Astray

The Adventures of a Xeno-Archaeologist

Jenny Schwartz

Nora Devi is a xeno-archaeologist with a complicated past. She has buried more secrets than she’s dug up. Widowed in the recently ended twelve year war between Capitoline and Palantine, she now makes a living as an independent tagger in border space.

Captain Liam Kimani could be credited with ending the latest royal war. Instead, he’s blamed for it. Dirty commoners aren’t meant to lay their hands on royalty.

He has no regrets.

When Liam and his crew of the battlecruiser, RC Genghis Khan, are exiled to Capitoline’s border they discover that life in unexplored space can be more dangerous than war, and that their best chance of survival lies with a mysterious, elusive tagger.

The only problem is that Nora’s secrets might destroy the precarious stability of the entire Human Sector.

Astray is a fast-paced, enthralling space opera of lost societies, ancient aliens, rugged warriors and semi-legal pirates.

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

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

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Chapter 1

After twelve years of war, with half a million dead in combat and millions more dead or suffering from the effects of an interplanetary royal pissing contest, the nightmare ended in a betrothal.

Nora Devi hadn’t trusted herself to be alone today.

Unlike Princess Hermione, the youngest daughter of the Capitoline royal family and newly engaged to Crown Prince Dominic of Palantine, Nora didn’t flaunt an engagement ring. Her sole adornment was the simple gold wedding band Ethan had slid onto her finger with all the love so conspicuously lacking from the royal betrothal.

It gleamed subtly as Nora reached for a scone. Scones with jam and fake cream and a pot of tea for one were her excuse to sit in the Ye Olde Tea Shoppe on Border Station and be alone in company.

About half the tables were occupied. Everyone, waitresses and customers alike, watched the wall screen and its display of the royal couple standing on a balcony in the Laotian Palace, smiling and waving as the rent-a-crowd below cheered their betrothal.

A whisper of gossip from the adjacent table caught Nora’s attention.

“King Magnus himself ordered the RC Genghis Khan out here to patrol the Hadrian Line.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t have them suffer a fatal ‘accident’.” On the border of the Human Sector, along the Hadrian Line, that treasonous statement might sneak by. The Capitoline Intelligence Bureau’s priority was discontent and rebellion on the planet itself and on its inner-realm stations and bases. The border wouldn’t be populous and prosperous enough to worry central authority for another century.

This was the region of fools, pirates, and opportunists.

“King Magnus was probably glad to see that Dominic embarrassed. Arrogant git.”

“Aren’t they all?”

The two sixty-ish women at the nearby table subsided for a moment, perhaps contemplating the power of the royals. Perhaps contemplating a second serving of scones.

“When will the RC Genghis Khan arrive?” The scrawnier of the two women shamelessly dipped her teaspoon in the bowl of impossibly white cream and scraped up the remnants.

“Thursday.”

Captain Liam Kimani listened to his ship.

Every spaceship captain had their own term for describing their sense of a ship and ship’s company under their command.

Liam had grown up listening to orchestra rehearsals and performances. Just as a conductor had to shape and direct an orchestra, Liam was responsible for the functioning of the RC Genghis Khan.

From the bridge he listened for discordant notes and a faltering tempo, but his people were veterans and proud of their ship. They refused to let outside judgements diminish them.

“We won’t be alone out here.” Lieutenant Allison Chirlee occupied her customary seat in one of the two visitors’ chairs at the back of the bridge. She was the RC Genghis Khan’s intelligence officer, and after thirty years of service, had a personal network of colleagues, enemies, informants and randoms which meant no rumor escaped her.

The RC Genghis Khan was three days out from Border Station which would be their base for the next five years, or until their current orders were repealed. They were to patrol the edge of Capitoline space to deter piracy and smuggling, monitor regulated and unregulated colonizing activity (such as who was mining what asteroid), and provide aid in an emergency.

The media celebrated it as a punishment assignment.

“Captain Isaac Mstivoj is reported as headed for Border Station,” Allison said.

“The Cougar’s here?” Lieutenant Oscar Murphy practically ejected himself from the navigator’s chair in shock.

The whole bridge was galvanized.

The familiar rush of combat readiness flooded Liam. He relaxed his shoulders and kept his face expressionless as he breathed consciously through the adrenaline surge.

“Nope.” Allison popped the bubble she’d created. “He’s on his own. Apparently…” She referred to her comms unit. They’d downloaded open and encrypted messages at the last mailbox. “Mstivoj transferred the CP Cougar to his officers and bought himself a sting ship. The CP Coyote.”

Ensign Blake Riou forgot the rule that ensigns are seen and not heard. “But a sting ship is solo-crewed.”

“Indeed, it is.” Allison’s nose wrinkled as it did when she was on the track of something intriguing.

“Captain Mstivoj is not our enemy.” Liam decided to remind them, having reminded himself. “He operated under a letter of marque. The peace agreement means he has the right, as a Palantine citizen, to enter Capitoline space.”

Lieutenant Commander Faith Becker supported his effort in her own way. “Captain Mstivoj wasn’t the worst of the privateers.”

“Pirates by another name,” Oscar said. “People died. Good ships destroyed. Trade disrupted. But they got rich.”

“Capitoline had its own privateers,” Faith riposted.

“Matching evils don’t cancel each other.”

Liam supported a healthy level of debate among his officers and crew. Nonetheless, he frowned at Allison, curious as to why she’d thrown the bomb of Mstivoj’s name into the morning watch.

As much as the Capitoline royal family, the Admiralty, civilian government and the media might now deride the RC Genghis Khan’s actions, in capturing the Palantine Crown Prince, the RC Genghis Khan had ended the war.

Holding Crown Prince Dominic hostage had given the Capitoline diplomats a compelling bargaining chip with which to negotiate peace.

What Liam hadn’t anticipated was that the peace terms would include Princess Hermione’s betrothal to Crown Prince Dominic, and the imperative to wash away her future husband’s embarrassment. That the RC Genghis Khan had defeated the RP Plymouth and taken him prisoner had become, publicly, an embarrassment for both royal families.

Royals were meant to triumph, not be beaten by war-weary commoners; not even commoners with a battlecruiser and blood-drenched years of combat experience.

So, the RC Genghis Khan was sent into exile to patrol the border, while Crown Prince Dominic would be returned to the Palantine Palace aboard a luxury yacht, accompanied by his beautiful fiancée.

But was it exile if former enemies voluntarily ventured to the border?

Clever, devious Allison. She’d reframed the situation just days out from their new base of operations, Border Station.

She looked up from her comms unit, caught him frowning at her, and smirked. “I bet—figure of speech only, Captain—that we’ll find a few interesting people on the Hadrian Line.”

Old habits died hard.

Skipping out ahead of the battlecruiser RC Genghis Khan’s arrival was the sort of action that raised suspicions. Nora had traveled out to the border with the intention of shaking off her former life and its constraints, but childhood survival training proved hard to ignore. Blending in to avoid notice had been the name of the game in the tenements of Angkor back on Capitoline.

She justified staying an extra week by cleaning the atmosphere recycling unit on her ship, the CC Kangaroo. It was a dirty, maddening job that she’d previously left to the cleaning robots, but after six days of crawling around, bashing her knuckles, head and knees on various parts of the system, she was surprised at the satisfaction she felt at knowing her air wasn’t merely clean, it all but sparkled.

When she entered the spaceship’s garden chamber, she imagined the plants fluttered happy leaves.

“You’re losing it, girl.”

Talking to yourself was an occupational hazard for solo travelers.

As a venerable class IX scout, the CC Kangaroo could comfortably carry four people, and effectively support double that number. However, the failed treasure hunter whom Nora had bought it from, had restored the CC Kangaroo with an emphasis on solo travel. After his expensive investment in an upgraded ship’s operating system, it had been his loss and Nora’s gain when he’d discovered he couldn’t survive the loneliness and uncertainty of soloing in deep space. His health had cracked.

Nora could have changed the scout’s name when she transferred its registration to herself on Timor. Unlike its former owner, she wasn’t a proud Viminal, proclaiming her identity by association with such iconic animals as kangaroos, wallabies and wombats. However, Kangaroo was the perfect name for a scout ship. It leapt ahead of mining, trade and settlement, and it could stash small finds in a metaphorical pocket; that is, its cargo hold.

Since she was still on-station, moored at the Gretel Loop, there was an obvious cure for her talking to herself. She should go out and socialize.

“Before the plants start talking back.”

She grinned at her self-directed snark, and went to change into a white peasant top with blue embroidery, faded jeans, and scuffed brown boots. Those leather boots had carried her through hell and back. They were old friends, whether she was getting into trouble or running from it. She left her long, dark hair loose, but didn’t bother with makeup, not even mascara to emphasize her green eyes.

The Science Club had a cafeteria attached to its hall, library and study rooms. Nora ate an adequate lunch there, rejecting the suspicious-looking “seafood” chowder in favor of bacon and eggs, and chatting with the asteroid miners who filled the seats around her at the long table.

“Collectors are insane,” the tallest of the miners said intensely. Given the beads he’d knotted into his beard that rattled when he talked, laughed or burped, Nora had to wonder what he considered insane.

“Insanely greedy.” The woman opposite Nora mopped up the last of her chowder with a biscuit. “Which is good for us. A few rare specimens can be the frosting on a job. Course, the issue is collecting them. Extracting a crystal cluster, for instance, requires the sort of fine drone control that isn’t usually needed.”

Harvesting mineral specimens required precise drone control—or going down to the planet, moon or asteroid oneself and digging out the specimens. Nora nodded acknowledgement of the miners’ expertise, and didn’t mention the years she’d spent in a lifesuit doing fieldwork on uninhabitable planets. For some bonus money, she could put on a lifesuit again and dig in the dirt.

After lunch, she examined the Border Station Science Club’s mineral specimens display. Researching the profile of mineral specimens sold from the border region along with trends in the sector-wide collectors’ market could wait till the CC Kangaroo was underway. However, some real world inspiration never hurt.

Studying the well-lit display cabinet, she mentally committed to learning how to best present her hypothetical finds. As with any product, presentation would add to mineral specimens’ value. Moreover, the months she spent on each voyage meant time was a resource she had in abundance. Cleaning up mineral specimens could become a lucrative hobby.

Until now, as a tagger, she’d been focused on discovering possible xeno-archaeological sites (none so far), which meant that the detailed system maps generated via her ship’s operating system were her main source of income. She was covering her costs despite the inflated prices for supplies, but mineral specimens might be the key to turning a healthy profit.

The war ending and trade picking up ought to help.

She hadn’t failed. After a year and a half on the border, she hadn’t tapped her rainy day fund. But she craved the security of adding to that fund.

Rainy days were inevitable.

“Ah, Captain Devi, there you are. Nora, I mean. I thought I saw you at lunch.” The Science Club manager tripped into the library. Two men in Royal Capitoline Navy uniforms followed him. The first was instantly recognizable as the man who’d kidnapped a prince. “Captain Kimani, Chief Engineer Songok, may I introduce Captain Nora Devi?” Dr. Ben Ueno burbled his way through introductions and finally reached the point of them. “Nora donated the chicken mushrooms to the Science Club. Chief Songok is interested in acquiring some spores.”

Nora smiled politely. “They’ve proven easy to grow. As robust as portobello mushrooms. I think they taste like roast chicken.”

“They do.” Chief Songok—“Xavier, please”—nodded. Enthusiasm gleamed in his dark eyes. He appeared to be in his late forties with gray flecked through his hair. He had the air of a man who’d ceased being daunted by life and now waited for it to amuse him. “Where did you acquire them? I’d heard the Viminalese were keeping tight controls on their newer fungi strands.”

“I purchased a scout ship from a Viminalese at Timor. A lot of his garden stock had failed, but the chicken mushrooms throve on his neglect. By the time I reached the station, I had sufficient to donate some to the Science Club.”

Captain Kimani stood stoically in their conversational grouping, but his gaze drifted past Nora to the mineral specimens display.

“We appreciated your donation enormously, Nora,” Dr. Ueno said. “The new rose variety of yams you gave us are delicious. Maintaining healthy diversity in space vegetable species is vital on the Hadrian Line.”

“Fascinating, too,” Xavier said. “I’m focused on partner cultivation.”

Dr. Bueno rubbed his hands together. “Which species have you paired?”

“Frost peas and pumpkin lettuce.”

“For the additional Vitamin A! Very good. Ambitious perhaps. The timing for harvest—oh, no. Child, no.” Dr. Bueno’s shell of fussy energy crumbled to reveal sad helplessness. He darted forward to intercept a girl of about ten who’d entered the library.

She evaded him easily. Her blonde hair clumped haphazardly, sticking out over her ears and falling in her eyes. Those eyes. Desperation was terrible to see in a child. “Captain Kimani.”

“Aria! The Captain is a busy, important man.” Dr. Bueno obviously knew the girl. “Don’t bother him.”

Nora had been on-station long enough to recognize the green t-shirt and pants the girl wore. The other children, and even some adults, called the children wearing them froggies: children orphaned or abandoned to station welfare.

“I’m not bothering him.” The girl folded her arms. “I want him to do his job. He can find my parents.”

Pity, grief and guilt swirled together in a punch gut for Nora. If she hadn’t escaped the tenements, she’d have children Aria’s age. She glanced at Captain Kimani.

His professional mask cracked at the girl’s demand for him to defy fate and return her parents to her. For a few seconds Nora saw the man rather than the captain of a battlecruiser. The man was scarcely a few years older than her, and exhausted to his soul. Then his mask clicked back into place.

“What happened to your parents?” His voice was low and pleasant.

Aria took half a step closer to him. “They’re asteroid miners. They were out in the Avestan Range searching for a new claim. They left me in school here. To socialize.” She said it like a dirty word. “They’ve only been out of contact fourteen months.”

Twelve months without contact, a Capitoline calendar year, was the legal requirement for declaring someone lost in space. After three more years, they’d be declared dead, and their estate distributed. But the year was all that was required to orphan Aria.

“If your parents were searching for a new claim, it’s unlikely they were on a patrol route,” Captain Kimani said gently. “But what was their ship’s name? I will have my crew scan for it.”

“I can go with you.” Aria grabbed his hand.

Emotion twisted with physical pain in Nora’s chest at the sight of the small, trusting hand grasping the man’s.

Dr. Ueno shook his head agitatedly. “You can’t. Aria, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Children aren’t allowed on a battlecruiser,” Xavier intervened. The RC Genghis Khan’s chief engineer offered Aria a sympathetic smile. “That is a rule even the Captain must obey.”

“But that’s for kids who don’t know space! I do. And I have to find Mom and Dad.”

Captain Kimani crouched down. “Aria, we’ll scan for your parents, but you can’t come with us.”

She’d been so brave and determined, bursting into the library with her demands, but now the tears escaped her.

Captain Kimani hugged her as she cried on his shoulder.

When the royals began the process of vilifying him, while redeeming Crown Prince Dominic as a worthy choice of husband for Princess Hermione, the media dug up one of Captain Kimani’s ex-girlfriends. She’d claimed emotion scared him and that he was no better than a cyborg.

Not that cyborgs existed.

Dr. Ueno hurried away and returned with a female cafeteria worker who coaxed Aria out of the library.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Ueno said into the silence after Aria’s departure. “Xavier, I’ll send the spores and seeds we discussed to the RC Genghis Khan. Please, excuse me.” Shaken and distressed, he departed.

Left alone with the two naval officers, Nora experienced a release of tension. There was a tenuous bond between them at having survived a child’s grief.

“I assume the station authorities searched for family members to take Aria?” Captain Kimani said.

Nora shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m only on-station briefly.”

“It’s rare to have no family,” Xavier observed. Large families were the norm across the Human Sector. “Perhaps it’s a financial consideration. With the war over, they may be able to afford Aria’s passage to them.”

“Not everyone has family,” Nora said.

That statement won her assessing stares from both men.

She gave her shoulders a shake, shedding the past. “I need a drink.”

“Good idea,” Xavier approved. “Where do you recommend?”

“I hadn’t anticipated a tea shop.” Captain Kimani looked around with amusement.

Nora thought he should be grateful she hadn’t simply ditched them. She wasn’t quite sure why she hadn’t. She could have made her excuses, as Dr. Ueno had.

“An excellent range of teas,” Xavier said, perusing the menu.

Nora ordered breakfast tea, despite the afternoon hour. She preferred a strong brew.

Captain Kimani followed her example.

Xavier chose a green tea with “hints of sunshine”. “You said you have a scout ship?” he referenced her comment in the library.

“An old one. Class IX.”

“Nothing wrong with a classic.” The engineer’s gaze dipped to her wedding ring. “What are they, three or four berth?”

“Four.” She added the information he was angling for. “I travel alone. My husband died five years ago. Ethan was a stinger pilot.”

“A brave man,” Captain Kimani said. “My condolences.”

Sting ships had been the tiny fighters of the war, serving as either escorts or couriers. Stinger pilots had had one of the shortest life spans.

“I used the insurance payout from Ethan’s sting ship to buy the scout.” Since far from avoiding notice, she’d somehow ended up in the company of RC Genghis Khan officers, providing some personal information was the best means of making herself unremarkable. Where there was no mystery, there was no interest. “I’m a xeno-archaeologist. I’ve been out here a bit over a year, working as a tagger.”

A waitress served their teas and a plate of shortbreads.

Nora sipped her tea. Without milk or sugar, the tannins nipped at her tongue. “Actually, I’m heading to the Avestan Range this trip. It’s highly improbable I’ll sight Aria’s parents’ ship, but as a tagger I keep an eye out for wrecks.” Taggers were informal surveyors who sold their data. The government, as well as shipping and insurance companies, were all buyers. Mining surveyors were a distinct sub-set of taggers, arguably the most profitable.

“It was the CC Marmot, a mining barge,” Captain Kimani said. “The Kellys’ ship. I checked the register as we walked.”

Xavier put his cup down with a distinct clink of porcelain as it hit the saucer. “It’s lost, Liam. They’re lost.”

“I know.”

“It’s not just her parents Aria wants back,” Nora said without thinking. Then she had to finish her thought, and explain it. “It’s her old life. Have you seen the orphanage here?”

The men shook their heads: Xavier alertly; Liam withdrawing.

“It’s a barracks. The stars know fostering has its faults, but the soullessness of dorms for these babies is no better.”

“Are you thinking of fostering?” Xavier asked bluntly.

Liam frowned at him.

“No.” Nora choked on a shocked laugh. “I’m not taking responsibility for another person.”

“It’s a challenge,” Xavier agreed. “My wife and I have six children. She carried the burden and joy of raising them. The war took me away too long. Too far.”

“Where do they live?” Nora asked. It was three months travel from Capitoline to the Hadrian Line.

“A farm in Peking.”

Nora jolted.

Liam noticed.

However, Xavier was absorbed in memories of his family. “The eldest two are out on their own. None of them are likely to follow me into space. They prefer the dirt and growing things.” While he made do with cultivating new varieties of space vegetables.

“Do you have photos?” Her question kept the conversational focus on Xavier, but it was also polite.

The RC Genghis Khan would be full of people missing their families. They’d ended the war, but they weren’t allowed to go home. Which was cruel. Their situation was hard enough already. They had to build new lives on the other side of twelve years of war.

Xavier called up family and farm photos on his comms unit and placed it in front of Nora. “It’s a nut farm. Mainly pistachios. My eldest daughter, Laurel, is managing a market garden next door. She’s engaged to the owner’s son. Childhood sweethearts.”

It sounded idyllic.

“Ethan was from Peking,” Nora said. “His family have citrus orchards. Like you, he was the only one who dreamed of the stars.”

Xavier tilted his head. “But you’re not from Peking.”

Her accent was different. She’d toned it down over the years, but the rough assertiveness of it lurked. A cough and a grumble was how she’d heard the Angkorran accent described.

“I grew up in the tenements of Angkor.” The towers. She pushed his comms unit back to him. “You have a lovely family. I hope you are able to see them soon.”

He smiled without commenting. There was that Navy discipline for you. He might hate his orders, but he wouldn’t admit his feelings to a civilian.

Liam blatantly reappraised her. “You’ve come a long way.”

She didn’t bother misunderstanding him. Few people escaped the towers. You lived and died in their crowded rooms; sinned your sins in their shadows. She had come a long way. “Trade school. The war was just starting, and I had a talent for repairing things. I got an assignment as a support worker for a xeno-archaeological field team studying the Silicaese.” Ethan had gotten it for her. “They encouraged me to study externally. I completed the final year of my xeno-archeology degree on campus—I already had the fieldwork hours—and headed for the Hadrian Line.”

She didn’t add that the first step on that pathway out of the tenements had happened by mistake. She already felt she’d shared too much with them. Simply agreeing to have tea with them was out of character.

On Border Station, where the war had brought austerity and rationing, Captain Liam Kimani was a celebrity. The royal spin doctors’ work damning him for kidnapping Crown Prince Dominic and ending the war didn’t catch on out here. People peeked at him as he ate a crumbly shortbread.

Liam studiously avoided meeting any of their eyes. He seemed uncomfortable with the spotlight, but he remained in the small café.

Nora blamed Aria. The girl’s grief had shaken the three of them, and out of their shared experience came a need for connection; expressed as tentative confidences.

Perhaps Liam had followed a similar line of thought.

He put his cup down, aligning the handle with the edge of the table. “My father was chief engineer on the RC Chingshih. It was destroyed in the Battle of Manila. I was twenty eight, a commander. I still felt lost. Losing a parent is like losing solid ground.”

Xavier’s mouth set in a hard line as he pocketed his comms unit.

Liam glanced at him apologetically. He’d just shared how Xavier’s children would feel if the man died on the border.

From the media reports, Nora knew Liam didn’t have children or a partner.

She, herself, had never had the solid ground of a parent she could rely on.

“You’ve truly never thought of fostering?” Liam asked.

Startled, she stared into his brown eyes. “Me?”

“You mentioned that the station’s orphanage is like a barracks, and in Angkor people foster…sorry.”

She closed her eyes for a few seconds, unsure what expression had crossed her face that led to his swift apology.

“Too personal. None of my business.”

She opened her eyes when she was confident she had her emotions locked away. “In the tenements of Angkor, fostering isn’t a compassionate choice. It’s an economic one.” Her accent thickened. “It’s a breeding ground. We all know it. The government pays the women to birth kids. Gotta have bodies for war or a new settlement. If someone doesn’t want their kid, they sell the babe to a foster ma. She raises it as her own. Gets the birth certificate in her name. It’s a job.” She stood, swiping her chip to pay for the tea and shortbread. “I ain’t raising a kid for dosh.” Dosh, money.

Liam exhaled, slumping in his chair as Nora stalked out of the café.

Xavier picked up the last shortbread, added a tip to the payment Nora had already given, and jerked his head toward the door.

Liam accidentally kicked a chair leg in his hurried exit. Out in the street, he said, “I hit a hot button.”

“You did.” Xavier’s amusement was tempered by concern. “It’s not like you to get personal.”

“I was trying to be tactful.”

Xavier coughed.

“You heard her life story,” Liam burst out. “She’s an inexperienced pilot. She can’t have had time to add flight hours to everything else she’s accomplished, and she’s heading for the Avestan Range. We’re a battlecruiser, and we’re only skirting the Arcana edge of it. It’s too dangerous for her to fly into.”

Xavier huffed. “I get it. She changed her plans after hearing Aria’s story. But it’s her choice.”

“I know. Which is why I gave her a better option. Take the girl with her and travel somewhere safer. Help Aria build a new life.” He felt Xavier staring at him, but kept his gaze focused forward. Some of his own castle in the sky dreams were showing.

He couldn’t afford dreams. He had to get his people through their tour of exile. His personal life would pay the price. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t draw anyone into the public disaster his life had become thanks to the royal order to demonize him and redeem Crown Prince Dominic’s reputation.

How dare Captain Liam Kimani, a commoner, capture and detain a royal?!

That spoilt playboy prince should never have been out in battle, attempting to take command of the RP Plymouth, and wasting lives.

Yet for his idiocy, Crown Prince Dominic would get a wife, children, and an honored future.

Liam would be alone.

“Maybe she’ll have second thoughts,” Xavier said. “Nora seems a sensible woman, a strong one.”

“A survivor.” Liam recognized and respected that quality in others. Resolutely, he prepared to put her from his mind. Those you couldn’t save—hadn’t saved—couldn’t be allowed to become ghosts, or you’d be haunted forever. “I hope she avoids the Avestan Range.”

Chapter 2

The Avestan Range spread out before Nora on the bridge’s linked screens. In a few minutes, she’d zoom in to double-check her route into it, but for now, she contemplated the extent of it. Huge and hazardous, there was a miniscule chance she’d find the Kellys’ mining barge, the CC Marmot, in its depths. The far greater probability was that the CC Kangaroo would become another wreck lost to the treacherous range.

Nora knew herself to be stubborn to the point of obstinate self-destruction. She’d had a sensible route planned, one that took her through the Erythraean Valley. She could have visited the “V” of its clustered solar systems half a dozen times on her three month trips before needing to choose a new target for her tagging runs.

However, Aria’s grief and need to know what happened to her parents had prompted Nora to change her plans. She might have reverted to her original Erythraean Valley route if not for the murky, churning emotions Liam’s suggestion of fostering had brought up. As always, when her emotions were heightened, Nora dug in her heels, instinctively fighting against fear.

She justified her run through the Avestan Range as a psychological necessity. If she flinched from its hazards once, what other risks would she start avoiding?

The voice of sanity—sounding remarkably like Ethan—suggested that some risks were better avoided.

She snorted. The ghost of a man who’d flown a stinger during wartime didn’t get to lecture her on avoiding risks.

She zoomed in and confirmed that the CC Kangaroo was on track to pass within comms distance of the mailbox on the edge of the Avestan Range nearest Border Station. Communicating between solar systems was immeasurably faster via ships than by comms systems. Consequently, if you were somewhere remote, like the Avestan Range, leaving a public message at a mailbox was your sole method of communication. Passing ships would download the contents of the mailbox, uploading it at the next hub they reached. Out here, that hub would be Border Station.

At the first ping of the mailbox, Nora requested a download for the CC Kangaroo and sorted through it for anything from the Kellys. Since they’d entered the range over a year ago, and mailboxes purged messages older than a year, if they’d left a message on entering the Avestan Range, she wouldn’t find it. If, however, they’d traveled back subsequently to record a message for their daughter, that might be available.

It wasn’t.

Nora sat back. It had been a forlorn hope. The Kellys were dead. She needed to focus on her journey to ensure she didn’t share their fate.

In truth, with certain hazards, like meteor storms, her survival would be a matter of luck. The CC Kangaroo’s shields, physical and energetic, could withstand ordinary intensity meteor storms, but if she encountered a cyclone, her ship would be shredded unless fate placed her near enough to shelter behind an asteroid or similar large body.

As for routine flying, well, that was what the ship’s operating system was for. Its autopilot was rated for treacherous space, so it ought to be able to identify and, as much as possible, avoid hazards.

She thought of herself as a passenger who got to determine the ship’s direction and priorities.

She recorded her entry into the Avestan Range, and left the mailbox behind.

Three weeks into the Avestan Range, Nora felt the first tingle in the little finger of her right hand.

She shook out her hand, and blamed the tingle on an incipient cramp from her practice work on a crystal cluster of jadeite that she’d excavated on a cold moon scarred by extensive volcanic activity in its ancient past.

The CC Kangaroo veered Arcana-ward to skirt a hazan field of crackling dark energy confusion. The tingle faded.

Five days later, when the ship returned to its borealis path, the tingle returned. Nora woke up to her little finger feeling extra alive. As soon as that description of the sensation passed through her mind, she swore. “Festering slime pits.”

That her cursing came from her Angkorran childhood slammed her mouth shut.

Tea wouldn’t cut it this morning. She brewed coffee and drank it hot and bitter, while curled up in the captain’s chair in her pajamas.

“No,” she said firmly to fate. She rubbed her hand against the flannel of her pajamas. The tingle in her finger was purely psychosomatic. It was unresolved issues from her relationship with her mother and her non-existent relationship with her father. She grimaced. Hopefully, he never dreamed she existed.

Nora had secrets she had to keep.

But over the next few days as the tingle spread to the other fingers of her right hand, across her palm, and to her thumb, a sneaky idea spread through her mind. If ever she was to safely (for an ironic definition of safely) test her biological mother’s stories, then the wilderness of the Avestan Range where no one was following her, and no one could—unless she shared her tagging maps later—was the perfect place to find what the tingle was leading her to.

She didn’t have to collect it. In fact, she wouldn’t dare. No matter the fortune such a find would net her if she sold it, connecting herself to the burrs could be a death sentence.

The royals had trashed Liam’s reputation merely for capturing an idiot enemy prince. What they would do to someone outside their ranks who challenged their power didn’t bear thinking of. Although at the impressionable age of seven, Nora’s mother had insisted Nora think of exactly that.

Nora shivered and cradled her right hand with her left.

“Their bodies would feel extra alive when they found a Vapori burr,” Maya Pendit had said. She’d been sitting at her market stall in the Holyrood square, nursing Nora’s half-sister Gina at the time. Nora had sat at her feet. For a year and a half, Maya paid Nora’s foster ma for Nora’s help in the market. There, out in plain sight, but their conversation lost in the babble, she taught Nora their family history, repeating warnings shared over centuries.

Stay out of sight. Hide our secrets.

A child’s ignorance could expose them all.

Nora’s half-brother Keith had been born during that time. Nora would hold Gina, while Maya nursed Keith. They were Maya’s children, born to her and to the feckless Scott Pendit.

Maya made it clear that she’d never acknowledge Nora as blood. “You’ll stay away from us after this.”

For Nora it had been a year of push and pull. She’d craved her time with Maya and the sense of importance that came from sharing secrets with her, but she’d also resented Maya’s determination to keep her at a distance: just another foster brat running wild in the Holyrood tower.

Maya had never coaxed her back. She’d relied on the lure of money, and that Nora’s foster ma would beat the girl if she failed to earn the coin Maya promised for Nora’s time working at the market stall. Maya lectured her, regarding her almost with hate. Her face never held tenderness for Nora as it did for Gina’s crawling or Keith’s burps.

“You are arrogant like your father. You don’t want to listen to me, Nora, but you need to hear this, if not for yourself, then for your children.”

The scent of clove cigarettes still had the power to transport Nora back to that time when she was hungry and lonely, and wore her anger as an armor against fear. Clove cigarettes, unwashed crowds, smoky street foods and violence. The market had been an ocean that swallowed a person in its noise. It was when it fell silent that you knew the gang enforcers were active. Nora had watched children beaten to death for theft. The market in the Holyrood square at the center of its four towers policed itself. The gang paid the cops to stay away. In Angkor, the protection racket went all the way to the governor.

Maya Pendit had fit right in. She’d arrived at Holyrood as a smuggler; her accent as rough as any Angkorran. As the story went, she’d fallen in love with the handsome Scott Pendit and traded her traveling ways for a wedding ring and a market stall.

But Maya Pendit’s identity was a lie. She wasn’t Angkorran. She hadn’t even been born on Capitoline. She was from Palantine, and her accent had the crisp refinement of the educated classes.

Not that Nora ever heard her mother speak more than a few sentences in that manner.

Maya believed that survival meant never breaking cover. “Blend in,” was her advice to the daughter she’d discarded.

“Except that I didn’t,” Nora told her past. “I got out.” Sudden laughter shook her free from her megrims and momentarily banished her awareness of her tingling hand. “To think that I owe all this to Henry Leyn.”

Scrawny, swaggering Henry Leyn. He’d been another foster brat, but he’d sworn his life to the gang. The war between Capitoline and Palantine started the year they turned sixteen. It was their last year of school, and a new test had been implemented. Nobody expected an Angkorran to go on to university, but a war needed workers to supply it. The test was for entrance into trade school.

Nora had flunked the written test the previous day. She knew she had. The correct answers were obvious, so she’d had fun creating her “mistakes”. Honestly, outsiders were such freaks. Just because a person lived in Angkor didn’t mean they couldn’t read, and once you could read, you could learn anything.

Survival, though, meant not letting anyone know you possessed anything, even knowledge, that they could envy or exploit. The gang sucked the life out of anyone with a spark of initiative. Leeches.

Henry swaggered into the classroom, driving before him the stumbling, stuttering Dennis. That kid had a miserable life. His father beat him, and outside his crowded family flat, other kids continued the pattern.

What angered Nora was that she could remember when Henry had been Dennis’s friend. The two sons of violent alcoholics had bonded. Now, Henry was tormenting Dennis to prove his badassery for the gang.

Thug.

In her rage, Nora didn’t concentrate on the practical test that was Day Two of the trade school entrance test. Her fingers moved automatically, repairing the broken mechanical alarm clock. With power outages due to unpaid bills a fact of life in the towers, clockwork technology had a practical value in Nora’s world, whereas beyond Angkor it was purely a novelty. Nora had repaired plenty of clock-tech for her foster ma and floor neighbors.

“Excellent repair work,” the Mandalayan proctor sounded shocked.

Belatedly recognizing the small man mouth-breathing over her shoulder—her instincts had dismissed him as not a threat, and so, she’d ignored him—Nora blinked and focused on the smugly ticking clock in front of her. Well, fuzz buckets. She’d repaired it.

“Innate talent. We’ll drum the theory into you. It’s trade school, so not so hard.”

Just that easily, Nora had a ticket to Mandalay and its southern trade school.

Actually, with the war effort kicking into gear, it wasn’t so much a ticket as a conscription order. Nora packed her few belongings, and caught the ferry.

Even if she’d wanted to see her mother a final time, Maya was off on a smuggling run. Scott had injured his back, or so he claimed, five years ago, so he ran the market stall and cared for their three kids—Cheryl had been born two years after Keith.

Employment in the Holyrood market was preferable to working in the factories that formed a bleak row either side of the towers, but the factories were where most of the jobs were. The government paid the factory owners to employ the tower residents. Robots delivered greater efficiency, but mind-numbing, exhausting work was a key plank in the government’s strategy for containing trouble in the towers.

Six days a week, Holyrood citz (residents) worked in the factories alongside the Tockyons and Pammies from the adjacent towers. On the seventh day, they fought them. The gangs were constantly jostling for power, and if she worked in the factory, Nora would be expected to fight as part of the Holyrood gang’s informal army.

On reflection, trade school on Mandalay was preferable, even if it brought the risk of being noticed by someone in the outside world. She’d be careful to avoid certain triggers and to stay away from the interests and places that would be monitored for people like her.

After Nora had tasted the non-vat grown food in the trade school’s cafeteria—and her board and lodging included all the food she could eat—she’d decided that Henry had done her a favor. Life outside the towers was worth navigating its new risks.

Besides, if Maya could go smuggling; Nora could risk a basic vocational education.

“It was worth it,” she said aloud as she uncurled, and a different sort of tingle resulted from blood returning to her legs. The pins and needles of restored circulation meant she’d indulged in pointless memories for far too long.

She had no regrets. Just meeting Ethan would have been worth the risk of leaving the anonymity of the Angkorran slums.

As it was, she’d not been discovered, and she’d ended up with the CC Kangaroo. The privacy and security she had in the scout ship, plus its good food, water and air, were luxuries she couldn’t have dreamed of back in Angkor.

Was she really willing to risk everything she had, including her life, to chase proof of one of her mother’s craziest stories?

A slow, self-derisive smile stretched her mouth. Of course, she was. If she’d been willing to live a safe life, she’d have stayed in Peking, with Ethan’s family, as they’d wanted her to. The Stirlings were an amazing clan. At twenty, they’d welcomed her despite her rough accent and attitude. All they’d seen was the love Ethan had for her, and the fact that she had returned his feelings with all the passionate fervor of first love.

Decision made, reckless though it was, Nora rejigged her plan. Five times a day she consciously assessed the tingling in her right hand. As it spread up her arm, she maintained the CC Kangaroo’s current course. If the tingling subsided, she redirected. It wasn’t simple, and it was slow as she sometimes had to spend days going out of her way to avoid hazards, but the tingling feeling gradually spread to her entire body.

That was when she knew she wasn’t just close; she was in striking distance of her target.

As the CC Kangaroo approached an unmapped solar system, Nora scanned it for promising planets.

The Silicaese, whom she’d studied as a xeno-archaeology student, had collected Vapori burrs and stashed them on the icy sulfuric planets they’d favored.

According to Maya’s stories, it was Vapori technology that Nora would react to. It was why Nora had ducked out of her university’s fieldtrip to the Planetary Museum in Bangalore. She’d feared the consequences of proximity to the depleted Vapori burr displayed on the museum’s sky deck. Her mother had said depleted burrs barely elicited a tingle, and that Nora would never encounter a charged burr as the royals kept those in shielded boxes to prevent other royals from detecting and stealing them.

As Nora entered this unnamed solar system in the Avestan Range, and rescanned for better detail, the tingling led her away from the sulfuric planet.

The sturdy scout ship headed for the system’s gas giant.

Nora might have carefully avoided displaying any interest in the Vapori during her university studies, but she knew the basics. The Vapori had left notably few traces.

In fact, when humans first settled the region, they’d confused the Vapori with the Silicaese. It had taken a century of vigorous scientific debate before consensus had been achieved that the first alien artifact the human colonists encountered in the region was Vapori, not Silicaese, and that the two were distinct species, separated widely in time and type.

The key argument had been the unique energetic structure of the black hole lens and how its principles were also identifiable in the underlying design of the burrs, but not in the other xeno-archaeological discoveries related to the Silicaese.

The conclusion, never disproven in subsequent centuries, was that while the younger Silicaese aliens had been silicon-based life forms, the Vapori had been gaseous life forms. The analogy was of jellyfish in water. The Vapori had been gaseous bodies on a gas giant. Their bodies were theorized to have held together by a combination of molecular bonds and dark energy; an arrangement possibly reflected in the structure of the burrs.

In effect, the burrs may have been food cells for the Vapori.

For the humans who discovered them, and the Silicaese before the humans, the burrs had been weapons.

Neither had managed to replicate a burr or any large-scale imitation of Vapori technological principles.

New burrs would be a priceless discovery.

Silicaese would never have stashed the burrs they’d found on a gas giant. But the Vapori would likely have produced and stored them on one.

Xeno-archaeological fervor rushed through Nora. Was she about to discover a Vapori burr or burrs in situ, unscavenged by the Silicaese? And if that possibility existed, how in tarnation was she meant to reach it? She knew how to operate a drone on a sulfurous world as well as the safety precautions for entering such a world herself, kitted in a life suit. But a gas giant was a totally different beast.

Her whole body tingled with energy, which would make this next part of the journey trickier. While the CC Kangaroo orbited and mapped the gas giant, she was the living scanner that had to home in on the location of the burr or burrs.

If she could find them, then she’d worry about how to retrieve them. She didn’t second guess herself with the question of whether she should retrieve them at all. She’d take one, purely to test it. She’d come this far on a tingle, the least she owed her curiosity was to experience what it felt like to fire a burr.

Vapori burrs ended wars.

In Palantine’s solar system—the first to be discovered by humans—the erratic orbit of the third moon of its outermost rock planet, Quercus, was a physical reminder of the colonists’ first firing of a burr. Two thirds of the moon disappeared. The burr, it proved, could be focused to produce a beam of entropic dissolution.

According to Nora’s study of the Silicaese and their hypothesized use of Vapori burrs, the burrs could also be employed as power sources. Scientists had tried, and failed, to reproduce the Silicaese’s Vapori-harnessing technology for centuries.

“Fuzzballs!” The expression of gobsmacked surprise escaped Nora at her first glimpse of the new image on-screen. Then she lunged for the controls, halting the CC Kangaroo.

Breathe. She had to remember to breathe.

Her pulse pounded in her ears.

There was an object orbiting the gas giant.

She stared at its image on-screen. “Do not pass out.” She’d never imagined that on discovering a xeno-archaeological marvel, she’d faint. But this discovery was, if not impossible, then highly improbable.

Shakily, she manipulated the image to assess its size. The multi-faceted shape was as large as her ship, but it didn’t resemble any spaceship she’d ever seen. If anything…

No, she was making assumptions, jumping ahead of simple observation and recording.

Her first concern should be for her safety.

The object lurking around the curve of the gas giant hadn’t reacted to her arrival—as far as she could tell.

She needed to assess not only the object, but her environment. She set the CC Kangaroo’s operating system to undertake every scan it could.

Meantime, she queried one of the scientific databases she’d installed on the scout. She called up an image of the Vapori lens that guarded Origin, the region’s black hole.

As the scans came in, and the details of the object emerged, whilst its overall shape was different, its latticework did indeed match what she remembered of the Vapori lens.

She’d discovered a Vapori structure.

Feeling weak, she made an overly sweet mug of hot chocolate and sipped it. To date, the CC Kangaroo’s system hadn’t detected other anomalies in the area. However, anything could be lurking around the curve of the gas giant.

A wise person in my circumstances would run and hide. They’d scrub all record of this journey from the ship’s system, and they’d try their darndest to never think of it, again.

Instead, Nora launched a drone. She wouldn’t risk the CC Kangaroo any closer itself, but the drone could circle around and study the Vapori structure from other angles.

And if my activities activate the Vapori structure, as the Originals did at the lens, I’ll…panic then. Ha! Like I’m not already shaking.

She forced herself to go about her ordinary routine, eating, exercising, and maintaining the ship, with hour-long periods of studying the incoming data. It was far too soon to determine if the object was inert, but after three days, it hadn’t reacted in any measurable way to the CC Kangaroo’s presence or that of its drones.

Except that the tingling in her body had ceased.

She tried not to speculate on what that might mean for changes in her body. The med-doc assured her she was normal, but what did it know about what might have happened to her mind or sense of self or to those royal-claimed powers related to using Vapori burrs?

By now, she knew that the shape of the object was a rhombic dodecahedron. Its latticework matched the limited information her database had on the Vapori black hole lens, and Nora was no nearer deciding what to do regarding her discovery.

Then on the fourth day, when the drone veered closer than ever before to the object, the drone exploded, triggering an alarm that had Nora sprinting for the captain’s seat and a replay of events. With the footage slowed down, a flash from the Vapori structure was visible fractionally ahead of the drone’s destruction.

But before she could reverse the CC Kangaroo, for whatever good a minimal retreat would do, the Vapori structure collapsed. Her screens showed it there one second, and vanished the next.

Nora froze.

Why destroy her drone before destroying itself?

But had it destroyed itself? Could it have translocated? Become invisible?

What had her drone’s proximity triggered?

When the Originals approached the black hole lens nearly five centuries ago, their drones hadn’t been affected. Nor had the lens vanished. It remained there, immovable and impregnable, blocking access to the Origin black hole’s millrace. It was why the humans of Nora’s home sector had lost contact with broader human civilization.

<Do not be alarmed.>

Nora stared at the words which suddenly appeared on the screen in front of her. Actually, the words appeared on all of the CC Kangaroo’s screens. The words blocked out everything but their message.

“Do not be alarmed,” she repeated. “As if those words have ever, in the history of the universe, reassured anyone. Do not be alarmed?” Anger was a familiar cover for fear.

She counted to ten.

Halfway there, the screens flicked back to normal. Well, almost normal. The ship’s operating system flashed up a warning. “Maintenance hatch, cargo hold B, open. Cargo hold sealed.”

It was the second of the scout’s cargo holds and the place where Nora stored the container of unsorted junk from Timor. She always suited up to enter the secondary hold, rather than waste atmosphere on it.

“Something is entering my ship.” Cold chills raced over her skin. This was like the plot from a horror movie.

Should she stay where she was or hide?

She couldn’t bear not having at least the sparse information available on the bridge, so she stayed.

“Do not be alarmed. Ha.” She grabbed her pulse pistol from its hidden slot in the base of the captain’s chair. Her gaze flicked from the screens to the doorway, to the lifesuit cupboard beside it.

A lifesuit would only prolong whatever the intruder intended to do.

“And violence is the answer?” she asked the empty bridge, snarky even to her panicked self.

She put the pistol away.

The ship’s operating system updated her on events. “Maintenance hatch, cargo hold B, closed. Hatch sealed. Unsealing cargo hold.”

“Never mind asking me, your captain, whether I want you to.” Great! Now, I’m snarking to a computer. She wiped her sweaty palms on her pants. She didn’t bother trying to override whatever was happening. Why damage her own ship in a futile struggle?

“Cargo hold B, internal hatch open.”

Whatever had entered her ship, now had the freedom of it.

Neither Nora nor the CC Kangaroo’s previous owner had installed an internal surveillance system. Both had anticipated being alone on the scout.

Nora’s ears strained. She thought she heard footsteps. But why would anything to do with the Vapori have feet? They were hypothesized to have been gaseous bodies.

She might have misidentified the nature of the object. Just because she’d been drawn to it via the tingling—and she’d damn her curiosity later—and its latticework had resembled that of Origin’s lens didn’t mean…

Her mouth dropped open.

A scruffy, scuffed, very much human-style android stood in the doorway.

I did hear footsteps! The validation of her senses was of minor importance.

The android held its hands up in a gesture of peace or surrender. It stood immovably.

It looked like a retro-gen model from two centuries ago. Conceivably, something like it could have lurked at the bottom of her container of junk. She hadn’t delved that far.

“My name is Jonah.” The android spoke with a masculine voice that matched his male facial features and body. He wore a t shirt and pants several shades darker than his gray metallic skin. His boots were black. “The closest translation for your understanding of my existence is that I am an artificial intelligence left behind by the people you call Vapori. I constructed this body so that you would feel somewhat comfortable with my presence. Damage done to the body will not damage me.” He paused. “I will not harm you.”

His accent was Pekingese. Nora had last heard that soft drawl from the chief engineer of the RC Genghis Khan. Xavier Songok’s speech had reminded her of Ethan. The accent wasn’t so common that it should be the first choice for an alien to adopt.

“I am pleased to meet you, Nora Devi. We have much to discuss.”

“Why are you on my ship?”

He took a cautious step onto the bridge.

Nora instinctively stepped back, and bumped into the control desk.

Jonah halted. “I’ve decided to accompany you on your journeys.”

“You’re not invited.”

He raised an eyebrow.

Retro-gen androids really had been remarkably lifelike, apart from being gray and not needing to breathe or eat or…Nora halted her mental babble.

“I believe,” Jonah said in a superior tone. “That you answered my invitation.” He had to mean the tingling. “Or did you merely come to steal from me, as the Silicaese did?”

“They stole your burrs?”

“No, or I wouldn’t be here.” He took a small step closer.

She held up her hand. “Stop.”

He held up both of his, peacefully. “I’m stopped.”

“But you’re here,” she wailed. Then her eyes narrowed. “I’m not saving the galaxy or anything.”

He coughed, which was a poor disguise for amused laughter. He hadn’t wanted to disguise his amusement.

She hated people laughing at her when she felt powerless. It brought back memories of her childhood. Nora folded her arms. “Well, why do you want to travel with me?”

For the first time he looked away from her.

“Well?”

His gaze returned to her face. “I’m lonely.”

She swallowed hard. She’d been telling herself that she was alone, by choice, not lonely. For how long had Jonah been stuck out here in the godforsaken Avestan Range? The Vapori were older than the Silicaese, and the Silicaese had killed themselves off over a hundred thousand years ago. “How are you not crazy?”

It wasn’t a polite question, but it was sympathetic in its brutal honesty.

The android face showed a wry smile. “A few of my kin survived the Silicaese. The burrs are our power source. When they took them, we died. They never found me.”

She considered his choice of form with new eyes. The android body was large enough to contain burrs. “They didn’t burn up in the explosion?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t feel them,” she said.

“I can shield their energy signature. I am shielding their energy signature.”

“You didn’t before. That was how you lured me here.” She stared at him. How could she tell if he was lying? If he was telling the truth, how did she measure his desperation? “You blew up your home?”

He nodded fractionally.

She exhaled sharply. “What would you do if I refused to have you onboard?”

“My kin and I have watched humanity since you entered the region. Very few of you interest me as individuals, but once you entered the Avestan Range and changed your course to approach me, I researched your history. You are incapable of leaving me here to die.”

He was right, which infuriated her. The anger felt good. It strengthened her. She surged forward in challenge. “So, you thought to force my hand by destroying your home?”

“I wished to leave no evidence of my presence behind. We are only alone for the moment.”

“Why? Who else is out here?”

He smiled. “I believe they might be friends.”

Chapter 3

The RC Genghis Khan currently had the blues. According to its chief medical officer, Dr. Brielle Smith, they’d fade away naturally in three days. Since Brielle had been in charge of formulating the blue dye that all but eight of the ship’s company had showered in, Liam took her word for it.

The blue skin coloring was a tradition. The first time someone crossed the Hadrian Line into the Arcana, they were considered to have “sailed into the blue”. For up to a week afterward, they wore their blue skin proudly, or at least, good-humoredly. It was the sort of harmless hijinks that maintained morale. The eight crew who’d previously crossed into the Arcana had showered separately, in a dye-free zone.

The line between the Human Sector and everything else, a.k.a. the Arcana, was purely notional. The nature of deep space and its hazards didn’t change. The difference was that in the Arcana there was no political authority to enforce. Where the Human Sector ended, so did Capitoline space.

Prudence had compelled Liam to order the RC Genghis Khan into the Arcana. This was an old patrol route, not traversed since before the war, and either the hazan field had shifted or it had been poorly mapped.

They were currently skirting the hazan field at the edge of the Avestan Range. Once it was safe to do so, they’d swing back into Capitoline space and travel directly to the Goldifalse solar system.

“We’re three weeks behind schedule, and that’s odds-on to increase,” Lieutenant Commander Santiago Bauer said from the comfiest armchair in Liam’s quarters, the room both office and living area.

Liam sat at his desk.

Lieutenant Paige Tran occupied one of the narrow, upright visitor’s chairs and picked at her blue-stained cuticles. She was always precise in her appearance. The uneven coloring of the dye had to be driving her crazy. “We may end up two months late in returning to Border Station. Two months overdue on a journey meant to last three months.”

“The paperwork explaining the delay will bury us,” Santiago moaned.

“Which is why I want you to start it now,” Liam said.

Santiago stretched and laced his hands behind his head. “Already underway, Captain. It’s a good training exercise for the ensigns. Get them accustomed to the bureaucratic nature of life in peacetime.”

“Our delayed return date may worry some of our families.” Paige was morale officer this quarter.

“On our return, I’ll send a message in the first fast courier departing Border Station. Navy HQ can pass on the information to families. You can discreetly share that reassurance, Lieutenant,” Liam added. “Regarding messages…I forbid anyone leaving a personal message at the Goldifalse mailbox. I’ll post a formal message to our Esquiline counterpart.”

“Understood, sir.”

Liam dismissed her. He frowned at Santiago, who hadn’t as much as twitched at during his subordinate’s departure. When Santiago pulled out this lounging act, it meant he had a concern he wanted to raise informally. Liam had time to indulge him. They were about two weeks—if estimates based on those dubious old maps meant anything—from the Goldifalse solar system and its mailbox that marked the border between Capitoline and Esquiline space. It also marked the midpoint of their patrol. On reaching it, they’d turn back for Border Station.

“We should attempt a different route home,” Santiago said. “We could wander back the way we came, as originally intended. In tracing a different path around obstacles, we’d add details to the border map. But mapping the outer edge is a task for taggers. That’s how they earn their living. Our duty is to secure reliable, low-risk transit routes for the protection of Capitoline space. I think we should cut through the heart of the Avestan Range.”

“It’s marked treacherous.” Liam wasn’t against the idea. A battlecruiser wasn’t a fragile flower, and he’d noticed on this journey out how the intensity in the ship picked up when they faced trouble, even if it was natural hazards and not an enemy vessel. We’ve become adrenaline junkies.

“Do we trust the maps?” Santiago asked. “Hazan fields don’t grow. If anything, they shrink. But they can move. So, this one we’re currently pussyfooting around was either inaccurately mapped or it moved, and if it moved, then the gap opened up behind it may well be a safe zone inside the Avestan Range.”

“A safe zone framed either side by the dangers of the range,” Liam pointed out. As captain, his role was to be the ultimate sceptic onboard the RC Genghis Khan. His desk was where fantastic ideas came to die.

“A secure, faster route to Esquiline space,” Santiago countered. “Given the paperwork we’ll be filing regarding the delays on our outward journey, searching for a new route is justifiable.”

Santiago was good at justifying most things. He was third in command on the RC Genghis Khan, having resolutely refused promotion beyond that point. He adored puzzles, and as a lieutenant commander he had greater leeway than Liam for indulging his curiosity.

“I’ll think about it.”

“All I ask.” Santiago ambled out. At three decades past his teen years, he still managed the gangster slouch of his youth.

Everyone on the RC Genghis Khan kept fit, under Liam’s orders and Brielle’s direction.

Liam’s gaze moved from the doorway to the safe in the corner of his quarters. His narrow bedroom was on the other side of that wall. The safe held the ship’s official orders and a personal order from Crown Prince Francis.

Liam had attended the Naval Academy in Laos with Francis. The royals had a tradition of naval service.

Theo Ishida, who’d brought Liam Francis’s message, had been in Francis’s year.

Commander Theo Ishida, Naval Intelligence, second son of a duke, had been onboard the ship that collected Crown Prince Dominic. It was that ship’s captain who’d passed on the Admiralty’s new orders for the RC Genghis Khan, effectively sending Liam and his people into exile.

“I’m sorry, Liam,” Francis had written. “It’s politics, which is a nastier game than war.”

Just how nasty, Liam learned when the news broke that Francis’s baby sister, Hermione, was to marry that ass, Crown Prince Dominic.

“While you’re out on the border, be alert,” Francis wrote. “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.”

Liam scowled at the safe in the corner of his office and the impossible request it contained.

Out here in the unmapped Arcana, and after the delays in navigating the badly mapped border region, the idea that the RC Genghis Khan could stumble over any Palantine activity seemed madly improbable. The border region was massive. Liam had a greater chance of running into the tagger, Nora Devi, in the Avestan Range than of detecting Palantine ships.

Thoughts of Nora reminded him of the orphan girl, Aria, and his promise that he’d keep an eye out for her parents’ ship. It wasn’t a promise that could decide his choice of the route home. On the other hand, it nagged at him that if Nora could risk the Avestan Range in a scout ship, then a battlecruiser oughtn’t to be deterred.

She could be dead.

It had been her choice to explore the range.

Liam turned away from the safe. Anyone preparing for a shot at reaching the Beta black hole would avoid the Avestan Range. Santiago’s suggestion that the RC Genghis Khan attempt to map a new, low-risk route through it to Esquiline space made sense if you were unaware of Francis’s secret orders.

Orders from my prince and future king, but not official orders. Francis wasn’t in Liam’s chain of command. Supplementary orders. Liam had to weigh the importance of varying objectives.

A new, fast route through the range would open it up to mining and other activity. It might also open Border Station to limited trade with Esquiline space. However, promoting civil development was not Liam’s concern. Protecting it was.

He spun the question on its head.

What if Esquiline ships discovered a direct route through the Avestan Range and into Capitoline’s settled border region, one that the Royal Capitoline Navy didn’t know about?

That would be a dereliction of duty, his duty as captain of the battlecruiser patrolling the region.

Liam scrawled a note. They would pursue the most direct route back to Border Station, cutting through the Avestan Range. He’d emphasize in the captain’s log the exploratory nature of patrolling in the region. When he submitted his report for the patrol, his major flag would be the unreliable quality of maps out here.

He stared at the blue dye staining his skin. It was paler across his knuckles, darker in the valleys between them. It reminded him of concerns he couldn’t record anywhere. The confidence he projected set the tone for the ship. He couldn’t admit to anyone that he worried if the RC Genghis Khan’s remote assignment would embed trauma in his people.

With the end of the war, they should have been free to retire or to apply for reassignment. Instead, orders had locked them all into two years of service on the Hadrian Line.

Where we can’t gossip. Where we’re out of sight and out of mind, and the media can’t interview us “off the record”. Liam guessed the reasoning. He was resolved, though, that he’d get his people through this and back to their families. The problem was that their emotional and psychological space was as poorly mapped as the physical space they traveled through.

“I wouldn’t worry.”

Ensigns Blake Riou and Rachel Badak were running side by side on the treadmill bank. Running and philosophizing. Their situational awareness could do with some work. They hadn’t noticed Liam enter and settle at a weight bench. Or perhaps they hadn’t noticed how their voices grew louder as their lungs strained.

Blake had never encountered a situation for which he lacked an opinion. In this instance, they were discussing opportunities for promotion. “War is the key to fast promotion, and we are at war. Yeah, everyone gives lip service to the latest peace accord. Marrying off our Hermie.” He tried to whistle, failed for lack of air, and panted. “But it’s endless war.”

Liam’s amusement at the ensigns’ conversation vanished. He was all too familiar with the doctrine of endless war.

“We’re…not…stagnant.” Rachel was pushing herself harder than Blake, thus chose her words for brevity.

“We’re not advancing,” Blake countered. He reached for his bottle of water, and in turning his head, saw Liam. Their discussion wasn’t treasonous, but it wasn’t one for ensigns to share with their captain. “Captain, sir.” The greeting was a verbal warning for Rachel.

She maintained her cool, concentrating on her running technique. The gym was a neutral space. Selective deafness and blindness was the key for everyone to sweat together.

Liam focused on his own workout as the ensigns finished their run in silence.

The doctrine of endless war was almost as old as the Human Sector. It argued that although the sector was rich enough in natural resources, including habitable planets, to support a growing human population, the devastating psychological impact of the sector’s settlement story meant that they existed on a war footing.

The argument went that when the seven colony ships found themselves unexpectedly in this sector and unable to re-enter the Origin black hole’s millrace to either return to Earth space or travel on to their carefully researched, target system they panicked. It was a very organized panic, but traumatic. The emergency founding of a settlement in unexplored space, in a region cut off from contact with the rest of humanity, created an imperiled mindset which Human Sector society had never thrown off.

While the Vapori lens blocked access to the black hole’s millrace, the stranded humans were on their own.

Each discovery and colonization of a new planet allowed a release of pressure within the society, but in between the settlement of those planets, warfare was the default pressure release valve. Since a new habitable planet hadn’t been discovered in over two hundred years, there was a lot of pressure for war.

Liam thought the idea was bunkum.

He’d studied the wars of ancient history, of the time before the Stranding, and what struck him by comparison was the stability of the Human Sector he’d grown up in. Peace rather than war predominated in time and across the sector.

They had a young society and six planets which, while not equal, were all capable of supporting growth. Maybe it was the abundance of potential that kept the peace, but he doubted it. Greed, self-interest and the marked socio-economic differences in society were all triggers for conflict. He suspected what kept a cap on the impulse to self-destructive sector-wide warfare was the Vapori burrs.

The ability to obliterate planets was a power without equal in human history. Pre-Stranding humanity had been able to pound a planet back into the Stone Age, but a royal wielding a burr could vaporize the planet. It would be as if it never existed.

His blood ran cold to think that Crown Prince Dominic of Palantine would one day ascend to the throne and control his family’s burrs. Personally, Liam wouldn’t trust that arrogant idiot with a water pistol.

It was control of the burrs that put the royal families above everyone else. They were the ultimate power on each planet, as they had been on the colony ships.

Liam wiped his face with a towel. Captains of colony ships were clearly different to captains of battlecruisers. He’d never allow himself to be recast as a king, as the colony ship captains had done.

From commanding their colony ships to commanding a planet and its satellite settlements, the royal families’ grip on the Human Sector hadn’t faltered.

The Human Sector enjoyed stability for the price of a rigid social structure and the burden of royals waging war for political and/or economic gain. It was never royals who died in those wars.

Crown Prince Dominic had been foolish by any measure to put himself at risk of capture by the enemy.

It was because of the sector’s stability that no expedition had ever attempted to reach the Beta black hole. If the sector hadn’t been stable, then the chance that they’d be able to ride Beta’s millrace back to a region capable of making contact with other humans would have been far more appealing.

The distance to the Beta black hole was a minimum of two year’s travel. That was the direct route. As the RC Genghis Khan’s current patrol along what was meant to be mapped space showed, the true length of the journey would be at least double that. Four years. Then if Beta’s millrace wasn’t accessible, it could be four years’ travel home in defeat. Success could mean a decade away from home, with those left behind not knowing if you were alive or dead.

Liam slung the towel around his neck.

Before Francis arrived at the Naval Academy, his schooling and experience, and his awareness that one day he would be king, had shaped him into a unique personality. Francis was capable of great loyalty, which was why Liam had given Francis his trust. What Francis wasn’t capable of was speaking clearly or letting his friends stagnate.

Unreasonable questions and requests were trademark Francis. He functioned by provoking those closest to him to engage with the issues that he found concerning.

Back in his quarters, Liam rapped his knuckles against the safe as he walked past it on his way to shower off the gym sweat. Secure in the safe was Francis’s request.

Beta black hole…supply bases…Palantine ambition.

Francis’s requests always had layers to them.

Liam had dressed to his undershirt and pants, and was lacing up his boots as he considered a different aspect of the issue.

Access to a black hole, or more accurately, to the millrace of a black hole, would be a massive disruption to their society. But change wasn’t always bad. It could be necessary.

Say the impossible happened and Liam discovered the beginning of a supply route by which the Palantines were establishing bases out toward Beta. Did Francis want Liam to disrupt or stop them, allow them to continue, or take over their mission?

Francis specifically hadn’t said that Liam’s was a watching brief only. He’d given Liam a poke to pay attention, then left him free to act as he judged best.

Liam paused in buttoning his shirt. “Francis, always believing I could be more.”

That optimism, Francis’s faith in the fundamental goodness of existence, would either make him a king unlike any other, or a king with one of the shortest reigns ever.

It was only Francis’s cleverness, and his friends’ loyalty, that saved Francis’s goodness from serving as a dangerous vulnerability.

“What do you want me to realize?” Liam muttered. “What do you expect of me? If we have the opportunity, do we preserve the Human Sector as it is, or open it up to change?”

One of their lecturers at the Naval Academy had been big on learning lessons from ancient history. On the whole, those lessons had been warnings.

Sometimes revolutionary change came not from those who wanted it, but from those who steadfastly defended old principles in a changing world.

Francis had been drunk one night when he’d labelled his friends. If he had to be king, and the woman he married, queen, then his friends were bishops, knights and rooks. Never pawns. Although pawns were important. “Never forget that they’re people with their own needs,” he’d proclaimed with drunken earnestness. He’d called Liam a knight. “Honor. Worlds will crumble before you fail me.”

Liam adjusted his collar.

Friends could get you into all sorts of trouble.

Chapter 4

“I do not have any friends out here,” Nora said to the Vapori AI in an android body who’d invaded her ship. “We,” she gestured between the two of them, “do not have friends out here.”

Jonah agreed. “Not in our immediate vicinity, which is why I dared to destroy my home and your drone—for which I apologize. It was a consequence of approaching your ship.”

A scientist would have pursued the how of Jonah and his burrs’ movement to and into the CC Kangaroo. Nora dismissed it as a lesser concern. She’d have to study for ten years to understand the physics involved. “Who is out here with us?”

“The RC Genghis Khan has entered the Avestan Range.”

Nora blinked. “How large is your scanning field?” She blinked again, eyelashes fluttering as her brain overloaded with all the implications of what the AI had shared so far.

“Perhaps you should sit?” Jonah suggested. He moved forward, hovering in concern.

She sat in the captain’s chair, but pointed at him. “You said you researched my history. You’re in contact with your kin. But you’re all the way out here, which means you have interstellar communication abilities.”

“With my kin, yes. With everyone else, it is passive. I can receive data, but not send messages. I cannot—could not—interact with others.” But now he could because he was in her spaceship, and he had a body. He was as capable as her at interacting with the technology around them. “I stored a lot of data, which I then searched for mention of you.”

“I’m boring.” I hope, Nora added mentally. Being boring, being unnoticeable, was her survival strategy.

He laughed.

“Okay, maybe choosing to be a tagger isn’t a typical career choice, but all sorts of people choose to become taggers. I’m just another oddball among the oddities. I have the skillset and personality to survive out here, alone.” She stressed the last word.

Jonah crouched down to be a fraction shorter than her seated height. He must have studied human mannerisms. He was fluid and natural and currently trying to diminish the threat he posed. “You can live the life you choose. I’ll just be along for the ride.”

“For how long?”

His android face was incredibly expressive. The tensing of the “skin” around his eyes and the slight thinning of his lips hinted at sadness. “My lifetime is not yours. You’ll be dead before I become bored with simply exploring existence in the CC Kangaroo. However, if you wish to evict me from the ship, if you do so somewhere settled, and not adrift in deep space, I won’t argue.”

He mightn’t argue, but she’d be responsible for loosing a Vapori AI into Human Sector society.

“I mean no harm to you or your species. It is written into my creation. The people you call Vapori left my kin and I positioned to observe developments, to witness if and when sentient organic life re-evolved in the region. We are not to harm sentient organic lifeforms. We chose not to defend ourselves from the ignorant predation of the Silicaese. I am neither angel nor demon, just lost.”

He had literally destroyed his home for the chance to travel with her.

Her initial anger at that piece of manipulation faded. She wasn’t naïve. He was still manipulating her. However, there was a crucial difference between manipulating for survival and manipulating to exploit someone for personal gain. Her childhood meant she understood and sympathized with the former.

She sighed. A small smile even managed to tug at her mouth. “I was the best of bad options, hmm? I’m guessing you needed someone descended from the Originals, someone sensitive to the burrs whom you could call, and the royals don’t tend to risk themselves on the Hadrian Line.”

“I wouldn’t have reached out to a royal.” Jonah shifted from crouching to sit on the floor with one knee drawn up. “From your lifestyle, I assume you have no desire to be used by them. I feel the same.”

She didn’t ask him if royals could use him. Such a question would be the same as asking if she could use him. She had been attracted to his burrs, after all. “Do you know who my father is?”

Jonah tilted his head. “No. Is your parentage something you wish to discover?”

“I know who my parents are. One is dead and the other must never learn of my existence.”

“I won’t tell your secrets.”

She frowned skeptically. “Do you include your kin in that promise?”

“I do,” Jonah said solemnly. “I have spent hundreds of years considering what I would do if I made contact with a human. A Navy cruiser with a royal aboard was my worst nightmare. I would have had to let them pass by. You, as an unmarked, independent descendant of an Original, are the best case scenario for me. In you is the inherited breath of the Vapori.”

“Excuse me?”

He waved a dismissive hand. “The lens at the Origin black hole altered your ancestors’ RNA. From your sensitivity to the burrs, you inherited a lot of the changes. I am comfortable with you. Comforted by your presence. I am not vowing to serve you or anything so pathetic. But you should know that you are the person I have chosen to trust most in the world, and that statement includes my kin. I shall endeavor to become the person whom you trust most in the world, and then, we shall be balanced. Perhaps not in harmony, since neither of us possess amiably vacuous personalities, but in mutual pursuit of the old-fashioned definition of happiness, which is the living of a satisfying life.”

Nora’s mouth opened, and closed. She couldn’t find suitable words. Jonah hadn’t been exaggerating. He’d thought profoundly about what he wanted. His actions, his intrusion onto her ship and into her life, might have been unexpected to her, but on his part, they were far from impulsive. “That…is…” She ran her hands over her face, covering her eyes for a fleeting second. “I find trust difficult.”

“That you’ve listened to me is satisfactory. Admirable. Now.” He slapped his hands against the floor. “I believe humans require sustenance after shock. We should eat.”

“You eat?”

“I intend to study your food with all the senses available to me. You shall eat it.”

She did feel shaky. A hot drink and something sweet would ease her shock. “Tea and a muffin.”

“What flavor?” He shuffled aside so that she could exit first.

It was a test. Could she walk past him? Could she give him her back? Trust meant being vulnerable.

It’s not like I can kick him out.

She strode past him. “Blueberry.”

“Fruit. Excellent.” He followed her into the kitchen which combined food storage, cooking and dining purposes. He sat at the table, taking one of the four chairs.

Just because she traveled alone didn’t mean she couldn’t host guests.

She brewed two cups of lemon balm tea and placed a plate of four muffins—she’d baked half a dozen yesterday—on the table between them.

Jonah carefully cradled his cup of herbal tea and bent his head over it. Androids weren’t built to inhale, but the Vapori was clearly absorbing every detail of the sensory experience the tea offered.

Nora ate a muffin in silence, and finished her cup of tea. “I think we both need time.”

The tea lost Jonah’s attention. He focused on her. Perhaps he’d always been focused on her, while giving her the reassuring illusion of being forgotten.

In the crowded towers of Angkor, sometimes the only privacy available was the unspoken mutual agreement to ignore each other and look away.

She met his brown, crystal android eyes. “Time to work out if we can share the CC Kangaroo.” If he meant what he’d said, and if she could live with his presence. “What we would do.”

“Coexistence or companionship,” he murmured.

“If I wanted companionship, I’d have chosen a lifestyle that facilitated it.”

He smiled. “Then we’re decided. We’ll concentrate on whether we can coexist.” He pushed back his chair. “The tea was delightful.” He poured it down the sink for recycling.

She studied the back of his head and the smooth movements of his gray body. As he pivoted, intent on who knew what action, she rose abruptly. “I’ll show you your cabin.”

A Class IX scout had an ovoid body with its stability ring situated at its major axis. It was a classic flying saucer, with the engines, storage and living space all within the vertical ovoid core. For efficiency, the cabins were on the same deck as the kitchen and bridge. The engine was below, and stores below that. The cargo holds were top and bottom of the ovoid.

The kitchen was open to the adjacent living area, with the two combined spaces sandwiched between the bridge and the sleeping quarters. Nora’s cabin, the captain’s cabin, was double the size of the three guest/crew cabins. The smallest of these, at the end of the passage, she’d converted into a gym. She assigned the first of the two remaining cabins to Jonah.

She didn’t expect him to sleep, but if he had his own room, perhaps he’d spend time in it. “Modify it however you like, as long as it doesn’t affect the safety and performance of the ship.”

“Thank you.”

The room had a narrow bunk, minus bedding, which Jonah wouldn’t need anyway. A desk and chair completed the furnishings. The back wall had a narrow cupboard beside an equally narrow bathroom.

She left him there, walked into her room opposite, and shut the door. She turned, braced her arms against it, and allowed herself a few minutes to feel the utter panic of being unable to see her path forward. Despite what Jonah said, merely knowing he existed had the power to change the trajectory of her future. Him joining her on her journey would inevitably alter the nature of it. Already she’d veered off-course to chase the tingling awareness of burrs.

If she’d been a dedicated xeno-archaeologist, she’d be obsessing over the knowledge Jonah represented. She’d be scribbling questions and arranging her thoughts so that she could study and interrogate him, and through him, the mysterious, long-vanished Vapori.

However, xeno-archaeology wasn’t her passion. She’d fallen into that lifestyle and found it interesting enough to pursue, but the mysteries of the past didn’t drive her.

She scoffed at her own thoughts, spun so her back was to the door and slid down to sit on the floor. The mysteries of her past were precisely why she was in this position.

Maya, Nora’s biological mother, had set the pattern of Nora’s life early.

When your sense of self, your place in the world, and your future were upended, get angry. That was how young Nora had coped with the revelations of who she was and what she had to hide. She’d seethed in furious resentment. How dare Maya put all this on her, then reject her?

When Ethan died, Nora had reacted in fury. She’d been at a Silicaese dig site. The team she’d been supporting as an all-purpose problem solver with an emphasis on mechanical repairs, had given her a wide berth. Even having loved and married Ethan knowing that his career as a stinger pilot had a short life expectancy hadn’t stopped her screaming at him for dying. For leaving her.

But Jonah had disarmed her anger before it could fully flourish.

No one else had ever promised they wouldn’t leave her.

“It would be a freaking ancient, alien AI.” She heard the tears in her voice and hated them. Jonah had struck at her greatest vulnerability, the one she preferred not to admit even to herself: that she needed people.

She pushed up from the floor.

There was no steady ground under her feet. She doubted she could out-think or overpower Jonah. Whatever purpose he had for her, she’d find herself herded along that path. But once she knew what it was, she could resist. Angkorrans were good at mule-headed, self-destructive resistance.

Or maybe, she wouldn’t want to resist?

Even less likely, maybe Jonah was telling the truth and she could trust him.

Nora’s Zen place was her workshop in cargo hold A. There she repaired or transformed finds from the container of unsorted junk she’d purchased on Timor. Some of her creations were for her own amusement, but others she sold and added the proceeds to her rainy day fund. The work occupied her conscious mind sufficiently that her subconscious mind was free to churn through its weird ideas, alarms, and distractions before presenting her conscious mind with concrete options.

She watched her latest automaton waddle the length of the workbench and bark tinnily. The wind-up pug was an amusing curiosity someone would buy, probably as a gift. To that end, presentation mattered. She dug through a drawer for a roll of red ribbon, cut a length, and tied a jaunty bow around the pug’s neck before setting it on a shelf.

When she yawned and stretched, she brought her attention back to the question of Jonah.

Essentially, she had two options. Either she stayed on constant alert for Jonah’s exploitation of her and her ship, or she accepted his word, like a naïve idiot, and went about her ordinary life, trusting that he wouldn’t hurt her.

Bluntly, the first option was a waste of energy since she doubted she could prevent him from doing whatever he wanted.

Consequently, option two, acting like a naïve idiot, was the better choice. She would struggle with it since it meant acting as if she trusted him, and she didn’t. However, it would give her a breathing space and conserve her energy until she saw the new pattern her life settled into. Then she could decide whether to accept or contest it.

She had to befriend the Vapori AI.

The first step was dinner. For herself, she fried a protein mix omelet folded over a mix of mushrooms and added a side salad rich in freshly picked herbs. She put a serving of the salad on a plate for Jonah and went to call him from his cabin.

Each cabin was sound-proofed. She pressed the buzzer by the door.

Jonah responded immediately.

She blinked at his handsome-side-of-average, gray, android face. “I thought we could share dinner. It’s ready.”

“Thank you.”

He followed her to the kitchen, leaving his cabin door open.

While he stared at, sniffed and even tasted each component of the salad, she ate steadily. Neither talked.

Nora frowned at an inoffensive slice of mushroom. Jonah had been chatty enough when he’d introduced himself. Why was he quiet now? Could an AI be overwhelmed by new experiences? Was he waiting for her to establish the topic and tone of their conversation?

Apparently, he’d been waiting till she finished her meal. He helped her clear away their dishes before standing at the foot of the table as she poured them both cups of tea.

“I do not believe I will ever tire of flavored steam.” He looked up from the cup he’d accepted. “May we talk?”

“In the lounge.” She headed for her usual spot on the long sofa.

He sat in the nearest of the two armchairs. His android body meant his every movement was precise. Not a drop of tea spilled.

Nora placed her cup on a small side table before sitting. She unlaced her boots and curled up in a corner of the sofa.

“The embodied experience of sensory input is bewildering in a manner I hadn’t anticipated. It is distracting. I hope to adjust and be helpful to you soon.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You do realize I was fine alone? I don’t need you.”

“Both of us need to participate in the adjustment period. I’d expected to be able to shoulder a greater part of the burden. As it is, I need to ask for your patience.”

Sympathy tugged at her. “Take your time.”

He nodded, avoiding her gaze for a few moments in the human manner of embarrassed self-protection. He stared at his cup of tea.

Nora sipped at hers.

“I like sharing meals with you,” he said tentatively.

“We can do that.” It wouldn’t be the worst thing to have company while she ate. Often, she listened to recorded lectures for the sound of human voices. It was also an easy method of learning new things.

She swirled the last bit of tea in her cup. “I’ve programmed the ship’s operating system to scan this solar system. After that, I’d like to find the nearest goldilocks planet and scan that solar system. It will serve as a good destination point for my journey, and provide a reason for my trek out here.”

“Do you suspect someone will scrutinize your system’s log?”

“No. I bought an Esquiline spaceship precisely so as to avoid the spy software installed in Capitoline-built ships. Not that they’ll admit they install it,” she added wryly. “As long as I act normally, I shouldn’t raise any flags for Capitoline Intelligence to prompt a border agent to examine the CC Kangaroo manually. Normal for a tagger includes selling the cleaned up data of my journey, adding to the mapping of the Avestan Range. Information on particular finds is sold separately.”

“Your tags,” Jonah said, showing his understanding. “A goldilocks planet would be the pinnacle of a tagger’s career.”

“That’s the dream.” She smiled at the memory of Ethan’s family’s good wishes and those of her friends when she’d made the career change.

Despite their reservations concerning her being out on the Hadrian Line alone, they’d sent her off with laughter and hugs. Maybe they’ll name the planet after you.

Nobody expected a tagger to actually find a habitable planet.

Five centuries ago, when the seven colony ships had exited the rivers to the wrong black hole, to Origin, they’d found their first human-habitable planet within three years of realizing they couldn’t re-enter Origin’s millrace and return to Earth space. That planet had been Palantine.

Capitoline had been discovered within two decades, and there’d been general rejoicing. The colonists were stranded, but Palantine was good to them and discovering another habitable planet so close was considered a good omen. People ceased regretting their inadvertent detour and forced exclusion from the rest of humanity.

Quirinal and Viminal were discovered and settled in the same century, and Esquiline and Caelian in the next hundred years.

But then the good luck vanished.

Each planet had been named after one of the seven colony spaceships. The region they’d intended to settle had contained seven habitable planets within trade-enabling distance of one another, and three at an acceptable distance for spillover growth. Trapped in this unexplored region by the Vapori lens blocking the Origin black hole, the new human society couldn’t find a seventh planet for the people, or rather, their descendants, who’d traveled out on the Aventine.

The Aventines had spread out among the six discovered planets, with the majority of their population on Caelian. Theirs was the last colony ship to be maintained in working order. Although “working order” was an arguable description. People could live onboard it, but only in orbit around Caelian. It was no longer rated safe for interstellar travel.

Many taggers since had chased the dream of being the one to discover a habitable goldilocks planet, but it hadn’t happened yet.

“I don’t believe in dreams,” Nora said to Jonah. “But a goldilocks planet provides a good destination point before the journey back to Border Station. It’s a solid cover story for the fact that I wandered here guided by a tingle.”

“You’re one of the Forgotten.”

“Descendant of.” She regretted the sharpness in her voice. “You would know more about them than I do.”

“I didn’t track their descendants. Two, of the fifteen who approached the lens, chose an ordinary life. It’s impressive that they managed to conceal themselves and their families in the relatively small human population of the time.”

“My mother told me they became pirates?” It had sounded like a tall tale, one embellished over time.

Jonah shrugged. “I do not know. I only recognized you by your response to the burrs, and research revealed that you’re not a royal. A royal parent wouldn’t leave you in the slums of Angkor, would they?”

Nora wryly noted the Vapori AI’s naivety regarding humans. “Royals are capable of anything.” Which didn’t answer his question.

He accepted the evasion. “Their use of the burrs is actually quite limited.”

“Weapons.” She grimaced. “Humans can convert anything into a weapon.”

“It is not a talent unique to your species.” He stood, easily balancing the full cup of cooled tea. “If you’ll excuse me…”

She was unaccustomed to such courtesy. “Goodnight, Jonah.”

He smiled. “Nighttime on a spaceship. Goodnight, Nora.”

Unsure how to occupy herself while he puttered in the kitchen, pouring away the tea and placing his cup for cleaning, she switched on music. A plaintive bassoon wove through raindrops. The Beauty in Mourning was an old favorite. As Jonah retired to his room, she let the familiar sounds wrap around her.

Her thoughts were less familiar.

She’d never been driven by the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. She’d enjoyed her xeno-archaeological studies, but had left behind the life of fieldwork and academia without regret. The sometimes clashing goals of freedom and security were the guiding lights of her life. She’d viewed Jonah’s intrusion through their lens. She hadn’t dwelt on his potential as a repository of knowledge.

“He’s older than the Silicaese,” she whispered.

He might know where they’d come from.

Xeno-archaeology was split on whether the Silicaese had evolved in the region, and humanity had simply, to date, failed to find their planet of origin, or if they were interlopers as humans were.

The databases from the colony ships carried records of other alien civilizations that had left traces in regions around black holes. Humans were merely the latest in a long line of species who’d surfed the millraces to travel mind-boggling distances.

Had humans encountered flourishing alien civilizations since Origin’s colonists had splintered from the main human group?

In five centuries of separation from the rest of humanity, what had Nora’s people lost? What had they become since the Stranding?

On the whole, taken in the context of the broad sweep of human history, their “island” of humanity had achieved few notable technological breakthroughs. And where they had advanced, as in biotechnology, it had been to survive and support the rushed settlement of habitable planets.

The genetic modification of viruses, for instance, had been shuffled to the top of terraforming priority lists whenever colonists exhibited strange symptoms. People had been the canaries in the coalmine in the hurried settlement of “habitable” planets.

What was seldom discussed was to what extent the accumulation of each encounter with an alien virus, and humanity’s forced modification of it for their survival, added up to a tipping point where the tentative balance between humanity and their new viral burden or profile changed the nature of the human species in the Human Sector.

Had the rest of humanity remained more stable? Less?

She doubted they’d embraced royalty as the Human Sector had.

Then again, royalty as an institution, as a means of structuring society, sounded important, but was really no more than a large-scale, glamorized version of the Angkorran brutality she’d grown up in. The kings were gang leaders. The military were their enforcers. The secret service their snitchers. They lived well by savagely suppressing all challengers, and by convincing the general population that life would be worse without them.

Perhaps royalty, by whatever name, was the price of social order.

Despite her cynicism, she was curious. How had the rest of humanity developed, who had they encountered, while Nora’s people colonized their small, isolated region of space?

Am I the first person to talk with an alien AI?

Chapter 5

“Captain, we have a ship!”

The discovery could have happened when Liam wasn’t on the bridge. He spent most of his time in his office. A captain’s role was managerial rather than operational, unless they were in combat. It was just chance—good or bad—that meant he was present when the scanner showed a stationary spaceship on the edge of its field.

Everyone on the bridge paid attention, riveted by the anomaly of encountering a ship out here while mapping a new route meridianam; that is, down toward Border Station.

Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Vlad Morgan didn’t need a prompt to add details as they came in. “A mining barge. Registration…I’m running the registration.”

At the helm, Paige held their course steady.

“It’s the CC Marmot, registered to—”

“The Kellys,” Liam interrupted. His officers spared him stares of varying duration before focusing back on their duties. “I met their young daughter on Border Station. They’re listed as missing, effectively orphaning her.” He hadn’t expected to actually find her parents in the vastness of the Avestan Range.

The excitement of finding a ship on their route faded. All of them had known someone whose children had lost one or both parents in the war. Deaths due to misadventure were no kinder.

Except, as the RC Genghis Khan drew closer to the shipwreck and its sensor array zoomed in on it, it became glaringly obvious that the CC Marmot hadn’t suffered accidental damage.

The signature scar of a ray cannon arced across the bow of the mining barge.

“Well damn.” Santiago whistled.

“Pirates, sir?” Vlad asked eagerly.

In the pilot’s seat, Paige poured cold water on the idea. “What would they pirate out here?”

Unconsciously, Liam stared at the empty visitors’ chairs at the rear of the bridge. As the Naval Intelligence officer for the RC Genghis Khan, Allison had mentioned Isaac Mstivoj’s lone presence out on the border. The former Palantine buccaneer currently claimed civilian status, but that could be a thin cover for covert operations.

“Monitor the CC Marmot and its surrounds. If we’ve got company, I want to know about it,” he ordered. “If the mining barge moves an inch, I want to know about it. Commander Bauer, you and Marine Captain Stas, my office, ten minutes.”

Santiago was studying the screens. “Yes, sir.”

“Boarding party,” Ensign Blake Riou whispered and cast puppy-eyes in Santiago’s direction.

Paige shook her head. Her pessimism was warranted. The Marines wouldn’t include a mere ensign in their boarding party, not on this sort of operation.

Casimir, Marine Captain Stas, agreed to include Vlad to represent the Navy. “Heck, we’d all like to go over. I would.” Discussing the boarding party in Liam’s office, he ran a hand over his buzzcut. “But Luke will run the op.” Marine Lieutenant Luke Hirano.

Santiago grinned at him. “It’s the worst part of getting old. Letting the kids have all the fun.”

“I can still kick his butt.”

No one doubted it, least of all Liam, who was of an age with Casimir and sometimes trained with him. The man was a beast.

The RC Genghis Khan steadily closed the distance between the ships.

With no movement detected on the mining barge or in its vicinity, a shuttle took the boarding party across. The Marines’ combat suits kept them in contact with each other, the shuttle and the RC Genghis Khan. Their helmet cams would capture video of the op for later analysis. The op was being treated as one with possible hostiles, which meant beam-space wasn’t wasted on a live visual feed back to the battlecruiser.

In reality, hostiles lingering on the mining barge was highly improbably.

Sabotage was possible. Some pirates liked to leave a surprise for anyone who came after them. It was doubtful in this case. The calculation of whoever wrecked the CC Marmot would have been that it would go unfound in the depths of the Avestan Range. Nonetheless, the boarding party proceeded with due caution.

They cleared the ship methodically, and reported that someone had boarded before them and ransacked the ship.

On the bridge, they found two bodies. “Lifesuits on. Cheap lifesuits. Killed by pulse rifle. If they had weapons, they’re gone.”

As well as whatever small arms the Kellys had possessed, the attackers had taken food and medical supplies.

“Fast in, fast out,” Luke reported.

On the bridge of the RC Genghis Khan Liam nodded curtly. It could have been worse. Assuming the bodies were the Kellys, they were dead, but they’d died cleanly. Some pirates took prisoners for “fun”.

“Visual and DNA proof acquired,” Vlad said.

The Marines would help him release the bodies into space for a spacers’ funeral. Navy ships were not hearses. Even their own dead were released to the cold dark rather than carried home to their families.

“Lieutenant Commander Do,” Liam formally requested their chaplain step forward. “Their daughter’s name is Aria.”

Kaiden Do bowed his head. “When you’re ready,” he said to the boarding party.

On the bridge of the RC Genghis Khan, they waited in fidgety silence till Luke asked Kaiden to begin the service.

“Of stardust we’re formed, and to the stars we commit your bodies. You are loved and remembered by your daughter, Aria.”

The brief service ended, the boarding party returned to the battlecruiser, and Liam gave them time to debrief before calling a meeting with his second-in-command, Commander Claire Stanimir, plus Santiago, Casimir, and Allison, representing the Navy, Marines and Naval Intelligence, respectively.

Santiago kicked off the speculation. “Whoever attacked the Kellys, if they’d been following the CC Marmot with the intent of hijacking it, wouldn’t do so this far into the Avestan Range.”

Everyone nodded. No ship’s captain would waste resources traveling further into the range than required to avoid observation.

Claire was four years older than Liam, ambitious, and unlikely to ever receive a promotion now that the war was ended and everyone who served on the RC Genghis Khan was out of favor with HQ. She was an introspective person who could flay a poorly performing subordinate with a few biting words. Her intelligence had worked against her in the Navy even as Liam valued her for it. In her leisure time, she read widely of scientific journals and had the capacity to draw together disparate research and apply it to real world situations. When she talked about the future, Liam had to suppress a shudder. Claire was not an optimist.

“I agree. The attack on the CC Marmot was presumably unplanned,” Claire said.

“Bad luck,” Allison murmured. “Opportunistic, or something more?”

Santiago stretched out his legs, avoiding Casimir’s large boots. “Either the Kellys saw something they weren’t meant to, or they had the bad luck of crossing paths with their attacker at the point when the attacker wanted whatever was on their barge.”

“The cargo holds were empty,” Casimir said.

“Meaning they were attacked on the way out, before they found a rock,” an asteroid, “and began mining.”

Claire frowned, objecting to Santiago’s reasoning. “There are closer asteroids. Obviously. Does anyone know what the Kellys were searching for?” She looked around. “It must have been significant because there are safer places than the Avestan Range.”

After the last meteor cyclone they’d turned tail and run from, everyone on the RC Genghis Khan would agree with the sentiment. The storm hadn’t moved in the pattern modeling predicted. Consequently, they’d ended up running through it rather than around it. The battlecruiser’s shields had fallen to twenty percent. The pounding had been as bad as during locked combat.

Claire completed her thought, adding another factor to the situation. “Maybe they did actually find what they wanted. Whoever wrecked them could have emptied their holds.”

“Luke copied the ship’s log.” Casimir glanced at Allison. “Logs. Both of them.”

Allison explained the censorious note in the Marine Captain’s voice. “I gave Luke the code for the track box.” The surveillance built into Capitoline spaceships. “It is hackable, as in some captains alter its tracking algorithms or isolate it completely. The Kellys seem to have left theirs active. I’ll use it to confirm their official log, according to which, they’d been traveling inside the Avestan Range roughly a month before they were fired upon. They didn’t record being fired upon. The log ended fifteen months ago. On a quick skim, there is no record of them stopping anywhere long enough to mine.”

“Either it was bad luck as to whoever they encountered,” Casimir said. “Or they were double-crossed at a planned rendezvous.”

Claire’s eyebrows rose. “In the Avestan Range?”

“We’re tackling it to map a low-risk route through the range,” he replied. “Others may have already discovered it. This valley, created by the hazan field moving Arcana-ward, has proven remarkably clear.”

Casimir was right. Once they’d found the narrow strip of space behind the hazan field, they’d run into remarkably few hazards.

Santiago actually sat up straight. “A reliable route in a region with a bad reputation would suit pirates. Could they be establishing a base?”

“You’re speculating ahead of the facts,” Claire said.

Liam had a different objection. “There’s insufficient activity out this way to support pirates.”

“It’s away from current trade routes.” Allison tugged at an earlobe. “Even with a low-risk route through the Avestan Range, trade between Border Station and Esquiline space wouldn’t be economically viable on a large enough scale to tempt pirates. Unless there’s something in the range worth mining.”

“Which there could be, and which brings us back to the question of what the Kellys were searching for.” Claire addressed Liam. “Would their daughter know? How old is she?”

“Um, eight. Ten?” He thought about her daring in approaching him in the Science Club. “Twelve?”

Santiago laughed at his ignorance of children’s ages.

Claire tapped a note into her comms unit. “She might possess information. Miners’ dreams are always to find blaze.”

Blaze sounded like the name of a street drug, but it was the popular name for the scientific tongue twister that was the rare ore that created the fuel cells necessary for faster than light (FTL) travel. Without blazsvitloium, interstellar trade and Human Sector-wide society would collapse.

When the seven colony ships arrived accidentally through the Origin black hole, locating blaze was low on their list of priorities. Once they realized they were stranded, they focused on finding and settling habitable planets. Fuel cells from the colony ships’ shuttles were raided to power the first new spaceships the colonists built. Then, as each successive population abandoned their ship for a planet—the Palantine colony ship for the planet Palantine, the Capitoline colony ship for the planet Capitoline, etc.—they used the fuel cells in their orbiting colony ships until only the Aventine colony ship remained capable of FTL interstellar travel. Although nobody sensible would risk themselves in the Aventine’s degrading shell.

It wasn’t just that raiding old ships for spare parts was the easiest solution.

On exploring the area around each habitable planet, they found it devoid of blaze. Mining exploration ships had to travel out from their home planets for weeks before they located any.

In Earth’s solar system and those systems surrounding it, blaze was reliably present, if not abundant. Hence, in colonization planning, experts had never considered a paucity of it.

Besides which, the seven ships hadn’t intended to exit the rivers to an unknown region. Their target system had possessed the Sol System’s level of blaze deposits scattered among its planets and moons.

Four centuries after the Stranding, the discovery of blaze on a planet along the Hadrian Line was the reason for Border Station’s existence. Now, the initial blaze deposit on Beaconpit was gone, and Border Station and its miners existed on extracting and processing lesser but still valuable raw materials.

If a second blaze deposit was found, Border Station would boom.

As would Liam’s headaches if he ended up patrolling a blaze rush zone. “It’s all speculation, but worth following up.” He eyed Santiago, the source of most wild ideas, and pre-empted an obvious one. “We’re already late returning to Border Station. We can’t waste any time sniffing around for a hint of pirates or a base.”

Claire’s tightly compressed lips were the lone betrayal of her amusement. Between her and Liam, it was his job to contain the impact of Santiago’s curiosity.

“But raise our stealth shield and we’ll operate in combat scan mode,” Liam concluded. “At least till we’re out of the Avestan Range.”

The new valley behind the hazan field ended before the RC Genghis Khan exited the Avestan Range.

Liam didn’t need coffee to wake up, but he tended to find his sociable instincts at the bottom of the first mug of the day.

Consequently, Ensign Rachel Badak bouncing into the officers’ mess before he’d been served his coffee should have expected to be greeted by his scowl. She blinked, froze, then shuffled aside for the steward to pour Liam’s coffee.

Liam didn’t bother with fripperies. He drank his coffee sans adulterants like sugar or creamer. He scowled at Rachel as he drank.

The sole reason for the ensign to be in the mess at this hour was to collect hot drinks for the night watch.

She glanced in the direction of the kitchen, then back at him. “Captain, we have a contact.”

Xavier sat down at the table, opposite Liam.

The steward poured the tea the chief engineer preferred, while listening avidly to Rachel.

That bit of interest seemed to restore her enthusiasm. “It’s a scout ship, sir. The CC Kangaroo.”

Liam put his mug down.

Rachel’s eyes widened.

“Is it wrecked?” Liam asked huskily. Wrecked like the CC Marmot?

“No, sir. It’s operational, headed meridianam, like us. It’s on the edge of our scan range, so they won’t have detected us.”

“She,” Xavier said.

“Pardon, Chief?”

Liam finished his coffee. “The CC Kangaroo is an independent tagger’s ship, solo crewed by Captain Nora Devi.”

“Yes, sir,” Rachel said, blankly. She goggled at him.

Xavier smiled as he drank his tea. “We met Captain Devi on Border Station.”

Liam gestured for a coffee refill. “And breakfast,” he prompted the fascinated steward, who jolted into action. “Drinks,” Liam added when Rachel didn’t move.

“Oh.” She flushed. “Yes, sir.” She hurried for the kitchen and the tray of drinks waiting for the night watch stationed on the bridge.

“What was that about?” Casimir fitted his massive legs under the table.

Well-started on his second mug of coffee, Liam answered readily. “Night watch spotted a scout ship headed back to Border Station. The CC Kangaroo. Xavier and I met its captain at the Science Club there. She’s a solo traveler.”

“Interesting woman,” Xavier said.

The steward served their breakfasts, including the Marine Captain’s. He hadn’t had to ask what they wanted to eat.

We’re predictable, Liam thought. He recalled Rachel’s goggly eyes. Mostly.

“How so?” Casimir’s alert gaze shifted from Xavier to Liam.

Xavier answered. “Liam’s reputation as the Prince-taker didn’t matter to her.”

That wasn’t what Liam had found most remarkable about her. “Captain Nora Devi escaped the slums of Angkor.” He trusted Casimir with the information. The man didn’t gossip.

“She’s old then.” Casimir’s square shoulders slumped a fraction, only then revealing he’d tensed with some kind of anticipation.

“I wouldn’t think she’s thirty yet,” Xavier said.

“Huh.” Casimir stopped chewing, swallowed, and chased the large mouthful with a gulp of coffee. “And she chatted with you long enough you know her background?” He stared at Liam.

Liam shifted uneasily. His friend didn’t intimidate him. Nonetheless, Liam mistrusted the speculation in his eyes.

Casimir reached a decision. “We’re on patrol. I’ll get a boarding party together.”

“What?” Liam exclaimed.

“Two Marines have to form part of any boarding party, including welfare checks.”

Xavier chuckled. “Include me. I’ll go along and say hi. Those chicken mushrooms we had for dinner last Wednesday were from Nora’s donation to the Science Club. I’d be interested to see her garden deck.”

“Pity a captain can’t leave his ship while it’s on active duty,” Casimir said.

“I…” Liam halted. “Someone should tell Nora that we discovered the Kellys’ ship.” He added for Casimir. “She was there when the Kellys’ daughter asked me to find them. She changed her journey plans to do the same.”

If they drew closer to the CC Kangaroo, he could hail the scout on a tight beam, in the same way they’d upload or download to a mailbox. He, or someone, could tell Nora that the Kellys’ ship had been found.

Should he share publicly that the CC Marmot had been attacked?

He had to. It was a hazard ships’ captains needed to be aware of when choosing their routes.

He hoped Nora would choose a safer area to map on her next expedition.

Casimir leaned back from his empty plate. His alert, satisfied expression wasn’t due to his customary breakfast of beans and soy sausages. He crunched the last of his toast. “I’ll join the boarding party. I’d like to meet your Nora.”

Liam did the unthinkable. He choked on his coffee. His girl? The last thing anyone could accuse him of was being a ladies’ man. He was too reserved. “She’s not mine.”

Casimir’s grin failed to reach his eyes. “That she could be is enough. If the captain of the infamous RC Genghis Khan can attract a good woman, there’s hope for all of us.”

The painful reality of their shared exile and disgrace silenced Liam’s objection. “Nora’s a widow. Her husband was a stinger pilot. She didn’t seem interested in a new relationship of any kind.” He recalled her horrified rejection of the idea she foster Aria. “At all.”

Slowly, Casimir’s smile reached his eyes. “You’ve thought about her. Meeting Captain Devi should be…was the word you used, ‘interesting’, Xavier?”

The Chief Engineer winked. “Let me know when we’re to go across.”

Liam growled. “Only if she invites you. Unless a ship exhibits signs of distress, there is no cause for a welfare check.”

“Charm her into inviting us, Liam.” Casimir laughed outright at his captain’s expression. He pushed up from the table. “We’ll put in a good word for you if you do.”

To his frustration, Liam felt color burn over his cheekbones.

Xavier waited till Casimir had departed. “It would be good to ask quietly if Nora has seen anything out here.”

The teasing was done. The reminder was valid.

They needed information on activity in the Avestan Range.

“I’ll ask,” Liam said.

Chapter 6

“If you weren’t an android, I’d kick you,” Nora said. Weeks of Jonah’s company at meals, and his generally unobtrusive presence on the CC Kangaroo, had removed a lot of the constraint she’d felt at housing an alien AI on her ship. “You knew the RC Genghis Khan was approaching. We could have avoided them if you’d warned me.”

“You wanted your behavior patterns to remain natural, unaffected by me joining the CC Kangaroo. You couldn’t suddenly veer away.”

She sniffed. The onions she was cutting were the reason for her tears. Also, because she had no couth, she waggled the knife at him. “You knew where the battlecruiser was when they were on the far side of the range. You could have nudged us out of their path.”

“Yes.”

His agreement didn’t assuage her annoyance. She chopped swiftly. Pieces of onion fell in white and purple slices so thin as to be almost translucent. The thinner they were, the faster they’d pickle, and she was preparing these for lunch tomorrow. She stuffed them in a mason jar and poured over a mix of warm water, vinegar, sugar and salt. They would go in tomorrow’s tortillas.

“They’re coming over for lunch.” Her tone transformed the statement into an accusation.

“You invited them.”

“I had no choice!”

Captain Liam Kimani had blatantly, and awkwardly, angled for an invitation for his people to “practice” a welfare check by visiting the CC Kangaroo.

Nora didn’t blame Liam. Her ire was focused on Jonah. “I’m on to you, buster. You guided us to cross paths with the RC Genghis Khan. You wanted us to encounter the Navy. Jonah. Argh.” She spun away from him, and rinsed her hands under the tap; rolling a stainless steel butterknife between her hands to rid them of the smell of onions. She let the blunt knife clatter into the sink and switched off the water.

She flicked her wet hands at Jonah. “When you first came onboard, you said you wanted trust between us. I told you I have trouble trusting people, and now, you went and forced it. For your reassurance.” The last three words were ominously spaced.

Jonah retreated a step.

She dried her hands huffily on a tea towel. “You wanted to cement my allegiance to you before we reached Border Station and other humans. If I don’t tell the Navy about you, then I’ll be less inclined to tell anyone. Keeping a secret becomes a habit.”

She smacked him with the towel. “I resent being manipulated. I wanted to stay away from the Navy.”

He snorted. “That’s not going to happen.”

Her somewhat amused annoyance vanished, replaced by true wariness. “Why not?”

“Not for the reasons you’re thinking, Ms. Secretive,” he mocked her. “My prediction has nothing to do with your ancestry and everything to do with the demographic and political realities of life on the border. You’re a single woman.”

She rolled her eyes. “The Navy has women.”

“Fraternizing among crew on the same ship is forbidden, and the RC Genghis Khan is the lone naval ship on the border. Navy isn’t an option.” He ticked off the limited alternatives. “Miners and taggers are predominantly male. Traders won’t risk association with Crown Prince Dominic’s kidnappers.”

“They ended the war!”

Jonah smiled. “And that attitude is why the RC Genghis Khan will adopt you.”

“Lots of people on Border Station feel the same,” she muttered.

Her annoyance flared again when he didn’t argue. “Now you’ve made me ridiculously self-conscious.”

“Better than unaware.” He ambled out of the kitchen.

She dumped maize flour in a large bowl and coughed at the dust. “Pest.”

The kitchen was ready for guests when the boarding party—seven people!—requested permission to come across. Tortillas were stacked high on two plates, ready to be reheated. Chili simmered on the stove. Bowls of lettuce, tomatoes, pickled onions and cheese waited in the fridge.

Nora wiped her hands down her jeans and picked up her comms unit. She had her ship’s operating system confirm their readiness for a shuttle to dock with the CC Kangaroo.

The shuttle would be larger than her scout ship, so really, it was more like her docking with them, except that the shuttle was the vessel closing the distance between them. There were security protocols about civilian ships keeping a distance from Navy vessels. A ship could be a weapon in and of itself, after all.

The scout and shuttle docked with limited jostling, something Nora credited to the Navy pilot’s skill rather than her ship’s operating system. She scrambled from the kitchen to greet the boarding party at the stores deck hatch and lead them up to the main living space.

First aboard was a massive Marine captain. Xavier followed. Introductions waited till they’d all assembled. The second Marine, a sergeant, stood unobtrusively on guard.

Perhaps she appeared as overwhelmed as she felt because Dr. Brielle Smith smiled sympathetically. “A welfare check is usually four people. Xavier, Santiago and I hitched a ride for the company. Although, if you did want to consult a doctor…”

“I’m fine. But thank you. I…um…Xavier, you said you were interested in space gardens? Mine is through the hatch.” She pointed deeper into the stores deck before frowning doubtfully at the Marine captain. “I’m not sure if everyone is interested or if you’re allowed to split up?”

“We’re your visitors, not a search party.” Marine Captain Casimir Stas spoke over Lieutenant Commander Santiago Bauer.

The latter was the ferret of the group; unabashedly, curious about everything. “Whatever you’re willing to show us. I haven’t been on a classic scout in years. Yours is a beauty.”

“The engine deck is above us. You can have a quick tour on the way to the lounge.” Fortunately, the combined kitchen and lounge seating would accommodate seven visitors, even when two were large Marines. “I’m proud of my garden deck.” As soon as she opened the hatch to the garden unit, the smell of healthy plants gusted out.

“No wonder you’re proud.” Lieutenant Paige Tran entered and moved efficiently aside before spinning in a slow, attentive circle. “This is amazing.”

Herbs and pick-and-come-again plants like lettuce, spinach and strawberries grew on narrow shelves up the walls. Miniaturized varieties of fruit-bearing trees and shrubs provided the unchanging backbone of the garden, although they weren’t actually immovable. She could shove their tubs this way and that. Vegetable and legume crops filled the rest of the space with her “dark house” for fungi at the back. Everything was neatly labeled, the lighting and watering automated.

“You’re welcome to pick anything you like as you wander through,” she invited. “A garden isn’t any fun if it’s hands off.”

Xavier, Paige, and Brielle immediately dived in. Santiago wandered with his hands in his pockets. Chief Petty Officer Ronan Houg and Marine Sergeant Cameron Pelan watched everything.

Casimir Stas stayed with Nora.

She thought of Jonah’s suspicions regarding Navy interest in her single status. She hoped he was wrong. The looming Casimir did nothing for her.

Then he grinned.

She had to admit, that engaging expression changed his potential rating.

Before he could speak, Santiago interrupted.

“You’re growing so much. What do you do with it all?”

“I’ll sell some fresh and some preserved at Border Station. I’ve discovered I like the rhythm of growing things. It keeps me grounded in time. It’s a natural way to measure the length of a journey. Plus, I’ll trade seeds at the Science Club.”

“Our journey is taking longer than expected,” Santiago said. “How have you found the Avestan Range?”

“You’ve had trouble?” Nora asked incredulously. “I guess I assumed a battlecruiser…I’ve had to skirt around a few hazards. Old taggers are cautious taggers.”

Paige joined them, shelling and eating a handful of peas. “Same is true for battlecruiser crews. No matter how big a ship gets, we’re all still rocketing around in tin cans.”

Nora indicated a compost bin. “Pods and other green waste.”

“I’m half-tempted to eat them,” Paige said. “I haven’t had fresh peas since I was a kid visiting my grandfather.”

Xavier had questions.

Nora answered them as she herded everyone up to the engine deck. At that point, Xavier’s passion for gardening gave way to his professional interest as an engineer. While he poked around, Nora decided to take advantage of the other professionals in the group. “Casimir, I haven’t really invested in weapons. I figure I’m one person on a scout ship. The best I can hope for is to avoid notice. But if I did have to defend the ship, is there anything simple you can suggest? Apart from a pulse pistol in a concealed compartment on the bridge, I have two pulse rifles and a sword in that cupboard.”

Casimir and Cameron’s gazes immediately locked in on the cupboard Nora called her “armory”.

“The rifles and sword came with the ship. I purchased the pulse pistol.”

“May I see?” Casimir asked.

Nora opened the cupboard, being careful to allow the armed Cameron a clear line of sight.

Casimir reached in. “The sword,” he sneered at it, “is a decorative piece of junk. The rifles are adequate, but given the tight confines of your ship, a pulse pistol is the better choice. You’d be more accurate with it.”

She winced. “I should practice.”

“A knife,” Cameron said. “The sword is useless, as Captain Stas said, but a blade is a good final defense.”

Paige punched his arm.

“She asked,” the Marine Sergeant defended himself.

“We all carry knives,” Paige admitted.

Brielle waved a dissenting hand.

“Except the doc.”

“I’ll get a knife,” Nora said.

Casimir nodded. “Stealth, the best shield you can afford, and speed are your best defenses. You’ve already realized that if you have to engage in a fight, you’ve already lost.”

Standing halfway between Xavier at the engines and Nora’s group near the hatchway, Santiago had been silent, offering neither questions nor opinions. “Captain Kimani said you met a girl, Aria Kelly, at the Science Club.”

“Oh no.” Nora responded to his tone rather than the opening words.

Santiago nodded once in solemn confirmation of bad news. “The odds were against us finding their ship. We weren’t searching for it. But it was there in the valley created by the hazan field that moved into the Arcana.”

After twelve years of war, Nora could make a mental note to investigate if the existing Avestan Range maps were wrong even as she listened to tragic news.

“The Kellys’ mining barge was attacked. They were boarded and killed,” Casimir said bluntly. “You asked about your security. Have you had trouble out here?”

“No. Yours is the first ship I’ve seen, and I didn’t expect to see you. There’s nothing out here.” She flung an arm wide, and accidentally hit the chief petty officer. “Sorry.” Her gaze stayed on Casimir. “I was just taking advantage of expert advice, the same as I intend to ask Xavier about the engines, now that he’s examined them.”

“Only a peek,” Xavier said. “I’d recommend running on your back-up engine five days a month. Letting it run hot will keep it ready.”

“Thanks.” Nora didn’t touch the back-up engine. She’d let the ship’s operating system manage the engines, and it had limited itself to running the back-up engine for a couple of hours a fortnight. “Do you know who killed the Kellys, or why?”

Santiago answered for the boarding party. “No.”

Nora slammed her armory door closed as she also closed the topic. “Let’s go. There’s a bathroom upstairs if anyone wants to wash their hands after the garden.”

They followed her up the ladder.

Which meant that she got the first glimpse of the android standing by to welcome them. Jonah’s gray clothes had the cut of a steward’s uniform.

She’d told him to hide away in his cabin with the door locked. The bathroom in the empty guest cabin would serve for the Navy.

Instead, here was Jonah, front and center and commanding everyone’s attention.

Cameron pointed his pulse rifle at him.

Casimir watched Nora with dangerous intensity.

Ronan bodily blocked the others from Jonah.

“He won’t hurt you,” Nora said hurriedly. “Jonah, sit on the floor, hands behind your head.” Fortunately, the troublemaker listened, and the tension in the room lessened. “It’s a retro-gen android. They built them a couple of centuries ago as customer service agents, but people preferred people, so the androids were scrapped. I’ve never heard of a retro-gen android being weaponized, and I certainly haven’t weaponized this one. He’s nobbut a curiosity.” Nobbut slipped out as her Angkorran accent emerged, drawn out by stress.

She crossed casually to Jonah and rapped his head as if he was no more than a restored heap of junk. “When I bought the CC Kangaroo on the moon base Timor, I also picked up a container of unsorted junk and had it transferred to the scout’s cargo hold so I’d have projects to work on during my journeys. A side hustle. I never expected an android would walk out of my cargo hold.”

Nora hated lying. Lying by misdirection was pretty much the same thing. However, confiding in the Navy the truth of Jonah and herself was not an option.

If the Navy learned what Jonah was—a Vapori AI—they’d have to hand him over to the Capitoline royals. She wasn’t sure how Jonah would react to being treated as a thing, but she knew she wouldn’t survive the scrutiny of being the person in whose company he was found. If the royals found out who she was, would it be imprisonment, torture, and death, or would she be used as breeding stock?

Jonah’s appearance had made misdirecting her guests a necessity.

“I haven’t fully tested Jonah’s capabilities. At Border Station, loading and unloading should be simpler with another pair of hands. If we had more room, I’d have him serve lunch. As it is, I think we should manage to squeeze in. The bathroom is in the cabin down the quarters passage. The one with the open door.”

Nobody moved. They stared at Jonah.

Nora laughed awkwardly. “You can touch him. I guess retro-gen androids are rare. Just no taking him apart, Xavier.”

The chief engineer nodded. “Promise.”

“He is lifelike.” Brielle eeled out from behind Ronan to study Jonah’s face.

“Good morning,” Jonah said. “I am Jonah. How may I help you?”

Casimir loomed. “Stay where you are.” His attitude went beyond suspicion. Casimir hated the android.

“I could send him down to the cargo hold?” Nora suggested. “Not every novelty is a hit.”

“Leave it,” Casimir ordered.

Her tentative smile died. “All right. Please, sit wherever you like. I have coffee or soda?”

Everyone chose coffee. The two Marines stayed on guard between Jonah and the others. Ronan went first to the bathroom, and stayed in the passage when the others trooped through to wash up.

The boarding party didn’t need practice in welfare checks. They were disciplined, alert and had each other’s backs.

And I’ve got Jonah, Nora thought, unhappy with the android who’d caused this tension.

He swiveled his head to watch goings on in the lounge and kitchen, but his butt stayed glued to the floor.

“Will you sell it?” Casimir asked.

Fortunately, Nora had a good answer to that question. “Not on Border Station. The market is too small. A curiosity like a retro-gen android needs a collectors’ auction on Capitoline or one of the moon bases. For Border Station, I’m trying to build a market for my automatons. They’re what I use the junk for.”

“You build automatons?” Santiago asked.

Nora warmed up tortillas as her guests sat or stood around watching. “Paige, do you mind getting out the tortilla fillings from the fridge? Thanks.” She gave the chili a stir. “Yes, I create small things. Toy dogs. Jumping frogs. Small and transportable items people will buy as gifts. If any of the junk is repairable,” she peeked misleadingly at Jonah-the-android, “then I fix it. That’s how I got into xeno-archaeology. I was the handyperson on a Silicaese field research team.”

She transferred the pot of chili to the table. “We’ll eat family-style. Help yourselves.”

“Smells great.” Ronan reached for a tortilla.

“Fieldwork,” Brielle repeated thoughtfully. “That’s where you learned to get along with people.” She considered Casimir’s slow approach to the table. He’d finally turned his back on Jonah. “And to manage upward.” The doctor recognized that Nora had given the Marines both time and a sense of controlling their environment. “Remember to balance your alone time with people time. True hermits don’t have your skills.”

Nora began filling a tortilla. “This tagging expedition was the longest I’ve undertaken.”

“Find anything interesting?” Santiago lounged on a chair, waiting for everyone else to serve themselves. “Or I guess we shouldn’t ask a tagger that?”

Nora caught a piece of shredded cheese falling from her tortilla. “I don’t mind. I checked out a goldilocks planet. It was a bust. The atmospheric pressure was too heavy. Mapped a few solar systems. Add in the mineral samples I picked up and I’ve covered costs.”

“Which means your journey-time hobbies, the junk repair and garden, provide your gravy?” Casmir guessed.

“This time round, yeah. With the war over, hopefully supply costs will drop.”

She shifted the conversation to plans for their leave on Border Station.

The Science Club came up for discussion, along with more active pursuits, such as both playing and spectating individual and team sports.

Xavier paused in his neat devourment of a tortilla. Neither sauce nor stray pickle dripped from it. “If there’s a concert, Liam will inveigle some of us into attending. Not me. I’m tone deaf,” he confessed cheerfully.

“The Captain’s mom is the first violin for the Royal Symphony Orchestra,” Ronan the rugby enthusiast volunteered. “When my daughter went on a school trip to the capital city, Captain Kimani’s mom showed them around the Royal Opera House personally.”

Brielle, who’d arranged for a tour of the Border Station hospital via a doctor met at the Science Club, licked sauce off her fingers. “Liam inherited her musical talent. When he plays his guitar in his quarters, he causes a minor traffic jam outside his door. No one wants to move on and miss the performance.”

“If you can convince him to play for you,” Santiago said. “Do so.”

“I doubt I’ll run into Liam again,” Nora said absently. She was calculating cooking time. She rose and went to the fridge, only belatedly aware of the silence behind her. She spun around with a tray of uncooked blueberry and apple guava turnovers in her hands.

Casimir smirked. “Liam’s not that slow.”

Cameron coughed into his fist.

Ignoring them, Nora switched on the compact air fryer.

The implication of the Captain’s romantic interest in her—undoubtedly manufactured out of the ship’s company’s boredom—was left hanging.

The turnovers disappeared as fast as she cooked them. At Santiago’s suggestion, she left Casimir in charge of the last batch while she showed Santiago, Xavier and Cameron her workshop and automatons. They skirted around Jonah, still seated on the floor, to reach the ladder down to the cargo hold.

Unexpectedly, it was the taciturn Cameron who spoke up once they were out of the kitchen group’s hearing. “Captain Stas fought a Palantine suicide squad on Romblon Base.”

A chill shivered down Nora’s spine. “A gladiator squad, complete with a combat android?”

“Yup.”

She swore. Jonah had screwed up more than he knew. Presenting someone with their worst nightmare was not the way to go unnoticed. “If I’d known, Jonah could have stayed in the junk bay.” The lack of atmosphere wouldn’t matter to him.

“There are some scars only veterans wear,” Santiago said. “Androids are entertainment to most people. Even the damned Palantines only weaponized a few.”

Gladiator squads, suicide squads. Call them what you will, they were an evil idea. The Palantine military trawled the prisons for inmates on Death Row or those condemned to serve life sentences, and gave them a worse option. They could be deployed on suicide missions. A surprising number of prisoners chose to die in action. For some, undoubtedly, one last chance to kill was irresistible.

Of course, the prisoners’ first choice for who to kill would be the lieutenant leading their squad. The Palantine military got around the issue by deploying combat androids. Kill switches were embedded in the prisoners’ bodies. If the android was destroyed, the prisoners exploded. If the android survived, it could be programmed to flick the switch anyway.

Some gladiator squads survived. Perhaps as long as three missions.

The combat androids were a nightmare for enemy fighters since defeating one meant the gory execution of its gladiator squad. The psychological impact of being responsible for a bloody execution affected a person, even knowing that the shower of blood and bone fragments was that of heinous criminals.

Nora didn’t need the details of the incident on Romblon Base to regret the wound it would have left on Casimir’s spirit. She showed off her automatons with less enjoyment than normal.

Nonetheless, Xavier was impressed. A sharp recalculation of who she was showed in his study of her.

She smiled wryly. “When you heard automatons, you thought toys. In the towers, in the tenements of Angkor,” she added for Santiago’s benefit. “The electricity supply was unreliable. People used clockwork where they could.”

“Why not batteries?” Santiago picked up the clockwork pug with its red bow. He studied its appearance and flicked the flat nose.

All the interesting parts of the pug were inside its body, in Nora’s opinion.

Xavier clearly felt the same. He edged toward the worktable and her current project.

Cameron stayed near the hatchway.

Restless, Nora picked up an alarm clock. She wound it and set the alarm to sound in a couple of minutes. “Batteries were saved for important tech. They fail faster than clockwork. Also, clockwork can be repaired. As a kid, that’s what I did for extra food.” She thought of the sneakers she’d worn to shreds, taping over holes and laying cardboard in the soles. “Clothes, too, if I was lucky.”

The tick, tick, tick of the alarm clock measured the silence.

“There’s welfare,” Santiago said.

Nora’s mouth twisted in what was not a smile. “And my foster ma survived on the payments.”

The alarm rang out. She allowed the urgency of the wake-up, wake-up ring to continue till it had buried the topic of her childhood. Then she replaced the silenced alarm clock on a shelf. “Did you know clockwork radios exist? There’s no market for them on Border Station. You’d be surprised, though, the number of people who buy a clockwork lock.”

“That’s what you’re working on?” Xavier asked.

“In between polishing mineral specimens.” Nora nodded at the hatchway deeper into the hold. She’d divided her workshop to keep rock dust from delicate clockwork mechanisms. “It’s a new skillset. I got the idea of trading in mineral specimens from the Border Station Science Club. Going down to a surface to collect them keeps my field training fresh.”

The three men gawked at her.

“You descend to a planet alone?” Santiago demanded.

Obviously. She was alone on the CC Kangaroo. The Navy didn’t know Jonah was more than an android. She ushered Santiago, Xavier and their guard, Cameron, out of the workshop, while she responded with a casually dismissive, “A walkabout is good for the soul.”

Santiago spluttered.

When they rejoined the others, Nora found they’d tidied the kitchen. “Thank you. And thank you for an enjoyable welfare check.”

“We’ll see you on Border Station,” Brielle said. “Maybe a concert?”

“Maybe.”

For a few seconds after the hatch closed behind the boarding party, Nora’s shoulders slumped. Tension could be like that: the degree of it hidden until its removal betrayed the previous burden. Her head came up. “Jonah!”

The alien AI in android form clattered down the ladder. “I’m sorry. I overheard Cameron explain Marine Captain Stas’s experience with androids. I had no idea I’d upset him.”

“You also kept the fact that you intended to join the party from me!”

“Mmm, yes? We would have argued. If I’d known of Casimir Stas’s past, I might not have appeared, or may have appeared seemingly inert. But the important goal has been achieved. I am known to the RC Genghis Khan, and they have accepted and dismissed me as junk.”

Nora folded her arms. “And I’ve hidden the truth of who you are from them.”

“It is for the best.”

She strode past him to ascend the ladder. “I agree. But blindsiding me is not a good strategy on your part, not in the long term and not for trust.”

He climbed behind her at an unthreatening distance. “I’m sorry. I’ll make amends.”

Chapter 7

In plotting a path that would swing the CC Kangaroo away from the RC Genghis Khan’s pursuit of the most direct route to Border Station, Nora aimed to time her return to the station for after the battlecruiser had departed on its next patrol. She liked the people well enough, but she wanted them to lose interest in her.

With the war over, traders and settlers ought to be willing to risk the border region again. Nora intended to use them as cover. Their enthusiasm and desperation to establish themselves would let her slip in and out of the station as an old hand. It just might take a year or two for the newcomers to wrap up their former lives and venture out.

Jonah blew up that plan during breakfast one Wednesday morning.

While Nora ate her unsweetened porridge, he examined the bowl of a sliced kiwi fruit and strawberries that she’d eat later.

After weeks together, she’d grown accustomed to eating food the alien had previously studied. Jonah kept his android form clean, so it wasn’t as if she risked germs from him employing his different sensors on it.

Jonah pushed the bowl of fruit toward her. “My kin didn’t believe I could create this body. The Vapori designed us as passive observers.”

She froze in scraping up the last of her porridge.

The metallic face opposite her smiled slightly. “You have been very kind in refraining from questioning me. The adjustment to being embodied is significant. That I have a body is miraculous.”

“Do you think more of your kin…?”

“Will assume bodies? No. None of the others are willing to become other than they are.”

She contemplated him. “I hadn’t considered that you’re a pioneer.”

“I’m not, since none will follow me.” He nodded at her coffee mug. “You will need caffeine.”

“Ominous.” She finished her porridge in two swallows and cradled the mug of coffee, inhaling the heavenly scent.

“I want to avoid sidetracking us into a discussion about me. However, the starting point is that in the past I passively received information. My kin and I were designed to be repositories for data that the Vapori could query. Over time, we learned how to analyze the data to satisfy our individual curiosity. Reaching out in pursuit of particular data is new to us. New to me.”

He stopped.

Nora concentrated on eating her fruit, confident that Jonah would continue when he was ready.

He did. “To learn about you, I analyzed the data I already had. Your public data. Consequently, there are many things I do not know about you, and it is your decision whether I should learn them. If I should know, you will tell me. I am beginning to understand the human saying that knowledge is power.”

“No wonder you wanted me to have coffee. Is this an ethics discussion? I had to do a unit on them for my university degree. Justifying shades of gray.”

He tilted his head. “Do you not perceive shades of gray, complexities and consequences?”

“Absolutely, but a lot of discussion around ethics is merely people attempting to defend their choices and ambitions. They’re not actually going to change. If they’re not going to change to align their actions to values, why discuss the values?”

“That is a bleak view of humanity. Perhaps it is an accurate assessment. However, it is not true for me. I am discovering that with an ability to acquire specific knowledge and, since I am embodied, to influence the world, comes a responsibility as to what I do with that knowledge.”

She frowned. “You’re talking about an actual dilemma, not a hypothetical one?”

“It is about the Palantine combat androids.”

“You’re not going to transform into one?”

He jerked back, horrified. “No!”

“All right. So, your dilemma is not a direct threat to you or me?” She cleared away her breakfast dishes.

“We could do nothing, and our lives would appear unchanged. However, I’m not certain that, at a deeper level, doing nothing wouldn’t set a pattern of disconnection. We could wash our hands of the problem, but the stain of that choice might linger.”

She leaned against the kitchen counter. “Sometimes you have to turn away, or you drown under everyone’s demands.” She had faced such a crisis before when she’d refused responsibility for her oldest half-sister. Gina was dead, now.

Jonah gave her statement a moment of silent respect. More than that, he ceased speaking in generalities. “After Casimir’s reaction to my android form, I researched combat androids. They are unique to Palantine.”

“A special nightmare.”

“A pet project of the previous king.”

Nora scowled. “I didn’t know that. I believe it, though. King Olav was brutal.”

“Thirteen combat androids were created during his reign. Since his death, when they’re destroyed, they’re not replaced.”

Reluctantly fascinated, she sat back down, facing him across the table. “Gladiator squads are dying out?”

“The evidence suggests that outcome. I cannot guess what the Palantine royal family or its military might decide in the future. For the moment, three combat androids remain.”

“Only three?”

“In twelve years of war, the Capitoline military destroyed eight of them, including one on Romblon Base.”

“Casimir killed one.”

“His platoon did. He lost half his men, and was promoted to captain.”

She winced. Deaths were the reality of war, but good officers didn’t embrace a fast-tracked promotion that came drenched in blood.

“I could have halted my research at that point if I was only interested in history. However, I wanted to know who else might encounter a combat android, and consequently, transfer that fear to the sight of me.”

Nora contemplated the coffeepot. But no. More coffee would make her jittery, which wasn’t worth the fleeting comfort of a hot cup, now. In fact, the problem was that she was already jittery from this discussion. “I’m guessing that you haven’t found that the Palantine military recalled the three combat androids to a testing range and blew them up.”

“I found where they were holding them. Storing them. One was recently signed out.”

She gave him a half-awed, half-appalled look. “Your information gathering is extensive.”

“Depending on my kin’s assistance, I can learn things from across the Human Sector.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And beyond?”

“The Arcana is a human concept, a border beyond which is otherness. It is all space. Your species seems to need limits.” He tapped the table. “A combat android was signed out to a Captain John Smith, of whom I can find no record. Or rather, Captain John Smith is the pseudonym of choice for the Palantine Intelligence Agency when it interacts with the military. A secret service ship left Delaware Base for the moon Miami.”

Androids didn’t breathe, but Jonah uttered a soft sound like an inhalation. It was a signal of bad news. A warning. “Miami is chaotic, especially in the transition from war footing to peacetime. The PIA ship returned to Delaware Base. I doubt the combat android returned with it.”

Nora curled her toes. Since so much of her problem solving involved hands-on repair work, she’d learned to confine her fidgeting to her feet. Her toes curled and flexed as she listened to Jonah’s news. He was moving from information to informed speculation. “The PIA ship could have been a decoy. Capitoline and Palantine were both spying on each other. That won’t change with the peace accord. But it would be an elaborate ruse for what pay off?”

Jonah widened his eyes, perfectly portraying ignorance. Then he narrowed them. “It is far more likely that the combat android was transferred to Miami. However, I found no record of a suicide squad transported there. In fact,” he hesitated.

“Go on,” she said grimly.

“I think the Palantines executed their suicide squads at the end of the war.”

They stared at one another.

Nora spoke slowly. “Why, then, do they need a combat android?”

He pushed back from the table. “One of the Palantine privateers transferred his ship to his ship’s company. He gave it away. Such generosity, by a human, seems unnatural to me, unless he had other compelling plans, such as a reward he didn’t want to share, or he could be dying.”

Her laugh surprised them both. “I can’t argue with your assessment of human greed. We hoard like dragons. It’s your casual juxtaposition of reward or death as his motivation that amused me.”

“Am I wrong?”

“Probably not. Who is the privateer that you think could be trying to buy his way into heaven?”

“I think it is likelier that Captain Isaac Mstivoj has plans he needed to shed his ship and crew to pursue. He purchased a sting ship, the CP Coyote, on Miami.”

A sting ship. “Fast and lethal, fighter and courier.” It was what her husband had piloted: why he’d died. It was generally solo-crewed.

“My kin and I are good at identifying patterns. I’ve studied human behavior.”

Nora dragged herself out of thoughts of the bad years: first of fearing for Ethan; then of grieving for him. She focused on Jonah and his comment. Good at identifying patterns. Studied humans. For her, those were the foundation of a con artist’s skill.

But Jonah wasn’t confessing to manipulating her. He was paving the way for her to accept the validity of his forthcoming guesswork, laying out his credentials along with the facts. “Captain Mstivoj intercepted many high value civilian spaceships during the war.”

“I recognize his name. Captain Isaac ‘Zac’ Mstivoj. He didn’t intercept ships. He captured them. He sold off everything he stole, including the people. Although he called that ransoming. His ship was named after a large cat…not a tiger.”

“Mountain lion,” Jonah said. “The CP Cougar. Was he worse than other privateers?”

If she’d been younger, she’d have rolled her eyes at him asking a question for which he knew the answer. She despised the Socratic method of teaching. Her inner slum child considered it patronizing. Nonetheless, she’d learned to play along. The stars knew university tutors enjoyed it.

“For Capitoline shipping corporations, Mstivoj’s effectiveness made him a bigger threat than bloodier, less disciplined privateers. Success begets success. The Palantine Intelligence Agency would have fed him information.” Her impatient response stalled on the last word as she realized where Jonah was headed. “You think the PIA entrusted the combat android to a privateer?”

“Captain Mstivoj’s new ship, the CP Coyote, is headed for Border Station.” He paused. “Who would have the authority to order a combat android be transported here?”

“They wouldn’t. A combat android in Capitoline space would break the peace accord…unless…no. No!”

Jonah nodded. “It would have to be a royal.”

“Dominic,” she spat.

“Crown Prince Dominic has spoken admiringly about his grandfather, Olav.”

She jumped out of her chair, and had to catch the back rail of it to save it from tipping over. “Who was a psychopath.”

“That’s Capitoline prejudice.”

She slapped the back of the chair. “Palantines say the same thing. Well, they whisper it.”

“Olav wasn’t a psychopath. He was a man crippled by, and raging at, his inadequacy.”

“What? He had a small…?” She gestured crudely.

“If he did, he kept that knowledge between himself and Queen Margot. He was a faithful husband. My suspicion is that, unlike you, he would not have sensed the burrs that brought you to me.”

She braced both hands on the back of the chair. “But he was king.”

“Your royals are careful people. Their intermarriages must be based on some measure and tracking of the ability they inherited from the Originals. However, my kin and I have never found a record of it. The royals have kept their power assessments from the digital record.”

“Paper copies. Unhackable.”

He agreed. “Perhaps an official journal for each royal house. In the absence of direct data, my kin and I adopted a de facto measure of an individual royal’s Vapori-related ability.”

“Their ability to sense and use burrs,” she said plainly.

“Exactly. Our measure is the number of times per year that a royal seeks out the burrs in their palace vaults. The outer scanners track who accesses the vaults. Those possessing greater sensitivity to the burrs seek them out more frequently.”

She released the back of the chair, standing straight. “Why? The tingle I felt wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t pleasant. Certainly not addictive.”

Jonah stood, too. “We’re not sure of the reason. Perhaps for humans connecting with the burrs is different to sensing them. Dominic is like his grandfather. Olav visited the burrs in the vault once a year, as tradition required. Dominic visited the vaults twice-weekly from age thirteen to fifteen, then once a year. For comparison purposes, Ivan visits the vaults one to two times a month. I suspect Dominic has a weak connection to the burrs.”

What about his siblings? How often do they visit the vault? What about his mother? Nora bit back the questions. She was aware of how curiosity could betray a person’s own secrets. “About this combat android. You’re guessing that one is headed for Border Station.”

“It’s a strong probability.”

“And you’ve made it our problem because the best cover story for an android’s unexpected appearance is that it was hidden in a load of junk.”

Jonah coughed. An android had no reason to cough. However, it was a nicely calculated expression of self-deprecation and apology without actually apologizing for how he’d complicated her life. “There are two barges bringing in loads of junk for recycling. The loads were bought as job lots on Flores, which received the salvage from Pakse Base.”

At her impatiently blank look, he added. “Pakse Base was raided by a suicide squad. They brought the base’s command center down around them.”

“Therefore, it would be conceivable, barely, that a combat android may have survived.”

“And pieced itself back together. I’ve compared the estimated arrival dates of the barges and the CP Coyote. Captain Mstivoj will beat them by up to a month. He can drop off the combat android and depart, leaving it to act after the junk barges’ docking.”

Nora paced. “You’re wrong. He won’t be in command of the android. He’s not royal or PIA. They wouldn’t give him the command codes for the combat android. It will be pre-programmed. But for what? Border Station isn’t a tactical target.”

“I doubt this is a tactical or strategic mission,” Jonah said glumly. “I’m stringing together data points that could fit a dozen different stories. My analysis hangs together not on logistics, but on personalities. Olav famously ordered a combat android to tear apart a traitor, a man who sold Palantine security secrets which endangered Olav’s son, the current king, Ivan. Crown Prince Dominic admires and seeks to imitate his grandfather, and Dominic recently found himself embarrassed by being captured by Captain Liam Kimani.”

“Who has been exiled to Border Station,” Nora concluded. She controlled the urge to kick something. Jonah’s hypothesis was scarily credible. “Dominic’s an arrogant idiot, but he’s not king yet. The secret service would have checked with Ivan…could he have approved the dispatch of a combat android as the price of Dominic playing nicely about his betrothal and with the media?”

Jonah tipped up his hands in a non-verbal maybe. “Or for other reasons. I can’t find a record of a digital message, but the father-son negotiations may have been conducted verbally through a human messenger.”

“A diplomat.” Nora had a low opinion of diplomats or courtiers or whatever they called themselves. There were too many scrabbling for power in the royal palaces.

“I doubt the nature of the messenger for this hypothetical message is important. Olav had his combat android kill the traitor by torture. Have you heard of the blood eagle? No? It is a method of execution from the times of Ancient Rome. A human’s ribcage is cracked open and the lungs pulled out. Spread like wings and still pulsing.”

Nora wrapped her arms around her chest. “That’s barbaric.”

“That was Olav. One possible reason for employing a combat android—other than the risks inherent in trusting a human assassin—is the possibility of arguing that Liam kidnapping the Crown Prince triggered an old program, from Olav’s day, to protect or avenge a direct descendant.”

“A thin skin of deniability. With the royals protecting one another, it’ll stand. Better than risking an assassin being caught and spilling secrets.” She took a deep breath with healthy lungs still tucked inside her ribcage. “I have no idea how we warn Liam of this. The whole crew of the RC Genghis Khan could be collateral damage.”

Jonah braced himself for her wrath. “We can’t warn him.”

“Then, why tell me all of this?”

He tilted his head ever so slightly in appeal. “Because we have to destroy the combat android.”

Chapter 8

Real space lacks the neat borders of a map, but according to the map, the RC Genghis Khan had just crossed out of the Avestan Range. The communications officer had pinged the mailbox hours before, grabbing an update on events in the wider world from the last ships to have contacted the mailbox before entering the range.

Reading the report, Liam found that two ships had logged their entry into the range since the CC Kangaroo, Nora’s scout ship nearly five months ago. That didn’t mean others hadn’t entered. Contacting the mailbox was custom, not law or necessity. Coming from Border Station, however, it would have been hard to avoid passing the mailbox. There was a bottleneck for safe entry into the Avestan Range from this direction due to a Newton plain and vast dust clouds.

Dust clouds, dense concentrations of cosmic dust, could spawn dervishes, tornados of dust capable of shredding a spaceships’ shields or throwing a ship off course. They were dangerous, best avoided, but not terrifying.

A Newton plain, with its vibrational ability to render fuel cells inert, was deadly. Add in that its fringe was literally fringe-like, possessing tendrils that could randomly lash out and capture ships skirting its edge, and it was why spaceships avoided a Newton plain like the death sentence it was. Without the FTL capability of the fuel cells, a spaceship caught in a Newton plain, even its fringe, would have to travel decades to re-emerge, and no current spaceship in the Human Sector was capable of sustaining human life that long.

Space travel was inherently dangerous.

The two mining barges recorded as entering the range hadn’t left messages of their return.

Liam added a note to the report for someone to follow up over the next few months if they returned. If they didn’t, even if the ships were never found, it might indicate that the Kellys’ fate hadn’t been due to bad luck. “And how do I investigate that?”

He finished reading the report, adding other notes on various topics before putting it aside.

His attention returned to the map he’d layered with data.

The skeleton of it was the old patrol routes previous captains had employed. When he’d added the locations of major historical mining claims and processing stations, plus two refueling stations that had since gone out of business, the logic of the patrol routes emerged. His under-resourced predecessors had tried to sweep the key routes into and through border space at least once a year. Their focus had, sensibly, been on the main route from Capitoline to Border Station.

Liam had one battlecruiser that had to keep open and safe the main route to Border Station, but in pursuance of Crown Prince Francis’s request, he also had to search outward, under cover of his patrols, for any hint of people attempting to establish supply bases for an attempt to reach the Beta black hole.

The latter task would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

The Kellys’ fate, however, had sparked a different perspective on the problem Francis had set him.

Supply bases were crucial to a long-range expedition and would have to be established hopscotch-fashion; each one enabling the development of the next. There were simply no spaceships capable of traveling self-sufficiently the distance to Beta. The biggest barrier was fuel cells.

Replacing fuel cells was one of the RC Genghis Khan’s largest ongoing maintenance costs. So significant was it, given the rarity of blaze, that in battle he’d tried not to destroy the engine and supply stores of his enemies specifically so he could raid them for fuel cells.

Analysis of samples taken on the Kellys’ mining barge, the CC Marmot, hadn’t shown any evidence of blaze, but it had sparked the idea that the blazsvitloium ore required for fuel cells would actually be the biggest impediment to a Beta expedition.

According to some analysts, tucked up in their snug planetside offices, the desire to control dwindling blaze resources was a primary driver of the war.

It would be ironic if the analysts were right, given how much blaze had been lost in the destruction of spaceships during the war.

Commonsense suggested that if Beaconpit, the mining planet, had contained blaze, then it was naturally occurring along the Hadrian Line, and, it seemed, hadn’t been depleted by the Iguanese.

The Iguanese.

Liam introduced them as the topic of conversation at dinner that night. To the bafflement of his officers.

“What do I know about the Iguanese?” Santiago repeated.

“Chronologically, they’re where xeno-archaeological studies begin,” Xavier said.

Brielle was late to dinner, apologizing perfunctorily. She’d been repairing a rating’s broken arm, an injury acquired during a “friendly” training bout in the gym. “Lizard people.”

Allison tsked at her for the derogatory phrase.

The doctor rolled her eyes. “It’s not like they care. They died out millions of years ago.”

“And they were lizards,” Vlad said with unusual seriousness. “They’re fascinating.” Suddenly, he stared at his plate. A slight blush colored his face. “I was a bit of a nerd in high school, and the Iguanese were my thing.”

Santiago was ready to tease. “Your thing?”

Brielle leaned over the table and swatted him.

“Tell us about them, Vlad,” Liam ordered.

Despite his blush, Vlad squared his shoulders courageously. “May I ask why, sir? It’ll shape what I tell you. I know a lot of useless facts.”

Paige snorted. “Sorry.” The laughter had escaped her. She concentrated on her mushroom tortellini.

“I’m interested in the Iguanese because of the theory that the scarcity of blaze in the Human Sector is due to us living where they lived and following where they had already exploited existing blaze deposits.”

The officers of the RC Genghis Khan were sharp. Their amusement, or boredom, with the topic of the Iguanese evaporated in the heat of their interest in their captain’s statement. Speculative gazes shifted from Liam to Vlad.

The young lieutenant’s blush died. “Yes, sir. A brief recap, then, on the nature of the Iguanese. They were, indeed, lizard people. Reptilian. They became extinct sixty million years ago. Reason unknown. They were spread across planets. Perhaps it was a disease that killed them off, although some remnant of such a widespread and space-faring species, which they must have been for them to be spread across multiple solar systems, should have been able to isolate themselves to survive.”

“Unless they chose not to. Not to survive the loss of their civilization,” Paige said.

Her senior officers stared at her.

“That’s bleak,” Santiago observed.

Brielle frowned in concern at Paige, but defended the lieutenant’s insight. “Trauma can suppress the survival instinct. We’re also interpreting the very distant past through a human lens, when the Iguanese were manifestly different.”

“Although their needs weren’t,” Vlad said. “Every planet humans have settled has yielded evidence of prior Iguanese settlement in the fossil layer. What they found habitable, so do we. It’s the chronological distance between us that makes the Iguanese mysterious.”

Allison leaned out of the way of the steward clearing the table. “I remember a documentary that said they resembled chameleons, but bigger, obviously.”

“Four to five feet tall,” Vlad said. “They evolved on Esquiline. The fossil record shows they started on four legs and evolved to bipedal locomotion. Like humans. They didn’t have thumbs, as such. Their hands had four digits fused into two, and one of those two was a bit like a thumb.” He waved his hands in explanation, separating the fingers in a “V”. The steward serving them stepped back sharply. “Sorry, Ace. Their feet had three digits.”

Ace finished serving mixed fruit cobbler and departed.

Santiago picked up the jug of custard in the center of the table and poured it over his cobbler. “Did their skin change color like a chameleon’s?”

“Unknown. Thank you, sir.” Vlad accepted the custard jug and poured carelessly. “DNA from plants and insects has been found fossilized in amber, but nothing from an Iguanese. Yet.”

Liam ate his cobbler plain. Non-dairy custard was an abomination he wanted no part of, even if Navy tradition included it as an option with every dessert.

“As for the Iguanese’s extraction of easily accessible blaze deposits, there is a theory that their search for it was conducted in a spiral pattern.” A thread of doubt flattened some of Vlad’s enthusiasm. “It’s not a respectable theory. I mean, it’s not taught at university or anything. But some of the fringe thinkers—” He peeked at Paige, who did not groan, but did take a healthy, dissenting gulp of coffee. “They’re not all crazy.”

“We all have our quirks,” Xavier said.

“Yes, sir.” Vlad probably didn’t mean to stare at his captain’s custard-free cobbler.

“Spirals,” Liam prompted.

“The Iguanese fossil layer is mainly compressed materials. Scientists have taken core samples from polar ice on each of our planets and from mud. They can track the growth of the Iguanese civilization. Kind of. On Esquiline, they had an industrialization era even deadlier than Earth’s. You know, humanity’s home world.”

Brielle rolled her eyes. None of them were uneducated rubes. They knew where their species had originated, even if the planet was unreachable on the far side of the galaxy.

“Esquiline recovered from the Iguanese,” Vlad said. “And they learned their lesson. They acted differently on their other planets. Small things, insect-sized, have survived in the fossil layer and, extremely rarely, a larger artifact, sometimes an entire wall, if it fell into mud or something similar that was able to fossilize around it. If only there’d been a volcano,” he added dreamily.

Xavier stayed on topic. “Presumably, among what remnants survived, the spiral pattern predominated?”

Vlad blinked. “You’ve read the fringe theories?”

“The Chief inferred a logical connection from your jumbled narrative.” Paige tidily scooped up the last of her custard and cobbler.

Her Iguanese-obsessed friend ignored her. He leaned forward. “The thing is, if the spiral theory is correct, the Iguanese moved outward from Esquiline in a spiral pattern that searched for habitable planets and useful resources like blaze deposits.”

Santiago hummed, intrigued. “Which would mean that while the Human Sector sets Esquiline space as its borealis limit, in fact, if we continued in that direction there ought to be other, formerly Iguanese, habitable planets.”

Vlad nodded eagerly. “We started at Palantine. Well, at Origin.” The black hole the colony ships had entered through. “And now we don’t have enough blaze to push on past Esquiline space. Actually, when you consider the theory, we’d be risking stalling out there because the Iguanese would have already stripped the region of blaze.”

“That’s always been the dilemma in blaze exploration,” Xavier said. “We need to use our limited supply of it to find more, but since we’re unsure where to search for it, the gamble is unattractive.”

Liam had finished his meal, coffee included. “Which brings me to my point about blaze. Beaconpit near Border Station was a rare blaze deposit, and the calculation of miners, investors and government will logically be that where it was found once, the chances are high for a repeat simply because the Iguanese hadn’t stripped Beaconpit. With the war over, people will be hunting for new investment opportunities. It’s possible we could end up patrolling a region overrun by a blaze rush.”

A discussion like this, signaled as informal by virtue of being held during dinner, provided an excellent means of disseminating an idea for discussion throughout the ship. After reading about xeno-archaeology recently, Liam was honestly interested in the Iguanese. However, for current purposes, focusing on them in relation to blaze was a means of signaling that thinking out of the box regarding issues around blaze was encouraged.

Liam respected his people. They would come up with ideas ranging from the weird to the practical. Those would filter up through his officers and inform the changes to the patrol routes which he’d already discussed with Claire.

During that discussion, his second-in-command had asked a single pertinent question. “Why focus on blaze?”

Crown Prince Francis’s request to Liam to discover evidence of anyone preparing for an expedition to Beta had been delivered in a manner that implicitly commanded confidentiality.

“Whoever controls blaze, controls the future. I read that somewhere.” He believed it, too. If the future was interstellar trade and exploration, blaze was essential. “There’s also Xavier’s obsessive acquisition and management of fuel cells. We wouldn’t have survived on our allocation.” In war, they’d had to run too hard and too fast, burning out fuel cells faster than the Navy could resupply them. It was why the Navy had turned a blind eye to Liam’s raiding of captured Palantine ships’ fuel cell stores. As chief engineer, Xavier had managed the transfer.

Now, Liam repeated his earlier comment to Claire to the table. “Whoever controls blaze, controls the future. It is our duty to ensure Capitoline blaze is controlled by King Magnus.”

Sitting at the end of the table, next to Brielle, Casimir had listened without participating. “The CIB,” Capitonline Intelligence Bureau, “ought to be tracking blaze related rumors and activity. Will they share?”

Allison answered. “To some extent. To be clear, wartime conditions of the Navy acting autonomously are over. Although the CIB can’t command us, they will exploit us now that we lack a greater purpose, like a battle to fight, to counter their requests. Nor should we deny them.” That was a bitter concession for a Naval Intelligence officer since the CIB were her rivals.

“We won’t play silly games duplicating the CIB’s efforts,” Liam said plainly. “However, nor do I intend for us to operate in an information vacuum.” His orders effectively rendered the border region “his patch”, and he intended to own it. He intended to know who entered and exited it, and what information was being traded, as in, placed for sale on the taggers’ market.

He wrapped up the conversation. “We’re finishing our first patrol, which means this is when we identify and apply lessons learned to our future patrols. Blaze is not a defining element of our purpose in border space. However, it’s a good reminder that bigger issues can affect us on the border, and our activities can impact developments back home.”

Santiago stared unseeingly at the empty custard jug. “I’ve been thinking of us as sheepdogs, rounding up and protecting the herd. But we’re also sniffer dogs. Be it trouble or opportunity, we need to sense it first.”

Liam couldn’t have said it better. He observed his officers’ solemn nods and unconscious straightening.

Their personal narrative had changed. The RC Genghis Khan was not in disgraced exile. They were providing an essential defense against future trouble.

Chapter 9

The CC Kangaroo was two days out from Border Station when Nora pinged the station’s mailbox, downloading messages, news and general broadcasts, and uploading her own messages that would set in motion both the sale of her tagger expedition data, her automatons, garden surplus and mineral specimens, as well as lay the groundwork for her and Jonah’s takedown of a combat android.

She wasn’t convinced that they could destroy a combat android.

But the first phase of their plan might render the question moot. First, they had to discover if it was really on-station. If not, then they could dismiss Jonah’s idea that Dominic was seeking revenge against Liam and simply live their lives.

“Uncomplicated by androids and alien AIs,” Nora said out loud. She was on the bridge.

Jonah was in cargo hold B working on his own repair and repurposing project.

His ability to acquire and interpret data was astounding, but physically he claimed limitations. The construction of his android body being a one-time achievement was one such achievement. Now, he could only affect the world in so far as his android form could. He lacked spooky Vapori powers, even claiming that he couldn’t use the three burrs inside him and powering his existence to obliterate reality in the way royals could.

The CC Kangaroo’s ship’s operating system automatically sorted the incoming messages. Nora had a few friends and her in-laws who’d send messages, lightly encrypted for privacy, out to Border Station. She had her own letters drafted, just waiting to read theirs before she finalized hers and sent them. Business messages were few. A couple of maintenance reminders and resupply offers for the ship could be swiped past.

Sender: Cheryl Pendit.

Nora froze.

Cheryl “Cherry” Pendit.

With as much caution as if the message was an Angkorran devil scorpion in a mating frenzy, Nora studied the message without opening it.

Sender: Cheryl Pendit.

Transmission record: composed and sent on Border Station.

“Fuzzy slimeballs,” Nora whispered. Cherry’s message ought to have the same forwarded transmission stamp as Nora’s friends’ and in-laws’ messages, identifying it as originating on Capitoline and carried by various ships out to the border region. For Cherry’s message to read Border Station meant that Cherry was here. “Or someone has cloned her ID.”

But really, who would bother copying an Angkorran’s ID?

Nora clicked open the message from her youngest half-sister.

“Captain Devi, there’s no reason you’d remember me from the towers, but as a kid you worked in the market for my mom, Maya Pendit. Look me up. I’ll be here a while. Us Angkor girls have to hang together. Cherry Pendit.”

On the bright side, nothing in Cherry’s message gave away their biological relationship.

On the negative side, why the star fire was Cherry here? How the stars had she paid for passage out to the border? Had she tapped Maya’s smuggling connections? But Maya had died years ago. Loyalty among criminals didn’t have a long shelf life, nor was it readily transferred.

By whatever method Cherry had gotten out to Border Station, the critical issue was what she wanted from Nora.

A sinking feeling in Nora’s gut preceded her conscious realization of what she had to do.

If Cherry—and worse yet, Cherry plus her brother and/or father—was on the station, then she could derail Nora and Jonah’s careful planning re the lethal Palantine combat android.

Nora closed Cherry’s message and stomped from the bridge. Then she whirled around and stomped back in. She called Jonah through the ship’s comms. “Are you free to talk? I need to tell you about my family.”

Inside ten minutes, Jonah had exited the atmosphere-free cargo hold and joined Nora in her workshop next door.

She sat on the drafting stool, spinning it restlessly an inch one way, then back.

He took the “thinking” chair with its cushioned headrest and arms. Not that he needed to sit. He could stand endlessly in his android body.

Was he the body or was he sheltered inside it? Nora shook her head. She’d refrained from asking him personal questions because she hadn’t wished to open the door to answering the same. Now, she had to open that door to her private life and her past, at least a fraction.

If she actually met with Cherry, she’d be tempted to kick her.

“Do you know about my biological family?”

He answered promptly. “One or both of your parents must be descended from the Originals. I do not know the lineage. I have not analyzed your DNA. I do not know who your parents are, only that you grew up in Angkor in the Holyrood tower.”

Nora pressed her toes to the floor, hard, if invisibly inside her boots. The pressure helped to ground her. “My mother was also there. I don’t mean my foster ma, Tania Devi. My biological mom was Maya Pendit. When I was seven, she told me who she was. She told me the stories of who we are. The stories that her ma had told her. Then she told me that she would never acknowledge me as her daughter, that I was safer separated from her. She rejected me as she cuddled my half-siblings Gina and Keith. Cherry is the third, the youngest. Nine years younger than me. Gina was six years younger. Keith is seven years younger than me.”

She pushed her hands down her thighs, wiping off the sweat on her palms against her utility pants. “Once Maya had told me her mother’s stories, she never spoke to me again as anything other than another brat scrabbling in the market. She died a few months after Ethan, my husband. I was still grieving him. Maya’s husband, Scott, the father of her children, contacted me as soon as Ethan’s estate was settled.”

Nora stood, spun, and kicked a punching bag hanging in the corner of the workshop. It was the long-suffering recipient of her frustrations with repair projects. Sometimes punching and kicking it helped her subconscious sort through and solve problems. “If Maya was going to disown me, the least she could have done was do so completely. Instead, she confided who I was to Scott. Of course, the lazy louse tried to leech off me. He’d done so with Maya for years.”

She leaned against the wall in the shadow of the punching bag. “Gina was seventeen. Scott had some story about how the government had issued orders for her transfer from a local garment factory to munitions. A factory off-planet. A wartime move. He said his princess wasn’t tough enough to survive away from her family. He told me I owed them, him and his kids. That I had to pay the bribes to replace Gina’s name on the munitions factory list with another girl’s. I should send him the money and he’d arrange it. I refused.”

“Why did he say you owed them?”

In her worst nightmares, she thought it was because Maya had also confided in her husband the truth of who Nora’s father was. But if Scott had known, he’d have sold that information. Maya had, at least, exercised that much commonsense, although she’d been foolish enough about Scott in every other way.

“I hated Maya,” Nora said. “But even hating her, I thought she deserved better than Scott. I guess he was good-looking till the alcohol ruined him. Maya did everything. She carried the family. Around the time I escaped the towers for trade school, Maya went back to the smuggling game.”

“Before or after?”

She scowled at Jonah. “After I left.” He wouldn’t convince her that Maya had stayed in Holyrood tower to keep an eye on her. “Cherry was seven. Old enough to survive Scott’s neglect. Do you know how twisted his thinking is? He said that if I’d remitted part of my pay to Maya once I’d graduated trade school—which was nearly two years after she left Holyrood to resume smuggling—she wouldn’t have gone back to smuggling. He said—”

Rather than hit the punching bag, she curled her toes tight and fought to keep her face expressionless. She swallowed her anger and grief. “Scott said that if I hadn’t been a selfish cow, if I had sent the money a daughter owed her mother to Maya, then Maya wouldn’t have had to leave her children. That she wouldn’t have died.”

Jonah leaned forward; elbows propped on his knees. “Why would you owe her anything?”

“I didn’t! She rejected me. But when he wanted money, someone to support him as Maya had, he landed on me. A pesky thing like the truth wouldn’t get in Scott’s way.”

“You didn’t send him any money.”

“No!” And more quietly. “No. A year later, Gina was dead. The wing of the munitions factory she was working in exploded. The company tried to claim it was sabotage. Enemy action. An investigation showed they’d compromised safety to maximize profits. Scott, and his son, Keith, sent me messages blaming me for Gina’s death.” Abusive drunken ravings. She’d blocked their IDs from her message inbox. “If they’re here with Cherry…”

“Here?”

She cleared her throat. “That’s why I’m giving you this insight into my…” not family, “biological connections. Cherry, my half-sister, has sent me a message from Border Station asking to meet. Mission Combat Android requires subtlety. I don’t like the wildcard of Cherry’s presence.”

Jonah spent a few seconds in thought. “We need to know why she’s here. At minimum, I can find out how she reached the station. With all respect to what you’ve achieved, I wouldn’t have thought a young Angkorran could afford a ticket this far.”

“Not legally. And although Maya had smuggling connections, she’s been dead a few years, and that sort of loyalty or favors owed doesn’t transfer.”

“Okay.” He clapped his hands together before pushing up from the chair. “I’ll do a little hacking.”

Their preparations for Mission Combat Android had shown Nora that Jonah could do more than a little hacking. How much was actual hacking and how much was something due to his Vapori construction she didn’t know.

His hacking meant they could acquire knowledge without anyone knowing they did so. It was how they hoped to locate the combat android, if it was on-station. Jonah had apologized for that limitation, explaining, “I was designed to be sensitive to what humans call consciousness. It is a partial aspect, a personalized portion, of the energy that provided the base for the Vapori. Just as you are carbon-based. Humans have near enough to the inverse proportions of the Vapori’s mix of energy and carbon in your lifeform.”

Which meant the Vapori had been mostly energetic, but incorporating a physical, organic structure.

“In short, because the android is not conscious, I can’t track it.”

The hints he’d dropped about what it was to be a Vapori, and the nature of his creators were tantalizing. When they weren’t preoccupied with big bads like combat androids, and when they’d gotten a better sense of one another and how, or if, their relationship would work, then she might risk questioning him.

Questioning went both ways, after all, and she still had secrets to protect.

Nora followed him up the ladder to the bridge where he settled in the second chair, his seat, and she took the captain’s chair. Automatically, she checked the scan readings, but they were dull. This close to Border Station, there was nothing unknown for her to scan. The screen merely showed one other ship in her range on course to the station and another heading out. The closer the CC Kangaroo got to Border Station, the more ships she’d see.

As long as they beat the RC Genghis Khan to the station by three days, they’d be fine.

As long as we can find the combat android, if it’s there, in two days. Nora scratched at her right ankle. Oddly enough, that was the ankle nearest the hidden compartment with her pulse pistol in it. Did she have an itchy ankle, rather than an itchy trigger finger?

“You won’t like this,” Jonah said.

“I don’t like anything involving the Pendits.”

“Cherry arrived on Border Station three weeks ago as an indentured servant.”

Nora closed her eyes. “She sold herself.”

Jonah lowered his voice, respecting her whispered despair. “Her contract is temporarily assigned to a gaming club. The temporary nature of the contract is not standard across the other indentured servants.”

“Slaves,” Nora said harshly. She glared at him, the messenger bringing bad news. “Everyone in the towers knows not to trust the slave traders. Recruiters.” She almost spat. “What the fuzzy slimeballs’ fuzz was she thinking?”

“Um, you did hear the bit where I said the temporary nature of her contract with the gaming club is unusual?”

“I’m not deaf! They’re parading her there among drunk and horny men so that someone buys her contract—” She broke off at his sharp headshake.

“Not someone. You.”

“What?”

He answered patiently. “No matter how you view your relationship, from Cherry’s perspective, at nineteen and still a reckless teenager, she expects her big sister to buy her freedom. For human adolescents, consequences are someone else’s problem.”

Nora opened her mouth, closed it, and slumped back to stare at the ceiling.

“If it helps, there’s no record of her father or brother on the station.”

Nora blew a raspberry.

“Well, that’s mature.”

She straightened to scowl at him. “Nineteen in Angkor isn’t like nineteen somewhere middle class where a teen can still run to mommy and daddy. At nineteen in the towers, Cherry could already have two children. Her coming out to the Hadrian Line isn’t thoughtlessness. She’s trying to force my hand.”

“To force a relationship,” he corrected, and added with a rueful smile. “If Scott and Keith were your family, wouldn’t you want to swap them for someone else?”

Stars damn. Yes, I would. She went back to staring at the ceiling.

“Cherry’s contract costs less than the fuel for this expedition.”

“Fuel is the biggest cost of any expedition. And I need it. I don’t need Cherry.” Abruptly, she bounced out of the captain’s seat. “Cherry is not my sister. Maya made that decision.”

“You can make a different one.”

“And burden myself with Scott’s daughter? You give a leech money once, and you never shake them.”

“Or you show a person kindness, and you change their life forever.” Sitting in his chair while she paced, he had to look up at her. “I pinned all my hopes on you. I was right to do so.”

She spun away from his earnest gaze. “If not for you, I wouldn’t be preparing to fight a combat android.”

“True,” he drew out the word. “I’m sorry? Except, how can I be sorry if our intervention saves Captain Kimani and other people from the android?” When she didn’t respond, he continued cautiously. “We can amend our plan. While I hack the station’s and ships’ surveillance systems to search for the combat android, you meet with Cherry. Catching up with an acquaintance from Angkor is good casual cover.”

Everything in her resisted the idea. Neither agreeing to nor rejecting his suggestion, she said, “I’m going to the gym.”

The truth was, she couldn’t afford not to meet with Cherry. Nora had to know what Cherry and her family knew about Nora herself. On what basis did Cherry believe Nora would pay out her indentured service contract?

“If she thinks she can blackmail me, she’s wrong.” With her education and experience, Nora could have gotten work on any xeno-archaeological field team. She had a track record of adaptability and resourcefulness. But she’d chosen a tagger’s life, and a tagger’s life on the border, because of the escape hatch it offered. If Nora’s past ever caught up with her, she intended to run and hide.

Jonah’s insanely large scanning range meant she could avoid other ships. He’d also be able to tell her where hidden bases and covert supplies could be obtained. The Vapori AI could provide her with a survival edge that would strip life on the run of the worst of its risks.

If he stayed with her.

She had to hold herself back from trusting him. Adjusting her plans to include him was necessary. Basing her plans on his stated commitment to her was not.

But all of those thoughts were maybe-problems. First, she had to deal with Cherry and the combat android.

The next day Nora and Jonah sorted through the couple of messages she’d received in response to her own, plus the information he’d acquired by hacking.

“Cherry agreed to meet me at three o’clock at the Ye Olde Tea Shoppe. Her shift at the gaming club doesn’t start till seven. She says ‘a tea shop is for old ladies. I could meet you at your ship and we could talk without our language offending the old ducks.’”

“She wants to talk without being overheard,” Jonah said. “But you need to be visible.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll stay at the café. I’m not permitting Cherry onboard Roo.” The CC Kangaroo was Nora’s home. Blood relatives were most definitely unwelcome. She checked another, equally important, message. “Department of Space has bought my survey data of the Avestan Range for their maps. They might have miserly payment rates, but they’re a reliable market.” She’d already contracted for the resupply of the CC Kangaroo for its next expedition, but now those costs were covered by the previous expedition.

When her store of fuel cells purchased with the ship ran out, that calculation would change. Costs would increase. She needed to start watching the market. An expedition in the direction of another, busier station might give her access to cheaper fuel cells. Even on a small, efficiently managed ship, fuel cells eventually corroded.

Pity spaceships couldn’t be wound up to run on clockwork rather than expensive, rechargeable batteries.

“Mstivoj remains docked at the station. No departure date,” Jonah said.

Nora tapped her toes against the floor of the bridge. “A pirate isn’t going to give away information, especially about his comings and goings. According to your notes, his ship is fully resupplied.”

She hadn’t doubted that the former Palantine privateer would find Capitoline citizens willing to deal with him. It wasn’t due to their support of the peace accord. Money talked.

“The CC Kangaroo should be finished docking by eleven tomorrow morning,” Jonah pursued his own priorities. “I have successfully inserted a virus into the station’s hourly news broadcast.”

Nora interrupted. “You really managed it?”

“I do not promise what I cannot deliver.”

“Yes, but, that’s one heck of a hole you punched in station security. It shouldn’t be possible. You could control all the ships…”

Jonah coughed.

“You control all the ships?” she shrieked.

“I do not choose to, but I could.”

“You do not choose to. Jonah, you’re dangerous.”

He grinned crookedly. “You already knew that.”

“I forgot.” Or rather, he’d disarmed her. He’d become Jonah, a person, more than an alien AI.

“Well, now that you’ve remembered.” He winked as she glared at him for that flippancy. “You can trust me to question Captain Mstivoj prudently.” He became serious. “The timing is important. I will acquire control of the CP Coyote at 2 a.m., while he is sleeping. He will wake to a sense of being threatened. Importantly, my takeover will start before we dock with the station. I will begin negotiations with him at 2 p.m., by which point you will have established your presence on the station, publicly visible as someone who could not be available to talk with Mstivoj.”

She ticked off her scheduled stops on one hand. “I’ll pop into Tam’s Information Brokerage for a gossip since my first stop after previous expeditions has always been to an info house. I don’t have additional information,” additional to the survey data she’d sold to the Department of Space, “to trade. It’s Liam’s responsibility to confirm the Kellys’ deaths. Poor Aria.”

“You could visit her,” Jonah suggested.

Nora’s mouth tightened before she took a deep breath and continued. “After Tam’s I’ll visit the Science Club to discuss the best places to sell my mineral specimens. Lunch there at the cafeteria. Then either I can extend some conversations and linger till it’s time to meet Cherry at the tea shop, or I’ll pop into the bazaar to confirm the table I’ve booked for the weekend market to sell my automatons.”

“It should work,” Jonah said of their plan.

Initially, their goal was confirmation of Jonah’s theory that Mstivoj had transported a combat android to Border Station. A bonus would be if the pirate could provide information on how to counter the android, if it was present.

But Nora wasn’t holding her breath as to Mstivoj’s helpfulness.

She bit her tongue. She’d already asked Jonah several times whether his hacking of the station’s surveillance system had revealed any hint of the combat android’s presence. It hadn’t, and each time she’d asked, he’d patiently repeated his explanation that the data from the station’s surveillance system was only as good as the system itself, and that the combat android had been designed and would have been upgraded to infiltrate far more sophisticated stations. Consequently, absence of data as to its presence was not proof of its absence. Moreover, he was working on it.

Nora sighed. “I really hope Mstivoj has no idea of any combat android anywhere near border space.”

Otherwise, Mission Combat Android would kick into its dangerous phase. More dangerous than threatening a pirate captain.

Chapter 10

For her visit to the station, Nora wore a spacer’s informal uniform of a t-shirt with a multi-pocket shirt over it, utility pants, and boots. Her t-shirt had a band name. She and Ethan had gone to an Interstellar Scream concert for his twenty seventh birthday. She’d saved for weeks to afford the tickets to his favorite band. Buttoning the gray overshirt hid the graphic on the faded blue t-shirt.

Jonah waited for her in the lounge, and accompanied her to the hatch. He hovered.

She fixed him with a minatory stare. “When I return, you will show me a complete, unfiltered recording of your conversation with Mstivoj.”

“We’ll go through it together,” he promised.

He twitched, shifting his weight slightly from foot to foot.

“What is wrong with you?” she burst out. “If you don’t want to talk to Mstivoj—”

“I want a hug.”

She gaped at him.

“You’re going out there.” He gestured at the station beyond the hatch. “We’re threatening a pirate captain preparatory to ambushing a combat android. I think a hug would reassure us both.”

Hugging an alien android AI will reassure me?

But as good luck superstitions went, a hug was simple.

She closed the small distance between them and hugged Jonah. She almost flinched when she realized he was human body temperature warm. His gray clothes felt like clothing, although he seemed to reshape them at whim.

His arms closed tentatively around her.

It had been over a year since she’d had a hug. The simple act of being held triggered an unwanted rush of emotions.

She leaned into Jonah as she tried to hide and control the tremble of her lower lip. She refused to be a toddler crying at kindness.

“Be careful.” He smoothed a hand over her hair before letting her go.

She hadn’t brought herself up to be a coward. She met his eyes. “You be careful, too. Mstivoj is trickier than either of us.”

“Oh, I doubt that.” Jonah smiled.

Nora turned away and opened the hatch. She exited the CC Kangaroo without looking back.

By the time Nora reached Ye Olde Tea Shoppe she was all peopled out. After months alone on the scout ship or just with Jonah, the chatter and demands of people for attention and validation were exhausting. She’d walked the long way around from the bazaar to the tea shop purely to avoid the sight of the orphanage.

Unfortunately, that meant traversing the crime district.

Despite knowing rationally that the buildings were as evenly spaced as anywhere else on the station’s Life Loop, the quarter of the station devoted to residential and commercial occupation, Nora felt as if they crowded in and loomed over her.

The gangs in the towers of Angkor had been shameless in their control, swaggering and bashing, taking and claiming. Those in charge of crime along the Hadrian Line could afford greater subtlety. After twelve years of war, they’d grown accustomed to Capitoline authorities ignoring them.

The crime bosses would be watching Liam and the RC Genghis Khan for what the battlecruiser’s patrols meant for their “business interests”. To date, on-station it appeared nothing had changed.

Nora walked past bars and gambling dens, read and ignored signs to venture upward into parlors, and consciously kept her pace steady as she passed the pawnbrokers and indentured service markets. It was as easy to lose everything out on the border as it was in the inner realm of Capitoline and its surrounds.

At the corner she turned right rather than left. Left would have taken her to the weapons markets; to the boutique storefronts and warehouses that catered to the demand for violence and for protection from it. A lot of the flotsam of war had washed up on Border Station and filled those stores.

Yet within a block of turning right, she was back among the innocuous stores selling clothing, homewares and food.

The Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’s doorbell chimed as she entered.

A young woman in a tight emerald t-shirt looked at the door, froze for a second, then smiled.

Cherry Pendit.

Nora recognized her half-sister from Jonah’s hacking efforts. There was no similarity between the seven-year-old girl she’d been when Nora left Angkor and the red-haired bombshell currently endeavouring to appear confident as Nora approached the small table against a side wall. However, she did look exactly like her ID photo.

“Hello, Cherry.”

“Nora! Hi. Hello.” Cherry stared at her avidly. “Do you know I recognize you from Holyrood? You were like a ferret.”

Nora’s eyebrows. “Flattering.”

“Feral. Skinny. Dangerous. You were a hero when I was growing up. The girl who got out. Really out. Not just smuggling or other muck.”

The waitress interrupted to take their order.

“My treat,” Nora said. “Tea and scones for two. Breakfast tea.” She didn’t consult Cherry. Anyone who grew up in the towers took their tea strong. Breakfast tea had the heavy tannins early exposure taught them to enjoy.

“It’s your eyes I really remember,” Cherry said before the waitress had departed. “Witchy eyes.”

They were striking. Nora had never attempted to hide them. In the beginning contacts had been an expense she couldn’t afford. Over the years, though, as no one ever connected her rare green eyes to her hidden past, she’d ceased worrying and even, on occasion, emphasized the black limbal ring at the outer rim of her irises by extravagantly applying black eyeliner.

“How do you come to be out here?” Nora asked.

“We skipping the polite how-dee-doos?”

Cherry resembled their mom. She was about Maya’s height, but softer. Happier. Maya had been toughened by life. Cherry could try to act tough, but she lacked that inner steel Nora had inherited in abundance.

Or perhaps life had given both Maya and Nora opportunities to develop it; struggles for survival that Cherry had never faced.

How much do you know? Nora stared at her half-sister, waiting for her answer.

Cherry caved. “I signed an indentured service contract.”

“Stupid.”

“Maybe. Staying in the towers woulda been stupider. Dad…is taking a long time dying. He’s pickled his liver, but keeps drinking. Near dies. Drinks some more. Keith.” She studied Nora from under long, fake lashes. “You remember him?”

Nora kept her voice crisp and inviting no follow up questions or comment on the topic. “Yes.” She certainly remembered Keith.

The waitress served them.

Cherry slathered fake cream on a scone.

Nora observed her even as she watched the steam escaping the teapot. She wanted tea, bitter and dark, and for that she needed to wait for it to brew longer. She also maintained awareness of their surroundings. Everyone appeared a typical customer of the café, paying no particular attention to Cherry or her.

“Keith is like Dad, but worse. I reckon the only person Keith ever loved was Gina. She was his big sis. He listened to her, and he looked out for her like he never did for me.” Cherry’s gaze locked with Nora’s. As he never did for you, she might have added.

She ate greedily in between sentences. “When Gina died, Dad couldn’t get work and Keith didn’t want to. Keith blamed,” she lowered her voice, “you.” She licked cream off her thumb and sized up a second scone. “That was some twisted thinking.”

The distinct absence of grief in her voice for Gina was curious. And soon explained. “Gina had choices, but she was always a princess waiting to be rescued. She could have pushed out a kid. They wouldn’t have sent her to the factory if she was pregnant.”

“Maybe she wanted to get away,” Nora suggested.

“Nah. She figured her prince wouldn’t want her with someone else’s kid in tow.”

Nora sipped her tea. After a long lunch, the scones didn’t appeal. She pushed the plate nearer to Cherry.

“All of them? Ta, then.” Cherry went to work smearing jam and cream. “Reason I’m here.” She chewed on a scone, unsubtly delaying her confession. “Dad’s not much, but he wouldn’t snitch on me. Keith, he’s different. And he hates you. Settled on blaming you for Gina and everything.”

Nora didn’t ask what everything entailed.

“Keith would be willing to spill Mom’s secrets, now it’s only me. Us?” Getting no response from Nora, Cherry refocused on her half-eaten scone. She shoved the rest of it in her mouth.

The defiant rudeness indicated how much Cherry, for all her bravado, was hurting and scared.

The stewed tea wasn’t as bitter as Nora’s thoughts. “Are you suggesting you came out to the Hadrian Line to warn me to be afraid of Keith?”

Cherry pouted. “I reckoned I was better away from him. The border’s as far as you can get from the towers.”

“And maybe I’d pay off your indentured service contract?”

“Would you?” Unthinkingly, Cherry licked the jam and cream off the dull knife, then flushed and hurriedly put the knife down. “It’s not blackmail. I’m not going to tell anyone our secret. If I wanted to be a baby machine I’d have stayed in the towers.”

“Maya told you those stories?” Nora murmured.

“The Forgotten as breeding stock? Oh yeah. Children taken from us. Us locked away. Fog that. I want kids and I want them with me. Family.”

“I don’t,” Nora said firmly, reacting more than anything to the last word. Family did not include Cherry.

Cherry had other ideas. “You’d be their aunt.”

“Are you pregnant?” Nora asked with sudden suspicion. She’d thought Cherry was naturally curvy, but she could be pregnant.

Cherry brushed crumbs off her ample breasts. She plucked a crumb from her cleavage. “No.” She sighed. “Sure, I would love it if you bought my contract and I was free. But I’m only nineteen and the contract is just seven years. I’ll be free at twenty six regardless.”

“But what will you have done in the meantime?”

“Nothing worse than what would have happened in the towers. They’re bad, Nora. The war took the money and the government’s attention. The gangs are wilder. Dad says it was Mom dying that ruined our lives. His easy life. But it wasn’t. The hell gates open wider each year.”

Nora shivered. That last sentence didn’t sound like Cherry. It sounded as if she was quoting someone.

She was. “Do you remember Ma Shakespeare? Called herself a poet?”

“Shaker?” Nora remembered a girl a couple of years older than herself. “She could rhyme anything.”

“She read everything. She told me to get out. She told anyone who had any chance to leave, to go. ‘The hell gates open wider and one day soon we’ll all fall in and they’ll close with a snap! Gobble, gobble, gone.’” The bleakness in Cherry’s eyes was terrifying.

Then the girl blinked, and a wide smile hid her despair. “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind you buying my contract, but being far away is good enough. With Keith it’s better out of sight, out of mind, and out of reach.”

“Would you like another pot of tea? Another plate of scones?” The waitress wanted to clear their table. The surrounding tables had filled up with customers laden with shopping bags.

“We’re done,” Nora said. She paid the bill and stood.

Cherry followed her out the door. “You mean we’re done, don’t you?”

Nora paused between shopfronts. The sidewalk was wide enough for people to go around them, and finishing this conversation would scarcely take a couple of minutes. “Did you trust your mom?”

“Yes.”

Nora shoved her hands in her pockets. She could guess what Cherry wanted: someone to restore the sense of security Maya had given her. Nora had known she was always on her own. Even with Ethan, his work as a stinger pilot meant she’d lived every breath knowing she would lose him. “Then trust Maya on this. She must have kept you and me, your family and me, separate for a reason.”

She cut herself off so as not to confuse her message. Adding that Maya had rejected her would lead Cherry to think that Nora’s refusal to help now was a matter of revenge. However, as with her refusal to help Gina avoid the munitions factory, it was far more fundamental.

Nora was dangerous to share blood with.

Cherry shook her head. “Things change.”

“Not this. I’m glad you got out of the towers, Cherry. Have a good life.” Nora strode away. She didn’t hear Cherry’s footsteps either following her or leaving. Nora turned at the nearest corner, wanting to be out of sight, but kept the even pace of her stride. It was important that today of all days, she appear normal.

Inside, though, she was tired and shaken. The conversation with Cherry had been the final nail in the coffin of a socially exhausting day. Nora checked where her impulsive turn had taken her, and ducked into Michelangelo’s, or Mike’s, Deli for a quarter of a real roast chicken. She’d eat it with salad for dinner.

She smiled faintly as she recognized the glossy, orange peppers in a basket. They were hers, from the CC Kangaroo. Diana, the owner of the deli, had bought all of Nora’s excess fruit and vegetables before the CC Kangaroo even docked. A stock boy had collected the crates within ten minutes of their docking.

Nora entered her ship with a sense of relief even if she had a new hoop to jump through courtesy of Jonah.

On the journey back to Border Station, he’d built a scanner. “We don’t want you bringing bugs back, do we?” She let it scan her and declare her free of electronic tracking devices, and plugged in her personal comms unit for it to be checked, too.

She hadn’t questioned how Jonah knew how to build such things, although she was madly curious about what he knew, how he knew it, and the gaps in his knowledge. In an odd way, her xeno-archaeological studies had given her a mindset capable of handling interacting with him. Each time her curiosity or frustration mounted, she reminded herself that he wasn’t human. Who he was and what he did presumably made sense by Vapori logic. She and he were two aliens who couldn’t force their understanding of each other, not if they wanted a healthy, constructive relationship.

We don’t have a relationship.

But he’d hugged her goodbye.

She’d hugged him.

She’d accepted him where she’d rejected her half-sister.

“Tough day?” Jonah asked quietly as she entered the lounge. He hadn’t ambushed her at the hatchway. He sat in an armchair that could be swiveled to face the viewscreen or the kitchen.

“Is the combat android on the station?”

“Yes.”

She collapsed onto the sofa near him. “Then, yes. It’s a tough day. I really hoped Mstivoj would tell you to get lost. That he had no idea what you were hinting at.”

“Do you want to hear the recording?”

“Not now.” She pushed up from the sofa to put the chicken in the fridge. It was still warm. She’d eat it cold, later. Shedding her jacket, she returned to the sofa and took off her boots. “How soon do we have to do something about the android?”

Her own android studied her with a frown between his eyebrows. Retro-gen model androids were complete with hair. There were modifications that could change their coloring, so presumably Jonah could change his if he wished. He didn’t have to be gray.

When he didn’t immediately answer, she continued. “I’ve booked a stall to sell my automatons at the bazaar on Saturday. You can come with me, if you like. If we’ve gotten rid of the combat android by then. I can’t be linked to an android if we haven’t.”

She’d managed to shock him.

“You don’t have to,” she said carefully. “If you think being around people would be too overwhelming. But I was thinking that an android at an automaton stall in the bazaar would be interesting without being too bizarre. People could get used to the idea that you’re part of the CC Kangaroo. If, while on the station, you took on the role of a delivery person for the ship, you’d have an excuse to explore.”

“I will think about it. Thank you.”

She rubbed her toes. “I should build an automated foot massager.” It was an idle comment. “About the enemy android?” she prompted.

“We should tackle it, tomorrow. The RC Genghis Khan is due Friday.”

“I was hoping we at least had the weekend.” She yawned and gave a full body stretch. “Actually, I wasn’t. I prefer to get trouble over and done with. I need a hot shower. I’m wiped. I’m out of practice peopling.” And my thoughts are all over the place. Why do I feel guilty for telling Cherry what I had to? She’s safer not linked to me. “Did you observe me on the station?”

“I set an alert that if anyone appeared to be following you or if you were attacked, I’d be informed. The alert wasn’t triggered. I felt it was the best compromise between protecting you and respecting your privacy. I didn’t watch you or listen to your conversations.” He hesitated. “I am curious about what Cherry wanted.”

“You were right. She wanted to upgrade her family. I made it clear she’s not part of my life. She’ll stay away.” Nora picked up her boots. “Do you know what happens to the Forgotten?”

“To the hidden descendants of the Originals?”

She nodded jerkily.

He leaned forward, lacing his fingers together. “You’ve obviously heard stories.”

“Maya. Cherry’s and my mom. I never dared research the subject. Curiosity begets curiosity.” It was safe to indulge this degree of curiosity with Jonah.

“The fate of the Forgotten varies over time and place. When they’re found, sometimes the women are used to add new DNA to the royal lines. Never acknowledged. Never the king or crown prince. The new DNA is observed for three generations before being bred into the direct royal line—if it’s powerful enough.”

By powerful enough, he meant sensitivity to and ability to use the Vapori burrs.

“With the male Forgotten, their sperm is frozen. Actually, women’s eggs are, too. Forgotten women aren’t always used to birth their own children.”

“We’re killed,” Nora said bluntly.

“Depending on the level of paranoia among the royals, yes.” He didn’t add any reassurance as to her safety.

She appreciated the realism. Without another word, she went and showered off the day. Afterward, she sat with Jonah in the lounge and listened to the recording of his conversation with Captain Mstivoj.

Comfy flannel pajamas, fluffy slippers and the low growl of an angry, infamous pirate were a weird combination.

“Release my ship!”

“We require a guarantee, first.” Jonah employed the royal “we” and a refined Capitoline accent to match. His voice was a shade higher than his normal tone.

“I guarantee I’ll kill you.”

“No, that is not the guarantee we seek.”

“Your choice. I can kill you fast or I can kill you slow. I will kill you for messing with my ship.”

Nora shook her head at the nerve of Mstivoj. Jonah’s virus had seized control of every system in the CP Coyote, effectively imprisoning Mstivoj, and the man was threatening his captor.

In the recording, Jonah sounded bored by Mstivoj’s threat. “On Border Station we believe in individual liberty, including a person’s right to make stupid decisions. Like a Palantine privateer traveling solo in our space.”

“Peace accord, you space rat’s butt,” Mstivoj growled.

“Which is why you were granted docking rights. How hypocritical of you to cite the peace accord when you broke it so deliberately.”

Silence.

“Captain Mstivoj, you are being very careful not to incriminate yourself. Do you wish to speak in hypotheticals for legal purposes? There is no need. We assure you. This is not a legal conversation. As stated in the beginning, we merely require a guarantee. Luck has been against you. If the RC Genghis Khan had followed its scheduled patrol, it would have returned to Border Station, resupplied, and departed before your arrival.”

“Your navy can’t touch me.”

Jonah clapped. “Very convincing, Mstivoj. Snarled defiance. But you were never a brutish privateer. You operated with remarkable finesse, bringing your ship safely through the war. Ruthlessly successful, but achieving your objectives with notably limited loss of life. The Palantine Naval Academy trained you well.”

“You’re making me blush.”

“We need your guarantee that you control the combat android you released onto our station.”

Nora slapped the arm of the sofa. “Pause the recording.” The ship’s operating system froze it. “I thought you were going to ask him or trick him into an answer. You gave him the information and time to prepare his answer.”

“Resume the recording,” Jonah said.

Mstivoj’s voice played neutrally. “I don’t have a combat android.”

“The Palantine royals are far away,” Jonah replied. “We are here and, have you forgotten, we control your ship? The truth will serve you better. We really want to believe you control the combat android because then it can be contained.”

“If.” Mstivoj paused for emphasis. “If you have sighted a combat android, my advice is that you destroy it with extreme prejudice.”

“We certainly would if we could, but we have lost sight of it.”

The audio recording picked up the faintest of whispered curses from Mstivoj.

“Precisely,” Jonah said.

“You may have falsely identified it. A true combat android is designed for stealth. Border Station wouldn’t have the systems to detect one.”

“We got lucky,” Jonah said dryly.

Mstivoj had a new note in his voice, skepticism battling with respect. “Did you? Taking control of my ship isn’t luck. It’s skill. Maybe you do have a chance…”

“With your help.”

“That, you can’t have.” After a brief pause, he spoke crisply. This would have been how he sounded when he captained the CP Cougar. “You mentioned my years at the naval academy. They told us that we’d never encounter one. The combat androids’ command codes are exclusive to the royal family. They will entrust a code to a senior secret service agent for the execution of a mission. If you have a combat android on the station, the Palantine Intelligence agent assigned to this backwater won’t have the code to control it. If it’s here, it will do what it’s programmed to do. You hacked my ship. Could you hack the android?”

This time it was Jonah who let silence answer for him. He was impersonating the station, rather than risking his own identity associated with the CC Kangaroo, but the power dynamics of the exchange with Mstivoj meant Jonah still couldn’t give away information. His abilities were none of Mstivoj’s business.

“It’s unfortunate for you, Captain Mstivoj, that you cannot guarantee the actions of the combat android you released onto Border Station. We have no wish to become mired in inner realm politics. We would have let you go if you recalled the combat android to the CP Coyote. Are you positive you cannot do so?”

“If you have a combat android on your station, it is not mine.”

Jonah responded briskly. “Unfortunate. We will detain your ship till the RC Genghis Khan’s arrival. Would you care to confirm our best guess that the royal-controlled combat android’s target is Captain Liam Kimani?”

Mstivoj’s breath rushed out in a gusty sigh. “I am not confirming any guesses or taking responsibility for a combat android, if one is present on your station. Let me add that I don’t hold any particular animosity against Captain Kimani. In fact, if I thought he’d let me close without shooting me, I’d shake his hand. Humiliating Dominic was a damn fine piece of work. But if you have reason to believe that a combat android is present on your station to eliminate Captain Kimani, I believe he’d agree with you that you should allow it to do so.”

“What?!”

“Combat androids aren’t programmed to care about collateral damage. You can have many casualties or just one.” He barely hesitated. “If you detain me, you’ll render me a sitting duck for a revenge attack after Kimani’s death regardless of my culpability. My blood will be on your hands.”

Sitting in the armchair, Jonah leaned forward. “That’s the end of the recording. He refused to respond to anything else after that.”

Nora rubbed her cold hands together. Despite her comfy pajamas, she felt chilled. Shock and dread had slowed her circulation. It was one thing to suspect a combat android’s presence. It was quite another to have it confirmed. “You did well, Jonah. Mstivoj all but said the android was on-station.”

“He’s scared of it.”

She nodded at Jonah’s observation. “How did they convince him to transport it to Border Station? He could have been lying, but his loathing of Dominic sounded genuine.”

“Perhaps, despite his privateering past, he is still military and this was a direct order. I don’t judge that to be the most credible reason. I believe someone found his pressure points.”

“A mix of threats and bribery. But which threats, and what does he want? If Mstivoj ends up hanging around this region, I’d like to know.”

Jonah hummed noncommittal agreement. He didn’t point out that destroying the combat android was their immediate concern, not the intentions of a former enemy securely locked up on his ship.

“So, Mission Combat Android is a go,” Nora said.

“I’ve programmed the lure for 1:19 a.m..”

“Good. Okay.” They’d already argued back and forth for hours over their plan. They had back-ups for back-ups. Information on how to fight combat androids wasn’t freely available. She wished she could ask the Marine captain from the RC Genghis Khan for advice, but even if she could reach Casimir, it wasn’t the sort of topic that came up in casual conversation. Or maybe it did with Marines?

She shook her head at her thoughts and went to the kitchen to plate up her roast chicken and a fresh salad.

Combat androids usually led—for a certain definition of “led”, remembering that they were functionally kill switches for a suicide squad—teams of men. Which meant they were usually opposed by other teams. Battle was public, or Nora assumed it was. Certainly, stories of combat androids seemed to hit the news when they happened, but with wartime patriotic propaganda, a.k.a. misinformation, who knew what the reporting actually hid?

“Paranoia is a hazan field,” she muttered to herself. Actually, a hazan field’s chaotic dark energy was at least real. Paranoia could have you flinching at false threats. And once you started to doubt what you actually knew, the next stage was becoming too frozen to act.

She sat at the table to eat her dinner, and Jonah sat beside her. Automatically, she put his plate of a chicken wing and stuffing in front of him. Mostly, she ate plant-based protein. She could feed the raw materials of her garden into the bulky food synthesizer and produce the protein, with the biowaste going back to feed her garden.

They anticipated waiting hours for the combat android to discover and react to the lure Jonah had placed in the raw ore dock on the Blue Loop.

The Blue Loop was the balance, the other half, of the infinity symbol framework that contained the Life Loop. The Blue Loop hosted the station’s scrapyard as well as the raw ore dock.

The station’s second, smaller infinity symbol structure crossed at right angles at the center of the first infinity framework and both of its loops provided moorings to smaller spacecraft. The CC Kangaroo was moored on the Gretel Loop. The hub where the two infinity structures met held the station’s power and operating systems, plus its administrative center.

The RC Genghis Khan had to moor at the raw ore dock due to its size. The battlecruiser, like the massive barges owned by interstellar mining corporations, required extra space for maneuvering and alignment.

Nora finished her chicken salad, and Jonah pushed the wing toward her. She chewed on it as she chewed on the problems ahead of them. As much as she hoped their initial tactic of a lure would work, she entertained major doubts.

The doubts were inevitable given the dangerously high number of assumptions that had gone into the construction and placement of their lure.

If they’d had more facts and less guesses, she’d feel more confident.

However, they had rolled the dice, and now they had to let the chips fall.

The mixed metaphor was excusable. Nora wasn’t one for gambling. Life was precarious enough without adding games of chance.

Which reminded her of Cherry’s current occupation as a waitress in a gaming club.

Nora’s resentment at her own life of concealment boiled over. “It’s insane. The royals have all this power simply because they can obliterate things with burrs. They’ve never even done so in anger, only for show. Our whole social structure is based on the threat of blasting things into nothingness. That’s plain wrong.”

“In humanity’s ancient past, when you existed on a lone planet, I read that nuclear weapons served a similar purpose.”

She disposed of the chicken bones in the waste disposal unit and washed her hands. “I read that, too. But it’s not the same. Ancient Earth’s national governments weren’t monarchies, not when they had nuclear weapons, anyway. And anyone could use a nuclear weapon. There was a kind of equality in that.”

Jonah seemed willing to go along with a non-combat android focused conversation. “As an observer, what surprised me about humans was how quickly you forget your past, and when you don’t forget, the history you remember is different to what actually happened. It’s possible both of us, in reading about Ancient Earth, have been misled as to how those living then experienced it.”

He poured boiling water into a teapot and swished it around before pouring it out and spooning in tea leaves.

There were no teabags on the CC Kangaroo. Nora had standards.

She leaned back against the counter, waiting for the tea to steep. Jonah had rightly guessed that tonight she craved the strong brew rather than a mild herbal tea. “Xeno-archaeology is even worse. We craft the best stories we can, on the evidence that has survived, and proclaim those stories the truth.”

“Humans tell their stories to meet current needs. Good, bad or misguided. When those needs change, sometimes you’re trapped by your stories.”

She puzzled over his statement.

He poured her a mug of tea. “I don’t want to change who you are or the nature of your society. But to some extent your royals did that when they changed due to contact with the lens.”

“How did that happen?”

“Honestly, my kin and I are still asking ourselves that question. The lens was stable, until it wasn’t.”

She took her mug of tea and her questions into the lounge, settling on the sofa while Jonah sat in his armchair. “Is it broken? Can you fix it?”

“I can’t fix it. We’re not sure it even broke. I’m…not a person, Nora. The Vapori left my kin and I to monitor this region for the evolution of sentient organic life. They didn’t tell us AIs their intentions. It could be that the lens was meant to interact with organic life.”

“Is it a lens? Does it refract energy from the Origin black hole?”

He hesitated. “It interacts with the black hole’s energy. Your ancestors didn’t intend to exit the rivers to this region. They guessed that the lens prevented them from correcting their mistake and returning to their home world. The seven colony ships sent a team of fifteen from the Palantine ship to investigate the lens. Perhaps if they hadn’t taken seven of the burrs back for study purposes the lens wouldn’t have reacted as it did and stranded them.”

As a xeno-archaeologist trained to study findings in situ, the question nagged at her. “Why did they? Surely it was insanely risky, taking alien artifacts back to their ship?”

“I don’t know why they did what they did. I do know that when they found they could use the burrs, that triggered their alliance with the captains. Suddenly the fifteen Originals were spread across the colony ships. The captains or the captains’ children married them. The captains had the authority of the old world to establish themselves as leaders in the new Human Sector. The Originals contributed the power to hold that position.”

He clasped his hands and tapped his index fingers together. “Despite what your mother may have told you from her family’s stories, the Originals could do more than use the burrs to obliterate things.”

Nora slowly lowered her mug to the coffee table. “More?”

“Two of the Originals, one of whom must have been your ancestor, hid themselves for a reason.” He paused. “They had gained the ability to kill people.”

She frowned in concentration, confusion and doubt. “Not to be rude, but that is what obliteration does. Gone equals dead.”

Sorrow deepened his voice. “They learned to focus the burrs.”

“Like a gun? They—I—can kill people with a burr.” She shuddered. “A gun would be more efficient. Easier to acquire, too.” Her heart wasn’t in the attempt at dark humor.

Jonah shook his head, reluctantly. “It’s more than that, Nora. You can kill a person, but leave their body breathing.”

Chapter 11

Liam felt the surge of energy rippling through the ship. It was an increase in chatter, a slightly faster pace. Good news or bad, the comms officer of the watch had finished the upload of their data to the Border Station mailbox and was about to begin downloading messages and news. After months isolated on patrol, the RC Genghis Khan was reconnecting with the world.

Official messages were first in the queue for downloading. The best encryption Naval Intelligence could provide protected the communications from hackers. So far, they seemed to be staying ahead of their enemies and of the merely dangerously curious. For truly secure communication, messages were transferred in physical form.

Liam wondered what waited for him on Border Station, which they’d reach in two days.

Some time in the last few years of war, he’d lost his faith in the authority he served. The Navy, the government, the King himself, were all fallible. What was worse was when people within those ruling institutions decided things for their personal benefit, and other people paid the price for that ambition with their lives.

But the system was better than chaos. They couldn’t have simply stopped fighting and given themselves over to the Palantines’ demands.

For all his education and experience, Liam’s sophisticated existential crisis had resolved into a simple principle. In an imperfect world, he trusted his friends. Those friends included Crown Prince Francis. Liam knew he wouldn’t always agree with Francis’s decisions, but he respected the man who made them sufficiently to accept them as the best of bad options in complicated circumstances.

If Francis had sent a courier with additional requests for Liam, Liam would do his best to honor them.

Meanwhile, new official orders for the RC Genghis Khan was the first packet of information downloaded from the Border Station mailbox.

In his office, Liam identified himself and used his command codes to open the packet.

“Well, hell.”

His orders had been amended.

“Mines?” Lieutenant Commander Faith Becker exclaimed at the strategy meeting Liam called. “Why in damned stars are we to lay mines? The war is over.”

Casimir had been invited as a courtesy. Marines weren’t involved in the deployment of interstellar space weaponry.

Liam valued Casimir’s tactical expertise. Bouncing ideas off a different perspective was a sensible precaution. Liam was well aware of the risk of groupthink emerging on the RC Genghis Khan in their exile to the border.

“Is this connected to your interest in blaze?” Casimir asked Liam.

“Could be. The orders mention smuggling without specifying what they fear will be smuggled.” They was Navy HQ. “The logic—”

“If that’s what it is,” Claire muttered.

Only his second-in-command could have gotten away with that criticism in a strategy meeting. Complaining about the wrongheaded decisions of the Admiralty was for informal sessions, like mealtime.

Liam understood what had shattered Claire’s usual discipline. “As activity ramps up in the border region post-war, we can’t let smuggling get a stranglehold. A battlecruiser is an overwhelming force in a one-on-one engagement, but we can’t be everywhere. By mining alternate routes, we remove them from the board. The logistical limits imposed by extra distance or hazards means we can constrain ships to specific routes. We identify—create—those bottlenecks, and place mailboxes and probes along them so that we can monitor traffic. That is part of our orders.”

“They’ll hate us,” Faith said. Her they was all spacers.

Claire folded her arms, still grumpy and offended. Hostile. Although her hostility was directed at Navy HQ who were far away and wouldn’t care. “The fact that the RC Genghis Khan’s reputation is in the toilet is undoubtedly why they have us doing this.”

As the Naval Intelligence officer at the meeting, Allison added to the pessimism with her own insight. “Having us lay mines destroys any reputational gains we might have made with Border Station.”

Liam frowned in sudden comprehension. “I hadn’t considered. Word got back to Capitoline that Border Station didn’t hate me.” He ran a hand over his short-cropped hair. “You’re collateral damage. Again.”

Casimir shrugged his big shoulders. “The mines are needed. Someone has to deploy them.”

“Arguable,” Claire countered. “In a crisis, a secondary route to escape or get help might be needed. Shutting those off with mines is near-criminal.”

That would be the spacers’ conclusion, and the RC Genghis Khan and its crew would be present and available to suffer their anger, while the Admiralty, who’d issued the orders, stayed securely on Capitoline.

“We have our orders,” Liam said. “Faith, work out an implementation plan. Locations for the mines. Priorities. Schedule not only the mines’ deployment, but the placement of additional mailboxes and probes. Claire, ask Xavier about the probes. How many do we have, and can he manufacture more? Faith, how many will we need? The mailboxes will be sent out from HQ.”

The mood in his quarters shifted from anger and regret to the tension of professionals set a challenge. Liam approved of that kind of tension. “Don’t focus on the mines. Focus on combating smuggling. The legacy of our time on the border will not be the establishment and growth of large-scale smuggling operations.”

He wasn’t a fool. Small-scale smuggling had been part of space life since the first lunar base back in Ancient Earth times. But large-scale smuggling, with its steady drain of essential resources, could bring down a kingdom. Not on his watch.

Chapter 12

Nora was meant to be sleeping while Jonah, who didn’t need sleep, monitored the station for any sign the combat android had taken the bait he’d dangled.

Unfortunately, sleep was hard to come by when you’d been informed you could “kill a person and leave their body breathing”.

On the bright side, Jonah’s bombshell distracted her from worrying about their trap failing and her and Jonah having to confront the combat android directly.

“Statistically, it’s highly improbable you have the power to do so,” he’d tried to soothe her. “It’s faded even among the royals who breed for their ability with burrs.”

“But you said I was stronger than Crown Prince Dominic in that I could sense the burrs in you and followed that tingle through the Avestan Range.”

“Yes, well, um. The Forgottens’ ability with burrs will have diluted faster than the royals. Being in hiding means lost opportunities to find one another, and possibly, your ancestors wanted to lose the ability.”

She’d hugged herself then. “I can understand why.”

Now, she sat up in bed and hugged her knees. I shouldn’t worry. It’s all hypothetical. It’s not like I can get hold of burrs. Jonah needs his to survive, and I’m not stupid enough to rob the royals for theirs, especially knowing that when the Silicaese acquired the burrs and stashed them away, the process meant the death of Jonah’s kin. I’m worrying about nothing.

Except that what Jonah had terrifyingly described was nothing less than the creation of zombies.

If I had access to a burr, I could destroy an individual’s personality. Obliterate it.

“Fuzzy slimeballs!” Realization struck as to why Jonah had thought to tell her of this ability, now.

What was an android but an artificial version of a zombie? It had no life, no personality, just a terrifying obedience to its master. In the android’s case, that was whoever knew its command codes.

Alone among the royals of the Human Sector, King Olav had ordered the creation of combat androids. According to Jonah, Olav had also been low in burr ability. As was Dominic.

Could they really be compensating for being unable to create zombies by using androids?

Nora dropped back onto her pillow. Yes, yes, they could. Or rather, Dominic could be. Olav was mercifully dead.

She put an arm over her eyes. How awful to be glad a man was dead.

But she wasn’t so much glad as relieved.

Envy could be a terrible curse.

Being the focus of it could destroy a person’s life and that of everyone she loved.

“Nora!”

Jonah’s voice through her comms unit woke Nora from the sleep she hadn’t thought she’d achieve. She checked the time.

3:44 a.m.

Their trap was predicated on the assumption that the combat android would be programmed to achieve Liam’s death as soon as possible.

They had taken a page from Naval Intelligence’s playbook during the war. Jonah had spoofed the RC Genghis Khan’s presence at Border Station. For a lesser hacker, it wouldn’t have been possible. However, Jonah had accessed the station’s register and at 1:19 a.m. he’d had the large mining barge CC Boddington’s details flicker to reveal the details of the RC Genghis Khan.

It was as if, for a few critical minutes, the battlecruiser’s cover had been blown—and hastily restored.

The combat android ought to have been actively scanning the station for any threat against itself, including detection, but it would also be alert for any hint of its target, Captain Liam Kimani.

Nora tore out of bed, grabbing her jacket and boots without pausing to put them on.

She owed Jonah an apology. She hadn’t thought the android would take the bait.

Whereas Jonah had described the stratagem as one of crude elegance.

A battlecruiser was as large as a mining barge. The RC Genghis Khan couldn’t moor anywhere other than at the raw ore dock on the Blue Loop. That meant that for efficiency’s sake, on exiting the CP Coyote, the android ought to have hidden in the vicinity of the raw ore dock. Which meant that the timeframe of it responding to Jonah’s lure ought to be short.

And so, it had proven.

The raw ore dock’s construction wasted no money on viewing glass. To see what ships were moored there one either had to trust the station’s register, scan from one’s own ship, or physically check via a docking tunnel.

Nora sprinted through the CC Kangaroo’s lounge and onto the bridge. “Is it in the docking tunnel?”

Jonah sat hunched over multiple screens, metallic fingers flying across an old-fashioned keyboard. “The docking connection triggered for unidentified weight. But the android retreated within two seconds. I don’t know what spooked it. Maybe its sensors are sharper than I anticipated, and it calculated the air quality to be that of a mining barge rather than battlecruiser. I failed to crush it, but I should be able to get a lock on it.”

She sank into the captain’s chair, studying the screens without touching anything. Crushing the android had always felt like a long chance to her.

Jonah had been in favor of trying this method first since it hadn’t required their physical presence. Thanks to the virus he’d inserted into the station and spaceships docked to it, he had control of the mining barge the CC Boddington. He’d used that control to take over the sensors of its docking connection. If the android entered the tunnel, Jonah would know about it and, if nobody else was present to be injured, which they oughtn’t to be at that time of night, he’d have triggered the collapse of the tunnel.

Docking connections were designed to collapse inward if they failed. Jonah was positive that if trapped and crushed, the combat android’s base commands would trigger its self-destruction. The Palantine royals wouldn’t want their toys in the hands of their enemies. Jonah had estimated that the CC Boddington and the station would survive the explosion of the android, given that it would be contained within the remains of the docking tunnel.

Unfortunately, although the android had taken the bait it had also, swiftly thereafter, taken flight. Something had spooked it, and now it would be on alert.

“We haven’t destroyed the android,” Jonah reported without looking up from the screens. “But this confirms its interest in the RC Genghis Khan, which supports my contention it is in pursuit of Liam. If I can identify which system it is, I can activate the virus I had hitchhike on the station’s broadcast. The problem is the android is unexpectedly good at mimicking the surrounding systems.”

“Systems?”

“Basic systems, like those running an automated cargo handler.”

“Ah.” In effect, the android was digitally camouflaging itself.

“But I have a target time and place. It’s just a matter of running through the possible systems.”

As Nora understood it, the virus was a key. Hacking turned the key and pushed the door open. However, for the key to work, the hacker had to know which door he or she was inserting it into.

Jonah’s fingers froze over the keyboard. “Found it.”

“Good.”

He grunted.

“Not good?” she asked cautiously.

“It will require a modicum of hacking.” After about ten minutes, he added. “You could go back to sleep.”

She debated questioning him regarding his grim tone and decided there was no value in the question. She wasn’t a hacker. She couldn’t understand the challenges involved, let alone help him. All she’d do was distract him. She returned to her cabin, but not to sleep.

Three hours later, after having hit the gym, showered and had breakfast, she ventured back to the bridge.

“Has it tried to approach the CC Boddington again?” Had their ploy held, and did the android still suspect the mining barge of being the RC Genghis Khan?

“No.”

She scowled. “Do you know where it is, physically?”

“Not exactly.”

If they didn’t know where the android was, they couldn’t attack it.

In the best of all options, Jonah would successfully hack the android, and in taking control of it, have it remove itself to a remote section of the station and self-destruct in a contained explosion that hurt no one.

Their task was complicated by the fact that they didn’t want the combat android’s presence on the station on record either before or after its destruction.

Jonah started talking; basically, venting his frustration. “It’s compartmentalized. Think of it as the command codes opening a series of hatches. But there are also time locks that come into play. I’m trying to determine where it is. It’s high risk. I’m uncertain if there’s a self-destruct protocol for it if hacking is detected, but I’m scared there is.”

“Yeah.”

“Thus, unless I know where the android is, I can’t tell if it’s safe to hack-attack it hard.”

Or physically attack it, Nora thought. Maybe it was because she repaired or repurposed technology, but she’d always assumed that in the end destroying the android would come down to a physical confrontation rather than a nice, neat hacktivist takedown.

“I didn’t expect a bio-lock,” Jonah muttered. “The command codes require blood as their second step.”

“Ew.” Conquering her instinctive revulsion, she considered it. “Dominic was still in Capitoline territory when the android was dispatched with Captain Mstivoj on the CP Coyote.” She drummed her fingers against the armrests of the captain’s chair. “Someone else would have had to share their blood. Someone from the royal family.”

Her fingers stilled. Ever so slowly, she drew her hands into her lap and clasped them together. “The bio-lock is the Palantine royal family’s DNA?” Her right thumb rubbed over the pulse point on her left wrist.

“And whatever else swims in their blood,” Jonah responded absently. “I should be able to fool the lock. Blood might be used, but the android analyzes and processes it as digital data.”

“King Olav. He had the androids created. He was obsessed with the purity of his family’s heritage.”

For a few seconds, Jonah redirected his attention from the screens, and possibly from whatever data he was manipulating in his AI mind, to focus on Nora. “I don’t know that it was the past, so much as his ability to live up to his heritage, that obsessed Olav. But you may be right. It might be his skewed thinking that shaped the android and confounds my hacking.”

He turned back to the screens. “I will get in.”

“The RC Genghis Khan arrives in two days.”

Very pointedly, he ignored her. Their deadline wasn’t news to him.

“You have to get me the android’s location,” she said.

“As per the plan,” he began tersely. “When I detected the anomalous weight in the docking connection, I secured the access points to the raw ore dock, while leaving open the exit to the scrapyard. Nothing has tested the access points. The android could be hiding in stealth mode on the dock and waiting to slide out when I release the doors for human workers. However, it is more probable that it fled to the abundant concealment possibilities of the scrapyard.”

“But you didn’t detect it doing so?”

Easygoing Jonah snapped. “I could hardly do so without alerting the android to our plan.”

Nora pressed her toes hard to the floor. They now had confirmation both from Mstivoj and from Jonah’s trick in spoofing the RC Genghis Khan that a combat android was present on the station. In addition, they had tentative confirmation that its default response to stimulation was direct action and that its stealth abilities were excellent.

It had also proven surprisingly unhackable.

That knowledge, employed correctly, might be—had to be—sufficient to contain and destroy the android.

As scary as the Palantine combat androids were, they were flawed. Or if not flawed, then limited. If they weren’t limited, they’d have been produced and deployed in greater numbers and for more complex tasks than serving as mobile kill switches or executioners.

The limit was obvious when you began your analysis of them by comparing them to the civilian androids, which had been commercially produced several times over the centuries since humans settled the region, but which had never caught on.

The problem was one of physical limitations. The human body provided the blueprint for android design. Going bigger than human-size presented challenges in terms of stability, and in the case of the combat androids’ suicide squad duties, hampered the ability to go where the gladiators went.

Other shapes were possible, but to be technical, those forms were robots rather than androids. And weren’t relevant to Nora’s current concerns. It was a combat android she feared being revealed on Border Station.

In the tradeoffs inherent in the design of the combat android, its creators had gambled on greater stealth, brute force, and, as Jonah had learned, protection from hacking. When you added in fuel cells and weaponry, that hadn’t left much room for processing power. The android’s problem solving ability was limited.

That was true of all androids. They simply weren’t large enough to house a complete AI. In civilian models, that lack was met by programming the service androids with routines to meet standard requests.

In combat androids, it meant that a model on the ground and detached from active oversight could be confused.

Nora needed to overwhelm the android with contradictory inputs and demands, or by challenging its commands.

Flawed decision-making killed humans. It ought to lead a lone android to destruction, too.

She had an inkling of an idea. She’d always anticipated that someone would have to physically attack the combat android.

Jonah hadn’t. He’d been confident his hacking could seize control of it.

However, the android’s design had so far defeated him. That sort of defense reinforced lessons learned from other aspects of combat androids’ behavior: they did few things, but what they did, they did well.

“Will it distract you if I talk while you work?”

“Go ahead.”

Nora organized her thoughts, both her incipient idea and the logical grounds for it, as well as the secret she had to conceal. “The royals have always been funny about their blood. Protective of it. I’m guessing the use of burrs to wipe an individual’s personality is part of that. They’re protecting their powerbase. Whatever it is that makes them unique. I’m curious about that unknown aspect of humans using Vapori burrs, but that can wait till you’re less busy.”

He grunted.

She gave a short laugh. “You sound very human male at the moment.” She rubbed her arms. It wasn’t how much humanity he seemed to be taking on that bothered her, but his reaction to her plan. A human who heard it would be angry. She’d be taking all the risk on herself.

“Back when I worked for xeno-archaeological field teams, I was support. I helped them achieve their goals. Fieldwork on icy sulfuric planets was about team survival. I never led. I was never the pointy end of an attack.”

Jonah abandoned the screens to face her.

She didn’t allow his angry stare to silence her. “We’re fairly certain of a couple of things about the Palantine combat androids. First, they were designed by King Olav, or at his command, and his priority was the defense of his family and, given the bio-lock you discovered, he trusted the knowledge and defense of their blood to the androids, too. Or maybe it was the blood and not his family that he sought to protect.”

Jonah slowly resumed his study of the screens and some desultory typing. Much of the analytical aspect of his hacking occurred in his AI energetic mind, anyway.

Nora didn’t grasp how it worked, but comprehension wasn’t necessary for acceptance. Her childhood had instilled pragmatism. Some problems you could solve. Others you accepted, or monitored and moved on. “King Ivan inherited control of the androids from his father, but Ivan is different to Olav. Less crazy. It seems that he has permitted an android to be tasked with the mission of killing Liam to settle his son’s disturbed need for vengeance.”

She ran her fingertips mindlessly over the top seam of the hidden compartment that held her pulse pistol. “Or maybe Dominic’s need to see dead the man who captured him isn’t viewed as irrational by other royals. In capturing Dominic and holding him hostage on the RC Genghis Khan, Liam had an opportunity to acquire a sample of Dominic’s DNA, possibly even blood from a scratch.

“Jonah, it’s incredibly rare for a royal to be captured by an enemy navy. Maybe it’s happened more often than is recorded in our history. Royals do often serve in their navy—and I presume that tradition is so that they are on a protected vessel while out and about with the chance of tingling, of sensing burrs, as I did.”

She slapped the hidden compartment in the chair. “The thing is, in those publicly acknowledged incidents, the enemy captain accepted the royal’s parole. He, or she, accepted the surrender of the vessel the royal was on and allowed the royal to remain onboard it.

“The captain of Dominic’s ship surrendered, but Dominic had previously said, publicly and repeatedly, that he’d never bow his head to anyone less than himself. He’s even claimed that a promise made by a royal isn’t binding if it’s made to a ‘lesser’ person. And that dangerous idiot will be king one day!”

She rose and paced the bridge. “Sorry.”

“Rant away. I’m working while you talk.”

No. She had more discipline than that. Plus, she had to convince him that she was calm and her plan well-reasoned as she laid it out.

Therefore, she choked back her thoughts on how they’d reached this mess. She was certain it was all Crown Prince Dominic’s fault. In fact, she pitied the Palantine captain whose ship he’d been on. The captain’s top priority would have been Dominic’s well-being, as heir to the Palantine crown.

Nora could readily imagine Dominic arrogantly and unrealistically disputing the RP Plymouth captain’s surrender of the Palantine ship, thereby forcing Liam to physically capture it. The pertinent point, brazenly ignored in the orchestrated media coverage of the incident, was that the Palantine captain never resisted Casimir’s Marines taking charge of Dominic. Everyone was trying to keep the idiot unharmed in the middle of a warzone, even if it meant surrendering him to Liam’s ship.

She doubted it had even occurred to Dominic that Liam could have simply killed him.

The RC Genghis Khan had disabled the Palantine ship with crippling strikes to their engines. They’d rendered it a sitting duck. If Liam had disabled his own ship’s comms system for a few crucial minutes, he’d never have received the Palantine captain’s surrender. Liam’s honor saved Dominic’s life, and that of everyone onboard the RP Plymouth.

In return, Dominic wanted Liam dead.

“Just to recap,” Nora said. “We could depart the station before the RC Genghis Khan arrives. We could even leave an anonymous tip for Liam as to a potential combat android attack. But even if we’re not on the station, the fact that the RC Genghis Khan knows I have an android will invite attention. Other people can weather that level of scrutiny. Other people don’t have my secrets. If I leave the station, now, and a combat android does attack, I’ll be running forever.”

“Because you’re Forgotten.”

“Partly.” She had his attention, but didn’t expand on her answer.

At what point do you stop hiding your secrets and fight to be who you are?

When the odds of survival aren’t catastrophically against you.

Nora had to hide. “I’ve refined our plan. I won’t attack the combat android to get its attention. Its current target is Liam. We’re confident of that, now. So, I’ll weave Liam into my story. Liam and the very real opportunity he had to acquire Palantine royal blood.

She was guessing, based on the origins of the Palantine combat androids, what its highest priority would be: protect the blood.

“Think about it. King Olav created the combat androids to defend his family. King Ivan isn’t as ruthless as his father. If he approved the android’s mission, he would have tightly focused it. At minimum, he’s too pragmatic to endanger the peace accords by a splashy act of public slaughter. Royals are accustomed to doing what they wish, but doing so in the shadows. Deniability. Secrets. The android will have been ordered to assassinate Liam. I bet it’s prohibited from large scale casualties.”

Jonah hedged his concession. “Mstivoj believes the android is widely dangerous. But yours is a reasonable deduction, albeit a dangerous one.”

“I’ll add another one,” she said.

He groaned.

“I bet combat androids aren’t programmed regarding eseduce arrays and their underlying science because they’re rarely encountered.”

Electric field assisted extraction methods weren’t economically viable for most metals. Generally, it was cheaper to crush rock and process ore than to invest in and operate eseduce arrays. However, for rare ores like blaze, extracting the blazsvitloium used in fuel cells was not only safer done in situ, but meant much less wastage. Blaze ore was toxic whereas pure blazsvitloium was easily handled. People tended to use blaze to mean both the ore and the pure metal, but they were two very different propositions.

Since finding a blaze ore deposit was every tagger’s dream, Nora had indulged in research regarding eseduce arrays.

“There are three eseduce arrays in the scrapyard here on Border Station. Actually, they’re in the secure storage yard attached to it.

Once the blaze ore on the planet Beaconpit had been exhausted, there hadn’t been another find of the rare ore to haul the arrays out to.

The scrapyard’s owner kept the eseduce arrays in working order. They were power-hungry beasts, but the station had the power, at least for a short burst.

Eseduce arrays weren’t a weapon, but only because of their size and immobility. Anything that needed to be positioned with such delicacy, each panel overlapping the next and angled to concentrate energy beams in a saturating sequence, definitively failed any definition of portable. That didn’t mean the eseduce array wasn’t a weapon. The difficulty was in maneuvering the enemy into its range and holding them there.

From Jonah’s analysis of past fights with combat androids, they were designed to withstand substantial damage, but at a specific point they flipped from absorbing the damage to self-destructing in a manner liable to kill anyone in their vicinity.

Unfortunately, the specific point seemed to vary, which made planning their destruction challenging.

Except for an eseduce array.

Nora waited as Jonah did his own research, blisteringly fast. She knew what he’d find.

Electric field assisted extraction had never been documented as utilized as a weapon.

That was rare for such a powerful method of undoing.

“If we keep it simple, and employ the eseduce array to pull the copper atoms in the android out of position, we ought to be able to disable it before it works out it’s under attack. The thing’s reasoning power is low. It operates according to its programming.”

It could counter magnetic weapons, and while that ability could be overcome by the heavy duty immobile magnets in the scrapyard, the android would be programmed to avoid them. Magnetic weapons had been too common last century to be discounted in its programming.

It was strange how weaponry had fashions to it, even without significant advances in the underlying technology.

Whilst Nora was gambling on the android not knowing to avoid the eseduce arrays, she was gambling even more on her method of attracting it and keeping its interest.

Killing her, eliminating her as a threat, was always an option on the menu for the android.

“I don’t like it,” Jonah said when she’d fully outlined her plan.

But he couldn’t argue that her strategy was better than their original backup plan, if his hacking failed, of luring the combat android to the CC Kangaroo and flying away with it. That plan had more hope and holes in it than it had potential.

“I can’t say I like it, either,” Nora said. “But I can make it work. We can make it work.”

The station’s artificial daylight banished many of the shadows in the scrapyard.

Nora walked down the rows of semi-sorted junk nearest to the raw ore dock. She hadn’t experienced such fear in years. It was as if she was back in the towers and cutting through another gang’s territory. She held her shoulders back, forcing a slight swagger, and hiding her hands in the pockets of her coat. The synth leather hung heavy from her shoulders, but not as heavily as the armored vest she wore beneath it.

The vest was her concession to Jonah’s worries. For herself, she’d have gone without it. After all, body armor couldn’t stop a headshot.

Mentally, she recalled a map of the scrapyard. Its rows were wide, but irregular, and arranged in a diagonal grid pattern. The nearest entrance to the storage yard was a quarter of a mile away, if you flew or could leap the piles of junk. Wriggling through them was dangerously impossible. Running to that entrance would be a third of a mile.

Nora had worn her comfiest boots.

Jonah had taken control of the scrapyard, and especially, its storage yard. He wasn’t actively interfering, not yet. But he would block any recording of what happened if—when—Nora successfully baited the combat android into action. Crucially, he would also jam all signals in the area. Whatever the android learned, it would stay between it and Nora.

She had to exit the yard for Jonah to return the yard’s systems to normal, and for him to know they’d succeeded.

If she didn’t make it out, they’d have catastrophically failed, and Jonah was to disappear in the CC Kangaroo.

Adrenaline crested in her body as she approached the pile of junk that was Jonah’s best estimate as to the combat android’s hiding place. Even if it was somewhere else, hopefully its sensors would pick up her words.

Junk loomed everywhere. Normally, Nora found that reassuring. It represented a treasure trove she could dive into, literally wriggling into wrecks. Her best finds were small, fixable items overlooked by those intent on pillaging wrecks for parts.

But now, it was as if the junk piles had grown hostile eyes.

She spoke quietly. “I know you’re listening. I know you can comprehend what I’m saying. You can reason, for a given definition of reasoning. You decide independently if a mission has failed and a suicide squad must be executed. You trigger their kill switch. So, you can decide if your current mission has to be put aside for more important matters. You have protocols for that.”

She was gambling on those protocols. She was about to attack the android’s core duty. Its protocols would compel it to attempt to communicate her threat to the nearest Palantine military or Intelligence Agency assets with appropriate security clearance. She had to trust Jonah could block all signals out of the yard.

“My name is Nora Devi. I am captain of the CC Kangaroo. I met with Captain Liam Kimani at the Science Club and at the Ye Olde Tea Shoppe on the RC Genghis Khan’s first visit to Border Station. I want to do a deal, and no Palantine official on Border Station has the authority level I require. Are you listening? Captain Liam Kimani held Crown Prince Dominic prisoner on the RC Genghis Khan. I hold a sample of the Crown Prince’s blood.”

The risk—one of the risks in her strategy—was that the combat android’s protocols might prioritize the delivery of that message to such an extent that when it encountered signal jamming in the yard, it would rush off to find another method of delivering its message. Her message. Mitigating that risk, was the fact that she didn’t present as a threat in herself. Her sole weapon was the knife sheathed at her belt. The combat android ought to stay and hear her out.

It stepped out from the row to her right, seeming to materialize out of random junk.

It didn’t strike her, and it didn’t leave the yard. It waited.

The combat android adhered to human conventions with some obvious modifications. It was man-sized, six foot two, but the width across its shoulders barely tapered to its hips, giving it a subtle wrongness that intimidated. Worse was its head. Two demon horns sprouted from its head. It could charge and gore opponents with those hand-length metal protrusions. Below them, its eyes had been replaced by a silver band of visual sensors. It lacked a mobile mouth, which was a convention adhered to with civilian androids. Instead, its voice synthesizer was set behind a grille.

Yet for all its wrongness, Nora had to fight to prevent her own mind from working against her and anthropomorphizing the machine.

It operated on unsophisticated reasoning based on the questionable values coded into it. It had no emotions.

She had to confuse its decision making protocols, not appeal to its non-existent emotions or a capacity for judgement. “Let’s talk somewhere private.”

“Stay.”

She kept walking. Her skin prickled with the awareness of death behind her.

“Stop.”

“I’m not a member of your suicide squad. I don’t take your orders. We can talk in the storage yard and,” keep it casual, weave in the lie, “you can message who I really need to speak with.”

She wasn’t running with it chasing her. Instead, death paced at her heels.

Then it grabbed her shoulder. “You will talk, here.”

She could see the eseduce array. “I don’t have Crown Prince Dominic’s blood on me, and if you torture or kill me, I have time sensitive arrangements that will release the sample to some very interested freedom fighters, the Forgotten, and to the Capitoline military. How I am to be dealt with is a decision above your level, android.” She jerked free.

Or rather, the combat android released her.

She ran because any distance she could get for her next action might be vital. She had places to be and no room for error. She was already chancing all her luck on a few key assumptions.

Tugging down her glove, she sliced the blade across the back of her wrist. As the android grabbed her again, she flung the knife at it in calculated defiance. “Analyze that!”

Casimir and his Marines would have sobbed at her lack of knife skills and chewed her out for throwing away her sole weapon.

The android caught her knife and literally slid it into its abdomen.

Now, Nora could have sobbed—with relief.

Her talk of blood samples had primed the android’s protocols to test any blood on her. Which was better than taking it from her.

“Let me go!” She pushed at the android, suddenly and with all of her weight.

Its arms went up and out.

Nora didn’t hesitate. As it took one crucial step back, she let the impetus of her tackle transform into a dash around the android for the button she’d extended from the control panel of the eseduce array. She slapped it in passing, spun, and faced the android again. “Stay there! You want the Prince’s blood? I want to talk to his father, King Ivan. You have to protect the royal blood at all costs. Secrets swim in it.”

That was what Jonah had said. Secrets swam in the blood of those descended from the Originals, and the royal families of the Human Sector had done their best for nearly half a millennium to concentrate those secrets in their hands. Or literally, in their blood.

The eseduce array was powerful. She just had to tangle the combat android’s protocols long enough to keep it unmoving, uncertain of its next action, listening for what she might say that it could communicate to its masters, and in three minutes the eseduce array would have shifted enough copper atoms to disrupt the combat android and lock it in place.

“King Ivan will want to talk to me. I want to trade the blood for a place on Palantine. Not stuck out on the border. But I have enemies. I’ll need protection.” She babbled on, watching the android. As long as she didn’t move, it didn’t, either.

Please, please, please, let Jonah have jammed signals from the yard as thoroughly as he said he could.

A man called a question to someone in the scrapyard. “How long?”

The combat android strained to move, and merely achieved a fractional forward incline.

It was exactly as she’d hoped.

If her wild plan succeeded, the first sign of it would be in the android’s operating system failing.

The blind band of visual sensors faced her. “What have you done?” Only its voice wasn’t weakened, which was odd. The delicate synthesizer ought to have been one of the first systems in the android to fail as the copper atoms danced for the eseduce array.

It was a machine; a machine that had killed very many people. Yet she pitied it. Irrationally. It was no more conscious than a gun. Nonetheless, she answered it, and she gave it a kind of absolution. “I freed you.”

There was no answer, no movement.

You couldn’t kill something that had never been alive.

Leaving the inert machine behind, she fumbled an earpiece into her ear as she ran out of the yard long enough for Jonah to see her on the active, unjammed surveillance system.

His voice rang clearly, his relief obvious. “Nora.”

“I’m fine. It’s inert, done. Help me get it to the hazardous waste crusher.”

Mission Combat Android wasn’t quite complete.

In the few seconds it took her to return to the eseduce array, Jonah had re-established his remote connection to it and switched it off. While he used a cargobot to transport the combat android to the crusher employed when the scrapyard wasn’t sure of volatile components in a junk pile, Nora removed the extension cord she’d attached to the eseduce array’s control panel. Stuffing it into a coat pocket, she strolled out of the yard, ducking into the office to ask why her comms unit had stopped working for a bit there.

The woman at the counter mimed spitting to the side. “Budget cuts.”

People made up the darnedest explanations for unexpected phenomena.

Chapter 13

The orphanage was a narrow building that stacked high. A low ramp beside shallow steps led up to the entrance. Liam took the steps three at a time. The glass doors remained closed at his approach.

A big, red arrow pointed to an intercom.

Liam obediently introduced himself and stated his business. “Captain Liam Kimani of the RC Genghis Khan. I have an appointment with Principal Garrett.” The appointment was for ten thirty. Liam was five minutes early.

“Please, enter,” a female voice said.

The smudged glass doors opened.

Liam waited, standing at ease, for over a minute. The neutral surroundings of the small foyer could have served for any business, from ship refurbishment to dental surgery, but it would have been a shabby and declining business. The signs of limited money were obvious in the cheap, worn flooring and chairs.

The man who entered the foyer from a side door matched the décor. He wore a gray fleece jacket over a blue shirt. The fleece was cheap and beginning to pill. His black pants were too long, meaning that the legs bunched above unpolished black shoes. His graying brown hair was long, too, but tied back in a ponytail. “Good morning. Captain Kimani? I’m Kyle Garrett. How may I help you?”

Liam noted the lack of invitation to speak privately in the man’s office. On the other hand, they were the sole occupants of the foyer. “I’m afraid I have sad news for one of your children. Aria Kelly introduced herself to me in the Science Club.”

The frown that pinched the man’s chubby face seemed concerned rather than angry. The wariness of his stance relaxed.

“Aria asked me to search for her parents. It seemed an unreasonable request, space being as vast as it is.”

“A non-result wouldn’t bring a busy man like you to the orphanage,” Principal Garrett said.

Liam nodded acknowledgement of the point. “We found the Kellys’ mining barge, and Aria’s parents’ bodies.”

Principal Garrett winced. “As painful as hope is, losing it will be hard for Aria.”

“Indeed. Confirmation of her parents’ deaths may mean an earlier insurance payout, if that helps her prospects at all?”

“I’ll have to check her file. There may be family elsewhere who will take her in now that she can afford a ticket to them.”

Rather than validate that euphemism, Liam remained silent. If the sole holdup to delivering Aria to family was passage to them, the station authorities could have arranged it. A small payment to a ship’s captain would be less than feeding, clothing, housing, and educating Aria.

Principal Garrett would know that distant family came out of the woodwork for money. Someone would be found who wanted guardianship fees, which were significantly higher than welfare. They would take in Aria for that purpose.

It was fostering by another name, covered by the thin veneer of a blood relationship.

Principal Garrett cleared his throat. “Once you’ve filed the wreck notice, I’ll begin the paperwork on Aria’s behalf to release her parents’ estate into a trust for her support and education.”

The man was simply doing his job.

Liam would do his, or rather, he’d do his duty, as he saw it. “I visited in person because I thought you might want me to tell Aria we found her parents’ ship. To confirm their deaths,” he added bluntly as Principal Garrett chewed his lower lip.

“I could call her to my office. You…” The principal didn’t finish the sentence. “I believe I will break the news myself, with Aria’s dorm matron’s assistance.”

Dorm matron. Liam recalled that Nora had called the orphanage a dormitory. Or a barracks. Whatever one called it, Principal Garrett was in charge of it and responsible for its residents. Liam glanced toward the door and escape. “If Aria wishes to speak with me, a call to the RC Genghis Khan while we’re moored will reach me.”

Whatever the future held for Aria, he hoped it improved on the air of resigned inferiority, of ambition beaten out of a person, that reigned in the orphanage’s entrance.

“There will be no need for Aria to bother you, Captain Kimani,” Principal Garrett said, gaining confidence now that Liam seemed to be leaving.

We haven’t laid any mines yet, but he’s wary of me. Liam would check with his senior officers their sense of the station on this, the Genghis Khan’s second visit. It could be that Principal Garrett was reacting poorly to Liam’s authority rather than his media-destroyed reputation.

Or it could be Garrett had something to hide.

Liam set his feet. “I’d like to speak with Aria’s dorm matron.”

“I’m sure I have the details you’ve given me correct…” Garret attempted.

Liam stared him down. “Now.”

“Zoe Peters.” The dorm matron was a late middle-aged woman almost as tall as Liam and definitely wider. Her grip was firm in the handshake she’d initiated. “You have news of Aria’s parents’ deaths?”

Garrett must have briefed her quickly behind the side door, through which Liam hadn’t been invited.

Liam had cooled his heels for sixteen minutes in the foyer. “I do. We found her parents’ mining barge, the CC Marmot, in the Avestan Range. Their bodies were onboard. It wasn’t natural causes. They were murdered.”

In the background, Garrett spluttered a shocked exclamation and some excited chatter.

Zoe Peters merely widened her eyes. Her focus on Liam remained assessing. “Aria is generally a sensible girl, practical rather than clever. But she is hoping for a miracle and her parents’ return. Your news will squash that hope. Are you willing to be the person to tell her?”

“It’s why I’m here.”

She nodded. “Come with me. I’ll call her from school.” She tapped a message on her personal comms unit before glancing at Liam. “Don’t tell her the details of her parents’ deaths.”

“Just that we found the wreck,” he promised. “But the news will get out. A warning that the CC Marmot was attacked has to be shared.”

“Zoe.” Garrett tried to insert himself into the conversation.

“I’ll handle this, Kyle.” The dorm matron led Liam through the back door to a bank of elevators. Garrett stayed in the doorway, but was near enough to overhear her next comment. She didn’t lower her voice. “Kyle is the administrator. I care for the kids.”

As a Navy captain, Liam disliked a model of divided authority. With Garrett in charge of the orphanage’s money and Zoe of the children’s welfare, there would be constant tension. Maybe the orphanage’s governing board wanted it that way.

In contrast to the unwelcoming foyer, the dorm matron’s office was a substantial corner room with a desk under one window, a low sofa and wide armchair, both covered in patchwork throws, and a play rug on the floor. Color bloomed everywhere.

Zoe gestured him to a visitor’s chair by the desk. “That seems your style, Captain. Swing it round.” She sat in the armchair.

A minute later, a young voice called out “Matron Zoe” before they’d even entered the room.

At the sight of Liam, Aria froze just inside the door. She appeared tidy and cared for; her brown hair cut to chin length, and her t-shirt tucked into her pants. She wasn’t to blame for the distressing shade of green the orphans wore.

Zoe patted the arm of the sofa. “Come and sit.”

Eyeing Liam as if he was tiger ready to pounce, Aria edged to the sofa.

As she perched on it, Zoe handed her a large teddy bear that had been leaning lopsidedly against the base of the sofa. “Squeeze tight, Aria.”

Liam took that as his cue. “I’m sorry, Aria. You asked me to find your parents. I found their wrecked ship in the Avestan Range.”

The girl’s wail hurt his soul.

She muffled the wail in the teddy bear’s fur.

Liam and Zoe gave Aria’s grief the respect of silence.

Then Zoe passed her a tissue box.

Liam ventured a question. “The mining barge was empty. Do you know what your parents were searching for?”

Aria froze, face hidden in a tissue. “Ox van.”

Dark vanadinite. A typical enough target for miners on the Hadrian Line.

“I’m sorry there wasn’t any for a payout. We committed your parents’ bodies to the stars.” Liam quoted the words of the familiar spacers’ funeral service. “Our chaplain sent them out with the reminder that they are loved and remembered by their daughter, Aria.”

Aria’s self-control broke. She flung herself at Zoe, who caught her readily and hugged her close.

Liam met Zoe’s teary gaze with a solemn nod. “I’ll see myself out.”

He retraced the route to the foyer.

Garrett watched from the side door, but offered only, “Goodbye, Captain Kimani.”

“Goodbye.”

All air on the station was recycled, but it seemed fresher outside the orphanage, although Aria’s cries haunted him. Rather than return to the ship, he headed for the Science Club, determined to discover if Garrett’s wariness was a station-wide suspicion of the RC Genghis Khan, or due to Liam’s authority trespassing on what Garrett saw as his turf.

Liam suspected Garrett was wrong about that, and that in a conflict, the orphanage’s governing board would back Zoe over Garrett. But governing boards could get things wrong. The Admiralty did.

Those few minutes with Aria had, however, reminded Liam that he didn’t serve to please the Admiralty or advance his own ambition. The vulnerable, the innocent, the hard-working and even the misguided, all needed protection. It was Liam’s honor to serve in the Navy and provide it.

The casual welcome he received at the Science Club reassured him that his crew wouldn’t suffer a hostile reception on Border Station.

Miners had questions about the new map details the RC Genghis Khan had provided for the Avestan Range and the hazan field’s shift into the Arcana.

Liam indulged their curiosity. The details his patrols gleaned and shared might save a ship. He wanted people to think that way.

The excitement of the RC Genghis Khan’s initial visit had faded, but that was all to the good. He trusted his people to behave well. If they could establish some degree of reputation with Border Station, it might counter spacers’ inevitable anger after the RC Genghis Khan’s mine deployment.

Liam ate lunch with Dr. Ben Ueno at the Science Club’s cafeteria. He informed Dr. Ueno of the discovery of the Kellys’ wreck.

People nearby leaned in. Liam hadn’t lowered his voice, although he hadn’t raised it, either. They were curious about the wreck.

“Attacked, you say?”

“Their mining barge was disabled by a ray cannon. Their attackers then boarded and killed the Kellys with pulse rifles.”

Someone muttered a physically impossible fate the pirates should suffer.

“The ship was looted for supplies. Obviously, they didn’t bother destroying it,” Liam finished.

A wiry, old miner, who’d questioned Liam about the Avestan Range, stabbed at his baked potato. “The odds were against anyone finding the wreck.”

Liam agreed. “That was my conclusion. I wish I knew how their attackers found the Kellys.”

By the concerned expressions around the long table, he wasn’t alone in that wish.

Perhaps the local office of the CIB had some idea. But liaising with them was Allison’s responsibility. The intelligence officers from the rival services could duel each other.

Liam strolled through the shopping precinct. His aimless wandering through the Life Loop took him past the Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, which was pure coincidence. He wasn’t looking for Nora, although he was aware that the CC Kangaroo was moored at the station.

Out of habit, he entered a music store and bought spare strings for his guitar. The store manager had Novo-Tro, a reinterpretation of the Troubadour style, playing, which led to a casual discussion of its origins on Esquiline and the latest guitarists to engage with it.

Liam found himself purchasing sheet music he hadn’t intended to buy. He hummed under his breath, appreciating the break from his command responsibilities. Everyone on the RC Genghis Khan was long overdue a month of rest and recuperation. Instead, they’d been sent to patrol the Hadrian Line, and as the lone warship on the border, they lacked a replacement to fill in and allow them downtime. Once they were resupplied, they’d be back out on patrol.

Laying mines, Liam thought darkly.

He pushed the thought aside. He’d given orders that resupply should take a week. He knew his people could do it in half that time. However, a week gave them time to breathe, even if they were breathing station air rather than the freedom of a planet.

It was a captain’s privilege to worry about his crew, but he should have realized they could amuse themselves. Really, he should have worried about himself.

Allison returned from her meeting with the CIB agent on Border Station in a foul mood. “She was aware of our new orders to deploy mines. She passed me her map of where we should place them, and in what order. Like a ground-kisser like her would know!”

Liam abandoned the reports he’d been working through. They were routine, and he tackled them when he wanted to think of other things. If there’d been anything important in the reports, his officers would already have informed him.

Reports were one of the wonders of the Navy. Routine ones were either make-work, holdovers from superseded operations, or butt-covering exercises. Anything important was flagged with the delivery of a routine report, not just in it. By the time a routine report reached Liam’s desk, any issues in it ought to have been dealt with. A captain led: the officers under him managed the ship.

However, other reports served other purposes.

The operational report on their first patrol of the Hadrian Line might need to serve as part of a foundation for a future strategic report, and Liam had composed it with that possibility in mind. Further, he assumed that Francis would read it and pick out the mention of blaze. Controlling the fuel for reaching the Beta black hole was more achievable than the needle in a haystack search for supply bases.

Liam wouldn’t risk messaging Francis unless and until he had something substantial to share.

“Fatima Drake,” Allison all but spat the name of her CIB counterpart, “says Isaac Mstivoj is on-station, but lurking in his scout ship. He hasn’t been seen in a couple of days. She claims she doesn’t know why he’s here.”

“But you have suspicions?”

“It’s obvious. Mstivoj must be a PIA agent.” An agent of the Palantine Intelligence Agency, the CIB’s equivalent. “Privateer would have been a good cover during the war. Now, they’re positioning him as an independent.”

Liam risked Allison’s ire. “Does Fatima Drake agree with you?”

Allison snarled. “No.”

He waited.

“She says she doesn’t know why he’s in Capitoline space, or why he’s alone. As far as she’s aware, he hasn’t reached out to anyone. How would she know? In her own words, ‘Mstivoj is not a priority’.”

“What is?”

Allison pinched her ear. “Rumblings of discontent. The royals aren’t popular on the border.”

“What does that really mean? Border Station is the biggest settlement along the Hadrian Line, and it’s not large enough to support itself.”

The Naval Intelligence agent’s anger evaporated. She gave her ear an extra hard tug, lengthening the lobe. “The station could align itself with someone else. We recently mapped a route through the Avestan Range to Esquiline space.”

“It’s not one the average trader would want to risk.”

Allison shrugged disagreement. “It would depend on the incentive. The other option is meridianam-ward. The station could align with Palantine.”

Liam suppressed his knee-jerk rejection of the idea. Loyalty mattered. But for loyalty to hold long-term, it was better if it went both ways. Through the twelve year war, Border Station had received less and less support from Capitoline. But he doubted Capitoline had lessened the station’s tax bill. “Capitoline will invest out here, again.”

“Some enterprises are already doing so.” Allison flicked the tips of her fingernails against one another, fidgeting in thought. “Fatima’s map of where she thinks we should lay the mines may be more informative than I initially thought.”

A map and a plan could tell them a whole heap of things Fatima wasn’t permitted to literally tell them.

Liam slowly put his suspicions into words, for Allison to confirm them. “It’s not just smuggling routes we’re meant to block with mines. If the first are deployed meridianam of the station, then the idea is to block traffic with Palantine.”

“Despite the claims of mutually beneficial trade written into the peace accord.” Allison smiled a twisted, defeated smile. “Obviously, it would be the RC Genghis Khan that blocked harmonious relations with Palantine. We’re already the bad guys in that story.”

Liam frowned at the abandoned reports on his desk. “Find out. Find out if Palantine could want Border Station—and why Isaac Mstivoj is here.”

Chapter 14

Nora strolled into the bazaar with Jonah trudging behind her, very obviously android.

He was giving an award-winning performance, imitating the incurious, amiable actions of a retro-gen android, as he towed the cart loaded with the automatons Nora hoped to sell at her stall.

As early as they were, the coffee stall on the corner of the aisle was open and had a queue of three.

One of the three was still drunk from a night of celebration. “Wotcha, gray man.”

Jonah halted. “Good morning, sir.”

Nora grinned. “I brought an android to help with my stall. I’ll be back for coffee and donuts once I’m set up.” I not we. She didn’t want anyone thinking too hard about Jonah’s nature.

The stall she’d leased for the day was a plain rectangle enclosed on three sides. Her neighbors today included a fortuneteller between Nora and the coffee stall, with a cobbler sharing Nora’s left wall and a candymaker her right. Nora had paid extra to be near a candymaker. The sweet scent would lure people in.

The cobbler was busy laying out her stock, but the candymaker paused in setting out jars to stare at Jonah. “What in the stars?”

“A retro-gen android,” Nora said. “Not an automaton, which is what I’m selling, but near enough that I thought it’d be good advertising. Plus, it helps with the loading and unloading. Jonah, set up the tables, one along each wall, the way I told you on the ship.” She tacked on the last bit to cover up if Jonah used his initiative.

“Well, I’ll be jiggered. As soon as I’ve got my first batch of candy started, I want to see.”

The woman’s interest answered Nora’s question of whether to hide Jonah inside the stall or not. She’d position him at the front of the stall near the candymaker.

By the time Nora had set out her automatons and indulged the candymaker, Ursila’s, curiosity regarding Jonah, she was confident enough to leave Jonah at the stall while she ducked down the aisle for coffee.

Jonah’s presence as a retro-gen android proved a strong attraction.

Norah had sold two automatons even before the RC Genghis Khan’s chief medical officer and another woman wandered up. “Hi, Brielle. You’re out early.”

“Not as early as you. You look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

“It’s disgusting,” her companion mumbled. Sunglasses covered her eyes.

Brielle laughed. “Nora, meet Claire. Commander Claire Stanimir, meet Captain Nora Devi.”

Greetings were exchanged. The two women seemed to ignore Jonah’s presence, if you overlooked the fact that Claire positioned herself so that she could watch him demonstrate a soft shoe shuffle to the cobbler and a customer wanting new buckles on his tapdancing shoes.

Brielle wandered off to browse the cobbler’s colorful slippers.

Claire stayed. She leaned her butt against a table. “I’m too old to celebrate shore leave like I used to.”

“They sell coffee five stalls down,” Nora said, not unsympathetically.

“I’m already swimming in it. Besides, you should be grateful I’m here.”

Nora hesitated in winding up a clockwork caterpillar to inch along the tabletop. “Why?”

“Because while I’m here, the crew won’t overwhelm you with their curiosity.”

Nora watched the caterpillar inch away. “Is this the idea I’ve heard before that Captain Kimani is interested in me?”

“Yup.”

“All because of one cup of tea? Xavier was there, too. You lot are seriously bored, meddling matchmakers. But I’ll leave Liam to stomp out the stupid rumor.”

A slow smile curved Claire’s mouth. “Liam.”

“Oh, for stars’ sake!”

Claire laughed before wincing and massaging her temples. “Maybe there isn’t anything between you. No spark. Whatever the situation, you’re right. It isn’t any of our business. But…”

“There’s always a but.”

“I think it’s fair you understand why our people won’t let this go.” Claire straightened despite her hangover. “Captains of battlecruisers are rare. They’re the closest we’ve got to the old colony ship captains. If we had to, RC Genghis Khan could last a year without contact. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but we’d survive.”

She faced Nora, although her sunglasses still hid her eyes. “Liam’s position is like that of an ancient feudal lord or a gangster boss. He’s a man who directs violence to tear down or protect. If he enters into a positive personal relationship, it means he’s investing in the future. That is a cause for hope for the people who follow him.”

Claire sighed. “Liam is a private person. The media furor around Crown Prince Dominic reinforced those tendencies. Sharing afternoon tea with him might seem like a small thing to you. To us, it was a sign of hope. You will be overrun by the curious.”

Nora thought back to some of the people wearing civvies but suspiciously upright with engrained military bearing. She’d been thinking they’d been drawn in by Jonah’s presence.

“Just so you know.” Claire ambled away in the direction of coffee.

Her departure was undoubtedly hastened by the whooping arrival of two children, bursting ahead of their parents. They, at least, were undeniably attracted by Jonah’s presence—and by the sweet scent of candy.

“What are you?”

“Are you a Mr. Robot?”

“Do you have to wear clothes?”

The children’s mom blushed.

Jonah responded to the children’s questions with the amiable, tireless patience of the retro-gen android he appeared to be.

“Are you strong?”

“Can you lift me?”

Nora intervened. “No. Jonah isn’t a toy.”

The little girl scowled at Nora before spinning to face her father. “I want candy!”

“And I want coffee, but we’re walking down three aisles before we buy any food, remember? This is aisle two.”

“No.” The little girl pouted.

“No!” her even littler brother screamed.

Their mom spoke in a no-nonsense, no-negotiation voice. “Behave, or we’re going straight home.”

The boy immediately caved. He patted Jonah’s knee. “I like you, Mr. Robot.”

“I like you, too, Mr. Boy.”

The kid laughed hysterically. “Daddy’s a mister. I’m Matty.”

The girl took longer to concede defeat, but the glaring match with her mom finally ended. She grabbed her mom’s hand. “Let’s go!” Clearly, if candy required marching down three aisles, the girl was prepared to march.

“You need new slippers.”

“Moooooom!”

Nora was relieved to see those non-customers disappear into the stall next door. She could still hear them, though.

As the morning progressed, she learned the downside to being adjacent to a candy stall while in possession of a novelty like an android. The parents were interested in Jonah, but their children’s interest was hyped up either from a gluttonous consumption of sugar or the feral need to consume the candy. All the candy. Their voices were high-pitched, and they scrambled over Jonah, smearing him in sugar and germs.

Other children arrived without parents, wearing the “froggy” orphanage uniform of green t-shirt and pants. They were every bit as interested in Jonah, but more reserved than the luckier children who hadn’t learned that life didn’t revolve around them.

Nora hated seeing the difference.

She hated, too, how the uniforms identified them, and parents and children treated them differently. The orphans were a physical reminder of how precarious happiness and security could be. She spied Aria among them, but the girl lingered at the back of the group, ducking away from Nora’s stare.

Nora handed the two leaders of the group some money, and sent them next door for candy.

In between the juvenile onslaught, she discovered the accuracy of Claire’s warning. The crew on leave from the RC Genghis Khan did drop by to study her. Jonah’s presence was simply a flimsy excuse for conversation.

As for Jonah, he handled the chaos better than she’d feared.

She checked on him frequently, although they’d agreed a code.

If the bazaar became too much, he’d sing the Clockwork March. When she heard that nursery rhyme, she’d order him back to the ship. If he didn’t think he could handle going back alone, he’d salute in response to the order, and she’d amend it to say she’d return, too, closing the stall for an hour while she grabbed some new product. The automatons were selling well enough that she had spare table space where she could display mineral specimens as new, different stock.

So far, he hadn’t burst into coded song, but she still worried. This had to be a shock for him after eons alone in space.

“Hi, Nora.”

She spun, surprised at the quiet greeting and by her own recognition of the voice. Even before turning, she knew it was Liam.

Her excuse was that he was on her mind due to his crew’s visits.

Said crew had drawn back, now, but Nora didn’t make the rookie error of thinking they were gone. They’d be observing from hidden vantage points.

“Hi, Liam.”

He smiled. It was a great smile, one faintly surprised and delighted at her recognition or perhaps at her use of his first name. To most people he was Captain Kimani. He hadn’t managed to shed his air of authority, although he wore a t-shirt and jeans, as casual as anyone else in the crowd. Possibly that signaled that his authority wasn’t merely a product of his rank, but a measure of the man.

His discipline and decency commanded respect.

She’d always had a weakness for strong men, where strength was defined as steadiness of purpose. The problem was they were generally either partnered up or too committed to their purpose for a relationship to flourish.

Not that she was looking for a relationship.

She blamed her sense of connection to Liam on saving his life. Even if he didn’t know it, she’d risked her life for him. Well, for him and to maintain her and Jonah’s low profile. Thank goodness that by some miracle they’d destroyed the combat android. The risks she’d taken had been ridiculously high.

“I visited the orphanage, yesterday,” Liam said. “I told Aria of her parents’ deaths.”

He could have delegated the responsibility. Instead, he’d stood witness to heartbreak. He’d delivered the killing blow to the hope that persisted when someone was missing presumed dead rather than confirmed dead.

Doing so would have stirred up his grief for Navy personnel lost in the war and the families who mourned them.

Death wasn’t just an ending. It changed the lives of the living.

She touched his arm. “Thank you, Liam. In case no one thanked you on Aria’s behalf. It matters that you respected her grief enough to tell her in person.” She broke the moment by rearranging the automatons on her table. There was one last flower clock tucked out of sight. She brought it forward. “Have you been into the guitar stall four aisles down? They don’t sell guitars, but they sell everything else. Socks with guitars. T-shirts with guitar jokes.” Her gaze lingered on how Liam’s t-shirt molded to his chest and shoulders.

“You know I play the guitar?”

She felt her face heat with embarrassment. “Your people mentioned it when they visited my ship.”

He smiled. “They mentioned to me that Casimir freaked at the sight of your android. It probably didn’t have kids dangling off it at that point.”

A five-year-old had clambered onto Jonah’s shoulders, and Jonah steadied him there while answering the father’s questions. “Yes, sir. I can mix any cocktail in my database.”

Nora lowered her voice. “People ask Jonah the strangest questions. I can pick out the military and former military among the crowd. They’re the ones who, like Casimir, assess him as a threat. A few compliment me on having an effective guard.” She grinned as the father collected the boy and wandered off. “They’re wrong. I’m the one who deals with thieves.”

A group of giggling and rough-housing young teens froze in playing with the remaining automatons.

Nora winked at Liam. “The candymaker next door sells high-priced thief fingers from under the counter. I’m one of her suppliers.”

After a moment of stunned horror, the children exploded into laughter. As one, they charged next door.

Liam blinked.

“They weren’t going to buy anything from me. But Ursila will make some sales.”

“You’re good at this.”

She picked up his meaning. He hadn’t seen her sell anything, but it was obvious she fit into the bazaar. She was at home here, whilst he was a visitor. “I grew up running errands in a market. I like the energy. I’d grow restless if this was all I had, but as a side hustle, it’s entertaining.”

“Entertainment.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “The market goes on into the night.”

“Not for me. As fun as this is, I’m closing up at five.”

“Five.” He peered sideways at her, coughed, then faced her directly, hands out of his pockets. “There’s a dueling fiddles contest, tonight. It starts at eight. Would you be interested in dinner and listening to the violins with me? I could help you pack up the stall, if that would help?”

“I can manage the stall.” That wasn’t why she hesitated. But one date wasn’t a commitment. It wasn’t an investment in a relationship. “I’d love to have dinner with you.”

He smiled that great smile. “I’ll pick you up from your ship at six thirty.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

She bumped him with her shoulder as she passed. “I have to serve a customer.”

“Okay.”

But they both paused for a second, frozen in a moment of mutual awareness of each other’s proximity.

She could smell the faint ocean-inspired scent of his cologne, layered over male pheromones. She wanted to lean in. Instead, Nora moved past him to greet the elderly customer in fraying jeans and a flannel shirt examining an alarm clock.

After a few seconds, and after catching her attention to nod good-bye, Liam departed.

A few seconds after that, Casimir materialized out of nowhere to grin at her.

She stared suspiciously at his back as he strode away. In the opposite direction to Liam.

Was Casimir watching Liam, her, or Jonah?

Back on the CC Kangaroo, while Jonah stowed away the tables and remaining stock, Nora asked herself a very important question. “What do I wear to a dueling fiddles contest?”

Her wardrobe wasn’t extensive, which simplified the question of what to wear. This was a date, so she’d wear a dress. She had an all-purpose, from funerals to galas, little black dress. She pushed it aside. The other dress was a boho-style turquoise, sand-brown and white flowing gown with a plunging neckline. Accessorizing was easy. Brown western boots, her interlocking silver hoops belt, silver earrings and her turquoise pendant.

Studying herself in the mirror, she felt feminine and powerful.

The last thing she expected was to walk out of her cabin, into the lounge, and be greeted by Jonah’s disappointed, “Oh no.”

The happy butterflies in her stomach died. “‘Oh no’, what?”

“We may have a problem.”

“I’m guessing it’s more serious than how I’m dressed.”

He gaped at her. Freed of the need to fake his android-ness, Jonah’s mannerisms were increasingly, unthinkingly, human. “Your dress? What’s wrong with you dress?”

“Nothing.”

He shook his head in bemusement before refocusing. “Captain Mstivoj bought Cherry’s indentured service contract.”

Nora dropped onto the sofa so hard she bounced. “What? No. NO.” And when he didn’t answer. “It could be a coincidence?”

“It’s my fault.”

The regret in his voice brought her out of her panicked dread. “Whatever Mstivoj has done, it’s on him. And we could be overreacting.”

“We’re not. Although I don’t know the extent of what Mstivoj knows or suspects. We released him yesterday.”

She nodded.

“But he didn’t emerge from his ship for hours. I’m actually guilty of two oversights. I didn’t monitor what he was doing in his ship. I assumed he was restarting and checking its systems.”

“Because you’d released them back to his control. That makes sense. I guess I assumed the same.”

Jonah stared at his feet. “Except that I think Mstivoj utilized the time to go through station news and accessible recordings to flag any anomalies in the previous couple of days. He must have found the blackout in the scrapyard’s surveillance on Thursday.”

When they’d defeated the combat android.

“I controlled the scrapyard’s surveillance system, but I forgot about the possibility of powered down machines in the yard, especially in the storage yard, retaining sufficient power to monitor their environment. I scanned the yard’s surveillance records for Friday. Around midday, Mstivoj crawled into a hopper. It was on the route by which you led the combat android to the eseduce array. After seventeen minutes in the hopper, Mstivoj departed the yard, returning directly to his ship.”

“He ran facial recognition on me,” Nora said.

“Presumably. I’m sorry.”

“We could swap blame on this one. I should have worn a mask.” She cut herself off. It wasn’t Jonah’s fault that she’d, lazily, relied on his hacking to protect her identity. Saying that his proficiency was why she’d failed to take basic precautions to conceal her identity would only worsen his sense of guilt. “So, Mstivoj identified me and investigated my background.” She fell silent. “He went hunting for variations in my pattern of behavior and found my meeting with Cherry. It was a loose thread to tug on.”

Jonah nodded. “I tapped into the gaming club’s surveillance system, as well as the station’s. Mstivoj flirted with Cherry throughout her shift. He bought her drinks.”

“Club policy would be not to drink them,” Nora said. “But Cherry is young. Mstivoj is older, but not too old. I’ve seen his photo. He’s a handsome jerk.”

“She stayed after her shift ended, and got drunk with him. They went back to his ship together.”

Nora paced. “She may still have been angry at me, for all that she sounded accepting of my decision. Lost, scared. Facing the future as a slave. Add that to alcohol, sex and a ruthless man. What secrets might she have told him?”

“At least one,” Jonah said grimly. “Mstivoj sent you a message via the CC Kangaroo. I didn’t read a private message.”

She slapped at the air, dismissive. “I don’t care about privacy right now. What did it say?”

Jonah called up the message on the viewscreen.

Mstivoj had gone full audio-visual. He smirked at the camera. “Nora Devi, aren’t you the interesting one. I thought you’d want to know. I’ve bought your sister’s contract.”

Sister.

He knew. The former privateer knew she was related to Cherry. The secret their mother had drummed into Nora to keep was out there, in the hands of a criminal. A clever criminal with a grudge against her. Locking a man in his ship, seizing control of that ship, was not an offense a man like him would forgive.

But knowing that Cherry was Nora’s half-sister wasn’t the important part of the secret.

Even drunk, Cherry had to have known better than to confide the essential truth of her nature to him.

“We’ll have to work out a deal for you to see Cherry,” Mstivoj continued smugly. “I would hate for her to be forgotten.”

His emphasis on the last word erased any hope Nora had held onto that Cherry had kept her mouth shut.

Nora slapped the sofa cushion.

“We can discuss what you find when you’re out tagging. Such an expensive pursuit, unless one has influential backers. Ones with a very particular interest.” Very slurred into burr-y. Mstivoj bared his teeth. “I’ll call you.” His message ended.

“Holy ducks.” Nora stared at the blank screen. “He’s insane. Mstivoj thinks the royals funded me as a Forgotten to come out here and find burrs.”

“It’s a logical assumption.”

She began laughing hysterically.

It was painfully, ironically funny, and she wasn’t about to tell Jonah why.

“He’ll try to use Cherry in the same way,” Jonah predicted. “She’s a two-for-one bonus. He thinks to use her to control you. If she can also find a burr for him, he has a major find to present to his king.”

“King Ivan.” Nora clutched her stomach as muscles ached with despairing laughter. “What a screw up.”

Jonah eyed her worriedly. “Liam is at the docking connection.”

“Liam?” For a moment, the name had no meaning. “Liam.” Nora took a deep breath, but her exhale was rushed and shaky. “I can’t.”

But she stood.

“You could,” Jonah said. “Mstivoj isn’t going to attack you.”

Nora barely heard him. She opened the hatch and strode down the docking tunnel.

Liam’s smile died as he saw her expression. “What’s wrong?”

She wiped a hand under her eyes. Had she cried tears of hysterical laughter and smudged her makeup? Her fingers came away clean. “I’m sorry. I had some unexpected news.”

“Is there anything I can help you with?”

She smiled faintly. “You’re a good man, Liam.” She closed the distance between them, put a hand on his shoulder, and kissed him lightly on the mouth.

His hand at her waist stopped her retreat. “Is being a good man the same as nice guys finishing last?”

The wry question almost drew another sad smile from her. “No. It’s about me letting go of a dream I shouldn’t have dreamed.” It wasn’t just that she didn’t want a relationship. She shouldn’t have risked letting even a thread of his life weave with hers. They were too different. Even more different than her and Ethan.

Ethan had been a stinger pilot in wartime. Like Nora, he’d never dreamed of a future. The time they’d stolen together had been their focus.

Liam was different. He wanted a future. He’d build one, too.

“Nora?”

She stepped back, and he let her go. “Good-bye, Liam.”

He didn’t answer her.

She walked back along the docking tunnel and closed the hatch behind her. For a couple of minutes, she leaned against it and simply counted the seconds. No thought. No emotions. One second after the other, and you could survive anything. The universe kept ticking, and you picked up the new pattern of your life and found a way through.

“I’m sorry, Nora,” Jonah said when she entered the lounge.

She kept on walking to her cabin. “Don’t be. Get me control of Mstivoj’s ship, again. We’re rescuing Cherry.”

Chapter 15

“Mstivoj has left the station,” Jonah said when Nora joined him on the bridge. She’d changed from her pretty date dress to a sweatshirt and utility pants. “The CP Coyote departed an hour before his message to you was sent. He had it on a timed release, and sent it from a public terminal in the Science Club. Risky. I’ve wiped the terminal. I’m also forcing a virus into anything in the scrapyard capable of receiving a signal. It will wipe the machines’ systems for the last week.”

“Cherry is with him?” Nora asked, hearing but caring less that Jonah had belatedly covered her and the combat android’s tracks.

“There is no record of her leaving the ship. If I’d continued monitoring Mstivoj—”

“Don’t go there. We took down the android so that we could continue to go our own way, unnoticed by others. Involving yourself in their games by monitoring them was the opposite of our goal of simple, solo existence.”

He sighed. “Liam—”

“Is in the past,” she said firmly. “Focus on Mstivoj. Even if he left the station hours ago, he’ll be within comms range. You have the virus in his ship—”

“He purged it. Or I’m assuming he did. I’ve lost control of the CP Coyote. Also, he’s refusing any and all comms, even those from the station, so I can’t sneak another virus into the ship’s system.”

“Which means he’s free to act as he likes. To go where he likes.” She frowned unseeingly at the screens. “We’ll have to track him physically, or we’ll lose Cherry.”

Jonah gripped her shoulder.

He so seldom touched her—she was so seldom touched by anyone—that it shocked her silent. It also froze her angry, jumbled thoughts.

“Nora, I can locate ships far beyond the range of human technology. We won’t lose Cherry.”

Her breath shuddered out of her, as if he’d literally given her breathing space.

He patted her shoulder. “Your anger and fear are understandable. Being human is not easy. Before, I was an observer. Now, I act, and my actions have consequences. This state of existence is a responsibility I hadn’t fully comprehended. Maybe my kin were wise to remain as observers. My…learning curve is steep, and others, like you and Cherry, pay for my hubris. I have waking nightmares when I recall you facing a combat android alone. So many things could have gone wrong.”

She struggled with her response.

Jonah always interacted carefully with her: never pushing his concerns ahead of hers; always respecting her space, be it physical or emotional. He wouldn’t be sharing his existential crisis now unless doing so somehow helped her.

“You want me to stop and think,” she said.

“Yes. For all the knowledge I possess, I lack your experience. I would have preferred to take down the combat android remotely, safely, via hacking. Instead, you had to risk yourself. I find I cannot judge the balance between risk and reward. We succeeded. You succeeded. But if it had been solely my decision, I would not have risked you.”

“The alternative would have been us going on the run. If an android had assassinated Liam, the RC Genghis Khan’s officers would have looked at me because of the android connection, and I can’t risk that scrutiny.” She huffed a deeply unamused laugh. “Instead, I have a Palantine privateer’s attention. Star dust it all.”

She slapped her thighs as if the physical assault could slap some sense into her. “I didn’t rush our resupply. How ready are we for departure?” She was talking to herself, calling up lists and readouts.

Jonah answered a different, related question. “Investing a few additional hours in the station would be worthwhile. Proximity helps my hacking. I can access data from a distance, but affecting computer systems requires human technology, and that means, it has human technological limits.

If you had an expert—and Jonah was an expert hacker—and you ignored their advice, you were an idiot.

“Overnight?” she asked him.

“Yup.”

Which meant she had a few hours to formulate a strategy. Nora had told Cherry they weren’t family. But family or not, Mstivoj was a dastard to have lured a drunk girl aboard and flown off with her.

And not even because he liked Cherry—although that wouldn’t have been any justification for his actions, anyway. But still. Cherry was a pawn in the game he wanted to play with Nora.

“He wants the burrs.”

“Go,” Jonah said. “I know I can multi-task, but your emotional turmoil—being angry, being scared, wanting vengeance—requires too much of my attention. If you want to leave early in the morning, let me concentrate.”

Being slapped with commonsense hurt, but it worked. Sitting here, complaining, wasn’t achieving anything beyond distracting him from a useful, concrete task. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”

“Okay.” His curt agreement was a dismissal.

Nora delayed a few minutes longer, but in silence. She forced herself to think like the captain she was and double-checked her stores and every aspect of her resupply. Fortunately, the CC Kangaroo’s operating system simplified the process for her. Really, all she had to change was the number of crew.

If, when, they rescued Cherry, they had to flee. The CC Kangaroo needed to be able to support two people, not just Nora. She set the parameters for a three month journey. That was sufficient time to reach another outpost or hide somewhere in the inner realm, the settled zone.

Since she routinely over-stocked the ship, the system quickly flashed green. The CC Kangaroo had sufficient supplies onboard, including fuel cells, for whatever they encountered.

Except violence.

As Casimir had said, if she had to engage in a fight, she’d already lost. The CC Kangaroo was a scout. It wasn’t fitted for combat.

She practically tiptoed out of the bridge.

The Marine Captain had advised her to invest in stealth. Be fast, be unseen.

Would Mstivoj expect her to come after him? Was that his plan? Did he hope she would?

She slammed the fridge door.

What was she thinking? She couldn’t defeat a pirate in a space battle.

She dumped leftover meatloaf and roast potatoes on a plate to reheat. Despite all the turmoil, she was starving. It had been a long day at the bazaar, and she’d expected to eat dinner with Liam, so she hadn’t snacked on market food through the afternoon.

The rosemary on the roast potatoes went unappreciated as she became locked into playing out scenarios in her mind.

They had to rescue Cherry, but Mstivoj had left the station. They couldn’t knock at the hatch of the CP Coyote and demand her freedom.

Besides, legally, he hadn’t kidnapped Cherry. He’d bought her indentured service contract, which meant he owned her. If Nora attempted to extract her, that would be illegal.

But legality and morality could be in conflict and you had to choose one or the other.

“This is your fault, Maya,” Nora said to their dead mother. “You shouldn’t have told them about me. This is your fault. You propped up that waste of space, Scott, and Cherry grew up like her sister and brother, believing that someone would always rescue them from their actions. That, like Scott, someone would buffer them from life. You shouldn’t have told them about me!”

Nora’s knife and fork clattered onto the empty plate.

Maya was dead. The only person Nora could truly blame for recent events was herself. I shouldn’t have met with her. With Cherry.

But she had, and as Jonah had said, every action had consequences.

Pushing aside her plate, she rested her elbows on the table and pressed the heels of her palms to her cheekbones, her hands covering her eyes.

All her bluster couldn’t cover one incontrovertible conclusion: she couldn’t assume the burden of Cherry’s fate. The cost was too high.

Jonah had just admitted that while he could passively track data in a vast range, affecting the real world required him to use human technology, and that had limits.

Currently, the crucial limit was that with Mstivoj away from the station, and on alert to repel an attack on his ship, there was no peaceful means of retrieving Cherry.

The easy option of Jonah hacking the CP Coyote, disabling its weapons system, and holding Mstivoj hostage till he transferred Cherry to the CC Kangaroo wasn’t on the table.

Instead, Cherry would have to be retrieved by force, and Nora and her scout ship were no match for a former pirate in a sting ship. It would be suicide to attempt it.

Even if Nora miraculously survived a space battle—which in itself would risk Cherry’s life—and boarded the CP Coyote, if she confronted Mstivoj face to face…

“I couldn’t kill him.”

That was the bar to every scenario Nora ran. She couldn’t kill.

Maybe if someone was a direct, immediate threat to someone she loved, she could kill then. Maybe. She wasn’t certain she could kill even in self-defense. She had a lurking fear that she’d freeze.

She sensed Casimir had seen that in her. When she’d asked how she could better protect herself and her ship, he’d advised she run and hide.

She wasn’t prey. But she wasn’t a predator, either. The pulse pistol and rifles were on the CC Kangaroo because they’d been there when she bought the ship and its contents. She’d even locked away the knife she’d worn when confronting the combat android.

Given their inability to peaceably hack the CP Coyote’s operating system, if she and Jonah attempted to rescue Cherry, Nora would risk both their lives, plus Cherry and Mstivoj’s, in the conflict.

Was Cherry’s freedom worth anyone’s death, even Mstivoj’s? In all the news Nora had read involving him, his reputation had been that hostages were safe with him. He’d been reported as saying that damaged goods paid out less. It was an effective justification that didn’t disguise the crucial fact that Mstivoj didn’t hurt anyone needlessly.

Hunched over the kitchen table, Nora confronted the harsh logic which kept being clouded by emotion.

Cherry had chosen indentured servitude. She’d gambled on Nora saving her from it. Cherry’s gamble did not make Nora responsible for her. That Mstivoj had drawn Cherry into his schemes still didn’t, technically, mean Nora owed her half-sister a rescue.

For that matter, nobody was going to rescue Nora from the consequences of Cherry’s actions. Cherry, by telling Mstivoj of her and Nora’s status as Forgotten, had given Mstivoj a powerful weapon to wield against Nora.

The threat was so powerful that Nora would have to run. Regardless of what she decided to do about Cherry, Nora couldn’t remain where Mstivoj or his allies could find her.

And if she wasn’t prepared to kill him to protect her own freedom, why should she risk doing so for Cherry?

In some situations, there were no good answers. Whatever choice Nora made, it would haunt her.

But then, she was already haunted by ghosts from the future: her fears of what could come to be.

No child of hers would be born into slavery, a product of the royals’ breeding program with the Forgotten.

What about Cherry’s kids? Nora’s potential nieces and nephews? Were they worth confronting Mstivoj for?

“We’ve got company!” Jonah called from the bridge.

“Who?” Who would he bother warning her about? Had Liam returned?

In answer, as she entered the bridge, the nearest screen showed an image of the person at the CC Kangaroo’s docking connection. As Nora watched, they put a small hand to the intercom button. Their chest heaved twice as they looked back over their shoulder, then resolutely forward. They pressed the button.

“She was followed,” Jonah said.

Nora halted mid-step. She glanced back at the screen and at a new image. Further back on the dock, a woman hesitated. Even as Nora watched, the woman started forward.

“Roo, open the hatch,” Nora ordered the ship’s operating system.

By the time she reached the open hatch, her unexpected visitor was dancing from foot to foot in the docking connection, but not entering. It was a courtesy spacers gave one another. Only friends and family entered a spaceship unescorted.

Nora was relieved to see that the other end of the docking tunnel was sealed. Jonah must have done so; shutting out the unknown woman.

“Hello, Aria,” Nora said.

“Captain Devi. Ma’am.”

Any temptation to smile at the girl’s good manners was prevented by Aria’s evident nervousness. “Come on in and tell me why you’re visiting.”

It was only three steps, but Aria appeared to dash into the safety of the CC Kangaroo. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“Nora will do.”

“Yes, Captain Nora.”

The compromise would do. Nora ushered the girl into the kitchen, hastily cleared away her dirty plate, and put a glass of milk and plate of cookies on the table before pouring herself a mug of coffee. She sat at the table at right angles to the girl. “How can I help you?”

There was no good reason for a nine-year-old child to be out at this time of night on the station. Admittedly, the station’s lighting made it twilight rather than full dark, but the orphanage ought to care for their children better than this. And whoever the woman was who’d followed Aria, the girl had been frightened rather than bolstered by her presence.

Aria sipped her milk, studying Nora over the glass. “You’ve been to the Avestan Range.”

“I have.” Nora kept her voice gentle, her problems shoved aside to deal with a child’s heartbreak and whatever trouble had followed her through the station to the CC Kangaroo. “But I didn’t see your parents’ ship. I’m very sorry, Aria.”

The girl crammed a cookie into her mouth.

Nora approved. Food was better than tears. “Captain Kimani might look scary, but he’s a good man. You can talk to him while he’s on-station. No?” Aria was shaking her head vigorously. “Why not?”

“I lied to him.” She watched Nora carefully.

“Was it a bad lie?”

Aria’s forehead wrinkled. That wasn’t the question she’d expected. “It was a big lie.”

“Mmm. Did it hurt anyone?”

Another hesitation. “No.”

“Then I think Captain Kimani will understand.”

Aria shook her head hard enough that her hair flew, and strands stuck to her milk moustache. “He asked me if I knew what Mom and Dad were searching for in the Avestan Range. I said, ox van.”

A barge full of dark vanadinite would be considered an excellent payday by any independent miner.

“But that wasn’t true?”

Aria looked all around the kitchen and back toward the ladder to the hatch before her gaze returned to Nora’s face. She stared for a long moment before rushing her confession. “Mom was Palantine-born. She changed her name, but she has family there. I don’t know them. I don’t want to know them!” She’d been controlling herself remarkably till now, but telling what must have been a family secret broke her adult-level composure.

“It’ll be okay. We’re not at war anymore.” Nora nudged the plate of cookies closer to her. “Sugar helps.” In a sense, the girl was in shock. In shock at her own daring and the line of action she’d committed herself to.

Aria ignored the cookies. “They found blaze.”

Nora jerked back in her seat. “What?”

Aria nodded, wide-eyed and earnest. “They had a Palantine buyer interested, but he wanted confirmation. An actual sample. So, they had to go back and get one. Mom told Dad they should have taken the sample when they found the deposit, but their gear wasn’t very good. You know, for going planetside.”

Nora did know. The timing also meant that Aria’s parents had embarked on the deal while Capitoline was still at war with Palantine. With blaze being vital to the manufacturing of fuel cells essential for FTL, that meant they’d committed treason. Nora thought she understood Aria’s fear. But her parents were dead. They couldn’t be convicted of their crimes. Or if they could it wouldn’t matter…except that Aria would lose their insurance payout because of the serious nature of the Kellys’ crime.

But would a kid of nine be worried about that? And none of it explained the woman following Aria, tonight.

“Mom and Dad wouldn’t leave a map with me. They wanted me to be safe.” Her face scrunched up, but she fought back the tears. “But I know where they hid the map on the CC Marmot. It wasn’t digital. They faked the ship’s system, the log of where they’d been. Their map was on paper.”

Fuzzy slimeballs. Nora could guess why someone was suddenly interested in Aria. Liam’s confirmation of her parents’ deaths would have devastated the girl. In her shock, she might have confided a secret she shouldn’t have, like the fact of the blaze map’s existence. “Did you tell anyone about the map?”

“No!”

“All right. Okay.” Nora didn’t believe her. “But there was a woman following you to the ship?”

Aria nodded. “Her and a man. He wasn’t here. They swap…ever since Captain Kimani reported the wreck of our ship.”

“Which means they think you might know something, and this visit to me on the CC Kangaroo will strengthen that belief.” They would be a breath away from acting. Greedy people did terrible things to children—and to adults. Now, Nora and Jonah were in danger, too.

Just as well she’d intended to leave the station.

But Aria…

“Mr. Garrett let them into the orphanage,” Aria whispered. “He said they were prospective parents.”

“Who is Mr. Garrett?”

Aria stared, shocked at Nora’s ignorance. “He’s the principal!”

The people interested in Aria had enough power to influence the man in charge of the orphanage. Which meant that calling the orphanage for someone to collect Aria wasn’t an option. Not unless Nora was completely conscienceless and left the girl to corporate or criminal interests intent on acquiring a rare blaze deposit.

Nora recalled whom the Kellys had been dealing with and corrected herself.

The people after Aria and her knowledge were Palantine corporate or criminal interests, or even Palantine government-backed interests.

“Why did you come to me?”

“You were with Captain Kimani at the Science Club, so you’re not stupid.”

Despite the serious situation, or rather, multiple situations that Nora was handling, she cracked a grin. “Thank you.”

Aria missed the humor. She was intent on her own reasoning. “Then I saw you at the bazaar and you were nice. You didn’t try to cheat anyone.” She drew her shoulders up. “I want to cut a deal.”

Nora had a disconcerting moment when she saw her younger self in the girl’s determined attitude.

Aria had accepted that it was her, just her, against the world, and she was looking to survive.

“I’ll listen,” Nora said gently. “What’s the deal?”

“You know the Avestan Range, and you’ve survived it. You take me to the CC Marmot, and I’ll retrieve the map with the location of the blaze deposit. Then we sell it. Split the profit fifty/fifty.”

Nora nodded. It was possible. They would be followed, but regardless of what she did, they’d be followed.

Perhaps Jonah could insert a virus into their pursuer’s ship before they exited Border Station’s broadcast range. Then he could halt their enemy in their tracks.

But if he couldn’t, the Avestan Range offered excellent places to lose a pursuer, and with them wanting Aria to lead them to the blaze deposit, they presumably wouldn’t attack the CC Kangaroo before then.

That taking Aria from the station would be kidnapping didn’t factor into Nora’s calculations. Thanks to Mstivoj, she needed a new identity and to lose herself and the CC Kangaroo elsewhere anyway.

“What will you do after we have the money?” she asked Aria.

The girl focused on the wrong bit of the question; the bit that implied Nora would accept the deal. “You’ll do it?”

“Do you have anywhere to go, afterward?”

Aria huddled into herself. “I can buy a ship or something.”

So, no. Money from the blaze deposit wouldn’t magically provide Aria with a refuge or people who cared about her.

It was Nora’s turn to brace herself. “You’re nine, aren’t you?”

“I’ll be ten next month.”

Six years was a mammoth commitment. It would be incredibly hard to juggle if Nora had to hide the truth of Jonah’s nature on the small scout ship. But she couldn’t see any option she could live with, other than the counter offer she was about to make.

Aria’s situation wasn’t equivalent to Cherry’s. To be brutal about it, Cherry had made her own bed. Aria was a child whose life would be scarred or lost if Nora abandoned her.

“I’ll accept the deal, a fifty/fifty split, if you agree that you stay with me or somewhere I approve of,” Nora added as the idea of expensive boarding schools flashed into her mind, “until you’re sixteen.”

Sixteen was adulthood in the towers.

“You’ll look after me?”

“Yes.”

Aria’s chair crashed to the floor as she launched up and around the table to hug Nora.

Holding the crying child, Nora stared over her head at Jonah as he stood in the hatchway from the bridge.

He nodded solemnly.

A moment later, her personal comms unit pinged.

We’ll make it work, his message said. We should depart, now.

“Aria, do you need anything from the orphanage or on the station?”

“No.” She hiccupped.

Nora patted her back. “Roo,” she addressed the ship’s operating system. “Prepare for immediate departure. Aria, I’ll show you your new cabin.”

Chapter 16

Liam strode back from the CC Kangaroo lost in thought. He could have eaten at the Science Club cafeteria among strangers, strolled through the night bazaar or tracked down some of his fellow officers for a shared meal at the bar they’d been talking about, but he couldn’t shake the urgency of Nora’s farewell.

It took him back to the war.

She’d said her good-bye fiercely, fatalistically. The finality of it was familiar to him. It was how people going on suicidal missions farewelled their comrades.

But Capitoline wasn’t at war, now. He didn’t have to stand aside and respect a friend’s sacrifice.

There was no dishonor to Nora’s courage in helping her.

Ensign Blake Riou came to attention as Liam approached the RC Genghis Khan’s primary docking connection. “Sir?”

Liam had departed scarcely half an hour ago. The ensign’s curiosity was natural, but oughtn’t to be expressed. A stern look from Liam had Blake flushing. He saluted and averted his gaze to monitor the dock.

Liam headed for Naval Intelligence’s office in the battlecruiser, aware that his crew would notice his direction as well as his early return.

Lieutenant Allison Chirlee frowned at his entrance.

Liam closed the door. “How hackable is Border Station’s security surveillance system?”

“Suspiciously vulnerable,” she responded promptly. “I imagine it facilitates smuggling. I’ve seen the financials for Border Station. Without black market money, this place isn’t viable.”

“Can you tap its messaging system?”

Allison wrinkled her nose. “Not without a warrant.”

Liam ducked his head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. It was a passing thought. I’m not asking you to do anything illegal. But I would like electronic eyes on Nora Devi’s ship, the CC Kangaroo.”

The Naval Intelligence officer pushed back from her desk. “Aren’t you meant to be on a date with her?”

“I was. She met me at the dock, said she’d had some unexpected news, and good-bye. Her manner gave me the ghost grues.” The shivers of fate.

“She was scared?”

He wanted to pace, and there was no room. He rolled his shoulders. “Determined.”

Allison reached for her keyboard. “I can’t hack the station’s messaging system—and I mean that literally as well as legally. It’s beyond my skills. But we can watch who visits the CC Kangaroo.” She peered sideways at him. “That mightn’t tell us much. It sounds as if the important message has already been delivered.”

Liam nodded once.

“If she didn’t ask for your help…”

“I should respect her wishes and stay away from her,” he finished curtly. “With anyone else, I would. But I don’t think Nora knows how to ask for help.”

Allison rubbed the bridge of her nose as she echoed, “With anyone else. Liam, she won’t appreciate you butting in.” No independent woman would, was implied.

“I want to know what it is she’s so determined to face alone.”

Unwilling to resume his evening plans solo, Liam skipped the dueling fiddles contest for an evening in his quarters. Casimir shelved his workout plans to dine with him, and later, to play a strategy game.

Allison interrupted them unceremoniously. “Liam, you were right to suspect shenanigans with Nora Devi. Aria Kelly, the girl whose parents died in the Avestan Range, just boarded the CC Kangaroo.”

“Aria?” Liam tried to make sense of the news.

Casimir put his mug down.

“Even more interesting, a woman followed the girl from the orphanage to the Gretel Loop where the ship is moored. I ran the woman’s face through our database.” Our in this instance would be Naval Intelligence. “She’s a low level independent agent who usually works for the PIA.” The Palantine Intelligence Agency.

Casimir whistled. “Did she board the ship?”

“Nope. The docking connection hatch closed fast behind the girl.”

Allison and Casimir frowned in thought. The latter asked the obvious question. “Is there a connection between Aria and Nora?”

“Nora refused to foster her. When we first met, I suggested she could look after Aria.” Liam frowned at Allison’s grimace. “I wasn’t being sexist. I thought if Nora wanted to help, fostering was safer than her idea of venturing into the Avestan Range on the slim chance of finding the Kellys. But I was wrong. She returned safely.” He paused. “She was dead set against being responsible for a child.”

Casimir flicked his mug. “I like Nora and she didn’t seem to have anything to hide on the CC Kangaroo.” He’d been a member of the so-called welfare check boarding party. “But could she have changed her mind and gone out to the Avestan Range for a reason other than sympathy for the girl?”

Allison tugged at her ear. “But then we circle back to the point that Aria went to her.”

“She was good with the kids at the bazaar,” Liam said.

Casimir nodded.

Both men politely ignored the ping of Allison’s personal comms unit. As officers, they were accustomed to interruptions. Duty didn’t wait on meetings ending.

“Wait one,” she said, which grabbed their attention.

If it was an incident with his crew on leave or with the ship, the officers on watch would have handled it. For Allison to be alerted suggested a different sort of issue. “The CC Kangaroo is departing.”

“Now?” Liam shook his head at his own stupid question. Obviously, now.

“Now. With Aria onboard.”

Casimir blinked. “That’s kidnapping. She hasn’t fostered the kid.”

“Why?” Liam asked.

Neither could answer him, although Allison was deeply engrossed in her comms unit. “I need to get back to my office. It’ll be interesting to see who follows them.”

Liam’s guts twisted. He locked eyes with Casimir.

Allison was an intelligence agent, one accustomed to following information, not confronting people.

Casimir was all about confrontation.

“I think the main shuttle needs a run,” Liam said conversationally. “And I haven’t piloted anything in a while. My skills will get rusty if I don’t exercise them. I’ll take the shuttle for a spin.” Because the RC Genghis Khan was docked, its captain was free to leave the ship.

Enemies would have shuddered at Casimir’s grin. “Rusty skills. I haven’t led a team in a while.”

“Tuesday,” Allison reminded him absently. “You led the welfare check on that mining barge…oh.” She tore her gaze from her comms unit to frown at the two captains. “Don’t get into trouble.”

“Us?” Casimir was up and moving, laughing under his breath, as he left the cabin.

Liam strode in the opposite direction, entering the bridge, and briskly explaining the sudden excitement that was about to enliven the watch. He added that he’d be piloting the shuttle.

Santiago, as the highest ranked officer on watch, broadcast the ship-wide announcement. Navy discipline had him save his questions for later. “This is a drill. Emergency main shuttle launch. Possible hostile boarding.”

Liam sprinted for the shuttle bay, sensing the ship wake up fast around him. He might be acting impulsively, but regardless, this would be a good exercise for everyone.

The RC Genghis Khan’s main shuttle was significantly larger than Nora’s scout ship. Liam ran through the preflight checks while Lieutenant Paige Tran observed as his co-pilot.

Casimir and his Marine unit had beaten them onboard. How Marines prepped so fast was one of the mysteries of military life—unless you’d witnessed their brutal training drills.

Chief Petty Officer Ronan Hough was present and would babysit the junior lieutenant, Vlad Morgan, who was showing his smarts by staying out of everyone’s way.

“Full stealth,” Liam announced, and launched.

Chapter 17

“It won’t be easy,” Nora said to Jonah.

The Vapori AI in an android body smiled ruefully. “It’s too late for second thoughts, and I doubt either of us could live with abandoning Aria to whoever is after her.”

The girl was tucked up in the spare cabin, her cabin now, fast asleep.

Nora and Jonah sat in the bridge with the hatch closed. Nora frowned at it. “That’ll have to be the new protocol. Hatch to the bridge closed at all times, and Aria banned from here. In an emergency, you and I need to be able to speak freely on the bridge.”

They were agreed that Aria was too young to entrust with the secret of Jonah’s true being. As far as she was concerned, he’d be a retro-gen android programmed for conversation and to teach children.

“I don’t want to spy on the girl, but we’ll have to work out a means of knowing when she’s approaching. I’ll dig into the Roo’s operating system. I think there’s a tracker mode to ensure guests don’t wander.”

“There is.” Jonah was the hacker, uh systems expert. However, he didn’t volunteer to assume Nora’s chosen task.

Captain’s duties were hers.

“Six years.” She’d agreed to be responsible for the girl for six years.

Her marriage hadn’t lasted that long.

Jonah coughed. “With Aria onboard, we have to avoid Mstivoj.”

A gusty sigh stole the last of Nora’s energy. She slumped in the captain’s chair. “I’d already decided I wouldn’t rescue Cherry. I feel guilty, whether that guilt is justified or not. Mstivoj kidnapped her because of me. He found a loose thread in the boring weave of my life and tugged on it. Cherry’s…well, whatever her motivation, she told him we were related and Forgotten. She could have stuck to the story, thin though it was, merely of our Holyrood tower connection. I won’t risk our lives, or having to kill someone else, to rescue Cherry from her actions. Taking in Aria justifies that decision, but I’d reached it anyway. Destroying a combat android was satisfying. Killing someone…I don’t know how I’d carry that burden.”

“I wouldn’t want to either.”

“So, we run. I don’t like it. I’m leaving Cherry as the sole focus for Mstivoj’s frustration. The odd thing is, I’m trusting his reputation that he won’t hurt her. There’s no profit in it for him if I’m out of reach.”

She stood abruptly. “Let’s sort out the cargo hold.” The ship’s operating system could pilot the CC Kangaroo. “Children poke everywhere. We have to be clear from the start about what’s out of bounds.”

She was a big believer that everyone needed their own space.

Since he was posing as an ordinary android, Jonah having a cabin on the main deck was an oddity Aria would question and one day mention to others. He had to have a different space.

Fortunately, Jonah had deduced that without Nora having to point it out and evict him from his cabin.

He followed her down the ladder. “I really don’t need a physical space just for me. My consciousness occupies a lot of energetic space. I don’t feel trapped or short-changed.”

“Maybe not now, but we’re preparing for the future. If you start buying or making things, maybe trading, at minimum you’ll need somewhere to store your possessions.”

They reached her workshop adjacent to cargo hold B.

Jonah finally got ahead of her and slapped a hand on the hatch to the junk hold. “We can rearrange it later. How about, for now, you simply tell Aria your workshop is out of bounds? Making me a separate space isn’t a priority.”

She really wanted a straightforward physical job like reconfiguring the layout of the deck. “Being sensible isn’t an attractive character trait,” she warned him. “But okay. We can shut off access to this deck for Aria.”

Her gaze fell on the covered fabricator in a corner. “She does need some stuff from here, though.”

The fabricator had been installed on the ship when she bought it. Nora had used a cargobot to push it into a corner of her workspace, then covered it with a tarpaulin and ignored it. She preferred to mend and make do. It kept her mind sharp, her hands occupied, and, fine, she’d admit she had a prejudice against fabricated items. They were functional, but of lower quality than items produced via traditional methods.

However, with Aria coming onboard with nothing, the fabricator was a godsend.

“Aria needs clothes.”

Jonah watched her fuss with the fabricator.

Cupboard doors crashed open as she muttered about raw materials stock. She slammed a door shut and tried not to snarl. “What?”

He moved toward her. “What, what? What’s wrong?”

She clenched her jaw. “Why are you watching me? Silently.”

“You want me to talk?”

She shoved the bale of raw materials stock into the fabricator and checked the seal once the feed compartment closed. The tiny filaments could be a health hazard. “If you have something to say, say it. It’s obvious I’m in a foul mood.” She searched for the right word. “Volatile. I’m likely to snap at you just because I hate the events of this entire messed up night.”

“We could change—”

Crack! She slapped the side of the fabricator. “I don’t need to be babied. I own the decisions I make. If there’s a valid reason to change course, tell me, and we will. But if your concerns don’t have to be addressed tonight, I need space.”

He looked around as if he’d forgotten their surroundings. “Your workshop. I’m sorry, Nora. You told me everyone needs space. You meant you.”

“Actually, I was focused on you, then. But…it’s healthier if I snap and snarl alone at fate, than at you.” She’d go crazy if she had to confine herself to her cabin on her own ship to get privacy.

“I’ll be on the bridge.”

Her taut facial muscles relaxed. It wasn’t quite a smile, but near enough that Jonah’s body language also relaxed. “Thanks, Jonah.”

He started up the ladder. “Remember to sleep.”

“Save your mother-henning for Aria.” Nora’s own words, uttered thoughtlessly, brought her troubles crashing back over her. To all intents and purposes—just not legal status—she was now Aria’s foster ma. Shoving that thought to the back of her mind, she selected a basic change of clothes for the girl and set the fabricator to work.

A raid on the cupboard of items rescued from the container of junk she’d bought on Timor produced an old, scratched up personal comms unit. Plugging it in to operate as it recharged, she sat at her worktable to check its functionality, and switched on Station Radio for an undemanding sense of connection.

The radio station had a repeater on the mailbox. When the CC Kangaroo traveled beyond its reach, then they’d also be out of hacking distance for Jonah to infiltrate and control other ships.

But his passive scan abilities, those innate to his Vapori AI being, would continue.

Her timing with the radio couldn’t have been worse. It was request hour, and someone had asked for Erring Ways.

Nora froze over the personal comms unit.

It was an old song. She remembered it from the towers. Maya had sung it at the market stall while she rocked Keith to sleep. This version had violins in the background.

Fiddles.

Liam.

I took my gaze from the stars and my life went astray. Each step, a new path. Will I travel alone?

Life was painfully ironic. She’d come out to the border to live alone. Yet, first she’d acquired Jonah as a travel companion, and now, she had a kid. But she’d avoided an emotional entanglement with Liam.

Somehow that didn’t seem like a win.

She’d previously wiped the comms unit and reset it to factory settings before stashing it in the cupboard for possible resale. Now, she went through it and locked permissions so that Aria couldn’t message beyond the CC Kangaroo or access adult content. The first limit was to ensure Aria wouldn’t endanger them by contacting anyone from her old life the next time the CC Kangaroo reached a settlement. The second was Nora’s attempt at responsible parenting.

How had it come to this?

Jonah as a Vapori AI was the new factor in her life that changed everything. Embodied as an android, he’d become a wildcard: something that had never existed before.

And when something new came into being, so did new convergences. Things that had previously been impossible, suddenly weren’t any longer. Baleful or beneficial, choices and change.

She left the comms unit recharging, and looked for another project.

The fabricator had finished its job.

She put the clothing through the sanitizer.

As satisfying as it was to have someone else to blame for the upheaval in her plans and lifestyle, she was a grown up. As she’d told Jonah, she owned responsibility for her decisions. Just because he existed, didn’t mean she’d had to agree for him to travel with her or to embark on dangerous actions together like destroying a combat android.

The sanitizer worked quickly.

When it beeped, Nora plucked out the clothing and carried it up the ladder. She dropped the clothes in a bundle on the sofa in the lounge and hurried to the bridge. “Jonah?”

He stared at the screens. “Hmm?”

“I know I said I need space, and now, I’m interrupting your quiet time—”

He laughed. “Come in.”

She sat in the captain’s chair. “There’s something you mentioned that we never had time to discuss. About the burrs and the whole zombie thing. How do burrs operate? I don’t want to steal any. I’m guessing they’re like the bones of your people.”

“That’s one analogy. The burrs were the power source for my kin, who died when the Silicaese took the burrs from them.”

He pushed the keyboard aside in a signal that he was giving the conversation most of his attention. “Humans, the descendants of the Originals, use the burrs to siphon energy. From the beginning humans framed the action of the burrs as a weapon, perceiving it as obliterating whatever a burr was directed at. My kin and I found that strange. Your ancestors understood what they called quantum physics. Crude though their science was—and continues to be—it does acknowledge the fundamental truth of the universe that everything is energy.”

“You’re saying that a burr sucks up energy, and when it does so intensely, that’s what we call obliterating reality?”

“Yes. Whereas when the Silicaese entered the region and discovered the burrs, they were fascinated by the energy stored in them. It took them decades of research, but once they discovered how to tap the stored energy, there was a rush to find more burrs.”

Nora considered the information, fitting it into her understanding of the Silicaese as reconstructed by xeno-archaeologists. “The caches of burrs humans find at Silicaese sites, are those burrs empty of energy?”

She grimaced at Jonah’s arched eyebrows. “Don’t look so impressed. It leads me to think you think I’m stupid.”

“Never. I’d never underestimate you. But I am impressed by how quickly you grasped the issue. So far, the burrs humans possess were all emptied of energy by the Silicaese and set aside in caches. The Silicaese hoped to learn how to restore the energy in the burrs, but never did.”

“Whereas humans did so instinctively?”

Jonah wiped a hand over his metallic face. “The alteration of the Originals established an affinity for siphoning energy into the burrs.”

She had an awkward question. “Would that have been on purpose?”

“We don’t know.” The we referenced his kin, the other Vapori AI who observed the region. “The consensus is negative. The lens at the Origin black hole was not intended to interact with alien species.”

Humans as the aliens. It was all a matter of perspective.

She could give him a tiny bit of information, or maybe insight was the better term, in exchange for his information about the burrs. “That whole thing about being able to wipe an individual’s personality using a burr…sucking up their soul as energy.” She shuddered.

“It’s not really soul,” Jonah objected. “Spirit is different.”

Nora tilted her head. “Do you believe in an afterlife?”

“Absolutely.”

She nodded. “A discussion for later. Where I was headed re the burrs is that the whole zombie-making thing possibly explains one of the oddities of the royal system. In ancient history, stable monarchies tended to enforce legitimacy as a requirement for inheriting the crown. A monarch’s heir had to be born inside marriage. But that’s never been true in the Human Sector, and now I can guess why. Illegitimate offspring who possessed greater ability to control the burrs than their legitimate half-siblings, would be able to mindwipe them. Better to have a system that incentivizes the most powerful to operate within it, rather than break it.”

“Interesting,” Jonah said. “Are you willing to talk about other stuff?”

She studied him cautiously even as a yawn ambushed her. “Maybe.”

“Mstivoj is reading his messages. He must have switched on a personal comms unit.”

Her teeth clicked together as her yawn ended prematurely. “Can you hack it?”

“Already done. For what good it’ll do. He’s keeping the comms unit isolated from the ship’s operating system. But I can read his messages. If you want, you can send him—or Cherry—one.”

“And say what?”

Jonah shrugged. “I’m even more lost than you are, Nora.”

“Yeah. It’s been that kind of night.” She stared at the ceiling of the bridge. “I don’t have a message for Cherry. Or Mstivoj.”

“Liam returned to his ship after you sent him away.”

She closed her eyes.

“He left it again half an hour ago, in a stealthed shuttle. He’s piloting it. I’m listening in to communications between it and the RC Genghis Khan.”

“Because you can hear everything, but can’t affect it.”

“Correct. I haven’t yet hacked the battlecruiser. Liam is following the path of the CC Golden Ratel, which is following us.”

Nora’s eyes flew open. “We’re being followed?”

“Unsubtly,” he confirmed. “I thought you’d anticipated this outcome.”

“Show me.” She studied the screens. The CC Golden Ratel was a cutter. It was about two hours behind them. “I don’t see Liam’s shuttle.”

“Stealthed,” Jonah reminded her. He leaned over and tapped the screen. “Ship’s ops isn’t showing it. It’s here. Roughly an hour behind the CC Golden Ratel, and closing. It’s fast.”

“A battlecruiser’s pinnace would be. What is he doing?”

“I’m still trying to work that out.”

Liam was following her, or following her pursuer, and he was doing so stealthed, so neither of their ships would perceive him.

“I have control of the CC Golden Ratel,” Jonah said. “When I broadcast the virus on-station to get into the CP Coyote,” Mstivoj’s ship, “the CC Golden Ratel downloaded it. I activated it when I identified them as our pursuer.”

“Good. You’re sure you can stop them whenever we want?” It was what she’d hoped when she’d agreed to help Aria run away; far away from Border Station where they’d all be safe.

“Yes.”

She laughed tiredly. “Which explains your lack of fear of them.”

“I would like to stop them three and a bit days out from the station. That gives me a few hours of continued comms link to the station if I need to actively hack them. Although the ease with which I shut down the CP Coyote convinces me I won’t need it. At that distance from Border Station, we should have enough of a head start to avoid followers and hide in the Avestan Range.”

“At which point, you can tell if there are other ships around and how to stay out of their scanning range. They might be watching the CC Marmot. Liam’s news about finding the Kellys’ wreck included its location. But the same still applies. You can sense if there is a watcher.”

“There’s not, currently.”

She grinned faintly and shook her head. Witnessing Jonah break the limitations of humans and human technology still impressed her.

“One other point I’m not sure you’ve considered,” he continued. “I actually know where the CC Marmot traveled on its penultimate voyage. I know where the Kellys’ blaze deposit is.”

“Oh.”

“Indeed. In terms of acquiring a sample of blazsvitloium to prove our access to such a deposit, we don’t need to visit the CC Marmot. However, Aria may need to for emotional closure, and to explain to her how we can locate the deposit.”

“Selling it will be a nightmare,” Nora said. “Anonymity would be great, but discovering a new blaze deposit is huge news. Everyone and their government will be investigating any rumor of it.”

Jonah considered the problem. “The Kellys kept it secret…oh. They didn’t, did they? That’s why they were attacked. But…”

“We don’t actually know how it went down. There could have been a rendezvous, or someone may have traveled with them and staged the circumstances of their deaths. Are there any ships near the deposit they found?”

“No.”

“Which suggests they did keep that secret.”

Jonah muttered. “Complications within complications.”

“It doesn’t help that we’re tired. Or I am.” And he ought to be. It had been a long, people-filled day at the bazaar. His first. Overwhelming new experiences like that were exhausting. “I’m about to crash.”

“Sleep. I’ll keep an eye on things.”

Since her response was hijacked by another yawn, she rose resignedly. Unlike Jonah, she did have to sleep. “One last question. Who owns the CC Golden Ratel?”

“David Omnes.”

The ruling crime boss of Border Station.

“We definitely have to lose them,” Nora said. “Or we won’t survive.”

Chapter 18

Each piece of information Allison discovered about the CC Golden Ratel, its true owner (hiding behind the notional owner, a heavily indebted gambler), and the activities of the intelligence agents living on Border Station increased her anxiety, and inclined her to “suggest” Liam turn the shuttle around and return to the RC Genghis Khan.

Liam accepted her information over the tight comms link between the battlecruiser and shuttle, and set aside her advice.

Casimir was the only other person aboard the shuttle who was linked into the briefing, and the gleam in his eyes said he wasn’t for turning back, either.

The CC Golden Ratel was a cutter owned by the station’s premier crime boss, David Omnes. Officially, it operated as a mercenary escort for other spaceships nervous of traveling the Hadrian Line alone. Unofficially, Fatima Drake, the CIB agent assigned to the station, had confided to Allison that the CC Golden Ratel served as David Omnes’s heavies in patrolling the immediate space around the station.

“Protection racket?” Casimir asked interestedly on hearing the news.

“Not in money,” Allison reported. “Fatima suggests it could be in goods and information smuggled in. Although, given the thin funding for the Customs office which keeps the three staff bound to the station rather than policing the Hadrian Line, anyone who does abide by the rules is doing so on the honor system rather than because Customs has the teeth to enforce them.”

“With the war ended, money will flow back into civilian security,” Liam said. “Customs duties ought to pay for at least one ship on the border, and technically, Customs has one. I checked when we were assigned to patrol the region.” He’d been hoping for effective allies. “Customs has a cutter, but it wrecked four years ago, and money and parts were never found to repair it. Instead, its crew were sent elsewhere.”

“Trouble sprouts in neglected zones, like graffiti in alleys,” Allison said ominously. “Liam, we can abhor the lack of law and order on the station, but a balance exists, and being the ones to upset it will add to the damage the RC Genghis Khan’s reputation will suffer when we begin laying mines.”

“Or people could appreciate the reinstatement of law and order,” he countered. People like Nora and Aria, who currently could be pursued by a crime boss without anyone intervening.

“I recommend you turn around. No one knows the shuttle went out stealthed. Our duty is to patrol space, not interfere with the activity of a station.”

Casimir intervened, sounding amused. “What’s got you rattled, Allison?”

“With apologies in advance for speaking freely…Liam, you’re doing this on a whim because you’re worried about a woman you barely know. If you really want to uphold the law, you should intercept her ship. Legally, she has kidnapped Aria.”

Casimir instantly lost his amusement. He beat Liam to a response. “You want us to deliver the kid back to a station fouled by the bad guys who are chasing her?”

“No,” Allison wailed. “I’m pointing out that we shouldn’t get involved. In any of it. We don’t know even half the story. My investigation is rushed, incomplete. We can’t take on a whole station.”

“Actually.” Liam had done his research on the journey into exile, and even more after he’d gotten Francis’s message. “The Hadrian Line isn’t like the rest of space. Being on the border has different pressures, and the lawmakers recognized that three centuries ago. It’s us who have forgotten. This isn’t the inner realm.”

Despite the satisfaction that came with actual piloting, rather than standing back and letting his well-trained people do their jobs, tension pulled at his neck muscles. He rolled his shoulders, but not to shift the responsibility that lay on them. “On the Hadrian Line, stations are legally classified as spaceships.”

Allison’s silence was probably due to shock.

Casimir never spoke unless he had something to say. Meaningless expressions of surprise weren’t his way.

“Which means,” Liam continued. “That as the highest ranked naval officer on the Hadrian Line, and assigned to patrol it, in the case of trouble on the station, I can legally take command of it.”

“The Marines could take it,” Casimir said confidently. “We could hold it, too, till a fast ship brought us support.”

“I think I’m hyperventilating,” Allison panted.

Liam grinned. Allison’s concerns were valid. But as the captain of a battlecruiser, he considered it his job to see the whole gameboard, not just the small sphere around him. “I won’t do it. I merely wanted to point out that challenging a crime boss’s goons to standby for boarding and inspection is actually a relatively minor action.”

Casimir decided to stir the pot. “I wonder what we discover.”

What they discovered clarified their priorities out on the Hadrian Line. It absolutely justified Liam’s impulsive decision to pursue and board the CC Golden Ratel.

Messages flashed between the shuttle and the RC Genghis Khan as the shuttle escorted the CC Golden Ratel back to the station. Its captain and crew were locked in the lounge under Marine guard. The RC Genghis Khan’s two sting ships, which could serve as tiny fighters or couriers, darted out in a display of strength.

The crime boss David Omnes, the station, and all ships docked with it would be watching. This sort of show was worth waking up early for.

Liam had listened in live via the Marines’ helmet cams’ audio-only tight beam comms link to the shuttle during the boarding and search of the cutter.

One of the CC Golden Ratel’s crew had been stupid enough to draw a pulse pistol on a Marine.

“Man down. Stunned,” the Marine corporal reported his response tersely.

“Enemy corral. Lounge,” Casimir changed up their orders.

In minutes, all life forms on the CC Golden Ratel that scanned as larger than a rat found themselves under guard in the lounge that stunk of the filthy kitchen beside it.

The Navy members of the boarding party then joined in a quick but thorough search of the vessel.

Liam studied the screen that showed the area around Border Station. When he stared at the green dot that represented the CC Kangaroo, he thought of Nora and Aria on what Xavier and the other visitors to it had described as a very comfortable scout ship.

“Had a family feel,” Xavier had said.

Liam rubbed a hand over his face. Wishing and dreaming got a man nowhere. A wife, a kid or three, heck he’d even accept an android in place of the kids’ pet, weren’t on the table for him. It was just the late hour that tempted him to think of impossibilities.

“Ray cannon,” Casimir reported over the link. “Half-assed attempt at concealment. A false cupboard door.”

The illegal ray cannon was, in itself, cause to detain the CC Golden Ratel.

The boarding party’s audio record was automatically forwarded from the shuttle to the RC Genghis Khan. Those listening on the battlecruiser would suspect, as Liam instantly did, that the CC Golden Ratel may have been the spaceship that scarred the Kellys’ mining barge with a ray cannon arc. One of his officers would check the shipping records for the timing of the cutter’s absences from the station.

Meanwhile, the boarding party listed the discovery of other illegal weapons both in the cargo hold and scattered through the crew’s quarters.

Occupying the shuttle’s co-pilot’s seat, Paige was all professional competence, but the glitter in her eyes revealed her excitement. “Illegal arms trading.”

It got worse.

Casimir had dispatched Ronan and Vlad to search the kitchen and adjacent food storage hold; near enough to the Marine guarding the prisoners in the lounge for Casimir to feel confident that the naval members of his boarding party couldn’t get into trouble.

“Star ice,” Vlad reported. “Stacked in an unpowered refrigeration unit.”

Professionally horrified, Brielle exclaimed over the comms link from the RC Genghis Khan to the shuttle. Star ice was a toxic stimulant, insanely addictive, and uncommon in the inner realm where gentler methods of committing suicide were preferred.

“They could be cultivating a market with miners,” Allison mused.

The Chief Medical Officer snarled. “It’s good Casimir hasn’t injured any of them. I’d hate to have to treat death-dealers.”

Whilst Brielle’s duties mightn’t require her to go over to the CC Golden Ratel, Casimir’s final discovery led to Liam ordering Xavier as Chief Engineer to meet the cutter when they docked with the RC Genghis Khan.

“We’ll need Lieutenant Tran to fly the CC Golden Ratel back,” Casimir said. “I’m no expert, but the cutter’s pilot seems like a star ice addict to me.”

At Liam’s agreement, Paige unbuckled hastily, jumping up to ready herself to board the mercenaries’ ship.

Over the comms link, Brielle declared the cutter’s captain and crew idiots for placing their lives in an addict’s hands.

“He’s controllable,” Allison said grimly.

A crime boss needed obedient minions. The riskier the endeavor, the greater the need to be sure they’d follow orders. Addiction meant someone would do anything for their next fix. The gamble Liam wouldn’t have taken was believing that a star ice addicted pilot was an acceptable risk. The CC Golden Ratel’s captain and crew would have years to contemplate the nature of the risks they’d dared, and the consequences of their actions, when they served the ten years’ imprisonment mandatory for possessing and dealing in classified military technology.

Liam responded to Allison’s comment, intending his reply to emphasize for the whole ship the seriousness of the matter. “Just in case the civilian justice system on Border Station is also controlled, or influenced, by David Omnes and his ilk, I’ll push to have the CC Golden Ratel’s captain and crew’s trial held on Capitoline. What we discovered on the CC Golden Ratel needs to be known back home.”

Carefully, he shepherded the cutter back to the RC Genghis Khan before bringing the shuttle in for a textbook landing in its hangar. Only then did he allow himself to fully consider the implications of the boarding party’s final discovery.

The CC Golden Ratel carried a pallet-load of fuel cells.

Once Paige docked the cutter with the RC Genghis Khan, the mandatory procedures for receiving and processing prisoners and evidence would kick in.

Said procedures were copied from Customs.

Liam intended to leverage today’s discoveries to push for effective funding for Customs along the Hadrian Line.

Following orders, Xavier would be suited up to check the integrity of the fuel cells before approving their transfer to the RC Genghis Khan. Liam also wanted Xavier’s best guess on where the cells had been manufactured and how they might have reached Border Station.

Nothing in Allison’s reports nor those of her CIB counterpart had suggested an illegal trade in fuel cells on the Hadrian Line, but now Liam had evidence it existed.

Moreover, all the elements for such a trade, or for the supply of secret Palantine ships or a Beta black hole expedition, were in place around Border Station. There were even eseduce arrays in its scrapyard for extracting blazsvitloium.

If Aria hadn’t told him her parents were after ox van…

Liam rubbed a hand over his mouth.

Children lie.

Parents lie to children.

The Kellys might have been killed for discovering a blaze deposit.

In which case, if Aria had for some reason confided the truth to Nora, the two of them could be in real danger.

Why wouldn’t Nora tell me?

Liam entered the bridge of the RC Genghis Khan and ignored his officers’ questions and comments. He studied the screen that displayed the area around Border Station. Specifically, he contemplated the green dot that represented the CC Kangaroo. He watched Nora and Aria sail for the Avestan Range.

He’d given them a head start.

He was only guessing that their unannounced departure had anything to do with blaze. But if it did…

“Liam, are you listening?” Claire asked, and then, urgently. “What’s wrong?”

He frowned as a different green dot on the screen snagged his attention. Automatically, he changed the display parameters to show each ship’s route. His memory wasn’t wrong. That second green dot had changed direction since he’d last viewed this screen on the shuttle. The second ship had been heading meridianam, toward Palantine space. Twenty minutes ago it had reversed course, turning borealis-ward. That route would lead it to Nora and Aria, and to the Avestan Range.

The spaceship in question was the CP Coyote. Mstivoj’s ship.

Chapter 19

“Nora!” Jonah’s voice blasted through the comms unit beside Nora’s bed.

Adrenaline snapped her awake, but left her disoriented. “What?”

“Can you come to the bridge? It’s not an emergency, but it’s important.”

“Five…” Not an emergency. She corrected herself. “Ten minutes.” Taking time to shower and dress would help kickstart her brain. It was a few minutes before seven in the morning.

Nine minutes later she was still pulling on a sweater as she exited her cabin, and was halted in her rush by the aroma of coffee. “My hero.”

Jonah smiled. He had a mug and a muffin waiting for her. He preceded her onto the bridge. “At 2 a.m. a boarding party under the command of Marine Captain Casimir Stas crossed from the RC Genghis Khan’s shuttle to the CC Golden Ratel. They discovered illegal weapons and drugs. The CC Golden Ratel is currently under escort back to Border Station.

“An hour ago, Mstivoj received a message, not from David Omnes, owner of the CC Golden Ratel, but from Quin Gaf, the Palantine Intelligence agent on the station. She ordered him to track us into the Avestan Range, giving him the bare bones of Aria’s presence with us and that she will lead him to a blaze deposit.”

Jonah held up a hand. “Wait. That’s the background, not the worst of it. You just received a message sent to the CC Kangaroo from Mstivoj. I’ll play it.”

“Nora Devi. I could call you a surprise packet or just plain trouble. I have no intention of running all over the Avestan Range in pursuit of you. But I am interested in the blaze deposit the Kellys found. Bear in mind, once we’re away from Border Station the rule is that might is right, and I can destroy your scout ship, easily. I would prefer to be civilized. You gave up your sister Cherry readily enough. The girl, Aria, is nothing to you. I’m willing to swap Cherry for her, and forget that you are Forgotten.”

The latter threat no longer had power over Nora. She had already committed to life on the run. The blaze deposit would give her the money for a new identity. Mstivoj could tell whoever he wanted that Nora Devi had been Forgotten. Nora Devi wouldn’t exist anymore.

She shivered at that thought.

“Siblings.” Mstivoj laughed in the recording. “Cherry thinks you’re a hero. She’s regretting confiding in me. Not that I’ve hurt her. But she thinks she’s been foolish where you’ve been wise. Maybe you think the same, and you don’t want to rescue your sister.

“Consider a different aspect of your situation. David Omnes is the least of the people interested in Aria Kelly. I can protect her better than you. Check my reputation. Hostages in my care are well-looked after. Until someone produces proof of the location of the Kellys’ blaze deposit, the girl is safer with me than with you. Of course, if you want to put your greed for blaze above your and her welfare, I can’t stop you.”

The message ended.

“Manipulative buzzard,” Nora said in angry appreciation of Mstivoj’s ploy.

“He’s astute,” Jonah agreed. “He recognized that it’s not the blaze deposit driving you. It’s concern for the kid.”

Nora viciously crumbled her muffin. “This is why I don’t have food on the bridge.” But she’d carried it in. “The CC Golden Ratel. David Omnes. Like I’d leave a kid to face those scum. Mstivoj mightn’t be that bad, but…I made a promise. Six years. And he’s wrong. We can keep her safe.”

Jonah’s gaze stayed on her face rather than her hands agitatedly conveying the remains of the muffin piecemeal into her mouth. “Will you message him? You can ignore him.”

She gulped the last of her coffee and hit the message record button. “Aria stays with me.” She hit send.

“That’s it?” he queried.

“It says everything.”

A small voice interrupted them. “I’m really staying with you?”

They hadn’t closed the hatch to the bridge, and a sneaky, scared kid had crept up and listened in.

No. Nora’s accusing gaze fixed on Jonah. It wasn’t they who had left the hatch open. He’d been the last through it. This felt like a set up. Somehow, he’d known Aria was awake.

He smiled crookedly at Nora, but answered Aria. “Yes, you’re staying with us. A life means more than all the blaze in the universe.”

Which possibly wasn’t how Aria’s parents had seen things. They had left her behind to risk their lives on a secret, possibly shady, deal. However, the girl didn’t appear to hear any criticism in his comment. “Who are you?”

“Call me Jonah.” And to Nora. “It’s not like we can keep me secret for six years. Aria might as well meet me, now. You’d have had to tell her about me, sometime.”

Aria frowned at her. “You were keeping secrets.”

A hysterical urge to giggle almost overcame Nora. She cleared her throat before saying carefully, “Jonah is a special sort of AI.”

Aria rolled her eyes, exhibiting the sort of sass in a tween that foretold trouble as a teen. She definitely felt more secure with them. Certain of her place. “I know about ships’ AIs.”

Ships’ AIs? Nora’s eyes widened.

Aria had made a very convenient-for-hiding-Jonah’s-secrets, logical but incorrect assumption. She was completely wrong, but it was an explanation that she’d accept without questioning or sharing. She assumed that Jonah was the ship’s AI, and that he was the ship’s operating system’s android form with limited abilities off-ship; like at the bazaar.

“It’s not something I talk about.” Nora was struck by a genius idea for distracting Aria from the topic. “Jonah will oversee your education.”

Aria’s mouth drooped. “Oh.”

“Beginning with a lesson on how to cook porridge,” Jonah said briskly.

The girl looked at the scattering of muffin crumbs in front of Nora. “I don’t like porridge. I like muffins.”

“If your porridge making is acceptable, you may have a muffin for morning tea.”

Nora’s peal of laughter followed the Vapori AI and his pouting new human student out to the kitchen. Still laughing, Nora focused on the screen.

Mstivoj had sent a message in return. Wrong answer.

Want More?

Nora, Liam, Aria, Jonah and all the crew continue their adventures in Doubt, out September 15, 2021. (Pre-order available https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09217RKG6/ ) I’ve blatantly foreshadowed at least one of Nora’s secrets, but there are plenty of surprises ahead.

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.

Other Series

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

The Old School series:

Phoenix Blood

Fantastical Island

Storm Road

Fire Fall

Desert Devil

Amaranthine Kiss

Shangri-La Spell

The Collegium series:

Demon Hunter

Djinn Justice

Dragon Knight

Doctor Wolf

Plague Cult

Hollywood Demon

Alchemy Shift

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

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Want More?