Song of Darkness: Backyard Starship #12

JN Chaney

1

CALAMITY. That’s what they were calling the virus chewing its insidious way through the digital architecture of known space. After being deliberately released by Helem Gauss on Adoration, home planet of the so-called Enhancement Empire, it had been unknowingly carried by infected ships to other systems before they could be stopped and quarantined. Now, Calamity had erupted in three different systems, cancerous growths turning whole networks and everything attached to them dark. There weren’t any effective countermeasures, at least not yet. Calamity was an alien AI, one capable of analyzing, adapting to, and eventually overcoming any firewalls or other impediments put in its way. The best digital defenses available had slowed its spread, but nothing seemed able to stop it. Except for the thing now sitting on a console beside Funboy’s workstation in the Fafnir’ s cockpit. “Almost 9 grand off the internet,” I said, opening the cover. “The best gaming laptop on the market.”

Funboy peered closely at it. “Hello?

What’s your name?”

I winced. “Funboy, talking to it like you’re a tourist trying to converse with a local isn’t going to work because… well, first, that never works—

and second, even if it did, it wouldn’t work here. It’s not voice activated.”

“Wait, a computer that just sits there silently doing what it’s told?

How do we replace Perry with one of those?”

We all turned to the speaker—which had been Perry. He looked back at us. “Hey, just filling in for Icky while she’s, you know, not feeling it.”

Torina and I both smiled, but they were sad smiles. Icky had taken the death of Zenophir, the Fafnir’s weapon engineer and general mother figure, pretty hard. We’d taken her back to her father aboard his freelance battleship, the Nemesis, to spend some downtime with him. Torina turned back to the laptop, crossing her arms and casting a suspicious eye over it. “So, you have to press those keys and move that—

what’s it called?

Vermin?”

“Close. It’s a mouse,” I said. “Mouse. Right. You have to wiggle it around to interact with it.” She shook her head. “Seems pretty primitive.”

“That’s exactly the point. It is primitive,” I replied. “Too primitive, in fact, to run Calamity at all. Perry and I have configured it to run a modified form of high-end security software—but stripped down so only voice and image data from the comm system pass through it. It’ll block anything else.”

“A countermeasure that Calamity could easily defeat in some ridiculously small fraction of a second, except the virus can’t run on this machine at all. It would fill up the available computing resources with inert code, and that would be it,” Perry said. “So it can’t adapt itself to overcome your firewall,” Torina said. I nodded. “That’s the theory. It’s like being chased by a giant, unstoppable killer robot down a wide, straight corridor. Eventually, it catches up and grinds right over you. But put a sudden narrow section in the corridor, one big enough to let you through but way too small for the robot, and all it can do is sit there and glare at you through the gap.”

“Anyway, we’ve got this cabled in between the Fafnir’s comm receiver and the console. It should mean we can safely receive voice and video,”

Perry went on. “But not data. That’s still a no-no, as long as Calamity’s out there and we have no way of blocking it,” I said. Funboy moved the mouse experimentally, then blinked up at me. “Not being able to receive data is still pretty limiting. It means, for instance, that Netty won’t be able to receive nav or traffic control information.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s a bandage over a gaping wound. But better that than just leaving the wound open to bleed, right?”

“Not necessarily. Sometimes it is desirable to allow wounds to bleed for a time—to remove local toxins or foreign debris, for instance—”

“You Surtsi aren’t big on metaphors, are you?”

A slow blink. “We have an entire field of art that is devoted entirely to metaphors, in fact.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I think it’s a refuse heap of misunderstanding.”

I had to grin. “Irony, thy name is Funboy.”

The laptop, top of the line consumer computing on Earth, was barely a slide rule compared to the systems that formed a substrate for the likes of Perry, Netty, and Netty-P, but it at least allowed us to talk safely to others via comm. Funboy was right. There was a lot of crucial functionality we still couldn’t risk, but it was better than nothing. We departed Anvil Dark to try it out, calling up Bester on a comm system that had been kept isolated and free of Calamity. His image came through clear enough, though with an annoying bit of lag. “Van, can you—”

“Bester, how does—”

We both paused. “Van, I’ll—”

“Bester, try—”

We both paused again, then I raised a finger. “Bester, if you want to say something, raise your hand.”

“And don’t chew gum unless you bring enough for everybody,” Perry added. Bester stared. “What?”

“That’s just Perry putting the ass in smartass. Anyway, I gather you can hear us, and we can hear you.”

Bester raised a beefy hand. I waited. He just sat there, silently. I wondered if the image had frozen. “Bester?”

“What?”

“What are you doing?”

“You said raise my hand if I wanted to talk.”

I made myself not sigh. “Yes, but—” I shook my head. “Bester, go ahead, speak to your heart’s content.”

“Right. I have a message for Perry.”

“For Perry. From who?”

“Hey, this might be a personal call, you know,” Perry said. I shrugged at him. “Sorry, bird, but for the time being we’re effectively screening all of our calls.”

“What kind of personal call would you get, anyway?” Torina asked. “I have a life, you know,” Perry replied and turned to the screen. “Who’s calling?”

“He says his name is Gorix. At least, I think that’s what he said. The message went through a few analog relay steps, so it’s pretty messy.”

“Gorix. You sure?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Huh. Interesting.”

“Interesting how?” I asked. Perry looked at me. “Oh. Right. Gorix was the Conoku engineer who worked on my intelligence matrix back at the time of my inception.”

“So he’s like your father,” Torina said. “Sorta, I guess. That’s not the interesting part, though. The interesting part is that he’s probably dead.”

THE MESSAGE to Perry was cryptic, partly because it was written that way, but also because of the poor quality of the comms. It was voice-only and essentially asked Perry to meet Gorix in a remote system, yet another red dwarf star just outside the boundaries of known space. “Yeah, that’s not suspicious,” Torina said. I turned to Perry. “Was that Gorix?”

“Yes?

I mean, it sounded like him, but I’m only able to do voice-pattern matching from the very few brief encounters I had with him after my inception and that garbled, static-laden mess we just listened to.”

“Perry shared his voice samples of Gorix with me to do a cross-check, and I’d place the confidence level that that was actually him talking at no more than sixty-five percent,” Netty-P put in. I tapped the armrest of the pilot’s seat. “Great. So that means a one third chance that it’s not him.”

“I suspect a trap,” Funboy put in. I looked at him. “Uh… yeah, that’s kind of where I was going with that.” I turned back to Perry. “So if we assume that Gorix is still alive—”

“Which is possible. He’d be pretty old, but Conoku do have a long lifespan,” Perry said. “Duly noted. So if he is alive, do you have any idea why he’d want to see you?”

“Well, my sparkling personality and devilish good looks aside, no idea.”

“Who would want to trap us, Van?

I think people across known space have more pressing issues than a vendetta against a Peacemaker,” Torina reasoned. I sighed and crossed my arms. “Two things to never underestimate—the power of boners, and the desire for revenge. Both will make people do stupid things.”

We sat in silence for a moment, each chewing on this development. On the face of it, it made no sense to go chasing after someone with whom our connection was tenuous, at best. Even Perry didn’t consider him anything more than the guy who’d helped build him many decades ago. Our priority should be finding whatever Gauss had inevitably established as his safe space, where Calamity couldn’t touch him, and extract any countermeasures he mightt have developed to protect it. He wasn’t suicidal. He’d made a determined effort to escape after releasing the virus, after all, and had only been stopped by Zeno sacrificing herself, bringing a miniature nuclear bomb down on both of them. But something about this plucked at me. It was just too… odd. Also, too convenient, sure. But if someone was going to set a trap for us, why make the bait an obscure engineer even Perry barely knew?

Why not someone more likely to bring us running?

It had been a call for Perry to come and help, yes, but it didn’t even have the urgency of an actual distress call. It was more of a, hey, I could really use a hand here kind of message. “I think we should go check it out,” I finally said, breaking the silence. “There’s just something about it—”

“Right?” Perry bobbed his head. “If it’s a trap, it’s a weird setup.”

“Perhaps the weirdness is the bait,” Funboy said. “Yeah, maybe. But there’s only one way to find out,” I replied. “And what about our search for Gauss’s safe house?”

“Most of the Guild and the GKU are already on it. Us taking a couple of days to check this out ultimately isn’t going to make that much of a

difference.”

I sat up. “Netty, let’s set up a rendezvous with the Nemesis. I want to bring Icky along, if she’s willing. And then, I’ve got a couple of other calls I want to make.”

WE RETRIEVED ICKY WITHOUT INCIDENT. She was still down, lacking her usual snappy edge, but the time off had done her some good. She’d obviously undergone some introspection during her break. “I’ve spent most of my life alone, except for my dad, of course. So I never really got close to anyone. With Zeno, I did. And then I lost her.” She gave a soul-weary sigh. “That was something else I never had a chance to get used to—losing people close to me.”

I put my hand on her arm. “Trust me, big girl. It’s not something you ever get used to. Or, you shouldn’t, anyway. If you ever get used to it,” I said, making air quotes, “then it might be time to think about your life priorities.”

“You still miss your grandfather?

And your father?”

“Every single day. Oh, it’s not as constantly there as it once was, but it’s still there.”

“So it never goes away, the missing someone part?”

“Icky, let me ask you this—do you really want it to go away?

For you to just stop missing Zeno?”

“Yes,” she said, then frowned. “But also, no. So, yeah, I see your point.”

Her frown persisted, though. “What?”

She gave a desolate shrug. “I still don’t get why Gauss was allowed to leave after his trial in the first place. They knew he had that damned virus in him. If they’d just, I don’t know, kept him in a cell, we could have avoided all of this. Why’d they let him go, Van?”

I shrugged, then put a hand on her massive shoulder. She leaned into me, and I realized, not for the first time, that she was still young. I’m not exactly a gray eminence, but Icky was… innocent. Still. Despite her hammer falling without remorse, she was innocent. She was, in a sense, the purest of us all. And I’d asked the same question, of myself and of Gerhardt. Why did we let that bastard go?

Gerhardt had been evasive, but in a tone that hinted that he hadn’t agreed with it either, and hadn’t been given a choice. Could someone have wanted to infect the Enhancement Empire with Calamity, and just hadn’t appreciated the potential risk?

Did they think Calamity was controllable?

A vainglorious idea that would now cost untold lives if we ultimately failed?

Or had somebody just wanted to let the virus loose?

If so, why?

I didn’t get the sense at all that Gerhardt or any of the other Masters had anything to do with it, and Valint and my mother had been just as outraged by what had been allowed to happen. But if that was the case, who exactly was calling the shots when it came to the Guild and the GKU if it wasn’t them and the Masters?

Was there another layer that I wasn’t aware of?

I resolved to confront Gerhardt about it the next time I met him face-to-face. I needed to know that the Guild and the GKU really did have my back

—or if they didn’t. With Icky aboard and the Fafnir fully fueled thanks to a stop at Spindrift, we prepared to twist to the location Gorix had given in his message. This fueling event had been a particular exercise in annoyance. Calamity hadn’t reached the station, not yet, and the Spindrift authorities intended to keep it that way. The quarantine measures on arriving ships were onerous in the extreme, and even pulling rank as a Peacemaker hadn’t budged them. We had to establish a data link with an isolated satellite, then wait for them to determine whether or not it had been infected. If it wasn’t, we were allowed to proceed, but all comms thereafter had to be analog, and we had to do all of our flying manually—which made me deeply thankful for Netty, who could fly the Fafnir through the eye of a needle. “What if it does get infected?” I asked Spindrift traffic control. “For that matter, has anyone infected it yet?”

“Yeah, five times so far. We just tell those ships to get the hell out of our system. A few laser shots across their bows generally convinces them we’re serious. In any case, we wipe the satellite’s systems completely and reinstall all the software after each ship we test, whether we find the damned thing or not.”

To say it was an abundance of caution was putting it mildly. But I got it. Spindrift was an orbital, a construct that was entirely dependent on computers to maintain it as a livable environment. If Calamity managed to

infiltrate it, there’d be little choice but to completely abandon the place. And that would mean thousands of people would go—where, exactly?

For that matter, I wondered what happened to the ships that were infected. Presumably, Calamity would eventually render them derelict. Were there such ships out there right now, hanging in the void without power or life support because no one was willing to take them in?

I’d heard stories from Earth’s past about plague ships, vessels infected with some virulent disease, turned away from every port and eventually rendered down to drifting hulks crewed only by corpses. The thought of it made me shiver. We finally twisted away from Spindrift and made an intermediate stop at Wolf 424 for a nav fix, then carried on to the lonely red dwarf that was our destination. As soon as we’d twisted into its system, we fired up the active scanners. One small contact further in-system, but still far enough away from the star, gravitationally, that it was a valid twist point. That was it. We waited to see if anything else showed itself. Nothing did. Ten minutes later, our reinforcements arrived—Icky’s dad in the Nemesis, our own battlecruiser, the Iowa, and B aboard her ship. It was a lot of firepower, but I wanted a lot of firepower as a hedge against the worst-case scenario. “This is a whole lot of nothing, Van,” B said, her image fuzzy thanks to the comm lag through the laptop. “I know. We’re going to check out that—what the hell is it, anyway, Netty?” I asked, pointing at the sole, small scanner contact. “A nav beacon. And an old one. Whoever put it here must have wanted to be able to twist past this system, without being close enough to the star to get a fix. They’d have to catch this nav signal at the very limit of their scans, then skip out of the system. That 's a bit risky, even for seasoned navigators.”

“Who would want to do that?

And more to the point, twisting past this system to where, exactly?” Torina asked. “No idea. There’s no immediate way to tell without establishing a data link to it, and I’m assuming that you guys don’t want me to do that,” Netty replied. “How likely is it that this thing is actually infected, though?” Icky asked. “I mean, it’s sitting out here in the middle of nowhere.”

I shrugged. “We don’t know, and that’s the problem. We kind of have to assume that everything is infected until we’re absolutely sure it’s not. And as for this thing”—I looked at the scanner display—“for all we know, it could be a trap set by Gauss before he died. Sort of a fail-safe, if him spreading the virus on Adoration didn’t work out. Lure us out here, get the Fafnir infected, and suddenly we’re stranded with no power.”

“Anyone who came looking for us would probably end up Calamity-positive, too,” Perry added. “Yeah, okay, point taken. So how do we figure out what that thing out there is?” Icky asked. I tapped my armrest. “Well, if you want to deal with a potentially virus-infected computer, you take it physically offline before you do anything else, to stop the spread. So… we’ll have to connect to it physically and retrieve whatever data it contains via something that’s also isolated.”

Torina turned to Icky. “How long would it take to remove the link module from a data slate?

So it isn’t able to link to anything?”

“About two minutes. Unless you want me to hurry, that is.”

I nodded. “Okay. Icky, you do that while we go and visit this thing. Let’s see just what the hell is going on out here.”

ICKY DID the EVA with the quarantined data slate. She was the best of us when it came to working quickly and efficiently in vacuum and no-g. While she worked, B fussed about the time it was taking. “Van, there are humanitarian disasters unfolding on three planets now. Half the population of the Essai Confederacy is in the dark, and there are rumors Calamity has spread from them to their old enemies the Arhun Combine. So not only are their people facing famine and probably disease outbreaks, but possibly also war—”

“B, I know. If you can hang on another couple of days, it would be really helpful. This Gorix, assuming he’s even still alive, would have to be really, really old and may not be in the best physical condition. And he might know something important.”

“There’s an awful lot of would and may and might in there, Van. Sounds like you’re asking me to trust that infamous Tudor gut instinct.”

“It’s infamous?”

“Your grandfather was famous for having feelings and suspicions and the like, all of which seemed to turn out to be not just right, but also important.”

“Oh. Well, yeah, sure, I’m good with magical thinking if it gets me what I want.”

B’s image shifted as she sat back. “Okay. Two days, then I’m off to try and save some lives. But that means I have to reveal my surprise now since I doubt I can keep it under wraps that long.” She glanced off-screen, then smirked. “No, the surprise is shaking its head at me. It’s not going to wait another two days.”

“B, what the hell are you talking about?” I asked her. “This,” she said, standing and moving out of the image. Someone else took her place. It was—a Wu’tzur. I stared for a moment as realization crept into my senses. It was Paxomar, Icky’s betrothed. “Paxomar, been a while. How are you?” I asked. Before he could answer, Icky broke in. On EVA, she wouldn’t have had any visual cues, so she reacted as soon as she heard the name. “Paxomar?

He’s here?”

“Hello, Icky,” he said. Just like the last time we’d met him, during the Wu’tzur ceremony at which Icky had selected him from several suitors to be her mate, he spoke in a way that made me think of big black plastic glasses with tape holding them together. But while he might be nerdy, I knew he was also bright, insightful, and most importantly, fervently devoted to Icky. “Paxomar!

What the hell are you doing here?” Icky asked. “Your father arranged it, but you left the Nemesis in the Fafnir before I could get there. So I hitched a ride with B.”

“Why didn’t you stay aboard the Nemesis with my father and come with him?”

“Because he was afraid I’d be judging him the whole trip, what with him planning on taking up with my little girl. And he’s right, I would have been,” her father said. Perry snickered. “Little girl.”

“Hey, shut up, bird,” Icky snapped, then Paxomar went on to explain how he’d enjoyed traveling with B because it gave him a chance to glean all sorts of biomedical knowledge from her to add to his repertoire. B

acknowledged that point with a rigid smile. “Yeah, it’s been great. He’s been asking me lots of questions. So many questions.”

I laughed. “Hey, Paxomar, why don’t you come over to the Fafnir?

That way, you can spend time with Icky.”

“An excellent idea,” he said, B nodding vigorously into the image from behind him. “Okay, I’ll send Funboy over in the Frankie to get you. Icky should be done soon—”

“Icky is done, actually,” she put in. “I’ve got what was in the data stores of this thing. It doesn’t look like much. A pile of old logs going back decades, and then a recent log of a comm message relayed from somewhere else.”

“That must be the message from Gorix to Perry,” Funboy said, standing to take the Frankie back over to pick up Paxomar. “It would be helpful if it had an origin noted.”

“It does,” Icky said. “It came from a star system… uh, that way. No, wait… that way.”

“Does it have a name other than that way?” Torina asked. “Typical gobbledygook catalog number—SG4585276A.”

“Okay, Icky, come on back in,” I replied. “Netty, do you have that on your charts?”

“I do. It’s thirteen light-years distant… that way.”

2

WE BROUGHT Paxomar aboard and let him get settled in the spare cabin. It was more for show—technically, he and Icky weren’t supposed to get intimate until they were actually wed, but it was pretty clear that little rule was going to be considered flexible. Perry gave a tongue click. “Boss, you sure about this, having Paxomar aboard?

I mean, will it be worth putting up with all the screaming and howling and general ruckus?”

“I think they’ll keep it lower key than that, Perry.”

“No, I mean all that racket coming from me, at having to put up with two of the fuzzballs.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“He did bring you a present, you know. I guess he’s not all bad,” Perry allowed. “Present?

Is it big?

And expensive?

Those are my favorite kind.”

“Elitist. No, it’s a—look behind you. It’s more than one thing, actually. It’s a basket of things,” Perry said, and he was right—Paxomar, the clever mutt, hadn’t just brought a small bottle of potent Wu’tzur liquor the color of floor polish. He’d brought us nine of them. “Is that—wait, what the hell does Icky’s world make, anyway?

Looks like tiny bottles of regret and sobbing in the shower the next day.”

Perry’s beak dropped in laughter. “I see you’re familiar with Wu’tzur brandy. Sort of. It’s rough stuff, but his hearts are in the right place—”

I tilted one of the small bottles to examine the sediment, which looked even more evil than the booze itself. And then I dropped it, which chipped the bottle, and a few drops of potent liquid dribbled on the deck. “Boss?” Perry asked. I stared down, feeling a flush—something. Flexing my injured hand, I made a decision. “I gotta get back to five fingers, bird. Netty?”

“Yes?”

“Make a note. At some juncture in our travels, let’s get to Pont Alus Kyr. Maybe have B meet us, if we pay for fuel, but… I need my full coterie of digits. I can’t afford mistakes when it counts,” I said, touching the place where my missing fingers had healed. Perry lifted his left wing. “Could use a touch-up myself. And Icky needs

—”

“Choose your words carefully, feathers,” Icky called out from her engineering nook. “She’s got damned good hearing for someone shaped like a four-armed pot roast,” Perry muttered. “Thank you!” Icky bellowed. Paxomar leaned out from behind a bulwark and grinned. “She’s magnificent.”

Perry shook his head. “Eww. Anyway, Icky could use a final round of shots like B recommended. Take the edge off any lingering effects from her second journey to adulthood. And my actuator hasn’t been right for weeks.”

“Can’t you just—oh.” The realization hit me like a slap. Zeno had the lightest touch on such matters, and she was gone. It was a somber moment, but Perry bailed me out. “I know, boss. I miss her too. So, new fingers for you, a winglift for me, and glorified acne prevention for the big girl. Deal?” Perry asked, his tone light. “Deal. Netty, don’t let me forget, okay?” I said. “I won’t. It’s kind of my thing.”

“Thanks. With that, kick the drive. Let’s go,” I ordered. We got underway, heading for SG4585276A. It wasn’t clear why the message was routed through this ancient nav relay instead of being sent directly. In a straight line, SG4585276A wasn’t much farther from known space than the relay was. Netty-P offered a possible answer. “By bringing us to the relay first, we’ve been forced to show our hand. Whoever is behind all of this might have wanted to see just what sort of opposition they were up against, in case this is a trap.”

I had to agree. We’d revealed that we weren’t alone in the Fafnir. We had two big battlewagons and B’s more-than-capable ship in company. I hoped it didn’t mean that we’d scared them off and would arrive to find SG4585276A just a lonely, empty star system. As we made the trip, with a stop at another intervening star system for a nav fix and to conserve fuel, Paxomar brought us up to date on the latest happenings in known space. He’d apparently been consulting with the Wu’tzur authorities regarding how to best protect themselves from Calamity, and it had given him some insight into how serious a threat this thing was. “It’s bad. Worse than the media is letting on. Four planets are now widely infected, and it's bringing down all of their infrastructure—power, water treatment, transportation, all of it. There have been scattered outbreaks across known space that have taken down orbital defenses, comms, traffic control.” He shook his head. “Apparently, Calamity has even shown up on Crossroads, so they’re looking at evacuating the place as a precaution.”

“There have to be, what, five thousand people on Crossroads, not even counting transients like the crews of ships?

Where are they all going to go?”

Torina asked. “Apparently Dregs is offering to take them in. They say they have the infrastructure to handle it.”

I sniffed with open derision. “Dregs has infrastructure?”

“Yes, consisting mostly of ramshackle castoffs from the gray market, virulent pathogens, and despair,” Funboy said. I smiled, but it didn’t last long. Even if Calamity were stopped and wiped out this instant, it was still going to take a long time for the affected parts of known space to recover. In the meantime, there’d probably be thousands, maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths as people used to a modern, networked existence were suddenly plunged into darkness and isolation. It was misery writ not just large, but vast, and its effects would be felt for generations. Damn Gauss. Damn him for doing this monstrous thing, and damn him to the searing depths of hell for killing my crewmember and friend in the

process. I found myself hoping that, in that last instant, when the mini nuke detonated, he was far enough away from the fireball to have felt pain, lots and lots of pain. It was a dark, vengeful hope, one I liked to think I was somehow above. For a while, though, I sure as hell wasn’t. AS SOON AS we twisted in-system, the scanner got a hard, strong return from the second of three rocky planets orbiting an orange-yellow Class K

star. It was the only planet with an atmosphere, but whether it harbored life or not wasn’t clear, because that atmosphere was similar to that of Venus—a thick, toxic soup of corrosive poisons pumped to inferno heat by a runaway greenhouse effect. Of the other two planets, one was utterly barren and airless, while the other still showed the scars of a relatively recent impact. Netty whistled appreciatively at the data. “Impact crater.”

“Big ’un?” I asked. “You might say. Makes the Chicxulub event that wiped out the dinosaurs look like a planetary fender bender. It’s beyond apocalyptic.”

“Show me?” I asked. The screen focused on—

“What the hell is that?” I asked. Torina leaned her head to one side, considering the image. “I’m no planetologist, but when you see a planet, it should be vaguely round. Or roundish, anyway. Not an angry, disjointed mess.”

Icky grunted, then peered at the screen with intent. “How did it even stay together?”

“Only one way to find out. Netty, if you please?” I said. “Full suite of data, too. I’d like to know if we have friends.”

“Firing drive, boss. Friends and enemies coming right up,” Netty answered. Funboy cleared his throat in what I’d come to recognize as his attempt at diplomacy. “I do not believe in reincarnation, but if this shattered world comes apart under our feet, I shall haunt you forever, Van.”

“I’ll likely be dead too.”

Funboy shook his head, making his eyebrows waggle. “No, you’ll live, and I’ll be consumed by lava, thus sublimating into a state of vengeful spirit.”

Icky stared at him. “If you haunt me, I’ll eat you.”

Funboy didn’t even blink. “I know.”

I sighed. “I really enjoy these team-building exercises, even if they involve our horrific death—"

“Is there any other kind?” Funboy asked. “Yes. Death due to tedium from your hypothetical doom at the hands of tectonic mayhem,” I answered. “Or me,” Icky offered helpfully. Funboy regarded her evenly, then gave us one of his gruesome smiles. “I prefer the lava, please.”

“Noted. Now then, Netty, drop us toward our inevitable fate, and burn fuel like it’s free.”

We set course for the second planet, banging away with active scanners the whole way. The Conoku had improved the Iowa’s scanner efficiency to the point where, at full power, they outmatched the output of the Fafnir and B’s ship combined by a factor of nearly three. It meant that they had incredible resolution, even at long ranges, at the cost of making the Iowa visible from—again, as Perry put it—the Andromeda galaxy. I was glad for them now, though, since we weren’t interested in being stealthy. Calamity precautions precluded us from linking to the Iowa and repeating her data, but Cantullin came up with a clever idea—just pointing an imager at the Iowa’ s tactical overlay and sending the video to us. It was like watching a bootlegged copy of some movie surreptitiously recorded on a phone, but it got the job done. “It’s a ship, class 18, that matches the configuration of an Able-class gas-processor,” Netty said. “Probably refining gas from that hellscape’s atmosphere,” Icky offered. “What are they processing, though?

Carbon dioxide?

Can’t imagine that’s very profitable,” Torina said. Paxomar, who was sitting in the jumpseat, spoke up. “Based on that scanner data… if I’m reading it right”—he peered at the image of the Iowa’ s overlay—“it looks like the atmosphere is worth mining, if barely. I’d say it’s due to some interaction with radiation from the star. And the star

itself exhibits unusually high neutron emissions, so I suspect that the planet’s atmosphere may be rich in deuterium.”

Icky smiled at him. “Isn’t he dreamy?”

“I—uh, yeah, sure,” I said, smiling in turn. “Anyway, regardless of why that ship’s here, we need to check it out. Icky, pull the link modules out of a couple more data slates. We’re having a party—a boarding party.”

“You’ve been waiting a long time to say that, haven’t you?” Perry asked. I narrowed my eyes at him, then shrugged. “Yeah, okay. Months.”

“WELL, THAT EXPLAINS THAT,” I said, staring at the console. It had taken us a while to find it, Perry’s ability to detect specific signals hampered by the maze of pipes, tanks, valves and conduits that comprised the interior of the gas-processing ship. It was fully automated, dispatching small robotic skimmers to gather raw gas from the top of the planet’s roiling, cloud-choked atmosphere, then retrieving them and refining their contents. And Paxomar had been right—the ship was accumulating deuterium, enough to fill nearly half of its capacity now. “But it’s not registered to anyone, at least as far as I can tell,” Netty said. Without a data link to the ship’s transponder, she could only go by what she could see, both in terms of configuration and registration marks. Based on that alone, she couldn’t match the ship to anything in her databases. “I betcha it’ll turn out to be BeneStar,” Icky said, her hammer slung over one shoulder and scowling around. “We should just blow the damned thing up.”

“How about we settle on seizing some fusion fuel, since we’re here anyway?” I said, still peering at the console. “So you’re sure that signal you detected came from here, Perry?”

He bobbed his head in his usual nod. “As near as I can tell. There’s a stolen person in there, and if I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably Gorix.”

“Based on what, exactly?”

“That it’s Gorix?

Who else is it likely to be?”

I shrugged. “Only one way to find out, I guess. Everyone set to analog only?”

I looked at Perry, Icky and then Netty-P, and got an affirmative from each. Making sure my own suit was set to send and receive analog data only, I tapped at the data slate Netty-P had cabled into it. “Hello?

Anyone there?”

“Finally. I was beginning to think that no one heard my call.”

“Gorix, is that you?” Perry asked. “Perry?

Oh, my, it is you. Is it ever good to hear your voice.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m not entirely sure. I remember everything fine up until about… a month ago, maybe, and then nothing until ten days ago, when I found myself here. Or a facsimile of myself, anyway, since I’m clearly not in my original body anymore. Although I do have a mobile version,” he said, then something unfolded itself from a compartment nearby with a soft whir. It resembled… a wombat, I guess, but made of alloy and ceramics. “I have never felt more beautiful. I’m as attractive as a brick, and about as mobile,” Gorix went on. “In any case, some introductions. I am Gorix. And you are?”

I made introductions, then noted that Gorix didn’t seem very upset about his situation, all things considered. “There’s not much reason to be upset, is there?

I’m clearly not the actual Gorix but am my own unique being. In fact, I wouldn’t even exist if I hadn’t been created,” he replied. “Kinda true for all of us,” Icky said. Perry, in the meantime, began pecking at the console containing Gorix and watching the display. “Exactly. So while I have no idea what happened to the original Gorix, I can only hope for the best for him. But I am not him—I’m a facsimile of him, but a distinct one with its own unique identity. My own verve, one might say.”

“Verve?” I asked. “Verve. Flavor, even.”

I shook my head. “I’ve encountered a bunch of stolen identities like yours over the past few years, and I don’t think any two have ever reacted the same way to finding out… what they’ve become. Some have been philosophical about it, like you—although I have to admit that being cognizant of your newness is, um, new. To us, anyway. And as to your

sanguine phrasing, it’s admirable given that others have gone utterly insane.”

“We are all different, Peacemaker.”

“Ain’t that the truth. Anyway, we’re here as part of an investigation, but I guess we’re also here to rescue you—if that’s what you want.”

“I think this unique being would rather not spend his time monitoring and regulating the flow of waste gas from a refining operation, thank you.”

“Uh, boss?

There’s one hitch. Gorix here comes with a copy of Calamity preinstalled,” Perry said. “You sure?”

“Well, considering I’ve had to do this manually and can only go by what this console can display, no, I’m not sure. But there’s a whole pile of code loaded onto Gorix’s chip that we’ve never encountered in any we’ve found previously. Here, let me show you.”

He started pecking at the controls again. Icky laughed, and he stopped to glare up at her. “What?”

“Ah, I was just thinking about those chicklets I saw when we stole that truck back in Iowa on Earth. They were pecking around, looking for worms and things. You look just like them.” She snickered again. “First, it’s chick ens, not chick lets. That’s a type of gum. Second—” He blew a raspberry at her, then resumed working. I had to fight back the urge to giggle myself, though, because Icky was right. The sharp clack—clack—

clack as Perry pecked away at the console did make him resemble a pecking hen, albeit ten times larger than most chickens, and far more militant. “There,” he said, pointing his beak at the display. Sure enough, the chip containing Gorix was loaded with a big chunk of extraneous code. It could have been any number of things, but we had to assume the worst. Icky made a hmph sound. “So if he’s carrying Calamity, how come this ship isn’t infected and powered down?”

“Good question. If it’s Calamity, it seems to be dormant,” Perry replied. I pulled at my chin, thinking. “True. And if we’d just done what we usually do, and plugged Gorix’s chip into something connected to the Fafnir, then we’d be infected, too.”

“Maybe we were meant to find this before Gauss released it, and the timing somehow ended up off?” Icky asked. “I don’t know. Maybe. Okay, Gorix, we’re going to retrieve your chip from this console. It’s going to take you offline.”

“But I won’t be aware of it until you reactivate me. Understood.”

“You’re taking this very well.”

“And the alternative is?”

I smiled. I liked this guy and his approach to life. “Good point.”

“I do have one question, though. What exactly is… Calamity?”

“That is going to take some explaining. The short version is that it’s the end of the world, sort of,” I said, then went on to recount for him what had happened in broad strokes. “I guess that leaves one question before we unplug you. Do you know, or did you ever have anything to do with Helem Gauss?” I asked. “I knew of him by reputation, but that’s all. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful.”

“Not a problem. Okay, Icky, let’s get him out of there and head back to the Fafnir.”

Icky knelt and opened the console. “Nighty night, Gorix,” she said, then started removing his chip. FUNBOY FROWNED at Gorix’s chip on the Fafnir’s galley table. “This seems too convenient, like the time they gave out hand sanitizer at that restaurant on Crossroads.”

“They do that at most restaurants,” I said. “Why, though?

The only one who should be touching my food after it’s prepared is me. What are they worried about?

What are they hiding?”

“They’re not hiding anything, and I’m never taking you to a buffet again. Anyway, touché, I guess.”

Perry spoke up. “That reminds me, we’ve got birthday dinners coming up. Should I be looking for deals and coupons?”

“Bird, we respect coupons, but we do not use coupons,” Icky replied. Torina cleared her throat. “Better not. My wedding gifts, though yet to be purchased, should be chosen while being mindful of two words—big and expensive.”

I glanced at her. “Really?

I didn’t figure you for a material girl.”

“I have hidden depths,” she answered, beaming. “You do. And your disregard for a budget is noted, dear.” I turned back to the chip. “Before we burrow any further down this particular rabbit hole, how about we focus on the matter at hand. Back to Funboy’s comment—

this seems a touch convenient. Do we even want to try plugging Gorix back into anything?”

“The question is if we can truly sandbox him, and Calamity with him, or if there’s a risk that the virus could somehow breach quarantine and jump wirelessly to a vulnerable system,” Torina said. “Excuse me, there are no vulnerable systems on the Fafnir, thank you very much. I’m maintaining rigorous scrutiny and control on all of them,”

Netty stated. “Hear, hear,” Netty-P added. “Listen to that girl, she knows what she's talking about.”

“Must be nice to have your own built-in cheerleading squad,” Icky muttered. I cleared my throat. “I sense another rabbit hole starting to open. Netty, are you sure that Calamity couldn’t somehow jump from Waldo if we put Gorix’s chip into him?

Even if we remove his link module?

I mean, I know there’s malicious software on Earth that can use slight variations on the speed of the cooling fan on its host computer to communicate information.”

“True, but Calamity isn’t a piece of malware intended to nag you with porn pop-ups, it’s a fantastically complex construct that consists of many terabytes of data. Perry, Netty-P, and I have independently analyzed every conceivable way Calamity could attempt to adapt Waldo to communicate data, and the fastest of them requires many minutes to transmit even a small amount. It would take… days, if not weeks to even have a chance of accessing anything, and then weeks more to actually make any use of it.”

“In other words, we’re not worried,” Perry said. “And we’ll be monitoring for it,” Netty-P added. Icky crossed all four arms. “Okay, but what about the inconceivable ways?”

Perry looked at her. “I do not think that word means what you think it means. Oh, and never get involved in a land war in Asia.”

Icky stared back. “What?”

“Don’t bother, Icky. Anyway, what I’m hearing is that the risk is…

low?”

“Exceedingly low,” Netty replied. “Actually, Van, it strikes me that we may have an opportunity here. If this instance of Calamity was programmed to remain inert until it met its conditions for activation, then we might have an original copy of it, free of any mutations,” Funboy said. I had to blink a few times at that. It was an excellent point. One of the main impediments to stopping the thing was the fact that there really was no one version of it. Calamity constantly mutated, reconfiguring itself to dynamically adapt to and overcome countermeasures deployed against it. The people trying to stop it were desperately searching for what they called the base version, Calamity 1.0 , so they could study it free of any such mutations. And we may very well have a copy of it right here. I reached out to pat Funboy on the shoulder to congratulate him on his insight, but his alarmed recoil made me pull my hand back. I settled for a broad grin. “Excellent point. Perry, Netty-P, let’s make a complete copy of everything on Gorix’s chip. We’ll hand it over to B, so we’ve got a back-up, and whichever of us has the first opportunity can deliver it to Anvil Dark.”

It didn’t take long. Once we’d copied the chip onto a data module, then stored it in a sealed evidence case to which we’d only give B access, we plugged Gorix into Waldo. Icky had already removed Waldo’s link modules, both primary and backup, and removed any other possible way he had of communicating via data link by disabling the relevant hardware. I peered into Waldo’s imager. “Gorix?

You in there?”

“Well… I see that my circumstances have changed. I gather I’m aboard your ship now?”

“You are. Welcome aboard the Fafnir. We installed you in our maintenance bot, who we call Waldo. We’ve disabled every means of communication he has, less audio, I’m afraid, so that’s all you’ll have to work with.”

“It’s all I’ve had to work with for the vast majority of my life. And believe me, Waldo here is a much more pleasant experience than the cumbersome remote I had aboard the gas-refining ship.”

I nodded. “Most of your life. Since you were involved in building Perry, that’s quite a long time.”

“I was born—or, rather, the original Gorix was born—just over two hundred years ago. The unit you call Perry was one of my earlier projects,”

he said. “And in case anyone was wondering, no, Perry doesn’t find being referred to as a ‘unit’ insulting at all,” Perry added. Icky grinned. “Hah, a unit.”

Paxomar looked from her to Perry. “I gather that you two have a history.”

“I have a history. Icky merely has the honor of being part of it,” Perry replied with a sniff. “When you built Perry, how long did you work on installing his ego?”

Torina asked, sipping coffee she’d just made for herself. “Given how humble I am, not long enough—but even my ego doesn’t quite buy that Gorix here was chosen for this trap just because of my good looks and great charm. Someone knew my history well enough to connect me to him,” Perry said. I had to agree. “Solid point. I’m starting to wonder if Gauss had accomplices who might still be out there.”

“Well, we know he had one accomplice, Dohlennz. He’s still in the wind,” Netty-P said. “Yeah, but I don’t know—I see Dohlennz as more of a back-office type of guy. He’s like the scumbag who builds the suicide bombs but gives them to other people to blow themselves up.”

“It would have to be somebody who knows Perry enough to know his history, or to be able to get access to it. That suggests someone in, or connected to, the Guild,” Funboy said. That gave me an idea. I had Netty put B through to the big display over the galley table. I brought her up to speed on what we’d done and discussed, then asked her the question that had just occurred to me. “B, is Kharsweil still out there somewhere?”

Her antennae twitched. “As far as I know, he is, yeah. Given everything going on with Calamity, tracking down a former Master on the lam—” She stopped, frowning. “Wait. You think he’s behind this oh-so-obvious trap?”

“He makes a great suspect. We know he’s connected to Gauss, he was a Master in the Guild, which gave him access to any information he wanted, and like you said, he’s on the lam. For all we know, he’s helping to spread Calamity.”

“If that’s true, though, then he must also know something about Gauss’s safe space and its countermeasures against Calamity. I mean, he doesn’t

strike me as the self-sacrificing type,” Torina said. I turned toward the cockpit. “No, he does not. He’s been running and hiding to save his skin for months now. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have our next course of action—after we drop off Gorix at Starsmith, that is, which seems to be the logical place to take you.”

“Starsmith. Now there’s somewhere I haven’t been in a long time. I wonder if any of my siblings are there,” Gorix said while wiggling Waldo’s various appendages, obviously getting a feel for them. “Are you related to Linulla?” Torina asked him, following me toward the cockpit. “Linulla?

He’s my brother. Is he still there?”

“He sure is. I don’t know about other siblings, though.” She glanced back and grinned. “As for nieces and nephews, though—have I got news for you.”

3

B TOOK the Calamity-infected copy of Gorix back to Starsmith to let them start digging into it. We sent the Iowa back to Earth—while Icky’s father accompanied us all to Starsmith. Like essentially every other place in known space, Starsmith had enacted quarantine measures to protect it from Calamity. There was relatively little traffic in and out of the system, though, so it didn’t stall us for long. We did make it clear that Waldo was carrying a dormant copy of the virus along with Gorix, though, but Linulla was satisfied that it posed little risk. He wasn’t going to let it stop him from meeting his brother. Even so, we didn’t take Gorix past the outer section of the Forge, to keep him away from any sensitive systems out of an abundance of caution. Linulla had his reunion with Gorix, which was… odd, at least from my perspective. Imagine a touching moment of tender homecoming, except it was a man-sized, anthropomorphic crustacean greeting his long-lost, spider-like maintenance robot. It was like a Hallmark Christmas special crossed with Alien, but with a lot more clicking. It soon became apparent that Gorix’s memories were intact up until about two months before, followed by a gap until ten days ago. Linulla and Gorix resolved to start doing whatever they could to retrieve the lost memories—which may not be possible, Perry warned, if the data simply wasn’t there. We decided they would try to figure out who had been responsible, though Gorix’s memories right before the gap were understandably hazy. I certainly didn’t remember much about what I was

doing, seeing, or hearing over the course of a couple of random days two months ago, either. But those data should still be there, and if they could be accessed, they might reveal the perpetrator, or at least some clues to who it was. “Looks like we’re going to need another Waldo. This is, what, our fourth?

Maybe we should get two, and keep one in the box as a spare,”

Netty-P grouched. I was struck by another thought, though, and asked Linulla to wait. “Can I talk to you?” I asked him. “Of course.”

I turned to the others. “You guys can wait for me on the ship. I’ve got something I need to discuss with Linulla.”

When the rest of my crew was gone, Linulla gave me a knowing look. “You want to talk to Matterforge, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “Well, since I’m here—”

“Indeed. Actually, Matterforge suggested that you would want to. I was going to ask you about it, but you beat me to it. Not that I’ve ever known it to be wrong about anything, really.”

Linulla passed his brother into the custody of an apprentice, yet another of his own sons who’d had no interest in crewing the Iowa. Instead, he was following in his father’s footsteps, which also meant he was getting to meet an uncle he’d never known. Then we walked to the remote chamber with the terminal connecting Starsmith to the bizarre, star-dwelling being known only as Matterforge. I stood, waiting for my summoning. I didn’t wait long. “Van Tudor, you’ve come to ask me about the thing you know as Calamity,” the sexless voice intoned from the terminal. On its display, loops of plasma rose from the angry crimson surface of the star, Struve 2398, before falling back again and vanishing into the stellar maelstrom. “I have.” I glanced at Linulla. “Handy not having to explain yourself so you can get right to the point.”

Linulla nodded. “There have been occasions when Matterforge has simply started talking to me as though we were already in the middle of conversation.”

“That is because, from my perspective, we were, and are, and will be. Each is as true as the other.”

I shook my head in wonder. “I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, about Calamity—what do you know?

Can it be stopped, and if so, how?” I was almost tempted to ask, Will we manage to stop it?

But I decided not to in case the answer was no. “Its existence is bound by physical laws, so it can be stopped from proceeding and evolving as it has been. However, you have incorrectly made an assumption regarding what it is.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”

“You have been treating it as a weapon. However, that is not its true purpose. Rather, you are seeing the effects of something that was designed for a specific function but is being precluded from fulfilling it.”

“I… don’t understand. If it’s not a virus, a weapon, what is it?”

“It is a reformulation. It is a convergence. It is intended to act as a bridge between the living and the non-living, the organic and the inorganic. Its purpose has been corrupted, though, by those whose goals are short-sighted and selfish, based solely on their own, ephemeral want, not on the greater need.”

“You’re saying that Calamity, this—virus, because that’s how it's behaving—was meant to somehow merge organic and inorganic life?

Was it meant to do that willingly?

Because it sure seems from where I’m sitting like it’s a weapon, regardless of what it was originally intended to do.”

“As I said, it has been corrupted from its original purpose. Ultimately, you must discern what that means for yourself and your species.”

“You as in people generally, or me personally?

“Both. It matters not only to all living, material beings, but also to the path you have chosen for yourself, Van Tudor. As I said the last time we spoke, the decision you made regarding the creation of a new form of life would have implications. These implications will continue to ripple into your future.”

I sighed. “Okay, look. This is all very… interesting, but it also kind of smacks of the oracular bullshit you hear from hustlers and con artists. I don’t want to seem ungrateful—”

“And yet you are.”

“I guess so, and I make no apology for it. So in the spirit of our history of honesty, how about a firm answer?

A piece of hard advice?

Something I can take away from here and actually use?”

“I am not trying to be deliberately ambiguous, Van Tudor. Like I have told you before, I see events across the continuum of time, but not in great detail. To borrow from your own species’ vernacular, I only see the forest, not the individual trees within it. Still, you have asked for advice, so I shall give it. A time may come when you face the choice between eradicating the thing you call Calamity and allowing it to continue existing. The greater good will be best served by keeping it in existence.”

“You’re joking.”

“I have no capacity to tell falsehoods, for amusement or any other purpose. Which is unfortunate, because many beings seem to take great pleasure in it.”

Linulla nodded. “I tried introducing Matterforge to jokes. Once. It’s amazing how quickly you can get from A grasshopper walks into a bar to a lengthy, introspective discourse on the nature of reality and how we perceive it.” He leaned conspiratorially toward me and hissed in a loud whisper. “It has no sense of humor whatsoever.”

“Interesting. You spoke in a manner that suggests an intent for secrecy but obviously intended for me to overhear. Is this another form of humor?”

Matterforge asked. “Here we go,” Linulla muttered. I smiled and shook my head. “It was, yeah.” But my smile didn’t last long. “So you’re saying that if I have the chance to destroy Calamity, I shouldn’t.”

“I am not advising you on your choice, Van Tudor. Rather, I am informing you of the fact that your choice has implications. Allowing what you call Calamity to continue existing will, in the course of time, be more beneficial to all living beings than not doing so.”

“To what extent?

Are we talking inconveniencing all living things a little, or destroying them all?

The difference kinda matters.”

“That would depend on subsequent decisions made by you and others. However, none of those decisions will even occur if you choose the eradication of this Calamity.”

“Me personally?”

“Yes, you personally, Van Tudor. You asked for advice regarding yourself.”

I couldn’t help getting a hint of crowing from Matterforge’s tone, which seemed a little odd—petulance from what amounts to a living star. We took our leave of Matterforge and made our way back toward the exit to the surface and the waiting Fafnir. I brooded along the way. “I don’t see it, either,” Linulla finally said, breaking into my thoughts. “Hmm?”

“Calamity. How not eradicating it could be beneficial for anybody.”

I sifted our conversation, ending with a helpless shrug. “It doesn’t seem to make sense—although, if the thing’s original purpose really wasn’t to be a destructive virus, and it’s been corrupted—” I ended on a shrug. “I wonder what its original purpose was. Beyond merging organic and inorganic life, that is, because that’s both vague and sweeping, a pair of traits I find maddening in matters of galactic importance.”

“I agree with your feelings, Van. As to Calamity, it adapts itself, rewriting its own code and the code of whatever it infects. Maybe there’s a clue in that,” Linulla said. I stopped. “Rewriting code. DNA?

Could it have been designed to alter that?”

“DNA is a fantastically complex molecule. Being able to reprogram it, as it were, certainly would be a major step in bridging organic and inorganic life.”

We both stood in ponderous, brooding silence for a moment at what that implied. I finally shook my head. “Okay, this is just speculation. Linulla, for the time being, please keep this between us—well, and Matterforge. Don’t discuss this with anyone else.”

“Probably a wise precaution. If people even begin to suspect that Calamity can rewrite genetic code—”

“We’ll go from a catastrophe to—I don’t know, an even worse catastrophe. Something apocalyptic, maybe.”

“Agreed.”

I nodded and started for the exit and the Fafnir outside but stopped and glanced back. “A grasshopper walked into a bar. And?”

Linulla stared for a moment. “The bartender says, hey, they named a drink after you. And the grasshopper replies, Really?

They named a drink Stan?”

It was my turn to stare back, then smile, then grin, then burst out laughing and keep laughing. Maybe it was the opportunity to blow off a

little of the monumental stress and emotion, and maybe it was an anthropomorphic crab telling me a dad joke, but I was still laughing when I boarded the Fafnir. “What’s so funny?” Torina asked. I stared at her, grinning ear to ear. “The universe, my dear. Have you ever heard a dad joke?”

She eyed me, then nodded toward our private space. “Can you tell me in there?”

Funboy protested as we began to migrate. “I wish to hear it.”

I shook my head as Torina stepped ahead of me, beckoning with a crooked finger. “Audience of one, fuzzy,” I said. Torina opened our cabin door. “But a party of two. Don’t disturb unless we hit a supernova.”

Perry called out, “Then what?”

I leaned back out of our cabin. “Take it up with HR.”

WE RETURNED to Anvil Dark to find the place in a state of—

Efficient, purposeful calm. We left the Fafnir’s hangar to pay our respects to the Wall of Remembrance, to Zeno, and to Rolis, and to all the other Peacemakers who’d died in the line of duty. I’d decided to make that a ritual, that upon arrival at Anvil Dark, our first stop would be this solemn memorial. It was the first time Icky had seen it since Zeno died. She’d been comatose in the Infirmary, recovering from a severe gut shot from Gauss that had nearly killed her. She spent some time looking at Zeno’s picture, then reached up and gently brushed it with the fingers of one of her smaller hands, the ones that were more about delicate touch and dexterity than brute force. We just stood back and gave her space. All except for Perry. He landed beside Icky on a bench and just perched there. Icky eventually looked over at him. “In this crew, we don’t do anything alone,” was all he said. She smiled and nodded gratefully. She touched Zeno’s picture one more time, then turned away. “We got business to do here, yeah?” she said, her voice gruff, but her eyes damp. Crying was universal, in one form or another. So was revenge. I nodded. “We do. Let’s get to it.”

Our first stop was Bester, to deliver our own backup copy of Gorix, just in case things went sideways with B—and Calamity. I asked him to see to it that Calamity was analyzed not just as weaponized software, but in a broader context. I particularly wanted his people, together with our Technical Department, to figure out if Calamity had any apparent purpose beyond being destructive. “What makes you think it would?” he asked. “Call it a hunch.” I left it at that, partly because I didn’t want to have to explain how I’d come into any information suggesting otherwise—in other words, to open the can of worms that Matterforge represented. But I also wanted to see what Bester and his cohorts came up with independently and not taint their objectivity with any preconceived ideas. As we were leaving, I realized I was getting strange looks from my crew. Torina spoke up. “What was that all about?”

“What was what all about?”

She scowled. “Don’t act dumb, Van.”

“Or treat us like we are,” Perry added. I shrugged. “Linulla had an interesting theory about Calamity, that it might have started as something other than a virus, and it was corrupted and repurposed.”

“That is an interesting theory. What is he basing it on?” Netty-P asked. “A… hunch, I guess. We didn’t really get any more deeply into it than that. But I thought it was worth getting Bester and company to at least be open to the possibility.”

I hated lying to my crew like this, but the whole Matterforge thing was a tricky affair. I wasn’t sure how much to divulge, particularly since at least some of what the strange being knew was based on things that hadn’t even happened yet. I decided that, for the time being anyway, less was more. “VAN, THERE YOU ARE,” someone said. I turned to the voice and found myself facing Lunzy. “I tried catching you at the Fafnir, but Netty said you’d already come aboard. I’ve been trying to track you down ever since.”

“We visited the Wall of Remembrance as our first stop.”

“Ah.”

“Why didn’t you just use the comm to call me?”

She shook her head. “New protocols in light of Calamity. Comms are analog only, which here at Anvil Dark means I can talk to someone maybe twenty or thirty meters away. This place is made from pretty tough stuff,”

she said, lightly stomping her foot on the deck. “But it’s not friendly to analog comms. And regular comms are restricted to emergencies only, unless the Masters lift the blackout. Didn’t you read the memo?”

I thought about the stuff that had piled up in my inbox that I hadn’t gotten to yet. Administrivia just hadn’t seemed all that high a priority in light of the disaster unfolding across known space. But I might have thrown the proverbial baby out with the bathwater and missed something important

—like this, a comm blackout on Anvil Dark. So I just shrugged and shook my head. “My fault. I did not.”

“Well, you’d better learn to get and keep on top of this stuff, if you’re going to be able to do your new job.”

“My—what?

What new job?”

Lunzy grinned. “You are being promoted to Emissary, my friend. You now represent the Masters, same as I do. You get Full Veteran rank to go with it. Oh, you’ll keep your title of Gerhardt’s Justiciar as well. So you’ll be a busy boy!”

“I—huh.”

“Does it come with more money?” Icky asked, then looked around as everyone stared at her. “What?

The Fafnir ain’t cheap to run, you know. Every time we add something new to her, it uses more power, which takes more fuel—although, Van, if we bought her a new power plant, one of the new, state-of-the-art models—”

I held up my hand. “Put away my checkbook, please, Icky. I know you’ve been salivating over that new line of fusion reactors Tau Ceti rolled out, but right now we don’t need the Fafnir laid up for days having her guts swapped out.”

“Checkbook?” Icky asked. Perry chimed in. “Checks are an archaic form of currency favored by elderly British ladies when they need a new electric kettle. Van, at his core, is a fussy retiree.”

Icky scratched her head. “He does like cats. And complaining.”

I held up my hands. “True, but I’m not ready to use coupons and drive ten miles under the speed limit. Yet. But it’s still a good question.”

Lunzy looked at me through narrowed eyes. “Which one?”

“The one about money.”

Lunzy laughed. “Yes, your stipend and expense coverages will all increase. Right now, though, I’m supposed to take you to Gerhardt so he can do the formal conferral of your new ranks and such. Try to act surprised.”

“I did a school play in eighth grade. Prepare to be wowed.”

AS WE MADE our way to the Keel to meet with Gerhardt, Lunzy explained the change that had come over the Guild in the past few weeks, resulting in the smooth, quiet efficiency we were seeing all around us. “It’s Gerhardt. And Alic. Oh, and our new Schegith Master, Volffin. But mostly Gerhardt. Two of the other Masters had aligned themselves with Kharsweil, and when he turned out to be dirty, they naturally fell under suspicion themselves. They’re now falling over themselves to be supportive of Gerhardt and end up on the right side of history. That means five Masters are acting as a bloc, with Gerhardt effectively in charge of it, and the other two are just happy to go along for the ride.”

“So, we’ve now got seven Masters all pulling in more or less the same direction, under the guidance of one of them?

I think that’s a first, at least for me,” I said as we entered the antechamber outside the Masters’ offices. Max, the multi-being who was their administrative expert, secretary, receptionist, and probably half a dozen other things, greeted us and told us to head right into Gerhardt’s office. Alic and Volffin were already there, the three of them apparently meeting. He stood from his conference table as we entered. “Tudor, I understand you retrieved another stolen personality, and also managed to get hold of what might be a pristine, unmutated copy of Calamity.”

I smiled. No hello or other preamble, just straight into it. I launched into our excursion to the remote star system where we’d recovered Gorix, and what transpired after, answering clarifying questions as he asked and using as much detail as I could. Again, though, I left out any mention of Matterforge, attributing Linulla for our musings over Calamity’s properties. “This one finds the idea that Calamity was created for another purpose intriguing,” Volffin said. “If you have indeed discovered a pristine copy, that may go a long way in providing critical answers.”

“It was good work, Van. Also lucky—but all success includes an element of luck,” Alic added. Gerhardt regarded me with a look so bland it made yogurt seem spicy. “It just underscores the rightness of what I’m sure Lunzemor has already leaked to you—that we’re promoting you to Full Veteran rank and making you an Emissary of the Masters’ Table.”

I gasped. “You… you are?

I’m being promoted?” I stood, then bowed slightly. “I am… overwhelmed. I am speechless. I am—"

Lunzy snorted. “If you’re speechless, you oughta be a lot quieter.” This was followed with a pair of rude gestures and a broad, cheerfully piratical grin. “I cannot say how much confidence it gives me to see our two Emissaries acting with such solemn gravitas,” Alic deadpanned. Even Gerhardt smiled. “Now then, with that out of the way, two other things—”

“Actually, before you continue, I’m going to leverage my new status to ask a question,” I cut in. Gerhardt raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”

“Who’s in charge around here?”

A ponderous silence fell. I expected Gerhardt to snap back at me, but instead I just caught a quick, sidelong glance at Volffin and Alic. Only then did he turn back to me. “What do you mean, Tudor?”

“I mean, I’m getting the sense that there’s another… something… in the background here that’s really calling the shots. For instance, I asked you why we didn’t immediately go after Gauss when his trial was done, to take him out when we had the chance. We knew he was carrying that damned virus, but we just let him fly away.” I narrowed my eyes at Gerhardt. “And

although I got the distinct impression you weren’t happy about it, I also sensed that it wasn’t your choice. So if it wasn’t, then whose choice was it?”

Gerhardt sat back and steepled his fingers. For a moment, he just returned a flat, unreadable look at me. I could see his mind working, pivoting around a decision before finally making it. He leaned forward again. “Tudor, the time will come, probably soon, when you’ll get the answer to that question. But that time is not now.”

“But—”

“This is nonnegotiable.”

“You will get an answer, though, Van,” Alic said. I’d prepared to protest but chose silence instead. There was something profound going on here, but I could tell that continuing to poke at it wouldn’t be helpful, and would probably be counterproductive. I gave a terse nod and sat at ease, letting the moment hang. After a gravid pause, I asked my question into the silence. “Alright. So, you were saying, you had two things to tell us.”

Gerhardt’s lip twitched. “Yes. First, I am naming Volffin as my Second. I know it’s unusual to have one Master act as Second to another—”

“Unprecedented, actually. And I mean that literally. It has never been done before,” Perry stated with certainty. “No, it hasn’t,” Gerhardt agreed. “It will no doubt be a topic of much discussion and debate going forward.”

I gave him a knowing look. “It will also immediately and dramatically put your stamp on the Guild—the guy who broke tradition and did something new, et cetera.”

“I don’t deny it. The past several years have been difficult for the Guild. Four corrupt Masters and a department head who turned out to be a mole for our criminal enemies have caused the Guild to have a crisis of confidence in itself.”

“Understandably so,” Torina said. “Indeed. The Guild needs to turn the page to one that’s fresh and blank. A symbolic gesture that dramatically breaks with past tradition will help everyone believe that,” Gerhardt said. It made sense, so I nodded. “And the second item?”

“Yes. The second is a new venture. We’re calling it Nodes of Memory. Bester has been given funding and has been asked to develop a program for gathering, storing, and managing social, cultural, economic, financial, and scientific information from across known space.”

“You want to have a hedge against the spread of Calamity,” Netty-P

said. “That’s part of it,” Gerhardt agreed. “If we can gather and protect data and information before Calamity can affect it, it will make rebuilding afterward—not easy, of course, but easier.”

“There is another reason as well,” Volffin said. “The Schegith have observed that many worlds in known space have begun to reach a plateau in terms of social, cultural and scientific development. This is, unfortunately, not unusual. This one’s people have archives documenting a similar phenomenon of plateau, followed by decline, in previous advanced races.”

That made me sit up. The Schegith were great friends, which tended to make me lose sight of the fact that they were also a very old alien race. They were, in fact, probably the oldest one known, with a history in space that spanned centuries. Their entire history stretched into the depths of time, as there were documents placing the Schegith firmly in the civilized category tens of thousands of years ago. “Plateau followed by decline?

That sounds ominous,” I said. “This one understands. However, the Schegith have observed that when a species reaches a very high level of technical achievement, one of two things are possible. First is that the progression continues, leading to a civilization that is eventually capable of manipulating, and perhaps even transcending space-time on a large scale.”

“And the other?” Torina asked, getting ready to shudder at the answer. “As this one said, decline—sometimes of a limited sort, and sometimes more dramatic, even plunging the civilization back to an early, or even primitive stage of development.”

“Yup, there’s the shudder.”

“Tell me, how many of the first thing, the development into a super-civilization, have the Schegith observed?” I asked. “One. Perhaps. It isn’t clear because the race in question began to interact with space and time in a way that was difficult for anyone but them to understand. And there may be examples that predate the Schegith.”

“One. Okay. How many of the second thing, the decline and fall?”

“One hundred and sixty-eight. Of those, ninety-eight experienced a slight to moderate decline. The Gajur are an example of such. They used to be a preeminent, starfaring race. Now their homeworld is—”

“It’s a polluted hellscape,” I said, remembering the grimy slums we’d searched there, seeking the family of one of the corrupt Masters. Volffin nodded sagely. “Degradation of a planet’s environment is one common cause of the decline. With increasing economic output and increased standards of living, there comes an increasing use of resources and production of waste products. But there are others. The rise of short-sighted, self-destructive political systems, unrestrained war using weapons of great and lingering destructive power, increasing devotion to regressive religious beliefs—the list goes on.”

“The Great Filter,” Perry said. Torina frowned at that. “What?”

“The Great Filter. It’s the idea that every civilization will eventually develop to some critical point, and then either keep going or fall back. Only the societies that manage to pass through the Filter—whether it's discovering nuclear power or trying to harness antimatter—become the really advanced ones. The others are the has-beens. Remember Dustfall, the planet orbiting Luyten’s Star that was colonized by the P’nosk?

The previous civilization there had nuked themselves into oblivion. They got Filtered.”

I nodded, remembering the dreary, irradiated ruins being explored and colonized by the radiation-hardy P’nosk. Of course, that then made me think of Zenophir, a P’nosk herself, and I sagged a little. “Indeed. Anyway, the point is that, just as individual societies peak and then decline, we’re starting to see signs of it across known space as a whole,” Gerhardt said. I slumped back in my seat, sagging with the reality of what we were seeing. It was… inescapable. It was depressing. It was ugly. Since discovering the Fafnir, then simply known as the Dragonet in my grandfather’s barn, I’d been introduced to an interstellar cavalcade of wonders, of advanced civilizations flitting more or less effortlessly between the stars, of artificial intelligences that made the vaunted Turing Test laughably useless, of technologies even science fiction writers back on Earth could have trouble envisioning. The robust nature of my awe had

been ground down by reality—interstellar crime and war had that effect, even on the ebullience of a kid from the midwest. But I’d just kind of assumed it would all not only keep being as amazing as ever, but the galaxy would… advance. This was a bucket of ice water right in my naivety. Known space was going to slide into superstition?

Barbarism?

All the mystique, all the achievement, it was all going to come undone, leading to a horror show of senescence and death?

Gerhardt actually laughed after seeing my expression. “Tudor, we’re not saying this is inevitable, or that it’s going to result in an interstellar dark age. In fact, it’s more likely that individual worlds will suffer, particularly in the wake of Calamity.”

“Of course, if Calamity is not stopped and does succeed in affecting known space as a whole, then—ah, this one heard a phrase recently that is apt. Then all bets are off,” Volffin said. Calamity. That damned virus, that was something more and whose ultimate fate I might get to decide. I chewed on my impending decision, then stowed it. Grinding myself into oblivion over a future duty would achieve exactly zero, and I knew it. I sat forward again as the path came clear, rubbing my hands together. “About Calamity. I’ve… learned something about it,” I said slowly. Everyone stopped, turned, and pinned me in the weight of their gaze. I sighed. “Let me tell you about something called Matterforge.”

4

MY FULL REVEAL of Matterforge was followed by a moment of deep silence. Volffin broke it first. “This one believes that you have met a member of one of those races that did not decline but continued to develop, eventually transcending physical laws regarding time and space, at least as currently understood.”

Gerhardt fixed me with an accusatory gaze. I waited for him to comment on my choice, but instead his eyes went flat with a command authority that brooked no invitation for discussion. At all. “What you have just described, Tudor, is to be considered an absolute secret. In fact, I’m applying a Writ of Supreme Reserve to the existence of this being, and any and all interactions you have had or may have with it.”

I glanced at Perry. “That means that everyone in this room is now bound by cosmic, top-secret, pinky-swear levels of security about this. The penalty for breaching them can be death.”

“What the hell kind of pinky swears have you done, bird?” Icky asked. Gerhardt’s face ended any further levity. “Tudor, you’ll be the sole interface with Matterforge, at least until I—and another Master—state otherwise. Is that understood?”

“Fully,” I said, inclining my head. His expression went distant, then he snapped back to attention. “I’ll speak to Linulla about keeping this matter… discreet.”

Torina turned to Perry. “You’ve been around the Guild for a long time. Do you know anything about this?”

“No, at least, not that I’m aware of. I mean, who knows what I’ve got memory-locked away. But if there is something, I can’t access it—"

“Van, I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s a priority message for you from Miryam, relayed via the Iowa,” Netty cut in. That sat me bolt upright. Miryam had a comm unit, but it wasn’t twist-capable, Gramps had wisely decided that leaving her in possession of antimatter wasn’t a good idea. It meant she must have sent a message to the Iowa, which, even at the speed of light, would have taken nearly nine hours to make the trip to her parking orbit in the Kuiper Belt. I looked at Gerhardt, who just nodded. “Put it through.”

“Van, it’s Miryam. I just took a call from Tony. He says you need to get back to Earth asap. He’s in possession of—ahh, a ship and its crew. Hope to see you soon.”

I looked around in mild shock, my gaze finally landing on Perry. He shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I was with you the whole time.”

“Tudor, you’d better get back to Earth and find out what the hell is going on,” Gerhardt said. I nodded, standing. As I did, Volffin spoke up. “If this one may, although Earth is not formally recognized as a part of known space, its people and culture have had a significant influence. Moreover, assessments suggest that Earth is within one hundred standard years of developing twist-capable spaceflight. It should be considered a Node of Memory.”

Gerhardt gave a firm nod. “Agreed. Tudor, I’ll leave that in your hands. Make sure you liaise with Bester about it.”

I did a double take. “You want me to record all of Earth’s cultural and social data?”

“No, of course not. We want you to lay the groundwork for it to be done,” Gerhardt said. I turned to Perry. “Hey, bird, I’ve got a special project for you—”

“Ah, the incredibly vague yet demanding order to come up with a plan. It’s a heavy crown to be this good looking and a superior organizer.”

“Humble, too,” I added. Perry dipped his beak. “I thought that was obvious.”

AS THE FAFNIR’ S drive hummed, we discussed the implications of Matterforge’s assertion that Calamity was more than a pernicious sort of malware, when Torina asked a question I knew was coming. I’d been waiting for it, in fact. Her idle tone was… revelatory. Those were the best questions. The kind that I had to slow down to answer. “Van, back in Gerhardt’s office, what was all that about who’s really in charge of the Guild and the GKU?”

“I don’t know. I just think there’s another power behind the throne, as it were,” she answered. Her eyes were bright with interest. “And Gauss?

What about the decision?” I countered. She anticipated my question. “You mean the decision to let that bastard go on his merry way, and take Calamity with him?”

“That very one.”

“It’s too soon. We’re… close. But too soon. There are some missing pieces,” Torina said. Perry leaned forward, his beak open in a half-smile. “The bird would like to offer some eternal wisdom.”

I made a face. “If the bird says that all will be revealed in time, then the human will paint the bird’s tailfeathers puce, or some other horrific color known only on third-rate drift cars from fourth-rate movies.”

Perry squared to me with great precision. “The bird wishes to withdraw his offer of eternal wisdom.”

I snorted. “You are indeed wise.”

Netty interrupted. “Boss, you said we answer that comm from Bester?”

“We do,” I answered. “He’s our first stop. We’ll do it in person. Fewer traces.”

“On it.”

I quelled my desire to find out just what ship and crew Tony had come into possession of, and what the hell had led up to it. Instead, Bester was waiting for us, and he had a gift. “This contains an AI that will sample things like mass media and telecommunications traffic to start building up a general picture of Earth’s knowledge and culture. Based on that, it and Perry can collaborate on a more detailed plan to assemble a Node of Memory for your homeworld.”

“Sampling telecommunications, huh?” Perry said, then looked at me. “Sounds like Earth’s contribution to the societal and cultural wholeness of

the universe is going to be porn, painfully obvious scams, and pictures of cats.”

“Let’s try to capture a few of the good bits, too, shall we?

Like Shakespeare and Da Vinci and such?” I replied as we headed for the Fafnir. “Cooking shows,” Icky stated. “I concur,” Funboy added. “I like the ones where people cry when they’re eliminated.”

I cut my eyes at him. “Of course you do.”

We cast off and started for Earth. We still had Icky’s betrothed, Paxomar, with us, which meant we were taking not one but two Wu’tzur to my home planet. At a distance, and discreetly attired, Funboy could pass as a kid—a hairy, mopey kid, so a typical teenager—and Zeno could have passed as human as well, and often had. But Wu’tzur?

Not so much. It was the ape-like build and extra pair of arms that tended to give them away. And the blue hair. And the seven feet of height. The warhammer didn’t exactly say I’m a local, either. Not that it mattered, not in light of the idea that Tony had somehow found, or captured, or—hell, for all I knew, bought a ship and its crew. Who were they?

Were they dangerous?

Were they injured?

And what sort of ship?

A workboat?

A warship?

Did Myron now have access to petawatt lasers and particle cannons?

Myron, who thought Girl Guides selling cookies door-to-door were a surveillance conspiracy and believed every parking ticket was part of some sort of convoluted plot by the gubmint. I sent a message ahead to Miryam via the Iowa, but with an eighteen hour round trip for comms between her and the Earth, we weren’t going to be having any real-time conversations. Frustratingly, the one additional message Miryam was able to get back to us as we sped toward Earth was, Sorry, Van, I’ve got no idea of any of the details yet. I only know what I’ve already told you. “Well, she didn’t say Earth is preparing for an alien invasion or anything like that, so that’s something,” Netty-P admitted. “Unless, of course, she is under alien control and is only saying the things they want her to say,” Funboy put in. “She—what?

Funboy, what the hell are you talking about, alien control?

You sound like Myron now.”

“Precisely. I am attempting to prepare you to have to deal with him. Based on his character, coming into possession of an alien ship and its crew

must be quite a milestone in his life.”

“Sourpuss has a point. Myron is whack-a-doodle enough that this could send him off the deep—er, deeper end,” Perry said. “Actually, I find his perspective on life rather refreshing,” Funboy replied. “At times, he’s a touch over the top with his optimism.” He shuddered. “So sunny about things.”

“Really. You find him… refreshing.”

“Indeed. If you assume the worst in everyone and everything, you will not only be ready for it, but you won’t be let down when it inevitably happens.”

Perry made his rim-shot sound, then shook his head. “Nope. Still doesn’t work.”

“YUP, when I think of places to start assembling a base of the best of Earthly culture, do I think London, or Paris, or Florence, or Milan?

Nope, I immediately think of Milwaukee,” Perry said. Paxomar chimed in. “My files state they make a great deal of beer. And cheese.”

I had to smile. “Fair. That’s a strong pair of entries in the cultural sweepstakes.”

Icky grinned. “I like both.”

Perry turned to her, eyes flashing. “You can’t have both. Not at the same time, anyway. Not since the incident—"

“That was an anomaly, bird!”

“A gas bubble that erupts from, as far as we could tell, every orifice in your body at once is not an anomaly. It’s an environmental threat.”

Icky sniffed. “I still think the curds go well—”

“Not in the beer, you barbarian,” Perry chided. “But they floated,” Icky protested. “So cute. Like little pillows of flavor.”

Paxomar looked at her askance. “You didn’t mention this… incident.”

Icky looked abashed, a feat given her size. “I was worried about what you’d think.”

He reached over and plucked a piece of noodle from her shoulder hair. “Not a concern. I chose you, dear.”

Icky beamed. “See?

That’s romance.”

I chose the diplomatic path. I smiled, agreed, and shot everyone a warning glare that worked. For the moment. The lights of Brew City sprawled ahead of us, to the right of our trajectory that would take us to Appleton. We were taking the Fafnir this time, not the Frankie, because I wasn’t sure what the situation was going to be with Tony’s apparent… guests, or captives, or whatever they were. I wanted to keep our options open. As we passed north of Madison, though, Netty took a message from Miryam, who’d apparently taken a call from Tony. “Van, Tony says he’ll meet you in Frankenmuth.”

“What’s a Franklin Mouth?” Icky asked. “Franken muth, Icky. It’s a town in Michigan—and why the hell does Tony want to meet us there?” I asked Miryam. “He’s being evasive about it. Apparently he’s worried about eavesdroppers on his calls,” she replied. “He’s got a secure comm unit to talk to you. No Earthly tech can eavesdrop on it.”

“Sorry, Van. He’s given me a location—I’m sending the Google Maps image to you now—and that’s all I know.”

I held back a sigh of frustration. “Okay, thanks, Miryam. Keep me posted.”

We altered course, turned almost due east, passed over the northern outskirts of Milwaukee, and started across the black expanse of Lake Michigan. Chicago was a continuous explosion of light splashed off to our right. “Hey, Van, remember when we were flying in the Frankie and the stealth failed, and we got chased by all those air-breathing war-jet thingies, and we dove into this lake to get away from them?” Icky asked. “Yes, Icky, I do.”

“Wasn’t that cool?”

She was looking at Paxomar as she spoke, obviously trying to impress him. I slowly shook my head. “No, Icky, it wasn’t. It was a close encounter—not a spot I’m anxious to be in.”

“I thought it was cool,” Icky said, then went on to recount the story for Paxomar. I smiled at the fact that somehow she’d become the star of the hour, and the rest of us had been reduced to bit parts, either incompetent or frightened or both, in varying degrees. “What’s so special about this Frankenmuth place, anyway?” Torina asked. “Let’s see—year-round Christmas, the world’s finest chicken dinner, the Bavarian Inn, a shop with 200 cheeses, lots of fudge, oompah music… and souvenirs. Lots and lots of souvenirs.”

“In other words, your typical place designed to separate tourists from their money,” Perry assessed. I shrugged. “To be fair, it’s a damned good time and a cool place to visit. Gramps took me there when I was a kid. What I remember most about it was eating fudge until I puked.”

“Thanks for sharing, appreciate it,” Netty-P said. “So how the hell did Tony and company find a spaceship here?” Torina asked. This time, I did sigh. “A good question. And there’d damned well better be an even better answer to it.”

“TRUST ME, Van, I’ve got a good answer for all your questions,” Tony said, holding up his hands in surrender. The location he’d given us was a farm just to the south of Frankenmuth, not far from a restaurant called the Dead Creek Saloon. It was a working farm, too, rows of soybeans stretching off into the night. We grounded the Fafnir among some stands of trees clustered along Dead Creek, then Torina, Perry, and I disembarked. I wasn’t about to take Icky, Paxomar, Funboy, or Netty-P out into the pastoral serenity of a rural Michigan night, not without knowing just what the hell we were up against. Perry had noted the possibility of this being a trap, reminding us about the fake lawyer in Des Moines. It was a good point, so Torina and I both did something we didn’t normally do on Earth. We went armed. Heavily. I had The Drop slung under my coat, while Torina kept her slug pistol tucked behind her back. Perry watched from on high, delivering an unusually crisp, emotionless commentary. But Tony met us, Marla and Myron in tow, and there was no sign of a trap or anything else sketchy—aside from the whole damned situation, of course—so I relaxed a little, then turned my attention toward Tony. “I need an excellent reason for this, friend,” I began. “And you got it, Van. Or you will. In a second,” Tony replied, then beckoned for us to follow him into a nearby barn. Clear, boss. Eyes open, I replied, and Perry dipped a wing to wheel tightly overhead. Open and scanning. No alerts. I answered with a grunt, turning my eyes to the farm in its entirety. The farm belonged to a former member of their group, a man named Godfrey. He still supported them but had inherited the farm and now ran it as his full-time job, leaving him no time to chase UFOs. He was, however, still at least an adjunct part of Tony’s inner circle and knew all about the reality of aliens. He was also a tidy farmer, and the scene was one of purposeful order. The Iowan in me approved. His barn was a much more elaborate affair than mine back in Iowa, though. It was relatively new and designed for dairy cattle, easily able to hold a couple of hundred head, along with a modern milking parlor that wouldn’t look out of place on a starship. Frankly, the tech was well past what I expected, despite us being surrounded by a herd of docile, watchful animals and their pervasive stink. It wasn’t unpleasant, it was… primal. I, or humans in general, belonged near these animals, and my instincts responded to it. What was unnatural squatted in the middle of the cavernous building, drawing us all up short in surprise. “Huh,” I muttered. “Superb detail, dear,” Torina said, patting my shoulder. “Thanks. I’m naturally elaborate.”

“I can tell.”

Before us rested a workboat, probably class 3.

It was sleek and of an unfamiliar design, and it looked… new. “It’s from outer space,” Myron said, his tone hushed and furtive. I gave him a look. “Thank you, Myron. I deduced that, but it’s good to know we’re on the same page.” He preened as I turned to Tony. “Okay, let’s start with where you got this thing,” I said as we gathered around it. Marla opened a nearby stall. “Ask them,” she said, pointing inside it at two aliens, small and gray with big, black eyes—your typical visiting Earth to abduct people aliens, as portrayed in pop terrestrial culture. It had always intrigued me how something very real had been incorporated into the zeitgeist as something entirely fake. I was no longer intrigued. “Who the hell are they?” I asked. “The crew of that, I imagine,” Torina said, nodding her head toward the ship. “Yeah, that’s who they are alright. Van, it’s my profound displeasure to introduce Gambol and Prisby.”

“Yo,” Gambol said. Prisby nodded. “Sup.”

I looked up to the ceiling, then back at Tony and the aliens. “Have we been invaded by a crew from Malibu?”

Tony raised his hands again. “Short version, or long?”

I exhaled as Torina snickered. “Long version. Then we’ll ask questions.”

“They descended on me and started in with the usual shit, you know—”

Icky and Funboy, who were listening in, both spoke over the comm at once. “Probing?”

Tony—and most of us—looked surprised. “Um, yeah.”

“Landing. I need to hear this in person,” Perry said with unalloyed glee. Seconds later, I heard wingbeats. “Thanks. Did I miss anything?”

I rubbed my face. “No. It’s just getting awkward.”

“Perfect. Do go on,” Perry said, beak open in laughter. Tony continued as the aliens watched in smug amusement. I was…

annoyed. That was it. They were annoying. Not dangerous. “Probing, abduction stuff, threats, waving some weapons around—”

“That was my dad’s code scanner,” Gambol said. “Made for good drama.”

“Drama?” I asked. Perry hopped over to the aliens, then looked back at me, clearly in stupefied amazement. “Probing?

And to repeat, probing?”

“Keep up, bird. I’m sensing a… performance,” I said. Tony nodded with gusto. “Damned right. Anyway, I used the comm unit you left for me when I figured out these idiots weren’t going to actually, ah, insert anything.”

“I did some local theater, but I’m not that committed to the character,”

Prisby admitted. I stared, then Torina put a hand on my arm. “On behalf of Van, then what happened?

Anyone?” she asked, her tone light. “Their ship broke down,” Tony finished. “You came here as… as a prank?” I asked, shaking my head in disbelief as the anger grew. “You exposed our—I mean, my—homeworld to… to infection?

For a friggin’ prank?”

Tony pointedly cleared his throat. “Just so we’re absolutely clear on this

—nothing that involves nudity and probing can be considered a prank,” he snapped, glaring at them. Torina adopted a bland look. “Oh, I don’t know,” she muttered. “No!

No!

Not a prank!

These assholes have made our lives hell these past few days!” Tony said, then looked at Myron and Marla. “Right, guys?”

“Correct,” Marla spat, adding a wintry look. She was pissed. Or curious. Or both. Myron scowled at the aliens. “They’re up to something, all right. More than they’re telling us. They say they’re here to probe Tony and shit, but they show up, then the Men in Black show up, then—”

“Wait, what?” I rounded on Tony. “Men in Black?

What’s he talking about?”

Perry giggled, a most unmilitary sound. “Is Tommy Lee Jones really a grump, or is it for the character?”

Tony carried on, unimpressed. “Like—older dudes in suits so plain they might as well be uniforms. Driving around in a sensible sedan, wearing sensible shoes, tryin’ to act casual and failing. You know, guys like that,”

Tony said. “Gubmint shoes,” Myron clarified. “Brown.”

Marla pointed toward town. “They ate a lot of ice cream, too. Watched

’em go twice a day, at least.”

“Well, if they’re eating ice cream, they must be secret agents,” I said, the color rising in my cheeks. I was… annoyed, in new and interesting

ways. I focused on Tony, intent on flogging him for a more detailed explanation, if necessary, but Torina touched my shoulder. “Van, I know you want all this explained, but”—she nodded toward the ship—“we apparently have a disabled, twist-capable workboat sitting right over there. Don’t you think we should make sure it's not about to, you know, lose containment?

I think this Frankenmuth place will be a lot less festive following an antimatter explosion, don’t you?”

“Excellent point, dear.” The ship had to be first priority. The idiocy of everything could wait. For now. Tony blinked. “Antimatter?

That thing has—it’s got antimatter in it?”

I flicked a glance at the aliens. “Those guys didn’t push it here. It needs antimatter to run the twist drive.” I turned to the comm. “Icky, I need you here asap. But keep low and try to stay out of the open on the way.”

“On my way!”

Tony spun on the aliens. “You assholes brought a ship full of antimatter into my back yard, then broke it?”

Gambol gave a languid shrug. “Hey, like I told you, we just tell the AI where to take us. It handles all that twisting, antimatter shit, bruh.”

I glared at him as my anger returned. “They told the AI. I guess everything’s… fine then. Perhaps even legal.”

Gambol turned to his companion. “Hear that?

The Peacemaker says it’s going to be cool. Told you we had nothing to worry about.”

“I knew it, bruh. Anyone got the time, local?” Prisby asked. “That—

what’d you call it?

It’s a banger. You gotta get yourself some of those, um”—he snapped his fingers in a very human gesture—“breakfast pizzas. Yeah.”

“You went to Casey’s?” I asked, making a quick deduction that sent my blood pressure soaring. “Van, you’ve stated repeatedly that Casey’s pizza is worth the trip home,” Perry said. “Just wanted that on the record.”

“You’re not helping, feathers.”

Perry’s beak opened in a laugh. “I really think I am.”

“It’s a banger. Every slice,” Gambol added. Tony looked sheepish. “I made them wait in the car, at least?”

I sighed, long and slow. “Tony, a question.”

“Sure, Van?” he replied, hesitation in each syllable. “Got any whiskey?”

Gambol and Prisby high-fived, but I pointed at them, and they went quiet. “No booze for you. Or breakfast pizza, for that matter.”

Prisby spread his arms. “Bro!”

I closed my eyes as Torina leaned against me with a soft laugh. “Still want kids?”

“We’ll see.”

ICKY STUCK her head out of the workboat. “Hey, boss. Looks like the safety lockout engaged and shut down the reactor, probably because there was a wicked-bad harmonic starting in the containment bottle.”

“Can you fix it?” I asked her. “Uh, gimme a few hours and I can. Might have to adapt a new magnetic flow controller from one of the Fafnir’s spares, but—”

“Whatever you need to do, Icky,” I said, starting to turn away. “There’s one other thing.”

I turned back, bracing myself for yet more bad news. I was about saturated with the stuff by now. “These a-holes somehow armed the point-defense battery and switched it into autonomous mode. It’s been looking for targets the whole time. I put it into safe mode and powered it down.”

I ran a hand through my hair. “Absolute dick move,” I growled. The workboat had only a single point-defense battery, as much to protect itself from nav hazards like debris as from attack. But only a single point-defense battery skipped over the fact that each round its mass driver fired hit like the main gun on an Abrams tank, and that it could spew them out at a rate of ten per second from a five hundred round magazine. And it had been active the whole time. I thought with horror about the trip Tony had described getting the ship here. His friend Godfrey had hauled it on a big, crane-equipped flatbed truck he used to move around farm equipment and sick or injured cows, all the way from Appleton. To avoid the urban jam of Milwaukee and Chicago, they’d gone north, to the Michigan Upper Peninsula, then they came back south across the big bridge over the Straits of Mackinaw, along Interstate

75.

The ship’s stealth system had rendered it invisible at least, but it had still been rocking along on the back of the truck, its AI keeping a ceaseless, dispassionate watch for anything it perceived as a threat. That meant that, at any moment, it could have laid waste to a swath of Wisconsin or Michigan roadside—and that might be hard to explain. “Icky, just disable that damned gun,” I said. “It’s got way more potential for carnage than I’m comfortable having around a Christmas-themed town.”

“What do you want to do here, Van?” Torina asked me. I looked from the ship to the aliens. “Number one, haul their scrawny gray asses back to the Fafnir and stick them in a holding cell, pending—” I put my hands on my hips. “Right now, I want to say, tossing them out the airlock, but I suppose we’ll just have to settle for whatever charges are appropriate. And number two, get that thing fixed and back up into space where it belongs—”

I paused. I noticed that Tony, Marla, and Myron were huddled in a furtive, seemingly urgent conversation. “Oh, this can’t be good,” I muttered and walked over to join them. “Please tell me you guys are talking about the weather, or what’s trending on Netflix, or anything except our current situation,” I said. Tony adjusted his bowler hat. “Uh—”

“Guys, please, this whole mess can’t possibly get any worse.”

“You’d, uh, think so.”

“Is it about those guys you called Men in Black?”

“Actually, they were more like Men in Dress Down Casual Black,”

Marla said. “What?”

Myron leaned close, because of course he did—it was just how the guy talked. “It’s about these aliens.”

“Myron, look, I don’t care if you think they’re in cahoots with the government, or the Illuminati, or Disney for that matter—”

“Disney is Illuminati, it is the gubmint, they’re all the same damned thing!”

“Myron, focus!

What about these aliens?” I snapped. Marla raised a finger. “What he’s trying to tell you is that there are three of them.”

I glanced at the two sitting in the stall, knobby knees drawn up, oversized feet flat on the floor. “Three. Where’s the third?”

No one answered. I turned back. “Where’s the third alien?”

Tony scratched under his bowler hat. “See, that’s kinda the problem, Van. We don’t exactly know.”

5

“SO WHAT IS this fudge you’ve mentioned?” Funboy asked. “Sugar. And different flavors. And an inability to eat only one piece,” I replied, as we made ready to head into Frankenmuth. That, apparently, was where the third alien, Koosbey, had gone. With all of the responsibility you’d expect from what amounts to a college freshman on spring break, he’d decided he wanted to see the place, or so Gambol and Prisby told us. “See, we were the responsible ones. Hope that means something, Mr. Peacemaker,” Gambol said, every word brimming with hope. I gave him a level stare “It does. With this supreme act of sober reasoning, I’ll throw you out the airlock last,” I said, closing the cell door in his face. We had to find Koosbey, and we had to do it immediately. Which put me into the position of saying something I never dreamed I would. “Okay, everyone, into the SUV. We’re going into Frankenmuth to find our missing alien.”

Everyone consisted of me, Torina, Tony, Marla, and Funboy. We chose to leave Myron behind to keep an eye on things, just so we didn’t have to worry about him and his particular brand of crazy out in public. Which was saying something, considering we were taking Funboy instead, but we needed as many eyes on Frankenmuth as we could manage. Funboy was small and humanoid enough that, with the right clothing, he could pass for a young teenager without close inspection. The right clothing was a problem, though, since we didn’t have a fourteen year-old’s wardrobe

handy, so Netty-P altered some adult clothing provided by Godfrey to fit him. “I didn’t know you were a tailor,” I said as she scanned Funboy for his exact measures, then set to work cutting and stitching a long-sleeved casual shirt and jeans to fit him. “I’m whatever I can download, Van, and we happen to have a whole module in the archives on tailoring human clothing.”

“We do?”

“We do. I can also cook a complete turkey dinner, fix a leaky pipe, and change the spark plugs in a ‘79 Chevy Impala if you need me to. Your grandfather had Netty download a complete library on human crafty skills.”

When she was done and Funboy was dressed, he looked pretty convincing—except for his face. Even with a John Deere baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, he didn’t look at all human to anyone closer than about two or three meters. We solved that with a surgical mask, which these days didn’t look out of place—and in the spirit of a true teenager’s style choices, Netty stitched a vaguely anarchistic-metal band symbol on the fabric, the irony of which was lost on Funboy, but not Perry. “Very anti establishment,” Perry pronounced. I grinned. “Right?

Rebellious, even.”

We capped off the ensemble with a pair of battered sneakers that we had to stuff to get them to fit on his feet, and a backpack to carry his data slate and medical scanner. The overall effect was actually… not bad. Not bad at all. “Cowabunga, dude,” Perry said, eyeing him up and down. “Yes. That’s a good point. I should probably know vernacular appropriate to a human of this age. Is Cowabunga dude a representative example?” he asked. I couldn’t help smiling. “If it’s 1993, sure. Let’s stick with sullen, moody, and most of all, quiet teenager, shall we?”

“Sullen and moody?

Funboy, you were born for this,” Torina said, patting his slim shoulder. While Icky and Paxomar continued working on the ship and monitored what was happening via the comm, the rest of us piled into Godfrey’s SUV

and headed into Frankenmuth. Perry, as usual, roamed overhead, watching out for trouble while scanning for any sign of Koosbey. It was now mid-

morning on a warm, bright summer day, so the business day in Frankenmuth was going full swing. As we drove into town, Funboy spoke up. “Van, as you know, I’m not usually anxious to be in close proximity to other beings—”

“Really?

Hadn’t noticed.”

“You hadn’t?

I’d have thought that would be clear—”

“Your point, Funboy, please,” I said as we approached the bridge over the Cass River that would take us up Frankenmuth’s main drag. “Since it appears I have no choice, I believe I should make the most of this opportunity. Could I have sufficient Earth currency to purchase some of the items you described?

I am particularly intrigued by this fudge. I did some research on it while Netty-P prepared this clothing for me, and the complex combination of various fats, sugars, and plant matter is admittedly appealing.”

“If the party pooper gets fudge, I’d better get fudge,” Icky said over the comm. I rolled my eyes as we drove across the river. “You can both have fudge

—and, before you ask, cheese as well. But if you get sick from eating all this rich stuff, I don’t want to hear about how my planet is a bastion of toxins or any such—”

“Blueberry cheese?” Funboy asked. I glanced back at him, nestled between Tony and Marla in the back seat. “What?”

“That sign we’re passing—it refers to blueberry cheese. What would that be—oh. That sign describes something called bratwurst. Hmm. My data slate translates that from the German language, specifically braten, ‘to fry’, and wurst, ‘sausage’, but also partly from an older Middle High German brātwurst, in which brāt is an unrelated word meaning ‘ground meat’—”

I looked at Torina. “Next time we go on vacation, the kids stay at home.”

WE PARKED and set out into Frankenmuth, looking for any sign of Koosbey. I was hoping he was—somehow—avoiding being seen, although it would

probably make it easier to find him, what with all the screaming and such. I kept Funboy with me, while Torina, Tony, and Marla each went their own way. The touristy part of Frankenmuth really isn’t that big, mostly a strip paralleling the Cass River along the western side of one of its meanders. Across the river, accessible by a genuine covered bridge, was parkland, the big Bavarian Inn Lodge, and several other attractions that sold everything from leather goods to whiskey. I was desperately hoping that Koosbey hadn’t wandered off away from the river, because we might never find him. Well, until he showed up in the news, that is. And wouldn’t that be a hell of a first contact?

“Funboy, you’re supposed to be looking for Koosbey, not staring into every storefront we pass,” I said. “He may be in one of these structures.”

“Oh, if he were, I suspect we’d be hearing about it.”

We ambled our way through the crowd of people themselves wandering along the main drag. I focused my attention in the spaces behind buildings, laneways, and the like, hoping to catch a glimpse of Koosbey or, as was sadly more likely, commotion around him being seen. We’d developed a half-assed contingency plan if that ended up happening—whichever of us happened on the scene first would announce that it was all a publicity stunt related to an upcoming movie. It wasn’t much, but it was the best we could do. I stopped and looked around. Now where the hell was Funboy?

Shit. I scanned the crowd, then saw him back in front of the cheese shop we’d just passed. He was… talking to a woman dispensing cheese samples to passersby?

Muttering a string of curses, I hurried back to catch him in mid-conversation. “—yes, I am a sexually immature human male, whose biochemistry is now entering the stage known as puberty, and I would like to taste some cheese, particularly the blueberry variety—”

“Now, now—Myron, you know you can’t have cheese, you’re lactose intolerant,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder and steering him away. The woman had a rigid smile fixed on her face. “Your son?”

“Nephew. He’s very, uh, precocious. Sometimes he uses big words when smaller, simpler and much quieter ones would be better,” I said,

glaring at him. He paused, then nodded. “Ah. Yes. Cowabunga, dude.”

I nudged him along. “Come on, Myron, your mother is waiting,” I said. After a few paces, I lowered my voice. “Might I remind you we’re looking to avoid an alien contact incident here, not cause one?”

“I believe that my disguise is holding up well. Although—what is that sound?”

I listened. Over the clamor of pedestrians and traffic, I heard the distinct oompah-oompah of a Bavarian band. “It’s music. German-style, horns of different types, accordion, drummer

—”

“I understand the acoustics of the drum, as almost all cultures have developed some form of percussive instruments, but horns?

What are they?”

“They’re… wind instruments. Some are made of brass, some of other things. You blow into them and—”

“Oh, dear. That sounds like a recipe for salivary projectiles and the spread of—” He stopped. “What is that?”

I was really starting to regret bringing Funboy on this little excursion since he was proving to be more troublesome than attentive. I sighed. “Those are Christmas ornaments. They represent a holiday period in the winter, but this place has them and sells them all year for touristy reasons and can we please focus on finding Koosbey?”

“Yes, certainly. However, I find those—Christmas ornaments?

They are utterly fascinating. I must acquire some. Can you give me some terrestrial currency to do so?

Perhaps ten thousand units of it?

Would that be sufficient?”

“Ten thousand… units?

Dollars?

You want to buy ten thousand dollars’

worth of Christmas ornaments?”

“Is that a lot?”

“Yes, yes it is—”

Perry cut in. Van, Torina found Koosbey. He’s on the east side of the river, under a tree on the lovely scenic path known as the Riverwalk. “Under a tree?

Is he… is he okay?”

Yes and no. We started walking as fast as Funboy could manage, heading for the SUV. “What do you mean, yes and no?”

Well, he’s alive, but—well, come see for yourself. I sighed, partly in relief, mostly in frustration. “On my way.”

“WHAT’S WRONG WITH HIM?” I asked, looking up and down the Riverwalk as I did. It was a well-used path, but Koosbey lay under a tree a few meters off of it, out of sight. Funboy looked at his medical scanner. “He’s suffering an adverse reaction to something he ingested—”

A loud fart erupted from Koosbey, interrupting him. “—which is causing the production of abnormal quantities of gaseous by-products in his digestive tract.”

I caught a boiled-cabbage whiff. Perry, perched on a branch overhead, chuckled. “Remember when you pretended that Funboy was lactose-intolerant?

Looks like these guys really are.”

“So much cheese,” Koosbey whispered. “A whole house of cheese. And so good!”

“Wait, there’s a house made of cheese somewhere?” Icky asked over the comm. “Where is it, and how soon can I move in?”

I watched as Tony backed the SUV as close to the trees as he could, along a road that ran between two baseball diamonds. “Sorry, Icky, but the last thing this town needs is another alien, especially a Christmas yeti.”

“Funboy got to check it out.”

“Yes, yes he did. And I’m still regretting it.”

When we were reasonably sure no one was looking, we quickly lifted Koosbey and put him into the back of the SUV, then loaded up and started back for the farm. We’d only gone about fifty meters, though, before we had to stop and open all the windows. “My, he’s really lactose intolerant, isn’t he?” Marla said while we all waved hands in front of our noses. Yet another loud fart ripped the air. I groaned. “Does that answer your question, Marla?”

“It—does, yes.”

WE STUCK Koosbey into the same holding cell as Prisby and Gambol—

which served them right, although I did have Netty monitor the air and periodically ventilate the cell, lest I be accused of cruel and unusual punishment. I then went to check on how Icky was doing with their ship. What she and Paxomar had discovered was not what I’d expected. “There was no harmonic in the containment. In fact, everything’s working just fine,” she said. “But… Gambol and his stupid cohorts said the ship was broken. Were they wrong?

Shit—are you telling me they could have left Earth at any time?”

Icky shook her head. “Nope.”

“What, then?

What’s wrong with it?”

She looked at Paxomar. “While Icky worked on the power plant, I dug into the flight controls. I was eventually able to figure out that the problem was there.”

“Okay, fine, the flight controls. Is it fixed?”

Again, Icky said, “Nope.”

I felt my fists clenching. “Guys, I’ve had a long night and even longer day. Would you please—”

“This ship was deliberately intended to not leave Earth once it arrived here,” Paxomar said. “The AI was programmed to bring it here alright, then prevent it from lifting off again. And it’s done a good job of it, too. We’d have to replace the entire flight management system, plus about a dozen specific system controllers before we could make her flyable again.”

“Is it Calamity?

Is this ship infected?”

“No evidence of that.”

I stared. “Why… would somebody do that?”

“No idea, other than to deliberately strand the ship and our three friends here on Earth.”

Marla, who’d been listening with her arms crossed, spoke up. “When I looked at this ship, while it was still at Tony’s, the AI spoke, telling me I wasn’t authorized access. I thought the syntax was rather curious. Torina, at Van’s farm, you showed me a video taken on… Anvil Black?”

“Anvil Dark,” Torina replied. “Right. Anvil Dark. You were showing me different alien species. There was one that you specifically said were a bunch of arrogant, criminally minded bastards—which, I must say, was a rather shocking generalization

—”

“Marla, focus,” I said. Holy shit everyone was finding it hard to stay on target lately. Marla described the alien, and Torina and I both spoke at the same time. “Yonnox.”

“Why would this ship’s AI use a Yonnox voice?” Paxomar asked. “A very good question. AI’s are usually pretty neutral in tone. Have you guys heard it speak?” I asked Paxomar and Icky, but they both shook their heads. “Nope, it’s been dumb the whole time.”

“Probably didn’t want to give away the fact it’s synthesizing a Yonnox voice,” Perry put in. “There’s more,” Icky said, leaning down and patting the barrels of the point-defense battery. “Remember how I said this was active?

Well, it wasn’t, actually. There’s no fire control system. In fact, this ship has had pretty much any system—beyond propulsion, that is—stripped. I pulled panels inside it and found nothing behind them.”

“So it’s… a prop?” Torina asked. “More or less. It seems like it was meant to bring our three little gray assholes here, then disable itself and—well, that’s it. Disable itself.”

I stared at the ship. “I can’t imagine it was some convoluted plan by dumb, dumber, and dumbest, so they were probably just patsies. They gave a reason for the ship to come here.”

I turned and looked at Tony. “And, more to the point, to come here and visit you in particular. That’s what you said, right?

That these guys had been told to come and play their prank on you specifically?”

“Again, just so we’re all clear on this—pranks do not involve nudity and probing,” he replied. Icky chuckled. “Probing. Hey, Tony, remember when we first met, and I said we were gonna probe you?”

“Yes, Icky, I do, thank you. That figured prominently in my reaction to those three little jerks. But, to answer your question, Van—yeah, that’s what they said. Their fraternity, or whatever it’s called, told them to come and visit me specifically.”

“Which means that whoever was behind all this wanted us to find it. This crew,” Torina said. “Not to mention this GKU element. Don’t forget that we’re not just a Peacemaker outfit, we’re also part of the Galactic Knights Uniformed, and they have their own list of bad guys and enemies.”

“I wish Zeno was here. Between her smarts, logic, and the fact she’d done time as a criminal herself, she was always good at teasing out levels to things,” Icky said, then sighed. “I really miss her.”

“Me too. We… we all do.”

We stood in silence for a moment, then Torina turned to me. “What do you want to do?”

“And what do you want us to do?” Marla asked. I tapped my chin a moment, thinking. “Icky, can we transfer the antimatter in this thing to the Fafnir?”

“Sure. It’ll take a couple of hours to do it safely, but it’ll save us some money on gas.”

“If we take out the deuterium and helium-3 fuel for the power plant and drive as well, it’ll also render this thing inert.” I turned to Tony. “Congrats, you’ve got your own spaceship, at least for the time being. See if you can figure out somewhere safe to take it and stash it, where no one is likely to be nearby. It would be good, though, if you can keep it under some sort of surveillance. Someone might come back for it.”

“You’re taking the three gray idiots away with you, right?” Tony asked. “Yeah, we’ll take them off your hands. Frankly, they’re more of a worry to me than this ship is, particularly if we drain all its fuel.”

“Van, this could still be some sort of trap,” Funboy put in. “I know, but—Funboy, are you still eating cheese?”

He swallowed. “Maybe.”

I shook my head. “Anyway, I don’t think it is a trap. If it was, it probably would have been sprung the moment we showed up. Someone wanted us to find this, but not just to spring an ambush—to talk, maybe, or for some other reason. So, I guess we wait for their next move.”

Icky grinned. “So, does that mean—?”

I sighed. “Yes, we can go get some fudge and cheese. But you’ll have to wait in the car, big girl, sorry. Torina and I will be the only ones doing the shopping.” I looked at Funboy, still decked out like a surly kid and still

munching on the cheese that he’d gotten, making Icky jealous. “I’ve had my fill of babysitting for one day, thanks.”

Torina grinned. “See?

We’re practically parents already.”

6

WE MADE a quick stop in Iowa to bring Miryam and Clinton Barnes up to speed on what had happened with Tony and company. When I described the kinda-sorta Men in Black Tony mentioned, Clinton made a hmm sound and leaned on the kitchen table in my farmhouse. I gave him a wary look. “Hmm?”

“Yeah, hmm. Hmm, as in I saw a couple of what I figured to be FBI guys driving a rented car around Pony Hollow—oh, about a week back, now.”

“FBI?

What made you think that?”

He shrugged. “FBI, DEA, something like that. I just know the type. They try to look inconspicuous, but they can’t ever quite manage to pull it off. Something about them looking officious, I guess. Anyway, I put in a call to the FBI office in West Des Moines to see if they were running any ops around here. They said no, but it wouldn’t be the first time they lied about it. They’ve got a spotty track record for engaging with local law enforcement. DEA’s even worse. I mean, I get the need for secrecy and security, but I’ve tripped over their ops before—usually when they’re looking to make a big drug bust.”

I sat back, nodding. “Ordinarily I’d just say yeah, okay, and leave it at that. But if there is some government agency snooping around—maybe just keep an eye out for them, if you could, please and thank you.”

“Will do. Although—Men-In-Black?

As a cushy posting for federal agents who’re burned out or retiring?” Clinton grinned. “Yeah, I could see

it.”

“Our tax dollars at work,” Miryam put in, rolling her eyes. “Mind you, I wonder if they’ve got openings for underachieving county sheriffs?

It’d be fun to go chasing after UFOs and little green men,” Clinton added, a glint in his eyes. I smiled. “Clinton, you know they exist. There’s a spaceship and some aliens out in my barn right now.”

“That’s what’d make it fun, watching all these feds thinking they know what’s what, me sitting back with a knowing smile.”

Barnes and Miryam both agreed to keep an eye out, and also keep a watch on the farm. I was mindful of the surveillance device in the tree across the road, which Perry had discerned was Earthly tech. He’d spoofed it, so it wouldn’t ever show anything but a boring view of the farm, but still. All kidding aside, having a federal agency of some sort interested in the farm, and therefore me, was another complication I really didn’t need. Miryam and Torina shared a glance, then Miryam spoke. “We’re on this, Van. No one will harm the farm.” When I started to protest, she added, “Or me. Or Clinton. We’re on alert, okay?”

I inclined my head. She’d read my thoughts. “Back in orbit, then. This time, we travel with blueberry cheese.”

Funboy spoke over the comm, his voice muffled by food. “Not for long.”

WE PAID a brief visit to the Iowa to see how the Conoku were doing. They’d been trying out all sorts of new maneuvers, leveraging the effect of the alien grav-plating still mounted on her. I told Cantullin to keep it up, but to avoid breaking the big old battlecruiser in the process, then we carried on to Anvil Dark to hand our three alien frat boys over to face whatever fate awaited them. I didn’t really want to pursue serious charges, but putting them through the arraignment process, hauling them before a Magistrate for a scare, then dropping the charges on a promise to keep their little gray noses clean would do. Fear and bureaucracy made for a powerful incentive—when applied correctly, of course. I’D JUST HANDED off a morose Koosbey, Prisby, and Gambol to the Custodians when Gerhardt abruptly appeared. It wasn’t like him to come to us like that—typically, we had to go to him. It made me a little uncomfortable, wondering what was coming, particularly since he only said, “We need to talk,” and entered the Fafnir, me in tow. He stepped out of the airlock and slammed to a halt. “What the hell, Tudor, is all this?”

The interior of the Fafnir was festooned with blinking lights, garlands, wreaths, and myriad other Christmas paraphernalia, all purchased in Frankenmuth. Icky had insisted, saying it would brighten the ship up. And it did, although in a National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation kind of way. Which is how Perry had described it, in fact, and kept leveraging the joke. “Mr. Griswold here wanted to get an early start on the holidays,” he said. “No, I did not. This is all to indulge Icky,” I answered evenly. “My inner Griswold is under tight control.”

Gerhardt, though, grinned—actually grinned, with actual delight. “I think it’s wonderful.”

I gave him a blink. “You do?”

“Absolutely. It does a great job of livening up the drab interior of a ship, don’t you think?” he said, touching a wreath hanging on the door of a holding cell. “I never had you figured for the festive type,” I said. “I have hidden depths, Tudor,” he said as we proceeded forward. We got to the galley, whereupon Torina stepped forward, put her arms around Gerhardt, and kissed him. When she pulled back, he actually blushed. “I—that—you—what the hell are you doing, Ms. Milon?”

She pointed up. “Mistletoe. It’s apparently an Earthly custom to kiss someone when you’re standing under it.”

Icky grinned and stepped forward, all four arms spread toward Gerhardt. “Come here, you. Time to get—”

“Moist?” Torina asked, ever helpful. “Or at least a little damp.”

Gerhardt hastily stepped aside. “How about I just consider myself to have been kissed, Icrul,” he said. “As to you, Ms. Milon, I will remember

this attempt to… help.”

Icky shrugged, then grabbed Paxomar, yanked him under the mistletoe, and kissed him passionately—for a while. An uncomfortable while. We all stood awkwardly, waiting, until Icky pulled away. Gasping slightly, Icky announced her assessment of what some people know affectionately as First Base. “This kissing stuff is fun. How come we Wu’tzur never developed it?

I mean, biting feet and ankles is great, but this is almost as good.”

Paxomar, nerdy little thing that he was, at least by Wu’tzur standards, just stood gawking at her. “I’m certainly sold on it.”

“I’m not,” Funboy, standing nearby, said, his tone somewhere between funereal and stunned. “I think it’s an utterly horrifying practice. Deliberately bringing your oral cavity into contact with someone else’s for an extended period of time—” He shuddered. “It’s certain death. Or worse.”

Torina grinned at him. “Oh, you sweet-talking little muffin—your romance knows no bounds. You’ll be a hot commodity back home.”

“What could possibly make you think that?” Funboy countered, but Gerhardt cleared his throat with meaning. “I did not come here to admire ornaments or—well, actually, Ms. Milon, that was rather pleasant, I must admit.” He stood straighter, the last of his blush still lingering with stubborn charm. “Anyway, I’ve come to discuss a matter of some sensitivity. To put it succinctly, I have a good-paying job for you and your crew, Tudor.”

I eased out a breath. Okay, so we weren’t in the shit with Gerhardt. “What sort of job?” I asked. “You recall the new program Bester is undertaking, collecting Nodes of Memory.”

“Yeah. We left a device with our contacts back on Earth gathering data, in fact.”

“Well, we have a case that requires more direct action. Bester has been scouring his archives for possible Nodes that are remnants of older civilizations, extinct progenitor races, that sort of thing. It’s a project he refers to as sifting. He has discovered a reference to one such possible Node, a remnant archive on a system about fifteen light-years beyond the spinward boundary of known space.”

“When was it located?” Perry asked. “About two hundred years ago, during a stellar cartographic survey.”

“Okay—so how do we know it’s intact, or even still there?

It’s a long way to go on two hundred year old data.”

“Because we have much newer data available. The planet in question is one of the places that the GKU stores the Object 6 when it’s not in use. It’s there now. And that brings me to the second part of the job. The Object 6

has suffered a malfunction and needs to be repaired and recovered. You would be paid out of Bester’s discretionary budget for the retrieval of the archive, and also by the GKU for the recovery of their ship. Are you interested?”

I glanced at the others and saw shrugs and nods. Funboy spoke up. “I am in agreement. The resulting payoff will assist me in realizing my decorating concept for the rest of the Fafnir.”

“What, for the one square meter of the Fafnir not already tarted up and punishingly bright?” Perry asked. “Don’t be a—what is the term, Van?

The name of the wealthy man who despised the Earthly practice of Christmas until he was supernaturally terrified into becoming a reasonably decent person?”

“Scrooge?”

“That’s it.”

Gerhardt looked at Funboy, then at me. “I thought you said that this”—

he gestured around at our little Christmas wonderland—“was Icrul’s idea.”

“I suspect she merely went along because she was stunned, like the rest of us. It turns out that Funboy is a big fan of gaudy decorations, though. Credit goes to him for this, um… all this.”

Gerhardt frowned at that. “Really?”

“Right?

It’s hard to believe,” Perry said. Funboy blinked. “I have my jolly side.”

Gerhardt’s frown deepened. “Again—really?”

“Is it so hard to believe that I can be merry and festive?”

We all answered together. “Yes.”

WE ACCEPTED the job and assembled the background material for the mission. I let Perry supervise that while I checked the latest intel reports on Calamity. Apparently, Pont Alus Kyr had been able to adapt an AI they’d developed for their own purposes and develop a more effective countermeasure against Calamity’s spread. Emphasis on more effective, though. It had slowed Calamity’s spread, but not halted or reversed it, so known space was still facing an eventual, apocalyptic catastrophe if a true antidote to the thing couldn’t be found. As we were reprovisioning the Fafnir for our upcoming mission, though, Linulla called with insight that might help toward that antidote. “Matterforge said Calamity wasn’t really a virus, and it was—of course

—correct. In conjunction with Viktor, aka the Body Thief, we’ve been analyzing the pristine copy that you recovered along with Gorix, which confirms it,” Linulla said. I leaned eagerly forward on the desk in my cabin, where I’d taken his call. “How so?”

“Calamity is an AI that was intended to fully bridge the gulf between organic and inorganic intelligence. It was never intended as a weapon but rather as a means of integrating both into a single, synergistic mind that would be far more capable than each alone.”

“So… the ID chips are, what, a version of that?” I asked. “A very superficial version developed using isolated elements of Calamity’s code. If fully realized, the resulting hybrid mind would have the speed and precision of a machine, but the insight and instinct of a human, or Conoku, or Gajur, or—you get the idea.”

“So Gauss somehow co-opted it,” I said, parsing the implications. “Actually, we think he negotiated with it, somehow convinced it to employ its programming to attempt a forceful combination of minds. To that end, it is Calamity that is co-opting machine intelligences as part of that effort. But that is only half the equation, of course. Without an organic sentience to merge the machine with, the process is incomplete. Calamity is effectively spreading from machine to machine, intent on combining them into hybrid minds per its original purpose,” Linulla said. “Which effectively paralyzes the machine. So Calamity copies itself—”

“And moves on to the next machine, seeking to do the same thing. And the next, and the next after that, and so on.”

I sat back. “Holy shit. Will it ever find an organic mind to merge with?

Are there even any situations in which sentient beings might be…

available?

Or vulnerable?

Or—whatever?”

“None that we’re currently aware of. An organic being with cybernetic implants capable of running Calamity would be a theoretical example, but Viktor isn’t aware of any such instances,” Linulla said. “Wait, so Calamity is just going to continue spreading, trying to accomplish something that might not even be possible?” I asked. “So it would appear,” Linulla concluded, his voice grim even across the miles. I thanked him, then immediately headed for Gerhardt. I wasn’t sure how much this would help—I was a skilled computer operator on Earth, but out here, in known space, I was still only just getting my digital feet wet. It might offer something, a hook or an angle, that could be used to stop Calamity before it put a stop to everything else. PERRY, Torina, and I met with Bester to get the details of the Node of Memory recovery operation. He explained that the remnants of an ancient civilization had been located on the remote planet, which had no official name, just a catalog number. “For convenience, though, we call it Trench Foot,” Bester said. “Oh, yeah, right, that place. It’s in the same star system as the planets Dysentery, Chilblain, and Abscess, isn’t it?” Perry said. I gave Bester a curious look. “That is probably the least inspiring name for a planet I’ve ever heard. Dare I ask why it’s called Trench Foot?”

“Guess.”

“It’s wet?”

“Outstanding. Yes, much of the planet is swamp. It’s also prone to wild temperature swings because of its peculiar orbit. It was hit by a massive impactor only a few hundred thousand years ago, so it’s got a wobble to it that causes temperatures on much of its surface to vary hugely over the course of days, and sometimes hours.”

“How hugely?” Torina asked. “Between tropical and arctic.”

“Yikes. So it’s wet, and either baking hot or freezing cold. Now you see why it’s called Trench Foot.”

“I’m sure I’ll regret this choice of words, but all we have to do is recover this… Node of Memory, right?

What’s that going to entail?” I asked. Bester gave his languid shrug. “Not really sure. It depends how much has survived the ravages of time and weather.”

“Bester, I have to ask, why is Object 6 there?

Do you know?

Because it seems awfully convenient for the GKU’s secret ship to be parked at a place we just happen to be visiting,” Perry said. “Something to do with the letter B, I bet,” Torina muttered. “And V,” Bester said. Then he lowered his voice and whispered, “That stands for Van.”

She smiled. “Thanks for clearing that up. Now, what aren’t you telling us?

I can’t help feeling that Gerhardt wrote the script here.”

“That’s because he did. All I know is that Object 6 was put in orbit around Trench Foot because it’s one of the places the GKU parks it. Gerhardt says they chose Trench Foot for a place to stash it this time to get eyes on that Node of Memory, sort of getting two things done at once. But something went wrong and Object 6 is offline. Now, how much of that is true, and what’s missing?” Another slow shrug. “All I can tell you is that there’s a Node, and a repair job, and a lot of money to be made.”

The lingering questions notwithstanding, the amount of money was the deciding factor. We weren’t poor by any means, but operating the Fafnir had gotten more expensive as we’d upgraded her, and now we had to add the Frankie to the budget. We were steadily eating into our cash reserves and needed an infusion to bulk them back up. The alternatives were to borrow money from someone like Torina’s parents—a well we’d gone to a little too frequently for my taste—or start offering liens on parts of the Fafnir. I didn’t want to do that, either. I’d managed to avoid it so far, and I really didn’t want to start giving part ownership of parts of my ship to what could charitably be called investors. Given the condition of my ship when I first took the controls, I knew that even a person of my grandfather’s intellect and will could lose damned near everything out here in the parasitic economy I lived within. The Fafnir had been stripped of everything except Perry and Netty, a reality that took nearly two years of slogging to correct. I looked around my ship and made the decision. “We’re going to Trench Foot, folks,” I announced. Icky scowled. “We’re going where now?”

“Oh dear, I don’t like the sound of that, not at all,” Funboy added. “I knew you would all feel the same frisson of joy I have right now. It’s hard not to feel that way, given the wild weather and possible death. And disease, of course. Can’t forget that.” I turned to Icky. “What does Paxomar plan to do?”

“Oh, he’s already left, on his way back home.”

“Ah, okay. Did you get your kiss goodbye?”

Icky blushed—blue. Funboy sighed. “I can sadly attest to the fact that they swapped salivary fluids at some length, yes.”

Icky shot him a glance. “You watched?”

“Two large creatures engaged in an unhindered display of groping, fondling and—whatever else it was you were doing in the middle of the galley while I was attempting to eat. Believe me, I did my very best to not watch, but space gorilla tonsil hockey, as the Earth internet would call it—

well, it demands my attention, much to my chagrin.”

Torina took Icky’s arm. “Don’t mind them. They don’t understand romance.”

“Yeah. Nerds,” Icky said, glowering at Funboy, Perry, and me. “Oh, he also gave me the best gift ever.”

I cocked my head. “Really?

What?”

“A socket set. With adapters.”

I whistled. “Holy cow, that is love.”

7

WE ARRIVED at our destination system, a distinctly reddish-orange K-class star about eighty percent the size of Sol, with a whopping twelve planets orbiting it. Only Trench Foot, the third, sat in the star’s Goldilocks Zone, though, while the rest were either lifeless rocks like Mercury, bigger rocks with tenuous atmospheres like Mars, or a couple of ice giants similar to Uranus or Neptune. The system was also full of asteroids whizzing along on a multitude of eccentric orbits, effectively enclosing the system in a shell of hurtling rocks. It was a busy place. “Collisions here are pretty common. In fact, I’m projecting four impacts on Trench Foot within the next thousand years, one of them from a rock about the size of Mount Everest,” Netty said. I narrowed my eyes. “Now, when you say within the next thousand years, that would include the next few minutes by default—”

“No impacts within the next eighty years, Van. So unless you plan on retiring here—”

“And living to be a hundred and ten,” Netty-P put in. “—we’re probably pretty safe.”

I nodded. “Good to know. Okay, anyway, let’s see what we’ve got,” I said, turning to the tactical overlay. Something immediately jumped out at me as wrong. “Netty, where’s Object 6?”

“Not on the overlay.”

“Thanks, darling. Could’ve figured that out for myself, though. Is there any sign of it?”

“None. I could ping its transponder, but that would imply a datalink, and I think you still want us to avoid those, no?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I do—”

Netty cut me off. “Van, I’ve got an incoming twist comm from Gerhardt.”

“Okay—” I glanced at Torina. “Why do I feel like the other shoe is about to drop?”

“A big, stinky shoe, considering this place is called Trench Foot,” she said. I nodded. “Netty, put him through.”

Gerhardt’s image appeared on the display, a little fuzzy, thanks to being filtered through our off-the-shelf gaming laptop, a Calamity precaution we still had in place. “Tudor, I gather you’ve arrived at the target destination,” he said. “Yes. Trench Foot. Charming place.”

“Isn’t it, though.”

“But there’s no sign of the Object 6.”

He nodded. “I know. It’s on the surface of the planet.”

“Someone landed it?

Wait—is there someone on board?

Is this a rescue mission?” I had rapid-fire visions of who it might be. Valint?

B?

My mother?

Someone else?

Someone who’d stolen the ship?

Someone dangerous?

But this time, Gerhardt shook his head. “No. It’s uncrewed. However, Object 6 is also infected with Calamity, or elements of it.”

“Really. That would have been good to know. I almost considered pinging it to get a transponder return so we could, ah, find it.”

“But you didn’t, because you are wise to follow sensible precautions regarding Calamity. You wouldn’t have pinged it in any case, even if I had told you that it was uninfected. Would you?”

I sat back and smiled. “You got me.”

“Of course I do. Now then, Tudor, part of the reason I waited until you were well away from Anvil Dark to tell you this is because it involves a…

sensitive matter. Object 6 did not just happen to be parked where you’re just happening to be going to recover a Node of Memory. It was brought there,

after being infected, so that it could be kept well out of harm’s way until you could go to recover it.”

“Why me?

I don’t have a magic wand that works on Calamity.”

“Actually, you will. Object 6 was infected by a beam weapon designed to transmit specific elements of Calamity, rather than the entirety of it. Listen carefully to this part, because you’re going to be pissed—and then, you’ll be thankful. Open your portside control box.”

“By my chair?

Okay—”

I opened the stowage and found a small, nondescript data chip. And two more next to it. “You put this here?” I asked. “Not personally, but… it doesn't matter. Yes, I violated the sanctity of your ship, but you’re going to understand.”

I held back a comment. “I’m listening.”

“It’s a counterpunch program developed by our people, working in conjunction with the GKU and Pont Alus Kyr. Have Netty sandbox it in protected memory, both for your peace of mind and to keep it away from interactions with other programs, since we haven’t yet had the opportunity to fully test it.”

I exhaled, long and slow. “I forgive your modest invasion of my borrowed ship, especially given the reason but as to the beam weapon—are you saying Calamity was fired at the Object 6, like a laser?

That’s—holy shit. Who’s behind that?”

“Thanks to some, ah, intelligence-gathering assets placed into their government when the former Satrap of the Seven Stars League was forced to step down, we know it was them. It would appear that they’ve acquired some of BeneStar’s expertise regarding Calamity.”

“Operation Paperclip,” Perry said. Gerhardt frowned. “I’m sorry, I don’t recognize that reference.”

“It’s an Earth thing. At the end of Earth’s second global conflict, one of the victorious parties, the United States, was able to seize scientists who had been working on various types of advanced technology for one of the losers, Nazi Germany. Those scientists brought their expertise to the development of new technologies for the United States—particularly, the technology that first got humans to Earth’s moon.”

“Ah. That’s actually an exact parallel, then. That’s precisely what the League has done.”

“While everyone’s scrambling to try and stop Calamity, those bastards have been working on ways to make it even worse?” Torina asked, her voice as hard as ice. “So it would appear. Object 6 was conducting a covert operation in League space when it was detected and subjected to an attack by this new weapon. It appears to be able to implant a very-much stripped down version of Calamity through remote current induction in a ship’s systems. It’s quite clever, actually.”

I glared. “Clever?

It’s criminal. A Crime Against Order, from where I sit. The League needs to be held accountable for this.”

Gerhardt’s face spread in a rictus that was almost a smile. “Oh, the League is about to receive its comeuppance, believe me. However, we’re getting sidetracked. We want you to employ these countermeasures against what our engineers are calling Calamity Lite, the version infecting the Object 6.

This will be their first field test. And, before you ask, no—they will be ineffective against the full version of Calamity. But in bench tests, they have been quite effective in eradicating this stripped-down version.”

“I’ve uploaded the countermeasure program and have it fully sandboxed in its own memory space,” Netty said. “And, of course, while you’re there, you’ll also retrieve the Node of Memory located on the planet,” Gerhardt went on. I nodded. “Great. I only have one request.”

“Which is?”

“When the League gets this comeuppance you mentioned, I want to be part of it.”

“We all do,” Torina said. Gerhardt’s face split with an executioner’s smile. “You can count on it. Gerhardt out.”

“I WONDER WHERE THE DRAGON IS?” Perry said, as we disembarked from the Fafnir. I glanced at him through my visor. “Dragon?”

“Yeah, dragon. Oh, it might not be an actual dragon, but it fills the role, if you know what I mean. Top monster on the food chain. This sort of planet

always has them.”

I stopped a few paces from the Fafnir’s airlock and immediately felt myself sinking into soft muck under my boots. I didn’t go very far, so I risked standing in one place and took in the spectacular—and terrifying—

surroundings. We’d landed the Fafnir in a clearing a few hundred meters away from Object 6.

The GKU ship was supposed to be in orbit, but her autopilot had, in light of the Calamity Lite infection, decided it was better to land her and power her down. Between us and the Object 6, and in every direction, sprawled a sodden morass of swampy muck, pools of murky water, and soaring trees similar to the gigantic club mosses that grew on Earth during its Carboniferous period. The only undergrowth seemed to consist of sludgy moss that coated the boles of the trees and the few exposed outcroppings of rock. In fact, everything had a brownish cast to it, probably because of the orange light of the star. It shone overhead, a ruddy disk that resembled the Earth’s sun seen through an evening haze. My suit’s heads-up told me that the outside temperature was currently thirty-three degrees Celsius, which was certainly hot, but not unlivable. Still, we kept ourselves sealed in our b-suits to stave off a rich stew of environmental toxins and microorganisms of unknown virulence. Funboy, to his credit, had donned his suit and braved stepping out of the ship, even though this must be setting off every germophobic alarm in his little hypochondriac’s head. Something thrummed by overhead, commanding my attention. I glanced up and saw a maggot as long as my arm, sprouting six pairs of wings that whirred like a hummingbird’s—if the bird was made of brass and steel. It was loud, grotesque, and wholly disinterested in our presence. “And a good day to you, sir,” I murmured, watching the corpulent, clanking thing vanish among the trees. “That was—I wanna use a Funboy word for it,” Icky said. “Repulsive,” Funboy chimed in. “Thanks. Yeah, that,” Icky agreed. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing it again in my dreams,” I stated, and we set off for the Object 6.

I’d worried that we might face some of the same threats we encountered on our last swamp planet, Hellhole, where we’d helped Adayluh Creel complete the testing of her super grain called Permada. But Hellhole had

been a death-world—which was an actual category of planet, one with a biosphere that could theoretically support life such as humans, but flora, fauna, and the like so hostile that it might as well be uninhabitable. The wildlife on Hellhole had been wild, as in very wild, as in constantly trying to kill and eat you wild. Trench Foot was unpleasant but wasn’t known to host anything as dangerous as Hellhole’s fauna. Emphasis on the wasn’t known to host it. Accordingly, we left Torina to man the Fafnir, while the rest of us headed for the Object 6 in a tight, hyper-vigilant group. I had The Drop drawn and ready, and the Moonsword’s scabbard latch open. Funboy and Icky both carried auto guns in addition to their usual weapons, while Netty-P sported a slug carbine in two of her manipulators. Perry again flew overhead but had to remain above the trees. Their club-like branches grew jammed into a tangled network through which it was impossible for him to fly. I scanned upward. “Bird, you arou—"

“Watch it, buddy, I’m flying here!” he snapped over the comm. I stepped over a mossy log and paused to shrug my pack higher onto my shoulders. It contained, among other things, the data-injection module holding the Calamity Lite countermeasures. It was heavy, but at least it was dead weight. “Perry, who the hell are you talking to?”

“One of those gross flying slug things. He damned near crashed into me, the reckless asshole.”

“Hey, bird, you’re in its home. They get the right-of-way,” Icky said, picking her way among the trees behind me. “Pfft. I’m a guest here, so I should—uh-oh.”

I stopped. “What does uh-oh mean?”

“I found the dragon. Big bastard—think an alligator, but about five meters long and with two pairs of wings—uh-oh.”

“Perry!”

“Sorry, I was wrong.”

“About what you saw up there?”

“No, about the dragon. Something even bigger just swooped out of the overcast, snagged it, and carted it away. On an entirely unrelated note, I’m going to fly as low as I can because I have plans for my future that don’t involve the gullet of that big bastard.”

“You’re made of alloys and composites,” Funboy said. “Yeah, that’ll make me feel a whole lot better when I’m being chewed up by teeth as long as Van’s arm.”

Icky blew a passable raspberry. “Fraidy pants.”

Perry started to correct her, then just agreed. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Fortunately, the thick mat of interlaced branches overhead protected us from any of Perry’s dragons, who seemed content to remain at altitude and hunt other flying critters. Still, there were smaller, more insidious things that hunted beneath the trees. We became aware of them when Funboy suddenly uttered a shrill, girlish squeal and opened up with a long burst from his auto gun, sending a fusillade of slugs tearing into the trees. Icky, Netty-P, and I all immediately turned, scanning around us, weapons at the ready as vegetation floated to earth like a vengeful god had cut loose with a salad shooter. All I saw were the mossy trunks of trees marching off into brownish gloom, like the pillars of some ancient cathedral. Some now had missing chunks, or branches, or both. “Funboy, what the hell are you shooting at?” I demanded. “What was that little shriek?

Last time I heard a sound like that, it came from a Wu’tzur baby crying for plustinarek,” Icky said. I grimaced. “Ugh. I remember what that is. Basically that first thing that flew over us, but in a bowl.”

“It’s an acquired taste.”

“No, it’s not. At least, not by me, ever. Anyway, Funboy, what the hell were you shooting at?” I asked as my alarm receded. Walking back to join him, I saw a dead—something, or its slug-shredded remains, anyway. It was scaly, and about the size of—

A cat. I looked at Funboy. “Really?

Did you have to empty an entire magazine to deal with that?”

“It seemed much larger when it abruptly and unexpectedly exited the water.”

“I don’t even think it has teeth. Looks like it just has—had—a siphon thingie to slurp up water bugs or something.”

Funboy gave a slow shrug. “By killing it, I have improved its species, eliminating a member from its gene pool given to precipitous decision-making.”

“Uh-huh. Whatever you gotta tell yourself. But let’s try to be a little more disciplined with our use of lethal force, shall we?”

“I will endeavor to do so. It would appear that our sojourn on Earth has dulled my senses somewhat.”

“It was the cheese,” I said, turning to start for the Object 6 again. “I don’t mind saying that I much preferred there to here.”

I stopped and glanced back, then nodded. “Yeah, I’d probably take Frankenmuth and year-round Christmas, over a sludgy, miserable swamp planet called Trench Foot, too.”

“Hey, that could be Frankenmuth’s tourism slogan—We’re not as bad as Trench Foot. What do you think?” Perry asked. I resumed sloshing my way toward the Object 6.

“I think, Perry, that you probably shouldn’t go into advertising.”

OBJECT 6 had grounded itself in a clearing about a hundred meters across. She’d obviously landed under control, showing no external damage. Icky did a walkaround anyway, confirming that everything was intact and in place. “Okay, Icky, you and I go inside. Perry, Netty-P, keep your distance, please—I don’t want any chance of you being exposed to Calamity, even this Lite version. Funboy, you’ll stay here by the airlock, ready to help them. Or us.”

“Oh dear. With no trees above us, I’ll be completely vulnerable to attack from the skies.”

I sighed. “Fine. Step into the airlock, but then be prepared to help deal with anything that comes out of the trees.”

“You’re expecting something to come out of the trees?” Funboy asked, his voice rising in alarm. “I—no, I—never mind. Just keep watch,” I said, then turned and entered the Object 6.

She was dark and silent, which I found more unnerving than the squalid morass outside. Even at rest, a ship faintly hummed and muttered to itself, systems like life support and ventilation whispering, the power plant a slight bass thrum in the background. Ships were almost never powered

down completely, unless they were undergoing major repairs or upgrades. And then, of course, their own noises are replaced by the ruckus of machines being used to work on them. This utter silence was unsettling. “Reactor must be cold. I wonder if Calamity did it, or the ship’s AI put her into dark mode itself,” Icky wondered aloud. We entered the cockpit to find all of the instruments were, of course, offline. The power cells were good, though, so Icky used them to put the fusion reactor through its pre-ignition sequence. In a matter of seconds, I heard the chirp of a completed power sequence. “Okay, boss, I’m ready to light her up,” she said, then glanced up from the engineering panel. “’Course, once we do, and the systems come online, that damned virus is probably going to come to life. And we have no idea where it is. I mean, it might be hiding in the waste reclamation or the coffee maker, for all we know.”

I’d extracted the data-injection module from my pack, the one containing the Calamity Lite countermeasures. “How about we plug this thing in, then just bring up one system at a time?

That way, this thing can scrub each one.”

“There’s, like, a gazillion systems. Switching them on one by one is going to take a long time.”

“You in a hurry to get somewhere?” I asked. “Yeah, somewhere I don’t have to wear this damned b-suit. It’s got pants, Van. Pants.”

I grinned and handed her the injection module. “Over to you, big girl.”

WHILE ICKY GINGERLY REACTIVATED THE Object 6 one system at a time, Torina lifted the Fafnir so Netty could launch the Frankie and bring it to pick up Netty-P and me. Leaving Funboy with Icky, we set a heading for the Node of Memory, which was about two hundred and fifty klicks off to our northwest. I piloted the Frankie just beneath the low, scudding overcast, watching the dreary, gray-brown landscape scroll beneath us. Netty-P had folded herself into the copilot’s seat and sat silently. “So,” I said. Her imager turned to me with a faint whir. “Yes?”

“Yeah. Well. I was just… just thinking—” I stopped, then sighed and shrugged. “Actually, I got nothin’.

I was just, you know, making conversation.”

“Actually, you weren’t. A conversation implies a discussion of something of substance. Although, now that we’re talking about this not being a conversation, I suppose it has become a conversation.”

I grinned. “I guess so.”

“Since we are now talking, though, Van, I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

“How do you feel after you kill someone?”

I did a double take. “Where did that come from?”

“As you recall, I was responsible for killing a mercenary attempting to prevent us from accessing the upper levels of the Enhancement Empire’s office tower on Adoration. I’ve had difficulty incorporating that fact into my subsequent behavior, so I haven’t.”

“What do you mean, you haven’t?

You’re asking me about it right now.”

“I have stored the memory in a partitioned space, so I’m aware of its existence, but I haven’t yet figured out what, exactly, to do with it.”

I sniffed and shook my head. “It’d be nice to just silo a memory off on its own, so you don’t forget it but also don’t have to deal with it. Being able to sell that ability back on Earth would probably net you a lot more money than even, oh, fusion tech.”

“I don’t want to sell the ability, nor do I believe it is even possible—”

“I know. I was just thinking of—I don’t know, it’s hard for me not to consider memories as revenue. At least that’s how I think now, and you’re not an AI. You’re a person, and people have needs.” I looked at her. “Why did you feel you had to treat this memory differently than any other?”

“Because I deliberately terminated the life of a living, sentient being.”

“Yeah, but you’ve been involved in a whole bunch of space battles—or Netty has, anyway. You’ve been involved in killing lots of sentient beings aboard ships we destroyed.”

“Netty-P hasn’t shared this memory with me,” Netty said. “Thus, I’m not currently facing the same conundrum that she is. However, I think there’s a degree of abstraction, a distance, as it were, in engaging another ship in battle. Rightly or wrongly, I see the target as a hostile ship, distinct from its crew.”

“The same applies to me when it comes to the engagement of other ships in battle,” Netty-P said. “It’s this particular memory, in which I deliberately target, engage, and kill—in this case—a human being that I’m having difficulty reconciling. I am concerned that if I simply integrate it into my memory base, it will have unpredictable follow-on effects.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know, Van. That’s what makes them unpredictable.”

I laughed. “Touché.

Okay, so speculate.”

“I suppose that, given the gravity of taking a life, I may be reluctant, even momentarily, to do so again. And that could put my own life and the lives of others, particularly the crew of the Fafnir, at risk.”

I nodded. “That’s definitely a possibility, yup.”

“So… doesn’t it make more sense to avoid that?”

“Let me clarify something here—what you’re saying is that you should be able to kill instantly and remorselessly, because it would be more efficient.”

She hesitated, a momentous thing for a being that could think a million times faster than me. “No, I don’t believe that would be a desirable outcome either. It appears there is no objectively correct answer to this question.”

I grinned and patted the top of her imager. “Welcome, my dear, to the reality of being a living, sentient being. There are almost never objectively correct answers to questions like this.”

“How do you deal with this uncertainty, Van?

You’ve taken lives.”

My grin faded. “Yeah, I have. And unlike you, I can’t just park those memories in some isolated storage space. I have to live with them, and let them shape what I do going forward.” I turned to her. “But that’s the way it should be. Every time I’m faced with killing someone, it should be a deliberate decision, and a difficult one—even if I have to make it in an instant. Hell, especially if I have to make it in an instant.”

“That sounds inefficient.”

I smiled, but ruefully. “I’ll say it again, my dear. Welcome to the reality of sentience.”

8

THE NODE of Memory was located on a small island in the middle of a mucky lake that hummed with primal life. We’d passed over a few bits and pieces of ancient ruins, but there wasn’t much to them. The environment of Trench Foot, as wet and subject to wild temperature swings as it was, was doing a good job of chewing away at whatever remained of the civilization that had once stood here. And speaking of those wild temperature swings—

“Is that snow?” I asked, looking at the stuff splatting against the Frankie’s canopy. “It is. The outside temperature has fallen to minus four degrees Celsius over the past ten minutes,” Netty replied. “Huh. Steamy hot to freezing cold in less than twenty minutes. Get me a timeshare, stat.”

“I think the name Trench Foot might be a touch too kind,” Perry groused. We circled low over the Node. As we did, we must have roused something living in the surrounding lake, because things began briefly breaking the surface, then vanishing again with a sinuous wake. When we finally got a look at one, we saw a glass eel the size of a hippo. Each beast bristled with dark ivory pharyngeal teeth in translucent gullets big enough to swallow Funboy. I sent the imagery back to the others, while checking in on Icky’s progress. “So far so good. I’ve got most of the critical systems up, and the countermeasures seem to be doing their job and scrubbing any traces of Calamity Lite from them. But I want to make sure every system is squeaky clean before I bring up the next. I’m also having to isolate each system as I do it, so I don’t wake the damned thing up and it spreads back to the ones I’ve already cleaned.”

“So it’s going slowly.”

“Very. But hurried work is worried work and all that, right?

Oh, and as for those big eel things in the imagery you sent back—are you thinking what I’m thinking, Van?”

“How do you fit one of the big bastards on a grill?”

“Bingo.”

“Just to be clear, no, I wasn’t thinking that. Believe it or not, the first time I see some alien fauna, my immediate thought isn’t hmm, how would that look on a bed of roasted potatoes?

”

“You don’t know what you’re missing, then.”

Torina cut in. “And just because I’ll bet you’re thinking about this, too

—no, I don’t believe they’d make great pets, either. At least not until we’ve got our own private ocean.”

“You guys are boring,” Icky said. Funboy spoke up. “Excuse me, but while all this playful banter is going on, might I remind you that some of us are stuck watching out for monsters that may want to eat us, rend us limb from limb, or otherwise make life decidedly short and unpleasant—a pastime I shouldn’t have to point out as being rather stressful. In other words, can we hurry this along?”

“Funboy, you’ll be glad to know that, from where I sit, there are very few monsters anywhere near you,” Perry said. “Very few?

How many is very few?”

“Almost none.”

“Almost none?

What do you mean almost none?”

“Perry, you’re a real asshole sometimes, you know that?” I said, banking the Frankie for a final pass over the Node. “Only sometimes?

Guess I’d better up my game.”

WE LANDED on the island as far back from the water’s edge as we could manage. I didn’t think the eels were amphibious, but I really didn’t want to just assume it and find out I was wrong when one of them started chewing on me. Still, I kept both The Drop and the Moonsword close at hand, while Netty-P carried her own gun at the ready. As an added precaution, I had Netty doing overwatch with the Frankie’s point-defense battery as a final just-in-case. As we picked our way through the muddy slush, a faint whine shrieked through my helmet. It was the system that melted snow trying to accumulate on the visor, then sloughing away the resulting water with an ultrasonic vibration. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really quite ultrasonic, hence the whine. For now, it was tolerable. But only just. The Node was, according to data collected by an old and pretty superficial survey, probably a device intended for gathering and reporting climatic information, which was understandable on this wildly changeable planet. However, the surveyors speculated that it contained other information as well, encoded on a wall inside a collapsed building of iridescent masonry. Each wall—and the remaining roof—were made of some black, obsidian-like crystal inlaid with alien filigree. I gathered the imagery and sent it back to Perry. “Any idea what this is?” I asked him. “It’s kind of like a super-advanced version of Python programming language from Earth, if it was written by a poet.”

“It’s code?” I asked. “Almost certainly. But lyrical, boss. Someone had the heart of an artist.”

Torina made a sound. “And now they’re gone.”

“Their code lives on,” I offered, getting a sad smile in return. By now, it was a blizzard outside, with the spillover coming in through the fallen roof enclosing the node. Netty-P gathered detailed imagery while I poked around to see if there was anything else of interest. There wasn’t, but something else caught me. I turned from a pile of ruined masonry, clearly weathered by the harsh climate of Trench Foot, to the Node wall. I looked from one to the other a few times, trying to reconcile what I was seeing. “Huh.”

Netty-P turned an imager my way. “Problem?”

“I… don’t know. It’s just a little odd that everything in here is so weathered—I mean, look at what’s left of this wall, all the corners and edges are rounded off the blocks. And they’re cracked, and have that slimy moss stuff that seems to be everywhere growing on them.” I turned back to the Node. “Everywhere, that is, except on that. It’s in really good shape compared to everything else around here.”

“That makes sense, though, doesn’t it?

Making an archive more or less impervious to the elements?

So it lasts?”

“I suppose. It just seems a little strange that there is absolutely nothing else around here like that.” I shrugged. “But maybe you’re right.”

Netty-P finished imaging the Node, and we returned to the Frankie. She looked like a car parked outside in an Iowa winter, rimed with frost and covered with a blanket of snow. “I could use a snowbrush right about now,” I muttered, wiping her canopy as I crunched by. “Van, the canopy is quite capable of keeping itself free of snow,” Netty said as we clambered aboard. I just smiled and shook my head. “Midwest nice, friend. It’s a lifestyle,” I countered. “Then thank you. And, ope,” Netty added. We began lifting immediately, and the comm flashed hot. “Van, there’s another call coming in from Gerhardt.”

“We can only take so many jobs at once—"

“It’s not just another paycheck. He’s set a new destination for us when we leave here—Milon Estates.”

“What?

Why?”

“Maybe he’s offering a time-share on Helso,” Perry said. “Beats the hell outta two weeks here, no matter how cheap it is.”

“Pass on that, with respect. Living with my in-laws is a bit—”

“Too close, even in this galaxy?” Perry asked. “Not as diplomatic as I’d go, but sure, let’s run with that.”

“Trust me, dear. I’m with you—I love my parents, but we need a little space,” Torina said. “Anyway, not that I object to going home for a visit, but this is business, not pleasure.”

“Business—what, with your family?

The phrase conflict of interest comes to mind.”

“No, it seems that Gerhardt has tapped us to run point on the Guild’s behalf on dealing with an economic issue. Apparently, there’s a small

transport guild called the Equal Grasp who’d like to talk business, and my parents have agreed to act as hosts for the discussion.”

“What sort of business?” I asked, leveling the Frankie off. The temperature was climbing again, remnants of snow streaming off the workboat in sublimating wisps. “Trade. They want to open some new commercial routes.”

“Okay. But why us?

We’re not even in the trading business.”

“It’s because of the first route they want to open, it seems,” Torina replied. “And where would that be?”

“Earth.”

I ALWAYS LIKED COMING to Helso, but I liked it even more when it wasn’t business. In fact, I hadn’t really been here for strict business since I had to deal with the nano-plague that had threatened to wipe out the Helso biosphere. This didn’t seem as dire, but… still. Alien trade with Earth?

The implications of that were so far-reaching that I couldn’t imagine any good reason to agree with or support the idea. As far as Earthly humanity was concerned, after all, space was empty and they were alone in it. Humans, as a species, could be skittish, mob-minded, and dumb. Finding out that aliens were real would create a paroxysm of emotion. If the aliens wanted to sell you trade goods, the chaos would shift from cultural to economic. It was a recipe for madness. I sifted these thoughts as we dropped off the Object 6 in the Wolf 424

system, where she’d be recovered and inspected by the GKU. Icky and Funboy flew her from Trench Foot to the rendezvous, whereupon we handed her over to my mother’s compatriot, Amazing. Landing, we were greeted by Amazing and her suspicious gaze—which I waylaid with an immediate report of all-clear. “She’s clean,” I stated. “Really?” Amazing answered, her piercing eyes still roaming the ship as if she was a coiled snake. “Countermeasures worked. Funboy flew her on manual control, and Icky spent the entire trip doing hands-on system scans. I think she ran out of curses about halfway through.”

“Dirty talk helps me focus,” Icky said, grinning broadly. “You mean, ah, foul language, right?

Cursing?” Amazing asked, cutting her eyes at me. Icky shook her wide head. “Whatever works.”

Amazing stifled a laugh. “And here I thought engineers were prudes.”

“Quite the opposite. Regardless, her close, personal interest gave me the assurance I need to deliver Object 6 clear and clean. But I understand your concern. The fact that those League hitters could spread infection at range is

—”

Amazing snorted in disgust. “Concerning.”

“Concerning,” I agreed. Amazing let her lip curl. “That shit ends soon. And no, you can’t know our battle plan—yet. When we roll back the curtain, you’ll have ample warning.”

“Appreciate it. I’ve always been a fan of front row seats.”

She gave me a curt smile, and we parted ways, but my thoughts didn’t linger on the League, the GKU, or their actions. I turned back to the sheer danger of opening the Earth to galactic trade. “Frankly, I don’t see why your parents, Gerhardt, or anyone else is giving the idea serious consideration,” I said as Netty prepared us to twist to Van Maanen’s Star. Torina shrugged. “Isn’t this better than them just going ahead and doing it anyway, without any Guild oversight and involvement?”

“To be honest, I’m surprised Earth has even been able to go this long without figuring out that there are aliens all over the place,” Icky said. “Like, are Earth people just dumb?”

“Some are, sure, but some aren’t. I think it’s more about people having more pressing problems eating up their time than worrying about what’s going on outside the Solar System.”

“Or even in it, for that matter,” Perry added. I looked at Torina. “All that said, you make a good point. I guess it’s better that these guys are at least trying to do the right thing. The bigger question is, if the Guild’s answer is no, stay away from Earth, will they?”

“Actually, Van, I think the question goes deeper than that,” she replied. “How so?”

“Maybe the question is, should they stay away from Earth?”

I blinked at her, surprised. “What, are you saying that we should just let them make first contact as part of some interstellar trade deal?

Wouldn’t you think that the whole interstellar part is going to have some serious effects on Earthly society?

Hell, the culture—politics?

Everything changes. With one moment”—I snapped my fingers—“myth becomes real. Rumor is truth. I mean, this shakes who we are as humans. It’s an inevitability, but it’s also an attack on human history and the foundation we built our lives on.”

“I’m not saying we should let it happen. I’m not even—look, I know there’ll be first contact with Earth. It’s a certainty. Icky’s point is a good one, but sooner or later, it’s not going to be Tony Burgess and his wacky friends who come into possession of some aliens and their ship. It’s going to happen somewhere where it can’t be covered up, and then all of Earth is going to learn the truth. Wouldn’t it be better for that to happen deliberately, according to a plan?

What if it happens somewhere hostile?

What if someone puts three rifle rounds through the head of a Nesit trader?

Or a Yonnox raids a holy place because those bastards love shiny things and don’t give a damn about Earth tradition and practice?

What then?

You want a firestorm?

Because that’s what I see happening. Humans aren’t passive, and getting in front of this isn’t just the right choice, it’s the only choice.”

“Your grandfather talked to Netty and me about this on more than a few occasions. He was worried about that very thing—that first contact with Earth would be made by some predatory commercial interests, or someone looking to get an early foothold there and dominate access to it,” Perry said. “He used the term bloodbath. And given his history in the Great War, it wasn’t hyperbole. He understood the capacity of both sides in this equation.”

“For that matter, some asshole frat boy on a mission to gas Santa with his farts—it could be that simple. And that gross, too,” Icky added. “I wish it was something that humorous, but… I don’t know, big girl. This could go sideways in a hurry,” I said, then made a decision for our next move. “What is it?” Torina asked. She knew me. She could read me like a book. “Helso. Let’s go.”

Her smile was warm. “Suit up, kids. Next stop, Milon Estates. And the boss says step on it.”

WE LANDED on Helso in our accustomed spot, the pad just a short walk away from Milon Estate. We had to share it with a ship that was already there, an unfamiliar one emblazoned with a logo that even Netty didn’t recognize. “What I do recognize are some of the structural and design elements,”

she said, as we powered down the Fafnir and unstrapped to disembark. “Oh?

From where?”

“They’re similar to the ship that Tony Burgess currently has in his possession back on Earth.”

That stopped me, making me sit back down. “How similar?”

“Similar enough to conclude that both came from the same shipyard, one located in the Eridani Federation.”

“Okay. And how many ships has this yard produced?”

“To date, eighty-four. It’s a relatively new operation.”

“Could just be a coincidence,” Torina said. I raised a doubtful brow. “Do you believe that?”

“I… don’t not believe it.”

“That’s what I love about you, my dear—your firm commitment to your convictions.”

We all walked the short distance up the hill to the house, since there really wasn’t any need to leave anyone aboard the Fafnir. We were greeted by Torina’s parents. They didn’t immediately invite us past the entry foyer and deeper into the house, though, and instead diverted us into the room her father used to store and display various bits of art and other artifacts—all legally obtained, of course. “I thought we should talk before we bring you to meet with the reps from the Equal Grasp,” her father said. “Yeah, who are these people?

And what’s your connection with them?”

I asked. “A new trade outfit. Really surging into prominence, based out of the Seven Stars League.”

I glanced at Torina. “Of course they are.”

Torina’s father gave a humorless smile. “Our thoughts exactly.”

“Then pardon my curiosity, but why do you have any dealings with them?

Joining with unproven businesses hasn’t been family policy,” Torina said, then looked at her mother. “Haven’t you always told me to stick to the old money because it knows what it’s doing?”

Icky lifted a meaty hand. “Then how did you end up with Van?” Icky asked. “I’m guessing personality?” Perry offered. “That hurts, bird.”

Her mother gave a fugitive smile. “That would still be my advice. But these people came to us. Since Helso used to be a protectorate of the Seven Stars League, we still have quite a few business contacts there. This Equal Grasp, which has shot up through the ranks of the League business world, got hold of us through them. As far as channels and proves go, they followed protocol that, ah, old money prefers.”

“Why, though?

What do they want from you?”

“They wanted us to help them contact the Peacemaker Guild. They’ve got some areas of business they’d like to get into, but they feel that they need the Guild’s approval to do it.”

“Such as opening trade with Earth,” I said. Torina’s father nodded. “They’re well aware that Earth is considered off limits, since it’s a pre-twist world. Their proposal includes addressing that very topic—they want first contact. They want it official, and the intention is clear. Earth will be brought into the fold of known space.”

“They want to provide Earth with twist tech?

That’s never been done before. Developing twist tech and the ability to leave and return to their home star system has always been the criteria for making a first contact,”

Perry said, his tone dripping with trepidation. “Well, according to Master Gerhardt, that’s a policy, not a law. There are apparently laws that indirectly support it, such as restrictions against cultural interference. But the Equal Grasp feels that they can do this and still respect those laws,” her father replied. I crossed my arms. “But why?

Why Earth?”

“Because it represents an untapped market of over eight billion consumers.”

We all turned to the speaker. It was Funboy. Torina’s parents both nodded. “He’s absolutely right,” her mother said. I still wasn’t convinced. “But what’s in it for them?

What could Earth possibly give them in exchange for anything of value?”

“Earth does have some commodities,” Torina countered. Funboy spoke up. “Again, if I may—perhaps it is more a matter of control. Humans already figure prominently in known space. The people standing in this room are proof of that,” he said, looking pointedly at me, then Torina, then her parents. “Humans are a dynamic, assertive, even aggressive species that has proven highly adaptable and quite comfortable beyond the confines of the Solar System, despite not technically being a starfaring race.”

“He has a point. There are few records of any significant presence of Wu’tzur, Surtsi, Nesit, Gajur, Yonnox, or any other races in known space prior to them developing twist technology on their own. For a pre-twist race, humans have managed to develop quite a large footprint across the stars,” Netty-P said. Torina nodded. “That must be it. If humans have managed to make their presence felt this much, imagine what happens when Earth does get twist tech. The trickle of people into known space will become a flood—maybe even an explosion.”

“And the Equal Grasp wants to be at the front end of it,” Torina’s father said. “Think of it as… human capital, legally acquired.”

I rubbed my chin. Again, this was all making a sort of implacable sense. I didn’t like it, but the reasoning—and possible results—were, even to me, attractive. Humans had managed to spread across the stars while their homeworld lived on in blissful ignorance of it even being possible to leave home. What would happen when Earth had twist tech and could leave the Solar System at a whim?

Who wouldn’t want to be in on the ground floor of that?

I sighed and looked at Torina’s parents. “I guess we should go hear their pitch?”

Her father gestured at the door. “They’re on the terrace, waiting.”

Torina fell in beside me. I glanced at her sidelong as we followed her parents. “It all makes sense, sure, but I’ve still got a really bad feeling about it.”

She squeezed my hand. “You’re not alone.”

9

THE TWO REPS from the Equal Grasp were a Yonnox named Lesthrix and a middle-aged human named Jacob Marley. I heard Perry snicker, and I even had to hesitate to take that in. “Jacob Marley?

Like, the—”

“Business partner of Ebenezer Scrooge?

Yes. As you can see, though, I’m a lot more alive. Just as interested in money, though!” Marley replied, smiling with aggressively perfect teeth that would have cost more than a used car. The two of them were nattily dressed, their mannerisms and speech impeccable. They were total professionals, and Marley had the ghost of a British accent. I instantly disliked them both. But I swallowed my distrust and returned my own best smile. I had to hear these guys out. Not because I particularly wanted them anywhere near Earth, but as a means to suss out their plans. We sat and made some small talk while the Milon’s robotic butler brought refreshments. It gave me a moment to study them, which began with me noticing they were studying me in turn. It was like an Innsu bout, the first part of which consisted of two opponents going through their Focus, each patiently seeking an opening in the other’s defenses. I decided to Strike first. “I understand you want to establish trade with Earth,” I said. “It is one of several new trade paths we wish to pursue,” Lesthrix replied. “Why?”

Marley sat back, crossing one leg over the other, exposing socks with little anchors. His vibe was somewhere between a yacht salesman and a lacrosse player from the Eastern Seaboard. I searched for a second, and the memory dovetailed with an inaudible click. He was Carter Yost, but with drive and networking skills. Marley’s opening gambit was delivered in an earnest, pleasant tone. “Peacemaker Tudor—”

“Van. Please call me Van.”

Marley gave me a short, probing look, then smiled. “Alright. Van, my father grew up in Yorkshire, a poor man living a poor life in a poor town. His escape from Earth was purely coincidental. He joined the army, the Prince of Wales Own Yorkshire Regiment, and was involved in the conflict with Malaysian guerillas in the late nineteen fifties. While he was there, on a patrol in the jungle, he had an encounter with an alien—a Yonnox, in fact, who had been forced to ground his ship because of a malfunction. They were attacked by the insurrectionists, and although my father’s patrol drove them off, the patrol itself was killed off—and he was seriously wounded. The Yonnox, grateful for their sacrifice, took my father offworld to be treated and healed and—well, here we are.”

Interesting how closely that parallels your own story, huh?

Perry said in my ear. It was. Was that because it was actually true, or just intended to make me sympathetic to the guy?

I mean, my own history wouldn’t be that difficult to uncover, particularly with people like Kharsweil, the former Master, still out there peddling Guild information. “I… see. That’s interesting. It doesn’t really answer my question, though, does it?”

“Actually, I believe it does. He enjoyed a far better life than he would have otherwise, thanks to leaving Earth. Even if he hadn’t died in that jungle, and even if he’d survived the rest of his career in the army, he’d have faced a meager retirement on his pension, maybe managing something resembling a decent, dignified existence until his untimely death from cancer. Instead, he lived a long, healthy, and prosperous life, his genetic proclivity for cancer rendered irrelevant by the medical technology you and I both enjoy.” Marley leaned forward. “Don’t you think the good people of

Earth deserve the same thing?

And that they shouldn’t have to be one of the vanishingly few that just happen to stumble into it, like my father was?”

“Or like yourself, Van,” Lesthrix said. “Your own story begins with inheriting a legacy of stars, doesn’t it?”

“No, my own story begins with me being born healthy, having a reasonably happy childhood, and becoming a suitably happy adult making a decent living doing something I enjoyed. All of this,” I said, gesturing around, “was simply layered on top of that.”

“But you and I, we’re still very much the exceptions, aren’t we?”

Marley asked. “You can’t deny that you have opportunities out here, in known space, that the truly vast majority of humans on Earth will never even realize exist.”

“What are you proposing?” Torina asked, her tone dangerously bland. They were on her territory, both literally and in economic terms. “Very simple. We want to undertake a detailed, managed first contact with Earth to ease humanity into the reality of known space, with a view to establishing a relationship we can build upon.”

“Initially, we envision establishing a not-for-profit benevolent agency to manage the transfer of knowledge and technology to Earthly humans,”

Lesthrix added. “You are, however, a for-profit business consortium. While you will probably receive tax benefits from your entity of registration, the Seven Stars League, for setting up such a not-for-profit agency, it is by very definition not profitable,” Funboy stated, every syllable oozing derision and doubt. “I think he’s trying to say you guys wanna make money, and this ain’t gonna do it,” Icky put in. Marley gave Icky a nervous glance, though whether because of previous run-ins with Wu’tzur, or just her looming, pants-less bulk, I wasn’t sure. But it was interesting, and I filed it away for future reference. “We admit that our ultimate goal is to establish a mutually beneficial trade with Earth, yes,” he said. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees. “Mutually beneficial?

Well, Earth gets access to things like twist technology, computers, and AIs that make what’s currently state of the art there seem like counting on your fingers and toes, hyper-advanced medical tech—and you get, what, exactly?

What does Earth offer to you?”

“Going on nine billion new customers,” Marley replied. “Customers implies that they’re paying for your goods. What are they going to pay with?

I can’t imagine you’ll be interested in taking payment in dollars or euros or any Earth currency whatsoever. And I’ve done some homework—Earth doesn’t really have any commodities that aren’t available somewhere else, and probably more cheaply. So, again—what’s in this for you?”

“Ah, Van,” Marley said, smiling. “You’re very good at what you do. But we’re very good at what we do. Over time, those nine billion humans on Earth will be paying in bonds. And until they are—well, making money in the context of the Earthly economy has a value all its own.”

“It’s very complicated and forward-looking,” Lesthrix said, an implied so you wouldn’t understand hanging at the end. Torina leaned forward, her eyes bright with interest. It was, I knew, a look that meant someone was about to get flayed. “What does Equal Grasp do?

What are your products?

What do you make?”

Marley flashed his perfect grin. “Deals, Ms. Milon. We make deals.”

“THOSE GUYS PUT the easy into sleazy,” Perry said as we watched the Equal Grasp ship lift and start climbing toward orbit. I looked at him. “What does that even mean?”

“That sleazy comes easy to them—you know, it’s—oh, never mind.”

“Sometimes you try too hard, bird,” Icky said. I watched the ship until it vanished into high clouds, thinking back on our conversation with Marley and Lesthrix. Awkward, shitty joke aside, Perry was right. They were sleazy. They’d even offered to give preferential business status to the Fren-Okun trading company that, through a convoluted series of events, I’d ended up owning. It fell just short of being an actual bribe, which told me that these people were not to be underestimated. Still, I wanted some other opinions since I had a vested interest in Earth. I turned to Torina and her parents. “What do you think?”

“That they’re cunning, exploitative, and borderline dangerous,” her father replied. She and her mother both nodded. So did I. “Yeah, they remind me of currency traders. They don’t produce anything new, and they don’t generate any new wealth, they just latch onto some existing system and milk money out of it. They’re vampiric, they just happen to come out during the day as well.”

“That’s exactly what they are. Charitably, they could be called brokers, but all they propose to do is buy other people’s stuff, mark it up, then sell it on Earth,” Icky said. “And, in the process, presumably try to enrich themselves in the context of the Earthly economy,” Funboy added. I crossed my arms. “That worries me as much as anything else. Dollars might not be worth anything out here, but they have huge sway in Earthly affairs.” I looked at the others. “And that’s not going to end overnight, because I suspect they won’t let it. They’re going to manipulate Earth’s economic and political systems to give themselves every advantage they can—position themselves as the gatekeepers of outer space.”

“What do you want to do?” Torina asked. I looked at Perry. “I’ve got a legal issue, bird. It wouldn’t be illegal for them to first-contact themselves on Earth, right?”

“That wouldn’t be illegal, no. It’s too difficult to define when a civilization is ready for first contact, so it’s almost impossible to draft a law around it. But it would be illegal for them to interfere in Earth’s cultural development, extract raw materials, and a bunch of other things that are easier to define,” he replied. “So that’s what we’ve got standing between these guys and Earth.”

“For now. They say that they’re going to develop a plan that will address all those sundry laws, though, and if they succeed—well, then there’s not much that can stop them.”

“Okay, that’s the key point then, isn’t it?

By succeed, you mean they’d have to get the Guild to sign off on their plan as being adequate, right?”

“Yes—ish.”

I narrowed my eyes at Perry. “What does that mean?”

“The law, as worded, has a little ambiguity to it. None of the major powers of known space wanted to hand sole discretion for things like first contact to the Guild,” he replied. “Because the Eridani Federation, or Tau Ceti, or any other sovereign power wants to keep open the option to make first contact themselves,”

Kaye Milon said, adding a snort of disgust. Perry turned to her, his eyes gleaming. “That’s exactly what they’re angling for. A lot of the conventions and protocols that make up the body of interstellar law have a little fuzz around the edges, to leave some discretion for the big powers to do what they think is in their own best interests.”

“But Equal Grasp isn’t a sovereign power. They’re just a bunch of corporate scumbags,” Icky protested. I stiffened. “That’s true. But the Seven Stars League is a sovereign power. So if they can convince a magistrate in the League to approve their plan—”

“Then they’d have legal standing to move in on Earth,” Funboy said. “Shit. Yeah. They would.”

“Which brings us all the way around the block, and back to—what do you want to do, Van?” Perry asked. I looked to Torina’s parents. “Can you use your contacts, dig up everything available about the Equal Grasp?”

“Sure. Are you looking for anything in particular?” Kaye asked. “Probably, but I won’t know what it is until we find it, so—no, I guess, in the short term. Anything and everything you can find would be helpful.”

“And what about us?” Torina asked. “Well, what’s the conventional wisdom for most crimes—especially ones involving the corporate world?”

“Follow the money.”

“Exactly. And there’s no better place to start following the money than The Quiet Room, and our old friend Dayna Jasskin.”

BEFORE WE LEFT HELSO, though, we had dinner with the Milons, after which I took some time to show Torina’s father the imagery we’d taken of the Node of Memory on Trench Foot. He was an enthusiast when it came to antiquities, and there was nothing particularly secret about it, so I thought he’d enjoy seeing it. But as he studied the imagery Netty-P had gathered, a frown deepened on his face. I thought he might just be rapt with concentration, but it quickly became apparent it was more than that. “Is there something wrong?” I finally asked him. “You say that you found this on—Trench Foot, you call it, right?

A very wet world?”

“That’s right. And alternately very hot or cold, thanks to a wobble in the planet’s rotation from an big ol’ ancient impact. Why?”

He held up a finger, turned to a terminal on his desk, and did some searching. We waited, giving one another puzzled looks. It only took him a minute or so, then he sat back and gestured at the display. “Look familiar?”

I studied the image. It was the same brassy script, or at least close to it, set in a similar obsidian-like matrix. “Where’s this from?”

“The S’rall homeworld—a desert planet. I remembered this brass-and-black combination, just because it’s so striking. As far as the archaeologists who did this survey knew”—he waved a hand at the screen—“this example was in-situ, so native, probably representing a precursor race to the S’rall.”

“The S’rall homeworld has been dry and arid, generally desert conditions, for tens of thousands of years at least,” Perry said. “Exactly. So what is this example of it doing on a swamp world some, what, thirty light-years away?”

“Maybe these people, whoever they were, just got around,” Icky suggested. But Torina’s father shook his head. “I don’t think so. See how the one in my archives is weathered?

It’s slightly scoured, probably from being blasted with wind-driven sand. Now take a look at the one you found,” he said, pointing at my imagery. It was just the same, weathered by the same sort of scouring pattern. “On top of that, how come the one you found doesn’t have any of this mossy stuff, or any of the weathering you see on the rest of the ruins you examined?” he added. “Well, shit,” I said. “What’s on your mind, my dear?” Torina asked. “Back on Earth, historical places, whether they’re in movies, or set up as theme parks or whatever, often tend to be kinda over-the-top and too

clean. Restored castles are more stately, Victorian Christmas scenes are all cozy and snowy when everything should be grimed with coal-soot—”

“Bavarian Inns like the one in Frankenmuth are all beer and lederhosen and oompah music,” Perry said. “But no wear and tear.”

“Yeah, they are. They’re not wrong, only they’re sanitized, not actual history but someone’s engineered version of it. They’re not real, because reality doesn’t sell. I mean, who the hell wants to see a real Victorian Christmas scene?”

“You mean the filthy, gray snow, grinding poverty, and callously exploitive Industrial Revolution working conditions?” Netty asked. “Yeah, and the workhouses and debtor prisons and cholera. It just doesn’t make for a very merry sort of mood. So it gets all gussied up and made more appealing—it’s like Vikings wearing helmets with horns on them. If they ever did, it was exceedingly rare. But that’s how pop culture portrays them because that’s what most people expect.”

“What are Vikings?” Icky asked. “A northern, historical people on Earth who were superb at trade and warfare. They’re often shown as wearing helmets with elaborate horns and carrying huge weapons.”

“Huge weapons?

Like hammers?

So I’m a Viking?

What’s their stance on pants?”

“I’d venture to say a lot more pro-pants than you. They lived in a cold climate and spent time on the open ocean. A bit chilly on the more sensitive bits to go au natural.”

“Hmph. Well, I prefer being me, then.”

“We all do, Icky,” I said. “Anyway, as to this Node, it feels like the same thing—a fake bit of history.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far, Van,” Torina’s father said. “It looks real enough to me. But that doesn’t mean its location is the original one. Which raises the question—who moved it, and why?”

“Well, we can start with that in two places—Bester and Linulla. One for the data, and one for the craftwork.”

Torina gave a thoughtful frown. “If this Node of Memory was faked, and the ship that landed in Tony Burgess’s lap was a fake—”

“And that ship bears similarities to the one belonging to the Equal Grasp,” Netty-P said. “Which is why I’d advocate a word with The Quiet

Room first. This sort of deception, whatever its purpose and whoever’s behind it, would cost money, right?

To do something this elaborate?”

“And no one’s better at following the money than the bank,” Torina’s mother added. I had to agree. “Right you are. So, first stop is Dayna Jasskin. Let’s see who’s been spending their birthday money.”

10

WE WERE ATTACKED the moment we twisted into Procyon. Alright, not the very moment. When we twisted, we found ourselves alone at the twist point, aside from a lumbering freighter outbound toward us. Its transponder corresponded to a bulk carrier owned by an Eridani Federation company, but that didn’t mean much. Still, the thing was far too ponderous to pose a threat, so we paid it little attention and started our approach to The Quiet Room’s facilities in-system. It was a few minutes later that the big freighter suddenly split into several contacts, three of which immediately accelerated toward us with high-G burns. “Netty, what the hell’s going on—” I started as the threat alarm sounded, but she cut me off. “Incoming ordnance—twelve missiles.”

“Fired by who?”

“Two class 11s, converted fast freighters, and a class 12 destroyer. They must have been powered down and latched right onto that freighter, so they appeared as a single scanner return.”

I cursed and turned the Fafnir into the oncoming threat. We’d only had passive scanner returns to go from, because we didn’t bother lighting up every ship that came near us with active scanners. That might have to change because active scanners would have shown us that the freighter wasn’t one contact but several jammed together. Only that was irrelevant, because my immediate concern was combat. We spent the next few minutes suiting up and depressurizing the ship, Torina bringing the weapons online, Icky hurrying back to her damage-control station just outside the engineering bay, Perry working on a tactical analysis, and Funboy readying his medical gear in case anyone got injured. It all happened with smooth, practiced efficiency, but it still cost us precious time. “Torina, are you going to be able to take out all those missiles?” I asked her, even as she opened fire with the lasers. “I’m going to say no, not likely. Probabilities say one or two are going to get close enough to do some damage.” Her tone was flat and matter-of-fact, her attention focused on her fire-control panel. I glanced back at Zeno’s empty station. Technically, Torina didn’t need any help. Gerhardt had given us a slick fire control system, which quite ably assisted her in engaging targets she selected. But the weapons worked more effectively when backed by instinct, which was the value Zeno had brought to a battle—Torina could only handle so much herself. But Zeno wasn’t here. I turned to Netty-P. “Can you help Torina out?”

“On it. Torina, I have control of laser-B battery.”

“You have control of laser-B battery,” Torina confirmed. We started taking laser fire ourselves. With Netty’s and Perry’s help, I slewed and jinked the Fafnir, taking advantage of the alien-grav plating to perform the maneuvers faster than thrusters alone would allow. The result was a serious targeting problem for our opponents, since we were able to change the size and shape of our maneuver envelope in unpredictable ways. We took a couple of hits, but neither were serious. We loosed our own missiles, firing them at a closer range so they could burn their fuel more prodigiously and twist, turn, and dodge harder. It was an idea cooked up by Perry, and it seemed to be working. “Two missiles still inbound”, Torina said, then she and Netty-P switched their fire to the enemy ships. The point-defenses would have to take care of the remaining ordnance because we needed to start landing hits of our own on the bad guys. A thrum rippled through the Fafnir as the point-defense batteries started shooting, pouring slugs into space and trying to take out the two remaining missiles. One abruptly came apart in a cloud of debris, but the other raced on, exploding about five klicks to starboard and high. After a flash, a series of loud bangs sounded as shrapnel slammed into the Fafnir. REAB modules blew, their blasts shoving back against the impacts and reducing their kinetic energy. We still took a hit that punched through the ship somewhere just aft of the cockpit. I glanced at the status board, but nothing had gone red, or even yellow, so I turned my attention back to the onrushing ships that were now coming within range of our deadly, short-range weapons like the particle beam, the plasma cannon, and the mass drivers. Had this been the Fafnir of even a year ago, we’d have been in serious trouble. The other three ships between them had more than twice the Fafnir’s firepower at long range. But with her progressive upgrades, like the fearsome plasma-burst cannon, improved fire control, and a more powerful drive?

We were a problem. Add the alien grav-plating, and we were now a match for these ships, even at close range. “Take the class 12, if you please. Hammer down,” I ordered. Instantly, Torina and Netty-P lashed the 12, then began alternating fire onto one of the class 11s. The punishment quickly began to tell, particularly on that 11, as it sloughed debris and vented gasses in a shimmering, tumbling trail. “We’ve got venting, boss,” Netty reported. “That means it’s working. Nice shooting. Double down, Torina, Netty-P.”

As they responded, I tapped at the console, activating thrusters, while Netty augmented my maneuvers with variations in the power to the grav plates. The resulting surges in thrust, combined with unexpected changes in the Fafnir’s effective mass, sent about half of the incoming fire flashing and snapping past us. We did take hits—more of the REAB modules blew, more shrapnel, and a couple of mass-driver rounds slammed into and through us, and systems started to flash yellow, then red. A klaxon brayed. Sparks flashed. The situation was now in doubt. Which was when our third hidden ace dropped out of our sleeve. Icky and Funboy had developed and practiced tight damage-control procedures, and as soon as we started taking hits, they started offsetting their effects in turn. Aided by Waldo—now free of Gorix and restored to his usual dumb competence—and EVAN on the ship’s exterior, they patched, rewired,

bypassed, extinguished, and triaged the Fafnir’s hurts. Systems that had gone red returned to yellow, functional if faltering, and yellows even flicked back to green. The fact was that a ship could take a fair bit of punishment if none of the damage hit something critical, like drive, power plant—or crew, of course. And all of it happened with minimal communication—just periodic terse questions and statements, the essential things being said in a minimum of words and with clipped, efficient professionalism. Even Perry remained silent, just keeping an eye on the big picture. He maintained situational awareness. Not just on the immediate battlespace, but on the void around us, seeking other threats or opportunities and freeing me to focus on fighting the battle. I was damned proud, and would have been even prouder if I hadn’t been quite so worried about taking a hypervelocity mass-driver round to the face. As we raced toward our point of closest approach to our foes, something occurred to me. “Netty, do we have any way of stopping them from infecting us with that damned virus, like the Object 6?

Just in case these assholes have that weapon?”

“I can partition the Fafnir’s essential systems so that an infection in any of them won’t be able to spread to the others. It’s going to degrade our effectiveness, though, particularly in fire control.”

“Do it. Torina, Netty-P, do your best with your local fire control.”

Without the Fafnir’s centralized fire control, we lost the ability to coordinate the weapons. Torina and Netty-P responded by pouring all of our fire into the already-stricken class 11.

It rapidly came apart, ship quickly becoming cloud of debris. But we took hits right back. Things slammed into the Fafnir, we lost a scanner array, the Frankie took a damaging hit in her bay. In a shuddering strike, the primary air handler went dark, throwing us onto backup scrubbers, then a power-cell exploded, starting a fire that Funboy and Waldo immediately set to work putting out. Icky and Torina took wounds from shrapnel, but both waved off any concern from me or Funboy. They fought on, as did everyone else. Unfortunately, one of our two laser batteries had gone completely dark, either damaged beyond our ability to repair it—or it was simply cooked into a brick. What remained of the battered 11 sailed on toward the galactic rim, but the 12 and the other 11 burned hard to come after us. Worse, the freighter that had been concealing our attackers fired a spread of missiles at us. We could shoot them to scrap, but there were enough that it would clock our point-defense batteries, leaving us far too vulnerable to another massed attack. I glanced at the overlay. I wanted to talk to Torina, to see her wound and if she was bullshitting me about how bad it was, but I didn’t. The battle wasn’t over yet. “Perry, some options, please.”

“Run, and keep running. Those assholes are burning like crazy to come about, and even if they’ll have trouble catching us, any missiles they fire won’t.”

I flicked my attention to the weapons status. “And we’ll have no point defense.”

“Bingo. Outward is probably our best bet. With luck, we’ll be able to get inside the envelope of their planetary defenses before we gotta worry about a round two—because I don’t think a round two is going to go in our favor.”

“How much not in our favor.”

“Depending on how badly we’ve damaged them, we’ll be moderately to heavily outmatched. No point-defenses and down one laser battery really cramps our style.”

“Netty, any sign of Calamity?”

“None,” she replied. “If they possess the weapon, they either never used it, or it wasn’t effective.”

“Small miracles,” I muttered, then finally spared a moment for Torina. “Babe?” I asked, loading that word with questions. She grimaced back at me through her visor. “Fine. I wasn’t planning on using this leg for walking. Or jumping. Or anything else,” she replied, her voice clipped. But she managed a taut smile while saying it and seemed more angry than wounded. Anger like that was useful. Sometimes. “Icky?

Status, please?”

“Funboy says I’ll live. Gotta be honest, though—getting a little tired of being the bullet sponge of this crew. How come I’m the one who takes most of the hits, and most of the serious ones?”

“So you’d prefer that the rest of us start taking the serious hits instead?”

“Well, duh.”

I had to chuckle, but it was short-lived “Netty, try and get Dayna on the comm. Let’s see if she can send any help.”

We waited, burning hard for the planet called Outward, but not so hard that we’d overshoot and sail off into space again. Netty had to calculate a trajectory that would take us as far as possible from our attackers but would still allow us to brake and fall into orbit around the planet. That meant our pursuers, assuming they were content with only one more pass, only had to keep accelerating so they’d overtake us before we were inside Outward’s protective envelope. We had few other options, though, since I didn’t fancy going another full round with those two ships without help, and I wanted to get the Fafnir into a safe orbit so we could perform some repairs. The trouble was that while we’d done some significant damage to the class 12, its companion 11 was still pretty much untouched. We only had so much fire to spread around. It all came down to timing, driven by the remorseless physics of space flight. Our grav plating let us play around a little, turning what was usually more or less a constant—mass—into something more variable. But that only went so far, and I had no reason to doubt Netty’s math. If we wanted to make orbit, we were going to take one more pass from the bad guys. Dayna came on the comm. “Van, I gather you received a rather hot reception. Are you alright?”

“For the moment, yeah. But things are looking tight for us being able to get away—” I glanced at Torina, who was being patched up by Funboy. Netty-P kept up a steady fire with our remaining laser, plucking the missiles fired by the freighter out of space one by one. “—without having to do some more fighting,” I went on. “If you could help us avoid having to do that, I’ll happily open a new Christmas account with you.”

Dayna nodded. “Your friend Dugrop’che was here and is just breaking orbit. I’ve alerted him, and he’s coming to your aid. I’ve also spoken to another ship close enough to help you, and they’re diverting.”

I looked at the tactical overlay. Sure enough, Dugrop’che, a Peacemaker we’d worked with on many occasions, was accelerating away from Outward on a long tongue of drive plasma. Since we were on converging courses, he could power right past us and straight at our pursuers in a head-on run, just as we’d done to them earlier. It was kind of like medieval

knights jousting. But Dugrop’che’s ship was considerably smaller and more lightly armed than the Fafnir, so it was going to be risky for him. But then what must have been the other ship Dayna had mentioned came onto the overlay, heading our way. I narrowed my eyes at its transponder data—

“That’s—Fren-Okun?

A freighter?” I scowled. “I’m glad for the help, but—it’s a freighter.”

“Van, the Fren are calling us,” Netty said. “Okay, put ’em on, let’s see what they’ve got.”

The display lit up with… an eye. I frowned back at it. “Uh, hello?”

The eye blinked, then pulled back, revealing the face of a Fren male. I tried not to sigh. My experience with Fren, particularly males, had been mixed. Frankly, a lot of them tended to be morons. The females were a different story, generally being more on the ball. As they aged, though, they tended to go one of two ways—descending into a senile fugue obsessed with mucosal secretions, or becoming shrewd, whip-smart masters of manipulation. “Dayna says you need help,” the Fren said. “We do. Any assistance you can offer would be—”

“Peacemaker needs our help!

Hah!

Who’s the boss now, eh?”

I fixed a smile on my face. “Look, if you can do anything to—”

“Hah!

Hah-hah!

Say it!

Say the mighty Peacemaker needs our—”

“Moist!

”

The Fren’s eyes bugged out, then it abruptly vanished from the display. For a moment, I was left staring at a bulkhead. “Moist!

Moist!

”

An elderly Fren woman tottered across the display and vanished, apparently chasing after the male. Again, I glared at a bulkhead. I muttered a curse and was about to cut the comm when another Fren appeared—this one a clear-eyed female of middle years. “Sorry about that, Peacemaker. I’m Luruket Klar, Master of this tub, the Clever Ruse. My boneheaded nephews had the watch on the bridge. I sent my mother to chase them off, keep them out of the way. What can we do—”

“Moist!”

Two male Fren rushed by in the background, their old crone of a grandmother hot on their heels. “Sorry, what can we do—”

Another “Moist!” rose in the distance. “—for you?”

I explained the situation. “I know you’re a freighter, but if there’s anything you can do—”

“Hah!”

I sank back. Shit. Not her too—

“A freighter, he says,” she went on, then tapped at some offscreen controls. “Van, that Fren ship just activated a military grade fire control system. I’m counting two laser batteries and a rotary missile launcher extending from her holds,” Netty said. “Make that three batteries. That ship is dangerous.”

I smiled. “Okay, so you’re not a freighter. Which kinda makes your ship’s name a bit on the nose, doesn’t it?”

“I have an overdeveloped sense of irony. And, actually, we are a freighter. We specialize in carrying small-volume, high-value cargoes—

notably bonds, and lots of ’em, for The Quiet Room. That entails a certain amount of risk, as you’ll appreciate,” the Fren said, baring her teeth in a feral leer I assumed was supposed to be a smile. “Ah, okay. You’re an armored truck that carries money between banks.”

“We… are, although The Quiet Room has its own very well-armed ships to carry official money around. We carry freight that’s not so… official. And before you ask, no, I have no idea where the money goes after I deliver it, nor do I really care.”

“I wasn’t going to ask. Anyway, if you can help dissuade the two ships chasing us, we’d be much obliged.”

“How much obliged?”

“Saw that coming,” Perry muttered. The Fren shrugged. “It’s what I like to call the thermodynamics of money.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry—”

“Wealth always flows from those who have it and want something, to those who want it and have something.”

“Ah. Okay, how much?”

“Ten thousand bonds.”

Torina leaned into the conversation. “Five thousand, and we’ll owe you a favor.”

“No free passes on major crimes, though,” I put in. The Fren leered again. “I like bargaining with other females. Alright, you’ve got—” she said, then abruptly stopped and stepped aside as shrieking figures blurred past her. “Moist!

”

“—yourselves a deal.”

TORINA AND NETTY-P managed to shoot down all but two of the missiles launched by the freighter, while Dugrop’che took out one with an amazing, long-ranged laser shot whose beam passed uncomfortably close to the Fafnir. Our point defenses took out the last one, leaving one of the batteries dry of ammo and the other with about fifty rounds. I winced at Dugrop’che’s image on the display as he fired and blew apart the incoming missile. “I think you singed my nose hairs, friend. Still, damned good shooting.”

He signaled humor in his usual way, by turning a shade of blue. “It was all skill, not just dumb luck at all.”

As the Fren ship and Dugrop’che raced to our rescue, the freighter decided to bug out and twist away, but not before Netty had recorded as detailed a signature from it as possible. If we saw it again, we would know. As for the two ships chasing us, their die was cast. Even if they tried to reverse course, they’d never bleed off velocity fast enough to avoid Dugrop’che and the Fren. We were treated to a ringside seat of the resulting battle that raged briefly in our wake. Both of our attackers were pummeled into glowing scrap, particularly by the fearsome firepower of the Fren ship, which engaged in a kind of naval assault that left nothing to chance. In thirty seconds, the Fren emptied their arsenal. “Now that is sexy,” Perry remarked. “More than an ankle bite from fresh teeth,” Icky breathed. “I—fresh?

Disregard, it’s better if we just admire that asskicking. Oh, shit—guess they had one left in the chamber,” I said as a final missile

lanced out into the black. The enemy wasn’t entirely done, answering the barrage with a high-dollar ship-to-ship missile nearly three meters long. It hit the Fren—and hard—but it was too little, too late. “Dud,” Icky said. “Huh.” I watched as the missile exited the Fren ship at a modest velocity, its warhead intact. The kinetic impact still did a fair bit of damage, though, so after some more drive burns and spaceflight ballet, we rendezvoused with the Fren to make sure they were okay. “Angry, and out of ammo,” Luruket Klar complained. “But intact,” I countered. “True. Are you offering assistance?”

“We are. Medical, then engineering. Prepare for company after we do some hull work. Fafnir out.”

While Icky and Torina worked at patching the holes so we could repressurize the Fafnir, I boarded the Clever Ruse, Funboy in tow to help treat a couple of casualties. Luruket met us just inside the airlock. “You know, Peacemaker, it’s going to cost a lot more than five-K bonds to fix that damage,” she said, leading us to the impact point and showing us the shattered hull plating and damaged structural members. “Ouch. Yeah, I see your point. Tell you what—thanks to a chain of events even I still don’t understand, I own a Fren shipping company.”

“You—what?”

“Again, chain of events, don’t really understand it. Tell you what, though. You submit an estimate for these repairs to them, I’ll approve it, and then they’ll reimburse you for the cost of repairing this”—I waved a hand at the tangled mass of alloy, cables, and conduits—“probably in installments, but I’ll let you work out the details with them.”

Luruket leered at me. “I notice you said to submit an estimate, not an invoice.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you—”

She coughed a laugh. “Why not?

I sure as hell wouldn’t trust me. But don’t worry about it. I can tell you’re sharp, and I respect you a hell of a lot more for that estimate versus invoice thing—”

“We have saved you, Peacemaker!

You owe us now!”

“Yes, you owe us big time!”

We turned toward the speakers, a pair of male Fren—

Who were slathered in iridescent, mucosal goo. Funboy gasped, then took an involuntary step backward, straight into the damaged section of the ship. This was despite him being securely and hermetically sealed inside his b-suit. I had to punch out a hand and grab him before he toppled into jagged shards of hull. Luruket uttered the Fren version of a sigh. “Mother, your nephews are in the starboard main corridor, and I think they’re starting to dry out. Their hide could split at any moment.”

“Moist!

”

The two slimy Fren males yipped and whirled away, flinging droplets of… fluid. I finished righting Funboy and looked at Lureket. “I’ve met older Fren women who are, um, really sharp. Is your mother—?”

“No, unfortunately. She really has passed into the”—the translator struggled a bit with the next word, before settling on one—“senility, which sadly means I probably will, too.”

That brought me up short. “I’m sorry. Truly.”

She offered a careless wave. “It’s why I fly large sums of money around known space, drink heavily, and pick fights in bars. One way or another, I’m going out on my own terms.”

I grunted at the sheer bravado—and fatalism—of the small, intense Fren before me. Years earlier, Petyr Groshenko told me one of my grandfather’s biggest regrets was that he sort of trailed off—instead of going out in a blaze of glory. I knew the reason why Gramps chose that path, but here, now, was a person writing her own story, page by page. I both admired and feared that kind of valor, because it made me confront Zeno’s death, yet again. No one could say she died without purpose. Without intent. Without value. Once again, I cast my thoughts among the stars, wondering if she could ever know how much we missed her. Still. 11

“OH DEAR. I may never exit this suit again,” Funboy said. He was staring with morose horror at a smear of the Fren goo—a viscous silvery streak across his arm, which had touched a bulkhead decorated by the oozing matron. I smiled and shook my head as we followed Luruket to the Clever Ruse’s bridge. “I went with my grandfather once to help a neighbor’s cow deliver its calf. The vet got stuck in a ditch, so Gramps was all that was available.”

“I didn’t know your grandfather was—” Funboy tried scraping his sleeve against a conduit, but all it did was smear the stuff into a resinous streak. “Oh dear.” He blinked up at me. “That your grandfather was a physician.”

“He wasn’t. But he had a bunch of training in first aid and basic trauma medicine, thanks to his military career—or careers, I should say, not that I knew at the time that he was a spaceman. Anyway, I got to watch and, uh, help, which mostly meant staying out of the way. There was all sorts of slime and goo when the calf finally came.”

“And this is supposed to make me feel better, how?”

“I—huh. Actually, I forget how, or even if it was. Still, cool story, eh?” I grinned. “No. No it wasn’t.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll decontaminate you when we get back to the Fafnir.”

Funboy looked despondently at his arm. “Can you decontaminate my memories as well so I don’t have to recall… this?”

We reached the bridge. It was quite tidy, being wholly free of gelatinous residue—leading me to suspect that Luruket probably didn’t let her mother into it. I noticed that most of the systems were running in semi-autonomous mode, suggesting that the ship was largely automated so it could be controlled by one person, much as the Iowa used to be before our Conoku crew came along. I noted this to Luruket. “My nephews are quite adept at maintaining and repairing the ship. Like most Fren males, they tend to be extremely knowledgeable about whatever interests them, and utter imbeciles when it comes to anything else. But it means I can mostly fly her myself.”

I glanced around. “So it’s you, your nephews, and your mother. That’s it, the whole crew?

How would you handle being boarded?”

Luruket, her eyes still on me, simply said, “Ship-wide security, one two three four.”

All around us, weapon turrets seemed to pop out of every available space. In an instant, I found myself at the convergence of at least nine auto guns, probably loaded with frangible slugs to minimize damage to the ship itself. Funboy froze. “Oh dear.”

I flicked my eyes back and forth. “Uh—if I, you know, move, am I going to be turned to mush?”

“Nope. That’s to make the point. And if that’s not enough, there’s a second command that I won’t, for obvious reasons, give out loud. And if the ship senses that I’ve ceased living, then it proceeds as though that second command has been given.”

“What about your mother and nephews?”

“The system is trained to avoid shooting at my mother.”

“Not your nephews?”

“They tried to mutiny once. They know better, now.”

“Aren’t you worried they’ll just try to deactivate it?

You just said they are competent engineers,” Funboy said. “I’ve told them that the system will immediately activate if there’s any attempt made to take it offline. Like I said, they know better than to try.”

I glanced at what felt like an artillery regiment’s worth of barrels pointed at me. “I’ll bet they do.”

Luruket deactivated the system, and the turrets vanished in a smooth whisper. “Anyway, Peacemaker, since I’ve decided you’re not a complete asshole, I figured I’d share a thing or two with you that I learned about those ships that attacked you. Thanks to the unique relationship I have with The Quiet Room and the work I do for them, they’ve enabled me to obtain some hardware normally reserved for more, ah, specialized users. That includes some sophisticated comms equipment. I was able to record this from those ships.”

She tapped at a console, then a voice spoke up, tinny and distorted, probably because they were using analog comms as a Calamity precaution. Snyder’s ship is down. We’re pursuing the target and should have it back in range in about thirty minutes. A second voice replied. Make this work, Gromen. This comes right from the Satrap’s people. The target has to be taken out before he can do any more damage than he already has. “There’s not much more,” Luruket said. “They weren’t exactly observing a comms blackout, obviously, but they kept their traffic to a minimum.”

I frowned. “Satrap?

I’ve only heard that term used once, in the Seven Stars League.”

“But the Satrap was deposed, and a new provisional democratic government put in place instead,” Funboy noted. “Yeah, I know.” I activated my comm, called Perry, and had Luruket send the recording to him. “What do you think?” I asked him. “That someone or something calling themselves a Satrap is still out there somewhere. Makes me suspect the old League government never really went away—it just went underground,” he replied. “Do we have any intel to support that?”

“While we’ve been talking, I’ve been going over all the available intel, from the Guild, from the GKU databases I can access, and from what Unity has shared with the Guild. A shadow government made up of the old guard, as it were, actually explains and connects a bunch of things that just looked like isolated data points.”

“Okay, pass all of this on to Gerhardt. Use a copying machine if you have to, but get it there.”

“Will do. There’s one other thing. I heard some peculiar noise in the background of that comm. It took me a while to tease it out from regular cosmic background noise, that sort of thing, but it seems to be resulting from a minute power fluctuation in their transmitter output.”

“Caused by what?”

“Calamity.”

I stared at my comm. “Calamity?

So it’s reached the League?

And—

wait, if those ships were infected with it, why were they even operational?”

“Now that’s a very good question, isn’t it?”

“Shit. If they’re somehow immune to Calamity—”

My mind started to race. As far as was known, there were no outbreaks of Calamity in the League—at least not yet. So either there was an outbreak that hadn’t yet been reported, or these guys had picked up Calamity somewhere else. But their ships were working just fine, something I could attest to having been on the receiving end of their attacks. And if Perry had detected Calamity running in the background of their comm message, it must mean that their comm system was infected, at the very least. But it was working regardless. So they were somehow immune?

All of the parts started swirling around me. Gauss. The Enhancement Empire. Dohlennz, who’d been playing on both sides. Kharsweil, who was Gauss’s man—and still out there. The Seven Stars League, which apparently still had a secretive pseudo-government loyal to the old Satrapy in place, who were probably the ones behind facilitating Gauss’s trial in the League, which led to his acquittal, which brought us back to Gauss, and the Enhancement Empire, and Dohlennz—

“Perry, take the Frankie and go check out the wreckage of those ships. See if you can pry out anything that might hint at some sort of immunity to Calamity. But be damned careful. Maybe take Torina with you—”

“Van, those ships are nothing but collections of parts flying in a ragged sort of formation. There’s nothing to try prying anything from,” Perry replied. “Do it anyway. Maybe we’ll get lucky. I’ll have Dugrop’che stay with you guys for cover, while the rest of us carry on with the Fafnir to talk to Dayna. Since we’ve come this far, I want to close the loop as much as I can on the Equal Grasp—who, I might add, also seem to be connected to the Seven Stars League.” I paused, then added something that felt unnatural—

but necessary. “I’m issuing an additional order for this foray.”

“Name it, boss.”

“A kill order.”

“A kill… order?

For whom?” Perry asked slowly. “Everyone and anyone who poses a threat to you, Torina, or our collected assets. No warnings, no disabling shots. Kill orders, Perry.”

“Understood. I have a question.”

“Ask it.”

“Why now?

Why here?”

“Until now, I’ve always considered our success an opportunity. With Calamity, it’s a necessity. There’s no path forward that doesn’t kill billions. And not to be a hardass, but not on my watch. If we turn some villains into vapor, so be it.” I thought of Torina again, and my anger morphed into something far more dangerous. “Our future is… correct. It’s just. And that means I’m done compromising.”

Perry laughed, low and cheerless. “About time you toughened up, boss. I’m tired of being so forgiving.”

Torina, who’d been listening in, spoke up. “I appreciate the protection, babe. We’ll be eyes open every step.”

“And guns on auto. You hear me, dear?

Spare nothing. Things are about to get… spicier.”

Torina’s laugh rang over the comms. “I’ll plan accordingly. And Van?”

“Yes?”

“You don’t have my permission to die.” Her tone was iron and silk, all at once. “Understood, dear. The feeling is mutual.”

OUR CONVERSATION with Dayna Jasskin revealed the Equal Grasp was as much an enigma to The Quiet Room as everyone else. She gave us her thoughts in typical thorough fashion. After all, Dayna was a banker. She just happened to work in space. “They’re relatively new, and privately owned, which limits the amount of information they must disclose to… anyone, really. And they have accounts with us, but they’re not very active. And whatever activity there is reveals very little. Money in, money out, all of the transactions only

involving their own financial arm, no odd payments to anyone, and all sums of money that are neither too large nor too small to seem suspicious.”

“It’s a fiction,” I replied. “They’re trying to be… gray. Bland. Unnoticed.”

She smiled, if only just. “From a financial perspective, they’re punishingly dull. Given time, our corporate intelligence people will probably be able to suss out more about them, but like I said, they’re pretty new. There simply isn’t much history available.”

“You have corporate intelligence people?”

“Of course. A lot of them are retired Guild, in fact. Which reminds me

—assuming that we all survive the Calamity calamity, and you decide to hang up your badge and want some work, just let me know.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.”

Dayna gave me a measured look. “Please do. You won’t always be so keen to—”

“Throw myself into harm’s way?”

“Exactly.”

Torina and Perry joined us at The Quiet Room’s complex a few hours later. As Perry predicted, there was nothing usable in what remained of any of the ships that had attacked us. “If we’d known at the time, I’d have tried to figure out a way to blow them up a little less,” I said, giving a resigned sigh as we returned to the Fafnir. “Might be a blessing in disguise, though. If we’d have boarded one of those ships, and it had Calamity aboard—” Perry said. “We might have been infected. But we weren’t, which means we keep on pushing. If the League has found a protocol for immunity, then we need it yesterday,” I said. “That may explain why they’re attempting to weaponize it in the form of a beam weapon. They know their ships are immune to it,” Funboy reasoned. “Yeah. It may also mean that they got the immunity to it from Gauss. Hell, he probably intended for that corrupt Old Guard to be his new powerbase.”

Perry dipped his beak in agreement as we entered the Fafnir. “Actually, that makes perfect sense. Gauss releases Calamity, it ravages known space, but the League’s Old Guard is immune. They become his new powerbase,

retake control of the League, then use that as a springboard to start seizing control of more and more of known space while it wallows in the grip of Calamity.”

I stopped. “That’s it. That was Gauss’s plan. His safe space, as we’ve been calling it, has been right in front of us the whole time. It’s the League, or the hidden part of it called the Old Guard. He was going to take over known space, or as much of it as he could manage.”

“And he had the perfect way of maintaining control—Calamity,”

Funboy said. “He could dispense immunity to it to those who fell into line, and if anyone tried to oppose him—”

“He could take it away again.” I could only shake my head. “Holy shit. It’s… brilliant. Evil as evil can be, but brilliant.”

“And if Zeno hadn’t—I mean, if Gauss had fled from Adoration, he might have gotten away with it, too,” Torina added. “I guess we’re those meddling kids, huh?” Perry said. Torina stared. “Let me guess. Another of those stupid movie references.”

“Actually, a TV show,” I said. Perry beamed. “Ruh-roh, Raggy.”

Torina sighed. “I’ll just smile and nod now, like I usually do.”

Icky, who’d been rewiring a conduit damaged in the battle, popped her head into the corridor behind the galley where we’d been talking. “You guys make it sound like the threat’s over.”

“Well, it’s not over, but with Gauss out of the picture… ” I said, but trailed off. Icky gave a knowing nod. “Right?

Maybe Gauss won’t be the one at the top, but what about someone else?

What about Kharsweil?

Or Dohlennz?

Either one of them could just step right into Gauss’s shoes, huh?”

“Shit. For that matter, any tinpot dictator could pop up from the Old Guard and take Gauss’s place—or maybe they already have,” I said, still thinking aloud. I got several frowns at that. “What do you mean?” Torina asked me. I carried on into the galley. “You guys heard all about Matterforge, the… the whatever it is, that lives on the star in the Starsmith system, when I explained it to Gerhardt. It said that Calamity wasn’t actually a virus or a weapon, it was only behaving as one, at least from our perspective. It’s actually an alien AI that was intended to merge organic and inorganic life. And later, Linulla called to say that he and Viktor, the Body Thief, had come to believe that Gauss had somehow negotiated with Calamity to do what it’s doing.”

I turned to the others. “Why was Gauss ever allowed to go free?”

“Because he managed to get off the charges against him,” Torina said as we entered the galley. “Yeah, I know that. But remember what Carefully Indulgent, B’s Surtsi friend, told us?

That the virus that had infected Gauss, the one that became Calamity, was pernicious and dangerous?

You’d have thought that would have been enough to hold him in custody even if he hadn’t been found guilty.”

“Well, he was tried and sentenced under the authority of the Seven Stars League. They’re the ones that ultimately released him,” Perry said. “Which was probably the point all along. Somebody pulled the right strings to get Gauss’s trial moved to the League, just so they could get this outcome. Probably not Gauss himself, but parties loyal to him.”

“Which is why the whole plan was put in place by the GKU to kill him, since they assumed he was going to get off,” Netty added. “Exactly. Someone has been fiddling with all of this behind the scenes since the very beginning, and at the highest levels of every organization involved. That includes the Guild and the GKU. I mean, why didn’t we just obliterate Gauss before he could leave League space?”

“Because that would have been illegal?

You know, murder?

Not to mention something the League could have interpreted as an act of war?”

Perry said. “But Gerhardt said that the GKU was planning to go to war with the League anyway. And yes, it would have been murder, but since when does the GKU really care about that?

They exist to do things that the Guild can’t or won’t do, remember?

That kinda sounds like, we’ll commit murders if we think it serves the greater good.”

“Ah, yes, the greater good. The thing that justifies doing nearly anything,” Torina muttered. “So, what, are you saying that Gerhardt’s corrupt after all?

And Alic?

And the new Schegith Master?” Funboy asked, naked derision in his words. I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so. I think Gerhardt’s been trying to move on the League for a while now, but something is stopping him.”

“What?

What are you getting at, Van?”

I stared at the display over the galley table. It was just displaying a languidly shifting abstract geometric pattern, basically an eye-pleasing screensaver. “I think there’s something even bigger than Gauss going on here. Something bigger than corruption in the League. Something that’s manipulating Gauss, the League, even the GKU and the Guild.”

I turned to the others. “Gauss thought he was negotiating with Calamity. But what if he was working for it?

What if Calamity has been around known space for a lot longer than we’ve realized?

If it inserted itself into events long ago, and has been manipulating them ever since?”

“So we’re only just detecting it now?” Icky asked. “But how?

Where could it have been hiding this whole time?

It’s a computer program, so it must have been running somewhere, right?”

“Not to mention that it’s a virus,” Funboy said. “We presumably would have seen its effects.”

But I tapped my chin and frowned. “Only if it chose to behave as a virus. Remember, Matterforge, Linulla and Viktor told us that it’s not, not really.”

“So that brings us back to where it was hiding this whole time. Can something that sophisticated just sit on a computer network somewhere without being detected?” Torina asked. “Potentially. If we’re assuming it’s a synthetic alien intelligence as powerful and adaptable as all that, it probably could conceal itself,” Perry replied. “Which is all very interesting, but it’s not the most immediate question we need to answer.”

“Then what is?” Torina asked. “Remember my question to Gerhardt, the one that he said I would get answered?

Well, the time has come for that answer. Because if something is manipulating the Guild and the GKU, and it’s not the Masters, or the senior GKU leadership like Valint and my mother—then I need to know who. Because our existence depends on it.”

“You’re saying we all die from this, boss?” Icky asked. I shook my head, fighting a grim vision of one potential future. “Sort of. Millions will die, but billions will lose something just as important.”

Torina took my hand, her eyes bright with worry. “What?”

“Free will. And I, for one, refuse to live as a slave.”

I’D INTENDED our next stop to be Anvil Dark, to pin down Gerhardt once and for all about what was really going on behind the scenes of the Guild and the GKU. If there was something influencing and shaping the actions of both groups, then they were influencing and shaping mine—and if that was the case, I wanted to know about it. For one, I was starting to look over my shoulder, wondering if the Guild or the Knights might suddenly not be there when I expected or needed them. For another, my crew and I had done damned good work for the Guild. We got results, and that meant we deserved to know the truth. Or at least more of the truth. But Gerhardt wasn’t on Anvil Dark. I’d contacted Lunzy but had gotten put through to Max, who informed me that only two of the Masters were currently on Anvil Dark. Neither of them were Volffin or Alic, the only other two I really trusted, so I asked Max to pass on my urgent request for a meeting to them and Gerhardt, then decided to change tack. I spoke aloud to the crew as we settled into the cockpit to go—

somewhere. “Our next step needs to be tracking down Kharsweil, Dohlennz, or ideally both. Not only are both fugitive assholes who need to be rounded up, but both have information we need. The question is, where to start looking?”

“The One-Eyed Yak,” Perry said. “The One-Eyed Yak?”

“I think that’s what I said. I felt my beak moving, yanno—”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why, of all the possible places in and beyond known space, are you suggesting The One-Eyed Yak?” I asked him. “Because Gabriella Santorelli was there when she filed her last report with Guild intel. And she’s been assigned to Kharsweil, and tracking him down.”

“So why don’t we just get word to her?

Why bother making the trip all the way to the Torus if she hasn’t learned anything useful?” Torina asked. “Or if it turns out she’s not even still there?” Icky added. “Because, according to the note appended to her intel file, she is on extended vacation.”

“Which is code for working undercover. Essie and I, when we were partnered, were sometimes also on extended vacation. It’s cover for why the

individuals in question cannot be reached,” Funboy said. “You know, Essie and Funboy would have made a great TV show back in the seventies on Earth,” Perry said, then changed his voice to overly dramatic announcer guy. “This week’s episode— Oh Dear, What A Germ-Ridden Way to Die.” He lifted a wing, then spread his feathers. “I could see it slotted right between Mannix and Columbo.”

“Mannix and Columbo were on different networks,” Netty said, but I cut it off before the conversation devolved into a debate about old Earthly cop shows. “Can we please get back to Gabriella?

Perry, when did she file her last report from The One-Eyed Yak?”

“Last registered message was two days ago, and there’s not much to it due to our limitations.”

“How come I was never informed?

An intel report from someone working Kharsweil’s case would be something I should read,” I protested. But Perry was unfazed. “It’s there, Van, the nineteenth item on your briefing list—so, right underneath the other eighteen items, all of which are things you insisted on being kept updated on. That you didn’t read. Um, boss.”

My scowl turned to chagrin. “See that it doesn’t happen again, or I’ll—”

“Call HR?” he offered. “Yes. There will be reports. And meetings,” I said with as much gravitas as I could muster. “If you propose sensitivity training, I’m joining the bad guys.”

“I’m not that cruel,” I admitted, turning to the instruments. “Netty, set a course to The Torus, please. We’re going to interrupt Gabriella’s vacation.”

12

RUMORS OF CALAMITY rattled around the Torus, but the virus hadn’t yet reached here and, like other space-borne platforms, stringent quarantine measures were in place. It took us three times as long to approach and dock because automated traffic control had been deactivated, with everything being done analog. Everyone was stuck with a sort of see and avoid type of flying, with Torus traffic control doing little more than assigning priority slots for arrival and docking. In the interim, ships had to wait their turn. Which was easier said than done. An Airbus waiting to land at, say, JFK

or Heathrow, could just be sent off to fly in a circular holding pattern somewhere away from the airport until they were given clearance. You couldn’t do that with a spaceship. There were already a dozen ships orbiting the moons of the nearby gas giant, trying to maintain enough velocity that when they did get the call, they didn’t have to burn a ton of fuel getting up to speed to approach, then a ton more to slow down again. Netty chose a different approach, one we could get away with thanks to the grav-plating. She quickly slowed us down based on the time-to-arrival value she’d been given. As long as that didn’t change, a couple of brief burns from the drive would be enough to get us ashore. Surprisingly, it worked. To perfection. We slid into our assigned berth right on time and gently docked. As Netty started the docking checklist, I unstrapped and stretched. “Sometimes the plan does survive contact with the enemy,” I said. Funboy gave me a puzzled stare—which wasn’t really all that different from his happy stare, scared stare, sad stare, or any other stare. “What enemy would that be?

Are you talking about Kharsweil?”

“I—no. Just a figure of speech. Let’s go find Gabriella, if she’s here.”

The Torus fell outside Guild jurisdiction, sitting in a no-man’s land between known space and the ominous gulf known as The Deeps. In fact, the Deeps turned out to be a lot livelier than first advertised to us. A number of populated systems lay on its far side, with a lot of traffic crossing the void to the Torus and then on to known space, and vice-versa. It was across that empty expanse that BeneStar had been born and lived most of its corporate life. We hadn’t heard much about the repercussions over there from BeneStar’s collapse, aside from a few rumors of vicious, internecine corporate civil wars. I was happy to stay on our side of the Deeps, where we had enough problems to deal with. By now, we had a routine around places like the Torus, which was as wild and lawless in its own way as Dregs. I slung The Drop and the Moonsword under my coat to conceal both them and my b-suit. Torina did the same with her stylish stroller coat, Funboy just dressed in nondescript civilian clothes, and Icky—well, she was just Icky. She happily lugged along her hammer, propped on one shoulder, walking ahead to clear the way for us. The crowd parted around her, and we just trailed in her wake. Perry did his usual soaring discreetly overhead thing, flying among the structural rafters, conduits, and ductwork that filled the station. When we reached the exit from the docking ring along the edge of the Torus, leading into the main concourse, we were confronted by a huge, utterly unmissable sign. THIS IS A CALAMITY-FREE STATION. IF YOU ARE FOUND TO HAVE THE VIRUS IN YOUR POSSESSION, YOU WILL BE KILLED. “Not much margin for discussion, is there?” Torina said, eyeing the sign as we passed it. “Makes sense if you ask me,” Icky said. “More laws should be worded like that, frankly.”

“Says the massive Wu’tzur with the hammer slung on her shoulder,”

Perry said over the comm. She shrugged. “Damned right. If that had been in effect back home, then I could’ve used it to bash Gauss’s head in and we wouldn’t have to deal with this bullshit. Also, I prefer the term thicc, regarding my voluptuous nature.”

“We’ll make a note of it going forward. Don’t want trouble with HR,” I said, giving Icky a sly grin. As we carried on into the crowds of the main concourse, I found myself thinking about Icky’s words. Not because I thought we should just start dispensing justice on the spot in the style of Robocop or Judge Dredd, but because she’d said it at all. Calamity was preoccupying everyone in one way or another, even here, outside known space. If you’d wanted to create a distraction, an existential threat like it was certainly a great way to do it. But a distraction from what?

“AH, man, better cheese it, the fuzz is here.”

I grinned at the scruffy Willie Nelson-esque figure behind the bar of The One-Eyed Yak. “Hey, Skrilla. How goes it?”

“You mean aside from the it’s the end of the world bullshit that we hear all day?”

I smiled, but there it was again, Calamity, front and center in the conversation. I opened my mouth, but Skrilla spoke first. “Van, been meaning to ask you something. Any bands back on Earth carrying the torch for Doctor Hook, the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd—you know, the giants?”

“I—uh, I’m not sure. I mean, those groups are still popular, I think.”

“How about Burning Man?

That still a thing?”

“I think so. I heard news about it just this past year. Why this sudden interest in Earthly counterculture?”

Skrilla shrugged. “Just thinking of a fallback in case this Calamity thing gets out of hand. I hear Earth’s immune, so if I gotta hunker down somewhere, I wanna make sure it’s gonna give me the things I need. Like music— Dark Side of the Moon, man, I’m telling you, that was an album. Hell, that was the album. I want to live on a planet that produces stuff like that. Only thing holding me back is my old lady.”

“Skrilla, there’s a lot of Earth where she doesn’t live.”

He grinned. “You don’t know my old lady, dude. I could go settle down in Uzbekistan, and she’d still somehow show up just to make me miserable.”

I grinned and again opened my mouth, but this time it was Torina who interrupted me, touching my arm. When I looked at her, I saw her staring into the crowd. “Over there, four tables away,” she said. I looked that way. I saw nothing but the bar crowd, jammed around wooden tables that gave the dingy place a Dungeons and Dragons-style fantasy inn vibe. But then I noticed the woman sitting with a group of people, a couple of humans, a Gajur, and two hulking aliens whose species I didn’t recognize, but who would have given Icky a run for her money size-wise. She was sitting with the group, but clearly not part of it, or at least not engaged with it. She was a redhead now, not a blonde, and her facial tattoo looked different, but it was clearly Gabriella Santorelli. “Well, then,” I said, meaning to head toward her, but Torina’s touch on my arm became a gentle grasp. “Hang on, Van. She’s watching somebody, I think, over to the right of the door.”

I stayed still. I didn’t want to compromise her, because she was on an undercover op. So I just looked toward the door instead, scanning the faces to see if there was anyone I might recognize—

“Oh, shit,” I muttered. There was. Torina frowned. “What—oh. Yeah, I see her. Oh, shit indeed.”

Her name was Alannis Myer, a slight, pixy-ish woman who was equal parts oily charm and mischievous intent. We’d run across her a couple of times, and each time she’d shamelessly flirted with me, even while I’d been arresting her. Torina had, needless to say, been less than impressed. But it got even better. Alannis was talking to Funboy. I muttered a curse. “What the hell is he doing, talking to her?

She knows he’s a member of the Fafnir’s crew. And he knows she knows it.”

I glanced around and found Icky at the end of the bar, blissfully unaware of any of this as she spoke with Rotan, the one-eyed yak-like alien who was Skrilla’s business partner, and for whom the bar was named. “Perry, any sign of trouble outside?”

His voice hummed back at me over the comm. “This is the Torus, Van. So, yeah, lots. Can you be more specific?”

“Trouble that might concern us,” I said, then gave him a brief overview of the situation inside the bar. “Okay, nothing I’d associated with Gabriella or your girlfriend.”

I glanced at Torina, who glared. “Perry, I don’t guarantee the safety of anyone who calls Alannis Myer my girlfriend.”

“Torina’s right there, isn’t she?”

“Good guess.”

I pondered how to proceed, but Funboy and Alannis made up our minds for us. They turned to face us, Alannis cracked her impish grin, and they started our way. I glanced toward Gabriella and saw that she’d realized Alannis had noticed us and, by extension, that we were here. With her trademark scowl, she finished her drink, stood, and stalked out of the bar. “Dammit, Perry, Gabriella’s leaving. She’s probably worried she’s going to get compromised. Follow her and try to make contact so she doesn’t leave the Torus—but do it discreetly.”

“Discretion is my middle name.”

Alannis and Funboy sidled up to the bar beside us. She kept her green eyes and grin locked on me, obviously ignoring Torina. “Why, Van Tudor, what a delightful surprise out here in the stars. I’m flattered you tracked me down.” She leaned in, but only just. Torina’s presence was like an electric fence. “I confess—being wanted like this really makes me feel special. I’d blush if I could.”

“Reptiles don’t blush,” I deadpanned. “Good answer,” Torina said, her lips lifted in a poisonous grin. Alannis laughed. “Oh, sweet, dear, Torina, you’ve got nothing to worry about. I’ve realized that Van is determined to suppress the urge he so clearly feels to be with me. You’ve… convinced him. That’s the word. He’s probably in love, or some other unpleasant biochemical reaction. I always trusted more primal instincts. Keeps me alive out here.” She gave me a look of frank appraisal. “And in quieter places. I find privacy is conducive to…

business, and being in public makes it difficult to suppress the desire to close deals.”

Torina’s eyes flashed, but her smile remained. “You have that effect on people, Alannis. In fact, I’m suppressing an urge right now. Care to guess what it is?”

Alannis’s grin widened. “I’m flattered, but you’re not to my taste. At least not unless there’s more on the line than the fate of an empire.”

Torina pouted. “Sad. Then again, Van promised me something you can’t deliver.”

Allanis tilted her head. “Such as?”

“Something authentic. Like a soul,” Torina said. Allanis twitched. The barb hit home. I began to slide between the women but noticed Skrilla leaning over the bar less than a meter away. I gave him a pointed look. He shrugged. “Sorry. What can I say?

I was walking by when I slammed into a wall of psychosexual tension,” he said, then withdrew. “The vibe is lethal, bro. Like… fatal.”

“It’ll be fatal for someone,” Torina purred. Alannis shook her head at Torina. “Believe me, I’m over Van—even if I’m not entirely sure he’s over me. I’ve got my eye on someone else.”

“Who’s your unfortunate victim?” Torina asked. Alannis turned and smiled at Funboy. Torina’s smile faltered like a guttering candle. “Funboy?

Really?”

Icky, who’d slid closer to listen in, blinked and echoed her. “Really?”

Even Perry spoke up. “Did I hear what I think I just heard?”

Funboy looked from one of us to the next. “I would like to point out that I am physically present.”

“Oh, you sure are, you adorable little thing, you,” Alannis said. Funboy put his arm around her back, touching Alannis. Touching her. I just gaped. “Is it really so hard to accept that someone finds me alluring?” he asked. “Are you aware of my medical knowledge?

My ability to dance?

My skill at free verse to primal beats?”

“I—uh—” I looked at Torina, who shrugged. “You—uh—no. Of course not, Funboy. It’s just that she’s—and please don’t take this the wrong way, Alannis—awful,” Torina said. “I’m sure you meant that in the nicest possible way,” Alannis said. Torina shook her head. “No. No, I didn’t.”

Icky leaned in. “Why?”

“Why what?” Alannis asked, putting her arm around Funboy in return. “Why—?” Icky shook her head. “Just, why?

Why him?

I’ve threatened to put him in my locker more than once. He really brings the room down.”

“Honestly, I’ve never had the opportunity to”—her grin turned sly

—“spend time with someone of his race before.”

Funboy held out an arm. “Don’t wait up.” He and Alannis left in the following moment of stunned silence. I watched them go, struck dumb by the sight. Icky raised a thick finger. “Is that little bucket of gloom gonna get laid?”

I shrugged. “If I’m any guess of—um, people’s nature, she’ll get laid. He’ll just be along for the ride.”

I WASN’T comfortable with Funboy consorting with Alannis. Not out of any sense of prudishness—I mean, he was an adult and could do what he wanted. I just didn’t trust her and worried what he might reveal. But as we made our way back to the Fafnir, where Perry had told us Gabriella had gone to wait for us, Torina just shrugged. “The bundle of woe used to be an undercover agent for the Guild, Van, and a good one. I think we can assume he knows what he’s doing.”

“The fact that Funboy—Funboy—might be operating as a honeypot is simply beyond my ability to process. But the real question is, why?

What does he intend to do with Alannis Myer?”

Icky snickered. “Well, Van, when a gloomy little Surtsi and a criminal piece of shit love one another very much—”

“Hah. And let me repeat, hah. You know what I mean.”

Gabriella had the same concern. “What the hell are you doing here?

And what the hell is going on with your crew member and my target?” she snapped as we stepped through the airlock. “Perry just told me he’s gone with her to—to—”

“Knock boots?” Perry offered. I just gave her a wry smile. “Hello to you too, Gabriella.”

“Tudor, if you or your crew of miscreants screw up this op—”

I gave her my most apologetic look. “As was just pointed out to me, Funboy is, among other things—among many other things, most of them depressing—a skilled undercover operative. He wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t have a very good reason for it.”

“He’s horny?” Perry suggested. “Ah, yes, Funboy’s hidden wellspring of forbidden passion.”

“Hey, who knows what he’s keeping clamped down. Maybe he needs a release every once in a while.”

Gabriella cursed. “If that’s what it is, if your Funboy just wants a release with my target, I swear I’ll have him spaced—”

“I don’t think that’s it, Gabriella,” I said as we entered the galley and I pulled off my duster coat. “Trust me, I really don’t think that’s it.”

“So if she’s your target, then she must have some connection to Kharsweil. That is the case you’re working, right?” Torina asked. “It is, and she does.”

“How do you know that?” I asked. “Because they met here on the Torus two days ago.”

I stiffened. “Kharsweil?

He was here?

Two days ago?”

“Is that what I said?

Hmm, let me think now, is that what I just freakin’

said—”

“Gabriella, if you saw Kharsweil, why didn’t you grab him?”

“Because I want to find out just what his connections are. He left just over a day ago, but not before I put a tracker on his ship.”

Icky scoffed. “Guy like him probably sweeps his ship for bugs every fifteen minutes. He is on the run, after all.”

Gabriella shook her head. “Not this one. It’s the latest and greatest from the Guild’s tech shop. It’s a swarm of nano-scale bots that can crawl aboard a ship and reshape themselves into whatever they need to be—including an antenna to transmit their presence. They’re programmed to do that every time they enter a new system, then they disperse and just go back into listening mode.”

That made Icky gaze in wonder. “That is so cool. Van, we gotta get one of those.”

“They’re not for general issue. But Kharsweil poses the sort of threat it’s worth throwing some cutting-edge tech at him.”

“So have they pinged their arrival anywhere yet?

Do we know where he’s gone?”

Gabriella gave a frustrated sigh. “I don’t know. Thanks to everyone being worried about Calamity, inter-system comms are throttled right down. I’m hoping I can pick up the trail once I get back into known space. But Alannis Myer was just too good a lead to pass up.” She glowered. “Until now, anyway.”

“Gabriella, I know you want to approach this with subtlety and all that, so you can tease out Kharsweil’s contacts, but we don’t have time. We need to grab him and find out what he knows.”

She gave me a frown. “I know the clock’s ticking on Calamity, but if we grab him and he just stonewalls us, we lose any chance to learn anything useful from him. Unless, of course, you’re going to resort to force to make him talk, which I’m okay with philosophically. It’s just not very effective.”

“Actually, I was thinking more carrot than stick.”

“What sort of carrot?”

“His freedom,” I replied. “His—what?

Freedom?

The bastard is guilty of—”

“Lots, yeah, I know. Hell, he rigged his office door with a bomb that was intended to kill whoever opened it, so we’ve got him for attempted murder right there.”

“Okay, so what am I missing here?”

Torina nodded. “I’m with Gabriella here, Van. How could we, in good conscience, just let Kharsweil go?”

“Oh, you want it to be in good conscience. Yeah, that would be nice, but so would Santa Claus being real.”

“The guy we saw in Frankenmuth, right?

Fat, red suit, beard, sweaty—”

“Yeah, that’s the guy. Lives at the North Pole but spends his summers in Frankenmuth, I guess.” I saw more questions coming but headed them off by turning to Gabriella. “If these were ordinary times, I’d say no, of course, the scumbag needs to pay for what he’s done. But these aren’t ordinary times. Kharsweil isn’t important. What he knows is. But I can’t help feeling we’re supposed to be focused on him, just like we were supposed to be focused on Gauss and Calamity.”

That made everyone frown at me. “Supposed to be focused on him?

What are you getting at, Van?” Perry asked. “I’m… not sure. It’s just a feeling. It’s like we’ve got these big, dramatic things happening, but—” I shrugged and shook my head, then turned to Gabriella again. “Do you have any idea where he was planning on

heading?” I asked her. My voice had a bit of an edge to it, but I didn’t care. I was pissed that she’d had Kharsweil firmly in her sights and decided to just let him fly away so she could focus on Alannis Myer. Gabriella’s reply was uncharacteristically subdued, as though she knew I was angry and had a damned good right to be. “No, I don’t. With almost everything gone analog, it’s not easy to hack into a flight plan these days.”

I crossed my arms and sighed. “So we’re stuck, at least until we get a hit on that fancy bug of yours. Excellent.”

“Maybe Funboy will learn something,” Torina suggested. “Oh, I suspect Funboy’s going to learn a lot of things,” Perry quipped. I gave him a bland look. As surreal… and hilarious as Funboy’s lustful cavorting might be, the fate of the galaxy was slightly more critical. Still, Torina had a point. Funboy was more than just a horny little blob of misery. He was an experienced undercover operative. I had to believe he had more in mind with Alannis than just knocking boots, as Perry put it. Frankly, I didn’t care if Funboy got lucky, as long as we did, too. AND WE DID. Funboy returned to the Fafnir a few hours later, looking—

The same as he always did. But he brought with him a data chip he’d liberated from Alannis. He dropped it into my palm from a small but long-fingered hand. As he did, everyone crowded around us. “I think you may find the contents of that useful,” he said, then started to turn away. But Icky stepped in his way. “Hang on, you little monster, you. Spill it.”

“Spill—it?”

“Oh, don’t play coy with us. What happened?”

“I wasn’t aware that my methods were the subject of scrutiny as long as they produced results. And they have,” Funboy said, gesturing back at me and the data chip I held. But I had questions, too, and not just salacious ones. “Funboy, all kidding aside—and please don’t take this the wrong way—but what the hell did Alannis want with you?

I mean, you’re my crewmate and my friend, but

—you’re not—uh—”

“Not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word desirable,” Perry said. Icky shot him a look. “What the hell would you know about it?”

“Hey, I read.”

I waved them all off. “Funboy, Alannis Myer is a manipulative, cunning schemer. Again, don’t take this the wrong way, but I kinda believe she was looking for more than a good time.”

Funboy blinked. “How could I possibly take any of this the wrong way?

These inferences that I am completely without merit as a romantic or sexual partner?”

“Look, Funboy, we’re sorry, but—”

He raised a beetled brow. “I am merely kidding, because I am a font of hilarity, which you all know having been in my presence for an extended period of time. Of course she had an ulterior motive. She was seeking information about you, this ship and crew, and more broadly, the Guild. She also had an inordinate interest in The Quiet Room. She assumed that her wiles would make me less cautious and therefore more likely to provide compromising information.”

“I gather it… didn’t?”

“Of course not. I ensured she got enough true information to remain plausible, while otherwise providing her with misleading or incorrect information. I would assume that she will report it to Kharsweil in due course.”

“Oh. I see.” I looked at the others, who all just looked… surprised, and more than a little taken aback. Funboy looked from one of us to the next. “You needn’t be so bemused about it. I am no stranger to the use of physicality as a means of manipulating the exchange of information.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Essie particularly valued my abilities in that respect.”

I stared. Essie. Essie, the strapping, charming, silver-tongued guy with an infectious grin. But it was Funboy who played the role of homme fatale in their partnership?

“So, did you learn anything from her?” Torina asked, a smirk playing on her face. “A number of things that I will provide to Perry for integration into the Guild’s intelligence database when the opportunity arises. None of them are

of particular or specific interest to our case, aside from one thing.”

“Which is?”

“Kharsweil departed here two days ago, bound for Dregs. He apparently has a safehouse there.”

We all went from staring to gaping. I looked at Gabriella, who just shrugged. “You—are you sure?”

“Couldn’t she just have been feeding you misinformation?

She is, um, like that,” Icky said. “That’s possible, but given the context and the fact she actually revealed this in nine otherwise disconnected pieces of information provided over a period of approximately ten minutes, during which her focus was largely on other matters, I judge it unlikely.”

I shook my head. “Funboy, you are a weird, amazing little guy.”

“I will take that as a compliment,” he said. “I absolutely intended it as one.”

Funboy turned away again, but Icky and Torina were having none of it. Even Gabriella was staring at him with rapt fascination. “Hang on, Funboy. We want details,” Icky said. Blink. “A gentleman does not force himself to kiss, despite the likelihood of transmitting pathogens, and tell,” he said and started to turn away, but this time he turned back on his own. “I will say only one thing, and then I consider this matter closed.”

“What’s that?” Torina asked, and we all leaned toward him. “I’ve definitely had better,” he replied, then turned and headed aft. We all simply stood there, staring at his retreating back. Icky finally broke the silence. “I’m disappointed.”

Torina spluttered. “What?”

Icky looked sympathetic. “What he said was kinda mean. After all, I’m sure she did her best.”

13

OUT OF AN ABUNDANCE OF CAUTION, we plugged the data chip Funboy had pilfered from Alannis—he was apparently an accomplished pickpocket, on top of everything else—into Waldo after Icky removed his data-link module. As in control of the situation as Funboy had seemed to be, I wasn’t going to underestimate Alannis and her own ability to twist things to her ends. And a data chip infected with Calamity, or even a light version of it, would be just such a twist. But we found no evidence of Calamity in Waldo, so we downloaded the chip’s contents and had Netty copy them into a thoroughly sandboxed memory space. As soon as she had, she reported the not-so good news. “The data is encrypted, and quite securely. It may be beyond our ability to decrypt it here, and it will have to be taken back to Anvil Dark so that Bester’s people can use their resources to do it.”

I frowned, but it was tempered somewhat. “If whatever is on that chip is that encrypted, then it must be something of value. I wish we could just transmit it back to Anvil Dark, but they won’t accept it, for obvious reasons.”

“So we have to physically take it back there,” Torina said. I made a face. “Unfortunately, yes. And Alannis will soon realize it’s missing, if she hasn’t already, so the information on it might become out of date quickly if she starts putting out warnings to—well, whoever might be affected by our decrypting it.”

“That could include Kharsweil,” Perry said. “We do have one thing working in our favor. As Gabriella noted, twist comms are severely restricted by Calamity protocols. It’s unlikely Alannis will get out any warnings quickly,” Netty-P stated. “No, not unless she leaves the Torus, which we’re going to have to assume she’ll do. And that means we need to leave first.” I turned to Gabriella. “Can you take this chip back to Anvil Dark, to get it decrypted?”

She opened her mouth to object, then thought it through—Kharsweil was important, and we needed the win. So she hesitated, then gave a single, decisive nod. “I can. I doubt that I’m going to get any more out of Myer than your Funboy already has, anyway,” she said, tossing him a wry look. He gave a languid shrug. “We all have our strengths.”

“Apparently so.”

We gave the chip to Gabriella, and she headed for her ship, which was docked on the far side of the Torus. Before we departed, though, I made a quick visit to Skrilla. “Hey, how would you like me to owe you a big favor?” I asked. “A big favor from the fuzz?

I like the sound of that.”

“Remember that woman from earlier today?

Short hair, small, kinda elfin good looks?”

“Oh, sure do. Definitely my type,” he grinned. “Always a sucker for the manic pixie dream girl. If she vapes and listens to The Cure, I might marry her.”

“Well, is there any way you can find out what she might use to leave the Torus, and run some interference in her getting aboard it?”

Skrilla tapped the side of his nose and flicked his eyes at his big, silent business partner, the eponymous one-eyed yak. “Rotan here knows pretty much everybody, and everything they’re up to. He can take care of this. Can’t you, big guy?”

Rotan nodded, once. I couldn’t help grinning. I had never heard Rotan utter a single word, but Skrilla had just said he was plugged into everything happening aboard the Torus, because of course he was. “What’s tickled your funny bone, Van?” Skrilla asked. “Oh, I was just thinking how nothing surprises me anymore.”

“I know, man. Now, about this chick. She single, or what?”

WE HAD no way of knowing for sure, of course, if Skrilla and Rotan would succeed in delaying Alannis, so we worked off the assumption they wouldn’t. That meant we needed to make the fastest possible trip to Dregs, hopefully before Kharsweil left. After all, even if he wasn’t warned by Alannis, he was an at-large fugitive and probably didn’t stay in one place for very long anyway. As we got underway, Torina had a wise word of warning to offer. “You know, since it looks like we—and by we, I mean Funboy, but he’s part of this crew—managed to pretty thoroughly outsmart and outmaneuver Alannis, she’s not going to be happy. And she doesn’t strike me as the forgiving, live-and-let-live sort. We’re going to have to be on the lookout for trouble from her in the future.”

I had to agree. “Yeah, I hear you. Unfortunately, I’m running out of shoulders to look over.”

Our trip to Dregs was, otherwise, uneventful. Once we arrived there and threaded our way through the Calamity quarantine procedures, the obvious problem facing us couldn’t really be ignored any longer. “Dregs is a big place,” Perry said, looking out the canopy at the dun-drab sprawl of the planet spread beneath us. “And we have no idea where Kharsweil’s safehouse is.”

I sucked my teeth, thinking as the world scrolled past in punishing blandness. “I know. I’ve been kind of hoping that Viktor, and our friend Balik, the Yonnox street medic, might have some idea, or some way to find out.”

“You’re forgetting about Flagas,” Torina said. “Flagas—oh. Wormy guy, right?

Old friend of yours?

He gave up the name of that shuttle pilot who was spacing people for money—pretty much our first case.”

She nodded. “If anyone knows what’s going on in the hidden recesses of Dregs, it would be him.”

“As I recall—and I’m a machine, so I recall it perfectly—the last and only time we dealt with him, you threatened to dig into and expose anything embarrassing you could find out about him. I doubt that’s going to work a second time,” Perry said. I gave a thoughtful nod. “No. This time, if we’re going to deal with him, we probably need to play good cop, rather than bad. That means giving him something he wants.”

“What could we possibly have that he wants?

Aside from money, that is, and unless his fortunes have changed dramatically, he doesn’t have much use for more of that,” Torina said. I stared at Dregs—technically, Simon’s World, though no one called it that—still rotating slowly beneath us. One of its small, shallow, hypersaline seas was just crawling into view ahead. Its star, Epsilon Eridani, was in the midst of a prolonged brightening phase, its increased stellar radiation steadily heating the planet and cooking off the water that was slowly sputtering away into space. In another few hundred years, the place would be utterly desiccated and unable to sustain life. Not that that mattered much to Dregs, whose inhabitants were generally more worried about making it through the next couple of days. “Actually, it occurs to me that we do have a bit of information I’m sure Flagas would consider extremely valuable,” I said. “Oh?

And what’s that?” Torina asked. I offered her a thin smile. “We know who’s immune to Calamity.”

WE VISITED Viktor and Balik first, just in case they could point us in the right direction—and we didn’t have to deal with Flagas. Neither had any useful idea where Kharsweil might keep his safe house. Both agreed to start making discreet enquiries. Before we left his house of near-horrors, I also asked Viktor if he had any more insight to share regarding Calamity, gained through the work he and Linulla were doing to try to understand the thing. He did, though it was cryptic. “Calamity is far more adaptable than we’d given it credit for. Taking the version you obtained from—what was his name, the one you rescued on the chip?

Gorix?”

“That’s it.”

“Taking that as a baseline, we’re seeing dramatic departures across known space. We’re calling them mutations, but again, that suggests a viral nature that we don’t believe really does a good job of describing Calamity. This is something different. Some versions of Calamity infecting known space bear little resemblance to this baseline version, or even one another. So this is more than just mutation triggered by countermeasures intended to block it.”

“What are you getting at, Viktor?”

“There’s an intelligence at work here. And it’s not resident in the individual instances of Calamity. Or it is, but only to a small extent. Somewhere out there, there seems to be a guiding will, as it were.”

“Am I alone in finding that ominous?” Torina asked. Viktor gave a mechanical shrug, marked by the faint whir of the machinery that comprised much of his body. “Unfortunately, ominous is all we currently have. We know nothing else about what this guiding will or force might be, or if it is even something distinct. It may be that all of the instances of Calamity in existence together form a greater whole, an overarching intelligence.”

“But if that were the case, they’d need to be communicating with one another. And we’d be able to detect that,” Perry said. “Indeed. That is the puzzle. We can’t detect any sort of such communications happening, and yet, it must be. Whether all the individual occurrences of Calamity form a hive mind, or there is something else lurking out there directing them, we’ve seen nothing resembling twist comms or anything else connecting them.”

“Okay, thanks, Viktor,” I said, then turned to the others. “I guess that leaves Flagas.”

“You’re planning on dealing with Flagas?” Viktor said as we started for the door of his gloomy little shop. I glanced back. “Kind of have to. We’re out of options.”

“Be careful, Van. Flagas has proven very adept at capitalizing on the strife and chaos fomented by Calamity. He’s probably never been better positioned or more influential than he is now—and therefore, he’s more dangerous.”

I returned a thin, mirthless smile. “Sounds like he’s just the guy we need, then.”

FLAGAS STILL HUNG out in Hiatus, a bar jammed into a short cul-de-sac opening off one of the main thoroughfares of Dregs. I’d say street, but that term implied something usable by vehicles. This one had been co-opted by hordes of pedestrians, then crowded with haphazard construction of every kind. There were vendors, food sellers, thieves, villains, victims, flesh merchants, customers and priests of every collar, either saving souls or reveling in the grime of it all. We ducked under a rickety walkway made from scrap and a prayer. I glanced back at it, rattling and trembling as people of various shapes, sizes, and appendage-numbers shambled over it, and I shook my head. “Guess they’re not big on building codes here?

Or municipal planning?

Liability insurance?”

“Are you imagining some sort of alternate Dregs here, Van?” Perry asked me. He perched on top of a building just up the street, keeping up his high-cover routine. Something resembling a squashed hippo shuffled past, sporting a husky alien stooped forward under the weight of a crate so massive Icky would have struggled with it. I assumed it was the rider and the hippo-thing its mount until they passed by, then the latter gave me a mournful, sidelong look. “How’s it goin’?”

The creature holding the crate gave me a dumb, blank-eyed stare, like a bored cow. I looked back at the hippo-ish creature. “Not bad, friend.”

The pair shuffled on. I amazed myself at not being amazed by the interaction at all. Perry was right—now, finding out Dregs actually had building codes, that would be a wonder. We’d brought everyone this time, wanting the raw fighting horsepower of the entire crew on-hand in case something went wrong. Flagas was, after all, a vicious, amoral criminal, and my last interaction with him hadn’t been pleasant. Torina knew him from previous dealings, but she hadn’t had anything to do with him since that same last interaction either, so we couldn’t really lean on that this time. In short, he was an asshole, and we would operate on that premise. I glanced at Netty-P, a slug carbine slung on her back. I hadn’t heard anything more about her difficulties regarding her partitioned memory of killing the mercenary on Adoration, so as far as I knew, she still had it sandboxed off somewhere. I really wasn’t sure what to do with that situation. I mean, if I could silo bad memories, then… I sure as hell would, and happily—

Or, would I?

Wasn’t facing my past, warts and all, fundamentally part of what it meant to be a moral being?

Of being human?

Was Netty-P

preventing herself from doing it likewise denying her journey toward moral self-awareness—

“Oof!

Hey, watch it, asshole!”

I blinked. I’d blundered straight into a Skel who’d been standing and talking to a Yonnox decked out in an eye-watering cascade of bling, practically a half-dozen Mr. T’s worth of golden chains. Skels were a race almost uniquely without redeeming qualities, so my gut reaction was to offer him medical advice about his head and ass. But the last thing I wanted was to get sucked into a noisy altercation right here in the street, just in case Kharsweil’s safe house turned out to be one of the adjacent buildings. So I just let my coat flick back enough to reveal the b-suit, then stared into the glassy circles of the Skel’s mask-like rebreather. “My bad, sorry.”

The Skel took in the Peacemaker garb under my coat, then gave a hasty nod. “Yeah, well—don’t let it happen again, okay?”

We pushed on toward Hiatus. Torina sidled up to me. “Something wrong, Van?

You walked straight into that Skel as though you didn’t see him.”

“Just musing on a moral quandary.”

“While walking down a crowded street on Dregs?

Really?”

I gave her a rueful look. “Right?

Morality?

Here?

That’s even more out of place than building codes.”

“Or sanitation. By the gods of deep space, Van, this place is ghastly,”

Funboy bitched. “This is a first,” I said in wonder. “Dirty enough to make him religious.”

“I’m a person of deep conviction, thank you.” Funboy frowned at a shop owner who emptied a barrel of noisome liquid onto the street. “Also, I will die soon, likely from an infection.”

“We’ll take care of you, princess,” Icky assured him. Funboy looked up at her. “I accept. If this situation continues to worsen, I shall expect a bacon-back ride.”

“Piggyback,” I offered, then gave Icky an appraising look. “Not a bad idea, though.”

“Being close to death inspires me,” Funboy added, and we stepped around another pool of something unpleasant, earning a glare from an alien with six legs and zero hygiene. We reached Hiatus and were immediately accosted by 3-D holographic advertisements seductively focused on getting us to go inside—a ravishingly beautiful woman for me, a romance-novel guy for Torina, and a buff, strapping Wu’tzur clad only in a skimpy loincloth for Icky. “Hey, beautiful, why not come inside for some fun?” the hologram purred at Icky. “What’s the allowable variation in the fuel-feed flow rate for a Type 15

fusion reactor running at fifty percent of maximum power?” she asked. It maintained a fixed smile on its perfect face for a moment, then said,

“Hey, beautiful, why not come inside for some fun?”

Icky waved it away. “I thought those things were supposed to be, you know, attractive.”

Funboy stood facing another Surtsi. “It is reasonably clean and hygienic inside the establishment,” it said. “I doubt that,” he replied. “It is true. Tests have demonstrated a much more limited array of pathogens on high-traffic surfaces, and in lower concentrations, compared to similar establishments on Dregs.”

“Oh, baby,” Torina muttered. “That’s love.”

“This is what passes for sexy talk with the Surtsi?

And it worked on Alannis?

Really?” I said. Funboy looked back at me. “My interaction with Alannis involved little in the way of talking.”

“I—yeah, okay, let’s just leave that path untraveled, shall we?” I replied, then headed into the bar. “That would be a first,” Funboy said with complete ease. Torina blinked. “Oh, I’m going to hate myself for this, but—could you clarify?”

Funboy looked at her, then tried to smile. “There were no paths untraveled. When I invade, for the good of our cause and country, I do so with the kind of sexual blitzkrieg that can only be imagined by beings who regard their body as a vessel, not a tool for the extraction of pleasure and secrets.”

I looked up to the sky, shaking my head. “I feel rather pedestrian now.”

Torina took my arm, then kissed me on the cheek. “You never had a chance against this tower of passion, love.”

Funboy preened. “It’s my burden. Now then, who wants hand sanitizer?”

Icky stared at him in horror. “If you try any funny business with me, you moping goober, I’ll—”

“Rest assured, my romantic interest lies only in beings without noodles stuck in their chin hair.”

Icky reached for her face out of habit. “Oh, good. Because I’m taken.”

We seated ourselves, then went through the little ritual involved in seeking a meeting with Flagas, buying a drink for a gray-clad bouncer lurking near a door at the back of the place. Netty-P and Perry remained outside, keeping watch, while Icky and Funboy would hold position here. We waited as the bouncer slipped inside, then emerged a moment later, holding the door ajar and gesturing for Torina and me to go in. Flagas, a caterpillar-like being with a mouth only Lovecraft could love, might not have moved from the last time we met him, the better part of five years earlier. Nor had this second, inner bar apparently changed. It was still impeccably set, as though ready for a private party that would never actually occur. “Ah, the lovely Torina Milon. Good to see you again. Have you finally recovered from your bout of insanity?”

“My bout—what the hell are you talking about, Flagas?”

“It was my understanding that you have Declared yourself into a betrothal, and it’s not with me. How could that be anything but crazy?”

“We’ve been through this, Flagas. As tempting as it was, it just wasn’t going to work. And yes, Van and I are betrothed.”

I looked at her, then pointedly at Flagas. “As tempting as it was?”

“Ah, yes, Van Tudor, Peacemaker extraordinaire. Not only have you ended any hope I had for a future with Torina, but you actually also cost me… notable money,” Flagas said. Just like last time, the translator had to

fight to keep up, since his native tongue sounded much like the gurgle of a clogged drain, bereft of anything recognizable as distinct words or phrases. “Let me guess—you made a bet with somebody that I’d never make it as a Peacemaker and would have died a long time ago,” I said. “Well, yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about. On two occasions, you intercepted shipments of goods in which I had a considerable financial stake. And now said goods are being held as evidence, although for what, I cannot imagine, since in both cases the crews of the ships involved were convicted of smuggling—wrongly, of course—and packed off to do time.”

I shrugged. “Sorry?

I mean, whatever this cargo is, it would have been considered contraband and subject to lawful seizure. Maybe next time you should hire better definitely-not-smugglers.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this particular meeting?

And by pleasure, I mean just that, since you presumably want something from me, which means you’re presumably prepared to give me something in return.”

“Right to the point, and candidly, it’s welcome. Yes, you have something I want—or, at least, I hope you do. There’s a former Master of the Guild, Kharsweil, who I want to track down. He apparently has a safe house here on Dregs. I want to know where it is.”

Flagas… stared back at me, I guess, although it was hard to tell in a creature that had no recognizable eyes. “That’s quite the ask. I trust you have something of commensurate value to offer me in return.”

I smiled. “I notice you didn’t say that you don’t know where Kharsweil’s safe house is.”

“Of course I know where it is. What I don’t know is what you’re prepared to pay for that knowledge—and you will, trust me, have to pay a lot.”

“How about the identity of a party in known space that has immunity to Calamity?”

“The Schegith, yes, I already know that—”

“Not the Schegith. Someone else.”

I fought to keep my poker face up in the ensuing silence. If Flagas already knew about the Seven Stars League’s apparent immunity to Calamity, then I wasn’t left with much to bargain with. Even then, it was by no means clear that he, or anyone else, would be able to do much to capitalize on it. But I was counting on the fact that Flagas dealt in information as much as he did in illicit cargoes, and probably even more so

—and if this was information he didn’t already have, then it would be valuable to him. Or so I hoped. A desperate hope, but these were desperate times. “Who?” he finally asked. I smiled. “Where’s Kharsweil’s safe house?”

“I’m sorry, I expect payment up front. It’s how I do business.”

I crossed my arms. “I’ll tell you what. You give me a list of the cargoes we’ve got impounded, the ones in which you have a financial stake, and as long as they don’t contain anything overtly illegal, like weapons or drugs, I’ll arrange to have them released. Consider it a down payment.”

Another moment of silence. I just waited, but it was easier this time. Flagas obviously didn’t know about the League’s immunity. “Very well,” he finally said. “Kharsweil’s safe house is on the Street of Worthwhile Pleasures, in the upper floor of a building right on the second bend, just before the bridge across the canal. Whether he’s there or not, though, I have no idea.”

“The Street of Worthwhile Pleasures. Is there a street of pleasures that aren’t worthwhile?”

“Yes, almost all the other ones. Now, about this immunity to Calamity.”

I held up a hand, but in a gentle way. It wouldn’t do to be imperious just now. “Perry, did you get that location?”

“Already on my way there. Just hang on a minute,” he replied on the comm. We waited. “Okay, boss. I’m here,” Perry said. “Make sure you keep it discreet, Perry. Kharsweil probably knows who you are.”

“He definitely knows who I am, Van, and duh, go tell your grandmother how to suck eggs.”

I laughed. Torina just looked confused. I shook my head. “Sorry, it was something my grandfather used to say when someone told him something he obviously already knew. Perry, any sign of—”

“Kharsweil?

Yeah, I’m looking right at him.”

I tensed. “You are?

Shit, grandmothers and eggs notwithstanding, don’t get cocky—”

“I’m not. I’m peeking at him from among some junk on top of the building across the street. I can see right into his safe house through a

boarded-up window that’s had one board come loose. Funny that, huh?

Kharsweil gets taken down because of a loose nail?

For want of a nail, the battle was lost—”

“Perry, are you sure it’s him?”

“Visual and thermal signatures match. He’s got someone with him, but I can’t tell who. They’re talking—maybe arguing. Spicy chat, at the minimum.”

“Okay. Icky, Funboy, grab Netty-P and start heading that way and get some more eyes on that building. Perry will give you directions.”

“On our way,” Icky said. “Well?” Flagas asked. “I’m waiting for this big reveal. Who has immunity to Calamity?”

“The Seven Stars League.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really. We were ambushed by some ships in their employ. They were infected with Calamity, but it didn’t slow them down or stop them from almost taking us out.”

“That’s very interesting,” Flagas replied. I’d started for the door but stopped and turned back. “Interesting how?”

Flagas said nothing for a moment, letting the moment grow fat with tension. “I am going to do something I rarely do, Peacemaker, and offer you a free piece of information. The League has been here, and recently.”

“Why?

What were they after?”

“The Schegith. They were asking questions about the Schegith.”

“What sort of questions?”

“Questions that lead me to believe that they are planning something involving the Schegith.”

“What?”

“That, I don’t know.”

I frowned at Flagas. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because, believe it or not, Peacemaker Tudor, I respect you. Like any businessman, I thrive on certainty, on knowing that certain things will be true. Known space is now rife with uncertainty, and it is bad for business. I must know what the rules are, after all, if I am going to break them.”

I glanced at Torina, but she looked as mystified as I did. “Okay, and?”

“And, Peacemaker, you represent certainty. I do not like you, but I respect you, and I particularly respect the fact that if anyone is going to restore that missing certainty, it is the likes of you.”

“What does that have to do with the League and the Schegith?”

“If, as you say, the League has an immunity to Calamity, and so do the Schegith, then the first’s interest in the second is not likely a benevolent one, is it?

Not that I particularly care about the Schegith, but they are part of known space—and, therefore, of that certainty I crave.”

I parsed his words, then turned, faced him, and inclined my head politely. “And to you as well,” he answered. We left, heading for Kharsweil’s safe house, but Flagas’s words stuck with me. What was the League planning?

And why?

I scowled it away as we pushed into the crowded street. It was another piece of a puzzle that I could maddeningly almost make out. Hopefully, Kharsweil would have the last piece, the one that would finally bring it all into view. Well, there was only one way to find out. 14

THE STREET of Worthwhile Pleasures may or may not live up to its name, but I wasn’t about to test it. It was a brothel district, ostensibly clean and well-regulated by a consortium of criminals and corrupt officials masquerading as local government. I guess it was at least slightly safer than the wholly freewheeling and uncontrolled red-light neighborhoods elsewhere in Dregs, but that wasn’t really saying much. In fact, if anything, the so called enforcers patrolling the Street and its adjoining alleys seemed more interested in forcing protection money out of would-be patrons, counting on them being desperate enough to pay it. A couple of them decided to take a stab at intimidating Torina and me. Again, I didn’t want to cause a scene and attract attention to us, especially just a block away from our objective. A hulking Wu’tzur in an ill-fitting, officious uniform blocked our way, while his human partner, a swarthy man with serious five o’clock shadow stood nearby, a hand resting on the grip of a holstered slug pistol. Neither had an air of uncertainty; this was their daily business. “We appreciate donations to, you know, help keep the district nice and orderly,” the human said, sporting a grin with two missing teeth. Torina turned to me. “Van, I don’t remember what Funboy told us. Is the most vulnerable point on a Wu’tzur here”—she waved a hand at the big alien’s lower left abdomen—“or here,” she said, pointing at one of its armpits. I shrugged. “Try them both. One of them will drop it like the sack of shit that it is. In the meantime, I’ll take care of his pal over there. He’s about to discover the wonders of street dentistry. Free of charge, of course. We’re not animals,” I finished with a charming grin. “Are you going to kill him, or just leave him crippled?”

“I dunno. What do you think?”

The two exchanged a look, then backed off. They were used to marks who’d quickly cave and were smart enough to recognize those who weren’t. And they weren’t really looking for an actual fight. Blustery, opportunistic bullies never were. “You have a nice day,” the human said. He was still grinning, but his eyes were those of a snake, flat and dead. I smiled back at him. “Why thank you. Friendly place, isn’t it love?

Truly—” I snapped my fingers, searching for a word. “Ambassadors for their community,” she said, offering a smile of her own to the Wu’tzur as we pushed on up the street. “That’s it. See you, boys. Stay the hell out of our way on the return. I’m only charming for short periods of time.”

We stopped right before the bend upon which Kharsweil’s safe house sat. I made contact with the rest of the crew. Icky and Netty-P had gone to stake out the alley in the back, while Funboy kept watch on the front. Perry flew surreptitiously from building to building, doing circuits of the safe house and building up a detailed map of the area, which I now examined on a data slate. “There’s a front door, and a back one in the alley. No doors on the side facing the canal, just windows. So that means if he’s got a bolthole, it accesses the building next door”—I looked up at the building in question, just a few doors away—“or it’s a tunnel.”

“There are no tunnels,” Netty-P put in. “I’ve used ultrasonics and ground-penetrating radar. The soil this close to that canal is deep, wet and loosely compacted. It’s uniform down to the bedrock, which is nearly ten meters below.”

“Okay. Good. That doesn’t leave him many options for running away.”

“One wrinkle, Van,” Perry said. “Remember how, after Icky got wounded by that car bomb, we went looking for the bomber and found that teleporter?”

I did. The device in question had been essentially a miniature twist drive, capable of moving small amounts of matter short distances instantaneously. We’d ended up seizing it—or them, since it required a transmitter and a receiver—and they’d been taken into Guild custody. At the time, Zenophir had called them a game changer, but once the Guild’s techs dug into them, they proved far less impressive. In fact, they were dangerous as hell, with about one teleportation in twenty going awry and simply flicking its subject out of existence. The units were the technological version of rolling a 1 in a session of Dungeons and Dragons, and those odds meant the devices were off-limits—

to us, anyway, and possibly to anyone who was enamored with remaining alive and in one piece. As far as I knew, occasional but futile stabs were taken at improving them, but they were otherwise gathering dust on Anvil Dark. Still, if Kharsweil had one of the things set up to whisk him out of his safe house, he might decide that one-in-twenty was a worthwhile shot if it meant keeping him alive and free. Even though he undoubtedly knew about the tech, we didn’t know about his willingness to try such a gamble. That just underscored how many variables we were facing. We weren’t sure who or what Kharsweil might have set up inside his safe house for security, if he had an escape route, or how many of the people currently milling about in the street might be on his payroll. A kinetic takedown, involving busting in and trying to seize him, could easily go badly wrong. It could even end up with Kharsweil dead, which would defeat the whole point of all this. I glanced around. The streets and laneways and buildings around us probably contained several hundred more people. How many of them would a sudden firefight end up hurting or killing?

“Okay, I have a plan,” I said. “I’m going in alone and unarmed.”

Silence. Torina finally broke it. “The hell you are.”

“I am. It’s like I told Gabriella. Ultimately, I don’t care about Kharsweil. Yes, he’s a fugitive, and yes, he’s a threat to the Guild with everything he knows. But those things are secondary to Calamity, and the Guild—and now, thanks to what Flagas told us, whatever’s being planned for the Schegith.”

“Van, you’re just handing him a hostage,” Icky said. “To what end?” I reached under my duster coat and unsnapped The Drop and the Moonsword. “So he takes me hostage?

What then?”

“Uh, he uses you to bargain for his escape?”

I handed my weapons to Torina. “That’s the beauty of it. He won’t need to. He’ll be able to walk out of here any time he wants.”

“What?

Why?”

“Because I’m going to offer him the one thing he’s going to want more than anything else. I’m going to offer him total immunity from prosecution.”

THEIR OBJECTIONS RATTLED over the comm as I walked up the street toward the safe house. I just acknowledged them, left Torina in charge, and carried on. She was particularly unhappy, and I was sure I was going to hear all about how stupid and dangerous a move this was. But, for the moment, she held her tongue and followed my orders. “Van, you technically don’t have the authority to offer any sort of amnesty to Kharsweil. That would be a Master’s call to make,” Perry said. “Then I guess Gerhardt, or Alic, or Volffin better back me up on this.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then I’ll resign my post as a Peacemaker, and Torina and I can retire to Pony Hollow and raise a family.”

“Seriously?”

I stopped just short of the door. “Yes. Seriously. That’s the situation we’re facing here, Perry. We don’t have time to play by the normal rules because, like Flagas said, the normal rules are out the window. We need to know what Kharsweil knows, and I can think of only one thing I can offer him to get it.”

Perry surprised me by laughing. “What’s so funny?”

“This is exactly the sort of stunt your grandfather would have pulled. And it drove the Masters of the day crazy.”

I walked up to the door. “How did he get away with it?”

“By getting results.”

I nodded. “Nothing succeeds like success,” I said, then knocked on the door. A small panel slid open, revealing a trope—a pair of eyes glaring at me suspiciously. I half-expected the next line to be, What’s the password?

I got part of that, anyway. “What?”

“I’m here to see Kharsweil.”

“No idea who that is,” the voice said, and the panel snapped closed. I banged on the door again. “I’m Van Tudor, and I have an offer for him. He’s going to want to hear it.”

Nothing. I waited. The panel finally slid back open. “There’s no Kharsweil here—” the gruff voice started, but another voice cut him off. The panel slid closed again. Again, I waited. Finally, the panel opened yet again. “There’s gonna be a big-assed gun aimed right at your head. So you keep your hands at your sides, visible, and if we see even a hint—”

“Yeah, yeah. Look, I’m not interested in doing anything dramatic. I’m going to offer Kharsweil complete amnesty, and all I want in return are the answers to a few questions.”

This time, the panel didn’t close. Instead, the door opened. I stepped inside and the snout of a slug-pistol pressed into my temple. “Hands at your sides. Up the stairs.”

I complied, walking up a short, dingy hallway with my hands out to my sides. I clumped up a set of stairs to a landing, did a 180, and climbed a second flight. They creaked and rattled alarmingly under my feet. I had a sudden vision of them giving way under the combined weight of me and the mercenary, who was still following closely with the gun now pressed to the back of my head. “If I die because of these shitty steps, tell Kharsweil our deal is off.”

“My cousin built these, you asshole,” grated a voice ahead of me. “Tell your cousin to get a new gig.”

The mercenary speaking to me bathed me with a glare, then stepped away to allow me passage. He reeked of fear, and sweat, and stale food—

the scent of a grunt. The aroma of a subordinate. To my right, a room held at least two more of the muscle, both bristling with weapons and caged anger. Their shabby appearance suggested they were more hired muscle than professional soldiers—the type hired to be tough, menacing and violent, rather than Pevensy’s or Groshenko’s crews. Not that that really mattered—in the tight confines of a dingy building, fighting desperately at close quarters, wild mongrels like these could be every bit as dangerous as their more spit-and-polished cousins. I was frisked, then turned and pushed toward a closed door. One of the mercenaries reached past me and knocked. A moment, then yet another of the scruffy thugs opened it and stepped back. So that was at least five of them so far. Every step up the stairs and into this veritable lion’s den had had me second-guessing myself—was this a clever way to avoid bloodshed, or was it just stupid?

Should we have just stormed the place instead?

But I was glad we hadn’t. At least five mercenaries—no, make that at least six, there was a second one in this upper-floor room—all armed with auto guns would have made for a tough fight. We might have taken casualties. And none of the surrounding buildings were exactly blast or bulletproof, so there’d almost certainly have been innocents and bystanders hurt as well. I shrugged at no one in particular. “It was a solid call.”

“That remains to be seen.”

Kharsweil stood near the not-quite boarded-up window. He was as pale and androgynous as I remembered him, but also taller, probably because I think I’d only ever seen him sitting down. He still looked diminished, though, bereft of the robes of a Guild Master, and clad instead in drab civilian clothes. “Peacemaker Tudor, you are one relentless pursuer,” he said, nodding to the mercenaries. They stepped back but didn’t leave the room. I shrugged. “What can I say?

It pisses me off when Peacemakers betray the Guild. Doubly so when they’re Masters—which, thanks to you, now brings the total of corrupt ones up to four.”

Kharsweil gave a faint… smile, I thought, though it was hard to tell for sure, just a slight rearrangement of his mild expression into something even more neutral. “I’m assuming that you didn’t come here simply to disparage me for my shaky loyalty to a moribund institution—”

“Shaky loyalty?

Moribund institution?” I rolled my eyes. “Vocabulary won’t enhance your failures, but if verbiage helps you sleep at night—"

“My race does not sleep, we simply enter regular periods of mild stasis but remain awake and aware. It is far more efficient than being rendered entirely unconscious for hours at a time. And I have no difficulties doing so because, as one might say, my conscience is clear.”

“You swore oaths, then betrayed them.”

Kharsweil waved a slender hand. “Oaths. They are feeble constructs based on ephemeral abstractions like honor and loyalty. Again, they are not efficient.”

“And your real boss, Gauss, was all about efficiency, and not just scooping money into his pocket. You can tart it up however you want, Kharsweil, making it about efficiency or whatever, but you and I both know you were just in it for the cash. In a sense, that’s the saddest outcome of all. Whoring yourself for money alone?

Amateur.”

“I admit that the wealth was a bonus. But—and I don’t expect you will be able to appreciate this, Tudor, being a creature driven by raw and, yes, inefficient emotions and more of those ephemeral abstractions—there is far more to my motivations than just that. I foresee a future in which all of those ephemera will become obsolete. It is my intention to embrace that future and position myself in a favorable position within it.”

“What coming change are you talking about?”

Kharsweil smiled again, in what was a joyless rearrangement of his features. “Why are you here, Tudor?

What brings you to my door offering… amnesty, I believe you said?”

“I want answers to questions. If I get them, then yeah—I’ll see that all pending charges against you are dropped.”

“You don’t have that authority. Only a Master can offer that. Do you have an instrument, a writ, something from the Masters that approves your offer?”

“No, because they don’t know about this yet. This was a spur-of-the-moment thing, a way of getting what I want from you without blood being shed—yours, mine, my crew, all of the innocent people around us. Even the muscle you’ve got lurking around” I said, glancing back at the mercenaries. They glowered straight back at me, but without as much menace as they had. I was presenting an alternative to violence, and regardless of their intellect, they knew that meant a better chance of survival. And being paid. “So you really aren’t offering me anything,” Kharsweil said. “No, my offer is real. I’m already on record as saying if at least one of the Masters doesn’t back me on this, I’m turning in my badge and walking away. Then you and they can fight it out while I sit on my back porch, drink lemonade, and watch the kids I’d really like to have someday grow up.”

Kharsweil’s face hardened slightly, eyes going to slits. After regaining control of himself, he leveled a searching look on me, then gave a slight nod. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

“I do.”

He pressed his hands together in a praying gesture and touched his fingertips to his lips. His eyes remained on me. I just waited. He finally crossed his arms. “I admit that attempting to remain at least one step ahead of the Guild’s tenacious pursuit—particularly by you, Tudor

—is becoming a wearisome distraction. Very well. I accept your offer. After we are done here, you will leave Dregs and allow me to go on my way. I will expect no further pursuit by the Guild—or the GKU, just to get that technicality out of the way. And if you are lying, then I will devote my life to making yours as miserable as possible, and that will begin with seeing everyone and everything you hold dear killed or destroyed. And I am not without the means to do it, trust me.”

“Oh, I do. I assume that between whatever you leveraged off your tenure in the Guild, and however much Gauss paid you, you’re probably pretty flush with cash. So I guess this means we have a deal.”

“I suppose it does. Now then, Tudor, what is it you want to know, exactly?”

“Let’s start with the Seven Stars League, their apparent immunity to Calamity, and whatever they’ve got planned for the Schegith.”

“Is that all?”

I shook my head. “Not even close. I think you’ll find I’m just full of questions.”

“IT PISSES ME OFF, just letting that bastard walk away. Who knows how many Guild agents he’s sold out?” Torina said as we headed back to the Fafnir. “It pisses me off, too. But, the information he gave up makes it worthwhile—at least, I hope it does, anyway.”

Kharsweil had been characteristically frank. I was correct in assuming that the League had some sort of immunity to Calamity. However, it was actually more complicated than that. It seemed that my musings over an old guard were right. The deposed Satrap and those loyal to him had formed a shadowy cabal and somehow obtained that immunity—but the rest of the League was as vulnerable as everyone else. It meant that a powerful faction existed within the League, like the rotting heart of an outwardly sound and healthy tree. But Kharsweil had told me something else, something that put urgency into my stride as I hurried the crew back to the Fafnir. That cabal lurking within the League included more than just an outcast Satrap and his disaffected followers. It also included many current members of the League military forces who were still bitter over their defeat in the battle that had purged the insidious hold of the Tenants. Following that, the League fleet had been forced to start decommissioning ships to bring it into line with the combat power of the other major powers. According to Kharsweil, many of the hawkish members of their fleet had conspired to go through the motions of taking ships out of service in accordance with the peace agreement. In fact, the ships had been laid up but protected from scrapping through a deliberate maze of bureaucratic red tape. “No one knows how to manipulate the system as well as those who built and work within it,” Kharsweil had wryly noted. It meant that the Satrap’s cabal could, with relative ease, power the ships back up and put them back into service. Add to that the ships whose crews were likewise loyal to the old guard, and the Satrap’s people could erupt from the shadows with an entire fleet, seize power, and reestablish themselves as the rulers of the League. It would put an aggressive and opportunistic power on the map of known space, and one that was immune to Calamity at that. It would be a disaster—one that could irrevocably upend the balance of power. The Eridani and the Tau Cetans, along with the Guild and the GKU, would be forced to join in a campaign to eradicate this new threat. Calamity made even the outcome of that uncertain—particularly if the League had figured out how to weaponize the virus and infect ships remotely, as they had with the Object 6.

All of which was why the actual intent of the Satrap and his cabal, as described by Kharsweil, made no sense. “They’re going to attack the Schegith?

Why?

They’ll just tip their hand. The Schegith won’t just roll over, the cabal will take losses, and it’ll be way harder for them to seize power from the League’s provisional government. The Schegith aren’t going anywhere, so why not consolidate their position first?”

Kharsweil shrugged. “I don’t disagree at all. If I were in charge of their strategy, that would be my approach as well. But I have reliable information that the Schegith are about to be attacked.”

“Is it the Tenants, maybe?

Are they still influencing the Satrap and his people somehow?”

Another shrug. “The Tenants were supposedly eradicated. The Satrap himself was never infected by them, but his closest advisors were, and they are all… gone. In fact, it would seem that the Satrap’s faction purged itself of the Tenants. So this is very much their plan, not the work of an outside agency.”

“You said that a new future is coming, one that’s all about efficiency and not what you so blithely dismiss as ephemeral things and emotions. You said that you want to get ahead of it, set yourself up to take advantage of it. What do you mean by all that?

What is this new future you’re talking about?”

Kharsweil hesitated before answering. I didn’t get the sense he was building a lie. Instead, it felt like he was trying to figure out exactly how he was going to tell me something complicated, like Icky about to explain some niche aspect of the Fafnir’s performance to me. He stared into the distance for a moment, then abruptly refocused on me. “I don’t know. And before you object, that is the truth. I honestly don’t know what is intended. Gauss did, but that knowledge died with him. If anyone else did, I’m not aware of who they are. All that I do know, based

on what Gauss shared with me, was that the very nature of known space and everyone and everything in it would soon be made… different.”

“Different how?”

“As I said, I don’t know. Gauss exhorted me to choose to be on the side that would inevitably win, and he was very persuasive. Now, admittedly, I was hedging my bets by remaining a Master in the Guild while also providing information and assistance to Gauss, but with the sudden rise of Calamity—”

Kharsweil ended with a shrug. I made a judgment call and chose not to press him further. His air, his bearing—all of it spoke of a man who knew just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be effective. Which was, I surmised, Gauss’s plan all along. Gauss built his empire, and then he had the audacity to die before completing an idea so nefarious it made the term evil seem cozy. The people he left behind were safer—but also, still at risk. The Satrap was a part of Gauss’s idea, though the details were lost forever. Calamity was out there, lurking, and the immediate secondary issue was quite simple. Who would fill the power vacuum Gauss left behind?

I could think of only one place to start trying to find those missing pieces. I needed to talk to Matterforge. Before that, we had to see to the security of the Schegith and deliver Gerhardt the unsavory news that I’d cut a deal with Kharsweil. And rally the Guild. And the GKU. And develop a clear plan to protect Schegith—

I felt a sigh escape my body, which earned a look from Torina. Arching a brow, she spoke in a tone that was casual but intimate. “Did you know, dear, that you have three distinct sighs?”

“I do?”

“Yes.” She began counting on her long fingers. “The first is rare, but it does happen. It’s when you actually relax. Usually, your head is on my chest, and the moment only lasts for—” She sprouted a bittersweet smile. “Not long enough.”

“I agree.”

“The next two pertain to all this—what the stars demand. One sigh is raw disgust. And the other is a combination of disgust and frustration. Like the one I just heard, which tells me—”

Dregs began to pop on our scans, and I turned to face her, a small grin creeping over my features. “You know me that well?”

She smiled, then put a hand on my chest. “Better. And I know you’re thinking about what we don’t know, and what we’re going to find out, and most of all—”

“How do we stop this nonsense from breaking free and causing mass chaos?” I interjected. “Yes. Just that. And we will. We’re all with you.”

“I am with you as long as we disinfect ourselves after leaving this bioweapon facility painted to be a trading station,” Funboy added, then absently scratched his neck as he stared at Dregs. “And before. And during.”

I uttered what was now officially Sigh Number Three, yet again. “Netty, take a hundred bonds out of the budget for soap. And hand sanitizer.”

Funboy tilted his head expectantly. “And?”

I raised my voice. “Everyone gets an extra ten minutes of hot shower.”

Hot showers pulled energy from the ship’s batteries and chewed through resources. Thus, Netty hounded us when we got too comfortable in the bathroom. Icky whooped. “Finally!”

Funboy looked pained. “Dare… dare I ask?”

Icky blinked, then pointed at her back, her entire manner changing to…

shyness. “Gives me time to scrub my back hair. He, um… you know, Paxomar, he likes it to be soft.”

Funboy instantly leapt at attention, his eyes closed tight. “I humbly request being shot into the nearest star. Thank you.”

I stood and looped an arm around his small frame. “Not a chance. You’re in it for the long ride. And because this is your fault, you’re going to run a little errand for me. Personally.”

Torina’s eyes danced with glee. “What’s his punishment, commander?”

“Netty, make it one hundred fifty bonds. Funboy is making a stop at the nearest trade post. We’re sending Funboy to buy something called conditioner.”

15

I DECIDED that the priority had to be the Schegith. Kharsweil could wait, which meant Gerhardt could wait. Likewise, worries about some unspecified but sinister future were of less immediate importance than the threat to the Schegith. Kharsweil wasn’t sure of the League old guard’s plan or timetable, but he was sure we had no more than days before they moved as a worst case scenario, and perhaps two or three weeks at best. That sounded like a long time, but if the Rogue League—which is what I’d taken to calling the Satrap’s faction—could muster the combat power Kharsweil described, then we would need to bring together some scattered forces to counter it. On their own, the Schegith were damned capable, but their immunity to Calamity put them and their ships in major demand across known space. Moreover, they’d invested considerable effort and resources into ensuring the security of Helso, which had become their protectorate. No one, not even the Schegith themselves, had anticipated a significant threat to Null World, their home planet. We twisted into the Gliese 440 system and immediately headed for Null World on a high-G trajectory. Fuel economy didn’t seem important right now. The planet was locked in another of its raging electrical storms, but fortunately it was on the wane. “Dying down a bit,” I remarked, watching a fork of lurid red lightning sprawl some ten thousand klicks across the sky. Icky pulled at the hair on her arm, clearly alarmed by the savagery all around us. “Um, yeah. Practically beach weather down there.”

“Easy in, Netty. Let’s run our discharge protocol on a ten second cycle,”

I ordered. “Got it, boss. Shedding risk as we go.”

By the time we arrived, it had abated enough that we could take the Frankie down without anything worse than hard turbulence. We left Torina and Netty-P aboard the Fafnir, which remained in orbit to keep watch and give us early warning of any sudden moves by the Rogue League or any other threats. We landed, and Perry, Funboy, and I made our way into the Schegith’s subterranean complex, then picked our way across the vast flagstones as the storm continued to boil away off to the east. I wasn’t sure, but there seemed to be a few more Schegith than the last time we dropped by—a sign of success that made me grin with pride. Schegith herself, the matronly head of her race, had given birth to a bouncing baby slug who would be her successor, but it seemed the other Schegith were busy making babies, too. That said, it was hard to distinguish young Schegith from the older ones, because they apparently spent only a few weeks to months in their immature form, then abruptly became adults. In addition, they matured and gained adult knowledge nearly as quickly. As B had described it to me, it would be like a human baby reaching six months old, then suddenly turning eighteen and starting college. If the human infant was a car-sized battleslug with rapier wit. And pharyngeal teeth. We noticed something else, as well. The Schegith had invested in a slew of AI bots, which we saw clattering and rolling about on myriad miscellaneous tasks. That made sense. The race had nearly been wiped out, reduced for a time to only Schegith herself—

and then, Schegith and a solitary cousin. They were recovering, but it took time, so the bots could take up the slack in doing all the unavoidable drudge work implied in a growing society, everything from construction to waste management. The bots flowed around us in a busy clatter, We arrived in Schegith’s sanctum, a cavernous room emblazoned with a mural depicting the Fafnir and my crew, who were heroes to the Schegith. I hesitated at the valorous rendering—not that I wasn’t flattered, but—

I found my limit. The mural was a bit much. “Van Tudor, this one is most pleased to see you,” Schegith said as we approached. As usual, she reclined on a large platform on a raised dais. It struck me that she came across a much larger, albeit less-tentacled version of Flagas, but without the utter amorality and criminal opportunism, of course. Several other Schegith were gathered around her, a sight that lifted my spirits given the dire state of her species mere years earlier. “This is despite the dire warning you offered in your message. However, as yet, this one has heard of no threatening movements from the League,”

she went on. I hesitated at that. What if Kharsweil had just been lying, plain and simple?

I’d been convinced of his sincerity, but he might simply be a gifted bullshit artist with a political and economic motivation that turned him into a savant of the stage. It was too late to retract Kharsweil’s performance, in a sense, as I’d sent the information on to Gerhardt. Schegith was an excellent ally, and even more important, a good friend who we cared about. Her loyalty mattered. Her people mattered. I drew in a breath, choosing my next words with care. She had to know what we did. “The warning exists, although Kharsweil thought that the Rogue League faction was marshaling forces somewhere off the beaten path, where they weren’t likely to be discovered. And there are a lot of remote and empty star systems out there,” I said. “Indeed, too many to investigate, of course. But this one has taken your warning to heart, recalling all Schegith vessels that are not currently involved in critical humanitarian work. The first should arrive very soon, the others over the coming days.”

“How many ships are you expecting?

What’s the biggest fleet you expect to be able to muster?” Perry asked. Schegith turned to one of her people, who slithered forward. “In total, fourteen ships capable of battle. Using conventional definitions, four of those would be capital ships, and the remainder, smaller varieties—four in the cruiser category, and six in the escort category.”

I did the math, and it wasn’t optimal. “That’s great, but… I don’t know if that’s going to be enough. In fact, based on what Kharsweil said, I’m sure it won’t. I’m hoping we can gather some additional forces from the Guild and the GKU to help.”

Schegith herself nodded. “Indeed, that is as this one expected. Accordingly, this one has also been in contact with other potential allies for assistance.”

“All due respect, but I hope that doesn’t include the Eridani or Tau Cetans. If they get involved, we’ll escalate quickly from a regional war into something far more dangerous,” I said. “This one does not consider either of those reliable allies. They did nothing when this one’s people were nearly exterminated. This one is most notably referring to Unity.”

I added this to my math, and the results were getting better. Unity was an alliance of several worlds anti-spinward to known space. Rather than amalgamate themselves with known space, though, they’d chosen to stay apart, both politically and socially, with the only regular interaction based on trade. Unity had proven reliable, if somewhat reluctant allies in the past, but if Schegith felt she could ask for their support, I wasn’t going to complain. “That makes our numbers better, assuming that all of those forces get here in time.”

“Van, this one notes that you are considering the impending attack from the rogue elements of the League as only a threat,” Schegith said. I stared at her for a moment, blinking. “Yes?

Because that’s what they’re doing, threatening to attack?”

“Ah, but perhaps this is also an opportunity.”

I blinked, taken off guard by her comment. “How so?”

“This one wonders what the response by the Rogue League, as you have called them, would be if there were no fleet here to confront them.”

“No… fleet?

What, you mean if Null World was undefended?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I assume they would just enter orbit and start bombarding the planet.”

“This one assumes that as well.”

I kept staring. What the hell was she getting at—?

“Ah. Yes. I see,” Funboy said, nodding sagely. I glanced at him. “You do. Okay, how about sharing?”

“The atmosphere of Null World is strongly charged, very turbulent, given to frequent, widespread and powerful storms, and laden with large

quantities of dust. Targeting anything on the surface from orbit is going to be extremely difficult.”

“Sourpuss is right, Van,” Perry put in. “I’ve just discussed it with Netty, and we figure targeting accuracy would be fifteen percent, tops.”

I looked from one to the next as they talked. “So you’re saying an orbital bombardment isn’t going to be very effective.”

“Lasers and particle beams would be useless, the first because of attenuation to atmospheric dust and debris, the latter because of the strongly charged environment. That leaves mass drivers and missiles, and those come in finite quantities,” Perry replied. I turned to Schegith. “So—ah, okay. You’re suggesting they’d have to land and attack you down here on the surface.”

“Precisely. And this one believes that is a much more equitable situation for the defenders.”

I looked around, sifting the memories of our former conflict. “I see your point.” I thought back to the earlier attack on Schegith, mercenaries hired to kill her newborn successor. Despite their superior firepower and numbers, the Schegith had been able to hold them off until we—the cavalry—arrived. But if the Rogues wanted to ensure they destroyed the Schegith, it was the only way they could reliably do it. “And this presents another, ensuing opportunity,” Schegith went on. “If the ships that land were to be seized and taken over—”

“Then we reduce the size of their forces and bulk ours up at the same time. You’re diabolical, Schegith,” I said, grinning. “This one prefers the term practical.”

I laughed. “So we get ’em down here on the rock, invite their crews to an engagement, and then kill their drives. Yeah, I don’t think they’ll have much fight in them once their rides are gone.”

“We presumably don’t wish to damage their ships to the point where they are unusable without major repairs. How do you propose to inflict sufficient damage to disable them, but in a way that can be easily repaired?”

Funboy asked. I pointed up. “Torina. She’s the best shot we have. I propose, therefore, to put her in the belfry, so to speak, and let her snipe engine bells from the surrounding hills. If she’s careful, it’ll be damned near impossible to track her shots.”

“We need something for her to use that’s strong enough to damage a drive bell—some sort of anti-material weapon. A slug rifle just ain’t gonna do it, I’m afraid,” Perry said. One of the attending Schegith slid forward but turned and spoke to Schegith herself. “If this one may, perhaps the experimental weapon would be useful. This would also be a good opportunity to field test it.”

“Experimental weapon?

Ooh, I like the sound of that,” I said. Schegith nodded, and the one who’d spoken turned to me. “This one has overseen the development of a portable weapon capable of damaging or destroying a ship. The intent was to use them to protect this sanctum, but they could probably be adapted to this role. They have the advantage of already having sighting systems designed for use inside Null World’s atmosphere.”

“Portable?

You mean, like, usable by one person?”

“That is the intent, yes. They have been named Deepstrikers, after a more voracious form of predator that dwells in the underworld waterways of Null World.”

“How many of these Deepstrikers do you have?” Perry asked. “Only five. They are working prototypes. This one will see to the development of more, but this will take time.”

“What if there are six or more ships in the raiding party?” Funboy asked. Schegith pulled on her pipe. “Then you will engage them in hand-to-hand combat while this one and her compatriots flee.”

Silence, then Funboy made a brief, clipped sound that I assumed was an actual laugh. “Finally, a sense of humor I can appreciate.”

WE WERE EVENTUALLY INTERRUPTED by the arrival of another Schegith, who spoke quietly to Schegith herself. When he withdrew, she turned back to us. “This one has received intelligence that the Rogue League fleet will be attacking no sooner than seven days from now. This one considers this

reliable, as the information comes from Unity, who have an agent infiltrated into their midst.”

“Does that mean they’ve found the Rogue fleet?” I asked. “No. The agent is still attempting to obtain that information. All that this agent can report is that our enemy’s intent is to attack in seven days. That gives somewhat more time for preparation than originally envisioned.”

But I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t. They say seven, so we have to assume five.”

Schegith hesitated. “Why?”

“Because these Rogues include a bunch of military professionals. And no major military operation in history hasn’t involved some sort of deception about its timing. If they’re saying seven, we assume five. That way, when they attack, probably in six days, we’ll be ready for them.”

“A good point. The Unity agent is not privy to their fleet’s exact location, so they are on the outside of the actual operation. We should, as Van says, assume that they have been deceived.”

“Or even be a double agent,” Perry added. Schegith gave us a ponderous nod. “This one is glad for your wise and prudent counsel. The expected day of the attack shall be taken as five days from now.”

I nodded. “That means we’ve got some time to kill. I don’t want to get involved in anything too complicated, but I’d also like to not just sit here, enjoying the sights of Null World, for almost a week.” As I spoke, I glanced at my fingers. I’d lost two of them during an operation to rescue Gabriella Santorelli, my pinkie finger and the one next to it on my left hand. I’d made do with simple prosthetics in the meantime, but they were awkward and inflexible. I’d meant to eventually get cyber prosthetics, or even get them regrown, but just hadn’t got around to it. I raised my hand. “Maybe I should get these fixed while we wait.”

Perry gave me a sudden amber stare. “You know what, Van?

Maybe you should.”

“The dramatic way you said that hints at a scheme of some sort,” I replied. “It does, and it’s a cunning one, if I do say so myself.”

DOHLENNZ. Helem Gauss’s one-time co-conspirator, he—or she, or even it, though we’d settled on he for now—was otherwise a completely blank page. We had his name, as well as the fact he was a gifted but utterly amoral specialist in hybrid biomechanical life and had developed the vile process called Braiding and—

And that was about it. We discussed it as we returned to the Frankie. “Dohlennz, if nothing else, may have answers regarding Calamity. He was instrumental in assisting Gauss in releasing it, after all,” Funboy said. “Not to mention the fact he was close to Gauss—and by close, I mean literally digging around inside the guy to give him a new body. He may also have insights into Gauss’s bigger plans,” Perry added. “Granted. That all sounds good. But what does that have to do with my missing fingers?”

“Well, the logical place to get them replaced would be Pont Alus Kyr, right?

And if Gauss has a connection to any place in known space, Pont Alus Kyr would be a logical assumption, no?”

“I… suppose. What are you suggesting?”

“That we go to Pont Alus Kyr.”

“And then?”

“Hey, I’m a big-picture, ideas kind of bird. I leave it to others to work out the sordid details.”

“The bird’s right, although I detest inflating his ego any further,” I said. “Impossible. I’m the picture of humility.”

I made a face. “That’s… generous. But still, Pont Alus Kyr is a good starting place in a search for Dohlennz. And they sell fingers wholesale, I think.”

“I might have a coupon,” Perry added. I inclined my head in thanks. “Never let it be said we aren’t classy.”

We walked on in thoughtful silence. Perry was right. Our only other real window into the esoteric world of hybridized biological and mechanical life was Viktor, the Body Thief. But we’d already asked him about Dohlennz, and he’d come up blank. It wasn’t a name he was familiar with. And while Viktor, as an ex-Sorcerer, was a wealth of information about them, he couldn’t match what little we knew about Dohlennz to anyone connected with them. Nor did he fit with anyone Viktor knew otherwise. So going to Pont Alus Kyr made sense. It was only a day or so round-trip travel time, meaning we could spend even a couple of days there and still have ample opportunity to get back by the time the Rogues made their move. We decided to leave Torina with the Frankie on Null World, learning the ins and outs of the Deepstriker missiles and how they could be adapted to disabling rather than destroying target ships. Better still, if we could gain access to a portable weapon system that could take out a ship, well, sign me up. The rest of us loaded aboard the Fafnir and set course for Pont Alus Kyr. Along the way, I contacted everyone I could think of who might be able to help defend Null World in case our little bait-and-switch scheme with the Rogue ships didn’t work. I couldn’t reach my mother but got Valint on the Stormshadow, and she agreed to put out the word through the GKU. Lunzy promised to round up whatever Peacemakers were available among those we trusted and would talk to Gerhardt, Alic, and Volffin about further reinforcements. I even contacted Petyr Groshenko, who I hadn’t spoken to in a long time. I got him aboard the flagship of his small flotilla of mercenary warships, the Poltava. “Petyr—holy shit, you’re looking damned good,” I said when his image appeared on the display in my cabin. He was. As a Master, he had a somewhat flabby and dispirited air about him. That was understandable, because he was facing a terminal illness that apparently defied treatment. But casting off his Master’s sash and returning to the life of a free-wheeling mercenary seemed to have been just the treatment he needed. He was lean and buff, his eyes bright with quick intelligence and keen humor. “Exercise, eating right, clean living, and the occasional firefight to keep the senses sharp,” he said, grinning. “And vodka.”

“I thought that would be a given.”

I laughed, and so did he, but he turned serious— more serious, anyway

—again. “Also, the best medical therapy money can buy definitely helps.’

I stared for a moment. “You were a Master of the Peacemaker Guild. Surely, if anyone has good health coverage, it would be them.”

Groshenko stared back, then grinned and laughed a deep belly laugh. “Oh, Van, youth really is wasted on the young.”

“What?”

His laugh faded again. “You’re just so charmingly naïve. It’s going to break my heart when the idealism is finally ground out of you.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

He sighed and leaned toward the imager. “There are seven Masters, yes?

Seven and only seven, as specified in the Guild’s Charter.”

“Right—”

“So an aspiring Master can only take a seat at the big Table in the Keel if an existing Master moves on. They retire, they die—or, lately, they turn out to be shockingly corrupt and flee just ahead of the forces of justice coming after them. That opens a vacancy, and there are lots of Peacemakers who are going to want it.”

“Wait—are you saying you were denied medical care for your condition because the Guild wanted you to kick off?”

“The Guild?

No, of course not. But ambitious up-and-comers calling in favors, paying bribes, and peddling influence to interfere with me getting what I needed when I needed it?

Definitely.”

“But—how?”

He shrugged. “There were always delays. Bureaucratic red tape. Files went astray. More red tape. Messages got lost. Did I mention there was red tape?”

“Holy—you can’t be serious.”

“Van, trust me, some of the biggest enemies any Peacemaker has hang out in The Black Hole on Anvil Dark. Look at you. You’ve shot up through the ranks, are regularly rubbing elbows with the Masters—hell, you’re Gerhardt’s Justiciar. You’ve also been instrumental in helping to take down, what, four corrupt Masters?

Including the supposedly untouchable Yotov?

Do you know how many meal tickets you took away from their minions?”

He leaned back and smiled, but it was a hard, wry smile. “Van, there are Peacemakers watching you very closely. Some of them envy you. Some of them despise you. Some of them believe you’ve only gotten where you are because you’re Mark Tudor’s grandson. Half of them are hoping you just keep rising and are looking for ways they can follow along in your wake. The other half are watching for any opportunity to bring you down before

you get in their way or take a position they covet—and that includes the seven Master’s seats.”

He shrugged again, with the languid air of a seasoned veteran. “Anvil Dark is many things. One of them is a rock. And you know what happens when you kick over a rock.”

“You get to see what things are living under it.”

“Bingo.”

“But I don’t have any particular ambition to be a Master.”

Groshenko laughed again and shook his head. “Oh, you naïve, innocent child. Neither did I.”

16

WE HAD CALLED AHEAD to Pont Alus Kyr to confirm that I could get my fingers replaced. Icky had also been discussing her own medical issues in the wake of the hormonal tempest that had gripped her some months ago. Apparently, B had recommended periodic hormonal therapy, so we arranged that with Pont Alus Kyr as well. “You know, Peacemaker Tudor, with the—pardon my language—

shitstorm raging around Calamity, we’ve been locked down, more or less,”

Winthrop said. He was an older human with Earthly origins like mine and was the Director of Pont Alus Kyr. “Given your record of assisting us in the past, though, we’re willing to lower the drawbridge, as it were, for you.”

I smiled at his image on the display. “I appreciate that, Director. I also thought I heard a bit of quid pro quo somewhere there in the background while you were speaking.”

He smiled back. “Very perceptive. I’m hoping that, when you leave here, you can take a couple of passengers with you.”

“What sort of passengers?”

“Two who have a… a pressing need to be somewhere else.”

“Okay. Where?”

Winthrop curled his lip. “Anywhere but here.”

That made me frown. “These people are, what, persona non grata with you guys for some reason?”

“You might say that. More to the point, they are irritating as hell. Or one of them is, anyway. He fancies himself the galaxy’s gift to hairstylists. His

name is Ralston.”

“A… hair stylist?”

“And his assistant, yes.”

My frown turned bemused. “Okay, I’ll bite. What, exactly, is a famous hairstylist doing on Pont Alus Kyr?”

“Making our lives miserable. We brought him in to consult on matters of hair—it’s one of the more difficult biological components to reproduce on demand.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really. It’s easier for us to print a functioning heart than it is to grow convincing hair en masse. We can do it one strand at a time, but—”

He spread his hands. “Yeah, it’d take a long time. Okay, so this—Ralston?

Why is he stuck on—?” I stopped, then nodded. “Wait. Let me guess. He got stuck behind your Calamity precautions.”

“No inbound traffic unless it meets the threshold of a category A3

emergency or higher,” Winthrop replied, nodding. “So how do we clear the bar for an emergency of any sort?”

“You’re a Peacemaker. It’s in the best interests of known space if you’re whole and functional and have all your fingers—”

I laughed, and Winthrop gave a rueful grin. “I know. When I say it out loud, even I don’t believe it. But if you want your fingers replaced and hormone therapy for your Wu’tzur crew member, you’re going to have to take Ralston and company off our hands. Otherwise, there will be an emergency when somebody here snaps and murders him.”

I was still chuckling. “You’ve got yourself a deal, Director. Although, there is another matter I’d like to discuss with you when we arrive. There’s someone we’re trying to find, and I’m hoping that you’ll be the place to start.”

Winthrop raised an eyebrow. “Someone?

Who would that be?”

“I’ll tell you when we arrive. It’s not something suited for open comms.”

“How mysterious. Very well, Peacemaker. I look forward to your arrival.” He smirked. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I look forward to your departure even more, if it involves Ralston going somewhere that isn’t here.”

I grinned and signed off, then started to stand to return to the Fafnir’s cockpit. Netty spoke up, though. “Van, I’m curious—why did you put that call through in the clear, no encryption?

I mean, nothing you discussed was especially sensitive, but we generally attempt to keep the Fafnir’s movements at least somewhat secret.”

“You noticed that, huh?”

“I am the Fafnir’s comm system, Van. Of course I noticed it.”

I sat back down. “I have a cunning plan.”

“Uh-oh.”

I chuckled. “You’re right, Netty. Usually, we want our movements to be secret, or as secret as we can make them, anyway. This time, though, I’m kind of hoping that someone will eventually overhear that conversation—a particular someone.”

“Dohlennz.”

“Got it on the first try. That’s right. I want Dohlennz, who or whatever he is, to know that he’s not just managed to walk away from all this while all the attention is on Gauss. And who knows, it might even provoke him into doing something dumb, or at least making a mistake. And even if it doesn’t, I don’t exactly feel bad for making him look over his shoulder, at least a little.”

“You called Schegith diabolical. But you’re a little diabolical yourself, Van Tudor.”

“I try.”

I returned to the cockpit and filled the rest of the crew in on what was going on, including providing Pont Alus Kyr with the evacuation Winthrop requested. “Evacuation?

We’re going to evacuate people?

How many?

Where to?”

Icky asked. “Two, and I don’t know where to yet, other than away from Pont Alus Kyr,” I explained, and Icky just scowled and grunted—in acknowledgement, if not actual assent. Funboy’s reaction was very different, though. “Hmm. Interesting.”

I glanced at him. Without Torina aboard, he’d taken the copilot’s seat. “Interesting?”

“Yes. Interesting, and also fortuitous.”

“Okay, why?”

“Because I’ve been toying with the idea of getting my hair styled, and this would seem like an excellent opportunity.”

“I—uh—really?”

Funboy blinked at me. “It isn’t just a matter of vanity. There’s an issue of practicality. I have noticed, particularly on Earth, that when I wear my melanoma-abatement system—”

“Your what?”

“He means a hat,” Perry said. “So why the hell don’t you just call it a hat?”

“If precise language is available, why not use it?

It exists for a reason.”

“Sure, fine. Let’s just stipulate that hat will stand in for melanoma-abatement system hereafter, shall we?” I said. Funboy considered it, then gave a sage nod. “That would be admirably efficient. Very well, then. I have noticed that when I wear a hat, the central portion of my cranial mane—”

“Your hair.”

Blink. “Yes, my hair. It gets flattened, and that leads to discomfort. I believe that the hairstyle known as a perm would obviate that.”

“A perm. You want to get your hair permed.”

“Yes. I discussed it with Torina, and she enthusiastically embraced the idea.”

“I bet she did,” Perry said. “She described my hair as silky and luxurious, which I gather are positive descriptors, and further suggested I arrange for the protein strands in the hair on the center of my head to be given a continuous, dextral curve throughout their length—”

“Curls,” Icky said. “Yes, but only in the center. They will retain their spring and, according to Torina, their appeal even covered with my mela—my hat.”

“So you are going to ask this Ralston to give you a perm,” I said. “Actually, Ralston is extremely well-known,” Perry interjected, helpful as ever. “I’ve done up a backgrounder on him. I should emphasize that he hasn’t stabbed anyone since the incident on that Eridani network reality show, though I personally think the one he jabbed with the scissors had it coming. She was a real bitch. She called him a gifted amateur and then threw wine in his face. I mean, how much can one Eniped take?”

“Wait. Ralston’s an Eniped?” I thought about Alic, one of the few Eniped I knew. He was a gifted tactician and strategist and a skilled pilot, but as for being a hairstylist—

“Eniped have fat fingers, practically flippers,” I said. “They’re noted for their brilliance as military commanders, not their fine manual dexterity.”

“Ralston uses a proxy, sort of like how you rely on me to make the complicated tactical decisions and stuff,” Perry replied. Icky gave a mischievous grin. “And I help him in the sex appeal department.”

“Riiight. Anyway, if this Ralston is so famous—and stabby—how much does he cost?”

“I have sufficient funds,” Funboy said. I gave him a suspicious side-eye. “Is this just about you wearing a hat, or do you have someone you’re trying to impress somewhere?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if there is a pretty girl Surtsi out there somewhere you’ve got your eye on?

Maybe the one who briefed us on Gauss’s trial?”

“I’d have thought I’ve made it clear by now that I have no interest in such base matters of the flesh.”

I laughed and shook my head. “That’s what they all say, right before they start writing love poems to their sweetie. Well, Netty, we don’t want to keep Funboy from improving his devilish good looks. To the murderous hairstylist, and step on it!”

WE ARRIVED at Pont Alus Kyr to yet another stringent quarantine. We had to deactivate all datalinks, switch everything to analog only, then wait for a shuttle from the station to manually dock with the Fafnir. We boarded it, but were denied any slates and, again, any comm systems had to be switched to analog only. Finally, when we arrived at the station, we had to remove our suits and don simple jumpsuits provided for us. They hadn’t even wanted to let us bring Perry along, considering him a risk just by virtue of his mechanical nature. I drew the line there. Netty-P had graciously agreed to stay behind, but I wanted Perry with me—he was a member of my crew and, in some ways, my right hand even more than Torina was. I informed Winthrop that if he didn’t allow Perry aboard the station, then he could find another ride for Ralston. That was enough to convince him, but only on the condition that Perry not just switch off, but also fully deactivate all of his datalinks. “This is weird,” he said as I pulled on the soft, pliant shoes that had been provided with the jumpsuit. “What’s weird?”

“Not being plugged in or connected to anything. I’m used to living on the edge of a sea of data. Now, I’m kinda stuck all on my own in a featureless desert with no ocean in sight. All I’ve got is what I can see, hear, feel, or sample with my chemical discriminator.”

“Your nose.”

“Or, in my case, my beak. But yeah.”

I stood, stamping my feet to settle the shoes in place. “Well, Perry, welcome to the reality of being… um, just about any other living thing.”

“Really?

This is how you go through life?” He gave me an amber blink. “Wow. This sucks.”

“Speaking of sucking—” Icky said, glaring at the coveralls still dangling in her hand. “This outfit has pants built right into it. What is this, some kind of sick joke?”

I shook my head. “Well, it could be that, or it could just be what a pair of coveralls, you know, is.”

She scowled back at me, then reached up and tied the sleeves of the coveralls around her neck, leaving the rest of them dangling down her back like a cape. “There. I’m wearing coveralls.”

“Technically correct is the best sort of correct,” Perry said. I turned to Funboy to see what his particular flavor of objection or complaint was going to be. It would no doubt begin with oh dear, then go on at length about having to wear clothes that weren’t his. I was pleasantly surprised to find him dressed and ready to go. “Before you say anything, I asked the attendant who handed us these outfits if they’d been previously worn. She informed me that they had been freshly printed, just for us. So, no, I have no qualms about wearing them.”

He blinked. “I am not totally unreasonable and obstructive.”

“No, you’re right, you aren’t—not totally, anyway,” I said, and we exited the decontamination station that had been repurposed into a dressing room. Winthrop met us, then introduced us to the various staff who’d be looking after us. Icky went with the doctor, a Gajur, who would administer her hormone therapy, Funboy accompanying her. Perry and I followed the human bioscientist who’d be hooking me up with new fingers. His name tape declared him to be Jameson. “It’ll be good to get rid of these stupid prosthetics,” I said, sitting on the reclining couch he indicated when we arrived in his glistening white lab. I pulled the little devices off my fingers and put them aside. They were clunky and offered only very limited finger-like function. “We’re just doing a straight replacement?” Jameson asked, fiddling with a display, before turning and putting my hand into a device to hold it in place. He then lowered an arm festooned with a terrifying array of gleaming instruments like knitting needles, tiny chainsaws, and a single saw-edged spoon. I didn’t want to know what that little tool was for. “Looks like something straight out of an Eli Roth movie,” Perry said. “Thanks, bird. Appreciate the visual.” I turned to Jameson. “There are alternatives to just replacing my fingers?”

“Lots. I mean, we could give you claws, or tentacles, or any number of other appendages to function as digits.”

“Ooh, Van, go for tentacles. That’ll be cool, and a hell of a conversation starter,” Perry said. “I… think I’m good with ordinary fingers, thanks,” I said, shooting Perry a glare. Perry sighed. “Well, that’s boring. You’ve got no sense of adventure.”

“How about added functionality?” Jameson asked. I narrowed my eyes. “Now what does that mean?

You mean, like, built-in screwdrivers or corkscrews or something?”

“Now, now, Van, think of Torina,” Perry said, and I turned to him with a grimace. “Perry, we really don’t need the running commentary, okay?”

“Hmph. Fine. I’ll just sit here being entirely isolated from the rest of creation—oh, I know, I’ll watch a movie. It’s been hours since I’ve seen Casablanca.” He hesitated a second or so, then nodded. “It is the start of a beautiful friendship. They just don’t make them like that anymore.”

Because Pont Alus Kyr specialized in integrating organic life with mechanical components—a step short of the sort of full integration Viktor the Body Thief aspired to—I was indeed able to get some added functionality to my new fingers. My pinkie finger could interface directly with a datalink, which was great, but currently pointless, since I had no way of processing or perceiving the data. Still, it offered some potential for future upgrades. My ring finger, though, was able to deliver a brief but powerful electric discharge, enough to fry an unprotected circuit or deliver a painful shock to someone I touched with it. “I’d keep that one deactivated until you actually plan to use it,” Jameson said as the needles began to poke quickly and deftly at the stump of my pinkie. They didn’t actually stab me, instead depositing minute quantities of tissue, quickly building up a finger. The datalink replaced the bone in my finger’s tip. “Otherwise, you may scratch an itch and get a lot more than you bargained for,” he went on. “And depending on what part of your anatomy you’re scratching—”

“I get it, thanks.”

“Just saying.”

I flexed my new fingers when they were done. They weren’t tender or sore, and they didn’t show any evidence of not being my own digits. The system had apparently blueprinted its work based on my DNA, so they effectively were my fingers, just back again after an absence. I did try out the shock effect and was able to produce an impressive blue, snapping spark on a test target. “It will recharge itself as you move and flex your hand. You should plan for at least five minutes between uses, though, as long as you keep your hand in motion.”

I spun on Perry. “Don’t.”

“What?”

“Say the crude thing you were about to say.”

“Who, moi?”

When we were done, Jameson took me to see Winthrop. Icky and Funboy were already there. I showed off my new fingers, then settled into a seat in front of the Director’s desk. “Now then, Peacemaker—”

“Please, it’s Van.”

“Alright—Van, you were going to ask me about a cryptic someone in whom you’re apparently interested,” Winthrop said. “We’re looking for a… man, or person, or somebody or even some thing named Dohlennz. He was in league with Helem Gauss, put him into a new body, and helped him release Calamity. Since he’s in the same field of work as you folks, I was hoping you might know something about him, or how we can find him.”

Winthrop nodded. “Your Master Gerhardt already asked us the same thing. We’ve done some digging, but we can’t find any references to anyone named Dohlennz who’s ever been involved with, or even vaguely connected to Pont Alus Kyr.”

“Well, shit.”

Winthrop shrugged. “It may be someone that we do know, or know of, anyway, going by an assumed name. But without more information, that’s all we can tell you.”

I watched Winthrop as he spoke, looking for any sign of dissembling or holding something back. He and his staff had proven reluctant to reveal information to us once before, when Hoshi Onwyn had been attacked and the symbiotic life-form attached to her, a creature named Cibilax, had been forcibly removed from her. Even though it had been an egregious attack, perpetrated right here on Pont Alus Kyr, and even though it had almost killed Hoshi, he and his staff had dodged and weaved around some key information before we finally pinned them down. But I saw none of that here. As far as I could tell, Winthrop was being entirely honest and forthright. He knew nothing about Dohlennz. So, again—a dead end. “Then it looks, for now, like the mysterious Dohlennz is going to remain in the wind.” I held up my hand and flexed my fingers. “Still, not a wasted trip.”

Winthrop smiled. “It will not be a wasted trip once you’ve relieved us of the mercurial Ralston. And, to that end—”

Winthrop stood. “Let’s go meet the man of the hour, shall we?”

I stood as well. “I can hardly wait.”

17

THERE’S a tendency to lump aliens together into broad bins when you first meet them. Yonnox are shifty. Skels are untrustworthy assholes. Gajur are dour. Nesit are cunning. Surtsi are miserable. Fren-Okun are moist. It’s wrong, of course, just applying sweeping stereotypes like that. At best, it’s disingenuous. At worst, it’s racist. That said, even I tended to be guilty of it sometimes, though I tried to catch myself when I did it. Like now. My only significant exposure to Eniped had been Alic, a brilliant commander and all-around great guy, and Kragdolous, the mysterious but super-competent engineer with his own workshop on Anvil Dark. So, despite everything I’d been told about Ralston, I’d gone into the meeting with him expecting someone smoothly and quietly competent. I was spectacularly wrong. Ralston was a caricature alright, but not one of quiet professionalism. He was flighty, arrogant, bitchy, and entitled. He was dressed in robes of a shimmering fabric like gold lamé, festooned with a double-sash that, unbelievably, spelled out Ralston in glowing letters that flowed along its length. And most striking of all, he wore cosmetics that looked like they’d been applied with a paint gun. If the paint gun was aimed at an angry sea lion. “Ralston is very pleased to meet you, Peacemaker. Ralston understands that you will be taking him away from this sterile, unfriendly place. Ralston is ready to depart now.”

He spoke in the third person. Naturally. I forced a smile. “We will be leaving shortly—”

“Ralston’s assistant will provide a list of requirements for accommodation aboard your ship,” he cut in, waving forward a—

Okay, I had never seen one of these before. Ralston’s assistant was—she was—okay, imagine a tardigrade, a water bear. Now imagine it being bipedal, over six feet tall, and slender, but still almost translucent and somewhat gelatinous. Now imagine it wearing welder’s goggles, a smock decked with pockets and pouches, and a broad, infectious grin with very human-looking teeth that carried you right into the middle of the uncanny valley, and then stranded you there. The assistant gave an elaborate flourish with one hand and bowed. “I am so, so very pleased to meet you, Peacemaker. It isn’t every day one gets to meet a hero, and your exploits are—well, you’re certainly a hero.”

“I—”

“Although it really depends on how you define heroism, doesn’t it?

Is it an individual, subjective thing, or is there an objective standard for heroes?

Personally, I believe that there is—an objective standard, that is—and that you definitely meet it.”

“You—”

“Of course, they say that meeting your heroes can be a letdown because they are, after all, people, and people are flawed and complicated. I know I’m certainly flawed and complicated, and—”

She went on. And on. I glanced at the rest of my crew, who just stared in wonder. I turned to Winthrop, and he was giving me a knowing, slightly smug smile that said, Told you. And now they’re your problem. “—charming, but I found that she was just a little… supercilious?

Is that the right word?

Hmm.”

Finally, a pause. I genuinely had no idea who she was or how the assistant had wandered onto the topic of her, but I seized the moment. “Okay, I—”

“Please, Gabby, we have more important things to do than listen to your inane prattle,” Ralston snapped. “The Peacemaker is very busy preparing his ship for my arrival.” He leaned conspiratorially toward me. “Subordinates and underlings. They are nothing but a burden to be endured, is Ralston not right?”

“Yeah, Van. Is Ralston not right?” Icky asked with a smirk, crossing all four of her arms. I held mine up. “Okay, look—ah, no, I’ve got the floor!” I said, preempting… Gabby, apparently. “We will be returning to my ship shortly, to take you to… wherever it is you wish to go, as long as it doesn’t interfere with our own schedule.”

Ralston looked surprised. “All due respect, darling, but Ralston has to be at Tau Ceti by—”

“You will get to Tau Ceti. Eventually. At the very worst, we’ll make sure you get to somewhere where you can make a connection—”

“Gabby, the list.” Ralston sniffed. Gabby did her flourish-bow thing again, then handed me something I surprised myself by not being used to—a list. As in, an actual piece of paper, with a list written on it. “These are Ralston’s needs. I’m sure you’ll find them all very reasonable. None of them are particularly onerous, and—”

“Golden bedclothes?” I asked, looking wide-eyed up from the list. “Ralston believes that gold best compliments his complexion, and he would never be seen clad in any other color, not even while sleeping.”

Ralston said. I blinked. “Golden shag carpeting as well?

The air temperature set to precisely twenty-four degrees Celsius—”

“If not throughout the entire vessel, then in those parts of it Ralston will be frequenting.”

“Humidity, light levels, light frequencies, the width and softness index of the bed—” I just gaped and shook my head. “Is this everything?”

“Ralston understands, of course, that one or two of these things may not be possible, given that your ship is presumably a utilitarian craft. But as long as most of the list is satisfied, so will Ralston be.”

I glared at Winthrop, who just smiled brightly. “Well, then, I’ll leave you to work out the details. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said, turning and sailing out of the room, presumably before I could cut my fingers off and return them to get out of having to deal with this… this—

I wasn’t sure what the right word was. Prima donna fell about as far short as problematic would in describing Joseph Stalin. I turned back and opened my mouth to tell Ralston to go pound sand, that he could either ride along in the Fafnir as she was or else walk to Tau Ceti, but Funboy cut me off. He sensed I was about to burn a bridge, knock

it into the river, drain the river, burn the bridge again, then fill the river with quick-drying concrete. “Perhaps, while Van is arranging for your accommodations, you could demonstrate your considerable artistic skill by giving me a perm.”

“What?

You expect Ralston to put precious time and effort into styling your hair?

Ralston only has so much creative energy, and it must be preserved—” He inhaled, filling his wide chest like a bellows, then wiped a

—flipper or whatever, across his face with theatrical fury. “Ralston’s gift is a rare element that, tragically, has a finite amount to be called upon when the stars demand perfection.”

“Van, I was discussing the very matter of the Fafnir’s temperature control with Icky just recently. Apparently, we have no way of keeping the ship’s interior at a fixed temperature. Isn’t that correct, Icky?” Funboy said. “We—uh—yeah. Yeah!

The one temperature we just can’t seem to nail is—well, what do you know, twenty-four degrees Celsius. Hey, wasn’t that the temperature on the list?”

Ralston sniffed. “Ralston understands how disappointing it would be to have Ralston present, in the flesh, and yet not be the beneficiary of any of Ralston’s amazing talent. Ralston will”—he cast a critical eye on Funboy

—“do everything that Ralston can.”

He turned to Gabby. “Prepare this person and my equipment. Ralston must again make a small change to the universe of which only Ralston is capable,” he said, then waved a flipper and sat down. Gabby flourished and nodded. “Yes, Ralston, I will get everything ready

—”

“Yes, you will. Now. You need not tell Ralston about it. You need only do it correctly—for once.”

“Yes, Ralston. Right away, Ralston. I’ll take care of it, Ralston,” Gabby said, bowing and scraping backward like she was leaving the presence of royalty. Ralston stared down his nose and nodded once. This is gonna be fun, Perry said in my ear bug. I shot him a quizzical glare. Perry is just a bird. Perry is just a machine. Ralston has no more interest in Perry than Ralston has in a coffee maker. That makes Perry happy, because Perry will just get to sit back and watch Van put up with Ralston for the flight out of here. As Gabby prepared for Ralston to work his condescending magic on Funboy, I walked in front of Perry and made a rude gesture behind my back. Wait—that wasn’t one of the fingers you got replaced. FUNBOY GOT HIS PERM, a fabulous ordeal I couldn’t help watching, sort of like a car full of glitter slowly slamming into a wall. Ralston walked around and around Funboy, making sounds of approval, or disapproval, or snapping out terse instructions. Sometimes, he paused to admire himself in the mirror. But his flat, plump flippers never touched a comb or scissors—that was all up to the longsuffering Gabby, who was Ralston’s so-called hands. And, I soon came to realize, Ralston’s talent, as well. Icky sidled over to me and lowered her voice. “Van, can I smash that asshole’s head in?

Please?

The way he treats Grabby—”

“Gabby.”

“Right. Gabby. The way he treats the poor sod—”

I nodded. “I know. But I’d rather keep coldblooded murder as a contingency for now.”

“Hmph.”

Ralston was a miserable, bitchy asshole to Gabby though. And Gabby just took it, chattering away with endless, bubbly enthusiasm. I started to get the sense that we were just seeing the latest salvo in a long, ongoing battle of wills. Ralston seemed determined to grind Gabby down into some mucky ditch of low self-esteem, while Gabby seemed equally determined to just slough it off. It was like watching someone try to use butter to scratch a diamond. The trouble was that the diamond might just eventually shatter, and then I could see cold-blooded murder becoming part of their dysfunctional relationship. I sighed. Whatever. We only had to put up with them for a day or two and then—

“That is enough.”

I glanced up. Funboy had spoken, causing Gabby to freeze with a brush poised over his now wavy hair. I assumed that Funboy meant he was

satisfied with what had been done, but what happened next left all of us just staring in rapt, horrified fascination. “No, no, Ralston is not complete. Ralston must see to the undoing of the cumbersome work done by the habitually incompetent Bagdaristan.” That was, apparently, Gabby’s actual name. Funboy slid out of the chair, turned to face Ralston—then casually punched the flamboyant Eniped in the nose. Ralston shrieked like a teakettle and stumbled backward, straight into Icky. She caught him and held him upright. While the Eniped was still squealing and clutching his face, Funboy turned to Gabby. “You deserve something more than assisting this—” He turned and gave Ralston a disdainful look. “This poseur.”

Icky laughed. “Ooof. Deep cut there, Ralston. Even the sad sack knows you’re a blowhard.”

Ralston spun around. “Get out!” he shrieked, still clutching his face. Funboy frowned at him. “What?

No blowout?

You expect me to just walk with these cur—”

“Out, out, get out!”

Perry turned to me. “I’ll say it. Funboy knows how to party.”

“I HAVE SPOKEN TO HER. She is a remarkable being. She is an extremely skilled chef, an equally gifted hairdresser and cosmetician, and just generally… fascinating,” Funboy said. We were on our way back to the shuttle to return to the Fafnir. Funboy’s punch had led to a miniature diplomatic incident of sorts, with Ralston demanding asylum—yes, asylum—on Pont Alus Kyr. Winthrop was having none of it. He declared that he was deporting Ralston from the station so he could either go with us or sit in the station’s brig until someone came along to cart him off for trespassing in a secure bio-facility. “And that someone will be Peacemaker Tudor, who’s already there, so you might as well just go with him now,” Winthrop said with a wintry smile. “Whether it’s as his passenger or his prisoner is up to you.”

I gave Winthrop a frown, but he was having none of that either. He’d already reminded me that we had a deal, and he was going to stick to it. Which meant that we had to lug the mercurial Ralston away from Pont Alus Kyr, regardless, only now he was all full of theatrically indignant outrage. “Van is disgusted by all of this,” I muttered. “So is Funboy.”

“Easy, slugger. But… where did all this come from?” I asked. “I spoke to her. She is fascinating. And skilled. And she takes hygiene—

and food security—quite seriously, which is an admirable trait.” He finished with a pair of blinks, then fell silent. I grinned at him. “You like her.”

“She is… reasonably acceptable, with a pleasing bilateral symmetry to her features.”

“You really know how to make a girl feel special,” Icky said, curling her lip. “For him, that’s downright sexy. He’s got it bad,” Perry replied. Funboy sniffed. “I don’t see how this is a useful trajectory for conversation. In any case, and in all seriousness, Gabby should be forging her own way, not living in the shadow of that… that individual.”

I glanced at Perry and nodded. “Yup. Bad.”

We reached the shuttle bay and started to change back into our own clothes. As we did, a voice came on the comm, the Pont Alus Kyr traffic control AI. “You say you’re going to the Fafnir?

The Peacemaker ship?”

I finished fastening on my b-suit. “That’s right. We’ll need to be shuttled back over to her.”

“Didn’t you miss the boat?

As in, literally miss it?”

I froze. So did everyone else. “What do you mean?”

“That ship departed almost an hour ago.”

“It—what?

What do you mean, departed?”

“Departed. Left the area. Flew away. Went from here to not here—’

“What the hell are you talking about?

How could it have just…

departed?”

“Sorry, I just control the movement of ships around the station. It’s not up to me whether they stay or go.” As the AI spoke, it put an image on the

display near the airlock door leading back to the shuttle. It was space—an empty piece of it. “Uh, where’d we park?” Perry said. I turned on him. “What the hell’s going on?”

Perry just stared back at me. “No idea, Van. I had to shut down all datalinks, remember?

The only way I could talk to Netty is the same way you do, via the comm.”

I swore and pulled on my boots. As I fastened them, I called out to the traffic control AI again. “Did the Fafnir broadcast anything?

Send any messages before she departed?”

“No. She maneuvered away using thrusters, then lit her drive and flew away.”

“Why the hell wasn’t I informed?” I snapped, standing. “About the movement of your own ship?

That’s not a standard practice

—”

“Fine, whatever. Where is she now?”

“Outbound, about thirty minutes from the closest twist point.”

I turned and headed back into the station, the rest of the crew at my heels. The tech overseeing the shuttle bay started to complain that we were supposed to be wearing only approved gear inside the station, but I silenced him with a look as I strode past. “STILL NO RESPONSE, SORRY,” the comm tech said. I glared at the display, which depicted the Fafnir as an icon rapidly accelerating away from the station. There was no way for anything departing Pont Alus Kyr to possibly catch her before she could twist away, so all we could do was watch helplessly as she dwindled into the cosmic distance. “What the hell is wrong with Netty?” I said, arms akimbo as I seethed. “Either she’s been compromised somehow, or she has a really compelling reason to be leaving and not communicating with us about it,”

Perry said. “How likely are either of those things?”

“Neither are likely, but both are possible. And one of them must be true.”

I said nothing, because Perry was correct, and it wasn’t his fault. The Fafnir couldn’t function without Netty overseeing and coordinating her myriad systems. That meant she was either a willing participant in the ship’s departure, or an unwilling one. If the former, she must have had a damned good reason for it, like Perry said. And if the latter, then she’d somehow been co-opted or corrupted into becoming an accomplice in stealing the ship. The comm tech suddenly looked up at me. “Have an incoming message for you, Peacemaker.”

I gave a relieved sigh. “About time. Put her through.”

“Van?”

“Netty?”

A pause. “Uh… no, last time I checked I was not your ship’s AI. And what the hell are you still doing on Pont Alus Kyr, when the Fafnir is on its way out of the system?”

It was B. I had to blink a few times to change mental gears. “B, what—why are you—” I shook my head. “B, someone or something has stolen the Fafnir. Is there any chance you can catch her before she twists away?”

As I asked it, an icon representing B’s ship popped onto the Pont Alus Kyr nav display. Even before B spoke, I knew what the answer was going to be. “Sorry, not a chance, Van. Physics and all that.”

“Shit.”

“Sorry, wish I could help, I really do—”

“What are you doing here, anyway, B?” I asked, my voice tinged with sudden suspicion. She was always… nearby when interesting things happened. Like now. “Coming to get you. Torina said you were here. And you’d better lose that tone of insinuation that we’re not all on the same side here, Tudor, before you find out what a nice girl I’m not.”

I took a long breath, then eased it out. “Sorry, B. I’m just… pissed. And confused, and frustrated, but mostly pissed.”

“Understandable.”

“So why are you here?”

“That… is something we need to discuss in private.”

“Consider inappropriate joke inserted here,” Perry said. I shot him a look. “What?”

“B’s line was crying out for some snarky innuendo. I wouldn’t be living up to my potential if I just let it go, but given the circumstances—” He shrugged. I turned back to B. “Well, whatever the reason, I’m glad you’re here, B. We could really use your help.”

“Ain’t that always the way?” she asked with a wink, her antennas twitching. Before I could say anything more, a tornado of words and gestures swept into the room. “I’m here, I’m here, I’m sorry I’m late, it took me a while to track you down, I thought you’d be catching a shuttle, so I went there, but they said

—”

I raised my hands and gestured like I was urgently waving a fighter off from a carrier landing going bad. “Gabby, what—” I stared. She had luggage in her hands, under her arms, slung over her shoulders and hanging from her back. “What are you doing here?”

“Why, I’m coming with you. Didn’t Funboy tell you?

He’s just a peach, I’ll tell you. Some people, you meet them and right away you know that—”

“Gabby!”

She stopped, her goofy tardigrade face staring at me. “Coming with us?

What the hell are you talking about?”

“And what do you mean, didn’t Funboy tell us?” Icky put in, turning a suspicious scowl on the little Surtsi. He gave his characteristic blink. “I may have told Gabby that she could leave Ralston’s service and come with us.”

I glared. “You may have?”

“In all of the confusion and excitement, it would appear I neglected to mention that,” he replied. His tone might have been apologetic, but it was hard to tell, since he only had one, dreary, and used it for everything he said. Gabby nodded enthusiastically. “So when do we leave?”

We all just stared at her. I sputtered—

“What?”

18

I’VE OFTEN THOUGHT that some of my worst moments as a Peacemaker were during the prelude to battle, when all you could do was sit and wait, watching the trajectories slowly converge on the tactical overlay as the orgy of violence began. Dark, immediate thoughts streamed through my mind during those interminable times—keep my crew alive, keep the ship whole, and make every shot count—

But this flight with B, with Ralston and Gabby aboard, made me wish it would just culminate in a vicious space battle. Just to get it over with. B agreed to honor my promise to Winthrop and remove Ralston from Pont Alus Kyr. At the same time, Gabby quit Ralston’s employment thanks to Funboy’s offer to join the Fafnir. The sum total of this unexpected chain of events was simple. Ralston was in what could only be described as a tizzy. In fact, most things called a tizzy weren’t, I realized, because you really needed a sort of flouncing, outraged verve to truly rate the word. “It’s like John Wick met a preteen girl. But meaner, and with a lot more glitter,” Perry said, assessing our situation admirably. “I don’t think preteen girls have that particular vocabulary,” I replied, then added, “but the eyerolls and huffing are on brand.”

Icky stared, bewildered, as Ralston launched into a fourth straight minute—on one breath, I might add—eviscerating the temperature of our

gravity sink, where we washed appendages, filled bottles, and considered dunking our heads simply to be away from his presence. “Does he breathe?” Icky asked. “I—maybe through a different hole?” I offered. “I can guess which one,” Perry murmured. The tension aboard B’s ship was so thick the Moonsword would have struggled to cut it. Ralston pointedly ignored Gabby in a flurry of passive-aggressive bitchiness, while Gabby genuinely ignored him in favor of chattering on and on about whatever subject happened to pop up in the rushing stream of consciousness that was her mind. Ralston, furious that his obvious display of contemptuous disregard was itself being disregarded, just ignored Gabby even harder. It was a vicious loop that would eventually implode into a singularity of pouty petulance. Half the trip was just us shooing them apart. During a lull in the catty belligerence, I cornered Funboy. “What were you thinking?”

“She could not remain in indentured servitude to that—and please pardon my strong phrasing—cretinous fop.”

Perry threw his wings over his mouth. “Oh, Funboy, such language!”

“Fine, Ralston’s an asshole. And sure, he treats Gabby like shit. But how do you go from that to, hey, I know, let’s offer her a place aboard the Fafnir We don’t know anything about her—”

Funboy held up a datachip. “This is the dossier Pont Alus Kyr compiled on her before she arrived there. It incorporates intelligence provided by the Guild, among other sources. From a security perspective, she has a strikingly clean past.”

I glared at the chip. “Okay, fine. So what the hell is she going to do?

There are a lot of skill sets we need aboard the Fafnir before the list gets down to hairdresser.”

“She is a skilled cook and, thanks to previous service with a commercial haulage firm operating out of Tau Ceti, an experienced logistician.”

Icky, who’d sidled over when she saw me confronting Funboy, looked intrigued. “A cook, you say. How good a cook?”

“She was employed, for a time, in a restaurant famous for its three stars.”

I frowned. “Restaurants in known space are rated with stars, same as on Earth?

Really?”

“No. This particular restaurant was located in a trinary star system. The view is, apparently, spectacular.”

“I—yeah, fine, whatever. But we really don’t need a cook.”

“Yeah, because of all the high-end cuisine we currently enjoy aboard the Fafnir,” Icky said, rolling her eyes. “None of us are particularly adept cooks, you must admit,” Funboy added. Icky nodded. “Yeah—I mean, Van, Torina can kick ass, fly a spaceship like it’s a part of her, and knock the beak off a bird with the lasers a gazillion light-seconds away—”

“Hey, I resemble that remark,” Perry protested. “—but, seriously, you guys are going to have to eat out or order food a whole lot once you’re shacked up because neither of you can boil water without burning it.”

I bristled, about to claim I was a damned fine cook—except I wasn’t, and even I knew it. I could cook pasta and dump store-bought sauce over it, and I toasted a mean bagel, but that was about it. And mealtimes aboard the Fafnir were pretty lackluster—

But looking from Funboy to Icky, I got what was really going on here. Sure, Funboy might have some other motives mixed in, including at least a little attraction to Gabby, but it mostly came down to Zeno. Losing her had left a hole in the Fafnir, her workstation in the cockpit a gaping wound even when Funboy was using it. Gabby wasn’t going to replace Zeno, of course, but she’d add some new life and energy to the crew, and maybe we needed that right now. I sighed. “Fine. We’ll take her on for a probationary period. But she’s got to earn her keep, so I’m expecting more than just some good eating—

although I am expecting some good eating, too.”

B, who’d been preoccupied with trying to keep a lid on the sudden tension aboard her ship while helping me set things into motion for the recovery of the Fafnir, caught my eye. “Van, a moment?”

I nodded and excused myself from the others. B led me to her cabin and closed the door, then turned with a wry grin. “Welcome to my inner sanctum, sir, where I usually—”

“Do things that I don’t need to know about, thank you very much,” I said, raising my hands to ward off whatever she might say next. She laughed, but quickly went serious. “I’ve put out the word about the Fafnir through both the Guild and GKU channels. I’ve also sent word to Groshenko, to the Schegith, the S’rall, those hunter folks on Ajax, and I let Linulla know. I also sent word to Retta, Viktor, and anyone else I could think of. Everyone has an eye out for her. Everyone.”

I made a face because I was outright impressed. Known space sometimes felt uniformly hostile, but I actually had friends—real friends, and that network might pay dividends. Although her mention of Linulla immediately made me think of Matterforge. I wondered if its particular view of time and space might prove useful—

“Anyway, while all that’s in motion, we’ve got other business to attend to,” B said. “Right. The mysterious reason you were coming to get me. I’m all ears.”

B gestured for me to sit down in a little sitting area in one corner of her cabin. “I was asked to come get you, Van. It’s been decided that the curtain should be pulled back for you, as it were.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

B sat back. “Long ago—”

“Oh, for—can we just cut right to the present chase?

Really not in the mood for stories that start long ago.”

“Just bear with me, Tudor. In other words, shut up and listen. Long ago, when the Galactic Knights were first formed, they were overseen by an inner circle called the Circle of Wisdom, or just the Circle. It consisted of thirty-two members of the Order who were judged to be those exhibiting what were considered its best qualities—wisdom, prudence, honor, honesty, courtesy, and so on.”

“Which was code for the ones who were the best connected and most influential.”

“Touch cynical for your age, young man.”

“I prefer the term pragmatist.”

B grinned and shrugged. “I see why Torina chose you. What a vocabulary.” She gave me a cheeky grin, then went on. “It started out with the most noble intentions but, over time, it became a sort of elite club within an elite club—shades of that group that supposedly runs everything on Earth, the… the Illuminazis?”

I had to laugh. “Illuminati. Although I kind of like Illuminazis. Touch more menace.” I cocked my head at her. “The Illuminati are supposedly in control of everything, all the time, though—who’s going to war with who and when, who’s going to be the next President of the United States or Prime Minister of the UK, who’s going to win the next World Series, that sort of thing. It’s all bullshit, of course, but in pop culture the Illuminati are a lot more than just a really exclusive club.”

“And so was the Circle—again, at first. Over time, though, it slid into internal bickering and politicking and lost sight and control of what the rest of the Order was doing. That was a big part of the reason the Knights went from an established institution in known space to a distrusted fringe group hiding behind the Peacemaker Guild.”

I shrugged. “Okay, and?

I’m assuming this little history lesson is going somewhere.”

“You’re bitchy today.”

“My ship was stolen, B.”

She wrinkled her nose, then smiled. “Fair, and current. Okay, to the point, then. The Circle never went away. Like the Knights themselves, it was reshaped and rebranded, and is now known simply as the 32.

Both nominally, and in many ways in reality, the 32 are the power behind both the GKU and Guild. Yes, there’s still some politics involved—I mean, duh, you get more than two people involved in something and you’ve got politics. But it really is much purer of motives than it used to be, thanks to being exceedingly careful about its membership.”

I sat forward. Another piece of the puzzle was falling into place. “I knew there was something more going on behind the scenes with the Guild and the GKU. These 32—they’re the ones who decided to let Gauss walk rather than ending him right after the trial and saving us all a lot of heartache and bullshit. So who are these people?

Or is this the part where you tell me it’s a secret and this has all just been—”

B held up her hands in a defensive gesture. “Before you accuse me again of being a conniving, manipulative bitch, Van—no, it’s not a secret. Or it won’t be, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

B looked me squarely in the eye. “The reason I came looking for you, Van Tudor, is because it’s been decided that you are going to become a member of the 32.”

IT TOOK me a moment of blank staring before what B had just said finally sunk in. “I am.”

“You are.”

“Really.”

“That’s where we’re going. We’re going to rendezvous with the Righteous Fury for your investiture.”

“But—” I stood up, paced a couple of paces away, then returned and sat back down. “I thought we were going to drop Ralston somewhere—”

“Oh, you can be sure of that. I want that mincing pile of lamé-draped belligerence off my ship. Then we’re going to rendezvous with the Righteous Fury.”

I opened my mouth, but B cut me off. “Your next question is going to be, but what about finding the Fafnir?

And, yes, that’s high-priority, which is why there are a lot of people looking for her. You taking a few hours to be invested into one of the most powerful organizations in known space isn’t going to make a huge difference either way. And besides, the Object 6 is co-located with the Fury. She’s been scrubbed squeaky clean of any traces of that stripped down version of Calamity that had infected her—mainly by physically replacing an array of components—so she’ll be available for you to use in the meantime.”

I closed my mouth again. B just waited. “Okay—so, why?” I asked. “Why are you being invested into the 32?”

“Uh—yeah?

I mean, I’ve only been a Peacemaker for a few years. I’ve grown in rank, some might even say senior, but I’m still looking up at the top, B. This just seems—I don’t know. Kind of unwarranted?”

B shrugged. “It’s true that the normal progression is from Peacemaker, to member of the GKU, to Master, to one of the 32.

Most Peacemakers don’t even make the first of those, much less the second.”

“So that just begs the question even more, doesn’t it?

I haven’t been a Master—hell, I just told Groshenko a couple of days ago that I don’t even particularly want to be a Master. So why this sudden jump into what sounds like the Guild’s stratosphere?”

“Your devilish charm, winning smile, and good looks aren’t enough?”

I frowned at her. B sighed. “Okay, there are reasons you’re being catapulted into the 32, yes, that aren’t really about you. Or they are, but not just ones related to your competence and accomplishments—although those are part of it, Van. You’ve accomplished more in the past few years than most Peacemakers do in an entire career.”

“Fine, I’m awesome. So what are these other reasons that aren’t about how awesome I am?”

“You’re trustworthy. And trust is a commodity that’s in short supply these days.”

“What do you mean?”

B steepled her fingers. “Van, you have dedicated yourself to rooting out and defeating the bad guys. You’ve never shown even a hint of wavering from that. Sure, you’ve done a few questionable things that might kind of skirt the law, but”—she grinned and shrugged—“who hasn’t?”

Her grin faded. “The point is that even when you’ve been a bad boy, it’s been for good reasons. Everyone trusts you to stay the course, and we need that right now.”

I sat back and crossed my arms. “Okay, fine. Then this dedicated opponent of evil has something to say about all this. I’d concluded that there must be some… I don’t know, some force at work, somewhere in the background of the Guild and GKU, that isn’t quite so dedicated to the cause. I mean, why was Gauss allowed to just get in his ship and fly away after his trial?

We knew he was carrying that damned virus. He should have been vaporized as he tried to break orbit. But he wasn’t, so either someone really screwed up, or there was some sort of intent to it.”

B smiled and nodded. “See, that’s the sort of skeptical suspicion we’re looking for.”

“We. So you’re a member of this 32, too.”

“I am.”

“Good to know. Doesn’t answer the question, though.”

“No, it doesn’t. And that’s because I don’t have an answer for you. In fact, that’s a big part of the reason we want you inside the organization. There’s something festering inside it, something that’s not devoted to fighting the bad guys. We need to know what it is. And you, my friend, are the perfect agent to root it out and eliminate it. You’re uncorrupted and, as far as anyone can reasonably tell, uncorruptible. Hell, you’ve spent forever

upgrading the Fafnir just to avoid having liens on her, so you don’t owe anything to anyone.”

“Okay, so who else is part of this happy little star chamber?”

“Gerhardt, Bester, Gabriella, Dugrop’che, and Schegith.”

That left me silent for a moment. I finally sat forward. “Dugrop’che?

He’s an even newer Peacemaker than I am.”

“He is. But he’s also a skilled and experienced GKU agent and has been for years. We inserted him into the Guild as a newbie Peacemaker mainly to gather intelligence from the ranks. Being so junior, he largely goes unnoticed. He’s also been helping us keep tabs on you. And providing backup for you. Discreetly, of course.”

“Well, shit. And Schegith?

Really?”

“She’s probably the longest-standing member, at least among the ones I know. She might even be one of the founders.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Among the ones you know?

What does that mean?

Are there members of the 32 whose identity you don’t know?”

“Damned right there are. I just told you all the members I know. One of them probably knows at least one other, or at the very least there are other members out there who know about at least one of us. It’s all about compartmentalization, keeping things in well-defined silos. It’s not like we all periodically get together for dinner parties.”

“But… that doesn’t make any sense. Why would a group that’s supposed to be running the Guild and the GKU from behind the scenes be so secret even from itself?

How the hell does anything even get coordinated?”

“Information still flows through the 32.

It’s just not always apparent who it’s flowing to or from.”

I stood up again, my hands beginning to wave in animation. “It’s no wonder that there’s something rotten somewhere in the 32, because big chunks of it are invisible to itself. You’ve named, what, six or seven members?

So there are twenty-five or twenty-six mystery members out there somewhere?

Is Bigfoot a member?

The Loch Ness monster?

How the hell does something like that even function?”

“Van, these are all very good questions. And you’re the perfect guy to answer them.”

“So you want to bring me into the 32, to investigate the 32, without knowing who most of the 32 are. Do I have that right?”

“Yup. Told you I was going to pull back the curtain here. I never said that what’s behind it would be very pretty, though.”

“It’s not.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m with you. I don’t think the 32 can continue functioning like this. But it’s not like we can just rewrite its charter and make it all better. If there is some sort of corruption gnawing away at it from the inside, then who—or whatever, that is, has a vested interest in keeping things just the way they are. It’s a logjam, and we’re hoping you can help break it.”

“Why haven’t you guys broken it yourselves?

You’re all at least as smart as I am, and probably smarter. You’ve certainly got better networks. I’m a gifted amateur as far as currying contacts. Hell, I don’t even like developing assets. Feels scummy to me.”

“Again, you’re keying on the reason we’re having this discussion. Look, we’re trying. But let’s be honest, Van. You’ve just proven that you’re pretty damned good at this life. This set of tasks. This… shiftless existence. We’d rather have you helping unwind this thing than not.”

I turned away, then back. “What if I decide that it’s just not worth the hassle?

I could decline, you know.”

“Well, we can’t stop you from doing that, but we’re hoping you won’t. The Guild and the GKU lost the opportunity to get one Tudor involved in cleaning this up. And who knows, if your grandfather had said yes, not just to becoming a Master but also one of the 32, then everything might be sunshine and lollipops and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now.”

I glared at her. “That’s not fair, B. That’s bordering on emotional blackmail.”

B stood, the intensity filling the space between us. “You’re damned right it is, Van. I was pissed at Mark for just walking away like he did. He made a huge difference for the good, right up until he didn’t. Now, you can do the same thing, sure. But if you do, then whatever good you could have done won’t happen, and we’ll have to live with the consequences—just like we have with your grandfather.” She hissed in disgust. “He didn’t abandon us, but it was close. We needed him.”

I crossed my arms but said nothing. It was still a sort of emotional blackmail, but it also made a dark kind of sense. “There’s another reason we want you as part of the group, Van,” B said. I turned to her. “What’s that?”

“Not gonna lie—we need you to help ride herd on your mother, and elements of the GKU loyal to her. We call them the Ferals, because that’s what they are. Even by GKU standards, which are pretty loose when it comes to ends justifying the means, they’re pretty unpredictable.”

As B spoke, I remembered one of my first true meetings with my mother, in a disused church on a planet in the Deeps. We’d been attacked by local security forces, and although we wouldn’t have had much trouble simply driving them off, my mother went straight to lethal force—killing people who were probably just doing their jobs. I sighed. “I think you might be giving me a little too much credit for my ability to rein in my mother, B. I probably know you better than I know her.”

“Sure, but we’re looking at it from the opposite perspective. She sure seems prepared to be influenced by you. Something about years of maternal guilt and all that.”

I grimaced. “Emotional blackmail seems to be a prominent arrow in your quiver today.”

“Whatever works. And we’re at a point here, Van, where whatever works is really all that matters. Calamity is pushing everyone’s backs against the wall, so we don’t have time to be more subtle and gentle, even if we want to be.”

I sighed again. “Okay, message received. In the meantime, I need some time to think about this.”

“Take all the time you need—as long as it’s not more than six or seven hours. Because that’s when we rendezvous with the Righteous Fury.”

“You people can be real bastards, can’t you?”

She shrugged. “Hard to save the universe if you’re not.”

19

I CALLED Perry into my cabin and told him what B said, and in what tone. With his typically insightful flippancy, he just nodded his head. “Congratulations, Van. I’m sure you’ll do a fine job—is what I’d be saying if I thought you were actually going to agree to this.”

“You don’t think I should?”

“No, I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that, based on what I know about you, I suspect you’re probably going to decline the offer.”

I gave him a side-eye. “What makes you say that?”

“Van, you are your grandfather’s grandson. He was deeply distrustful of the 32—for that matter, he was deeply distrustful of the Masters, too, or at least the ones not named Groshenko. He felt that joining them was akin to validating something he wanted at arm’s length, if at all. Worse, he had an even deeper suspicion that it was just an attempt to get him under control—

that he’d rocked too many boats and needed to be reined in. Becoming a Master and joining the 32 were just subtle ways of compromising him, eliminating him as a threat.”

I frowned at the bunk for a moment. “You’re right. I am definitely Mark Tudor’s grandson, because that’s exactly how my thinking was going.”

But I turned to him. “Except for one thing.”

“Schegith.”

I smiled. “Are you running the read Van’s mind subroutine?”

“Nope. I’m just the galactic expert on you Tudors. Schegith is a member of the 32, and you believe she is above any sort of suspicion. So if she’s

part of the organization, then it can’t be entirely bad, which in turn means that the corrupt part of it is just that—only a part of it.”

“So what do you think I should do?’

“Ask George Bailey.”

“Ask… who?

Who the hell is George Bailey?”

“You’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life. I know you have, I’ve watched you watch it.”

“You mean the Christmas movie?

The one with Jimmy Stewart?”

“And Donna Reed, and the incomparable Lionel Barrymore. And it’s not really a Christmas movie. I mean, just because the last forty minutes or so of the movie—”

“Perry, can we stick with why a ninety year-old movie is relevant here?”

“In the movie, George Bailey wishes he’d never been born. His guardian angel, Clarence, grants him his wish. George finds out that the world would be a much shittier place without him. Although, I’ve never really been sold on Pottersville being worse than Bedford Falls. I mean, Pottersville is a happening place, all those bars and clubs and stuff, that’s lots of, ah, varied economic activity—”

“Perry!”

“Sorry. The point, Van, is that the world is going to go on whether you join the 32 or not. One version of it will probably end up being better than the other. My bet is that the version where you join the 32 is way more likely to lead to the idyllic—kind of boring, but idyllic—Bedford Falls than the one where you don’t.”

“So you think I should agree to this. That I should join the 32.”

“Yeah, I do. I always thought Mark missed an opportunity to make things better because he couldn’t bring himself to believe that he could. I also personally think that’s why he wanted you to be his successor—so that a Tudor could do what he couldn’t.”

I gave him a thoughtful stare. He went on. “There’s another reason, too. George Bailey didn’t end up married to Donna Reed in the Pottersville version. Circumstances prevented them from ever settling down, having kids, and living out a happy, fulfilling life.”

“You’re talking about Torina.”

“No, Van, I was actually talking about you marrying Donna Reed. Of course I’m talking about Torina. I know you want to live happily ever after

with her. But you might have to put some effort into making sure that ever after is actually happy.”

I smiled. “Thanks, bird. You make damned good sense.” On impulse, I reached out and tapped the top of his head. “Wow. That would feel a lot more affectionate if rubbing your head didn’t feel like touching metal shavings.”

“I am what I am, Van. And you’re welcome.”

I turned for the cabin door to go tell B that I’d be accepting investiture into the 32 and—and then everything that came after that. Perry moved to follow me. “There’s another thing that’s always bugged me about that movie, you know—that whole wings thing. Every time a bell rings, an angel gets their wings. I mean, seriously?

Speaking as someone with wings, there’s a lot more to it than that, let me tell you—”

WHILE THE AIRLOCK CYCLED OPEN, I heard Icky muttering behind me to Funboy. “What the hell was that rant of his all about, anyway?

Angels and wings and shit?”

“No idea.”

Gabby fluttered along behind them with B and Perry. Ralston was, thankfully, gone. B had transferred him to a fast freighter owned by a friend who’d agreed to carry the outraged hairdresser back to Tau Ceti. It meant just a quick rendezvous, with no need to crawl into, then back out, of a gravity well. Still, whoever they were, they must have owed B one hell of a favor. I entered the Righteous Fury. Valint and Gerhardt were waiting just inside the airlock. “Hey, grandma,” I said. Her eyes flashed at me, one brow lifted. “Sometimes terrible accidents happen at airlocks. Wouldn’t that be awful, Van?”

“Most grandmothers just offer their grandsons hard candies, not veiled threats. I like butterscotch, for the record, and I prefer it with lint from a purse that smells like—”

“Now that the family reunion part of the program is out of the way, can we move on?

There is an existential threat to all life in known space simmering away out there, after all,” Gerhardt said, dryly. We followed them into the Fury along gleaming, utilitarian corridors. Again, she reminded me of the aircraft carrier I’d toured with my father—

vast, impersonal, and lethal. We arrived in a conference room I’d been in before, while being prepped for Helem Gauss’s futile trial. I was surprised to see my mother was present, as was Essie. I gave him a surprised look, then turned to Gerhardt. “Is he—uh—”

“A member of the 32?

No. He is, however, an agent of the group and well aware of its existence.”

“I’m happier working for them than actually being one of them, thanks,” Essie said, tugging playfully at the red collar of his custom b-suit. “Bit tight with the egos. At times.”

Valint turned to me, ignoring his barb. “I realize you want to get out there and find your ship, but we have the matter of the 32 to attend to first. B explained the situation to you. Have you decided whether you’ll accept our offer to join the group or not?”

I glanced around. “I expected a bit more… pageantry?”

Valint just stared back at me. Gerhard crossed his arms and looked grumpy. So I sighed. “Yes, I’m going to accept, mainly because there’s something rotten somewhere in this cryptic little organization of yours, and it's influencing not just the GKU but the entire Guild. And by influencing, I mean aiding and abetting the bad guys.”

“That’s quite a claim, Tudor,” Gerhardt said. “All due respect, but do you deny it?

Why was Gauss ever allowed to leave the scene of his trial alive?

You told me you’d answer that question eventually. Well, here we are. This is eventually.”

My mother smiled. “If I closed my eyes, I could swear it was Mark talking.”

But my patience with all of the lurking and obfuscating and delaying had suddenly run out. I rotated, slowly, to face her, feeling my cheeks flush with the heat of a lifetime’s questions. “I know everyone remembers him fondly, and that includes me. But if he’d stepped up when he had the chance, maybe we wouldn’t be here. And

maybe I wouldn’t have to.” I turned back to Valint, daring her to contradict me. But she didn’t. If anything, I got a sense that she actually agreed with me. I waved vaguely. “So let’s do whatever it is we need to do, so that we can all get on with saving the galaxy.”

“There is a Ceremony of Investiture, but it’s frankly an antiquated bit of theater that we haven’t used in—ever, at least in my experience. But there’s a piece of it we still adhere to,” she said, turning and picking up a rather unremarkable, short, broad-bladed sword in a battered scabbard from the conference table. Valint drew the blade with a steely rasp. “This was borne by one of the founding members of the Galactic Knights. You might recognize it as a gladius, a weapon used by the Romans of ancient Earth. Marcus Flavius Procillus was a Tribune of the Seventeenth Legion when it marched into the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD. He would have died with his Legion had he not been rescued from the massacre under circumstances strikingly similar to my rescue of your grandfather during the Great War.”

I looked at the sword, then back to her. “It… wasn’t you who rescued this Procillus, was it?”

Valint actually laughed. “No, believe it or not, that's actually a little before my time. Procillus went on to not just find his place in known space, but to also play a central role in founding the Galactic Knights. We use his gladius as a symbol to represent the unbroken lineage of the Knights from the time of their founding to today.”

She handed me the blade. I took it, my hand closing around the hilt of a weapon that had been forged two millennia ago. It was a strangely sobering moment. “Van Tudor, do you swear to uphold the Galactic Knights ethos of Honor, Duty, Loyalty and Integrity?”

I hefted the blade. “I do.”

“And do you swear upon those qualities to keep secret all those things that must be kept secret, and reveal all of those things that must be revealed?”

I hesitated at that. The GKU in general, and the 32 in particular, were nothing but secrecy, to the point where it got in the way of actually doing the job. That made revealing all of those things that must be revealed a little

rich, considering this was a group that didn’t even know who all of its own members were. But, fine. I could live with this oath—and expect everyone else to live up to it, too. “I do.” I looked up at Valint. “I don’t have to cut myself and do some sort of blood-oath thing now, do I?”

Valint curled her lip. “It’s a two-thousand year-old sword, Van. You’d be lucky to cut butter with it.”

Gerhardt stepped forward. “Besides, such trappings aren’t necessary. You’ve given your word to us, and that’s sufficient.” He glanced around the room. “Incidentally, the veil of secrecy applies to everyone here. As members of Tudor’s crew, you are bound by the same oaths he is, so—”

He stopped, frowning at Gabby. “Who the hell are you?”

“My friends call me Gabby, and I’m a cook—well, not just a cook, but people tell me I cook really well, so anyway, I used to work with Ralston, you’ve probably heard of Ralston, he’s the famous hair stylist, although he calls himself a hair artist, which I think is pretentious and—”

I stepped in front of her. “Gabby—shhhh.”

“Oh, right, I do talk too much, don’t I?

People are always—”

I held up a finger. She blinked, then put her finger to her lips and nodded. “Let me try this again. Tudor, who the hell is that?” Gerhardt asked. “Gabby. She’s the newest member of my crew. On a trial basis, anyway.” I turned back to her. “Gabby, everything here is—”

“A secret, yes, I know!

I’m very good at keeping secrets. In fact, I know quite a few about famous people, but I would never even think of divulging

—”

Valint scowled. “Anyone would be hard-pressed to separate anything useful from that inane stream of consciousness anyway.”

I gave Gabby a pleading look, and it worked. She fell silent, and I held the gladius out to Valint, my face neutral. “I’m now officially a member of the 32?”

“You are.”

“Outstanding. First thing I want to know is, who are the other 31?”

Valint and Gerhardt turned to B, who shrugged. “I told him about how compartmentalized it all is.”

“Ludicrously so, thank you very much. I think the first thing we have to do is find out just who else is calling the shots here, because the rot is somewhere among them. And it may be spreading.”

I glanced at B. “You said that only certain members are able to identify certain other members, and that’s how this outfit stays in its silos. Okay, so who here knows the identity of any other members who aren’t here?

I’m asking because I really think this is one of those things that needs to be revealed. Oh, and I already know about Schegith, Dugrop’che, and Gabriella.”

“Bester is a member, but he’s the only other one I know,” Gerhardt said. “Dayna Jasskin,” B said. Even Gerhardt seemed surprised at that. It just underscored how stupid this all was. Why wouldn’t he know?

I just shook my head. Keeping the circle of knowledge as small as possible was smart, sure. Keeping it so small that it became a blank, indecipherable dot was something else again. “Okay, Bester and Dayna. Anyone else?”

I just got looks, which meant they had no other contacts, or were holding back. I turned to my mother. “Are you a member?”

“The offer was extended to her. She turned it down,” Valint said. My mother shrugged. “I have enough to do without taking on something like this. Besides, I do my best work as a free agent.”

I just returned a curt nod. My mother was a whole other issue, one that I apparently had to try and get under some semblance of control. But one thing at a time. “Okay, so I need to talk to Bester and to Schegith to see if they know anyone else that’s part of this happy little crew. Also Dugrop’che and Gabriella. Someone among them must know at least one other member, to keep the chain going. That is, unless the 32 has actually fractured into pieces and you guys don’t even know it yet.”

“Unlikely. Although we may not be entirely sure how, someone out there is exerting influence on the Guild,” Gerhardt said. “Yeah, that leads to another question. How?

If there’s a rogue element in the 32, exactly how is it influencing things like Gauss’s release?”

“That’s an excellent question, Van, and one we’d like you to help us answer,” Valint said. “Somehow, some faction or sect within the 32 seems to be… shaping… not just the affairs of the GKU and the Guild, but also those of known space. We’re really not sure how.”

I sighed. “Great. I’m officially part of an organization that may very well be at war with itself.”

B grinned and clapped me on the shoulder, her antennae dancing with glee. “Welcome aboard.”

THERE WERE many reasons I wanted the Fafnir back. Starting with—she’s mine. But among the others was the fact that there were things aboard her I considered personally important. They included the ring Groshenko had given me, the one representing my membership, and those of my grandfather and mother, in the GKU. There were also some pictures and mementos, including some given to me by my mother. Somehow, seeing my mother while becoming a member of the vaunted 32

had made me miss these things even more. Seeing my mother. It didn’t happen very often, partly because space is big, partly because she spent most of her time off doing… whatever the hell it was she did as the de facto leader of the Feral part of the GKU, and partly because I really didn’t go out of my way to see her. She was my mother, but she was also a stranger—she was the woman who’d borne me and agonized over not being a bigger part of my life growing up, but she was also a mercurial and often dangerous person to be around. To say I had mixed feelings about spending time with my mother was an epic understatement. I was conflicted in a visceral way that left me genuinely uncertain about what I wanted from her, if anything. On the one hand, she was my mother and I wanted her in my life. On the other, she stood to be a seriously destabilizing influence on that same life of mine, which was already more than complicated enough. And I was a commander. An officer. A man who had responsibilities beyond the here and now—my duties went over the horizon, as did my ties to Torina. Still, she was here, on the Righteous Fury, and so was I. The math didn’t get simpler than that. She and I stayed in the conference room when the others left, either because they had other things to do, or they sensed we wanted some alone time. When they were gone, I gave her a hug, which she returned the way

she always does—with an awkward restraint, as though she wants it to be an intimate moment but isn’t sure how to make it one and doesn’t want to screw it up. “How… how are you, Mom?” I asked her, pulling away. “Good. We confronted and destroyed a flotilla of ships that had been assembled by one of the BeneStar remnants at Rodantic’s World in the Deeps. They had visions of setting themselves up as BeneStar 2.0 and reclaiming Gauss’s empire.”

I smiled and shook my head. “You know, I suspect that when most sons catch up with their mom, they hear more about trips and hobbies and things, and not space battles.”

“We’re an odd family,” she replied

“Aren’t we ever.”

“So I’m assuming that your investiture in the 32 is to try and bring me and my compatriots into line.”

I blinked, taken aback by her out-of-the-blue bluntness. But I shouldn’t have been. Diplomacy was not one of my mother’s strengths. “Would you believe me if I said no?” I asked her. “Not even a little bit.”

I smiled again, then rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, it’s on the agenda. You and your compatriots, as you call them, are considered to be loose cannons at a time when all the ordnance should be pointed the same way and firing the same fire mission.”

“Like I said, I do my best work when I can use my own initiative, and form and execute my own plans. I’m not a big believer in bureaucracy and centralized authority.”

“No shit. That said, though, I think we really do need to all be pulling in the same direction, Mom. More and more shit is being dropped into the fan, and we’ve only got so many resources to try and deal with it.”

“I just need to know the desired outcome. How I get there shouldn’t matter, should it?”

I crossed my arms and looked at her sidelong. What she’d just described was called mission command by modern Earthly military forces. The commander states his intent and the end-state he wants to achieve, then steps back and leaves his subordinates to figure out how to make it happen. And that’s fine, except even the US Army and organizations like it have doctrine, and procedures, and processes, and rules. Those same

subordinates have to coordinate their activities and keep the commander informed of the situation, and be prepared for said commander to issue new orders to account for changes or seize fleeting opportunities. That was about as far as my expertise in the subject went, but even I knew that mission command really wasn’t a gaggle of individual platoons and companies and things running around doing whatever the hell they wanted. There was a method to the madness. “Actually, Mom, I think it does matter. There are distinctions here, critical distinctions that… I have to state, and clearly, if only this once. I get using initiative and being flexible and adaptable. And then, there’s chaos that’s all pointed vaguely in the same direction, sort of oriented to a common goal. You get results, sure. But are they the best results?

Could we get better ones by working together?”

“It’s not my fault if people can’t see and seize the moment, Van.”

“I—”

But I cut myself off. This wasn’t going to work. Just trying to argue that my mother and her followers should be willing to subject themselves to a more rigorous, centralized authority because it was the right approach wasn’t going to get any traction. My mother, for a lot of reasons, didn’t trust the more established and conventional parts of the GKU and the Guild. She thought they were cumbersome and timid. I needed an argument that was about her, rather than the organization or the greater good. I had one. Tenuous, but present. “Mom, let me ask you this. How do you know that you’re not being used?

That whatever forces are trying to manipulate the GKU and the Guild generally aren’t also manipulating you?”

“Well, that’s the advantage of not being beholden to a central authority, now isn’t it?

I can’t very well be manipulated if I’m only doing the things that I believe need to be done.”

But I shook my head. “No. I disagree. Who or whatever is pulling strings behind the scenes is good at it. In fact, we have to assume that no matter how good at it we think they are, they’re even better. Hell, we’re assuming that the problem is somewhere among the 32, but it may be something manipulating the 32 from the outside.”

My mother’s face—still beautiful, but troubled and worn by battle—

creased into a frown. “Van, it’s one thing to try to root out genuine

corruption. It’s another to start seeing ghosts behind every corner. Don’t let determination turn into paranoia.”

“Tell me, Mom, how did you learn about that would-be BeneStar 2.0

thing, as you called it?”

“Routine GKU intelligence, backed up by some information from Unity. They have a vested interest in keeping the Deeps free of ambitious warlords and aspiring emperors as much as we do.”

“Uh-huh. How pivotal was the Unity stuff in prompting you to take action?”

“It… brought together some data points in the GKU intel, pointed the way for us.”

“And it came from Unity.”

Her expression flashed to annoyance. “I just said it did.”

“Are you sure?”

“I—yes. Yes, of course I’m sure. Came through the same channels as always.”

“And those channels haven’t been compromised. You know that for certain.”

She opened her mouth but hesitated. Then she shook her head. “What are you saying, Van?

That we were set up to take out that petty dictator’s flotilla?

Why?”

“I’ve got reasons. Consider some—just hear me out, okay?

Why was the Enhancement Empire trying to kill their former boss and chief backer, Helem Gauss?

Why would anyone want to take out a potential rival—and for bonus points, have someone they consider an enemy do it for them?

It wipes out the competition and weakens your opposition, right?”

My mother crossed her arms but said nothing. “This isn’t just paranoia. There is something, or maybe several somethings, out there. This enemy is cunning, insidious, patient, and above all, dangerous. Like I said, no matter how bad we think they are, we have to assume they’re even worse.”

“What are you suggesting, other than simply being alarmed?

We stop operating based on intel?

How the hell will we ever get anything done?”

“I’m not saying that at all. What I am saying is that we need some kind of unified front, rowing in the same direction. We don’t have the luxury of time to do otherwise.”

“Alright. Let’s get right to it. What are you saying we should do?”

“We need to focus on Calamity—what it is, where it came from, and what reason someone could possibly have for wanting it to spread across known space.” I stared at the blank surface of the conference table. “We’ve been assuming, more or less, that it comes down to the Seven Stars League, or the Rogue part of it that seems to have some sort of immunity to Calamity. That they want to use that as a lever to become the dominant force in known space.”

“That makes sense—which means I think you just answered your own question, Van.”

I sighed. “Maybe, but… I think there’s still something missing here. That endgame, effectively controlling known space—” I shook my head. “I don’t know. It just seems needlessly complicated. The threat of Calamity would probably have been sufficient to give them the power they want. Instead, they control known space, sure, but it’s a shitshow of failed technology and humanitarian disasters. I mean, what’s the point of ruling over a crime scene that spans light-years?

It’s reigning in hell, if you ask me. It makes no sense.”

“Van—”

“I know, Mom. Action, not bullshit navel gazing. That’s where this ends up short for me. I don’t know. We aren’t sure if Calamity is a cause, or a symptom, or a goal, or some of all of those things—or none of them, and something else entirely. But I think knowing that is the key to understanding everything that’s going on. And if we come to understand that, it’ll bring us that much closer to being able to do something about. I mean, it’s pretty tough to land a punch when you can’t just not see your opponent, but you aren’t even sure who the hell he is.”

My mother’s face shifted to an expression of open interest. “You’ve done a lot of the work, son, even though it might not seem that way just now. We have a target. We have some of the players, and most importantly, I’d say the 32 has a tactical advantage. You won’t get caught sleeping.”

“Not a chance. If anything, we’re riding the edge too closely, but we know how to step back. Milon Estates is a second home, to all of us, and we’ve got a soft place to land in Iowa. But… that’s just a few of us. What I control, though we’ve got a helluva punch.”

“You do. That battleship is a heavy hitter.”

“So’s the Fafnir. We’re safe—or relatively safe, anyway, as long as those two ships are under my command. That means I can focus on

motive.”

“Motive?” My mother’s eyes flashed with curiosity. “We need to account for everyone who has a motive to see Calamity spread across known space. I’m really starting to think that the Rogue element of the League is a dangerous one but still not the main event.”

“Alright. Who’s not accounted for, then?”

“We keep circling back to one name—Dohlennz.”

My mother narrowed her eyes. “Dohlennz. Interesting name.”

“Why so?”

“Call it repetition. I’ve heard it three or four times in the intel over the past few months. A known associate of Gauss’s, but apparently more of a…

a personal care physician, someone taking care of Gauss’s inhuman form and keeping him alive. He doesn’t sound like a mover and a shaker, just a technical specialist. A really vile technical specialist, sure. But do you really think he’s somehow pivotal in all this?”

“Showing up repeatedly in intelligence and in my own networks?

I don’t believe in coincidence. I think all of us should angle toward the same goal—a quiet word with Dohlennz to find out who and what he really is.”

My mother looked at the floor for a moment, then back up at me. “Okay, you’ve convinced me, Van. Where do we start?”

I shrugged. “That, mother dear, is a very good question.”

20

I PAUSED after settling myself into the pilot’s seat of the Object 6, my hands reaching for controls that weren’t where they belonged. I’d meant to switch the power plant status display from its default overview mode to one that showed a schematic of current power demands, which I preferred—on the Fafnir. Instead, my finger touched the channel selector on the comm panel. While there was a broadly similar organization to the controls on most ships, the details were all over the map. “Just like sitting in a rental car for the first time, trying to figure out where the headlights and wipers are,” I muttered, pulling my hand back. “I can reconfigure the instrument layout if you like, Van,” Six, the ship’s AI, said. I glanced around. Most of the instruments were virtual—images displayed on a screen. It meant Six could move most of them around if I wanted. But I didn’t think it would make much difference because the layout of the displays was different from those of the Fafnir, so things wouldn’t be where my muscle memory thought they were anyway. “Nah, don’t bother. I’ll just get used to it.”

“I’ve completed the preflight checklist. All items are green,” Six said. “I can confirm that,” Icky added. She’d been poring over the checklist as Six ran it, apparently doing her own parallel check. The Object 6 wasn’t her ship, either. And like me, she felt out of place, so taking the unnecessary step of running the checklist herself was probably just her way of taking back some control. “Okay, then. So first—”

“First, we should get this thing rearmed. She’s got one load of point-defense ammo and no missiles on board,” Icky grouched. I nodded. “She probably had all of her ordnance removed when they scrubbed her clean of Calamity.”

It meant we should probably take the ship back to FOB Trebuchet, the GKU’s semi-mobile forward operating base, where she’d been repaired. But it was a long way out of our way. As we raised our orbit to climb away from the Righteous Fury and the ships with her, we mulled over the options. I even called Gerhardt to see if the Fury could spare any ordnance, at least point-defense ammo. But he had a better idea. “Call Dayna Jasskin. Since she’s one of the 32, she has a vested interest in helping.”

I cocked my head at him. “How did you not know she was a member?”

Gerhardt shrugged. “All of our dealings with The Quiet Room went through B.”

“And what if B suddenly died?

Does that link just get severed?”

Gerhardt gave me a hard look, but it faltered under my own bland gaze, then dissolved into a sigh. “Tudor, I actually agree with you. We’ve become complacent. The way the 32 has been compartmentalized has been a fixture of how it has worked for decades, certainly, and probably centuries. And that was fine—right up until we’ve found ourselves facing the known space-wide emergency that is Calamity. Now, the deficiencies are starting to become clear.”

“No shit. Well, I’m putting you guys on notice. If I’m going to be and remain part of this little cabal, that’s going to have to change. We need a lot more transparency inside our own ranks.”

Gerhardt actually smiled. “There was a reason we wanted to bring a fresh perspective into the group.” But his smile turned into its more accustomed thin, charmless form. “Just remember, though, Tudor, the old proverb about flies, honey, and vinegar.”

“He’s saying not to be an asshole about it,” Perry hissed in a stage whisper. “Yeah, I got that, bird. Thanks.” I turned back to Gerhardt. “Okay, we’ll call Dayna.”

I had Six put a call in to Dayna. By the time she replied, we’d lifted our orbit as far as we needed to in order to put ourselves a safe distance from

the other ships before lighting our drive. First, though, we needed a destination, and that depended on what Dayna had to say. “We need money, fast. We’ve got a ship to arm,” I said. She smiled. “Well, since B called and told me of your recent admission to the 32, I guess I won’t just put you through to our loans department.”

“That’d be nice, yeah.”

“Actually, Van, B anticipated that you’d likely need some resources in excess of what you had readily at hand. To that end, I’ve been working up a letter of credit drawn on certain special accounts, but you don’t need to concern yourself with that.”

“Awesome. How much?”

“Two million bonds.”

I paused for a second. “That’s… a lot of money.”

“We consider you a worthwhile investment, based on your track record so far. Of course, we’re also expecting that you’ll continue to make it worthwhile.”

“We want you to save the universe, but only if we get a decent return on our investment in the process. Ain’t capitalism grand?” Perry put in. “It keeps the lights on,” Dayna said wryly. “In this case, literally, since the return we’d like on our investment is the mere continuation of civilized life. It does, however, come with a condition.”

“If you say it’s a loan and we have to repay it, Dayna, so help me I’ll—”

Dayna cut me off with a grin. “No, this is a grant, not a loan.”

“But a conditional one.”

“Yes. And the condition is right here,” she said and leaned back from her end of the display. A new face popped in front of hers. It was Zenophir. I think I recoiled, and I even heard Icky gasp. But even as the thought occurred, it passed. No, this wasn’t Zenophir. It was a P’nosk. Certainly similar to her, but not her. “Hello there. I’m Rabouleth, cousin to Zenophir, and it pleases me to say that I am here to help.”

I sat forward again. “Rabouleth, I—”

“Call me Rab.”

“Okay, Rab it is. Rab, all due respect, but the only thing that strikes more fear into my heart than the words I’m here to help is if they’re

preceded by I’m from the government and. Dayna, what exactly is going on?”

She peered around Rab’s grinning, walrus-esque face. “We want you to bring Rab on as a member of your crew. We know that the loss of Zenophir has left a hole, but it has also degraded your ship’s performance. In fact, by our modeling, the Fafnir has suffered a loss of efficiency in battle of between six and ten percent without her aboard.”

I frowned. The Quiet Room had people modeling the performance of my ship and crew?

That seemed a little over the top, and I opened my mouth to say so, but Dayna beat me to it. “Van, before you start bitching, we model the performance of all of our major clients, looking for ways we can help them improve.”

“And thereby improve that almighty return on investment again.”

“I’d be lying if I said otherwise. Anyway, we believe that adding Rab to your crew will make up for that performance loss, which will increase your chances of success, which is better for everyone—us and you.”

I had to smile. It was cold and calculating logic in the extreme, but it was also pretty unassailable. It also came with two million bonds of free money attached to it. “Rab, I assume you have a background in weapons, military tactics, that sort of thing?” I asked. He nodded. “Indeed. In fact, I have a passion for weapons and their employment that’s only exceeded by a desire to discharge those weapons at people connected to the death of Zenophir.” His cheerful face hardened and darkened as he spoke. I nodded at that, satisfied. “May I be the first to welcome our new crew member aboard,” Perry said. Dayna gave a wry grin, “I thought you’d see it my way.”

“And where is Rab going to join us?” I asked. “The happiest place in the universe, of course. The Armory at Gliese 876, where everyone has the best day ever.”

“Gliese 876?

The Fren-Okun home system?”

“That’s right.”

I turned to Perry. “That mean anything to you?”

“Nope. The Fren home system has two habitable rocky worlds, both controlled and populated by the Fren themselves. Otherwise, there’s not

much to see.”

“Ah, that’s not quite true. There is a mining operation on the innermost planet, extracting helium-3 produced by the effect of the star’s emissions on the planet’s exposed surface,” Rab said. “Okay, I know about the mining operation, but… so what?

Helium-3

mining isn’t exactly all that unique—unless, of course, you’re saying that the mining operation is the front for something else, like a hidden cache of weapons,” Perry replied. “I’m not not saying that,” Rab replied, sporting a grin that mirrored Zeno’s own expression in every way. I missed my friend. I shook my head slightly to clear the presence of ghosts and stated the obvious, because a lot of my job now seemed rife with secrets. “Let me guess—this is another secret of the 32,” I said. “I’m not not saying that either.”

“Okay, fine. We’ll rendezvous with you in the Gliese 876 system in—” I looked at the nav display but found myself looking at the thruster status panel instead. By the time I found the nav, Six had already put up our ETA. “In about sixteen hours.”

“I’ll be there!”

“Van, I have one other request,” Dayna put in as Rab vanished. I suppressed an urge to sigh. Now what?

“What’s that?” I asked her. “Not just from The Quiet Room, but from me, personally—make every damned shot count.”

I smiled, and even to me, it felt… primal. “I’ll make sure of that, Dayna. Trust me.”

“ARE WE IN-SYSTEM?” Perry asked, easing into his chair. “We are now,” Six informed us. “Anyone feel moist?”

Funboy, “No. And if you ask me that again, I’ll bring up my request for mandatory hand sanitizer every two meters on the bulkheads.”

I gave him a look. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

He waggled his enormous brows at me in a subtle gesture of thanks, because the Surtsi don’t do anything joyous to excess. “Queries coming in, boss. A lot of them, from various system authorities,” Netty said. Many of the questions were redundant, variations on Why should we let you come here?

and How do we know you’re not infected with Calamity?

and Why should we let you come here when you might be infected by Calamity?

“Chatty group,” Perry declared. “I find it unprofessional.”

Funboy agreed with gusto. “Unwarranted discussions and ceaseless nattering indicate a social structure that is absolutely ripe for things like high fives and kissing.”

I turned to him, my brows raised. “You can extrapolate all that from their, um, questions?

And do you really equate high fives and kissing?”

He thought it over as Icky snickered away. Gabby watched, smiling and curious. Torina added her own look of inquiry. “When done properly, a high five is as or more sensual than most kisses. It is also slightly more hygienic,” Funboy announced. “This I gotta see,” Icky enthused. “Maybe, um… later. And by later, I mean never. We’ve got questions rolling in still,” I said, and we did. The comms rattled with endless variations of the same question. Were we compromised or not?

I answered them as patiently as I could, pointing out that we didn’t intend to make planetfall on either of the Fren worlds but were inbound all the way to the helium-3 mining operation on the planet appropriately called Scorch, since it was so close to the star. In fact, after taking into account Gliese 876’s radiant output compared to Sol, Scorch actually had an effective orbit nearly fifteen percent closer to its star than Mercury did. The Object 6 was a reasonably tough ship, but that was getting damned close—

close enough that full exposure to the star’s shine would soon inflict damage. So Six designed our trajectory to keep Scorch between us and the star as much as possible during our approach. Fortunately, Scorch was tidally locked to the star, so it had a permanent dark side, and that’s where the mining operation was based. Robotic miners specially hardened against

thermal and radiation did the actual digging, with the ore being whisked to the mining complex itself on the dark side via a mag-lev tram system. “Why do I suspect that this whole thing is just a front?

I mean, it can’t be very profitable mining ore on the other side of the planet then shipping it all the way back here,” I said as the Object 6 settled onto the landing pad assigned to us by the mine’s traffic control AI. “That’s a lot of trouble to go through to hide something you could just, um, hide. Without much fuss,” Icky said, standing up from her seat and stretching her legs and all four arms. Her tendons rippled and snapped, and she smiled, proving a universal truth—regardless of species, there are few things more satisfying than a bone cracking stretch. “However, it does explain why there is ship traffic to and from here. If this was just an uninhabited planet, that would risk attracting undue attention,” Funboy offered. I nodded. It suggested the armory concealed here was a pretty sophisticated operation. And if it belonged to the 32, it suggested there was even more to this organization that I didn’t know about. And I was tired of seeing it one layer at a time, peeled back with dramatic slowness. The group needed an orientation package entitled something like, So you’re a brand new member of the 32, that went on to explain just what the hell it was and what it was all about. We disembarked from the Object 6 and made our way to a bunker-like entrance a couple of hundred meters away. Scorch was about the size of Mars, so gravity was a little light, and there was no atmosphere to speak of. It meant we were fully suited up, which was fine with me. I’d also brought both The Drop and the Moonsword, because I’d rather have them than not. It wasn’t that I particularly expected trouble, but I didn’t want to be caught flat-footed by the unexpected sort. We were met inside the airlock by Rab. As he introduced himself, I was struck again by his similarity to Zeno. His tones, inflections, mannerisms, body language—it was all eerily familiar. It made me wonder if that was just a P’nosk thing, that such things tended to run in families, or if there was something more at work here. In either case, I found myself watching him a little warily. Rab provided me with a chip containing the certified letter of credit from The Quiet Room. I plugged it into a data slate that had its link module

removed as a Calamity precaution, meaning that to read it, Perry had to literally perch on my shoulder and peer at the screen. “Arrh matey, she be a standard letter of credit, with no terms or conditions that make me think it should walk the plank,” he growled. “Perry.”

He turned to me, his amber eyes centimeters from my face. “I’m on your shoulder, Van, so one of us should talk like that, right?

By the way, your line is—”

“Don’t say Polly want a cracker.”

“Okay, I won’t.”

“All the piracy aside, there’s nothing that gives you any concern in this?”

“No. If anything, I’m surprised by how open-ended it is. The sole condition is taking Rab on to our crew. So we can buy all kinds of crap for the Object 6, then just transfer it all over to the Fafnir when we get her back. It’s basically a free two-million credit upgrade for our ship.”

“That’s by design,” Rab said. “Dayna made it clear that The Quiet Room has a lot of faith that you’ll use the money wisely, and to get results.”

Icky gave Rab a suspicious look. I wondered how she was taking having someone so reminiscent of Zeno around. “You’re a spy for The Quiet Room, aren’t you?” she asked with characteristic bluntness. Rab just shrugged. “You got me. Of course I am.”

“You—wait. You are?”

“Of course. That’s why The Quiet Room insisted on me joining your crew. They’re protecting their interests.”

“So they come first. Great.”

But Rab’s smile faded and he shook his head. “Not at all. What comes first is helping you guys find those ultimately responsible for Zeno’s death

—and by ultimately, I mean just that. There’s a lot more in play here than Helem Gauss or the remnants of BeneStar.” He looked back toward the airlock door. “There’s something else out there. Someone or something that’s pulling the strings from a deep, dark hole. Whatever it is, or whoever it is, it’s what’s responsible for what happened to Zeno. I want to find it and kill it.”

I watched him as he talked. Maybe it was my long association with Zeno, or maybe I was just getting the knack of reading alien feelings and

motives, but there was no deception there. Rab meant what he was saying, and fervently. His background dossier, which Perry had assembled from what was available in the Object 6’s data stores, described him as a general mercantile trader, which was just buzzwords intended to cover the fact he was an inveterate arms merchant. Most of the business he did was legit and fully permitted, but it seemed he wasn’t above the odd gray or even black market smuggling job. It had left me wary of him—until now. Now, seeing and hearing the iron determination in his voice and manner, I believed him. “You were close to Zeno, weren’t you?” I said as he led us all away from the airlock and along a straight tunnel excavated into the rock. “We grew up together. As adolescents, I considered her my best friend. I still do.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but she never mentioned you,” Icky said. “No, she wouldn’t have. She and I had a… a falling out. It was complicated. And stupid, and mostly my fault. I’d always meant to rebuild my relationship with her but never got around to it, and now—” He shook his head but didn’t say anything else. I nodded. Regret. Yeah. I got it. I still castigated myself for not seeing Gramps more often in his last years. I’d always meant to, told myself the next visit would be a long one, but it never was. There was always somewhere else to be, and then he was just… gone. “Anyway, we’re not here to talk about—” He shrugged. “We’re here for things that go boom. And trust me, friend, this is the place to come when you want things that do that.”

“So this all belongs to the 32?” Funboy asked. “Not the mining operation itself. It belongs to the people who run this place. They’re the same people that run the Armory, and have for centuries. So it’s a hereditary thing.”

“Centuries?

How many?” I asked as we reached a set of heavy blast doors. Rab spoke into a comm, then a warning buzzer sounded and the doors swung open. “Six. And you’re about to meet them.”

The doors, which were each about three meters of layered alloys, composites, and ceramics, swung with eerie silence and stopped just before they touched the walls of the tunnel. The tunnel continued beyond them. Just inside, though, was a small tram on spherical balloon tires. A black-suited figure stood waiting with crossed arms. “You guys take the scenic route or what?”

The voice was gruff, female, and unmistakably Fren-Okun. Sure enough, the suited figure was an older Fren woman with a furrowed brow, and her eyes that told me they’d seen enough bullshit for one lifetime and didn’t have the time or interest in any more. Rab stepped forward, then turned. “Van, this is Mother Hen. Mother Hen, Van Tudor, newest member of the 32.”

I did a double-take on the name. “Mother Hen?

Really?”

“No, not really. I mean, what sort of stupid name would that be?

My real name is Kelyx’t. But I got called Mother Hen by one of you human assholes years ago, and the stupid name stuck.”

I had to smile at her unashamedly irascible tone. I’d met a few of these older Fren females now and had learned they were the real power among their people. But they wielded it discreetly, meaning they had to put up with a lot of moronic males who thought they were in charge. I could see how that could put you into a permanent state of being grumpy, especially given the reality of some females deteriorating into mucosal enthusiasts with the table manners of a toddler. I’d be pissed too if my cousins considered loogies to be high culture. She curtly told us to mount on the tram, then settled into the driver’s position. We zoomed off, the blast doors closing behind us. As we scooted along, Mother Hen turned to me. “I understand you’ve met my people, out there in the big empty.”

“I have, and I’ve been struck by how—uh—what’s the word I’m looking for. Bifurcated?

Contradictory—?”

“Yeah, yeah, moist and not-moist. They’re all our relatives, but—well, those of us who aren’t either idiotic males or demented old females really call the shots.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it. You’re about to be introduced to the real secret of the Fren-Okun. It’s right up ahead, in fact, through this next set of doors.”

Another massive set of blast doors already sat open ahead of us. We hurtled through them into a cavernous space easily the size of a massive

sports stadium. Mother Hen halted the tram, and we all sat and just gaped around us. “Welcome to the Armory,” Mother Hen said. I saw… weapons. Lots and lots of weapons. There were racks of small arms, from pistols to big, crew-served autocannons. More racks were festooned with melee weapons of every description, from swords to boarding pikes. There were howitzers, missile launchers, armored fighting vehicles on wheels or tracks or with no apparent means of propulsion, or at least not obvious ones. And I saw spaceship components—REAB modules, applique armor plates, laser mounts, point-defense batteries, particle cannons, and a myriad of things I didn’t recognize at all, but damn if they didn’t look deadly. “Holy… shit.”

“Yup. The Fren-Okun are the armorers of known space. We sell everything from bullets to fusion warheads through about a million subsidiaries, shell corporations, and middlemen. The weapons on your ship probably came off our production lines. Same with the weapons mounted on just about every ship in the Tau Ceti, Eridani and League fleets. We’ve even started selling into Unity and just bought a new fabrication plant for ordnance on Rondantic’s World in the Deeps,” Mother Hen said. “Again—holy shit.”

I saw dozens of figures scurrying about, some examining weapons carefully arrayed on stacked industrial shelving, others supervising the loading and unloading of bulky cargo trams. There were other exits from this place, too, suggesting that the underground complex sprawled far beyond this vast chamber. But something about the people bustling away in the vast subterranean complex struck me. “Not all of these people are Fren-Okun,” I said, watching a Yonnox whip by on another tram, pulling a train of trailers loaded with what looked like some sort of artillery ammunition. “No, we take in strays from all over known space. Beyond it, too,”

Mother Hen said. “I guess it takes more than one race to develop a vast arsenal of weapons that could probably dominate most of the galaxy.”

“Correct.” Mother Hen turned to Rab. “I like this one, Rab. No huge moral qualms about manufacturing and dealing in weapons, none of that swords into plowshares bullshit. Not like that last one you brought, the one that threatened to expose us for a bunch of destabilizing, warmongering butchers—that’s the word she used, wasn’t it?

Butchers?”

Rab nodded. “Yeah. Her. What can I say, she was a dilettante, all in love with the idea of honorable war for a noble cause, blah, blah.”

“Yeah, like sausages.”

That caught me. “Like sausages?

Really?”

“Yeah. Everyone enjoys the finished product, whether it’s sausages or victory in battle. But no one wants to know what actually goes into producing it.”

“I do have to ask, though, why you’ve constructed such an expansive facility?

You are probably capable of producing more weapons and munitions here in a day than would be consumed across known space during that same time,” Funboy said, turning from the vista of armaments to Mother Hen with a slow blink. “And while I do have moral qualms about manufacturing weapons on this scale, my question is more about practicality—you seem to be outproducing your potential market.”

“We don’t run the fabricators nonstop. And, we sell outside known space. But there’s another reason the 32 want to maintain a large, high-capacity armaments facility,” Mother Hen replied. “And that is?”

Mother Hen’s eyes glittered. “It’s a big galaxy out there. And a bigger universe beyond it. Who knows what’s coming our way?

Be a hell of a thing to have something vast and deadly come crashing into us out of the big black, and only then try to spool up something to deal with it, dontcha think?”

We rolled on, brooding over Mother Hen’s ominous words. It was a good point, wasn’t it?

We hadn’t expected Calamity, either, but here it was. And it had apparently come from somewhere “out there.” As she said, what else might be heading our way?

It just hardened my resolve to purge the 32 of whatever worms of corruption were gnawing away at it from the inside. Known space needed the 32 and what it was supposed to stand for now more than ever. After all, what if Calamity was just the prelude to something even worse?

21

ONCE WE WERE DONE GAWKING and marveling—both at the scale of the Armory and the fact it was, apparently, a secret buried at the heart of Fren-Okun society—we got down to business. Mother Hen stopped the tram among racks of spaceship components, then turned to Rab. “Since I’m assuming this isn’t just a vacation for you folks, Rab, do you have a number in mind for the refit on that ship lurking out there?”

“Sure do, Mother. Van?”

“Armor and weapons for sure. But I’d also like to get the ship hardened against things like EMP and other EM effects. She’s proven a little vulnerable in that area,” I said. “Okay. And what’s your budget?”

Rab waved a hand. “Let’s say… two point three million?”

Mother Hen said nothing, waiting. Rab just smiled back at her. Finally, she relented. “Let me guess. You expect to pay two million for everything after you appeal to my maternal nature.”

“Naturally.”

“Fine. Done. But you’ll probably have to accept some used and refurbished components. Is that agreeable?”

I held out my hand. “Very.” As she shook it, though, I had to ask a question that had been bothering me. “I’m curious. All this”—I gestured around us—“and nobody knows about it, outside of a small circle of people?

Really?

How is that even possible, to keep a secret this big so well?”

“It’s the bombs we implant in everyone who comes here. They breathe a word about this place, and they go boom. Oh, and you guys will have to have them implanted, too.”

My eyes widened. Mother Hen just stared back severely for a moment, then burst into the unsettling damp rattle of Fren laughter. “And you’re a cop?

Aren’t you supposed to be able to see past the obvious bullshit at least?” she said. I lifted my middle finger while smiling broadly, which just made her laugh even more. “Ah, being an asshole keeps me young. Seriously, everyone who works here is thoroughly vetted using the resources of your Guild, the GKU, and a few other agencies I won’t mention, then put under a non-disclosure agreement. But the main reason we do a pretty good job of keeping this all low-key is that we pay everyone well and treat them well. We want people to not want to lose their jobs. You’d be surprised how effective it is.”

“And all that said, it’s not really a complete secret anyway. There are rumors out there, but the Armory deals with those by starting their own, spreading misinformation, false locations, all sorts of nonsense that obfuscates the truth,” Rab put in. “We have a whole section in our security department devoted to just doing that. Those guys have a ball, being paid to bullshit the galaxy,”

Mother Hen said. We spent the next couple of hours or so going over possible upgrade options and following Mother Hen around the facility to look at components. I leaned heavily on Icky and Funboy for their engineering expertise. While they cast a critical eye over every possible addition, I took the opportunity to get to know both Rab and Gabby a little better, since they were apparently joining my crew. Rab’s story was pretty straightforward—essentially just what he’d already told us. He and Zenophir had been close as kids and only got closer as they got older. They shared a passion for, as Rab put it, things that go boom, which led them both into weapons engineering. At some point not long after that, they had a schism that never healed. I could see regret gnawing at Rab as he spoke, but I didn’t poke at it. The nature of their falling out was obviously personal and none of my business. If I had any lingering concerns about Rab, they revolved around the intensity of his thirst for revenge for losing Zeno. Revenge was a powerful but dangerous

and unpredictable motivator. To put it another way, I didn’t doubt for an instant Rab’s dedication to tracking down the bad guys, but I did have doubts about what he’d do when we found them. Gabby was… very different. It was an effort, even a struggle just to talk to her, because her stream-of-consciousness nature meant she’d constantly take off onto conversational tangents. “So I understand you worked in a high-end restaurant?” I asked her. “Oh, yes, I did, it was wonderful, I learned so much, and I love applying it, like the meat pies I make, I include just a pinch of a spice from the S’rall, but not too much, it’s very potent, but the S’rall love it, I think they have a flavor palate that favors very strong spices, but it’s just like them, they’re a very interesting but exotic people, I knew a S’rall once who—”

Bet you’re missing the bird’s way more succinct assholery about now, huh, Van?

Perry said in my ear bug. “—never actually been to S’rall, but I want to go sometime, oh, do you think we’ll go there, because if we do there’s some other spices I want to

—”

I nodded. Yes!

Score!

Remember that the next time I’m bestowing my cutting witticisms upon you, Tudor!

“—just like parts of Simon’s Arch, I spent some time there a few years ago cooking for a very wealthy mercantile family, they said I made the best starbeam soup, have you ever had starbeam soup, Van, because if not I’ll make you some, although we’ll need fresh chetzlitzh, and it’s hard to get because it doesn’t keep—”

Icky cut in with a shout from near a rack of weapons. “Van, we need you—”

“Thank God—I mean, okay. Thanks, Icky, I’ll be right there,” I said, excusing myself and hurrying away from Gabby. When I joined her and Funboy, I nodded gratefully. “Thank you. Gabby is—”

“Remarkable, I know,” Funboy said, staring at her with a hint of actual longing. I turned to Icky and mouthed, Wow. She mouthed a word right back at me. Right?

WE ENDED up selecting components for the Object 6 based as much on how useful we thought they’d be on the Fafnir as on her. They included an active protection system, an APS, essentially a powerful, short-ranged laser coupled to a magnetic pulse generator, a dedicated threat scanner, and an AI to control it all. It was autonomous like a point-defense battery, only it was capable of engaging not just incoming missiles, but projectiles as well. The pulse generator could also disrupt an inbound particle beam. The only thing it couldn’t defeat were light-speed weapons like lasers. The other real score was a weapon called a swarm cannon. It was actually more rapid-fire missile launcher than gun, though, and got its name from its ability to spew a stream of small, guided pieces of ordnance at a target. The result was a literal swarm of nimble little projectiles that were designed to coordinate their attacks and close in on a target from myriad directions and with complex timing, making them hard to defeat. And while it packed five hundred rounds, its downside was that reloads weren’t cheap. Most importantly, it was a mid-range weapon, effective in the space between the longer reach of missiles and lasers and the close-in lethality of mass drivers and the particle- and plasma-burst cannons. It would be a potent upgrade for both the Object 6 and, when we finally found and reclaimed her, the Fafnir. We rounded out the rest of the purchase with an upgraded power-management system, then a few applique armor modules to better protect critical parts of the ship. “Boss?” Perry asked. “See something shiny?”

“And how. There’s an upgraded fire-control AI for the point-defense batteries. Think of it as if I ran as a subroutine. It’s fast. Adds a lot of speed and cycling to our rate of fire. And accuracy, too, somewhere in the range of five-and-a-half percent,” Perry explained. “Done. Get it.” Nearly six percent didn’t sound like a lot until you were in a battle, then it became the margin of victory. I also put a down payment on a battle module, but since it involved disassembling the ship to install it, we’d save that for the Fafnir and not use it for the Object 6.

It offered more weapons hard points, a backup fire-control system, an alternate workstation for someone like Torina to control

the weapons, and miscellaneous other features to help buff up the Fafnir’s combat capability. It would also increase the Fafnir’s mass, bringing her up to class 13 or so. That would officially make her too big for the barn. Which was a problem but one I was willing to tackle after we retrieved her—and her recovery was the next item on our agenda. Of course, the thought of breaking her apart to install the new module stirred up dark unease about whether she was still intact at all and hadn’t been disassembled in some sort of chop shop, with her components flung to the cosmic winds. But I stubbornly refused to entertain the notion and just pushed on assuming she was still in one piece and still out there, somewhere, waiting for us to find her. “I know,” Perry said. “We’ll get her back.”

“Reading my mind again, bird?”

“We’re all thinking the same thing here. No need for the paranormal.”

Funboy overheard us. “I agree. If I were capable of being… titillated, this place would do it. Our reactions are, as a whole, healthy and normal.”

Then he tried to smile. “Please don’t say titillated again,” I asked him. “Ever.”

He continued his hideous smile. “I agree to your terms. If I can have that shoulder mounted laser over there—”

WE BROUGHT the Object 6 into a hangar excavated into the bedrock of Scorch, where an Armory crew got to work installing the upgrades we’d purchased. It consisted of a Nesit, a Yonnox, and two Eniped, all of them brusquely efficient and slick in their command of both ship and weapons engineering. A host of robotic assistants assisted them, swarming over the Object 6 with chaotic purpose and showers of welding sparks. Perry perched himself on a tool cart to watch but had to fly away as a pair of robots suddenly grabbed the cart and started wheeling it away. “Can you believe what that guy said to me?”

I paused in examining the mount for the new swarm cannon, making sure the weapon was secure and signing off before all the internal hook-ups were made. “What guy?”

“That six-armed welder over there. Such language.”

“Kinda nice to see that working stiffs like these guys are hard at it, even out here in outer space—and the casual cussing that goes along with—”

Another robotic welder carrying an alloy panel scuttled around the curve of the hull, straight toward me. I had to dodge it as it clattered by. “Outta my way, candy ass. Gotta tack this panel in.”

“So, anyway, Van, you were saying how charming you found the gritty, lunch-bucket authenticity of the working-man experience out here in the galactic beyond.”

I glared at the welder. “Not as charmed as I was a few seconds ago. I mean, a simple excuse me would have been sufficient.”

I returned to inspecting the swarm cannon and had just signed off, giving the Nesit supervisor the go-ahead to finalize the installation, when Perry reappeared. “Now what?

Someone insult your tail feathers?”

“Yes, actually, but that’s not why I’m here. Lunzy’s on the comm for you with an urgent call.”

I glanced around. I still had an actual list of things I had to do if we were going to get Object 6 launched with enough time to get back to Null World. Defending Schegith was critical. It was, for the moment, our purpose. It wouldn’t do to be late. “Hey, can we route Lunzy’s call through you?”

“What?

You mean turn me into a walkie talkie?”

“More like a fly-ee talkie, but yeah.”

“The things I do for you. Okay, go ahead.”

“Uh… Lunzy?”

“Van, you need to get to Helso,” Perry said, somewhat disconcertingly, because it was Lunzy’s voice. But I ignored it as a thrill of apprehension tickled me. “What?

Why?”

“Because Dohlennz left a message there, with your name on it. The Helso authorities discovered a cargo pod with the remains of nine people in it. At least, they think it’s nine, but it’s hard to tell.”

I stood. “How is this connected to Dohlennz?”

“Well, that might have something to do with a note etched into the pod’s interior wall explicitly saying it was from him, and it was meant for Helso generally, and you and the Milon family in particular.”

“Shit. Lunzy, you have to—”

“Helso is on full alert and pretty much locked down. They’ve mobilized their home defense fleet, and the Schegith orbitals are fully online and ready. It would take a pretty sizable fleet to pose a serious threat at this point.”

I stared at Perry, mind racing. A few seconds of that, then it abruptly clicked into place. “A diversion. It’s got to be a diversion, meant to distract us from defending Null World.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve been expecting a Rogue fleet from the Seven Stars League to launch an attack on Null World, to take out the Schegith. But if Dohlennz is conspiring with them, sending an obvious, over-the-top warning that he knew would trigger Helso’s defenses—”

“Then it becomes an obvious target for them to attack.”

“Which pulls our attention and resources away from Null World.”

Perry’s voice abruptly changed to his own. “Helso is a Schegith Protectorate, so that’s another factor. The Schegith are obligated, under their agreement with Helso, to move vigorously to their defense. Those orbitals will go a long way to satisfying that, but it does put the Schegith between a rock and a hard place.”

“It would also satisfy a likely desire by the hardline elements of the League to redress what they probably see as the loss of Helso, since they were its original Protector,” Funboy put in, making me jump. I hadn’t seen or heard him climb the scaffold to stand beside me. I nodded. “The real problem is that both Null World and Helso may be actual targets. The Rogues could just see which one we defend the hardest, then attack the other one.”

“And if we split our effort between the two, then both end up being weaker as a result,” Lunzy/Perry added. I turned and stared at the swarm cannon for a moment, then nodded to myself. “We can’t leave the initiative with the Rogues. We can’t just wait for them to decide where they’re going to attack. Not a chance. We take the fight to them.”

“How?

We don’t have enough combat power assembled to mount an attack against what’s probably a superior force, at least not yet,” Perry said. I nodded again. “Maybe not, but I know who probably does, or is at least only too willing to give it a try. Lunzy, do your best to marshal whatever we can and get it heading toward Helso. In the meantime, Perry, get Six to put out a comm call. She’ll probably have to go through the GKU

side of things to do it.”

“A comm call to who?”

“To my mother.”

RAB PUT in a word to Mother Hen, whereupon the Armory’s crew scrambled to get the Object 6 back into space. In the meantime, I spoke to my mother. I was about to give her a chance to show that she could be a team player. I hoped she didn’t disappoint. We didn’t have many other options. “A spoiling attack,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “I don’t normally do spoiling attacks. I attack to win, and do it decisively.”

“Understood, Mom, but I really don’t want to wipe out the Rogues’

fleet. We’re not sure how many of the people involved in it are truly corrupted and loyal to their cause, and how many are just schlubs who happen to be crewing ships commanded by dirty officers.”

“So you want me to, what?

Take their fleet out of action without destroying it?”

I steeled myself, already tired of her relentless bloodlust. It was useful

—when it could be controlled. “What I’m asking, Mom, is that you attack it, do some damage, take some ships out of action, and then withdraw. If we can let them know we’re onto them, and knock out a few ships in the process, it’ll hopefully be enough to buy time for both Null World and Helso.”

My mother’s face was… serene, which I’d come to understand as her version of patient lethality. Preemptive spoiling attacks are a critical part of warfare. But my mother’s style of fighting was hyper violent, final, and prone to extremes. There was a time and place for such fervor, but not now. Still, if she left that as my only alternative—

“Fine,” she abruptly said. “I can gather enough combat power to give them a bloody nose. But if things go sideways and there’s no other choice than to kill them, that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll leave every hull burning if they force my hand, Van. Do you—do you understand?” She delivered the last question as a note of query—a tone that didn’t fit her. At all. I felt myself smile at her clever riposte. Even in a running conversation, her instincts made her insert an out clause that allowed permanent, lethal force. I suspected my mother’s definition of things going sideways was…

generous, and she’d be looking for any reason to unleash hell. But I’d take what I could get. Of course, there was another problem, one that might be a deal breaker that made all of this academic. “One small problem before we start this shindig,” I began. “You don’t have a hard location?”

“Correct.”

My mother just shrugged. “I’ll find them.”

She said it with such certainty that I knew she would. “Thanks, Mom.” I snorted. “There’s a phrase I didn’t think I’d say. And sure as hell not with regard to a space battle.”

She smiled. It was somewhere between sincere and cynical. “This makes up for all the birthday presents I missed buying you.”

“A fleet action?

Of my very own?

Mom, you shouldn’t have.”

Her smile swung toward the sincere side, then she signed off. Perry, who’d been sitting nearby, spoke up. “Do you really trust her?”

I crossed my arms and shook my head. “No. But what choice do we have?

She and her Feral friends have the ships and the means of using them. So unless you’ve got another fleet kicking around somewhere, our only other alternative is to go to Tau Ceti, the Eridani, or even Unity to help. And those have political repercussions I don’t even want to contemplate. I mean, I don’t want to win one battle, only to provoke an interstellar war.”

Perry dipped his beak. “Gotta hand it to you. You’re getting better at diplomacy.”

I let my head drop back, sighing toward the ceiling. 22

WE RETURNED to Null World to pick up Torina and explain the plan to Schegith. Schegith was grateful and wasn’t completely unprotected—a half-dozen Schegith warships had returned home, giving their homeworld at least some cover. We then hurried to Van Maanen’s Star, to Helso. Torina’s first words, boarding the Object 6, weren’t about the fact the Fafnir had been stolen, about the fact we now had two new crewmembers, Calamity, or the Rogues. Instead, she looked straight at Funboy. “Is that a perm?”

I got her caught up on all non-perm-related things on our way to Van Maanen’s Star. As soon as we twisted into the system, we were lit up by a half-dozen active scanners in fire-control mode. We kept our own scanners carefully passive, and I hastily broadcast my credentials. It took a moment, but Helso traffic control finally responded. “Sorry about that, Peacemaker. The Helso Council and the Schegith jointly decided to go to weapons-tight, which means that anything positively identified as hostile is a legitimate target. That means we hammer the crap out of anything coming into the system with full-power scanners.”

“Yeah, all that scanner energy was starting to curl my hair. Better safe than sorry, though.”

We lit the drive and made the inbound run to Helso. The Schegith kept us under active-scanner surveillance, albeit not in fire-control mode, apparently out of an abundance of caution and so they could keep our exact location pinpointed. After running the gamut of Calamity quarantine

measures, we finally grounded the Object 6 on the pad near the Milon estate and disembarked. Torina’s father was there to meet us in an air car. “I’m going to take you right to the crime scene,” he said, his manner curt and no-nonsense. I didn’t blame him. Being explicitly named in a manifesto etched into a cargo pod full of bodies by a fugitive mass murderer would make anyone grumpy. “So you have some new crew members, I see,” her father said as he lifted and spun the air car toward our destination. “We do. This is Rab—”

Rab smiled and nodded. “—and this is Gabby.”

“Hello there, so you’re Torina’s father, well, Torina and I only just met and I’m sure we’re going to become great friends, she seems very nice—

well, look who I’m talking to, of course you know that, she’s your daughter, silly me, anyway, I—”

“Gabby is our ship’s quartermaster and cook,” I interjected, doing it forcefully enough to cut Gabby off. I’d come to realize it was really the only way to stop her once she got started—interrupting with something that wasn’t overtly rude or a terse , Gabby, would you shut up already!

I still wasn’t convinced she was going to really work out. She had produced a couple of decent meals, but the galley on the Object 6 was pretty bare bones compared to the Fafnir’s. It really came down to her proving her value more as quartermaster and logistician than her ability to cook, though. The Fafnir was becoming a complex ship to operate, and doing all of the little jobs required to keep her flying, everything from stocking provisions to getting the waste reclamation system flushed, really was turning into a full-time job. “So I gather things are starting to get pretty bad in some places, what with disruptions by Calamity,” Torina’s father said. “I’ve heard that a half-dozen worlds are now in serious trouble.”

“Yeah. That’s why we need to get this thing stopped,” I replied. “So this Dohlennz—he’s implicated in all this?”

“Oh, he’s more than implicated. I’m starting to believe he’s playing a key role, maybe a pivotal one. We’ve been focused on Helem Gauss, but, I don’t know—I’m thinking now that Gauss was just a means to an end.”

Her father gave me a sharp glance as the air car started to descend toward some buildings clustered around another series of landing pads, one

of Helso’s commercial cargo ports. “Are you saying this Dohlennz bastard is behind all of this?”

I shrugged. “I’m not not saying that, but we don’t know for sure.”

“Whatever. I don’t care. This asshole has threatened my home and my family. Find him, Van, and—hell, chuck him out an airlock, or shoot him while resisting arrest or something. No more sham trials. Gauss never should have gotten off and just walked away the way he did.”

“No, he should not have. And that won’t be happening again, trust me. Not while I’ve got anything to say about it—and weapons to prevent it.”

We landed near a warehouse with a group of air cars marked with the emblems of the Helso Magistrates parked outside. A pair of guards scrutinized us as we approached, but they relaxed when they saw we were with Torina’s father. They relaxed even more when I showed them my Peacemaker credentials. “Nice to have you folks involved. We could use all the help we can get on this one,” one of the officers, a hard-faced woman said. She lowered her voice. “This one is ugly. I mean, brace yourselves when you go in there. Even the medical examiner looked like he was going to puke.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” I said, and we entered the warehouse. Right away, we were hit by the faint but unmistakable stink of dead flesh. As we approached a cargo container surrounded by a security perimeter that had several figures milling around it, the reek intensified. I glanced at Rab and Gabby to see how they were handling it. Both seemed pretty blasé in their own way—Rab looking grim, and Gabby just her usual, somewhat flouncy self. Icky noticed it. “Doesn’t this stink bother you?”

“Oh, the smell of dead bodies?

Not really, my species doesn’t really smell things in the way you do, we need to touch things in order to get that sort of sensation from them, oh, so if you see me touching the food as I make it, that’s just me smelling it!” she said brightly. We all glanced at Funboy, waiting for his inevitable morose outrage at any suggestions someone was touching his food. He just nodded. “As long as you have adequately disinfected whichever part of your body you use to test the food, I’m sure that’s fine.”

Torina gave me a wide-eyed look of surprise. I just returned a knowing nod. “Can you guys stop talking about food?

I don’t wanna end up associating food with this reek—” Icky said, then stopped when we reached the pod and could see inside. They were bodies, alright. But to say there were nine was optimistic. There probably weren’t more than a dozen, but aside from that, the gelatinous amalgam of arms and legs and torsos was unrecognizable as anything but that—a gelatinous amalgam. “Ewww, that’s unpleasant,” Gabby said, peering into the container, then retreating to join Funboy a few meters back, which was as close as he was prepared to get. The Magistrate in command of the scene gave a dour nod. “Now you see why we’re working in suits and masks.”

I put my hand over my nose. We hadn’t brought our helmets, which I was definitely regretting. “Where’s the note from Dohlennz?” I asked him. “About halfway in, on the right side.”

“Don’t suppose you’ve got an image of it, huh?

So we don’t have to go in—well, there?” Torina asked. “As a matter of fact, we do,” he said, making a follow me gesture. We followed him back outside where there was thankfully fresh air and got into a cube-van sized command post vehicle. He had a tech call up the images they’d taken from inside the container. He stopped at the one with the note, etched into the alloy of the cargo pod’s wall by some sort of tool. This is the fate awaiting all the people of Helso, especially the Milon family. Only the death of Tudor will spare you. “That’s rude,” Perry said. “I notice that little detail didn’t get released—the whole killing me part of it,” I said to the Magistrate. He shrugged. “For good reason. It helps us sort out real leads from spurious ones. Only someone familiar with the note will know what it actually says.”

“Any chance we can match that script to someone or something in particular?” Torina asked. The Magistrate shook his head. “Nah, we’ve already looked into that. That lettering was almost certainly done by an AI-controlled bot, but it’s too

generic to say much else. Any one of many thousands of the damned things could have been used to do it.”

“So this is all pretty much a dead end—”

“Hang on,” Icky said, leaning toward the screen. We all looked at her. “What is it?” I asked her. She pointed at a portion of the bodies in the foreground of the image. “How did these people die?”

“The medical examiner’s working on that. The trouble is we have to figure out how to remove”—he nodded at the screen—“that from the pod and get it into a forensics lab. And we have to do it soon, or else we’re going to have to spray preservative all over it and risk screwing up things like toxicology—”

“They were shot. Or, at least, this one was,” Icky said. The Magistrate leaned toward the image. “What makes you think that?”

“See this mark?

The one that kind of blossoms out from this central welt?

It’s a burn from… I’m thinking a pulse gun of some sort.”

Now we were all staring at her, bemused by sudden Icky the forensic investigator. “She needs sunglasses, and an opening blast of chords from The Who,”

Perry said. Icky scowled at him. “What?”

I shook my head. “Never mind. How do you know this, Icky?”

“Because my dad owned a pulse rifle for a while. He only used it once, though. Some scavvers found the Nemesis while we were still getting her flightworthy and thought she looked like a good place to grab some salvage. We fought them off, but the stupid pulse rifle was super slow to recycle, and it caused some really nasty, painful burns. Dad really didn’t like the idea of that, so he ended up busting it into pieces and using it for parts.” She glanced back at the screen. “Anyway, I remember the burns it caused on the scavvers looking just like that.”

I peered at the grotesque image. “A pulse rifle. I’ve heard of pulse weapons, but they’re… rare, aren’t they?”

“Very rare,” Perry said. “Like Icky said, they’re not really very good. They’re kind of grossly scaled-down versions of the Fafnir’s plasma-burst cannon, shooting a soliton-stabilized pulse of incandescent plasma. They’re slow and power-hungry, though, so they take a while to recycle and recharge their capacitors, and they eat through energy cells with every two

or three shots. Oh, and they sometimes explode instead of shooting, so there’s that, too.”

“Not surprised they haven’t caught on. They sound like trash,” Torina said. “They are. But they still get used among the lowlifes because they pack a punch when they hit. And if they blow up a minion or two, eh, whatever.”

“So if they’re not very common and there’s not much demand for them, then there can’t be many places manufacturing them,” Funboy said. “Or gunrunners carrying and selling them,” Torina added. I nodded and turned back to Perry. “Is there any intel available on these things?”

“Some. Object 6’s data stores aren’t as up-to-date as you’d find on an operational Guild ship. If you’ll let me open a data link to your slate, I’ll show what we’ve got.”

I pulled out my data slate. “Go ahead.”

An intel brief popped onto the display, along with an image. The brief didn’t say much, but it did give one key piece of information—at the time the brief was written, about a year ago, there was only one known manufacturer of pulse weapons, on Rodantic’s World in the Deeps. “Huh. My mother mentioned she was involved in a fight with some BeneStar remnants, as she called them, near Rodantic’s World. I wonder if there’s some connection,” I mused. “Lots of weapons made on Rodantic’s. It’s kinda what they do there,”

Perry said. I gave a glum nod. It wasn’t much of a lead, but maybe my mother could—

“Yeah, that looks just like the one my dad had,” Icky said, leaning her shaggy head over my shoulder. “Even has the same weird inscription, right there below the barrel.”

I looked at where she was pointing. After zooming in, I was struck first by the fact that it wasn’t a language I knew. But an instant later, I realized it was a language I recognized, even without the benefit of a translator. It was French. “Perry, what does that say?”

“Une chanson entre les étoiles. It means a song between the stars.”

“If only we knew someone who speaks French,” Torina said through a thin smile. “Yeah. When it comes to French stuff, we need to consult our favorite French girl. And by girl, I of course mean a slug. On a ball.”

“I’m going to assume that means something,” the Magistrate said, his face creased in a puzzled frown. “It does. It means we know where we’re going next.”

WE LEFT HELSO LOCKED down and on full alert while I tried to get updates from my mother regarding her progress in delivering a blow to the Rogues’

fleet before it could launch an attack of its own. She was maddeningly out of contact, though, so all I could do was desperately hope she came through for us. In the meantime, we did make contact with Retta, but rather than meeting her at her Parisian-style restaurant, she offered to meet us at the place favored for every shady, clandestine rendezvous—Wolf 424.

Retta met us aboard a nimble little ship of her own, a class 7 yacht named Le Magnifique. It was more correctly a class 7 yacht hull that had been upgraded into a more utilitarian sort of ship with heavier armor, more potent weaponry, and an insane scanner capability. Half of her power plant must have been devoted to running her expansive suite of scanners, which included a few military-grade sensing devices. These were the sort employed by stealthy surveillance ships, allowing them to lurk silently on the edges of star systems and sluice up data regarding everything from comms to ship movements. I made note of it as we boarded her ship. “Looks like you could detect someone sneezing or farting a couple of light-years out,” I said, chuckling. “Mais oui, I like to see trouble coming long before it sees me!” she replied, leading us into her ship’s comfortable—and unsurprisingly French-themed—interior. In fact, her ship was a striking contrast between functional, such as the sparse cockpit and stark engineering bay, and elaborately ostentatious, such as an ornate sitting room that could have been plucked right out of the Palace of Versailles. I’d brought the whole crew, mainly so I could introduce Gabby and Rab to Retta. Her reaction to Gabby took me by surprise, though. “Ah, ma bonne amie!

Gradie, you are part of Van’s crew now?”

I frowned. “Gradie?”

Gabby bobbed her head in a quick, enthusiastic bow. “Some people call me that because I sort of look like one of those little critters, the adorable ones, tardigrades, so tardigrade, Gradie, get it?

I don’t mind, though I think I prefer Gabby, because—”

I held up a hand. “How do you and Retta know one another?”

“Ah, that is simple, no?

Gradie— pardonez moi, Gabby—is associate with le coiffeur célèbre Ralston, and he is a frequent patron of my establishment.”

“I’m not with Ralston anymore, we parted ways, I decided to join Van’s crew because I thought it was time I did something to help, to give back, I mean, styling hair is alright but it’s really just vanity, isn’t it, so—”

“So she’s part of my crew now,” I cut in. “Good. That Ralston, he is un cochon, a pig,” Retta said. “I thought you were friends with him,” Torina said. “No, I said he is a frequent patron of my establishment. Many are, who I think are les cochons. But their money, it is as spendable as everyone else’s, no?”

I laughed. “How very practical of you, Retta. I respect your tenacity for revenue, even in the face of clients with appalling manners. However, dear friend, we’re here for a reason,” I said and showed her the data-slate entry Perry had downloaded. I’d been evasive about it on the comm, partly because I couldn’t securely transmit the data we had owing to Calamity precautions, and partly because I really didn’t want Dohlennz or his people to know that we might have a lead on him. “Ah, yes, the pulse gun. A terrible weapon. I am glad they are nearly as dangerous to the user as the unfortunate target,” she said, her tone dark. “Agreed. But what’s with the French inscription?”

“That is a brand, yes?

The song between the stars refers to an arms dealer who moves many weapons into, out of and around known space. He is arrogant, though, and likes to leave his carte d’appel, his calling card, whenever he can.”

“So he’s—what, French?

A human, from Earth?”

“From Earth, yes. But not everyone who speaks French is from France. Some out here are Belgique.”

“Belgian?

Belgian space pirates?” I sniffed and shook my head. “And there is another phrase I hadn’t imagined I’d ever be saying, at least not

until I opened my kitchen window and found Perry outside all those years ago.”

“Good times,” Perry agreed. “You rang?

That was my opening phrase. Droll, if you ask me.”

“Droll. Seems so inadequate to describe a two-word witticism of that caliber,” I told him. “Big words, boss. You trying to impress Retta?”

“Naturally. She’s got… verve.” I turned back to Retta, who regarded us with patient humor. “So what do you know about this— Song between the Stars?

That’s what he calls himself?”

“Very little. In fact, there have been rumors that he actually died, some say many years ago. But his organization still flourishes, yes?

In any case, my people are aware of their actions. I have another of my little birds working among the water haulers that run through this system, Wolf 424.

Mostly they carry water. Sometimes, though, they carry other things, hiding them in sealed containers inside the big water tanks.”

“Clever. Unless inspectors are willing to go for a swim, those would be tough to find,” Torina said. “Absolument. It is very clever and works very well. But they carry many guns, much ammunition, and are implicated in many missing ships and people. They are in league with the Stillness, yes?”

I sat back. “Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. They were one of the first criminal groups I ever dealt with.”

“I thought we’d kicked their asses into the void,” Torina said, frowning. “Ah, well, there was an offshoot, the Fade, which you and your Guild mostly destroyed. But the Stillness, they are still out there. They have been very… low-key, yes?

Keeping quiet and seeking opportunities amid crises. They are like the dog that slinks under the table looking for fallen scraps while its masters bicker and fight around the table above.”

“Elegant metaphor, Retta,” Perry said. “Merci. Anyway, we have been keeping the tabs upon them, but they have done nothing to warrant us taking action. They have been more valuable as a source of information, yes?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I get it. I hate it, but I get it.” I sighed. “It seems like we have to let three-quarters of the bad guys just go on their merry way just so we have a chance of taking action against the rest.”

“Oui. It is compromises, letting the lesser villains go, so we can deal with the greater ones. But it is the way of it, non?”

“Still, I think maybe it’s time to take some action against them. We need some answers, and we need them fast.”

“Agreed. I think this is a time for an arrest, and questions.”

“Many questions,” Torina agreed. Icky cracked two pairs of knuckles. Funboy just sighed. “Funboy, you going to throw hands?” Perry asked. His reply was slow and soft. “No. Just promises. I find that they often get the best results.”

Torina gave him a wary glance. “I’d really like to hear just what sort of promises you make when you whisper to these people.”

Funboy looked straight back at her. “No, Torina, you wouldn’t.”

Icky just shook her head. “You know, I’m glad this little weirdo is on our side.”

23

I EXPECTED it would take some time for Retta’s people to come back to us with a hard lead. In fact, I actually intended to head back to Null World, or Helso, just to follow up on how well both places were preparing themselves against a possible Rogue attack. Not that the presence of the Object 6 would necessarily prove decisive, but it would give us something to do other than waiting around while known space fell apart around us. Retta’s people got back to us within a couple of hours. “There is a water freighter outbound from the cometary mining station called LX618 in a nearby system. It is bound for here, Wolf 424, to deliver fresh water to the Gideon refining platform,” Retta reported in her cheerful, thorough way. She showed us on a star chart. LX618 was located in the Oort Cloud of an otherwise uninhabited star system about four light-years distant from Wolf 424.

It was an important operation, extracting water from the plethora of icy comets whirling through the Oort Cloud and selling it throughout known space, even to places like Spindrift and Crossroads. Water was as crucial as fuel to spacecraft and orbitals, and it was incredibly expensive to haul out of planetary and stellar gravity wells. In fact, it was actually cheaper for a place like Spindrift to import water from an operation like LX618 located light-years away, than it was to lift the same quantities off a planetary surface in the same system. Which is why Gideon, an important hub for mining, refining, and smelting in the Wolf 424 system, was importing the stuff from LX618.

Whatever ancient processes had seemingly pulverized Wolf 424’s planets into asteroids, boulders, and gravel had apparently also divested it of most of its water ice—or else it just had very little to begin with. Either way, Gideon needed the water, and LX618 was happy to provide it, at a price. Which meant there were regular flights carrying water from LX618 to Gideon, one of which Retta’s people had tagged as worthy of our interest. She was the Sunder, a small ship for a freighter, at only class 10.

Based on her registry data, she’d originally been built as a fast utility freighter but had been converted to a dedicated water hauler about ten years ago. “Definitely a pint-sized water carrier. Most of them are big-assed things, like our Fren-Okun friends’ Big and Long,” Perry said. Icky snickered. “Big and long.”

“Please, Icky. We’re professionals. We don’t sully ourselves with—”

“Dick jokes,” Perry interjected. “It’s unseemly.”

Icky shot us a dubious look. “Perry made a joke about glistening pedipalps yesterday, and he did it while I was eating noodles.”

“No one likes a tattletale, Icky,” Perry informed us, then ruffled his wings into place with a formidable snick. “You were saying, boss?

About the size?

Of the vessel in question?”

I rolled my eyes, then pointed to the schematic of the Sunder. “She is pretty small. She sure as hell couldn’t carry very much water.”

Perry’s eyes flashed. “No, and since the stuff is priced based on volume, she doesn’t make a lot of sense as a water hauler. Moreover, she’s fast and agile in a way that water haulers don’t really need to be.”

“Which means she’s hauling more than just water,” Torina said. “No doubt,” Perry agreed. “Right. So, how to proceed. Suggestions?” I said. “Okay, I wanna say something. And I don’t want anyone to laugh,” Icky said. Perry looked at her. “You’re learning interpretive dance?”

“Maybe, but that’s not what I’m getting at. I think we should be subtle. Not just grab ’em and smash the hell out of everything.”

Funboy blinked up at her. “What have you done with Icky, you obvious imposter.”

“He’s not wrong. Icky, why?

Why use a light touch now?” Torina asked. “Because I don’t think we’re going to like whoever this is. Or they’re not going to be who we think they are. I don’t know, I just feel weird about

it. I mean, I’m an engineer. I fix things, which is why I know that breaking things can be a really good strategy. But this whole thing—it feels like a trap. Or a pit. Like it’s meant to drag us farther in somehow.”

“It’s intentional. Like a setup.”

“Exactly.”

I gave Icky an appraising look. I was so used to her smash first, think later methodology that it was a little jarring to hear her urging caution and advocating subtlety. It left me… thoughtful. “Okay. I’m convinced. So we need a more nuanced approach than just go git ’em,” I said. “Ah, well, if you will not resort to violence, perhaps I may?

Because I have what I believe is a simple solution, and an elegant one,” Retta asked, her tone still cheery. “Elegant violence?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “Mais oui.”

I smiled and nodded. “It’s definitely good to be friends with a battle slug.”

“Battle slugs, they are best for matters of war, yes.”

We all laughed. “Okay, Retta, and your proposal is?”

“Simple, mon ami. I will use one of my hideously expensive BlueLight missiles to knock out the drive of this Sunder.”

Rab gave an impressed huh. “Those are two hundred thousand a pop, not to mention unavailable to anyone not really well-connected.”

“But I am very well-connected, yes?

And they are worth every bond. I will fire, melt their engine, and then I shall make them a reasonable proposal to give us information we need. If that fails, then we will unleash the monster.”

Icky puffed up a little, but Retta rolled over to face Funboy instead. “Perhaps you will do your worst after all, eh?”

Funboy peeled his lips back in his hideous approximation of a smile. “I can only hope.”

THE SUNDER WAS TRYING to fly an unremarkable course, meaning she predictably arrived in the Wolf 424 system at a twist point that would give her the lowest-energy trajectory to the Gideon refinery. We’d parked the

Object 6 and Le Magnifique close enough, and with enough velocity to give us a decent chance at an intercept. And, as expected, the Sunder popped into real-space existence only a few minutes later than Retta’s people had told us to expect her. Technically, as a Peacemaker, I was obligated to transmit an order for the Sunder to heave to before firing on her. But we didn’t want to spook her because she might just twist away again. So, instead, we did our best to look innocuous, like we were a pair of ships involved in some shady deal of our own, to give the Sunder a chance to get too far into Wolf 424’s gravity well to twist. Only then did Retta fire her insanely expensive BlueLight missile. “My goose is flying. She will land soon,” Retta reported. Torina frowned. “A goose?

Why a goose?

I’ve seen them on Earth, and they look kind of—I don’t know, awkwardly big and docile.”

But I shook my head. “Meanest bird there is. You don’t want to get anywhere near one, believe me.”

“There’s a reason they're called cobra chickens,” Perry added. I smiled a quick smile but stayed focused on the tactical overlay. The BlueLight missile apparently had a stealth capability that made it extremely difficult to detect or counter, so I saw… nothing, just the things I expected to see. According to Rab, it also had a warhead that could be detonated in the usual way, as a spherical blast flinging high-velocity shrapnel in all directions, or with a more focused, shaped-charge effect. Which was all fantastic, but tempered by the price tag of the damned things—at over two hundred thousand bonds a shot, when you could get them at all, you’d definitely keep them for only high-value targets. So far, nothing. I started to frown. Had the thing been a dud?

Missed?

Malfunctioned somehow—?

But a flash of discharged energy that pulsed on the overlay out of nowhere showed that the missile had apparently found its target. Six immediately switched us to active scanners, which slurped up the details of what had happened to the Sunder. Hopefully, it hadn’t just been blown to bits, because that would just shove us back to square one and with the deaths of a ship’s crew on our hands. But she was still intact. I got my first good look at her, a tapered cylinder with a bulbous flare at her aft end, her hull bare, unpainted and

chrome-bright alloy. Debris spalled off her drive bell, which looked as though a huge cutting torch had ripped through it. “That was almost perfect. Her drive is as dead as dead gets, but she’s still intact,” Rab said. “And her powerplant has scrammed, so her scanners and weapons are offline,” Six said. I nodded. “Yeah, but now comes the part where we don’t just sit and watch things happen on a display. Retta, keep us covered, please. Six, take us in. Everyone else, get yourselves ready for the fun and excitement of a boarding action.”

“I hate those,” Torina muttered. As I unstrapped and started to clamber out of the Object 6’s pilot’s seat, I nodded. “Yeah, so do I.”

I HAD Six broadcast repeated warnings that we were boarding, and to take no hostile action lest we finish what the BlueLight missile had started. We got no reply. There was a chance that the crew of the Sunder simply couldn’t reply because of the damage they’d sustained, but we had to assume that they weren’t going to be cooperative. “I recommend we snuggle our ship right up to theirs. The only weapons they’ll be able to run effectively off power cells alone are their point-defenses, so if we can get inside the safety range for those, we’ll be golden,” Rab said. “If they haven’t deactivated the safeties, that is,” Icky said. “Well, sure, but that would be illegal—” Rab started to reply, then gave a sheepish smile. “Oh, yeah. Never mind.”

“It’s still sound advice. Torina, can you take out their point-defense batteries?” I said. She nodded. “Sure. Just let me finish getting my harness strapped up—”

“I’ll do it!” Gabby said. We all turned and stared at her. “What?

Because I do the cooking?

But I know how to shoot weapons, I’ve done it before, I mean once I was working on a private yacht that

belonged to the Prefect of K’nyer, he was a S’rall who never went home because his family hated him. Seems he got caught with a cousin or three and the S’rall sure do take the whole family line thing seriously. You should have heard the threats, delivered in some weird singsong trade language that reminded me of—”

“Gabby!

You’re saying you can handle ship-board weapons?”

“Yeah, totally!

I—”

I held up a finger. “Okay. Now’s as good a time as any to find out how good a shot you are, so we know going forward. Torina, take Gabby up to the cockpit and do your thing.”

Torina nodded. “Follow me, dear, and crack your knuckles, stretch—”

“What are knuckles?”

“Disregard. Limber up your, um, digits. Follow me.”

The rest of us finished getting ready to board the Sunder. We were kitted out in our usual ways, but we didn’t have a b-suit for Rab, so I loaned him my various extra armor bits and pieces, like the vambraces Linulla had made for me. Still, it left him only with the scant protection of an environmental suit over much of his body. The last thing I wanted was for him to become a casualty on his first major op with us. But, according to his dossier, he had an extensive background in combat, including the up-close-and-personal type, so I didn’t want to just leave him behind, either. An aggressive veteran is too good to leave on the sidelines. Ever. “Okay, Icky, Perry, and I will lead. Rab, you’re with Funboy behind us, and Torina will bring up the rear. Rab, keep yourself under cover as much as you can, avoid getting into any hand-to-hand shit and just focus on looking for opportunities to use that goo gun. We want prisoners, not corpses, so that’s going to be important. Got it?”

He hefted the bulky goo gun. “Got it.” His voice was even. That was good. A faint thump shuddered the deck under my feet. I turned my attention to the nearby display and had Six switch it to an image of the Sunder as we approached her. It flicked over just in time to show a fan of glittering debris radiating away from her. The deck thumped again, a flash lit the Sunder’ s underside, then another spray of wreckage erupted and whirled off downrange. A moment later, Torina and Gabby reappeared. Torina shrugged. “Two shots, two clean hits, no more point-defenses. I’d say Gabby here knows what she’s doing.”

“So she can cook and effectively employ lethal force. What a remarkable person,” Funboy said. “Layered. Hygienic. Hmph. Quite something.”

We exchanged quick, knowing grins, then readied ourselves to board the stricken Sunder. I MADE a last cut with the Moonsword, then Icky yanked back the loose chunk of hull plating and sent it whirling off toward deep space. I immediately pushed into the hole, The Drop raised and ready. The Sunder’s interior was bathed by emergency lighting. We’d already confirmed she had no internal atmosphere or gravity, either. I hoped that their ship being effectively dead would be enough to convince her crew to simply give up, but you never knew. Sometimes, fanatics gotta fanatic. Funboy followed me in, his own club-knife-gun combo ready. As he did, a figure emerged from a compartment just aft of us, and something sparked off a conduit just to the right of my head. Funboy didn’t hesitate in snapping out a pair of shots that slammed into the suited figure and flung it back against the hatch coaming. It rebounded, then bounced back into the compartment, out of view. “Permission to come aboard?” Funboy said, before immediately heading aft to check on the target he’d shot and to clear the way for Icky to enter, followed by Perry. “Funboy, what would you do if they said no?” she asked, swinging nimbly into place beside me. “I would come aboard anyway. However, it doesn’t hurt to be—”

He stopped as another figure appeared further up the corridor heading aft, toward engineering. They raised a pistol and fired just an instant before Funboy did. The slug snapped past Funboy’s head, passed between Icky’s torso and her left arms, flicked a few centimeters past Perry, then smacked into my shoulder. I winced and cursed at the thud of impact. “Really?

Three of you in the way, one of you big enough to be two people all on your own, and I’m the one who gets hit?”

“It wasn’t the bird. That’s all that matters,” Perry said. “Protect that moneymaker, handsome,” Icky cooed. “She gets me,” Perry preened. Funboy struck the figure in one leg, then the opposite arm with a second shot. The figure fired once more, and Funboy put a slug right through his visor. I swore again. “Alive, people. We need prisoners who are alive.”

“Apologies. Unfortunately, though, this is often a zero-sum game, one of us surviving meaning the other does not. I would rather be on the positive side of that equation,” Funboy said. Icky pushed forward, and Rab came through the opening, Torina following him. “Torina, you, Perry, and Funboy go aft and make sure there aren’t any other assholes back there looking to shoot us. Icky, Rab, we’re heading forward. And again, Funboy has a point, sure, but we really need at least one of these assholes alive.”

We started forward. For the next few minutes, we drifted past chunky water tanks that filled most of the Sunder’ s amidships space. I glanced at them as we went by. “Wonder what’s inside those?

Besides water I—”

Two figures popped out from behind a water tank ahead, both firing at once. Icky took a hit right in the middle of her faceplate, and a spider crack raced away from the impact point even as her thick neck absorbed the impact. Bellowing with rage, she deftly kicked off the bulkhead and sailed like a swung battering ram straight at the closest figure, hammer raised. Instead of ducking out of the way, he foolishly tried to snap another shot at her, missed, and Icky’s hammer slammed into his head, drove it back against the water tank behind him—then kept going, causing his head to burst in a shower of gore and leaving a dent in the wall of the tank. I sighed. “Icky!”

“Sorry, boss. I’m a swinger, can’t help it.”

“We’ll address that comment later,” I said, smoothly lifting The Drop for a double-tap of the dead enemy’s companion, who was raising a wicked pulse rifle to fire. Pressed into cover, he dove back, his own shot going wild

—

—then he reappeared, intent on firing again. Something whipped past me in a smear of color. Rab. He somersaulted over Icky’s head, pulled a knife off the corpse of the figure whose head she’d just splattered, kept going, and drove the blade into the second figure in a smooth, unbroken motion. Fluid shot wildly from the enemy body, spraying upward in chaotic loops as a third figure appeared from behind the next tank. I leapt forward, The Drop raised, the Moonsword ready in my off hand. This new figure brandished a boarding shotgun, which he lifted and fired—

Straight into his wounded companion. The big slug evacuated several kilos of guts, a few bones, some cartilage, and for good measure, half of a wrist comm unit that sparked with incandescent madness as it flew past my head. Then, he threw the shotgun aside and lifted his hands in surrender. “I accept,” I grated, placing The Drop against his faceplate—

It was a Nesit, glaring back at me with open hatred. “Tell the rest of your crew to stand down or you go out that lock without a suit, shithead,” I ordered. But the Nesit just looked smug. “I doubt it. You need me, especially since I’ve got no crew to call off—they’re all dead.”

I glanced at the figure he’d just shot. “Including the one you killed yourself.”

“Just making sure I was indispensable. It wasn’t anything personal.”

I stared back at him over The Drop’s sight. He’d killed the only member of his crew he knew was still alive—just to make himself essential to me. I’d met some cold sons of bitches, but this took it to a new and vile height. Torina and Funboy appeared, confirming that the ship was secure aft of us. I sent them and Perry forward to clear the rest of it, while Icky, Rab, and I secured our prisoner. I gave Rab a nod. “Quite the bit of acrobatics, the way you leapt over Icky and skewered that guy.”

“I’ve got a few no-g scraps under my belt. Although I made sure it was a non-fatal wound,” Rab said, glaring at the Nesit, who just returned an offhanded shrug. I turned back to the Nesit. “You know, you can be as smug as you want about all this, but I’m not in the mood to play good cop here. In fact, I might be in the mood to just do whatever it takes to crack your memory open like a ripe peach.”

“What the hell’s a peach?”

“Something soft. Something that can’t fight back. And something we can preserve for a long, long time.”

The Nesit spread his hands. “No need for the dramatics, Peacemaker. I’m quite happy to give you what you want. Well, except for one thing, that is.”

“Oh?

And what’s that?”

“Your ship.”

I couldn’t resist widening my eyes at him. He smiled. “Yeah, I know who you are, Clive Van Able Tudor the Third. We all do. In fact, we’ve been planning to reach out to you but, well, looks like you beat us to it.”

“Who’s we?”

“Well, my name is Tynser. As for the rest of us, let’s just say we’re a concerned group of citizens of the Seven Stars League. And if you want your ship back, you have to do something for us, first.”

“A concerned group of citizens of the League. I’ll bet. But see, here’s the mistake you’re making. You seem to think this is a partnership of some sort. It’s not. It’s a hostile takeover.”

“Oh, I’m well aware of that.”

There was something about this guy’s behavior, a hint of righteousness to his smugness that suggested there was more to his motivations than just greed or profit. There was a cause. “What is it you want from us?” I asked. “Well, that gun out of my face would be a nice start. Seriously, I am not going to resist. In fact, that’s the last thing I want to do. I want to get you on our side, after all.”

“There you go with that we and our bullshit again. So just to get it out of the way, there isn’t the ghost of a chance I’m going to side with you Rogue assholes. I want you expunged from the League before you can do any lasting harm, so if I have to track my ship down another way, I will—

certainly before I help you.”

But Tynser shook his head. “You’ve got me on the wrong side, Peacemaker. I’m all for cutting out the Rogues, like the cancer they are.”

I hesitated, frowning. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“What I’m talking about is a coup. We want to take over the League and cleanse it of those damned Rogues, as you call them. And we want your help doing it.”

“I MUST ADMIT, I did not expect this,” Torina said. I nodded. “Neither did I. But he’s pretty damned convincing, right down to the self-righteous conviction.” I touched my comm. “Perry, any luck getting into their data?”

“Well, considering I can’t just interface with them—thank you very much, Calamity countermeasures—I’m literally left with hunting and pecking, which means it’s going to take time, Van.”

“Keep me posted.”

I turned back to Tynser. If what he was claiming were true, then he was a member of an organized and markedly ruthless resistance movement within the League. They believed, it seemed, that the current Provisional Government had been corrupted into nothing but a front for the group we’d labeled the Rogues, people loyal to the old Satrap. They wanted to overthrow it all and install yet another new government. This time, it would be headed by a person with the ideal qualification for the job. They didn’t want it. “Who the hell is this person you want to install as the new grand poohbah, or whatever it is you want to call them?

Fersun Cad—er, Caud—”

“Cauldexx. Fersun Cauldexx,” Tynser replied. “Right now, she’s the leader of a small commune on Perspectus, one of the founding planets of the League. She’s spent the last forty years or so as a shipwright and marine scientist.”

“Why her?” Torina asked. “She doesn’t seem qualified at all.”

“On the contrary. She’s done a fantastic job organizing the people of Vistal—that’s her commune—and keeping them organized and productive, even growing the place while the rest of the planet languishes in a recession

—one caused by those Rogue bastards who are manipulating the markets to suck as much value out of them as they can to fund their bullshit.”

“Okay, fine, but it’s a long way from running a single commune to running a star-spanning sovereign state,” I said. Tynser shrugged. “Nobody’s born into that sort of role, are they?”

“But you say she doesn’t want the job.”

“And that’s why we want her to have it. The people who want to be leaders and power brokers are exactly the ones you don’t want doing the job because they inevitably want it for their own benefit.”

“Ah. A cynic,” Torina said, but I hesitated, regarding Tynser from a new angle. He was a criminal—a smuggler, a gun-runner, and a cold-blooded murderer. But he had a point. I’d often thought that the people who wanted power were the last ones who should actually have it. Sure, you occasionally got someone who had worthwhile motivations and really wanted to change things for the better, but in my experience, they were the rare exception. “I prefer to think of it as being realistic,” Tynser said, then turned a steady gaze on me from behind his visor. “So, do we have a deal, Peacemaker?

You help us overthrow the League government so we can install a new regime under Fersun, and we get your ship back for you?”

I narrowed my eyes back at him. “My answer is a definite maybe.”

He frowned. “That’s not—”

“It’s the best you’re going to get for now. In the meantime, you’re coming with us. There are some people I want you to meet. You can make your case to them and, if they buy in, then so do I.”

“What people?”

“The ones you’re going to want on your side—if what you’re telling us isn’t just fabricated bullshit to save your own hide, that is.”

Funboy stepped forward. “And if it is, then you and I are going to have a quiet word.”

Tynser’s smile fell, then vanished completely when Icky leaned into his face, her own features hard as iron. “Trust me, friend. You don’t want that. People he talks to never get over it.”

24

SOP WOULD HAVE HAD us bring Tynser back to Anvil Dark to be booked and arraigned, whereupon he’d be shuffled off into the slow chew of the justice system’s voracious maw. But there was nothing standard about this. So, instead, we interrogated him at some length to try and work out if he was being honest about the coup. We ended up convinced he was. “At the very least, he genuinely believes it—that there’s a clandestine organization in the League, and that it intends to install this Fersun Cauldexx as First Chancellor of a new government,” Torina said once we’d put the Nesit into the Object 6’s holding cell and gathered to discuss the matter. Retta joined in by comm from her ship. “Retta, have your little birds caught any wind of this at all?” I asked her. “Not specifically about this Cauldexx, no, but this does not mean it is not true, yes?

The League, it is very unstable right now, so there are many hints and rumors of this and that.”

“This could just be a distraction. For that matter, this could just be a side plot by the Rogues to keep us chasing our own tails,” Funboy offered. I nodded. “Yeah, it could be. But it could also be entirely legit, in which case there’s an organized resistance simmering away inside the League. And even if we decide that they aren’t the right choice to be forming the government, we still need to be aware of them and prepared to—I don’t know, do something about them, anyway, right?”

I finally contacted Gerhardt, and after a brief discussion, we collectively decided to bring Tynser back to the Righteous Fury so he could speak his peace to the rest of the 32—or the part of it that was present, anyway. “Despite being a murderous sonofabitch, he’s charismatic as hell, I’ll give him that,” I said to Gerhardt before we signed off. “Which makes him even more dangerous.”

“It does. It also makes me leery of having just stumbled on him like this. The only reason we found him was because Icky happened to recognize burn patterns on those poor bastards in the cargo pod. If she hadn’t, we’d probably still be on Helso, trying to unwind that particular little atrocity.”

Gerhardt’s image flickered and fuzzed, the result of still being routed through our off-the-shelf laptop intended as a Calamity measure. “It wouldn’t be the first break in a case to come about by happenstance—or arrogance.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Guild has located three more cargo pods containing the remains of some of Dohlennz’s unfortunate victims. Each one was discovered near an important and affluent commercial hub, similar to Helso. Each also had a similar missive etched into the pod, making specific reference to you.”

Perry, perched nearby, spoke up. “This isn’t just murder. This is a message.”

“So it would seem. A message aimed specifically at you, Tudor. And those same pulse-weapon burn marks are reported in each case. However, that’s where the matter of arrogance comes into play. We were probably never meant to make that connection—because, again, we only did so since Icrul happened to notice them.”

I sighed. “Either way, though, it just suggests that Tynser is in league with Dohlennz, which means we shouldn’t trust him.”

“Or maybe we were meant to make the connection,” Perry said. I looked at him. “Go on.”

“Let’s assume that Dohlennz is in League with the Rogues because, ah, there’s ample evidence that he is, and it makes sense that he would be. Let’s also assume he’s aware of this underground movement to take over the League and put this Cauldexx character in charge. That stands to threaten everything he and the Rogues are trying to do.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“The same thing they do every night, try to take over the world!” Perry crowed. Gerhardt frowned and opened his mouth, but I gave the bird a look. “Thanks, Brain. Please keep things serious. For now.”

“I’ll do my best, but—”

“I know. It was hanging there. But Gerhardt needs us to flesh this out.”

“Agreed,” Perry went on smoothly. He knew when to deliver information in a hurry. “They clearly have plans to make the League, under the leadership of the Rogues, into the preeminent power in known space. Tynser and his co-conspirators threaten to interfere. Now, he and the Rogues could try and root that threat out themselves—”

“Or they could try to manipulate us into doing it for them by making us think that Tynser’s crowd is in cahoots with him and the Rogues. At the very least, it sows the seeds of distrust between us and them,” I said, nodding along now. The picture grew clearer as we spoke. It… fit. Gerhardt picked up the thread. “And either way, it pulls our attention away from the real threat, which is Dohlennz and the Rogues.”

“Yeah. If he can’t get us to do his dirty work for him by wiping out Tynser’s movement, he can at least try to ensure we don’t ally with them. It’s actually… damned clever.”

“Downright Machiavellian,” Perry said. “But what if we hadn’t made the connection with the pulse-weapon burns?

We’d have four cargo pods of corpses, each with a cryptic bit of writing about you, Tudor, and—what?

If Dohlennz really is that clever, he must have had another purpose layered onto this one. Money?”

“I don’t know. Why would a galactic criminal want small change?

There’s got to be more to it than that. The question is, what?”

“I think we’re soon going to find out,” Perry said. “Whether we want to or not.”

WE LEFT a salvage beacon on the Sunder, then followed Retta back to the Righteous Fury. I couldn’t help thinking the clock was only ticking faster now. Worse, we were still just reacting to events and potential threats, and

hadn’t yet managed to get ahead of them. I was pinning a lot of hope on my mother, but she remained out of comms. When we arrived back at the Fury, we brought Tynser to meet with Gerhardt and the others. Gabriella Santorelli was there and actually smiled when she saw me. “Tudor, you’ve come a long way. Thanks to you, though, I owe Gus ninety-one bonds,” she said, shaking my hand to welcome me to the 32.

I gave her a puzzled state. “Ninety-one bonds?

Why ninety-one and—

well, just why?”

“Gus spotted something in you that day you showed up all pink-cheeked and innocent at Crossroads. He definitely saw more than I did, anyway. So we wagered about where you’d end up, and he thought you’d eventually go right to the top. I didn’t—certainly not this fast. And as for the ninety-one bonds, it’s one for every one of his fingers, or scales, or tentacles or whatever.”

She shrugged. “He counts differently than I do. But, whatever. I lost the bet. Only I think we won.”

My face flushed and heated up a little. “Uh—oh. Well, thanks for that, Gabriella.”

Torina took my hand. “Some of us won more than others,” she said, grinning. Icky rolled her eyes. “Mom?

Dad?

Could you two not be gross right now?

This is serious—you know, planning the fall of a dying empire and all that.”

“Sometimes genuine, heartfelt emotions are perfectly acceptable,”

Gerhardt said, surprising me. But Funboy shook his head. “No, they’re not.”

Gabby, who’d been restraining herself with effort, suddenly spoke up. “Is he always this much of a downer?” she asked, looking at Funboy. “No, sometimes he actually smiles,” I said as we moved to settle in around the conference table in the Fury’ s briefing room. As if to prove it, Funboy offered his trademark leering rictus of a smile. Gabby recoiled. “Oh… my. I’d like to reconsider joining your crew, I think!”

Funboy surprised me even more than Gerhardt had. He looped a fuzzy arm around Gabby. “It is too late for that. Microorganisms aside, I enjoy your presence.”

“That’s somehow both touching and horrifying,” Gabriella muttered. Funboy shrugged at her. “Such is the duality of existence. Everything is, in its own way, horrifying. Now then, how can we assist with the League’s next iteration?”

Gerhardt answered by asking one of the Fury’ s security personnel to bring in Tynser. For the next hour or so, Gerhardt and the others questioned him and ended up with essentially the same story we had—that there was an underground movement that considered the League’s Provisional Government corrupt, and that didn’t want the Rogues to have an opportunity to overtly take over. Instead, they wanted to overthrow the existing power structure and replace it with their own, under the guidance of the reluctant Fersun Cauldexx. “And we’ve got the means,” Tynser said. “We have the people in the appropriate places, ready to take the reins of power. A lot of rebellions are just about overthrowing something but don’t have anything worthwhile to replace it. We’re not going to make that mistake.”

“So why didn’t you come to us for support?

Or make any overtures to anyone?

Why did we have to find out about you by Tudor here stumbling over you while investigating an apparently unrelated matter?” Gerhardt asked, his gaze suffused with simmering anger. “Why didn’t we come to the Peacemaker Guild?

Would you be in a hurry to, knowing that you’ve had a bunch of corrupt Masters, one of whom is still in the wind?” Tynser countered, then smiled as a ripple of discomfort passed around the table. “Oh, yes—we know about that. We have our sources. But those same sources pointed us at Peacemaker Tudor as someone we could contact and trust. We were already heading in that direction, but you beat us to it.”

I sat back, rubbing my chin. If Dohlennz had found out that Cauldexx’s faction was soon going to make contact with me, then it would explain why he and his minions went to such unsubtle lengths to try and discredit them before they could. There was still another layer to Dohlennz’s machinations around the bodies in the cargo pods that we hadn’t yet worked out, but this much, at least, did fit. Gerhardt had Tynser marched back out and put into a holding cell. As soon as he was gone, Gerhardt activated a display, which flicked to life with Schegith’s image. “So the question is, what now?

How do we proceed regarding the League, since it seems to be the fulcrum around which everything is pivoting,” Gerhardt said. “This one has thoughts about that. They involve taking the war to the League rather than letting it set the terms of the conflict. Van Tudor has already begun that, but this one believes it is important to strike now, to capitalize on it.”

“I and my little birds, we are eager to assist with this most unsavory matter,” Retta chimed in. But Gerhardt turned to me with a hard look. “What does she mean, you’ve already begun that?”

“I asked my mother to gather the Feral parts of the GKU and launch a preemptive strike on the Rogues—just enough to do some damage and let them know we’re onto them.”

“And what made you think you could do that, Tudor?

We’re the 32, not the 1.”

“This one believes that Van Tudor’s action was the correct one,”

Schegith said. “That’s not the point,” Gerhardt snapped. “We do not take unilateral action. We consider the courses open to us as a group, and assemble as many votes as possible toward confirming people who offer the best chance for success.”

I started to wither a little in the face of Gerhardt’s ire—right up until I didn’t. A sudden surge of anger flashed through me. The 32 had done what, exactly?

Allowed Calamity to be released, and then effectively nothing since. The Schegith were under threat, and so was Helso. Calamity was continuing to spread. Dohlennz had perpetrated yet more mass murder, then casually planted the horrific results of it around known space for us to find. The Rogues still had the initiative. To hell with it. This wasn’t about rank or hierarchy or proper procedures anymore. So I leaned forward and stared straight into Gerhardt’s eyes. “Okay, Master Gerhardt. What’s our next move?”

“That is what we have to consider.”

“Okay, let me ask the question this way. Why isn’t our next move finding the Rogues and turning them into clouds of vapor?”

“Tudor, there are any number of factors to consider here. We need to ensure we’ve got contingencies that—”

I stood. “Excuse me, but could Torina, Perry, and I have a moment alone with Master Gerhardt,” I said, glowering around the table. The others exchanged looks, then nodded, stood, and quietly filed out. The Fury’ s security personnel closed the door behind them with a small but final click. “Excuse us for a moment, Schegith,” I said and touched a control on the table, dismissing her image. “What do you intend here, Tudor?

A little coup of your own?” Gerhardt asked. “If necessary, yes.”

Gerhardt’s eyes actually widened. He’d probably prepared himself for a heated rant, but I was nothing but cold fury. “What the hell is going on?” I asked him. “What do you mean?”

“This… dithering. We’re up against the wall here. Calamity’s gnawing away at known space like a worm in an apple, the Rogues are going to capitalize on it—sooner, rather than later, if my mother doesn’t manage to give them a bloody nose—”

“Yes, about that,” Gerhardt cut in. “Who the hell do you think you are, launching your mother and her untamed followers against a target without

—”

“It’s called action, Gerhardt!”

He winced back at my shout. So did Torina. I surprised myself a little with it, too. But I wasn’t going to back down, not now. I’d come too far. “The Rogues are going to attack the Schegith because they’re immune to Calamity, and that doesn’t fit into their plans of waiting until the damned thing is everywhere, then swooping in to take over. Or, they’re going to attack Helso, and then they’re going to attack the Schegith, unless we stop them. But that means we need to act, and do it now. We don’t have any more time for deliberations and considerations and drafting up detailed contingencies.”

“Tudor, if we run off half-cocked and we’re wrong—”

“Then we’re wrong, and we deal with it.”

“If we can deal with it. If we haven’t been dealt a mortal blow in the process—”

“I had an instructor back in my army days who said that a half-assed plan executed when it’s needed is better by far than an excellent one executed too late.”

Gerhardt scowled. I narrowed my eyes on him. “What’s really going on here?

Why are you holding back?

Wait—were you involved in letting Gauss escape?”

I felt Torina tense. If Gerhardt was about to reveal that he was one of the 32 responsible for letting Calamity spread… that he was one of the corrupted—

But he sighed. “No. I tried to issue orders that Gauss was to be stopped, whatever the cost, and not allowed to leave League space. But orders had already been put into place explicitly disallowing that. The Captain of this ship, in fact, had received such orders, sealed ones, stating that Gauss was to be allowed to leave.”

“From who?”

“From the Masters of the Guild—me included.”

I gaped. “What?”

“Exactly. Someone was able to inject fully authenticated orders into the command chain and put them under a Writ of Seal. We’ve investigated how, and can find nothing. They just suddenly seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. By the time we got that unwound, it was too late. Gauss was gone.”

He crossed his arms. “We were badly compromised, Tudor. And, as far as I know, we still are. We have no way of knowing if messages or orders we send are going to be received, or altered, or if completely fabricated ones are going to be sent instead.”

“That’s not good,” Perry said. “No, it is not. It means that I have no idea who we can trust. Any information we send or receive is immediately suspect. We have to authenticate everything, and it's paralyzing us.”

I’d been leaning on the table as though I was about to lunge at Gerhardt across it. I straightened. “It’s all the more reason to attack, now, before the situation gets more out of hand.”

“We don’t have enough combat power to ensure a victory over the Rogue fleet—not when we can’t rely on our own chain of command.”

I schooled my features into something more reasonable. Gerhardt wasn’t corrupt. He was, to use his own word, paralyzed. Analysis paralysis,

it was often called. He was so deeply submerged in thinking about how to proceed, then second guessing himself, then second-guessing his second guesses, all while wondering if the information he was using was even accurate—

I got it. I did. It was probably just the way our enemies—Dohlennz, the Rogues, Calamity itself, whoever—intended it to be. They’d successfully attacked the weakest part of any organization, military or otherwise—its ability to make decisions. I actually felt bad for Gerhardt. But I couldn’t let how I felt get in the way of what needed to be done. I leaned forward again. “Look. If you can’t find it in yourself to muster the courage and conviction to take action, then step aside and I’ll do it.”

Again, Gerhardt and Torina stiffened. Even Perry’s eyes flashed. I quickly raised a hand. “Don’t get the idea that I want power or command. Frankly, I’d be happy to head back to my farm in Iowa, sit on my back porch, and watch the corn grow. In fact, power and control is the last thing I want.”

“You and Cauldexx,” Torina said. I nodded. “Oh, trust me, I know where she’s coming from. And I think I understand my grandfather a little better now,” I said, turning to Gerhardt. “You wanted to make him a Master, but he refused. He didn’t want power, either. Power is a burden, I get it. But, much as I love the old guy, he screwed up. He was selfish. He gave in to what he wanted, didn’t become a Master, and didn’t join the 32.

And that meant he didn’t get to influence events—not for the better, or the worse, or in any way at all.”

It was my turn to sigh and stare at things only I could see. “I’m… tired. Exhausted, actually. Every time another layer gets peeled away and I gain rank and position in the Guild, it’s just more. More to know, more to do, more danger to face. I’m damned tired of it all. I honestly don’t want to do this.”

I turned to Gerhardt. “But I will do this. Whether he knew it or not, it was Gramps’s last gift to me. Perry and I recently talked about an old Earth movie, one where the protagonist is given a chance to see what the world would have been like without him.”

“I knew my passion for old movies would save the universe someday,”

Perry said. I shot him a glance and a smile, then turned back to Gerhardt. “Gramps has given me that same chance, at least in a way. He stepped away from everything, never tried to make things better. So here we are. And here I am. Vacillating and doing nothing isn’t an option anymore. So, to quote another of my Army instructors, you need to either lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.”

I was ready for Gerhardt to lash back at me. But he just stared at me for a moment, then nodded. “We brought you into the 32, Tudor, because we hoped that you’d bring a fresh perspective and new energy. It seems we were right.” He narrowed his eyes. “How good a thing that is remains to be seen. But you’re right. We’ve dithered long enough. So, what do you propose to do?”

“Well, you say we don’t have enough combat power to take on the Rogues. I disagree. We’ve got lots of combat power, because we’ve got friends. We don’t have to worry about fake orders compromising their loyalty. Isn’t that right, Schegith?” I said, reactivating the display. “Having heard everything Van Tudor has said, presumably because the audio channel was intentionally left open, this one agrees. In fact, Van Tudor is more than merely a friend. He is family. This one is happy to follow his lead.”

“We’ve got others who’ll do the same. Helso has a fleet. So does Groshenko. And the S’rall, whose princess considers Van one of her people. The hunters of Ajax. The Wu’tzur,” Torina said. “And my mother. She and her Ferals have a savage gauntlet of combat power.”

“We’ve never considered her trustworthy, Tudor. She’s too unpredictable,” Gerhardt said. “Yeah, but you aren’t her son. I am,” I replied. Gerhardt nodded. “Alright. But if the Rogues have weaponized Calamity while they’re immune—”

“Then we’ll deal with it. We already know the Schegith aren’t affected. Hell, let’s get working on protecting ourselves against that now, if we haven’t already. We’ve got the data from the Object 6 to work with. And anyway, the Rogues aren’t immune to good old-fashioned lasers, mass drivers, and particle cannons.”

“This leaves only two questions, then. Where will this one’s ships rally, and when?” Schegith said. I gave Schegith a smile and bowed to the screen, then turned back to Gerhardt. “We’ll need a hard count of everything you’ve currently got available to the 32, plus all the latest intelligence on the League.”

“Alright, Tudor, let’s assume we’re able to assemble enough force to give us a real shot at victory. How do we bring the Rogues to battle?

How do we take the initiative from them?”

I smiled. “I have an idea about how to do that and get the Fafnir back, both at once.”

“Are you saying that showing mercy to that Nesit, Tynser, paid off?”

“It will. Or else.”

25

“YOU WANT our help with your coup and installing Cauldexx?

Fine. Where’s my ship?”

I stood looming over Tynser in one of the Fury’ s holding cells. I had my crew with me, lurking outside the cell door. Tynser stared back up at me. “What guarantee do we have—?”

I reached down, snatched up a handful of his tunic and yanked him to his feet. “The only guarantee I’m going to give you is that if you don’t give me my ship back now, then you will not get our support. In fact, we’ll just install a government of our own, headed up by—I don’t know, someone, I don’t really care who. A stuffed suit with good hair, but the critical details here is it won’t be someone of your choosing. That ship sailed, friend.”

“That’ll just lead to more instability, more unrest—”

“And probably conflict, strife, and death, right.”

“You can’t—”

“I can, and I will. Now, we’ve held back against you and your people so far, but I’m not making that promise anymore. Frankly, I’d rather see the League mired in a protracted, bloody civil war because at least that will keep it out of our hair while we deal with Calamity. Your body count is irrelevant to me. Is it sad?

Oh, indeed. Tragic, even. That’s the kind of butcher’s bill your people will see.” I shook my head slowly. “To think you’d actually do that—you’d condone suffering and death over… a ship?

A thing?”

I still had a good head of seething, furious steam built up following my confrontation with Gerhardt, so I let it vent. Tynser made his next mistake. He sniffed—and he tried to delay. “I could make the argument that ships have souls, otherwise we wouldn’t care about them so much.”

I twisted his tunic and slammed him against the cell wall. “But the Fafnir was given to me by the finest man I’ve ever known. One of the very best people to live. It’s more than metal. It’s my legacy. It’s his wishes made real. It’s a chance to accomplish things he didn’t. And for that reason, I won’t be gentle getting it back. Do you understand me?”

“I—”

“Do you?

”

Tynser tried to maintain a defiant stare. But the fact was, he needed us. We were his and his co-conspirators’ best chance to get Fersus Cauldexx installed as the leader of the League. He was going to have to accede to this, and he knew it. But he still had to throw up one final demand, probably to maintain a glimmer of control. “I want immunity to all other charges,” he said. “You shot a guy, like, right in front of us,” Icky barked. Tynser shrugged. “And he probably killed nines of people during his time as a pirate and smuggler. The universe is better off without him.”

“Where’s my ship?”

“Do I get immunity?”

I shrugged. “Sure. What the hell.”

“I want it in writing—”

I shoved him against the bulkhead and jammed my forearm over his throat. “One of you guys have a knife?

He wants our deal in writing. I’m going to carve it into his flesh so he never loses it. And then I’m going to a comm, and I’m going to tell the current Provisional Government of the League all about the conspiracy to overthrow them—and that I got all the information about it from Tynser here, in exchange for a promise of immunity. I wonder how long it’ll take for that to get back to your friends?

Think they’ll be impressed?”

“Your ship—” Tynser gasped, and I released the pressure a little. “Yes?”

“It’s at… Last Cry.”

“Where the hell is that?

And what the hell is that?”

“It’s… a salvage op. A boneyard. They—”

I shoved my face into his. “You mean they’re going to scrap my ship?”

“Wasn’t… my idea… we thought—”

“Where is it, you prick?” I bawled into his face. Icky had come forward behind me, cracking her many knuckles. “Hand him over to me, boss. I am begging you.”

Tynser looked at her, glaring over my shoulder, then at me. I could see it in his eyes—the moment he realized he was out of options. If I made his co-conspirators think he’d flipped on them in exchange for his own freedom, then not only was their cause lost, but so were his days of not constantly looking over his shoulder. Tynser finally named an unremarkable star system in unclaimed space about midway between Unity’s territory and the Deeps. I let him go and he reeled back, gasping. “Let’s go,” I said to Icky. “What about… immunity?

I want… to be released!”

I turned back. “After I confirm that you’ve told the truth. And after I get my ship back. Because, Tynser, you’re just not a very trustworthy guy. So I don’t want you getting any warnings out, especially since I would not put it past you to be playing both sides of this, or trying to, anyway.”

Gabby poked her head in. “I’ve heard that the Fafnir’s galley is a lot bigger and better than the one on the Object 6.”

“It’s got a better spice rack, too,” Perry put in. For the first time, Gabby’s face lost its almost goofy good cheer. “Okay, now I feel like one of the crew,” she said, her tone hard and all the more unsettling for it. It didn’t fit. And yet, it did. “Why?” I asked her. “Because now I’m madder than hell, thinking about the meals I could be preparing.”

Funboy shook his head at Tynser. “See what you’ve done?

You made our ray of light angry. In fact, we’re all angry.”

“I hope that none of the people in that boneyard are your friends, Tynser,” I said, grabbing the cell door. “Because now they’re going to get to see what the likes of Gabby and Funboy being angry means in person.”

Tynser opened his mouth, but I slammed the cell door in his face. THE SYSTEM CONTAINING Last Cry was a dim red dwarf with almost nothing going for it, but then again, most systems were like that. It had no planets, but a few orbiting rocks, the largest of them about the size of Luna. The star radiated too little energy to even have a meaningful Goldilocks Zone, so the rocks were just lifeless orbs. And none of them contained any minerals or other commodities that couldn’t be obtained far more cheaply elsewhere. It was nothing but the husk of an ancient star, uninteresting and unwanted, surrounded by the bland detritus of a system that meant nothing to anyone in known space. Of course, that made it the perfect place to establish a chop shop for stolen spacecraft. We’d encountered a similar but much more elaborate operation when we’d retrieved the Hawksbill, my mother’s stolen workboat, from the clutches of a criminal named Druxalt. His operation—located in the Theta Ursae Majoris system—was more about piracy, though. It sat astride one of the few reliably navigable routes between known space and the Deeps, used mainly by smugglers and other unsavory operators. It dealt as much in stolen cargoes as it did in ships. Last Cry was just a chop shop located in a dead-end in space. There was nowhere to go beyond it, aside from the near empty expanse of The Deeps themselves. With nowhere to reliably navigate to, Last Cry was literally a route to nowhere. That actually worked in our favor. Druxalt’s operation had been organized and well-defended, making it a hard target to take out. It simply wasn’t worth the effort and risk, particularly when Druxalt was careful to only prey on those working outside the law anyway. Last Cry relied on secrecy for its protection since it was here that ships of all sorts went to die. “I might end up spacing that asshole Tynser yet,” I muttered as we twisted into the lonely system. “I suspect we were never intended to get the Fafnir back. These rebels who want to install Cauldexx as head of the League were probably hoping that they’d just prove too valuable to hold accountable.”

“And in the meantime, they collect the hefty bounties that have piled up over time on the Fafnir,” Perry agreed. I gave a snort of disgust. “Playing both sides, the bastards.”

I studied the overlay. Last Cry consisted of an expansive gantry vaguely reminiscent of the International Space Station orbiting Earth—a series of modules connected by an open framework of girders and supports. Ships in various stages of disassembly were docked with it, while others, some more or less intact and others in pieces, hung in space around it, forming an orbital junkyard. “There she is,” I said to no one. And everyone. She was docked with the gantry, apparently still intact. At this distance, though, it was hard to tell more than that. For all we knew, she may have been gutted by now. But she was here. My ship. Our ship, and home. “We’ve just been lit up by active scanners,” Six said. “Good. Return the favor. And let’s call in the cavalry, too.”

Our scanners went active as I lit the drive and charged straight at the boneyard. The star had lost so much mass over its existence that its gravitation was quite weak, meaning we’d been able to twist in just outside of missile range. We were less than two minutes from being able to engage. More icons popped onto the Object 6’s tactical overlay. The largest was the Stormshadow, Valint’s big cruiser. Also incoming were B and Dugrop’che. As soon as they twisted in, they lit their drives and joined us in a headlong rush at Last Cry. “Lotta steel coming at those boys,” Perry mumbled. “And anger, too,” I answered. “Keep your head, boss.”

I shot him a look of thanks. “I will.” It was good advice, coming from a good officer. “Comm from Valint,” Six said. “Now?

Okay. Put her on.”

“I’ll be direct. Your mother found the Rogue fleet and raised hell with them long enough to vaporize a light cruiser, do serious damage to another, and rake at least two heavy cruisers—all in a series of four combat passes.”

“That’s good, yes?

I’m sensing another layer to this issue?”

“She took some damage, Van,” my grandmother said, slowly and with meaning. “Jocelyn was never one to—she doesn’t leave the field, so to speak. If anything, damage to her ship assures the enemy that their days are numbered, likely at one.”

“But she didn’t go for the throat?” I asked. “She didn’t. She attacked, did damage, and then withdrew. Which means you’ve managed to do something none of the rest of us have, Van—

get your mother to behave herself,” Valint said. Her lips curled in a reluctant smile at that. “I don’t know if I can duplicate that feat, so we probably shouldn’t get too comfortable with it,” I countered. Still, it was a success. My mother disrupted the Rogue fleet while gathering intel about its strength, and that’s where we had to pump the brakes—I could tell by Valint’s expression. “You guess correctly. They’re… robust, Van. Heavy weapons and armor, and damned good fire control. It’s going to take every hull we have to match them, and even then, I don’t like the numbers.”

“I like enemy fleets that number zero.”

“So do I. Which means, when we meet this fleet, and the firing is through—”

“Only one more ship makes it out. The Fafnir.”

A wintry smile danced on her lips, and it jarred me how much my mother looked like her. “Finally. Math I can agree with.”

THE POINT-DEFENSES HUMMED AWAY, vibrating the deck under my feet with their characteristic buzz. Perry, Icky, Funboy, and I just huddled in the Object 6’s airlock, though, trusting Torina to fight the ship as we closed on Last Cry. The Object 6 lurched as something slammed into her. I looked forward and saw a ragged hole in her hull the size of a dinner plate, its edges still glowing white. A mass driver’d hit, or a big piece of shrapnel, I thought. Through the hole, I could see the stars spinning crazily as Torina maneuvered the ship. “We’re about one minute out, Van,” she said. “One minute,” I replied, grimly watching the airlock indicator. We’d already depressurized the ship, so we only had to open the outer door. Our plan was simple. All four of our ships were going to hammer everything that wasn’t the Fafnir, with the intent of getting us close enough that Icky, Funboy, Perry, and I could board her, while Torina and Rab kept

fighting the Object 6.

Once we’d assessed her state, if we thought we could move her under her own power, we would. Otherwise, we’d just defend her until the rest of the boneyard was destroyed or subdued, then use the Stormshadow to tow her back to Anvil Dark for repairs. Either way, Last Cry would no longer exist. “Thirty—” Torina started, then again, something struck the Object 6, detonating a REAB module with a heavy whump. Her lights flicked briefly off, then came back on. A sinking feeling tickled my gut as Torina spun the Object 6 through a hard maneuver. “Sorry, got distracted by things going boom. Make that twenty seconds,” Torina said. “Twenty seconds,” I replied, then hit the airlock control. The outer door slid open, revealing an orgy of destructive violence. Debris whirled about. Sparks of tracers from point-defenses and mass drivers flickered and flashed. Missile drives erupted, went white, then died. I saw Dugrop’che’s ship sliding past a defensive drone, slamming point-blank fire into it as glowing wreckage spun crazily away. An engine sheared off—a ship, I assumed, then went critical, sending gas and shrapnel into a passing class 7.

The 7 imploded, but not before it launched a trio of missiles that hammered the hulk of a drifting liner, which whirled, spewing tables and chairs into the void. In that instant, workers rose on the gantry, shoulder-mounted guns at the ready—

A searing brace of lasers boiled them in their suits, and all eight people

—now in pieces—drifted, burbling fluids winking obscenely in the light of combat. “Bit spicy out there,” I remarked. Perry laughed at my assessment. “I can hardly wait to expose my tailfeathers to that shitshow.”

The view abruptly rotated vertically as Torina rolled the Object 6.

Dugrop’che slid out of sight, and the Fafnir appeared less than one hundred meters away. “Hold it there, Torina. Here we go!” I said, and launched myself out of the airlock. Perry followed, with Icky and Funboy behind him. We had no tethers, just maneuvering units. The crossing would only take seconds, but it felt like forever, the gantry surrounding the Fafnir slowly crawling closer

—

A piece of debris the size of a refrigerator blazed past me, less than ten meters away. Smaller chunks spun and tumbled about. A point-defense battery on the gantry spewed tracers at something above and behind me, and I got a wild moment of open-channel overflow as someone shrieked in pain, their long howl cut off with a sickening series of gurgles. “Stay on me!” I barked. “Where the hell do you think I’m gonna go?

Out there?” Perry asked, then lifted his right foot to deflect something. “Oh,” he said, catching and hurling the object away in disgust. It had been an arm. Or a leg. Or maybe both. “On me, bird.”

“I am. I have soiled talons now, is all.”

I gritted my teeth, certain the gun mount was going to spin our way and hose us down. But the gantry slid blissfully into reach. I puffed the maneuvering unit, slowing my approach until I could just grab a strut. I let go of the MU and it drifted off to the end of a short tether, out of my way. Then, hand over hand, I pulled myself along the length of the Fafnir, heading for her airlock. I glanced back. Icky nimbly scrambled along the gantry behind me. Funboy followed her, moving with deliberation. Perry drifted along beside them on deft puffs of his own maneuvering thrusters, using his talons to reroute the storm of debris. I looked ahead again, grabbing a strut. It shuddered in my grasp as a section of gantry above me vanished in a shower of debris as something, probably a mass-driver round, slammed into it. Bright shards scattered, edges glowing white, then cherry, and then—gone. “Bit of a close shave, dear,” I said to Torina, who’d fired the fatal round. “Sorry, Van, but that laser battery just forward of the Fafnir is giving us grief, and we’re having trouble targeting it without hitting her,” Torina replied. I saw the Object 6 wheeling around a klick or so away, her point-defenses swatting aside an inbound missile. “I’ll take care of it. Icky and Perry, get aboard—”

Something moved in my peripheral vision. I glanced up in time to see a bot clinging to the remains of the gantry, a cutting torch flaring toward me. “Bogie!”

I flung myself off the gantry, thumped against the Fafnir’s hull, then rebounded. The searing arc of the cutting torch swept through the space I’d

occupied a second earlier. I still had The Drop holstered, but I swept out the Moonsword as I sailed back toward the bot, activating its function to deflect energy weapons. I saw Icky wallop another bot that had attacked her, sending it sailing off into space, one side of it crumpled in from the blow. The bot ahead of me lashed out with its torch again, the flame a searing arc that forced me to darken my shield. My sword landed, parried, and turned the bot’s entire body as it lost purchase—then the machine jabbed at me again with the torch, the flame nearly blue with perfection. The bot was fast. The Moonsword was faster. A single cut, and the torch died, along with half the bot’s mass. “Nice form, boss,” Perry remarked. “Send the rest of that thing into the deep, will you?”

Perry obliged, tearing the bot free with one grab of his powerful beak. He spat theatrically as the bot careened away, leaking power and lubricants. Two remaining bots attacked as a pair, but we were ready. The Moonsword struck as I lanced forward, opening the bot into equal halves. “Disassemble, Johnny!”

Funboy almost casually blasted another bot at point blank range. “I assume that was a cultural reference, Van?”

“Yeah. Decent battle cry, actually,” I replied, finally getting oriented. I started toward the offending laser battery—the one that still pumped out rounds, that is. A nimble bot lurched my way, but Perry swept past me with a casual air, then roasted the area with his dazzle effect. Another of the nimble little bots had appeared to block my way. I gritted my teeth, but Perry swept by me, sailed almost within reach of the thing, then pulsed his dazzle effect. The sudden flood of EM radiation cooked the bot into momentary oblivion, then it regained control and surged forward, arms and cutting weapons at the ready. “If you could read my mind, love!” Perry howled. I opened my mouth, but a bellow cut me off as Icky charged past me, using two hands to pull herself along the gantry, the other two muscled ones to swing her hammer and smash the bot to sparkling confetti. I altered course and charged the laser battery, which was jerking back and forth in search of targets. “Was that Gordon Lightfoot?

Are you using his lyrics as a battle cry?” I asked Perry, passing him as he clung to a strut. “Something I’m trying out.”

“Yeah, but If You Could Read My Mind?

Really?”

“Seemed more upbeat than The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

“Everything is more upbeat than that song, bird.”

I reached the laser turret and began hacking, using a popular technique I like to call swing until you’re tired. After a few swipes from my blade, the mount was open to space—

—then it traversed, coming toward me at breakneck speed. I jammed the blade into the opening I’d made and stirred it around. I hit something critical that flashed brightly and spat dollops of incandescent slag. The blood of machines. But the battery had gone dark, so I turned back toward the Fafnir. I had my first chance to see her as a whole, up-close. Her weapons were gone, stripped away, and to say that pissed me off was like saying Captain Ahab had a passing interest in Moby Dick. Other than that, she seemed intact. At least externally. Icky and Funboy were already opening her up, preparing to board her. Perry had moved in behind them. I took a moment to take in the greater battle raging around us. There was still lots of spinning, whirling debris, but the explosions and exhausts and tracers had all died away. “Torina, a SITREP, please?”

“No more incoming fire. We all took a few hits, and Valint apparently has two casualties aboard the Stormshadow, but that’s about it.”

“Okay. We’re boarding the Fafnir now,” I said, watching as Icky vanished inside her. “Stand by.”

“Will do.”

I took a breath and clambered back toward my ship, my gut clenched up tight. How much of her was even left?

26

MY SHIP WASN’T WHOLE, but she wasn’t a husk. While her weapons had been stripped off, her internal systems and machinery was still largely intact. “We can replace her weapons easily enough—we can just take them off the Object 6,” Icky said. “The problem is Netty.”

I stared around the dark and silent cockpit. “A problem, how?” I asked, bracing myself. Icky glanced at Perry, who answered. “She’s hopelessly corrupted, Van. I’m sorry. Whatever they used to seize control of the ship scrambled anything resembling a higher function. She’s been reduced to her basic, autonomous workings. What’s left of her can keep the fusion reactor running and do basic nav calculations, but that’s it.”

“Shit. Can we restore her from the version of her on the Iowa?”

“We can, but it’ll take time, and she won’t be synchronized—”

“Actually, that won’t be necessary,” Funboy said, stepping into the cockpit. “It turns out the means of restoring her is right here.” He stepped aside and let a gleaming, vulpine form move past him. It was Netty-P. I widened my eyes at her. “Netty-P, you’re… here!”

“I am. When the ship was seized, I placed myself into the cargo bay, climbed into a shelving unit, and powered down. I retained enough functionality to be aware of what was happening, but that was it. My hope

was that the thieves would ignore me, at least for a time, assuming I was just… an inactive maintenance bot, or cargo, or spare parts.”

“So we can restore Netty from you?”

“Yes. In fact, if she is powered back up and wiped, it should be as simple as resynchronizing myself with her.”

I opened my mouth but closed it again. This was great. Perhaps too great?

Was it possible that Netty-P had been corrupted as well?

“What’s the matter, Van?” Icky asked. “I—” I hesitated, trying to think of a diplomatic way of putting it. But Netty-P beat me to it. “Van isn’t certain I can be trusted.”

Icky frowned at me. “Why not?”

“Because he can’t be sure I haven’t been compromised and will just extend that to the Fafnir in the form of a restored Netty.”

I shrugged. “Sorry, gang, but we can’t be too careful about this. I think we need to haul the Fafnir and Netty-P both back to Anvil Dark, have them both checked out, and then decide how to proceed. It may turn out that restoring her from the Iowa is a safer bet.”

“Van, that’s going to add days to our timetable. We don’t have the luxury of that sort of time. Your mother has probably kicked a hornet’s nest, so the Rogues are going to be looking to be trying to recover and regain the initiative,” Perry said. “Yeah, but I don’t see much choice. We can’t risk having a corrupted Netty turn on us at the worst possible time.”

“If it helps, I understand completely,” Netty-P said. “There’s another way, a faster one. Let me interface with her and confirm that she’s clean and intact,” Perry said. “And risk compromising you?

I don’t think so—”

“Van, I’ve been hardening myself against Calamity since we discovered that unmutated version that we gave to Linulla. I got copies of all of the data gathered by Bester and his people, and I’ve been using that to develop countermeasures. I know what to look for. And, at the very least, if Netty-P

is compromised, I’ll be able to warn you about it.”

“I can’t risk losing you along with Netty, Perry,” I said, shaking my head. “Van, you’ve said it yourself. We’re up against it, here. The Rogues could be making their move even as we speak. I know it sucks, but I think

we have to take some risk. We have to take a leap of faith.”

I glanced at Icky and Funboy. Icky shrugged. “We can probably swap over the weapons from the Object 6 in a day or so since they’re all standard mounts. No idea how long it’ll take to scrub Netty-P, make sure she’s clean, and restore Netty from her.”

“I am normally quite risk averse, as you’re well aware,” Funboy said. “No shit,” Perry muttered. “But even I see the imperative of trading certainty for time.”

Perry turned his amber gaze on me. “A wise man once said, a half-assed plan executed when it’s needed is better by far than an excellent one executed too late. ”

I grimaced at him. “Yeah, well, he’s not that wise.”

“Wise enough.”

I looked around my ship. It seemed wrong, dark, and quiet like this. “And what if we restore Netty but it turns out that Calamity, or even something else, has been hidden away in some system somewhere?

Hell, in the waste reclamator, for all we know?”

“Oh, well, the bird’s an expert when it comes to the poop processor,”

Icky said, grinning. “Quiet, you,” Perry countered, then turned back to me. “We’ve got no guarantees here, Van. I mean, Netty will scrub every system, of course. But, who knows, that might not be enough, it’s true.”

I looked around again. I needed the Fafnir back in action. I needed the dark, silent instruments to be lit with data, the ship vital and active and ready for battle. I sighed, then nodded. “Fine. Let’s do it.”

Perry bobbed his head, then turned to Netty-P. “You ready?”

“Anytime,” she replied. Perry’s eyes flashed as he linked to Netty-P. TO OUR ENORMOUS RELIEF, Netty-P was clean, at least as far as Perry could tell. It turned out, though, that the Fafnir herself wasn’t. As soon as we restored Netty and rebooted her, she immediately went into safe mode. At the same time, as the displays lit up in the cockpit, the status board showed one of them as being offline, flashing red. “Auxiliary air purifier. Huh. Why would a fault in that trigger her going into safe mode?” I asked. Icky shook her head. “It wouldn’t,” she said and headed aft. We followed her. The system in question was in a cramped machinery space just ahead of the engineering bay. Icky opened it, rooted around, then made a Huh sound. “What is it?” I asked, trying to peer past her. She unplugged something from a diagnostic data port and held it up. “This. This ain’t part of my ship.”

I examined the little device, about the size of a pack of playing cards. “At the risk of repeating myself, what is it?”

“It’s a compact data module and processor in one package. This was running something, doing something, that—”

“Hello?”

We all jumped at the unexpected voice. “Netty?”

“Yes. I assume you removed that damned interrupter since I can’t detect it anymore.”

“Damn, Netty, is it ever good to hear your voice. How are you feeling?”

I asked, letting out a breath I’d apparently been holding. “Like I’m operating within acceptable parameters, which means quite good.”

Icky held up the little device. “Is this what you’re calling an interrupter?”

“Yes. It contains an AI that seized control of the ship. It would have just done so again if I hadn’t immediately gone into safe mode.”

“Did you show the air purifier being offline to alert us to it?” I asked her. “Yes. That stupid AI was ready to block my access to all critical systems. But I could still access the status display system. I could only hope you understood what I was trying to tell you.”

“Clever girl,” I said, smiling. “Hey, I thought I was the clever girl!” Icky protested. I patted her arm. “Absolutely. And there’s, um, more of you.”

Icky smiled. “Of course there is. Netty-P, how did your system get overwhelmed?”

“The interrupter AI took over my essential functions when it was installed, then it locked me out of everything else. It’s a sophisticated bit of programming, I have to admit. I’m afraid the experience damaged my higher cognitive functions, but I gather you’ve restored me, probably from Netty-P, since I now remember hiding in the cargo bay.”

“Who planted this damned thing?”

“I don’t recall the details. Somehow, a Yonnox was able to get aboard and plant it where you found it. I think I was attacked with some sort of EM

weapon before that, but it’s about then that my memory falters.”

I looked at the others. “I’m thinking it was that same weapon that affected the Object 6, firing a stripped down version of Calamity.”

“We’d developed countermeasures, though, based on the data collected from the Object 6,” Funboy noted. I shrugged. “It must have still been enough to open a window of opportunity for someone to get aboard the Fafnir and install this thing,” I said, nodding toward the interrupter. “Since Tynser seems to have been implicated in the theft of the Fafnir, it implies that his people have access to the Calamity weapon,” Perry said. “Which means he, or they, are either in league with the Rogues, or at least have access to their tech,” I agreed. My gut reaction was fury, but hard on the heels of that came a sudden flash of inspiration, a way that we might be able to turn this to our advantage. I pointed at the interrupter. “Put that thing somewhere safe and securely lock it down for now. We’ll get to it later. Right now, I want you guys to examine every square centimeter of the Fafnir for any more surprises. Then, we’re going to get the weapons from the Object 6 moved over to her. In the meantime, I’ve got a call to make. Netty, do we have twist comms?”

“Actually, we’ve got all systems operating normally. Except for the weapons, of course, which are all offline.”

“Good. Put a call through to Gerhardt on the Righteous Fury. I think it’s time to let Tynser know we’ve decided to support their coup, and then release him from custody.”

“Why?” Icky asked. “Because, if he is dirty, or at least playing both sides of this, he’s going to take that news right to the Rogues,” Perry said. I spread my hands, grinning. “And that’s going to give them an opportunity I don’t think they’re going to pass up.”

WE GAVE OURSELVES TWO DAYS. In that time, we had to make the Fafnir battleworthy and get all of the parts of our plan into position. Gerhardt and the other members of the 32 had bought into it, since none of them really had anything better to suggest. Simply waiting for the Rogues to make their move and then react to it just didn’t seem like a winning formula. The plan itself was simple, but we had to scramble to get it set up. Gerhardt named Tynser official liaison to the new government, which would be headed by Fersus Cauldexx. In fact, we now suspected that Cauldexx would just be a figurehead, a way of lending legitimacy to an otherwise illegal takeover of the government of the Seven Stars League. The part we still weren’t entirely sure of was just who would be behind the figurehead. Was this just a sneaky way of letting the Rogues take control without it appearing that way?

Or was there actually a third rebellious group that wanted neither the existing Provisional Government or the Rogues to be in charge?

The beauty of the plan was that it didn’t really matter. We just needed to flush the Rogues out and get them to make their move. And dissolving the corrupt Provisional Government and anointing Cauldexx as the leader of a so-called New Government should be incentive enough. To sweeten the deal, a substantial portion of our available forces would be present at Sunderbach, the League’s capital. It would give the Rogues an opportunity to stop the transfer of power, while also having an opportunity to cripple our forces and gain a decisive advantage. Regardless, there was… hesitancy. “Hell of a risk we’re taking here, Tudor,” Gerhardt said during our hastily convened coordination meeting. I had all of the important people involved in it—Gerhardt, Valint, Schegith, Retta, and a few others—on the twist comm, and they’d all agreed to it, but some, like Gerhardt, had serious misgivings. Hell, so did I. I nodded. “I know. But I think this is our best shot at delivering a crippling blow to these assholes.”

“And you really think that they’re going to fall for this?”

“I think they’ll see it as a golden opportunity to get what they really want, and get their biggest obstacle out of the way,” I said. “This one agrees with Van Tudor. The envisioned course of action for our enemies is the most logical one for them to pursue,” Schegith said. Gerhardt scowled into the display for a moment, then sighed. “I hope you’re right about this, Tudor. Because if you’re not—”

“We’re screwed, I know. But at least we’ll be screwed doing something that gives us a shot at a win.”

Valint smiled. “Your mother and I often say how much you remind us of your grandfather. But I have to admit, Van, I don’t think Mark could have brought himself to be quite this bold.”

“Yeah, well, maybe he’s the smart one.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But it does mean you’ve finally stepped out of his shadow, grandson of mine.”

“Meaning the path forward for you from here is very much your own, yes?” Retta put in. I nodded. They were right, a fact I found both satisfying and, yes, a little frightening. “For better or worse, yeah, I guess it is.”

WE WERE as ready as we were ever going to be. The Fafnir was re-armed, albeit down one laser battery, which we’d have to replace later. And it had happened in considerably less time than we’d anticipated, thanks to—of all people—Gabby. Icky created a scheme to swap the weapons over from the Object 6, and do it right here, near the wreckage of the former Last Cry boneyard. In fact, there were still a couple of heavy manipulators working that we could press into service by powering from the Object 6’s reactor. But as Icky presented her scheme, I saw Gabby suddenly start tapping at a data slate. “So there we go,” Icky said, finishing up. “That should get everything moved over, installed, powered up, and tested in about twenty-six hours, if

we start now—”

“But why so long?” Gabby asked, looking up from the slate. Icky scowled. “Because it’s a lot of work?

And it can only be done so fast—?”

“No-no-no. Oh, no. See, look here.” She put her data slate down on the galley table. “See, if you move these tasks up and do them in this order, then you’ll free up some capacity to do these ones you’ve got right at the end, and they can be done simultaneously with these ones, and—oh, you have a full-sized oven!” Gabby’s attention had flicked back to the Fafnir’s galley. “I can make you my spicy sweet loaves, they’re one of my favorites, but I couldn’t make them on the Object 6 because—”

“Gabby, please!” I interrupted, pointing at the data slate. “You were saying?”

“Oh. Right. Well, it’s simple. Just rearrange all the tasks Icky just laid out like this, and it’ll only take about eighteen hours, right?

That’s using Icky’s times.”

We all stared at the data slate. Icky finally scratched her head. “Well, I’ll be damned. She’s right. That saves, like, eight freakin’ hours, almost.” She turned to glare at Perry. “How come you super-smart AIs didn’t figure that out?”

“Well, first, because you never asked us about it. And, second— to be honest, half of what Gabby is suggesting doesn’t make any rational sense. I mean, who would think to only partly hook up a laser turret, then come back four steps later to finish it?” Perry replied. Gabby stared at him. “But it only makes sense. You’ve only got one of these tools, right?

So it only makes sense to use it here, and then here, and then over—”

I raised my hand. “Icky, are you saying you can work with this scheme Gabby’s laid out?”

“I—yeah, I don’t see why not.”

“Great. Do it.” I turned to Gabby. “What made you think of that?”

She stared back at me. “It’s just how my mind works. I mean, it’s really not much different than making sure every dish in a six-course meal hits the table when it's supposed to, hot and fresh and ready to eat, right?”

I smiled. “I suppose not, no. Now I get why you’re such a great logistician—not to mention a cook.”

My smile became a grin. “You know, Gabby, I don’t know if I’ve said this to you yet. Welcome aboard the Fafnir.”

She nodded happily. “This is going to be so much fun!”

Funboy stared at her with moon eyes. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

WE’D GOTTEN all of the ships we could get our hands on in position. A fleet hung in orbit over Sunderbach, ostensibly there to observe the installation of the new government. The existing Provisional Government had folded like a cheap card table once confronted, collapsing under the weight of their own corruption and double dealing, paving the way for the New Government to take over. So it was now or never. All we could do was wait. I watched the proceedings unfold over the comm. After a few clashes in and around the Governmental Complex on Sunderbach between the would-be rebels and security forces, the situation quieted down. The resistance even by the security elements had been pretty half-hearted, which just accentuated the fact that nobody liked the Provisional Government. Fersus Cauldexx finally came on the media cast. She was a Gajur, middle-aged for her species, soft-spoken, and radiating reluctance like a floodlight shone into the image. Her words were terse and to the point, and she scratched at a blue scale on her neck in what I knew to be a nervous tic, betraying some of the confidence ringing in her voice. “—will immediately establish a new government and set into motion the necessary mechanisms for an election to be held within six standard months. I will resign as acting leader of the New Government at that point, and then will assess my options regarding standing for full election—”

She stopped and glanced off-camera. At the same time, another twist-comm channel lit up with an incoming message. It was Dugrop’che. “A flotilla of ships has just twisted in to the Sunderbach system. They’re broadcasting a message to the effect that this is an illegal coup, and that they’re here to restore order”—he looked off-screen—“and, I quote, throw off the shackles of outside interference and remove the foreign powers from Sunderbach.”

I nodded, then braced myself. It was time for the big question, the one that would determine if my gamble had been a brilliant one, or a disastrous bust. “How many ships?”

I swear Dugrop’che paused a dramatic beat, then smiled. “Ten. Two heavy cruisers, and the rest are escort-class vessels.”

I sank back with a sigh of relief. It was enough combat power to be a threat, but not enough to win a decisive victory. Or, at least, it wouldn’t be if our own fleet had actually been orbiting Sunderbach. But all that was really there was Icky’s father in the Nemesis, four of Groshenko’s ships, all eight of the light cruisers from the Helso defense force, and a half-dozen of the Fren-Okun freighters I happened to own, all broadcasting fake telemetry as Peacemaker Guild warships. “Van, multiple new contacts have just twisted into the system,” Netty announced. “Right on time,” I said, nodding and standing. “Thanks, Dugrop’che. I’ll leave matters there in your capable hands. As expected, the bulk of the Rogue fleet has come here, to Null World.”

“You were right. The Rogues were always going to go after the Schegith.”

“They were. They—or whatever’s behind them, anyway—have seen the Schegith as the biggest threat all along.”

Dugrop’che nodded. “Give ’em hell, Van.”

“That’s the plan,” I said, then I signed off and headed for the Fafnir’s cockpit. The battle was about to begin. 27

I SLEWED the Fafnir hard to port, firing a blast from the main drive to alter our trajectory and have us pass broadside-on to a Rogue cruiser. Missiles flared around us, jinking as they tried to dodge streams of point-defense fire. Mass-driver rounds flashed past the cockpit. Something hit us aft with a heavy bang, detonating REAB modules. I saw three or four systems go yellow on the status board, but none of them were critical so I flicked my attention back to the overlay. Our forces had essentially charged head-on into the Rogue fleet, provoking a swirling melee. They had a slight edge in numbers, but we had the formidable firepower of the Iowa, the Righteous Fury and the Stormshadow, not to mention no fewer than eight Peacemakers and another ten GKU ships, plus the Fafnir. Bolstering our fleet were ten Schegith ships, including two battlecruisers. They led the charge since they were immune to the effects of the Calamity weapon we’d feared. As the battle progressed and devolved into a general furball of ship-on-ship action, though, the Rogues started employing weaponized Calamity, or trying to, anyway. I saw an EM surge engulf the Fafnir, marked by a sudden spike on the space-environment display. It was the weapon firing again, this time from the cruiser we were attacking. “Netty, talk to me!

Is that Calamity?”

“It is. Our countermeasures are holding, though.”

I nodded. I was glad, actually, that the weapon had been used against the Object 6 and, we assumed, also against the Fafnir. It had given us time

to analyze its effects and develop countermeasures adequate to deflect the stripped-down version of Calamity the thing was trying to project. Still, the Rogues were adjusting the weapons parameters as they used it, seeking ways of defeating our protections against it. We needed to turn the battle in our favor, and we needed to do it soon. A ship swept overhead. It was a Rogue corvette, with a ship I recognized as Lunzy’s Foregone Conclusion in hot pursuit. Another ship slid into view to our nine o’clock, low—the Lexington, piloted by Jamberac, the only known offspring of the criminal Jacomir known to not be a complete asshole. He’d taken several serious hits, the Lexington trailing a plume of debris. A Rogue cruiser had him in its sights. I rolled the Fafnir, bringing the cruiser tormenting Jamberac into view. “Torina, can you take the pressure off him?”

She glanced at the target, then smiled. “With pleasure. I’ve been so wanting to use this thing, and I think this target is worth the expense,” she said, swinging the swarm cannon into firing position. She loosed a salvo, fifty small guided projectiles, bigger than mass-driver rounds but smaller than missiles. The swarm cannon spat them out in rapid succession, almost machine-gun like, whereupon they zipped off in seemingly every direction. For a moment, I thought something had gone terribly wrong, maybe that Calamity had managed to take hold and seize control of the weapon, which would be disastrous. But the swarm projectiles quickly changed course and came slashing back at the Rogue cruiser from about twenty different directions. It hurled a stalwart wall of fire from its point-defense batteries but only managed to stop a dozen or so. The rest slammed into the cruiser, their warheads rippling across her hull in a series of explosions that left her a battered, powerless wreck. “Now we’re cookin’ with gas,” I said, turning my attention back to the nearer cruiser, our original target. I saw that Gerhardt had already engaged it, so we caught it in cross fire. A massive shape swept by, rolling to bring her broadside to bear. As she did, a protruding sensor mast flashed by the Fafnir’s cockpit, making me wince. It was the Iowa. “Damn it, Cantullin, watch where you’re flying!”

“Sorry, Captain Van!”

The Iowa’ s full broadside slammed into the cruiser, blasting out chunks of hull plating and exposing structural members beneath. Edges glowed,

metal turned liquid, and critical parts whirled away in a silent, colorful dance. I peeled the Fafnir away, saw that B was now in trouble, and hurried to her aid. We fired another salvo from the swarm cannon, then finished off the destroyer that had been pummeling her with repeated bursts from the plasma burst cannon. She came on the comm, her cockpit full of smoke. “Thanks, kid. Look, my ship is more holes than ship. I gotta pull out of this mess and regroup,” she said, coughing and waving a hand. “You do you, B,” I said, then turned back to the overlay. “Losses are about equal on both sides, Van,” Rab said from what had once been Zeno’s station. “This is turning into an attritional slugfest.”

“Yeah, that’s not—”

The Fafnir rocked hard, her inertial dampers not able to fully compensate and slamming us all hard to the right. Perry squawked as he crashed against my seat. The lights flickered, and red lights flared across the status board. “Icky, what hit us?”

No answer. I glanced back. “Icky?”

“Sorry, boss, just getting back on my feet. Good thing I’ve got some padding back there. Looks like we took a burst of mass-driver rounds through the aft hull. I think a couple went right through the Frankie. The whole portside power bus is gone, so we’re running everything off the starboard one. If it goes down, we’re dead in space.”

“Can you fix it?”

“It’s not like I can install a jumper cable. The bus carries about a jillion amps—uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh?”

“Yeah. The portside spar went when the bus did. Netty, you’ve gotta keep the g’s down—”

“To no more than ten. Anything more, and we’ll break the tail of the ship off, right.”

I swore. Ten g’s was a crippling cap on our acceleration. The alien grav plating would help some, probably letting us pull about fifteen or so and have the ship experience it as ten, but it still dramatically reduced our ability to maneuver. I glanced at Perry. “Any sign of the cavalry?”

“Your mom?

Nothing yet.”

“Well, shit.”

The coup de grace, as it were, was supposed to come in the form of my mother and her Feral compatriots twisting in-system and swinging the battle in our favor. Aside from a curt acknowledgement that that was what we wanted her to do, we’d heard nothing more. I switched to the comm channel to Valint’s Stormshadow. “Have you heard anything from my mother?”

Valint was backlit by a fire, which I could see some of her crew struggling to extinguish. “Nothing.”

“Dammit. She’d better not bail on us,” I growled. “Why would she?” Rab asked. “Why would she do anything?

I mean, we call them Ferals, right?

To her, targets are… changeable. They’re anything but static.”

The overlay showed a battle that was deteriorating rapidly. At least a third of the Rogues’ ships were dead in space, but we were looking at similar losses. If this kept up, both fleets might be virtually destroyed, with the attendant loss of life. Worse, Null World would be left completely unprotected. I was beginning to wish we’d gone with our original plan, enticing the Rogues to land. As desperate a plan as that had been, at least it might have spared a lot of lives—

“Tudor, are you there?”

I stiffened. I recognized the voice, which had come through a comm broadcast channel. I punched at the comm panel to open a separate channel and switched the signal to it. “Kharsweil. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Making a deal with you. You disengage and let us finish off the Schegith, and we’ll let you go on your merry way.”

“You know that’s not going to happen.”

“No, but I thought I should at least make the offer.”

“Not that I’m terribly surprised you’re mixed up in this, but—why?” I asked him. “What possible interest do you have in the Rogues and whoever controls the Seven Stars League?”

He laughed. “Oh, do you still really believe that’s what this is all about?”

I narrowed my eyes. Torina kept fighting the ship, snapping out shots at targets as we passed, while I did our best to keep us maneuvering without putting undue stress on the Fafnir’s damaged structure. The Fafnir rocked, then rocked again as a keening howl caromed through the hull. I drew a breath and steeled myself in the midst of such fury. Then, I chose my words. “Enlighten me,” I stated. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out in time.”

“Where’s your boss?

Dohlennz?

Because he’s the real architect of all this, isn’t he?”

Again, Kharsweil laughed. “You’re so close, Tudor. So very close. But you’re not quite there yet.”

I glanced up at Torina, then at Perry, but they both shrugged. What the hell was he getting at—?

“Tudor, look, this is all futile anyway. You can’t stop what’s coming. None of us can. All we can do is learn to live with it. So why not preserve what you can today?

Because we’re not backing down, and if it means wiping out everyone and everything here—well, in the long run, that’s just another step toward the future, isn’t it?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but Netty cut me off. “Van, you’ll be happy to know that your cavalry is finally here. Your mother just twisted in with a dozen ships. They’re about ten minutes from engagement range.”

I switched to her channel. “Mom. Jocelyn. You’re late to the party. I needed you thirty minutes ago, at least.”

“I was waiting for the real target to reveal himself, which he just did.”

“Kharsweil?”

“Yes. We want Dohlennz, right?

He’s the big prize?

Well, Kharsweil knows where he is.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve got intel to that effect.”

I swore, low and rich. “Intel?

What intel?

Mom, you can’t keep shit like that—”

“Sorry, Van, I don’t have time to answer you. Got a battle to win.”

She signed off. The hull rang again, but this time, it was just me being creative with language. MY MOTHER’S arrival changed the field. A substantial piece of what remained of the Rogue fleet had to break off and turn to confront this new threat, meaning they were caught, pinned in a set of closing jaws that was us on one side and my mother on the other. I gave our fleet a quick once-over on the overlay, then told those worst hit to withdraw. “Leave the fight. Now. I’m not saying it again. If you get hit and lose crew, you’ll answer to me. Directly,” I said. “Copy that,” came a voice on the channel, followed by two more. All three sounded raw with strain, and alarms howled in the background of the last respondent. “Van, I’m leaking atmo and I have a drive that’s about to pop off.” It was B, sounding harried and tired. “Saw you take out that corvette. Fight another day, friend,” I suggested, and her icon began retreating seconds later. Lunzy—also with a kill, a light cruiser—left as well. Her drive guttered like a dying candle, and as she wheeled her ship away, three missiles streaked away in a last act of defiance. Dearly. “What did the Stormshadow do?” I asked. Perry answered immediately. “Destroyer. Heavy cruiser. Raked three other vessels, and generally raised hell.”

“Valint, thank you,” I said. It seemed… thin. But I said it anyway. “No need,” she answered, and her ship began to recede through the chaos of battle and debris. Gerhardt finished off a destroyer with a direct hit on its drive, ending the enemy in a plume of searing plasma. Despite his ship’s damage, he was in fighting shape. He stayed. So did Jamberac, gamely keeping the Lexington in battle as well despite enough holes in his hull that I could see inner decking at various places. The Righteous Fury ruled thus far, and she wasn’t done. As I continued parsing the combat data, the big ship rolled, fired four missiles and a bank of lasers, and shredded two wounded cruisers in one magnificent broadside. The silent flare of ships dying dazzled my sight until Netty hit the automatic dampers, leaving two pulsing points of light where ships had been seconds earlier. “Unreal,” I murmured. “What a beast.”

“I make both crews as a total loss there, boss,” Netty said, each word subdued by the ugly reality of death. The Iowa kept fighting as well—she’d taken hits, but none of them were serious. Cantullin and her Conoku crew happily threw the big ship wildly through space, finishing off their fourth kill, a light cruiser, with a devastating combination from every weapon she could bring to bear. But she was out of hard ordnance and had to rely solely on lasers and beam weapons to keep fighting. That left the Schegith, who had taken the initial brunt of the battle. Of their original strength of ten ships, only six were still mobile, and only three of those could realistically keep fighting. My heart sank when I saw that their most damaged ship was the one belonging to Schegith’s cousin, the battlecruiser that had come to our aid so many times. She was a wreck, pounded to scrap. I was grimly sure her crew was almost gone, given the horrific condition of her hull and portside tower. I would confront that tragedy later. The Fafnir wasn’t up to any more hard maneuvers, but we could keep her on the edge of the battle, giving fire support to Gerhardt, Jamberac, the Righteous Fury and the Iowa and everyone else still slugging it out with the Rogues. Which was how I ended up with a front-row seat to what I was sure was my mother’s death. THANKS TO HIS MESSAGE, we’d identified Kharsweil’s ship, a heavy cruiser hull that had been up-armored and up-gunned to the equivalent of a battlecruiser like the Fury. My mother’s ship formed the tip of a flying wedge that drove through the Rogue’s hasty battle line, charging straight at Kharsweil. She and the two ships following her unleashed a hurricane of fire onto their target, rapidly silencing its guns. Purple and blue lights seared local space as drives collapsed, followed by the dizzying explosion of a missile battery. Or two. “They’re going to board her,” Funboy said while patching up a wound on Torina’s arm from a stray piece of shrapnel that had punctured our hull. Fortunately, it was just a graze. I reached for the thruster controls. “Fine. Then we’re going to join her. I want Kharsweil as much as she does—maybe even more.”

“What does that mean?” Perry asked. “It means that I don’t know if I really trust my mother to actually take him alive. And we absolutely need that asshole alive—”

“Tudor, are you there?”

I glared at the comm. “Speak of the devil. Kharsweil, it’s time for you to just give up. No one else needs to die today.”

“Death is an illusion, Tudor.”

My glare became a frown. He’d said it with such calm certainty that it started an alarm bell clanging in the back of my mind. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I just want you to remember this, Tudor. Remember that this is what you’re up against.”

I sat forward. “Kharsweil?

Kharsweil!”

No answer. I stabbed at the comm panel. “Mom, break off, get the hell away from that ship—” I shouted, but it was futile. Simple physics precluded anything but what followed from happening. Kharsweil’s ship exploded, a colossal antimatter-fueled blast that engulfed every ship around it. Including my mother’s. I BLINKED FURIOUSLY, trying to clear away the kaleidoscopic splotches filling my vision. The Fafnir’s canopy had prevented the titanic flash from permanently blinding me, but enough light still leaked through to leave me dazzled. As I blinked, I shouted at the comm. “Mom!

Mom, are you there!”

Silence. “Shit, Netty, what can you—”

“Kharsweil’s ship is gone, of course. Your mother’s ship and at least three others have been catastrophically damaged. That includes two Rogue ships.”

My vision was finally returning. I could make out the battered hulk of my mother’s ship, its buckled hull still glowing from the ferocious energy of the blast. In its wake, all of the shooting had stopped. There had been silence before, but now there was stillness. The battle was—if not over, then paused. Time stood still in the moment after such limitless violence. I heard myself breathing. I put my hands out, steadied by the smooth outline of my chair. “Netty, clear the chaff. Get me something visible.”

“On it.”

I forced myself to look at the overlay. Only three of the Rogues’ ships remained operational—a heavy cruiser, a light cruiser, and a destroyer, and they were fleeing. Cantullin wanted to pursue them, but I ordered her back to the rest of the fleet so we could start recovering survivors. I could only hope beyond hope that one of them would be my mother. “SORRY, Van, but we’ve got nothing to indicate whether Dohlennz was aboard Kharsweil’s ship, or any other,” Perry said after summarizing the butcher’s bill from the battle, which had been the bloodiest I’d ever experienced. The Rogues had lost an astounding sixteen ships, crippling them and rendering them largely impotent, even after taking into account those that had made their feint toward Sunderbach. The battle there had been short and sharp, the Rogues fleeing before they could be decisively engaged. We’d only had one ship seriously damaged there—one of Groshenko’s mercenary vessels. It meant that most of the remaining Rogue ships were damaged, further diminishing the threat they posed. At least for the foreseeable future. We’d lost a total of seven ships, along with most of their crews. That included three of the Schegith’s flotilla, one Peacemaker—a young woman named Carson I’d only recently met, and whom Lunzy had taken on as something of a protégé—and three GKU ships, all part of my mother’s contingent. My mother lived. Barely. B had taken her aboard her ship, then done her best to stabilize her while making a beeline for Anvil Dark and full-fledged medical care. When I asked her the prognosis, she just shrugged, her antennas drooping in exhaustion and stress. I let her go without further interrogation, knowing that B would care for my mother like family. “A girl with antennae performing surgery on the one who ran away,” I muttered. Torina put a cool hand on my forehead, her fingers calming me like a drug. “Thanks, babe.”

She said nothing, but lifted her shoulder an inch. She was… worn. Beyond tired, really. Her beauty was ragged at the edges, gone thin from the grind of battle that seemed like it was never, ever going to end. Right up until it did. I rubbed my eyes. We’d landed the Fafnir on Null World to make it easier for Icky, Funboy, Rab, and Netty-P to perform repairs and at least get her spaceworthy enough for her own trip back to Anvil Dark. Gabby, desperate to help out somehow, had thrown herself into helping the others work on the Fafnir. Watching them chattering and gesticulating outside the ship actually made me smile. That was a bright spot, at least. Gabby was a person of hidden talents and was going to fit in nicely with the crew. And Rab had proven himself more than capable of being—not a replacement for Zeno, but rather her legacy aboard the Fafnir. I turned back to Perry, alone in the cockpit with Torina and me. “Dohlennz isn’t dead. He wasn’t on Kharsweil’s ship or any other.” I looked up at Null World’s electrified sky. “He’s still out there.”

Torina nodded. “He is. And we’re going to find him.”

I nodded back. “Yes, we are. I will chase that son of a bitch down—until the stars burn out, if I have to.”

We sat in silence for a moment, hearing only the background white-noise hum of the Fafnir’s systems idling away. “What do you think he meant, death is an illusion?

And what else did he say right before he blew himself up?” Torina asked. “He said that this is what we’re up against,” Perry replied. “So what did he mean by that?”

I kept staring at the sky. “I’m not sure. But we’re going to find out.”

EPILOGUE

“WELL, ordinarily, I’d say that the Fafnir’s going to be laid up for at least a week. But Gabby’s rearranged all my task scheduling and thinks we can get her flying again in five days,” Icky said. I smiled at her as we left the maintenance hangar on Anvil Dark. We’d been allowed to use the special, secret one that belonged to Kragdalous. It had all the facilities we needed, including those needed to install the additional module we’d purchased from the Armory. Since we had to break the ship apart to replace her broken main longitudinal spar, we figured we might as well do everything at once. It officially made the Fafnir a class 13, equivalent to a light cruiser in mass and firepower. Torina and Rab were working out the details with the Armory now. Funboy and Gabby—

They’d gone off somewhere in the station together, taking well-earned shore leave. We’d all just smiled, watching them go. I looked at Icky. “She’s not doing it to make you look bad, you know. It really is just how her brain works, seeing patterns that even AIs might have trouble picking out, because on the face of it they just seem kinda dumb.”

Icky gave me a smug, sidelong look. “Actually, I think she and I are going to get along just fine. You’ll tell me to do something, I’ll tell you it’ll take four days, then we’ll get it done in two and I’ll look like a hero.”

I laughed. “And what does she get in return?”

“I’ll be her test subject for all of her meal experiments. Me and sourpuss, that is. He’s got it bad for her. Which reminds me, I’ve got a boyfriend waiting for me to take some leave of my own. Once the Fafnir’s flying again, Van, I’d like—”

“Granted. You’ve got it coming to you, Icky.”

She grinned. “Actually, he’s got it coming to him—probably several times.”

I laughed again and waved as Icky peeled away, heading to a different part of the station. I was bound for the infirmary, and my mother. My good humor deflated with each step, leaving me in a somber mood when I finally arrived. She lay swathed in bandages, hooked up to wires and tubes and surrounded by instruments flickering and flashing with several displays in tow and three dimensions. I wrinkled my nose as I entered the bay where she was being treated. Somehow, hospitals all managed to smell the same, whether on Earth or light-years away. Cleanser, urine, fear—hope. All scents at all times. Every time. B looked up from a data slate as I entered. She’d taken on my mother’s case personally while her own ship underwent extensive repairs. “How is she?” I asked, reflexively lowering my voice in that way people do in hospitals. “No change, I’m afraid. She’s stable, but that’s about all I can say.”

I looked down at her, at the little I could see of her under the dressings. “B, is she… ever going to recover from this?

You can be as honest as you want.”

B sighed. but her eyes were still bright with intellect and purpose. “Right now, Van, based on what I know, on what this is telling me”—she lifted the data-slate—“the answer is no. I mean, she may survive, but I can’t see her just walking away from this, no.”

I wanted to hold my mother’s hand, but I couldn’t even do that because both were thoroughly swathed. I settled for resting a hand on her bandaged arm. “There’s no but appended to that?”

“Oh, hell, Van, I’ve seen some amazing things. I’ve seen people who should have died on the spot pull through. Of course, I’ve also seen minor injuries go bad and the patient die. So—yeah, there’s always a but. The question is, how much of a but. And that, I really don’t know.”

I slumped, but remained standing. “Thanks for your honesty.”

“I’ve never been in the business of comforting lies. It’s probably why I’ve got such a shitty bedside manner.”

The door opened, admitting Perry and Netty-P. “Sorry to disturb you, Van, but we wanted you to know this right away. And we didn’t want to tell you about it over the comm,” Perry said. I frowned. B asked, “Should I leave?”

“No, this is something that the 32 is going to have to know,” Netty-P

said. “Okay, so what is it that’s so secret and important?”

“Betty—that is, the Iowa version of Netty—intercepted comms from one of those fleeing Rogue ships before you called them back. They were encrypted, but we managed to break them.”

I tensed. “And?”

“And, it was a report that Kharsweil had died and the fleet had been defeated. But it’s the reply that’s the interesting part,” Perry said. “Interesting?

Wait, was it from Dohlennz?”

“That’s the thing. No, it wasn’t. It was from someone else. It said to let Dohlennz know what had happened, and to tell him that the current plans were to be shelved until new forces were assembled.”

“You mean that it was someone giving instructions to Dohlennz?”

“So it would seem.”

I just stared for a moment, the ramifications shivering through me. “Looks like our casualties at least bought us some time,” B said. “The question is, how much?” Netty-P replied. I gave a slow nod as something finally started to coalesce, something that had been teasing me now for weeks—for months. “A year, maybe. Maybe more. We’ll know for sure when it starts up again.”

“It?

What do you mean, it?

And how can you know for sure?” B asked. I looked down at my mother, then up at her. I could feel the brightness in my eyes, and her response—silent, patient, watchful—told me she saw my intent. My concern. My conclusion. “Because it can’t help it. It’s in its nature.”