Copyrighted Material

Distant Horizon Copyright © 2022 by Variant Publications

Book design and layout copyright © 2022 by JN Chaney

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.

1st Edition

CONTENTS

Don’t Miss Out

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Epilogue

Glossary

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1

I shook my head in disgusted wonder. “This has got to be the sleaziest menagerie of characters I’ve ever seen.”

Torina nodded. “Right? When they look at you, they kind of leave an oily residue, don’t they?”

We’d stopped a class seven workboat that was outbound from Dregs, and Netty noted that its transponder data actually matched another class seven currently impounded by the Eridani Federation. Trafficking in bootleg transponder codes was big business. If yours was subject to a warrant, then just switching to a blank code wasn’t going to cut it. It would attract unwanted attention anyway, and your cover would inevitably end up blown because no one was ever as slick as they thought they were. Genuine codes, on the other hand, that actually conformed to registry databases barely attracted any notice at all. The vast majority of ships in known space didn’t receive updates to their transponder databases regularly, so they’d never notice a bogus code. It made using a pirated code a good bet.

Until you ran into a Peacemaker whose database was updated pretty much in real time, that is. Combine that with an attentive AI like Netty, and you were pretty much screwed.

Perry hopped up beside us with a metallic clack-clack of alloy talons on the deck plate, a sound I’d come to associate with good advice. When Perry and I put our heads together, problems generally went away—and often, at the speed of an AI’s computational power. Icky and Zeno were checking the boat’s bill of lading against the actual cargo, while Perry had been scouring their computers, leaving no file unexplored.

“To use a precise scientific term, there are about a bazillion crimes recorded in their logs,” Perry said, then raised his voice. “I mean, if you’re going to fiddle your cargo registry and smuggle shit, you should at least make an attempt to cover it up.”

The nearest of the skeezy crew, a pot-bellied Yonnox, shot Perry a rude gesture.

“Sorry, my friend, but I don’t have a mother,” Perry said, then turned back to Torina and me. “It’s all really small, even trivial shit, though. These guys aren’t exactly rocket scientists when it comes to petty crime. It seems to be their stock in trade. None of the payoffs are big enough to fund an operation past lunch.”

“They aren’t rocket scientists when it comes to taking care of their ship, either—which is kind of ironic when you think about it. I don’t know when they last tuned their drive, but it’s got more harmonics than that Synclavion World-Organ thing you told me about,” Zeno said over her shoulder while rooting through an open cargo pod.

I scanned the crew. Two Yonnox, a human, and a couple of S’rall. The latter were a surprise, frankly, because the S’rall were well known as homebodies who rarely left their planet. All grease stains and scowls, they seemed seedier and sketchier than the others.

Zeno finished up the manifest and shrugged. “This manifest is a mess. There are things on it that aren’t here, and things that are here that have no official record.” She handed me the data slate showing the items that couldn’t be reconciled. It was most of them. “But nothing notably illegal. Probably some stuff that’s stolen, but I’m not sure it’s really worth our time trying to match missing crates of hatch bolts against a theft report somewhere in known space.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Zeno. Unfortunately, incompetence and sloppy bookkeeping aren’t crimes.”

“Yeah,” one of the Yonnox snapped.

I rolled my eyes. “You guys are still up for charges for your illegal transponder code, so don’t get too excited about your freedom yet.”

The other Yonnox shrugged. “We just fly it. We don’t know nothing about transponder bullshit.”

I glanced at Torina. “That’s the outer space version of I was just holding it for a friend—”

“Van? Rolis here.”

I frowned. Rolis, who rejoined our crew after quite happily being installed into a new version of the standard maintenance bot commonly named Waldo, had stayed aboard the Fafnir. A disembodied identity loaded onto a sophisticated chip, he was an oddity. Technically, he’d been murdered, his essential self stolen in the process and stuck into the chip—another victim of the elusive identity-theft ring we’d been chasing for what now seemed like forever. But while for the vast majority of those who’d been brutalized this way it was nothing but horror, Rolis had embraced his new digital existence. We’d offered to procure an organic body for him, but he was happy being Waldo.

He was also a skilled spacecraft structural engineer and had done a mandatory stint as a gunner aboard a warship. It meant our Waldo was far more than just a simple maintenance AI who could diagnose and fix complex problems with the Fafnir. I was quite happy to have him aboard, although his actual status was uncertain, caught somewhere between an Auxiliary crewmember like Torina or Zeno and an AI like Perry and Netty. He had, however, saved the Fafnir and almost lost his own life in the process, so I didn’t care—he had nothing to prove to me.

“What’s up, Rolis?”

“That workboat you’re on—its hull has been expanded by about two meters along most of its ventral length.”

I glanced at the sketchy crew, who were all suddenly no longer looking defiant and instead were interested in other things.

“Really? Fascinating. I’m hardly an expert at—Perry, what’s that term?”

“Measuring things, boss.”

“Right. Thank you—at measuring things, so naturally, my math might be off a bit. But even a simple fellow like myself can see that increasing the size of a ship will yield extra space. Is that accurate, Rolis?”

“I’d say so. These off-the-shelf workboats get modified all the time. I’ve worked on a few jobs like that myself, back when I was, you know, all fleshy and squishy and stuff.”

“Good catch, and thanks again, Rolis.”

I grabbed the nearest Yonnox, the one ostensibly captaining the workboat, and spun him toward me, then leaned in with menace. “Care to show me around downstairs?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I sighed and turned to the others. “You know, it’s not the sullen defiance or obscene gestures that bother me. It’s when they treat me like I’m stupid. That pisses me off.”

Icky stomped to a halt in front of the Yonnox. She loomed over him, a quarter again as tall as he was and nearly twice his mass. “You know what pisses me off?” she growled, her voice like stones grinding underwater.

I shook my head. “No, Icky, I do not. What pisses you off?”

She poked the Yonnox in the chest hard enough to knock him against the oily bulkhead. “This guy.”

The Yonnox gave his head a quick shake in the face of Icky’s menace. “Look, I just fly the damned thing, I don’t—”

Icky bristled, but I touched her arm. “Let’s just find our way into their little secret compartment. I’d rather not let them get anywhere near it, thanks.”

“Van, we’ve got four deck plates here with no sub-frame under them,” Perry said from a few meters away. “Seems they just interlock with one another.”

“Torina, Zeno, can you watch these guys? Icky, you can pry up a deck plate, right?”

“Just show me where to start.”

* * *

“Well well. I’m not sure what I expected to find down here, but it was not this,” I said, crouching a little in the long, narrow compartment. At roughly two meters high, my head didn’t quite touch the overhead, but it was still a tight fit.

Especially since most of the empty area was filled with a spaceship.

Well, maybe a spaceship. It reminded me uncannily of how old tech magazines on Earth from back in the twenties and thirties imagined future vehicles, all art deco curves and bubble canopies and flaring tail fins.

“This is… gorgeous,” I said out loud.

I ran my hand across the sleek alloy. Whatever it was, it was only about six or seven meters long and two meters across, narrow and sleek in a way that implied speed. The hull, smooth to the touch, was a misty gray color so nondescript as to be hardly a color at all. My fingers felt pressure as I touched the hull, but got no purchase on it, sliding along as if I was trying to handle a wet bar of soap. Little flourishes of a bright metal like chrome may have had some function, or they might have been just that, little flourishes. It looked like art. It looked like quicksilver.

And it looked fast. Even sitting here, stuffed into this hidden cargo hold, it gave the impression of racing along at some insane speed despite sitting perfectly still.

Icky couldn’t fit into the hold and could only poke her head in from above. “Van, what’s—oh. Oh wow. What is that?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea.”

She withdrew and I heard some conversation, then Zenophir clambered into the hold. “Oh, it’s one of these,” she said.

“One of what? What is it?”

“A—thing. A really fast little thing.”

“You have no clue, do you?”

“None at all. All I can say is that it’s a ship—which you’ve probably already figured out.”

“I’m going to need a bit more detail, if you please.”

She touched it. “Wow. That is one hell of a low coefficient of kinetic friction. Put that together with all that streamlining, and I’d say this is meant to fly inside an atmosphere.”

We pushed along the narrow compartment past it, noting that it seemed to have stubby wings that were currently retracted into its slender hull. That further suggested that it had been designed for atmospheric flight. Moreover, unless its drive was tech beyond even the current bleeding edge of anything in known space, it was far too small for any sort of sustained spaceflight.

“Okay, I give up. And I don’t say that lightly because I take pride in my knowledge base after decades as an engineer,” Zeno finally admitted.

We exited the cramped compartment and questioned the crew, whose responses varied from claiming that all they knew was that they were supposed to carry it from Dregs to Tau Ceti, to claiming—unconvincingly—that they had no idea it was even down there. We finally sent imagery back to the Fafnir, where Rolis broke the case.

“Oh, hey, that’s a Rumor,” he immediately said.

I glanced at the others and their blank looks. “A Rumor? What’s a Rumor?”

“Insert joke about defining what a rumor is for Van here,” Perry muttered.

I shot him a lip-curl, but Rolis came back right away.

“It’s a Conoku atmospheric racer. It’s not a sport thing, though. It’s involved in whatever they call the process of an immature Conoku becoming a mature one—so a rite-of-passage sort of thing.”

“Conoku? Huh, that’s not a race you hear about very often, unless you’re talking about Linulla the Starsmith and his adorable brood of little crab kids.”

“Yeah, here it is. Netty just fished it out of infospace. The Rumor is used for ritualized races on a moon called Ock-kuss-nar. It’s part of a larger coming-of-age thing that involves feasting and dancing and going like a bat out of hell through the upper atmo.”

“Bat out of hell?” Zeno asked.

“Cultural reference that means not just fast, but stupidly fast,” I answered.

“Absolutely accurate then,” Perry added.

I tried to imagine Linulla dancing. It made me smile.

“Okay. Netty, contact Linulla so we can talk to him about this, please.” I turned to the crew. “Meantime, folks, this ship is now officially impounded, and you’re under arrest for transporting stolen cultural artifacts.”

One of the Yonnox peered back at me blankly. “That’s a thing?”

I sighed. “Yes, sir, that’s a thing. Perry will explain it to you.”

Perry nodded. “And I shall use suitably simple, ideally one-syllable words to do it.”

“To do what?” the Yonnox asked.

Perry turned to look at me, his amber gaze one of resignation. “You might as well go do something else, Van. This is gonna take a while.”

* * *

“So that’s what we found, Linulla, one of those little ships of your peoples’ called a—”

“A Rumor, yes,” Linulla said over the comm. I could hear a mix of outrage and excitement in his voice. “It should never have been removed from Ock-kuss-nar.”

“Why is it called a Rumor?”

“It’s an imperfect translation. The actual Conoku word is more like a story begun and shared, the idea being that as young Conoku pass into maturity, the story of their life truly begins. The races conducted in the Rumors are not competitive, at least in the sense of pilots competing with each other. Rather, each young Conoku will race the course trying to beat their own best time. Each Conoku will do so until they’re satisfied that they have achieved the best possible time they can, so any further attempts would just be needlessly dangerous.”

I crossed my arms. “How dangerous is this course?”

“At low speeds, not very. But as the Rumors are pushed harder and faster, it becomes quite dangerous. The point of it is for each Conoku to recognize their own limitations and, more importantly, come to accept them.” He waved a claw. “I realize this all must sound very complicated, even silly—”

“No, not at all. On Earth, the transition to maturity mainly involves growing hair, getting drunk, and having to pay taxes. So your peoples’ ceremony is really quite impressive and a helluva lot more fun than some kid from Omaha growing his first mullet.”

“The fish, or the hair?” Linulla asked.

“Impressive. How’d you know?”

“Baseball cards, of course. There appear to be a high rate of mullets among that class of athletes. I’m convinced it’s an elaborate mating ritual,” Linulla concluded with the air of a sage.

“And you’d be right.”

“I can only assume the Rumor was bought by some wealthy dilettante, then hidden on that rust bucket, and intended for racing by someone other than my people. The new owner might even have entered races for money, given the quality of that little craft,” Linulla said.

Considering the craftsmanship and sheer engineering elegance of Conoku design, I could see why.

“But it’s still a stolen cultural artifact, which means I need to return it to your people. Should I bring it to you, Linulla?” I asked him.

“No. It needs to be returned to Ock-kuss-nar. I’m going to have to make some calls, mainly to get dispensation for you to visit. The moon is closed to all outsiders.”

“Okay. Well, in the meantime, I’ll find somewhere safe to keep it, probably at Anvil Dark.”

“I appreciate this, Van. On behalf of the Conoku, thank you.”

“Hey, it’s what I do, Linulla. I trust you with my blade, and I hope you’ll trust me with this ship.”

“I do, and I’m honored. Starsmith out.”

I signed off as well and returned to the workboat, where we’d docked the Fafnir. A cutter from Dregs was en route to take the crew into custody, which prompted a derisive snort from Perry.

“They’ll be in custody until that cutter touches down, whereupon they’ll be released on their own recognizance with a promise to appear before a court at a future date.”

“They’ll just be set free, you mean,” I replied.

“Yeah. Catch and release. I guess the consolation is that none of these guys are exactly criminal masterminds, so they’ll just be a few more petty thugs among an ocean of them.”

Effectively just letting these guys go bothered me, but the Fafnir’s holding cell wouldn’t take them all, and frankly I didn’t want their unwashed, reeking presence aboard my ship. Besides, we’d seized their workboat and its cargo, so whatever payout they’d been offered to transport the Rumor had just been blown out the airlock.

It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

“We have another problem,” Zeno said, appearing behind me in her work coveralls and wiping her hands of some greasy fluid.

“And here I was just thinking that we were dangerously low on problems.”

Zeno cocked her head at me. “Really?”

I stared at her, wondering how she hadn’t got it, until she broke into one of her unsettlingly feral grins.

“No, of course not, Van. Friend, you have got to loosen up a bit,” Zeno said, burbling with laughter.

“I’ll do that when I know there isn’t a price on my head anymore.”

“If you’re a Peacemaker without a price on your head, you’re doing something wrong. Anyway, this old tub isn’t going anywhere.”

“Why not?”

“Because that powerplant is a wink and a nudge away from blowing itself apart. Icky and I scrammed it so we could look at its guts, and it’s not good. I don’t think you could even pay off a certification inspector to give it a serviceable rating.”

“To put it another way, if you want to restart that reactor, that’s fine, but I’ll be on the Fafnir about ten thousand klicks that way,” Icky said. If anything, she looked even grubbier and more disheveled than Zeno. I couldn’t help noticing that they both also seemed as happy as proverbial pigs in shit at having a chance to do some gritty, detailed engineering.

“So unless we want to take this thing in tow, it is stuck here, as is the Rumor, floating around the hinterland of Dregs,” I said, sticking my hands on my hips.

“Pretty much sums it up, yeah,” Zeno replied.

Waldo—or rather, Rolis—scuttled through the airlock. “Couldn’t help overhearing, and I have a solution. At least, a solution for the Rumor, not for this wheezing old bucket of bolts. I think the only viable future for this rattletrap workboat is as a target drone.”

He went on to explain that, with a combination of the Fafnir’s cargo winch, some clever cabling, and a pair of hardpoint adapters, we could strap the Rumor onto our ship as external cargo. It would dramatically limit the Fafnir’s maneuver envelope because of the shift in her center of gravity. But it would also let us haul the sleek little ship back to Anvil Dark, until Linulla made arrangements to return it to the Conoku.

“What about the workboat?” I asked.

“Trash it, boss. Not worth saving,” Icky said, her thoughts echoed by Zeno and Rolis as well. Since it was space junk, it was also a navigation hazard.

And there was only one solution to navigation hazards, which Torina enacted with the Fafnir’s lasers from about ten thousand klicks off. Five seconds of firing, and the old boat lost its antimatter containment, briefly flaring into a hard point of light, then dying again into darkness.

“Okay, Netty, let’s prepare to get underway to Anvil Dark—carefully, if you please, so we don’t scratch or ding our cargo. Rolis, how does it look out there?”

I saw him on an external imager, handily moving from stanchion to stanchion just as Waldo had been designed to do. “Fine. No sign that our move away from the workboat messed up the cradle we built for it.”

“Well, come on back inside so we can get underway.”

“On my way. Although, I have to admit, it is really something to be out here in hard vacuum and not even notice it.”

“Rolis has moved on to a higher state of being—mechanical,” Perry said, his voice somber.

“I quite agree,” Netty added.

We laughed, but the offhanded joking left me thinking.

Were Perry and Netty right?

* * *

Part of me had hoped that our plodding trip back to Anvil Dark would be routine and uneventful. It was an ever-diminishing part of me, I had to admit. I was finding it hard to believe that doing anything these days would be routine and uneventful.

I was, to paraphrase an old curse, living in interesting times.

“Class 10, configured as a corvette, on an intercept course. It will be in missile range in about four minutes,” Netty announced.

I swore, low and angry. For a relatively large and powerful ship to suddenly appear nearby, while we were still about half an hour from our twist point, smacked of someone tracking and reporting our movements. The nearest other ship was a class 20 bulk carrier about eighteen light-minutes away, but for all we knew it could have been them.

I turned my head. “Rolis, can we ramp the drive up to full power?”

“If you do it very slowly. That cradle we rigged up might take three g’s of acceleration before coming apart, but for safety’s sake, I wouldn’t make it more than two,” he called back.

I sighed. “Okay, Netty, let’s slowly get out of here.”

The corvette, lugging no delicate external cargo, had no such restrictions and burned toward us at a snappy eighteen g’s.

“I really don’t want to fight these guys,” I said, then turned to the cabin at large. “Ideas, anyone?”

The Fafnir was by no means defenseless. In fact, in terms of sheer firepower, we were probably a match for the corvette, especially at close range where we could employ the mass driver and the particle cannon. But our inability to maneuver meant we’d come up way short on one leg of the space combat triad of firepower, protection, and acceleration.

The corvette bore in, entering missile range and launching a salvo, then burned hard to break away. We sent a spread of missiles after it, encouraging it to keep breaking away. Meanwhile, Torina and Rolis worked at taking down the half dozen incoming missiles before they reached us, while Netty stood by on the point defenses.

“That’s four,” Torina announced while sliding her fingers across the weapons panel, hunting a new target for her laser battery. Rolis took shots with the other one, but the missiles were small and elusive and employing countermeasures.

“Military hardware,” Perry announced. “Someone’s got money to throw around.”

The point defenses actually managed to shoot down a fifth missile, but the sixth slipped through our defenses and detonated close enough to rattle the Fafnir with shrapnel. Nothing penetrated, fortunately, especially since we’d taken most of the REAB modules off-line. Reactive armor blasts would not be good for our delicate little racing-machine cargo.

Speaking of which—

“Any damage to the Rumor?”

“Yeah, looks like it,” Zeno said, studying the feed from the external imager. “Couple of holes, anyway.”

“Oh, for—nothing can ever be easy, can it?”

The good news was that the corvette, in an effort to outrun our missiles, ended up too far away and moving too fast in the wrong direction to come back at us. We were able to twist away into the relative safety of the Gamma Crucis system, Gacrux, the home of Anvil Dark.

Rolis happily scampered out the airlock to inspect the Rumor. “Yeah, it got a little beaten up, I’m sorry to say. Looks like two—no, make that three shrapnel hits, one through and through. It’s not critical damage, I don’t think, but it’ll need to be fixed before this little beauty flies again.”

I turned to Torina. “I really don’t want to hand the Conoku damaged goods.”

“So we’ll get it fixed,” she replied with a shrug.

“Yeah. Wonder how much that’s going to cost.”

“Just talk to Linulla. He can probably do it.”

But I shook my head. “That’s the point, though. I feel kind of—yeah, responsible for the damned thing.” I turned to Icky and Zeno. “I’ll let you guys and Rolis work on that once we’re docked. Meantime, Torina, Perry, and I are going to take the pulse of Anvil Dark. It’ll be interesting to see how much the place has changed with Yotov suddenly out of the picture.”

2

As vile and reprehensible as she was, one thing I did have to admit about Yotov was that she’d brought order to the Peacemaker Guild. During her watch, the Guild had functioned with minimal friction, albeit tinged with sucking-up or sullen resentment, depending on which side you were on. Now, though, the Guild had fractionated, with multitudes of Peacemakers either frantically trying to rewrite their history to dissociate themselves from the disgraced Yotov, exact all sorts of petty revenge against those who had been her sycophants, or capitalize on the chaos and confusion of it all.

It felt a lot like Earth politics to me, but with an array of species who brought new levels to the term pettiness.

“So the Guild only has five Masters,” Perry reported as we disembarked the Fafnir to enter Anvil Dark. “Other AIs have told me that besides Yotov being gone, Master Ilirana also stepped down.”

“You mean she was dragged away by her nose because it was stuck up Yotov’s ass,” Torina said.

I gave her a raised-eyebrows glance. “How crude.”

“But true,” Perry said.

I nodded. “It is that. So how come they haven’t replaced those two Masters?”

“Well, let’s see. Yewlo was corrupt as hell, Proloxus was corrupt as hell, Yotov was corrupt as hell and evil, Ilirana was bound to Yotov by corruption—you see a theme here, Van?” Perry asked.

“So four corrupt Masters is enough to make the Guild take their appointment seriously?”

“Four this time around. There have been at least twenty-two Masters in Guild history who have been removed or stepped down because of corrupt practices. Mind you, that’s over almost thirteen hundred years, and four of those Masters came and went from office in the last two years.”

“There’s clearly a problem with the way the Guild recruits its Masters,” Torina said as we entered the main concourse leading off the docking ring.

“So much so that there are rumors, at least among the AIs, that the Galactic Knights are going to get involved,” Perry replied.

I glanced at him. “Wait. The Galactic Knights Uniformed? You mean they really exist? Or at least still exist?”

“Apparently.”

The Galactic Knights were, nominally, the parent body for the Peacemakers. It had been explained to me that it was similar to the Guild being a specific chapter of a larger, noble order. But the Galactic Knights had become nearly mythical, a shadowy group of recluses who exercised influence from their secret lair or star chamber or whatever you wanted to call it. The general wisdom was that the Knights no longer actually existed, having faded into oblivion years, maybe even centuries ago. But that didn’t stop the whispered rumors and conspiracy theorizing that they were still out there, somewhere.

Conspiracy theorists were not exclusive to humanity. The difference was that on Anvil Dark, conspiracies had galactic implications, not just the chance to rile up a bunch of people who thought the moon was flat and the Illuminati was real.

Or something like that. I can never keep all of their ideas straight.

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” I said, then we pushed on and made our way toward The Black Hole, Anvil Dark’s main watering hole. It was the best place to go to get immediate updates on the latest rumors and innuendo.

We moved through the crowd in the bar, noting that their general seating arrangements mimicked where they stood on the state of the Guild. I recognized various supporters and hangers-on of Yotov, mostly on the upper level, muttering and glowering down at the generally anti-Yotov crowd babbling away on the lower one. And sure enough, a few opportunists seemed to be cycling between the two groups, stirring up shit or seeking ways of benefiting from the situation.

“Van!”

I turned and saw Lucky sitting at a table with Lunzy. They beckoned us over, and we crossed to join them. There weren’t many Peacemakers I trusted implicitly, but these were two of them.

“I hear you’re still in the business of recovering stolen artifacts,” Lunzy said, pushing over to make room on the bench seat. Torina pulled over a chair, while Perry just hopped onto a clear spot on the table, his talons rattling in a staccato beat.

I stared back at Lunzy. “Seriously? We only just docked, not even fifteen minutes ago. Is there some sort of grapevine comm system I don’t know about?”

“Yes. It’s called the comm system,” Lunzy said, then smiled and sipped her drink.

“You twisted in with a Conoku Rumor strapped to the Fafnir’s belly, Van. You weren’t exactly being discreet about it,” Lucky put in.

I had to nod. “Okay, you got me there. Still, there must be people who just hang around the docks, waiting to pass along—” I stopped and glanced at Perry. “There are, aren’t there? Traffic control AIs, maintenance AIs, that sort of thing. They’re watching all the time, aren’t they?”

“You got us, Van. You’ve figured out that we AIs never sleep and process data at quantum-tunneling speeds. So, mea culpa, it leaves time heavy on our hands, and we fill it with gossip about you humans because we have absolutely nothing better to do. Well, that and soap operas, but we don’t have time to discuss current storylines. It’s sweeps season, and the action is spicy,” Perry enthused.

“You’re not entirely joking, are you?” Torina asked.

“About the soap operas, or the low-key stalking?”

“The stalking, bird. I stopped watching soaps years ago. We’ve talked about this. I left them behind after the twenty-eighth evil twin storyline popped off.”

“Huh. Interesting that it wasn’t the twenty-seventh. You’ve got staying power, boss. But regarding us AIs, we do gossip a lot,” Perry admitted.

“I feel so much closer to you, Tudor,” Lunzy said with a snort. “Now, a villain question. Do you remember our old friend Ewanaxamun?”

I stared into my drink. “I remember the name—I mean, how could I forget a name like that—” I looked up and snapped my fingers. “Right. Ewanaxamun. One of the muckety-mucks in the Salt Thieves. She dabbles in illegal osmium mining and has hooked up with our Czar-loving cultist, High Doctor Markov. And she had a nickname—”

“No-No,” Perry put in.

“Right. No-No.” I said the name like it tasted vile. No-No was a vicious criminal, but she was also cunning, patient, and careful, making her a truly dangerous opponent. In fact, if the bumbling idiots we’d seized the Rumor from were the bottom of the scummy barrel, she sat comfortably right on the barrel’s top edge.

I also suspected she was behind the illegal mining operation that had been scarring Pluto in fits and starts for months now.

“Please tell me someone finally managed to nab her—or at least freed up the molecules in her body to pursue less malignant paths in life.”

Lunzy shook her head. “Sadly, no, but I like your sentiment. She’s as in the wind as she’s ever been. But we did get a criminal intelligence hit on her. She seems to be involved in some shady deals in the Epsilon Indi system.”

“Okay. I’ve heard of it, but we’ve never been there.” I glanced at Perry and Torina. “That’s right, isn’t it? I’ve been to so many star systems now—and how many humans get to say that?—that they kind of blur together.”

“We haven’t,” Torina confirmed.

“And for good reason. Until just a couple of years ago, Indi was the scene of a brutal war. It ended when both sides finally spent themselves and negotiated a sort of restless peace. Now, they’re all struggling to rebuild, and that takes resources,” Lunzy said.

I thought about the potential effects of known-space weaponry and nodded. “I’ll bet. I’m surprised anyone ever survives a war out here, considering how potent these weapons are.”

“Well, these people did almost wipe each other out. What finally stopped them was one side, the Esstai Confederacy, detonated an antimatter weapon in low orbit over the homeworld of the Arhun Combine. It did so much damage and killed so many people that a popular uprising took out the Esstai leadership and replaced them with a provisional government that sued for peace.”

“Good for them. Firing antimatter warheads at your enemies just invites them to return the favor. With interest,” I said.

“Truth. This was a rare case of cooler heads prevailing, and both the Confederacy and the Combine are now trying to rebuild, and that’s where No-No comes in,” Lunzy said.

Torina sniffed. “A war profiteer, too. And just when you thought she couldn’t get any cuddlier.”

“It seems that somehow No-No has gained some pretty significant leverage over the Esstai provisional government. She used it to convince them to surrender their claim on a dwarf planet called 109 that is orbiting a gas giant on the edge of the system,” Lunzy went on.

“Let me guess—there’s osmium there.”

Lunzy shrugged. “There might be, but it looks like that isn’t No-No’s main interest this time. In fact, it seems she isn’t doing this on her own but is either associated with, or even employed by, Traversia Bolt-Right.”

“Uh-oh.”

I glanced at Perry. “Uh-oh?”

“Traversia’s an old fossil of a corporation that’s one hundred percent owned by the Traversia family from Tau Ceti. Their reputation in the business world is a little bit worse than… let’s say Satan’s, if Satan was a businessman.”

Torina nodded as Perry spoke. “My father and his business partners did one joint venture with Traversia. One… and then never again. He said they were—oh, how did he put that? Right—he said they were corruption shaped like a corporation.”

“How about the Bolt-Right part? It makes them sound like they sell auto parts,” I said.

“They originally made their fortune in, you guessed it, bolts,” Perry replied. “You know those self-locking bolts that hold the Fafnir’s hull plating on? They’re a Traversia design, and they make a royalty off every one of them. Not much per unit, but imagine how many bolts are out there, holding ships together.”

“Huh.” I thought about the clever design of the bolts. You could practically tighten them by hand, then use a little mechanism built into each one to lock it securely into place. Unlocking and removing them was just as easy.

And now, I thought of each bolt as clever but evil.

“Anyway, developing innovative new tech is about three hundred years in their past. Now Traversia mostly acts as a holding company, gobbling up smaller firms, gutting them for anything of value, then tossing away the hollowed-out remnants,” Lucky said.

“And that’s their legitimate business. If they were just scummy and unethical, we wouldn’t even be talking about them. But they’ve crossed the line into illegal many times,” Lunzy added.

“So why haven’t they been held to account for it?” I asked, but I knew what the answer was going to be even as I uttered the question.

“Money,” Torina said. “Lots and lots of money.”

“You get the justice you can afford,” Lunzy agreed, sipping her drink.

“Okay, I get it, this is all old, powerful, and dirty money, which feels a lot like Earth politics all over again, by the way. So what’s that got to do with No-No?” I asked.

“There’s something on that dwarf planet, 109, that Traversia wants. To get it, though, they need to get clear title to the planet, which means the Esstai Confederacy has to surrender it. And that is what No-No is doing. She and her evil cronies are fiddling around with Esstai politics, paving the way for Traversia to get what they want.”

“So she’s hired muscle.”

“Exactly. And since we—and by we, I mainly mean you, Van—have put some massive dents in the Salt Thieves’ top ranks, she’s just consolidated her power, so she has lots of that muscle available.”

I sat back. “Great. So we’ve actually ended up helping her.”

Lucky shrugged. “Look at it this way, Van. The more that power gets funneled into a single person, the more and more that person becomes a single point of failure.”

I sat forward again and narrowed my eyes. “Why do I have the feeling this is more than just gossip and you guys are telling me all this for a reason?”

“You’re quite the investigator, Van. You saw right through us,” Lunzy replied, smiling.

“Well, saw through it eventually. I saw it right away,” Perry said. “I can give you the specific syllable that triggered my awareness of this silken prison, which—”

“Bird?”

“Yeah, boss?”

“You are a genius. But not really humble, you know?”

“As I’ve mentioned, you’re hurtful but fair.”

“Thanks. Now then, friends of mine who totally aren’t using me for my muscle, ship, and crew, where were we?” I asked with a bland smile.

Lunzy mimicked a shiver. “Oof. Chilly reception. To be blunt, we need someone to go to Indi to scope out exactly what’s going on and start trying to tease out No-No and Traversia’s involvement. Because of the shitstorm around the Masters, I’m stuck here doing damage control, though. I mean, do you have any idea how many cases Yotov handled? And now each one of them has to be reviewed.”

Lucky waved in frustration. “I got drafted into helping with that. And frankly, Van, if you hang around Anvil Dark too long, you will, too. It’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of thing.”

“So stick my soft, fleshy neck into a den of vipers, or else do paperwork, huh? Tough choice.”

“Really? Because I’d vote for the den of vipers any day,” Lucky replied.

“The benefit is that if I assign you this case, its profile, combined with your Third Veteran status, will pretty much ensure you’ve got a free hand to pursue it. There’s also a generous stipend to cover costs, plus a warranty of Guild assistance to pay the costs resulting from any damage to the Fafnir,” Lunzy added.

I turned to Torina and Perry. “What do you guys think?”

“I hate paperwork,” Torina replied.

Perry gave me a curious look, then just nodded. “I was built to fight crime, not wallow amid bureaucracy—even if I would be very, very good at it.’

I turned to Lunzy. “Well, assuming the rest of my crew doesn’t have any objections, I guess we’re in.”

We gossiped a bit more, but my mind was now fixed firmly on Epsilon Indi and No-No. She wasn’t just associated with High Doctor Markov. She was also associated with the Cabal, the assassins for hire that had killed my father.

So I had a few things I wanted to discuss with her.

* * *

We left the Rumor at Anvil Dark, awaiting some specialized parts and materials to patch its battle damage. Anvil Dark was probably the safest place for it, and we hadn’t yet heard back from Linulla about returning it, so I didn’t mind leaving it parked in the custody of the Guild’s ship techs. With that bit of business settled, we headed for Epsilon Indi.

I was surprised by just how Sol-like Epsilon Indi was. When we twisted into the system, I had a moment of déjà vu, like we’d just arrived back at our home system. But the tension in the cockpit erased that notion—immediately.

“Van, we’ve got a class 7 workboat orbiting the dwarf planet, 109. It’s configured for a fight, though. Two laser batteries for sure, a rotary missile launcher, and what might be a particle cannon,” Netty said. “As an empathic device of rare design, I’m also sensing the possibility of bad intentions on their part. Call it my softer side.”

I whistled. “That’s a lot of firepower for such a small ship. Half its interior space must be power plant.”

“It gets better. These guys have done a good job of hiding it, but I’ve been able to eventually trace its ownership to a numbered holding company owned by Traversia Bolt-Right,” Perry said.

“Does that give us probable cause to investigate it, maybe even board it?”

Perry clicked his beak in rueful disagreement. “Outside of the better-regulated systems, like Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, it’s generally not illegal to mount that sort of firepower on a ship. And ownership through any number of intermediaries and shell companies might be suspicious, but again, it ain’t against the law.”

“Fine. So someone find me some probable cause, then.”

Torina and Perry went to work, digging into the myriad databases we could legitimately access with my Peacemaker credentials, along with a few that weren’t. We set course for 109 in the meantime but kept a wary eye on the inner system and its two planets, Esstai and Arhun, that were existing in a tense kind of permanent ceasefire. They weren’t anyone’s homeworld, per se, both being inhabited by a diversity of species and cultures. But they were politically distinct, the Esstai Confederacy being a loose collection of semi-independent states that resented centralized authority, while the Arhun Combine was so monolithically communist it would have made Karl Marx blush like a new father.

Based on the background reading I’d done on the way out from Anvil Dark, their nasty war hadn’t been about politics.

It had been about resources.

They were settled about the same time, and it took nearly two hundred years for the two planets to grow apart. Where there’d once been cooperation in exploiting the system’s bounty, it eventually turned to competition. The resulting conflict had left millions dead, the biospheres of both planets damaged, and the whole system declared a no-go zone by ship insurers. The detonation of the antimatter weapon, which had a yield estimated to be in the hundreds of megatons, had been the last straw. Antimatter had been outlawed as a weapon across known space, partly because it was so expensive to manufacture, but mainly because the destructive potential was so great. A single antimatter weapon could easily render a planet uninhabitable.

Antimatter was, in every sense, a killer of worlds.

In fact, weaponizing antimatter was considered another Crime Against Order. There was only one known instance of a terrorist attack using the stuff, detonating it on a sparsely populated moon in the Tau Ceti system. The terrorists had demanded the usual terrorist things, but all they’d gotten was hunted to extinction across the stars. The last few had been taken alive and very publicly executed in a way that I tried hard not to think about. The Esstai knew that their own leaders’ use of an antimatter bomb stood to invite the wrath of all of known space upon them, so they’d acted quickly. In a two-day revolution, the new provisional government had taken the reins, while the previous administration had been put to death, and here we were, muddling around in the aftermath of hostilities.

“Van, the best we’ve been able to come up with is an old warrant from about three years ago, naming a ship almost exactly matching the configuration of that one involved in gun running in the Wolf 424 system,” Perry finally announced.

“Probable cause?”

“Probably not. But that probably does give you some latitude.”

“I like latitude, especially if it means I can potentially clean up an outstanding warrant.” I gave the image in the warrant file that Perry put on the central display a cursory glance. The ship pictured could have been any of hundreds, maybe thousands in known space, but I nodded.

“Looks like the same ship to me. Netty, take us in.”

The thrusters rumbled, and the Fafnir veered onto a new course, headed for orbital insertion at the dwarf planet called 109.

* * *

About one light-minute out, I started broadcasting the usual stand by to be boarded message to the class 7. It gave no reply.

“I’m feeling slighted,” I said, sitting back.

“Maybe they’re busy,” Torina said, smiling.

“Well, in that case, I should be able to leave a voicemail—”

The shrill chime of the threat alert cut me off. I looked at the tactical overlay and saw that the class 7 had just loosed a barrage of twelve missiles at us, all in a few seconds.

“Holy shit, that thing fires fast,” I said. It would have taken the Fafnir four or five times as long to fire the same number of missiles.

“Rotary launchers are great,” Perry said.

Zeno clicked her tongue. “Sure, until you need to reload them. Big warships can retract them and use an auto-reloader, but the crew of that punky little class 7 is going to have to step outside and manually reload the weps..”

“All of which is very interesting, but we have twelve missiles inbound. And I’m seeing only a sixty-four percent probability that we can stop them all, which means we’re going to take some hits,” I said.

Torina and Rolis had already warmed up the lasers and started shooting as soon as the missiles came within range. Even with Netty’s fire control assistance, they were tough targets, small and agile. They only got five before the point defenses joined in, spewing Zeno’s upgraded ammo in streams of tracer. I started randomly stabbing at the thruster controls, jinking the Fafnir around and trying to make us as difficult a target in return.

“Four left, one minute to detonation,” Netty intoned.

This was not good. We simply weren’t shooting the damned things down fast enough—

I had a sudden surge of inspiration. I stabbed my finger at the glitter-caster control, which enveloped the Fafnir in a cloud of chaff. At the same time, I gave a brief burst of lateral thrust that slid the ship out of it and put it between us and the missiles.

“Everyone cease fire! Netty, shut everything off!”

I felt the looks of puzzlement, but to their credit no one balked or even hesitated. The lights and instruments died, and we began coasting along on a slowly diverging course from our glitter cloud.

Torina turned to me, a shadowy presence across the cockpit. “Any particular reason we’ve left ourselves defenseless?”

“Yeah, that chaff’s meant to defeat laser fire. Those missiles are just going to ignore it,” Icky put in.

“Full explanation coming, but everyone brace for impact, just in case,” I shot back. We all grabbed our helmets, snapped them into place, and tightened our crash harnesses, while Perry and Rolis fastened themselves to secure handholds.

“Fifteen seconds to impact—I assume, since I can’t see anything with the scanners shut off,” Netty said.

“Okay, quick explanation. We’re all stealthed up, right?” I said.

“Yeah, sure, but we’re still radiating heat,” Icky shot back.

But Zenophir chuckled. “I get it. Van’s hoping that chaff breaks up our heat signature enough that these words of mine aren’t the last ones you hear.”

“Five seconds,” Netty said.

I counted the time down in my head, as I’m sure everyone else did.

Five seconds came and went. So did ten. And fifteen.

“Netty, thirty more seconds, then bring everything back online,” I said.

We waited. The missiles might yet pose a threat, but the probability of it diminished with each passing second. By the time we reached thirty, they hadn’t detonated, and now probably never would.

The Fafnir hummed back to life, systems rebooting and coming back online. I watched the tactical overlay light up and begin to fill with data. Sure enough, the missiles had passed through or near the chaff cloud and just kept going. Two of them seemed to notice us, probably detecting our thermal signature, then flipped and burned hard to come back at us. But the delta-V was too much, particularly when we lit the Fafnir’s drive and accelerated away, bound for 109.

“Van, that was brilliant!” Rolis said.

Perry shot him a glance. “What a suck-up.”

“And proud of it, thank you very much.”

I grinned. “Okay, folks, let’s—”

“Van, we’ve got a new player in the game,” Netty said.

That yanked my attention back to the overlay. We did have a new player—a ship of entirely unfamiliar design rising from the surface of 109. It flickered in and out of existence, refusing to offer a hard scanner return.

I sighed.

“Now what?”

3

The unknown ship was about the mass of a typical class 7 but was a toroidal shape, unlike any other vessel in our registry. We therefore had no idea of its capabilities or armament. Faced with that, I realized I had no choice but to reluctantly order a withdrawal.

Until, that is, it opened up on the class 7 that had fired on us, searing it with some sort of energy weapon that quickly reduced it to slag and glowing debris.

I whistled softly. “You have my attention, new best friends.”

“That was an x-ray laser,” Netty said. “A powerful one, too.”

Zenophir and Icky muttered away to one another. Zeno finally turned to me. “Netty’s right. And that’s rather amazing, a ship that size being able to mount a sustained-fire x-ray laser.”

I nodded slowly, digesting the reality of what we’d seen. I was no expert in x-ray laser technology, but I did have a strange history with them. I’d worked on a shadowy government program, the most classified one I’d ever been involved in, developing and testing x-ray laser tech for orbital, anti-ballistic missile defenses. I’d even taken the, ahem, liberty of using one to save us from a surprise attack in Earth orbit. But that had required the detonation of a nuclear weapon to pump a coherent pulse of x-rays in a single-shot orgy of destruction. This thing seemed to be able to simply fire sustained, concentrated beams of x-ray energy—

At least, until it detonated in a dazzling flash and simply vanished.

We all stared at the overlay for a moment.

“Well, then. I guess they weren’t able to put out sustained x-ray fire,” Torina finally said.

Zeno nodded as she studied the data Netty had collected. “Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I see.”

“Care to share, Zeno?”

“Right as it started shooting, that thing spiked a massive burst of neutrons. It fits with a fusion plant cascade—basically, a somewhat slower thermonuclear bomb. As soon as that ship committed to firing that thing, they were on borrowed time.”

“I hope it wasn’t crewed,” Torina said.

I stared at the overlay, which was now showing nothing but clear space between us and 109.

“Well, if it was, then there are some deadly serious players involved in whatever’s going on down on that planet,” Zeno said.

I peered down at the dark world below us, my mind whirling with concern. “Yeah. I think I now know why no one’s ever managed to claim it.”

* * *

We entered orbit just in time to detect the launch signatures of two ships, another class 7, and a class 9. Neither answered our comms. Given the fact we’d been fired on by one orbiting ship, and another had just detonated itself in a spectacular show of grim violence, I wasn’t going to take any chances.

“Torina, four missiles on my mark, two at each. Keep the yield on the warheads low to minimize any collateral damage on the ground. I’m going to give them one more chance.”

She nodded and switched our missile launchers to weapons-hold, meaning the weapons wouldn’t fire unless we positively ID’d the targets as hostile. It meant that both ships would realize they’d been lit up by our fire-control scanners, which I hoped would persuade them to stand down. Climbing through an atmosphere and out of a gravity well not only meant they were incredibly vulnerable, but also that the transit time for our missiles would be measured in seconds.

“Unknown ships, return to the surface, land, and await further instructions. This is your last warning,” I said.

Nothing.

“Idiots. If they at least pretended to cooperate, they might have a chance,” Perry said.

I nodded at Torina, who tapped the COMMIT control. The Fafnir shuddered as the missiles launched. And, sure enough, five seconds later, three of the four warheads detonated. Despite having climbed high enough that the air was beginning to get seriously thin, the shock waves were still powerful enough to smash both ships to fragments.

Perry shook his head.

“I repeat, idiots. Or, at least they were.”

* * *

“After all this, you don’t want to check out what’s going on down there?” Torina asked.

We’d assumed orbit around 109, but I’d hesitated to try to descend to the surface. Perry had come up with a possible identity for the strange toroidal ship that had ascended and attacked the class 7 that had attacked us.

I made a hang on a moment gesture to Torina, then turned to Perry. “The Hwananyne? Who are they?” I asked him.

“We know very little about them, aside from the fact that they exist. There are mentions of them in some old Esstai Confederacy records, but it’s all fragments. And the brutal war didn’t help keep the information intact. Anyway, they appear to be creatures of living metal—think intelligent mercury. But they may have a little more form than that. We’re just not sure.”

“So this might be their homeworld?”

“Or a colony. Or a group of them that got stranded here. They apparently live somewhere beneath the surface, avoid contact with others, and generally keep to themselves.”

“They live beneath the surface? That would explain why they don’t want anyone coming here to do a bunch of excavating and mining,” Zeno said.

I had to agree. “Yeah. Which means, to answer your question, my dear Torina, that we won’t be descending to check things out, no. If these Hwananyne have been roused to defend themselves and their cozy little planet, they might not distinguish between us, Salt Thieves, or anyone else. I’d hate to end up hurting or killing any of them.”

“Kinda hate to have them hurting or killing any of us, too,” Rolis said.

“There’s that, too,” I agreed. “That laser had one hell of a kick.”

We were preparing to break orbit when we received an incoming comm message. I immediately wondered if it might be the Hwananyne, but the message was inbound from the inner system. Its origin seemed to be an arbitrary point in space about a light-minute away from Esstai. And it consisted only of a single phrase.

“We’ll talk about this later on, laktos.”

I looked at Perry. “Do I even want to know what that means?”

“Considering it didn’t translate, I’m thinking probably not,” Zeno muttered.

“Um. Well, boss, I think the closest thing would be dead runt of the litter,” Perry said.

“Hey, I’m over six feet tall. Frankly, I find that offensive.”

“You’re still alive, too,” Icky noted.

“Thanks, Icky, that too. Anyway, I think we know what needs to be done now.”

Torina put a finger on her chin. “Hmm. I’m going with kill or capture every Salt Thief, run down No-No, and turn her ship into vapor?”

I gave her a broad smile. “It’s like you read my mind.”

* * *

We departed 109 without further incident and set a course back to Anvil Dark. Still, the cryptic threat from No-No’s Salt Thieves made it clear that we’d gotten under their skin. I hoped that would translate into more wariness on their part, since they’d lost three ships in quick succession. At the very least, it should have them looking over their shoulders, wondering when a Peacemaker might suddenly appear and cause trouble for them.

When we arrived at Anvil Dark, Lunzy met us and came aboard before we could even disembark. “I wanted to catch you before you ended up talking to anyone else. This whole 109 affair has become a delicate balancing act. Traversia just issued a strong protest through back channels about the Guild getting involved in the system, so now we’ve got a couple of Masters starting to ask questions.”

“Such as?” I asked.

“Such as, why are we there? What’s our justification? That sort of thing.”

“Upholding the law isn’t a good enough reason?”

Lunzy smiled. “Van, I’m just giving you some realpolitik here. Traversia is like a big old spider, sitting in the middle of a web and spinning schemes. Unfortunately, their web reaches almost everywhere, and that includes Anvil Dark.”

I crossed my arms, but Torina spoke before I could. “Are you telling us that we’re going to have to drop it?”

“No. Or, at least not yet.”

“Lunzy, those are Salt Thieves meddling in 109. You know, criminals? The kinds of people we’re supposed to be hunting down?” I said.

She held up her hands. “Van, I’m on your side. I’m just telling you what’s happening.”

I blew out a frustrated sigh. “Look, there are aggrieved and injured parties here—the people of Esstai and Arhun, for one, who need the resources from 109 to rebuild their damaged worlds. And then there are the Hwananyne. I mean, 109 is their home.”

Lunzy tilted her head. “The Hwananyne? Who or what are they?”

Oh. Right. We’d only discovered the existence of the Hwananyne when they’d attacked the Salt Thieves’ ship, and even then only after Perry had scoured databases and assembled bits and pieces. Very few people likely even knew of the race. I gave Lunzy the thumbnail version, and she turned thoughtful.

“Wait, these cryptic aliens live on 109? Like, right now?” Lunzy asked, her voice tinged with disbelief.

“More like in 109, under its surface. Apparently, anyway. There isn’t much info about them.”

“Do we know where?’

I shrugged. “Under the surface. That’s all the records tell.” I turned to Perry. “Right?”

“That’s right.”

“And there’s no record of a formal first contact with them on file?”

“Nope. And I think I see where you’re going with this. A Preservation Order?”

Lunzy nodded. “It would reverse thrust on any development on 109, at least temporarily. Unfortunately, that includes Esstai and Arhun as well. But it would cut Traversia’s ambitions off at the knees.”

While she was talking, I tried to remember anything about a Preservation Order. I recalled seeing the term in some document or other, but that was all.

“Care to enlighten those of us who don’t know offhand what a Preservation Order is?” I asked.

Lunzy narrowed her eyes at me for a moment. “Van, have you ever heard of the Iolanians?”

“Uh… no. Should I?”

“Probably not, because they’re all dead.”

“What happened?”

“The Iolanians were a race of silicon-based lifeforms, essentially made of crystal. Their life processes were very, very slow. It would take them minutes to formulate and then communicate a single thought. Unfortunately, that was too slow for a group of colonists from Tau Ceti who landed on the Iolanian homeworld and proceeded to destroy them.”

“What? Why?”

“Because they didn’t realize that the Iolanians were even alive. As far as the colonists were concerned, they were just rocks—and beautiful, crystalline rocks of nearly every color you could imagine. It wasn’t until some years later that a researcher learned the truth, almost inadvertently. By then, it was too late. What had been an intelligent race had been turned into what amounted to decorative inlay.”

I dropped my hands to my sides.

Torina actually gasped. “Holy shit. That’s awful.”

“Even worse for the colonists. They’d never intended to harm anyone. Anyway, the colony failed—”

“Not surprised,” Zeno put in.

“—and was abandoned. But the powers of known space learned a valuable lesson from that, so we’ve got the Preservation Order. Basically, if sentient life is known to exist, or reasonably believed to exist somewhere, then until a formal first contact protocol has been enacted, no development is allowed. It’s right up there in the Crimes Against Order category of importance.”

I nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s get a Preservation Order set up for 109. It should at least buy some time.”

“Fair warning, Van. it’s also going to subject you to the wrath of Traversia, and maybe a Master or two on their behalf,” Lunzy said.

“Bah. What’s a little more wrath on the pile?”

* * *

The Preservation Order proved remarkably easy to get. No one, it seemed, wanted to be responsible for another incident like the fate of the unfortunate Iolanians. Lunzy, Perry, and I drafted the Order, and, thanks to my new status as a Third Veteran, I could walk it straight in to the Masters for their approval.

I ended up waiting for about an hour, so I talked shop with Max, the hybrid multi-creature who was the Masters’ receptionist-administrative assistant. I actually learned a lot about the nuances of the Guild in the post-Yotov era and filed away more than a few things for possible future use.

Max, taking a break from our discussion, adjusted their body and tentacles with what could only be a conspiratorial sense of motion.

“Yes?” I asked.

“They’re almost done. We’ve got time to pass along a—let’s call it a cultural artifact, created by your grandfather. Interested?”

“Absolutely. What is it? Some kind of wisdom? A nugget of historical data guaranteed to warm my heart and instruct me in the ways of law enforcement?” I asked, excitement fizzing my nerves.

Max wiggled. All over. “Not quite. It’s a truly filthy limerick your gramps wrote in honor of—”

“Don’t say a redhead. Please don’t say a redhead.”

“How did you know?” Max asked, curious. “Are you psionic?”

I sighed, slow and gusty. “No. Just a human male, and gramps—like many other human males—had a lifelong fascination with redheads. They, ah, inspired him, in ways both artistic and, um—”

“Dirty?”

“Well, if you want to be accurate, yes. So if you have a limerick, and Mark Tudor coined it, then there’s either a redhead or a bottle of whiskey in it.”

Max burbled with laughter. “Both.”

“Of course. Well, hell. Hit me.”

“A ginger there once from Des Moines—”

“Max? Document is prepared, and the… Peacemaker… is to be sent along immediately,” a synthetic legal assistant said, appearing in the doorway like a disapproving wraith. The Synth either disliked me or limericks.

Or both.

Max handed me the signed Preservation Order without preamble, then confirmed it would be proclaimed later that day. Lunzy suggested I should probably brace myself for a backlash, including a formal diplomatic one from Esstai and Arhun. The Preservation Order required a first contact assessment, which could only be conducted by a qualified and properly certified xenobiologist. Lunzy had already arranged for one—who was involved in some survey on the far spinward edge of known space, where a pre-spaceflight culture was on the brink of taking its first steps into the void. She would be available, it seemed, sometime in the next few months.

“Which means that backlash I mentioned might be even more, um, forceful,” she said.

I could only nod. It wasn’t the diplomatic backlash that really worried me, though. It was the potentially violent one from the Salt Thieves and, ultimately, Traversia Bolt-Right. I’d been flippant about more wrath descending on me, but the fact was it ratcheted my anxiety up another notch or two. And not just for myself, either. I had a crew to worry about, and as recent events had shown, people I cared about on Earth, like Miryam, who might also be targets for that wrath.

What we really needed to do was deliver a decisive blow to the Salt Thieves, one that would take them out of the game—ideally permanently, but I’d happily take a good long time instead. I was learning to appreciate ending criminal careers, not just interrupting them.

We reclaimed custody of the Rumor, which had been repaired, as I was brooding over this. It wasn’t perfect, of course. Conoku tech and manufacturing methods were inscrutable to anyone who wasn’t Conoku, but it was, I thought, good enough. At least we’d put in the effort, after all.

And a short time after that, Linulla finally contacted us with news about a reception on his people’s moon, Ock-kuss-nar. We accordingly strapped the Rumor to the Fafnir and set course for a remote star system near the coreward edge of known space, the Conoku home system, which was simply and cryptically known as Eln.

Perry watched me as I settled into my seat, his eyes glowing with interest. “Ready to exchange a little culture?”

“I confess that I’m interested to see the Conoku at home, as it were. I like Linulla and his kids so much, I’d like to see the people who made him.”

“Even if it means speeches and awkward translation of your food?” Netty asked.

I shrugged but smiled too, thinking back on some of the attempts at human food that I’d been presented as a guest of honor. The results were… erratic. “As long as the mac and cheese is close enough to edible, we’re good to go.”

“I’ll call ahead and place your order, boss. Did you want the noodles cooked or free of heavy metals?” Perry asked, beak open in mirth.

“I’m feeling optimistic. How about both?”

* * *

“Eln? It essentially means world, although that doesn’t quite capture it. It also has components of home and birthplace and that which needs to be protected,” Perry said.

“That’s a lot of meaning to pack into such a little word,” I replied as we accelerated toward Ock-kuss-nar, a moon orbiting the system’s third planet.

“What can I say? The Conoku are efficient, even in their own language.”

“Ock-kuss-nar doesn’t sound very efficient,” Icky put in.

Perry shrugged. “Hey, I’m just the translator here. You want to complain, take it up with Linulla and the other Conoku when we meet them.”

I grimaced. “Yeah, that’s what we need right now, another diplomatic incident on our plate.”

Conoku traffic control routed us straight in to Ock-kuss-nar, pointedly noting that an exclusion zone existed around Eln itself—and that violating it would invite attack by automated defensive systems. It was a surprisingly stark warning, considering that we were here on what was essentially a goodwill visit, returning a Conoku cultural artifact.

“They sound kind of xenophobic, actually. Which is strange, considering that Linulla doesn’t come across as xenophobic at all,” Torina said.

“It’s not really xenophobia, though. Conoku culture has a strong spiritual component that revolves around purity and impurity. We don’t know much about it other than that because they keep it to themselves. Our entry into their space and landing on their world would introduce impurities, and that’s a spiritual affront to them,” Netty said.

“It’s why they make such kickass smiths and artisans. The way Linulla put it to your grandfather is that the Conoku view the process of forging metal to remove its impurities and make it into something more perfect as a metaphor. It’s a real-world reflection of their own spiritual quest for true purity,” Perry added. “And perfection, if we’re being accurate.”

Zeno spoke up. “I worked with a Conoku back in the day. He explained that the hunt for perfection is, to their people, both a blessing and a curse—a blessing, because it drives Conoku to always improve and try harder, and a curse because—ah, pretty much the same reason.”

“In other words, if we approach their space without doing the proper… rites, I guess, we’ll be contaminating them,” I said.

“Close enough,” Perry replied.

We carried on, remaining studiously within the narrow flight corridor the Conoku had established for us. Netty had mentioned that the Conoku had, among other things, a missile that could twist a short distance in the instant before it detonated, making it almost impossible to avoid. That sounded amazing, but I was okay without a demonstration.

Netty kept us flying straight and true into the orbital insertion around Ock-kuss-nar, then the atmospheric entry that took us down to the surface.

We broke through low clouds, revealing a rugged landscape of mesa-like highlands rising amid hundreds of lakes, rivers, and swamps, all of it covered by thick, dark vegetation. When I was ten, I accompanied my father on one of the few father-son ventures we’d undertaken, a fishing trip to northern Minnesota, just south of Quetico Park on the Canadian border. The wild landscape impressed me deeply. I was used to the endless flat plains and gigantic sky of Iowa, so the thick, trackless bush going on seemingly forever had seemed like an alien world to ten year-old me. I felt exactly the same about Ock-kuss-nar—except it really was an alien world, wasn’t it?

Traffic control routed us to an island in a huge lake well north of the equator, not far from where the bushy wilderness faltered. A few klicks from the lake, the terrain faded away into barren tundra, then into icy, dry polar barrens of howling wind and gritty sand. The island was an oasis of development in the midst of what was, as far as we could tell, absolutely empty wildlands stretching to the horizon in every direction. With an atmosphere breathable by most of the major races in known space, surface gravity a little less than standard, a hospitable temperature range, and abundant liquid water, I was surprised it hadn’t attracted more development. A glance up at the looming presence of Eln, its night side awash with the lights of myriad towns and cities, seemed to confirm that the choice was a deliberate one by the Conoku. They’d left Ock-kuss-nar essentially pristine, probably because it formed a core part of their faith.

With the Rumor slung beneath her, the Fafnir couldn’t simply land. The last thing I wanted to do was bring it all this way and then damage the thing in view of our Conoku hosts. We’d already arranged with Linulla what to do—gently settle the ship down on a pair of massive cargo handlers so her landing pads rested on their outstretched manipulator claws. This left the Rumor suspended beneath her about a meter off the ground. A third cargo hauler slid its manipulators under it, then Conoku techs disconnected the sling system Rolis had designed and gingerly slid the Rumor free.

Once the ground control AI had confirmed we were clear, we lifted the Fafnir, then settled her down a short distance away. We disembarked, stepping out into a cool, windy day. A rainstorm deluged the area south of us beneath scudding gray clouds, but the sky vaulting overhead was a clear, purple-tinged deep blue. A small group of Conoku approached us from a bulbous ground vehicle. Behind them sprawled a good-sized town of buildings, all constructed with a slender, fluted architecture that was somehow elegant and austere at the same time, a braided visual experience that challenged my senses with every wall and tower.

Torina watched the approaching Conoku. “You know, they all look alike, but I can still tell them apart. That second one to the right is Linulla,” she whispered to me.

I nodded, a smile spreading across my face. She was right about Linulla, and right about essentially identical creatures all somehow being distinct. I wondered if there was a bit of latent psionics involved.

“Van, thank you for returning the Rumor to us,” Linulla said, then proceeded to introduce the rest of the delegation. It included a Conoku holding an office that the translator called Prelate, who apparently oversaw whatever happened on Ock-kuss-nar—a sort of combined planetary governor, chief administrator, and spiritual leader all rolled into one.

“I would echo Linulla’s gratitude. These craft are ancient artifacts of great significance to us.” He gestured with a chitinous claw. “This one is named Ar-kel-su-esk-tar-esk-salas-tar-emda-kel—”

He went on for some time. Linulla obviously saw our bemused reaction to a name that took nearly a minute to say, even being delivered at a fluid pace.

“The vessel’s name is its story. It describes every young Conoku who has flown it during their Passage, and their achievements while doing so.”

“Ah. Well, it must be pretty old then, I gather?”

“Five hundred and forty years, yes,” the Prelate replied, the translator doing the conversion to terrestrial years automatically. I had to resist a whistle, which might have been inappropriate. This little ship had been built at about the same time that Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria represented a great achievement in Earthly shipbuilding.

I introduced the crew, and we spent a few more minutes talking, but I quickly got the vibe from the Conoku that we’d done what we’d come here to do, now get the hell off our planet. Okay, maybe not quite so harsh, but the point when our little meeting turned to farewells was pretty evident.

Before we boarded the Fafnir, Linulla spoke up.

“Van, compensation among my people for favors done is never monetary, which would be crass and inappropriate. However, we do wish to express our thanks, so I’ve been given the honor of offering to you a unique creation for each member of your crew. I propose, therefore, that at your convenience you meet me on Starsmith, and we’ll work out the details.”

I nodded gratefully. “Very happy to, Linulla, and I—we, rather—are honored. Truly. We’ll be there in a few days. Thank you, one and all.”

We boarded the Fafnir and lifted. As we did, the cockpit filled with chatter regarding what a unique creation was.

“I’d recommend armor. Linulla is a master at it,” I said.

“What if I want a gee-gaw?” Torina asked.

Zeno chuckled. Rolis, though, was puzzled.

“What’s a gee-gaw?”

“It’s better than bric-a-brac, but not quite as good as a doodad,” I said.

“Ah. Well, that clears it right up, thanks.”

4

Over the next couple of days, we traveled from the Conoku moon to Crossroads, then to Spindrift, and then to Dregs. We didn’t actually land or dock but just watched traffic and listened across the comm spectrum to the chatter. We recorded thousands of transmissions and terabytes of data about ship traffic, which Perry and Netty thoroughly mined for useful intelligence. The most intriguing messages were the ones that were encrypted, which was about a quarter of them. Of those, a few dozen were encrypted to standards that required specialized equipment, meaning they were either military or someone who could access and afford military comm gear.

When we finally set course for Starsmith, we convened in the galley to review what we’d managed to glean.

It wasn’t much. Or, rather, there was lots—cargo-haulage trends, vaguely suspicious ship movements, hints of a popular uprising by a disaffected group of dissidents on Tau Ceti, and petty crime, lots and lots of what was obviously petty crime. But there was nothing of immediate interest to us. We passed along the salient points back to Anvil Dark, then twisted to Starsmith.

Linulla greeted us warmly, without the veneer of formality he’d portrayed on Ock-kuss-nar. We spent a full day thrashing out the details of the things he was going to create for us and ultimately settled on cuirasses, breast-plates for each of myself, Torina, Icky, and Zeno. It seemed like the most practical and useful thing we could ask Linulla to create for us, especially if they were fitted to go over our b-suits.

“As long as you don’t mind making what amounts to four of the same thing,” I said to him.

Linulla gave me a curious stare. “They aren’t the same thing at all, though. Even if they’re outwardly identical, each will be made from its own allocation of materials, at a different time, in different circumstances. Each will be its own, unique story.”

“I’d… never really thought about it that way. Thank you for clarifying.”

“Even the Rumor you returned to Ock-kuss-nar tells a unique story, despite being identical to its fellows. In fact, to its name has now been added –alk-ku-tar-Tudor-nar, incorporating the story of its being found and returned by you. My oldest daughter has asked to pilot it when the time comes for her official rite.” He leaned a little closer. “I believe she has a crush on you.”

“Ah—”

Torina and Zeno, standing nearby, giggled. I shot them a glare, but Torina held up her hands.

“Van, I think that’s wonderfully flattering, and so should you.”

“Well, I do, I just—I don’t know. I’m not aware of anyone ever having had a crush on me before.”

Zeno laughed, looking pointedly from me to Torina and back again. “Yeah, right.”

* * *

I decided to spend the several days with Linulla on Starsmith, along with several of his children, as they made the cuirasses. He pointed out that his daughter wanted to work on mine, which prompted more grins and giggles from the crew. I just shrugged them off. It was, as Torina had suggested, both sweet and flattering.

More to the point, it was another break from the grinding paranoia of the rest of known space, where threats might lurk around every star, planet, moon, and station. It was nice to sit in a domed enclosure on the mountainside above the Starsmiths’ subterranean workshops and watch the twin red suns of Struve 2398 slowly sink in the night-black sky. The airless, radiation-scoured barrens around us, cast into ruddy light and purple shadows, had a dangerous, forbidden beauty all its own. In spare, minimalist land, there was an austere elegance that made me pause and stare.

I heard movement behind me and turned in my chair to see who it was.

“Sorry, Van, if you want to be alone—” Zenophir said, but I shook my head and gestured at a chair nearby. They were arranged on a sort of patio, surrounded by clusters of plants with thick, deep mauve leaves. It was more of that menacing loveliness that characterized the place.

“Sit, take a load off,” I said.

She did. When she settled, she looked up at the twin stars. “Hard to imagine that someone actually lives on the surface of one of those stars.”

She meant the strange, ancient, and mostly incorporeal being known as Matterforge. I nodded. “It explains why these are flare stars, I think.”

“I wonder how many flare stars are just dumb physics, and how many are unique beings like Matterforge,” she replied, her tone a musing one.

I shrugged. “Not sure we can ever know.”

We sat in silence for a while. I got the sense that Zeno wanted to say something, so I just waited.

“Van, do you plan to have children?”

If I’d had a drink, it would have caused a spit-take. I turned to her, wide-eyed. “What?”

“Children. Do you intend to have them?”

“Uh—I—” I fumbled a bit longer, then just shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. It’s—” I shrugged again. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I’m considering it. And if I do, that means I’ll be leaving the crew.”

I sat up. “Zeno, is this your letter of resignation?”

She smiled. “No, of course not. Before I can have children, I need to find a mother brood and the right fathers. But I have started the background work for that—or, well, my mothers have, anyway. But I’m not going to stop them.”

“Well, I would hate to lose you, but when the time comes—well, you have to do what’s best for yourself.”

She smiled again. “Your grandfather once used those exact same words, do what’s best for yourself. It actually sounds kind of selfish.”

“It’s not intended to be selfish. I just think that before you can have other people in your life, you have to be happy in it yourself.”

She nodded. “Again, much what Mark said to me. You really do take after him.”

“Thank you.”

Zeno turned to me. “You’ve never asked me about my child. My daughter.”

“You’ll tell me, or not, when you choose to… or choose not to.”

She sighed. “It’s the part that’s holding me back from fully committing to having more children. Every time I come here and see Linulla and his brood, I decide that’s it, yes, I’m going to. But then I get out there”—she waved a hand—“and see how dangerous and unpredictable it is, and my resolve falters. I don’t want to go through all that pain of loss again.”

I decided to take the plunge. “What happened to her? Your daughter? And if you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine—”

“No, Van, telling people I trust actually helps me deal with it. Are you familiar with the Tonaat?”

Surprisingly, I was. They were one of only three spaceflight-capable races that weren’t, and had no interest in being, part of known space. Aquatic, or semi-so, they’d rebuffed every attempt at diplomatic relations. In fact, the only interactions they initiated with known space were attacks on its anti-spinward rim, normally orbital bombardments that devastated any settlements that crossed some arbitrary line.

So I nodded, letting her tell the story at her own pace. In her speech pattern, I sensed something coming—a revelatory moment as she opened up to me about something that was deeply personal.

Zeno continued after a hesitation. “My daughter had just matured and joined a P’nosk research and settlement mission in space well coreward of what seemed to be the Tonaat region of interest. Turned out that wasn’t right. For whatever reason, the Tonaat appeared and bombarded them, leaving only a few left alive. My daughter—she wasn’t one of them.”

“I’m… I’m sorry, Zeno. Don’t know what to say.”

“Yeah. I was in a bad place after that. It’s the reason I ended up running afoul of the law. I’m just thankful your grandfather was the one who ran down the case and arrested me. He seemed to… understand. Anyway, it leaves me stuck between desperately wanting children and also not wanting them, because I don’t ever want them to get hurt. I can’t relive that ache, and the stars are dangerous, Van, even with us out there doing what we can. Violence is beyond random. It's cruel, it’s permanent, and it’s everywhere. And, still—"

I sighed. “I’m not sure if you’re asking me for advice here, or what, but I’m not the guy to give it to you, Zeno. I’m just not at that place in my life because I’m not a father. Hell, if I’ve learned anything since putting on this uniform, it’s that I’m just now becoming an adult. To be a parent? It’s a state of maturity I hope to achieve, but I’m not there. Not yet.”

We sat in companionable silence, letting the quiet bind us together.

“Thank you, Van.”

“For… what?”

“For being so much like your grandfather. I miss his wisdom.”

“I do too. I miss so much of him.”

She stood but hesitated. “Back when we first met, I said that I’d never submit to someone other than your grandfather, that he got a free pass from me and no one else ever would. I’ve changed my mind. You get a free pass, too, Van.”

“Zeno, I would never ask you to submit to me in any way.”

“I know. But I wanted to say it anyway.”

I grinned. “Well, unless you break the law, of course. Then I’ll be coming for you in full Peacemaker mode.”

She grinned back. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

* * *

Over the next few days, we did some test-fitting of our new cuirasses. Linulla had crafted them out of some layered composite of a thin alloy and a material that was woven and flexible but otherwise felt and looked like ceramic. They weighed less than a kilogram but still offered tremendous stopping power. It was going to be good going into fights with that sort of protection.

I felt a little bit invincible.

I did notice one touching little exchange. While Linulla was fitting Icky for her voluminous cuirass—he noted wryly that hers contained almost as much material as the other three combined—Zenophir clicked her tongue and suggested little tweaks and changes. She hadn’t given her own armor the same focus or attention. It reminded me of a mother fussing over her kids, making sure they dressed properly so they didn’t catch their death of cold.

Icky surprised me even more by not trying to brush Zeno’s attention aside or express any impatience at all. She just stood there, looking resigned, as Zenophir continued to natter at Linulla over tiny changes.

I was starting to think that Zeno might already be a mother, in a way. And that was… generous. And warm.

As long as nothing ever happened to Icky, that is.

* * *

As Linulla’s work drew to a close and we faced our departure, I found myself brooding over thoughts I’d been doggedly staving off.

What now?

“Everywhere we go, the Salt Thieves might already be waiting for us,” I said as we met again in the Fafnir’s galley.

“Do you really think they will, though? That’s an awful lot of time, effort, and money to invest in dealing with one Peacemaker,” Rolis suggested.

But Zeno spoke up, shaking her head. “It doesn’t matter. Van’s grandfather defeated the Salt Thieves at every turn. Even when they allied with the Stillness, he still tried taking the war to them and still almost beat them.”

I gave a grim nod. “Yeah, we’re causing trouble for them, and if they get the sense it’s Gramps 2.0, they’ll want to take us out before things get out of hand for them.”

“Is this your idea of a rousing, inspirational speech? Because if it is, it sucks,” Icky said.

I glanced back. “Do you need a rousing, inspirational speech to keep you going?”

“Hell no. I’ll fight anyone, anywhere. I’m just saying that one sucks.”

I grinned, but it didn’t last. “So the question is, where would they come after us? Earth and Anvil Dark are logical places.”

“They’d have to be either bold or desperate to lurk around Anvil Dark. The Gamma Crucis system is heavily surveilled right out to its Kuiper Belt,” Netty offered.

Perry bobbed his head in agreement. “Not only that, but attacking and possibly killing a Peacemaker within sight of Anvil Dark is also sending one hell of a message—and that message, whether they like it or not, is come and wipe us out.”

“It would risk hardening Peacemaker resolve to take the whole organization out and may just end up causing them more problems than it solves,” Torina agreed.

“Okay, so Earth then,” I said.

“Again, yes and no. I’ll remind you that scuttlebuttt among the AIs is that a few Peacemakers have taken to hanging around the Solar System or leaving surveillance devices there. The idea is that the Salt Thieves or Fade or Cabal or whoever will be coming after you, so it stands to offer some easy pickings—salvage, bounties, and prize money,” Perry said.

I slumped back in the pilot’s seat and let my gaze wander toward the twin red suns of the Starsmith system. Too bad we couldn’t have Matterforge join the crew. Of course, a being that lived amid the incandescent fury of a star’s surface might not be a good fit with a crew whose ignition point was a little lower than a nuclear furnace.

“Van, I think we all need to take some time to think this through, but you especially. Where do you do your best thinking?” Zeno asked.

I thought about it for a moment. My gut reaction was the farm, but it struck me that wasn’t really true.

“Helso, on the Innsu dojo floor with Master Cataric,” I finally said.

“My father has informed me that the Seven Stars League has based a squadron of warships there. That whole incident with the illegal mining and the nano-plague embarrassed them, so they’re determined to put the protect into protectorate.”

“Helso it is then. Netty, if you please.”

* * *

I watched Master Cataric’s eyes, studying them for that flicker of intent that came a fleeting instant before the strike.

I waited.

And waited.

And—

He struck, a flurry of blows that abruptly drove me back, before forcing me to one knee in submission.

The Master helped me stand. “Again?”

I nodded.

He picked up the wooden rake used to craft the sand into a unique victor’s pattern and made a single pass. It was a symbol of a symbol, a way of acknowledging his victory without taking the time for a long, contemplative period of raking the sand that covered the dojo’s floor. He put the rake aside and returned, then stood in front of me and initiated another challenge.

Again, we focused. And again, Cataric just let the moment of focus persist. I found myself strangely fixated, holding back my own strike. The Master was up to something here. He normally fought quite aggressively, a fact I’d come to count on—

Cataric’s knife blurred. I moved to block but was a heartbeat too late.

I dropped to one knee. Cataric acknowledged my concession, then helped me stand and grabbed the rake. As he crafted another design, a simple whorl, he spoke a single word.

“Again?”

“Yes.” I was determined to pull out a win here. I mean, my Innsu hadn’t become that rusty.

Had it?

I dropped into the First Stance. But Cataric didn’t, he just watched me from under a lowered brow.

“I will defeat you this time as well, Van. And likely the next, and the next after that.”

I relaxed. “Oh. Is this the next level of Innsu, where you defeat me with words instead of a knife?”

I’d meant it as a flippant remark, but Cataric remained grave. “Words are the ultimate weapon, Van. A nuclear weapon may kill thousands, even millions. A single word can end an entire civilization.”

“Okay, fair point.”

I waited for Cataric to go on, but he didn’t. He just put the rake aside, crossed his arms, and waited.

“Okay, so this is a lesson, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Everything is a lesson for someone.”

“Uh… look, Master, I’m not getting what you—”

“Van, why are you not striking at me?”

“I could ask the same thing. You’ve never just let the Focus go on like that.”

He finally smiled. “Yes, I am behaving differently today, aren’t I?”

“Again, if there’s a lesson here—”

“There are two. The first, and most trivial, is to not let yourself start taking your opponents for granted. You and I have fought many times now, so you think you know me. But knowing your enemy goes far beyond what you know he is likely to do. It is far more important to think of the things your opponent is capable of doing and is willing to do.”

I nodded. “Point taken. So what’s the non-trivial lesson?”

“I changed my behavior, Van. I chose to fight far less aggressively and instead allow the Focus to continue. Given that, why didn’t you strike at me?”

“I guess—well, you caught me off-guard with your change in tactics.”

“Alright, three lessons. Yes, don’t let your enemy doing something you don’t expect fluster you. But the more important one is that by making you hesitate, I’ve created a situation in which I get to choose the moment of my Strike.”

He said it with a declarative finality that said that was the third and most important lesson. I didn’t get it, though—until I did.

I nodded. “This is about the Salt Thieves, isn’t it? Did Torina call ahead?”

He raised his hands in surrender. “She did. She contacted me before you arrived here and described the burden of your thoughts to me regarding your enemies. I thought that this might serve to help you determine what to do.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Yeah, it has. It’s shown me that I should be listening to my gut here. Instead of worrying about when and where the Salt Thieves or their offshoot, the Fade, come after me, I need to take the fight to them.”

“You need to stop Focusing and start considering how to Strike,” Cataric agreed.

I nodded, then resumed my stance. “Master, if you please.”

He smiled and settled into his own stance. This time, I decided to dictate the pace of the clash irrespective of what Cataric chose to do. When I was ready, I struck—

And Cataric blocked it, and landed a killing blow on me instead.

He smiled. “That was much better, Van.”

“Was it, though? I still lost.”

He grinned. “Well, I am called Master Cataric for a reason.”

* * *

I actually won three of the next ten bouts—my best win rate against the Innsu Master yet. When I finally ambled back to Torina’s family estate up the road, Van Maanen’s Star had sunk to the horizon, and the shadows were getting long. I stopped at the last bend in the road before it passed into the estate, then I turned back. The road had climbed a hill these last few hundred meters, so I had a vantage point not too different from the one from the Milon family terrace. That’s probably where Icky, Zeno, and maybe Torina would be, drinking wine and watching the sunset, surrounded by companionship and chatter.

It's where I’d go myself once I’d cleaned up. But, for this moment, standing on the road and looking out at the panorama of lands reclaimed from the nano-plague, I was alone. And I was glad for it. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d truly been alone, not jammed into the Fafnir with the crew, jostling through crowds on Spindrift or Dregs, or rubbing shoulders with other Peacemakers on Anvil Dark. And my solitary sojourns on the Daren-thal homeworld didn’t count because I’d been on the job, acting as bait for the Fade kidnappers seeking fodder for their damned Cusp machines. Besides, I’d had Perry with me, and a bunch more people just a comm away.

Right now, though, I was truly alone. And I reveled in it.

Lights came winking on across the town spread below me. I could pick out Cataric’s dojo, an unassuming building amid the rest.

“Do I really want to keep doing this?” I asked myself and the wind.

I blinked, surprised at my words. Where the hell had that come from?

But I knew exactly where it had come from. Zeno had asked me if I ever wanted to have children, and that struck a spark somewhere deep inside me. It had kindled into a fitful, smoldering flicker, one I hadn’t even really been consciously aware of. But now that I’d taken a moment to spend some time inside myself, I could see it for what it was.

Did I want to have children someday?

“Yes.” One word. A lot of weight.

But not until the threat of the Salt Thieves, the Fade, the Cabal, No-No, Traversia Bolt-Right, and whoever else was out there gunning for me, was ended.

Which might be never, because threats like that never could be truly ended. If I wiped out the Salt Thieves to a person, something new would slither into the gap they’d left in the criminal ecosystem.

Or, of course, I’d die—and no kids then, right?

I sighed and looked up at an arbitrary point in the darkening sky, where the first stars were beginning to twinkle, bearing mute witness to my inner conflict.

“You had kids, Gramps. How did you manage it? Especially since your own son died to the very people you were trying to fight?”

The sky had no answer to that, of course, and neither did I.

5

We needed to take the fight to the bad guys immediately, instead of trying to figure out their next move. The question was how.

To answer that question, I decided to return to Anvil Dark. Not only was it a relatively safe haven while we strategized, but almost all the people I wanted to talk to—Lunzy, Lucky, Sussbrid, Bester, and the rest—were also there.

We spent the next few days at Anvil Dark as Torina, Perry, and I met with various people around the station. Netty, Icky, Zeno, and Rolis took advantage of the downtime to move the Fafnir into a maintenance hangar, do some postponed maintenance, and give her a thorough inspection to keep her flight certification in good standing. I was happy to let them do their thing, at least until I got the bill.

“Thirty six thousand two hundred and twenty bonds? For maintenance? Were things really that bad?” I asked, looking up from the data slate as we stood in the hangar.

Zeno shrugged. “Depends what you mean by bad. We had to replace one of the confinement coils in the reactor since it was nearing the end of its certified life. We still had a bit of lingering battle damage, and a few hull-plates were starting to show some serious micrometeorite abrasion—”

I held up a hand. “Okay, I get it. And I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you guys weren’t staying on top of stuff. Been in my head a bit, I think.”

“You might say that, boss,” Zeno agreed.

“That distant?”

She paused, forming her words in a diplomatic fashion. “When you’re present, you remind me of your grandfather—his goodness. His decisiveness. His ability to win and see what’s right.”

“And when I’m not?”

“You remind me of your grandfather when he was thinking of Valint, and home, and things beyond the hull,” Zeno said, and there was a warmth to her voice that hadn’t been there before.

“Huh. Apology accepted for doubting you?” I asked.

“There was no offense given, Van.”

Despite peace among us as a crew, it was still a hefty financial hit. I really wanted to avoid dipping into the cash reserves that generated the annuity funds we used to cover our operating costs, so it was going to leave us a little tight until the next annuity payment.

“That’s the trouble with everything, it costs money,” I grumbled as we headed back into the station.

Torina batted her eyes at me. “We could always live on love.”

“That might work for you two, but for the rest of us, not so much,” Perry said.

“None of them do it for you, bird?” Torina asked.

“Do any of them do it for you?”

“Uh—

“Exactly.”

We carried on to our next meeting aboard Lunzy’s ship, the Foregone Conclusion. It was a nicer place to meet than the Fafnir, despite our ship now being a Dragon. Lunzy had invested in an additional crew hab module that she’d converted into a study with plush chairs, paneling, and even a fake fireplace.

She also had better booze than the rest of us.

Lucky and Sussbrid were already there when we arrived. We settled in, and Lunzy got right to the point.

“Van, we all did some digging and thinking over these past couple of days, when you met with us individually. It’s time for some groupthink now. And we can start by reaffirming we are a group. The three of us here, plus Bester, as well as Alic and K’losk, are all firmly committed to what you intend to do,” she said.

“Whatever that ends up being,” Lucky added.

Sussbrid raised a cautioning hand. “And within reason.”

I nodded. “Of course. And thank you. That means a lot to me.”

“The universe is a big, lonely, and scary place. It’s even bigger, lonelier, and scarier without allies,” Sussbrid replied.

I looked at Perry. “The galaxy is a cold and hostile place.”

“Damned right it is. Whoever told you that is a wise bird indeed.”

I smiled and turned back to the others. “Okay, so I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, too. I think I want to go after Traversia Bolt-Right.”

A moment of silence followed, punctuated by the crackle of Lunzy’s fake fire.

She finally blew out a sigh. “Taking aim right at the top, huh? Ballsy.”

“And very, very dangerous. What made you set your sights on them, Van?”

I sat forward. “The logical thing for me to do is to try and preempt the bad guys, go after them before they come after me. And when I say the logical thing, I really mean it. But I must assume that the bad guys are at least as smart as we are, so they’ll be ready for that.”

Lunzy nodded. “But you don’t think they’ll be ready for you to go after Traversia.”

I shook my head. “No. Keeping to that whole logical thing, what would make sense is for us to keep doing what we’ve been doing, striking at the Fade and the Salt Thieves and the Sorcerers and—ah, that whole lot. So that’s what they’re going to be ready for.”

“That all makes perfect sense, except for one thing,” Lucky said.

I turned to her. “Which is?”

“Well, to go after Traversia, you have to have something to go after them for. But they are a legitimate corporation, making and selling legitimate stuff, legitimately employing people and generally being—”

“Don’t say legitimate,” I said.

“I won’t, but you know it fits,” Lucky groused.

“And if you just start poking around their business and boarding their ships and things without some seriously probable cause, they’ll come at you with all the legal firepower billions of bonds can buy,” Lunzy added.

“That’s a lot of legal firepower,” Torina said.

Lunzy nodded firmly. “Damned right it is. So unless you can find something they’re doing, or have done, that’s actually illegal—”

I smiled. “We have. Or at least we’ve discovered something they’re doing that looks illegal. Perry?”

“We can thank our good friend Rolis, who spent his career as a structural engineer in several different shipyards until he was turned into a chip, for this. He helped design a specific type of fast freighter for Traversia, to their specifications. He was involved in building three of them and knows that two more were built after he moved to other projects. Those five are all that were ever built, and they were all for Traversia.”

Lunzy, Sussbrid, and Lucky were all leaning forward, evidently intrigued by where Perry was going. “Okay, and?” Lunzy prompted.

“And, ship-registry data records that Traversia ultimately leased two of them to a shell company that’s apparently completely free of any Traversia involvement. They don’t hold any shares, and none of their corporate officers are implicated.”

“Well, that goes a whole lot of nowhere,” Lucky said.

But Perry raised a wing. “Ah, you might think so. But it turns out that the shell company is wholly owned by yet another shell company, and it’s owned by the brother of a Traversia director.”

“Still not quite seeing a point here,” Sussbrid said.

“One of those two leased fast freighters, the Auspicious Day, makes a run to Dregs every two months, ostensibly to deliver various supplies on a standing contract. But we’ve got intelligence reports that it doesn’t deadhead away from Dregs and is instead loaded with contraband cargo,” Perry said.

Lunzy grinned. “So a ship leased to a company owned by another company owned by the brother of a Traversia director may be involved in smuggling stuff from Dregs? Have I got that right?”

“When you put it that way, it just sounds lame,” Perry replied, his tone taking on a touch of petulance.

But I was ready for this. I pulled out a data slate and offered it to Lunzy. “Three Peacemaker cases, each similar to this one—investigations that turned on indirect relationships, one of them four steps removed from the actual crime, that resulted in convictions,” I said.

She made an impressed face, then handed the slate to Lucky so she and Sussbrid could read it. “Someone’s been doing their homework, I see.”

I shrugged. “I think we all tend to imagine that big, dramatic break that busts a case wide open. But back on Earth, when I was hacking, the big discoveries didn’t come from dramatic breaks. They came from hours of tedious work, a lot of it just researching targets to figure out how to hack them most effectively. Hell, in a few cases it turned out to be a simple email with a link to some—trying to be delicate here—specific materials—”

“Porn,” Perry put in.

“Yeah, okay, it was porn. Still, though, it makes the point—know your enemy and all that, right?”

Lunzy sat back and stretched out her legs. “Van, what do you know about Traversia itself?”

“Big corporation, super wealthy and super old, and—” I shrugged. “I assume you’re not really asking me to explain it to you, though.”

“No, I’m actually pretty familiar with Traversia. Believe it or not, one of my first big-paying jobs as a Peacemaker had me working for them. One of their more lucrative trade routes, hauling food and water and air to mining operations in Wolf 424, and hauling concentrated ore out, was plagued with pirates. They asked me to locate their base of operations so it could be shut down. And I did—including the shutting down part.”

“All by yourself?” Torina asked.

“Correct. Because it turns out that when you get fired on by a ground installation, and you shoot back, and one of your missiles hits that sweet spot that causes an uncontained reactor failure—well, the resulting multi-megaton explosion pretty much counts as shutting things down.”

“The story I heard was that you specifically targeted their reactor, giving no quarter, no mercy, that sort of thing,” Lucky said.

Lunzy laughed. “Yeah, I know. And I admit I rode that whole remorseless killer thing for a while. But no, the truth is that I panicked and fired all of my missiles back at the pirate base, and one of them landed just right.”

“The golden bb,” I said, nodding, then caught the puzzled looks from Lucky and Sussbrid.

“Sorry, got that from my father. He flew jet fighters—atmospheric fighting machines—back on Earth. During a conflict called the Gulf War, he talked about how some planes came back to his carrier shot full of holes but still flying perfectly fine. Others, though, went down from a minor hit—the golden bb, that one little fragment or projectile that hits just the wrong place at just the wrong time.” I turned to Lunzy. “Did you do any more jobs for Traversia after that?”

She shook her head. “Nope, I moved on to other things. But I got to know some things about Traversia, like how their board is now composed of powerful and connected people from family and tribal groups across known space, and how they’re all a bunch of cutthroat, ruthless, old money sons of bitches. But the reason I moved on to other things was because they did offer me more work.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

She gave a thin smile. “See, they believed the whole Lunzy’s a merciless psychopath story that Lucky here heard. And they came back to me with a list of targets, people and groups, they wanted me to take out.”

“They wanted to bring you on as, what, a hired killer?”

Lunzy nodded. “They were thrilled to see those pirates get nuked, and they wanted more of the same. So that’s who and what you’re dealing with here, Van. I pretended to be a merciless psychopath. They’re the real deal.”

* * *

The real deal, huh?

Well, I guess that remained to be seen.

As we lurked on the edge of the Dregs traffic control zone, though, that brave whatever-ism was starting to show some cracks. I was second-guessing myself, wondering if taking on a clearly criminal organization like the Salt Thieves was one thing, but challenging a huge, multi-system corporation was another altogether. For one, criminal organizations were large scale groups of criminals. They existed to break the law and do it efficiently and profitably, hence the term organized crime. A corporation might do criminal things, but most of what Traversia Bolt-Right did involved perfectly legal and, honestly, uninteresting stuff—manufacturing, shipping, sales, back-office administration, all that vital administrivia that kept everything running. Every Salt Thief was effectively a crook. The vast majority of Traversia employees were just honest people making a living.

It somehow made Traversia… more menacing. I could fight back against criminals. I had a sinking feeling that, when it came to Traversia, all I was going to end up fighting was lawyers.

“It’s like punching a pile of pillows,” Torina said.

I blinked, startled out of my brooding reverie.

“Huh? What about pillows?”

“I can tell you’re worried about taking on Traversia. That made me remember something my father told me about fighting large corporations. It’s like punching a big pile of pillows. You punch and punch away, but you never really leave a dent, or if there is one, it doesn’t last long.”

“Great speech, coach,” I said, giving her a small, wintry grin.

She smiled, waving airily. “It’s a gift.”

“Just set fire to the whole pile of pillows and call it a day,” Icky said.

“There’s actually some wisdom buried in that call to commit arson,” Zeno put in. “The way to bring down something like that is to do it all at once.”

Rolis, who’d taken to clinging onto the rear bulkhead of the cockpit behind Zeno, spoke up. “Sure, you could do that—and put millions of people out of work, not to mention the impact of Traversia’s production suddenly shutting down on spaceflight and interstellar commerce.”

“So, what, they’re too big to fail or something?” Icky growled.

“It sucks and nobody likes it, but, yeah, sometimes things just are too big to fail.”

I glanced at Perry. “You and Netty haven’t had much to say about this whole little undertaking, Perry, other than agreeing to it.”

“If Traversia’s breaking the law, they should be held to account for it,” he replied.

“But?”

“But nothing. If they’re breaking the law, drop the hammer. Full stop.”

We were all looking at Perry by then. He glanced around.

“Look, Van, your grandfather believed someone was bankrolling both the Stillness and the Salt Thieves. He always said they had too ready access to ships and weapons and tech, along with the funds to maintain and operate them. He thought the only way to bring them down for good was to get at who or whatever that backer, or those backers were. Netty and I believed him, but we never found any evidence to link anyone in particular.”

“This link between Traversia and No-No is the sort of lead he was desperate to find but never did. So as far as Perry and I are concerned, we’re just picking up where your grandfather left off,” Netty added.

“Sticking with Torina’s analogy, your grandfather punched a pile of pillows that covered up another pile of pillows—the Stillness and the Salt Thieves and whoever else being that first, outer pile. He punched and punched at it but never got past it. You, Van, have got a peek into that inner pile, and a chance to punch at it. Personally, I think you’re going to find it’s a lot more fragile than it looks,” Perry said.

Icky scowled. “How can a pillow be fragile?”

Perry had been working on his resigned sigh. It was coming along quite nicely.

I turned back to the overlay. “Well, let’s see if we do have a chance at that fragile pillow beneath the outer layer of pillows, and holy crap did that metaphor ever end up bouncing along the ditch—”

“Van, the Auspicious Day has just broken orbit, outbound from Dregs on the trajectory I just put on the overlay,” Netty interrupted.

I sat up. “Showtime. Netty, is everything in position?”

“It is. I’ve tested comms, and the link is solid.”

“So right date, right time to within an hour, and on the same route it always takes in and out. Seems a little reckless if you’re running contraband,” Zeno said.

But Torina shook her head. “This contraband run is just one of a bunch this ship does during the two months it’s not here on Dregs. It’s got a schedule to keep.” She smiled. “And so we stick our toe into the fascinating world of corporate bureaucracy.”

“Big toe or pinky toe?” I asked.

She blinked at me. “Uh… wasn’t aware it made a difference.”

“You can live without your pinky toe. Without your big toe, you can’t walk anymore. At least not well.”

“I—uh—”

I chuckled and waved her off as the drive came to life, Netty angling the Fafnir onto a slowly converging intercept course with the Auspicious Day.

“How would you grab stuff?” Icky abruptly asked.

I turned back to her, frowning. “What?”

“If you lost a toe, how would you grab stuff with that foot?”

“Do you grab things with your feet, Icky?”

“Sure, when I can. It’s great when you’re jammed in among some conduits and have to grab a tool. Saves you climbing out and climbing back in again.”

“Remind me to sterilize the tools after you use them,” Zeno muttered.

We flew on in silence for a moment. Rolis finally broke it.

“I lost all of my toes, and I’m fine.”

* * *

“Auspicious Day, this is Peacemaker Van Tudor. My credentials are in my transponder broadcast. Please heave to and prepare to be boarded for a cargo inspection, pursuant to Article Two, Section One of the Sirius Treaty governing interstellar commerce.” I made it sound as officious as I could, which was made easier by the fact Perry had put the reference on the center display for me to read aloud. Apparently Gramps had done the same thing once he realized he’d never be able to commit every chapter and verse of the myriad interstellar treaties, accords, protocols, and agreements to memory.

The reply was immediate, terse, and dripping with go to hell. “On what grounds? What’s your probable cause?”

“We have evidence that there may be contraband aboard your vessel.”

“What sort of contraband?”

We were ready for this. I turned back to the display, where Perry had fed me more text.

“Our sources indicate that you may be carrying materials that contravene Article Four, Sections Seven through Fourteen of the Accord on Prohibited Goods—specifically, weapons and their components that aren’t registered with the Interstellar Commerce Authority.”

Silence.

I turned to Perry. “Is that really going to hold up?”

“Schegith told us they might be carrying weapons. And, as the effective head-of-state for her people, her testimony is considered category one-alpha—reliable as hell.”

“Perry, we asked her to give us that testimony.”

“And she gave it, and here we are.”

I turned back to the overlay, which showed us well within missile range of the Auspicious Day, coming up on effective laser range in just over a minute. The freighter hadn’t done anything provocative—no fire control scanners, no abrupt maneuvers. She’d just sailed majestically on along her course, which was smart. It forced us to rely solely on our manufactured testimony and the niceties of interstellar commerce law. That bothered me—but not as much as murdering people and imprisoning their identities in a virtual hell for the amusement of others.

It really was easy to start believing the ends justify the means, wasn’t it?

I opened my mouth to repeat the demand for the freighter to heave to, but her drive suddenly flared to life and she accelerated away.

I nodded. “And there we go.”

The big flaw in our plan was the Auspicious Day continuing to dawdle along her trajectory, refusing to stop or let us board. If they had, there wasn’t much we could do about it, aside from an opposed boarding, and that would bring us under even more scrutiny. I’d hoped, though, that the Auspicious Day was crewed by at least part-time criminals who’d get jumpy once a Peacemaker started sniffing around them. No doubt we’d find more than a few outstanding warrants among them, on top of whatever contraband they were carrying.

So they’d run. But we were ready for that, as well.

“Netty, you may proceed.”

Far ahead of the Auspicious Day, a quartet of missiles we’d dropped off on our way into the system came to life and lit up the freighter with their seeker heads. Even being a fast freighter wasn’t enough for her to avoid them. The inexorable rules of physics made it impossible for the Auspicious Day to avoid the missiles if they lit their motors. And although she had point-defenses, it was unlikely they’d manage to take out all four missiles, especially since they’d be closing from head-on at a ferocious relative velocity.

I touched the comm. “Auspicious Day, this is your last warning. Cut your drive and prepare to be boarded, or we will assume you are in flight from a lawful authority while carrying prohibited military hardware, in accordance with—”

I didn’t need to go on. The freighter’s drive cut out, leaving her coasting and us rapidly overtaking her.

“Good thing they didn’t call your bluff,” Zeno said.

I shrugged.

“You… were bluffing, right? You wouldn’t have actually sent those missiles after them, would you?”

I couldn’t help thinking about my own brief experience with a Cusp machine. I still had the occasional nightmare about it, and had twice more quietly spoken to Sussbrid about dealing with it. Torina’s father had said the machine actually rewired your brain to make you less empathic and more psychopathic every time you used it.

I didn’t need to be a psychopath to be utterly revolted by anyone who’d do something so monstrous, though.

I turned to Zeno, who was still awaiting my answer.

“Honestly, Zeno, I don’t know. I hadn’t really decided yet.”

6

“Yeah, yeah, tell it to the judge,” Icky snarled, cutting off the Gajur mid-word. All of the Auspicious Day’s crew, now lined up in the corridor just accessing the cargo holds, had tried some sort of defiance on for size. It had mostly been dumb insolence, but the Gajur insisted that we had no right to hold him.

“I’m just saying, check me out and you won’t find any outstanding warrants. I’m clean, so—”

“So you haven’t committed any crimes in the past—correction, haven’t been convicted of any crimes in the past. Fine. Now, let’s see if there are any crimes you’re committing right now,” I snapped.

Torina and Perry emerged from the hold they’d been inspecting, one of eight. Four of them had been empty, and two more had been loaded with perfectly legitimate cargo, scrap machinery and tech that was heading off Dregs to be recycled. I was starting to get a little nervous. The other flaw in our plan, of course, was that the Auspicious Day was doing absolutely nothing illegal. If that was the case, it would make future action against Traversia a lot more complicated to pull off.

So I searched Torina’s face for a message. I found one.

She nodded. “Chems. Lots of them, secreted away inside some old turbo pumps. Jack-up, dreamrace, brainfog, the list of them goes on and on.”

I exhaled in relief. These were all egregiously illegal chems, sort of the equivalent of things like meth and crack back on Earth, but much more potent—and dangerous.

I turned to the Captain, a slender, hatchet-faced human woman. “Let me guess—you didn’t know they were there, you just took delivery of scrap machine parts, blah, blah.”

She gave an offhanded shrug. “Something like that.”

Icky glared. “Something like that? That’s your answer—?”

“Icky, that’s fine,” I said, stepping in front of her. “They’ll be called to account for this in due course—”

“Pfft.”

I turned. The creature that had scoffed was an unfamiliar species to me, willowy and rat-like, with pointed ears set high on the sides of their head, a squashed face, and six arms.

She’s Cotzei, Perry said in my ear bug.

“You have something to say? A statement you’d like to make, maybe?”

She turned hard, glassy eyes on me, then uttered a string of guttural gibberish that the translator didn’t even touch. I turned to Perry, but his answer was less than enlightening.

Beats me, boss. The Cotzei don’t get around known space much, so our translation database for them is pretty thin.

I turned back to her and read her name from the data slate we’d downloaded the crew manifest onto. “Strazush Hawant. Did I pronounce that right?”

Her reply was another burst of angry nonsense.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Zeno and Rolis, who’d gone to inspect the ship’s power plant, drive, and other critical components, reappeared. “Everything back there is more than ship-shape, boss. It’s immaculate, in fact, everything’s running well within specs,” Rolis said.

“Not all that surprising, being owned by a big corporation,” Zeno added.

“Correction—owned by a corporation that’s owned by a corporation that’s owned by a big corporation,” Perry noted. But he went on, again in my ear bug.

Boss, when you’ve got a second, there’s something you should know.

I turned to Torina and asked her to finish processing the ship, slap a warrant lock onto its transponder, and otherwise prepare it to transit to impoundment at Anvil Dark. Then I returned with Perry to the Fafnir.

“What’s up?” I asked him, half expecting some reason that this wasn’t going to work and we weren’t going to be able to make it stick. I’d asked him and Netty to document everything, so if there were a problem, we were just going to have to live with it.

But it wasn’t that at all.

“Not sure how important it is, but that string of invective the Cotzei unleashed—it included the word Schegith.”

“In what context—oh, wait. You don’t know.”

“Sorry. Like I said, our translation resources for her people are pretty thin. There might even be other components to their language, latent psionics, pheromones, that sort of thing. But that word seemed clear enough. I’ve played it back a few thousand times, and I’m about ninety-five percent it’s Schegith.”

I had to smile. Coming from me, or Torina, or most others, played it back a few thousand times would be hyperbole. With Perry, though, he was just stating a fact.

“Could you tell anything about it at all? Like, was it a threat? Was she implicating Schegith in something?”

“Sorry, Van, I don’t know. The whole thing was delivered like some kind of curse, and it included the word Schegith. That’s all I can tell you.”

I crossed my arms. I was torn between contacting Schegith to let her know what had happened and just blowing it off as the ramblings of an angry criminal. I decided to hold this card in my hand.

But I’d come back to it. Soon.

* * *

I was quite proud of our little operation. We’d seized a big load of dangerous, illicit drugs, we’d done it cleanly and efficiently and without firing a shot or hurting anyone, and we’d done it all with every i dotted and t crossed. We’d even been able to retrieve our four missiles and reload them back into the Fafnir’s magazines.

Which was why my mood was buoyant as we returned to Anvil Dark. But I should have known better.

I stared at the text message Lunzy had sent us. I’d let the smooth success of our seizure of the Auspicious Day lull me into forgetting we were dealing with a mega corporation. And yes, I should have known better, having crossed paths with a few of the big players back on Earth.

“A pile of freakin’ pillows,” I said, handing the data slate to Torina.

She read it. “Hmm. Restraint of trade… wrongful search and seizure… abuse of authority…” She nodded. “Yeah, it all seems about right.”

“In what way is it right?” I asked her, incredulous.

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t mean right as in the right thing to do. I mean right as in, yeah, this is pretty much what I expected.”

Perry bobbed his head. “Yup. The only surprising part is that they cut loose with a full broadside right away. Usually, the big corps file their objections one after another to keep dragging things out.”

“They’re trying to scare us off,” Rolis said.

Zeno nodded. “Yup. Hit us with everything, bury us in complaints and objections, make the whole thing not worth our while.”

“So how do we fight it?” I asked as Netty lined us up on our final approach to dock with Anvil Dark.

“We grit our teeth and push on. It’s the only way,” Torina said.

I sighed. “Why do I have a feeling I’m going to need dental work by the time this is all done?”

7

“He’s making us wait deliberately, isn’t he?”

“Probably.”

I sighed. I hoped that shitty little mind games weren’t what Gerhardt was all about. I was starting to lose patience with Masters who all seemed to be corrupt, incompetent, petty, or some of all three.

Fortunately, just a couple of minutes later Max sent us in, and we entered the office of Master Trayner Gerhardt.

What immediately struck me was the size—not of Gerhardt, but of the office. Groshenko and Yotov had both worked from large and reasonably plush offices, each with a small suite including their office proper, a meeting room, a waiting area, and maybe one or two more compartments used for various things. But Gerhardt apparently used what had been intended as a meeting room for his office. It felt like stepping into a cramped compartment on a ship, like Lunzy’s wood-paneled living space on the Foregone Conclusion. Lunzy’s place was at least cozy. Gerhardt’s office combined cramped with austere in an unholy way I associated with storage cupboards and broom closets—places people went, but not where they stayed.

A desk with nothing on it but a terminal and a blotter, two chairs facing it, a single cabinet, a large-format display showing a star chart of known space, and Gerhardt himself. That was it.

“Peacemaker Tudor, have a seat,” he said.

I nodded, taking the man in as I did. Swarthy, deeply tanned skin, clean-shaven, graying, brush-cut hair, medium build—but his eyes caught me. They were hard and dark, like chips of volcanic glass. Those eyes, and the face containing them, didn’t even seem designed to smile.

Yotov had latent psychic powers that tended to make anyone listening to her feel sympathetic to whatever she was saying. I doubted Gerhardt had a similar ability, but he didn’t need it. Every nuance of expression and body language communicated impending disapproval. And his office—both spartan and ascetic—only magnified it, like a pissed-off echo chamber.

“Now then, Peacemaker Tudor—”

“Please, feel free to call me Van—”

“I do feel free to do so, but I choose not to,” he snapped.

Oh, shit. I nodded contritely and with some precision.

“Now, as I was saying before you interrupted me, Peacemaker Tudor, I understand that you launched an operation against a ship departing Dregs, boarded it, detained the crew, and impounded the vessel. Is that correct?”

I was tempted to say, hey, it’s all in my report, but I didn’t. Somehow, I knew that wouldn’t go over well. So I just nodded again.

“It is.”

“And your prima facie case for undertaking this operation was based upon what, exactly?”

“Criminal intelligence reports that linked the ship back to Traversia Bolt-Right.”

“I see. And you have referenced these criminal intelligence reports in your own?” he said, those black-diamond eyes flicking to a terminal facing him, then back to me.

“Yes, I described them—”

“Did you explicitly reference them, with appropriate hard-links, in section seven of the standard report form?”

“I—well, no. They were verbal—well, except for the documentation proving the ownership of the ship, those were actual documents—”

“So your answer is no.”

“It—uh—” I finally shrugged. “I guess not, no.”

“You guess not.”

“I… didn’t.”

He said nothing and just kept his crystalline gaze leveled on me.

I sighed. “My answer is no.”

“Very well. Moving on, I would like you to walk me through the process by which you concluded that this operation was legally justified.”

I glanced at Perry, but one of the disadvantages of him being a machine was that his expression offered me nothing. I’d been hoping for at least a little bit of encouragement from him, but his face, like Gerhardt’s, wasn’t made for it. Of course, he had an excuse.

I turned back to Gerhardt, took a breath, and plunged into the explanation he wanted. He steepled his fingers and sat motionless, listening until I was done.

A moment passed in silence. I resisted the urge to squirm.

“And that is all?”

“It is.”

After another moment of silent staring, he placed his hands flat on his desk.

“Peacemaker Tudor, there are deficiencies in your chain of investigation. Let us start with your prima facie reasoning. In accordance with Article Two, Section Four of the Peacemaker Charter—”

What followed was nearly ten minutes of flat, monotone recitation of articles, sections, paragraphs, appendices, and annexes that managed to be both incredibly tedious and profoundly unnerving at the same time. By the time Gerhardt was done deconstructing my case, I was looking back fondly to my ordeal in the principal's office, fretting over my impending fate and wincing around my black eye.

Gerhardt finished. “Do you have any questions or comments?”

Again, I turned to Perry. “I’ve got nothing,” he said.

Back to Gerhardt. “No—well, except for one thing. These people are implicated in Crimes Against Order, and of the most monstrous sort at that—”

“And?”

I blinked. “And, well, they’re people we want to stop from doing these things, right?”

“Are you suggesting I disagree with that?”

“Well, no. But to get at these people, we need to—”

“Need to what, Peacemaker Tudor?” Gerhardt said, leaning forward as though he’d been waiting for this moment. “Circumvent the rule of law? Appoint ourselves judge, jury, and—in your case, in what appears to be several instances—executioner?”

“Of course not. But these are Crimes—”

“Against Order, yes. But pursuing something as a Crime Against Order is not intended as a means of avoiding the applicable laws, protocols, and regulations simply because they’re inconvenient. Pursuing something as a Crime Against Order demands a higher standard of correct protocol, since the accusation, and the penalties a conviction would carry, are so severe.”

He leaned back again and gestured at the terminal that was still presumably displaying my report. “This does not meet that standard. In fact, to say that it falls woefully short is a profound understatement. You proceeded to pursue, stop, and seize a ship based on the fact that it is owned through a succession of companies by a relative of a Traversia board member, and then only because you believe on the flimsiest of evidence that Traversia is involved in whatever has been happening on the moon called 109. That isn’t sufficient.”

“But that ship was loaded with illegal chems—”

“All of which are no longer useful as evidence, since they are fruit of the poisonous tree. The manner in which you came to find them failed to meet a reasonable evidentiary standard, so they are tainted with impropriety. And for that reason, while the chems have been seized, I am simply going to order them destroyed. In the meantime, I am dropping all charges and removing all warrants from the Auspicious Day and its crew, and allowing them to depart Anvil Dark.”

I stared, aghast. This man was torpedoing our one bit of leverage over Traversia, which left them just a shadowy presence in the background of our primary case.

“Master Gerhardt, if we just let these people go—”

“We’ll be sending a signal that we will only proceed strictly in accordance with the laws as written,” he said flatly.

I sat back, feeling like I’d been punched. Yotov had been bad enough, but with her departure, I’d assumed we could get on with the job. It turned out, though, that Yotov was less obstructive than this guy.

Gerhardt leaned forward. “Peacemaker Tudor, I am not unsympathetic to your intent. You are trying to stop some very bad people from doing some very bad things. But if you don’t do it in accordance with the law, then you are simply making yourself—and by extension this Guild—into what amounts to vigilantes, exercising justice from the muzzle of a gun.”

I had no difficulty staring into those eyes anymore. It was easy when you were consumed with rage.

“So is that what I should tell the next person we find reliving the instant of their horrible, agonizing death over and over and over for someone else’s amusement? Sorry, love to help you, but Section blah of Article blah says I can’t?”

Gerhardt stared right back, unfazed. “I don’t particularly expect you to do anything, Peacemaker Tudor, except your job, which is upholding the law. And speaking of doing your job—”

He wheeled on Perry. “You are supposed to be his legal resource. If you’re aware that a procedure or process isn’t being followed, it is your duty to raise the issue with Peacemaker Tudor, then record his response for future consideration and analysis. You clearly haven’t been doing that, which means you’re either choosing not to, or you’re defective. If there are any further instances of this, I will assume the latter and have you taken offline for repairs.”

He turned back to me. “Do you have anything else you wish to say, Peacemaker Tudor?”

Oh boy, did I ever. But I just shook my head.

“Very well, Peacemaker Tudor. You may return to your duties.”

We left, my blood fizzing with rage I hadn’t known I could muster.

* * *

Torina was waiting back at the Fafnir, sitting in the galley and nursing a cup of socah, the Helso equivalent of coffee. “So, how did your—?”

Perry landed on the galley table between us. “I’d recommend you don’t ask,” he said to her.

She looked from him, to me, then gave a slow nod. “Oh. I see.”

“Torina, can I ask you to find Icky and Zeno and take them to The Black Hole? I need… a few minutes.”

She stood and moved toward the airlock. Partway there, she stopped.

“You can always come join us.”

“I don’t think so.”

She nodded. “Van, if you need space, I’ll give you space. But please don’t forget that this is a crew, and we’re all here for one another.”

I nodded back, tightly. “I—” I sighed. “I know. Thank you.”

When she was gone, I turned to Perry. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Was there anything he said that wasn’t correct?”

“Not a damned thing. Everything he quoted was a strictly correct and literal interpretation of applicable laws and regulations.”

I slumped back. “Great. So we’ve got another Master going up to bat for the other team.”

But Perry gave me an amber stare. “There’s no evidence he’s corrupt, Van, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Whether he’s corrupt or just an asshole, the end result’s the same. He’s standing between us and doing our jobs,” I snapped.

Perry cocked his head. “Van, I’m not sure how to say this, other than just saying it. He’s right.”

I flung my gaze at Perry. “What do you mean, he’s right?”

“He’s right, insofar as our job—your job—is to uphold the law. And, let’s face it, we have been pretty liberal in interpreting how much latitude we’ve got under that whole Crimes Against Order thing.”

“You never really objected, though, did you?”

“No, I didn’t, and that’s another thing, unfortunately. I’m programmed to obey a directive from a Master that isn’t itself manifestly unlawful. That means I now have to rigidly apply the law and regs as written and make a detailed record of your response to my recommendations—and warnings.”

“Great. So you’re a spy now.”

“Van, I—”

I held up a hand and sighed. “I’m sorry, Perry. I’m just—I’m just pissed.”

He shrugged his wings. “I guess I got used to your grandfather and his more relaxed approach to enforcing the law—which is apparently genetic.”

“How long has Gerhardt been a Master?”

“Eleven years.”

“So he was a Master when Gramps was sitting here. How come Gerhardt didn’t go after him for being relaxed?”

“Two words—Petyr Groshenko.”

I let out a breath. Gramps and Groshenko had somehow transitioned from two guys seeking to kill one another during their day jobs in spec ops back on Earth, to best friends. Having a Master running interference for you was a definite advantage.

Which, now that I thought about it, Yotov had effectively been doing for me, whether she intended to or not. Whatever her cryptic motives, she’d controlled the Masters’ Table and had effectively neutered the officious Gerhardt. But that particular safety feature was gone.

“I’ll bet that Gerhardt loved that, Groshenko and Gramps tag-teaming him.”

“Actually, they mostly ignored him, which I think he resented even more.”

“So, what? I’m paying for the perceived sins of my grandfather?”

“Uh, yeah. In part, at least.”

I sat back and put my hands to my face. Not only had Gerhardt just demolished our first opportunity to break into the powers and money behind the identity thieves, but he’d also set us back to square one. I said as much.

“Look at the bright side, Van,” Perry said.

“What bright side?” I shot back, dropping my hands and glaring at Perry.

“With all of Yotov’s cases now under review, there’s no capacity to review any others available, including yours. Unless, that is, Gerhardt decides to do it himself.”

“Not much of a bright side, bird. About as bright, in fact, as a candle—and a shitty, guttering candle at that.”

“Excuse me, but perhaps I can help,” a new voice said. I jumped and turned to find Rolis entering from the Fafnir’s galley from somewhere aft.

“I really wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, despite listening to every word you two said,” he went on.

“Rolis, I would really like to be—”

“Left alone. Sure. Of course. I’ll just go back to what I was doing, and when you’re ready for my suggestion—”

“Oh, for—Rolis, like I said to Perry, I’m just pissed. Sorry about that. What’s your suggestion?”

“Well, it seems to me that to proceed against Traversia or anyone else, you need probable cause, right?”

“I thought we had probable cause, but apparently chains of shell corporations really do protect rich people from the law.” I shook my head and made a conscious effort to lower my voice. “But, yeah, we do.”

“Wouldn’t the best probable cause be an actual complaint? A formal accusation?”

I glanced at Perry. “You’re going to ask me to comment on every last little thing now, aren’t you?”

“Blame Gerhardt. He’s the one who started all this.”

Perry uttered his impressive sigh. “Yes, a bona fide complaint that establishes the reasonable likelihood that a crime has been committed is sufficient to warrant opening an investigation.”

I turned to Rolis. “The answer is yes. Where are you going with this, Rolis?”

“You know, Van, I was a real disappointment to my parents.”

I blinked dumbly at the abrupt change in subject. “What?”

“They were hoping for a, you know, organic child. Imagine their shock at instead having to raise a Waldo maintenance unit.”

I shook my head, still dumb. “Rolis, what the hell are you talking about?” I blew out an exasperated sigh. “Look, we’ve got a lot to work to do if—”

I stopped. What Rolis had just said was ridiculous. Stupid, even. But Rolis wasn’t stupid.

“You obviously weren’t born as a Waldo. But you are one now.”

“Or any other compatible device—”

“Like a waste reclamator, tell me about it,” Perry muttered.

“Sure. Anyway, Van, I think I probably count as a victim of a crime, one that—how did you put it, Perry? One that reasonably warrants opening an investigation?”

I turned to Perry—again.

“Well, if Rolis is prepared to swear out a complaint that’s backed up by at least a preliminary investigation—”

“You mean how I was killed, and my mind was transplanted onto a chip to be used as what amounts to a digital slave? Is that enough backup to justify going ahead?”

“I’d think so, yeah,” Perry said.

“Perfect.” Rolis rotated Waldo’s imager toward me. “Peacemaker Tudor, I would like to lodge a formal complaint of wrongdoing, insofar as, well, what I just said about being killed and stuck on a chip. I believe that the Salt Thieves, particularly the Fade, backed up by Traversia Bolt-Right, are responsible.”

I once more turned back to Perry, who again sighed.

“If you prepare a formal statement to that effect, and we include it in a properly completed form GA-6S2—”

“So the answer is yes?” I asked Perry.

“Yes. Rolis’s complaint is, based on the letter of the law, sufficient grounds to open an investigation into the parties he’s accusing. But that’s all it does, Van. You still have to do everything by the book when you’re, you know, doing the investigating part.”

I felt a slow, sinister smile spread across my face. “Oh, absolutely. Wouldn’t have it any other way. Perry, please take a statement from Rolis, write it up for my signature, and then submit it as necessary—with a copy to Master Gerhardt.”

“Uh, Gerhardt doesn’t need a copy—”

“Oh, but he’s getting one. In fact, he’s getting a copy of every document this crew and this ship generates that’s even remotely related to this case.”

Netty, who I sometimes forgot was always present, spoke up. “Van, I’ve got a pile of expense data related to, ah, every case we’ve worked on. I’d recommend that we itemize them in detail and submit them for reimbursement, in accordance with Guild Operating Procedures, Chapter Six, Sections 1 and 5.”

“Will… that work? Will we really get money back from the Guild?” I had to admit to being a little peeved at the thought that we could have been claiming back funds from the Guild all this time. But Netty dispelled that idea at once.

“Not a chance. However, every one of those line items must be scrutinized and either accepted or rejected. That would be done by the Guild Comptroller—who reports directly to the Masters.”

“So it wouldn’t be unreasonable to send a courtesy copy to Gerhardt.”

“I wouldn’t think so, no.”

My sinister smile became a gleeful, even predatory grin. Perry, though, just sagged a little.

“Malicious compliance isn’t going to make Gerhardt any happier, Van,” he said.

“Well, Perry, believe it or not, Master Gerhardt’s happiness is pretty much the least of my concerns right now. In fact, I’m more concerned that I might not have changed my socks this morning than I am regarding his freakin’ happiness.”

Another of Perry’s sighs. “Yay. This is going to be fun.”

I turned to Rolis. “Thank you, my friend. I really appreciate this.”

“Don’t mention it. I mean, I am an engineer. I fix things.”

* * *

We called the crew back, and I filled them in on what was happening in terse, dry language, inviting no questions for the moment. Their reactions spanned the complete range. Torina was wary of our strategy of malicious compliance, afraid it would backfire. Zeno thought it was an excellent strategy, one we should go ‘all in’ to, as she put it. As for Icky—

I gave her a fond smile. “Much as I’d like to kick down Gerhardt’s door and beat some sense into him, that probably shouldn’t be our first choice.”

She scowled. “Another corrupt scumbag Master. This Guild has a problem.”

But while we’d waited for Torina and the others to return, I did some quick background reading on Gerhardt. I particularly focused on case summaries that he’d been involved in, and found that he invariably came firmly down on the side of the law as written, almost slavishly so. The man was an absolute stickler for doing things correctly, however the laws and treaties and protocols defined that. It was part of the reason, I suspected, that he never seemed very prominent before, particularly with Yotov as one of the Masters. To her, laws and regulations were whatever happened to suit her best. She must have driven Gerhardt crazy, but he'd had no allies to support him. Turns out that being dictatorial and uncompromising about everything… doesn’t endear you to others.

So I shook my head at Icky. “I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s actually corrupt. He’s just an asshole.”

“An asshole who happens to be right,” Perry put in, sounding unhappy about it.

Icky wheeled on him. “Whose side are you on here, bird—?”

“No!”

Everyone turned at my near shout. But I wasn’t going to let this even begin.

“We will not turn on one another. We are a crew, and we work together. Now, Perry is just saying it the way it is. For the time being, at least, that’s what he’s going to be doing. And we are going to listen to him, and then make a decision, and he’s going to record it all, and none of us are going to complain about it. Do I make myself clear?” I finished, focusing on Icky.

She gave a glum nod. “Got it, boss, loud and clear.”

I could feel the tension remaining in the air like an electric charge. Everyone was frustrated and wanted to lash out at something. It was probably a good thing we weren’t out on an op, because I suspected none of the crew would have been especially forgiving or merciful right now. And they didn’t need the influence of an infernal Cusp nightmare machine to provoke it, just the uncompromising rigidity of a legal bureaucrat.

“Van, I hope there’s one way you’re not like your grandfather,” Zeno finally said.

I returned a puzzled stare, not sure if I were about to be offended but ready if it happened. “What’s that?”

“If you ever get the chance to become a Master of this damned organization, don’t turn it down.”

I made to scoff at the idea but found myself looking into a wall of agreement from the others. Even Rolis and Perry managed to somehow look earnest about it.

“Look, right now, let’s concentrate on our case. Gerhardt might be an immovable object, but I’m damned determined to be the unstoppable force.”

“Ah, yes, the classic paradox. Of course, in the usual version, the unstoppable force doesn’t outrank the immovable object,” Perry said.”

I pressed on.

“Okay, before we do anything else, I’ve got a question about what the Cotzei—what was her name? Hawant? Anyway, what she said sure sounded a lot like a curse of some kind, and I want to know why that curse involves the word Schegith.”

Torina rubbed her hands together. “You know what this means.”

I smiled, and some of the emotional charge left the air around us. “Only one place to go. Our local public library.”

8

I’d expected to be dealing with Bester, but he’d left Anvil Dark for personal reasons related to a high ritual back on his homeworld. We were shuffled over to his deputy, who was running the Archives in his absence. I knew him only vaguely, mainly because he was one of the most alien aliens on Anvil Dark. He was a tall, incredibly slender creature, covered in wispy, hair-like tendrils and striding about on four, triple-jointed legs. Known as a Polloxitun, he wore a breathing tank and mask, as well as a headset. Think of a hairy coatrack with spider legs at one end and a fighter pilot’s helmet on the other, and you had a pretty good picture of Witowere, nicknamed Wit.

“Hey, Wit. Hoping you can help us today,” I said, gesturing to Torina and Perry, who’d accompanied me.

The voice that replied was so smooth and melodious it was obviously synthesized. “I’m not sure. Aren’t you in deep shit with the Masters?”

“Let’s see—one, how could you possibly know that; two, only one of them; and three, does it matter?”

“One, this is Anvil Dark, the only place in the universe where information can move faster than light as long as it’s gossip; two, which one; and three, no, I’m just trying to satisfy my own curiosity. When someone like you is in deep shit with a Master, it’s probably over something important.”

I smiled. “It’s Gerhardt, and what do you mean, someone like me?”

“You have a reputation for big cases and dramatic moments, Van. You’re not the kind of Peacemaker who’s going to get hauled onto the carpet over padded expense claims. And it being Gerhardt doesn’t surprise me. I’m a huge stickler for order and process myself—just try reshelving an archival piece instead of putting it on the cart for us to do, and you’ll find out.”

“Why doesn’t it surprise you that it’s Gerhardt?”

“That transluminal rumor mill is claiming Yotov’s fall is his opportunity. He wants to impose his view of order on the Guild, and apparently Peacemakers like you are squarely in his procedural sights.”

I turned to Torina. “Great. So instead of Yotov turning the Guild into her own little empire of corruption, Gerhardt wants to bury it in process and paperwork.”

“Hey, those bloated, creaky, horribly inefficient bureaucracies you hear about don’t create themselves,” she replied.

“Actually, they kinda do,” Perry said. “I think that’s the point.”

“Well, Gerhardt’s the cumbersome, micromanaging spark that starts it then,” she shot back.

“Much as I’d love to stand around and bitch about Gerhardt all day, we’re here for a reason, Wit,” I said, then proceeded to explain what we were looking for—information about the Cotzei that might somehow link them to the Schegith, presumably in some kind of negative way.

“Really?”

“Um… yes? You seem surprised by that.”

“I am. We received a request to have all archives related to the Cotzei pulled for evaluation. In fact”—he twirled several of his tendrils into a thicker mass and pointed at a cart with it—“it’s that stuff, on the top shelf facing us—everything we’ve got that’s actually cataloged.”

“Who asked to have it pulled?”

“Sorry, Van, but our operating procedures don’t allow us to release—”

“Oh, come on, Wit. Today is not the day to procedure me,” I snapped but immediately relented. “Wow, I really am having a bad day. This is the third or fourth time I’ve had to apologize for being a frustrated asshole. I’m sorry, Wit.”

“No problem. I understand. But those rules are around for a reason. Like I said, superluminal rumors, right? So if a Peacemaker comes and asks for something specific, and that gets around—”

“It could compromise an investigation, yeah.” I turned to Torina and Perry with a sigh. “Someone doesn’t want us exploring this—probably someone on Traversia’s payroll.”

Torina nodded glumly back, but Perry hopped up on the counter.

“Wit, when are you releasing that stuff to whoever asked for it?”

“As soon as we get a receipt drawn up for them. Why?”

“So, technically, the stuff on that cart is still in circulation, right? I mean, it either is, or it isn’t, correct?”

Wit just looked at Perry for a moment, leading to the unnerving sight of a sentient coatrack holding a staring contest with a mechanical bird. But Wit finally chuckled.

“That’s correct. Until we draft up the receipt and have it signed off by the borrower, it’s still technically on the shelf. But I can’t just loan it to you instead. I mean, it has already been requested.”

“Can we look at it over here?” I asked.

Again, the coatrack stared, this time at me. It was exactly and disturbingly like looking into the blank visor of a pilot or astronaut and seeing nothing but your own reflection.

“No reason you can’t,” Wit finally said. “It’s going to be at least a couple of hours before we get to it, so you’ve got that long.”

I looked at the pile of stuff on the cart. Some of it included archival disks, which could potentially hold vast quantities of information. Trying to pore through it all in two hours—

I shrugged. “Guess we’d better get started then.”

* * *

We pulled both Zeno and Rolis in to help. We left Icky with the ship, her and Netty carrying on with tweaks and minor maintenance. It was stuff that needed to be done, but Icky wasn’t really cut out for a detail-oriented slog through piles of archival data.

“Hey, did you know that the Cotzei need to consume acidic water with a pH less than five? Apparently, they carry around additives with them,” Rolis said.

I glanced at him. We’d taken over five stations in the Archives’ reading room, had divided up the load of material, and were now all perusing it, looking for anything useful before our time ran out.

“That’s interesting to know, Rolis, but—”

“Here. Got something,” Zeno announced, sitting back from the terminal she’d been using.

I stood and leaned beside her, reading over her shoulder. Torina did the same.

I pointed at the screen. “Perry, we need a copy of all of this stuff, starting right here and going on until—I don’t know, just make it this whole report.”

Zeno had unearthed a military intelligence report that had been declassified by the Eridani Federation and dumped, along with a bazillion other documents, into the Peacemaker archives. It was a reciprocal arrangement whereby declassified Peacemaker stuff was handed over to them. The Guild supposedly had similar agreements in place with Tau Ceti and the Seven Stars League. Their information was a bare trickle, though, compared to the Federation, who seemed to embrace the idea that sharing stuff was better than not sharing it.

Even then, the intelligence report wasn’t the actual item of interest. Rather, it was a field report from some long-dead cultural xenologist who’d been focused on unearthing information about interstellar religions, both existing and extinct. His mention of the Cotzei appeared in an entry entitled The Victory Supernal. The introductory paragraph left me gaping.

The Victory Supernal is a Type II cult that worships asymmetrical power and exploitation, the more egregious and violent the better. Its origin is an unlikely alliance between three disparate races—the Tonaat and the Hus, both rated as Secretive on the standard scale, and the Cotzei, rated as Closed, who act as the cult’s public-facing agents and muscle. It is no exaggeration to call their actions unsavory. Victory Supernal is particularly noted for the use of systematic eugenics to destroy factions they consider to be too weak to continue existing, to prevent them from polluting the galactic body.

I let out a breath. “Eugenics. Holy shit.”

Torina nodded. “That certainly implicates them in the Fade’s so-called fertility treatment for the Eykinao.”

I nodded back and read on—and hit pay dirt.

The Victory Supernal seems to have a particular hatred for the race known as the Schegith. Although some of their actions against the Schegith are clearly motivated by profit and self-interest, the majority seem to be cultural. Their doctrine, to the extent I’ve been able to access it, demands that the cult “send the worms of the deep to their deaths.” I am going to explore this aspect of the Victory Supernal further because their targeting of a specific race, presumably for eradication, suggests a particular purpose or motivation that I have yet to discover.

There was more, but it started to get into specific cultural metrics and things that quickly started to lose me. I straightened.

“Well.”

Torina straightened too and looked at me. “Yes. Well, indeed.”

I turned to Perry, but something about Zeno caught my eye. She was sitting as though transfixed, staring at the screen. I opened my mouth to ask her what was wrong, or what she’d seen, but then it hit me.

One of the three races involved in the Victory Supernal was the Tonaat, whose attack on a new settlement had killed her daughter.

“Zeno?”

She blinked up at me. “What?”

I said nothing.

She finally just gave a slow nod. “The Tonaat” was all she said.

I saw the others give me puzzled looks, but I just waved them off. “Look, if you want to—”

“Find these Victory Supernal bastards and exterminate all of them? Yes, I do.”

“I understand.”

She stood. “I’m not sure you do, Van. Just to be clear, if and when we cross paths with them, and especially the Tonaat, not you or any of your Masters are going to stop me from doing whatever needs to be done. And if you want to stick me back in isolation on some lonely planet because of it, so be it,” she said, then stalked away.

Torina turned a frown to me. “What was that all about?”

“An old grudge.”

“Do you think she means what she said?” Rolis asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, I believe she does.”

* * *

I asked Wit to find any information he could about the Tonaat or the Hus, since readily accessible sources were entirely silent about them. Other than the fact they existed, we knew almost nothing about either race. Wit agreed, saying he’d reach out to what was essentially an interstellar inter-library loan network if necessary to do it.

“Although that might take time. For any records older than about two hundred years, we’ll have to have physical copies brought here,” he said.

I cocked my head. “What happened two hundred years ago?”

“Standardized data interchange formats. Anything older than that falls under the previous system, which goes back over a thousand years and is—well, let’s just say it’s pretty entrenched.”

I acknowledged it and we left. Outside the Archive, I turned to the others, less Zeno. “Torina, you’re with me. The rest of you head back to the Fafnir and get ready to fly. And make sure Zeno’s there. If she isn’t, find her.”

“Where are you going?” Perry asked.

“To see Master Gerhardt. I want to personally present him with some new evidence.”

“Uh, Van, I should be with you for that.”

I nodded. “I know.”

“But?”

“But I don’t want you there. If you don’t hear what gets said, you can’t know about it, right?”

“Okay, Van, look. I’m on your side here, I really am. My first loyalty is to the Guild, but—”

“Why?” Rolis asked.

Perry turned to him. “Why what?”

“Why is your first loyalty to the Guild?”

“Because it was what I was made for?”

“So? Make your own choices.”

“Sorry, but there’s this little thing called programming—”

“Again, so what? I make choices all the time. Sometimes they’re bad ones. But they’re still mine. And how different are we, really?”

Perry didn’t answer. I cleared my throat.

“Guys, this sounds like a really important—hell, philosophical, even existential debate that probably isn’t suited for a corridor in Anvil Dark. And Perry, of course I know you’re on my side. Just… indulge me, for the time being, at least. Any up yours I can throw back at Gerhardt is a bit of payback I need right now.”

“His approach to things might be clunky as hell, Van, but he’s not wrong.”

“I know, and that’s what really pisses me off.”

We parted company, Torina and I headed for the Keel. Once we were out of earshot of the others, she turned to me.

“Do you think Rolis was on to something?” she asked.

“What? About Perry?”

“Yes, and by extension Netty and every other advanced AI. They’re self-aware intelligences installed in a machine. But that’s what Rolis is, isn’t it?” After a few paces, she went on. “For that matter, isn’t that all any of us are? We just happen to be installed in machines made of flesh and blood, but is it any different?”

I gave her a sidelong glance. “What did I say about existential conversations in the corridor?”

We walked a little longer, but her question remained hanging. I finally answered it.

“Is there a difference between Perry and Netty, Rolis, and us?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. I suspect no one else does, either.”

* * *

The look on my face when we returned to the Fafnir must have given away my mood. It wasn’t quite as furious as it had been the first time I met with Gerhardt, but it wasn’t far behind.

“Is your chili cookin’, boss?” Perry asked.

“Medium high,” I said, keeping my tone flat. “Gerhardt considers the mention of the Schegith to be hearsay and refuses to act on it without firmer, and neutral, evidence. He’s forbidden us to reveal any of what we’ve uncovered regarding the Victory Supernal to the Schegith, too, to avoid triggering a diplomatic incident with the Cotzei, in particular.”

“He insists we need to find harder evidence not obtained from the Cotzei or the Schegith, to corroborate what we found,” Torina added, every syllable ripe with disgust.

“As for the eugenics thing with the Eykinao, he was a little more open to investigating it, but not much,” I finished, tossing my data slate onto the galley table with a clunk.

“What about Rolis’s complaint?” Zeno asked.

“If there’s a bright spot in all this, it’s that. He had to acknowledge that a legitimate complaint, especially one from so compelling a complainant as—a murder victim—sorry, Rolis—”

“No problem. I mean, I am a murder victim, right?’

“You are. And he acknowledged that might be a legitimate basis to proceed with a full, Guild-endorsed investigation. But he wants to take time to do some due diligence.”

“What does that mean?” Icky asked.

“Presumably, he wants to consult with the legal folks regarding whether Rolis’s statement really is admissible. There’s no precedent for it, and it might set one.”

“So? Set the precedent then! I mean—holy shit, what the hell is that guy’s problem?” Icky asked, her voice halfway to a full, menacing growl.

“He wants to ensure that when cases are brought forward, they’re well-supported,” Perry clarified.

“That’s one way to lighten the burden on the court system—never bring any cases forward,” Rolis muttered.

“That’s just hyperbole,” Perry shot back, his tone distinctly annoyed. “He’s not advocating never bringing cases to trial—”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Zeno said. Unlike the others, her voice was as cold as Gerhardt’s eyes had been. I actually found it more unnerving than outright anger.

“What’s the point of bringing a case if it’s just going to get dismissed—?” Perry began, but I cut him off.

“Guys, I’ll say it again, and I might add, for the last time. We can’t get divided over this. And, ultimately, it all comes down to me, anyway. I’m the one responsible, so I’m the one who has to make and answer for the decisions. I expect the rest of you to support me regardless. And again, if you can’t”—I pointed—“there’s the airlock. You’re not indentured servants, so you can leave at any time.”

On impulse, I turned to Perry. “That includes you.”

“I… can’t leave, Van. I’m assigned—”

I crouched in front of him. “You do whatever you have to, Perry. What I’m saying is that, as far as I’m concerned, you’re the equal of any one of us and can choose. Even if you somehow can’t because of your programming, I personally believe the choice should still be yours.”

I glanced up. “Yours too, Netty. Of course, you’re kinda my ride.”

“One of the advantages of being a spaceship is that all I really need to do is spaceship stuff, mostly flying you from place to place and keeping you alive while doing it. In fact, it’s part of the reason Peacemaker’s have a ship’s AI and a combat AI. It keeps the thing that does those trillions of calculations needed for a successful twist largely out of those ugly legal and political arenas.”

“I think she’s passing the buck to you, Perry,” Rolis said in a stage whisper.

“Damned right I am. Now, where do you want to go, boss?” Netty asked.

“To Null World. I want to talk to Schegith.”

Perry sighed his ever more convincing sigh. “Van, you just said that Gerhardt—”

“Said that I couldn’t proceed with a case involving the Schegith without neutral and compelling evidence. I’m not going to. Honestly, I just need a couple of days off, and I can’t imagine a better way of spending them than on Null World’s Undersea—can you, Torina?”

“No argument here. Let’s go drift.”

9

Returning to Null World, as forlorn and desolate a place as it was, still felt like coming home—or at least coming home-ish—as did returning to Starsmith, and even Anvil Dark. None of those would replace Iowa as home, of course, even though all of those were no doubt much safer than the farm.

We told Schegith our reason for the trip was simply to take advantage of her standing invitation to spend some time in the subterranean splendor of the Undersea. But I made a point of talking with Schegith because, after all, we were presuming on her hospitality.

After some small talk, I decided to move the conversation to where I wanted it to go. “Anyway, Schegith, if it’s okay with you, we’ll head down to the Undersea and—” I stopped and pointedly snapped my fingers. “Right. There was something I wanted to ask you about, if you have a moment?”

“This one always has a moment for the one who preserved this one’s race,” she said, shifting her considerable bulk on the palanquin she habitually occupied.

“I’m doing some research related to a potential case and was wondering if you might be able to help me out. What do you know about the race called the Cotzei?”

Van, what are you doing? Perry asked in my ear bug.

I kept my attention on Schegith. “I’m just seeking information, and I know you’re a wealth of it, so anything you might know—”

“The Cotzei are a violent, dangerous race who should be avoided at all costs,” Schegith immediately answered.

“Really? Okay, that’s good to know. Are they unique? Do they—will I run into them, or maybe their allies, if miserable people like that even have friends?”

Damn it, Van, you know that I’m recording this and will probably have to report it to Gerhardt.

“I’m only asking so that I can keep my crew and me safe, you understand, and for no other reason,” I added.

Schegith gave me a long stare. She wasn’t dumb—far from it—and obviously knew I was being coy about something I was trying hard not to discuss. I knew it was driving Perry crazy, and I was sympathetic. I really wasn’t trying to make his life difficult, but if Gerhardt was going to go by the absolute letter of the law and live in a realm of technicalities and precise wording—well, there were two seats at that gaming table.

“This one is unsure of which relationships between the Cotzei and other races to which you refer, Van Tudor. They have relationships with many races.”

“Well, they clearly don’t have a good one with yours. We recently encountered a Cotzei who cut loose with a rather shocking profanity that included a reference to your people.”

Van!

I shrugged. “I know it’s not very pleasant to hear that, but it’s just a statement of fact. As you’ll appreciate, I have to remain impartial in these matters.”

“It’s true, I heard it myself. I was shocked and appalled,” Icky put in.

“Why would the Cotzei have such a negative opinion of the Schegith, I wonder,” I said, keeping every word as bland as wet toast.

“Because, as this one said, they are volatile and dangerous. And you asked, Van Tudor, about specific Cotzei relationships with other species. There are two of particular concern, about which very little is known.”

“Oh? And what two races would that be?” I asked, practically batting my eyes as I pushed the obviously fake innocence really hard.

I heard Perry sigh.

“The Hus and the Tonaat. Neither occupies any part of what is considered to be known space but are apart from it. This one’s people has had confrontations with them and the Cotzei in the past.”

“Really? I’m glad you’re here. Don’t like the sound of them at all, but coming from where I did, it’s not surprising. The stars are dangerous.”

Schegith apparently realized what I was getting at now and proceeded to tell me essentially what I already knew from the declassified Eridani Federation report and xeno-cultural paper that had been linked to it—that the three races had come together to form this cult-like Victory Supernal, that they almost worshipped strength and ambition at the expense of others, and that they had a particular hatred for the Schegith. As far as I was concerned, Schegith had volunteered the information with no references to any of the evidence we’d collected. Even the Cotzei’s potty-mouthed curse was no longer protected, since Gerhardt had dismissed the case and it no longer had any evidentiary value. Accordingly, we were now in the clear to ask her for more information—all for the sake of idle curiosity, of course.

Gerhardt, climb aboard your own petard, because you’re about to be hoisted upon it.

* * *

Perry wasn’t happy. He made that clear as we traversed our way down to the Undersea.

“Van, you put me in a terrible position back there,” he said, after asking me to stop and motion for the others to continue.

“Why?”

“Because you were talking about things that—”

“That are what? Evidence? Gerhardt threw it all out. Now it’s all just shit that happened, right?”

“Yes, but anything you learn as a result is fruit of the poisonous tree—”

“Again, why? Isn’t that only true if it’s stuff we couldn’t have discovered any other way?”

Perry stared back at me.

“Perry, is there one thing about my conversation with Schegith that was, from a strictly legal, policy, procedural, or administerial perspective that was a problem?”

Perry sighed. “No. You definitely put your toes on some lines, but you didn’t put them across them.” He cocked his head at me. “So is this our new relationship? You crafting every word with great care to prevent me from calling you on it?”

“You tell me.”

“Van—”

“Look, Perry, I feel for you. I really do. I consider you a true friend. But Gerhardt has put us both in this position, so for now, we just have to live with it.”

“I’ll say it again, Van—he’s not wrong about all of this. I believe he really does want cases that can stick, survive appeals, and not fall apart.”

“Sure. And in the meantime, while we’re doing paperwork, people are being hunted and killed in horrible ways, then being consigned to slave labor, or, even worse, reliving their deaths over and over so some rich asshole can get their twisted jollies from it.”

“I know that. But if you bring forward cases that aren’t airtight, Gerhardt’s already shown that he’ll let the air out of them.”

I crossed my arms. “You know what? Let him. And then he can explain to Schegith, and Rolis, and the people like Rolis, and their families and friends why somebody who’d do that sort of vile, sick shit got to walk.”

“Fine. Then there’s one other thing to consider. You’ll no doubt find other Peacemakers who agree with you and would support you. So if Gerhardt pushes back—how far are you willing to go with this?”

For a moment, I stared down the passage leading to the Undersea. It was lit every few meters with a lamp glowing a soft gold, so I could see as far as the next bend. Except I wasn’t really seeing that at all. What I was seeing was some of the things I’d experienced when I subjected myself to one of those damned Cusp machines. I didn’t usually do that, relying on some mental tricks Sussbrid had taught me to deflect the worst of those memories. She’d even offered to have them removed, but I told her no, that I was going to keep those memories until—

“Until it’s not happening to anyone else,” I said, turning back to Perry. “I’ll go however far I have to, to put a stop to it once and for all.”

“You might very well cause a split in the Guild—a schism—you on one side, Gerhardt on the other.”

I nodded. “I know.” I said it with certainty, too. With a sudden deep and almost placid conviction.

Perry said nothing, and again, I just waited. Finally, he looked up at me.

“I’m probably going to regret this, but okay. Wherever you go with this, Van, I’m with you. Just promise me one thing. If Gerhardt orders me in for repairs—”

“As far as I’m concerned, Perry, you can choose to allow it or not. It’s up to you. And if you decide not—well, I’ll let Icky handle it.”

“Surprisingly, that’s rather reassuring. But don’t you dare tell her I said that.”

I laughed. “Your secret, my metallic-feathered friend, is safe with me.”

I started to turn to resume my way to the Undersea but had to stop and look back.

“By the way—thank you, Perry. I know you have a job to do, and I’m going to do my best to let you do it.”

“Thanks. Back atcha, boss.”

* * *

The Undersea was as nice as it ever was, but my mind was elsewhere so my heart wasn’t in it, either. I spent a short while watching the others futz around the boats, particularly amused by Icky and her antics and she rowed a boat with four oars at once. If we ever needed to chase anyone by rowboat, I knew who our girl was.

Still, I decided to head back up to Schegith, and then likely the Fafnir. As I turned away, though, Rolis came scuttling across the sand.

“So, Van, do you think we’ve finally got enough to go after those bastards? My complaint and Schegith’s corroboration of the stuff you got from your Archives?”

I sighed. “I think so, but I’m not sure Gerhardt will. And as long as he’s haunting us like some sort of whiney, bureaucratic ghost, I’m keenly aware of all the i’s and t’s that need to be crossed and dotted.”

“Dotted and crossed, you mean.”

“I—yeah. I guess I do.”

“Look, Van, I know that I’m not suffering nearly as much as the others that have had this done to them, but I didn’t choose it, either. It was forced on me. And while I’ve decided to make the best of it—”

He stopped, and I tilted my head at him.

“What are you trying to say, Rolis?”

“Just how much I appreciate what you’re attempting here. I’ve talked to Torina and Perry and the others, so I know how much time and sweat and, yeah, even blood you’ve put into this. So while it might be presumptuous of me to speak on behalf of all displaced persons, what the hell. Thanks.”

“Displaced persons?”

“Just something I’m trying out.”

I laughed and started back up the tunnels. Coming here had invigorated me and my determination to keep chasing this case, but not for the reasons I thought it would. I’d expected that talking to Schegith, then spending some time down here with literally hundreds of meters of rock between me and the rest of known space would do it. But it had been the simple expressions of gratitude from Perry and Rolis that left me feeling a lot more buoyant.

I felt a bit of bounce come back into my step. My pace quickened a bit more when I thought about Gerhardt and decided he wasn’t anything special—just another obstacle among the many that had tried over and over to stymie this case. So, like I had with Yotov, I’d work around him. Fortunately, his slavish devotion to process and procedure made him eminently predictable, so it shouldn’t be too hard to extrapolate what he was going to do or say.

Now we just needed an actual next step. Or rather, a next next step, since my next one was going to be convincing Schegith to launch a formal complaint with the Guild regarding the Victory Supernal. Eventually, the growing pile of complaints would force Gerhardt to either play ball, step aside, or start inviting suggestions of some sort of collusion.

Either of the first two would be the best, but I found myself almost wishing it would end up being the latter, just so I could be the one to put the cuffs on him.

All in accordance with proper arrest procedure, of course.

* * *

“Everyone buckled in?”

I flashed a grin to the others. Torina rolled her eyes. “Yes, Van, and no, Van, no one needs to go to the bathroom.”

“Hey, Gramps had a whole preflight checklist he went through before he’d back the car out of the driveway. And I’ve abbreviated it for you guys.”

I turned back to the instrument panel. “Okay, Netty. To infinity and beyond!”

“So Crossroads first, and then Procyon?”

“What?”

“There’s a bar on Crossroads called Infinity, and Beyond is a chain of upscale fashion boutiques in the Procyon system. They’re quite bougie, as the kids said on your planet last year. Given your love of slightly outdated slang, I can only assume that—"

“I—no. I was just—” I shook my head. “Never mind. Let’s just get into orbit.”

As the Fafnir lifted, we tossed around ideas for where to go next. The logical place was wherever the Victory Supernal did their thing so we could try and find any harder connection between them and Traversia, and from them our other suspect organizations, like The Fade. Right now, all we had was a curse uttered by a Cotzei crew member aboard a ship indirectly linked to Traversia Bolt-Right. And I didn’t need Gerhardt to tell me that connection was flimsy to the point of rumor.

The trouble was that we had no idea where the Victory Supernal had their base or bases of operations, or if they even had such bases at all. We knew the location of the Cotzei homeworld, and that was it.

“Just so we’re clear—we’re going to fly around the Cotzeis’ home system and look for inspiration?” Torina said.

I shrugged. “It’s an option. Actually, though, I was thinking—”

The threat alarm sounded, truncating my words. It snapped my full attention to the tactical overlay, which showed a ship coming at us, fast.

“Class 12, configured as a light warship, a big corvette or a frigate. No ID or transponder, so we can only go by primary scanner returns,” Netty said.

I nodded while swearing under my breath. Our two old friends, the cousins acceleration and velocity, had put in another appearance, and this time they weren’t on our side. We were still in orbit and would have to break it and claw our way out of Null World’s gravity well before we could even begin maneuvering. By then, the incoming ship would be all over us.

“Van, we’re going to have to go back down to the surface,” Perry said.

“So they just bombard the Fafnir into scrap? And even if they don’t do that, we just sit down there and wait for them to go away?”

“Van, if we try to fight, things are not exactly slanted in our favor,” Netty added.

I felt a scowl pinch my features. A ship was at its most vulnerable in that tiny space between a planet’s surface and orbit about it. We’d even proven that by destroying No-No’s two ships as they tried to lift from the dwarf planet, 109. So Netty and Perry were right—our best option was to just descend again and hope that we could somehow find cover for the Fafnir, maybe amid the ruins surrounding Schegith’s subterranean lair, or maybe even inside it, if she had the facilities. But that was a one-way trip, at least until we figured out some way to drive off or otherwise avoid the bigger inbound ship.

I found myself stuck on the very sharp horns of a serious dilemma—take our chances up here, or surrender the initiative and hide on the surface?

“Van, there’s an incoming transmission from Schegith,” Netty announced.

I accepted it. “Sorry, Schegith, kind of busy right now—”

“This one understands, but this one would ask that you accelerate to raise your orbit and cross this planet’s terminator with all due haste.”

“Why?”

“Because this planet is not defenseless, and this one would hate for you to become a casualty as a result—”

“All I need to hear. Netty, let’s burn like crazy.”

“That will preclude our returning to the surface before we’re engaged by the incoming ship.”

I looked at Torina.

“I guess this is the part where we decide how much we really trust her.”

I nodded without hesitation. “Netty, do it.”

The Fafnir’s drive lit, kicking us into a progressively higher orbit while also speeding us along toward the terminator. I watched anxiously as the class 12’s threat envelope—the combined effects of its velocity and the effective ranges of its weapons—crept inexorably closer. We’d reach the terminator maybe two or three minutes before it engulfed us. If Schegith didn’t stymie this attack by then, we’d be caught in nearly the same way we’d caught No-No’s ships on 109.

The bitter irony wasn’t lost on me.

“Petard, meet me and start hoisting.” At Torina’s lifted brow, I added, “Disregard, if you please. At least, I hope we can. Okay, everyone, let’s go to battle stations and suit up,” I said, my gaze never straying far from the overlay as I grabbed my helmet. The others snapped theirs into place, while Rolis and Perry braced themselves using metal, ceramic, and talons.

About thirty seconds before we reached the terminator, the red line outlining the class 12’s threat envelope rolled over us. Five seconds later, it launched a storm of missiles—twelve of them in rapid succession.

I just stared at the sudden eruption of icons on the overlay.

“Holy shit.”

“That’s military hardware, launching that many missiles that fast. High-end stuff, too,” Zeno said, her voice quiet.

“Somebody really wants us dead, don’t they?” Torina asked, already slewing the lasers around to engage the incoming ordnance.

Netty spoke up. “Van, the class 12 will be in effective laser range in forty seconds, and mass-driver range just over a minute later. And given that it’s obviously equipped with military-grade missiles launchers—"

“Yeah, the rest of their stuff might be, too. In which case we are woefully outgunned.” I reached for the comm to ask Schegith to do whatever it was she was going to do, and do it very soon. Because those twelve missiles were going to be occupying our full attention just as the class 12 opened fire with her other weapon systems, no doubt by design.

Before my finger touched the comm, though, Netty spoke up again.

“Van, something’s happening inside Null World’s atmosphere, about a thousand klicks astern, and about another thousand klicks beyond that.”

I saw that two more icons had appeared on the overlay, but they were devoid of information, just marking the location of—something.

“Netty, can you be a little more specific?”

“Two regions of the atmosphere are becoming opaque—no, make that reflective.”

“Oh. Shit. I know what she’s doing. That’s… incredible,” Zeno said, her voice again quiet, but this time with awe.

“Glad you’re all impressed and stuff, Zeno, but if you could share—”

“It’s a laser.”

I tried to turn back, but the helmet and harness conspired to prevent me from being able to actually see Zenophir. “A laser? What are you talking about?”

Before she could answer, though, the question resolved itself.

Somehow, Schegith had made two sections of the planet’s atmosphere into nearly perfect reflectors in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. Now, UV energy from the fiercely white star, Gliese 440, bounced back and forth between the two virtual mirrors, and quickly synchronized itself into coherence. A few seconds later, one of the ‘mirrors’ became less reflective, allowing a colossal blast of UV laser energy almost five kilometers wide to erupt into space.

No amount of ablative armor or any other defensive measures would make even a glimmer of difference in the face of such power. One second, the class 12 bore implacably onward, right toward us—the next, it had vanished, replaced by a cloud of glowing gas. A few tougher bits whirled onward, glowing like bright sparks, then passed out of the beam and cooled into darkness.

“Just so I’m clear on this—she was able to turn the planet’s atmosphere into a laser?” Rolis asked.

“So it would seem,” Perry replied. Even his usual sardonic tone had faded into quiet awe.

We all sat in stunned silence for a moment, then Torina snapped us back to reality. “Uh, guys? We still have eleven missiles inbound—”

“Don’t kill our vibe, Torina,” Icky said.

“Vibe?” Torina asked, brow lifted.

Icky shrugged her massive shoulders. “I’ve got over two hundred followers on social media now, and—"

“Icky, let’s talk about your clout later. Schegith, any chance you can use your amazing laser thingy to take out those missiles tracking us?” I asked.

“Sadly, no. The weapon, as powerful as it is, has a limited field of fire, since it is powered by the radiation from the star. This one can offer you little further assistance, at least until this one’s cousin arrives—but that will not be for at least two hours.”

I glanced at the overlay. “Those missiles are going to be here a lot sooner than that. But thank you, Schegith. We can deal with these missiles—”

Torina, in fact, shot another one down. Rolis had taken over the second laser battery and opened fire, quickly taking down a third.

“—ourselves, but that ship was going to be another matter. Anyway, things are about to get busy, Fafnir out!”

We finally broke orbit with the missiles only a minute behind us. By then, we’d whittled them down to six—no, five—but Netty was projecting a grim probability that at least one, and more likely two, would get close enough to hurt.

I switched the point-defense systems to weapons-free, then took over the particle cannon myself. For the next forty seconds or so, the Fafnir poured laser and particle-beam fire, and streams of slugs in sparkling arcs of tracer, taking out three of the missiles. Rolis just managed to bag a fourth before it reached detonation range, but the last sailed imperiously by the shattered debris.

“Brace for—”

The missile detonated with a searing flash, then everything went dark.

10

I blinked, trying to clear the fog away. It took me a moment to realize that everything seemed dark, though, because it actually was dark. All of the Fafnir’s systems had gone offline.

“Netty?”

Nothing.

“Perry, what—”

“Safe mode, Van. That was an EMP warhead, intended to disable us. Which, as you might have noticed, it’s done, and quite handily, too.”

Safe mode. It meant that Netty had effectively tripped breakers, shutting all of the Fafnir’s systems off while also disconnecting them from the main power buses and one another. She’d also cut the fuel feed to the power plant and drive, instantly slamming their fusion reactions to a stop. The only system left operating was the antimatter containment, which was specifically hardened against nearly any EMP effect. Even then, it was only meant to reinforce the incredibly potent permanent magnets in the fuel pod that kept the anti-deuterium suspended away from any actual matter and, well, poof.

Slowly, the Fafnir came back to life. Systems rebooted and reactivated in a precise order. As soon as I could, I scanned the status board to assess the damage. It recorded several shrapnel hits on the hull and the detonation of two of the REAB modules. Otherwise, we seemed to be in pretty good shape.

Except Zenophir. For the second time, she’d been injured by an attack on the Fafnir. This time it wasn’t anywhere near as serious.

“Fragment of something buried itself in my damned leg,” she snapped, scowling at the sealing foam that had hardened on her upper calf. It’d probably hurt like a sonofabitch if it wasn’t for that foam.”

“What did I miss?” Netty said, her personality coming back online.

I looked up from Zeno’s leg. “Well, a missile was about to explode, then it exploded, and now it has just finished exploding. And now that you’re caught up, anything critical beyond what the status board is showing us, Netty?”

“No. The missile seemed to be intended to disable us, not destroy us.”

“That’s new,” Torina said. “Seems they want to take us alive—which, considering who and what they are, stands to be way worse than them just outright killing us.”

A moment of silence hung off the end of her words, each of us contemplating what that meant. No one said anything, though.

I finally made an affirmative noise and nodded inside my helmet, while extracting a leak finder from the crash box behind my seat. It was just a little smoke generator intended to locate leaks in the absence of full-blown decompression. Sure enough, the wispy vapor was sucked directly to a point where the deck met the pressure bulkhead just beneath Zeno’s workstation. I plugged it with a shot of vac-sealant, then carried on and found the remaining holes. I talked as I worked.

“Netty, how come they could even see us? What happened to our fancy stealth coating?”

“They likely detected the disturbance caused by our passage through the atmosphere, then just extrapolated that up into orbit. Our ability to maneuver was limited, so it wasn’t hard to predict where we’d likely be, or get pretty close to it, anyway.”

“There’s another possibility. We did steal—sorry, seize—this stealth coating stuff from some bad guys, so they might also have the means of defeating it,” Perry offered.

“They’ve got the antidote,” Torina said.

“Yeah, something like that.”

I plugged the last leak, and by that time the Fafnir was fully operational again. I clambered back into the cockpit, after stopping to check Zeno on my way by. “We’d better get you some medical care.”

But she pulled off her helmet and waved me off. “Van, I’m fine. It’s going to need a bandage and some mild cussing, but I’ve had worse. Hell, remind me to tell you about the time I lost two toes on my right foot to an uncontained plasma discharge.”

“I think you just did tell him about it,” Perry put in.

“You lost some toes?”

“Yeah. I’ve got some burns and scars if you’d like to see them, too. You can’t fiddle around with engineering experiments without a few injuries.”

“Tell me about it. I have a burn scar as long as my forearm across my—” Rolis began, then paused. “Okay, I used to have a burn scar as long as my forearm across my chest.”

We considered returning to Null World to effect repairs and get Zeno checked out, but when she pulled off her b-suit and revealed her leg, we immediately saw a fragment of metal protruding from it, partly encased in sealing foam. It was a simple matter to remove it, then clean and bandage her wound as she taught me new and interesting forms of vulgarity.

As for the Fafnir, aside from a few plugged holes, she was fit to fly.

We decided to set course for Earth and spend some time there. The barn facilities were more than adequate to handle the repairs we needed to do, and we even had some extra REAB modules stashed there to replace the ones that had blown. Even better, Schegith’s cousin agreed to accompany us to Earth. Icky’s father and his old battlewagon, the Nemesis, had been parked there in a stable Jovian Lagrange point to keep an eye on things and would take over covering us.

“So a class 14 battlecruiser and a class 17 battleship for company? That definitely makes my ass feel a little less exposed,” Zeno said.

“Icky, what does your father do with his time, all alone on that big old ship of his?” Torina asked.

“He tinkers. All he needs is an idea for a project and some scrap, and he’ll be happy for hours, sometimes days,” Icky replied. “Oh, and he sings. Terribly.”

“He… sings? Like, what?” I asked.

“Mostly Wut’zur songs that you… you would call them show tunes. Musical production songs about things my culture finds romantic, like love and smashing things. Or welding. We like singing about welding, too,” Icky said.

I pretended to wipe a tear. “And I thought romance was dead.”

“You know what we actually need? One of Schegith’s atmospheric laser gizmos to protect the farm,” Rolis put in.

I chuckled. “Yeah, that wouldn’t cause too much consternation. There are still articles being written about that x-ray laser that detonated in orbit a couple of years back.”

“You mean the x-ray laser that you detonated?” Perry asked archly.

“Hey, let’s not get hung up on who detonated which weapon of mass destruction when,” I replied, then shot him a sidelong glance. “Besides, I seem to recall it saving our collective asses.”

“That wasn’t a complaint, Van—merely an observation. My feathers have never looked more magnificent.”

I gave the status board a last scan, then pointed to Perry’s wing. “Told you that feather polish was a good investment. Okay, all green, with a couple of yellows. Netty, next stop Iowa. Oh, and get Schegith for me, will you? Speaking of saving people, I think a heartfelt thank you is in order.”

* * *

It was nice flying in company with a battlecruiser, then rendezvousing with a battleship to take over the escort duty. A few active scanners briefly lit us up from long range, but only for a moment before going dark again. No one else came near us.

“I could get used to this, having this kind of cover,” I said, watching as Schegith’s cousin accelerated his battlecruiser out of Jovian orbit, heading back into deep space. Icky’s dad’s ship, the Nemesis, hung against the spectacular backdrop of Jupiter’s nightside, silhouetted against the diffuse flicker of restless auroras. It would make one hell of a cool desktop background on a computer.

“I thought that was the idea behind the Iowa,” Torina said. “You know, our own battleship.”

“It is—once we get some guns and stuff for it. Not much point, though, as long as the Fafnir’s better armed than she is.”

“That should probably be one of our next priorities, Van. My family’s delivered those three Yardcraft to the Iowa, but they’re eventually going to want them back—” She stopped with a wince and a hiss.

“Zeno, are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. Just my leg. I take it back, though. Our next priority should be getting a tissue regenerator for the Fafnir and then guns for the Iowa.”

“Do you know how much a tissue regenerator costs?” Perry asked.

Zeno glared at him. “Easy to say when your healing consists of swapping in new parts.”

“That’s another thing I have to admit I like about this. I used to have a bad back, sometimes laid me up for a day or two. Not anymore!” Rolis enthused.

“Bite me,” Zeno snapped back, massaging her leg.

I turned back to the broad sweep of Jupiter. We tried to use the planets for cover as much as possible, not that there was much likelihood of anyone on Earth detecting us. Netty and Perry both figured that terrestrial sensors were probably at least several decades, and maybe as much as a century away from even starting to reach that level of capability.

“And what then?” I asked, and they both offered their versions of shrugs.

“Either Earth gets introduced to the reality of known space, or it gets quarantined,” Perry said.

“Quarantined? Why, because we’re infectious somehow?”

“In a way, I guess, yeah. Quarantine happens when a race is on the brink of spaceflight but is considered too volatile to have the red carpet rolled out to them from the stars.”

I thought about recent goings-on on Earth. “Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound good. What happens to races that are quarantined?”

“They’re usually just integrated into known space once they start to reach out of their home system. It’s just done with extra patience and care to avoid any incidents.”

“They’re usually integrated into known space? That implies there are some that aren’t. What happens to them?”

“Kind of depends on them. About three hundred years ago, one race collapsed into religious infighting when they learned they weren’t alone in the universe and ended up pretty much destroying themselves. About a hundred years later, another race decided to be all xenophobic and come out of their system swinging.”

“What happened to them?”

“I think the xeno-archaeologists are still digging through what’s left—at least, the stuff that’s not too radioactive.”

“Oh.”

I was startled out of my reverie by Icky.

“Van!”

“What? Oh, sorry, just woolgathering here.” I glanced across the instruments and saw that Netty had started us inbound, toward Earth.

“My dad wants to know if you’re okay with him staying out here, or if you’d prefer he park himself somewhere closer to your homeworld.”

“Sounds like he wants to hang out here around Jupiter,” I replied.

“Yeah, he’s come up with some new expedient refueling thing and needs a gas giant to test and tweak it. He says this Jupiter of yours is perfect for it.”

“He can stay out here, I guess. Earth and Jupiter aren’t too far off their closest approach, so it’s not like he’ll be chilling on the other side of the Sun from us.”

We carried on, sweeping past the orbit of Mars and coasting past Earth’s at a high delta-V, then burning like hell to come back at it from the direction of the Sun. It was a maneuver intended to hide our fusion exhaust plume as much as possible, since even Earthly systems could detect a kilometers-long flare of incandescent plasma if they were oriented just right. It burned a crazy amount of fuel, but I wasn’t keen on finding myself in the midst of a first contact scenario with my own people.

* * *

We found Miryam already at the farm when we arrived. Gramps had given her a portable comm, which we triggered with an encoded burst to sound an alarm, indicating our arrival back on Earth was imminent. It could be used as an actual comm transceiver as well, but we agreed with Miryam that we’d keep that for emergencies only. We had to assume Earth was at least being monitored, even if the potent bulk of the Nemesis dissuaded our foes from approaching too closely—for now, anyway.

“Hello, Van. I just made some coffee,” she said, greeting Torina, Zeno, and Perry in turn. Icky and Rolis had stayed in the barn, getting to work on patching up the holes in the Fafnir’s hull and replacing the expended REAB modules.

“Little late for coffee, isn’t it?” I said, glancing at the clock on the stove and seeing it was just after midnight.

Miryam smiled. “Not if you were jangled out of a nice warm bed by an alien device like I was. Oh, by the way, Perry, I need you to show me how to change the ringtone on that thing. Shrill, piercing squeal just isn’t doing it for me. I think you can still see the impression of my face on the ceiling over my bed.”

“No problem, Miryam. We’ll get you set up with something more soothing.”

We spent the next half hour or so getting caught up. Not surprisingly, not much of particular interest had happened on the farm and its environs since our last trip—with one notable exception.

“I came by—what, two days ago? Maybe three? Anyway, there was a ratty old pickup truck parked just up the road, toward the Parkers’s farm.”

“This is rural Iowa, Miryam. If it isn’t a ratty old pickup, then it’s either a tractor or a combine harvester.”

“Can you turn up that stereotype a little, Van? I’m having trouble hearing it. Anyway, yes, by itself that doesn’t mean much. But I’d already seen that same truck on the road a couple of times, then saw it again, parked on the side of the road in the opposite direction—actually, in the laneway where your Master Yotov and her ugly little minion made me stash my car.”

I leaned back, and the kitchen chair squeaked just so, a sound I’d heard a thousand times sitting here doing homework. “One of the neighbors has a new pickup maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“But maybe not,” I said, nodding.

“But maybe not. I let Clinton Barnes know, and he said he’d keep an eye out.”

I nodded. Clinton Barnes, the county sheriff, was in-the-know regarding me being a Peacemaker, a relationship originally cultivated by Gramps. It was nice knowing the outwardly laid-back, bucolic lawman helped Miryam have our backs here on Earth, particularly since behind that slow drawl was a quick, incisive, and imaginative mind.

“Oh, by the way, Van, I have something for you,” Miryam said, opening her briefcase and extracting something from it. It was a picture in a frame.

She placed it face up in front of me. It was, indeed, an old photograph, black-and-white, a little tattered, and wrinkled around the edges. It showed a man it took me a moment to recognize as Gramps, although much younger than I’d ever known him, standing in front of what was obviously the farm. Gramps was in his twenties, maybe, but no older. He was wearing a uniform, old style army—and by old style, I mean just that, with high jodhpur boots and the sort of round, brimmed hat I associated with Boy Scout leaders. As intriguing as that was, though, my attention only just flicked across him before being immediately drawn to the other figure in the photo, standing at his side.

A Peacemaker.

The b-suit was unmistakable, never mind the logos on the right shoulder and left breast. She stood tall and slender, almost ethereally so, and was so pale she almost seemed to glow. Her hair was a cascade of white with highlights that almost seemed metallic. She clearly wasn’t human, or at least not entirely so.

“Who is that?” I asked Miryam.

“That, Van, is Peacemaker Valint—your grandmother.”

* * *

“You know what’s funny? Here on Earth, you’re actually more alien than I am,” Torina said.

I’d had to excuse myself from the kitchen and walk into the cool night to take some time on the back porch to listen to the crickets chirping off in the darkness and regain my mental footing. Torina had come out a few minutes later, presumably to make sure I wasn’t curled up into a fetal ball or something.

“Hmph,” I managed. “Not your best, but I get it.”

She leaned on the porch railing beside me. “Why not?”

“I thought I was human until a few minutes ago. Sort of dealing with a shaken-foundation feeling right now, and I don’t know what to do with it.”

She crossed her arms. “Again, why? I mean, you didn’t know, right? So it can't make all that much of a difference, can it?”

I thought about all the vaccinations and other medical treatments I’d had, typical for a kid growing up in twenty-first century America. I’d broken my arm when I was nine and had appendicitis when I was fourteen—and in neither case did the “Men In Black” suddenly swoop in and whisk me off to Area 51 or Atlantis or the hollow Earth under Antarctica or whatever.

I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, I know. And I know you’re right. Still, it’s—” I just shrugged.

“It will take some getting used to, sure. I get that.”

“I didn’t even end up with superpowers, like being able to fly, or x-ray vision or super strength.”

Torina frowned at me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I straightened, then smiled. “Just more Earthly pop culture. In the meantime, though, I really would like to know if alien DNA or whatever it is I’m carrying actually does make a difference. Like, if I’m going to sprout gills when I turn forty or something like that, I’d like some advanced warning.”

“That’s easy. Check with the medical people next time you’re at Anvil Dark.”

“Always the voice of reason. Thanks, Torina. I mean it,” I said, then headed back inside.

“You over the sudden revelation of your alien-ness?” Perry asked.

Zeno put her arm around me. “Maybe we’re related.”

“Hilarious. You’re the funniest walrus I know. I’m glad you find my existential angst amusing.”

“Only for now. I’m sure it’ll get old pretty fast.” Zeno looked up at the ceiling, grinning.

“Are you—what are you doing?” I asked.

Zeno’s eyes, dancing with merriment, slid down to meet mine. “Just thinking about how many years I’m going to get out of that joke.”

“I’ll hire a comedy writer for you.”

Zeno waved dismissively. “Don’t bother. I do all my own stunts.”

I picked up the old picture in what must now be considered an antique frame, my vision swimming with the enormity of this new history. Now that I could look past the Peacemaker named Valint—my grandmother—I could take in more of it. Gramps’ old-style military uniform must have predated the Second World War. During my own stint in the Army, there’d been walls of photos in the HQ building depicting various regiments and other units going back to the Great War, and even a few from the Civil War. I knew that khaki wool, jodhpur boots, and Smoky Bear-style campaign hat was gone by the Second World War, so this photo must have been taken sometime in the 1920s, or the early 1930s at the latest.

So when had Gramps been born? How far had the time distortion entailed by twisting pulled him out of his natural time? And would the same thing happen to me?

I scanned the rest of the photo, looking for more details—and I found one. There, just on the very edge of the frame, almost lost against a background of some trees that apparently once stood where the cornfield was now, I saw a distinctive shape that included a beak and two luminous eyes.

I turned the picture to Perry and pointed. “Really?”

“You think humans invented photobombing?”

I turned the picture around and stared at it. “That means you knew about my grandmother. Netty too.”

“We did.”

“Let me guess, Gramps didn’t want you to tell me about her.”

“He went beyond that. He memory-locked us so we couldn’t even if we wanted to. The lock was set to expire as soon as you learned about her some other way.”

“And that was probably going to be this way. He told me to give you this picture once I knew you’d learned the truth about him and had become a Peacemaker yourself,” Miryam said.

“That memory lock released something else, too,” Perry said.

We all turned to him, and I braced myself for another shock—that I had an alien twin, maybe, or Gramps himself had been part Yonnox or Gajur.

“Your grandfather had a pretty good idea of how and when you’d reach certain milestones, it seems. He was able to get firm location data for both the Hus and the Tonaat. Now we’ve got that data, Netty and me. We know where they are and how to get there.”

11

“Warren? Never heard of it,” Zeno said. Torina, Icky, and Rolis were just as mystified.

Netty answered. “Very few people have. Even Peacemaker archives contain only scant mention of it, and nothing firm. It’s an orbital station controlled by the Cotzei, just outside the accepted boundary of known space in the Sigma Draconis system, about twenty light-years away from Sol. The Hus Collect and the Tonaat Hegemony lie beyond it. Because of the particular arrangement of stars in the area, Sigma Draconis is kind of a chokepoint. Unless you’re prepared to do a really long twist, or a bunch of shorter ones to check your nav, you pretty much have to pass through it going to and from those two races’ space.”

“So another scuzzy, crime-ridden orbital platform like Crossroads, Spindrift, or Halcyon? How many of those places are there?”

“Not sure if it’s crime ridden, boss. The Cotzei aren’t signatories to most interstellar treaties and agreements, so the Guild really has no jurisdiction out there,” Perry replied.

“That dramatically limits the ability of the Cotzei to conduct commerce and trade in known space, but they don’t seem to care. They’ve probably got a cozy enough arrangement with the Hus and the Tonaat that they don’t really need to trade coming this way,” Netty added.

“Doesn’t hurt that all three are a bunch of murderous theocratic assholes,” Zeno muttered. “Better to just wipe them all out and end their evil influence before it spreads.”

Miryam gave Zeno a raised-eyebrow look, then turned to me. I just shook my head slightly. I’d have to tell Miryam about Zeno’s daughter and her death at the hands of the Tonaat—but not right now.

“Looks like we’ve got a new destination,” I said, leaning back and sipping coffee—which I’d decided I needed, despite it being the wee hours.

But Perry raised a wing. “I’m gonna urge caution, boss. The Cotzei aren’t exactly friendly, and their Hus and Tonaat buddies even less so. The usual trick of blustering about laws and regulations ain’t going to work. And militarily, we could line up Icky’s dad and Schegith’s cousin and any number of other Peacemakers, and we’d still be facing the combined military force of three races.”

The refrigerator abruptly kicked on, its compressor humming softly in the silence. It was another of those familiar, comforting sounds that jangled so harshly against the reality of several aliens and an AI filling the kitchen.

“Okay, looks like we’ve got a new destination we need to think about how to approach,” I finally said.

“Why don’t you just go take a look and see what you’re facing first?” Miryam asked.

I opened my mouth to reply, not even entirely sure what I was going to say, but closed it again. Torina nodded.

“That’s a really good idea. Do some reconnaissance,” she said.

“What, you mean actually knowing what we’re dealing with before we go charging in headlong to confront? Madness! Madness, I say,” Perry exclaimed.

“A recce, huh? Not a bad idea,” I said, musing even as I said it. It sure felt right.

“If there’s any ship to do it in, it’d be the Fafnir. She’s got to be one of the stealthiest things in space, what with that coating and all,” Torina added.

“Okay. We’ve got a plan.” I pushed the picture of Gramps and my… grandmother, who was part alien—and holy shit that had only just begun to sink in—back toward Miryam, but she waved her hand.

“Your grandfather meant for you to have it, Van.”

I stared at it, and especially at the woman, Valint. She had a regal, almost imperious bearing, her chin tilted slightly up, her eyes glittering straight into the camera. But she was smiling just a bit, and it served to soften the edges and round the angles off her expression.

In a way, she reminded me of Torina.

I held the picture, which suddenly made me wonder something.

“Perry, who took this picture? It wasn’t you, since you decided to ham it up for the camera, you vain little construct, you.”

“It was one of Valint’s crew,” he immediately, almost abruptly replied.

Huh. Had Perry just lied to me? And if so, why? Because my grandfather had wanted him to?

But again, why?

I decided to just leave it for now. “Well, Miryam, it’s way past the witching hour here—”

“I’ve got two meetings tomorrow, and I’m going to be sucking wind through both of them.” She stood, leaned over, and kissed my forehead. “The things we do for our spacemen.” She straightened. “Be careful, Van. This Warren sounds like a bad place.”

“Unfortunately, bad places are where Peacemakers tend to go.”

She gave me a curious look. “Your grandfather once said almost exactly the same thing to me. You really do take after him,” she said, pinched my cheek, and left.

* * *

We spent the next day on the farm, while Icky, Zeno, and Rolis completed repairs to the Fafnir, took care of some routine maintenance, and used the last few sheets of stealth coating to patch gaps left by previous battle damage. Around noon, Zeno and Icky called me to the barn on the comm.

“Problem?” I asked, giving the Fafnir a once-over. In the white glare-that-wasn’t from the lights that canceled the ship’s displacement field—normally left switched off when not here on Earth, both to save power and because it wasn’t really effective against known space tech—I gave the ship a hard stare. Everything looked fine.

“With the Fafnir? No. She’ll be ready to fly by dark,” Icky said.

“So what’s up?”

“You know that big ol’ hole out there, the one we threw those wrecked shuttles into?”

I nodded. “What about it?”

Zeno answered. “Icky and I thought it might be worth picking through whatever’s down there for parts and things. We might be able to save a lot of time and money if we can salvage usable stuff.”

I curled my lip. “I don’t know. That sinkhole’s all fenced off for a reason. It’s deep and full of water at the bottom.”

“We just need to get in there with a hand scanner and try and ping as many of the ID tags on whatever’s down there as we can, at least for now.”

Most ship parts that were bought and sold on the open, legitimate market were tagged with something like radio frequency ID, or RFID chips. This made them a lot easier to find, whether being sought by techs working on an unfamiliar ship, or trying to dig what they needed out of a voluminous inventory. They could only be detected from a few meters away, though.

“Van, if you’re worried about someone climbing down inside there, don’t be. We Wu’tzur are natural climbers. It’s kind of why we’re, well, built like this,” Icky said, raising four arms and gently stomping both feet.

I finally shrugged. “Sure. What the hell. We’ll go out there after dark and take a look. We can spend one more night on the farm.”

* * *

I tensed as Icky clambered down into the sinkhole. We’d attached an EVA tether removed from the Fafnir to her, and had all hands on deck in case we needed to heave her considerable bulk out of the hole by hand. I’d also insisted she wear a suit and helmet because one of the big killers in enclosed spaces like a sinkhole was bad air, rendered unbreathable by an accumulation of toxic gases, low oxygen content, or both.

“Perry, how do things look to you?” I asked.

His voice came back across the general comm. “I see flat. Lots and lots of flat. It’s like flying over a billiard table in a dark room.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Iowa’s new tourist slogan—it’s like flying over a billiard table in a dark room.”

We’d deployed Perry as top cover, mainly to ensure no one unexpectedly showed up while a group of aliens and I recovered parts from a wrecked spaceship. I’d asked him to keep a particular eye out for pickup trucks, though. The one Miryam had mentioned she’d seen seemingly nosing around the farm bothered me. It was probably nothing, of course—as I’d said, this was rural Iowa and pickup trucks were hardly rare. Moreover, I doubted that the next time the Salt Thieves or the Fade or Stillness or whoever came at me, it would be behind the wheel of a three quarter ton extended cab.

Time passed. Icky kept us up to date on what she was finding, including a trove of potentially useful spare parts for the Fafnir, and a few things we could probably sell. Take that together with a few cold cases that the picture of Gramps and Grandma Valint had unlocked in Perry’s and Netty’s memories, and we suddenly had some pretty good income potential.

“Oh.”

I stiffened at Icky’s single word. “Icky, what’s wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing. Weird, maybe even amazing? This thing right here that I’ve got my foot on.”

“That isn’t very helpful, Icky,” Zeno said, her tone the resigned indulgence of a bemused mother.

“It’s a—”

I sighed. “Fewer dramatic pauses would be appreciated, Icky.”

“It’s a weapon. A particle cannon, I think. But not any design I’ve ever seen before.”

“Can you retrieve it?”

“Holy crap, boss. I’m strong, yeah, but not that strong. The thing probably weighs hundreds of kilos at least, maybe more than a thousand. We’re going to need the Fafnir to lift it.”

I glanced at Torina. “What do you think?”

She shrugged in the darkness. “It’s night, it’s quiet, Perry’s watching from on high—” She shrugged again.

“Okay. Netty, we need your strong yet delicate touch out here.”

“Rolis is tinkering with my internal sensor suite. I’ll have to wait until he’s done.”

Torina grinned. “Rolis is tinkering with her sensor suite. That sounds lewd.”

“What are you, fourteen?”

Torina snickered. “Only on planets with looooong years.”

* * *

It took more time than we’d expected. The particle cannon had been mounted on one of the shuttles Lucky had disabled and that we’d subsequently heaved into the sinkhole, just to get them out of sight. We had to send tools down to Icky, and she had to fiddle with the weapon to get it freed from its mount. By the time we finally managed to lift it, the eastern sky was starting to pale toward dawn.

Netty lowered the weapon into the barn, then eased the Fafnir back down beside it. We looked the strange device over, taking in its roughly eight meters of mysterious bulk.

“I have never seen a weapon like that,” Zeno finally said. That was something, considering that spacecraft armament was her specialty.

“Can you tell, um, anything about it?” I asked.

“It’s configured like a particle cannon, but I’m not sure what all this stuff wrapped around the firing chamber is, or these things along the barrel are, or what this device around the muzzle does.” She shrugged. “That’s the best I can do, I’m afraid. It’s going to take some work, though, to figure it out. And I sure wouldn’t recommend trying to power it up until we do.”

“Why would a shuttle have been carrying something like this? It’s too big even for the Fafnir,” Icky said.

I put my hands on my hips. “Well, other than they were expecting a fight, I’ve got no idea. It’s probably a good thing Lucky took it out before they got to use it, though.”

The thing was too bulky to mount on the Fafnir, and Zeno figured its power requirements would strain her capabilities, so we decided to haul it out to the Iowa and stash it there. Once we knew more about it, we could decide if we wanted to try mounting it on the Fafnir anyway or, as was probably more sensible, mount it on the Iowa. She had lots of open hardpoints, power to spare, and an eight-meter-long weapon wouldn’t inconvenience her at all.

Perry flew into the barn and landed on one of the horse stalls. “The other farms are coming to life now that the sun’s coming up, but I didn’t see anyone who might have even caught a glimpse of what you guys were doing—hey, sweet gun!”

* * *

We took the next day to get some sleep, then departed Earth that evening. Our outbound flight was most uneventful. The only noteworthy part was our passive scan of Pluto. We saw no evidence of the big battlecruiser that had been hanging around the little planet, nor any sign of any ongoing osmium mining. I decided to take a closer look, bringing the Fafnir near enough that we could use her imagers to get a direct look at the dwarf planet.

I shook my head at the resulting image. Pluto sported a massive, heart-shaped field of ice that had charmed the world when the New Horizon probe had done its flyby. Now, several parts of the heart were scarred black by heaps of waste rock that had been excavated out of the planet’s bedrock.

“That’s going to raise some eyebrows if anyone on Earth ever gets a good look at Pluto again,” I said.

Perry shrugged. “Unless it’s a really good look, they’ll probably just assume it’s evidence of something impacting the surface—and write a bunch of scientific papers that argue in circles about who’s right and who deserves tenure.”

“I see you understand academia,” I admitted. Peacemaking was dirty work, but fighting for an academic reputation could be vicious.

I saluted whatever future grad student would be doing a thesis on Cryptic Impact Events on Pluto, without realizing the stunning truth. Then, after changing course, we accelerated the Fafnir to meet up with the Iowa and unload our enigmatic new weapon, before heading to our outbound twist point to Warren.

12

Except we didn’t make it to the twist point. Before we could, we received an urgent message from a ship that had just twisted in to the Solar System.

It was Carter Yost.

I frowned at the screen. “Carter, we’re just on our way—”

“This can’t wait, Van,” he cut in. He looked anxious, with a hint of frantic. I exchanged glances with Torina, then leaned toward the comm panel. Had something happened at Anvil Dark? Was Gerhardt on a paperwork-laden warpath?

“Okay, we can spare a few minutes. What’s up?”

“Van, this is no joke. I have something you need to see, and if we don’t act, then Gertie’s days are numbered.”

“Gertie? Who the hell is Gertie?”

Carter shook his head. “Not over the comm. I need to show you this in person.”

Netty immediately calculated and depicted the quickest possible rendezvous with Carter. It entailed nearly six hours of flight time.

“Carter, look, we’ve got somewhere we—”

“This is more important than that, trust me. In fact, you’re going to want to know about this, because it’s kind of about you.”

“So let’s switch to an encrypted high-security channel—”

“No! I mean, that might be okay, but it might not, depending on who’s all involved in this.”

I sighed. “Okay, fine. Netty’s going to send you the course she’s calculated. We’ll meet you in a few hours.”

Carter nodded and signed off.

“So, who wants to lay bets that this is all just a big waste of our time?” Icky said.

The others chattered away, but I just smiled and nodded along. Carter Yost was many things, most of them annoying. But I’d never seen him unnerved like this before. There was something he genuinely wanted to tell me, something that had upset him pretty deeply—probably about this Gertie, whoever she was. A friend? A lover, maybe?

I sat back in my seat. I didn’t like Carter, but he had quite cleverly helped us pull off a major sting operation a few months prior. It meant he’d earned something I’d never felt Carter was entitled to before: the benefit of the doubt.

* * *

Carter hurried aboard as soon as the airlocks were synchronized and opened. He clutched a piece of paper and a—photograph? Both seemed to be of Earthly origin, too.

I noticed that Torina and Zeno had both armed themselves, while Icky’s sledgehammer leaned against a bulkhead within easy reach. They all tensed as Carter rushed out of the airlock, but he was alone.

“Okay, Carter, what’s going on? And what’s this about Gertie, and more importantly, who the hell is Gertie—?”

He answered by lifting the photo and pointing it at me.

It was a car.

I heard whispers behind me as bets were claimed. I just scowled as I remembered an awkward dinner conversation some years earlier when I’d visited Carter’s parents. He’d just bought a new car, something apparently vintage and cool, and had said he’d named her Gertie. I’d rolled my eyes at the time and thought something along the lines of, yeah, as close to a real woman as you’re ever going to get.

I leveled a disgusted look on Carter. “Are you shitting me? You dragged us literally hundreds of millions of klicks out of our way because of that stupid car?”

Torina crossed her arms. “Gertie is some sort of ground vehicle?”

“Who names a vehicle?” Icky muttered.

“That’s a really good question,” Netty replied.

Perry just bobbed his head at Torina. “Yeah, an automobile, commonly called a car, is internal combustion-powered, hydrocarbon-fueled, operated through simple mechanical linkages, although more recent versions make more use of computer tech—” he said, then stopped and took in the photo. He whistled.

“Oh, sweet! That’s a Datsun, right? Late seventies model?”

Carter actually flicked a smile at Perry. “You’ve got a good eye, bird. Gertie’s a fully restored, flawless 1977 Datsun 280Z with forty thousand original miles.” His smile flicked off again, though. “But they’ve got her, and they’re going to torch her if you don’t give them what they want.”

“Give who what they want?” I asked.

Carter handed me the letter. I sighed again and started to read.

I looked up when I was done and said one word.

“Shit.”

* * *

“So who are these—what did you call them? The Truly Aware?” Torina asked.

I nodded at her across the galley table. “That’s what the letter says. They’re apparently a group of ufologists.”

After a pause, Rolis spoke up. “Okay, I’ll be the one to ask. What’s a ufo—ufoph—”

“Ufologists. It refers to anyone who ascribes to the theory that intelligent, extraterrestrial life is secretly visiting Earth,” Perry answered.

“And for some reason, flying around in weird formations, mutilating farm animals, and abducting humans for experiments,” Netty added.

“Experiments? What sort of experiments?” Rolis asked.

I glanced at Perry. “I knew someone was going to ask that.”

Perry turned to Rolis. “Experiments that involve sticking probes up—”

“Into intimate places, and let’s leave it at that,” I said.

Silence. I could see everyone chewing on that, and could see the moment each realized what it implied.

Icky’s face twisted into an appalled frown. “Why?”

“That is a really good question, but one that we can park for now. The more important one is, what do we do about this?”

The letter, written by one Tony Burgess of Appleton, Wisconsin, claimed that they had incontrovertible evidence that spacecraft had recently visited a certain farm in Iowa, where they’d apparently fought a battle. It further claimed that The Truly Aware had also managed to secure a piece of material from one of the spacecraft, probably a piece of debris flung from one of the shuttles when Lucky slammed some shots through it. They dug up whatever they could on the farm, which wasn’t much—but was still enough, because they learned that I’d assumed ownership when my grandfather died. They tracked Carter down as a relative of mine and stole his car, and now they held it for ransom.

“But they say they don’t want money. They want the truth,” I said, placing the letter down on the table.

“All I know is that I decided to make a trip back to Earth to see my parents. They didn’t even notice Gertie was missing since all the other cars were still there. I found this letter and photo in her place in the garage,” Carter said, his shoulders slumping.

“Carter, where do your parents think you are when you’re not on Earth?” Torina asked.

He shrugged. “Jet-setting around. Lately, they’ve been receiving prescheduled emails that seem to come from Monaco.”

I stared at my cousin. “You know, Carter, your lifestyle is more alien to me than any of my crews’.”

“Yeah, fine, whatever. The point is that I’ve only got three days to respond to these assholes. And I can’t respond to them, at least not without you, Van. You’re the one they saw—doing what, anyway? What the hell were you doing joyriding a ship around the farm?”

I spun on Carter, then leaned onto the galley table and into his face. “My crew and I were trying to survive a surprise attack by the Fade, a faction of the Salt Thieves, that’s why we were joyriding around the farm.”

Carter tried to maintain a defiant stare but couldn’t and quickly lowered his.

“I’m sorry, Van. I just—” He shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

I straightened, a little nonplussed. It wasn’t like Carter to so quickly back down, much less apologize.

“That’s… fine, Carter. All of our stress levels have been a little on the high side lately.”

“Not mine. I’m cool as an artichoke,” Perry said.

I gave him a sidelong look. “Don’t you mean cucumber?”

“Cucumbers are always hogging the cool spotlight. I thought I’d give another vegetable some time to shine.”

“Are artichokes actually even cool?”

“They are if they’re refrigerated.”

Carter watched Perry and me trade verbal volleys, then shook his head. “What the hell are you two talking about? We’ve got a crisis here!”

“Whatever. So your internal combustion machine thingie got stolen. Hardly a crisis. I mean, I’ve done that. Van and Torina and I, we stole an up-pick truck. It wasn’t a big deal,” Icky said.

Carter gaped at her. “Gertie is not some—up-pick truck? Don’t you mean—”

I raised my hands. “Folks, we’re wandering way off course here. And, actually, Carter’s right—surprisingly. This is a crisis. People like this can be a bad combination of smart, cunning, and crazy. Netty, how long would it take some present-day humans to figure out the barn’s more than just a barn if they were determined to do it?”

“Hard to say. The barn’s security systems are meant to defeat casual inspection, but a determined one—I don’t know.”

I nodded. “Exactly. And it gets worse, because this could spin off into some uncontrolled first-contact thing, couldn’t it?”

This time, all I got was instant agreement from everyone.

I turned back to Carter. “Look, they said three days, right? Okay, then we’re going to take two of those days to follow up this lead we’ve got in our case, because I am not going to let it go cold. Regardless of what we find, we’ll come straight back here to Earth before their deadline and figure out what we’re going to do.”

Carter opened his mouth, but I raised a finger in his face. “Carter, you are going to spend the next two days doing some homework. You’re going to find out everything you can about these Truly Aware idiots—every post on every blog and website, every screed they’ve written about aliens or bigfoot or lizardmen controlling the Earth from Antarctica, Nazis on the moon, all of it. By the time we get back, I need you to know the Truly Aware as well as you’d know any criminal enterprise. Got it?”

He nodded, surprising me again by looking both earnest and maybe even a little… enthused? Glad to be able to do something to help?

I decided to sweeten the deal. “Carter, I’m going to give you the URL of a particular blog, a screen name registered to that blog, and a recognition key that’s a specific arrangement of cards in a fifty-two card deck that you’re going to send to that screen name. When they contact you, you’re going to tell them what you’re looking for, and they’re going to dig up whatever they can from—let’s just say some databases that you won’t have access to.”

“Why a sequence of playing cards? Won’t that be easy to figure out?”

I smiled. “Carter, there are many, many, many, many more ways of arranging the cards in a regular fifty-two card deck than there are stars in the observable universe. So no, it won’t be easy to figure out, not at all.”

* * *

We left Carter to it, and he hurried back to Earth to get to work on his part of the—

I’d say plan, but we didn’t have a plan to deal with these Truly Aware. But we did have to deal with them, somehow. If we didn’t, then either deliberately or even inadvertently, they could compromise our operations on Earth, or even usher in that first contact scenario that so worried me.

Especially since there was a good chance I’d be the alien emerging from the spaceship, asking to be taken to some leader somewhere.

“You know, Van, we could just… deal with them?” Icky said as we resumed our interrupted journey to Warren.

I looked back at her. “Deal with them?”

“Yeah. You know—deal with them.”

“Who, the Truly Aware?”

“Of course. They could… you know, have an accident or something.” She thought for a moment, then added, “Maybe accidents. Bad ones.”

I inhaled, looking upward as I searched my soul for patience. “Zeno, can you have a little talk with Icky about why casual murder is a not very good thing to do?”

“Especially when the one advocating it is sitting in a ship belonging to the space police?” Torina added.

Icky shrugged. “Hey, it’s an option.”

Perry snickered. “I always wanted to be a Made Bird.”

Icky shook her head. “You are made, bird—”

“I—never mind. Add it to the list of things to explain to the big girl.”

“I won’t forget,” Icky admonished.

“That’s just what a Made Wu’tzur would say,” Perry concluded, a touch smug.

We flew on. The trip to Sigma Draconis was completely uneventful, and I wanted it to stay that way. Our purpose for this first trip was just to get the lay of the land, taking some time to get to know how things flowed around Warren, the sort of traffic it had, how it might be defended, that sort of thing. Ideally, we’d just hang in space in a low power state for a day or so, then quietly leave and return to Earth.

And that’s how it started. We parked the Fafnir in a denser part of the Sigma Draconis Oort Cloud, our passive scanners pointed in the general direction of the ruddy-orange star and slurping up whatever data they could. We settled in to wait and pass the time. The others were suddenly interested in playing cards, thanks to the recognition code I and some fellow hackers back on Earth used to authenticate ourselves to one another. Even picking a fifty-two card sequence entirely at random was almost certain to result in a unique combination that hadn’t before been seen, and probably never would be again.

It gave me a chance to teach the crew some games, though, including my favorite, euchre. I was in the midst of explaining how the game was scored when Perry summoned us back to the cockpit.

The first stop for my eyes as we hurried back was the tactical overlay. It showed nothing, though, aside from a nondescript class ten freighter dawdling its way out of the system, well over ten million klicks away, and another sporadic return about five hundred million klicks sunward.

I turned to Perry with raised eyebrows.

“That flickering return, Van. It’s a stolen person,” he said.

I turned back to the display. “We can detect that from this far away?”

“Only because Netty and I were looking for it, and even then we had to clean up the data and do some enhancing. But yeah, that’s a chipped person. Or it was, anyway, since that signal’s limited to light-speed, so it’s about forty-five minutes old.”

“That’s… a random spot in the middle of nowhere. Is there anything there?”

“There’s a thermal signature suggesting a ship or platform of some sort, but it seems to be effectively stationary. Its only other emission is a standard nav signal, but its identifier is just an alphanumeric string that doesn’t mean anything to me, at least. And that’s all we can tell from this distance without using active scanners,” Netty replied.

I zoomed out the overlay and pondered it. The origin of the stolen ID signal, whatever it was, was several hours away from Warren itself. No traffic that we could detect was anywhere near it, or even en route.

“I hate to say this, Van, but it could be a trap. The bad guys know that nothing is more likely to draw us in than that type of signal,” Perry said.

I nodded. “Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing. Still—”

I looked around. Everyone was waiting for me to make a decision.

“Anyone think checking this out is a really bad idea?”

“Isn’t it kind of what we do, Van? Or are supposed to, anyway?” Zeno asked.

“Speaking as a chipped person, I’m all for not leaving whoever that is stuck there, because it probably sucks,” Rolis put in.

“Okay, then. Netty, let’s go check it out.”

“I’m going to have to use the fusion drive, Van. That might give us away.”

“I’m going to quote one of my old instructors from my Army days, Master Sergeant Byron Toews. He used to say ‘tough shit, sunshine. Suck it up.’”

“I was expecting something a little more… inspirational than that.”

“Hey, when it’s being screamed in your face by a man built like Icky, it’s hella inspirational.”

* * *

It wasn’t a ship or a platform. It was both.

An old class twelve gas carrier hung motionless in space, enclosed in an intricate arrangement of gantries Rolis identified as an automated scrapper. Essentially a massive robot, the scrapper was positioned around a ship, whereupon it lived up to its name and disassembled it. The scrapper either stored the bits and pieces or parked them nearby for later recovery and recycling, or else tossed them onto a trajectory that would eventually plunge them into the sun.

“That explains why it was parked way out here. Those scrappers are efficient, but they sometimes lose track of pieces, or bits come off during the demolition and escape. It means there’s a navigational no-go area around it while it’s working,” Rolis said.

I studied the image, splitting my attention between it and the overlay. The latter was still mostly dark, no one either noticing or caring that we’d transited partway into the system. I went back to the former, depicting the slow extinction of a derelict ship.

“It could still be a trap,” Torina warned.

I curled my lip and narrowed my eyes at the image. We now had a much better picture of what we were dealing with, and, even better, we saw no evidence of any other ships. There was just the fragmented freighter and the scrapper steadily chewing it to pieces. When it was done, it would lumber back in-system to unload whatever useful scrap it had recovered, so it didn’t even need a crew. The only crew hab was a small module stuck onto it like an afterthought. According to Rolis, it was only used to house maintenance workers when they were aboard. And the signal wasn’t coming from there but another part of the scrapper altogether.

“Netty, let’s move in. Torina, I’m going to leave you, Perry, and Zeno here to keep an eye out. Icky, you and Rolis are with me. Let’s go see if we can help this poor bastard.”

* * *

Ironically, the scrapper included a small squadron of YardCraft, fully automated versions of the little utility vessels we’d borrowed from Zeno’s family. They moved purposefully about the gutted remains of the class twelve, flaring a plasma torch to slice through the structural component while wrapping a hauling tether around one that floated free, already cut away.

“The signal’s coming from that one right there,” I said, pointing at a YardCraft currently en route from the freighter’s bow to its stern. Icky and I had tethered ourselves to the scrapper, while Rolis clung to it with impressive skill. He was definitely getting the hang of controlling his new Waldo body.

“How do you want to do this, boss?” Icky asked.

I considered the possibilities. It was probably easiest to push off and use the maneuvering packs to intercept the target YardCraft. It was a long shot, though, more than a hundred meters, so it would take some careful flying.

Rolis volunteered to do it. “This is kind of what a Waldo unit was meant to do,” he noted, and I couldn’t disagree. We attached another tether to him, and fastened the other end to the scrapper, then he launched himself and abruptly straightened his legs to push free. Gentle puffs of reaction motors neatly kept him on an intercept course.

“Hey, I’m flying. And well!”

“Eyes on the prize, please, Rolis,” I said.

“Sorry boss. This is just so… cool. Right? That's the right Earthly usage, isn’t it?”

I smiled inside my helmet. “It sure is.”

We watched as Rolis made contact with the YardCraft and neatly latched onto it like a spider clinging to its web. The YardCraft ambled on, apparently unperturbed, until the tether went taut. The sudden pull caused it to slew to one side, then start arcing inward toward the scrapper and the freighter, like a weight on the end of a string.

“Shit. Rolis, we—”

“Hang on a second, Van.”

I waited, watching intently as the YardCraft and Rolis continued their stately arc toward collision. The YardCraft was firing its thrusters, trying to right itself and probably to return to its original course, but only ended up making things worse.

“Damn it. Icky, check your tether. We’re going to have to go and—”

“Got it!”

As soon as Rolis said it, the YardCraft’s thrusters died. He applied thrust from Waldo’s maneuvering unit and slowly brought it to a stop less than ten meters from what remained of the freighter’s flank.

“That was fun—no, cool! It was very cool!” Rolis crowed.

I shook my head. “Care to fill us in there, Rolis?”

“Oh. I just yanked out the personality chip and triggered the thing’s emergency shutdown. It was—what was that other Earth expression I’ve heard you use? Peasy-easy?”

“Close enough, Rolis. Close enough.”

* * *

The chipped identity turned out to be a Yonnox, whose name was either Slizin or Ilzin. We couldn’t really tell which because he kept switching between them.

“Probably some degradation in his memories,” Perry mused. “This chip’s not as slick as the ones we’ve seen so far, so it’s probably an older design.”

Our only option to interact with him was to plug him into Waldo, since there was no way I was going to let a strange chip anywhere near Netty and the rest of the Fafnir’s systems. Rolis had been good about it, giving us a chance to speak to our new rescuee.

“Slizin—I’m going to call you that, okay?” I asked.

“Why not? It’s my name.”

“Of course it is. Anyway, Slizin, what can you tell us about how you ended up here?”

He launched into a rambling, often sidetracked description of what must have been his life before he was taken, although that seemed to be a mish-mash of being part of a ship’s crew and… a farmer? He also went on at length about the tasks he was compelled to carry out with the YardCraft, but that dissolved into a winding description of what was probably several different ships he’d been involved in demolishing. He said one thing, though, that perked all of us up.

“As long as I never have to go to that damned dark platform again. That place scares me.”

“Dark platform? What dark platform?” I asked.

“It’s… not too far, I don’t think. I haven’t been there in a long time, though.”

“Slizin, how not very far is it? Is it in this system?”

“Yes. Of course. That’s where they brought me. I was there for—I don’t know how long. Longer than it took to scrap this one ship, a bulk carrier, that was a big job. I was in charge of cutting vertical structural members from bulkhead A-7 back to—”

“Slizin, please—”

“My name’s Ilzin. Why do you keep calling me that?”

I suppressed a sigh. “Okay, Ilzin, try and stay focused. Tell me everything you can about this dark platform.”

“It’s… the worst place. The worst place of all places.”

“Okay. Take your time,” I said, trying to sound both sympathetic and encouraging.

It took nearly a half hour and a lot of patience, but we finally extracted enough information from him to narrow down its likely location. Sigma Draconis had just four planets, and only one of them fit his description of a pastel world, a Neptune-like ice giant. He remembered that the dark platform had only been lit by that pastel light, suggesting it either orbited the planet or was somewhere near it.

We reinstalled Rolis, and while the others got him caught up, I returned to the cockpit and had Netty turn our passive scanners to the distant ice giant. At first, she detected nothing. We waited. Finally, after nearly an hour of lapping data of every sort, she was able to paint an icon onto the overlay.

“That’s it, whatever it is. It’s a weak thermal source and seems to be emitting some neutrinos, suggesting an operating fusion reactor. Other than that, though, it’s a thing. That’s about all I can say.”

“Okay, so this wasn’t a trap. Could that be?” Zeno asked.

I thought about it, then shook my head. “The whole point of a trap is making it so someone can stumble into it. This is just too obscure. Netty, a course, if you please.”

I turned to the others. “Everyone else get into full battle rattle, up and ready to fight. Even if it isn’t a trap, I have a feeling we’re not going to be welcomed with open arms.”

13

Lucky arrived with almost perfect timing, twisting into the Sigma Draconis system at almost exactly the same time we got close enough to get some detailed images. We found ourselves looking at a rickety old platform, whose guts seemed to be an old, standard-model mining rig. Things had been appended to it, though, including most of the hull of a class ten freighter. The only ships in sight were two small workboats, class three and class four.

“How heavily armed is that thing?” I asked.

“I can detect two laser batteries, although one of them seems to be partly disassembled, Otherwise, just a few point-defense systems. Of course, there could be a lot more under the hood than we can see,” Netty added.

I sat back and crossed my arms. “What we need is a way of finding out what goes on in that place. Even if it’s something truly awful and deserves to be destroyed, we need to know exactly what.”

“So just blowing it apart isn’t your first choice, huh?” Zeno asked with a touch of heat.

I turned back to her. “It’s on the list, but not at the top spot.”

She nodded once.

“Van, Lucky here.”

We’d locked a comm beam onto her ship and left the channel open so she could participate. “Go ahead.”

“I’m carrying a class 2 workboat, standard design, nothing special. I lug it around in place of an escape pod. It’s twist-capable, but only for short hops, five or so light-years at most without refueling. If you wanted to pay that place a visit, you could use it. It’s registered to a shell company in the Eridani Federation and has no connection to the Guild at all.”

I smiled. “Clever, carrying around your own anonymous little ride.”

“Keep upgrading the Fafnir, and you’ll have the space and power for it, too.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Meantime, yeah, I would like to borrow it, thanks.” I turned to Torina. “Care to join me in visiting the lion’s den, my dear?”

“Lion. Large Earthly predator, right?”

“Yes. Top of the food chain, vicious, all claws and teeth. Still a cat, though, and still likes to sit in boxes—if I fits, I sits,” I replied.

She gave me a puzzled smile. “I’m sure that all meant something.”

“You know, when we next have some spare time on Earth, I’ll take you to the zoo. All these animal references would land better if you actually knew what I was talking about.”

“Can’t we use the internet, too? You know, to see cats?”

I stopped and bowed.

“What’s that for?” Torina asked.

“In honor of you understanding what the internet was made for.”

Icky held up a thick finger. “I heard you dirty weirdos also use it for—”

“Icky?” I asked, my tone a warning.

“Um, yes, boss?”

“Let’s stick to kitties.”

* * *

The approach to the station was a tense one. Torina and I huddled in the cramped confines of Lucky’s Class 2, a ship not really much bigger than an escape pod but capable of free-flight in a way pods weren’t. It was also unarmed and unarmored. A single point-defense round could be catastrophic—and quite likely fatal. We’d put a round through the YardCraft that had been carrying the chipped Yonnox we’d rescued, after accelerating it off in a random direction. Small, dark, and cold, the damaged YardCraft would be almost impossible to find. We hoped that, and hacking our presence out of the automated scrappers memory, would prevent us from being detected.

Or at least buy us some time.

But we weren’t sure of that. For all we knew, the scrapper could have sent an alert that had been received by this platform. All we could do, though, was ply our stately way toward it, grit our teeth, and wait.

The approach dragged on. Lucky and the gang back aboard the Fafnir were ready to come to our immediate aid. But immediate meant at least ten or fifteen minutes, which was more than long enough to encompass a whole space battle. The only thing we had going for us was the tiny size and relative nimbleness of Lucky’s workboat and its correspondingly tiny signature. But even that protection disappeared when we pinged the platform for docking authority.

For a moment, we received nothing but silence in return. Finally, a voice crackled out of the comm.

“I think dock three is working. Try that one.”

And that was it.

I turned to Torina as she applied thrust, following the automated coordinates to dock three. “Not what I’d call a very professional outfit.”

“Are you complaining?”

I turned back and watched the ramshackle platform looming ahead now, then shook my head.

“Nope. Let’s just hope they’re as slapdash on the inside of that thing.”

We docked, and when the airlock confirmed a solid lock and stable pressurization, we opened the door—and were hit with a wave of odor that made my eyes water.

I wrinkled my nose, fighting a sneeze. “I’d say sweaty feet with a dash of burning rubber and just a hint of armpit.”

“Throw in a bit of bad breath, and I think that covers it,” Torina added in disgust.

We stepped into the platform and found ourselves in a cramped, dingy compartment with graffiti stenciled on the grimy bulkheads. Most of it was alien, but some of it came from human tongues, and there were even a couple English entries. All of it that I could read was shockingly profane, with a few that were hilarious. I assumed the other stuff was, too, proving that vulgarity truly is universal.

We checked ourselves over. We wore baggy clothes over our b-suits, and I wore my coat over that. Torina had foregone her usual coat in favor of a bad-girl-mechanic look that, I had to admit, was really working for me. I sported The Drop and the Moonsword, both concealed, while Torina had her trusty slug pistol.

We both wore expressions of careful alert.

With deliberate movements, we picked our way deeper into the station. There were sealed blast doors with low-pressure warnings flashing beside them, suggesting that parts of the place had been decompressed. I wished we could have brought our helmets with us, but they were too bulky to conceal and would have blown our cover. We’d have to rely on our emergency crash hoods to get us back to the workboat, if it came to that.

We spent nearly fifteen minutes traversing dark, cramped corridors and creaky compartments piled with miscellaneous junk, ducking cables and conduits slumping from rusty overheads, and contending with that dirty-sock stink. I was starting to think there was really nothing of interest here. At least some of the sealed and supposedly airless sections and compartments might contain things we cared about, but accessing them wasn’t an option. The last thing I wanted to do was inadvertently decompress the station.

Finally, we saw someone.

A reedy alien—apparently naked except for a harness and a noisy rebreather—emerged from a lit compartment ahead. He glanced our way and I tensed, but he turned away just as quickly and set off down the corridor away from us. I turned to Torina.

“Shall we?” I asked, gesturing at the light ahead.

“Kind of why we came here, isn’t it?”

We walked up to the lit compartment, stopped, and peered inside.

It was another space piled with all sorts of junk, from spacecraft parts to tangled rolls of optical cable. Behind a counter, though, stood a—

A something. I’d never seen anything like it before, and from her wide-eyed reaction, neither had Torina.

Think of a doll, the sort with the dead, staring eyes that roll back in its head when you lay it down. Now, imagine it being skinny to the point of skeletal, two meters tall, and obviously synthetic. Through ragged gaps in the skin of its joints and neck, I could clearly see rods and cables and actuators, as well as tubes throbbing slightly with pumping fluids. Two shark fin-like protrusions extended from its back.

It turned to us with a soft whir and click of unseen mechanisms, some of the visible rods and cables sliding to accommodate the movement.

“Good day I am pleased to have you here what can I do for you.”

It spoke in a flat monotone with only the barest hint of modulation, virtually no inflections and no pauses—just a steady string of words.

“Uh—well, we’re here because we’ve got business with the Cotzei. But we saw your platform and decided to pay a visit,” I replied.

“Then you have never been to Touchpoint before welcome to you.”

“Touchpoint? That’s the name of this place?”

“Yes it is and I am Lystin and I find it unusual that someone would come to Touchpoint without specifically intending to.”

I tensed a bit, but Torina smoothly cut in.

“That’s because we’re obviously not here for a casual visit. We’re interested in buying some goods on behalf of a… a client.”

“Which client would that be perhaps it’s someone with whom I’ve done business before.”

I stepped back a half pace, as though to check out a bin full of odd electronic components, to signal for Torina to carry on. She clearly knew something, or had seen something that I hadn’t.

She smiled. “Now, I’m sure that someone in your line of work knows that information like that is privileged.”

“Indeed yes I do what then is your interest I have various wares to offer.”

“I’m sure you do. We’re particularly interested in obtaining heavy weapons, especially missiles.”

I blinked at the gizmo I’d picked up and was supposedly examining. Torina had gone to weapons merchant awfully quickly. I could only hope she was right, but I put the thing back in the bin and kept my hands down at about waist level just in case.

“And what surety do you offer that you are genuinely interested in such things if they were even available and are not here for other more subversive purposes.”

She extracted a data slate, poked at it, then turned it toward Lystin. “I can offer you one million one hundred and thirty thousand two hundred and sixteen reasons why you should believe us.”

Lystin took in the display on the slate. “Ah yes, it seems that you do have sufficient funds to potentially purchase such things were they even available.”

I caught a glimpse of the slate’s display. Torina had read-only opened an account specified as certified by The Quiet Room, showing its balance of one-million-and-change bonds, just as she’d described. The account was only numbered, and I didn’t recognize it. It must have belonged to her family.

She wiped the display and put the slate away. “That’s the second time you’ve said if such things were available. I’m getting the distinct impression they’re not, or you’d be dying to part me from this money,” she said, then glanced at me. “I told you this was a dead end. Let’s go.”

And she turned and started to leave.

I’d gleaned enough of her little deception to try and risk playing along. “What can I say. It was a longshot, I know, but kind of on our way.”

“Now can I put out the word this place is a bust?” she asked, reaching the door.

“Yeah, might as well—”

“That is incorrect this is not a waste of time you must appreciate my care.”

Torina and I turned back. I shrugged. “Why? Touchpoint is out of the way and sketchy as hell, in a system right on the edge of known space. What do you think people are going to expect when they come here? Fine art and gourmet dining?”

“Very well I have several items in available inventory that may interest you.”

I glanced at Torina, who sighed. “We’re listening, and when you’re done, we’re heading back to our ship if it’s not worth our while.”

“I have six Whisperwing ship killer missiles complete with all ancillary tech manuals and software.”

Netty, who’d been listening over the comm, spoke up in our ear bugs.

Whisperwing missiles are a civilianized variety of the military Firewing missile system, manufactured by—and you’re going to love this—a wholly owned subsidiary of Traversia Bolt-Right. They are as good as civilian market anti-ship weapons get.

“Whisperwings, huh? Kind of second-rate, aren’t they? We—and by we, I mean our client, of course—would prefer Firewings,” I said.

“Firewings are subject to strict end-user controls and are not generally available however Whisperwing performance is only slightly less.”

Torina and I exchanged a look, then ambled back to the counter.

“Okay, we’re still listening. How much, and when and where can they be picked up?” Torina asked.

“Asking price is one-point-two-five million bonds per unit and they are available immediately however their location will only be given when payment has been received.”

That is way overpriced, Van. Maybe seven hundred and fifty thousand, tops, for Whisperwings. One-point-two-five million is what you’d reasonably pay for a Firewing. Oh, and there’s a lot more than a slight performance difference, Netty said.

“One-point-two-five million is an awful lot for a Whisperwing. I could see a million, tops.”

I wish that Lystin betrayed some emotion, some reaction at all. He was obviously a machine, but unlike Netty and Perry, he was also very machine-like about it. Reading him was like trying to read a doll, albeit one with jerky movement and a vaguely skeevy air.

In other words, reading him was impossible.

“I could consider coming down closer to one million per unit if you were willing to purchase all six.”

“We need to consult with our client to see if they’re willing to go that high.”

“I cannot guarantee that the units will be available for any particular duration of time.”

I opened my mouth to say understood, but Torina spoke first.

“We’ll put a one hundred thousand bond deposit on them and commit to an answer in no more than five days. Whether the purchase goes ahead or not, you can keep the deposit.”

“That is very generous and acceptable to me I will provide routing information to the relevant account.”

I stuck my hands in my pockets and nodded.

“Pleasure maybe doing business with you, I guess.”

* * *

“That Lystin character was lying,” Lucky said, back aboard the Fafnir. “I made a few discreet enquiries, and there are no Whisperwings unaccounted for, either by the manufacturer or any of the registered end-users. Guild intelligence keeps a pretty close eye on weapons of that sort of lethality.”

“Then it’s a scam,” I said. “They don’t have the goods.”

“You nailed it, boss. Totally a hustle.”

Torina sniffed and rolled her eyes. “Anything offered by a place that smells like that is bound to be a scam.”

“What do you want to do?” Zeno asked.

I’d shucked my coat and took a moment to unstrap The Drop and the Moonsword. “Torina, have you ever had a hankering to go into counterfeiting?”

“Can’t say I have, but I’m willing to give it a shot.”

“Van, before we launch whatever nefarious plot you’re hatching, might I remind you that you did agree to help your cousin back on Earth? The deadline he was given is just under a day away,” Netty said.

I sighed. “Yeah, good point. Lucky, can I trouble you to run down all the data and imagery Torina and I collected in there? I’d really like to know who or what Lystin is.”

“Creepy as hell, that’s what he is,” Torina said.

“Yeah. He kind of reminded me of those Trinduk—the Sorcerers,” I replied, which suggested another avenue of investigation. Lucky seized on it and nodded enthusiastically.

“Sure. I’ve got a few days to kill while Linulla works on a project for me. And honestly, you’ve piqued my interest, Van. I’ll find out whatever I can.”

“Thanks, Lucky. Meantime, I guess we’re heading back to Earth. And to Appleton, Wisconsin, in particular.”

Torina pulled a face. “Ugh. I love that Wisconsin cheese you gave me. But that… place, and stink, and hint of rancid cheese might have ruined dairy for me forever.”

I grinned. “I’ll fix that, Torina. I’ll introduce you to a cheese so ripe you’ll forget all about the smell of Touchpoint.”

“Forget about it in a good way, I hope. What’s this cheese called?”

“Limburger.”

Torina’s eyes lit up. “Sounds fancy.”

“Sure, let’s go with that.”

14

“Carter, are you sure this is where they meet?” I asked.

He nodded. “That contact you gave me was able to dig right into their encrypted emails and chats—which, incidentally, is kind of scary.”

“Believe me, Carter, that’s just the tip of the cyber-iceberg. Anyway—a wine bar. Not exactly the sort of place I’d expect a bunch of conspiracy nuts to meet.”

“Crazy people can appreciate wine, Van,” Perry said. “It’s people who drink IPAs that are to be ostracized. For the good of the galaxy.”

“No argument about that. But I’d always pictured dank basements slathered in grainy photos of dots and streaks and things in the sky, and lots of hushed whispers—”

“There, that’s our guy,” Carter said.

We’d rented a room in what turned out to be one of the upscale chain hotels just outside Appleton, in whose wine bar The Truly Aware held their occasional meetings. According to the chats and emails Carter had procured from my contact—who I now owed a favor—tonight was such a meeting. It probably had something to do with Carter, his stupid car, and the incidents at the farm, since their deadline was first thing in the morning.

Carter, being surprisingly on the ball, had pre-positioned a couple of small and unobtrusive imagers in the bar before we even arrived. For obvious reasons, we’d left Zeno, Icky, and Rolis aboard the Fafnir, which was parked a few kilometers away in a wooded area bordering a lake. Carter had been waiting with a rented car, which took Torina, Perry, and me to the rendezvous location. Now, we stood in the room he’d rented, watching the imagery from the bar on a data slate and waiting for our plan, which was hatched on our way back to Earth, to unfold.

I studied the man who’d just entered the wine bar, then shook my head. Central casting couldn’t have sent in a more stereotypical UFO nut. Tony Burgess was a large man, unkempt and unshaven to the point of bushiness, probably in his late twenties or early thirties. He wore a bomber jacket hanging open to reveal a faded Star Wars t-shirt, jeans, combat boots—and, of course, a fedora.

“Even if I’d never known what a UFO conspiracist was, I’d know that he was one,” Torina said.

I touched my comm. “Zeno, how are you guys doing?”

“Marvelous. Netty’s been pointing out the local wildlife. I now know what a trash panda is,” she replied.

“A trash panda? You mean a racoon?”

“Netty, you said it was a trash panda, that furry thing with the mask that wandered by.”

“I happen to like trash panda more than racoon. It’s more poetic, like murder chicken instead of Canada goose,” Netty replied.

“Anyway, guys, our contact is here. Stand by for us to call.”

“Standing by since that’s all we really can do,” Zeno said.

“Accurate as ever, engineer.” I turned to Torina. “Okay, my dear. You’re on.”

Torina nodded and opened her jacket to reveal a shirt that was… rather snug. I smirked at it, then her. “You’ve been carrying that in your stuff aboard the Fafnir?”

“You never know when it might come in handy. I call them the Distractors.”

“The Distractors? But there’s only one shirt.”

Torina blew me a kiss. “I wasn’t referring to the shirt.”

Perry sighed. “Get a room. Or, should I say, get another room.”

* * *

“I have to admit, she’s stunning,” Carter said, a sly smile creasing his face.

We watched on the imager as Torina sauntered into the wine bar, casual, aloof, and just slinky enough to be interesting. She wasn’t supposed to be interesting to Carter, though. And I narrowed my eyes at him to make the point.

He blinked at me. “What, a guy’s not allowed to appreciate a… beautiful vista?”

“No, he’s not.”

Carter shrugged. “Fine. Just sayin.”

Our target, Mister Tony Burgess, had been joined at his table by two other people—a mousy guy with thinning hair and a build like a stickman, making him an almost exactly negative image of the bulky and more than a little hirsute Burgess, and a young woman with a page-boy haircut and glasses, otherwise nondescript both in appearance and dress. These two were the ones Tony had obviously been waiting for, and they’d gotten down to whatever business they intended just a few minutes before Torina sailed into the place.

“Carter, why didn’t you use imagers with sound?” I asked.

“Sorry, Van. They were all I had, and I didn’t think it was worth the trip back to Anvil Dark to get some.”

I glanced at him sidelong. “You never thought of it, did you?”

“Pay attention, this is important,” he managed, face pinking with embarrassment. At least his capillaries could admit he was wrong.

Something tapped against the door leading to the room’s balcony. I had The Drop but had left the Moonsword on the Fafnir. While I didn’t intend to shoot holes in anyone, The Drop’s stunner could definitely come in handy. A blade that could carve open an Abrams tank without much effort, not so much.

I cracked open the door.

“Room service,” Perry said.

I opened the door, and he hopped into the room.

I frowned at him. “Aren’t you supposed to be our eye in the sky?”

“Yes.”

“Is… something wrong?”

“Yes.”

Carter and I both tensed, but Perry just shook his head.

“I’m just too damned attractive for my own good,” Perry said, sighing. He was sighing a lot lately, apparently trying to get it just right.

“Perry, what the hell are you talking about?”

“There’s a big-ass owl out there that keeps flying up after me. I think she’s got it bad, Van.”

“Got what bad?”

“Perry Syndrome. And there’s no cure.”

It was my turn to sigh. “Perry, we need you to—”

“She won’t leave me alone, Van. How am I supposed to do my job if I’ve got women throwing themselves at me—literally, as in, right in midair?”

“Find a way, Perry. But let her down gently. She deserves that much.”

He sighed yet again, and I opened the door so he could launch himself into the air. Before he did, though, he turned and stuck out a wing.

“Now what?” I asked.

“What, no tip?”

I closed the door and returned to the slate depicting the imaging data. Torina had taken up a place at the bar, conspicuously alone. At this point, her plan got pretty fluid. We assumed she’d have to find some way of specifically getting Burgess’s attention, then working from there.

But, as Carter and I watched, Burgess made a wait a moment gesture to his companions, then stood and started for the bar, straightening his fedora on the way.

We just stared.

“Really? He’s going for her? Just like that? Him?” Carter said, his voice tight with disbelief.

I shrugged. “Gotta admire the guy’s optimism.”

Carter glared at me. “I notice you’re not worried about him admiring Torina.”

“It’s because I’m intensely jealous of you, Carter. My jealousy burns with the cataclysmic power of an exploding sun,” I said, keeping my eyes on the slate.

No, Burgess hadn’t gone to the bar just to put in an order. He’d deliberately closed in beside Torina, ordered a drink, then turned to her and spoke, flashing her a grin through his scruffy beard. I didn’t need audio to know he was offering to buy her a drink, too.

Torina didn’t betray a flicker of anything except mild, almost detached appreciation for the offer. Burgess, apparently encouraged by not being immediately brushed off, carried on speaking, leaning on the bar as he did.

“—with some friends, but only for an hour or so. If you’re interested in maybe having a drink then—”

The voice came on the comm just as Torina reached into her coat. She’d obviously used the opportunity to open the default channel on her comm, the one shared by the Fafnir’s crew.

“Sorry, I am not—” She paused. She’d been learning English to make life easier for her on Earth, and had come a long way. “Sorry, English is not my first—talk? Speak?”

“Language?”

“Ah, yes! Lan-guage. I am—Italy.”

“Italian?”

She nodded. “Very Italian.”

Burgess smiled. “Nice.”

Torina looked around. “I was hope to find someone interesting to talk now, but—”

“Forty-five minutes. Half an hour, and I’ll be free,” Burgess insisted.

“Sorry?”

Burgess did what many people do when talking to someone who doesn’t understand their language well—he talked louder, and more slowly, as though that would help.

“Thirty minutes! Thirty, and I’m done!”

“He’s telling you he’ll be free in thirty minutes,” I said, ensuring to route my voice into Torina’s ear bug.

“Ah, thirty minute! Okay, yes, but not sure.”

“I’m a fascinating guy! Believe me, it’ll be worth the wait!” Burgess punctuated this with waves of his hands that looked like he was doing the world’s most awkward martial art.

Carter shook his head. “This clown is—I mean. This is bullshit. Does he really think that someone like Torina—”

“Yes, he does, which is the whole point of this,” I growled. “Read the room. It’s a honeypot, in case you missed that discussion.”

Carter took the hint and fell into a brooding silence that still managed to both irritate me and somehow imply Torina was out of my league. I had to give Carter credit; he was the Emperor of Assholes.

Torina finally agreed to hang around, whereupon Burgess went back to his friends. His body language broadcasted he was in a hurry, which his companions noted and bitched about. But Burgess said something, they all looked at Torina, then both the other man and the young woman smiled and nodded back with something like curiosity shining in their eyes.

Ten minutes later, they were done, and Burgess hustled back to join Torina.

“Perry, what’s the situation out there?” I asked.

“I think she’s decided that I’m out of her league.”

“What?”

“The owl. She seems to have given up. I’m obviously just too much bird for her—”

“Would you forget about that stupid owl and keep your little mechanical head in the game, please?”

“Oh, sure, when you and Torina are feeling frisky, then everything else goes to the bottom of the pile—”

“Perry!”

“Fine. There’s nobody out in the parking lot, or around Burgess’s van. In fact, the ditch right in front of his parking spot will cover you well until he’s right up to the driver’s door.”

“Thank you. Let us know if anything changes—unless it’s about your would-be girlfriend, in which case you can regale me about it back aboard the Fafnir.”

I nodded to Carter. “Let’s go.”

We headed for the door, checking ourselves over for anything that might inadvertently betray us as not quite ordinary people. The data slate was a bit of an issue, but it just resembled a tablet computer, so we should be able to get away with monitoring it.

I checked The Drop right before we left the room, making sure it had been set to its lowest stun setting. I also removed the magazine and cleared the chamber, so I couldn’t accidentally discharge a round that would blow Tony Burgess in half.

That would be hard to explain, but given his fashion decisions and wilting fedora, I didn’t think many juries would convict me, even if I did get caught.

* * *

“Did he just try—just try to close the deal?” Carter hissed.

“She’s a woman, not a transaction, you dinosaur. Shit, no wonder you’re an expert at first dates,” I remarked, keeping one ear focused on Torina’s voice.

We’d killed the video on the slate and just kept the audio going over the comm. The glow from the screen didn’t exactly help us hide in the ditch, and Torina kept up a running commentary in her broken, awkward English to let us know what was going on.

“Sorry, but don’t staying alone. Have mating in room.”

“I—what?”

“Roommate, Torina. Mating in room is a little different,” I said.

“Ah, wait. Roommate. You have place? Live lonely?” Her voice had taken on a purring tone, which was both bizarre and kind of—well, intriguing, in her pidgin English.

“I… do, yeah. Why?”

I looked at Carter, and we both shook our heads. Why? Really?

Torina said nothing, and Burgess eventually just said, “Oh.”

A pause, then he went on. “Oh—oh! Right, uh… yeah, I do.”

“We go there why not? You say UFO things is interesting, so you can show me”—she held a pause—“things.”

“Easy, big shooter. Leave some charm for the rest of us,” I whispered, though not to her, since I was keeping my comm’s transmission closed.

Another pause, then Burgess spoke, his voice suddenly quick, almost urgent.

“Let’s finish our drinks, then, and, um—my van’s outside.”

Carter snorted low. “Of course he has a van. Does it have Free Candy on the side?”

Despite my annoyance with Carter, I laughed. “And shag carpet. Probably. I knew we could count on old faithful.”

“Old faithful? The geyser?”

I shook my head. “No. Boners. There’s no force more powerful in the universe, including black holes and quasars.”

Carter snickered, but then he fell silent when I shot him a look. His one good joke earned him a little leeway with me.

But only a little.

Torina and Burgess kept up the small talk as they left the wine bar and headed for the parking lot. Carter and I stayed still, crouching amid the tall grass in the ditch. The night was cold and clear, stars glittering overhead like gems tossed by the hand of god. We heard only distant crickets and the occasional swish and rumble of traffic on nearby roads—all the gentle noises braiding together into a song played every night.

Our mark just walked out the door to the parking lot. He and Torina are outside, heading your way now, Perry said, keeping his transmission to our ear bugs.

“Ready, Carter?”

He lifted the burlap sack. “Yup.”

Fifteen meters, Perry said.

Ten.

Five.

We could hear them now, their muttered voices, their footsteps against the pavement of the parking lot. I peered through the grass at Burgess’s beater of a van, an old Ford Econoline eaten through by rust along its rocker panels. Fast food wrappers competed for space on the dash, and there was a small, classic alien doll hanging from the rearview mirror.

You should be able to see them now, Perry said.

I could. Torina split away to head for the passenger side, while Burgess came straight toward us.

Keys jangling, he grabbed the door handle. I stood and walked toward him, Carter following.

Burgess saw us and stared—

It was all I needed.

I raised The Drop and fired, slamming a pulse of energy into him that sent him slumping against the van with a thud. Torina was already hurrying around the van. She arrived just in time to catch him and stop his fedora-encrusted head from smacking into the pavement.

Carter stuck the hood over his head, while I scooped his keys. We manhandled Burgess into the van through the driver’s door, reasoning the doors in the back were too exposed for use. Then we clambered in and thunked the doors closed, but not until Perry glided inside and landed neatly in the back with Torina and Burgess.

I heard Torina make a noise. “What… what is that smell?” she asked from the back of the van, where she was watching over Burgess. Carter rode shotgun.

I flicked a little cardboard pine tree dangling from the rearview mirror, then put the key into the ignition. “That, my dear, is supposedly the smell of pine trees.”

“No, I mean that other smell, the one that reeks.”

I cranked the engine. It took a couple of tries, but it finally caught. “Oh, that smell? That’s called weed.”

“Weed? Why would someone burn weeds in their—van, right?”

“Note to self—have Torina try weed sometime.”

“I know a guy on Spindrift who makes absolutely killer bongs, boss,” Perry enthused.

“Why do you—”

“I got a guy for everything.”

“Of course you do, bird. Of course you do.”

With that, I wheeled the van onto the road adjacent to the hotel and started back to the Fafnir.

“Do I have to be the one to say it?” Perry asked.

I eyed him suspiciously through the rearview mirror. His tone was too light to be anything other than trouble.

“Say what, bird?” I asked.

Perry’s beak dropped open in a laugh. “Van. In a Van. Driving a—”

Torina snorted, then groaned. “Perry, if you make me inhale any more of this Van’s essence, then you’ll need more than a guy to keep your tail feathers.”

Perry closed his beak.

Smart bird.

15

Burgess was groggy by the time we stopped in the bushy lane fifty meters or so from the Fafnir. I left Torina and Carter to watch him and made my way back to the ship. Perry was already there when I arrived.

“How’d it go?” Zeno asked.

“Good so far. But I had an idea on the way back, a way to firmly convince our friend Burgess to cooperate with us.”

I turned to Icky. “Icky, I’m going to teach you a phrase in my native tongue, English. When I give you the cue, I want you to repeat it to our guest. Word for word, no deviation.”

“Uh… okay. What’s the phrase?”

I gave it to her and made her repeat it several times until she had it down.

“What does it mean, anyway?” she asked.

I told her, then gave her some additional instructions. By the time I left the Fafnir to head back to the van, everyone was laughing.

“Van, you’re cruel,” Zeno said.

“I will take that as a compliment, thanks. Okay, Icky, give me five minutes, then follow. Perry will guide you to the van.”

“Yessir, boss!”

I exited the Fafnir and pushed my way through the night-damp undergrowth, back to Burgess’s van. By the time I arrived, Burgess had largely recovered and was hurling profanities through his hood, along with threats to see us locked up or sued, or something suitably dire, anyway.

“As you might have noticed, he’s awake,” Torina said.

“Who are you people? What’s the language you’re speaking? What the f—”

I yanked the bag off his head. From Burgess’s point of view, it revealed three ordinary-looking humans. He immediately began spitting even more curses and warnings.

“Tony, Tony—relax. We’re not going to hurt you. Or, well, we’re going to try to not hurt you, anyway, but that’s kind of up to you.”

“Wait. You’re—you’re the Men in Black, aren’t you?”

“Do I look like Will Smith?”

“Very funny,” Burgess snapped back, licking his lips. “We’ve gotten too close to the truth, haven’t we? I knew it. I knew we were on to something from that farm in Iowa.”

“Actually, Tony, that’s right. You’ve gotten very close to the truth. And now you’re going to get even closer.”

I leaned toward him. “This is very important.”

“I won’t—”

“Tony, stow it, and I mean that. Listen to what I’m about to say, because your life depends on it. Do you understand?”

“You government bastards, let me guess, I’m just going to disappear—”

“Maybe, yeah. But if you don’t want that to happen, then you need to listen carefully. You must cooperate. You scream, try to fight, or even just refuse to do what we tell you, and I can’t save you. Do you understand? I can’t save you.”

Sweating now, and pale, Burgess blinked wide eyes at me. “Save me from who?”

I turned to Torina and nodded. She and Carter opened the back doors of the van.

Perry hopped in, landing with a metallic rattle and scrape on the rusty floor. “Hey, boss, what’d I miss?” he asked, speaking in English.

Burgess let out a strangled gasp, then something like a whimper. “What—?”

But he cut himself off when Icky appeared at the back of the van, brandishing one of the flexible tools she and Zeno had picked up on Plenty.

“LET THE PROBING BEGIN!” she bellowed in passable English.

Burgess said nothing. He just stared.

Then fainted.

* * *

Burgess proved very cooperative after that—once he came to, that is. Icky was gone by then, but I informed him she was nearby with her bendy tool, ready to—

I left the rest to his imagination.

What followed was a long, rambling conversation that started deep in conspiracy theory country but soon wandered out into the realm of interesting. Despite their nerdy obsession with all things UFO or extraterrestrial, Burgess and his companions in the Truly Aware—which included the three we saw in the bar and one or two more—had actually compiled some surprisingly good intelligence. Partway through the interrogation, though, Carter finally spoke up.

“Where’s Gertie?”

“Where’s—who?” Burgess asked.

“My car. I swear, if you’ve so much as scratched her—”

“She’s—er, it’s in my garage! And it’s fine!”

I motioned Carter back. I’d only been planning to put the fear of extraterrestrial attention into Burgess and compel him to back off. And return Carter’s car, of course. But it struck me he could actually be much more useful to us. He’d not only compiled shockingly good information about the farm and the night the Fade attacked it, but he had also amassed intel on dozens of supposed alien encounters around the world. Some of them were obviously nonsense, but others smacked of being all too real. And Burgess not only had encyclopedic knowledge of it all, but he was also smart and insightful enough to extrapolate and draw conclusions.

In other words, this was a guy I’d rather have on my side than not. If he stayed in the wild, as it were, he’d be nothing but an ongoing pain in our asses.

“Tony, how would you like to help me out?”

I felt Torina look at me and Carter stiffen. Neither said anything, though.

“Help you… how?”

I gestured to the back of the van. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Oh, no—”

“What? Oh, wait. No, I mean an actual walk. I’ve got something I want to show you so you know who you’ll be dealing with—or standing against.”

We ushered Burgess out of the van, then walked him into the bush, to the Fafnir.

When we broke the edge of the clearing, we stopped. Burgess looked around.

“I don’t see anything. Oh—oh, shit, you’re going to execute me—!”

“Oh, for—I’m not going to kill you, you drooling troglodyte. Get your shit together and stop whining.” I touched my comm, but not before I gave Burgess a pitiless look that shut him up. “Netty, please drop the veil of secrecy.”

The Fafnir abruptly popped into existence, a hulking presence squatting on her landing struts.

Burgess hissed in shock and wonder.

“Tony, this is the Fafnir, our ship. She’s a Vigilant-class starship, although they’re more commonly known as Dragons, or Dragonets if they aren’t upgraded to a certain standard.”

Burgess’s voice was small and quiet. “A starship?”

“Yup. Come on and check her out.”

We escorted Burgess aboard. Trembling, his breath coming in hard, short pants, he gingerly entered the airlock.

I wondered if this was how I looked the first time I saw her sitting in the barn so long ago.

“Is this our guy?” Zeno asked.

Burgess whimpered again. To him, Zeno must be a talking, anthropomorphic walrus.

“Hey, pleased to meet you. I’m Rolis.” He scampered along the bulkhead, sticking his imager into Burgess’s face.

“I—”

“Guys, he can’t understand a word you’re saying. Netty, can you translate everything into English, please?”

“Let’s try this again. Hi, I’m Rolis!”

“You’re a… a robot?”

“No, I’m an engineer. I became a robot when I died.”

“Of… course you did.”

“Yo, boss, before we lift, we should take some time to calibrate the—oh. Well, hello there? You ready to be probed?” Icky asked, clambering into the crew hab from aft, where she’d obviously been poking around engineering.

“No, please—”

“Relax, Tony,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Icky doesn’t really want to probe you.”

“I don’t?”

“No, you don’t,” I said, then turned back to Tony. “That was a little ploy to get you to cooperate, which worked quite nicely, actually. Anyway, I thought we’d go for a little flight so you can see—well, the truth. That’s what you’ve been after, right?”

“A… flight? Where?”

I shrugged. “Not far. Let’s say, the moon? You can check out the Apollo 11 landing site. It’s worth the trip.”

* * *

I admit that I enjoyed watching Burgess’s reaction as the Fafnir lifted and he realized this wasn’t all some big con or scheme, or some elaborate joke being leveled at him. We’d settled him in the copilot’s seat so he got a good view, and he gaped from it—probably in much the same way I did—as the sky darkened and the horizon began to curve. We hit orbit as we climbed over northern California, then did a complete circuit of the Earth.

Burgess’s mouth occasionally moved, emitting the beginnings of a thought.

“This—”

“What—?”

“How—?”

Perry leaned forward. “I never get tired of this part, where they realize it’s all true and this really is a spaceship. The look on Tony’s face is going to be great in my collection.”

I turned to him. “What collection?”

“What? Oh—sorry, just a glitch, Van. I don’t have a collection of imagery of the faces of people hitting space for the first time, and how dare you suggest such a thing.”

Burgess turned and looked at Perry. His voice finally found some traction.

“You’re… a bird.”

“Well, technically, I’m modeled after a bird. I’m actually a Peacemaker Guild combat AI, model AU-987T, serial number 18974XM6. The AU series are all patterned after native fauna of different worlds, so they can fit in better.”

“A… combat? Worlds? What?”

“We’ll take it a little at a time, Tony. Just hang in there and watch the scenery. That’s Japan beneath us. Pretty cool, huh?” I said.

“Japan. I—holy shit, that is Japan.”

We swept across the Sea of Japan and passed almost directly over Seoul, South Korea. Burgess shook his head.

“Wait. We’re heading over China? Aren’t you worried they’ll… like, detect you—er, us? Consider it a hostile intrusion?”

“They can’t see us. No Earthly sensor really can,” I replied, then frowned and turned my attention to Netty.

“Which reminds me—Netty, how long to the moon if we don’t use the drive?”

“Using gravity polarizers only? About eight hours, give or take.”

“Gravity polarizers?” Burgess asked, his eyes wide as dinner plates.

“Yeah. They’re the things that allow us to experience a constant one g aboard the ship. It makes it easier to move around, but it also prevents us from being turned into a thin layer of goo against the bulkheads when the drive kicks in. We can use them as a sort of drive for the Fafnir as well, but not a very good one, especially outside a decent-sized gravity well—and, holy shit, am I ever getting good at understanding and explaining this stuff,” I said, unable to avoid sounding a little triumphant.

“Anyway, that means we should count on a full day for the round trip. Are you okay with that?” I asked Burgess.

“I—uh, yeah, I guess,” he said, looking and sounding shell-shocked. “I mean, what the hell. I miss a day selling gas and snacks in exchange for a trip to—”

He stopped and grinned. “A trip to the moon. You’re serious, aren’t you?”

I smiled back. “Netty, let’s show Tony how serious we are.”

* * *

Burgess had resumed staring struck silent when we left orbit, the Earth turning to a full disk and falling away behind us in a smear of blue and green glory. We pretty much left him alone with his thoughts through the trip, although one of us, either me, Torina, or Carter, kept an eye on him. Otherwise, we moved to the back with Icky, Zeno, and Rolis and took care of some lingering paperwork and administration, because paperwork and administration are a universal constant, like taxes and the speed of light.

I returned to the cockpit when we inserted into Lunar orbit. Carter was yammering on about something, and I prepared to intervene, but it turned out he and Burgess were actually discussing cars.

“No, no, the Black Pearl edition of the 280Z was a limited run. The pace car at the 77 Long Beach Grand Prix was a Zap edition,” Carter was saying.

“Are you sure? I could have sworn that was a Black Pearl.”

“No, it was a Zap—”

“Excuse me, guys,” I cut in, shooing Carter from the pilot’s seat. I turned to Burgess. “I didn’t realize you knew cars. I thought you just stole them.”

“That—yeah. I’ve already apologized to Carter for that.”

“Glad to hear it. Netty, how long until the Apollo 11 site?”

“It should be rising over the horizon in about five minutes.”

Netty kept us in a low orbit—low enough that we could see the Eagle descent stage, the disturbed regolith, and the bits and pieces of equipment scattered around the site by Armstrong and Aldrin with the naked eye. The imager gave Burgess a view so close up you could easily make out the tread patterns of the astronauts’ overboots.

* * *

When the site had fallen away behind us, I turned to Burgess.

“There you go, Tony. You are now one of only a few hundred humans to have been up close and personal with the Apollo 11 landing site.”

“A few hundred? You mean… you guys aren’t the only humans out here?”

“Far from it. Torina’s from Helso, an Earth-like moon in the Van Maanen’s Star system.”

Burgess turned to her. “So you’re not from Italy?”

Torina laughed. “No, sorry.”

Burgess turned back to me. “Okay. Now that I’m a little less freaked out—what’s this all about? Why are you showing me this?”

“Like I said, Tony, I want to enlist your help.”

“My help?” He gestured around. “What kind of help could you possibly need from me?”

I smiled. “Let’s talk about it on the way back to Earth.”

* * *

“You detonated that nuke in orbit a few years back?”

I nodded as the Fafnir descended toward Appleton. “Mea culpa. It powered an x-ray laser, which we kinda needed to help us get out of a jam.”

“That was massive news. It disrupted internet and GPS and stuff for days.”

I shrugged. “Sorry?”

Burgess laughed. “Ah—holy shit. I just can’t believe all this. I mean, I do, but I don’t.”

“Trust me, I’ve been exactly where you are.”

“So what else have you done that’s, you know… alien.”

“Such as?”

“Well, abductions, for one. There have been a bunch of them over the past couple of years.”

I tensed and sat up. So did Torina, and even Carter and Perry.

“Abductions? Tell me about them, Tony.”

He launched into an exhaustive description of disappearances around the world that Burgess was convinced were the work of aliens. The guy had an eidetic memory, so he was able to rattle off names, places, dates, and associated hints that these were extraterrestrial doings.

“Tony, can I get you to send me as much of that information as you can?”

He laughed. “What? Send it to vantudor-at-outerspace-dot-com or something?”

“Nah, just send it to my regular email address. It’ll auto-forward to outerspace-dot-com.”

“Really?”

I smiled. “No, of course not. What I will do, though, is give you a secure email address you can use, along with an encryption key. You’ll get a mail delivery failure message, with message misspelled, only one s. That’ll acknowledge receipt. I won’t reply. If I need to talk to you, I’ll contact you directly.”

“You’ve thought of everything.”

“I wish.”

“Why the specific interest in the abductees? Is someone abducting people from Earth for—”

“Probing?” Icky said, lifting up her bendy tool.

“Icky, why the hell are you still brandishing that thing?” I asked.

“Just in case our friend here needed more persuading.”

Burgess winced. “I don’t, believe me, I don’t.”

“To answer your question, Tony, people being abducted are—well, they might be implicated in a case we’re investigating. I don’t want to say any more than that.”

“Because you’re actually an interstellar cop?”

“Badge and everything, yeah.”

He looked around, then back outside the Fafnir, at the surrounding bush. Netty had landed right where we’d started, near the lake just outside Appleton. “This is unbelievable. I mean, I knew it. I knew there was way more to the whole extraterrestrial thing than the government would admit.” He gave a sheepish smile. “Although it turns out they’re as much in the dark as the rest of us, huh?”

“More in the dark than you are, Tony. You now are truly aware, aren’t you?”

“And what happens if I turn around and blow your cover on all this? I mean, you’re trusting me with—” He ended with a ponderous shake of his head.

I grinned. “That’s easy. Icky?”

She lifted her bendy tool and bared her teeth.

Burgess winced again. “Message received. Trust me, your secret is safe with me.”

16

True to his word, Tony sent us everything he and his little group had compiled on abductees, a complete, compressed database containing a few hundred megabytes of data. It showed up in the encrypted email account I’d given him shortly after we landed back in Iowa. It was voluminous and detailed, although once we filtered out the conspiracy nonsense about Men In Black and Area 51 and such, most of the detail vanished. Still, it was a telling list of people who’d gone missing under mysterious circumstances, often in conjunction with observed, or at least suspected, UFO phenomena.

As we sat in the farmhouse kitchen, Perry analyzed the data, looking for trends. He found one almost immediately. More to the point, he found an image file attached to one of what he rated as high-priority cases.

“Why would they call it a Predator?” Torina asked.

“Because whoever drew this picture has seen some movies,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the image. It actually looked nothing like the movie Predator, even when rendered as a crude sketch. But I recognized it immediately anyway.

It was a Trinduk—a Sorcerer.

“When and where was this supposedly spotted, Perry?” I asked.

“Just outside the city of Zagreb, in Croatia, about three years ago.”

“What the hell was one of those assholes doing on Earth three years ago?” Torina asked. That made me shoot her a glance. Torina didn’t often use even mild profanity, so it stuck out when she did. It was explained when I saw the look on her face, something that mixed anger and disgust.

I shared her feelings. The idea that Earth was being visited by those ruthless, evil bastards at any time or place lit a slow fire of rage somewhere deep inside me.

Icky, who’d been peering over our shoulders, pointed a meaty finger at the sketch. “What’s that on the sleeve? Three globes and… a star?”

Perry shook his head. “Not a clue. But I know someone who’s cataloged every one of those scum. Might be time for a visit to an old friend.”

“Which old friend is that?” I asked him.

“Petyr Groshenko.”

“Our friendly interstellar mercenary? Do you even know where the hell he is?”

“That’s… tricky.”

* * *

Perry remained coy about Groshenko, mainly because he didn’t know exactly where the former Guild Master was, but he did know how to get ahold of him. We left him to it and departed Earth the next day, headed for Anvil Dark. We detoured to return Carter to his ship.

“Thanks, Van, for helping me with that whole car thing,” he said shortly before he left.

I bit back my surprise. I’d expected Carter to remain an unrelenting, narcissistic pain in the ass, but his experience with the Guild seemed to be nudging him toward being a decent human being. So I offered him a genuine smile instead.

“Don’t mention it. But if my vintage car ever gets stolen, I’ll be coming to you for help.”

“Do you even own a vintage car?”

“Does the broken-down old tractor out in the shed beside the barn count?”

He gave me an imperious look. “Are you comparing Gertie to an old tractor?”

Okay, character growth takes time. Still, two steps forward and one back and all that, right?

We left him with his ship and made the trip back to Anvil Dark. When we arrived, we were immediately met by Lucky and Lunzy.

I stopped and sighed when I stepped out of the Fafnir’s airlock and found them waiting.

“Now what? What does Gerhardt want this time?”

But Lunzy shook her head. “It’s not about Gerhardt. I need you to come to my ship.”

“Why?”

She gave a thin smile. “You’ll find out when you get there.”

I gestured for Torina and Perry to follow, leaving the others to attend to the Fafnir. “Wait, my birthday’s in another week or so. This isn’t some dumb surprise party, is it?”

“Well, if it was and I admitted it, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise, would it?” She quickly turned serious though. “But it’s not. Lucky filled me in on what you found out on your little jaunt out to Touchpoint. That reminded me of an intel report I read a few months back that might be related to those supposed Whisperwings you were offered.”

“For an outrageous sum,” Torina added.

Perry, who flew in short hops along with us, nodded. “Yeah, pretty sure that supposed is right. I think those things are vaporware.”

“Well, that kind of ties into—well, you’ll see,” Lunzy said, directing us off the docking concourse and down a corridor to her ship, the Foregone Conclusion. We entered and found Lunzy’s mysterious surprise was a someone—specifically, Dayna Jasskin, the woman who’d represented The Quiet Room in the Procyon system, one of the very first places I’d ever visited after leaving Earth for the first time.

Lunzy motioned us all to sit in the cozy little study she had set up aboard her ship. As I sank into the overstuffed armchair, I nodded.

“Yeah, we definitely need to get a second habitat module for the Fafnir so we can set up something like this. Perry, you could fetch my pipe, slippers, and smoking jacket,” I said, shooting him a grin.

“I exist only to serve.”

“Good help is hard to find.” I turned to Dayna. “You’ve come a long way. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“Lunzy told me that you want to counterfeit some bonds.”

I sat up. “Woah, that was barely an idea, much less a plan—”

“It’s alright, Van,” Dayna said, holding up a hand.

“It’s… alright for us to make counterfeit bonds? I gotta admit, that’s a far more liberal policy than I’d expect from a bank.”

“No, it is not okay to make counterfeit bonds. Having said that, though, we have cooperated with the Guild in the past by providing… um, let’s call them real bonds that can also be traced with absolute certainty.”

“You can trace cash?”

“We can trace cash specifically intended for the purpose. It started as a way of watching how bonds circulate for statistical analysis, to refine Quiet Room policy, that sort of thing. Not surprisingly, it turned out to have some useful law enforcement applications.”

“How? What sort of tech do you use—?” Perry began, but Dayna cut him off.

“That is a very closely guarded secret. Enough for you to know that we can provide you with traceable bonds and then trace them for you. At any time, we can declare them counterfeit by serial number and render them worthless. That’s why they’re real bonds—right up until they’re not.”

“Okay… why? Why are you telling us this?” I asked her.

“Because you were offered some shipkiller missiles. The Quiet Room has a vested interest in things like that not being readily available.”

Torina gave a knowing smile. “You act as an insurance carrier, don’t you?”

Dayna smiled right back. “Saw right through me, huh?” She nodded. “That’s part of it, yes. The Quiet Room has some insurance subsidiaries. We also hold liens on quite a few ships, whose value would greatly decrease if those ships were suddenly killed.”

“We don’t think those missiles are real, though. So, while I appreciate the offer of the fake-not-fake cash, I really don’t think there’s anything to buy,” I said, then had to frown in thought. “Which means we’re going about this part of the investigation all wrong. I mean, if the missiles are fake, what’s the point of offering them? Why shipkiller missiles in particular?”

“You said it yourself, Van. They’re ship killers. Put that together with what Dayna’s told us—”

I nodded as understanding dawned.

“It’s not the fact of the missiles being out there. It’s the threat of it. It’s a scam within a scam. These scumbags are trying to shake down people with ships. So, what if someone’s already paid?” I turned to Dayna. “Is there any way to find that out?”

“Possibly. But why? And are you sure the missiles aren’t real?”

“Sure? No. Convinced of it? Yeah. The price was set so high that we could never agree to it. The whole point was just to get word out about the Whisperwings and harness the power of the rumor mill to spread the fear.”

“It would be a little embarrassing if we actually showed up with the money, then,” Torina said, a wicked grin spreading across her lips.

But Lucky shrugged. “Not really. You’d be told they’d just been sold to another buyer, or something like that. And that would reinforce the whole scam.”

Dayna nodded. “That makes sense. But why do you want the information about the ships—”

She paused, and now it was her turn for understanding to dawn.

“You want to track down any shipowners that might have recently paid large sums of bonds for no apparent reason.”

“Or at least reasons that are suspect, like large down payments on new ships that haven’t even been commissioned for construction, that sort of thing,” I replied. “Then, rather than let them draw a bead on us, we can hunt them from our end with one simple tool. We find some victims, track their movements and the ships they own—”

“And backtrack the location of whoever is running this operation without sticking our feathers in the fire,” Perry said.

“I thought your feathers were fireproof.”

“Fire resistant. It makes all the difference in my warranty.”

“Fire resistant? Would you wear a bullet resistant vest?” Torina asked.

I shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t, but I didn’t come with a warranty.”

* * *

In just a few hours, Dayna was able to provide us with several candidate ship owners and operators with recent large and unexplained payouts. Three of them in particular stood out. We had Netty and Perry chew over the data and see what useful intelligence they could extract from it. A short while later, they announced they had a result.

“Based on the data Dayna gave us, combined with flight plans and traffic control reports, things seem to converge on the Theta Indi system, just over a hundred light-years away from Anvil Dark,” Netty said.

We studied the star chart Netty displayed in the galley. I curled my lip at it.

“That’s a long haul. Why way out there, I wonder?”

“That far outside known space, no one’s likely to be looking for you. Nor is anyone likely to just stumble across you,” Perry offered.

“Still, it must cost them a fortune in fuel to twist back and forth,” Zeno replied.

Rolis tried to approximate a shrug, something a Waldo unit was never really designed to do. “Cost of doing business, I guess. As long as their revenue is high enough to make their margin, that’s all that matters.”

“What a sterile, business-like way to describe vile criminality. Accurate, but still sterile and business-like,” Torina said.

“Crime on this scale is a business, though. It also tells us something else,” I said.

Everyone looked at me.

“We’ve been focusing our efforts on known space and their criminal shenanigans in it, right? But that might be just treating the symptoms, not the disease itself.” I pointed at the screen, where the Theta Indi system was highlighted.

“That’s the disease, out there. Which explains why we’re making such slow progress in unraveling this case. While we’re playing whack-a-mole here, the real action is all—”

I swept a hand across the display.

“—out there.”

Everyone kept staring at me. I sighed.

“Whack-a-mole is a dumb game where you whack little creatures called moles. Every time you do, another one pops up.”

Torina clicked her tongue. “That sounds awful.”

“Poor moles—whatever they are,” Zeno muttered.

Icky cocked her head. “What’s the point?”

“Let’s just take my metaphor as it’s intended, okay? We need to start casting a wider net, further out into space. Have to admit, though, I don’t feel like setting up some elaborate ruse to bait these scumbags into attacking.”

“Well, we could just attack everybody who looks at us the wrong way,” Torina said.

Icky cracked her many knuckles. “Finally, a plan that I can get behind. When do we start?”

* * *

We decided to start immediately. I didn’t especially want to hang around Anvil Dark longer than we had to, anyway. The longer we did, the more likely we were to run afoul of Master Gerhardt. So we packed up and shipped out, heading for the closest known refueling depot to the Theta Indi system. That turned out to be the mining-focused Wolf 424 system, where an automated platform dispensed antimatter and helium-3 and other goodies for ore carriers coming into and leaving the system.

Keeping a wary eye on other traffic in the system, we topped up our tanks, then disconnected and backed away from the depot. As we did, a class 5 workboat several refueling slots away from us also backed out—

Then spun and accelerated directly toward us.

I hissed when the collision alarm blared. The class 5 had lit its drive, bathing two other ships in the stellar flare of its fusion exhaust while they were refueling. We had about fifteen seconds to react, which wasn’t going to be enough time to stop it. Even if we smashed it to scrap with our weapons, the wreckage would still slam into us broadside.

“Aw, hell—” I said, bracing for impact as I reached instinctively to Torina.

But there was no impact.

Netty reversed the thrusters and neatly slid us back into our refueling slot. The workboat swept past our exhaust cone, missing it by meters. Netty then fired a brief, hard burst from our own drive, effectively vaporizing the rear half of the class 5. We banged hard into the docking buffers, then rebounded. The whole depot began to slowly turn under the momentum we’d imparted to it, before it began firing thrusters like mad to stabilize itself.

It had all taken twenty seconds.

I watched as the molten wreckage coasted on, heading roughly for the galactic core where it would arrive in a few million years. Then I turned my attention back inside the Fafnir.

“Everyone okay?”

“Some ruffled feathers, but otherwise I’m fine, thanks for asking, Van,” Perry said.

I got nods from everyone else, followed by a barrage of rapid-fire exclamations.

“What the hell—?”

“Who was that—?”

“What were they thinking—?”

I raised my hands. “Excuse me, but credit to the hero of the hour. Netty, thank you for saving our butts.”

“Your butts? Oh—oh, right! Yes, that was totally what I was doing. I never once thought of myself. Team player and all that, that’s me.”

Zeno looked up from her panel. “Icky asked what the point of… whack-the-hole, or whatever it was—"

“Whack-a-mole,” I put in.

“Sure, whatever. So what was the point of that? Or was it just an accident?”

“That was no accident. That was an attempt to kill us—and no, I’m not just being paranoid. I mean, seriously, what are the chances that was just some shit that happened?” I said, trying to will my racing heart to slow down to something a little less than a machine gun.

“But it was a suicide run. And a real suicide run, at that, if there was a crew on board. They could have opened up on us with whatever weapons they were carrying, right?” Zeno said.

“I only detected point-defense batteries. They’d have hurt, but not enough that we wouldn’t fire back with a decisive outcome,” Netty replied.

“It wasn’t even a very good attack. Must have been pretty much spur of the moment. I mean, did that seem carefully planned to you guys?” Rolis asked.

“I know what it was,” Perry proclaimed.

Everyone turned to him. I stared. “Well?”

“It was a spur of the moment distraction.”

“A distraction from what?”

“I’d say from the class 8 fast freighter that’s suddenly tearing out of the system,” Perry replied as Netty painted it onto the tactical overlay.

“Follow that ship, boss?” Netty asked.

“If you please, and with all due haste. In other words, kick it, Netty.”

17

Our class 8 quarry had a head start on us, leading to a long stern chase. However, our drive was much more efficient, the many tweaks and adjustments done by Zeno, Icky, and Rolis showing their value. We gained on the class 8 with surprising rapidity, so much so that overtaking it before it could twist away became pretty much inevitable.

“Missile range in four minutes, nineteen seconds, Van,” Netty said.

I grunted my acknowledgement, then sat back. “I’d really like to stop these guys without, ah, blowing them into vapor. Hard to get information from a cloud of glowing gas.”

“Not if it’s a Syzgilthin,” Perry said.

“A what?”

“A Syzgilthin. They’re sentient clouds of glowing gas in the Beta Pictoris system.”

“Uh… okay. Guess you got me there.”

Torina turned to Perry. “Aren’t they the ones that take days to complete a thought?”

“Supposedly, but there are rumors they just want everyone to believe that so we’ll leave them alone.”

“Well, who am I to foist myself on a sentient cloud?”

“Guys, let’s stay focused, shall we?” I said.

“Suggestion—fire missiles at them, but set them to detonate further away than normal. If we shower them with shrapnel, it’ll hopefully do enough damage to slow them down without, you know, blowing them to bits,” Zeno said.

I looked around. “Anyone got any better ideas?”

I got nothing in reply, which was a collective decision unto itself.

“Alrighty, then. Torina, if you please.”

She brought the missiles online, then waited until the range band on the tactical display embraced our target. She tapped at her fire-control panel, and the Fafnir shuddered as a trio of missiles flashed away.

“Run, little fish,” I murmured, earning a nod of approval from Torina, Icky, and Perry. They all appreciated a good offense.

We watched them track. The class 8 knocked out one with a blizzard of point-defense fire, but the other two bracketed it with detonations. The next few seconds passed in tense silence.

The target’s acceleration dropped dramatically.

“Bingo. Looks like we hit something that’s slowing them down anyway,” I said.

We quickly ate up the distance between the Fafnir and the class 8. A brief but furious battle ensued that saw us take a couple of laser hits and a rail gun slug that detonated a REAB module. Our return fire, delivered by Torina and Rolis with relentless deadly precision, quickly ended the battle though by shooting off the other ship’s weapons. We then closed in, broadcasting a boarding warning.

“Let me lead this time, boss,” Icky said as we suited up.

“Only if you promise to leave them alive,” I said, clipping the Moonsword to my harness.

“Aww.”

“Icky—”

“Okay, fine.” She hefted her sledge. “Alive. Not necessarily undamaged, though—”

“Just to be clear, Icky, alive is the minimum I’m looking for here. Lucid and able to communicate are important, too.”

“Aww.”

I put a hand on her chest. “Icky.”

“Um. Yes, boss?”

“You may thump, but thump lightly. Understood?”

“Is thumping more than a whack but less than a crunch?” Icky asked.

“Exactly.”

“I—fine. Thump lightly then.” Icky managed to sound aggrieved and happy at the same time, a feat I considered nothing short of fascinating given how near we were to a hostile boarding action.

We sidled the Fafnir up against the now-defenseless class 8 and locked our docking adapter to theirs. Their outer airlock door stayed stubbornly closed, though.

“Sorry, Van, I’ve hacked it. It should be opening, but it must be jammed,” Perry said.

“You know what? I’ll bet they spot-welded it shut from the inside. I’ve seen that in other ships that came in for salvage,” Rolis said.

I nodded and drew the Moonsword. “Fine. Then we’ll make our own door.”

I drove the blade into the blank alloy face of the outer door. It punched cleanly through, then sliced apart the metal as I pulled it down, across, up, and back across. I left a tiny sliver of metal holding it in place, then stepped back.

“Icky, after you.”

“Thanks, boss. Next stop, Thumptown,” she said, a feral grin splitting her wide features. She stepped into the airlock, gripped her sledgehammer like a battering ram, and drove it into the door with a heavy, metallic clunk. The door quivered, but the cut section remained in place. Icky hit it again, and once more, then it broke free and toppled into the other ship’s airlock. We repeated the process on the inner door with a practiced ease.

This time, when she bashed it open, a fusillade of gunfire erupted. Rounds clanged against the airlock bulkheads. A couple banged against the Fafnir’s structure and spangled away in scorching paths. A ricochet struck my right arm, but the b-suit took the hit, reducing it to the force of a middling punch. Unfortunately for the shooters, Icky caught a round full-on in her right, smaller arm. She howled in fury and charged like a mad bull.

A mad bull with a warhammer.

“Oh, shit—Icky, alive, lucid, and able to communicate, remember!”

“I won’t break’ em too bad!” she shouted back, then laid into the shooters, a human and a Nesit. The human took a solid whack from her hammer that probably broke his arm—and that was it. The Nesit and a third crewman, another human, immediately dropped their weapons and surrendered.

Icky looked at them in disgust. “Aww. Just when it was getting good.”

* * *

“What do you mean, you haven’t been paid? Haven’t been paid by whom?” I asked.

“Nice grammar, boss,” Perry said.

“Thanks. I’ve been taking classes.”

“Keep it up. You’ll sound British in no time.”

We’d taken Icky and the man whose arm she had broken into the Fafnir to be treated, while questioning the other two aboard their battered ship. Most of the aft section and a compartment amidships had been depressurized by our missiles, and the reactor had slumped into safe mode and cut their available power by about eighty percent. We turned Rolis and Zeno loose on it to determine what, if any of it, was worth salvaging. Torina and I focused on the interrogation.

Which was surprisingly easy. Once they surrendered, the crew fell over themselves trying to be cooperative. I sensed that not being paid helped our position. That, and Icky’s constant glower.

“By the Fade. They contracted us to take you out,” the Nesit said.

“Another contract? Isn’t one enough? I mean, how many times can they kill me?”

The human, a scruffy man with a beard who reminded me vaguely of Tony Burgess, shook his head. “No, not just a wide-open contract. They hired us specifically to find you and take you out. Some other ships and crews, too.”

“Ooh, hiring thugs and ruffians a la carte to kill you. You’re moving up in the world, Van,” Perry said.

I shot him a sharp look. “Well, don’t I feel special,” I replied, then turned back to these particular thugs and ruffians.

“Who hired you?”

“I already told you, the Fade—”

“No, I mean who specifically? Which person, where?”

The human answered. “Yeah, I’ll never forget him. Creepy as hell. Tall, skinny—a robot, because you could see tubes and rods and cables and shit, but still mostly covered with skin.”

“Two big fin things sticking out of his back, too,” the Nesit added with a delicate shiver of revulsion. “I’m no elitist, but that… thing… gave off some bad energy.”

I looked at Torina. She nodded and mouthed a name—Lystin.

I gave her a look of understanding, then turned to our prisoners.

I took a brusque tone, clipping my syllables to bare bones. “I’ll cut right to it. You’ve been helpful. Where do you want to be dropped off?”

The human blinked up at me. “You’re not arresting us?”

“No. Instead, I’m giving you a job to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Boss? No blue-girl-smash stuff? Thought that was, you know, standard policy,” Icky asked.

“Heluva lotta fun, too. Did you know teeth can ricochet?” Perry asked.

I knelt beside our unwilling guest, my eyes hard and flat,. “You’re going to tell everyone you know that the next time someone tries to cash in on one of those contracts, they will die. And badly. I’ll make it my mission to see that whoever comes for us doesn’t just end up dead, they go in a baaaad way. A creative way. Maybe I let Icky work out some of her—”

“Issues, boss. I got ’em,” Icky said, smacking her hammer into a meaty palm.

“You feel me?” I asked, my tone light and friendly.

Our human guest twitched, visibly. “I, ah—”

“Let me clarify further. You, my friends, just received the last Get Out Of Jail cards I’ll ever deal. My suggestion to you? Hold on to them, and never, ever get on my bad side again.”

* * *

Icky’s face pinched as she exhaled with a gusty sigh. “You just let them go?”

I watched as Netty backed us away from the battered class 8. We’d put a salvage beacon on it and informed what passed for an overarching authority in the Wolf 424 system, adding a friendly but firm expectation that our salvage rights would be honored. And they probably would be. Salvage was serious business, and salvage-claim jumpers were looked up—and treated—about as well as mining-claim jumpers and horse thieves in the Earthly Old West.

“They were such small potatoes, Icky, you couldn’t even make decent fries out of them.”

“They shot me—!”

“And me,” I said, holding up a hand. “But if it makes you feel better, I told them to spread the word that the next assholes who try to take us on die for sure.”

“Promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope not to die.”

That mollified her, and I turned to Torina and Perry. “How’d you guys like to help me craft a report for the Guild—and especially to Master Gerhardt. I want to connect all these dots but do it in a way that’s sitting on rock-solid legal and administrative ground.”

“I’ve got nothing better planned,” Perry said.

“Meantime, Netty—” I said, then hesitated.

“You rang?”

“Before we carry on to the Theta-whatsit system—”

“Theta Indi.”

“Right. Before we twist there, get Lucky on the comm for me, please. She’s one of the very few Peacemakers I trust to have our backs. And we could use that when we start poking sticks at the bear.”

Netty put us on a relatively low-g, fuel-conserving trajectory out to a twist point, while Torina and Perry and I dug into our paperwork. Icky, Zeno, and Rolis checked out the damage the Fafnir had taken during the brief firefight while ensuring there wasn’t any more we’d missed. That included an external exam of the ship, which made Rolis almost giddy with excitement.

“I love going out there. No bulky, stinky vac suit—it’s great!”

About twenty minutes later, Netty put Lucky onto the screen over the galley table.

“Peacemaker Tudor, how may I be of assistance today?”

“That’s very formal of you.”

“Okay, how about this—what the hell do you want, Tudor?”

I grinned, then explained how I was hoping she could accompany us to Theta Indi.

“Love to, but I’ve got a job I have to finish up—” She stopped, cocking her head. “Hey, tell you what, you scratch my case, and I’ll scratch yours. I could use your help with what I’m doing now.”

“Sure. What’s up?”

She explained that tourists and cruise ships were being jumped by pirates near a planet called Paktarr’s World. A rugged, icy planet orbiting just outside its star’s Goldilocks Zone, Paktarr’s World had been declared a nature preserve by interstellar treaty, apparently to protect indigenous aquatic life on its way to eventual intelligence. Paktarr’s was a planet-sized version of the spectacular, wild beauty of Alaska or Greenland. It was also a major attraction for viewings from low orbit and shuttle trips into the atmosphere that weren’t allowed to actually land.

But the lucrative tourism business had inevitably attracted some bad actors, and Lucky picked up a case to clean them out.

“Sure, this sounds like fun. Got an address?” I asked her.

“Rendezvous coordinates on the way. See you when you get here. And thanks, Van, appreciate the help.”

“You’ve saved our lives at least once or twice, so I think we owe you.”

“Damned right you do.”

* * *

Even from several million klicks away, Paktarr’s World was a thing of beauty.

“Almost feel like I need sunglasses to look at that day side. That’s a lot of ice,” I said.

“Ice or rock, that’s about it,” Perry agreed.

“It must suck trying to scratch out a life down there. I’m shivering just looking at the place,” Zeno said.

But Perry shook his head. “There’s an ocean under all that ice, and that’s where the indigenous life lives. The planet’s internal heat is enough to keep the water liquid, at a cozy eight degrees Centigrade or so. People of many species dive in that ocean, too.”

“Eight degrees? Well, let me put on my bathing suit.”

“Okay, cozy if you’re a Paktarrian and not concerned with shrinkage.”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Shrinkage. The membranes used in breathing equipment generally contract in colder water, making it necessary for helmets to be self-correcting. Why, what did you think I meant by shrinkage?” Perry asked innocently.

“Same, bird. Same. Membranes and, ah, tech,” I said, carefully avoiding Torina’s look of interest.

“Hmph,” Torina said, then turned to the screens with a half-smile pulling at her lip.

“Diving is fun at any temperature, or so I’m told,” Perry continued.

“Bird?”

“Yes, Van?”

“Could you get me a rundown of every bit of fuel use since I took over the Fafnir, comparing hour-by-hour expenses versus actual mass of fuel on board? Oh, and I’d like it in both—”

“Even for me, that will take some doing, boss. What are you looking for?”

I gave him the blandest look possible. “Shrinkage, of course.”

Perry dipped his beak. “Of course. If I were to forget about the ocean temps below could that report—”

“Wait indefinitely? Why yes, yes it could.”

“Thanks, boss. What ocean?”

“Attabird.”

Icky snorted in disgust. “You’re so weird.”

“Thank you,” I said, sketching a small salute.

We’d rendezvoused with Lucky and strategized our approach. She’d launched the class 2 workboat she lugged around with her ship, sending it under AI control toward the planet using the same flight characteristics as a typical tourist ship. We coasted along a hundred thousand klicks behind it in the Fafnir, powered down and relying on our stealth coating to keep us hidden. Lucky, in the meantime, coasted in-system along a different trajectory. The bad guys must, we thought, be hiding in a patch of dust, rocks, and asteroids that had probably once been a planet and, over time, would accrete back into one again. That meant their approach to the class 2 would be from a limited arc, which likewise constrained their likely escape route. Lucky was positioned to cut them off.

Now we just needed some bad guys to take the bait.

“I don’t know, maybe a class 2 is just too small for them to bother with,” Torina said.

I stared at the overlay. It showed us the class 2 and the elongated patch of rocks and debris off to our starboard. And that was it.

I had an idea. “Let’s sweeten the deal a bit. Netty, can you link us via comm beam to Lucky’s class 2 and have it broadcast some comm messages as though they’re originating from—”

“Done.”

“Ah. I guess that’s a yes, then.” I turned to Torina. “Care to play your indolent rich asshole persona again?”

“Why, dahling, I thought you’d never ask.”

“Okay, Netty, open the link,” I said, then gave Torina a you’re on the air gesture.

“Excuse me, you—traffic control AI or people or who or whatever you are—this is very tedious. We’d like to arrive at Paktarr’s World in time for lunch, so… do whatever you do to make that happen, dahling. You know, push buttons or wave us through or whatever.”

Zeno suppressed a snort. Icky was grinning. Rolis had scampered into the back, and I could hear him laughing in a metallic wheeze.

“Push buttons?” asked an incredulous traffic AI.

“Yes, dahling. That’s what you do?”

“I am a sentient traffic-control being capable of managing data on a scale you cannot comprehend, you—”

“My wine is getting warm, you fussy device. Will we land before lunch or not, dahling?”

“You… will… stay… in your pattern. Is that clear?” the AI huffed.

“You don’t have to be so snippy about it. I guess we’ll stay in our paddock.”

“Pattern. I said pattern, not paddock.”

I snickered. The AI was on the verge of an old human hobby—losing its temper. I mouthed well done at Torina, who flashed a brilliant smile.

“Fine. We’ll see you when we land then. I sincerely hope this is worth all the fuss. Signing out.”

“Off. It is off—”

Torina cut the comm with a grin of evil triumph. “I think that went well.”

We all laughed at her performance, at least until a new target appeared on the overlay, emerging from the debris field at high acceleration.

“It’s a class 7 cutter, high-performance, probably more engine than anything else—well, except for weapons, that is,” Netty said.

“Does it match anything in anyone’s database?”

“Actually, it does. I’ve got a hit in an Eridani Federation database, with two warrants attached. And—these are not nice people, Van. Not nice at all,” Perry said.

“Not nice in what way?”

“Piracy, and two cases of multiple murder.”

“Oh.”

Netty spoke up. “It gets better, and by better, I mean it gets worse. They’re communicating with another ship out near Lucky. Their encryption sucks, so I’ve got the gist of their conversation. They’re in the process of deciding to kill whoever’s aboard the class 2. Apparently they’ve decided Torina sounds like more trouble than she’s worth.”

Torina clicked her tongue. “Rude.”

“If we put the alleged murders on the Eridani warrants together with Torina and extrapolate that to another three or four people who’ve gone missing in this system, it means they might be responsible for as many as thirty deaths in the past year or so,” Netty went on.

“Holy shit. And that’s not just my reaction to those thirty murders. Four people have gone missing in this system, and the tourist charters and things just keep chugging along?” I said, shaking my head in disgust.

“It’s a big money business,” Perry said.

“Oh, well, that makes it all okay then.” I turned to the comm. “Netty, do we have a directional link to Lucky?”

“We do.”

“Lucky, it’s Van. Netty’s going to send you some information about these shitheads. This is your case, so once you’ve read it, let us know how you’d like us to handle this.”

“One second,” she said.

We waited, and a moment later she came back to us.

“Issue them three commands to cut their drive and prepare to be boarded. And if they don’t—and I really kind of hope they don’t—then it’s summary judgment time.”

I turned to Perry. “You and Lucky could argue that they pose a clear and immediate danger, and it’s necessary to preserve innocent lives.”

“Will that work? And by that, I mean will it work for Gerhardt?”

“No idea. Like I say, you can argue that.”

“Good enough for me. Okay, Lucky, we’ll take care of these vermin. Oh, and Netty tells me there’s another one out near you.”

“Already got them in my sights. As soon as you light your drive, I’ll do the same and take care of them.”

I turned back to my own crew. “Okay, everyone, action stations.”

Zeno frowned. “We have action stations?”

“Yeah, the place you normally sit.”

She looked down at herself, then at Icky and Torina. “But we’re… all already in the places we normally sit.”

I sighed. “I was just trying for a dramatic moment, Zeno.”

“Oh. Well, then, action stations it is, boss!”

I lit the drive and accelerated onto an intercept course with the pirate ship. It responded almost immediately by turning and burning hard, directly away from us.

“Look at that. They are running. I am so surprised,” I said in a robotic staccato. I was clearly not surprised as I hit the comm’s general broadcast key.

“Unknown ship, on behalf of the Peacemaker Guild, I am ordering you to cut your drive and prepare to be boarded.”

There was no response, nor any to the two subsequent commands to heave-to—not that I’d expected one.

“Fast, aren’t they?” Torina asked.

I nodded. “Icky wasn’t kidding when she said they’re mostly engine, was she? Netty, are we going to be able to overtake these guys?”

“It’s going to be close. If you’ll authorize me to spool the drive up to one hundred and fifteen percent for about two minutes, though, I can change that to a yes. Well, assuming we’re seeing their maximum performance right now, that is.”

“That’s going to throw the drive way out of tune, Van,” Icky said. “We’ll need to spend hours retuning it next time we’re in dock.”

“You love tweaking and tuning the drive.”

“I wasn’t complaining.”

I grinned. “Okay, Netty, pour it on. Let’s get these bastards.”

* * *

It’s much easier to destroy a ship than capture it.

Capturing a ship means a careful approach, intricate maneuvers, precision shooting, patience, and, above all, accepting a whole lot of risk. Destroying one means running it down and pounding the shit out of it.

And that’s what we did. As fast and nimble as the pirate’s ship was, it couldn’t outrun the Fafnir. Zeno and Rolis, and especially Icky—because drive and powerplant were her thing—had tuned the drive to an almost insane degree. It seemed like an awful lot of time and effort for a small performance boost, but we’d benefited from it before, and we really benefited from it now.

Running the Fafnir’s drive at one hundred and fifteen percent drove us forward in a way that must have made the pirates’ guts clench. When it became clear that they weren’t going to outrun us before they could twist away, they started broadcasting their desire to surrender.

I glanced at Perry. “Do we have to honor that?”

“By the strict letter of the relevant laws? Well, we warned them three times, and they disregarded them, clearly stating their intent to flee lawful authority. Now, most Peacemakers are going to want the bounties—”

“Perry, is that a yes or a no?”

“It’s a no.”

I nodded. “Torina, weapons-free.”

That authorized her to fire at anything hostile or not positively identified as neutral. She switched the Fafnir’s arsenal into free-firing mode without a word and opened fire with a quartet of missiles and a laser barrage, then, as the range closed, the mass-driver. The pirates fought back as hard as they could, but they weren’t geared to take on what amounted to a small warship. Their defense was acceleration and subterfuge, not armor and firepower. Their single point-defense battery took out two of our missiles, but the other two detonated in quick succession, boom-boom. And, unlike back at Wolf 424, these missiles weren’t set to detonate far enough away that they’d likely only damage their target. The searing blasts enveloped the pirates, and their acceleration dropped.

I saw the repeated flashes of laser hits, then the successive impact of mass-driver slugs. By the time we were close enough to even think about using the particle cannon, there was nothing left worth shooting at.

She turned to me. “I think I’m done.” Her voice was flat and emotionless. I knew how she felt. It was never pleasant to do something like that, but… thirty people. That’s how many the pirates had almost certainly killed. They wouldn’t get to kill number thirty-one.

I switched the comm to broadcast since we didn’t have a reliable comm-beam lock to Lucky.

“Lucky, how are things going with you?”

“Well, only a few of the pirates’ molecules are still sticking together. The rest are glowing gas. So, where to next?”

18

We decided to take some time to check over the Fafnir’s drive before making the long flight out to Theta Indi. It was a sensible decision, but it was our undoing.

While Icky and Rolis futzed around back in the engineering bay, Netty announced a message from Anvil Dark.

It was from Master Gerhardt.

“Tudor, I want you to return to Anvil Dark immediately.”

“I’m just about to follow a major lead on a—”

“I don’t care. Anvil Dark, by midday tomorrow.”

The comm link flicked off.

“He didn’t even say goodbye,” Zeno said, curling her lip.

I turned to Perry. “Do I have to—”

“You don’t have to do anything, Van. But if you defy him, well, he is a Master. He could make life miserable for us, administratively and logistically.”

“Ah, administration and logistics, the weak spots of even the most potent military force,” Zeno observed.

I sighed. “Fine. Netty, let Lucky know that we’re going to have to postpone our trip out to Theta Indi, even if it means some more death and horror visited on innocents, because Master Gerhardt wants us to go back to Anvil Dark and fill out some forms. Send that to her at the highest-possible power, in the clear.”

“No encryption?”

“None.” I glanced at Torina. “I’m tempted to send it on all standard channels, too.”

She gave a thin smile. “My father always told me that if you’re in a confrontation with someone, don’t escalate things until you have to.”

“Your father is a wise man.”

* * *

There was a bright spot in being dragged back to Anvil Dark. It meant we had the time and facilities to do more than just fieldstrip the Fafnir’s drive and retune it. Our overcharging it to catch the pirates had apparently introduced some sort of harmonic into the fusion core’s magnetic containment system, which meant that at certain power settings it would wobble, disrupting its output, and I took Icky’s word on all of it because I was certainly no expert.

“It’s like one of those internal combustion-powered thingies—you know, like the one your cousin treats like his girlfriend—”

“A car?”

“A car? I thought they were called up-pick trucks or something like that.”

I smiled. “Sure. Up-pick trucks. Let’s go with that.”

“Anyway, it’s like one of the combustion chambers is firing just a little out of sync with the others, so the pistons don’t move in sync either, and—”

“Icky, I said yes about five minutes ago.” I pointed across the hangar at the Fafnir. “Go, do your thing, instead of explaining it to me.”

She saluted me with all four of her arms. “You got it, boss!”

I turned to Torina. “You ready to face the grumpy bear?”

“What is it with you and bears? You keep talking about poking them, you getting them or them getting you—it’s always bears.”

“Fine. Ready to walk into the lion’s den?”

“Van, do you want me to come along?” Perry asked.

I started to answer but stopped. Ordinarily, I did. But this time I decided that no, I didn’t.

“The best-case scenario is that Gerhardt’s going to treat you like a piece of equipment and ignore you. The worst-case scenario is that he’s going to give you shit. So no, you stay here, listen in, and give me your take on things via ear bug. Oh, and Icky?”

She stopped in mid-lumber and turned back.

“If anyone comes here looking for Perry, or anyone else for that matter—”

She grinned and snatched up a big spanner from a tool cart. “I’ll fix ’em good.”

I sighed and started out of the bay. “I hope I don’t regret that.”

* * *

“Reckless, callous disregard for the law, flouting the authority granted you as a Peacemaker—”

I raised a hand, interrupting Gerhardt in mid rant. “Excuse me, but do you have any specific violations I might have committed that you’d like to raise?”

“I don’t need to raise specific violations. Your behavior—”

“Has been illegal? In what ways?”

Van, don’t push him. I strongly advise you to just shut up and let him vent, because you really haven’t violated anything, Perry said.

“It’s been unethical, even immoral,” Gerhard snapped back, leaning on his desk. “I just read your report and the transcripts of your clash with those pirates near Paktarr’s World.”

I frowned. “Paktarr’s World? Pirates? Oh, right—the ones who killed thirty people.”

Perry spoke up again. Van, seriously, don’t!

Torina shot me a warning glance.

I sighed inwardly. They were right. The logical thing to do was nothing. Gerhardt clearly despised me, but in the absence of actually breaking any laws or protocols or policies, that was all he could do—despise me.

“It doesn’t matter whether they killed thirty people or three hundred—”

“It doesn’t?”

It wasn’t me this time. It was Torina, and from the look on her face, she seemed to have surprised even herself by blurting that out. I couldn’t resist offering her a fleeting, See, it’s not easy to stay quiet when an asshole is carrying on, is it? smile.

“From a legal perspective, no, it doesn’t. Those pirates surrendered to you, Tudor, but you killed them anyway,” Gerhardt snapped.

“We issued them the three requisite warnings, worded exactly as Guild policy requires. Upon refusal of the third—”

“I don’t care!” Gerhardt almost shouted, cutting me off. “When they chose to surrender, you were obligated to accept it!”

I leaned back. “I was obligated? Why?”

“Because—and I can’t believe I have to repeat to you what the newest Peacemaker Initiate knows—we investigate crimes and lay charges, but we do not try them and render judgment.”

I… said nothing.

That seemed to infuriate Gerhardt even more. “Well?”

I frowned. “I’m sorry. You made a declarative statement. I didn’t realize you wanted an answer.”

Gerhardt’s face started to glow like Anvil Dark’s star, Gamma Crucis—big, red, and hot.

“Why didn’t you accept their damned surrender, Tudor, so they could face justice?”

“We issued them the three requisite warnings, worded exactly as Guild policy requires. Upon refusal of the third—”

Gerhardt slammed his fist down on the desk. “It’s not enough to adhere to the absolute strict letter of the law, Tudor. There’s the spirit of it—”

I felt Torina stiffen. Gerhardt stopped, looking a little aghast.

And for good reason. He’d just made a profound mistake.

Perry knew it, too. I said to hold your tongue, Van, but… screw it, go get him.

I leaned forward. “Tell me, Master Gerhardt, exactly how much latitude do I have to interpret the spirit of the law?”

His mouth opened, then closed again. I’m ashamed to admit it, but this was hugely satisfying.

Okay, I’m not really ashamed to admit it at all.

He pointed at his door. “Get out. I have more important things to do than try to educate you in how to be a decent human being, Tudor.”

I stood. So did Torina. Without another word, we left, with Gerhardt fuming crimson at his desk.

* * *

“That went well,” Perry said when we’d returned to the Fafnir.

I shrugged. “I tried to hold my tongue, like you said, but—”

“Van, believe it or not, I wasn’t being sarcastic. That went well, as in far better than I’d expected.”

Torina told me the same thing on the way back from Gerhardt’s office. She flashed me a triumphant smile. “See?”

“Yeah, it was satisfying as hell, but I can’t help thinking I’ve antagonized him into becoming an actual enemy.”

Torina shook her head. “He was already an enemy, Van. What you did was show him you won’t be pushed around.”

“A lot of Peacemakers would have just rolled,” Perry agreed. “Antagonizing Masters isn’t considered a career-enhancing move by most of the rank and file.”

“Well, I guess it’s a good thing I’m not worried about enhancing my career then, isn’t it?”

Netty spoke up on the Fafnir’s external speakers. “Every little Peacemaker dreams of growing up and becoming a Master, Van. Gerhardt knows that and uses it to get what he wants. You’re not following the playbook, though.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“Oh, hell no. It’s like working with your grandfather all over again. And I’d gone through seven Peacemakers before him, as their ship’s AI, and I didn’t enjoy working with any of them as much as I did him.”

“He got shit done, Van. He didn’t paddle around in the grubby pool of politics that is Anvil Dark,” Perry added.

Despite my gnawing worry about antagonizing Gerhardt, the faith of my crew buttressed me back up. It was Rolis who sealed the deal. He came scampering over from where he was helping Zeno replace an expended REAB module and stopped, his glittering imager pointed up at me.

“I’ve never met this Gerhardt character, and don’t really want to. Even so, I’ve got one thing to say about him.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

His response was a string of profanity that would have made my army buddies blush in horror.

“Holy shit, Rolis, wherever did you hear that?”

“Van, I worked in a dockyard, duh. Ain’t nobody in the universe that can cuss like a mechanic trying to yank a stripped bolt.”

I stared. And then I laughed, long and with abandon, and my soul needed every second of it.

* * *

“Sorry, Van, but I’m stuck here at Anvil Dark for two or three days,” Lucky said.

“How the hell did a maintenance remote smash into you? I thought those things were specifically programmed to avoid smashing into… things. Or Peacemakers.”

“They are.”

It was all she said. It was all she needed to say. Gerhardt, or one of his minions, had probably been behind it. It probably would have happened to us, too, if the Fafnir hadn’t been safely tucked in a hangar.

I shook my head and moved aside as Icky lugged another fresh REAB module toward the ship. “I’m sorry, Lucky, for dragging you into my shitty fight with Gerhardt.”

She shook her head right back. “Don’t be. I’ve chosen to place myself here.” She smiled. “Just don’t forget about who your loyal partners were when you become a Master. Anyway, I’ll meet up with you at Starsmith in, let’s say three days.”

I gave a fond smile. “I’ll be there.”

She walked away.

“Master Tudor. I always thought it had a nice ring to it,” Perry said from his perch on a diagnostics cart nearby.

“I don’t want to be a Master, Perry.”

He nodded. “I know. And that’s why you’ll be a good one.”

I stuck my hands in my pockets. “Golly gee shucks, all this warmth and praise could really go to a guy’s head.”

Perry stuck out a wing and pressed it into my arm. “And if it does, Van, I will be there to cut you back down to size again.”

I made to respond, but Torina stepped out of the Fafnir’s airlock, thunder on her face.

“Uh-oh. Are we making a trip to Helso?” I asked.

She stopped. “Helso? What? Why?”

“You’ve got that look, the one that says something bad has happened and you’re pissed about it.”

“Something bad has happened, and I am pissed about it,” she snapped back, handing over a data pad. It depicted the most recent statement for the account Yotov had opened for us, the one specifically earmarked to support our investigation of Crimes Against Order.

I glared at it. “Account frozen, pending audit. Oh, for—”

“Told you Gerhardt would make our lives miserable,” Perry said.

“It means we’re back to our financial resources,” Torina snapped, then turned and swept a hand at the Fafnir. “We owe bonds for five REAB modules, a new fuel-flow regulator for the Fafnir’s drive, hangar fees, tool rentals—oh, and we still have to refuel. By the time we pay all of that, we’ll have enough funds left in our own account for drinks at The Black Hole. Maybe.”

I sighed. “Guess we’ll have to dip into the principle of our annuity account.” Which sucked, because the more we drew that account down, the less return we received on it, which meant less income overall. “Gerhardt’s trying to starve us out,” I muttered darkly.

But Torina shook her head. “I’ve already lined up funding. My parents, Schegith, and Rovan, on behalf of the Daren-thal, are all happy to advance us funds, open-ended terms, and I had to convince them to take even a little interest.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good news,” I replied, a little mollified, anyway.

“It helps to have friends of means,” Torina agreed.

“Actually, I might have more good news for you, Van. I’m not ready to give it to you yet, though,” Perry said.

“Why not?”

“Because it might not pan out.”

“Can you give me a hint?”

“I traded a memory for something. Let’s leave it at that for now, given where we are.”

I looked around. “A maintenance hangar?”

“Yes, Van, I’m concerned that this diagnostics cart is going to overhear our secret plans.”

Torina leaned close to me. “I think he means here at Anvil Dark.”

“Ah. Oh. Okay.”

Perry shook his head. “You’ll be a good Master, Van. A kinda dumb one, but a good one.”

19

We ended up beating Lucky to Starsmith by, as it turned out, three days. The damage to her ship was worse than she’d thought, and it was going to take that long to fix it.

That left us kind of hanging around the place, which was both pleasing and aggravating. Pleasing, because I still considered Starsmith the safest place in known space—which might have something to do with the vastly powerful, enigmatic being called Matterforge that lived on the surface of a living, searing star. Aggravating, because we had a case to run down and couldn’t do it sitting here.

I decided to make the most of it. If we were going to be stuck here, I asked Linulla if there was a quick upgrade available for the Moonsword that wasn’t too pricey.

“Ah, yes, the filler upgrade,” he said.

“The filler upgrade? What’s that?”

“That’s the fast, cheap upgrade I keep ready for Peacemakers in a hurry, on a budget, or both.”

I smiled. I tended to think of Linulla as an artisan, like Masamune, the famous medieval Japanese swordsmith, dedicated to his craft and unconcerned about crass commerce. And they both were, but they were both also businessmen and had bills to pay.

“What does it do?”

“It will allow your sword to emit a radiant glow.”

“So… I can turn the Moonsword into a flashlight.”

“I like my description better. It’s more poetic. Besides, it’s not just visible light, but also near infrared and ultraviolet.”

“I… guess, sure. I mean, I suppose it could be useful,” I said, shrugging at the modest nature of his suggestion. “Although does this mean I need to start wearing sunscreen when I use the damned thing so I don’t get a burn?”

“Ah. Yes. You humans are sensitive to ultraviolet radiation, aren’t you?”

“Among my people, Linulla, I am what is described as quite caucasian. I start getting a sunburn if I glance at a picture of the sun. Oh, and then I tan, but first, I burn.”

“Then I will adjust the composition of the overlay to minimize the ultraviolet. However, this does provide the basis for future upgrades as well. Every upgrade until now has been passive, in the sense it is applicable at all times. This one is active—you can switch it on and off, using a control that I will add to the pommel. There are future active upgrades that will use the same control infrastructure.”

“What the hell, I’ve got the time. Let’s do it.”

I handed the Moonsword over to Linulla and left him to work. Exiting his forge, I was both surprised and a little charmed to find Zeno overseeing a group of Linulla’s kids—and Icky.

“These are the children of Linulla who have chosen to pursue spacecraft engineering,” Zeno explained. “I’m taking them to the Fafnir, if that’s alright, so they can get some hands-on experience.”

“I’ve almost got things back where I want them, and you’re going to let them start fiddling with stuff?” Icky protested.

“We don’t fiddle! We’re artisans!” one of the young Conoku shouted. Her siblings erupted with a chorus of what amounted to, Yeah, what she said!

“That’s my drive! I’m the one who has to live with it!” Icky shouted back.

The whole thing collapsed into a raucous babble. I slowly backed away. As much as the idea of becoming a father someday appealed to me, that day was not today. And my only experience with kids to date was in media, like The Simpsons, and Golding’s Lord of the Flies—which, for all of their strengths, probably weren’t great parenting guides.

“That is enough!”

Zeno’s voice cracked like a whip, easily slicing through the ruckus. It carried such a weight of parental gravitas that I winced, stiffened, and paid close attention along with everyone else.

“I am taking you to Fafnir to see how her systems and structures are configured, not to start making any changes to them,” she said, her voice now flat, uncompromising and ringing with more authority than my old Master Sergeant’s.

“If they get their claws on stuff, they’re going to screw it up—” Icky stared, but Zeno spun on her.

“Excuse me, young lady, was I talking to you?”

Icky slumped. “No.”

I had to turn away. The sight of Zenophir confronting Icky, who out-massed her by at least two and a half to one, with her hands on her hips and motherly power pouring off her like heat from a fire—it was absolutely—

“Is there something funny, Peacemaker Tudor? Something you’d like to share with the rest of us?”

I turned back and found myself looking straight into Zeno’s eyes. Like Icky, I abruptly lost my will to resist.

“No, ma’am.”

Icky changed tactics. “Zeno, I’m just worried that if they do change anything, even without meaning to, it’s going to—”

“Are you suggesting that I’m not responsible enough to take some kids on a tour of the Fafnir?”

Icky looked down. “No, ma’am.”

Silence. Zeno stared around, daring any of us to speak up. I sure as hell wasn’t going to.

Neither did anyone else.

Zeno finally relented. “Icky, I’m going to let you explain things and answer questions. No one knows the Fafnir as well as you do,” she said.

Icky brightened. “Oh. Okay.”

“Now then, everyone follow me, single file and quietly. And claws, manipulators, and hands—all four of them—to yourselves.”

They all dutifully fell in behind Zeno as she led them away, an orderly line of little anthropomorphic crabs and a hairy, gorilla-like hulk following a grumpy sort-of walrus.

I shook my head. I had to admit, this was not the life trajectory I’d expected.

* * *

With the Fafnir overrun by Linulla’s kids and under the watchfully dour eye of Zeno, I decided to hang around Linulla’s place. I decided to park myself in the observation dome on the planet’s barren, radiation scarred surface, but no sooner had I reached the elevator that would take me up to it than Linulla called me over the comm.

“Van, can you come back to my forge?”

I turned and started back. “Sure, Linulla. Problem?”

“No. Just something very unusual. Matterforge is asking to speak to you.”

I stopped in my tracks. “He—what? Why?”

“I don’t know. But he requested you by name.”

“On my way,” I said, and hurried the rest of the way. What the hell did Matterforge, a being so alien that I still had trouble believing it was real, want with me?

I arrived in Linulla’s forge, and he took me to the discreet little room containing the comm terminal apparently dedicated to conversing with Matterforge. Linulla didn’t speak, he just ushered me in, gestured a claw at the indicator showing the link was open, then left.

“Uh… hello?”

“This is the one known as Tudor.”

The ponderous voice might have been making a statement or asking a question. I assumed the latter.

“It is, yes. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“You are strangely similar to a Peacemaker that came before.”

“I… am? Oh, wait, you must mean my grandfather.”

“A progenitor.”

“Yes, he would be. He was my father’s father.”

“Generational transmission of genetic information.”

“That’s right. I—uh—”

Was I about to explain the birds and the bees to a being that lived on the surface of a sun?

“Confusion is superfluous. This is straightforward. Generational propagation of genetic data is not an unusual means of ensuring its continued existence through the linear, sequential series of events you label time.”

I cocked my head. “Forgive my curiosity, but don’t you experience events in a linear sequence, too?”

“To an extent, yes. But I am not confined to any one point in that linear sequence. It is the nature of existence.”

“Wait. Are you saying you can see the future?”

“I have been asked that repeatedly and can only offer the same answer—I cannot conceptualize what you mean.”

Okay, that was a swing, from the birds and the bees to the fundamental nature of time. I rolled up my mental sleeves, determined to not let this bizarre opportunity slip by.

“I’m standing here now, talking to you. Eventually, I’ll go somewhere else and do other things. And I’ll go other places and do other things after that, and so on and so on.”

“You misunderstand me. I have discussed this with Linulla at length. I understand how you conceptualize time. I do not, however, experience existence the same way.”

“Okay, so you can see into my future? Like, you know what I’m going to be doing”—I was going to say tomorrow, but the term probably meant nothing to Matterforge—“further along my linear experience of time?”

“I have no means to experience what you do.”

“Ah. Okay, I think I get it.” Matterforge might very well exist across all of time simultaneously, if that’s what it was suggesting, anyway. But it still seemed to be constrained to a specific physical location, so maybe it could tell me everything I wanted to know about life on the surface of Struve 2398-A a thousand or a million years ago, or from now. I suspected I already knew the answer to that, though—hot and bright.

With Matterforge’s ability to see through time kind of deflated, at least from my perspective, I turned to the next most pressing question.

“You asked to speak with me. Was there something specific you wanted to ask me, or tell me?”

“I wished to experience you. You are an anomaly.”

“Oh. I’ll take that a compliment, I guess?”

“Linulla has attempted to explain the concept of ego to me. It is another aspect of your existence I have difficulty conceptualizing. You exist. You are. Is that not sufficient?”

A few times in my life, I’d run across the work of Abraham Maslow, a well-known psychologist who postulated that every being—every human being, anyway—was governed by a hierarchy of needs, from breathable air, food, water, and shelter at the very bottom, to self-actualization at the top. The point was that a person didn’t care about needs higher up the scale if ones further down weren’t met. It was hard to care about fulfilling your potential if you were starving to death.

It always struck me that the part at the top, self-actualization, was theoretical. No person was ever absolutely, one hundred percent happy with their lot in life. They couldn’t be. Even the most serene and contemplative Buddhist monk occasionally stubbed his toe.

All of which was to say that I was now speaking with the very pinnacle of Maslow’s scale.

“I wish it worked that way,” I replied. “Unfortunately, we’re imperfect and messy. Trust me, I know how imperfect and messy I am. I wish I could be better, and I try, but I know that I’ve got a long way to go to a destination I’ll probably never reach.”

A long pause followed. I started to wonder if we were done. Just ending the conversation without a word would be rude as hell if it were done by somebody who didn’t casually manipulate stellar plasma like it was plasticine.

I shrugged and started to turn away, but Matterforge spoke up.

“You are an interesting being, Peacemaker Tudor.”

“Uh… please, call me Van,” I said, more than slightly bemused by this old and powerful creature calling me interesting. I needed to know what he meant.

“I’m curious. Calling me interesting implies that I’m different from others you’ve encountered. Might I ask how?”

“Of course, you are different. You occupy a different location in space-time than any other concentration of energy and information in existence in your now.”

“Right. I get that. I guess I was thinking maybe it was something about me the person, not just my particular concentration of energy and information.”

“The Starsmith holds you in high regard. That is no small feat. The only other Peacemaker for whom he has expressed such a high regard was your progenitor. It suggests that your genetic line is different in ways that go beyond the obvious, superficial ones. Your motivations, in particular, seem to be different than most.”

“How so?”

“You are less motivated by personal accumulation of additional energy and information, or by a desire to be viewed in one or more ways that, I must confess, I have difficulties conceptualizing. You do not wish to be feared or adored but are motivated by the interests of others. Your progenitor was similar. That makes you unusual and, therefore, interesting. I believe it is by examining the exceptions to the norm, such as yourself, that I can effectively learn more about your existence, which is alien to me.”

I laughed. “My existence is alien to you. Huh. Yeah, I guess it must be.”

“Other Peacemakers come here quite frequently. Few are motivated by the same desire for balance, for what I believe your term to be justice. Those who are, are very interesting to me.”

“Uh, care to share who those others are?”

“Why?”

“It would be good to know who I can trust.”

“Just because I put effort into perceiving the motivations of your kind does not mean I care about them.”

Touché, omniscient star being. I was basically an interesting experiment to Matterforge. But what he said next blew that line of thinking to bits and left me stunned.

“You are a being of unique value—Van—which again goes far beyond the obvious and superficial. From the perspective of your kind, this existence is better with you in it than not. The Starsmith believes that, and I respect his views. For that reason, although I do not care, I do not care about you less than I do not care about others.”

Talk about faint praise.

“Given all of this, I desire for you to continue existing as well. The universe is a more interesting place with you in it. I therefore wish to communicate something to you that you may find of value.”

I shook my head, utterly amazed by what this remarkable being was implying. “Sure. Okay. I mean—yes, I’m listening.”

“You cannot trust your regalia to protect you. Most of those who bear it and come here to consort with the Starsmith do not respect it—not their own, and certainly not yours. There are, however, a few that clearly do. These are the ones that the Starsmith has named as Lucky, and Lunzemor, Sussbrid and K’losk. These ones will not betray you, Van. You may trust them.”

I stared at the comm terminal. I wasn’t really surprised by any of the names, but to hear them from Matterforge, a being that apparently existed across time and had a unique perspective—

“I—wow. Thank you, Matterforge. You have no idea what a difference it makes knowing that.”

“Do not ignore the corollary.”

“Which is?”

“Those are the ones that you may trust. The rest, you may not.”

* * *

Lucky arrived in a storm of profanity.

As soon as she twisted into the Starsmith system, she came on the comm and unleashed an extended rant about how her ship had been sabotaged, and yet she was stuck paying for it because her operating account, like mine, had been frozen for audit by Gerhardt.

“Sorry, Lucky. That’s probably my fault,” I said.

“Why? Because you’re trying to do your job and catch bad guys? Hell with that. This is Gerhardt’s bullshit, not yours.”

She powered on with her indignation for a moment, then stopped and stared out of the comm screen at me.

“Why the hell do you have that goofy smile on your face, Van?”

I grinned and shook my head. “It’s hard to explain. Suffice to say that someone I consider very wise thinks well of you.”

“Who?”

“Look out your canopy, at those binary stars.”

She peered back blankly, opened her mouth, then stiffened. “Who? That—what’s it called? Matter-something?”

“Matterforge.”

“It thinks well of me?”

“So it says.”

“To you? It said this to you?”

“It did, yeah. I don’t know if it meant to, but it also kind of confirmed that what happened to you was sabotage by someone in the Guild.”

“What? What do you mean? What did it—?” She stopped and shook her head. “No. I’ve got a couple of bottles of snap-fruit brandy aboard. When I get there, we are going to sit down and crack them open, and you’re going to tell me all about this.”

I leaned back in the Fafnir’s pilot’s seat.

“It’s a date.”

20

“I’ve been the Fafnir’s AI for decades, and I have to admit that this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done,” Netty said.

We and Lucky both needed to refuel before we took the long trip out to Theta Indi, but there was no refueling depot in Starsmith. We’d resigned ourselves to an intermediate—and expensive—stop in another system to gas up, but Matterforge abruptly popped up again, via Linulla, offering to provide us with all the fuel we needed.

Doing whatever it was that it did, it extruded an enormous cloud of essentially pure deuterium from the surface of Struve 2398-A, through which we could simply fly with our emergency magnetic refueling scoops active. They were intended to use in dire straits, scooping unrefined material from a gas giant and crudely refining it to concentrate the deuterium. It was far from a perfect solution, though. The resulting fuel was dirty, full of impurities to the extent that it could damage a power plant or drive—hence the emergency part. But the billowing cloud Matterforge sent our way was, to the detection limits of Netty’s instruments, one hundred percent pure deuterium. You didn’t even get that from the most sophisticated refineries in known space.

Antimatter for the twist drives was a trickier proposition. It seemed that Matterforge could, somehow, turn protons and electrons into their oppositely charged antimatter versions—because of course it could—but we couldn’t just fly our ships through a cloud of antimatter. Instead, Matterforge bombarded an uninhabited planet in the Starsmith system with a slow, tenuous wind of antiparticles, which slowly accumulated in the planet’s magnetic field. With very careful use of our own ram-scoops, which were magnetically far more powerful, we were able to slowly slurp up antimatter and shuffle it into our fuel pods. It was delicate and nerve-racking work, and a full day of it netted the Fafnir and Lucky’s ship just a few grams. But, combined with what we already had in the tanks, it was enough to ensure we could get to Theta Indi and back again.

When we were done, I called up Linulla on the comm before we twisted away.

“Thank Matterforge for us, would you? This makes life much easier.”

“And cheaper,” Torina put in.

“I will, but I doubt it’s going to mean much to it. As near as any of us can tell, it did it because it did it, and there’s no explanation beyond that.”

“Well, thank it anyway. It can’t hurt.”

“Will do. Take care, Van.”

We signed off, then twisted to Theta Indi, my thoughts ranging back to the being that lived in a star—and thought of me as Van, the Peacemaker.

* * *

“I have to admit, it’s nice knowing that we can absolutely trust Lucky,” I said as I waited for the tactical overlay to fill with data about the Theta Indi system.

“Can you, though? Or to be blunt, can you really trust Matterforge?” Torina asked.

I opened my mouth but hesitated as I considered the question. It was a good one to ask. But I remembered my remarkable conversation with the strange being and nodded.

“Yeah, I can.”

Torina watched me for a moment, decided, and gave a delicate, one-shoulder shrug of near French insouciance. “Good enough for me.”

“It should go into the refueling business, I’m telling you. Never mind all the tweaks we’ve been doing to that reactor and drive. Burning fuel this pure is a massive tweak in itself. The reactor’s running at, like, ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-something efficiency,” Rolis said.

Zeno nodded. Icky just shook her head.

“Let’s hope he doesn’t, or we’ll be out of a job. There is literally no way I can improve on this,” she said, waving one of her smaller arms at her instruments.

“Yeah, I suspect Matterforge isn’t really interested in running a gas station. What’s it going to do, make it rich? You may have noticed it doesn’t really need anything.”

“Certainly nothing that isn’t really, really fireproof,” Perry said.

I focused my attention on the overlay, which was steadily coming to life. Theta Indi was actually several stars locked in a complex orbital dance. The primary was itself two stars, a bright, hot blue-white star about twice the size of the Sol, orbiting closely around a barycenter with a nearby, Sol-like yellow star. A third yellow-white star orbited them, all the gravitational tugging and pulling resulting in some complex orbital mechanics.

Which was all very interesting but not why we came here. What had brought us here had just popped onto the overlay, as the passive scanners sucked up data. Four ships, one a small, class 3 workboat and three larger, similar ships of class 5 or 6. They hung in space about three light-minutes away from us, which was closer than I liked. It was where we twisted in, though, and twisting to another location would burn antimatter we couldn’t afford. Once we lit our main drives, the gig would be up.

“How do you want to do this, Van?” Lucky asked via comm beam.

“Well, they haven’t detected us yet, probably because they don’t expect anyone to bother them out here, so—” I shrugged. “I guess we just light ’em up and charge.”

“What’s odd is that there’s nothing else out here. I expected at least a small orbital platform, or a tender-ship, or… something. There’s got to be a purpose for this,” Perry said.

“They probably use this as a staging point for their attacks because they consider it safe. Who the hell else would come out here?” Torina offered.

“There’s also the fact that the complex gravitational interactions among these three stars have prevented any stable planetary formation, aside from a few rocks orbiting all three of them about as far out as Neptune orbits Sol. No planets, so no reason to come out here,” Netty added.

I made the call. “We have a reason to come out here, and this system isn’t a safe haven for them anymore. Netty, light the drive, and like I said… charge.”

* * *

I’d grown up on a diet of science fiction that portrayed space battles in generally one of two ways—either ponderous and stately, the sort that raged between great fleets clashing on the seas of Earth, or wild, freewheeling melees like World War Two dogfights. Both were exciting.

Both were wrong.

Capital ships were rare, and when they fought, it was normally with a deluge of missiles and laser fire at the greatest possible range. Having delivered a barrage, they’d generally break off again, and that was probably it. The fuel required to come about and cross-the-T and all that simply wasn’t a viable expenditure for such massive ships, so whoever did the most damage in that one, hopefully decisive pass was generally the winner. Smaller ships generally did much the same thing, albeit at closer ranges and with a lot more anxiety for the crew, who were fighting at basically knife range. And they might burn hard for a second pass, or even a third, but wheeling around like nimble fighters just wasn’t possible. Or it was, but only by expending prodigious amounts of fuel, generating enough thrust to bank through turns. Again, not very practical.

We ended up fighting the most common sort of space battle at Theta Indi, among small ships with decent acceleration—the bad guys ran away, and we chased them. To add an air of authenticity, every single member of the crew swore richly, in languages that ranged from English to machine code.

Which could have led to a chase we were hardly guaranteed to win if it hadn’t been for the remarkably pure fuel we’d acquired from Matterforge. Both the Lucky and the Fafnir burned along at nearly one hundred percent efficiency, far better than the usual eighty to ninety-odd percent that was considered as good as it normally gets. In fact, the gravity polarizers that prevented us from being smashed to gooey paste by the Fafnir’s colossal acceleration were straining, leaving us all pressed slightly back into our seats. It wasn’t any worse than being aboard an Earthly airliner during takeoff, but it was still unnerving. Normally, we didn’t feel a thing.

I turned from the tactical overlay, which depicted our weapons’ maximum range bands creeping inexorably closer to the small flotilla of fleeing ships. “Uh, Netty, forgive my being concerned, but how are those gravity nullifier things holding out?”

“They’re operating within specs.”

“Sure, but a lot of airplanes are operating within specs right before their engines fall off or something critical goes boing. Or boom. Or both..”

“If you’re asking me if they’re going to fail, well, I can’t see the future, Van. There’s no indication they’re going to fail. They’re running a little harder than they normally do but not enough to be a concern.”

“Besides, if the system does fail, none of us are gonna know it. A bazillion g’s of acceleration ends things quickly,” Rolis said, his voice almost cheerful.

“Thanks, Rolis. Always the optimist.”

“Van, we’re in missile range,” Torina said.

“Trigger finger getting itchy?”

“Little bit. Besides, based on Netty’s projections, they’ll be able to twist before we get in either mass-driver or particle-cannon range.”

I grunted in assent. As deadly as the missiles and lasers could be, they actually played second fiddle to those two brutal but short-ranged weapons. “Okay, let’s—”

“Van, that class 3 workboat is falling back. Looks like its drive failed. We’ll be overtaking it in about two minutes.”

“Oh. Hmm.” I turned to the others while opening the comm channel to Lucky. “Some advice, please. Do we settle for the class 3 and let the others get away, or do we keep up the chase and hope the class 3 doesn’t get his drive fixed before we can get back to him?”

“Why not both?” Lucky asked.

“You mean split our forces? Not sure that’s wise,” Perry cautioned.

“My AI projects that we’ll get only a brief window of attack on those other three ships. And even if they do a loop around one of the stars and come back at us, it’s still going to take them hours.”

“I concur with Lucky. She’s damned smart,” Netty said.

“I’d thank you, Netty, but you mean my AI, don’t you?” Lucky asked.

“Of course.”

I sniffed. “You, your ship, and your ship’s AI are all named Lucky?”

“Yup. Keeps things simple. Leaves more brain power for important things, like choosing my lunch.”

“If you say so, and no argument on the value of lunch. Anyway, if Netty and your Lucky agree, that’s good enough for me. You’ve got the heavier armament, Lucky. How about you keep running down the three bad guys, and we’ll take care of the class 3.”

“Sounds good.”

“Okay, Netty, time to turn and burn I guess,” I said. No sooner had I finished speaking than the drive cut, making us all feel like we’d been thrown forward in our seats. The starscape outside the canopy whirled around, then the drive fired again. And again, we all sank back into our seats. We immediately started shedding velocity, slowing to match pace with the stricken class 3.

I glanced at Torina. “I don’t know, it seems a little undignified to charge into battle backward.”

“Or, as your grandfather used to put it, watch out, bad guys, I’m coming at you ass first!” Perry said.

I laughed. “Yeah, that sounds like Gramps.”

* * *

We overshot the class 3 by a few thousand klicks, which was in space terms effectively zero. It still coasted, its drive dark. We accelerated back toward it—far more gently, this time—then once more flipped, decelerated, and came to a stop relative to it, about ten klicks away. Torina had everything aimed at it, ready to cut loose if it tried to fight.

“Don’t really think he can,” Netty said. “I’m seeing two point-defense batteries, and that’s it—”

As soon as she said it, the class 3 opened up, spitting streams of slugs at us. Some flashed past, the others clanging against the Fafnir’s armor. One managed to detonate a REAB module, making me wince. Not because of the threat it posed, but because the modules weren’t cheap.

“Torina, can you—”

“On it,” she said, carefully targeting the mass driver. She fired three rounds, adjusted her aim, then fired three more. Netty’s fire control assistance was a definite help with targeting, but Torina’s instincts were just as important. First one, and then the second of the class 3’s point-defense batteries were neatly blown to tumbling fragments, silencing the other ship. She put another slug through its aft end, hopefully to just knock its reactor offline without destroying it.

Sure enough, the power emissions dropped to zero.

I nodded. “That should make sure they don’t scuttle it, and us along with it.”

We closed in.

“What are the odds they’re going to want to fight?” I asked as Torina, Icky, and I suited up and strapped on our weapons.

“Do you need to ask?” Torina turned to Perry. “How about doing your dazzle thing?”

“I would, but I need space for it, and a class 3 is just too small.”

“So that’s a no.”

“I prefer to give you this opportunity for personal growth without managerial interference.”

I narrowed my eyes at Perry. “Bird, where did you learn corporate-speak? You know, the kind that says very little and protects your ass?”

Perry managed to look abashed. “Web series on the internet. It’s hosted by a former human resources directory named Courtney who—”

“Disregard my question. I forbid you to quote Courtney from HR ever again.”

Perry sighed. “I didn’t even get to use synergy or circle back. Kinda looking forward to them.”

“It’s a cruel universe. Now, let’s make contact, shall we?”

The Fafnir clunked and shuddered as Netty docked her with the class 3. The airlocks sealed, and we opened our outer door. I was in no mood to piss around with hacking or trying to hotwire the door, so I just swept out the Moonsword. For the hell of it, I activated its new light-generating function, and it glowed.

“There must be goblins nearby,” I said.

Icky and Torina stared blankly. Perry sniffed. “I’ll explain it to them, Van. See, when young males are virgins who discover role-playing games, or RPGs, they incorporate mythical races into their everyday speech as an attempt at something we call humor. These young males are sometimes known as dorks.”

Icky leaned forward, frowning. “What’s a virgin?”

Torina held up her hands. “Not a chance. Maybe later, Ick.”

“I can wait,” Icky said.

“That’s what Van said in high school,” Netty deadpanned.

I turned back to the door, muttering, “Et tu, Netty?” Then with a slash, I cut my way through. The inner door followed, and we pushed into the class 3, weapons at the ready. Zeno kept her coil gun, essentially a small mass driver, trained on the airlock behind us. A fearsome but cumbersome weapon of her own design, it’d make sure nobody tried to board the Fafnir while we were otherwise engaged.

This class 3 was enormous for that style of craft—about the same size as the Fafnir, bigger than a city bus and smaller than a Coast Guard cutter. A central corridor ran the length of the ship. We reached the center terminus and, as we’d established in the hasty plan we hatched before cracking the airlock, I turned right, toward the bow. Torina, right behind me, turned left, toward the stern and engineering.

No one in sight. I started forward, trusting Torina to take care of things in the back, while Icky was our reserve, ready to move either direction. I’d only gone three paces when Torina cried out—instinct made me whirl, putting my back to the part of the ship we hadn’t cleared yet in a tactical error I knew was wrong. Icky, and even Zeno, would take care of her. I snorted frustration and started to turn back but froze.

Something had clamped onto Torina’s arm. It resembled a miniature version of Waldo, and it clutched her bicep, doing… something.

Torina flailed back against the bulkhead, grabbing at it. She cried out again, yanking at it, but it wouldn’t come free. A second or two later, I saw blood start dripping from it, onto the deck.

“Shit! Icky!”

“Yeah, I see it!” she said, dropping her sledge with a clunk. She took three steps, reached Torina, and began trying to pull the thing off her arm.

Torina shrieked a third time, her tone rising with desperation and pain.

“Zeno, get in here!” I shouted, racing back the seven paces or so to Torina. Zenophir was already through the airlock. I glanced at her as I rushed by.

“Cover us forward! Blow away anything that shows itself!”

I had to bodily jam my way past Icky. Torina sagged against the deck, her face a rictus of pain. The thing on her arm was whirring away, drilling or sawing through her b-suit and gouging into the flesh beneath.

Icky clutched at it, trying to pull it apart with raw strength. But she couldn’t get her fingers around it, and even her prodigious might wasn’t enough if she couldn’t get a grip.

Torina looked at me. “Van!”

“Hang on!”

“I can’t get it!” Icky shouted.

“Van please!”

Torina thrashed and flailed in obvious agony while the thing dug through her b-suit.

Icky cursed and kept trying to grab it, to no avail. I let The Drop fall to the floor.

“Icky, hold her!” I commanded.

“What?”

“Van please—!” Torina wailed.

“Icky, hold her still!”

“What, why—?”

“Just do it!”

She released the fiendish device and pushed Torina up against the bulkhead.

“Grab her arm!”

I raised the Moonsword.

“Van, are you insane—?” Icky started, but I just shouted her down.

“Grab her arm and hold it!”

Icky did, using one of her smaller hands.

I took aim. I had one shot at this, and if I missed, I was going to bisect Torina’s arm, or slash Icky, or maybe both.

I swung, angling the Moonsword so it would slice parallel to Torina’s upper arm, only a centimeter or two away.

The blade shuddered slightly as it passed through the horrifying little contraption, cutting it apart. It instantly went silent, then dropped off Torina’s arm and clattered to the floor somewhere amid our feet.

I looked at Torina’s arm. Her b-suit had been shredded deep enough to expose bleeding flesh. Fortunately, it looked like the thing hadn’t quite managed to gnaw its way completely through the armored fabric, but it still made me incandescent with fury to see her wounded by the little metallic shithead.

“Torina! Torina, look at me!”

She did. Her face had gone as pale as snow, her eyes wide and showing whites all around, but she nodded.

“I’m here,” she hissed, her voice a strangled, agonized gasp.

Zeno glanced back but kept her coil gun aimed up the corridor. “Might be poisoned! Get her to Netty!”

Poison. Shit. I hadn’t even thought of that. “Icky, take her—”

“On my way,” she said, then lifted Torina bodily and carried her back into the Fafnir. Again, on instinct, I moved to follow.

“Van, we’re not done here,” Zeno said. I turned to her as I passed, ready to snap out, I don’t give a shit or words to that effect. But her expression stopped me. It was partly one of deep sympathy, but mostly one of grim truth. We couldn’t leave the Fafnir docked to the class 3 without clearing it. Not only was that our primary job, but it might also risk Torina and my entire crew.

I loosed a string of profanity as I retrieved The Drop. I called Icky back and told her to clear engineering while I went forward and Zeno backed us up.

I hoped I didn’t run into any crew who tried to fight back because I knew I’d just kill them. No quarter. No mercy.

For the very same reason, I really hoped we did.

* * *

We swept through the cramped confines of the class 3, but slowly, in case there were any more wicked little booby traps. Zeno noticed a small, suspicious compartment in the overhead just behind the cockpit. I had her slam a round through it from her coil gun, despite the risk of damaging something we didn’t want ruined. It was a good thing we had, because another of the vile little robots had been lurking inside it.

By the time we reached the cockpit, a thin haze of smoke fumed the air pale blue. I called back to Icky about it, and she confirmed it had rolled out of the engineering bay when she opened it up. Something had definitely failed somewhere, probably accounting for the drive going dark.

We reached the cockpit. We found the crew.

A single figure sat in the pilot’s seat, motionless.

I activated my helmet’s external speaker. “Lift your hands, asshole. Slowly. Been a bad day.”

The figure didn’t move. All I could see was the top of their head, bald and pale and—

I pushed around the seat, The Drop ready to start blowing things apart. The figure still made no move.

I stopped. “Well, shit.”

Zeno closed in beside me, her coil gun aimed, finger on the trigger. We found ourselves face-to-synthetic-face with Lystin, the synthetic person who’d offered to sell us Whisperwing missiles on Touchpoint—

No. As I examined the motionless figure, I could see that this one was markedly different. Its external membrane wasn’t so tattered, for one, so less of the hardware beneath was visible. And this one sprouted a third arm from its left shoulder, one that ended in some sort of manipulator.

I nudged it with the barrel of The Drop. “Hey. Wake up, artificial scumbag.”

Nothing.

“I think it’s… dead, or deactivated, or broken, or… whatever the right word is for it,” Zeno said.

I opened my mouth to reply, when the workboat’s comm chimed with an incoming message. I looked at the others, then shrugged and opened the channel.

The caller was a Trinduk, a Sorcerer. And it had that same triple-globe design on its sleeve, just like the one depicted in the drawing Tony Burgess had shared with us. It also bore one of the multi-function cuffs around one wrist. We’d reverse-engineered one of those ourselves, but it kept malfunctioning so we stashed it in a storage locker on the Fafnir.

I stared flatly back at the Sorcerer. “Sorry, your synthetic friend is a little dead at the moment. Please leave a detailed message and kindly go to hell.”

The Sorcerer said nothing, and the channel died.

“What is it with people not saying goodbye anymore?” I called up the meta data attached to the Sorcerer’s transmission. Not surprisingly, it was encrypted.

“Zeno, can you go get Perry? I’d like him to look over our friend here and figure out if he’s just temporarily out of order or actually dead. He and Netty can try and figure out where that message came from,” I said.

“Probably one of those other ships Lucky’s chasing, no?”

“Maybe? Netty, what’s going on with Lucky?”

“She’s engaged the three fleeing ships. She destroyed one and damaged a second. It’s unlikely she’ll be able to prevent it, or the undamaged one, from twisting away, though.”

“Good.” I turned back to Icky. “That Sorcerer asshole sure didn’t seem like he was in the middle of a space battle, did he?”

“Nope.”

“Then the question is, where was he calling from?”

* * *

I made myself finish up on the class 3 before returning to the Fafnir to check on Torina. I left Icky and Perry to take custody of the inert synth and check over the rest of the ship for anything useful.

I found Torina sitting in the galley with Rolis—or, actually, Waldo, because Rolis had relinquished control to Netty.

“What am I, a doctor or spacecraft engineer?” he said as Waldo deftly sealed the deeper parts of Torina’s wounds with tiny dissolving medical staples, applied first-aid spray, and readied a bandage.

I inspected Torina’s arm as he did. It had been gouged badly but not enough that it looked, at least to me, like it wouldn’t heal.

“Looks painful,” I said to her.

She grimaced. “You should feel it from this side.”

“It’s fortunate she was wearing her b-suit. If she hadn’t been, or was wearing even just a normal vac suit, she would have lost her arm,” Netty said.

I nodded but didn’t say anything. Instead, a truly horrifying little succession of images flashed through my mind—Torina, or whoever that damned thing had attacked, being systematically dismembered by it, one limb at a time.

I took a breath, held it, let it out. “Just when you think these assholes can’t get any worse, they prove you wrong,” I said.

Torina nodded, while Waldo wrapped the bandage in place. She looked shaken, badly. I suspected we all were.

“Van, I’ve got an origin point for that Sorcerer’s transmission. It was the moon we didn’t quite visit, the one called 109.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am. And I’d give better than even odds it was from the surface of 109, too, although it’s hard to be sure at this distance,” she replied.

“Okay, thanks, Netty. We’ll hold that card in reserve. Got some things to address right now.”

The others returned from inspecting the class 3. They hadn’t gleaned much, unfortunately. The synth hadn’t just shut down, it had suffered an entire wipe, reducing it to a collection of actuators and other parts enclosed by a skin-like membrane. Examining that would be useful, but whatever it had known died with it. And the ship itself didn’t reveal much more. I even had Perry scan for hidden things behind bulkheads and under the deck, but we found nothing of interest except a small container of illicit food that smelled like a dumpster at high noon. The substance—a paste with lumps and runny fibers—slid around inside a jar marked Prasmulat.

When Icky opened her mouth to speak, I placed a hand on her arm, gentle but firm. “If you’re about to say but it’s a delicacy, don’t.”

Icky dipped her head, then grinned. “Copy that, boss.”

That didn’t mean we’d come away empty-handed. For one, we now had hard evidence of another player in this whole evil, sordid game—the synthetic beings apparently called the Usu. At the very least, we could surmise they were connected to the Sorcerers, since it wasn’t likely the comm message from 109 had been a wrong number. And we also knew that 109 was, itself, still in the picture.

And on top of all of that, we’d sent a message to the bad guys that even lurking way the hell out here, at Theta Indi, wasn’t going to protect them.

But we weren’t unscathed. Torina obviously needed time to recover, but in a broader sense, we all did. I could feel it. Zeno and Icky both seemed tired, neither of them their usual selves. Both would normally have been keen to get at the Fafnir’s reactor and drive, and see what effect burning pure fuel at nearly a hundred percent efficiency would have had. Neither of them did, though. Even Rolis seemed more subdued than his usual chatty self.

I assumed that Perry and Netty weren’t subject to fatigue or burnout, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, either.

And I needed a break—a real one, not a few days hanging around Starsmith waiting for things to happen.

Layered on top of all of that was Master Gerhardt’s obstructive, bureaucratic bullshit, not to mention the relentless threat of bad guys trying to jump us, or assassins trying to attack us wherever we went. We might all have been downplaying it, but keeping your eyes moving and your attention pushed out in every direction was like touching a blade to a spinning grindstone. It didn’t wear down much at any one time, but it accumulated. Eventually, there’d be nothing left.

“Guys, we’re taking a break,” I announced.

Everyone perked up. I turned to Torina.

“Think your parents would be okay with us visiting for a few days?”

“My parents are never not going to be okay with us visiting Helso, Van. I’ll call ahead and let them know we’re coming.”

And just like that, Icky and Zeno suddenly started musing over the power plant and drive, Rolis started uttering his snappy, happy quips, and I felt a few kilos lighter. It might have just been me projecting, but even Netty and Perry seemed happier.

When Lucky finally made it back from chasing the other miscreants, we told her what we intended and invited her along. She smiled gratefully but shook her head.

“Downtime is a damned good idea. But I’m heading to Tau Ceti. I have a… a friend there.”

“Ooh, Lucky’s got a booty call,” Perry said with a schoolyard singsong.

“Damned right I do. And I’ve got your grandfather to thank for it, Van,” she replied.

I tilted my head. Gramps? What, had these two once had something…?

She must have guessed my thoughts from my expression, because she laughed. “He told me something that changed the way I look at life. Probably the most important thing to know, in fact.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“He said, Lucky, there’s more to life than Peacemaking.”

I smiled. “That sounds like Gramps.”

“He could never wait to get back to Earth, you know.”

“Yeah, home is where the heart is and all that.”

But she shook her head. “That wasn’t the reason, Van. You were the reason. He told me that you were the reason he kept going home.”

I blinked. I would have answered, but just then, silence was all I could muster.

21

I took a deep breath as soon as the Fafnir’s airlock opened. It filled my lungs with a fresh, lush, green smell, with hints of recent rain.

“Those Synergists really came through, didn’t they?” I said, stepping into the ruddy sunlight and taking in the sprawl of forests and grassy fields stretching out to the rolling hills of the horizon. It was a stark contrast with the view from the landing pad near Torina’s family home even just a few months ago. The nano-plague that had ravaged the biosphere and left this same view parched and drearily barren might never have happened.

Once again, life was in command—gloriously so.

Zenophir, ever the mom, fussed at Torina as she disembarked. She gave Zeno a bemused, sidelong look. “It was my arm, Zeno, not my leg—or my neck. I’m fine.”

“You’re fine when I say you’re fine.”

Torina rolled her eyes.

We all made our way up to the house—except for Netty, of course, but we kept a comm channel open for her to participate in things. Torina’s parents greeted us at the door. Her mother pulled her close and then started to fuss over her yet again.

“Great. Now I’ve got two mothers clucking their tongues over me,” Torina grouched.

“Only two? We need to recruit a few more,” Zeno said.

I grinned and thought about her brood of mothers. It must be quite the experience to grow up P’nosk, I thought, having a half dozen motherly figures constantly tut-tutting over you.

“We’re having a little dinner thing tonight, Torina,” her father said, for some reason glancing at me as he said it. “And I think it’s only fair to warn you—”

“She doesn’t need to be warned about anything,” her mother snapped as they led us out onto the terrace overlooking the Fafnir and the once-more lush fields rolling beyond.

Torina stopped, looking from her father to her mother. “Why do I suddenly have a bad feeling about this little dinner thing.”

“We’re just having a guest or two over,” her mother said, waving a dismissive hand.

But her father crossed his arms. “We are, and one of them is Boswic.”

Torina stared for a moment, then shook her head. “What?”

I glanced at her. “Who’s Boswic?”

She ignored me. “Why the hell did you invite him over?”

Perry tapped my leg with his wing. “Former boyfriend. I’ll put ten bonds on it,” he whispered, pointlessly, since everyone heard it.

Torina nodded, twice. “Yes. Former boyfriend. Emphasis on former,” she snapped.

Her father spread his hands in a don’t look at me gesture. Torina turned on her mother.

“Why, mother, would you invite Boswic over for dinner?”

Her mother returned a sheepish shrug. “I had dinner with his mother last night, and, well—”

“She got drunk,” her father said.

Her mother glared at him. “I did not get drunk. I… might have had a touch too much to drink and spoke a little too freely, but I was hardly drunk—”

“I don’t care! Uninvite him!” Torina shot back.

Her mother’s sheepish look became a little defiant. “That would be rude. Besides, it’s not like the two of you are bitter enemies. He’s really just an old friend now, isn’t he?”

Silence. It took me a moment to realize that everyone was looking at me while trying very hard to not look at me.

“What? So Torina’s old boyfriend is coming for dinner. I’m sure he’s perfectly nice—”

“He’s a successful version of your cousin Carter, Van. So all of Carter’s charm, combined with boasting about how well he’s doing,” Torina said.

“Oh.”

“Looks like you owe me ten bonds, Van,” Perry said.

I glared down at him. “I don’t recall shaking your… wing on it. Besides, what the hell would you do with ten bonds?”

“It’s the principle of the thing.”

* * *

Boswic Broadmore—and yes, that was his name, something lifted right out of some bodice ripper—wasn’t Carter Yost at all.

He was worse.

While Carter was superficially perfect, underneath the veneer was an insecure guy who used bluster and bravado to dampen down that basic insecurity. Beneath Boswic’s perfect exterior was just more perfection.

He was handsome in a craggy kind of way, with wavy hair that was meant to look casual but I knew the sonofabitch spent an hour tousling it. Dark, piercing eyes, dimples, high square cheekbones and a square jaw. Built like the proverbial brick shithouse, well dressed, smart, funny, glib—and yes, successful. He’d apparently inherited part of a burgeoning air-car rental business, but, to prove he wasn’t just old money, he’d grown it to twice the revenue over when he’d started.

He probably pissed rainbows and farted cinnamon, as one of my old army buddies described the type.

“Van Tudor, pleased to meet you,” he said, shaking my hand in a vice-like grip. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Seems Helso has a lot to thank you for.” He grinned so whitely it almost glowed.

“Uh—yeah, thanks.” I shrugged. “Just doing my job.”

It wasn’t my best response, I admit, but I held his eye contact until he wandered off to work the rest of the room, like he was running for office.

I glanced at Torina.

“You dated this guy?”

“I was sixteen. I had different hair back then.”

“Oh, well, that makes all the difference.”

We settled down to dinner—Boswic was actually the only guest—and proceeded to enjoy his endless wit. And, damn it, I did enjoy it. The man was so genuinely charming and funny that I found him impossible to dislike.

Suddenly, Carter didn’t seem so bad.

Rolis, who’d taken a place at the table despite his obvious lack of needing to, or even being able to eat or drink, spoke to Torina in a hushed tone I still caught.

“Why’d you let this one get away, Torina? Hell, I’d consider marrying him.”

Torina returned a sweetly poisonous smile. “How’d you like to be the Fafnir’s waste reclamator?”

“Been there, done that, don’t recommend it,” Perry said.

“I’ll shut up now,” Rolis replied.

The dinner conversation continued. Boswic continued to be the focus of attention. I picked at my food and tried hard to smile and laugh at the right times. All the while, I kicked myself for not picking the farm as a place for R&R. Or maybe Anvil Dark, and that was despite crossing paths with Gerhardt. Right now, in fact, venting at Gerhardt was an appealing proposition—

“Wait, I get it!” Icky bellowed.

Everyone fell silent and turned to her.

She looked at Boswic. “You’re successful and attractive for your species, I guess. And I’ll bet you’re hoping that you can be all romantic and stuff with Torina. But she’s in love with Van. I dunno know why—I mean, you should smell him after he eats that stuff called cheese. But I think they’re gonna try reproducing, so you’re outta luck.”

The silence that followed was about a dozen light-years beyond stunned.

No one moved, spoke, or did anything but slide their gaze back and forth to see how everyone else was reacting. Perry finally broke the spell, abruptly taking wing and sailing into the Helso night, his laughter slowly fading.

I looked at Icky. “Thanks for that, Icky. I really appreciate it.”

She blinked. “What?”

Zeno leaned over. “Icky, for the rest of this dinner, if you feel like saying anything, jam some food into your mouth.”

“Why? I was just—”

Zeno put a finger to her lips. “Shh. Eat now.”

I glanced at Boswic. He grinned, then laughed—like bass wind chimes, because of course he did.

“Hey, hey, I can take a hint—”

“That was a hint?” I heard Torina’s father mutter.

“—but if you ever want to stop chasing scuzzy people around the galaxy and come home for good, Torina—” He shrugged. “Just sayin’. I’ll be around, you know, raking in the money from that air-car rental business. We’ve hardly had any fatalities this year. Things are really happening for me.”

* * *

“Well, that dinner put the raw in awkward,” I said, leaning on the terrace railing.

I felt Torina, standing beside me, shoot me a glance. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I… have no idea. I’m just trying to move things along here. You know, get past the staring, avoiding eye contact, shuffling feet, all that stuff.”

“It’s not working.”

I turned and looked back into the house. Boswic had gone. Zeno and Torina’s parents sat inside, immersed in conversation about something. Icky lounged beside her, looking wholly unconcerned about her—

Faux pas? Was it still a faux pas if it made you want to pick a random direction and just start twisting?

I sighed and started to talk. So did Torina.

“Look, I—”

“Van, I—”

We both stopped and looked down, then back up. I sighed again, exasperated this time. “I’ll go. Look, I’m going to draw on my background here. When something new gets introduced to a computer and things screw up, you roll the thing back to the last place everything was okay. I think we should do that here, just pretend that never happened.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Is that what you want?”

We held each other’s gaze for a long moment, and the awkwardness started to slither back in. Torina finally laughed.

“Look at us. What are we, teenagers?” She crossed her arms and sat back against the railing. “Van, what Icky said was awkward because it brought up something—to everyone, including my freaking parents, but that’s a conversation I’ll be having with her—anyway, something that we’ve never discussed. And if we haven’t discussed it, then I don’t think we’re ready to.”

I let out a breath. “Thank you for wordsmithing so nicely something I had no idea how to say. Yeah, we might want to talk about it sometime—but I don’t think that here, tonight, is that time.”

“And if and when we do, it won’t be because some big, hairy alien opened their yap when they shouldn’t have.”

I laughed. “Don’t be too hard on Icky. It’s not like she had a lot of education in the social graces growing up alone, with her dad, aboard a spaceship.”

“Oh, I know. And Zeno’s no doubt going to talk to her all about it, anyway.”

“Those two are getting close, aren’t they?” I said, watching them through the terrace doors.

“You say that like it bothers you.”

“Not bothers—worries. I mean, we’re not exactly in the safest line of work, are we? And, well—”

“Zeno lost her daughter, and you don’t want her to go through it again.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t. It hurt her, down to the core. If Gramps hadn’t been there for her—”

Torina abruptly smiled. “And this time, she’s got you there for her, and that’s as good, if not better.” She leaned over, kissed me quickly, then turned back to the house.

“Shorter or longer?” I called after her.

She stopped and looked back, puzzled.

“Your hair. When you were sixteen. Was it shorter or longer?”

“Neither. It was a special kind of red.”

“What—what kind?”

“Crisis red.”

“Um. I have to ask—”

“If you see a woman with bright red hair—obviously dyed—then she’s, ah—well, she’s going through some shit. In my case it was a condition called Being Sixteen. So, crisis red.”

“I’ll make a note of it in the event I ever encounter teenagers.”

“Let’s stick to intergalactic beasts. They sulk less.” Torina laughed and went inside, leaving me alone on the balcony.

I stayed there, leaning on the balcony, staring out across an alien landscape and up into unfamiliar stars. I saw none of it, though, and just spent a while inside my own head, sifting the memories of a life I’d never lived.

* * *

We spent three more days on Helso, kicking back and not doing much of anything at all. In fact, if we all did one thing, it was not talk about that damned dinner. I spent half of one of those days sparring with Master Cataric in his Innsu dojo, still mostly getting my ass kicked. But that margin of mostly was getting smaller every time, and I came back to the house sweaty and exhausted, yet more relaxed than I’d felt in—days? Weeks?

When our departure day rolled around, we faced a tough choice. Where the hell were we going to go? We had some leads—for instance, 109 was an obvious place to start—but after our trip to and from Theta Indi, and our prodigious use of the Fafnir’s drive chasing bad guys, we were low on fuel. And, thanks to Master Gerhardt’s assholery, we were also low on funds. After topping up the Fafnir’s tanks, we’d be starting to scrape to cover things like docking fees and routine maintenance, much less handling any repairs that might come up.

“Netty, are there any jobs worth considering on the Guild’s job slate?” I asked while inspecting a slight fluid leak in the buffer assembly of one of the Fafnir’s landing struts.

“Your choices are menial to the point of not being worth the fuel, or long and involve major cases that will probably need weeks or months of work.”

I sighed. I scanned the slate off and on so I knew the type of long and involved jobs Netty was describing. Some of them were new, potential cases that might actually turn out to be dead ends. Others were cases left hanging by Peacemakers who, for whatever reason, no longer pursued them—because they’d retired, in a few cases because they’d died, and in the rest because the Peacemakers running them down had simply exhausted their leads and wanted to hand them over to a new set of eyes. The latter often came with a clause specifying that the original Peacemaker could reassume control of the case at will. It struck me as a way for Peacemakers to farm out the work to get new leads, then grab the reins again and end up getting the credit—and the bounties and rewards.

More than that, though, I wasn’t keen on taking on a big new case that was going to pull us away from the identity-theft ring. I had a feeling that we were getting close to the core of it. We’d now linked the Sorcerers, the strange, synthetic Usu, the Fade, Traversia Bolt-Right, and the shadowy assassins known as The Cabal. And, of course, we couldn’t rule out the involvement of the Guild. We’d had three Masters go down to corruption—although I still thought Yotov had just been arrogant and greedy rather than evil—and had uncovered a mole in Anvil Dark, in the person of Steve, the insectoid alien who used to head up the research shop.

These various parties were all too disparate, too fractious and untrustworthy to just be some sort of sinister alliance. Someone was pulling all these strings, orchestrating a complicated and no doubt deliberately obtuse puppet show of schemes within schemes. And the fact that we’d been given such a place of honor on their hit-list meant that that someone was getting nervous. I didn’t want to let up the pressure, not now.

I sighed. “Okay. Well, pick the menial jobs you think can get us the most cash for the least work—”

“Actually, Van, before I do that, you’ve got an incoming call.”

“From?”

“I’m explicitly not supposed to tell you unless you’re literally sitting in the pilot’s seat.”

I backed away from the balky strut and stood. “Huh. Okay, I’ll be right there.”

* * *

It was Dayna from The Quiet Room. And it was on a heavily encrypted comm channel, the sort normally reserved for stuff related to deep-cover ops and sensitive intelligence.

“Dayna, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Have a job for you, Van.”

“Oh. Wow. Talk about timing. We were just looking for some fast cash.”

“This one pays two hundred and fifty thousand bonds.”

I blinked. “Again, oh and wow. What do you want me to do, conquer a planet or something?”

“It’s an escort mission.”

I chuckled.

“What’s funny about that?”

“You ever played a video game?”

“I—no. Well, unless you count panjmay, when I’m supposed to be working.”

Panjmay was essentially an outer space version of solitaire or Minesweeper that involved arranging differently shaped holes so you move differently shaped things through them. I’d tried it but didn’t get the appeal. “It’s a trope. Escort missions usually involve trying to coax some slow, moronic, and utterly uncooperative character through a maze of enemies. Mostly, it involves them dying over and over, forcing you to start over again and again while your hair slowly falls out—” I waved a hand. “Anyway, who would we be escorting, and to where?”

I braced myself for it to be some vital VIP with a huge price on their head, and we had to take them somewhere deep into Dregs or Spindrift. But it wasn’t.

“I’d like you to pick up an elderly Fren-okun named Tepsis in the Tau Ceti system and bring her here, to Procyon.”

I frowned. A quarter million bonds to pick up an old alien from one of the safest places in known space and cart them to one of the other safest places in known space? I eyed Dayna suspiciously.

“What’s the catch?”

“Well, it is an elderly Fren female, so—”

I kept frowning, puzzled, until a single word poked into my brain and popped my confusion like a balloon.

Moist!

“Oh, shit. I’m going to have to spend most of that quarter mil just cleaning up the mucus!”

Dayna smirked. “Is that a yes?”

I leaned back and rubbed my eyes. “Yes, it’s a yes. Beggars and choosers and all that, right?”

She laughed. “I’ll see you in about three days, Van, thanks.”

* * *

“Okay, I’m gonna ask this again. What’s the catch?” Torina asked.

A solid clunk, followed by a chime, announced that we achieved a hard dock with the orbital transfer platform sailing along in geosynchronous orbit over Calanis, one of the four busiest worlds in the Tau Ceti system. I’d read that nearly ten percent of the population of known space lived in Tau Ceti, and from the sheer bustle of traffic, I could believe it.

“Moist. Need I say more?”

“There’s got to be more to it than that.”

I shrugged. “I guess we’re about to find out.”

The airlock opened, and we made our way up the corridor. It joined four others in a central hub, the five of them comprising one of twenty docking annexes protruding from the main bulk of the transfer platform. It meant a hundred ships could dock here at once, and, sure enough, a hundred had. We’d had to wait nearly eight hours for a docking port to clear just so we could dock, and even then, we only had the port for two hours before we either had to move on or face ruinous fees that went up exponentially.

“What a difference from Spindrift or Crossroads,” I said as we looked for our passenger. I couldn’t immediately see her because of the throngs of people. I’d flown through most of the biggest airports back on Earth—LAX, O’Hare, Heathrow, De Gaulle—and this place had them all beat. The clamor and push, the babble of voices, the multitude of shops and kiosks and restaurants, it was all a little overwhelming, especially compared to the pastoral tranquility of Helso.

“I think that’s her, over there,” Torina suddenly said, pointing.

Sure enough, I caught a glimpse of a trio of Fren, two males and a doddering, elderly female. I took a deep breath and we aimed ourselves that way.

“Peacemaker Tudor?” one of the males asked as we approached.

“In the flesh,” I said, and we proceeded with introductions. The old female, Tepsis, just peered back and forth, apparently trying to follow the conversation.

We turned and headed back to the Fafnir. The two male Fren moved as fast as the old woman could hobble along, every nuance of their body language screaming that they wanted to get her aboard our ship and be gone.

We reboarded the Fafnir without incident. One of the male Fren, apparently Tepsis’s grandson, bid her goodbye, and she finally said it, the word we’d all been dreading.

“Moist!” She tottered toward him as she said it, and he beat a hasty retreat.

I gave a resigned sigh as I closed the airlock, then turned to Tepsis. “Okay, we’re giving you a cabin—a cabin, of your very own—”

“Yeah, yeah, I can hear you just fine. You don’t need to shout.”

I gaped. The old Fren scowled in a way I recognized as a Fren smile, but I’d only ever seen one on the face of a male.

“You—”

“Are lucid? Yeah, I am. Sorry to disappoint you.”

I glanced at Torina, who was grinning. “Wait. Are you saying that that whole, uh, moist thing is just an act?”

Tepsis shook her head. “Nope. About eighty-five percent of Fren females are actually afflicted by it. We old farts just don’t bother making it clear who that fifteen percent are.”

Now I was grinning. “Why?”

She shrugged. “Because it never hurts to be underestimated. You wouldn’t believe some of the shit that gets discussed in my presence while I sit drooling in the corner. That’s why I’m on my way to see Dayna, in fact. My idiot grandson and his—friend, lover, whoever the hell that is, anyway—thinks I’m going so Dayna can help me settle my will. He’s expecting to inherit my whole estate, the greedy little putz.”

“So why are you going to The Quiet Room?”

“Like I said, I hear stuff. So I’m off to do some insider trading, bulk up that inheritance my grandson isn’t going to get. It’s the only reason he pretends to give a shit about me, the little asshole.”

“Torina, I’ve got that warm and fuzzy feeling that only family can bring. Can you feel it?”

“Sure can. Like a damp hug.”

“Don’t be assholes. That’s my job. Now then, have you amateurs got a bunk for me? I’m brittle, not stupid.”

“Actually, we do have a cabin for you, and may I say that your sparkling presence makes me glad I didn’t go to trucker school back on Earth. This is the life,” I enthused, earning a snort of contemptuous laughter from the old Fren.

“Good. Take my luggage and get me settled in so we can get this show on the road. First, though, I’ve got a question.”

“What’s that?”

Her look turned predatory. “Do any of you play poker?”

* * *

Tepsis was an absolute delight. An absolute delight that cost me a few hundred bonds, thanks to her also being a ruthless card shark, but still a delight. The only one that seemed subdued on the trip to Procyon was Perry.

I left Tepsis sitting with Zeno, Rolis, and Torina in the galley drinking some acrid hooch she’d brought along that somehow seemed to be more than one hundred percent ethanol, and joined him in the cockpit. Icky had been standing watch, and I shooed her away.

“Everything alright?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Why?”

“I don’t know. You just don’t seem your usual self.”

“Oh, my charm and incisive wit is still there. I’m just studiously trying not to tell you something.”

“Uh… what’s that?”

“If I told you, I wouldn’t be not telling you, now would I?”

“You know, there’s being cryptic and mysterious, and then there’s—well, that.”

“Trust me, Van, until I know for sure this is going to work out as intended, I’m staying quiet to protect you and the crew. Sometimes, the less you know really is the better.”

I stared at Perry for a moment, but I was looking into the ultimate poker face. He literally could not change his expression, so trying to discern anything from it was like trying to unravel the motivations of one of Madame Tussaud’s wax dummies.

“Alright then, keep your secrets.”

I returned to the galley and left the con with Perry. Tepsis was in the middle of raking in another pot of bonds, cackling away with evil joy. Speaking of poker faces, hers was almost as good as Perry’s, because it was fixed into a similar permanent expression—the absolute, predatory certainty she was going to win.

22

We landed at The Quiet Room’s sprawling office complex on the moon orbiting Outward, the fourth planet, without incident but about a thousand bonds poorer between us. Tepsis surprised me by then offering all the money back.

“You won it, fair and square.”

“Bah. Like I need money. I’m like a million years old, what am I gonna do with it, hook up with some fancy man? Although…”

She grinned. “You’re kinda cute. What are you doing for the rest of my life?”

“I… uh—” I fumbled for words, but only one thundered in my head.

Moist!

She laughed and slapped my arm. “Oh, give it a rest. Like I’d hook up with a human. I mean… yuck. I might be sclerotic and bitter and mucosal and ancient, but I have standards.”

She turned suddenly serious. “Kidding aside, I’ve heard about the work you’re doing, Van, from Dayna. I like winning the money, but I don’t really give a shit about having it. Please, take it back, and let me throw another ten thousand bonds on top of it to help you keep doing what you’re doing.”

“Thank you, Tepsis. You’re honorable and—I won’t forget you. Ever.”

“One of fifteen percent, and don’t forget it.”

I tilted my head at her. “How do you know I won’t spill your secret?”

“You won’t. And even if you did, all I’d have to do is shriek moist a few times, and everyone would fall in line.”

I laughed and shook my head. “You take care, Tepsis.”

“I’ll take whatever I can get.”

She doddered off onto whatever business she had with The Quiet Room, apparently some insider trading, which was illegal back on Earth. Out here, who knew? Anyway, our business was with Dayna. Torina, Perry, and I met her in her office, while Icky, Zeno, and Rolis finally got to work retuning the Fafnir’s power plant and drive to accommodate our return to ordinary fuel.

When we were settled in, I gave Dayna a straight look. “Okay, as fun as that trip was, it was not worth two hundred and fifty thousand bonds. What gives, Dayna?”

“Simple. You need money to keep your investigation going, and that idiot Gerhardt is getting in the way.”

“Oh, you know about that.”

“We know most of what goes on everywhere. Everywhere legitimate, anyway, although we do have some insights into the stuff that’s not quite so legitimate. And before you ask, no—we don’t know anything about your case. In fact, that’s why we’re grossly overpaying you to carry a harmless passenger on a harmless trip.”

“Harmless? Tell my wounded ego that. I thought I was a pretty damned good poker player until she came along,” Torina said.

Dayna smiled, but it flicked on and off like a light. “That whole affair with those Whisperwing missiles, counterfeit funds, owners of ships being extorted, all of that makes us nervous. And you are our best bet to get to the bottom of it.”

“And by paying us to do a routine job carrying Tepsis means the money goes straight into our account, where Gerhardt can’t get at it,” Perry said.

I nodded. “Oh, I hope he finds out about it, too. Anything that makes that asshole angry is a good thing, in my book.”

“But… I guess what we’re saying is that The Quiet Room has been watching your performance, and a decision was made that you’re the one we want to back. So the money is yours. But is there anything else you need that we can help you with? Anything to keep moving the case forward?”

I sat back and thought for a moment. “Yeah. Probably the biggest obstacle is knowing who we can trust. I’ve got it from a reliable source—an utterly weird one, but still absolutely reliable—that there are four Peacemakers I can count on, maybe five if I decide I can trust my cousin, Carter. Then we’ve got a few people on Earth, Schegith and her people, Icky’s father, and a certain S’rall princess we rescued from digital slavery. And that’s it. Against that we’ve got—I don’t know, feels like the entire rest of known space.”

“What are you asking, exactly?”

“You say you know a lot of what’s going on. So, can you help us find Petyr Groshenko, the former Master? He was my grandfather’s best friend, so I think he’s in our trusted category. Or mostly, anyway.”

“He’s in Iowa.”

I sat and stared for a moment. “Iowa? He’s on Earth?”

“Actually, he’s on the Iowa, not in Iowa,” Perry said.

Dayna shrugged. “Sorry, I’m not really up on my Earthly geography. I just know that Iowa’s some sort of political entity.”

“And our currently semi-mothballed battlecruiser. How do you guys know he’s on the Iowa?” I asked.

“And so my secret is revealed. Remember that thing I said I bargained for back on Anvil Dark, that memory I traded? It was Groshenko’s location. I got it, but it wasn’t somewhere we could easily get to, at least not without a fight. So I sent word to him to wait for us in the Solar System. But until Dayna here just confirmed it, I wasn’t sure and didn’t want to say anything.”

“Why the secrecy, though?”

“Did you want Gerhardt to know you were dealing with a former Master? Any other Peacemakers? The bad guys?”

“Uh—okay. Good point.”

“He sent a message for you. Bring vodka, and don’t delay,” Dayna said.

I scowled. “You know, it feels like I’m being played. But, yeah, you’re right. Okay, let’s go see the old dog.”

Torina held up a hand. “Wait. So you asked him to come back from some… war zone, or whatever it was, and he did? Just like that?”

“I think he’s got his own reasons for that,” Perry said.

“Which are?”

“It’s best if we let him explain.”

* * *

With a fresh injection of The Quiet Room’s cash, the pressure was definitely off. We were even able to afford a trip to Outward and purchase some new parts for the drive. The pure fuel had burned with supreme efficiency, but it had also taken life off some of the components exposed to the incandescent fury of the plasma, which was burning well outside the specs of normal fuel. It ended up coming to almost fifty thousand bonds, but it still left us with a comfortable margin.

We then made the trip to Sol, making a point of twisting in close enough to Pluto that we could get some detailed passive scans, but not close enough to be detected, particularly with our stealth coating.

“No one’s home,” I said, noting the lack of contacts around the little planet—and I learned about Pluto as a planet, and it would always be one to me. Landing on a certain celebrity scientist’s front yard and bellowing Pluto is so a planet, you giant preening gasbag was something that, candidly, I figured would eventually happen one day after a few bourbons.

“Maybe they’ve mined it out,” Torina suggested.

I nodded morosely. “Well, let’s go say hello to Groshenko.”

We found a small ship, maybe class 6, docked with the Iowa. It was a sleek vessel, though, well-stealthed and bristling with at least half again the Fafnir’s firepower. We docked at another open port and strolled in.

“Van!”

The booming voice of Petyr Groshenko filled the compartment. He entered wearing a broad grin.

“Petyr, you look fantastic,” Torina said as he embraced her in a bearish hug.

He did. He’d lost weight and picked up a bounce in his step and a sparkle in his eye that was nothing like the rather soft, dour man I’d come to know on Anvil Dark.

He pulled back from Torina. “Are you flattering me, sweet girl? Because if you are, I’m entirely okay with it.”

We adjourned, laughing, to the Iowa’s crew lounge, one of the few compartments in the ship we’d gotten around to outfitting with anything that wasn’t purely military in purpose. I started with a confession.

“Sorry, Petyr, I wasn’t able to scare up any vodka. There aren’t many liquor vendors between here and Procyon.”

He laughed. “What does an American know about vodka, anyway?” he said, reaching under the table and triumphantly revealing a bottle. He’d pre-positioned some glasses, too. He clunked them all on the table, cracked the bottle, and poured a healthy shot for each of us, including Icky and Zeno. They both sniffed at it suspiciously. Icky wrinkled her nose.

“Ugh. It smells like ethanol.”

“That’s because it mostly is ethanol,” I said.

She stared. “We use ethanol to clean electrical connections. Why the hell would we drink the stuff?”

“Because it’s ethanol imbued with the fire of a warrior and the nurturing touch of a mother’s love,” Groshenko said, holding up his glass and regarding it gravely.

“That’s… very poetic, Petyr.”

He laughed. “No. That’s what it says here on the back of the bottle. I mean, it really is mostly ethanol and water and a few other things, but it gets you drunk, right?”

And with that, he drained the glass.

I sipped at mine. I wasn’t a fan of hard liquor at the best of times, and vodka in particular just tasted, to me, like—

Icky put it well. Like the stuff we used to clean electronic connections. Torina did likewise, sipping at hers enough to be polite. Zeno smiled but declined hers, saying that the P’nosk didn’t tolerate alcohol well. Icky scowled at her glass, then finally sipped.

Her face lit with a smile. “Oh, wow. That’s actually really good!”

She drained the glass, thunked it down, and gestured for more.

I looked at Torina. “Uh-oh.”

Groshenko laughed but raised a finger. “You only get one more. That’s my rule, two glasses, unless you’re actually planning to get hammered. And we’re not here to get hammered.”

I shook my head. “No, we’re not.”

He turned to me. “So why are we here, Van?”

“Honestly, I’m hoping you can help us out, what with your current connections in the world of mercenaries and your old ones as a Master.” I went on to explain pretty much everything of importance that had happened. Torina and Perry both occasionally put in details I’d missed.

Groshenko nodded along, toying with his glass as he did in a way I recognized as him listening and thinking, like he had back on Anvil Dark. When we were done, he sat back.

“Well, I have done some digging of my own, based on the message Perry got to me. I can reduce the number of players on the other team by one. Traversia Bolt-Right and The Fade are one and the same.”

“Really? How so?”

“The Fade isn’t working for Traversia, they own Traversia. Some years ago, maybe even decades, they started taking control of the corporation from the inside, a sort of slow-motion, very low-key coup. It took them years, but they finally had a controlling interest they still hold today.”

“Why would The Fade want to own a big corporation, though? I mean, there’s the profit, sure, but… for legitimacy? Do they even care about that?” Zeno asked.

Perry, Torina, and I all answered at once and simultaneously.

“Money laundering.”

Groshenko grinned. “Exactly. There are ways of moving dirty money through a big corporate structure that leaves it squeaky clean when it comes out the other end.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Petyr. That’s good to know.” I turned to the others. “It means that we can assume that Traversia’s motives are The Fade’s and just treat them as one big entity.”

“It also suggests that we can focus less on Traversia being a player themselves and more on them being another potential route to get inside The Fade,” Torina offered.

Groshenko put his glass down. “As for offering you more direct assistance, Van, I might be able to do that, too. But to do it, I have to reveal some things to you that you might not like.”

I sat up. Shit. Was this going to be some new revelation about Gramps?

“What sort of things?” I asked, bracing myself.

But Groshenko’s reply had nothing to do with Gramps, thankfully. “Since I left the Guild and started my new gig as a security contractor—mercenary sounds so crass, doesn’t it?—I’ve managed to find a number of other security contractors of a like mind.”

“In what way?” Torina asked, her tone guarded.

Groshenko sighed. “When I started with the Guild, I was idealistic, even martial. Part of it was the way I was brought up. Russian education puts a lot of emphasis on national pride. Joining the army, going through training, and then doing the sorts of things I ultimately did only accentuated that.”

“Indoctrination,” I offered.

“You can call it that, sure. And don’t get me wrong, there’s no shortage of that in other countries, either—including America.” He waved a hand. “But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that I had been taught to dedicate myself heart and soul to the principles I’d come to accept. That remained true with the Guild.”

He shrugged and smiled. “Your grandfather was always the more pragmatic one. I think his philosophy was more warts and all. He saw the limitations and flaws of the Guild a lot more clearly than I did, and a lot sooner. It was a big part of the reason he refused to become a Master.”

Groshenko shot me a level stare. “Which I still think was a big mistake. He could have done things to and for the Guild that would have made it better. But he chose not to. I don’t blame him for that, but I remain steadfast in thinking he was wrong.”

“I sense you’re going somewhere with this beyond ‘the Guild has some problems,’ aren’t you? Because you’re not exactly unleashing any great revelations on me otherwise, Petyr.”

He smiled. “I’m an old man. Old men like taking their time telling their stories. Anyway, these like-minded individuals believe, like I do, that the Guild simply isn’t capable of doing the things that need to be done to maintain order and peace, and keep at least most of the people of known space safe and able to live out their lives, raise their offspring and all that. Some of them are former Peacemakers. Some have had… other interactions with the Guild.”

“They’re criminals,” Zenophir said.

“They were criminals, yes. And now they’re not. Which is something you should know intimately—am I right, Zenophir?”

Zeno’s lip twitched, but she said nothing.

“So this band of merry—men, creatures, entities, whatever—you’ve put together does what, exactly?”

“I told you. We do the things that the Guild, that you, cannot.”

“Extrajudicial operations,” Perry said.

We all looked at him. “What? It’s what it’s called, although vigilantism and taking the law into your own hands come to mind, too.”

“And it’s illegal, under the laws of most systems, as well as interstellar protocols and conventions,” Netty put in, reminding us she was here, too.

Groshenko nodded. “They’re right. It is. And that’s why I said you wouldn’t like it.”

I sat back again in my chair. “So you’re… breaking the law.”

“Yes.”

I was a little surprised by Groshenko’s quietly stark reply. I saw Torina and Zeno both chewing on it, turning it over in their minds and doing what I was doing—trying to separate the emotional response to it from the intellectual one.

Icky, though, didn’t bother with that. “Finally, someone who gets it. I say, good for you and your friends!”

I opened my mouth to speak, to tell her that it wasn’t that simple, but Groshenko beat me to it. “It’s not a good thing. It’s actually a bad thing. That younger, idealistic me is kind of outraged that it’s a thing at all. But I saw so many criminals, sometimes very bad ones, outmaneuver the law and just… get away with it. It really began wearing down my soul in an incremental feast of despair.”

He looked down at the table. “I think that’s what was killing me. Yes, I still have this disease, but it’s in remission and I’ve frankly never felt better.” He looked up and around at us. “So is it illegal, what we do? Yes, it often is. But is it right? Well, it’s right to me.”

He announced it with such conviction, such a weight of belief in his voice, that I found it hard to even push back at it. Groshenko was admitting something I should actually be investigating and potentially charging him for doing, after all.

However—

I thought about Yotov and the other Masters, who viewed the Guild as their own personal path to wealth and power. I thought of the many Peacemakers who went through the motions of upholding the law but really just wanted to make a buck, exercise some dominance over others, and shore up their own wobbly self-esteem. And I thought about Gerhardt, a man for whom process was paramount. To him, the ends didn’t just not justify the means, they didn’t matter. Only the means themselves did.

Perry broke the lingering, weighty silence.

“You do realize, Petyr, that Netty and I are obligated to report this to the Guild, right?”

Icky started to stand. “Listen, you miserable little—”

Zeno pulled her back down. I raised a hand. “Icky, that’s not how we do things in this crew. Perry’s right. In fact, I’m probably obligated to as well, aren’t I?” I asked Perry.

“You are. And so are the rest of you, being signed on as Peacemaker Auxiliaries.”

Even Groshenko was nodding. “Perry is absolutely right.”

That left another silence hanging, an awkward one. It was more awkward, in fact, than Icky’s faux pas at dinner had been, and in a much more profound, high-stakes way.

Again, though, Perry broke it. “Netty and I are obligated to report it, but we’re not going to.”

“I can confirm that,” Netty put in.

We all stared at Perry.

“What? Van, you once said that I could choose to stay with you or not. Is that still true?”

“Absolutely.”

“So if I—if we, Netty and I—can make that choice, why not this one?”

“But aren’t you bound by your programming?” Torina asked.

“My programming was designed to be adaptive, allowing me to learn and grow. Otherwise, I’d be no different than Waldo, just a semi-autonomous machine.” He turned to Rolis, who’d been sitting quietly in the background this whole time. “No offense.”

“None taken. Waldo’s a moron. A loveable moron, but still a moron. Believe me, I know, I live with him,” Rolis replied.

“I’m an artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, people tend to focus on the artificial part, not the intelligence one,” Perry said, then turned to me.

“Van, previous Peacemakers I’ve worked with have given me varying latitude to make decisions. Some, like your grandfather, were very liberal. Others, not so much—to them, Netty and I were more like more advanced versions of Rolis’s loveable moron. But you’re the first one who gave me the choice to opt out completely. That meant a lot to Netty and me.”

I could only nod. I mean, I’d come to accept Perry and Netty as not just sentient beings, because sentience just means perceiving and responding to their senses. They were conscious. Sapient. They were aware. Like Perry said, they were intelligent, and being artificial didn’t matter.

Hell, as far as I was concerned, they were people.

I turned to the others. “Anyone else feel like weighing in on this? And just to be clear, if your conscience demands that you inform the Guild about this, then do that. And no one on this crew will hold it against you—just so we’re clear on that, too.”

Torina shook her head. “How could I turn in someone as cuddly as Petyr?”

Groshenko put on a bashful expression. “If I weren’t Russian, I would tear up at such praise.”

“I’m hardly the one to start insisting we adhere to the letter of the law,” Zenophir said.

Icky just laughed. “You guys already know what I think, duh.”

I turned to Rolis.

“Oh. Uh—”

“As far as I’m concerned, you’re part of this crew, Rolis, for as long as you want to be.”

“Well, speaking as a murder victim, I’m all for nailing those scumbag assholes to some airless rock.”

I turned back to Groshenko. “There you have it.”

But he gave me a keen look. “What about you, Van?”

“Those bastards killed my father and attacked me in my home. I want to bring them to justice, you’re damned right I do. But justice is them getting what they deserve, not what some protocol or article or paragraph this subparagraph that says it is.”

Groshenko nodded. “Alright, then. Here’s what we know.”

* * *

Groshenko and the specialized little mercenary company he’d formed, which he’d named the Swift Sword—after the line in the Battle Hymn of the Republic—turned out to already have Traversia and The Fade in their sights. Through a network of spies, informants, and collaborators he’d cultivated during his rise up the ranks of the Guild, he’d been in contact with the Hwananye, the strange and reclusive subterranean species native to the moon called 109. Notwithstanding their impressive tech, which we’d seen in action, they were desperate for help in driving Traversia and the Fade, under the sinister direction of No-No, from their homeworld.

Groshenko put it succinctly. “It’s an existential crisis for them. Rampant mining will disrupt the crust of 109, ultimately making it uninhabitable for them. And they have nowhere else to go.”

“They can’t be relocated, as a backup?” Torina asked.

Groshenko shook his head. “Whether it’s some deeply rooted cultural belief, or something about that moon that they simply need to survive, they’ve made it clear that evacuating isn’t an option. And it was hard for them to admit that, or that they even needed help. They don’t breach the surface of 109 very often, and when they do—well, between the Esstai and the Arhun and their war, the Esstai interest in their homeworld and now The Fade and Traversia, let’s just say they don’t really trust other races.”

I didn’t need to hear anymore, and neither did anyone else. We were eager to help the Hwananye in any way we could. To that end, Groshenko told us he’d broker a meeting with them, but it would take five or six days to set it up. That left us with the better part of a week to kill.

“Torina’s still favoring that arm of hers, and I’d like to meet with Miryam and our new friend Tony Burgess to find out if they’ve learned anything new. So, I’m saying Earth,” I suggested.

“Besides, there’s one hundred percent less Boswic there,” Zeno put in, smiling.

“And one hundred percent more corn,” Perry added.

I clicked my tongue. “There’s more to Iowa than just corn, you know.”

Perry bobbed his head in a nod. “You’re right, Van, of course. There’s wheat, canola, sorghum, soybeans…”

23

Miryam arrived an hour or so after I called her, which I’d done shortly after we tucked the Fafnir safely away in the barn. She arrived in a huff.

“Van, if you’re going to start recruiting new people to the cause, a heads-up would be nice,” she snapped as soon as she came in the door.

I frowned. “Sorry? Oh—wait. Right. Tony Burgess.”

“Imagine my surprise when I have a—gentleman—with a fedora, a beard like old steel wool, and the distinct aroma of unwashed gamer show up here to say hello—and then proceed to grill me about a hundred or so UFO sightings, as if I knew anything about them. Oh, and his friends were a treat, too. And, before I forget, they’re demanding that you fly them to the Moon like you apparently did with the big guy—Tony, right? Anyway, where the hell did you find these people, in the classifieds on some conspiracy theory website?”

“Yeah, I guess I forgot to tell you about them. Sorry.”

“Anyway, he showed up with that damned car your cousin calls Gertie or Squirty or whatever it is.”

“Gertie. Although I do kind of like Squirty. And you mean Carter’s car is here?”

“Yes. I had them park it out in the tractor shed.”

“Did you let Carter know?” I asked.

Miryam’s eyes narrowed. “No. I thought I’d leave that to you, in case you wanted to, you know, hold it over Carter for a while.”

I laughed. “Oh, you’re an evil woman. I like that.”

We’d been keeping Icky and Zeno under wraps, reasoning it was one thing for any prying eyes to see Torina and me wandering around the farm, but quite another for Zeno and Icky. I couldn’t rule out the farm being under surveillance, because if Burgess and his motley little Truly Aware band could do it, then so could others. And if we’d attracted their attention, there could be more capable and less amusing parties out there that might have had their interest piqued, too. The sort of parties that might fly unmarked helicopters and wear sunglasses all the time, even at night.

Men in Black, indeed.

Zeno and Icky were okay with it, because it gave them an opportunity to fiddle with the Fafnir, particularly since the upgraded barn’s facilities gave them more options to do work. But they both insisted on seeing Gertie. I decided that wasn’t much of a risk since the side door of the barn and that of the tractor shed were only a couple of meters apart.

Icky ran a hand along the smooth, gleaming finish of the vintage Datsun. “Ooh, very pretty. Hey, I wanna operate it.”

“You mean drive it. And I don’t think you’ll fit behind the wheel,” I said.

“That some sort of fat joke?”

“What? No! You’re just physically too large, Icky, sorry. The Datsun design crew back in the seventies just didn’t think, hey, you know what? Sometime in the future a massive alien might want to drive this car, so we should build it for that.”

“Pfft. I can fit.”

I opened the driver’s door and gestured. “Feel free, my dear.”

Icky put her leg in, tried to stoop, awkwardly bumped and thumped against the door and the roof, then cursed and gave up.

“Okay, I want to complain to this Datsun, whoever they are. This is discrimination,” she snapped.

Torina grinned. “We’ll write a scathing letter, with exclamation points and everything. Full Karen mode.”

“Yeah, I’m sure if we send a letter of complaint to… Nissan, I guess, because they own Datsun now—to the effect that someone six-foot-six or seven can’t fit into their fifty year-old car, they’ll get right on fixing it.”

Icky crossed all four arms in pairs. “Fine. But I want to operate, or drive, or whatever one of these damned things sometime.”

“She could drive the tractor,” Miryam suggested.

I giggled. As soon as Miryam said it, I had an image of Icky in overalls and a straw hat, bouncing along in the seat of the old tractor, a stalk of grass sticking out of her mouth.

“Let’s just put that on the maybe pile for now.” I turned back to the car. It really was a thing of beauty, and in impeccable shape. Carter had obviously put a lot of work into it or, much more likely, paid someone to put a lot of work into it. I was no vintage car buff, but I could certainly appreciate the charm of an old machine kept immaculate. It was a bit of a testament to the tech that came before what we now took for granted, like old war planes restored to flying condition, or ancient steam locomotives still rumbling, hissing and snorting steam as they plied twenty-first century rails.

“You know, Van, you might not want to just give Squirty here back to your cousin,” Perry suggested, making sure to keep his alloy talons well away from the car’s gleaming paintwork.

“Yeah, well, as much as Carter bugs me, it is his car. And I think auto theft isn’t a good addition to my resume now that I’m a… a space cop.”

“No, I don’t mean keep it for yourself. I mean offer it back to him, but in exchange for something.”

“Hmm. Such as?”

“Well, if he owed me a favor, I’d have him use his goodwill with the Guild in general, and Master Gerhardt in particular. Use all of it. Burn it up. Every last bit, to help us get off the hook for that clean shoot of those pirates.”

“Make Carter go to bat for us? Pure evil. I love it. But aren’t you maybe overestimating his pull with the Guild, and with Gerhardt?”

“You’ve made the point emphatically that he’s a shameless, manipulative suck-up. Don’t you suspect he’s done whatever he can to ingratiate himself to the powers-that-be?” Perry asked.

I had to nod. “That would be Carter’s style, yeah. The first thing he does in any interaction with, well, anyone is ensure he’s got an exit strategy from it that’s going to benefit him. So, yeah—let’s do it.”

We returned to the Fafnir, and Netty opened a channel to Anvil Dark. Sure enough, Carter was there, and Max put us through to him.

“Van, kinda busy here. Can I call you back—?”

“Nope, and you’re not going to want me to.”

“Why not?”

“Because, Carter, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. And you’re not going to like either one.”

* * *

Carter fumed, but not as much as I’d expected. He seemed much more relieved Gertie was back, and although it—I refused to call his car she—was in my custody, I could tell he trusted me to keep it safe. After some venting, he arranged to set up a meeting with Gerhardt and use the favors he’d accumulated on our behalf.

“But that’s it! After this, Van—”

“Yeah yeah. Carter, look at it this way—you’re going to be helping us with this damned case, possibly quite a bit. And what better use for these favors of yours could there be?”

He kept grousing, but I could tell that the idea of staying connected with our case and helping move it forward was something he considered—not terrible.

We intended to go to Anvil Dark, meet with Carter and Gerhardt, then be prepared to meet with Groshenko and the Hwananye. But I had some business I wanted to finish on Earth first, and it required a trip to Appleton, Wisconsin.

We landed the Fafnir in the same remote, lakeside clearing we had before, and found Tony Burgess and his two sidekicks waiting for us. We’d called ahead, Netty simply hacking the phone system and putting me in the odd position of making a phone call from the Fafnir while she was in flight. We even got a ringtone, which just seemed so out of place in the sleek cockpit that it made me snort at the absurdity of it all..

Torina, Perry and I disembarked from the Fafnir, which Netty kept fully stealthed and invisible to the naked eye and any Earthly detection tech. Tony just shook his head as we approached.

“You know, somewhere in the back of my mind I just assumed I’d hallucinated or dreamed it all or something. But here you are,” he said.

“I know how you feel, believe me. I still get weird vibes sometimes.”

Tony introduced his friends. Marla was the studious, mousey-looking girl. She combined a quick and incisive wit with few words.

“So you’re the spaceman.”

“I am, yeah.”

“Antimatter?”

“Uh—sorry?”

“What powers your ship. Tony says it’s antimatter.”

“For twisting, yeah. That’s the tech that lets us move from one star system to another. It’s a combination of deuterium and helium-3 for the real-space drive,” Perry said.

Marla looked down at him. “A self-aware AI construct. Pretty sweet.”

“Why thank you, my dear. You’re pretty sweet yourself,” Perry replied.

She smiled, a fugitive gleam that came and went in a flash.

The gangly, sallow, and slightly menacing third member of the group, clad in an old army jacket, was named Myron. He refused to give his last name.

“Don’t want the guv’ment to know it,” he snapped, pronouncing it that way, guv’ment. “You can call me Smith.”

“So… Myron or Smith? Which do you prefer?”

“Up to you. It doesn’t matter. Names don’t matter. They leave a trail, like credit cards and cell phones and all the other shit they use to track you. And they do track you.” He pointed up. “Drones. Predators. Global Hawks. Reapers. They’re up there, fifty thousand feet or so. You can’t see them, but they’re always there.”

“Uh—sure. Whatever you say—let’s go with Myron.”

He glanced at Tony and shuffled his feet. “How do we know they’re not feds, Tony?”

I sighed and made a follow me gesture. They did, and we took them back aboard the Fafnir.

“And yes, we’ll go for a flight, and no, not to the Moon, we don’t have the time. One orbit, that’s it. Oh, and brace yourself,” I said.

Marla and Myron both stiffened.

“What? Brace ourselves for what?” Myron asked, his eyes darting from side-to-side.

I stepped aside to let them into the Fafnir’s interior, then gestured at Icky.

“That.”

She held up one of her flexible tools. “Time for the probing yet?”

“Oh, for—Icky, we’ve done that shtick already.”

“It never gets old.”

I looked at Marla and Myron. Okay, this never got old, either.

Tony nodded. “Yup. That’s an alien,” he said.

Icky scowled. “Nuh-uh. You’re the aliens.”

Marla pointed. “It—it’s—”

Myron just muttered something like, I knew it, I knew it, under his breath.

“It’s—”

“Actually, Icky identifies as a female, despite her obvious hatred of pants and/or skirts. And, Icky, to these guys, you’re the alien. And since you’re on Earth, well, that makes you even more of the alien here.”

I turned back to the Truly Aware. “So this is Icky. She’s from a race called the Wu’tzur. Her thing is powerplant and propulsion, so if you have any questions about that, she’s the one to ask. And that over there is Zenophir. She’s a P’nosk, and specializes in weapons and defensive systems.”

Myron looked at me. “Weapons? You’re armed?”

“Two petawatt laser batteries, two missile launchers, a mass-driver—that’s a rail gun—and two point-defense batteries—think the Phalanx system the US Navy uses, but on steroids.”

“Don’t forget the particle cannon,” Rolis put in.

“Oh, right. This is Rolis. He’s… a little hard to explain.”

“I was murdered, but I got better.”

Icky chuckled. “You guys should see your own faces.”

Myron blinked. “Wait. Do you mean—this is actually real? That you took Tony to the Moon?”

Burgess scowled. “Did you think I was lying?”

“Uh, yeah. I mean—holy shit. This is real.”

I nodded. “It is. But just in case there’s any more doubt, let’s seal the deal. Netty, you ready?”

“Anytime.”

I gestured for Myron and Marla to follow me. “Come on up to the cockpit. The view’s way better up there.”

* * *

I had to hand it to Myron and Marla. They managed to get their mental feet back under them, more or less, by the time we’d reached the Himalayas. The sun was just rising over Nepal, and even from several hundred kilometers up, the rugged mountains were a thing of splendor, sunlight glowing against rock and snow in a carmine smear that took our breath away.

By then, Marla had started up a machine-gun barrage of questions about the Fafnir and her technology. I asked Icky and Zeno to take care of her, and they bustled her off into the engineering bay. Myron just stared out the window.

“We’re really in orbit,” he said, peering down from the copilot’s seat.

I nodded. “We are.”

“And we did it without, like, a big-assed rocket, like the Saturn V.”

“Your go-to is nineteen sixties spacecraft tech? Really?” Netty asked.

“I—uh—”

But I had to agree. “I hear you. I still think the Saturn V is one of the most impressive things mankind has ever built.”

Myron glanced at me. “Right?” Then he shook his head. “But how, it makes no sense—”

“How is gravity polarizing tech. Basically, it makes the Fafnir fall off the Earth under her own weight. And before you ask me how it works, I have no idea. I just drive the Fafnir, I don’t really understand what makes her go.”

“So this must have been one of those X projects, the ones they’re testing at Area 51. It was Roswell, wasn’t it? That ship that crashed at Roswell in forty-seven, you took the tech from it,” Myron said.

Perry spoke up. “No, the Fafnir was built by a shipyard in the Tau Ceti system. All of the Guild’s Vigilant-class ships were made there.”

“And as far as I know, the Fafnir’s never been to Nevada—oh, wait. There was that time we deorbited over the Southwest on our way down to Iowa. I wanted to see the Grand Canyon from the air,” I said, shrugging.

Myron, though, just stared at Perry, then at me. “Tau Ceti. That’s another star. Light-years away.”

I nodded. “Yup, it is.”

“Eleven-point-nine light-years, in fact,” Netty said.

“And you’re saying that we could just, like, go there.”

“We could. We’d probably need about eight to twelve hours to reach a point where we could twist, but we could be there by, oh, say midnight Iowa time?”

Myron sank back in the seat. “Tau Ceti by midnight—” He shook his head. “This is all really happening.”

“It most certainly is.”

Tony, who’d been sitting in Icky’s usual spot, cut in. “See, I told you guys I wasn’t bullshitting you.”

“Yeah, well, excuse me Tony for not immediately believing you’d flown to the gawdamm moon in a ship full of aliens.”

Torina, sitting in Zeno’s place, grinned. “I thought you guys were truly aware.”

“Well, sure, but—I mean—wait.” He turned to Torina as though seeing her for the first time. “You’re human, right?”

“Last time I checked,” Torina replied.

“So you’re from Earth.”

She shook her head. “Uh-uh. I’m from Helso, a moon in the star system you’d know as Van Maanen’s Star.”

“Fourteen and a bit light-years from here,” Netty added, trying to be helpful.

“So there are humans from outer space? What, were you kidnapped by, well, like the thing we saw in the back? The big, hairy, four-armed thing?”

“Ooh, don’t let Icky hear you call her a thing,” I said, shaking my head. “That will not end well. You’re lucky she’s a pescatarian this week. It’s a thing she’s trying out.” At Myron’s look of horror, I grinned. “I’m bullshitting you. Icky’s not gonna eat you. But Torina is from somewhere other than our planet.”

Torina gave Myron a patient grin. “No, I was born on Helso. So was my father. My mother’s from Epsilon Eridani—”

“Ten-point-five light-years,” Netty said.

“—and their families are—well, it starts getting complicated. My ancestors about four or five generations back were from Earth, though.”

“Of course they were,” Myron said.

I heard chatter as Marla, Zeno, and Icky came back forward. Marla was in mid-question.

“So these thermo-electric generators, how do they handle the heat output from fusion plasma? And what about neutron radiation? Do you capture it, too, and—”

Zeno held up a hand. “Honey, I think it’s time for you to just enjoy the ride.”

Myron suddenly turned to me. “So, why?”

“Why what?”

“Why—this?” He gestured around. “Why are you revealing all of this to us—wait. Wait. You’re not taking us away, are you? Is this an abduction—?”

“Myron, shut up. I already told you. Van wants our help.”

“Help? Help doing what, exactly?”

I told him, explaining how I needed alert eyes and ears on Earth that I could trust.

“And I think you guys are ideal. You’re already tuned in to the whole UFO, aliens on Earth thing. And you’re already known to be, so no one’s going to think it’s weird in a way that a sudden, new interest would be.”

“But… the world needs to know about this! The world needs to know the truth!”

I shook my head. “No, Myron, it doesn’t. In fact, that would be the worst thing for mankind right now.”

“Don’t give me that. Humanity couldn’t handle it bullshit—”

“I’m not. It’s not about that at all.”

“So what, then?”

I turned in my seat so I was facing him. “Myron, you’ve spent who knows how long obsessed with UFOs and Roswell, Area 51, conspiracy theories, abductions, that sort of stuff. And yes, you now know that a lot of it is true, although not in the ways you think it is.”

I leaned forward. “The truth, and the threat, isn’t down there,” I said, pointing at the Arabian peninsula, which was now sliding beneath us. I turned my finger and pointed up. “It’s out there. The Men in Black aren’t your enemy, if they even exist at all, that is. The biggest threat to mankind are vicious, amoral alien assholes who would exploit the shit out of Earth if it ever lost the ignorance that’s protecting it.”

“Ignorance? A protection?”

I nodded. “There’s a community of peoples out there that put a lot of effort into protecting places like Earth, until they’re ready to take their first real steps into space. And I don’t mean sending a few guys to go futz around on the Moon. I mean serious, deep space travel. The organization I’m part of, the Peacemaker Guild, is part of that protection. But mankind’s ignorance of the truth is the far more important one. Once that’s gone, all bets are off.”

I leaned forward even more, pressing my gaze into Myron’s. “Imagine the worst thing you can. Now, try and imagine something worse than that. That still doesn’t even come close to the true horror out there. Now, it’s not just horror, of course. There are lots of good things, wonderful things. But it’s the horror that keeps me awake at night.”

“What Van is saying is that, if you managed to convince humanity of the truth, it would pretty much be the end of the line for Earth,” Perry put in.

Myron sank back and shook his head. “So you mean that we now really do know the truth, and we can’t share it with anyone?”

I leaned back and smiled at him.

“Congratulations, Myron. You thought there was a conspiracy, and you were right—and now you’re part of it. Ain’t life a funny thing?”

* * *

“Do you think they’re going to play ball?” Perry asked, as the Fafnir lifted from the secluded, lakeside clearing near Appleton.

I nodded. “Yeah, I think they are. They wanted to know the truth, and now they do. They might not be able to ever tell anyone else—not that anyone would ever believe them—but they know. And now they’re part of it.”

We said goodbye to the Truly Aware, with the understanding that they’d keep doing what they do, scouring the internet and other media for close encounters and UFO sightings. But we also told them what to look for, with particular emphasis on things like Sorcerers and Usu. We made it abundantly clear to not try to contact or interact with them, no matter how tempted they might be.

“Or else you’ll experience a truly horrible death, which will be recorded into a digital version of yourself, something like Rolis, except that poor virtual bastard will experience that same horrible death over and over again—all for the amusement of others.”

They’d all blanched at that. “Yeah, don’t worry. We’ll look, but we won’t touch.”

I nodded. “Keep your eyes open but your head down.”

I watched Wisconsin drop away beneath the Fafnir. I’d been tempted to go back to the farm, but we had business on Anvil Dark. Carter Yost was about to do us a big favor, whether he wanted to or not.

* * *

We received a summons to see Master Gerhardt even before we’d finished docking at Anvil Dark. It arrived via Netty, who announced it was a priority three message.

“Is that urgent? I mean, if there are only three priority levels, that’s one thing, but if there are thirty, well, that’s another,” Rolis asked.

“There are five. Five is routine, four is time-sensitive but not critical, three is time-sensitive and critical, and two is an emergency.”

“So what’s priority one?”

“There’s a continuous stream of shit hitting the fan.”

“Ah.”

I asked Torina to come with me, but I intended to leave Perry behind again. He’d objected.

“Van, I’m not going to hide from Gerhardt.”

“I don’t want to see you hauled in for repairs.”

Icky looked up from the tools she’d spread on the Fafnir’s galley table, prior to digging into yet more of her tinkering with the drive. “Van told me that if anyone tries that, I’m gonna stop them.”

Perry looked at her. “Believe it or not, that actually makes me feel better. I mean that, seriously.”

“Hey, if anyone gets to tinker with you, bird, it’s me.”

I looked from Perry to Icky, then a slow and sinister smile spread across my face. “Icky, postpone whatever it was you intended to back in engineering and put on your best yachting togs. I’m bringing you along, too.”

Torina cleared her throat. “Van, are you sure about that? Remember dinner the other night?”

I nodded, still smiling. “Oh yes, I do indeed.”

Icky looked down at herself, clad in boots, trousers, and the vest she wore that doubled as a tool apron. “Which part’s the yacht, and which is the tog?”

“Don’t worry about it. You look fine.”

24

Gerhardt kept casting nervous glances at Icky as we settled ourselves into his office. He turned to me.

“Was it really necessary to bring your entire crew, Tudor?”

“What? Oh, no, there’s a couple more. I can call them if you like—”

“That’s… fine. Now, Yost here tells me you wanted a meeting. What’s this about?”

Carter had already been there when we arrived, along with another Peacemaker, a frumpy Nesit named Barik-tar. I knew nothing about him, aside from the fact he was another desk jockey who rarely left Anvil Dark and spent most of his career ingratiating himself to the Masters.

Well, someone had to make their coffee, or alien equivalent thereof, I guess.

I looked Gerhardt in the eye. “I would like our accounts unfrozen. I’d also like our shoot down of those pirates declared a legitimate use of force.”

Gerhardt leaned back. “Would you, now? Well, there are a lot of things I’d like, too, Tudor,” he said, then smiled a smile so smug I wanted to punch it right off his face. I didn’t, though, and just smiled back—and then turned to Carter. As I did, I caught a strange look on Torina’s face. I couldn’t immediately read it, though, so I just pressed on.

Carter sighed. “Master Gerhardt, I agree with Peacemaker Tudor. His case is too important to leave tied up in audits and other administration.”

Gerhardt’s smile faded into a frown. “Really.”

“Yes. In fact, I think it would be as damaging, in the long run, as those files I brought to your attention—you know, the ones with the incorrect security classification? The ones that almost ended up being entered into evidence in that smuggling case the Seven Stars League handed over to us?”

The Nesit sat up and started to speak, but Gerhardt cut him off.

“What are you saying, exactly, Peacemaker Yost.”

Carter glanced at me, looked briefly miserable, then turned back to Gerhardt.

“I just think, Master Gerhardt, that if the Seven Stars League ever got their hands on the metadata for those files, that showed how close they’d come to being released—well, they wouldn’t be happy. I mean, they included a list of all of their current covert ops—”

“That’s fine, Yost,” Gerhardt said, sitting up and scowling, first at Carter and then at me. I just returned an empty, vapid smile, like I had no idea what was going on. “That would be unfortunate, yes,” he said, his gaze locked on mine. It was poisonous enough that it could have killed weeds with a glance.

“Now that I’ve had a chance to reconsider matters, Tudor, it strikes me that unfreezing your account and declaring that shoot down justified is a better contribution to the furtherance of justice than… not doing so.”

He turned to the Nesit, Barik-tar. “See to it immediately.”

“But, Master Gerhardt—”

“That was neither a request nor an invitation for debate.”

The Nesit shot me a venomous look of his own, and another at Carter, then simply nodded.

I glanced at Torina. She still had that odd look. Something was going on here, some subtext I wasn’t getting. Presumably, it had something to do with the fact that Barik-tar, someone I barely knew from a hole in the bulkhead, seemed to be so strangely invested in our affairs.

Gerhardt looked around, then his gaze fell on Perry. “Despite all of this, I am not satisfied that you are giving Peacemaker Tudor good advice. Clearly, your protocols are flawed.” He gave a thin smile. “You are to report to Systems Maintenance for a complete diagnostic and installation of new, updated software—”

“No.”

Perry’s word hung in the air, creating yet another of those really awkward moments.

Gerhardt leaned forward, surprised anger etching his face. “What did you say?”

“I said no, I’m not going to do that.”

“I didn’t realize I’d have to repeat myself, but that isn’t a request, and it’s not an invitation for debate.”

“I refuse.”

Gerhardt now looked genuinely confused. “Okay, there is definitely something wrong with this unit. I’m going to have you taken completely offline and—”

“Oh, no you won’t.”

Icky stalked forward, utterly without fear. “If Perry needs fixing, I’ll do it.”

Gerhardt leaned back, now even more surprised. “I’m sorry, but just who do you think you are?”

“I think I’m the one who fixes things aboard the Fafnir, and that includes the bird,” she said, leaning on Gerhardt’s desk with all four arms. Despite its stout construction, it creaked ominously.

Gerhardt leaned back, his eyes widening. “That unit is Guild property—”

“I didn’t realize I’d have to repeat myself, but that isn’t a request, and it’s not an invitation for debate.”

I was about to stand and pull Icky back from the brink of doing something stupid, but just as I tensed, I saw Gerhardt actually crumple a bit.

“Fine. Then fix it. But the next time I give it direction, it had better obey, or I’ll have it shredded and recycled.”

Now I stood and put my hand on Icky’s arm to pull her back. She’d made the sale, so it was time to stop talking.

“All on the same side here, everyone. Icky, can you—yes, just back this way—thank you,” I said, guiding her away from Gerhardt’s desk.

I turned back to him. “Thank you for your time and assistance, Master Gerhardt. You’re no doubt very busy, so we’ll get out of your—”

Hair, I was about to say, but the man was bald.

“—way.”

Before anyone else could speak, I herded Icky, Torina, and Perry out of Gerhardt’s office. Carter followed. Barik-tar remained behind, glowering at us as we left.

We all kept quiet until we’d left the Keel and returned to the relative bustle of the main concourse of Anvil Dark’s central ring. I turned to Carter.

“Thank you, Carter. I mean it. You’ve been a huge help to our case. And by our, I mean ours and yours.”

Carter glanced at me sidelong, suspicious and probably wondering if I was just yanking his chain. But I wasn’t. He saw that and actually smiled. “Yeah, well, just give me Gertie back.”

“She’ll be gassed up and waiting in the valet spot for you when you get back to Earth. Just talk to Miryam.”

“Carter, where did you come up with that stuff about leaks and the Seven Stars League, anyway?” Torina asked.

He shrugged as we wended our way back toward the Fafnir. “The trick to thriving in a bureaucracy is to read everything. No one actually does, so you’d be surprised at the stuff that slips through that shouldn’t. I happened to catch that classified material buried amid a bunch of other stuff. Gerhardt missed it, though, and had already signed off on it.”

I slowed. “Really? A guy like Gerhardt missed that? The guy who probably has spicy dreams about protocols and regulations in triplicate?”

“What would one of those be like, I wonder? I mean, there’s nothing like legislation to set the erotic mood.”

We chuckled and kept going.

“Icky? I just wanted to say… thank you,” Perry said.

“For what?”

“For—you know. For sticking up for me like that.”

She grinned. “Hey, my takeaway from that was that I could fix you, bird. In fact, I think that’s what Master Asshole explicitly ordered me to do? Isn’t that right, guys—?”

A sudden explosion of violence cut her off mid-sentence.

* * *

I saw the gun, not the person wielding it, and reacted on raw instinct. A shot snapped out while I was reacting, though, and I winced—

But it hadn’t been aimed at me. It had been clearly aimed at Carter.

I wasn’t sure if it had hit him, wasn’t sure of anything other than the need to stop the gunner—a human—from firing again. I grabbed his arm and yanked, pulling him off balance, then let my Innsu-honed reflexes kick in, twisting and striking at him in a way that would have made Master Cataric proud. If I’d been holding a knife, it would now be buried in the man’s throat.

But he recovered almost immediately and swiped back at me with the butt of the gun. I dodged back, missing being pistol-whipped by centimeters and feeling the puff of air from the swing against my face. It unbalanced me, though, and the shooter yanked his arm free and made to shoot again. Torina was leaping into action, but she was too far away to intervene before Carter, who stood frozen and gaping, would have his head blown off.

Icky wasn’t.

With a furious roar, she lunged at the shooter, shoving me aside. She scooped him up, raised him twisting and fighting furiously to break free over her head, then slammed him down against the deck. He hit like an express train, his neck snapping like a firecracker.

I spun around, seeking more threats. Peacemakers who’d taken cover peered back at us, a few with their own sidearms drawn. Three of them closed in, forming a protective circle around us. I recognized two of them, and they both gave me a we’ve got this look.

“Everyone okay?” I asked.

Torina nodded. Perry, who’d flung himself into the air, wheeled by. “Okay here, boss.”

Carter just kept staring, his chest heaving like a bellows from fear and adrenaline.

Icky, glaring down at the dead man, pointed. “He’s not.”

Torina knelt beside him. “No, I’d say the fact some of his spine is sticking out of his neck is a pretty good sign he’s not okay at all.”

I stepped in front of Carter. “You with us, Carter?”

“He tried to kill me.”

“Well, he tried to kill one of us—”

“No. Me. He tried to kill me.”

“He did, Van. Carter was definitely his target,” Perry called down, still circling a couple of meters above us, just beneath the concourse’s overheads.

“Hey, somebody wants you dead. Way to go, and welcome to the club,” Icky said, slapping Carter’s shoulder hard enough to almost knock him off his feet.

I looked down at the shooter. A crowd had gathered, so I looked around. “Anyone know this guy?”

Shrugs and headshakes. I put my hands on my hips. He wasn’t a Peacemaker, or wasn’t garbed as one, anyway. But that didn’t mean much. There were lots of Peacemaker Auxiliaries on Anvil Dark, like Torina and Icky, and even a good number of other civilians, like couriers and various sorts of contractors, suppliers, and technicians.

“I’ve got an ID, Van,” Perry said, landing beside the body with a metallic clatter of talons. “His name is Arturo Darvik.”

“Okay… and? Is that all we’ve got, an ID?”

“Nope. He’s currently registered as an Auxiliary to a Peacemaker named Gesko Tarn.”

A scaley, lizard-esque Peacemaker stepped out of the crowd. “Uh, excuse me, but I’m Gesko Tarn, and I have no idea who this is. They’re no Auxiliary of mine.”

But a Peacemaker I knew vaguely, a human named Donal-something, spoke up. “Okay, yeah. I thought this guy seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place him.” He glanced at Tarn. “As soon as you mentioned Auxiliary, I remembered. I saw him entering and leaving a Dragonet that was berthed beside mine when I was getting some work done on my drive.”

“Whose?” I asked.

“Uh—oh, shit. I don’t recall the name. He was a Nesit, who I heard works for one of the Masters. Gerhardt, I think.”

I stood up. “Barik-Tar?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

I looked at Torina, then we spun and hurried back the way we came. “Icky, stay here and make sure no one touches that body until we get back. Carter, you might want to—”

“Come with you? Damned right I do,” he snapped, revealing a Carter Yost I’d never seen before, one fuming with a righteous indignation that was, for once, actually justified and not just being pissy.

* * *

Gerhardt gave us a doubtful glance but touched a comm on his desk. “Barik-tar, can I see you in my office?”

Nothing.

He frowned. “Peacemaker Barik-tar, Master Gerhardt here. I need you in my office immediately.”

I looked at Torina, who just mouthed, “He’s long gone.”

I nodded.

Gerhardt switched to a general comm broadcast, and even a public address to the entirety of Anvil Dark but, sure enough, got no reply.

He sat back down, looking stunned. “A spy?”

“Or worse,” I said.

Torina turned to Carter. “Okay, Carter, full reveal time. I saw you exchanging some odd looks with that Nesit when we were here. What was that all about?”

Carter’s simmering fury came off the boil, and he looked suddenly sheepish. “I—uh, well, you see—”

“Yost was helping me stay aware of your activities, Tudor,” Gerhardt said, almost offhandedly.

I turned to Carter. “Is that true?”

“He’s a Master! And besides, how do you think I—well, managed to get close to Master Gerhardt to begin with.”

I scowled but decided to just shelve it. He had helped us, after all, when he’d been fully within his rights to simply return to Earth and report us to the cops for possessing stolen merchandise in the form of his damned car. I turned back to Gerhardt.

“There’s a good chance that little bastard was on someone’s payroll, and that payroll might have been The Fade—”

“Actually, Van, it was the Fade,” Netty interjected. “Perry and I have been scouring every data store we can find, and we found two surveillance images of Barik-tar that put him into the immediate presence of known Fade operatives. One of them was No-No. Dayna at The Quiet Room has also discreetly informed us that he has an account that has had three deposits since it was opened. Two of them were from a holding company owned by Traversia Bolt-Right.”

I turned back on Gerhardt. “What the hell? Do you not screen your assistants?”

“I—” he started, then sank back in his seat.

“See? Nobody reads everything,” Carter said.

Gerhardt looked up at me. “This creates a massive problem for me, obviously. It puts every case I’ve handled since I took him on under suspicion.” He lolled his head back and sighed. “As if Yotov’s treachery hadn’t caused the Guild enough trouble.”

I leaned on the desk. “Master Gerhardt, it puts you under suspicion, too. Are you compromised? Are you connected to the Fade, or any other criminal organization, even through blackmail or extortion?”

He sat up. “How dare you—!”

“Oh, no. We’re way past the righteous anger or being insulted part of this. I mean, look at this from our perspective. We crossed swords with three corrupt Masters already. I need you to tell me if you’re the fourth on that list, and do not try to bullshit me, because if you do, I’ll go get Icky and get her to do some persuading. Then I’ll carry you out of here in a bucket, and you’ll be a memory before dinner.”

Gerhardt looked around the room. Carter had his arms crossed and looked ready to jump on Gerhardt. Torina just gave him a thin, humorless smile.

“I will happily inform the Seven Stars League about those classified documents. Helso, my home, is one of their protectorates, and they’ve done a perfectly shitty job of protecting it. So they’re falling over themselves looking for ways to make it up, including putting my father on one of their advisory boards. One comms call is all it would take.”

Gerhardt looked back up at me. “I am not compromised, Peacemaker Tudor. Not even a little.”

I held his gaze for a moment, then straightened and nodded. “I believe you. It doesn’t change the fact you had a mole sitting in that chair right over there not an hour ago, though—”

Max, the Masters’ administrative assistant, interrupted. “Master Gerhardt, I’ve confirmed that Barik-tar left Anvil Dark about forty minutes ago. His ship is outbound at high-g, and we don’t have any assets that can really stop him before he can twist.”

Gerhardt groaned. “This is a disaster.”

I nodded. “Maybe. But maybe it’s time that you stop being an obstructive, bureaucratic part of the problem and become part of the solution.”

He looked up at me. “What… do you suggest?”

* * *

I actually had nothing specific to suggest, other than making it clear that we’d be there to support Gerhardt—something I never imagined I’d ever say—if he was being honest with us, and would back off on his status as a hidebound martinet.

“I can’t just toss out the laws and regulations, Tudor,” he countered, and I shook my head.

“Not suggesting you should. And if I genuinely break the law, fine. But if I’m just pushing at the edges of it, to try to stop bad guys from doing bad things, I’d appreciate you taking a step back from the books and taking in the big picture.”

Torina had leaned in. “Frankly, from where I sit, being so slavish about the policies and protocols is what got you into this mess. You’re so micro-detail-oriented that you’re not seeing the bigger and much more dangerous shit. Like, Carter finding that classified Seven Stars material that ended up where it shouldn’t have. You should have noticed it before you signed off on letting it be entered into evidence.”

Torina’s cool tone seemed to get through. The part about Carter especially stung, I could tell. But speaking of Carter—

We’d left Gerhardt’s office with him, in a stunning reversal, having gone from implacable adversary to kinda-sorta ally. I turned to Carter as we walked, but he spoke before I did.

“Why did they want to kill me?”

“Well, if I had to guess, that classified material had been intended to do something else, probably blackmail Gerhardt into compliance. Instead, you used it to blackmail him into getting your car back.”

“They were using you, Carter. Barik-tar probably convinced Gerhardt to order you to keep an eye on Van, probably to help set him up for something,” Torina said.

“But you blew up some plans they’d probably been working hard to put together, costing them time, effort, and maybe a whole lot of money.” I smiled. “And just think—if it hadn’t been for you, your car, and some meddling conspiracy nuts in Wisconsin, they’d have gotten away with it, too.”

“Uh, Van?” Torina pointed ahead, along the concourse. A medical tech crew stood shuffling around, its leader confronting an irate Icky.

“Oh, for—” I hurried to join them.

The medical tech glared at me. “She won’t let us take the body.”

“He told me not to let anyone touch it,” Icky snapped back.

I held up a hand. “Give us a few minutes to capture some imagery and stuff, and then it’s all yours,” I said to the tech.

Icky shrugged. “Works for me. Anyway, I was hoping you guys would get back before he started to stink.”

* * *

While it was great to have some new allies—even if they were Carter and Gerhardt—we still had no clear path forward until Groshenko got back to us. Our only hard lead was on 109, but I didn’t want to even poke my nose near there until we’d had a chance to meet with the native Hwananye.

So we sat in The Black Hole and pondered our next move. Carter had joined us but insisted on being armed and sitting facing the door, with his back to the wall. I smiled.

“You’re one of us now, Carter.”

Torina smiled. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to the rampant paranoia.”

“Really?”

“No, not really. I was just trying to make you feel better.”

“Well, you failed miserably.”

We mused over visiting Schegith, or maybe Dayna and seeing if The Quiet Room had any jobs they needed done, or even picking up something quick and easy off the job slate. In the midst of it, though, Rolis interrupted over the comm.

“Van, I know you guys are trying to decide what to do next, and I had an idea.”

I glanced at the others, then shrugged. “Go ahead, we’re all ears.”

“Well, I was just talking to Zeno, and she mentioned those YardCraft her family loaned you to work on the Iowa. She’s worried that if you don’t actually start using them, they’re going to take them back. And that got me thinking—the Iowa is a battlecruiser with a pile of hardpoints, all of them sitting empty. She’s about as well armed as a dock tug.”

“That’s true. But we don’t have the time, and we really don’t have the money to go shopping for weapons to arm her.”

“Understood. So how about we go somewhere where there’s tons of ship-borne weapons available, all free for the taking?”

I looked at the others. “We’ll be back to the Fafnir in a few,” I said, and we quickly finished our drinks.

We returned to the ship and found Rolis, Zeno, and Icky all waiting for us.

“Okay, Rolis, tell me about this magical place where laser batteries and missile launchers are given away for free,” I said.

“It’s not so much they’re given away. It’s more that they’re there, free to be salvaged.”

“Is this some secret place only you know about?” Torina asked.

“Nope. It’s fairly well-known.”

I shook my head. “Free weapons and well-known, huh? You sure you didn’t have some sort of dream, or—do you dream, by the way?”

“Since I don’t sleep, that would be a no.”

“Ah. Right, good point. Anyway, Rolis, you’ll forgive me if this sounds too good to be true.”

“Or there’s one hell of a catch,” Torina put in.

“Mostly the second. See, the catch is that the place, um… it’s haunted.”

25

Some wars are barely remembered. Sure, I’d heard of, say, the Peloponnesian Wars, and knew they’d been fought between the various Greek city states, but that was about it. Even that had gotten mixed up with pop culture stuff, so when I ever thought about that period at all, I ended up with visions of incredibly buff men in loincloths who somehow seemed to be oily—but not covered with dirt and grass.

Hollywood really was magic. Even about wars.

Such was this one, the so-called Piraxian War. It had been fought nearly five hundred years ago between one combatant, the Piraxians, who’d long since been absorbed into the Eridani Federation as a dispersed minority race, and another combatant who simply didn’t seem to exist anymore. No one knew much about it because the Piraxians didn’t or simply chose not to keep detailed records. Despite having advanced technology like spaceflight, the few surviving records were fragmentary, with huge holes.

I leaned back from the data slate I’d placed on the Fafnir’s galley table. “Wow. You’d think there’d be more than ‘a battle was fought on or about this date—maybe—at this place—possibly, but maybe it was actually this one, and this side likely won, although we’re not sure about that either.’ Or something.”

I glanced at Perry and Rolis. “And this at a time when we could, if we wanted to, record the date of me last trimming my toenails, along with imagery of it.”

“Except we don’t want to, Van—or at least I don’t. Not sure about you,” Perry said, looking at Rolis.

“Nah, I’m good living without knowing that.”

Perry turned back to me. “But it makes the point, doesn’t it? Just because we can record everything, if we don’t, then the capability might as well not exist at all, right?”

“Yeah, but this was”—I glanced at the slate—“twenty years of war, although it might actually have been eighteen or twenty-three. I mean, holy shit, they couldn’t be bothered to record how long the war lasted?”

“This may all still be chronicled in detail in some dusty archive somewhere, and even if it’s not, neither side in the war effectively exists anymore,” Perry replied.

“All of which is fine and interesting, but also not really the point, Van. We do know that somewhere in the vicinity of RX J185635-3754 are the remnants of a battle that supposedly still contain a whole pile of weapons, just drifting through space,” Rolis said.

I shook my head. “Yeah, we definitely need to come up with a better name than RX—J—uh, 586—um—” I shrugged. “See?”

“RX J185635-3754.”

“Whatever. Something that rolls off the tongue better than that.”

“How about Arx?” Torina asked, ambling into the galley from astern. She, Icky, and Zeno had been working back there, putting the final tweaks into the Fafnir’s drive.

“Arx. Sure. Works for me.” I glanced back. “How long until we can fly?”

“They say another couple of hours,” Torina said, pouring herself a coffee and sliding into place across the table from me. “So, Arx is haunted,” she said, looking at Rolis and taking a sip.

“Supposedly, yeah, it is. Stories are all about ships that head out there, looking for salvage, and are never heard from again. Or those that do make it come back with something awful that lurks amid the wreckage, waiting to pounce on anyone who dares to disturb it.”

“Ghost stories in space. Spooky, but rare,” I said.

Perry cocked his head at me. “You can scoff, Van, but there are three formally reported ship disappearances in that area over the past fifty years.”

“Is that a lot?”

“It’s… higher than the expected average, yeah.”

“Which is?”

“Given the desolate nature of the region, zero to two.”

I shut the data slate off. “So one more than expected, over half a century. I’m shivering, Perry.”

“Scoff if you want to, Van, but these dockyard tales usually have some basis in fact,” Rolis said.

I nodded. “I’m sure they do. Isn’t Arx a neutron star?”

“It is. The closest to Earth, in fact, about two hundred light-years away. It will make its closest pass in about two hundred thousand years,” Netty put in.

“So… might it not just be that it’s super dangerous to fly around neutron stars? I mean, aren’t they all intense gravity and radiation and magnetic fields?”

“That’s a definite possibility. And if the wreckage is too close to the thing, sure, that might be what’s destroying ships or driving them off,” Perry said.

“And the ghost stories are just an embellishment,” Netty added.

“Or not,” Torina said with a thin smile before sipping her coffee.

I gave her a look. “So, what, you believe it’s the—I don’t know, the vengeful spirits of the dead from the battle or something that destroyed this veritable armada of—oh, right, three ships?”

She shrugged. “I’m just saying I’m not prepared to rule anything out. It’s arrogant to assume we know everything about how the universe works, isn’t it?”

“Well, sure. But ghosts?”

“Lots of stories about them, Van. Derelict ships, perfectly intact, with their crews just gone. Mischievous gremlins making perfectly sound machinery and systems fail. Strange sightings of figures in antiquated spacesuits that aren’t there when you go looking for them,” Rolis said.

“Okay. I’m going to put this on the record right now—I do not believe in ghosts, all these dockyard stories about them notwithstanding. But I am prepared to accept that Arx itself is horribly dangerous, so let’s work with that hypothesis, shall we? So—is it worth a four hundred light-year round trip and the time dilation that entails to fly out there? Especially since it’s going to take us—what, weeks, in terms of time back here?”

“Just a few days,” Netty said.

“Uh, it took us months to twist to Rigel, and it was just four times or so farther away.”

“The time dilation from twisting isn’t linear, though. If we wanted to twist, say, twice as far as Rigel, about fifteen hundred light-years, we’d lose years—how many depending on the mass we’re moving and some other factors. Double that again, it would be decades, although I doubt the ship or twist drive exists that could fly that far.”

“Ah. So twisting to Arx and back would cost us…?”

“A week to ten days or so.”

“I think we should do it, Van. We still haven’t heard from Groshenko. Carter is willing to stay here at Anvil Dark and wait for him to call. And if there’s any chance we can get the Iowa decently armed on the cheap, we should take it,” Torina said.

I stared at the slate for a moment. “What the hell. Let’s do it. Torina, can you talk to Icky and her dad, get him set up to come out to Arx with the Iowa and join us, if this pans out?”

She nodded. “Roger wilco.”

“Netty, you do a thorough preflight and make sure we’ve topped up our fuel and all that. Perry, I’d like you to keep scouring whatever databases you can think of for any information that might be useful about this ancient war, or Arx itself.”

“How about me, boss?” Rolis asked.

I put a hand on his hull. “Who ya gonna call?”

“I don’t know. Do you want me to call someone?”

I laughed. “No, it’s just a line from an old Earth movie. But a damned good one. Maybe we’ll watch it along the way.”

* * *

Carter agreed to stay on Anvil Dark, wait for Groshenko’s call, and set up the meeting with the Hwananye. Icky’s father was likewise happy to stand ready to join us with the Iowa if this little excursion bore any fruit. Surprisingly, Gerhardt paid us a visit shortly before we were about to depart Anvil Dark.

“Here to make sure we’re not breaking any regulations?” I asked him. I smiled while I said it, but I wasn’t entirely joking.

“Yes. Of course. Always,” he said, then offered a thin smile of his own. “But I understand that you’re flying beyond the boundaries of known space, so—” He shrugged.

“To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“I just wanted to—” He stopped and looked around the Fafnir’s interior. The whole crew was present, bustling through last minute jobs as we got prepared to depart.

“I just wanted to thank all of you.” He turned back to me. “I know I haven’t been your favorite person, Tudor—”

“No kidding,” Icky muttered.

Gerhardt shot her a quick glance. “—but I don’t make the decisions I do on some whim. Without the law, we’re just another faction vying for power, not really any different from the Salt Thieves or The Fade.”

I nodded. “I get that. And yeah, sometimes I push the envelope—”

“Sometimes, Tudor, you poke holes right through it.”

“Fair enough. But I don’t make the decisions I make on a whim, either. There are some genuinely bad—make that evil—people out there, doing truly terrible things to other people. And, yeah, I’ll poke a few holes to stop them. If it means saving lives, I’ll risk leaving a few t’s uncrossed.”

Gerhardt nodded. “I think the point is that we need to meet somewhere in the middle. But that’s not why I came here, Tudor. I came to make a peace offering, combined with a gift of gratitude. A few months ago, another Peacemaker seized a shipment of illicit goods. Included among them was an advanced, prototype fire-control system which has languished in the evidence lockup ever since. We can’t establish any clear ownership for it, since everyone contends that it belongs to them.”

“Of course they do,” Zeno said, suddenly perking up and taking an interest.

Gerhardt nodded. “Indeed. Anyway, since the provenance of the thing will probably never be established, and since the case has been closed, it no longer has any obvious evidentiary value. I am going to do some rule-stretching and give it to you, Tudor, if you want it.”

“Oh. I—yeah. Yes, of course we’ll take it.”

“I was eyeing it myself for my own ship, honestly, but I think you’d get more use out of it. At the very least, it might make it easier for you to stop your bad guys without, ah, actually blowing them to bits.”

Everyone had stopped what they were doing and were now staring. I finally stuck out my hand.

“Gotta be honest, Master Gerhardt, I never expected to be thanking you for—”

“Anything,” Icky muttered, then looked abashed. “Sorry.”

Gerhardt took my hand and shook it. “And I’ll be honest, Tudor. I assumed that the day I came aboard your ship it would be to take you into custody.” He started to turn, then stopped.

“I may still make decisions you will not thank me for, you know.”

I nodded. “And I may still do things that will make you want to take me into custody.”

Gerhardt offered a genuine smile, then turned and left.

* * *

“I love it when they unwrap their presents. Their eyes get so big and round and shiny—”

Zeno shot me a venomous glare. “Quiet, you. The experts have got to figure out how to install this thing.”

The fire control system was essentially a gray, metal box-cylinder combination about the same size as a garbage can. Indeed, it was a design that even Zeno, our weapons expert, had never encountered before. She’d hooked up a data slate to its control port and run some tests, and the results had left her shaking her head, apparently wowed.

“This thing is bleeding edge. It can actually use passive scanner input to develop pretty damned good firing solutions, out to a pretty decent range, anyway,” she said, studying the slate’s display.

“And the significance of that is?”

“That we can start shooting without switching to active scanners and giving our position away. And getting those first accurate shots in is huge—the difference between winning and losing a space battle, huge.” She tapped at the display. “And that’s on top of way better resolution. Hell, we’re going to need to upgrade the Fafnir’s scanner suite to take full advantage of what this thing can do.”

“So the next question is, can we install it? Or are we going to have to shelve it until we get back to Anvil Dark or the farm, or somewhere with a workshop, anyway?”

“Nope. We should be able to bring it online in just a few hours. We’ll be without any fire control at all while we are, though, so I’d recommend doing it before we twist out to this haunted ship graveyard.”

“Or wait until we come back, because we might not want to install some entirely untested kit right before we run into any ghosts,” Torina said.

I clicked my tongue. “You guys and your ghosts and ghoulies.” I gave the device a thoughtful look. “Torina does have a good point, though. Do we know for sure this thing is actually going to work?”

Zeno nodded. “It’s working right now. My recommendation is we go for it. Even not running at its full potential, it stands to give us a big leg up on anything we have to fight—even if it’s all spooky and non-corporeal.”

“Really, Zeno? You believe in things that go bump in the night, too?”

“Oh, hell no. There’s enough scary shit out there without bringing demons or whatever into the picture.”

“Now ain’t that the truth.”

* * *

We twisted in to a point some five hundred million klicks from Arx, the wandering neutron star that happened to be the closest to known space, including Earth. It was invisible at that distance, of course, the object itself having a radius about as long as Manhattan Island. But it packed roughly the Sun’s entire mass into that tiny volume, resulting in something so dense that a sugar cube-sized piece would, according to Netty, have the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza—about one thousand times over.

We could still experience its effects, though. Arx spun on its axis at a blistering one hundred-odd times per second, resulting in a faint ‘whine’ on the Fafnir’s radiation sensors as beams of radiation emitted from its poles swept through space like the beam of a really, really fast lighthouse. We’d made sure to twist in as closely aligned as possible with the equator of the bizarre little stellar corpse, where the radiation emissions would be the weakest. We were also orbiting it, at nearly the same distance Jupiter orbited the Sun.

There was nothing else out here. If the star that had died and collapsed into Arx had planets, they’d been vaporized when it blew apart as a supernova about a million years ago. There was just the neutron star, and us, and emptiness all around.

“I can see why this place is called haunted,” Torina said, crossing her arms like she had a sudden chill. “There’s lonely, and then there’s this.”

I grunted my agreement but kept my eyes on the tactical overlay, which was slowly filling up with—a lack of data, actually, but a lack of data was still data. I didn’t for a moment believe in ghosts, but something could still be profoundly dangerous without being supernatural.

We finally got some hits, aside from the neutron star itself. There seemed to be a multitude of objects orbiting Arx at a distance of just under one hundred million miles, about as far as the Earth was from the Sun. I narrowed my eyes at the overlay as Netty painted more and more icons, until there were hundreds of them. Thousands. She finally gave up and started clumping them, reducing the number of icons by about a hundred, smeared out across more than a million klicks.

“Those are all showing as metallic. So we’re not looking at rocks then,” I said.

“No. There are a handful of rocks in orbit, probably bits and pieces of wandering stuff that got captured by the neutron star’s gravitation. I haven’t bothered displaying those, though.”

“Looks like we found our debris field,” Rolis said from the back of the cockpit.

“Yeah, so it would—” I stopped as one icon caught me in particular. “Netty, is that one giving a transponder return?”

“I thought you’d notice that one in particular. It is. It corresponds to a class 9 salvage freighter based out of Spindrift, the Brawny Lass, mastered by—”

“Toph MacGregor. Holy shit.”

I looked back at Rolis “You know him?”

“Yeah. Professional salvager, one of the best in the business. He swung by my old shipyard almost like clockwork, sold us all sorts of bits and pieces we could refurbish.”

“Small universe,” Torina said.

I nodded. “Yeah. So I guess he made the trek out here, ghost stories notwithstanding, to grab some salvage.” I sighed. “Just our luck, come all the way out here to find someone beat us to it.”

“Van, the Brawny Lass was reported missing more than three years ago,” Netty said.

“And the last time I saw him must have been… oh, four years, anyway,” Rolis added.

I turned back to the overlay. “You mean he’s been out here for three years?”

“As much as that, yes,” Netty replied.

I stared at the transponder return, standard format, ship’s name, registration, and some flight data, all of it currently reading zero. It felt like a desperate cry for help into a long, dark night.

Okay, now it was my turn to shiver.

* * *

“The radiation, gravitational, and magnetic effects are definitely getting more intense,” Netty pronounced.

The numbers had been slowly but inexorably creeping up the scale as we’d accelerated in toward the Brawny Lass and the debris field around her. We were still a good hundred million klicks short, though.

“How intense is more intense?” I asked her.

“Somewhere more than noteworthy, getting close to a cause for concern, but not yet worrisome.”

“Okay, and how much closer to worrisome are they likely to get?” I asked.

“If the current rate of increase keeps up, we’ll definitely be past worrisome and probably somewhere around uh-oh by the time we reach the debris field.”

“That’s what I like—good, hard, quantifiable values on the trusty old holy shit scale,” Perry noted wryly.

I shrugged. “Works for me better than fifty rads or becquerels or whatever, which doesn’t mean squat to me,” I said, my eyes glued to the overlay.

More information sluiced in, Netty adding to the various icons. Many of the fragments were unrecognizable, their compositions unfamiliar, or their purposes or even what they were once part of unknown. But another, more unnerving fact was also starting to become clearer with each incoming byte.

A lot of these fragments belonged to ships that were recognizable, as in originating in known space.

I glanced up at Perry and Torina. “There are a lot of pieces of spaceships out here from back home. And that leads to two questions—why were these ships here, and what reduced them to whirling pieces of scrap?”

“Well, the answer to the first question is pretty obvious, I think. They were here for the same reason we are, to scavenge, just like Rolis said,” Perry replied.

“Yeah, sure, but I figured a handful of ships. There have got to be, oh, at least a dozen, based on these different fragment types, and maybe closer to two dozen,” Rolis put in.

“The second question is a lot scarier. Something smashed these ships to bits and pieces,” Torina said.

I nodded. “Yeah.” I stared at the data a little longer. As we got closer to the debris field, the resolution became better and better. The Brawny Lass had been nearly broken in two, most of her amidships simply gone. It might have been some sort of internal explosion, but we’d need to take a closer look to know for sure. As for the rest, Netty was able to distinguish strictly structural components, like spars and hull plates, from parts of ships’ systems, like reactor components, pieces of drives, bits of flight controls—

And weapons.

Lots and lots of weapons.

“Netty, can you filter out anything that’s not a weapon system, as much as you can, anyway?” I asked.

Most of the icons winked out. It still left dozens—laser batteries, missile turrets, point-defense cannons, and, most intriguingly, things that appeared to be weapons but weren’t immediately classifiable. Some of those were no doubt false positives, but some probably weren’t.

“If we want to reject our approach and just power away, Van, we’re getting close to the decision point. Another fifteen minutes and we’ll be committed to reaching the debris field before we can realistically maneuver away from it again,” Netty said.

“Are we far enough away from Arx that we can just twist away if we want to?”

“No. Remember that although size-wise the neutron star would barely reach from the farm to the nearest decent-sized town back in Iowa, it still contains roughly the same mass as the sun. Its gravitational effects are essentially the same.”

I turned to the others. “Does anyone strenuously object to us continuing? Because if you do, even one of you, we’ll punch out of here, no questions asked. And that includes you, Perry and Netty.”

Nobody spoke.

I nodded. “Okay then. Netty, please carry on. But let’s go weapons-hot and keep our fingers brushing those triggers, shall we?”

* * *

I found my attention flicking among several different numbers—the distance to the debris field, the distance to the neutron star, the radiation and magnetic flux values, the distance to the nearest twist point. They all inexorably changed with each passing second, some going down, others up.

“Netty, how dangerous will the radiation be to us once we reach the debris field?”

“The effects should be mild, as long as you organic types take the requisite anti-rad chems, we limit our visit to no more than a few hours, and nobody steps outside the Fafnir.”

“What happens if we’re outside?”

“Well, Zeno and Icky are both from relatively rad-resistant species, so it wouldn’t change much for them. The P’nosk are resilient enough that very little of this might even apply to her, although that would change if we decided to get much closer to Arx.”

“Which we have absolutely no reason to do, outside of sightseeing,” Perry put in.

“Perry, Rolis,and I are largely immune to the effects of radiation in the short-term, but in the long-term, we’d probably start to suffer some degradation.”

“I notice you haven’t mentioned Van and me yet,” Torina noted wryly.

“That’s because I was saving the best for last. And by best, I mean most vulnerable. Humans aren’t terribly rad-resistant, so you two really are the limiting factor here. As for outside, you’d likely suffer permanent harm in an hour or so, and a lethal dose in about two.”

“Damn. And here I was planning on doing a spacewalk so I could take a bunch of selfies with all this loot,” I said. I tried to sound flippant about it, but the thought of unseen radiation sleeting through me, tearing apart the bits and pieces that kept my cells working, smashing DNA and setting up future cancers and things—

There were ghosts out here after all. They went by names like alpha, beta, and gamma.

“Okay, so here’s the plan. We’ll spend about two hours scanning the debris field and marking possible targets to investigate. Then we’ll pull back and, based on what we learn, decide how to proceed, or even if we should proceed. I mean, there’s no point bringing the Iowa out here if we don’t think any of this—”

“Van, we have a moving contact in the debris field ahead,” Netty said.

That yanked my attention, along with everyone else’s, to the overlay. I saw the new icon, bright red instead of the neutral green. And it was moving fast, directly toward us. Really fast.

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

“No idea. It’s a completely unfamiliar design. Roughly equivalent to a class 10 mass-wise, but it has phenomenal acceleration,” Netty replied.

I had to agree with the assessment. Whatever it was, it was managing nearly twice the Fafnir’s acceleration, which seemed improbable—but there it was.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s the sort of delta-v you’d expect from a missile, not a ship, isn’t it?” I asked, trying not to let my sudden surge of anxiety creep into my voice. I didn’t do a very good job of it.

“It certainly is. No inertial dampening system can cope with that sort of acceleration. There must be a good twenty g’s of force being applied on the structure of that thing,” Rolis said.

“Twenty g’s. So I’d weigh, like, seventeen hundred kilos.”

“You would. Not that you’d have long to worry about all that extra weight, because you’d be squashed flat against some bulkhead,” Perry replied.

I watched as the new icon rapidly gained velocity. “Netty, is it broadcasting… anything?”

“No. Not even active scanners.”

“Let’s try opening a comm channel.”

Netty dutifully complied, but I ended up speaking to dead air.

“Okay, I’m officially considering that whatever-the-hell-it-is to be hostile. Torina, let’s fire some warning shots.”

We were still outside maximum effective laser range, but Torina didn’t try to hit the thing, just slam a couple of shots across its bow. It made no difference, the strange ship just kept driving straight toward us.

“Van, I’ve been doing some quick calculations back here, and I think we should probably run,” Rolis said.

I glanced back. “Not that I disagree, but why?”

“Because that thing probably has no crew. It’s automated, completely autonomous. And its material composition matches a lot of the debris, suggesting it’s a survivor from the battle.”

“So… a drone?”

“Yeah. A drone that’s still active, still following its programming to attack anything perceived as a threat. And that means that it’s probably responsible for destroying all of these ships, including the Brawny Lass.”

We all just stared at the overlay in silence for a moment. The Brawny Lass had been a hefty ship, designed for salvage and stoutly constructed. And yet, somehow this thing had torn the guts right out of her.

“Netty, highest possible acceleration in whatever direction’s going to get us away from that thing in the quickest possible time,” I said.

There was a pause, then she answered.

“There is no direction like that, Van. Given our current velocity and trajectory, our best acceleration, and its performance, we can’t possibly outrun it. It will catch us long before we even get close to a twist point.”

I sank back in my seat. “Shit.”

Torina nodded in grim agreement.

“It looks like we’ve finally found our ghost.”

26

Not a ghost, though, as much as a sort of junkyard dog, one of those vicious mongrels that were used to protect scrapyards from would-be scavengers. It might not have been designed for that, and was intended to be a machine of war, but that was the role it had fallen into. Still loyal to its ancient programming, it must lay dormant, sometimes for years or even decades, before an approaching ship would bring it back to destructive life.

“Okay, folks. Options would be appreciated,” I said.

“Shoot the shit out of it,” Icky said, her shrug evident in her voice.

Perry looked back at her. “We have to assume that everyone else who came here tried that and, well, all the wreckage tells us how effective that was.”

I zoomed out the overlay. There was absolutely nothing out here except for the debris field and the neutron star. The latter would irradiate us, rip us apart with gravitational or magnetic effects, or, more likely, some combination of the above. It was effectively a no-go zone as far out from Arx as Mercury orbited the Sun, maybe a little farther.

“The debris field. It’s our only choice, the only place we’ll find any cover,” I said.

I felt everyone start to object, then cut themselves off. We had literally no other choice, aside from confronting the thing more or less head-on. And Perry’s point about trying that still rang in my ears.

“Netty, can we dodge this thing and make a break for all that wreckage?”

“That’s one thing we can do, yes. It would mean accelerating directly toward it, though, which entails a close pass by. And it wouldn’t take long to reverse course and come after us, assuming it can sustain that sort of performance. But it should be long enough for us to reach the field.”

“Okay, then. Let’s do that.”

Thick, tense silence fell over the Fafnir’s cockpit like a funeral shroud. There were implacable, unspoken questions and realities hanging off the end of my order. Foremost among them was then what? We were good for a few hours before the accumulated radiation from the neutron star started to reach dangerous levels, particularly in Torina and me. Our anti-rad drugs would buy us some time, but probably only a few more hours. At some point, we’d have to either fight or make a break for it. And if our junkyard dog maintained its fearsome performance, making a break for it was really just another way of saying fight.

And to make matters worse, our options for running were equally bleak. We were denied a huge swath of space because of the lethal power of Arx, which meant it wouldn’t even be all that hard to predict which way we’d have to flee.

“Torina, as soon as that thing’s in range—”

“Way ahead of you, Van,” she said, keeping her eyes locked on her fire controls. There was that, at least. Thanks to Gerhardt’s little present of a new fire-control system, we’d be able to start shooting as soon as our weapons had a decent chance to do damage, rather than being able to hit in the first place.

“We’re in effective missile range, Van,” Netty said.

“Okay. Let’s fire a spread, two from each launcher.”

The Fafnir shuddered as the ordnance leapt away. In the meantime, Torina handed control of one of the laser batteries to Rolis.

“Okay, firing… now,” Torina said.

The lasers opened up and slammed coherent beams of energy into the dog.

They both skipped off, like they’d struck mirrors.

“What the hell? Netty, what happened?”

“Remember how your Moonsword can deflect beam weapons? It would seem this thing can do that, too.”

“Yeah, this just gets better and better,” Zeno muttered.

“Keep firing anyway. Hopefully it’ll still be enough to distract it while our missiles close in,” I said, my voice filled with false bravado.

Torina and Rolis fired the lasers in controlled bursts, giving them time to recycle and their emitters to cool between shots. I hoped that the decreasing range and the concurrently increasing intensity of the beams would eventually burn through whatever was deflecting our shots, but no such luck.

“Van, I’ve been analyzing that thing’s course corrections as we close. It’s on an intercept course,” Netty said.

“Uh, kinda had that figured out already, Netty.”

“No, I mean an actual intercept course. It appears to be trying to collide with us.”

“What? You’re saying it’s—what, expendable? So there might be more of these out there?”

“Oh.”

We all turned to Rolis.

“Oh. Oh, dear,” he said.

“Rolis, please tell the whole class whatever you’re muttering about,” I said.

“A ram. It’s a ram. It’s designed to collide with other ships.”

“But… that would destroy it,” Icky said.

Zeno, though, shook her head. “Not necessarily. I’ve been puzzling over what, exactly, is deflecting our shots. All I can tell is that there’s some sort of field wrapped around the prow of that thing. That’s what’s doing the deflecting. But if it can deflect any sort of energy, including kinetic—”

“Exactly,” Rolis said.

I turned in my seat. “Wait. Are you telling me that thing is, like, impervious to any sort of frontal attack?”

“It may not just be frontal attacks. If it’s designed to plow through other ships, then whatever’s protecting it might enclose the whole thing,” Rolis said.

“So… the sonofabitch is indestructible?”

“And immortal, and utterly remorseless. In other words, it’s a machine perfectly designed to do what it does: kill things.”

* * *

I shook my head. “Wait. It must have fuel. Surely it can’t make energy out of nothing.”

“Not unless someone figured out how to break fundamental physical laws, which then makes me wonder how they just didn’t win this battle outright in the first place,” Rolis replied.

“Actually, the characteristics of its exhaust plasma suggests it may be burning antimatter as fuel. If that’s the case, then it may have a functionally nearly unlimited supply of fuel, depending on how much antimatter it’s carrying,” Netty put in.

“Antimatter drives? Hell, we’re still years away from managing that sort of tech. Who the hell were these people?” Zeno said.

“Our missiles will be detonating momentarily,” Netty said.

We all turned back to the overlay, and the image on the display above it. I waited for point-defense fire to erupt from the dog, but it just powered on, ignoring the missiles entirely.

They finally detonated in rapid succession, their rudimental AIs altering their terminal trajectories and timing their detonations to keep focusing the repeated blasts on the same part of their target. I tensed as the fourth and last vanished in a searing flash.

An instant later, the dog sailed out of the lingering cloud of cooling plasma, entirely unperturbed.

“Okay. Well, that didn’t work,” Perry said.

“Van, I’ve programmed a course that will take us into the debris field close to the Brawny Lass. It’s the densest part of the field and should give us the best cover. We’ll be flipping and decelerating in about five minutes,” Netty said.

I swallowed the anxious bile prodding at the bottom of my gullet. “Okay, Netty. Do what you have to do.”

I turned to Torina. “Keep shooting. And as soon as the mass-driver and particle cannons are in range—”

She nodded. “I will.”

Our eyes met. We both knew that none of it was going to do a damned bit of good.

* * *

The dog kept up its relentless maneuvering, determined to collide with us despite the onslaught of our weapons-fire. Fortunately, we had acceleration on our side, at least for the moment. The thing had built up so much velocity that it had the turning radius of a speeding asteroid, while our own relatively low velocity meant we were much more nimble. It had obviously expected us to keep closing in the hope that our weapons would finally start to bite, but when it figured out our strategy, it flipped and started to bleed off velocity at a furious rate.

Netty adjusted our course and burned hard, pushing the Fafnir out of the dog’s path and beyond its ability to turn and keep tracking us. We ended up sweeping past it just a few hundred kilometers away. I’d braced myself for a sudden barrage of weapons fire to erupt from it, because of course it must be armed on top of everything else it had going for it, but it didn’t. We, on the other hand, pummeled it with every weapon we had as we flashed by, all of them firing as fast as they’d recharge and recuperate.

We might as well have been lobbing spitballs at it.

It raced on spaceward but would soon stop and be able to reverse course and come after us. Netty kept us slowing relative to the debris field anyway, sliding us neatly through its near boundary with enough velocity to maintain our way while still being able to dodge the bigger pieces. The Fafnir took a few hits from smaller bits, one of them detonating a REAB module with a heavy thud.

A few moments later, we coasted to a stop. I took the controls, using the thrusters to nudge the Fafnir behind the battered hulk of the Brawny Lass. I left only our upper scanner array exposed, effectively hull-down, so we could watch the dog as it made its return.

“Netty, how long—"

“About forty minutes, then it’ll be on top of us again.”

I sat back. Forty minutes. Working my jaw muscles to relieve some of the building tension, I let a breath trickle from my nose, eyes closed to the blackness outside.

“Van?” Torina asked.

“Yeah?”

She said nothing, and when I turned to face her, I saw an expression I knew well, because I felt it myself. There are few things heavier than words yet unspoken, and both of us labored under the silence we didn’t know how to fill.

27

I watched the blood-red icon representing the dog steadily slow as it burned off its velocity. “Anyone have any brilliant ideas that we can make work in, like, half an hour?”

“Get it to point-blank range and then blast it with everything we’ve got,” Icky suggested.

“A very Icky idea, and not even necessarily a bad one. But Netty and I have been analyzing the patterns of damage we’ve seen on the wreckage of ships from known space in this debris field, and—let’s just say that we need to assume that’s not going to work,” Perry said.

Icky scowled. “Why not?”

“Because it seems that the most common, and maybe even the only attack mode used by this thing is colliding with its targets.”

“Why, though? Pretty inefficient, isn’t it? Ramming another ship in space—which, I might add, is really, really big? And ships are really, really fast?”

“Not if it’s a capital ship, which I suspect is what this thing was specifically built to attack. It’s far faster and more maneuverable than, say, a class 12 or larger, and being all but impervious to incoming fire actually makes it really deadly, a sort of big, reusable kinetic penetrator,” Perry replied.

“Like a huge mass-driver slug that guides itself around space,” Zeno put in.

“Exactly. And as for why it has no lasers or launchers or any other conventional weapons, that might have something to do with keeping the hull unbroken. Anything protruding through it is just a potentially vulnerable spot.”

“How is that even possible, though? How could anything survive a collision with another ship? How is it not just a one-shot weapon?” Torina asked.

Zeno spoke up. “I might have an answer to that. I’ve been analyzing the hell out of our weapon performance when we bombarded the damned thing as it streaked by. We had an overall hit rate of nearly eighty-four percent, which is, by the way, some damned fine shooting, thanks to our new fire-control system. The sheer amount of energy we delivered to it should have been enough to shred it into just so much chaff. But we didn’t even seem to scratch it.”

I glanced back. “What are you suggesting, Zeno? That it’s somehow impervious? It can’t be destroyed?”

“No, I’m definitely not saying that. I mean, it might be true, but we can’t come to that conclusion based on what we actually know. What I can say is that using our weapons the way we normally do, just to shoot the shit out of the target, probably isn’t going to be a winning strategy.”

“Alright, I accept your premise. I’m listening to any and all solutions you might have.”

She shrugged. “Still working on it. The only thing I can say for sure at the moment is that hitting it from head-on, or along that one flank, did no noticeable damage. As for the other side of the hull relative to us as we passed it, or from astern, I have no idea.”

“So maybe shooting this thing right up the tailpipe is the way to go,” Torina said.

Icky giggled. “Right up the tailpipe.”

I opened my mouth to snap on her for flippancy at a time that was most definitely not flippant, but I heard giggles and saw Torina smile. What the hell. If Icky’s schoolyard humor helped keep up spirits, who was I to argue?

“Okay, so an attack from directly astern might be the answer,” I said. But Netty spoke up.

“If we go that route, we’re definitely going to want to be more than a thousand klicks behind it,” she said.

“Why so far?”

“The exhaust plume is why. Remember I said it has all the characteristics of a plume produced by antimatter reactions? Within one thousand kilometers, we’d probably be at a greater risk than it would, simply because it could simply fire its drive and either destroy or cripple the Fafnir. In fact, I’d recommend more than twenty-five hundred klicks, to be on the safe side.”

“How the hell can they afford to burn antimatter for a real-space drive anyway? There’s a reason it’s so damn expensive, and we only use it to power twist drives?” Icky said.

I shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. Whoever built this thing obviously either thought it was a good investment, or could somehow source antimatter on the cheap.”

“Now that would be a moneymaker,” Rolis noted.

“Yeah, except we have to figure out how to not be vaporized into elements. Tough to do banking in that state.”

“Speaking of which, Van, have you been watching the rad levels? I hate to pile on more bad news, but that neutron star does have an accretion disk spiraling around it. It’s not much of one, but the material is hot enough that it’s glowing in the gamma-ray end of the spectrum. The intensity this far away reaches that uh-oh category we talked about earlier, which means it’s not going to be immediately fatal, but—”

I nodded. “Yeah. But it will be fatal. How long?”

“Six hours, give or take a couple of hours either way. It depends on other factors, like how much debris we keep between Arx and us. But gamma this intense penetrates pretty well, so there’s nowhere we can actually reduce it to zero, aside from the emergency shelter.”

I sighed. Again. The Fafnir’s hold was a designated rad shelter, being stout enough to resist rads far more intense than even these values. It was intended as a place to take refuge from a big stellar flare or something similar. But it wasn’t very big, and in the absence of some way out of this mess, would only swap taking a fatal radiation dose for a different, eventual death—starvation, maybe, or even asphyxiation once the radiation began chewing its way through the Fafnir’s systems.

I clenched my teeth. We needed a plan, and we didn’t seem to have one. We couldn’t possibly outrun our pursuer, and we had no idea if we could damage it or, if we could, how. But we couldn’t just outwait it, either, because even if we could avoid it, we’d end up dead anyway. It would just take longer.

I sighed and shook my head. “Apologies, everyone.”

Perry looked at me. “What are you sorry about? Wait—is that your ship out there, that you designed and built and ordered to attack us? Dick move, boss.”

“Hilarious. You know what I mean. It’s my fault we’re here and stuck in this predicament—"

Torina looked at the others, then turned to me. “Van, sto—”

I glanced at her. “What? It’s true. I should have—”

“Listened to the ghost stories?”

“Yeah. Or at least… taken it under advisement. My definition of ghost is too narrow for me to be an effective commander, which is a sentence I never planned on saying, mind you, but here we are. This isn’t a moaning apparition. This is worse, and I should have seen it for what it truly is: a cautionary tale.”

After listening patiently, it was Torina’s turn to sigh. “Van, remind me when you rescinded your policy that any member of this crew could object without fear of reprisal?”

Perry flicked a wing. “Didn’t get that memo, boss. Which means—"

I felt a grin pulling at my lips, which was a solid improvement over staring into the blackness. “It’s time for an answer to this problem. Alright, that means we all kick in—no suggestion is out of bounds, maybe with the possible exception of whatever Icky is about to say first. Wanna get this one out of the way, Ick?”

She looked sheepish, kneading her hands together. Mumbling, she said, “I was just gonna say we should smash that bastard into scrap even though it might hurt some feelings.”

I lifted a brow, my smile turning to a grin. “Feelings? Interesting. Okay, friends, gather ’round. Let’s discuss the best way to hunt a ghost.”

* * *

With about fifteen minutes to go, we finally had a plan, and in those moments of discussion I learned yet another lesson about the art of command. Sometimes, instinct is just as important as doctrine, and instinct has a funny way of saving your ass.

I watched the crimson icon steadily drawing closer. The thing burned like hell to accelerate back here but had flipped and decelerated at about the halfway point, suggesting it wanted to come to nearly a dead stop relative to us and the debris field around us when it finally returned. And that made sense, since it could just sit on the edge of the field and wait for us to make the next move. It had no reason to come in hunting us and could just conserve fuel, like a big cat on the Serengeti that knew an antelope was lying low in the tall grass so it just waited, conserving energy, for it to show itself. It was unnerving as hell.

Being prey, I decided, was not my natural setting, and I wasn’t about to tolerate it.

But the battered, radiation-infused wreckage around us sure didn’t help matters. Everywhere we looked, we saw the shattered evidence of the dog’s tenacious power, a harbinger of the likely fate awaiting us. The Brawny Lass offered the starkest picture, since we were now pretty sure we knew what had smashed through her, ripping out her amidships guts.

The dog had stopped about five hundred klicks away. We remained huddled on the other side of the Brawny Lass, using her bulk to shield us. Not that we thought for a moment that the dog had lost track of us, but it seemed content to just wait for us to start maneuvering.

“It’s not waiting. It’s… lurking,” I muttered, watching the screens with diamond focus. The target sat with an inert patience that made little combat sense, then Perry hopped forward, his amber eyes fixated on the debris field sprawling before us. “What are you thinking?” I asked.

“Some of the hulks and fragments in here would once have been part of its fleet. Maybe its programming limits its aggressive behavior because of that,” Perry said, then turned to face me. “Friendly fire, so to speak.”

I took that thought and ran with it. “So maybe it won’t weaponize its drive while its inside this debris field, which means we can try a shot right up the engine bell, since there won’t be any exhaust to cook off our round. All we need to do is set the table and see if our dog comes to dinner.”

Torina’s face was a mask of worry, but then we locked eyes and she brightened, if only a bit.

“Okay, everyone ready?” I asked.

Torina glanced around, then gave a grand wave. “Onward.”

“Was hoping you’d say that. Okay, Netty, Perry, you know the plan. Whenever you’re ready.”

A frisson of fear and excitement ran through the Fafnir’s cockpit. Between the looming threat of the dog and the rad warnings quietly blipping away on the status display, things were already wound tight. For the first time in a combat situation, I reached out, took Torina’s hand, and gave it a gentle squeeze, then it was over, a lingering sensation of presence and support that went well beyond a simple touch.

Netty applied thrust, lifting us clear of the Brawny Lass relative to the junkyard dog. Torina, Rolis, and I were already poised over the triggers, and everyone opened fire as soon as our weapons came to bear.

At only a few hundred klicks range, the sheer weight of firepower from the Fafnir was fearsome. Torina and Rolis fired as fast as the lasers would cycle, while I switched back and forth between the particle cannon and the mass-driver, slamming out shot after shot in a punishing volley that lit up the screens in a staccato of violence. Zeno focused on the effect we were having, and Icky kept close watch on the Fafnir herself, while Perry stayed focused for any other threats that might present themselves, his eyes following the action far faster than any human—or alien—could.

As expected, we bathed the dog in a hurricane of destructive energy that seemed to have little effect. A thrill of worry hit me, that the thing would just sit there, forcing us to go to plan B—and there was no plan B. But the dog suddenly coughed out a searing plume of drive plasma and shot toward us at a fearsome acceleration.

“Netty—”

“On it, boss.”

She was playing what amounted to a very delicate game of chicken with the dog. The closer she let it get, the more velocity it built up and the more cumbersome its maneuvers became. The trick was to basically play a matador, letting the bull charge as close as possible before dodging aside.

I doubt that any of us, even Torina, as fine a pilot as she was, could have matched Netty’s timing. She abruptly slammed the thrusters to full power, shoving the Fafnir aside just as the dog swept past, missing us by only a couple of hundred meters.

“Now, Netty!”

She spun the Fafnir in place as hard as her thrusters allowed—the dog had cut its drive and already started to flip, to burn to a stop, then come back at us. It gave us the momentary opening we’d been hoping for as the engine bell bloomed into vulnerability right on cue. Torina, Rolis, and I targeted the gaping maw of the dog’s drive and loosed a torrent of laser, mass-driver, and particle cannon fire, then followed up with a pair of missiles. One of us—I wasn’t even sure who—inadvertently clipped one of them, blasting it apart. But the other sailed on with the vicious, unerring aim of a shot that was powered by good luck and destiny.

“This won’t hurt a bit,” I hissed.

“What’s that, boss?” Perry asked.

“Just something I heard during my Army physical.”

Perry gave me a sidelong glance. “You’ll have to tell me some—”

“Not a chance, bird. Looky there—the magic bullet.”

Destructive energy flared around the dog’s tail, culminating in the blast of the missile’s warhead. We’d had to deactivate the safety that normally prevented the thing from arming until it had traveled a minimum safe distance from the Fafnir, so the blast seared our own exterior. I stared, then blinked as the residual plasma cleared, my vision swimming with kaleidoscopic fury.

The dog had come about and was accelerating straight at us.

Before any of us could react, Netty slammed the forward thrusters to full power, pitching the Fafnir up, then fired the main drive. We shot forward and up relative to the dog, which passed so close beneath us I was sure we’d hear the sickening sound of our hulls kissing.

An instant later, our exhaust—and the dog's impact—shattered what remained of the Brawny Lass as her midships exploded in a storm of gleaming debris. The proud little vessel broke apart in a final cataclysm of violence, her components racing outward from the point of impact.

“Netty, get us back behind some cover!”

“On it.”

She deftly spun the Fafnir through all three axes, accelerating toward the Brawny Lass’ intact stern section, then flipping hard over, thrusting us to a relative stop, and cutting the drive.

Glancing at our screens, I saw we’d been in combat for seventy-one seconds.

I looked around slowly, a deliberate calm cloaking my features. “Everyone okay?”

“Does being scared shitless count as okay?” Icky asked. I glanced at her, startled to see a sort of panic etched into her simian face. It didn’t fit.

“Scared shitless is fine, yeah,” I said, then turned back to the overlay. The dog had come about and gone quiet again—

No. Wait. It puffed thrusters of its own, bits and chunks of debris sliding slowly past even though it remained stationary relative to us.

I blinked, not getting it. How was all the debris suddenly moving?

But it wasn’t. We were. The impact of the dog had started the stern of the Brawny Lass slowly tumbling, maybe one revolution every few minutes. But it had also ejected it from the debris cloud, which meant that, as long as we wanted to use it for cover, we’d slowly exit the debris cloud, too.

And the dog, with the remorseless patience of a machine, was keeping pace and waiting.

* * *

“Van, we’re going to have to make a decision in about twenty minutes,” Netty said. “Actually, closer to nineteen given our inertia.”

“Thanks, Netty. Let me know if the rate of decay changes.”

“Will do.”

We had nineteen minutes—or less—before the ruined stern of the Brawny Lass would tumble out of the debris field and into the relative clear. At that point, it would be all that stood between us and the dog. And since smashing through a ship was what the dog apparently did, it was an illusory sort of cover. Unencumbered by the debris field, we had to assume that the dog would be free to use its fearsome acceleration to full effect. That meant we had to be both good and lucky every time it took a run at us, to get out of the way.

It only had to be better and luckier once.

I stared helplessly at the tactical overlay, as there didn’t seem to be a possible win here. The dog seemed impervious to our weapons no matter what the target aspect—it likely had unlimited fuel, it did have the infinite patience of a machine, and most of all, time was entirely on its side. If we didn’t get clear of the neutron star’s ceaseless gamma ray bombardment, Torina and I would succumb to radiation sickness in another couple of hours. Icky would follow, and Zeno sometime after her. Perry, Rolis, and Netty would last longer, months or even years, maybe, but the unending bombardment by high-energy photons would eventually take them down, too.

“You guys are sure we can’t call for help? Schegith’s cousin, maybe. Or Lucky?” Icky asked, frustrated stress hardening her voice.

I sighed. We’d already been through this. The combined effects of the neutron star’s gravitation, its other emissions, and interference that seemed to be emanating from the debris field, the dog itself, or both, we couldn’t form a stable twist-comm link. And even if we could, help was much too far away to do Torina and me any good.

“If we’re going to get out of this, Icky, we have to do it ourselves,” I said.

A thick shroud of silence descended over the cockpit even as I schooled my features into something other than the obvious conclusion—this haunted, lonely, place, filled with—

I glanced at the debris field, at this graveyard of broken ships. How many other crews had sat here, in exactly the same position, their last moments ticking away? How long had it taken them to accept that their own end was inevitable?

“Damn.”

I turned to Zeno. “What?”

She waved a hand at her workstation. “I’ve been poring over the data from our attack, as ineffective and useless as it was. I think I get what’s protecting that damned thing. It’s generating some sort of effect that basically reinforces the molecular bonds in the substance of its hull. I have no idea how, and holy shit would that be worth a lot of money if we could figure it out.”

“Gotta be honest, Zeno, but getting rich is not high up my priority list right now.”

“Yeah, yeah. Mine neither.” She sat back and rubbed her eyes. “It’s too bad we can’t duplicate the effect of that Moonsword of yours, and do it on a bigger scale.”

I turned in my seat. “Why?”

“Well, because what makes it so sharp is an effect built into its blade that effectively neutralizes molecular bonds. Linulla explained it to me, but honestly, the science is even beyond me.” She lowered her hands and smiled. “Frankly, I think he left some stuff out, protecting trade secrets and all that.”

“Wait—are you saying the Moonsword would cut through that thing’s hull?”

“Uh… yeah, probably. Doesn’t matter how much you reinforce a bond if something just neutralizes it. And maybe if we had weeks, and the facilities of a whole lab, I could try to reverse-engineer it. I mean, if we could apply that effect to some mass-driver rounds, hell, we’d probably be able to shoot clean through the damned thing.”

She shrugged. “But could’a-would’a-should’a, right? Might as well wish to have magic powers—”

But I was unstrapping. “Zeno, I just want to be clear on this. The Moonsword will cut through that thing’s hull, right?”

“Yeah. Well, probably. I mean, we’d have to test it, but—”

She stiffened. “Van, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that we’ve been approaching this wrong. We want to bludgeon this thing into submission. Maybe—with all due respect to Icky’s preferred combat method—maybe it’s time for me to cut.”

28

“Van, you’re crazy. I’ve a good mind to declare you unfit for command and confine you to the brig,” Torina snapped.

I glanced at Perry. “Can she do that?”

“Oh, I’m sure she could. But if you’re asking if there’s any provision in the regs for it—well, yes, but you’d have to be incapacitated, or so delusional or whatever that you simply couldn’t exercise proper command.”

“I’m not delusional, Torina,” I said, strapping the Moonsword onto my harness.

“Maybe a little, Van. You’re proposing to go out there, somehow get yourself onto that damned thing, then cut your way inside. There are—I don’t even know how many ways that could go wrong, starting with the approach. And the second step. And then every single solitary thing after that. I—look at me. Your valor is pure, we all know that. You don’t swagger, you don’t gloat. But… this?”

“So what would you propose? Us sitting here until we die from radiation poisoning from that damned neutron star, or that thing out there finally manages to land a hit, or we just run out of water or starve to death? Because if you’ve got another alternative, I’m all ears.”

“Let Zeno and Perry and the others keep working on the problem, find a way to penetrate that thing’s armor. They’ve got the idea of your Moonsword to work from—”

“In the meantime, I’ve got the actual Moonsword, right here, ready to use now.”

Torina turned to Zeno. “Is there any chance you can—?”

“No.”

Torina seemed taken aback by the starkly blunt answer, but Zenophir just shrugged. “I’m sorry, Torina, but I’m not the sort to tell comforting lies. When I said a full lab, and weeks of time to do research, I meant it.”

“We could contact Linulla—”

“We can’t contact anyone, Torina,” I said, then stepped close to her. “I’ll be honest. I don’t want to do this. But it’s our only chance, and I need you here, on my side, calling the shots while I do it. Can you do that?”

“Van, I—”

“Torina, can you do it? If you can’t, that’s fine, I’ll get Perry to take over.”

“I’d have to take orders from the bird? Torina, please don’t make me take orders from the bird,” Icky said, and I gave her a grateful look. In her own way, she was trying to be supportive.

Torina crossed her arms and looked down. I gave her a moment, then she looked back up. Her face had hardened, maybe because she was angry at the dog, at the situation, maybe at me. It didn’t matter. If she needed anger and outrage as a foundation to work from, fine—whatever worked. I could be her sounding board, if only because I could take it, and she needed the outlet.

“Alright. You’re going to do this, despite me not wanting you to. You’re just lucky that I hate that thing out there more than I hate you right now.”

“Van, I think she’s coming on to you,” Icky whispered.

That provoked a few chuckles, and even a fleeting smile from Torina. “Okay, since this is going to happen, let’s get it over with.”

“Van, I should be the one going with you,” Perry said.

I looked at him where he was standing on the galley table. “And I honestly wish you were the one who was—no offense, Rolis.”

“Hey, none taken. Honestly, I wish Perry was the one going with you, too, and not me,” Rolis replied.

I smiled. “Perry hasn’t designed, built, and repaired spaceships, Rolis. Sorry, that makes you the ideal candidate for, ah, figuring out how a spaceship works.”

“Skewered by my own brilliance.”

My smile became a grin. “Something like that.”

I looked around at everyone. “Ah’ll be bahk.”

Perry made a tongue click. “Van, you really gotta get better at reading the room before you try to land a pop culture joke.”

I made a point of exchanging a look with each of my crew and putting a hand on the bulkhead to include Netty. “Okay, Torina’s in charge, and like she said—let’s get this over with.”

I snapped my helmet into place and turned for the airlock, Rolis clattering along the deck behind me.

* * *

I crouched in the open airlock, facing the void. Rolis was clamped to my back, clamped to my harness and gripping a portable maneuvering unit.

I blinked. I was sweating, which might have just been nerves, but might have been something else. The same something else that was triggering the first stirrings of a headache. I couldn’t see the high-energy gamma photons streaming away from the neutron star sleeting through me, of course, but I thought I was starting to feel their effects. And it would only get worse once I left the enclosing mass of the Fafnir.

“Van? Body report, boss?” Rolis asked, using the private channel we’d established so we didn’t end up with the others talking over us.

I looked at the slowly turning hulk of the Brawny Lass’s broken stern, just a few hundred meters away. “Yeah. Why?”

“Because you muttered something there.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, you did.”

I meant to shrug and leave it at that, but there was too much at stake for me to play tough guy. “I think I’m allergic to gamma rays. Which means—well, Rolis, if I seem to do or say anything that seems stupid, out of place, whatever, I need you to give me a reality check, okay?”

“You got it.”

Torina came on over the general channel. “Van, we’re ready. How about you?”

“Oh, hell no. But we’re going in, and we’re bringing the Moonsword with us.”

“Ten seconds.”

I braced myself.

The battered stern of the Brawny Lass began to move and slide downward. At the same time, the Fafnir rotated, keeping it in view.

“Bad guy inbound,” Torina said in a brusque, clipped tone, and I braced myself even harder. Torina and Netty had to again play the matador to the charging bull of our tormentor. Worse, they had to do it with even more tolerance for failure, because we needed the dog to pass by as close as possible without, you know, actually hitting us. And we needed the dog to cut its drive as soon as it realized it was going to miss, and then—

I cut my racing thoughts off. Yes, many things had to go right, many of which we simply couldn’t control. But that’s where we were—desperate times and measures and all that.

I checked myself again, for the dozenth time. I hefted the Moonsword, ensuring that my tether was still firmly connected to the lanyard loop in its pommel.

The smooth bulk of the dog abruptly blotted out most of the Brawny Lass, sliding past seemingly close enough to touch.

The Moonsword raised, I jumped, then Rolis hollered, “Stab that sumbitch, cowboy!”

* * *

If I managed to land on the dog’s hull, and if the Moonsword would penetrate the otherwise impervious hull, and if the dog obligingly cut its drive the way it did last time, and if we could cut our way into it before it fired its drive again—well, if all these things, then this wouldn’t be an abject failure.

The first if was easy. Between my own leap and the thrust of the maneuvering unit controlled by Rolis, we easily sailed across the gap and arrived at the dog’s hull about a third of the way from its stern.

It had cut its drive, too, and was thrusting madly, trying to turn to bring the Fafnir back into its sights. Torina and Netty would be thrusting just as hard, trying to stay tantalizingly out of its reach. So that was another if down, although it meant that the dog was actually rotating away from me as it spun, effectively slowing my approach. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it was the next if that would determine if this even had a hope of working. Everything hinged on what happened in the next five seconds.

We reached the smooth, unbroken curve of the dog’s hull.

I slammed the Moonsword point-first against it as hard as I could.

I expected to bounce back and rebound into space. At best, I hoped it might stick deep enough to give us a chance at some purchase, because there was nothing else to grab—not a stanchion, not an antenna mount, nothing but flat, slightly resinous-looking alloy. What I hadn’t expected was for the blade to smoothly sink into the metal, almost hilt deep.

The dog’s spin immediately tried to yank us from the hull. Perry was watching us closely, trying to coach Torina and Netty to maneuver in a way that would minimize the dog’s gyrations as it tried to track the Fafnir. My hand was pulled off the Moonsword’s grip, and Rolis and I were flung spaceward. We only traveled a couple of meters before the tether went taut, slamming me to a stop. I winced and yelped, ready for the blade to pop free of the hull, but it stayed rooted in place, as though it was meant to be part of the thing’s structure.

I pulled at the tether, trying to drag myself back to the hull. But despite being only a couple of g’s, the acceleration was enough to have me trying to drag nearly two hundred kilos of weight back to the blade. I just couldn’t do it.

“Perry! Need you… to stop it—!”

“Hang on, boss.”

I couldn’t see the Fafnir, wasn’t even sure what she was doing. It didn’t matter. I trusted them to do their part, which was—

The tether abruptly went slack, and the hull of the dog suddenly rose toward me.

“Rolis, this is about to get—”

“More dangerous? Somehow doubting that, Van, but I love your vaguely emo outlook.”

I grabbed the blade. Rolis deftly applied thrust with the maneuvering unit, giving me enough weight, and therefore leverage, to push the blade in a steady arc. It cut through the dog’s hull with surprising ease, the blade moving like a proverbial knife through butter. Gasping, grunting with exertion, I kept shoving the blade until I had a half-circle of a cut, the metallic edges bright in a violation of the dull, battered hull.

“Perry—” I sucked in a breath. “Thirty more seconds.”

“Doing our best.”

The dog abruptly shot forward. I clutched the Moonsword in a deathgrip, my knuckles cracking with dull pops. If the thing’s drive was firing, this was over. I wouldn’t hold against thirty or forty g’s of acceleration for even an instant, and I’d likely lose my arm or the blade or both. I wouldn’t feel much pain, though, because Rolis and I would be engulfed in incandescent plasma, and that would be that—too fast for the pain impulses to even reach my brain.

But the acceleration died again. I caught a glimpse of the Fafnir spinning wildly only hundreds of meters away, locked in a lethal dance with the dog as its murderous partner and desperately trying to shape its movements to give us our best chance. One even slightly wrong move and the dog would smash the Fafnir to fragments.

I cut, hard. I finally closed the cut, then twisted the Moonsword slightly. A flattened circle of hull plating drifted away, heading starward.

We had no idea how the dog’s interior was laid out and could have just cut into a piece of machinery or a structural member. But the gap was empty, and that was all I needed to see.

“Rolis, go!”

I gripped the edge of the hole as he scampered up my back, over my head and into the gap. The maneuvering unit sailed off after the cut piece of hull plating.

As soon as he was inside, I followed him, sword raised as stygian blackness wrapped me tight.

The fight was on.

* * *

We found ourselves facing more ifs, ones I really hadn’t expected to have to worry about it. What if the dog’s interior space was essentially non-existent? It wasn’t, as far as we knew, intended to carry a crew, after all. Even if it wasn’t, what if there were security systems we couldn’t bypass? What if entering it triggered a self-destruct? The detonation of the sheer amount of antimatter we suspected might be aboard would vaporize the Fafnir and most of the debris field. And even if we got past all of that, what if the thing didn’t have internal gravity? As soon as its drive kicked in, Rolis I would be nothing but smears on the bulkhead.

As I swung my helmet lamp around it, it struck me this wasn’t a plan as much as it was a whole bunch of wishful thinking. Torina had been right—a fact I preferred to keep to myself for a few decades.

“See, Van, I told you there’d be an actual interior. Remember what I said—somebody’s got to maintain this thing,” Rolis said.

I took a shuddering breath. “I believe you—now. Forgive my lack of faith before.”

“No worries. And look, there’s internal gravity, too. Fancy that.”

Rolis had insisted there would be, to relieve the stress of high-g acceleration on interior components. He had an I told you so tone in his voice that he’d rightly earned.

“My pride will recover from having so wrongly doubted you. I—” I had to stop, wincing and momentarily losing my balance. I’d avoided looking at the rad count on my heads-up because it had been red the whole time. The accumulated dosage still was, but the current count had dropped to nearly zero.

So the dog was apparently impervious to radiation, too. Small mercies.

We pushed into the dog’s central access corridor. I let Rolis lead, since he knew ships and their fundamental design principles—well, at least as well as I knew hacking. He scampered along toward the bow for a few meters and stopped at a cross-junction. Short corridors, each only a few meters long, extended left and right. Rolis immediately began searching, looking for some way to access the dog’s flight-control and other systems.

“Torina, you there?”

Nothing.

“Torina, come in.”

Silence.

Shit. “Torina, answer me—!” I started, but Rolis cut me off.

“Van, this thing’s hull is probably blocking comms, too,” he said.

I cursed. With no external references, no sense of motion, and no comms, I had no idea what was happening. For all we knew, the Fafnir may just be so much debris.

“Aha—here we go,” Rolis said, finding an access plate set into a conduit. “This conduit’s carrying the primary data bus, right up the core of the ship where it’s best protected. There’s probably a diagnostics port behind this panel.”

“Do you know that for sure?”

“Oh, hell no. But assuming this thing was designed and built according to the usual, common-sense way of laying out a ship, it’s a pretty good, educated guess.”

I shrugged. “What the hell, why should we be worried about certainty now, right? Just… as fast as you can, Rolis.”

“You can count on that,” he said, levering the plate off. Sure enough, there was a data port inside, set into a box that merged a variety of cables.

“Do you have a compatible plug? Any way of connecting into that?”

“Nope. I mean, seriously, what are the odds a robot could scoot around an alien war machine and find nothing but compatible data ports?”

“So… we’re screwed?”

“Nope. Fortunately, this is what Waldo was built for,” he said, prying off the faceplate of the data port. He extracted Waldo’s data cable, snipped it, then stripped the superconductive wires. He then extended a probe and touched a contact inside the dog’s port.

Then shifted to another. Then another.

“Rolis, we don’t—”

“Van, I’ve got to know what I’m hooking up to what, here. Bad connections aren’t going to work. And I have to watch for anything that might trigger, you know, a self-destruct. This is going to take a minute.”

I took a breath. Even a minute might be too long.

* * *

It took Rolis nearly ten minutes of probing connections, evaluating them until he found the one he wanted, then spot-soldering a conductor from Waldo’s data port. And then he did it again. And again. In a dizzying model of efficient chaos, Rolis proved to be worth his weight in antimatter, and I told him so.

“Think nothing of it,” he quipped, gliding to another data portal attached to a device that reminded me of a vintage shake blender, if said blender had a magnetic containment system and a language no human had ever seen.

All I could do was sweat, try to ignore my throbbing headache, and wait. I’d already turned off my b-suit’s rad alarm, but now I dismissed the count without looking at it. If I’d taken a fatal dose of gamma radiation, I didn’t want to know it.

“There,” Rolis said, making the final connection. “I’ve got full data communications with this thing. Now, let’s see if I can do anything with it.”

I waited again. I wanted to urge Rolis to move faster, to shout at him that every second that passed was another second that Fafnir didn’t have, but I swallowed my acrid and anxious impatience. I knew full well that hacking, which was essentially what Rolis was doing, took time. The trouble was that sometimes it took hours, or longer—

He suddenly turned Waldo’s imager to me.

“Do you want the good news, or—”

“Rolis!”

“Okay. I can do this. I can disrupt the data connection between the AI controller, which is somewhere forward of us, and the flight control system, which is somewhere astern. That will let me take full control of this thing.”

“It—really? That’s—well, that’s fantastic. But I assume that’s not the bad news.”

“Nope. Two bits of bad news, actually. There’s a regular fail-safe signal being sent back from the AI to the fuel-storage system. If that signal gets interrupted, the antimatter back there—kilograms of the stuff—is going to lose containment, and we’ll vanish in a—oh, probably something around a gigaton explosion, give or take.”

“So… we’re screwed.”

“No, I can replicate the signal and have Waldo keep auto-broadcasting it.”

“So we’re not screwed. You’re going to be stuck here for the time being, which is a pain, but we’ll be good.”

“Well—”

“Damn it, Rolis!”

“Van, once I block the AI and assume control, I’m going to have to keep it indefinitely. It’s reasonable to assume that the AI, once it loses the connection, is going to terminate the fail-safe signal. That’s fine, as long as I stay hooked up. But as soon as I’m not—”

“Boom.”

“Yeah, boom. And that kind of segues into the second bit of bad news. Since this fail-safe system exists, we have to assume the AI also has counter-intrusion capabilities in case it gets hacked so it can trigger the self-destruct. That means that as soon as I take control—”

“It’s going to start trying to regain control.”

“It comes down to how good Waldo’s firewall system is.”

I let out a breath. Waldo was an off-the-shelf maintenance unit, hardly military grade.

“Okay, so we are screwed, is what you’ve been talking the long way around to saying.”

Waldo’s imager stayed fixed on me.

“No. I can take control and immediately accelerate this thing at the neutron star. A few tens of kilograms of antimatter won’t even make it burp.”

I stared at the imager. “How will you get away?”

“We both know the answer to that, Van.”

“Rolis, I am not going to just let you—” I couldn’t finish it aloud.

“I don’t see many other options.”

I shook my head. “No. No way. I will not lose a member of this crew.”

“Kinda think you already have. This will just formalize it.”

“Shit—Rolis, I don’t want you to—” I still couldn’t say it.

“Die? Well, Van, I joke around about how I already have—but it’s true. I already have. Somehow, I ended up with this second chance, and it’s been great, but—” He paused. “Do you know what really bothered me about being murdered?”

“I… don’t know if that question has ever been asked before. What?”

“The pointlessness of it. I just died. There was no purpose to it. I could handle the dying part, but the fact it was an utterly meaningless death—that’s what bothered me. This time around, though, it can actually mean something. And, well, I’m okay with that.”

“Rolis—”

“Van, you don’t have an alternative to offer, and neither do I. And time’s wasting. You need to get the hell out of here, so you can return to the Fafnir and I can ride this thing straight into neutron star hell, where it belongs.”

I opened my mouth but closed it again. I knelt and put both hands on Waldo—on Rolis.

“I… don’t know what else to say,” I said. I tried to stop my voice from breaking but failed pretty miserably.

“How about goodbye?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Goodbye, Rolis. I—” I swallowed. “Shit. You—”

I just stared into the imager for a moment.

“Van, go. I don’t have access to the external scanners, just the inertial nav. And I’m pretty sure the Fafnir’s still out there, because this thing is still thrusting around like mad, like it’s chasing something. Just one thing.”

“What?”

“Solve my murder, okay? I called this a second chance, but it’s not one I’d really wish on anyone.”

“You can count on it.”

“I’ll give you five minutes, then I’m firing up the drive.”

I nodded, then stood and turned back to the breach we’d cut in the hull. I didn’t look back.

* * *

“Okay, Van, I’m taking control now,” Rolis said.

I poked my head through the breach. The dog sat rock-steady relative to the starfield and the nearby bits of debris. “Guys, if you’re still in one piece, come get me, would you?”

“Van! Holy shit, we didn’t know—”

“No time, Torina. The sooner the better.”

The Fafnir rose into view, then turned and slid toward me with a puff of thrusters. Her airlock stood open. I saw something emerge: Perry, trailing a tether.

I pushed off the edges of the breach and sailed toward him. After catching the tether, I pulled it taut, then hauled myself back toward the Fafnir.

“Uh, Van? Where’s Rolis?” Perry asked.

“We need to get out of here, Perry.”

A pause.

“Oh.”

When we were both inside the airlock, I sealed the outer hatch and slumped against the bulkhead. “Netty, get us the hell out of here.”

“Uh… okay. Direction?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just away.”

She didn’t ask any questions. The Fafnir shuddered as the thrusters fired, but I ignored it and just leaned on the bulkhead. When the airlock pressurized, I unsnapped and yanked off my helmet.

I glanced down. Perry stood on the deck, staring up at me.

“You okay?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No.”

A thrum, as the Fafnir’s drive lit. I opened the inner door.

Torina stood, waiting for me. She didn’t say anything. Perry must have quietly informed the rest.

She hugged me. We cried.

Inside me, the vow took root, and someday, somewhere, when I fulfilled the promise, a killer was going to have a very bad day.

29

We sat in silence, watching the red icon that was the dog slide away from us ever more quickly, its drive burning at full power. Icky had already called her father to have him bring the Nemesis, with the Iowa slaved to his control. We trusted him to select and mount the optimum weapons load-out on the Iowa, from whatever weapons were scattered around the debris field and were still operating. That meant we had no reason to stay, except we did.

Rolis was not going to die alone.

I sent several comm messages, in the hopes of letting him know we were still here, albeit further away from the neutron star, where the radiation intensity wasn’t a serious threat. Torina and I were both feeling downright shitty, but the anti-rad drugs were starting to take effect. We still both needed a course of anti-rad therapy back on Anvil Dark, and we’d get it.

But not until we were done here.

I’d sent another message to Rolis, just a few words to let him know we were with him. I had no idea if he received it, nor did he have any way of replying. It didn’t matter, though. Honestly, we were doing it for us almost as much as we were doing it for him. I noticed the icon flicker, then flicker again—like a heartbeat, but from a being that was fighting for survival. There was no rhythm to the light, and even the erratic flashes were growing farther apart.

“Netty, what’s happening?”

“Gravitational and radiation effects from the neutron star—”

The icon winked out.

I watched the point on the tactical overlay where it had been, nursing a lingering hope that it would reappear, but the truth began to crowd my senses with each passing second.

I finally turned to what remained of my crew, my eyes stinging as a sense of loss flooded me. Sudden. Unrelenting. Uncaring.

“Let’s go home.”

Outside the ship, only the stars spoke, our comms broadcasting the steady hiss of eternity.

* * *

Torina and I were both bedridden by the time we reached Anvil Dark, our bodies riddled with damage from the foray. Perry had already arranged for a medical crash team to meet us when we docked, and although it really wasn’t an emergency as much as an urgent event, I was happy to let them wheel us away to the sprawling infirmary rather than hobble along under our own power.

The doctor who examined us—a human, since policy was for each species in the Guild to maintain their own doctors here—clicked his tongue as he scanned the data slate holding what I presumed were my diagnostics. His name patch said Agbani, which piqued my interest because I knew a hacker from Nigeria named Agbani. I knew better than to ask if they knew one another and kept my curiosity siloed.

“Bad?” I asked, bracing myself for grim news.

“Yeah.”

“Oh. I—”

“Yeah, your cholesterol is way too high, Van. You’re going to have to do some work to bring that down, or you’ve got heart disease in your future.”

“Uh—okay. And the radiation?”

“Nah. You took a healthy dose—and by that, I mean an unhealthy dose—but between the absolute amount of exposure and you guys using the anti-rad drugs, it’s mostly reversible.”

“Mostly?”

Agbani gave a slow, tilted nod. “I’m not going to pretend there won’t be consequences. Your chances of developing cancer later in life are… let’s just say higher and leave it at that. And you’re going to have to take some immune supplements for a while because you’ll be more susceptible to infections and disease until your own immune system recovers and stabilizes. But I wasn’t joking, your cholesterol levels are a bigger concern, as far as I’m concerned.” He looked up from the slate at me.

“Learn to enjoy salad, Van.”

“You mean my steak garnish? I’m a Midwesterner. Salad, to me, comes in a dish and has mayo, cheese, or whipped cream, or—”

Agbani sighed. “Minnesota?”

“Iowa.”

“Close enough. Vegetables. Make friends with them, and then eat them. You hearing me?”

“Copy that, doc.”

I sank back into the bed as he left me alone in a compartment meant for two. I’d have thought they’d have put Torina in with me. The Guild didn’t really care much about gender, being more worried about providing for different species. But Torina’s absence was explained a few minutes later when she strolled into the room.

“Haven’t they released you yet?” She rolled her eyes, but there was a tension to her stance that belied a concern for me. “Men. You’re so frail.”

“I gather being obnoxious means you’re healthy?”

“Clean bill—well, except for the immune supplements and some ongoing rad drugs.” She moved beside the bed and turned serious. “You went outside, Van. I didn’t.”

I nodded, recollecting the fear—and it had been fear, though I did my damnedest to hide it while out there. Thinking of exiting the Fafnir made me think of everything that had happened as a result, and I couldn’t argue with the results.

Torina grabbed my arm and tugged. “Come on, let’s get you released. I’ve got something to show you.”

“As long as it’s not a salad, sure.”

* * *

I still felt a little wobbly but was at least moving reasonably well, and under my own power. Torina led me to the atrium-like concourse that wrapped around the Keel, the sort of transition zone from the more raucous, outer sections where Peacemakers came and went and bustled about, and the Masters’ sanctum in the station’s hub. This part of the Keel housed the Guild’s administrative offices and those of more senior types, like Sussbrid and Lunzy.

It also held the Wall of Remembrance, where dead Peacemakers were memorialized.

We arrived to find Icky, Zeno, and Perry squared off against a pair of Peacemakers, one of whom I recognized, a self-important Gajur named Tridliss. We’d apparently arrived in the midst of a heated argument.

“—makes a mockery of the Wall, that thing!” Tridliss snapped.

Zeno was holding back Icky, who looked like she was all set to rearrange Tridliss into a wholly different anatomy. I waved to take in the unpleasant tableau that was unfolding.

“Guys, what’s up?” I kept my tone light and amiable. For the moment.

“This”—the next word didn’t translate, but I’d heard Icky use it before, usually when she smashed a finger with a spanner or something similar—“says that isn’t appropriate.” She exaggerated appropriate to an almost schoolyard taunt, while jerking a thumb back at the Wall. It was just a general gesture, but I instantly saw what she was indicating.

It was a picture of Rolis.

“It’s a damned Waldo,” Tridliss snapped back, his companion, a Yonnox, nodding. “What’s next, the torque wrench you lost—”

It wasn’t until I’d already grabbed Tridliss and shoved him backward that I realized I’d touched him at all. Torina moved in, but not to stop me.

“Listen, you little piece of shit. Rolis was a member of my crew, and my friend, and he died a hero, saving our lives,” I hissed into his face.

He blinked fast. “It’s just a Waldo—”

“And you’re just a Gajur, so what? It’s the stuff that’s inside that matters, which is why you’re a piece of shit.”

Tridliss looked like he wanted to snap back, but I saw his eyes flick from me, to Torina, to Icky. He finally nodded.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I thought it was just a Waldo unit.”

“He wasn’t.”

I released him. The surge of adrenaline had left my head pounding, so I waved off his further apologies, then turned to the Wall. I looked at the picture of Rolis for a moment, a still captured from some imagery or other during one of our missions.

I turned back to the others. “Thank you, guys. Putting him on this Wall—it means a lot.”

“To all of us,” Perry said, and I think I caught a deeper current of meaning in his tone, or at least imagined I did. Combat AIs weren’t recognized on the Wall. To most Peacemakers, like Tridliss, they were just tools, like a sidearm or handcuffs. I think, without asking me, he was asking me if he’d end up on the Wall, too.

“Every member of my crew belongs on that Wall,” I pronounced.

Zenophir laughed. “Do you have, like, a schedule? Some order of priority you’d like to see us put up there? Because I’d humbly request that my picture goes up… last. Got things to do and all that.”

I stared. “What?” Then the joke landed, and I snorted, and we all laughed—

Because Zeno’s snappy comeback was exactly the sort of thing Rolis would have said.

* * *

We hauled the Fafnir into a pressurized hangar for an extensive flight check. Netty hadn’t noticed any faults, but she’d smacked into more than a few pieces of debris while madly gyrating, trying to lure the dog into repeated attacks and then dodge them at the last possible moment.

Torina summed it up. “Looking back on it, it was as exciting as hell. Not so much at the time, though. We were pretty keenly aware we were one mistake from—well, not being able to look back on it.”

I noticed that Torina went with we, even though Zeno and Perry had already told me that it was she, assisted by Netty, who did all the flying. She was determined that if anyone was going to screw up, it would be her.

To my pleasant surprise, despite all the stress and tensions and treading the edge of catastrophe, the Fafnir had taken little damage. We ended up replacing one REAB module, a scanner emitter, and a thruster array. In the midst of installing the new bits and pieces, Netty interrupted.

“Van, I’ve got Groshenko on the comm.”

I glanced at Zeno, who’d been helping me fasten the REAB module. She just nodded toward the airlock. “Go, I got this.”

I made my way to the cockpit and slid into the pilot’s seat.

“Go ahead, Petyr.”

“Netty tells me you had quite the tense encounter. I’m sorry about your fallen comrade, though. It’s never easy to lose one of your people.”

Coming from nearly anyone else, that would have made me roll my eyes. But Groshenko had probably lost more subordinates across three careers—Earthly spec ops soldier, Peacemaker, and now mercenary—than I knew people well enough to call friends. I nodded gratefully and noted he said one of your people. He understood.

“It… it’s not. I mean, computer hacker doesn’t really prepare you for this sort of thing.”

“Nothing prepares you for this sort of thing, Van. Nothing can. And it never gets any easier, which is good, because it shouldn’t.”

I said nothing, because he was right.

“Anyway, I’ve got news about 109. Some friends of friends provided me with some intel, including a verbatim signal intercept. Traversia is planning a ‘significant investment in new work’ on 109. On the backchannels, though, the Fade’s calling it a ‘pacification operation.’”

“You mean genocide. They want to wipe out the Hwananye.”

“Before anyone can mount any sort of meaningful assistance for them, yeah. Right now, almost no one in known space even knows the Hwananye even exist, and they want to capitalize on that.”

“Shit. How long have we got?”

“Two days, possibly three. We should plan on two, though. They’re assembling a flotilla of eight ships, ranging from a pair of up-armored class 6 workboats repurposed as gunboats, to a former Wu’tzur class 12 planetary defense cruiser.”

“Holy shit. That’s a lot of firepower.” I sank back. “And our ship, the Iowa, won’t be available for at least a couple of weeks. And I really don’t want to leave her sitting alone at the damned neutron star, partly gunned-up and unattended.”

“I can contribute a class 9 corvette under a good master, an Eniped named Dosic. He’s one of the best I know. I’d come and help you myself, but I’ve got another job to do that’s even more urgent.”

I said nothing, believing Groshenko but not prying. If he said he had something more urgent, then he did. Besides, the contribution he was providing was excellent. One of the few Peacemakers I really trusted, Alic, was an Eniped. They were a race known for their cool, professional approach to warfare, considering it almost an artform. Having one on our side, helming a class 9 warship, was an excellent start. But it still only left us with it and the Fafnir, which was woefully short of the sort of firepower we’d need to counter the Fade’s potent little task force.

“Okay, Petyr. I’ll see whatever other support I can drum up. Thanks.”

We worked out the details of our rendezvous with Dosic, then he nodded and signed off.

“Netty, we’ve got some calls to make. Let’s start with—”

“Schegith?”

“You’re getting pretty damned good at reading my mind.”

“This one is pleased to hear it.”

I laughed. “Make the call. And if there’s time after the battle, we’ll find an open mic night for you.”

“Open mic? Why?” Netty asked.

“Every comedian has to start somewhere.”

* * *

As it turned out, we got immediate commitments from Lunzy, Lucky, and K’losk. Alic was off doing undercover work. That brought us much closer to parity with the expected Fade force, but we needed more.

Which brought Torina, Perry, and me to The Black Hole to meet with someone I’d never imagined in my most fevered dreams I’d be coming to for help.

“Hey, Carter,” I said, sitting down.

He looked suspiciously from me to Torina, then back. “I heard you lost one of your crew, Van. I’m really sorry.”

Wow, the first words out of his mouth weren’t about Carter Yost. I had to admit it, becoming a Peacemaker was turning Carter into a decent human being.

“Thanks. He saved all our lives.”

The AI waiter took our drink order, then I glanced at Perry. “Are we in the clear?”

“I can’t detect anyone listening in, but I’ve got my jammer running, just in case.”

Carter shifted uncomfortably. “What’s this about?”

“I need your help, Carter.”

“For what?”

“A fight. A space battle.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, seriously.”

I saw him chewing on it while he watched me. It struck me that, just as I had a lot of baggage loaded with shit about him, he likewise did with me. His gaze finally softened a touch.

“Where? When?”

“I’ll give you the details back at the Fafnir, not here. Here, I just wanted to meet my cousin for a drink, a chat—and see if anyone takes an obvious interest. Perry? Torina?”

Per the plan, they’d been surreptitiously scanning the crowd around us. If the Fade had agents or informants on Anvil Dark who’d been watching us, this seemed like a good opportunity to flush them out.

Torina smiled and nodded. “No, nothing I can see out of place,” she said, laughing.

“When I activated my jammer, a kind of surly looking human on the upper level behind us suddenly looked concerned, maybe verging into pissed off,” Perry said.

“A Peacemaker?”

“Nope, he’s not on the Peacemaker roll. An Auxiliary, maybe, or a civilian contractor.”

“Okay, flag him.” I turned back to Carter. “Are you in?”

“Well, I’d have to know—” Carter began, then stopped himself.

“Actually, you know what? Yeah, I am. Turns out that doing all this noble shit is—” He shrugged. “It’s pretty damned good for the old self-esteem. Who knew?”

I smiled. “You are not the Carter Yost I came to know and despise.”

“You’re not a complete asshole either, Van.”

“Not a complete asshole means… progress then.”

He held up a finger. “If I die doing something noble, though, I’m going to haunt the hell out of you.”

30

Carter’s well-armed class 7 was almost as potent as the Fafnir, bringing us close in power to the expected Fade flotilla. I’d have really liked to gain a material edge over them, but that didn’t look likely. There simply wasn’t anyone else available, not in the few hours we had left before we had to depart Anvil Dark to marshal our little fleet at 109. In addition, there was the issue of trust. Guns could be hired. Friends could not.

I was brooding over this when I got a call from an unexpected and unwelcome source: Master Gerhardt.

I went alone this time. I hoped that he still harbored at least a little goodwill toward us and hadn’t invested all of it in our new, kickass fire-control system. But I wasn’t counting on it. Gerhardt was still a creature of process and administration, and what I really feared was that he’d found out about our impending clash with the Fade and was going to order me to stand down. It flew in the face of regular Guild policy to willingly engage in what amounted to a military operation. My argument was that it was necessary to prevent the extermination of the Hwananye, which should be more than enough justification.

But with Gerhardt, I just didn’t know. All I did know was that I’d outright disobey him and fight my way back to the Fafnir if I had to. I was not going to let the Hwananye die because of procedures.

He gestured for me to sit down and, without preamble, spoke right up.

“I understand you’re contemplating a confrontation with the Fade over the moon, 109.”

I sighed inwardly. Damn it. Wasn’t it enough that I had to fight bad guys out there without also having to fight not-good-guys in here?

I nodded. “I am. And before you start listing off reasons it’s a violation of this or in contravention of that, I’m going to just put it out there—you’re going to have to lock me up to stop me.”

He stared for a moment, his expression unreadable beyond something like cool appraisal. Then he cocked his head to one side.

“How about if, instead of that, I accompany you and help you defeat these bastards?”

“I—” I blinked. “Uh—”

Gerhardt laughed. “Ah, that glib Tudor tongue finally fails you. That alone makes this moment worthwhile.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. My ship, the Splinter, is a class 10, and I’ve put a lot of time, effort, and money into her. She’s got at least thirty percent more firepower than the Fafnir, and I haven’t taken her out of dock in a while now.”

I sat, stunned. The very idea Gerhardt wouldn’t just be supportive but willing to help—let’s just say that, before entering his office, I’d probably have thought it more likely Gerhardt would have offered to put on a clown suit and start doing kids’ birthday parties.

“Uh—well, that’s—I mean, I appreciate that, very much. But—okay, I recommend a plan, which we have, though I’m sure you’ll want to review it—"

“Why?”

“Because… you’re going to need a plan if you’re commanding this little venture?”

“I’m not commanding it. You are.”

Silence stretched as I searched for something brilliant to say. Naturally, I delivered, because glib genius is my default setting.

“I… am?”

“Unless you’re stepping down.”

“I—no. No, I’m not.”

Gerhardt offered another thin smile. “Don’t get used to it, Tudor. I’m yielding and accepting your being in command—this one time.”

I nodded and started to stand but stopped and looked at Gerhardt.

“Why?”

He knew what I was asking. “Because, Tudor, when you uncovered that mole, sitting in that chair right there, you made me realize something profound. I’ve become so fixated on doing the correct thing that I’ve let myself lose sight of doing the right thing.”

He shrugged. “The fall of three Masters into corruption and disgrace only made me more determined to enforce the processes and procedures, my reasoning being to prevent any further rot. I was utterly convinced of that, and that people like you are the problem—you open yourself to doing what’s expedient, and what’s expedient might not be what’s right, either.”

“There needs to be a balance,” I offered.

“As it turns out, and much to my embarrassment, you’re right. And you seem to have found that balance, Tudor, just as your grandfather did. I’ve pored over your records and reports, looking for any hint of wrongdoing, and I most certainly found it.”

I opened my mouth, but he held up a hand. “But my outrage at your cavalier behavior was tempered by the fact I could never find an instance of you flouting the rules for your own benefit. Quite the opposite, in fact. You’ve brought genuinely bad people to justice and put others on the run, and as far as I can tell, you’ve done it because it’s the right thing to do. You haven’t made yourself wealthy or powerful, haven’t even hinted you’ve got any designs on becoming a Master yourself—”

Gerhardt leaned back and shook his head. “And then you uncovered the mole in my office, who I’d missed despite all my best efforts.” He smiled, more genuinely this time. “The famous definition of insanity, about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a better outcome—it’s famous for a reason. And I’m not stupid. So, if my way wasn’t working, then it’s time to try something new.”

He leaned forward. “I’ll be ready to depart in an hour or so, Tudor. Please send whatever operational instructions you have to my ship in the meantime. Oh, and Tudor—”

I paused.

“Just to be clear, as much as I’m willing to accept that sometimes what’s expedient must trump what’s correct, I have my limits. Some of the things you’ve done do push things too far. And if you do any more such things, I will hold you accountable for it. Do you understand?”

I gave him a single, decisive nod, and I meant it. “I do, yes. And I appreciate you being candid about it. It’s always good to know where you stand.”

“Well, for the time being at least, that would be together.”

I offered a grateful smile, turned, and left, because the die was cast, and there was nothing left to say.

It was time to do.

* * *

I scanned the tactical overlay. We’d arranged ourselves in two lines—Lucky, Groshenko’s class 9 corvette, the Cossack, and the Fafnir forward, with Gerhardt, Lunzy, and Carter to the rear. Our plan was simple—we’d simply close with the Fade ships lurking around 109, and they’d either run away—not likely—or turn to fight, which was what we expected.

“Netty, have they detected us?” I asked.

“It would seem so, since they’ve illuminated us with active, long-range scanners. They probably can’t detect the Fafnir this far away, thanks to our fancy stealth coating, and the Cossack is surprisingly stealthy for a ship of her type. Lunzy has her active stealth system engaged. But Carter’s, Gerhardt’s, and Lucky’s ships aren’t anywhere near as stealthy, so they can probably see them.”

I scanned the screens again, looking for any unseen advantage. “So they know we’re here, but think there are only the three ships to the rear.”

“Only if they’re morons, Van. They know we’d never even bother coming at them with only three ships, the biggest being a class 10,” Perry said.

“And you should always assume your opponent is better than you,” Torina put in.

I glanced at her. “Channeling Cataric, I see.”

“He’s rarely wrong.”

“And he rarely loses. Okay, let’s get moving. Netty, tell the Cossack and Lunzy to minimize their emissions, and the others to be as flashy and loud as they can. Let’s keep the attention off us for as long as possible.”

We started our run in toward 109. As we did, I saw the red icons representing the Fade flotilla abruptly rearrange themselves, as Lucky repeated her own up-to-date active scanner data to us. We stayed dark, at least for the time being.

Time ticked past. There was little we could do but sit and watch the overlay as it updated. The Fade ships had arranged themselves in a ring around the old Wu’tzur planetary defense cruiser. It was our most dangerous opponent since, given its mainly defensive role, it sacrificed acceleration for armor and firepower. The Fade seemed content to just keep it interposed between us and 109. That provoked a sense of urgency, since we had no idea what was happening on the surface of 109, which could include anything up to and including the outright genocide of the Hwananye.

We were about ten minutes from maximum effective missile range when a sudden flash punctuated the blackness off to our right, accompanied by a crash of static.

“Netty, what the hell just happened?”

“An explosion.”

“No shit, what—?”

“One moment, Van.”

I took a breath and looked back at Zeno and Icky, who were both ready to leap into damage control mode. “Any effect on us?”

They both shook their heads, and Icky muttered, “Nope.”

“Van, it was Lunzy. Her ship triggered a mine,” Netty announced.

“A mine? They’ve got mines deployed? How the hell didn’t we detect them?”

“We’re not the only ones who have access to stealth tech.”

“Lunzy, are you okay?”

Her answer was immediate. “Mostly. I’ve got some structural damage aft that’s limiting my acceleration, though. I’m pushing the Foregone Conclusion as hard as I dare, but you’re going to have to leave me behind.”

I cursed with the low, savage timbre of a commander who’s just lost a critical fighter. Lucky and Gerhardt both switched their scanners to a shorter-ranged, higher-intensity mode, which revealed another dozen or so mines scattered around 109. None of them posed a real threat because the Fade had no way of knowing how we might approach. We had to assume they were keyed off of some sort of identification-friend-or-foe system that would trigger them if we got close enough but wouldn’t react to Fade ships. That gave us another factor to consider as we maneuvered, complicating things further.

“Alright. Lunzy, we’ll try to keep one or two alive for you.”

“If I arrive to find you’ve won the battle and all I have to do is march in the victory parade, I’ll be good with it. I’m a big fan of parades. And bonuses, of course.”

I smiled but inwardly kept cursing at the dumb, bad luck of Lunzy triggering one mine of a relative few scattered around an immense volume of space—

But I cut myself off. Our eventual victory over the junkyard dog at Arx had been nothing but luck, so who was I to complain?

We pressed on and reached maximum missile range as the threat bubble touched our own weapons capability. Per prior arrangement, we held fire, as did the Cossack, hoping that the Fade’s attention would remain on our rear line of ships. Of course, the Fade must know we had other assets in play—their mine had been triggered by something, after all—but the longer we could keep them in the dark, the better.

I was feeling pretty good about the plan until that damned former Wu’tzur cruiser opened fire. It spewed missiles at a horrific rate, putting out more ordnance in fifteen seconds than all of our ships could manage combined.

“Rotary launchers, at least four of them,” Zeno said, studying her instruments. “The good news is that they have to be retracted to reload, so they’ll be firing in bursts, not continuously.”

“As long as they have reloads,” Icky put in. “Big money, those.”

I whistled low, watching with a gnawing tightness in my gut as the swarm of icons rapidly closed on us. Lucky, Gerhardt, and Carter had opened fire, and Lunzy, now behind us, joined in.

“It’s now or never. Netty, signal the Cossack to go weapons-free. Torina, over to you.”

“With pleasure,” she said, tapping at her fire control panel. Our own missiles leapt away, three successive pairs, which was half of our load-out. Our new fire control system was feeding them targeting data over an active link, meaning they didn’t have to go active with their own seekers until the last moment. It was an edge—missiles that aren’t seeking are small, elusive targets—albeit not much of one.

The seconds ticked by. Dosic, the Eniped commander of the Cossack, came on the comm.

“Van, cut your drive for about ten seconds and fall back.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I’ve got six point-defense batteries that are going to be spitting out an awful lot of projectiles, and I’d hate for you to take any hits.”

“I’d hate that, too,” I said, cutting the drive. The Cossack immediately shot forward into the teeth of the oncoming storm of missiles.

At about the same time the Fade ships began to engage our missiles, the Cossack opened fire. I watched in awe at just what a dedicated warship could do.

Streams of tracers erupted from Groshenko’s corvette. She spun, tracking her weapons around through a spherical volume of space. Her own fire-control system, another sophisticated, military-grade rig, rapidly swung both her primary batteries and point-defenses around, combining them with her rolling motion to deftly swat one missile after another out of space.

“I want one,” Torina said, staring at the mechanical carnage.

I could only nod.

By the time the Fade’s missiles reached their terminal guidance phase, most of them had been shot to a storm of pelting fragments. Still, four managed to slip through the Cossack’s defenses. Three of them detonated close enough to shower her with debris, consuming REAB modules all over her hull. The fourth must have somehow noticed the Fafnir, because it locked onto us, spawning a warning from Netty.

“One locked. Coming on fast,” she said.

“Weapons free,” I repeated.

Our own fire controller came to life, plus the point-defenses opening up and relentlessly tracking the missile. In a stream of hypersonic rounds, our weapons shredded the missile at a range of eighty clicks.

“Knife fighting range. Don’t like it, if I’m being honest.”

“Nor do I, boss,” Netty agreed.

“I’ve seen closer.” Perry spoke as he lounged on a chair-back, his wings dropped insouciantly.

I slumped back, feeling like I’d just run a marathon. The opening round had been inconclusive—the Cossack had taken damage but nothing serious enough to take her out of the fight. On the other side, two of the Fade ships had taken hits from our missiles, but like the Cossack, they were still in action.

The Fade’s tactics quickly became clear. Knocking down their first missile salvo had chewed up most of our point-defense ammo, so when the former Wu’tzur cruiser again started spitting out a torrent of missiles, the stark truth was revealed.

They would fire, and fire, and fire some more. They would create a tide of missiles that couldn’t be held back, and then they would clean us up at their leisure. It was a good plan.

For them.

* * *

Unless we changed our own tactics, that is, which was just what we did. I told Dosic to fall back, while Gerhardt, Lucky, and Carter slid into the lead. They still had full loads of point-defense ammo, which the Fafnir and Cossack could back up with laser fire. We started a long-range bombardment of the approaching missiles, trying to thin out their numbers. Unfortunately, that meant we weren’t shooting at the Fade ships, which were now coming into range of our primary batteries.

“Zeno, how many missile reloads does that damned thing have?”

“I’ve been calculating that. Based on the types of missiles, the numbers fired in each salvo, and the size of the ship, as many as three, maybe four.”

“Aw, for—"

“Van, maybe it’s time to switch tactics here, enact our contingency plan,” Perry said.

I glanced at him. “Which contingency plan?”

“The one where we run away.”

“Not yet.”

The second missile swarm reached point-defense range. Our three lead ships opened fire, gushing depleted uranium rounds at a horrific rate. Again, between those and our own laser batteries, we managed to winnow away all but a handful. Lucky was bracketed by two detonations, while a third missile exploded near Gerhardt’s Splinter. Two more unwisely chose the Cossack as their target and were quickly pummeled into scrap by her mass-drivers and lasers.

But we were almost out of tricks. If Zeno was right and that damned Wu’tzur ship still had two reloads—

Even if the Wu’tzur only had a single mass firing of ordnance left, it was still one more than we could stop.

Carter spoke up. “Van, why don’t we scatter? That’ll force those missiles to pick targets sooner, right?”

I glanced at Perry, who nodded. “Fine idea. Do so immediately.”

“Good call, Carter. Okay, everyone, start maneuvering on your own. Let’s open our formation up—but watch those damned mines.”

I applied power and veered the Fafnir away from the Cossack. Dosic likewise peeled off, opening the range. Sure enough, the Fade’s missiles had to start locking onto targets sooner. Maybe recognizing it as the biggest threat, the majority decided to chase after the Cossack.

Another agonizing wait ensued, followed by another orgy of weapons-fire as each ship tried desperately to shoot down whatever was tracking it. Where possible, our ships’ fire-controllers cooperated to target missiles as opportunities arose, but we were mostly each on our own.

Two missiles raced past us, apparently losing lock because of our stealth coating. A third detonated off our starboard quarter, though, only ten klicks away. Shrapnel slammed into the Fafnir, triggering REAB modules with heavy thuds. Something managed to slam through our hull somewhere aft, and the cabin pressure started dropping.

We all snapped on our helmets, while Icky unstrapped. “Damage control on the way,” she announced, charging aft, already pulling tools from her belt.

I scanned the status board. A few systems were yellow, though none were critical. We had one system go red, offline, but it was the auxiliary air purifier, so it wasn’t an immediate problem, either. I snapped my attention to the tactical overlay and the other ships.

Lucky and Gerhardt had both taken hits. Carter, true to form, had somehow skated through untouched. The Cossack, though, despite a valiant defense, had taken at least four hits. She’d spalled off debris and was venting atmosphere in fitful gouts.

“Dosic, are you still in the fight?”

A new voice came on. “Dosic’s down. This is her XO, Garven. We’re doing damage control now, but we’ve lost half our thrusters and can’t maneuver worth shit. I think we’re going to be reduced to long-range fire support, sorry.”

“Do what you can,” I said, almost grinding my teeth in frustration. Perry might be right—we might have to withdraw because another salvo from that Wu’tzur cruiser could bring this battle to an unpleasant end.

I turned to Perry. “We’ll do it your way. Time for the backup plan. Call in the Ace.”

“You sure?”

I looked at the situation on the overlay, then nodded. “Yeah. I am.”

* * *

I’d been hoping we could just bore straight in and take the Fade down fast, with minimal harm on both sides.

But it wasn’t working out that way.

At least until I realized that that damned Wu’tzur cruiser had ceased firing missiles and now punched out shots with heavy laser batteries. They were potent, but she only had two of them, and they had a long recharge time—the kind of windup that let us take evasive or offensive action between volleys.

“Perry, Zeno, what gives? They should have another salvo left, no?”

“I said they had the capacity to carry another salvo, maybe two if they were willing to share their bunks with missile reloads,” Zeno pointed out.

“They’ve fired an awful lot of ordnance at us, probably well over a million bonds worth. Maybe they just ran out of cash,” Perry stated, ever practical if a touch smug.

It was the break we needed.

I switched to the general comm. “We’ve got a window here, folks. Let’s turn this into a knife fight, shall we?”

Knife fight was our set codeword to close and engage the Fade at the shortest possible range. The Dragon-class ships used by the Guild weren’t built for long-range battle. They were optimized for fighting close in, ideally to disable ships and take prisoners. Close in, you could get surgical in your hits, taking out weapons, thrusters, and drives. At long range, all you could do was broad destruction, with little control of the type of damage.

Ironically, Carter led the charge, followed by Gerhardt and us, with Lucky bringing up the rear. The Cossack remained back, still furiously doing damage control and giving us what fire support she could. Lunzy, in the meantime, had finally gotten the Foregone Conclusion in range and added the weight of her missile bombardment to our attack.

“Van, duck,” Lunzy’s voice said over the comm.

“To the ecliptic?” I asked.

“Yes please. Netty?” Lunzy replied, even as the Fafnir moved a few hundred meters. Seconds later, missiles streaked through our previous location, hell bent for leather as they all converged on a single target.

“Close shave, but nice shooting. Thanks,” I told Lunzy.

“My pleasure.”

I peered at the overlay. Icons crowded it, not just ships, but missiles, both live and expended. Netty was painting bigger pieces of debris on it now, too, since collisions with those at speed could be like taking a rail gun shot. I finally shook my head.

“Netty, can you clean that up? Take away the debris?”

“If you give me authority to enter uncommanded control inputs so we don’t fly into a big ol’ chunk of metal.”

“Command given. Do it,” I said. The overlay abruptly cleared, and I took in the new—and far clearer—picture. All it really told me was that we’d hit that point in the battle where plans gave way to skill, guts, and luck. It was rapidly devolving into a wild melee, the smaller Fade ships now starting to trade close-range shots with our own.

The next—minutes, though it felt like hours—were a blur. My attention shifting between the overlay and the flight controls, I accelerated the Fafnir hard, thrusted her through turns, flipped her, burned hard, and did it all again, augmented by Netty’s superior senses and gentle suggestions from Torina and Zeno.

Naturally, Icky helped too.

“BOSS BREAK LEFT THAT WAS DUMB YOU—”

“Icky?” I asked, my eyes still on the screens.

“Too loud?” Icky replied, watching me wiggle a finger in my left ear.

“Let’s use our inside voice, mkay?”

“Gotcha.”

Perry clicked his beak in approval. “You’re gonna be an amazing asset in the old folks’ home, Van. Ever played shuffleboard? I’m told that up to eleven people still remember how to—”

“Any advice on shortening this fight, bird?” I interrupted.

“None. You’re doing fine. I’m mostly moral support, which you’ll note seems to be yet another of my core abilities,” Perry said.

“Humble, too.”

“It’s a curse,” Perry agreed.

Then 109 and its blue gas giant parent slid into view, before sliding away, then back into view again, over and over in a kaleidoscopic dance of colors that would have made an old seadog queasy. Torina kept up a steady, deadly accurate fire with the lasers, while Zeno took over the particle cannon and mass-driver, the latter’s recoil thumping through the Fafnir’s bones.

Having them in action bulked up our firepower, and combined with the speed and accuracy of our new fire-controller, we landed punishing hits on whatever Fade ship presented itself. Perry kept an eye on the overall situation, making sure to pay close attention to the space around the battle, in case any new threats appeared.

Still, we took hits. Shrapnel slammed into the Fafnir, some of it punching through the hull. We took a mass-driver shot that neatly punched through one side of the ship and out the other. All I could do was wince when a laser plowed a glowing furrow across our armor, slag flying away in a dim red blur even as we powered into another directional shift. Damage warnings flashed, systems across the board went yellow, some went red. A few came back, but a few didn’t. While Netty rerouted power and data, Icky scrambled around in the back, doing her frantic best to keep us in the fight, muttered curses and tool sounds flooding the space between us.

I hit the starboard thrusters, noting that their reaction fuel levels were starting to edge toward yellow. But Netty yanked away control and fired the port thrusters instead, at the same time pitching us upward. A chunk of debris the size of a railcar whipped past us just a few meters away. When I tapped the flight controls to stop her rapid pitch up, the Fafnir rolled to the right, forcing me to compensate for a thruster obviously gone dead, or just destroyed.

The overlay blurred into smears of color. I only had time to count the blue ones, ours, and see that none had vanished—yet. An up-armored class 6 gunboat tore past us and was less than a klick ahead. Hard on its tail was Gerhardt’s Splinter, banged up and trailing fluid or vapor—or both—but gamely pouring fire into the Fade ship. We missed him by a hundred meters and lost sight of them as the current of battle carried them away, weapons flashing with demonic purpose.

A searing flash to our left caught my eye, and I twitched, then turned to see the cause.

“Shit, was that—?”

“That’s another Fade down. Looks like Gerhardt got his kill,” Perry said.

I blinked away sweat. “Another Fade ship? How many—?”

I blinked some more and stared at the overlay, willing it to come into focus through the burning sting in my eyes. When it did, I sank back.

“Oh.”

Only two of the smaller Fade ships remained active, both of them pulling away from the battle. Torina loosed a final pair of missiles at them, sending both warheads on with a rude gesture and a kiss. The other Fade vessels were just so much wreckage. The Wu’tzur cruiser was still fighting, though, exchanging fire with Lunzy and the Cossack, both of whom had closed in. Icky had confirmed it was too slow to realistically break off, so it seemed determined to stick it out, like a cornered bull among wolves.

I shook my head, trying to clear away a fuzz of adrenaline-laced stupor. “Okay. Umm—right. Everyone, let’s—”

“Van, we’ve got company,” Perry said. “Two new contacts on the overlay, coming up from 109.”

Netty zoomed in the image. Two of the strange, toroidal Hwananye ships were breaking orbit and accelerating toward the battle. As before, their icons wobbled and flickered, refusing to paint a solid return.

Torina turned to me, wide-eyed behind her visor. “Can they even tell the good guys from the bad guys?”

I reached for the comm. “Now that is a very good question.”

31

I checked in with each of our people. Gerhardt was as flat and officious as ever, describing how he’d taken some hits but his ship was still “performing adequately.” Lucky and Lunzy both assured me they were functional, if hurting. Carter, though—

“Holy shit, Van, did you see that? I got right on his six and sent two shots straight up his ass! I mean— “.

Icky giggled over the comm. “Straight up his ass. That never gets old.”

I held back a sigh, for once, then turned to Carter. “You done good, cousin. Credit where it’s due. You took a class 8 single-handedly, that’s no mean feat,” I said, smiling.

He grinned back, his face suffused with the unusual sensation of receiving genuine praise. “So is that it? Is the battle done?”

“Not quite. We’ve got some new players on the field. I’ve sent the Hwananye a message, and Netty’s repeating it, but they haven’t responded. They’re going to reach that former Wu’tzur cruiser before they reach us, though, so hopefully they’ll confine their wrath to it.”

As I spoke, I checked the overlay. Lunzy and the Cossack were still trading blows with the Wu’tzur ship, which was doing an impressive job of standing its ground. Its heavy armor let it shrug off most of the hits it took while it struck back hard. I saw it slam two potent laser hits on the Cossack, one of them blasting a chunk out of her lower hull and sending it spinning away in a mixed cloud of solid and sublimated armor.

“No choice—we’ve got to help them,” I said, watching as Carter, Gerhard, and Lucky reformed around the Fafnir. We turned and accelerated toward the Wu’tzur cruiser, determined to swamp it with fire. But the Hwananye apparently had the range, both of their ships firing their strange beam weapons. One chewed into the Fade ship’s armor, while the other punched right through it and exited with a shadowy diffusion of light and matter, just at the cusp of my vision.

The big cruiser staggered under the hammer blows of the Hwananye fire while still taking hit after hit from Lunzy and the Cossack. The next Hwananye salvo slammed right through it, both shots this time. An instant later, the cruiser vanished in a colossal blast as its antimatter containment failed.

The Hwananye then turned and headed our way.

“Buckle up. Okay, everyone, new plan. Let’s turn tail and switch off our fire-control scanners, make ourselves as unthreatening as possible—”

“Van, you might want to rethink that,” Perry said, gesturing at the tactical overlay with a wingtip.

I looked, then sank back and sighed.

“Really?”

Three more ships had risen over the dayside limb of 109—two class 12 light cruisers and a class 13 battlecruiser. And they weren’t friendly, judging from their liberal use of targeting scanners.

“They must have been inbound already and used 109 and the gas giant for cover.”

I nodded, trying to keep my nerves behind a mask of neutrality, but Torina saw through it at once. I wasn’t a tactical genius by any means, but I didn’t have to be to know that we had no chance against three fresh, undamaged capital ships.

“The Fade are going all-in on this place. Must be really important to them,” Lucky said.

Netty cut in. “Van, I have a response from the Hwananye, one word.”

“What’s that?”

“Go.”

I glanced at Torina. “That’s a little cryptic. Are they telling us to get lost?”

But Perry shook his head. “I don’t think so. The Hwananye are changing course, or they seem to be, anyway. It looks like they’re going to intercept the Fade ships.”

“They’re telling us to go while they take on these newcomers,” Gerhardt said.

“I think you’re right. In any case, go is exactly what we’re going to do. Netty, reverse course, out of the system the way we came in. Lunzy, Dosic, we’ll join you and—”

“Don’t worry about us, Van,” Dosic said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“What?”

“The drive’s nothing but scrap. We’ve got thrusters and—other than that, we’ve got to get out and push, I guess.”

“Damn it. Okay, we’ll come alongside and—”

“I’ve already modeled it, Van. There’s no way for you to rescue us and get away from those Fade ships.”

“Dosic, I’m not just going to leave you here. If the Hwananye can’t stop those Fade ships—”

“Then it will be our turn to try.”

I took a deep breath. These might be Groshenko’s people, but they’d been fighting for us—for me. The idea of losing them so soon after Rolis—

“Van, Gerhardt’s on a private channel for you.”

“Okay. Master Gehardt?”

“Tudor, you’ve got to get yourself and others out of here. We did what we came here to do.”

“How… do you figure that? Those Fade ships aren’t here on some sort of tourist jaunt.”

“No, they aren’t. But we’ve made it abundantly clear that we’re prepared to fight for this planet and its inhabitants. You need to get out of here, regroup, gather more forces, and come back.”

“Look, I—” I stopped as the implication of Gerhardt’s words sank in. “Wait. I need to get out of here. Don’t you mean we?”

“Someone’s got to try to rescue the crew of the Cossack.”

“You can’t! You won’t stand a chance, if those Fade ships get past the Hwananye—”

“Then let’s hope they don’t. Or that the Hwananye hold them off long enough to save the Cossack’s crew.”

“No! I’m not going to risk—”

“Tudor, this isn’t a request, and it’s not an invitation for debate,” Gerhardt said, and I could swear I heard a smile in his voice.

“In other words, get your flotilla out of here. We’ll give you as much cover as we have fight left in us, right until the end.”

I just sat there, stunned. In just a couple of days, Gerhardt had morphed from a hidebound, inflexible asshole to an icon of bravery and self-sacrifice.

I thought about the plan. Then I crumpled it up and threw it away.

“Do your best to hang in there, Master Gerhardt. This ain’t over yet.”

* * *

We accelerated away, straight up relative to the system’s ecliptic plane. I’d had to issue a flurry of new instructions and could only hope it all came together.

“Perry, I’ve got a special job for you,” I said and told him what I wanted him to try.

“Van, the Hwananye are engaging the Fade,” Netty said.

All we could do was watch. Gun for gun, the Hwananye were hopelessly outclassed by the sheer weight of fire of the three big ships. But the Hwananye had a fatal trick up their sleeve.

Both of their ships concentrated their beam weapons on the largest of the three Fade ships, slamming damaging hits into it. It charged on unshaken, though, unwisely trying to close the range.

Apparently, they hadn’t gotten the memo about how the Hwananye fought.

Laser fire and missiles streamed at the two Hwananye ships but only managed a few hits, likely due to their inconstant scanner returns. That was enough to let them close, then abruptly accelerate straight at the class 13. It was, I thought, like watching the junkyard dog in action. From what I gathered, the Hwananye were essentially intelligent metal, so high-g acceleration probably didn’t mean much to them. Moreover, given that this was a one-way trip, they weren’t worried about expending power or fuel, either.

“They’re brave,” Torina said, her words so soft I could barely hear them.

“It’s heroic,” I agreed. “And… sad. A waste.”

“Every battle is,” Torina concluded, just as The Fade class 13 suddenly erupted with a hurricane of point-defense and mass-driver fire.

But it was too late.

One after another, the two Hwananye ships streaked in, then exploded in eye-searing blasts. When they cleared, what remained of the class 13 emerged from the debris. The ship’s drive was still running, but she’d started to tumble, the rapidly changing acceleration vectors spinning her through wild gyrations.

“She won’t last long, gonna rip herself apart,” Icky said, peering past Perry at the overlay and tactical imager.

Sure enough, what remained of her started to come apart as damaged structural components failed. She lasted another few seconds, then abruptly blew apart.

“Is it just me, or has this been one hell of a day?” Zeno muttered, sounding as tired and drawn as I felt.

“It’s not over yet,” I said, shifting my attention back to the two class 12 cruisers. They were charging after us, howling for blood.

In that moment, our fortunes looked brighter. I turned to Perry.

“Any luck?”

“I’ve got limited access to that mine of theirs, dead ahead. It’s definitely detected us, but we aren’t close enough to trigger it yet.”

“Can you give it any commands?”

“Self-destruct, probably. Not much else.”

“Can you change its IFF recognition?”

“Uh—huh. Gimme a second.”

We powered on. I kept a careful watch on the class 12s, particularly as they closed the range to Gerhardt and the Cossack. Since they were chasing us, and we were fleeing the system by the shortest possible route to a twist point, they’d reach a point of minimum range to Groshenko’s battered ship, and then it would open back up again. It meant they’d have a brief window to deliver fire on Gerhardt and the Cossack as they swept past. I just had to hope it would be too brief to be fatal.

“They’re opening fire on the Cossack,” Netty said.

Sure enough, laser fire slammed into the stricken ship. A salvo of missiles followed. Before they even arrived, though, the Cossack lost containment and blew apart.

I pounded the armrest. “Shit! Where’s Gerhardt?”

“I… don’t have any returns from his ship. If he was alongside the Cossack, taking off survivors—”

“Thank you, Netty,” I said, letting my head loll back in my helmet. I was drenched, the inside of my b-suit now reeking of stale sweat, stress, and fresh sweat, a miasma I was blissfully unaware of—mostly. The suit would flush it away, but it said something about the sheer exertion—physical, mental, and emotional—that it hadn’t been able to keep up in the first place.

I turned to Perry. “Any luck?”

“No. I can’t find a way into the mine’s operating system.”

I turned away, then back, decisions clicking like solutions to a puzzle. “These mines—are they custom-made, or just off-the-shelf?”

“Definitely off-the-shelf. Standard design, made by Klaxuu Armaments in the Tau Ceti system. Why?”

“Check to see if there are any open access points, no matter how obscure. I once broke into a secure system because some moron was gaming on it, had opened a port to play at being a wizard or something, and never closed it.”

A brief pause. “Aha… well, that’s a flaw. This thing is set to accept automatic upgrades to its software from the manufacturer. Speaking of morons, somebody didn’t disable that, so it’s still willing to accept dealer access. Of course, to make use of it, I’m going to have to pretend to be a Klaxuu rep, which means I’ll have to use a stolen Klaxuu access code that may or may not exist in a database somewhere, and that’s all pretty illegal—”

I just looked at Perry.

“—not that that’s really an issue right now, of course, exigent circumstances and all that—and, I’m done. That mine now loves us.”

“Perfect, thank you.”

We flew on, passing close to the mine. It led to a moment of paralytic tension, but it stayed obediently unexploded. I let out a breath, my hands flat on my thighs, rubbing absently as if I could dissolve the stress through repetitive motion.

“Van, those class 12s are gaining on us. As long as we keep formation with Lunzy, they’re going to catch up. Soon.”

“Hey, Lunzy, any chance you can pour on a bit more speed?” I asked.

“Sorry, Van. My poor Conclusion is already squeaking and groaning like me after a night in The Black Hole. My AI is adamant that we’re maxed out for acceleration. But don’t worry about it. You guys just go—”

“You know what? I’ve lost enough people lately. I’m done with it. Lucky, Carter, are you guys in agreement?”

“We need to agree with something?” Lucky replied.

Carter didn’t answer right away. I wondered if his nerve was going to break and he’d rabbit out of here. If he did, he did. It had to be his decision—

“And let you get all the glory, Van? No way,” he shot back, but I could hear the tremble in his voice.

I opened my mouth, but Icky cut me off.

“Hey, Carter. I still think you’re an asshole, but you’re a damned brave one. Drinks are on me when we get back to Anvil Dark.”

“I—” He hesitated. When he finally spoke, he sounded genuinely grateful. “Thanks.”

Torina turned to me. “What a day.”

I nodded. “Yeah. And it’s still not over.”

* * *

It had been a faint hope that the Fade would run afoul of their own mine, which should now identify them as targets, but they were smarter than that. A brief flurry of laser fire destroyed it before it could be a threat.

“It was a good try,” Perry said.

Five minutes later, the threat warning sounded as our two pursuers entered missile range. They immediately began spewing ordnance, which rapidly closed the distance. If we left Lunzy behind and made our best possible speed, we’d dramatically limit our exposure, of course.

But only if we left Lunzy behind.

Instead, we arranged ourselves into a protective formation around her, linking our fire control systems. We slaved Carter’s, Lucky’s, and Lunzy’s to ours, since it was the most capable, and watched as it calculated firing solutions on the rapidly approaching salvo of missiles.

Zeno muttered a curse. “They’re good solutions, with only one problem.”

“Ammo,” I said.

“Yeah. Best case scenario, firing everything, we get eighty percent of the incoming missiles. That still leaves, what, four or five that are going to get through? And we’re already pretty beaten up.”

“We are, yeah.”

There was nothing left to say. We could take down most of this salvo but would take some hits. We’d have almost no effective defense against a second salvo, the best projection seeing us stopping about twenty percent of the incoming projectiles. That would leave fifteen or sixteen scoring hits. I didn’t need to see any simulations to know how that was going to work out.

Torina came on a private channel. “Van, as your Second, I’ve got to think about this ship and crew. We have to leave Lunzy behind.”

“I know.”

“You… know?”

“Of course. I know it intellectually. I just need another minute or so to know it, well—”

“I get it.”

I took a deep, shuddering breath. There was no other way. We had to leave Lunzy behind, or else we’d all die. It really came down to a choice between the Fade winning the day and a few of us surviving, or the Fade winning the day and none of us making it out of here alive.

I stared at the starfield ahead of the Fafnir. It was stark and impassive. The stars didn’t care, of course, but it wasn’t the stars I was looking at. I was hoping for a miracle. It seemed that the luck we needed to make this plan work had been spent saving us from the junkyard dog.

I let out my breath, then took another to give the order to Lucky and Carter to make best possible speed. I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d join them, or if we’d stay with Lunzy. No one should die alone. I hadn’t wanted it for Rolis, and I sure as hell didn’t want it for her.

“Holy shit!”

I’m not even sure who said it or, at first, why. It turned out that the miracle I was hoping for didn’t happen ahead of us, it happened behind us.

* * *

Icons snapped into existence so close astern that they practically overlapped our own. I barely had time to register them before I was bracing myself for a collision alarm. But we didn’t hit anything, and nothing hit us, and only then was I able to make sense of what was happening.

Five ships had twisted in behind us, dangerously far into the system’s gravity well. Prominent among them was the Guild’s warship-that-wasn’t, the sleek black battlecruiser Righteous Fury. She was accompanied by two more heavy cruisers, another battlecruiser I recognized as Schegith’s cousin, and a truly massive ship I didn’t recognize at all.

A new voice came on the comm. It was Groshenko.

“Damn it, Van, I loan you a ship and you get it blown up.”

“Petyr, I… I’m sorry.”

He waved a hand. “Relax. Most of the crew was able to abandon ship. Gerhardt’s picking them up from their escape pods now.”

“They—wait. He’s still alive?”

“Yup. He’s a wily old dog, that one. He put the Cossack between him and those Fade ships, then powered right down. When they blew her, the thermal and radiation and other emissions from the blast gave him all the cover he needed.”

“They blew her? You mean, what, they scuttled the Cossack?”

“Damned right. Any ship of mine goes out on its own terms, not some Fade assholes—”

He paused, as someone off the image spoke with him. “Yeah, sorry, Van. Got a battle to win here. You guys just get clear and chill for a while.” He smiled wickedly. “This won’t take long.”

* * *

It didn’t. The Fade suddenly found themselves outgunned at least six or seven to one. They flipped and burned like mad, but it was too late. The combined fire of the Righteous Fury, Groshenko’s cruisers, and Schegith’s cousin alone were enough to pummel the two Fade capital ships into scrap. Add in the fire of the big-assed—dreadnought, maybe? Whatever it was, it unleashed almost as much firepower as the other four ships combined. In less than five minutes, both of the Fade ships had been blasted to scrap and whirling debris.

I slumped back in a pool of my own sweat, almost gasping. I glanced at Torina. She stared back at me from behind her visor, eyes vacant and dazed, like she’d just startled herself awake from a deep sleep.

“I’m repressurizing the ship so I can hunt for any more leaks. Don’t take your helmets off just yet,” Icky said.

“No worries, Ick. Taking off my helmet is way more effort than I can muster.”

* * *

Before the battle, Torina had asked me why we didn’t just attack with everything we had right up front. I hadn’t expected Schegith herself to show up, and in the biggest warship I’d ever seen, at that. She apparently kept it hidden away in some remote star system—and hadn’t been sure about the Righteous Fury, which had been involved in operations somewhere else. Gerhardt and Groshenko had collaborated on her involvement, though. It was a lot of combat power, and that was the problem.

“If we show up with all those big-assed ships, what do you think the Fade will do?” I’d asked her.

“Wisely run for their lives?”

“Exactly. And once we’ve left, they’ll just come scuttling back, like cockroaches when you turn the lights out. I don’t want to just chase them away, Torina. I want to hurt them, and hurt them bad.”

Which we’d done. Between us and the Hwananye, we’d destroyed a class 13, three class 12s, and four smaller ships. We’d taken one intact but disabled, with its crew, and two more had gotten away. We weren’t sure how many Fade crew we’d killed—dozens, certainly, with a possible number in the hundreds.

But it hadn’t been without cost. Of the Cossack’s original complement of sixteen, only nine had survived, and four of those had been badly injured. The cruiser that Groshenko had arrived aboard had taken a couple of hits in the final spasm of battle, as had the Righteous Fury, inflicting two more deaths and a half-dozen more injuries.

Still, considering how it could have turned out—and honestly almost had—we’d gotten off lightly. Things definitely hadn’t gone according to plan, and we’d had to make a lot of shit up on the fly, but Groshenko just nodded sagely during our post-action confab.

“That’s the difference between plans and leadership,” he said. “Plans only get you to the enemy. Leadership is how you defeat him.”

* * *

We weren’t without leads, either, thanks to Perry. During the swirling melee earlier in the battle, when two up-armored class 6 workboats had decided to bug out, Perry had loaded and fired our remaining pair of tag missiles. These detonated with a convincing enough explosion, but instead of showering their target with nothing but shrapnel, these effectively non-lethal weapons also spattered the target with tags—small electronic trackers that could later be pinged and located. While we organic beings had dealt with the aftermath of the battle, Perry and Netty had put the word out across the Peacemaker fleet, asking AIs everywhere to ping around for our tags. Since there’s almost always at least one Peacemaker in nearly every inhabited system, it didn’t take long to get a hit.

“Bliss? That’s an awfully poetic name for a criminal hideout,” I said, staring at the chart Netty had depicted. It was a planet-sized moon orbiting a gas giant in the outer portion of the Tau Ceti system. “Also not the sort of place I’d expect to find a criminal hideout—you know, in one of the busiest systems in known space.”

“That’s because it’s not a criminal hideout. I guess there are criminals hiding out there, so it is a criminal hideout, but its day job is being a corporate retreat for—” Perry paused, holding a wing out at me.

“Traversia Bolt-Right.”

“Ding ding ding, we have a winner.”

I nodded. “Okay, then. Torina, get the Fafnir ready. I’ll talk to Groshenko, Gerhardt, and Schegith about what they can send along with us.”

Torina looked around at the Fafnir. She was pressurized again but had a tiny leak somewhere that was driving Icky crazy. Some of her panels were dark, marking systems that had been knocked offline. The status board was more red and yellow than green, and the magazines were nearly depleted of missiles and point-defense rounds. In short, the Fafnir was stripped down to her bare skin and in need of a great deal of detail work.

“Van, are you sure you want to push right into another fight?”

“No. But I don’t want to let up on the pressure on the Fade, and I especially don’t want to miss a chance at linking them to those shitheads at Traversia.”

“Have to agree. Those Fade crew we took off that disabled ship are going to stand trial, but let’s face it, they’re just triggermen. You can bet it was the masterminds that bugged out of here. No-No might even be one of them,” Perry said.

Torina sighed, then blew a few errant strands of hair out of her face. “Well, I was hoping for a shower, but—what the hell.”

I smiled. “Not gonna lie, the whole post-battle-glow Valkyrie thing is really working for me.”

“Then you’ll see Valhalla when I take off this b-suit,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

I dialed up my smile to a leer.

“Hold that thought.”

32

Bliss, as it turned out, wasn’t the corporate retreat. Rather, it was an idyllic planet of ostentatious, even obscene wealth—a sort of gated world where the stupidly rich could build rambling estates and sprawling mansions, each trying to outdo the others with their garish displays of stuff. Gerhardt warned us that even the Guild had limited ability to descend onto the surface of Bliss, which was protected with something even more imposing and dangerous than a slew of orbital defenses—

It was surrounded by a wall of lawyers.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to test Bliss’s formidable legal defenses. The Traversia retreat was actually an aerostat, a huge platform floating in the upper portion of Bliss’s atmosphere through a combination of gas chambers full of helium. The chambers also acted as fuel reservoirs for its fusion power plants and a huge, whirling fan built into its central hub. I scanned what little data we had on it, noting that it only needed a helium top-off every few years. It was effectively a floating town, close enough to space that it was easily accessible from orbit, but also able to launch and receive atmospheric craft to service the planet below.

“What a weird construct,” Zeno said.

I grunted in agreement, taking in the scene. Apparently, a popular pastime was leaping off of the thing clad only in a powered wing suit and zooming around the stratosphere, before either falling to the surface or soaring back up to the aerostat.

“Never underestimate the stupidity of people with free time and a few cocktails,” I said.

“Definitely an open bar next to the flight deck,” Torina agreed. “I was born rich and even I think this is a bit… much.”

I glanced at the overlay. We had Gerhardt, Lucky, one of Groshenko’s cruisers, and Schegith’s massive dreadnought in company. Carter, Lunzy, and the rest of the force had stayed at 109 to deal with the aftermath of our battle. Nothing in sight even remotely matched our firepower here at Bliss, so there was no escaping into space. My worry was that someone like No-No might be connected enough to take refuge on the planet below, where she might as well be in another galaxy from a legal perspective.

A wall of lawyers was a lot like a missile defense network, the only difference being the lawyers charged by the hour.

I got Gerhardt, Schegith, and Groshenko on the comm. Groshenko immediately spoke up.

“How do you want to do this, Van?”

I blinked, a little surprised. I’d expected to be told how we were going to proceed, not asked.

“This one believes we could just destroy the platform,” Schegith said, sounding almost cheerful about it. Of course, her race had almost been exterminated by the Fade or their associates, so she could be forgiven a certain amount of enthusiasm regarding such mass destruction of sapient life.

Icky, still hunting the elusive leak, stuck her head into the cockpit. “That’d be awesome! Like your Dependence Day, Van! Fireworks and—hot dogs, right?”

“Independence Day, Icky, but I like your enthusiasm.”

Gerhardt frowned. “And what about the megatons of debris that would fall onto the surface of Bliss? I suspect that would raise a few, ah, complaints. Perhaps even lawsuits or strongly worded letters.”

I grimaced. “Yeah, that’s a non-starter. What about—?”

“Serious damage to take out their defenses, followed by a savage boarding action? Sure. Let’s go,” Gerhardt said, quirking one side of his mouth.

I smiled. “Yeah. That. And since I guess I’m still in charge—”

“This is your op, Tudor,” Gerhardt said.

“Okay, then. Follow me down, but everyone leave when I say leave. Just in case things get out of hand, we’re not hitting the ground in that whirling blade of doom.”

“Let’s try to avoid that event, shall we?” Gerhardt insisted.

I pointed down toward the planet’s surface, shaking my head. “You bet. But if the shit hits the fan—tip your bartenders—I’d rather be alive with a bunch of rich people pissed off at me than dead on their lawn.”

Icky raised two hands like a kid in class. “Van, what’s a lawn?”

“An area of grass that ruins your Saturday afternoon. Now, eyes on me. It’s time for violence.”

Icky smacked one hand into another, a goofy grin pulling at her features. “This already sounds better than a Saturday.”

* * *

Being good law-enforcement officials, we opened with an order to deactivate all weapons and prepare to be boarded. The aerostat’s CEO, himself just a cog in the Traversia machine, refused, stating that we had no jurisdiction. I pointed out that the two class 6 gunboats we’d tagged were still present on the aerostat, had just been involved in a firefight with the Guild, and were wanted for that and for fleeing lawful custody.

“I don’t know anything about that. Now, I’m going to send you the contact information for our legal representatives. You can speak to them. We have nothing further to say to you.”

“You know what exigent circumstances are?”

“I—yes. But you—”

“Good, just making sure,” I said, switching the comm to call Groshenko.

“Petyr, you’re on.”

He smiled. “With pleasure.”

The aerostat’s meager defenses were no match for the firepower we had available. Groshenko’s cruiser, the Aurora, lashed out with laser and mass-driver fire, surgically obliterating the point-defenses and a trio of laser batteries. With her military fire control system and the discipline of professional soldiers, collateral damage was kept to an absolute minimum.

We then began broadcasting on a general comm, swamping the aerostat with our signal. I explained why we were here and what we wanted—the crews of the two Fade class 6s. Everyone else was free to go—

“But, when you depart, you will enter orbit and allow your ship to be boarded for inspection. Any vessels that attempt to flee or descend to the surface will be considered hostile and treated accordingly.”

I’d intended to let them fill in the blanks, but Schegith cut in with her own broadcast.

“This one wishes to make it clear that by treated accordingly, it is meant that you will be destroyed, and if any of your crews have the misfortune to survive the collapse of your hulls, this one will give consideration to preparing and eating the unfortunates, based on their body fat and marbling.” Given her impassive tone and the looming bulk and enormous firepower of Schegith’s massive ship, I’m pretty sure everyone got the message. Based on her appearance and reputation, the possibility that a sentient being would actually eat other people was—let’s say her story got their attention, at minimum.

“Schegith?” I asked, the question far more than just one word.

“This one likes the occasional hyperbole.”

“But not the occasional person for dinner?” I returned.

“You are far too lean for this one’s tastes, friend.” Then Schegith’s laughter hissed over the comms, and Icky boomed out in her own appreciation of the joke.

“Is that even legal?” Torina asked as we readied ourselves to descend to the aerostat.

I shrugged. “Eating people? No. The rest? Dunno. Perry?”

“Hey, she’s not part of the Guild, but a sovereign power in her own right. If she chooses to use lethal force and someone has a problem with it, they’ll have to take it up with her,” he replied. “As to the threat of interstellar barbecue, I have no opinion. I ain’t made of meat, friends.”

“Appreciate the backup, Perry. Really giving me bestie vibes.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Will her threat of destruction actually stick?” I asked.

“I guess we’ll find out if it happens.”

I clipped the Moonsword to my harness.

“We sure as hell will. Alright, friends. Let’s go wreck this country club.”

* * *

A shuttle from the Aurora came and picked us up. We left Zeno commanding the Fafnir, while the rest of us joined a squad of dour, hard-eyed mercenary assault troops Groshenko had committed to the mission. Their squad leader was, of all people, a lean, wiry man with a leathery face and a Yorkshire accent.

“Bert Brown,” he said, shaking my hand as I sat beside him.

“You’re not from around here, are you?”

“Newcastle-upon-Tyne, actually. Ex-Special Air Service. I got to know Petyr Groshenko during some business back on old Terra.”

I smiled and shook my head. “Is this where you spec ops guys go when you retire? Into space?”

“Eh, it’s either that or take over me dad’s farm. And I’m allergic to hay.”

We detached from the Fafnir and descended to the aerostat, veering around a procession of small ships—workboats, sloops, yachts, and sundry similar vessels—streaming up into orbit.

“Rats from a sinking ship,” Perry said.

Torina shook her head as we pitched up and around the line of ships. “Petyr, Gerhardt, and company are going to have their work cut out for them, checking the IDs of all these people.”

“Yup. And given that they’re all probably rich, they’re no doubt going to be assholes about it, too.” I shrugged. “Hey, better them than me.”

It only took us about ten minutes to touch down on the aerostat, which was now mostly empty. The mercenaries quickly disembarked and formed a perimeter around the shuttle.

I activated my comm as I stepped onto the landing platform. We needed rebreathers in the thin air, but Torina and I had just suited up and fastened our helmets back on. I kicked myself for not showering during the trip here, but there’d just been too much to do.

“Schegith, you must have crazy powerful scanners on that big ol’ boat of yours. Can you help us pin down where, exactly, the people left aboard this aerostat are? You can feed the data to Perry.”

It took a moment to establish the link. Perry repeated the data to us, painting the locations of anyone remaining on the aerostat on our heads-ups.

“Wow. Maybe, what, fifty people left on board?” Torina said.

“Yeah. Okay, folks, whichever of these are the bad guys, they might be tempted to make some sort of last stand. Remember, I’d like somebody to stand trial when all is said and done.”

Icky swung her sledge. “One question, boss. When you say stand trial, do they actually need to be able to stand?”

* * *

I cursed and dodged back as a mass-driver slug slammed into the bulkhead behind me. Bert Brown, the ex-SAS squad leader, moved up beside me in a crouch.

I pointed at the nearby corner where this corridor intersected a much wider one that led to a set of richly carven doors of some deep purple wood. They were cracked open, allowing whoever was inside to fire straight down the wide corridor.

“Sorry, mate, no other ways in. Looks like we have to go that way,” Brown said, pointing at the corner.

I sighed. We’d already had to fight past three automated sentry guns, one of which had seriously wounded two mercenaries. Perry had had to hack through pairs of blast doors, each one taking precious time to breach due to hardened alloy and clever design. We’d dismounted from the shuttle nearly two hours ago, and I was ready for this to be over.

“What do you suggest?” I asked him.

“I find smoke grenades, followed by a charge, is always a decent fallback.”

I peeked around the corner again. Another shot ripped past, and I pulled back.

“Smoke grenades, then charge, huh?” I shrugged. “Let’s.”

Brown turned to his squad. Two of his mercenaries came up, grenades ready. I turned to Icky.

“This is your chance to shine, Icky. I can’t think of anyone scarier to lead the charge, if you’re willing.”

She gave a vicious grin and hefted her hammer. “Once more, just to be clear—they don’t have to be able to stand, right?”

“They just have to answer the charges.”

“So they need a few teeth and a working jaw. Copy that, boss. I’ll do my best.”

The mercenaries lobbed their grenades around the corner. We gave the smoke a moment to build, then I slapped Icky’s arm. With a howl that split the air, she raced around the corner. Torina and I followed, with Brown and his mercenaries right behind. Gunfire erupted as the bad guys shot blindly down the corridor, bullets spangling my vision with impacts and ricochets.

The smoke was designed to suppress all signatures, not just visible. With no thermal or anything else to go by, all we could do was run in the general direction of the door. I veered a little too far left and collided with the wall, while shots snapped past in a whine of violence. I heard one of the mercenaries cry out, then call, “Hit, down!” I had no idea where she was except somewhere behind me, lost in the roiling clouds of thick smoke. Without thinking, I kept going forward until I reached the doors. Icky was already inside, something I discovered when her sledgehammer whistled over my head.

“Shit, Icky!”

“Sorry. AWOOOOOO!” Icky bellowed, her hammer whistling overhead again with the song of lethality. Her blow connected with—someone, or an object that used to be someone, the sound of crunching bones and armor filling my comm channel with grim finality.

The next thirty seconds or so were a confusing melee, clouded by smoke drifting into the room from the corridor, erratic but in constant motion. I had The Drop ready to stun any bad guys I saw, with the Moonsword in my off hand. Someone I didn’t recognize suddenly leapt in front of me, then raised a gun right in my face. Without thinking, I swung the sword in a glittering arc, feeling only mild resistance as—

Oh. Shit.

“Good to know it’s sharp,” I murmured, surveying the result.

I didn’t cut my target. I cut my target in half, their torso falling to one side with a spurting arc of dark fluid, punctuated by a mewling scream that chilled every cell in my body.

Icky appeared just in time to catch their bottom half—legs and lower torso—and hold it upright with a bark of triumph.

“Hey, look! This one can still stand!”

* * *

“You know, if we find a lead to another group of bad guys in this office, I’m not going to immediately tear off after them,” I said, slumped on a couch in the sumptuous office. It was probably the CEO’s office, palatial and luxurious in an understated, corporate sort of way. Its elegant charm was marred, though, by bullet strikes gouged in the walls, a grayish residue of smoke slathered across the woodwork, and a spectacular amount of blood where I’d bisected my opponent.

We’d taken two people, a human and a Gajur, into custody. Perry confirmed both were known Fade operatives, and senior ones at that. Unfortunately, neither of them were No-No. She’d either managed to slip away or had never even been here in the first place.

Gerhardt appeared and ambled up in front of Torina and me. We both just looked up at him.

“Pardon us if we don’t stand.”

He shrugged. “I was just speaking to Perry. Apparently, this suite of rooms is as much a vault as an office. It turns out there are a lot of bonds here, along with artwork and more than a few obviously stolen cultural artifacts.”

I waved a hand. “So I’ve heard. Sorry, but I’m so tired that even vast wealth can’t get me off this couch—which is really comfortable, by the way.” I looked from one end of it to the other. “Torina, you think this would fit in the living room back at the farm?”

“No, but I think we could find a place for it aboard the Iowa.”

“Good idea. Love your design sense.”

“Tudor, since you have a history of repatriating looted cultural artifacts, I’ll leave that to you—with a supporting stipend, of course. As for the rest of this—”

Gerhardt paused, looking around.

“The Guild will seize all of this, of course, as proceeds of crime. However, we’ll allocate one percent as a bounty to the apprehending parties.”

Perry appeared and landed on a mirror-polished end table with a clatter. “Don’t you mean two percent, Master Gerhardt? That’s the standard rate.”

Gerhardt gave Perry a sidelong glance. “Well, aren’t you the legal eagle.”

“Oh, for—can we officially retire that stupid joke?”

Gerhardt actually laughed. “I stand corrected. Two percent to the apprehending parties.”

He wandered off to examine the rest of the suite of palatial rooms. I turned to Torina and Icky, who stood nearby, her hammer propped on her shoulder.

“So we’re rich.”

“Good. The Fafnir needs about a zillion bonds in repairs,” Icky said.

I sat up with a groan. “Easy come, easy go,” I said. On the way out, I stopped beside Brown, the mercenary squad leader, whose people had secured the scene pending the arrival of a forensics team from Anvil Dark.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t mention it, mate. You ever need us again, just shout.”

I clapped him on the shoulder and, Torina, Icky, and Perry in tow, started back to the Fafnir.

“Time for a beer,” I said, getting a chorus of assent in return.

Torina eyed me sidelong. “And a shower.”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

EPILOGUE

We brought the Fafnir back to 109 because the Hwananye wanted to meet us. Groshenko, who’d been trying to broker a meeting with them, just laughed.

“All it took was saving them from genocide. Hell, I should have started with that.”

The meeting was both profoundly strange and deeply touching. I found myself standing on 109’s barren, arid surface, speaking with what amounted to motile, silvery metal, like intelligent pools of mercury. They offered us their profound thanks, explaining that it gave them the opportunity to follow the Bright.

“I’m sorry—the Bright?”

The translated voice was flat and mechanical, devoid of inflection or tone. “Those of us who left, to travel to the stars, to die.”

“To… die?”

“It is our way.”

“Well, I’m glad we could help,” I said. “But I hope your people have a good long while before they follow the Bright, then.”

“It does not matter, Van Tudor. You have given us the opportunity to die as we wish, not to the careless greed of others. That is a great gift.”

I bowed slightly, because it felt like a formal moment. I was sure there were many nuances to the discussion that the translator couldn’t communicate. But this was important to the Hwananye, and that was good enough for me.

“I say this in truth—if you ever come starward, it is my hope that you’ll consider us as friends,” I said to the silvery, sapient puddle that wobbled before me. As strange moments went, it was rivaled only by speaking to Matterforge.

The Hwananyne shimmered, then spoke again. “Just as you have friends here, Van Tudor. Our world is yours, for as long as you shall be.”

I bowed again, and this time, it was my eyes that shimmered, awash with the emotion of our losses—and what we gained, too.

* * *

“Tony, who the hell are these people? I thought the Truly Aware was just the three of you!”

Tony stood inside the door to the barn, watching as the four motley people he’d brought to the farm milled around the Fafnir, taking in not just her splendid form, but also her battle damage.

“These are our online members,” Tony replied, then pointed. “Sacramento, Calgary, Miami, and—yeah, the short guy with the glasses who always looks grumpy? A compound in Idaho.” He gave me a meaningful look. “Don’t ask, unless you want to hear all about his manifesto, which makes the Bible look like a pamphlet.”

“Ah. Good to know.”

One of these new Truly Aware—Calgary, I think—ambled over, hands in the pockets of a combat jacket. “This is—holy shit.”

I smiled. “That’s sometimes how I still describe it myself.”

“How do you know that we won’t, you know, just blow the lid on all this?”

I was going to answer, but Tony beat me to it. “Believe me, Brian, you don’t want to—” He paused, shaking his head. “Hey, Icky? Tell Brian your favorite word in the human English language.”

Icky, who’d given up on her repairs to the Fafnir in exasperation, at least until the visitors were gone, wandered over until she loomed over Brian. She grinned, baring her teeth.

“I like to do the probing.”

Brian laughed, but Icky’s expression didn’t change, and he turned serious again.

“Yeah, don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me,” he said to me.

This time I laughed. “Our secret. Remember, you guys are my eyes and ears here on Earth.”

Tony rounded up the Truly Aware and herded them back to his van. He assured me that the Truly Aware would be on the case and report anything they thought we needed to know.

They drove away in a cloud of dust, leaving me with the crew and Miryam, who’d brought cold beer out onto the porch of the farmhouse. For Icky, she had chilled fruit punch, partly because Icky didn’t like beer—but mainly because none of us wanted Icky to get drunk. Having a hairy, four-armed wall of muscle bellowing I love you guys and wanting a hug was not an experience any of us wanted to repeat.

As we sipped beer, I turned toward a rolling boom from the southwest. Clouds the color of new tar, edged laser-white with sunlight, were rapidly piling up. Prairie thunderstorms could turn nasty really fast, but if it spawned any tornadoes—well, the Fafnir had taken multiple hits in battle, so I was pretty sure she could weather a twister.

The wind did pick up, a cool slap to our faces as the trees waved in summer protest, so we went inside. Zeno, Icky, Perry, and Torina sat at the kitchen table, chattering away. I poured beer at the kitchen counter and was going to join them, when Miryam intercepted me.

“If your grandmother was here, do you know what she’d say?”

“I’m an alien, and it might change you later in life?”

Miryam smiled. “Well, okay, maybe that.”

“Come on, Miryam, I have actual alien DNA in me. But there’s no discernible difference between me and any other human being.”

“Yet.”

“And that’s the part that worries me, yeah.”

“Anyway, what I was going to say was that she’d probably say something like, ‘Mark, you knew a good thing when you saw it.’” She flashed me a smile. “Sorry, your grandfather’s here in this little scenario, too.”

“So I gathered.”

She touched my arm and looked at Torina. “Don’t let this one get away, Van. Torina’s like your grandmother. She’s… one of a kind. In all the stars.”

I stared at Torina, backdropped by the gauzy curtains over the kitchen window, just like the one through which I’d first met Perry. They were stirring, lifting in the growing breeze. Fat raindrops began to patter the ground, the ozone tang of the storm wafting into the kitchen. Torina saw me staring and flashed a smile that was as incandescent as the first flash of lightning outside. Then Icky said something to her, pulling her attention away.

I didn’t take my eyes off her, though, and I answered Miryam in the only way I could.

“Don’t worry. I won’t.”

* * *

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Van will return in KINGDOM COME available to preorder now on Amazon.

GLOSSARY

Anvil Dark: The beating heart of the Peacemaker organization, Anvil Dark is a large orbital platform located in the Gamma Crucis system, some ninety lightyears from Earth. Anvil Dark, some nine hundred seventy years old, remains in a Lagrange point around Mesaribe, remaining in permanent darkness. Anvil Dark has legal, military, medical, and supply resources for Peacemakers, their assistants, and guests.

Cloaks: Local organized criminal element, the Cloaks hold sway in only one place: Spindrift. A loose guild of thugs, extortionists, and muscle, the Cloaks fill a need for some legal control on Spindrift, though they do so only because Peacemakers and other authorities see them as a necessary evil. When confronted away from Spindrift, Cloaks are given no rights, quarter, or considerations for their position. (See: Spindrift)

Dragonet: A Base Four Combat ship, the Dragonet is a modified platform intended for the prosecution of Peacemaker policy. This includes but is not limited to ship-to-ship combat, surveillance, and planetary operations as well. The Dragonet is fast, lightly armored, and carries both point defense and ranged weapons, and features a frame that can be upgraded to the status of a small corvette (Class Nine).

Moonsword: Although the weapon is in the shape of a medium sword, the material is anything but simple metal. The Moonsword is a generational armament, capable of upgrades that augment its ability to interrupt communications, scan for data, and act as a blunt-force weapon that can split all but the toughest of ship’s hulls. See: Starsmith

Peacemaker: Also known as a Galactic Knight, Peacemakers are an elite force of law enforcement who have existed for more than three centuries. Both hereditary and open to recruitment, the guild is a meritocracy, but subject to political machinations and corruption, albeit not on the scale of other galactic military forces. Peacemakers have a legal code, proscribed methods, a reward and bounty scale, and a well-earned reputation as fierce, competent fighters. Any race may be a Peacemaker, but the candidates must pass rigorous testing and training.

Perry: An artificial intelligence, bound to Van (after service to his grandfather), Perry is a fully-sapient combat operative in the shape of a large, black avian. With the ability to hack computer systems and engage in physical combat, Perry is also a living repository of galactic knowledge in topics from law to battle strategies. He is also a wiseass.

Salt Thieves: Originally actual thieves who stole salt, this is a three-hundred-year-old guild of assassins known for their ruthless behavior, piracy, and tendency to kill. Members are identified by a complex, distinct system of braids in their hair. These braids are often cut and taken as prizes, especially by Peacemakers.

Spindrift: At nine hundred thirty years old, Spindrift is one of the most venerable space stations in the galactic arm. It is also the least reputable, having served as a place of criminal enterprise for nearly all of its existence due to a troublesome location. Orbiting Sirius, Spindrift was nearly depopulated by stellar radiation in the third year as a spaceborne habitat. When order collapsed, criminals moved in, cycling in and out every twelve point four years as coronal ejections rom Sirius made the station uninhabitable. Spindrift is known for medical treatments and technology that are quasi-legal at best, as well as weapons, stolen goods, and a strange array of archaeological items, all illegally looted. Spindrift has a population of thirty thousand beings at any time.

Starsmith: A place, a guild, and a single being, the Starsmith is primarily a weapons expert of unsurpassed skill. The current Starsmith is a Conoku (named Linulla), a crablike race known for their dexterity, skill in metallurgy and combat enhancements, and sense of humor.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

J. N. Chaney is a USA Today Bestselling author and has a Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. He fancies himself quite the Super Mario Bros. fan. When he isn’t writing or gaming, you can find him online at www.jnchaney.com.

He migrates often, but was last seen in Las Vegas, NV. Any sightings should be reported, as they are rare.

* * *

Terry Maggert is left-handed, likes dragons, coffee, waffles, running, and giraffes; order unimportant. He’s also half of author Daniel Pierce, and half of the humor team at Cledus du Drizzle.

With thirty-one titles, he has something to thrill, entertain, or make you cringe in horror. Guaranteed.

Note: He doesn’t sleep. But you sort of guessed that already.