That minister only had so much pull, though, so the Imperative didn’t send its newest military ships on a likely mission of no return. They sent ships from the previous generation of development. You had to do something with the vessels, after all – selling them to other polities had led to scandals and war crimes, stripping them for parts was time-consuming, and mothballing them was wasteful. Why not consign them to the void, with crews made up of troublemakers or idealists or zealots. If the expeditions figured out what was happening in the Vanir system and came back, wonderful. If not, well… at least the Imperative’s operational readiness wouldn’t be negatively impacted.

  Even a ten-years-ago model of a Jovian Imperative battleship was something to behold, though. Shall had selected the flagship of the most recent expedition, the Cleansing Fire, and, if its systems were in good working order, he should be able to load a copy of his consciousness onto its computer and run the entire ship himself, no cumbersome human crew required. The Jovian Imperative didn’t allow AI on its ships – there were too many staunch traditionalist paranoiacs among the ministers – but the technology was compatible with Shall’s needs.

  Unfortunately, battleships were thoroughly shielded against electronic infiltration. It wouldn’t do to have the pride of the Imperative fleet hijacked by an enemy machine consciousness in the middle of battle. In order to open a connection to transfer Shall’s consciousness, someone had to board the Cleansing Fire and access its systems directly. Ashok and Shall had built a dongle for her to plug into the commander’s terminal, loaded with a program that would open a hole for Shall’s consciousness to slip through. “Do I have to call it a dongle?” she’d objected. “Can’t I call it, I don’t know, an infiltration and control key or something?”

  “Dongle,” Ashok said cheerfully. “Dingle, dangle, dongle dongle.”

  “We’re within range, Callie,” Janice said over comms.

  “Be safe, Captain Machedo,” Kaustikos said.

  “Your concern touches me.”

  “Have fun!” Ashok said. “I wish I could teleport into an abandoned battleship.”

  “You’d forget what you were there for and just start prying juicy bits of tech out of the walls.”

  “That’s the whole reason you hired me,” Ashok said.

  “Is it?” Callie left the observation port and went down to the infirmary, where Elena was studying. “I’m about to take off,” she said.

  Elena sighed and put her handheld terminal down. “You’re dead set on doing this?”

  “I’m the infiltration specialist.”

  “I wish Shall could just fly over there in his scary spider-drone body.”

  “If he starts cutting holes in the hull of a warship, someone might notice. The personal teleporter, on the other hand, is very subtle. Don’t you like it when I’m subtle?”

  “I don’t recognize you when you’re subtle.” She opened her arms, and Callie hugged her. “Be careful over there.”

  “It’s a dry-docked spaceship,” Callie said. “How much trouble can I possibly get into?”

  “It’s a good thing I don’t believe in jinxes.”

  Callie stepped out into the hallway, made sure the coordinates were right (a triple-check, but she really didn’t want to end up stuck inside the bulkhead of a spaceship), and triggered the teleporter.

  Callie passed through her own personal wormhole and emerged in a corridor on one of the Cleansing Fire’s upper decks. The ship was dark and silent, but her suit told her that life support was operational – there was breathable air in here. That was odd. Why leave any systems running at all? She decided to stick with her own air supply anyway. She turned on her suit lights and felt absurdly like someone exploring a haunted house with a flashlight. The fact that she was floating weightlessly like a ghost only made it more eerie.

  The walls were shiny and smooth, the floors likewise, and the architecture tended toward graceful curves – the Jovian Imperative military aesthetic was one of simple elegance. Bring overwhelming force to every conflict and look good doing it.

  She had a map in her helmet display based on theoretical ship schematics, but the Imperative didn’t exactly publish detailed blueprints of their warships, and it quickly became apparent that her map was based largely on erroneous speculation. Fortunately, there were signs directing her toward the combat information center. On a boat this big, even experienced crew could get lost.

  Callie turned a corner and found her first dead body, a young man floating against a bulkhead stained with long-dried blood. Callie was glad she’d kept her helmet on – there was air in here, which meant microorganisms, which meant the stench of decay. She stepped around the body, continuing along corridors, and found a bulkhead door twisted and warped by an explosion, and black fragments of organic matter she didn’t care to explore too closely. One of the Exalted’s bombers had triggered here. She hoped the terminal she needed to plug this dongle – stupid word – into wasn’t damaged. There were other candidate ships for Shall to take over in the dry dock, but none as powerful as the Cleansing Fire.

  Something clattered ahead of her, and Callie froze and turned on her active camouflage. That noise had sounded like metal on metal… maybe just something bumping against something else in the microgravity? The ship was uninhabited, right?

  Unless it wasn’t. What kind of actual intel did they have about this ship? Wilfred’s assumptions and maybe third-hand accounts said the battleships were dry-docked and served only as trophies for the Discourager of Doubt’s ego, but Callie didn’t know if that was true. The Exalted could use these ships for anything, including dormitories for junior genetic space monsters.

  The Exalted probably would have cleaned up the dead bodies if that were the case, though.

  The sound didn’t repeat, so Callie continued, glancing into the room where she’d heard the noise. It was someone’s crew quarters, the door locked into the open position, the bunk unmade –

  Something moved under the covers. Ghost, she thought, entirely irrationally, but just because her mind knew it was nonsense didn’t stop her body from reacting. Her heart thudded, the hairs on the back of her neck rose, and her breath shallowed out.

  One of those horrible hunter drones scuttled out of the covers and propelled itself toward her with a hard thrust of its mechanical legs. Callie silently stepped aside and it sailed past her. The hunter didn’t appear to detect her, but went caroming down the corridor, pushing itself off first one wall and then another.

  Callie let her breath out. Wilfred’s intel just had some gaps. The ships weren’t totally uninhabited. There were drones, doubtless here on the off chance the resistance tried to take control of one of the warships. It wasn’t ideal to have a lot of enemy agents on board a ship she was planning to commandeer, but Shall should be able to seal all the doors and keep the hunters contained. It wasn’t like the ship would have an actual crew for the drones to attack.

  She proceeded more slowly and saw more hunters, either following intricate search patterns or just wandering aimlessly – she had no way to tell. There were more dead bodies, too, as she got closer to the command deck. Once she finally reached the CIC, she was prepared to find it bombed beyond recognition, crawling with hunter drones, and full of drifting corpses… so the reality, an empty command center with a few scorch marks from energy weapons and a mere three dead bodies (one of them with captain’s bars on his shoulders) was a relief.

  She pushed the captain’s floating body out of the way, murmuring an apology almost automatically as she did so, and found the inputs on his terminal. She inserted the dongle – the control key – and watched the terminal light up and begin to flash angry red warnings about unauthorized software and demands for a command override if they actually wanted to run this mysterious program, which should only be done if commanded by the Jovian Imperative high council, blah blah blah blah.

  The ship’s firewalls were robust but they were also a decade old, and the Trans-Neptunian Authority security forces had done ample quantities of espionage. As a former security officer of that former nation, Callie had access to all kinds of infiltration data, and Ashok and Shall had integrated it into their program. The Imperative constantly improved their security protocols, but the Cleansing Fire wasn’t exactly getting regular software updates, so this control key was sufficient to let her crack open the ship’s controls.

  The angry red letters were replaced by happy green ones and Callie breathed a sigh of relief. “Shall, I’m in. Is it working on your end?”

  “Transferring data now, Callie. Oh, it’s nice over there, very roomy. Huh. I’m getting all sorts of life signs.”

  “Hunter drones,” she said. “Scuttling around like cockroaches.”

  “Their bio-parts need atmosphere to survive, so I’m going to turn off the life support, if that’s all right with you.”

  “I’m not over here on this creepy ghost ship with my helmet off, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Glad to hear it. You can take the dongle out now. It’s going to take several hours for me to take full control.”

  “I have to wait until my teleporter recharges to come back anyway. I guess I can catch up on my reading.”

  “Once it’s up and running, you could teleport to the escort ships that came through with the Cleansing Fire. What’s another eight or twelve hours? I could always use more bodies…”

  This is going to be a long night. “You know I can’t get enough of you, Shall.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The smaller, faster gunships – the Blaze and the Sunspot; someone had settled on a fire theme for the last mission, apparently – were less creepy because they were smaller, but it was the difference between being in a haunted cottage instead of a haunted mansion. There were fewer hunter drones and fewer dead bodies, but the smaller vessels were still charnel houses. Ghost ships about to rise from the dead and take revenge. Very appealing.

  She teleported to the Cleansing Fire’s bridge just as Shall completed transferring his consciousness to the Sunspot. She’d managed to nap a little, incredibly, so she was reasonably alert for the fun part of their plan.

  The bridge lit up, stations coming to life, and Shall said the systems checked out, more or less – the damage to the interior was mostly superficial, and a ship like that was full of redundancies and systems made to route around damage. Most importantly, the weapons and propulsion systems were fully operational. The Exalted probably couldn’t have disabled them if they’d tried. Imperative warships were tough. “Shall we blow some stuff up?” the Cleansing Fire’s version of Shall asked.

  “Yes, we shall.”

  Callie itched to run the tactical board, but Shall had it covered. He was nice enough to let her see the trajectories he was plotting for the projectile weapons and torpedoes: every single scourge-ship that hovered around the operations center was lit up, and, at this range, they’d be annihilated before they even realized they’d been targeted. “Release the boom,” she said.

  The big screen in front of her came to life, offering a panoramic view of the devastation. The first ship struck was on the distant edge of the screen, and it burst into a corona of radiating fire. Then another, closer to the center, went up, producing a pinwheel of white and yellow light. After that several scourge-ships lit up simultaneously, flashes so bright the screen dimmed the view to keep the sight from washing into a wall of undifferentiated color. The scourge-ships exploded like miniature stars going supernova, and Callie filled with furious joy. Those ships were ugly things, deliberately designed to evoke fear and disgust. They’d borne genocides, and now they were radioactive particles.

  The last flashes faded, leaving behind nothing but glowing dust.

  “Hail the station,” Callie said. “Don’t accept anyone less than the Discourager of Doubt, and, when you get her, put her onscreen.”

  The Cleansing Fire wasn’t under thrust, and human ships didn’t have the gravity-altering capabilities of Axiom or Exalted tech, so she strapped herself down in the captain’s chair. Shame about the former captain floating around behind her, but it couldn’t be helped. She removed her helmet. The air didn’t smell too bad – Shall had the filters working overtime, sucking out all the bad stinks.

  A few long minutes later, Shall said, “Here she comes.”

  The screen switched to a close-up view of a pale yellow liar with a single immense eye in the center of her body, the iris a more poisonous shade of the same color. “Captain Machedo,” she said. “You’ve come to offer more of the diplomacy the Weaver of Worlds told me about, I see.”

  “We call it ‘gunboat diplomacy’ back where I come from. You make a conspicuous display of military force to set the right tone for negotiations.”

  “What is it you think we’re negotiating?”

  “Your surrender. You might want to get Shaper on the line. You’re just a ruling bi-umvirate now, since I watched Opener die.”

  “The Exalted do not negotiate with humans–”

  “I learned something interesting about your station, when I was chatting with the resistance generals,” Callie interrupted. “It’s the only facility in the whole system that doesn’t have any human prisoners or experimental subjects on board. No labs or holding areas at all, just Exalted admin and military personnel, and what we in the resistance like to call ‘traitors.’ That means my gunboat here can diplomatically turn the entire station into rubble, and nobody in the resistance will be sad. That sounds like a good idea to me, too, because then I’ll only have one division head to negotiate the surrender with.”

  “How did you find enough capable crew members to operate that ship?” the Discourager demanded.

  “I know you’re just stalling until help arrives, Discourager, but I’ll answer you. The answer is ‘magic.’ I am magic. Or maybe I’m a judgment from the gods. Do you believe in gods?”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “You do, though. Your gods are not dead, but sleeping. The Axiom, Discourager. You believe in them, don’t you?”

  The eye slitted. “That is not… that word does not mean anything to me.”

  “Okay. Say your final prayers to nothingness, then. We’re targeting your office first.”

  “Wait! What do you want?”

  “It’s too bad you aren’t the one called the Opener of the Way, because that would be a lot more poetic. I want you to open the way. Activate the bridge, and open a portal to the Jovian Imperative gate.”

  “Impossible. The wormhole gate has been permanently disabled.”

  “That’s a real shame. Enjoy dying in a fire.”

  “Wait.” The Exalted’s flesh pulsed with colors, greens and blues. Callie had no idea what the display meant. Maybe she’d ask Lantern later. “It will take some time to reactivate the gate.”

  “Really? I bet it’s just a big button you have to push. Don’t stall me, Disco. If you aren’t helpful, I’ll just kill you and bring in my engineer to figure out how to reactivate the bridge. The only reason you’re still alive is because this seems like it could be faster.”

  “I… I will comply.” The Discourager did something offscreen, and a moment later, a huge wormhole opened in the center of the space marked out by the buoys, inky tendrils reaching out into space.

  “We are prepared to negotiate–” the Discourager began.

  “Kill the feed,” Callie said. The screen went blank. “Now kill that station.”

  “Callie? She said they were willing to negotiate.”

  “They should have negotiated when they still had something to offer me,” Callie said. “The Discourager of Doubt is a terrible diplomat. Destroy that station, Shall. It’s an enemy installation, and the people on board don’t even deserve the mercy of a quick death. I’m just softhearted enough to give them one, is all.” She paused. “If you set up the shot, I’ll push the button, if you want. I understand.”

  “No, captain. I knew what I was getting into when I took on a battleship for a body. Firing now.”

  Callie had actually never seen a battleship of this class fully open up on a single target. As a child on Earth, she’d stomped through patches of dandelions, sending hundreds of wispy seeds airborne, so numerous they made the currents of air visible with their movement. That was what the Cleansing Fire’s onslaught reminded her of. The scores of torpedoes, illuminated as bright white specks on her screen, seemed caught up in a deadly wind that bore them toward the station in a cloud. The impacts were so forceful and numerous that the station actually listed in space, beginning a slow spin it would never have a chance to complete. Airlocks and windows burst open under the missile strikes, and mercifully unidentifiable shapes poured from the brutal new openings. After a few moments, Callie turned her gaze away. She could feel the vibrations of the weapons firing through the deck, though.

  “It’s done, captain,” Shall said finally, and the vibrations faded.

  Callie looked, and the Exalted operations facility was a devastated rock, with bits of debris she tried not to recognize floating all around it.

  “Shall, send one of the smaller ships through the wormhole and let the Imperative know the door is open to this system. Fill them in, broad strokes, about the Exalted, and the people who need help here. They can send in a real cavalry.”

  “Will do. But. Um. How do I explain how we got here in the first place?”

  Callie had been thinking about that question. “I don’t know. Tell them we encountered a space-time anomaly and everything went wobbly and then we wound up here.”

  Shall’s voice was gentle. “They’re going to find out about the bridge generators, Callie. There’s no way we can keep them a secret, not as long as any scourge-ships survive.”