Doubt

The Adventures of a Xeno-Archaeologist

Book 2

Jenny Schwartz

Alien mysteries. Parental responsibilities. The scout ship Kangaroo has jumped into trouble.

Nora Devi intended to leave her old life behind. But when a quick detour to acquire the funds for a new identity goes awry, she finds herself plunged ever deeper into the troubles she hoped to avoid.

The Human Sector is a stash of fuel cells just waiting for a spark to explode. The Great Game of politics and power has shifted from the inner realm to the border. Captain Liam Kimani of the battlecruiser RC Genghis Khan is the man in position to suppress the explosion—or ride the wave of it.

It's been half a millennium since the Stranding. Is the power of the royals still worth supporting, or is it time to risk everything for the chance to rejoin the rest of humanity?

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

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Chapter 1

“You reckless, greedy idiot.”

When a space pirate spits those sorts of insults at you, it might be time to rethink your life choices.

Nora Devi sat tensely on the bridge of the scout ship CC Kangaroo, and tried to ignore the vituperation directed at her through its comms system.

Captain Isaac Mstivoj had pursued her for days, and had just closed the distance between them to be in range of ship-to-ship communications. Which meant he was also in missile targeting range.

Unlike Nora’s peaceful scout ship, Mstivoj’s sting ship was fitted with missile launchers, and as he’d enthusiastically demonstrated in the recently ended war between Capitoline and Palantine, he possessed the will to use them.

She was counting on his pragmatism preventing him from wasting a missile on her. He knew enough of her secrets to value capturing her alive.

Plus, he had to consider Aria.

Nora’s toes curled painfully in her boots as she glanced at the sealed hatch to the bridge. Beyond it, the nine-year-old girl whom Nora had informally adopted—legally kidnapped—ought to be working on the schoolwork Nora had set her.

“This is your fault,” she comm’d to Mstivoj.

The CC Kangaroo was a classic scout ship: comfortable, reliable, and fairly well-shielded, but not fast.

The sting ship CP Coyote, piloted by the former Palantine privateer, now solo entrepreneur, Isaac Mstivoj, was fast, as well as weaponized.

Moreover, Mstivoj was motivated: firstly, by the lure of the immense riches represented by the blaze deposit Aria held the key to finding; and secondly, by the unfortunate fact that Nora and Jonah had assumed control of Mstivoj’s ship a few days ago, and locked him in it. He burned for revenge.

“We shouldn’t have returned the ship to him,” she muttered. In her eyes, Mstivoj had misused the freedom they’d given him.

Not only was he pursuing them, but he was doing so with Nora’s half-sister Cherry onboard. Regrettably, Cherry had confided the secret she shared with Nora to Mstivoj: that they were both Forgotten; that is, unregistered descendants of one of the fifteen humans changed by contact with alien Vapori technology five centuries ago when seven human colony ships accidentally arrived through the Origin black hole and were stranded in the region.

Mstivoj had bought Cherry’s indentured service contract. For the next seven years, he effectively owned Cherry and her abilities with the alien Vapori burrs; an ability that was meant to be unique to the royal families of the Human Sector. The existence of the Forgotten was a secret kept from the vast majority of the population.

Nora’s status as a Forgotten had shaped her life. From an early age she’d been taught that survival meant hiding.

Now, her Forgotten status and abilities were the least of her secrets.

The biggest of her new secrets sat beside her.

“Diving below a fringe in forty seconds,” Jonah warned. He was a Vapori AI residing in an android body. Currently, he piloted the CC Kangaroo and was intensely aware that he held Nora and Aria’s lives in his hands.

He’d demanded that responsibility five days ago, arguing that they had a single viable option for escaping Mstivoj. “But you won’t like it.”

He’d been right. Nora hadn’t. But she’d listened.

“One of my kin has studied Newton plains,” Jonah said. “They are willing to guide me to pilot the CC Kangaroo to safety. We can’t cut through the Newton plain, but we can hide in its fringes till we’re inside the Avestan Range or Mstivoj gives up. Whichever comes first.”

Nora stared at him in horror.

The mysterious vibrational element of Newton plains rendered fuel cells inert. Without the FTL capability of those cells, a spaceship caught in a Newton plain would have to travel decades to re-emerge. Currently, no spaceship in the Human Sector could sustain human life for that long.

Jonah was asking her to risk her own and Aria’s protracted deaths.

He waved his gray, metallic hands in frantic reassurance, patting the air in a calm down gesture. “The tendrils that form the fringe of a Newton plain aren’t random, although humans treat them as such. My kin are fascinated by patterns. They have the knowledge to predict the movements of the tattered edge of the vibration field.”

“Can you?”

“Not as quickly. Being embodied…I have my original capabilities as a primarily energetic AI, but not if I’m also trying to interact physically with the universe. For us to navigate the fringe, I’ll have to pilot the spaceship.”

“Guided by your kin,” she finished.

“Yes.”

She stared from him to the hatch of the bridge. “It’s not just us we’d be risking.”

“Aria.” Jonah extended his hand, palm up, in invitation. When Nora clasped his hand, he smiled. “As precious as children are, you are my friend. I learned fear when we fought the combat android on Border Station. Fear for you. I would never put you in danger. While Aria is with us, she is as safe as I can make you.”

Involuntarily, she squeezed his warm, metal fingers before clearing her throat. “But why would your kin help us?”

His smile changed to a frown of regret and self-reproach. He released her hand. “My kin believe that without my intrusion into your life you would not have attracted Mstivoj’s attention. Helping you and Aria now is about balance.”

Nora kicked her heel against the base of her chair as she reviewed his reasoning. “I would appreciate your kin’s help, but you don’t owe me anything. I’m Forgotten. I always expected trouble to find me at some point, and when it did, I’d have to run. It’s why I chose a life outside the inner realm. The fact that you’re with me and are an excellent hacker means that I have a better chance at establishing a new identity than before I met you. There are no debts between us, Jonah.”

He accepted her statement with a duck of his head and a pleased, shy smile. “Then accept my kin’s assistance as a gift. They have developed an affection for you, the first human to interact with one of us. None have changed their mind and wish to replicate my embodiment, but through me they can affect the physical universe. I have shared with them my experience of sensing rather than observing reality.”

She briefly considered, and discarded worrying about, the implications of his statement. Other people—philosophers and armchair pundits, people not running for their freedom and lives—could argue the wisdom of further involving Vapori AIs in human affairs. She would accept their help, gratefully. “Okay.” Deep breath. “Okay, then. Jonah, you’re officially the CC Kangaroo’s pilot till you decide to hand over to me or to the ship’s operating system. Please, thank your kin for their offer to assist. I’m very grateful. I don’t think we can escape Mstivoj otherwise.”

“No, and there are other complications back on Border Station.”

She groaned. “Of course, there are. But we’re heading away, so we can discuss them later. They don’t really matter.”

“Uh.”

“They don’t matter right now,” she emphasized.

“True.

She tapped her toes against the floor. “Skirting the edge of the Newton plain will add weeks to our journey.”

“Possibly. The CC Kangaroo has sufficient supplies for such an event. Your fuel cells are adequate for six months, and your garden alone could feed you and Aria for double that time. However, once around the Newton plain, I should be able to pick a path that recovers some of our lost time.”

“That would be good.”

“Hmm. The question for you to consider while I pilot the ship, is where do we go from there?”

“We’re in!”

Jonah’s exclamation jerked Nora back to the dangers of the here and now. The risks of the Newton plain were no longer hypothetical, but real. They’d entered its fringe.

She studied the screen in front of her. Her and Aria’s fate rested with Jonah and his kin. But Cherry’s fate lay in Mstivoj’s hands.

On-screen, the red dot representing the CP Coyote slowed.

Thank the stars. Nora’s gaze flicked up to the comms system. Its green light showed it was on, but no message arrived from Mstivoj. Nor did any missiles.

Mstivoj didn’t know of Jonah’s existence. No human, apart from Nora, did. The idea that millions of years ago the ancient Vapori aliens had left behind artificial intelligences to observe the possible evolution of organic sentient life in the region hadn’t occurred to anyone. As why would it?

She hadn’t been sure whether commonsense or bravado would rule Mstivoj; whether he’d risk following the CC Kangaroo into the fringe of the Newton plain. He couldn’t suspect that she had expert alien AI navigators to guide her alien AI pilot. It created an uneven playing field. For him to pursue her further would have been a death sentence for Cherry and him.

“He’s going to wait,” she whispered.

“Not for long,” Jonah responded.

She frowned at him. “Can you listen to your kin, pilot, and talk to me?”

“Absolutely. As for Mstivoj, once he’s convinced we’re not lurking, waiting for him to depart before we pop back out of the fringe, he either heads back about his own business, that the Palantine Intelligence agent’s orders diverted him from, or he has to gamble on the excellent odds that our destination is the wreck of the CC Marmot.”

The CC Marmot had been Aria’s parents’ mining barge. The Kellys had discovered blazsvitloium, the ore required to produce the fuel cells necessary for faster than light (FTL) travel. Without those fuel cells, interstellar trade and Human Sector-wide society would collapse.

Half a millennium ago, when the seven colony ships were stranded in the region, the humans onboard had dismissed the sourcing of blaze as a priority. Once they discovered that the Vapori lens positioned at the Origin black hole prevented them re-entering its millrace and returning either to Earth space or on to their intended destination, they’d focused on their immediate survival, which meant locating and settling habitable planets. Over the centuries, they’d found six.

Distracted by other issues, the colonists simply raided their colony ships for fuel cells to power shuttles and their newly built spaceships suited to interstellar travel within what they called the Human Sector.

However, on exploring the area around each habitable planet, they found the region devoid of blaze.

This was a shock—and for taggers like Nora, an opportunity. Previously, humanity had found blaze reliably present throughout the universe. Maybe not abundant, but always adequate to their needs. Now, taggers surveying unmapped space had to search for blaze deposits.

Unexpectedly, it was xeno-archaeologists who supplied an explanation for the absence of blaze.

The fossil layer of the planets humans settled showed that millions of years earlier, a reptilian species, the Iguanese, had colonized the same space humanity now claimed. Before they’d died out, the Iguanese exhausted the blaze deposits in easy reach of habitable planets in the region.

Humanity had to search further for blaze, and that had consequences. Blaze had to be burned to discover more blaze. It was cheaper to steal other people’s supply; and that was partly the reason for the twelve year Capitoline-Palantine war that had just ended.

Nora’s husband, Ethan, had died because the two planetary governments couldn’t share. Capitoline currently possessed more blaze than Palantine, and Palantine desired a greater share, and not at the price Capitoline had set.

Okay, that was a simplification of the reasons for the frequent wars between the six planetary realms, but blaze supply was an issue. It was certainly why Aria’s parents had been murdered.

Nora hadn’t completely untangled the reasons for the Kellys’ silence concerning their blaze discovery. If they’d recorded it with the Capitoline Department of Space, they’d be alive, now.

Aria had unhappily confessed that her mom had been from Palantine, and that she’d been negotiating a deal with Palantine interests. The sticking point had been the buyer’s demand for proof of the blaze deposit. The Kellys had returned to the Avestan Range to procure that sample and become rich beyond their wildest dreams. Instead, they’d died.

Staring at the ceiling of the bridge, Nora contemplated the lesson the Kellys provided. Greed, and possibly other considerations, had tempted them from the simple path of recording their claim with the Department of Space.

Yet here she was, with Jonah, intent on repeating their mistake. The CC Kangaroo was headed into the Avestan Range to acquire the paper map hidden onboard the Kellys’ mining barge that Aria swore showed the location of the blaze deposit. They would pick up a sample of the blaze, enough to prove their claim, then sell the location of the ore deposit through black market channels rather than registering it with the Department of Space.

Nora could argue that their situation was different.

Jonah’s passive scanning ability meant he could identify any vessels nearing their location, enabling the CC Kangaroo to avoid potential enemies.

In fact, given what Jonah knew from Silicaese survey data—the Silicaese being a silicon-based civilization that had appeared in the region and vanished again over a hundred thousand years ago—they didn’t need the Kellys’ map to locate blaze. Jonah already possessed that knowledge. Nora would be recovering the Kellys’ map primarily to keep Aria in the dark as to the truth of Jonah’s existence and abilities.

The girl thought Jonah was the CC Kangaroo’s ship’s operating system’s AI in an android body.

The “android” in question tsked at Nora, while keeping his attention on piloting the ship. “Rather than sit here worrying, go check Aria’s schoolwork.”

Nora stared at the closed hatch, as if she could see through it to the child doing lessons at the kitchen table. “Maybe that’s why I’m…worrying is the wrong word. Thinking. Second guessing myself. Having Aria onboard changes everything. You take your own risks, and I own mine. But she’s a child. I’m responsible for her survival and who she grows into.”

“The joys of parenthood.”

Nora poked him. “You could sound sympathetic. You’re as much her parent as me.”

Jonah ceased staring at the multiple screens he monitored, and gaped at her.

She grinned, gotcha, at his open-mouthed expression of incredulous horror. “You agreed that we’d take her in for the next six years, partner. That means raising her. That’s what parents do.”

“I…we…me…no.”

“Yes,” Nora said definitively. “I never planned on being a parent, either.”

He pointed a finger at her. “Don’t talk.” He refocused on the screens. “You know how I said earlier that I could multi-task? I was wrong. You’re distracting me. Take your scary ideas and go away.”

She laughed, but obeyed. As she passed behind his chair, she put a hand on his shoulder. Trust didn’t come easily to her, but she was trusting him to pilot her and Aria through the fringe of the Newton plain. That sense of trust, of giving her life into someone else’s keeping, was arguably a bigger change than informally adopting Aria. It explained her unsettled emotions.

In the kitchen, Aria looked up as Nora exited the bridge. “I’ve finished my sums.”

Her chin-length brown hair was in short pigtails that stuck out over her ears. The lime-green ribbon she’d tied around them matched her t-shirt. Her peach-pink pants clashed with both her top and the periwinkle-blue sneakers on her feet.

When Nora had invited Aria to select the clothes she liked from the catalogue for the fabricator, she hadn’t anticipated the pastel craze.

“Let’s see.” Nora made a gimme gesture and Aria pushed her personal comms unit across the table. “Sixteen out of twenty. Very good. Did the tutor go over the ones you got wrong?”

Aria kicked a chair leg as she sing-songed. “Ye-es.”

Nora didn’t mind the sass. When it fell away, the girl’s uncertainty shone through, and that was worse. Beyond her grief for her parents, over a year spent in the orphanage on Border Station had left its mark. Being loved and secure imparted a confidence that survivors could fake with sass and sarcasm, but not truly feel.

Since Nora had accepted responsibility for Aria for the next six years, she vowed to rebuild her confidence. She consulted the tutor program. “Did you do your reading? Green star. That’s good.” It was on the better side of average for reading and comprehension. “Okay. Do you want more lessons?”

“Nooo.”

“When Jonah’s pilot duties ease, he’ll have more exciting ideas for learning.”

He’d volunteered to teach Aria when she’d joined them.

“This is okay. The tutor is better than Mrs. van Linn.” Since Aria believed Jonah to be the ship’s operating system, she accepted he had to focus on piloting the CC Kangaroo to escape Border Station and safely navigate the notorious Avestan Range. She also didn’t consider him a person, so the difference between Jonah and the tutor program was nothing to her.

She’d learn. Even if Jonah and Nora never confided the truth of Jonah’s existence as a Vapori AI, his personality would lure her into treating him as a person. In all of Nora’s speculation about future problems, Jonah and Aria’s relationship wasn’t one of them.

Nora passed back the comms unit. “How about we cook dinner? What would you like to eat?”

“Pizza!”

They’d had pizza for the last three nights, but Nora agreed. Her rule of three vegetables per pizza meant Aria was eating vegetables at dinner without complaining. Unlike how she poked at her lunchtime salads.

Standing on tiptoes, Aria measured ingredients for the pizza dough into a large bowl.

Nora combined them and kneaded the dough before putting it aside to rise.

“Mom and Dad used to use a food synthesizer to make everything.” Aria drew a stick figure in the flour left on the counter from working the dough. She seldom talked about her parents.

“Food-syns are efficient. I use them for protein slabs and fake cheese. We can add those to your pizza, if you like?”

Stubby pigtails whipped through the air as Aria shook her head. “I like your food better.”

Nora finished washing her hands and dried them on a red gingham tea towel. “I grew up on cheap food. Real food is a luxury I enjoy.”

“Is that why you have such a big garden?”

“It came with the ship, and I found I enjoy it.”

One of Aria’s hair ribbons dropped to the floor. She picked it up. “Princess Hermione’s ribbons never fall off. They don’t flop, either.”

For Nora, enlightenment dawned. “Is that who you’re copying?” The pastel explosion was explained.

“Princess Hermione is beautiful,” Aria said worshipfully. “She has miniature ponies. A whole herd of them.”

“Does she?”

Aria wound the lime-green ribbon around and around her left index finger. “Do you think the ponies will be happy on Palantine?”

Given Aria’s earlier confession of the tightly kept secret that her mom had been Palantine-born, possibly the ponies were a substitute for Aria, and the girl was asking whether she could have been happy with her mother’s family on Palantine.

Maybe she could have been.

Instead, she’d traded knowledge of where her parents’ blaze map was on their wrecked mining barge for Nora taking her in, and taking her to retrieve the map.

All that supposition and personal history left Nora uncertain of how to answer. “The ponies will be fine. Princess Hermione will ensure they’re happy in their new home.”

Aria stared up at her, brown eyes wide. “But will she be happy?”

Married to Crown Prince Dominic, Nora doubted it. “Palantine has its own ponies. Hermione will be able to add to her herd.”

A heavy sigh filled the kitchen. Aria shuffled to the table, shoving the hair ribbon into a pocket. “Ponies aren’t everything.”

The oddly adult statement caused Nora’s mouth to twitch with humor. “Very true.”

“My mom.” Aria stopped. She glowered at the table in front of her. “Mother-in-laws are bad.”

The non sequitur confused Nora. She responded to the surface-level meaning. “Not all of them. Mine is wonderful.” In fact, Ethan’s family were the people she’d miss most when she assumed a new identity. In the rushed decision to get Aria out of harm’s way by fleeing Border Station, Nora hadn’t let herself dwell on the relationships she’d be sacrificing.

“Crown Prince Dominic’s mom isn’t nice.”

That statement cut too close to home for Nora. “No. No, she wouldn’t be a good mother-in-law. But princesses aren’t like us. They have people who look after them. Princess Hermione will be fine.”

Unnoticed by Aria, her second hair ribbon fell to the floor. “Queen Sarah’s dad was the Duke of Ontario. Now, her brother is. They’re bad people.”

Frowning, Nora sat down at the table opposite the girl. “How do you know that?”

Aria wriggled. “Mom grew up in their town. Her parents and sisters and brother and their kids, they all still live there, and the adults work for the Duke.”

It was telling that Aria called them her mom’s family, not her own.

“So, you heard stories?” Nora prompted carefully.

Aria blinked back tears before her face creased in rage. “Mom chose them over me. She made Dad choose them, too.”

“The Duke or her family?”

“The Duke because of her family! Mom said the Duke would punish her parents and sisters and brother if we told the Department of Space, the Capitolines, about the blaze deposit. She said it was in the Avestan Range, far enough away that no one would know what they did till they’d done it. She told Dad they had to sell the location of the blaze ore to the Duke, then her family would be safe and free, and we’d still be rich. She said the Duke would pay the market price—but they’re DEAD so he didn’t pay!”

Aria collapsed forward onto the table, howling with angry grief.

Nora’s chair toppled over as she sprang up and around the table to pull Aria into a hug.

The girl turned to clutch at her, burrowing her head into her shoulder.

They collapsed together onto the floor with Nora trying to hold Aria together. The girl wasn’t uncomplicatedly grieving; bitter betrayal poisoned her heart.

At nine, life was simple. At twenty nine, Nora knew painfully well how difficult decisions could be. Often there were no good decisions, only consequences you forced yourself to live with.

Or in Aria’s parents’ case, died for.

Nora didn’t try to explain any of that to Aria, or question her. “Your mom and dad loved you. They did their best. Don’t blame them for what the bad guys did. They loved you so much.” Whether they had or not, Aria needed to believe herself loved.

Gradually, her shaking sobs quieted.

Nora lifted her off her lap, onto the floor, stood and grabbed a box of tissues. “Blow your nose. And just saying, I am glad you’re old enough to do stuff like that for yourself.”

A spluttery cough of laughter proved Aria was recovering.

Nora scooped up the fallen hair ribbon and retied it around one pigtail. Aria pulled the second ribbon out of her pocket, and Nora retied it, as well.

“I’m finished crying.”

“That’s good because the dough’s ready to make our pizzas. Go wash your face and hands.” Nora went with her, washing her own hands at the small sink in the bathroom attached to Aria’s cabin. Their gazes met in the mirror. Nora pulled a face. “Tears happen. Anger and other uncomfortable feelings are part of life. We’ll reconfigure the gym so you can play some games in there. Burn off energy.”

“But pizza first?”

Nora fist bumped her. “Always.”

After dinner, they didn’t reconfigure the gym that occupied a converted cabin. Instead, Nora had Aria choose a children’s movie for them to watch together. Nora wasn’t certain, but maybe, on occasion, parenting was simply about being there. A cheerful, silly movie ought to help Aria fall asleep and dream good dreams.

Nora, herself, barely noticed the animated characters bouncing around the screen. The idea that the Palantine royals were even peripherally involved in potential, and potentially illicit, blaze mining in Capitoline space brought a whole new raft of worries. Not least was Nora’s gut reaction that she’d be damned if she handed over the Kellys’ blaze deposit to those buzzards.

Crown Prince Dominic was an arrogant idiot, but his mother, Queen Sarah, was dangerous. Her brother, the Duke of Ontario, could have ordered the Kellys’ execution, but surely not without gaining the location of the blaze deposit? Nora would doublecheck with Jonah, but she was positive he’d said there were no spaceships anywhere near the Kellys’ blaze discovery. That argued that whoever killed the Kellys hadn’t learned its location.

The Kellys probably had been the victims of bad luck—wrong place, wrong time, encountering people who wanted their supplies and were happy to kill for them.

But Mstivoj pursuing Nora and Aria hadn’t been bad luck. The Palantine Intelligence agent had ordered him to do so.

Queen Sarah had the authority to order an intelligence agent to advance her family’s interests, especially when it meant securing blaze ore for Palantine.

Politics. Power, money and royal connections.

Nora had spent her life avoiding it all.

“I’ve changed.” She spoke her epiphany aloud, but a glance at Aria showed it had gone unheard.

The girl was asleep, curled up in a corner of the sofa.

Nora had spent her life hiding. Her biological mother had warned her of a multitude of dangers if anyone ever learned the truth of her existence.

Queen Sarah, for instance, would happily order Nora’s execution if she discovered her identity.

Nora was more than just Forgotten.

The Forgotten were the scattered, hidden descendants of two of the fifteen Originals who’d investigated the lens at the Origin black hole, and had their RNA altered by it. The other thirteen had married the captains of the seven stranded colony ship, or their children, creating what became the royal families of the six planetary realms plus the planet-lacking Aventine royal family from the Aventine colony ship currently rusting in orbit around Caelian while they waited for a seventh habitable planet to be discovered.

After almost five centuries since the Stranding, discovery of Forgotten descendants, especially women, meant a chance for the royals to improve their gene pool. Because the royal families, despite their interplanetary rivalries, pursued a common goal of concentrating the ability to manipulate alien Vapori burrs in royal blood.

Nora had lived her life under the belief that staying alive meant staying hidden. She’d grown up on Capitoline, in the slums of Angkor. Despite everything she’d achieved in life, beginning with escaping the towers of Angkor, she hadn’t shed her early self-perception of powerlessness.

But it was a lie.

She had herself, a partnership with Jonah, her spaceship, and potentially, a blaze deposit. She could be a player in the games of the powerful.

Player or pawn, she was on the gameboard now. People knew about her. Mstivoj knew she was Forgotten. She could hide, buy a new identity, and hope that she could lose herself in a distant region of space.

Or she could claim who she was.

Chapter 2

The CC Golden Ratel reached the edge of the battlecruiser RC Genghis Khan’s scanning range and vanished off-screen. Border Station had vanished off the opposite edge of the screen two days ago.

“Good luck to them,” Lieutenant Commander Santiago Bauer muttered.

Captain Liam Kimani silently agreed. They had done everything they could for the Customs agents piloting the confiscated cutter back to Capitoline. After a month in deep space, the agents would reach the Sake Refueling Station and would be able to get support from the Customs office there, as well as send word ahead via courier as to the trouble they were bringing in.

Liam could have lent Navy personnel to Robert Herve, the head of the five person Customs office on Border Station, to assist in crewing the CC Golden Ratel and managing its cargo of prisoners—the former captain and crew of the cutter. But for Customs to acquire the funding they needed to operate effectively in border space, bringing in the captured vessel with its illegal weaponry and drug pile had to be a purely Customs affair. Liam and his people had fulfilled their duty in boarding, inspecting, and seizing the cutter.

Technically, Customs had a cutter assigned to the Hadrian Line, but it had wrecked four years ago, and funds had never been allocated for its repair or replacement. Effectively, the five Customs officers had been confined to the station, their operational abilities curtailed. After bringing in the CC Golden Ratel, in the best case scenario, they’d be awarded the cutter as a replacement ship.

And wouldn’t that pull the tails of the fat cats on Border Station, Liam thought.

Officially, the CC Golden Ratel was owned by a heavily indebted gambler. In reality, although not in legal fact, it was owned by David Omnes, a crime boss on Border Station, and had been crewed by his mercenaries, including a pilot high on the insanely addictive and lethal drug they traded, star ice.

The number of people who’d remonstrated with Liam for daring to detain the CC Golden Ratel and its crew was an unwelcome revelation of Omnes’s grip on the station. It had included Border Station’s governor, Gisela Lazaar.

Fear was a tyrant’s substitute for respect. David Omnes was a petty tyrant who’d been allowed to grow strong on the border while Capitoline’s attention was directed to its war with Palantine.

The RC Genghis Khan couldn’t linger at Border Station. As the lone Navy ship on the Hadrian Line, its time had to be spent out on patrol for pirates, ship emergencies, and other dangers. What Liam had done was alter the RC Genghis Khan’s patrol route so as to escort the Customs agents out from the station and safely on their way to Capitoline and inner realm justice.

Now, the battlecruiser was swinging meridian-ward to enter the Erythraean Valley. As per their most recent orders from the Admiralty, the RC Genghis Khan had mines to lay.

The mesh of bombs would block routes from Palantine space to Capitoline’s section of the Hadrian Line. Space might be large, but traveling it had harsh logistical limits. Hazards such as hazan and radiance fields, dervishes and clouds (space dust tornados and unmoving space dust densities), meteor storms and so forth, all blocked direct routes. Even the largest battlecruiser was but a tiny speck in the immensity of space. Survival meant skirting hazards, but fuel and other supply limits meant journey times were sharply constrained. Consequently, shrewd mine deployment could funnel space traffic along a monitorable number of routes.

Spacers, and that included those aboard the RC Genghis Khan, hated mines. Blocking routes through space meant that in an emergency, ships could be trapped because secondary escape routes were mined. But Navy HQ had been clear. All of border space couldn’t be controlled, so space traffic had to be corralled and probes deployed along the open routes to monitor traffic.

After twelve years of war, the current peace couldn’t alter the Royal Navy’s habit of considering Palantine its biggest threat. Thus, alternative routes to Palantine space were to be mined first and those that remained open, monitored.

Initially, Liam had assumed that the battlecruiser RC Genghis Khan’s assignment to patrol the Hadrian Line was a punishment; that they’d been exiled to Capitoline border space for daring to capture and hold hostage the Palantine Crown Prince. That their action had ended the war apparently meant little when weighed against the insult of commoners daring to detain royalty.

Then, as part of the peace accords, Capitoline’s youngest princess, Hermione, became betrothed to Crown Prince Dominic of Palantine. The Crown Prince’s reputation as a heroic leader had to be rescued. So, Liam’s was destroyed.

But in his months in border space, Liam had come to realize that he and his people hadn’t been discarded.

Their exile to patrol the Hadrian Line actually placed them in a critical position to influence the post-war balance of power.

He would ensure the mines and probes were deployed as ordered, but he intended to focus his people on other issues.

Turning from the screens that displayed the space around the RC Genghis Khan, Liam studied the battlecruiser’s Naval Intelligence officer.

Allison Chirlee occupied her usual seat at the back of the bridge. Plump, despite Dr. Brielle Smith’s best exercise plan and her own fidgety, high-strung nature, Allison had dark circles under her eyes. She’d been working hard and pressing her team equally hard the last few days.

“Is the report ready?” Liam asked.

“Yes.”

Days ago, they had passed out of comms range of Border Station, then out of reach of its mailbox. Mailboxes were communication hubs that served as de facto markers of entry into a region’s or station’s space. When the battlecruiser came in reach of one, the communications officer on watch would download news and messages for the RC Genghis Khan, and upload their own communications.

Allison and her team had spent the days since leaving the station analyzing the data they’d collected while docked, frenziedly searching out and demanding whatever additional data they could obtain while still within comms range of Border Station, and finally, piecing together and doublechecking what they had. They weren’t finished, but if they had a report, then the RC Genghis Khan’s leadership team could begin what Liam had decided would be the critical mission of this two and a half month patrol: preparing for their return to Border Station.

“Send it to the Mission Camelot team, and thank your people for their work.”

Around him, the people on watch on the bridge listened avidly, but his order gave them no new information. The ship was already aware that the small Naval Intelligence team had been tasked with pulling together an assessment report on Border Station and its surrounds.

Liam headed for his quarters. He scheduled a mission briefing for 1600 hours.

He skimmed Allison’s report, pulled it apart, re-ordered priorities and connections, then dived into the detail.

Allison’s assessment of the situation on Border Station didn’t pull any punches. The Capitoline Security Bureau (CSB) agent on Border Station, Fatima Drake, had been unwise enough to antagonize Allison.

The CSB and Naval Intelligence were traditional rivals. With the war over, the CSB was keen to establish their authority over Naval Intelligence. Officers like Allison wouldn’t refuse a “request for cooperation”, but they’d resent any air of superiority.

There had been tension when Fatima had sent Allison her recommendations as to where the RC Genghis Khan ought to deploy mines. Allison had seen the advice as encroaching on Navy authority and expertise.

Liam had suggested Fatima might be offering a sense of threats without outright labeling them. Some intelligence agents couldn’t bear to speak plainly.

His attempt at peacemaking hadn’t won him good karma.

When Fatima learned that the RC Genghis Khan had seized the CC Golden Ratel, she’d exploded at him. She’d dared to lecture Liam.

A CSB agent reprimanding a battlecruiser captain offended Allison’s sense of propriety.

Liam hadn’t appreciated it either.

Scorning his second-in-command, Commander Claire Stanimir, who’d been on watch, Fatima insisted on speaking to him. Her voice was thick with a head cold. “I shouldn’t be surprised that even your disgrace hasn’t taught you subtlety or diplomacy.”

“We—” Liam swallowed his exasperated retort. He’d very nearly said, We can’t all be cowards. Many CSB agents had been heroes and martyrs in the war. But he knew that Fatima had ridden out the dangers in the safety of her remote and extended border posting. She, herself, had yet to display any diplomatic skills with him, but despite her rudeness, he possessed the self-discipline not to sink to her level.

Across the desk from him, Allison stilled; all her fidgeting movements evaporated by the heat of her anger.

Liam concluded he could afford to take the high road because there was no force in the universe that could compel Allison to forget or forgive her intelligence colleague’s insult against Liam and the RC Genghis Khan.

Allison was merciless when she feuded.

Fatima would regret her scorn.

Now, reading Allison’s report, Liam saw the end of Fatima Drake’s career. She wasn’t merely rude and unwise, the evidence on the state of the station showed her incompetence. She’d grown cozy with the people she’d been meant to report on. Allison hadn’t turned up evidence that Fatima was complicit in their criminal activities, but her failure to “discover” and report their activities indicated a willful blindness.

“Probably not convictable,” Allison added bluntly. “It can be dismissed as incompetence, but she’ll be reassigned.”

Until she was, however, Fatima could be a problem. Her position as the sole CSB agent on Border Station gave her significant surveillance powers and access to intelligence databases.

Unless Liam acted.

The legal situation along the Hadrian Line differed to that of the inner realm. On the border, a station was legally classified as a spaceship, which meant that as the highest ranking Navy officer in the region, Liam had the legal right to take command of it. The law that supported him was three hundred years old, but it had never been revoked.

When he’d mentioned that fact to the station’s governor, Gisela Lazaar, her attack on him for daring to detain the CC Golden Ratel, a.k.a. David Omnes’s spaceship and stooges, had spluttered to a dumbfounded halt.

Those on the station had accepted that while on patrol, Liam had the authority to order the boarding and inspection of spaceships, and the arrest of people breaking Capitoline space law.

They hadn’t understood that the same laws applied to them.

Liam had both the legal right and the military might to assume command of Border Station if the station demonstrated a breakdown in law and order. Part of Mission Camelot involved preparing for such a scenario. Whatever they faced on their return to Border Station at the end of their two and a half month patrol, Liam wanted them ready for it.

The fastest travel time between Border Station and Capitoline was four months. Most ships took closer to six. Then it would be another four months to return with any new orders or personnel. The Customs agents would push the CC Golden Ratel hard, but the RC Genghis Khan would be on its own out here for a year. Orders didn’t just have to be issued. They had to be argued about first, then preparations undertaken for the long voyage.

If David Omnes was wise, he’d use the RC Genghis Khan’s two and a half month patrol to scale back his ambitions to a form in which he could continue his criminal enterprises on the down-low, while Liam dealt with bigger issues. However, a crime boss accustomed to having the station governor in his pocket was likely to be destroyed by hubris.

Liam wasn’t averse to he and his people serving as hubris’s weapon.

A flourishing criminal empire provided a jungle in which other unsavory types could hide, including Palantine intelligence agents and their assets; people like Isaac Mstivoj who’d chased Nora Devi and her ward away from the station.

The leaders for Mission Camelot crammed into the office section of the combined office and living area of Liam’s quarters. By long-established custom and commonsense, Marine Captain Casimir Stas had the largest chair. It didn’t contain, but it managed to support, his giant, muscled body. Santiago lounged in the comfiest chair, with Claire seated upright beside him.

Completing the people gathered around Liam’s desk were Allison and Lieutenant Bryce Tyler from the Legal Corps.

“You’ve read the report,” Liam said. “At the end of the meeting you can query or request additional data from Allison. Unless it’s critical to the discussion, save those comments till then. Mission Camelot is about securing Capitoline control of its border space, which is something we’ve taken for granted. But complacency gets people killed.”

The veterans in front of him nodded or, in Casimir’s case, grunted.

Liam’s gaze didn’t as much as flicker to the safe in the back corner of his office. In it was a private message to him from Capitoline Crown Prince Francis. They had attended the Naval Academy in Laos together. Francis was capable of great loyalty, and inspired it. His confidence in his friends meant he didn’t order them into action, so much as provoke them into engaging with issues he judged significant.

When the RC Genghis Khan was assigned to the Hadrian Line, Francis had sent a secret message to Liam. “While you’re out on the border, be alert. The half-millennium mark is approaching for the Stranding, and tensions will build. Part of the sector’s founding charter was that missions to the Beta black hole would be composed of people from every solar system. We’ve heard rumors Palantine wants to go it alone. Keep an eye out for their ships or proxies or even supply bases.”

It had taken Liam months to work through the subtext of that request, or warning.

It was impossible to stumble across supply bases in the vastness of border space or in the Arcana outside it; the Arcana being the unclaimed space beyond the boundary of the Human Sector, as defined by the Hadrian Line.

However, any expedition to the Beta black hole would require a massive supply of FTL fuel cells, and fuel cells required blazsvitloium, and what was Capitoline border space if not the most likely location for the next discovery of a rare blaze ore deposit? The deposit on the uninhabitable planet Beaconpit was exhausted, but Border Station existed because of it. Where one deposit had been found, chances were high there were others the Iguanese hadn’t stripped millions of years before.

Without sufficient blaze, interstellar travel wasn’t possible, and without interstellar travel, the Human Sector would fall apart. Stranded humanity would be trapped on its six separate planets.

Could some people be working to that end? Possibly.

Alternatively, if sufficient FTL fuel cells could be amassed, along with all the other requirements for a years-long journey, then Stranded humanity had a chance of reaching the Beta black hole. If it wasn’t blocked by a Vapori lens, as their own Origin black hole was, then they might be able to enter Beta’s millrace, ride the rivers, and reconnect after half a millennium with broader humanity.

The choice was to open up or close down.

Liam knew that Francis, with his weird-for-a-prince’s belief in the goodness of existence, would optimistically choose to open their sector to others.

In a sense, it was hypothetical. But unless Liam prepared for the possibility of a Beta mission, it definitely wouldn’t happen.

“The royals aren’t popular on Border Station,” he said. “Fatima reported it, Allison confirmed it, and we experienced it in our cordial reception on the station while the inner realm reviled us for holding Crown Prince Dominic hostage. Border Station has become insular in its concerns. When we seized the CC Golden Ratel, we reminded them that the inner realm commands them, and can and will disrupt their careful, self-serving arrangements. The potential exists for the station to ally with someone else. Palantine.” It was both a clarification and a prompt as he looked expectantly at Bryce.

The space lawyer tugged at his cuffs. “By virtue of its presence in Capitoline space, Border Station is subject to Capitoline law. Theoretically, it could remove itself from our authority by employing tugs to push it over the Hadrian Line into the Arcana. In reality, the physical structure of the station is unlikely to survive the stresses of such a move. Moreover, the cost of bringing such powerful tugs out here is prohibitive.”

Bryce sat comfortably with his hands on his knees, professionally intrigued by the problem. “However, the peace accords mean that the Palantines have an equal opportunity to everyone else to take over the station economically. They could buy up properties and businesses, schmooze the right people, add negative reinforcement via criminal connections, and gradually, systematically, assume control of the station.”

Allison wrinkled her nose. “Or not. What we’re considering is the possibility of such a scenario. We’re Navy, but the unique legal situation on the Hadrian Line means we’re responsible for the station and what would be civil concerns in the inner realm. We’re not trained for this role, but somehow we’ve beaten the CSB out to Border Station—Fatima doesn’t count.”

“It’s on us,” Liam summed up. “To identify and address issues before they embed themselves in border life. As Santiago said a few weeks ago, out here, we’re sniffer dogs as well as shepherds guarding the flock.”

Santiago grinned. “And the flock includes some stupid sheep.”

“And possibly some rabid ones.” Allison stretched the metaphor to its breaking point.

“Therefore, we will prepare for three scenarios.” Liam flicked up a visual presentation of his plan on the wall screen behind him, and scooted his chair sideways so as not to block anyone’s view. “Scenario One. We return to Border Station to find it descending into lawless chaos, either from David Omnes and other criminals’ last ditch activities to establish themselves against the impending arrival of inner realm attention and authority, or from Palantine saboteurs. Casimir will take the lead in planning our response to the breakdown of law and order on the station.”

Casimir folded his massive arms. “Bryce, legal advice on Liam taking command of the station. My Marines will train for taking and holding it. Allison, key personnel on the station, who we have to trust, who we can trust, and who to replace.”

“We need allies,” Claire said. “Currently, in any scenario, we lack effective allies. Longer term, a better resourced Customs office will help. The gamble of sending them all home with the CC Golden Ratel ought to pay off. If Customs returns with more people and a cutter, they’ll be capable of doing their job policing the docks and the area around Border Station, leaving us free to concentrate on the patrols we’re tasked with.”

Allison pulled at her left earlobe. “Leaving one Customs agent on the station to monitor events from the inside would have been useful.”

“That’s what your electronic spies are for,” Santiago said.

“My eavesdropping programs are meant to supplement not—”

“Second scenario.” Liam pushed the discussion forward. “We return to news of a blaze discovery in the region, resulting in us overseeing preparations for a blaze rush.” An influx of people unprepared for border life, but dreaming of striking it rich—or appropriating some of the wealth via legal or illegal means. “These have happened before. Santiago, find precedent for the Navy’s role, but your primary purpose is to identify problems, and present solutions. Mstivoj is in the region. How big a problem is piracy in a blaze rush? Bryce, focus on the legal history. Claims, claim disputes. Not just on-station trouble. Might we be pulled in to settle disputes while on patrol?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Third scenario. Rescue.” Liam considered his next words. Francis’s message to him, and its method of delivery, implicitly demanded confidentiality. He trusted his people, but it might be a distraction rather than motivation if he linked his next scenario back to their Crown Prince. “There is a broader, Human Sector-wide scenario in which the war we just fought was but a symptom of pressures that continue to build.”

Allison rubbed her nose. Everyone else stared at Liam.

“Endless War?” Santiago asked, disbelieving. Those who knew Liam, knew he detested the theory.

On cue, Liam grimaced. “No. The doctrine of Endless War is bunkum. The Stranding didn’t define the society of the Human Sector as one perpetually on a war footing. The concept of intergenerational trauma is real, but we healed. We can argue about whether in healing we rigidly stratified society and the value or cost of that, but on the whole, our five centuries of isolation have been remarkably stable. We fight among ourselves, but we haven’t destroyed our sector. We aren’t gone like the Vapori, the Iguanese, or the Silicaese.”

He bowed his head. “But I’m tired of war, of spilling our blood, losing our lives, of war being the pressure release valve for competition and dissatisfaction.”

“Go back to the rescue scenario,” Casimir said.

Liam locked gazes with his friend. “This is its context. Pressure continues to build. Our history shows that the discovery and settlement of a new planet would release those pressures, but that hasn’t happened for centuries. If we don’t have war, there’ll be other conflicts. Out on the border, those non-military problems become ours.

“Border Station grew out of the discovery of blaze ore on Beaconpit. The planet wasn’t habitable, so the government built a station to support the ore’s extraction and processing onsite, and its trade offsite. Beaconpit is exhausted, but the fact it had blaze, means this region is considered the most promising for the next blaze discovery. That makes Border Station the base for any games competing interests aim to play regarding gaining control of blaze supply. It’s not just planetary governments. Corporations and criminal interests are involved.” He tapped the screen on his desk that displayed Allison’s report.

“I don’t have names. Fatima should have, but…” Allison clapped her hands together angrily. “Whatever scenario occurs, even the happy one of the station ticking along in its current dysfunctionally reliable manner, people we consider allies and rivals will descend on it. I expect other Navy ships as the Admiralty belatedly realizes this is a rumbling volcano. CSB will send people to replace and clean up after Fatima.”

Santiago quirked an eyebrow. “Maybe some of those people are already in place. It struck me as I read through the list of Fatima’s failings that her incompetence could provide effective cover for other, less obtrusive agents to operate unnoticed.”

Allison reached across Casimir, practically falling in his lap, to swat Santiago. “Nora Devi is not a CSB agent.”

“What?” Liam and Casimir exclaimed together. Casimir helped Allison right herself.

She smoothed her jacket. “It’s Santiago’s stupid idea. You know how the Registry Office’s record changed for Aria Kelly?” The Registry Office recorded births, deaths and marriages in Capitoline space. “Suddenly, it showed Nora Devi registered as the girl’s legal guardian.”

“Um, I didn’t know.” Bryce glanced curiously at Liam.

The entire ship’s company of the RC Genghis Khan was aware of Liam’s personal interest in Nora. Their reserved captain had been tempted to dip his toe into the dating pool. Unfortunately, all he’d gotten was a cold shower when she’d cancelled their first date and fled the station with Aria.

Allison turned to explain things to the Legal Corps officer. “Someone hacked the Registry Office database. It wasn’t an official change. It’s lucky Gaites’s alerts caught it at all. I would have set the parameters differently and missed it. The record now shows that authority for the transfer of Aria Kelly’s guardianship from the orphanage to Nora was signed off by one of the three members of the orphanage’s governing board, making it incontestable. That board member was David Omnes.”

“No way,” Bryce said.

Faint smiles appeared on the senior officers’ faces.

Santiago nodded. “Interesting, isn’t it? We’re to believe that the same bad guy who had his goons in the CC Golden Ratel chase Nora and Aria, also signed off on Nora’s guardianship of the girl before the CC Kangaroo left the station.”

Allison gritted her teeth. “Backdated hack.”

“Impressive,” Claire said, although she’d heard this before. The Registry Office was not a soft target. It couldn’t afford to be; not with its foundational role in establishing identity across the Human Sector. “Either Nora Devi has access to a highly skilled hacker or is one herself.”

“Or is a CSB agent and someone covered for her,” Santiago said.

Casimir caught Allison before she could swat Santiago again. “No,” he told her. “You did well with the report, but now you’re tired and grumpy. Sit.” He thumped Santiago’s knee, ignoring the man’s reflexive “ow”. “And you, don’t stir trouble.” He fixed a commanding gaze on Liam. “Rescue scenario?”

Tabling thoughts of Nora and the insane idea that she was a CSB agent, Liam got back on track. “When pressure builds, people justify otherwise unthinkable actions. Depending on what forces converge on Border Station they could seek to distract, disrupt or destroy it. Claire, you take the lead on this one. What is required for the station to function and to defend it? That’s the line. Pass that line and the station has to be evacuated. Plan the evacuation.”

She made a note on her comms unit. “There’ll be a guide for station evac. Outdated and fantastical. Guides always start with the dangerous assumption people are rational.”

Liam looked around. “Obviously, the scenarios and our responses to them blur. Work together. Allison’s report supplies a sense of current conditions on and around Border Station. Draft scenario responses are due one week from now. Include what we must prepare and train for.” Everyone nodded. “Questions?”

Claire answered for them. “Not now. Allison needs to sleep. That’s an order, Lieutenant. The rest of us will think on our scenarios.”

After dinner, Casimir invited himself back to Liam’s quarters. The two were friends: similar in age; dissimilar in background and temperament.

Casimir accepted a mug of coffee. “Nora’s not a spy.”

A smile pulled at Liam’s mouth. “I know. Santiago’s imagination is what fuels his curiosity. But it leads him down some strange paths.”

“He’s jealous.”

Liam blinked and put down his coffee mug. “Of what? Nora literally ran away from me. Clearly, she had reasons wrapped around Aria’s presence onboard the CC Kangaroo, but there’s nothing enviable in having your first date in over a year cancel on you.”

“Santiago doesn’t realize he’s jealous. But his personal history is with women who use him up and move on. Nora…enough of us saw her at the bazaar. She was good with the kids, which is probably why Aria trusted her above anyone else who might have headed for the Avestan Range and her parents’ wreck. If that’s where they’re going.”

The RC Genghis Khan’s last scanned sighting of them had been the CC Kangaroo aiming for the Avestan Range, with Isaac Mstivoj’s sting ship in pursuit.

Liam’s fists curled thinking of it.

“Mostly, we saw how Nora lit up around you. A strong woman willing to trust you.”

“She said we were a dream she shouldn’t have dreamed.”

Casimir toasted him with his coffee mug. “But she took that risk for you. That’s what Santiago envies.”

“Mstivoj…”

“Is a pirate,” Casimir finished. “But he doesn’t revel in killing. There are worse people who could have chased her. We stopped the CC Golden Ratel. David Omnes’s people would have been worse.”

Liam drank his coffee. “I’m tired of settling for the best of bad options.” He’d only have admitted that truth to a friend.

“That’s war. And according to your scenario briefing, we’re fighting it in a different form.”

Liam met that challenge with his own. “You read Allison’s report.”

“Which is why I agree with you. Trouble will erupt along the Hadrian Line at some point in our two year assignment. The station will inevitably be a focal point. There’s nowhere else to go out here. The question is whether we’ll have back-up available when the trouble starts.”

“For the moment, the answer is no. Some of the miners might fall in with us. The civilians…”

“Allison reckons ex-military are beginning to arrive as new settlers.”

Liam rubbed the back of his neck. “The hatchet job on my reputation might cause them to hesitate in backing our actions.”

The snap of Casimir’s empty mug hitting the table was as definite as his words. “I’ll never regret taking Crown Prince Dominic hostage. You want to talk about bad options. The others were worse.”

It was true. Destroying the RP Plymouth under the cover of battle, with Dominic onboard, had been possible. Liam had chosen to accept its captain’s surrender—disputed by Dominic—and save hundreds of lives, instead.

Liam resolutely shifted his attention from the past. “Whoever controls the supply of blaze will determine the future of the Human Sector. Without FTL fuel cells, we’re confined to our individual solar systems. Capitoline and Palantine have the resources to continue flourishing. Esquiline will struggle.”

“They’re still adding water to their atmosphere.” Casimir scratched his chin. “We’d miss the clever clogs on Quirinal, but you know, they’d miss us more. They’ve made their planet work, but it’s geologically volatile. They’ve always lived there with an escape plan.” Evacuating an entire planet meant spreading their population across the Human Sector, which required FTL travel. “Viminal has potential they’ve yet to exploit. Canny folk. They’d be fine. Maybe do better than the rest of us in isolation. Caelian would scratch by.”

Casimir didn’t parade his curiosity like Santiago, but quietly accumulated knowledge. People saw the brutality of his presence and missed his insightfulness.

Liam valued him for it.

Casimir yawned widely. “Sorry. So, some people would gain from breaking up the sector. Not news. There are always winners and losers.”

“That’s war,” Liam echoed his friend’s earlier words. “Don’t you find it strange, though, that they set our militaries and privateers squabbling over what blaze we had, rather than invest the resources spent in funding the war in search for more?” By “we” he meant Capitoline and Palantine, the two most powerful planetary realms.

Casimir flexed his massive shoulders. “I decided it was politics.” His teeth flashed in an unamused, feral grin. “By which I mean, royal egos.”

“Francis isn’t like that.”

Normally, Casimir might argue the point. He hadn’t attended the Naval Academy in Laos with Liam and Crown Prince Francis.

Casimir’s family were rugby royalty in Karachi, the polar-spanning continent where the game was almost a religion. His older brothers, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, not to mention uncles and cousins, had dominated the sport in each generation. Casimir had chosen military service over commanding the rugby field. He’d attended the Naval Academy in Karachi, graduating into twelve years of war.

Casimir stared broodingly at the safe in the back corner of Liam’s quarters. “How much of what you have us doing, the scenarios, is due to the Prince?”

An insightful friend who was guaranteed to ask the hard questions kept a leader honest.

“Francis got me thinking.”

“He aims you in the right direction, and lets you wear the consequences.”

Liam held up a hand. He’d already heard Casimir’s suspicions regarding how conveniently the smuggling problem Francis confidentially asked Liam to check on led them to engaging and defeating the RP Plymouth and capturing Crown Prince Dominic. “It’s what we do. The military serves.”

“That we do.” Casimir stood. “I have a station takeover to plan. It shouldn’t be that different to a raid. Well, the fun bit. Holding it afterward will be a pain.”

Alone in his quarters, Liam sighed. Holding on was always the problem. Holding onto his faith in good friends, like Francis. Holding onto his principles. Holding onto, preserving, the lives of the people under his command.

Doing his duty while watching his own chances at happiness disappear.

Liam crossed to his desk and the routine reports waiting for him.

Whatever Nora’s reasons for taking in Aria, he hoped a miracle kept them safe from Mstivoj.

Chapter 3

Raising a child onboard a spaceship challenged Nora in ways she hadn’t anticipated. The toughest was acquiring a second shadow.

Aria had plenty of activities to busy herself with, from schoolwork to games, with chores and crafts thrown in. But in between those activities, and sometimes in the middle of them, Aria would default to tailing Nora.

It turned out that the CC Kangaroo possessed everything except other people.

Having chosen the solitary life of a tagger, Nora had to remind herself that Aria’s need for her would lessen. It wasn’t purely for company that Aria sought her out, but for reassurance as she settled into her new life onboard the scout ship.

Nonetheless, when Jonah ambled into Nora’s workshop late one night and announced that they’d exited the hazardous fringe of the Newton plain and were in the Avestan Range, she hugged him.

After a startled moment, he hugged her back cautiously. “I didn’t realize you were so scared.”

“Scared?” She drew back, then swatted his shoulder. “I wasn’t scared. I trusted you and your kin. No, I’m relieved.”

His mouth quirked. “And the difference is…?”

“I’m relieved you can step up and keep Aria company. You did offer to supervise her education.”

“The offer stands. If you think she’ll be comfortable with it.”

Nora collapsed onto her work stool. “Yup. She needs company. She’ll treat you as a person, even though she thinks you’re the ship’s AI. She’s lonely. I told her you were fully occupied piloting for a bit, but that you’d be around in your android form when we reached a charted area of the Avestan Range.”

He dropped into the workshop’s “thinking” chair, a shabby recliner Nora kept for curling up in to think through problems.

She spun on the stool to face him. “Aria is scared at times. She chose to trust me, but I’m still a stranger to her. I’ve had to let her into the workshop so she can have time with me, which is why I’m doing the more dangerous activities late at night, while she’s asleep.”

“When we entered the fringe, you said I was as much Aria’s parent as you. That we’d both agreed to raise her to the age of sixteen. Did you mean it?” Before Nora could answer, Jonah hurried on. “You have this habit of flinging unsettling ideas as humor, and I can’t always tell if you mean them seriously, if you’re aware of how you upend my sense of self.”

“I do that?”

He grinned ruefully. “You do, and it’s good for me. I don’t know what I don’t know, including the possibilities and consequences of who I might grow to be. I’m okay with being Aria’s parent.” He exhaled, although as an android he didn’t breathe. His shoulders slumped in apparent relief at getting the statement out there.

“Have you been stewing on this the whole time you’ve been piloting?”

“Yes.”

She frowned. “I’m sorry, Jonah. You’re right. I don’t always consider what I’m saying. Although I think the idea of either of us assuming parental responsibilities is hilariously scary, I should have picked a less stressful time to share it with you. You freaked, which was why I didn’t discuss Aria again while you were busy.”

He shook his head. “You mightn’t have discussed Aria again, but my kin did. One of them made the jump that if I was parenting her then she became their niece.”

Nora’s eyes opened wide. “I thought your kin didn’t want to be involved with humanity?” She’d been shocked, but ultimately grateful for their offer to help her and Aria escape Mstivoj. Even if it had meant trusting the kin’s guidance while Jonah piloted the CC Kangaroo through the fringe of the perilous Newton plain.

“That’s what they thought, initially. But I guess we’re hungrier for connection than we realized.” He ahem’d loudly as a signal that the moment of emotional vulnerability was over. “I didn’t actually intend to discuss Aria. A few other issues were put to one side as I piloted us through the fringe.”

“I’m aware,” Nora said drily. She’d been in a holding pattern, unable to do much until they exited the fringe. It was why she hadn’t resented the time Aria claimed from her.

“The priority is a message from Mstivoj.”

She pressed the toes of her boots hard to the floor, but maintained a calm expression. “How close is he that he can send a message?” If he was close enough for a ship-to-ship comms call, he was close enough to fire on them.

“He’s not. He left a message for us at the Avestan Range mailbox before he headed back to Border Station. I picked it up on a passive scan when he did so, but only decoded it now. It was rather clever. He used a public mailbox with the assumption that anyone who could hack into and take over his spaceship could decrypt a high level security message.”

“So, others won’t know what he said to us, but they’ll know he messaged us.”

Sympathetic but rational, Jonah pointed out the obvious. “They already know he pursued us in the direction of the Avestan Range.”

“Fair point.” She braced her shoulders. “What did he threaten?”

“It’s an audio-visual recording. Come and watch it on the bridge.”

She tidied her workbench quickly. Basically, she stowed out of sight anything that might tempt Aria into meddling. “Is it bad news?”

“No.”

They climbed the ladder and crossed the night-lit lounge to enter the bridge. Once she’d settled in the captain’s chair, Jonah opened the decrypted message.

Mstivoj had recorded himself on the bridge of the CP Coyote.

A pang of mingled heartbreak and nostalgia squeezed Nora’s heart. The bridge of her husband, Ethan’s, sting ship had looked the same. It was designed for a solo pilot, and like Ethan, Mstivoj hadn’t personalized it in any way. It was a bare, functional space in which a person took death-defying decisions.

Mstivoj’s pale blue eyes were red-rimmed with tiredness. “You’re a frustrating woman, Nora Devi, but I hope you’re alive and viewing this message. Given your combat abilities…” The stress on combat referenced his deduction that Nora had fought and defeated a Palantine combat android which had been ordered to assassinate Captain Liam Kimani. “Maybe you can survive the fringe of a Newton plain. If you do, you’re likely to see me as an enemy. You’re wrong.”

He ran a hand through his raggedly-cut, black hair. “Have you considered what makes someone a villain? The simplest is when they’re your enemy. They have to be bad because otherwise they’d be good, and you’d be left in the bad guy role. But if not your enemy, what if the villain is the person set up to wear the blame for other people’s decisions?”

Nora’s hand shot out and she paused the recording. “Is he saying we should trust him?”

“I haven’t previously watched the video. Perhaps.”

“Not likely.” She huffed. “I haven’t forgotten he’s got Cherry.” She resumed the recording.

“I wasn’t sure who you were,” Mstivoj said. “But the alteration of the Registry Office record making you Aria’s guardian indicates you’re a CSB agent. Your husband died, they recruited you, and put you in place toward the end of the war. Someone in CSB saw the obvious.”

Nora froze the recording. “The obvious! Stupidhead.” She borrowed the insult from Aria. “He investigated me!”

“I suspect much of his information came from Cherry, and her knowledge of you is limited. You’re not actually a CSB agent. And I was the one who altered the Registry Office record.” Jonah restarted the recording. Waiting for Nora to get over her outrage would take too long.

“The future will be decided by those who have blaze.” Mstivoj coughed. “Advice is like kicks—better given than received—but listen to me anyway. If Aria leads you to a blaze discovery, don’t give it to Capitoline or Palantine.”

“Huh.”

“I didn’t expect that,” Jonah muttered.

On-screen, Mstivoj remained expressionless. “If you can find the star path that everyone ignores, I think you have the background to value it.”

Nora kicked the base of her chair. “What does that mean?”

“Even the recklessly stupid shouldn’t go into the darkness without a blessing. Stars guide you and the child home, Nora Devi.” On-screen, Mstivoj vanished.

Cherry appeared.

“Hi, Nora. I guess you’ll think Zac is dictating what I say. He’s not. He could be being tricky and treating me right so that I’ll tell you he’s an okay guy…” She leaned toward the camera. “If Keith was like him, I wouldn’t have had to come out to the border.”

Mstivoj in the role of big brother? Nora blinked, stunned.

Cherry sat back. “I thought about what I wanted to tell you if you do get this message—once I got over you taking in a strange kid when you pushed me away.

“Being stupid enough to open my big mouth and tell Zac I’m Forgotten, that’s on me. But telling him we’re sisters and you’re Forgotten, too, wasn’t my secret to spill. I got drunk. I’m sorry, Nora. Whatever it is you’re involved in, I get that you were trying to protect me by pushing me away. I screwed that up. Just forget about me, okay? That’s the best I can do to make this up to you. I won’t think of you as my sister anymore. Don’t think about me, either. Do what you have to do for you, and maybe for the kid.”

She smiled. If the smile was forced and failed to meet her eyes, it was nonetheless resolute. Cherry had grown up. “I’ll be fine with Zac and wherever he drops me off.”

The message ended.

Nora scowled. The scowl didn’t ease any of the pain she felt in her chest at Cherry’s message. “I don’t get it. What was so important that Mstivoj had to encrypt this message for me? Star paths are Silicaese routes. We’ve found frustratingly few inscriptions that include them.”

“Maybe we can tease more meaning out of his use of ‘star paths’, but he seemed to select his words carefully in case someone did crack his message. He might be hinting at the issues we started to discuss before we entered the fringe. Remember how I said there were complications back on Border Station?”

Nora pressed her fingers to her temples, while she tried to breathe in calm and expel frustration and other unhelpful emotions. “Yes, but we were leaving them behind.”

“When we departed Border Station, we thought we were burning your original identity. I changed the immediate legal necessity for that when I altered Aria’s Registry Office record to place her as your ward. That eliminated kidnapping charges being brought against you.”

“Unless someone other than Mstivoj discovers your hack. Then those charges will be added to a kidnapping offence.”

“Pfft.” He waved aside her concern. “Who would be looking? For us, it means you don’t have to sell the location of the blaze deposit on the black market. And really the black market is somewhat of a fiction. Governments and businesses play in it as readily as anyone else. You might sell the location of the blaze deposit on the black market, but ultimately one of the planetary realms will control the actual supply of it, whether directly via their government, or through their business or criminal groups.”

He stalled. “There is another group, though they can’t pay as much.”

“Who?”

“Those who don’t operate within the system, who desire to break it.”

She massaged her temples. “Criminals—”

“No, criminals use the system. Subvert it if they’re ambitious enough, but they don’t destroy it. These people are unaligned with planetary realm interests.

“Pirates are criminals,” Nora reasoned out loud, trying to guess who Jonah meant by the process of elimination. “Terrorists don’t need blaze. They can blow things up just fine without it.”

“Cynic. But I am talking about one faction of rebels.”

She squinted at him. “If you’re going to suggest there’s a hidden colony of Forgotten, don’t. Your heroic triumph over the fringe of a Newton plain is already enough like a space melodrama. Secret societies—” She choked at Jonah’s awkward grimace.

“You know my kin and I passively observe everything in the sector. This group is exceedingly cautious about committing anything to the communications systems. But we’ve picked up hints.”

“And you’ve put these hints together with Mstivoj’s star path hint and come up with what?”

“A possibility. For some people, fighting a war increases their patriotism. They’ve lost so much, so many, that they don’t dare entertain the thought that it wasn’t worth it. Others are the opposite and become completely disenchanted.”

Nora slowly finished his thought. “They want to break the system. You suspect Mstivoj might be one of those and playing a deep game.”

“Yes. He might have left the message he did in the hope that since you and Cherry grew up in the towers of Angkor, you’d suffered the worst of the current social structure and would be open to the idea of destroying it.”

“Holy hells.” There was several minutes of silence before Nora shook herself out of her thoughts. Old memories of the towers and their horrors could suck hours out of a day, and it was already late at night. “I promised Aria money and a new start.”

“What you really promised her was that you’d keep her safe.”

Nora smiled wryly. “Humans focus on money.”

“If it’s needed, there are other blaze deposits. I watched the Silicaese survey the sector. My kin and I can point you at a blaze deposit.”

“The things you know…” She sighed. “Knowledge is a burden in itself. You probably know the locations of undiscovered human-habitable planets.”

“Yes.”

She nodded at having a suspicion she’d held for months, confirmed. “Let’s not think about that can of worms right now.” It was the kind of information that could redefine the balance of power in the Human Sector.

He laughed. “Can of worms, can of opportunity. But I agree. We have time till we reach the CC Marmot. It is like eating an elephant. We will discuss our problems and opportunities one bite at a time.”

Retreating to her cabin and bed, Nora shivered. By himself, Jonah had the ability to fundamentally alter the future of the Human Sector. Even scarier, he was relying on her values and desires to use his knowledge wisely. “We’re doomed,” she whispered with semi-hysterical, ironic foreboding.

But a glance at Aria’s cabin reminded her of why they had to face the challenge.

As parents, Nora and Jonah’s responsibility for the future now had a name. It was spelled out in pastel glitter on the kid’s door.

“Aria.”

The fabricator had produced a lifesuit for Aria. It was far more basic than Nora’s, which was rated for survival on an icy sulfuric planet such as those the Silicaese had settled, and which Nora had helped xeno-archaeological teams to explore. But the basic lifesuit would keep Aria alive when they crossed to her parents’ wrecked mining barge in the next few minutes.

Nora and Jonah had worked with Aria to limit their time and movement on the barge. First, they would collect the paper map showing the route to the blaze ore deposit, then Aria could collect three mementos. Her most important treasures had accompanied her to the spacer kids’ boarding school when her parents had departed on their final voyage. Those treasured items had gone with her to the orphanage when the school fees her parents had paid ran out. Then, she’d had to leave them behind when she’d fled with Nora from David Omnes and others’ interest in the secret of her parents’ blaze discovery.

The map was hidden under a narrow strip of the floor of the passage to the cabins of the CC Marmot. According to Aria, it should be midway between the door to her cabin and that of her parents’. “You have to press the wall edge of the lift-out section twice, then the inner edge once. Then it’ll pop up. Mom liked tricks like that.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Nora checked one final time before she and Aria entered the docking connection to the wreck of the CC Marmot. “You could stay here. You might want to remember the barge as it was before.” When your parents were alive.

“I have to find the map. They left it for me.”

“All right. Remember, though, if I give the order to scoot back to the Roo, you move your butt.”

“I will.”

It was a terrible experience to lead a child into the dark, cold, gravity-less expanse of a wrecked spaceship. Nora could add light, but she couldn’t remove the knowledge that Aria’s parents had been murdered on the bridge of the barge.

Fortunately, on entering, their planned route took them in the other direction, to the cabins.

Aria used her mag-clamp boots with the natural ease of a space-raised child. She kept bumping into Nora’s back, wanting to go faster.

Nora went first, in case there was trouble.

“It’s here.” Aria crouched and tapped the floor. The panel lifted up as easily as she’d described. Aria drew out a scrap of paper. “It’s not the map. There is no map.” She held the note out to Nora with a shaking hand. “It’s Mom’s writing.”

Nora took the note and read it aloud. “‘Sorry, baby girl. Be free of this. We destroyed the map when the Marmot was shot. Dad and I love you. Be good. Be happy. Chase your own dreams. Love you forever, Mom and Dad.’”

I should have waited to read it, Nora realized belatedly.

Aria was crying in her lifesuit, which was far from ideal.

Thanks to the absence of gravity, Nora effortlessly picked the girl up, but carrying her back through the docking connection was awkward.

Jonah had been monitoring them via Nora’s helmet feed. He met them on the stores deck in the first chamber with atmosphere and folded Aria into a tight hug.

“I’ll fetch her things.” Nora ducked back through the connection to the wreck. She moved fast but surely. The patched teddy bear Aria had listed as one of her three mementoes lay tumbled among the stripped bedding of her bunk. Someone had cursorily searched the ship.

Liam had reported on locating the ship that it had been stripped of supplies. Perhaps that ransacking had hidden from him that the people who’d wrecked the CC Marmot and killed the Kellys had also been searching for something.

They’d probably hoped to find a data stick with the blaze deposit’s location.

Teddy bear in hand, Nora discovered that the searchers had torn into Aria’s parents’ cabin. The Bible Aria had wanted to remember her dad by was on the floor. A hasty riffle through it showed they hadn’t ripped out pages. The notes Aria remembered him writing in the blank back pages were still there.

Putting the Bible and bear on the stripped bunk, Nora hunted for the penknife Aria wanted to remember her mom by. Nora didn’t search for long. A penknife was the type of souvenir criminals pocketed. Instead, she picked up the silver photo frame and the photo pulled out of it that would have stood on the shelf nearest the bunk. It was a family photo. That and a chunky cardigan that offered warmth and possibly her mom’s scent was the best Nora could substitute for the penknife.

She wanted out of this wreck, which felt like a floating grave. Nonetheless, she halted at the door of the cabin. “I’ll look after your girl. Aria isn’t alone.”

Back onboard the CC Kangaroo, Nora hurriedly divested herself of the lifesuit. She pulled a flannel shirt and jeans over her underclothes before climbing barefoot up the ladder to the bridge and living quarters deck. Its familiar light and warmth were welcome.

Aria curled up, still in her lifesuit, on the sofa was less so.

Jonah looked on helplessly. “I’ll disconnect from the CC Marmot.” He gestured at Aria. Comfort her.

The girl was a silent, huddled lump of misery.

Nora put the Bible on the coffee table, using it to anchor the note Aria’s mom had left for her. She propped the teddy bear against it before setting down the cardigan and the Kellys’ family photo in its silver frame.

Aria ignored the salvaged treasures. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“The map wasn’t there.”

Nora wasn’t sure if the Kellys’ had done the right thing in destroying the map. They’d been in a crisis situation, and they had taken time to leave a message for their daughter. They had expected—hoped—she’d come searching for the map. Had they thought she’d do so in enemy hands?

“I need the map to pay you,” Aria wailed.

Nora left her to grab a box of tissues from the kitchen. She shoved them at Aria. “There was always a risk the map wouldn’t be there. Our deal holds. You’re ours—mine,” she corrected herself. Aria didn’t know Jonah was a person. “For the next six years.”

“But I can’t pay you! How will we buy new IDs? How can you afford to keep me?”

“You’re not that expensive.”

The humorous comment won her a glare. Finished blowing her nose, Aria wriggled out of her lifesuit.

“Clothes in your cabin. Tissues in the bin.” Some parts of parenting were simple commonsense. Also, Nora subscribed to the anything-is-better-if-you-do-something school of recovery.

Aria gathered up her used tissues and lifesuit, plus boots, and trudged off.

Nora gave her time to reach her cabin before getting up and making hot chocolate.

The absence of the map reinforced that she and Jonah had to decide their course of action. They couldn’t drift any longer. They had to choose their future. But that discussion came second to Aria’s emotional crisis. Nora expected Jonah would stay on the bridge till she and Aria had talked, but he’d be listening.

In spite of Nora’s dislike of surveillance and privacy intrusions, to keep their secrets and Aria safe on the CC Kangaroo, Nora had installed a system that allowed her to monitor the girl in communal spaces if required. Primarily, if she needed to keep an inquisitive child from eavesdropping.

Aria returned wearing a sky-blue sweatshirt and pink sweatpants. She slumped at the kitchen table. “Why?”

“Pardon?” Nora added marshmallows to their mugs, and sprinkles.

“Why did you take me in and have bad people chase you when you thought that maybe the map wouldn’t be there?”

A sweet treat helped counter sour thoughts. Nora put the girl’s mug in front of her and sipped from her own. The deepest, truest answer to Aria’s question was one Nora would never share with her. It had taken Nora days to accept it herself.

Because I spent most of my life hiding from someone far more powerful than David Omnes and his thugs. I couldn’t stand by and watch you wrecked as I could have been. If they’d caught me, they’d have destroyed me to indulge their hate.

Aloud, she gave a different, but nonetheless honest answer. “Because adults look after children, but on Border Station there was no one who would have or could have gone against David Omnes and whoever else to save you. Running was your only option.” Even Liam couldn’t have intervened. As a battlecruiser captain, his duty to it and the ship’s patrols took precedence, and took him away from the station.

A melting marshmallow stuck to Aria’s upper lip. It didn’t detract from the cynicism of her scowl. “People don’t do things like that.”

“Some of us do.” The weight of her own childhood in the towers of Angkor could have held Nora back forever. She could have gotten stuck in the muck of it and lived pessimistically. Ethan had saved her.

Her husband would have laughed at the idea. Ethan had admired her independence and the flare of her courage and defiance of circumstances. He’d been the first person to love her, and in loving her passionately, he’d convinced her she was worth loving.

One person could change the trajectory of another person’s life.

Arguably, now was not the time to present Aria with Nora’s own hard-won life wisdom, but leaving the girl to hug her anger and suspicion wasn’t healthy either. Traumatic events were prime occasions for establishing new, destructive patterns—or encouraging resilience.

“People give what they can survive giving. You know those green uniforms you had to wear at the orphanage and how people called you froggies?”

A sullen pout said Aria remembered vividly.

Nora contemplated the hot chocolate she no longer felt like drinking. The lesson of acceptance she was about to share with Aria had been bitterly learned. “Maybe some of the kids called you froggies because they didn’t know any better. But the adults who did that are people so locked up in their own fear, all curled up and afraid of the future, that they couldn’t survive giving you even a tiny bit of kindness and respect. As orphans, you were a visible reminder that fate twists. It ruins plans and steals lives.”

“And maps,” Aria said.

Nora smiled. “And maps.”

Aria gulped some of her hot chocolate. “That’s why you’re not mad at me. Because you know fate twists.”

Was that the lesson I meant to give her? Nora shrugged. Close enough. “I know we all do the best we can, and for some people, their best is pretty ratty.” She decided to change the subject. “You want to check what I grabbed? I couldn’t find your mom’s penknife, but I picked up a cardigan that’ll swamp you now, but you can snuggle with, along with a photo and your dad’s Bible. They’re on the coffee table.”

Aria departed the kitchen slowly, half-reluctant to investigate. “You found Eddy Ears.”

“Is that the bear’s name?”

“Yes.” Aria cuddled the bear, but didn’t touch anything else.

Nora waited her out, sitting at the kitchen table with the hot chocolate cooling. Then she rose and rinsed out the two mugs.

As if Nora’s movement was a signal, Aria scooped up the rest of her mementos and vanished with them into her cabin.

She took the tissue box, as well.

Leaving Aria to her grief, Nora entered the bridge.

“I heard,” Jonah said. “You’ll get an alert if she leaves her cabin. You can be there for her.”

“I’m not used to ‘being there’ for anyone.”

Choosing to work as a tagger along the Hadrian Line was a clear signal that Nora had been one of those people who’d decided she couldn’t survive giving any more of herself. Jonah’s intrusion into her life had forced her to reassess that self-perception. She couldn’t convince herself of her non-involvement in society when she’d fought a combat android to save Liam—although that had also been about saving herself and Jonah’s android appearance from suspicion.

One bad android could color people’s reaction to all other androids and whoever owned them.

In fact, it was people’s irrational but fervently expressed opinions that created her current problem.

Jonah put it succinctly. “People won’t accept that Aria doesn’t know the location of her parents’ discovery of blaze, not now that you flew toward the Avestan Range with her onboard.”

The bridge wasn’t big enough for Nora to pace. She dropped into the captain’s chair. “Which leaves us with two options. Either we run and hide, as we originally intended, and somehow pay for a new identity.”

Jonah coughed. “Ahem. Or rather than pay, I hack the relevant systems and establish new identities for you, Aria and the CC Kangaroo.”

“Yup. Or Option B, we return to Border Station. It’s a high risk option. Mstivoj still has leverage over me because he knows I’m Forgotten.”

A whistling sigh from Jonah prefaced more bad news. “Mstivoj is the least of the threats we face. In fact, he may have been genuine in his warning that he could protect Aria better than us, and that he needs to.”

She frowned. “That’s not…I didn’t expect you to say that.”

“Discovering the truth of how Aria’s parents died took me a while. It wasn’t high priority. Our survival was.” True. Navigating them through the fringe of the Newton plain had taken most of his attention. “My kin and I don’t hold onto all the data we capture. If humanity had evolved in the region, then yes, our core imperative from the Vapori to observe the evolution of organic life to sentience would have compelled us to record every aspect of your activity. But with you being incomers, we can choose where we give our attention. As we did with the Silicaese. I had to piece together the story around the Kellys’ encounter with their killers. I haven’t been able to complete the picture of who the Kellys communicated with regarding selling their blaze discovery.”

“Aria said it was the Duke of Ontario, the Palantine Queen’s brother.”

Jonah tipped his head side-to-side in a gesture that said, I’m considering that statement, but I’m unconvinced. “I have tracked down evidence of Aria’s mom being in contact with a textiles and clothing importer from Palantine, who in turn, has contacts with both David Omnes and other criminal figures on Border Station as well as with the Palantine Intelligence agent embedded there under cover as a piano teacher.”

That final fact startled Nora. “A piano teacher? Really?”

“Personal instruction is a status symbol. It says the student can afford to employ a person rather than a digital tutor. For a spy, the role of a teacher who visits their students’ homes and has them visit hers must be useful.”

“I hadn’t ever thought…maybe Aria should learn a musical instrument? Liam plays the guitar.” Nora shook her head free of thoughts of Liam. “Did you discover if the importer Aria’s mom spoke with is in the Duke’s pay or the PIA’s?”

“Or both, plus David Omnes’s?” Jonah asked sardonically. “I’m unsure. What I found disturbing was the timing of the attack on the Kellys.”

Nora agreed. “There’s been no report of a new blaze discovery and you said there are no spaceships around the planet where the Kellys found it. All of which suggests the Kellys were attacked before they reached the blaze deposit where they were meant to grab a sample. If the Duke’s agent had sent someone to follow the Kellys and protect his future investment, they’d have waited till the Kellys led them to it.”

“Exactly. It’s possible, but unlikely in the extreme, that the Kellys were attacked by people with no awareness of who they were. Just meeting another ship in the wilds of the Avestan Range is highly improbable.”

She nudged his foot. “Unless a sneaky AI guides you into crossing paths with a battlecruiser.” She referenced their meeting with the RC Genghis Khan when she and Jonah were still learning to trust each other. “But I take your point. Someone killed the Kellys before they could share the location of their blaze discovery. The question, then, is why would someone throw away a chance at that much money?”

“The only answer I can come up with is that adding to the supply of blaze, and hence, FTL capable fuel cells, in the Human Sector would cost this group more than they’d gain. In which case,” he drew out the words. “They’re likely to come after us to ensure that if Aria does know the location of her parents’ blaze deposit, we don’t get a chance to exploit it.”

Nora stood. Instead of pacing, she gripped the back of her chair and swung it fractionally side-to-side. “That threat against us ends if we register a blaze claim with the Department of Space.”

“Yes. Moreover, with the wealth from a blaze discovery, you’d be able to buy yourself protection. Lawyers, bodyguards, politicians.”

“I dig your cynicism. ‘Friendly’ politicians, those susceptible to bribes, can be useful.”

“On Border Station you’d also have incorruptible allies such as Liam and others from the RC Genghis Khan.” He continued as she froze. “I like Border Station as our base of operations. It has a small population center, and one ultimately dependent on technology for its existence, which means my hacking ability is most useful there rather than on a planet where variables are greater.”

“You would have to supply the location of a blaze deposit to replace the Kellys’ destroyed map.”

He smiled. “Easy enough.”

She squeezed the back of the chair. “It still weirds me out to think that you observed as living, functioning settlements, the Silicaese ruins that I’ve dug up as a xeno-archaeologist.”

“The Vapori designed me with their own distinct sense of time and timescales. In my opinion, reporting a blaze deposit is our best option. People will assume it is the Kellys’ find. They’ll stop chasing Aria and you for it, and we’ll have time, in the isolated safety of Border Station, to work out what games are being played regarding blaze.”

Nora’s toes curled. “It’s the opposite of hiding, which has always been my default strategy for survival. Don’t attract attention.”

“I don’t want to convince you to do something you’re uncomfortable with…” He let the sentence trail off because this was what he considered her best option.

She stared at his gray, android face; handsome and other.

He was even stranger than he appeared, being the embodiment of a previously mostly energetic rather than physical artificial intelligence. He’d sacrificed who he was with no guarantee of who he’d become.

That sort of courage shamed her into considering her own choices. It introduced doubt about the wisdom of moldering in old patterns. And doubt opened the door to change.

In life you could stifle doubt. You buried it as complaints or dissatisfaction when you didn’t believe you could change anything. But if you could change things, then doubt became an invitation to do so. Rather than being crippling or a sign of lacking self-confidence, doubt served as a test of conviction. Who are you? What is your life worth?

Nora reached out and clasped Jonah’s hand. “If you don’t mind giving up a blaze deposit…”

He blew a raspberry. “The knowledge is nothing to me.”

“We’ll return to Border Station.”

He pulled her into a friendly hug. “It might be a fight, but I believe it’s better than you losing who you are.”

She wouldn’t be creating a new identity. She’d be strengthening her existing one. “We’ll have to plan what we wish to achieve and how we want to live. Analyze threats and opportunities.” Nervous excitement flooded her body. Maybe she could have a second chance at a date with Liam, and she wouldn’t lose friends and family back on Capitoline.

Jonah joined in the generalized, anticipatory planning. “We have time to consider our situation and devise solutions to our problems before we return to Border Station. Also, not to brag, but we have an edge not just from my hacking, but because my kin and I know what’s happening across the region. We won’t be blindsided by events in the inner realm or caught off-guard by newcomers to the station.”

“We can do this,” Nora said.

He laughed. “We’re going to rock the Hadrian Line.”

Chapter 4

Nora had raided her scrap bins for a workshop project for Aria.

“Workshop project” was Aria’s term for any activity she could do beside Nora at the workbench. “And not wool or paper or crafty stuff.”

Nora had learned that those types of projects were for scattering across the lounge. She was surprised that living in the orphanage hadn’t taught Aria the value of picking up after herself, or perhaps Aria had discarded the lesson and reverted to lazy habits now that she lived on a spaceship again. She cleaned up without grumbling when Nora reminded her, but in the orphanage, as in Nora’s foster mom’s apartment in the towers of Angkor, if Aria had left her belongings out, they’d have been stolen. Growing up with that experience had indelibly marked Nora with the need to stow everything away securely. Tidiness was merely a byproduct of protecting her belongings.

In the workshop, she’d marked a section to be purely Aria’s. The rule was that the girl couldn’t touch anything outside of it. However, Nora wouldn’t nag her about the mess she created inside it. Currently, slivers and snips of foil lay everywhere as Aria rolled and threaded beads to make a bracelet.

The foil came from the container of unsorted junk Nora had bought on Timor. She hadn’t had time to scavenge it so far this trip, but fortunately supplies like the foil were available from her earlier forays into the adjacent cargo hold where the container occupied an atmosphere-free space. Equally fortunately, Nora had already sterilized everything in her scrap bins, meaning as long as the scrap pieces were safe for Aria’s low skill level, they were safe for the girl to play with.

She might even be able to sell her bracelets at the bazaar on Border Station.

While Aria worked on her bracelets and Nora fiddled with the clockwork mechanism for a brass music box, Jonah sat in seeming idleness. In truth, he was undoubtedly scanning the Human Sector for relevant data or communicating with his kin, but to an uninformed observer, he was at rest.

It had been a fraught few days since Aria had discovered her mom’s note and the absence of the expected blaze treasure map.

She still struggled with Nora’s solution to the problem. As she rolled blue foil into a bead, Aria peeked at Nora. “I want to learn about tagging.”

Nora pressed her toes hard to the floor to control her frustration. “Aria, you don’t owe me anything. We’ve been over this a million times. There is no debt between us. I don’t take debts from children.”

“I know it’s not like I’ll find another blaze deposit—and you’ve said it won’t be safe for me to search for my parents’ because people’ll be watching. Bu-uut…”

“But what?” Jonah prompted while Nora muttered under her breath about stubborn brats who didn’t listen.

“Maybe I could find a Silicaese site for Nora to explore.”

Aria had been dreaming up outlandish methods of repaying Nora ever since Nora had explained that she possessed the location of an unrecorded blaze deposit, and that she’d collect a sample from it before returning to Border Station to register a claim with the Department of Space.

By allowing people to assume the blaze deposit was the Kellys’ discovery, those wanting it would lose interest in Aria.

The girl had asked a very pertinent question. “If you discovered blaze, why haven’t you registered it already?”

Despite how much she hated lying, Nora had been forced to fudge the truth so as to hide Jonah’s role in the blaze discovery. “It was money in the bank. Because I hadn’t told anyone about the discovery, it was something I could use when and how I wanted. I had no immediate need for it.” She refrained from burdening Aria with the worry of how many problems would accompany the level of wealth a blaze ore claim granted.

She and Jonah were devising a strategy to handle Nora’s new status.

“A Silicaese site, hmm?” Jonah braced his hands on his knees. “I’ll add some xeno-archaeological courses to your curriculum.”

Suddenly, Aria was all kid again; no longer concerned about adult debts. “Noooooo. Not more courses.”

“A busy brain is a happy brain.”

It was Aria’s turn to mutter under her breath. “Only an AI would think that.”

“A tagger’s lifestyle is somewhat similar to an independent miner’s, like your parents.” Nora tested the tension of the spring that would power the music box. “Being out alone in space for long stretches of time, it’s good to keep your mind busy as well as your body.”

“You don’t study.”

“Not formally. But I read and listen to talks. I stay curious about the world.”

“And you talk to Jonah.”

Nora looked away from her clockwork project. “Huh?”

“Jonah knows lots. I listen at night when you talk to him about ‘everything and nothing’.”

“Everything and nothing?”

Jonah explained. “It’s how I described our philosophical discussions.” Those were their after-dinner conversations in the kitchen or lounge while Aria watched child-friendly entertainment on the lounge screen.

“I hadn’t realized you were listening.” Chatting with Jonah in the evening was Nora’s compromise for the two hours before Aria’s bedtime. Nora was present, which meant Aria had human company, but at the same time, talking with Jonah saved Nora’s brain from rotting due to exposure to tween-targeted programs.

Aria shrugged one sherbet-orange sweater-clad shoulder. “If the episode is boring, I do.”

The casual confession confirmed the necessity of Nora’s precautions to ensure the girl didn’t hear anything she shouldn’t regarding Jonah’s true nature. When Aria had come onboard, she’d seemed determined and brave, but not outstanding.

The weeks since had revealed the truth.

Aria was smart. Not in the sense of being a genius, but she was curious and alive to opportunities. Back on Border Station, she’d hidden that aspect of herself.

Nora recognized the survival strategy as she’d used it herself in her childhood in the towers. When you were vulnerable, going unnoticed was a small cloak of protection you could pull around yourself. Don’t stand out. Hide your intelligence. Conceal the spark that others would seek to exploit.

Even as an adult, Nora had been hiding. She still wasn’t sure how they’d handle Mstivoj and his knowledge of her Forgotten status. Could blaze wealth really protect her from being scooped up by the royals for breeding purposes?

Does Mstivoj truly think I’m a Capitoline intelligence agent? And if he does, what does that say about his view of the games being played on Border Station?

Could they leverage Mstivoj’s knowledge of Palantine’s interest in Border Station to advance their own concerns?

Thanks to Jonah’s passive scanning of the region, they’d learned that Mstivoj had returned Cherry to Border Station. She was now the public face of his newly registered company, Realm Edge Security. While Cherry oversaw the renovation of a combined office and accommodation building on the edge of David Omnes’s crime district, Mstivoj had departed in the direction of the Erythraean Valley. The fact that the refit of the building included the installation of an armory and the expansion of a gym space confirmed that Mstivoj’s “legitimate” business would lean on his background as a privateer.

If Mstivoj is going into the security business, what’s his purpose? He’ll be a Palantine former pirate in Capitoline space. Not wise, even on the border.

The tiny wire Nora was testing snapped. The recoil stung. Nora had taken off her gloves for the fiddly work. She sucked on her injured finger to soothe it.

“Ouchy. Don’t worry. You can talk in front of me,” Aria said confidently. “I won’t tell anyone your secrets.”

Despite Aria’s promise, difficult conversations were saved for when she was guaranteed to be out of earshot. The bridge had become the place for them. Nora and Jonah gravitated there naturally. Not only was it where the ship was piloted, but it had the best array of screens if Jonah wished to show her anything. Plus, they always shut the hatch, which guaranteed they couldn’t be overheard.

Jonah kicked back in his seat, lounging as stagily as an action movie star.

Nora braced herself. The more exaggerated Jonah’s relaxation, the greater the probability of him ambushing her with a confounding issue.

“Aria’s interested in xeno-archaeology.”

“Kids go through fads,” Nora said dismissively. She’d read that pearl of wisdom in a parenting book. Parenting books were scary. An astounding number of things could go wrong with a child. Raising children hadn’t seemed so challenging in the towers. Nora’s foster ma had flung food and, occasionally, clothing at them, and they’d raised themselves.

With varying success, Nora was willing to concede. There were a number of things wrong with the towers, and not all of them were due to the inequality of the government system. Some children grew up emotionally stunted or twisted. Violence had been the solution to too many problems.

Jonah hummed agreement with Nora’s statement. “But xeno-archaeology is more than a fad with you. You spent years getting your degree.”

If he desired a story from her past, she’d oblige. “Initially, when Ethan got me a job as a maintenance technician with the dig on Diyu I thought it was odd but sweet of him. He had military contacts from his work as a stinger pilot, and the military funded the Silicaese digs, hoping for the discovery of star paths.

“I was already doing maintenance work at a food processing plant. I was a nameless number in a routine job, but food factories stay on-planet, you’re fed, and life could have been worse. Ethan offered me something different. He flicked me a message about the opportunity after he met the Diyu team on a military refueling station, and talked me up.”

She tapped her toes against the floor. “I think I was their good deed. They’d hire a kid from the towers and feel all supportive of the disadvantaged. The weird thing was, I fitted in. It turned out that surviving out there,” she waved a hand at the vast emptiness of space, “was a whole lot like life in the towers. Space is big, but spaceships aren’t. Xeno-archaeological digs are defined by limited supplies and limited space crowded with people you either coax into alliance or compete disastrously with.”

“You had people skills as well as tech skills.”

“And I’m adaptable. It was Tadj, the dig director, who pushed me to consider a degree in xeno-archaeology. Course unit by course unit. People on the team would help me.” She stared at her hands; turned them palms upward and flexed her fingers. “I was always confident in my work with machines and I adjusted to the fieldwork, lumbering around in lifesuits. I got better. I learned to move smoothly on freezing sulfuric planets. It was the academic, theoretical work I resented.”

“Why?”

A rueful grin tugged at her mouth. “Some of the dig team blamed failings in my educational background, but since then, since choosing to be a tagger, I’ve come to think it was simpler than that. I resented having to justify my curiosity.”

Jonah straightened from his slouch.

“Xeno-archaeology as a discipline is about arguing competing ideas until a generally agreed narrative takes shape. New discoveries are incorporated into existing narratives or arguments. I didn’t see why I had to rehash old, resolved arguments. Nor why my finds would be used by other, more privileged academics who’d never had to risk their lives on a space dig, but who would shape the story of the past because their voices are counted as worth more than mine.”

She swallowed, uncomfortably aware that her hands had curled into fists. Usually, her telltale expression of nerves was hidden in her boots as fidgety toes. She coughed. “I guess I hold more resentment than I realized.”

“You became a tagger on the Hadrian Line, rejecting life in the inner realm, for more than one reason.”

She thought she’d been choosing a life which let her hide or run away if her status as a Forgotten was ever revealed. But she’d also been running from a life which squashed her. Angkorran tower rats could make themselves useful, could be pet projects for encouragement, but they could never be allowed to advance too far.

In the rigidly stratified Human Sector, everyone had to know their place. They were even taught to be grateful for it.

She stared at the screen that showed their progress through the Avestan Range. Within the week they’d reach the planet Jonah had identified as containing blazsvitloium. She’d don her lifesuit and grab samples. They could be back at Border Station and registering the claim in two months. The planet Jonah had identified was surprisingly close to the edge of the range. It was also close to one of the dust clouds that framed it. Mining barges would have to travel carefully; as the CC Kangaroo was doing.

Nora refocused on Jonah. “I marked all the changes in my life, like the decision to attack the combat android rather than run and hide, as starting from you coming onboard, but that’s a false burden to put on your shoulders, isn’t it? I’ve been resisting the system for a long time. Switching from passive to active resistance, fighting it, was always the trajectory of my life.”

“Perhaps.” He smiled crookedly. Jonah was always careful not to make his android body’s actions overly perfect. “I wasn’t pushing you toward that epiphany.”

She laughed. “What were you pushing me toward?”

“A discussion about the Silicaese. No.” He gripped the arms of his chair hard. “They’re the symptom, not the problem.”

She leaned across and put a hand over the warm metal of his. It no longer felt odd to her.

Jonah was a person. This was his body.

He turned his hand to clasp hers. “You never ask me about the distant past, about what I observed for hundreds of thousands of years. You’re barely accepting of the blaze deposit required for Aria’s security.”

“I’m grateful for it, Jonah.” But she pulled her hand free of his to stand restlessly. “I guess I’m like Aria. She said it to me. It’s too much money. It makes me itchy. You’re literally handing me a fortune by giving me information the Silicaese collected. I don’t want to take advantage of you, not for money nor to indulge my curiosity about the past.”

“It’s not taking advantage if I offer.” He distracted himself for a few seconds, studying the screens. “I didn’t bring it up because I expect gratitude, either.” There was a longer, uncertain pause before he resolutely squared his shoulders. “I wish to be all of me. That doesn’t mean you have to interact with all of me. If me being that old or alien weirds you out, I’m okay with being android-Jonah with you.”

Nora grabbed his hand. “No.”

He stood. “It would be okay. People selectively share aspects of themselves with others. I know enough of who I am and who I wish to be that I won’t limit myself by ignoring who I was before I gained a body and, with it, the ability to affect the world. The part of me that was a Vapori AI locked into passive observation still exists. I’m inviting you to choose to interact or ignore that part of me.”

Ashamed and anxious, she shook his arm.

Jonah was both young and ancient, and she hadn’t given enough thought to the difficulty of his personal journey, and he’d noticed. He was telling her she didn’t have to walk the challenging bits with him; the ones where what he knew could change reality now.

Their joined hands swung between them as she concentrated on his face and the micro expressions he permitted himself to display. “I’m a bad friend if you feel you have to hide any part of yourself.”

“You’re an excellent friend, but you’re trying to respect a fenced off area in me that isn’t fenced off to you.”

“Just to check, you’re talking about all the things you know as an AI?”

He squeezed her hand in what seemed to be an unconscious gesture. “Yes.”

His trust was a massive burden. They’d had a discussion once about the power of knowledge. He was explicitly offering to share with her the responsibility for how who he was and what he knew could change the Human Sector.

She hugged him. “Thank you for your trust. I want to be an all-of-you friend.” Even if in accepting every part of him, she had to recognize her role as a player in the game of shaping the future.

It was worth it. And they didn’t have to use his knowledge.

A couple of years ago, she’d questioned how you could claim to understand ancient aliens without first understanding ancient human thought. Didn’t the mind have to train to stretch across the distance of time? Yet, the study of ancient philosophers, such as Confucius or Socrates, wasn’t included in any course of xeno-archaeology. Once she had weeks alone on the CC Kangaroo, she’d begun reading ancient philosophical texts, in translation, with commentary.

As Jonah hugged her back and released her, she asked if he’d heard of Aristotle. “Long ago, on Earth, he talked about friendship as being of three kinds. Where we can use someone or they can use us. A friendship of utility. Then there is the friendship that comes from deriving pleasure from a shared activity. Both of those types of friendship disappear when the utility or shared activity ends. The third type of friendship, of purely appreciating your friend, of valuing them for their inherent virtues and not for what you gain from being in relationship with them, is the rarest but the best.”

She patted his chest. “That’s who you are to me. I value all of you, Jonah.”

He hugged her again. “If I could cry, I would, now.”

“Then I’m glad you can’t cry. Seriously. I’m done with emotional stuff.”

He respected her wishes and tugged at her braid. “Aria’s recovering from her grief and adjusting to living with us.”

“Changing the subject,” Nora said firmly. She was serious about being overloaded on emotion. She felt all hollowed out yet hot in her chest. “Tell me about the Silicaese. Are the Silicaese star paths incomplete on purpose?”

He smiled.

She’d asked a good question. A harmlessly interesting one. Relaxing, she wriggled in her chair like a child settling in for a bedtime story.

“The Silicaese who came to this region were lepers. They considered themselves disordered. Diseased. Their civilization had excised them, and they upheld the validity of their exile. They scrubbed their spaceships’ databases, so they had no path of return. Having star paths that went no further than thirteen solar systems grew out of that embrace of dislocation. Translation often fails to capture nuances. In human terms, the Silicaese who emigrated to our region called themselves ‘the Troubled’.”

“Troubled, not infected?”

“Their beliefs were broken. Consequently, cultural taboos meant less or nothing to them, with the result that they broke those taboos. Sometimes, their forbidden actions resulted in physical changes to their bodies, both good and bad. Certain fungi infected them. They became a means of that fungi spreading. The Troubled acknowledged that they had no right to spread the infection to the vast majority of Silicaese who upheld the taboos. They departed, and settled in this region.

“Millennia passed. A new wave of Silicaese arrived. These weren’t exiles. The Silicaese civilization had changed. Some big crisis had broken taboos. The Silicaese had searched for centuries for their Troubled. They needed them. For their cultural stability, for their genetic inheritance. Despite being so very many generations from exile, the Silicaese of our region voted to return to their home systems.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Jonah tilted his head, considering the question. “Others of my kin were more interested in the Silicaese than I. Technically, the Silicaese were not our concern. The Vapori seeded us here to observe the evolution of organic, sentient life in the region. The Silicaese were a silicon-based life form.”

“And like humans, hadn’t actually evolved here.” Nora smothered a yawn. “Sorry. Interested, but tired. Blows my mind to think that the Vapori expected you to exist for long enough to witness the evolution of a species to sentience.”

“The Vapori timescale is different to humanity’s.”

“But now you’re fitting yourself to our timescale. That must be a mind explosion in itself.”

He chuckled. “One of the more minor ones, and one I anticipated.”

She reverted to the original topic. “Did the Silicaese ever return to this region?”

“No.”

“Huh. I guess borrowing their knowledge, like their star paths, isn’t so bad then.”

He agreed cheerfully. “They’re not using it.”

She stood and stretched, ready to head for bed. “Tadj, the dig director I worked for, would have sold his right kidney to talk with you. When we’d leave the refueling station for Diyu and the dig, Tadj would say we were flying to the Faraway, where the Bygone fade away. He called the Silicaese the Bygone. Those lost to time. He never thought of them as aliens, as beings fundamentally separate from our organic selves.”

As she rubbed her tired eyes, she remembered Tadj’s passion for xeno-archaeology. He used the military’s money to fund the dig, but military and societal demands never meant as much to him as respecting the Bygone. He’d maintained it was “…our job to ensure they and their knowledge are not lost. Life, even long ago life, is precious.”

Life here and now was precious, too. If Jonah’s knowledge of the past could protect them, she’d use it. “In the end, we’re all just people wanting a good life for ourselves and those we love.”

Chapter 5

Knives don’t flash in a Marine fight. Their blades are black. The Marines wielding them are silent.

In the final training session before the RC Genghis Khan made contact with the Border Station mailbox and downloaded news on what they faced after two and a half months on patrol, the Marines fought each other. A third acted as station security personnel and a third as crime gang enforcers. The latter were modeled on pirates. Pirates fought dirty.

In this session, a stealth mission had been compromised, and the Marines had to adapt to achieve their objective of acquiring control of station headquarters with minimal property damage and, ideally, no civilian casualties.

These were Marines. They did the impossible every day—or so Casimir claimed.

Today, he was a pirate, and a bloody scary one at that. He channeled, or faked, some of the berserker rage that had gotten him and his units home from impossible missions.

Facing him, highly trained Marines staggered and fell as their training suits locked up in simulated death. In this scenario, the Marines’ terms of engagement might be to limit deaths, but the criminals wouldn’t operate under the same constraints.

Lieutenant Bryce Tyler watched from beside Liam. Bouncing on the balls of his feet, the lawyer appeared as eager as any Marine for a fight. If the RC Genghis Khan had to take over Border Station, Bryce had the legal cover for it ready.

Anticipation for what awaited them on Border Station hummed through the ship.

Liam kept his personal reservations to himself. The idea of assuming command of civilians disturbed him. He used to think of the original colony ship captains of the Stranding and be glad he wasn’t them: taking on responsibility for a settlement; ruling it. Obviously, those captains had signed on to lead ships with a preponderance of civilians and all the problems they created, so they’d been primed for a civilian leadership role.

If we’re forced to take the station, we only have to hold it a few months. He rolled his shoulders. Maybe a year. It would depend on the reaction from Capitoline.

A buzzer signaled the end of the combat portion of the training session.

The Marines relaxed by degrees.

Brielle and an assistant entered to provide medical treatment to the injured.

Liam nodded to Casimir before continuing on to Engineering.

Under Xavier’s direction, the RC Genghis Khan had deployed the mines and probes as ordered by the Admiralty. They had also prepared the battlecruiser to support either the takeover of Border Station or its evacuation. In the event of an evacuation, there was a limited number they could take onboard, but Engineering had increased that number to the maximum by overhauling the life support systems on the battlecruiser and its shuttles.

Liam walked the ship. His people deserved to know he appreciated their work regardless of what they faced at Border Station.

Best case scenario, they’d return to the frontier station to learn it had accepted the reminder that his seizure of the CC Golden Ratel and arrest of its captain and crew represented: namely, that the RC Genghis Khan was merely the first and inevitable reassertion of inner realm interest and control of Border Station and the border region.

Worst case scenario, Xavier’s plan for jury-rigging life support for the unatmosphered holds of mining barges would be brought into play and a flotilla of survivors evacuated for the nearest refueling station, Sake.

Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Vlad Morgan was the communications officer on watch when the Border Station mailbox pinged the RC Genghis Khan, signaling that they were in range to download news and messages, and upload their own. “Contact established with the Border Station mailbox.”

Given Liam’s presence on the bridge, no one responded with speculation. Or perhaps it wasn’t their captain’s presence that inhibited them, but the fact that they’d already been speculating for weeks as to what they’d face on their return.

The Navy’s communications protocol prioritized naval messages, first from the Admiralty, and then, from other naval spaceships. Only emergency messages took precedence.

In good news, there were no emergency messages from Border Station or the ships who’d visited it.

“Negative for Admiralty. Negative for fleet,” Vlad reported.

On balance, Liam judged the absence of new orders from the Admiralty to be a positive. However, if they’d sent a message advising additional naval resources incoming, he’d have been pleased.

“A number of messages from Border Station to the ship, flagged ‘urgent’ by their senders.” Vlad wouldn’t ordinarily have added that to his verbal report.

“Sort them as usual,” Liam said. Some would go to Allison as the battlecruiser’s senior Naval Intelligence officer. Others would be forwarded to Engineering or to the Supply officer. Most would cross Claire’s desk, as the second-in-command. Liam got the high level or troublesome ones. Often those didn’t have to be sorted. The people sending them addressed them directly to him as captain.

He returned to his office to skim the messages and news, but he’d hold off on responding until Allison and her team submitted an assessment of the situation on Border Station, and the leadership group for Mission Camelot had convened to discuss it.

“Watching brief,” was Casimir’s summation when they gathered in Liam’s office.

Everyone agreed. According to the information they had, the situation on Border Station seemed business-as-usual. It didn’t require their intervention.

Allison qualified that assessment. “We’ll know more when we’re in real-time contact with the station. I have queries for various databases as well as people. But from what’s come through via the automated surveillance I left in place, we’re good for another resupply and patrol.”

“Governor Lazaar messaged me. Her attitude might be a fair guide to the station’s immediate response.” Liam forwarded the letter to their personal comms units. “In which case, we’re likely to get through the year till Customs’ return without being forced to take drastic action.”

Santiago clicked his tongue in mock-regret after reading Governor Lazaar’s conciliatory message to Liam. “Disappointing.”

Allison spoke briskly. “Gisela Lazaar’s strategy is clear. She is buying herself wriggle room. Whether that is to defend her position as governor, including past actions and future status, or whether it is to generate time for others to bury or restructure their activities is unclear. Either way, she is strongly signaling that there is no trouble on the station, and hence, no reason for Liam to involve himself.”

“Is she too conciliatory?” Bryce ventured. Then flinched at Allison’s toothy grin. “I’m not sure if you’re happy or mad?”

“Happy. Anticipatory. We have new allies on-station,” Allison said. “We received an invitation.” She read it off her comms unit. “‘The officers and crew of the RC Genghis Khan are cordially invited to the Veterans’ Day picnic at the Blue Dock Scrapyard—now under new management.’ Sent by Willow Lange, proprietor of the Blue Dock Scrapyard, Border Station.”

Liam’s eyes narrowed as Allison smiled smugly. “Willow Lange?”

“What am I missing?” Santiago asked.

“Last I heard.” Liam watched Allison. “Willow Lange was chief engineer on the RC Shashka. It appears that with the war over, she’s retired and adopted a new occupation. Willow is the third daughter of the Duke of Raffles and a friend of Crown Prince Francis. She graduated from the Naval Academy a couple of years ahead of us.”

“Back-up,” Casimir said succinctly.

“I believe so,” Allison said briskly. “I would suggest that since Chief Engineer Lange initiated indirect contact with you, Liam, that you follow her directions and discuss her presence on Border Station in person.”

He nodded. He was curious as to why Willow was here, and if she’d brought with her any orders official or otherwise (that is, from Francis) that would affect the RC Genghis Khan’s priorities.

Allison wrinkled her nose in thought. “Willow Lange’s invitation to a picnic confirms that the station isn’t in crisis. We can dock peacefully and execute our own real-time assessment of conditions.”

“We’re due to dock on the morning of Veterans’ Day,” Claire observed. “If we’re accepting the picnic invitation…?” Liam nodded. “I’ll arrange for us to visit the picnic in shifts. Casimir, I’d like to insert Marines in each shift.”

“Yes.”

Liam added. “The shifts are to be duty not leave. No leave anywhere on-station till we’re confident of conditions.”

Allison tapped her comms unit. “The Veterans’ Day picnic is a good excuse for isolating our people till we have up to date intelligence on the state of the station. I have a list of people we can send out under cover of their duties to observe the situation.”

“Do it.” His people weren’t trained for espionage, but they were smart, experienced personnel. They knew how a space station should feel. “But not alone. Everyone goes anywhere with a partner. Whatever happens, we know we can rely on each other.”

Border Station was composed of two infinity loops that crossed at right angles in a central sphere that housed the station’s operational headquarters and power systems. The smaller of the two infinity loops provided docking space for ordinary spaceships on the Hansel and Gretel Loops. One half of the larger infinity loop contained the Life Loop, which was where people lived and worked on-station. The second half of the large infinity loop was known as the Blue Loop and housed the scrapyard and the raw ore dock where the battlecruiser RC Genghis Khan had to moor due to its size.

The curving frame of the loops was reinforced by horizontal bars. As part of the skeleton of the station, they, and the space between them, was enclosed and atmosphered as required. The balance between adding living space to the station and increasing the power needed to run it was a decision that had to be signed off on by the station governor.

The Blue Loop had the most unimproved bars. The scrapyard had enclosed three, protecting them from space hazards, but only atmosphered one. Rather than traverse the length of this bar on foot, the first shift of Veterans’ Day picnic attendees rode across on two haulers to the hub of the scrapyard on the opposite side of the Blue Loop from the RC Genghis Khan’s mooring.

Santiago had hired the haulers from the raw ore dock manager. They’d return to the raw ore dock once their passengers descended outside the scrapyard gate.

Liam brushed dust off the seat of his jeans. He’d ridden in the tray of the hauler along with everyone else.

Some of them moved ahead, following the “Picnic” signs.

Casimir prowled along beside him. “Your engineer friend employs Marines.” He jerked his head toward the towering rows of scrap. “The layout has changed since I checked out the scrapyard last visit.”

Of course, Casimir had familiarized himself with the scrapyard on their previous two visits to Border Station.

“Defensive. Opportunities for offense,” he summarized. “And there’s the first Marine,” he added as they followed an arrow through the maze of scrap and turned to the right.

“Afternoon,” the guard on duty almost saluted, but turned it into an ear scratch at the last moment.

“Habit, Marine,” Casimir said cheerfully. “It’ll kill ya.”

The man grinned back, matching Casimir’s leashed ferocity. “Hasn’t yet.”

But the aborted salute gave away that the guard recognized Liam and that he, himself, was recently retired. The habit of saluting a superior officer remained engrained.

Or else, Liam silently observed. He’s not retired at all.

Passing the guard, they entered the center of the scrapyard. A barbeque smoked in front of a warehouse with a large “Office” sign over a human-sized door positioned to the side of massive double doors, which were currently closed. At right angles to the warehouse, a long building resembled a barracks. Opposite to it was a separate cabin, on the steps of which sat a teenage boy hunched over a personal comms unit.

The boy was the lone child in the compound.

Back on Capitoline, Veterans’ Day was celebrated by families.

Here, thirty late twenties to thirties, mostly men met the eighty RC Genghis Khan’s personnel arriving. Perhaps their families were tucked away elsewhere.

However, many veterans were like Liam with no children or close relationships. War had demanded their everything.

And if all you’d known in your adult life was war, it was hard to walk away from it.

As he assessed the scrapyard veterans, he suspected that those without families had self-selected for this mission. And it was a mission. That was obvious by the tension in the air. Ordinary scrapyard workers didn’t hold themselves like warriors.

Nor would an ordinary scrapyard employ this many people.

A curly haired, blond woman in t-shirt and jeans shorts strode forward, hand outstretched. “Liam! Good to see you.” Willow’s clothing and greeting proclaimed that this was to be a casual afternoon.

“You’re looking well.”

In fact, she looked stressed. She smiled, but the lines at the corners of her eyes were those of anxiety, not welcome. Physically she might be healthy, but she wasn’t unburdened. “I’m a new business owner. The change of lifestyle is invigorating.”

From thirty feet away, Liam heard the teenager’s snort.

Willow’s smile flattened. She focused on Casimir, and introductions continued. Then she raised her voice. “Lucas! Come here.”

The teenager sauntered through the crowd of veterans. He displayed an impressive amount of swagger for someone so outclassed in terms of training, experience, and sheer ability to crush him into the dirt. The kid was short and skinny. “Yeah, Ma.”

Liam almost choked on his tongue. Willow has a kid?

“My son, Lucas. He’ll be finishing school by tutorial.”

Lucas smirked. “Because I’m just that lucky.” He sounded like a snotty adolescent, but the kid’s handshake was adult, firm.

Willow nudged him. “Go get Captain Stas a drink.”

“This way, Captain Muscles.”

A muscle twitched at the corner of Casimir’s mouth. Only a friend, or one of Casimir’s Marines, would have recognized it as amusement rather than anger at the disrespect. “Work hard enough, kid, and you might develop a muscle or two. Maybe next decade, after you start shaving.”

Willow’s apology was swallowed by startled glee. Clearly, no one else had managed to so neatly counter her son’s determined rudeness.

“Yeah, yeah. Beer or soda?” But Lucas’s fair skin flushed red.

“Coffee in my office?” Willow suggested to Liam.

He was here to talk; to learn why she’d bought the scrapyard, and how it involved the RC Genghis Khan. “Lead on.”

They left the low-key barbeque behind them, walking through the shopfront of the office to a private room behind. The lock was keyed to Willow’s biometrics. The door opened to the welcoming aroma of freshly brewed coffee.

“We can talk in here. Penny, Penelope Fagin, my personal assistant, checks for bugs on random sweeps, at least twice daily.” Willow poured two coffees.

Liam sat, leaning back in unexpected comfort. Its worn leather appearance was misleading. The chair was as ergonomic as his own on the RC Genghis Khan. “Is that level of vigilance warranted?”

“We’re establishing good habits.”

He raised an eyebrow. “The reclamation and recycling business is that dangerous?”

Willow grinned, but pointed a finger at him. “I get enough snark from Lucas, thank you.”

“I’m sure you do.” The boy appeared to be about sixteen. Willow hadn’t been pregnant at the Naval Academy. She must have given birth shortly before entering and worked like crazy to be ready for the academy’s physical training.

She drank some coffee, while eyeing him contemplatively. “I remember you saying your dad served as a chief engineer. Do you know what engineers say scrapyards are for? They’re where you bury the bodies.”

“I have heard that. I assumed they were talking about machinery bodies.”

“Maybe not always.” Her mouth twisted. “I didn’t buy the scrapyard to bury things. Hiding problems seldom works.”

Her fingers drummed the side of her mug. “Francis didn’t arrange your assignment to the Hadrian Line. He didn’t need to. The Admiralty might play political games, but those games don’t undermine their fundamental pragmatism. On balance, the Admiralty manages to serve Capitoline’s interests. They exiled you to border space because you’ve proven you’ll do the right thing independently and at great personal cost. That’s how you earned command so young.”

He had been young to assume command of a battlecruiser, even during wartime.

She held his gaze. “This is me, daughter of a duke, survivor of political games, not Francis saying this.” She waited for his nod of acceptance. “This is as high as you’ll rise. You won’t ever reach the Admiralty.”

Liam’s explosive sigh was half laughter, and ruffled the papers on the desk. If Willow feared that foiled ambition was his weakness, she was flying the wrong kite. “I know that. Crown Prince Dominic—”

“Before then,” Willow said, and silenced him. “You’ll do what is necessary for the good of Capitoline, but you’ll do so as Francis’s man. That sort of loyalty can propel a royal up the ranks, someone like me. For you, a commoner without an independent powerbase such as wealth might give you, Francis would have to overtly return that loyalty for you to advance, and he won’t.”

She held up her hand. “I’m not criticizing Francis. I’m on Border Station, the unforeseen owner of a scrapyard, because I believe he’ll be a good king and I’m backing his vision for Capitoline and the Human Sector. But we’re allowed our personal lives.”

Personal lives. Liam thought about where she was coming from. Lucas. Her son. “We are,” he agreed solemnly. “I’ll respect yours.” Willow’s priorities had to include her son. It was fair of her to state it.

Lips compressed, she stared down at her desk.

Her comments were a strange echo of Casimir’s. Both respected Francis, but both also warned Liam against sacrificing his life to serving their future king.

Liam recalled what Francis, himself, had said about the future when they were at the academy. They’d been drinking.

“I’m not the king.”

Liam misunderstood. “You will be one day.”

For which response, Francis kicked his boot. “No. On the gameboard, Father’s not a king, either.” He held his bottle of beer up to the light, assessed the level of liquid remaining, then drained it before setting the empty bottle on the table. He flicked it. “In some of the oldest versions of chess, the piece we call a queen was called the vizier. That is my role. Vizier, queen. The king is our society. It’s the vizier’s role to keep society safe by doing absolutely everything they can.” He knocked over the empty beer bottle. “Even sacrificing every other player on the board. It’s the king who has to survive.”

The king, meaning society. Francis had warned Liam from the beginning that he’d sacrifice everyone, himself included, for a secure Human Sector.

The question that challenged that singular goal was how did one define security?

“I brought fifty people with me to the scrapyard,” Willow said. “That’s the rough number. People will come and go about their duties. I’m a private venture, although Francis discreetly added to the money I inherited from Great-aunt Hildy so that I could buy the yard. It has to run at a profit to cover costs, which is challenging. We’re starting up some side hustles that will support our core goal, which is to reinforce Capitoline control of the station without committing official forces. Francis added that I’m to support you in any way you ask.”

This was the flipside of royals’ privilege. The good ones, like Willow, gave their lives in service to society.

“You’ll want to think about how we make this work. I’ve had time to do so, both on the trip out, and during the month we’ve been setting up here.”

“You’ve gotten a lot done in a month.”

She finished off her tepid coffee. “I have good people. Your people will benefit from working with them. They’re experienced personnel. Mostly ex-Navy, Marines or experts in their field.” She fished out a data stick from the top drawer of the desk, and handed it to him. “Background on everyone, plus my ideas on what we’re doing out here and can do out here.”

“Sum that up for me,” he invited.

“We’re your support. I’m resupply and repair. There are seven of us. We also have scientists and a security force. As for what we’re doing out here, personally I’m waiting for all hell to break loose with the discovery of a new blaze deposit.”

Liam pocketed the data stick. “That matches my thinking. Our two alternative scenarios were a breakdown of law and order on the station with the RC Genghis Khan having to take it over. Your presence should be sufficient to squash that, especially if we limit our patrols to two months away.”

“What was the other scenario?”

“Someone determined on destroying the station, and us having to organize its evacuation.”

She blinked slowly. “How high do you put the probability of that?”

“Low. It’s wasteful of resources as well as evil. It was our worst case scenario, but some people would destroy what they can’t control. Let me get up to speed on what you bring to the table, then we’ll sit down with a mixed team to revise the scenarios and our joint response.”

They returned to the picnic. The meat was cooked and being served, along with salads and bread rolls. The picnic had the appearance of a party, but not the feel of one. It was a meet-and-greet exercise with both sides warily evaluating the other.

Despite Willow’s statement, Liam didn’t get the sense that her people saw themselves in a support role. If anything, they conducted themselves as if they occupied a superior position and were assessing the RC Genghis Khan’s personnel’s usefulness.

He might be biased, but he thought his own people were more tactful in their attitude. They were guests at the scrapyard. They socialized, they observed, and they refused to respond to provocation.

A new player had entered the compound during Liam’s meeting with Willow. Her security personnel orbited the man. It wasn’t blatant, but he unmistakably held their attention. They’d take their orders from him, not her.

Did Willow know that?

The man marched forward to greet Liam. He was gray-haired, no more than early fifties. Still physically tough, but probably nursing some long-term weaknesses from old injuries. He’d be slower than in his prime, but willing to compensate for the difference with ruthlessness. “Yuri Bennett, head of security.”

“Captain Yuri Bennett, former Royal Guard,” Willow clarified.

Definitely ruthless, then. On Capitoline, protecting the royal family came before all else. For the Royal Guard, non-royal casualties were acceptable losses in a crisis.

Had Francis, or someone else, sent Yuri Bennett with Willow to Border Station?

The dynamics on display in the yard signaled trouble.

When in doubt about a situation, watch the most vulnerable. Liam spotted Lucas standing in Casimir’s shadow, and that worried him.

The kid was out of place among the veterans, and knew it. He covered it with smart aleck comments and a sneer, but his hovering near Casimir was a warning sign. The most nervous new Marines did the same.

Casimir’s presence, big, sardonic and unrelenting, reassured the jumpy ones. He frightened the heck out of the enemy, but those under his command knew he’d protect them till his last breath. That he’d guide them out of danger.

It was a red flag that Lucas found reassurance from a stranger and not from one of the veterans working for his mother.

Judging by the glances Willow stole in their direction, she recognized it as such.

The two RC Genghis Khan Marines nearest Casimir and Lucas gently included the kid in their ribbing. Marines could be gentle, although it took the form of rough-housing that would leave bruises but not break bones. One put Lucas in a headlock and ruffled his hair.

The boy emerged grinning; the grin falling as he caught Yuri watching.

Trouble, for sure. Especially with how Casimir deliberately kept his shoulder to the other alpha male. Casimir had a protective streak that meant he’d flatten anyone whom he suspected of child abuse.

But dislike between Lucas and Yuri needn’t mean abuse.

Liam trusted Willow. She interacted easily with her head of security. She wouldn’t if she suspected him of bullying her son.

It could be as simple as Yuri perceiving Lucas’s presence on the border as a distraction from their mission, especially for Willow, and trying to manage it in a manner that supported the mission, but failed Lucas.

As Liam, Willow and Yuri reached the empty seating near Casimir, Yuri suggested a friendly fight club. “Not enough room for a baseball game.” The traditional activity at a Veterans’ Day picnic. “But you’ve brought Marines and I’ve heard your Navy personnel also train for personal combat. How about some matches? You can set the rules.” His gaze slid to Casimir.

Liam’s did the same, and he jerked his head, no, as Casimir looked a question at him.

“Not for us,” Casimir drawled. “We’re not going to fight on Veterans’ Day. We can arrange some training bouts for another time.”

Yuri came offensively close to sneering. “Then my people will have to provide the entertainment. Sool, Whitby.”

Two men sprang up from benches and claimed the empty central area of the compound. They erupted into the aggressive, militarized street-fighting style Casimir excelled in. It could handle multiple opponents, a fact Yuri emphasized when he called in another. “Against Sool.”

Sool blocked and kicked. He connected with Whitby’s nose. Blood splashed.

Lucas flinched.

Because he knew Casimir, Liam caught the slap of his friend’s hand against Marine Sergeant Cameron Pelan’s shoulder.

The sergeant’s situational awareness, which included the status of civilians, meant he got the message. He broke into a low-voiced commentary on the fight that distracted Lucas.

Yuri frowned unhappily and glanced across at Willow. The dip of his head might have been an apology.

The bout ended with Whitby out and Naviz yielding.

Sool punched the air in victory. Then he glanced at Lucas, and his fleeting celebration flattened into a blank mask belatedly covering bleakness. Sool recognized that hadn’t been a fight for a child to witness. But he’d had his orders.

“Good fight,” Casimir said calmly, eyes on Sool. “We’ll definitely take that training bout. Sign me up for whoever it is here you wouldn’t want to fight.”

“Sool’s the best,” Lucas said.

Casimir nudged him. “You doubting me?”

The kid caught himself before he toppled off the bench. “Um, yeah?”

Casimir’s Marines shook with silent laughter.

“If you know Sool’s the best, you should let him train you,” Yuri advised Lucas. “Instead of avoiding him.”

Lucas might have skipped fight training, but he had attended an elite school. As he rose to his full skinny, insignificant height, he ignored Yuri and said a general farewell to Casimir and the Marines near him. “Nice to meet you. Thank you for your service.” It was Veterans’ Day.

Lucas looked over at Liam. “Captain.” He sauntered off toward the cabin, a lonely figure.

“Yuri,” Willow muttered.

“Sorry.”

That was the extent of the public chewing out.

It was a strange situation. For a former Royal Guard captain to be running security on the border there had to be a factor Liam was missing. At the moment, the dysfunction of it was patent. Yuri had to act the hard-ass to maintain his authority. The former royal guards serving under him ought to already know and trust him, but the Marines and the non-security civilian personnel had to be convinced and that conviction maintained. Yuri wouldn’t have had a chance to prove himself to them in action, only in preparation and training.

Back on the ship, Liam dealt with routine duties while the remaining people cycled through the picnic. Presumably, they’d meet some of the scrapyard people not present during his visit.

He wanted his senior officers’ opinions before he finalized his own. Therefore, he readily abandoned his paperwork when Claire entered.

“They’re black ops,” she judged. Or warned. “They present as benign, but they’re off the books for a reason. Like political deniability. We don’t have that luxury, a lesson we learned with Crown Prince Dominic. If a situation goes to Hades, we’re the ones who’ll bear the fallout. We should be wary of publicly aligning ourselves with Willow’s group.”

Liam studied his second-in-command. “What sort of situation are you worried about?”

“They represent a disruption of the balance of power on Border Station. When Willow purchased the scrapyard as a going concern, she would have acquired with it the freehold for the half of the Blue Loop that the scrapyard occupies. Border Station’s back-up systems are on the Blue Loop, split between the raw ore dock and the scrapyard. Thus, both in terms of area occupied and control of systems, Willow now holds power on-station. That’s not even counting the former Marines she employs.”

Claire took a breath. “In the absence of a significant change in the situation, like a blaze rush or new orders from the Admiralty, our duty is to maintain the status quo. It’s not to back Willow, even by implication, and further destabilize the situation.”

Being nearly a decade older than Liam, Claire had served as a peacetime officer. In peacetime, the Navy’s role was to protect key routes, primarily by anti-piracy activities, note hazards, and respond to emergencies.

The RC Genghis Khan’s assignment to patrol the Hadrian Line included securing the future of the Capitoline border station. That meant maintaining the law and order requisite for a stable society and profitable trade.

Claire sat fiercely upright. “Our role is not to decide the shape of society. It’s to protect society’s right to shape itself.”

“Willow has Crown Prince Francis’s backing.”

The rigidity went out of Claire’s spine as she snapped forward, as sudden as a striking snake. “We’re being used!”

Liam retreated an inch, in affront rather than surprise or fear.

Claire straightened. “We’re meant to be neutral, not befriending one group over another. Willow, unless I miss my guess, and Allison’s quick and dirty analysis is wrong, represents a group of royals. The scrapyard has eseduce arrays, necessary for processing blaze ore. Just as you’ve suggested yourself, they’re betting that the Hadrian Line will be the location of the next major blaze discovery, and they intend to lock it down for themselves, with us as muscle.”

“You could argue that securing a new supply of blaze is a matter of realm security,” Liam countered.

“Only if it’s explicitly written into our orders from the Admiralty.”

Frowning in the direction of the safe at the back of the office, he considered her concerns. When he refocused on Claire, she’d recovered her usual composure. Without wanting to downplay her concerns or her right to defend the Navy’s independence from corporate interests, he didn’t think her fears warranted refusing the informal alliance Willow offered.

To put it bluntly, the support the scrapyard could provide was too important to the RC Genghis Khan’s success, isolated as they were on the Hadrian Line, for him to refuse it. “A blaze strike is hypothetical. If it happens at all, it could be long after the RC Genghis Khan is assigned a new mission elsewhere. For now, Willow and her people provide our strongest guarantee for maintaining Border Station as a secure base for our return from patrol.”

Her brusque nod meant she accepted his decision. Her stiff back as she departed signaled her disapproval.

In deep space, there was a lot of latitude for interpretation of one’s duty. Willow’s assessment of him had been accurate. He’d never flinch from unpopular decisions and their consequences. Generally, though, his officers and crew were behind him.

What-ifs and maybes were always harder to agree than concrete decisions undertaken in action.

The complexities of peacetime would never cause him to long for war, but at least then they’d had a clearly defined enemy.

“Claire?” he called her back.

She turned in the doorway.

“Allison’s briefing me tomorrow regarding the situation on the station. She’ll have investigated Willow’s impact. You’ll be off duty since it’s at eleven. But you’re welcome to join us.”

The rigidity left her spine. “I will.”

His eyes narrowed in a smile. “You get to tell Brielle why you worked during downtime.” Their chief medical officer had instituted a system alert if people logged too many hours. Liam’s smile reached his mouth. “And yes, you have to log the meeting as overtime.”

Brielle oversaw exercise regimes, which meant what she considered bad behavior, namely overworking, was guaranteed punishment.

Claire groaned. “That witchdoctor will sign me up for yoga.” Claire alone was allowed to call her best friend a witchdoctor.

“Enjoy.”

Chapter 6

Allison’s briefing on the state of Border Station had grown to include Casimir as well as Liam and Claire. “I’ve confirmed significant and increasing Palantine activity on Border Station. I’ll send you the data on recent arrivals, but beyond the increase in Palantine-registered ships, Palantine interests are acquiring key businesses, including medical and professional services, on-station. The details are in the report I’ve sent you.”

She flicked her left index finger against her thumb. “I ought to be able to rely on Fatima Drake’s report on conditions on Border Station. As the CSB agent, her report enters the official record. That’s how I acquired a copy of it. Fatima,” Allison sunk a universe of scorn into her fellow intelligence agent’s name, “failed to send a courtesy copy to me, and her responses to my requests for specific information is brief to the point of uselessness.”

“Because she’s incompetent or because she’s hiding something?” Liam asked.

“Neither. I think she’s entered a bunker mentality. When you sent the CC Golden Ratel off with Customs to Capitoline, people saw Fatima’s inability to influence events. People who’d cultivated her as an asset—and yes, I’m aware of the irony. CSB agents should be cultivating assets, not letting themselves be used—dropped her. She has shut down, seeing enemies everywhere.”

Claire jotted a note on her personal comms unit. “If Fatima isn’t interacting, we’ve lost a player who ought to be an ally, but at least we haven’t lost her to active engagement with our opponents.” She raised an eyebrow at Allison. “I assume you’ve checked on the activities of David Omnes.”

Allison nodded. “But before we get to organized crime on Border Station, let’s finish discussing Palantine’s influence. They’re flooding the station with money. I’m trying to identify persons of interest—playing catch-up on work Fatima should have done. There are strange rumors. Even a tall tale about a combat android seen in the scrapyard.”

Casimir jerked, head snapping around to stare at her.

She flicked away the idea. “It’s just a tale. If there was a combat android, Willow’s people would have dealt with it.”

“It can hide outside the scrapyard,” Casimir said. “In the raw ore dock, on the unused bars, or it could be on an entirely different loop. We must change our security protocols.”

Liam frowned from Casimir to Allison. “Why mention a combat android if you judge it merely an urban legend?”

She tugged at her left earlobe, hard enough for those watching her to wince. Except for Casimir. “Because it’s a sign that people have noticed Palantine pushing in. The combat android is a metaphor for an unconsciously perceived Palantine threat.”

“Or it’s real.” Casimir folded his arms.

“I support increasing the threat level we operate under while docked,” Claire said. “It wouldn’t hurt us to stay sharp.”

“Amber alpha,” Liam said.

Claire jotted another note.

Casimir’s jaw remained set. He had a bad history with Palantine’s rare combat androids and the suicide squads that often accompanied them.

“Unfortunately,” Allison returned to the briefing. “On Border Station suspicion of a growing Palantine influence is countered by a general mistrust of our royals, of all royals. People who emigrate to the border are often those dissatisfied with the state of affairs in the inner realm.”

“And because there’s profit to be made out here,” Liam said. He valued Allison’s intelligence reports, but it was crucial to analyze them within a framework of general knowledge and popular opinion. Most times, the simplest answer was the influential one.

“Mmm.” Allison rearranged some notes on her comms unit. “Willow Lange is a good test case. People know she’s actually Lady Willow Lange, third daughter of the Duke of Raffles. This is only preliminary, but my impression is that while Governor Lazaar wants to schmooze Willow, other stationers are wary of Willow and the veterans she employs.”

Casimir grunted. “They’re right. The scrapyard crew is the core for a militia.”

“If the rest of Border Station embraces Willow for the wealth a well-run scrapyard can generate, then anti-royalist feeling is at manageable levels,” Allison said. “Grumbling rather than the serious dissatisfaction that leads to sabotage or other subversive activities. Which brings us to David Omnes and the border’s black market, which he runs.”

“The scrapyard team will have thoughts on him.” Casimir stretched his long legs to the side of the desk. “Omnes has more foot soldiers than Willow, and his tentacles are throughout the station. He’ll use influence instead of direct attack. What’s his position re Palantine money?”

Allison snorted. “Omnes certainly isn’t a patriot. He’d take Palantine money under other conditions. Right now, though, he thinks they’re guilty of challenging his control of the black market and his criminal enterprises.”

“Are they?” Claire asked.

Allison wrinkled her nose. “Open question. Someone is destabilizing Omnes. I need to lock down who to work out why.”

Liam caught her restless gaze. “In the absence of Fatima performing her duties as a CSB agent, use the help Willow offers. Her people are on-station. Cooperate to discover if we have an unknown player on the board. Or if Yuri has authorized clandestine operations against Omnes.”

Nodding acceptance of his order, Allison continued. “Omnes does have some Palantine connections. Fatima’s earlier reports record fleeting contact with Quinn Gaf, the Palantine intelligence agent embedded on Border Station as a music teacher. There’s also a clothing and textiles merchant from Palantine, Roger Aldrich, who operates a warehouse at the end of the street where Omnes has his headquarters. Roger Aldrich showed an interest in Aria Kelly. I suspect it was due to him that Omnes paid attention to the girl.”

Everyone’s attention sharpened. Ensuring the security of Border Station and space routes along the Hadrian Line was their duty. Worrying about the well-being of a girl and the woman who’d chosen to protect her was a personal matter. It elicited a different kind of focus.

For once, Allison’s fidgety hands stilled. “I don’t credit Santiago’s suggestion that Nora Devi is a spy. She’s an ordinary Capitoline citizen. However, if Aria ran to her, as someone approachable who has recently returned from the Avestan Range where Aria lost her parents, then it’s better that Nora gains the secret of the location of the Kellys’ blaze discovery than for it to fall, along with the girl, into the hands of Palantine agents or criminals like Omnes.”

They all followed the complicated statement with its single, huge assumption.

Claire stated it. “You’re assuming that the Kellys were killed for blaze.”

“Or for failing to produce it,” Casimir added.

“It’s an assumption worth risking, given the importance of blaze to the future of the Human Sector.” Allison pressed her fingertips together. “Within the confines of my normal duties, I would never have learned of the change to the Registry Office database that establishes Nora Devi’s status as Aria Kelly’s legal guardian. It’s a status that I judge is in Capitoline’s interest to uphold, especially if Nora registers a blaze claim.”

Knowing he had a personal stake in this decision, namely Nora’s status as either Aria’s legal guardian or her kidnapper, Liam stayed silent and expressionless.

“There is an art to writing reports,” Allison said slowly. “I’ve analyzed enough to know how to bury specific data. I can include the fact of a backdated change to the Registry Office database without drawing attention to it.”

“How?” Casimir asked, frankly curious.

“By sticking it in among evidence of Fatima Drake’s incompetence. Leaving her out here for years while her independence and performance deteriorated will make for uncomfortable reading. People, even highly trained and experienced people, instinctively avoid dwelling on unpleasant topics. Their attention will go to minimizing the embarrassment Fatima represents.”

An evil smile produced a dimple in Alison’s right cheek. “Remember, I’m Naval Intelligence. Having me point out a CSB failure will be a distraction in itself.”

“Huh.” Casimir leaned back.

“I think you should,” Claire said. “With the proviso that you discover how the change to the Registry Office database was made, even if you have to tackle Nora directly.”

Casimir nodded.

Liam didn’t do anything as unprofessional as sigh with relief. “Remember that the change included listing David Omnes as the orphanage governing board member who authorized Nora’s legal guardianship.”

“Oh, I haven’t forgotten. The motivation behind naming Omnes is fascinating. Was it to tweak his nose? Or was it because the hacker was reluctant for an innocent person, one of the other two orphanage governors, to be blamed? The answers generate divergent pictures.”

Claire redirected the runaway conversation. “If Nora brings back a blaze discovery, then she’ll warrant attention. For now, our concern is our interaction with Border Station. We’re holding a watching brief.”

Allison nodded.

Liam and Casimir waited motionless for Claire to continue. Their absence of objection was agreement.

She presented her suggestion. “We’ve overlooked a potential pool of allies on the station. Those who keep it running.”

“Protection of operational workers,” Casimir began. “Is included in our scenario planning.”

“Protection isn’t the same as partnership,” Claire countered. “If we prove we value them, at minimum I would hope they’d be less obstructive in a crisis. You know how engineers are. They’re possessive of the systems they work on.”

Allison laughed. “We’ve all heard Xavier’s scoldings for failing to respect the systems that keep us alive. Possessive and protective.”

Claire folded one hand over the other. “Which is why we shouldn’t push the station’s engineers regarding their core functions…but the station has back-up systems on the Blue Loop.” She let the reminder sink in. The RC Genghis Khan’s scenario planning exercises had taught them much about Border Station.

“The back-up systems border the scrapyard,” Liam warned. He’d explicitly stated that they needed Willow’s offer of support on-station.

Claire amended and added to her proposal. “The back-up systems are inserted between the scrapyard and the raw ore dock in their own station-owned section. The section is fenced to prevent trespass or terrorism. Undoubtedly, as neighbors, Willow’s people will see to its defense. Which is fine. I don’t intend to impinge on Border Station’s independence by suggesting we assist in improving the section’s security. However, an offer from Xavier, engineer-to-engineer, for a joint operation to review and overhaul the back-up systems is likely to be accepted, especially if it includes an offer to supply some of the necessary replacement parts.” Most of which the RC Genghis Khan’s workshop could produce.

Allison drummed her fingers on her personal comms unit. “Working together encourages confidences. From an intelligence-gathering perspective, a joint exercise would be useful.”

Liam’s father had been a chief engineer, like Xavier. Liam understood the scope of the exercise Claire suggested. “It would have to be broken into parts, undertaken in between patrols.” There were definite advantages to the idea. “We’d have to ensure Engineering got sufficient R&R.”

“Brielle will do so,” Claire said.

They stared at one another.

Claire’s purpose was blatant. A joint exercise between the RC Genghis Khan and the station undertaken adjacent to the scrapyard implied Willow’s people were superfluous to the RC Genghis Khan’s protection of the station and border region. Claire knew Willow and her engineering personnel could overhaul the back-up systems solo. At minimum, they could be invited, as neighbors, to join the exercise. Instead, Claire proposed pointedly excluding them.

Liam trusted his second-in-command’s judgement. He also held that if Willow’s people couldn’t handle being snubbed, or grasp the reason for it, then that was a weakness he ought to be aware of. “All right. Claire, work with Xavier to define the project. I want to sign off on it, especially the schedule, before Xavier approaches Border Station’s engineers.”

Satisfied, Claire nodded and jotted another note.

“But we’ll balance it by reaching out to the scrapyard,” Liam added. “Casimir, have you scheduled the trial bouts?”

“Not yet.”

“ASAP. I want your reading on the personnel, especially if you happen to talk to any privately. Marine to Marine.”

Casimir dipped his chin in acknowledgement. “I recognized Sam Gurung’s name from the file Willow gave you. We served together back when we were green lieutenants. According to the file, Sam retired as a captain. Hells to the no. That man never left a fight.”

“A personal connection is always useful,” Allison murmured.

Casimir returned from the training bouts with stitches above his right eye. He’d taken the time to shower before presenting himself at Liam’s office.

“Nice bruise.” Liam pushed aside his paperwork.

“Lucas was right. Sool is a nasty fighter.” Casimir’s tone was admiring.

Liam paused in pouring their mid-afternoon coffees. A steward had left the tray a scant minute before Casimir’s arrival. Stewards knew everything, and refused to divulge their secret methods to Allison. “I hope you won.”

“Do you doubt me?”

“Never.” He shoved a mug at Casimir.

Once seated, Casimir rubbed at the outer side of his left knee. “If Willow said they’ll support us, then I believe they will. For all their hidden purposes, I think they’re honest patriots. But it won’t be like Navy supporting Navy, or Marines Marines. There’s a distance.”

“We can work with that.” Especially when they lacked other effective allies out here.

Casimir grimaced. “Some of the post-war media messaging worked. They’ve drawn the line that peace was achieved via us capturing Crown Prince Dumb,” Dominic, “and the price of that peace was Princess Hermione’s betrothal, and now, her marriage to him. If you refuse to blame our royal family for selling out Hermione, then we’re an acceptable scapegoat.”

He stared unfocusedly at the wall behind Liam. “It’s stupid thinking, but they’re taking their lead from Yuri Bennett.”

“Marines?” Liam asked skeptically.

Casimir grunted acknowledgement of the point. Usually, Marines’ first loyalty was to each other. “They got out. It’s like Allison with the CSB.” The Capitoline Security Bureau. “The civilian services think they can look down on us in peacetime. The Marines are mixed with Yuri’s people from the Royal Guard, and they’re taking their cue from them. They’re acting as if those of us still in service are sidelined.” He swallowed the last of his coffee and placed the mug down with a snap. “Until the next conflict.”

“And how do we avoid that?” Liam asked.

The two friends stared at one another.

Liam mightn’t accept the doctrine of Endless War, but military conflict seemed an unshakeable recurring pattern between the realms. Despair weighed on him as he thought of being at war another two or three times before he retired.

“I don’t see how we can,” Casimir muttered.

Chapter 7

On a normal day, Nora never noticed the slight resistance of her wedding ring: how it hit her knuckle, almost as if checking that she was sure she wanted to take it off, before sliding free at her insistence.

But on a normal day, Nora took off the ring to work in her workshop or at ship maintenance. She would thread it onto a gold chain that looped over her neck and was long enough to nestle the ring in her cleavage.

Today, she took off her ring to don a lifesuit.

She’d be venturing from the CC Kangaroo to obtain samples of blazsvitloium from three sites on the planet she’d named Beaconditch. The name referenced the planet of Beaconpit where the initial discovery of blaze had established Border Station.

The planet had a turbulent atmosphere and entry had been rough.

Aria was asleep in her cabin, recovering from vomitous nausea.

They’d spent a day analyzing weather conditions on the planet before selecting the three landing sites where Nora would film herself acquiring the blaze samples. She didn’t intend to allow any loophole for someone to challenge her claim registration with the Department of Space.

She and Jonah had spent days strategizing their return to Border Station, and how they’d establish an unassailable position there, legally, financially and physically. Jonah was already scanning real estate listings for a suitable building they could purchase outright and improve defensively.

To be honest, Nora didn’t believe anyone could gain an unassailable position. Even royals fought among themselves.

But you could minimize risks, as she was doing in following every safety protocol for venturing planetside.

Fully suited up, she walked out of her cabin, and was surprised not to find Jonah hovering at the end of the passage.

After descending to cargo hold B, she found him lurking beside its external hatch.

“I’ll be fine.” She patted his shoulder.

“Absolutely.” Nonetheless, he stood ready in case she needed rescue.

Closing her helmet hid her smile. “I have survived numerous solo expeditions.”

“But now you have me.”

She patted his shoulder again, and turned the last pat into a gentle shove. “Out of the hold. If it’s safety first, you should be in the next chamber when this opens.”

Reluctantly, he retreated.

Some of Nora’s tension went with him. For her, a planetside expedition was a familiar activity. She’d picked up mineral specimens on her last journey, and before that, there had been years working on xeno-archaeological digs.

Jonah, on the other hand, wasn’t used to being embodied or worrying about people.

Nora was determined to nip in the bud his tendency to fuss.

With the same determination, she suppressed the wistful question that popped up. What if her husband, Ethan, had survived the war and he’d been here as her partner?

But they wouldn’t have come out to the border.

If he hadn’t died, she wouldn’t have torn herself from his family. The two of them would have stayed in the inner realm.

They had never planned for the future. As a sting ship pilot, especially in wartime, Ethan’s life expectancy had been short. In loving her, he had gifted her a family, and given his family the reassurance that he’d loved and been loved. They had agreed no children. He’d refused to leave kids without a dad.

He’d expected Nora to remarry.

The hatch opened to a cloudless midday. There was water on Beaconditch, predominantly underground. It wasn’t an ocean world like Capitoline. Nor did a cursory scan detect any sign of life. Given the value of blaze to the Human Sector, miners would have been granted the right to mine the planet even if there had been life on it. As it was, they seemed to have avoided the complication.

Which wasn’t random. Jonah had carefully selected the planet he’d shared with her.

Sepia-brown sand covered darker formations of rock, blasted smooth and sinuous by millions of years of sandstorms. Where the blazsvitloium neared the surface, the rock shaded to blue.

She sent a drone out first. Jonah had already taken readings of the surface. The drone was to record Nora as she acquired a sample from the blaze deposit. Huffing at the heavy gravity, she climbed into the single person cab of her all-terrain vehicle and steered it out of the hatch.

The spider’s eight legs clambered agilely to the ground and with a wave at the drone, Nora headed for the system of minor gorges where she intended to dig.

Unless an emergency required it, she’d convinced Jonah to go no-comms. She didn’t want the drone’s recording of her to inadvertently show her apparently talking to herself. Of course, she could claim she’d been talking to Aria, but Nora preferred not to lie. Avoidance was simpler than outright deception.

The spider was designed for stability and resilience. It picked a steady path to midway down the nearest gorge. Nora halted it on a level section of blue-tinged rock, and activated her portable scanner. It identified an all but exposed vein of the rich blaze deposit she’d marked from the ship.

Perfect. She climbed out of the spider’s cabin and positioned the drill; grateful that she’d spent the extra money to purchase one that was self-supporting as well as self-propelling. In heavier than human standard gravity, the physical cost of extra exertion added up fast. As the drill bit in, a few rocks tumbled to the floor of the gorge. However, the cliffside remained stable. Exactly as planned.

She sealed the sample in a crate and secured the crate beside the drill in the storage pocket at the back of the spider’s cabin.

When it came to expeditions, boring was best.

By the time Nora returned with the third and final sample, acquired at the far side of the planet to the first, Aria was awake and sitting morosely in the lounge with a glass of orange juice.

Nora’s satisfaction in a job well done evaporated.

This was what Jonah had warned her of when he’d met her in the cargo hold, and why—coward!—he’d stayed in the hold putting away the samples and checking over the drone and spider while sending her up here.

Nora could guess Aria’s thoughts.

Securing a sample wasn’t proving difficult. If Aria’s parents had done so when they first discovered a blaze deposit, they wouldn’t have been killed while going back for the sample demanded by a prospective buyer.

“The CC Kangaroo is a scout ship optimized for survey work. Equipment on a mining barge destroys what it digs up, which wouldn’t necessarily matter for a blaze sample, but containing the toxic ore would. I doubt your parents were prepared for handling hazardous materials. Plus, you’re overlooking what left you miserable in your cabin.”

“What?”

“Atmospheric entry. If the planet your parents found was like Beaconditch, entry would have shaken an ordinary mining barge apart. All of that in addition to the fact mining barges aren’t designed to land on a surface.”

Aria’s expression cleared.

Nora rapped her knuckles lightly on the top of the girl’s head. “You can choose dinner while I have a shower.”

“Okay.” A small smile.

After Aria went to bed, Nora relaxed on the bridge with Jonah. “So, step one is complete. We’ve confirmed the presence of blaze and acquired samples, and in doing so, confirmed that the blaze deposit is easily reached.”

He grinned. “Aria’s stomach wouldn’t say ‘easily’.”

“I’ll note the rough entry in my claim registration.” She stretched her arms above her head. “We’re heading home.”

“Do you think of Border Station as home?”

She let her arms flop back into her lap. “I’m training myself to. It has potential.”

“It’s a good base,” he said seriously.

“Right. So, step two. How’s your hack-attack strategy shaping up?”

“As soon as we’re in comms range of the station, I’m ready to infiltrate its systems in a staged advance. I’ve created viruses to exploit vulnerabilities. Taking control of core systems would be inefficient. Having the ability to take control is vital. Same with the ships docked and those that arrive.”

She frowned at him. “Are you sure that won’t be too much for you?”

“Now, you’re the one fussing. I’m passively scanning activity on Border Station and along the Hadrian Line. Having the ability to act on what I notice will be a relief.”

“Okay. Just don’t overload yourself. You have to recognize and respect your limits, not simply what you can do, but what you can handle without jeopardizing your quality of life or impacting you emotionally. Perceiving a problem doesn’t mean we have to correct it.”

He hummed disgruntledly. “My kin have expressed similar reservations regarding the extent of my self-defined obligations. I am fine.”

She held her hands up in surrender.

He changed the subject. “Cherry is fine. Judging by her messages, she’s thriving in her role as receptionist for Realm Edge Security.”

“Spying on her still feels iffy.”

Jonah was more at ease with the role of voyeur. He’d had millions of years of experience. In fact, he and his kin had been created to perform that role. “We’re gaining intelligence on Mstivoj,” he reminded Nora.

She sighed, half humorously. She was resigned to what they had to do. Jonah’s passive scanning ability was their ace in the hole. His ability to learn what was happening across the Human Sector meant they had an information advantage. Depending on whether he was paying attention, they’d know of events months in advance of communications to the Hadrian Line. Nonetheless, she said, “It’s a slippery slope, my friend. It’s a slippery slope.”

“I’m aware,” Jonah said seriously before breaking into quiet laughter. “Your sister has nerve. You should see what she’s doing to Mstivoj’s office.”

Nora imagined various garish decorating schemes. “Gilt and red velvet, like a bordello? No? A speed rink, chrome and neon green?”

He shook his head. “Mstivoj should be grateful you’re not overseeing the renovations.”

She grinned.

It had been kind of Mstivoj to drop Cherry at Border Station before he ventured out to the Erythraean Valley. It had been kinder still to arrange a job for her that encouraged her self-respect. Receptionist for a security firm, even one run by a former Palantine privateer, beat her previous work as a for-sale indentured servant in a club.

Perhaps he hadn’t anticipated how Cherry would interpret her position as receptionist. She’d styled herself as she-who-must-be-obeyed in the renovation of Realm Edge Security’s newly purchased headquarters. Or perhaps he had. After all, the workers respected her authority.

Other interested parties wouldn’t have guessed Mstivoj’s destination after he left Border Station.

Jonah didn’t guess. He tracked Mstivoj through space to a secret base in the Erythraean Valley.

Typically, unofficial bases attracted deserters (in wartime) and drifters. When Jonah tracked some of the ships that had arrived at the small base, he discovered, instead, a mix of black market miners and mercenaries. The latter group included veterans from the recently ended war as well as pirates.

The base was better than the average of its kind. If the Capitoline Security Bureau had known of its existence, they’d have been monitoring it.

Perhaps they suspected it, and that was part of the reason for the RC Genghis Khan deploying mines across routes to the Erythraean Valley.

Nora was sure Liam wasn’t enjoying that new duty.

Mstivoj spent a mere three days on the Erythraean Valley base, and despite his experience with piracy—or because of it—he spent that time recruiting from among the veterans rather than the pirates.

Or maybe it wasn’t so much recruitment as rejecting a handful of the people who’d traveled out to the base onboard Palantine ships. Three of those ships, numbering one hundred and seventy three people across them, were accompanying him back to Border Station.

With twenty nine people, including Cherry, already employed by Realm Edge Security, the newcomers would establish Mstivoj as a significant force on-station.

“Have you found any connection between Mstivoj and the Palantine royals or government?” Nora had asked the question before.

Jonah’s answer remained unchanged. “Nothing new. In his past as a privateer, Mstivoj received orders from the PIA.” The Palantine Intelligence Agency. “In contested space and along the Hadrian Line, they speak in the King’s name. The last time Mstivoj received orders from them was when he was sent after Aria and us. He told them then that if he caught up with Aria, any of the hypothetical blaze was his. He said that he was no longer theirs to command. That was the deal.”

Nora nodded at the recitation of known facts. “Do you think the final deal, or the last condition of his service to the King, was the delivery of the combat android to the station to assassinate Liam?”

“I haven’t been able to locate conclusive evidence one way or the other. I hope it was because then there’s no big unknown relating to Mstivoj’s relationship with Palantine that will bite us. The other mystery is who it is who’s destabilizing Omnes, creating a gap in the political and criminal landscape of Border Station that Mstivoj can step into on his return.”

Nora smirked. “Still can’t find them?”

“If station surveillance was more complete or I could give my entire attention to the search, I could.”

That David Omnes was being purposely undermined was indisputable. Less evidence existed to support Jonah’s contention that the current crime lord was being deposed in favor of Mstivoj.

Regardless of the intent, Omnes being distracted and ultimately, possibly, removed from the station, either fatally or less drastically, worked in their favor. It reduced the chance of him caring to challenge the veracity of the Registry Office record which Jonah had altered to show Aria as legally Nora’s ward under Omnes’s authority as an orphanage governor.

When Nora registered her claim to the blaze deposit on Beaconditch, she’d create a trust fund for Aria, which would mark the girl as a very rich, tempting target for anyone who could contest and claim guardianship of her.

An important step in Nora and Jonah’s strategy for securing their futures was hiring a top tier legal firm to defend their interests, including Aria’s fate.

Nora tapped her toes against the floor of the bridge.

If Mstivoj succeeded in establishing himself as a power on Border Station and along the Hadrian Line, the question for Nora was whether she could, or should, spin that to her advantage. “Well, we’ve got the blaze samples, which is pretty much money in the bank. We have to decide whether to go with Mstivoj or throw all-in with the duke’s daughter.”

“We’re not sure of her intentions,” Jonah said.

Nora pulled a face. “We’re not sure of Mstivoj’s. You have no proof for your belief he’s a rebel. And if he is, his intent to break the system hardly benefits us when we’re positioning ourselves in the system.”

“Or we position ourselves to be agile and survive any disruption.”

Out of habit, since she was in the captain’s chair on the bridge, she checked their surrounding space on-screen. “I don’t believe Mstivoj is connected to anyone strong enough to overcome the royals’ stranglehold over the sector.”

“He could be,” Jonah said in a strange voice.

When he didn’t continue, she glanced at him.

“You.”

She blinked. “Me? I doubt it. You, maybe, but you’ve already said you don’t want to change humanity’s path.”

“It’s over a month back to Border Station.”

She frowned at the non sequitur.

He coughed. “We have time for you to learn a little more about yourself.”

It was amazing how silent the bridge could be. Nora heard her own breathing, and hers alone. She was the sole human on the bridge.

That Jonah wasn’t human couldn’t be allowed to matter. Couldn’t be permitted to intimidate her.

“Jonah, I warned you I find trust difficult. If you’ve been manipulating me—”

“No! It’s…not that. Caring what happens to you, and determining what choices we have, is the first time my kin and I have focused our data gathering and analysis on an individual. Building a profile for a person as opposed to a species is new to us. We’ve learned how much we missed by focusing at too high a level.”

“But I’m not the first person you’ve noticed. You were monitoring individuals like the royals. That’s what you said when you explained that their Vapori burr abilities are diminishing. You tracked them through time.”

He lightly clasped the arms of the pilot’s chair. “Actually, tracking the royals through time produces some of the data one of my kin has used to populate an ancestral medical history for you.”

“What?!”

The arms of the pilot’s chair creaked. Jonah hastily relaxed his grip. “This is the bit you won’t like, and you have every right to be angry, but in my defense, I am telling you now that I know it happened. I could have stayed silent. Also, I have told my kin that you’d view their action as an invasion of your privacy.”

Nora spaced out her words. “What did they do?”

“They analyzed your DNA and RNA.”

She’d be outraged in a minute. First, she was dumbfounded. “You can do that from however far away they are?”

“Yes. We’re designed to collect data on organic sentients’ evolution. It’s a necessary ability.”

“You keep telling me, and I keep forgetting or underestimating your abilities. But, Jonah, my genetic profile is mine. Why would your kin think they had a right to it?”

He relaxed a fraction. “My kin have become emotionally invested in you and Aria. You accepted me, and you’re the sole human to know of our existence. With Aria, my kin are contemplating what it means to act as parents or aunts or uncles. We take our commitments seriously, and one of my kin had an idea as to how to reinforce your reputation as a person not to be messed with. They sought to understand why your Vapori burr manipulation power is strong, while the royals breeding for the ability are declining in power.”

She scowled at him, the scowl a desperate cover for her feeling of naked vulnerability. “I’ve kept the secret of who my father is since I learned it aged seven.”

“We’re not going to tell anyone,” Jonah said. They weren’t in contact with any other humans. He was the bridge between species.

Are the Vapori AIs a species? A bridge between peoples? She rubbed her eyes, which had the added advantage of momentarily hiding Jonah’s hopeful, apologetic expression. “You’re right. You didn’t have to tell me what your kin did.” And I’ll deal with my emotions later, in private. “What do you mean by an ancestral medical history?”

“We don’t retain all the data we gather. Plus, some of the details of your ancestors’ existence were likely never collected. But by filling in identities where they could, and deriving estimates from generalized data, my kin created a profile of how changes in humanity over the five hundred years since the Stranding have specifically produced you.”

“That doesn’t really clarify things.”

He tilted his head as he considered his answer. “It might be easier to start with my kin’s conclusion.”

Nora shrugged a silent invitation to proceed.

“You are likely one of the strongest Vapori energy users in the Human Sector.”

When he didn’t immediately continue, she prompted him. “You’ve danced around that idea before when you compared me to Crown Prince Dominic’s low ability with burrs.”

He defended himself. “I didn’t know of your connection to Dominic when I did so.”

Her shoulders hunched. “Does it matter?”

“For the purposes of this discussion, your blood status as a Palantine royal is one of the least influential factors.”

Nora counted her breaths. I will not hyperventilate at hearing that said aloud.

She was King Ivan’s daughter and Crown Prince Dominic’s older half-sister.

Jonah watched her warily, his speech slowing to the rhythm of her breathing. “I can guess why you’ve hidden it. Politically, your existence is dynamite. Add in that you’re stronger than the current heir, and we have a potential concentration of interest that supports your original intention to run and hide.”

Dread she’d carried since childhood chilled her blood. Most children outgrew their fear of monsters. Nora’s monsters were real, and royal, and she’d never been able to set aside her fear. “Should I be going back to Border Station?”

“Why did you decide to take a stand now, rather than run?”

Her toes curled painfully tight, stretching the top of her feet. “Because you can hack and control systems on Border Station, giving us a chance to run if we have to, but really because I’m hoping a blaze discovery gives me enough wealth and status that, along with your knowledge of events across the sector, I’d be strong enough to withstand threats against me.”

“So, nothing has changed except that now I know your father is King Ivan.”

She flinched. She hadn’t heard that sentence since her biological mother, Cherry’s mother, had coldly informed her of that fact, and informed Nora—then aged seven—that she’d be hunted, tortured and killed if anyone learned of her parentage. Maya had ordered her to stay away from the biological children Maya was willing to claim. “I won’t let you drag them down with you.”

Cherry hadn’t even been born than.

“Ivan doesn’t seem to be a bad man,” Jonah said gently. “Not like his father.”

“My grandfather.” Nora leapt up and tried to shake off her tangled, useless emotions. “Olav might be dead, but Queen Sarah would kill me for being her husband’s bastard.”

Jonah stayed seated. “You were conceived before their marriage.”

“Ivan was betrothed to Sara when he had a drunken encounter with Maya. Betrothed. As Hermione is to Dominic. No, actually, they’d be married by now. Ha! I’ve acquired a sister-in-law.” She rubbed her arms, trying to ignore the fact that she was trembling. The impact of talking about her long-held secret was traumatic enough to elicit a physical response. “Queen Sarah would have me killed for being competition for her children. Legitimacy isn’t required to inherit the throne. It’s DNA and the ability to manipulate Vapori burrs.”

“We’ll look into Palantine politics,” Jonah promised.

Nora stilled with her hands cupping her elbows.

He gave a slight, reassuring smile. “I had begun to do so, anyway. We need to know what games Mstivoj is playing and bringing to Border Station.”

“Aria mentioned that her mom’s family worked for Queen Sarah’s brother,” Nora muttered.

“The Duke of Ontario. You told me. I had intended to study his activities along the Hadrian Line. I’ll shuffle it higher up my list of priorities.”

Nora attempted a shaky laugh, but when it was more shake than laughter, disturbingly shrill and wavery, she stopped and drew a deep breath. “Even you can’t learn everything. And I prefer it that way. If you could achieve omniscience, you’d be a god, and that would be weird.”

While Jonah dealt with the idea of godhead, she slowly ceased trembling.

Judging by his expression, he found the idea of deification appalling.

“Was this your dramatic method of telling me you knew who my dad is, or is there something more you need to tell me?”

He grimaced. “Something more. Do you want a coffee or a sugar hit before we pull the band aid off all at once?”

She dropped into the captain’s chair. “Hit me with it.”

Jonah led into his revelation more gently this time. “Human scientists have been studying the forced evolution of Stranded humanity’s DNA for five centuries. My kin used some of those scientists’ insights in their compilation of your ancestral medical history. The royals know enough to acquire any new Forgotten’s genetic profile. In the last half century, as the decline in royals’ ability with the burrs has intensified, they’ve researched the interplay of changes to their genetic heritage due to forced and natural adaptation to your six distinct planetary environments and the changes wrought on the RNA of the fifteen Originals due to their encounter with the lens at the Origin black hole and which are decreasingly inherited by their descendants.”

“Whoa. I need a minute.” She frowned at the screens showing the space around them. Currently, they were headed for the space dust that partially blocked access to the Avestan Range. At a prudent distance, they’d turn aside and run parallel to the cloud till they reached the safest exit from the range to the space nearest to Border Station.

On stations, as in spaceships, the artificial air supply filtered pathogens and toxins. On planets, although terraforming had some effect, the most efficient method of ensuring human survival long-term was to alter the human settlers. Some of it happened naturally via the human body’s reaction to pathogens and toxins. Other times, immunity and adaptability was enhanced or outright achieved by medical intervention via a range of methods including vaccinations and more intrusive measures. Some of those changes had affected human RNA and passed down the generations.

The result was that after five centuries, the people of the Human Sector differed from their ancestors and would differ from the rest of humanity if and when they ever encountered their own again. According to the scientists, Stranded humanity wasn’t significantly different. They were nowhere near creating a new species. The common analogy was to dog breeds. Dogs were all canines, but a Great Dane was most definitely not a chihuahua.

Now, Jonah was outright stating that some of those survival changes had interacted with her inheritance from those of her ancestors who’d been among the fifteen Originals altered by their contact with the Vapori lens at the Origin black hole.

Humans had never intended to arrive through the Origin black hole. When the seven colony spaceships set out from Earth space, they’d entered and exited three black hole millraces. Nora was sketchy on the science of the millraces and how they fed into the rivers that streamed at impossible speed through time and space, basically collapsing it.

At any rate, the expedition had not gone as planned. The colony ships hadn’t exited the last river to their intended and scrupulously surveyed region of nine terraformed planets. Instead, they’d burped out of the Origin black hole and encountered an alien object which they labeled a lens, and which they ultimately concluded was the reason they couldn’t re-enter the black hole and correct their journey.

The fifteen personnel sent out to investigate the Vapori lens returned with burrs. How they had known that the burrs were important was a mystery best explained by their attraction to the energy in the burrs. Just as Nora had found Jonah by her tingling awareness of the burrs that powered him.

Now that he was embodied as an android, she couldn’t sense the three burrs sealed inside him.

Humanity had misunderstood the nature of the burrs. When the Originals or their descendants activated a burr, it annihilated whatever they aimed it at. Obliterated reality was what they called it. Consequently, the humans who first encountered them, defined the burrs as weapons.

However, as a Vapori AI, Jonah explained that annihilation as a siphoning of energy. At quantum levels, matter was energy. The burrs absorbed energy, which could then be used to power the lens or AIs such as himself.

In fact, the other burrs humanity, or rather, its royals, collected over the centuries all came from Silicaese caches. Unlike humans, the Silicaese had discovered how to use the energy stored in the burrs. Ironically, where they’d failed was where the humans naturally succeeded: the siphoning of more energy into the burrs.

According to Jonah, the alterations to the Originals in their contact with the lens gave them a natural affinity for siphoning energy.

Since hearing that, Nora had been curious if the technology of the lens—both physical and energetic—had altered the fifteen humans for that purpose.

The Silicaese weren’t altered by their contact with Vapori technology even as they unwittingly killed many of Jonah’s kin by stealing their burrs and adding those burrs to their caches.

Humanity had only ever discovered the Silicaese caches. Never burrs still inside and powering Vapori AIs, Jonah’s kin.

The difference between humans and Silicaese was that humans were carbon-based lifeforms with a small energetic component, which created a commonality with the Vapori who’d also been carbon-based, although the ratio of physical body to energetic body had been the opposite to humans’. The Vapori had been mostly energetic, like their AIs.

Of the Original fifteen, thirteen had married the captains of the colony ships, or the captains’ children, thereby creating the royal families who controlled the six inhabited planets of the Human Sector.

As a Forgotten on her mother’s side, Nora was a descendant of one, or possibly both, of the two Originals who’d declined to join the creation of a new royal social structure buttressed by the obliterating power of the burrs controlled by the royals.

The dirty secret Jonah had told her weeks ago was that the burrs’ ability to siphon energy could be focused to remove an individual’s personality; in effect, rendering them a zombie. The obvious deduction was that the reason illegitimacy was no barrier to inheriting the crown was because the royals wanted their strongest descendants inside and supporting the system rather than reacting with resentment and zombifying a king.

“I’m an outlier,” Nora said. “The general trend is a loss of ability to activate the burrs. Instead, my genetics have somehow combined to increase the ability. So, it’s not really a coincidence that I found you. Someone with less ability wouldn’t have sensed your burrs.”

“That is my kin’s conclusion. I’ll send your ancestral medical history to your personal comms unit.”

“Thank you for telling me.” The words emerged hoarsely. Nora had to force them out. But she was grateful. There was power in knowing what others knew about you, and vulnerability in ignorance.

Jonah bowed his head. “The knowledge belongs to you. It is freely given, with no expectations.”

“Why does that sound ominous?”

He laced his fingers together. “Because of the last piece of knowledge I have for you. A system can’t change itself from within. Humans think it can, but that’s a delusion. A system that has been around for a while is adaptive, sly. It subverts its changemakers. Fundamental, revolutionary change requires a truly external catalyst. Something has to be added or taken from the system by an external force.”

He flexed his interlaced fingers. “That’s me. But the real gamechanger is the combination of you and me. You have the ability—an affinity with Vapori energy, and therefore, its technology—while I have the knowledge of how the technology works. I don’t understand everything about it, but where it’s similar to my own construction, I do.”

“Would you…I mean the burrs are the bones of your kin. Would you really be okay with me utilizing them? It’s all hypothetical because I don’t have access to any burrs. The royals have them locked away.”

“My kin and I aren’t thinking about the burrs. Although, yes, we’re fine with you using the power sources that charged our deceased kin.”

She frowned at him, puzzled. “Is this all hypothetical? The only other Vapori tech is you, and I’m not messing with your existence.”

“You forgot the lens.”

Nora froze.

“My kin and I discussed the question. It’s possible that your affinity with Vapori energy is strong enough that you could redirect the focus of the lens to allow a human spaceship to enter Origin’s millrace.”

She licked her dry lips. “And return?”

“Possibly.”

“Holy ducks. Holy, star-quacking ducks.”

“It’s not a guarantee. In fact, it’s less than forty percent odds an attempt to refocus the lens would work, but…”

She nodded slowly, stunned. “You and I could be the key to opening up the Human Sector, reconnecting us with the rest of humanity. That would be…but to do it…”

“I don’t want you to tell anyone of my existence, or my kin’s.”

“Absolutely not. We humans have a bad habit of hunting others to steal their power or simply destroy them.”

Jonah rose and clasped her shoulder briefly. “I just wanted you to know how special you are.”

She laughed incredulously. “Mostly, when people claim they’re special, they’re not. But this…”

He smiled sympathetically. “It’s like me. Becoming embodied and bridging the worlds of my kin and yours is both a burden and a gift.” He departed the bridge.

Nora stared distractedly at the screens displaying the space around their ship.

Burden and gift.

Jonah, and his kin, had given her a great gift. The knowledge of herself and her abilities was important, but far greater was that they’d trusted her with that knowledge.

She alone, of all humans, had the ability, and could reach for the knowledge, to alter Vapori technology and change the future.

Jonah trusted that she could handle that responsibility and gift.

It was paradigm-altering.

Who am I? Who might I choose to be?

Back in Angkor, Nora had known a girl a couple of years older than herself who’d claimed the title of poet. Shaker had used words like graffiti, scrawling them across people’s imaginations.

They crack our mirrors.

Nora hadn’t understood then. Now, she was in awe of a seventeen-year-old towers’ poet who’d identified and expressed their subjugation.

The entire system of the Angkorran towers slums functioned to prevent its residents from seeing themselves as capable or deserving of respect.

Nora was half-ashamed to realize that every step she’d taken out of and away from the towers had been due to someone else demonstrating their belief in her. It hadn’t been self-belief that freed her.

First, there had been the test for entrance to trade school in which the proctor had seen her practical ability to repair mechanisms and pushed her into trade school in Mandalay.

Then Ethan had believed her brilliant, and in loving him and trusting him she’d gained work on xeno-archaeological digs and inclusion in his wonderful, healthy, farming family.

The xeno-archaeologists’ support had encouraged her to try academia.

All of it had combined to shape her into a person capable of working as a tagger in border space where Jonah had entered her life, and his belief that she could do anything had pushed her further than ever. She’d fought and defeated a combat android, and she was preparing to face the Human Sector with her secrets as a Forgotten at risk of discovery.

He and Aria had shoved her into accepting that maybe she could be a parent.

At each step she’d chosen to change, to grow, but the impetus hadn’t come from her. It had come from someone else seeing her potential.

She only saw herself in the cracked mirror forced on all towers’ residents.

“But I got out.”

With the help of everyone who’d loved her, she’d pieced her mirror back together; that is, her self-perception and self-respect.

“No more doubt.” Whatever she decided to do, whatever skills and abilities she pulled together, she’d do it without regrets and without takebacks. “All-in.”

Chapter 8

Nora shoved the question of the Vapori lens, and whether she and Jonah might be able to reconnect Stranded humanity with the rest of humanity, to the back of her mind. Future problems and opportunities could only be addressed once they’d established a secure foundation.

The lens was a years-in-the-future, maybe-never problem.

Here and now, on the bridge of her small scout ship, she had to register her claim to Beaconditch and its blaze deposit. It was the first step, the irrevocable action, after which everything would happen fast.

Three hours ago, the CC Kangaroo had come into comms-range of Border Station.

Anyone else would have spent those three hours receiving and reading messages and news newer than that downloaded at the Border Station mailbox which they’d passed two days ago. However, Jonah’s passive scan ability meant they were up to date on critical news and events. He’d spent the three hours hacking station systems.

Behind them, the hatch to the bridge remained closed.

If Aria needed Nora, there was an intercom.

It wouldn’t be used. In the gym, Aria was playing a fierce game of handball against a virtual opponent. After she showered, she had a math tutorial. If she finished it on time, Nora had promised her a Stars Galore Sundae on Border Station. So, Aria was motivated to work independently while Nora dealt with bureaucracy.

“Ready,” Jonah said.

Nora hit the submit button which sent her registration of a blaze discovery to the Department of Space. Then she sent the other messages she had queued up.

Inside of two minutes, she had a response to her claim registration in the form of a voice call.

A deep male voice identified himself as the director of the Department of Space office on Border Station. Jonah authenticated the caller. “Are you joshing us, Captain Devi?”

“Nope.” Nora popped the “p” in her response. “I have three samples and footage of me acquiring them on the planet. I’ve struck blaze. A whole planet of it.” Which was an exaggeration. The percentage of blaze in Beaconditch’s crust was probably closer to three percent; a fact she’d included in her claim registration.

Three percent was significant enough that the director didn’t correct her hyperbole. “We’ll meet you when you dock. If we verify your samples, it will increase the value of your claim.”

Nora laughed. “I don’t have to be coaxed into sharing the samples with you. However, I expect you’ll have company as you wait for me to dock. I’m hoping to open negotiations with Willow Lange of the Blue Dock Scrapyard.”

The director’s sharp inhalation carried over the comms link. “An open market bid—”

The Department of Space oversaw open market bidding for new claims. For independent taggers like Nora, they were considered the safest option.

But that was in the inner realm where the Department of Space was fully supported by robust police forces. On Border Station, the Department of Space required the RC Genghis Khan to be docked for the department to have any teeth. With the battlecruiser away on patrol, the Department of Space was a legal power, but in practical terms, offered the same level of support as wet cardboard.

The new owner of the scrapyard, on the other hand, was very, very interesting. As were the people she employed, and her silent partner, Crown Prince Francis.

Jonah had spent days researching the Blue Dock Scrapyard and analyzing where it might fit in the games being played along the Hadrian Line and in the inner realm.

Most importantly, he and Nora had decided they could use Willow Lange, her employees, and connections.

However, what Nora said to the Department of Space director was simply, “The scrapyard possesses the only three eseduce arrays in border space.”

In fact, Nora had used one, before Willow bought the scrapyard, to kill a combat android. Such an action would be impossible now. The scrapyard’s new employees, many of them Marines “retired” from service, would insist on joining in the fun.

If any similar “fun” targeted Nora, she needed allies to protect Jonah, Aria and herself. Jonah’s hacking skills were awesome, but on occasion, skillfully wielded violence was the smarter option.

“The eseduce arrays. I’d forgotten,” the director muttered.

“As you can imagine, I’m busy exploring my options…”

“Of course, of course. We’re here to help you. If you have any questions or require assistance, please contact us. At any time. A blaze discovery such as you describe will spark a blaze rush. I wasn’t on-station for the last one. Oh, crud.”

Nora grinned at the director’s realization of exactly how much trouble she’d landed him with.

Everyone and their dog would be out searching for blaze and staking wild claims.

The Navy would have to send other ships to help Liam control the increased space traffic and conflict, and respond to emergencies. Those within comms range.

There would be tragedies.

But all of this would take months. News of her discovery had to be carried out on ships heading to the inner realm, decisions made there, and reinforcements sent.

She and Jonah would use that time to establish themselves securely.

The Blue Dock Scrapyard and its unusual employee profile, heavily skewed to security, was part of her plans. But so, too, was Mstivoj.

When the Department of Space director hurriedly hung up to prepare for the avalanche bearing down on his small office, the next call came in from Cherry.

Nora decided she could confirm her slightly more detailed message in two short sentences. “Hi, sis.” Yes, I’m willing to publicly acknowledge our relationship if you are. “I want to hire your boss.” Yes, I’m officially insane and want to employ as my security force, the new business founded by the man who recently threatened and attempted to capture me. But in Mstivoj’s defense, he also left a genuinely well-meant message in case I survived the Avestan Range.

Cherry choked. “You’re kidding.”

First, “joshing” from the Department of Space. Now, “kidding” from my half-sister. I guess my actions really do seem insane. Or at minimum, preposterous.

“Cherry, I found blaze.”

“Flaming rat turds.” The awed curse was pure towers.

Jonah grinned in amusement, eavesdropping happily.

“You’re rich,” Cherry said.

“Gonna be.”

“Holy ducks.”

“Yup.”

Cherry shouted. “HOLY ducks!” Then, “No, no, shut up! Go away. Sorry, not you, Nora. These bozos. I ain’t talking to you! I gotta sit down.”

Nora laughed. “So, you’re taking this well.”

“I’m really not.” A door slammed. “Okay, I’m on my own. I guess this is why Zac chased you.”

“He’d have been out of luck. The blaze discovery is mine. Aria’s parents destroyed the map she had us run out to the range for. They left her a personal note instead.” Nora and Jonah had decided to run with a version of the truth, even if no one believed it.

Sure enough, Cherry scoffed. “You expect me to believe that you pulled a different blaze discovery out of your ass?”

“Language.”

“Butt.”

“I’m not sure I missed anything, not having a sister,” Nora mused.

“A stranger would tell you the same. No one’s going to believe you stumbled over blaze.”

Nora coughed. “I may have been less than honest about what I discovered on my previous journey through the Avestan Range.”

Cherry was silent a moment. “You know, I almost believe you.”

“Good instincts.” Nora ceased teasing her sister. “I’m serious about hiring Realm Edge Security to provide my security. Initially, to protect my mooring for the CC Kangaroo. Then I’ll be purchasing a house on the station, and it’ll need a security upgrade.”

“Headaches,” Cherry said. “They’re upgrading security here at headquarters, and it’s headaches.”

“Well, I’d like to pay you to have those headaches.”

“Aww. Ain’t you the sweetest? Not!”

“Cherry, I can buy out your indentured service contract with Mstivoj as part of the deal, and give you enough to establish yourself anywhere, including in the inner realm. I won’t fund your brother and dad, but if you wish to waste the money I give you on them, you can.”

Cherry snapped her gum. “Not me. Being a free woman sounds good, but I’ll stay here. Working for Zac is pretty good. No one gets handsy with me. I could look after your interests. Funnel the best guys to your security team. Stuff like that.”

If Cherry had found a place to belong, Nora was glad for her. “You do that. When the money starts flowing for the blaze discovery, I’ll create a trust fund for Aria and one for you. If you change your mind, you’ll have the ability to move on.”

In contrast to her tough-gal charade of gum-chewing, Cherry’s voice was soft. “Thanks, Nora.”

They both knew how lack of money could trap a person. That defined the situation for the majority of people in the towers.

“Who has Mstivoj left in charge? Can they negotiate a contract?”

“Ben. Benjamin Hough. He’s the head of security and all that. You can hire him to provide security for your mooring. A small contract. Then talk with Zac about an ongoing arrangement. I reckon we’re about your best bet on Border Station, but if you head back to Capitoline…Zac’s Palantine, Nora. He won’t be welcome in the inner realm.”

“Whereas people out here don’t care?”

Cherry’s gum snapped. “Not as much. Or they didn’t till veterans started turning up. The old-timers here say the station’s changing. Guess you’re going to change it way more.”

“The blaze rush will,” Nora agreed. “Have Ben sent me a contract for a security team to cover the CC Kangaroo’s mooring.”

“Will do. Hey?” The syllable was tentative.

“Yeah?”

“You sure you want to acknowledge me as family?”

Nora sighed. “I have secrets, Cherry. I’m not sure when or how some of them will come out. I’ll do my best to protect you from the fallout. But given Mstivoj knows we’re kin, then this is one secret that has escaped us. No sense trying to stuff it back in the bag.”

Cherry didn’t try to tell her that Mstivoj wouldn’t spill the beans regarding their Forgotten heritage. “If you’re okay with it, then I am. I’ll get you your contract, sis.”

Their call ended, and Nora wipe a hand over her eyes before meeting Jonah’s concerned gaze. “I’m okay.”

“Yes, you are. But every step out of hiding is an adjustment. Take the time you need.”

She glanced at the flashing messages of people wanting to talk to her. “After I’ve spoken with Willow Lange.”

They had done their research into the new owner of the Blue Dock Scrapyard who possessed the only three eseduce arrays in the region.

Eseduce arrays were crucial to processing blazsvitloium. Unlike with most metals, electric field assisted extraction methods, which pulled atoms out of rock, was the cheapest as well as safest method of processing blaze. Other ores could be hauled in bulk to the raw ore dock at Border Station for processing. With blazsvitloium, it was more efficient and economical (although not cheap) to process the toxic blaze ore in situ at the mine site. The result, pure blazsvitloium, was safe to handle.

Jonah had collected their data on Willow Lange.

Nora had helped interpret it.

Undoubtedly, the Blue Dock Scrapyard was a means for the Capitoline royal family, particularly Crown Prince Francis, to acquire substantial influence over life and the development of settlement and business along the Hadrian Line.

The preponderance of military veterans in its fifty-strong workforce indicated an intent to do far more than deal in scrap, as did the cutter and two smaller spaceships leased from Crown Prince Francis by the company.

The anomaly in the profile of a financial and security force establishing itself in a crucial outpost, was that Willow had brought her sixteen-year-old son with her.

“Why?” Nora had demanded. “Lucas is the grandson of a duke. He’d have far more opportunities on Capitoline. Bringing him to Border Station…what trouble is he in?”

“Does it matter? I have a thousand and one data trails to pursue, and—” Jonah broke off. “Not Lucas, himself. He’s a point of vulnerability. Important to our profile of Willow.”

“Exactly. The Blue Dock Scrapyard with its financial resources and connections is our best bet for a long-term partnership in developing Beaconditch. We need to know what makes Willow Lange tick.”

The royals and high society on Capitoline might have been scandalized at a seventeen-year-old girl giving birth. But in the Angkorran towers, seventeen was an acceptable age for first-time motherhood. Nora was more interested in the arrangements made for the child. “She didn’t stick around.”

Lucas Lange didn’t take his father’s name, although it was listed on his birth certificate.

Vincent Zangmo. Fifth son of the oligarch, Stanley Zangmo. Also a high school student at the time. Willow and he had probably met at a private school dance or some similar elite activity.

The Zangmos showed no interest in Lucas. Stanley had many other grandchildren, legitimate heirs.

Willow’s parents had raised Lucas, for a definition of “raised” that meant nannies until boarding school at age six and holiday activities that meant he was never around.

Nora understood what it was to be an unwanted kid. She just hadn’t expected to sympathize with the grandson of a duke and an oligarch.

Lucas’s expulsion from boarding school happened three months after the war ended.

Nora wondered if it had been deliberate, a bid for Willow’s attention. If so, she doubted Lucas had anticipated being dragged out to the middle of nowhere. “Poor kid.”

But the fact that Willow had brought Lucas with her meant something.

“Do we risk the scrapyard?” Nora had asked Jonah.

“It’s our best option. Willow won’t sell those eseduce arrays. Plus, the scrapyard has the core of a group to operate them and protect the mine site.”

Thus, Nora found herself in the position of returning Willow’s call and hearing, unsurprisingly, that yes, the Blue Dock Scrapyard was keen on partnering with her to develop a new blaze discovery.

“We can offer you a secure berth at the scrapyard. No obligation.” Either Willow’s upper class drawl had been drilled out of her by the Navy’s insistence on concise precision, or else Willow had done her homework on Nora and was downplaying her upper class background to avoid irritating the towers’ brat.

“I have a secure mooring,” Nora said. “But thank you.”

“Do you have a legal representative?”

“Next step.”

The two women matched each other’s brevity.

“Excellent,” Willow said. “I’ll send you our draft proposal of what we’d offer for either a partnership or an outright purchase of your claim, subject to verification by the Department of Space as well as ourselves.”

“I’ll send you our lawyer’s name.” Nora hung up. “One more call,” she said to Jonah.

He flapped a hand. “No rush. I’m listening to Willow’s conversation. Our blaze discovery is triggering a few of their plans. Fascinating.”

To directly affect events in the scrapyard and on its ships, he had to hack their systems, which was proving difficult. Security at the scrapyard was top of the line. However, no human actions could prevent his passive scanning of events utilizing his Vapori AI observational abilities.

It was his and Nora’s secret weapon; the real reason she believed they could survive the snake pit of Human Sector politics.

However, she had to play her part, which was to be the public face and contact point for all interactions.

The law firm they’d selected as their top choice to handle their affairs had a main office in Bangalore, Capitoline’s capital city, and regional offices tentacled throughout the inner realm. Ganbold, Pak and Karimov were corporate lawyers with centuries of experience in space law, including mining claims. In fact, two of their founders had helped draft those laws.

Within twenty minutes, George Karimov had a contract for Nora to sign electronically, and promised that a junior would meet the CC Kangaroo on docking. In fact, he insisted on it. “She will accompany the Department of Space official at all times until your samples are verified.”

“Will she need a guard, as well?”

George Karimov allowed himself a small chuckle. “The junior will be my niece. I assure you. The samples are safe under her supervision.”

“Yes, but will she be safe?”

“Yes.” Rock solid conviction.

Nora decided to trust his judgment. If she couldn’t, she’d chosen the wrong lawyer. “Realm Edge Security will protect the CC Kangaroo while we’re docked. You’ll have to sort out security access with them. I’ll send you their details.”

“I have them.”

Nora hesitated, then decided how and why was none of her business. A short exchange of civilities ended the call.

Having addressed the pressing issues, she flopped back in the captain’s chair and stared at Jonah.

“Ssh,” he said. “I’m busy eavesdropping.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

He winked. “You have a loud silence.”

“We’re doing this,” she said.

“Yes.”

She considered hyperventilating. Researching, strategizing, and envisaging events was so not the same as actually doing them. “We’re doing this!”

Jonah grinned.

She pounced on him for a surprise hug before dashing out of the bridge. “Aria!”

“I’m not watching cartoons! I don’t know how they appeared on-screen.”

Nora didn’t bother checking how much schoolwork Aria had left undone. “Let’s pick out a party dress for you from the fabricator menu. A Stars Galore Sundae deserves a new dress!”

“Yay!”

“You can even have glitter.”

“Glitter stars!” Aria hauled Nora into a crazy dance around the kitchen.

Nora called Jonah into the celebration. Eavesdropping could wait. It wasn’t every day you had the courage to change your life. They swing-danced through the kitchen and into the lounge, throwing Aria into the air for the finale.

“Aaargh!” The girl landed on the sofa and giggled madly.

One of life’s perfect moments.

Nora had timed their approach to the station so they’d dock mid-morning. She had a very full schedule once they did.

She wore an olive utility shirt over black pants with her don’t-mess-with-me boots completing the look. She was professional, but she was a professional tagger, a qualified xeno-archaeologist, not a lawyer or bureaucrat. Her black hair was tightly braided.

Aria’s hair was too short for a full braid, so the girl had plaited two skinny braids to frame her face. She was aware how important today was, and had promised to be “quieter than a mouse” if she was allowed to stay and do her schoolwork at the coffee table in the lounge, while Nora conducted business at the kitchen table.

Nora had already sent the department, her lawyers, and Willow a copy of her video of Beaconditch and her acquisition of the samples, including how she’d sealed them in hazardous materials crates, which meant the Department of Space needed only to take possession of the blaze samples. However, Nora doubted the director would simply stand by while the department’s automated, hazard-rated cargo handler transferred the three sealed crates from the CC Kangaroo’s cargo hold to its own. There had to be some hoopla for a blaze discovery.

She’d baked mini apple guava pies and lemon bars for morning tea.

Aria had made chocolate brownies, under supervision.

Nora would feed the Department of Space director, her lawyer and—she acknowledged ruefully as she contemplated the vast array of cakes—the security guards supplied by Ben Hough under a short term contract for Realm Edge Security to protect the CC Kangaroo while it was docked on the Gretel Loop. Even with Aria’s appetite, they’d have to give away cakes.

While their official visitors were onboard, Jonah would stay out of sight on the bridge, monitoring everything. He was already on the bridge overseeing the spaceship’s docking. “Three minute countdown,” he shouted through the hatch.

Aria raced dramatically from the kitchen to throw herself down by the coffee table and frown fiercely over her schoolwork on her tablet.

Nora grinned.

George Karimov had already proven his courage as well as his legal ability by raising the question of Aria’s wardship. He wasn’t a man who let a problem fester. “Your departure from Border Station with Aria Kelly is potentially contentious. A dorm matron at the orphanage, a Mrs. Zoe Peters, contacted the police when Aria failed to return to the orphanage on the night in question.”

Nora hadn’t known that. Jonah had been otherwise occupied at the time, and so, not scanning the station for relevant happenings. They’d been busy running from the CC Golden Ratel, owned by the crime boss, David Omnes. He’d had his goons try to follow to threaten, or seize, Aria in pursuit of his growing suspicion that the girl could lead him to her parents’ blaze discovery.

“Is there a charge against me?” Nora knew there wasn’t. Jonah had checked.

“No. My understanding—” George cleared his throat. “The chief of police will generally answer questions off the record.”

Translation: he could be bribed to spill privileged information. The station police’s corruptibility partially explained the opportunities David Omnes and his ilk had found to flourish. In this case, the corruption helped Nora.

In fact, a conflux of events, then and now, gave her some wriggle room regarding Aria’s legal status and the circumstances of the Beaconditch blaze discovery.

George filled in the gaps in Nora and Jonah’s knowledge of what had happened on the station in the immediate aftermath of their departure with Aria. “Principal Garrett overrode his dorm matron’s concerns, shutting down any police investigation or kidnapping charge.”

George coughed. “As a rule, I prefer not to speculate.”

Nora withheld her skeptical reply. Speculation was the twin tool, along with information gathering, of a good, connected lawyer.

What George meant was that he doubted the wisdom of sharing his speculations with a new client.

However, he pushed past his reservations, probably in the interests of establishing goodwill with her. “In this instance, I suspect the close working relationship Principal Garrett has had in the past with one of the orphanage’s governing board members guided his action.”

“David Omnes,” Nora said, unimpressed though unsurprised that the man in charge of an orphanage could be bought by a crime boss.

“I’m not sure how you convinced him to authorize your guardianship of Aria Kelly…”

Nora stayed silent.

“Intriguingly, no one at the orphanage seemed to realize you had become the child’s legal guardian, until now. At the orphanage, they had dropped the matter since Aria was out of reach. In ordinary circumstances, David Omnes might have caused trouble. He’s already tried out the lie that he never authorized your guardianship.”

“It’s official,” Nora said. “It’s in the Registry Office database.”

“Indeed. Omnes’s claim of fraud would be unsuccessful if he pursued it. Even unofficially, people won’t believe him. His dubious reputation against your clean one and your wealth renders the public judgement plain. The sole point of doubt is why he, and not one of the other two orphanage governing board members, signed off on your guardianship?” A faintly rising intonation invited an answer.

Nora had one she and Jonah had prepared earlier. “At the time, Omnes was the controlling member on the board. However, I’ve heard rumors that Omnes’s grip on the station is weakening?”

“Don’t count him out yet,” was all George would say in response to Nora’s own trailing question. “You’re swimming in deep waters, and be aware, they’ll get deeper, murkier and violent. Bernice will look after your legal affairs. We will treat everyone as your enemy, even those you ally with.”

Seeing enemies everywhere hurt a person’s emotional health, but it was an exemplary survival paradigm.

“In legal affairs, that’s wise.” Nora decided to lay some groundwork for future maneuvers in power games along the Hadrian Line. “Thank you. I’m hoping that a partnership with the Blue Dock Scrapyard and its backers will provide some protection.”

“Ah.” It was an enlightened “Ah” as George registered that Nora knew more about Willow Lange and her royal investor, Crown Prince Francis, than a lone tagger recently returned to Border Station might reasonably be expected to.

Nora was satisfied by that “Ah”. Better that Ganbold, Pak and Karimov overestimate her than think to manipulate and exploit her supposed naivety.

Thanks to Jonah’s information gathering, she could present as a mysteriously competent political player on the station.

Everyone would be desperate to discover who her backers were. That there were none would keep the curious distracted for weeks.

Jonah interrupted her thoughts. “Nora, the Department of Space director has arrived. The security guards are verifying his identity and Bernice Karimov’s. Once they’ve searched the cargo-handler, you’ll have visitors.”

Aria retied a pastel hairbow. “We’re ready!”

“Showtime,” Nora agreed.

Chapter 9

“Bring out the cakes,” Nora said to Aria.

“Mm-right,” the girl mumbled through a mouthful of brownie.

The Department of Space director’s visit had been short and to the point as he stared in horror at Aria’s pastel presence and austerely declined cake. Apparently, the kitchen surroundings and presence of a child failed to meet his standards for a business meeting.

Bernice had accepted a lemon bar, assured Nora that she or her father would visit again shortly, and accompanied the director and the blaze ore samples back to the Department of Space office.

There was a sense of anticlimax at their swift departure that had Nora and Aria exchanging disappointed looks before Nora decided visiting with their security guards was the answer. “Guards are always hungry, and cake is always a good bribe. Well, except with the director, apparently.”

“Why are we bribing the guards?” Aria asked as she carried the box of cakes to the hatch. “Aren’t you paying them?”

“It’s not so much a bribe,” Nora conceded. “Guards see everything, and they gossip among themselves. They call it ‘sharing intelligence’. We’ll get into conversation with them and learn about how things are on the station.”

“Sneaky. I could do that with kids at a playground.”

“You could.”

“And they would talk to me because I’m not wearing froggy-green.”

The reminder of the prejudice against the orphanage children flattened some of Nora’s good mood. She wasn’t going to let it flatten Aria’s. “Remember, we’re going for ice-cream sundaes this afternoon, so only one more cake, now.”

“Yes! I’ll have a pie not a brownie. There’s fruit in the pies, so they’re good for you.” Aria and Nora exited the docking tunnel as the girl finished talking.

“Is that true?” one of the two guards asked in an amused tone.

Aria shoved the box toward him. “We have cake for you!”

“You do?” The guard’s alert gaze locked on Nora.

The other guard continued scanning their surroundings.

“The morning tea we planned wasn’t appreciated,” she explained briefly.

Aria couldn’t hold the box and open it.

Nora took it from her. “Chocolate brownies baked by Aria, lemon bars and apple guava pies.”

The guard examined the contents of the box. For security purposes, obviously. “We’re on duty.”

Nora pulled out the big guns. “Do you want me to tell Cherry that you refused homemade cake from her sister?”

The teasing question, with its deliberate spill of information, caught both guards’ attention. “Cherry’s your sister?”

The second guard’s accent was Palantine. Perhaps that was why he’d been silent till now. In the aftermath of war, a Capitoline accent on a Capitoline station was the prudent choice.

“Half-sister. We’ve both come a long way from the Angkorran towers.”

The Capitoline guard nodded, and offered a compromise. He smiled at Aria. “Your cakes look delicious, princess, but our boss would force-feed us laxatives if we ate on duty. Would you save us some for when we go off-duty?”

Aria smiled back, effortlessly charmed. “Yes!”

The guard held out his hand for her to shake. “Trent.”

“Aria.” She shook earnestly.

Nora juggled the box of cakes to her left hand. “Nora Devi.”

Trent shook hands firmly and jerked his head in his partner’s direction. “Gage.”

The Palantine guard glanced at Nora. A fractional dip of his head acknowledged the introduction before he resumed scanning the area. “I like lemon bars. Reckon that lawyer was enjoying hers.”

“You can have three,” Aria said.

Gage’s eyes flicked to Nora.

She sent back a wait for it look.

Aria wasn’t being generous without cause.

“We’re having ice-cream sundaes this afternoon!” Aria pirouetted.

The dawning humor on Gage’s face vanished. He rocked forward.

Nora followed his gaze down the dock. She recognized Willow Lange and the teenager trailing in her wake. “Willow Lange, a potential business partner, and her son, Lucas,” she murmured for the guards.

Trent nodded, moving two steps away and effortlessly resuming his game face.

Nora’s gut feel was that the affability he’d shown Aria and her was the pretense, and his soldier’s face the real man.

“Nora!” Willow called from just beyond Gage. She stepped around him with innate aplomb. As the daughter of a duke, she’d have grown up with guards. “Willow Lange. Glad to meet you in person.”

The two women shook hands.

Aria stared.

“Cake? Cool.” Lucas showed no shame in his perusal of the cake box. He reached for a brownie.

“Lucas,” Willow snapped.

Nora pretended it was an introduction. “And this is Aria. She baked the brownies.”

Lucas shot Aria a thumbs up. “They’re good, kid.”

Aria’s uncertain expression cleared to a smile. She was shy, though, in the “big” boy’s presence, and edged nearer to Nora.

“We’re on our way to the shops,” Willow said. “It’s always the little things you don’t think of when you move. We need potholders and chopsticks. I thought I’d stop in and invite you for dinner, tonight. No business, I promise. Just company, unless you have plans?”

Willow’s casual visit on the way to the shops—despite the CC Kangaroo’s mooring being a decided detour on the way to the Life Loop’s retail neighborhood—was a transparent attempt to establish a personal connection with Nora.

And Nora had to accept the offer, not rebuff her.

After all, Willow had gone to the hassle of dragging her teenager with her to assure Nora that the scrapyard was child-safe.

“Dinner cooked by someone else would be great.” Nora waved the cake box at Lucas in a silent offer of a second treat.

The boy had been kind to Aria despite the low-boil resentment with which he regarded his mother.

Nora could respect Lucas. He had cause for his resentment, but enough maturity not to inflict it on innocents.

Willow hadn’t just dragged him to a quasi-business encounter at the CC Kangaroo. She’d hauled him out to the border. The kid had been forced to leave behind his entire life.

“Six o’clock?” Willow suggested. “Or does Aria eat earlier?”

Lucas rolled his eyes.

Willow’s question was polite, but Nora could guess at his cynicism. He’d have eaten most of his dinners without his mom, yet here she was showcasing parental concern regarding dinner hours.

“Six o’clock is fine. We’ll see you then.”

“You can bring dessert,” Lucas said.

“Lucas!”

Nora laughed. “We’ll bring ice-cream and fruit salad. I promised Aria sundaes this afternoon, so I’m expecting her to be ice-cream-exhausted by then, but it’s no problem to pick some up. Any preferences?”

Willow’s lips were tightly compressed as she frowned at her son. She forced them into a smile as she turned back to Nora. “Dessert isn’t necessary, but ice-cream and fruit salad would be lovely. A couple of friends, people who work with me, will be joining us.”

“No problem. I always over-cater.” Nora hefted the cake box as evidence.

“We’ll see you, tonight, then. Casual dress.” Willow marched Lucas away. They were barely out of earshot when she started berating him.

“Lucas is in trouble,” Aria sing-songed. She fixed Nora with a stern gaze. “You were wrong, too.”

Nora raised an eyebrow. “I was?”

“Yes! I can ALWAYS eat more ice-cream.” Aria’s mock-stern expression shattered into glee.

Trent chuckled. “Before you get us all into trouble, little princess, why don’t you pop the cakes in the fridge till we finish our shift?”

“Okay.” Aria grabbed the cake box and skipped back through the docking tunnel.

The humor dropped from Trent. “Amend your security contract with us.”

“Pardon?”

“You have us visibly guarding your ship, which was a sensible precaution, especially while the blaze samples were onboard. But the interest you’re getting will only increase with Ms. Lange seeking you out. And there are others we’ve seen watching. If not for you, then for Aria, get a bodyguard till this situation shakes out and settles.”

The guard’s serious expression sent a chill through her. “Will Ben take the contract? I thought I had to negotiate with Mstivoj when he returns.”

“Kids trump politics with the boss,” Gage said.

Trent nodded.

Nora guessed “the boss” was Mstivoj, not Ben, but perhaps it was both men.

Children also changed the calculation for Nora. What she’d risk for herself, she wouldn’t expose Aria to. “I’ll call Ben.”

After a final stare around, and noting how many stares she received in return from people passing by or working on their own spaceships—lurkers and gawkers all of them—she retreated inside the CC Kangaroo to contact Ben.

Negotiating the additional bodyguard contract, both of them accepting it as temporary till she could speak with Mstivoj, proved effortless. Either Trent had been instructed to suggest the amendment to her, or he or Gage had messaged Ben to request he honor Trent’s assessment of danger and suggestion of a Realm Edge Security bodyguard.

Nora had the entire deal done in the twelve minutes before Aria tracked her down to her workshop, which she’d ducked into for peace and privacy.

The girl was bouncing out of her skin at the excitement of social contact after months away, along with the promise of sundaes. “I won’t wear my new dress to the ice-cream parlor. I’m saving it for dinner.”

At a scrapyard, Nora thought wryly. Out loud, she said, “Good idea.”

“I know!”

Nora winced at the shrill shout. “Gym time for you.” The girl needed to burn off her energy.

“Handball! I’m the winner, I’m the best.” Aria took her chanting, prancing self off to the gym.

Nora sought out Jonah on the bridge and closed the hatch. “We’ve acquired a bodyguard.”

“It’s a sensible precaution.”

“Yeah.” But the idea of being followed everywhere gave her an itchy feeling between her shoulder blades.

“And a dinner invitation,” he observed.

She frowned. “Why would Willow want to force a personal connection? A business partnership between us is inevitable. I have the blaze. She has the eseduce arrays. Why should either of us wait months to get started on extracting the blaze and making money? But we could have kept our interactions at the professional level.”

“The station is too small for that to work. Inevitably, you’ll meet at social events. It’s better for both of you if you can present a harmonious front rather than leave cracks for others to exploit. Plus, she could simply be lonely. You have more than blaze in common. Both of you recently assumed parental responsibilities.”

Nora’s eyes widened. “You think the daughter of a duke genuinely wants to be friends with me, a towers rat?”

“Don’t be a snob.”

She blinked. “Jonah?”

He seldom disagreed with her, let alone expressed disapproval.

His tone gentled. “The cracks in your self-confidence can be exploited, too. You have to value yourself. Besides, think of Liam. He’s friends with Willow and her backer, Crown Prince Francis. You didn’t doubt yourself with him.”

She smiled sadly. “I cancelled our first date and ran away.”

“For good and sufficient reason. To save Aria and ourselves. But those people we fled—the crime bosses, the corporations, the Palantine agents—they’re all still here. We knew we needed allies. If those allies are also eager to be friends, that’s a bonus.”

She nodded. “By the way, do you know the etiquette for bodyguards? Should I let Willow know we’ll be bringing one?”

After a blank stare, he burst out laughing. “I have no idea.”

Nora went to inquire of Trent.

At the end of their shift, Trent and Gage kept their promise to Aria and ate cake. First, though, they introduced Nora to the bodyguard who’d accompany Nora and Aria to the scrapyard.

Veronica Elloway was taller than Gage and dauntingly fit. Her very stillness radiated danger.

“There’s plenty of cake for you, too.” Aria offered her the box. “I made the brownies.”

Unlike the two men, Veronica didn’t balk at eating on duty.

Nora looked around and identified a second guard strolling along the dock, assessing threats. He’d be guarding the CC Kangaroo while Veronica guarded them.

Veronica’s job was to get Aria to trust her.

As she watched Veronica enthusiastically eat a brownie, nodding along to Aria’s explanation of its ingredients, it seemed she’d succeeded.

Watching professionals at work was enlightening. Ben had chosen well the guards for this duty. Nora felt herself relaxing with them. She trusted them to do their jobs.

“Cakes away and wash your hands,” Nora said to Aria. “We’re leaving in five minutes to catch the tram.”

The tram that ran through the station had a regular seven minute schedule, less so for the line to the scrapyard and raw ore dock. If they missed this tram, they’d have to call a cab or be late for dinner. Private vehicles were rare. The space station simply didn’t have the space to support traffic congestion.

Aria scampered and returned in three minutes. “I’m ready!” Her party dress sparkled as she pirouetted.

“Sweater,” Nora reminded her.

“Oops.”

The station was climate controlled, but Nora knew from past experience that the scrapyard was cooler. Hence, her own leather jacket. She picked up the chiller bag filled with ice-cream and fruit salad from her garden, and looped the strap over a shoulder.

“Now, I’m ready.” Aria carried her sweater rather than hide her pretty dress.

Trent and Gage walked the trio to their tram stop, and let the tram headed to the Life Loop pass them by. Evidently, they intended to wait and confirm the security of the scrapyard-destined tram.

Nora let them do their job, observing how easily Veronica redirected Aria’s enthusiasm to talking with Trent while she checked the inside of the tram.

Veronica nodded an all-clear, and Trent let Aria rush onboard.

“’Night,” Nora said quietly, aware but taking care not to seem aware of how the three passengers on the near-side of the tram stared. They could have been gawking at the guards. More probably, they guessed her identity. She’d have to get accustomed to being recognized.

It was the little things like that which made becoming wealthy a pain.

Nora preferred anonymity. Since her own actions had stripped that anonymity from her, she had to trust in other strategies for her safety.

For her and Jonah, the goal in partnering with the Blue Dock Scrapyard was the influence and support it could draw on. Willow had the security force and royal connections to thwart or survive attacks. Nora and Jonah could sit back and watch who came after Willow once she took on the risk, and high reward, of developing Beaconditch.

Meantime, Realm Edge Security ought to keep Nora and Aria alive.

Lucas and a tall, gray-haired man waited at the scrapyard tram stop. The man stood square-shouldered and alert, obviously a highly trained security expert, as Veronica was. Lucas slouched at a wary, unhappy distance.

Aria turned shy.

Nora had to nudge her off the tram. “Hi, Lucas. Aria chose Chocolate Explosion ice-cream just for you, so I hope you like chocolate.”

Aria peeked around her. “He does! He ate the brownies.”

Lucas relaxed. Strangely, his relaxing actually straightened his spine. Which meant that his slouch was a calculated pose. “I do like chocolate. Thanks, kid.”

Aria beamed.

“Let me carry the bag.” Lucas reached for the chiller bag.

Good manners were merely the formalized expression of kindness. Nora had read that in one of her recently studied parenting books. “Thank you, Lucas.”

He hitched the bag over his shoulder. As excellent as his manners were toward her and Aria, he totally ignored the man with him.

After a frown at Lucas, the man introduced himself. “Yuri Bennett.”

Nora recognized him. He was head of security for the scrapyard and its vessels, and undoubtedly would oversee security on Beaconditch as well. Thanks to Jonah’s research, she knew Yuri had served as a Royal Guard captain. “Nora Devi.”

“Willow invited me to dinner, so I thought I’d join Lucas in meeting you. And this must be Aria.” He offered to shake hands with her, as well.

Aria touched her hand to his, and shuffled sideways to join Lucas.

In other circumstances, Lucas might have scorned solidarity with the young girl. As it was, he smirked at Aria choosing him over Yuri.

“And this is Veronica Elloway, our bodyguard for the evening.”

Veronica and Yuri exchanged sharp nods.

Lucas seemed to view a bodyguard as a natural and ignorable phenomenon. He asked Aria if she’d enjoyed her ice-cream sundae that afternoon as he led their small party into the scrapyard.

The yard had changed since Nora’s last visit.

If the current security, both technological and personnel, had been in place a few months ago, she’d never have been able to fight the combat android here.

Equally as profound as the security changes was the reassembly of the rows of scrap. Or perhaps, the new row design was part of the security changes? Either way, the scrap was now sorted, and undoubtedly far more expensive. A scrapyard owner who knew what their yard contained could keep the treasures, rather than allowing a casual scrapper to find and benefit from what got lost in the muddle.

Despite her new wealth, Nora mourned the loss of the treasure hunt energy that a visit to the Blue Dock Scrapyard and its barely contained chaos had previously provided.

Nonetheless, her fingertips tingled as they approached Willow’s cabin, which was positioned at right angles to the main office/warehouse, with a barracks-style building opposite.

As Trent had promised, Willow’s people understood bodyguard-hosting protocol.

Yuri directed Veronica to the barracks. He also jerked his head at a man lurking by a cold fire pit, and the man came forward to meet Veronica.

Nora subtly shook out her hands. She hadn’t expected the adrenaline rush of remembering her life-or-death fight with the combat android. She flexed her tingling fingers. The scrapyard oughtn’t to trigger her like this. Its appearance had changed. Even the gate to the storage yard where she’d used an eseduce array to destroy the combat android had been replaced and repositioned.

Nonetheless, here she stood, buzzing with adrenaline.

She couldn’t be nervous about a simple dinner, could she?

Lucas pushed open the cabin door and held it for Aria, who spooked. He stared, brown eyebrows twitching in a puzzled frown, as she dashed back to Nora.

Shyness couldn’t be unknown to him. Perhaps it was that she had someone to hide behind that got him. Who had stood in for his parents when he was little? A nanny?

Nora held Aria’s hand.

Lucas stepped back onto the narrow porch above the steps, letting the door go.

Willow raced forward from inside the house, and caught it. “Hi! Come on in. What a pretty dress you’re wearing, Aria.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart. Come on in.”

Disregarding the adrenaline still prickling her fingers, Nora smiled approval at Aria for her manners. She squeezed her hand before releasing it.

The girl wasn’t shy so much as uncertain of the people and surroundings and a grown-up dinner party. Confidence would grow with experience.

It helped that the small cabin was comfortably rather than luxuriously furnished. The sofas might be new, but they looked solid, capable of surviving children’s antics.

Like Nora, Willow wore jeans and a t-shirt. As did the woman who met them in the combined kitchen and living space.

Willow introduced her. “Irina Wismer, captain of the CC Arowana, the Blue Dock Scrapyard’s cutter.”

Lucas put the ice-cream in the freezer, but opened the container of fruit salad. “Looks good.”

Willow reached past him and snapped the lid shut. “You’re not the food inspector.”

Judging by his smirk, that was exactly the response he’d hoped to provoke. “Nora and Aria grew the fruit themselves. Aria was telling me how she picked the strawberries.”

“Strawberries, kiwi fruit and orange segments,” Nora said. “Plus, some mint. The acidic fruit ought to balance the sweetness of the ice-cream. If we have room for it. Something smells good.”

“Roast chicken. It’ll be ready in a few minutes.” Willow settled them at the table.

Irina sat at the head—or was that the foot? Willow’s chair was left vacant at the end of the table nearest the kitchen. Lucas sat on her left, with his back to the wall, opposite Nora; Aria slipped in next to her, and Yuri sat beside Lucas.

Nora rubbed her fingers against the seam of her jeans. The darned tingle still hadn’t—holy ducks! She stared unseeingly at the glass of water Lucas poured for Aria.

Her fingers weren’t tingling from adrenaline.

This was the tingle of a royal or Forgotten sensing a burr. This was how she’d first sensed Jonah, before he’d changed to android form and sealed his three burrs, his power source, inside.

Willow has a burr.

Nora stopped rubbing her fingers and concentrated on the herb bread Willow had gotten out of the oven and emptied into a basket before passing it around the table. Whatever Nora was feeling, and her suspicions, she didn’t want anyone at the scrapyard to guess them.

They wouldn’t, right? They couldn’t possibly know I’m Forgotten?

The idea that dinner and the slight leak of burr energy might be a trap for her to betray herself tightened her muscles. Her appetite, damaged by the ice-cream she’d indulged in earlier, vanished completely.

“There’s an excellent artisanal baker on Merchant Street. I hadn’t expected sourdough baguettes on the Hadrian Line,” Willow said.

“Or much of anything,” Lucas muttered.

Willow smiled determinedly. “Lucas made the herb butter.”

He looked at Nora. “I bet you grow your own herbs.”

Beside him, Yuri rumbled; the single word, “Behave”, barely audibly.

Lucas rolled his eyes. “Herb-herbs. Not dope.”

Willow had promised that it would be a casual dinner. No business discussion.

A business discussion might have been easier than this family meal.

“Nora grows everything,” Aria said. “I have to eat salads.”

Irina laughed. “Oh, the horror.”

“I like pizza better.”

Lucas reached across the table to fist bump her.

Aria giggled.

Yuri scowled.

“The chicken should be ready.” Willow rose to serve the main meal.

The small interlude gave Nora time to steady herself. The burr’s presence wasn’t about her. A minute’s thought produced the obvious answer. This was all about Willow. Moreover, it explained her complicated relationship with Lucas.

She was the third daughter of the Duke of Raffles. As a royal, Willow potentially possessed the inherited ability to sense and use Vapori burrs. Jonah hadn’t flagged her as a royal with a strong talent, but that’s where the assumptions inherent in how he and his kin judged a royal’s sensitivity to burrs confused things.

According to Jonah, the more frequent a royal’s visits to the vaults where burrs were stored, the greater the sensitivity. Those who could barely sense or use the burrs ignored them.

But Willow hadn’t visited because she was out in space, serving in the Navy.

And she’d been serving out there because of her marked sensitivity to the burrs. That was the logical deduction. The Capitoline king had ordered her into the Navy because as she journeyed through space, she might sense undiscovered Silicaese stashes of burrs.

Burrs were the weapons that underpinned royal control of the Human Sector. They could obliterate reality. Discovering additional burrs carried as much import, or more, than discovering blaze. After all, anyone could stumble across blaze. Only those descended from the fifteen Originals, and maintaining their talent, could sense the burrs.

Therefore, at eighteen, Willow must have been convinced to leave her baby with her parents and do her duty for Capitoline by becoming a serving officer and, hopefully, sensing burrs.

If she’d succeeded, Jonah would have flagged her as a strong royal. He hadn’t, so she mustn’t have found any.

But she had one with her now.

That was a daunting thought.

The Capitoline royal family expected trouble along the Hadrian Line; trouble significant enough to warrant entrusting Willow with a burr capable of obliterating it.

Somewhere very close by, its shield ever so fractionally incomplete, a burr was absorbing power.

Had Lucas inherited Willow’s talent?

Probably not. He showed no signs of considering himself important, or even, of believing he had a place here in his mom’s home.

He was an unhappy ball of resentment.

Nora spoke without thinking. “Lucas, will you travel with Willow to Beaconditch?”

It was a spacer tradition, and a means of ensuring the honesty of a claim’s registrant, that they guide the first mining operator to the claim. The shared journey out meant a sharing of risk for reward until the mining partner could evaluate the claim and how it would operate, including the journey, for themselves.

“Yeah.” Lucas glowered at Willow as she brought to the table the roast chicken she’d carved. “Mom doesn’t trust me alone.”

Aria piped up. She had her eyes glued to the chicken, although how she could be hungry again after the ice-cream sundae of the afternoon was a mystery. “There’s a boarding school for spacers. My parents—” She fell silent.

No one pushed her to continue, which meant everyone at the table knew her story.

Nora put a wing on Aria’s plate. “Aria’s learning with digital tutors. You might find it a faster style of learning,” she said to Lucas.

He shrugged. “Schoolwork’s not my thing.”

“What is?” Yuri asked, his question weighted with disapproval rather than honest curiosity.

Opposite the older man, Aria shrank in her chair.

Yuri’s gaze flicked from her to Nora. Whatever he read in their faces, his own mouth closed firmly.

Not a bully, Nora decided. But regimented.

Whatever role Yuri believed Lucas should fill, the boy kicked against it.

At Lucas’s age, at sixteen, Nora had considered herself an adult. She’d left the towers for trade school in Mandalay. She could accept that Yuri considered Lucas old enough to have and meet responsibilities, but if the kid hadn’t agreed to those responsibilities, the greater the pressure put on him, the more he’d rebel.

“Everything looks delicious,” Irina said. “Is that your green beans with almonds dish?”

Polite conversation could only cover so much. It would fail sooner or later.

Nora was grateful that she and Aria would be traveling on their own ship to Beaconditch, away from whatever emotional drama enveloped the CC Arowana on the journey.

She’d have to talk to Jonah about whether he could sense the burr. If he couldn’t, or they couldn’t get him close enough to do so, maybe he could passively surveille the scrapyard and ascertain whether Willow transferred it to the CC Arowana. He wasn’t all-seeing, however, and burrs were the size of a tennis ball. Even its shielded case would be small enough to conceal it among other objects.

Did it matter if Willow brought a burr to Beaconditch?

“I can’t see her leaving it behind,” Jonah said when Nora described the evening to him. Fortunately, Aria’s age meant Nora hadn’t been expected to stay long after the meal ended. She’d had coffee and politely declined chocolate before being unexpectedly grateful to see Veronica waiting and join her in entering a cab the woman had called. “It’s too good a weapon, and too valuable, for her to leave it in the scrapyard.”

Put like that, Nora had to agree.

She sighed. “I accepted that we’d be dealing with royals and cutthroat business interests, including criminal organizations, but a burr? What in stardust do the royals think might happen out here?” She kicked at the base of the CC Kangaroo’s captain’s chair. “What are we missing?”

Chapter 10

The morning after the dinner party, Nora’s second morning on Border Station, Cherry invited herself for brunch. She brought dark chocolate croissants. “It’s a workday, but I have heaps of overtime owing, so I snuck away.”

Snuck was unlikely. Cherry’s appearance was too attention-grabbing to be overlooked.

But Nora was okay with Ben sending over her sister to scope out the inside of the CC Kangaroo. She brewed a pot of strong tea for the two of them.

Aria was less sanguine. From the coffee table in the lounge, which was apparently her new favorite study nook, the girl stared at Cherry. “You don’t look like sisters.”

“Because I’m prettier?” Cherry teased.

Disgusted and indignant, her loyalty outraged, Aria blew a raspberry. “No.”

“At least pretend to do your schoolwork,” Nora said. “Or find something to do in your cabin or the gym.”

“I’m learning punctuation.”

“Then learn it silently.”

Aria pouted.

Cherry had changed her appearance since Nora first met her in the Ye Olde Tea Shoppe months ago. Her hair remained long and red, curling around her shoulders, but those shoulders were now clad in a smart emerald-green jacket above a tight, but knee-length, black skirt. High, high heels brought her to average height.

Nora’s nineteen-year-old sister was attempting to present as a professional businesswoman, and almost succeeding.

A businesswoman wouldn’t have been caught licking chocolate off her fingers. “You want a croissant, kid?”

“I have brownies. I made them myself.”

Nora intervened. “The correct answer is ‘no, thank you’.”

“No, thank you.”

“Look at you, ma,” Cherry teased as Nora sat down opposite her.

Nora pulled a face. “Ma” was the towers’ name for foster mothers. Nora’s own hadn’t been horrendous, just neglectful. Nora intended to do better than Ma Devi. She’d kick her own butt before she did worse. That didn’t mean she’d let Cherry get away with her teasing. “You going to explain why Ben’s okay with you skiving off work? You could have shown up after hours.”

“Family. The guys who work at Realm Edge Security are kind of like us. Not much family, or not much family worth much. Ben reckons you should see for yourself that I’m okay. Happy.” She pursed her lips. “You’ll trust what I say if I say it on your ship rather than where we might be overheard. Well, overheard by anyone other than Little Miss Big Ears.”

Aria poked her tongue out at Cherry.

Nora pretended not to see.

The buzz of the intercom followed by Trent’s voice interrupted the exchange. “Zoe Peters, dorm matron from the orphanage, is at the docking tunnel.”

Aria jumped up. “Mrs. Peters.” She glanced all around.

Nora frowned. In Aria’s stories of the orphanage, Mrs. Peters had sounded like a good woman, a kind person. “I’ll come and talk to her.” She checked that her side of the comm was muted. “Why does Mrs. Peters visiting scare you?”

“Because I ran away from the orphanage.”

“And I adopted you.” Nora crossed to the lounge and clasped Aria’s shoulders. “Mrs. Peters wants to see for herself that you’re okay.” Nora glanced back at Cherry. “Kind of like how Cherry and Trent’s boss thinks I need to see for myself that Cherry is okay.”

“It’s because she cares,” Cherry said, dropping her teasing. “You can’t actually think a dorm matron could beat up Nora and take you away?”

Aria stared up at Nora. “No.”

“There ya go.” Cherry stood. “We’ll all go and meet her. We’re family now. The three witches.”

Nora rolled her eyes. Evidently, her baby sister was irrepressible.

Cherry elbowed her as they walked to the internal hatch to the docking tunnel. “Remember. Act nice. You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar, sugar.” She drawled the endearment. Shugahh.

“Poop attracts the most flies,” Nora said, deadpan.

Cherry snorted a laugh, destroying her faux sophistication.

Aria giggled.

Greeting Zoe Peters with laughter relaxed the older woman’s expression into a tentative smile. The smile became genuine when Aria rushed to her and hugged as much of her as she could. Zoe was generously sized.

“I’msorryIranaway,” Aria said all in one gasp.

“Will you run away from Captain Devi?” Zoe asked. That was a good question; far shrewder than asking if Aria was happy.

“No!” Insulted at the idea, Aria pulled away.

Zoe tugged her back into a tight hug. “Good.”

Nora introduced herself and Cherry, and invited Zoe to enter the CC Kangaroo. “Aria can show you her cabin.”

The dorm matron considered Nora, then Trent, standing guard. “I won’t strain your security precautions.”

“Visitors are welcome,” Nora said.

“Family.” Zoe nodded at Cherry before looking back at Nora. “I’m aware you’re negotiating significant business matters. I wished to meet the woman Aria ran away with. I did, and she’s thriving. Happier than with us.”

Aria nodded solemnly.

“You can visit me anytime,” Zoe said to her.

“Yes, Mrs. Peters.”

Nora had a thought. It wasn’t a new thought, but it was one that her new wealth would make possible. “You’re correct that I have a great deal of business to handle. Once I have, I’d like to talk with you about the orphanage.” Nora hated how it resembled a prison; housing and educating children as cheaply as possible.

Aria tugged at her arm. “No more froggy-green uniforms?”

Nora held Zoe’s gaze. “That would be one of the things we’d talk about.”

“I’m available to talk any time. Although Principal Garrett—”

Nora interrupted. “Aria described him. I’ll contact you.”

Sly dimples dented Zoe’s cheeks. “Very well.”

After a hug for Aria, the dorm matron departed.

Cherry glanced after her, then at Aria, and lowered her voice. “She’s hitched her hopes to you.”

Nora exhaled. She knew that. She felt the burden of the girl’s trust.

“Two minutes,” Cherry said to Trent.

The guard nodded and spoke to Aria, distracting her.

Cherry caught Nora’s elbow and dragged her into the docking tunnel.

Nora allowed herself to be dragged. She stared down at her younger sister. There was a tie there. Maybe it was family. Maybe it was their shared experience of being Forgotten and from the towers. Maybe Cherry was simply likeable and that explained why Mstivoj hadn’t used or abandoned her.

“Zac is from Palantine,” Cherry said.

Nora pulled a “duh” face. Isaac “Zac” Mstivoj had yet to shed his wartime reputation as the infamous Palantine privateer.

“Yeah, but they’re not all the same. The Palantines.” The urgency and worry in Cherry’s voice stripped away her sophisticated businesswoman persona and her sass. “They talk around me sometimes. I’m young and I’m pretty and I don’t seem smart.”

But she was. She was a survivor. There was more of Maya, their biological mother, a successful smuggler, in Cherry than had ever enlivened either of their other two siblings.

“Look into the Palantines,” Cherry advised hurriedly. “I think Zac served their king, or served the PIA to serve their king. The king, not the queen. Zac chose a Capitoline station for his business, away from them. But I think the people he is setting up against are here. No one will bother with me, a receptionist. You need to be careful. He’s protecting you, but if he has enemies, maybe they’ll go after you.”

Both of them glanced back at the entrance to the docking tunnel where Zac’s guards waited: one Palantine, the other Capitoline.

Or are we creating something new, people of the border?

“I’ve gotta go.” Cherry tugged at her jacket before strutting back to the dock and her two fellow Realm Edge Security employees.

Nora rapped the wall of the tunnel from a subconscious desire to touch base with Jonah. He’d have heard Cherry’s warning. They had agreed that unless Nora asked for privacy, as in her cabin, he would observe everything on and in proximity to the CC Kangaroo.

We already knew Mstivoj is linked to rebels, to people determined to play outside the rules of the current system. He’d hired the remainder of his people from a secret base in the Erythraean Valley. They would arrive in four days.

Unlike Cherry, or the rest of Realm Edge Security and Border Station, Nora knew the timing of Mstivoj’s return within a couple of hours either way. Jonah was tracking Mstivoj and the three spaceships accompanying the CP Coyote, and confidently estimated that they’d be in comms range of the station in four days.

At that point, Mstivoj willing, she and he could talk.

Mstivoj proved willing to talk. He accepted Nora’s comms call.

It was Nora who had to force herself to engage. Negotiating with Willow, as well as jumping through the bureaucratic hoops of the Department of Space once they’d tested her sample of blaze ore, all required more energy than she’d have imagined.

Fortunately, George and Bernice Karimov seemed to thrive on handling, including disputing, the details and paper shuffling that exhausted Nora.

“Since we’re business partners, you can call me Zac.”

Nora was not charmed. “We’re not partners. We’re discussing whether we formalize and extend the current security contract I have with your firm.”

“Zac,” he prompted.

“We’re not friends.”

“We’re not enemies either. Ben told me. You’re dealing well with my people.”

She bit her tongue. A snarky “they’re not you” helped no one. It wasn’t even true. “I appreciated the message you left for me at the Avestan Range mailbox. I wish to deal with a decent man. Whatever else happens, Aria must be safe. Kids don’t have a choice what happens to them. I think you’ll protect her, as you promised.”

“Yes.”

She liked that stark answer.

Mstivoj had a question. “The star paths could have taken you elsewhere. Why register your claim on Border Station? Why register it at all?”

Nora countered readily. “You came back to Border Station to establish a business.”

“I need the border.”

In the subsequent silence, she contemplated exactly what he meant. “Why?”

“Maybe I’ll tell you one day.” He paused. “But probably not. Tell me what you need. I realize you’ve spoken with Ben, but tell me.”

Glancing down at her notes, she pulled her thoughts together, dismissing the distraction of Mstivoj’s mysterious intentions. “We’re partnering with the Blue Dock Scrapyard. Initially, that means we’ll be guiding them out to Beaconditch. Willow Lange has her own security force. I’d like to hire your firm to provide an escort cutter.”

“Your ducal daughter won’t like a Palantine pirate joining the party.”

Nora zeroed in on a different point. “Would you, personally, escort us?”

Mstivoj whistled. “That is trust. I have a lot to do on-station. However…yes. I’d like to see Beaconditch.”

“The planet isn’t worth the journey.” Nora chided herself for feeling relief that Mstivoj would accompany them. “But Willow would have to allow your presence. There are the peace accords.”

His barked laughter interrupted her.

“I don’t put much faith in them either,” Nora said impatiently. “But Willow is royal and ex-Navy. She has to put on a show of adhering to them. That includes not discriminating against Palantine companies. Our partnership contract explicitly states that Blue Dock Scrapyard is not responsible for my safety. It will be responsible for protecting the mining operation on Beaconditch and the hauling of the processed blazsvitloium to wherever. I am an independent entity who can hire whoever I want for my security.”

“Me.”

Nora rolled her eyes.

She ended the comms call and slumped back in the captain’s chair, spinning it to face Jonah. “Have we done a deal with the devil?” And before he could answer. “I’m almost tired enough not to care. I’ll be glad when we’re finished with the business side of things and Willow’s organized her side of things and we can leave for Beaconditch.”

She’d pushed so many issues to the back of her mind to consider later, that nightmares haunted her sleep. Her subconscious was pulsing with a mix of apprehension and excitement.

As long as she stayed away from the scrapyard, she couldn’t sense the burr Willow hid there. But the knowledge that a burr was within reach ate at Nora.

And then there was the bombshell Jonah had lobbed on the journey back to Border Station; that her genetic heritage meant she might be able to refocus the lens at the Origin black hole.

What if the people of the Human Sector could rejoin broader humanity?

Opportunities and threats. Secrets she might die, keeping.

Jonah stuck out a foot and nudged her boot. “You need to hire an executive officer for Blazing Kangaroo.”

“Aaarghhh.”

The sealed hatch to the bridge meant her scream wouldn’t disturb Aria’s evening movie.

“I don’t wanna be a boss,” Nora whined like a baby.

George Karimov had insisted on walking Nora through incorporation. A separate legal entity to handle the business of the Beaconditch blaze deposit was necessary.

Currently, Nora was the sole owner and officer of the Blazing Kangaroo Corporation. She had to hire an executive officer and support staff before she departed Border Station to guide Willow’s team to Beaconditch.

People were falling over themselves for the opportunity to join the new corporation. Realm Edge Security had fended off dozens of approaches, both to the CC Kangaroo and in attempting to intercept Nora as she moved around the station.

She sat up and frowned at the list of five names Jonah had put on-screen. “The problem is I don’t trust any of them. And I know trust isn’t necessary, not personal trust. Heck, I’ve contracted with Mstivoj.” Zac. She tapped her toes on the floor. On some level she did trust the man. She had some degree of history with him.

However, all five of the top candidates—as judged by George and Jonah—were total strangers. Nora had no sense of them as people.

“I’ll hire the most boring one,” she said.

“Uh, why?”

“I don’t know.”

That earned her a weird look, plus a concession. “How about we discuss this tomorrow?”

She jumped up. “I’m going to go hit things in the gym, shower and sleep. Watch Aria?”

“We’ll be fine,” Jonah said.

Aria, too, was struggling at times to find her feet. Being wealthy and wanted was the opposite of her previous experience as an orphan on Border Station.

Nora ought to arrange for Aria to join some group activities with kids her age. Temporary ones, though. Aria would travel with them to Beaconditch.

And thinking about social activities…according to Jonah, the RC Genghis Khan was a week away from Border Station. Could she, should she, reach out to Liam?

Chapter 11

Liam sat at his desk signing off on routine reports prior to the RC Genghis Khan’s arrival at Border Station. Every so often, he checked his inbox, waiting for the moment they made contact with the station’s mailbox and messages downloaded. Anything urgent would receive priority, and land with him.

Returning from patrol felt calmer this time. Willow’s scrapyard base meant the RC Genghis Khan had allies keeping a watching brief on things in their absence. He didn’t feel the relief of returning home, but he wasn’t braced for trouble.

Although he was prepared for it.

The RC Genghis Khan was ready to act if they perceived a threat to the security of the station and surrounding space.

Messages arrived in his inbox.

There was nothing from the Admiralty. Apparently, out of sight was out of mind for his exile to the border. As much as he’d like news of a second ship being sent out to share patrol with the RC Genghis Khan, he’d settle for no new, contentious orders, like the one that had his people deploying mines to block alternative routes to and from Border Station and toward the inner realm.

In the absence of Admiralty orders, he opened a message from Willow Lange which she’d marked urgent.

The subject line read: Blaze discovered in Avestan Range.

The first line of the message jolted Liam’s heart out of rhythm. It was disconcerting how one name had the power to punch through his self-control.

I’ve partnered with Nora Devi who found blaze on a planet in the Avestan Range. She will guide us out there shortly to establish a mining operation.

The station is buzzing as people prepare for a blaze rush. Some taggers have dashed out already to survey the region near Beaconditch, Nora’s planetary claim. Judging by what she said of the hazards, some won’t return.

Blue Dock Scrapyard has its own security force. We’ve recruited additional people, veterans, and will provide security on the journey and at the mine site. We should arrive at the planet before news of the blaze discovery reaches Capitoline.

Nora has hired Realm Edge Security to escort her to Beaconditch and, presumably, back to Border Station. She’s purchased a house, here, for herself and her ward, Aria Kelly.

Liam frowned.

Willow was providing a lot of information, but was she overly concerned with detailing Nora’s activities?

He scribbled a note to find out more about Realm Edge Security.

Hopefully, you’re reading this while I’m still on-station. We need to talk, Liam. The blaze discovery has changed the game along the Hadrian Line.

Willow

Nora was here. He stalled on that news. She hadn’t run. For all that she’d said good-bye to him, she’d returned.

But she’d returned with a blaze discovery, and that catapulted her into the ranks of the insanely rich.

“Have you heard?” Navy discipline kept Allison from stampeding into his office, but she crashed in at his nod to enter. She collapsed onto the nearest chair. Her hands were steady, but her breathing too fast. That could have been from excitement or from rushing here. “Nora found blaze.”

“Willow messaged me,” Liam said. “Apparently, they’ve entered into a partnership.”

“So, the news says.”

He swiped at the screen on his desk. “Does it mention Realm Edge Security?”

“Who?”

“That’s what I want to know. Willow mentioned.” Made a point of mentioning? “That Nora has contracted Realm Edge Security to protect her when she guides Willow’s ships out to the blaze claim.”

Allison stated the obvious even as she consulted her personal comms unit, swiping through data. “We’re still out of comms-range, so I can’t query…but I can search the news…oh.”

Her “oh” sounded ominous.

She glanced up, half-apologetic, half-worried. “It’s a new company, recently opened by Isaac Mstivoj.”

Liam’s hands curled into fists. “Why would Nora partner with a pirate? The last we saw of her he was chasing the CC Kangaroo.” He concentrated on uncurling his fists. “Might they have done a deal?”

Allison wrinkled her nose. “Oh yeah. But is the critical deal on or off the record?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just thinking out loud.”

At least one of them was thinking. Liam felt as if his brain had stalled, or his emotions had.

Willow had said they needed to talk. But who he wanted to question was Nora.

What is she involved in? Does she need help?

He ran a hand through his short hair. Developing a white knight syndrome regarding Nora would undermine any chance of a relationship with her.

She could look after herself, and where she couldn’t, she’d contracted Mstivoj to do so.

After twelve years on opposite sides of a bloody war, Liam might hate the Palantine privateer, but the man had been efficient and not without his own code of honor. Once committed, Mstivoj would keep Nora safe.

Is there even a chance to repair the broken, tentative beginnings of whatever was between us?

His visceral reaction said he wanted to try.

Reason suggested he shouldn’t. Their life trajectories were too different.

He was the disgraced Navy captain whose career was dead, while Nora would have doors flung open everywhere, not just from her new wealth, but from the alliances she could leverage, like the one with Willow, who was the daughter of a duke and silently partnered with Francis.

Liam dragged his focus back to the challenges that partnership and the broader blaze rush would present for patrolling the region. He re-read Willow’s message.

It didn’t sound like she expected an escort out to Beaconditch. In fact, it seemed she might be hinting him away from the idea.

At least his next step was plain.

Their scenario planning and training whilst on patrol had clarified their strategy in the event of a blaze rush. Claire, his second-in-command, had led the effort. Thanks to her determination that the RC Genghis Khan stand unmistakably separate from Willow’s supposedly civilian operation, the Navy’s independence in the action of the next few months, until additional orders and support arrived, would show incontrovertibly.

A blaze rush could spark a commercial war. It was not the Navy’s place to take part in such action. Liam, and the RC Genghis Khan, had to throw their weight into maintaining law and order, not facilitating one group above another.

Given their history, he’d have to watch that Palantine participants were treated equally if and when he intervened in any conflict, from ship sabotage to claim jumping. Most importantly, Border Station had to stand strong.

Whatever Willow’s reasoning and intent, it was Liam’s responsibility to the station, which physically represented and maintained Capitoline’s control of the region, that had to come first. Until he had back-up, the RC Genghis Khan’s patrols would be short; keeping it close to defend Border Station, even from its own citizens.

Liam contemplated Allison. “Claire will initiate and run the blaze rush protocols. You will report to her.”

Allison froze. The complete absence of movement by the fidgety woman emphasized her shock.

On the RC Genghis Khan, trust earned in battle had carried over to their peacetime operation. Other ships wouldn’t permit a lieutenant to skip the chain of command and enter the captain’s quarters to discuss a problem as equals. At minimum, Allison should have waited for an invitation from Liam, not forced the issue.

“Your competence is a vulnerability.” He held her gaze, both assessing her reaction and conveying his respect by giving her one hundred percent of his attention. “You and your small team are excellent. That excellence, ironically, both encourages you to exceed your limits and conceals it when you do. I’ve used that. No question of it. You’ve saved us a number of times over the years.”

He watched as she gradually unfroze and rubbed the tip of her nose with the back of her hand. “Allison, there are two primary reasons for you to pull back from broad-ranging intelligence work and focus on Claire’s preparation for the blaze rush.” He was confident Claire could and would define and direct Allison’s work. “I want that focus on the blaze rush to guide your ongoing attention as to the problems and threats we should prepare to encounter on patrol.”

He tapped one finger against the desk. “First, the RC Genghis Khan will be heavily scrutinized for how we handle the situation along the border. People here, unhappy with us curtailing their power and games, people like the governor, will accuse us of mission creep. We must be able to demonstrate our adherence to our field of authority. I recognize that’s blurry out on the border, given that the station is legally classified as a spaceship, and hence, technically I can take command of it in an emergency. Unless we’re presented with actual evidence of law and order breaking down, we’re treating Border Station as a civilian outpost, as it would be in the inner realm.”

Allison nodded jerkily. “Understood. But there are risks to doing so because, like it or not, you are able to exercise your authority over the station.”

He didn’t like it, but he’d do his duty. He would keep his people safe, and he had reluctantly accepted that as the highest ranked Navy officer on the Hadrian Line, “his people” included the civilian population. It wasn’t that he didn’t care what happened to them. It was a matter of fitness for duty. He was not a civilian administrator. He was Navy. He was the shield that let others live in freedom.

“The legal basis for that authority hasn’t been tested in centuries,” he reminded her. “I won’t exercise my authority for anything less than an emergency. You know the problem. The Navy has to be free from bias, such as supporting one commercial entity over another, and must appear free of bias as well.”

“That’s Claire’s hang-up regarding the scrapyard group,” Allison observed.

“Claire’s scruples will keep us out of hot water. The second reason you’re to limit your activities is to ensure that Fatima’s incompetence during this build up to a blaze rush isn’t concealed by your competence.”

“Someone has to monitor events on-station.”

He tapped the desk with two fingers. “That remains you, but within guidelines Claire and I have discussed.”

Allison visibly swallowed her resentment that they hadn’t discussed them with her.

“Stretch yourself thin and you’ll snap, Allison. Brielle is already concerned.”

Allison wriggled in her seat. “I’ll exercise more.” Everyone knew that Allison had weaseled around the Chief Medical Officer’s individualized exercise plan.

“You will. Brielle will hunt you down. But target your information gathering under Claire’s direction. Our objective is to maintain peace on the border until news of the blaze discovery reaches Capitoline and we receive new orders.”

“We’re to keep a lid on things.”

“Exactly.”

Ironically, in practice, keeping a lid on things meant digging into far more civilian matters than a Navy captain generally had to consider. A wide range of information concerning Border Station and border space crossed his desk.

Liam couldn’t help but pay special attention to news concerning Nora.

He respected her independence.

Although Willow had offered Nora free, secure mooring at the scrapyard, Nora had moored the CC Kangaroo at the Gretel Loop.

Willow had offered the same deal for the RC Genghis Khan—free, secure mooring at the scrapyard—and Liam had rejected it.

Claire was right. The RC Genghis Khan had to demonstrate its impartial independence.

“Perhaps not relevant to anything,” Claire said as they caught up on the day’s events and Allison’s team’s latest report, one Liam hadn’t yet had a chance to read. “Nora Devi has a half-sister on the station. She came out to the border on an indentured service contract. Isaac Mstivoj bought it.”

Liam’s head jerked up. His eyes narrowed. “Leverage?”

“Unsure. Nora and Cherry hadn’t announced their relationship previously, so I don’t know how he knew. If he knew.”

“Allison believes he’s connected to Palantine Intelligence.”

Scrolling through her comms unit, Claire answered absently. “Allison’s unsure if that still holds. She can’t find any hint of Palantine backing for his new business, although he’s certainly employing enough of them. She’s sending an inquiry back to HQ for someone to investigate it.”

But the information might take a year to acquire and transmit to them.

They had to operate on the basis of what they knew or reasonably suspected, now.

Claire changed the subject. “David Omnes is losing influence on-station. There is a deliberate campaign to undermine him, but no proof of who is behind it. Three of his key personnel have vanished—and before you raise the issue of law and order and stamping out vigilante justice, the station and, in fact, women everywhere, are safer for those three men disappearing.”

“The police on Border Station need a fire lit under them.”

Her grin was sly and satisfied. “I suspect David Omnes’s creeping fate is doing that.”

Liam stared at the safe in the corner of his office. It had become a habit to fix his gaze on it while he evaluated unpalatable decisions. “We aren’t obliged to combat vigilantism unless it disrupts the stability of the station or it goes off-station into ship-to-ship conflict.”

In other words, David Omnes was on his own, or with what little assistance the police were willing and able to give.

Claire nodded sharp agreement. “Backtracking for a moment. The Kellys’ note has been authenticated. Nora’s blaze discovery isn’t theirs. Which means there is another blaze deposit in the Avestan Range, one that’s been discovered and lost, and people are desperate to rediscover. Secondly, Nora sold her tagging data from her first expedition to the Avestan Range to the Department of Space. Comparing it to the location of Beaconditch, she must have pushed her scout ship to the limit after discovering the blaze ore to hide its existence. Why she initially hid it, rather than registering a claim, is a puzzle for the whole station.”

“Has anyone asked her?”

Claire smiled humorlessly. “Willow did, or claims she did. According to Willow, Nora said she had to think about whether she wanted to be rich.”

The answer rang true. “Nora was comfortable in her life, with who she was.”

The tension in Claire relaxed. “Yes, she was. My guess is she saw an opportunity to get Aria free of the people interested in the Kellys’ blaze discovery. Despite the evidence, people will conclude that Nora stole it from the girl. Becoming rich isn’t a huge sacrifice.”

Liam grinned ruefully. “True.”

But Nora’s new wealth was an issue. For him. On a personal level. He thought he was handling it, but Brielle cornered him in the gym, seizing an opportunity when no one was near enough to overhear a quiet conversation.

“Stop overthinking.” She pushed his shoulder. “Nora came back, Liam.”

“After ending things. She said goodbye.” Worse, he’d had to let her go. He hadn’t been able to help her. She hadn’t felt free to confide in him. His duty had come first, and always would. “It’s done. Not that there was anything.”

Brielle rolled her eyes. “Outside of my office, I don’t hand out relationship advice.”

Despite himself, Liam grinned. That was such a blatant lie.

Brielle meddled because she cared about people.

“All right, maybe I do. But I wasn’t going to now. I truly was going to leave it at that. She came back.” The serious medical professional that she was peeked through her good humor. “Liam, we’re not at war anymore. You can and should look beyond what you feel is your duty to the Navy and Capitoline. You’re allowed a life, and not merely a few small joys, like your guitar, to get you through till the next crisis.”

The tram’s smooth deceleration ended with a slight judder at the second Gretel Loop stop. Nora rocked with it, already on her feet and ready to disembark. Her grip on Aria’s shoulder kept the girl steady.

Veronica had allowed their impulsive surge to the door since they were the carriage’s only passengers. She disembarked on their heels.

Jonah ambled behind them, maintaining his imitation of a retro-gen android with limited abilities. As part of his cover, he carried the new clothes Nora had bought for Aria.

Once on the ground, they sorted themselves out with Jonah stepping up beside Nora, and Aria hanging back to be dragged along by Veronica.

“Clothes shopping is exhausting.” Aria drew out the last word. “The fabricator is easier.”

“These are better quality,” Nora said over her shoulder.

Aria kicked the ground. “I don’t care.” She’d lost the excitement with which she’d started the morning, and was now perilously close to whining from tiredness.

Since Nora hadn’t exactly loved shopping for a kid, she refused to tolerate whining. “You’re having a nap this afternoon.”

“Nooo! I’m not a baby.”

Veronica coughed, laughter barely disguised, as the response, You’re acting like one, almost rang on the air.

“Lunch,” Nora said. “An hour’s nap, then you can have free time.”

The sulky silence behind her was loud, and it continued throughout lunch.

When Aria stomped into her cabin and closed the door, Nora was sure the girl intended to do anything but nap during the hour, but an hour’s forced rest, whether she listened to music, watched a cartoon or read, might rebalance her mood.

“And I need the break,” Nora muttered.

Jonah had vanished to the cargo hold deck during lunch. He returned silently.

She wouldn’t have said he hovered as she wiped the table and counter, but he definitely wanted to talk. “Bridge?”

He spun on his heel and headed for where they’d be private, even if Aria suddenly decided she needed a glass of water or any other excuse to interrupt her naptime.

Instead of taking his usual seat in the pilot’s chair, Jonah stood beside it.

After a morning walking and standing around while Aria chose, tried on and argued over clothes, Nora unhesitatingly sat. She looked up at Jonah. “Was it very awkward, having to pretend you weren’t a person?”

“What?” He blinked. The gray metallic lids closed over his crystal eyes and immediately retracted. “Oh, clothes shopping. No, I’m glad I got to avoid having to give an opinion.” He bowed his head to stare at the floor. “I don’t sleep. I envy Aria the time-out of a nap.”

It wasn’t like Jonah to avoid eye contact with her. Normally, he acted as if he appreciated every connection he could get, as if each form of contact provided an additional acknowledgement of him as a person.

Perhaps walking around the station as an android, being among humans but not treated as a person, had been an isolating experience.

Nora responded carefully, leaving him space to raise whatever issues he wished to share. “I admit, Aria’s naptime is a time-out for me, as well. But that just means I crave adult time, like talking to you.”

“Adult,” he repeated contemptuously. “Am I?”

“If you’re not, who is? Jonah, you saw the Silicaese come and go. You’ve existed for longer than humans have been human and not simply evolving toward it.”

He gripped his hands together. “When I was an AI.” The emotion in his voice packed a punch. “I’ve been embodied, able to affect the world, for less than a year. It’s changed how I understand the world. I experience it rather than observe it. I miss things.”

“What do you miss?” Nora asked gently.

A crack of unhappy laughter splintered his reply. “Not miss as in regret. Miss as in overlook. Cherry had to remind us to study the Palantine situation. Queen Sarah—”

“Wait. That’s not on you. I’ve had a lifetime of avoiding the Palantine royals. That habit has carried over to now. You can’t expect to be across everything. We prioritized what we needed to handle immediately, as well as what we had to lay the foundation for. We’re in Capitoline space. The Palantines’ games are low down the list.”

“But they’re not.”

Nora spoke firmly. “Maybe with new data they’re not. But with what we knew at the time, we made the right call.” As she saw it, Jonah was struggling with two separate issues.

The first was Palantine’s politics and the fact that Nora was, even if unknown and unacknowledged, a possible heir to the throne. She ought to be across the players and the game, and not relying on Jonah. For that, she apologized. “King Ivan, Queen Sarah and anyone else,” like their son Crown Prince Dominic, “is my problem.”

The second issue was Jonah’s crisis of confidence from being stretched too thin.

Vapori AIs weren’t all-knowing. They weren’t even all-seeing. They’d been designed to focus on species development, not on individuals. Tracking the political implications of individual human activity required significant modification of intent and resource allocation; the resources being attention and analysis.

Maybe AIs could become exhausted and lose a sense of proportion, the same as humans.

“Just because you’re aware of stuff and, possibly, can influence events, doesn’t mean it’s all on you. You can’t know everything, and you can’t control everything.” Or everyone, even to protect those you love. Her hands curled slightly. Tucked inside, she touched her thumb to her wedding ring. The gold was warm. “People have to be free to do things you disagree with, to take false steps, and make mistakes. We can’t wrap people in a bubble of care and defeat fate for them, no matter how much we wish we could.”

“I know that,” he snapped. He tapped his fists together. “My kin were helping, but they’re drawing back. They’re interested in you and Aria, but …”

“Our lives, our problems,” Nora concluded. “They’re not wrong. Jonah, when we met—”

“When I forced my way onto the CC Kangaroo and into your life.”

“Which I don’t regret at all,” she answered his self-criticism. “You’re a good friend. My best friend.”

He turned around and stared at the hatch, his back to her. Since he could observe her regardless of where his android body faced, this was a statement rather than avoidance. He could also control his expression if he wished to hide his emotions.

“Do you want to leave?” she asked as emotionlessly as she could. If her situation was overwhelming for someone so new to being embodied, he had to realize he was free to leave.

She wasn’t able to talk to his kin. She couldn’t comprehend what he’d given up to become embodied, or what he’d gained, good and bad.

He moved so fast that he staggered as he turned back to her. “No.” He stopped. “I’m failing you.”

She studied his frozen stance, aborted mid-move, as if he feared he’d lost the right to reach for a connection with her. She stood and hugged him.

“You don’t have to be kind.” He returned her hug tightly.

She patted his shoulder. “Kind? Me? I feel like I asked too much of you, took your amazingness for granted, and it’s hurt you.”

“My amazingness?” A sob roughened his voice.

She rubbed circles on his back. “Everyone feels lost or inadequate at times.” She leaned back to meet his eyes. “I’ve been reading ahead in the child raising books to prepare myself for Aria’s teen years. That’s what the experts say we should tell teenagers. Everyone feels lost or inadequate at times. We’re not complete in ourselves. We rely on others, just as we hope they can rely on us, imperfect though we are. Cut yourself some slack. You said it yourself, earlier. You don’t feel like an adult. You’re new to being embodied. You could argue you’re an adolescent. Hiccups are allowed.”

He rested his forehead against hers. “And you’ll supply the spoonful of sugar to cure them?”

She grinned. “That or a sharp surprise. Probably the latter.”

“Even if you’re being sweet now.” He laughed softly as he stepped back. “Thank you, Nora.”

“You steady me, too. Partners.”

They shook hands, half in fun to ease the emotional tension from the discussion, but also half-seriously.

“Partners,” Jonah confirmed. “Now, I really do have to tell you about Queen Sarah.”

Chapter 12

Claire grabbed Liam as he headed for his quarters after visiting Engineering for a mug of tea and talk with Xavier about improvements to the back-up systems on Border Station. “Do you have twenty minutes? Allison has information.”

“Brief update.” Allison poked her head around Claire. Unlike the on-duty and uniformed commander, Allison was in civvies.

Liam nodded. “My office.”

Once there, Allison chose an unusual starting point for the conversation: a condemnation. “Fatima Drake is so useless that even our enemies have written her off.” She sniffed, and with that, dismissed the CSB agent. “Quinn Graf, the PIA’s agent on Border Station, intercepted me while I was shopping for chocolate. Right there, in Michelangelo’s Deli, she asked if I knew about the CP Polecat’s return.”

CP meant the spaceship was registered with Palantine.

Polecat? Liam recalled a piece of trivia. Doesn’t that mean skunk? Who names their ship Skunk?

“Quinn didn’t say anything else. She sashayed away with her annoying I’m-a-music-teacher boho skirt swishing, confident that she’d stirred the pot enough that I’d look into it.” Allison huffed at being used by Palantine Intelligence. “I bought my chocolate, first, but then I returned to the RC Genghis Khan and checked out the CP Polecat.”

Allison had the information she’d found on the tip of her tongue. “The CP Polecat is a frigate that hires out as a guard for journeys. They arrived a week before us as escort to a barge from Palantine. They were hired by Roger Aldrich, a clothing and textiles merchant on Border Station who has ties to both the PIA and David Omnes. This is the second time he’s hired them. The first time they departed Border Station a day after the Kellys.”

She allowed that information to sink in.

Aria Kelly’s parents had been murdered in the Avestan Range, their ship wrecked, and their discovery of blaze seemingly lost.

“The CP Polecat,” Liam repeated.

“Owned by an ‘independent’ security company.” Allison’s intonation put ironic quotation marks around “independent”.

Liam’s gaze flicked to Claire. If she’d already heard Allison’s report, then Claire’s stern expression, added to the fact that she’d requested this meeting, meant they now had either strong suspicion or evidence that the Kellys had been killed as part of some greater scheme. A scheme that had at least one tentacle in border space, making it the RC Genghis Khan’s problem.

Allison rushed on. “The security company has ties to the Duke of Ontario, who, it is worth remembering, is Queen Sarah’s little brother.”

A royal Palantine connection. Liam closed his eyes. “And Crown Prince Dominic’s uncle.”

“Yes.” Claire waited for Liam to open his eyes, and nodded at his pained expression. “Apparently, we can’t escape the machinations of the Palantine royals.”

Allison tugged at her earlobe. “The barge that brought the textiles and clothing, and other goods out to Border Station, is owned by the Ontario Logistics Company. The connection to the Duke of Ontario is indisputable.”

She put her comms unit on the desk. “The CP Polecat is docked at Border Station, and the timing of its previous visit means it could have followed and murdered the Kellys. If it did, then add in that there’s been no evidence, not even whispers, of Palantines gaining access to additional blaze, and the question must be asked, why did they do it?”

Claire added her own question. “Why has the PIA turned on them, directing our attention to them?”

“All of this is speculation,” Allison said. “But this is where I go wild with it. The scuttlebutt in intelligence circles is that there’s a rift between King Ivan and Queen Sarah.”

Liam pushed back from his desk. “Putting it mildly. Theirs is an arranged marriage and they dislike each other.”

“Sometimes I forget what Prince Francis must have told you,” Allison mumbled.

The royals, even from different realms, knew each other.

Allison picked up her comms unit, resting it on her knee again. “In public, the king and queen present a harmonious front. In private, they have separate power blocs. The PIA takes its orders from King Ivan.”

Liam didn’t wait for his subordinate to spell out her conclusion. “The Kellys got killed in a powerplay by the Queen?”

“Possibly.”

He frowned. “The CP Polecat is here, again. What does the PIA suspect?”

Claire spoke up. “If our assumptions are correct, it involves blaze. Which means it involves the Blue Dock Scrapyard and Nora. She’s to guide Willow to the newly discovered blaze deposit.”

“And Nora has hired Isaac Mstivoj to guard her,” Allison finished mournfully.

Striding through the commercial section of Border Station, Liam glimpsed his appearance in a shop window.

White shirt, dark jeans, black boots. Casual clothes for a not so casual appointment.

If he wanted a relationship with Nora, he ought to be marching to her mooring on the Gretel Loop. His questions and concerns, which went far beyond the CP Polecat’s presence, ought to be addressed to her.

But all too often it didn’t matter what he wanted. Life had a habit of demanding sacrifice. Protecting others always came at a cost.

The difficulty this time was an atypical uncertainty. Who, precisely, was he protecting? He’d informed Willow of a possible threat from the CP Polecat, sharing the timing of its previous visit and the Kellys’ deaths, as well as the Ontario connection. He didn’t owe her and her security team anything more; certainly, he couldn’t justify changing the RC Genghis Khan’s patrol route—and disrupting progress in meeting the Admiralty’s orders to lay mines—to guard Willow’s group and Nora.

Nora couldn’t have any idea of the forces arrayed against her.

Would Willow, with Francis’s remote backing, be sufficient protection?

Speculation was a distraction at this point. He could see the building he sought up ahead, and as he approached, the surprisingly discreet brass name plate.

Realm Edge Security

The door slid open.

His muscles tensed despite his training and the refresher bouts Casimir insisted on. Either luck was with him, or fate was setting him up for a diabolical fall.

The man he’d intended to demand a meeting with stood by the reception desk, listening with an amused smile to the girl behind it.

At the sight of Liam, Isaac Mstivoj straightened.

The second man in the foyer didn’t move. But then, he’d already taken what was usually Casimir’s position. He stood between the reception desk and the outer door. Any visitor would have to go through him to reach the other two.

Liam doubted the unknown man expected trouble that morning. Security and protection detail became a habit.

Ironically, Mstivoj seemed to have similar thoughts about him. “Cherry, attention! Your prince’s fierce guard dog is here. Captain Kimani, have you come to warn me away from your master’s yard?”

Liam’s gaze flickered to the young woman, momentarily reassessing her in light of the name. Cherry Pendit, Nora’s half-sister.

The women looked nothing alike.

Nora’s height and athletic figure, her obvious competence and confidence, commanded respect.

Cherry was short and curvy and dressed to draw attention to those curves. Her brightly painted mouth curved in an “O” of interest as she assessed him.

She couldn’t hold his attention.

Liam hailed Mstivoj. “I’d like to talk to you.”

“As who wouldn’t?” The flamboyant, amused response didn’t match the serious calculation in Mstivoj’s unnervingly pale blue eyes. He glanced at the second man, one whose expensively tailored suit couldn’t conceal the muscle beneath. “Ben, can you take my eleven o’clock appointment?”

The dark-haired man nodded.

“This way, Captain.” Mstivoj ushered Liam into an elevator. Neither spoke on the journey up nor as they entered his office.

Liam blinked at wood-paneled walls and a massive desk that dwarfed the computer on it. Expensive leather chairs allowed for three visitors. The floor rang under their boots, uncarpeted, but the pattern painted on it was of a Persian rug in crimson, orange and small flecks of blue.

“Cherry.”

Liam stared at Mstivoj as the man sat in a chair conspicuously grander than the visitors’ chairs.

“In my absence, Ben thought it amusing to allow her to decorate. This is Cherry’s vision of how ‘the boss’ should live.”

“I’m surprised there’s no humidor or whisky decanter.”

Mstivoj’s teeth flashed in a fleeting, feral grin. “Behind that paneling, beneath the painting of a horse.”

His indulgence of Cherry’s whims contradicted Liam’s view of the former privateer. Then, again, the man’s personality was strong enough to render even a ridiculous setting mere background. Perhaps it didn’t matter to him.

“You’re guarding Nora Devi,” Liam said.

“My company accepted the contract.”

“Are you doing so for her security or to pursue Palantine royal interests?”

Mstivoj’s eyes narrowed. “What an interesting question. I have one for you. Are you here for Capitoline or Nora?”

“Is there a difference?”

Mstivoj’s tone turned hard. It was a tone of command and reprimand. “You’re not that naïve.”

No, Liam wasn’t. But he didn’t want to have to choose between Nora’s well-being and Capitoline’s interests. He resented Mstivoj for forcing that doubt.

But he wasn’t unfair enough to claim Mstivoj introduced the doubt. Liam had carried it in with him. He had previous experience of being forced to choose between individual welfare and acting for the good of the realm. Battlecruiser captains had to put their people at risk.

Mstivoj read his hesitation. “Nora is an interesting woman. Unexpectedly capable. I stumbled over her while she was protecting you.”

Liam held very still.

“She didn’t tell you? But then, perhaps protecting you wasn’t her primary purpose. She has secrets to hide.”

“And you’re suggesting you know them?”

Mstivoj laughed softly. “Only the ones she was prepared to discard. Although I may have pushed her on one of them. Cherry. The sisters weren’t going to acknowledge each other.”

Why not?

“Quinn Gaf, the PIA agent on-station, ordered me to follow Nora and Aria when they fled Border Station. She lost me in the fringe.”

“Of a Newton plain?”

Mstivoj measured Liam’s shocked response. “Hmm. It surprised me, too. But Nora has a habit of surviving suicidal risks. Which makes me curious whether they’re not suicidal for her.”

Liam frowned. His frown deepened to a scowl as Mstivoj smiled.

The frustrating man lounged in his chair. “She fought a combat android.”

“No.”

“It was how we met,” Mstivoj said. “Oh, not directly. But it’s what caused me to pay attention to her. See, she suspected I’d brought the combat android to Border Station.” A tantalizing pause. “She was right.”

Liam shook his head at the incredible story.

“I was glad she destroyed it. Couriering it here was the final price for my freedom. If it had killed you, I’d have regretted it.”

“Me?”

“A discreet assassination of the man who captured Crown Prince Dominic. It has that royal style. And understanding that, you’ll understand why I wanted out.”

But Liam was stuck on an earlier point. “How could Nora take out a combat android? Why would she try?”

Mstivoj shrugged. “How would I know? Secrets. But I’d guess that she feared the combat android being associated with the retro-gen android she paraded at the bazaar.”

“Jonah.”

“Yes, the guards said it had a name,” Mstivoj responded absently. He stared into the distance.

Liam gave him time.

When those pale blue eyes refocused on him, Mstivoj had reached a decision. “We both fought the war. Opposing sides didn’t matter as much as our opposing roles. When you came into port, you knew you’d find support. Me, in the role of privateer, I never knew how political winds may have changed or what PIA orders I would receive. I learned how distance limits communications and information, and I prioritize it now.”

If Mstivoj proposed an information exchange, should he agree? In the absence of a competent CSB agent on Border Station, Liam could justify assuming responsibility for the decision.

“The combat android sent to kill you wasn’t the only one unleashed since the war. There was an attack on the Duke of Ontario, on his estate. He survived. Several of his security team didn’t. It never made the news, but I pay especial attention to anything related to Queen Sarah.”

The darkness in his voice when he mentioned the Queen reminded Liam that Mstivoj had been the Palantines’ most successful pirate; clever and ruthless.

Mstivoj would still be both, but now, he was hinting, in his own interest. “Queen Sarah doesn’t have the ability, the blood, to command the combat androids. King Ivan wouldn’t involve himself in her powerplay with her brother. But you’ve met Dominic. He’s fool enough to do so. In certain circles, the rumor is that Queen Sarah desires control of Ontario security assets.”

“Like the CP Polecat?”

Mstivoj smirked. “Well, now. You do know some things.”

“Not enough.”

Mstivoj watched him struggle. “Nora’s security contract isn’t personal for me. I respect her, which makes her a good business contact beyond her wealth.”

“And she’s Cherry’s sister.”

“So? Cherry adopted us the way a kitten does. Ben’s a soft touch. Ben Hough, former Special Weapons and Tactics team leader from Denver, my business and life partner.”

“Oh.”

“A gap in your intelligence briefing?” Mstivoj mocked him. “I like Nora. She’s a wildcard. The impossible suddenly happens around her. Either you get close to someone like that, or you avoid them. On balance, out here, she’s worth allying with.”

Despite how off-kilter he’d been throughout the meeting, Liam caught the “out here”. “Do you mean your contract won’t last away from Border Station?”

“Outside of border space,” Mstivoj corrected. “The inner realm has different political players and faster backup.”

Liam sighed. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about—Nora’s future once news of her blaze discovery breaks and the inner realm draws her in.”

“They might find she resists.” Mstivoj stretched before leaning forward, forearms landing heavily on the desk, his shoulders hunching. “Secrets. If you care about her, let her keep her secrets. Unless you’re prepared to put her and those she loves above the royals.”

He wasn’t finished. “I’m not deriding your loyalty to Francis.” Mstivoj had done his research on Liam. “But think about where he gives his loyalty. He let his sister be married off to Dominic. What would he permit to happen to someone like Nora?”

As Liam returned to the RC Genghis Khan, a single question nagged at him above all the other information and inferences that would fascinate Allison.

Why did Mstivoj believe Francis would be interested in Nora as a person and not simply as a random tagger, suddenly wealthy from a blaze strike?

Chapter 13

Having completed the vast number of urgent, essential business-related tasks that would hopefully lay the foundation for Jonah, Aria and herself to live peacefully, plus having organized the resupply of the CC Kangaroo and met Aria’s physical and emotional needs, Nora was finally able to justify turning her attention to other matters.

Like her personal life.

“Should I message Liam?” she asked Jonah during their Aria-free time on the bridge.

The RC Genghis Khan had been docked for a few days and Liam hadn’t contacted her. He could be being polite and waiting for her to reach out, since she’d been the one who ended things between them before they began.

However, no one else from the RC Genghis Khan had contacted her either, and she would have thought Brielle or Xavier or someone would have suggested coffee.

Had her abrupt treatment of Liam frozen the possibility of friendship with any of his intensely loyal officers?

Maybe she was being egocentric, and they had other priorities. Their leave seemed limited. They certainly weren’t as visible around the station as on previous visits.

What had changed?

“Message Liam?” Jonah squeaked. “Ahem.”

Nora leveled a suspicious look at him.

“It’s the timing,” he excused himself. “I was just eavesdropping on Liam’s meeting with Mstivoj—”

“They were meeting?”

“Liam dropped in at Realm Edge Security.”

“Huh.”

Jonah shifted uneasily. “We spoke about privacy, given how much I’d be observing people you know.”

“So, their meeting didn’t concern me?”

He vacillated. “It did. And what they said about Queen Sarah’s actions confirms what I learned. I’ll have to identify Mstivoj’s information sources and follow them.” He summarized the combat android’s foiled attack on the Duke of Ontario, and Mstivoj’s guess that the Queen wanted control of her brother’s security resources, including the CP Polecat.

“Dominic was involved,” Nora said.

“I’m afraid I wasn’t tracking the Palantine royals during the assassination attempt, and those involved presumably had a personal, unrecorded conversation to organize the assassination since I can’t locate a record of it to study.” Jonah temporized. “Mstivoj seemed confident it wasn’t the king. Conceivably, one of Dominic’s many younger siblings might be recognized by the combat androids as a lawful authority. Princess Regina, perhaps, as the second oldest.”

She rejected the idea. “Monarch and heir. But why would Dominic attack his uncle?”

“Because his mother said so.” Jonah held up a hand, forestalling Nora’s protest. “I’m not saying he ordered his uncle’s death out of filial piety. Queen Sarah is an instigator. Dominic had arrived on Palantine with his betrothed. The Queen must have met him with a compelling reason or ploy for murdering her brother.”

Nora’s disgust was visceral, a sourness on her tongue. “He could have said no. He’s the Crown Prince. He’d have allies, even if he couldn’t go to his father for some reason.” His father. Their father. What had King Ivan been doing? Had he been aware of his wife’s maneuvering?

Jonah shocked Nora out of her musings. “You could amass allies, too, if you wished to. If you really believe Dominic is a terrible royal, you have the legal right to challenge for the position of heir to the Palantine crown. You’re more sensitive to burrs than Dominic, and you’re older. Primogeniture has been strongly supported by humans in your history.”

“I’m also illegitimate, slum-born and, worst of all, in respect to this issue, I’m from Capitoline. Palantines would never accept me.”

“If they could be convinced, would you feel a duty to step forward and rescue them from Dominic’s prospective rule?”

She shuddered. “No. That’s not me. I can’t be royal. Why would you even ask?”

He hunched fractionally, eyes avoiding hers; embarrassed. “You’re the human I know best, and the one I can ask questions of, about the ‘why’ of your decisions. I’m curious. A lot of humans would be lured by wealth and power. For you, those seem red flags, instead.” He straightened when he realized she was listening intently, rather than annoyed. “Also, if you were contemplating inserting yourself into Palantine society, I’d have to observe it a lot more first.”

“Don’t,” she said bluntly. “I wish to avoid the royals, all royals. As for ambition…you’ve seen how much work the blaze discovery brought me. Why would I seek additional headaches?”

He smiled tenderly, and answered her rhetorical question. “Because you care about people.”

Left alone on the bridge, Nora contemplated the rose-colored glasses Jonah viewed her through. She wasn’t uncommonly caring or altruistic. To survive as a child in the towers of Angkor, she’d had to be selfish. Her foster ma and her biological mother hadn’t cared if she lived or died. No one had. To survive, herself, Nora had been forced to turn away from the sight of other people’s needs. In adulthood, and financially and emotionally secure, she could afford the luxury of kindness. Why wouldn’t I indulge?

Putting aside the nightmare notion of revealing herself as a royal and involving herself in Palantine politics, Nora found that her decision as to whether she should contact Liam was simple. She wanted to talk to him. And if talking led to other interesting activities, that would be more than fine.

However, whilst she had resolved the most pressing of her issues, she couldn’t be sure that Liam was equally as free.

Why had he visited Mstivoj?

She slapped her hands down on the arms of the captain’s chair. “If you’re going to be a cowardly baby, like a girl with a crush in middle school, then be like that. Talk to his friends. Ugh.” Her face screwed up in disgust at her loser approach.

She could contact Brielle, but the RC Genghis Khan’s doctor was tactful and kind. Commander Claire Stanimir would give her the no-nonsense truth. If Nora being in Liam’s life complicated things for him, she’d stay out.

But wasn’t it his choice?

Before she could chase her thoughts in another dizzying spiral of procrastination, Nora messaged Claire. “Do you have time for coffee?”

Veronica escorted Nora to the house Nora and Jonah had purchased and planned to renovate.

Aria was left on the CC Kangaroo with Trent on guard outside, and Jonah in teacher-mode onboard.

A slight detour allowed Nora to buy three coffees. She handed one to Veronica, or tried to. Nora sighed. “At the house, then.”

“When we’re inside,” Veronica conceded. Coverage for the large house on Green Park was included in Nora’s security contract with Realm Edge Security. A minimum of two guards patrolled it at all times, and one of Realm Edge Security’s experts was consulting on its renovation.

Claire waited at the Royal Street entrance.

The house was so large it covered four lots, which gave it frontage to both Green Park and to exclusive Royal Street.

Nora greeted her guest and dispensed coffees before starting off on the tour she’d offered Claire. She was happy to have someone to talk to about her plans for the house, but her primary concern was Liam.

“I kind of ran away from him. That’s a conversation I must have with him, but…I’ve noticed you all from the RC Genghis Khan are sticking to yourselves this visit. I messed Liam around once. I don’t want to cause additional complications by reaching out to him if…well, if I am a complication.”

“Because of your new wealth?” Claire asked bluntly.

They wandered around the fussy reception rooms on the first floor. Veronica waited in the foyer.

“Yes. I’ve partnered with Willow, and you’ve emphasized the separation between her and yourselves.”

“Ah.” Some of Claire’s tension relaxed. She tried her coffee. “Good coffee. Your situation is different to Willow’s. If you like Liam, go for it.” She changed the subject; finished with providing dating advice. “How many floors above this one?”

“Five, plus the rooftop terrace. Basements, plural, below.”

“What will you do with all the space?”

“I’m modeling the redesign on a clan house.”

Claire’s eyes widened. “Are you planning a family?”

“No. But then, I didn’t plan on adopting Aria, either. It’s better to have space and not need it, than not to have space. Also, I do have friends and my husband’s family. Border Station is a long journey for a visit. So, they’ll stay a while. I want this to be a home for everyone.”

Claire nodded. “About Aria’s adoption. Who did you have hack the Registry Office database?”

The blood drained from Nora’s face. She coughed, drank some coffee, and cleared her throat. “It wasn’t me.” As much as Claire had shocked her with the question coming out of nowhere, she and Jonah had planned for such a situation. She had to lie. “I can give you a name, but I imagine he burned the identity when he left the station.”

Jonah had hacked records to create and vanish a fictitious Capitoline businessman.

“Serge Buckley. I contacted him through the darknet as I fled with Aria. I couldn’t leave her for Omnes, and he had his people following her.”

“I’m aware,” Claire said sympathetically.

“He did it to screw with Omnes, or that’s what he said. I found him on a board where people were grumbling about Omnes’s protection racket. I didn’t think anybody could hack the Registry Office. But he did, and that meant I could come back…but, if you know…Claire?”

“Liam knows. All of the RC Genghis Khan’s command group does.”

Nora put her coffee cup on a windowsill. “I’m not sorry.”

“I don’t expect you are,” Claire agreed. “You saved the girl.”

Nora folded her arms. “What will you do? I should stay away from Liam.”

“What we’ve done is Allison filed a report that included mention of the Registry Office hack, but she contends she hid the information well enough that no one will notice it.”

If they did, Nora thought. Jonah would pick up on it early enough for us to flee. If he knows to look for it. She’d ask him to.

“I’m safe? Aria’s safe?”

“As far as I know. No one knows the future, Nora. Go after what you want.”

It was good advice, but the fact that the hack of the Registry Office database was on record worried Nora about when it would come back to bite her—or worse, bite Liam.

After he’d held Crown Prince Dominic hostage, people had lined up to smear Liam’s reputation.

Nora refused to be the weapon they could finally wield to prove him corruptible. She debated the risks of reaching out to him all the way to the day of the CC Kangaroo’s departure for Beaconditch. Then left without talking to him.

It was easy to be brave for oneself: far harder to risk being someone else’s downfall.

Traveling in convoy proved an interesting experience, and a good distraction from her personal issues. On the one hand, it felt cozy. Humans were social creatures, and now, Nora had humans all around her in the usual emptiness of space; albeit, on other ships. Other people would also have been reassured by Zac and Yuri’s security forces. However, that was a lesser concern for Nora since Jonah’s scanning range meant the CC Kangaroo always had enough warning to avoid potential enemy spaceships.

The nagging sense of being herded along by Willow’s team, even as Nora notionally guided the convoy, was the downside to traveling in convoy. Nora couldn’t choose her own pace, but had to adhere to group protocols, and those were decided by Captain Irina Wismer.

It helped that Irina acted sensibly.

Also, tactfully.

As the convoy passed the mailbox that marked the entrance to the Avestan Range, Irina comm’d Nora.

Nora answered the call in her workshop, assuming that Irina was using the late evening hour to do a welfare check.

In a sense, it was a welfare call. However, it wasn’t Nora’s welfare Irina was concerned about.

“Lucas is unhappy. He hates being locked up on the CC Arowana with Yuri.”

Even on a separate ship, Nora had picked up the tension. It had existed on Border Station, and intensified since.

The two were oil and water, but Yuri had a position of authority, and Lucas didn’t. Lucas, according to Yuri, ought to follow orders, like everyone else. Lucas thought Yuri should take a long walk outside without a lifesuit.

“I’m asking, not ordering. No, not asking, merely floating the idea,” Irina began.

Nora’s attention remained on the feline automaton she’d been working on when Irina called. “Spit it out.”

“Are you sure Aria can’t hear you?”

“Her bedtime was hours ago.”

The convoy captain sighed. “Yuri and Lucas even argue about his bedtime.”

Nora’s hands stilled. She lowered the screwdriver. “How is that Yuri’s business?”

“It isn’t.” Irina was stuck on the CC Arowana with the two of them, and Willow. “But Lucas pokes and Yuri growls…”

And what’s Willow doing?

“I wanted to float the idea that Lucas stays with you?”

“Me?”

Irina answered hurriedly. “Obviously, you don’t have to. I haven’t as much as hinted at the idea to Willow. But Lucas and Yuri need space. Yuri won’t budge from the CC Arowana, and Willow won’t agree to Lucas moving to one of the combat ships.”

“Which leaves the Roo.”

“Where you have a spare cabin, and Aria, and she boasts about how good your ship’s AI is at tutoring.”

Nora stifled her own sigh. Yes, Aria did indeed boast about Jonah. It brought attention to him when he and Nora would rather he faded into the background.

In preparing for the journey to Beaconditch, he’d had an excuse to wander around Border Station and experience it in an embodied state, not simply through passive observation. He’d done so under the pretext of collecting and delivering items for Nora.

The idea they’d sold to everyone was that away from the CC Kangaroo, Jonah was a basic retro-gen android; a novelty she’d rescued and repaired from a shipment of unsorted junk. But once onboard or near-to the CC Kangaroo, he functioned as a moveable element of the spaceship, as its AI.

Aria claimed he, as the ship’s AI, was the best teacher “E-VAH!”

Actually, maybe Aria’s exuberance could do with being exposed to Lucas’s older “cool kid” factor?

Whether Aria would benefit or not, Nora had enough sympathy for Lucas’s position being stuck with Yuri, and what Nora suspected were Yuri’s priorities, that she was amenable to Irina’s suggestion.

Yuri, Nora was sure, was onboard the CC Arowana to protect the burr.

The day before departure, Nora had brought Jonah with her to the scrapyard to carry the junk she’d bought to work on as projects on the journey to and from Beaconditch, and not so incidentally, to pass close to where the CC Arowana was moored and sense the burr in it.

“If Lucas is willing to tolerate a kid and a boring old lady like me, he’s welcome to finish the journey to Beaconditch with us.”

Irina snorted. “You’re neither old nor boring. In fact, I think you’ll fill the role of kickass aunt that he needs. Authority, but on his side. From Lucas’s perspective, I’m too close to Yuri.” Her hesitation was barely perceptible. “Who’s not a bad guy.”

“I didn’t think he was,” Nora said neutrally.

Irina’s voice resumed its usual decisive tone. “All right. I’ll tell Willow I sounded you out and you’re okay with the CC Kangaroo being the schoolhouse for the remainder of the journey, if she’s okay with sending Lucas over. Slowing to a stop to dock and pass him over will be worth the time.”

Nora grinned. “I doubt even Yuri and his obsession with schedules will argue that point.”

Aria didn’t argue at all.

In fact, she had a crush/hero worship thing going on regarding Lucas, and eagerly dived into the project of decorating the spare cabin for him.

Lucas’s face when he saw the pastel, glittery stars Aria had asked Jonah to glue onto the cabin’s ceiling after she’d made them in the workshop caused Nora to choke on her smothered laughter.

“Serves you right,” her unsympathetic new guest said. And to Aria, in full big brother mode. “I like the stars.”

Aria beamed. “Glitter is for everyone!”

Lucas settled into the routine of the CC Kangaroo as if he’d always been a member of the family; gassing everyone with his teenage boy preference for overly strong body spray, and adding fart jokes to the dinner table.

“I’m not overseeing your schoolwork,” Nora had said bluntly. “Nor anything else. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a college student.”

Being responsible for himself in a safe environment suited him. Lucas pursued his own interests, finishing his schoolwork with astonishing speed and competence—Willow commented on it privately to Nora, shocked—then asking for lessons on things he didn’t know. Like cooking.

On the whole, he was a poor cook, but a first-rate eater.

“The leftover berry muffins are in the fridge,” Nora said one evening when he drifted into the kitchen an hour after Aria’s bedtime.

In Nora’s opinion, the kitchen smelled delicious. The fillings for her ravioli were cooling in the fridge, but the aroma of their cooking remained. Her garden had produced an abundance of pumpkin, and she intended to fill the freezer with roasted pumpkin ravioli and, since she always had an abundance of mushrooms, mushroom ravioli as well.

She measured out the ingredients for the pasta dough.

Lucas grabbed a muffin and leaned against the kitchen counter to eat it. “Have you ever done anything illegal?”

She gave him A Look. “You do know where I grew up?”

He responded with a distracted but cheeky grin. “Are you saying that all towers chicks are bad?”

She scraped a well in the flour and poured in the olive oil, adding water, before combining the ingredients. “Some laws were regularly broken in the towers. If towers tradition clashed with government rules, we followed our own traditions. Things like children working underage. I did that. It was about survival.”

His grunt was somewhere between sympathetic and awkward.

She added a dash more water to the dough till it came together, then dumped it onto a floured board on the counter.

“I was just stupid,” Lucas said.

She wondered if that was his judgement, or if Yuri had pounded it into him.

Between Jonah’s research into events on Capitoline—databases were incredibly useful, holding secrets people hoped had been forgotten, especially if you could piece together disparate data points—and Nora’s own observations of Willow’s people, she was confident of her understanding of Yuri’s role in the group.

Put simply, his priority was to protect the burr. From there, flowed his commitment to Willow and to the other elements of their mission on the border.

Previously, Nora hadn’t considered the obvious: that the Royal Guard was the security force responsible for the defense of the Vapori burrs held by the royal family.

Yuri saw himself as serving the royals as they served the realm.

He thought Lucas should value Willow’s commitment to her duty; that is, serving in the Navy, both protecting the realm and being in a position to locate additional burrs. Not punish her for it.

From Lucas’s perspective, Yuri wanted Lucas to respect Willow for leaving him to be raised by others.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that Lucas was with Willow because he’d been expelled from school. Publicly, the details were murky, but Jonah had dug them up.

Lucas and his friends hadn’t hurt people. There had been property damage and laws broken, but their street racing, while illegal and dangerous hadn’t hurt anyone. Not even their underage selves. Lucas had been fifteen at the time; too young to have a driver’s license.

He’d crashed his father’s car.

Kneading the pasta dough, Nora silently speculated if anyone had followed up how he came to have it, since officially, the Zangmo family, had nothing to do with the result of patriarch Stanley Zangmo’s fourth son’s teenage liaison with Willow Lange.

Jonah had found no hint of a formal or informal commitment from the Zangmos to leave Willow’s son to his ducal grandparents. Instead, it seemed the Zangmos were simply uninterested in Lucas.

“I was street racing and crashed. It wasn’t like it was the first time I crossed Principal Duckface’s rules.” Lucas shrugged, attempting nonchalance. “I was the only one caught. The cops hauled me out of the wreck. I didn’t squeal.”

“You stood by your own code.”

He flashed her a surprised and grateful smile. “Yeah.”

“But you thought, maybe, some of your friends would come forward?”

He hadn’t been there alone, but the school database showed the careful absence of a record checking who else had been absent from school grounds that night.

“Yeah.” He coughed. “They didn’t, though.”

And in staying silent, protecting themselves, they’d betrayed him. They’d left him to take the fall.

Nora laughed softly. “You know, that’s where you went wrong.”

He stared at her, shocked by the sudden lack of sympathy.

“With Yuri,” she clarified. “If you hadn’t stood by your own code and refused to snitch, he wouldn’t keep expecting you to meet his notions of honor and duty. He hasn’t written you off.”

“You’re crazy.”

She grinned. “Nope. Just older and seen how weird people are. Yuri’s big hang-up with you is that you’re not onboard with respecting Willow’s sacrifice of being with you as you grew up. She gave up being a hands-on mom to serve Capitoline.”

Lucas flat-out gawked at her. “You’re saying Yuri thinks I should be grateful for being raised by nannies and sent to boarding school when I was six?”

“I doubt he’s that unreasonable. But I think he believes you should value Willow’s sacrifice and try to reconnect with her now. Which she very much wants.”

His little boy lost look showed that he wished he could believe her last statement. But he tried a tough response. “Doesn’t mean Yuri has the right to go on at me like he does.”

“No. But he has his own issues.”

Lucas’s mouth and hands twitched as he thought through everything she’d said.

Nora concentrated on the dough.

“What issues?”

She bit her inner cheek so as not to smile at the belligerent demand. “People want other people’s lives to validate their choices.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Yuri is estranged from his adult children.”

Lucas cracked his knuckles. “Well, yeah. Guy’s an ass. What’s that to do with me?”

“If you and Willow can reconnect, maybe his children can come to accept Yuri’s choices. Choices that took him out of their lives.”

She popped the dough in the fridge to rest, and cleaned up the kitchen.

Lucas moved out of the way as she did so, but he didn’t help.

She didn’t expect him to. This was her mess. She owned it. Even if he would eat the ravioli.

“I don’t know how we got distracted talking about that ass Yuri. I mean, I know how he’d answer me if I asked…Nora.” Suddenly, the words burst out of Lucas. “What if I’ve screwed up my life?”

This was why he’d sought her out. He must have been stewing over the question.

“At sixteen?” she scoffed. Derision, used judiciously, had impact. “Whatever your school principal, family or anyone else said, crashing while street racing is not the end of the world. Being expelled isn’t, either.”

Lucas tried for cool and sardonic, and missed. He was stressed. “What about being forced out to border space?”

Nora washed her hands, dried them and sat at the kitchen table, indicating he join her.

He sprawled gracelessly opposite her. “Well?”

“Willow’s proud of how smart you are.”

Lucas jolted. He recovered himself, folding his arms. “Nice one. She’s not. Grandmother’s secretary always sent on my school reports.”

“Forget them. What you’re doing now, working with the tutor and Jonah, shows your true capability.” She waggled a finger at him. “Don’t laugh at me when I confess I’m reading child raising books, so I don’t screw up with Aria.”

His sulky, uncertain scowl lessened. “You’re great with her.”

“Thanks.” She smiled fleetingly. “My point is, one of those books described self-directed learners. That’s you. Your school’s rigid program supports kids who need their hands held or slaps and kicks to propel them in the right direction. You don’t. Willow’s proud of how you’re crushing your required subjects, then pursuing an interest in science and engineering. And I know this because she and I talk. I don’t monitor your tutorial progress, but she gets a report. She’s proud of you, Lucas.”

He kicked the table.

“Talk to her,” Nora urged. “Whatever it is you aim to do with your life, Willow will know more about how to get there than I do. I’m good with repairing things, but I barely grasp the engineering concepts you discuss with Jonah. Willow would love to have those discussions with you, and she could answer your questions. You haven’t done anything to screw up your life. You just need to seize the opportunities open to you.”

Lucas rose, all gangly, jerky limbs and overwhelmed emotion. “Good talk.” He jerked his chin at her, and dived for the privacy of his cabin.

Alone, Nora slumped in semi-relief. She thought she’d handled the conversation as well as she could. But who knew? Other people were a mystery, and teenagers more than most. Hopefully, she’d given Lucas what he needed to make healthy choices. “Wretched child raising books. ‘Healthy choices’ my butt! Stupid jargon.” She wanted Lucas to be happy and to have the confidence to choose what was right for him.

In the morning, after a late breakfast, Lucas tracked Nora to her workshop to talk to her without Aria overhearing. “I talked to Mom. Have you?”

Nora rolled her eyes. “No. The adults in your life are not colluding.”

He grinned. “Just checking. Mom was actually somewhat cool.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. We talked about engineering and what I might do. I refuse to be stuck in the Navy like she was, but maybe purely theoretical stuff isn’t for me, either. I dunno. So, Mom said she and Mason—that’s Mason Walsh, a mechanical engineer at the scrapyard—would oversee a project if I chose one.” Lucas bounced on the balls of his toes. “I’m thinking about what I might want to do, and later, what I could study at university. Mom said if I get the grades, she’ll get me in wherever I want.”

“Remember me when you’re a famous inventor.” Nora cheered him on.

“Ha!” He swung his arms, energy bursting out of him along with his laughter. “I’ll have you invest in my designs.”

“Convince me and I will,” she promised.

He dashed forward, gave her the universe’s briefest hug, and ran off to the gym to work out his energy.

Lucas wasn’t the only person Nora was having perspective-challenging conversations with.

At sixteen, Lucas couldn’t be sent to bed early, as Aria could. So, Nora retreated to the bridge and closed its hatch for her private conversations.

Often, she left Lucas and Jonah chatting. The two had rambling, ridiculous discussions while Lucas played video games at night in the lounge.

The bro-mance entertained them, even if Lucas considered Jonah a sophisticated AI.

A week out from Beaconditch, after a reassuringly dull journey, she closed the hatch to the bridge behind her and sank into the familiar comfort of the captain’s chair. She comm’d Zac on the CP Coyote.

Realm Edge Security had two ships in the convoy: a cutter and Zac’s sting ship, which he piloted. He hadn’t taken on the position of captain for the larger ship despite his previous captaincy of the CP Cougar.

In fact, after several conversations with Zac—conversations both serious and as ridiculous any Jonah and Lucas indulged in—Nora realized that Zac hated his pirate past. For herself, she no longer referred to him as a pirate or privateer.

She wouldn’t say they were friends, but they were approaching that status.

To date, the biggest excitement on the journey out to Beaconditch had been Lucas’s transfer to the CC Kangaroo. Nonetheless, Zac touched base with Nora every second day; checking on his client, he claimed.

After a professional run-through of her ship’s systems’ current functionality and a discussion of the route ahead for the next two days, they tended to linger to chat.

Tonight, she asked him why he’d established his business on the border.

“I’m Aventine.”

She studied his scruffily unshaven image on-screen, trying to grasp why being Aventine mattered.

Five centuries ago, when seven colony ships came through the Origin black hole and found themselves stranded, the inhabitants of the ships were unloaded onto planets as habitable planets were discovered.

Each planet was named after the colony ship whose population settled the planet.

That worked fine when habitable planets could be located in a reasonable timeframe. But after five centuries without discovering a seventh habitable planet, the descendants of the colonists from the ship Aventine had mostly settled on the sixth-to-be-settled planet, Caelian, and given up on getting their own planet.

Other Aventine colonist descendants had spread out across the Human Sector.

Evidently, Zac’s family had ended up on Palantine.

He scratched at his chin. The microphone picked up the faint scritch of his bristles. “I’ve given up on the Aventine goal of a habitable planet of our own. The system didn’t work for us. It squashed us. So, we need to change the system, and that can only happen if we break it open. I intend to lead an expedition to the Beta black hole.”

She whistled. It explained why he was on Border Station—it was the best launch pad for an expedition into the Arcana toward the Beta black hole—and why he was interested in the blaze deposit on Beaconditch. An expedition to Beta would require a mind-boggling number of fuel cells to ensure a return journey. “Ambitious.”

“Go big, or rot in other people’s shadows.”

“The royals’ shadows,” she interpreted. “Yet, you served the Palantine royal family as a privateer. Would this be a Palantine expedition?”

“I’d take anyone’s money, but no. I don’t have any Palantine backers.”

So, if he found his own blaze deposit, that would give him money as well as fuel cells for his expedition.

In the history records, spaceships as small as frigates had successfully entered the millraces of black holes and navigated the rivers great distances across the universe. Zac’s ambition was achievable. With luck.

Jonah had said the Vapori hadn’t left a lens at the Beta black hole. If Zac reached it, he had a chance of entering its millrace. Nonetheless, the expedition was high risk.

Could the Human Sector’s shipbuilding match that of the humans’ five centuries ago who’d built the colony ships?

Would Zac and his ship’s AI be able to navigate the rivers?

The rivers themselves would be chancy without any charts for where they might emerge.

“It’s risky,” she observed.

“You going to advise me not to try?”

She laughed. “I wouldn’t be that big a hypocrite.”

On-screen, his eyebrows knit together.

She elaborated. “I just mean that I’ve faced my doubts and taken risks. I’d be a hypocrite to advise you against doing the same.”

He nodded abruptly, glancing away from the screen.

How many people told you your dream is crazy, Zac? “Why? Why is the system so bad that you’ll risk your life to break it?”

He ended the comms call.

Nora blinked at the blank screen. Was that a refusal to answer or a challenge to her to find the answers herself?

Chapter 14

Two days out from Beaconditch, excitement at finally reaching their destination had everyone on edge. On the CC Kangaroo, Aria considered herself an expert on the planet. After all, she’d visited it before.

“Don’t eat breakfast,” she advised Lucas. “I was sooo sick. I spewed everywhere.”

“Delightful dinner conversation,” Nora observed.

Lucas smirked.

Aria rolled her eyes, but did change the subject. “Have you checked your lifesuit? We can check them together!”

“Neither of you are going out on-planet. At least, not from the CC Kangaroo.”

Lucas held his hands up in surrender. “Don’t look at me. I don’t want to walk out there.”

“I do!” Aria shouted.

Nora was grateful when it was bedtime and Aria, after twenty minutes of delaying tactics, fell asleep. Nora made herself a mug of chamomile, lavender and mint tea, and went to hide out in her workshop.

She had ten minutes of peace before Lucas intruded.

He’d been fidgety all day. He’d started and abandoned activities, and snapped at Aria before teasing and apologizing to her. It had been a genuine apology, too, given that it had included an hour playing her favorite pastel-pink, fairy-themed boardgame. But now, he was in Nora’s workshop, and he’d picked up a lighter and was flicking it on and off.

Flame. No flame. Flame. No flame.

When a woman can’t find peace in her own workshop…

“What’s up, Lucas?”

He tossed the lighter back onto a counter and flung himself into the “thinking” chair. The recliner squeaked in protest. “You can sense burrs, can’t you?”

He suddenly had her full attention.

From where Jonah was on the bridge, Lucas undoubtedly had his attention, also.

“It was at the dinner at the scrapyard. You were rubbing your fingers against your jeans when you walked in, and later. Like they tingled. It’s this buzz-buzz, like the burr demands your attention.” He studied her from behind the shaggy curtain of his brown hair. “Mom doesn’t feel it, doesn’t realize the shielding has a crack in it.”

“Lucas…” Nora was at a loss.

“I haven’t told anyone—about you. Or about the shield leaking. I…I haven’t told anyone I can sense burrs.” And by the way he avoided her gaze, he wasn’t comfortable telling her, now.

“I thought royals tested their kids?”

He looked at her then. “Yeah. They tested me when I was five.” He hunched his shoulders. “I was a quiet kid. I didn’t cause trouble. I watched and listened, but I hated people telling me what to do.

“My nanny drove me to the palace in Bangalore. The Duke met me there. He didn’t hold my hand or anything. He barked, ‘Follow me.’ The nanny stayed behind. We went down to the vaults. There was this room there, a man in it, sitting at a table. The Duke,” not Granddad, “told me to go in and do what Dr. Reuss said. ‘Be a good boy and try hard.’”

Lucas cracked his knuckles. “I sat on a chair on the opposite side of the table, my back to the door. I swung my legs. I remember because the doctor told me to stop doing that and concentrate. He had an object like a snow globe on the table between us. He said when it shone with a green light I was to concentrate. If I felt a buzz, a funny feeling, I was to put my hand on the table. If I didn’t feel anything, I should keep my hand in my lap.”

He scratched at the palm of his right hand. “They started out really strong. The snow globe thing lit up green, and my whole body buzzed. But I decided Dr. Long Nose wasn’t telling me what to do. I started swinging my legs. Didn’t move my hands. I guess I fooled them. They tried lots of times, different levels of buzzing, some just in my fingertips like I felt at the scrapyard and like I’ve been sensing on the CC Arowana. It was good to escape to the Roo.”

“At five, you fooled them?”

He nodded. “I’ve thought about it. A lot. I didn’t react to the big buzzy feels. I responded as if one of my older cousins was teasing me. No reaction, then they left me alone. Same with the burrs and the buzzing. No reaction. A couple of times, though, I put my hand on the table when the big buzz happened. I was afraid Grandfather would say I didn’t try hard enough if I didn’t put my hand on the table at all. But because I was also a little pest, I put my hand on the table randomly three other times.”

“So, they judged you as not sensitive to Vapori burrs.”

“Useless,” he corrected her.

She recalled that his grandparents, the Duke and Duchess of Raffles, had sent him to boarding school when he was six.

The logical conclusion was inescapable. They’d shoved him out when he presented as incapable of sensing the burrs.

“You’re the first person I’ve told.”

She stared at him. “Why?”

“Because you’re Forgotten, aren’t you?”

Hesitantly, she nodded. Zac knew. This was a secret that was going to leak. “Yes.”

“Is your half-sister?”

“That’s her business.”

Lucas pushed his hair back from his face. “Yeah, in the ideal world of duty and honor that Yuri talks about. But in the real world, the one where you grew up in the towers and both of my grandfathers are jerks, it won’t stay her business. You and she need to be careful.”

Disbelievingly, she realized he’d confided his secret to warn her. A sixteen-year-old boy was trying to protect her. “Of what?”

“Of whom.” His hair fell forward again as he slumped in the chair. “People like my dad’s dad.” His bright blue eyes peered at her through the shaggy hair. “You’re rich, now.”

“I know.” She waved a hand. “Sorry. That was rude.”

“Nah. But the thing about being rich is…it’s not enough.”

They stared at one another.

“For a kid, that’s worryingly profound.”

He laughed at her. “Poppa—I call Dad’s dad that because he’d hate it, but I’m never allowed anywhere near him where he’d hear it. Poppa isn’t just rich. He has a powerbase. That’s why people who challenge him always fail. Dad says so.”

Lucas got up and paced around, all scrawny, gangly limbs and churning emotions. “Mom thinks Dad’s a goof. He kind of is, but she doesn’t know that he steals time to catch up with me. Apparently, she gets to leave for years, but he’s a loser if he doesn’t do the parent thing.”

Lucas spun around to confront Nora, or to confront his own anger. “She doesn’t get it. Dad staying away from me is the best way for Poppa to ignore me, and everyone’s safer when Poppa ignores them.”

“Stories of connections to organized crime hang around the Zangmos,” Nora tried to say neutrally.

Lucas’s grin was feral. “Crime bosses are terrified of Poppa. That David Omnes who used to be a big deal on Border Station? He’d piss himself if he met Poppa.” The disturbing grin vanished. “And that’s the problem. If Poppa chews up buzzards like Omnes and bigger deals than him, you’re not going to survive.”

“Why would Stanley Zangmo notice me or Cherry?”

“It doesn’t have to be Poppa. It’s anyone like him.” Lucas’s voice rose in frustration. “Do you think he’s the only buzzard breeding Forgotten?”

A deathly silence greeted his shout.

He flopped back into the chair and rubbed his forehead, swearing under his breath. “It’s why Dad knocked up Mom.”

“What?!”

“Poppa’s master breeding program. Snag the royals. If the offspring show sensitivity to burrs, bring them into the family. On the quiet, Poppa picks up Forgotten. Some, him, my uncles and cousins, they marry. Others they just…well, don’t. It’s what Dad said to me before I stole his car. He said me being a dud with burrs was the best thing I’d ever done for him. Told me that Poppa saw it as proof that Dad wasn’t a good stud—if his genes couldn’t get it on with a duke’s daughter’s—and that’s why Dad was allowed to marry a normal woman, not a Forgotten. He told me they were having a son.”

Replacing Lucas with a son his father actually wanted.

“Cherry’s and my mom was Forgotten. She acknowledged Cherry, but not me. I grew up a foster brat. Family can hurt you the worst.” But Nora’s situation was different to Lucas’s. “Willow genuinely cares for you.”

“Not enough.” Not enough to put him before her duty. “If she knew I could sense the burr on the CC Arowana, she’d tell Yuri. She’d tell my grandparents and her precious Francis and who knows who else if she learned I was sensitive. And do you know where I’d end up? Where she was! And she’d tell me it was my duty and for the best and that I could be an engineer on a Royal Navy ship just as well as anywhere else.” He broke off with a choked sob.

He’d carried his fear of being used around with him for years. It explained, better than the child raising book’s notion of self-directed learning, that Lucas underperformed for a reason.

Like she had, he did his best to avoid notice.

He sniffed loudly. “The royals and their guard dog Yuri think that Mom’s sensitivity to burrs is strong. But she can’t sense this burr leaking. I can. You can. If they knew, they’d use us. Just like Poppa. Just like the pirate guy you talk to.”

“Mstivoj was a pirate. He isn’t anymore. He had his own royal demands shackling him.”

Lucas waved aside her excuses. “Yeah, yeah. We’re all pushed around by buzzards. But he’s one of them. The war’s over and he’s setting himself up in Omnes’s place. He’s building a powerbase. He’s already got Cherry. Does he know she’s Forgotten?”

Nora’s old misgivings about Cherry confiding in Zac flooded back. “Yes.”

“He’s snowed you. You’re paying him to ‘protect’ you, and really, he’s just keeping his pet Forgotten close. You’re an asset. Just like Mom is to the royals. Just like Poppa hoped I’d be. If Mstivoj knew there was a burr close by, he’d steal it.”

He would.

But there is a difference, Nora thought. With his expedition to the Beta black hole, Zac hoped to cleanly break the system. Whereas people like Lucas’s Poppa acted to pervert the system for personal power.

As for the Capitoline royals…Lucas had grown up among them, or at least, on the fringe of them, and he feared them.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked him. “Why trust me with the fact you’re a sensitive?”

“Because you’re nice.” He scrubbed a hand over his eyes. They were reddening with tears he refused to shed. “You wouldn’t have believed me if I hadn’t told you I’m like you, and I don’t want you trapped. Not by Yuri or Mstivoj or anyone.”

She sighed. “That’s the plan. That’s what the money from the blaze is meant to buy. Safety.”

“It won’t, though, if you trust the wrong people.”

He had trusted her.

“I’ll make myself safe,” she vowed. With Jonah’s help. “And Lucas, if you’re ever in trouble, you come to me. We’ll face the buzzards together.” In fact, she’d ensure Jonah could hide Lucas away somewhere. Nora was the adult. This fight was hers.

The convoy arrived at Beaconditch and settled into orbit around the planet.

Yuri refused to split resources, namely his security personnel, so the three eseduce arrays were deposited at the same site.

Nora’s role in the convoy ended with their arrival. She’d met her contractual requirement to guide them to the blaze deposit. Now, Blue Dock Scrapyard would extract it, and the blazsvitloium would be shipped back to Border Station to be processed into fuel cells.

Back at the scrapyard, Mason Walsh was overhauling equipment mothballed three decades ago. When the first shipment from Beaconditch arrived, they’d be ready.

Nora wasn’t waiting for that moment. She intended to return immediately.

Unlike Nora, who’d landed the CC Kangaroo on Beaconditch to demonstrate a survivable if bumpy entry, the cutter CC Arowana remained in orbit. Willow had insisted on Lucas rejoining her onboard prior to Nora’s scout ship descending to the planetary surface.

When Willow heard Nora’s decision to return, she responded peremptorily. “We’ll join you.”

“Nice that she waited for an invitation,” Zac snarked. But he adjusted his plans to accommodate the addition of the CC Arowana.

In fact, the CC Arowana led the reduced convoy as they retraced the route home, despite Nora being the one paying for Realm Edge Security’s escort. Lucas stayed on the cutter with his mom, and from his own reports, was doing his best to ignore Yuri. Which was an improvement on actively provoking the man.

Since Lucas’s confession of his sensitivity to burrs, Nora had a greater sense of how deep, and possibly irreparable, the breach of trust was between him and Willow. Their mutual interest in engineering might be their best chance of building a bridge across a chasm Willow didn’t suspect existed.

Nora wished them well, but concentrated on her own concerns.

Aria quickly adjusted to the CC Kangaroo being just their small family’s once more. “I like Lucas, but he’s a boy. Witches together, like Cherry said. Girl power! Can we invite her for ice-cream sundaes with us when get home?”

“Yup.”

“Awesome sauce!”

Surprisingly, it was Jonah who seemed most distracted on the journey home.

He worried Nora the day he said, “Now, I understand why you kept repeating that knowing something doesn’t make me responsible for it.”

“Jonah?”

“Let me think about this.”

For two days, he existed with most of his attention manifestly elsewhere.

“Are we in a danger zone?” Aria asked over dinner. She ate her pizza with gusto, seemingly unperturbed by the idea.

“No. We’re on the charted route home, almost out of the Avestan Range.”

Aria discarded the crust of her pizza. “Jonah’s not talking much. I reckon he’s busy piloting.” Because she still thought Jonah was the spaceship’s AI.

“Jonah’s not busy with anything dangerous.” I hope, Nora concluded silently.

Once Aria was in bed, Jonah apologized for frightening the girl.

“She wasn’t scared,” Nora said. “She hoped I’d miss her plucking the bell pepper slices off her pizza and trying to hide them under her crusts.”

The story barely won a smile from him. “Bridge.”

Nora joined him.

“Princess Hermione is dead,” he said.

Of all the potential issues Nora had braced to confront, the death of Crown Prince Dominic’s new bride wasn’t one. Selfishly, her first question was why the news bothered Jonah?

“Tracking back through data from passive scanning is difficult and time-consuming and there are frustrating gaps. I was investigating the how and why of Dominic potentially being the person who ordered the combat android’s attack on his uncle. The PIA is positive it was him. Unfortunately for the Duke of Ontario, the PIA kept their investigation highly confidential. If they spoke to King Ivan about it, which I’d assume they did, no record of the conversation exists.”

He paused. “The Duke of Ontario’s attempts to contact his sister, Queen Sarah, are on record. Their face-to-face conversation at the palace isn’t. If the Duke of Ontario had known what the PIA dug up, perhaps he’d have been able to avoid his fate.”

Nora interrupted. “I thought you said Princess Hermione died.”

“The Duke of Ontario was killed during his arrest for her murder.”

“Holy ducks.” Nora’s toes curled. The consequences of a Palantine duke killing a Capitoline princess could take thousands of additional lives. It could mean war. “Did he…?”

“No. Ontario wasn’t a good man. But he was a smart one. Killing Hermione wouldn’t have benefited him. But if he had desired her gone, he’d have provided himself with an alibi, rather than stabbing her at the palace stables. A stablehand said she saw the Duke leaving the stable Hermione’s body was found in. The Royal Guard moved to detain him. When they came upon him in his chamber, one shouted, ‘gun’. They fired. He died without a chance to answer the charges against him.”

“Did he have a gun?”

“No.”

Nora stared at him. “Who set him up? Dominic?” Getting rid of an unwanted bride as well as killing the man who’d survived the combat android.

“No!”

Jonah’s emphatic rejection of her half-brother’s guilt shocked her.

He noticed. “Dominic isn’t who we thought he was. As I went back through the data, I didn’t understand at first. You’re careful and rational regarding Liam. I thought that was how humans decided whether to love or not.”

She blinked.

“But Dominic changed in his time with Hermione. It wasn’t merely in his public behavior, manufactured for media consumption. It was in the things he did and bought for her. She noticed it and sent messages back to her family reassuring them that Dominic was surprisingly sweet under his bravado. She compared him to a mistreated stallion, lashing out at friend and foe alike, but wanting to have a herd, a family, he could trust and protect.”

Hermione and her famous obsession with miniature ponies.

“You think she was right.”

“I obtained evidence that Dominic sent the combat android after his uncle because he believed the Duke was scheming against Hermione as the future queen. The evidence reached Dominic via his mother.”

“Oh, hells.”

“Dominic tried to talk to his father, presumably about the Duke. But King Ivan and Dominic have a terrible, mistrustful relationship. Ivan wouldn’t grant him an audience.”

Nora snorted. “An audience? His own son has to make an appointment? Stars above! They are all sorts of crazy.”

“Except that Dominic fell in love and it changed him.” Jonah’s eyes were wide with awe. “Love is revolutionary. With Hermione trusting him and learning to love him, Dominic became a man capable of considering others. He could have been a good king.”

Nora’s heart squeezed at Jonah’s expression of mingled hope and mourning. She swallowed the remark that honeymoons ended. Such cynicism was wrong. Love was powerful.

Loving Ethan had changed her from simply surviving to daring to share more of herself; to grow and to care.

She rubbed her thumb over her wedding ring. When she’d lost her husband… “How is Dominic?”

“Raging.” Jonah’s shoulders slumped. “Everything is coming apart exactly as I imagine his mother intended.”

Nora froze.

“Queen Sarah has taken over the duchy of Ontario on the basis that she is familiar with it, and will dig out the traitors who killed her beloved daughter-in-law.”

“Hold up. You’re implying that Queen Sarah ordered her daughter-in-law’s and her brother’s murders?”

“She devised and executed the plot that resulted in their deaths. Of course, she had an impeccable alibi for both deaths. She wasn’t even at the palace. It was a diabolically clever move. In addition to gaining control of the resources of Ontario, she has strained Palantine’s relationship with Capitoline, and destabilized Dominic. I can’t help but speculate that his unstable personality is a product of her intentions. She is power-hungry.”

“She’s a harpy,” Nora said.

“Pathologically selfish. I believe she truly intends to consolidate her power by reducing blaze supplies. Without fuel cells, interstellar travel and trade becomes impossible.”

“And Queen Sarah rules her realm without outside influence or the ability of her people to escape,” Nora concluded. The idea of what lack of blaze could result in wasn’t new. “Could it really happen in her lifetime?”

“Some blaze stockpiles have gone missing or been destroyed. Not so much in Palantine, to date. Capitoline lost some during the war, and naturally attributed the destruction to enemy action. Other realms have suffered blaze losses, mistakenly ascribing it to criminal theft.”

“And all that is Queen Sarah?”

“She has allies. There is a loose cabal who share the belief that they can position themselves to gain immensely from the ending of interstellar travel. A complete absence of blaze isn’t even necessary. Drop levels to a low enough threshold and they presume a scarcity mentality will encourage the individual realms to bunker down.”

Nora rubbed her eyes. “That is ridiculously probable. Humans would shut down at the threat of a shutdown. But surely the other royals and the intelligence agencies are acting against the loss of blaze…oh. Willow.”

“She is certainly out here to secure a new supply of blaze and to protect it. Will it be enough?” He shrugged.

“If a society starts regressing,” Nora said slowly. “It can literally lose capability.”

Jonah agreed. “The Vapori concluded that happened with the Iguanese.” The first people of the region, dead and gone millions of years ago.

“Which means Queen Sarah and her greedy friends could seriously harm us. I mean, everyone in the Human Sector. They could reduce what we’re capable of. Zac wants to lead an expedition to the Beta black hole and beyond to reconnect with the rest of humanity. He has a tiny chance of doing so now, but if interstellar travel was lost, such an expedition would be completely impossible. We’d never connect with other humans. Never, even, be able to realistically dream of it.”

She was sorry for Hermione and Dominic, but this was a danger that threatened the entire region. She grappled with the implications and with rightly judging the value of what could be lost. “The Silicaese.”

“What about them?”

“You told me how they came to this region as exiles. They lived here for millennia and spread across multiple planets. They had a sophisticated, successful civilization. Yet when the main community of Silicaese, the descendants of those who’d exiled our region’s Silicaese, came to them, our Silicaese chose to abandon their world here and return to the main community.”

“For the survival of that community,” Jonah reminded her.

Thinking deeply, she kicked a heel against the base of her chair. “The main community’s survival wouldn’t have needed everyone who was here. They chose to rejoin the main group, and none of them returned to the Human Sector.”

With a final kick to the base of the chair, she shared her conclusion, which had been developing for months. “I think there’s a psychic trauma to identifying as exiled. As a people, we have an instinct to be whole, whatever species we are. If we, Stranded humanity, give up the ability to realistically entertain the hope of reconnecting with the rest of humanity, will it break us?”

He regarded her mournfully. “I’m uncertain. I’m still learning the terrible and amazing reality of the human experience.”

She smiled ruefully and hugged him. “So am I, Jonah. So am I.”

In the privacy of her cabin Nora contemplated her heavy conversation with Jonah.

It was absurd and shameful that her actions had convinced him that loving someone was a choice.

As she’d healed from her grief for Ethan, she’d suppressed the memory of how fiercely his death had hurt her. She’d focused on their time together, instead. However, denying how she flinched from recalling the pain of grief, only served to trap her in an unconscious fear of suffering it again.

Liam was as easy to love as Ethan had been: a man to respect and trust.

Loving Liam wasn’t a choice. Acting on her love for him was.

That’s why I hesitated to contact him. Even as he was forever in her thoughts.

She slid Ethan’s ring off her finger and kissed it. “I love you so much,” she whispered. He had wanted her to love again. “I hope I can be as brave as you believed me to be. You’d like Liam.”

She swiped at a tear, then another, then gave in and bawled.

Heartache and hope were the improbable partners to her decision.

She blew her nose, splashed her face with cold water, and with Ethan’s ring wrapped in a silk scarf and tucked in her jewelry box, wrote and rewrote a message to Liam.

When she and Jonah had partnered, trusting him had been a challenge. That he wasn’t human had made things both harder and easier. But overwhelmingly with Jonah she’d witnessed his uncertainty. They were vulnerable together.

It was different with Liam, and not simply because he was human and a man she could love.

For all the manufactured media opprobrium directed at him for daring to capture the Palantine Crown Prince, the Capitoline royal family and its navy continued to trust him. They’d kept him as captain of a battlecruiser. No demotion. Even his apparent exile to patrol the Hadrian Line could be seen as a strong expression of confidence in his loyalty and ability to control a volatile situation.

No, Liam’s personal circumstances were the complete opposite of Jonah’s.

When Nora had trusted Jonah enough to confide in and build a partnership with him, Jonah had already sacrificed his old life to be with her. He was all-in. He couldn’t have gone back to being a bodiless AI.

With Liam, telling him her secrets meant starting him on a path of choosing the life he had, of responsibility and respect, or wandering into unchartered territory (metaphorically, and maybe, literally) with her.

If she respected him, she had to let him choose his own path.

What he did with her secrets, who he might share them with, were fears, the fallout of which, she would handle if she had to.

Chapter 15

Liam had timed the two patrols since Nora and Willow’s departure for Beaconditch so that the RC Genghis Khan’s return from the second patrol was likely to coincide with a scout ship’s swift return from the uninhabitable and uninteresting planet.

His guess that Nora wouldn’t linger at her claim was proven correct.

He also wasn’t surprised to note that Willow had returned as well. Border Station was a far superior base of operations, whatever Willow’s true purpose on the Hadrian Line, than Beaconditch offered.

Both women sent messages ahead of their arrival, releasing them as soon as their small convoy was in comms range of Border Station, and giving him two days to decide his response.

Claire could handle Willow’s requests, while Allison analyzed the data Willow supplied from the journey.

However, Nora’s message to him was personal.

Alone in his office, he reread it.

“Liam, I’ve been a coward. My life’s complicated, so when I say I feared you as the biggest risk of all, that shows how much you mean, could mean to me, if you want to. I’ve rewritten this note so many times, I’m just going to send you this mess. I ran away from our first date, the dueling fiddles. I don’t know if there are any performances like that on at the moment, but there are always buskers in Green Park. Will you meet me there, at the Blue Entrance to the stadium? We can walk and listen to the music and talk. Say, eleven o’clock Tuesday morning?”

Green Park was where she’d bought a house.

Claire had walked through it before the current renovations. His friend and second-in-command had told him of her conversation with Nora. “She’s afraid she’ll mess up your life, Liam.”

From the beginning, he’d known she would, simply by growing to mean as much or more to him than his duty.

Nora wasn’t a person to build her life around his.

But he had commitments and obligations. He couldn’t build his life around hers.

So, he’d waited. He’d given her time to deal with the complications of organizing things to cope with her blaze discovery and new wealth, and to meet Aria’s needs. He’d let her leave for Beaconditch without sending so much as a safe travels message.

He’d intended to talk with her on her return, and clearly, she had the same idea.

Interest and attraction didn’t mean love. But when you found someone who was worth complicating your life for and you couldn’t forget them…

Liam had initially fought the realization. He’d tried to hide behind the excuse that when he’d met Nora he’d been at a point in his life when he’d wanted what she represented: someone to love; the possibility of a family; and, a life beyond serving the realm.

But the truth was inescapable in his mind’s refusal to forget her.

He’d fallen in love.

“One brownie, after you’ve eaten your salad.” Nora finished laying down the law to Aria before leaving her with Jonah, while she went to meet Liam. “Tomorrow, we’ll catch up with Cherry for ice-cream sundaes. If you’d like to make her a witch’s hat as a gift, you can.”

Nora’s mischievous impulse back-fired.

“I’ll make you one, too! And I’ll put extra glitter on mine. The three witches!”

“Fantastic.” Nora exited the CC Kangaroo. She wore a swirling boho dress in shades of red and orange, a bright challenge to fate, and had left her hair loose.

Veronica picked up on the clues Aria wasn’t old enough to put together. “Who are you meeting?”

“Liam Kimani at Green Park. You can watch from a distance, but I need privacy.”

The amusement vanished from Veronica’s expression. “Problems?”

“Hopefully, the opposite.” But nerves gripped Nora hard.

They boarded a tram to Green Park and arrived ten minutes early.

Liam was already there.

The station’s artificial lighting felt warm on Nora’s face and bare arms. The air smelled of the green lawn and shady trees. A fiddler played beneath a nearby oak tree, and Nora smiled, taking it as a good omen.

Liam returned her smile. He wore a khaki shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, with jeans and dark brown boots. He also wore a look of hope and determination.

Her heart lurched. She’d been reminding herself for days that he was a good man, a kind and courteous one, and that he might simply be meeting her for a polite ending to a relationship she’d run from.

But that fear couldn’t survive the warm look in his eyes.

Veronica fell back.

“Nora,” Liam said huskily.

She ran the last few steps. Months ago, on the Gretel Loop, she’d kissed him goodbye. Now, she kissed him on the mouth, and it was a welcome, an invitation, and an offering.

He kissed her with hot, sweet demand; holding her close.

“Liam.” She heard the acceptance in her voice, the longing and love, and felt the tremor that shook him. It shook her back to reality. “Wait, love. I have to tell you things, first.”

“No more doubts,” he said softly. “Claire said you were worried about Aria’s adoption.”

She hadn’t thought he’d lead off the discussion. “I had someone hack the Registry Office database, Liam. It’s kind of a big deal.”

“It is, but you didn’t hack it. Serge Buckley did.” His arms slid reluctantly from her. He clasped her hand and started walking.

Their connection made everything seem possible. But it wouldn’t be easy.

Nora followed him readily, putting distance between themselves and others. “The Registry Office hack is the least of my problems. I’m Forgotten, Liam.”

He halted to stare at her.

She smiled wryly. “What are the rules on reporting Forgotten?”

He rubbed his thumb over her knuckles. “There aren’t any laws. Being Forgotten isn’t illegal. The Navy does have guidelines. Forgotten should be reported.”

“To who?”

“Naval Intelligence. It’s a guideline, Nora. Not a necessity. That you’re Forgotten is your business.”

She gathered her courage. “What about the fact that King Ivan is my father?”

“What?” His shocked gaze searched her face as if hoping she’d gone crazy. Disbelief changed to resistance in his expression. “But…you’re from Capitoline.”

The romance of mere minutes earlier was gone as if it had never been.

Confronted by the shock of her news, Liam leant on his training and experience, and that was as a battlecruiser captain.

She didn’t take offence. This was the rock-solid core of the man. She needed his complete and honest acceptance. “I’m guessing my biological mom ran as far as she could afford and bought herself a new identity. I’m trouble, Liam. I’m a mix. Forgotten and a king’s daughter. Forgotten are bred into royal families, and that has to be because they offer some benefit or pose a threat. Something lurks in our genes.”

That something was the interaction between the Vapori lens’s alteration of the Original fifteen five centuries ago and the subsequent alterations to people as humans adapted to survive the planets in the Human Sector.

She owed him not merely the truth of who she was, but the risk of who she might become. “If I can use burrs, what if I could affect the lens at the Origin black hole and open its millrace?”

Liam gave her a weird look. She was boggling his mind, but he was adjusting. “Mstivoj said you do suicidal things that maybe aren’t suicidal for you.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “It’s five centuries, Nora. If that was possible, others would have tried, the Originals and the earlier royals who were stronger.”

She nodded.

His argument was the logical, standard view of burrs and of the people sensitive to them and able to operate them to obliterate reality.

What snagged her attention was what he revealed. “You’re aware that sensitivity to burrs has been falling.”

His mouth tightened. “Francis told me. It’s not a state secret. Just not talked about. Why would you think you could do what others have failed to change?”

Nora had prepared for this question. Sharing her secrets was her decision. Sharing Jonah’s was not. “I have two hypotheses. The first is from my xeno-archaeological studies. I’ve dug on Silicaese planets. Our dig team would talk about the Silicaese. How they lived. What their motivations might have been.

“We, humans, use burrs to obliterate reality. The burrs siphon the energy that, at a quantum level, forms whatever they’re pointed at. If, that is, a human has the ability to trigger them. And that ability, or sensitivity, is inherited from the Original fifteen who were altered by the lens.”

She held up a finger. “But the Silicaese were different. Xeno-archaeologists believe the Silicaese used the burrs as a power source rather than an energy-siphoning weapon. There’s no evidence in the vicinity of Silicaese planets to show they ever obliterated a patch of space.”

“That’s not a new claim.” Even as he argued with her, Liam clasped her hand. She closed her fingers tightly around his. “People have tried ever since the Stranding to use the burrs in various ways. They’ve only ever obliterated things.”

Things? Nora tilted her head. How far was Liam in Francis’s confidence? Did Liam know that a strong royal could use a blur to obliterate an individual’s personality, mind-wiping them to become a zombie? Burrs weren’t just massive weapons of destruction. They also had the capacity to destroy on a personal, insidious level.

She moved closer to him, and sighed in outright relief when he put an arm around her. “My second hypothesis. The royals collect and breed Forgotten, adding them to their bloodlines, for a reason. In the beginning, it probably was about collecting and strengthening the genetic inheritance from the Originals. But it’s been five centuries. All humans in the sector have changed from what our ancestors were. Adapting to the planets available to us forced the changes.”

Liam’s fingers dug in lightly at her waist. “You’re suggesting random mutations interacting with whatever the lens changed in the Originals has passed down the generations to create new abilities?”

“I’ve lived in fear of being outed as a Forgotten. Maybe I’m paranoid, but that hope for new abilities would explain the royals and others chasing us down.”

“Others?”

She winced. “Unfortunately. People who have power generally want more. The royals aren’t alone in hoarding power in the Human Sector. Wealth, crime networks, and scientific knowledge are all sources of power. The ability to use burrs in new ways could redefine the balance of power in our society.”

“Disrupt it.” He considered her for a long moment. “But you’re not power-hungry.”

“Thank you for that.” Her swift grin died fast. “The problem is that I could be. I want to feel safe. Be safe. I can’t do this alone, if I do it at all.” She put a hand over his mouth. There was nothing cutesy in the action. It was meant to silence him. “I want you to consider everything I’ve said. Then, if you still want me, we find a path forward or through. One that works for both of us—and for Aria. She’s mine, now.”

He smiled at her. “I know she is. I’m glad for her and you. I want you, Nora, but you’re right that your confession is huge. I understand that you want me to be sure of my feelings and commitment, so that you can be sure of them, too.”

She swallowed hard, and nodded. “There’s one last thing, before you decide if…well, if I’m worth the hassle.”

She still thought of burrs as the bones of Jonah’s deceased kin; kin killed by the Silicaese when they stole the burrs.

Jonah had said he and his kin were okay with Nora using burrs.

The least she owed them was to respect their stated position, but she had her own standards.

She refused to ask him to pinpoint an undiscovered Silicaese cache of burrs which she could raid to acquire burrs unknown to the royals and other interested humans. It would be like asking him to reveal the location of a cemetery so that she could dig up his siblings’ bones.

Which meant that for her to have access to a burr, she’d have to borrow or steal one that was in the royals’ possession.

“Willow has a burr.”

“What?”

Nora covered Liam’s hand at her waist with hers. “I’ve felt it. The shield around it must have a tiny flaw. I can’t sense it from a distance, but once I’m near it, in the scrapyard compound, my fingers tingle.”

He stared at their hands before his gaze flicked up to meet her anxious eyes.

“I think I can change our world, Liam. I think I have to. For so many reasons.” Queen Sarah’s isolationist efforts were one of the many issues they could discuss later. “I have to convince Willow to lend me the burr.” She took a deep breath. “Once I tell a royal who I am, I open the door to a whole heap of trouble. You don’t have to walk through that door with me.”

He hugged her hard, his shock and doubt already resolved. “Yes, I do.”

Want More?

Interstellar intrigue is fascinating to write, especially with a character-driven plot. The more Nora accepts herself, the more complicated her life becomes. But don’t worry, she’ll be solving some of her problems—and creating new ones—in Rebel, out December 15. (Pre-order link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09F5KYD95/ )

Jenny

P.S. To stay up to date on new releases from me, please follow my author page on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Jenny-Schwartz/e/B0042MAD86

Catch up with me at my Facebook page, on Twitter @Jenny_Schwartz, or at my website.

P.P.S. For everyone who has protested that the Uncertain Sanctuary trilogy can’t be the end of my “House” stories, I’m hoping to write a spin-off series, Hidden Sanctuary, beginning with Any House in a Storm, out September 2022. Yep, a whole year away. Sorry. I haven’t yet managed to clone myself and I’m determined to finish Nora’s story first.

Other Series

Uncertain Sanctuary:

The House That Walked Between Worlds

House In Hiding

The House That Fought

The Faerene Apocalypse:

Stray Magic

Bound Magic

Loyal Magic

First Magic

Rough Magic

Interstellar Sheriff:

Space Deputy

Space Rodeo

Space Specter

Space Baby

Shamans & Shifters Space Opera series. Complete (for now):

Her Robot Wolf

Cosmic Catalyst

Shattered Earth

Jingle Stars

The Ceph Sector

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Want More?