“We’ll do our best to destroy them, then,” she said. “And if we fail… hell.” Callie hadn’t kept their bridge generator a secret out of selfishness, but to try to protect humanity. When the truth-tellers found out the White Raven had a bridge generator, they’d blown up Meditreme Station and killed fifty thousand people in an attempt to hide the secret. What would the truth-tellers do if the Jovian Imperative got their hands on such technology? What would the Imperative do? They would explore space, maybe stumble on Axiom technology, maybe wake the slumbering gods, and maybe get everyone killed.

  But that was a possible future problem, and there were hundreds of thousands of people in this system who needed help, right now. Callie knew her limitations. The Imperative could save the inhabitants of this system. She couldn’t, at least, not alone. “Actually, when you get through the gate, don’t hail the military. Contact Michael instead. Use the emergency number. He’ll pick up.” Her ex-husband’s family owned one of the Imperative’s most powerful corporations, and he could exert influence on the highest levels of government. “He’ll keep the port authority from blowing you up, probably, though I’m sure you’ll be impounded. Tell Michael… tell him everything. About the bridge generator, the Axiom, all of it. Tell him… I trust him to do the right thing.”

  “Which is… what?”

  “How should I know? Maybe Michael can figure that out. Tell him to get in touch with Uzoma. I bet they’ll have some ideas about how to deal with the implications of the Imperative getting their hands on Axiom tech.”

  “You’re sure about this? Sharing our secret this way?”

  “When we were blowing up space stations, that was one thing, but this situation, it’s way beyond. It’s just too much for us alone. I’m starting to think maybe dealing with the Axiom is a bigger job than we can do by ourselves.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  Callie thought it was polite of Shall not to mention that he’d made that same argument many times, only for her to stubbornly insist it was better if they handled matters alone. “I’m going back to the White Raven.” I need Elena, she thought. Elena always made her feel better.

  “Aye, captain – huh. That’s odd.”

  “What’s odd?”

  “The White Raven… it’s gone.”

  “What do you mean it’s gone?”

  “It’s not on my sensors, and they’re not in communication – I thought they were just laying back while we dealt with the station, but… they’re not here.”

  “Did they leave? Did they open a bridge somewhere?”

  “There’s a radiation signature near their last known position. A wormhole bridge did open there. Why would they leave without telling us?”

  Everything inside Callie turned to ice. “We have to find them, Shall.”

  “I’m scanning with everything I’ve got, but they could be anywhere. I don’t understand this. They wouldn’t leave without telling us. Do you think… were they boarded? Were they taken?”

  Callie put her head between her knees and tried to breathe. “Okay. The rest of the crew is on board the White Raven. You’re on board, Shall. Ashok. Drake and Janice. Lantern. Even stupid Kaustikos. Fuck. Everyone. Everyone is on board. How could I let this happen?”

  “Callie, please, panic won’t get us anywhere.”

  “Not panicking won’t get us anywhere either, Shall. Get me… get me the resistance. Get me Wilfred. They owe me. They’re going to repay me by helping me find my ship.” And my friends. And my love. And my life.

  Wilfred didn’t bother with consensus building and consulting the other generals this time. He had his own people, his own squad, and he put together a team of veterans to accompany Callie on the Blaze – the Sunspot was off through the wormhole, negotiating with Michael and the Jovian Imperative, Callie assumed, and the Cleansing Fire was guarding the bridge.

  First they stormed the headquarters of the surgical division. The Shaper of Destiny was the last member of the triumvirate standing, and if anyone had abducted her people, it was probably him. The station was a soft target, because it was deserted. Callie stomped through the corridors and offices as the resistance members helped those patients who were still capable of being helped, but all the personnel, Exalted and chimera collaborators both, were gone. “Maybe the Exalted are abandoning the system,” Wilfred said.

  “Do they strike you as gracious losers?”

  “They strike me as survivors, and they may have realized their survival isn’t likely if they stay around here, now that the wormhole gate is open.”

  Callie hadn’t told any of the resistance about the Axiom, and it was too much to go into now, but she believed they were still in the system. “Can you get me a map of all the Exalted facilities in the system?”

  Wilfred provided one and she retreated into the captain’s quarters on the Blaze. “Shall, you have Lantern’s map of Axiom and truth-teller facilities, right?”

  “I do.”

  “Compare them to this map, would you?”

  She sat at the captain’s desk and considered the screen, with one map overlaid on another. One of the stations marked on Lantern’s map was the surgical facility they’d just assaulted and had probably once been the truth-teller outpost in this facility. The Exalted must have absorbed or killed the cultists a century ago.

  But the other location, outside the plane of the Vanaheim and Niflheim’s orbits, wasn’t a facility known to the resistance. “That’s where we’re going, Shall. The secret thirteenth station of the Exalted. That must be the base for whatever the Axiom are doing here. I bet that’s where Shaper is now – he’d know better than to go anywhere the resistance might target.”

  “You think he took the White Raven?”

  Callie slumped down in her chair. “I think they could be anywhere in the galaxy, and we have to start somewhere. Get these resistance fighters off my boat, and set a course for the station.”

  “It will take us a while to get there, Callie – more than a day. We don’t have a bridge generator here.”

  “Stop wasting time talking about what we can’t do, and start doing what we can,” Callie said.

  “Aye, aye,” Shall said softly.

  CHAPTER 24

  “That sure is a pretty boat, Shall.” Elena looked at the sleek vastness of the Cleansing Fire through the observation deck’s windows. “Looks like a shark and a manta ray had a baby full of beautiful murder.”

  “I’m a little jealous of that other instance of my consciousness,” Shall said. “You can really stretch out in a ship like that, I bet. Not that the White Raven isn’t nice too. I didn’t feel cramped at all until a few minutes ago.”

  “Is Callie okay over there?” She’d been going from ship to ship and loading software and waiting for her teleporter to recharge for twelve hours now, with minimal communication, because they didn’t want the Discourager to pick up any chatter.

  “Oh, she’s fine. I think she’s even enjoying herself. Look – there go the guns.”

  Elena whistled as streaks of light arrowed from the Cleansing Fire and turned the scourge-ships into haze. “I’m glad they’re gone,” she said. “Ugly, vile things.”

  “Now Callie gets to be sarcastic at the head of operations,” Shall said. “I bet she’s going to enjoy – huh. That’s weird.”

  “What?” Elena said.

  “Our communications just shut down. We can’t transmit ship-to-ship anymore. My consciousness is already transferred from the Cleansing Fire and the other two ships, so it doesn’t break the plan, but… how strange. Janice, any ideas?”

  “We’re being jammed.” Janice always sounded annoyed, but now she sounded super annoyed. “I can’t even get the sensors up and running. Something’s thrown an isolation field of some kind around us.”

  The observation bay screens flashed red briefly and then turned into windows. Without magnification, the Cleansing Fire and the operations center were just distant dark shapes, and the vaporized scourge-ships faint hazes of light.

  “The engines aren’t responding,” Drake said.

  “The bridge generator seems fine,” Ashok said, “but with the navigation and propulsion systems shut down, we can’t fly through a wormhole even if we opened one.”

  You’re in charge, Elena, she thought. “Shall, send a drone to see what’s happening outside.”

  “There’s a ship above us,” Drake said. “It’s… big.”

  “I thought the sensors were dead?” Elena said.

  “They are,” Janice said. “We’re looking at it through the windows.”

  Elena couldn’t see anything from the observation bay so she hurried up to the cockpit, where Drake and Janice had angled their chair to look up through the windows. Elena gazed with them at the vast dark shape blotting out the stars above.

  “Weapons aren’t responding,” Shall said. “A lot of processes on the ship are just frozen. I can’t even figure out how it’s happening.”

  A line of white light appeared in the darkness above them, like a seam opening in the fabric of night. The bar of light widened, shining through the cockpit windows and turning everything white.

  “Janice,” Drake said. “That light. Do you… does that…”

  “Yes,” Janice said. “We’ve seen that ship before.”

  “What do you mean?” Elena said, and then it was like she blinked, and somehow during the course of that blink everything changed.

  The cockpit was gone. She sat on a softly upholstered couch in a room with deep red wallpaper – it was like being inside the chamber of a heart, she thought wildly. She stood up and looked around, but there were no doors or windows. And what was she wearing? Some kind of dress with frilly loose sleeves, the fabric a slightly paler red than the rest of the room. The floor was made of wooden boards of alternating light and dark shades, interwoven in a complex design that made her head hurt if she looked at it too long. “Hello?” she said tentatively. “Is anyone there?”

  The doctor will be with you shortly, a pleasantly modulated voice said, but it seemed to speak inside her head.

  Elena hugged herself. “Where is this place? What’s happening?”

  You are in the waiting room, the voice said. Please wait.

  Ashok, Lantern, and Kaustikos were in the machine shop when the ship’s systems froze. “This is bad,” Ashok said. “Right? It seems bad. Then again, whoever took control of the ship hasn’t turned off the life support yet, so that’s promising.”

  Lantern said, “Being a hostage is better than being dead, yes, but ‘promising’ is a strange word for–”

  Ashok disappeared, and so did Kaustikos, and so did the machine shop. Lantern was floating in a relaxation tank in a white-tile room, clothed in a wetsuit. She clambered out of the warm water and dropped to the floor. There were no evident doors or windows in the round chamber. She closed her seven eyes and considered her biological systems. She had no sense that she’d lost or regained consciousness, and discerned no gaps in her continuity of awareness, but clearly something had happened. “Shaper?” she called. “Is this your doing?”

  The doctors will see you shortly, a voice spoke in Lantern’s head. She spun, tentacles flailing, but you couldn’t turn to face a voice in your mind, could you?

  “How are you doing that?” Maybe there was an implant, something in her head that made it seem the voice came from within. “What is this place?”

  This is the waiting room. You may wait here.

  “Where are my friends?”

  The doctors are with other patients right now. Your turn will come.

  Ashok didn’t blink – he basically didn’t need to anymore – but everything changed in the time it would take to blink. He was in some kind of red parlor, with a soft couch and a pretty geometric tile floor, wearing some kind of weird velvet suit with a ruffled shirt. He ran a diagnostic and –

  Nothing. The diagnostic didn’t run.

  He tried to review his sensory cache (he recorded everything he experienced), but he didn’t have access to the data. He didn’t even get an error message. It just… wasn’t there.

  Ashok stretched his arms and legs, and everything seemed to work fine, but none of his non-standard senses were giving him any information: he couldn’t sense magnetic fields or radiation, his sonar was offline, and his olfactory senses were appallingly baseline. He’d been reduced to ordinary human senses… but that didn’t make any sense. His original sense of smell was long gone. He could only smell things at all through his upgrades, and he didn’t even know a way to customize them so they only noticed dust and sweat and stale air without also notifying him about the chemical composition of whatever he smelled.

  Ah, I get it. “This is a simulation,” he said aloud.

  This is the waiting room, a voice spoke in his head.

  “You’d better not be doing weird stuff to my body out there.”

  The doctors are examining you now. You are a very interesting case. They will be with you shortly.

  “You’re the Shaper of Destiny, right?” Ashok said. “Last of the bigshot Exalted. You captured us with some stupid idea that you can ransom us or hold us hostage or whatever, right? Callie is not as sentimental as you think.”

  The doctors will be with you shortly.

  Ashok sat down on the couch. He hoped Callie was more sentimental than he thought, because it was hard to rescue yourself from inside a simulation. “If you were going to put me in a virtual environment, you could have at least let me ride dragons or something!” he shouted.

  Please wait.

  The cockpit disappeared, and Drake and Janice were no longer in their mobility chair but floating weightless in some kind of energy field in a white room. An immense Liar, two meters in diameter with skin as pale as snow, gazed at them. His body glistened with silvery prostheses and augmentations of uncertain purpose, and he had a multitude of pseudopods, some as thick as a human leg, some as thin as a finger.

  Drake groaned, and Janice screamed, and then their voices converged into a single voice of fear. For the first time in a long time, they weren’t experiencing any pain, but that was, in some ways, worse.

  “Hello, subject one,” the Liar said in a low, gravelly voice. “We are so pleased to see you again. How much of our time together do you remember?”

  The field they were in began to hum, and Janice and Drake’s eyes rolled back, and they remembered as much as they could stand.

  Drake and Janice were working for a development company based in the Trappist system. They’d been military surveyors once upon a time, and they were highly respected in their field… which was why they got the weird jobs, and the hard ones. After months of doing routine surveying trips around the system, the captain of their ship, Martinique Hidalgo, picked up an anomalous radio signal – just a brief snippet, way out beyond the areas they’d explored so far, but the signals definitely seemed artificial in origin. She came into the cockpit and said, “I’ve convinced the company we should investigate.”

  “Are we hunting aliens again?” Drake wrinkled his nose. “That week we spent in the Bondye system, chasing what turned out to be a malfunctioning beacon on a survey buoy, wasn’t enough time wasted for you?” Drake had known Martinique since childhood, growing up with her in the Toronto arcologies, but he would have been just as openly exasperated with any other captain. The joke about Drake was that he had a pretty voice and a nasty disposition.

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?” Janice chided. “There’s a great big universe full of mysteries out there to explore.” Janice was well-liked by the whole crew, and it was a testament to her sunny disposition that she even got along fine with Drake, leading to their long partnership. Everyone from Europa was polite – ‘Europa nice’ people called it, because they’d be friendly to your face even if they wanted to stick a knife in your eye – but Janice was nice actual.

  “There could be other intelligent life in the universe.” Martinique sat in the jump-seat behind the pilot’s chair. “There’s us, and the Liars, and whole lot of planets we’ve found capable of sustaining life, so there’s no reason to believe we’re alone. Wouldn’t it be nice to meet some aliens you can have an actual conversation with?”

  “You can talk all day with Liars,” Drake said. “Lots of them won’t shut up, no matter how much you beg.”

  “I mean a conversation where one of the parties doesn’t just make things up all the time,” Martinique said. “There are so many big questions about the universe that the Liars should be able to answer… but they just spout their endless bullshit instead. It drives me crazy. So crazy I’ve read anthropology papers speculating about why they do it. If we could find other aliens… well. It would be a pretty big deal. Since we’re wandering the outskirts of the Trappist system looking for anything worth exploiting anyway, why not chase down the signal?”

  “It’s another malfunctioning buoy, mark my words,” Drake said. “Some unlicensed miner working the far edges of the system, hoping the company won’t notice them poaching our sweet minerals, using salvaged or refurbished equipment to mark likely asteroids. How much do you want to bet?”

  “I learned not to gamble with you when we played dice back in the arcology,” Martinique said. “Quit complaining and fly the ship.” She patted Janice on the shoulder and left the cockpit.

  “Fool’s errand,” Drake grumbled. He tapped a readout on his board. “That’s the third ‘maintenance suggested’ light I’ve had to turn off just today. We’re overdue for service, and instead of getting checked out, we’re going even deeper into the black.”

  “We’ll get the ship checked out when we return. Did you want to go all the way back to base and then come all this way again? We’re already so far out here, we might as well take a little diversion to keep the captain happy.”

  “Nobody ever seems too concerned about whether or not I’m happy,” he groused.

  “You get paid the same whether we’re chasing aliens or leaving transponders on rocks, so why complain?”