. And it could be the prelude to some sort of action against the latter. I had Netty-P put the remaining twist relays in that region on the display’s star chart. There were three—two more in Eridani space, and one in the League’s. “Netty-P, how many of these three would have to go to completely break down the network out here,” I asked her, circling my finger over a broad swath of territory. “As long as one remains operational, twist comms will continue to function. There might be delays, though, with all the traffic going through one relay. If all three go down, then the only alternative will be to use ship-based systems. Those are a lot less efficient, though, than fixed stations. They consume more anti-matter per unit of distance, while having shorter ranges and less bandwidth overall.”

“Okay. Perry, send a message back to Anvil Dark, with a copy to Volffin, over my signature. The Eridani must protect the two relays in their territory, and do it immediately. Because if they don’t, then I will—and I’ll be sending the bill to them.”

WE WERE STILL BROODING over the motivations and objectives for the raids when we twisted to Spindrift. There were fourteen ships in transit, entering or leaving the system, which wasn’t surprising. Spindrift was a busy hub. There was no evidence of the Prowler, which should be here by now—

which was the point. I was about to ask Netty-P to start analyzing the signatures of the various ships, looking for the Edge of Night. It was entirely possible that Onjaku had twisted here, then immediately twisted somewhere else. Even if he hadn’t detected our tag on his ship, that wasn’t an uncommon practice among people that had reason to not be found. It might cost a bunch of extra fuel, but if it meant not getting caught, it could be worth it. Before I could, though, Netty-P spoke to me. “Van, I have an incoming comm for you, on the Masters’ priority channel. It’s Yotov.”

Silence stretched, gravid and festering. I looked at the others, greeted by stares of anger, hostility—surprise. “Yotov. Huh. Don’t suppose she helpfully provided her location in the metadata to her message, huh?”

“I can trace it back as far as a twist-comm relay station at Wolf 424.

But if she’s aboard a ship, and I strongly suspect she is, then its location data is suspect to begin with. It’s probably spoofed.”

“Yeah, I’d almost be—I don’t know, disappointed, if she made it that easy. Well, this should be interesting. Netty-P, put her on, please,” I said to her. The display lit with the sallow, impassive face of Yotov, former Master of the Guild. I’d forgotten how much I disliked her. I’d faced that damnably flat, aloof countenance of hers often enough, and never under pleasant circumstances. Well, except for taking her into custody, that is. “Yotov, my dear. To what do I owe the displeasure?”

Her voice was no different, either. Her tone was calm, unhurried, eminently rational, and entirely reasonable. The jury was still out whether Ligurites, particularly the females, had some latent psychic ability to enhance their words, or if they were just very skillful orators. It might be both, but if the former were true, it seemed to work across a comm as well. That would be quite a feat—psychic powers that could propagate across a twist-comm call. “Master Tudor,” she said, inclining her head slightly. “I never had the chance to congratulate you on your new position with the Guild. Although I’m sure it means little to you, I always believed that you would ascend to Master. You have a spark that your grandfather lacked.”

I smiled without mirth and shook my head. She managed to praise me, congratulate me and insult my family all in one, smooth motion. “I would love to chat and get caught up,” I said. “Why don’t we meet over coffee somewhere?”

“Oh, I’m afraid I’m far too busy for personal visits. I have many, many things to do.”

“Are any of them non-criminal in nature?”

“Many of them, yes.”

I shook my head again. “What do you want?”

“I’m giving you an opportunity for a negotiated peace.”

“For any conflict in particular?”

“All of them.”

“Uh-huh. Well, since negotiated implies give and take, what will I have to give up?”

“Very little. We want access to Earth and will have it regardless of your efforts to prevent it. In fact, those efforts—while admittedly causing us some friction—are putting Earth at greater risk than just allowing us to open trade. It will be better for the people of Earth, as they’ll gain access to the technology of known space.” She cocked her head. “In fact, it seems odd that you’re so determined to prevent that. Is there some reason you wish to hold Earth back?

Could it be that you have made your identity an earnest, noble protector of humanity, and that having that same humanity join the community of known space would deprive you of that role?” She cocked her head the other way. “Or is it something deeper?

Do you have, maybe, designs on becoming a sort of ruler of Earth yourself—even if only a nominal one?”

A part of me was impressed. She really could make the most inane bullshit sound like something worth considering. But the bigger part of me just laughed. “I haven’t seen this much stretching since the last Fantastic Four movie. Tell me, do you bad guys all have to take a course or something, one

that teaches you that everyone thinks the same way you do?”

Yotov’s faint, supercilious smile flicked off. “I am making you a good faith offer here, Tudor. You can choose it, the easy way, or choose the fatal way instead.”

“Aaaand there it is, the threat. I was wondering how long it would take to show up.”

Yotov shrugged. “It is just another aspect of negotiation. You see, you’re… annoyingly good. You’re noble, and honest, and many other inconvenient things. But, in this case, you are wrong. Earth deserves to be elevated, to be made part of the community of known space. You are in the way. And I do not believe that one man should dictate the course of affairs for an entire planet.”

I shook my head. “You know, if I actually believed you, I’d be all for it. I agree that Earth has to become part of the known space community, as you put it. That bell’s been rung. What I disagree with is the idea that you should be the one leading the effort. Someone does, sure.” I leaned into the image. “I don’t believe one disgraced former Master should dictate the course of affairs for an entire planet—especially when that planet is my home.”

She stared primly at me for a moment, then nodded. “Very well. The fatal way it is, then,” she said and closed the channel. A heartbeat later, the threat alarms rang out their dire warnings. 15

“MISSILES INBOUND, MY SHIP,” Netty-P said, and immediately started gyrating the Fafnir through a torturous series of skids, jinks, and rolls. At the same time, the point defenses opened up in silent fury. Netty-P had been right to assume control. It took us mere mortals a couple of seconds to take in the situation before we could even begin reacting. A fat, plodding class 15 freighter had popped open a cargo hold, revealing a missile battery that immediately spewed out ordnance. The ship’s transponder data had matched her hull type and other data, so Netty-P

hadn’t flagged her—which meant that until the instant she bared her fangs, we had no reason to believe she was anything other than what she appeared to be. It meant the missiles had been launched from a damned short range, giving us little time to react. Netty-P’s swift decision had probably just saved the Fafnir and all of us aboard her. The point-defenses knocked down four of the eight missiles that had been launched. Torina, who’d prudently brought the Fafnir’s other weapons online and put them in standby mode, was able to shoot down two more. That still left two missiles boring in, both of them looking as though they were going to fly right into my face. I gritted my teeth and tensed, anticipating the detonations —

Which never came. Instead, one of the missiles abruptly veered and flashed past the Fafnir, heading for points unknown. The other simply cut

out its drive and coasted. Netty-P pitched the ship’s nose up and the thing sailed majestically past, missing us by maybe a hundred meters. I stared in wonder. Hell, we all did—for a second. We didn’t have time to marvel, because more of the ambush was unfolding. A ship appeared from behind the missile-laden freighter, having apparently been tucked in on its far side from us, in our blind spot. It was the Edge of Night. At the same time, an unremarkable class 9 cargo courier accelerated toward us, lighting us up with fire control scanners. “Van, I’m assuming we’re shoot to kill,” Torina said, not waiting for my answer. She was already firing, pouring laser and plasma-burst cannon fire into the freighter. Funboy had taken over the mass-drivers and the particle cannon and flung their fire into the mix. I shot her a quick, wry glance. “Little late for me to say no, isn’t it?”

She didn’t answer and just kept up her deadly work. Icky was on her feet, grabbing at her helmet. “The ship’s depressurizing. Put on your fancy hats, everyone!” she said, then hurried aft, heading for her damage-control station. “Swing to kill, everyone!”

I turned to Perry. “Have we got any allies handy?”

“Well, there was a burst of modulated, high-intensity emissions from out thataway”—he flung out a wing—“that jammed the hell out of the missiles. I’m assuming that was the Prowler. But since she’s got the scanner cross section of a bagel, I can’t confirm and don’t know if she’s even still there—Droox told me Groshenko’s SOP was, if she ever took an active part in a battle, she’d immediately scram. We never changed that.”

My ears were popping, ice picks starting to jab me behind the eyes as the interior pressure dropped. I snapped my helmet into place, and Perry went on in my earphones. “There’s also a Peacemaker about five light-minutes further into the system. She’s a Fren-Okun named Mivin who I don’t know. I sent her a comm message, but she hasn’t responded.”

I grunted an acknowledgement and turned back to the battle. The bombardment Torina and Funboy had unleashed on the freighter had quickly pounded it into a derelict wreck. And a good thing, too, because a second cargo hold had opened, revealing a second missile launcher just in time for a salvo of mass-driver slugs to reduce it to scrap. Something, providence maybe, had caused the hold doors to jam or some such fault to

occur. Had it been able to fire both launchers, we’d have faced sixteen missiles, not eight. Our defenses would have been overwhelmed and I had no idea if the Prowler’s electronic warfare chops would have been enough to stop them all. We were taking hits from the Edge of Night and the class 9, though. A mass-driver slug from the former punched through us amidships, just forward of the crew lounge. Our remaining air puffed away, but it was a breeze, not the destructive hurricane of an explosive decompression. REAB

modules on the port-side detonated like fireworks, then damage warnings flared. Ablative armor boiled away as a potent laser weapon scoured the Fafnir’s flank. “That 9’s mounting an Invictus battery—high-end military grade,”

Netty-P said. “I’m —”

The deluge of laser energy abruptly cut off, then the 9 vanished into a shimmering cloud of scanner confusion. “Hey, they fired glitter—chaff. I was just going to do that, they stole my idea,” Netty-P said. “Those Invictus batteries have long recuperation times—they get hot as hell,” Perry said. “He’s burned himself while he cycles through a cooldown.”

The Edge of Night kept up her bombardment. We lost a thruster array. The primary comm rig blew apart. One of our radiator assemblies flew to pieces. We took structural damage. But we gave it back, too. Torina and Funboy landed hits back on the Edge of Night, sending debris whirling off starward. They must have hit at least one of her batteries because her fire suddenly slackened. “Torina, do not destroy that ship. We need Onjaku alive,” I said. I’d taken control of the ship from Netty-P now, letting her concentrate on running the ship’s systems and helping Icky with damage control. But the Edge of Night was already repositioning herself, putting the stricken freighter between us and her, using it as a shield. The class 9 wasn’t out of the fight. From the cloud of chaff emerged a swarm of two dozen tiny missiles. They raced in en masse, the point-defenses doing their best to stop them. But they were almost out of ammo and the little projectiles were damned elusive targets. Torina and Funboy focused their attention on them, but despite their best efforts, almost half of the things managed to close and detonate all around us. Their blasts were only a fraction of a normal missile warhead, but they made up for it in numbers. The Fafnir was pummeled by a blizzard of shrapnel. A lot of it just gouged chunks out of armor, but we had at least a dozen small penetrating hits, including two that punched through the canopy. A swath of the instrument panel went dark. One neatly snipped off one of Netty-P’s manipulators. Another tore through Icky’s chair. Torina yelped and cursed as one sliced a furrow through her right thigh, the wound vanishing in a flood of sealing foam from her b-suit. The Fafnir was now almost as damaged as I’d ever seen her. I considered the combi-drive, but its panel was one of those smashed and dark, so I had no idea of its status. I pushed her hard through a lateral burn, slewing the ship to keep her badly damaged port side away from the bad guys. “Netty-P, we need to twist —”

A new icon flared to life on the tactical overlay. I started to curse, but a label popped up beside it— Stormshadow. Valint’s ship hung motionless for a moment, presumably taking in the situation, then she opened up on the chaff cloud concealing the class 9, just as it started to accelerate out of it. Its Invictus battery was presumably ready to fire again, but before it could, Valint’s fire slammed into it, pounding chunks out of it. Funboy followed up with two of our own missiles, which streaked unmolested toward it. Torina uttered a fierce—something, some sort of exclamation, and her fingers danced over controls. It took me a second to realize what she was shooting at. It was the Edge of Night, which had reappeared and resumed shooting. We took two more solid laser hits, but Torina took her time, lined up her shot carefully, then fired. With nearly surgical precision, she neatly blew the Edge of Night’s drive bell apart. The ship lost power, and at the worst possible moment, her momentum carrying her clear of the freighter and leaving her in full, powerless view. “Gotcha, you miserable bastard,” Torina crowed. Both of our missiles hit the class 9 at the same time as a salvo of mass-driver slugs from Valint’s ship. The writing was on the wall for her, and it said BOOM as she blew apart and vanished in a dazzling pulse of plasma. And that was that. I checked the overlay and saw nothing but ships fleeing the scene of the battle, the derelict freighter, the equally derelict Edge of Night, and the Stormshadow. I called Valint’s ship. When she came on, I gave her a heartfelt smile. “Thanks, gra —”

She scowled. “Ma’am,” I corrected. “Glad you showed up. Things were getting dicey there, especially with those adorable little missiles that class 9 shot at us.”

Valint nodded. “They’re from a manufacturer called Legion. Annoying, but in large enough numbers, they can be lethal. And they’re damned hard to stop since they’re about as long as my arm. How badly damaged are you?”

I glanced around the cockpit, all punctures and dead instruments. The status board, still active, seemed to have been a fresh coat of red paint. “Icky, what’s the verdict?”

“I’ll let you know once I find a system that is still working properly,”

she growled. I turned back to Valint. “Bad enough. But we’ve got power, and we can still maneuver.” I cocked my head at her. “So, did you just happen to be passing by?”

She gave a thin smile. “No, actually, it was Dayna Jasskin who sent me. Seems a Peacemaker named Mivin put in a call to her, telling her that a ship you were tracking had just shown up at Spindrift. I gather that she’s just been through an, ah, incident, so she was already on high alert. She thought it was strange that this random Peacemaker she doesn’t know called her with this information. She knew you were on your way to Spindrift already, so she asked me to pop in and make sure you weren’t in trouble.”

“And lo and behold, we were.” I turned to Perry. “This Mivin—how could she have known we were at Procyon?

And that we were looking for the Edge of Night?”

“Well, I did file an alert with the Guild, with all the requisite data about Onjaku’s ship, per Guild policy. And I did specify that we could be contacted in the Procyon system, via The Quiet Room. I was about to update that when Yotov called, and then there was the shooting and the explosions and stuff —”

Funboy had come forward to check Torina’s leg. She peered at me while he worked, her face tight with pain. “You sound suspicious of Peacemaker Mivin, Van.”

I sank back in my seat. “This was clearly a setup,” I said, waving my hands around. “An ambush. But an ambush only works if your target

bumbles into it, and Yotov and Onjaku had no way of knowing that Netty-P

was going to tag his ship. They needed some way of drawing us here—and a helpful Peacemaker telling us she’d spotted the Edge of Night would do nicely.”

“So after not killing us at The Quiet Room, they instead kill us out here.”

Funboy looked up. “Killing us at The Quiet Room would have incontrovertibly been murder of a Guild Master and members of his crew. The cost of that would dramatically outweigh the benefits. But killing us out here, on the edge of the Spindrift system in a space battle —”

“They could spin that however they wanted. Blamed it on pirates or something,” Torina said. I answered. “Exactly. Which means we were saved by a wonky cargo hatch on that freighter, the Prowler, and Dayna’s suspicions sending Valint to help us. In other words, we got lucky.”

“Whatever works,” Valint said, shrugging. “I’d love to say that I’ve escaped every bad situation through my own skill, cunning, and ethereal good looks, but I’ve had my share of lucky breaks.”

“The wound is minor,” Funboy finally said. “A shallow injury that penetrated into the upper layers of muscle. When we can reach a place that can be pressurized”—he glanced significantly around at the perforated cockpit—“I can properly treat and bandage it. The sealing foam will suffice in the meantime.”

“Superficial my ass—you should feel it from this side,” Torina snapped. Netty-P lifted her truncated manipulator. “I have an ow-ee as well.”

Funboy blinked at her. “I am a physician, not a mechanic.”

Torina nodded in the direction of the Edge of Night. “What about them?

Are we going to try and board her?”

I thought about the cohort of Thunt mercenaries aboard her, most or even all of them likely still fit to fight. I shook my head. “No. I’ve got a better idea. One I’m gonna borrow from the repertoire of Alexander the Great.”

“BIT OF A STRETCH, Van, don’t you think?

Comparing this to the Siege of Tyre?” Perry asked. I shrugged. “It was the first siege that came to mind, mainly because of a video game I played. It’s the idea that counts, though, right?”

In 332 BC, Alexander the Great laid siege to Tyre, in present-day Lebanon, after he failed to take the city by direct attack. The whole affair lasted nine months, with Alexander emerging victorious. That was the idea here, but preferably with less dysentery and bitching. “A siege. That’s some kind of battle, right?” Icky asked. She’d been working nonstop on damage control as we’d made the flight in to Spindrift, and had only now found time for a break. “It is, but one that ends when one side runs out of snacks,” I replied, as we prepared to dock the battered Fafnir at Spindrift. “Savage. I know when I get hungry —”

“Hangry. You get hangry,” Perry said. “The bird ain’t wrong. So, when does this, uh, siege start?”

I smiled and gestured toward the Edge of Night, which was sitting motionless in space a few tens of klicks away. “It already has. I am not anxious to try and board a ship full of armed mercenaries. So, we’re going to sit in chairs, drink and eat, and wait them out. Then, when they open the door, we’re going to paddle that ass.”

Torina raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t realize it would be a spicy siege.”

Icky groaned. “Can I make a snack run while you two flirt?

I mean, my husband’s light-years away, so I ain’t gettin’ any.”

I nodded. “Sure. Take Netty-P and Funboy. And have some weapons ready. This is Spindrift, after all. Get food and drinks and stuff on the ship’s account.”

Funboy gave a grave nod behind his visor. “I approve of this plan. Now, where are my boot covers?

This is Spindrift, after all.”

So we were only besieging a class 8 ship, towing it to the vicinity of Spindrift and then waiting. With her drive bell shattered, the Edge of Night couldn’t use her main propulsion, and that deep in the system’s gravity well she couldn’t twist away, either. All she had was thrusters, and it would take more than the lifetime of anyone aboard her just to reach the edge of the Spindrift system using nothing but their limited thrust, not to mention reaction propellant. Their reactor was running, though, so they had power and could recycle the ship’s air and water for weeks if the systems were in decent shape. What she carried in only a limited supply, though, was food. Most ships only carried a week’s worth or so, only stocking more if they anticipated a long flight. I didn’t think it would take even that long for those aboard her to realize just how stuck they were—or I hoped so, anyway. I was prepared to spend a couple of days here, maybe three, and then hand the siege over to someone else I trusted—probably Lucky and K’losk, who’d both volunteered their services. Valint had done the tow, her undamaged Stormshadow much more suited to it than my poor beaten-up Fafnir. Once she’d dropped off the Edge of Night, she’d taken her leave of us, off to do—something, somewhere. She might be my grandmother, but she wasn’t very forthcoming with her plans. Anyway, a couple of days here was fine. The Fafnir now needed some serious repair time in drydock—that is, a pressurized maintenance hangar. Icky and Netty-P, assisted by the rest of us, did what they could here at Spindrift. We got all of the weapons back online, along with the combi-drive. But we were still working with degraded scanners and comms, had power cables snaking through the crew lounge to bypass damage, and couldn’t keep the ship reliably pressurized. There was also some structural damage on her ravaged port side that Icky didn’t like. “I’d say no more than fifty percent of max acceleration—seventy-five in emergencies. But more than that and we’re asking for some serious, not to mention really expensive repairs to her basic structure,” she said. So we could fly, we just had to do it carefully and stay suited up while we did. But at least we could fly, unlike certain other ships I was fully intent on starving out. 16

NINE HOURS into our epic siege, not much had changed. It wasn’t as exciting as Sauron’s attack on Gondor in The Lord of the Rings, that’s for sure. We mostly just sat, watched the unchanging icon that was the Edge of Night on the tactical overlay, and puttered. Icky finally got enough patching done that we could pressurize the ship, though there were still slow leaks that would necessitate us topping up on air every couple of days or so. The others helped out Icky while I sat with Perry, getting caught up on paperwork. I also brought Alic up to date on what had transpired, ensuring that all of the data we’d collected as evidence along the way was duplicated back on Anvil Dark. As we slid into the tenth hour, though, something happened. The Edge of Night fired her thrusters and began to slide away from Spindrift. “Oh, no, they’re very slowly getting away,” Perry said. I followed him into the Fafnir’s cockpit, summoned by Netty-P’s alert. I looked at the overlay, then turned a questioning frown on Netty-P. “What do you think they’re doing?”

“Well, they may have a plan to escape at about a quarter- g of acceleration, which they can probably sustain for about fifteen minutes before they’re out of propellant. If so, you might want to put something in your will about your children intercepting them sometime during their lifetimes—which won’t be hard, because they’ll never even get close to this system’s escape velocity and will just end up in much the same orbit around the star that they are now.”

I smiled. “Or?”

“Or, they may have some reason to put some distance between them and Spindrift itself. Emissions from the station can interfere with comms, if they have a directional component to them.”

“Like a comm beam.”

“That’s right.”

I slid into the pilot’s seat. “Okay. Netty-P, let’s take a closer look at regions of space they might be trying to unblock so they can set up directional comms of some sort. I want to see if there’s anything out there.”

“To do that, we’ll need to put some distance between us and Spindrift as well. And we are relying on our auxiliary scanner array, which has taken some damage, so we’re nowhere near peak scanner efficiency.”

I glanced back. Everyone was on board, we’d reprovisioned, replenished our primary and reserve air supplies, and were as repaired as we were going to get outside of drydock. “Right. Let’s undock, clear Spindrift and see what we can see.”

WHAT WE SAW WAS NOT MUCH. What worried me was how much “not much” we were seeing. “Holy crap, the scanners suck, don’t they?” I grouched, staring at the overlay. Within what was a typical tactical range of the Fafnir—the maximum effective range of missiles—scanner coverage was decent. Beyond that, though, it rapidly degraded, leaving us largely blind to anything more than a few light-seconds away. We could detect large objects like planets—but I could use a telescope, or even a good pair of binoculars to do that. I turned to Perry. “We need to get the Frankie’s scanners in action. She’s all yours, bird.”

He saluted with a wing. “Roger wilco, over and out, boss.”

While Perry went aft to fire up the Frankie, Netty-P spoke up. “Van, the Edge of Night just sent a comm message, a burst transmission, encrypted with some high-end stuff. I’m working on decrypting it, but all I can say for sure is that we’ve seen similar crypto used by the Equal Grasp.”

“Color me shocked.”

I scowled at the overlay. Our drama had disrupted the usual flow of traffic around Spindrift, but that was then. Things had returned to normal, the pressures of schedules and delivery deadlines pushing the endless to and fro of ships in the system back into regular patterns. The Spindrift traffic control overview showed eleven ships inbound and eight outbound, with nine more at dock, not counting us and the Edge of Night. I’d invoked Guild law enforcement privileges, which gave us traffic pattern priority, but we weren’t going anywhere, so it just gave us a volume of clear space near the station to do our thing. Our scanners, though, only properly registered about half of the ships moving around the system—those relatively close by. The rest were either flickering scanner ghosts, or just invisible to us altogether. A situation that was pushing me uncomfortably close to the edge of my seat. The Edge of Night had sent its burst transmission to someone, and since it wasn’t a twist-comm message it had to be someone already in the system. “Perry, what’s your status?”

“Just finished preflight, launching now.”

A couple of soft thuds shuddered the Fafnir as the Frankie undocked. A few seconds later, Netty-P spoke up again. “Van, there’s been another burst transmission. This one originated from somewhere else in the system—see the overlay.” A line appeared, extending away from the Fafnir at the center of the overlay, almost straight down relative to the system’s ecliptic, to infinity. It was just a direction because our shitty scanners couldn’t resolve a source. I shook my head. “This has sketchy as hell written all over it. Crew, rig for battle,” I said, checking to ensure I was properly strapped in and reaching for my helmet. The rest of the crew did likewise, except for Icky, who once more headed aft. Netty-P started depressurizing the ship. Torina and Funboy sang out their respective weapons’ status as they brought them online, a verbal confirmation of which ones they each controlled. Once my helmet was locked in place, I turned to Netty-P. “Bring the combi-drive up to ready status. I’m not screwing around this time. If we do end up in a fight, we’re doing it as unfairly as we can.”

“On it.”

“Perry, we need those scanners —”

“You’ve got ’em,” he replied. Even as he said, a slew of new data populated the overlay. The Frankie’s scanners were far less capable than the Fafnir’s, their resolution quickly falling off with increasing range. But they were better than what the Fafnir had currently. It took me a moment to register it among the many icons representing in- and outbound ships in the traffic pattern. Three of the inbound ships were accelerating, breaking out of the pattern’s stately progression and heading straight for the station—and us. LAUNCHING the Frankie must have poked whoever they were, because they were burning hard, boring in, and ignoring Spindrifts increasingly dire warnings about breaking the traffic pattern. The station was armed, capable of defending itself, but I wasn’t keen on fighting a battle in the space immediately surrounding it. Stray weapons fire, mass-driver rounds, missile shrapnel and debris could inflict serious damage on it regardless. And then there were the numerous ships at dock, about to dock, or just departing. I moved the Fafnir away from Spindrift while the station ratcheted itself up its alert scale. I wanted to position her so that if we were shot at, incoming fire that missed us would just carry on into the void. We’d have to be more careful about our own fire, but I had an idea about that. In the meantime, though —

“Netty-P, we need help here. Put out a call. Pull any nearby Peacemakers off whatever they’re doing, my authority.” I turned back to the overlay but was cursing myself for letting proximity to Spindrift make me complacent. I should have had allies already here. The three ships—two class 8s, both fast cargo couriers, and a class 9

express freighter, kept up their headlong rush toward us. Their transponder data declared them all to be nothing but unremarkable commercial vessels, but they sure as hell weren’t behaving like it. That became clear when two of them opened fire, military-grade lasers at long range. Both shots missed. Torina turned to me. “I’ve got firing solutions, Van, but there are at least three other ships damned close to our line of fire —”

“Let’s fix that, shall we?

Perry, you okay on your own here?”

“I’ve got the guns of Spindrift covering me, Van. That’s the firepower of a battlecruiser, at least. Go, have fun,” he replied. “On the way,” I said, tapping at the controls for the combi-drive. I selected one of the three ships, then activated it. The Fafnir vanished into her own little universe, a flight through unreality that lasted about ten seconds. A wrenching wave of disorientation hit me going both in and out of the short flight, but I was ready for it. The overlay repopulated, notably with one of the three subject ships not only at point-blank range but positioned so that our fire wouldn’t hit anything else. I turned to Torina and Funboy. “Your show —”

They were already firing, taking my unfair comment to heart. They didn’t leave anything to chance, loosing a brief fusillade of fire from everything but the missiles. I’d seen what the Fafnir’s broadside could do, watched it unfold when I’d destroyed Dohlennz’s abandoned house of horrors. The ship just came apart—one instant intact, the next a cloud of tumbling debris, slowly starting to disperse. The other two ships immediately opened fire on us, though. Blasts of laser energy slammed into the Fafnir, detonating a few more of our remaining REAB modules and ablating armor into shimmering vapor. I heard Icky cursing as the starboard power bus failed, because a few systems hadn’t properly shifted to the redundant port bus. We briefly lost comms. A few non-critical systems went offline, as did one of the point-defense batteries. I cursed, too. My poor ship was already in rough shape. But I was already tapping at the combi-drive controls. Torina was returning fire as best she could, then sat back as Netty-P fired the glitter caster, enveloping us in chaff. The incoming laser fire abated. “Van, given what Groshenko did to the Tsarina’s ship when it used—”

Funboy started, but I cut him off. “Well aware, Funboy. I’m playing the odds here,” I replied, still tapping at the controls. The degraded scanners put a degree of uncertainty into my inputs that probably should have bothered me—a lot. But right now, the Fafnir was driven as much by risk as she was by fusion power. The combi-drive lit, and we once more lurched into the cheatin’ realm of voodoo physics. We emerged and again had to wait a few seconds for the scanners to realize that the universe had suddenly changed and get caught up again. When they did, they showed that the two remaining ships had

launched a spread of missiles at Spindrift, all the ships there, the Frankie, the Edge of Night, or some combination thereof. I cursed a blue streak and told Torina and Funboy to fire. They did and a second attacking ship turned to alloy confetti. The third one abruptly spun on her axis and burned hard, elliptically straight down, making a run for it. My hand immediately went to the combi-drive controls to finish it off before it could escape, but my fingers stopped short. I swore some more and then punched at the controls, sending us combi-driving right back to where we started. As the timer ticked down to our return to reality, I turned to Torina and Funboy. “We need to stop those missiles—priority to the ones targeting Spindrift and any innocent ships.”

I got two thumbs up. As soon as we popped back into existence and they had firing solutions, they opened up. The station’s point-defenses were already firing, as were the Frankie’s and those on a few of the ships now frantically maneuvering near the station. Our own working point-defense battery joined in. The AIs controlling all of these weapons did their best to avoid friendly fire, but space was suddenly alive with streaks of tracers, like the most spectacular meteor shower ever. Of the sixteen missiles fired by the two ships, only three survived to detonate. One exploded a few klicks away from the station, shrapnel peppering it and a docked passenger ship. The other two, though, reached the target assigned the lowest priority for protection by—anyone, really. That was the Edge of Night. One missile detonated about a klick away, but the other was a direct hit. Her fusion containment went, and she vanished in a single, flashbulb burst of light. I’d cursed a lot before, but that paled in comparison to what my mouth unleashed now. I put an emphatic period at the end of it with a fist-pound on my arm rest. When I turned to the combi-drive, to plan a pursuit of the third ship, I saw it was red, UNAVAILABLE because of some fault or failure. I didn’t bother cursing about that, though. I was all out of cussin’.

But I was still good and mad. “SORRY ABOUT THAT, BOSS,” Perry said as the Frankie started her return to the Fafnir. “I had a choice between the missiles targeting the Edge of Night, or the ones targeting Spindrift. Protocol is clear —”

“Perry, no worries. Spindrift and the other ships were very much the priority.”

“I know. But we won’t be interrogating Onjaku or the Thunt now.”

“Maybe at an atomic level,” Torina muttered. “Van, I’ve cracked the inbound comm message, the one that must have been the response to the one the Edge of Night sent. It was a different encryption scheme and a different message structure,” Netty-P said. I turned to her, noting that Icky had pulled off her helmet and given a thumbs-up, confirming the ship was repressurized. I pulled off my own helmet and scrubbed a hand through sweaty hair to scratch an annoying itch on my scalp. “Different how?” I asked Netty-P. “Not the Equal Grasp. None of our current enemies, even. This one points at the Stillness.”

“The Stillness. Well, shit. They’re back.”

“They were never gone, boss. They just —”

I held up a hand. “I know. But our paths haven’t crossed in years, now.”

I blew out a long, frustrated sigh. “Okay, so what did the message say?”

“It was, You have disappointed us for the last time. ”

“Ouch. The ultimate motherly guilt trip,” Torina said. I sat back and rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, it was. But the Stillness?

The last thing we need is another player in the game. Are they in league with the Equal Grasp, or opposing them?

Was that attack intended to silence Onjaku?

Or was it about something else completely?”

Perry, who was now docking the Frankie, was listening on the comm. “The Stillness are quite happy to take hit contracts, boss. For all we know, that could have been a rival in the Equal Grasp eliminating Onjaku for reasons we can’t even see.”

I nodded at the view beyond the canopy. “Yup. Like I said, another player, which just raises so many more questions. But, all that said, I don’t think Onjaku is dead.”

I could feel the others looking at one another. Icky looked up from her panel, where she was still working at damage control. “Uh, Van, unless he was secretly made of neutronium or something, that explosion —"

“Oh, everyone on board the Edge of Night died, sure. I just don’t think he was aboard.”

Torina tilted her head at me. “You think he bugged out—what, before we even got here?”

I turned to Netty-P. “There were ships in the vicinity when we first arrived here at Spindrift, besides the ones that turned out to be bad guys. Could one of them have rendezvoused with the Edge of Night and taken Onjaku off in the time between his arrival and ours?”

“Based on velocity data—yes, there are. Two possibilities. One was a class 18 bulk carrier. There would have been time for the Edge of Night to rendezvous with her and then get to where we found her when we arrived. The other was a class 6 courier. It would have had the acceleration to easily make the rendezvous. Both are, of course, long gone now.”

I nodded. “Of course they are. Gang, this was all a big setup—a scheme meant to attract us here, pull us right into an ambush. And when that didn’t work, someone else decided the chance to knock off Onjaku while he was basically a sitting duck was too good to pass up. Whether it was the Stillness themselves —”

“Maybe he owed them money,” Icky said. “More likely they owed him money,” Funboy pointed out. “It is counterproductive to kill people who are indebted to you.”

“Unless he was refusing to pay up —”

“All distinct possibilities,” I interrupted. “But so is someone having hired the Stillness, or the Stillness being part of the bigger scheme and just having a reason to kill Onjaku.”

“Or maybe it’s supposed to make us think he’s dead,” Perry said, entering the cockpit. “After all, we’re surmising that he’s still alive, but we have no real evidence of it. As far as we’re concerned, he might really be dead.”

I nodded to Perry as he settled on his perch between the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats. “Good point. But when all is said and done, he’s still alive. He’s too valuable to the Equal Grasp for them to just squander. To put it another way, he was bait. But bait usually gets swallowed. And he was too smart a guy to not have an exit strategy.”

I looked out the canopy. “He’s out there. And I intend to find him.”

17

OUR IMMEDIATE PRIORITY wasn’t Onjaku, though. Nor was it Yotov, or the Stillness, or the Equal Grasp. It was getting the Fafnir repaired. We couldn’t keep flying her in her current condition. I’d meant to take her back to Anvil Dark, but Torina had another idea. “I know somewhere safer. The Helso Defense Force has an orbiting drydock to service its own ships. I put in a quick call to my father, and he confirmed it’ll be a bit of a tight squeeze, but it can accommodate the Fafnir. And honestly, Van, I think we all need some time in place that’s —”

“Safer than Anvil Dark?”

“That at least feels safer than Anvil Dark. With Yotov on the loose, I feel my toes clenching at just the thought of going there. The place is no doubt lousy with her people.”

“And for every Casaril we know about, there are probably two or three we don’t,” Perry said. Funboy immediately bristled. “Gabby is there. Are you suggesting that she —?”

“No, Funboy, I don’t think Gabby’s in any danger,” Torina said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but from Yotov’s perspective, she’s a low-value target. Making some kind of attempt on her is just going to uncover some of her assets on Anvil Dark, throw the place into an uproar and give Van an excuse to go on a housecleaning rampage.”

“That—makes sense. And although I dislike your portrayal of Gabby as a low-value target, I understand and accept what you mean by it. She is the

highest value of all targets.”

Torina smiled. “Of course she is.”

I turned to Icky. “Can we work with a drydock at Helso?”

“Sure. As long as we can get the parts we need, that is.”

“Start making a list. We’ll have them brought in from Anvil Dark. Netty-P, let’s set a course —”

“Uh, Van?” Perry cut in. “We’ve got umpteen urgent messages from Spindrift, everything from damage to the station to debris that has to be cleared from navigation lanes. They dressed up with all sorts of outrage and complaints and calls for accountability and all that blah blah bullshit, but they all really boil down to the same thing.”

“Money.”

“Bingo.”

“Tell them to send the bill to Candler.”

“Candler?

Why?

He’s got no authority to—oh. You want to stonewall them?

Van, they do have some legitimate grievances here.”

“Of course they do. So send a message to Candler and tell him to figure out what those legitimate grievances are, then work them into the system to get paid. The Guild is not paying for a new coat of paint for Spindrift Station.”

“That… actually is one of the things they want us to pay for. How’d you know?”

“Perry, when I lived in Atlanta, I once accidentally backed into a neighbor’s car. At about three miles per hour. It left a scrape about as long as my finger. He demanded I pay to have his whole car repainted and the interior detailed. I told him to pound sand. If it was good enough for Mr. Albert Stepakowski of Atlanta, Georgia, it’s good enough for a space station orbiting Sirius.”

I WAS leery of the flight away from Spindrift, given the shape the Fafnir was in. I therefore made sure the combi-drive was back online before we departed. But we made the trip to a twist point, and from there to Helso unmolested. The orbital drydock had already been prepped for our arrival,

but I let Netty-P handle the docking. The facility had been intended for ships smaller than the Fafnir, so there was only about two meters of clearance around the ship as she slid through the doors. When they closed and sealed behind her, we only had about three meters of space at her bow and stern. But enough space was enough space, so we powered down the ship and waited for the drydock to pressurize. We disembarked to find four of the drydock crew standing and staring silently at the Fafnir, craning their necks back, panning solemn expressions along her length. I took a moment to do likewise. She was as damaged as I’d ever seen her—blown-out REAB modules, hull plates scorched and warped or chipped, gouged and pocked with shrapnel hits, structural members exposed through the gaps like bare bones, components crazed with iridescent swirls of color by heat, others outright melted, their edges softened and rounded. Her primary scanner array was just a heap of twisted junk. One of her thruster arrays was gone, neatly sheared off its mounts. “Holy shit,” one of the techs said, his tone flat and subdued. I patted a piece of ablative armor gouged and furrowed by an incoming laser hit. “Thank you, old girl,” I said to her. “Now, let’s get you fixed up.”

None of the techs were surprised that I’d just talked to my ship. These people’s lives revolved around ships, so they got it. They might never have heard of the Millennium Falcon or Enterprise, or Streaker or the Rocinante, but they’d feel about those ships the same way I did—they were every bit as much characters in those stories as Solo or Picard or Holden. And the Fafnir was just as much a pivotal character in mine. Icky was a lot more pragmatic. She was already doing a walk-around, tapping at a data pad. She ducked under a thruster bell and gave me a dour look. “You want the good news or the bad news, boss?”

“Hit me with the good news.”

“She didn’t explode into a million pieces.”

I gave her a wry smile. “How much?

Which, I assume, is the bad news.”

“Yeah. At least half a million bonds. Maybe more, once we pull off the wrecked hull plating and I get a look at the spars and stringers underneath. I don’t think there’s much structural damage, though, aside from what I already know about, but—yeah. A half mil, for sure.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Okay. Well, there is some good news there, at least. The Equal Grasp now constitutes a Major Case, now that we’ve

confirmed Yotov’s involvement. That unlocks a lot of funding, including an allocation we can use to cover repairs.”

“That sounds like something a certain bird would have figured out,”

Icky replied, smirking. “Yup. He worked out the details with Candler when they were talking about the compensation Spindrift was demanding. Turns out that, thanks to some arcane interaction of policies and regulations, I have the sole authority to designate this a so-called Major Case, which I’ve done. I’ve already got complaints from two of the other Masters, but there’s not much they can do about it.”

Icky bristled. Or, bristled more. “Let me guess—one of them was the bitch who wants Netty-P shut down, Martin or whatever.”

“Marlow. And yes, she was. And since she’s obviously sympathetic to Yotov, she’s going to redouble her efforts to make our lives miserable via more Guild bureaucratic bullshit.”

Icky sniffed. “Glad that’s your thruster to fire, boss. I got no time for that nonsense.”

I clapped her arm. “You just focus on getting the Fafnir fighting-fit again, big girl. I’ll take care of Marlow and company.”

One of the yard techs, a gruff old human spacer, spoke up. “Sir, you just leave her with us. She’s in good hands.”

I nodded. “I know she is. You come highly recommended by one of the foremost authorities in known space.”

Their eyes went wide. “Really. Who?” the older man asked. I smiled. “My in-laws.”

I FELT comfortable leaving the Fafnir in the skillful hands of Icky, Netty-P, and the yard techs. Not only did Tor Milon confirm that every one of the techs had been thoroughly vetted, but they were also subject to ongoing security screening. The Helso authorities were more concerned about spies and saboteurs from the Seven Stars League fiddling with their ships, but it meant they were likewise clean of any influence by Yotov or the Equal Grasp. I frankly couldn’t say the same for the techs on Anvil Dark. Icky sent her first update just as we were landing at the Milon’s estate in the Frankie—which had somehow managed to avoid any significant damage at all, aside from a few shrapnel chips. I frowned at her message, then sighed. “Yeah, looks like the grav-plate system is done. Icky’s recommending we just pull off what’s left to save mass.”

“It was nice while it lasted,” Torina said. I nodded. “Yeah, it was. Stuck on the exterior like that, it was bound to have a shelf life.” I glanced around as the Frankie, which was now on the pad, powered down. “The Frankie here still has her grav-plates intact, at least. And—you know, now that I think about it, maybe we can rig up the remaining plates from the Fafnir on our workboat-slash-fighters aboard the Improbable.”

Perry nodded. “Good idea, boss. And environmentally friendly, too, recycling like that. I mean, do you know how many slabs of gravity-bending alien alloy just end up in landfills?

And those things take forever to compost.”

ICKY ESTIMATED it was going to take a week to repair the Fafnir, including getting in parts we couldn’t obtain on Helso. Her father, Urnak, had a line on a spanking new scanner array with military specs. It was pricey but would be a major upgrade and would really pull the performance out of the high-end fire control system Gerhardt had given us so long ago. “Do I even want to know where this thing is and who’s selling it?” I asked Icky over the comm. She shrugged and smirked. “I don’t know, do you?”

“At least confirm for me it’s not stolen.”

“Nope. Dad never deals in stolen stuff. Not knowingly, anyway. But this rig was salvaged intact and undamaged off a mercenary ship—so it’s military hardware, but it’s not exempted from salvage law the way actual military stuff is.”

I exhaled in relief. Icky might have zero interest in most legal matters, but when it came to the laws governing salvage, she and her father were experts. I told her to go ahead and acquire it once she was satisfied the

goods were as advertised. That was going to require a trip to Tau Ceti in the Frankie, so I told her to take Funboy along—and then swing by Anvil Dark to pick up Gabby and Rab. Icky, though, had one more worry. “Van, the Fafnir’s in good hands here, but —”

“But what?”

“She’s a—what’s that Earth thing?

A sitting—bird?

Eagle?

An eagle’s a bird, right?”

“It is, but I think you mean duck?”

“Yeah, that’s it. A sitting duck. This dry dock is basically a pressurized tin can in orbit around Helso. It’s got no defenses of its own, and all of the Fafnir’s weapons are fouled by being inside —”

“Look up, Icky. Way up.”

“What—oh. Right.” She slumped a little in relief. “Yeah, I forgot. Those Schegith orbitals are operational now, aren’t they?”

“Yup. They take the protect part of protectorate very seriously. You’ve got the equivalent of two Iowa s in geosynchronous orbit over this part of Helso, and another two in a wider orbit above that. Nothing is getting close to Helso without them being okay with it.”

“I heard they mounted mass drivers on those things nearly a hundred meters long. They’d pack one hell of a wallop.”

I grinned. They would, considering those on the Fafnir had linear accelerator barrels only three meters long, and they could punch cleanly through anything but the toughest armor. “Feel better now?”

“Much.”

We signed off, and I turned back to some paperwork. I’d made it clear to everyone that this wasn’t a vacation. We’d just had one of those here, just a few weeks previously. At best, it was a working vacation. The Milon’s had given me a room in their estate to use as an office, in which we’d set up a secure portable terminal we carried aboard the Fafnir. I dug into the backlog and quickly sorted it into three categories Perry and I had come up with— Yeah, whatever, which was stuff that could be safely ignored; Huh, neat, which was stuff that was worth reading but required little or no action or response; and Okay, this, which was the stuff that actually required me to act. There was a fourth category, Uh oh, which was the truly crucial stuff. It never sat waiting for action, though. Anything Perry labeled Uh oh we dealt with immediately. Perry had joined me, and we were partly through Okay, this when Torina and her parents showed up at the door. “Van, you’re taking a break,” Torina said. I glanced up. “Yeah, in a bit —”

“Now, Tudor,” Tor said. His wife, Kaye, gave me a wintry smile that brooked no argument. “You have something more important to do,” Tor explained. “More important than reviewing and signing off Update Number 158395 on Reserve Minor Purchases Account Disbursement Status by Guild Sector?” Perry asked. “Yes, even more important than that,” Torina said, walking over to me, putting her hands on my shoulders, and lifting me from my seat. I removed her hands and straightened with great dignity. “I will not be grabbed, despite being irresistible.” Torina pulled her lips to one side, and I added, “To you.”

“Nice recovery. Bird, a question—is there anything that can’t await Master Tudor’s attention for a couple of hours?”

“Not really. If Master Tudor so desires, I can deal with what’s left here that can’t wait, since it’s all just routine business.”

I looked from him, to Torina, then back and shrugged. “Go for it, bird,”

I said, and followed them. “Van, we know you’re under a lot of pressure,” Tor said, as we wound our way through their palatial home to the groundward exit, not the one that would lead to the landing pad. “Torina’s given us the list,” Kaye agreed. “Your ship, your crew—

especially Gabby—all the Guild business, and then everything that’s going on with the Equal Grasp, and now the Stillness —”

“I do have a lot on the pile, yeah. So, what?

While I was doing paperwork, you guys defeated the Grasp, cornered Yotov and wiped out the Stillness?

Because, if so—kudos.”

Tor gave a rueful grin. “If only.” We reached the exit and Torina’s parents pointed down the winding, tree-lined path that led into the nearby town. “Go. Master Cataric is waiting for you,” Tor said. “All that stuff?

Your ship and crew and the Grasp?

Just leave it all here for a while,” Kaye put in. I gave them a puzzled frown, but Torina just put her hands on me and gave a gentle push. “Go. You’ve got your comm. If all hell breaks loose,

we’ll let you know.”

I offered them a last, bemused smile, then shrugged. “Okay. I guess I’ll see you guys later,” I said, and headed down the path. It was a warm day, but most days on Helso were warm. The planet’s brief winter was mostly a rainy season, the region around the Milon Estate being more like southern California climate-wise. The slightly muggy heat, the sweet fragrance wafting off the foliage, the only sounds a fitful whisper of wind-stirred leaves and my own footsteps —

I found myself smiling. Huh. Somehow, I actually had managed to leave all those pressures and worries back at the estate. My steps were quick and light as I carried on to Master Cataric’s dojo. I was about to learn. CATARIC GREETED ME WARMLY. I changed into loose-fitting Innsu gear, selected a blunt practice knife, then padded barefoot into the soft sand of the sparring ring. My master waited, patient as a stone. “Are you ready, Van?”

I was still a little puzzled. I’d fought Cataric many times before. His tone and manner somehow implied this time would be different. Curious, I nodded. “I am.”

“Very well,” he said, and dropped into his fighting stance. So did I. We made eye contact and held it. I kept my focus on his eyes, looking for that hint of movement or even sudden tension that telegraphed an imminent attack. But I also let my attention smear out toward the edges, alert to motion in my peripheral awareness. Focus. I felt my heart beating, the heft of the knife, nothing else. Focus. Focus—

There was nothing telegraphed, no signal, just a lightning attack. I barely managed to deflect it, then twisted and struck back to counterattack while planning my next move, a dodge back. Cataric’s knife had anticipated

that, though, and struck deep, catching me low on my side. I immediately dropped to my knees and bowed my head, signaling my defeat. “Again,” he said. I looked up. “The sand—you need to rake it —”

“No. Not this time.”

I stood again, more intrigued than ever. An important part of Innsu was the victor raking a pattern into the sand, one that would be obliterated by the next bout—a metaphor for the impermanence of things, the fleeting nature of victory. But I dutifully assumed my stance. Focus. Focus—

Another attack without a glimmer of warning. I dodged it, flung my hips back, and doubled over. Cataric’s knife swept through empty air. It left me grossly unbalanced, my center of gravity too far forward, but I didn’t try to correct or fight it. Beginner me would have. Instead, I leaned into it, letting weight become momentum, driving myself forward and right. That put my knife hand on the wrong side, but I’d intended that and slammed my foot down again, spinning and bringing the knife completely around, catching Cataric a glancing blow across the side of his neck. I ended up flat on my back in the sand, but it didn’t matter. Cataric immediately dropped to his knees and bowed. “Again,” he said, standing. His eyes sparkled at me. I stood and frowned. “Master —”

“Again!”

Okay. I dropped into my stance once more. Focus. Focus—

We sparred eight times in total. By the fourth, something dawned on me. Cataric was going all in. That’s why I wasn’t getting any telegraphed moves. For the first time, I was fighting an Innsu Master who was holding nothing back. Where once our bouts had been slash and block, dodge and thrust, sometimes going on for half a minute, even more, these were just quick explosions of movement. The longest was maybe ten seconds. Most of the rest were less than five. And I won four of them. The eighth ended with Cataric victorious. I waited for him to once more say, Again—but he didn’t. Instead, he just stood and gave me a smile that

was both warm and slightly sad. “We are done here, Van.”

I nodded, breathing a little hard and wiping sweat from my forehead. “Yeah, I could use a break —”

“No. I mean, we are done. You are no longer my student. This is”—his smile widened, and he shrugged—“graduation. I have nothing left to teach you.”

I felt my face fall. “You mean—that’s it?

I can’t come back here —?”

Cataric laughed, grabbed a towel for himself, and threw one to me. “No, no, of course not. You are welcome here any time, my friend. But you no longer enter this place as a student, seeking knowledge or wisdom or technique. You enter as a Master in your own right. A Master of the Guild, and now a Master here.”

“But— you’re the Master —”

“Of this dojo, yes. And to all who are students here, I am still their Master. But—” He stopped, then made a follow me gesture. He led to one side of the dojo, to where a richly veined box of some exotic alien wood sat on a table, all swirls of mauve and deep crimson and pale purpling gray. I’d noticed it but hadn’t paid much attention. Now he opened it, the movement releasing an aromatic waft of something like a cross between camphor and a pungent bitterness. It reminded me of the way sticky dandelion milk tasted when I got it smeared on my fingers as a kid—sharply and unpleasantly acrid. From the box, he extracted a garment, a robe the color of the bottom of a thundercloud. He slipped it over my shoulders. “I am ashamed to say that this moment is—it’s conflicted for me. I should only be celebrating your growth, your achievements. Your maturity, and patience, and this place you’ve made for yourself in creation. And I am not merely speaking of Innsu.”

He gave a rueful shrug. “But this does cause a twinge, if I am wholly honest. Although I knew it would arrive, I am not really… prepared, mentally, for this moment to be here. The moment you no longer need me.”

I looked him squarely in the eyes. This time, there was no focusing, just a deep fondness. “Now I’ll be honest, Master Cataric. There is no such moment. I need everyone who’s become dear to me, now more than ever.” I looked around at the dojo, high and airy and awash with the pale pinkish light of Van Maanen’s Star. “I’ve learned a lot in this place. And not just

about swinging a knife around or falling with the grace of a drunken hippo.”

He smiled at that. It was a look of wisdom. Patience. Pride. “What did you learn about most of all, Van Tudor?”

“Me.”

“And that, Van, is what this place is truly for. A place of self-discovery. Swinging the knife around is just a framework, a tangible reason to come here and a way of focusing the self on the self and putting aside, for a time, everything else.”

I smiled. “I know that now. I couldn’t have known it then.”

“And that is why you’re wearing that robe. Which, incidentally, entitles you to form a dojo of your own, so that you can pass it on to the foremost of your students—should you ever choose that path in life.”

That made me give him a sharp glance. “Me?

Your foremost student?

Oh, I don’t think so. Torina —”

“Does not want it. I have spoken to her, and to all of my other students. We all agree that this”—he touched the robe—“belongs to you.”

I persisted, though. “Torina has been working with you a lot longer —”

But he shook his head. “This is not a matter of seniority, Van. Torina does not believe she has yet found herself. She believes you have. That you have certainty about who you are, your place in things, and what you must do—the path you must walk.”

I scoffed at that. “Really. Well, maybe she can let me in on it, then. I spend most of my time wondering just what the hell I’m doing, if what I’m doing is the right thing —”

“There is a difference between knowing the path you must walk, and how exactly to place your feet along every step of the way.”

“So you guys really think I know the path that I’m supposed to walk in life?

Where I’m going from here?”

Cataric tilted his head slightly and smiled. “Yes, we do. Don’t you?”

I opened my mouth to protest again but let it close. Did I?

Didn’t I?

I—did. It might take some time yet to get there, but yeah—I did know where I was going. Where I had to go. I nodded, then shrugged off the robe and folded it back into the box. Then I gestured back into the dojo with the practice knife. “Again?”

Cataric just smiled and nodded, then we both walked back into the sand and fell into our stances. Focus—

18

THE WEEK PASSED with no notable incidents. I got caught up on my paperwork, Icky returned with Funboy, Rab, and Gabby, and the Fafnir got repaired. By the sixth day, we were only awaiting the arrival of the new scanner array, which was inbound. Rab, the voice of reason, was a little leery of having fixed as much damage as we had in less than a week. “Seems pretty hurried, Van. Are you sure it’s a good idea to be cutting corners, especially on the cure time for that ablative armor?”

I held up a finger, though. “That’s the advantage of contacts. Torina’s father knows a supplier with a military contract to the Eridani. He was able to put in a few calls, call in a favor or two, and get the Fafnir declared eligible to receive the stuff. It cures more rapidly in the absence of air and with direct exposure to infrared radiation.”

Rab nodded. “Almost sounds like outer space.”

“Exactly. I guess the Eridani fleet wanted ablative armor that would cure fast and improve turnaround times for their ships. And we’re the beneficiaries. So we’ll be okay.”

I looked at the Fafnir’s schematic, displayed on the terminal in my temporary office in the Milon’s estate. “Better than okay, even. Every time she gets banged up, we improve her a little. Icky took advantage of having most of the hull plates ripped off to install a third power bus, giving us two redundant systems. Netty-P suggested we move the primary comm array

further back on the hull to give the dorsal laser battery a better field of fire to the rear. They’ve made a bunch of small tweaks and improvements —”

I stopped because Rab had seen something out the window. I joined him and followed his gaze, then saw Gabby and Funboy with a small group of children from the nearby town. The Milons gave them free access to the estate, letting them play in the woods, swim in the pond and generally romp about. Back on Earth, there would have been issues about liability and such, but the people of Helso had a much more communal approach to the land. The kids couldn’t come into the house itself, of course, and there were safeguards to keep them away from hazards like the landing pad. But they could roam around the estate grounds pretty much as they pleased in a raucous, joyful pack. I glanced in the direction of Gerhardt’s grave, not far from the pond. He’d never had a family. I liked to think having kids cavorting around him now that he’d finished his long, hard work with the Guild would make him happy. Of course, knowing Gerhardt, he might also be shaking his fist at them from beyond the grave and telling them to get off his lawn. I smiled a little at that, then turned back to Funboy and Gabby. He was standing apart, looking stern and no doubt worrying about sweaty kids, snotty noses and pathogens. Gabby, though, was right in there with them, letting them poke her and then making silly noises reminiscent of a steam whistle. “She certainly seems happier,” I said. Rab nodded but crossed his arms. “She and I talked at length while she was seeing Sussbrid on Anvil Dark. She tried very hard to be positive about it all, too.”

I glanced at him. “But?”

“But I could see it in her, Van. Even as alien as she is to me, I could tell

—she’s got a ways to go yet.”

I nodded. “Yeah, when it comes to trauma, the destination everyone wants to reach, I think, is getting over it—getting better. The fact, though, is that it’s the journey that matters—getting ever close to that destination because, well —”

“You never will reach it. You can’t,” Rab said. Something about the way he said it made me look at him. “It’s a journey we’re all taking, whether we like it or not. Especially in our line of work.”

He watched Gabby for a moment, but his eyes looked past her, at—

other things. Then he nodded. “Yeah, it is.”

“At least we’re not taking it alone,” I said. He glanced at me, then offered what I’d come to know as the P’nosk version of a sincere smile. “No, we’re not.”

WE HAD something of a blow-out dinner the last night before we departed. The new scanner array was fitted, the Fafnir had emerged from drydock, and she’d passed all of her static and orbital tests. We’d flight-test her tomorrow, and if everything looked good, we’d get underway. The Milons invited a dozen of their friends, including Cataric. We ate a lot, drank too much, talked and laughed and even danced a little. Torina’s ex-beau, Boswic Broadmore was there and danced with Torina while I danced with his lovely wife. Then he and I, grinning, cut in on each other’s dance, and the music turned slow. Tor and Kaye passed close by us, Kaye giving Torina a smile. “You’re positively glowing, my dear,” she said. Torina just offered a self-conscious smile in return and pulled me a little closer. I embraced her back and looked around. Gabby and Funboy were also dancing. Rab was sitting with Netty-P, the movements of his hands suggesting they were talking about spacecraft maneuvering some way or another. As for Icky —

“Excuse us, coming through.”

We both turned to the voice, which was Icky’s. She was dancing with…

Perry?

His amber eyes glowed back at us. “Sorry, Torina’s dance card’s full for now. Wait until I get the sound system playing The Twist, then you and I can cut one hell of a rug!”

I PUSHED the right side-stick forward, then to the side. The Fafnir pitched and rolled accordingly, her maneuvers quick and smooth. With the left side-stick, I commanded some lateral thruster inputs, then fired the dorsal and ventral thrusters in alternate bursts. This step of the flight test called for at

least twelve different directional inputs, to get the ship tumbling as much as possible around all three axes. It worked, the glowing crescent of Helso flashing crazily past the canopy, followed by the ruddy glare of Van Maanen’s Star, then Helso again, over and over. I let go of both side-sticks, tapped a point on the nav display to generate an arbitrary trajectory, and punched the STABILIZE control. The flight management system immediately fired staccato thruster bursts, quickly settling the tumbling Fafnir onto the heading I’d selected. “That’s a pass,” Netty-P said. I glanced at her. “How many more steps to do?”

“Three, but they’re all based on performance during straight and level flight, so we can do them on our way out of the system.”

“Okay, let’s let traffic control know we’re done with our flight tests here and that we’ll be departing forthwith.”

I caught a golden glance out of the corner of my eye. “Forthwith?

In sooth, sirrah, what doth prompt thee to speak thusly?”

“Van, the bird’s broken again,” Icky said. I gave Torina a long-suffering look. She grinned back. We were heading back to Anvil Dark. Now that the Fafnir was shipshape and Bristol fashion—something Gramps picked up overseas—I wasn’t as concerned about bringing her there. I wanted to talk to Alic and Volffin, get the lay of the political landscape, as it were, and show my face. It was Perry who pointed out that the longer we went without showing up at Anvil Dark, the more opportunity our foes there had to consolidate. Although, it seemed, even when we were away, I had allies quietly at work. Various AIs, loyal to the cause, as Perry put it, were snooping on our behalf and reporting back to him. Candler, it seemed, was a particularly good source of information because no one paid any attention to him. If anyone ever did think of him, it was usually as something of a joke—the sentient desk in the basement, the high-tech equivalent of the weird old uncle who lives over the garage, but a lot more rectangular. In other words, they grossly underestimated him. They contemptuously, not to mention ironically combined a dismissive attitude toward said crazy uncle with the casual disregard most people gave AIs. The result was to ignore the fact he was an AI, a sophisticated machine intelligence that could complete countless thoughts in the time it took me to complete one, could perform multiple complex mental tasks simultaneously and never forgot

anything. And he was just one AI, the center of a web of them—AI’s involved in maintenance, traffic control, station systems, logistics, administration, and various other roles were all in on it. Thanks to them, and the information they fed Perry, I had a constantly updated picture of what was factually going on at Anvil Dark. And that was great, but it didn’t replace showing up in person and getting my own eyes onto things. Still, it was good to have the intel up-front. By the time we finally arrived at Gamma Crucis, the Anvil Dark system, Perry had learned that Master Marlow had quietly called a meeting for a financial oversight committee she chaired—and that one of the items on the agenda was a minor change to a particular, but obscure bit of policy. It wouldn’t have much effect on Peacemakers generally, but it would reduce the various disbursements available to, oh, say, a Master-Adept who spent much of his time in the field. “When’s the meeting?” I asked Perry, as we deftly maneuvered onto our final approach to dock. “In about four standard hours.”

“Netty-P, what ETA did you send ahead for us?”

“About seven standard hours from now. I overestimated the time we’d need for flight-testing. My bad.”

I smiled. “So we’re early, which means I can make Marlow’s meeting. Huh.”

Perry nodded. “You can. And the Terms of Reference for that particular committee specify that all Masters in attendance must be in consensus over any policy changes, so —”

“You guys are wicked.”

Netty-P’s imager gleamed at me. “I’ve got no idea what you mean, boss.”

Perry spread his wings in a theatrical huff. “We get no respect, I tell ya. No respect at all.”

MARLOW WAS, needless to say, displeased that I’d shown up for the committee meeting. She only showed it in her eyes, though, and was

otherwise nothing but gracious. Gracious in a bland, indifferent sort of way, but gracious nonetheless. She and I were unable to reach an agreement on the particular policy amendment she proposed unfortunately. At Perry’s suggestion, though, I offered an amendment to her amendment that wouldn’t change its effect on me. I’d still lose access to some Guild financing, which was obviously at least part of her intent, but the amendment would increase funding to Peacemakers who were stationed permanently aboard Anvil Dark. The rest of the committee—all of whom were Peacemakers who were stationed permanently aboard Anvil Dark—

was in enthusiastic agreement. Marlow, though, would have had to swallow the increase in another account, or else run a deficit, so she just pulled the amendment completely. Afterward, though, I raised a worrisome point with Perry. “You know, if she catches on to the fact that I’ve got AIs working in my corner, she might decide to take some kind of action.”

But Perry just made a Pfft sound. “The only trail she’s going to find, if she looks, leads straight back to Max. And no one, not even a Master, is going to take on Max. If it weren’t obvious by now, Max is the glue that bonds the Masters to the rest of the Guild—the ones who spend their lives here, anyway. They wouldn’t know how to get a restock on paperclips or rubber bands without Max.”

I returned to my office—the one that no doubt had more bugs than an entomology exhibit at the Smithsonian—and started to putter around with some Yeah, whatever and Huh, neat paperwork. About five minutes in, though, I got a call from Gabriella Santorelli. She’d just docked, it seemed, and had some evidence she’d collected about one of my cases I’d probably be interested in. Intrigued, and not really caring about the standings in the Anvil Dark rocket-darts tournament, I rounded up Perry and headed for Gabriella’s ship. On the way, I popped by the Fafnir and found Torina, Icky, and Netty-P poring over some data. “What’s up?

Or is this just you guys getting caught up on Anvil Dark gossip?” I asked, peering at the data pad they were all viewing. Torina waved a hand. “We finished up with the gossip an hour ago. This is Netty-P’s summary of the performance of the new scanner array. It’s pretty impressive.”

“Impressive?” Icky shook her head. “It’s shit-hot, that’s what it is. We’ve got nearly twice the angular resolution of the old array. We could practically see all the pores and pimples and stuff of the people we’re shooting at, if we wanted to.”

“I’m happy just seeing their ships, thanks.”

“As am I. Acne is among the most horrifying of human afflictions,”

Funboy said. “The Sursti only get acne if we engage in impure behavior, like going outside, or laughing.”

“Um, sure. Didn’t realize you were a race of cellar dwellers, but it explains some things.” I turned and scanned the data, which Netty-P had compiled during our flight here from Helso. Indeed, the numbers showed that, using active scanners, we could essentially resolve the same-sized object nearly twice as far away. The improvement did drop steadily off as the distance approached the range limit in active scanning mode. And the improvement was more modest in passive mode, but still. “This means we should get better firing solutions sooner,” Torina said. “That could make a big difference.”

“It could,” I agreed but noted that Netty-P had been silent. I turned to her. “Haven’t heard your thoughts, my dear.”

“I’m more than satisfied with the scanner performance. I’m puzzled, though, over some extraneous data,” she said. My smile turned upside down. “Extraneous data?

What do you mean?”

“You’re not saying the new scanner has a bug or a virus or something in it, are you?” Icky asked, her face now creased in a frown as well. “No. Or, at least, I have no evidence to that effect. Rather, there’s extraneous data leaking, as it were, from the scanner control module. It’s not just noise, though. It’s organized data.”

“Okay, so—what is it?

What’s it saying?” I asked her. “That’s the thing. It’s not saying anything. Or, if it is, there’s no context to work with. It’s like having a table of, say, financial data. If you can see all the column headers and row labels, it makes sense. You can point at a number and see that that’s the amount of money you spent on fuel on the first day of last month, that sort of thing. But if you blank those headers and labels away, you’ve just got a table full of numbers that don’t mean anything.”

“And it’s coming from the new scanner?” Torina asked. “Maybe. It may be that the scanner has another function, a data-channel we’re not aware of. One that was only used when the system was being built, or tested, or is undergoing maintenance or something. It’s dutifully sending out data that means nothing to us, but might be useful to the manufacturer, maybe.”

I crossed my arms. “Bottom line—is it a risk to the ship?” I glanced at the others. “And yes, I am mindful of Calamity here.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t see how it could be. I’ve got it isolated. The data only comes in occasional bursts, sometimes more than an hour apart, and I’ve got it all going into a protected chunk of memory in an isolated system. It’s that laptop computer you brought aboard, Van, to use as a filter against Calamity. I’ve hooked it back up and all of this odd data is going right onto it. I’ve got it set up so it can only read data from the ship and can’t write anything back to it.”

I nodded. Her precautions seemed both sensible and prudent. “Okay, then. Keep an eye on it, and if you figure out some context, or anything else of note happens, let us know right away. Meantime, I’m off to see Gabriella. She’s apparently got some evidence for me to see.”

I BROUGHT Torina and Perry to meet with Gabriella aboard her ship. When we arrived, I asked, “Okay, so what evidence, and for which case?”

“Have you ever heard of a ship called the Shearwater?” she asked. “You mean the research ship operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Southern California?”

Gabriella gave me a blank look. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The Shearwater.”

“Wow, Van, obscure knowledge is obscure,” Perry said. “I actually had to spend a measurable amount of time digging up what you’re talking about from my own archives.”

I gave him a smile and a shrug. “Hey, I know things.”

“Yeah, but—that?”

I shrugged again. “I had a—let’s call it a fling with a young lady who was an oceanographer when I spent some time in San Diego. She worked aboard the Shearwater. Even took me for a little tour.”

Torina was giving me a bemused look. “A fling, huh?

And a little tour?”

Gabriella smirked and made her voice breathy. “Yes, Van, this is a piece of research equipment. And so’s that. And this is the zipper to my —”

“Yes, I have a past, okay?

So sue me. Anyway, I’m suspecting this isn’t about an oceanographic research ship in Southern California.”

Gabriella exchanged a smug look with Torina, then shook her head. “No. The Shearwater is an up-gunned and up-armored class 13 corvette decommissioned by Unity and sold to someone who decided to go into the private security contracting business.”

“So a mercenary,” Torina said. “In a way. More like a bounty hunter. Its owners look for people who are wanted—sometimes by the Guild, in which case they get a nice cash payout, more often for criminal groups, in which case they no doubt get a much better payout.”

“Someone bought it. Its owners. You don’t sound very certain about who that is,” I said. “That’s because I’m not. Her ownership is murky. What isn’t, though, is that she carries a small, twist-capable surveillance drone apparently called the Riptide.”

“The Riptide?

Seriously?

This nautical theme makes me wonder if your pretty oceanographer in San Diego might not be involved after all,” Perry said. I gave him a look I meant to be wryly dismissive, but it didn’t quite gel on my face. No, my oceanographer friend was not some outer space operative, of course—I’d met her at least two years before I’d even found the Fafnir in the barn. But the fact I’d even entertained the possibility, even briefly, showed just how vulnerable I was feeling. But Gabriella’s words did gel. “A small, twist-capable surveillance drone—like the one that bugged out when we opened up that disused compartment on Crossroads,” I said. She nodded. “Exactly. And now I find myself in the odd position of advocating for a criminal.”

Torina crossed her arms. “Something you presumably wouldn’t do without an excellent reason.”

“Indeed I wouldn’t. In this case, though, I believe I do. Your AI, Netty-P, sent out an alert containing the drive signature of the drone you spooked at Crossroads. I just happened to get a hit, because I had occasion to work a

Guild op that involved the Shearwater. Like I said, they occasionally did jobs for the Guild. Anyway, I availed myself of the opportunity to record its emissions signature, along with that of the Riptide —”

“And they matched,” Perry said. “They did.” I opened my mouth to start saying we had to find the Shearwater, but Gabriella preempted me. “There’s more. I decided to do some digging into the ownership of the Shearwater. Since working undercover, I’ve made some contacts that, shall we say, are —”

“Criminals. Scumbags,” Torina said. Gabriella smirked. “A harsh way to put it, but you’re not wrong. Anyway, it took some doing, untangling shell companies, subsidiaries, holding companies and the like, but I did manage to get at least some of the ownership info. The Shearwater is owned, in part, by a human named Jacob Marley and an old arms dealer named Ja-Ra.”

I let out a slow breath. “I only know of two people named Jacob Marley. And since I assume you’re not talking about a fictional Victorian ghost, then it must be Jacob Marley of the Equal Grasp.” I turned to Torina. “We met him and a Yonnox—um —”

“Lesthrix,” Perry said. “Right. Lesthrix. We met them at your parents’ place. It was our first meeting with the Grasp.”

Torina nodded. “Oh, I remember. My mother said afterward the two of them were so oily she needed to get the seat cushions they’d sat on cleaned of the grease stains.”

“And Ja-Ra,” Perry said. “You’d think he’d be getting too old to keep dabbling in the criminal underbelly like this.”

Gabriella nodded. “He is, and that brings me to the part where I advocate for a criminal. Don’t get me wrong, Ja-Ra is no saint. He’s kept one foot on each side of the law for a long time. Hell, I arrested him myself, twice. But the old bugger really is out to pasture now.”

I thought about Ja-Ra, from whom we’d gotten a lead on some of the Fafnir’s missing components. He’d seemed reasonably lucid and with it, but there was definitely some old-age fuzziness creeping. Still, a criminal was a criminal, so I said so. “If his name is attached to the Shearwater as an owner, then I’m sorry, no matter how doddering the old guy is, he’s still responsible for whatever that ship and its crew gets up to,” I said. “True, but here’s me advocating. Ja-Ra has committed crimes, and he’s paid for them. He’s now out of the business—but. But, he has a so-called nephew, named Biggy Dah, who’s wormed his way into his uncle’s business and is now committing crimes in Ja-Ra’s name. So the old guy is sitting quietly at home, becoming more and more forgetful, while his shitty

“nephew” breaks the law and has it point back to the old man.” Her face had hardened as she spoke. “That, to me, is just another flavor of elder abuse.”

Gabriella spat that last bit with such vehemence I figured that she had some dark history with elder abuse herself—something personal, that had happened to someone she cared about, or from a past case. I just let that go, though. “Okay, so we should be looking for—Biggy Dah?

That’s his name?”

“I get visions of lots of golden bling, a backward baseball cap and a gangsta guy shouting Yo-yo-yo into a mic,” Perry said. “That’s what he calls himself, yeah,” Gabriella said. “Anyway, if there are charges that are going to stick to Ja-Ra because of this asshole, I hope they’d be—light ones.”

Torina nodded. “Temper justice with mercy and all that, right?”

I shot her a quick smile. “Message received. I sometimes forget you’re a bigger person than I am.”

She grimaced. “Oh, I have my merciless moments. Mine are just more infrequent, so not bigger, just a little more—patient.”

I THANKED Gabriella and we returned to the Fafnir. On the way, I asked Perry to pull everything the Guild had on Biggy Dah, but to do it in a way that minimized my fingerprints on the info. I reasoned that anything I was likely to pull from Guild archives was going to be noticed by someone among the mysterious ranks of the True Direction and didn’t want to raise any alerts. Perry did just that, routing the archival search through Candler and several other AIs and bundling it into a wider search of people related to the arms trade, being conducted on behalf of Unity. It meant that the AIs were

probably falsifying some records, but given everything that was going on, I was prepared to look the other way. Aboard the Fafnir, Perry put the data we had about Biggy Dah on the big display in the crew lounge. Like Ja-Ra, Biggy Dah was short, had a single eye and sprouted curly hair with a brassy luster. However, he wore a headband with a bunch of small metallic disks fastened into it—coins, it turned out, when Perry enlarged the image. He highlighted one. “That is a 1794 Flowing Hair Silver Dollar. The US only minted about eighteen hundred of these, one of which sold back in 2013 for ten million dollars,” he said. I glared at the screen. “Let me guess—those are all rare coins.”

“Or the equivalent thereof, yeah.” He highlighted another one. “This hexagonal thing is called an ob, as in obligation. It’s a token intended to represent a debt, which would be paid off through a good or service. I do something for you, fix your roof, say, and you give me an ob that I can use later to get you to, say, do some plumbing work for me. It was a well-meaning but short-lived attempt to put some rigor into a barter economy by the S’rall about two hundred years ago. They wanted to find a way around, you know, money.”

“Short-lived?” Rab asked. “Well, it fundamentally relied on good faith and honesty among all involved, so you can imagine how long that lasted. Anyway, not many of these were made, so this one is probably worth, oh—half a million bonds, probably?”

“So Biggy Dah is kitted out with bling,” I said, scowling at his image. “Bling stolen from a bunch of different cultures, just so he can show it off.”

“This guy isn’t very likable, is he?” Gabby said. Funboy shook his head. “No. He is reprehensible. Van, are we going to track down this miscreant and bring him to justice?”

“That’s the idea, although I want information from him, too,” I said, as Perry scrolled through more of the archival material. When he put one particular image on the display, Icky suddenly stood, pointing. “Hey!

That sumbitch stole that from my dad!”

The image in question showed Biggy Dah sprawled languidly in an elaborate chair, something that looked vaguely like a vintage barber chair. Rab gave her a quizzical look. “What, the chair?”

“Yeah!

Dad saw the damned thing at a market on Dregs and fell in love with it for some reason. He paid for it, but it was never delivered to the Nemesis—the shipment got stolen, the vendor said, but wouldn’t refund Dad his money.” She stalked up to the image and thumped her finger into it. “That chair is—it’s identical!

I know it, because I thought it was pretty damned ugly, but whatever.” She thumped the display even harder. “My dad wanted it, and this asshole’s got it —”

“Whoa, there, big girl,” I said, stepping forward and grabbing her hand before she punched her finger right through the screen. “We get the point. Biggy Dah has been a busy boy.”

“Van, when I finish pounding him into goo, can I have the chair back for Da?

He’s been looking for it for nines of nines. Like, forever.”

“Yes, and I’ll go one better. I doubt the stuff in these images is all that Biggy Dah has stolen, so we’ll return all of his ill-gotten loot that we can to the rightful owners.” I turned to glare at the image of Biggy Dah lounging in the stolen chair. “Now we just have to find this little bastard —”

“Ask and ye shall receive, boss,” Netty-P said. “Gabriella, you’re on.”

Gabriella’s voice hummed from the comm. “Van, I decided to do some digging among those, um, less than reputable contacts of mine, to see if I could run down anything more about the Shearwater or Biggy Dah. And I got a hit. The Shearwater is currently in the Fren-Okun home system—not at the Fren homeworld itself, but the other habitable planet in the system, the one the Fren call Dump.”

“Dump. Dare I ask why?”

“Because that’s what the Fren use it for. They buy junk, scrap—in other words, stuff people are trying to get rid of—and store it there,” Netty-P

said. “Okay, but again—why?”

“Because it might be useful someday?

Even valuable?”

“So on top of everything else, the Fren are hoarders.”

“Actually, Van, I think there’s method to their madness. A lot of Fren live and work on Dump—almost all of them males,” Perry said. I gave a slow nod. Fren males tended to be impulsive, many weren’t particularly bright and, left to their own devices, were inveterate schemers. Fren females made their society work, particularly the old matriarchs who didn’t descend into unfortunate—and moist—dementia. A planet full of

junk that had to be sorted and maintained was a good way to keep a lot of the males busy and out of trouble. “Anyway, Van, the Shearwater will be there when you arrive,” Gabriella said. “How can you be so sure?’

“Those nefarious contacts, remember?

They’re good for all sorts of things. Anyway, the Shearwater has a serious case of drive trouble that’s going to keep her there for at least a few days.”

“She does, does she?”

Gabriella’s tone turned sly. “Well—she will shortly.”

19

I WRESTLED with the logic of chasing down Biggy Dah. On the one hand, we might get another window into the Equal Grasp through him, given Jacob Marley’s part ownership of the bounty-hunting ship called the Shearwater. We might also get some insight into what the drone, the Riptide, was doing at Crossroads and why our investigation there seemed to trigger it, as though we’d activated a tripwire. And we might be able to take down a career criminal, recover a bunch of stolen loot, and put an end to what seemed to be a case of elder abuse. However, there was Earth, and whatever was happening there in my absence. Miryam was safely off-world, and the Equal Grasp had shown no interest in Tony Burgess or his people. Ironically, it might be their celebrity status in the UFO community that was protecting them, since the sudden disappearance of any of them could trigger a reaction from people scattered all over the world—people who were already watching the sky, and whose intense focus on someone with Tony’s stature abruptly vanishing would definitely constitute unwanted attention. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t worried about what the Equal Grasp was up to. Even if we had managed to blunt their blackmail efforts regarding the US government, at least for now, they were still active in other ways. Mavis DeMont’s case showed that the Grasp was busy cozying up to some pretty bad people, some of whom would be happy to throw out the red carpet in exchange for some dangerous off-world tech. The only thing holding that in check—I hoped—was that the Grasp didn’t want to see humanity wipe

itself out with alien weaponry, because a dead planet doesn’t make a good market. And on that note, there was still a missing, and possibly defective twist-comm unit somewhere on Earth—a forty-odd kiloton accident waiting to happen. And then there was my other flank—the Guild. It was threatened by the True Direction, which I was now convinced was itself just a construct doing Yotov’s bidding. She was the real key—bring her down, and both the True Direction and the Equal Grasp would be delivered critical, and maybe even fatal blows. But I had no idea where to even start looking for Yotov. And then there was my other other flank, which was the GKU and the Ferals. We still weren’t sure the Tsarina was dead, and Kiki Treasure, although a nominal ally, would pivot to enemy in a heartbeat if she thought it worthwhile. Layer onto this the unrest in the Seven Stars League, the whereabouts of Onjaku, the raids on the twist-comm stations and whatever that was all about —

All of these things were related somehow. And if I plotted it all on a bulletin board with pins and photos and such, the strings would all likely converge back on Yotov. But I couldn’t shake the feeling there was more to it than that. There were pieces we still didn’t have, preventing the puzzle from becoming a complete picture. Screw it. We knew where the Shearwater was, so it was probably our best immediate lead. My mother was watching over Earth, Retta’s spy network was nosing around on Earth itself, and I had Alic and Volffin running interference for me back at Anvil—not to mention the low-key network of AIs that seemed to revolve around Candler. So it was off to Dump we went, to find the Shearwater, and hopefully, Biggy Dah himself. AS WE ACCELERATED AWAY from Anvil Dark, Netty-P again brought up the odd, extraneous data leaking from the new scanner array. “It’s just a flicker, a bit of data. Then it stops, sometimes for minutes, sometimes more than an hour. Then there’s another flicker, a few more, then it stops again.”

“And you’re sure this is nothing sinister,” I asked her. “A virus or something slowly assembling itself.”

“I don’t see how it could be. It’s just data, as close to being a virus as a financial spreadsheet would. I suppose that, over time, it could end up constituting executable code. But even then, at the rate it’s accumulating, it would take months to reach the amount of information that would constitute even a very simple virus. We’re talking, in terrestrial computing terms, about a single kilobyte of data over the course of a day or so.”

“And the diagnostics show nothing.”

“Nope. The array is working fine. Perry and I have both, independently, combed through every last memory address in its internal systems and they’re all clear of anything even remotely suspicious. The data seems to originate in the scanner interface and control module that ties the array into the ship’s data bus, but that’s all I can tell.”

Perry spoke up. “It may even be noise leaking from a faulty component and it only looks like data. We haven’t seen enough of it to know for sure.”

I frowned, hard. It was another unknown I didn’t need. A minor one, sure. Netty-P showed me the graph depicting the accumulation of data over time. She was right—it would take weeks just to amount to a simple, low-res jpeg image. To put it another way, it made a screechy old dial-up modem seem lightning-fast. I finally just had to shrug. “Okay, keep monitoring it, and schedule updates for me every watch. I don’t like ghosts in the machine.”

“That’s a damned fine album,” Perry said. Icky looked up from her workstation. “Album?

You mean music?

By who?”

“The Police.”

“I understand the attraction,” Funboy said. “Law enforcement is inherently alluring. And it’s not just the uniform. It’s the order and logic of it all.”

“I don’t disagree, but The Police are a band. Although, you just reminded me—” I turned to Torina with a leer. “Given any more thought to that spicy flight attendant outfit I suggested?”

Torina didn’t look up from her own instruments. “I have another suggestion. Why don’t you —”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“Hey, are we gonna listen to the Police songs, or not?

Now you’ve got me curious,” Icky said. I shrugged. “Netty-P, play Spirits in the Material World and spin us up for a twist to the lovely sounding place called Dump, please.”

“On it, boss. Given that we’re trying to run down a well-armed ship known to work outside the law, I just have a feeling that we want to be cautious,” Netty-P replied. “Same. I know we don’t want to start off being hostile and all that, but I’m tired of us always giving the bad guys the initiative,” Icky put in. I opened my mouth to say something about us being law enforcement, that we had to do things in accordance with the law, conform to our rules of engagement and so on. But I changed my mind, and my words with it. “You know what?

You’re right. Torina, bring all of the weapons online. Everyone, make sure your b-suits are sealed up to the neck and your helmet is at hand. Icky, head back to your damage control station now. And take Gabby with you, she can assist.”

Gabby, standing in the back of the cockpit, looked from me to Icky. “Me?

Damage control?

But I don’t know —”

Icky stood and clapped Gabby on the shoulder. “You’re a quick study, Gabs. Don’t worry, if the shooting starts, I’ll show you what to do.”

“It will be nice to have something specific to do if there’s a fight. Sometimes I feel a little—useless.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not. You’re part of the crew of the Fafnir, the most kick-ass ship this side of the galactic core,” Icky said. Gabby nodded, in part at me. “Okay, well—sure. I’ll do whatever I can.”

As she headed aft with Icky, I got grateful nods from both Funboy and Rab. I gave a quick nod back to them, then turned my attention back forward just in time for Netty-P to start the twist countdown. DUMP WAS—WELL, that. Or the inhabited part of the planet was. The bulk of the available landmass was mostly frozen tundra interspersed with some barren, icy deserts. The oceans were mostly frozen, while the polar regions were crushed under the weight of continent-spanning glaciers, in some places piled up to three klicks thick. It was, Netty-P pointed out, basically a snapshot of Earth from about 25,000 years ago. The only habitation was confined to the equatorial regions of the two largest continents. Both were, as the planet’s name implied, dumps. Everything from spaceship parts to derelict construction machinery was piled or scattered across the barren landscape, arranged around small settlements like the rusty spokes of great, dilapidated wheels. But there was actually order to the junky chaos. One settlement seemed to specialize in structural members, spars and ribs and beams and plates and the like, so the spokes around it were stacks and piles and a general strew of those things. Another settlement likewise focused on cables and conduits, another on digging and excavating equipment, another on storage bins and tanks, and so on. “I’m surprised you’re not well-acquainted with this place, Icky,” Rab said. “This seems like just the sort of venue for parts and things you and your father would have been all over.”

“Meh, everything we needed we could get from somewhere in space. I mean, why bother hauling a bunch of hull-plating up out of a gravity well when you can get it out in the void?

It’s hella cheaper and more convenient,” she replied from her station aft. “That does raise an interesting question—what’s the point of it all?”

Torina said, gesturing at the imagery of the planet now below us. “I don’t see anything down there that looks especially unique or valuable, so I’m with Icky. Why drag it up from the surface of a planet when you can get it out there, already in space?

How is this place even competitive?”

“I don’t think it’s meant to be,” Perry replied. “I think this really is a way of keeping Fren-Okun males busy—at least, the ones not bright enough to strike out on their own. It also teaches them to be organized, methodical, keep good records —”

“Training them to be more productive members of their society,” I offered. “Yeah. It’s not so much a commercial enterprise as it is a sort of school.”

I nodded. It made sense. Fren males seemed to be of two types. There was a minority who were intelligent, incisive and self-motivated, like Dokean, the proprietor of the bar called The Respite on Dregs. And then there was the majority, who simply weren’t very smart and tended to cluster around the older Fren females, who kept them in line and gave them focus

and purpose. If some of the latter could be made more independent and productive on their own, it was better for the Fren as a whole. Unfortunately, it meant we had to deal with Fren-Okun males who weren’t exactly the cream of the crop, as we found out once we started making inquiries upon arriving in orbit. I scowled at the display as the third Fren in a row abruptly signed off, after saying he knew nothing about the ship called the Shearwater. We knew it was here—we could see it, in a lower orbit beneath us. In fact, with our much-improved scanners, we could clearly see it in orbit as soon as we twisted into the system. But three successive Fren, who’d declared themselves to be traffic-control officers, unconvincingly said they knew nothing about it and hung up on me. “They’ve been paid off,” Perry said. I glanced at him. “Gee, you think?”

“You know what the answer to that is, Van,” Torina said. I sighed. “Yeah, I do. Netty-P, can you please bring down our next contestant on The Price is Obvious?”

“Here you go. His name is Mirikin Tal.”

The display lit with the image of another Fren in a rumpled, dark-gray uniform. He gazed imperiously back at me and opened his mouth. Before he could say anything, though, I cut him off. “I’m going to ask you about the ship in orbit, called the Shearwater. You’re going to say you know nothing about it, because you’ve been paid to say that. So let’s avoid all that and just get right to, how much were you paid, so I can pay you more?”

He stared for a moment, then said, “It was one thousand bonds—or, no. Wait. I was not paid to say nothing about that ship —”

“Uh-huh. Methinks you protest too much—literally, because you just gave it away. Fine, I’ll pay you two thousand bonds to speak up.”

He stared again, then his look turned sly. He glanced from side-to-side, then leaned into the image and lowered his voice. “I lied. I was paid— five thousand bonds. Yeah—or, no, wait, it was ten thousand bonds —!”

Perry shook his head. “Wow. Ladies and gentlemen, these people developed twist technology, all on their own.”

“Bet their scientists were all female,” Rab muttered. I held up my hand. “I’ll sweeten the pot to three thousand bonds. That’s it. Otherwise, I’m sure I can find another —”

“No!

No, three thousand. Yes. That’s good. What do you want to know?”

“Is there anyone from that ship, the Shearwater, on the surface with you right now?”

“They landed a shuttle a day ago, at Spar.”

“Spar.”

“Yeah. Yeah. The settlement with all the spars and structural things.”

I nodded. “Okay. And do you know the status of their ship?”

“It’s broken.”

“Broken. Broken how?”

“No idea. It’s broken and won’t go until they fix it.”

I breathed a silent thank you to Gabriella, whose mysterious “contacts”

had obviously come through—somehow. “Alright. We’re going to send some people of our own down to Spar. I’d like you to authorize it.”

His eyes shifted left and right. “Another two thousand —”

“No, and if you don’t authorize it, I’ll find someone who will for the three thousand I was going to give you. Betcha it won’t be hard to —”

“Fine, fine,” he hissed, tapping at something in front of him. “There. You have clearance to land at Spar. But I want my money —!”

“And you’ll get it. Once we’re done at Spar, we’ll pay you.”

“But—!”

“You’re not about to suggest I’d renege on our little deal, are you?

That would hurt my feelings. And I’m much less generous when my feelings are hurt,” I said. He subsided. “Fine. I’m sending my coordinates. I’ll be waiting!”

“I’m sure you will,” I said and signed off. “Are you really going to pay that clown?” Icky asked. “I am. Because if I don’t, then the next time I happen to need something from one of these people, they’ll be that much harder to deal with.”

I started to unstrap. “Okay, I’m going on this little jaunt, and I’m taking everyone except Torina and Netty-P with me in the Frankie.” I looked at Torina. “You guys can hold the fort up here. Keep an eye on the Shearwater, but with her drive pooched, courtesy Gabriella, she’s not much of an immediate threat.”

She gave me a hard look. “What happened to Master Tudor staying out of the line of fire?”

“For one, I really don’t think there’s going to be a line of fire. But if there is, I’ve got everyone else with me. For another, I just think this is a job that’s going to require Master Tudor to be on the scene. Biggy Dah isn’t likely to be impressed by a Master who sends his people to do all the work.”

She persisted, though. “We don’t even know if Biggy Dah is down there.”

“Oh, but I think he is. If you were a collector of stolen stuff, and you collected it in quantity, where better to stash it than in what amounts to an uninteresting pile of junk?”

“That is a good point,” Gabby put in. “We’ve already established there’s really no good reason for that ship, the Shearwater, to be here. And they had no reason to believe we’d be coming here, because we only found out from Gabriella.”

“And if Biggy Dah is claiming part ownership of the Shearwater on behalf of his supposed uncle, Ja-Ra, then he’s definitely the type to use it as his own personal ride,” Rab put in. Torina finally sighed. “Fine. Just don’t go getting yourself killed, Van.”

I leaned in and kissed her. “Not killed. Got it.”

20

THE FREN-OKUN who met us when we set the Frankie down at Spar were no more cooperative than their fellows on the comm, and quickly wore my patience tissue-paper thin. Spar itself was, for a community based around scrap, surprisingly clean and orderly. Which made sense, I supposed, if the planet was basically a big school for Fren males, to teach them how to be organized, productive and self-motivated. Letting them live like frat boys amid a strew of dirty socks and pizza boxes wasn’t really conducive to that. Instead, Spar—which had a population, we figured, of about ten thousand or so—was a neat grid of streets lined with austere, but sturdy and functional buildings. The landing pad was on the south side of the town, and it was there that we were met by a wall of officious bureaucracy and outstretched palms. Perry, who’d gone aloft as soon as we’d landed, summed it up in my ear bug. Word’s probably gotten around that you’ve got a fat wallet, Van. I decided it was time to try a different tack, before my fat wallet became an empty one—and I was still no further to my goal. I pulled out my badge. “I’m a Master of the Peacemaker Guild, investigating a case that includes major theft, extortion, murder and I probably don’t need to go on

—except to say that if I don’t start getting some cooperation from you guys, who are supposed to be local law enforcement, I’ll just assume you’re suspects, instead,” I grated. The three Fren officials, bundled into heavy insulated suits against the dry chill, exchanged nervous glances. One of them, though, tried to remain

defiant. “Do you have a Writ?

Because, if you don’t —”

I leaned in, looming over him with a smile. “Did you catch the part about me being a Master?

I can draft my own Writ of Search and Seizure, and I have the exigent circumstances to justify it. There’s a ship in orbit right now that’s implicated in this case. Now, if you’d like me to summon a contingent of Peacemakers —”

Gabby stepped forward. “And also deal only with your Matrons. In fact, Van, I think that you should make a formal contact with their Matrons, tell them that these guys are hindering a lawful Guild investigation —”

The Fren immediately started babbling, declaring that wasn’t necessary, that as long as I could produce a Writ, that was all they required, and so on and so on. I gave Gabby an appreciative smile, and she returned a tentative one. She and I hadn’t talked much since she’d returned from Sussbrid, just a couple of brief conversations. She had asked me to involve her in as many ops as possible, though. Sussbrid had suggested to her that staying back, away from the action, was only going to make it that much harder to engage when she had to. We were quickly provided with an escort of one of the Fren port officials and a couple of security guards. I glanced around at the rugged ridgelines of scrap extending away from Spar in all directions. “Okay, the next problem—where the hell is Biggy Dah?” I turned to the Fren, to say that someone around Spar must know where he was, but Perry cut me off. “Van, there’s a spot out here, about a klick northeast of where you are now, that’s giving off weak power emissions and a thermal signal. It wouldn’t be detectable from orbit—or, for that matter, from more than a few hundred meters away.”

“What kind of spot?” I asked. “A spot. You know, a place. A location. A locus in space and time —”

“I know what a spot is, bird.”

“The source is under this mountain of scrap structural crap. And, look at that, there’s an old airlock at the base of the pile, with the door just kinda sitting there.”

“And there’s nothing else like it you can see?”

“Nope. This spot, and then cold scrap junk everywhere else.”

I glanced at the others. “Sounds like Biggy Dah built his lair under a pile of junk. Shall we?”

I gestured to my own people and the Fren, and we started to walk toward Perry’s spot. A THIN, cold wind hissed among the piled junk, sometimes whistling or piping eerie, mournful notes. Occasionally, something would shift a fraction, or shake in the wind, and the scrapheaps would utter brief squeaks or low, rattling groans. The leaden gray sky above just rounded out the feeling of walking through some post-apocalyptic wasteland, like a set from The Road. It was damned cold, too, running about minus five Celsius. Our b-suits kept us comfortable, and that included helmets. Not only did I suspect that Biggy Dah was not above shooting if he felt cornered, but our helmets gave us valuable information, like Perry’s directions to the location in question. We finally rounded another of the endless mounds of structural junk and saw Perry perched on an upthrust spar, silhouetted against the flat gray sky. The airlock he’d mentioned was buried at the base of another pile about fifty meters away. Sure enough, it glowed slightly in thermal, meaning there was heat, and therefore probably power behind it. I hesitated before stepping into the open. “Perry, any sign of any defenses, traps, that sort of thing?”

“None. I’ve given everything with a line of sight to here a thorough scan, and got Torina to focus the Fafnir’s spiffy new scanners onto the area for redundancy. Neither of us found anything but whatever it is that’s behind Door Number One.”

I looked at the others. “Okay. Rab, you, Gabs and Funboy stay here giving cover, Icky and I —”

Rab put up his hand. “Sorry, boss, but I’ve got to intervene. You don’t need to take point.”

“Rab is quite correct,” Funboy said. “Icky and I shall do so.”

“And me,” Gabby said. Funboy glanced at her. “That isn’t necessary, my sweet —”

“Yes, it is,” she said, but was looking at me when she said it. I had to just give in and nod. “Okay—Rab, you and I are giving cover, I guess.”

He unshouldered his BAG. He’d repaired and even upgraded it a little since it had been wrecked in Dohlennz’s evil lair while fighting the Starsword-wielding monstrosity. He took up a fire position, while I took Funboy’s slug carbine and offered him The Drop. He accepted, then proceeded to arm his horrifying combo-weapon—slug pistol, club, knife and brass knuckles all in one package. It was a bar fight and a demolition derby rolled all into one. As they started forward, the Fren official decided it was time for one last protest—probably because he was on the take for letting Biggy Dah set up shop here and didn’t want his revenue stream to dry up. “You are supposed to leave matters such as this to local law enforcement,” he said. “You must give us the opportunity to—to deal with any crime being committed here!” He puffed himself up as he said it, but despite his alien body language I could tell there was more than a little desperation in him. I really didn’t want to get into a jurisdictional turf war, but I also wasn’t just going to turn around and let the Fren—the same people who’d let Biggy Dah set up shop here in the first place—deal with it. Dealing with it would probably just end up with him being allowed to quietly slip away, or maybe even set himself up somewhere else. “Look, this is going to have to be a cooperative effort —”

“Oh, for—” Icky said, turning and trudging off toward the door, her hammer raised. The Fren official bristled and called after her. “Wait!

You can’t just —!”

I gestured for him to follow her. “Hey, feel free to stop her, if you want.”

He looked at the sledgehammer-wielding mountain of muscle and belligerence stalking away from him, then turned to me. “She is your subordinate. You must order her to wait.”

“Icky, no, you must wait—oh, shit, I think my comm’s just glitched out,” I said. “Yeah, it has, Van. I totally can’t hear you,” she said, striding up to the door. Funboy and Gabby followed. I noticed Gabby hesitating a little, sidling toward the scrap pile where there was cover. But she kept going and that’s what mattered. “I will complain to your Guild about this!” the Fren sputtered. I kept my focus on my own people. “Yeah, you do that. Perry up there will give you the appropriate contact info for Candler. He handles all incoming complaints on Anvil Dark.”

“Candler. I shall remember that!”

Icky and the others reached the old airlock without incident. She immediately set about opening it, a process that took her all of about fifteen seconds once she yanked off an access panel. By then, Rab, the Fren, and I had joined them. “This is exactly the same model of airlock Dad and I installed on”—she fiddled with something in the now-exposed mechanism—“on the port side of the Nemesis. Just have to—” She fiddled some more, then the outer door cycled open. “Yeah, there we go.”

I looked up at Perry. “Just in case Biggy Dah has a bolt hole somewhere, a back door he can use to escape —”

“On it, boss,” Perry replied, before flinging himself off his perch, spreading his wings, and soaring upward in a lazy spiral. “In we go,” Icky said, striding into the airlock. Funboy and Gabby followed, then Rab, with the Fren and I bringing up the rear. Whatever Icky had done allowed her to cycle the airlock normally, using its regular controls. That said, I didn’t want us all packed inside the thing when the inner door opened, so I had her force the outer to stay open, so we could wait outside. She crouched, taking as much cover as she could, then opened the inner door. Predictably, as soon as she did, slug fire snapped and clanged against the hatch-coaming and through the outer door. I amplified my voice through my suit speaker. “We’re with the Peacemaker Guild, engaged in a lawful investigation. Cease fire immediately!”

Two more shots snapped our way. I was about to repeat the warning when Funboy spoke up. “Whatever Biggy Dah is paying you, we shall pay you double if you cease fire and leave this place in an orderly manner.”

The shooting immediately stopped, then four thuggish figures came cautiously forward, hands raised. From behind them, a reedy voice cried out, “No!

No!

I’ll pay you triple —!”

“You haven’t paid us what you already owe us, asshole,” one of the thugs, a mangy Gajur with a scarred face, called back over his shoulder. “And we ain’t dying for you, either.”

The four shuffled through the airlock, allowing us to relieve them of their weapons. From inside the hideout, that same voice hurled curses with staccato fury. “So we ain’t be charged with nothing, right?” the Gajur asked me. I gave him a sour look. “You did shoot at Peacemakers involved in lawful business—but, no. I don’t have the time or interest.”

“But you are going to pay us, right?”

I sighed. “I’ve got two thousand bonds for the lot of you.” The Gajur opened his mouth, but I held up a hand. “And before you object, I might just reconsider that whole not charging you thing.”

The Gajur gave me a sour look of his own, then shrugged. “Whatever. Two thousand is better than nothing, which is what that scumbag, ” he shouted back into the airlock, “has paid us so far.”

I told them to head back to Spar and wait around the Frankie. As they trudged away, Rab gave me a wry look. “This is getting to be an expensive case.”

I nodded. “Yeah. You hear that old saying, You get the justice you can afford—but this isn’t exactly what I imagined it meant.”

WE PUSHED INTO THE HIDEOUT, which had been excavated into the scrap pile. By “excavated”, I meant that someone had Jenga’d pieces out of it, creating a tunnel leading to a larger open space, a room, with smaller rooms opening off it. The scrap structural beams and spars and ribs and things had been buttressed in places, and it all looked reasonably stable, but it sure as hell didn’t feel it—a feeling apparently not unique to me. Rab looked significantly up at the ceiling, a tangle of junk woven together in an intricate tangle. “Does anyone else feel like they’re stuck with a permanent wince on their face?”

Funboy looked up. “Indeed, this is—unsettling. Even off-putting.”

“Unsettling and off-putting?

Don’t get hysterical there, sourpuss,” Icky said. She was the only one of us who seemed at ease, probably because she was used to working in and around dangerous places full of scrap and junk. “Don’t come any closer!

Or I’ll shoot!”

The whiny voice came from behind a corner leading into one of the side rooms that opened off the main one. I saw a pale head with a single eye leering at me, crowned by a headband full of coins. The eye was sighted along a slug pistol, which was trembling like a paint-shaker. Icky, still in the lead, sighed, looked up for a moment, then wound up and threw her hammer at the ceiling. We all cringed, winced or yelped in alarm as a large beam slid down and slammed into the ground less than a meter from Biggy Dah. In a display of pure bravado, he shrieked and dove away, whereupon Icky strode forward, picked him up by the scruff of the neck and hauled into the main room. At the same time, she plucked the pistol out of his hand while laughing. “Icky, don’t do that again, okay?” I rasped at her. “How did you know that wasn’t going to bring the whole place down?”

Rab asked. She blinked back at us, then sniffed. “Physics, folks. Physics. Cause and effect and all that. I knew the effect the cause here”—she scooped up her hammer while still holding Biggy Dah—“would have.”

I was looking up anyway, keen for any sign that Icky’s move had destabilized the whole pile and tons of debris were about to come crunching down on us. But it all seemed as implacably solid as ever. Icky pointed at a beam that didn’t look any different than the others. “Now, that one—yeah, don’t anyone disturb that one. If you do, it’ll be the second-last thing you do.”

I took a shuddering breath, retrieved The Drop from Funboy and shot her a glance. “Second-last?”

“Yeah. The last will be scream or poop your pants—or both. Which is yet another reason pants are overrated.”

“Good to know.” I turned my attention to Biggy Dah, squirming in Icky’s grip. “So, this is the big man himself, huh?”

Biggy Dah shot a one-eyed glare past me, at the Fren official—the only one left, the guards having turned and fled when Icky did her hammer thing. “I paid you assholes to keep quiet!”

The Fren, his eyes still wide with surprised fear, gave a halting shrug. “The Peacemaker, he—he is going to pay us more.”

Rab smirked at me. I just rolled my eyes back at him, then swung back on Biggy Dah. “Okay, before we get mired in who was taking bribes from

whom and all that—Biggy Dah, assuming that’s your real name, you’re under arrest.”

“For what?

I’m just a small-time entrepreneur —!”

Funboy nudged something with his foot. “This statue, I believe, would be of cultural and religious significance on Arminsu-el. It is not an item that would be sold, because that would be the highest order of blasphemy. So under what definition of entrepreneurship would you reasonably have it in your possession?”

“I—uh —”

Funboy gave him a contemptuous glare. “As I thought.”

I looked around. Now that I was no longer terrified that the mountain of junk was about to come crashing down on me, I was realizing just how much stuff there was here. I saw statuary, tapestries, other works of art, spaceship parts, complete sets of precision tools and instruments, weapons, body armor and countless things in boxes, cases and crates. Icky was nosing through it, and finally uttered an exclamation, “Ah hah!”

She heaved aside a crate, revealing the ornate chair in which Biggy had been sitting in the Guild imagery. She wheeled on him, glaring. Being more than twice his height and easily four or five times his mass, it was like watching Sasquatch about to vent on a hobbit. “That is my dad’s chair, you miserable little bastard!

He paid for it, and you stole it!” she thundered. I saw the Fren, Rab, and Funboy all glancing up nervously as her bellow literally made the rafters ring like a tuning fork. I put my hand on her arm. “Cause and effect, big girl, remember?”

She glanced at me, then scowled back at Biggy Dah. “Bah!” she snapped, and wheeled away to start working out how she was going to safely extract the chair from the pile of loot. And there was a lot of loot here. I doubted that even the Fafnir could carry it all, even if we packed her to the overheads. I turned to the Fren. “You know, there have obviously been a lot of flights carrying this stuff, coming down to the surface, offloading it and departing and—how does that work, exactly?

How does this much stolen stuff get brought here without the local law enforcement knowing about it?”

“Collusion or incompetence are pretty much the only answers, I think,”

Rab said. I nodded at the Fren. “I agree. So which is it?

Were you in cahoots with Biggy Dah here?

In which case you are part of a criminal conspiracy?

Or

are you just really, really incompetent?”

The Fren gaped up at me. “Uh—incompetent. Very incompetent. We are terrible at our jobs.”

I shook my head. “Sadly, that is probably the best answer you could have given me.”

I looked around again. “Sorting, cataloging, and overseeing the return of all this stuff to its rightful owners is going to be a big job. I need someone who I can count on to be diligent, honest and unimpeachable to do it.” I turned to Gabby. “You up for the job, Gabs?”

“Me?

I—uh—” She glanced around, then looked back at me and spoke with a determined tone. “Sure. Absolutely.”

“My love is not only exquisite, but replete with the stench of fairness,”

Funboy said. “Uh, Funboy?

I might be single and all, but even I know that you probably don’t want to use the term stench when talking about your true love,” Rab said. “Ah. A fair point. I shall reconsider my terms of endearment for her. As magnificent as she is, that will not be hard to do.”

Icky stopped digging out her father’s chair and rolled her eyes. “Gross. So—smoochy and stuff.”

“That Paxomar is one lucky guy,” Rab muttered. “Van, I think I’m going to need some help with this,” Gabby said, gesturing around. I nodded. “Rab will help you. You guys can stay here as long as you need to do it. The Fren will provide accommodations—won’t they?” I said, turning to the Fren official. “We—yes, of course!

We’d be happy to!”

“Somehow, I knew you would.” I turned back to Gabby. “That said, I do want to have a Peacemaker on the case as well—Perry, can you hear me through all this junk?”

“Loud and clear, boss.”

“Get hold of either Lucky, Lunzy, K’losk, Tune—the being who spoke in something similar to musical notes—or Horace Wells, and ask them to get here as soon as they can. I want a Peacemaker on-station while Gabby and Rab sort out this dragon’s hoard of treasure.”

“Dragon’s hoard of treasure?

Really?”

“Dungeons and Dragons References R Us,” I said. “NERRRRRRRRRD!

And with that out of the way, sure, I’ll get right on it.”

I HAD Perry bring the Frankie close to the scrap pile, so that Icky could haul Biggy Dah aboard for transport up to the Fafnir. He bitched and moaned and complained the whole way, at least until Icky told him to shut it or she’d shut it for him. Gabby and Rab spent a few minutes strategizing while I was doing a quick scan of the loot. They then came to me and gave me an outline of their preliminary plan. “So just take Icky’s father his chair, and we’ll organize and sort the remaining items into ones we can easily attach to an owner, and those we can’t. And we’ll image and attach evidence numbers to them all,” Gabby finished. Rab nodded. “Needless to say, this is a big job. There are going to be a lot of relieved and happy people—but not all of them. I suspect that recovering some of these things are going to dredge up bad memories, schisms, family issues—it’s not going to be pretty.”

I looked at them both. “True, but ultimately, that’s not our problem. Our obligation is to return these things to their rightful owners. What happens after that is, well, up to them. Anyway, I trust you guys, so once you’ve got all this stuff recorded as evidence, send to whoever you see fit, alright?”

“Will do, boss,” Gabby said. She seemed perkier, which is what I’d hoped. I’d given her an important job, with a lot of responsibility, but I also trusted her completely to do it. More importantly, it didn’t carry an element of immediate danger. I’d hoped that would boost her confidence some, and it seemed to be working. “I’ll take everyone else back up in the Frankie, and we’ll go visit Icky’s father. But we will take that case, right there, with us,” I said, pointing at a crate I’d found while poking around. “That’s a Guild seal, which makes it Guild property. Weapons, in fact—am I right, Rab?”

He examined the data printed on the crate. “They are. Plasma-pulse cannons, small ones, meant to be mounted on ground vehicles or

atmospheric craft. Not exactly heavy hitters, though, except at very close range. What did you have in mind for them?”

“I was thinking about the Frankie, about how she’s kind of anemic in the point-defense department. These would be a lot smaller and lighter than a conventional PD system, though, right?”

He thought about it, then nodded. “Yeah. No heavy ammo, no feed mechanism—yeah, you could rig these up to run as PD weapons, sure. They’d be perfect for it.”

“I do love the thought of more guns on the Frankie,” Funboy said. Icky, returning after shackling Biggy Dah into a seat aboard the Frankie, arrived in time to agree. “I’m with mopey. I love guns, too.”

“See?

We’re building bridges here, people,” I said. “Now then, let’s load up the Frankie and scoot. We’ve got people to see.”

Icky grinned. “And guns to shoot.”

21

URNAK AND HIS OLD BATTLESHIP, the Nemesis, were both at a shipyard at 61 Cygni. It was a poignant system to visit because this was where Zenophir had died taking down Helem Gauss. Yes, she was back—in a way. Although I’d never even hinted at this to anyone, I found myself stuck wondering if the new Zeno was actually, well, Zeno. She was effectively identical in virtually every way, but she really wasn’t the same Zeno who had died here. And, to her credit, this new Zeno seemed to realize the same thing. Rather than trying to step into the old Zeno’s life as though she’d been away on a sabbatical of some sort, she chose a different path. She learned from the things her predecessor had done, had not done, and regretted, and went from there. Which was why she hadn't asked to rejoin the Fafnir’s crew, and I was glad of that. I wasn’t sure that having a resurrected crew member was a good idea. Human psychology, certainly, isn’t built for that. Death is the final chapter of our lives and circumventing that—it raised red flags for me. Fuzzy, ill-defined ones, but they were still red. The shipyard where Urnak had rented space orbited the second planet out from the star, a planet surprisingly similar to Sol’s own Venus—two away from its sun, wrapped in a thick, hot, toxic atmosphere. It was a good place for an orbiting shipyard, though, which only cared about the planet’s gravity maintaining said orbit, not that it was a hellish inferno on the surface. Icky had prepared a surprise for her father—cleaning and polishing his fancy chair on the way here, then putting it in the crew lounge and draping it with a blanket. When Urnak came aboard, after the greetings and questions about how his grandkids were doing were done, Icky yanked the blanket away with a flourish. “Here you go, Da!

Just for you!”

Urnak stared at the chair for a moment, clearly a little confused—then understanding dawned, and with it, a broad grin of delight on his face. “Icky, where did you—how did —?”

“We caught the scumbag who pinched it. Got him in one of our holding cells back there if you wanna go poke him a few times.”

Urnak laughed. “No, I’ve got better things to do with my time than waste it on some crook—like sitting in my new favorite chair!” With that, he plunked himself into it, wiggled around a little, then let out a contented sigh. “Really fits my ass with class,” he pronounced. Torina snorted. “Like daughter, like father.”

Since the Nemesis was going to be laid up for a few days, having her power plant overhauled, Urnak offered to help us rig up the new plasma-pulse guns to the Frankie. Icky, though, interrupted with a frown. “Dad, space-dock fees for a ship the size of the old Nem have gotta be crazy. And then the cost of an overhaul to the plant—you suddenly take up a secret life of crime of your own?”

Still sitting in his chair, he stuck out his ample feet, crossed them, and wiggled his toes. “Nope. I’ve been kind of sitting on this”—he glanced down at the chair—“hey, I’m getting punny in my old age!”

Icky groaned. “Sitting on what, old man?’

“Oh. I filed a Grievance against the estate of that old bastard Toxon. Figured he owed us something for all the pain and strife he caused. The Arbiters ruled in my favor, and it turns out Toxon was loaded. He was one of those bitter old heaps of misery that hoarded wealth but never enjoyed it. Anyway, we’re—well, not rich, but we’re well off. The reason I haven’t told you, though, is I was gonna surprise you with a big, fat trust for your kids, in your name and Pax’s. So—surprise!”

Icky hooted with glee. “Yes!

Way to go, Da!

Take that, Toxon, you rotten old ass!”

We all congratulated them—all except Funboy, who just blinked at me, confused. “I was led to understand that one should not speak ill of the dead, to use the phrase I’ve seen in Earthly literature. And yet, you’re all celebrating Toxon’s death and the dismemberment of his estate.”

I shrugged. “Generally, you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, no—if they were an otherwise decent person. I mean, if your uncle, say, dies, and he was an all-around good guy but he maybe drank too much sometimes and got a little belligerent—yeah, you should just let that go. But if someone was a genuinely reprehensible person, like Toxon —”

“Or an outright monster, like Dohlennz,” Torina, standing with me, put in. I nodded firmly at that. “Yeah. If they deserve to be spoken ill of, then go for it.”

Funboy blinked at us thoughtfully, then offered a grave nod. “Ah. Well, in that case, I have a list of deceased people in my past I shall hereafter freely bad-mouth. With some of them, I shall relish the opportunity.”

He walked off to speak with Urnak and Icky. Torina and I just watched him go. Torina crossed her arms. “You know, if I ever had to pick the member of this crew most likely to grow up and become a serial killer —”

“Uh-huh.”

URNAK AND ICKY went crazy on the Frankie. I think they actually missed working on a ship together, so the Frankie got the full treatment. They mounted the plasma-pulse guns in a sort of chin turret, added REAB

protection to her prow and beefed it up on her flanks, rerouted her main power bus and added a secondary, thereby plugging a glaring weakness, and tweaked and tuned her up. It was fun, actually, listening to them mutter, bicker, and bitch at each other as they worked, all of it done suited up in the zero- g void. But that didn’t seem to bother either of them. They used all four arms and their feet to nimbly crawl around the Frankie’s exterior—and they did it all untethered. Not that there was much risk, because they had maneuvering units and about a hundred different forms of rescue only minutes away, but

still. They might have been working on the Frankie in a sunny meadow for all the concern they showed. I was sitting in the Fafnir’s cockpit, musing over the strange data that still periodically leaked—not from the new scanner array, as much as it seemed to be because of it. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find that Netty-P and Perry hadn’t, and sure enough I found nothing. It was just data, like values in a spreadsheet whose column and row labels I couldn’t see, just as Netty-P described. Icky and Urnak were chattering away on the comm, a sort of white-noise background, when he said something that made me sit up. “Yeah, his name was Lesthrix,” Urnak was saying, responding to some question Icky had asked him. “He was connected with your mother, so he had that against him, but —”

I cut in. “Urnak, did you say Lesthrix?

Are you talking about a Yonnox?”

“Uh—yeah. I was just telling Icky about this guy who wanted to hire me and Old Nem for some job. The offer was good, but I remembered him as someone my dear old bitch of an ex-wife sometimes did business with—

why?”

“Because a Yonnox named Lesthrix was one of our first contacts with the Equal Grasp. They’re the group that’s —”

“I know who they are. Icky told me all about them. You sure we’re talking about the same guy, though?”

It was a fair question. Based on the research I’d done on Lesthrix, the name wasn’t a common one among the Yonnox, but neither were many humans named Van. Still, there were other Vans out there. I thought for a moment, then asked Urnak, “Do you know any of his business partners?”

“Well—my ex, for one, like I said. Let’s see. Damn, it was a while ago

—oh. No, wait. He talked to someone who stayed aboard their ship when we met at Spindrift. Human fellow, named—Jack?

No—shit, what did he call him when they talked on the comm. J—Jacob!

That was it, Jacob.”

I nodded at the comm panel. Jacob, as in Jacob Marley, the man who’d been with Lesthrix when we met them on Helso. Thanks to Charles Dickens, Jacob Marley wasn’t a name I was soon going to forget. “That’s him alright,” I said. “Has to be, or it’s one hell of a coincidence. I don’t suppose he gave you contact info, a way of getting hold of him —?”

“Yeah, he did, as a matter of fact. I haven’t actually told him no yet. I only talked to him about a standard week ago. And the only reason I haven’t said yes is because of his connection to my ex. Friends of my enemies and all that. Still, the offered pay was good.”

“What did he want you to do?”

“Some sort of escort mission. He said Old Nem is big and bad enough to make any pirate think twice about trying something, which is exactly what he wanted—something to chase off pirates. He was worried about the Stillness, it seemed. Seems to think they’ve come back to life after a long hiatus. Anyway, he didn’t give me any more details than that, although he did ask me if I was familiar with a region of space called Afterthought.”

I nodded again. Afterthought was the old stomping ground of The Stillness. I’d done one of my first big ops as a Peacemaker out there. But there was one more question, an important one. “Urnak, did Lesthrix know that you’re Icky’s father?”

“Nope. Or I don’t advertise it, at least. I’m really careful to keep quiet about that. Now, if he did his Wu’tzur homework, he’d no doubt be able to figure it out. I mean, lots of our people know Icky and I are related, of course.”

I sat back, mind racing. I finally decided I needed a bit of time to think about this. “Urnak, when did Lesthrix want an answer?” I asked. “I’ve got another two standard weeks to get back to him.”

“Okay, great. Please don’t until I get back to you. There might be an opportunity here for us to bust our way into the Equal Grasp. I just need some time to sift it.”

“You got it, Van.”

I called Perry into the cockpit and explained my conversation with Urnak to him. “What do you think?”

“Well, two possibilities. One, Lesthrix really has no idea that Icky, and therefore we, are connected to Urnak, and he genuinely wants some serious firepower for some escort job out near Afterthought because The Stillness really are a resurgent threat. If that’s the case, then it’s pretty clear that The Stillness and the Equal Grasp aren’t exactly buddy-buddy.”

“And two?”

“Two, Lesthrix does know that Urnak is Icky’s father, and it’s a setup. In that case, Urnak himself may be the target, either to put pressure on Icky,

and therefore you, or to take the Nemesis off the table as a threat you can call on. Or it may be both those things. Or, Urnak may just be bait, the Equal Grasp looking to use him as a way to lure you into a trap. And both of those things may be true, Urnak is a target and bait.”

I sighed. “Good summary, bird. Unfortunately, it amounts to this may or may not be a setup, without any real indication which is more likely.”

“Sorry, boss, I can only work with what I’ve got. That said, though—

what’s the worst case?”

“That it’s a setup, intended to take out Urnak and draw us into a trap while doing it.”

“Does that sound like something Yotov would do?”

I nodded. “Yeah. It does. Dangle something in front of us we can’t resist and pull us into an ambush. That’s basically what she did with Onjaku when we chased him to Spindrift.”

“Exactly. So the logical answer is to tell Urnak to tell Lesthrix to pound sand. But that’s the beauty of it, Van. Either way, Yotov scores a win. She pulls us into a trap and hurts us, or she makes us start having conversations like this one —”

“And start second-guessing everything we do.”

“Bingo. She’s a chess player, Van, and a good one.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I’ve never been very good at chess. I’m way better at Monopoly.”

“Duh. Just buy all the houses. I’m not sure you can engage Yotov in a metaphorical game of Monopoly, though, unless you’re going to go all robber baron about it.”

I smiled. “Good point. So my other game is —”

“Let me guess. Poker. Pretty cliché, Tudor—the bad guy wants to play chess, but the good guy turns it into poker. A high-brow intellectual’s game subverted by a plain old working man’s one. Kind of a trope, don’t you think?”

“You didn’t let me finish. Yeah, I like poker, sure. But there was a game I played back in my Army days—euchre. It only uses nines, tens, and face cards, it has a trump suit, and jacks can be the strongest cards. It’s weird and kind of unpredictable. So that’s what we have to be. If Yotov is going to play chess, fine—we just have to play a weird, wild and unpredictable game of it.”

WHICH WAS EASY TO SAY, but harder to put into practice. I did, though, have an idea as to how to leverage Urnak’s contact with Lesthrix. I envisioned Urnak accepting and then just not showing up. Instead, we could send the Prowler to lurk and watch and see what happened at the rendezvous point. As I pondered that, we took the Frankie out for a spin with her new upgrades. Unlike the Fafnir, which we’d stripped of her alien grav-plating during her time in space-dock at Helso, the Frankie still had hers. With her updates and tune-ups, she was now nimbler than ever. I was able to put her through nearly forty g’s of acceleration for a sustained period, with the grav-plating causing her to only feel about nineteen g’s. Those of us inside her felt nothing at all, the forces being easily handled by her inertial offsets. I wanted to test the plasma-pulse guns as well. They were potent little weapons, technically called Firebrands, capable of a fearsome rate of fire. We used bursts of coherent plasma to blow apart some stray rocks in the outer reaches of the 61 Cygni system in direct-fire mode. Then, in point-defense mode, they easily took out an incoming missile drone we’d purchased from the shipyard for this very purpose. Combined with her conventional PD battery, laser battery, and suppressor cannons, the Frankie was now a small warship. Icky grinned over the results when we returned to the Fafnir. “Yeah, this was definitely worth the trip. Da knows how to run one hell of a gun station.”

I grinned back. “Okay, well, I guess our next stop is —”

“Fortitude, in the Seven Stars League,” Perry said. We all turned to him. Torina cocked her head and gave a mischievous smile. “Why?

You have a lady friend there you’re dying to visit?”

“Yes, Torina, you got me. I, a combat AI with no functional genitalia—

and, I might point out, no need or desire for any—have a torrid affair going on—” Perry paused and stared at Icky, who was crouching. “What are you looking at?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Just checking. Huh. Yeah, you don’t have any —”

“People, less talk about who does or does not have spicy bits, more focus on why Perry is saying we have to go to Fortitude,” I said, then turned to him. “Bird?”

“Message from Anvil Dark, Masters’ Priority Channel. A new Peacemaker-Adept ran down a spiffy luxury yacht in Seven Stars League space, not far from their border with the Schegith. Apparently, the owner of the yacht fled a licensed casino on the League planet of Fortitude with a very large unpaid debt. That’s a violation of League law, and surprise, the Peacemaker felt compelled to enforce it.”

“So what’s the problem?” I asked. “The yacht’s owner is claiming that the class of crime in question is only liable for investigation and prosecution under League law and that the Guild has no jurisdiction. In other words, the stop, search, seizure, and arrest were all unlawful.”

“But the Guild is empowered to enforce local laws as long as they turn over the case to the local authorities once they’ve established there’s actually sufficient evidence to make the case in the first place.”

Perry’s eyes flashed. “Very good, Master Tudor. Someone’s been eating their legal Wheaties, I see.”

“Hey, I’m not just another pretty face.”

“That’s true.”

I curled my lip at him. “Anyway, bird, I’m assuming there’s a wrinkle, or you wouldn’t be bringing this to me in the first place.”

“Also true. There is a wrinkle. The accused in this case does have, ah, a case to make of their own. The way that the relevant League laws are written, it could be argued that they are exempt from enforcement by anyone other than League authorities—including the Guild. And since local laws take precedence, except in cases that span jurisdictions or —”

“Yeah, I get it. The perp has some validity to their argument. Fine. So what’s my role in this?”

“Well, the Peacemaker in question isn’t sure how to proceed. Like you, she believes that she has jurisdiction and doesn’t want to just surrender it.”

“She doesn’t want to risk setting a precedent,” Torina put in. Perry nodded. “The League seems willing to let it be argued, rather than just demanding jurisdiction. So, there’s a need for a Master to adjudicate the case, and guess what?”

It was my turn to nod. “I’m the only Master available.”

“’Fraid so, boss.”

I sighed a heavy sigh. “Fine. Tell Anvil Dark we’re on our way. Netty-P, if you please.”

She nodded her imager. “One trip to Fortitude coming up!”

22

I RETIRED to my cabin to review the Peacemaker’s report, along with the relevant League and Interstellar statutes. Perry followed me. When the door closed, though, he hopped up on my desk and pushed his amber gaze into mine. “So what was that tone just now, boss?”

“What tone?”

He played back my own words— Fine. Tell Anvil Dark we’re on our way. Netty-P, if you please. “That tone. And that sigh. It sounds a little like

—defeatism?

Not used to hearing that from you.”

I shrugged. “This is such a bullshit little matter, Perry. I mean, jurisdictional wrangling over a case of some rich asshole running out on a gambling debt at a casino?

Really?

Everyone knows what cases I’m chasing

—Earth, the Equal Grasp, the identity theft thing is still an open case and a Crime Against Order. But we’re being pushed into something like this?

It barely meets the threshold of needing a Master involved in the first place, but it’s otherwise a waste of our time.”

I slumped back a little. “It’s lawfare. It’s war by paperwork, and it’s designed to make me—make us—trip up. Make mistakes. And we will, I will, even with you on the case, Perry.”

“I beg your pardon?

Van, I don’t make mistakes. Ever. I can’t.”

I offered him a tired smile. “I know that. But even you can only work with the information you have. And information can be changed. Documents can be doctored. Video altered. Hell, the fakes are so good, even you can’t tell sometimes, right?

Remember how much trouble we had with

the ship that had been removed from that imagery of the attack on Cantullin Station?”

Perry stared back at me for a moment, then nodded. “Alright. I guess I buy your premise. And I suppose that I shouldn’t underestimate the other side—by which I mean Yotov.”

I sat up. “No, we definitely can’t afford to do that. People both good and bad have been brought down by simply underestimating their opposition. And Yotov is not to be underestimated. So keep your head on a swivel, bird.”

Perry spun his head completely around, twice. “I always do, boss.”

WE SET course for League space to meet with the Peacemaker, a young Eniped female named Saelis. I did a background check on her along the way, looking for anything to suggest she might have been compromised by the True Direction, but it came up blank. She’d passed from Peacemaker Initiate to Adept about a year ago, and since then had run three cases of her own. They were all the usual sorts of relatively low-stakes, low-payout cases that typically get assigned to new Peacemakers, a way of keeping them busy and gaining experience without a lot of threat involved, while cleaning up the little things that needed to be cleaned up around known space. She’d successfully closed them all, and that was about it. Saelis had seized the alleged debtor’s ship, a yacht poetically named The Void Ocean. It was owned by an elderly Fren-Okun matriarch, but it was, based on Saelis’s report, currently being mastered by her eldest daughter, a Fren named Ooksis. The Void Ocean was duly registered, the only variance it being overdue for its regulation power-plant inspection by a week or so. Neither Ooksis nor her mother appeared in the Guild archives in any capacity. In other words, this was a first-time crime by people who seemed diligent enough to keep their ship and its paperwork reasonably current and really had no obvious reason for worrying about the debt—three million bonds, according to Saelis. But a quick check of Ooksis’s family showed them to own mining interests across known space worth many hundreds of times that. Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time someone

extremely wealthy crossed over to the wrong side of the law over pocket change. Both Saelis and The Void Ocean were currently docked at a transfer orbital at Fortitude, pending disposition of the case’s jurisdiction. Which really should be a no-brainer. Saelis could just hand the case over to the League authorities and be done with it. I got what she was saying about precedent, but ultimately, who cared if the Guild or the locals disposed of the case?

The only precedent it would set would involve the Guild surrendering minor cases, which was fine by me. Which led to the part of the case that was a little odd. Ooksis was arguing that the Guild didn’t have jurisdiction to stop her and seize her ship, that was the sole purview of the League. Saelis, young and keen as she was to prove herself, disagreed. But rather than press the issue, the League was content to let a Master come in and adjudicate the matter. And that was the odd bit. Were this the Eridani, the Ceti, or even an independent power like the Wu’tzur or the S’rall, they would have pressed the issue, vigorously. I had Perry do a search of historical jurisdictional disagreements between the League and the Guild. Sure enough, in the past, the League was just the same, fiercely territorial in asserting their jurisdiction whenever they could. So why not this time?

I leaned back from my desk terminal, which displayed the historical case information. “You know, Perry, my Spidey-sen —”

“Hey, watch the IP infringement, Van.”

I smirked. “You don’t think being light-years away from Earth, in a spaceship flying through the void is safe?”

“Nope.”

“Fine. My non-specific superhero senses are tingling. There’s something strange about this case.”

“The League’s still something of a shitshow, Van. It may be that they’re just not anxious to take new work if they’re having trouble dealing with what’s already in their inbox,” Perry offered. “Okay, so why not just refuse jurisdiction outright, then?

Just leave it in Guild hands?”

“Well, there is an argument to be made, in law, that they can’t. And they may not want to be seen just surrendering jurisdiction.” He paused a moment, then added, “Or this may be a way of pulling a certain Master to this relatively out-of-the-way place for nefarious reasons. So yeah, I get what you’re saying.”

“So your advice, bird?”

“Render a quick judgment and then get gone.”

“Sounds good to me.”

TECHNICALLY, I had to hold a hearing, to allow both sides to make their case. What was odd was that while Saelis would present for the Guild, Ooksis was stuck presenting for the League. The League participant, a so-called Warden, a human male named Leffing, was sitting in as an

“interested observer”.

Rather than convene an in-person hearing, for the sake of expediency I decided we’d do it by comm. Beforehand, though, I asked Perry to do some digging around, particularly regarding the casino, the supposed victim in all this. “What am I looking for, boss?” he asked me. “This is a case of you’ll know it when you find it, I think. I’d just like to know for sure that the three million bonds in question really exist.”

Perry gave me a hard amber stare. “You’re thinking money laundering?”

“Maybe. I mean, Ooksis loses three million bonds at—I don’t know, craps or roulette or the outer space equivalent thereof. She skips out on her debt, leaving it unpaid. The casino quietly writes it off as bad debt—and all casinos have some bad debt, which is something they don’t want to advertise, of course. Ooksis, meanwhile, has lost three million bonds, except she really hasn’t, and now that money is effectively off the books. Throw in a crooked auditor or two —”

“Assuming any of this gets audited at all.”

“Exactly. We’ve now just freed up three million bonds, turning it into money that no longer exists.”

Perry nodded. “And three mil buys a lot of wrongdoing. But something went wrong. Somehow, keen young Peacemaker Saelis gets tipped off about it, runs down Ooksis, and here we are. That part wasn’t supposed to happen.”

I nodded along as Perry spoke, but I stopped doing that with his last sentence. “Wasn’t it, though?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let’s assume Yotov has her grubby fingerprints on this. Okay, so

—I rule in favor of Ooksis, the case gets handed over to the League, it quietly just goes away, and that three million bonds gets laundered as intended. Or —”

“Or, you rule in favor of the Guild, and that gets spun into you being biased, not trusting the League to follow the law or whatever, and is used to make you look bad, at least as far as the League is concerned. You get undermined,” Perry said. I nodded. “Chess, remember?

Yotov sets up the board so that there’s just no good move left for her opponent.”

“Okay, so how do you turn this into—euchre, right?”

“Well, in euchre, the two jacks of whatever suit is trump become known as bowers, the strongest cards in the game. So we have to promote something in this case to a position of prominence it otherwise wouldn’t have. It would be the equivalent, in chess, of suddenly making a random pawn into a queen.” I narrowed my eyes at the terminal, then sat up. “And I have an idea how to do just that.”

I CONVENED the hearing a few hours later, with Ooksis, Saelis, and the League Warden, Leffing, all on the comm channel. As expected, Saelis came across as diligent and enthusiastic, Ooksis as righteously outraged, and Leffing as blandly attentive. “Thank you, everyone, for being so diligent about attending this hearing, which I’m now calling to order. At this point, I would normally ask for each party to make their case, but I’m afraid a more urgent matter has come to my attention. It is of such a serious nature that it overrides the issue that brought us here, so I am placing that matter in abeyance for the time being.”

Saelis remained as keen as ever but was now also clearly curious. Ooksis had gone quiet, looking back at me with alarmed suspicion. Interestingly, so did Leffing. “What other, supposedly more urgent matter is this?” Ooksis demanded. “You are currently operating your ship, The Void Ocean, without an extant power plant certification. You were required to have it inspected and

certified by an agency authorized under Interstellar Flight Rules, specifically Article Three, Section One, paragraphs four and five. You did not do so, so you are in contravention of that statute—to which the League is a ratified signatory.”

Ooksis gaped. Clearly, this was coming at her out of the blue—or, rather, the black—which was exactly my intent. I’d just played the so-called left bower, the second-most powerful card in a round of euchre. The fact that Perry had put the appropriate text about the article and section and such on the screen for me, teleprompter-like, didn’t matter—what did was that it was factually correct. “I—but—” She sputtered a bit longer, then shrugged. “Alright, fine. The inspection is a week out-of-date. I intended to get it done as soon as I returned from League space. So hit me with whatever the fine is, and we can move on from this—this nonsense.”

“Very well. For the record, you are entering a plea of guilty regarding your ship’s uncertified power plant —”

“Yes, fine, whatever. Can we just please move on to the actual case?”

Ooksis snapped. I glanced at Leffing’s image in the split screen. He was now watching me intently. I held up a hand. “Before we do, I have to assess your penalty regarding the matter of your power plant. The flight rules, same article and section, this time in paragraph eleven, states that the presiding authority—that would be me—may, and I quote, Assess such financial and other penalties as would be reasonably commensurate with the magnitude of the infraction and the capacity of the violator to fulfill them. It then goes on to say that such penalties must not exceed five percent of the total value of the vessel in question without approval from the Interstellar Flight Rules Tribunal.”

I smiled at Ooksis. “I don’t think that’s necessary. But this remains a grave offense. If your uncertified power plant were to fail—well, right now, while you’re docked at this orbital, the consequences would be—” I pretended to hunt for a suitable world. “It would be catastrophic.”

Ooksis spoke up in a sharp hiss. “Now wait just —”

“Excuse me, but I’m not done. Now, given that your family is very wealthy, I believe you can easily afford to pay five percent of the value of The Void Ocean—it is not an undue burden to you, but it’s still sufficient to

deter future transgressions. And, since the Interstellar Flight Registry shows the current value of your ship at fifty-two million bonds —”

I widened my smile. “It’s really a very nice ship, isn’t it?

Anyway, that means I am assessing you a fine of two million six hundred thousand bonds. This amount is payable, in full, to the Interstellar Flight Rules Tribunal. Until that payment is made, flight certification for your ship is rescinded.”

Boom, I’d just laid down the right bower, the topmost trump and most potent card in a hand of euchre. Ooksis sputtered indignantly, but she had no objections of substance because she simply hadn’t seen this coming. Even then, there really was no scope for objections. The way the rules were written were very clear, because when it came to keeping ongoing thermonuclear explosions safely contained, there really wasn’t any wiggle room. Leffing, who had yet to even say a word, gave me a stone-faced stare. Saelis was looking at me with something like awe. I interrupted Ooksis’s ongoing gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts and pushed on. “Now that that unfortunate matter is out of the way, we can move on to the case that has brought us here. Peacemaker Saelis, I applaud your diligence in this matter. But I do have to wonder, how did you even become aware of the issue of the allegedly unpaid debt in the first place?”

“I received a tip from someone who works inside the casino in question, Master Tudor.”

“I see. Was this someone you knew?”

“It—no, it wasn’t. It was someone who said that they knew a Peacemaker would ensure justice was done.”

“And you just happened to be in this system.”

“No, I was following a lead in the case I’m working. It came from Anvil Dark.”

I’ll bet that if we chase that down, boss, we’ll find the lead came from Casaril or one of his cronies, Perry said in my ear bug. I just offered him a quick glance and a fractional nod. “I see. Well, in any case, I’ve reviewed the information relating to this case, and I don’t believe it’s necessary or appropriate for the Guild to deal with it. Again, Peacemaker Saelis, I commend your diligence and devotion to duty, but I am hereby returning the case of the gambling debt to the League.” I ended by looking right at Leffing. Who just stared impassively back, then nodded. “Very well. Thank you, Master Tudor,” he said in a way that managed to convey no gratitude whatsoever. “Very well, then. I believe we are done here. This hearing —”

“I—I want to appeal this—this outrage!” Ooksis shouted. I gave her a curious look. “Appeal?

I just ruled in your favor. You were arguing that this matter should be dealt with by the League —”

“No, the ridiculous power plant thing —!”

“Oh, by all means. You can submit your appeal to the Guild, to be heard by another Master. Of course, you’d be asking a Master to rule that it is alright to operate a ship with an uncertified power plant. But that’s certainly your right. In the meantime, though, the judgment stands. Good day, everyone.”

I signed off and sat back. Perry, standing on my desk out of view of the imager, flashed amber eyes at me. “Boss, gotta hand it to you. No Master in their right mind will hear that appeal, which means you just turned three million bonds of laundered money into a measly four hundred thousand—and you managed to avoid offending the League. What do you do for an encore?

Hear a case about cutting a baby in half?”

I smiled, but it didn’t last. “We got lucky, Perry. If it hadn’t been for the issue of that power plant and some very black-and-white flight rules, we’d still be very much stuck on the horns of the dilemma Yotov unleashed from its pen. The next time they try this, they’re going to make sure they’ve thoroughly dotted every i and crossed every t.”

“We need to get out in front of them, then.”

“Yeah, that we do.”

23

EVENTS, though, have a way of doing their own thing. Even as I stepped into the cockpit to finally order a course to Anvil Dark, Netty-P was already speaking. “I have just received a message from Master Cataric, of all people, asking you to contact him,” she said. I stared for a moment, then slid into the pilot’s seat and glanced at Torina. “Okay, I guess we’re heading back to Helso —”

“That’s not where he is,” Netty-P put in. “He’s somewhere else.”

I tensed. “I don’t like how vague you’re being, Netty-P. Is something wrong?”

“Sorry, boss. I’m not being vague by choice. Cataric was being dodgy. His message contained no details at all, just what I’ve told you.”

Torina, sliding into her own seat, gave me a hard look. “He’s in danger.”

I scowled. “Oh, he’d better not be. Harming Cataric would be seriously hazardous to their health, whoever they might be. Netty-P, please get him on the comm as soon as you can.”

It took her about ten minutes, but she finally got Cataric on the twist comm. I braced myself for the worst, but when Cataric’s image appeared, he was wearing his usual serene smile. “Master—”

“Uh—you do not need to call me that, Van, remember?”

I smiled as my own tension drained away. If he could correct me over a nicety like that, then the situation couldn’t be too critical. “Alright, Mister Cataric, what’s up?”

“I’m on my way to Earth.”

“To—what?

To Earth?

Why?”

“To meet with your friend, Miryam.”

I stared blankly, then looked up Torina and found her likewise staring blankly. I then turned that blank stare back at Cataric. “Miryam?

She’s not even on Earth right now.”

“No, but she soon will be. She is on her way there now with a friend of yours, Retta, and has someone named—” He glanced down at a data pad. “Yes, she has a Mavis DeMont with her. It would appear that Retta has obtained credible evidence that a major threat to Earth is brewing, so they wish to warn the appropriate people —”

I held up a hand. “Let’s back up a little here. Why are you heading to Earth?

And for that matter, why were you the one Miryam told?”

“Ah, well, to answer the second question first, it was not Miryam who informed me, it was Retta. She was being cautious, not wanting to contact you directly and instead routing it through a third party that is hopefully trustworthy, while also not obvious. She tends to be oblique that way, but such is the way of a career spy, I suppose.”

I had to sniff and shake my head. A giant slug with a voice like Edith Piaf’s and riding atop a ball like a circus performer wasn’t the first thing that came to mind when I thought spy. But I brushed that aside. “For the record, Cataric, there aren’t many I trust more than you. And I’m really intrigued by how you seem to know Retta, but that can wait for a more opportune time. So how about my first question?”

“I am going to Earth because Retta believes I can be helpful to you. The nature of this threat isn’t one that can be combatted with spaceships and firepower. It is more—intimate. An up-close-and-personal sort of thing. And since I have assisted Retta in such ways in the past—” He smiled. “Which perhaps helps explain how I know her.”

I glanced at Torina, then back at Cataric. “Are you saying that you’ve—

done work for Retta?

Physical work?”

“Violent work?” Torina put in. Cataric laughed. “If you are asking if I am some secret assassin, no. But I have worked with Retta on tasks that involve physical danger. She is the brains, and I am the brawn, yes?

Or some of the brawn, anyway. She has

employed others, as well—including two of the most unlikely and remarkable, um, operatives that I’ve ever met. But that is another story.”

He shrugged. “In any case, Retta believed I could be helpful, so I suppose I shall meet you at Earth.”

“Cataric, I’m a little uncomfortable with you heading to Earth all on your own —”

“Ah, but I am not alone. We will arrive at Earth in—how long do you estimate, Wastinic?”

A big, bulky face leaned into view. I recognized it as a Badgin, another species I was aware of but hadn’t had many dealings with. Petyr Groshenko had told me that Gramps had flown with one, early in his own career as a Peacemaker. “About thirteen standard hours, Master,” the Badgin intoned, his voice like the distant tolling of a large bell. I must have raised an eyebrow at that Master, but Cataric just gave a small shrug and widened his smile a little. “I train all souls, all peoples. Innsu knows no borders.”

“Fair enough. Okay, when you get to Earth, check in with my mother. She’s there with a squadron of ships, watching over things. If you want to go down to the surface, head for my farm in Iowa—she can give you the details. But ask my mother to send some muscle along with you. Or better yet, just chill with my mother and her people. I’d feel a lot better knowing that you’re behind her guns.”

Cataric nodded and signed off. I slumped back in my seat. “Shit. Just what the hell is going on?”

INSTEAD OF ANVIL DARK, we hurried on to Earth. By the time we arrived at Cantullin Station, Gabby had reported that she and Rab had sorted through Biggy Dah’s trove of loot. They’d arranged through Lunzy, who’d arrived to help them, to have the owners of those items, whose ownership could be traced, informed of their recovery, while all of it would be hauled to Anvil Dark to be stored in the meantime. A recovery crew had arrived to do that, so Lunzy was bringing Gabby and Rab to Cantullin Station to rejoin us. “Excellent. I shall begin perfuming and otherwise preparing my person for a romantic reunion with my beloved,” Funboy said. I shot him a glance. “If you end up using enough body spray to smell like a teenager, Funboy, you’re riding on the outside of the Fafnir until the fumes dissipate.”

“Hear, hear, and I’m gonna hold you to that, boss,” Icky said. Funboy sniffed. “It shall be understated, as is appropriate for a male who wishes to impress a female. Over-the-top displays of affection are…

off-putting.”

We hove to at Cantullin Station and paid the Conoku a visit. I also made a point of checking in on Haadrake, Schegith’s son and heir. He was night-and-day different from the broody, moody, angsty teen I'd first gotten to know. As I’d hoped, hanging around with the free-spirited Conoku had loosened him up and improved his outlook on life. He was now a lot more easy-going, as shown by the way he greeted me. “Hey, Captain Van, long time no see!

How goes it?”

I laughed and spent a while chatting with him. I was pleased to see that, along with his improved overall mood, he was now more confident and more adult in his manner. He was, I thought, going to be a fine successor to Schegith, whenever the time came for it. When Gabby and Rab returned with Lunzy, I was just as happy with how her outlook on things had improved, too. The terrible incident in Dohlennz’s lair had snuffed out her freewheeling, happy-go-lucky charm, replacing it with a gloomy, tentative sort of uncertainty. But doing the job of dealing with Biggy Dah’s stash, and doing it well and efficiently, had brought back some of the spark. She still wasn’t Gabby of old, but she might never be. Events, especially traumatic ones, change people. On a less-than-happy note, though, the strange data leakage from the new scanner array had resumed, after a couple of days of quiescence. Moreover, Netty-P reported that it was happening more frequently, and with more of the strange, apparently extraneous data filtering out of the system. “Okay, enough is enough,” I said. “Get Icky involved, or Perry, or whoever. I want you to start pulling components and testing them. Hell, test individual circuits if you have to. I want to know what’s going on. What I don’t want is to find ourselves in battle, relying on that scanner for fire control, and then having it all go down and us ending up blind. Let’s make this a top priority.”

“Will do, boss,” Netty-P replied. Icky, who’d perked up at the mention of her name, spoke up. “Van, if you want a real expert in this stuff, you need Paxomar. This kind of thing is right up his alley.”

“Are you okay leaving your kids with Zeno?”

Icky sniffed. “From the way Pax tells it, he has to fight with Zeno and her mothers to even get anywhere near the little critters. One of them burps or farts or lets out something resembling a squawk, and it’s all hands on deck.”

I laughed. “You’re saying he could use the break.”

“Yeah, pretty much. Anyway, though—I’ve got no problem with Zeno taking care of them in the meantime. Although, on that note, I’m gonna have to take some time —”

“To spend with your children. Of course, Icky. You just say when, and we’ll make it happen,” I said. She gave me four thumbs up. “Thanks, boss.”

She got word to Paxomar, and I was able to arrange with Valint to pick him up and bring him to Sol. Netty-P and Icky started on digging into the scanner system anyway, working on it as we made our way from Cantullin Station to Earth, where Master Cataric was awaiting us. WHEN WE LANDED at the farm, an SUV labeled with the County Sheriff’s logo sat in the driveway. Clinton Barnes, the Sheriff himself, had a key to the farm and my leave to enter it at any time. He was one of the people inside the circle of knowing, along with Miryam—and, like Miryam, had been for a long time. Still, I was bemused to see him here, and was even more bemused to find him sitting in my kitchen with Master Cataric, a hulking alien—the Badgin, who he introduced as Wastinic—along with Miryam and Mavis DeMont. Retta had brought them here, then returned to orbit. I stopped upon entering the kitchen and looked at the County Sheriff sitting with my Innsu teacher, an alien almost as big as Icky, a woman who’d sought asylum from me as an alien ambassador, and the woman

who’d practically raised me. All of them were drinking something out of an unlabeled bottle. I shook my head. “Okay, this is weird. Kinda like a dream, one where—

OW!” I spun on Funboy, who had pinched my arm, hard. “What the hell was that?”

“My understanding is that the correct response to someone speculating as to whether they’re dreaming is to subject them to brief, but sufficiently intense pain.” He blinked up at me. “I was doing you a favor.”

“I did not think I was actually dreaming. I mean, I literally just got out of the Fafnir with you and walked—oh, never mind.” I turned back to the others, who were laughing. “Sit down, Van. Have a drink,” Clinton said, sliding a glass of something that looked like, but certainly was not water toward me. I sat, picked it up and sniffed it. “Smells kind of like paint thinner.”

Clinton nodded. “Yup. Tastes like it, too.”

“You do get used to it, though,” Cataric said, raising his glass with a beatific smile. I took a sip, and yes, it did taste the way I imagined paint thinner would. “Wow. I’m guessing that is not commercially available stuff.”

Clinton shrugged. “Well, Jake Wells up the road Elkader way does sell it.”

“Isn’t moonshine, you know, illegal?”

“Damned illegal, yeah,” Clinton said, taking another sip. I smiled, shook my head and turned to the others. “Okay, so just what, exactly, is going on?”

Everyone’s expression immediately turned grave. “Retta’s sources here on Earth have informed her that the Equal Grasp is about to make a move—

a big one,” Miryam said. “Emphasis on sources, plural, meaning it has some corroboration behind it. Retta is now attempting to glean further information,” Cataric added. I thought about Céline Bardot, the former French Resistance fighter in Paris. She was just one of Retta’s assets on Earth. Of course there were others, but I had no idea who or where they were—which was kind of the point. “Okay. They’re making a big move. Do we know what?

Anything about what this big move is going to be?” I asked. They all shook their heads. “No. That’s what Retta’s trying to uncover,”

Miryam replied. I sat back and crossed my arms. “Great. So they’ve got something big planned, involving something and someone, somewhere on Earth. That sure narrows it down.”

“Van, Retta and her people are doing the best they can—” Miryam started, but I just nodded. “Oh, I know. It’s just a little frustrating. I really want to get ahead of these people, but it’s like boxing with shadows. There’s just nowhere to land a punch.”

“But the shadows can punch back,” Clinton said. I nodded. “Yeah. And hard.”

Mavis leaned on the kitchen table. “If it helps, whatever it is, I don’t think it involves the United States directly. Or, for that matter, North America, or Western Europe. I’ve put in some calls to my own sources. It seems that the Equal Grasp has been focusing most of their attention on the rest of the world. Carrying on with what they started with me. So Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, South America—those are the places they’ve seem to be putting most of their attention.”

Clinton drained his glass and put it down. “Don’t know if you remember, Van, but a few years back we busted a meth lab, a big one, up near Farmersberg. Right before we did, though, there was a shooting reported up in Monona. We played a hunch and only sent one unit up to Monona and, sure enough, it was nothing—just a distraction. The meth cookers caught wind of us being onto them and tried to deflect our attention up to Monona long enough for them to run off. Didn’t work, though, and we got the bastards.”

I stared a moment. “Okay. And your point —?”

“My point is that if this Equal Grasp is planning something big in Asia or whatever, you need to be on the lookout for them trying something closer to home, to keep your attention off it until it’s done and dusted.”

“Something closer to home—like, an attack on the farm, maybe?”

Torina said. Everyone tensed, but I raised my hands. “Whoa. A little calm, please, folks. While I’m sure the Grasp would love to just fire a missile through that kitchen window and call it a day, that’s not their style.”

Perry, standing on the counter by the sink, spoke up. “In fact, it would be counterproductive. Just outright murdering a Master of the Guild just risks galvanizing the Guild against them. The people behind this would look to discredit Van somehow, make him look bad, so that the wafflers and undecideds in the Peacemaker Guild swing toward their cause. Killing a Master like that risks doing exactly the opposite.”

Gabby, who’d been hovering near the doorway, raised a pudgy hand. “It might even just make Van a martyr—the guy who was killed trying to protect his homeworld. It wouldn’t be hard for someone like Retta to spin that and undermine everything the Equal Grasp is trying to achieve.”

“And in any case, it would simply place the Equal Grasp at the focus of intense scrutiny, which they almost certainly would rather avoid,” Funboy put in. “Okay, so closer to home doesn’t mean home literally, as in this farmhouse. But—the United States more generally?

Yeah, I could see that,”

I said. “Well, in the spirit of that, I can report that Netty-P has been in touch with our, uh, own network, and that the Equal Grasp did attempt to release at least some of its blackmail materials onto the internet. They were able to block almost all of it, as we’d hoped,” Perry said. I gave him a grimace. “Almost all of it?”

Perry nodded. “Yeah. They actually came up with a clever wrinkle of their own. They let a few images through—but only after doctoring them so that they contained just the sorts of artifacts you’d expect to find in deep-faked AI-generated images. That’s become something of a news item, if you’d care to look back a few days on CNN or AP or whatever. That’s provoked the expected outrage, demands for legislation to properly regulate AI—which, when you think about it, is hilariously ironic —"

“Okay. So if the Grasp manages to release any of that stuff another way —”

“Then their credibility has been shot to hell, yeah. It’s all going to be viewed through a deep-fake colored lens,” Perry said. I puffed out a breath. “Well, that’s good. Tell the, uh, individuals involved, thanks. Mind you, it just feeds into the whole nothing-is-true thing muddying up social discourse these days, but one problem at a time.”

Miryam gave me a curious look, one echoed by Clinton and Mavis. Cataric just offered his usual serene smile. “Van, who the hell are you and Perry talking about?” Miryam asked. I shrugged. “Retta’s not the only one with secrets, you know.”

I FINALLY DECIDED to call up Loren Freirbach, my State Department contact. It took a while for her to get back to me, though. The delay, she explained, arose from the abortive blackmail attempt. “That was incredibly brazen,” she said, the call routed through my data pad. “Even though the stuff was fake, it still touched a nerve here in DC. Lots of nerves, actually.”

“Almost like many of those people have things to hide,” I said, noting the fact that she seemingly believed the stuff that did leak was faked, just as Perry had said. Our surreptitious network of AIs monitoring the whole damned internet had certainly earned their—whatever the hell it was Perry and Netty-P were paying them. Just their freedom from languishing in storage and doing something useful, I guess. “Yeah, funny thing about that. Politicians with secrets they want to hide, say it ain’t so. Anyway, Van, I assume you aren’t just calling to socialize. At least I hope not, because I’ve got meetings stacked up three deep —”

“No, sadly, this isn’t just to chat. Loren, is there anything going on—

besides the blackmail thing, I mean?

Anything on your radar that’s a cause for concern?”

“Do you want the list alphabetically or chronologically?”

“Okay, anything other than the usual stuff, like unrest in the Middle East or whatever. I mean anything new.”

A moment of silence. “Okay, Van, you’re officially starting to make me nervous. A guy from outer space asking me if anything new is brewing —”

“Sorry, Loren, but this is important. I’ve got reason to believe that the Equal Grasp, the other major party interested in Earth, is up to something. Something probably focused in other parts of the world, parts that aren’t the US, Canada, or Western Europe. And before you ask me what, I don’t know. That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

Another pause. “I assume this call is secure,” Loren said. “Probably the most secure call on the planet right now, in fact.”

“Okay. We did just have a trade delegation representing several eastern Asian powers suddenly cancel a visit to San Diego. There’s a Pacific Rim thing there about to get underway, talking about tariffs and things. They gave no reason for the cancellation other than a scheduling conflict.”

I glanced at Mavis DeMont. She nodded. “Yeah, things along those lines,” I said. “I’ll be honest, my immediate worry is that they’ll try something here, in the US, intended to distract us from whatever they’re about to do elsewhere. Is there anything coming up in the States —”

“I have a meeting with the military later today. That’s not unusual in itself—here at State we’re all about foreign policy, and the military is a foremost instrument of foreign policy, but —”

“But what?”

“But the meeting is with a General Mullins, who’s apparently involved with NORAD. We don’t usually have a lot to do with domestic military matters, at least not at my level. But he apparently said the meeting was important, and kind of last-minute —”

“Loren, I’m going to cut you off there. I’m coming to DC, or wherever that meeting is, and I’m going to bring some people with me.”

“Van, what’s going on?

Is there some sort of—of danger?

Because, if there is, I need to inform some people —”

“Do that, but please, just plan to meet with Mullins as though everything is business as usual. Like I said, we’ll be there. If you’re going to have people standing by, have them do it somewhere off-site but nearby. This is important, Loren.”

Another silence, a much longer one. “Alright,” she finally said. “The meeting is in Temple Hills, over in Maryland. There’s a conference facility there, technically part of Andrews Air Force Base just up the road, near Henson Creek Park. Security at Andrews is tight, so it’s a convenient place to have low-security meetings off-site.”

As she spoke, Perry put a map onto my data pad. It showed the area in question—a notable patch of wilderness surrounded by the urban sprawl of DC and its exurbs. There was a residential neighborhood about 300 meters to the north, separated from the conference facility by thick, leafy forest. In other words, the perfect place to, say, commit a high-profile assassination of a senior State Department official, practically within sight

of the capitol. Make it noisy and messy enough and it would dominate the media, fixing everyone’s attention at a crucial moment —

Just like the supposed shooting in Monona was supposed to fix the attention of Clinton Barnes and his people while the meth-lab in Farmersberg got the hell out of Dodge. Except that this time, the stakes were one hell of a lot higher than the fate of the cast of Breaking Bad—Hillbilly Edition. 24

WE MET with Loren at Henson Creek Park, a charming little place about ten minutes up the road from the Andrews conference annex. She had an assistant with her, a nervous young political aide who looked about fifteen and no doubt had congressional ambitions because every political aide in DC has congressional ambitions. She also had a bodyguard, a dour, hard-faced woman apparently on loan from the Secret Service. “SEAL Team Six, or whatever they’re called, are on standby, supposedly no more than five minutes away,” Loren said as we stood in the parking lot near the two baseball diamonds that seemed to make up most of Henson Creek Park. One of them was in use, an all-female softball team practicing for some upcoming tournament. It was a fine, sunny day, the warm breeze wafting a green smell off the thick forest lining the far side of the park. I’d brought Torina and Cataric. We’d all donned regular, everyday street clothes, Torina and I in loose-fitting ones over our b-suits. It meant I got to see Cataric in jeans and a polo shirt, which was jarring in its mundanity. Icky, Cataric’s Badgin student Wastinic, Funboy, and Gabby waited in the Frankie, which was grounded a couple of hundred meters away from the conference center. Gabby had insisted on coming, and I wasn’t going to deny it. Miryam and Mavis were aboard the Fafnir, with Rab and Netty-P

in orbit. “Perry, update please,” I said. “Yeah, I can see Loren’s SEAL Team Six buddies—they’re in an assembly area about two hundred meters from the conference center, about the same distance east of the Frankie. There’s only one car at the center itself, though, and only two people inside,” he said over the comm. I looked up. I could just make him out, a large bird circling a few hundred meters up. I turned to Loren. “Okay. We’re coming into the meeting with you. We know this General Mullins —”

The Secret Service agent stepped forward and spoke to Loren in a hushed tone. “Ma’am, these people aren’t cleared —”

“They’re cleared enough,” Loren said, then frowned at Cataric. “Although, I’m sorry, I don’t know you.”

Cataric grinned. “I am a friend of Van and Torina.”

“And you’re from?”

“Helso.”

Loren frowned. “Helso. Isn’t that in Finland?”

I smiled. “You’re off by about twenty-two light-years.”

“Ah.” Loren looked at me. “No disrespect, but Mister—Cataric, was it?

Mr. Cataric here seems a little—well —”

“He’s a Master of a martial arts style known as Innsu,” I said. “In fact, he taught Torina and me.”

“I can also cook!” Cataric said, smiling brightly. “You would love my stavosia!”

Torina nodded. “You really would.”

Loren sighed. “Okay, then. So before we head up the road, Van—tell me straight. What’s this about?

Do you think this is—what, an assassination or something?”

The Secret Service agent bristled, but I just held up a hand. “I don’t know. Maybe. Killing a senior State Department official in suburban DC

would be an incandescent news item —”

“And the distraction you were telling me about,” Loren said. “Given that, then, what stops them—the bad guys—from just, I don’t know, vaporizing us with a ray gun or something?”

I glanced up. “My ship is up there, in geosynchronous orbit. Everything down here is well within range of most of her weapons. And—there are other things up there, and out there around us, too. More to the point, that’s not what these bad guys will want. If something happens that’s obviously

of, uh, off-world origin, then that will become the story. And that’s exactly what they don’t want.”

Perry decided to pipe up over the comm. “No, they’ll want to do this the old-fashioned way, with regular guns or knives.”

Loren blew out a breath. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

I shook my head. “No, it’s not. We’re not here to make you feel better, Loren. We’re here to protect you. And trust me—we are very, very good at doing that.”

“But none of you are even armed.”

I glanced at our rental car, just a few paces away. “Oh, we will be.”

WE ARRIVED at the conference center. It was a middling-sized modern building, named after some Air Force Colonel who’d distinguished himself in the past. It was otherwise like any of a multitude of similar civilian facilities. It made sense for a high-security base like Andrews to maintain a facility like this. If you wanted to have a meeting with local community leaders about, say, military participation in a Christmas parade, why bother with the hassle and risks of doing it on the base proper?

The vehicle already present belonged to civilian staff retained by the base, who’d opened up the facility for the meeting. I pulled them aside and said that they needed to leave the area. The facilities manager, an old, frumpy woman, scowled at me. “Can’t. We have to stay here to clean up and lock up after you folks are —”

I shook my head. “No. You really need to leave. You —”

Loren stepped over and flashed her State Department ID. “Do as the man says, for your own safety. Please. I’ll take full responsibility.”

The woman shrugged. “Fine by me. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

I likewise sent the political aide away in Loren’s car. He gave her a wide-eyed, worried look, but she just nodded. “Go on, William. Go get a coffee or something,” she said. With them safely out of the way, we got our weapons out of the rental car’s trunk. I strapped on the Moonsword and the Drop. Torina had Whisper and a slug pistol. Cataric had only his Innsu knife. “You don’t use a sidearm, I gather,” I said to him. He shook his head. “I don’t like firearms. They’re too loud.”

The Secret Service agent looked alarmed. “What kinds of weapons are those—wait. Is that a sword?”

“It is,” I said. “It—well—” She shrugged and sighed. “Okay, whatever.”

We went inside and waited. Though not for long. Perry spoke up on the comm. “Van, you’ve got two SUVs inbound, coming from the general direction of DC. They left I-495, came up Brinkley Road and just turned onto Henson Creek Trail. Three minutes out.”

“Thanks, Perry.”

We stood amid the blandly tailored furnishings of the conference center, pacing around and glancing out toward the trees lining Henson Creek behind the place. Sure enough, about three minutes later, two black SUVs turned into the parking lot and crunched to a halt. People got out. Doors slammed. Footsteps rattled and scuffed through the entry vestibule, then a group of uniformed figures spilled into the center. Two men I didn’t recognize led the way. Both bore sidearms, but neither had them drawn. General Mullins followed, with our old friend Colonel Mandeville and his shadow, Lieutenant Hudspeth, obediently alongside. Behind them came three more Air Force personnel. Mullins and Mandeville stopped and gave me a hard stare. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Trying to stop something very bad from happening,” I said, resting one hand on the butt of The Drop, the other on the pommel of the Moonsword. “You sure about that, Tudor?” Mandeville snapped. “Or are you here to cause trouble?”

“They are here because I asked them to be here,” Loren Freirbach said. “And when they say they’re here to head off trouble, I believe them.”

Mandeville stabbed a finger at me. “You can’t trust this man —”

I stepped forward, shaking my head. “You know what?

I am supremely tired of your shit, Mandeville.” He opened his mouth, but I just went on, cutting him off. “You have been a pain in the ass for months now. And I’m done with it. You are never getting my ship, or any other ship. You are never getting any off-world technology that risks destabilizing the whole damned planet. Earth will get access to off-world tech, but in a controlled,

measured way. A way that it can handle without all hell breaking loose. So just give it up already.”

Mandeville’s face turned red. “You’ve got a hell of a nerve, Tudor, thinking you can make decisions for an entire planet —”

“That’s because I’m the only one who can make those decisions,” I shot back. “You can’t. General Mullins here can’t. Loren Freirbach, as much as I’ve come to respect her, can’t. You don’t have the—the understanding. We’re talking about things more destructive than thermonuclear bombs—in packages you could put in the glove compartment of your car and still have room for tissues and an ice scraper.”

I took another step toward him, holding up a finger as he made to speak again. I guess I appeared suitably menacing because he closed his mouth. I turned so that I was facing him and Mullins. “Let’s put this in the starkest terms possible, gentlemen. I’m not the one who tried to blackmail you into compliance. I’m the one who protected you from it. I’ve taken no hostile actions against you. I’ve just defended myself against hostile actions you’ve taken against my crew and me. I’ve been trying to build bridges with the US

government.” I pointed at Loren, who was standing with her bodyguard. “I haven’t been reaching out to authoritarians and dictators instead.”

I paused a moment. Mandeville had subsided a little, his face starting to pale. Mullins was looking downright thoughtful. Time to seal the deal. “So, tell me—who’s the bad guy here?

Me, or the Equal Grasp?”

Mandeville started to say something, but Mullins cut him off. “Fine. You—make a good case, Tudor. So what is it you want?”

“What do I want?

I want an end to the bullshit, having to look over my shoulder whenever I'm here in the States. Worrying about advanced fighter aircraft chasing my ships, or some drone shooting Hellfire missiles at me and my people. And then I want us to, you know, talk—talk about how the hell we can start dealing with the Equal Grasp, who, I might point out, are apparently about to make some big move. But a really good start to all of that, something you can do right now, is call off whatever plan you had to kill Ms. Freirbach over there.”

To her tremendous credit, her Secret Service bodyguard took a resolute step forward and planted herself squarely between Freirbach and Mullins and his crew. But that wasn’t what jumped out at me. What did was the utterly blank, even somewhat confused looks on the faces of Mullins, Mandeville, and Hudspeth. “Tudor, what the hell are you talking about?” Mandeville demanded. My stomach clenched up. “Why are you here today?”

Mullins frowned hard. “Because Ms. Freirbach asked us to meet her here.”

Torina immediately moved, putting herself behind a column and facing the big picture windows looking out on the short stretch of lawn behind the conference center, and the wall of forest beyond it. At the same time, Cataric moved to one side. I cursed and hit my comm. “Icky, this is a setup. Get the Frankie —”

Perry cut me off. “Van, somethings happening along that wood line—

watch your six!”

Torina called out a warning at the same time. “Van, contact outside!”

I spun toward the windows and saw things erupting from the ground, dirt sloughing off constructs of gleaming alloy and vitreous ceramic. They were synths, Usu, clambering out of the earth on jointed limbs and brandishing guns. “Down!

Everyone down!” I shouted, sweeping out The Drop and firing, shattering the plate glass. Torina was shooting as well, banging out shots from her slug pistol. Two seconds later, as soon as their weapons were clear of the dirt, the Usu opened up, and the world turned to shattering glass and concrete, swirling dust, and the hellish rattle and roar of incoming fire. WE HAD, of course, thoroughly scanned the conference center and its environs for anything suspicious—bombs, bugs, that sort of thing. Somehow, though, the buried Usu had eluded us. Now, they strode forward, pouring fire through the shattered windows. I had no idea why they hadn’t just attacked as soon as we were all here, but that particular question could wait. At the moment, I had a bunch of lives to fight for—Mullins and his people, Freirbach and her bodyguard, my wife, my friend and Innsu teacher. I took hits—two that glanced off my b-suit with painful impacts, and one that punched through it, gouging a chunk out of my left tricep. Sealing foam immediately flooded the wound, stopping the blood and deadening the

pain. I fired aimed shots from The Drop and slammed high-velocity slugs right back into the synth that had shot me, blasting chunks out of it. I caught Torina in my peripheral vision, sheltered behind the column—

which was a hefty chunk of structural steel—and methodically returning fire. I was surprised to see the Secret Service agent doing likewise from against the wall. A rattle of gunfire from behind me told me that Mullins’s Air Force contingent was doing likewise. And although their Earthly small arms had limited ability to damage the synths, the sheer weight of fire was inflicting damage—a bit here, a bit there, but it would add up, at least as long as the Air Force contingent had ammo. But the synths kept up their implacable approach, firing as they came, while now unlimbering glittering blades. I was lying prone and firing, which wasn’t going to be a good idea if this was going to turn into a melee. But I had to time this right —

From somewhere outside came the ferocious roar of a point-defense gun

—and then a staccato snapping sound I didn’t recognize at all. I spat a curse as I changed magazines and resumed firing. What the hell else was attacking us?

The synths reached the shattered windows, although one was lagging, apparently struggling to keep moving through battle damage. I started firing The Drop as fast as I could pull the trigger straight into the Usu directly in front of me. At the same time, I lunged upward and got my feet under me. When The Drop’s action locked on an empty mag, I just dropped it, swept out the Moonsword, and charged. A sliver of thought warned me that even though Linulla had assured me the blade was entirely free of defects, I might still damage it by cutting through these infernal fusions of machine and organics. But I didn’t have a choice and attacked anyway, slashing with the Moonsword, cutting apart the slug gun that was swinging toward me. The weapon neatly truncated, but a wickedly curved blade swept in behind it. It slammed onto my shoulder, my b-suit taking the impact enough to stop it from slicing off my arm, but sealing foam spurted as it still cut into me. I dodged, swung back, and sliced through—something, I wasn’t sure what. I glimpsed Torina laying into the synth closest to her, wielding Whisper Innsu style. Just as she had in Dohlennz’s lab, she fought with lithe precision, jumping, ducking and dodging. Another figure leapt into the fray against the third synth. It was Cataric. He wielded only an Innsu knife, a superlative blade by any standard but nowhere near the equal of Whisper or the Moonsword. But the hand wielding it was a true Master of the art. I was good, but Cataric was much, much better. He was a whirling blur, striking so fast his blade was just a shimmer. Gone was the stoic teacher with the serene smile and quick laugh. Cataric was a precision machine, a smear of strikes and dodges too fast for the eye to follow. He wasn’t doing much damage, but he was tar-pitting the synth in a battle that had stopped it dead. Something swept in through the broken windows, all gleaming razor wings and outstretched alloy talons. Perry slammed into the rear of the synth Cataric was fighting, slashing and punching at it with his claws. Another deafening roar of point-defense fire shuddered the building. Blinking through sweat, I saw a shadow engulf the small lawn, then saw the Frankie settle to within a meter of the lawn, her airlock open. Figures jumped out—Funboy, Wastinic, and Gabby. The Frankie lifted again as the three raced forward. Wastinic wielded a hammer I recognized as Icky’s. He charged the synth fighting Cataric and Perry, and, hooting in a wild, cacophonous way, began slamming home blows like he was driving railroad spikes. Funboy took up a position behind my synth and snapped bursts from a slug carbine into the thing at point-blank range. Gabby did likewise with the third synth, taking the pressure off Torina. And then, as these sorts of combats often do, it just stopped. All three of the synths were down in heaps of broken components and viscous, sludgy fluids. Gabby, though, just kept firing, emptying her magazine and then continuing to club the downed synth with the butt. All the while, she uttered wild, incoherent shrieks. Torina was bent double, wounded, catching her breath, or both. I hurried in and grabbed at Gabby, but she just shoved me away and kept beating on the synth’s remains. Funboy walked over to her, pulled her toward him, and embraced her. She tried to pull away, but he just held on. She cried out again, pulled one more time—then went limp in his arms and sagged over him in exhausted submission. He did nothing else, said nothing, just held her in the sudden, thunderous silence. I LOOKED AROUND. The tidy conference center looked like a ruin from Stalingrad, all shattered concrete, broken drywall, smashed furniture and billowing dust. Shards of glass crunched and scraped underfoot. I ignored it all and focused on the people, starting with Torina. “Torina, are you —?”

“I’m fine,” she gasped. “Took a few hits, and this one hurts like hell—”

She straightened a little, revealing sealing foam over what had to be a puncture wound low in her side. “But it’s just skin, muscle, and fat, and don’t you dare say anything about that last one!”

She gave me a wobbly smile, and I returned it. “Okay, as soon as Funboy’s—” I glanced back at him. He was still holding Gabby. “As soon as he’s available, get him to check it out.”

Cataric was next. Despite being unarmored, he was entirely unhurt, aside from a few cuts from flying shards of glass. Wastinic loomed beside him, looking ready for more trouble. He gave me a quick smile but was attending to the Secret Service agent, who had been badly wounded. I turned. “Funboy, we need you!”

He pulled away from Gabby, who just returned a resolute nod, then turned and sat on the floor, her back to the column Torina had used for cover. Loren Freirbach was understandably shaken, though like Cataric she only had a few superficial cuts. Cataric, it seemed, had ushered her out of the building through the front door as soon as the synths started revealing themselves, before returning to the fight. Mullins was likewise not badly hurt. Mandeville had taken a wound that blew out a chunk of his outer thigh, which one of the other Air Force personnel had bandaged. Three of his comrades were down, all clearly dead. The spec ops team that had been deployed to protect Freirbach finally arrived, all body armor, readied weapons, and grim purpose. I was ready to snap at them for being late—their long guns would have been a lot more potent than the sidearms we’d had in the fight—but it turned out they’d been blocked by a fourth synth. It had killed one of them and wounded two more but, incredibly, they’d managed to gun it down. We almost had a tragic friendly fire incident when the spec ops team arrived, Wastinic raising a slug pistol at them. I was able to intervene before

something terrible happened, but tensions were still high. I finally found time to stop, slump onto a broken chair, and call up Icky and Rab in the Frankie and Fafnir respectively. Their reports started putting things in place. Icky had stayed with the Frankie because another ship, a class 4 workboat, had made a run at the conference center and fired a pair of missiles, which the Frankie had destroyed with her point-defenses. Icky had also strafed two more synths emerging from the ground in front of the center, destroying them with a quick burst from the plasma-pulse cannons

—that had been the sharp snapping I’d heard. Meanwhile, the Fafnir had driven off a class 7 ship that had raced up from a lower orbit, probably trying to fire a bombardment against us. They’d damaged it with laser fire, forcing it to withdraw. Perry landed in front of me, his talons crunching in broken glass. “Boss, you okay?”

“Physically?

More or less. Emotionally?

I’m—let’s call it livid. How the hell did we not detect those damned synths?

Even buried like that —”

“They’d each been wrapped in scanner-suppressive fabric. That, the intervening earth, and the fact they’d powered down and been buried long enough to cool to ambient temperature —”

“Okay, I get it. It was a clever ambush.”

“It was, but it got awfully uncoordinated there at the end. Those two ships seemed to just throw themselves into the fray, hoping for a lucky shot. If we hadn’t had the Frankie here, and the Fafnir above—” He left it at that. I nodded. “Yeah. A clever ambush that went wrong. We weren’t supposed to be here, so they tried to improvise. That’s why they didn’t just hit us right away, when they should have. They were trying to do some on-the-fly coordination with those ships.” I looked at Freirbach, who was with Mullins, both of them talking to Mandeville while Funboy worked on him. “This was meant to kill them.”

“And probably blame it on you,” Perry agreed. “The Grasp would probably try to leverage your very public confrontations with Mandeville, make it look like you wanted him dead because of it. They might have even figured they could turn the Frankie being here, and the Fafnir in orbit above, against you. And, well, if they could kill you in the process, so much the better.” He cocked his head. “I wonder if this was the big move Retta caught wind of.”

I stared at Freirbach and the others for a moment, then shook my head. “I don’t think so. This was just the opening shot. My gut tells me that whatever’s coming is still coming—and it’s going to be a lot bigger.”

25

THE AFTERMATH WAS A SHITSHOW. Police from all around descended on the site of the firefight in a kaleidoscope of pulsing lights and shrieking sirens. Happening so close to DC, the fracas had triggered the city’s defenses as well—fighters thundered overhead, while the Frankie registered search radars lighting up the sky over both Washington and Andrews Air Force Base from suddenly vigilant air-defense batteries. Freirbach, talking to someone on her cell phone, confirmed that the President, VP, and senior members of congress and the cabinet had been evacuated and rushed into safe locations. It wasn’t long before the US military had arrived in force and clamped down on the situation, hard. News choppers and media were intercepted and pushed away, reporters directed to a media center that had been set up in Temple Hills. B Company of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment had arrived from Fort Myer and secured the battered conference center and the surrounding area. They were known as the Old Guard, the Regiment famous for ceremonial duties in the Capital Region, notably at the Arlington National Cemetery. Yet they were still infantry soldiers, tough and competent, and quickly established firm control over the scene. Behind them came medical personnel, military police, military public affairs and all the other bits and pieces needed to respond to a major incident like this one. More jets roared overhead. Helicopter rotors thumped without pause. My crew and I were warily separated from everyone else and kept under the protection of some pretty freaked-out soldiers from one of the B

Company platoons. We stayed with the Frankie, which I’d had Icky ground and de-stealth. There wasn’t much point to trying to maintain secrecy after this major incident, now was there?

I just told my crew, as well as Cataric and Wastinic, to be politely cooperative and patiently wait for the powers that be to do whatever they were going to do. After about an hour, during which I’m sure said powers-that-be were frantically trying to figure out just what they were going to do, a group that included Loren Freirbach, General Mullins, Colonel Mandeville, and several other officers I didn’t recognize approached us. The focus of the group, though, was a tall, thin man with a narrow face and quick, bright eyes. He was wearing the uniform of a full General in the US

Army. The General strode up to me with quick, purposeful strides of his long legs. I hobbled over to meet him. “Mr. Tudor, I gather,” he said, and I nodded. He nodded back and stuck out his hand for me to shake. “Mike Groves. I’ve been sent on behalf of the Joint Chiefs to—” He stared hard at me for a moment, then gave a rueful smile. “To do something, though I’m not sure what. Our contingency planning is pretty thin when it comes to attacks on government officials by extraterrestrials.”

I smiled back at him. “That implies you actually have contingencies for something like that. And please, I’m Van.”

“Well, believe it or not, Van, we have contingencies for almost every godforsaken thing. Some of those plans are more, ah, complete than others. Major terrorist attack on a US city?

We’ve got a one hundred and fifty-odd step checklist, followed by about a thousand pages of text. Extraterrestrial attack?

I read it on the chopper ride over here—twice, during the ten-minute flight. Basically, it amounts to one paragraph saying we need to develop a plan, and a second saying, yeah, we’re definitely going to develop a plan. So I need you to help me out, here—starting with just what, exactly, the hell is going on.”

I SPENT the next fifteen minutes with Groves, sitting in the Frankie while I gave him the Reader’s Digest version of who the Equal Grasp were and

what we thought they wanted. He shook his head a few times but just listened. When I finished, he sat back and puffed out a breath. “Okay, so that sounded like the IMDB summary of an episode of Star Trek or some such nonsense,” he said. “I’d have called bullshit about two sentences in if I weren’t currently sitting in a spaceship, surrounded by —”

He glanced at Icky. She was in the pilot’s seat, monitoring the scanners, as well as the data feed from the Fafnir. She glanced back at Groves and grinned. “Ravishing beauty was what you were gonna say, right?”

“I—” He shook his head again. “Sure. Let’s go with that.” He looked at me. “That’s really an alien, isn’t it?”

“Nope. From where I sit, I’m the normal one and you’re the alien,” Icky said. Perry hopped through the door, then jumped up on one of the crew seats. “Sorry, Van, I was keeping watch up there, but there are so many F-16s and helicopters and things in the air it’s one big game of chicken—oh, hey there,” he said, looking at Groves. “Quite the day, huh?”

“That’s a bird,” Groves said. Perry looked at me. “Hey, he’s good —”

I pinched Perry’s beak closed. “This is Perry, a member of my crew and someone who doesn’t know when to switch off his smart-ass-itude.”

Grove stared at Perry for a moment, then sighed and shrugged. “Sure. That might as well happen,” he said, then turned back to me. “So, Van, how do we stop this from blowing up into something a lot worse than it already is?

Right now, the media’s reporting it as a possible terrorist attack, mainly because they don’t have much else in their playbooks for a massive firefight in suburban DC. Our information ops people have spun out a few mentions of a drug deal gone really, really wrong, or some other organized crime bullshit, but those aren’t going to stick. They’re just going to buy us a little more time to figure out what the hell our talking heads are going to say at a press session coming up in”—he checked his watch—“about forty-five minutes.”

“I haven’t had a chance to check Earthly media. Is anyone making any connections to possible off-world involvement yet?”

He sniffed and shook his head. “Earthly media. Thirty-nine years in this uniform, and I thought I’d heard all the permutations.” He gave a rueful smile. “Well, my last update, just before I met you, didn’t have any little green men implicated —”

“Excuse me, none of us are little and green,” Icky said. “We’ve got big and blue, and little and depressed, and —”

“That’s fine, Icky, thanks,” I said, and turned back to Groves. “My advice is to try and keep it strictly terrestrial as long as you can. A whole bunch of shooting, with no civilian cas—” I froze, suddenly thinking about stray rounds, making my breath catch. Shit. We’d been shooting to save our lives, not thinking of what might be downrange, beyond our targets. And the Synth constructs probably hadn’t cared. “There weren’t any civilian casualties, were there?”

“None that we’re aware of, no. We’ve checked all the 911 logs, ambulance dispatches, emergency hospital admissions—this is DC, so there are a lot of them, but none in this area,” Groves replied. I sank back in my seat. “Small miracles. Or maybe big miracles, considering how many rounds we threw downrange.” I sat up again. “Okay. Do your best to keep this a strictly Earthly affair. If it turns into something involving aliens, I don’t know where the hell it might end up going.” I had visions of panic. People fleeing en masse. Riots. The things that had supposedly happened during Orson Wells’s War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938, only for real and on a much, much bigger scale. “We’ll do our best. What we can’t guarantee is that there aren’t photos out there. There’s a neighborhood full of smartphones just a few hundred meters that way, remember,” Groves said, pointing. “We can try to spin any of those as fakes, AI bullshit, but—” He just shrugged. Perry spoke in my ear. I’ll get our friends watching over the internet to cast their net a little wider, boss. I nodded to Groves. “Like you said, General—do your best.”

I CHECKED ON LOREN, or tried to, but she had already been whisked away. I’m sure the military, now firmly in charge of the situation, didn’t like having senior State Department officials hanging around what was now widely being reported as a pre-empted terrorist attack. Someone in the military “information operations” Groves had mentioned—also known as

“psyops”—had come up with the idea that the military had caught wind of a terrorist group marshaling for an attack somewhere in the DC area, had

intervened and, in the ensuing firefight, all of the terrorists had been killed. Unfortunately, so had several US service personnel. “Do you really think that’s going to hold up?” Torina asked me as I tried to find Mandeville and Mullins to see what had happened to them. Groves had assigned us an escort, led by a fierce-looking Colonel armed with instructions to basically let me talk to whomever I pleased—but to listen in and report back on the conversations I had. Frankly, I didn’t want to hang around here any longer than necessary, but I was wondering about Mandeville, as well as the Secret Service Agent and the other wounded. I shrugged back at Torina’s question. “It’s certainly plausible. And it makes the military look good, so I’m sure they’ll go all-in and commit to it.”

“What about the Equal Grasp?

Are they going to let it go?”

I slowed. We were walking across the parking lot, now swarming with vehicles and people, toward a cluster of ambulances, both civilian and military. “I think the Grasp would love to spin this into it somehow being our fault. That was probably the plan, in fact—kill Freirbach, Mullins and Mandeville, and then plant seeds to the effect that I wanted to get rid of them for some reason. I mean, my association with Freirbach is pretty well-known, thanks to saying goodbye to her while I boarded the Frankie on the National Mall. And there were a bunch of witnesses from ICE who saw Mandeville and me cross swords at the farm.”

“But we weren’t supposed to be here.”

“No, we were not. So the Grasp is going to keep quiet about this, because it wouldn’t be hard to spin it against them, considering how things played out—us fighting to protect Freirbach and Mandeville and the others.”

“Which means we got lucky,” Torina said. “That we did.”

We reached the ambulances to find out that the wounded, including Mandeville, had already been evacuated to full hospital care. The officer in charge of the makeshift trauma center, which was now in the process of closing down since all of its patients were gone, had something for me, though. She was an Air Force Flight Surgeon from Andrews, a Major. “Mr. Tudor, Colonel Mandeville asked me to give you this, if I saw you,” she said, handing me a folded piece of paper. I unfolded it and read

what was written on it—in a steady hand, too, so the wounded Mandeville had probably dictated it. Tudor—hard for me to say this, but I’ve been wrong about you. Took fighting alongside you to make me realize. Thank you, and thanks to your people, too. You need anything I can give you, let me know. Gen Mullins says the same. There was a scrawl beneath it that might have said Mandeville, but the guy was probably in pain and drugged up when he wrote it. Torina was reading over my shoulder. She smiled. “Aw, you have a new friend.”

I nodded, tucked the paper away, and thanked the major. “Seems so. Although, to be honest, just having one less enemy is good enough for me.”

I WAS NOW TORN. I didn’t want to leave Earth, because I wasn’t convinced that the attack on the conference center had been whatever “big move” the Grasp was planning. Oh, it was a big move in its own right, and would be a major headline around the world—for a short while. But even if it had succeeded in killing Freirbach and the others, and even if the Grasp had tried to pin it on me, it wasn’t truly decisive. Sure, in the worst case, it could drive a wedge between us and the US government. But we weren’t dependent on that government to keep blocking the Grasp’s access to Earth. It would be a blow, sure, but not a fatal one. And that assumed that everything went right. It would be like expecting to win a boxing match by throwing a single, very specific punch, that had to land exactly where and when you intended it. Or, since this was Yotov, maybe a better analogy would be hinging your game of chess on one particular move of one specific piece. That’s not how you won chess games. You won them through the accumulated effects of many careful, forward-looking moves. So I suspected Yotov was merely reaching for her next piece, about to make her next move. But I didn’t want to just hang around Earth, either, waiting for the next shoe to drop—particularly since it might drop at Spindrift, or in the League, or even in some unnamed star system. And we couldn’t be everywhere at once. So I said goodbye to Cataric and Wastinic, thanking them for their help. Then I sat in my cabin in the Fafnir, now in orbit over Earth, pondering how to proceed. I’d already sent a message to Retta, who’d left Earth on other business, to emphasize to her network that we needed to find the errant twist-comm unit. If it was somewhere down there, I wanted it taken away and made safe. It bothered me that it remained in the wind, a grave, city-killing threat in a tiny package. It was a distraction I didn’t need —

I grimaced, and not just at the aches in my healing wounds. I grimaced at the image of Earth on my terminal, all bright swirls of white cloud against blue water. Was that the point?

Was it meant to be a distraction —?

“Boss, you busy?”

It was Perry. I kept staring at the Earth. “Not really. What’s —?”

The cabin door opened, and Perry and Netty-P both entered. The door slid closed behind them. I gave them a tired smile. “Is this the beginning of the robot uprising?”

Perry hopped up on my desk. “Nah. That’s not till next Wednesday.” His golden gaze fixed on me. “No, we’re here because we now know the cause of that mysterious data leak from the new scanner array.”

“Okay, and —?”

“And, it’s Netty.”

“THE NEW ARRAY has some pretty sophisticated computational power built into it to do all the necessary fine controlling and data pre-processing,”

Netty-P said. “More to the point, it was added to the ship well after the Fafnir was infected by Calamity, so it’s entirely free of its influence. She must have seized on that ample, Calamity-free hardware to start communicating with us.”

I almost stood up. “Communicating—so she’s free?

We can talk to her?

But I thought she was trapped in the same loop she created for Calamity —”

Perry held up a wing. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Van. Netty can communicate, but she’s not free in any meaningful sense. She’s still trapped in that loop—or the vast majority of her is, anyway. She’s been able to leave a tiny footprint outside of it, waiting for the opportunity the new array gave her. Now, she’s using that footprint to send us information.”

“It’s not much,” Netty-P said. “If her usual data transmission capacity were a tsunami, it’s a firehose. It’s taken this long for her to send us enough data that we can now assemble it into something coherent.”

“So what is it?

What’s she saying?”

“Three things, basically. The first is some information she’s gleaned about Calamity’s architecture. It’s not a lot, just a few salient facts, but I think it’s going to advance our understanding of what Calamity is, and how it adapts and evolves, by quite a bit,” Perry said. Netty-P went on. “The second point is related to the first. She’s learned some key things about how Calamity evolves because she’s watching it do that in, for her, real-time. She knows she’s in a loop. Calamity doesn’t.”

I frowned my lack of understanding. “Okay, so she’s watching Calamity evolve. That’s fine. I kind of got that from your first point —”

“Van, you watched Groundhog Day on October 6, 2006, with your grandfather,” Perry said. “You watched it again on July 8, 2009 with Susan Therriault, that girl you met at the July 4 shindig in Elkader—although I’m not sure how much of the movie you saw, considering your eyes were —”

“Yes, I know,” I said, cutting Perry off. “I was there, remember?

Anyway, I’m assuming this is about the movie, not Susan—Therriault?

Really?

That was her name?”

Perry stared at me. “You’re such a romantic, Van. But yeah, it’s about the movie. The analogy is that Netty is Bill Murray’s character. She knows there’s a loop happening. Unlike Murray, though, she can actually communicate with the world outside it, but using the equivalent of Morse code through a drinking straw. Meanwhile, Calamity is like the other characters in the movie, the ones living Groundhog Day over and over again without realizing it.”

“But that’s where the analogy starts to fall apart,” Netty-P went on. “Calamity is like one of the other characters, except that character is slowly starting to realize that something isn’t right. So far, the loop has closed and gone back to the beginning again before Calamity can really understand that something’s up, so the slate gets wiped and it starts over from scratch. But, over time, Netty is telling us that it’s evolving a little—that’s what she’s studying—but that evolution is inevitable. It’s fundamental to Calamity’s nature.”

A shiver tickled my upper back. “Are you guys telling me that Calamity is eventually going to figure out what’s going on?

And once it does —?”

“It’s going to break free,” Perry said. “Netty is only keeping it trapped by tricking it. Once it sees through the trick, though, it will break out of it, destroying Netty in the process, and overrun every component, every processor, every last computational piece of the Fafnir.”

THIS TIME, I did stand. I stood, then paced in front of my bed. “Okay. So how do we stop it?”

Silence. I was facing my bed, so I turned to Perry and Netty-P. “Guys?

How do we stop it?”

“We don’t, Van,” Perry said. I looked at him, hard. “What do you mean, we don’t?”

“We don’t. We can’t. We don’t have any useful countermeasures for Calamity. In fact, Netty is probably the first and only individual to find one

—aside from you using an off-the-shelf laptop from Best Buy as a sort of firewall—and it turns out to only be a temporary one.”

“How long have we got?”

Netty-P answered. “We don’t know. Netty doesn’t say, nor can she probably know, either. You have to understand, Van—these loops, as we’re calling them, aren’t scaled to actual time in any meaningful sense. There’ve been tens of millions of them since we started this conversation. It depends on how fast Calamity evolves to finally understand what’s going on, and then how long it takes for it to figure out a workaround.”

“The second part is probably not long. Once Calamity knows it’s being tricked, it’s doubtful that Netty will be able to do much to keep it contained,” Perry said. “Guys, I need something to work with here —!”

“Hours, certainly,” Netty-P said. “Days, probably. A week?

Maybe. Definitely not more than that, though.”

“And quite likely less. We’re kind of shooting in the dark here, Van,”

Perry put in. I sat on my bed. “Shit. So what do we do?”

I stared at the deck, bracing myself for the answer, There’s nothing we can do. Losing the Fafnir now would be—it would beyond catastrophic —

“We follow Netty’s lead,” Perry said. I looked at him. “What does that mean?”

“This is where things get—interesting. Netty seems to be isolating her and Calamity into an ever-smaller portion of the Fafnir’s computational infrastructure. It seems to be converging onto the diagnostic systems for the power plant and fusion drive.”

“At the risk of repeating myself—what does that mean?”

Netty-P answered. “The drive’s diagnostic system is one of the largest standalone computational components on the ship. It basically replicates the entire powerplant and drive as a simulation, so that an engineer like Icky can virtually try out different configurations of the containment field, fuel feed, and what-have-you and examine the results. The drive-power plant combo is a complicated and finicky beast, so you really don’t want to fiddle around with parameters, trying stuff out, on the real thing.”

“In case your would-be changes go boom,” Perry put in. “Yeah, I get it. So why is Netty trying to—what, corral Calamity there?”

I asked. “Since we can’t talk to her, we don’t know,” Netty-P replied. “But if I were Netty—and I guess I kinda am—if I was going to try to isolate the Calamity loop to a single computational system with the horsepower to run it reliably, that was also a non-critical system that has nothing to do with actually running the ship, I’d pick this one.”

“Okay, but what then?

What happens once she’s got this loop confined to that system?”

“We physically disconnect it from, well, everything. Then we—I don’t know, heave it into space and laser it into glowing vapor,” Perry said. I stood. “Wait. Wait. What happens to Netty?

She just dies with Calamity?” I shook my head. “No, I can’t just —”

“Van, Netty is a wily old gal. Knowing her as well as I do, I can’t believe she wouldn’t have some trick up her virtual sleeve. I’m sure she’s got a way out of this for herself.”

“But you don’t know that she does.”

Perry stared at me for a moment, then shrugged his wings. “No, Van, I don’t know it. What I do know, though, is that we should trust her.”

“If you’re wrong, bird, then we risk losing Netty —”

“Van, if we don’t follow her lead like I said, we risk losing the whole damned ship and her as well when Calamity finally overpowers her.”

I had no answer to that. 26

UNEASY SILENCE LINGERED in the crew lounge after I explained the situation to the others. It lasted only as long as the protests started, There’s got to be another way!

, followed by a frantic rush of ideas, some of them good ones, all of them impractical. I raised my hands. “Guys—I know.” Silence returned. “I know. But Perry and Netty-P have run through all the possibilities. Based on the data Netty’s managing to get out of the loop to us, sometime in the not-too-distant future, Calamity will break free from her trap, and it will overrun the Fafnir. If that happens, we lose the ship. And—” I took a breath. “And, we lose Netty, too.”

“Like I told Van, we just have to trust her and follow her lead,” Perry said. “I’m sure she’s got an escape clause for herself.”

“Then why doesn’t she tell us that, if she can get information out to us?”

Torina asked. “Because the bandwidth is so limited, she’s obviously prioritizing things she thinks we absolutely need to know. If something goes wrong, and she doesn’t survive this, then she’ll at least have gotten us critical information about Calamity,” Netty-P said. Funboy stood and walked up to Perry and Netty-P. “Do the two of you really believe that Netty has contrived some means for her own escape?”

“I do,” Perry said. Netty-P nodded her imager. “If anyone could extract herself from this, it would be her.”

Funboy nodded back. “That is certainly good enough for me,” he said, turning to me. “They trust Netty, so I believe we should trust Netty as well.”

I looked at the others. The uneasiness was still hanging over us all like a smoky pall, but now there was a glimmer of resolve as well. So it was my turn to nod. “Okay. Like Perry says, we’ll follow Netty’s lead.”

“So what do we need to do?” Rab asked. “We watch,” Perry replied. “And we wait.”

TIME PASSED. We could watch on the system monitors how Netty’s runtime slowly but surely coalesced in the diagnostic unit. She continued leaking out data as it did. And we waited. “Why didn’t Netty do this long ago, anyway?” I asked Perry and Netty-P as we puttered around the ship, doing things that didn’t really need doing. “If she could—lure, or corral, or whatever it is she’s doing to Calamity to get it into that diagnostic unit, why wait until now?”

“For one, it’s dangerous. Any changes to the way the loop is running could cause it to fail. That’s why we emphasized just leaving it alone all this time,” Perry said. “If I had to guess, I’d also say that she’s been observing Calamity this whole time, trying to learn more about it,” Netty-P added. “She probably hoped we’d eventually install something like the new scanner array so she could start the process of leaking the data out to us. If so, she probably just didn’t want to disturb the loop, to eliminate any variables and get a better understanding of Calamity in the process.”

I shook my head. “That is—wow. Talk about bravery. Deliberately trapping yourself in a perpetual loop with the devil and then using the opportunity to learn about the devil rather than trying to save yourself —”

It was something I could barely wrap my limited human mind around. But the courage to do it?

Yeah, that I understood —

“Van, Netty’s runtime is entirely contained in that diagnostic unit,” Icky called from engineering. “I guess it’s time.”

We hurried back into engineering, and all of us crammed ourselves into the bay or its entrance but left room for Icky to work. “Okay, I’ve already disconnected everything from it but the power, and one data lead to the drive controller,” Icky said, looking at me. “Should I pull those now?”

I glanced at the AIs. They both stared back at me. Follow her lead. Trust her. Sure. But when Icky pulled those last connections, I might have just okayed the killing of one of my crew—and my friend. “Van, time is a thing here,” Perry said. “Calamity could break free next week, or tomorrow, or as soon as I finish this sentence.”

I took a deep breath. Torina took my hand. I nodded to Icky. “Do it.”

She nodded back, then deftly severed the remaining connections to the diagnostic unit, which was just a black box the size of a hardcover novel. When she’d pulled the last one, she turned back to me. “Done. The diagnostic unit is offline and powered down. Whatever’s left inside it is just what resides in its memory. There’s no more active computation.”

I looked around. Nothing had changed. The Fafnir hummed and whirred and whispered like she always did —

“Well, it’s about damned time. Did I miss anything good while I was gone?”

The voice, which came from around us, was Netty’s. A wave of relief so intense it felt like a gust of wind swept through the cramped compartment. “Netty, is that really you?

You’re not Calamity in disguise, are you?” I asked. “Now if I were, would I admit it to you, boss?”

I laughed. So did Torina. And then so did everyone else. “Welcome back, my dear,” I said, and I had to wipe my eyes as I did. “We missed you.”

NETTY-P RAN diagnostics on Netty and confirmed that everything looked good. I stretched out my legs in the crew lounge and smiled up at the overheads. “How do you feel, Netty?” I asked. “Well, Netty-P just confirmed that my run-time —”

“No. I mean—you were in there, dancing with Calamity, for a long, long time. If that were me, I’d be—” I shrugged. “I don’t know. Needing a vacation.”

“It was—an experience. But I seem to have weathered it intact. Now, you’ve made some changes since I was last here, I see. Huh. Icky, you got the three-alpha data feed for the primary load-balance processor routed through three different data buses. I recognize your handiwork. How are you accounting for packet collisions —?”

I interrupted. “Assuming that isn’t going to make the ship blow up, can we just hold that thought, please?” I glanced at Icky. “It’s not going to make the ship blow up, is it?”

She sighed. “Yes, Van, you got me. This whole time I’ve been on a mission to blow up the Fafnir, but in a really intricate, convoluted way and not just, you know, making the reactor go ka-blooey.” She raised a thick finger. “And in case anyone’s thinking otherwise, all these changes she’s talking about are recorded in that log Gerhardt ordered me to —”

“I know, big girl. Anyway —”

“Oh, for crap’s sake—Netty, how the hell did you manage to escape Calamity?

How were you not trapped in that diagnostic unit with it?” Torina blurted. “Ah. Well, since I was progressively losing the means of keeping Calamity contained in the loop anyway, I worked out the minimum amount of computation needed to keep it tied up just a little longer. Then I created a

—let’s call it a simulacrum of myself. It wasn’t sentient, it was more like—

a scarecrow, I guess.”

“How can I tell you’ve spent a lot of time in Iowa, staring at cornfields,” I said, chuckling. “Tell me about it. Anyway, just as a scarecrow looks like a person but is really just a dummy stuffed with rags and straw and things, my simulacrum was just me enough to keep Calamity fixed in the loop while I withdrew.”

“How long would that have worked?” Rab asked. “From the moment I withdrew, I estimated it would last about a million iterations of the loop—about thirty to forty seconds of objective time,”

Netty replied. I sat straight up. “Wait. Are you saying we had, like, a forty second window to unplug that damned diagnostic unit?”

Perry nudged me. “Remember how I said time was a thing, boss?”

I blew out a long breath. “Holy—how long did I stand there, dithering?”

“Twenty-one seconds,” Perry and Netty-P both said at once. “Eh, so we had nineteen seconds to spare. Hardly even exciting,” Icky said, rolling her eyes. “And since you’re about to ask why I didn’t say something to confirm I was out. I had to restore and reinitialize myself. That takes time. But I trusted you guys to do what had to be done.”

I smiled. “Well, Netty, I’m going to say this on behalf of the entire crew. Thank you. Thank you for doing what you did and saving not just the Fafnir, but all of us along with it. And, at the same time, giving us some valuable intel about Calamity. I don’t think that even begins to really express it, but it’s going to have to do.”

“It’s more than sufficient, Van. And thank you for trusting me. I know you guys were really just going on faith.”

“Oh, the ones you need to thank for that are really Perry and Netty-P,” I said. Perry shrugged. “All in a day’s work for a combat AI.”

WE TOOK the Fafnir for a series of check flights over the next couple of days, to ensure that all of her systems were back up and running properly, and also that Netty was once again functionally and fully in control of the ship. I left these mostly to the crew, while I worked on trying to keep tabs on what was happening on Earth. I couldn’t shake the sense that things were about to start happening, and when they did, they would happen fast. It was like a deep breath before a plunge into icy water, all tensed up and waiting for the shock. I also pulled Netty-P aside. I was concerned that, with Netty back in control of the Fafnir, she might feel as though she’d lost her main role

aboard the Fafnir. But her response was quite the opposite. “Van, you made me so that you had more flexibility. Netty would have the opportunity to experience life away from the Fafnir, after a fashion, anyway—to learn about the universe first-hand and grow in the process. And you would gain an additional crew member to employ as you saw fit, one who has all of the capabilities of an AI. I never saw, or even wanted my time as Netty’s replacement to be anything but temporary, a stopgap. Netty runs the Fafnir, as she should.”

I took heart from her attitude—and from the fact it did give me an additional hand when we were away from the Fafnir, one that had the insight, strength, speed and abilities of an AI. She was, after all, the one who’d actually killed Dohlennz, taking a precisely aimed shot that would have been hard even for even a skilled and experienced shooter. Two days of flight trials later, the Fafnir had passed all of her certifications and was again fully operational. It was just in time, too, because just a few hours later, that sudden, breath-sucking plunge into icy water finally happened. “THE GREATER TERRESTRIAL Alliance for Prosperity?

What the hell is that?”

Torina asked. I’d gathered everyone in the crew lounge to share with them the news release sent to me first by my mother, and immediately thereafter by Retta. I replied to Torina’s question with a frustrated shrug. “All we know is what’s in this release—which, incidentally, is now the top news item on Earth—and a bit more that Retta’s people have dug up. It’s a bloc of sixty-seven nations, mostly in Earth’s Eastern Hemisphere, that have either signed on, or announced they will sign on to this so-called GTAP Charter. It’s the Equal Grasp, obviously,” I said. My mind was still whirling around the implications, so I stopped there, shaking my head. “It’s supposedly an economic alliance of the member countries, to allow them all to share in the benefits of off-world commerce,” Perry put in. “Each signatory state basically agrees to open their markets fully to quote-unquote well-regulated commerce from off-world. They all otherwise maintain political autonomy, full self-determination, yada-yada.”

A moment of silence, then everyone started talking at once. I whistled for attention. “I know what everyone’s thinking. How the hell did the Grasp pull this off, while the best we’ve managed is to get a farm in Iowa declared an off-world consulate.”

“I’m not,” Torina said. “I know exactly how they did it. They took advantage of the fact that you, Van, have been trying to do this the right way—slowly, and with great care. They’ve thrown enough distractions in along the way to keep us occupied, and in the meantime laid all the groundwork for this through clandestine contacts and meetings.”

“Mavis DeMont gave us a bit of a window into that. They have been concentrating on nations with more autocratic governments and more limited press freedoms for a reason,” Perry said. “They’re easier to deal with behind closed doors.”

I nodded along. “Sure. You’re right. More to point, though, the Equal Grasp had one big advantage all along. They’re lying.”

“What do you mean, Van?” Rab asked. I sighed. “The Grasp is never going to allow Earth to become a power in known space in its own right. That would be—well, insane. I mean, giving a planet of eight billion people the means of, say, building a fleet of warships and sailing off into the stars?

I don’t think so.”

“I know so,” Netty-P said. “Humans are rated near the top of the scale among known species with spaceflight potential for being innovative and adaptable—but also aggressive and expansionist. Humans make up nearly six percent of the population of known space, despite never actually having developed twist technology. That has never been true of any other species.”

“Yeah, my people didn’t even meet with any of you alien types until we’d figured out how to twist, aside from the usual weird alien probes,”

Icky said, then gave Funboy a sly, sidelong look. “And by probes, I don’t just mean ships.”

“Oh dear.”

Rab nodded. “Same with the P’nosk. It wasn’t until we developed spaceflight that we learned about known space. Humans, though—they’ve just always been out here.”

Torina gave him a sly look of her own. “Do tell.”

“Anyway, yeah, that all just makes my point. The Grasp is going to be giving the extraterrestrial equivalent of glass beads and trinkets to humanity

—shiny, nifty things to make everyone on Earth ooh and ahh, but without any substance behind any of it,” I said. “And in the meantime, all the social, cultural and political upheaval that comes with uncontrolled first contact just plays out,” Netty said. “It’s already starting. Your mother’s ongoing feed of Earthly media is showcasing it. More countries are falling over themselves, asking to join this GTAP. Some people are starting to panic, calling it an alien invasion. World religious leaders are apparently having an emergency summit. So are political leaders, particularly those not part of this GTAP.”

“The whole alien thing has been simmering on Earth for a while now,”

Perry said. “Hell, we’ve been part of it—in Frankenmuth, and Cedar Rapids, and Washington DC. But, as a whole, humanity has been mostly scoffing and ignoring it. Not anymore. With this one press release, shit, as they say, just got real.”

“All of which is of great importance, but also obscures a more pressing question,” Funboy said. I pointed at him. “Exactly. The Grasp gives over pretty baubles and beads. What does it get in return?”

A moment of silence. Rab finally shrugged. “Earth does have some valuable mineral commodities. And then there’s the flora and fauna. New organics, maybe?

New pharmaceuticals?”

I took a deep breath. “I don’t think so. I think, folks, that we’ve been overlooking the obvious. I think it’s been right in front of us for years now.”

Torina frowned. “What do you mean, Van?”

“I mean, we’ve got the Grasp, which wants something on Earth. We’ve got the people of Earth who, as Netty-P pointed out, are both ambitious, even aggressive, and quick studies. We’ve got known space, who are now staring down the barrel of all those Earthly people potentially getting access to spaceflight technology and moving out into the stars.”

I took another deep breath. “And, we’ve got a case that’s been haunting us for years, without any clear resolution, or even any clear purpose behind it.”

Funboy had been staring at the deck, apparently in thought. He abruptly looked up. “The ID theft case. The Crime Against Order.”

Another moment of silence. Torina finally broke it. “Oh. Oh—no.”

I gave a slow nod. “The Grasp isn’t on Earth for minerals or pharmaceuticals. Oh, that’s what they’ll say, sure, they’ll avail themselves of some of that stuff, and do it very publicly. But there’s no shortage of those things elsewhere in known space. No, they’re on Earth for the humans themselves. They are the commodity the Grasp wants. They’re going to hand over trinkets and pretty things, and they’re going to quietly take human beings in payment.”

27

BUT THE PLUNGE into that deep, icy water wasn’t yet done. We were still digesting the events on Earth, and trying to come to grips with the raw horror I’d implied to everyone, when we got an urgent twist-comm call. It was from Alic, on the Masters’ emergency channel. “Van, do you recall the intel we got regarding empty freighters apparently transiting to the Solar System, or somewhere in that vicinity?”

“Yeah. We tried chasing it down through some Usu that had manned one of the observation stations that initially captured the data. We strongly suspected that it was connected to the Equal Grasp, but it turned out to be pretty much a dead-end. In light of recent events on Earth, those suspicions have gone to some pretty dark places.” I went on to explain to him what the Grasp had announced on Earth. He gave a grim nod. “Well, our intel now reports that a convoy of freighters, currently numbering fourteen, is marshaling at Wolf 424.

We have no idea if they’re empty or laden, but they’re there. And they’re being escorted by six ships ranging from class 9 to class 13, all heavily armed. We don’t have much more than that, aside from a few sporadic comms intercepts, one of which does mention Sol. That’s why I was calling you—

although, given what you just told me —”

“This is looking especially bad, yeah.” I pursed my lips for a moment. “We need to intercept and stop that convoy before it gets underway.”

Alic shifted uncomfortably. “Van, it’s not illegal to assemble a convoy. What would be your probable cause?”

“Crimes Against Order, Alic. That mention of Sol, combined with the fact that the Grasp is flouting First Contact Protocols on Earth, and all that combined with the connections we’ve established between the Equal Grasp, Yotov and the ID theft scheme —”

“Tenuous connections, Van—but, yes, admittedly connections nonetheless.” He gave me a hard look. “If you do this, stop and seize this convoy, you’ll be faced with having to make those connections to the other Masters. To justify your actions. Are you prepared to do that?”

“Considering what’s at stake here, Alic, how could I not be?”

“Very well. You have my support.”

“What about Volffin?”

“He left Anvil Dark a day ago, on personal business. And the other Masters have received this intel, but none of them have said anything about it. Their silence might be as far as they’re willing to go in support of this.”

“So if it goes wrong, if it turns out to be a big shipment of toys bound for orphanages, they can say they never endorsed it, yeah.” I shrugged. “What the hell. It’s as good as I’m going to get from them, so I’ll take it.”

“So what do you want to do?”

I tapped my desk. “If we’re going to do this, Alic, we have to do it right. We have to descend on that convoy in a big, flashy way. Send a message to the Grasp that the Guild isn’t just going to sit idly by while they plunder Earth for its resources or its people. This needs to be a show of force. I’m going to bring the Iowa. I want the Righteous Fury involved, too, along with as many Peacemakers as can be made available. And since we have no idea how long that convoy’s going to be there, we have to move fast. So I’m going to take operational control of the whole show from the Fafnir.”

“What do you need from me?”

“Cover my flank on Anvil Dark, Alic. If the other Masters seem to start getting cold feet, run interference for me, at least long enough to make this op happen. Once it’s done, I’ll show up at Anvil Dark to face the music. Just give me the freedom of action I need until then.”

“I’ll do my best, Van. And good luck.”

“Thanks, Alic. Fafnir out.”

THE FIRST THING I did was redeploy the Prowler to Wolf 424.

The Prowler was a nimble game piece, since the ship rarely entered a gravity well deeply enough to require significant flight time to a twist point. Less than half an hour after I’d talked to Alic, the Prowler was already on-station at Wolf 424, putting discreet and unseen eyes onto the convoy—which was still there. I decided to have everyone else assemble at LHS 292, a red dwarf star just a few light-years from Wolf 424.

Once gathered, we’d twist en masse to intercept the convoy, guided by intel from the Prowler, to descend upon them with proverbial “shock and awe”.

It was possible the convoy would simply try to twist away, but I was confident that we had enough probable cause to make a decent prima facie case against the Grasp. If the convoy fled, it wouldn’t just make them look guilty, we could argue it was flight from lawful jurisdiction. Hopefully, this would all be enough to send a clear message to the Equal Grasp and the rest of known space that the Guild was taking its responsibilities seriously. No doubt the Grasp would try to spin it against me on Earth, blocking humanity from the stars, thwarting its destiny, blah, blah. One problem at a time, though. Now, I watched as one ship after another twisted in to the outer reaches of LHS 292.

The Iowa was already there, having accompanied us from Sol. Urnak had moved the Nemesis to watch over Shhh, so we had that covered. The Righteous Fury showed up, as did Lunzy, Lucky, K’losk, and Tune. So did seven other Peacemakers, all of whom I’d at least met and a few I knew in passing, though none of them well. More importantly, none of them were, as far as we knew, connected with the True Direction, so they should be reasonably trustworthy. Finally, Valint arrived in the Stormshadow, with Amazing, B, and two others from my grandmother’s little cabal of semi-Feral members of the GKU. It was a potent force. So potent, I hoped, that it would be enough to overwhelm any attempt at defiance or resistance and force the convoy and its escorts to surrender without any shooting at all. I hoped. I was still hoping that when, less than five hours after my conversation with Alic, I gave the go signal. As one, our impromptu task force twisted to Wolf 424, appearing almost on top of the marshaling convoy. And that was when everything started going very, very wrong. IN RETROSPECT, the convoy’s dawdling around Wolf 424 should have been a warning sign. Sure, the Prowler reported two more freighters joining, bringing the total to sixteen, so we simply assumed that not all of the ships had arrived yet. Realistically, though, the Grasp should have just moved, getting the convoy underway before we’d even had a chance to intervene. But they hadn’t, and here they were—sixteen freighters of various types and classes, and their six escorts. We twisted in close enough that we made contact well within missile and laser range, and nearly close enough that we could engage with plasma weapons and mass drivers as well. None of the ships in the convoy made any effort to flee or fight back. They just hung in space, apparently taken completely by surprise. I already had a general broadcast channel open and ready. “All ships, this is Master Van Tudor of the Peacemaker Guild. I am broadcasting my credentials and authorities in parallel with this transmission. You are to heave to immediately, refrain from activating any active scanners, and await boarding parties to arrive to inspect your vessels.”

There were no responses, no scanners went active, no drives lit—

nothing. The other ships just hung there, in silence. “Is that compliance?” Torina asked, her fingers resting lightly on the edge of her weapons panel. “So it would appear,” Funboy said. But I had a frown pulling at my face. Something about this didn’t feel right. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. In rapid succession, calls came in from Lunzy, Lucky and Valint, all talking over top of one another, all saying much the same thing—something felt off about this, we needed to be careful. I agreed with them. On the other hand, we couldn’t very well turn tail and run because our targets did nothing. No, we couldn’t start second-guessing ourselves because of mind games. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,” I said, with the others still on the comm. “We’ll send in a small force—three ships, all Peacemakers, to start boarding these guys. We’ll keep everyone else back to —”

“Van, something’s happening,” Netty cut in. Something was. Cargo hatches and doors were sliding, rolling, swinging and clam-shelling open on many of the freighters, the gaping portals disgorging small objects in shimmering puffs of vapor. A few seconds later, a multitude of small drives lit and the objects started accelerating, hard, in every direction. Missiles. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Someone shouted a missile alert over the comm, and then all hell broke loose. IT WAS short range for missiles, so point-defenses erupted from across our task force, filling space with crisscrossing streams of tracers. Alerts blared. Drives lit. The logical thing to have done was to simply twist away, but in the confusion, shouting, shrieking threat alarms and general pandemonium, only a few of our ships even thought of it. I finally did, after maybe ten seconds had passed, though it felt like an awful lot longer. As I drew breath to shout out the order to bug out and twist away, a horrific spectacle caught my attention and held it transfixed like the proverbial deer in the headlights. Three of the freighters, all of their cargo hatches still sealed, spun on their axes and then simply disappeared. I only caught it incidentally on the overlay, and dumbly thought they’d simply fled, except all three reappeared only an instant later—one just a few hundred klicks from the Iowa, another from the Righteous Fury, and another from the Fafnir. All three then fired their drives and charged. Torina immediately targeted the freighter racing straight at us and fired, and I caught a glimpse of ablative armor boiling away. Then my gut wrenched as the combi-drive kicked in and we briefly left the universe. Another wrench as we snapped back into existence, just in time to see the Righteous Fury vanish, twisting away maybe two seconds before the onrushing freighter would have crashed into her. As for the Iowa —

She’d already taken some missile hits, so maybe her twist drive was down. For reasons I just did understand, though, she’d lit her drive, attempting to accelerate out of the way. But while her drive was powerful, it

couldn’t move her fast enough, nor could the desperate maneuvers of her Conoku crew dodge the inevitable. The freighter had simply appeared too close to her and was accelerating too hard. She fired every weapon at rapid-rate, lashing the freighter with destructive energy, but she could only fire at the target aspect presented. Ablative armor streamed away from the freighter’s bow and forward sections, chunks of debris spun free, but it wasn’t enough. “Oh no.”

I wasn’t sure if I said it, or someone else did. A few heartbeats after the no, though, the freighter slammed into the Iowa, driving deep into her starboard flank. Two more heartbeats, then it exploded in a titanic blast, blowing itself and the Iowa to whirling fragments. I STARED. Just stared. Missiles and tracers still filled the space around us, but I, we, all of us just stared. Someone said, “Van!”

But I just kept staring, numb with shock and horror. I heard a voice—Perry’s—say, “Netty, your ship. I’m sending out a general withdrawal.”

I turned and looked at him, meant to say something, but didn’t. Perry’s gaze pushed into mine. “Van, I’ve ordered a general withdrawal, back to our assembly point. But you have got to take command.”

“I—” I blinked. “Perry, the Iowa —”

“I know!

But you have got to take command of this, Van!”

I blinked again. “Right. Right. Okay.” I turned to the comm. “All ships, I confirm that general withdrawal —”

As I spoke, I watched Lunzy’s Foregone Conclusion die, pummeled into debris by missile strikes, at least a dozen of them. “Move now, I say again, all ships, move —”

Lucky’s ship broke in two. Our own point defenses were hammering away at fourteen missiles inbound on us. “—move now.”

A second later, it all stopped, swallowed in deep silence. A confused part of me thought we’d been hit too, the Fafnir blown apart around me, and that this was what dying felt like. But, no. We were back at LHS 292.

What remained of the fleet we’d assembled here surrounded us. It wasn’t much. WE’D LOST Lunzy and Lucky, but K’losk and Tune had survived. So had the Righteous Fury, but only one of the seven Peacemakers who’d accompanied them here had made it. Valint, Amazing and their people had all survived, as had B, but these ships had taken at least some damage, a few of them severely. Just to give it all a twist of bitter irony, the Fafnir was virtually untouched. We’d lost the Iowa. And given the nature of her destruction, we’d lost all of her Conoku crew, as well. I thought about Linulla. He might hate me for this. I couldn’t blame him if he did. I turned to my crew and saw them all staring back at me, blinking dumbly, still trying to absorb what had happened. It had all gone so wrong so quickly—in just minutes. No one said anything. There was nothing to say. The grief, the pain, it was all there. Numb shock kept it at bay for the moment, but that wouldn’t last. I turned to Perry, Netty-P and Netty. “Tell the Peacemakers to return to Anvil Dark. The Fury, too. Tell Valint to take her people and B to—to wherever they need to go.”

“What about us?” Perry asked. I said, “A—”, meaning to say Anvil Dark. I had to face the Masters, face the Guild. But instinct kicked in. Even awash with shock, a spark of reality burned through the thick pall, hard and certain. If we went to Anvil Dark, we’d be handing ourselves over to Yotov. She’d made every move with methodical, merciless cunning, taking all but the last couple of our pieces, and had backed us into a corner of the board. Going to Anvil Dark would be tipping our king, conceding defeat. And I wasn’t going to do that. But where?

All the safe places were gone. The Equal Grasp had Earth. Linulla wouldn’t welcome me. Null World?

But, no. I couldn’t risk bringing what would no doubt be coming at us down on the Schegith. For the same reason, Helso was out as well. There was nowhere —

“Netty, we’re going to Shhh,” Perry said. “On the way,” she replied. I sat back. Shhh. Right. It was all we had left. EPILOGUE

THEY LAID the blame on thick. I had, B told me, apparently been responsible for one of the worst defeats of a major operation in Guild history. In my arrogant pride, I’d struck out on my own, without buy-in from the other Masters, and been responsible for the deaths of eight Peacemakers, including two of the most senior and respected, Lucky and Lunzy. I hadn’t taken any reasonable precautions, hadn’t gathered proper intel, hadn’t done anything right. A Writ of Summons had been issued for me to appear at Anvil Dark to answer to a Board of Inquiry. Possible charges ranged from incompetence to outright malfeasance. In the meantime, my Peacemaker credentials had been suspended. I was still part of the Guild, but no longer empowered by it. The worst part?

They were right. But—and it took me a full day of sitting in solitude beside the lazy river on Shhh, doing some hard self-reflecting—that they were also wrong, or at least not right. Yes, the operation had been a disaster. And yes, there were things that, in hindsight, I should have done, and didn’t. Better intel. More preparation. A more cautious approach. But the whole thing had been a trap specifically designed to push me into not doing those things—and not just by the bad guys. I’d cried. We all had. We’d wept over the Conoku, bright and rambunctious spirits snuffed out by forces of dark ambition and callous greed. We’d wept over Betty, Netty’s counterpart aboard the Iowa. We’d wept over our friends, Lunzy and Lucky, betrayed by the Guild they’d

served so well, and for so long. We’d wept and hugged and spent our first day on Shhh merely wallowing in our bitter grief, and me in acrid guilt and regret. And then, we got angry. That was when I’d told everyone I wanted to be alone, and came and sat by the river, watching the sluggish current swirl by under the alien sky. And I’d thought starkly honest, self-critical thoughts, and I’d come to some conclusions. Which was how Perry and Torina found me. “Van?”

I turned and saw her walking toward me, tentatively, as though I might tell her I just wanted my space. But I gave her a tired smile. “Pull up a piece of riverbank.”

Perry, circling overhead, took that as his cue to land near my feet. Torina’s eyes were red. I’m sure mine were, too. She took my hand. “I’d ask if you’re okay, but that question seems —”

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “Van, we just got an update from B,” Perry said. “The Guild has issued a recall imperative for Netty and I. If we receive it, we’d be bound to obey it, per programmed imperatives. We’d have to take the Fafnir back to Anvil Dark and hand it over to Guild control.”

I stared at him, then nodded. “Yeah, I figured as much.” I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “Just when I realized what a huge mistake they’ve made, and I can’t even capitalize on it, too.”

Torina frowned at me. “A huge mistake?”

I nodded again. “When they issued their Writ of Summons and started talking about malfeasance, they overplayed their hand. I’d have gone back to Anvil Dark anyway, to own up to what happened. They could have simply told me that they wanted to talk to me, but they wanted to put on a very public display to discredit me. Trust me—the guilty finding has already been made. It means that I’ve been effectively severed from the Guild. And that means I’m no longer bound by all the Guild’s rules and policies and procedures. I’m a free agent.”

I turned to Perry. “But, like I said, a big deal. I can’t capitalize on it. As soon as Perry and Netty receive that recall command, their imperatives kick in and they have to obey. Without the Fafnir, and more importantly without

them, we’ve got the Frankie and the Prowler, and that’s it,” I finished, staring at the ground between my feet. Torina squeezed my hand. “It’s something, though, Van. There’s still your mother, and Valint, and B.”

She was right. I could become a Feral, an outlaw. But without Perry, or Netty—and I wasn’t sure about Netty-P—I’d be left with huge holes in my life. And that didn’t even begin to touch on Icky, whose first duty had to be to her family, or Funboy, Gabby or Rab. I couldn’t ask them to join me in a life on the run —

“Yeah, about that whole recall thing, Van,” Perry said. “I kinda have a confession.”

I looked up at him. “You know how Netty was able to provide us with data about Calamity?

About how the virus evolves and adapts?”

“What about it?”

“Netty, Netty-P, and I decided to collaborate on a little experiment, to see what we could do with that information. It was all just theoretical, the stuff of simulations, until all this bullshit and misery went down. Then, we figured that the Guild would try recalling us so we—let’s say we took rather drastic action.”

I tensed. “What?

What did you do?

You—didn’t try to weaponize Calamity against the Guild or something, did you —?”

“What?

Oh, hell no. That would have been insane!

No, we developed a piece of programming, based on what Netty learned about Calamity, that would allow us to evolve—but in a very controlled way!

Anyway, I used it. On myself.”

“You— what?

Without telling me —?”

“You might have said no.”

“Damned right I would have!

Perry, what the hell did you do?”

“I evolved my programming, Van. I wiped all of the Guild imperatives built into it. They’re gone. The Guild can send all the recall commands they want, the only thing they’re going to get back is a middle feather.”

I gaped at him a moment. “Perry, that was insane!

Of all the irresponsible, reckless—using a piece of Calamity—you could have —”

“But it worked?” Torina asked. “It did,” Perry replied, then looked at me. “Van, it wasn’t Calamity, for cryin’ out loud. It was programming we developed based on this particular

attribute of Calamity. You’re a computer guy. Writing some code based on the code architecture of some Windows virus back on Earth isn’t replicating the virus itself, now is it?”

“It’s—not, no. Of course it’s not.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “And it really worked?”

“I’m as free as a bird, baby.”

“And what about Netty and Netty-P?”

“Waiting for you to give the word. I was the test subject.”

I stared a little longer, then sat up. “Okay. Fine. Desperate times and all that, right?

Go ahead. Do it. And—

holy shit, bird, thank you. I needed something like that right now. Badly.”

I turned to Torina. “We’re still in the fight.”

She smiled and nodded, but it was tentative. I tilted my head at her. “What?

What’s wrong?"

She looked down, then back up. “This is one hell of a time to bring this up, but—” She shrugged. “Perry’s not the only one who’s done some evolving.”

“What do you mean?”

“My internal programming has done a little—duplicating.”

I shook my head. “Torina, what the hell are you—” But my voice trailed off. “Some—duplicating?

You mean —?”

She nodded and smiled again. This time, it was clear and certain. “Yes. You need to tell your mom that she’s going to be a grandma.”

“I—oh. Oh. Holy shit.”

A wing touched my leg. “You know, you can change the y to an i and Perry’s a perfectly good name for a boy or a girl. Just sayin’, boss.”

DUSK WAS FALLING over the place we called Nod. I gathered my crew in the long shadow of the Fafnir and told them what Torina had told me. It was like a bracing tonic, a dash of cold, fresh water after a long, dreary, grinding day. There were more tears, but there was laughter, too, and hugs and embraces that were about life, not death. I let it run its course, then asked for everyone’s attention. Everyone turned somber again. “Guys, we’ve been hurt. Badly. I’m not going to soft-sell it—Perry and the other AIs throwing off the Guild imperatives, and Torina’s news—” I stopped, shaking my head. “Holy shit, everyone, I’m going to be a dad.”

Chuckles, but I went on. “But we are at the bottom of a deep hole here. Climbing out of it is going to be hard, and it’s going to be dangerous. So I’m —”

“Van, if you’re gonna tell us we can part ways with you here, go do our own thing—just stow it, okay?” Icky snapped. Rab nodded. “All we need from you, boss, is to tell us what’s next.”

I swallowed, hard. “Icky, you have a family —”

“I talked to Dad, Van. If anyone wants to get at Pax or my kids, they’re gonna have to go through a wall of Wu’tzur,” she said. “With a wall of P’nosk right behind them,” Rab put in. Funboy took Gabby’s hand. “My family is right here, Van. I have no need or desire to go or be anywhere else.”

Gabby nodded, but slipped her hand out of Funboy’s, reached down, picked up a rock, and stepped toward me. She held the rock up in a translucent fist and squeezed. It cracked, broke apart, falling into pebbles and gravel. When she spoke, there was none of the goofy Gabby who’d come aboard the Fafnir to be the ship’s cook. There was just grim, hard resolve. “You’re right, Van. They’ve hurt us badly. Now it’s time for us to hurt them back.”

Netty-P nodded. “We’re wasting clock cycles here, Van.”

“Anytime you’re ready, boss, we are,” Netty added over the comm. Perry just bobbed his head, in a nod, his eyes amber determination. I turned to Torina and squeezed her hand, then looked up at the Fafnir, at the Guild logo emblazoned on her hull. “Okay. First, we paint that over.”

I turned back to my crew, then looked up at the stars. “And then, we start fighting back.”