“So I am getting stronger,” Bianca said. “Thinking faster, too. Doing everything faster. Remembering things better. I thought I might be, but it just… seemed impossible.”

  “It is certainly unprecedented in my experience. If we could make a serum that does for others what your body does naturally for you, we’d be rich enough to buy whole systems.”

  “I retain the intellectual property rights to any technology derived from the study of my body,” Bianca said.

  “True enough in the Barony,” Errin said. “Provided you aren’t in a subordinate client relationship and have full legal status, which you don’t. Anyway, this isn’t the Barony. Not all jurisdictions have the same rules, and some places have no rules at all. Those are the places where the most interesting science gets done.” Bianca glared at him, and he winced. “But don’t worry. I don’t care about wealth, and I don’t think I could replicate the miracle of you anyway. You are the product of Mahact technology. I can look at your genetic code, and see what it does, without having the faintest idea about how to replicate that effect. A worm might sense the vibrations of a spacecraft passing overhead, but that doesn’t mean the worm can invent space travel. All right, you can jump down now.”

  “My body started changing when I left my homeworld.” Bianca leapt easily from the podium and accepted the thin white robe Errin held out for her. “Why?”

  “You’re being prepared for something.” Errin bustled over to a console and began calling up data on several of his screens. “I have no idea what. The changes aren’t just altering your physical characteristics. There’s another part of the code, linked to the deepest parts of your brain, where the instincts and the autonomous systems live. Your file said something about a ‘yearning’?”

  Bianca nodded. “I look at the stars, and I feel a strong desire to go to a certain place.”

  “Hmm. Perhaps it’s similar to the way some migratory species feel a need to travel when the weather changes.”

  “That’s nicer than Archambelle’s idea. She thought it was like a parasite, changing my behavior for its own purposes.”

  Errin smiled. “Archie does have a certain point of view, doesn’t she? I have examined the mechanism of the yearning, and have reached certain conclusions. I will have to share those conclusions with the Letnev, since that is why they hired me, but I do not have to share all the other details of my examination with them. Do you understand?”

  “You mean, you’re not going to tell them how I’m changing?”

  “I am not. I do not know their ultimate intentions for you, but I do know they’re meddling with forces beyond their ability to comprehend or control. You have been chosen for something – no, you have been made for something – and Archie and the rest think they can control that process. But I’m not sure the creations of the Mahact can be controlled. They’re all dead now, exterminated by the Lazax, but if the stories are to be believed the Mahact were prepared, once upon a time, to destroy the galaxy in order to demonstrate their refusal to bow to those they considered lesser races. The Letnev share the arrogance of the Mahact without as much justification. If they try to push things too far, they may bring ruin. If I tell them how strong you are, I fear they will hobble you. When the time comes, Bianca Xing, you might need your new strength and speed and cleverness to ensure your own survival.”

  Before she could reply, he punched a button on the console, and the lab’s doors slid open. Kyrria walked in, the Letnev delegation following. “Well?” Archambelle said. “What were your findings?”

  “Have you deciphered this map hidden inside her genetic code?” Richeline said.

  “Are you all right, Bianca?” Voyou asked, and she smiled at him and bowed her head in assent.

  The guards didn’t say anything, just hung back in a little cluster, unreadable in their blank facemasks.

  “There is a no map,” Brother Errin said. “Bianca is more like a metal detector. Beep beep beep, yes? Or a radiation sensor. She can feel when she is going in the right direction, and when she is getting closer to her destination.”

  “There must be a way to extrapolate from the data and figure out that destination!” Archambelle said.

  Errin shrugged. “There may be a sort of counter hidden inside her, or a complete set of directions, or even something like coordinates, though we don’t know how to read these ancient cartographic measurements, so they wouldn’t do much good. Given enough time – on the order of years – and computational power, yes, there’s a chance I could find out where her yearning will take her, or perhaps I could bioengineer an organism that glows or screams or hisses when you’re headed the right way… but there is a simpler solution, yes?” The Yin scientist looked around expectantly, and they all looked back at him blankly. Brother Errin sighed. “Why don’t you just ask Bianca which way you should go, and follow her directions?”

  The Letnev delegation stared at him for a long moment. Then Archambelle and Richeline burst into furious outrage at once: “Absurd,” “impossible,” “give control of our navigation to a human,” “not even part of the chain of command,” “you don’t ask the test subject to run the test,” and other objections along those lines.

  Bianca cleared her throat, and then did it again, louder , and then said, “Quiet!” She smiled at them sweetly as they scowled at her. “We have an agreement, don’t we? A partnership?”

  “Yes,” Richeline said, rather sullenly, Bianca thought.

  “Then I don’t see the problem. I’ll talk things over with the navigators on the Grim Countenance, and we’ll set a course.” They wanted to use her? Fine. She’d use them instead. She’d make the Letnev take her to the source of her yearning, and when she got close to Ixth, she’d escape and make her own way to the planet, and seize the treasure for herself. Ha. She’d show them all.

  “We can’t go wandering all over the galaxy on the say-so of a human,” Richeline said.

  “We both know I’m not human,” Bianca said. “Not really. You wanted a treasure map. I am the treasure map. Now you don’t want to follow the map’s directions?”

  Richeline looked at her, dead-eyed and cold. “I’ll have to consult with the captain.”

  “Of course you will,” Bianca said. “I’d like to the meet the captain soon, too. As the most important person on this mission, it’s really time I stopped talking to subordinates.”

  Kyrria made a low rumble that was probably a laugh.

  Archambelle didn’t care. She was arguing with Brother Errin, who was shooing them toward the door. “Yes, Archie, I’ll send over my data, but it won’t tell you anything I didn’t – it will just illustrate the wisdom of my advice.”

  Kyrria led them back to the corridors. Archambelle and Richeline went first, heads together in furious conference, followed by Bianca and Voyou, with the guards at the rear. Voyou walked beside her, murmuring, “Very impressive, Bianca, it’s good to see you asserting yourself and recognizing your value,” and she wanted to shush him, because the doctor and the first officer were exchanging angry words in Letnev, and she wanted to hear them. Then she realized she could just split her auditory focus, taking Voyou’s bland affirmations into one ear and the more interesting discussion into the other.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” Archambelle was saying. “Let her think she’s in charge – let her play the space princess again, strutting around the command deck in her fancy red dress! Once we reach our destination, you can hand her over to me for vivisection as planned. That will shut her up, apart from all the screaming.”

  “She thinks she’s so smart,” Richeline seethed. “But she doesn’t even realize the contract she signed is a sham. As if we’d let some alien science experiment extort us that way.”

  “Lower your voice,” Archambelle said. “She speaks a little Letnev, we think, after all, so better to be discreet.”

  Oh. Bianca’s plan to use the Letnev suddenly seemed ill-advised. If she let them get close to this Ixth, they might decide they were close enough, and kill her. Plus, how could she travel with them as she had before, knowing the depth of their deception, and their plans? Bianca thought for a moment. She considered angles, velocities, the dimensions of the corridor, the distance to the shuttle, and, the true x factor: her body’s new capabilities. A little time dilation would have been welcome, but she still couldn’t enter that state deliberately, so she’d have to settle for speed, strength, and the element of surprise.

  After a few milliseconds, she was satisfied with her calculations, and she spun. As she whipped around, she elbowed Voyou in the face, his nose crunching beneath the blow. She whipped an energy rifle out of the hands of a startled guard, used her momentum to strike a second guard across the face with the gun butt, then dropped and struck out with her leg, sweeping the two guards still standing off their feet.

  She didn’t want to fire the rifle here – what if it punched a hole in the wall and exposed them to vacuum? – but she’d always been good at throwing things, even back on Darit, before her improvements. She ejected the rifle’s energy cell and then hurled the weapon at the back of Archambelle’s head.

  That was a tactical mistake – she hated Archambelle more, so she’d aimed for her, but Richeline was a bigger threat. When the doctor hit the floor, Richeline spun and rushed straight at Bianca, without hesitation. The look on her face was gleeful. Bianca tossed the energy cell at her face, but Richeline just ducked and dove for her.

  Bianca did a standing vertical leap, higher even than the one she’d done in the lab, and when Richeline passed below her Bianca dropped, both feet slamming into the back of her neck. Richeline landed with a gasping cry, and Bianca bent her knees and launched herself onward, down the corridor, toward the towering form of the Hacan. Fighting her would be a different proposition; the Letnev were big too, but they didn’t have those fangs or those claws.

  But Kyrria just stepped out of the way, putting her back to the wall. “No one paid me to stop you, child. Best of luck to you.”

  Bianca made it to the shuttle and got inside, sealing the doors. She scanned the documentation and figured out how to take manual control. She started the engines, but the station wouldn’t release its docking clamps. She could manually force the shuttle’s clamps to release, but that was only half the issue.

  People began hammering on the shuttle doors, trying to override her locks with various priority codes she had to frantically counter. There were no weapons on board, no escape pod, nowhere to go from here. Maybe if she put on an environment suit, she could spacewalk, make her way to another portion of the station, somehow get inside, hide in the service tunnels, but she couldn’t get out of the shuttle, because there was only one door, and it led to an airlock full of angry enemies.

  The Letnev, she knew, were not a very trusting people. Their technology was full of spyware, remote overrides, and countermeasures meant to enforce obedience and punish non-compliance. On the shuttle, it turned out those countermeasures consisted of anesthetic gas, triggered remotely from the Grim Countenance, she assumed. Once the vents began hissing, Bianca filled her lungs with clean air, and then she held her breath.

  It turned out she could hold her breath for thirty-seven full minutes. Is that a record for a human, Brother Errin? she thought, and then she opened her mouth and inhaled, and sank into blackness.

  Chapter 19

  “We’ve been waiting here for over an hour!” Heuvelt shouted into the comms.

  “We’re terribly sorry,” the Hacan’s voice purred. “We’ve had a small… security issue. The situation is nearly resolved, and then you will be allowed to board the station.”

  Heuvelt cursed and stomped back to the galley, where Ashont and Clec were playing a card game. Heuvelt had no idea how that worked, because Clec was perched on Ashont’s shoulder, and could see all the cards in her hands, but apparently the Naaz was scrupulously honest when it came to playing games. “They treat us like our time is worth nothing,” Heuvelt said.

  “‘A small security issue’ could be a euphemism for all sorts of horrible things,” Ashont said. “A terrorist attack by genetic originalists, a lab-grown monster eating the staff, a disappointed client waving around an energy rifle… anything really.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t be in such a big hurry to climb onto the Tree of Grace,” Heuvelt said. “I suppose you’re right. Even if it’s nothing as dramatic as you describe, there are Letnev on board, and they still want to arrest me for crimes I never committed.” He paused. “Don’t you want to know how I surmised there are Letnev on board?”

  “The giant Barony warship floating a few klicks away, all covered with unnecessary spikes, was my first indication,” Clec said. “The presence of a Barony shuttle, covered in smaller unnecessary spikes, in one of the other docking modules confirmed my initial findings.”

  Heuvelt picked at a peeling piece of the tabletop’s laminate. “Yes, that’s what gave it away for me too.”

  “Well spotted, though, captain,” Ashont said. “You still get credit.” She slammed down two cards, one depicting some kind of snake twisted into a sigil and the other a curving fang. “Serpent’s Tooth! Ha! The initiative is mine!”

  “I am sure you cheat,” Clec said. “I don’t know how, but you must.”

  Heuvelt looked at the screen in the galley, showing a map of the system. “After we finish this delivery, I say we head to that moon there and spend some of our profits.”

  “I didn’t know we had profits,” Ashont said. “I thought we were looking at offsetting some debt at best.”

  “We can afford a few drinks, Ashont.”

  “Mmm. That particular moon caters to medical tourists who come here to consult the Yin,” Clec said. “Since he doesn’t let friends and family stay on the Tree of Grace overnight, just patients, there are luxury accommodations and entertainments for all the relatives and hangers-on. The amenities on that moon are expensive, is what I mean to say.”

  “Then we can afford one drink,” Heuvelt said. “I call dibs on said drink.”

  “Oh, there are always bars for the pilots and security staff and valets and corset-lace-tighteners and scale-polishers and mandible-cleaners,” Ashont said, shuffling the cards. “We can find some affordable entertainment. The captain’s right. We should celebrate our change of fortune. We’ll get a lot more work from Sagasa after this job, and with the captain’s record cleared we’ll be able to pass through Letnev space without worrying about it more than anyone else does.”

  “Did the two of you just disagree with each other?” Heuvelt said.

  “No,” Clec said. “Ashont makes good points. What you just witnessed was the process of us discussing a topic and then coming to agreement. We do that a lot. You just don’t usually pay attention.”

  Heuvelt went back to the cockpit to wait for someone to open the airlock. He had a crate full of who-knew-what grotesque biological material in his cargo hold, and he just wanted to hand it over to the mad scientist, go on his way, and reap his rewards. Working for someone like Sagasa was troubling, but if it got his record cleared and allowed him to give up this furtive half-fugitive lifestyle, and make progress toward his dreams of exploration again, it was all worthwhile.

  I can’t wait for life to get simpler again, he thought.

  •••

  “We could threaten to torture her parents,” Voyou said. “She’s clearly very fond of them.”

  “That is an option,” Severyne said. “I am certainly not above compelling obedience, but there are drawbacks to the technique. For one thing, we’ll have no idea if Bianca is telling the truth or leading us astray. Since we don’t know where we’re going, or what might be required from her in terms of activating mechanisms or opening vaults or what have you, she could lead us on indefinitely.”

  Richeline rubbed the back of her neck where Bianca had stomped on her. Severyne had watched that part of the video twice, her annoyance slightly tempered by amusement. What a leap! The young woman clearly had hidden capabilities, including fluency in Letnev, since overhearing Richeline’s comments about the sham contract was the only reasonable explanation for the timing of her escape attempt.

  Richeline growled. “I say we just cut off one of her hands and tell her we’ll cut off the other if she doesn’t take us where we want to go, and fast.”

  “Same problem,” Severyne said. “We can’t give her a ticking clock, because for all we know the journey will take years. Besides, now she knows we don’t plan to let her live after we’re done with her. We also don’t know the extent of her physical capabilities, so torturing her effectively will be a difficult series of trials-and-errors, with more of the latter than we have time for. Especially in light of Archambelle’s theory about her pain management.”

  “What theory?” Richeline said.

  “No one reads the whole files,” Severyne sighed. “Really, you can’t just skim the precis.” She leaned back in her desk chair and fixed Richeline with the full weight of her disappointment. “Tell her, doctor.”

  The doctor was still a little groggy from the meds she’d taken after the blow to her head, but her gaze sharpened as she spoke. “I think Bianca can control her pain receptors, though perhaps not consciously. I deliberately did some painful procedures, to test her reactions, and after a brief wince she evinced no further distress, and I detected reduced conductivity in her nerves. Very targeted, very selective. Inflicting pain on her is likely to be difficult. As for maiming her, yes, that could be highly motivating, but I have also noted astonishing capabilities in terms of tissue regeneration. I have not gone so far as to cut off one of her hands, but if I did, I suspect it would grow back. I also have other concerns about compelling her cooperation through force.”