“The princess doesn’t have many friends. She becomes overly attached to those she does have. Even if we aren’t worthy of her regard.”

  “She’s extremely pleasant, for an unstoppable, genetically engineered killing machine.”

  “She’s not engineered for killing, I don’t think.” Severyne decided speaking freely here would do no harm, and might ingratiate her, a little, with Clec and thus the rest of the crew, which could be useful when the time came to betray them. “I think her capacity for violence is a side-effect. If it was just about murder, the engines in her DNA would have her spewing neurotoxins or producing biological weapons instead of bliss-inducing pheromones. She’s engineered to do something else, and the ability to defend herself is just a way of making sure she survives long enough to do whatever that is.”

  “Was she always so bright and quick? She pumped me for everything I know about space flight, physics, and galactic history and culture, and it’s not because she needs to know anything, she just has an endless hunger for information. I think she’s read every piece of media we have in the ship’s database, and the other day I caught her consuming audio-visual media at thirty-two times the standard playback speed – how can she even follow it when it plays that fast?”

  “Time doesn’t work for Bianca the way it does for us. That’s how she took down armed shock troopers without any combat training. She’s not a particularly skilled warrior. She’s just so much faster than everyone else that it doesn’t matter. A clumsy blow can knock you down just as well as a graceful one, if you can’t dodge or block the strike.”

  “I hope those kind of reflexes aren’t a prerequisite for survival wherever we’re going.”

  “Me too,” Severyne said. “Though we could actually trust Bianca to go in on her own, and bring back whatever treasures she finds, and share them out as agreed. Isn’t that remarkable? I’ve never known anyone like her.”

  “I think you’re right,” Clec said. “She seems so… well, good. But I think the flip side is, she expects her allies to behave just as honorably. If someone disappoints her, and she loses her temper and acts impulsively? I wouldn’t want to be on the other end of that fit of pique.”

  Severyne kept her breath steady. She was afraid that was a hint, and that the Naaz would casually say, “By the way, I intercepted your transmission,” and then things would turn very violent very fast.

  Clec didn’t say anything like that, though; instead, she said, “I’m picking up something on the long-range sensors.”

  “A planet? A moon?”

  “Can’t tell. Maybe an asteroid, but there’s a lot of metal in it. Could be a ship, but if so, it’s derelict – no energy signatures. We’ll be close enough for a visual scan in a few hours.”

  “I knew this trip was going too smoothly,” Severyne said.

  “You make a good partner for Bianca,” Clec said. “Someone needs to provide a counterbalance to her optimism and good cheer.”

  Chapter 27

  Another message arrived.

  This time, when the sleeper woke, he remembered who he was: Kor Noq Weer. A name to inspire terror, once upon a time, even among those who trafficked in terror. A name synonymous with rogue, with renegade, with apostate, with traitor. But that name had outlasted so many others, hadn’t it?

  He took in the message, sent by a nearby relay. The child had passed through a wormhole, it seemed, closing the distance between them greatly, and soon she would reach the World of Stone. From there, she need only traverse the gate, and open the tomb, and fulfill her purpose.

  After so many uncounted millennia spent patiently waiting, things were moving fast, now – very fast.

  Soon the name Kor Noq Weer would be known and feared across all the worlds of the galaxy again.

  Chapter 28

  “A wrecked ship.” Heuvelt gazed at the viewscreen with everyone else. “When I was a teenager, I went hiking in the wilderness. I forced my way through the brush, broke trail along the bottom of an overgrown ravine, climbed up a cliff face, and reached the summit of a rock tower, with absolutely breathtaking views in every direction. Except right at my feet. Do you know what I saw right at my feet?”

  “A beer can,” Ashont said. “You’ve told this story before.”

  He sighed. “Sev and Bee haven’t heard it. The point is, there’s a unique sort of disappointment in going to a place you think is wholly undiscovered and realizing someone else got there first and left their junk behind.”

  “The more pressing question is who wrecked that ship,” Sev said. “I’ve never seen damage like that before.”

  The ship actually looked a bit like a crumpled can, Bianca thought. It had probably been graceful, once, shaped like an arrowhead or a predatory bird in flight, but it had been crushed. “Do you know what kind of ship that is, Clec? I didn’t see anything like it in the Show and Tell’s database, or the Grim Countenance’s, either.”

  “Its design is unknown to me,” Clec said. “Would anyone like to go over and see what’s inside? Whatever destroyed the vessel doesn’t seem to be lurking around at the moment.”

  Bianca, Heuvelt, and Sev suited up for the spacewalk. “You could probably go outside without a suit on, Bianca,” Heuvelt said over their comms. “Given everything else you can do.”

  “I can hold my breath for a long time,” Bianca said. “But that wouldn’t help with the moisture on my eyeballs and tongue vaporizing instantly, or my lungs exploding from the pressure change, and then there’s the solar radiation… let’s just say I’d rather not test my capabilities that way unless I have to.”

  The outer airlock door opened. Bianca had never done a spacewalk before, and the experience of stepping out of the ship into the void was dizzying, exhilarating, and astonishing, but by now her yearning was so intense she had to fight her urge to use her little propulsion pack to send her off past the wreck, toward the point of her mysterious desire. She was tethered to Heuvelt and Sev, though, so they pulled her along to the ship and didn’t even notice her urge to fly away alone.

  They reached a huge gash in the hull of the wreck, and Heuvelt shone a light inside. Debris floated around the interior, the artificial gravity as dead as everything else. They eased into the ship. The corridors were a little larger than they were on most human or Letnev vessels, but the contents of the compartments weren’t too alien – there were hammocks, even, though they seemed to be spun of some cocoonlike silk material. There was a galley, with unfamiliar foodstuffs, preserved by the airless vacuum – pale blue eggs, bits of gray meat sealed in plastic, bundles of stalks and flowers and stems.

  “They were humanoid, judging by the clothes in this locker,” Heuvelt said. “Let’s take a look at the bridge. Maybe there’s some data to be recovered.”

  Bianca reached the bridge first, so she was the one who found the bodies. The front of the bridge was open to vacuum, the viewscreen cracked right down the center, and a hole torn in the hull big enough to walk through upright, so the two crew members must have died quickly. Unlit consoles ringed the room, controls for systems that had been catastrophically damaged.

  The floating aliens were humanoid, insofar as they were bipedal and had two arms, but they had wickedly curved beaks, and heads covered in feathers, though they seemed devoid of wings. They both wore uniforms with unfamiliar insignia at the shoulders, six jagged quadrangular segments of alternating size arranged around a central point to create a sort of starburst shape. “Bird people?” Bianca said. “I didn’t know there were bird people.”

  “It’s a big galaxy.” Sev floated past the corpses, toward one of the control panels. “I wasn’t aware of any avian humanoids with the capacity for space travel, but I’m no xeno-anthropologist. Unless a species is powerful enough to be a military threat, or unlucky enough to live somewhere with resources we need, the Barony isn’t concerned about keeping track of every sapient species.” She worked at the computer for a while, then shook her head. “Even if I understood their technological architecture, this is all hopelessly broken.” She looked at the deep dents on the ceiling and the floor, where the metal had been deformed under some terrible pressure. “It looks like somebody picked up this ship and squeezed it in their fist. Have you led us to the land of spacefaring death giants, princess?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Sev grunted and sailed out of the bridge, down an unfamiliar corridor.

  “How long ago do you think this ship was destroyed?” Bianca asked.

  “It’s hard to tell,” Heuvelt said. “Nothing rots in vacuum, and I have no idea if this ship is state-of-the-art for bird people, or a quaint antique. I think we should probably proceed very carefully from here. If the place we’re headed is as valuable as you think, it could well be protected. We might be looking at the aftermath of a security system being triggered.”

  “I’m supposed to be the key, though,” Bianca said. “Surely they won’t crush me?”

  “Let’s hope they won’t crush the people standing next to you, either.” Heuvelt spun around slowly, taking in the bridge. “There’s nothing here for us. No information, and nothing I’d call treasure. We should continue on our way. We’ll be wherever we’re going in a few days now, if your calculations are correct.”

  It took them a while to find Severyne – she’d gone to the engine room, she said, to see if there was anything worth salvaging, but the technology was so different from their own, she soon realized it was pointless.

  The three of them returned to the Show and Tell and continued on their way, the crew overall more subdued, and more watchful.

  •••

  But they were more watchful in the sense that they were looking out for potential threats from the outside, which is why none of them noticed that Severyne had a souvenir. She’d carefully wrapped an item she found on the wrecked ship in a layer of alien hammock fabric and jammed it in the crack between her back and her suit’s propulsion pack. While everyone was getting out of their suits on the Show and Tell, she managed to slip the salvaged item out of the gap and into her waistband, and made her way to her own little corner of the ship, a hammock strung among heaps of supplies.

  Nestled safely behind a pile of crates, she slid the object out of her waistband and unwrapped it.

  Severyne had found a weapons locker near the engine room on the alien ship, and there had been many lovely things inside: rifles of an unfamiliar curving design, and graceful sidearms with multiple barrels, and even something like an archer’s bow, but with integrated sights and no visible ammunition, which made her wonder if it fired energy bolts of some kind.

  Most interesting, though, was the symbol she saw carved into all their hilts or stocks or barrels. She had no idea what the symbol meant, but she’d seen it before: it was one of the glyphs Archambelle had shown her. A symbol of the Mahact. Archambelle hadn’t said anything about the Mahact servants including bird people, but her information was hardly complete. Perhaps these were Mahact weapons. Or, perhaps they were the weapons used by those who opposed the Mahact. There were hash marks beside the symbols, three lines on one weapon, four on another, two on a third, all clearly scratched there by hand. Were they tallies, perhaps, of enemies killed by those weapons? There was no telling how old the ship was – the dead might have been soldiers in a war that ended untold eons ago. Those guns probably wouldn’t work after all this time, anyway, even if Severyne could have gotten one off the ship unobserved.

  But there was a knife, with a blade curved like a raptor’s beak, the edge shimmering with its own faint blue light. The hilt was etched with that same symbol, and there were easily a dozen hash marks carved around it. This might be a blade that had tasted Mahact blood – or whatever they had instead of blood – many times. Best of all, the knife was small enough for Severyne to sneak it out.

  Would the knife hurt Bianca? She wasn’t sure, and in truth she hoped she never had to find out, given how formidable the girl had proven to be, but Severyne believed in taking advantage of opportunities when they arose, and this knife was a gift from the universe.

  She found some canvas and used the blade to cut it into strips – the weapon was gratifyingly sharp, having lost none of its edge during its long interval of disuse. She used some epoxy resin to bind the canvas into a sheath, and fixed the sheath to the inner waistband of her pants. Now the knife could rest comfortably, hilt nestled into the small of her back. Maybe it would stay there.

  The blade was just a contingency, but Severyne felt so much better when she had one of those at hand.

  •••

  “It’s today,” Heuvelt said. “Isn’t it today? You said it would be today.”

  “We’re very close,” Bianca said, for the third time that morning. She sat in the co-pilot’s chair, while Ashont and Clec ran the ship. Their scanners were stretched to the limit of their range and sensitivity, and they revealed: nothing.

  If she shuffled through the Show and Tell’s external cameras, Bianca could still see the three stars that had formed that triangle encompassing her yearning, but each one was off in a different direction now; one behind, one above, one below. They formed no discernible pattern from this vantage, transformed into unrelated points of light. Everything was a matter of perspective, wasn’t it?

  They were close – she could feel that. Doubt crept in, though. What if she was being drawn to a place that had once held something of value, but now held nothing at all? What if her yearning led her to a wormhole that had been disabled millennia ago by the victors in a forgotten war? The lab her father Keon found her in was so old. Maybe her whole existence was meaningless. She could be a compass leading them to a city that was not just ruins but entirely vanished. A distress beacon on a dead ship, still pointlessly beaming out a cry for help. A key to a door that had turned to dust in some forgotten epoch.

  “We’ve got enough food and fuel to get back where we started easily enough.” Heuvelt’s dolorous tone belied the practicality of his statement. “No great loss, apart from time.” He sighed. “I suppose Sagasa always needs more–”

  “What is that?” Ashont pointed through the view­screen.

  “What?” Heuvelt peered. “I don’t see anything. Magnify?”

  “It’s a light,” Bianca said. “There’s a light shining out there!”

  “Whatever it’s shining out of must be tiny,” Clec said. “I’m not picking up any objects in that direction at all. Let me see what I can do with the visual sensors.”

  That distant yellow point of light leapt forward, growing in the screen, and now they could see the contours of some solid object illuminated by its backscatter, the surface smooth. “Some kind of asteroid?” Bianca said.

  “It can’t be!” Clec said. “I’d be picking it up on my sensors… here, let me try something, if I move the ship so the object occults one of those distant stars, I can examine the lensing and – wait. It eclipsed that star way too fast. That doesn’t make any sense, the object would have to be huge.” Clec buzzed around like an agitated fly. “That’s a planet. Or something the size of a planet. But it doesn’t show up on our sensors. How does an entire planet not show up on our sensors? There’s no stealth technology in the galaxy that can do that! If we hadn’t seen the light, we might have been caught in its gravity well before we even noticed.”

  Bianca gazed at the absent planet, and a feeling of serenity descended on her like a blanket in the coldest winter. She released an audible sigh. She felt like she’d spent the past twenty years being thirsty and had finally taken a drink.

  Hungry, and had finally eaten.

  Asleep, and was finally awake.

  “We’re here,” Bianca said.

  Chapter 29

  First they orbited the planet, and did a visual survey, which didn’t tell them much: the surface was mostly smooth, and black or dark gray, with occasional large irregularities that might have been structures or the remnant of structures. The planet was either an unnatural object created in a colossal feat of engineering, or a planet with no star that had been transformed for unknown reasons.

  There were no lights or signs of habitations, save for the single yellow beacon.

  The Show and Tell didn’t have a shuttle – it was too small – so they had no choice but to descend to the surface on their own. “I’ll have to land entirely by eye,” Clec said. “We can’t use the automated systems, because they don’t think there’s any land below us at all. If we miscalculate our angle or velocity… well, it won’t be good for us.”

  “Let me pilot the ship.” Bianca was perfectly serene.

  “Have you ever flown a ship like this before?” Heuvelt asked.

  “She hasn’t,” Sev said. “But she’d never defeated a squad of Letnev shock troopers until the first time she did. If she thinks she can land us safely, she can.”

  “I can.” Bianca sat down in the pilot’s chair, looked over the controls, and switched the system to manual. She began a slow descent. “There’s no atmosphere, or if there is, it’s very thin – I’m not hitting any turbulence at all.”

  The ship felt like an extension of her body. Flying it was no more difficult than walking down a set of steps. Bianca guided the Show and Tell gently in the direction of the light, which proved to be a luminous orb set atop a cyclopean structure made of stone blocks, like a step pyramid.

  Bianca set the ship down so gently they barely felt the impact. She smiled beatifically at the crew crowding into the cockpit. “Shall we take a walk?”

  “Is this the destination?” Sev said. “I mean, is this the treasure planet? Ixth?”

  Bianca shrugged. “It’s the place I was meant to go. If I’m meant to go somewhere else after this, that will be revealed. But from what Doctor Archambelle said, no. I don’t think Ixth is seventeen days’ voyage away from a known wormhole. That seems too easy. So, this may just be a stepping stone.”