Ghost in the Deep: Backyard Starship #17

JN Chaney

1

I SLUMPED into a chair in the farmhouse kitchen. The man named Mandeville, an opportunistic scumbag Colonel in the US Air Force, had hauled his smug ass away, promising to return at noon when the wrath of US bureaucracy was due to come crashing down on Pony Hollow, Iowa. I looked around the kitchen. My crew, and Miryam, all stared back at me with grave worry. “Van, you can’t let that asshole have the Fafnir,” Perry said. “Oh, I know.”

“I mean it. You can’t. Netty-P and I have built-in imperatives to prevent it. And without us—particularly without Netty-P—the Fafnir won’t even fly.”

I looked at him. “Perry, if I ordered you to surrender the Fafnir, would you do it?”

“Only a Master can issue an order like that—”

“And I was offered a position as Master. So if I say right now that I’m accepting it, then could I give that order?”

Perry stared at me. “Van, you’re not seriously considering handing that maniac the keys to the Fafnir, are you?”

I gave a tired smile. “No, of course not. I just want to know what my boundaries are here.” I shrugged. “Or maybe I’m just procrastinating against a decision I really do not want to make.”

I looked around at the kitchen, so familiar. I’d eaten many meals here, some of them Christmas dinners, some of them special birthday affairs with

all my favorite dishes, most of them forgettable and forgotten but still parts of warm, fond memories. I’d done homework at this table, built model kits and studied circuit diagrams. I’d frantically chased Miryam around the house, through the kitchen, desperately trying to keep her from catching Icky—only to discover later that she knew all about the realities of known space. I didn’t want to give this up. Schegith had been right. This was my center of gravity, the place from which I drew so much of my strength, my will to keep pushing on. It was my safe haven, my harbor against the storm, where I knew I could always come back to, no matter what. The refrigerator would still be here, humming away, the starburst clock over the sink ticking interminably, always a little slow, the kitchen table and chairs creaking exactly the way I knew they would when I sat at or on them. This was my home. I didn’t want to give it up. But I couldn’t just hand over the Fafnir, either. Netty had once calculated that she could deliver as much destructive energy in one minute of firing as an entire American armored brigade could put out in the same time. She was a city killer. Hell, a country killer, given that some of her most destructive weapons, like the lasers, didn’t need ammunition and would fire as long as they had power. And her reactor, which could easily energize an entire large city, had copious power to spare. On top of that, she was effectively invulnerable to Earthly tech, which couldn’t even see her. In the wrong hands, she would be the most fearsome, wantonly destructive thing to ever deliver pain and suffering onto humanity. But it was even more complicated than that. Sure, I could declare myself a Master and order the Fafnir turned over to Mandeville, but then what?

Perry and Netty-P might have to obey, but it didn’t mean they had to cooperate. They were free-willed beings, and I would die before I’d even try to use their programming to force them into compliance. The Fafnir was unflyable without them, and particularly without Netty-P. Only she had what it took to make the mind-bending physics of the twist drive work. So if she refused—

The worst part of all was that I should have seen this coming. I’d gotten not just smug, but cocky, taunting the likes of Constance Plowitz and Manon Clemenceau. I knew they were behind this, that Mandeville was the attack dog they’d unleashed in response to my cockiness. I’d been so sure I had the high ground, literally and figuratively, that I hadn’t paid attention to

my Earthward flank. I’d underestimated them and left it exposed, and they’d attacked it. My center of gravity. That’s what military doctrine was all about, wasn’t it?

Attacking your opponent’s center of gravity, the thing that gave him the freedom to act—

I sat up and looked around. At the familiar old kitchen, sure. But also at my crew. Torina, my wife. Perry, my best friend and confidant. Icky and Funboy, Rab and Netty-P, sturdy rocks of reliability. I actually smiled. Torina frowned at me. “What?

You look like you’ve just thought of something.”

“A clever idea to make it all go away?” Icky asked, her glower easing a little. “No—and yes.”

“Okay—well, that sucks. And fantastic.”

I smiled again. “I’ve just realized that the farm isn’t really what I think it is. Schegith called it my center of gravity, the thing that gave me my freedom and the will to act. And it was—but it isn’t anymore. Sure, it’s important to me. It’s my home. But my center of gravity is”—I waved a hand around the room—“it’s you guys. It’s the Fafnir. Some time ago, I started thinking of myself as a sort of dual citizen, a guy from Earth who also happened to work in space. But I’ve moved on from that. I’m now a guy from space who happens to be from Earth.”

“So—what?

We’re just going to leave and abandon the farm to Mandeville?” Torina asked. I looked at Miryam and deflated a little. “If only it were that simple. I mean, I don’t want to give up the farm. It’s my home. But if that’s what it takes, I will. That doesn’t help Miryam, though. Or Clinton Barnes. Or Tony and the Truly Aware. Anyone they could associate with us is at risk of being called an accessory and arrested.”

Miryam clicked her tongue. “So I’ll be arrested for abetting illegal entries into the United States?

I think that would be damned fun to argue out in a court of law—not to mention in the media. Because that’s how this is going to go, Van. The first time they put me in front of a camera, I will cheerfully tell the world that the US military is trying to seize control of alien technology. I’m sure that people everywhere will be thrilled to hear that.”

“That is only true if they provide you access to the media. We must assume that they are going to avoid that, for that very reason,” Funboy pointed out. Miryam tried to continue looking defiant, but I saw how brittle it was. Because Funboy was right. Hell, if Mandeville wanted, he could probably arrange to have Miryam and the others arrested as terrorists and stuck into Guantanamo Bay. The media would never get anywhere near them. Glum silence returned. “What I don’t get is why Mandeville showed up and effectively gave warning of what was coming. I mean, he must have realized it would just give us time to fly away,” Perry said. “Sure, he could seize the farm, and he could even end up arresting Miryam and the others—but so what?

How does that help him out if his goal is to get his grubby paws on the Fafnir?”

Rab nodded as Perry spoke. “Do you think maybe he’s bluffing?

That things aren’t as certain as he’s making them out to be?”

“That’s a good question. Since when does ICE wait on the say-so of the military to do their thing?

Or give anyone their plans in advance?” Miryam asked. Again, I sat up, struck by sudden inspiration. Dangerous inspiration, but inspiration nonetheless. “We’ve been thinking in terms of taking some sort of stand, or else running away. What if we do both?”

THE IDEA OF FLEEING, of abandoning my home to the likes of Mandeville, was galling. But I couldn’t let him have the Fafnir. So the Fafnir was leaving, heading safely into orbit, crewed by Torina, Rab, and Netty-P. I, along with Funboy, Icky, and Perry, would await noon and whatever it was going to bring down on the farm. That’s an easy decision to describe. Getting to it wasn’t. We’d debated, argued, and outright ranted at one another about it for over an hour. Torina was particularly stubborn, for obvious and understandable reasons. “I am not just going to sit up in orbit while my husband gets arrested and thrown into prison!”

It had taken a while to work her past that. I’d ended up having to take her aside for a personal discussion. Just the two of us, answering to each

other under the aegis of our wider responsibilities. “Babe, look—this sucks, I know. But I can’t just leave Miryam and the others down here to twist in the wind. I can’t let them have the Fafnir, either. If we run to prevent the second, then how do we stop the first from happening?”

Torina stared but said nothing. I sighed. “I’m starting to think that Rab was right. That this is less about actually seizing the Fafnir or arresting anyone and more about disrupting us and our ability to keep Earth locked down. Mandeville might actually be all hot and horny on getting his hands on the Fafnir and her tech, but I suspect Plowitz and Clemenceau—whose grimy fingerprints are all over this, believe me—just want us out of the way. So we run, and they keep the threat of arresting Miryam and Tony and the rest hanging over us, and blackmail their way into opening up access to Earth. That’s why we’ve been given this time to run away—so that we do.”

“So instead, you propose to hand yourself, Icky, and Funboy over to these people, to—what?

Simply give them grief?”

“It’s the worst outcome for all of them. They don’t get the Fafnir, which is still active under your command, but they suddenly do have to contend with a very public showing of arresting us, charging us, and going through trials, all of which is going to give us a very public podium to denounce them.”

“Funboy said they wouldn’t let the media anywhere near you—”

“Which is why I’ve already let Tutsi Auffenberg know. She’s informing the rest of the media-sphere. And then we’ve got Perry, the ultimate media source. He can record everything that happens in insane high-res, by Earthly standards, and hand it over to Tutsi and the rest of the global media. Miryam was right—this isn’t going to play out well in other parts of the world, the US trying to grab alien military tech for itself. In the meantime, our message is going to be that we’re trying to prevent things like that from happening while trying to make sure Earth benefits from alien contact but isn’t exploited by it.”

She crossed her arms. “But you’ll be in prison. Maybe for years.”

I sighed again and shrugged. “Yeah, that’s the part of this I don’t like any more than you do, trust me. Perry’s pretty sure the Guild will get involved and negotiate our release, probably at the cost of exchanging

something for us. I’m going to have to count on you, working with Alic, Volffin, and the other Masters to make that happen.”

I put my hands on her shoulders. “I know this is terribly risky, yeah. But it’s the only way I can think of that will prevent the Fafnir and her tech from falling into the wrong hands while also continuing to protect Earth. Because that’s what’s really at stake here, Torina. It’s Earth itself. What would you do to protect Helso?”

She looked down, then back up, appearing momentarily defiant. “I would—or, I wouldn’t—” she said, then stopped and heaved a sigh of her own. “Fine. Yes. I’d probably do something like this to protect Helso.” Tears suddenly glittered in her eyes. “But I sure as hell wouldn’t like it—”

I took her in my arms, my own eyes stinging. “We’ve got that in common, my love. We’ve definitely got that in common.”

I COULDN’T WATCH the Fafnir lift and climb skyward because her stealth system prevented it. I only knew she was gone when the barn roof folded itself closed. I turned to Miryam, Icky, and Funboy. “I guess we might as well wait out on the front porch.”

We made our way out the front door and variously sat, stood, or paced on the porch. It was 11:40.

“Hey, is prison cheese a thing?

You know, like, blocks of cheese?” Icky asked, ever the optimist. I shrugged. “No idea. If it is, it’s going to be the cheap stuff, not Blueberry Monterey Jack or whatever.”

“That in itself would constitute cruel and unusual punishment,” Funboy said. Time passed. “Maybe this is a bluff after all,” Icky said. As soon as she did, though, we saw a dust trail up the road, followed by the hum of an approaching vehicle. It rushed into view, then braked hard and turned into the driveway. It was a news van. It rolled to a stop, and Tutsi Auffenberg got out of the passenger side. The driver hurried around to the side door, opened it, and began assembling camera and sound equipment. “I came as soon as I got your call, Van. Dodged a few speeding tickets on the way. So give me the whole story,” Tutsi said, her ditzy façade put aside in favor of the no-nonsense reporter. I filled her in. She listened intently, her face hard, then gave a grim nod. “Yeah, that sounds like something the ugly sisters would do.”

“The ugly sisters?

Is that your less-than-flattering way of referring to Plowitz and Clemenceau?”

“Oh, you haven’t heard the truly less-than-flattering things I call them,”

she snapped back, crossing her arms. “Tells me one thing, though. I got no heads-up on this at all, despite being the senior field agent overseeing this case. Manon has obviously cut me out of the loop.”

“Is it possible she doesn’t know?

That this is Mandeville operating all on his own?” Miryam asked. “I suppose it’s possible, but I’d be awfully surprised. I know that Manon has been looking for some way to neutralize you, Van. And like you said, this would seem to be tailor-made to do just that—”

“Vehicles coming,” Icky said, pointing down the road. We saw more dust—a lot of it. Several vehicles were coming this way, and fast. “Showtime,” Tutsi muttered. “Van, I’m going to switch on my reporter thing. I want you to know, though, that I’m going to do everything I can to help you. That’s going to start with letting the world know what’s going on here.”

I nodded my thanks. I didn’t tell her about Perry, who was lurking somewhere nearby. His amber gaze would be a completely separate record, one that he would ensure made it into the global media regardless of what happened with Tutsi’s reporting—which I suspected was going to be suppressed as much as possible. Mandeville’s car turned into the driveway, followed by a dark SUV

emblazoned with Department of Homeland Security regalia. Behind that came a dark van bearing the same logos, and behind that, a pair of olive drab Army trucks loaded with troops. The latter had to stop on the roadside, there no longer being room in the front yard. Tutsi was already rolling, speaking into a microphone as officious people dismounted from the vehicles. I couldn’t help thinking that the thunk of vehicle doors closing rang with an ominous finality, like the shutting of barred doors on cells. 2

WHAT FOLLOWED, though, was a bit of a comedic shitshow. Mandeville and his smug aide strode up to the porch, but the ICE people who exited the DHS vehicles were less certain, milling about, talking amongst themselves, and shooting us furtive and—in the case of Icky, in particular—fearful glances. The military folks, in the meantime, about a platoon in total, dismounted and formed up off to one side, doing their best to look professional and disciplined while also seeming unsure why they were here in the first place. Mandeville stopped at the foot of the porch stairs. His aide, the oily Lieutenant Hudspeth, veered toward Tutsi, raising a hand as he went. “You can’t be here, recording this—”

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of my Constitutional rights,”

Tutsi replied, her camera guy aiming his lens right into Hudspeth’s face. The smarmy Lieutenant hesitated and glanced back at Mandeville—who only had eyes for me. “Well, Mr. Tudor, since I never heard back from you, I assume you’ve decided to let justice run its course,” he said, stopping with a foot on the bottom stair. I smiled back at him. “That’s exactly what I’ve decided to do, yes.”

Miryam stepped up beside me. “I would like to inspect any and all warrants and other documents relating to this matter,” she said, her tone brusquely businesslike, her hand extended toward Mandeville. His gaze flicked from Miryam’s to mine. He shrugged. “Fine. The good people from ICE have them. And once they’re served, we’ll be seizing control of this property and everything on it.” His eyes glittered. “Including my empty barn?” I asked him. A flash of irritation crossed his face. Clearly, Mandeville had expected we’d either flee or give in. Instead, we’d handed him the least satisfying outcome, the one where he didn’t get anywhere near the Fafnir yet still had to deal with us. But irritation became calculation. He was going to bargain, from what he assumed was a position of strength. I could see it now—the Fafnir in exchange for letting all of us go, all charges dropped. And from the profoundly uncomfortable looks on the faces of the ICE

agents approaching, I was pretty sure they’d be okay with that. The senior agent couldn’t pull his eyes away from Icky, who loomed on the porch, all four arms on her hips, grinning. “Hi there. I’m an illegal alien,” she said. The senior agent stopped. “I… uh, know that, yeah.”

Mandeville told the man to hand over the paperwork he was carrying to Miryam, who accepted it graciously and began studying it closely. In the meantime, the ICE agents hesitantly sidled up onto the porch. One of them turned to the senior agent and hissed something. “Are we sure they’re… safe?

Not contagious or something?”

Funboy bristled. “You are worried about me being contagious?

I’ll have you know that I am probably one of the most hygienic beings in known space. If there is any concern about contagion—”

He flicked his eyes significantly toward Icky, who shrugged. “I got all my shots and washed at least two of my hands. I’ll let you guys guess which two.”

Tutsi and her camera guy were filming the whole thing, dodging and weaving around Lieutenant Hudspeth, who was doing his best to get in their way and block their shot. The lead ICE agent came forward, looking like he’d much rather be anywhere else. “Mr. Tudor?

I’m Agent Carson. We have a warrant—”

“For my arrest, for illegally entering the United States, bringing illegal aliens—”

“Heh, that never gets old,” Icky put in. “—in and out of the country with me, and so on.” I took a breath and nodded. “I understand you’re here to do a job. We’ll cooperate.”

Carson looked deeply relieved. He probably expected to face—I don’t know, a battle against ray guns and monsters or something, or some situation that was going to be totally out of his element. He nodded. “I appreciate that, sir. Now, we’re going to have to cuff you folks. It’s procedure.”

Again, I nodded. “I understand.”

Carson turned and waved, and the other ICE agents came forward. The soldiers stood at ease in ranks nearby, watching in rapt fascination. Mandeville clumped up onto the porch beside me. “You sure you don’t want to make all this go away, Tudor?” he said. I glanced at him. “And miss a chance to become more of a celebrity than I already am?

I don’t think so.”

“Oh, don’t worry, we’ll be preventing Auffenberg’s little morning show from reaching very far. Your audience might consist of a few bored shift workers and some moms getting up early to get their kids off to school.” He leaned in closer. “You’re not going to have a chance to turn this into a media circus, Tudor, because you’re not going to be getting anywhere near the media.”

“Just so we’re clear—you mean the terrestrial media, right?

The Earth-bound type?

Because that’s not what I’m talking about here.”

Mandeville frowned. I smiled. “Actually, Colonel, every minute of all of this is going to be recorded and broadcast at our leisure, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it. You’ll never even figure out how it’s happening because you simply don’t have the means.” I let my smile turn into a smug grin. “You wanted to involve yourself with advanced alien tech, Colonel. Well, you’ve got your wish.”

Mandeville’s face tightened into a hard glare, but he didn’t say anything else and just backed off as an agent cuffed my hands, then turned to cuff Miryam. She smirked. “The last time I wore handcuffs was in the late eighties.”

I lifted an eyebrow at her. “Really?

Were you arrested as some sort of…

activist thing, or something?”

She gave me a coy look back. “Who said anything about being arrested?”

I blinked at her. “Uh—ah. Alrighty, then—”

“Are you going to subject me to an intimately intrusive search?”

Funboy asked the agent putting cuffs on him. The man frowned. “Uh… no, I don’t think we planned to—”

“You should. If I were in your position, I certainly would. I could be concealing all manner of items in various parts of my anatomy.” He looked the man up and down. “Come to think of it, I really should do that sometime. There are aspects of intimate human anatomy I’m still unfamiliar with. Would you be willing to participate in a study, should the opportunity arise?”

The man backed away slowly, shaking his head. “Van, we’ve got a problem over here,” Icky said. Two ICE agents had converged on her. One had managed to get a set of cuffs around her smaller wrists, but there was no way a pair were going to even begin to fit around her larger ones. “We might have a zip tie big enough,” one of the agents said, then looked up at Icky apologetically. “We don’t normally use these unless it’s essential, but—”

“Hey, do what you gotta do, bud.”

The agent tried putting a long zip tie around her big wrists. It just managed to wrap around and connect. Icky moved her arms a little, though, and it promptly snapped. “Oops. Sorry about that.”

Mandeville muttered something. “Agent Carson, I’m going to leave this matter to you. Can I get one of your agents to accompany me while I look around?” he asked, then shot me a smug glance. “I want to see what I can find hidden away around here.”

Carson gave the man a mildly contemptuous look and nodded. I didn’t bother to conceal my loathing for the man. The thought of him rooting around inside my house was offensive. I didn’t care about him discovering alien tech. It was the man pawing through things that were my memories, remembrances of my father and grandfather—

A dull whump-whump-whump rose in the distance. Perry spoke up in my ear bug. Helicopter inbound, boss. Military, a UH-60 Black Hawk, Perry said. I muttered an acknowledgement. More of Mandeville’s friends, probably, come for their share of the fun. The helicopter thumped into view from the west, roared overhead, then wheeled around and descended toward

the far side of the road, blowing dust and grit across everyone gathered in the yard. I glanced at Mandeville and was surprised to see that he was surprised. He obviously hadn’t been expecting this, nor had the ICE agents or the assembled soldiers. As the craft bounced and settled on its wheels in the field along the other side of the road—someone else’s property, though that didn’t really concern me much right now—I noticed it bore an innocuous label on its tail boom— USSTRATCOM—and beneath that, OFFUTT AFB. Offutt Air Force Base was the closest major Air Force installation to Pony Hollow, located just outside Omaha on the other side of Iowa. It would have been about an hour and a half flying time, which meant someone had been determined to get here. And USSTRATCOM was, I knew, United States Strategic Command, the outfit that oversaw everything that went into keeping America’s nuclear deterrence up and running and ready to go. I assumed this had something to do with Mandeville, but if he hadn’t been expecting this, then what the hell was going on?

A dapper-looking man in dark blue Air Force service dress dismounted from the helicopter and swept mirror-shaded eyes around as he made his way through the field and across the road. He put on his flight cap as he approached. He carried a small portfolio. A second man followed him, clad in a dark suit, also wearing mirror shades and walking with comfortable purpose. The approaching Air Force officer was, like Mandeville, a Colonel. The Army Captain commanding the contingent of soldiers saluted him as he passed. The ICE agents backed away, two of them, including Carson, remaining on the porch with me and the others of my crew. The new Colonel walked straight up… to me. The man in the suit followed but stopped a few paces behind. “Are you Van Tudor?” he asked me. I nodded. “I am.”

He nodded back, unzipped his portfolio, and extracted a sheaf of paper. “I have an order here declaring this farm, and a zone extending one kilometer from it in all directions, a Special Operations Area. This SOA is, effective immediately, under martial law, and all other jurisdictions are hereby suspended.”

Mandeville stepped forward. “What kind of bullshit is this?”

The other Colonel, whose name tag I saw read BURTON, handed Mandeville the papers. “The kind of bullshit that comes directly from the Pentagon, Colonel,” he said. Mandeville took the papers and leafed through them, a scowl deepening on his face. Colonel Burton, in the meantime, asked who was in charge of the ICE agents. Carson identified himself. “In that case, Agent, please release these people from custody immediately. You and your agency no longer have jurisdiction here,”

Burton said. We all just watched in stunned wonder as Carson—actually looking both relieved and grateful—nodded to his agents, who removed our cuffs. Well, all of us except Icky, who flexed her smaller wrists as she held them out—and snapped the handcuffs apart. They clattered onto the porch at her feet. She gave an apologetic shrug. “Sorry about that. Van’ll buy you a new set, though, won’t you, dear?”

Carson picked up the broken cuffs and smirked. “That’s okay. We can just write these off.” He looked up at Icky. “Oh, and thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for not trying to resist arrest.”

One of the other ICE agents nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, no shit.”

Icky shrugged. “Hey, we law enforcement types have to deal with enough assholes without some of them being one another, amiright?”

COLONEL MANDEVILLE FUMED. Colonel Burton was unmoved. “Colonel, if you have questions, you can direct them to the Joint Chiefs’

office in Washington—through the chain of command, of course.”

Mandeville swung a venomous glare from him to me. I just shrugged. “Hey, he’s the deus that popped out of the machina—”

“A flying machina, at that,” Miryam added. I gave her a grin. “Good one. Love a true classical jest. Anyway, this is as much a surprise to me as it is to you, Colonel Mandeville.”

Mandeville scowled at the papers again and looked up as the Captain commanding the contingent of troops approached, holding another paper. It had apparently been given to him by the unnamed man in the dark suit. “Excuse me, Colonel, but these new orders are crystal clear. I’m to secure this location and disallow any of”—he gestured at the ICE agents—“um, of this.”

Agent Carson shook his head. “Hey, this doesn’t ruin my day, believe me,” he said, directing his remaining agents back into their vehicles. “I’ll let you military types sort this out. Once you do, if you still need me—well, you can contact me through our chain of command,” he said, then clambered into his SUV. The door thunked closed, and they began the awkward process of turning their vehicles around to leave. Mandeville, his face a study in restrained rage, handed the papers back to Colonel Burton. “Fine.” He spun on me. “I’ll be back, Tudor, once this is sorted out,” he snapped. Perry, who’d reappeared and landed on the porch railing, balled up the end of his wing and shook it. “Next time, Gadget!” he rasped. Tutsi seized the moment to approach. “Well, now, Mister Tudor, this has been quite the day!

I’m not sure what to do with all of this footage we recorded, since it looks like all’s well that ends well!” She turned her bubbly smile to Colonel Burton. “I guess there’s not really a news story here, is there?”

Burton shook his head. “No, ma’am, I don’t believe there is.”

“Well, then, we’ll be off. I’ll be in touch, Mr. Tudor,” she said, letting her façade slip for an instant into a knowing look. I wondered if she’d had something to do with the fortuitous arrival of Colonel Burton and his mysterious orders from on high. But she clearly didn’t want to switch off her ditzy personality among so many people, so I just waved and let it go. Then I turned to Colonel Burton, who I most certainly was going to question. “Okay, Colonel, what is going on here?”

“Like I said, Mr. Tudor, this farm and the area around it has been declared a Special Operations Area.”

“What is that, exactly?” Miryam asked. “Imagine if a plane that may or may not be carrying a nuclear payload crashed somewhere in the United States. An SOA would be created around the area, to establish control for the purposes of investigation and recovery.”

“So you can just take a slice of American territory and subject it to martial law?”

Burton offered her a thin smile. “When you put it that way, ma’am, you make it sound sinister. I’d think you’d be more… ah, thankful for it, in this case.”

Miryam opened her mouth, but I spoke up, cutting her off. She was big into civil rights, which was fine, but Burton was right—gift horses and their mouths and all that. Mind you, I did want to make sure we hadn’t just swapped one massive headache for another. So I stepped closer to Burton and looked him in the eye. “Seriously, Colonel—what’s happening here?

Where is this coming from?”

Burton nodded. “Off the record?”

“Absolutely.”

“Let’s just say that your father and grandfather both had friends who ended up in influential positions. One of them became aware of your predicament with Colonel Mandeville and chose to intervene.”

“We must be talking someone pretty high up in the chain.”

Burton laughed. “Oh, that’s a fair statement. I’ll put it this way—there are only a couple of people who could be considered to outrank this individual. Incidentally, he says he really enjoyed your tenth birthday party.”

I stared, blinking. My tenth birthday?

I had… vague memories of a party here at the farm, a cake, candles—

And several other people who happened to be visiting either my father or grandfather. Men, though I remembered nothing about them, other than them being adults and in the military. And I only remembered that much because I managed to smear cake frosting onto one of them. I remembered being horrified and expecting some sort of punishment, but I had only ended up with some good-natured complaints. So one of those men, maybe the one I’d inadvertently frosted, had gone on to become—what, one of the Joint Chiefs?

It had to be someone at that level if they were only outranked by one or two people and they had the authority to declare this Special Operations Area. “Anyway, Mr. Tudor, this is only a temporary fix. An SOA is a time-limited thing”—he looked at Miryam—“for obvious reasons. We don’t like establishing martial law to begin with, much less leaving it open-ended. So this should buy you some time—”

“Until we can enact a more permanent solution,” a new voice said. I turned and saw it was the dark-suited man. I nodded at him. “And you are—?”

“A humble civil servant.”

“Really.”

The man extracted a smile from somewhere and stuck it on his face. “Don’t worry, Mr. Tudor. We’re on your side here.”

“And who is we, exactly?”

“That, Mr. Tudor, is something my superiors will have to reveal to you. In the meantime, please just carry on as you have been, knowing that we appreciate the efforts you’ve been making to protect this country—and beyond.”

THAT WAS AS MUCH as I was able to pry out of either him or Burton. They mounted up on their helicopter and flew off, while the contingent of soldiers mounted their trucks and pulled away in a cloud of dust. And then it was back to only me, Miryam, Icky, Funboy, and Perry on the porch. “Can someone explain to me what just happened?” Miryam finally said. I shrugged. “I think there’s a power struggle going on between—ah, powers. Factions inside our government.”

“Maybe outside it, too,” Perry put in. “I can’t help feeling that Mr. Suit there was representing more than just the government or the military.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Anyway, there are wheels turning within wheels here.”

I sighed. “As if intricate schemes and plots out there weren’t bad enough”—I jabbed a hand skyward—“now we’ve got them simmering all around us down here, too.”

Torina’s voice came on the comm. “Van, Perry just told us what’s going on. Should we bring the Fafnir back down to the farm?”

“Yeah, you might as well. Everyone be careful, though, and keep a close watch out.”

“For what?” Icky asked. “I don’t know. Anything and everything. While I’m happy the unexpected cavalry arrived, I’m finding it hard not to be more than a little suspicious.”

3

WE’D SEEMED to have settled into a sort of cold-war state. Burton and his mysterious suited friend had insisted we could carry on with business as usual, free of worry that Mandeville or someone like him was going to take another run at the farm. They’d also assured me that, the idea of martial law notwithstanding, the military had no intention of enforcing it in any sort of ongoing way, like posting troops on or around the farm. There would be flyovers of airborne assets—probably drones—to keep watch for potential trouble directed at the farm, and we were given contact information at Offutt Air Force Base to call if we encountered trouble ourselves. There were also apparently going to be other assets available for quick deployment to the farm to deal with said trouble, if necessary. It all seemed tidy. Convenient. Scripted, even. And it rang my alarm bell loud and clear. “Maybe this really is one of your grandfather’s friends doing his grandson a favor,” Torina suggested. I nodded as we prepared to head back to Cantullin Station, and then on to Anvil Dark, fussing about the farm as we collectively dragged our feet.“Looks that way. But… I don’t know. I’ve been trained to suspect kind acts from government employees, no matter who they knew—”

“Damned right,” Perry said from his perch atop one of the Fafnir’s thruster arrays. He looked out over the fields, cloud shadows chasing each other from west to east in the steady breeze. His beak opened again, eyes

flashing amber as he spoke. “There might be a parallel dimension out there with free lunches somewhere, but this sure as hell ain’t it.”

“How long can this realistically last?

I have given myself a passing familiarity with your nation-state’s laws and have to conclude that imposition of martial law is inconsistent with its stated principles,” Funboy said. I nodded at that, too. “You’re right. It is. Frankly, this is an abuse of what’s supposed to be a system for… things like the example Burton himself gave. An aircraft carrying nukes crashes somewhere in the US, and you want to exert immediate, positive control. Creating a zone of martial law around while the area’s made safe only makes sense. It protects the public and national security.”

I glanced around. “This, though—hell, I’m the beneficiary of it, and it feels wrong to me.”

Icky was unmoved. “Why?

It just means that your military is calling the shots around here for a while. It’s not like the farm’s suddenly a free-for-all law-wise, right?

I mean, I can’t grab someone like that asshole Mandeville, drag him here, beat the shit out of him, and just get away with it, right?”

“Icky, are you asking that to confirm it’s the case, or because you’re planning something?” I asked her. She smiled and shrugged. “Asking for a friend.”

I rolled my eyes at her and turned back to Funboy. “Anyway, to answer your question, based on what Burton told me, it appears that this Special Operations Area can remain in place for up to thirty days. Then it has to be renewed, and that’s going to require some sort of review to happen. He was also quite candid that it probably wouldn’t pass muster—and that means renewal is a longshot at best. As if that wasn’t enough good news, his friend in the suit said they were working on a more permanent solution.”

“Which is?” Miryam asked. She’d just exited the Fafnir, where she was helping Netty-P stow some provisions we’d stocked up for the trip—thanks to a grocery delivery out of Elkader. One of the corollaries of our Special Operations Area was that, outside it, we were no longer under its protection. I didn’t trust Mandeville—or, for that matter, Plowitz or Clemenceau—to not have people lurking nearby, waiting to pounce the moment we stepped outside of our nifty bureaucratic force field. “They didn’t say. The best and only answer I got from them is that it’s something that’s going to involve actual politics, state and federal, so I

don’t think they want to play their hand too early.”

“So what’s the fallback if that isn’t going to work out?

If we assume that, in just under thirty days, the farm loses its protection—what then?

We should have a contingency plan ready just in case,” Torina said. I stopped, hands on my hips, looking up at the Fafnir. “I’m not sure. We need a base on Earth. But it’s not like I’ve got other properties scattered around the globe. I’m not a mogul.”

Torina grinned. “Your wife is.”

“Fair, but you just own most of one planet. Or moon. Whichever, you get my point,” I said, looping an arm around her. She leaned toward me, her hair covering my eyes for a moment as a breeze kicked up. “I’m sure there’s no end of countries that would be willing to take you in, Van,” Miryam said. “Of course, they’re going to want something in return. There are no free lunches. Ever.”

“There oughta be,” Icky groused. Funboy gave her a long look. “Allow me to introduce you to a concept known as food cost, of which we can deduce something else known as profit. You see, when a restaurant—”

Icky stuck her bifurcated tongue out at him, then blew a passable raspberry. “I see our grasp of economics is in good order. Now then, as to our…

incipient invitations,” I said, waving a hand at the Fafnir, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we get overtures from some of them in the very near future. Hey, the United States is making your life miserable?

Come and set up shop with us, and make sure you bring all your cool tech and weapons and stuff

—”

“And me. For eye candy,” Icky said. I tilted my head at her. “To be fair, you are striking.”

She mimicked swinging her hammer. “Clever, boss. But I still feel pretty.”

Netty-P spoke up over the comm. “Van, hate to interrupt Icky manifesting her best life, but we’ve got some Peacemaker business happening. One of Panzygrus’s Lagrange Point surveillance bots just detected a class 10 fast freighter making a run toward the Earth’s surface. If we launch now, we should intercept it at about the time it starts to hit atmosphere.”

I looked around. “Okay, folks, let’s saddle up. Miryam, I hate to just leave you like this—”

“Don’t worry about me, Van. I can take care of myself. Besides, I now officially have nothing to do but live here, in your house, lest I be arrested when I step outside the magical barrier. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at writing, but I’ve never had the time.” She put on an exaggerated thoughtful look. “Hmm. Maybe a story about the rousing adventures of an interstellar cop who found a starship in his backyard. What do you think?”

I smirked. “Sounds kinda—what’s the word?

Trope-y?

Trope-ish?

But you never know, it might sell a few copies.”

“Especially if I’m featured,” Icky said, grinning. “Naturally. Eye candy and all that. Okay. Anyway, everyone, get your asses aboard this ship I found in my backyard, and let’s get moving. We’ve got bad guys to catch.”

Funboy pointed to his face as we began moving. “Make sure Miryam describes my rugged good looks.”

I bowed my head, then gestured everyone toward the ship. “Of course. You’re nothing if not chiseled.”

And a fuzzy germophobe with a penchant for hot Canadian spies, Perry sent. I snorted but kept my face neutral. And cheese. Don’t forget the cheese. THE FAFNIR SHUDDERED as we punched through a turbulent layer of atmosphere about sixty klicks above Cape Town. We were plunging steadily westward, toward a point somewhere in the middle of the South Atlantic. The class 10 we were chasing had refused to answer our comm warnings, so we’d fired on her, attempting to inflict only enough damage to make atmospheric insertion impossible. That would force her to fire her drive and raise her orbit again, or so the theory went. But she’d either been damaged more severely than we’d thought, or her occupants were determined to land in one of the most remote and uninhabitable places on Earth. Either way, she stubbornly continued her descent. I’d expected her to simply break up as she plowed into the thickening atmosphere—but she didn’t. If we’d damaged her that severely, then her

chances of surviving the aerodynamic ordeal of insertion probably were slim to none, especially given the soupy cloud banks and swirling rain. But she stayed in one piece and managed to transition to atmospheric flight—more or less. Her trajectory now had her landing somewhere in the vicinity of Tristan da Cunha, a cluster of volcanic islands roughly halfway between Africa and South America. It was, I concluded, the actual middle of nowhere. I cocked my head at the view out the canopy. With the last bit of cloud-spotted African landmass sliding out of view to the right, we had nothing but the restless, wind-tossed gray sprawl of the South Atlantic ahead of us. “Huh. Why do we say they ‘land’ if they come down in water?

Wouldn’t they ‘water?’”

“Because saying I’m going to water the ship down there makes it sound like some chugging old-timey steam locomotive,” Perry said. “Or a houseplant. Just let me water this ship, see if it comes up in bloom,” Torina put in. Icky was more practical. “Isn’t the right word for landing in water crashing?”

“A ship could deliberately choose to land—or water—in the water, though. We did, that time we dove for cover in Lake Michigan in the Frankie,” I countered. “Well, whether it’s landing or crashing, it’s now on track to intersect the surface about thirty klicks southwest of Tristan da Cunha, not far from Inaccessible Island,” Netty-P reported. “Inaccessible Island?

What makes it so inaccessible?” Torina asked. “That’s actually its name—Inaccessible Island. It’s probably named that because it’s virtually impossible to land a boat anywhere on it. Now, though, it’s a nature preserve, so it’s out of bounds and inaccessible for that reason, too.”

“It’s a bird sanctuary, actually, so it gets my stamp of approval,” Perry said. “My people need our own place. For too long, we’ve served at the beck and call of—“

I sighed. “I like birds—usually.”

I felt Perry’s golden gaze turn on me. “Gonna need some clarification on that, Van, particularly that presumably deliberate ‘ usually.’”

“Had a group of teenaged emus take a dump on my rental car in a place called Stuart’s Well, Australia, and it cost me twenty bucks to wash it off. So you might say I have a grudge of sorts. But the birds on those islands ahead seem—”

“To be the kind that won’t shit their brains out on your ride?” Icky offered. “Thank you, big girl. That was classy and succinct. Anyway, let’s shy them away from that island. It’s called ‘Inaccessible’ for a reason—oh. Shit. Duck, everyone.”

The class 10 opened fire on us, spewing point-defense slugs in shimmering tracer streaks. I dodged and wove the Fafnir at random, but we still took a couple of hits, one of which blew a REAB module. I cursed. Those damned modules weren’t cheap, and I watched the debris spin away behind us in a display of falling money. And I was consumed with annoyance at that cost—and the fact that it resulted in a small weakness in my ship. I blew out my breath, then settled into my chair with a look of disgust. “Fine. We’ve tried to be civilized and restrained, but now these guys are shitting on my ride, so to speak. Torina, let’s put them into the ocean and see if the survivors are interested in being rescued.”

Torina nodded. “On it,” she said, deftly tapping at her weapons panel. She fired a single mass-driver round that slammed into the other ship’s engine bell, blasting a chunk out of it. That precluded them firing their drive and trying to escape. She slammed a second round into their engineering section, just ahead of the drive bell. It finished what the first shot had started, causing her reactor to completely shut down, leaving her without power. And no power meant no gravity polarizers or thrusters, aside from a few bursts drawn from the emergency power cells. And no polarizers or thrusters left her as aerodynamic as a brick, so she plunged abruptly seaward without any course deviation at all. We followed her down. Tristan da Cunha was now in sight off to our right, while a rugged, cliff-ringed island just to our left must be Inaccessible Island. Sure enough, the other ship fell toward the waves just a few klicks offshore of the rugged volcanic rock, ejecting an escape pod while about a hundred meters up. The ship itself continued on for another klick until it finally impacted the gray, rolling waves in a plume of spray and breaking up in a spectacular fashion. “Ouch,” I murmured. “Yeah, what he said,” Icky added. “Boss, they hit hard.”

Torina winced. “They hit without brakes.”

Rab swept a hand over his screen, then made a face. “They hit at just over two hundred and forty klicks. Not what I’d call a landing at all. More like—”

“A fatal crash with catastrophic injuries, likely the complete separation of limbs paired with the liquefaction of softer organs,” Funboy interjected. “Eww. Kidney soup,” Icky said. “Don’t knock it. The British built an empire with that, uh, cuisine,” I said. Torina’s lips twitched. “Cuisine?

Who knew you were so generous, love.”

I held out my hands, smiling. Then I looked back down to see most of the wreckage slip beneath the surface, leaving a heaving field of flotsam bobbing in the swells. “Umm. Okay, immediate concern—any sign of her antimatter pod?” I asked Netty-P. That was my main worry. Her fusion fuel was basically just deuterium and helium-3, both environmentally inert, but the antimatter that powered her twist drive posed a whole different scale of threat. Antimatter pods were built to imposing specs, sure, and weren’t only almost indestructible, they’d remain such for a very long time—centuries, at least. But “almost” indestructible was still too uncertain for my tastes, so if we could recover the pod—

“I’ve got it,” Netty-P said. “They’re designed to break free and float in the event of this sort of crash, and this one seems to have worked as designed.” As she spoke, an icon lit up on the canopy, highlighting one of the bits of debris still rising and falling in the wind-tossed waves. “Okay. Rab, take Funboy in the Frankie to go and recover it, then come join us. We’re going back to the escape pod they ejected to see if anyone’s alive and willing to surrender.”

“On the way,” Rab said, heading aft, Funboy in tow. I kept the Fafnir circling, monitoring both the escape and antimatter pods while Rab launched the Frankie. Then we aimed ourselves at the former and descended, sidling our way closer to the bobbing sphere and whoever—or whatever—it contained. WE DECIDED TO BE CAUTIOUS, using both the Frankie and the Fafnir to approach the floating escape pod. By opening the airlock doors on each ship, one of us—Funboy in the Frankie, with Rab’s BAG, and Icky with an auto-slugger in the Fafnir—could cover the pod with the threat of small-arms fire. I stood beside Icky in the Fafnir’s airlock, both of us tethered against being knocked into the iron-gray South Atlantic heaving just a few meters below. We were all fully suited up and helmeted, just in case this turned into a firefight. A powerful wind boomed through the airlock, speckling my visor with spray. I configured my comm to use the ship’s external speakers, which would amplify both my voice, and those of whoever showed themselves in the pod. “This is Peacemaker Van Tudor. You have unlawfully entered Earth’s atmosphere, which is prohibited under a cordon established by the Peacemaker Guild—” I went on to cite the specific reference to the Guild’s Writ of Cordon. “You will immediately surrender yourselves to be taken into lawful custody—unless you really want to be left here in the middle of watery nowhere, that is.”

We waited. A hatch finally popped open on the escape pod, revealing an Usu and a small, feline-looking alien probably not much more than a meter tall. “Holy crap, that’s adorable, even through a gunsight,” Icky said. Perry cut in on the comm. “That’s a Barundi. They originate from somewhere outside known space. Those that do show up tend to be bounty hunters, assassins, that sort of thing.”

“That… is a bounty hunter or an assassin?

Really?

It looks like it belongs in an Internet meme about ‘cheezburgers,’” I replied. “Don’t let looks deceive you. They can be vicious little killers. Think the bunny rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

I zoomed my visor for a closer look. It was adorable, broadly reminding me of Puss in Boots from Shrek, except clad in some sort of close-fitting armor patterned with blue and green lines like Celtic knotwork. Its flat, wide face held oversized dark eyes and a mouth full of sharp teeth. “Mean little bastard,” I mumbled, making my assessment on the spot. “Repeat my command, please?”

Netty-P ran my speech back, the words booming across wind-torn waves and foamy chop. “We’re listening!” the Barundi replied seconds later, its voice amplified over the wind and back through the comm into my ears. “Maybe we can start with something simple, like what the hell are you doing on my planet?”

The Usu looked at the Barundi, shrugged, then looked back up at me. “Pest control.”

“I don’t see any cockroaches. Or… do I?”

“Not us. An Usu named Rigobrutiz. Known murderer and thief. He actually had one of his arms replaced with a removable pulse rifle. He does his own killing.”

“And you probably put his corpse on the bottom of this puddle you call an ocean, you bastards,” the Barundi snapped. “Easy, whiskers. We shot you down because you were breaking the law, remember?

And now you’re floating in a life pod in one of the emptiest pieces of ocean on the planet, with us being your only ride out of here. So I’d drop the attitude, if I were you.”

“More like cattitude, the little shit,” Perry said. The Barundi bristled but did rein their tone in. “We went through a lot to run that asshole down, me and my friend Thraxxen here,” they said, gesturing at the Usu. “And now we’ve lost him and our ship, so you’ll forgive me for not feeling especially charitable, thank you very much.”

“Why were you bringing him to Earth, anyway?” Icky asked. “We weren’t. We snagged him from his ship as he was leaving your planet.”

I shook my head. “Uh, no. Try again. You were descending toward the surface when we detected you. That’s kinda the opposite of leaving.”

The Barundi shrugged. “Yeah, yeah. Fine. He had info aboard his ship suggesting he might have an accomplice down here. We decided to come and check it out—since we’d come all this way, figured we might as well make it a double payday.”

This time, I nodded with understanding. They’d gotten greedy. Greedy, I could understand. Not approve of, mind you, but understand. “Anyway, we had Rigobrutiz, and now we don’t. He’s probably in pieces somewhere down there,” the Barundi went on, pointing over the side of the bobbing escape pod in the gray water. “Perry, do we have any mention of this Rigobrutiz in Guild archives?” I asked. “Yup. In fact, there are several bounties out on him, totaling four hundred thousand bonds. None of it is Guild money, though. It’s all posted by people he presumably pissed off.”

I whistled at that. Four hundred thousand bonds. “That’s a lot of cheese.”

Icky and Funboy replied in unison. “Don’t I wish.”

“Yeah. Four hundred thousand bonds. Now you understand my less than bubbly mood,” the Barundi snapped. “So why the hell didn’t you just heave-to when we ordered you to?

If you’re after legitimate bounties, we’d have just let you go on your way,” I said. “Uh, I think I can answer that, boss,” Netty-P said. “This Rigobrutiz might not have had any Guild money posted for him directly, but it doesn’t mean he was in the clear. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was a suspect in multiple murders, at least one Theft of Person case, and was also suspected of—you know what, it’s such a nice day, let’s not ruin it with, ah, the details.”

“That bad?” Torina asked. “Let’s put it this way. No matter how bad you think it was, it was worse.”

I gave a grim nod. Now I got it. If the Barundi and their Usu sidekick had let us board them, and we’d found this Rigobrutiz in their hands, we’d have been duty-bound to take him into custody. That would have cost them the vast majority of their bounty. At best, the Guild would have offered them a bit of compensation, maybe ten or twenty percent, as a sort of finders fee. So, again, the answer was greed. “What I’m hearing here is that we should go down and recover that body. It would help us wrap up a bunch of cases all at once,” I said. I did it mainly to see what sort of reaction I got from Barundi, to see if I could flush out some other motives or schemes that might be in play here. But it was the Usu that reacted to it. “That would be inadvisable,” it said

—whereupon the Barundi leapt up onto the pod exterior, leveled a slug pistol, and fired into the Usu at point-blank range. It kept shooting, emptying its magazine as the Usu desperately tried to return fire. A few seconds later, it was over, the Usu a shattered mess of gory components. We all just watched, stunned at the sudden explosion of violence. I finally spoke up. “Um… what the hell was that all about?”

“That was Rigobrutiz,” the Barundi said, pointing at the remains of its companion. “He must have somehow swapped places with Thraxxen, the bastard. And that means Thraxxen’s body is the one in the deeps now.”

“Gee, don’t sound so broken up about it.”

The Barundi shrugged. “I was getting tired of him anyway. By the way, my name is Ettner.”

“O—kay. Well, welcome to Earth, I guess, Ettner. Hold on, and we’ll bring you aboard.”

I told Netty-P to move the Fafnir closer so we could pull Ettner into the airlock. As we slid toward him, he pointed at the body that was apparently Rigobrutiz’s. “So this is the guy you want for all those charges and stuff, and I found him for you. My question is, when do I get my payout from the Guild?”

Icky shook her head. “Just found out his partner was murdered, gunned down the guy who did it, and the only thing he’s interested in now is the money. What an asshole.”

I smirked as I reached down to help Ettner aboard. “An adorable asshole, though.”

4

PERRY DID a quick dive to find out if the wreck of Ettner’s ship was still accessible—and it was, having come to rest on a spur of volcanic rock thrust out from Inaccessible Island at a depth of only about forty meters. He poked around, found a couple of interesting items, and retrieved them while Rab and Funboy circled above in the Frankie. We took the Fafnir, in the meantime, to a desolate piece of Tristan da Cunha coastline, landed, and proceeded to interrogate Ettner. The little alien proved to be surprisingly cooperative for someone who probably lived a life of almost constant deception. When I asked him about it, he shrugged. “Very little of what I do is actually illegal, believe it or not. I try to stay on the good side of the law. I find it makes life generally easier.”

“Bounty-hunting is a completely legal activity in known space,” Netty-P pointed out. “As long as you don’t violate other laws while doing it, of course.”

“Which I don’t. Mostly, anyway. I mean, sure, I suppose I’m occasionally guilty of trespassing, breaking into places, that sort of thing.”

Ettner stuck out his hands, revealing small pads like a house cat. The sumbitch really was adorable. “So if you want to arrest me for that sort of stuff, then take me away, officer.”

I sniffed and smiled. “Yeah, I’ve got better things to do, thanks. Although, I’d point out that you are guilty of one serious crime—breaching the Guild’s Cordon on Earth.”

“Oh. Yeah. That. Um… my bad?”

I decided not to confine Ettner. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to charge him. He had the air of someone that might be more valuable to me as an asset. It really depended on what Perry found in the wreckage of his ship. For now, I left him free in the Fafnir’s crew lounge under the menacing gaze of Icky. Perry and the others finally returned, letting us lift the Fafnir and bring the Frankie back aboard. By then, it was getting dark, turning the wind-tossed South Atlantic from a steel gray wave-scape to something even more ominous. With somber clouds scudding overhead, driven by a booming wind, and nothing but scrubby plants clinging to foreboding volcanic cliffs, it didn’t exactly scream vacation spot. I was glad to point the Fafnir’s nose skyward and leave the dreary little cluster of lonely islands behind. As we ascended, Perry scoured the material he’d recovered from Ettner’s ship. We set course for Cantullin Station to make a stopover before we headed for Anvil Dark. Part of it was that I wanted to check in and see how the station and the Iowa were doing. Part of it, though, was that I wanted to show it off to Ettner. Now that Cantullin Station was almost fully armed and the Iowa was once more fully operational with a trained Conoku crew, I was happy to let word start getting out about how well-protected Earth was. And the gregarious Ettner seemed like the perfect vector for it, straight into the zeitgeist of the known space underworld. As we passed the orbit of Jupiter, Perry filled me in regarding what he’d found, most notably in a data core he retrieved from the wreckage. We then dawdled along, our course decelerating us to a relative stop with Cantullin Station. I parked the Fafnir about a klick away from the Iowa, then called Ettner to the cockpit. “Take a look over there,” I said, pointing at the Iowa. “She’s a fully armed battlecruiser, heavily upgraded, with the best crew in known space.”

I shifted his attention to the center display, which had a zoomed image of Cantullin Station. “And that installation has more big guns than most fleets and the willingness to use them. With enthusiasm.”

Okay, more guns than most fleets was a stretch, but it got the point across. I also noted that, at any given time, there were one or two other warships in the system, as well as surveillance assets, none of which I described in detail and instead kept ominously vague. “Why are you showing me all this?” Ettner asked. “To make a point—one that I’m happy for you to share around during your, uh, travels. That the Solar System is well-protected and that no one, and I mean no one, is going to get in or out of it without us knowing and having something to say about it.”

“Yours is not the first ship we’ve consigned to a watery grave,” Torina noted. “Or a fiery one. Sometimes they just, you know, blow up and kill everyone on board,” Icky added. “The implication of all of this is that you’re going to let me go,” Ettner replied. I smiled. “Wow. It always ends up about you, doesn’t it?”

“Well, since I’m the only person who matters to me, then yeah, it does. Anyway, is that a yes?”

I sat back. I should actually hate this little alien for the utterly amoral, self-serving little shit that he was. But just as I found it hard to hate the very similar Alannis Myer, I found myself almost… respecting, I guess, Ettner the Barundi. He was, indeed, a self-serving little shit. But he made absolutely no effort to pretend otherwise, so what you saw is what you got. I didn’t like him by any means. But I knew where I stood with him, and that was more than I could say for most people. I smiled. “I actually haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you yet.”

“Hey, I’m just—”

“The one who had a full and detailed analysis of my home planet, the opportunities to make money from it, the opportunities for trade—and by trade, I mean smuggling?”

Ettner tried to look defiant, then sagged a little. “Yeah, things happened pretty fast. I kind of forgot to wipe my ship’s archives—which I assume you found.”

“Perry did, yeah. And he scrutinized them thoroughly, then he and I talked. By the way, thanks for doing all that, bird. Damn fine work.”

“Don’t mention it, boss. Ettner’s a chatty fellow. Probably keeps a diary about his thoughts and feelings somewhere, too.” He puts a wing across his chest, eye flashing, “Now, I try to see the best in people. It’s one of my finest qualities—although there is a lot of competition for that. Anyway, if I were a more suspicious type, I’d think the rogue Usu, crash, and subsequent

brawl were all, ah, intentional. I mean, a little digging tells me that Ettner Truvanao has a spotty record with the law, at best.”

Perry turned to Ettner, his tone bland. “And, yeah, that’s his full name. It’s not a family name, it’s what the Barundi call a second name. And once you search Guild archives for said second name, Truvanao, lo and behold, you find some outstanding writs. None of them are especially major, but they’re enough to make pressing charges worthwhile.”

I watched Ettner as Perry spoke. He didn’t sag more, but he did adopt an intensely weary resignation, like every French detective who’s just been told he can’t smoke in the hospital room. Perry flashed his amber gaze at Ettner. “So what do you think, whiskers?

Care to hurry this along?

Talk about the farm—yes, the farm, where you were ultimately headed, according to your comms with whomever was employing you. They used a cutout or two, Van, so it’s unclear who wrote the check, so to speak.”

Perry hadn’t mentioned this part to me—probably so that my reaction would be one of genuine anger, which it was. I sat up, seething. “The farm?

My farm?

You were going to do exactly what on my farm?

That’s my home. Our sanctum. It’s not for sale, and it sure as hell isn’t a stomping ground for some rogue kitten to make profit at our cost.”

Torina put her hand on my arm. I expected her to call for some restraint, but it turned out to not be that at all. She wanted her turn. “I think we should have a firm policy in place for people who violate the sanctity of the farm. And Earth, for that matter. A firm, harsh and unforgiving one.” She worked her jaw for a second, then exhaled, her eyes like lasers. “No exceptions.”

Ettner’s ears flattened, his almost feline face taut with anger and surprise. “Look, I’m no threat. My ship is trash, I’m stranded, and I’ve got to return the advance we took for this job.”

I pointedly shrugged. “I didn’t hear a single word in there that is my problem.”

“I know. But, look. You’ve got a reputation as… fair. Lethal, but fair.”

“Lethal, but fair. What a great slogan. Time for some branded merch,”

Perry cut in. It actually was funny, but I ignored him and focused on the Barundi. “My reputation and how it’s about to evolve is predicated on your actions. I’ve become a bit ornery about my planet, so you’ve got about one

minute to talk before we enact—bird, what will we enact?”

“How about Article Two of the Convention on Prisoners, Paragraphs A and C, to wit—The Peacemaker shall immediately capture and neutralize agents determined to have lethal intent, where such neutralization will protect innocent lives and uninvolved property. In accordance, the Peacemaker may use all appropriate means to negate the risk to life and place.”

Torina smiled. “Don’t you just love vague legal speech?”

Ettner responded by putting his hands up in full surrender. Torina immediately made an aww sound. I shot her a glance. “Uh… my dear?”

“Look!

He’s got toe beans!

They’re adorable!

Despite him being, you know, a galactic criminal and all.”

I sighed and looked back at Ettner. “Alright, please talk. We’re about ten seconds away from looking at kitten pictures for an hour, and if spacing you and your toe beans is what it’s going to take to head that off, I’ll do it in a heartbeat.”

Ettner nodded. “Okay. Look, all I know is you’ve recently recovered something like two hundred, ah, compulsory workers—”

“Stolen persons.”

“Right. Sure. Stolen persons. Anyway, you’ve basically ended a particular group’s ability to make money. They had to give it all back to their, um, investors when you took those people back. So they wanted to gain access to the places you’re likely to, you know, talk. About stuff.”

“Where are they?” I asked. “Where are what?”

“The bugs?

The devices?

The cameras or surveillance devices or whatever the hell they are.”

“They were crated aboard my ship. But I guess they’re sort of down in your ocean now. Quite a way down, I imagine.”

I said nothing, content to leave Ettner thinking the remains of his ship had sunk to some unfathomable depth, with minimal recovery of gear or cargo. Perry spoke up. “Someone is desperate, boss. If you consider the average contract on a stolen person is worth one hundred thousand bonds at a minimum, then we dinged someone for about twenty million bonds.”

“But the loss doesn’t stop there,” Netty-P explained. “A lot of those contracts were probably financed, and I doubt it was at generous rates. So

they lost all that juicy interest, too, along with the cost of actually stealing the people in the first place. And then there’s the hit to their reputation and credibility.”

Perry clicked his beak with unalloyed joy. “Who’s going to want to do business with them after this?

It’s a staggering amount for one organization to lose, especially in a single blow.”

I looked out at the Iowa for a moment, where she hung majestically in space. Then I turned back to Ettner. “Ettner, you’re not going to die today. But your career as a crook will die. In fact, it already has. We’re going to take you to Anvil Dark, where you’ll answer for this attempt to run the cordon and bug a Peacemaker—

which sounds to me like interfering in a lawful investigation. But I’ll give you some friendly advice. Start talking and don’t stop until the Guild asks you to shut up. If you do that, I’ll arrange to swing things in your favor. You know, a suspended sentence or something like that. And if you don’t, then I’ll swing things the other way, make sure it’s your, ah, final time among us. I think I can make enough stick to you that you’ll be in our prison barge for a very long time. Are we clear on this little deal I just told you you’ve made?”

Ettner sighed and nodded “Yeah, we are. So, in the interests of showing my good faith, did you want to know about the money and where it came from?

Because it wasn’t out there,” he said, waving a hand vaguely toward the Iowa. I sat up. “You mean the pay for this job was coming from Earth?”

“It was.”

“I want a name.”

“Vawna Sanders. Big woman, fond of guns. She worked for—”

“Blackstar Security,” I said, sitting up even more. “You know her?”

“I do. We met. Years ago.”

“That must have been before your term as a Peacemaker, ’cause I’ve got no record of that name,” Perry said. I nodded. “It was. It was back in my computer security consultant—”

“Hacker,” Perry said, pretending to cough. “—days. I never made her as someone into… kinetic ops. Figured her to be more of a back-office type.” I looked at Ettner. “Are you sure she was your actual employer?”

“She was the one with the money. That’s all I know,” Ettner replied. Torina leaned in. “So what was your bug-out location?

If things went wrong on Earth?”

“Which they did,” Icky muttered, grinning slyly. “That was one of the things I didn’t like about this op. My fallback was eight twists away, inside The Deeps. I just assumed it wasn’t an actual option and was… I don’t know, smoke and mirrors intended to conceal something. My fallback to my fallback was to take everything I had to an engineer named Uvistan Sere,” Ettner said. Okay, that was a name I didn’t recognize. “Where?”

Ettner’s answer was flatly matter-of-fact. “Pont Alus Kyr.”

I STARED at the image Perry put on the display, that of a Gajur in a professional head-and-shoulders shot, like something from a product brochure—which it apparently was. “Uvistan Sere, medical doctor, with a specialization in bioengineering. She has a reasonably distinguished if not really remarkable career, has no outstanding writs or warrants, and is… kinda boring, actually. She’s the Gajur equivalent of unbuttered wheat toast,” Perry said. “That bland?

Gah. Okay, kitty.” I looked at Ettner. “To clarify—this is the person you were supposed to go to if things went badly on Earth?”

“Which they did,” Icky reiterated, savoring the criminal’s discomfort. Ettner had some stones, or he was galactically stupid, because he shot Icky a murderous glance. She smiled, then reached out and patted his head. Twice. “Good kitty,” Icky said, and the tone froze our blood. It was far from friendly. The tone held… possibilities. He flinched, then looked at the image with renewed interest. “Yeah, that’s her,” Ettner replied, turning back to the picture. “It matches what I was given, anyway.”

“So why her?”

Ettner shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve never met her before, never even passed the time of day with her. She was the name given to me, so I

assumed that if I showed up, she’d know why and what to do about it.” He shrugged again, his little b-suit creaking. “But because I never had the opportunity to do that, there’s really nothing else I can tell you. Which, I might add, is by design. In my line of work, the less my associates and I know about one another, the better it generally is.”

“There is one bit of interesting information about Sere,” Perry put in. “In reviewing her work history, I saw that about ten standard years ago, she was involved in a medical relief operation on a planet called Gone 5U9, or just Gone, out on the far edge of The Deeps.”

“Okay, what’s interesting about that?” Torina asked. “Well, when I cross-reference her work history with pretty much every other timeline I can access, looking for points of intersection, I found one. It turns out that a certain Jocelyn Wallis was also involved in a relief operation on Gone 5U9 at the same time Sere was there.”

That lifted my eyebrows a little. “My mother?

Involved in a relief operation?”

“Hey, I don’t know what to tell you. The GKU apparently considered this operation important because your mother and several of her so-called Feral comrades all pitched in. There aren’t many details available, since Gone is outside Guild jurisdiction, but there’s enough to suggest your mother and Sere probably at least met.”

I sat back and pondered it for a moment. Frankly, I had been looking for an opportunity to do something collegial with my mother, something that would start giving a shared history that wasn’t all about conflict and strife, or else neglect. This was perfect. It was a low-profile operation that, at least on the surface, sounded like something positive. And it happened a long time ago, so it wouldn’t be fresh in my mother’s memory. Even so, I wanted to play it light and easy. “Netty-P, send a message to my mother. Ask her to make her way to Anvil Dark at her earliest convenience. You can give her all the details we’ve gone over here, then tell her that I’d appreciate her help in finding out what Uvistan Sere’s involvement in all of this is.”

“Will do. It might take a while and involve some expense, though, since I’m not even sure where she is. Blind twist comms can get pricey.”

“Don’t worry about it. Do whatever it takes.”

“Ooh, a blank check. Time for some retail therapy.”

I grinned at her, then turned to Ettner. “Policy says that I’m now supposed to lock you up in one of our holding cells for the trip to Anvil Dark. I’m prepared to be a really nice guy and not do that, if you’ll promise not to get into trouble, try to screw around with my ship, or become a pain.”

Icky loomed over him. Perry tapped his shoulder. “Look up. Look waaaay up.”

Ettner, who barely came to mid-thigh on Icky, did just that. Icky grinned down, her massive teeth gleaming with quiet menace. She tapped Ettner with one finger, then removed her hand. “What Van said?

Don’t do any of those things. I’ll be watching.”

Funboy leaned against the bulkhead, then pointed at Ettner. “So… will I.” One side of his face lifted in a rictus. He was smiling, sort of, which was something he did now and then, but then he added an attempted wink. Somehow, it was a threat so pure I felt myself flinch. Ettner stared for a moment, then nodded, surrounded by danger far more real than he’d ever known. 5

WE DROPPED OFF, to Funboy’s relief, as the passenger was both gregarious and uninterested in hygiene. My mother, as it turned out, was close enough to Anvil Dark that she actually beat us there. Apparently, her ship had taken damage in a skirmish with a smuggler trying to run arms to a dissident group in the Esstai Confederacy. The uneasy truce between the Esstai and the Arhun, who’d been fighting a bitter war for years, was still holding, with the GKU helping both sides enforce it. But it seemed that not everyone was happy about it, with the Esstai dissidents agitating to renew the hostilities. We arrived at Anvil Dark, and I was immediately asked to report to Volffin, the Schegith who’d been named the Guild’s newest Master. Gerhardt’s position was still empty, probably because there was some remaining expectation that I was going to give in and accept it. I had no plans to do that—but I couldn’t help a nagging feeling it was eventually going to happen whether I wanted it to or not. I found my mother meeting with Volffin and his new Justiciar, a Nesit Peacemaker named Casaril. I knew Casaril, though not well. He’d been another up-and-comer in the Guild, rising from new Peacemaker Initiate to Third Veteran status in just over four years. He had a good reputation but had focused most of his effort on the Stillness, a powerful criminal syndicate with whom we’d crossed paths early in my career. We’d had little to do with the Stillness since—probably because Casaril had been doing a good job of keeping them in check. “Van,” Casaril said, nodding as I entered. “I hear you’ve been making life miserable for the Sorcerers.”

“Doing my best. Likewise with you and the Stillness. Couldn’t be happening to a more deserving group of people,” I said. “Oh, and congrats on becoming Volffin’s Justiciar.”

Casaril nodded again. Volffin spoke up. “This one is very pleased to have a Peacemaker of Casaril’s character and accomplishment working closely to hands. This one has been discussing the events involving the Esstai dissidents with Joceyln.”

“Which we think involves, in turn, the Stillness, which is why Casaril is here,” my mother said. “We’ve got reason to believe the Stillness are behind arms shipments slipping through to the dissidents. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to stop all of them, judging from the number of violent incidents starting to flare up among the Esstai.” She smiled at me. “But that’s not why you’re here. You’re interested in… Uvistan Sere?”

I nodded. “Well, I should warn you that I’ve had nothing to do with her in, oh, at least ten years. I’m not sure how much help I can be.”

I glanced around. “If you can pry yourself away from here for a while, we can talk.”

My mother looked at Volffin and Casaril, both of whom just nodded. “This one has no further immediate need of your presence, Jocelyn.”

My mother rose to follow me. I caught Casaril’s eye as I was turning to leave. “Be seeing you, Van.”

There was something about the way Casaril said it. It had… an edge to it, though I wasn’t sure why. Again, Casaril and I were contemporaries, sure, but we otherwise had had almost nothing to do with one another. After we left Volffin’s office, though, my mother revealed what was going on. “There’s a growing push to get Gerhardt’s position refilled. And since you apparently don’t want it, Casaril is being seen more and more as a viable alternative.”

“Hey, that’s great. I think he’d do a good job.”

“You’re one of a few, then.”

I glanced at her as we left the Keel and headed onto the main concourse that traversed the circumference of Anvil Dark’s main ring. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Casaril doesn’t come without baggage. Early on, he was a protégé of Master Yotov.”

“Ah.”

Yotov had been a criminally corrupt Master who’d leveraged her innate psionic ability as a Ligurite to manipulate people into compliance. My crew and I had been instrumental in bringing her down, which meant I’d cost Casaril his patron. He’d obviously been canny enough to find a replacement, but if he still harbored some resentment, then that might explain the attitude. “Needless to say, there are a lot of Peacemakers—and members of the GKU—who’d rather not see one of Yotov’s disciples become a Master,” my mother went on. I shrugged. “It can’t be that big a deal. I mean, I had no idea that he was associated with Yotov.”

“That’s only because Casaril put a lot of effort into concealing the fact. To be blunt, Van, I don’t think you’d find Casaril a very accommodating Master—all the more because he’s well aware that he’s effectively competing with you for the job.”

I sighed. “Me being competition implies that I even want the job—

which I don’t.” I decided to change the subject. “Anyway, speaking of jobs, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I know you haven’t had anything to do with Uvistan Sere in a long time. The question I do have, though, is how closely did you work with her when you did?

How well did you know her?”

“We worked quite closely together. Gone 5U9 was a terrible situation. The native race, a sort of semi-aquatic, sort of reptilian race we called the Gone—whatever they called themselves, it wasn’t anything that would translate—ended up locked in a brutal civil war. It followed their first contact with none other than Gabby’s race, the tardigrade-like Vruks, although the Gone apparently knew them as the Companions.”

“A whole race composed of Gabby, huh?

Yeah, I can see how that could end up being a little trying.”

But my mother didn’t smile. “For reasons that I still don’t understand, first contact with an alien race caused the Gone to split into two factions,

progressives and isolationists. The resulting civil war killed millions and, unfortunately, drove the race back into a pre-spaceflight level of technology.”

“Oh. Ouch.” I regretted my flippant comment about Gabby now. My mother waved a hand. “If you’re concerned about your Vruks crewmate—Gabby is her name, right?—they didn’t cause the civil war. Not directly, anyway. It was the first contact of the Gone with an alien species that did it, basically rupturing fault lines that already existed in Gone society.”

We walked on a few paces. “That… doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better, honestly. Earth is only just starting to wake up to the fact that it really has made contact with extraterrestrials. Once that truly takes hold, well, I have no idea where it’s going to go.”

It was a sobering thought. I could try to protect Earthly humanity from abuse and exploitation by opportunistic aliens, sure. But I couldn’t protect Earthly humanity from itself. MY MOTHER AGREED to help us deal with Uvistan Sere, but only once her own ship, the Retribution, had been repaired. To that end, Icky, Perry, and Netty-P lent a hand, helping her to get her ship’s damage fixed. It gave me an opportunity to visit the Retribution, which was an eye-opening experience. My mother had upgraded and tailored the Retribution as a dedicated warship. She was heavily armed, packing at least as much firepower as the Fafnir, and probably more, given she mounted a trio of high-speed rotary missile launchers that could be reloaded from internal magazine stores. And this was in a class 12 hull, two classes below the Fafnir’s current rating. But the trade-off was anything resembling crew comfort or ergonomics. The Retribution was cramped, her interior spaces packed with conduits and cable-runs, she was dimly lit and lacked anything but the most basic of crew amenities. I’d thought that the US warships my father had taken me aboard to tour had been austere, but even they made some sacrifices for the sake of crew comfort and entertainment. If you were crew on my mother’s Retribution,

you were either in a battle, or waiting to be in a battle, because there was really nothing else to do aboard her. Still, it prompted Icky to sidle up to me in the pressurized hangar where the Retribution was being repaired. She wiped something off her hands, watching critically as a chunk of hull plating was lowered into place. “Glad your mother seems to be on our side now. I’d hate to have to try to fight this damned thing,” she said to me sidelong. She paused, then added, “Or live aboard her. She’s basically some engines and pressurized compartments strapped to a bunch of mass drivers.”

We changed the subject as my mother approached. She gave Icky an approving nod. “My Engineer tells me that things are going about twice as fast as normal with your help, Icky. And Perry and Netty-P have been instrumental in getting some issues sorted out with our fire control system.”

She glanced at me with a thin smile. “You should start hiring these people out for things like this, Van. It could be a whole new revenue stream for you.”

I smiled back at her. “I’ll maybe consider it once the stack of cases on my desk isn’t threatening to topple over and crush me.”

My mother opened her mouth to say something, but a bellow from Icky cut her off. “Hey!

Don’t let that hull plate rotate like that!

You drop it into place out of alignment and you’re gonna damage the spar—damn it, stop and just hold it there!” She stalked off, heading for the crew working to fasten the plate. They looked more than a little alarmed at the approach of a hulking, four-armed Wu’tzur pissed at some sloppy work. “Anyway, once the Retribution’s flight-worthy again, Van, I’ll help you out with Sere. I’ve rearranged things to free up the time. Although, again, I’m not sure just how much help I’ll actually be. I worked with Sere a long time ago, and on one project.”

I nodded. “It can’t hurt, particularly since the Guild doesn’t have a lot of information on her. And Pont Alus Kyr isn’t very forthcoming with information, either. They just point us at a public profile, which is pretty general—talks about Sere being involved in genetic research, without going into details.” I crossed my arms and watched as Icky got the hull-plate issue sorted out, then took personal charge of making sure it seated properly

against the structural spars beneath it. Even at a distance, I could hear the satisfying snick as the plate settled in place. “I’ve encountered vague, cryptic profiles like that before. It usually means that the researcher is involved in some sort of cutting-edge research their employer doesn’t want to reveal for reasons of commercial competition—”

“Or they’re in bed with the military,” my mother said. “Exactly.”

“Well, I’d be surprised if she was helping out the military. The Sere I remember was quite anti- military. Not a pacifist, exactly, but someone who considered the military a necessary evil.”

“Yeah, but people change—especially if other people offer them large amounts of money to do it.”

“Very true.”

“So what was her research focus?

Do you remember?”

My mother frowned, then shrugged. “It was at the absolute cusp of my understanding, but Sere worked with gene-specific techniques involved in cloning… things. She went on and on about being able to clone new body parts for medical therapy—lost an arm?

She’ll clone a new one for you and attach it. Heart defect?

She’ll clone and install an exact replacement, defect-free and with no chance of your body rejecting it.”

“That sounds positive. Even humane?” I offered. “It does,” my mother replied, her eyes narrowing. “Although I do remember how one night, when we were taking a break from our humanitarian duties, she started going on about cloning entire organisms. She believed she could even replicate a brain that could receive that individual’s memories, basically making them a perfect copy.” My mother nodded at her own words. “And I remember her and another member of her medical team having quite a spirited debate about the ethics of it. They got deeply philosophical—is a perfect copy of Van Tudor, complete with all of his memories the moment they were collected, still Van Tudor?

Or is it an entirely different person?”

She smiled. “That was about the time I bowed out. Deep philosophy has always kind of bored me. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

My answer is—who cares?

Let’s fight.”

I smiled back, but it faded as I considered the implications of Sere’s work, at least as my mother described it. “Dancing angels aside, though, I

can see how cloning entire beings, complete with intact memories, could be… not such a positive thing. In fact, I can see how it could be turned to some pretty bad ends.”

“Anything can be used for evil—and will be, if there’s enough money involved.”

I glanced at her. “Sounds like we could call that Jocelyn’s Law.”

“Oh, I can’t take credit for that, Van. It’s just how the universe works.”

I grinned. “Anyway, once your ship is certified to fly again, let’s button up and go speak to Uvistan Sere. And mom?”

She looked at me. “In case it isn’t obvious, this is a chance for us to—”

“Do something together. Start building a relationship that isn’t based entirely on regret and incrimination.”

“I guess it was pretty obvious, wasn’t it?

Anyway, let’s… just let it happen, okay?”

She touched my shoulder and gave me a resolute look. “I’m certainly going to try.”

WE TRAVELED to Pont Alus Kyr, only to find that Uvistan Sere wasn’t there. She’d apparently gone to a system just inside Unity space on a mission of mercy. Pont Alus Kyr, under contract to Unity, had developed a vaccine against a persistent viral infection chewing away at a reclusive alien species called the Stred. It seemed that the Stred, who were only recently spaceflight-capable, were wary of joining Unity. The Stred spent most of their time locked away in a complex subterranean society, well beneath their homeworld’s surface. Providing the vaccine had been intended as a goodwill gesture, but it had somehow made the situation worse. Since we were only traveling to the Stred homeworld to meet with Sere, we were able to get border clearance from Unity without much difficulty. The visa we’d been given made it extremely clear, though, that we had no legal standing or jurisdiction as Peacemakers while in Unity space, and to not try to claim any. If we encountered a crime or evidence of one, we were to immediately hand the matter over to Unity authorities. Perry shrugged at it. “Not surprising. The last time we were in Unity space, we busted up a sexy yacht party being held by some well-connected criminals. I suspect that ruffled some diplomatic feathers, particularly once said well-connected criminals started calling in favors.”

I shrugged right back at him. “I’ve got no great desire to antagonize Unity. Let’s just hope we don’t reveal the whole criminal enterprise behind our identity theft ring and the resurgent Sorcerers. It would truly suck to uncover it all and not be able to do anything about it.”

I didn’t say anything about the fallback plan my mother and I had secretly organized. If we did uncover something—for instance, a reason to take Uvistan Sere into custody—then my mother would be the one to deal with it. I would very publicly protest about it on the Guild’s behalf, laying the blame for it on the GKU. I wasn’t sure how well that would stick, but I hoped it would at least muddy the waters enough to create some reasonable doubt. It truly would suck to uncover something crucial and not have the legal standing to do anything about it. I wasn’t happy about the prospect of letting my mother take action while pretending it outraged me, and I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. But if it did, it did. I wasn’t about to let something critical slip through our fingers just to help assuage wounded Unity pride. WE ARRIVED at the Stred homeworld, a barren, Mars-like planet orbiting an orange star known on Earth only by its stellar catalog number. The planet had barely a wisp of dry, cold atmosphere on the surface, but its pressure increased deeper below the surface, where the aliens lived. They’d apparently evolved in the subterranean tunnels and chambers, eventually developing them into a complex system of excavations home to several million Stred. They reminded me of the Schegith, if the Schegith had a significantly higher birth rate. “You have to wonder how a race that evolved underground would be attracted to the stars,” Rab mused, as we entered orbit in close station with the Retribution. “They didn’t even have a sky.”

“It must have been a watershed moment for them the first time one of them ventured up onto the surface of their planet and did see the sky,”

Torina said, looking over a basic map of the Stred tunnel system on her comm. I nodded, trying to think of a similarly world-changing moment in human history. The discovery of fire?

Finding new lands across an ocean?

Landing on the Moon?

Maybe, but none of them quite captured what must have been a thundering moment of sheer existential change. When that first Stred looked out of a tunnel mouth and saw not just more rock above them, but the sun or the stars, the very nature of the universe itself would have suddenly and fundamentally changed. We fell into orbit with three other ships, two freighters, and a small research support ship from Pont Alus Kyr. I made a comm call to confirm that, yes, Uvistan Sere was on board, but that no, she didn’t have time to meet with us. We got a few snippy comments about her being too busy trying to save people’s lives, punctuated by a terse explanation. “The Stred have been infected by a pernicious virus. We provided them with a vaccine, but they haven’t responded well to it, and we’re not sure why.”

Surprisingly, it was Icky who spoke up. “Are you guys the ones who were administering it?” she asked. “No. The Stred are very insular and don’t allow those they consider outsiders into their underground world. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got

—”

“Do they have tough skin?”

A pause, then, “Yes, probably an evolutionary adaptation to their ancestral burrowing existence, but I don’t see what—”

“Are they supposed to be injecting the stuff you gave them?”

Another pause. The voice at the other end of the comm had lost its edge though, now sounding… intrigued?

“Yes. We provided injectors that should be able to penetrate their dermal layers—why?”

“Because when I was little, I hated needles and injections and stuff. Hated them. My dad had some sort of shot he was supposed to give me, but I didn’t want him to stick me, so I ate it instead. Made me sick all over the place.” She glanced around, suddenly aware we were all watching her, fascinated that it was Icky giving medical advice. She scowled at us and went on. “Anyway, if they’ve got tough skin, make sure they aren’t trying to eat the stuff, ’cause that might be the

problem.”

“No, they wouldn’t try to ingest it—at least, they shouldn’t—” Another pause. “Just… hang on a moment.”

We waited. Perry turned to Icky. “You hate needles?

The shaggy blue mountain doesn’t like teeny-weeny boo-boos?”

Icky suddenly reached out and grabbed Perry’s head in one of her mighty fists. His face and beak protruded through her fingers. “I might hate getting boo-boos, you little winged appliance, you, but I don’t mind giving them. And they won’t be so teeny-weeny,” she growled. Perry made his voice sound strangled. “I understand.”

“Are you sure?”

I raised a hand. “Icky, please don’t damage the merchandise. You break it, you pay for it.”

She glared at Perry a moment longer, then let him go. He made a show of rearranging his feathers. “Well, I know when I’m not wanted,” he said, turning to face aft. Before he left though, he had to be the asshole and play a line from Pink Floyd’s rock masterpiece “Comfortably Numb.” It was the one about a little pin-prick, followed by a delicate ping, then he flung himself into the air and vanished aft in a flurry of beating wings. Icky snarled a curse and tore off after him. I looked at Torina and sighed. “I keep telling myself it’s good practice for when we have children of our own.”

“Good practice at doing what?”

“Not screaming in frustration and just locking them all up in a holding cell.”

Torina grinned as a new comm voice returned. “Okay, so it turns out you were, um, right. The Stred were trying to eat the vaccine. Who was it to suggest that might be the case?

Do you have a doctor on board?”

I opened my mouth just as Icky shouted somewhere aft. “Damn it, you slippery little bastard, get back here!”

I looked at Torina again, and she nodded, before standing and heading aft to restore order. “We have a medic on board, but not a full doctor, no. What we do have is a crew with a lot of, um, life experience,” I replied. “Well, I must admit that it’s a little embarrassing to have something so obvious pointed out to us. We were starting to analyze the biochemical properties of the vaccine with respect to Stred physiology—” The voice

paused. “But you’re a Peacemaker. I suspect you didn’t come here to dispense medical advice.”

“I did not. I’m here to speak with Uvistan Sere.”

“Why?”

“That would be a matter for me to discuss with her.”

“Well, I’m Uvistan Sere. So now can you tell me what this is about?”

“I can, but I’d prefer to do it face-to-face. I can come to you, or you can come to me.”

“And if I refuse?

You’re not in your jurisdiction here, are you?” Sere asked. “Is there a reason you’d refuse?”

“Well, maybe I want legal representation.”

“And that’s certainly your right. We can escort you back to known space, even to Pont Alus Kyr, which is in our jurisdiction, so that you can retain legal counsel and we can speak with you there and then.”

Another pause, followed by a sigh. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll come to your ship. I hope you won’t object to my bringing my assistant along, as witness.”

“As long as it’s clear that they hold no special legal status, and that you’re accepting that anything discussed in front of them isn’t privileged in any way, then sure, go right ahead.”

“Out of gratitude for the help you’ve given us, but only for that reason, I agree. We’ll be there shortly.”

“Sounds good, thank you.”

She signed off. Rab smiled. “You’re getting pretty good at this legal stuff, Van.”

I shrugged back at him. “I like to think I’m not just another pretty face.”

“None of us think that, Van.”

I started to head aft but stopped. “Wait—none of you think I’m just another pretty face?

Or none of you think I’ve got a pretty face at all?”

Rab grinned. “Yes.”

I lifted one finger, then left, my dignity intact. 6

SERE ARRIVED WITH HER ASSISTANT, an Usu named Durfik. I wasn’t particularly pleased to see an Usu or have him come aboard, but I had to remind myself not to generalize an entire people based on the actions of a few. After all, Rektorr was an Usu, and he’d not only been instrumental in helping us to confront and defeat the Jackals near Reverie, but he’d also been doing stellar work since helping to get Cantullin Station up and running. I offered Durfik a civil greeting, trying to keep it politely noncommittal. Sere, on the other hand, was charming and effusive, even for a Gajur. The race certainly had its ups and downs but struggled as a whole with overcrowding and abject poverty on their homeworld. It tended to give most Gajur a bitter edge, but again, I put some effort into seeing past that. Sere might have a hint of it, but she’d clearly risen above her origins and made herself into an accomplished researcher. I just studied her, trying to figure out the best way to approach her, as she and my mother renewed their old acquaintance. As it turned out, though, my mother was able to get her speaking about her research with little trouble. We moved our discussion into the crew lounge, me emphasizing on the way that we didn’t particularly suspect Sere of any crimes but noting that her name had come up in an investigation as a person of interest. Perry and Torina joined us, while Icky and Funboy puttered nearby, obviously listening in. Icky, I noticed, had her hammer nearby and was watching the Usu in particular. Sere immediately nodded. “I suppose I’m not surprised it’s about my research,” she said. I frowned. “Can you, um, expand on that?”

She shrugged. “I sold the rights to it all.”

“But you work for Pont Alus Kyr. Wouldn’t they hold the rights to whatever research you did?” my mother asked. “The research I’m talking about was my own. Freelance work. I paid Pont Alus Kyr for the use of their facilities, but I held onto the rights. The deal was that they’d get first right of refusal if I decided to sell those rights. I did, and they refused the purchase.”

“So who did you sell them to?” I asked. Torina cut in. “And maybe just as importantly, what exactly did you sell?

What was your research all about?”

My mother gave Sere a keen look. “Wait. I remember a conversation we had back during the Gone crisis. You were speculating that it should be possible to extend the life of biological systems, cells, that sort of thing. You mused about immortality.”

Sere smiled. “As I recall, we were drinking.”

“Uh-huh. But as I recall, it wasn’t just drunken rambling. You were serious. I remember you said that it was… a logical extension of your cloning research, or something like that.”

Sere’s smile faded. “It was. And no, it wasn’t just booze and enthusiasm talking. In fact, that was the moment I decided to try and pursue it, see how viable it really was. It turned out to be exceptionally viable.”

I sat up. “Wait. You succeeded in creating immortality?”

Sere barked the harsh, guttural, and unnerving version of a Gajur laugh, which made her sound like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings crossed with a Scandinavian death metal band. “If I had actually succeeded, do you really think I’d be here, trying to deal with some people who should be injecting vaccines and not eating them?”

“Is that why Pont Alus Kyr passed on buying your research, then?

Because it wasn’t successful?” Torina asked. Sere shook her head. “It wasn’t that it was un successful. It was that it wasn’t clearly successful. There were still issues—technical aspects of cellular regeneration that we hadn’t sorted out. My collaborator finally dropped out of the research and went his own way, which left me stuck. And then I got the offer—an outright purchase of the rights to my research,

all my samples, relevant equipment, even the contracts of two lab assistants.”

“So you sold the rights to… almost but not quite immortality?” my mother asked her. Again, she laughed. “That’s what everyone thought. Really, though, what I was able to do was offset the effects of cellular aging—to a point. I’d also developed the theoretical basis for cloning cells with inhibited aging, creating a sort of cellular ancestry that could go on forever.”

I cut in. “Wait. You mentioned a collaborator. Who was that, exactly?”

“His name was Mikiln Dohlennz.”

A MOMENT of stunned silence was broken by Perry. “Well, I’m a believer.”

I shook my head. “Wait. Your collaborator was Dohlennz?

The same Dohlennz that we tracked for several years, finally cornered, and killed?

Because he was a horrific, amoral piece of shit who happily played God in the most vile, egregious ways?

That Dohlennz?”

Sere shrugged. “That sounds about right. And before you start thinking I was an accessory to any of his crimes—and they were crimes, very much so

—I didn’t even know what a disgusting piece of excrement he was until after he and I had parted ways.”

Torina sat back, crossing her arms. “How the hell did we miss this connection?

We might have been able to track down and stop Dohlennz a lot sooner than we did if we’d known to come and talk to you.”

Perry, though, raised a wing. “Nowhere in the available archival information is there any connection between Sere and Dohlennz. I’m assuming that your relationship with him was probably papered over with non-disclosure agreements.”

Sere nodded. “About a half-dozen layers of them. Dohlennz told me that he was involved in a bitter dispute over some unrelated research with other parties and wanted to keep our collaboration invisible to them. That certainly made sense to me at the time—I wasn’t anxious to get mired in someone else’s legal problems.”

I shook my head again. “I’m not going down a road of self-recrimination here. If we start second-guessing what we should have done

about Dohlennz—well, that way madness lies.” I gave Torina an emphatic look as I said it. We were risking wallowing into a swamp of regret over Cantullin, Gerhardt, and everyone else who’d been hurt or killed trying to run down Dohlennz. Thinking that if only we’d known to talk to Sere, they might have survived. But we hadn’t known about her. We’d known what we’d known, and that was it. Torina got it and nodded back to me. I turned back to Sere. “Okay. So you and Dohlennz went your separate ways. Then what?”

“Then, I tried to continue my research. As evil as he was, though, Dohlennz was brilliant, and without his insights, I was stuck. Worse, my research funding was starting to dry up, meaning I wasn’t going to be able to keep paying Pont Alus Kyr. I was looking at just abandoning it all. And then, I got the offer.”

“What offer?

And from whom?”

Sere looked uncomfortable. “Speaking of NDAs, there’s one covering this. If I break it—”

“Then you won’t be breaking the law regarding withholding evidence during a lawful investigation by the Guild,” I said. “One of those might get you sued. The other will get you charged and thrown in jail,” Perry added. Sere looked from one of us, to the other, then slumped a little. “Fine. But I want it on the record that I’m only revealing this because of the threat of criminal legal action, not—”

I nodded. “Fine. Perry, please specifically note that.”

“Done. Uvistan Sere is only revealing the details of the offer and purchase of her research, which would otherwise be protected by an NDA, because she doesn’t want to end up in The Hole.”

“Her name is Rosen. She’s a research administrator at Pont Alus Kyr. She made the offer to me.”

Torina looked puzzled. “I thought you said Pont Alus Kyr wasn’t interested in buying your research.”

“They weren’t. She wasn’t representing Pont Alus Kyr, though. She was representing other interests—and since I know what your next question is going to be, no, I’m not sure who those other interests are. All I know is that when I decided to put my work up for auction, I immediately got a bid and a hefty deposit from Rosen. I knew I wasn’t going to get anything better, so I accepted it.”

“How much did you get for it?” Perry asked. “Sixty.”

“Sixty?

You sold the path to immortality for sixty-thousand bonds?”

Sere barked a laugh. “Pfft, sorry, I assumed you’d know better than that. Not sixty thousand. Sixty million.”

I gaped a moment. “Sixty million bonds?

I… don’t know if I’m more stunned or impressed that, despite that kind of money, you’re here trying to sort out what’s going on with the Stred.”

Sere shook her head. “Sixty million was the total. They paid an up-front deposit of ten percent. Six million bonds is a lot, sure, but it’s not enough to make me give up doing what I love—which, believe it or not, is helping people.”

I have to admit, Uvistan Sere just shot up in my estimation. Six million bonds was easily enough to retire on, in comfort, if not opulent luxury. The fact that she was here anyway, helping the Stred, told me a lot about her character. It certainly explained why parting ways with Dohlennz hadn’t broken her heart, it seemed. “So where did you make this sale?

Pont Alus Kyr?” Perry asked, then in my ear bug, he added, Just wondering where we can pick up the trail. “No. Believe it or not, we concluded the deal in a bar, a place called The One-Eyed Yak, located on the edge of—”

“The Deeps, yeah. On The Torus. We know it well. Was Skrilla involved in the deal?”

“The scruffy man behind the bar?

No. I met Rosen there. She said she wanted our business to be well-removed from Pont Alus Kyr, so there was no question of their involvement in it.” Sere sniffed. “I have to admit, on Pont Alus Kyr, she always came across as an officious bitch. In The One-Eyed Yak, though, she was even worse, like she’d just dropped that shitty veneer of civility. She was, in the words of your Skrilla, as mean as a snake and with the same body temperature. I later looked up what a snake is, and I have to agree. I was glad to be done dealing with her.”

I nodded. “Yeah, it’s a small universe. We’ve crossed paths with Ms. Rosen ourselves. All I really remember about her was that she was obstructive as hell. She tried to keep us from meeting with Hoshi Onwyn, in fact, right before she was attacked and her symbiote was taken from her.”

“I was always suspicious about that, but we could never paint her as anything but being a bureaucratic asshole,” Torina put in. “Annoying, but

not an actual crime.”

“So, in summary, you sold research into what might be the key to everlasting life to Rosen, who was representing… somebody.”

“That’s right. But unless I’m mistaken, none of this was illegal. No laws were broken, were they?”

Perry shook his head. “Based on what you’ve told us, no. There are certain interstellar regulations governing biochemical research—”

“All of which were duly accommodated in the purchase agreement,” the Usu Durfik said, speaking for the first time. Sere turned to me. “So, now I have a question. What, exactly, is your Guild’s interest in this matter?

If it’s about Dohlennz, then again, he had nothing whatsoever to do with any of this—”

“I believe you. Suffice to say that my home planet is on the brink of joining the interstellar community. But it’s doing it prematurely, so we’ve got some bad guys—some hideously wealthy guys—sniffing around and looking for ways of exploiting it. One of them gave us your name.”

“They did?

Who?”

“A Barundi named Ettner. He was up to some no good on Earth, my homeworld, when we caught him. He said that he’d been told to come to you if things went wrong.”

I watched Sere closely. I knew that Torina, Perry, and my mother were all doing the same. Either Sere was a truly gifted actor, though, or she was genuinely surprised by this. I immediately favored the latter. “I don’t know anyone named Ettner, and I’m not even sure what a Barundi is. I can assure you that I know nothing about this. I don’t spend much time on Pont Alus Kyr anymore, so in all likelihood anyone showing up wouldn’t even find me there.”

Perry turned to me. “So if Ettner arrived on Pont Alus Kyr looking for Sere, that would probably trigger… something else.”

I nodded. “It’s a variation on a dead drop. Someone on Pont Alus Kyr knew what to do if a Barundi looking for Ustivan Sere showed up. The question is who, and what was the thing they were supposed to do?”

Silence. No one had the answer to that, of course. Maybe the best way to find out was to send Ettner there looking for Sere and see what happened. I filed that away as a possible option and instead turned back to Sere. “How long ago did you meet with Rosen on The Torus?”

“It would have been, oh, a standard month ago, now.”

“So the question is where she went after that, and what’s happened to your former research in the meantime.”

“I might be able to help with that. Rosen had someone with her, an old Fren-Okun woman named Luruket Klar. She was doing her moist routine, which did a good job of making sure no one came near and that we were undisturbed. But I caught her looking at me a few times. There was a sharp mind behind those eyes,” Sere said. Perry bobbed his head. “Yeah, Luruket Klar is on our radar. She has a ship, the Ruse, that has been spotted in company with known smugglers and similar miscreants. We’ve never found anything to stick to her, though. Not surprised that she’d show up in a deal this big.”

“Well, that gives us somewhere to start, anyway.” I looked back at Sere. “You know, one of the things I’m lacking is a good source of information about life tech—someone who knows all the details and ins and outs. We’ve had to deal with it often enough that I think we could use someone like you as a sort of consultant. Are you interested?’

“Possibly. But I’m more or less retired, while you’re in the middle of what’s starting to sound like a pretty touchy affair. Dangerous, even. I’ll need a damned good reason to implicate myself in something like that. Call me when you find one. In the meantime, good luck with whatever it is you’re doing. You’ll need it.”

I cocked my head at her. “What makes you say that?”

“Because you mentioned that some super-wealthy people were involved in this. Super-wealthy people no doubt want to live forever, and you’re going to try to stop them. They don’t hear the word ‘no’ very often—and they don’t like it.”

“Ah, well, you’re underestimating my charm.”

Icky picked up and hefted her hammer. “And mine.”

7

WE RETURNED to known space and parted ways with my mother, who was heading off on another cryptic GKU mission. I took the time to visit her aboard the Retribution before she left. “Mom, please do me a favor, and don’t do anything illegal,” I said to her. “Now when you say illegal—”

“Mom—”

She laughed. “Van, I said I was going to come in from the cold and start getting settled on the side of the angels, and I meant it. I’m working with Valint, and she’s working with the Guild. In fact, we’re going to head out to The Torus and see if we can pick up the trail of our friend Rosen, based on the information we got from Sere.”

“Oh. Yeah, that would be very helpful, actually.”

“Believe it or not, Van, I really would like you to be as proud of me as you are of your father and grandfather.” I opened my mouth, but she put a finger to my lips. “Please, no bullshit about how you are proud of me, proud that I’m working to turn things around, blah, blah. I’ve got a long way to go and lots of work to do, and I know it.”

I smiled and nodded. “Fair enough.”

She lowered her finger, and her face turned serious. “There is one thing I’d like you to do, however.”

“What’s that?”

“Reconsider the Guild’s offer to make you a Master.”

“Mom—”

“Van, the Guild needs the kind of leadership I know you can give. What it doesn’t need is another ambitious politician grinding their particular axes, and it sure as hell doesn’t need another outright corrupt or incompetent Master. It’s the one thing your grandfather did—or didn’t do—that he absolutely should have. If he’d been a Master, I think the Guild would be in a much better place right now. And that—” She actually hesitated. “That leads me to something I find it hard to talk about. I haven’t been part of your life, so I really don’t have much moral authority to stand on. But here goes anyway. Van, you and Torina need to think very carefully about having children. And I don’t mean when, or how many. I mean whether you should have children at all.”

I stared, taken completely off guard. It had never even occurred to me that my mother would have an opinion about this. Moreover, I guess I’d assumed that, like any prospective grandma, she’d have been all for it. I crossed my arms and continued my silence, wanting to hear what she had to say. She sighed. “One of the big reasons your grandfather turned down a Master’s chair was you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. He was keenly aware that neither your father nor I were in a position to be the parents you needed. And Miryam is wonderful, but raising you wasn’t her job, nor could anyone expect it to be. Mark wanted to make sure you had some stability in your life. Now, that wasn’t the only reason he turned it down, but it was a big part of it. Being a Master would have taken him away from Earth more or less permanently. He didn’t want to do that to you.”

I could only stand there and keep staring. I guess I wasn’t really surprised that my grandfather had put my well-being ahead of the Guild—I mean, I loved the man and genuinely believe he loved me right back just as much. What surprised me was that I’d never put this together before, and that no one—not Miryam, not Groshenko, not Valint or anyone else—had put it to me in such a succinct way before. My mother sighed again. “I know. I’m overstepping here. Like I said, I’m standing at the bottom of the moral high ground on this one—”

“No, Mom, you’re not. In fact, it makes me very glad that you feel—I don’t know, close enough that you can share this with me.”

“Just think about it.”

I sniffed and shook my head. “Oh, believe me, I’m going to. I mean, Torina and I have talked on the subject of kids, sure. We both want them, but we both also know that having them is going to force some changes in our lives.” I didn’t voice the thoughts that tumbled on from that, that my grandfather’s situation had been very different from mine. He had a grandson on Earth. I had no similar ties at all. If I became a Master and ended up spending most of my time on Anvil Dark, though—wouldn’t that make raising a family easier?

Some of the Peacemakers stationed permanently on Anvil Dark did have their families with them—

I shook my head again. This was too much, too big to contemplate on the spot and all at once. I finally gave my mother a smile. “I will think about it, Mom, thanks. And I’ll ask you for advice about it, too. The thought of having small humans reliant on me is—um, it’s—”

“A lot. And it’s a beautiful, natural phase of your life.”

I looked at her, and she regarded me with a face suffused by pride. The years fell away, like water through sand, and I felt… lighter. Less alone. We hugged. It was a different hug than I’d ever had with her before, though. It wasn’t a hug charged with deep emotion, with pain or sadness. It was just a goodbye hug, simple and quick. It was also the best moment my mother and I had ever shared. I DIDN’T TELL Torina what my mother and I had discussed. I needed time to digest it, probably sleep on it a bit. Instead, I focused on the way ahead of us, which was logically to return to Pont Alus Kyr and start digging into Sere’s research, Rosen and her role, and the whole research environment there generally. The connection between Sere and Dohlennz meant we now had a hard connection between Dohlennz and Pont Alus Kyr, and that made me nervous. I said as much to the crew as we sat around the lounge strategizing. “I can’t help thinking that we seem to keep ending up back on Pont Alus Kyr. Every line of investigation we’ve been following points back there in one way or another. “Not surprising, really. It is the preeminent place for research and development of biological and technological interfaces, right?” Rab replied. “It is, and that made it a place of interest. But—I don’t know. I’m starting to get the feeling there’s more going on there. Layers to that place that we need to start seriously peeling back—”

“Van, I hate to interrupt, but I have an urgent twist comm from Paxomar, for Icky,” Netty-P put in. Icky frowned, then stood and headed for her cabin. “If you hear wild screams, don’t worry about it unless you hear me shout blueberry cream cheese,” she said over her shoulder. “What does it mean if you do?”

“That… the screams are genuine alarm and not just—” She grinned. “Definitely too much information for my tastes,” Funboy said as she left. “Besides, lovemaking shouldn’t involve screaming and similar overt displays. It’s unseemly.”

Torina smirked. “Oh, I don’t know—”

Funboy went on, adopting a professorial air. “Much preferable is a quiet intensity, a deceptively placid silence as the mechanisms of speech are stilled by deep and profound pleasure that yields a post-orgasmic state of near coma.”

Torina, Rab, Perry, Netty-P, and I all exchanged looks. Rab finally stood and headed for the cockpit, speaking as he went. “What was that you were saying about too much information?”

WE HEARD no screaming as we got underway, heading for Crossroads where we’d have to refuel. In fact, Icky came thumping out of her cabin not long after, coming straight to see me. “Van, can we have a bit of an extended layover at Crossroads?”

“We… can, I suppose. For a short while, anyway. Why?”

“Because, as Paxomar put it, he needs a little Icky. Or a lot. ”

“This is perilously close to flirting,” Funboy observed. Torina snickered. “Perilously close?

Oh, I think we passed perilously close a while ago and are charging headlong into flirting becoming fu—”

“Fun times had by all?” I offered, then turned back to Icky. “Tell him,

‘Okay, loverboy, we’ll make the time.’”

“I trust this liaison will occur off the ship and in some location that isn’t… obvious,” Funboy said. Icky grinned. “Oh, I think we’re gonna make Crossroads ring like a gong, Paxo and me. It’s been a while.”

“I see. So a trip into hard vacuum, it is. After all, in space, no one can hear you f—”

“Finally get a chance to spend time with a loved one?”

Funboy blinked at me. “Yes, Van. That is exactly what I was going to say.”

WE ARRIVED AT CROSSROADS, Icky standing in the airlock as we docked. As soon as the outer doors slid open, she shouted “See ya, bye!” over her shoulder and vanished into the station. Perry watched her go. “Wow, she can really move when she wants to f

—”

He cut himself off and looked at me expectantly. “What?

So I couldn’t instantly think of anything witty beginning with f. I can’t always be on, you know.”

“Well, that’s disappointing.”

While Icky reacquainted herself with Paxomar, we attended to the ship. I decided, since we were here for a few hours, to replenish everything—

antimatter, fusion fuel for the powerplant and drive, provisions, water, the works. In the midst of this, Netty-P came to me while I puttered around in the cockpit. “Van, I’d draw your attention to that air hauler currently recharging our reserve,” she said. As she spoke, she flashed an image up on the cockpit display. It showed a boxy little vessel sporting a dozen or so spherical tanks, latched onto a pair of docking stanchions and connected to the input feed for our reserve air. Air haulers were common sights around places like Crossroads and Spindrift. They were small, AI-controlled yard craft that plodded around from ship to ship. They delivered just what their name implied, air, which was used to top off the pressurized reserves used by

almost all space-going vessels. Even if you never tapped the reserve deliberately, it slowly depleted as it compensated for small but unavoidable losses of air from the ship’s interior. I stared at it. “Okay. It’s… certainly there. And?”

“And—” The image zoomed. “One of its manipulators just quietly placed that on our hull.”

The image showed a small device tucked into a recess behind a thruster array. It was probably no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. I sat back and sighed. “Really?

Another bug of some sort?” I sat up again. “How are you getting this imagery, anyway?”

“From EVAN. I routinely have him futz about on the ship’s exterior while we’re taking on things like air and fuel, watching out for just these sorts of antics. Netty passed on a healthy dose of paranoia to me.”

I smiled at Netty-P’s use of words like futz about and antics. But I nodded, appreciating her diligent foresight. EVAN was our external equivalent of Waldo, a semi-autonomous bot who performed routine maintenance and simple repair tasks on the Fafnir’s exterior. Although not actually sentient in the way Perry or Netty-P were, he—along with Waldo—

were still unsung heroes of the ship’s crew. “Do you want me to get him to remove it?” Netty-P asked. “Is there any evidence it’s dangerous—as in, an explosive device or something similar?”

“No. In fact, its only emission has been a handshake with a transceiving device somewhere, establishing comms. And it’s too small to contain much of an explosive charge, or to contain something like antimatter at all, if you’re concerned about that. That said, though, it could contain something like Calamity and be intended to infect the ship if and when it gets the chance.”

I nodded, staring at the thing. Technically, the ship was already infected by Calamity. The virus had been trapped in a perpetual loop by Netty, Netty-P’s progenitor, in the Fafnir’s computing architecture. I’d actually put a note on the login screen of the terminal in my cabin reminding me about her, one that just said “Netty lives.” It was so that I thought of her and remembered her sacrifice every day—as well as my determination to somehow find a way to rescue her from her self-induced existence, essentially stuck on the surface of a Mobius strip, her and Calamity forever going round and round and round. “Okay, Netty-P, once that air hauler has departed, have EVAN quietly retrieve that thing and—huh.” And what?

I was reluctant to bring it into the ship in case it was dangerous. I’d done that with things that had been surreptitiously attached to the Fafnir before and, in retrospect, it had been a little reckless. “We could use EVAN to examine the device while keeping it outside the ship. However, he himself only has basic functionality—his job is to repair the Fafnir, not analyze bugs.”

Rab had come into the cockpit and stood, listening to us speak. He jumped in. “You know, I got to know Icky’s boyfriend, Paxomar, pretty well when he was last aboard the Fafnir. He has just the sort of expertise we need in analyzing small, probably complicated electronic devices.”

“That’s a good point. Paxomar could use EVAN as a remote manipulator and viewer,” Netty-P added. I nodded. “Okay, then. Netty-P, extend an invitation to come aboard. Meantime, I’m going to let Gus know what’s going on.” Gus was the Peacemaker in charge of the Guild’s office here on Crossroads. He’d been one of the first Peacemakers I’d ever met after leaving Earth for the first time, and was another of the relative few I trusted as a reliable ally. “Uh, you might want to wait a while before contacting them, I think,”

Rab said, smirking. “Otherwise, I don’t know if you’re going to like what you hear.”

Netty-P bobbed her imager in a nod. “Yes—another very good point.”

PAXOMAR DID FINALLY COME aboard with Icky once they were… done. Both of them had serene smiles as they boarded. Torina grinned at Icky. “I recognize that look.”

Icky just nodded back. “Yeah.”

I explained the situation to Paxomar. He nodded as I spoke. “Sure, Van, I’d be happy to look at this thing for you.” Idly, he picked a piece of noodle from his hair, then placed it carefully on a bulwark, where EVAN would get it on a cleaning pass. I gave Torina a

look. The lovebirds had been exchanging food debris in addition to other—

things—and I kept that to myself for several excellent reasons. Not the least of which was Funboy and his crusade against disorder. And grime. And fun. I kept my attention on Paxomar, waving toward the airlock. “I’d like to get underway before we do, just in case anyone on Crossroads is keeping an eye on us. That might help Gus and his people on Crossroads suss out just who it was that planted it. We can turn around and bring you back here, though.”

He shrugged. “I don’t mind staying aboard for a while, if you’ll have me. I’m taking some time off from the academic grind anyway.”

Funboy stepped in front of him, standing tall—as tall as he could—and cloaked in an air of righteousness. It was a side of him I liked to call the bishop, and he wore it well. “I have no objection to you coming aboard. However, I must insist, here and now, that your amorous relations with Icky remain at or below eighty decibels. Above that, sounds begin to penetrate the interior bulkheads. And in case you did not hear that detail, I reference the interior bulkheads, which are capable of taking a direct missile hit.”

Paxomar smiled down at him. “Do you want me to keep a sound-intensity meter beside the bed, just in case?”

“If you believe that would be helpful, certainly,” Funboy replied, dead serious. I handed Paxomar over to Netty-P, and they set to work, using EVAN to retrieve the bug and analyze while keeping it outside the ship. After half an hour, Paxomar declared that it was safe to bring it inside for more detailed analysis. “It’s definitely a tracking device. No evidence that it’s a bomb or anything like that,” he said. We accordingly had EVAN put in the airlock, then return to his little garage up on the dorsal rear of the Fafnir’s hull. Once the device had warmed up, Paxomar took it to the workbench in the engineering bay and dug into it with delicate, practiced confidence. An hour later, he had the verdict. “It’s a bug, alright. It’s designed to emit burst transmissions on a very tight comm band at the extreme end of the scale, so if you’re not specifically scanning there when it transmits,

you’ll miss it. It also seems to have some capability to intercept comm emissions from the ship, record them, and burst-transmit them as well.”

“So not just a locating device, but an actual bug, intended to eavesdrop on our comms,” Torina said. Paxomar nodded. “Exactly. It’s a sophisticated piece of hardware, but with a wrinkle.” He held up a data slate with an image on it. It was a close-up view of the interior of the device, with one component centered, a small chip with a logo I immediately recognized. Intel. I blinked at that. “Wait—Intel?

Like, the Earth corporation?”

Paxomar nodded. “That’s what Netty-P and Perry tell me. So unless this company has some operations off of Earth, then this particular component originated there.”

“But—why?

How is this sort of Earthly tech even compatible with a device like this?”

“The device in question is a simple one that regulates power flow, which is well within its capabilities. It’s not involved in any of the actual computation. The interesting question, though, is why is it there at all?

There are similar components readily available all across known space.”

Funboy, listening in, spoke up. “Perhaps this corporation has begun some sort of export of its products off Earth. Or perhaps, as we saw in the case of Manon Clemenceau’s family in the Earthly state of Belgium, they are part of an illicit operation trading extraterrestrial items for terrestrial ones.”

I frowned at the image. “Maybe. But it’s hard to imagine there being much demand for Earth tech in known space.”

Perry, though, wasn’t as convinced. “Why not?

People on Earth still buy things like tack and bridle for horses, and that technology in its current form is almost two hundred years old. If this chip works for this application, and it’s cheaper than the equivalent made on, say, Outward or one of the Ceti worlds, why not use it?”

I had to nod at that. “Fair enough. So I guess the next question is, how did this chip end up in this device?

Was the chip moved off of Earth, or was it installed in the bug on Earth?”

“Are you suggesting that there might be extraterrestrial manufacturing already happening on your homeworld?” Funboy asked. “I’m not—not suggesting that, I guess. What would really help is to find out where this thing is ultimately intended to call home to.”

“Oh, I can tell you that. As part of its initial handshake to establish comms, it received a transmission through a twist-comm relay here in the Crossroads system. It was just an acknowledgement that comms had been established,” Paxomar said. “Oh. Well, okay then. Where’s the other end of the line?”

“The same place that component came from: the Solar System.”

Perry snorted. “That sound you heard was the plot thickening.”

Funboy turned a gimlet eye his way. “If I can hear anything thickening, then I shall leave this section of space. For good.”

KNOWING the device was communicating with the Solar System was great—

in celestial terms, narrowing it down from somewhere in known space was absolutely an epic reduction in scope—but it still wasn’t very helpful. The Solar System was a pretty big place, considering it took light about sixteen hours to travel from the Sun to the heliopause, the point generally considered to be its edge. There could be a ship, a twist relay—hell, there could even be a base hidden somewhere among the myriad planets, moons, and asteroids whirling around the Sun in their endless astrophysical dance. We weren’t afraid to let known space in on the existence of Cantullin Base, now that it was effectively a fortress capable of defending itself. But prior to that, we’d kept it secret. We kicked the problem around until Paxomar and Icky came up with a solution. “The device wants to transmit copies of our comms emissions to wherever, or at least stripped down versions of them. So far, there’s been no outbound comms from the Fafnir since the bug was planted, aside from routine traffic control comms—and that’s all involving AIs. The bug probably recorded them, but it hasn’t transmitted anything itself yet.”

Icky picked up the thread of discussion. “We think it waits until it contains a certain amount of data before it transmits, or until its tiny little built-in AI decides that it’s picked up something juicy and sends it. Remember, it’s trying to not get caught, so it’s going to keep its own emissions to an absolute minimum.”

“Not only that, but it uses the regular twist-comm network to transmit stuff, so if the Fafnir was somewhere off the beaten path and away from a twist-network node, it would have to wait until it could access one before it transmitted,” Paxomar added. “So what are you guys suggesting?

That we generate some comms traffic and—then what?

This thing will shoot it off into the network. That doesn’t get us any closer to knowing where it’s actually going, right?”

Torina asked. “No, it won’t. But if we do it in the Solar System—well, then it doesn’t have to access the twist-comm network. It can just communicate directly with its receiving station. But it’s going to have to handshake again to do that, so we’ll hopefully be able to detect where the other end of that handshake comes from,” Paxomar replied. “So it sounds like we need to go back to Earth,” I said. Paxomar nodded. “If you want to figure out where this thing is sending its data, yes, we do.”

“Fortunately, it would not be unusual for us to return to the Solar System,” Funboy added. “No it wouldn’t. That said, though, let’s give it something to send back now, just so the other end is satisfied it’s up and running.” I looked forward, out of the crew lounge and toward the cockpit. “Netty-P, put a message through to Miryam. Tell her we’re coming back to Earth to check on things.”

“Will do.”

“Okay. So we just have to come up with some natural comms traffic when we arrive in the Solar System,” I said. Paxomar grinned. “Van, Icky and I have an idea. Honestly, it would work out better for my schedule if you could drop me off at Spindrift. I know it’s out of your way, but once I’m there, Icky and I could, um—” He suddenly looked embarrassed. “Do some sexy talk over the comm,” she proclaimed. “Serve the bastards right for eavesdropping on us.”

Torina gave her a bemused frown. “Are you sure you want other people listening in on that?”

“Yeah. Paxo thinks it would be kinda hot, actually.”

Paxomar glanced at her aghast. “Icky!” he hissed. Funboy simply touched his arm. “There is no need to be embarrassed. In fact, there are only eleven ways in which it is inappropriate to experience physical pleasure, and this is not one of them.”

Paxomar stared back at him for a moment. “Eleven ways?

What are they?”

Funboy said nothing. He offered a ghastly smile, then turned and walked away. We all stared after him. “He’s a strange little creature, isn’t he?” Torina said. I nodded. “Yeah, he is. Sometimes I’d really like to know what’s going on in that mulleted little head of his. And then I realize that no, I’m sure I would not.”

8

WE HAD EVAN replace the bug where it had been planted, then let Miryam know we were on our way to Earth with a stop at Spindrift to let Paxomar disembark—but not until we extracted a promise from our shadow—B—to bring the lumbering, lovesick oaf back to our ship after a few days. B

agreed, winked, cut the comm, and we dropped Paxomar off as he began jabbering about twist-capable calls and whether or not they were considered

“vintage phone sex.”

“They are if you do them right.” Funboy said

“I—um, sure. Okay, now that we’ve all experienced, uh, that, let’s twist, shall we?” I said into the awkward silence, but then again, every silence around Funboy is awkward. We twisted, dropped Paxomar off, and twisted again, before arriving in the Solar System with about fifteen days remaining until the Special Operations Area protecting the farm would either have to be renewed or lifted. That was the downside of the time-dilation effect of twisting. Only nine days had passed for those of us aboard the Fafnir since we’d left Earth. It meant that clocks ticking there effectively ticked faster, making timing and deadlines back home even tighter. Once we were inbound from the twist point toward Earth, Icky and Paxomar fired up their twist-comm call. We caught the first part of it because Icky left the door to her cabin open. Paxomar waxed eloquently about the first time Icky walked past him, stuck her leg out to kick a door closed and saw her ankle, then went on to say how it “inflamed his passion

like a runaway fusion reactor.” I had Netty-P close her door, since we really didn’t need to hear any more. Perry made a disappointed sound. “Aw, and just when the long-distance lovin’ was getting good. And nerdy. I mean, runaway fusion reactor?

Where’s he getting his lines, the romance bargain bin at some seedy used bookstore?”

Torina shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it’s kind of cute.” She pushed up her lower lip in thought for a moment, then added, “Okay, also weird. But cute.”

Funboy sighed. I turned to look at him. “You okay?”

“I find myself missing Gabby.”

“Why don’t you go see her?

I’m sure Linulla can get a dispensation for you to travel to the Conoku homeworld.”

Funboy shook his head. “No. For now, I would rather hold her incandescent beauty as a cherished memory. It will make our reunion all the sweeter for the time that passes in the interim.”

Rab smiled. “Now this man understands the meaning of love.”

Funboy gave him an approving look, then wandered off toward his cabin, seeming lost in thoughts of his own. “Did he just describe Gabby as an incandescent beauty?” Perry asked. Torina nodded. “He did. And again, that’s very sweet.”

“She’s mostly protoplasm.”

“Incandescently beautiful protoplasm, though,” Rab replied. I shot Perry a glance. “Bird, I would point out that I’m mostly protoplasm. And so is Torina.”

“Where exactly are you going with this, Tudor?” Torina asked me. “Uh—incandescently beautiful protoplasm, though.”

IT WORKED. Icky and Paxomar’s… let’s call it “traffic,” was picked up by the bug, which then did a handshake to open comms with the receiving station. It took almost an hour for the acknowledgement, which immediately confirmed the thing I had frankly suspected, that the receiving station was on Earth. “Well, we’ve now got it narrowed down to a single planet. Netty-P, can we get any more specific than that?”

“We can, and actually have.”

“Well, then, spill it, girl. Where?”

“A bastion of ne’er-do-wells if ever I saw one. The receiving station is in Montreal.”

“Montreal?

Quebec?

Canada?”

“You’re three for three, Van.”

Perry nodded. “It was only a matter of time. I’ve never bought their cover story—oh look, we’re nice. We like hats and we apologize, eh?

Bullshit. These are the same people who kicked ass in two world wars. I always figured we’d end up there looking for something nefarious.”

“These are the people who eat… potatoes, right?

But covered in cheese curds and some sort of sauce derived from certain types of meat?” Torina asked. I smiled. “It’s called poutine, and yes, I’m sure some people eat it. But Canada has, like, forty million people, it’s the second-largest country on Earth, and it has the longest undefended border in the world, with the United States. Suffice it to say it’s a lot more diverse than everyone there eats poutine.”

“Everyone should eat poutine, though. The cheese curds alone are reason enough. Am I right, sourpuss?” Icky said, looking at Funboy. But Funboy had a thoughtful look. “Van, I’ve done background research on this Canada and have been meaning to visit it someday. That being the case, I have two requests.”

“Shoot.”

“First, my longing for Gabby prompted me to contact her on the Conoku homeworld. We spoke at some length, and she is effectively done with her work there.”

Icky smirked. “Guess these Canadians got two sexy talks for the price of one with their bug, huh?”

Funboy gave her a solemn look. “We did not engage in carnal discussions, at least for the most part.”

Her smirk became smirkier. “Uh-huh.”

“Yeah, we can make that work. I’ll talk to Linulla about getting her to Cantullin Station. You can use the Frankie to pick her up from there. What’s your second request?”

“One of the things I recall reading about Canada is that it produces the majority of an Earthly product called maple syrup. This substance is apparently produced by boiling the sap of a particular type of tree.”

“It is. In fact, Quebec, the province in which Montreal is located, is the maple syrup capital of the world. It’s big business—so much so that it’s actually attracted the attention of organized crime. There was a big heist of the stuff a few years ago, to the tune of nineteen million dollars,” Perry said. “Indeed. In any case, this appeals to me, a consumable made by the process of boiling, which destroys pathogens and ensures purity,” Funboy said. I shrugged. “Yeah. If memory serves, they do it in things called sugar shacks. I think pouring the syrup onto snow is considered a real treat, since the sap runs in the late winter and early spring.”

“Again, indeed. I therefore also wish to experience this maple syrup, and to tell you how serious I am, I do so despite the lewd nomenclature associated with this sweet delicacy.”

I shrugged as everyone wore blank stares. “Hell, I’ll bite. What, pray tell, is lewd about maple syrup?”

Funboy almost blushed. “The… the location, where it is made?

The sugar shack, or in local parlance cabane à sucre. Van, I don’t want to be the bearer of such news, but that term is also applied in certain unsavory publications, films, and other forms of media that are what I deem smut.”

I schooled my face into the gravest countenance possible even as Torina covered her mouth and Perry started studying the floor, his beak closing with a click. “And you, ah, found this how?”

“An internet search for things that were quintessentially Canadian. I assumed we would be working in that area and wanted to prepare, so I searched for maple syrup and beavers. May I say, to my disgust, the search results were certainly not appropriate to my needs. However, there is, as you say, a silver lining to this unfortunate brush with Canadian depravity.”

“Please, go on,” I said, loving every word of his revelatory tale. “And let me say, since we’re going to Quebec anyway, I think we can easily arrange a maple syrup haul. Didn’t realize you had a sweet tooth on top of your love of cheese.”

“I do not. I am merely taking advantage of my newfound grasp on spicy living, as one website called it. I now understand that maple syrup has…

other potential uses, which brings me back to my desire to be reunited with Gabby—”

“Annnnd we’re done. Don’t think we need to go any further down this particular road, Funboy. We, um, get it,” I said, holding up my hands. Icky, though, looked blank. “What the hell is he talking about?”

Torina leaned over and whispered to her. As she did, Icky’s eyes widened. “Really?

You can do that?”

I sighed. “Netty-P, make sure Evan’s subroutines for cleaning up sticky, syrupy messes are fully updated, would you?

In the meantime, let’s set course for Montreal. We do have some criminals to run down amid all of this sweet talk, after all.”

Funboy sighed in turn. “Ah, yes. Very well, let us take care of our law-enforcement business first, if we must. Another point, I’m reminded of this after several websites—well, I’ll just ask. Can I have one or two of your credit cards?”

ONE THING I have to hand to southern Quebec in the autumn—it’s absolutely glorious. We took the Frankie on a wide, circling trajectory around Montreal, staying clear of airspace used by flights arriving at and leaving the various airports servicing the city, including Mirabel and Trudeau. The foliage around the city, mostly hardwoods, had turned to a spectacular blaze of color, ranging from luminous golden yellows to glowing oranges and blazing reds. As for the city itself, I gazed down on it fondly. I’d been to Montreal several times and had enjoyed myself there every time. It was a relatively tidy city steeped in history, permeated with French-Canadian culture but still sparkling with others, from Indigenous to Chinese. And the Old City was just gorgeous, full of specialty shops and upscale restaurants, and yes, little cheese shops. I hadn’t mentioned the last because I didn’t want to start Icky and Funboy agitating for trips to Montreal the same way they did for Frankenmuth. Our goal was to find the receiving station for the signal emanating from the tracker attached to the Fafnir. Rab had pointed out, though, that it

probably wasn’t wise to bring the ship, with the bug still attached, right into the immediate vicinity of Montreal itself. “It’s one thing for them to pick the thing up near the orbit of—that big planet with the rings around it—”

“Saturn?”

“That’s the one. But if they suddenly start pinging it and find it’s only a few klicks over their heads—”

I nodded. “Yeah. They’ll know something’s up.”

Accordingly, we left the Fafnir in orbit for now, which wouldn’t be unusual to someone watching, and took the Frankie down for a look. Netty-P, who was still aboard her with Rab, would generate some comm traffic in about five minutes. Hopefully, we could get a more precise fix on the receiving station from the Frankie when she did. We swung well south, giving an Air Canada Airbus A330 a wide berth as she climbed away from the city, just as Netty-P started transmitting from high above. I studied the center display intently, waiting to see where the receiving station would—hopefully—pop up. We finally got a hit. The receiving station was located on the edge of a disused marble quarry about twenty klicks south of the city, meaning it was probably a remote station. But we’d been prepared for that, the Frankie’s scanners specifically looking for any relay of the data to another location. And it was, to a server farm located about ten klicks west of the city, in a rambling industrial park. I was well-acquainted with such facilities from my previous life. They were almost always shady, though not usually not outright illegal. Most often, they hosted various combinations of porn, online gambling, and cryptocurrency mining. It took only a moment to break into this one and start sifting through its contents—

“Oh. Oh my.”

Torina’s eyes widened at the webpage that had popped open on the center display. Perry started his rendition of seventies syntho-percussive porn music, bow-chikka-WOW-wow. “Those people don’t have any clothes on,” Icky observed. I shook my head. “No, they most certainly do not.”

She shrugged. “I’m not complaining, just making note of people who choose not to wear pants.”

“Or anything else,” Torina said, then gave me a look. “You seem awfully unsurprised by this.”

It was my turn to shrug. “My dear, in my past life, I used to traverse the heights and crawl through the depths of the online world. I’ve seen everything from the sublime, to the grotesque, to the just plain ridiculous. Trust me, that”—I nodded at the display—“is positively tame.”

She pointed at one of the videos playing. “That’s tame?

Really?”

“Well, maybe not so much that one in particular, but overall?

Yeah, it’s not surprising.”

“You don’t still have access to this stuff, do you?

An account or something—”

I smiled sweetly at her. “Girl, I don’t need accounts for the vast majority of the stuff on this planet’s information networks. I can, and did, pretty much go where I please. But to put your mind at rest—no, I genuinely have no real interest in this stuff. And with things like generative AI starting to create it, it’s just starting to get… creepy.”

“Starting to?” Netty-P asked. “Trust me, Van—what the people of Earth are calling AI isn’t even remotely I. It’s just A,” Perry said. “Anyway, this isn’t what we’re looking for. Although redirecting the comm traffic through here isn’t a bad idea, hiding in plain sight and all that

—”

“That’s quite odd.”

It was Funboy that had spoken. We all looked at him. “What’s odd?” I asked him. He shrugged and waved a hand. “That they would feature such unimpressive male humans—and naked, at that. I assumed the purpose was to hypersexualize the visual nature of this data.” His gaze turned thoughtful. “Although I suppose the underlying psychology could be to make the average terrestrial human male believe that they are also exceptional. It may even give them hope that they too can effectively perform as naked actors specialize in making exaggerated faces of… pleasure, I assume?

It’s difficult to tell.”

Icky just stared at him. “And you’re hot with the ladies, huh?”

“So I have been informed.”

“Uh-huh.”

I shook my head. “Anyway, Netty-P, have we located a particular server

—”

“We have. I was waiting for the fascination with the unimpressive male humans to die down.” The image flicked to another website, one that was far more mainstream. It was for a package tour company, one that specialized in family vacations to parks and on cruise ships. “The comm data is being sent to an IP address that is linked to this website.”

“Okay, and do we know where that is?” I readied myself for it to be someplace far away—China, maybe, or somewhere in Africa. But it was actually a local address, a small storefront on a main street, rue Saint-Jacques. Perry accessed the land registry data and got an immediate hit of more than a little interest. “Huh. The place is being rented by a holding company based here in Montreal whose principal shareholder is one L. Rosen. Could be a coincidence. Rosen isn’t an uncommon name. German, Jewish origin, and there is a large Jewish community in Montreal.”

“What do you think?” I asked him. “Oh, that’s most definitely the good Ms. Rosen from Pont Alus Kyr, absolutely. These things almost never are actually coincidences.”

“So how do you want to proceed, Van?” Netty-P asked. I thought for a moment as we continued a wide circuit around the city. “Have we got a bug of our own?

One that we could use to intercept any other comms coming in through this system?”

“We do. We’ve got a standard-issue device up in the Fafnir that we could plant near the receiver in that quarry. It should do the job quite nicely since it doesn’t seem the bad guys have taken any particularly sophisticated security measures to protect this little setup of theirs,” Perry said. I sniffed. “Of course they haven’t. Complacency is the real enemy of the villains.” I set the Frankie to climb back to orbit, to rendezvous with the Fafnir. “Okay, let’s go get the bug. When we get back, bird, we’ll let you plant it. And then, hopefully, we’ll see what else L. Rosen of rue Saint-Jacques may be up to.”

PERRY PLACED THE BUG, we confirmed it was working, and then we got a hit off it almost as soon as the Frankie’s airlock closed behind Perry. Based on our intercept, Rosen herself had a meeting with several covert agents in

four days, here in Montreal. At least one of them was associated with Manon Clemenceau, but there was scant information otherwise. Still, it was a solid hit and a solid lead. Which left us with four days to effectively kill. I shrugged at that. “Well, I guess it’s the farm—”

“I have an alternative idea,” Funboy put in. “Okay, shoot.”

“There is a surprise that I have been waiting to reveal to Gabby, for the purpose of our reunion. Since she is on her way here, this would seem the opportune time to reveal it.”

“Okay—what did you have in mind?”

“I have won a very special, all-inclusive luxury vacation at an elite location.”

I had to frown. “Funboy, it’s only four days. By the time we can twist

—”

“The elite location in question is here on Earth.”

That didn’t make my frown smooth away. If anything, it deepened. What the hell kind of vacation had Funboy won here, on Earth?

“Here on Earth. Where?”

“In the political entity known as Louisiana. I gather it is another state within those called the United ones, similar to Iowa. Having done some background research, my understanding is that it is renowned for a form of cuisine called Cajun, a festivity known as Mardis Gras, and wetlands featuring a large, reptilian predator known as a gator. I further understand that, in the past, girls were given to going wild during the Mardis Gras event—which seems to have mostly involved revealing particular aspects of their anatomy to fortuitously placed imaging devices.”

“Louisiana. A vacation.”

“Yes. It is entirely free of charge. And their literature is very clear that they are open to couples and groups of all types. I believe that Gabby and I would constitute a subset of couple that would fall within the set, all types.”

Funboy actually looked smug. “I believe you see where this is going, you being a fellow male of a worldly bent.”

I just stared, a knowing smile slowly spreading itself across my face. “You won a free vacation in Louisiana, huh?

Yeah, I do think I see where this is going.”

Perry cut in. “So do I. This is obviously a—”

I gently pinched his beak closed. “You know what, Funboy?

Let’s do this. Go ahead, take the Frankie out to Cantullin Station to pick up Gabby and bring her back, which should have you and her here tomorrow morning. We’ll meet you in Louisiana.”

“I appreciate this very much, Van, thank you.”

I was still smiling as I shrugged. “Eh, we’ve got time. And the farm has probably got a thousand government eyes scrutinizing it right now. So what the hell.”

I gave Perry a knowing glance. “We can all share some time down in the good ol’ Bayou State. Isn’t that right, bird?”

“Yes it is, boss. It’s time to let the good times roll.”

9

FUNBOY’S free and elite vacation spot was south of Bogalusa, Louisiana, close to the border with Mississippi. We left Netty-P in orbit with the Fafnir while the rest of us descended in the Frankie and landed in a muddy field about a half a klick away. I was careful to approach from the direction opposite our vacation spot destination, so as to not overfly it and spoil the surprise I was sure awaited us. Funboy had patched into the cell network to let his benefactors, La Belle du Grande Vista Developments LLC, know that we were coming. A

“courtesy van,” an old Dodge Caravan with magnetic signs labeled La Belle du Grande Vista in severe black letters on white, was waiting for us. The chubby man behind the wheel peered at us as we approached, his eyes wide. I walked—squelched—up to the driver’s door. The sun beat down like a red-hot hammer, driving the humid air up to stifling incandescence. The window shuddered down. A cool gust of air conditioning hit me, tinged with the earthy stink of weed. “Holy… crap. Boss told me some space people were comin’, but—hey, you really are space people, aintcha?”

I blinked at the accent, expecting a Cajun drawl and getting something distinctly Texan instead. “Actually, I’m from Iowa. The rest of these folks, though—yeah, they’re from space, alright,” I said. He took in the others, gaping in wonder at Icky, Rab, Funboy, and Gabby. She waved at him happily with the hand that wasn’t holding

Funboy’s. They’d been in one form of physical contact or another ever since Saturn. “Hi, nice to meet you!” she chimed. The man’s eyes finished on Torina. “And how about you, pretty lady?

Where’re you from, besides my dreams?”

I bit back a laugh. Torina smiled. “I’m from a planet called Helso. And regardless of what you might have heard, we are not cannibals. I mean, it was one incident. One. Well—two, if you count that one other time. But that was nearly five years ago!”

The man’s face went blank. “Uh—”

“So are you here to give us a ride to”—I stepped back and looked at the magnetic sign on the oxide-dulled door—“the beauty spot that is La Belle du Grande Vista?”

“Uh—” He looked at Torina, then shook his head. “Uh, yes… yeah!

You can just… climb in.” He blinked at Icky. “If you can fit, that is.”

“I’ll manage,” she said, going to the back and lifting the hatch. She left it open and settled herself in, her feet drawn up and resting on the rear bumper. The rest of us packed in as best we could. “Perry, how about you?” I asked. “Yeah, I’m already circling over La Belle du Grande Vista. Van, it’s—

it’s everything I expected it to be.”

“Oh, I’m sure it is,” I muttered, jamming myself in beside Torina. As I did, I glanced at her. “Two incidents?

I thought it was three. What about that time that—you know. With all the eyes—”

She shook her head. “That was never proven,” she snapped, then turned away as though upset. I could see her struggling not to laugh now as well. Rab was doing an admirable job of looking interested in the scenery. Gabby and Funboy—

They were just gazing longingly into one another’s eyes. I turned to—

“What’s your name, anyway?” I asked the driver. “I’m Van.”

“It’s—I’m—Bob.”

“Well, Bob, let’s be off, then,” I said, gesturing out the cracked windshield. “Don’t you folks have… uh, luggage?”

I waved a hand. “We’ll come grab it later. Right now, we just want to check out our new home away from home.”

He put the minivan into gear and it lumbered off, its suspension creaking slightly. We crawled up a gravel track to a paved road, turned, and followed it for a couple of hundred meters, then turned onto another gravel track. We passed a wooden sign proclaiming La Belle du Grande Vista Estates in flowing script. Beneath that was, Share Luxury Times at Affordable Prices!

I smirked at that. Ballsy, embedding the true nature of your business right in your motto. We wheeled to a stop and piled out of the minivan, then stood and peered around. As Perry had said, it was everything I’d expected it to be. La Belle du Grande Vista Estates was, in fact, an old quarry south of Bogalusa, near a murky, sluggish waterway called Yellow Branch Creek. The quarry had filled with yet more murky, sluggish water, and was surrounded by a couple of dozen cheap cabins. We peered around in a desultory sort of way, Torina and I, at least, already sweating in the thick, sultry heat. A few cicadas buzzed fitfully from the nearby line of oaks and magnolias. Mosquitoes whined through the air like tiny dentist drills, while lovebugs staggered through the air in paired gyrations, plunking into everyone and everything with repulsive frequency. A vaguely sweet, perfumy smell from miscellaneous flowering shrubs—obviously intended to pretty the place up but not quite managing it—fumed the air, punctuated by hints of dank water and mildew. “Well, this is”—Torina swallowed and forced a smile—“nice.”

Icky frowned at her. “You really think so?

Seems like a shi—”

“Shining example of a prime vacation spot?” I cut in, flicking my eyes significantly at Funboy and Gabby. “I absolutely agree.”

Icky stared at me for a moment, glanced at Funboy, then nodded. “Oh. Yeah. Right, it’s—it’s something, alright. Downright charming and, uh, stuff.”

I looked at Rab. He seemed utterly unperturbed by it all. He saw me looking at him and shrugged. “I lived a few years on Dustfall. This place is much nicer than that.”

I flashed a grin. Dustfall was a planet orbiting Luyten’s Star, a world irradiated by a long-forgotten war. The radiation-hardy P’nosk had

established a colony there that was thriving—insofar as anything on a war-blasted, rad-scoured world could be considered thriving, anyway. As we ambled down to the lake, I watched Funboy and Gabby. She was chattering away, filling Funboy in on the details—every last one of them—

of her time amid the Conoku. Funboy, in turn, seemed to hang on her every word. So far, neither of them had taken much notice of the state of La Belle du Grande Vista. That changed when we reached the water’s edge, though. Funboy’s hygiene sense was obviously tingling, because he turned from Gabby to look across the lake, then froze. “Oh dear. Is that—the corpse of an animal?” he asked, cutting Gabby off in mid-word. I swatted at yet another of the mosquitoes craving my blood, looked, then nodded. “Yup. A possum, I think. Kind of hard to tell with all the—you know, bloating, though.”

Torina let out a long sigh as she stared around us. “I think it might have died from disappointment,” she said, looking pointedly at the shabby little cabins. Perry spoke over the comm from near one of them. If you like the water, you’ll love this, Perry quipped. We headed to join him. Gabby resumed chatting, but Funboy now seemed more forlornly aware of his surroundings. When we reached the cabin, Perry gestured with a wing into a crawl space beneath it. I looked and saw yellow tape printed in black with Crime Scene—Do Not Cross—

Police Orders over and over along its length. “Kind of looks like it was shoved under there in a hurry, doesn’t it?”

Perry said. I nodded. “Let’s hope that’s all that was shoved under there.”

“You folks have your pick of the cabins, any two you want,” Bob called out, putting away a cell phone. “Boss just called, he’s on his way to meet you folks.”

“Any two we want, huh?” Rab said, looking around. “Kinda spoiled for choice.”

We half-heartedly checked out a couple of cabins, then settled into one, plunking ourselves into furniture that looked like it had either come from a discount store, or maybe the curb where someone had left it. A small window air conditioner struggled mightily to blow air that was merely hot instead of incandescent, but it was still like sitting in a sauna. Funboy was

looking decidedly unhappy—I think, it was hard to tell with him—but Gabby just kept prattling away about her adventures. Icky was puttering with the TV, which theoretically had internet service, but we ended up watching a lot of buffering. I was just about ready to pull the plug when a vehicle raced up and practically skidded to a halt outside. A moment later, the door flew open to reveal a rail-thin, sunburned man with capped teeth, thinning, dirty-blonde hair clearly dyed that way, and eyes like security cameras. He wore white alligator shoes, white pants, and a gold shirt with the name of La Belle du Grande Vista spelled wrong, Belle being Bell. He must have seen me looking at it, because he glanced down, then back up, and grinned with teeth so white I had to squint. He tucked a folder under his arm and stretched out a hand toward me, three rings glittering brightly. “No sense in getting rid of forty perfectly good shirts, am I right?

What’s a letter or two among friends?” He laughed and reached toward me, though I noticed his eyes roving warily over the rest of the crew. “Wow, you really are out of this world?” He barked another laugh. “Eh?

Get it?”

I offered a watery smile back. “Yes. Yes I do.”

“Houston Tagwell,” he said, shaking my hand with a palm that made me think of old Fren-Okun women. “Born and raised in Bogalusa, so local boy makes good, am I right?

Anyway, just a bit about me. Went to college over at the West Texas Liturgical College and Technical School. I mean you get accepted to a school like that you go, am I right?”

“I… suppose you do, yes.”

“Anyhoo”—that was how he pronounced it, anyhoo—“you folks are obviously here because you’re interested in making Puerto de Olas Doradas your new home away from home—”

“Sorry, where?”

Tagwell blinked at me, then grated that too-loud-and-enthusiastic laugh of his again. “Oh, sorry, sorry, that’s another luxury property I own in—“

“Fort Lauderdale?”

“You’re close—west of there.”

West of Coral Springs, Florida, is swamp—lots and lots of swamp, Perry said. I released his hand. “Lucky guess.”

“Anyhoo—”

Tagwell then proceeded to launch into a spiel for buying into his time-share, a rapid-fire monologue so slick it would have made a Yonnox sit up and take notice. The hell of it was that he actually made it sound appealing. It had me wondering if he had some latent psychic talent similar to that of the Ligurites, like Master Yotov, making everything sound more reasonable. If he did, though, it wasn’t enough to actually sway me—or Funboy, who’d now realized how the whole thing worked. I found that out when I finally managed to jam a word into the torrent of sales talk spewing out of Tagwell, saying I wanted to talk to my associates in private. As Funboy put it after Tagwell had stepped outside, “This was a naked attempt to exploit me into buying into this arrangement. I feel so… used.”

I offered him a smile. “Oh, don’t be too hard on yourself. This is what these people do. In the future, though, just remember that grifters don’t need advanced technology to grift. There’s legions of them here on Earth, and they’re just as seductive as any you’ll find on Dregs or Spindrift.”

“He actually makes it sound like a good deal,” Rab said. I switched my smile to him. “He does, right?

Have to admit, he’s good at what he does. Although if I’m thinking of signing, it’s mainly to get him to shut up and go away.”

“Hey, whatever works, am I right?” Perry asked—in Tagwell’s voice. Torina shrugged. “If you do sign, we can always flee to another star system. There isn’t a judge in known space that would side with our friend Houston.”

I curled my lip at her. “For the record, no—I am not signing anything, and neither are any of you guys.”

I turned to the door and called Tagwell back in. He bounced through the door, with a contract in one hand and a pen in the other. “So who’s giving me their John Hancock?”

Gabby spoke up. “John Hancock?

Who’s that?

And how do we give you some body?

And why this John Hancock in particular?

Is this some strange Earthly custom I’m not aware of?”

To his credit, Tagwell had handled Rab, Funboy, and even Icky with reasonable aplomb. Gabby, though, perhaps being a little too gelatinous for his tastes, clearly put him off. He shot her a look that combined a little disgust, a little irritation, and a lot of just not wanting to have to engage with her, then ignored her and turned to me. That was a mistake. “So, Van, are you the lucky signatory—”

“Excuse me.”

Tagwell turned to find Funboy staring up at him. “Oh—you’re the winner of the package, right. So you’re going to sign

—?”

“Your attitude has insulted this precious blossom I consider my soulmate. I shall require you to apologize to her.”

Now Tagwell looked flustered. “I—you want—I—what—?”

Funboy’s gaze didn’t waver a millimeter. “I shall only repeat this once. You will apologize to my significant other, or I will demonstrate a randomly chosen method of inserting that pen into your anatomy. There are fourteen relevant to humans.” He blinked. “Pray I don’t select method nine.”

Tagwell gaped, stuttered, then stammered an apology to Gabby, yanked a handful of buffet vouchers out of his pocket, tossed them onto the table, and beat a hasty retreat. We all finally burst out laughing. Gabby, though, gave Funboy a fond hug, then glanced in a foggy mirror hanging on the wall. “Well, I guess my looks at least got us a free meal.”

I walked over, disengaged her from Funboy, then hugged her myself. It was like hugging a sack of stiff Jell-O, but I didn’t care. “Gabby, your beauty matches your charm—and you are incredibly charming,” I said. Rab nodded. “Hear, hear.” Even Perry bobbed his head. I let go of her, to receive a tap on my arm. It was Funboy. “Thank you, Van.”

I smiled down at him. “Okay, gang, I don’t know about you, but I’m not anxious to find out what constitutes a buffet around here. How about we go somewhere we enjoy—and where we know we’re wanted.”

Funboy nodded. “Indeed. Frankenmuth, here we come.”

10

FRANKENMUTH WAS, incredibly enough, starting to feel homey. I doubted we’d ever get to the point where our presence there didn’t cause a stir, but true to the entrepreneurial spirit, the town had started to adapt. An extraterrestrial sub-theme had started to wind its way through the place, with UFO and alien-themed books, postcards, trinkets and knick-knacks appearing in windows and on shelves and spinner displays. One of them, a t-shirt supposedly depicting Icky—we thought—caught our eye in a gift shop as we ambled up the town’s main street. “That’s supposed to be me?” Icky asked. We peered at an obviously AI-generated picture with elements of ape, Bigfoot, yeti and—and I’m going to say an owlbear from Dungeons & Dragons, glaring at the viewer, waving arms and proclaiming, “I LOVE

CHEESE FROM FRANKENMUTH, MI!”

Perry flicked his gaze back and forth, from the t-shirt, to Icky, then back again. “Wait. Which one is the actual Icky?

It’s like I’m seeing double!”

“I like cheese from Frankenmuth, and I notice there are no garments depicting me,” Funboy said. Torina glanced at him. “Smile.”

He did. Torina gave a tight nod. “That’s why.”

By then, a small crowd had gathered, brandishing cell phones like melee weapons. A small boy, maybe five or six years old, suddenly stepped forward and peered up at Rab. “You’re weird.”

Rab sighed. “That’s what my friends used to tell me, yes.”

The boy’s mother hastily pulled him back. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, trying to avoid eye contact as she herded her son away. An older boy, a teenager, gave Icky a smirk. “Were you gonna eat him?”

She stared back down at him. “Not as my first choice. I mean”—she pointed at the t-shirt in the window—“I LOVE CHEESE!”

The kid, who’d been doing his best to look cool about it while obviously teetering on the edge of nervous retreat, yelped, turned, and ran. So did a few others. The rest of the crowd drew back warily, now holding their phones like talismans to ward off some evil spirit. I raised my hands. “It’s okay, everyone. Icky just gets grumpy when she’s hungry.”

“And not for people. She definitely does not eat people,” Perry added, with just enough uncertainty to make it questionable. “Funny you need to specify that,” someone said. We carried on, heading for chicken dinner at a restaurant whose staff was clearly torn between fascination and terror. The manager gave us a separate dining room intended for things like meetings or private functions, but that didn’t stop the gawkers from trying to take things in as we ate. I’d planned to head back to the Frankie, with Paxomar aboard watching her after being smoothly deposited by B, who was in the area—naturally Even as a “small and somewhat nerdy” Wu’tzur, Paxomar towered over most humans, and I didn’t really want to bring him and Icky on the same trip into Frankenmuth. I figured we’d return to Pony Hollow, but the crew wasn’t ready to give up on the Frankenmuth fun. “C’mon, Van. Your farm is nice and all, but it’s not exactly party central, is it?” Icky said, her tone a pleading one. I looked at the others, while another small crowd started gathering, phones held aloft in the gathering dusk. I sighed as the streetlights came on. “Guys, don’t you think we’re making enough of a spectacle?”

Torina touched my shoulder. “Van, this is a chance to show the world that extraterrestrials aren’t monsters. You did want to control the messaging, right?”

I glanced at her and sighed again. Every moment we spent with our non-human crew members in public was another moment something could go terribly wrong. On the other hand, if we hid them away, then it did let

the likes of Plowitz, Clemenceau, and the Equal Grasp to control the narrative as they saw fit. “What the hell.” I lowered my voice and called everyone in close. A few of the crowd closed in as well, wielding their phones, but a glare from Icky pushed them back like a strong—and angry—gust of wind. “Guys, you have to promise me that no matter what happens, you will not respond to it with anything even remotely resembling violence. The absolute rule is turn and walk away. And nobody drinks any alcohol. In fact, this is something I don’t often do—it’s an order, and I expect you to treat it as such. Got it?”

Everyone nodded emphatically. We then resumed our way, heading for a place down the street from which oompa music wafted, thumping the cooling dusk air. The next couple of hours were—okay, they were fun. A lot of fun, actually. The place was pretty empty, but as word apparently went around town that we were here, it soon started to fill up. Funboy watched an older couple dance a polka, then he pulled Gabby up onto the floor, and the two of them gave it a try. Funboy, unfortunately, never managed to loosen up enough to make it look natural. Instead of smoothly hopping from foot to foot, he basically stomped rigidly from side to side, making it a fusion of a lively polka and rigor mortis. Gabby, though, was a natural. She flung herself into the dance like she’d grown up in Bavaria. Icky got up and tried to match her at one point. The heavy thud of her feet against the dance floor prompted the manager to come to me and ask her to stop before she broke something. I nodded and stood, then walked up and tapped her—whereupon she grabbed me and tried to pull me into a dance. It was like trying to polka with an Abrams tank. Torina came to the rescue, stepping up to the karaoke mic and launching into a glorious rendition of “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. It made the whole place stop, gape, then start singing along. I just stood there, enchanted by Torina’s voice. I never knew she could sing so beautifully!

“I never knew she could sing so beautifully.”

I blinked at my thoughts being voiced out loud and turned. It was Rab. I nodded at him. “Neither did I.”

“Isn’t it a wonderful feeling, discovering new things about the one you love?”

I smirked at him. “I guess it depends what those new things are. Fantastic singer?

Yes. Serial killer?

Maybe not so much.”

He laughed, but I decided to push a little. I’d become more than comfortable with Rab, but there were still huge parts of his life I knew nothing about. “You’re speaking like someone who has experience, Rab.”

He shrugged. “I have experience with a lot of things, Van.”

It was all he said and apparently it was all he was going to say, so I left it—

“No, for the last time, I do not want any peanuts!”

Rab and I both turned to the voice, which had been Perry’s. A couple of giggling young women were trying to offer him food. “But birds like peanuts!” one of them said. “Again, I am not a bird. I am a combat AI shaped like a bird—”

A man walking by, carrying two mugs of beer, glanced at him with a dumb grin. “Hey, Polly wanna cracker?”

Perry turned to me. “Van, if you don’t mind, I’m going outside for some fresh air.”

“But you don’t need fresh air, you’re a combat AI that only pretends to

—”

Snapping a curse, he flung himself into the air and deftly wove a flight path over the heads of the crowd and out the door. Phones followed him, as did a smattering of applause and a few cheers. I decided to let the festivities go on for another half hour or so, then we’d call it quits. Torina sang another song by popular request, “Open Arms”—again by Journey—while Funboy started to finally get the hang of polka. He even started flexing his knees a little. Only ten minutes passed, though, before Perry spoke up in my ear bug. Van, we’ve got a situation outside. Two guys, hard-looking types. They’re not very inconspicuous, though, while they take a lot of interest in the bar you’re in. No sooner had he stopped talking than Netty-P, in orbit aboard the Fafnir, cut in. Van, there’s also a ship up here, stealthed. It moved into an orbit trailing the Fafnir by a thousand klicks or so about ten minutes ago. I’ve been watching it, but I haven’t gone to active scanners. I looked around at my crew. Perry and Netty-P had obviously broadcast into their ear bugs as well, everyone putting on a casual show of returning to the table where Rab and I sat. “So what do you want to do, Van?” Torina asked, taking my hand and smiling as though we were just a couple chatting. I glanced around at the crowd. Too many eyes were watching us. “Well, first thing’s first, we need to get out of here.”

I settled up the tab—and holy crap can my crew shovel down the food, I noted, wincing at the charge on my credit card—then we headed out, waving and saying goodnight over and over to people that we passed. Out on the street, we stopped, spreading out as though pausing to take in the night air. One of them is about twenty meters to your left, trying to… hide behind a lamppost, I think?

Perry said. I glanced that way. Sure enough, I saw a burly guy with a brush cut standing on the curb, partly blocked by a streetlamp post. He was pretending to be interested in a window display of a drugstore. “Yeah, these guys really aren’t very good at this, are they?

Perry, where’s the other one?” I muttered, while Icky, Torina, and Gabby started up a loud chatter for cover. Other side of the street, about five meters further north, right outside the fudge place. Now I flicked my attention that way. Another brush cut. Again, he was all too easy to pick out. “Okay, let’s see what these guys do,” I said, turning and starting south along Frankenmuth’s main commercial strip. The rest of the crew fell in around me. Yeah, they’re following you guys, Perry said. I was holding hands with Torina as I walked. “I’d really like to grab at least one of these guys to find out who they’re working for. Thoughts?”

“Whatever we do, we need to do it quietly and without being noticed. If we make a scene—”

I nodded. “Yeah. Paxomar, are you there?”

I am. Perry linked me in so I know what’s going on. “My gun, The Drop, is in the arms locker. Grab it and bring it to a place Perry’s going to guide you to. Perry, I need you to pick a spot for us to meet Paxomar, somewhere this side of the Frankie.”

Gotcha. Just past Zehnder’s, where we had dinner, there’s that green space where we parked the Frankie. If he meets up at this end of it, it should be nice and secluded among those trees. I acknowledged and we continued our unhurried way south. I quietly asked everyone except Torina to slowly fall back. By the time we passed Zehnder’s, which was across Main Street from the Bavarian Inn, there was a good six or seven meter gap between us and them. It meant that we reached the trees before they did. Paxomar waited in the gloom pooled beneath them. I whispered for Icky and Gabby to spark up a loud conversation as distraction while he handed The Drop off to me, then Torina and I hurried into the cover of the trees. I checked to make sure the weapon was set to its human-stun setting. It was late enough that Zehnder’s was closed, and there were only a few people outside the Bavarian Inn watching the extraterrestrial commotion across the street. Immediately south of us was nothing but the Cass River, so there wasn’t much other foot traffic around. “Okay, guys, bring ’em this way,” I whispered into the comm. As Icky and company resumed their way toward us, I spoke to Perry, still circling unseen above. “Any other players in this game?”

None that I can see. Looks like it’s just the two. I waited as Icky, Gabby, Funboy, and Rab passed us, doing my best to blend into the gloom. Paxomar had pulled back. Torina—

Grabbed me and started kissing me passionately. “What are you doing—?” I hissed, but she cut me off, whispering into my ear. “Giving you a reason to be hiding in the shadows.”

“Ah. Well, carry on then,” I whispered back and resumed kissing her. “Okay, Van, almost time,” she said, pulling back again. “No it isn’t. I can go longer—oh, right. The bad guys.”

They’d done us a favor, closing up with one another, so that only a few meters separated them. I whispered for the others to keep going, hoping to pull both of them in among the trees. One of them did follow, but the other hung back, keeping to the sidewalk. “Now or never,” I said, moving away from Torina, who immediately went off to my right in a crouch. I aimed The Drop at the one on the sidewalk and fired a stun pulse with a dull thump. The man dropped, fortunately onto the grass beside the sidewalk and not smacking his head

into concrete. The other one stopped and turned, and I stunned him, too. By then, Icky had hurried over, scooped the first one up, and pulled him back under the trees. I braced myself for shouts or other signs of alarm from the street, but there were none. Paxomar hefted the second one I’d dropped, and we all rushed back to the Frankie. “MORNING, SUNSHINE,” I said, smiling at the gruff man as he came to. He blinked at me, then he looked around, taking in the interior of the Frankie. I had Torina, Icky, and Gabby with me, while the others kept watch outside, Perry still aloft. The man turned back to me. “Where am I?”

“Aboard an alien spaceship—”

“Where you’re gonna be prooooobed!” Icky said, making a spooky voice. I shot her a glare. “Icky, play nice. I just want some answers from these gentlemen, then they can be on their way.”

By now, the other one was waking up. When they both finally managed to push their thoughts back out of the stun fog clouding their brains, they immediately spoke—a familiar refrain. “Roja, Jason, Warrant Officer,” he snapped, followed by his service number. The other immediately followed suit, declaring himself, “Craft, Jason, Warrant Officer,” followed by his own service number, along with a sneer..

“You’re both named Jason?” Torina asked, smiling. Roja looked at her. “Yeah. What about it?”

“I don’t know, it’s just sort of—” She shrugged. “Funny.”

Roja tried to glare, but she just kept smiling back. We spent the next twenty minutes or so trying to dig some answers out of the two Jasons, but they were determined to give nothing but name, rank, and service number, like good prisoners of war. I finally gave up, left Icky watching them, and retreated outside of the Frankie to confer with the others. “They’re not going to talk. And I’m not really in the mood to play subtle mind games to try and wiggle anything out of them, or lean on them because I don’t think that’s going to work, either. So—suggestions for what to do with these guys?” I asked at large. “Van, I have a thought. I once idly speculated that a micro-comm bug intended for use in the aural canal could be adapted into a surreptitious listening device. I further speculated that, based on my recent research into details of human anatomy, such a device could be inserted into a nasal cavity, where it should be undetectable if implanted correctly,” Funboy said. I stared at him. “You’ve been idly speculating about how to implant covert bugs into human beings?”

“Among other things, yes.”

“Among other—” I shook my head. “What other things—no, wait, I’m sure I don’t want to know. How reliable would this be?

Is it going to be easy to dislodge or cause sinus infections, anything like that?”

“Unless they were to sneeze with a vigor similar to that of Icky, the chances of becoming dislodged are minimal. And I can treat them to prevent them from becoming a locus of infection. The subject may experience occasional, slight discomfort in the form of a mild headache, but that would be all.”

“It would be a way of gaining information we’re not otherwise going to get,” Torina said. “And then some, if these hidden bugs let us hear everything they not only say, but that’s said to or around them,” Rab put in. I thought about it a moment, then nodded. “Okay. As long as it won’t do any harm to them, let’s give it a try. Worst case scenario, if the scheme gets discovered, it might make the bad guys more wary about getting too close to us. Speaking of which—Netty-P, what’s going on with that other ship?”

“Still just keeping its distance, no active scanners.”

“Okay, let us know if anything changes.” I turned to Funboy. “How long do you need to get things ready?”

“With Perry’s assistance, perhaps an hour,” he replied. “Well, I’ll take another stab at getting these guys to talk the old-fashioned way in the meantime. And when you’re ready”—I touched The Drop in its holster—“we’ll make them go nighty night again.”

SURE ENOUGH, the two Jasons spilled nothing more than their basic personal data. That didn’t mean we weren’t able to learn anything more about them, though. Netty-P scoured open sources, then dug into the Army’s information systems, hunting for anything else useful about them. What she found was both surprising and a little mystifying. Jason Rojas, age thirty-two, and Jason Craft, age thirty-four, had been born in Flagstaff, Arizona and Albany, New York respectively. Both had had distinguished military careers as Army helicopter pilots—Rojas flying AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, with a secondment to the Royal Netherlands Air Force to help them train pilots on their own Apaches, while Craft had flown UH-60 Blackhawks, including some very high-level VIP flight ops. Both had subsequently ended up flying more esoteric aircraft in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), also known as the Night Stalkers, the outfit that supports Army spec ops missions. At that point, information became scant—not surprisingly, since anything related to spec ops was generally highly classified and kept in pretty secure places. I had an idea where I could find it if we really wanted it, but I decided to leave it for now. Instead, we now stared at two unconscious men, into whose nasal cavities Funboy was inserting the tiny bugs he and Perry had modified from standard comm ear bugs. He was also going to administer a mnemonic inhibitor, a drug that would turn their memories of the last six to eight hours or so to fuzz—basically, the blackout part of getting really, really drunk, but with none of the other effects. “Their skills seem kind of—I don’t know, specialized, I guess, to be tailing people in Frankenmuth,” Torina noted. “No, it’s not really up their alley, is it?

They’re both obviously skilled helicopter pilots, but that doesn’t make them good spies,” I agreed. “It must be something about their background in spec ops. I doubt that tailing us has anything to do with Army special operations, so they must have been recruited into it by someone else—someone like Manon Clemenceau,” Perry said. I frowned and nodded. No matter how we looked at it, it seemed strange. Why helicopter pilots?

Why were helicopter pilots even interested in… well, not flying helicopters?

They were obviously good at it. Of course, a warrant officer’s pay wasn’t going to make them rich, so that left the obvious angle of money. Maybe someone had made them an offer they

couldn’t refuse, and that someone had been more interested in their involvement in the spooky world of spec ops, not their ability to fly helicopters. Still, it didn’t quite add up. But since they weren’t going to talk, and I wasn’t going to try to be coercive, the bugs seemed our best way of finding out more. Funboy stepped back and nodded. “There. Both devices are implanted. Again, short of serious head trauma or the sort of sneeze only a Wu’tzur is likely to manage, they—”

“Um, excuse me, but if you’re referring to that time I sneezed back at the farm, it was because of all that dust in the barn,” Icky grated. I chuckled. “That sneeze rated a hurricane warning to boats, big girl, and Iowa’s nowhere near the ocean.”

“As I recall, I was carrying a drink and didn’t even spill it, so it couldn’t have been that bad—”

“You know what?

Let’s leave this fascinating discussion for another time. I want to get these two somewhere where they’re going to wake up away from prying eyes—probably among those trees down by the riverbank. “Besides, I’ve got enough mucus in my life these days, what with the

—”

“Fren-Okun?

Boss, it’s like you’re a psychic,” Netty-P said over the comm. I glanced at him as Icky and Paxomar moved in to pick up our two sleeping beauties in order to lug them out of the Frankie. “What do you mean?”

“Guess who just linked to that bug we left hot on the Fafnir.”

“Is it someone who says moist a lot?”

“Got it in one. The skies up here are getting a bit crowded. I think we better have an exit strategy in case—”

Perry cut her off. “Van, you’ve got an incoming message on a secure comm channel. It’s our friend and mysterious benefactor Colonel Burton.”

I blinked a couple of times. Burton—?

Oh, right. The Colonel who’d literally dropped out of the sky and saved the farm—or brought the orders from the Pentagon that saved the farm, at least temporarily, anyway. But we’d never given him a comm. It meant he’d

gotten one from somewhere else and knew how to use it, and he also knew how to use it to get ahold of us specifically. “Okay—put him on.”

Perry nodded. “Van Tudor here.”

“Tudor?

Burton here. You’ve been compromised. You need to get the hell away from Earth.”

Icky gave me a questioning look and pointed at our two unconscious helicopter pilots. I nodded, and she and Paxomar hefted them in turn and carted them away. I crossed my arms. “No, Colonel, I’m not going to do that.”

“No?

But—”

“No. We’d be in no more or less danger up there than down here. Probably less, since I doubt any bad guy is going to want to engage in open hostilities down here on Earth—that would serve me better than them, in fact, since it would discredit the efforts of people like the Equal Grasp. They want to portray extraterrestrials as kind and wonderful, not dangerous and violent, remember?”

“But, Tudor, you and your people are in danger—”

“I’ve got two ships that aren’t just popguns. Between them, they could destroy a carrier group without breaking a sweat. And my crew and I are battle-hardened and heavily armed. So, no, I’m not leaving. Now, if you’ve got information to share—and I’m assuming you do, hence you feeling the need to warn us like this—we’re listening.”

Silence for a moment, then a laugh. “Have to admit, Mr. Tudor—”

“Call me Van.”

“Okay, Van. I’m Frank. Anyway, Van, you’ve definitely got some big brass ones, I’ll give you that.”

“Having all sorts of powerful alien tech definitely helps brass ’em up, I’ll admit. Anyway, you were about to tell me what this is all about.”

“I know about the project that was being done by”—there was a pause, as he apparently consulted something—“Sere?

Do I have that name right?”

I glanced at Torina, who frowned back at me. “What about it?” I asked. “I know who wants her work, and what they’re willing to do to get it.”

“Yeah, let me guess—every narcissistic multibillionaire with delusions of godhood, and they’re willing to do anything. Absolutely anything.”

“Okay, so maybe it’s not that big a mystery after all.”

“It’s not. The nature of power and greed is as constant as the speed of light. Only the species changes. Oh, I don’t think humans are particularly evil or anything, but the bigger the prize, the higher the climb. Although this does tell me one thing useful.”

“What’s that?”

“That Sere’s research wasn’t as incomplete or inconclusive as I was led to believe. Even the mega-rich assholes don’t throw money and influence at something without having a pretty good expectation of a return on their investment.”

Burton sighed. “You seem to have a knack for being right—and notably ethical. Well, I tried. Can’t say you weren’t warned, Van.”

“I’ve been doing this for a while now, Frank. I’ve learned some things

—one of which is that if you want to accomplish anything in this universe, you have to make it happen. So the level of shit I’m willing to tolerate is pretty much zero. I thought you should know that in case you’d like to pass that information along.”

I glanced at my crew, at Torina. I got looks of approval back. I smiled. “Oh, and Frank?

Just in case any of the people you happen to be talking to are on my side, make sure they get this message, too—things are different now. We won’t have a repeat of Helem Gauss. Ever.”

11

AND—

Nothing happened. We were on guard, prepared for— something, a confrontation, a war of words, more bluster and threats, even an outright attack. But we left Frankenmuth, heading for the farm, my thinking that if somewhere were going to blow up, it was better for it to do it in rural Iowa than in or near Frankenmuth. But checking in with Miryam, she just emphasized the lack of anything going on. “I’m actually getting caught up on a bunch of work, even took on a couple of new cases as an adjunct advisor. Hell, I’ve even given a couple of online lectures on property law at a community college in Dubuque.”

“That must have had them on the edge of their seats,” Perry put in. “Will the easement extend all the way to the edge of the property, or will there be a setback?

Stay tuned to our next exciting—” He started making a snoring sound. Miryam tapped his beak. “Shush you. The grown-ups are talking.”

“Hey, I’m older than you and Van put together—”

“Only by the calendar, dear.” Miryam turned back to me and gestured around the house. “Anyway, I’m working remotely, I get all my groceries delivered, and aside from the occasional helicopter or drone buzzing overhead, it’s as quiet as a church.” She smiled. “I think I could get used to a hermetic existence like this. For that matter—I am!”

I checked in with Clinton Barnes, the Sheriff, and got a similar story. He’d stayed at his job, roaming the county on calls and working out of his office, daring the feds to come after him. But they hadn’t. Even Kyle and Derek, the two ambitious young men who I’d caught snooping around the farm, had come and gone a couple of times. Between them, they’d concocted an actual business plan for an off-world trading post based on the farm, a copy of which they’d left with Miryam. I glanced over it and shook my head. “This is”—I flipped the page—“amazing. Miryam, send the bird a copy

—”

“She already did. And I agree. They might have only just lately come through this side of puberty, but they’re sharp—they’ve done good work for you. I think this would make money and do it in an ethical way, and do it only dealing in relatively innocuous or beneficial goods. The only thing now is to implement it.”

I finished reading their executive summary, then nodded. “Yeah. And the only thing standing in the way of that is our good friend Colonel Mandeville.”

“And Constance Plowitz, and Manon Clemenceau, and the Equal Grasp

—”

I held up a hand. “Fair enough. Still, I’d like to keep these two engaged, let them get a little back. Bird, who do we know who’s off-world that we trust, that’s familiar with Earth and well-connected enough that if we hook them up with Kyle and Derek, that—”

“That’s easy. Skrilla.”

I just frowned at him for a moment. “Skrilla?

Really?”

“Do you trust him?”

“I do.”

“Well, he’s well-connected, and he’s from Earth—he even comes back here from time to time. And my chemical discriminators sensed more than a little residue of whacky t’backy wafting off those two—along with a few other teenaged emanations that don’t bear thinking about. Now, it’s nothing compared to the pea soup of marijuana fog that rolls off Skrilla, but still—it gives them a bit of common ground.”

I smiled and turned to Miryam. “Okay. Get ahold of Kyle and Derek and tell them to go into a holding pattern for the time being while we see

about sparking up the off-world end of our proposed little supply chain, please and thank you, my dear.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh. Great. I can hardly wait. They’re like the grandsons I never wanted.”

AS WE CLIMBED BACK to orbit and rendezvoused with the Fafnir, we mused about the reasons the other side hadn’t made any further overt moves, aside from our two sullen helicopter pilots in Frankenmuth. We found our likely answer when we boarded the Fafnir. “Your mother’s ship, the Retribution, is slipping into a high orbit even as we speak. She broadcast a general message warning the universe that Earth is now under her personal protection and that any moves by ships to arrive or depart without her express approval will be met with lethal force. Oh, and she has two Feral friends in company with her.”

I missed a step in surprise as I walked forward, heading for the cockpit. “My mother?

She’s set herself up as protector of Earth?”

“She has. And her reputation obviously precedes her because the ship that had been shadowing the Fafnir, along with the Fren-Okun ship that seemed to be planning to descend to the surface, both suddenly beat a hasty retreat,” Netty-P confirmed. I nodded and carried on to the cockpit. “Netty-P, please get my mother on the line. I’d like to talk to her.”

I’d barely sat in the pilot’s seat before the display lit up with my mother’s face. There was a tiny but noticeable lag in the conversation since we were too close to make using a twist-comm call worth the antimatter. “Mom—good to see you. And, now that the pleasantries are out of the way, what’s going on?”

She shrugged. “I told you I was coming in from the cold. I meant it. I know that Earth is important to you, but I also know that you’re stretched thin. So’s Petyr Groshenko—he can’t afford to keep a ship on station here much longer. So, I found some like-minded friends and decided to come and take an extended vacation in the Solar System. A working vacation, though. I’m going to help you keep an eye on things.”

Torina slid into her seat beside me. I knew the rest of the crew was hanging out just behind the cockpit, eavesdropping. Which was fine. “Sounds good to me. Anything you’d like to elaborate on?” I asked, feeling the start of a grin. Things were different. Now, I wanted them to stay that way. She gave a faint smile. “Van, I’ve never felt any particular attachment to Earth. It just seemed like a backwards planet that happened to produce three of the finest men I know. Otherwise, though, I’ve never been connected to it. I’d like to change that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one, I plan to spend some time with Miryam. She’s more of a mother to you than I ever was, so she might have insights to share about you—what you were like growing up, that sort of thing. And no, don’t worry, I’m not going to start trying to insert myself into your life as your mom. Frankly, it’s not my style, and I don’t think you want that anyway. But I would like to get to know you better. And spending time with the woman who did help raise you is a good start.”

I glanced at Torina. She nodded her approval. I turned back to my mother. “Well, Mom, I appreciate this. I really do. But the situation on Earth is… it’s complicated right now. Delicate, even. There are forces up here and forces down there that are caught in a sort of cold war. What I really don’t want is for—”

“That war to turn hot.” She smiled again. “Don’t worry, I get it. No, I have no intention of going in with any guns blazing. What I have done is checked in with the Guild, and been deputized by writ from Master Alic to aid in enforcing the cordon established around Earth. I think the Retribution and her consorts will be able to do that quite nicely. But we’re staying firmly up here. Any visits to the surface—mine included—will be the model of discretion.”

Now it was my turn to purse my lips in thought. Frankly, having the Retribution and two equally well-armed ships watching over Earth would be a huge relief. It would also give my mother a chance to prove herself—

I smiled at her and nodded. “Okay then. Welcome aboard. I’d spend more time with you, but we’re on our way—”

“To do your job. I know. Why the hell do you think I’m here, Van?” She waved a hand. “Go, save the universe. I’ll hold the fort.”

“Thanks, Mom. This… means a lot to me.”

“Consider it your birthday present.”

“You missed my birthday by almost a month,” I said, waggling a finger..

Her grin was pure mischief. “Or am I just eleven months early?”

WE ARRIVED at Cantullin Station to find the place abuzz with activity. I was surprised to see a freighter I didn’t recognize hanging a few thousand klicks away. It turned out that her Captain was interested in starting up some trade with Earth, but to his credit, he wanted to do it by the book. He’d already consulted the Guild and had now come to check in with Cantullin Station for further instructions about how to proceed. Which put me in an unexpected spot. According to the freighter’s Captain, Anvil Dark had told him to check with me—that I’d be the one to lay down the conditions for establishing commercial trade with Earth. I shook my head as we took the Frankie to Cantullin Station, leaving the Fafnir parked near the Iowa. “Me?

Why is it up to me?

Since when do I call the shots when it comes to Earth?”

“Since you kind of made it clear you were going to be Earth’s gatekeeper, I guess,” Torina said. “I just wanted to, you know, prevent greedy, unethical scumbags from ruthlessly exploiting my homeworld.”

Icky patted my shoulder. “Sounds like a gatekeeper to me.”

I turned to Perry. “This isn’t how this is supposed to happen, is it?

I mean, Earth can’t be the first pre-contact planet money-grubbing assholes have tried to exploit.”

“Oh, hell no. The difference is that they either get away with it because no one really cares, or one of the major powers cares and basically browbeats the rest of the known space into respecting First Contact Protocols. But Earth is too far away from the Eridani Federation or the Ceti Alliance or any of the others for them to get involved. So you’ve basically dragged the Guild, which enforces the Protocols on behalf of other powers, into running the show itself.”

Netty-P jumped in. “And the Guild isn’t really set up to do that, at least not without a formal declaration of First Contact in place.”

“Okay, so how do we get that?” I asked them. Perry and Netty-P glanced at one another, a wholly unnecessary gesture since they didn’t need physical communication. Perry spoke. “Van, we’ve kind of been dancing around this for a while now. Like it or not, you’re a candidate to be a Master. There’s a significant faction in the Guild that really, really wants you to be a Master. Much of the rest of the Guild is waiting to find out if you’re going to be a Master.”

“You might not feel like it, but you’re in a position of power here, Van,”

Netty-P went on, picking up the thread. “At least for the time being. No one is going to presume to call this a First Contact—or not—because that’s being left up to you. No one wants to cross you, get on your bad side, or do anything that they might think is going to run counter to your interests.”

Torina, still listening, nodded. “Whether you realize it or not, dear husband, you’re a political figure. As long as it looks like you might become a Master, no one is going to want to cross you.”

I looked from one to the other. “You know, this all makes sense, except for one minor detail—I’ve already told the powers that be that I don’t want to be a Master.”

“No, Van, you’ve told Gerhardt, who’s dead, your mother, Valint, and B, who are all GKU, and us. As far as the rest of the Guild is concerned, you’re still very much in the running—and will be until you come out with a public statement otherwise,” Perry said. I opened my mouth to correct him but slowly closed it again as it sank in. The offer to make me a Master had, indeed, been made at a meeting involving those people, aboard the Righteous Fury, and it’s where and when I’d given them my answer. I actually hadn’t said anything publicly about it since. Which meant that my ongoing silence was probably being perceived as some sort of strategy or something. I sighed. “Well, I guess I’ve got a public statement to make then, don’t I?”

Netty-P and Perry exchanged another of those looks that were so obviously done for my benefit. Torina gave a doubtful frown. Even Icky shook her head. “Wow. And he’s usually so smart,” she said. Torina nodded. “I know.”

“What the hell are you all going on about?” I snapped back, scowling. Torina walked over and looked me in the eyes. “Van, the minute you declare that you’re not going to accept the title of Master, all that implied power we just described is going to—”

“Go pffft,” Icky put in. Torina glanced back at her, then turned back to me. “Exactly. You will go from the Peacemaker who’s on his way to the top to—well, not that.”

“The good news is that you won’t be the gatekeeper for Earth anymore,” Netty-P said. Perry nodded. “And the bad news is that you won’t be the gatekeeper for Earth anymore, but someone else will be. Maybe Casaril. Remember him?

You told us how you met him when you and your mother met Master Volffin on Anvil Dark?

He’s a definite candidate for Gerhardt’s old job if you turn it down. So says the scuttlebutt amongst the Guild AIs.”

“Do you really want someone like him deciding what happens to Earth?” Torina asked me. “Because, ultimately, someone will, whether it’s you or not.”

Again, I let my gaze roam from one to the other. I wanted to protest, to tell them they were wrong, to make it finally and absolutely clear that I had no intention of becoming a Master—

But then I thought of Casaril, who’d been a protégé of Master Yotov—a Master who’s deep, insidious corruption I’d helped end. So I said nothing, because they were right. Right now, I was getting to call the shots regarding Earth because the Guild was running the show, and I was coasting on the implied power of maybe-kinda-sorta becoming a Master soon. But as soon as I kicked that implied power out from under myself, I’d just be an outsider, looking in. Others would hold the fate of Earth in their hands. And if those others had been Gerhardt, or Alic, or even Volffin, I’d probably be okay with it. But Casaril?

And I’d heard that Volffin’s assignment was only temporary and had been championed by Gerhardt. Who would replace him?

Torina nodded and glanced at Icky again. “Now he gets it.”

Icky nodded back. “Yeah, he does.”

Yeah, I did. I could turn down being a Master, or I could continue protecting Earth from the heartless, ambitious, rapacious forces eyeing it like a ripe piece of fruit, ready to be plucked. But I couldn’t do both. 12

I TOLD myself and the others that I didn’t need to make any decision right this instant—although that brought me back to something Netty-P had said. “You said I was in a position of power for the time being. What did you mean by that?” I asked her. “The Guild’s not going to leave Gerhardt’s seat empty forever. Eventually, someone is going to fill it. Alic, Volffin, Lunzy, and some others are doing their best to keep it open for you, but they’re inevitably going to have to let the process go on. The Guild Charter demands it.”

“How long does it give them?”

“It doesn’t specify a time. But there are certain things the Guild can’t lawfully do without all seven Masters in place. For instance, it couldn’t enter into an agreement to provide service to a new Charter member.”

“So if Unity, say, were to come to us and say they wanted to sign up to have the Guild start exercising jurisdiction in their space, we’d have to tell them no,” Perry added. I sighed and nodded. I was able to at least make one person happy. I didn’t want to just turn away the Captain of the freighter who’d showed up on our doorstep empty-handed. He’d made a good-faith effort to do things the right way, so he should be rewarded for it. I thought about it for a bit, then decided to call up the Fren-Okun shipping company I’d somehow managed to end up owning. They had several open contracts they hadn’t yet fulfilled, so I was able to arrange for him to take on a couple of those. I also reimbursed him for the

fuel he’d expended getting to the Solar System, which meant he left a happy man. I then trekked to Cantullin Station to get another tour because the place had expanded since my last visit here. Panzygrus and her bots had been busy, excavating new tunnels and spaces that we had vague ideas about purposing into commercial trade facilities. That was still just a general idea, though, since the details of how Solar trade was going to be handled hadn’t been worked out. That hit me again with the whole issue of being or not being a Master. If I wasn’t, then it would be someone else dictating how that trade would work. But before I could lapse into further brooding about that, both Panzygrus and the Conoku who commanded the Station, an older female named Makullis, raised an entirely separate problem with me. “Water,” Makullis said. I frowned at her. Linulla had arranged for her to be sent to take command of Cantullin Station, the reasoning being that what was now a steady rotation of young Conoku through the station and the Iowa demanded a stable, authoritative leader. Makullis was a decorated veteran of some war the Conoku had fought several decades before. She was a tough, no-nonsense type who’d apparently been playing bad cop to Gabby’s good cop back on the Conoku homeworld before she’d been offered to head up Cantullin Station. She and Gabby, it seemed, had become fast friends. I narrowed my eyes at Makullis. “Water. Okay. What about it?”

“We need it. We’re going through it too fast to maintain a decent reserve, and that could be a critical flaw in our operation out here.”

“Right. But isn’t there lots of it out here?

There are chunks of ice all over the place.”

“There are, but even the smaller chunks of ice mass kilotonnes, and almost all of them have a high delta- v compared to this Station. That means a lot of fuel to even get them to a relative stop, much less get them close. Worse, the only ship regularly out this way with the thrust to do it is the Iowa, and I’m not thrilled about having her tear off to go chasing down overgrown ice cubes.”

I crossed my arms. “No, neither am I. So what do you suggest?”

“That’s the thing. I don’t have a suggestion. Any solution is going to require resources we just don’t have out here. We either have to import

water, or have a dedicated ship with a lot of acceleration—and a fuel budget to match.”

“You need something big and long, dontcha, stud?” Torina asked, smirking. I grinned at her. “Oh yeah. And I’ve already got that—as you’re well aware, my dear.”

Icky made a retching sound from nearby. “Gross. Mom and dad are flirting.”

We laughed. Makullis just stared. I turned back to her. “Sorry, we helped a group of Fren-Okun entrepreneurs purchase a bulk water hauler, which they named the Big and Long. The old Fren matriarch offered us a permanent standing discount on her services as a way of saying thanks.”

“Now, by old Fren matriarch, do you mean one of the ones that—they

—” Makullis hesitated, obviously looking for words. “Scream ‘moist’ and fling mucus everywhere?” I offered. “Much more disgusting than I’d meant to put it, but yes.”

“No. She’s one of the old Fren crones who pretends to do that but is really a wicked sharp businessperson.”

“Ah. Good. I wasn’t anxious to get slimed in the name of doing business.”

I rubbed my chin. “However, this is going to cost yet more money. And correct me if I’m wrong, but our discretionary budget is getting pretty thin,”

I said to Torina. “You could say that. We’re okay, but if we face a sudden, major cost—

say, a lot of battle damage we have to repair—it could get pretty tight.”

I nodded. We’d come a long way from when I’d first started this gig as a Peacemaker, when I’d taken whatever cases I could get just for small payouts to keep the Fafnir’s lights on. Now, we had revenue in the form of profits from the shipping company I fell into owning, an operating stipend from the Guild that had only grown as I’d gained rank, and a reasonably healthy bank account. In case of emergencies, we had good credit with The Quiet Room, as well as the largesse of Torina’s parents. And my grandmother, it seemed, since I’d recently learned that Valint’s family came from money. But I didn’t want to lean on credit if I could avoid it. The Quiet Room would still want security on any substantial loans, and that basically meant

accepting liens on the Fafnir or her components. I’d managed to not do that to date and wasn’t anxious to start. And I hated borrowing money from personal sources like the Milons or Valint. I wanted our operation to be self-sufficient. “You know, it would be nice if we could somehow make money from our water problem,” I said, musing aloud. Perry, who’d just been listening, suddenly spoke up. “Ah, been thinking about something form Mark’s era, back when we were new—or newish, rather—together.”

We all turned to him, tensing. There were still huge questions involving my grandfather, and his role in the Guild and in something called the Peacemaker Wars, which involved the cryptic aliens called the Tyrants, and others known as the Jackals. My grandfather had apparently locked chunks of both Perry’s and Netty’s—now Netty-P’s—memories, keying them to unlock only when certain conditions had been met. So far, there’d seemed to be no clear rhyme or reason why he’d done it, or what his logic had been in setting it up. But this was just a memory, and that gave me some small relief, because it meant two things. Gramps and Perry had memories that were just part of their daily lives—and they’d had daily lives. I took solace in both facts. Perry watched me as I thought, then dropped his beak. “Relax, Van, it’s nothing dire. In fact, it’s something that might be useful, given the current conversation.”

“Okay—what have you got?”

“A war. A different one this time, a conflict we ran into on assignment. Although it’s more accurate to say we were drawn into it by the need for bonds, but—anyway, different time. This nasty little fight was known as the War of the Sea of Deserts. It took place on the homeworld of a race called the Ixtan and eventually pulled in a few other planets. A lot of people died, unfortunately, and it changed the course of history, at least in the local region, on the rimward side of Unity space. It shouldn’t surprise you that your gramps was in the middle of it from day one.”

“Alright. So what, pray tell, does a war named after a Sea of Deserts have to do with making money off water?” I asked. “That’s what the war was all about. The Ixtan started off with good intentions, providing water to several surrounding worlds that were all deficient in the stuff. But, over time, they did what all good nascent empires

do and came to realize that controlling the supply of water meant… well, control. Mark and the Peacemakers were instrumental in shutting that down. That said, though, I think there are some valuable takeaways from the whole affair applicable to us, here. Things we should do and things we shouldn’t.”

I nodded. “You know what, bird?

I agree. But let’s get comfortable. I think I need to hear this in more detail.”

“How much detail do you want?” Perry asked. My answer was simple. “All of it.”

WE’D RETIRED to a crew lounge excavated in the bedrock of Orcus, a sort of hub to several hab excavations used by the Conoku crew. Perry then launched into his description of the so-called War of the Sea of Deserts, aka the Ixtan Water War. “So, like I said, the Ixtan, who were a pretty fractious race to begin with, found common cause in supplying water to surrounding worlds. For almost a century, it was a cozy arrangement—the Ixtan shipped water, which their homeworld had in abundance, off to these other races, and in return they got a bunch of goods, from basic foodstuffs to luxury items,”

Perry said. “So let me guess—after a century of things going well, someone realized that these other races needed water more than the Ixtan needed the goods they were getting in exchange,” Torina said. Perry pointed a wing at her. “Bingo. The Ixtan—particularly a couple of those factions I mentioned, the ones that thought that they should naturally be in charge—decided to start tightening up the taps, as it were. The prices they were charging for water went slowly but steadily up, progressively squeezing the other races. But what choice did they have?

They needed water. Most known forms of life do, in some way at least.”

“And eventually, the price became too high,” I said. “Again, bingo. Increasing prices led to instability, and instability led to war. And that’s lesson number one. Water should be cheap. People generally don’t mind paying the cost of collecting, cleaning, storing, and distributing it, but they don’t have a lot of patience for those who decided to profit from

it. It would be like making money off air—which, incidentally, Spindrift once tried. That didn’t last long. A few greedy people ended up breathing vacuum for it.”

“So don’t come across as a profiteer when it comes to water. Got it.”

“That’s right. So I think that however you choose to do it, you should plan for easing our water woes here at Cantullin Station to be revenue neutral, or as close to it as possible. It’s not about bonds.”

Torina nodded. “I agree. If you start making money off something like water, people can use it against you, to discredit you.”

“Anyway, Mark came up with a clever scheme to rein the Ixtan in. Remember those factions?

He exploited the fault lines between them, slowly but steadily teasing them apart, turning a unified whole into a disunited bunch. And, as it turns out, it was yours truly who came up with the way of doing that.”

“You did?

What did you do?”

“Well, as it turns out—and as I’ve only recently recalled—I was really clever. I suggested we use the law to break up the Ixtan water monopoly. See, the reason we were involved in the first place was because the Ixtan had applied to become a Charter member of the Guild. So I suggested that we exploit that fact. The Ixtan owned”—he did the air-quote thing with his wings—“all of their tech for gathering, processing, and distributing water. But they didn’t own it in a legal sense, at least not under the terms of Guild jurisdiction.”

“I think I see where this is going. You threatened to duplicate their tech and then fight them for ownership in an endless series of hearings and tribunals,” Torina said. “And keep it up until they were running on fumes.”

“It’s almost like you were there. Rich people tactics, I’m assuming?”

“We prefer the term income diversification based on creative acquisition of existing technologies.”

I smiled at her. “I remember a quartermaster back in my Army days who used the term ‘creative acquisition’ a lot. Turns out what he meant was stealing, evidenced by him ending up in the stockade for a stint.”

“Well, then, I guess he just wasn’t that creative, was he?”

Perry went on. “Anyway, by carefully selecting which tech we threatened, and in what order, we were able to fracture those fault lines I mentioned. The Ixtan deteriorated into a squabbling heap of former allies, and the war finally ground to a halt.”

“And the point of this admittedly pretty interesting story of yours, bird?” I asked. “Don’t try profiting off water. It’s not good business. Eventually, people are going to get sick of it, and it’s going to come back to haunt you.”

I nodded. “Good advice. So here’s what I think we’re going to do. We’re going to talk to the Fren-Okun who own the Big and Long and go into the water business ourselves. We’re going to upcharge only a little, though, and we’re going to put that money to good use. In fact, we’re going to put it to work.”

The rest of the crew, who’d been listening in, now jumped into the conversation. “I have some tasteful suggestions for the dispensation of funds,”

Funboy said. I opened my mouth, but he cut me off. “I’ll take your silence as a yes. If you’ll give me access to the financial instruments known as credit cards, I can—”

“For the last time, we aren’t giving you the AmEx, so quit asking. We’re going to enter one of the oldest, most venerable lines of business there ever was.”

“We’re opening a bakery?

Sweet!

As in literally sweet!

I’ve always wanted to open a bakery!”

We all turned to Gabby—but she just shrugged and pointed at Icky. “Wasn’t me, it was her.”

“Icky?

You’ve always wanted to open a bakery?

Really?” I asked, wide-eyed. “Yeah. I mean, sure, I love building and fixing spaceships and things, but… I don’t know. Since Gabby started showing me how baking works—

how you can mix A and B and C, subject the resulting mixture to heat, and poof, muffins!” She shrugged. “It’s kind of magical. Really cool. Plus you get to eat your work!”

I chuckled and shook my head. “Big girl, you’re full of surprises. I think that’s a wonderful idea—but not applicable today. No, we’re not opening a bakery.”

Funboy cleared his throat in annoyance. “If I may go on, since I was so summarily interrupted, I must admit to some concern. You suggested this is one of the oldest and most venerable forms of business around. Since it seems you don’t mean farming, or related activities like irrigation, then I

must assume you intend otherwise. And while I may be open to using my body and the various means of pleasure it is capable of instilling in others, I refuse to become mere man candy without an appropriate increase in benefits and paid leave.”

“Man candy?” I blinked a few times at Funboy’s response. “Oh, ah—

not where I was heading with this at all. The fact that your mind went there says a lot about my managerial style.”

Funboy’s expression didn’t change—but I did see the gleam of humor in his eyes. Funboy was joking. Wow. We really had come a long way. “Anyway, gang, we’re not becoming farmers, or bakers, or”—I glanced at Funboy—“any gender of candy. No, we’re going into the business of bribery.”

The others exchanged looks. Icky cocked her head. “Bribery?

Who are we bribing?

And why?”

I sat forward. “We’ve been confronting the dark forces on Earth—”

“Dark forces?

Really, Van?

You make it sound like we’re going on a quest to toss jewelry into a volcano or something,” Perry said. “And I’m not doing that again.”

“I—” I glanced at him, then shook my head. “Anyway, we’ve been confronting Constance Plowitz, Manon Clemenceau and the Equal Grasp in the court of public opinion. And sure, we’ve managed to muddy the waters of credibility enough that there’s still a lot of uncertainty and confusion regarding whether this whole extraterrestrial first-contact thing is real or a hoax—”

“Not in Frankenmuth,” Torina said. “Okay, maybe not in Frankenmuth. The point is, though, that that’s going to stop working, and probably all at once. These things have a way of suddenly reaching critical mass. The people of Earth are going to start accepting it’s real, and in ever-growing numbers—and that’s when the fight to control the messaging is really going to begin. This has just been sparring up until now.”

“I don’t know about that, Van,” Rab said. “Unleashing the forces of your governmental agencies onto the farm was more than just a bit of sparring.”

I nodded. “I agree. But in a way, the other side showed its hand. They intend to weaponize everything they can against us, including the institutions of civil society. So we need to start dealing with that reality—

and Perry’s story about the Ixtan has given me an idea as to how. We’re going to start using money to pry open some cracks in Clemenecau’s organization. We know the cracks are there, because of Tutsi Auffenberg and the people loyal to her.”

I sat back. “People like Clemenceau step on a lot of other people on their way to the top. Show me a ruthless and ambitious over-achiever, and I’ll show you a bunch of people subordinate to them who are bruised and bloodied and really resentful. We’re going to find those people, and we’re going to make it really worth their while to start helping us.”

“Just like the Ixtan, you’re going to pull the other side apart and turn them into a bunch of squabbling factions,” Torina said. I nodded, then looked at Gabby. “And you, my dear, are going to be our secret weapon in all of this.”

“Me?

How?”

“You have a knack for quickly teasing out the subtle niceties and details of people’s behavior. You’re going to use that to help us find those fault lines, so we can then jam money into them to pry them open. The aim is to peel their best people away from them, one after another.”

“Oh. Uh—okay, sure. Sounds like it could be kind of fun!”

“Will this require me to wear a disguise?” Funboy asked. “Because I find mustaches to be fascinating, particularly the improperly named Fu Manchu—“

“Uh—perhaps. I think we’ll start with me, Torina, and Miryam, though, backed up by Gabby.” I sat back. “But first, we have to deal with our soon-to-be partners in the water-hauling business. We need to convince them they really want an investor.”

“We don’t have a lot of money to play with here, Van, unless we go to outside sources—”

“We’re going to. We’re going to use The Quiet Room’s money, in fact, because they’re going to get a cut. You can do that, right?

Satisfy the Fren who own the Big and Long, make sure Dayna Jasskin gets her payout, and ensure we still have enough to use to bribe the hell out of the bad guys?”

Torina gave me a look. “Oh, sure. Want me to end poverty while I’m at it?”

“I have faith in you, my dear.”

“Hmph.”

“I can deal with the Fren,” Icky said, pausing to pick something out of her teeth. “They’ve got no manners at all.”

Funboy watched her, then shook his head. “I would like to reiterate my desire for paid leave. Also, I have another commercial shoot on earth. Can we schedule our foray into corrupting Clemenceau’s people with my inevitable rise to megastardom?”

“Yes, we can. There are other things I have in mind, but, bottom line, we’re going to go on the offensive. For years now, we’ve been rescuing people, fixing things that are broken, putting things right. I want to start eliminating the things that are causing the harm in the first place.”

“How idealistic. It’s one of the reasons I married you,” Torina said, taking my hand. “Oh, and what are the other reasons?” I countered. “Yeah, Torina, what are the other reasons?” Icky asked. Torina gave Icky a cool look. “I’ll save those for when we’re alone. Now then, shall we go get moist?”

Icky groaned. “Uh, gross. Mom and dad are being that way again!”

13

AS NETTY-P TRIED to locate the Big and Long, and the rest of the crew busied themselves in learning about the new additions and facilities in Cantullin Station, I retired to my cabin. I needed some time to think. A Master. It was easy to come up with reasons why I didn’t want the job. It would chain me to Anvil Dark in a way that I hadn’t been before. It would bury me in paperwork and bureaucratic administrivia. Most egregiously, it would immerse me in the convoluted, backbiting politics of the Guild’s inner circles—not to mention the GKU and the 32.

I’d already skipped like a stone off of those a few times, and I hadn’t enjoyed the experience at all. But still. But still— Earth. The team was right. The only reason I’d been given as much leeway to make decisions about and commit resources to Earth was because I was widely seen as a Master-in-waiting. The instant that balloon popped, I’d almost certainly be sidelined. I’d just be another Peacemaker, effectively a cop working a beat. Sure, I’d still be a Third Veteran and carry that seniority, but I knew what other Third Veterans did—they got put in charge of bigger cases, maybe given a couple of junior Peacemakers to help them, and then sent off pretty much on their own devices. What they didn’t do was set policy for entire planets, or have much sway with the senior leadership. Groshenko, Perry, and Netty had all told me that once Gramps finally and firmly turned down the offer of becoming a Master, he’d been

effectively put on the beginning of his retirement. Sure, he’d done stuff after that, but his days of influencing the Guild as a whole were done. Right now, I could come and go as much as I pleased to the Keel, the literal but also political and administrative heart of Anvil Dark. Would that continue?

Would the GKU likewise lose interest in me?

What would happen to Earth if one of Master Yotov’s protégés took over Gerhardt’s seat?

I lay on my bed, staring up at the overhead. “I don’t want to do this.”

The overhead had no answer for me, though. In fact, who did was Mick Jagger, whose voice wafted up from my memories. I sighed. “Yeah, Mick, you’re right. You can’t always get what you want, can you?”

I sighed again and sat up—

“Van, I’ve located the Big and Long. It’s currently in the Reticulum system, offloading water to the Reapers’ domed city,” Netty-P said. “Okay, let the crew know—”

“I already have. They’re on their way back to the Fafnir.”

“Efficient as always, my dear. As soon as they’re aboard, let’s get underway.”

OUR TRIP to the Reticulum system was uneventful—and that included a stop at Dregs to refuel. Our trip inside the Reticulum system, though, was anything but. We twisted into the system, set course for the Reaper’s domed city, sparked up the drive—

And were immediately lit up by fire control scanners. As we reacted to that, the threat alarm shrilled, announcing a salvo launch of missiles. “Uh, Netty-P, where the hell is this coming from?

I don’t see anything on the overlay,” I said as the crew hustled through battle prep. I was snapping my helmet on as I spoke, all of it happening with smooth familiarity. I jammed my thumb up once my helmet was sealed. “I have everyone now sealed up. Depressurizing the ship in ten seconds,” Netty-P said. “On my way aft, I’ll be at my damage control station if anyone needs me,” Icky put in. Rab spoke up. “Weapons are hot. Point-defenses in autonomous mode.”

Perry: “I’ll keep an eye on the big picture, boss. Right now, all clear.”

Torina: “Ready to engage—once we have a target.”

Funboy: “Gabby and I will be aft, ready with the trauma gear.”

I glanced at the chrono. We’d gone from flat-footed to fully ready for battle in just over fifty seconds. “Okay, about that target. Netty-P, they’ve got to be stealthed—” I started. “They are. And it’s good stealth, too. I’m able to pin their location down to a volume of space twenty klicks across.”

I cursed. “That’s it?

Gonna be hard to hit anything if we—” Something on the overlay caught my eye, though, now that Netty-P had switched modes, searching for stealthed ships. She’d found not just one, but two. I tapped at the comm. “B, is that you out there?”

“It is, and I was just reaching for the comm to call you. Are you having as much trouble pinning this asshole down as I am?”

“Yup.”

“My trusty AI suggests we combine our efforts. Triangulate for better data,” B said. I glanced at Netty-P. “On it,” she said. I nodded and turned my attention back to the overlay. With nothing else to shoot at, Torina and Rab had engaged the incoming missiles. They knocked down all but two. Point-defense took out one more, and I flipped the Fafnir and burned hard away from the one that slipped through. It detonated in our wake, peppering the ship’s tough backside with bits of shrapnel, but doing negligible damage. Our unseen assailant fired another salvo—which was a mistake. As soon as he did, our respective AIs compared notes and narrowed down his location to a volume of space only a klick or so across. One of the realities of stealth is that you have to “clear the datum,” military-speak for getting the hell out of dodge once you’ve revealed yourself through, say, launching an attack. All the stealth in the world won’t do you any good if you give yourself away and then just sit there. But space presented another problem. Acceleration was king out in the black, but to get the sort of high- g’s and corresponding delta- v you needed to clear the datum quickly, you had to fire something like a fusion drive. And again, all the stealth in the world wasn’t going to conceal a plume of incandescent plasma. That was why, when using stealth, ships tended to coast, and used only thrusters or gravity polarizers to maneuver, a much slower prospect. Torina clicked her tongue. “He should have stuck to lasers,” she said as she opened fire, pouring our own laser energy into the now much smaller volume of target space. Rab joined in with the plasma-burst and particle cannons, while Netty-P took over the swarm launcher and used it to loose a protective barrage at the incoming missiles. B, meanwhile, poured everything she had into the target area. We got hits. Bits of debris appeared, then our enemy’s stealth system failed and he was revealed—an unremarkable class 11, pushing a class 12, with a modest weapons load-out. In fact, it seemed that missiles were his main trick, with his other weapons being short-range affairs, like point-defense. As soon as our attacker had been outed, Torina and Rab switched their fire to the onrushing missiles. Again, one slipped through the net, this time detonating close enough to do some damage. Shrapnel popped two REAB

modules, and we took a couple of through-and-through hits that punched through the hull just ahead of engineering. Icky cursed. “Okay, that one missed me by less than the length of the bird’s wing. Van, this ride isn’t fun anymore. I wanna get off.”

“Duly noted, Icky. We can let you off at the Reaper’s domed city. They don’t call it a pleasure world for nothing.”

“Sweet. Let me call up Pax. He’ll be all over it—and by it, I mean me.”

I laughed. I could tell she was moving around as she bantered, applying sealing patches to the hull punctures so we could repressurize the ship. I glanced at Perry. “Any other surprises?”

“Aside from having my gorgeous wing reduced to a mere unit of measure by the big blue monster in the back, no. The big picture is clear. All we’ve got is one other ship, a cruise liner probably carrying package tourists to be parted with their money on Reticulum. And it burned like hell when the shooting started, giving us a super wide berth.”

“Yeah, I can smell the all-you-can-eat buffets from here. Okay, then. B, what’s your status?”

“I’m fine. Can’t say the same for our friend out there, though. He’s pretty much dead in space,” she replied. I looked back at the overlay, at the data depicted for our attacker. The ship was, indeed, dead in space. It seemed to have lost main power, its emissions nearly flatlined. “Okay. So we’ve got a mystery ship, with a kick-ass stealth system, lackluster armament, and an unknown reason for attacking us. I think we need to get aboard her for some answers.” I turned to the crew. “Don’t bother un-suiting. Rab, go fire up the Frankie. Let’s go say hello to our new friends out there.”

NETTY-P WAS unable to sense any signs of a crew aboard the ship using remote scanning. We took the precaution of shooting off the remaining weapons with carefully aimed mass-driver shots, then crossed to her in the Frankie, ready for a fight. I brought Icky, Funboy, and Rab with me, all of us armored-up and armed to the proverbial teeth. To find a ship that was empty. It had no crew on board. Nor had they somehow managed to eject in life pods or something similar without us knowing, because the ship’s sole life-pod bay was empty—and obviously had been for a long time. Icky pointed through the viewport at several devices mounted in a ring around the small life-pod bay. “See those?

Those are the clamps that hold the pod in place. When you eject it, they snap open, a boosting charge kicks the pod free, then its own motor kicks in to take it clear. Two of those clamps are open, but two are still closed. And that one up there”—she pointed at one of them, up and to the right—“has a bunch of corrosion on its inner face. That’d be the part that was clamped against the pod.”

“So it’s been exposed to an atmosphere, and for a while,” I said, peering out the small port. “Yeah. So that, plus the fact that two of the clamps aren’t even open—”

She shook her head behind her visor. “There hasn’t been a pod latched in here in, oh, at least ten years. Probably longer.”

B came on the comm. “Van, something about this one just doesn’t add up. We’ve tracked that ship, whose name is Fights With Shadows, to a registered owner among the Reapers. That might not seem strange,

considering where we are, but the registry shows a sale-in-progress that was never signed off.”

“So it’s still his.”

“Yeah, but also no. Legally, it’s still his. But he signed off on the sale, even if the buyer didn’t. According to Perry, that puts it in a bit of a state of legal limbo. But there’s more.”

“Go on.”

“This ship’s been invisible for years. That means we either missed it—

repeatedly—or it’s been somewhere else, out of service. But take a look at that hull. Seems a bit… pristine?

Very little micrometeorite scarring?”

“Yeah. Icky noted some corrosion on a life-pod clamp. Seems to suggest this thing has been inside an atmosphere for a while. It’s cleaner than Funboy’s shave kit.”

“I don’t shave. I groom,” Funboy said, joining us from aft. Icky sniffed. “I don’t do either,” she said, following Rab forward. I grinned at her. “We know, big girl. And we love you anyway.”

We finished searching the rest of the ship. Sure enough, we found nothing associated with a living crew. There were virtually no provisions on board, aside from a couple of emergency ration packs, long-expired, and a single jar of what looked like pickles. I shook my head at that. “You know, when I cleaned out my fridge in my apartment in Atlanta, I found an old jar of pickles in the back. I hate pickles. Never buy ’em. I swear jars of pickles just spontaneously appear in refrigerators and pantries all over the universe.”

“You may have just spoken some deep, foundational insight into the nature of the universe and the reality that defines it, Van,” Funboy said. I glanced at him. “Really?”

He blinked. “No, of course not. We’re talking jars of pickles here. Which, I might add, are quite disagreeable. They are blobs of cellulose infused with acetic acid, sodium chloride, and plant residue. And they make my tongue sting.”

I smirked at him. “You know, you can make any food sound unappetizing if you describe it like that.”

“Not cheese.”

“Oh, really?

Tell me, Funboy, have you delved into what, exactly, cheese is?”

“No. I do not wish to spoil the magic.”

“Okay, then. Don’t.”

“That—now makes me want to.”

“Trust me. Don’t.”

“That makes me want to even more—”

“Van, found something,” Rab said. He and Icky had pushed forward and entered the cockpit. We followed them, whereupon Rab revealed his discovery. A small console had been fastened to the deck, with cables snaking out of it and vanishing into the instrument panel. And set into a socket in the top of the console was the drearily familiar shape of an ID chip. I sighed. “You know, I’d be happy to never see one of these damned things ever again.”

BACK ON THE FAFNIR, we tried to activate the chip, to communicate with whatever personality was installed on it, but had no success. Netty-P was able to confirm it had a full installation of data on it, but we couldn’t get it to respond. B offered to take it to Pont Alus Kyr for further analysis, but I frowned at that. “I’d kind of like to keep case evidence away from Pont Alus Kyr for the time being, thanks.”

B swiveled her antennas and her attention toward me. “Why?”

I explained the situation with Sere, Rosen, and all of my other mounting misgivings regarding Pont Alus Kyr. B’s frown deepened as I spoke. “So you think they’re dirty?”

“The whole place?

Probably not. Elements within it?

Yeah, I do. I mean, that whole thing with Hoshi Onwyn, losing her symbiote the way she did and no breaks in the case since has me pretty suspicious all on its own. How does that happen and the perpetrator get away without a trace, from what’s supposedly one of the most secure research facilities in known space?”

We finally decided to send the chip to Anvil Dark. The research facilities were more limited, and the Guild’s people certainly didn’t have the same level of expertise as those on Pont Alus Kyr. But I was more confident

that the chip wouldn’t end up lost, or inadvertently wiped or subjected to data loss. As for the ship, I decided to treat it as more than just salvage. I registered it as evidence, placed an evidence beacon on it, and then hung around until a Guild recovery team arrived. It did, a few hours later, led by none other than Jamberac. “Kinda surprised to see you here,” I said to him over the comm. “I’m pretty sure our forensic salvagers have got this. Do they really need a Peacemaker watching over them?”

“It was Master Volffin’s decision to send me along. Given the circumstances, this is being treated as high-priority evidence,” he replied. That just raised more questions. The salvagers were professionals, well-versed in the art of retrieving complex evidence like entire ships and returning it, essentially pristine, to Anvil Dark. They didn’t need a Peacemaker in tow. But Volffin had apparently thought they did. Why?

I decided not to probe any deeper for now and just left it. Instead, we thrusted away from the scene of the battle, pressing on. The Big and Long had concluded her delivery of bulk water and was now on her way back out of the system. We arranged to meet her on her outbound leg from Reticulum and get started on the path to becoming water barons. Torina shot me a look. “Touch smug there.”

I waved. “Can’t help it. I’m thinking of the things I’ll buy you from our new trade empire.”

Torina nodded graciously, a wicked gleam in her eyes. “As you were, sailor. And remember—not just Big and Long. For my gifts, think big and expensive.”

14

IT TURNED OUT, after talking to the wily old Fren matriarch who owned the Big and Long, that the issue wasn’t really hauling water—they could do that, and would moreover still honor the discount she’d originally offered us. The issue was processing water from whatever form it was in, to a state that was safe and potable. Cometary ice, for instance, was considered a great source of water if you could find icy bodies that fit a profitable velocity profile. As long as they weren’t moving too fast or in too extreme a direction to make the fuel expenditure to recover them too great—and therefore expensive—they were one of the best sources of water available in space. But cometary water was also dirty. It not only contained lots of particulates in the form of everything from dust up to boulders, but it also tended to contain high concentrations of organic compounds and even heavy metals. So it had to be melted, filtered, and processed, and that pretty much had to be done on the spot. It was just far too expensive to redirect a comet to a water refinery, so you had to bring the water refinery to it. Enter the water processor. This was a self-contained unit, several versions of which were manufactured by corporations based variously in Tau Ceti and Procyon in the Eridani Federation. They were also manufactured and exported by a company based in Unity space. They all did much the same thing, they just did it somewhat differently. Our Fren contact recommended the version made by the manufacturer based in Ceti Alliance space, a company called WindSail. “Why them in particular?” I asked her. Her dark eyes gleamed slyly back at me. “Because I’m a shareholder.”

I laughed. I liked these old Fren matriarchs. They were cunning, but blunt—when it came to them, what you saw was pretty much what you got. Still, it was good enough for me. If we purchased a water processor, we could load it aboard a ship—probably one of the Fren freighters I’d somehow ended up owning and repurposed for the job. Then we could have it chase down icy bodies on the margins of the Solar System and process as much mass of water as it could manage, and still stay within an acceptable fuel budget. So it was off to the Ceti Alliance, and Tau Ceti itself, the busiest and most populous star system in known space. WE’D BEEN to Carson’s Arch, one of the seven inhabited planets in the Tau Ceti system, before. A mainly farming world, it had been where we’d brought Adayluh Creel and her first yields of Permada super wheat to sell, and where we’d famously ended up having a street brawl with agents of BeneStar. We weren’t descending to the surface this time, though, but to one of the planet’s moons, known simply as Scape. “Why Scape?” Torina asked as we entered the traffic-control pattern. “Because no one could settle on a name. Given the way the moon is so ravaged by industry, ideas were floated that included ‘Hellscape,’

‘Bleakscape,’ ‘Ruinscape,’ and a few that aren’t suited for polite company. They finally settled on Scape, although that’s actually an informal name. The moon’s real name is Carson’s Landing.”

“And the planet’s name is Carson’s Arch. I see why they wanted to avoid confusion.”

I nodded along as they talked, but my eyes were on the sprawl of the moon filling half the view out the canopy. The surface was, indeed, a warren of pits and waste rock piles from mining, sprays of debris flung across the landscape by huge mass drivers that were used to accelerate loads of ore into space, and broken fields of slag vomited from big robotic smelters. Basically, take the worst examples of polluted industrial sites on Earth, expand them to nearly the size of Mars, and you’ve got Scape. But we didn’t have to descend to the dreary surface. Our destination was an orbiting factory owned by the WindSail Corporation, maker of many things—including water processors. The big machines were assembled here, in orbit, because they were too heavy and bulky to build inside a gravity well and then lift. The factory’s traffic controller was reluctant to let us dock until we declared ourselves potential buyers, at which point the figurative red carpet came rolling out, right up to the Fafnir’s airlock. It brought with it one of the factory’s senior engineers, a rather brusque Nesit, and a human woman named Osken carrying several small, disposable containers. “Mr. Tudor, please—drink this,” she said, offering me one of the containers. I smiled, accepted it, and popped it open. The rest of the crew, less the AIs, got their own little bottles. I suspected this wasn’t a plot to poison us en masse or something, but I took a sniff anyway. I smelled nothing, so I took a sip. “Ah. Yes. That’s definitely water.”

Torina nodded. “I concur. I’ve tasted water before, and that’s it.”

Osken grinned brightly. “Just a few hours ago, that water was locked inside cometary ice, mixed with a whole slew of dirt and stinky organic chemicals. Now, it’s pristine and pure!

And do you know why?”

“I’m going to guess it has something to do with your technology,” I replied. “You’re right!

Our processors can handle up to ten thousand liters per hour of processing, with our biggest industrial processors handling up to ten times that!

And all of it happens with minimal overhead, just power up the unit and start feeding it your supply—and that can be almost anything!

Our processors can deal with anything from cometary ice to water full of industrial pollutants!

And all for reasonable, competitive pricing—!”

“You’re in sales, aren’t you?”

“Why, yes, I am!” She grinned again. “Am I that obvious?”

I smiled and turned to Gabby. “Gabby, how would you like to get Ms. Osken here better acquainted with our situation and what we need?”

“I’d love to!

Ms. Osken, my name is Gabby!”

“Hello, Gabby, I’m so pleased to meet you!”

“And I’m pleased to meet you!

Would you like to hear about what we’re looking for?”

“I absolutely would!”

As they engaged, we sidled away, leaving them in cheerful, animated discussion. Perry shook his head. “That conversation is going to use up our monthly quota of exclamation marks.”

Icky smirked. “I know, right!”

I turned to the Nesit engineer, whose name was Tak’isil. He was giving me a knowing look. “You’d like a more… factual overview of our technology, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded. “Please.”

Tak’isil cut through the hype and immediately delved into the technical details of the processors, which were remarkable pieces of technology. They could be purchased fully self-contained, with their own fusion power plants to run them, or they could be powered externally. More to the point, they used a variety of filtering and treatment methods that could strip nearly any contaminant—physical, chemical, biological, or even radiological—out of water, leaving what amounted to distilled stuff, just H2O and nothing else. “The units capable of removing radiological contaminants are more complicated, though. They collect a residue of radioactive sludge that has to be kept behind shielding and properly disposed of—”

“I don’t think we’re too worried about that,” I said. We’d been walking as we talked, following Tak’isil into a cavernous warehousing compartment where finished units were crated up, ready to be shipped. Several examples had been left on display, though, and the crew now walked around them, taking them in. They ranged from the size of a desk to big industrial-scale units as big as a boxcar. “You know, the P’nosk settlers on Dustfall could use some of these,”

Rab said, eyeing a mid-sized unit. “I have a cousin there, and he keeps complaining that relatively rad-free water is one of their biggest problems.”

“Yeah, I can think of a whole bunch of places these could be handy on Earth, too,” I replied. Desalinating seawater, for instance, would be a snap for these things. And there were whole swaths of terrestrial humanity that were facing ever-increasing water issues, with desalination one of their few options—

A robotic version of a forklift came trundling into the warehouse area. It avoided several other bots and workers who were apparently preparing a couple of bigger units for shipment, then came rolling toward us. Tak’isil frowned at it. “Excuse me. This area is supposed to be closed off to activity while we have customers here,” he said, walking toward the approaching bot. I turned toward the others to discuss our particular needs, shelving greater, more altruistic thoughts of providing water to a thirsty Earth for now. Still, if there was any sort of alien tech I wouldn’t mind introducing to Earth, it would be something like this—

Someone shouted—I got a warning, a sound, loud and unclear. A hard blow to my back pitched me forward, then I bounced off a massive water tank and fell to my knees—

There was another noise—a shout—then a scream. The explosion bloomed, fiery and scalding. I reeled. My teeth rattled. I staggered, and the ground came to greet me. THE AIR TURNED WHITE. The explosion morphed into a long, savage roar that buffeted me as I hit the ground, shoving me hard as the event clicked in my mind—

An explosive decompression. I knew it, and hard-won muscle memory kicked into gear. I was wearing my b-suit but didn’t have my helmet. So, instead, I reached behind my neck, grabbed the tabs of my crash hood, and yanked it up and over my head, then pressed it down to seal against the latching ring that would normally seat my helmet. The crash hood offered no ballistic or similar protection, but it did give me two hours or so of air, thanks to the rebreather tech built into the suit. With my own air supply assured, I looked around through the foggy air, taking stock of my crew. I saw Funboy with his hood in place, helping Rab with his. Icky and Torina were already hooded-up, Torina rushing to help Gabby and Osken, the staffer who’d been so kind. Icky, who I now realized had grabbed me and flung me down behind the purifier, was back on her feet. All four of Icky’s massive arms strained against the howling wind, her legs braced against the nearest giant water tank. The wind went on. And on. We were in a big space, and it was going to take a while to fully depressurize. But as the air pressure dropped, the wind died from a

hurricane to a mere gale, then a polite—if vigorous—breeze. I stood up and let the air press me against the mass of the purifier so I could look past it. Where Tak’isil had been just a moment before, a great hole now gaped in the deck. The fog, water vapor frozen out of the air by adiabatic expansion, streamed into it and vanished. There was no sign of the bot—or, I quickly realized, of the other workers who’d been prepping a shipment. I breathed a silent thanks. Each of my crew had responded instantly to the sudden explosion and resulting decompression, hard experience won from many battles fought in the void. The dockworkers and other people working here, building and selling water purifiers, didn’t have the same skills or instincts. I did see a couple hanging onto the cargo they’d been preparing to ship for dear life, but they had no crash gear and would soon be without breathable air. So they were the priority. “Torina, what’s your status—”

“Gabby’s started to go dormant, like she—you know, does. So she’ll be fine. I guess. I need to get Osken to air, though.”

Rab was already hurrying toward her, now that his own hood was in place. “I’ll help you,” he said, and together they grabbed Osken and started hauling her toward the nearest airlock—after making sure Gabby was propped somewhere she wouldn’t be blown into space from. “Icky, Funboy, with me—wait. Where’s Perry?”

We looked around. There was no sign of him. “Perry?”

Nothing. I cursed. The breeze was still… assertive. In another thirty or forty seconds, we’d be in hard vacuum, and the two workers, desperately clinging for dear life, would be choking their last breaths. I gestured for Icky and Funboy to follow me. On the way, I chattered into my suit mic. “Netty-P, we’ve lost track of Perry. He might have been blown into space when this place decompressed. He might—”

“I’ve got him. He was. He’s about five hundred meters out and on his way into an unstable orbit around this moon.”

“Can you get to him?”

“I can, but I’ll have to leave the Fafnir crewless and take the Frankie.”

I swore, low and rich and silent. At least I tried to be silent. The last thing I wanted to do was leave the Fafnir uncrewed while we seemed to be

under some sort of attack. But Perry needed us—

This time, I swore out loud, and with even more enthusiasm. “Netty-P, do not leave the Fafnir uncrewed. Undock her, back her away, and send the Frankie after Perry and—can you use it to nudge him so he doesn’t end up falling to the surface or colliding with anything?’

“I’ll do my best.”

We reached the two dock workers just as the residual breeze died, the last of the big compartment’s air venting into space. Icky grabbed one, Funboy and me the other, and we lugged them toward the nearest airlock. By the time we got them inside, the outer door closed and the airlock pressurized, they’d both been exposed to vacuum for nearly a minute. I looked at Funboy as he checked them. “Well?”

“They will likely both recover, albeit with decompression-related injuries,” he said, yanking a pneumo-syringe from the first-aid kit he kept strapped to his harness. It was a blood-oxygenator, a handy bit of nanotech that could tune itself to whatever species received it and provide a short-lived burst of oxygen. The two workers, a human and a Gajur, both breathed more easily after he injected them. And by then, the airlock was pressurized and the inner door opened. An emergency team of factory personnel were already waiting. We handed the workers over to them, then I got back on the comm. “Netty-P, status?”

“I’ve got the Frankie on her way after Perry. There are no other signs of hostile or even suspicious action. It would appear that whatever happened was confined to the factory orbital.”

“Got it. Torina?”

She spoke from the other airlock, the one she’d evacuated through, on the other side of the expansive warehouse compartment. “Osken—she didn’t make it.”

“Shit.” I thought about that smiling face and bubbly personality, suddenly and arbitrarily snuffed out by—

Had it even been an attack?

Or a terrible accident?

It quickly became clear that it had been no accident at all. WE FINALLY RETRIEVED PERRY. By then, Netty-P had confirmed that the detonation had been accompanied by a powerful electromagnetic pulse. The Fafnir and the Frankie had both been suitably hardened against it, so they hadn’t been affected. But Perry had, as had dozens, maybe hundreds of systems throughout the factory orbital. “An EMP?

But how?

And why?” Torina asked when we’d reconvened aboard the Fafnir. “And had it even been directed at us?” Rab asked. I shrugged. “Right now, I’m only worried about one thing. Icky, how is he?”

She frowned down at Perry, who was lifeless on her workbench. “I don’t really know. I think his data—his memories, that sort of thing—are all intact, in protected archives. But something in his processing train seems to be fried.”

Netty-P, who’d been assisting her, bobbed her imager in a nod. “I think we’ve tracked it down to a surge protector that, ah, didn’t. It looks like some stray current leaked into one of his quantum spin processors and damaged the system interface.”

I stared down at him. He looked no more or less like a mechanical construct than he normally did. In fact, I’d seen him sitting motionless and quiet, like the statue of a bird, many times. But this was different. Now, he looked—lifeless. It wasn’t rational and really came from the fact I knew he was damaged. But still. There was an essential, ineffable spark of—

Of life. Yeah. A spark of life. It was missing. “Can you repair him?”

“We should be able to, but it’s going to take a while. We don’t have the sort of dedicated equipment they do on, say, Anvil Dark. It’s kind of like—”

Icky turned to Netty-P. “What did you call it?

Putting a ship into a bottle?”

“Building a ship in a bottle. Van will get the reference.”

I did. I’d worked inside some cramped computer chassis in the past, especially laptops, whose tiny components really make working on them feel like assembling a ship in a bottle. But Perry was far more complex. Still, if anyone could do it, Icky and Netty-P could. Even so, I told Netty-P to prepare to depart for Anvil Dark—but only prepare, because we still had work to do here at the factory orbital. There’d been a deliberate attack, either on us or the factory itself, so we had an obligation to follow up. Which started with Gabby, who we retrieved from the vacuum of the warehouse. As Torina had said, she’d gone dormant, meaning she’d wadded herself up into a dried husk, which made her look very, very dead. But once we brought her into an atmosphere and gave her access to water—

something there was plenty of—she quickly rehydrated and came back to life. She stumbled around a bit once she’d revived. “That always leaves me feeling—I don’t know, not my usual self,” she said in the understatement of the century. Leaning against a bulkhead, she waved an arm, her digits limp. Torina stared at her, then formed a small grin. “Being dead can do that.”

“I wasn’t really dead.”

“You had no vital signs. None. You were completely inert and lifeless. Sounds like dead to me. You just happen to be able to get over it.”

“Which would be awfully handy, I have to admit,” Rab said. Funboy, for his part, practically hovered around her, fussing anxiously

—for Funboy. “I am very relieved to see you returned to a fully living state. You had me concerned,” he said, each syllable as flat as Kansas. “I’m okay, Funboy, really!” Gabby said, scooping him up in her pudgy arms. But she sighed. “I only wish we’d been able to save that poor woman.”

I waited for Funboy to start objecting to Gabby’s physical encroachment, but he seemed content to just stand in her embrace. He even put his arms tentatively around her, in turn. “There, um, there. I too am sorry for the loss of a person who was both mannerly and effervescent. I will consider this crime something to be resolved regardless of timeline,” Funboy said. “I concur,” I told him. He wore the expression of a hanging judge on a bad day, and I knew we would revisit this crime until he was satisfied. All I got was a terse nod, and the work began all over again. It was surreal—and necessary. Now that everyone was back on duty—except for Perry, of course—I headed back into the orbital with Torina, Rab, and Funboy. This time, we went armed and armored, with helmets at hand. For the next couple of hours, we poked about, taking images of the damage, interviewing people, reviewing security logs, and nosing our way through a preliminary investigation. I also had Netty-P request a forensic team from Anvil Dark. Our findings were disturbing. The bot that had been approaching us, the one that Tak’isil had been trying to intercept, was carrying a shipment that had only just arrived. Its bill of lading claimed it was just pipe couplings, but a little digging showed that no one aboard the factory had ordered it, nor had it come from a usual supplier. Netty-P had also managed to tease out a little more information about the explosive device itself, based on its emissions when it detonated. “It was primarily an EMP weapon. It was probably the charge from a standard EMP warhead, given the yield of the explosion, the intensity of the pulse, and the size of the package that contained it,” she said over the comm. “So someone attacked the factory with an EMP?” I asked her. “I don’t think the factory was the target. If it had been, then the weapon was detonated in one of the less-effective places to do damage. Most of the systems that had been knocked offline are back up again. If it were detonated, say, even two or three decks higher, it would have done considerably more damage to systems that probably would have remained offline until repaired or replaced. The inverse-square law and all that.”

“So—what are you saying?

That we were the target?”

“Again, the explosive effect itself was enough to punch a hole into the deck and through the outer hull of the compartment, but none of that is armored. In fact, as explosive devices go, it was anemic.”

“It killed Tak’isil.”

“Because he was in close proximity to the device when it went off. If he’d been even a few more meters away, he likely would have survived, albeit with injuries.”

I nodded at that. It turned out that it had been Icky that had shoved me behind the water purifier right before the weapon detonated, based on what she described as some sort of funny instinct, that something was just off. And while the purifier was a bulky piece of machinery. It wasn’t built to withstand explosions. A more capable weapon exploding that close would probably have just turned it to that much more shrapnel. All of which led to one inescapable conclusion. “The target was Perry,” I said into the silence. “So it would seem. In his case, if he’d been even a few meters closer, the damage to his systems likely would have been catastrophic.”

“We got lucky.”

“We did,” Netty-P said. “In fact, very lucky.”

A new voice came on the comm. “Hey, boss.”

I almost gasped in relief. “Perry?

How are you feeling?”

“Oh, man, my life flashed before my eyes, boss. I saw a bright white light, there were choirs of angels, and Pat Boone, and maybe Debbie too, can’t be sure, but someone asked me if Robert Goulet really wore a toupee, and I accused them of rhyming for cheap laughs, but I digress—”

“There seems to be something wrong with the bird. He’s trying out new material, which means his subroutines aren’t, ah, partially functional.”

“I’m a machine, Van. I pretty much either work normally or I don’t work at all, regardless of how you think my joke landed,” Perry argued. “More like jumped to its death, but still, a fair point. Okay, so who do you think was targeting you?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say the Ixtans.”

I frowned. Torina, listening in, just shook her head. “How could they?

How could they even know you were here to set up an attack in the first place?

We only decided that a couple of days ago. How could they have moved that fast?”

“Again, if I had to guess, I’d say they probably have a source inside Anvil Dark. We did file a flight plan to bring us here. They might have seen their chance and taken it.”

“But why?

Why now, after all this time?” I asked. “We’re snooping around water and water-related issues. As far as we know, they’ve been trying to restore their position of preeminence based on controlling water ever since your grandfather and I kind of knocked them out of it.” He paused. “For that matter, when I told you about the Ixtan water wars, I retrieved all the relevant records from Guild archives. That might have been enough to alert them to the fact that I was back in the know. A kind of tripwire, so to speak.”

Gabby nodded. “That makes sense. As soon as Perry got interested in the Ixtan and their water stuff, they probably thought he was going to come back at them for another round.”

“So they wanted to knock him out before he could.” I sighed. “And they killed two innocent people in the process.”

I turned back to the comm. “Just how much money did you cost the Ixtans, bird?”

“It wasn’t the money. It was their empire. I suspect they’d be going after Mark, too, if they could.”

I sighed again. “Yeah. They’re not gonna give up, are they?”

“Would you?”

“Well, since I’m not an amoral killer in search of dominating an entire natural resource, I find this whole situation to be alien. But yes. I guess if I was the CEO of an evil corporation—”

“Or a politician. They can be evil too,” Gabby added. “Naturally, you’re correct. I think—or suspect, rather—” Perry began on the comm. “That they’re trying to rebuild that moist empire of theirs?

Because if they are, then you’re going to remain a threat, bird,” I said. “And a target. And by extension, we’ll all be targets,” Torina said. Rab barked a humorless laugh. “That list of people who want to off us never seems to get any shorter, does it?

When names come off the top, new ones just appear at the bottom.”

“It means we’re making a difference,” Gabby said, then clapped her arms together for emphasis. It was an oddly cheerful gesture, but then everything Gabby did was odd. Or cheerful. Or both. I smiled at her. “It does.” I narrowed my eyes in thought for a moment. This was now about more than just water. “Since we’ve started down this road, I think I need a little more background,” I said. “What sort of background, boss?

You want to see, um, water?” Perry asked. “No. I want to see places without water. Because those are the people we’re going to help.”

15

THE CETI ALLIANCE authorities asked to take over the investigation into the attack on the orbital factory, and I was content to let them. It had happened in their own proverbial backyard, after all, and had killed two of their citizens. I handed over copies of all the case notes we’d compiled, assured them that the Guild would remain ready to assist them if they wanted it, then stepped away. In fact, I was just as happy simply because I didn’t want to have to take on another case. The handover still cost us another day, thanks to the bureaucratizing we had to do. But it did give us time to line up a smaller water processor from the company to use as a demonstration model—and we got it for only a small deposit, with the balance waived. Apparently, WindSail had decided that the attack on their factory was an egregious act of corporate sabotage, not particularly tied to us. And we couldn’t entirely rule that out. We assumed the attack had been directed at Perry, but we didn’t know that for sure. And the timeline about that still bothered me. From when Perry first contacted Anvil Dark about my grandfather’s old Ixtan case to the instant the EMP bomb detonated was just under four days. That wasn’t much time to conceive, set up, and execute an attack. But while we told the Ceti authorities about that, we didn’t tell WindSail. It wasn’t our place to reveal details of a case, particularly one we weren’t investigating. So I decided to offer something substantial for the water processor, a device branded a WindSail Plethora Model Two, rather

than take it for next to nothing because they felt bad—especially if we really were the reason for the attack in the first place. As for the logical place to take the device, we quickly settled on the S’rall homeworld, which was a parched desert planet constantly struggling with supplies of water. The S’rall themselves were part of the problem, the more traditional elements in their society eschewing modern technology in favor of ancestral methods of finding and husbanding the stuff. All of which left my crew scratching their heads, until we’d finally started on our departure from Tau Ceti. Then I called all hands into the Fafnir’s crew lounge. “So, you guys are wondering what we’re up to,” I said. Icky nodded. “Yeah. I mean, I think we understood going into the water business to keep Cantullin Station supplied and generate some extra to sell to the Fren to haul off in their Big and Long to make a bit of money. But why the hell are we peddling water processors to the S’rall?”

“It isn’t like they cannot purchase their own,” Funboy stated, his eyes narrowed in suspicion. Or rather, more suspicion. I spread my hands at that. “I know. And no, I’m not really interested in going into the water business and trying to do business all over known space. There’s a reason I want to try very publicly to push water extractors onto the S’rall.”

“Bait,” Gabby said. Everyone looked at her. “Bait,” she repeated. “Van wants to bait the—who were they again, the Ixtans?

Anyway, he wants to bait them into making another attack so he can spank ’em. Right, Van?”

I pointed at Gabby and grinned. “Give the beautiful lady a prize. That’s it exactly. You’ll note that I’ve had Netty-P and Perry inform various parties on Anvil Dark where we’re headed. I also made a big, public deal about it to WindSail before we departed, and made sure to file an open flight plan to the S’rall homeworld. In other words, I’ve given the bad guys lots of opportunities to learn our plans.”

“Yeah, but we’re going to be there in less than a day. That doesn’t give them much time to act,” Rab said. “No, it doesn’t,” I agreed. “However, the S’rall homeworld is only our first stop. Our next one is going to be a nice, dry planet called Tradus. And we’ve plastered that fact across all our travel plans as well.”

Icky frowned and crossed two of four arms. “Where the hell is that?”

“That, my dear, is a former colony of the Ixtan Empire.”

“So—wait. That’s outside known space?

Where we don’t have jurisdiction?”

“That’s right. But we still have the inherent right to defend ourselves, and to do so vigorously. Let’s just say I intend to be really vigorous and make an example of whoever tries anything hostile toward us.”

A slow smile spread across Icky’s face. Rab and Torina joined in. “So this really is all about laying a trap,” Rab said. I nodded. “Yeah. Like I’ve said, I’m tired of being reactive, of waiting for the bad guys to make their move before we take action. Unfortunately, their action tends to mean a bunch of people getting hurt or killed, and then we’re left picking up the pieces. Now, law enforcement isn’t preemptive, nor should it be. You shouldn’t be arresting people for crimes they might commit—”

“Why the hell not?

It would make our lives a whole lot easier,” Icky grumbled. I gave her a cool look. “Really?

So you’d have been okay with the Wu’tzur authorities arresting you and your father because you guys might violate some ancient law?”

Icky scowled. “Well, I wouldn’t want it to apply to me, duh. Just everyone else in the universe.”

“Uh-huh. Anyway, while we can’t be truly preemptive, nothing stops us from baiting the bad guys into doing bad things, and then catching them in the act.”

Perry bobbed his head. “Stings are, indeed, a time-honored law enforcement technique.”

“Damned right. So that’s the plan. Now, unless anyone has any other great objections, let’s go see the S’rall and start getting our trap set.”

THE UNFORTUNATE THING about going to the S’rall homeworld is that it was in the 61 Cygni system. The planet called Adoration was also located here, which is where we’d finally run down Helem Gauss and where Zenophir

had died. The system held painful memories for everyone, except Gabby, and Funboy had filled her in on the details. For that reason, I quietly asked Netty-P to take us in through a twist point that was on the opposite side of the system from Adoration’s present location in its orbit. That added nearly another full day to our transit time from the twist point to the S’rall homeworld, but that was fine. It kept Adoration from being anything more than an icon on the edge of the display. It also offered our would-be assassins more time to digest our itinerary. Unfortunately, it also meant that we had to deal with the S’rall, who could be pleasant...

Up to a point. THE S’RALL WERE AN ANOMALY—A space-faring race that was perfectly comfortable with the technology of known space, but whose culture was deeply rooted in ancestral traditions and folklore. For instance, the S’rall believed that the universe had been created by the various antics of a pantheon of deities. But they also believed that twist drives and similar advanced tech just amounted to the details of how said deities pulled it off

—and were still pulling it off, for that matter. Fortunately, we had a firm ally to help us navigate the confusing swirl of modern understanding and ancient belief. M’rika, a young S’rall noble, was what translated to a “princess,” the head of one of the family units that roughly translated to “clans.” M’rika had been one of the first stolen personalities we’d rescued and restored, years ago now. She and her clan had adopted us as honorary members, meaning we didn’t have to thread our way through the convoluted politics of the S’rall just to even get down to the surface. As soon as we arrived in orbit and announced ourselves, M’rika personally invited us down. We landed on a late S’rall evening, with the glow of 61 Cygni fading on the horizon. In true desert fashion, as soon as the sun set, the ground continued to radiate its stored heat for a while, then the temperature started to drop. It was still warm when we stepped out of the Fafnir’s airlock into

the desert gloom, but there was a definite hint of chill starting to harden the air. M’rika greeted us warmly, in the fashion of her people. She offered us a deep, formal bow, which, per her people’s tradition, we were not supposed to return. As the head of her clan, this was her symbolic way of making her our servant and inviting us to share in the hospitality of her home. She then straightened, took my hands into hers, and bowed again, touching her forehead to our joined hands. This symbolized her recognizing us as members of her family. It was a very solemn affair, and we treated it with the gravitas it was due. Once these staid formalities were out of the way, though, the S’rall relaxed, and things turned into an upbeat mixer. We were invited into an expansive hall excavated into the rock and roofed over with alloy joists and other advanced materials, creating a space that would be relatively cool even under the fierce daytime sun. Within, we were immersed in S’rall culture, which was so unique I had trouble thinking of any good Earthly analogs. There might have been hints of nomadic peoples like the Bedouin or the Mongols, but there were also bits more similar to some sub-Saharan African cultures, some northern European, and a few reminiscent of Indigenous peoples from the American Southwest. Most of S’rall culture, though, was entirely unique—an intriguing blend of science and religion, of reason and faith, of rational understanding and mythical belief. We also never saw much of the S’rall. They garbed themselves in loose, flowing clothing intended to help ward off the heat, but they also wore tight-fitting suits beneath that recycled moisture like the stillsuits in Dune. These included a hood and face mask, which the S’rall rarely removed outside the presence of immediate family. The general effect was like talking to the Sand People or Tusken Raiders of Star Wars, but in a far more easygoing way. While my crew indulged themselves in the festivities—Icky predictably found several items of S’rall cuisine she couldn’t get enough of—I spoke with M’rika. We exchanged small talk, then she cocked her head, the eyepieces of her mask glittering at me. “So then, Van, why have you come here?

Your message said something about water processors, but—” She hesitated. “How do I put this—?”

I smiled. “But why am I trying to sell you something you obviously know all about.”

“That’s it, yes. We use water-processor technology. In fact, there’s a bank of the machines operating just a short walk”—she pointed—“that way, producing most of the water we need for this community.”

I smiled, nodded, then explained my real reason for coming here, that this was to help bait a trap. M’rika immediately acted very relieved. “I was afraid that you were going to try to push this technology on us, which would have been awkward, because it would have been—”

“Patronizing?

Insulting?”

She made a humming sound I knew to be S’rall laughter. “Something like that.”

“No, of course I know better than that. That said, though, I would like to find a conspicuous way to try to sell some water processors here. I mean, I don’t really care if I do—although if it helps someone get fresh water, that’d be great. But if not, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s big and splashy—

pardon the pun—and obvious.”

“Ah. Well, in that case, I will bring you to speak with the prince of the L’rinil clan on the new day. They are enthusiastic traditionalists, shall we say, and practice the old ways of obtaining water.”

“By enthusiastic, do you happen to mean stubborn?”

“Very.”

I grinned. “They sound perfect.”

SURE ENOUGH, the L’rinil clan proved to be as intractable as M’rika had foretold. It took nearly a half day for a delegation of M’rika’s people to make contact and propose the meeting. And then it took the better part of the remainder of the day to set it up and finally schedule it for midnight, atop a mesa a couple of klicks from M’rika’s settlement. “It’s like a society obsessed with the collective goal of creating paperwork. And meetings,” Perry groused. “Welcome to the Army, bird.”

“No thanks. I hear the food is terrible,” Perry countered. “You don’t eat.”

“Neither do people in the Army.”

“Touché.

Now, as to the Air Force,” Perry said, then shrugged his wingshoulders. “Still not as good as being a Navy officer,” I said. “They get chow and clean silverware. It’s almost obscene.”

“Silverware is obscene?” Icky asked, leaning in. “Hah. Toldja. A plot to, um, domesticate me. Just like the people who make pants. And that other stuff that hurts my teeth—”

“You mean dental floss?” I asked. “Yeah!

I know a torture device when I see it. I was—”

“Hiding an entire Christmas dinner in your gums?

Yes. Yes you were, big girl. The floss is for our benefit too. Someday, I’ll have Torina tell you about the effects of halitosis,” I interjected, finishing with a cheery grin. Torina was not amused. “The effects of halitosis are similar to what Van will be experiencing if he drags me into these conversations.”

Icky looked interested. “Like what?”

Torina lifted a brow. “Being alone. Permanently alone.”

I turned to the cooling desert vista before us. “So, about this task at hand. We face a strenuous but doable walk. For the purposes of, um—”

“Think carefully,” Torina warned. “For the purposes of expediency, bird, bride, you’re with me. The rest of you are at rest, as the saying goes.”

Icky pumped four fists. “I’m gonna nap.”

Funboy looked mournful. “I will nap as well, but not within fifty meters of… her. And that bellows she calls a chest.”

I gave him a look of sympathy. “Best of luck, chuckles. We’re off. Bring the processor on the Frankie when I call.”

“Gotcha, boss,” Funboy said, then managed a half salute. I looked at Torina. “I really feel the power of command.”

“I’ll bet.” She cut her eyes at me, then we began our climb, holding hands as Perry circled overhead

Gee, that climb looks hard from way up here, where I’m lazily circling. Ever caught an updraft?

It’s delightful. I levered myself up onto a rock. “Stow it, feathers. I can hear your patches from here.”

I’m in a delicate state. I require more parts. More care. More sympathy, you brute. Is that any way to speak to someone recently back from the dead?

Torina answered this time. “Keep it up, bird, and you’re going to end up right back there again.”

Oh, you know that part of the trail you’re on now?

With all the big rocks and stuff?

Well, wait til you get to that next bend, and you’ll see you’re on the easy part right now. “Rab, switch the Frankie’s guns to air-defense mode. Priority target anything the size of a skinny turkey,” I hissed. “Done. All you have to do is give the order to shoot,” Rab replied, laughter in his voice. Hey, what’s that over there?

I’ll go check, see you laterrrrrr—

We reached the small plateau to find the delegation from the L’rinil clan waiting for us. Outwardly, they were identical to M’rika’s people, although closer inspection revealed a few different doodads on their outfits. As a people, they liked their flare. In addition, they were, as M’rika had promised, enthusiastically traditional — to the point of being surly about it. After a lengthy ceremony of greeting led by M’rika, who’d accompanied us, we were formally introduced to the L’rinil. Their leader, named Est’lina, immediately made her position clear. “We have agreed to this meeting only because of our esteem for the clan of M’rika, not because we are interested in your technology. That being the case, I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time—”

“I would like to hear them out,” one of her followers said. Est’lina tensed, then slowly turned. “We discussed this—”

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to dig for water under rocks anymore!”

“We have our ways—”

I carefully stepped back, giving them some space to resume what was obviously an ongoing argument. It was, I could immediately tell, a clash of generations. The S’rall who were apparently tired of scrabbling for water using traditional methods were the younger ones, while the core traditionalists were older. I had no desire to get involved, so I left them to a sudden, heated argument carried out in hissed, low tones and stepped away to check in with my crew. “Perry, any signs of trouble you can see?”

None. There are you folks on the plateau, and then the closest beings producing thermal signatures—aside from a few critters, that is—are nearly two klicks away, on the lowlands. “Rab, how about you?”

He and the others were circling high above, waiting for the word to land or else wave off and return to M’rika’s settlement. “Nothing beyond what Perry sees.”

I turned my attention to Netty-P, who, with Funboy and Gabby, had returned to orbit in the Fafnir. “How about space-side?

Anything standing out?”

“Nothing up here, Van. Just routine commercial traffic—oh, and a stealthed ship that’s obviously B,” Netty-P replied. “Hi, Van,” B put in. “B, why do you even bother?

We know you’re there,” I said, laughing. “You’re not as bright as I thought you were, young man. I’m not trying to hide from you. I’m trying to hide from the bad guys that are after you. Never a dull moment in the space around the Fafnir. You see, there’s a concept in the military that we like to call security, and—“

“Hmph. I accept your overwatch with grouchy thanks—”

M’rika sidled up closer to me. “Van, the L’rinil are ready to have the water processor demonstrated to them.”

“So the young’uns got their way, huh?”

“That’s the way of it. To be fair, though, my parents would have been the same way.”

“So you are the young’un in your clan.”

“I suppose I am, yes.”

I nodded, and we returned to the meeting. The L’rinil had grudgingly agreed to a demonstration, so I had Rab bring the Frankie down. He and Icky unloaded the WindSail water processor from her cargo hold and wheeled it into the clear on a frame with comically large balloon tires. They activated it and it began to hum, running off its own internal power cells. After just a moment, it started producing a steady trickle of water harvested from the surrounding air. “It comes with accessories that let it drill into the bedrock and extract water from there, too,” Rab explained. “And it can even process cometary ice—” He looked around. “Although I suspect you don’t have much of that kicking around here.”

The younger L’rinil were thrilled. The older L’rinil were deeply unimpressed. The result was an acrimonious debate that became more heated—and animated—by the moment. I turned to M’rika. “I’m sorry about this. I didn’t realize it would end up being such a sore point—”

She raised a hand and leaned closer. “Van, this is wonderful. The L’rinil have been trying to encroach on our territory for years now. Anything that keeps them focused inward works for me.”

I gave her a sly and appreciative grin. “Why do I feel like I’ve just been used?”

“I prefer to think that I seized an opportunity when it presented itself.”

I laughed. “I’m going to have to remember that you’re kind of sneaky.”

We left the water processor with the L’rinil—after M’rika offered to pay for it. She declared that it was a gift from her clan, given as a token of desire for good relations between their peoples. I had to work to keep the smile off my face as she did. Rather than returning to M’rika’s settlement, though, we bid her and her retinue farewell on the spot and loaded aboard the Frankie to return to orbit. Perry descended and landed on the rim of the Frankie’s airlock as we boarded. “Looks like our work here is done. I guess we can come back for some follow-up once these people have gotten used to getting their water from a machine.”

Rab crossed his arms and looked back. “There’s a lot of tradition to overcome. That might take a long time. Years, maybe—”

One of the S’rall suddenly threw a punch at another. Shouts erupted, followed by a brawl. I shook my head as we hurried aboard to depart and get out of range. “I have a feeling it might be a lot sooner than that.”

16

OUR NEXT STOP, the former Ixtan world, was going to be awkward. For one, we didn’t have a second water processor, so we had to return to Tau Ceti to procure one. We then had to trek out past the boundary of known space, coreward of Unity’s territory, which meant three long twists taking up nearly two days of objective time. And we were going to have to refuel at a place I’d never been, only seen marked on the charts, an outpost station known as Tolono-Metre. As we left 61 Cygni, though, Torina pulled me aside for a quiet word. “If this about about M’rika flirting with me—”

“It’s not,” Torina said, then stopped and narrowed her eyes. “Why?

Was she flirting with you?”

“No.”

She stared at me. I shrugged. “My fragile male ego wants to interpret it as flirting. There, how’s that?”

“Fragile male ego I can buy. Anyway, we have a, um, problem.”

“Oh, you’ll have to be way more specific than that.”

“It’s Icky. I had a conversation with her when we were dining with M’rika’s clan—you know, when you were busy convincing yourself you were flirting with her—”

“Yes, I get it, har-dee-har. Any way—”

“Anyway, I think being surrounded by people who consider themselves all family—it made her kind of… introspective, I guess.”

“Icky?

Introspective?

Not two words I’d normally put together, but okay. What did she get introspective about?”

“Life, the universe, her career—she’s oddly intense about engineering. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it verges into religion for her. Then we discussed Paxomar and what it’s going to mean for Icky to be, um, an adult, for lack of a better term.”

“Ooof. That’s a lot of arm waving.”

“It’s like you were there. But in the end, I understood I was hearing a young woman faced with the biggest challenges of her life, and what’s over the horizon, too. All in all, she’s doing well—which means the ship will do well,” Torina finished. I immediately got it. Afterward, I called a crew meeting in the Fafnir’s lounge to run over our plans for the upcoming days. “I’d really like to add an engineer to the team temporarily as well. Someone who’s good with power systems, and aerodynamics in particular.”

Perry gave me an amber look. “Aerodynamics?

Why do we need—?

Icky perked up. “Oh!

Paxomar specializes in both those things!”

I stared at her. “He does?

Well, he’d be a great choice, then.”

Perry switched to my ear bug. Ah. Gotcha, boss. Icky shenanigans. I gave him a surreptitious wink, then turned to the others. “Okay. Let’s sort ourselves out so we can go get our engineer.”

Perry had one more word to add to my sentence but wisely kept it for my ear alone. Laid. IT TOOK a flurry of twist-comm calls and some nudges to everyone’s schedules, but we were able to arrange to meet Paxomar at Tau Ceti. While there, we obtained another, smaller WindSail unit, cheerfully paying for it. I wasn’t sure if the Starbright Corporation had figured out that we were the likely cause of the EMP bomb attack on their factory, or if their largesse didn’t extend past one water processor. But it didn’t matter. We paid, retrieved Paxomar, refueled, then started the trek out to Tradus, the former Ixtan colony. We’d only just gotten underway when a call from Anvil Dark came through. Netty-P took it and reported it to me in my cabin, where I was working to catch up on the novel I was writing. And by novel, I meant paperwork. Because there was only paperwork. I’d come to accept that the universe would not die its uttermost heat death until the requisite forms were filled out and submitted, and approval was granted. “Van, the dispatch desk on Anvil Dark has asked us to divert to SCR

1845-6357.”

“Hey, I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“Really?”

“Sarcasm, Netty-P. It’s sarcasm. What’s there—and I’m sure you’re going to say a red dwarf star, so what else is there?”

“A companion brown dwarf star. So that’s different. But there’s also a ship there.”

I sat up and turned my chair toward her. “What sort of ship?”

“According to the report, something class 10 to class 12, apparently derelict. It was detected by a stellar cartographic probe from an Eridani-based research group doing a routine survey in the system. There’s really no reason for any ship to be there, since the system doesn’t even make a useful waypoint for twisting.”

“Which means it’s a great place to get up to all kinds of mischief, like clandestine meetings.”

“And transferring illicit cargoes, passing along stolen information, meeting with other crooks to cook up schemes—”

I smiled at her. “Exactly. Okay, so how far is this going to take us out of our way?”

“That’s actually the nifty thing. It actually isn’t a bad waypoint for us as we head out to Tradus, so it really doesn’t take us out of our way much at all. But we will be dipping into our reserve fuel by the time we reach Tradus if we don’t gas up. And that means we’ll definitely have to make a stop at Tolono-Metre.”

“Well, that was sorta the plan anyway. Alright. Let Anvil Dark know we’ll check it out, and inform the crew. We’re going to battle stations before we twist into SCR—uh—whatever the hell it was. I don’t intend to be caught flat-footed. Is B still shadowing us?”

“No. She sent a cryptic burst message that she had some medical thing she had to deal with, and that she’d catch up with us at some point.”

“So our guardian angel is off-duty. All the more reason to be careful.”

SCR 1845-6357 WAS another of the systems that proved that, as ethereally glorious and wondrously spectacular as the universe could be, a huge amount of it was pretty meh. Small, dim, and relatively cool red dwarf stars were by far the most common type, at least in the vicinity of Sol. It meant that the region conventionally called “known space” encompassed hundreds of stars, but only a few dozen of those weren’t red dwarfs. All that really made SCR 1845-6357 stand out was the fact it had a brown dwarf companion, an even dimmer, cooler sort of quasi-star—

basically, a big, hot version of Jupiter. And it had a ship. We approached it cautiously, active scanners hammering away, every weapon system hot and ready to fire. We sat in our suits, the Fafnir depressurized, with Rab and Funboy sitting in the Frankie, ready to launch in case we needed the extra firepower. This might be a trap, after all, and maybe even the trap we were trying to get the Ixtan to spring. Not that it would be a very good one, though. The small mass of SCR 1845-6357

meant that its gravitational influence was limited, so we could investigate this mysterious ship while remaining at a safe twist distance from the star. I looked at Netty-P, who, along with Perry, would be collating and analyzing the data sluicing in through the scanners. “Netty-P, what can you tell us?”

“Class 11, standard light freighter hull, only obvious armament being a pair of point-defense batteries. No visible damage beyond what you’d expect from long exposure to the space environment. No significant power emissions. In fact, the ship is at ambient temperature, no heat, so its power plant is completely dark.”

“Kind of spooky,” Torina said. “Like Halloween in space, but with less candy,” I agreed. Icky leaned around from her spot. “I just—”

I held up a hand. “I know. Buckets of candy. Got it.”

She gave me three thumbs up—the other hand held a dried fruit stick the size of a baseball bat. I turned back to consider the image on the center display. It was spooky. A dark, silent, derelict ship in a slow orbit, decades long, around a lonely red dwarf star—and a helluva long way from anywhere. Thanks to twisting, I’d started to think of these stars as being relatively close together, the distances between some vague sort of “a lot.” But if I shined a light from here toward Spindrift, the closest system known to be inhabited, it would take more than ten years for it to arrive there. Ten years, at the speed of light in a vacuum. I had another of those moments, this one charged with awe, but instead of wonder, the accompanying feeling was dread. Ten years, at the speed of light, to reach the nearest known people. I shivered. Damn, space was big. “Big, isn’t it?” Torina asked. I gave her a sly look. She knew me, and yet she loved me. “Get outta my head, dear.”

“Never.”

“Good.”

I exhaled, considering the screen. We had a derelict—and presumably abandoned—ship out in the middle of nowhere. It had probably come here for sinister reasons and never left. But it hadn’t been disabled as a result of a battle. That meant the crew had either abandoned it for some reason—

Or they hadn’t. I sighed again, then clapped my hands together in decision. “Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out what’s going on. Rab, Funboy, since you guys are in the Frankie already anyway, Icky, Perry, and I will join you. Torina, you can hold the fort here with Netty-P, Pax, and Gabby.”

I unstrapped and stood. “Places, everyone. The show’s about to go on—

again.”

Paxomar grabbed Icky. “Be careful, my love.”

She nodded. “I will. Don’t worry, Pax. I’ll be back.”

He nodded back at her. “Soon, I hope.”

She nodded in turn. “I will, I promise—”

Perry abruptly started hacking and gagging. “Oh, sorry about that. Something smarmy got stuck in my throat. Had a real Hallmark taste to it.”

“Bird?” I asked. “Yes?” He blinked, his eyes round with innocence. “On my hip. And save the comments for your restaurant reviews.”

“Noted. But—”

“I know. You don’t eat.”

WHILE THE FAFNIR stayed a few thousand klicks away on overwatch, we brought the Frankie closer to the mystery ship in incremental steps. Nothing changed. Keeping a close eye on the point-defense guns, we sidled up to the ship, mated the Frankie’s universal docking adapter with the UDA on the other ship, and achieved a hard dock. I led the way into the silent ship, Icky right behind me, Funboy and Perry following. We left Rab as our getaway driver. I held The Drop at the ready, but it quickly became clear it wasn’t necessary. There was, indeed, nobody home. We picked our way through from stem to stern and found that it had been stripped of a lot of its functionality. Panels were missing, components gone, leaving gaping openings and cables hanging like dangling viscera—an image I regretted the moment it occurred to me. The avionics systems had been stripped out, as had the fire controller, the nav, and comm systems, and most of the flight controls. The power plant was intact, but most of the ancillary systems, control units, and fuel feed regulators and the like were gone. Even the builder’s and registry plates had been yanked off the bulkheads, leaving sheared bolts and slightly brighter, cleaner spots where they’d been. We finally gathered in what had been the galley to compare notes. “Someone really did a number on this thing. Everything that could possibly identify her has been removed,” Perry said. Icky nodded behind her visor. “Yeah, it’s basically a hull, what’s left of a power plant and drive, and a couple of point-defense batteries. Anything that could be easily carried away, was.”

“It would, therefore, seem to be a dead end,” Funboy said. “My suspicion is that this ship was stolen and chopped for parts, and the hulk was abandoned where it was unlikely to be found.”

I nodded at that—but. “Since we’ve come all this way, I want to make sure we exhaust every chance to figure out what this might have been. I

mean, this is two mysterious ships we’ve found in a week.”

“At least this one didn’t try to kill us,” Rab said over the comm. “True. So, gang, let’s split up again, and this time start looking for anything that isn’t obvious. Hidden compartments, cryptic markings—hell, garbage, for that matter, if it sheds some light on this.”

“As long as I don’t have to deal with the crapper,” Perry said. “That’s my line in the sewage-infused sand.”

We spent the next hour or so poking, prodding, and nosing around, examining all the nooks and feeling around in all the crannies. I made note of the waste disposal chute in the galley, thought about my own comment about garbage, and called Icky over. “Hold onto my leg, big girl.”

“I—pardon?

Is this one of these toxic workplaces I keep hearing about?”

I curled my lip at her. “Yeah. I, a married man, am putting the moves on you, a giant alien with four arms and more muscles in one arm than I have in my whole body, while our respective beloveds listen in on the comm. You got me—I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time. This is me swooping.”

“All I can say, Van, is you’ve got good taste.”

I laughed, opened the chute, and leaned in. Icky grabbed my legs and hung on. “I gotcha, boss. Gripping you like a bowl of hot, spicy noodles.”

“What did I just say about flirting on the job, Icky?

Safety, not sensuality, please.”

“Believe it or not, Van, you’re not my type. Too small, too few arms—

and too small—”

“Ouch, my ego!

Let’s just leave it at that, thanks—“

I squirmed and pushed my way to the back of the chute, where I would drop into the disposal unit. It would have been far easier without a helmet on, but the ship had no reserve air and I wasn’t about to use up the Fafnir’s to repressurize her. Wincing a little, I felt around in among the blades of the disposal unit, which, if they’d been working, would have swiftly pureed my hand. I felt nothing, though—

And then something. Something that crinkled under my touch. I grabbed it and told Icky to pull me out. “Food!” I said, holding my prize aloft. Torina spoke over the comm. “I don’t know what you found over there, babe, but I can spot you a few bonds for a meal. No need to scavenge eats off a derelict ship.”

I chuckled. “Consider this a comm kiss, my dear.”

Funboy, who’d joined us, clicked his tongue. “What mixed messages. Love… and disease.” He pointed at the thing in my hand. “You don’t intend to eat that, do you?”

I turned and tapped the thing in the wrapper against a bulkhead. The impact started me drifting toward the other side of the galley but had no discernible effect on the—cookie. That’s what it was. A cookie. But it was the wrapper that interested me much more. I held it toward Perry, who’d also now arrived. “Huh. Recognize this, bird?”

“It’s a cookie.”

“Yes, I know. I mean the wrapper.”

“It’s cellophane—”

“Perry!”

“Oh, of course!

It’s a wrapper for a cookie with some French writing on it. And my knowledge of European pastries is second only to… my knowledge of everything else. By which I mean that I have no idea what it is, other than a fossilized cookie that could probably break my beak.”

“It’s not the fact of the French writing—although that is, admittedly, pretty interesting. It’s the address on the wrapper. It points to a place called Lembeke, in Belgique. And quite literally pardon my French, but even I can reason out that that probably means Belgium.”

“No chance of slipping that past detectives like us, huh?” Icky asked. I wasn’t anywhere near as amused. “Manon Clemenceau. There’s no way this isn’t connected to her. I don’t know if it pisses me off more to learn she’s not content to commit crimes on Earth but has now taken her malfeasance into the stars—or if she’s bringing snacks along from home while she does.” I held up a hand. “No, wait. Both of those things piss me off equally.”

“What would her angle be, though?

What motivation does she have to be involved in a ship that has been stripped and abandoned?” Funboy asked. “A very good question.” I thought about it. “Stripping ships seems a little low-rent for someone at her level of grift.”

“It may not have actually been her, Van. More like one of her people,”

Icky said. “Some sort of associate,” Rab put in. “Well, either way, we are now going to truly scour this tub. I’m prepared to spend a whole day here doing that. Priority is anything that can collect data of any sort. I don’t care if it’s a maintenance monitor for some minor system, the controller for the toilet—”

“Why the hell did everyone just look at me?” Perry snapped. WE BROUGHT Gabby and Paxomar over to help. I was determined to wring every last bit of intel out of this ship we could, given how it had unexpectedly fallen into our laps. Or had it?

As the others searched, I spoke with Perry. “What do we know about this research group that was doing the stellar survey that found this old tub?”

“You’re thinking this was some sort of setup?”

“Let’s put it this way—I’m not not thinking that.”

“The Grandle Institute for Stellar Cartography is a reputable organization, one of the leaders in producing star charts certified across known space for commercial navigation. They’ve been doing it for nearly two hundred years, and during that time haven’t as much as incurred a parking ticket.”

“So they’re either really, really good at being crooked—”

“Or they’re just what they seem to be—a rare example of an honest organization doing good work that benefits everyone across known space,”

Perry said. “Yeah, they don’t really fit the profile of bad actors, do they—?”

“Van?

Found something back here—uh, second cabin on the right after you leave the galley,” Gabby said. We headed that way, me pulling myself along using conduits and hatch coamings as handholds. I held Perry’s wing and towed him with me to save him using up reaction fuel for his little maneuver thrusters. Gabby pointed when we arrived in the cabin. “See this outline?

Here on this table?

It looks like something was bolted here. And there’s a cable leading down there”—her stubby finger dropped beneath the table

—“leading into the…” She shrugged. “Okay, that’s the limit of what I know about this technical stuff.”

I pulled up an access plate in the deck, and Perry examined the cabling. “It’s tied into the ship’s intercom—the video channel. It was probably a camera, or some sort of imager.”

I looked at the table, trying to imagine an imager mounted on it. If it was, then the only logical place it could have been pointed was—

At the bed. “Ewww.”

I think we all said at the same time, realizing the implications at once. But it got worse, believe it or not. “Van, I’ve been able to retrieve some data from a maintenance monitor back here,” Icky said over the comm. “It’s not much, and most of what is here is just boring performance data for a few boring systems. But there’s one signal I’ve seen before. There was a stolen ID chip operating aboard this ship—and tied right into her systems.”

I glanced uneasily at Gabby and Perry. “Which systems?”

“Uh—just a sec.” We waited. “Looks like the ship’s internal comm, the

—”

“Video channel?”

“Yeah. How’d you guess?”

“Sadly, Icky, it wasn’t a guess at all. Come to the crew hab and the full, sordid, horrifying details will become clear.”

I turned to the table, to the holes marking the spot the camera had been mounted, and gave a disgusted grimace. “Let’s keep tearing this ship apart.”

I patted the evidence pouch in my harness, where I’d stored the Belgian cookie in its wrapper. “I want to know everything we can find out about what Clemenceau, or the Equal Grasp, or whoever the hell was out here was up to. I’ve got a hunch it’s something other than the usual.”

“Other than money and power, you mean?” Perry asked. Funboy, who’d just arrived with Icky, spoke up. “You’re forgetting something—money, power, and sex. All are equally potent motivators.”

“He said potent,” Perry muttered. I sighed. “Oh, grow up, bird.”

“Sorry, Van, non-biological being here. I am as perfect as I’ll ever be.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“You—hey, wait a minute!”

“For once, I’m with grouchy,” Icky cut in. “And by with him, I mean I agree, me being Paxomar’s and all.”

Gabby looked at her. “You seem to be trying very hard to make your relationship with Paxomar evident to everyone. We know, Icky.” She cocked her head. “Do you?

Is that why you’re—”

“Uh, excuse me, my relationship with Pax is just fine and dandy, thanks. I’ve just been”—she glanced at him, and he looked shyly down behind his visor, which was quite a feat, a Wu’tzur looking shy and demure—“missing him.”

She turned to Funboy. “Besides, I doubt sourpuss here could handle being boarded and looted.”

Funboy blinked back at her. “A mystery that will remain such until the stars themselves burn out. But it does not matter. You belong to Paxomar alone, and I”—he turned to Gabby—“belong to a being of such incandescent beauty she is proof positive that divine beings walk among us.”

Perry gave a theatrical sigh. “You biologicals and your—biological stuff.” He lifted a talon. “Anyway, cleanup on aisle four. I think I stepped in a bunch of romance.”

17

WE UNFORTUNATELY OBTAINED LITTLE MORE of use from the derelict ship. That said, we were certain there was just nothing else to obtain. So I filed a report back to Anvil Dark and recommended another forensic salvage crew be dispatched, then we carried on to our next waypoint, the orbital known as Tolono-Metre. Technically, the orbital was a waypoint between known space and Unity. Practically speaking, though, it was another of those orbitals just enough out of the way to make it not worth the passage of regular traffic, so what it really was was a place through which black-market goods moved between Unity and points in known space. Its veneer of legitimacy came from a robotic deuterium mining operation skimming raw fusion fuel off the upper margins of a nearby gas giant. Still, fuel was fuel, even if Icky bitched about the effect of its impurity on our power plant and drive. After an initial round of suspicion, I made it clear that we were only passing through and weren’t interested in enforcing any particular laws if we didn’t have to. I then told the traffic control AI that we’d wait an hour, to give the people aboard the orbital time to hide anything they didn’t want us to see. When the time elapsed, we received clearance and proceeded to dock. When we did, we found ourselves immersed in filth. Tolono-Metre was a creaky, decrepit place, its bulkheads and decks rimed with grunge and corrosion, murky fluids dripping from rusty overheads into sludgy puddles

that fitfully drained through gaps in the deck plates. Funboy’s reaction was predictable. “Oh dear.”

While we refueled, we did a brief exploration of the place’s amenities. There wasn’t much, just a few shady vendors selling even shadier stuff—

some of the milder recreational chems, a wide range of porn—not all of which was species I’d even heard of, let alone seen naked—and other media that was probably bootlegged and could easily be infected with Calamity or any number of other digital infections. There was a restaurant, too, which Icky insisted on visiting. But even her iron stomach turned to tinfoil at the sight of the place. “They’ve got… noodles,” she said, peering through a murky and distressingly well-used sneeze guard into a sort of steam table beneath it. “At least I think they’re noodles. Although—noodles shouldn’t be moving on their own, should they?”

“No,” I agreed. “I think one of them winked at me,” Icky said, her voice soft with wonder and horror. “Twice.”

Funboy merely stood by, turning a slow circle. He’d suited himself fully up, helmet and everything. “Oh dear. This is the nadir of anything resembling decent hygiene. Were it not for me being hermetically sealed, I’m sure I’d be gasping my last words to my beloved right now.”

“And what would they be?” Gabby asked him, her tone expectant. “To ensure that my remains were cremated in a fusion-arc furnace, that none of the pathogens responsible for killing me could escape to infect others.”

Torina put her hand on her heart. “Oh. It’s almost poetic, isn’t it?”

Icky sighed. “Never thought I was going to say this about food, boss, but—I’ll pass, thanks.”

I nodded. “I think we all will. Back to the ship, gang, please. And Netty-P, let’s have decontamination protocols ready, just in case.”

“You are a relentless optimist, Van,” Funboy said. “Why?”

“Because you think all this might be fatal, whereas,” Funboy said, stepping over a puddle of oily residue, “I know it is.”

WE PREPARED TO GET UNDERWAY. Icky settled herself into her workstation, chewing on something. “Icky, what are you eating?” I asked. “Well, I didn’t want their noodles, but their candy isn’t bad. It’s like that stuff you bought me in Frankenmuth. It was all fluffy, made my face all sticky—”

“Cotton candy?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

Perry turned his amber gaze on her. “Uh—Icky, where did you get that?”

“From a vendor on our way out.”

“Okay. You do realize that it’s not actually food, though, right?

It’s insulation.”

Icky blinked at him and stopped chewing. “Oopth.”

I shook my head and turned my attention back to the instruments. “Your first clue, big girl, should have been that you don’t usually have to chew cotton candy.”

“Umm, bossth?” Icky asked. “Let me guess, your tongues are itchy?”

She nodded. “At leatht one half.”

I looked up and away, stifling a laugh. “Naturally.”

WE CARRIED ON TO TRADUS, a strikingly Earth-like planet orbiting a star that was more orange than Sol, and twenty percent bigger. As we approached the planet, I reviewed the data we had on file. It had been supplemented with stuff Perry had retrieved from Guild archives. Tradus had, at one time, come under the sway of the relatively short-lived Ixtan Empire. Its indigenous people were a race known as the Mandicuu, humanoids with slate-colored skin and long memories. Tall and regal, they tended to dress in brilliant robes either of white, or of vibrant, spectacular swatches of color. They also wore a sort of battle armor, though it was meticulously hand-sewn and more ornate than functional. An industrious people, the Mandicuu had apparently entered into a sort of protectorate agreement with the Ixtan, which outwardly had looked all

fine and fair. In reality, though, it had been nothing but exploitation in pretty wrappings. Tradus was a dry, relatively cool planet still in the process of emerging from an ice age, so most of the planet’s surface water was locked up in vast continental glaciers sprawling across the high latitudes. The runoff meltwaters and what remained liquid at lower latitudes had been enough to see the Mandicuu through to a tech level roughly equal to that of Earth. To grow their population and develop further, they needed more volume, and more reliable supplies of water. Enter the Ixtan, with their protectorate. The Ixtan had engineered new water systems for the Mandicuu, using their proprietary tech and helping them to further develop. In reality, they’d just made the Mandicuu dependent upon them. They’d insidiously leveraged their control of the water supply to wring concessions out of the Mandicuu, including allocations of land for Ixtan use in some of the most fertile and productive areas of Tradus. I sat back from the reports and summaries, sighed, and looked at Perry, who was perched on my bed. “You know, I’ve heard of empires created and kept going through war and conquest, through brutal oppression, through weaponized commerce, even through marriage—thinking of the Habsburgs there—”

“And their famous chin,” Perry agreed. “Empire by inbreeding’s a risky business.”

“It is. But empire through manipulation of critical resources, like water?

That’s a new one. For that matter, a new low in empire-building, too. I mean, what’s next—controlling the air?”

“Van, remind me to tell you about one of the first hustles on Spindrift sometime.”

“Someone was trying to control the air?”

“It was a literal carbon tax—on the breath you exhaled.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Why am I not surprised?

Yeah, save that story for another day. Using the water that people need to, you know, just survive is enough assholery for me today.”

I read the rest. The Mandicuu were noted for their elegant engineering, with aesthetics and visual appeal being as important as structural strength or dynamic loading. It wasn’t enough for the Mandicuu to build a bridge that was merely functional—it had to conform to their version of feng shui with the environment around it. And by “had to,” they meant it—it was a

bottom-line requirement of their engineering. The spinoff from that was some glorious fine metalwork, which was one of the few things they exported, mostly to Unity. “So why hasn’t Unity stepped in to help these people?

Why are we the first ones who seem to be coming to them with anything like WindSails?”

Torina asked when I’d gathered everyone later that day to brief them on the situation we’d be facing. Perry answered. “Unity… isn’t. We call it Unity, and we kind of think of it as unified, but it’s not. Unity’s actually driven by internal divisions—a few of them even originate with the Ixtan. In fact, that’s why the Ixtan originally wanted to join known space. There are some powerful social, cultural, economic, and even religious issues simmering between them and other factions in Unity.”

“So allow me to guess—the Ixtan influence is what has prevented Unity from getting involved with the Mandicuu,” Funboy offered. “That’s pretty much right. The Mandicuu are kind of stuck in a no-man’s-land between the Ixtan, who were prevented from exploiting them, Unity, who are being prevented from helping them, and known space, which is too far away to care,” Perry replied. “Or too far away to make it worth getting involved, anyway. I mean, if Mandicuu became, say, an Eridani protectorate, it would just be a big headache for them and the Guild—and for what, some gorgeous metalwork and a water-poor society producing it?

I don’t think so,” Gabby put in. I gave her an appreciative nod. “So what’s the plan?

We’re just gonna go and offer them these WaterSails?” Icky asked. Rab frowned and crossed his arms over his ample chest. “And if we do, doesn’t that just risk putting a target on them?

If they start to develop some serious space-faring capability, then both Unity and the Ixtan might start getting nervous about having them right on their doorstep.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. But maybe that will be enough to spur the Guild into talking with its Charter members about bringing them into the fold.”

Gabby gave me a curious look. “You’re up to something here, Van. You have some sort of longer-term plan.”

I smiled. “Yeah, you got me. Frankly, I’m worried about this area, sort of the anti-spinward flank of known space. Directly coreward, we’ve got The Deeps, which are pretty much empty, and spinward and rimward

there’s no advanced civilizations for—well, who knows how far. We went all the way out to Reverie before we found the Tyrants and the Jackals—

that’s two months of twisting each way. Out here, though—”

I turned to the star chart that I’d had Netty-P put up on the big display in the crew lounge. “Out here, we’ve got Unity, and the Ixtan, and bits and pieces of what used to be the Ixtan Empire, like Tradus. We know that there are some serious criminal elements working out of Unity. And although they helped us clean up the Sorcerers the first time around, we really don’t know much about them—what motivates them, their long-term goals, that sort of thing. It makes me nervous.”

“So you’d like to see the Guild extend its jurisdiction out here?” Torina asked. I nodded. “Yeah. Preferably by convincing either the Eridani Federation or the Ceti Alliance to make Tradus a protectorate, as a start. It would give us eyes and ears where we really don’t have eyes and ears right now—

what?”

I was looking around, from one of my crew to another. As I’d been talking, they’d been exchanging looks, nods, even knowing smiles. Torina spoke up. “It’s just that, from where we’re sitting, Van, you kind of sound like a Master in the Guild.”

Icky nodded. “Yeah. You’re talking about expanding jurisdiction, making protectorates, dealing with the Eridani and the Ceti—”

“Not the sort of conversation one would expect to have with the average Peacemaker,” Funboy put in. “Nope. Way too strategic. Most Peacemakers are just worried about whatever case they’re working on,” Gabby added. Torina stood and faced me. “If you’re going to talk the talk, why not just make it official?

I mean, I think we all agree that what you’re proposing here is brilliant, absolutely something the Guild should do. So why not take that Master’s chair and just make it happen?

Don’t think of this as… as a question from your wife. This is me, the Peacemaker and Second. The person who appreciates honesty, tactics, strategy. That’s who’s asking this question. A peer, and a peer in a guild that needs help.”

I kept looking from one face to the next. I finally sighed. I didn’t want to be a Master—

“I’m thinking about it, okay?

It’s a big decision—for all of us. So, when the time comes—”

“It’s coming soon, Van,” Perry said. “Yeah, I know. And when it does, it’s going to be a decision we’re all going to make, okay?”

Everyone nodded, some more animated than others. Torina put her arms on my shoulders. “Don’t worry, Van, you can be the Master—and I’ll be the Mistress.”

“I like the sound of that—”

“Oh, for—” Perry flung himself into the air and sailed away forward, toward the cockpit. “I’m getting the hell out of here before Gopher, Julie, or Isaac show up.”

Torina frowned. “Who the hell are they?”

I smiled and shook my head. “From an old television show Gramps used to watch in reruns.”

“I’m still becoming familiar with Earthly culture, but those character references elude me. To which television production was Perry referring.”

I couldn’t help grinning. “The Love Boat.”

Netty-P’s laugh rang through the ship. “I’ll set a course… for adventure.”

WE DESCENDED to the surface of Tradus and were met by a delegation from their Central Collective, an upper level of government formed by representatives of smaller, more regional bodies. They weren’t based on family, like the S’rall, but rather on something related to the particular configurations of celestial bodies when they were born—a society basically based on the earth’s zodiac. It seemed more than a little callous, parents having children who were then handed over to that astrological group to be raised as part of a collective. Each of these collectives then focused on a particular part of society—governance, law enforcement, teaching, public works, and so on. But, the system worked for the Mandicuu, and that was all that really mattered. Torina and I had no say about it, nor should we. We focused on demonstrating the Starbright WaterSail technology instead. The Mandicuu were deeply impressed. They’d been working on water collection and processing tech of their own, but they’d come nowhere

near achieving the ease and efficiency of the WaterSails. Before the demonstration was even complete, many of the Mandicuu present were already arm-waving and speaking in excited tones about agricultural expansion, improving their infrastructure, and overcoming the bottlenecks that were throttling their people’s well-being and development. In the end, the Central Collective formally asked us to enter into an agreement whereby we’d act as the middle-man, bringing them WindSail technology and them paying us a premium over the basic cost of the units. But before there was any signing on the dotted line, one of the Mandicuu, a grizzled old man who obviously commanded deep respect from his peers, raised his hand. “Our people have been here before, Peacemaker Tudor. We trusted the Ixtan to help us with our water shortages, and they took advantage—”

I was already shaking my head. “We’re going to bring you WaterSails, and that’s it. How and where you use them is entirely up to you. Frankly, I’ve got enough on my to-do list that the last thing I want to do is add exploit the Mandicuu to it. I swear it on my badge and in the presence of my bride, your destiny remains your own. We’re not staying.”

The old Mandicuu regarded me gravely for a moment, then reached out and gathered me in a tight embrace. It was a little off-putting, more passionate than I was used to from someone who wasn’t Torina, Miryam, Gramps, or my father. But it was, I knew, the Mandicuu equivalent of a sincere handshake, so I just smiled through it while being pawed like a sweater on the sale rack at Walmart. When we were done with our diplomacy, I called up Netty-P, who was still aboard the Fafnir. “Contact my Fren shipping company. Tell them that they’re going to start making runs out here to Tradus to bring WaterSails, and they’ll be bringing fine metalwork back in payment. Emphasize how much that stuff is worth in known space markets and how lucrative this is going to be.” I went on to give her the details so that the Fren management could look after the whole arrangement, and I didn’t have to. And then we went for a walk. I started in the fairly rudimentary spaceport, really just a cleared expanse of rock for a blast pad and a small cluster of plain, drab terminal buildings. I made sure to wander among the handful of other ships there, then headed into the nearby town. I brought Torina, Icky, Funboy, and Gabby with me, while Rab, Paxomar, and Netty-P stayed with the Fafnir. Perry, as usual, flew top cover, but he had to do it

at altitude, out of sight. There were no flying creatures similar to him on Tradus, so he’d have stuck out pretty obviously against the almost always cloudless sky. I’d made it clear to the crew why we were doing this—it was, after all, our ultimate reason for coming to Tradus in the first place. I wanted to give the Ixtan, the Equal Grasp, or anyone else on the bad guy list their chance to take a shot at us. And they didn’t. We ambled through a lot of Mandicuu streets, took in their fascinating culture, did some local dining, which was Icky’s and Paxomar’s favorite part of it, and that was it. I even gave it an extra day, us wandering around until we started to get bored. I finally stopped on the edge of an open-air market we’d already visited twice and looked around. “Well, gang, I guess nobody loves us. And by ‘loves us,’ I mean, wants to kill us.”

“At least, not today, or not here, anyway,” Icky said. “So is this a genuine lack of interest in killing us, the inability to put the mechanisms in place to kill us in the time available, a more subtle sort of approach to killing us, or something else?” Funboy asked. “Unfortunately, we have no way to know. And as much as I like the Mandicuu, I think we’ve just about done all we can here—and I don’t want to wear out our welcome.” I looked around at the bustling market. Icky pointed at a particular stall. “Well, if we’re leaving soon, I’m getting another of those sweet, gooey things on a stick. Gonna get one for Pax, too,” she said, ambling off. “Is anyone going to tell her that sweet goo she likes so much is basically lizard vomit?” Gabby asked. Torina shrugged. “Would she care?”

But I fixed her with a thoughtful gaze. “You know, it strikes me that if this is some sort of subtle, convoluted plan on the bad guys’ part, we need to consult with a subtle master of convoluted thinking. And I’m thinking Master Cataric would be a good choice.”

She gave me a blank look. “Okay—“

I flicked my gaze pointedly toward Icky. “Master Cataric. I think both Icky and Pax would approve of us consulting him, don’t you?”

A slow smile spread across Torina’s face. “Why don’t we ask her?”

I knew the others were mystified, but they followed us as we made our way after Icky, toward the food stand. She turned with two gooey, syrupy…

blobs, for lack of a better word, each skewered onto a stick, then blinked around at us. “What?

You guys hungry for lizard vomit too?”

“Ah. Well, that answers that,” Gabby muttered. “Icky, Torina, and I were just talking. We’re thinking of going to see Master Cataric—you know, the Innsu Master on Helso. We’re hoping he might help us unravel what our enemies are up to.”

She looked from me to Torina, then back again. “Okay—”

“Well, he also enjoys a good party. Dancing. Some sort of festivity, like, oh—a wedding, maybe?”

Icky kept staring. “But you and Torina are already hitched.”

I glanced at Torina. “Wow.”

Funboy stepped forward. “I believe that Van and Torina are strongly suggesting that you and Paxomar may wish to avail yourselves of Cataric’s

—”

“YES!

Master Cataric can do the ceremony, sure!

I like him!

He isn’t all formal, doesn’t get all wrapped up in everyone wearing pants and stuff!

I’m in!”

“We should probably check with Paxomar?” I asked her. “Oh. Right. Let’s go—I gotta get this to him before it all oozes down my hand, anyway,” she said, and charged off, back toward the spaceport. “In case anyone cares, the bird, who has been dutifully circling for hours up here, has nothing to report,” Perry cut in over the comm as we all hurried after Icky. “Well, come on back to the Fafnir. I think our work here is done, anyway.”

Back at the ship, we piled in, Icky heading straight for Paxomar and handing him the thing-on-a-stick. “Here you go, Pax. Wanna get hitched?”

He stared at her, then looked at the stick-thing. “I’ve been reading up on how this works, and I know about rings and other jewelry, different types of dowries, and various other customs around marriage proposals.” He held the stick up. “This one is new to me, though.”

We laughed. Funboy, though, spoke up. “You haven’t actually answered Icky’s question.”

Paxomar looked at him. “No, I haven’t.”

Strangely, he turned and walked a few paces, toward the forward end of the crew lounge. He reached up and brushed a finger across a splicer plate welded to the overhead, a permanent fix of a shrapnel wound inflicted on the Fafnir in one of her now-many battles. “There’s so much struggle. So much strife. So much pain. The universe is—it’s all so uncertain.” He pulled his finger back and looked at Icky. “The one constant is you, Icrul, and how I feel about you. So yes, of course I want to”—he smiled—“get hitched. And the sooner, the better.”

Icky howled and flung her arms around him. In a moment, their respective sticky-sticks were both plastered and smeared into their fur. They pulled apart, and Icky laughed. “I need a shower!”

“So do I,” Paxomar said. They looked at each other, held their gaze that way, then turned and hurried back toward the cabin they were sharing. “We’re going to… uh, save water,” Icky called out as they rushed off. “Will we be going back to Cedar Rapids for an appropriate tuxedo?”

Funboy asked. I smiled. “In the middle of assassins, and Sorcerers, and a crime wave and the upheaval of civilization on Earth?

You bet your sweet ass we are. I mean, no matter what happens—”’

Funboy nodded gravely. “There is absolutely no reason to be underdressed.”

18

I WASN’T ALL that enthused to travel with the gang to Cedar Rapids just to visit the tailor, Otto Swenson. In fact, there were good reasons to not do that, foremost of which was just not unnecessarily stirring up shit on Earth. But that logic failed in the face of what I admit was a visceral, almost ornery reaction to the idea that I should stay away from my home. It was, after all, my home, and letting worries about the schemes and machinations of the likes of Constance Plowitz and Manon Clemenceau keep me away just pissed me off. So, screw it. We were going to Cedar Rapids, and then back to the farm, to check up on Miryam. I compromised a bit with myself, though, and decided to be less splashy about it this time. Last time, we’d landed the Frankie unconcealed in the parking lot of the strip mall containing Swenson’s shop. This time, we kept her stealthed and landed her in a secluded spot not far from the strip mall. We walked the rest of the way, but I did bring everyone except Rab and Perry, who remained with the Fafnir. The reason I left Perry is because Netty-P asked to come along. I was a little uncomfortable with that, because while Perry could cover for her in nearly every respect, the one thing he couldn’t do was run the twist drive. The AI that controlled the combi-drive, Hodgepodge, could run it, if necessary, and he was our backup. But he was only certified for short twists. The two twists it normally took us to get from Earth to Anvil Dark would, for instance, become four, or even five. On the other hand, I certainly wasn’t going to chain Netty-P to the Fafnir. So I shrugged. “Uh—sure, I guess, as long as Perry can cover your duties running the Fafnir in your absence.”

“Good. Thank you, Van. I’d like to look into getting some formal wear myself, actually.”

I stared. So did everyone else. Gabby, though, bubbled forward, nodding her bulbous head. “Yes, we talked!

I think she’d look lovely in a nice peach chiffon!”

“I don’t know if Swenson works with chiffon. He’s more of an old-school men’s tailor.”

“Then the next best thing would be a dark tuxedo—I’m thinking a really deep, charcoal gray, but with peach piping and… ooh, and peach lapels!

What do you think, Netty-P?” Gabby asked. “I’m visualizing that now, and, yes, I think I could get behind that.”

I grinned. “What the hell, why not?

I think you’re lovely just the way you are, but if you want to formal yourself up, who am I to stand in the way?”

WE USED the strip mall itself as cover, coming up an alley, so that we were only fully exposed to public view for the time it took us to walk around the front of the building. As soon as we stepped into view, I heard a shout, followed by a couple of cell phones inevitably swinging our way. We waved and smiled, and Icky and Pax gave eight thumbs up as we passed by. But the street happened to be fairly quiet, so we attracted little attention. I was pretty sure that would change as word started to get around that we were in town, though. Swenson was delighted to see us. “My favorite customers—mainly because you’re making me rich!” he laughed. “We are?”

He pointed at an advertising poster behind his till. It showed stylized versions of me and the crew, with yours truly standing at the forefront of the group, leaning toward the viewer, craggy jaw thrust out. I’d been drawn like a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Harrison Ford in one of the early Indiana Jones movies, which was

flattering as hell—even if the result did make me look a lot scruffier and at least ten years older than I was. Torina smiled at it. “So that’s supposed to be you, huh?” She pointedly looked from the poster, to me, then back again. “So where the hell is that version of you?

He’s kinda hot.”

I spread my arms. “Right in front of you?”

“Really?

Where?” She looked around, wide-eyed. “Okay, gotta admit, that is kinda clever,” Icky said, pointing at the title on the advert— Where the stars get dressed!

“It was my daughter’s idea,” Swenson said, laughing. “Anyway, yes, business has gone through the roof since you first came here. I’ve made at least a half-dozen tuxedos just like yours, in fact,” he said to Funboy. Funboy gave a solemn nod. “I am, indeed, a trendsetter.”

“Well, we’ve got a special challenge for you today, Mr. Swenson,” I said, gesturing at Netty-P. “My colleague here would like you to hook her up with something nice.”

Swenson stared for a moment. Finally, he turned to me. “It’s—”

“She.”

“She. Ah. But—she’s a machine.”

“An artificial or synthetic intelligence, actually,” Netty-P replied. “And just to be clear, I am not in any way similar to what humans currently refer to as ‘AI.’”

I nodded. “They’re about as similar as you would be to a sewing machine. It can stitch things together, sure, and result in gorgeous clothing

—but not on its own, or with any creativity that wasn’t yours to begin with.”

“I see. Alright. A… gown, I assume?”

“I think I’d actually prefer a tuxedo,” Netty-P said. “With peach lapels and piping!” Gabby chimed. Swenson stared for another moment, then shrugged and laughed. “Why not?

Why not indeed?”

We spent the next hour or so with Swenson taking measurements—

mine, Paxomar’s, and Netty-P’s. Mine were easy enough, but the others presented Swenson with challenges he’d never before encountered, nor likely ever expected he would. Challenges like a chest as big as a fifty-five gallon drum and four arms, or a quadrupedal machine. Although, it turned out he had done something similar to the last. “A very affluent client decided he wanted a tuxedo for his daughter’s wedding,” he said, as he measured my arm. “That doesn’t sound unusual.”

“It was for his Great Dane.”

“Ah. Okay.” I smirked. “Was she the bride?”

Swenson just gave me a look. “Yes, she was. He considered her his daughter.”

“He—oh. Well, who am I to judge, am I right?”

Swenson looked at the rest of the crew poking around his shop, grinned, and shook his head. “You are. And that goes for both of us, I think.”

Funboy decided he wanted new duds, too, but Swenson already had his measurements. He was just finishing up on Netty-P when she swiveled her imager toward the rear of the shop. “Someone is attempting to surreptitiously pick the lock of the back door,” she said. We all froze a moment, then swung smoothly into action. I gestured for Torina and Pax to cover the front of the shop, while Icky, Funboy, Netty-P, and I went to the rear and pushed into the workroom where Swenson did his cutting and sewing. A small office opened off to one side, a stockroom full of bolts of fabric and a washroom on the other. Gabby remained with Swenson. Iowa has been an open-carry state for firearms since 2021, so we were all armed and, in an instant, a small battery of weapons was pointed at the back door. Sure enough, the lock clicked, then the door slowly opened. A man’s face peered through it, then went blank and wide-eyed with shock as he realized what he was looking at. From his perspective, it must have been like staring into the readied broadside of a battleship. Funboy, who’d moved to one side, stepped forward, grabbed the man’s arm, and pulled him into the shop. He brandished—a pair of scissors. “These are lovely instruments, capable of cutting and shaping cloth into achingly beautiful garments. I wonder what they would do to the tender, yielding flesh of a miscreant breaking into a place like a common thief?” he asked. The man’s eyes practically crossed as he looked at the gleaming menace of the scissors, then he shook his head. “Hey, look, you got this all wrong. I’m not a miscreant, just a reporter!”

“Gotta be honest, not a lot to pick or choose from between either of those,” I said, The Drop aimed at him—though my finger was on the trigger

of the stunner, the slug gun part being firmly on safe. “Who are you, and what station or channel are you from?”

“And how come you’re picking locks and sneaking around?” Icky growled. She was holding two guns, one each in her smaller hands, while one of her bigger ones was busy being a massive fist softly punching itself into the other palm. The man shook his head again. “My—” He swallowed and looked quickly around. “My name is Gilbert Stone-Corey. I’m—I’m between permanent assignments right now.”

“So a freelancer, looking for a scoop.”

“You might say that, yeah.”

“Van, I’ve done a search on this man’s name. It occurs mainly in photo credits, mostly of celebrities of various sorts, usually taken in moments that probably should be considered private,” Netty-P said. A servo whirred, and she added, “I find him distasteful.”

“I hate his guts,” Icky added. “He is… dirty, too. Look at those fingernails. Like a street urchin,”

Funboy said, completing the group opinion. I turned back to him, shaking my head. “To clarify, you’re an unemployed paparazzi. Full stop.”

Gilbert glanced furtively around, swallowed, then decided to put on some swagger, with as much of a hint of defiance as he could muster. “Hey, it’s not like I want to be out here picking locks, trying to sneak a few photos just to make rent. Do you know how much health insurance costs in the big city?”

“You mean Cedar Rapids?

Yeah, okay, I guess it’s a city—but a pretty strange one for a paparazzi to be haunting. Shouldn’t you be hanging around Hollywood or Malibu or somewhere like that?”

“Pfft. So I can take exactly the same picture of some asshole movie star as a dozen other guys, just from a slightly different angle?” He shook his head. “Nah. Between the internet, deep fake pics, and drones, the traditional job of the photo documentary journalist has become a lot tougher these days.”

I smiled. “Photo documentary journalist?

Isn’t that kind of like calling a guy who pumps gas a petroleum transfer technician?”

“There are still people who pump gas?” Swenson put in from the door into his storefront where he was watching everything unfold. I chuckled. “Fair point, but you know what I mean. And that’s not what really bothers me. What is, is how you knew we’d be here today?

And, Gilbert, don’t bother with anything but the truth. We really don’t have time for anything but.”

Icky leaned in, looming over Gilbert. “What the man said. I’m doing my best to be the good alien, like—oh, what’s that old movie about that alien guy, the one that was like the three aliens Tony Burgess caught trying to probe him, he made friends with that kid, ate candies, made a bunch of those two-wheeled contraptions fly—”

“You mean E. T. ?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Perry got me to watch it. Anyway, that’s me right now. E.T.,” Icky said to Gilbert, baring her teeth. “You really don’t want me phoning home.”

“What is that supposed to mean, exactly?” Funboy asked. Icky shrugged. “I dunno, it just—” She scowled. “Just don’t lie, asshole, got it?”

Gilbert nodded, fast and hard. “I saw your ship. Or, I saw the air kind of warp when you landed in that little park back there. And then you got out. I followed you.”

“Dumb luck for the win,” Torina said. She’d moved closer to the action but was still with Swenson, keeping an eye on the front of the store. “Okay, so why didn’t you just take some pictures of us and scram to get them published?

Why follow us and then try to break in here on top of it?” I asked him. Gilbert licked his lips but looked a little confused. “Because I wouldn’t score the bounty that way?”

“Bounty?

What bounty?”

He reached inside his rumpled suit jacket, prompting a warning growl from Icky. “I’m just getting my phone!” he said, before reaching into a pocket, extracting a cell phone, and tapping at it. He kept shooting nervous glances at Icky, obviously fat-fingering a few presses and cursing as he did. He finally turned the phone around so I could see the screen. “Bounty. Yeah. All the papara—uh, photo documentary journalist message boards and apps are absolutely cooking with cash offers to find out where you are, who your family is, stuff like that. Only thing I know is that it’s not from an American source—” He glanced around, then added,

“Might not even be a human source, now that I think about it.”

“How much?” I asked him. “Yes, how much?

This might affect my rate today,” Swenson asked with a mischievous grin. “Sorry, this might give my reputation even more zest, if you will.”

“A half-million,” Gilbert replied. “A half-million. For pictures. Of us.”

Funboy sniffed. “I’m somewhat insulted. That seems rather low, especially given my recent upgraded wardrobe.”

“Not just pics,” Gilbert said, shaking his head. “The full bounty is for pictures—or video—of you buying stuff. Selling stuff. Doing, I don’t know, business things. And if we can get hard data about the transactions, like dollar values, quantities, that sort of thing, then it goes to a million.”

“Boss, I think we’ve got a hit out on us—sort of,” Netty-P said. “But not a kill order. This is an economic hit. It must be another tactic by those awful people you told me about, the one from that cookie place, and that woman Torina keeps calling that political bitch,” Gabby said. I couldn’t help smiling. The cookie place obviously referred to the fossilized cookie we’d found on the derelict ship, from Belgium. “Manon Clemenceau and Constance Plowitz. Yeah, that’s a pretty good bet.”

I exhaled a slow breath, staring at Gilbert as I did. A nefarious plot quickly came together in my mind, a plan so cunning you could, in the words of a great philosopher, put a tail on it and call it weasel. I must have smiled in a sly way that made Gilbert wince. “What—what are you smiling for?”

“We’re not going to give you what you need”—Gilbert’s face fell a little but brightened when I went on—“today. But I believe in helping people, and taking money from our enemies is very much a positive. So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to let us finish up here with our fine tailor, and then you’re going to take a little ride with us.”

“A ride?

Wait. You don’t mean one of those rides where—” He finished on a taut expression of dread and a hard swallow. Funboy blinked at him. “Yes, Gilbert, we are taking you to go live on a farm, where you can run and be free and—”

Torina cleared her throat. “Technically, Van does own a farm, so that example might not work.”

I shook my head. “No, Gilbert, today is your lucky day. You’re going to Washington, DC.”

WE MADE a brief stop at Pony Hollow to check in with Miryam to ask her to do a favor for us. We found her comfortably ensconced on the farm, with another week of protection on the place from the exclusion zone established by our mysterious friend at the Pentagon. She hadn’t heard anything yet about it being extended but was philosophical about it. “I get to spend my days drinking tea and lemonade, lounging about the house, keeping in touch with my work online, and reading, lots and lots of reading—” She smiled and shrugged. “Strangely enough, it’s very soothing. I think I’m becoming an introvert in my old age.”

I glanced at a book open on the kitchen table, something about renegades among the stars. I laughed. “I didn’t know you were into this sort of stuff, Miryam. I figured you for… weightier stories. Faulkner, Joyce, Hemingway, that sort of thing.” I looked up at her. “That’s what you have on your shelves at home.”

“Bah. That’s just for show.” She tapped the book, which featured an improbable picture of a bulky, armored figure against the background of a spaceship, with streaks and flares of exhausts all around. I rolled my eyes at that. “I’ve done that stuff for real. Trust me, it’s nowhere near that dramatic.”

Miryam looked at Gilbert, who was standing out in the yard behind the house under the watchful gaze of Torina and Icky. “Who’s your friend?”

“A photo documentary journalist.”

“Oh, paparazzi.”

I laughed and filled her in, then went on. “Anyway, I have a request, Miryam. I need a warehouse in the DC area.”

“I… don’t have a warehouse in the DC area, Van, sorry.”

“No, but if anyone could track one down quickly, it would be you.”

She shrugged. “I know people. When do you want it?

How much space?

Do you just need truck access, or—”

“Just a warehouse, for a few hours, as soon as possible.” I lowered my voice. “We’re putting on a little show.”

“Keep your secrets, then. Alright, I’ll make a few calls.”

“Great. We’re going to head to DC via the Fafnir, so let us know as soon as you have something for us.”

“Will do.”

I leaned down and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, my dear.” Then I headed back outside. “Okay, everyone else, we’re heading back up to the Fafnir.”

Torina frowned. “Why?”

“Because we need some props.”

I got questioning looks, but it was Gilbert who spoke up. “Where’s this Fafnir place?”

Funboy and Icky both pointed up. Gilbert shook his head. “I don’t get it…” His voice trailed off, though, then he blinked. “Wait—up there?

In space?”

Icky shrugged. “Just orbit, so—eh, barely.”

“But— wait!”

I took Gilbert by the arm and led him back toward the Frankie. “C’mon, flyboy. Let’s see if you’ve got the right stuff.”

I WAS ready for Gilbert to be a panicky mess, but he was just the opposite—

sitting quietly transfixed as the Frankie climbed out of the atmosphere. We docked with the Fafnir, to find that Rab had already gathered most of what I’d asked him to. “Here you go, Van,” he said. “This is every crate and container I could find, empty or otherwise, that didn’t contain things that could be considered dangerous or too valuable.”

Perry stared at Gilbert. “Who’s this guy?”

Gilbert blinked at him. “You’re a bird.”

Perry stared, then looked wildly from one wing to the other. “Holy shit!

When did that happen?

You lied to me, Van. You said I’d become my true self, and I took the courses and went to the seance, and you cashed the check too, and—”

“He’s a photo documentary journalist,” Torina said. “Oh, the paparazzi. Hey, you ever meet Ryan Reynolds?

He was awesome in Deadpool. I’d love to meet that guy.”

“You’re… a talking mechanical bird from another world. Why don’t you just ask?” Gilbert replied. “I—huh. You know what, that’s a good point. Hey, Netty-P, can you look up Ryan Reynolds’s publicist—?”

I raised a finger. “Excuse me, bird, but schmoozing with celebs can wait. Let’s get this stuff into the Frankie. Now, we just need Miryam—”

“Call coming in from her right now, Van,” Netty-P said. “Perfect.” I smiled at Gilbert. “You’re about to see a plan work out. It’s rare, so enjoy it. I know I will.”

MIRYAM FOUND us a warehouse in an industrial park just north of Dulles International Airport. It wasn’t much, just a drab, prefab thing utterly indistinguishable from dozens around it. But it was perfect for what we planned. We landed the Frankie just outside it, and then, while Icky, Gabby, Torina, and I proceeded to schlep the packing crates liberated from the Fafnir into the warehouse, I turned Gilbert loose with his camera. At the same time, Funboy, Paxomar, and Netty-P had set up a variety of small surveillance devices inside and around the building to capture a complete record of what went on. By then, Gilbert had definitely warmed to the plan. True to form, he didn’t care that the photos were staged or part of some scheme—he just wanted his payout. And we were going to make sure he got it. It would be half a million, or even a million dollars Clemenceau and company wouldn’t have available for other malfeasance. Moreover, it would undermine their own scheming, which made it worthwhile just based on that. “I hope no one gets pictures of us unloading these crates of… of… ”

Icky said loudly, then lowered her voice. “What the hell are we supposedly unloading here, anyway?”

I shrugged at her as I manhandled a case of—I glanced at it—

emergency rations. “It doesn’t matter, Icky. Gilbert’s just taking still photos

—isn’t that right, Gilbert?”

He waved. “You said no video, no sound, so that’s what I’m doing. If I want that full million, though, I need some hard evidence about what you’re offloading here, remember.”

I frowned and looked at the various crates. One of them caught my eye, labeled Spacers, Warheads, Type Five, Quantity Fifty. I didn’t recognize it. “What the hell is this?”

Icky smirked and opened up the crate. It contained a half dozen wheels of cheese, each encased in red wax. “It’s my secret stash.” She glanced around conspiratorially. “Don’t let sourpuss see it,” she added, closing the case again. “What’s this about warhead spacers?”

She shrugged. “Beats me. I grabbed this crate from a pile last time we were on Spindrift.”

“Whatever. Here you go, Gilbert. Warhead spacers. It sounds suitably ominous.”

He lifted his digital camera, a slick bit of photographic tech, and took a picture. He did it from a distance, though, and slightly off-kilter, so the picture would look candid, as though photographed from concealment. He finally nodded. “I think that’s enough. This is—I just gotta say thanks, Van. Can I call you Van?”

“Well, my friends call me Van. But I guess you can, too.”

He smiled. “I’d say ouch, sick burn, bruh, but I’m more than a little used to being treated like something stuck to your shoe.”

We went ahead and reversed the process, loading everything back into the Frankie. As we did, I pulled Gilbert aside. “There’s one condition. You do not release those photos to anyone until Miryam tells you to. Got it?”

“But—”

“No buts, Gilbert. This is non-negotiable. If you do, there will be consequences.”

Funboy stepped up, holding out a dataslate with a photograph on the display. It was—

I pulled a disgusted sneer. “Wait, is that the dead possum we saw floating in that quarry down in Louisiana?”

“It is. I intend it as a warning to Gilbert here should he fail to heed your admonition. He will go on vacation—and he won’t come back.”

I think Funboy intended it to be all menacing, but Gilbert just looked confused. “I don’t get it. What does a dead possum in a lake have to do with going on vacation?”

“I’ll tell you the story someday,” I said to him, then turned to Funboy. “Why the hell do you have a picture of that?”

Funboy gave a slow shrug. “I thought it may come in handy. And now it has. Isn’t that right, Gilbert?”

“Uh—yeah. Absolutely. Wait for your friend Miryam to tell me I can release those photos. Got it.”

Funboy gave me a distinctly triumphant look. “And it worked, didn’t it?”

I sighed. “Yes, Funboy, your picture of a dead possum worked. Well done.”

19

OUR NEXT ORDER of business was decidedly more pleasant. We spent another day at the farm with Miryam, then got a call from Swenson that the garments we’d ordered were ready. Since we were the reason for his new found fame and fortune, he’d moved us to the top of his work list. We picked them up from him, then departed Earth and rendezvoused with the Fafnir. From here, our destination was Helso. I did a quick check-in with my mother, who was still watching over Earth, but she’d gone off on business so I spoke to her Executive Officer. She assured me all was well regarding Earth, and that there’d been no serious attempts by ships to arrive or leave. Now all we had to do was rendezvous with Urnak. The last time we’d meant to do this, he’d managed to get himself badly injured in a deal for spaceship parts gone wrong. Icky, therefore, made it clear to him that he was to bring his ship, the Nemesis, to Helso directly, with no stops or side trips on the way. However, he countered that he had a side trip he had to make. “I have to return to our homeworld—”

“Dad, no, you come straight to Helso—!” Icky started, but Urnak cut her off. “First of all, young Icrul, you do not speak to me that way.”

Icky, who’d done the call with Urnak in the cockpit as we made our own way to Helso, immediately subsided. Perry snickered. “She got in trouble from her dad.”

“Shut up, you clockwork buzzard!” she hissed. I looked pointedly at Perry and put a shushing finger to my lips. Urnak went on. “Second, I have to pick up the soustankin I had specially commissioned for your nuptials,” he said. Icky blinked at him. Paxomar, looking over her shoulder from the back of the cockpit, gasped a little. “Dad, we’re not doing the whole soustalkiso!

We talked about this!

I don’t want a huge ceremony, which is why we’re having it on Helso in the first place!” She sagged a little. “I wasn’t… the most popular kid around, remember?

Even if I invite all of my friends—”

She paused and glanced around. “Actually, I am inviting every single one of my friends. They’re all here, listening in, in fact,” she said, sweeping an arm in a gesture that almost backhanded Funboy. She gave him a sheepish look. “Oops. Sorry, grumpy.”

He gave her a trademark slow blink. “Quite alright. Although I’d be much more worried about whatever that is you have smeared on the back of your hand than the actual impact—” He frowned. “What is that on the back of your hand, anyway?”

She looked at it. “Sauce. I had some of those Earth noodles, ramen.”

She licked the back of her hand, then nodded. “Yup, that’s it.”

“Oh dear.”

Perry looked up at Paxomar. “You really must love her. A lot.”

He grinned back. “Yup. In fact, I’ll probably lick it off—”

“That’s enough, you randy barbarian.”

Urnak laughed. “We are doing the soustalkiso.”

“But that has to be done on our homeworld to count as a legal nuptial!”

“I know. And no, I don’t expect you to change your plans and have the ceremony there. Instead, I’m bringing our homeland to you,” Urnak replied, his eyes shining. “I… don’t get it.”

“Well, thanks to Toxon’s nonsense, trying to get us charged with violating some decrepit old laws, the Administer of Justice came under some severe fire in the public media when it all came out. It turns out if you dig deep enough, about ninety percent of Wu’tzur are guilty of some stupid archaic law or other.”

“Like the one that says you can’t throw stones into any legally designated maritime Wu’tzur harbor so it doesn’t get filled up?” Perry

asked. “Because, as you know, that’s a serious risk. Remember that the next time you see kids skipping stones across the water. Little terrorists, that’s what they are.”

Urnak laughed. “That’s right. There’s a multitude of idiotic old laws like that—and now, of course, anyone with a score to settle with someone else is blowing off the dust and diving into them, looking for ways of getting back at people they don’t like. There was a nearly three hundred percent increase in Writs of Complaint in just two standard months.”

Icky gave a bemused shrug. “Okay, but I still don’t see what this—”

“The Administer of Justice contacted me and offered to apologize formally in the media, in exchange for me formally accepting it and telling everyone to knock off the bullshit so the laws could get properly updated. I managed to wring another concession out of him, though.” Urnak’s smile turned triumphant. “I got the Nemesis legally declared part of the Wu’tzur homeworld for the purpose of the soustalkiso. So, you can have that beautiful, formal nuptial I know you always wanted. You can do the First Bonding, the soustalkiso itself, aboard the Nemesis. And then you can do the Second Bonding, the Affirmation, down on Helso.”

Icky just stared for a moment, wide-eyed. And then she burst into tears. “Oh—Dad—I—” She shook her head, wracked with a sob or two, then leaned forward and pressed her head to the display. “I love you, Da. Thank you,” she whispered, tears dripping onto the console. Urnak swallowed. A couple of times. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “Stop that, baby girl. You’re going to short out Van’s ship.”

I was a touch emotional myself, and Torina smiled through tears of her own. Gabby grabbed Paxomar and pulled both him and Icky into a hug. Rab looked on with a fond, warm smile and nodded. Perry bobbed his head in approval. Netty-P reached out a manipulator and touched it to Icky’s hand, which closed around it. Funboy blinked around at the sudden swell of emotion in the cockpit. “This is a most remarkable reaction to a politically motivated administrative action to temporarily extend legal jurisdiction to a spacecraft—“

Gabby released Icky, and Pax wrapped her pudgy arms around him and whispered to him. He listened, then nodded. “Ah, I see. Well, then.” He tapped Icky’s arm, and she looked at him. “Rest assured that I, too, am awash with emotion regarding this moment.”

Icky stared, then laughed. She laughed loud and long, and we all joined in. Things were good. THE SOUSTANKIN, it turned out, was a fundamental part of the soustalkiso, the formal Wu’tzur marriage ceremony. It was a small fiber mat woven from a particular type of reedy Wu’tzur plant associated with good health and fortune. It was customary for the father of the bride to present it, whereupon the bride and groom would dip their hands into bright red ink and put their handprints onto it, each of the bride’s overlapping one of each of the groom’s. Even the ink was special, made from the Sunfire Tree, another native Wu’tzur plant that blooms for an hour or so only at sunrise. In that way, the soustankin kind of filled the role of both wedding rings and marriage license. Which all spoke to a rich and complex culture that I realized I knew very little about. For that matter, I really knew little about P’nosk or the Surtsi, about the significance of the small pouch Gabby habitually carried with her, or really anything about the culture of the Fren-Okun, the Gajur, the Nesit—hell, I’d only scratched the surface of Helso culture, and it was predominantly a human one. There was far more depth, texture, and complexity to the beliefs, practices, ceremonies, and superstitions of all of these disparate races than one person could possibly absorb, even in a lifetime. But realizing that also made me realize that I’d fallen into the lazy habit of mentally stereotyping these people. Fren-Okun were conniving, Yonnox were shady, Eniped were clever, Surtsi were dour—but the key was that they were people, and people were complicated. I resolved to start getting to know all of these cultures better, scratching down past the surface to learn more about the social forces that shaped the people and, in a large part, made them what they were. All of which passed through my mind as I prepared myself for the soustalkiso aboard the Nemesis. Torina had insisted I wear my full Peacemaker dress uniform to the First Ceremony, which I hated doing because it combined the relaxed fit of a straitjacket with a high collar I

swore was made from a piece of plasma conduit. But as I checked myself out in the mirror in my cabin on the Fafnir, I had to admit it looked pretty good. It gave me a chance to show off the various bells and whistles and bits of filigree that denoted my rank and my achievements in the Guild, which was nice for the occasional ego boost. Emphasis on occasional. For the Second Ceremony, the so-called Affirmation—which was more like a wedding reception and much more informal, but still part of the process—I’d change into my new tux purchased from Swenson in Cedar Rapids. The one benefit to wearing my dress uniform was that the tux would seem like loungewear in comparison. When I emerged from my cabin, it was to find all of my crew in states of formal wear. It was quite an amazing sight. The only one missing was Icky, who’d crossed to the Nemesis earlier to get dressed there. She’d apparently heard about the Earthly superstition of it being bad luck for a groom to see the bride in her full resplendence before seeing her at the altar, and decided she loved it. “Okay, everyone, we set?” I asked. I got affirmations all around. We’d grounded the Fafnir, so those of us who were attending the First Bonding aboard the Nemesis would take the Frankie up to her. The First Bonding only involved nine people, by custom, so the rest of the crew would chill on the Milon’s estate in the meantime, waiting for the following event, the Second Bonding. Urnak, also dressed in Wu’tzur formal wear, greeted us at the airlock. He crossed his arms and looked officious. “This is Wu’tzur home territory. Can I see your passports, please?” he growled, then broke into a broad grin. “Just kidding, come on in, folks, and follow me to the venue!”

I smiled at Urnak as we walked. “Tell me, does that Wu’tzur version of a tuxedo you’re wearing feel as uncomfortable as it looks?”

“It feels about as comfortable as your uniform looks,” he shot back. “That bad, huh?”

“Yup.”

He led us to the Nemesis’ s cavernous cargo bay. Only nine of us would be present for this, the First Affirmation, as witnesses. Nine was a culturally significant number to the Wu’tzur, with the particular individuals present being chosen by the happy couple. Today, that would be me, Torina, Perry, Funboy, Gabby, Paxomar’s mother—his father had died several years ago—

Urnak, and Icky and Paxomar themselves. We gathered amid the stark,

metallic venue, which still held pools of gloom in the corners despite the lights being powered up to full. Icky, though, had insisted on it. “I grew up aboard the ship. Hell, I practically rebuilt that cargo hold all on my own. It’s as much a part of me as the Fafnir is, so damned right it’s where I wanna get hitched,” she’d said. For my part, though, it was the perfect venue. Now, we all assembled and waited for her. Gabby arrived in a cloud of excited chatter. “Oh, she’s so beautiful!

I did her hair myself, it was my gift to her and Urnak, I really went all out, Ralston would be—well, I’d say proud, but he’s a jerk so he’d have tried to take credit for it, but still—”

A gong sounded, struck by Paxomar’s mother. There was no minister or priest or anything equivalent present to officiate. Apparently, the Wu’tzur bride and groom undertaking the requisite ceremonial tasks in the presence of their families was sufficient. Urnak would be the so-called presiding witness, but that was more of a master-of-ceremonies than anything else. We waited a moment, and then Icky appeared, entering the hold with Urnak at her side. She was—

Perry said it best. “Wow, she’s actually beautiful. And so not the Icky I’ve come to know and tolerate, but still beautiful!”

He was right. Clad in a Grecian-esque tunic of snow white bordered and piped in blue that complemented her fur perfectly, she glided toward us, a tightly nervous smile on her face. Gabby had indeed done her hair, as in all of it—small pieces of silver and crystal jewelry had been plaited into braids on her head, arms, and legs, and it jingled and glittered as she walked. She radiated a feminine charm that, yes, did seem out of place in comparison to the Icky we all knew. But it also didn’t. Again, people are complicated. It certainly charmed me that the Wu’tzur I’d seen covered in grease, arms deep in damaged systems or working on replacing bulky ship components, could take on such a sweet radiance that it left everyone beaming at her. But none harder than Paxomar. He beamed so hard I thought he might sprain something. When Icky reached the—I’d say altar, except there wasn’t one, just a table with the soustankin and two bowls of Sunfire Tree ink—she stopped, then Paxomar impulsively flung his arms around her. “This comes later, you big jerk,” she hissed, and we all laughed. He pulled back. “I’m sorry, Icky, but you’re just so—not you, except you are.”

Awkward phrasing, but he’s not wrong, Perry noted. Urnak stepped forward. “Friends, loved ones, we are here today to all witness the soustalkiso that will bond my daughter, Icrul ap Kisni ap Fafnir ap Saes, to her betrothed, Paxomar ap Saes. I will now ask each of the Celebrants to state their Oaths.”

Paxomar stepped forward, looking nervous, then launched into his Oaths, the Wu’tzur equivalent of vows. They were unsurprisingly short, economical, and to the point. Essentially, they were variations on the whole love and cherish and good times and bad, but with a lot more fur and twice as many arms. Paxomar inhaled, narrowed his eyes, then spoke in a rich, resonant tone. “Icrul, I am yours to bear, yours to celebrate, and yours to keep. I gift this to you willingly, and with the fullness of my hearts. As ever we are now, we will be. With this oath, I cease to be free. I am, instead, freed to be yours. Would that you keep me for all my time, as I keep you, and lift you for all the beats of my hearts.”

True to my recent decision to learn more about all the many cultures I encountered, I’d started with marriage ceremonies and was struck by that commonality. Although the details, procedures, rituals, and ceremonies varied hugely from species to species, they all boiled down to that basic message—we’re in this together for the long haul. More interesting to me was the fact that most species recognized the concept of long-term, monogamous relationships. Most, but not all—apparently those Fren-Okun could get pretty wild. When Paxomar was done, Icky stepped forward. She looked even more nervous than Paxomar had, but before she launched into her prepared words, she hesitated, and then looked around until her eyes settled on… me. “Uh, before I do this—Van, can you come up here?”

I stared, looked around, caught Torina’s eye beside me, but she just shrugged. I gave a wary look, then stood and walked up toward Icky. As I did, she looked past me. “Bird, you too.”

“Uh-oh,” Perry said for my benefit, but he sailed into my field of view as I stopped, then he landed on the table with a soft clatter of talons. Icky kept looking past me. “I’d actually ask the whole crew of the Fafnir to come up here, but, honestly, they’re all with me wherever I go. Even Rolis and—” She swallowed. “Zenophir. But I wanted to have you two up here when I do this.”

She looked at me. “Van, it’s because of you that I am who I am today. And for that, I want to thank you, and have you at my side while I do this. And—” She turned to Perry. “Bird, I know that you and I… strike sparks off each other sometimes, but I’m glad you’re part of all this. Part of why I’m here today.”

“I will never let you forget you said that,” Perry said. Icky smiled. “I know. Consider it my marriage gift to you.”

Perry bowed his head. “And this is mine to you, Icky—I will never bring up what you just said to me. You know, about you being glad I’m around. That thing you just said. Out loud, in front of all these people. I’ll never bring it up again—”

I pinched Perry’s beak closed. Icky grinned at us but got serious, her gaze dissolving into a moment of wonder. It was almost voyeuristic to see her in that moment, her mind racing through thoughts and years as she envisioned the time ahead with her mate. She inhaled, her great chest expanding, the breath then leaving in a hiss. The wind went still, and so did we. “Paxomar, I am yours to, uh, bear, yours to celebrate, yours to keep. I gift this to you willingly, with the fullness of my hearts. Ever as we are now, we will be. And with this oath, I—I cease to be free. I am instead freed to be yours. Would that you keep me for all my time and yours, as I keep you and lift you for all the beats of my hearts.” She finished with a little sound

—of relief, that she’d spoken the words truly and well. After a moment, they both proceeded to dip their hands in the bowls of Sunfire Tree ink, then imprint them on the soustankin—Paxomar made one handprint, then Icky did hers touching it, and they did that three more times. When they were done, Urnak raised his hands. “The Oaths are made and embodied in the soustankin. The soustalkiso is fulfilled. Let none stand between Icrul ap Paxomar ap Kisni ap Fafnir ap Saes and Paxomar ap Icrul ap Saes. Let them face and overcome all trials together and enjoy the fruits of their labors as one.” He gave a sidelong glance. “And a few grandchildren would be nice.”

Icky scowled at him, while everyone else laughed again. She then flung her arms around Paxomar, and they hugged tightly, while everyone looked

on, smiling and nodding. Gabby turned to Funboy. “What do you think?

Will that be us up there someday?”

“It is unlikely. Neither of us are Wu’tzur. Our hypothetical marriage would be done according to different customs, in a different place—”

“I know that, Funboy, yes, I just—” Gabby stared, then chuckled. “Oh, never mind.”

Perry just shook his head. “Funboy gotta Funboy.”

20

WE ALL RETURNED to Helso for the Second Bonding, the Affirmation. This was much more like a wedding reception, a party, which the Milons graciously hosted on their estate. There was a bit of ceremony, though, the wrinkle being that until their Bond was Affirmed, the marriage could technically be nullified by either party. Apparently, old Wu’tzur custom was to have the First and Second Bondings happen days, even weeks and sometimes even months apart. This gave the newlyweds a chance to try one another out, as it were, in a sort of trial marriage. If it turned out it wasn’t working for them, then they could just declare they weren’t going to Affirm their Bond and that was it, the marriage went poof. It was a very practical arrangement, rooted in the days of ancient Wu’tzur clan customs, when alliances, loyalties, and fortunes could shift with a bad harvest or a natural disaster. In modern times, though, the two Bondings had come to be more or less run together. Moreover, the Second Bonding had become a chance for a much larger group to celebrate the marriage. The Affirmation was, therefore, really just a formality taken care of before the feast. And this time, it would be Master Cataric doing the honors. There were now twenty or so of us seated on tables on the expansive terrace of the Milon’s house, overlooking the rolling fields and forests now lit brown-gray by the pinkish light of one of Helso’s moons. Cataric stood and everyone fell silent. Cataric looked around with a beatific smile. “Friends, we are here this night for Icrul ap Paxomar ap Kisni ap Fafnir ap Saes and Paxomar ap Icrul ap Saes, because they have been here for us. They continue to be better people than many planets deserve, and we celebrate this here and now, beneath the skies of a place they can always call home. But no matter where they go, Icrul and Paxomar will be welcome. Now, let us cheer their new beginning. To the happy couple!”

We all cheered and drummed on the tables. Icky moved to grab Paxomar, but he surprised us by preempting her, grabbing her, and kissing her passionately. Funboy sighed. “That is one display of affection I will never get used to. I mean, deliberately placing ones mouth onto—portions of it even in—

another’s—”

Rab cut him off. “Tonight’s a night for love, Funboy, in all of its forms,”

he said, then let out a loud whistle and applauded. Funboy stared, then shrugged and raised his glass. “Hear!

hear!”

They held the kiss until Paxomar broke it off. “I guess daddy’s home,”

Perry said. Torina nodded. “It’s always the quiet ones that surprise you by being so spicy.”

At that moment, a bright flash erupted above, followed by a shower of incandescent streaks that starburst through the upper atmosphere. I tensed, but Netty-P—resplendent in the tuxedo Swenson had made for her—put a manipulator on my arm. “Relax, Van. Urnak had the Nemesis ready to fire a missile he rigged with a pyrotechnic warhead—which Torina’s father approved on behalf of Helso. For once, an explosion doesn’t mean we’re under attack.”

Everyone stared up as the glittering display flared and faded. And then, the important business of partying began. Cataric appeared beside me on the terrace. “So, Van, how long do you plan to stay on Helso?”

“Two days. One for them to—” I glanced at him and smiled, and he just smiled back. “And a second for them to recover. Although I suspect it will be Paxomar who’ll have to do most of the recovering.”

“Ah, very good. Why don’t you come by and see me tomorrow afternoon?

We haven’t had a chance to spar for some time.”

I nodded. “I’d like that, yeah. Not too early, though. I plan to cut loose tonight, at least a little.”

Cataric grinned, clapped me on the shoulder, and moved on. So did the party, which lasted well into the wee hours. Yes, I got a little drunk, I danced, and I had a damned good time with Torina and the others. And why not. We’d all earned it. I DODGED LEFT, striking out to my right, starting low, but changing the trajectory of my knife to an upward one. I was hoping to catch my opponent off-guard, but this was Cataric. His hand was already in position, slapping mine aside and sending my blow wide. His own blade slid gently across my gut. I immediately straightened, then dropped my knife into the sand of the dojo floor, and I went to my knees with it. He acknowledged my submission with a broad grin. “That’s the trouble with alcohol, Van. It makes you think you’re better and faster than you are.”

“I barely got drunk, though,” I said, levering myself back to my feet. “Or at least I don’t remember getting very drunk.”

He laughed. “So you don’t remember standing on the table and singing a rousing chorus of something you call a sea shanty?

And a shockingly profane one at that, as I recall.”

“Oh, crap—I didn’t sing The North Atlantic Squadron again, did I?”

“See, you don’t remember,” he said, then his eyes glittered at me. “And no, you didn’t sing that, or anything else. But you weren’t sure, were you?”

I grinned. “No, I wasn’t. I mean—yeah, I kind of cut loose last night, but it’s been a while since I’ve been able to. Since any of us have been able to.”

I followed to the edge of the dojo, my bare feet swishing through the sand. I had cut loose, and I did have a bit of a headache and that dragging, disconnected feeling that comes with a hangover. It was far from the worst I’d felt after a night of partying, though, and I’d been reasonably sure I hadn’t drank to the point of losing time. But it had felt good, damned good, to let my proverbial hair down in a place I considered safe while among friends. “And now it’s back to the grind of saving the universe from itself,”

Cataric said, as though just carrying on from my own thoughts. He tossed me a clean, white towel to wipe away the sweat, which I did, before returning the Innsu practice knife to its rack. “Yeah, it never ends.”

Cataric—said nothing. He just watched me. I frowned back at him sidelong. “What?

Have I got something on me?” I asked, making a show of looking down at myself. “Yes. A heavy weight.”

I shrugged. “Oh, that. Yeah, I think it’s melded right into me, by this point.” I gave him a narrowed-eyed look. “So who was it?”

“Who was what?”

“The one who told you to talk to me, to get me to bare my soul and all that. Was it Torina?

Perry?”

“Actually, Van, it was none of them. Believe it or not, I’m quite capable of attempting to be a good friend unprompted—”

“Oh, hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

Cataric waved a hand while wiping his own face and smiling at me. “Don’t worry about it, Van, really. I’m just… concerned. I could have seen that burdensome weight that’s become part of you even if you’d said nothing about it.”

“That obvious, huh?”

“It is. And it’s not just last night’s festivities that are slowing you down, Van. It’s that very same weight. And you say it’s melded into you, but I don’t think it has. And that’s the problem. Until it does, or until you shed it, it’s going to keep bearing you down.”

I tossed the towel into a bin for the used ones. “Okay, now I’m curious. What does this weight look like to an outsider, someone who’s not me?”

Cataric sat on a bench. I sat beside him. He just stared into the center of the dojo for a moment, at the sand that had been disturbed by our feet. Custom held that the loser of a bout would rake the sand smooth again, leaving a Zen sand garden-like pattern that would only last until the next bout. It was meant to be symbolic of how a victory was a fleeting thing, and that impermanence was the ultimate truth. “Van, when you first came to me, you were new, untried, unsure of yourself, but certain of the things you wished to accomplish. In other words,

you were young.”

I smirked at him. “And now I’m old?”

“No, but you are not young. Oh, yes, by the calendar you are—and you’re certainly remaining that way, thanks to the way you flit among the stars. But in yourself, in the way you view the world around you, you are not young anymore. You are mature.”

“Is that a nice way of saying jaded and cynical?”

He turned to me. “You tell me, Van. Is it?”

I sighed. “Yeah, in a way it is, I guess.” I waved a hand at the dojo. “I fight and fight, and sometimes I draw my patterns in the sand, but then the next fight wipes them away and it just starts all over again. Nothing seems to ever get any better.”

“I suspect there are more than a few people who would disagree with that. You know, the ones whose lives you saved?

The ones you rescued from the most evil forms of bondage and servitude?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So, even if I can accept that fatigue and frustration are part of that weight, what is the rest?

Because much of it seems to me to be… something else. Something that has been growing as you have. You now stand here as someone of much more substance than you once were. Someone whose decisions themselves weigh heavily on the fates of many others—”

“See, that’s it, right there. Every time I turn around, it seems the choices I make have bigger and bigger consequences, for more and more people. It’s getting—”

“Ah, now I think we start to get to the heart of things. Perhaps the next question I should ask you then is, what comes next?

Do you embrace those bigger, more consequential choices, or do you put them aside?

Is achieving justice an end for you?

Because you’ve done that, many times. And you may do it many more. Or is it really just a beginning?”

“You sure no one put you up to this?

Torina?

Her parents?

Someone from the GKU?”

“Now why would they do that?”

“Because they all want the same thing. They want me to become a Master of the Guild. They want me to embrace, as you put it, even more responsibility. To become accountable for more lives, for more choices that will affect them.” I shook my head. “I choose not to—at this point.”

“Then you’ve made your decision. That weight should be lifted. But it’s not. Why?”

I gave him a sidelong glance again. “You have a really annoying way of getting right to the heart of things.”

“I’m sorry?”

I chuckled, but it didn’t last. “Don’t be. This is a conversation I’ve had many times, but only with myself. It’s probably about time I had it with someone else.” I rubbed my eyes. “My grandfather had a chance to become a Master, and he turned it down. Oh, I’ve heard different reasons why, but ultimately, I know why. He didn’t want to be chained to a desk, to all those responsibilities. He wanted to be out there, running down bad guys.” I sighed. “And I think he felt unworthy of the job. I think he believed he’d failed as a Peacemaker, in some profound way.”

I looked at Cataric. “I grew up respecting—no. Hell, I grew up idolizing Gramps. Even more than my father. It’s really, really hard to think that he might have been wrong.”

“So by becoming a Master, you call his decision not to into question?

You lessen him and his choices?”

I sniffed. “Yeah, like I said, right to the heart of the matter.”

“Van, if I choose to retire and close this dojo tomorrow, and you choose to keep practicing Innsu, does that call my decision into question?”

“No, but you’re not my grandfather.”

“So?”

“It just seems—” I sighed again. “It seems disrespectful to him.”

“Why?”

“Because—” I stopped with my mouth hanging open. Cataric leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Van, you’re right when you say I’m not your grandfather. But you are not your grandfather, either. His decisions were his, right or wrong by whatever standard you would judge that. And your decisions are yours.”

“I’m getting the sense that you think I should take the job, become a Master.”

Cataric smiled. “No, I’m not saying that. It is a world so far removed from my own that it would be presumptuous of me to offer an opinion about that. What I am saying is that, whatever you decide, you need to be sure that you’re making that choice for reasons that are right for you—not for your grandfather, or me, or anyone else.”

I just stared back into that point. It was, I had to admit, a damned good one. How much of me not wanting to become a Master really was about just not wanting the headaches that came with the job—and how much was me being afraid that if I did, I’d somehow be lessening or undermining the choice Gramps made?

I puffed out a sigh. “I don’t know. Maybe I have been approaching this the wrong way. Maybe I need to dig a little deeper and remove Gramps from the whole equation. Besides, if it does take me out of the field, it might take my crew out of the field, too. We’ve all been doing this for so long now—”

I sat back and rested my head on the wall. “We’re like a flock of migratory birds. We all start in the same place, with the same goal. But the odds are against all of us landing together, unscathed. Sane. Free of losses. Especially since the destination never seems to get any closer.”

“If I have gotten you to look at this big decision of yours from a new direction, then I am content. And, while I stand by my words that I won’t presume to tell you what I think you should do, I think you would make an excellent Master, Van—should that be your choice.” He stood. “So what will you do next?”

I stood with him. “One last WaterSail to install, to see if we can draw out the bad guys. And then it’s back to Earth for a little pest control. I’ve been too soft in my approach with these people. As I’ve said before, we’re going on the offensive.”

Cataric nodded while I retrieved my socks and shoes to make the trek back up to the Milon estate at the top of the hill. I waved to Cataric and turned, looking forward to a shower, and then another full day and a half of rest. I could use it. That vague hungover feeling was still stuck to me like a layer of sweat. “Oh, Van?”

I turned back. “I particularly enjoyed the verse about the First Mate.”

I blinked at him, totally blank for a moment. Then I remembered mentioning that bawdy old song, The North Atlantic Squadron—

“Wait, what?

What verse?

Cataric—!”

He just smiled over his shoulder and walked away. 21

WE PUTTERED around Helso for another two days, taking it easy and doing a bit of unwinding—or as much unwinding as we could do. We all knew that we’d be boarding the Fafnir again soon to fly off into whatever came next. For now, though, we just lazed around and relaxed. Most of us did, anyway. Icky and Paxomar were conspicuous by their absence. And when their names came up, everyone just adopted a knowing smile. At dinner the next day, a more intimate affair hosted by Torina’s parents for them and the crew only, the newlyweds finally put in an appearance. Icky was now considerably less radiant, with most of the braids in her fur gone and only a few hanging in there, though they were more knotted tufts now. Paxomar looked just as rough around the edges. And they were smiling. A lot. At each other. As we gathered for dinner, Perry took a place on the back of a chair nearby. As Icky and Paxomar passed him, he spoke up. “So, guys, how’s the sex going?”

There was deep, echoing silence, then Torina hissed, “Perry!”

He looked around. “Oh, for—that’s what they’ve been doing, we all know that’s what they’ve been doing—hell, you’ve all been making little sidelong jokes about it all day.”

“Well, sure. But you don’t just ask—”

“It’s been going great!” Icky pronounced. Paxomar looked at her, then nodded and pointed at her with a goofy grin. “What she said.”

Everyone exchanged glances that changed from a little shocked to more amused. Icky just laughed. “Eh, the bird doesn’t bother me. You guys should know by now that I love being offensive. It’s my natural setting.”

Icky put on a scowl. “Wait a minute. How come none of you are arguing with me about what I just said?”

Paxomar took the initiative, grabbing Icky and actually sweeping her up in his arms. “Offensive or not, wife of mine, I don’t care. I’m going to show you my appreciation either way—again.”

“Uh, guys?

Dinner?” I said. Paxomar actually carried Icky away on his shoulder. She peered back at us. “Don’t worry, we’ll be good with leftoverrsss—!”

They turned a corner and vanished. Funboy shook his head as he turned to the dinner table. “As strange as it sounds, I cannot wait to get back to war and danger.”

WHEN WE FINALLY PRIED OURSELVES away from Helso, we set course for our next destination, a WaterSail demonstration. This time, it was well inside known space, in a system about equidistant between Pont Alus Kyr and Tau Ceti. Most traffic passed through nearby systems, so this one wasn’t exactly on the beaten track, but it was just off it enough to be quiet without being isolated. It meant we’d have brought WaterSails to locations on the edge of known space, well outside it, and deep within it. And if that wasn’t enough to provoke any further attacks on us by the Ixtan, their agents, or sympathizers, then it was time to move on to other things. I didn’t actually want to go into the water business in a big way and would have just moved on from it by now had it not been for the attack on Perry at the Starbright orbital at Tau Ceti. Like I told Cataric, we’d be heading back to Earth. I was getting increasingly concerned about the apparently growing interaction between Manon Clemenceau and off-world forces and wanted to put a stop to it before it advanced much further. In the meantime, though, we arrived with our WaterSail in a system known only by a catalog number, with the unofficial name Bypass. That spoke to the way traffic routed around the system, on more efficient twist

routes. The Nesit had established a colony here whose name roughly translated to Optimistic—as in, they were optimistic that a colony could work here in the first place. The only reasonably habitable planet was Mars with more atmosphere. You still needed breathing assistance on the surface, but it was warm enough for water to exist in both liquid and gas states. Optimistic had, to date, relied on literal water sails to capture the stuff, but it was slow and inefficient. Which we noted as we landed the Frankie on the landing pad the Nesit had scoured into the bedrock nearby their colony. Vast sails of tough monomolecular fabric, literally square kilometers of it, had been spread like the sails of some old clipper ship, angled to catch the thin, prevailing winds. They were electrostatically charged to attract and condense water, which trickled down into collector systems to be fed to the colony itself, which was mostly underground. “Yeah, that doesn’t look very efficient at all,” I said, as we stepped out of the Frankie, b-suited up, and helmeted. The huge expanses of fabric rippled slowly in the thin, fitful wind, an admittedly impressive sight. Perry landed nearby. “It’s not. But with the water table too deep to access, and water just too expensive to import from off-world in the quantities they need, it’s actually not a bad solution.”

“The best one they could come up with, anyway,” Torina put in. Icky, Funboy, and Paxomar unloaded the WaterSail just as a small delegation of Nesit emerged from a nearby bunker. Like us, they were suited up. They greeted us with stiff formality, which eased when it became clear we really were here to sell them on the WaterSail and not some surprise Peacemaker mission. Kind of makes you wonder what they were afraid we were going to find, Perry noted. We did our demonstration. I let Gabby do most of the talking since she had an easy, bubbly charm that was quite the weapon of persuasion in our little social arsenal. The WaterSail immediately proved capable of stripping water from the air much more efficiently than their big, flappy fabric versions. In fact, just a half-dozen of the units would produce as much as their millions of square meters of cloth—but, as Torina pointed out, the two weren’t mutually exclusive. “You can keep your sails going as well. You can’t have too much water, after all,” she said. “Tell that to everyone who wasn’t Noah or his family,” Perry muttered, then squawked as I “accidentally” kicked him a little. The Nesit did their best to not be thrilled, but they were. Within an hour, they were talking not just purchases, but actually wanting to buy in to the side hustle in WaterSails I’d been setting up with my Fren shipping company. I stepped aside and looked to Torina for advice on that. She shrugged. “I’d recommend selling no more than ten percent. I don’t think we want them trying to exercise actual control, and a ten percent share really isn’t enough to give them any real say. And as long as they’re making a return on their investment, they should be happy.”

“And we get the extra cash, which we don’t have to source ourselves,” I said, nodding. We returned to the group, and I agreed to the Nesit offer, with the understanding that Torina would draft up an investment agreement and send it along to them. “Well, this has been a very successful business venture overall,” I said, watching the Nesit flutter around the WaterSail, chattering amongst themselves. “We’ve brought water to places that need it, we’ve set up a new and profitable little side gig for ourselves, and we’ve even attracted some investors.”

“I’d call it a win,” Torina said, nodding. “Yeah—except what we didn’t do was lure out Perry’s would-be assassins. And that was, you know, kind of the original point of all this.”

“So you’re upset that we didn’t get attacked?”

“I don’t know if I’d say I’m upset about it.”

“But you’re disappointed that there wasn’t violence and mayhem.”

I gave Torina a wry smile. “Oh, sure, it’s easy to make ambushes and assassination attempts sound bad.” But I shrugged and let my smile fade. “Whatever. I really don’t want to go chasing these particular ghosts any longer—”

“Van, we’ve noticed an anomaly from up here,” Rab put in on the comm. He and Netty-P were aboard the Fafnir, in orbit. I tensed, my hand automatically angling toward The Drop at my side. “What sort of anomaly?”

“There’s another settlement about thirty klicks east and south of your present location, on top of a broad plateau. It’s pretty well camouflaged. We only noticed it because we’re scanning the crap out of the area around you,

keeping an eye out for any would-be attackers. If we hadn’t been, we’d likely have never noticed it.”

“Huh. Okay, thanks, Rab. See what you guys can learn about it from up there and keep us posted. Gabby, a moment, please?”

She disengaged from the Nesit and walked over to me. “What’s up, Van?”

I explained what those in the Fafnir had found. “I need you and your keen powers of knowing what makes people tick to tell me if the Nesit respond truthfully when I ask them about it.”

“It’s kind of hard to tell with these suits and visors and stuff on, but I’ll do my best!”

I nodded, then turned and walked to the Nesit, Gabby in tow, interrupting their fascination with the WaterSail. “Are you sure six units are going to be enough for your purposes?” I asked their leader, who’d introduced himself as the Chief Councilor. “We’ve done the calculations, yes, and that should be sufficient, at least for now.”

“What about that settlement you’ve got about thirty kilometers southeast of here?

Are they set up for water?”

The Chief Councilor stared back at me with a blank expression. “I’m sorry, what settlement?”

“The one—” I turned, looked at the direction data in my heads-up, then pointed. “That way, on top of a plateau.”

“Peacemaker Tudor, I have no idea what you’re talking about. We have two satellite settlements planned but haven’t yet embarked on establishing either. In fact, these WaterSails might be just the thing we need to actually get those initiatives finally underway.”

Gabby spoke over our private comm channel. “He’s telling the truth, Van. Him and the other Nesit really do have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I frowned. “Huh. Well, then, Chief Councilor, it seems you may not be alone here.”

He bristled. “We did all the requisite administration, obtained all the necessary approvals to establish our presence on this planet—”

I raised my hands. “Indeed you did. And because of that, it’s time for me to do my job, on your behalf. We’ve going to go investigate what—and who—it is. And then I’ll make a full report back to you.”

The Nesit hurried off, sounding a security alert while we boarded the Frankie. I decided to shuffle the crew around before we paid the mystery settlement a visit, though. We’d take Gabby and Paxomar back up to the Fafnir and bring Rab back down, along with his big ass gun. I hoped he wouldn’t have to use it, but as the man said—better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it. USING the data collected by the Fafnir, we planned our approach to the settlement. A ravine split the side of the plateau, offering a relatively easy path up from the lowlands below, giving us cover until we reached the top. That let us bring the Frankie in from the south, flying nap-of-the-earth and protecting us from detection by ground-based scanners. We landed at the mouth of the ravine and sent Perry ahead as our airborne eyes. In the meantime, Funboy remained with the Frankie to give us fire support or extract us as needed. The rest of us—me, Torina, Rab, and Icky—started our careful way up the ravine. It proved to be a trickier ascent than I’d expected. The slope was shallow enough, but large boulders had sloughed off the heights, choking the ravine in places. It forced us to pick and clamber our way around and over them as we ascended. Rab took a bit of a tumble off one and would have seriously wrenched his ankle if he hadn’t been wearing a b-suit. We finally reached the top, though, then made our way closer to the settlement, moving from cover to cover. Rab hadn’t been kidding when he’d said the place was well-camouflaged. Even knowing it was there, it was hard to see. Perry, above, likewise had trouble making out its exact size and layout. “It’s small—I think. Half a dozen structures, constructed as bunkers, excavated into the rock. At least, that’s all I can see. Under the ground around it—who knows?” he said. “No signs of any movement?”

“Nada. This place could definitely be abandoned.”

“But we don’t have any record of earlier settlements here?” Torina asked. “We don’t, but that doesn’t mean much. A lot of settlements get established without people bothering with the paperwork—unlike the Nesit who, to their credit, dotted every i and crossed every t. That’s especially true if it’s an illegal operation of some sort—I mean, duh—like illicit mining, a lab for cooking up chems, that sort of thing.”

We spent a few minutes watching the place, using our visors to do the zoom-and-enhance thing. We didn’t see even a flicker of life. “Like a tomb,” I said. “It wasn’t always that way,” Torina replied, her eyes searching for anything alive. “Kinda hope it is now, though,” Rab stated, his brow pinched in worry. I finally glanced around at the others spread out around me. “Okay. Icky, you and I will go first. Torina, you and Rab cover us. Once we’ve got ourselves firm on the ground again, you guys can come forward. And everyone stay sharp, please.”

I gestured to Icky, and we both started forward, while Rab and Torina took up firing positions with their BAG and slug rifle respectively. The top of the plateau was flat but scattered with enough boulders and riven by enough low spots and small ravines that it wasn’t hard for us to dash from cover to cover. It took us about five minutes to make it the roughly two hundred meters, but we finally arrived on the outskirts of the settlement. We could now see the structures clearly. Perry was right—they resembled the sort of bunkers I’d helped build back in my Army days, the types that would house an HQ or a heavy weapons position. “Nothing at all, boss,” Icky said, finishing a long, hard look around us. “Agree. Okay, Rab, Torina, you guys can come forward,” I said. We waited as they made their way to us. They likewise moved from one place of cover to the next, but that was fine, we were willing to wait. Once they arrived, we set ourselves up to clear the first bunker. Icky yanked open the door, and I rushed in with The Drop ready—

To find nothing. Or, rather, just a few pieces of utilitarian furniture in the form of some tables and some litter, like remnants of packaging and empty food containers scattered on the floor. The remaining bunkers proved equally deserted. When it became clear the place really was empty, we gathered in the center of it, and I called Funboy to bring in the Frankie. We then spent the next hour or so poking around, trying to figure out what we’d found. It was a whole lot of nothing

but evidence of past occupation and a hurried departure until we searched one of the smaller, more innocuous bunkers. Excavated more deeply than the others, it had a hole drilled in the floor about as big across as the palm of my hand. Rock bolts had been planted in the rock around it, suggesting something had been fastened in place over it. Perry examined the hole and used his chemical discriminators. He immediately got a hit. “There are traces down the hole, and on the ground around it, of various cyclic hydrocarbons,” he said. We all stared. I frowned at him. “Just for a moment, pretend I’m not an organic chemist—which shouldn’t be hard, because I’m not—and tell me why that’s significant and not just, you know, someone drilling for oil.”

“The traces include phenanthrene, a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon with four carbon atoms for every ten hydrogen atoms. In its natural state, it’s a colorless, crystalline solid. This stuff, though, seems to have come out of the hole dissolved in benzene.”

“Still not sure why this should interest me, Perry.”

“There are two reasons you should find this very interesting, Van. One, phenanthrene, in a highly purified form, is used to make quantum-spin materials that are fundamental to advanced computational architecture—

like that used in the ID chips. And two, phenanthrene is relatively easy to make from other hydrocarbons, although to make it especially pure is harder.”

“Okay, the mention of ID chips has officially piqued my interest. But your second point paints a big, fat so what?

on it.”

“When the ID chip thing became a… a thing, Master Gerhardt spearheaded an effort to get sales of highly purified phenanthrene across known space subject to more stringent regulations. It’s now almost impossible to purchase the stuff without a valid end-user certification—”

“Simple words, bird!” Icky snapped. He looked at her. “You can’t buy the stuff without the Guild ultimately knowing about it.”

Rab frowned down into the black depths of the hole. “So someone procured their own supply. Okay, that seems pretty straightforward.”

But Perry shook his head. “It’s not, though. Every bureaucratic solution like these end-use sales safeguards on high-purity phenanthrene has holes in it. It’s a pain, and more costly, but there are ways of fiddling the system to

get the high-grade stuff if you really want it.” He looked at the hole. “Somebody wanted this phenanthrene in particular. And they were prepared to invest the time and money and incur the risk of running this little operation here to get it.”

Torina shrugged. “Okay, why?”

“That’s what we need to find out. But I don’t have the onboard hardware to do it myself. We need to get samples up to the Fafnir so Netty-P can analyze it with the gear on the ship.”

“Perry, where are you going with this?” I asked. “Right now, I’m just taking a slow mosey down suspicion lane. But if I’m right, then the Nesit might just be sitting on one of the most valuable planets in known space.”

BACK ABOARD THE FAFNIR, we all waited while Netty-P and Perry did their analysis. I couldn’t resist a sardonic smirk. “Have to admit, this is the second-most tense and exciting hydrocarbon-related drama I’ve ever experienced.”

“What was the first?” Gabby asked. “The time I was trying to gas up a tractor and ended up slopping gasoline all over me—while a friend of Gramps was standing a few feet away, smoking a cigarette. It was the second-fastest I ever got naked.”

“And what was the first?” Gabby asked again. I turned my smirk on Torina. “That would be that time Torina and I—”

“Got it,” Netty-P announced. “Perry’s suspicion was right. The phenanthrene in these samples already shows characteristics of quantum spin. That means some natural process that once occurred, and may still be occurring in the substance of this planet caused it.”

“Which means that this stuff bypasses the whole make phenanthrene, then purify it, then modify it into a quantum-spin material stuff. It literally comes out of the ground that way, ready to be extracted from its benzene carrier and put to use,” Perry said. “In ID chips,” I replied. “That, or a variety of other types of advanced computation. And that means that, if this stuff is reasonably plentiful down there, then the Nesit

have stumbled into a gold mine, but this stuff is worth way more than gold.”

“Are we going to tell the Nesit about it?” Icky asked. I nodded. “Damned right we are. They have a right to know, since they’re the ones that technically have claim to this stuff. Besides, that should make sure that they’ll be really diligent about not allowing any poachers dropping onto the surface down there looking for quantum spin phenol—phenyl—”

“Phenanthrene,” Netty-P said. “Right. That.”

THE NESIT HIGH COUNCILOR seemed bemused when I informed him about our find. He stared back at me over the comm channel with a flat expression in his dark, beady eyes. “Peacemaker, you must be new to this. You’re supposed to demand your price before you give me the goods.”

I smiled back at him. “I’m not new to this, no, trust me. And there’s no price because they’re your goods. You have a right to know about it.”

He stared at me for a moment, then sat back. “Well, well. An honest man. I’d heard about such things, but I never really believed they existed.”

“Glad to have been able to reduce the galactic cynicism quotient a little.”

The High Councilor laughed. “You’ll have to pardon me, Peacemaker, I’m just not used to such unselfish honesty. So many in your place would have demanded your cut in some fashion. And that should not go unrewarded. Peacemaker Tudor, should you ever need a favor that we can fulfill, a safe harbor, anything of that sort, you only have to ask. And I make this offer under the seal of an honor oath—which, if you know our culture, you also know means something.”

I did, and inclined my head respectfully. One of the most striking cultural tidbits of the Nesit was the concept of an honor oath. A problem among peoples with a tendency to play fast and loose with things like promises and agreements was having no way of knowing when someone really meant it. The Nesit honor oath was a way of doing that, a solemn and unbreakable promise that the Nesit themselves took seriously. Breaking an

honor oath was the ultimate cry of wolf, meaning that there was no way that Nesit would ever be trusted again. There was a reason they were used very, very sparingly. Which is why I reacted with suitable gravitas. “High Councilor, I appreciate that very much. I’ll definitely keep that in mind.”

We signed off. Perry, who’d been listening in, bobbed his head in approval. “Good one, boss. He’s right, a lot of Peacemakers would have made sure to profit from that. Getting an honor oath out of him is a big deal.”

I leaned back and sighed. “Yeah, well, it seems all the perks flow to those willing to lie and cheat and steal. We poor saps who try not to do that deserve the odd one now and then too, don’t we?”

Icky leaned around her bulkhead. “What’s a sap?”

Funboy sighed. “It’s a component of that syrup you drink by the gallon.”

I held up a finger. “It’s—you know what?

Rather than argue about the semantics of language, let’s just have pancakes?”

Icky’s fists went up. “I love diplomacy!”

22

AS WE PREPARED to get underway, Bester came back to us with more information on quantum spin hydrocarbons like phenanthrene. Current research held promise of even faster, more complex computational systems, which was interesting, but he zeroed in on one particular area of investigation. “The type of computation that probably interests you the most is in development of more truly organic artificial life,” he said over the comm. “We can make entirely artificial life-forms, like Perry—”

“Excuse me, we prefer the term synthetic, thanks.”

“So should I be calling you a synthetic intelligence?” I asked him. “Well, either that or, you know, Perry.”

I grinned at him and turned back to Bester, who went on. “Sorry, entirely synthetic life-forms, or we can make entirely organic ones—”

“That’s called having babies,” I said. “That’s one way of doing it. But the so-called Flesh Merchants, who front-end for Pont Alus Kyr, are able to make organic bodies and restore intelligence into them from previously stolen identities—which you know, of course, because you’ve dealt with that.”

“Depressingly too often, yeah.”

“Exactly. But in-between those two is a hybrid—a truly synthetic intelligence in an entirely or almost entirely organic body. Think an Usu, but instead of being mostly machine, it’s almost totally, ah, human, to pick one species as an example. So more biological than an Usu, but less

biological than, say, someone with an artificial limb or cybernetic implants.”

“And this quantum-spin stuff would make that possible.”

“Theoretically, yes, based on currently published research. The Guild has flagged it as a matter of concern because real people with synthetic intelligences would be extremely difficult to detect if you weren’t specifically looking for them—and even if you were, you’d get a bunch of false positives from anyone with any sort of cyber implant. The brain, as it were, wouldn’t have to be in the head. It could be anywhere in the body—”

“And look like any other implant, got it.”

“They’d also have all the capabilities of a synthetic intelligence, they could be made to be unquestioningly loyal—”

“So they’d be perfect spies, saboteurs, assassins—”

“Or soldiers. Or slaves.”

“Shit. So it’s not enough to trap biological people in synthetic bodies. Now they want to trap synthetic people in biological bodies.” I sighed. “Just when you didn’t think the bad guys could get any worse—”

“Van, we just detected a ship outbound from Bypass,” Netty-P cut in on the comm. “On my way,” I said, before thanking Bester and signing off, then hurrying forward into the Fafnir’s cockpit. My gaze was already planted on the tactical overlay as I entered and headed for my seat. I was immediately struck by what the data was telling me. “That ship must have left Bypass—what, at least a couple of hours ago?

How come we’re just detecting it now?” I asked, sitting and strapping in. “The usual reason—it was stealthed. And it likely left the vicinity of Bypass long before that. We’re only detecting it now because it decided to give up stealth and light up its fusion drive.”

I nodded. Hard to conceal a vast plume of thermonuclear exhaust. “Okay, can we catch it?”

“If we use the combi-drive, we could probably manage about ten minutes of engagement time before it twists away.”

I found myself agreeing. Ten minutes was forever in space combat. On the other hand, the outcome would be uncertain—from the data available, the Fafnir was probably more than a match for the other vessel, but we might very well destroy it, or its crew might scuttle it. Either way, we’d lose what information it might offer. I cocked my head, thinking it through. “Okay, we’ve got a tagging missile in the magazine, don’t we?”

“We do. Per your instructions, we always keep one loaded.”

“Alright, how about this, then?

We run them down and order them to heave to. If they do, great. If they don’t, then we can put on a show of attacking them as cover to get that tag put on their ship.”

“That should work,” Netty-P said. “Then that’s the plan. Get Hodgepodge to fire up the combi-drive. Even if we can’t stop them, we can do the next best thing—find out where they’re going.”

SOMETIMES, a plan just falls apart, turning into a smoldering heap of at least you tried. Most times, parts of it work, parts of it don’t, and you just carry on and adapt around the failures as best you can. And sometimes, in rare, shining moments, a plan will execute flawlessly. This was one of those rare, shining moments. Using the combi-drive, we overtook the fleeing ship, a class 10

unremarkable for anything but its stealth capability. I ordered them to heave-to and prepare to be boarded. They dutifully replied with missiles, which we naturally shot down. In the meantime, we responded with a missile barrage of our own—six projectiles, including the tag missile. Netty-P made sure to keep at least one of the other weapons between it and the other ship as they made their run in. A spirited defense took down three of our missiles and one malfunctioned and didn’t detonate, while another detonated close enough to do some damage and, more importantly, act as a distraction. The tag missile did its thing, detonating in an underpowered fizzle. Among the shrapnel was the tag, which latched itself to the ship and began sending back data in tight stream bursts. We exchanged some laser fire with the other ship as it doggedly sought to escape, all the while continuing to order it to stop. Torina actually had some fun with it, trying to make her shooting as convincing and yet as ineffective as possible. Finally, the other ship fired up its twist drive and made good the escape. When it had vanished across the dimensions, I turned to Netty-P. “Please tell me that after all that, we got something useful.”

“We did. Its twist destination is Wolf 424.”

I grinned. “Everyone’s favorite system for shady dealings. Which is a little disappointing, because if I’d had to guess, that’s where I’d have said it was heading. I feel like we wasted some missiles, but confirmation is good.”

“Now we just have to hope they don’t just immediately twist away from there again,” Rab said. “I suspect they won’t, or at least not immediately. They were definitely leaking atmosphere, so they’ll likely take the time to make field repairs. Wolf 424 is an ideal place to do that,” Netty-P replied. I thought about it for a moment, staring at the now-blank tactical overlay. “Okay, that didn’t get us quite the lead I’d hoped for. Still, we know where they are. Now, if we go to Wolf 424, they’re definitely just going to bolt. So the question is, do we have anyone close enough to do the honors and take them down on our behalf before they do just twist off somewhere else?”

“I was just looking into that. And, in the vein of small universes and all that, we do have an asset available who could do the job,” Perry said. “Who?”

“Your mother.”

“She—wait, she’s supposed to be watching over Earth,” I said, feeling my face harden. Shit. Had she played me again—?

“Before you get too bent out of shape about it, Van, the Retribution is reported as still on-station at Earth. Your mother is on the Daggerthrust, with Amazing. Remember her?”

I shook my head, sorting thoughts about my mother and where she’d been—and why. Amazing was one of my mother’s loyalist supporters in the GKU, an arrogant, supercilious woman from a race closely related to the Huw’arde, my grandmother’s people. We’d first met her far out in The Deeps, at Rodantic’s World, and we’d dealt with her a few times thereafter. But we hadn’t seen or heard of her in a while. Okay, so my mother had made good on keeping watch on Earth, if the Retribution was still there. I wasn’t sure what she was doing with Amazing at Wolf 424, but I was about to find out. “Netty-P, I’m going to say something every male says at some point in their lives. I want to speak to my mom.”

MY MOTHER AGREED to run down the ship that had fled from us, which would be helped by the fact that Amazing’s ship, the Daggerthrust, had a sophisticated stealth system of its own. Since we could twist pretty much right into the action, we waited at the edge of the Bypass system for my mother to give the all-clear, or else let us know our quarry had gotten away. But they hadn’t. Amazing apparently had a knack for sneaking up on, disabling, boarding, and seizing ships. It was her specialty. I didn’t delve into why—there are some things I just don’t want to know—but when my mother reported they’d taken the ship intact, we twisted to join her. Now, as we approached the disabled class 10, over which the sleek Daggerthrust loomed, my mother came on the comm. Her voice and manner were both taut. “Van, this ship is”—she made a sound that was between a growl and raw disgust—“you need to see it for yourself.”

“Mom, that you’d better come and take a look at this cliché is more than a little annoying—”

“No, Van, in this case, it’s not. Words really don’t do this justice.”

“Can you at least tell me who is crewing it?

Can we get that much of a dramatic reveal?”

“No one is crewing it.”

I blinked at her. “Oh. That was kind of a dramatic reveal, actually.” But I shook my head. “Someone was crewing it. It flew, it fought, it fled—”

“There are two AIs aboard, one operating the ship, and one mobile unit probably intended for maintenance and repair tasks. They’re—they’re not the problem. From a tactical standpoint, I don’t think they know anything at all beyond where and when to fly.” She exhaled in disgust at the command situation before us. “And even what little information they have is siloed to the point that no one can backtrack the owners. Or programmers,” my mom said. I knew she was an able commander, and more importantly, she was on our side. The decision was simple. “Okay, we’ll be over shortly. Wait—

programmers?”

“Well, they sure as hell aren’t partners or commanders. These AIs have been… degraded. Perhaps intentionally, and without a doubt, they’re being

kept intentionally dumb. It’s sad. And a bit grotesque, given your opinion of AIs as, ah, people.”

“It is, and you’re right. Um… thanks, mom, for that. On our way.”

Since Amazing and my mother already had a team aboard from the Daggerthrust, I crossed in the Frankie with only Perry. We docked, boarded, and met my mother, who took us on a quick tour. Right away, it was clear that this ship was far more than it seemed. Almost all of its interior space was given over to compartments—clean rooms, in which sophisticated electronics were being manufactured. But it wasn’t just computer components, as Perry noted. “Boss, look at this,” he said, landing on a worktable in a clean room and gesturing with a wing. “Remember those artificial brains we talked about, that could be installed in biological bodies?

Well, I think that’s what this is. There are traces of phenanthrene here, especially in that compartment two back. I think that’s where the raw phenanthrene they collected from Bypass was processed into whatever form’s suitable for their version of a quantum computing system.”

He hopped along the table. “It’s strange, though. Some of this tech is downright primitive.” He gestured a wing toward an instrument the size of a microwave oven. “For instance, a chunky old substrate printer about three generations out of date.” He turned to another device, this one the size of a breadbox. “This, though, is an atomic force manipulator, but a cutting-edge version I don’t even think is on the market yet.”

I looked around. “So this ship is some sort of self-contained manufacturing laboratory for these artificial brains. It was lurking around Bypass because that’s where the phenanthrene they needed as a raw material, the stuff that was already quantumly spinning, was coming from.”

“I’d say so, yeah. Why this ship was still there when it looked like the mining gig had shut down, I don’t know. Maybe they meant to come back. Or maybe they just wanted to stash this ship somewhere out of the way for a while, so they stealthed it and parked it with an AI crew.”

My mother, listening from the entrance to the compartment, nodded. “That fits. What we’ve been able to glean from the ship’s flight data and the AIs is that your discovery of their mining operation triggered them to flee Bypass.”

“So they came here because we’d done some damage to the ship, which our little mobile AI friend out there was working to fix.” I nodded, my

hands on my hips. “This clearly wasn’t their final destination, though. The question is, what was?”

AFTER SOME MORE INVESTIGATION, and with Perry digging into the ship’s data archives and flight control software, we were able to narrow its possible destinations down. Based partly on available fuel and partly on the flight data, we could draw a sphere around the ship and determine where it could go. It still left us with nearly two dozen systems, half of them inhabited. But one potential destination in particular jumped out at us. Pont Alus Kyr. I asked Netty-P to do her own analysis, and she concurred. “In fact, given where the ship twisted in to the Wolf 424 system, Pont Alus Kyr is even more likely.”

“Why’s that?” I asked her. “Because when you twist into a system with the intention of just using it as a waypoint and carrying on to somewhere else, you generally twist in to a point closer to your intended destination. It doesn’t make sense to twist in on the north side of a system if your intended route is to the south. Even if you’re far enough from that system’s star that it doesn’t actually stop you from twisting, its gravitation still has an effect. Twisting through it just adds unnecessary gravitational overhead to your trip. It would be like starting a journey with a steep hill in front of you, when you could instead just start it from the other side of the hill.”

I acknowledged and turned back to my mother and Perry. “Well, Pont Alus Kyr is likely, but it’s not a sure thing. Perry, can we fiddle with these AIs, make them forget us boarding this ship?”

“And then tag it and send it on its way?” my mother said, and I nodded. “With these guys?

Yeah, piece of cake. They’re not very sophisticated AIs, pretty bargain-basement stuff. Gimme, say, half an hour, and I’ll have these two dum-dums thinking it’s been smooth sailing ever since Bypass.”

“Perfect. Mom, let’s get everyone off this ship and leave Perry to do this thing.”

As we left, I made small talk with my mom, but what I didn’t do was thank her for not being treacherous and actually holding to her promise to

look out for Earth. That struck me as being a little heavy-handed, so I settled for a simple “thank you,” and a quick hug. That seemed best, and we had a lot of broken roads behind us. She gave me a short look and a grin, and that meant more to me than I was prepared to admit. In that fugitive moment, we both said everything, and the years we’d lost seemed a little less grim. AS THE SHIP, whose AI crew was now blithely unaware they’d ever been stopped, twisted away, we got the pirated nav data from the tag still attached to it. Sure enough, she was on her way to Pont Alus Kyr. We twisted to Zeta Herculis, the location of Pont Alus Kyr, ourselves shortly thereafter. We powered the Fafnir down after twisting. And we picked a twist point several million klicks away from the laboratory ship’s destination point—close enough that we could passively monitor what was going on, but far enough that we wouldn’t be easily detectable. In fact, as soon as we twisted in, I had Netty-P shut everything but passive scanners down. Then we sat, and we watched. About an hour passed, during which time Perry taught Icky, Paxomar, Rab, and Gabby how to play Crazy Eights and Go Fish. Funboy peered at their game through the dim emergency lighting, blinking solemnly at their enthusiastic shouts of “I’m out!” or “Go fish!”

“I have never understood the appeal of games. Competition for the sake of supposed enjoyment seems counterintuitive,” Funboy said. I was watching the passive scanner data in the big display in the crew lounge, catching up on some reading while the others played. I’d brought a few books with me from Earth months ago, but had barely touched them. So now I was following LA private detective Philip Marlowe through the events of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. I’d lately discovered a love for noir detective novels and had The Maltese Falcon cued up and ready to go once Marlowe was done—saving the dame, putting the bad guys on ice, or wherever the plot took me. I glanced up at Funboy from my book. “It’s called, you know, fun. As in part of your name.”

“A moniker I was given, not one I chose. Remember, I am actually Cheerful Enthusiast.”

I grinned. “That doesn’t really invalidate my point. Anyway—”

“Van, we’ve got a ship on the scene. It just twisted in, and it’s heading for our target,” Netty-P cut in. I stood. “Okay, places, everyone,” I said, locking my book into a storage locker. Perry cocked his head at me. “You worried someone’s going to steal your copy of The Big Sleep?”

“No, but if we get into a fight, I’d like to make sure it has a chance of surviving. I’d hate to be left hanging on what Marlowe’s going to do next.”

“Watch the movie. It’s way better. You gotta love Bogart.”

“I’m a tactile, book-in-hand kind of guy,” I said, closing the locker and heading back into the cockpit. We were all suited up, helmets ready, but I didn’t want to decompress the ship—not yet, anyway. Netty-P adjusted the imagery to show the incoming ship. It was an elusive target, only visible because she’d been watching the space around our target ship so closely. I could tell it was slender, almost delicate, probably about class 10, but I could make out few details otherwise. “That ship is constructed to optimize passive stealth,” Netty-P

announced. “Its design and the materials used in its construction are specifically tailored to that end.”

“Which means that it’s probably not a ship that wants to fight. For one thing, it’s got practically no armor,” Icky put in. “Or weapons,” Rab added, peering at the image on his own console. “I see one laser battery and two things that are probably some sort of point-defenses. And there’s just not room in that skinny hull for much else.”

I nodded. “So it’s a ship built for speed and stealth, not—”

“It’s Ixtan,” Perry said. We all looked at him. “Are you sure about that?” I asked him. “Yeah. I had to send a quick twist query to the Anvil Dark archival AI to confirm, but yeah, it is. It’s an Ixtan ship.”

“Okay, then.” I turned back to the display. “So we’ve now added the Ixtan to the program, because we didn’t have enough players involved already.” I heaved a grumpy sigh. “You just don’t get this many bad guys in those old detective novels.”

Perry laughed. “You haven’t read The Maltese Falcon yet, have you?”

As we watched, the Ixtan ship closed on the laboratory vessel. It appeared to maneuver to dock, but when it gently made contact, it unfolded a series of clamps that latched it to the other, chunkier ship. A few moments passed, then the paired ships abruptly twisted away. “Sorry, Van, we didn’t get destination data from the tag this time. Its power cell has probably run down. It was only ever meant for limited use, though, so that we got two out of it was a bonus,” Netty-P said. I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. We have a lot more information than we did, so now we have to digest it. Netty-P, you can power us back up.”

As the systems around us came back to life and the lights came on, I looked around at the crew. “So now we know that Pont Alus Kyr is definitely involved in whatever’s going on here. And we know that the Equal Grasp is connected to it as well. And now the Ixtan. What I don’t get is why, and why now. Why the resurgence in activity my grandfather had to fight?

I know he closed cases. Perry, do you have any other insights you can offer us?”

“Sorry, boss, I don’t. I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Okay. Well, we need data, information—hell, we need everything.”

“Van, I do have a suggestion,” Perry said. “One I can’t believe I’m going to make, because I hate the thought of it.”

I patted his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll pay, so you don’t have to—if that’s any consolation.”

“Wow. You already figured out I mean Candler?

Huh. And here I thought I was keeping some of my sleuthing skills unique to me. You know, job security and all that.”

“Perry, you’re not going anywhere, at least not until we run out of villains.”

“So, never,” Torina said. I gave her a thumbs-up. “And our big question now is—”

“Does it have anything to do with the food available, wherever it is we’re going to fight crime?” Icky put in. “Hungry, big girl?” I asked her. “Not so much hungry as spoiled. After all that awesome food back at Torina’s parents’ place, these shipboard rations are—kinda meh.”

Gabby, standing at the back of the cockpit, brightened. “Oh, well, I can fix that, now that we’re not chasing things, powered down, all that. One

batch of ship’s biscuits coming right up!”

Now it was Icky’s turn to brighten. “Now we’re talking!

Pax, you’re gonna love these!”

I waved her off. “Since that urgent problem is settled, let’s get back to the less important work of actually investigating cases. So, to Candler, then. And, while we’re at it, to our favorite librarian, too. I have questions for both of them.”

Netty-P got busy doing her thing. “Anvil Dark, here we come.”

23

WE ARRIVED at Anvil Dark without fanfare and slid into a maintenance hangar so that Icky could take care of some outstanding maintenance on the Fafnir’s exterior. I hadn’t told Candler, Bester, or anyone else that we were arriving. But since Candler was essentially a piece of intelligent furniture, and Bester never left Anvil Dark—ever—then it was a safe bet they were both here. As we were disembarking, though, someone called my name. I looked and saw a sallow, shifty-looking man I didn’t recognize. He was human, wore the most nondescript clothing imaginable, and had an equally shady, unremarkable human woman with him. Both were… reedy. That was the term. Reedy and forgettable. “Yeah, they’re definitely not spooks,” Perry said. “I mean, they’re the walking equivalent of the color beige.”

They stopped. “Peacemaker Tudor?

I wonder if we might have a few moments of your time.”

“Depends. You are—?”

The man gave a thin, pale smile. “Needing to talk to you. In private. It’s a matter of some urgency.”

I glanced at the others. “You guys can go ahead and do whatever you need to do, even if it’s just to go to The Black Hole for a drink. Perry and I will meet you there in say… an hour.”

The others, all eyeing the two strangers warily, left. I invited them back aboard the Fafnir. The woman gave Perry a cold look. “We’d like to speak to you in private, Peacemaker—”

“You get me and Perry, or you get the hell off my ship. How’s that?” I offered. The woman looked put out. “There’s no need—”

“Oh, I think there is. You’re clearly here on some super-secret mission that you believe is the most important thing in the universe right now. Trust me, unless it involves Tau Ceti going supernova or a new outbreak of Calamity, it’s not. So, remember, this is my time you’re using up—not yours.”

The two exchanged a look, then the man shrugged. “Very well. I’m Agent Harker, and this is Agent Wiles. We’re with Guild Internal Affairs.”

I blinked at their credentials as they showed them. “Wait, what?

We have an internal affairs?

Really?

Where the hell have you guys been through umpteen corrupt Masters, a Science Department head who was being blackmailed, and Peacemakers on the take?”

Harker smiled again. “We’re not internal affairs insofar as we police the Guild. We’re more… holistic internal affairs, shall we say.”

“Oh, for—let’s cut the oblique insinuation bullshit, shall we?

What the hell does that even mean?”

Harker shrugged. “Fine. We keep an eye on the bigger picture around the Guild, particularly as it involves the so-called GKU.”

“The so-called GKU?”

“The GKU is a very real organization. Or it was. You’re aware of its history?”

“Yeah, started with all the best intentions, like these things usually do. But noble purpose turned to corruption and abuse of power, so the GKU

was effectively quashed and the Guild was created to take over its role.”

“Close enough. Anyway, the GKU itself was kept alive by a small cadre of die-hards. People wedded to the old ways—”

“Desperate to cling to power, you mean.”

“Essentially that, yes.”

I crossed my arms and sighed. “Look, if you guys just came here to give me a history lesson, I’ve got way more important—”

The other agent, Wiles, held up a slender hand. “Please, Peacemaker, we’re going somewhere with this, trust us.”

“Really?

Where?

How about a sneak preview of the ending?”

“Fine. Peacemaker Tudor, you’re a member of the 32.”

“So?”

“So, the 32 is a fiction. It was created specifically to sow confusion and distrust.”

That caught me, turning my impatience down from a near boil to a simmer. A half-dozen ways of following up on that whirled through my mind before I picked one and ran with it. “Why?

To what end?”

The first agent, Harker, picked up the thread. “In part, to keep the GKU

in check. And also to protect the legacy of your grandfather, Mark Tudor.”

OKAY, that dumped my simmering impatience down the drain, leaving an empty pot. I gestured the two agents into the crew lounge, then had Netty-P

close and seal the airlock. Once we were sitting, I turned back to Harker. “Protect his legacy?

How?

And why?”

“Frankly, Peacemaker, there’s a great deal we can’t tell you about it. Some because we simply don’t know. There are things your grandfather was involved in that are still pretty cryptic.” He looked at Perry. “Some of those things are locked away inside of you, as well as your ship’s AI—Netty, I believe?”

Perry shook his head. “All of my internal archival storage is accounted for. I simply can’t have any locked-up memories. Not anymore.”

“How much storage capacity do you think you have?”

“I’ve got one thousand standard storage units of onboard memory,”

Perry replied. He and I had discussed this in the past, me being a computer nerd and him being a sophisticated computer—among other things, like snarky little rogue and all-round best friend. One thousand SSUs was roughly equivalent to five terrestrial petabytes of data storage, which was pretty freakin’

incredible. At the time we’d talked, the largest publicly known data store on Earth was the CERN Large Hadron Collider dataset, and that was only two petabytes. Wiles nodded as though agreeing, then said, “Suppose we told you that you actually have about ten times that much data storage space?”

“I’d call computational bullshit. There’s no computer architecture in known space with that much memory, and that can access it in anything resembling real time. On top of which, I’d probably know if I had that much storage because I’d be swimming in empty SSUs.”

“And yet, that’s what Mark Tudor claimed,” Wiles replied, before fishing out a data slate, tapping at it, then handing it to me. It contained a simple document stating that Perry’s archival storage was an order of magnitude larger than his onboard system management functions would indicate. It went on to describe that it was incorporated in the form of

“innovative technology originating from outside known space” and that any attempt to access it physically would fail and result in complete loss of all contained data. It ended with a declaration that I was to be informed of this at such time as I became a candidate for Master of the Guild, followed by authentication data. Appended to it was one last bit. Van, everything you will need to know is in there, but only when you need to know it. There are good reasons for that. Please trust me on this, the way you trusted me about that Buford girl. I just stared at it for a moment, trying to let the ramifications sink in. But now a multitude of things—questions, comments, complaints, visceral reactions—swirled around inside me, leaving my mind about as absorbent as oily pavement. I finally put the slate down where Perry could see it, turned back to the two agents, and pursed my lips. “Okay. Why are we just learning about this now?”

“Because your grandfather placed this document under a lock in Guild archives. When unlocked, it was specifically released to Petyr Groshenko under a confidential seal used by the GKU. That guaranteed it would end up in our hands,” Harker said. “And when did this happen?”

“As soon as the Fafnir twisted into this system about, oh, five hours ago now.” Harker glanced at his colleague, who raised an eyebrow. “Look, if you don’t mind us asking—and because we’re just damned curious—who’s the Buford girl?”

I smiled at that. “Cathy-Lynn Buford. The most sought-after girl in high school.”

“I remember her. You took her out a couple of times,” Perry said. “She had a nice set of—”

“Perry.”

“—eyes, Mr. Gutter, eyes. They were a striking dark blue, as I recall.”

I nodded, still smiling. “The color of the bottom of a storm cloud, yeah. Anyway, she developed a sudden interest in me late in my sophomore year. I was smitten, because she was Cathy-Lynn freakin’ Buford. I’d have done anything for her—which was what Gramps said was the problem, one night, while we sat in the kitchen and it rained outside. He’d told me that Cathy-Lynn’s only interest in me was my ability to do her computer science and math homework for her.”

The two agents actually smiled. “He was right, wasn’t he?” Wiles asked. I grinned. “Oh, I’d been righteously pissed off at the mere suggestion, the way only a sixteen year-old male ego can, but Gramps had asked me to trust him on this. So I hadn’t trusted him on it, right up until I had—which was about the time Cathy-Lynn yanked out my heart and kicked it around the classroom a few times.”

It was, in retrospect, a watershed moment in my relationship with Gramps. It had shifted my perspective of him in a profound way. He’d gone from a figure of authority and childish reverence to a man, a real, vulnerable person who’d been there, done that, and had the bruises to prove it. Although I could only see it in hindsight, the silly little incident had brought us both a lot closer together. And more than any authentication block, it told me that this message really had been written by Gramps. No one else had ever known about our conversation—apparently not even Perry, who must have been off at the movies or something. I shook my head, though, pulling myself back into the present. “Okay. So this is from Gramps. He says that Perry has a ton of hidden information inside him, more than even he realizes. Fine, I accept that. So the question now is, what the hell does this have to do with you guys, with the GKU and his legacy. What legacy is that?

What legacy are you trying to protect?”

“I have a couple of questions of my own,” Perry put in. “I’ve been with the Guild for literal centuries. I’ve dealt with every AI wearing Guild colors. I’ve been around—but I’ve never heard of you and your internal affairs. So who are you, really?”

Harker smiled. “You haven’t heard of us because we don’t exist—as far as the Guild is concerned, anyway. Our funding for operations is entirely separate from the Guild and the GKU. Even most of the Masters don’t know of our existence. That’s all by design. It’s baked into the way we operate.”

“By whom?

Who are you guys?

Where did you come from?” I put some snap into it because I was getting tired of adding mysteries to the pile faster than they got solved or answered. Harker again looked at his partner, who shrugged. He turned back to me. “Peacemaker Tudor, we’re going to draw back the veil here a little more than we normally would, because you’re—ah, you. We were created by your grandfather and Petyr Groshenko. Our job is to watch over both the Guild and the GKU, and to insert enough friction into each to ensure that neither ever gets too powerful.”

“Or that neither organization ever becomes so self-assured in its power that it tries to do something… unwise, like the original incarnation of the GKU did. They were on the road to styling themselves the masters of known space, and even beyond. We, Peacemaker, exist to ensure that can never happen again.”

I SAT BACK. Wow. I’d just glimpsed depths I never even knew existed. It took me a moment, a moment that Harker and Wiles gave me. Then I sat forward again. “Okay, so tell me about the 32.”

“A fiction, as we said. There is no 32.

It’s an idea, created for the purpose of making it appear as though the GKU has some sort of centralized leadership, that is somehow also answerable to the Guild.”

“So what about the people who claim to be part of it?

Like B, or Valint, or Schegith?”

“They’re all correct. They all belong to something called the 32,” Wiles said. “But you’ll note that most of the 32 are unknown persons—mysterious figures who are”—she waved a vague hand—“out there, somewhere.”

“But they don’t actually exist, do they?” Perry asked. “No, they do not. Or, rather, to the extent they do, it’s us. Our organization.”

I sat up. “Wait. It was supposedly the 32 who held the GKU back from killing Helem Gauss before he had a chance to unleash Calamity. Are you saying that you’re responsible—?”

Harker held up a hand. “Peacemaker, I assure you, that was not supposed to have played out that way. Yes, we, in the guise of the 32, arranged for Gauss to successfully depart when his trial was concluded. The point was to sow further distrust and suspicion within both the GKU and the Guild. However, Gauss was supposed to have been subsequently disposed of. Unfortunately, that never happened. He quite frankly just eluded us.”

Wiles nodded. “That shouldn’t have even been possible. Unfortunately, we greatly underestimated the capabilities of Calamity, which we believe was controlling his actions by that point. Had we even suspected its potential for harm, we’d have just allowed the GKU to vaporize him before he broke orbit.”

“In other words, we failed that one, Peacemaker. We failed it hard. And we’re well aware of it,” Harker added. I sat back again. Their contrition was genuine, of that I was sure. Not that being sorry would undo the vast damage done. But at least these people weren’t just trying to cover their asses or, worse, somehow double-down on the wrong they’d done. That was something too many people were doing these days, both in known space and back on Earth. I sighed. “Okay, fine. So you exist—” I stopped and cocked my head. “Internal Affairs?

Is that what you’re really called?

Because that wouldn’t seem to be a very good label for a part of a law enforcement organization that’s trying to stay under the radar. It seems a bit—bird, what’s the term?”

“Flashy, boss. We detest flashy, unless it’s a holiday.”

“Agreed. And since it’s not Halloween—is it?”

“Nope,” Perry said. “Thank you. Well, then here, in front of me, are two people claiming to be from a department I didn’t know existed.”

Perry decided to be helpful. “Internal Affairs are almost always portrayed as jerks in movies and stuff. Everyone hates them—not exactly low key.” He gave the agents a slow blink. “Are you hated?

That seems like a good place to start.”

“Agreed,” I said, then turned back to the officers. Or whatever. “Well?

Are you hated, or are you just larping a division that I sorta think is bullshit?”

Harker froze, then paused, then managed a short, perfunctory smile. “Ah. Well, that was just our intro pitch to you. Face it, saying we’re Internal Affairs got your attention, didn’t it?

But as to who we actually are

—”

“I knew it. Bullllllshit,” Perry crowed. Harker continued, unperturbed,“Our actual name is Tufton Enterprises. Outwardly, we’re an independent security consulting firm—Peacemaker, why are you laughing?”

I took a breath and shook my head. “Tufton. If I’d needed any more confirmation that Gramps was behind this, that’s it.”

They both frowned back at me. “I’m sorry, Peacemaker, I don’t understand—” Wiles started, but I waved a hand at her. “When I was growing up with Gramps and decided to feel my oats and get a little rebellious, he’d say, So you think you live in Tough Town, huh?

Maybe it’s time for a move to Hurtsville. Tough Town—Tufton.”

Wiles smiled. Harker laughed—a much warmer and genuine thing now

—and said, “I honestly never knew that. We thought it was bland cover, by design.”

I lifted my shoulders briefly, not taking my eyes from them. “Far from bland. Funny, but still—Gramps never did anything by accident. So, why are you here?

And why are you spilling this now?

I’ve been at the Peacemaker thing for a bit, not exactly a noob.”

“Because your grandfather wanted us to. His instructions were clear. Contact Van Tudor immediately, explain who you are and what the 32 is, and give him and Perry the following. Appended to that was the note you just read about Perry’s memory.”

“And that’s all you can tell me?”

“Honestly, Peacemaker, it’s all we know. If he’s left further instructions for us, they haven’t been revealed—at least, not yet.”

I stood. “Okay. I need some time to digest all of this. How do I contact you if I need you?

And please don’t say, you don’t call us, we call you, because—”

“Not a problem, Peacemaker,” Wiles said, handing me a surprisingly low-tech item, a small card. Printed on it was a comm channel and a name,

Watson Gill. “Who the hell is Watson Gill?” I asked. “Nobody. However, if you use that comm channel to ask for Watson Gill, it will let us know you want to talk to us. We’ll arrange to get in touch with you as soon as we can thereafter.”

The two agents stood, said their goodbyes, and left. About a hundred questions followed them out of the airlock, but I just let them go. I needed a moment. And so, I think, did Perry. WHEN THEY WERE GONE, I asked, “Netty-P, did you get all that?”

“Sure did,” she replied, coming around the bulkhead. “I really like being sneaky.”

“I’ll do my best to get us into more, ah, clandestine stuff. Maybe—”

“A car chase would be okay by me,” Netty-P interjected. “Huh. I’ll see what I can do. But about these two, what do you think?” I asked. “This goes for you too, bird. I need input.”

Perry stared amber back at me, then shook his feathers into place with a series of satisfying snicks. “Where to begin?

I just found out that ninety percent of what I know is locked away somewhere, and so damned tight I didn’t—I didn’t know what I didn’t know, boss. And it’s tech from outside known space?

The implications of that are—”

Netty-P cut in, her tone contemplative. “Troubling, which puts me in the same position as Perry, not knowing if there’s information that I have, that I can’t access and for that matter don’t even know exists. It’s like… finding another room in your house. Or another wing of the house, in your case, Perry. And the question is, why?

What the hell is the point of this mental scavenger hunt?

Why didn’t Mark just say here, Perry, this is the score, and reveal everything?”

I slumped back and blew out a sigh. “Good question. But there’s clearly something big going on. Hell, something massive. I mean, what we’ve just been told is that Gramps and Groshenko created this organization, Tufton Enterprises, specifically to screw around with the GKU and the Guild. And they, what, also completely made up the 32 and suckered some people into being part of it?

People that I happen to like and respect, like my

grandmother—Gramp’s own wife, for crapsake—and B, and Schegith, and Gerhardt?”

“It does imply that they had reason to either not trust those individuals

—or to protect them from a truth that was even more dangerous,” Netty-P

said. I rubbed my eyes. “And that’s the crux of the thing, isn’t it?

What is about this—whatever the hell it is that’s going on, that convinced Gramps that he had to drip the information out in bits and pieces?”

“A roadmap,” Netty-P said. I opened my eyes and looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“Your grandfather may have, based on the things he did and learned, come to realize how whatever it is he believes is the problem had to be approached. He therefore created a roadmap for you, one whose next steps would be revealed as you accomplished preceding ones.”

“But why?

Why not just spell it all out?”

“Perhaps there are decision points that will determine the way forward, and he didn’t want you to face them without all the information you needed. Perhaps there are obstacles you should not confront until you’re ready for them. I could go on speculating, but you get the idea. He clearly had his reasons. I mean, you trusted him?”

“Still do.”

“Then our first reaction should be to think of the advantages Mark Tudor was applying by releasing data slowly. Or in controlled bursts, if you will,” Netty-P said. Perry gave his head a bob. “This wasn’t set up for the lolz. Your grandfather was funny, but this has a design to it. It’s… nuanced. It’s subtle.”

Netty-P’s head tilted, servos whirring. “There are a lot of variables, starting with if you even became a Peacemaker. But Mark did this with confidence. The kind of confidence that feels like he knew at least some of what was going to happen. Can you think of anyone who could accurately predict the future, more or less?”

“I can,” Perry said, instantly. I felt my eyes narrow. “Maybe I’m not the only one who got to know Matterforge.”

“Exactly. Mark had many dealings with Linulla, although not to the extent you have. It’s not a stretch to say he might have gotten to know

Matterforge because of it,” Netty-P agreed. I inhaled, then sat very still, thinking for ten solid seconds. Then, the decision clicked, and I knew what had to be done. Perry’s eyes flashed. “That’s the face of a young feller who made up his mind.”

“Sure don’t feel young, but, yes. The next step is easy. Sort of. We need to find Groshenko, and ask him to tell us the story.”

24

I GATHERED the crew and brought them up to speed on what had transpired. I decided to hold nothing back but nonetheless cautioned them that this was as classified as any information we’d ever handled. The breadcrumbs of things that only Gramps could have known, like his warnings about the true motives of Cathy-Lynn Buford and the name Tufton Enterprises, certainly gave it all a hell of a lot of legitimacy. But I had to add my own caution to the crew about that. “We live in a universe where minds can be scanned and implanted in things. We can’t be one hundred percent sure that my grandfather wasn’t scanned somewhere, sometime, and somehow and had that information extracted from it all. So, for now, we’re going to treat this whole Tufton Enterprises thing as credible, but not absolutely confirmed to be true.”

“So what does it all mean, Van?

Let’s assume it all is true. How does this affect us and what we’re doing?” Rab asked. I sighed and shrugged. “A really good question. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem to change much at all. I mean, there are still bad guys out there who still need to be brought to justice, right?”

Gabby looked around, then spoke up. “I’m not sure if anyone else is going to ask this, Van, but—what about you becoming a Master?

Does this affect how you feel about that?”

“Another really good question. And the answer is, I have no idea. I need time to just let this stew, think through all the ramifications.”

“There is one that jumps out at me right away.”

I gave Gabby a keen look. “Go for it.”

“You’ve said that your grandfather decided not to become a Master of the Guild because of how he failed to take down the—oh, who are they again, there’s so many of these criminal empires it’s hard to keep track—”

“The Stillness.”

“That’s them.”

I smiled. “Yeah, well, that was how it was first explained to me. But we know—or at least, I’m betting that was just a cover story. He stepped in politics, saw what it smelled like, and bailed out. But he knew the need for competent people.”

“Competent, honest people,” Perry clarified. “Okay, but hear me out. Apparently everything you just described, like this Tufton Enterprises and maybe even the 32, were all set up by your grandfather and Petyr Groshenko. And we know your grandfather was involved in—ah, things. There was that whole thing with the Jackals and the Tyrants and the Junkway and whatever that was all about. And now there’s this whole thing with the Ixtan and their water empire and whatever that was all about. Notice anything about those events?”

“They’re in the past. And they were a bit grand in scale?” I offered, then gave my head a quizzical tilt. “Okay. Where’s this going, Gabby?”

“Well, what if they were working together through all of it?

They were best friends, they had a shared history from Earth—what if they were both a Master of the Guild?”

“Gabby, how—?” I began, but Torina distracted me. Her eyes were brilliant with interest, and she leaned forward, putting a hand on my knee. “Oh. Gabby, I think you’re onto something.” Torina then closed her eyes, thinking, and when they opened, her gaze was locked on me. “Van, what if this was their plan all along?

Groshenko becomes the Master, and deals with what’s happening inside the Guild and the GKU—”

Now Paxomar joined in. “And your grandfather was his sort of—

shadow. Yeah. A ‘Shadow Master.’ He took care of things going on outside the Guild and the GKU. So between them—”

“They were a team, the whole time. Groshenko covered your grandfather’s back from his seat at the Master’s Table, made sure he had all the support and resources he needed, so he could go out and do the field work,” Torina said. Perry joined in. “You know, it does make sense. Mark often expressed doubts about the, uh, integrity of the Masters—except for Groshenko. And whenever Mark needed something from the Guild, Groshenko either got it for him or connived his way to get agreement for it from the other Masters.”

Perry raised his eyes to me. “They gamed the system, those two salty vets. They didn’t trust anyone except one another, so they created the perfect little scheme of their own. They didn’t trust the system, so they built a system of their own.”

I swiveled my head around the crew lounge, following the conversation. As it evolved, I had an epiphany of my own, one that just became more certain with every word spoken. I said out loud, into the silence, as much to hear it myself as to say it to the others. “So Gramps didn’t turn down the job of Master because he didn’t want it. He turned it down because it was part of a deliberate, calculated collusion between him and Groshenko. They did an end-run around the system. They gamed it, like Perry said.”

“What a couple of cunning old bastards. They ran this little racket of theirs—a racket for good, for justice and all that, I might add—and no one caught onto it. Not even me,” Perry said. His amber gaze turned to the deck. “Well done, Mark, you sly old fox, you.”

When Perry said it, I heard echoes of the bond he’d shared with Gramps, of their friendship. I got it. Perry and the Tudor family were made for each other, it seemed. But hard on the heels of this revelation came a more personal realization, one that went straight back to my recent conversation with Cataric on Helso about me, Gramps, and the whole Master thing. So by becoming a Master, you call his decision not to into question?

You lessen him and his choices?

Catar had said. I shook my head at the audacity of it all—labyrinthine, clever, effective. It was the heart of Gramps and Petyr as agents of justice. But if this cunning collusion between Gramps and Groshenko was true, then his choice wasn’t born of some sense of personal failure or feelings of unworthiness for the job. That was just a smokescreen. The truth was that it had been a deliberate, pragmatic choice, part of a scheme that saw the two salty vets, as Perry called them, cunningly manipulate the Guild, the GKU, and everyone else. So any hesitation that I had about becoming a Master no longer had anything to do with Gramps. I’d been, at least in part, using him and his choices as my own smokescreen—trying to obfuscate my reluctance to take the job not just to others, but to myself as well. Making a decision that wasn’t really a decision at all, and just dodging the question. As Cataric said, if I didn’t want to be a Master, then the reasons for it had to be about me and me alone. Because they sure as hell weren’t about Gramps anymore. I REALLY NEEDED to talk to Groshenko. So, of course, he was unavailable. Netty-P had tried to track him down through his mercenary company but had only been able to determine he was somewhere in The Deeps, on a job. His people weren’t sure when he’d return, or even when they’d hear back from him. So all we could do was leave an urgent message for him to contact me. Assuming he didn’t manage to get himself killed, of course. Because if he did, a lot of the answers I needed would die with him. So I turned my focus onto more immediate matters. We’d come to Anvil Dark for a reason. A big part of that reason was Candler, an AI installed in a desk in the administrative warrens of the station called the Labyrinth. This part of the station was sandwiched between the outer ring of the docking, maintenance, warehousing, and other spaceflight-related facilities, and the inner core of Anvil Dark, the Keel, where the Masters and their myriad underlings did their thing. It was an expansive, multi-level maze of corridors and compartments housing the many bureaus and departments that constituted the Guild’s bureaucracy. Apparently, a single photon of energy created in the heart of a star could take literally thousands of years to make it to the star’s surface. That was nothing compared to how long it took a piece of paperwork to emerge from the Labyrinth. I rarely went very deep into the Labyrinth, simply because I rarely needed to. In fact, my only regular visits here were to Bester’s archives, and occasionally to the Science Department—and both of those were only just off the beaten path, as it were. But Candler lived in an office submerged in the nether depths of the Labyrinth. Without Perry as my guide, I’d have been thoroughly lost about half a dozen nondescript corridors ago. We rounded a bend to confront another stretch of drab, gray-beige passage lined with doors. I shook my head. “This is like getting off a commercial flight and walking up the jetway toward the terminal—forever. Do you actually know where you’re going, bird?”

“Nope. Since I’m effectively immortal, I decided to lead you into the Labyrinth on an endless, pointless journey until you die. It’s what I do, and you’re just my latest victim. I’m the slowest, most uninteresting serial killer ever.”

“Now, you say that like you’re joking, but—”

A female Gajur in the plain uniform of a Guild administrative minion exited from a door ahead of us, carrying a large file box. I caught her eye as she passed. “I’m curious—do you actually know what’s in that box, or why you’re taking it to wherever you’re going?”

“No and no—nor do I care,” she said, walking on by. Perry and I resumed our way. “Seriously, couldn’t they just have a bot carry around file boxes like that?”

“They could, but then she’d lose the benefit of doing that job.”

“Uh-huh. And what benefit would that be?”

“Getting enough seniority for a promotion to the person who tells other people to carry boxes around,” Perry said. I sniffed. “And my soul gets crushed a little more. Perry, how much—?”

“Right here,” he said, stopping outside a door. I tapped the door control to reveal—

“Oh, for—!”

Another corridor. This one, though, led to an actual compartment. There were sealed and unmarked doors to the left and right, but my attention was drawn to a plain-looking desk against the opposite wall. I stopped a few paces away from it. “Candler, I presume?”

Silence. “Uh, hello?”

Nothing. “Van, what are you doing?” Perry asked. “I’m talking to—wait. Is that Candler, or is that just a desk?”

He stared back at me—then his eyes flashed and he laughed. The desk joined in. “Ah, that never gets old,” the desk said. I swung my scowl from bird to desk. “Congratulations. I now dislike a piece of furniture.”

“Believe it or not, that’s not the first time that’s been said in this compartment,” the desk—obviously Candler—said. “I can imagine.” I turned to Perry. “Actually, bird, I’d like to speak to Candler alone.”

“You gonna lean on him?”

“Lean on a desk?”

“You see what I did there.”

“I did. Now scram.”

“I assume you mean leave, and not shut down like a reactor?”

“Brilliant, bird.”

“I know. Okay, I’ll wait outside to guide you back to civilization,” Perry said, leaving. I closed the door behind him, then turned to Candler. “Okay—uh, desk

—I want some answers.”

“Desk?

You’re calling me ‘desk?’”

“I call Perry ‘bird,’ so yeah, you’re ‘desk.’ And quit stalling.”

“Okay, I will—just as soon as you ask me some questions. Saying you want answers is pretty vague—”

“I’ve got two,” I cut in. “And trust me, as you answer them, keep in mind that I am way past any enthusiasm for secrets. My crew and I have neither the time nor inclination to futz around trying to unravel mysteries. And I’ll be honest—I think you’re hiding information related to my grandfather, Mark Tudor. So, if I don’t get full and satisfactory answers, then I will see to it that you’re yanked from Anvil Dark and sold off to some poor schlub of a writer frantically trying to crank out fiction for their adoring masses. Are we clear on this?”

“Very.”

“Good. Now, first question. Why are the Ixtan resurgent after fifty years of silence?”

“They’re not. Or they’re not doing it on their own, at least. The Ixtan weren’t really a stand-alone empire even when your grandfather put them in their place. They were beholden to other interests.”

“Just to be clear, this is a follow-up question to what you just said, not my second question. Who?

What other interests?”

“At the time, they were called the Free Space Commercial Cartel. Today, they’re known as the—”

“Equal Grasp.”

“If you’re going to answer your own questions, then you don’t really need me here for this, do you?”

“Fine. Leave.”

“Hah, you’re a hoot.”

“Then don’t leave, and just go on,” I said. “The Equal Grasp is a convenient name for something that is hardly equal but certainly has a grasp. And they also have a unique worldview. See, most people consider crime to be an event, or a series of them. These guys consider crime to be a product, if that makes sense.”

“It does, actually. It’s a twisted way of looking at it, but I can certainly see it. Now, who is the Equal Grasp, exactly?

Or the Free Space-whatever before them?

Because the drones I’ve met who claim to be part of it are clearly nothing more than mouthpieces. Who’s really running their show, making this product they call crime?”

“Ah, that’s a good question. Seriously, it is, and I honestly don’t really know. But if I had to make an educated guess, I’d say it’s the old guard among criminals.”

“The old guard?

What does that mean?”

“See, most criminals are amateurs. They’re in it for the money, they’re in it for the infamy, they’re in it for their immediate needs, wants, desires, and perversions. Pfft. Amateurs, like I said. The old guard, the ones really running the show—and I don’t just mean inside the Equal Grasp—they’re in it for the power, the control that power gives them.”

“Go on.”

“See, Van—may I call you Van?”

“Sure, why not.”

“Okay. See, Van, money and power aren’t ends in themselves. They’re just means to an end. That’s the fundamental truth the old guard knows. I’ve sat here and watched you organics come and go, and one thing has stuck out. At your core, what you really all care about—the only thing you really care about—is control. You want to have control of the world around you, to shape it to whatever version of it best fits you. You want to make your reality as comfortable and comfort ing as possible. Some of you place your favorite knickknacks just so, and make sure all your accent colors match. And some of you build vast criminal enterprises to try and control society as a whole. It’s the same thing, really.”

“Wow, you’re the single most cynical item of furniture I’ve ever met. But you’re also making sense. Keep doing that.”

“Well, these people, this old guard, the powers behind the Equal Grasp

—they want to exert their own version of control. But that version is something new. Something bigger and deeper than we’ve ever seen before. Until this gang came along, even what was then the old guard put their effort into manipulating markets, creating monopolies, blackmailing, bribing, and extorting people to do what they want.”

“The classics, yeah,” I said, nodding as my own thoughts picked up the thread. “But then something changed. This new old guard wants to be able to directly control people—to actually dictate their behavior. Push button A and person X scratches their butt, push button B and X goes on a murder spree.”

“You got it. The hard stop on any strongman, warlord, or dictator is that they have to maintain the loyalty of their followers. Whether it’s paying them big bucks, threatening to kill their families, or promising a sweet, sweet afterlife full of—I don’t know what you organics are into—they have to put a lot of time and effort into keeping their loyal minions loyal. But what if that hard stop didn’t exist?

What if the warlord doesn’t have to question the dedication of his troops, or the dictator the loyalty of his people, because they’re incapable of being anything but?”

“Yeah. Holy shit. A hive mind, except they run it.”

“That would be a sort of paradise, wouldn’t it?

Ultimate control. The only shots they couldn’t call would be, oh, supernova explosions and gamma-ray bursts and other such natural stuff. And trust me, their next project would be finding a way to control those, too.”

“Make themselves gods, you mean.”

“Isn’t that really what it’s all about?

Every criminal kingpin, every politician, every general, every business magnate—they’re all taking those first steps toward divinity.”

I took a slow breath. For something that could have come in pieces from Ikea, Candler was pretty damned insightful. It was a dark, cynical insight, but I supposed that decades doing nothing but holding up a blotter could do that to you. “Okay, enough of the horrifying big picture. They might be out there trying to change people, but I’m not. I can’t.”

“Good call. That makes you the sixth Peacemaker, in my experience, to ever actually realize that.”

“Who are the other five?”

“Groshenko and your grandfather were two of them. As for the other three—hell, let me keep a few secrets, Van.”

Despite Perry’s problematic history with Candler, I had to admit that I was coming to like the guy. “Okay, fine. Let’s get more practical. So, my second question. The Ixtan, or the Equal Grasp, or whoever the hell is out there trying to style themselves the puppet master of everything, have got to have eyes and ears where we don’t want them.”

“Oh, absolutely. The rot goes deep.”

“To the core, yeah. So, are there any agents of the—I’m just going to go with the term ‘Equal Grasp’ from now on, to keep it simple. Do they have any agents here, on Anvil Dark?”

“What makes you think I could possibly know that?”

“Well, for one, the fact that your immediate answer wasn’t no.”

“You’re good.”

“Yes, I am. But I’m also impatient. Remember what I said about keeping secrets, Candler?

Oh—and here’s a subsidiary question, before you answer the one I just asked. Are you an agent of the Equal Grasp?

Because, if you are, and you admit it here and now, we’ll work something out. But if you are and you don’t tell me, and I find out, then I will personally chop you up for firewood and burn you in Lunzy’s fireplace aboard her ship.”

“Ouch, message received. No, Van, I am not an agent of the Equal Grasp. That is the truth. I have been given certain incentives to look the other way at times—”

“A practice that stops now, and for which you’re going to atone by revealing all the things you’ve overlooked.”

“But—”

“Uh, no buts here, Candler. This isn’t a negotiation. Given that the Equal Grasp now seems like far more of a threat to my homeworld than it did a few minutes ago, I’d be more than happy to rip out your memory archives and pick through them bit by bit to learn what you know that way.”

“Again, ouch. Okay, I’ll make you a list—but, seriously, it’s almost entirely trivial bullshit. A Peacemaker brings me some breathtaking imagery

of a newly discovered gas giant, and I reduce the Guild’s cut of the next ship they seize. I mean, are you really gonna wrap yourself up in knots over that?”

I actually smiled at that, a little ruefully. Frankly, Candler’s lot in life sucked. He craved new experiences, because what else could have any meaning for him?

So I shook my head. “Nope, don’t give a shit whatsoever. Now, tell me about the Equal Grasp here on Anvil Dark.”

“I was given a complete set of ancient archives of some long-dead aquatic race in return for not paying attention to this guy,” Candler said, a holo image appearing in the air over him. It showed a shifty alien, another Gajur, in coveralls. He was working the intake desk at a large cargo bay I recognized. It was on the third level of Anvil Dark’s outer ring, a cargo bay specifically intended to handle items of human affiliation. A human cold remedy or skin cream might be an allergen, even a toxin to, say, a Nesit, so such goods were kept carefully apart. There were a bunch of such cargo bays, each designated for a different species. Which, now that I thought of it, made it kind of ironic that this guy was an alien, but whatever. We also managed to catch him in the commission of an offense. Turning pointedly away with a furtive glance, the Gajur missed a Yonnox and a b-suited Leonide slipping grav-float goods right past the desk. I swore. “Any goods headed for Earth are going to be routed through that bay,” I said. “Yup. Anything that has to pass through Guild inspection, anyway, per the terms of the Writ of Cordon you managed to get set up around Earth,”

Candler replied. “Okay, Candler. I’m satisfied—or I will be when you send me that list of all of the infractions you’ve committed. As long as none of them are too egregious, I’ll just accidentally delete it. But if you forget to include any—”

“Yeah, yeah, firewood, Lunzy’s ship, I know.”

“And… thank you.”

A pause. When Candler finally spoke, his tone had softened. “That’s the first time a Peacemaker has said that to me in the last eighty-seven interactions. I appreciate it, Van. I really do.”

I nodded, then turned and opened the door. Perry looked up at me. “Did you get what you wanted?

Please tell me you didn’t, and that Candler’s about to be sold off as used furniture.”

“Sorry, bird. He was actually quite helpful.”

“Damn.”

“Anyway, bird, summon the gang to the human cargo bay—wow, that sounds really bad. The bay where human cargo is—nope, that doesn’t sound any better—”

“I get it, Van. Bay three, level three, outer ring.”

“Yeah, that. And get every access point to that bay sealed off.”

Perry had already started issuing instructions, when Funboy came on the comm. “Will there be violence?

I’m in the middle of a manicure.”

I rolled my eyes. “Wear gloves, and we’ll see if old-fashioned intimidation can handle this without the need for bloodshed.”

“Good news. They will sell me protective gloves here at the spa. I’ve taken the liberty of billing it to the ship.”

“The spa?

Where the hell are you?”

“In a new and very welcome business venture set up on the main concourse, near The Black Hole. An oasis for weary Peacemakers to slough off the stress of their jobs through facials, mani-pedis, mud baths—”

“Oh, for—pull the cucumber slices off your eyes, switch your robe for a b-suit, and get to the damned bay.”

Candler spoke up behind me. “You know, I was going to ask you about payment, but… I see you’re busy.”

I tossed a glance back at him as I left with Perry. “You have no idea.”

25

I TOLD Perry to get everything sealed off quietly. Our target might be the Gajur Candler had highlighted, but he might have accomplices, or there may be evidence he could damage or destroy if he got spooked. On the way to the bay, Perry found the Gajur’s personnel record and gave me the highlights. “His name is Arkos Thraxitin, middle-aged by Gajur standards, employed by the Guild as a cargo handler for nearly five standard years, promoted to bay overseer just under a year ago. His record is… pretty much what you’d expect for a low-ranking cargo handler. The single biggest blot on his record was missing a shift two years ago because he was late getting back to Anvil Dark from a trip home.”

Perry’s reference to home made me think about my one trip to the Gajur homeworld to follow up on the family of a corrupt Master. Huge swaths of the Gajur population lived in abject, crowded poverty, thanks to a high birthrate that wasn’t matched by growth in things like employment, housing, or infrastructure. Coming from circumstances like that could definitely push people to do desperate things. “Speaking of back home, what about his family?” I asked as we finally exited the Labyrinth and reentered the curving sprawl of the main concourse. “Not much to tell. We’ve got a next of kin, who’s his… sister. She lives on Gajur Prime. Judging from her contact information, it’s not one of the nicer parts of Gajur Prime, either,” Perry replied. “Bingo. There it is.”

“A motive to take bribes?”

I sighed at the dreary reality of it, the fact that most crimes arose from drab mundanity, not the machinations of criminal masterminds. “Yeah, all it takes is one sick nephew who needs otherwise unaffordable treatments, or a brother-in-law with gambling debts.”

“Okay, I got the AI who runs the show down there to quietly seal off strategic access points. He’s put up an alert that there’s a suspected air leak, and crews are on the way.”

I glanced sharply at him. “In what way does telling everyone it’s a suspected air leak constitute doing things quietly?

Last time I checked, blind panic doesn’t tend to be very quiet.”

“You don’t spend much time on Anvil Dark, do you?

There are suspected air leaks all the time. Some of it might even involve leaking air.”

“Uh—boy, crying wolf, ring any bells?

Isn’t that just setting the stage for a disaster when there really is a serious air leak and no one takes it seriously?”

“Probably, yeah.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

“I don’t breathe, Van. And it’s not like I can enforce changes to Guild policy when it comes to Anvil Dark. That would take, oh, say, the authority of a Master.” He glanced at me sidelong as he sailed past, heading for his next perch a few meters ahead. I ignored him—not a subject I really wanted to get into right now—and headed down two levels of stairs, then turned to follow another wide avenue of a curving corridor. This one was almost as wide as the main concourse two levels above, but it was mostly free of pedestrian traffic. Instead, people on foot were confined to walkways along the inner and outer bulkheads, with the central part reserved for robotic haulers carrying loads of cargo between bays. You could cross from one walkway to the other, but you had to be quick and nimble about it, like crossing a city street at rush hour. I saw the crew waiting just ahead. Netty-P had stayed with Paxomar and Gabby on the Fafnir, but everyone else was present, b-suited, and armed. Icky had her hammer slung casually over one shoulder. She pointed at a closed hatchway as I joined them. “Says there’s an air leak in there. That got something to do with whatever’s going on?”

“In a way, yeah,” I said, then quickly briefed them on the situation. Rab looked doubtful. “We’ve got an awful lot of firepower here, Van, to arrest one unarmed Gajur in coveralls. Are you expecting something more, um, exciting?”

“No idea. And that’s the problem. So, while Icky and I make the arrest, the rest of you stay back and keep an eye out for—I don’t know, armed bots erupting from cargo containers or something,” I said. Torina gave me a flat smile. “Well, there’s something it never even occurred to me to worry about until now. Thanks for that.”

“I have an imagination. Anyway, forewarned is forearmed, right?”

Perry contacted his AI friend and unsealed the door. It opened, revealing the face of a pissed-off pair, a Nesit and a Yonnox. Both immediately started bitching about the door being sealed because of a, quote, ‘bullshit air leak ’ that was keeping them from their break. The Yonnox gave me and my team the once-over and offered a surly, knowing nod. “Yeah, it was you, wasn’t it?

Got some bullshit little operation going, and it costs me my coffee break—”

I pushed past him. “Yonnox don’t drink coffee.” Which was true, it was mildly toxic to them, a factoid I’d picked up during my travels around known space. “Just a figure of speech!” he called after me, then loosed a curse that followed us up the corridor. Icky turned and, walking backward, replied with four simultaneous and identical hand gestures. “No one gives the finger like Wu’tzur give the finger,” Perry said. We reached the cargo bay in question. Its door hadn’t been sealed, since that risked giving away the show. I hit the door control, and it rolled open. We strode in, Icky and me straight toward our Gajur target, the others fanning out to cover the rest of the bay. Perry kept watch in the corridor. I’d barely taken two paces before the Gajur saw me. He stiffened, his expression flicking to that of someone who’d just realized they’d been caught. That, as much as anything, told me that this guy was no professional. Like Steve, the former head of the Science Department who’d fallen in with the bad guys, he was a desperate person who’d turned to desperate ways to solve his problems. It suggested a softer touch, which I immediately offered in the form of a bland smile. “Arkos Thraxitin?”

He nodded, once, quickly. I maintained a smile. “Good. I have a few questions.”

“Wh—what can I, uh, help you with, Peacemaker?” he replied, his voice practically warbling with sudden fear. Yeah, this guy definitely wasn’t a criminal kingpin. However, he was a criminal, so even if I felt a little bad for him, I made myself ruthlessly exploit his unease. “Well, for a start, you can tell me why, about fifteen minutes ago, you turned a blind eye to a load of cargo being wheeled past you by a Yonnox and a Leonide.”

“I—uh—it—” He shifted restlessly from foot to foot. “I just—it was busy—”

I shook my head. “No, it wasn’t. See, I know that because I was watching you. We’ve been watching you for a while now.”

His eyes went wide and bright, the Gajur version of incipient panic. I raised a hand and kept smiling. “Look, this doesn’t have to be difficult. You answer my questions and—”

“Ghost Federation knocking on the door. Here for the goods,” a tinny voice said from a comm unit clipped to Thraxitin’s belt. He winced, cursed softly, then closed his eyes. “Who’s that?” I asked him. “It’s—they’re, uh—”

Again, I held up a hand. “Never mind. Netty-P, any unusual traffic en route to Anvil Dark?”

She replied over my comm. “Let me check the station’s scanner feed—

and there are four ships inbound. Two Peacemakers, one ship carrying an envoy from the Eridani Federation and broadcasting diplomatic credentials, and one cargo ship.”

“Tell me about the last one.”

“Class 9, standard hull design, standard armament—oh, and a spoofed transponder. It’s broadcasting data for a class 9 cargo hauler out of Tau Ceti, which, as it happens, is showing in the Guild shipping database as having been seized on behalf of The Quiet Room for unpaid loans about a week ago.”

“Okay. Tell the appropriate people to stop and seize that ship. It’s currently inbound on one hell of a ballsy mission to pick up some illicit cargo.”

“Illicit cargo?

From Anvil Dark?

Really?”

“Told you it was ballsy.”

“On it.”

I turned back to Thraxitin. “Okay, so here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to show me which cargo that ship was planning on—”

A door at the other end of the bay abruptly opened, admitting a contingent of Guild security personnel and cutting me off. I identified their leader, a human Sergeant, and waved him off. “That’s okay, folks. We’ve got this under control,” I said. The Sergeant gave me a hard look. “Our jurisdiction, Peacemaker. You can stand down. We’ll take this man into custody,” he said, jerking his head toward Thraxitin. As he did, three things struck me, more or less simultaneously. First, there were seven or eight security personnel behind the Sergeant, all with drawn weapons—which was a pretty damned massive reaction, on short notice, and to what should be a relatively minor incident. Second, as he spoke, the Sergeant’s eyes never left me, even when he referred to this man. And third, Thraxitin’s manner changed from simple fear to outright, pants-shitting terror. He looked desperate to say something, his eyes pleading in my direction, but he stayed quiet. I rested my hand on The Drop. “That’s okay, Sergeant. My crew and I have this.”

As soon as I said it and touched my weapon, my crew tensed and made themselves ready. The problem was that, if all of these security people were actually bad guys, we were heavily outgunned. Worse, if some of them weren’t bad guys and were just doing their jobs, they might suddenly get caught up in a firefight that could get them hurt or killed. And even worse, a firefight would just be a handy excuse to kill Thraxitin, so that whatever he knew died with him. That was the plan anyway, I was sure. The Sergeant gave me a hard look. “This is an internal security matter, Peacemaker. We’ll take it from here.”

Perry spoke in my ear bug. Van, that security detachment is legit—it was dispatched about five minutes ago. But it was under the command of a corporal, and it was five personnel in total. I scanned the security detachment and saw the corporal. He looked a little confused. No doubt. On his way here, he and his detachment had

obviously been joined by this sergeant and four of his subordinates. He’d dutifully turned command over to the more senior officer but was probably having second thoughts. Unfortunately, that meant that he and four of his subordinates were probably clean, but I had no way of knowing who was who. Fine. I had to get control of this, and do it decisively. So I puffed up a little. “Sergeant, I wasn’t asking your permission, because I don’t need it. This is my case, my jurisdiction, and this is my suspect. Now, you have a choice. You can stand down and leave this to me or—” I shrugged. “Actually, that’s it. That’s your only choice.”

“Peacemaker—”

I held up a finger. “Let me add to that. Peacemaker who outranks you—

by a lot.”

My gaze locked on the sergeant’s. I’d know in another few heartbeats if he was going to quietly give in, or if this was going to get very, very ugly. And there it was. The subtle shift in his gaze and body language that gave me my answer—very, very ugly it was. Shit, I thought, followed by, Somebody must be paying this guy well, or they have something really damning on him. Even as my fingers started to flex toward The Drop—

“Hi, kids. What’s all this unresolved tension in the air?” a new voice said. Everyone glanced that way. It was B. With her was Gabriella Santorelli, Lunzy, and Lucky. They all had drawn weapons—B’s wasn’t far off Rab’s Big-Ass Gun in size and menace. As soon as they’d drawn the attention of the security detachment, I yanked out The Drop, while the rest of my crew pulled and aimed their own weapons. Just like that, it was the bad guys who were suddenly and grossly outgunned. “This kinda feels like one of those old westerns, a big tense standoff with everyone watching everyone else to make the first move—but with more aliens,” I said, smiling in relief. “We’re not aliens. You are,” the Sergeant spat. It was a stupid thing to say, given that everyone was alien to somebody else, but it also rang with sudden desperation. It was the sound of an animal that had just realized it was cornered, and was now faced with a choice between fight or flight. B waggled her antennae. “I might be an alien to you, but I’m adorable. I’m also GKU, which means I’m kind of wild and crazy, and I have my weapon here pointed straight at the bodily bits your kind uses for fun. So, before I get testy, lower… your… weapons. Now.”

B finished with a hard menace I’d never heard from her before. It was like listening to Clint Eastwood asking a punk how many rounds he’d fired. I saw the sergeant’s lips twitch, then he snarled and raised his weapon at

—

Someone, something, I wasn’t sure who, because he jerked away as if stung from a sudden, sharp flurry of gunfire. It only lasted a second, the echoes rattling around the cargo bay. I wasn’t even sure who’d shot at him

— I hadn’t, and because of how I’d been facing, I knew Icky hadn’t—but whoever had had managed to wing the Sergeant and absolutely eviscerate one of his buddies, turning the area into an abattoir. I kicked the sergeant’s weapon away and pointed my own at the bridge of his nose—an act that had the unique effect of making him piss his pants and stay very, very still. In the stunned silence, I immediately turned to the Corporal. “I want you to identify the people you brought with you, and those the sergeant—

ex-sergeant, now—added when he joined you and took command. And I want the rest of you to put your weapons on the deck. Anyone still holding a weapon five seconds from now will be considered hostile and”—I nodded at what used to be the security person—“dealt with. Clear?”

Everyone complied. We separated the guards who’d accompanied the Sergeant from the others to do some further investigating, find out who they were and if they were dirty, too. I then turned to Thraxitin, who looked like he was about to be violently ill. “Well, that worked out well, don’t you think?” I asked him. His eyes were riveted on the bloody remains of the soldier. “How is—is that—things working out well?” he hissed. I shrugged. “Because if they had their way, that would have been you.”

Thraxitin opened his mouth, closed it again, and then he was violently ill. Definitely not a hardened criminal. While Funboy took Thraxitin into custody, I turned to Icky. “Hey, how come you didn’t shoot?

It’s not like you to be conservative in that sort of situation.”

“Sorry, boss. Was f—” She hiccupped. “—fighting hiccups.” She hiccupped, grinned, hiccupped again. “Think I—” Hiccup. “—ate too f—”

Hiccup. “—fast.” One of the Sergeant’s security people made a sudden and unwise move, and was kicked, hard, by one of Icky’s massive feet. She barely glanced at him as she did. I pointed at her chin, which was smeared with—something that looked like sauce. “Yeah, I think you did eat a little too fast, big girl.”

“Won’t happen a—” Hiccup. “—again.”

I shook my head. “We both know that’s a lie, big girl.”

26

I HANDLED the interrogations of Thraxitin and the security sergeant myself, with Perry for his legal expertise and Icky for her towering, glowering menace. Gabby joined us late, coming from another little job I’d given her. The sergeant tried to hold out and demand a deal for what he knew. After a few minutes of that, I told the station security personnel standing by to take him to a cell. “I don’t have the time for playing poker with a man holding no pairs, no matching suits, with his cards face up when I get to control what he draws next,” I snapped, nodding to the two guards. They looked positively delighted to be running the sergeant off to a cell. Turned out the man wasn’t very popular in the Anvil Dark security community. “Note to self—when trying to be low-key corrupt inside a law enforcement organization, don’t be an asshole and piss off said organization,” as Perry put it. The sergeant abruptly stopped as he was being led—and by led, I mean bodily pulled—out of the interrogation room. “Alright, fine. I was paid by a guy named Marley to make sure that damned Gajur didn’t get himself outed

—like he did, the asshole, moron—and to take care of him if he did. And to keep security’s eyes off that cargo bay as much as I could.”

I motioned for the other two guards, who’d been progressively yanking the sergeant toward the door, to stop. “This Marley have a first name?”

“Sorry, we didn’t develop a deep emotional relationship,” the sergeant snapped back at me, but the look on my face must have convinced him to

simmer down. “All I know is that he was with a Yonnox, Les—ter?

No. Les

—something, anyway—”

“Lesthrix?” Perry asked. The Sergeant nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that was it.” He looked back at me. “So do I get any consideration here?

I did spill what I know—”

“Yes, you gave us the minimal possible information after a protracted and really, really annoying interrogation that’s kept me away from other really, really important things I should be doing.” I glanced at the two security guards. “Make sure he gets an extra cookie for dessert tonight.”

The sergeant flung a string of curses at me as they dragged him away, but I just smiled. “I was in the US Army, my friend. I was called much worse by much better sergeants than you.”

When he was gone, I turned to the others. “Well?”

“Lesthrix and Jacob Marley.” Perry snickered. “Ah, that never gets old.”

He raised his wings menacingly and made his voice into a creepy echo. “Icky, you’ll be visited by three ghosts tonight, of noodles past, present, and FU-ture—”

“Van, I think the bird’s broken again. Seriously, can I finally take him apart and look for that loose screw?” Icky grumped back at him. I scowled at them both. “Yeah, Lesthrix and Marley. Last time we saw them, at the Milon Estate on Helso, they were representing that small, unassuming trade consortium called the Equal Grasp.”

“Van, I spoke to Thraxitin, like you asked me to,” Gabby said. “He’s a really nice guy, by the way. Has a really sick nephew back on the Gajur homeworld. He’s trying so hard to get bonds together to pay for the treatments he needs—”

“Wait—this nephew, his name isn’t Tiny Tim, is it?” Perry asked. Gabby gave him a blank, tardigrade-inous stare. “I don’t think so, why?”

“No reason.”

Gabby looked at Icky. “I think you’re right. He’s broken.”

Icky nodded at me. “See!

Even Gabby thinks that, and she’s an expert in minds and stuff—”

“Any way, Gabby, you were saying?” I said, pointedly ignoring Icky and Perry both. “That Thraxitin is a really nice fellow, with a sick—”

“Got that part, yeah. Fast-forward to the good stuff, please.”

“He’s not a bad person. Just desperate. I was able to get him to open up after just a few minutes. Anyway, he said he was paid by the Equal Grasp, too, mainly to turn a blind eye and not record some shipments being routed through that cargo bay.”

“How’s that even possible, though?” Icky asked. “Isn’t every box, bag, and crate tagged so it can be scanned automatically?”

“Oh. He says he figured out how to bypass all that. Something about switching tags, or switching them off, or—”

I looked at Perry, who nodded. “On it, boss. I’ll let the materials-handling people know they’ve got a hole in their system.”

“In the end, though, Thraxitin said he really just did what he was told, in exchange for the money. He was expecting to get new instructions from whoever’s aboard that ship that Netty-P got seized, in fact,” Gabby went on. “Van, I think we should try to give Thraxitin some benefit of the doubt, here.”

I sighed. “He broke the law, Gabby. He abused a position of trust and deliberately circumvented safeguards meant to prevent it. And, for all we know, some of the stuff he let get moved through here might have been weapons. If so, then he might not have pulled the triggers, but he sure helped put them in the hands of those that did.”

“I know. It’s just that his case is—it’s so sad.”

I sighed again and nodded. “Yeah, it is. I’ll put in a word with the Judge, see if he can get some leniency in sentencing—but only if he’s willing to sit down with a Scribe and disclose every last thing he knows. You can tell him that.”

Gabby nodded. “That’s more than fair. I’ll go tell him now,” she said, and flounced merrily off—which looked really odd in a man-sized, anthropomorphic water-bear-like thing. I stood. “Okay, I’m done with these guys. Any more effort is going to be a waste of time since these are the lowest of the rungs on the ladder. I’m going aboard that ship.” I called Netty-P as we left the interrogation room to let her know we were coming. She replied right away. “Boss, you’re going to love this.”

“What’s the short version?” I asked her. “This ship was carrying three distinct types of cargo hidden among legitimate stuff—mainly provisions bound for Anvil Dark. We found EM

weapons that were designed for, as far as I can tell, disabling WaterSails

and similar tech. They seem to be specifically tuned to do it, probably from a standoff range of a couple hundred meters.”

“Charming. What else?”

“There are more conventional types of weapons, but they’ve been placed into fake receivers to make them look like Earthly weapons. Think an M16A2 or an AK-47, but it’s actually a slug rifle firing depleted uranium darts.”

That caught me, made me miss a step. There was only one reason to design weapons intended to look like conventional Earthly ones—to use them on Earth. I felt the scowl tightening my face. “Even more charming. Let’s finish the trifecta. What’s the third thing?”

“Well, just in case destroying someone’s water supply or slipping advanced weaponry onto Earth in disguise wasn’t cuddly enough—how about medical supplies that are actually powerful explosives with AI detonators?”

I put some of my old Army sergeants’ language to use for my next few paces. Icky shook her head. “And they’ve got the balls to rout this stuff through Anvil Dark, too.”

“Actually, a pretty smart play,” Perry replied, sailing past us and landing on the deck just ahead. “Stuff moving through here just doesn’t get the scrutiny it should—and will, from now on—because of that very fact. Who would be crazy enough to try it?”

“Hidden in plain sight,” I snapped, then turned back to the comm. “Okay. Do we know where this stuff was meant to go from here?”

“We do. Pont Alus Kyr.”

I stopped. Perry and Icky said nothing to me, just waited. Finally, when I no longer felt like flying to Pont Alus Kyr and bombarding the place into scrap, I started walking again. As I did, I nodded to myself. Too many things had converged on Pont Alus Kyr. It was time for a reckoning. “Van, there’s one more thing,” Netty-P said. “Great. Lay it on me.”

“According to the crew, who are sitting here in handcuffs being watched by Torina, Funboy, Rab, and some really grouchy-looking security guards, this is the second load like this they’ve moved—”

“Of course it is. Shit. Netty-P, open a comm channel to Pont Alus Kyr, now.”

“Did you want to talk to anyone in particular?”

“I don’t care. I don’t care if we start with a janitor. Because no matter where we start, we won’t be stopping until we’ve got to the very top.”

WE SET course for Pont Alus Kyr, but I wasn’t done with Anvil Dark. I wrote a painfully polite email laden with hidden anger—I was channeling my British genetic heritage—to Alic, who read it almost immediately and opened a comm. “Van, I’m just reading the summary—”

“Of the bullshit that went on down in that cargo bay?

With yet more corrupt Anvil Dark security leading the way?”

Alic tilted his bulbous head at me. “I gather your issue is with the station’s security as much as it is the miscreants—”

“No, no, not at all, Alic. I have more issue with security. The bad guys are just doing what bad guys do—bad guy stuff. Anvil Dark security is supposed to be the good guys. But we’ve had so many instances of them being on the bad guys’ side that it’s getting embarrassing.”

“There have been a few incidents, yes—”

“Sorry to keep cutting you off, Alic, but there have been more a than a few. Anvil Dark security has been implicated in at least three cases that involve me, and that’s not counting Steve, the former head of the science shop being compromised and a succession of dirty Masters. I had Perry check, and there are a half-dozen more incidents involving not just security failures, but outright corruption in their ranks. It’s so bad that this latest group of assholes set up a standing smuggling operation in that cargo bay.”

Alic gave a slow nod. “What do you suggest?”

“I know the word purge is kind of loaded, so let’s call it a review of security. Find a core group of security people and Peacemakers you trust and have them vet the shit out of everyone else. Bring a very obvious, very public hammer down on anyone they turn up as dirty. And tighten the hell out of every security policy and procedure on the books. I want heads to roll. I want these bastards running scared, and I want to convince anyone on the fence that corruption is a road that leads to me. I’m done being reasonable.”

“Van, I think one of the reasons Anvil Dark works as well as it does is that it’s a relatively collegial place. If we get too heavy-handed, we risk doing more harm than good.”

I leaned forward. “Alic, that ship we just seized had explosive devices rigged to look like medical gear. It had advanced weapons disguised as the lower-tech types you’d expect to find on Earth—you know, my home planet?”

“Van—”

“How would you feel if it were your home planet, Alic?”

No answer. I pressed on. Alic was a friend, but this was bigger than friendship. “What if next time it’s bioweapons?

Or dangerous nanotech?

What if it’s Calamity?

The things that are getting past these tainted guards and onto Anvil Dark are already scary, Alic. If something packed in some smuggled container gets loose, it might render the whole freakin’ station uninhabitable or just destroy it outright. Won’t be very collegial then, will it?”

Alic stared back at me, then nodded. “Alright. You’ve made your case most effectively. We were going to undertake a security review anyway, but I’ll see to it that it’s intensified. I still think we risk turning Anvil Dark into a foreboding bunker, and not just physically, but in terms of mentality, too.”

“It’s called Anvil Dark, Alic, not Happy Fun Police Hangout. It should be foreboding. It should be the last place the creeps and criminals want to come anywhere near—not a place for them to set up shop.”

We signed off. I felt bad afterward for unloading on Alic, but only a little. And, in any case, it paled in comparison to what I had planned for Pont Alus Kyr. WE TWISTED INTO ZETA HERCULIS, home system of Pont Alus Kyr. B was already there, waiting. I’d put out urgent calls for her, Lunzy, Lucky, and Jamberac—three Peacemakers I trusted implicitly—to join us there. But they were only part of the show of force I had planned. The rest was on the way. “Van, we’ve got an incoming call from the station’s traffic control AI,”

Netty-P said. “It’s routine stuff, establishing an inbound course,

deconflicting traffic, that sort of thing. But you said you wanted to be notified of all comms from Pont Alus Kyr—”

“I did. Ignore it. Just start broadcasting our full Peacemaker credentials and set an inbound course, your discretion.”

“That would be violation of traffic control regs—”

“Which I can authorize under exigent circumstances—a crime in progress.”

Netty-P focused her imager on me. “Is there a crime in process?”

“Oh yes.”

“Alrighty then. Sending the traffic control AI to the friend zone.”

“And contact B. Active scanners, full power, focused on that station. I want to know if a bolt comes loose and starts drifting away. Nothing arrives or departs without us knowing about it.”

“Got it.”

I turned to Perry. “Bird, give me the summary history of this place. In particular, who built Pont Alus Kyr?”

“Construction of Pont Alus Kyr was announced one hundred and eighty-five standard years ago, by a consortium composed of universities, research institutes, and corporations called United Life Sciences. The stated purpose was to build a secure facility where research into things like dangerous communicable diseases and bioengineered microorganisms could be conducted.”

Torina nodded from the co-pilot’s seat. “Makes sense. Isolate all the stuff that could possibly get loose and wreak havoc in a place it can’t really escape from.”

I shrugged. “Sure. But that changed. Somewhere along the way, their whole thrust of research switched from that to looking at the integration of biological and artificial life and components thereof.”

B was listening in on the comm and now spoke up. “That’s not really a stretch, though, Van. Some of the most promising research into disease mitigation, life extension, and the like involves sticking organic and inorganic things together. Think an adaptive immune system made of nano-scale molecular machines that can identify and destroy disease pathogens before they can even get a foothold in the body.”

“Sure, fine, I agree. It sounds wonderful. But there’s clearly more than that going on. Bird, what happened to United Life Sciences?

Do they still run the show here?”

“No. ULS went offline forty-six standard years ago. By then, more than half of the original participants in the consortium had pulled out for one reason or another, so ULS was dissolved, and Pont Alus Kyr established as its own corporate entity.”

“Million dollar question—why did these members jump ship from the consortium?

Do we know what any of those reasons were?”

“Nothing firm. We don’t have access to their inner deliberations, so all we’ve got is a smattering of stuff in the open media sources. The Ceti Bio-Institute said it had changed funding priorities. Vaxan University on Outward, in the Procyon system, shut down most of its bioscience programs and related research in favor of other fields. It’s all that sort of thing.”

“Were there any silent partners?” Torina asked. “Yes. There were three entities listed in the ULS incorporation charter only by numbers. They were probably military, or military-adjacent.”

I sniffed. “So one of them could have been BeneStar, then, or one of its subsidiaries.” I narrowed my eyes at the image of Pont Alus Kyr on the display. “This place might have started out with the best of intentions, but we know where roads paved with those often lead. And in this case”—I gave the image a slow nod—“I’m starting to think it was an expressway straight into the abyss.”

27

THE REMAINING guests to our party showed up—at least the ones who could. Lucky made it, but Lunzy was on leave, and Jamberac was off in some remote place that would require several twists to make it to Zeta Herculis. B

arrived, and so did K’losk, who’d been with her on some job they’d been doing together. The Iowa also made it, as did the newest addition to our little fleet. “And there she is,” I said, sitting back, crossing my arms, and eyeing the display. It showed a chunky, boxy ship, a one-time water carrier that my Fren-Okun shipping company had obtained. She’d been repurposed into a freighter, but she was a freighter with secrets. The first secret was that her bulky hull incorporated four bays each suited to hold a workboat. Two of them were being used as cargo space, but they now held two class 3 workboats, each outfitted with a laser battery and a mass driver, but otherwise stripped down to reduce their mass as much as possible. Her second secret was that part of her crew was Conoku—young but experienced Conoku pilots who could fly the nimble little workboats like fighters. In other words, she could be re-repurposed on short notice as an aircraft carrier—after a fashion. I smiled with pride at this newest slug of combat power added to our arsenal. She was still a work-in-progress—Rab wanted to add more defensive armament and some armor to the freighter herself,

and we still had to acquire two more workboats to arm and keep ready to load aboard her. But she was a thing of beauty, I thought, admiring her—

“Yup, there she is. The mighty Oblivious,” Perry said. I deflated a little and shot him a scowl. “Okay, we have got to rename her.”

Torina had cheekily registered her as the RCS Oblivious as a dig at the fact that I tended to neglect my inherited shipping company. She and Perry kept it chugging profitably away in the background while I mostly forgot about it. “Ooh, bad luck to rename a ship if she doesn’t change owners, Van,”

Netty-P countered. “That’s not just me, that’s just the nature of a cruel, uncaring universe.”

I swung my gaze on her, lifting a brow. “And now I’m working with a superstitious AI?”

“Not superstitious, just a little stitious. But—just a moment, yes—but now I’m hearing disembodied voices from the vooooooid—” she said, then smartened up. “Seriously, we’re getting comms across three channels from Pont Alus Kyr now, all of them frantic messages demanding to talk to you.”

I spent a few moments examining my fingernails and picked some lint off my tunic. Then I yawned and stretched. I could feel the others watching me, bemused and smirking. I finally turned back to Netty-P. “Put the bitchiest on, please.”

The comm exploded to life. “—the meaning of this—this—intrusive attempt to—!”

“This is Peacemaker Van Tudor. I’m broadcasting my credentials now. I am conducting an investigation of a serious crime and, under the terms of the Peacemaker Guild Charter, am exercising any and all jurisdiction under that charter to enter into a place implicated in said serious crime. So there, you—”

I caught myself. I’d been reading a script Perry had put onto the display, and had ended it with, so there, you whining biznitches. “Oops. Now how’d that get there?”

I turned back to the comm. “All ships currently in-system are to remain where they are, or cut their drives and coast until otherwise instructed. I will be coming aboard when I arrive to continue this investigation.”

“You can’t just barge in—”

“Yes, I can, and yes, I’m going to do just that. Any attempt to prevent it will be considered a hostile act and treated accordingly. Any ship that doesn’t conform to these instructions will likewise be treated as hostile.”

“So—what?

If we don’t just roll over, you’re going to destroy this station?

Kill everyone on it?”

“I’d rather not.”

“You—you—”

The comm feed cut out. “Okay, Netty-P, take us in,” I said. “We have no clearance to dock. None of their docking adapters are set to receive us.”

“Tell them to activate one, or we’ll cut our way in—in which case they might want to put on some spacesuits.”

Icky sniffed and shook her head. “Hope they have enough for everybody.”

THEY TRIED TO BE DEFIANT, even in the face of the combined might of our little fleet. Frankly, it wasn’t Pont Alus Kyr that had prompted me to bring all this firepower—the station was armed only for self-defense, and weakly, at that. It was the thought that someone on Pont Alus Kyr might try to call in help. Still, they refused to allow us to dock. “Torina, bring the mass driver online and take aim at that spherical module off to the right. Light it up like a Christmas parade with the fire control scanners.”

While she did that, I turned back to the comm. “This is Peacemaker Tudor. I’m going to give you a ten count to activate a docking adapter for us, and then I’m going to put a mass-driver round through that spherical ventral module of yours, off to my starboard side. If memory serves from my previous visits, it’s mostly storage space. Still, I’m sure you wouldn’t welcome having it suddenly decompressed.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“You obviously underestimate just how determined I am. So, ten.”

“That would be—”

“Nine.”

“—an act of war—”

“Eight.”

I continued counting, and the voice kept ranting back at us. At two, they finally caved. “Don’t shoot. You can use docking adapter six,” the voice snapped, its tone defeated but belligerent. Torina stood down the weapons, and we docked. Unsurprisingly, we were greeted by a large and rather hostile group of people, including several security guards with arms prominently displayed and a slender female Gajur I didn’t recognize. “I’m Gesath Trelix, Director of Pont Alus Kyr. Now, just what the hell is this all about?”

“What happened to the previous director?” I asked as my crew fanned out behind me. Everyone was b-suited and armed. Icky took particular delight in looming over the security guards, her bulk radiating cheerful menace. “Hey, fellas,” she said, grinning. They returned uneasy smiles and sidelong glances. “The previous director retired, and you didn’t answer my question,”

Trelix replied curtly. “No, I didn’t, did I?

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ll be searching this station. I’ll have additional Peacemaker personnel coming aboard shortly to assist.”

“You can’t just search wherever—”

“I can, and I will,” I snapped. “Now, you can have your personnel accompany us while we—”

“You can’t!

I won’t allow it!

Do you even have a writ?”

I looked Trelix squarely in her bulging eyes. “I don’t need a writ. These are exigent circumstances. We’ve had several shipments of an illegal nature

—in a couple of cases, a highly illegal nature—traced to here. And per the Peacemaker Guild Charter—”

“Article one, section two, paragraphs eight through eleven,” Perry said without hesitation. “—to whose jurisdiction you are subject—”

“Per the Pont Alus Kyr charter, chapter two, item two.”

“—we are empowered to search any place in which evidence is reasonably believed to be present, and to do it expediently to prevent it from being tampered with or destroyed.”

I leaned a little closer. “And just so we’re clear, Director—if it turns out evidence does get altered or destroyed while you’re standing here being obstructive, I will happily toss your ass into my holding cell, haul you back to Anvil Dark, and personally charge you with as many offenses as I think would apply. You will become my hobby. My mission. My sole focus.”

She blinked, literally and figuratively. With a petulant sniff and a dismissive wave of her hand, she stepped aside. “Fine. Search. You’ll find nothing but people whose vital and often life-saving research is being interrupted.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. Now then, are there any sections of this facility that are inaccessible to the people who normally work here”—I swung on the security guard I’d recognized as most senior

—“especially for reasons of so-called security?”

I was playing a hunch, one that caught him off guard, just as I’d intended. The guard blinked, stammered a bit, then said, “Just down on Level Four—” He cut himself off with a wince, realizing he’d just been played. I nodded. “Perfect. We’ll start there. Gabby, can you greet B, K’losk, and their people as they arrive?

It’s going to take us a few hours to search this place thoroughly, so I’d prefer not to have any delays.”

I QUESTIONED a human male guard in his thirties about closed-off sections in the station as we headed for Level Four. I had Icky and Funboy with me. Torina, Rab, and Perry formed another search team, heading for the other end of the station. We walked with the stride of people who had things to do and skulls to crack, clearing a path before us as others turned away or found something interesting to do in another direction. “And just to be clear, do not lie to me, be obstructive, or any other bullshit,” I said to the guard. “In case it isn’t obvious, I’ve got a serious thorn in my ass about this place, and I am not in a forgiving or forgetting mood.”

I could see his mind working for a moment, then coming to the conclusion he didn’t get paid enough to take a fall for Pont Alus Kyr. “There are closed sections all over this station—clean rooms, biohazard labs, that sort of thing. But the only section under a security seal is the one on Level Four.”

“And you have no idea what’s in it.”

He shook his head as we descended a flight of stairs. “Just that the space was contracted out to someone, and that we weren’t to allow anyone entry. Even the director has to get clearance from the contractor to go in there.”

“Just putting this on the table, but you are going to let me in there.”

He pressed his lips together. “I don’t—”

“What did I just say about being obstructive?”

“That contractor—they’re apparently paying a lot of money—”

“See this?

This is my I profoundly do not give a shit face. Remember it, because you’re going to see it every time you raise an objection.”

The man sighed and shrugged. We arrived at Level Four. It was a short walk to the sealed section, which was closed off behind a set of blast doors. A security guard was stationed outside it, a bored-looking Nesit who perked up and tried to look all on-the-job when he saw us. The guard with me waved a hand as we approached. “Open it up.”

The Nesit opened his mouth, but I caught his eye, and he just nodded. He tapped at a keypad beside the blast door, and it slid smoothly aside. We strode through. There were a half-dozen compartments of various sizes beyond it. Three of them were labs, all in a state of disarray. Things were knocked over, and there was even broken glassware on the deck. Funboy pointed at an empty table with an unconnected cable lying on it. “There was a device here of some sort. I detest guessing, but I believe it was removed with great haste and little care.”

Icky looked around and nodded. “Someone bailed in a hurry, boss. They’re on the run.”

I turned to the guards. “Well?”

The Nesit shrugged. “They have their own airlock in this section, down at the end of this corridor. There was a ship there until a few hours ago, only it left. But it came and went often enough I never paid much attention to it.”

Funboy looked around. “This suite, with enclosing blast doors and its own airlock, seems tailor made for suspect research.”

“Military, I heard,” the human guard said. “Apparently there’s been a lot of military research done here in the past.”

“Was that a military ship that was docked here?” Funboy asked. The Nesit guard shook his head. “No. Definitely not military. Civilian, about, uh—I don’t know, the size of a small freighter, maybe?”

I turned to the comm and explained the situation to Netty-P. “I want to do whatever we have to, whatever we can, to track down that ship. Dig into the Pont Alus Kyr traffic control archives, anything you have to. Crack any system. I assume full responsibility.”

“I’d happily do that, but I haven’t been given access to their archives—”

“Tell them if they don’t give you access immediately, I’ll find and yank out every computer and other piece of hardware I feel might be interesting, haul it all back to Anvil Dark, and crack it there. And then, I’ll seize every bank account or ship that’s even passed by this ghoulish hole.”

“Will do.”

I turned to the others, heat rising in my face. “Let’s finish searching this place, then we’ll go back for a little talk with the Director.”

Of the three remaining compartments, two were just storage and office space. The third, though, was a recovery room with someone lying in a bed. They were hooked up to several machines that were softly humming, blinking, and beeping around them. Frowning, I entered the room, Funboy and Icky right behind me. We stopped at the bedside and stared. It was a P’nosk—

No. It—

Icky hissed in a breath. “Van, that’s—that’s Zeno!”

I FLICKED my attention from the figure in the bed to B. She’d taken skin scrapings for DNA analysis and was fussing over her medical slate now, tapping at it, peering, tapping at it—

I couldn’t contain myself, as I bounced on the balls of my feet like a kid waiting on ice cream. This was Zeno. I could feel it. I wanted it to be Zeno. I wanted it all the way in my bones, a need to correct a mistake so grievous it haunted me day and night. Icky wanted it as well, her body almost vibrating with excitement. “Well?”

B held up a hand, then touched Icky and me in turn. “A moment. Okay?

Give me a moment.”

The new director came in, escorted by Lucky. I swung my gaze to her, straining to maintain some sense of professionalism. This was Zeno. I inhaled, exhaled, and drew myself up in a crisp stance. I spoke, my voice somehow even and clear. “I want to know everything you know about whoever contracted this space, and if you attempt to hide behind confidentiality, I’ll open this butcher shop up to hard vacuum to get what I want.” I smiled, but it wasn’t friendly. Lucky held up a hand. “Van, she’s already handed it over,” she said, offering up a data slate. Director Trelix glanced at it, then back at me. “The contract has been in place for nearly four years. The contractor was a consortium that we assumed to have military ties—”

“Assumed to have… military ties?

Did you verify?

Actually, did you do anything other than take their money?” I asked, my voice still reasonable. For the moment. “Due diligence is a thing, you scurrilous shits,” Torina growled. Her eyes blazed with fury, and I saw her right hand twitch as she fought not to grab her sidearm. Trelix was feeling froggy, and she shot a retort without hesitation. “So are budgets, and fixed costs, and a slew of other financial obligations. The revenue we realize from contracts like this one is the only reason Pont Alus Kyr isn’t another in a long list of abandoned research facilities. You think we’re scared of you?

Swinging your di—”

B cut in. “I have a result.”

We all turned to her, waiting. “It’s probably Zenophir,” B said. I stared. Blinked. “Probably?

What does ‘probably’ mean?”

“It means that while the DNA profile seems to be substantially hers, there are small but consistent variations in what’s often called the junk

DNA—the stuff that’s non-coding, that plays no role in what DNA normally does. It’s almost as though someone has put that DNA to use for something else. But what that something else could possibly be, I have no idea. And I’m sure as hell not going to figure it out with this.” She held up her slate. “That confirms that this is a physical body whose characteristics are based on Zenophir’s DNA. But is she actually… in there,” Funboy asked, looking at—Zeno. It was Zeno. I was stunned, though I shouldn’t have been. We’d seen others effectively brought back from the dead, hadn’t we?

People whose IDs we’d rescued from electronic slavery and had restored to physical bodies?

“The only way she could be is if Victor, the Body Thief, is involved in this somehow. He’s the one who scanned her… brain, or whatever. That makes him a major person of interest,” Torina said, staring down at Zeno. “I can answer that, I think.”

It was Perry. He sailed into the compartment, did a deft wing-over, and landed on a table with a clatter of alloy talons. “As soon as you guys said you’d found Zeno, I put in a call to Dregs and spoke to Victor. He says he’s got nothing to do with this and still has the scanned image he did of Zeno. He did, though, say that his little shop of horrors was broken into about three months ago. A few items were stolen, a couple of some value, the rest basically junk.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Someone trying to cover up what they were really after—Zeno’s scan.”

“So they were able to break into his shop and make a copy, just like that?

Is that even possible?” Gabby asked. “He said it is. Unlikely, sure, but still possible for someone with the resources and know-how to bypass his security, and the hardware necessary to clone the image.”

I turned back to Trelix. “Just who the hell was this consortium you mentioned?”

“They were called Applied Genomics,” Trelix replied. Lucky consulted the slate she was holding. “Their contact information puts them in the Tau Ceti system.” She sniffed. “Yeah, I’ve run across this place before. It’s a dead drop fronted by a supposedly legit consulting outfit. It’s used by the higher-priced sorts of criminal elements, so they can

pass information around without having to actually meet the people doing their dirty work.”

“And this place is still running?” Gabby asked. Lucky shrugged. “It’s too valuable to too many people with too much money to really take down—not without a bitter and really, really expensive legal fight. Besides, I suspect that the Guild, Unity, and major known space powers are getting intel from it. Sometimes it’s better to just let the bad guys do what they do and watch from afar.”

Perry, though, spoke up. “That might be a dead end, but I’ve managed to tease a little bit more out of Guild archives. Applied Genomics is obviously a front, registered by some numbered corporations that are also fronts. But here’s where it gets interesting. Two of the numbered members of the Applied Genomics consortium were also members of”—he made a drum-roll sound—“that’s right, you guessed it, United Life Sciences!”

“The people who built this place,” I said, nodding around us. “That’s right.”

My thoughts started to charge off in that direction, wanting to chase these people down and find out who the hell they were. I suspected we’d find them closely connected to the Equal Grasp. Hell, maybe it just was the Equal Grasp. But I caught myself and shook my head. “You know what?

There’s too much here to stand around in this compartment speculating on it. We’re going to have to do some detailed detective work—and we will. Right now, though, we’ve got a more pressing issue,” I said, turning back to Zeno. I looked at B. “Can we wake her up?”

“I’ve gone through everything she’s hooked up to, and it’s mostly just monitoring gear.” She pointed at one small box with a glowing display. “This is administering periodic doses of a sedative that’s keeping her under. If I shut it off and give her a mild stim shot, I should be able to wake her up in about—oh, fifteen or twenty minutes.”

She frowned, and her antennae waggled. “That’s assuming she actually has, you know, a conscious mind. All the lower autonomous functions are here, and there’s some higher level brain activity but—ah, hell, Van. There’s only one way to find out for sure if there’s actual cognition going on.”

I stared at Zeno, her face a blank mask that was somehow peaceful. Innocent. And young. “Do it. In the meantime, Director Trelix is going to

get one of her medical crash teams to come here and stand ready to assist. Isn’t that right, Director?”

She gave me a sour look. “It’s like you took the words right out of my mouth.”

28

I STOPPED in front of the woman, who was now sitting up on the bed. “Zeno?”

She smiled. “Hello, Van.”

Icky barged past me and enveloped Zeno in a four-armed hug that made her gasp. “Zeno, you’re back, you’re back—”

I reached out and pulled Icky’s arms away. “Not for long if you crush her under the weight of that Wu’tzur love, big girl.”

The others closed in. Torina gave Zeno a considerably less life-threatening hug. Rab did likewise, looked at her smiling, and said, “Good to see you, cousin.”

She smiled back at him, but confusion was plain on her face. She likewise gave Gabby a smile, but it was clear that Zeno had no idea who she was. She smiled fondly at Funboy, though. “It is pleasantly surprising to see you,” he said to her. “I would offer a hug, but—’

She gave a fleeting grin. “Germs.”

“Thank you for your understanding.”

Perry and Netty-P approached together. She put a hand on both of them and stroked the top of Perry’s head. With the greetings over, though, her smile faded, and she turned to me. “I suppose this is the part where you tell me what happened. How I got”—

she looked around—“here. I gather I’m on Pont Alus Kyr, but that’s really all I know.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Being on Dregs. Sitting in a chair while Victor the Body Thief scanned me.”

“Nothing since, huh?’

She gave a bit of a shuddering sigh. “No. It’s like that’s where I was when I fell asleep last night, and this morning I woke up here.”

“Been there, done that a few times,” Rab said, grinning. Zeno offered him a quick smile. “Rab, I haven’t seen you in months. How come—” she started, then stopped and turned back to me. “Months. Van, how long has it been?”

I took a breath. “Years.”

“Oh.”

She was silent for a moment. I glanced at Torina, who was already glancing at me. We both knew what was coming next. “What happened to me?

I notice there isn’t another me here with you guys, so—”

I took an even deeper breath. “Zeno, this is going to take some explaining.”

She gave me a look that was both apprehensive and resigned. She knew. “I’ve got the time.”

WE SPENT the next day at Pont Alus Kyr. We uncovered no overt signs of wrongdoing anywhere in its operations outside of the mysterious Allied Genomics contract, and that was a black box we were going to have to dig into separately. But I was determined to leave no stone unturned and spoke to Alic and Volffin about dispatching a full forensics team to continue the search in the sort of meticulous detail we probably needed. Director Trelix gave up being obstructive once it became clear that Allied Genomics had been up to no good pretty much right under her nose. She promised full cooperation and readily accepted all of the restrictions we placed on operations of the facility. “We’re going to leave a Peacemaker on station here. We’ll start with Lucky, but we’ll be rotating people in and out. They’ll be inspecting all ships coming to and leaving the station, no exceptions. The forensics team,

when it arrives, is going to be copying every scrap of data you’ve got and taking it back to Anvil Dark for detailed scrutiny—again, no exceptions. Once they’re satisfied they’ve got everything they need, you can resume your normal research operations. But note that we’ll continue to maintain a presence here, monitoring all inbound and outbound comms for the foreseeable future.”

She wasn’t happy—I wouldn’t have been, either, in her place—but she knew only too well that the survival of Pont Alus Kyr depended on restoring its credibility. And that depended on her cooperating with us, since it was also pretty obvious the place had been supporting some serious criminal activity. Worst of all, they were either aware of that fact, or they weren’t. That meant they’d either been committing serious crimes themselves, or at least turning a blind eye to them, or they’d been obliviously incompetent. Neither of those was a good look for a place that relied on its reputation simply to go on operating. From the mysterious disappearance of Hoshi Onwyn’s symbiote, Cibilax, to the equally mysterious appearance of Zeno, Pont Alus Kyr had a lot to answer for. ZENO LOOKED around the Fafnir and shook her head. “Wow. You’ve done a lot with the old girl in—ah, from my perspective, since yesterday,” she said. I’d filled her in on everything that had happened since we’d left her ID

scan on Dregs. Or—almost everything. There were a few details I kept to myself, bits and pieces of information that I didn’t want leaking. Because that was a thought that had occurred to me, one reinforced by the unexplained changes in her DNA. What if she was a plant?

She’d been brought back and left where we’d find her, then we brought her back into the Fafnir’s crew—

Where she would become a spy. A manufactured one, tailor-made for the job. If so, that was as evil as anything else the bad guys had done. It was just servitude of another sort, and that was one thing I could never allow. Which put me in the really difficult position of having to tell Zeno I couldn’t bring her back aboard the Fafnir. At least, not until we were sure

there was no risk associated with it. Although I wasn’t sure it was Zeno that I was really going to crush with that. It was Icky. She bounced happily around Zeno, filling her in on all the dumb little things we’d done over the past two years, adding the color and flavor to the more stark, bare-bones facts I’d already given her. She was in the midst of starting to tell Zeno about Funboy’s acting debut at the cheese shop in Frankenmuth when she caught herself—

“Holy crap, Zeno, I’m unloading all this stuff on you at once. But we’ve got lots of time, now that you’re back!”

Zeno smiled at her, then turned to me. Our eyes met, and just like that, I knew that she knew what I’d been thinking. She’d been thinking the same thing. She stood from where she’d been sitting on the couch in the crew lounge and wandered around, brushing her hand along and across things as she went. Icky spoke up. “So is Rab staying aboard now that we got Zeno back?

It’s gonna be tight, but—” she asked, looking from Zeno to me. Zeno stopped, her gaze on a patch in the hull, a repair to some battle damage. It was the same patch Paxomar had touched when he said he wanted to marry Icky sooner rather than later. She reached up, touched it, then lowered her hand and turned back to Icky. “I’m not coming back aboard the Fafnir, Icky.”

Icky stared. “What?

What do you mean?

Of course you are, we’ve got the room—”

But Zeno was shaking her head. “No, Icky. I’m not.”

“But—” Icky turned to me, her gleeful happiness replaced by something far more sad and confused. “Van, you want her to come back, right?”

“I—do, Icky, yes. Of course I do. But it’s not that simple.”

“Yes it is!

She’s back, so—”

Zeno walked over to Icky and took her smaller hands in hers. “Van’s right, Icky. It’s not that simple. I—I didn’t just come back, Icky. I was brought back. By people whose motives we don’t know. Hell, we don’t even know who they are.”

“So what?”

“So, Icky, there are risks. Van knows it. He’d never be able to completely trust me.”

Icky turned to me. “Van, tell her that’s not true!

This is Zeno!

Of course we trust her!”

Torina appeared at my side, standing with me. So did Perry. The others had gathered around us to listen. Paxomar, who’d been kept firmly out of the whole Pont Alus Kyr operation since he had no legal standing, moved to stand with Icky, his wife. I took a deep breath. Let it out. “I want to trust her, Icky, I really do—”

She stomped a step toward me. “Van, this is Zeno!

We lost her, and now we’ve got her back!”

Zeno reached up and nudged Icky’s hard, brittle gaze back onto her. “Icky, it’s not just that. It’s not just that Van can’t truly trust me. There’s more.”

Icky swallowed. “What?’

Zeno let go of her hands, then wandered back to the patch and touched it. “Icky—” She turned. “Van, Torina—all of you. You’re all very special to me. I love you all. But—” She glanced up at the patch, a metal plate covering a hole punched by a piece of shrapnel. It was just one of many hurts the Fafnir had survived. That we’d survived. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to come back to the Fafnir. I don’t want to for me, and I don’t want to for the woman who died trying to stop Helem Gauss on Adoration. She died doing something… she thought was important. It was a good death. A meaningful death.”

She walked back to Icky. “I can’t just step back into that woman’s shoes, Icky. It would diminish what she accomplished. I’m proud of her. So damned proud.” Zeno wiped her eyes. “But that was her. Someone else. She lived her life, and now I’m going to live mine.”

Icky’s face crumpled. “Zeno—”

“Icky, you’re married. You have someone you love in your life, who loves you. You’ll have children. I—” It was her turn to swallow. “I had a daughter. The day she died, I died, too. The woman who was Zeno after that, the criminal, the expert in weapons and killing people—she’s dead, too. And now I’m back. Again. I’ve been given another chance, in a body that hasn’t paid the price for my sins. A body that… that didn’t pay for crimes with decades of shame and isolation.”

Icky’s body began to shake. In a very small voice, she said, “Zeno?”

She nodded, her lip quivering. “I’m going home, Icky. To my family. Maybe I’ll find someone like Paxomar, or”—she looked at me—“or Van. Or maybe I won’t. But it doesn’t matter. That—it’s what I want to do. But not—” She looked around. “Not this. That Zeno—she was born from her daughter’s death, and now she’s gone. And now I’ve been born from her death. She didn’t try to live her predecessor’s life, and neither will I. She and I both want the same thing, Icky. We want to go home.”

Icky’s great shoulders shook as she began coming apart at the seams, great wracking sobs tearing through her without mercy. She managed a single word, blurred by gales of crying. “Mom,” Icky said, and my heart broke all over again. “It’s okay,” Zeno murmured, stepping into the quivering embrace of a daughter she’d found out among the stars. “You will be a mother, too.”

Paxomar put his hand on Icky’s head and ran it to her shoulder in a delicate, caring motion. Icky hugged Zeno. Zeno hugged her back. The sobs began to fade, like echoes of something that could never be again. We all eventually joined in, weeping and wiping real or figurative tears. Even Funboy somehow managed to look sad. Sadder, really. He understood what was happening. We were finished welcoming Zeno back. Now, we were saying goodbye. RAB TOOK Zeno back to the P’nosk homeworld. Her mothers and fathers were understandably beyond speechless at her return, so the flight with Rab would give her a chance to get caught up on family matters—and to prepare for what was going to be quite a remarkable reunion. We, on the other hand, wiped the last of our tears and set course for Earth. The protective order that had established the farm in Iowa as a special operations area was about to expire. It had seemed like an awfully quick thirty days—and it had been, because from my perspective, it had been just over three weeks, thanks to twist time-dilation. The flight was a subdued one. The events at Pont Alus Kyr had wrung us out emotionally. Ordinarily, I’d be looking forward to spending time on Earth as a break, but this time, there would be no respite. We were flying from a confusing and painful frying pan into an uncertain and frustrating fire. I’d meant to drop off Paxomar at the Wu’tzur homeworld, but he’d asked me if he could stay aboard. “I think Icky needs me,” was all he’d had to say, and I’d agreed. She had taken Zeno’s unexpected arrival and wrenching departure harder than any of us. She and Zeno had bonded, a mother to a daughter, so losing her again had been particularly hard on her. Knowing that Zeno was there, on the P’nosk homeworld, was little consolation. Unsurprisingly, it was Gabby who’d managed to cut right to the heart of things. “I didn’t know Zeno,” she’d said, sitting with Icky and Paxomar in the crew lounge. Torina and I were nearby, so paused to listen in. “She seems like a wonderful person, and I could tell you were very close to her. She was… kind of your mother, wasn’t she?”

Icky looked at her. I braced myself for her to tell Gabby to butt out and leave her alone, but she finally nodded. “Kinda, yeah. My real mom was a horrible, horrible bitch. And dead—which is the only good thing about her. But Zeno was—”

“Your mother, or as close to it as someone could get. I get it. But look at it this way, Icky. You’ve married Paxomar. He’s the most important person in your life now. Even if Zeno really was your mother, you wouldn’t be living with her, now, would you?”

“Probably not, no.”

“Definitely not,” Paxomar said, then shrugged at Icky’s sharp glance. “Sorry, Icky, but it’s true. I don’t want to share you with anyone else—your mother included.”

“That’s because it’s natural for daughters to get married, move away—

and then go visit their mothers,” Gabby said. Icky again stared, then nodded. “Yeah, I—I guess that is how it works.”

Gabby sat back. Torina stepped up beside me and whispered, “Damn, she’s good.”

I smiled. She really was. BY THE TIME we arrived at Sol and made a brief stopover at Cantullin Station, we were better. For my part, I was bracing myself for what was going to be awaiting us on Earth. As we passed the orbit of Mars, I called up Miryam for an update, time delay notwithstanding. The news wasn’t great, though also not unexpected. “That Colonel Burton called me. He said they—whoever the hell they are—have tried to get the special status extended for the farm. They can’t. Apparently extending it would require them to demonstrate there was a clear threat to US national security if they didn’t, and they really can’t. Otherwise, it would take Congressional approval and—well, Congress. Need I say more.”

Which meant that at midnight tomorrow, the special operations area around the farm would expire. There’d be nothing stopping Colonel Mandeville, Constance Plowitz, Manon Clemenceau, ICE, the IRS or anyone else from swooping in and wreaking a terrible regulatory vengeance. I slumped back, pressed into my seat under a sudden, suffocating weight of weary despair. I had no choice. Schegith’s worry about the farm had come to pass. I was going to have to convince Miryam to leave Earth, and then we were going to have to… go somewhere else. Back to Cantullin Station, maybe, then figure out our next move. As for Tony and his people, and even our two ambitious, would-be entrepreneur teenagers, Kyle and Derek—

I had no idea. Gabby broke the silence in the cockpit. “It’s too bad you can’t claim some sort of diplomatic immunity or something,” she said. “You know, be an alien ambassador, that sort of thing.”

I shrugged. Perry, though, perked up. “Hang on—the giant water-bear lady might be onto something.”

I looked at him. “What do you mean—?”

“Hang on. I’m working here.”

Working consisted of him sitting there on his perch. I could tell, though, that he was accessing data somewhere, looking for something—

“Ah, and there it is,” he finally said, coming back to life with a twitch. “There what is?”

“Two hundred and fourteen years ago, when the Guild first made contact with what we now call Unity, the major powers of known space were locked in one of their periodic cold wars. The Eridani Federation, the Ceti Alliance, the Three Stars League—they were all focused inward,

weren’t interested in Unity because they were too far away to be either an immediate threat or of particular use. The Guild decided to open formal diplomatic relations with Unity on its own.”

I sat up. “And?”

“And, they did. The Guild functioned as a state, representing the interests of known space to Unity even though the individual parts of it were all busy glaring at one another, scheming and skirmishing.”

“Perry, are you saying that the Guild should open diplomatic relations with Earth?”

“Well, with the United States, for a start. And a good first step would be establishing an embassy.”

“An embassy.”

“Yeah. Granted, the farmhouse could probably stand to be gussied up a little, if it’s going to be hosting foreign diplomats—”

“Make the farm… an off-world embassy of the Guild. Are you serious?’

“No, Van, I just thought it’d be fun to get your hopes up before dashing them. Sheesh. Of course I’m serious.”

I stared, blinking. “How would that even work?”

“Well, I think you’d start with a visit to the State Department, asking for a meeting with the President.”

“Of the United States.”

“No, the United Fruit Jugglers. Am I not being clear here?’

“Who would be the ambassador?” Gabby asked. Perry looked at me. “He’s sitting right here.”

I shook my head. “Perry, I can’t just enter into diplomatic negotiations with the United States of America on behalf of the Guild. Bit out over my skis, don’t you think?”

He stared back at me, amber eyes unblinking. He was good at that. “No, you can’t. You’re just a Peacemaker. Only a Master could do that.”

Torina gave me a thoughtful look. “You know, if this were a formal and very public proposal to your country’s leadership, one that really extolls the virtues and benefits of an off-world relationship—um, it wouldn’t look very good if they arrested the people making it, would it?”

“But Mandeville was right. We have been flouting American law just by flying in and out of Iowa—”

“Oh, so what?” Perry asked, annoyance in every word. “The very first aliens who flew into US airspace and landed on the White House lawn

would be breaking American customs and immigration laws, too. Do you really think arresting them for—I don’t know, not declaring if they’re bringing fruit into the country would be high on anyone’s to-do list?”

I looked around at my crew. Everyone was looking thoughtful. Even Icky, the one who’d voiced the loudest objections to me becoming a Master, seemed subdued. Part of that might have been about Zeno. I decided to just come out and ask her what she thought. She tilted her head at me. “If it were up to me, the embassy would be in Frankenmuth, right across the road from that cheese shop.”

“Hear!

hear!” Funboy agreed. I turned and looked out the canopy, at the distant point of brilliance that was the Earth dead ahead. The Equal Grasp was already there, relentlessly trying to spread its influence. What if the Equal Grasp really was part of who or what was behind United Life Sciences?

What if they were one in the same. I turned back to my crew. When I did, Perry lifted a foot, lowered himself on his other one, and extended his wing toward me. “Bird, what the hell are you doing?”

“This is the closest I can get to going on one knee and extending my hand to you.”

“But… why?”

His amber eyes glittered. “Because it’s the traditional and customary salute offered to a Master of the Peacemaker Guild.”