“Nothing definitive, but I did find some things that are… suggestive. The logs are a mixture of human language, the language of the Free, and the Axiom alphabet… sometimes mingled all in the same message.”

  “That’s weird,” Callie said.

  “I had assumed we were going to a system where human life had been exterminated, but something else is happening there,” Lantern said. “I fear the humans may have been enslaved, as my people were, long ago. The sort of changes wrought in the human pilot… in the museum of subjugation, there are accounts of the Axiom altering my people for specialized tasks and environments, albeit not to such an extreme.”

  “I’ve been having similar thoughts. I don’t suppose… did you find out the pilot’s name?”

  Lantern’s tentacles fluttered in some complex way Callie couldn’t parse. “Yes. No. Sort of.” A long pause. “Her name is Subject SS-802.”

  CHAPTER 10

  “I’ll call you Sadie.” Elena sealed the combustion chamber. “SS-802 is a terrible name.” She took a deep breath. “Sadie, I’m sorry this happened. Callie wants to save people – even people she doesn’t like very much – not kill them. I wish we could have helped you. I can’t imagine what you went through. What your life has been like. If you suffered, and I think you did, I am glad your suffering is over, and sad you didn’t have the chance to live free.”

  That was the best she could do. Elena punched in the sequence and turned her back before the panel opaqued and the chamber beyond heated up. The combustion system was meant for destroying medical waste. She’d never used it to cremate the dead before.

  “May I come in?” Kaustikos’s suspiciously smooth voice sounded over the room’s comm. She glanced at the screen and saw he was hovering outside the door.

  “I can’t see why,” Elena replied. “You don’t need a doctor. If you’re malfunctioning, talk to Ashok. He’s the engineer here.”

  “Ha, no, I just thought we could have a conversation.”

  “About what?”

  “About what happens next. Your captain has been rather… reluctant to share her plans with me. Which is to say, she doesn’t even respond when I attempt to open communications with her.”

  “She’s been pretty busy, infiltrating an Axiom ship and gathering intelligence. I’m sure she’ll talk to you when she has time. Is that all?”

  “Not entirely. I understand you were new to the crew, not so long ago, and yet you’ve integrated beautifully into the whole. I seem to be having a hard time making connections with my crewmates. Any advice?”

  Elena snorted. “My situation isn’t comparable to yours, Kaustikos. Your mysterious employer has been helpful, which is why you’re here, but the Benefactor done a lot to build trust. That lack of trust extends to you. We think you know more than you’re telling us.”

  “Doctor Oh, doesn’t everyone know more than they share? I should hope so. Otherwise every interaction would become quite tiresome as people rambled on, sharing the pertinent and impertinent alike. I would point out that the Benefactor is our mutual employer. It seems I have to point that out quite often.”

  “I hope that’s not too tiresome. No one is happy when their employer sends a spy to keep an eye on them. Callie and the others are professionals. Just let them get on with the mission, and if you know something useful, share it.”

  “I am not a spy. Or, at least, not just a spy. I am an underutilized resource. I gather you and the captain have an… intimate relationship. I assume you care greatly whether she lives or dies. I would appreciate it if you could use whatever influence you have to convince her to avail herself of my services. I am useful in the field, I am useful as a strategist, and, indeed, I am useful as a friend. Shouldn’t we all be friends?”

  “Sure. Let’s be friends. My name’s Elena. What’s yours?”

  “You may call me… ah. I see. If I am reluctant even to divulge my name, what basis can there be for a friendship between us? Fine. My name is… John.”

  Elena thought for a moment. “You’re lying, aren’t you?”

  “Elena, my employer wants me to exercise a certain amount of discretion–”

  “My friends call me Elena,” she said. “You can keep right on calling me Doctor Oh.” She muted the comms.

  Something about that floating lying surveillance orb really gave her the creeps.

  Kaustikos came floating into the machine shop and Ashok waved. “Hi! Could you go away? You have a bomb on you and I like to be outside the potential blast radius. Even with an inward-pointing charge there’s always a chance some piece of shrapnel will come bouncing in my direction, and while I don’t tend to fear injury, I’m pretty busy just now.”

  “I came to see if you needed any help interpreting the data recovered from the scourge-ship.”

  “Are you a data analyst?”

  “I have a full suite of software–”

  “Pfft. So do we. Anyway, nah, we’re good.”

  The orb bobbed. “Does that mean you’ve found a way to penetrate the Vanir system?”

  “Penetrate! Why does that sound so pervy when you say it? Something about your voice, it’s got this oily quality, like you’re an evil lawyer in an immersive about the problems rich people have. You might want to consider a different suite of vocalization software–”

  “This voice is an emulation of the one my human template had,” Kaustikos said.

  “Ouch. No reason to be stuck with the garbage nature gave you, though. Look at me – it’s not like I kept most of my original equipment.”

  “Nevertheless, my voice has some sentimental value for me.”

  Ashok nodded. “I definitely get a super sentimental vibe from you, like as a rule.”

  “This interaction is most vexing. My dossier assured me you like everyone, yet you’re very hostile to me.”

  “I do like everyone! I don’t even dislike you, Kaustikos. I just dislike corporate oversight, and you are the personification of corporate oversight. Everyone on this ship fled the kind of world where there’s a boss who tells your manager what you need to do so your manager can tell you to do it. You’re… middle-management, Kaustikos. Everyone hates middle-management.”

  “I am a fellow freelancer! Just because I act as a liaison doesn’t mean I’m management. Have I given any of you orders?”

  “You tried to give a couple, yeah, when you first showed up. That didn’t work out, so now you’re trying to buddy-buddy things. I get it. Unfortunately, you kinda spoiled things with that first impression. It’s not me you need to win over, anyway – it’s the captain. I don’t have much hope for you, but let me give you some advice about dealing with her. If you have something important to say, you say, ‘I have something important to say, and you should really listen.’ At that point she will listen, and then you should say something that is actually important, and also something she doesn’t already know. Do that successfully a few times, and she might not wince every time you speak. Okay?”

  “That is… genuinely helpful, Ashok. Thank you.”

  He shrugged. “I’m an engineer. I fix broken systems. You’re a loose ball bearing bouncing around inside a machine that otherwise functions extremely well. We’re all watching to see if you’re going to bounce into the gears at the wrong time and mess things up. So… try not to do that.”

  “I will make myself scarce until I have something of value to offer, then.”

  “Great! Also, people are nervous about being around someone with a bomb attached to them, but I’ll grant you that part is not entirely your fault.” He paused. “Say, can you tell me something?”

  “If I can.”

  “What color are the Benefactor’s eyes?”

  Kaustikos paused. Ashok had a rough idea of the kind of computing power packed into that probe and knew a pause of any length was either faked for purposes of anthropomorphization… or the result of millions of calculations, extrapolations, and branching probability trees being analyzed rapidly under that silvery surface. “Blue. Very bright blue. And the Benefactor only has one eye.”

  “So you have met him.”

  “I have seen him on a screen. I have not met him in person.”

  “Thank you for sharing, Kaustikos. This could be the beginning of a beautiful something.”

  “One hopes.” The orb bobbed once, which Ashok decided to interpret as a friendly nod, and then floated away.

  “Blue,” Ashok muttered.

  “Is everyone where they’re supposed to be?” Callie asked from her chair at the tactical board. The crew chimed in to confirm their positions. “The bridge generator is recharged and ready to make another jump. We’re going to aim for the Vanir system again. We don’t know what we’re jumping into – it could be a nice bit of empty space. It could be a fleet staging area filled with thousands of scourge-ships. Obviously I’m hoping for the former, but if it’s the latter, we’re just going to hope nobody notices us while we get our bearings and figure out a way to slip away. The ship will be disguised to look like a scourge-ship, so with luck we won’t be vaporized on arrival. Are we ready?”

  The crew chorused their affirmatives.

  “Take us away,” Callie said.

  The wormhole opened before them, tendrils reaching out and enveloping, and then they traveled through the bridge. The wormholes accessed by the large bridgeheads in the human colony systems were utterly dark, but the one their generator created was lit by rings of white light at regular intervals, blurring past the viewport as they traveled. Even those lights were invisible to sensors, cameras, or mechanical vision – only biological eyes could perceive them, perhaps as some sort of security measure, but no one really knew why. The Axiom hadn’t left any documentation on the ruins of their empire.

  Lantern theorized that all the wormholes had been lit this way, once, but that most of them had broken down in some incomprehensible way, through age or disuse. The Axiom had created the bridges and the nature of those passageways through space were barely understood, the secrets of their construction and maintenance lost.

  If one of the bridges stopped working, no one would have the first idea how to fix it – the colony worlds on the far side would be cut off forever from their neighbors. In fact, that was a popular theory for what had happened in the Vanir system: that the wormhole had simply stopped working, and the ships that vanished inside never returned because they were lost somewhere in the crawlspace of the universe, tumbling forever in the dark.

  She’d seen that blue eye inside a wormhole, and if the Benefactor could access wormholes, could somehow travel in the structure behind wormholes, he could go anywhere. That would explain how he seemed to know what was happening in the Vanir system – that cryptic message that the place would be ‘interesting’ to unspecified members of her crew certainly suggested the Benefactor had some idea what they were flying into. If he had that much power and knowledge, though, why did the Benefactor need Callie to run errands for him? And why not share some of that information?

  Callie kept her eye on the tunnel for the twenty-one seconds of the journey but no blue eyes peered out at her, just alternating bands of light and dark, and then they emerged into ordinary space.

  They were not immediately fired upon, which was nice. The screens filled up with sensor data as Janice ran scans. They were definitely in the Vanir system – the astronomical charts matched up. There were dense shapes floating all around them for kilometers in every direction: other scourge-ships, powered down, seemingly lifeless. Off in the distance an asteroid bristled with airlocks in various sizes, from smaller-than-human-scale openings for drones to hangar doors meant for ships five times as big as the White Raven. That structure was putting out lots of heat and light and electromagnetic fields and assorted forms of radiation. It was a working facility. The home of the ‘Command,’ maybe, that had sent out the scourge-ship that pursued them.

  “The station is talking to us,” Janice said. “Nothing personal, though, just automated-system-to-automated-system. Shall?”

  “I’m emulating the scourge-ship’s communication protocols. We’re back early, so their system wants to know if we’re damaged or if this is a situation that needs to be escalated to someone with an actual brain. Wow. I haven’t interfaced with technology this primitive in… ever. It doesn’t even qualify as an expert system. Our coffee maker is smarter.”

  “Lucky for us,” Callie said. “We don’t want to talk to anyone with a functioning frontal lobe. Tell the station there was a malfunction with our weapon systems.”

  “There’s a small vessel launching from the station,” Janice said. “It’s not coming this way, though – it’s heading for one of the other scourge-ships.”

  “The system acknowledges and says a diagnostic and repair drone is being dispatched. Then it says… something I don’t understand. Some kind of ritual sign-off?” Shall played a burst of something guttural.

  “The accent is odd,” Lantern said. “But I think it said, ‘Glory to the Exalted.’”

  “I’ll play the same sounds back to them,” Shall said. “Okay. That seems to have satisfied the system. Comms closed.”

  “That smaller vessel has docked with one of the scourge-ships,” Janice said. “I think it’s a pilot. I bet they’re dispatching a ship to replace this one. They don’t want to leave their fence unguarded, even though we have to be the first people to try to jump it in maybe forever.”

  “The price of liberty,” Callie muttered. “Ugh. They’ll find the remains of the ship we scuttled. Ashok, how good is your stealth and projection system at this point? Can you make it look like we’re a scourge-ship sitting nicely waiting for a repair drone while we actually sneak the hell out of here?”

  “I am the master of smoke and mirrors, captain. Hmm. You know, that’s a good idea. I should put some smoke bombs in my wrist launcher, and I could do something fun with mirrors and lasers–”

  “Ashok.”

  “Implementing evasive measures, captain.”

  Everything seemed to go so well at first. They silently sank, toward the portion of the shipyard where the scourge-ships were least densely arrayed, which was conveniently also the direction farthest away from the command station. Janice noted when the replacement scourge-ship opened its wormhole and vanished. They were nearly to the edge of the shipyard at that point, and Callie thought they were going to make it. The bridge generator on that ship would have to recharge, so even if it noticed the wreckage of the ship it was replacing right away, it would be hours before it could return to give a report and raise an alarm –

  “Another wormhole is opening,” Janice said.

  “What? The same ship?”

  “I don’t – no, it’s smaller. Looks about the size of Lantern’s little one-person blister-ship.”

  Callie groaned. Apparently the ships had escape pods equipped with their own wormhole-opening technology. They’d missed that on the scourge-ship they’d destroyed. It had never occurred to her that one ship could have two bridge generators on board. Scarcity mindset.

  “There’s… suddenly a whole lot of comms traffic happening,” Shall said.

  “They’re shooting at the place where they think we are,” Janice said. “It’s good we’re not there.”

  “Ashok, can you make it look like we exploded?”

  “I can try, but it’s not just a question of making a big flash of light – I have to mimic the radiation signature of an exploded ship, and we’re getting pretty far away from the projection, so it takes time for the changes to propagate.”

  “They aren’t shooting to destroy us anyway, based on the portions of the fake ship they’re targeting,” Janice said. “Looks like disabling shots, meant to take out propulsion. I think they want to talk to us instead. There are a whole lot of little ships bursting out of that asteroid now, spreading out all over the shipyard.”

  Ashok said, “Uh, cap? I think they figured out that image of a ship is not a real ship, and now they are looking really hard for a real ship.”

  “Drake, let’s get away from here, and quickly.” The ship obligingly accelerated.

  “Our stealth technology is good… but it’s Liar tech,” Ashok said. “Developed from Axiom tech. If there are countermeasures, these are the people who’ll–”

  “We’re being painted with sensors!” Janice said. “They see us! Those little ships are coming in fast.”

  Callie kept her voice steady. “Can we get away, or do we need to fight?”

  “There are too many ships, coming from too many directions,” Shall said. “If we’ve lost our stealth, we’ve lost our way out. We can destroy a few of them if you like. They aren’t shooting at us, though – just positioning to surround us.”

  “Shooting at them wouldn’t make a boarding party any more favorably disposed toward us, would it?” Callie said.

  Elena reached over and squeezed Callie’s hand. “What do we do?”

  “I’m open to suggestions,” Callie said.

  “Captain,” Kaustikos said over her personal comm. “I have something important to say, and you should really listen.”

  She did.

  CHAPTER 11

  “We’re going to baffle them with bullshit,” Callie said. “Open a general communications channel, Janice.”

  “It’s always nice to chat with the wild animals before they devour you,” she muttered, but complied. “Speak your mind, captain.”

  Callie stared into the camera, trying to project steely-eyed determination. “Greetings to the inhabitants of the Vanir system. I am captain Kalea Machedo, leader of a delegation from the Trans-Neptunian Alliance.” She should have said the Jovian Imperative, probably – they’d been a major power when the gates to Vanir closed, and many of the original colonists had come from there, while the TNA had been an upstart polity back then. The TNA had been destroyed when agents of the Axiom turned their capital Meditreme Station into so much radioactive dust, but she missed her old nation, and claiming that allegiance now was a way of keeping its memory alive. “We’ve been sent to determine the status of the colony system here. We are on a diplomatic mission, and it is not our intention to engage in hostilities, though we will defend ourselves if necessary. Please acknowledge.”