Outside the ship, there’s nothing but fire, the explosions managing to punch through the banshee’s hulls and expose the inner atmosphere to the space beyond. Everywhere I look, space is red and orange and filthy with debris.

  It’s over in seconds. The atmosphere burns fast, and when it clears, the result of the effort is obvious. The banshee ships are a mess, the massive holes in their hulls too big to seal, and in some cases causing secondary detonations that have torn the entire vessels apart. One of the masterships is nearly sheared in half from the damage. While the other is relatively intact, the hole in its side leaves it floating through space away from the scene, its occupants apparently killed.

  The banshee skirmishers are completely gone. The transporters are down. The ship’s AI is like a pinch in my head, screaming at me because the shields are dead, the generators fried.

  “Targets destroyed,” Amara says. “One hundred percent success.”

  I’m in a state of shock that the idea worked at all, let alone as well as it did. “Get us out of here,” I reply. Amara’s already doing it, plotting a course to clear us from the debris field.

  Rozik’s laugher booms over the comm. “I’ve seen a lot of crazy things, Alliance. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “Sometimes crazy works wonders,” I reply. “Naraka Station. Amelia, are you clear?”

  “Confirmed,” Amelia replies. “We’re clear, Odin. The golems dropped like their strings were cut.”

  “Yari, are you okay?” I ask out loud. She doesn’t reply. “Yari?”

  “I’m here,” she replies, panting she’s so out of breath. “I’m okay.”

  “Naraka Station, we’re coming home.”

  Chapter 44

  I don’t leave the mesh until Sleipnir is safely docked with the inner core of Naraka Station, at the single empty cradle amidst the rest of the station’s dormant fleet. It pains me to see all of the ships still sitting there, rendered useless in the fight because of the strife between Amelin and Amelia and the banshee attack that left most of the crews cut-off or dead. The loss of life is never easy for me to take. Nobody should ever like killing anything. You do what you have to do to protect the things you love.

  “It was good flying with you, Amara,” I say before disconnecting from the mesh.

  “You as well, Commander,” Amara replies. “Perhaps we’ll fly together again?”

  “I think we might.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Oh, and Commander?”

  “Yes, Amara?”

  “Where is Geramin? Is he well?”

  The questions take me by surprise. The digitized mind is a more complete copy than I realized. It seems to know what it is, but also what it isn’t. It makes sense. I would think it would be living in misery if it believed it was human and trapped on the ship.

  I’m not going to lie to Geramin’s wife, virtual or otherwise. The fact that she didn’t peek into my brain for the answer tells me a lot about her morals and respect for the mesh. “He passed away. I’m sorry.”

  We’re still linked, and I can feel her pain and sadness at the news. It passes quickly as she buries the emotions the way we’re taught.

  “Thank you, Commander.”

  I don’t respond out loud, instead breaking the connection with the mesh. The sense of the corvette fades away and I open my eyes.

  I’m shocked by what I see. Yari is sitting at her station, her chair rotated around to face me. The door to the bridge is hanging open, the edge a mess of damaged metal. Two banshee golem are face down on the floor, heads and torsos damaged by gunfire.

  “I had no idea,” I say.

  “You were pretty busy,” Yari replies. “I took care of them.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. That was fun.”

  I definitely don’t agree, but I don’t say so. “Come on. I need you to get us out of the ship.”

  We leave the bridge, and she leads me into the interlock to the cradle. We go through it and back into the cylinder, into a corridor where a couple of dead men in dark uniforms lay slumped against the bulkhead, killed in the banshee attack.

  The sight causes me to clench my jaw in frustration. I don’t want to be pissed at Rozik all over again for leading the banshees here, but it’s a hard ask. All of this should have been avoided.

  Then again, if it had, where would Amelia be? Where would Yari be? Dead and a slave, respectively. And Amelin would be in control of Naraka Station. Maybe for all that’s happened, the fates are guiding me where I’m needed, even if it isn’t where I want to go.

  We make our way around the outer ring to the connecting corridor, and then to the central elevator. The cab is on a higher deck, and we wait for it to come down. The doors open.

  Rozik is inside.

  He smiles, and it seems like he’s almost genuinely glad to see me. I offer a curt nod while Yari runs forward and he kneels down to embrace her. It’s a simple moment, but one that hits me harder than I ever would have expected. Maybe it’s because of the mesh with Amara. Maybe it’s because I lost Shae. Maybe it’s because I’m starting to like Rozik. I don’t know. But in that moment, I don’t see a Commune officer, an enemy. I don’t look at him and think of the death and destruction. The prisoners. The labor camps. The propaganda. I just see another human who cares about the well-being of a young girl.

  Just like me.

  “Heading to control?” I ask.

  He lets go of Yari and stands up. “Yup. Going down.”

  I join him in the cab. The doors aren’t closed before my comm badge chirps. “Commander Stone,” Kratz says.

  “Kratz? Tell me you’ve got something.”

  “I’ve got two things, Commander. Can you come up?”

  I look at Rozik. We should probably go down to check on Amelia first, but after what we just went through I’m done waiting to get access to the synchronizer.

  “We’re on our way,” I reply, canceling the elevator’s current command and ordering it back up to the top deck. “Stone out.” I disconnect, and then tap on the badge again. “Amelia Rocklin.”

  “Odin,” Amelia says. I wish she wouldn’t call me that, especially when I’m not in the middle of a fight. “Let me guess, you’re going to the synchronizer?”

  Kratz must have contacted her first. “Confirmed. That’s why I was contacting you. Are you meeting us there?”

  “No. I’m headed to medical to get my head looked at, and I’ve got a ton of work to do to organize the cleanup. A few of the modules were destroyed in the fighting, and the golem killed a lot of my people. Do what you need to do, you’ve earned it.” A brief pause follows before she speaks again. “Odin, I can’t thank you enough for what you did here.”

  “Stopping the banshees? We brought them to your door.”

  “I mean with Amelin, too.”

  “So you didn’t promise the mercenaries who stuck around that you’d hand me over as payment for their risk?”

  I catch her back on her heels, and It takes her a few seconds to answer. “You’re only one man. How would I split you eight ways?”

  It’s a funny response. No indignation. No shock. The thought crossed her mind one way or another.

  “We’ll discuss it when you’re done with the synchronizer,” she adds.

  “Roger,” I say. “Stone out.”

  I disconnect the comm and look at Rozik. He’s shaking his head. “She’s going to turn on you, Alliance.”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” Yari says. “She’s nice.”

  “She doesn’t have a lot of choices,” I reply. I don’t really blame her for it. She needed the help, and I am who I am. “Just me, or both of us?”

  “That I’m not sure of,” Rozik replies. “I’m not worth anything.”

  “To hell you aren’t. You split fifty drones into separate squadrons. I’ve never seen a single pilot do that before.”

  “Because they train them wrong. Rush them through the program to get them into the field, so it takes four times more humans to manage the drones than it should.”

  I raise an eyebrow, not even close to believing the excuse. But he doesn’t seem to care. The elevator stops as it reaches the synchronizer, and the doors slide open.

  Kratz isn’t alone on the deck. A contingent of twenty guards are stationed with him, taking cover behind quickly constructed barricades. A nearly literal stack of golem are on the ground in front of it, along with a few dead soldiers. It’s a mess, but at least the defense held.

  “Commander,” Kratz says, approaching me and coming to attention.

  “At ease, Kratz,” I reply. “Is the synchronizer fixed?”

  “Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s better if I show you.”

  He leads us over to the station near the VR chairs and taps on the control board, displaying a mess of computer code on the terminal in front of us.

  “This is the synchronizer code the way it’s supposed to look.” He taps again, and another batch of code opens. A lot of the text is highlighted in red. “This is the code after Amelin inserted his virus. The part that we isolated, anyway. We were still in the process of identifying all of the touchpoints, not even close to having it operational. We stopped working on it when those things showed up.” He points back at the golem. “I’m excited to get a look at them and see how they work. In any case, yeah. We weren’t close to getting the synchronizer running.” He opens another view of code. The red is gone. “This is the synchronizer code right now.”

  “What happened to the virus?” Rozik asks. He notices the differences better than me.

  “It’s gone,” Kratz replies.

  “Gone?” I say. “I’m not a computer expert, but I’m guessing stuff like this doesn’t just disappear.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Rozik agrees.

  “Commander, we were working on this right up until the aliens came. And I went back to it as soon as Miss Rocklin gave the all-clear. It was already like this.”

  I stare at the terminal, and then at him. “You’re saying the banshees did this?”

  “I don’t have another explanation, sir.”

  “You’re suggesting they got access to encrypted code and repaired the damage to it in less than an hour.”

  “Seems crazy, I know. But yes. That’s one thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “What’s the other?” I ask, getting nervous. There are a million more thoughts and questions swirling in my head over the first point.

  “The enemy repositioned the synchronizer.”

  “What?” Rozik hisses beside me. I look at him because I have no idea what that means. “Let me guess. Toward the Disturbance?”

  Kratz nods.

  “Bollocks,” Rozik says, and he isn’t trying to be funny this time.

  “Can someone tell me what this means?” I ask. “Because it sounds bad.”

  “It is bad,” Rozik replies. “It means the banshees fixed the synchronizer so they could use it to send a message beyond the Disturbance. Where do you think that message went, and why do you think they sent it?”

  “Bollocks,” I say, lowering my head. I can imagine what the message might say. Hey guys, we found a great new part of the universe with millions of suns to drain. Come on over and party. “Do you think that’s why they boarded the station?”

  “It may be,” Kratz says.

  “But how would they know about the synchronizer. Or about the tech? How could they possibly repair something they’ve never seen before and in only an hour.”

  “ Maybe they’ve seen it before,” Rozik says.

  “How?” I ask, my breath catching in my throat when the answer pops into my head. “Spindle.” Could there be a chance, even a slim one, that Shae and the girls are still alive? That the banshees took the synchronizer from the station and maybe took some prisoners too? I can’t let myself believe that, no matter how much I want to.

  “It’s possible,” Rozik says.

  “There’s another issue,” Kratz says. “We don’t know they didn’t plant something in the code. A means to eavesdrop on any communications we send. And there’s no way to know they can’t use it to reverse engineer the positions of our satellites and find the rest of the populated worlds within the Sphere.”

  “So the synchronizer’s working, but we can’t use it,” I say.

  “It’s a risk.”

  “A risk we have to take,” Rozik says. “We both know it.”

  “Agreed,” I reply. “If they go after Bruxton, they go after Bruxton. Our people have to know about Warrick.” I glance at Rozik. “You must have some super-secret base you can report to. One that’s alone on its very own planet.”

  He smiles. “How did you guess?”

  I’m not sure if he’s serious or not. Most likely not. I turn back to Kratz. “Set us up. The banshees did us a favor fixing the code.”

  “If you say so,” Kratz replies. “There’s something seriously terrifying about an enemy that can hack our systems that easily.”

  “I’m trying not to think about that. It’s outside our control.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kratz says, going to one of the chairs and picking up the VR headgear. “Give me ten minutes to reposition the array and we’ll be ready to broadcast.”

  I nod in reply, leaning against the terminal. “What do you think?” I ask Rozik. “Bad to worse?”

  “It was always going to get worse before it gets better,” he replies. “At least we can begin to mobilize.”

  “Do you think we’ll be able to get our governments to agree to work together on this?”

  “We’ve been at war for a long time, Alliance. I want to believe we can, but I don’t know.”

  Neither do I.

  And that’s the most terrifying question of them all.

  Chapter 45

  Sixteen hours pass before I see Amelia again. We’ve all been busy since the meeting with Kratz. She’s spent the time getting treatment for the bump on her head and figuring out who and what she has left to defend the station, organizing clean up crews, notifying next of kin and doing all the other hard stuff that leaders have to do.

  I finally made contact with Bruxton through the synchronizer, my emergency code getting me immediate access to Rear Admiral Shen Yi, the commanding officer of the small Alliance military outpost. They weren’t going to let me through at first because my code is nearly twenty years old, but once I got them to show it to Admiral Yi, the rest was easy.

  He believed every word I said without question. I might be ostracized by the powers-that-be, but the people in the field who were around when Capricorn happened have every reason to trust me. I don’t know what the final outcome of my debriefing will be. What I do know is that Yi plans to send a task force out to Warrick to take stock of the situation, and I want more than anything to be part of it. I don’t have Valhalla to ride back to that section of the Sphere, so I’m counting on Amelia to show me her gratitude for my work.

  And hoping that gratitude doesn’t mean detaining me and then handing me over to someone for the price on my head.

  Rozik got his message through too. Of course, he had to do it in private and I have no idea what he said. A few days ago I’d be convinced he told his CO everything is going according to plan, and there’s still a part of me that believes that might be true. When he came out of the transmission room he had a look on his face that I know he could have hidden if he wanted to, but he didn’t. He wasn’t happy with whatever they said, but he also wouldn’t divulge and I didn’t push. We both understand the line in the sand.

  I used the rest of the time to shower, sleep and eat—all of those things desperately needed. I had a nightmare. No surprise there. In it, the banshees swallowed Spindle into their mothership, taking the entire station intact and keeping everyone on it alive. That might be wishful thinking, except they used the prisoners to make new golems, sending them out to attack Naraka Station against their will. And Shae is the one that got me, her face pained and tearful while she watched me die.

  Now I’m waiting for Amelia in the atrium on Deck Seventy-three. I’m wearing a Navy flight suit she had sent up for me, complete with star and three bars over my chest. There’s another insignia there too, one that’s out of place on the uniform and that I don’t understand. Three solid interlocking triangles. I’ve never seen it before.

  I walk through the gardens, looking at the plants, occasionally touching the leaves. Spindle was too functional for vegetation, and it’s been a long time since I was back to Vilsy. I remember the touch of stiff leaves and the smell of soil, and as I circle the fountain in the center, I find myself more in tune with Geramin Rocklin. The atrium is peaceful, and it helps with all of the emotions I’ve stuffed away.

  Would it help with the nightmares?

  The door on the far end of the atrium hisses open. It takes me a second to break out of my trance and look up from a yellow flower bud to see who’s coming.

  Amelia, and she isn’t alone.

  A pair of guards are with her, along with a woman I don’t know. The newcomer is slim and athletic, dressed in synth leather and high boots, her head shaved on one side and long enough to cascade down over her shoulder on the other. She’s got a pistol strapped to her hip, and she carries herself with an arrogance I associate with smugglers.

  I sigh at the sight of her. I wanted to believe Amelia would do the right thing. But I guess Sasha was right. I don’t know her at all.

  Or maybe I do.

  “Odin,” Amelia says. The guards are watching me. Expecting me to make a move. I don’t. I already fought my way through this place once. I don’t have the energy to do it again.

  “Is this how it ends, Miss Rocklin?” I ask.

  “You were right, I’m afraid. I made promises. I need to deliver.”

  I nod and look at the smuggler. “You have a buyer lined up?”