The closest colony systems had dispatched unmanned probes to see what was going on in the Vanir system but, traveling conventionally, it would be centuries before they arrived. The Vanir system was remote even in terms of galactic scale. Earth’s solar system was on the Orion Spur, a minor offshoot arm of the Milky Way, not even one of the main spirals. Most of the other twenty-seven colony systems were in the Perseus, Outer, and New Outer arms, close neighbors in astronomical terms. The Vanir system, though, was way on the outer tip of the Scutum–Centaurus Arm, just about as far from Earth’s neighborhood as you could get while remaining in the galaxy.

  There was lots of speculation about why the system had gone dark, and whether it had something to do with its relative remoteness, but that had always seemed unlikely to Callie. Absent the wormhole technology of the twenty-eight bridges, all the colony systems were impossibly distant from each other, and if they were suddenly forced to rely on conventional methods of space travel it would take centuries to send a letter even to the nearest colony.

  “If there’s something right outside the wormhole gate turning spaceships into neutron paste, we’ll be spared,” Callie said. “If the whole system is some kind of Axiom area-denial weapon, or full of hungry nanomachines looking for raw material… well, with luck we’ll be far enough away from the big nasty to avoid being caught up when we come out. All right. Ready when you are, Ashok.”

  After a moment, the spreading black inkblot tendrils of the wormhole gate opened before the ship, and the eddying arms of darkness stretched out to embrace them. They moved into the familiar but eerie darkness beyond the gate – it looked like a round tunnel, interrupted by bands of white light at regular intervals. Callie watched the twenty-one second countdown begin on her screen. No matter how far you went, to the colony next door or the far side of the galaxy, the journey between two ends of a wormhole bridge always lasted exactly twenty-one seconds.

  That’s why she was rather surprised when they emerged spinning wildly into ordinary space after only seventeen.

  CHAPTER 7

  Unfamiliar stars whirled on the viewscreens. “Stabilize!” Callie shouted, but Drake was already correcting the nauseating spin and getting the ship steady.

  “What a good idea,” he said amiably.

  Callie ignored him. “Elena, report!”

  Elena wasn’t just XO but also the ship’s medical officer, though in terms of experience she was maybe a third-year medical student at this point, and that was with a whole lot of neural enhancers and many cramming sessions in medical education simulations. “All crew life signs are green – just some accelerated heart rates and adrenal spikes, and that makes sense.”

  “Shall, report!” Callie barked.

  “The ship is fine,” Shall said. “All systems functional. Or, I mean. They appear to be.”

  “Janice, where are we?”

  “Not where we’re supposed to be,” she snapped. “Give me and Shall a minute to try to figure it out, would you?”

  “Ashok, Lantern, what the hell happened with the bridge generator?”

  “It malfunctioned in a really interesting way, didn’t it?” Ashok said cheerfully. “This isn’t a case of punching in the wrong coordinates – we got booted out of the wormhole early. How does that even happen? It would help if we understood how the bridge generator worked in the first place. I sure wish the Axiom had left some diagrams, or maybe a repair manual or two.”

  “Is the bridge generator broken?” Callie’s nightmare was being stranded far from any human-habitable world, with safety and resources beyond the reach of their Tanzer drive.

  “I’m not seeing any errors,” Ashok said. “As far as the bridge generator’s logs are concerned, it took us exactly where we wanted, and, once it finishes cooldown, I don’t see any reason it can’t take us somewhere else. Maybe even a place we’re trying to go next time.”

  The fist of Callie’s heart unclenched. “Good to know. Lantern, do you have any insight?” Lantern knew more about Axiom technology than they did, since the truth-tellers used selected parts of it, though the more devout treated the devices like holy relics than technological tools.

  “I am very confused,” Lantern said. “I have never heard of something like this happening. We will investigate.”

  “Report if you come to any conclusions. Or even wild speculations. I’d take anything at this point.”

  “You aren’t going to shout ‘Kaustikos, report?’” The drone AI sounded amused.

  “Cargo doesn’t have any responsibilities,” Callie said.

  “And yet. The Benefactor worried something like this might happen.”

  Callie tightened her fingers on the armrests of her chair. “What? You knew the bridge generator might malfunction, and didn’t think to mention it?”

  “Oh, don’t make it sound so sinister.” Kaustikos sniffed. “The Benefactor didn’t say ‘oh dear, you might get kicked out of a wormhole, be careful.’ He just mused that whatever aliens disabled the bridge in the Vanir system might have taken steps to prevent incursion from small wormhole generators like yours as well. He theorized that they might, at the very least, be able to detect such arrivals, and suggested we emerge on the outskirts of the system to avoid detection. Since that was already your plan, I felt no need to mention the Benefactor’s suggestion. Indeed, I was afraid if I did mention it, you might choose to do the opposite out of spite or contrariness.”

  Callie started to object, then noticed Elena trying not to laugh and settled for scowling instead.

  Kaustikos went on. “It seems that whatever entity or group runs the Vanir system now has more… robust methods to prevent intrusion than expected.”

  “It’s gotta be a force field,” Ashok said. “Some kind of barrier around the system that interrupts wormhole bridges and makes them terminate short of their destination. Or maybe space caltrops.”

  “Okay, we know where we are now,” Janice said. “The good news is, we’re closer to the Vanir system than we were before. Much closer. Very much. The bad news is…”

  “Let me guess,” Callie said. “Space is big.”

  “Just like it says in the Bible,” Janice agreed.

  “I think that line comes from Shakespeare, actually,” Drake said.

  “Isn’t it from the Epic of Gilgamesh?” Ashok said. “Or, wait, no, one of Aesop’s Fables?”

  “It’s the Bible,” Janice said. “Proverbs. Right? It sounds like a proverb.”

  “The source is a little later than any of those,” Elena said. “I don’t think the man who wrote that line ever thought it would become a proverb, but–”

  “There’s a ship approaching,” Shall interrupted. “I’ve never seen anything like it. No matches in our database at all.”

  “Let’s take a look at it.” The ship was a long way off, far beyond visual range, but the White Raven’s sensors scanned it and put together a composite of what it would look like.

  Callie grunted as the image assembled itself onscreen. The ship approaching them was roughly spherical, twice the size of the White Raven, covered in spines and fins and needles, and apparently made of gleaming black glass.

  “It’s a scourge-ship.” Lantern’s voice was awestruck. “I’ve seen drawings in the museum of subjugation. The Axiom had a fleet of those ships. They’re made for scouring worlds. They were sent out for… the Axiom called it ‘cleansing.’ Eradicating sapient life, or life that showed signs of sapience to come, before they could pose a threat to the Axiom. Those ships burned whole ecosystems, whole planets, down.”

  “Now we know for sure the system wasn’t taken over by a doomsday cult among the colonists or an isolationist human warlord,” Callie said. “Score one for the Benefactor’s mysterious source of information. Do these ships usually travel alone, Lantern?”

  “No. It’s formidable enough on its own, but it took a fleet of dozens to destroy a planet, and they generally traveled in packs.”

  “Just one here, though,” Callie mused.

  “It makes sense,” Kaustikos said. “If our adversaries built a fence around the system, why not have a guard dog to chase anyone who tries to climb over the fence? What now, Captain Machedo? Run away as fast as we can?”

  “Oh, no,” Callie said. “That ship is a valuable source of intelligence, and we’re going to suck it dry.”

  “Scourge-ships were typically crewed by my people,” Lantern said into Callie’s suit comms. “The truly loyal ones – fanatics, who believed they owed their existence to the Axiom, that slavery was the proper state for any creatures the Axiom permitted to live, that service was glory. Axiom officers would oversee the fleet remotely.”

  “So it’s not likely to be fully automatic? Good. Punching a control panel is so much less satisfying.” Callie crouched aboard the scourge-ship, in a narrow corridor that showed bright new welds where the interior had been repaired or retrofitted sometime in the not-so-distant past. This wasn’t an Axiom relic mothballed for millennia, but a working ship in active service. The lighting was shaded a lot farther into the red end of the spectrum than humans preferred, and the bare metal all around took on a rust-colored hue. They had artificial gravity here, not too heavy, but enough to keep her feet on the ground. She’d released a handful of Ashok’s scuttling spider-sized drones and they were beaming a map of the ship’s interior back to her as they explored. They were also probing the ship’s automated systems in the hopes that Shall might be able to hijack the ship, or at least interrupt its functions. Shall thought it was possible, assuming the scourge-ship ran on the same protocols as the other Axiom machines they’d encountered and studied.

  Callie wore her prized possession, an experimental spacesuit with the best stealth technology humanity had yet developed – almost entirely undetectable to scanners or biological eyes, but so ruinously expensive that her old bosses at the now-defunct Trans-Neptunian Alliance had never created more than the single prototype she’d been selected to test. She’d boarded the ship using the personal, short-range wormhole generator Lantern had given her, a piece of rare and highly restricted technology, much prized even among the truth-tellers. Callie was a perfect stealth and infiltration machine, and she loved it.

  She crept along a corridor the drones had assured her was clear. Shall kept whispering in her ear, keeping her apprised of the situation outside. The White Raven was running, and the scourge-ship was chasing. “It’s gaining on us, but slowly,” Shall said. “It absolutely bristling with weapons, but it’s not firing on us.”

  “They must want some intel too,” Callie said. “We’re probably the first people to ever trip this little alarm of theirs, and they’ll want to know if we’re a one-off or the vanguard of a larger force. Being isolated in the Vanir system goes both ways – no information gets out of there, but precious little information goes in, either. You’re scanning the White Raven for intruders, in case they sent in a boarding party of their own with personal teleporters like mine?”

  “I’ve been ludicrously vigilant ever since you found out the Benefactor had been skulking around,” Shall said. “No signs of any space-time anomalies here. They could be scanning for the same thing, though – they might know you’re there.”

  “That’s why I didn’t linger after I ’ported over. They might know I’m on the ship, but they won’t know exactly where. They can play cat and mouse but I bet I’m better at it than they are.”

  Most of her drones had dead-ended into bulkheads, but one had found the engine room – that could be useful – and another was slowly making its way toward Lantern’s best guess for where the control room would be. The ship was roughly spherical, covered in hooks and spines that Lantern said served no known purpose, apart from looking wicked. Elena said the ship looked like a sweetgum seed pod. Apparently they were black and spiky too. Callie thought it looked like the head of a medieval morningstar mace. Lantern speculated that the cockpit was in the center, the most protected and armored place, the nut in the shell. Lantern had no idea how many crew members a scourge-ship required, but Callie hadn’t passed anything that looked like cabins, or a galley, or a gym, or even an infirmary – just armor plating and storage rooms and access panels.

  She froze and watched her feeds as one of her drones went dark, and then another, and then a third. but on that last one, she got a flash of what killed it: a scuttling thing with spindly black metal legs, and a central body bristling with lenses and spikes. It was just a robot, but it gave her the same visceral revulsion that particularly leggy and hairy insects did. She slid into an alcove, crouched, and checked her weapons.

  Callie might have missed it, because the hunter was walking on the ceiling, but she made a habit of scanning her whole environment, and glanced up at the right moment. The hunter-drone stopped directly above her, lenses rotating, antenna bending this way and that. Callie had faith in her suit – it mimicked her background, hid her heat and sound and breath, and was invisible to every kind of sensor she knew about. She should be completely undetectable unless the nasty spider thing actually brushed up against her –

  The hunter dropped, and Callie rolled out of the way just before it struck the space she’d occupied. The drone made an annoyed chittering sound and its antennae waved wildly.

  Callie decided she was tired of being the mouse. She sprinted down the corridor and tossed an electromagnetic pulse grenade behind her. The grenades had a small radius – wouldn’t do her much good if the blast disabled her own suit – but enough to knock the thing’s systems offline long enough for her to more permanently disable it.

  She turned to watch the grenade pulse green for a moment (Ashok’s concession to her desire for some indication the thing had actually gone off), and the hunter obligingly dropped, its spindly legs motionless, its glowing lenses dark.

  Then half a dozen pseudopods popped out of small round portholes ringing the central orb and it rose up on obviously biological limbs and started running toward her.

  She’d seen Axiom biotech, and Axiom robots, but this was some combination of both, or else it was a Liar in some kind of armored suit. Callie tossed a stun grenade this time, a burst of electricity that should scramble the nervous system of just about anything that had one. The hunter tumbled and slid to a stop in front of her, tentacles twitching.

  “Is there anybody in there?” Callie resisted the urge to rap her knuckles on the thing’s carapace. It would probably explode or give her cancer or inject her with a neurotoxin or something. Instead she took out a marble-sized green ball from her belt and tossed it onto the hunter. The marble burst on impact, gooey filaments spreading across the hunter in a web and sticking to the floor and the walls. Ashok used the same goo to seal hull breaches, and, while the material wasn’t indestructible, it was tough enough to keep the little monster secure for a while.

  Callie was running blind now, her drones eaten up, and the ship knew something was here, hunting its hunters. Callie decided time was becoming precious, so she took a perpendicular corridor and started working her way to the ship’s creamy, murdery center.

  Several hunter-drones scuttled past, converging on the one she’d disabled, some with their organic parts undulating wildly, others looking as purely robotic as her original victim had at first, and Callie crouched and pressed herself against walls and at one point crawled underneath a pipe to let them move past without making physical contact and discovering her.

  She finally reached a sealed round door with Axiom script written above it in red. “Translation?” she asked, sending her view back to the White Raven.

  “The scourge fleet had its own dialect,” Lantern said. “I think it translates as something like, ‘Heart of Correction’? Or ‘Core of Punishment’ might be more accurate.”

  “Sounds important.” Callie stuck plastic explosives to the door, backtracked around a corner, and hit the button. The boom reverberated through the corridor, and when she peeked around the edge she saw the shaped charge had done its job – blown the door inward, spraying a lot of shrapnel in the process. She moved through the opening low and fast – and then stopped, staring at the pilot dying on the floor with a gaping hole in her torso.

  Callie turned and tossed a few more marbles of expanding sealant at the remains of the doorframe, and the material obligingly filled in the hole and hardened, giving her some temporary security and privacy. Seconds later, she heard the scratch and scuttle of hunter claws trying to breach the barrier, but she barely spared the bio-drones a thought. She knelt instead by the dying pilot, and said, “I’m sorry.” The pilot didn’t reply, and Callie watched the light disappear from her eyes.

  Her human eyes, in her human face.

  CHAPTER 8

  Callie numbly operated the controls of the scourge-ship, following instructions, intuitions, and guesses from Shall, Lantern, and Ashok. Once she successfully loaded Shall’s control software into the system, everything got a lot easier.

  She disabled the internal security and the scuttling of the hunters stopped. Then she transferred the ship’s navigational data back to the Raven, so they could see where it had come from, and how it ended up here. The scourge-ship, presumably, could come and go from the Vanir system at will, and might reveal a path they could follow. Worst case, they could travel in this vessel… but Callie didn’t want to do that. She couldn’t remember when she’d been more unsettled, and she wanted to get off this ship, and away from its dead pilot.