Woman Decides to Die and Let Baby Live

BY JAMES S. A. COREY

The Expanse
Leviathan Wakes
Caliban's War
Abaddon's Gate
Cibola Burn
Nemesis Games
Babylon's Ashes
Persepolis Rising
Tiamat's Wrath
Leviathan Falls

The Expanse short fiction
The Butcher of Anderson Station
Gods of Risk
The Churn
Drive
The Vital Abyss
Strange Dogs

ORBIT

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Orbit

Copyright © 2021 by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck

Excerpt from Far From the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson
Copyright © 2021 by Tade Thompson

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in anyform or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without asimilar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-356-51037-8

Orbit

An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk

www.orbitbooks.net

Nine books later and you're still here,
so this one's for you.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One: Jim

Chapter Two: Tanaka

Chapter Three: Naomi

Chapter Four: Elvi

Chapter Five: Tanaka

Chapter Six: Naomi

Chapter Seven: Jim

Interlude: The Dreamer

Chapter Eight: Elvi

Chapter Nine: Kit

Chapter Ten: Fayez

Chapter Eleven: Teresa

Chapter Twelve: Tanaka

Interlude: The Dreamer

Chapter Thirteen: Jim

Chapter Fourteen: Elvi

Chapter Fifteen: Teresa

Chapter Sixteen: Tanaka

Chapter Seventeen: Naomi

Chapter Eighteen: Jim

Chapter Nineteen: Kit

Chapter Twenty: Elvi

Interlude: The Dreamer

Chapter Twenty-One: Tanaka

Chapter Twenty-Two: Jillian

Chapter Twenty-Three: Jim

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Lighthouse and the Keeper

Chapter Twenty-Five: Tanaka

Chapter Twenty-Six: Jim

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Elvi

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Tanaka

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Jim

Interlude: The Dreamers

Chapter Thirty: Elvi

Chapter Thirty-One: Tanaka

Chapter Thirty-Two: Kit

Chapter Thirty-Three: Naomi

Chapter Thirty-Four: Tanaka

Chapter Thirty-Five: Alex

Chapter Thirty-Six: Jim

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Tanaka

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Elvi

Interlude: The Dreamers

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Jim

Chapter Forty: Naomi

Chapter Forty-One: Jim

Chapter Forty-Two: Alex

Chapter Forty-Three: Jim

Chapter Forty-Four: Teresa

Chapter Forty-Five: Naomi

Chapter Forty-Six: Tanaka

Chapter Forty-Seven: Jim

Chapter Forty-Eight: Alex

Chapter Forty-Nine: Naomi and Jim

Epilogue: The Linguist

Acknowledgments

Extras

About the author

Prologue

First there was a man named Winston Duarte. And then there wasn't.

The last moment had been banal. He'd been in his private study at the heart of the State Building, sitting on his divan. His desk— Laconian rainwood, with a grain like sedimentary rock—had an inset screen showing the thousand different reports vying for his attention. The clockwork of the empire ground slowly forward, with every revolution of the wheel making the mechanism a little smoother and more precise. He'd been reviewing the security reports from Auberon, where the governor, responding to separatist violence, had begun recruiting locals into the system security forces. His own daughter, Teresa, had been on one of her illicit adventures outside the grounds. The solitary nature hikes which she believed to be outside the watchful eye of Laconian Security were developmentally important for her, and he looked on them with not only indulgence but pride.

He had only recently told her about his ambitions for her: to join him as Paolo Cortázar's second patient, to have her awareness opened and deepened as his had been, to live perhaps not forever but at least indefinitely. A hundred years from now, they would still be guiding the human empire. A thousand. Ten thousand years.

If.

That was the terrible pressure behind it all. The overwhelming if. If he could push back against the human habit of complacence. If he could convince the vast, incoherent scrum that was humanity that they had to take action to avoid the fate of their predecessors. Either they did whatever it took to understand and defeat the darkness on the third side of the ring gate, or they died at its hand.

The experiments in Tecoma system were like all the critical steps that had come throughout human history. Ever since the first mammal decided to rise on its hind legs to see above the grass. If it worked, it would change everything again. Everything changed everything that had come before. It was the least surprising thing in life.

He had reached for his tea in those last moments, but noticed through one of the weird new senses Dr. Cortázar had given him that the pot had already gone cold. The awareness of molecular vibration was analogous to the physical sensation of heat—it measured the same material reality—but the merely human sense was like a child playing a whistle compared with Duarte's vast, symphonic new awareness.

The last moment came.

In the instant between deciding to call his valet for a fresh pot of tea and then reaching his hand out for the comm controls, the mind of Winston Duarte blew apart like a pile of straw in a hurricane.

There was pain—a great deal of pain—and there was fear. But there wasn't anyone left to feel it, so it faded quickly. There was no consciousness, no pattern, no one to think the thoughts that swelled and dimmed. Something more delicate—more graceful, more sophisticated—would have died. The narrative chain that thought of itself as Winston Duarte was ripped to pieces, but the flesh that housed him wasn't. The subtle flows of energy in his body fell into a storm of invisible turbulence, whipped past coherence. And then, without anyone being aware of it, they began to slow and still.

His thirty trillion cells still took in oxygen from the complex fluid that had been his blood. Those structures that were his neurons fell into association with each other like drinking buddies bending their elbows in unconscious synchrony. Something was that hadn't been. Not the old thing, but a pattern that took up residence in the empty space it left behind. Not the dancer, but a dance. Not the water, but a whirlpool. Not a person. Not a mind. But something.

When awareness returned, it first appeared in colors. Blue, but without the words for blueness. Then red. Then a white that also meant something. The fragment of an idea. Snow.

Joy came to be, and it lasted longer than fear had. A deep, bubbling sense of wonder carried itself along without anything to carry it. Patterns rose and fell, came together and came apart. The few that fell apart more slowly sometimes came into relationship with each other, and sometimes that made them last even longer.

Like a baby slowly mapping touch and sight and kinesthesis into something not yet called "foot," scraps of awareness touched the universe and something like understanding began to form. Something felt its own lumbering, brute physicality as it pushed chemicals into the vast gaps between cells. It felt the raw, open vibration that surrounded the ring gates that connected the worlds, and it thought of sores and ulcerations. It felt something. It thought something. It remembered how to remember, and then it forgot.

There had been a reason, a goal. Something had justified atrocities in order to avoid worse ones. He had betrayed his nation. He had conspired against billions. He had condemned people who were loyal to him to death. There had been a reason. He remembered it. He forgot. He rediscovered the glorious brilliance of yellow and devoted himself to the pure experience of that.

He heard voices as symphonies. He heard them as quacks. He was surprised to find that a he existed and that it was him. There was something he was supposed to do. Save humanity. Something ridiculously grand like that.

He forgot.

Come back. Daddy, come back to me.

Like when she'd been a baby and he had slept at her side, he refocused on her by habit. His daughter mewled, and he roused himself so that his wife wouldn't have to. His hand was in hers. She'd said something. He couldn't remember the words, so he looked backward in time to where she spoke them. Dr. Cortázar? He's going to kill me.

That didn't seem right. He didn't know why. The storm in the other place was loud and soft and loud. That was connected. He was supposed to save them from the things in the storm, that were the storm. Or from their own too-human nature. But his daughter was there, and she was interesting. He could see the distress flowing through her brain, through her body. The pain in her blood scented the air around her, and he wanted. He wanted to soothe her, to comfort her. He wanted to make right everything that was wrong for her. But more interesting, for the first time, he wanted.

The strange sensation of feeling these things plucked at his attention, and his focus drifted. He held her hand and wandered. When he came back, he was still holding her hand, but she was someone else. We just need to scan you, sir. It won't hurt.

He remembered Dr. Cortázar. He's going to kill me. He waved Cortázar away, pushing at the empty spaces between the tiny motes that made him a physical thing until the man swirled like dust. There. That was fixed. But the effort tired him and made his body ache. He gave himself permission to drift, but even so, he noticed that the drift was less. His nervous system was shattered, but it kept growing together. His body kept insisting that even if it couldn't go on, it could go on. He admired this stubborn refusal to die as if it were something outside of himself. The sheer mindless and physical impulse to move forward, each cell's determination to churn along, the obdurate need to continue existing that didn't even require a will. All of it meant something. It was important. He just had to remember how. It had to do with his daughter. It had to do with keeping her safe and well.

He remembered. He remembered being a man who loved his child, and so he remembered being a man. And that was a stronger rope than the ambition that had built an empire. He remembered that he had made himself something different than a human. Something more. And he understood how this alien strength had also weakened him. How the brutish and unapologetic clay of his body had kept him from annihilation. The sword that slew a billion angels had only inconvenienced the primates in their bubbles of metal and air. And a man named Winston Duarte, halfway between angel and ape, had been broken but not killed. The shards had found their own way.

There was someone else too. A man with dry riverbeds in his mind. Another man who had been changed. James Holden, the enemy who had shared his enemy, back before Winston Duarte had broken, and in breaking, become.

With infinite effort and care, he pulled the unbearable vastness and complexity of his awareness in and in and in, compressing himself into what he had been. The blue faded into the color he had known as a man. The sense of the storm raging just on the other side, of the violence and threat, faded. He felt the warm, iron-smelling meat of his hand, holding nothing. He opened his eyes, turned to the comm controls, and opened a connection.

"Kelly," he said. "Could you bring me a fresh pot of tea?"

The pause was less than might have been expected, under the circumstances. "Yes, sir," Kelly said.

"Thank you." Duarte dropped the connection.

A medical bed had been put in his study with an aerated foam mattress to prevent bedsores, but he was seated at his desk as if he had never left it. He took stock of his body, noticing its weakness. The thinness of its muscles. He stood, clasped his hands behind him, and walked to the window to see whether he could. He could.

Outside, a light, tapping rain was falling. There were puddles on the walkways and the grass was bright and clean. He reached out for Teresa, and he found her. She wasn't nearby, but she wasn't in distress. It was like watching her traipse through the wilds again, only without the artificial lens of the cameras. His love and indulgence for her was vast. Oceanic. But it wasn't pressing. The truest expression of his love was his work, and so he turned to it as if this were any other day.

Duarte pulled up an executive summary the way he had at the start of every morning. Normally it was a page long. This one was a full volume. He sorted by category, pulling out the thread that addressed the status of traffic through the ring space.

Things had, putting it mildly, gone poorly in his absence. Scientific reports of the loss of Medina Station and the Typhoon. Military analyses of the siege of Laconia, the loss of the construction platforms. Intelligence summaries of the growing opposition in the widely scattered systems of humanity, and of Admiral Trejo's attempts to hold the dream of the empire together without him.

There had been a time not long after her mother passed when Teresa had decided to make him breakfast. She had been so young, so incapable, that she had failed. He remembered the crust of bread heaping with jam and a pat of unmelted butter perched on top of it. The combination of ambition and affection and pathos had been beautiful in its way. It was the kind of memory that survived because the love and the embarrassment fit together so perfectly. This felt the same.

His awareness of the ring space was clear now. He could hear the echoes of it in the fabric of reality like he was pressing his ear to a ship's deck to know the status of its drive. The rage of the enemy was as apparent to him now as if he could hear its voices. The shrieks that tore something that wasn't air in something that wasn't time.

"Admiral Trejo," he said, and Anton startled.

It was the fifth week of Trejo's combination press tour and reconquest of Sol system. He sat in his cabin, spent from his long day of glad-handing and speech-making with the local leaders and officials. He was the visible face of a nearly toppled empire, making sure no one knew how close he'd come to losing it all. After the hard weeks-long burn out from Laconia, it was exhausting. He wanted nothing more than a stiff drink and eight hours in his bed. Or twenty. Instead, he was on a video call with Secretary-General Duchet and his Martian counterpart, both of them on Luna and near enough that light delay didn't interfere. The politicians were lying through their smiles. Trejo was threatening through his.

"Of course we understand the necessity of getting the orbital shipyards up and running as quickly as possible. Rebuilding our shared defenses is critical," Duchet said. "But given the lawlessness that has followed the recent attack on Laconia, our first concern is security for the facilities. We have to have some guarantee that your ships will be able to protect these valuable assets. We don't want to just paint a target on ourselves for the underground to aim at."

You just got the shit kicked out of you, had your factories blown up, lost two of your most powerful battleships, and are scrambling to hold the empire together. Do you have enough ships to force us to work for you?

"We've suffered setbacks, that's true," Trejo drawled, the way he sometimes did when he was angry. "But there's no need for concern. We have more than enough of the Pulsar-class destroyers to provide total security for Sol system."

I just reconquered you with two dozen of those ships, and I have a shit-ton more of them I can call in if I need to, so fucking do what I tell you to do.

"Excellent to hear that," the Martian prime minister said. "Please let the high consul know we will spare no effort to meet his production schedule."

Please don't carpet-bomb our cities.

"I will let him know," Trejo replied. "The high consul treasures your support and loyalty."

Duarte is a drooling moron, but if you give me the ships to hold the empire together, I won't have to glass your damn planets, and maybe we all win.

Trejo killed the connection and leaned back in his chair. The bottle of whiskey in his cabinet called to him gently. The freshly made bed was much louder. He had time for neither. The underground was still running riot in thirteen hundred systems and more. And that was just his human problem. After that, there were the gates to deal with, and whatever within them kept turning the minds off in whole systems at a time as it sniffed for ways to exterminate humanity.

No rest for the wicked. No peace for the good.

"Connect me to the Association of Worlds rep, Sol system. I don't remember her name," he said. No one heard him but the ship.

CONNECTING Now flashed on his screen. Time for more smiling lies. More veiled threats. More—and he used the word as an epithet—diplomacy.

"Admiral Trejo," said a voice from behind him. It was familiar but so unexpected that his mind scrambled to place it. He had a brief, irrational idea that his attaché had been hiding in his room this whole time and had only just now chosen to reveal himself.

"Anton," the voice said, lower and as intimate as a friend. Trejo turned around in his chair to face the room. Winston Duarte stood near the foot of his bed, hands behind his back. He wore a loose casual shirt and black trousers. He wasn't wearing any shoes. His hair was mussed, as if he'd only recently woken up. He looked like he was actually there.

"Security alert," Trejo said. "This room. Full sweep."

Duarte looked pained. "Anton," he said again.

In milliseconds, the ship had swept every inch of his cabin looking for anyone or anything that wasn't supposed to be there. His screen reported to him that the room was free of listening devices, dangerous chemicals, unauthorized technology. He was also the only person in it. The ship asked if he wanted armed security personnel to respond.

"Am I having a stroke?" he asked the apparition.

"No," Duarte said. "Though you should probably be getting more sleep." The ghost in his room shrugged its shoulders, almost apologetically. "Look. Anton. You've done everything that could have been asked of you to hold the empire together. I've seen the reports. I know how difficult this job has been."

"You're not here," Trejo said, asserting the only possible reality against the lies his senses were telling him.

"What here means has become strangely flexible for me," Duarte agreed. "As much as I appreciate your work, you can stand down now."

"No. It's not over. I'm still fighting to hold the empire together."

"And I appreciate that. I do. But we've been running down the wrong road. I need a little quiet to think this through, but I see things better now. It's going to be all right."

The need to hear those words—to believe them—rushed through Trejo like a flood. The first time a lover had kissed him, it had been less overwhelming than this.

Duarte shook an amused and melancholy smile. "We built an empire that spanned the galaxy, you and I. Who'd have imagined we were thinking too small?"

The image, illusion, projection, whatever it was, vanished so suddenly it was like a skipped frame in a film.

"Fuck me," Trejo said to no one. The security alert was still flashing on the screen over his desk. He slapped the comm link with one hand.

"Sir," the duty officer said. "We've got an active alert from your quarters. Do you want—"

"You have five minutes to prep for a max burn to the ring."

"Sir?"

"Sound the alarm," Trejo said. "And get everyone in their couches. We have to get back to Laconia. Now."

Chapter One: Jim

It pinged us," Alex said. His voice was a light almost singsong that meant he thought they were screwed.

Jim, sitting on the ops deck with a tactical map of Kronos system on the screen and his heart going double time, tried to disagree. "Just because he's knocking doesn't mean he knows who's home. Let's keep acting like what we're acting like."

The Rocinante was acting like a small-haul freighter, a class of ship thick on the ground in Kronos system. Naomi had tuned the Epstein to run just dirty enough to change their drive signature without generating too much extra waste heat. A set of extra plating welded to their hull at an underground shipyard in Harris system had altered their silhouette. A slow dribble of liquid hydrogen was pumping out across the top of the ship and changing their thermal profile. When Naomi had gone over the plan to layer on camouflage, it had seemed comprehensive. It was only the threat of violence that made Jim feel exposed.

The enemy frigate was called the Black Kite. Smaller than the Storm-class destroyers, it was still well armed and had the self-healing outer hull that made Laconian ships hard to kill. It was part of a hunting group scouring all the inhabited systems for Teresa Duarte, runaway daughter of High Consul Winston Duarte, heir apparent to his empire, and, for the time being, apprentice mechanic on the Rocinante.

This wasn't the first time they'd seen it.

"Any follow-up?" Jim asked.

"Just the ladar ping," Alex said. "Think I should warm up the peashooter, just in case?"

Yeah, let's do that was on the edge of Jim's mind when Naomi's voice answered instead. "No. There's some evidence that their next-generation sensor arrays can recognize rail-gun capacitors."

"That feels unfair," Jim said. "What a crew does with its rail-gun capacitor in the privacy of its own ship shouldn't be anyone else's business."

He could hear the smile in Naomi's voice. "While I agree in principle, let's keep the guns offline until we need them."

"Copy that," Alex said.

"Still no follow-up?" Jim asked, even though he had access to all the same logs Alex did. Alex checked anyway.

"Comms are dark."

Kronos wasn't quite a dead system, but it was close. The star there was large and fast-burning. There had been a habitable planet in the goldilocks zone there at one point—at least enough that the protomolecule had been able to hijack the biomass needed to build a ring gate. But in the strange eons since the gate's formation and humanity's stumbling into the alien ruins, the goldilocks zone had moved. The original life-bearing planet hadn't quite been engulfed by the star yet, but its oceans had been boiled to nothing and its atmosphere stripped away. The only native life in Kronos was on the wet moon of an outlying gas giant, and that wasn't much more than viciously competing continent-sized sheets of slime mold.

The human inhabitants of Kronos were around ten thousand miners on seven hundred thirty-two active sites. Corporations, government-sponsored interest groups, independent rock hoppers, and unholy legal hybrids of all three were stripping palladium out of a nicely rich scattering of asteroids and sending it out to anyone still building air recyclers or working on adjustmentterraforming projects.

Which was everyone.

Kronos had been the edge of the Transport Union's reach back in the day, then the ass end of the Laconian Empire, and now no one really knew what it was. There were hundreds of systems like it, all through the gate network: places that either weren't self-sufficient yet or didn't plan to be, more focused on digging out their own little economic niche than any broader coalition. The kinds of places where the underground could usually hide and repair their ships and plan for what came next. On the tactical map, asteroids marked by orbit, survey status, composition, and legal ownership swirled around the angry star as thick as pollen in springtime. The ships were clumped around the excavation and survey sites by the dozen, and as many more were on lonely transits from one little outpost to another or on errands to gather water for reaction mass and radiation shielding.

The Black Kite had come through the ring gate three days before, torpedoed the underground's radio repeater at the surface of the gate, and then burned gently to remain in place like a bouncer at a pretentious nightclub. The ring gates didn't orbit the stars so much as remain in fixed position as though they'd been hung on hooks in the vacuum. It wasn't the strangest thing about them. Jim had let himself hope that blowing up the underground's pirate transmitter would be all the Kite did. That the enemy would finish its little vandalism and fuck off to cut the metaphorical telegraph wires on some other system.

It had stayed, scanning the system. Looking for them. For Teresa. For Naomi, functional leader of the underground. And for him.

The comm display lit up the green of an incoming transmission, and Jim's gut knotted. At their present range, the battle wouldn't come for hours, but the rush of adrenaline was like someone had fired a gun. The fear was so present and overwhelming that he didn't notice anything odd.

"Broadcast," Alex said over the ship comms and from the deck above Jim. "Weird it's not a tightbeam . . . I don't think he's talking to us."

Jim opened the channel.

The woman's voice had a clipped, emotionless formality that was like the accent of the Laconian military. ". . . as offensive action and treated as such. Message repeats. This is the Black Kite to registered freighter Perishable Harvest. By order of Laconian security forces, you will cut your drive and prepare for boarding and inspection. Refusal to comply will be viewed as an offensive action and treated as such. Message repeats . . ."

Jim filtered the tactical map. The Perishable Harvest was about thirty degrees spinward of the Roci, and burning toward the wide, angry sun. If they'd gotten the message, they hadn't complied with it yet.

"Is that one of ours?" Jim asked.

"Nope," Naomi said. "It's listed as property of a David Calrassi out of Bara Gaon. I don't know anything about it."

With light delay, they should have received the Black Kite's command ten minutes before the Rocinante did. Jim imagined some other crew in a panic because they'd received the message he'd been dreading. Whatever happened next, the Rocinante was out of the crosshairs for the moment at least. He wished he could feel the relief a little more deeply.

Jim unstrapped from the crash couch and swung around. The bearings hissed as it shifted under his weight.

"I'm heading down to the galley for a minute," he said.

"Grab a coffee for me too," Alex said.

"Oh no. Not coffee. I'm maybe up to some chamomile or warm milk. Something soothing and unaggressive."

"Sounds good," Alex said. "When you change your mind and get some coffee, grab one for me too."

On the lift, Jim leaned against the wall and waited for his heart to stop racing. This was how heart attacks came, wasn't it? A pulse that started fast and then never slowed until something critical popped. That was probably wrong, but it felt that way. He felt that way all the time.

It was getting better. Easier. The autodoc had been able to supervise the regrowth of his missing teeth. Apart from the indignity of needing to numb his gums like a toddler, that had gone well enough. The nightmares were old acquaintances by now. He'd started having them on Laconia while still a prisoner of High Consul Duarte. He'd expected them to fade once he was free, but they were getting worse. Being buried alive was the most recent version. More often it was someone he loved being murdered in the next room and not being able to key in the lock code fast enough to save them. Or having a parasite living under his skin and trying to find a way to cut it out. Or the guards on Laconia coming to beat him until his teeth broke again. The way that they had.

On the upside, the old dreams about forgetting to put on his clothes or not studying for a test seemed to be off the rotation. His weirdly vindictive dream life wasn't all bad.

There were still days when he couldn't shake the sense of threat. Sometimes a part of his mind would get trapped in the unfounded and irrational certainty that his Laconian torture team was about to find him again. Others, it was the less irrational dread of the things beyond the gates. The apocalypse that had destroyed the protomolecule's makers and was on the path to destroying humanity.

Seen in that light, maybe he wasn't the broken part of the equation. Maybe the larger situation was bad enough that feeling as whole and sane as the man he'd been before his Laconian imprisonment would have been a sign of madness. Still, he wished he could tell whether the waves of shuddering were a resonance effect of running the drive dirty or if it was just him.

The lift stopped, and he stepped out, turning toward the galley. The soft, rhythmic thump of dog tail against deck told him Teresa and Muskrat were already there. Amos—black-eyed, grayskinned, and back from the dead—was there too, sitting at the table with the same placeholder smile he'd always had. Jim hadn't seen him shot in the head back on Laconia, but he knew about the drones that had taken the pieces of human flesh and reconnected them. Naomi still struggled with whether the thing that called itself Amos really was the mechanic they'd shipped with for so many years, or if he'd become an alien mechanism that only thought it was Amos because it was made from his body and brain. Jim had decided that even if he looked different, even if he sometimes knew things that were scraps of the ancient alien world, Amos was Amos. He didn't have the spare energy to think about it more deeply than that.

Besides which, the dog liked him. Not a perfect critical guide, but probably the least imperfect.

Muskrat, sitting at Teresa's feet, looked up at Jim hopefully and wagged her tail against the deck again.

"I don't have any sausage," Jim said to the expressive brown eyes. "You'll have to make do with kibble like the rest of us."

"You spoiled her," Teresa said. "She's never letting you forget that."

"If I go to heaven, let it be for spoiling dogs and children," Jim said, and headed for the dispenser. Without thinking, he keyed in a bulb of coffee. Then, realizing what he'd done, he added one for Alex.

Teresa Duarte shrugged and turned her attention back to the tube of mushroom, flavorings, and digestive fiber that was her breakfast. Her hair was pulled back in a dark ponytail, and her mouth had a permanent slight frown that was either a quirk of her physiology or her character. Jim had seen her grow from a precocious child to a rebellious adolescent in the State Building in Laconia. She was fifteen now, and it was sobering to remember who he'd been at her age: a thin, dark-haired Montana boy with no particular ambitions beyond the knowledge that if nothing else worked out, he could join the navy. Teresa seemed older than adolescent Jim had been, both more knowledgeable about the universe and angrier with it. Maybe the two went hand in hand.

She'd been afraid of him when he'd been her father's prisoner. Now that she was on Jim's ship, the fear seemed to have evaporated. He'd been her enemy then, but he wasn't sure that he was her friend now. The emotional complexity of an adolescent girl socialized in isolation was probably more than he could ever really understand.

The dispenser finished both his bulb and Alex's, and Jim took them, appreciating the warmth against his palms. The shuddering was almost gone now, and the bitterness of the coffee was more calming than tea would have been.

"We're going to need a resupply before much longer," Amos said.

"Really?"

"We're okay on water, but we could stand to re-up the fuel pellets. And the recyclers ain't what they used to be."

"How bad?"

"We're solid for a few weeks yet," Amos said.

Jim nodded. His first impulse was to dismiss it as a problem for another day. That was wrong, though. Fuck-it-if-it's-not-happeningright-now was crisis thinking, and if he couldn't break out of it, it would only lead to more crises later on.

"I'll talk to Naomi," he said. "We'll figure something out." Assuming the Laconians don't find us. Assuming the gate entities don't kill us. Assuming that any of the thousand other catastrophes I haven't even thought of don't kill us all before it matters. He took another sip of his coffee.

"How're you doing, Cap'n?" Amos asked. "You seem a little twitchy."

"Fine," Jim said. "Just covering near-constant panic with light humor, same as anyone."

Amos had a moment of eerie stillness—one of the hallmarks of his new self—and then smiled a little wider. "All right then."

Alex broke in over the ship comms. "We got something."

"Something good?"

"Something," Alex said. "The Perishable Harvest just dumped some kind of liquid, and it's burning like hell for the big trade station in the outer Belt."

"Copy that," Naomi said—also over the comms—in the new staccato calm that Jim thought of as her Commander Nagata voice. "Confirming."

"The Black Kite?" Jim asked the wall.

Alex and Naomi were silent for a moment, then Alex said, "Looks like they're going after them."

"Moving away from the ring gate?"

"Yes indeed," Alex said, and the pleasure in his voice was unmistakable.

Jim felt a surge of relief, but it didn't last more than a moment. He was already thinking about the ways it might be a trap. If the Roci turned toward the ring too soon, it would draw attention to them. Even if the Roci evaded the Black Kite, there might be another Laconian ship risking itself by waiting inside the ring space, ready to intercept any ship fleeing the system.

"Why are they running?" Teresa asked. "They don't think they're going to get away, do they? Because that would be stupid."

"They aren't trying to save the ship," Amos said. He had the same patient, almost philosophical tone as when he was walking her through how to do a good weld in microgravity or checking the seal on a pipe. It was the voice of a teacher walking his student through a lesson in how the world worked. "Whatever they had on that ship that Laconia was going to get pissed about, they can't hide it. Not in a system as thin as this one. And there's no way they're slipping off and swapping transponders, so their ship's fucked. The trade station's big enough they can maybe get the crew off and sneak onto other ships or pretend they were on the station all along."

"Running to where the hiding places are," Teresa said.

"And the more lead time they have, the better the chances they can find a good spot," Amos said.

That could be us, Jim thought. If the Black Kite had decided that we looked a little sketchier than the Perishable Harvest, we would be sacrificing the Roci and hoping we could get small enough to overlook. Only it wasn't true. There was no hiding place in Kronos or anywhere small enough that Laconia wouldn't look there. Plain sight was their best hope, because their plan B was violence.

He didn't think he'd said anything aloud or made any kind of noise that would show his distress, but maybe he had, because Teresa looked at him with something between annoyance and sympathy. "You know I won't let them hurt you."

"I know that you'll try," Jim said.

"I'm still the daughter of the high consul," she said. "I've gotten you out of trouble before."

"I'm not leaning on that trick," Jim said, more harshly than he'd intended. Muskrat shifted, hauled herself up to standing, and looked from Jim to Teresa and back in distress. Teresa's eyes hardened.

"I think what the captain's saying," Amos said, "is that using you as a meat shield isn't something he's a hundred percent comfortable with. It's not that you wouldn't do it, since you already did. But the people on the other end of that gun? We don't know them, they may not be the most reliable, and the less we have to count on them, the better."

Teresa scowled, but less.

"Yes," Jim said. "That was much more eloquent."

"Sometimes I'm good that way," Amos said, and it might have been a joke or it might not. "You want us to get the ship ready to rabbit? We've got enough reaction mass for a decent burn."

"I thought we needed fuel pellets."

"We do, but we can spend 'em getting out of Kronos, put water on the grocery list, and call it good. Recyclers are really going to be our limiting factor."

The pull of the thought was stronger than gravity. Light the drive, put nose toward the ring gate, and get the hell out before the enemy could get hold of them. Jim intentionally loosened his grip on the bulbs. "Naomi. What do you think?"

A moment of silence, then, "Sorry. I wasn't listening. What was the question?"

"Should we prep the Roci for a mad dash out of here? As soon as the Black Kite's fully committed to its burn, we could make a break."

"No," she said, the way he had known she would. "They haven't identified us. If we go too soon, it'll only make them suspicious. Better if we look like bystanders. Alex? Plot an intercept with the Whiteoak. It's the big ice hauler at the second gas giant."

"Got her," Alex said.

Amos shifted on his bench. "Captain?"

"I'm fine."

"If we need to run," Naomi said, "we'll run."

We'll always need to run. We'll never get to rest, Jim thought. There didn't seem like any point in saying it.

Chapter Two: Tanaka

Aliana pressed the button on her vaporizer and inhaled deeply. The mist tasted like vanilla and hit her lungs like a soft warm cloud. Nicotine and tetrahydrocannabinol mixed with just a touch of something more exotic. Something that tempered the THC sleepiness with a vivid hyperawareness. The shades in her room were drawn, but the hint of light at the edges shifted the dust into a rainbow of sparks. She moved one leg, and the silk sheet caressed it like a thousand tiny lovers.

Tristan was asleep next to her, his small muscular butt pressed up against her thigh. He snored gently as he slept, punctuated by the occasional twitch and sigh. Aliana knew that she found the noise charming and sweet because she was high and postcoital. The minute his snoring became annoying, Tristan would have overstayed his welcome.

There were, in her experience, two ways to thrive in a rigid, authoritarian regime. The first—the one most people reached for—was to be what power wanted you to be. Mars had wanted loyal soldiers, and they had produced them like they were printing machine parts. She knew, because she was old enough that she'd been one of them. She'd seen her cohort try to strangle or excise from their collective souls anything that wasn't sufficiently Martian, and sometimes they'd managed.

The other mode of survival was to enjoy having secrets. Enjoy the power of seeming to be one thing while being another. And then be good at it. Even when it didn't involve fucking her junior officers, it was a kind of sexual perversion. The thrill of knowing that a wrong word or an unexpected slip could put a bullet in the back of her head was more important to her than the actual sex.

A permissive, open society where she could have done all the same things without fear of consequences would have driven her crazy. She'd loved being part of the Laconian experiment from the beginning because Duarte's vision—first as a capital offense against Mars and then as a permanent engine of danger—fed her kinks. She felt no shame about that. She knew what she was.

"Wake up," she said, pushing her fingers into the young man's back.

"Sleeping," Tristan slurred at her.

"I know. Now wake up." She jabbed him again. She spent ten hours a week boxing and wrestling. When she stiffened her fingers, they were like iron bars.

"God dammit," Tristan said, then rolled over. He gave her a sleepy grin. His tousled blond hair and clean-shaven face with its deep dimples made him look like a cherub in a classical painting. One of Raphael's putti.

Aliana took another hit off the vaporizer and offered it to him. He shook his head. "Why'd you wake me?"

Aliana stretched luxuriously under the soft sheets, her long frame barely contained by the oversized bed. "I'm high. I want to fuck."

Tristan flopped onto his back with an exaggerated sigh. "Allie, I barely have any fluid left in my body."

"Then go get a glass of water, take a salt pill, and get your ass back into my bed."

"Aye, aye, Colonel," Tristan said, laughing.

The laugh ended in a sharp oof when she rolled over on top of him and slammed down onto his belly, locking his thighs to the bed with her ankles and feet, and gripping his wrists in her hands. He looked up at her with surprise, then thinking it was sex play, started to struggle. His arms and chest were well formed but soft, more like a healthy teenager's than a man in his twenties. Her arms were thin and ropy, the muscles of a long-distance runner, burned down to their essence through constant hard use, and strong as steel springs. When he tried to move, she easily shoved him back down, squeezing her hands until his wrists popped and he squealed.

"Allie, you're—" he started, but she squeezed again and he shut up. She was angry, and he saw it. She liked that she was angry. She liked that he saw it.

"In this room, I am Aliana. You are Tristan," she said, speaking slowly, making sure the drugs weren't slurring her words. "Outside that door, you are Corporal Reeves, and I am Colonel Tanaka. Those things can never be confused for us."

"I know," Tristan said. "I was just kidding."

"No kidding. No jokes. No slipups. If you make a mistake, if you forget the strict discipline that allows this to exist, I will at minimum be dishonorably discharged."

"I'd never—"

"And you," Aliana continued as if he hadn't spoken, "will not like the version of me that comes calling on you then."

She stared down at him for a moment, waiting until his sudden fear turned into understanding. Then she let go of his wrists and climbed off of him, lying back down on her side of the bed.

"Get me some water too, would you?" she said.

Tristan didn't answer, just got up and left the room. Aliana watched him go, enjoying the clenching of his thighs and ass as he walked, the gentle V of his back and shoulders. He was very, very pretty. When the thing they had inevitably ended, she was going to miss him. But that didn't change the fact that it would end. They always had before. That was part of the joy.

A few moments later, Tristan returned carrying two glasses of water. He paused at the foot of the bed, looking unsure. Aliana patted the sheets next to her.

"I'm sorry if I hurt you," she said.

"It's okay," he replied, then handed her a glass and sat down next to her. "I'm sorry I slipped up. Still want to fuck?"

"In a minute," she said. They both gulped water for a while.

"Will I see you again?" he eventually asked. Aliana found herself gratified by the hopefulness in his voice.

"I should be on Laconia for a while this time," she replied. "And I do want to see you again. We just have to be careful."

"I understand," he said. And she knew he did. She liked her toys to be much younger and much lower rank. It kept things simpler that way. But she didn't waste her time with stupid men.

Her thirst gone, the warmth in her lungs was spreading down to her belly in a very pleasant way. She reached over and put her hand on Tristan's thigh. "I think we should—"

The handheld on her nightstand chimed. She'd set it to do-not-disturb, which meant the device thought the incoming call was important enough to ignore that. She'd had it a long time and trained it well, so it was probably right. She lifted it to check the connection request. It was coming from the State Building. She accepted the connection without visual. "Colonel Tanaka here." Tristan slid out of bed and reached for his pants.

"Good afternoon, Colonel. This is Lieutenant Sanchez with scheduling and logistics. You have a debriefing at the State Building in two hours."

"First I've heard of it," she said, reaching for the side table and her sobriety meds. "Can you tell me the agenda?"

"I'm sorry, Colonel. I don't have access to that. You were added to the attendees by Admiral Milan."

The party was over.

When she reached the State Building, a light rain was falling. Tiny droplets turned the paving dark and shiny at the same time. The low mountain at the edge of the grounds looked like something from an ancient ukiyo-e print. Yoshitoshi or Hiroshige. An attaché from the Science Directorate was waiting to meet her with a cup of coffee and an umbrella. She waved both away.

Tanaka knew her way around the State Building. Most of her assignments were in the field, but she'd made enough friends and professional connections in the highest ranks of power that when she was on Laconia, she was often here. She hadn't been back since the siege of Laconia, the destruction of the construction platform, and the maybe-kidnapping, maybe-autoemancipation of Teresa Duarte. There weren't any physical changes to the building. The poured concrete was as solid as ever, the cut flowers in the vases as fresh. The guards in their razor-pressed uniforms were as stolid and calm. And everything felt fragile.

The attaché guided her to an office she'd been in before. Yellow walls of domestic wood with the blue seal of Laconia worked into them, and two austere sofas. Admiral Milan—acting commander in chief while the high consul was in seclusion and Admiral Trejo was in Sol system—sat at a wide desk. He was a broad man, with a heavy face and salt-and-pepper hair shaved tight. And a crusty old sailor from the Mars days, impatient with bullshit and quick-tempered as a badger. Tanaka liked him immensely.

At one sofa, a lieutenant with a signal intelligence insignia on the standard Laconian blue naval uniform stood. Beside him, Dr. Ochida of the Science Directorate sat with his hands on his knee, fingers laced together. The silence had the awkwardness of an interruption.

Admiral Milan was the first to speak. "We're running a little long here, Colonel. Have a seat. We'll be done soon."

"Yes, sir," Tanaka said, and took the other sofa for herself. Admiral Milan looked to the standing lieutenant—Rossif, to judge by his nametag—and drew a circle in the air with his fingertip. Get on with it.

"Gedara system. Population just shy of two hundred thousand. High concentration of fissionables in the upper crust, so they've been trying to get deep-crust mining operations going for the last several years. Agriculture exists but it's a decade away from self-sustaining."

"And the incursion?" Admiral Milan said.

"Twenty-three minutes, eleven seconds," Rossif answered. "Total loss of consciousness. Some accidental fatalities, some damage to infrastructure. Mostly people crashing vehicles or falling off of things. And logs show that just seconds before the incursion, two unscheduled heavy freighters passed through the ring and went dutchman."

Dr. Ochida cleared his throat. "There was something strange this time."

"Something stranger than everyone's brain shutting off for twenty minutes?" Admiral Milan said.

"Yes, Admiral," Ochida answered. "A review of instrumentation during the event shows a different kind of time loss as well."

"Explain."

"Short version," Ochida said, "light went faster."

Admiral Milan scratched his neck. "Did the word explain change meanings and no one told me?" Tanaka suppressed a smile.

"Simply put, the speed of light is a function of basic properties of the universe. Call it . . . the fastest causality can propagate in vacuum," Ochida said. "For twenty-some minutes in the Gedara system, the nature of space-time shifted in a way that altered the speed of light. Made it faster. The light delay from the ships at the Gedara ring to the planet at the time was slightly less than forty minutes. Logs of the event show that during the incursion, it decreased by nearly four thousand nanoseconds."

"Four thousand nanoseconds," Milan said.

"The nature of space-time changed in that system for twenty minutes," Ochida intoned, then waited for a reaction he wasn't getting. He looked crestfallen.

"Well," Milan said. "I will certainly have to think about this. Thank you for the briefing, Lieutenant. Doctor. You're both dismissed. You stay, Colonel."

"Yes, sir," Tanaka replied.

Once the room was empty, Milan leaned back. "Drink? I've got water, coffee, bourbon, and some herbal tea shit my husbands both drink, tastes like grass clippings."

"Am I on active duty?"

"I don't think you need to concern yourself with breaking protocol, if that's what you mean."

"Then bourbon sounds great, sir," Tanaka replied. Admiral Milan spent a minute fussing at his desk, then came back with a cut crystal glass and two fingers of smoky brown liquid swirling in it.

"To your health," Tanaka said, then took a sip.

"So," Milan said, and sat with the unconscious grunt of an old man with a lot of bad joints. "What do you think that lightspeed shit means?"

"Not a clue, sir. I'm a shooter, not an egghead."

"This is why I've always liked you," he said, then sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers. The silence was different this time, and she wasn't certain what it meant. "So just between the two of us—one old sailor to another—is there anything you want to tell me?"

She felt the adrenaline hit her bloodstream. She didn't let it show. She was too practiced at deception for that. "I don't know what you mean."

He tilted his head and sighed. "I don't either. I find this whole thing pretty fucking mysterious. And I'm not as good at swallowing my curiosity as I was when we were young."

"Still genuinely unclear what we're talking about. Was someone supposed to tell me why you wanted me here?"

"It wasn't me that wanted you. Trejo made the request, and he had me do a little paperwork on your behalf." He pulled out a physical folder of red paper with a silver string to close it, and handed it to her. It seemed so out of place, it was like being handed a stone tablet. She drank the rest of her bourbon off in one shot before she took it. It was lighter than she expected, and the string came undone easily. Inside was a single sheet of three-layer security parchment, the document verification circuits crisp as lace. Her picture was on it and her biometric profile, her name and rank and identification record numbers. And a short passage granting her Omega status from the Laconian Intelligence Directorate at the personal request of the High Consul's Office.

If it had been a severed head, she wouldn't have been more surprised.

"Is this . . ." she began.

"Not a joke. Admiral Trejo has instructed that you be given the keys to the kingdom. Override authority on any mission. Access to any information, regardless of security classification. Immunity from censure or prosecution for the duration of your deployment. Pretty sweet. You really telling me you don't know what it's about?"

"I assume there's a mission?"

"Probably, but I'm not cleared to know what it is. You just keep your seat. I can show myself out."

When Admiral Milan closed the door behind him, the office system threw a comm message on the wall screen. After a moment, Admiral Trejo appeared. She'd known him for as long as she'd known anyone living. His eyes were still the same uncanny green, but now there were dark bags under them. His hair was thinning and his skin had an unhealthy waxy shine. He looked haunted.

"Colonel Tanaka," he said. "I'm reaching out to you with a critical mission for the empire. At present, I am taking a break from a hard burn from Sol system, and if this could wait until I arrived on Laconia, I'd brief you in person. It can't, so this will have to do."

She stared into her bourbon glass. It was empty, and the bottle sat just a meter away, but suddenly she didn't want it anymore. She felt her attention sharpening.

"I'm sure that you, like everyone else in the empire, are wondering what exactly the high consul has been doing in seclusion. How he has been spearheading the fight against the forces that are threatening us from within the gates. I know there's been some speculation that he was somehow injured or incapacitated. So, candidly, I need you to know that when I left for Sol system, the high consul was a drooling, brain-damaged moron who couldn't feed himself or wipe his own ass. He has been that way since the attack that destroyed the Typhoon and Medina Station."

Tanaka took a deep breath and let it out through her teeth.

"Dr. Cortázar had altered the high consul's biology considerably by using modified protomolecule technologies. It left the high consul in possession of certain . . . abilities that were not fully documented or explored before Dr. Cortázar's death. And in fact, Duarte killed him. Waved his hand and splattered that crazy fucker across half a room. I've never seen anything like it. Right now, the only people who know this are you, me, Dr. Okoye of the Science Directorate, and Teresa Duarte, who ran away with the underground's assault forces after they cleaned our clock. So, pretty much the whole fucking enemy.

"Given that for background, you'll understand how confused I was when the high consul appeared to me eighty . . . eighty-five hours ago in my office in Sol system. He didn't register on the sensors. He didn't interact with any physical object or leave any evidence of his presence that could be verified by an outside observer. But he was here. And before you get too happy with the Anton-Trejo's-having-a-psychotic-break theory, there is some external evidence. Just not here in Sol.

"Shortly after I experienced what I experienced, Duarte disappeared from the State Building. Not popped-out-of-reality disappeared. He put on his pants and a fresh shirt, had a cup of tea and a polite conversation with his valet, then walked off the grounds. Every planetary sensor we have has been sweeping the landscape since then. No one has seen him.

"We've got over a thousand colony systems that are wondering if there's anything left of the government. We have extradimensional enemies experimenting to find ways to snuff us out wholesale. And I am convinced that the answer to both of those issues is Winston Duarte, or whatever the fuck he's turned into. I've known you for a long time, and I trust you. Your mission is to find him and bring him back. You've heard of carte blanche, but I promise you have never seen a check this blank. I don't care what you spend—not in money, equipment, or lives—as long as you bring Winston Duarte back from wherever he's gone. If he doesn't want to come, convince him nicely if you can, but this only ends with him in our custody.

"Good hunting, Colonel."

The message ended. Tanaka leaned back on the sofa, stretching her arms to her sides like a bird unfurling its wings. Her mind was already ticking away. The strangeness of it, the shocking revelations, the threat it posed. All of those were in her. She could feel them. But there was also the calm of a job that needed doing and the pleasure, deeper than she would have guessed, at the power she had just been given.

The door opened quietly, and Admiral Milan came back in.

"Everything all right?" he asked.

Tanaka laughed. "Not even close."

Chapter Three: Naomi

They waited until the Black Kite was far enough from the ring gate that an intercept burn would have been difficult if not impossible. Then they waited a little more so that they wouldn't seem suspicious for starting their transit burn at the first possible moment. And then Naomi couldn't stand waiting anymore.

Three hours after that, the Laconian frigate hit them with a tightbeam demanding in official language and harsh tones of voice who they were and where they thought they were going.

"This is the Vincent Soo, independent freighter on contract with Atmosphäre Shared Liability Corporation out of Earth. We are carrying ore samples for quality control testing. Our public contracts and permissions are attached. Message repeats."

The voice was built from samples of ten different men, slip-mixed by the Roci's system so that even if the Laconians realized the message was false, they wouldn't be able to track the voice patterns back to anyone. The Vincent Soo was a real ship with a similar drive signature and silhouette to their present modified version of the Roci, though it didn't work outside Sol system. The contracts the message included would come back as real unless someone started digging into them. It was as plausible a mask as Naomi could fashion.

"They aren't responding," Alex said.

They were both on the ops deck. The lighting was low, though she noticed that Alex had started keeping even the low settings a little higher than he had when they'd both had younger eyes.

"Could be good, could be bad," Naomi said.

"Sure wish I could tell which it was."

"If they start chasing us with their guns blazing, then it was bad."

Alex nodded. "Yeah. That makes sense. I just wish they'd say 'Hey, we decided not to chase you down and kill you.' Just out of courtesy."

"At this range, we'll have plenty of time to watch violent death barrel down on us. You won't miss anything."

"Well, thank God for that."

With every minute the Black Kite didn't answer and didn't turn its drives in pursuit, Naomi felt the fear of capture or destruction fade, and the fear of transit grow. It was hard to believe that there had been a time when her life hadn't been moving from one trauma to the next like walking on stepping-stones in an ornamental garden. There had been whole decades when passing through the ring gates hadn't been more than a passing unease. Yes, if there was too much traffic, the ship could go dutchman— quietly vanish from existence for who-knew-where or no place. But it had been the same scale of threat as anything. They could hit a micrometeor that broke their drive. The magnetic bottle could fail and spill a free fusion reaction into the body of the ship. She could have a stroke.

Once, there had been rules about how the gates worked. Human rules about what traffic was allowed through. Inhuman rules about how much matter and energy could pass through in a certain period of time without angering the dark, ship-eating gods.

All of that was gone now.

"How many ships you think they have looking for us?" Alex asked.

"You mean how many ships do they own, or how many are in the specific hunt group tasked with trying to find us?"

Alex was silent, then made a soft clicking sound with his tongue. "Probably wouldn't like either answer, would I?"

"How long until we reach the gate?"

"If we don't brake before the transit, about eighteen hours."

Naomi unstrapped from her crash couch and stood up. The deck rose up under her, thrust gravity at just over half a g. "I'm going to get some rest. Call me if someone decides to kill us."

"Will do," Alex said as she headed for the lift. And then, "How's Jim?"

Naomi looked back. Alex's face was tinted blue by the light of his screen. The thin white stubble of hair clinging to the side and back of his head reminded her of pictures of snow on rich soil, and the gentleness in his eyes told her the question hadn't really been a question.

"Yeah, I know," she said. "But what can I do?"

She made her way down to the crew decks, listening to the reassuring hum of the ship around her. After so many years in close company with the Roci, she could judge the health of the ship by its sounds. Even if she hadn't known already that they were running the drive just a little out of balance, she'd have been able to pick up on it from the way the decks muttered and creaked.

When Jim had been taken prisoner by Laconia, Naomi had mourned him. Mourned the version of herself that had him at her side. When, against all odds, he'd come back, she hadn't really been ready. It was something she hadn't let herself hope for, and so she hadn't thought deeply about how it would be.

The crash couch was rigged up for the two of them to share. For extended hard burns, one or the other of them might take one of the spare cabins or—more often—a couch on the ops deck. The doubled couch wasn't built for optimum function so much as quality of life. The pleasure of waking up at someone's side. The intimacy of watching them sleep, feeling them breathe. Knowing on a cellular level that she wasn't alone.

Jim was sleeping when she came into the room. He still looked thinner than she remembered him being before his time in prison. Before her time in self-exile. It might only have been the graying of his hair, but the skin of his eyelids seemed darker than it had been before, as though he'd been bruised in a way that wouldn't heal. Even in sleep, there was a rigidity to his body, like he was braced against an attack.

She told herself that he was recovering, and that was probably true. She could feel the passing days and weeks changing her too. Letting her expand a little bit more into a place she hadn't had access to when they had all been apart. It was different than it had been. Bobbie was gone. Clarissa was gone. Amos was transformed in ways that made her skin crawl if she let herself think about it too much. And Teresa and her dog were there, half permanent passengers and half threat. Even so, this was closer to the life she'd had than she had any right to expect. A version of her family, back together. Sometimes that was a comfort. Sometimes it was just a way to be nostalgic for what hadn't returned.

If they could stop, recover, decompress, who knows what else they might have been able to salvage, but they couldn't.

She lay down beside him, her head pillowed on one folded arm. Jim shifted, yawned, cracked open one eye. His smile was the same—boyish, bright, delighted to see her. This time is a gift, she thought. And she smiled back.

"Hey, sexy lady," Jim said. "What did I miss?"

Years, she thought. We missed years. Instead of the truth, she smiled.

"Nothing critical," she said.

"I really want to slow us down," Alex said.

Naomi, in the galley, was putting the remains of her meal into the recycler. They had cut thrust, and the whir of the vacuum sucking the stray bits of food into the system was almost as loud as Alex's voice over the comms. On the wall screen, the Kronos ring gate hung against a wide field of stars, the weird dark, twisting mass at its perimeter visible only because of the Roci's enhancements. With each passing second, the magnification dropped. The ring was a thousand klicks across, their transit was counting down from twelve minutes, and it still would have been invisible to the naked eye.

"You can tap the brakes if you want to," Naomi said. "But if there's unfriendly company in the ring space, it'll just make us easier to hit."

"I want to charge up the rail gun," Alex said. "But you won't let me, so I'm sublimating."

"You could recheck the torpedoes and PDCs."

"Amos and Teresa are doing that already. I don't want to seem like I don't trust them."

"You could arm the hull charges and be ready to blow the disguise plates off."

Alex was silent for a long, slow breath. Across the little room, Jim gave her an approving thumbs-up.

"Yeah, I'll do that," Alex said. "Really want my rail gun up, though."

"When we're on the other side, you can charge it to your heart's content," Naomi said.

"Promises, promises." A click said that Alex had dropped the connection. The magnification on the ring gate continued its slow fall. Naomi called up a little inset window pointing back. The noise from their drive cone made the image blurry, grainy, and approximate, but even so, she could see that the Black Kite wasn't moving toward them.

"I'm not seeing a repeater," Jim said. "They blew ours up, but it doesn't look like they dropped one."

"I noticed that. They aren't worried about coordinating with anyone on the other side. So there's at least a chance we aren't burning straight into a trap."

"Yay!"

Ten minutes remained.

"Ready?" Naomi asked. In answer, Jim pulled himself to a wall handhold and pushed off toward the central lift. Naomi opened a connection to Amos. "We're taking stations on the ops deck. Not that we're expecting any trouble, but if there is some . . ."

"I hear you, Boss. I've already got the pup in her kennel. In case we bang around a little."

Bang around a little meaning evade incoming fire. "And Teresa?"

There was one of his odd pauses before he answered. "We're strapping down in engineering. You have a need, just say the word."

Naomi dropped the connection and followed Jim. The lift was at the bottom of the shaft, locked down until someone called it, and they swam through the empty air of its shaft until they reached ops. They went to their usual stations, pulled the straps across their bodies, shifted the screens to the controls they would each take if the transit landed them in danger. The combination of fear and familiarity turned it into a ritual, like brushing her teeth before sleep. The ring persisted, but the lensing of the telescopy put fewer stars around it now.

"Ready in ops," Naomi said.

"Flight deck," Alex said.

"Yeah," Amos said. "We're good. Do your thing."

The counter reached zero. Jim took a sharp breath. The gate blinked to the grainy trailing image—the same structure, but behind them now and receding. The stars all went out at once.

"And we are through," Alex said. "No threats on the board so far as I can see, but shit howdy, are there too many people in here. I'm flipping us around and putting the brakes on until we know where we're headed."

The thrust gravity warning went on even though he'd just said it, and after a moment of vertiginous rotation, up and down returned. The gel of the couch pressed into Naomi's back. She had already brought up the tactical map.

The ring space—what she still thought of as the slow zone even though there hadn't been the hard limit on velocity here since Jim and a protomolecular echo of Detective Miller had turned it off decades ago—was a little smaller than the sun in Sol system. A million Earths could have fit in it, but the only things it contained now were 1,371 ring gates, the single enigmatic station at its center, and fifty-two ships including the Roci, all of them on transits of their own. Alex was right. It was too many. It was dangerous.

"How many do you think we've lost?" Jim asked. When she looked over, he had the same screen open before him.

"Just underground ships?"

"No, I mean the big we. Everyone. Laconian. Underground. Civilians just trying to get supplies where they're needed. How many do you think we've lost?"

"No way to know," she said. "No one's keeping track anymore. There's a war on."

She set the Roci to identify the ships by transponder, drive signature, thermal profile, and silhouette, to note any discrepancies and flag any ships that were known to be associated with the underground or the Laconian Empire. It took the ship system three seconds to produce a compiled list with cross notations and a navigable interface. Naomi started the human work of paging through. The ships most closely allied with Laconia were a freighter called Eight Tenets of Bushido that operated out of Bara Gaon and a long-range explorer called the Flying Buffalo that was based in Sol but owned by a corporate network that had embraced Duarte's rule the moment Earth and Mars had surrendered. Neither were warships, and both struck Naomi as being allies of convenience more than true believers in the Laconian cause. They weren't part of the official Laconian hierarchy, anyway.

The only ship on her known underground contacts was an independent rock hopper out of Sol that was flying as the Caustic Bitch but was listed in the registry as PinkWink. There was probably a story there, but Naomi wasn't sure she wanted to know what it was.

There was also a bottle on the float.

"One of yours?" Jim asked.

"Hope so," Naomi said. "We'll see."

Once, humanity's comm network had been a fairly robust thing. In-system radio signals hit repeaters at the ring gates that were either strong enough to shout over the interference in the gates or actually physically penetrated them with transceivers on both sides. Medina Station, at the heart of the ring space, had maintained them and monitored the comm traffic. For decades, a message from Earth could reach Bara Gaon and receive an answer back within a day even if the signal queuing was swamped. But with the death of Medina and the rise of the underground, that was gone.

Now the thirteen hundred worlds communicated in a shifting patchwork of relays, ships carrying messages, and the modified torpedoes she called bottles. This one in particular was an advanced design, set to wait and gather incoming messages from the underground that were meant for her and keep them until it was triggered. It was an imperfect system, and she was certain she'd lost more than a few along the way, but it was easy to verify, difficult to fake, and difficult if not impossible to trace.

She pulled up the Epstein drive controls and dropped in a slightly altered feed pattern. To anyone besides the bottle, it would be unremarkable—well within the range of normal drive fluctuations. To the sensor array on the surface of the bottle, it would match a pattern.

It did.

The bottle shouted a dense blip of tightly packed data, putting it out broadcast for any ship in the slow zone to hear. A tight-beam would have pointed a finger if anyone had caught backscatter from it. This could be meant for any of the dozens of ships that could hear it. And every now and then, the underground set false bottles to sneak into the slow zone or a gate to spit out faked data and confuse the patterns.

The Roci's system sucked in the radio burst and set quietly to work decrypting it, while at the edge of the ring space the bottle lit its own drive and zipped out through one of the gates. Naomi's underground knew to watch for its detonation as the sign to place another one when they could. If the Laconians saw it—even if they knew what it meant—there still wasn't anything for them to do about it.

It was all run like an OPA cell writ large, and Naomi was the one who'd designed it. The sins of her past, finding a use.

"Well, that could have gone a lot worse," Jim said. "I guess the question now is where we go next."

"That will depend on what's in the data," Naomi said. "I don't like spending more time in the ring space than we have to."

"I would also hate to be eaten by forces from beyond space and time before it was my turn." The lightness and humor she'd always known were still there, but there was an emptiness behind it. Not nihilism, she thought. Exhaustion.

"If we need to," she began, "there's always—"

Teresa's voice cut in on the ship-wide comms. "I need help. In the machine shop. I need help now."

Jim was unstrapped before the girl had finished speaking. All the weariness was gone from him. He didn't wait for the lift to engage, dropping down the handholds in the shaft like climbing down a ladder. Naomi was barely behind him. Some part of her was almost relieved to see him moving with certainty again. Like catching a glimpse of the Jim from before. Even if a lot of him was in hiding, he was still in there.

"What's going on?" Alex asked from the flight deck.

"Something's happening to Amos," Teresa said. She had the tense calm of an emergency responder.

"We're on our way," Naomi said. Jim didn't respond at all. When they reached the engineering deck, Naomi heard something. A voice, Amos' voice, but not with words in it. It was a low wet sound, half growl, half gargle. Something about it reminded her of drowning. She and Jim strode down to the machine shop together.

Teresa was sitting on the deck, her legs crossed and cradling Amos' wide, bald head in her lap as he jerked and shuddered. A pale foam dripped from his mouth, and the pure black eyes were wide and empty. A sickening smell—as much metallic as organic—filled the air.

"He's having a seizure," Jim said.

Teresa's voice trembled when she spoke. "Why? Why is this happening?"

Chapter Four: Elvi

Get her out," Elvi said. "I'm pulling the plug."

"No," Cara replied. The girl's voice was still shaking, but the words were clear. "I can do this."

Cara's brain function showed in seven different datasets on twice that many screens. The data from the BFE—the technicians' pet name for the Jupiter-sized block of green crystal that was the only feature of Adro system—showed beside it. Advanced pattern-matching protocols mapped the two together in six dimensions. The instability had passed in both datasets, the seizure—if that's what it was—falling back from turbulence to a more stable flow.

All around the lab, the researchers and techs turned wide and uncertain eyes toward Elvi. She could feel the desire to keep pushing forward from her whole staff. She felt it herself. It reminded her of being the RA in her graduate dorm house and having to shut down the hall parties.

"I am the lead researcher. She is the test subject. When I say we're pulling the plug, we're pulling the plug." As her team sprang to life, closing down the experiment, she turned to Cara, who was floating over the bed of imaging sensors. "Sorry. It's not that I don't trust you. It's that I don't trust any of this."

The girl with the pure black eyes nodded, but her attention was on something else. Cara's visual and audial cortices were lit up like Paris at New Year's, and a deep, slow pulse was passing through the girl's postcentral gyrus that matched the energy readings coming from the BFE's southern hemisphere. Whatever Cara was feeling just then, it was taking up more of her attention than Elvi was. She had the sense that she could scream in Cara's ear right now and still be a tiny minority of the information flooding the girl's brain.

Or for that matter the girl's body, which was part of the issue. Elvi had studied somatic cognition theory, but the degree to which the BFE seemed to want to present its information to Cara's whole nervous system—muscles and viscera included—was complicating things. She spooled back through the data as her team ran the shutdown procedures and brought Cara back to merely human reality.

The Falcon, Elvi's private and state-sponsored science ship, was the most advanced single-function laboratory in thirteen hundred worlds. Which sounded really impressive until she remembered that most of those thirteen hundred worlds were the equivalent of 1880s European dirt farmers trying to grow enough food to not slaughter half their cattle at the start of every winter. The Falcon was the only ship that had survived the attack that killed the Typhoon and Medina Station, and the scars showed everywhere. The decking was subtly mismatched where threads of darkness that had been somehow more real than reality had ripped a third of the ship's mass away. The power and environmental systems were all patchworks of the original and rebuilt. Her own leg had a line across it where the new skin and muscle had grown in the softball-sized scoop that had vanished in the attack. Working on the Falcon was like living inside a trauma flashback. It helped Elvi when she could focus on the data, and on the BFE, and on Cara and Xan.

Dr. Harshaan Lee, Elvi's second lead, met her eye and nodded. He was an energetic young scientist, and she liked him. More than that, she trusted him. He knew what she wanted to do, and with a gesture, he'd offered to make sure Cara's re-emergence from the experiment went according to protocol. She nodded back, accepting the offer.

"All right, people," Lee said, clapping his hands together. "By the numbers and by the book."

Elvi pulled herself through the air to the lift shaft, and aft toward the engine and the isolation chamber and Cara's younger brother Xan.

Fayez floated against one wall, his left leg tucked behind a wall grip and his hand terminal glowing with text. Beside him, the thing they called the catalyst—the body of a woman infused with a contained but live sample of protomolecule—was strapped in its gurney. The catalyst's sightless eyes found her, and Fayez followed its empty gaze.

"How'd he do?" Elvi asked, nodding toward the containment chamber and therefore Xan. Most of the time, the catalyst was stored there, but for the periods when they used it to activate the old, alien technologies, she put Xan in its place. The only time the young boy and the protomolecule interacted at all was during the changeover.

Fayez pulled up a screen with the security camera. Inside the isolation chamber, Xan floated. His eyes were closed and his mouth was just slightly open, like he was sleeping or drowned.

"Listened to some music, read a few issues of Naka and Corvalis, and went to sleep," Fayez said. "For all the world like the preadolescent boy he appears to be."

Elvi pulled herself to a stop at her husband's side. The data on his hand terminal was the feed from the lab laid side by side with the monitors trained on Xan. She could tell at a glance that there wasn't a correlation between them. Whatever Cara was going through, Xan wasn't being subjected to it along with her. Or at least not obviously. She'd still feed everything through pattern matching.

She wasn't conscious of sighing, but Fayez touched her arm as if she had.

"You heard about Gedara system?"

She nodded. "Lightspeed change. Dark gods banging around in the attic. Feels like that's happening more often."

"We'll need more data points for a good frequency analysis," he said. "But yeah. It does. I hate the feeling that something vast and angry is scratching at the corners of reality and looking for a way to kill me."

"It's only scary because it's true."

He ran a hand through his hair. He'd gone silver, and when they were on the float, he tended to look like something out of a children's cartoon. Elvi's hair was well on its way to white, but she kept it short. Mostly because she hated the compression fluid in the high-g crash couches, and it took forever to get the smell of it out of longer hair.

"You shut down early?"

"There was some instability when she synced up with the BFE."

Now it was Fayez's turn to sigh. "I wish they didn't call it that. It's a diamond, not an emerald."

"I know. Sorry."

"And anyway, BFD's funnier," he said, but there wasn't any heat to it. Their marriage was a vast tissue of in-jokes, light comic bits, shared curiosity, and common trauma. They'd built it like a code between them over the course of decades. She knew the inflections that meant he had something that was interesting him, and how it sounded different from when he was angry about something. When he was trying to protect her and when he was struggling with something he was seeing but couldn't understand.

"What's on your mind?" she asked.

"You didn't notice the sync?"

"What sync?"

Fayez pulled up the dataset again. On one side, the brain and body of a teenage girl fixed at the age when she'd died and been "repaired" by alien technology. On the other, the particle scatter and magnetic resonances of a vast crystal that—if they were lucky—held the history of a galaxy-spanning species whose tracks they were following toward extinction. She could trace the similarities with her fingers. Fayez lifted his eyebrows, waiting for her to notice something. She shook her head. He pointed to a tiny indicator on the side of the readout: IN-FRAME LIGHT DELAY CORRECTION OFFSET: -.985S.

She frowned.

"We're point nine-eight-five light seconds from the diamond," Fayez said. "Matching orbit around the star, neither moving toward nor away from it. The last times we tried this, Cara and the diamond were talking back and forth. Call and response. Now they're singing in harmony. No light delay."

Elvi felt the implications running through her mind like water spilling down a creek. They'd always known that the protomolecule was able to do strange things with locality, but they'd thought it was related to quantum entanglement of particles. Cara and the BFE hadn't exchanged any particles that she knew of, so this pseudo-instantaneous information transfer was something new. One of the fundamental hypotheses of protomolecule technology had just taken a profound hit.

It also meant that their reaching out to the artifact had gotten it to reach back. Her experiment was working.

She'd expected success to feel less like fear.

When Elvi had started working for the Laconian Empire, it had been under duress. Winston Duarte had taken over all humanity with the speed and thoroughness of a plague. When he'd invited her to a senior position in his Science Directorate, the answer was yes. It would have been a dream job, except for the consequences of refusing it.

Then Duarte's plan to confront the forces that killed off the civilizations that built the ring gates went wrong. Duarte was crippled by it. And Elvi's immediate boss, Paolo Cortázar, was reduced to a thin, heme-stinking mist. Elvi, who'd wanted the job but not the employer, found herself receiving a field promotion to the head of the Laconian Science Directorate with the understanding that her primary task was to figure out how to stop the attacks that were knocking out consciousness, sometimes in single systems, sometimes all through the empire. Unless her primary task was to find a way to fix Duarte's scrambled mind. Or maybe to prevent any more ships from vanishing in the transit between the normal universe and the weird nexus of the ring space.

She had the nearly infinite resources of the empire behind her, the survival of humanity on her shoulders, and a research protocol so streamlined it would have failed out of an ethics review board from just the table of contents.

There were two levels that she had to figure out. First was the civilization that had built the protomolecule and the gates, then the forces that destroyed them. On her best days, she'd thought of herself like a medieval monk struggling to understand the saints to better see the face of God. More often, she felt like a termite trying to explain dogs to her fellow Isoptera so that they could all speculate about fusion jazz.

She understood the protomolecule engineers and what had killed them better than anyone else in all of humanity. Except, if this worked, for Cara. And Xan.

"It was like being in a dream," Cara said, "only bigger. I don't remember really tasting things in dreams, you know? This was tasting things and hearing things, and the shape of my body seemed like it was changing. It was . . . everything."

"I didn't feel anything," Xan said. He sounded disappointed.

Originally, Elvi had done the debriefings with the two siblings separately, talking first to Cara and then to Xan. The idea being that by keeping them from hearing each other's accounts she could keep them from influencing those reports, but it stressed both of them to be apart.

Now, she brought them into her private lab together, the two of them on the float while she braced herself at her desk and wrote up her notes. The décor was rich psychiatrist's office: blond grasscolored padding on the walls, spider plants in capillary-fed niches, the low pulse of a dedicated air recycler. Everything about it was designed to say that the woman who used it was a very important person. She hated it more than a little, but she didn't spend the energy to examine why.

"Was it different from the last time?" Elvi asked.

"There was a . . . stutter? Like a moment when everything fell apart, and when it came back together, everything was brighter and more immediate? That's not the right word. There may not be a right word."

"How did it compare to your experience of 'the library'?" Elvi asked.

Cara went eerily still for a moment, the way she and Xan did sometimes. Elvi waited for a breath, and then Cara came back. "The library isn't sensory at all. It's just knowing things. But this? It isn't the library, but it's where the information all comes from. I'm sure about that."

Xan made a soft noise. Cara put a hand on his arm and pulled him close to her. A primate's instinct to comfort by cuddling unchanged by its translation across light-years of vacuum into a bubble of ceramic, steel, and carbon lace.

"Were you able to interact with it at all?"

"I think so," Cara said. "I mean, I didn't understand what I was doing, but I think I can figure it out. I feel fine. I'm ready to go back in."

Elvi typed SUBJECT SHOWS STRONG DESIRE TO RETURN TO INTERFACE CONSISTENT WITH DROP IN DOPAMINE AND SERO-TONIN LEVELS POST-EXPERIMENT. ADDICTIVE?

"That's good," she said out loud. "There are a couple recalibrations we need to make, but we should be ready for another run in a couple shifts. And I'm going to want to run a scan or two while we're doing that. Check your baseline."

"Okay," Cara said, almost hiding her impatience. "Whatever you want."

Xan fidgeted against his sister's arm, setting both of them turning a little. "I'm hungry."

"Go ahead," Elvi said. "I need to write this up, but you two should eat and rest. I'll be along in a little bit."

Cara nodded once, gathered Xan close to her. "Thank you, Doctor." She pushed off Elvi's desk with one long, graceful leg. The children—or test subjects, or human-alien hybrids, or however Elvi thought of them in the moment—closed the door behind them. Elvi pressed her palms against her eyes until colors bloomed, and she let out a sigh. Her body was rattling with exhaustion and excitement and anxiety. It felt like drinking too much coffee, and she hadn't had any at all.

She wrote down the rest of her observations of Cara and Xan and attached the raw data to the report. Then it was just her summary still to go. She shifted the interface to Dictation and let herself float away from her desk. Her leg wanted her to stretch, but it also wanted to cramp. Ever since she'd regrown the hole in her thigh, it did this sometimes.

"We are seeing definite progress," she said, and the words laid themselves out on her screen. "The triadic relationship between protomolecule catalyst, conscious subject, and the BFE—" Elvi scowled and made a clicking sound with her tongue that backed out the last two words. "—the presumed alien data core seems to be finishing what we're calling its handshake protocol. I am concerned that the primary subject and the interface weren't designed for each other, and the interaction between them might be—" She clicked twice again. "—has the potential to be destructive to one or both of them."

Her office door opened, and Fayez floated in. She raised a hand, asking for silence, as he stopped himself on a handhold. She waited for the door to close before she went on.

"The next phase will be trying to confirm information we already have. Specifically, I'm going to ask the subject a set of simple questions about details from the research into artifacts and archaeology from several systems that she wouldn't plausibly have had access to. If she can confirm information we already have, that will let us move forward with some confidence that what we get from her further on will be trustworthy. But since she was present in Cortázar's private lab, and we don't know what his information hygiene was with the subjects, I'm having to be very careful in choosing test questions.

"Neither subject seems to have been affected by the events in Gedara system. The staff here, myself included, haven't had any blackouts or losses of consciousness since the all-systems attack months ago. Without knowing what constraints the enemy is working under, I can interpret the limited scope of the Gedara attack as an indication that it is still in an experimental phase, looking for interactions that will be effective in disabling us. Or that the new attacks required more effort, and the enemy doesn't want to expand them. Or that we just don't have enough information yet to know what we're seeing and I'm just talking out my ass."

She clicked her tongue to delete the sarcastic editorial at the end, and then finished the report. She started spooling through the text to look for errors and typos. Fayez shifted over to her side, watching the screen over her shoulder.

"You didn't say, 'And if we don't get a handle on it soon, the bad guys will figure out how to snuff out all our minds like so many billions of candles, and the cockroaches will have to evolve enough to take over before we get an answer.'"

"Ants, I think, before the cockroaches," Elvi said. "Predatory superorganisms. Cockroaches are just mobile food pods to them."

"You've given this a lot of thought."

She routed copies of the report to Dr. Ochida at the Science Directorate back on Laconia and privately to Admiral Anton Trejo, who was at the moment the closest thing Laconia had to a controlling intelligence for their own predatory superorganism. Somewhere on the Falcon, a tightbeam stuttered on and off, spilling light to the repeaters they'd dropped behind them on the assumption that they were still up and functioning. At the speed of light, it would take the information almost an hour to reach the ring gate, then across the cobbled-together, war-ravaged, unreliable communications network that laced the ring space, and then she didn't know how long to reach Trejo.

She packaged another copy of the report, flagged for easy interception by the underground and addressed to Naomi Nagata. She sent it too.

"That's going to get us in trouble someday," Fayez said.

"We're already in trouble."

"Yeah, but it's cosmic-forces-beyond-space-and-time-kill-us-all trouble. Feeding all our data to the underground is ship-securityshoots-us-for-treason trouble."

Elvi laughed, but it was a tight, angry laugh. "What we're doing here is bigger than politics."

"I know," he said. "I just keep hoping the politicians see it too."

As if in response, her system chimed. A high-priority message from Laconia. Elvi's eyes only.

"That's fucking eerie," Fayez said. "You want privacy?"

"No," she said. "But I'd better take it anyway."

The door closed behind him, and she started the playback. Kelly, Winston Duarte's personal valet, leaned in toward the camera. His lips were thin and gray. Whatever it was, it looked like bad news.

"Dr. Okoye. I have been authorized by Admiral Trejo to brief you on a security matter that may touch on your work. There's been a change in High Consul Duarte's status . . ."

Chapter Five: Tanaka

The Laconian Mechanized Infantry Suit: Special Reconnaissance, or more affectionately the Stalker, was a marvel of design. Built for extended recon, it was lighter and faster than the standard suit, and instead of bristling with weaponry, it was covered with sensors and tracking systems. It wasn't meant for front-line fighting. Its job was to slip in, spot the enemy and mark the targets, then slip away before the heavily armed shock troops arrived to take care of business. The small-caliber rapid-fire Gatling gun on the suit's right arm meant a Stalker could still handle a little business of its own, should the need arise.

In her many decades of service, first in the Martian Marine Corps as a member of the elite Force Recon Battalion at Hecate Base, and later as a combat officer in the newly created Laconian Marines, Tanaka had worn just about every model of power armor made. The Stalker suit was her favorite. Long and lean, fast as a greyhound and tough as nails, she'd always fancied that the suit looked like a robotic version of herself.

The one she wore now was currently a gentle mottled green, the color-shifting surface changing to match the rolling forest and Laconian brush that the suit's three-sixty optics were picking up. It didn't make her invisible, but it meant the suit's camouflage was always appropriate for the environment. Two large battery packs rode on the back, giving her a ninety-hour range. The gun was loaded with a belt of mixed armor-piercing and high explosive. She loped through the forest at an easily sustainable twenty kilometers an hour, scattering the small animals before her. There was no reason to move cautiously. Unless she actually found the high consul out there, nothing in the wilds was a threat to her.

She'd started her work by reviewing some of the files and background previously closed to her.

Actual information about the high consul's personal life and data was thin, even with Omega status to unlock files for her. His medical records were sketchy and vague. Much of his privacy had been preserved over the years by never recording data in the first place. Everyone else on Laconia, on the other hand, was well documented. She'd taken the high consul's laundry and locked it in a room with her suit's sensor package while she prepped for the trip. When she put the suit on, it had identified the chemical markers of every human who'd come in contact with the fabric. All but one of them were identifiable. Process of elimination made the remaining signal the high consul. Negative space for hunting animals.

Now she had a scent.

From the security records, she could track Duarte to the edge of the State Building's grounds, and then a little beyond it. The track after that was thin. Wind had scattered the scents, rain had washed them away.

Laconia wasn't a huge planet, but it was still an entire planet. Duarte had left days before on foot. Best-case scenario he was still walking, and she'd be able to find him in a long afternoon. But the colony worlds had a habit of sprouting ancient transportation networks—methods the aliens who'd engineered the place had used to move shit around. If he'd tapped into one of them, he could be anywhere on Laconia or miles under it. If she could find where he'd accessed it, she'd have the next step. That was all it took: one step after another until the mission was done.

She was moving fast enough to surprise a family of bone-elk digging for food in the soil with their impressive racks of horns. They startled at her sudden appearance, then all bolted in different directions trying to get away. Her suit tracked them all, marking their threat level as low. If she overrode that and changed the threat to high, the gun on her arm would turn the entire herd into paste in seconds.

She chose not to.

At first, she followed the vague signs. A 15 percent match, hardly better than an educated guess, led down a particular animal trail lined by silver-leaved bushes. A 20 percent match went directly up a sheer rock wall, and she discarded it as a false positive. As she crisscrossed the landscape, her mind relaxed into the experience of the search, and time became less concrete. She'd heard about a similar kind of flow with artists when they fell deeply into their work. It was a lovely way to be—alone in her head with the pure focus of the task.

She made steady speed through the narrow band of forest and into the rocky foothills of a mountain. When she reached it, she had a pretty good hunch where she was going. Topographical maps led her through a twisty box canyon and up to the entrance of a cave. It was well hidden from casual view. No wonder no one had found it without a concerted effort. Teresa must have thought she'd found the best hiding spot in the world.

A pair of large rodent-like creatures—black fur and eyes, callused mouths, and ears like seashells—were in the entrance, fighting or mating or some combination of the two. They stopped and hissed at her as she approached, baring brownish hook-needle teeth. She kicked them out of the way. They hit the cave wall with a wet thud, and stopped moving. She considered the little bodies for a moment and ducked into the darkness below the stone.

The tunnels near the entrance were where the enemy spy had lived for years. His stink was still everywhere. The suit also found traces of Teresa and a dozen other Laconians. The extraction team that had killed Timothy or Amos Burton or whoever he'd been, and then the search team that came looking for his corpse and his equipment. The report said he'd been sitting on a backpack nuke the whole time. The prevailing theory was that he was waiting to see if he could extract James Holden before using it. She had a certain respect for that. There was a purity about someone who could casually hold death in his hands, just waiting for the right moment.

The suit thought it had Duarte's scent, but if the high consul had come through here, his trail was either too faint or too muddled up with everyone else's for the suit to track it with certainty. She moved through the cave, trying to recapture the pure state she'd felt in the forest, but something about killing the little not-rats and finding the evidence of the spy's nest had gotten her thinking. The pure and beautiful moment was gone, even if the hunt was still on.

The stone here was pale, flaking, and weak. She could have dug a passage through it with the powered gloves of her suit. It made her more than a little worried about cave-ins, especially after she got past the entry area where the camp had been and the tunnel system turned into a maze. Her suit's inertial tracking meant it could create a 3-D map of everywhere she went in real time, but the mountain was large. If the tunnels carved their way through the whole thing, she could be there for days. If she was right and Duarte had come here, it was going to be hard getting him out.

The efficient thing would have been to call for a swarm of micro drones and flood the tunnels with them. But Trejo had impressed on her the need for strict operational security, and including a tech team to run the drones felt like an unnecessary risk. Still, if she couldn't put her hands on the man, that could be her plan B.

She wasn't ready to give up, though. Not yet.

The farther into the caves she got, the less natural they seemed. Near the entrance, they had felt like accidents of geology, but here and there strange textures and protrusions began dotting the walls and grew up from the floors in the larger caverns. Black and silver spirals that seemed to carry their own light. Tanaka had spent enough time on Laconian warships built by the strange orbital shipyards to know protomolecule builder tech when she saw it.

This place had definitely been one of their installations, but its purpose was lost to time. The report from the investigation team had marked the location as needing further study, but with the attack on Laconia, everyone seemed to have just forgotten about it. No one's first priority. Unless maybe Duarte's.

She passed through a complex junction—an east-west tunnel above intersecting with a curving north-to-southeastern one below, and the suit alerted. She checked the display. Seventy-five percent match in the upper passage.

"Got you," she said.

Only maybe she didn't. She followed the suit's prompting through the twists and turns of a section of the tunnels, the chemical signal staying between 75 and 60 percent match, and came out into a large room filled with elaborate crystalline growths. They rose from the floor like delicate five-meter-high towers of glass lattice, glowing in soft pastel colors when her suit's lights hit them. In another context, they'd have been breathtakingly lovely. A kind of post-revivification abstract sculpture. She wondered if they were made by alien intelligences or the blind, idiot forces of nature. That she couldn't tell was either beautiful or damning, but either way, beside the point.

The suit was sure the high consul had been in the room. Her first 100 percent hit. Whether he was still in there or not, Duarte had definitely stood where she was or very close to it. Had seen the crystals with his weirdly altered eyes. Her heart rate increased a little as the realization struck that she might actually be able to find him. The relief at a real prospect of success showed her how carefully she'd been ignoring the possibility of failure.

The trail led her around the base of one of the towers. A pair of doglike constructs were worrying at a shard of crystal lying on the ground next to it. Tanaka could see the gap at the top of the tower where it must have broken off and fallen. In the files, Laconian intelligence called these things repair drones and indicated that they were nonthreatening. Occasionally they'd wander into the fringes of the city and steal broken things, only to later return them repaired, but altered. Researching what they chose to fix and how they went about intuiting original function was one of the projects that the Science Directorate was going to get around to one of these days.

The suit indicated that the high consul's scent was on one of the drones. Tanaka scowled to herself. If Duarte had left his scent on the thing by touching it—if that was the trail she was following— she was screwed. They could have interacted anywhere before the dog came here, and she'd have no idea where Duarte and this thing had met up.

She was about to go searching for another trace of the scent when one of the dogs said ki-ka-ko, then picked up the broken crystal shard in its weird puppetlike mouth and wandered off. She followed it.

After a confusing series of twists and turns, they emerged into another chamber, ten times the size of anything she'd seen before in the tunnels. It was like stepping into a cathedral. A fluting sound like wind over the top of empty bottles muttered through the space with no clear origin. Strange, almost organic-looking mechanisms grew up from the floor and towered over her, ten or fifteen stories high. For a moment, she felt something like awe.

In among them were half a dozen pits filled with viscous brown fluid, like sewer water mixed with petroleum oil. The dog walked over and dropped its broken bit of crystal into one of the pools, then waited motionless. The suit warned her that there were eleven other mobiles in the cavern. Each of them another one of the weird dog things. None seemed hostile. As she watched, they brought things into the room and dropped them in the pools. One time, a dog took something resembling a half meter of water pipe out of the pool and then left with it.

"This your machine shop, puppy?" she asked. "What are you doing here?"

Tanaka raised her arm and fired half a dozen shots into one of the motionless dogs, blowing it apart. She waited. After a few moments, three of the other dogs came over and began gently picking up the pieces of their dead comrade and dumping them into the pools.

"Ah-ha," Tanaka said to them. "Fixing your friend up, aren't you? All right. I'll wait."

They just looked back at her with their big eyes as though they were embarrassed at her outburst.

One said ki-ka-ko but didn't move.

There were a lot of strange chemicals in the air in the chamber, and the suit took a while sorting through them all, but after a few moments it popped up an alert. Duarte's scent. It was a significant trace. She had a hard time believing that it was just contact with a repair drone. If he'd passed through that room, had he been hurt or killed and the dogs brought him there? Had he figured out the same thing she just did, and used the sewage pools to fix something? Her hands itched a little bit, and she grinned. She felt the impatience of the chase, like she was a dog straining at its leash at the smell of rabbits. The joy of the hunt.

Slowly, methodically, she moved around the perimeter looking for the strongest match. Tracing Duarte's movement inside the room was probably pointless, but knowing where he'd come from and what direction he'd left would be enough. The best hit was a tunnel leading off the large cavern and gently sloping up.

She followed it, the chemical scent growing stronger as she moved. Half an hour later she emerged into a large room with an open window to the outside.

The chamber was shaped like a half circle, with a flat wall nearly sixty meters across. The middle twenty meters of the wall were missing, creating a large opening to the outside. Sunlight streamed in. Sky glowed oxygen-blue between the draping strands of vine and branch.

He'd been here. More than that, he'd spent time here. Duarte's scent marker was everywhere.

"High consul?" she said, the suit amplifying her. "This is Colonel Tanaka. If you're here, I just want to talk with you, sir."

No one answered.

On either side of the outside opening were spindly cradles growing up from the floor, with fifteen-meter-long egg-shaped objects held in them. The eggs had the same mother-of-pearl gleam she'd seen in the interior of a Gravitar-class battleship. Like something made at the alien construction platform. And the high consul's most recent scent track moved up to the empty cradle in the center. She walked slowly around the cradle, but no track led away.

"All right, little buddy," she said to the egg that had been there and was gone, "what the fuck are you?"

"A ship," Dr. Ochida said.

Tanaka leaned back in her chair. She'd taken over an office in the State Building as her base of operations with a staff of ten and high-priority access to everyone of any importance to the empire. The décor was generic politician, but she'd put a print of Ammon Fitzwallace's Artemis the Hunter on the wall where she could see it, all vibrant green with shocks of bright and bloody red.

"You're sure?"

"Well, no," Ochida said. "We have a team going to the site now, as you requested. We'll know more once that's complete, but we have seen similar structures elsewhere. Persephone system. Bara Gaon. Swarga Loka. Seven Kings. It's not the most common, but it's certainly not unprecedented. A fair proportion of the artifact tree seems focused on material transport, and especially in the Seven Kings data, we see—"

"Probably a ship."

"That's oversimplifying. We believe they were material transport pods," Ochida said. "But—"

"Did it fly?"

"The location and design seem to indicate yes," Dr. Ochida agreed with a nod.

"Then how do we track it?"

Ochida leaned forward. His chair creaked under him, and he blinked like an owl. "Track it?"

Tanaka clenched her fist where the scientist couldn't see it and kept her voice even. "If I wanted to find where the ship went. Is there a drive signature I can search for? Some kind of energy profile?"

Ochida shook his head like she was a little girl who'd asked him for a unicorn. "The native propulsion systems aren't something we've cracked yet. Not for want of trying. But we've known since Eros moved that it involves decoupling local inertia from frame inertia. That's not something that has a drive. It seems more like a controlled gravity where a nonlocal area falls through normal space—"

"Okay," Tanaka said, not punching the grinning scientist in the face only through great effort of will. "No drive plume. Then what can I use to find it?"

"Eros was also invisible to radar, you'll recall."

"You're telling me a lot of things I can't do. Start telling me what's on the 'can' list."

Ochida shrugged. "Eros was at least always visually available. If the ship passed through any light telescopy, you might find it that way. Of course, after the attack the planetary defenses are compromised, so . . ." He pressed his lips together in a universal gesture of impotence.

"All right," Tanaka said. "Thank you."

"You're quite welcome."

"No," she said. "I mean you're dismissed."

Ochida blinked in surprise, but then he left. So that was good.

Tanaka ached. She'd barely begun, and her search area had just expanded from Laconia at or near a transport network to literally anyplace in 1,300 systems and no obvious path to narrow it down. The raw frustration of it was a knot between her shoulder blades. She pulled up a notepad and started thinking her options through. Signal intelligence was obvious. Images of the remaining egg-ships had to be put out to anything with visual telescopes. Stations. Ships. Anything near a ring gate.

The Voice of the Whirlwind—the only surviving Magnetar— was acting as ersatz planetary defense. It would be the priority. If it had seen the egg-ship, that would at least give her an idea what direction it was going. It was possible, after all, that Duarte had been going someplace in-system. She didn't know for sure he'd been headed for a gate.

And then . . . what? Hunting a ship that couldn't be tracked on radar, that didn't leave a drive plume. That ran dark. If she knew what he'd been going after, maybe it would give her a smaller list of possible destinations. She'd need to talk to the valet and Admiral Trejo to see if Duarte had given any hint where he might be heading.

Or . . . maybe hunting wasn't the right model. Maybe trapping was. Maybe it wasn't a place Duarte was heading for. If the high consul was looking for something, that thing could be used as bait.

The records of ongoing operations were highly restricted. Trejo was probably the only one who could access everything, but he'd given her the keys. There were five active groups trying to recover Teresa Duarte. She read over their operating reports, but half of her mind was probing the strategy. Before his resurrection, the only sign Duarte had given that he was still conscious was his slaughter of Paolo Cortázar. That, according to Dr. Okoye, who had been there at the time, had been out of concern for his daughter. Was it such a stretch to think that the girl would be the first person he reached out to now? Wasn't she the best available bait?

It sure as hell seemed like better odds than tracking the missing ship.

The most promising lead was an intelligence counter-op. A distant cousin of Duarte's dead wife ran a boarding school on New Egypt, and there had been some chatter between her and known underground contacts. If Tanaka had the girl, it was the sort of place she'd have found to park her. And the school's new term was starting soon. Hiding a teenage girl in a place with a lot of other teenage girls made sense.

Tanaka pulled up the command structure. The operation was being run through a hunting frigate called the Sparrowhawk. Captain Noel Mugabo was in charge.

Or had been, anyway. Until now.

She opened a connection to her aide and didn't wait for him to speak. "Contact the Sparrowhawk and let them know I'll be taking over direct operational command of their New Egypt mission. And find me a fast transport. Something with the breathable-fluid crash couches.

"Put me on New Egypt now."

Chapter Six: Naomi

Amos—or the thing that had been Amos—smiled and waited for the autodoc to finish its run. Naomi, braced at a handhold, watched the values and scans as they spooled out. Red and amber and occasionally green, they were the medical equivalent of a shrug. The machine thought he was a basket full of different kinds of strange. Some was the strange he'd been ever since returning from Laconia. Some was new strange that deviated from previous measures. Whether any of it was significant was anybody's guess. There was no comparison data for an animal like him, no others of his kind apart from the pair that Elvi Okoye had. There was no context.

Naomi felt that way a lot these days.

"I'm feeling fine," he said.

"That's good. You should stay here for a while anyway. In case it happens again."

The pure black eyes shifted. It was hard to tell if he was focusing on her or something else in the room. Without iris or pupil, he could appear all-seeing and blind at the same moment.

"I don't think I'll be getting the wigglies again anytime soon," he said.

"You've been pretty shaken up. Not just this. All of it. Better that we get an idea what's going on with you now so you don't have another seizure while you're doing something dangerous."

"I get that. But it's not going to happen again."

"You can't know that unless we know why it happened."

"Yeah."

They were quiet for a moment. Only the hum of the air recyclers and the muttering of the autodoc. "Do you?"

"Do I what, Boss?"

"Do you know why the seizure happened?"

Amos lifted a wide, grayish hand in a gesture that said maybe, maybe not. The little widening of his smile was exactly the one he'd have used before, but half a second later than he would have used it. "I got a feeling. There's stuff running in the background with the new head. There was a hiccup. Don't think it'll happen again."

She tried to smile back, but it felt forced. "That's not as reassuring as you think."

"You don't think I'm him, do you?"

She noted the pronoun. Him. Not You don't think I'm me. "I don't even know what that question means."

"It's all right. I get it. I went away like I used to be. I come back with these eyes and this blood. And my brain doing things it didn't use to do. If you weren't at least wondering, that would be weird."

"Are you?"

"Am I?"

"Are you still human?"

His smile could have meant anything. "Not sure I ever was, really. But I know I'm still me."

"That'll do then," she said, and made herself lean over and kiss his wide smooth scalp the way she might have if she hadn't had doubts. If it was true, and he was Amos, then it was the right thing. If it wasn't, and he wasn't, better that whoever he was believe she accepted him. "Still, wait an hour before you get back to work?"

He sighed. "If you say so."

She squeezed his shoulder, and it was solid. Had it felt like that before? Amos had always been strong. He'd spent as much time in the ship gym as Bobbie, and Bobbie had damn near lived there. Naomi couldn't tell if this was a change or just her mind looking for discrepancies. Building them whether they were there or not.

"I'll check on you," she said, because it wasn't a lie, no matter what she meant by it.

The ring space wasn't somewhere to relax. There had been a time when it had been the hub of humanity's great spread to the stars. It had seemed safe then, or relatively so. Anything that found its way to the edge of the sphere defined by the ring gates vanished and was lost, but nothing reached back.

Until it did. And then it had been annihilating. Now most ships moved through it fast and hot, setting the angle of their transit before they came in and getting out the farther gate as quickly as they could. It was exactly the wrong thing to keep from going dutchman, but it minimized the time spent in the uncanny space.

Other ships passed in and out of the rings, the traffic of more than a thousand systems, all of them relying on trade to one degree or another. All of the ships on their own errands with no particular interest in or awareness of Naomi and her burdens. The Roci stayed there, on the float. Every hour courted the danger that reality itself would start boiling again and everything in the ring space would be killed. But before they could go anywhere, they needed a place to go and a plan that was more fleshed out than Don't die.

She worked on the ops deck, floating just over her crash couch with her legs folded in the lotus position. The straps shifted around her like kelp in a vast water recycling tank, and the web of the underground spread out on the screen before her. It had been easier when she'd been focused on attacking Laconia. Breaking things was always easier than building them up.

In the aftermath of Laconia's defeat in its home system—on its home planet—the empire had moved to consolidate the power it still had. Trejo was locking down shipyards and supply lines as best he could with the forces that remained to him. Naomi was trying to leverage the influence and organization she'd gathered for the battle into some kind of sustainable self-governing network. The newsfeeds from Sol, Bara Gaon, Auberon, and Svarga Minor chattered about increased Laconian presence. Though why anyone was worried about a backwater like Svarga wasn't entirely clear. The message queue was as long as her arm, it felt like.

"Their objection is the same one we're seeing over and over again," Jillian Houston, the captain of the underground's stolen flagship, said from Naomi's screen. She looked like a child. She was older than Naomi had been when she'd signed on to the Canterbury a lifetime ago. "Báifàn system is on the edge of being self-sustaining, but which side of the edge is debatable. They don't like anyone saying when they can and can't trade, and they're absolutely not going to accept constraints that other systems aren't abiding by. And I have to say, I'm sympathetic. We're here to protect people's freedom. I'm not sure what liberty is if you're not permitted to decide what chances you're willing to take."

Naomi turned her head, trying to ease the knot at the base of her skull. She'd watched the report three times now, each time hoping she'd find a graceful and diplomatic response that had eluded her before. It hadn't happened.

Instead, she felt herself growing taut and angry. The tension in her neck, the tightness across her chest pulling her shoulders forward into a hunch, the ache at the corners of her scowl. They were the physical manifestations of an impatience that reached far beyond Jillian's message or her own still-uncomposed response.

She kept coming back to the uncharitable thought that if the underground were just made up of Belters, the problem would have been tractable. Or if not that, at least she'd have been sure a solution existed. Belters were viciously independent, but they also understood what it meant to rely on the community around them. Skipping a seal replacement didn't only risk the life of the slack bastards who'd cheaped out on their work. Failure meant the death of everyone on the crew.

The colony worlds were acting like their safety could exist separate from the well-being of all the other systems and ships. It couldn't be so hard to see how accepting a little restriction and regulation benefited everyone. But inner-worlds culture didn't measure it that way. For them, being better meant being better than the person next to you, not both of you sharing the same increase.

She knew it wasn't fair or even really accurate. Her frustration was leaking out as tribalism and spite. Which was why she hadn't responded yet, even though as the de facto leader of the underground, she had to. What she really wanted to do was put a camera on Jim and have him give one of his heartfelt little sermons about how they were all one people, and that by pulling together, they'd get to the other side of their struggles. It was his genius that he could still believe that, even after everything they'd seen and been through.

But she'd just gotten him back. If she let herself get into the habit of seeing him as a useful tool for her work, it would betray the chance they'd been given. She needed to have the connection between them as something separate, something sacred, that the rest of the universe didn't have claim on.

So maybe there was a thread of selfishness in Belters too.

She started the recording.

"Jillian. Thank you for the report. Please let our friends in Báifàn system know that I hear and understand their concerns, and I absolutely understand their need for safety and equity in how trade is carried out through the rings. The goal has to be minimizing the need for ring transit by building up to sustainability for all the colonies as quickly as possible, and their goal for that is absolutely the same as ours. I'll include the presentation for why the protocols are the best, safest way forward for all of us, and you can pass that along too. Hopefully, they've already seen it."

But maybe this time they'll actually pay attention.

Or maybe the builders' ancient enemy would figure out how to end all human life and none of this would matter. Fatalism had its dark attractions, after all. Hopelessness and despair could almost look restful.

She played back her message, decided that it sounded too pat and rehearsed, and redid it another four times before she gave up and sent it out. The message queue still waiting looked like forever.

She massaged her hands, digging into the aching muscles at the base of her thumbs, while the next message played on her screen. Governor Tuan had thin, terrier-sharp cheeks, frog-wet eyes, gray-black hair, and a tight, officious smile. She wondered whether she would still have thought he was ugly if he'd had a different personality. She'd probably have been more forgiving.

"On behalf of the governing council of Firdaws, I would like to thank you for submitting your proposal. I am very interested in returning to a schedule of reliable and mutually profitable trade."

"But," Naomi said to herself as Tuan scowled theatrically on the screen.

"There are, however, some very real concerns about the document as it stands that will require some thoughtful conversation. In that spirit, I would like to propose a summit meeting. While Firdaws is not yet entirely self-sustaining, we do have certain amenities that we will be happy to offer. Our state-of-the-art luxury villas can be set aside for you and your associates for as long as the negotiations take."

She slid it into a secondary queue. There was only so much explaining to people how cooperation would keep them all from dying she could manage in a single sitting.

The next entry stopped her. It was from Sol. It was from Kit.

The only child of Alex's second marriage was a grown man now, but she'd seen him as a newborn and known his mother, Giselle, as well as any of the Roci crew had really gotten to know her. Now here he was, looking into a camera. He looked more like his mother—Giselle's high, sharp cheekbones and regal forehead and brows. When he moved, she could see Alex in him.

"Hey," he said. "So I know it's been a while. And things . . . I know it's not like we could be in touch more. But I wanted to let you know something."

Naomi's gut tightened, and she braced for a hit. That Kit had come to her had to mean it was something about Alex, or something that would hurt Alex badly enough that Kit wanted to be sure there would be people there to comfort him, even if he decided to keep it to himself.

"Well," Kit said, "there aren't a lot of planetary engineering gigs in Sol system, and the ones there are they have fifteen people applying for every spot. I know that we talked about me keeping a low profile—"

Naomi frowned, trying to remember when she'd said something like that.

"—but we got offered a contract with a geological survey on Nieuwestad. It's a good company. Jacobin-Black Combined Capital. They're doing a lot of industrial construction and microclimate engineering, and I think it could be a really good move for us. But it will make it harder for you to come visit, and I know with Rohi pregnant, you'd want to see your grandson."

Kit grinned like he'd just delivered the punch line to a joke, and Naomi stopped the playback. Relief was like a drug in her veins. She leaned back in her crash couch, the gimbals hissing under her, and called up toward the flight deck.

"Alex! I think I got some of your mail. I'll send it up."

But he was already coming down the lift ladder. "What's up?" he said.

"I got some of your mail. It's in the intelligence packet, but it's yours. From Kit."

His smile was quick and automatic. "Well, play it."

Naomi scrubbed the message back to the start and let it play. Knowing what was coming, she watched his face, and saw the shock and the joy and the tears in Alex's eyes when the news landed. Kit went on for a time, telling Alex about the dates they were shipping out for Nieuwestad and the due date for the coming child. And some news of no real importance about Giselle and life on Mars. And then the message ended with Kit saying I love you, Dad and Alex lowering himself into the crash couch at Naomi's side.

"Well ain't that a kick in the nuts," Alex said through a wide grin. "I'm going to be a granddaddy."

"Yes, you are."

He considered it for a moment, then shook his head. "I was going to say I'm too young to be anyone's grandfather, but I'm not, am I?"

"No," Naomi said. "You aren't. If anything, you ran kind of late."

"Took a while getting it right. God. Kit's a good kid. I hope he's better at keeping a marriage together than I was."

"He isn't you. I'm not saying he won't fuck it all up, but even if he does, it'll be however he fucks it up. Not how you did." For a moment she thought of her own son, dead along with his father and the rest of the Free Navy. The memory almost didn't hurt. That wasn't true. It would always hurt, but now it was a low-level ache instead of a knife to the belly. Time had done its healing, or at least let the scars go numb.

The piloting subsystem chimed, and Alex hauled himself up out of the couch. "I guess Giselle's going to be a grandmother." He grinned. "And she's going to hate the shit out of it, isn't she?"

"The title may not fit her self-image," Naomi said.

"You make a good diplomat," Alex said, and headed back for the lift. When she was alone again, she separated Kit's message from the rest of the packet and copied it over to Alex's message queue. She thought about keeping a copy for herself, but it hadn't been meant for her, and she didn't want to presume.

A soft clicking alert, and a new message popped up on her queue. She'd built a system of flags to help her keep track of her cascading responsibilities. This flag was the deep gold color that she'd chosen to mean Home. Issues specific and peculiar to the Rocinante and her little family. What remained of her little family.

The message was the one Naomi had been waiting for. Its tracking headers showed the subtle signs and countersigns the underground used to confirm authenticity. The repeaters echoed back to New Egypt, as she'd hoped. Nothing looked amiss. Anything that touched on the daughter of High Consul Winston Duarte, Naomi treated like it was made from snakes and plutonium.

Once she was certain of the message protocols and origins, she isolated her comm system, offered a silent prayer to the universe, and decrypted the message. It was a single line of text:

ADMISSION APPROVED FOR FALL SEMESTER.

Chapter Seven: Jim

Why am I only hearing about this now?" Teresa asked.

Jim couldn't tell if the tension was anger, fear, or something else, but it had settled around the girl's shoulders like a shawl. Her eyes were focused someplace just over Jim's right shoulder, fixed and glaring in a way that he knew from his time on Laconia was her way of listening intently.

It was strange to think that of all of them, Jim had spent the most time with Teresa. They'd lived in the State Building for years, her as the child of the high consul, and him as his prisoner. Or maybe both as his prisoner, just in different ways.

"That was me," he said. "I didn't want to float the possibility if it didn't come through."

Her gaze flicked to him with a question.

"I didn't want to disappoint you," he said.

"But it came through. It's here. A possibility."

"It's a boarding school in New Egypt system. Sohag Presbyterian Academy—"

"I'm not interested in a religious education," she said.

"It's not really specifically religious. I mean, there are religious classes and services, but they aren't mandatory."

Teresa took a moment, processing that like she'd taken a bite of food and was deciding whether to spit it out.

"A cousin," she said.

"Elizabeth Finley. She was your mother's cousin, and apparently doesn't think much of your father. It's kind of perfect. She knows who you are, and can take steps to keep you safe, and she's not interested in bowing before Laconia for personal reasons, so we don't have to worry about her deciding to hand you over for a bounty."

"And you've vetted her?"

"The underground did what it could. She seems to check out.

There's not a big presence in New Egypt, Laconian or underground. That's another part of the appeal."

Teresa's gaze floated back over his shoulder as she thought.

Like all the cabins in the Roci, Teresa's had been designed for Martian military back when that had still meant something. Jim was used to the spartan design for himself or the others. Putting an adolescent girl in the same setting made it seem more like a prison. At fifteen, Jim had been a sophomore at North Frenchtown High. The issues he'd struggled with were how to sleep an extra twenty minutes in the mornings, how to cover over his profound disinterest in Mr. Laurent's chemistry lectures, and whether Deliverance Benavidez would go out with him. Back then, all of Montana had seemed too small. Teresa only had a few square meters.

"What about Muskrat?"

"Finley says it won't be a problem. There are other students who have pets too. Mostly they're service animals, but it won't stand out enough to cause trouble."

"I don't know," she said. "I like it here. Amos is teaching me things. And there are fewer variables here. I wouldn't know the people there. I don't think I'd trust them."

"I hear you," Jim said. "But this is a warship. And we're at war. And while you did pull us out of the fire, I'm not comfortable using you as a shield."

"I'm a good shield."

"Yeah, but I'm done with that play."

"Why?" she asked. "I know you don't want to, but it worked. And it'll keep working, at least sometimes. Why don't you want something that works to keep you safe?" The sincerity in her voice surprised him.

"Shields take the hit," Jim said. "Shields get shot. That's what they're there for. And someday, someone is going to think that they can disable the Roci by putting a round through our drive cone. Or that it's worth the risk to drop a few rail-gun rounds through us. There's a calculus here, and yes, you make them less likely to shoot us down. But I don't want to be the guy you died for. I'm not okay with it."

She tilted her head like she was hearing a new sound. "You care about this."

"Yeah. Kind of do."

If he'd expected an outpouring of emotion from her—gratitude or admiration or just respect for the morality of his position—he'd picked the wrong girl. She considered him like he was an unexpected kind of butterfly. It wasn't quite contempt, but it wasn't not-contempt either. He saw something occur to her and waited until she was ready to say it.

"If I went, and I didn't like it there, could I come back?"

"Probably not," he said. And then, a moment later, "No."

The sorrow in her expression was brief, but it was deep. He understood a little better the loss he was asking her to embrace.

"I need to think about this," she said. "When do you need my answer?"

When Naomi had come to him with the news, she'd asked him to tell Teresa. Not ask permission, not negotiate with. The verb had been tell. And yet, here he was. Jim scratched his neck.

"It's weeks until the term starts. I'd like to get you there early enough to have you situated, but if we make it a relatively hard burn . . ."

"I understand," she said. "I won't take too long."

He pulled himself out of the room, skimming down the corridor. He heard the door close behind him. The ship was quiet. Naomi was waiting for him on the flight deck. He was going to have to tell her that a fifteen-year-old girl had maneuvered him into giving her the choice of going to boarding school or . . . staying on the ship, he guessed. Doing something that wasn't Naomi's plan. It was barely his responsibility, and he still felt like he'd screwed it up.

He passed Alex's cabin and heard the familiar voice drifting through the door. But it will make it harder for you to come visit, and I know with Rohi pregnant, you'd want to see your grandson. Alex had been smiling a lot since the message came through, but he knew there was something else there too. Jim wanted to be happy for him, and he thought he was faking it pretty well. He'd slapped Alex on the back and made grandpa jokes that made his old friend grin.

The truth was, Jim was astounded by Kit's optimism. And by astounded, he really meant horrified. When Alex talked about his grandson, working out whether he'd been born yet, how big he was likely to be, speculating on the names that Kit and his wife might choose, all Jim could see was one more body on the pile when the end came. Another baby who'd stop breathing when the deep enemy solved its puzzle. Another death.

Maybe that was unfair. There had been any number of end-times before this: black plague, nuclear war, food web collapse, Eros moving. Every generation had its apocalypse. If they made humans stop falling in love and having babies, celebrating and dreaming and living out the time they had, they'd have stopped a long time before.

It was just that this time, it was different. This time, they weren't going to make it. The only other one who knew, who understood, was Amos. And so Amos was the only one he could talk to.

He made his way down toward the reactor and the drive. The smell of silicone lubricant sweetened the air, and Muskrat's soft bark drew him toward the engineering deck. The dog was floating in the air, her tail a circular whirl that left her head shifting in a circle a few centimeters across. Her lips were pulled back in a wide canine smile.

"Still no sausage," Jim said, and the dog barked softly.

"She doesn't actually care about that," Amos said. "She just likes having you around."

Jim steadied the dog with one hand and petted her with the other. "You know, I would have said dog on spaceship was a very bad plan, but I do kind of like having her here. I mean, more when we're under thrust."

Amos rose from a workstation, a small welding torch in one hand and dark goggles to protect his eyes pushed up onto his forehead. A hydraulic valve was clamped at the station with a line of scorch marks along the ceramic where the metal sealant was still cooling. "She does get embarrassed when I have to take her to the vacuum fire hydrant."

"The what?"

"It's the idiom for where dogs piss," Amos said. "I don't make this up. I just follow the network groups."

"Because there's a lot of floating puppies," Jim said to Muskrat. "You're not the only one."

"They cope with atrophy better than us too," Amos said as he stripped off the goggles and fit them into his tool case. "Something about having more legs on the ground, I think."

"Probably. I will miss her when she's gone," Jim said, then nodded at the valve. "Is there a problem with the water feed?"

"Nope. And there isn't going to be. Mineralization was messing with the seal, and you wait until that's bad enough for a little erosion, you might as well print up a new one, y'know?"

"I at least have it on good authority. That's close enough for me."

Amos snapped the welding torch into its place and pulled a polishing cloth out of his pocket. "We need to get the fuck out of the slow zone. Hanging out here like this is making my scalp crawl."

"Yeah. As soon as Naomi gets through her data, decides for sure where we're going," Jim said. "I'm worried about the kid."

"Yeah. Me too."

"It's easy for me to forget how much she's lost, you know? Her entire experience was curated to the millimeter before she came with us. A few months here—just enough to get comfortable and find her feet—and now another total change. It's a lot. She's fifteen. Can you imagine facing all that at fifteen?"

Amos looked over at him like he'd said something funny. "You stressed over Tiny? She's going to be fine."

"Is she? I mean . . . What do we even know about this school we're taking her to?"

"We know it gets shot at less than we do."

"Besides that."

Amos put the cloth over his thumb, took a firm grip on the valve, and started rubbing away the scorch marks as he talked. "Tiny's working out who she is. Shit, what she is. It's what she was doing on Laconia. It's what she's doing here. When she goes to that school, it's not like the job changes. The question is, does she have more to learn from a boarding school at the ass end of nowhere or getting missiles thrown at her with a bunch of old-fart revolutionaries?"

"I don't think we're really revolutionaries."

"And," Amos went on, raising his voice to keep Jim from changing the subject, "it's not what's really eating you. We both know that."

Before Jim could reply, Alex's voice came over ship-wide. "Hey, everybody. I was hoping . . . I kind of need to call a little group meeting? In the galley. If you can. Um. Thanks."

Amos squinted at the valve, turning it one way and then the other before giving it a last, satisfied swipe with the cloth. He set it back in its clamp.

"Do you need to put that back in place?"

"Nah," Amos said. "I got a spare holding the line for now."

"Then I guess we should go see what's up with Alex."

"He wants something, but he needs to apologize for a few minutes before he asks."

"Well, sure," Jim said. "I mean, I wonder what he's going to ask for."

If there had been gravity, Alex would have been pacing when they came through the galley door. Teresa was already there, floating beside the wall without touching it. Her arms were crossed, her mouth was tight and small, and every now and then she moved her jaw and made some brief expression. If he had to guess, Jim would have said she was deep in conversation with herself and barely paying attention to them. Amos took a place at the table, rooting himself by his mag boots to keep his hands free to steady Muskrat. The dog seemed perfectly at ease, reassured by having so much of its pack together.

Naomi came last and pulled herself a bulb of tea while motioning to Alex that he could start.

"So, yeah," Alex said. "You all heard about Kit and Rohi, right?"

"You may have mentioned it," Jim said, teasing him, but gently. Alex grinned.

"So I did the math, and I'm pretty sure that the baby's already born. Now, I know that we've a lot on our plates here. The work we're doing is really important. And risky. I didn't sign on to any of this thinking it was like a normal contract. This has never been a normal contract."

Amos' sigh was almost inaudible. Alex heard it anyway, and Jim could see the old pilot dropping minutes of talking around the subject.

"Communication is dangerous, for him and for us, but I would really like to . . . to send my boy a message, you know? Maybe get a picture of my grandson. I don't know what we have or what the underground needs from us. If we can't . . . I just had to ask. You know, if it was something we could, and I just didn't . . ."

Jim turned to Naomi and lifted his chin, asking. She took a sip from the bulb.

"It would mean poking our nose through the Sol gate," she said. "We could get a tightbeam through trusted repeaters from there."

"Any gate's just about as far as any other one right now," Jim said. "I mean, we'd just have to keep pretending we were on the same fake contract as before. Even if Laconia has forces in the system, there's no better system to get lost in the traffic. Sol's got a few centuries' worth of ships and infrastructure to blend in with. It's not like we'd be trying to go unnoticed in Arcadia or Farhome."

"It would be more risk," Alex said, but he was just trying to tell them that he wouldn't be angry if they said no. Jim, Naomi, and Amos had all shipped with him long enough to know that was true. He wouldn't be angry, but he would be sad. And if they were all going to die anyway, there was no reason to miss the chance.

"I think we should go," he said.

"I was hoping we could drop Teresa off at school and then head for Firdaws," Naomi said.

"The Sol gate's right here," Jim said. "A quick burn. If there aren't any guard ships right at the ring gate, we can flip as soon as we've passed through the gate."

Amos scratched his neck. "We got enough water out of Kronos. We're not hurting for reaction mass. We could probably make up the time by burning a little longer to and from New Egypt. We are still hurting on fuel pellets and recyclers, but a little detour like that won't matter for those."

"Fine," Naomi said. "Sol gate for long enough to contact Kit, then New Egypt. We resupply in Firdaws."

"That work for you, Tiny?" Amos asked.

Teresa snapped back to the room from wherever she'd been. There was a bright sheen of tears over her eyes. Not thick, but present. "Yes. Fine. Yes."

Alex's relief melted him. When he spoke, his voice was reedy and thick. "Thank you. Really. If we hadn't, I'd have lived with it, but . . . just thank you."

"Family's important," Naomi said, and Jim couldn't tell which of the thousand things she could have meant by it were in her mind.

It took less than an hour to get the Roci ready to go, even with Amos swapping and testing the repaired valve. Alex, on the flight deck above them, was singing to himself like a finch at dawn. There wasn't a melody to speak of, just the musical lilting of pleasure and anticipation. Amos, Teresa, and Muskrat were in engineering, and Jim was thinking about all the things the girl might be feeling. Abandonment. Anger. Rejection. He hoped it wasn't like that. Or that at least there were other things—anticipation, curiosity, hope—to leaven them. He hoped without any reason to hope that it would matter and that Teresa would by some miracle live long enough to work through the complications of her own heart.

As they started the burn for Sol ring at half a g instead of the usual third, Naomi sighed. At first, he thought her mind was on the same things as his.

"Too many fucking ships going through the rings," she said. "And here we are, not exactly leading by example."

He looked at the tactical. She was right, of course. Just in the time they'd been at a relative stop so that she could read through the data, ten more ships had passed through gates, burning on one errand or another that someone decided was worth the risk. Or didn't understand that there was a risk. Or didn't care.

"You saw there was another event?" Naomi asked. "There was a message from Okoye. It happened in Gedara system."

"How many does that make?"

"Twenty? Something like that."

Alex, above them, burst into a little run of melody. Something bright and jazzy, and as full as springtime. It was like listening to a message from a different universe.

"She'll figure it out," Naomi said, answering Jim's silence. "If anyone can, she will."

As they dove down toward the fluttering interference surface that was the gateway to Sol, a fast transit ship burst through the Laconia gate behind them, flipped, and started a punishing maneuvering burn. Jim watched them, waiting for the tightbeam demanding their surrender. It didn't come.

"Looks like we skipped out at just the right time," Naomi said.

"Another near miss," Jim said. "Don't know how many more of those we're going to get."

They passed through the Sol gate before they could see where the fast transport was headed.

Interlude: The Dreamer

The dreamer dreams, and her dream carries her and hers flowing backward into a time before minds. Like grandmothers telling the stories their grandmothers told about their grandmothers before them, she falls gently and forever into black oceans the size of everything. The other two are and aren't and are again, with her and within her like humming to the memory of songs she never quite forgot. She broadens like a sunbird spreading its wings to catch the warming light, but there is no sun and no light—not yet—and the cold darkness is wide and comforting as a bed.

And she knows things.

Once and gone so far away no one was there to think it, the it was like this: Down was the hardness of heat, and up was the hardness of cold, and between those two implacabilities was the universe. The dreamer dreams the currents of flow and force, and her blood is the ocean's blood. Her salt is the ocean's salt. With a hand as wide as continents and softer than her skin, she caresses the burning heat below her and the soothing cool above. Long eons, and nothing is alive until something is. Maybe many things are, but the dream is a middle dream, and she dreams the middle because the path that crooks her swimmingly on begins there, but slowly slowly slow.

The dreamer drifts and the others drift with her, and more now: little bulbs of pastness around her and within, drifting on the same flow that she is and that she is. Two touch and become one; one thins itself into two and two and two and two. She watches the languid, lightless stuttering in the blessed cold as the grandmothers whisper that here is the birth of lust. Here, the puppy-wise gambol of making for the joy of making, with nothing to make of but from self more self.

The dreamer forgets, and is the slowness. She reaches over timelessness and invisibilities, thirsty for something richer than water. Thimble feasts rise from below and sate her for decades, and she dreams that she is dreaming, safe inside the eternal flow. Her hand reaches up to her heel, fingertips stretching ahead to brush her toes. She is a child made of saltwater bubbles, and one of the others says so, like cells? but the words are another place and she is voluptuous now, outside all language.

There is no light—not yet—but there is heat far far below, stuttering and buzzing and raging. It boils up the strange taste of stones that draws her and drives her away and becomes her. Above, the cold where nothing flows, the endless curving wall around the universe. And the ripple, now the always-ripple of a flow inside the flow that only some things feel. A handhold in the waters, a something made from nothing that she shimmies wrigglingly along. She presses herself against it, and lusty, she improvises. The little bulbs of pastness complicate and reach, one for another. And for the first time in all of time, she is tired.

Watch watch watch, the grandmothers whisper. Feel that one that falls, slippingly down too far into the heat and riot; that mindless genius. This is important, they say, and the dreamer draws herself down too and others how many with her sink. The bubble rises, full of thrum and fever and ill, and when it cools, it is butterscotch on the tongue and a billion insects choiring joyful in the summer night. It is a thousand new toys wrapped in gauze and ribbon. It is coffee and candy and the first awkward kiss, the almost-almost-almost shuddering against the skin. And she knows she will go again, that she who is a child of bubbles will send herself away again to be burned and then cherish her blisters. She longs to be made strange by the hotness and the hurt.

This is how it was when we were girls, the grandmothers say, and the dreamer dreams that she understands.

That's enough, someone says. All right, people. By the numbers and by the book.

Chapter Eight: Elvi

Fayez, floating at her private desk, scrolled through the notes. Whenever he was confused or skeptical, a little line appeared between his eyebrows. "So does this make any fucking sense to you? Because I'm baffled."

The notes had the scans of Cara's brain and body and the ones of the BFE, but the important part for Elvi was the interview and subject report with Cara. It had taken them hours to complete, Elvi asking questions and Cara answering verbally or writing out her reply, and while it was the least objective thing in the report, it was also the thing that excited her most.

"It does. I mean, I think it does," Elvi said, and paused. "I have some ideas."

He shut down the window and turned his attention to her. "Maybe you better tell me, then. Because I don't know what I'm looking at here."

She gathered her thoughts. Exobiology hadn't been Elvi's first field of concentration. Back in the dim and ancient times that were really just a few wild and change-filled decades before, she'd gone to Sejong World College because it had the best medical genetics program that she could afford. When she was being honest with herself, it wasn't even that she loved medical genetics all that much. When she was fifteen, she'd seen Amalie ud-Daula play a medical geneticist in Handful of Rain, and she spent the next year trying to get her hair to look the same. She never really managed. The weird alchemy of adolescent imprinting transformed her unconsidered identification with an entertainment feed actor into an interest in how strands of DNA turned into pathologies.

The idea of a flaw as tiny as a missed base pair translating itself into a slightly different curve on a protein and then into a leaking heart valve or a nonfunctional eye was compelling and creepy in more or less equal degrees. She thought that it was her passion, and she'd followed it with the dedication of a woman who believed she was on the path the universe wanted for her.

She'd taken a course on non-terrestrial fieldwork because her advisor had pointed out how many more postings there were for newly graduated medical geneticists on Mars and the stations on Jupiter's and Saturn's moons than there were on Earth. Elvi had taken the hint.

Lectures had been held in a small room with yellow, water-stained carpet and a wall screen with a burned-out pixel that made it look like there was a fly on it. Professor Li was three years into his retirement, and only came back to teach the class because he liked it. Maybe his enthusiasm had been infectious, or maybe it had all been the universe's way of putting her in the right place at the right time. Whatever the reason—or lack of reason—Professor Li had done a section about the first explorations for extraterrestrial life in the oceans of Europa, and Elvi's brain had lit up like someone had put euphorics in her breakfast cereal.

To the dismay of her mother and her academic advisor, she changed her focus to the then-purely-hypothetical field of exobiology. Her advisor's exact words had been From a work perspective, you'd be better off learning to tune pianos.

And that had been true right up until Eros moved. After, everybody in her program had jobs for life.

She was older now than Professor Li had been when he told her about Europa and those first tentative efforts to show that Earth's tree of life wasn't alone in the universe. She'd seen things she hadn't dreamed of, been places she hadn't known existed when she was a girl, and found herself—thanks to chance and James fucking Holden—at the razor's edge of the most important research projects in human history.

Strange then, how it all cycled back to Professor Li's lecture about Europa. Cold dead Europa, which had turned out to never have had any life in it but opened up the universe to her anyway.

Elvi steadied herself with a handhold. She'd been on the float enough that it came almost naturally now. She still missed being able to pace. "Okay. How much do you know about the slow life model?"

"I am now aware that there is something called a slow life model."

"Right. Basics. Okay. So, there's a range of metabolic rates. You can see that in animals. You have something fast with a high reproduction rate like rats or chickens on one hand, and tortoises with a really long lifespan and a much slower metabolism on the other. The whole tree of life is on that spectrum. It predicts that you'd see things evolving in very low-energy environments that, y'know, needed very little energy. Low metabolisms, low reproduction. Long lifespan. Slow life."

"Space turtles."

"Ice turtles. Actually, very cold saltwater slugs. Or jellyfish. Probably something pretty near neutral buoyancy. That's not the point. You could in theory have something evolve in an environment with very little available energy, and with a very . . . let's call it 'leisurely' sense of time. It's what the Tereshkova missions were looking for."

"And that's awesome," Fayez said, blankly.

"Tereshkova One and Two were the first long-term crewed surveys of Europa? They were looking for extraterrestrial life."

"Which they didn't find."

"Some amino acid precursors, but no life."

"So the space turtles weren't from Europa."

A brief flash of annoyance rose in her and faded. They were both tired. They were both in the only ship in an unpopulated solar system with help weeks away at best. And she wasn't explaining herself that well. She swallowed, set her shoulders, and went on.

"They weren't. But maybe they were like what we were looking for. And here's the other thing. The other form of life the Tereshkova missions were looking for was deep vent organisms."

"Those I know. Worms and things that live near volcanic vents. They use the energy from the vent instead of sunlight."

"And they also get a bunch of biologically interesting minerals, but yes."

"Start talking vulcanism, and I know my way around," Fayez said.

"That's what Cara's describing. That biome. Look. She talks about the cold above and the heat below. Like the ice shell of a water moon with a hot core. And free water in between. The part where she says she felt it starting to make more of itself. That's . . . I don't know. Some kind of reproduction. Mitosis or budding."

"And the thing where she tasted stones," Fayez said. "Minerals and nutrients floating up from below. You're thinking they're both there. These slow life turtles—"

"Jellyfish."

"—and vent organisms too, but lower down."

"Like what we were looking for on Europa."

The line on his forehead erased itself. She wanted to keep going, but she knew her husband's rhythms. He was working something through, and if she talked now, he wouldn't hear her. The hum of the ship around them and the ticking of the air recycler were the only sounds until he laughed once, like a cough.

"Okay, I know what I was thinking of," he said. "The part about the thing in the water."

"The handhold?"

"Yeah, that. It happened after the . . . fuck . . . tasting stone? Seriously, I feel like we should have brought a poetry grad student along. This is bullshit as data."

"You were thinking of something?"

"Right, sorry. If that was some kind of impressionistic, experiential description of iron uptake leading to magnetic navigation. Maybe that's the handhold in the water?"

"And that thing at the end," Elvi said. "When something went down into the heat and came back up scarred, but with this . . . revelatory whatever it was? If that's the slow life intentionally reaching for a nutrient-rich environment for the first time. Seeking out food instead of just bumping into it. I think Cara is experiencing this organism's evolutionary history. The diamond—"

"Thank you for not calling it an emerald."

"—is showing her how they came to exist. Like if we were explaining life to something that had never seen anything like us by pushing down to organic chemistry and building the story up from there so that we'd have a common context."

Fayez went quiet. The line on his forehead came back. Elvi pushed off the wall, turning to take the edge of her desk in her fingers and pull herself to a stop. He saw her expression and shook his head.

"No, it makes sense. Sort of. I see why that would be the best information-sharing strategy and all that. It's just. Okay, say the protomolecule engineers have gotten us up to the part of their story where they were like hamsters avoiding the dinosaurs. I don't mean to be an asshole, but . . . so what?"

Elvi didn't know exactly what she'd been expecting him to say, but it hadn't been that. "So we know something about what they are. This could be the origin of the species that established a vast galactic presence and overcame a bunch of things we always thought were laws of physics? That's a big deal."

"It is. I hear you. But it's so far back, sweetie. If Cara could ask the diamond maybe the top five ways to keep vast monsters from beyond time and space from killing everyone, that might be a better place to start."

"Only if she can understand the answer."

"And if they knew. Which evidence suggests they didn't. I mean that elaborate gamma-ray burst trap in Tecoma system was just them wiring a shotgun to a doorknob. Even if we know everything about the space jellyfish, is that going to be enough?"

They fell silent. Elvi knew the solid feeling at the center of her gut. It was always there these days. The only thing that changed was how aware of it she was. She anticipated what he would say next—What are we doing here?—and her own reply—The best we can. But he surprised her.

"It's going to be okay."

She laughed, not because she believed it but because it was obviously untrue. And because he wanted to comfort her, and she wanted to be comforted. He took her arm, drawing her across the open desk, and pulled her beside him. His arms enfolded her, and she let herself curl against him until they were floating together, his head at her shoulder, his thighs under hers, like twins in the same amniotic sac. It wasn't an image she thought other people would find heartwarming, but she did. And when she was alone with Fayez, other people weren't important. His breath smelled like smoky tea.

"I'm sorry," she murmured. "Baby, I'm so sorry."

"For what?"

"All of it."

"It's not your fault."

She pressed her cheek to his head, felt the scratch of his hair against her cheek. Tears were sheeting across her eyes, making the office swim like she was underwater. "I know. But I don't know how to fix it, and I'm supposed to."

She felt the subtle expansion and collapse of his sigh. "We are hailing an awful lot of Marys, aren't we?"

"We're making progress. We already know so much more."

"You're right. I'm frustrated. I didn't mean to piss on the project," Fayez said. "If the answer's anywhere, it's here."

She nodded, and hoped that was true, and that the growing sense she felt that there was something important—critical—in her notes that she'd missed was right. And that whatever it was, she could find it in time.

Later, when Fayez had gone to get some sleep, she went through a packet of reports from Ochida. The high-energy physics workgroup had their most recent data ready for review. The latest complex modeling outputs mapped possible connections between the attack on the Typhoon, the uptick in virtual particles in Tecoma system, and the initial loss of consciousness after the Tempest had destroyed Pallas Station. A surveying company that usually did mining operations around Jupiter was trying to find the weird magic bullet that had been frame-locked to the Tempest when it was destroyed. Her own computational biology group was setting up a distributed study that would put subjects in NIRS imaging around the clock in every populated system in hopes of catching good data the next time the enemy flicked consciousness off. And all the reports were being dumped through massive virtual pattern-matching arrays on Earth, Mars, Laconia, and Bara Gaon in hopes that machine intelligence might catch something the humans had overlooked.

It was the broadest, best-funded research effort in the history of the human race. A million people searching through a haystack the size of 1,300 planets and hoping there was a needle in there someplace.

She sometimes wondered if this had been Duarte's plan all along. Push and push until solving the ring entity problem was forced into first position for all humanity. He'd always held that it was a problem they'd have to solve sooner or later, and humans did tend to do their best work when survival was on the line. But whether it had been the high consul's intention or not, humanity had one problem it was trying to solve now. And James fucking Holden had somehow managed to put her in charge of it.

She didn't know whether looking over the vast effort calmed her or keyed her up. Maybe both.

When she reached the end of the packet, she closed down her screen. There were a couple dozen things that she, as head of the Laconian Science Directorate, needed to authorize or comment on, and she would. But after she'd had some food and maybe a nap. If she could sleep.

She pulled herself through the ship, floating down the corridors. Cara and Xan were in the galley with Harshaan Lee and Quinn de Bodard, and Elvi watched them as she decanted herself a bulb of lentil soup.

"Major," Harshaan Lee said, nodding to her as she floated over.

"Doctor," Elvi said, and took a mouthful of soup. The Falcon made good food. The lentils tasted almost fresh—like nutrition and mud and comfort—even though they were probably made from textured fungal proteins.

"We were just talking about Koenji Wizard," Quinn said. "It's an entertainment feed out of Samavasarana system."

"I don't know it," Elvi said, and Xan, spinning slowly about his z-axis, launched into a description of the story. It involved a hidden space station built by angels that were also human desires in physical form. And apparently there were a lot of songs, one of which Xan sang. Cara joined in for the chorus. Elvi listened and, to her surprise, felt herself beginning to relax. Xan's enthusiasm and the benign, childlike narcissism that drove him to the center of every conversation were actually a joy. For a few minutes, Elvi was out of her own head. It was easy to forget that he'd been a seven-year-old for over forty years now.

She almost regretted coming back to herself.

"Cara?" she said, nodding toward the other side of the common room. "Could I borrow you for a second?"

The girl who wasn't a girl froze the way that she and Xan did sometimes, suddenly going as still as stone. It only lasted a moment, but it was eerie every time. Then she nodded and pushed gently off in the direction Elvi had indicated. Elvi tossed her empty bulb in the recycler and floated over to meet her. Xan, still with Quinn and Harshaan, blinked anxious black eyes at them, and Elvi waved what she hoped was reassuringly.

"What's on your mind, Doc?" Cara said. Her casual informality left Elvi feeling warm toward the girl every time she heard it. For someone who'd been imprisoned and experimented on for decades by an induced sociopath, Cara had given her trust to Elvi quickly.

"Couple things. I wanted to see how you were feeling. The last dive was . . . There were some interesting readings. It looked like you were in a different kind of sync with our big green friend. It was looking more like a nonlocal reaction than something with light delay."

"Yes," Cara said, so quickly it was almost interrupting. "I felt like that too."

"And since we don't know what this is, I need you to tell me how you feel. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," Cara said. "Going in there like this seems . . . I don't know. It feels good. It feels right."

Which Elvi knew already. She'd seen the scans and knew what the connection was doing to Cara's endorphin levels. It was anthropomorphizing to say that the BFE wanted Cara to come back. There was no reason to think it had any will or intentions. But it wanted the girl to come back.

Somewhere deep in her mind, Elvi knew that what came next was a mistake. And that she'd chosen to make it.

"Given that," she said, "I'd like to consider accelerating the session schedule. If we could take a day or two less between the dives—"

"That would be great," Cara said. "I don't think there's any reason not to. I can handle it."

Her grin was so genuine—so human—that Elvi couldn't help grinning back. "All right then. I'll talk with the team, and we'll get a new protocol schedule out. Maybe we can try another run as soon as tomorrow?"

Cara gave a little shiver of excitement, and from across the common room, Xan frowned and looked anxious. More than anxious. Melancholy. Elvi took Cara's hand, squeezing her fingers, and Cara squeezed back. A human gesture of connection, as old as the species.

"It's going to be all right," Elvi said, not realizing until she heard herself that she was echoing Fayez. That she hadn't believed it when he said it.

"I know," Cara replied.

Chapter Nine: Kit

His father looked out from the screen, eyes red from happy tears. Probably, Alex Kamal had wept over Kit the same way once, but Kit had been a baby then. He didn't remember it, and so seeing it now felt like the revelation of something new.

"I am so proud of what you and Rohi are doing. The life you've put together. It's—it's—it's hard to understand what it means to make a family. To bring a new person into the world. But now that you have, I hope you can see that's the love we had for you. Me and your mother both. It's overwhelming. This is everything I hoped you could find. And I know—I know—that you'll be a good father. A better father than I was."

"Oh, fuck, Dad," Kit breathed. "Are we doing this again?"

"The bad things that happened were never about you. About how much I loved you. How much I do love you. I am so full. What you've done, it just leaves me feeling so full. I'm so happy. I'm so happy for you."

The message ended. It was five full minutes long, and Kit wasn't sure he had the stamina right now to listen to it again. It was easy for his father to romanticize Kit's life. Distance and the political dangers of their contact meant Alex could only see a small part of a very large picture.

He checked the time. There wasn't much to say, and most of it wasn't something he'd want to put on Alex's shoulders anyway. If Aunt Bobbie had still been alive, maybe he'd have turned to her. She'd had a way of seeing to the heart of a thing. Compassion without sentimentality. His father was carrying too much baggage for that, and Kit still couldn't help protecting him.

He started the recording.

"Hey," he said into the camera. "I want you to know that I really appreciate you coming close enough to swap these messages close to real time. More often than not, I send you something and I just have to hope you even got it . . . Shit."

He stopped the recording, deleted it. He didn't want this to devolve into another round of Alex whipping himself for not being more present in Kit's adolescence. The issue carried more guilt for his father than any resentment from Kit. It was just that he had too much right now to add on the burden of one more person's emotional well-being.

But he had to say something.

The door chime saved him for the moment. He dropped his comms and told the door to unlock. His mother breezed into the apartment the way she always did. She was a stately, strong-jawed woman who wielded the nobility of her features like a club. Kit loved her and he always would, but he liked her more when she was on a screen.

"Where's my baby?" she said with a grin. She didn't mean him.

"Rohi's changing his diaper," Kit said, gesturing toward the back room with his chin. "She'll be out in a minute."

"Rokia!" Giselle said. "Grandma's come to help."

Rohi hated it when people not from her birth family used her full name. From the day his mother had found that out, she'd never called her anything else. Kit understood that she meant it as a statement of love and acceptance. He also understood it was a power play. The apparent contradiction of being both things at once made sense to him in a way it didn't to Rohi, but he'd been raised with it. The dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies of childhood became the self-evident norms of adulthood.

He listened to their voices—Giselle's and Rohi's and the gabble and fuss that was Bakari. He couldn't make out the words, but he knew the tones. Mother's imperiousness compensating for her insecurity. Rohi's polite kindness that masked her annoyance. And the baby's vocalizations, still too new to mean anything to Kit but his own joy and exhaustion.

A minute later, the three of them came out together: his mother, his wife, and his son. Giselle already had Bakari on her hip. Rohi's smile was strained but patient.

"Grandma's here," his mother said. "I am in control. You two lovelies go off and enjoy your date night while I play with my perfect baby boy."

"We'll be back after dinner," Kit said.

"Don't hurry," Giselle said with an airy wave. Rohi's eye roll was so small it was almost subliminal. Kit bowed to his mother, kissed his confused son on the top of his head where the bones hadn't yet fused, and then he and Rohi walked out to the public corridor and closed the door behind them. The last thing he heard was Bakari starting to wail as he realized they were leaving.

"Date night?" Rohi asked as they walked down toward the local hub.

"It was easier than 'Rohi and I need to have an uninterrupted conversation,'" Kit said. "It would have been half an hour of her telling me why divorce is bad. This way, there was no lecture."

He had hoped she would laugh, but her nod was sharp, short, and businesslike. She didn't take his arm, and her gaze stayed locked on the walkway before them. The common corridor was bright, and the plants on the median shifted their broad leaves in the breeze of the recyclers. They'd taken positions at Aterpol on Mars with the understanding that it was both a center of research, second in the Sol system only to Earth, and a more congenial place for pregnancy than any of the deeper stations except maybe Ganymede. Giselle had been delighted, and Rohi had too, at first.

They came to the noodle bar that had been their habitual off-shift hangout. A young man with an untreated acne problem and a dombra sat on a little dais, plucking a gentle melody and being ignored by the people eating at the tables. Kit sat, Rohi sat across from him, and they ignored the music too.

"Do you want to order first?" Kit said, careful to keep his voice neutral.

"Yes," Rohi said. It didn't take more than a moment to key their preferences into the table and have the system confirm them. They sat in silence for the three minutes before old Jandol came out with their bowls—lemongrass and egg roll for him, com chiên cá for her. That she'd ordered one of her comfort foods meant something to him. Jandol nodded to them both, missing the tension or else ignoring it, and went back to the kitchen. Rohi leaned in over her bowl.

"Well," Kit said. "What's on your mind?"

"Hear me out, all right?"

He nodded her on.

"I think we should look at postponing the contract again."

"Rohi—"

"No, hear me out." She waited until she was sure he'd be quiet. "I know Mars is only a third of a g, but it's a consistent third. Always-on gravity is really important in the first few months of development. His inner ear is still forming. His bone growth is starting. He'll be going through a lot of fundamental changes in the next year, and even if we're on one of the fast ships, we'll still be on the float for months. I don't want him to grow up with any of the low-gravity syndromes. I don't want to start his life by changing his body in ways that give him fewer options later on. Not if I don't have to."

"I hear what you're saying."

"I've looked at the schedule. There's three other parts of the team who could take our berth on the Preiss. We'd still be in the date range if we switched to going out on the Nag Hammadi."

"Assuming we got on it," Kit said.

"I'm not saying don't ever do it," Rohi said. "I'm not saying cancel the contract. That's not what I meant."

A fat, slow tear drifted down her cheek, and she wiped it away like it had betrayed her.

Kit took a deep breath, and let it out. When he spoke, he spoke carefully. "You're crying."

"Yeah. Well, I'm scared."

"What are you scared of ?"

She looked at him, incredulous. Like the answer was obvious.

It was, but he thought it was important for her to say it out loud anyway.

"I'm suggesting that you compromise your career," she said. That she'd said your career, not our careers, was everything. Kit thought he'd understood the dynamic between them, and now he knew he was right. The corners of her mouth tugged down, and he could see for a moment what she'd looked like as a child, long before he met her.

"Okay," he said. "My turn?"

She nodded.

"Here's the first thing," he said. "I'm not my father. And I'm not your mothers. I'm not going to make the decisions they made. You and Bakari are my first choice, every time. I'm not going to leave, even if it means cutting off a career path."

"I just—"

He took her hand. "Hear me out?"

She nodded. The next tear, she ignored.

"I know this isn't the perfect time," he said. "But there's never going to be a perfect time. There will always be something. Bakari's development or my mother's health or a conference we won't be able to come back for or something. There's always something."

"Until Laconia decides to start another war to prove a point. Or the aliens kill us all."

"I can't control any of that," Kit said. "All I can do is keep acting like the universe is going to keep existing and planning for a future in it. Nieuwestad is one-point-two g. It's going to be hard on him, and us too. Jacobin-Black Combined Capital is a good company doing the kind of work we want to do, but that doesn't mean we have to do it. We can break the contract and find something else. Or we can go and do the best we can. If we go, there are a lot of good programs for helping kids and babies with gravity transitions. And I'll get up to go to the gym with you every day if you want. If we stay here, there are other jobs. We can do anything. But we're going to be doing it together."

Rohi's eyes were red now, and she wicked the tears away with her napkin. "This is stupid."

Kit took her hand. "You get scared when we talk about balancing the family and work, and it's okay that you do. I get it, and I love you, and a good cry is just part of the way we talk about this stuff. And you never judge me when it's my turn to be the weepy one."

"I just don't want to mess things up," she said. "What if we mess things up for him?"

Kit stroked her knuckles with his thumb the way he did when she couldn't sleep. "We will, though. No one's perfect. Everyone's carrying something that their parents would have done differently if they'd known. Or if they'd been better people. Or if things had just been different. That's all right. It's normal. Part of why I am what I am is all the bad choices my mom and dad made, and if they'd done differently, they'd still have made some mistakes somewhere along the line, and those would be part of me instead. They weren't perfect, and we aren't perfect."

"He is, though," Rohi said. "Bakari is."

"He is, isn't he?"

They were quiet for a little while. Jandol came out and offered to take their leftovers away. When Kit shook his head, the old man shrugged and puttered back to the kitchen.

Eventually, Rohi hauled in a breath, and when she sighed, she folded forward. When she spoke, her voice had lost its tightness. "All right. Thank you."

"Don't say 'I'm sorry.'"

"I didn't."

"You were about to."

She smiled, and he could see the storm had passed. "I was about to."

He sucked up a mouthful of noodles and chewed. The lemongrass tasted real, and the noodles were soft and salty. If they'd gone a little cold, he didn't care. Rohi sighed and relaxed into her chair.

After dinner, they walked home slowly. She took his hand, and he leaned against her. For a while, it was almost like they were courting again, only deeper. Richer. Fuller. This was the life that both of their parental groups had given up, and Kit didn't understand any of them at all.

At the rooms, Giselle was sitting on the couch, spooling through entertainment newsfeeds on her handheld. As they came in, she lifted a finger to her lips and pointed toward the nursery.

"He fell asleep ten minutes ago," she said. "Ate well. Shat out his bodyweight. Giggled, played, cried for fifteen seconds, and out."

"Thank you, Mama," Kit said, and Giselle stood up and wrapped him in her arms.

"It's not for you," she said, quietly enough that only he could hear. "I'm soaking in all the grandbaby I can while I have him. Storing up for winter."

After she left, Rohi went to her office, walking softly to keep from waking the baby, and he sat at his own desk and pulled up his message queue.

He started the camera.

"Hey, Dad. I love you too. Thank you for coming close enough to send the message. I know how hard that can be. And I love you for it. Having a kid is the scariest thing I've ever done, and I love it. I love having a kid. I love being a dad.

"I know you and Mom didn't have things go the way you'd have picked. But no matter what happened, I always knew you cared about me. I learned that from you. If that's the only thing I manage to pass on, it'll be worth it. It's a great legacy. Seriously the best."

He tried to think of something more, but exhaustion was seeping in at the corners of his brain, and he didn't really know what else there was to say. He reviewed it, sent it, scrubbed his system the way he always did when he'd gotten something from the underground's network, then showered and got ready for bed.

Rohi wasn't there. He found her standing over the crib, looking down at the new little life they'd made together. Bakari's soft, round belly rose and fell as he slept. Kit stood there with her and with him.

"He's a strong little guy, isn't he?" Rohi said.

"He is. And his parents love him."

"Okay, then. Let's go."

Chapter Ten: Fayez

Planetary geology wasn't the sort of degree people usually went into looking for a career as a kingmaker. There wasn't a lot of crossover between freshman analysis of sedimentary patterns and having people vie for your influence over issues of life and death. Add in political sway over a galaxy-spanning empire, and the overlap was pretty narrow.

But without intending to, Fayez had stumbled into it.

He was floating in Lee's private cabin with a bone-colored bulb of whiskey in one hand. It was a thick, peaty distillation that was too harsh for him when they were under thrust. A couple weeks on the float did something to deaden his taste buds, and so at times like this, it was perfect. Lee, Elvi's second-in-command, was queuing up a message from home. Or, at least, from Laconia. Which despite having lived there for years, Fayez still didn't think of as home.

"Here," Lee said, pushing back from his station.

"Okay, who am I looking at?" Fayez said.

"His name is Galwan ud-Din," Lee said. "He's a senior researcher in extrapolative physics."

"Right. So I'm not going to understand this at all, am I?"

"I told him to give you the educated layman's version."

The screen flipped to an image of a thin-faced man with a vast and well-trimmed beard and a collarless formal shirt. He nodded to the camera in not-quite-a-bow. "Thank you for your time, Dr. Sarkis. I want you to know how much I appreciate it."

Since it was a recording, Fayez sighed.

"I wanted to share with you some thoughts my workgroup has put together. I think you will find them very promising," the thin-faced man said, then visibly gathered himself. His expression settled into the thing Fayez expected on grade-school teachers who were trying to be approachable. "Light, as I'm sure you know, is a membrane phenomenon on the surface of time."

Fayez drained the bulb of the last drop of whiskey and put his hand out for another. Lee had it ready.

For half an hour, ud-Din made what in the end was a surprisingly comprehensible case that Elvi's slow-life jellyfish had ended their evolutionary arc as a complex, vastly distributed brain-like structure that relied on the counterintuitive truth that time dilation put photons in a state of instantaneous emission from a distant star and absorption by an observing eye even if they seemed to outside observers like Fayez to travel for years in between. The rate-limiting step on a system like that would always be mass, and so technologies for moving mass—inertia manipulation, "shortcut" ring gates—would be prioritized, which evidence suggested they had been.

By the end of the presentation, Fayez felt almost as excited as ud-Din seemed to be, and he hadn't even finished his second whiskey.

"You see, I hope," ud-Din said, "why I am so hopeful for this path of research. Which is why I need to ask your help. The new orders from the Science Directorate putting us at the beck and call of Colonel Tanaka . . . I don't dispute that the high consul has the absolute right to direct our efforts as needed, but you have his ear. If you could encourage him to refrain from interrupting our research unless it is critical to the empire. I . . . I only say it because I feel we are on the verge of a breakthrough, and I would hate for the high consul to make his decisions about our workgroup without a full understanding of our situation. Thank you. Thank you for your time."

Ud-Din licked his lips anxiously and the message ended. How charming to pretend there's still a high consul running this bumblefuck, Fayez thought, but didn't say aloud. Some things were too dangerous, even for a kingmaker.

"I have half a dozen like this," Lee said. "Workgroup and research leads who got the message to do whatever Tanaka asks. Several of them, she has already retasked."

"They know we can't do shit about it, right? Because we literally can't do shit about that. You got the brief about what Tanaka's doing?"

"I did," Lee said, and then pointedly didn't expand on it. "We have a great many absolute top priorities. We can't do them all."

"I get that," Fayez said. "But Elvi's not the one setting them. She's been very open about letting expertise place the goalposts."

"But she is the adoréd saint to Duarte's Holy Ghost," Lee said. "People want her to intercede for them."

"And so they ask you to ask me to ask her," Fayez said. "No, one more. So that she'll ask him. Or, functionally, Trejo."

"Yes."

"The way we do things, it's amazing humans ever figured out shoes. I'll talk to her, but you know how she is right now."

"I do. Thank you, Dr. Sarkis."

"Keep plying me with drink, and you'll wind up turning my head, Dr. Lee."

Lee's thin smile was as close to emotional intimacy as the man got. Fayez liked him.

The halls of the Falcon hummed and glowed. He navigated his way through them from handhold to Laconian-blue handhold. Some of the younger members of the crew launched themselves like Belters, zipping from intersection to intersection without touching a wall in between. He wasn't that guy. Getting where he was going with all his cartilage intact had become a more interesting prospect in the last couple decades.

The thing about expertise was that it wasn't actually transferable. Winston Duarte had cut his teeth in the MCRN's logistics department, where he had apparently been an underappreciated genius. It was easy to see how his brilliance there had helped build his breakaway empire. He'd pulled it off, and by grabbing up samples of the protomolecule and the experts who could use it, he'd tamed enough of the alien technology to put all humanity under his heel. For a while, anyway.

Being good at something—even the best that humanity's billions could offer—didn't make him good at everything. It just made him too powerful to say no to. And so when he decided to make himself into an immortal god-king, not for his own benefit, but to selflessly provide the human race with the continuing stable leadership that it needed in order to storm heaven and kill God, he'd already talked himself and everyone around him into thinking he was as impressive as the story about him claimed.

Only a few people officially knew how badly that plan had gone. Elvi was one. Fayez was another.

He heard Elvi and Cara talking as soon as he came into the corridor for her lab. The door to Elvi's office was open, and Cara was floating in the open space between the workbench and the medical scanners. The young woman's—girl's—face was bright with excitement, and she gestured as she spoke, as if she needed to stuff more meaning into the words than mere syllables could hold. Elvi was strapped into her crash couch, taking notes as they spoke. Except for the part where they didn't look even vaguely genetically related, they reminded Fayez of a grandmother and granddaughter bonding through solving some great puzzle. Even before he could make out what they were saying, the tones of their voices told the story. Giddy and enthusiastic was the good spin. Fevered and manic also fit.

"Then there was this sense of . . . of light?" Cara said. "Like we were eating eyes and it made me able to see."

"That actually fits," Elvi said.

"It does?" Fayez said. "What does it fit into? Because I just learned a lot about light, and it was really weird."

Elvi's smile wasn't annoyed at all, and Cara's was only a little. "I think our sea slugs hit a milestone," Elvi said. "They already had a method of exchanging information through direct physical transfer, like bacteria trading plasmids. If we're getting this right, they formed a mutualistic relationship or successful parasitism with a little goo cap that could go down to the volcanic vents and come back up."

"Ooh. Dirty," Fayez said, pulling himself fully into the room. With all three of them, it was a little tighter than comfort, but Cara grabbed the wall and made space for him. "How did the eyeballs come into it?"

"They harvested evolutionary innovations from the faster ecosystem. Something down by the vent figured out a rudimentary infrared eye so that it could navigate the vent. The slugs got it, put it on the signaling protein mechanism, and all of a sudden they didn't need to stick plasmids into each other to share information anymore. They could do infrared semaphore."

"No, it was light," Cara said.

"Maybe bioluminescence," Elvi agreed. "At that point, the very slow things started being able to talk very very fast. And they start looking a lot less like jellyfish and a lot more like free-floating neurons. Plus we already see the deep strategy of sending out semi-biological runners to inhospitable biomes and implanting instruction sets into whatever life they find there. Which—I'm stretching here—starts sounding a lot like the protomolecule's mission on Phoebe . . ." Her voice trailed off. Her smile shifted to something more rueful. "But that's not what you came to talk about, is it?"

"There's a briefing you should totally listen to, but no," Fayez said. "I needed to talk about something else."

"Cara? Could we take a quick break?"

The black eyes were still for a fraction of a second, then flickered up to Fayez and away. "Sure. No problem."

Cara pushed herself to the doorway and out into the corridor, closing the office door behind her as she went. Fayez drifted to the medical scanners. Cara's readouts were still on the screens. He traced the curve of her stress metabolites. He wouldn't have known what they were, except Elvi had explained them.

"They're not as high as they look," she said, a little defensively. "We don't even really know what the upper boundary is for someone who's been modified like her."

"I didn't know you were doing another dive today," Fayez said.

"She felt up to it. That's not what you came for either, is it?"

He shut down the screens, rotated back to face Elvi, and braced on a foothold. "The Tanaka thing is a problem."

She had looked tired before he said it. She looked worse now. "What are we seeing?"

"She's reallocated and retasked four workgroups. Instead of doing deep background scanning, they're searching for an artifact that may or may not have left from Laconia and doing deep brain scans of Trejo looking for . . . I don't know what."

"Traces of manipulation," Elvi said. "Something that would show evidence that he'd had a direct neural link like the one James Holden and the remnants of Miller did on Ilus."

"So you know about this?"

Elvi made a vague, helpless gesture. "She outranks me."

"But you're the administrator of the Science Directorate."

"And that used to matter," Elvi said. "Not anymore. Right now, her orders might as well say, 'from the desk of God.'"

"These scientists want you to protect them from the bureaucracy."

"What they want is for me to talk Duarte into overriding Trejo and getting her clearance pulled," Elvi said. "There's a problem with that plan."

"That Duarte doesn't exist?"

"That Tanaka will need to find him before I can ask him any favors, yes."

Fayez was quiet for a moment. He didn't want to go to the next place, but he had to. "Do you think that's really what's going on?"

Elvi's sigh meant she'd had the same thoughts and suspicions. "You mean do I think Tanaka's really searching for a version of Duarte that came out of his coma and disappeared?"

"Or is Trejo feeding us a story and seeing if it leaks out to the underground? This could all be a test. Duarte could be back at the State Building right now contemplating his oatmeal. We wouldn't know until Dr. Lee gets a quiet order to put a bullet in the backs of our heads. We're high in the food chain, but Trejo's still an authoritarian despot, and there's a lot of precedent for shit like that."

"I can't care about it," Elvi said. "I can't play the game. I don't have the focus or the energy."

"You can stop feeding our results to Jim and Nagata."

Elvi nodded, but not in the way that meant she agreed.

Fayez pressed his fingertips into his closed eyelids. "Babe," he said, but she stopped him.

"It's happening more than we thought."

"What? What's happening?"

"The incidents. Like Gedara. We've only been seeing the near misses. We always catch the ones that turn off consciousness, but I had Ochida run through pattern matching for other anomalies like Gedara's lightspeed thing? They're happening all the time."

"What do you mean, all the time?" Fayez said, but his gut had gone suddenly cold.

"Changes in virtual particle annihilations in Pátria, Felicité, and Kunlun systems. Lightspeed variations in Sumner and Far-home. Electron mass changed in Haza system for almost two minutes. Electron mass. Sanctuary system had gravity increase by a tenth of a percent throughout the system for six seconds."

"Okay, every single thing you just said fucks me up."

"This was one twenty-four-hour period. The things that are doing this are rattling all the windows looking for the way to make us die, and I don't know how we guard our physical fucking constants against attack. It's just a matter of time before they figure out how to trigger vacuum decay or something. So I'm going to keep doing exactly everything I can, and yes, that means sharing data. Because if that's how we catch a break on this, it will be worth it. And if poor Dr. Lee needs to assassinate me because of it, at least it won't be my problem anymore."

"Okay. I get it."

"Trejo's fighting to hold on to an empire. I'm fighting to have something that's recognizable as the universe with living things in it."

"I get it," he said again, but now that she'd started, she couldn't stop. Not until the pressure was vented.

"If there's a chance—one chance in a billion—for me to figure this out, I'm taking it. If there's a price that I have to pay, that's fine. Not even going to think about that. Just opening my wallet, and whatever the universe needs to take from me, it's welcome to. That's what we're playing for. So yes, I really, really hope that Duarte snapped out of his fugue state and ran off to do whatever the fuck half-protomolecule former emperors do in their retirement, because that would mean Trejo wasn't playing court intrigue games with me while I'm at work. But who knows? I don't."

She went quiet, still shaking her head in a tight, angry motion. Fayez steadied himself on the handhold.

"How do I help?"

"Just keep doing what you're doing. Help me keep doing what I'm doing. Hope that we catch a break in time."

"All right," he said. "Can do."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"

"I do not accept your apology. You're right. I get it."

She took his hand. She felt cold. Her skin was dry. She'd grown thin enough that he could feel the individual tendons shifting over her bones. "I'm so sorry I pulled you into this."

"It's hellish, that's true. But the company's good."

"No one I'd rather face the end of everything with than you."

"It's because I have a cute ass, isn't it? That's my secret power."

She managed a smile. "You got me."

"I can crack a walnut with these cheeks," Fayez said. "I mean, you wouldn't want to eat it afterward, but—"

"I love you," she said. "Stop cheering me up. Send Cara back. I need to get some work done."

He found Cara in her quarters with Xan. They were floating together in the space between their bunks, with Xan chattering excitedly about something from his entertainment feeds. Cara's face was the polite boredom of older siblings throughout history. It was weirdly reassuring to see something normal, given their context. When Fayez cleared his throat, the pleasure on the girl's face was as clear as the disappointment on her brother's.

"Is Dr. Okoye ready?" Cara asked, and there was a hunger in the question that left Fayez a little uncomfortable. He swallowed it.

"She is. Sorry I interrupted. Just had some stuff I needed to talk with her about."

"It's okay," Cara said. "But I should go."

Fayez pulled himself aside and let the girl haul herself out. As she floated down the corridor, he had one of those moments he had sometimes where his sense of balance tried to wake up. For just a moment, Cara wasn't floating away to the side, but falling headfirst down the hallway. He grabbed the handhold to steady himself, and after a few breaths, the feeling passed.

"Is something wrong?" Xan asked.

"No. I just . . . I'm never going to get used to living on the float. Spent my formative years down a gravity well, and some things are baked in."

"I've heard that," Xan said, then turned and touched the ceiling to press himself down toward the floor. It was hard to read his expression. The kid had been a little boy for several decades now, and between his child-stuck brain and the depth of his experience, he wasn't really one thing or the other. His sister was like that too. It was impossible to see them as children, and it was impossible not to. Xan's mag boots locked onto the deck, and he turned almost like he was walking in gravity.

"What about you?" Fayez said. "All well in your world?"

"I'm worried about Cara," he said without hesitating. "She keeps coming back different."

"Yeah? Different how?"

"Changed," Xan said. "The thing that's teaching her? It's making her too."

The chill that ran through Fayez had nothing to do with temperature. He kept his tone light and jovial. "What's it making her into, do you think?"

Xan shook his head. An I don't know motion. "We'll find out," he said.

Chapter Eleven: Teresa

At fifteen years since the first permanent settlements, New Egypt was a younger colony system. It had two planets with large habitable areas. The school where she was going to live, like most of the other established settlements, was on the smaller of them, the fourth planet out from the sun. The planet—called Abbassia—had a little under three-quarters g and a thirty-hour day. For reasons that hadn't been investigated in depth yet, the magnetosphere was very strong, which was important given the very active and frequent solar flares. Even near the equator, the auroras were supposed to be magnificent.

The total population of the two planets together was less than the Laconian capital, and it was spread across half a dozen small cities and a score of mineral extraction sites. Only a third of Abbassia was covered by ocean, and most of the land surface was arid, though with extensive cloud forest analogs at upper elevations in both the northern and southern hemispheres.

Sohag Presbyterian Academy was nestled in a river valley in the south, a few hundred kilometers from Nouvelle École, with which it cooperated academically. Sohag Presbyterian's grounds were a little under a thousand hectares of terraformed soil and agricultural cultivates. The buildings had been designed by Alvaro Pió shortly before his death, and they were listed in the top thousand most significant architectural sites in the new worlds.

Teresa had looked at pictures of the campus filled with smiling young people her age and a little older. She tried to imagine herself among them. Tried to imagine who she would be if she were in those images. This is going to be my home now. Unless something goes wrong.

And it seemed like something might be going wrong.

The whole crew was gathered at a screen on the ops deck that showed the tactical display of the New Egypt system. Their focus—and so Teresa's focus too—was the ship that had just passed through the ring gate 6 AU behind them and was burning hard for Abbassia.

"I don't have it on any of the transit schedules from the underground," Naomi said. "But that's exactly the problem. There isn't a single coordinated set of flight plans, and even if there were, people are smuggling all the time now."

"Nothing on the drive signature?" Jim asked.

"Doesn't match anything in the records," Alex said. "But that doesn't mean much either. Could be something that was built or had the drive swapped out at a shipyard in Bara Gaon or Auberon. There's more and more decent yards in other systems too. It's not like it was back when everything was just Sol system."

"I know," Jim said.

Alex increased the size of the image, but the ship was still too small to make out—a black dot against the brightness of its drive plume. A few dozen meters of ceramic and carbon-silicate lace as seen from almost nine hundred million kilometers. It was a miracle they could make out as much as they could. "Chances are decent that its coming through now is just coincidence."

"Yeah," Jim said in a voice that meant he disagreed. Amos crossed his thick arms over his chest and smiled. He wasn't smiling about anything. Teresa still thought of him as Timothy sometimes. Timothy always smiled, even when he'd been hiding in a cave. Jim hauled in a wide sigh and let it out again. "But if it is a Laconian ship—"

"It still probably wouldn't be tracking us," Naomi said. "We've kept radio silence. We're not even passing data with the local repeater network. They'd have to know we were coming here."

"Probably it's what it looks like," Amos said. "Freighter hauling freight. Or a pirate. Pirates are good too."

"It's not the chances that bother me," Jim said. "It's the stakes. I don't want them tracking us down to the surface."

"I can make landfall when the site's on the far side of the planet," Alex said. "Zip in, drop Teresa and the pup off, and get back up above atmosphere before they'd see us taking off. Even if they're watching, they won't know where we went. Might not even know we landed at all."

Teresa listened with a sensation growing in her belly. It was like a tightness. Or a stone. It had a taste too. She unbuckled herself from the crash couch and pulled herself down the lift. She wasn't sure where she was going, but the crew of the Rocinante talking through the details of how they were going to drop her off made staying in place unbearable.

She passed by the galley to the crew quarters, including her own. She heard Muskrat bark an inquiry as she passed, but she didn't answer, just kept going down. The machine shop was as close to a safe and comfortable place as she had anymore. She had a list of tasks from Amos and she pulled it up. It was time to check the water supply's chemical sensors. She'd never done it before, but the instructions were linked to the entry. She read them, gathered up the tools, and made her way to the tank feeds. Her jaw ached. She made herself stop clenching her teeth.

Travel between systems was slow. The Rocinante didn't have any of the breathable-fluid crash couches that would let bodies sustain long, very high-g burns. The duties that Amos assigned her to keep her engaged filled the gap that Ilich and other tutors had left, and she clung to them now not because she particularly enjoyed them, but because they were familiar. And because it felt like laying claim to something.

She was about halfway done with a bubble of escaped water the size of her fist adhering to her arm when Amos pulled himself in beside her. He didn't say anything, just took a little hand vacuum and cleaned the spilled water off her wrist. He handed her tools when she needed them and stowed them for her when she didn't. It went faster with him there. In the end, she found that two sensors out of sixty were showing periodic faults. Low-voltage shorts. Harmless. And they could be down half the sensors and not really have to worry about water quality. She tagged both of them for replacement anyway. Amos' philosophy was to replace things before you needed to, not after. She found it a sensible rule.

"So," he said, "this was back on Earth when I was younger than you are now. There was this guy I knew. His parents both OD'd the same night. Upside, he was a registered birth, so someone gave a shit. Downside, he got put into the foster system. It fucked him up pretty good."

"Abusive foster caregivers are a common issue in aggressively individualist social orders. I had a unit about civil service reform two years ago. We studied it."

"True, but that wasn't the only thing got him. He was one of those people that tried to put down roots, you know? Wherever he was, he'd find things and hold on to them. Put him in a new city for a week, and he'd already have a favorite park. That kind of shit. Only it was fostering, so every few months he'd lose it all again."

"Is this an uplifting story about how he found his real home inside himself ?"

Amos went still for a moment the way he did, then looked chagrined. "Actually, he got addicted to a bunch of home-brewed narcotics and slow-melted his nervous system. So, nah, not really. I was trying to say that you're not the only one who has a hard time letting go. Moving on to the next thing. I don't know. Thought it might help to hear that."

"What about you?"

"I'm good wherever I am," he said. "But getting to that point was unpleasant. You don't want to be like me."

They were quiet for a moment. Her sleeve was still wet. It clung to her arm.

"I'm angry," she said.

"I know."

"I feel like he's throwing me away. Putting me aside because I'm inconvenient."

"I hear you."

"It's like who I am and what I want don't even matter to him. I know that's crazy. Or at least I know it's overblown, but it's like I have a splinter I can't dig out. It's just right there on my nerve ending, and every time I even brush up against it, it hurts."

"Yeah."

She sat still, feeling her blood pulse in her temple, her mind agitated. "I'm not really mad at the captain, am I? This is about my father."

"This school thing could be good for you, Tiny. A lot healthier than hanging around an old warship with nobody your own age."

"But I like it here. You like me being here, right?"

"No," Amos said. "I don't want you to stay."

It felt like a punch in the gut. "But—"

"Look, Tiny, I've watched a lot of people die. Some of them were my friends. I'm mostly okay with that now. But I ain't ready to watch you die. And if you stay here on this ship, you will. That's the kind of ship this is."

"That's what Jim said too," Teresa said.

"Yeah? Well, the two of us see a lot of things the same way."

"You seem very different to me."

"We are."

"You're going to be fighting for the fate of humanity. I'm going to be worrying about algebra assignments."

"Well, maybe you'll get lucky and we'll win and the algebra will matter. Then twenty, thirty years down the road, something else will show up to slaughter everyone, and you can take care of that one."

She didn't want to be crying. She didn't want to be sad. Amos leaned over and put a thick, ropy arm around her. He was strangely hot to the touch, like he was always running a fever. She leaned into him and wept anyway.

She said her goodbyes to Alex and Naomi on the ship just after they touched down. They'd landed far enough away from the school that they wouldn't damage the grounds, so there was still a little walk from her old life to her new one. She tried not to think about that. It was easier if she could pretend that this wasn't the last time she would be on the ship. That she didn't have to start her life over again. She just put one foot in front of the other as if this particular walk didn't signify anything in particular.

Jim and Amos went with her to make sure everything was all right, but she could tell their minds were more than half on the incoming ship. Like guards from the State Building, they wore light body armor and sidearms. She just had a duffel bag with a couple of folded flight suits and a few days' supply of dog food. Muskrat trotted along with them, her brown, worried eyes shifting between Teresa and Amos.

The sky was wide and blue with cumulus clouds on the horizon. The valley opened before them, gentle curves of land that looked like erosion and wind and the growth of plants. The local plants were tall and thin, rising up into the air like three-meterhigh blades of blue-tinged grass. The breeze passing among them sounded like radio static. The school's grounds stood out from the world around it—straight lines and right angles. The air smelled like overheated metal.

There weren't any people.

"Term doesn't start for another two weeks," Jim said. "You're probably the first to arrive."

"Isn't it a boarding school?" Teresa asked.

"They still have breaks between terms. I mean, don't they?"

Amos shrugged. "Not a lot of private school types in my social circles. They know we're coming?"

"Finley knows to expect us, but Naomi was keeping the radio-silence thing pretty strict. You know, in case."

"Sure," Amos said.

The main path was crushed stone gravel, light gray with flashes of pink and blue and gold where the sunlight glittered off it. An earthmover stood idle at the side of the path. Its wide industrial treads had left tracks behind it half a meter across. The disturbed ground was dark and damp. The sun hadn't dried it yet. Amos smiled at nothing in particular, looking around like a tourist taking in the sights. Jim seemed tenser.

They walked up the path to a central courtyard three glass-windowed stories tall with a canopy stretched between the buildings. A stone fountain had lines of mineral deposits that showed where the water would have flowed if it had been flowing.

Teresa recognized it all from her reading about the school—the pale wood juxtaposed with the glass was apparently very interesting from an architectural perspective, but she just thought it looked awkward. The smiling kids and serious instructors that had filled the campus weren't there, though. Muskrat whined and pressed in against Teresa's leg.

"Yeah, dog," Amos said. "Putting my little hairs up too."

The wide double doors of the main building ten meters ahead of them swung open and a woman stepped out. Her arms were out at her sides, her hands open and empty. She was tall, long limbed, and thin, with high cheekbones and dark eyes. Her skin looked as taut and tough as if she'd been carved out of wood. Teresa couldn't guess the woman's age, but she wore a Laconian Marine uniform.

Jim muttered fuck to himself.

"I'm unarmed," the woman said. Teresa recognized her tone. An officer's voice. Brusque, and carrying an expectation of obedience. Her father's palace had been filled with voices like it. "I'm no threat to you. You don't need to escalate."

"What are you doing here?" Teresa said, loud enough to carry through the courtyard. "Do you know who I am?"

Amos put a hand on her shoulder and gently pulled her half a step back. Jim's eyes were wide, and his face was bloodless. If his expression hadn't been so calm, she would have thought he was having a panic attack.

"Yes, I know who you are," the woman said. "You're Teresa Duarte. I am Colonel Aliana Tanaka of the Laconian Marine Corps. And Captain Holden, if I'm not mistaken. I have to say that's a bit of a surprise. I'd have thought you'd have put her on a different ship. Eggs. Baskets. You know."

Jim stood silent. Frozen. Oh, Teresa thought. He's about to have a panic attack.

"I'm not here to hurt anyone," Tanaka said. "I need the girl's help."

"I am here of my own free will," Teresa said. "If my father—"

"At this point, I am considerably better briefed about your father's condition than you are," Tanaka said.

Amos reached down into his pocket, appearing to scratch idly at his leg while he looked up toward the canopy. Teresa heard a tiny, distant voice. Alex, saying What's up, big guy?

"If we're all friends and just talking," Amos said, his voice loud enough to carry, "how come you got a fire team on the roof up there?"

Teresa looked up. She wasn't certain, but there might have been shadows on the canopy. Her heart was tapping at her ribs like it wanted to get out. Muskrat whined, and she put a hand on the old dog's back.

"He's right," Jim said, his voice steadier than Teresa expected. "That doesn't seem friendly."

The woman didn't miss a beat. "You're correct. If I wanted to resolve this through violence, it would already be resolved. But I think we've all been through enough firefights to understand that when the bullets start flying, it gets very hard to be certain where they all end up. And I don't want anything to happen to the girl either."

"Where's the head of school?" Jim said. "The one who was meeting us?"

"She's safe. Honestly, I was hoping I'd find Teresa already here."

"We didn't know we were inconveniencing you, or we'd have scheduled things differently," Jim said. Despite the casualness of his words, his voice was like a wire under so much tension it was about to snap.

"In your position, I would have made getting her to safety a much higher priority. You can't imagine what a relief it is to discover I didn't waste my time coming out."

"You sure about that?" Jim said.

"Wouldn't play with this one, Cap," Amos said softly. There was a dangerous buzz in his voice Teresa had only heard once before. Close your eyes, Tiny. You don't want to watch this. The last thing he'd said to her before he'd been killed.

"This isn't a fight either of us need to have," Tanaka said, taking a few slow steps forward. Her arms were still out to her sides, fingers splayed to emphasize the emptiness of her hands. "I'm not looking to arrest you, Captain Holden. Or your crew. Or your ship. You're free to go. My mandate at present is very narrow."

Teresa glanced over at Jim, and he looked back. While their gazes were still locked, he shouted, "How do I know you won't open fire as soon as we don't have her?"

There was no reason for her to believe that Jim was bluffing. In the moment, Teresa was certain he would leave her with Tanaka, and relief complicated her fear. They didn't want to see her die. She understood that better now. She didn't want to see them die either.

"You have my word," Tanaka said.

"I was looking for something a little more solid."

"I don't have a habit of breaking faith. That's going to have to be enough."

Jim looked away from Teresa, back to the woman. Amos had started humming softly and tunelessly. The shadows on the canopy were larger now, and more clearly shaped like Laconian power armor.

"Not sure that it is going to be enough," Jim said, "but I'm willing to discuss other ways to make a handoff. You let us go back to our ship. Once we're in the airlock, we'll let the girl walk back by herself."

Tanaka's smile was hard. "Let me make a counteroffer. How about you do what I said, and no one dies?"

Jim tensed. He was on the edge of doing something stupid out of fear, and Tanaka was starting to escalate. Teresa had been trained in negotiation strategies, up to and including hostage situations. Jim was going to fuck this up. She had to take control. "I'm a little tired of being talked about like I was luggage. This isn't a conversation between him and you. This is a conversation with me. I decide what ship I leave this place on. Not him."

Muskrat, sensing the tension, started barking and hopping on her front legs. Tanaka smiled, and it was cold.

"All right," Tanaka said. "Please come with me. Do it now, and in return I won't kill your friends."

"You don't have to do this," Jim said, quietly enough that it was just for her to hear it.

Whatever happened, she would know that even now, having landed on this planet to get rid of her, he was still willing to die to protect her. The knot in her stomach was replaced by something warm and comforting. It had to be enough.

"I'll go," Teresa said, but no one heard her. Her voice was suddenly drowned out as the static hiss of the tree-sized grasses took on a deafening rumble. For a second, she thought of earthquakes or stampedes of cattle. Tanaka's neck worked. She was subvocalizing to someone.

"You have to the count of three," Tanaka shouted. "One—"

Amos said Fuck it, stepped in front of Teresa, and drew his gun.

Chapter Twelve: Tanaka

The girl was staring at her, arms crossed defiantly, so certain of her place in the natural order. Comfortable with the absolute necessity of her existence. Tanaka had seen that attitude before in other people, many times. She'd also seen the surprise and hurt in their eyes as they died.

Tanaka had no such illusions.

Anyone could die at any time, and the universe didn't give a shit. So while the girl stood in front of her shielded by nothing but the accident of having a powerful daddy, Tanaka wore an armored suit of woven carbon-silicate lace that would stop anything short of a rocket launcher under her clothes.

"I'm a little tired of being talked about like I was luggage. This isn't a conversation between him and you. This is a conversation with me. I decide what ship I leave this place on. Not him."

Oh, little girl, Tanaka thought, you have no idea. It made her hands itch to have Duarte's daughter so close and not just grab her. A dozen quick steps and she'd have the girl, the escaped prisoner, and the terrorist who was apparently not dead despite having been shot in the head back on Laconia. But killing the kid had a lot of downside, and the risk wasn't zero. So instead, she smiled and spread her hands a little wider, trying to seem as nonthreatening as possible. James Holden might be rounding the corner from middle-aged into old, but he was still dangerous. And the lump of gristle next to him that went by Amos Burton had more than one question mark next to him in her book. Tanaka didn't under-estimate either of them. The dog started barking and bouncing up and down on its front paws. It wasn't a trained attack animal, just an old pet. She knew from the file that the girl would be easier to control if they didn't kill it.

We're all friends here, she smiled at them, willing it to be true. A large-caliber pistol loaded with high explosive rounds pressed into the small of her back in case it turned out they weren't.

"Venom One," a voice said in her ear. "Check check."

"Venom Two at southwest corner, I've got Holden," came a different voice.

"Venom Four northeast, I've got Bluto," said a third.

"Three covering south."

Tanaka smiled. Whatever happened from here in, her enemy was well and truly fucked.

"All right," Tanaka said to Teresa, playing for time. "Please come with me. Do it now, and in return I won't kill your friends."

The girl looked uncertain. She'd never believe a threat made to her. Not really. But threats to her friends she believed. Her file made it clear she had significant abandonment issues. If things like that didn't make you strong, they made you weak.

"You hearing this?" Venom One asked, his mic buzzing with background noise as he spoke.

A distant rumble was growing, the tall swordlike foliage whipping as something blasted toward them. The girl was talking, but whatever she was saying was drowned out by the noise.

"Sparrowhawk," Tanaka said, activating the bone mic in her jaw.

"Mugabo here."

"Rocinante is oscar mike," she said.

"On our way," Mugabo replied. He'd hidden her ship around the far side of the planet to avoid detection. She'd known that was a risk. She didn't regret it. Not yet, at least. "I'll be to you in twenty."

Tanaka's gaze flickered across what was about to be a battlefield. She probably couldn't stall for twenty.

"Forget me," she said to Mugabo. "Stay on the Rocinante. Do not let it leave this planet with the girl on board."

"Are you . . . authorizing force? Even if the girl is on board?"

Tanaka didn't answer. She needed to get her hands on the target before the Rocinante showed up. She couldn't risk losing the girl if the situation went violent. And when her team moved on the two adults and the Sparrowhawk showed up overhead, things were liable to go very violent indeed.

Out of time and out of options. Something like pleasure flowed through her. It was time for someone to make a decision.

"You have to the count of three," Tanaka shouted at the girl as she beckoned. Come to me. "One—"

Burton shoved the girl behind him and pulled his gun. The Rocinante blasted into view, barely skimming the tops of the foliage, the powerful landing thrusters in her belly flattening everything it passed over. Tanaka found herself impressed by the recklessness of the maneuver. Here she was, working so hard not to put the girl in any danger, and the Rocinante crew was willing to throw a spaceship at her to keep her away.

"Venom, take the girl," she shouted over the deafening sound of the ship, pulling her gun from behind her back in a smooth, practiced motion. Burton saw her do it and drew down on her as he continued pushing the girl back toward the approaching ship. Tanaka dove behind a low stone planter box just as he fired, the bullet blowing a fountain of soil into the air.

"Shots fired," one of her team said.

"Five millimeter caseless. Low threat," someone else said, as flat and emotionless as if he were placing a lunch order.

"They're firing at me," Tanaka shouted back. "Get the girl!"

"Free fire?" Venom One, the team leader, asked.

"No, no shooting. Pull the other two apart with your hands if you need to, but do not risk firing toward the girl," Tanaka yelled, then peeked up over the planter box. Holden, Burton, and the girl were about thirty meters away now, still backing up. The Rocinante had taken up position about two hundred and fifty meters farther away, still hovering on its landing jets. It would have to put down to let them board, but the pilot wasn't taking any chances.

A metallic-blue figure dropped into the courtyard between Tanaka and Holden, then darted toward the fleeing group in a blur. Three more figures dropped from the canopy above, surrounding Holden and the girl. Burton pointed his gun at one and started firing.

"Taking fire," Venom Two reported.

Her team moved toward the three, not returning fire but moving fast. Aggressively. The old-style Martian Navy sidearms Holden and Burton carried would never penetrate a modern suit of Laconian power armor. They could fire their guns dry, and her team would just walk up and snap their necks. Quick, neat, almost no danger to the girl unless Burton shot her. But the old mechanic was careful and methodical as he fired. Every shot hit one of Tanaka's team, and he kept the girl behind him.

Venom Three was the closest, only a few meters from Holden, when the world exploded. A blinding flash, and a concussion like someone had hit her in the chest. Tanaka dove back behind her planter box, her mind trying to make the detonation into her team having disobeyed orders and opened fire. But the guns on the Laconian armor weren't that loud. Nothing was that loud.

A quick look over the planter box told her that all four members of her fire team were down. No, not down. Literally blown apart. She could see the remains of Venom Two, an undifferentiated pile of meat and technology spread across a few meters of ground. In the distance, the barrels of the Rocinante's point-defense cannons were fully extended, and swiveling as they looked for new targets.

PDC fire in atmosphere with their own people between the ship and its target. If she'd had time to think about it, she'd have been impressed by the audacity.

Tanaka jumped up to her feet and ran flat out toward one of the school buildings surrounding the courtyard, looking for cover. She imagined one of those PDC barrels snapping around with merciless machine speed to lock onto her. If it fired, she'd never hear the shots that ended her. Against a warship's PDC rounds, her fancy armored undersuit might as well be silk pajamas.

She made it to the wall of the school building. The Rocinante, hovering on its maneuvering thrusters, was completely blocked from her line of sight. She didn't think a pilot who flew for James Holden would shoot through a school to get her, but she displaced to another nearby building anyway. Once the shooting had started, people could panic and do things they would never have imagined themselves doing otherwise. Better not to risk it.

The roar of the ship's thrusters rose in pitch, then began to cycle down. The ship had landed. They'd blown her team apart, sent her running, and decided the coast was clear.

The coast is decidedly not clear, motherfuckers.

Tanaka sprinted out from behind the building and into the tall native grass. She ran parallel to the path Holden and crew were taking toward their ship, staying far enough away to hopefully hide the sound of her movement. If anyone could still hear anything after the ear-shattering blast of the Rocinante's PDCs firing in atmosphere. Even if they caught something on thermals, they might think twice about accidentally shooting a bystander. Might. They were a pretty fucking reckless bunch. She was going to enjoy taking them down.

After thirty meters she slowed down and angled in toward the three fleeing shapes. She was still a dozen meters away from them when she caught a glimpse of Holden in his dark Martian armor heading toward the ship. He wasn't looking in her direction. Through the ringing in her ears, she was almost certain she could hear the dog barking, so the girl had to be nearby.

Tanaka angled away and put on more speed, staying low but getting ahead of them. The surface of the tall native grass was covered in tiny hooks that tugged at her clothes when she brushed against them. When she accidentally hit one with the back of her hand, it left a painful abrasion, like a rug burn. She ignored it. She had the scent of blood, and her prey was just a few meters away.

When Tanaka felt she'd gotten far enough ahead of them, she moved back to the edge of the grass and waited. The ship had gone quiet. The grass hummed its white noise around her. From farther down the path, the dog was barking. She heard Holden's voice. Hurry. They'll have backup coming. They were a dozen meters or so away and moving toward her. They were trotting, but she'd been faster. One step ahead.

Tanaka stepped out of the grass, leveling her pistol at Holden. The look of surprise on his face would have been comical in any other context. The girl shrieked with alarm and grabbed at her dog's collar as it barked furiously.

"I can't let you leave with that girl."

Holden had his gun in his hand, but it was down at his side. He shifted his weight like he was going to make a move, but Tanaka just shook her head at him and pointed her gun at his face.

"If I spray you all over that girl, she'll panic. If she runs, things get even less predictable than this. No one wants that."

Holden nodded and dropped the pistol, then his gaze shifted to Tanaka's left shoulder.

"Wait," she said, "where's—"

"Right here," said a deep voice from behind her.

Shit. She was one step behind.

She was already swiveling to bring her gun to bear before the second word was out. Something heavy slammed into the side of her head and sent her spinning to the ground. Amos Burton stepped out of the grass, his hands balled up into fists.

"Hi," he said, moving toward her.

The hit was solid, jaw to inner ear. Her world was swimming. Tanaka rolled away and found her gun on the ground. She was bringing it up when Burton's boot connected with her forearm and sent the pistol flying off into the grass.

"What are you doing?" Holden asked.

I'm getting my ass kicked, Tanaka thought, dazed enough to wonder why he was speaking to her.

"I think we might want to talk to this one," Burton said. "Let's take her with us."

Tanaka said, "No," and tried to stand, then let herself collapse again. Look how hurt I am. It was only half bullshit.

"Hurry up," Holden said, and started to lead the girl past her.

Burton reached down to grab Tanaka's arm and yank her to her feet. He was very strong. That was good. It would make him overconfident. Tanaka let him pull her up, pushing hard with her legs as she rose, and snapping her other arm up to drive her palm into the underside of the big man's chin. His head jerked back from the impact, but his grip on her left bicep didn't loosen.

He raised his other arm and threw a massive fist at her face. With his hand gripping her, she couldn't dodge, so she whipped her head to the right and slapped at the punch, shoving it to the left. It still grazed her cheek, and the impact was enough to make that side of her face go numb.

The motion brought him in closer, and Tanaka threw herself backward, letting the momentum of the punch and her own weight yank Burton off his feet and on top of her as she fell.

He let go of her arm, trying by reflex to catch himself, and they both hit the ground. He landed on her like a falling tree, driving the air from her lungs. She was ready for it, though, and threw up an elbow that caught Burton in the throat as he dropped. He made a sound like an injured duck and rolled away, clutching at his neck. Tanaka bounced to her feet and looked for the girl. The swimming world whirled around her. She gritted her teeth and ignored it.

The girl was hiding behind Holden, clutching at her dog and staring at the melee, her mouth a round O of surprise. He was digging around at his feet, trying to pick up his dropped gun.

Tanaka could see hers, lying in the grass not too far away. Diving for it to take a rushed shot at Holden would be risky with the girl so close by. She raised a hand instead. "Holden, wait."

"Leave him out of it," Burton said behind her, "we're not done yet."

Tanaka spun on the ball of her foot and lashed out with a kick at the spot the sound was coming from. The big mechanic casually swatted it away. He looked none the worse for wear after a throat strike that would've killed most people. Something was wrong with his eyes. They were flat black. She remembered reading about someone with eyes like that. She didn't remember who.

"I've read your file," Tanaka said, backing toward Holden and the girl. She didn't have time for a boxing match with the strange-looking man with the eerie black eyes. Not when her best shots didn't seem to even faze him.

"Yeah?" he asked, moving toward her.

"It said we killed you," she said. "Any other time, I'd stay to figure that out." The girl was so close that, if she could just get her balance, she could take two steps, grab her, and be running before the others knew what had happened. Tanaka would place bets they wouldn't shoot at her if she had the kid in her arms.

"You've got time," Burton said.

Tanaka turned toward the girl and then stopped short. Holden was standing in front of her, his gun in his hand. The eyes that had seemed frightened a moment ago were now flat, emotionless, cold. That's bad.

"No," he said. "She doesn't."

Before Tanaka could even start to move, Holden's gun went off three times. She felt the three shots as hammer blows to her sternum. All three, center mass. Kill shots. She hadn't been certain until that moment that he had it in him.

Tanaka staggered two steps toward the edge of the path and then collapsed on her face. The three slugs from Holden's gun pressed into her chest where the nanofiber undershirt had caught them, like daggers in the deep-tissue bruise they'd left in her flesh. She ignored the pain and lay very still, holding her breath.

"Shit, Cap," Burton was saying. "I think we shoulda kept her."

"We have to go. We have to get out of here. Now," Holden replied. He sounded angry. Based on her reading of his file, Tanaka would have bet he wasn't mad at the mechanic. He was angry he'd been forced to shoot someone. For all the shit he'd seen, the Laconian interrogator's psych evaluation said that Holden had never really grown comfortable with violence.

Don't come check my body, Tanaka willed at them.

"Let's get out of here before more of them show up," Holden said, and the three of them started walking away.

Moving as little as possible, Tanaka inched toward her gun. When she was able to put her right hand on it, she risked turning her head to see where they were. Holden and Burton were side by side, the girl between them. They were about forty meters away. Not a very long shot. Not for her. They were both wearing old Martian light body armor. The high explosive rounds in her pistol would go right through it. There was some risk of fragmentation hitting the girl, but it wasn't likely to be fatal. And fuck it. A little bruising might do the bitch some good.

Tanaka rolled onto her back and sat up. She aimed at Burton's back. He was the more dangerous of the two. Kill him first. She lined up her sights between the big man's shoulder blades. Took a long breath, let half of it out, and pulled the trigger.

The round slammed into his back and blew out his chest like someone had swapped his heart with a grenade. Tanaka shifted her aim to Holden, who was already spinning, gun in hand. The big man took a couple more steps and fell over. She lined up on Holden's chest, then jerked her head as something cut a groove across her scalp. The report of the gunshot arrived a split second later.

He figured out the body armor, Tanaka thought. He's taking the headshot.

She moved, scrambling for cover in the grass and trying to line up her next shot. Holden was standing still, pivoting slowly at the waist to put his sights on her. It was a race now, and she was sighted in on his head, ready to pull the trigger and end it, when someone slammed a sledgehammer into her cheek. The other side of her mouth exploded out. The pain barely lasted long enough to notice, and everything was gone.

Interlude: The Dreamer

The dreamer dreams, and her dream carries her deeper into intimacy with vastness. All through the wideness and flow, she sparkles and the sparkles become thought where there was no thought before. The great slowness remains, soft and wide as the icy cold and all-encompassing sea, and the slowness (drifting, languid) shuffles and reshuffles itself. The sticky and the slippery, the bright and the dark, the moving and the moving for there is no true stillness in the spark-filled substrate, and the sparks become a mind. The dreamer dreams, and others dream with her, not just the ones at her side, not just the bubbles of salt, but the dance that they make. She dreams the dance, and the dance dreams her back. Hello hello hello.

Once, and gone so far away there were only the first thoughts to think it, the it was like this: the ball at the center of down, and the shell at the edge of up, and between them the slow dancers and the sudden dance. Watch watch watch, the grandmothers whisper, and their voices become a chorus, and the chorus says something else. The dance wants, and it pushes to the edges of everything, the skin of the universe. The dreamer dreams the dance and the dance dreams and its dreams become things and the things change the dreams. Desire and longing for desire bumble over eager forward and make new things to dance with. A brain growing the wires that form itself, thoughts flow from one substrate into another, and the great curiosity spins and makes and spins and learns. It presses down into the heat at the bottom of everything. It presses up into the cold, and it cracks the vault of heaven. The cold and hard of up yields to the dance, and the lights that they are meet lights that they are not.

A new thing has happened. Light from elsewhere. The bright-singing voice of God, inviting and inviting and inviting—

The kick from behind blows through, carrying blood and bone and breath with it. The dreamer takes a step, and then another, and then falls, shrieking, and the grandmothers say no not that, over here over here, look at what came next. Death floods toward her emptier than darkness and the dreamer forgets, grabs for the brother who is always at her side except not here except not here and the other one is, pock-voiced and funereal, it's all right it isn't you I've got you.

She floats up faster than bubbles, the heat below and behind, the cold cracked open to the stars, and screaming, she launches up and out of the dream and into the body that is only hers, in a confusion of vomit and weep and a fading deeper than dreams could be.

What the fuck was that?

Chapter Thirteen: Jim

Amos was limp, his dark eyes closed. His mouth hung open and his lips were white. The hole in his back was about as big as a thumb. The one coming out his chest was wider than two fists together. The black meat of his flesh made the pale bone of his spine look like a worm someone had pulled apart.

"We have to go," Teresa said from very far away. She pulled at his sleeve. "Jim! We have to go."

He turned to look at her—her impatient scowl, her hair pulled back over her ears. Muskrat, at her side, was dancing on anxious paws and whining. Or maybe that was him. He tried to say All right but realized he was about to vomit just in time to turn away.

We have to go, he thought. Come on. Pull it together.

He went to Amos, putting his arms under the big man's knees and across his wide shoulders. On Earth, he'd never have been able to lift him. With the three-quarter g of Abbassia, he was heavy but manageable. Man, girl, dog, and corpse, they started running toward the Rocinante. Jim tried to yell Hurry, but the thing that had clenched up in his chest when he saw Amos blown apart wouldn't let him. He didn't look back. His peripheral vision started to narrow, like they were running down a tunnel that was slowly squeezing closed. He had to get to the ship. A wash of cold and wet stuck his clothes to his belly and his thighs. Amos' black blood spilling down him.

Ahead of them, the airlock opened. Alex was in it, a rifle in one hand, waving them forward. The dog reached the lock first, misjudging the gravity and skittering against the hull. Teresa grabbed Muskrat around the middle and climbed the ladder with her. The weight of Amos' body slowed Jim down, but Alex reached out to help with the last couple steps. Jim knelt, lowering the corpse to the deck. The eyelids had opened a slit during the run, and the eyes beneath focused on nothing. Jim closed them.

"Fuck," Alex said. "What the fuck?"

"Take off now."

"All right," Alex said. "Let's get stowed, and we'll—"

Jim shook his head and opened a connection to Naomi. "We're in. Get us up."

"Are you in a couch?"

"No, so don't bounce us around too much, but get us out of here." She didn't argue. The roar of the maneuvering thrusters rattled his teeth. He took Teresa by the shoulder, pulling her close to shout in her ear. "Get the dog to her couch and strap yourself in. I don't know how bad this is going to get."

She looked at him with an equanimity he couldn't feel. She was hurt, frightened, traumatized. She was a kid. How could she stand to see what she'd seen? How could he?

"He isn't secured," she said.

"He won't care. Go."

The deck lurched under them, shifting slowly as the ship went from belly-down to the usual engine-down orientation. Muskrat whined, and Teresa took her by the collar, leading her away. Amos' body shifted and rolled. There was horror in Alex's eyes, and Jim felt a rush of anger. The distress in his old friend's eyes was too much. If he tried to comfort Alex, it would be too much. He was shaking as it was, and he didn't know if it was the vibration of the ship carving its way through the atmosphere, or his own body betraying him. Maybe both.

"We have to get to ops," Jim shouted. Alex took a step toward the spent clay that had been Amos, then caught himself, and they made their rocking, unsteady way toward the central lift. The deck shook and plunged under them as they went from handhold to handhold. Thrust gravity and the pull of the planet made his knees and spine ache. His vision, dark. He found himself on the edge of confusion, unsure for a moment whether they were fleeing New Egypt or Laconia. When they reached the lift, he sat down to keep from passing out. His mind pieced itself together as they rose.

Alex squatted beside him. "You okay?"

"They were there waiting for us. They knew we were coming."

"I'm sorry," Alex said. "I should have been there."

"She shot Amos in the back. Shot him in the back as we ran."

Alex was quiet, because there wasn't anything to say. Jim looked at his flight suit, smeared black from the gut to the knees. His hands were stained black too, but it still smelled like blood.

The lift pushed up, deck by deck. When they got to ops, Jim either had himself back together or he was fully dissociated. It was hard to know which.

The ride smoothed out as they reached the upper atmosphere. The winds were screaming past them, but with so little mass to the air that a ripping five-hundred-kilometer-per-hour current deflected them less than a breeze. The deck felt steadier under his feet. Naomi was in a couch, the flight controls on her screen. She glanced over as he lowered himself into the crash couch beside hers. He saw her register the blood and whose it was.

"Amos?" she asked.

He shook his head, not meaning that it wasn't. Meaning not now. He knew she understood.

Alex went up to the flight deck, his rifle still bouncing against his shoulder. "I'm taking the stick," he shouted down moments later.

"Copy that," Naomi replied. "I'm fire control." The screen before her shifted to status readouts on the ship's guns—PDCs, torpedoes, the keel-mounted rail gun. Jim pulled up tactical. On this screen an augmented map of Abbassia below them filled one side, a schematic of the nearby space of New Egypt system the other. And a sliver of red marked something the Roci's threat detection thought he should be alarmed about. A stone in his chest, he selected it and pulled up the ship identification.

"We've got company," Alex shouted from above.

"I've got them," Jim answered.

Naomi's voice was sharp and matter-of-fact the way it always was in the teeth of crisis. "Is it a Storm?"

Jim looked at the analysis. Now that there was only one Magnetar-class ship left, stuck in Laconia guarding their homeworld, the Storm-class destroyers were the backbone of Laconian power. And even one would be more than a match for the Roci. But this was smaller, with a squat, broad design, and a drive cone that promised it was built for speed.

"No," he said. "Smaller. Maybe an explorer. I don't know."

"Well, it's coming our way," Alex said. "And it looks pissed."

"Can we keep the planet between us and them?"

"If I put us in a low, fast orbit, maybe for a little while. Long term? No."

"Give me a little while, then."

Naomi didn't speak, but she cycled through the PDC status checks. If it was a shooting war, they'd be as ready as a lone ship could be. Jim's first impulse was to turn their back to the sun and burn as hard as they could stand it toward the ring gate and out of the system.

It wouldn't work. The Laconian ship was made to be faster. And if they wanted Teresa, their best move was to punch a hole in the Roci's drive cone and force a shutdown, then board and take her at their leisure. Turning tail and running would just make the shot easier. The alternative was to make it hard.

He closed his eyes. There was only one next step that he could think of, and he hated it. His mind shifted and slipped, looking for a better idea.

"Uh, Jim?" Alex said. "Your while's about up. What's the play?"

Fuck, he thought. "Keep our nose pointed at them. Make it so they have to put a hole through every deck in the ship to hit the drive."

Naomi and Alex were silent for a moment, then Alex said, "I'm on it."

The distant sound of the thrusters was totally different from the earlier roar. The shift of the crash couch felt almost gentle.

Naomi nodded, and checked power status on the rail gun. "Funny. You were saying before that the human shield thing made you uncomfortable."

"I've moved past uncomfortable to furious."

She nodded her agreement, then the screen lit up as the tight-beam request was accepted. A man's face appeared on the screen: broad, with round cheeks, dark skin, and a full and well-groomed mustache. He was wearing the blue uniform of Laconia with a captain's rank. He nodded at the camera, as calm as if they were in line together at the commissary.

"Captain Holden. I am Captain Noel Mugabo of the Sparrowhawk. Please return to the planet surface. I mean you and your crew no harm."

"You people just put a bullet through my mechanic," Jim said, and Naomi stiffened.

"And you killed four Laconian Marines," the captain said. "I am here to help us both deescalate. My orders are to keep you here. We need Teresa Duarte's assistance, and for that, she must come with us. We will not hurt her, nor will we detain you."

"I don't believe you."

"Your doubt doesn't change our situation." Jim noticed the way the man said our situation. Building rapport. Making it harder to pull the trigger, but also not backing down a centimeter. He'd had conversations like this as a prisoner on Laconia. "Please return to the planet's surface, and we will take care of all this without any more violence."

His crash couch put up a low-grade medical alert. His blood pressure and heart rate were concerning. Not dangerous, but not not-dangerous. He turned off the alerts.

"No," Jim said. "I think we both know that's not going to happen."

Alex called down from the flight deck. "They're getting closer. Want me to break orbit?"

Jim muted his mic. "Not yet."

"What alternative do you suggest?" Captain Mugabo asked. "I am open to discussing this."

"I propose you land so we know you're not a threat. Then we leave. With the girl."

"May I have a moment to consult with my superior?"

Jim nodded, and Mugabo's eyes shifted down as if he were sending a text-only message. Jim pulled up a tactical window. The two ships whipping around the planet in a low orbit, pointed dead-on at each other like gunmen in a cheap entertainment feed. He didn't know what sorts of weapons the Sparrowhawk carried, but he knew for a fact they were all pointed at him right now.

Another window appeared. Fire control, with the rail gun charged and ready, the Laconian ship locked in with passive targeting so that it wouldn't seem like an escalation. He glanced over to Naomi. She mouthed the words If you need it. He nodded.

"All right," Mugabo said. "I accept your terms."

"What?"

"We both value the life of the girl. If we have to continue this negotiation another time, so be it. You can go."

Jim took two long breaths. "You're not beginning a deorbit burn."

"Did you expect me to?"

"I don't think you're telling me the truth," Jim said. "I think if I fire the maneuvering thrusters, start to turn a little bit, you'll send a round through my drive cone. I think the only reason you haven't already done it is that you'd have to shoot through the whole ship to do it, and the risk to Teresa Duarte is too high."

"I assure you that is not the case," Mugabo said.

"Then you go first. If we're free to leave, begin your descent. When I see you touch down, I'll know you were telling the truth."

"Yes," Mugabo said. "Of course. I very much understand your position."

"You're playing for time."

"I understand why you would feel that way, Captain Holden. Please believe me that we mean you and your crew no harm, and that my offer is sincere."

The tactical screen bloomed at the same moment that Naomi's calm voice reached him. "Fast movers. They've launched torpedoes."

Radar tracked the pair of torpedoes as they arced out away from the Sparrowhawk. Mugabo had been buying time while his people locked in a firing solution that sent the torpedoes out and around the Roci to arc back in and hit her from behind. Take out the drive and leave the rest of the ship intact.

Jim tapped the fire control, and the Rocinante dropped away beneath him for a fraction of a second as a two-kilo tungsten slug spat out toward the enemy without the main drive on to compensate for the kick. Mugabo vanished, the tightbeam connection lost. The rolling, deep chatter of the PDCs vibrated through the ship. One of the torpedoes blinked off his board.

"I'm lining up another shot," Alex said. The rail gun showed ready. The other missile blinked off the board. The Roci squealed a warning at them as two more torpedoes locked on.

"They're getting ready to launch again," Jim said.

"I've got the reactor set to dump core if the Roci thinks we're out of luck," Naomi said.

"Alex?"

The rail gun locked onto the Sparrowhawk a second time and fired without Jim's having to clear it. "I think you got 'em," Alex said.

Jim switched to the external telescopes. The Sparrowhawk was where it had been, curving around the planet toward them, its orbit unchanged. But now a cloud of gas and water vapor sprayed out of the ship along one side. The lock-on tone died as the Sparrowhawk's torpedoes failed to fire.

"They may be playing dead," Naomi said.

"Alex, keep the rail gun trained on them."

"Copy that."

A tiny suggestion of up and down came, shifting the couches on their gimbals as Alex adjusted the ship's orbit to keep the Sparrowhawk lined up in their sights. No new lock-on warnings sounded. No active radar bounced off their hull. Jim pulled up the comms again, tried the tightbeam connection without knowing exactly what he'd say if Mugabo answered. He didn't. The Laconian ship drifted on in its low, fast orbit. Either the Laconian ship would repair itself, or in another few weeks it would fall back down into the planet's gravity well and burn up like a meteor. Or it was only playing dead, waiting for Jim to declare victory, turn the ship, and catch a rail-gun round through its drive.

"Alex," he said. "Pull us back on maneuvering thrusters. If they don't turn to match . . . Turn us, and let's break orbit. Get out of here."

"Copy that," Alex said, and the Roci shifted under Jim. They moved gently. Slowly. Waiting for the alarms that would mean the Sparrowhawk had only been playing dead.

The alarms didn't come.

"So what now?" Alex said.

"Now we plot the fastest way back through the ring gate and out of here."

"Any thoughts on wher

Woman Decides to Die and Let Baby Live

Source: https://flibusta.club/b/644456/read

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