“I concur,” Ashont said. “Working with her is the only practical approach.”

  “So, we believe her story?” Heuvelt said.

  “It’s so outlandish, it’s hard to believe it’s a fiction,” Ashont said. “Surely a liar would have concocted something more plausible. The Letnev certainly wanted her for something. Plus, we saw what she did in that bar, and even on our ship – she is something more than human.”

  “It’s all very hard to credit,” Heuvelt said. “But it won’t be the first time I’ve chased a hint of a whisper of a rumor into the depths of space.” He smiled. “Let’s do it.”

  Ashont cocked her head, and Clec made a sort of strangled sound. “Wait,” the Naaz said. “You agree?”

  “All I want is to be a treasure hunter,” Heuvelt said. “I didn’t lay awake in bed as a child and dream about transporting freight – that was simply a necessity for survival. This is a chance to get back to what I love. Seeing the light of unknown stars on new worlds. Cracking open vaults and looting the treasures within. Walking where no human has trod before. That’s what I was made for. To be honest, I’m delighted this strange woman hijacked our ship. Otherwise, what – we’d be doing more deliveries for Sagasa, ad infinitum?”

  “Helping a Letnev fugitive – two Letnev fugitives – isn’t going to help your legal situation,” Ashont said. “If they find out we’re involved in this, Sagasa won’t be able to scrub you from their systems.”

  “I have spent too long driven by fear,” Heuvelt declared. That fact had recently struck him with the force of epiphany. “Look at Bianca – barely an adult, from a nowhere planet, taken from her family and friends, used against her will, abused and experimented upon, and what did she do? Did she sulk on the outskirts of a system waiting for paperwork to go through? No. She seized control of her destiny and struck out into the unknown, to seek her destiny. She inspires me.”

  “Are you sure there aren’t any more strange pheromones floating around?” Ashont said.

  “None at all,” Clec said. “This is all him.”

  “It’s unanimous, then,” Heuvelt said. “Set a course for the nearest appropriate wormhole.”

  “There’s a Federation of Sol gate that will get us in the right direction,” Clec said.

  “And we won’t have to worry about running into any lurking Letnev there,” Ashont added.

  “I’ll go give our guests the good news.” Heuvelt stood up, smiling. He didn’t do that much anymore – smiling made the muscles in his face contract around the scar, and the skin felt tight there as a result, which usually wiped any brief sign of happiness off his face. This time, though, he didn’t care. He’d resigned himself to a life of shuttling to and fro, running errands for criminal scum. But now, now, he was on a mission of greatness, chasing a chance at wonder once again.

  Granted, things hadn’t turned out very well last time he tried that, but what kind of explorer would he be if he gave up forever after the first time he got lost?

  Chapter 26

  The Federation of Sol ran an efficient port, and, according to Heuvelt’s grumbles, charged accordingly. Bianca sat in the cockpit, watching the ships bustling to and fro, taking in the strange convex shape of the space-time anomaly at the center of all the traffic. “Why does the wormhole glow that way?”

  “There is nothing I’d call a glow in any of our visual spectrums,” Clec said, hovering over the pilot’s chair. “I think you’re seeing things we can’t see again.”

  “That’s a shame,” Bianca said. “It’s so beautiful.”

  The Show and Tell transited the wormhole without difficulty. Bianca slowed down her subjective time sense as they passed through – she could do that at will now – but the transition still happened almost instantaneously, and she didn’t gather any useful data. She’d have to think about wormholes more. They were interesting. The whole fabric of space-time… it seemed like there were possibilities there.

  They emerged on the far side of the wormhole, where there was comparatively little traffic, and all of it headed in the same direction. Heuvelt stepped into the cockpit and nodded at Bianca. He looked a little queasy. “That’s step one on our journey of who knows how many steps.”

  Bianca pointed at the departing ships on the viewscreen. “Where are they headed?”

  “Toward the Zaxony system, mainly,” Clec said. “It’s the nearest point of interest, a Federation of Sol colony built in the ruins of a star-shell left behind by some lost civilization. There’s a joint project with the Hylar government to research the structure’s origins and find new applications for the tech. Beyond that, there’s a colony world called Whiteraven, which I’m told is a nice place to live, except for all the bone-colored terror birds trying to rip you to pieces. Is that where we’re going?”

  Bianca shook her head and pointed. “We’re going that way. What’s over there?”

  “Nothing,” Clec said. “At least, as far as anyone has noticed in any recorded survey.”

  The door opened again, and Ashont stood on the other side, Severyne lurking nearby, hands still shackled. They couldn’t all fit in the cockpit.

  “Should we resupply?” Heuvelt said. “The administrative station for the wormhole can provide most of what we need, but it would be nice if we had some idea how far we were going. I don’t suppose you can be more specific than saying ‘that way’, Bianca?”

  She considered. “We’re much closer now. Drastically so. That wormhole really made a difference. Hmm. I know how far we’ve traveled, and I know how much more intense my desire to reach our destination is now, and if I plot the change in my internal state against our movement in space, I can extrapolate an end point to the curve–”

  “You don’t have any telemetry data,” Severyne interrupted. “You don’t have records of ship speeds or course headings, nor do you know this ship’s capabilities. How can you extrapolate anything?”

  “I glanced at navigation screens on the Grim Countenance,” she said. “I perused star maps. I read through this ship’s manual this morning, so I know the specs. I was sitting right here when coordinates were discussed. I remember it all well enough. It’s just a question of putting the data together.”

  “How can anyone possibly remember that level of detail?” Heuvelt said.

  “I… just can,” Bianca said. “Do you trust me?”

  “Trusting you is the entire basis of this expedition,” Clec said. “So it doesn’t seem to be optional.”

  She closed her eyes, and a three-dimensional map of this sector of the galaxy filled her mind. She drew curves across her vision and watched them converge. She opened her eyes. “At top speed, it will take us seventeen days to reach our destination. But I don’t know if that’s our final destination. Maybe it’s just the first stepping stone.”

  “You’re saying there might be a wormhole there,” Sev said.

  “There may be. Or maybe just directions, or a trail marker, pointing to another place. I just don’t know. Sev, do you want to stay here? Or on the shellworld? You just wanted to escape the Grim Countenance, and I feel terrible asking you to risk your life this way. You never set out to be a treasure hunter.”

  “Though there is no more noble calling,” Heuvelt said.

  “Not many more interesting ones, at least,” Ashont said.

  Sev grinned. “Being free is one thing, princess.” She rattled her shackles. “Isn’t it better to be free and rich? Besides, now I’m curious about these Mahact of yours.”

  “Very well,” Heuvelt said. “We’ll outfit ourselves for a journey of indefinite length. I’ve done that before.”

  “We’ll outfit ourselves for a journey of depressingly finite length, actually,” Ashont said. “We didn’t get paid that much for our last job. We did some repairs based on the assumption that we’d be getting more work from Sagasa soon, too.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Bianca said. “I have authorization codes. We can charge whatever we need to the Barony, or rather, to one of the officially neutral sub-accounts they use when it’s necessary to make payments to organizations they don’t have diplomatic ties with.”

  Sev made a choking noise. “What?”

  “I hacked the ship’s financial system, just to see if I could.” She shrugged. “When you see something nested under ten levels of encryption and dig through those and see the words ‘covert operations budget’ in the metadata, well, that sort of thing grabs your interest.”

  “The Letnev will know someone defrauded them,” Sev said. “They’ll know we came this way. Use those accounts, and we might as well still have tracking devices on us.”

  Bianca cocked her head. “They’ll know we came this way anyway. They know the general heading of my yearning, after all, and this is one of the obvious wormhole gates to use. A flagged transaction won’t tell them anything they don’t already know. They just won’t know where we went from here. We can lay a false trail, I bet – Heuvelt, when you’re getting supplies, talk about your plans to explore the uncharted regions of space beyond Whiteraven.”

  “That might possibly work,” she said.

  Bianca beamed. “Sev, coming from you, grudging admiration is like a kiss on the mouth and a whoop of joy all rolled up in one.”

  •••

  Bianca loved her time aboard the Show and Tell.

  When she’d first caught sight of Heuvelt, sitting alone in the bar on Glamarij, she’d made the sort of swift (and usually accurate) assessment her mind automatically generated these days: a once-formidable man, handsome and privileged, fallen on hard times – slipping into middle age, nursing his bitterness, and fixated on his failures and scars. She didn’t think her read on him was wrong, exactly, but it was incomplete. Heuvelt Angriff had simply been a man out of place, and miserable there, but now, he was back in his element: right or wrong, wise or otherwise, he was pursuing his passion again, and being on a treasure hunt animated him, made his spirit bright, and turned his whole bearing boisterous and warm.

  She’d been worried, at first, that Heuvelt would be creepy – he was a human man, after all, and she’d met plenty of those on Darit who wouldn’t let a little thing like a two-and-a-half-decade age difference stand in the way of flirtation or attempts at even greater liberties. Heuvelt had never even needed a brush-off, though, either because his tastes didn’t run that way, or because, as seemed increasingly obvious, he looked at her more like a younger sibling than anything else.

  Bianca didn’t know if she reminded him of someone from his earlier life or if she was the little sister he wished he’d had, but they clicked, and spent a lot of time together laughing as they told each other stories about their homeworlds. Their upbringings could not have been more different, which made the swapping of experiences more interesting for both of them. He called her “farm girl” and she called him “rich kid” , and he told her about exploration techniques and she tried to teach him to be slightly better at cards.

  Ashont and Clec were complete in themselves, but Bianca got to know both of them too: as the members of a relatively less powerful polity, they had strong opinions about all the various factions in the galactic political arena, and Bianca absorbed their perspectives as fast as they could share them. For their part, the duo was amused and amazed by Bianca, and they frequently played games to test her capabilities – throwing multiple objects for her to snatch out of the air, blindfolding her and making her identify various objects through the synergy of her other senses, cranking up computer games beyond their maximum speed settings and watching her reflexes keep up just fine anyway. Ashont liked to recite long passages of literature in a foreign language into one of her ears while Clec whispered technical specs into the other, and they’d marvel as she recited them back, one after another at first, and then alternating word-by-word, letter perfect every time. “You could make good money on the entertainment vids,” Ashont said. “If the whole being-a-fake-space-princess thing doesn’t work out.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Bianca said.

  Sev was… not blossoming, but she was, at least, not engaged in open hostilities anymore. She sulked a bit, and didn’t talk to anyone except Bianca, but their talks were fascinating. Sev was more than willing to answer questions about security protocols, how to exploit flaws in systems (people, Bianca knew, but Sev explained how to exploit people), and to share her opinions on assorted military matters. Bianca had the persistent sense – based on another synergy of senses – that Sev was hiding something, but really, a woman like that probably had lots of secrets.

  One night, Sev loosened up sufficiently to share some of Heuvelt’s liquor – Letnev biology was roughly compatible with that of humans, at least when it came to getting intoxicated. Bianca got tipsy and told her about her first time (pretty much her only time, with Grandly, which is what led to him following her around all moon-eyed).

  “My first time was nothing to speak of,” Sev said. “Just another girl in the dorms. Lots of us did that sort of thing, just to calm the hormonal distraction so we could focus on our studies.”

  “You’ve never been in love? I thought I was in love with Grandly, for about five minutes, but it was just the idea of being in love.”

  “The Letnev are more about strategic interpersonal alliances than love, princess. But…” She sipped brown liquor from her tumbler and grimaced. “There was one person.”

  “That human you fraternized with?”

  She winced. “Ah, that memory of yours, princess. Yes. Her name was Azad. She was fascinating, and challenging, and profoundly irritating – she made your company positively soothing in comparison. Still. I am glad we shared what we did. Knowing her opened up my understanding of the world. But we could have never worked out. I’m glad our involvement ended before it became even more disastrous.”

  “Doomed romance is even more romantic, in a way,” Bianca said.

  Severyne threw her head back and laughed until tears rolled from her eyes.

  “What?” Bianca said. “What?”

  “Sometimes, princess, you’re so fast, and so smart, and so strong, that I forget you’re also so young.”

  Bianca grinned despite herself. “It’s nice to hear you laugh, Sev, even if you are laughing at me.”

  “It’s a cold, dark universe, princess. We should all take laughter where we can find it.”

  •••

  It was fourteen days into the journey before Severyne felt safe making contact with her people.

  Bianca was sleeping, and careful experimentation had revealed that she didn’t snap instantly awake when a signal went past. Severyne wriggled her way into the ship’s communication system so she could piggyback on their emergency beacon and its powerful supraluminal broadcast capabilities. She wouldn’t be able to engage in an actual conversation with Richeline and Archambelle and Voyou, but she could update them on the ship’s destination… assuming they’d had the good sense to traverse the obvious Naalu wormhole and head in the known direction of Bianca’s yearning. If not, Severyne would be broadcasting to empty space. She didn’t like depending on the competence of her underlings, but she had no choice.

  Severyne recorded and sent her transmission, before scrubbing all evidence of the message. Then she waited, crouched in the corridor beside the access panel she’d tampered with. After ten minutes, when no one came to jettison her into space, she crept back to the hammock she’d strung in the port side cargo hold.

  Heuvelt slept in the starboard hold, and if the connecting doors were open she could hear him snoring. Bianca was sleeping in the captain’s bed, because Heuvelt was a polite host, but that politeness didn’t extend to Severyne. She was meant to be grateful they’d taken the shackles off her a mere three days into the journey. Bianca had finally convinced them that “Sev is trustworthy, even just on the basis of her naked self-interest!” That was certainly true, to a point. She would help Bianca and her pet menagerie fulfill their mission, up to the moment it diverged from her own. There was no reason to be a treasure hunter when you could just follow the treasure hunters and steal what they found, after all.

  She looked at the hammock with great distaste, and went instead to the cockpit. Clec was there, as she was most of the time. Naaz didn’t sleep much, apparently, and while Ashont slept frequently she didn’t do so for very long at a time. Severyne dropped into the co-pilot seat and said, “Anything going on?” Casual, casual, always casual.

  “Nothing at all. No one has even tried to tear my arms off in over a week.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “You never did, actually.”

  Severyne sighed. “I meant to. That sort of thing doesn’t come easily to me. So: I apologize for laying hands on you.”

  “Apology accepted. Why did you strike your ship’s first officer?”

  Severyne didn’t have to watch her words as carefully with Clec – there was no reason to think the Naaz could detect a lie – but she was in the habit now. “Richeline is arrogant, self-important, and irritating.”

  “These are qualities you detest? In anyone other than yourself, I mean?”

  It could have gone either way. Once upon a time, a jab like that would have made Severyne bare her teeth and strike back, verbally at the very least. She’d been through a lot, though, and had been jabbed more ruthlessly by experts. She was able to laugh at herself a little now, and so that’s what she did: or chuckled, anyway. “I have nothing against arrogance, as long as it’s justified. I don’t think I’m arrogant at all. I simply have… a clear-eyed self-regard.”

  “You can’t be all bad. Bee seems fond of you.”