They both stood silently for a moment, looking at the vault.

  “Which war?” Callie said.

  “How would you know it was the last day?” Ashok said.

  Callie shivered. “We can’t. We just… Ashok, we can’t. Whatever’s locked up in here, we should leave it locked up.”

  “I get where you’re coming from, but maybe it’s a weapon we could use against the Axiom.”

  Callie shook her head. “The last day of the war? If we’re guessing, I’d guess it’s a weapon of last resort. Like, our enemies have taken the capital, the palace is about to fall, let’s blow everything up ourselves so there’s no country left for them to conquer.”

  Ashok slumped. “You know how I tweaked my risk-assessment engine to be real comfortable with dangerous activities? Even it’s telling me we shouldn’t open the door. This is officially the worst, though.”

  “Make a hole, Ashok.”

  He obliged, tearing another rip in the air. They slipped through and sealed the temple up behind them.

  “What do we do with the key?” Ashok said.

  “Once we get underway, I’ll load the key and the phase-shifter onto a torpedo and launch them both into the nearest star. Your idea was a good one. The phase-shifter will burn up, and the key will be safe there, at least until heat death, and by then everyone will have bigger problems. Maybe the star will become a black hole and the key will be really locked away.”

  “Oh captain, my captain,” Ashok said glumly.

  The next day, she and Ashok stood in the White Raven’s observation deck and watched the flare of the torpedo’s propellant drive it toward the sun. They stood silently for long moments after the torpedo vanished from sight. A while later, the screen on Ashok’s arm flashed. “Impact,” he said. “The world is a little safer now. A little more boring, but safer.”

  “Sometimes that’s best,” she said. “Being thrown into a volcano is probably exciting too. Exciting isn’t always good.” She clapped him on the shoulder. “Next time we find an alien vault, I’ll let you open it, for sure. Okay?”

  “Promises, promises,” he muttered.

  Back in her quarters, Callie made sure the door was sealed, then opened up the strongbox bolted under her bunk. It wasn’t a four-dimensional vault that could only be opened by a pentachoron key, but it was pretty secure, with a code to enter and biometrics both.

  She opened the lid, and gazed at the key inside: crystalline, shifting as her eyes played over it, beautiful and strange and not entirely of this world. Shooting a torpedo into the sun – and talking about their plan to do so on unencrypted comms – had been a necessary deception. Callie had no doubt their mysterious ‘ally’ the Benefactor was still watching them, but she was confident her quarters were secure, at least for the moment.

  If the Benefactor had sent them to clear the path in order to take the key, better to make it seem like the key was beyond reach forever. She wasn’t about to get rid of it – not until she had a better idea of what it was for. The answer could be in some Axiom database. In the meantime, she’d keep the key locked away. The universe was full of dangerous things, and Callie liked having them under her control.

  Ashok made sure the door to his machine shop was locked, then took the cloth-wrapped bundle containing the phase-shifter from underneath a pile of scrap in one of his work table drawers. Callie had told him to keep the device safe, and to try to figure out how it worked, if he could. They’d discussed destroying it, but what if the Benefactor had a dimensional ripper of his own? They might need to get back to that temple eventually.

  Because maybe someday there would be a war. And maybe someday that war would have a last day.

  Ashok settled down with his instruments and began to study the device.

  CHAPTER 4

  “I think we should go,” Ashok said.

  Callie looked at the three letters they’d received from the mysterious Benefactor, pinned by magnets to the table in the White Raven’s galley, the crew’s unofficial conference room. They had an actual conference room at home on their asteroid Glauketas, but this was an all-hands meeting and Drake and Janice preferred to stay on the ship and away from the artificial gravity on the station. Weight made them hurt.

  Callie shook her head, her great cloud of hair floating around her. She usually kept her hair ruthlessly pinned down in microgravity, but living someplace where ‘up’ and ‘down’ were meaningful terms had made her lax. Also, Elena liked it when her hair floated around that way, and Callie liked being something Elena liked. “It’s probably a trap, Ashok.”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “You want us to fly into a trap.”

  “I could live without the trap part, but I can also live with it, too. If we never flew into obvious traps we’d never go anywhere. Besides, this note worked out.” He tapped his finger on the second note the Benefactor had left, the one Ashok had found in his machine shop on Glauketas – the note that provided coordinates for the space station where they’d found the pentachoron key and the vault.

  “That intel was good, sure,” Callie said. “And the first few times you play cards with a con artist, they let you win, so you’ll be stupid and bet big later, and that’s when they fleece you. That exemplary trustworthy note basically said ‘Go check out this place on the edge of the very normal and pleasant Nommo system, home of gorgeous colony worlds and excellent music and food,’ right? Whereas this note says, ‘Go visit the haunted nightmare system that has devoured every ship that visited in the past hundred years.’ You see the difference?”

  “Sure I do,” Ashok said. “The difference is, the Nommo system is boring, and the haunted nightmare system is interesting.”

  Callie wished Stephen, her old XO, were still around. His realism, pragmatism, and habit of expecting the worst had provided a wonderful rudder (and occasional anchor) for the crew. Of course, then he’d gone completely against type and fallen in love with an environmental artist on Owain in the Taliesen system and decided to get some pleasure out of life instead of sticking his head into alien space stations to see what might bite it off. There was no accounting for some people’s baffling life choices.

  To Callie’s surprise, her new XO, Elena, chimed in with a rather Stephen-like observation: “It’s obvious the Benefactor has their own agenda. Your theory about them trying to use us to get their hands on that key… thing… makes a lot of sense. If they want us to go to the Vanir system, they have their own reasons, I’m sure.”

  “Right,” Callie said. “And why should we do anything to further the Benefactor’s undeclared interests? I don’t mind taking jobs, but I do like to get paid for them at least, and it’s helpful to know what the jobs even are. I’m glad Elena’s on my side.”

  “Er,” Elena said. “I am on your side, always and forever, absolutely yes. That said… our mission is to destroy everything related to the Axiom that we possibly can, right?”

  “I see where this is going,” Callie said.

  “What if that’s the Benefactor’s mission too? They clearly have intel, but maybe they lack the resources to do anything about that intel, and that’s why they need us.”

  “Or maybe the Benefactor just thinks we’re expendable. They could have come to us in a spirit of partnership and alliance, and instead they hid on our ship, spied on us, and left these creepy secret admirer letters. Why not meet us face-to-face? Why all the cloak-and-laser-pistol stuff?”

  “Maybe they can’t take the risk,” Shall said from the ceiling speakers, entirely too reasonably. “It could be dangerous for the Benefactor to approach us directly. Or maybe they’re testing us, to see if we’ve got what it takes to make use of their information. If Lantern is right about the Benefactor’s identity, they have to proceed cautiously.”

  They’d speculated at length over who the Benefactor might be, and so far their best guess was a rogue Liar in the cult of truth-tellers. Who else could know the locations of multiple Axiom facilities? The cult was mostly compartmentalized, with the cells in each system never interacting with each other. Their friend Lantern – herself a secret traitor to the sect, a double agent now working against the Axiom while pretending to lead the cell of truth-tellers in the Sol system – theorized that the Benefactor must be one of the handful of elders who made up the central council of the truth-tellers. Lantern didn’t know where that council operated, who was on it, or even how many it numbered – the Elders just sent orders to the individual cells, and those orders were followed without question.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Callie said. “I–”

  “Speak of the alien,” Shall said. “Incoming call from Lantern. She seems excited.”

  “Put her up on the screen,” Callie said.

  Lantern was transmitting from her own space station off in the Oort cloud. They were practically neighbors, by cosmic standards, and the communication delay was minimal. The small seven-armed alien appeared on screen and undulated her tentacles in a gesture that Elena doubtless recognized but Callie couldn’t. Elena wiggled her own arm back, grinning. “Good to see you again,” she said.

  “I have interesting news,” Lantern said.

  Callie grimaced. Interesting could mean lots of things. “About the note?”

  “Oh yes,” Lantern said. The third note the Benefactor had left, in the room Lantern used when she visited Glauketas, had been written in Axiom script, and had proven to be a series of passwords Lantern speculated would give her access to a secret truth-teller database. “I had to be very careful, in case the codes were a trick, a – what do you call it in your language, Ashok?”

  “A honeypot,” Ashok said. “If you think someone might try hacking your system, you can set up an isolated and monitored section of the site that looks legitimate, and when your hacker gets in, you can trace them back to their source, or even flood them with malicious software to take over their systems.”

  Lantern undulated. “In the language of the Free we call systems like that ratatoks, after a kind of carnivorous stationary hunter on one of the planets we settled. It smells sweet, but tries to eat you when you come too close.” Liars didn’t call themselves ‘Liars,’ of course – among themselves they went by the Free, because they were no longer slaves to the Axiom.

  “Comparative linguistics is fun,” Callie said, “but what did you find out?”

  “The codes allowed me to access an old, abandoned truth-teller database. There wasn’t much data there, but I did find a map marking various locations around the galaxy, in inhabited systems and uninhabited both. The map wasn’t annotated, so I was unsure what the locations were until I noticed one of the markers matched the location of my station, and another was the site of the truth-teller base we found in the Taliesen system… and a third marked the location of the Dream.”

  Callie whistled. “You’re saying we know the locations of the other truth-teller cells, and of the Axiom facilities?”

  “Some of them, anyway, though maybe not all, and some of the locations may be other things, but… they are certainly worth investigating. I’m especially interested in the locations marked outside systems inhabited by humans.”

  Callie nodded. The truth-tellers were the Liars who’d given humans the wormhole technology that allowed them to colonize the galaxy – but only in twenty-eight systems that were relatively distant from Axiom facilities. The Liars had carefully corralled and managed the humans to keep them from disturbing Axiom projects, while making them think humanity had the run of the galaxy. Callie and her crew – and a few distant friends on Owain and in the Jovian Imperative – were the only humans who knew the Axiom existed. Most of the truth-tellers were tasked with making sure humans didn’t stumble onto Axiom secrets; one had destroyed a space station that was home to fifty thousand souls in a failed attempt to kill Callie and her crew after they discovered Axiom wormhole technology. “There are no truth-tellers in uncolonized systems, right? So those must be something else. Like maybe Axiom facilities. We’ve gone from having no idea where to go next to getting a to-do list of places to investigate.”

  “All thanks to the Benefactor,” Ashok said. “Which is why I say we go check out their first tip.” He tapped the first note, the one Callie had found in her cabin on Glauketas not long after they destroyed the Axiom facility called the Dream. “How about we vote? I vote yes.”

  “I’m shocked,” Callie said.

  “We also vote yes,” Drake said from behind the silvery privacy screen of the mobility chair he and Janice used to get around. “Janice and I are both intrigued.”

  “I’m not intrigued,” Janice said. “I just like doing things, because then I’m not sitting around dwelling on the essential horror of the human condition. No offense, Lantern. I’m sure your condition is horrible too.”

  “I… none… taken?” Lantern said.

  “You know we’re going to go, Callie,” Elena said. “I mean… the Vanir system. It’s been almost a hundred years since the rest of the galaxy heard a word from the place. Three-quarters of a million colonists went through that gate before it was sealed off, and no one knows what happened to them. It’s like the lost colony of Roanoke times ten thousand.”

  Callie wrinkled her forehead. “Was that a historical reference? You know we’re shaky on our ancient history around here.” Elena had been born in the twenty-second century, gone into cryo-sleep for a long space voyage, and been thawed out five hundred years later, just in time to fall in love with Callie. Sometimes the universe was wonderful, but dating someone whose cultural references were half a millennium old could be tricky.

  “Never mind. I’m just saying, the Vanir system is a mystery box. You can’t resist a mystery box. We know this about you.”

  Callie crossed her arms. “Maybe I’m not so prone to outbursts of suicidal curiosity anymore. Maybe I’m growing and evolving as a person.”

  Elena twinkled. “Mmm, no. I sleep with you every night. I think I would’ve noticed if you’d done any evolving.”

  “Come on. Give me some credit. I didn’t open the weird fourth-dimensional vault, did I?”

  “True,” Elena said. “But you did go and look at the vault first. We’re literally the only people in the galaxy with a shot at figuring out what’s wrong in the Vanir system. We can solve one of the great mysteries of our time. How can we not?”

  Callie picked up the note, the one she’d found on her pillow, written in an unknown hand. It said,

  I’ve been watching your progress, checking in on you occasionally since you set out for Ganymede in that ramshackle pirate ship, and watching you closely once you reached Taliesen. Did you sense me? I thought you might have, once or twice. You’re very perceptive, for a human. You did excellent work dismantling the Dream. For your next project, you might visit the Vanir system. What you find there should interest you… and certain members of your crew.

  Callie had glimpsed shimmers and corner-of-the-eye disturbances on their voyage to Taliesen, visual glitches she’d put down to stress and fatigue. Either the Benefactor or their agents had hidden away on the ship and watched her, or they had access to enough information about what happened on board her ship to make it seem like they had.

  The note was signed ‘The Benefactor’ – a nom de plume she still found the opposite of reassuring – and beneath the signature was a stylized blue drawing of an eye. That part gave her chills.

  Once, when traveling very slowly through the tunnel of an ancient Axiom wormhole bridge, strapped to the back of a drone, Callie had seen something strange: a section of the tunnel that looked like a window. Behind the window sat something dark, and slumped, and rounded, with a single fist-sized eye the blue of Cherenkov radiation.

  She’d only glimpsed it for a moment and had assumed it was delirium – she’d been under a lot of stress and fully expected to die – but later Stephen’s friend Q had mentioned seeing something from the White Raven’s observation deck when they passed through the bridge: a blue eye that glowed. Then they’d gotten that letter from the Benefactor, with a drawing of a blue eye. The connection was obvious – the Benefactor was either the entity in the wormhole or wanted them to think he was.

  Callie’s first impulse after finding the note was to clear their ships and the asteroid and run full decontamination protocols, the kind of deep-cleanse procedures reserved for pathogen outbreaks, meant to kill anything on board ships or stations from microbes on up. But if this Benefactor had stealth and teleportation technology good enough to creep around her home and evade notice, and the skills to blank out their AI Shall’s security cameras without Shall even noticing the tampering, then the Benefactor could easily slip out with the crew and make Callie’s whole plan to decontaminate the interloper into oblivion moot.

  Her second impulse had been to destroy the note and pretend she’d never seen it, because she didn’t like being manipulated, and this wasn’t even subtle manipulation.

  “Shall?” Callie said. “What do you think? Do we go to the system of no return?”

  “I do like expanding my data banks,” Shall said. “And going to the Vanir system would definitely do that. So I say yes.”

  “Lantern?”

  “The map I found has two locations marked in the Vanir system, one just outside the orbit of the twin colony planets, and one quite distant, several degrees outside the path of the ecliptic. I’m curious to find out what those are. I’d like to go and see.”

  “So even if I vote no, I get overruled,” Callie said. “This is what I get for giving you all ownership stakes in our little concern, isn’t it?”

  “Demonstrably,” Elena said.

  “Then for the sake of unit cohesion and morale, I vote yes as well,” Callie said.

  As if she were ever going to do otherwise.

  CHAPTER 5

  “There’s a probe approaching Glauketas,” Janice said into Callie’s comm.

  “Are you sure? We haven’t gotten any alerts here on the station.” Callie was in the room she shared with Elena on Glauketas, out beyond the orbit of Neptune, trying to pack for the possibly one-way voyage to the Vanir system. She’d never had any trouble packing before – pants, weapons, it wasn’t hard – but she’d never traveled between the stars with someone she was in love and lust with, and these days many more options were variously appealing.