Issue 59, December 2019

© Wyrm Publishing, 2019
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

This month’s editorial was supposed to be about my adventures at a pair of science fiction conventions in China, but it won’t be. I’m sitting on the floor of my house, blasting some music by Infected Mushroom, and trying to work out how to tell you the story of how none of that came to be, at least for me.

The first convention, China SF Con, was set to take place at the start of November in Beijing. In addition to attending the conference, I was scheduled to do a few interviews, a signing, and a twenty-minute talk entitled “The Future of Science Fiction is International.” I had been looking forward to returning to China since I was there in 2017, but after over twelve hours at the airport—and a couple of hours sitting in the plane just outside our gate—we returned to the terminal. Due to mechanical problems they had known about all day (and from the previous flight) my flight was canceled. The next available flight was leaving two days later, on Saturday, so I’d arrive at the hotel as the convention was wrapping up. Much to my disappointment, I had them cancel the flight and issue a refund to the people hosting my trip. I was given a $500 travel voucher for my troubles and went home.

This was the second international flight I’ve had canceled at Newark in the last six months, so I was a bit concerned about the viability of my trip to the 5th International Science Fiction Conference in Chengdu later in the month. It turns out that I had nothing to worry about there. That flight left on-time, just without me. Earlier in the month, my father-in-law, Donald Rodriguez, had ended up in the critical care unit. It wasn’t looking good, but the Friday before my trip he was in good form, cracking jokes, and talking with us. It seemed like progress, but things took a turn for the worse over the weekend. We were warned that he only had days left, so I canceled my flight. He passed away right around the time I would have arrived in Chengdu.

Try as I might, I can’t really write much more about him or the rest of the month. There’s a hole in our family and looking into it is just too much right now. I’m just glad I was here.

This issue closes out 2019 for Forever and I’m sorry for ending on such a down note. (And recycling most of this from my Clarkesworld editorial.) It’s been a month.

Thank you for all your support this year (and to those who heard about this earlier and reached out with kind words). Should you celebrate, happy holidays, and I wish you all a wonderful 2020!

Until next time,

-Neil

Lazy Dog Out

Suzanne Palmer

Khifi traded the warm embrace of her wife’s arms for the pricking of cold air on her bare skin and a regret she knew she would not dispel until she was back here again on the far side of a ten-hour shift. She danced on her toes across the metal floor and out of their small sleeping alcove, sliding the screen doors closed behind her. Lema had more than once suggested she keep her boots at the bedside so she could slip straight into them, but if she did, she couldn’t sneak out without waking her.

She checked the apartment monitors to make sure oxygen was optimum, all systems running green. Not that they ever weren’t, but she required that brief reassurance. Pulling clothes out of the post-wash basket, she shrugged into a sports bra, bright red tank top, and black pants before wrapping her vambrace over her left forearm. Her boots were by the door, and she stepped into their fuzzy warmth with a sigh of relief as they adjusted around her feet. As the kitchenapp kicked on to start the coffee, she skimmed the news, disinterested. There were no big Tanduou stories, and anything else local worth knowing—and that she didn’t already know—wouldn’t be on the feeds anyway.

Rummaging through the foodkeeper, she pulled out an oblong shape and tucked it carefully in her backpack that hung near the door. “Khif?” Lema called from the other room. She sounded like she wasn’t sure if she was awake or asleep. “Are you stealing the whole loaf of protein bread again?”

“Only half of one, Lem,” she said, “and it’s the stale one from two days ago.”

“It’s only stale because you don’t eat enough.”

“It’s only half a loaf because I ate plenty,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

There was a long silence, and Khifi had just concluded that Lema had done exactly that when she heard, sleepily, “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said. “Gotta go.”

She slipped on her jacket and backpack, took her coffee out of the maker, and left the apartment feeling warm enough after all.

At the fastlane station, she slid her license through the reader and waited the four point three seconds for it to verify that she was rated for the lane and deposit an empty sled in the tube. Climbing in, she made sure the lid on her coffee was fully sealed before she put the thermal mug in her backpack, tied the pack down at the base of the sled, and strapped herself in. She put her hands on the dual joystick controls on either side and ran though a mental self-check to make sure she was awake and alert enough. Once she was sure she was good, she launched herself up into the tube at top acceleration.

Navigating the branching maze of the Tanduou tube system was almost an art. More than one overtired, over-intoxicated, or over-self-estimated tube-noob had turned themselves into a pulpy obstruction in the system before skill-ranked licensing was implemented. It had reduced, if not eliminated, fatality-related delays.

Eight turns, the surface rotary loop, and two timed junctions later, she kicked her sled out the exit for the Paxillo Docks. As she braked the last quarter kilometer into the transit station, she could see the city-lit underbellies of ships shifting overhead like a perpetual storm cloud of rusty junk. The bright yellow-brown disk of the nearby planet lurked behind them, a faded sun never quite able to break through.

Her eyes looked for trouble, found none.

Shouldering her pack, she left the transit station and merged into the cramped hallways of the underbelly of the Docks. As she turned a corner toward the central hub, faint footsteps fell in behind her, distinct from the usual heavy-booted crowd. For a half-second she thought about the three knives she had within easy reach, then instead abruptly stopped walking mid-stride. Her follower slammed right into her. She spun around in time to catch the chagrin on his face. He was eight or nine standard years old, although he was small enough to be younger and had the eyes of someone older. “Morning, Mole,” she said. “Where’s your partner in crime today?”

He shrugged. Traffic in the hallway moved seamlessly around them, uncaring. “Birdie had business.”

“You were looking for me?”

“Figured I might run into you,” he said, and almost smiled.

She glanced around to make sure there was no one in the halls who could make trouble, then slid her pack off and set it on the floor. She took out the half-loaf and handed it to him. “You okay?” she asked. “No one hassling you?”

“No one new,” he answered. When she waited, he added, “I’m okay.”

“Everyone else?”

He looked down toward his threadbare shoes, held together with cargo sealant and grime. “Peezy and Gums went off to Notomyo Dock. Gums come back in bad shape, pissing blood, not talking. We not found Peezy yet. Thinking she dead or grabbed.”

Well, shit, she thought. “Why’d they go there?”

“Heard about easy stuff to get.”

“What’re the rules, Mole?”

“No stealing except direct to survive, no stealing more than you need, no stealing from anyone who can’t afford to lose it,” he said. “Assume everything’s a trap.”

“And?”

“And don’t get caught.”

“How do you know this isn’t a trap?” she asked.

“Know it is. Food’s the bait, and the trap is you make me learn reading and numbers and stuff.” He broke the loaf carefully into three roughly equal pieces. Putting two deep down in the pocket of his ragged coat, he began chewing on the last. She knew he’d save one piece for Birdie and wondered who the other was for.

“If you learn to run manifests and do other textwork, you could get a job and get out of the crawl. You’ve only got a few more years before you’re too old to stay down there,” she said. “You do that lesson I gave you?”

“Yeah. Tuck’s taking a turn now,” he said. “Tuck’s new. Little. Not a runaway, a drop. Cries all the time. Birdie says we looking after him now.”

Khifi watched as he licked a fingertip and meticulously picked up and ate the crumbs he’d dropped on the front of his coat. She remembered being that hungry, once. “Bugs came in last shift,” he said, eventually. Bugs were crawler slang for aliens.

“Yeah? Which kind?”

“Hain’t seen, don’t know. Down in Velatos.”

Velatos, she thought. Shit, I forgot.

Mole stiffened at her suddenly tense body language. “It’s okay, Mole,” she said, “I promised Lema I’d run an errand for her in Velatos and now it’s too late. Going to have to go after my shift.”

“If you do, let me know about the bugs,” Mole said. He patted his pocket to make sure he still had the food secured there, then peered through the crowds back down the hall. By the time she’d got her pack back on, there was no sign of him in the swirling tide of merchants and haulers, scavengers and lost.

She headed toward the central hub into the heart of Paxillo.

Tanduou’s Docks had spread out over the surface of the tide-locked moon, thickening and growing together until they were one interconnected network of docks and storage facilities, black markets and slums, arms reaching out from individual locii to embrace and entangle each other. The hubs remained distinct, massive metal and stone towers rising toward the constant swarm of ships above, while here and there, at the outskirt borders between them, small patches of the native rocky surface could still be seen, littered with twisted scrap and, sometimes, the remains of the unlucky or unwise on eternal, cautionary display.

The lowest level of Paxillo’s hub was a wide concourse, full of shops selling uncertain foods and goods banned on dozens of worlds. Lines of people queued to enter, queued to leave. Always among them were the crawlers looking for dropped food or unattended luggage, a bold few looking to liberate things more actively. Hunting on the floor was desperation or reckless overconfidence; even the best of the best would, eventually, get caught. She knew that all too personally.

An assault of activity, noise, and smells hit her face-on as she merged into the concourse. Normally she found the chaos a comforting unpleasantness. This time, though, one particular smell had infiltrated, tainting the usual, complex mix. That specific cheap Titan cologne had only one devotee she knew of, at least at the level of fanatical self-slathering needed to stand out in this space.

“Fox,” Sniv said, using her pilot name as he appeared out of the crowd and fell in beside her, enveloping her in his toxic miasma. “Another long shift? You must be very tired.”

“I sleep well,” she said, and kept walking.

“I trust you are sufficiently compensated—”

“I am, Sniv, and it’s none of your business.”

“Ah, but I am a man of all businesses!” he declared. “I know about your past, and I have an offer for you. A simple guide job, well-paying—”

“If it’s a legit job, bring it to Quizzie, the Dock manager. If not, I’m certain I am not interested,” Khifi said.

“If you reconsider, perhaps we can meet and break bread over it,” he said. “I hear you like to share your food with Tanduou’s unfortunates, and surely I am begging for your time. Think about it.”

Before she could form an answer, he swept back into the crowd, leaving her choking down a blistering reply.

It was neither common knowledge nor a secret that Khifi was once a crawler herself. It was just dumb luck that she was caught by a pilot rather than security, and that he’d had a need to save the world one lost piece at a time. She would spend her lifetime trying to pay that good fortune back. Whatever Sniv wanted of her, it could only be a step backward.

Sniv had left her just a few steps away from the uniformed Dock Security officer half-asleep at his post. She passed through the gate to the private elevators, put her hand on the palm scanner, then stepped into the lift when it opened. The car smoothly rose up the tower to Paxillo Dock Control.

Control was a circular room with a view of the entirety of Paxillo Dock. In the dim light, console displays bathed everyone and everything in a reddish glow. In the center was an elevated platform where the ending shift’s Ops manager, Goffs, was slouched in his chair with a deep frown on his face. Inchbug, on air comms, gave Khifi a half-wave as she entered. Khifi smiled and waved back before looking around for her own team.

Sparkle was sprawled in a chair at the end of the room, arms crossed over her chest and feet up on an idle console, eyes closed. Jonjon was at the break station trying to coax the coffee dispenser to break whatever law of physics limited the speed at which even spacer fakebrew could be squirted out first thing in the morning. Redrum sat in a chair, his bony hands already wrapped around a mug, a small smile playing on his face as he listened to Jonjon’s low, ritual wheedling.

Khifi walked over to stand beside the machine. “Let me,” she said after a few moments and thumped the side of the machine with her fist. Immediately it began to chug out its small measure of low-rent heaven.

“I don’t know how the fuck you always do that, Fox,” Jonjon said.

“Magic,” she answered. And timing, she didn’t add; the machine had a small but distinct hiccup in its internal rumblings just prior to dispensing. “Just remember to save me some. Quizzie’s not here?” Quizzie was their shift’s Ops manager, but her larger duties as dock manager sometimes took her elsewhere.

“Dockmaster caught a ride with her down to the Gee. Another trade meet, arguing about the gravity bill,” Redrum said. “Stickles is the man in the chair today. He’s on his way.”

Jonjon relinquished his position in front of the coffee dispenser to her. She took her mug off the shelf above it and poured herself a full cup. Despite Tanduou being independent, the central government of Guratahan Sfazil believed that, simply because they provided a planet for Tanduou to orbit around, they deserved a cut from the dock trade profit. It was a never-ending argument. Khifi’s impression was that the Gee’s strategy was to wear them down through constant, petty annoyance.

Speaking of annoyances. She drained her coffee with barely a grimace, stuck the mug back in the sani-rack, and went to Inchbug’s station to look out the window. “The Rimbolan freighter is still out there?” she exclaimed. “Is this four days now?”

“Yeah,” Inchbug said. “Waiting on parts, they say. Damned heap of junk is taking up three dock slots. We’ve swamped Velatos with our extra traffic, and we’ve even had to push ships as far off as Oreasta and Luida docks.”

“Surprised Goffs hasn’t called in a salvage team.”

“Yeah, well. I think the only reason he hasn’t is that Mr. Balcko is so spun up about it he’s shitting rocks, and Goffs is enjoying that.”

“Mr. Balcko? Why does he care? If the traffic isn’t going outside our cluster—”

Inchbug shrugged. “No idea. Goffs suddenly seems to be all about getting in Balcko’s face, and with the Dockmaster off-moon . . . Well. If I were you I’d let it be Stickles’s problem and stay out of it. And I’m going to hope your lot or the next has this all settled before my shift comes round again.”

Balcko was the manager of the seven docks, including Paxillo, that made up Velatos cluster. That put him high enough up the Tanduou food chain to make life difficult for anyone down at their level, answering only to the Dockmaster himself. “Thanks for the warning,” she said. “You out?”

“Soon as Tumbler and Beanmaker get their feet down,” Inchbug said. “Yebbles is in, and Ryeneck’s waiting on Pits in cargo to give the clear.”

Khifi glanced across the room. Ryeneck was cleaning gunk out from under his nails with the end of a handpad stylus as he talked, mouth moving nonstop, the murmur low enough from here to sound like a cargo-drone losing its engine at altitude.

“There a problem?” Khifi asked.

“No, Pits isn’t even on the line yet. Rye’s lost his head for a controller over in the Odinella cluster, and he’s a-wooing.”

“Over the official lines?!”

“Naw. He hacked into an illegal relay down in the markets and used it to patch an encrypted channel through the public comm system. Can pretty much talk the ear off anyone and everyone on Tanduou all day, so long as no one too high up notices. We’ve got cred riding on how many shifts it takes him to crash and burn.”

“Based on that pilot in Acontias cluster he was in love with last week? My guess is not long.”

Inchbug snorted. “Too right. Hey, speaking of gossip, I hear you and Lem are implanting?”

Khifi sighed. “Fourth try,” she said.

Inchbug shook her head. “I can’t imagine bringing a kid into this world,” she said. “I—”

Stickles walked in, interrupting whatever Inch had been about to say. He looked as disheveled as always, like someone had just dumped him out of a sack on their doorstep. “Almost shift time, gang,” he said. “Give me five minutes to check in with Goffs. Fox, you’re air captain, do what you do best.”

Khifi looked around. She was still missing two of her pilots. Kaiju was always last second, but Knits . . .

“Tumbler is in, Beanmaker docking in five,” Inch announced, just as Kaiju, on cue, ran out of the half-open elevator and pitched himself into the chair beside Redrum, trying to catch his breath.

“Shift change,” Goffs announced.

“Ops commander, checking in,” Stickles announced.

“Ops commander, transferring command and checking out,” Goffs said. He pulled his ID card from the console, stood up, and said one last thing to Stickles before climbing down the ladder onto the floor.

Sparkle cracked an eye open, unfolded herself from her chair, and loomed over Ryeneck until he disconnected his line, threw down his headset, and yielded his chair. He kicked the post as she sat down, and she swiveled around and smirked at him until he left.

“Jonjon, you may relieve Inchbug,” Stickles said.

Jonjon brought his mug over as Inchbug slid off her headpiece and rubbed wearily at her eyes. “All yours,” she said, and let him take her seat.

“I’m still down a pilot,” Khifi said. “I don’t know where Knits is.”

“She called in sick,” Goffs said, as he climbed down from the ops platform. “Stickles was bringing a replacement.”

“Candles is on his way up by tube right now.”

Khifi thought she knew all the pilots in the cluster and most beyond, but the name was unfamiliar. “Candles?”

“New,” Stickles said. “Working out of Novodinia with me.”

“How new?” She narrowed her eyes.

“So shiny and new the wrapper hasn’t sloughed off yet,” Stickles said, “but only to Tanduou; kid’s got time under his belt driving cargo skips out around the Bounds dodging pirates. You won’t hate him, and it mostly won’t even feel like babysitting. Give him a chance. Please?”

Please? That was unusual. “What aren’t you telling me?” she asked.

“He’s just not a local, okay?” Stickles said. “Burnout’s been giving him a hard time.”

“Burnout’s an assvalve. Whose tug is he taking?”

“The cluster spare. Beanmaker is hauling it over now, that’s why he’s running late. Once Candles makes it past review, we’ll assign him a permanent tug and home dock. Think about that as you work with him; if there’s a happier fit here in Paxillo, it’d save everyone some grief.”

The lift doors opened and someone very, very tall stepped out onto the floor. The newcomer was well over two meters in height, attenuated and gangly looking. He was also shirtless and hairless. What really stood out, though, were the thick swirls and whorls of silvery-gray that climbed up his torso, along his neck and bare scalp. Contrasted against the spacer-brown of his skin, the effect was startling. As he stepped forward, the patterns shimmered in the changing light.

Not local, indeed, Khifi thought.

Stickles looked up from his seat at the command console. “Candles, just in time.”

Candles raised one long, skinny arm, and gave an uncertain wave. “Uh, hi,” he said. It was so much the gesture of any awkward teenager anywhere that Khifi laughed. His eyes went straight to her, his face a mask of both defiance and anxiety. Yeah, she could imagine Burnout being rough on this kid.

Khifi thumped Jonjon on the shoulder so that he turned around in the chair. “Hi, Candles. I’m Fox,” she said. She pointed to the rest of her team. “This is Jonjon on Comms for the air,” she said, “and over there is Sparkle on ground. By the coffee machine is Redrum and Kaiju, pilots.”

“You air captain?” Candles asked.

“I am today,” she said.

“She is every day,” Jonjon said. “Best pilot in the cluster, but don’t tell her I said that.”

“Best, huh?” Candles asked. That spark of challenge brightened.

She shrugged. “Everyone does their best as a team, or no one does,” she said. “Stickles, you got work for us?”

“Soon as you slackers finish up your coffee social and get out there, yeah,” he said.

“Okay,” Khifi said. “Move, everyone. Candles, I’m going to come watch you go through your preflight checks.”

He made a face. Damn, he’s young, she thought. “Done a hundred checks afore,” he said, his Bounds accent thick. “Not needing your eyes on me.”

“Yeah, well, you get them anyway,” she said, pointing toward the tower lift emphatically. “No one goes out on my watch that I don’t know first-hand can handle themselves.”

“Trust her, kid,” Stickles called down from the command platform.

The lift arrived and Candles followed her reluctantly in. As the doors closed, she turned to him. “You have a suit, right?” she asked.

“Do,” he said. “Just the Colony not like it, being closed.”

“The Colony?”

He waved one hand loosely up and down his torso. Closer up she could see the silver markings were more of a dense fuzz, and that it rippled gently despite the lack of moving air in the car.

“It’s alive?” she asked.

“Yeh. Does it give you fear?”

“Not really, no,” she said, and wasn’t sure if he looked more relieved or disappointed. “You want to talk about it?”

“Gen-mod symbiote,” he said. “Converts rads to vitals.”

Vitamins, she interpreted. “You’re from deep out.”

“Yeh. Suvastia. Jobworld. Family contract got redunded and we was let go,” he said. “Sibs got refuge on Beenjai, I came here with eyes on better work.”

“Well, if you can fly, you should do fine,” she said. “It’s staying out of trouble that’s the real challenge. Stickles is a good lead; his advice is worthwhile.”

“Said same of you.”

Khifi laughed. “Okay, so most of his advice is worthwhile. How’d you end up as Candles?” Nicknames were a point of both pride and deep superstition in the Docks; few people went by anything else, especially pilots.

“Burnout wanted to nick me Vacuumfodder. I said I specked he’d find the final cold sooner, and he said, quoting, ‘Boo hoo, I’ll light you some candles.’ So Candles.”

“There are definitely worse nicks. There’s a cargo hauler on one of the skip runs who goes by Assface.”

He laughed. “Don’t mind Candles. Light in the darkness, know so? Growing on me. How come Fox?”

“The pilot I apprenticed with was obsessed with languages. Made sure it was my hobby, too. The Earth dialect a lot of our language grew up from had only twenty-six letters in it, and there was a sentence that used all of them, which was, in translation: ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.’ You’ll have to trust me it’s got all the letters in there. Anyhow, my trainer figured I was quick enough to get out of the way of almost any trouble, so Fox it was.”

The lift stopped and opened out onto the tug bay. Her own ship—ugly as shit, powerful enough to push the biggest freighter and most warships off their own paths— sat in its cradle, feedlines connected from ceiling and floor charging its systems. “And that,” she said, waving at it with no small pride, “is my Lazy Dog.”

Parked beside it was the smaller loaner tug Beanmaker had brought in. “There’s yours,” she said. “Walk through your checks like I’m not even here.”

“If you be not here, I be doing my checks naked,” Candles said.

Khifi stopped in her tracks. “You’re joking.”

He met her eyes, his somber face incrementally shifting into a grin.

She closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose, trying not to laugh and failing. “Okay, you got me,” she said.

Candles walked over to his ship and she followed. He ignored her, moving over and around his ship with efficiency and thoroughness before he disconnected the spare’s feeder hoses and let them retract. Disappearing inside, he powered it up, then reemerged to walk around the ship’s perimeter, checking the exterior lights. It was only as he stood by one of the two engine pods that he turned to her. “Pitch be low,” he said.

He knows what his engines are supposed to sound like, she thought, approving. And he was right: the pitch was low. Candles stared at his ship for a long minute before he took two steps to his left, listened again, and then began unscrewing the safety grill over one of the half-dozen air intakes for his port engine. “Where I about finding tools?” he asked.

“What do you need?”

“A light, and someit long and skinny.”

“You got it,” Khifi said. She went to the back of the bay, swiped her ID, and pulled open drawers until she’d found a handlight and a long-handled hex driver. She brought them back over to Candles. “These do?”

“Perf, thanks,” he said. He took the handlight, slipped it over his palm, and shone it down into the intake. Nodding his head, he took the hex driver and with his other hand poked around inside the air intake until he managed to pull out a long, blackish gray lump.

“Sock?” Khifi asked.

“Sock,” he confirmed. He shone the light in again, then turned it off and stood with his eyes closed, listening. “Sounds right, now.”

“You want me to have a word with Stickles?”

“No,” he said, stuffing the sock into a pants pocket. “Best deal back myself.”

“All yours then,” she said. “Nothing dangerous, understood?”

“Stood. But shit-yourself scary is in play, right?”

Khifi chuckled. “As I said, as long as it’s not dangerous. Just make sure it’s something you can both walk away from after with no hard feelings. We don’t need—”

Her comm buzzed on her wrist, and she tapped it.

“Fox, you done having a nap up in the docks yet?” Stickles.

“Just finishing,” she said. “We’ll be out in your airspace soon.”

“Good. I’ve just sent Redrum to do a cargo transfer and I need the remainder of the tugs out now. The Rimbolan freighter paid its fees and wants a push back up to orbit to do the rest of its repairs.”

“They got their life support back online?”

“So they say. Otherwise in about seventy-two hours we’re going to be calling in a bodywagon. I’m dropping the specs to your tug comp. I’m giving you full lead and the roster of waiting ships. Use your judgment. Check back in if you have serious problems. Otherwise, Ops out.”

“Well,” Khifi said. “I guess he’s not a micromanager. Suit up, and let me know when you’re ready to fly.”

“Got it,” Candles said.

Khifi turned to her own ship. The Lazy Dog was a typical Tanduouan tug, which meant it looked like a giant cyborg squid-crab with a mean case of engine. She retracted her own feeder lines, did her checks, then climbed the short ladder up its side and slipped down into the cabin. Inside, bathed in the blue-green glow of the console, she felt safe, strong, armored. She had never felt that way before she’d become a pilot, still never felt it anywhere else except in Lema’s arms. She was lucky, she thought, that neither got jealous of the other.

She buckled herself into her seat and initiated the internal system checks, then slipped on the comm headset.

“—ox? Fox, you online yet?” It was Jonjon.

“Just now,” she said. “What’s happening up there?”

“Mr. Balcko walked in. He and Stickles are arguing. I don’t know.”

“Jonjon, the line—”

“I’m on Ryeneck’s secret line. Something’s up,” Jonjon said. His voice was carefully casual, low. “I really don’t like the tone— Uh-oh, gotta go.”

She found herself listening to dead air. Shaking her head to clear out a sudden anxiety, she punched in the comm code for the spare. “Candles? What’s your status?”

“Ready to go in thirty count,” he answered.

“Launch as soon as ready, then proceed to the Rimbolan freighter docked at five through seven clockwise. I’ll be less than a minute behind you.”

“Got it,” he said.

“Redrum and Kaiju, you hear that convo?”

“Yeah,” Redrum’s gruff voice came on the line.

“I don’t like it,” Kaiju added.

“Whatever’s going on groundside isn’t our problem once we’re out. Stickles can handle it,” Khifi said. The last of her system checks returned green just as she finished speaking. She pulled her helmet down, reflexively checked her safety harness one last time, then fired up the engines. The Lazy Dog lifted off the floor, turning gracefully in the tight space of the bay.

As soon as she got into the bay envelope, it sealed behind her, and the exterior doors split apart like a metal egg hatching out onto brilliant sunshine. She checked her airspace display one last time to make sure nothing was in her way, then, satisfied her exit trajectory was clear, slid up the power on her engines.

She smiled, despite her worries, as her ship leapt out into the sky.

“Lazy Dog out,” she announced over her comms as she turned her ship around Paxillo’s tower, the bright orange disc of Guratahan Sfazil filling her peripheral view. She keyed in Redrum, Kaiju, and Candles into a local comm group. “Status?”

“I’m halfway to Luida to pick up a cargo pod,” Redrum said. “Turnaround in twenty min.”

“Good. Check in when you’re on your way back. Kaiju, meet me and Candles at the Rimbolan freighter. Let’s free up some dock space.”

“Got it,” Kaiju said.

The Rimbolan was a massive, oblong ship, pointed and slightly curved at the ends in a shape Jonjon once referred to as a “ginormous fucking canoe.” It had come in without prearranged berth or sponsor, paying triple fees for an expedited dock. Offloading it should have been a two-shift job at most, with three bay arms attached to it, but it had sat there locked up and unresponsive for nearly a full shift before its captain broke silence to issue a call for help. Major systems failure had swamped it with radiation, personnel were sick or dying, and its cargo was contaminated.

In dock, the freighter was covered under a number of interplanetary distressed vehicle and medical mercy laws. A handful of critically ill and wounded crew had finally been offloaded, at which time it was discovered that the ship, while Rimbolan in manufacture, had been sold to (or scavenged from a junk pile by) a private company out of Temperance Enclave. Another group of crew disembarked and was busy trying to find a buyer for their hot cargo, but no one was taking. Some of them had since disappeared, and the reigning explanation was that they had run away.

What mattered was that the freighter had run out of delaying tactics. She didn’t believe they had anything fixed, but if they stayed in dock long enough for Paxillo to call salvage rights over unpaid fees, assets claimed would likely include the crew themselves. How they’d scraped together enough to get back off the ground she couldn’t begin to guess.

It damn well better not break in half when we lift it, she thought.

She could see Kaiju’s tug Nobunaga, its hull painted with green scales, closing in on the far end of the freighter. Candles’ tug hovered near the gaping maw of the Rimbolan’s wide-open cargo bay doors. “Jonjon, bay doors aren’t sealed,” she said.

A moment later, he got back on the line. “Ship says doors no longer functional, but assure us the cargo is fully secured inside.”

“Has Terrapin verified this?” Terrapin was the Dock Inspector.

“No. Because of the radiation he was unable to go aboard.”

“Do we know that there’s a radiation leak?” Khifi asked. “I mean, other than the word of the ship’s captain?”

“There were exposed crewmembers brought in and sent over to Velatos for treatment,” Jonjon said. “What are you thinking?”

She passed over the freighter’s bow. “I don’t like it. Do we have a waiver from them, in case of damages?”

“No. Why?”

“Because if I were them, and as far in the red as they are with a junk ship, unsellable cargo, and salvagers circling in, I’d have spent the last four shifts taking off every safety in the ship, and if I finished with that, I’d be taking screws and bolts out of everything else, so that when the freighter breaks apart during our lift, we’re liable for ship and cargo and they walk away clean. We’re not touching it. Tell them sign a waiver, pay the next docking fee, or yield to salvage.”

“On it. Hold tight.”

Kaiju started lazy circles around the Paxillo tower, and after a few minutes Candles followed. Khifi pulled up the incoming ship registry and winced at the long list of ships waiting for a berth. Some had arrived only hours after the Rimbolan. Glancing overhead, it was definitely more crowded than usual.

“Fox?” Jonjon came back on the line.

“Here. What’s our status?”

“We’ve got a waiver, but whoa were they unhappy about that. I think I learned some new words. Seems like you called that one right.”

“Got it,” she said. “Candles, Kaiju? I still don’t want this thing dropping parts all over Paxillo when we pick it up. If they’re smart, they remembered where we grabbed on when bringing them down and made the most trouble there. So I want you both on the underside instead of top. Candles, take the cargo bay end. Let me know when you’re in position. I’m taking topside.”

“Which end?” Kaiju asked.

“Neither. I’m going for dead center. The bridge.”

Candles’ chuckle came over the line. “Perf,” he said. “Safest place, ’cause if the ship’s rigged, the people be all there for the ride up.”

“Jonjon, let everyone overhead know that once we get this thing moving, we’re heading straight up to orbit, and if they’re in our way that’s their own damned problem.”

“Already on it,” Jonjon answered. She wanted to ask what was going on in ops but didn’t dare, not on the main line.

The space beneath the Rimbolan was tight, but she knew Kaiju well enough to know he could handle getting in there, even upside down. Candles . . . well, as long as he didn’t break the tug itself, it was a good test of his skills.

She brought the Lazy Dog out over the top of the freighter, close enough that she could make out the shapes of people behind the thick window at the forefront of the bridge. At least one of them appeared to be shouting and making a rude gesture at her. Given that she was just about to drop a giant metal spider down on their heads, she figured they were entitled.

“In position,” Kaiju said.

“There most,” Candles added. “Three count. Two, one, done.”

“Okay. Hold there for a moment,” Khifi said. She brought the Lazy Dog down to barely a meter above the freighter’s bridge. Then she swung her tug’s arms down and one by one, like she was smothering prey, latched them onto the sides all around. “Okay. I want to do this carefully. Any time either of you feel like we’re moving too fast, you speak up, okay? Candles, I’m going to send the commands to the docking systems to disengage, and then the freighter is all on us. I want you to start lifting your end as soon as you feel the clamps let go.”

“Got you,” he said.

“Kaiju, you and I get to do the heavy lifting. I want to take the freighter vertical and out. Candles is going to keep the cargo bay end up and pointed in the right direction, and you and I are going to provide the thrust we need to get it entirely out of Tanduou space. If this thing is going to fall apart, I want it well out of everyone’s way when it does.”

“Ready,” Kaiju said.

“Sending the release signal . . . now,” Khifi said, and finished the sequence. She felt the drag of the freighter’s mass shift almost immediately into a pressure upward as Candles’ end began to climb. She rotated her engines to keep in sync with the ship’s angle and began adding lift as Kaiju got his own engines down and joined in.

Her instruments said they were nearing vertical and already close to a thousand meters clear of Paxillo tower. “Let’s hope they were smart enough to strap themselves in,” she said. “Anyone see signs of structural integrity problems?”

“Some debris dropped past me when we first started pushing, but nothing big enough to cause any damage,” Kaiju said.

“Candles, how’s your view?”

“Clear and good,” he said.

“Then let’s push it,” Khifi said, and powered up to three-quarters. She could feel the vibration of the freighter through her boots, but it was steady, felt right.

“You guys could have waited for me before you started the party,” Redrum’s voice came over the comms. Out of the corner of her eye, Khifi could see the Jolly Roger splashed in paint across Redrum’s hull as he flew up alongside them.

“There’s a small freighter named the Olympian Razor from Mars that’s been waiting for almost two days,” Khifi said. “Check in with ground ops to make sure no debris hit anything down there, then if it still looks good, bring her into dock five. We should be back by the time you’re done.”

If the Enclavers had tried to engineer a disaster, either they were terribly bad at it, hadn’t had enough time to do an effective job, or the old freighter still had some fight left in it. Probably some combination of all three. It soared up out of Tanduou’s feeble gravity well with surprising grace. They were well outside orbit zones for either Guratahan Sfazil, Tanduou itself, and the big planet’s tiny second moon, Tammou. “Powering down engines to minimum on three . . . two . . . one. Down. Candles, disengage. Kaiju, pop an all-channel navigation hazard beacon on it before you let go. They can scrape it off themselves when they get out of our space.”

“ . . . Done,” Kaiju said. “Disengaging.”

“I’m untached,” Candles said.

Khifi retracted her tug’s spiderlegs one by one until she floated free of the freighter. She rarely got much past the swarm of ships surrounding the moon, and the view was beautiful. Guratahan Sfazil was an arid, golden desolation, pockmarked by the slowgrowing brown and green skunge of civilization. The half-circle glow of Tammou hung above, and it took her a few moments longer than it should have to notice the tiny glints between her and it. A small cluster of eight ships drifted there, seven small cargos and one sleek, military-style cruiser. A quick check showed them not in the queue for Paxillo, nor any of the other docks in the Velatos cluster.

Jonjon’s voice on the comms broke her away from her curiosity. “Fox? I’m on Ryeneck’s line again. There’s—”

“This is Paxillo ops.” The incoming official signal from Stickles cut off Jonjon’s connection. “Fox, is anyone currently engaged?”

“Redrum, status?” Khifi asked.

“Just settling the Marsies down now,” he said.

“Two minutes, ground,” Khifi replied down to the surface. Those two minutes went by in silence until she saw Redrum retract from the new ship safely tucked in dock. “We’re clear.”

“Cluster Manager Balcko has an announcement,” Stickles said.

Balcko came on the air. “Normally this is news the Dockmaster would pass on in person, but as you know, he is downplanet on business,” he said. “There was a tube accident a short while ago. One of the Paxillo staff—Airon Gofersen, also known as Goffs—has been killed. It appears to have been operator error. In respect for Gofersen, I am closing down Paxillo Docks for the remainder of the shift.”

Khifi couldn’t believe she’d heard right. “Goffs is dead?” she asked.

“Yes,” Balcko answered. “I’m sorry.”

“Should we . . . ” What should they do? She didn’t know. She wanted to stay flying, as if it wouldn’t be real until she set foot in dock again. “Should we finish parking the last few—?”

“Paxillo is shut down effective immediately,” Balcko said. “That is all.”

“You heard the boss,” Stickles said. “Come on in.”

She was last down, Candles just ahead of her. Redrum had arrived first and was sitting between Jonjon and Sparkle. Mr. Balcko had already departed.

Stickles stood at the railing at the control platform, his face an unreadable mask. “I’ll see you all back here for shift tomorrow,” he said. “In the meantime . . . well. Take time for yourselves and be safe.”

Jonjon stood up and put an arm around Redrum’s shoulders. “I worked with Goffs as my ops manager for four years before I switched shifts, and he was a good man,” he said. “I’m heading to the Hellwater for a drink, and I’m buying for anyone who cares to join me.”

“I’m in,” Sparkle said, putting the headpiece down on her console and standing up.

“Me, too,” Kaiju said.

“Fox? Candles?” Jonjon asked.

Candles started, as if surprised to have been invited. “Yeah. Didn’t know Goffs, but team is team.”

“One round and then I’m going home to my wife,” Khifi said. She felt sick.

“Stickles?” Jonjon asked.

“Maybe later,” Stickles said. “I have to make a call to the Gee, break the news to Quizzie and the Dockmaster. I’d rather they heard it from me.”

“Understood,” Jonjon said. “We’ll be there for a while.”

Khifi and the others stumbled into the elevators, leaving Stickles standing where he was, his head hung low, his knuckles pale where he gripped the platform rail.

The Hellwater was in a dead-end spoke off Paxillo, and had long since earned its reputation as Velatos Cluster’s roughest bar, surpassing even the Brood and the Tarpit. Tanduou had started off life as a pirate haven before finding marginally more legitimate business as a shipyard and waystation; here in the Hellwater, Khifi felt closest to those early pirate days. She wasn’t sure that was entirely due to the wall of holoportraits of everyone who’d been murdered in the bar, divided into those justifiably killed, those sorely missed, and the largest section in between of those people who fit both categories. A lone portrait stood by itself, labeled “a lesson to others”—a nameless, offworld joker who’d thought it funny to put the bartender’s portrait up among the dead and got caught in the act.

Why no one had ever shut down the Hellwater—and right now the Brood was in another sixty-day time out for bad behavior—was unclear, but Khifi figured the fact that it was the pilots’ bar was a big part of it.

Now, though, the Hellwater was subdued, almost quiet, and that struck her hard. Goffs had been a pilot before he became ops; it seemed unthinkable that he could be dead when just a few hours before he’d been right there in control with them. He should be here with us now, dammit, she thought. Everything they’d been through, all the crazy, dangerous, drunken things they’d done, the idea that he’d die in a stupid tube accident was just wrong. And if he could slip up, which of them couldn’t?

Jonjon had claimed a large table toward the back, and the bartender—rarely generous—brought a tray of Sfazili Whiskey bulbs and set it on the table. As he passed by Khifi’s chair, he gently touched her shoulder. “Sorry,” he said.

Sparkle raised a bulb. “To Goffs,” she said.

“To Goffs,” the others answered, clanking bulbs. Khifi took a long sip, watched as everyone but Candles did the same.

“You okay?” she leaned toward him and asked.

He made a wry face. “Alcohol hurts the Colony.”

“First met Goffs back during the Henrici Dock crash,” Redrum spoke up. “We’d both showed up to see if we could help, got drafted as fire crew trying to get to the survivors in the tower. Saved some people, couldn’t others, never talked about it after that day. But when he needed another pilot on his team, he knew I wasn’t happy in Archasta and called me. Man was calm as ice in a fight, or at the helm, and I can’t imagine if Henrici never gave him the shakes how the fucking tube blinked him.”

“We get tired, I think,” Jonjon said. “We forget to pay attention. Wrong place at the wrong moment and that’s the end.”

“Ever try to sneak up on Fox when she looks like she’s lost in thought?” Kaiju said. “Because she ain’t never not paying attention.”

“You still have the scar?” Khifi asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good,” she said, downing the remainder of her bulb, feeling it burn its way down. “Never put your guard down.”

“He tried that with me, too,” Redrum said. “I only kicked him.”

“See? Your lesson didn’t stick,” Khifi said. She pushed back her chair and stood. “Speaking of safe, stay at one bulb or stay out of the tubes, okay? Don’t make me come yell at your corpses, because I will and even dead, you will hear me.”

“You aren’t staying?” Sparkle said.

“Going to get home while I can,” Khifi said. She felt like she should say something else, unsure what wouldn’t sound sappy and drunken, when she glanced up at the door.

“Shit,” she said, instead. “Trouble.”

Burnout and two other pilots from Novodinia were walking in, and from their loose swagger the Hellwater wasn’t their first stop. He spotted Khifi’s group and pushed through the small crowd to their table. “Came by to pay our respects,” he said.

“That’s appreciated,” Sparkle said.

“I mean, you know,” Burnout continued, “kinda remarkable Goffs made it this long, given how shit—”

“You should leave it at just your respects,” Khifi interrupted.

Burnout blinked at her, then glanced around the unsmiling faces at the table. He broke into a big grin. “Aw, c’mon,” he said, “we all know his piloting skills is what grounded him in a chair.”

Before anyone could respond—Redrum was half out of his chair—one of the Novodinia pilots put a hand on Burnout’s arm. “We should just go,” he said.

“Naw, Stash. Pilots are all on the same team, right?” Burnout said. His gaze fell on Candles. “Except maybe this mutant freak here. I wondered where he slunk off to. Feeding the strays again, Fox?”

He reached a hand out, clearly intent on touching the Colony on Candles’s shoulder. As Candles leaned away, Khifi grabbed Burnout’s hand and twisted hard. Burnout let out a strangled cry and dropped to his knees.

Khifi leaned forward, still gripping his hand. “Next time you come to pay your respects in Paxillo, you might want to learn what that means first,” she said. “Or at least start listening to Stash, who’s a fucklot smarter than you.”

She let go and stepped back.

“Come on, Burn, let’s go,” Stash said, trying to help his friend up.

Burnout slapped his hand away as he got clumsily to his feet. “No way,” he said, “I’m not letting—”

“House bets on Fox, six to one,” the bartender called out. The entire Hellwater went silent, turning to watch. Burnout glanced around, not sure what was happening.

“Burnout, let me be clear,” Khifi said. “I’ve had a bad day and right now I would love an excuse to add your face to the wall. But you’re drunk and I’m not, and I wouldn’t want anyone doubting for a second that you’d lose just as fast in a fair fight.”

Stash pulled Burnout back. “She’s right,” he said, “and I’m halfway toward killing you myself for dragging me into this asshole move. We’re going. Now.”

If Burnout still wasn’t convinced, the collective groan of disappointment in the bar did it. He shook off Stash, made a rude gesture at Khifi, and stomped out.

“I’m true sorry about Goffs,” Stash said, and followed.

Khifi stood there until they were gone and the Hellwater stuttered back into life around them. “Well,” she said at last. “That was unpleasant.”

Candles stood. “Fox, you didn’t need to—”

“I did, Candles,” she said. “We’re supposed to be better than that, and dammit if I’m not going to act like we are.”

She walked out of the Hellwater and stood in the bright lights of the Paxillo corridor. Anger still burned—at Burnout for being a predictable asshole, at Goffs for being dead—and with the shot of whisky to fuel it, felt like it would not die low anytime soon. Not the right frame of mind for the tube, she thought. Walk it off. Get it out of your system. Go home when you’re ready. It’s not like Lema is expecting you for another seven hours.

She did have that errand to run to Velatos.

In addition to the interdock fastlanes, there was also an autowalk between Paxillo and Velatos. She stepped onto the wide, slow-moving platform, leaning against the rail as people rushed past her. Velatos was the central dock of the cluster that bore its name, Paxillo and the others arrayed around it in a circle. It was one of the largest docks on Tanduou, second only to Solaster and Leilaster, also centers of their own clusters. The floormover briefly skimmed along the surface toward it, an xglass arch crisscrossed by thick beams overhead. Before it gave way again to the monotony of carved rock, she could see that Velatos was buried in ship traffic, the usual flotsam of freighters, small cruisers, and scavenger ships. She watched a tug extricate one of the freighters with smooth precision before taking it back up into orbit, trying not to think about Goffs. Already another ship was being pulled down to take its place.

The autowalk was subsumed back into city and ended, depositing her at the edge of the Velatos Market. She moved through the crowd into the concourse. Xie’s store was hidden in the back corridors; not many locals had the cred to shop there. As Khifi walked in, self-conscious around the elegant glass that seemed to loom into her path, the bald, heavily bearded man looked up from his counter where he’d been reading on his handpad.

“Khif!” he said, genuinely pleased to see her.

“Hello, Xie,” she said. She was suddenly glad of the friendly voice, so thoroughly removed from the day’s events. “Lema wanted me to pick something up for her.”

He unlocked the drawers under his counter and rummaged through them. “How’s her latest project coming?”

“She doesn’t talk about the art until the art is done, not even to me. Besides, what can I say other than I love it or I don’t get it? I’m useless.”

He took a tiny, sealed box out of the drawer and set it on the counter. “Maybe you can convince her to use less wood in her pieces, or work smaller. Do you know how expensive it is to fab in that stuff?”

“She likes the feel of it. Says it reminds her of home. How much do we owe you?” Khifi tapped the box.

“Nothing, it’s on me.” He slid it across the counter to her. “Unnatural fondness for hard-to-obtain organic media aside, she’s made me a happy agent.”

She picked up the box, small enough to easily fit in her palm. “Uh . . . any instructions?”

“Yes. Let Lema open it, or she’ll be quite mad. And tell her I’m eagerly looking forward to her next piece?”

“Will do. Thanks, Xie,” Khifi said. She tucked the box into a jacket pocket, made sure it was zipped in tight, and left his shop. Conscious of it against her chest, she was less afraid of being alone with her thoughts on the long walk back to Paxillo.

The Market concourse was even more crowded now, and when she reached the large open floor she saw why. The Velatos Dock manager and a contingent of her upper staff were escorting a trio of tall, bluish-green, portly aliens across the space. The aliens looked halfway between humpty-dumpties and walruses, complete with meter-long whiskers, and seemed to be wearing gigantic purple leg-warmers on their elongated, flattened feet. Two legs, two eyes, she thought, thinking of Mole’s inevitable questions. How wide a range that covers.

She checked the time on her vambrace as she waited for the huddle of people to get out of her way, then glanced back up and did a double-take.

“Peezy!” Khifi called.

The girl was pale, wide-eyed, breathing in fast, shallow gasps as she slid along the wall, arms outstretched against it, her ragged coat unnaturally bulged out around her near-starving frame as she followed the aliens. She froze at Khifi’s call, glanced at the departing delegation, then back at Khifi. “You can’t be here!” she called back, her voice barely audible over the crowd noise. “Please, I can’t . . . ”

“Can’t what, Peezy? Are you okay?” Khifi asked. She held out her hand as she walked quickly toward her.

Peezy turned her face away and suddenly sprinted into the back of the moving delegation.

All Khifi’s own years spent living in the crawlspaces of Tanduou had honed instincts that hadn’t dimmed; she threw her hands up over her ears and turned away just as something clapped her on the back, hard, slamming her down onto the polished rock floor.

It took her a few moments to piece together what her body was telling her: pain from her hands and elbows where she’d hit the floor, a prickling along the back of her neck and head as if tiny darts of fire had lodged there, sound muted as if her ears were full of sludge. It was several moments longer before she recognized the screaming and alarms and the acrid smell of smoke for what they were. She tried to push herself up, but vertigo and a stabbing pain in her back sent her crashing back down again.

After a bit, she was able to roll onto her side.

The concourse was in chaos. Fire suppression bots flew in and out of the smoky haze as people rushed back and forth through it. Most were bystanders; emergency responders and security were just starting to flood in. A young woman in a med vest stopped and crouched over her. “How badly are you hurt, ma’am?” she asked.

“Not as bad as others,” Khifi said. “I can wait.”

The woman started to straighten up, then spotted Khifi’s badge. “Oh!” she said. “You’re a pilot! Let me get you out of here—”

“No, really, I’m not hurt bad,” Khifi said, not at all sure if that was true. “There was a delegation moving through. It’s hard to think. Are . . . ” She knew it was a dumb question, but couldn’t not ask. “Are people going to be okay?”

“No,” the medic said. “No, they’re not.”

She stood up, snapped her fingers. Another medic with an autotravois came over. “Get this one to the group C triage and checked out.”

Khifi tried to stand on her own, but couldn’t pull together enough strength to rise. The med shook her head. “It’s not special treatment,” the med said. “Think of it like this: We need you out of the way, too. This is us doing our jobs.”

“Okay,” Khifi said.

The other medic lowered the autotravois and helped shift her onto it. Already there was a growing line of injured people on other stretchers, and one by one the medic connected them up and began leading the grim train back out of the concourse.

They released her from the overcrowded med bay three hours later, a half-dozen pain patches and blisters of plastiskin dotting her back beneath her tattered and grubby red shirt. She had been told in no uncertain terms not to go too far; as a witness, investigators would want to speak with her as soon as the immediate crisis was over. If she wasn’t a pilot, she wasn’t sure they’d have let her go at all. Even then, going home wasn’t straightforward. Sections of Velatos were cut off by blast doors she’d only seen closed during drills. With the acrid smell of smoke pervading everything and the stricken faces of people as they scurried through the newly placed obstacle maze, the doors were more ominous than reassuring.

She was exhausted and more than a little unsteady with the amount of pain drugs soaking into her back. The box she’d picked up at Xie’s shop was battered around the edges but miraculously not crushed, and a gentle shaking of the box did not produce the woeful chorus of broken parts she’d feared. It was easier to worry about the box than think about Peezy, or the Velatos Dock manager and her alien guests; word had rippled through the medical bay that Dock Manager Le had been killed, along with her security chief and four of the six Yuaknari visitors. The prevailing theory was that the bombing was Humans First extremists targeting the Yuaknari, but no one really knew.

Bypassing the damaged and cordoned-off areas meant detouring out of Velatos to Oreasta Dock, and from there taking the autowalk back to Paxillo. It was hard to wrap her head around the idea that Goffs had died this very same day.

Reality still hadn’t fixed itself by the time she reached the Paxillo tube station, but the meds were starting to make it harder and harder to care. She bypassed the fast lane and went all the way down to the guided tubes, which were computer-controlled, dead-last for priority, and moved about as fast as rock crept across sand. Buckling herself into the sled, she leaned her head against the hard cushioned side and let her mind drift.

She had dim memories of the sled finally arriving, then being at the door to her tiny apartment. Letting herself in, she saw Lema hard at work at her desk, goggles on, back straight, hands moving slowly in the empty air over her tablet as she worked a 3D simulation only she could see. Khifi smiled; the world narrowing to just this place, just the two of them, and things were miraculously, mostly okay after all.

Khifi slipped off her boots as quietly as she could, tiptoed past Lema’s workspace, and tumbled, already half asleep, face-first into the bed.

Waking was a slow climb up, fighting the gravity of grief, exhaustion, and the lingering pull of the meds. Finally, Lema’s voice broke through and lifted her the rest of the way. “You awake?” she was asking.

“I am,” Khifi answered, mostly convinced it was true.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re a liar, an idiot, and I’m very angry with you,” Lema said.

Those also seemed likely true. “Oh,” she managed. She still hadn’t decided if she was going to open her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“I wasn’t expecting you back for nearly another hour, and I get up to go beep some food and find you collapsed on the bed covered in bloody bandages.”

“Sorry,” Khifi mumbled again.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were home?”

“Didn’t want to bother you.”

“Idiot. Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Liar,” Lema said. “Xie called to ask if you’d made it home safe. What the hell were you doing in Velatos?”

“Dock shut down. Went to get your thing.” Khifi cracked open one eye, but could only see Lema’s thigh where she sat beside her on the bed. “I may be lying on your box,” she added. It was hard to separate out the various discomforts.

“Wait,” Lema said. “Why was the dock shut down before the bomb? The docks never close.”

“Goffs died. Tube accident. Everything’s gone all wrong and none of it makes sense.”

She was aware of the shift in the bed as Lema got up, and must have dozed off because next thing she knew Lema was beside her again and touching her shoulder gently. “Can you sit up?” Lema asked. It took her a few moments but she did, and blinked blearily as her wife pressed a steaming mug into her hands. “Drink this.”

Khifi took a sip; it was one of Lema’s expensive, imported teas, a blend handpicked by monks on Fadsji. She’d always been more of a coffee person, but it was warm and the rich fragrance was comforting. She suspected that was because she associated it with Lema. “Thanks,” she said.

Lema reached past her, picked up the half-crushed box, and tucked it out of the way on top of the nightshelf. “So. Tell me.”

Khifi had been nine when she hopped a cargo freighter out of her home colony. By ten, she knew every crawler in Velatos and most from neighboring Myonota and Freyella clusters. She knew the location of every fixed electronic eye and which corners they were blind to, and she could pick out the hum of a floater above all but the loudest crowds. Tanduou thrived by treading the gray area between security and privacy, and crawlers took advantage of the lack of an omnipresent surveillance state in the same way all the back-dock dealers and covert arms merchants did. Systems had been updated and changed over the years, but she’d never lost the instinct to notice and remember them. It was not a challenge to slip out of sight.

Maintenance corridors ran behind the public spaces. The service hatch was right where she remembered it being, the seemingly random marks beside it crawler code for the current nesters. None of them were familiar. Although stories of generations of crawlers were shared and reshared, an oral history perpetuated by the need to get through one day after another and the long slow nights in between, everyone who had been part of her nest was long gone. The crawl only tolerated adults in memory.

She climbed through the hatch and crouched on the far side as the door shut behind her. Crossing into the crawl after all this time was a punch in the gut. Everything felt smaller, dirtier, more unremarkable than it used to.

She turned on the handlight she’d brought. The tiny tunnel leapt into stark relief.

Walking bent over under the low ceiling, she followed a pipe, looking for the remembered crack in the wall hidden behind it. She barely fit through. On the far side was another tunnel, and she followed that until it turned, sloping downward. More pipes appeared from out of the ceiling and walls, slowly filling up her available headspace until she was afraid she might have to get down on her hands and knees. Did she really call this home for nearly six years?

There was another dip in the floor, this one sharp enough that she almost fell, catching herself with hands on the rough rock wall. Once she got down to where the floor was level again, she could walk almost upright. Memories of running, hunched over, through the tunnel and leaping down off that dip into what felt like open space seemed almost fantastical now. I was always trying to fly.

From here it was easy. Three turns, and then a long wide stretch where thick sewage pipes ran overhead. Every six hours the pipe system was flushed out with steam, so this was one of the rare places in the crawl that was comfortably warm. It also caused a sticky dust layer to form over everything; she’d spent hours trying to get it out of her hair and clothes until she gave it up as futile.

She’d hoped Mole would be here, or Birdie, but the corridor was empty save for the thick mat of insulation scraps and packing foam that made up the crawler nest. In one corner she spotted an old blanket she’d given Birdie years ago, now coated with the same dust as everything else here.

As she stood there trying to decide where to go next, she saw a rough-cut foam block shift slightly. “It’s Fox,” she called out softly. “I’m by myself. I came looking for Mole.”

After a long moment, the block shifted again and a face peered out from beneath it. The boy’s face was swollen, one eye shot red and surrounded by a black-purple bruise. He’d been crying.

“Gums?” she asked. “Can I come closer?”

He nodded, trembling. She moved slowly, taking a pack of vitawafers out of her pocket. Crouching, she held the pack out, and he sat up and took it. He was gaunt, shirtless, and his upper body was covered with ugly bruises and a sour-looking gash crusted with blood. Reaching over her shoulder, Khifi peeled off one of the med patches on her back, shook it to make sure it still had some life in it, then carefully spread it over the cut. “This will help a little,” she said. At least it should clear up the infection, if not much else. “What happened? You were with Peezy.”

The boy started, dropping the wafers, and began shaking in earnest. “Was here,” he said.

“You and Peezy were here? When you got hurt?”

“No,” he said. “Man who catched us, he was here.”

“He caught you here?”

“No. He was here now. Just before you.”

Khifi stood, pulling a blade from where she kept it tucked at the small of her back, half-expecting to find someone looming up behind her. The corridor remained empty and she heard nothing but the faint susurration of the pipes. “What did he look—” she started to ask, but Gums was back under the foam, out of sight. The wafers, moments ago scattered across the floor, were gone with him.

This time, when she turned around again, she was not alone.

“Fox,” Mole said. He was standing near the turn in the corridor, a half step from being able to disappear. He looked unhappy to see her in his home territory. She couldn’t blame him; adults in the crawl were dangerous.

“I came to ask you about Peezy,” Khifi said.

“You seen her?”

“I saw her,” she answered carefully. “She ever talk about aliens? You know, in a scared or angry way?”

“Peezy loves the bugs. Nearly gotten caught a hunnerd times out in the open, making pictures. Always wants to go see ’em, then talks about it no-stop for days.” Mole moved into the room, fear forgotten, and rummaged through a corner of the nest. He came up with a handful of vellum sheets and a handpad.

Mole handed her the sheets. On them were passably good drawings of an E’zon, a Tuarig, and two aliens she did not recognize. The girl had had some real talent. Khifi’s eyes teared up, and she wiped them with the back of her hand.

“Peezy not coming back,” Mole said. It wasn’t quite a question.

“No, she’s not.”

Mole inhaled deeply, held it, then let it out again. “Okay,” he said.

“Can I keep these?” Khifi asked.

“Yeah.” He dropped his hands to his side, the handpad dangling from his fingers.

“What’s that?” Khifi asked.

“Dunno,” Mole said. “Never seen it before right now. None a’ ours.”

“May I see?”

He held it out. The surface was still shiny, free of crawl dust. Khifi turned it on. The Humans First logo flashed up onto the screen, and she turned it off with a startled jerk. “Are you sure this wasn’t here before?” she asked.

“Sure sure,” Mole said. “Not like we got so much nice stuffs we can keep any secret from t’other.”

That much she certainly remembered from her days in the crawl.

“Gums said there was someone here, the man who’d caught him and Peezy,” Khifi said. “You need to go through this whole place and make sure there’s nothing else, and then I think you all need to find a different place to nest for a bit. The harder to get to, the better. Where’s Tuck?”

“Waiting ’round the corner,” Mole said. “What’s going on, Fox?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s over. Be careful.”

“You too, Fox,” he said.

“Don’t forget Gums.”

Mole almost smiled. “Forget nobody,” he said, “’til they forget us.”

She tossed the handpad in the first flash recycler she found. Two more off-shifts before she was flying again, and if she couldn’t be home, she wanted nothing so much as to be a half-hundred kilometers above it all.

When she rejoined the upper world and the Paxillo concourse, the crowds were noticeably thinned and most were gathered near the center where a column of large screens normally ran the endless litany of trading news, ship arrivals and departures, and gossip. Now, Mr. Balcko’s face was on every screen, a dozen mouths moving simultaneously. “ . . . has been successfully removed, with no remaining danger to the citizens of Oreasta,” he was saying. “I will be following up with casualty information from Notomyo as soon as the emergency teams have finished their work. If anyone has information, or saw anything suspicious prior to either incident, please contact your nearest security officer. Be assured, we will catch the perpetrators of these acts. Thank you.”

Balcko’s face disappeared, replaced by the familiar scroll of the hourly trade bulletin.

One of the Paxillo cargo haulers stood not far away. Khifi touched his broad shoulder. “Excuse me,” she said. “Something happened since Velatos?”

“Bomb in Notomyo about half an hour ago,” he said. “They just found another in Oreasta before it went off. Whole cluster is in security lockdown. I tell you, if I find those assvalves what put the bombs? Then someone really get hurt. No one messes with Tanduou, not our people, not our bugs, not our nothing.” He looked her up and down. “You’re a pilot, right? You get me.”

“I get you,” she said.

He grunted, nodding, and went back to watching the boards.

Khifi’s vambrace buzzed. She tapped it, and Inchbug’s voice echoed out of her earpiece. “Fox?” she asked. “Mr. Balcko asked to check if you were going to the security debriefing about the Velatos bomb.”

“Yeah. I’m on my way now,” she said.

“Balcko said you were there?”

“Close enough for a few new scars,” she said. “How are things up there?”

“Balcko called in terrorism experts from Haudernelle. Uberman docked them about an hour ago, but other than that nothing is moving up here at all.”

“What about the Rimbolan freighter?”

“The Enclavers loaded up everything they could fit in a shuttle and abandoned it. Unofficially, of course, so we can’t declare salvage rights for three more days. I’m heading over to Luida to fill in for a sick comm op, so see you when I see you. Be careful, okay?”

“I try,” she said.

“Try harder.” Inchbug signed off.

Khifi made her way over to a long, winding, reinforced corridor that ended in thick xglass doors with PAXILLO SECURITY stenciled on them in large block letters. The officer at the doors scanned in her id. “Room three, at the back.”

“Thanks,” she said, and went in.

Room three was a small, nondescript conference room. Paxillo’s head of security, Chief Bell, sat there with another security officer with a Velatos patch and chief’s stripes that looked—and likely were—newly sewn on. Two more men in suits sat with them.

“Ah, Fox,” Chief Bell said, standing up and extending his hand. “I trust you’re recovering?”

“Nothing that’ll slow me down,” she said, taking the one free chair.

“This is Acting Chief Tres of Velatos Dock. Joining us is Mr. Allen and Mr. Arve, who just arrived from Haudernelle. They’re private consultants here at the behest of Mr. Balcko,” Bell explained. “If you could go through what brought you to Velatos Dock, anything you might have seen, impressions you have, we’d appreciate it.”

“I’ll do my best; my memories are kind of fuzzy and unreliable,” she said. “I’d gone to Velatos on a shopping errand, and was on the way back. I had just seen the aliens in the concourse when the bomb went off.”

Mr. Arve leaned forward and opened a display window on the tabletop. “Ms. Iwalewa—”

“Call me Fox,” she said reflexively.

“There is limited security footage of the incident,” Arve said. “We’ve identified the bomber as an illegal underground squatter. We believe she and other ‘crawlers’ have been actively recruited by a hate group called Humans First.”

“I don’t think that’s likely,” Khifi said.

“No? We have the detonation on video.” Arve tapped open a picture. Peezy was standing near a column, expression unreadable, the Yuaknari delegation in the foreground passing by. He tapped the picture again, forwarding it. “And here you seem to be speaking to her.”

“She looked scared,” Khifi said.

“You knew her?”

“A little. I know for sure she didn’t hate aliens.”

Arve’s partner, Allen, folded his arms over his chest. “Hate groups are very good at radicalizing the underprivileged, many of whom are desperate for a purpose or an opportunity to hurt those more fortunate than themselves. Each and every one of them is a ticking time-bomb. You’re naïve if you think otherwise.”

“Mr. Allen, you’ve been on Tanduou for what, an hour now?” Khifi said. “Tanduou’s crawlers are here because whatever life they walked away from was even worse. They want to be left alone. They don’t have an agenda beyond that. They’re kids.”

“So you did talk to her?”

“I asked if she was okay,” Khifi said. “She ran off, and after that I only remember the smoke and the alarms.”

“So you knew she was the bomber and didn’t disclose this sooner?”

Khifi sat up straighter, met Allen’s eyes without flinching. “I don’t know anything for sure, but if Peezy did have a bomb, it’s because someone forced it on her. Word was someone had grabbed her a few days earlier, and another crawler barely got away with his life. That’s who you need to be looking for.”

“How do you know this?” Arve asked.

“Fox has lived in Paxillo most of her life,” Bell interjected. “She knows many of the local crawlers and has a degree of their trust, which has been an asset to us in a few situations over the years.”

Arve pulled up another picture. “This was our Notomyo bomber,” he said. It was a crawler boy, maybe barely ten. “Humans First propaganda was found on him. He had a handpad we were able to extract the memory from, and it had a propagandist video blaming aliens for the poor conditions so many humans live under. It was compelling. Mr. Balcko has initiated a sweep of all the underground areas to look for additional evidence.”

Khifi pounded her fist on the table. “If there’s evidence, it’s planted,” she said. “There have been strangers down in the crawl, going through their things, leaving stuff, just like this handpad you talk about.”

Allen’s eyebrows shot up. “Do you have proof of this?”

She thought about the handpad she’d stuffed in the flash-recycler. “No,” she said at last. “But the crawlers—”

“Are not exactly reliable sources,” Allen said. “You seem to have a lot of information that you are conveniently only sharing now. If these things happened, why weren’t authorities informed?”

“Because no one else cares about the crawlers,” she said.

“Well.” Allen stood up, and after a moment, Arve did too. “We certainly do now, don’t we? I believe that will be all.”

“For now,” Arve added. He was already tapping at his wristcomm as the two consultants left the room.

“Sorry, Fox,” Chief Bell said. “We’ll get to the truth of this. It just might get ugly for a while, while we do.”

She stood. “It’s ugly enough already,” she said. “But thank you for the optimism.”

Frustration propelled her back up the corridor and into the concourse, and a halfminute later she found herself moving through the doors into the Hellwater, half hoping Burnout would be there and say something stupid to her face.

You’re losing it, Khif, she thought. She ran one hand over her short, wiry hair and stepped up to the bar. “A Ceres Triple,” she said, and the bartender set one in front of her before she’d even blinked. She downed it in one shot, then stared morosely at the empty bulb until a hand gently touched her shoulder.

She spun, half-reaching for her knife, when she recognized Stickles.

“Saw you come in. You okay?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “No, I’m not.”

“You want to talk? I know I’m not Quizzie, but you know I’ve got your back.”

Khifi pushed the empty bulb away. “When I went with Candles to do his flightcheck, he caught on immediately that his engines sounded wrong. Someone had stuffed a sock in one of the air intakes. Most people don’t listen enough to pick something like that up, but he did. A lot of people would’ve told him he was imagining it.”

Stickles nodded. “Told you he was good.”

“Yeah, but here’s my point,” Khifi said. “All that’s going on? With the bombs, and saying the crawlers are behind it? Even with Goff’s accident. It sounds wrong. It sounds like someone has stuffed a sock in Tanduou’s engine, pitch is a half-note off from the truth, and I’m not sure anyone is hearing it but me.”

Stickles stared down at his hands on the bar. “I trust your instincts, Fox, but damn. What have you got?”

She told him about Peezy and Gums, the Humans First handpad, the stranger in the crawl. “She drew pictures of the aliens, Stickles,” she said, pulling the vellum sheets out of her jacket and spreading them out on the bar. “Do these look like the art of hate?”

“No,” he said. “But . . . if not the crawlers, why pin it on them? What does anyone gain?”

“I don’t know. It makes no fucking sense.”

“You told the consultants?”

“Some of it,” she said. “I don’t think they were listening. I’d be happier if we were relying on our own people rather than outsiders to sort out what’s going on.”

He considered. “What do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know,” Khifi said. “Keep our eyes and ears open, listen for everything that doesn’t sound right, make sure all the facts are out there before anything is done that can’t be undone. What else can we do?”

“I guess just that,” Stickles said. “If you find out anything more, you’ll tell me?”

“Yeah.”

He pushed back from the bar. “I’m covering Ops for your shift again. So maybe we should talk it over then, after we’ve had a chance to think about it?”

“Yeah,” she said again.

“Better than just sitting here drinking all day,” Stickles said, “although I won’t pretend I don’t see the appeal. Go home, Fox. You look like a bomb hit you.”

“Har har,” she said, but he was right. Stickles left. She swiped her credit chit over the bar, added a healthy tip, and headed home.

“Khif, I love you, but if you don’t stop fidgeting I’m going to smother you with your own pillow,” Lema murmured.

Khifi stomped toward Paxillo’s main concourse. She had a crick in her neck from spending most of the night in a chair, and her stomach had wound itself into so many knots she wasn’t sure she’d ever feel hungry again.

Her thoughts lost in a maze of whys and what-ifs, she had taken several more steps before her brain registered that someone had whispered her name. She stopped, turned, saw the small alcove in the corridor full of piping, thought she saw uneasy shifting in the shadows.

Walking back, she casually leaned one shoulder against the wall beside the opening, taking out her handpad as if checking an incoming message. “Mole?” she asked softly. He was there, his face and eyes red and puffy as if he’d been crying. She heard a sob, but it didn’t come from him. She spotted a tiny, dirty face behind the bigger boy.

“This’s Tuck, new kid I told you bout,” Mole said.

“You two aren’t safe out here, even on good days,” Khifi said. “You come across the wrong security guard, and you’re going to be joining the bone pile out an airlock. What the hell were you thinking?”

“Nowhere safe in the crawl,” Mole said. “Lots of people, no uniforms, but move like authority and got guns. Birdie ain’t come back yet and Gums ran away last night and there was alarms and we was scared. Ran into Terkle an’ he said same thing happened over in Luida Dock. Some’a us gonna try to get over to Odinella cluster, but that a hard journ. We got nowhere else to go and Birdie’s not here being in charge and Tuck is always crying and hungry and there’s doors down and smoke in the crawl.” Tears began making fresh tracks down his dirty cheeks. “Can run, but only by myself.”

“Mole, look at me,” she said, and he raised his face to hers. “Try to find a safe place, somewhere you wouldn’t normally go. Doesn’t need to be comfortable, just hard to find. If you can’t find anything—and this is last resort, you understand?—there’s a shop in Velatos Dock owned by a guy named Xie-Yan Che. He’s a friend of mine. If you go, you can’t steal from him, not even a little, not even once. You understand that? Tell him Khifi sent you. That’s my real name,” she said.

Mole shivered. “Telling names is bad luck, Fox. If you see Birdie or Gums—”

“Just go,” Khifi said. “Be smart. And if you can get yourselves out of the cluster? Take it.”

Tuck wrapped his skinny arms tightly around her legs, just for a moment, then Mole grabbed his hand and pulled him back into the dark. She watched after the door closed for a long while and wondered if she’d ever see either again.

She drifted into the Paxillo concourse, eyes on the distant elevators up to Dock control. The footsteps were just part of the background noise, one set slightly offbeat among dozens, until she thought she heard Mole, impossibly, calling her name over the noise.

Oh, you fool kid! she thought, whirling around to confront him for following her out into the open.

She got her arm up just in time to block the blade, but it hit her vambrace with enough force to make her stumble back. Her attacker was dressed in grubby clothes, a young man with wild eyes, dilated pupils, a crawler by all the looks of him except he was too old. “Humans First, Humans forever!” he shouted, raising the knife again.

Around them the crowd had fallen back. “Put the knife down!” she yelled, backing away. “I am not your enemy!”

“You bring them here. Your alien masters!” He rushed her but she was ready, dodging away and pulling out her own knife.

“You don’t want to do this,” she said. Where the hell was security?

He swung wide and she dodged again, but this time he brought his other hand around to grab her arm, then kicked at her legs. It was a glancing blow, but enough to send her sprawling onto her butt on the floor. He was grinning now.

Khifi threw her own blade. It caught him in the shoulder and he dropped his knife. She scrambled to her feet, cursing the lingering stiffness from her Velatos injuries, and had another knife drawn from her boot by the time he had pulled hers out and was brandishing it back at her. He tried the wide swing again, probably hoping to catch her the same way he had before, but she anticipated the move and feinted to the left, then moved under his swing and kicked him sideways, hard in the chest.

Her attacker stumbled back, landing on one knee. People behind him scrambled out of his way. Getting up, he grunted, stabbed forward at Khifi with her own knife, and when she stepped back out of his reach he turned abruptly and fled through a scattering, panicked crowd.

She stood, breathing hard. Someone had just tried to kill her. The realization of how close he had come—if she hadn’t turned, or had turned a half-second later—hit her like a rock, and she turned and ran for the elevator doors.

There was no guard at the gate. She hopped it, scanned herself in, and threw herself into the first elevator that opened, feeling like she couldn’t breathe. Tapping madly at her damaged vambrace, she tried to call Lema, but it made a sickly buzz before going dead.

The elevator opened onto the control deck, and she was nearly knocked over by the security guard who should have been manning the gates below. “Fox! So sorry, I need to go, there’s something going on down—” He paused, getting a better look at her. “— You okay?”

“Someone tried to kill me,” she said. She unwrapped her dead vambrace from her arm, only then realizing her jacket was soaked dark with blood.

Stickles was up on the command platform with Mr. Balcko and a pair of guards. “Fox?” he asked. His eyes were wide.

Jonjon was, as always, beside the coffee dispenser. He walked forward and pressed his mug into her shaking hands. She was grateful for the warmth. “Some guy with a knife. He ran away.”

Balcko turned to the guard. “Go find out what happened. Have a word with Mr. Arve and Mr. Allen, and send security up. This is unacceptable.”

“Yes, sir,” the guard said, and vanished into the elevator.

Candles put a gentle hand on her elbow and propelled her toward one of the unused console seats near Sparkle, who was busy on the ground comms.

“We’re in full security quarantine now,” Stickles said. “Mr. Balcko will be overseeing things from here until his team gives the all-clear.”

“When is the Dockmaster returning?” Khifi asked.

“Not until the active situation is over,” Balcko said. “Mr. Lohra has elected to remain on Guratahan Sfazil rather than risk becoming another target. In the meantime, as the most senior Cluster Manager, I am in charge.” He said that last as if he expected to be challenged on it.

She had no intention of doing so; with the Dockmaster gone, someone needed to run things, and Balcko was right that he was most senior. “Of course,” she said. “Just let me know what you need me to do.”

“Although we’re not open to normal business, I have a cargo crate of medical supplies that needs to get to Novodinia from Astrolyr in the Myonota Cluster,” Stickles said.

“Okay. I can take it,” she said.

Kaiju stood. “No,” he said. “She’s hurt. I’ll go.”

Stickles glanced at Khifi, then at Kaiju. “Of course,” he said. “We’re still waiting on that medic. It’s all yours.”

Kaiju nodded and left.

Khifi looked down at her arm. Blood was crusting dark along the slit in her sleeve where the edge of the vambrace had been. Now that adrenaline was wearing off she felt cold all over.

When Sparkle paused on the comms, Khifi asked her, “Where’s Knits?”

“Weren’t expecting any work to do with the docks shut down,” said Sparkle. “I’m only here because we’re still shifting some stuff in cargo. Inchbug is supposed to be coming in. It’s bad down on the floors, and is only gonna get worse when word gets out that someone tried to kill a pilot. Hang on, cargo biz.” She went back to her headset.

Jonjon was explaining the coffee dispenser to Candles and Balcko was busy with Stickles, so she rolled her chair over to Inchbug’s empty station. Above, the endless shuffle of ships was at a standstill. Down where the Rimbolan freighter had been, a small, sleek military-style cruiser had taken its place at one of the berths.

“What’s that ship doing here?” she exclaimed.

Sparkle put one hand over her mic. “That’s the security consultants that Mr. Balcko brought in from Haudernelle. Allen and Arve and crew? Didn’t you meet them?”

“That ship was in outer orbit when we took the freighter up,” Khifi said.

“Can’t have been. First bomb hadn’t happened yet.”

“It was here,” Khifi said. “I saw it with my own eyes, that ship and a handful of cargos. I never forget a ship.”

“I don’t—” Sparkle started to say, when the elevators opened and a pair of security personnel from Velatos came in.

Mr. Balcko stood up. “You two will please escort Ms. Iwalewa down to secure holding and process her for arrest, on charges of aiding and abetting terrorists,” he said. At everyone’s look of confusion, Balcko stabbed a finger at Khifi. “Right, idiotic superstitious nicknames. Fox,” he said. “Her. Arrest her.”

“What!?” Khifi said, already rising to her feet.

“You confessed to Mr. Easson— Stickles—that you deliberately destroyed evidence from the crawlers to hide it from our investigators,” Balcko said.

Khifi stared at Stickles. “That’s a misunderstanding,” she said. “Stickles, tell them—”

Stickles didn’t meet her eyes. “She was drunk, over at the Hellwater,” he said. “Lots of people will confirm we talked. She told me of her involvement in the crawler attacks.”

“That’s a lie!” Khifi shouted. The security guards glanced at Balcko, then began moving toward her. Both had hands on their pistols.

“Stickles?” Khifi said. “Don’t do this to me.”

“It’s on your own head, Fox,” he said, looking down at his hands.

“There’s something going on here,” she said, desperate. “Those Haudernelle security consultants are a sham. That ship was in orbit when we took the Rimbolan freighter up, before the very first bomb. And—”

“If she says one more word, shoot her,” Balcko snarled.

Sparkle, Candles, and Jonjon were all staring. “I’m being framed,” she said, raising her hands, feeling tears welling up in her eyes. “You all know me.”

As one of the guards reached for her arm, the elevator behind them chimed and the doors opened. Inchbug stepped in carrying a tray of takeout.

“Hey, everyone, I brought—” she started to say, then stopped mid-sentence. “— What the hell is going on?”

Both guards turned toward her.

“I know you enough,” Candles said, and in one blinding-fast move struck out with a hand, knocking the nearest guard down.

Shit, Khifi thought. She hauled the other guard off-balance toward her and brought his head down in hard contact with her knee. As he dropped, she ran past him, sprinting for the still-open elevator doors.

“Stop her!” Balcko yelled. Stickles was staring, his face pale. The guards up on the command platform scrambled for their weapons, then dodged as a full pot of coffee came sailing over the railing, leaving a spinning trail of near-boiling liquid along its arc.

“It just slipped out of my hands, I swear!” Jonjon yelled, his eyes wide with what seemed genuine surprise.

Sparkle had both her hands raised. “I have nothing to do with any of this!”

Khifi threw herself into the elevator past a still-stunned Inchbug just as the doors closed. With everything on lockdown, and not even the crawl safe, there was nowhere to run except up. She stabbed the button for the docks and hoped Balcko’s men weren’t going to be fast enough to stop her.

She reached the bays. Slamming and locking the door behind her, she shorted the lock with her knife before racing over to the Lazy Dog and powering it up. She wanted to jump in and fly away as fast as she could, but she remembered Goffs, dead of an apparent accident just as everything else started going wrong. She wanted to scream as she moved around her ship, checking everything, listening, hoping, until her breath caught.

A single coupling dangled loose beneath the Lazy Dog’s belly, just barely visible in the shadows. That’s a cooling line, she thought, reconnecting it, then checked the others. All six were undone, their ends tucked up out of sight.

Balcko wouldn’t know to do that; he wasn’t a pilot, had come up through the ranks via security. Stickles, though . . . Stickles who had just tried to send her out on a cargo run.

I trusted him, Khifi thought. I thought he was a friend.

He also knew enough to know that the coolant couplings wouldn’t change the engine pitch, not until the ship started to overheat. She furiously wiped tears from her face as she reconnected the last of them. Everything else checked out. If she’d missed those, she’d have plastered herself and her ship all over Paxillo and taken the truth, whatever it was, with her.

At the helm of the Lazy Dog, she reached under her console and yanked free the tug’s beacon. Then she hit her engines and was out and moving up into Tanduou’s crowded skies.

Now what? she thought. It was only a matter of time before Balcko mustered someone to come after her. Or no time at all: She could see another tug, coming fast toward her from the other side of Velatos Tower. As if on cue, Kaiju’s voice crackled to life on her comms.

“Fox?” he said.

“Yes, Kaiju?” she asked. What else was there to say?

“I’m on Ryeneck’s secret love line,” he said. “I’m getting some weird instructions from Paxillo control that I do not like. Do you have any insight on this?”

“Does it involve shooting me out of the sky as a traitor?”

“As it happens, yes,” Kaiju said.

“This whole thing: Goffs, the bombs, hate groups recruiting crawlers—it’s rotten. I started to ask questions and someone tried to knife me, and then my ship was sabotaged. Stickles and Balcko are saying I’m a terrorist, and I have no proof to convince you I’m not.”

“Very well, Air Captain, you don’t leave me much choice,” he said. “I’m going to hail you on the official comms and tell you to land or be brought down, and then I’m going to chase you straight up right on your ass like bugs fucking, in that maneuver that messes up tower radar like nothing else. You better have a plan by the time I need to say I can’t catch you after all.”

She already was nose up and heading for space, intent on reaching Guratahan Sfazil and the Dockmaster. Above her the sea of waiting ships was parting, getting out of her way.

Inchbug’s voice cut in on the main comms, which the Lazy Dog should have been blocked from. “Transit Sat Four moving into position,” she said. “Should have weapons tracking in . . . Oh! It’s just rebooted. Signal loss for twelve . . . eleven . . . ”

Khifi punched the Lazy Dog’s engines up to full, Kaiju right on her tail. She couldn’t get to the Gee in the time left. Between here and the planet, heading straight out, there was only one thing. “You’re gonna want to suddenly break off in three,” she said to Kaiju.

The abandoned Rimbolan freighter lay dead ahead, its wide cargo doors still gaping open. Pulling all the Lazy Dog’s arms into tight formation around the tug’s body, she aimed for the opening.

“Online in four . . . three,” Inchbug said. Kaiju’s tug, the Nobunaga, veered, just enough to skirt past the outer hull of the freighter as the Lazy Dog was swallowed whole.

She hit the braking jets hard, throwing herself forward against her harness, and hoped the former owners had done a thorough job of taking as much with them as they could. The Lazy Dog had more armor than some light military cruisers, but hit the wrong thing in the wrong way and anything could rip you open like you were paper.

The far end of the cargo bay loomed ahead, closing fast. A large pile of crates floated around the disabled cargo drones. Khifi braced herself as the Lazy Dog bowled into the abandoned cargo and came to rest in a pile of them.

She jumped in her seat as something red oozed all over the front window of the Lazy Dog. It was a long, terrible moment before she realized it was vegetable pulp seeping out through tears in the flexible crate material currently plastered across her front hull. Inflatable crates and rotten tomatoes. She started laughing, couldn’t help herself, nor as it quickly turned to all-consuming sobs. Goffs was dead. Murdered? Stickles had betrayed her to her face. The idea that she might never see her wife again was a tiny seed of a black hole in the center of her heart, threatening to pull in and crush everything she cared about.

No, she thought, pulling herself together. I’m not done fighting yet.

Her systems were still mostly green. She’d scraped off a few external antennae, but nothing worse. As quickly as she could, she shut down her engines and used her fine maneuvering thrusters to turn around to face out of the long tunnel from her pile of crates, a spider at the back of its cave ready to jump.

“Lazy Dog?” Her comms crackled to life again. “This is TexLex over in Luida Dock, calling on the Ryeneck Line.”

She stared at it. Who could she trust? Maybe this was a stalling tactic to keep her pinned down. You are anyway, she told herself. “Fox here,” she said, keeping her voice as even as she could.

“All of Velatos is shut down and Paxillo control is currently offline,” TexLex said. “I assume either because of mutiny, or because the mutiny is over. There’s no longer a safe channel between you and your team.”

“No offense, TexLex, but I don’t know you,” Fox said. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“Don’t got an answer for that, Fox,” TexLex said. “Sure would like to know what kind of a shitwell you got my Inchbug spinning down into, though.”

Ah. Khifi knew Inchbug had a partner in Luida Dock. “The crawlers didn’t set the bombs, and they’re being framed,” she said. “If I can get back down, there’s someone I might be able to get answers out of.”

“And how are you gonna do that?” TexLex said.

“I don’t know. I—”

“Right fuck you don’t, because you can’t. You’re stuck in your little hidey-hole. What is that thing Inchbug is always quoting you for? Being your best as a team or no good at all? Well, being a captain means not just leading, but trusting your team, and like it or not you’ve drafted a lot of us into your mess.”

“I trusted Stickles.”

“Yeah, well, Stickles is nice enough, but you can only trust him to look out for himself. Asking more from him is like trying to get beer back outta piss. You say it’s not the crawlers? Give us a chance to prove it. But do it fast, ’cause half the cluster is rioting and Balcko and his offworld security team are rounding up every grubby kid they can lay hands on. As soon as Balcko manages to negotiate a price with one of the ships in orbit—halfa which saw right where you went and are trying to figure out what that info is worth in both creds and trouble—you’re done. Your time is running out.”

“You know a mover named Sniv?”

“By sight and smell,” TexLex said.

“He tried to hire me as a tour guide to the crawl right before this mess started. That can’t be coincidence.”

“We’ll find him. Anything else?”

“Yeah. My wife, Lema,” Khifi said. “I don’t think Paxillo is safe, and she should get out if she can. Please tell her I love her and I’m sorry.”

TexLex’s voice was softer when she replied. “Will try, Fox. Hold out if you can.”

Khifi disconnected and stared out through the frozen streaks of tomato pulp at the small square of space at the end of her tunnel, braced for the moment when it became the end of her life.

When her comms came back to life nearly an hour later, she wished it was TexLex again, but it wasn’t. “Ms. Iwalewa,” Mr. Balcko’s voice came over the docking control channel. “As soon as I find out which ship is sheltering you, I’m going to blow it and everyone in it out of orbit. Is that what you want? More innocent dead?”

“Find me if you can,” she said.

“Or . . . ” he said. “I have these buttons here in the Dockmaster’s private office. Do you want to know what they do? This one locks down residences. Not unreasonable during martial law. How about apartment 4188 in the orange block of Paxillo Deep? Middle of the night, door already locked, who would notice?”

That was Khifi and Lema’s apartment. “Don’t—” she started to say.

“Oh, and did you know I can also not only turn off oxygen, but turn on reclamation to filter it back out?” he said. “It’s not fast, but it is thorough. I wonder how long it’d take to scrub the oxygen out of a space that small? A few hours?”

“Mr. Balcko, Lema has nothing to do with any of this,” Khifi said. “Let her go and I’ll agree to whatever you want.”

“I don’t know how much use that would be to me. You’ve already badly interfered in my business,” Mr. Balcko said. “I’m going to think about your offer for a while and get back to you.”

Balcko was gone. Khifi let out a cry of rage and punched the console. Even the dampers in her suit glove weren’t enough to soften the blow and, needing the pain, she punched it again, harder, until her fist felt on the verge of breaking. She had no leverage to force Balcko to let Lema go, nor any confidence he’d keep his word even if she did everything he said.

One thing she knew, she couldn’t just sit and wait for Balcko’s next move. She unbuckled from her seat and pulled on her exosuit. There was a spare vambrace in the utility locker along with a handful of idled bots. She slipped on the vambrace with gratitude and synced it to her tug’s systems, tucking a crackbot into the exosuit’s pocket.

Cycling herself out the Lazy Dog’s airlock, she checked her sensors. As she’d expected rads were off the charts, but her suit could handle it for five or six hours before it became a concern. She’d be lucky to live that long anyway. She had to shove several leaking crates of miscellaneous goo away from the bay’s back wall to uncover the main control console, but it was still live. She pulled a cable from her tug’s underside over and jacked it in.

That connection was purely information-transfer, but having the freighter’s full eyes and ears in addition to the Lazy Dog’s would help. It wasn’t, however, enough.

There were times in the life of a tug pilot that you had to move someone who didn’t want to be moved. Taking the crackbot from her pocket, she thumbed it on and let go. The bot hovered midair for a few moments, then zipped across the short space to attach itself to the console. It extended several hair-thin needles into the case and blinked in escalating complexity. Khifi left it to do its job and climbed back into the Lazy Dog.

She didn’t know what good having control of the Rimbolan would do her, but she didn’t have enough resources to be picky. She was conscious of every breath she took, of another’s running out.

Back at the helm, she routed signals from the freighter’s sensors to her secondary display. Pulling up her data from earlier, she compared it to the cruiser parked in Paxillo: same ship, without a doubt. The public docking feeds had it listed as the Escarre, with a South Haudernelle registration too recent to be entirely believable.

It had not been in orbit alone, and one of the seven small cargo ships she’d seen it with now sat in dock between it and the Martian freighter Olympian Razor. She’d hardly begun a scan before the rest jumped out at her: one each in the other six docks of Velatos cluster. Whatever was happening had been planned well in advance, and she had blundered right into its path. I wonder what Goffs did to get in their way, she thought. And if either one of us slowed them down at all.

Her console pinged. The bot reported back that it had easily rerouted the freighter’s command systems and transferred control to her helm.

Tugs didn’t receive public broadcast feeds because they were a potentially lethal distraction in the air, but she piped them in now via the Rimbolan, pulling up Velatos official news. The very first image on the screen was a stillpic of Candles. “No, no,” she said, turning the audio up.

“ . . . temporary assignment in Paxillo Docks. He fled during the mass arrest of the conspirators led by Iwalewa, but was later seen being shoved out an airlock by masked people with anti-althuman slogans inked on his body. Cluster Manager Balcko released a statement that it is believed that members of Iwalewa’s group targeted him out of concern that during his time working among them he may have unwittingly gained information or been able to identify more members of the conspiracy. Shortly after—”

Khifi closed the feed. They killed Candles and blamed me for it . . .!

Anger was a star igniting. She punched her comms, trying to reach anyone on Ryeneck’s secret line.

“Can’t talk long,” TexLex answered.

“Tell me you have good news, TexLex. Tell me someone got to my wife and warned her to get out.”

“We tried, Fox. The tube lanes under Paxillo have been shut down for hours now, and cluster comms are keyed to emergency personnel only.”

“Balcko is killing her,” Khifi said. “Right now. And I can’t do anything to stop him. And Candles! I didn’t—”

“Save the timewidth for things we can’t guess on our own,” TexLex said.

Khifi gritted her teeth. TexLex was right, of course. “The cargo ships that came in, one per dock.”

“Balcko’s consultants ordered them. They’re rounding up every single crawler in Velatos and say they’re holding them on the cargo ships until it can be determined if any of them have legal status, or which are involved in Humans First. And after the latest bombing and Candles’s death, it’s probably safer for them than out on the floors,” TexLex said. “People are angry and not thinking, and no one inside Velatos is hearing a story other than Balcko’s. The entire cluster is in riot.”

“Kaiju . . . Did he get home safe?”

“He left right after he chased you up,” she said. “Said he had something to do, then went offline.”

“The rest of my team?”

“Not sure, but we think they’re being held on one of the cargo ships.”

“I’m sorry,” Khifi said. She wanted to cry. “Everyone is going to die because of me.”

“Fox! Snap out of it. Lots of people could still get dead if you give up and let Balcko win. The only reason he hasn’t wiped out all of your team is that he hasn’t got you yet. He turned you into his convenient fallbody thinking you’d be easily caught, but he can’t find you. Somebody got word out that if any of the ships in orbit ratted on your location, they’d be cursed by a lifetime of shipping mishaps. Other clusters seem to be unsure what to do or what side to take, so no one’s talking to Velatos from the ground either. You and Balcko both backed yourselves into corners.”

“But he’s got all the cards,” Khifi said.

“Not all. We got Sniv. Dirtnapper and TugThug are talking to him now,” TexLex said. “Come on, Air Captain. You’re mid-job and your whole team is on the line. What do we do?”

It was so hard to think. “We need to know everything Sniv knows,” she said. “Record it, then send it on every public channel you can get on. Everyone needs to know Balcko is behind the bombings, not the crawlers, not my team. Every single death needs to be marked against him.”

“Got it,” TexLex said. “Balcko’s imported security team is about to sweep here again, so I’ve gotta be scarce for a bit. Later.”

Khifi was beginning to hate the amber light of a closed connection.

She turned the newsfeed back on to watch about three minutes footage of a fullscale riot erupting in Notomyo; a family of Ijt, including their young offspring, had been found butchered outside the closed tube station to Freyella Cluster, the words Non-humans go home or die! scrawled in their blue-green blood on the floor. Rioters had entered the crawl intent on finding the perpetrators, and what few crawlers were left were fleeing toward Balcko’s cargo ships as the only option left to them. She didn’t recognize any of the dirty faces shown being hounded across the concourse, but she knew the fear on them only too well.

She turned the feed off, stewing in her inability to act.

“Fox!” TexLex called over the comm. “Can you get news feeds?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Then hold on for some epic Sniveling,” she said. “I uploaded Sniv’s confession to a friend over in Solaster, and he’s passing it on to others. In about two minutes Balcko won’t have anywhere to hide on Tanduou. I’m outta here for now. Good luck, and I’ll be back in touch if I reach somewhere safe.”

Khifi turned back on the news feed just as Balcko called. “Ms. Iwalewa. I hope you haven’t been holding your breath waiting for my call. If you immediately return to Paxillo and hand yourself over to my security consultants and sign a full confession on the terrorism charges for aiding Humans First, I could see being more merciful toward your friends.”

“Like you were merciful to Candles?” Khifi asked.

The line was silent for a moment. Is he trying to figure out if I have proof of that, she wondered, or what to throw at me next?

“I don’t think you’ve got the right attitude yet,” Balcko said.

“And I don’t think you have much time left,” Khifi answered. “Have you watched the news?”

“I control the news,” Balcko snarled.

“Yeah?”

The news feed switched over to Sniv’s face, puffy and red. “It was Mr. Balcko’s idea,” he was saying. “All Balcko’s idea. He planned the whole thing. I was only an advisor on a few technical details, nothing illegal!”

Khifi could hear Balcko shouting at someone over their open link. “Find it and kill it!” he was screaming.

“Problems, Mr. Balcko?” she asked.

“You and your wife are dead,” he said.

“I already knew as much,” she said. “Just returning the favor.” The comm link cut out somewhere amid her last few words.

“—Humans First,” Sniv was saying. “No, I mean, the bugs are easy targets, get people angry, focus that anger on the illegals down in the crawl. Now they’re all packed up and ready to go and who really is going to miss them, especially after this? In a few years we’ll have a whole new crop of ’em.”

“So this isn’t about the aliens and human supremacy?” someone asked. It sounded like TugThug.

“Noooo, it’s about the crawlers,” Sniv said. “We’re just cleaning up the garbage in Velatos and making a bit of profit at it for our troubles.”

Below her, a tug she didn’t recognize soared into Paxillo airspace, deftly undocking the security consultant’s cruiser. It rose quickly with the tug, the cloud of ships above parting again. As she watched, another tug pulled one of the cargo ships free from Novodinia and began its ascent.

“No!” she shouted. Balcko was not going to get away that easy. She ran through the hijacked controls to the freighter, found what she was looking for: three sets of subcompartment blast doors to the cargo bay. She watched as her distant square of open space narrowed to a slit and disappeared. Two sets fully closed, one jammed at eighty percent. Close enough. The main cargo bay doors were still wide open.

She powered on the Rimbolan’s engines and began drifting toward an intercept point with the cruiser. Bet you’re not looking up right now, she thought.

The tug released the Escarre as soon as they were through the field of waiting ships. She could now make out the giant yellow smiley-face painted on its nose, Xs for eyes. Burnout.

Burnout dipped down, beelining for the cargo ship still on the ground in Paxillo.

“Just you and me now,” she said, eyes riveted on the cruiser. She pushed the engines up to full. The Escarre must have noticed her at the last moment because it began to turn, but the wide maw of the giant freighter caught it nearly nose-on. Khifi braced against her console as the cruiser punched through two sets of subcompartment doors before becoming wedged fast, fully two-thirds of the ship swallowed by the Rimbolan. The freighter complained desperately across her boards about multiple hull ruptures, red and yellow warning lights blinking frenetically. For all that the freighter was already abandoned and dying, she felt a pang of guilt for the catastrophic damage.

She flipped on her comms. “This is the Lazy Dog, calling the Escarre,” she said. “Are you prepared to meet my demands?”

It was Stickles who answered. “Fox,” he said. “That was incredibly stupid of you. Think what you could still lose. Your wife could still be saved if we acted right now. The question is, do you love her enough to save her?”

“Oh, fuck you and your manipulative bullshit,” she said. “Is that all you’ve got?”

“Do you know how much cred your useless crawlers are worth on the open market? They’re young, they’re tough, they’ve got no one who cares what happens to them. And they’ll be better off, be taken care of and fed regularly in exchange for their work. They’ll be valued. This is a private channel, just you and me, so I have no reason to lie. You could save your wife, maybe get a small share of the profit, and help your crawlers find a better life.”

“So human trafficking is altruism, for you? What about all the people you’ve killed, whose lives you’ve destroyed? Do you think they don’t matter? You bombed your own people, you killed Goffs, you murdered aliens to cover your actions. Don’t you think that matters?”

“To be honest, not really,” Stickles said. “If not us, it would have been someone else eventually. You just can’t understand that, can you?”

“Where is the rest of my team?” Khifi asked.

“They’re on one of our ships. If you want to see them again—”

“Stop with the threats. Land the three cargo ships you’ve had lifted and let everyone on board all seven of them go. And then we can negotiate.”

“Enough of this.” Balcko cut in on the line. “Ms. Iwalewa, I admire your resourcefulness, but we’ve got a ride coming to pick us up and you won’t be coming with us.”

The Rimbolan’s proximity alarms flared, and she glanced over at the sensors in alarm. There was a tug positioning itself above the freighter’s long topdeck, a cutter attached to its underside. Right on cue, Burnout’s voice was added to the comm traffic. “Hello, Fox,” he said.

“Hello, Burnout. You come to kill me?”

“On Balcko’s orders, of course,” he said. “Clever of you to get him and Stickles to confirm Sniv’s confession on your private line, not knowing you were piping it over the freighter’s systems down to the public feeds in Tanduou.”

“It seemed a conversation worth sharing,” Khifi said.

“Burnout, enough of this; kill her,” Balcko said. “You have your orders.”

“I do,” Burnout said. “Now shut up for a minute. Fox, remember in the Hellwater when you said that, if you beat me, you wanted everyone to know it was a fair fight?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Well, this ain’t one either. We’ll settle this on the ground, if you make it.”

Burnout disconnected.

“Where the hell is he going?” she heard Balcko ask, as Burnout’s tug fell to one side and headed back to Novodinia.

Khifi smiled, powered up the Rimbolan’s engines.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Balcko demanded.

“Escalating,” she said. The freighter was struggling to turn, maneuvering engines reporting varying degrees of dysfunction or overload, but once she got it pointed the way she wanted to go, the main engines accelerated decently. She wished she could see the bright yellow face of Guratahan Sfazil beyond Tanduou, see its second moon Tammou one more time with her own eyes, but she didn’t figure it ultimately mattered; it would hurt just as much to hit.

Someone onboard the Escarre figured out where they were going; her boards flared in alarm as an escape pod ejected from the cruiser without being fully clear of the cargo bay and turned itself into a brief ball of fire at the lip of the Rimbolan’s mouth. The remaining maneuvering thrusters on that side of the ship went offline, but she wasn’t planning to change course anyway.

“Ms. Iwalewa, stop this freighter and we’ll let your teammates free,” Balcko’s voice came over the comms.

“Mr. Balcko,” she said. “And here I was hoping the escape pod was you.”

“That was your friend Stickles trying to cut and run,” he said. “Not much of a loss. So, I’ll give you your teammates back and you let us off this ride, yes?”

“No,” she said. “You let my teammates free, and you let all the crawlers go, and then maybe I let you off this ride.”

There was a long pause, then a very hate-filled, “It’s a deal.”

“I’m not sure that deal’s still available,” Khifi said. “Let me think about it and get back to you.” She cut the connection to the Escarre.

Below, she watched a trio of tugs appear heading up from Henrici Dock in the Myonota cluster. They straightlined for the cargo ships that were no longer in dock. The cargo ships scattered, trying to evade, but the sky was still crowded and the tugs faster and more maneuverable. She watched as one by one the ships were pulled back down to ground. A suited team emerged on the surface from inside Luida Dock and swarmed over one. The bright sparks of cutting torches were tiny flares on her display screen.

As if in sympathy, a few more red alerts on the Rimbolan’s sensor feed lit up. “What the hell are you up to?” she asked, but she already knew. They were desperate if they were firing the cruiser’s weapons inside the cargo hold. So far the last remaining set of doors between them was holding.

The barrage stopped and didn’t start up again. The one remaining functional sensor reported exactly what she expected: movement.

Still not that easy, she thought. She activated the hull breach systems. Only about a third of the sprayers were online, but they were most likely enough to fill the bay with fast-hardening foam. She wondered if they’d be able to get back inside their ship before it solidified, or if someone was going to be carving their corpses out as part of a final salvage job. Assuming there’s any piece of us left bigger than a pebble.

“Fox, this is Siren in Henrici cluster.” Her comms reactivated. “TexLex is on the move and offline, and I’m your new designated ears. Four of the cargo ships surrendered without a fight and released all their passengers. Luida and Velatos Docks stormed theirs as soon as they landed. Paxillo’s security chief Bell apparently had a disagreement with Balcko’s consultants and went missing, but we’ve got a team from Paxillo, Oreasta, and Novodinia retaking Paxillo Dock as we speak. We think your teammates and Bell are aboard the cargo ship there, and there’s signs of fighting inside. As soon as we’ve got the control room, we’ll do what we can to try to help your wife. But it’s been . . . ”

“But it’s been too long. I know,” Khifi said. “Thank you for trying.”

“This is TexLex back on ground in Luida.” TexLex came on the line. “We have another ship incoming!”

Khifi’s heart, already shattered by the day, seemed to grind itself to a fine powder of despair. “Not more—”

“It’s the Nobunaga!” Siren said. “Kaiju has come home!”

“Hey, Siren!” Kaiju got on the line as well. “You miss me?”

“Always, monsterboy. Who else I gonna put my cold feet on when I sleep? Where the hell did you go?”

“I went to pick up some stranded friends,” he said. “Where’s safe to land in Velatos?”

“Luida is now,” TexLex said.

“Then we’re coming there. Hang on.”

“Fox,” TexLex said. “You can slow that hunkashit down now. They ain’t going anywhere.”

“Thanks, but I’ve got this,” she said. She checked the Rimbolan’s sensors again, saw that nothing new had failed and she was still on course for a hard meet with Tammou.

“Air Captain, stop or I’ll come get in your way and make you kill me, too,” Kaiju answered.

“No,” she said. “I’m still your air captain, and I order you to stand down.”

Another voice came on the line. “I override that order.”

The Dockmaster.

“Told you I picked up some friends,” Kaiju said. “I got through to Quizzie on private channels and found out they’d been cut off from all offworld feeds, and every time they tried to leave, they were told there were mechanical problems in dock.”

“Fox,” the Dockmaster said. “You haven’t changed course or speed.”

“They killed my friends, sir. They killed my wife.”

“So you think we should lose more people?” the Dockmaster said. “What about the rest of your team? Don’t you think they need you—that you all need each other—more than ever right now? This is not the only way to serve justice.”

“Sir,” she said. It felt like begging.

“You still haven’t changed course,” the Dockmaster said.

“Please, Fox?” Quizzie asked.

“Fuck this shit all to hell,” Khifi said, wanting to throw and smash and kick something. Anything. She could barely see through the flood of tears as she reached for her connection to the Rimbolan and cut the freighter’s main engines, flipped on the brakers. She tapped her comms one last time. “Acknowledged,” she said, then shut the line down.

Kaiju picked up the cutter from Novodinia and brought it up, carefully lifting free the hull plates above the Lazy Dog. When there was a big enough hole, Khifi used two of her tug’s long arms to push herself free of the freighter. From the outside, the Rimbolan was a spectacular mess. The Escarre had nearly split it apart, jagged tears along much of the length of the cargo bay, plates warped and buckled, hull struts protruding like broken bones.

“Whoa,” she said.

“Don’t forget, they signed a damage waiver,” Kaiju said. “I think we’re still good.”

She laughed at that, despite all.

Khifi followed the Nobunaga down, and when Kaiju turned toward Paxillo, she didn’t even think to question it. She climbed out of her tug, walked through postlanding procedures as if she was on autopilot, as if they still mattered, and her hand lingered on the Lazy Dog’s tomato-splattered hull as she went.

“They retook Paxillo while I was on my way up. We needed our coffee machine back,” Kaiju said. As the doors on control opened he held out a hand. “After you, Air Captain.”

She stepped onto the control floor and stopped. Standing there was the Dockmaster and Chief Bell, and behind them in a semicircle was Redrum, Jonjon, and Inchbug with her arms around someone she could only assume was TexLex. Jonjon’s arm was in a sling, and both Redrum and Bell were sporting swollen and bruised faces, but everyone was smiling.

“Welcome home, Air Captain,” the Dockmaster said.

“You’re all alive,” she said.

“You should’ve seen Jonjon,” Inchbug said. “Never would have thought he had that kind of a fight in him.”

“I bit someone,” Jonjon said, beaming with pride.

“I . . . ” Khifi started to say, but it was all so overwhelming that she just stood there in shock.

“Fox!” Sparkle called from her comm station. “Foible’s team is on the line! She’s not there!”

“ . . . What?”

“Your apartment! Foible and Grippy cut the door down. There’s no one there.”

Her knees gave out, sending her tumbling. Kaiju caught her halfway to the floor, and he and Bell helped her into a chair. She was barely sitting before she tried to stand again. Both men put hands on her shoulders to keep her from rising. “Xie’s,” she said. “I have to get to Xie’s.”

“It’s not safe to go down there yet,” the Dockmaster said. “There’s still most of a riot going on, screens were smashed, and while everyone on Tanduou now knows your face, not nearly as many know you’re not the enemy. I’m bringing in extra security from all over Tanduou to put the riots down. Give me a chance to do that first?”

She didn’t want to wait at all, not one extra second, but she knew he was right. She nodded.

“Dockmaster,” Sparkle said. “Quizzie is calling from the secure dock. They’ve got Balcko down using a rescue pod.”

“Chief Bell, with me,” the Dockmaster said. “Fox, will you accompany us?”

“Yeah,” Khifi said.

She followed the Dockmaster and Bell down through the tower and into the docking corridors, straight to a heavy door. There were two Luida security officers there waiting outside with Quizzie. “Not a word out of them,” Quizzie said. “They tried the door a couple of times then gave up.”

Chief Bell unlocked the door and stepped back as it rumbled open. Balcko, Arve, and three other men stood waiting. Arve’s weapon was on the floor at his feet; from the expression on his face, surrendering his weapon was not his idea. “Dockmaster,” Mr. Balcko said. “I’m sure if you let me explain—”

The Dockmaster raised a hand, and Balcko fell silent. He turned toward the other man. “I assume you’re either Allen or Arve?”

“Arve,” Arve said. “My crew and I are foreign nationals and we insist on our right to speak to a representative of our colony before giving any statements or being subjected to any legal proceedings.”

“Both Haudernelle ambassadors expressed disinterest in speaking with you,” Chief Bell said.

“We’re not from Haud—”

“No? You came here under a South Haudie flag. I see no reason to look elsewhere for someone willing to claim you,” the Dockmaster interrupted. “Where is Mr. Allen?”

“He and our pilot left the Escarre in an attempt to reach Ms. Iwalewa and negotiate,” Balcko said. “They didn’t return and we were unable to get the airlock door open again.”

“You’ll find them stuck in hull foam aboard the Rimbolan,” Khifi said. The Dockmaster’s lip twitched up in a faint smile.

“You have no proof of our wrongdoing,” Balcko said. “Only her word and that of people obviously under her influence.” He pointed at Khifi. “Sniv is one of her creatures, not mine, as are the crawlers. That’s well known.”

“Let’s ask one,” the Dockmaster said. He turned to a familiar if unexpected figure at her side. The change in context threw her badly, having not seen the youth in weeks, and then last scrounging for food scraps with Mole at his side, caked in crawl dust.

“Birdie!” Khifi said.

“Hey, Fox,” Birdie said.

“Birdie, were the crawlers being recruited by Humans First?” the Dockmaster asked.

“Nope,” he answered.

“That’s good enough for me,” the Dockmaster said. He held out his hand and Chief Bell slapped his pistol into it.

“Wait!” Balcko said, raising his hands.

The Dockmaster shot him in the head, and whatever thin denials Balcko had left died with him. “Justice, Fox. Properly administered by the authorities, and with no further collateral losses,” he said. He handed the pistol back to Bell. “This is why it’s always useful to have a source of inside information. Right, Birdie?”

“Right, Uncle,” Birdie said.

“Chief Bell, what’s the situation down on the floor?”

Bell had just been checking his comms. “Concourse is cleared, everyone is under curfew until further notice,” he said. “We have a lot of crawlers in cargo warehouses throughout the cluster. Some need medical care, and they’re all hungry.”

“Get food and water to them. Tell them they’re not in trouble and we’ll be talking to them and letting them go free as soon as we know it’s safe.”

“Not all will want to talk,” Birdie said.

“That’s okay, too.” The Dockmaster turned to Fox. “Now. You wanted to go to Xie-Yan Che’s shop?”

It was so hard not to run, not to fly across the concourse to that tiny shop. Only the thought that Lema might not be there, might have been caught up in the disaster somewhere else where she’d never be found, slowed her steps until she was a walking war between anticipation and dread.

Xie’s door was locked with curtains pulled across the shop windows, but he opened up on the second chime. He looked haggard, anxious, but his eyebrows went up in delight. “Khif!” he shouted, flinging himself through the door and pulling her into an embrace.

“Xie, you’re the best agent a sculptor could have, but if you don’t let go of my wife and get out of my way I’m going to crush you into a tiny little ball of a man and throw you down the hall,” a voice said from the doorway, and Khifi froze.

Xie let go and stepped back, and it seemed almost faster than light could move that her wife was wrapping her arms around her. Khifi could feel tears on her neck, and was struck by a mortifying guilt. “I tried to get word to you, to get you out,” she said. “I tried, Lema, but I failed. I thought Balcko killed you.”

“You did get word to me,” she said.

“What? How?”

Lema nodded her head toward the shop door. Peering around the corner was Tuck. “Mole dropped him off here,” Lema said. “He told Xie about the attack on you in the concourse and that he thought we were all in danger, and Xie called me.”

“Is Mole still here?” Khifi asked.

“No, he left right after,” Xie said.

The Dockmaster coughed gently. “Birdie went to find him,” he said.

“Are you okay?” Lema asked Khifi.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “Peezy’s dead, and Candles—”

“They couldn’t find his body,” the Dockmaster said.

“What?”

“After he was thrown out the airlock. He disappeared. You know that the Colony are also oxygen-injectors? If he managed to get indoors again fast enough . . . ”

“Oh, I hope so. He was a good kid. Good pilot, too.” Khifi sagged against her wife. “I still can’t believe you’re okay.”

Lema straightened up. “I’m not okay,” she said. “I saw my wife’s face on the news as she was branded a terrorist and mass-murderer. I watched riots break out and people forming hunting parties to look for her, and I am not okay with that. I don’t think we’re ever going to feel safe here again. I know I won’t.”

“What do you want us to do?” Khifi asked.

“Go somewhere else. I can work anywhere, but you . . . you need to choose.”

“I’ve been here almost my whole life. Everything I know is here. Where would I go? What would I do?”

Quizzie coughed. “I wasn’t going to pass this on for obvious selfish reasons, and I want you all to appreciate how conflicted this makes me,” she said. “The Olympian Razor, the Martian ship that’s been in dock through this whole mess? Sent me an inforeq as to whether you were on contract and if so, if it could be bought out, in the interests of extending you a job offer. Apparently you impressed them.”

“ . . . What?” Khifi said.

Quizzie rolled her eyes. “It was a terrible idea to ram the cruiser with the Rimbolan, but it was still beautifully executed,” she said. The Dockmaster held out a hand, and she passed him her handpad with the message on it. “And if I had to guess, they must be Free Marsers, because they seemed just as taken with your willingness to defy authority.”

“I know some of these names,” the Dockmaster said. “They’ll treat you fairly and well.”

“I don’t know,” Khifi said. She looked to Lema.

“I admit, I like the idea of being near Earth again,” she said, “but it’s up to you.”

“You’ll keep an eye on the crawlers?” she asked the Dockmaster, and he nodded. She looked back to her wife. “Then yes,” she said. “I can’t bear ever living through another day where I don’t know you’re safe.”

“Good,” Lema said. “And we’re bringing Tuck.”

“Do you need me to send someone for your things?” the Dockmaster asked.

Khifi smiled as Tuck wrapped his skinny arms around her legs again. “No,” she said. “I have everything that matters right here.”

The Olympian Razor was already back in orbit when Khifi took the Lazy Dog up out of Tanduou space for the last time. A battered but unbroken Mole had seen them off at the dock, Birdie by his side. He declined the offer to come with them. “Learning textwork,” he’d said. “Earn my own way out.”

“After we dock and transfer, how does your tug get back down? Autopilot?” Lema asked.

“No,” Khifi said. She smiled. “Wait and see.”

The Olympian Razor took the jump point from Guratahan Sfazil in toward Haudernelle, first of several hops on the long trip to Sol, with a large, spider-like barnacle clinging to its back. If anyone in Paxillo had expected otherwise—and she had no reason to doubt they had—no one dared call her on it.

Systems on minimum, Khifi sat on the small couch behind her pilot’s chair, her head on Lema’s shoulder as exhaustion settled in. Tuck was asleep beside her, barely a lump buried under a blanket.

“Khif,” Lema said, her voice a whisper. With effort, Khifi opened her eyes. In her hand, Lema was holding the small, badly flattened box from Xie’s. “Open it.”

Khifi took it, popped the seal. Inside was a silver shape, elegant and curving in the distinctive way of all Lema’s designs. “It’s beautiful,” she said. Nodding her head forward she slipped the necklace on and felt the metal warm against her skin. “What is it?”

“An Earth bird,” Lema said. “It’s called a stork.”

“Oh,” Khifi said, none the wiser. She closed her eyes and leaned back against Lema, listening to the low hum of the Lazy Dog’s systems and the slow heartbeat of her wife, both of them reassuring and steady and familiar, and let sleep catch her at last.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, April-May 2016.

Incomers

Paul J. McAuley

Mark Griffin was convinced that there was something suspicious about the herbalist.

“Tell me who he is, Sky. Some kind of pervert murderer, I bet.”

Sky Bolofo was a hacker who had filled the quantum processor of the large, red-framed spex that perched on his nose with all kinds of talents and tricks. Right now, he had a look of focussed concentration, and the left lens of his spex was silvered over as it displayed something to him. He said, “No problem. My face recognition program picked him up straight away, and right now I’m looking at his public page. His name is Ahlgren Rees. He lives right here in the old city, he sells herbs—”

“I can see that,” Mark said. “What else?”

“He also fixes up pets,” Sky said.

“What about his private files?” Mark said. “What about the real dirt?”

“No problem,” Sky said complacently, and started tapping his fingers on the chest of his jumper—he was using the virtual keyboard of his spex, which read the positioning of his fingers from the silver rings he wore on fingers and thumbs.

Jack Miyata, whose idea it had been to visit the produce market, had the sinking feeling that Mark had spied an opportunity for some serious mischief. He said, “The man sells herbs. There’s nothing especially interesting or weird in that.”

“If he isn’t weird,” Mark said, “why is he living with the tweaks? He’s either crazy, or he’s up to no good.”

The man in question sat behind a small table at the edge of the market, selling bundles of fresh herbs and a dozen different types of herb tea whose virtues were advertised by handlettered signs. He was definitely an incomer. Native Xambans who’d been born and raised in Rhea’s weak gravity were tall and skinny, and most of them were Nordic, with pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. The herbalist was a compactly-built man of indeterminate middle-age (in the third decade of the twenty-fourth century, this meant anything between forty and a hundred), not much taller than Sky Bolofo, and had skin the color of old teak. He was also completely hairless. He didn’t even have eyelashes. As far as Jack was concerned, that was the only unusual thing about him, but Mark had other ideas.

Jack had brought his two friends to the produce market because he thought it was a treasure house of marvels, but Mark and Sky thought it was smelly, horribly crowded, and, quite frankly, revoltingly primitive. When makers could spin anything you wanted from yeast and algae, why would anyone want to eat the meat of real live animals like fish and chickens and dwarfed goats, especially as they would have to kill them first? Kill and gut them and Ghod knew what else. As they wandered between stalls and displays of strange flowers and fruits and vegetables, red and green and golden-brown streamers of dried waterweed, tanks of fish and shrimp, caged birds and rats, and bottle vivariums in which stag beetles lumbered like miniature rhinoceroses through jungles of moss and fern, Mark and Sky made snide comments about the weird people and the weirder things they were selling, pretended to retch at especially gross sights, and generally made it clear that this was very far from their idea of fun.

“Do you really think I want to know anything at all about people who eat things like that?” Mark had said to Jack, pointing to a wire cage containing rats spotted like leopards or striped like tigers.

“I think they keep them as pets,” Jack had said, feeling the tips of his ears heat up in embarrassment because the tall, slender woman who owned the stall was definitely looking at them.

“I had a pet once,” Mark had said, meeting the woman’s gaze. “It was a cute little monkey that could take a shower all by itself. Quite unlike these disease-ridden vermin.”

Which had made Sky crack up, and Jack blush even more.

The three of them, Jack, Mark and Sky, were all the same age, sixteen, went to the same school, and lived in the same apartment complex in the new part of Xamba, the largest city on Rhea, Saturn’s second largest moon. Their parents were engineers, security personnel, and diplomats who had come there to help in the reconstruction and expansion of the Outer Colonies after the Quiet War. Unlike most city states in the Saturn system, Xamba had remained neutral during the Quiet War. Afterwards, the Three Powers Alliance which now governed every city and orbital habitat in the Outer Colonies had settled the bulk of its administration on peaceful, undamaged Rhea, and had built a new city above the old.

Fifteen years later, the city was still growing. Jack’s parents, Mariko and Davis, were thermal engineers who were helping to construct a plant to tap the residual heat of the moon’s core and provide power for a hundred new apartment complexes, factories, and farms. They’d moved to Rhea just two months ago. In that short time, Jack had explored much of the old and new parts of the city, and had also completed a pressure suit training course and taken several long hikes through the untouched wilderness in the southern half of the big crater in which Xamba was located, and from which it took its name. He’d even climbed to the observatory at the top of the crater’s big central peak. Although both Mark and Sky had been living here much longer, like many incomers neither of them had so much as stepped foot on the surface of the moon, or even visited the old part of the city. Jack had been eager to show them the produce market, his favourite part of old Xamba, but now he was feeling miserable because they had been so rude about it. He had been about to give up and suggest they leave when Mark had spotted the herbalist.

“That’s obviously a front,” Mark said. “How’s it going, Sky?”

Sky, sounding distracted and distant, said he was working on it.

“Maybe he’s a spy. Selling herbs is his cover—what he’s actually doing is keeping watch for terrorists and so-called freedom fighters. Or maybe he’s a double agent. Maybe he’s gone over to the side of the tweaks,” Mark said, beginning to get into his little fantasy. “Maybe he’s feeding our side false information to sabotage the reconstruction. There was that blow-out at the spaceport last month. They said it was an accident, but maybe someone sabotaged an airlock and let the vacuum in.”

“Air escapes into a vacuum,” Jack said, “not the other way around.”

“Who cares which direction the vacuum flows?” Mark said carelessly.

“And anyway, they said it was an accident.”

Mark raised his eyebrows. They were thick, and met over the bridge of his nose. He was a stocky boy with pale skin, jet black hair and a perpetual scowl who looked a lot like his policeman father. His mother was in the police too, in charge of security at the spaceport. “Of course they said that, but it doesn’t mean it really was an accident. What’s the word, Sky? What is this fellow hiding?”

“There’s a problem,” Sky said. His fingers were fluttering frantically over his chest, and he had a look of such intense concentration that he seemed to be crosseyed.

“Talk to me,” Mark said.

“He has really heavy security behind his public page. I had to back out in a hurry, before I tripped an alarm. Right now I’m making sure I didn’t leave anything that could lead back to me.”

Mark said, “So what you’re saying is that Ahlgren Rees—if that’s his real name—is hiding something.”

Sky shrugged.

Mark said, his eyes shining with sudden excitement, “I bet you thought I was kidding, but all along I had a feeling there was something wrong with this guy. It’s what the Blob—” that was his nickname for his rotunt and none too bright father—“calls gut instinct. My gut told me that Ahlgren Rees is a wrong one, my man Sky has just confirmed it, and now it’s up to all of us to find out why. It’s our duty.”

Jack should have told Mark that he wasn’t going to have anything to do with his silly fantasy, but his need for his new friends to like him (which was why he’d brought them to the market in the first place) was stronger than his conscience. Also, it was the school holidays, and his parents were spending most of their time at the site of the new power plant, a hundred kilometers northwest of the city, and were only at home on weekends, so he was pretty much on his own for most of the time. There was no way that the herb seller, Ahlgren Rees was either a spy or a criminal, so what harm could simply following him about actually do?

Jack spent much of the next three days following Ahlgren Rees, sometimes with Mark, sometimes on his own (Sky Bolofo, spooked by the experience of running up against Ahlgren Rees’s electronic watchdogs, had made a weak excuse about having to do some extra tuition for the upcoming new school year). It wasn’t hard; in fact, it was a lot of fun. The herbalist spent much of the day at the stall in the produce market, or tending the little garden where he grew his herbs, or simply sitting outside the door of his apartment, a one-room efficiency on a terrace directly above the market, drinking tea or homemade lemonade and watching people go by, but he also liked to take long walks, and every time Jack followed him, his route was different. Jack saw more of the old city in those three days than he had in the past two months.

The old part of the city was buried inside the eastern rimwall of the huge crater, and some of its chambers had diamond endwalls facing what was generally reckoned to be one of the most classically beautiful views in all of Saturn’s family of moons, across slumped terraces and fans of ice rubble towards the crater’s central peak which rose up at the edge of the close, curved horizon. Inside the old city’s chambers, apartments and shops and cafes and workshops and gardens were piled on top of each other in steep, terraced cliffs, linked by steep paths, chutes, cableways and chairlifts to the long narrow parks of trees and lawns and skinny lakes that were laid out on the chamber floors. There was no shortage of water on Rhea, which was essentially a ball of ice one and a half thousand kilometres in diameter wrapped around a small rocky core. A series of long, narrow lakes looped between several of the chambers, busy with skiffs and canoes paddling between floating islands and rafts and pontoons, and the main pathways were crowded with cycles and pedicabs and swarms of pedestrians.

The old part of Xamba was a busy, bustling place, and Jack had no problem blending into the crowds as he trailed Ahlgren Rees through walkways, parks, markets, malls, and plazas, even though most of its inhabitants were tall, skinny Outers, genetically engineered so that they could comfortably live in microgravity without the medical implants that Jack and every other incomer needed in order to stop their bones turning to chalk lace, their hearts swelling like pumped-up basketballs with excess fluid, and a host of other problems. Jack even plucked up the courage to chat with the woman behind the counter of the café where Ahlgren Rees ate his lunch and breakfast, which is where he’d learned that the herbalist was originally from Greater Brazil, where he had worked in the emergency relief services as a paramedic, and had moved to Rhea two years ago. He seemed well-liked. He always stopped to talk to his neighbors when he met them as he went about his errands, had long conversations with people who stopped at his stall. He was a regular at the café, and at several bars in various parts of the city. His only money seemed to come from selling herbs and herb tea and fixing broken pets.

“Which must mean that he has some other source of income,” Mark said.

“Maybe he has some kind of private income.”

“He has secrets, is what he has. Ahlgren Rees. We don’t even know if that’s his real name.”

The two boys were leaning at café counter in the produce market, sipping fruit juice from bulbs. Ahlgren Rees was sitting at his stall twenty metres down the aisle, reading a book (books printed on paper were a famous tradition in old Xamba), completely oblivious to the fact that the two boys were watching him and talking about him, licking his thumb every time he had to turn a page.

Jack said, “He’s a herbalist. He works at his stall. He works in his garden. He goes for long walks. Sometimes he visits people and fixes up their pets. If he has any secrets, I’m missing something.”

He was hoping that this would be the end of it, but Mark had a determined look, a jut of his heavy jaw like a bulldog gripping a bone it isn’t willing to let go.

“What we need to do,” Mark said, “is get into his apartment. I bet he has all kinds of things hidden there.”

Jack tried to talk him out of it, but Mark was determined. Jack was pretty sure that he didn’t really believe that Ahlgren Rees was a spy, but it had become a matter of pride to find out who he really was and why he had come to Xamba to live amongst the Outers. And Jack had to admit that the past three days of following the man had sharpened his curiosity too, and eventually they managed to hash out a plan that more or less satisfied both of them.

The next day was Monday, and the produce market would be closed. Mark told Jack that he would have to intercept Alhgren Rees at the café where he ate breakfast every day, and keep him occupied. Meanwhile, Mark would break into his apartment.

Jack said, “How are you going to do that?”

“Police tradecraft,” Mark said. “Don’t worry about it. Just make sure you keep him busy.”

Although Jack believed that he had a good idea about how to do just that, he slept badly that night, going over every part of a plan which seemed increasingly silly and flimsy, and he was very tired and nervous when, early the next morning, he and Mark rode train into the city. Mark wanted to know what was in the box Jack was clutching to his chest, and Jack told him with a confidence he didn’t feel that it was a foolproof way of keeping the man busy.

“I’ll tell you what it is if you’ll tell me how you’re going to break into his apartment.”

“I’m not going to break in, I’m going to walk in,” Mark said. “And I could tell you how I’m going to do it, but I’d have to kill you afterwards. Are you sure you can keep him talking for half an hour?”

Jack tapped the top of the plastic box, feeling what was inside stir, a slow, heavy movement that subsided after a moment. He said, “Absolutely sure.”

Actually, he wasn’t sure at all. This was a lot more dangerous than simply following someone through the city’s crowded paths. Following someone wasn’t against the law. Breaking into their private apartment plainly and simply was. Jack had the same sick, doomy feeling that had possessed him in the days before he and his parents had boarded the liner that had taken them from Earth to Saturn. He felt that he was about to do something that would change his life forever, and would change it for the worse if he failed at it. It was a very grown-up feeling, and he didn’t like it at all. There was a sharp edge of excitement, to be sure, but the muscles of his legs felt watery and his stomach was doing somersaults when, after spending half an hour with Mark watching Ahlgren Rees’s apartment from the cover of a little arbour made by the drooping branches of a weeping willow, he followed the herbalist to the café.

It was more or less on the same level as the apartment, a bamboo counter beneath the shade of a huge fig tree, with a bench long enough for a dozen customers and a hissing steel coffee machine that the owner, a white-haired wisp of a woman, had built herself, from a design centuries old. The food was prepared from what was in season in the garden behind the fig tree, and whatever came in trade—the citizens of old Xamba had a complicated economy based on barter of goods and services.

Jack took a seat next to Ahlgren Rees, the closest he had got to the man so far. He asked owner for the juice of the day, set the plastic box on the counter, and turned to the herbalist and said as casually as he could that he heard that he treated sick pets.

“Who told you that?”

Ahlgren Rees, hunched over a bowl of porridge flecked with nuts and seeds, didn’t look up when he spoke. He had a husky voice and a thick accent: the voice of a villain from some cheap virtuality.

“She did,” Jack said, nodding to the owner of the café, who was filling a blender with orange segments and a handful of strawberries.

“I did,” the woman said cheerfully, and switched on the blender.

“Stop by my place when you’ve had your breakfast,” Ahlgren Rees told Jack. “It’s just around the corner, past a clump of black bamboo. The one with the red door.”

The man was eating his porridge slowly but steadily, his elbows on the counter. In a few minutes he would be finished. He’d get up, walk back to his apartment, find the door open . . .

Jack pushed the box an inch towards the man and said, “I have it right here.”

“So I see,” Alhgren Rees said, although he didn’t spare Jack so much as glance. “And I have my breakfast right here too.”

“It belongs to my little sister,” Jack said, the little lie sliding out easily. He added, “She loves it to bits, but we’re scared that it’s dying.”

“Take a look, Alhgren,” the woman who owned the café said, as she placed the bulb of juice in front of Jack. “The worst that can happen is that your karma will be improved.”

“It will need much more than fixing a pet to do that,” Alhgren Rees said, smiling at her.

The woman smiled back. Jack was reminded of his parents, when they shared a private joke.

“All right, kid,” Ahlgren Rees said. “Show me what you got.”

It was a mock turtle, a halflife creature that produced no waste or unpleasant odors, and needed only a couple of hours of trickle charge and a cupful of water a day. It had large, dark, soulful eyes, a yellow beak as soft as a sock puppet’s mouth, and a fifty-word vocabulary. The color and texture of its shell could be altered by infection with simple retroviruses created using the simple RNA writer kit that came with it; this one’s was covered in thick pink fur. It didn’t belong to Jack’s imaginary little sister, of course, but to the youngest daughter of Jack’s neighbors, but it really was sick. Its fur was matted and threadbare; its eyes were filmed with white matter, its soft beak chewed ceaselessly and its breath was foully metallic.

Ahlgren Rees studied it, then took a diagnostic pen from one of the many pockets of his brocade waistcoat and tipped up the mock turtle and plugged the instrument into the socket behind the creature’s stubby front leg.

“Tickles,” the turtle complained, working its stubby legs feebly.

“It’s for your own good,” Ahlgren Rees said. “Be still.”

He had small, strong hands and neatly trimmed fingernails. There were oval scars on the insides of his thick wrists; he’d had plug-in sockets once upon a time, the kind that interface with smart machinery. He squinted at the holographic readout that blossomed above the shaft of the diagnostic pen, then asked Jack, “Do you know what a prion is?”

“Proteins have to fold up the right way to work properly. Prions are proteins that fold up wrongly.”

Ahlgren Rees nodded. “The gene wizard who designed these things used a lot of freeware, and one of the myoelectric proteins he used has a tendency to make prions. That’s what’s wrong with your sister’s pet, I’m afraid. It’s a self-catalysing reaction—do you know what that means?”

“It spreads like a fire. Prions turn proteins into more prions.”

Ahlgren Rees nodded again, unplugged the diagnostic pen, and settled the mock turtle in the box. “The myoelectric proteins are what power it. When they fold the wrong way they can no longer hold a charge, and when enough have folded wrongly, it will die.”

“Can you fix it?”

Ahlgren Rees shook his head. “The best thing to do is to put it to sleep.”

He looked genuinely sorry, and Jack felt a wave of guilt pass through him. Right now, Mark was breaking into his apartment, rifling through his possessions . . .

“If you like, I can do it right now,” Ahlgren Rees said.

“I’ll have to tell my sister first.”

Ahlgren Rees shrugged and started to push away from the counter, saying, “Sorry I couldn’t help you, son.”

“Wait,” Jack said, knowing that Mark must still be in the apartment. Adding, when Ahlgren Rees looked at him, “I mean, I want to ask you, how do you grow your herbs?”

“I suppose you told him about the herbs too,” Ahlgrem Rees told the woman, who blithely shrugged.

“I saw you at the produce market,” Jack said boldly. “And then I saw you here.”

Ahlgren Rees studied him for a moment. Jack felt a moment of anxiety, thinking he’d been found out, but then the man smiled and said, “I had the feeling I’d seen you before. You like the market, uh?”

“I’m interested in biology,” Jack said, speaking the truth because it was the first thing that came into his head. He was good at it, could solve genetic problems or balance a simple ecosystem without thinking too hard, and got pleasure from solving it. Before coming to Rhea, he’d lived with his parents in on the eastern coast of Australia, and one of the things he missed most, after leaving Earth, was snorkelling above the elaborate architecture of the coral reef and its schools of bright fish in the bay, and the aquarium he’d taken a whole year to get just right, a miniature reef in its own right. He added, “I’d like to know how you grow the herbs you sell.”

“In dirt, with water and sunlight.”

“That isn’t what I meant. I was wondering how the low gravity—”

Ahlgren Rees held up a hand. “I have a date,” he said. “If you stop at my stall, if I am not too busy, perhaps we can talk then.”

He said goodbye to the owner of the café, who with a smile asked him to have a good thought on her behalf, and then he was walking off down the path. Not towards his apartment, but in the opposite direction, towards the little funicular railway that dropped down to the floor of the chamber.

Jack wanted but did not dare to ask the owner of the café where he was going. After the woman had refused his offer to pay for his juice (“You can bring me some sour oranges next time you visit the market,” she said), he set off after Ahlgren Rees, and called Mark on his phone, told him about the conversation, and what he was doing. Mark said that he’d catch up, and arrived, breathless and excited, at the lakeside jetty just as Ahlgren Rees was climbing into one of the swan boats.

“Where is he going?” Mark said.

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “But he said that he had a date.”

“With a woman?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you sure you actually talked to him?”

“He said that he had a date, and he left. What was I supposed to do—make a citizen’s arrest.”

“No need to feel guilty. Our mission was successful.”

“You found something. What did you find?”

“He’s a spy all right.” Mark patted the pouch of his jumper, waggled his thick black eyebrows. “I’ll show you in a minute. First, we need a boat.”

There were several high-sided dinghies waiting at the jetty, rising and falling on the long, slow waves that rolled across the lake. Jack and Mark climbed into one, and Mark stuck something in a slot in the fat sensor rod that stuck up at the prow, told the boat that this was a police override, told it to follow the boat which had just left.

As the boat’s reaction motor pushed it towards the centre of the long, narrow lake, Jack said, “That’s how you got into his apartment, isn’t it? You overrode the lock.”

He was sitting in the stern, the plastic box with the mock turtle inside it on his knees.

Mark, standing at the prow, one hand on top of the sensor rod, glanced over his shoulder. “Of course I did.”

“I suppose you stole the card from one of your parents.”

“Sky made a copy of my mother’s card,” Mark said.

“If she finds out—”

“As long as I don’t get into trouble, she doesn’t care what I do. The Blob doesn’t care either. They’re too busy with their jobs, too busy advancing their careers, too busy making money,” Mark said. He had his back to Jack, but Jack could hear the bitterness in his voice. “Which is fine with me, because once they make enough, we’ll leave this rotten little ball of ice and go back to Earth.”

There was a short silence. Jack was embarrassed, feeling that he had had an unwanted glimpse through a crack in his his friend’s armor of careless toughness into his soul, had seen the angry resentment and loneliness there. At last, he said, “If we prove that Ahlgren Rees really is a spy, your parents will be proud of you.”

Mark turned around. “Oh, he’s a spy, all right. Guess what I found in his apartment.”

It was the kind of question you were bound to fail to answer correctly, so Jack just shrugged.

Mark smiled a devilish smile, reached into the pouch of his jumper, and drew out a small, silver gun.

Jack was shocked and excited at the same moment. He said, “Is it real?”

“Oh yes. And it’s charged too,” Mark said, pointing to a tiny green light that twinkled above the crosshatched grip.

He explained that it was a railgun that used a magnetic field to fire metal splinters tipped with explosive or toxin, or which sprouted hooks and knives after they hit their target, burrowing deep into flesh. He played campaigns based on the Quiet War on a wargaming network, knew all about the different ways the rebellious colonies had been pacified, and all about the guns and the various kinds of weapons used by both sides. Discovering the gun had not only confirmed his suspicions about Ahlgren Rees, but had made him bold and reckless too. He talked excitedly about catching the spy in the act of sabotage, about arresting him and whoever he was going to meet and making them talk.

Although Jack was excited too, it was plain that his friend was getting carried away. “This doesn’t change ours plan,” he said. “We follow the man and see what he gets up to, and then we decide what to do.”

Mark shrugged and said blithely, “We’ll see what we’ll see.”

“I mean that we don’t do anything dumb,” Jack said. “If he really is a spy, he’s dangerous.”

“If you’re scared, you can get off at any time.”

“Of course I’m not scared,” Jack said, even though he felt a freezing caution. “All I’m saying is that we have to be careful.”

The boat carrying Ahlgren Rees stopped three times, dropping people and picking up others, before it headed down a canal that ran through a long transparent tunnel between two chambers, Mark and Jack following two hundred meters behind it. The tunnel was laid along the edge of a steep cliff. It was the middle of Rhea’s night out there. Saturn hung full and huge overhead in the black sky like Ghod’s Christmas ornament, the razor-thin line of his rings cutting across his banded face, his smog-yellow light laid across terraced icefields below. Jack leaned back, lost in the intricate beauty of the gas giant’s yellow and dirty white and salmon pink bands, their frills and frozen waves, forgetting for the ten minutes it took to traverse the tunnel all about the gun in Mark’s pouch and following Ahlgren Rees.

At the end of the tunnel, the canal entered a lake with a rocky shoreline pinched between two steep slopes of flowering meadows and stands of trees and bamboos. There were no houses in this chamber, no workshops of markets, no gardens or farms. It was the city’s cemetery. Like all Outer colony cities, Xama recycled its dead. Bodies were buried in its cemetery chamber and trees planted over them, so that their freight of carbon and nitrogen and phosphorous and other useful elements could reenter the loop of the city’s ecosystem. It was a quiet, beautiful place, lit by the even golden light of a late summer afternoon. On one steep slope was the black pyramid, hewn from the crystalline iron of an asteroid, that marked the resting place of the people who had died in accidents during the construction of the old city; on the other was a slim white column topped by an eternal blue flame, the monument to the citizens of Xamba who had died in the Quiet War. For although the city had remained neutral during the war, more than a thousand of its citizens had died, almost all of them had been either passengers or crew on ships crippled when their nervous systems had been fried by neutron lasers, micro wave bursters, or EMP mines during the first hours of the invasion of the Saturn system. Otherwise, the woods and meadows seemed untouched by human hands, a tame wilderness where birds and cat-sized deer and teddy-bear-sized pandas roamed freely.

Ahlgren Rees and two women got off when the boat docked at a jetty of black wood with an red-painted Chinese arch at one end. The two women went off along the lakeshore; Ahlgren Rees started up a steep, bone-white path that wound past a grove of shaggy cypress trees.

Mark sprang out of the boat as soon as it nudged alongside the jetty and bounded through the Chinese gate and set off up the white path. Jack had to hurry to catch up with him. They slogged around the cypress grove, climbed alongside a tiny stream that ran over white rocks speckled with chunky black shards of shock quartz, and followed Alhgren Rees as he cut through a belt of pines. There was a lumpy heath of coarse tussock grass and purple heather and clumps of flowering gorse, rising in steep terraces to the place where the top of the slope met the edge of the chamber’s curved blue roof. The flame-topped white column of the monument to Xamba’s war dead stood halfway between the pines and the painted sky, and Ahlgren Rees stood in front of the column, his bald head bowed.

He stood there for more than fifteen minutes, still and obdurate as a statue. Crouched behind a pine tree, shoulder to shoulder with Mark, Jack was convinced that the herbalist really was waiting to meet another spy, that he and Mark really had stumbled over a conspiracy, that once they had learned enough they could turn their information over to the authorities. In excited whispers, he and Mark discussed what they’d do when Ahlgren Rees’s co-conspirator appeared, agreeing that they might have to split up and follow the men separately. But no one came. Big silver and gold butterflies tumbled over each other above a clump of gorse; one by one, rabbits hippity-hopped out of their burrows and began to nibble at the grass. At last, Ahlgren Rees turned from the monument and moved on up the slope, silhouetted against the solid blue sky for a moment when he reached the top, then dropping out of sight.

The rabbits scattered as Jack and Mark followed, making a bounding run up the rough slope, jinking from gorse clump to gorse clump. Mark quickly outpaced Jack, who still hadn’t quite mastered running in low gravity, waiting impatiently for him to catch up near the top of the slope, crouched amongst rocks spattered with orange lichens. There was a narrow stairway down to the floor of a long, narrow rock-sided gully. Ahlgren Rees was walking at his usual unhurried pace down the gully towards a steel door set in a wide frame painted with yellow and black warning chevrons—an airlock door.

“He’s going outside!” Mark said, and bounded down the stairs, the pistol flashing as he drew it, shouting a warning, telling the man to stop or he’d shoot.

By the time Jack reached them, Mark and Ahlgren Rees were standing a few yards apart, facing each other. Mark was pointing the pistol at Ahlgren Rees’s chest, but the stocky, bald-headed man was ignoring him, looking instead at Jack and saying mildly, “Tell your friend he has made a mistake.”

“Kneel down,” Mark said. He held the pistol in his right hand, was bracing his right wrist with his left hand. “Kneel down and put your hands on your head.”

Ahlgren Rees shook his head slightly. “I believe that is mine. How did you get it?”

“Just kneel down.”

“You broke into my apartment while your friend—” he looked at Jack again, who felt a blush heat his face “—kept me busy. What is this about? What silly game are you playing?”

“It’s no game,” Mark said. “We know you’re a spy.”

Ahlgren Rees laughed.

“Shut up!” Mark screamed it so loudly it echoed off the rough rock walls of the gully and the blue concrete sky that curved overhead.

Jack, clutching the plastic box to his chest, frightened that his friend would shoot Ahlgren Rees there and then, said, “You said you were meeting someone here.”

“Is that what this is about?” Ahlgren Rees said. “Yes, I visit someone. I visit her every Monday. Everyone knows that. Give me the pistol, son, before you get into trouble.”

“You’re a spy,” Mark said stubbornly. “Kneel down—”

There was a blur of movement, a rush of air. Mark was knocked into Jack, and they both fell down. Ahlgren Rees was standing a yard away, the pistol in his hand. He was sweating and trembling lightly all over, like a horse that has just run a race. He stared at the two boys, and Jack felt a spike of fear, thinking that he’d shoot him, shoot Mark, dump their bodies in some deep crevasse outside. But then the man tucked the pistol in the waistband of his green canvas trousers and said, “My nervous system was rewired when I was in the navy. A long time ago, but it still works. Go home, little boys. Go back to your brave new city. Never let me see you again, and I won’t tell anyone about this. Go!”

They picked themselves up, and ran.

On the boat-ride back, Mark blew off his nerves and shame by making all kinds of plans and boastful threats. He was scared and angry. He promised vengeance. He promised to find out the truth. He promised to bring the man to justice. He said that if Jack said so much as one word about this, he’d get into so much trouble he’d never find his way out again.

Jack kept quiet. He already knew that he was in a lot of trouble. Even if Ahldred Rees was a spy, there was nothing they could do about it because they were outside the law too. They’d broken into his apartment, stolen his gun and threatened him with it. Suppose Mariko and Davis found out. Suppose the police found out. It was a Mexican stand-off.

Jack spent the next week in a misery of fear and guilty anticipation. When his parents came home, he avoided them as much as he could, and refused their offer of a trip to the canyonlands to the north. If it had been possible, he would have caught the next ship back to Earth, leaving the whole horrible wretched incident behind him. As it was, he spent most of his time in his room, studying or half-heartedly fiddling with the virtual ecosystem he was constructing, or mooching around the apartment block’s mall.

That was where he met Sky Bolofo, and heard about Mark’s plan. Sky wanted to know what had made Mark so terminally pissed, and eventually got Jack to confess everything.

“Wow. You’re lucky the guy didn’t report you,” Sky said, when Jack was finished.

“Don’t I know it.”

They were sitting in the mall’s food court. The chatter of the people around them rose through the fronds of tall palms towards the glass dome. Sky studied Jack through his red-framed spex, and said, “Do you think he’ll really go through with it?”

“Go through with what? What has he been saying?”

That was when Jack learned that Mark was determined to prove that Ahlgren Rees was a spy, was determined to pay him back for the humiliating incident in the cemetery chamber. Jack tried to phone him, but Mark was blocking his calls, and wouldn’t answer his door when Jack went to his apartment. But by then Jack suspected what he was planning to do. Every Monday, Ahlgren Rees had a rendezvous with someone. They’d followed him to an airlock last Monday, which meant that it was probably somewhere outside the city . . .

Jack knew that he couldn’t tell either his parents or Mark’s about this. He was as guilty as Mark, and would get into as much trouble. He’d have to sort this out himself, and because Mark was refusing to talk to him he’d have to catch him in the act, stop him before he did something really dumb.

When he asked Sky to help him out, Sky refused at first, saying he’d heard what happened—Mark had been ranting to him too, he wanted nothing to do with it, thank you very much—but he quickly changed his mind when Jack told him that if Mark was caught, everything would come out, including the cloned override card. Sky had hacked into the apartment block’s CCTV system long ago, and told Jack he’d download the hack into Jack’s spex, and patch a face recognition program over it, so that Jack could use the CCTV system to follow Mark wherever he went in the public spaces of the big building. After Jack told him about what he thought Mark was going to do, Sky said that he’d add an AI that would alert Jack if Mark got anywhere near any of the apartment building’s airlocks.

“And that’s all I’m doing. And if anyone asks you where you got this stuff, tell them you made it yourself.”

“Absolutely,” Jack said. “I know all of this is my fault. If I hadn’t told him about the market, and the funny guy selling herbs—”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Sky said. “Mark would have got into trouble all by himself sooner or later. He’s bored, and he hates living here. It’s quite obvious that this whole thing, it’s a silly rebellion.”

“So do you,” Jack said. “But you didn’t break into someone’s apartment, and steal a gun.”

“I don’t care for the place and the people who live here,” Sky said, “but as long as I’m left alone to get on with my own thing it doesn’t matter. Mark though, he’s like a tiger in a cage. Be careful, Jack. Don’t let him get you into any more trouble.”

The AI woke Jack in the early hours of Monday morning. He’d worn his spex to bed. After he’d managed to shut off the alarm lay there in the dark, staring at a skewed view of Mark sitting in a dressing frame that was assembling a pressure suit around him, until he woke up enough to realize that this was it. That Mark really was going through with it.

The main airlock complex of the apartment building was an ancillary structure reached by a long slanting tunnel. By the time Jack reached it, Mark was long gone, but he remembered his training and after the dressing frame had fitted him with a pressure suit he carefully checked that its electronic systems and power and air reserves were fully functional before making his way through the three sets of doors.

The airlock opened onto a flat apron of dusty ice that, trodden everywhere with cleated bootprints, reminded Jack of the snow around the ski lifts at the mountain resort where he and his parents had several times gone on holiday. It was six in the morning by city time, but outside it was the middle of Rhea’s long day. Saturn’s slender crescent was cocked overhead, lassoed by the slender ellipse of his rings. The sun was a cold diamond, a hundred times less bright than it appeared from Earth. Its light gleamed on the swept-back tower of the apartment block and on the other towers of the new city and the great curve of the scarp behind them, shone wanly on the crests of the rumpled ridges of ice that stretched to the close horizon.

Ordinarily, Jack would have been transfixed by the alien beauty of the panorama, but he had a mission to accomplish. He tried and failed to pick up the radio transponder of Mark’s pressure suit—presumably Mark had switched it off—but that didn’t matter. Jack knew exactly where his friend was going. He crossed to the racks where the cycles were charging, and found every one occupied. Mark wasn’t qualified to use a pressure suit (he must have used the cloned override card to force the dressing frame to give him one) and either he didn’t know about the cycles, or he didn’t know the simple code which unlocked them.

They were three-wheeled, with fat diamond mesh tyres, a low-slung seat and a simple control yoke. Jack slid into one and set off along the road that headed towards the eastern end of the old city, feeling a blithe optimism. He was on a cycle and Mark was on foot. It was no contest.

But the road bent wide to the south, skirting the fans of ice-rubble and fallen boulders at the base of the huge cliff of the crater’s rimwall, and Jack quickly realized that someone on foot, taking a straight path instead of the road’s wide detour, would have far less distance to travel. To his left, the rumpled plain of the crater floor stretched away to the cluster of the central peaks; to his right, the lighted circles of the endwalls of the old city’s buried chambers glowed with green light in the face of the cliffs two miles away, like the portholes of a huge ocean liner.

After ten minutes, Jack spotted a twinkle of movement amongst the boulderfields at the foot of the cliffs. He stopped the cycle, used the magnification feature of his visor, and saw a figure in a white pressure suit bounding in huge strides amongst tumbled blocks of dirty ice as big as houses. He tried to hail his friend, but Mark must have switched off the suit’s phone as well as its transponder, so he drove the cycle off the roadway, intending to cut him off. At first the going was easy, with only a few outlying blocks to steer around, but then the ground began to rise up and down in concentric scarps like frozen waves, and the rubble fallen from the cliffs grew denser. Jack kept losing sight of Mark, spotting him only when he crested the tops of the scarps, and he piled on the speed in the broad depressions between them, anxious that he’d lose sight of his friend completely.

He was bowling alongside a row of boulders when the inky shadow ahead turned out to be hiding a narrow but deep crevice which trapped the cycle’s front wheel. The cycle slewed, Jack hit the brakes, everything tipped sideways, and then he was hanging by his safety harness, looking up at Saturn’s ringed crescent in the black sky. He managed to undo the harness’s four-way clasp and scramble free, and checked the integrity of the joints of his pressure suit before he heaved the cycle’s front tyre out of the crevice. Its mesh was badly flattened along one side, and the front fork was crumpled beyond repair: there was no way he could ride another yard.

Well, his suit was fine, he wasn’t injured, he had plenty of air and power, and if he got into trouble he could always phone for help. There was nothing for it. He was going to have to follow Mark on foot.

It took two hours hour to slog four miles across the rough terrain, clambering over piles of boulders, climbing down into the dips between scarps and climbing back out again, finding a way around jagged crevices. Sometimes he could see Mark’s pressure-suited figure slogging ahead of him, on Earth Jack could have shouted to him, but not even the sound of a nuclear bomb would carry in the vacuum here—but most of the time he had only his suit’s navigation system to guide him. He was drenched with sweat, his ankles and knees were aching, and he had just switched to his reserve air pack, when at last he reached the road that led to the airlock of the city’s cemetery, the place where he had guessed that Mark would lie in wait for Ahlgren Rees. He went slowly, moving between the rubble at the edge of the road, creeping from shadow to shadow, imagining the worst. Mark crouched behind a boulder with a gun he’d stolen from his mother or father, waiting for Ahlgren Rees . . .

But there was no need for caution. Mark’s white pressure suit was sprawled on the roadway, about two hundred yards from the airlock. Jack knew at once that something was wrong, adrenalin kicked in, and he reached the figure in three bounds. A red light flashed on the suit’s backpack; its oxygen supply was exhausted. Jack managed to roll it over. Behind the gold-filmed visor, Mark stared past him, eyes half-closed and unseeing, skin tinged blue.

Jack hit his suit’s distress beacon and began to drag Mark’s pressure-suited body towards the yellow-painted steel door of the airlock. He was halfway there when the door slid open and a figure in a pressure suit stepped out.

“You kids again,” Ahlgren Rees said over the phone link. “I swear you’ll be the death of me.”

Three days later, after the scary confusion when Jack and Ahlgren Rees had dragged Mark’s body inside the cemetery chamber and the medivac crew had arrived, after Jack had explained everything to Davis and Marika, after the visit to the hospital where Mark was recovering (when its oxygen supply had run dangerously low, his pressure suit had put him in a coma and cooled him down to keep him alive for as long as possible, but it had been a close run thing), Ahlgren Rees took him to see the place he visited each and every week.

There was a kind of ski lift that carried them half a mile up a sheer face of rock-hard black ice to the rim of the huge crater’s rimwall, and a path of steel mesh that followed the curve of a frozen ridge to a viewpoint that looked out across a cratered terrain. There was a steel pillar a yard high, with a plaque set into its angled top, and an induction loop that would play a message over the phone system if you pressed its red button, but Ahlgren Rees told Jack that there was no need to look at the plaque or use the loop because he wanted to explain why they had come here.

It was early in the morning and the brilliant star of the sun low on the horizon, throwing long tangled shadows across the glaring moonscape, but the long scar that Ahlgren Rees had brough Jack to see was clearly visible, still fresh after fifteen years, a gleaming sword cutting through shadows, aimed at the western horizon.

“Her name was Rosa Lux,” Ahlgren Rees told Jack. “She was flying a small freighter. One of those freelance ships that are not much bigger than tugs, mostly engine, a little cargo space, a cabin not much bigger than a coffin. She was carrying in her hold a special cargo—the mayor of the city of Camelot, on Mimas. He had been one of the architects of the rebellion that started the Quiet War. His city had fallen, and if he had reached Xamba he would have been granted political asylum. My job was to stop him. I was a singleship pilot then, part of the picket which orbited Rhea to prevent ships leaving or arriving during the aftermath of the war. When Rosa Lux’s freighter was detected, I was the only singleship in a position to intercept her, and even then I had to burn almost all my fuel to do it. She was a daring pilot and had came in very fast, skimming the surface of Rhea just a mile up and using its gravity to slow her so that she could enter into a long orbit and come into land when she made her second pass. That was what she was doing when my orbit intercepted hers. I had only one chance to stop her, and I made a mess of it. I fired two missiles. One missed by several miles and hit the surface; the other missed too, but only by a a few hundred yards, and it blew itself up as it zoomed past. It didn’t destroy her ship, but it damaged its main drive and changed her vector—her course. She was no longer heading for Xamba’s spaceport, but for the rimwall, and the city.

“I saw what she what she did then. I saw her fire her manouvering thrusters. I saw her dump fuel from her main tank. I saw her sacrifice herself so that she would miss the city. Everything happened in less than five seconds, and she barely missed the top of the rimwall, but miss it she did. And crashed there, and died. Rosa Lux had only five seconds to live, and she used that little time to save the lives of a hundred thousand people.

“The funny thing was, the mayor of Camelot survived. He was riding in the cargo section of the ship in a coffin filled with impact gel, cooled down much the same way your friend was cooled down. The cargo section pinwheeled across the landscape for two kilometres, but it survived more or less intact. After the mayor was revived, he claimed asylum. He still lives in Xamba. He married a local woman, and runs the city’s library.”

There was a silence. Jack watched the scar shine in the new sunlight, waiting for Ahlgen Rees to finish his story. He was certain that there would be a moral; it was the kind of story that always had a moral. But Ahlgren Rees showed no sign of speaking, and at last Jack asked him why he’d come to Rhea.

“After the war, I went back to Greater Brazil. I left the navy and trained as a paramedic, and got on with my life. My children grew up, and then my wife died. I decided to make a last visit to the place where the most intense and most important thing in my life had happened, and bought a roundtrip ticket. And when I got here, I fell in love with someone. You have met her, actually.”

“The woman who owns the café!”

“We were in love, and then we fell out of love, but by that time I had begun a new life here, and I stayed on. But what brought me here to begin with was a chance encounter with another woman—the bravest person I know about. A single moment, a chance encounter, can change everything. Perhaps you’re too young to know it, but I think it’s happened to you, too.”

Jack thought about this, thought about all that had happened in the past week, and realized that his new friend was right.

Originally published in The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

The Art of Alchemy

Ted Kosmatka

Sometimes when I came over, Veronica would already be naked. I’d find her spread out on a lawn chair behind the fence of her townhome, several sinewy yards of black skin visible to second story windows across the park. She’d scissor her long legs, raising a languid eyelid.

“You have too many clothes on,” she’d say.

And I’d sit. Run a hand along smooth, dark curves. Curl pale fingers into hers.

The story of Veronica is the story of this place. These steel mills, and the dying little city-states around them, have become a part of it somehow—Northwest Indiana like some bizarre, composite landscape we’ve all consented to believe in. Cornfields and slums and rich, gated communities. National parkland and industrial sprawl.

It is a place of impossible contrasts.

Let it stand for the rest of the country. Let it stand for everything.

On cold days, the blast furnaces assemble huge masses of white smoke across the Lake Michigan shoreline. You can still see it mornings, driving I90 on the way to work—a broad cumulous mountain range billowing from the northern horizon, like we are an alpine community, nestled beneath shifting peaks.

Veronica was twenty-five when we met—just a few years younger than me. She was brilliant, and beautiful, and broken. Her townhome sat behind gates on the expensive side of Ridge Road and cost more than I made in five years. Her neighbors were doctors and lawyers. From the courtyard where she lay naked, you could see a church steeple, the beautiful, dull green of oxidized copper, rising over distant rooftops.

The story of Veronica is also the story of boundaries. And that’s what I think about most when I think of her now. The exact line where one thing becomes another. The exact point where an edge becomes sharp enough to cut you.

We might have been talking about her work. Or maybe she was just making conversation, trying to cover her nervousness; I don’t remember. But I remember the rain and the hum of her BMW’s engine. And I remember her saying, as she took the Randolph Street exit, “His name is Voicheck.”

“Is that his first name, or last?”

“It’s the only one he gave me.”

We took Randolph down to the loop, and the Chicago skyline reared up at us. Veronica knew the up-town streets. The restaurant on Dearborne had been her choice of location—a nice $60 a plate Kazuto bar that stayed open till two a.m. Trendy, clubby, dark. Big-name suppliers sometimes brought her there for business dinners, if they were also trying to sleep with her. It was the kind of place wealthy people went to get drunk with other wealthy people.

“He claims he’s from Poland,” she said. “But the accent isn’t quite right. More Baltic than Slavic.”

I wondered at that. At how she knew the difference.

“Where’s he based out of?” I asked.

“Ukraine, formerly, but he sure as hell can’t go back now. Had a long list of former this, former that. Different think tanks and research labs. Lots of burned bridges.”

“Is he the guy, or just the contact?”

“He’s playing like the guy, but I don’t know.”

She hit her signal and made a left. The rain came down harder, Chicago slick-bright with streetlights and traffic. Green lions on the right, and at some point, we crossed the river.

“Is he bringing it with him?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But he said he was actually bringing it?”

“Yeah.” She looked at me. “He said.”

“Jesus.”

Her face wore a strange expression in the red glow of dashboard light. It took me a moment to place it. Then it hit me; in the year and a half I’d known her, this was the first time I’d ever seen her scared.

I first met her at the lab. I say “lab” and people imagine white walls and sterile test tubes, but it’s not like that. It’s mostly math I do, and something close to metallurgy. All of it behind glass security walls. I check my work with a scanning electron microscope, noting crystalline lattices and surface structure micro-abrasions.

She walked through the door behind Hal, the lab’s senior supervisor.

“This is the memory metals lab,” Hal told her, gesturing as he entered.

The girl nodded. She was young and slender, smooth dark skin, a face that seemed, at first glance, to be more mouth than it should. That was my initial impression of her—some pretty new-hire the bosses were showing around. That’s it. And then she was past me, following the supervisor deeper into the lab. At the time, I had no idea.

I heard the supervisor’s voice drone on as he showed her the temper ovens and the gas chromatograph in the next room. When they returned, the super was following her.

I looked up from the lab bench and she was staring at me. “So you’re the genius,” she said.

That was the first time she pointed it at me. The look. The way she could look at you with those big dark eyes, and you could almost see the gears moving—her full mouth pulled into a sensuous smile that wanted to be more than it was. A smile like she knew something you didn’t.

There were a dozen things I could have said, but the nuclear wind behind those eyes blasted my words away until all that was left was a sad kind of truth. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s me.”

She turned to the supervisor. “Thank you for your time.”

Hal nodded and left. It took me a moment to realize what had just happened. The laboratory supervisor—my direct boss—had been dismissed.

“Tell me,” she said. “What do you do here?”

I paused for three seconds before I spoke, letting myself process the seismic shift. Then I explained it.

She smiled while I talked. I’d done it for an audience a dozen times, these little performances. It was practically a part of my job description since the last corporate merger made Uspar-Nagoi the largest steel company in the world. I’d worked for three different corporations in the last two years and hadn’t changed offices once. The mill guys called them white-hats, these management teams that flew in to tour the facilities, shaking hands, smiling under their spotless white hardhats, attempting to fit their immediate surroundings into the flowchart of the company’s latest international acquisitions. Research was a prime target for the tours, but here in the lab, they were harder to spot—just another suit come walking through. It was hard to know who you were talking to, really. But two things were certain. The management types were usually older than the girl standing in front of me. And they’d always, up till now, been male.

But I explained it like I always did. Or maybe I put a little extra spin on it; maybe I showed off. I don’t know. “Nickel-titanium alloys,” I said. I opened the desiccator and pulled out a small strip of steel. It was long and narrow, cut into almost the exact dimensions of a ruler.

“First you take the steel,” I told her, holding out the dull strip of metal. “And you heat it.” I lit the Bunsen burner and held the steel over the open flame. Nothing happened for ten, twenty seconds. She watched me. I imagined what I must look like to her at that moment—blue eyes trained on the warming steel, short brown hair jutting at wild angles around the safety goggles I wore on my forehead. Just another technophile lost in his obsession. It was a type. Flame licked the edges of the dull metal.

Then all at once, the metal moved.

It contracted muscularly, like a living thing, twisting itself into a ribbon, a curl, a spring.

“It’s caused by micro- and nano-scale surface restructuring,” I told her. “The change in shape results from phase transformations. Martensite when cool; austenite when heated. The steel remembers its earlier configurations. The different phases want to be in different shapes.”

“Memory metal,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see this. What applications does it have?”

The steel continued to flex, winding itself tighter. “Medical, structural, automotive. You name it.”

“Medical?”

“For broken bones. The shape memory alloy has a transition temp near body temp. You attach a plate to the break site, and body heat causes the alloy to contract, thereby creating a compressive force on the bone at both ends of the fracture.”

“Interesting.”

“They’re also investigating the alloy’s use in heart stents. A cool-crushed alloy tube can be inserted into narrow arteries where it’ll expand and open once it’s heated to blood temperature.”

“You mentioned automotive.”

I nodded. Automotive. The big money. “Imagine that you’ve put a small dent in your fender,” I said. “Instead of taking it to the shop, you pull out your hairdryer. The steel pops right back in shape.”

She stayed at the lab for another hour, asking intelligent questions, watching the steel cool and straighten itself. Before she left, she shook my hand politely and thanked me for my time. She never once told me her name. I watched the door close behind her as she left.

Two weeks later she was back. This time, without Hal.

She drifted into the lab like a ghost near the end of my shift.

In the two weeks since I’d seen her, I’d learned a little about her. I’d learned her name, and that her corporate hat wasn’t just management; but upper management. She had an engineering degree from out east, then Ivy League grad school by age twenty. She gave reports to men who ran a corporate economy larger than most countries. She was somebody’s golden-child, fast-tracked to the upper circles. The company based her out of the East Chicago regional headquarters but occasionally flew her to Korea, India, South Africa, to the latest corporate takeovers and the steady flow of new facilities that needed integration. She was an organizational savant, a voice in the ear of the global acquisition market. The transglobals had long since stopped pretending they were about actually making things; it was so much more Darwinian than that now. The big fish ate the little fish, and Uspar-Nagoi, by anyone’s standards, was a whale. You grow fast enough, long enough, and pretty soon you need an army of gifted people to understand what you own, and how it all fits together. She was part of that army.

“So what else have you been working on?” she asked.

When I heard her voice, I turned. Veronica: her smooth, pretty face utterly emotionless, the smile gone from her full mouth.

“Okay,” I said. And this time I showed her my real tricks. I showed her what I could really do. Because she’d asked.

Martensite like art. A gentle flame—a slow, smooth origami unfolding.

We watched it together. Metal and fire, a thing I’d never shown anyone before.

“This is beautiful,” she said.

I showed her the butterfly, my little golem—its only movement a slow flexing of its delicate steel wings as it passed through phase changes.

“You made this?”

I nodded. “There are no mechanical parts,” I told her. “Just a single solid sheet of steel.”

“It’s like magic,” she said. She touched it with a slender index finger.

“Just science,” I said. “Sufficiently advanced.”

We watched the butterfly cool, wings flapping slowly. Finally, it began folding in on itself, cocooning, the true miracle. “The breakthrough was micro-degree shifting,” I said. “It gives you more design control.”

“Why this design?”

I shrugged. “You heat it slow, an ambient rise, and it turns into a butterfly.”

“What happens if you heat it fast?”

I looked at her. “It turns into a dragon.”

That night at her townhome, she took her clothes off slow—her mouth prehensile and searching. Although I was half a head taller, I found her legs were as long as mine. Strong, lean runner’s legs, calf muscles bunched high like fists. Afterward we lay on her dark sheets, a distant streetlight filtering through the blinds, drawing a pattern on the wall.

“Are you going to stay the night?” she asked.

“Do you want me to?”

She was silent for a moment. “Yeah, I want you to.”

“Then I’ll stay.”

The ceiling fan above her bed hummed softly, circulating the air, cooling the sweat on my bare skin.

“I’ve been doing research on you for the last week,” she said. “On what you do.”

“Checking up on me?”

She ignored the question and draped a slick arm across my shoulder. “Nagoi has labs in Asia running parallel to yours. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“From years before the Uspar merger. Smart alloys with chemical triggers instead of heat; and stranger things, too. A special copper-aluminum-nickel alloy that’s supposed to be triggered by remote frequency. Hit a button on a transmitter, and you get phase change by some kind of resonance. I didn’t understand most of it. More of your magic steel.”

“Not magic,” I said.

“Modern chemistry grew out of the art of alchemy. At what point does it start being alchemy again?”

“It’s always been alchemy, at the heart of it. We’re just getting better at it now.”

“I should tell you,” she said, curling her fingers into my hair. “I don’t believe in interracial relationships.” That was the first time she said it—a thing she’d repeat often during the next year and a half, usually when we were in bed.

“You don’t believe in them?”

“No,” she said.

In the darkness she was a silhouette, a complication of shadows against the window light. She wasn’t looking at me, but at the ceiling. I studied her profile—the rounded forehead, the curve of her jaw, the placement of her mouth, positioned not just between her nose and lips, but also forward of them, as if something in the architecture of her face were straining outward. She wore a steel-gray necklace, Uspar-Nagoi logo glinting between the dark curve of her full breasts. I traced her bottom lip with my finger.

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“How’s that?’

“I’ve seen them. They exist.”

I closed my eyes and slept.

The rain was still coming down, building puddles across the Chicago streets. We pulled onto Dearborne and parked the car in a twenty-dollar lot. Veronica squeezed my hand as we walked toward the restaurant.

Voicheck was standing near the door; you couldn’t miss him. Younger than I expected—pale and broad-faced, with a shaved head, dark glasses. He stood outside the restaurant, bare arms folded in front of his chest. He looked more like a bouncer than a scientist.

“You must be Voicheck,” Veronica said, extending her hand.

He hesitated for a moment. “I didn’t expect you to be black.”

She accepted this with only a slight narrowing of her eyes. “Certain people never do. This is my associate, John.”

I nodded and shook his hand, thinking, Typical Eastern European lack of tact. It wasn’t racism. It was just that people didn’t come to this country knowing what not to say; they didn’t understand the racial context. On the floor of the East Chicago steel plant, I’d once had a Russian researcher ask me, loudly, how I could tell the Mexican workers from the Puerto Ricans. He was honestly curious. “You don’t,” I told him. “Ever.”

A hostess walked us down dark carpet, past rows of potted bamboo, and seated us at a table near the back. The waitress brought us our drinks. Voicheck took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The lenses were prescription, I noticed. Over the last decade, surgery had become so cheap and easy in the States that glasses had become rare. Only anachronists and foreigners wore glasses anymore. Voicheck took a long swig of his Goose Island and got right to the point. “We need to discuss price.”

Veronica shook her head. “First, we need to know how it is made.”

“That information is what you’ll be paying for.” His accent was thick, but he spoke slowly enough to be understood. He opened his hand and showed us a small, gray flash drive, the kind you’d pay thirty dollars for at Best Buy. His fingers curled back into a fist. “This is data you’ll understand.”

“And you?” Veronica asked.

He smiled. “I understand enough to know what it is worth.”

“Where is it from?”

“Donets’k, originally. After that, Chisinau laboratory, until about two years ago. Now the work is owned by a publicly traded company which shall, for the time being, remain nameless. The work is top secret. Only a few people at the company even know about the breakthrough. I have all the files saved. Now we discuss price.”

Veronica was silent. She knew better than to make the first offer.

Voicheck let the silence draw out. “One hundred thirteen thousand,” he said.

“That’s a pretty exact number,” Veronica said.

“Because that’s exactly twice what I’ll entertain as a first counter offer.”

Veronica blinked. “So you’ll take half that?”

“You offer fifty-six thousand five hundred? My answer is no, I am sorry. But here is where I rub my chin; and because I’m feeling generous, I tell you we can split the difference. We are negotiating, no? Then one of us does the math, and it comes out to eighty-five thousand. Is that number round enough for you?”

“I liked the fifty-six thousand better.”

“Eighty-five minimum.”

“That is too much.”

“What, I should let you steal from me? You talked me down from one hundred thirteen already. I can go no further.”

“There’s no way we—”

Voicheck held up his hand. “Eighty-five in three days.”

“I don’t know if we can get it in three days.”

“If no, then I disappear. It is simple.”

Veronica glanced at me.

I spoke for the first time. “How do we even know what we’d be paying for? You expect us to pay eighty-five grand for what’s on some flash drive?”

Voicheck looked at me and frowned. “No, of course not.” He opened his other fist. “For this, too.” He dropped something on the table. Something that looked like a small red wire.

“People have died for this.” He gestured toward the red wire. “You may pick it up.”

I looked closely. It wasn’t one wire; it was two. Two rubber-coated wires, like what you’d find behind a residential light switch. He noticed our confusion.

“The coating is for protection and to make it visible,” he said.

“Why does it need protection?”

“Not it. You. The coating protects you.”

Veronica stood and looked at me. “Let’s go. He’s been wasting our time.”

“No, wait,” he said. “Look.” He picked up one of the wires. He lifted it delicately by one end—and the other wire lifted, too, rising from the table’s surface like some magician’s illusion.

I saw then that I’d been wrong; it was not two wires after all, but one.

“The coating was stripped from ten centimeters in the middle,” Voicheck said. “So you could see what was underneath.”

But in the dim light, there was nothing to see. I bent close. Nothing at all. In the spot where the coating had been removed, the strand inside was so fine that it lacked a cross-section. There was only the hint of something—a thing that might or might not be there, at the very edge of perception.

“What is it?” I asked.

“An allotrope of carbon, Fullerene structural family. You take it,” he said. “Do tests to confirm. But remember, is just a neat toy without this.” He held out the flash drive. “This explains how the carbon nanotubes are manufactured. How they can be woven into sheets, what lab is developing the technique, and more.”

I stared at him. “The longest carbon nanotubes anybody has been able to make are just over a centimeter.”

“Until now,” he said. “Now they can be miles. In three days you come back. You give me the eighty-five thousand, I give you the data and information about where the graphene rope is being developed.”

Veronica picked up the wire. “All right,” she said. “Three days.”

Iron and fire and dark, cool water. The mills jut for miles out into the lake, black structures built on mounds of slag.

My father had been a steelworker, as had his father before him. And now I, too, work in steel. My great-grandfather, though, had been here before the mills. He’d been a builder. He was here when the Lake Michigan shoreline was unbroken sand from Illinois to St. Joseph. He’d built Bailey Cemetery around the turn of the century—a great stone mausoleum in which some of the area’s earliest settlers were buried. Tourists visit the place now. It’s on some list of historic sites, and once a summer, I take my sister’s daughters to see it, careful to pick up the brochure.

There is a street in Porter named after him, my great-grandfather. Not because he was important, but because he was the only person who lived there. It was the road to his house, so they gave it his name. Now bi-levels crowd the street. He was here before the cities, before the kingdoms of rust and fire. Before the mills came and ate the beaches.

I try to imagine what this part of Indiana must have looked like then. Woods, and wetlands, and rolling dunes. It must have been beautiful.

Sometimes I walk out to the pier at night and watch the ore boats swing through the darkness. From the water, the mill looks like any city. Any huge, sprawling city. You can see the glow of a thousand lights; you hear the trains and the rumble of heavy machines. Then the blast furnace taps a heat, a false-dawn glow of red and orange—flames making dragon’s fire on the rolling Lake Michigan waves, lighting up the darkness like hell itself.

The drive back to Indiana was quiet. The rain had stopped. We drove with the windows half-open, letting the wind flutter in, both of us lost in thought.

The strand—that’s what we’d call it later—was tucked safely into her purse.

“Do you think it’s for real?” she asked.

“We’ll know tomorrow.”

“You can do the testing at your lab?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Do you think he is who he says he is?”

“No, he’s not even trying.”

“He called it a graphene rope, which isn’t quite right.”

“So?” I said.

“Clusters of the tubes do naturally aggregate into ropes linked together by Van der Waals forces. It’s the kind of slip only somebody familiar with the theory would make.”

“So he’s more familiar with it than he lets on?”

“Maybe, but there’s no way to know,” she said.

The next day I waited until the other researchers had gone home, and then I took the strand out of my briefcase and laid it on the lab bench. I locked the door to the materials testing lab and energized the tensile machine. The fluorescent lights flickered. It was a small thing, the strand. It seemed insignificant as it rested there on the bench. A scrap of insulated wiring from an electrician’s tool box. Yet it was a pivot point around which the world would change, if it was what it was supposed to be. If it was what it was supposed to be, the world had changed already. We were just finding out about it.

The testing took most of the night. When I finished, I walked back to my office and opened a bottle I kept in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. I sat and sipped.

It’s warm in my office. My office is a small cubby in the back room of the lab, a thrown-together thing made by wall dividers and shelves. It’s an office because my desk and computer sit there. Otherwise it might be confused with a closet or small storage room. File cabinets line one side. There are no windows. To my left, a hundred sticky notes feather the wall. The other wall is metal, white, magnetic. A dozen refrigerator magnets hold calendars, pictures, papers. There is a copy of the lab’s phone directory, a copy of the lab’s quality policy, and a sheet of paper on which the geometry of crystal systems is described. The R&D directory of services is there, held to the wall by a magnetic clip. All the phone numbers I might need. A picture of my sister, blonde, unsmiling, caught in the act of speaking to me over a paper plate of fried chicken, the photo taken at a summer party three years ago. There is an Oxford Instruments periodic table. There’s also a picture of a sailboat. Blue waves. And a picture of the Uspar-Nagoi global headquarters, based out of London.

Veronica finally showed up a few minutes past midnight. I was watching the butterfly as she walked through the door.

“Well?” she asked.

“I couldn’t break it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I couldn’t get a tensile strength because I couldn’t get it to fail. Without failure, there’s no result.”

“What about the other tests?”

“It took more than 32,000 pounds per square inch without shearing. It endured 800 degrees Fahrenheit without a measurable loss of strength or conductivity. Transmission electron microscopy allowed for direct visualization. I took these pictures.” I handed her the stack of printed sheets. She went through them one by one.

Veronica blinked. She sat. “What does this mean?”

“It means that I think they’ve done it,” I said. “Under impossibly high pressures, nanotubes can link, or so the theory holds. Carbon bonding is described by quantum chemistry orbital hybridization, and they’ve swapped some sp2 bonds for the sp3 bonds of diamond.”

She looked almost sad. She kissed me. The kiss was sad. “What are its uses?”

“Everything. Literally, almost everything. A great many things steel can do, these carbon nanotubes will do better. It’s super-light and super-strong, perfect for aircraft. This material moves the fabled space elevator into the realm of possibility.”

“There’d still be a lot of R&D necessary—”

“Yes, of course, it will be years down the road, but eventually the sky’s the limit. There’s no telling what this material will do, if it’s manufactured right. It could be used for everything from suspension bridges to spacecraft. It could open our way to the stars. We’re at the edge of a revolution.”

I looked down at the strand. After a long time, I finally said what had been bothering me for the last sixteen hours. “But why did Voicheck come to you?” I said. “Of all places, why bring this to a steel company?”

She looked at me. “If you invent an engine that runs on water, why offer it to an oil company?” She picked up the strand. “Only one reason to do that, John.”

She glanced down at the red wire in her hand. “Because the oil company is certain to buy it.”

That night we drank. I stood at the window on the second story of her townhome and looked out at her quiet neighborhood, watching the expensive cars roll by on Ridge Road. The Ridge Road which neatly bisects Lake County. Land on the south, higher; the land to the north, low, easing toward urban sprawl, and the marshes, and Lake Michigan. That long, low ridge of land on which the road was built represented the glacial maxim—the exact line where the glacier stopped during the last ice age, pushing all that dirt and stone in front of it like a plow, before it melted and receded and became the Great Lakes—and thousands of years later, road builders would stand on that ridge and think to themselves how easy it would be to follow the natural curve of the land; and so they built what they came to build and called it the only name that would fit: Ridge Road. The exact line, in the region, where one thing became another.

I wrapped the naked strand around my finger, watching the bright red blood well up from where it contacted my skin—because in addition to being strong and thin, the strand had the property of being sharp. For the tests, I’d stripped away most of the rubber coating, leaving only a few inches of insulation at the ends. The rest was exposed strand. Nearly invisible.

“You cut yourself,” Veronica said. She parted her full lips and drew my finger into her mouth.

The first time I’d told her I loved her, it was an accident. In bed, half asleep, I’d said it. Good night, I love you. A thing that was out of my mouth before I even realized it—a habit from an old relationship come rising up out of me, the way every old relationship lives just under the skin of every new one. All the promises. All the possibilities. Right there under the skin. I’d felt her stiffen beside me, and an hour later, she nudged me awake. She was sitting up, arms folded across her bare breasts, as defensive as I’d ever seen her. I realized she hadn’t slept at all. “I heard what you said.” There was anger in her voice, and whole complex layers of pain.

But I denied it. “You’re hearing things.”

Though of course it was true. What I’d said. Even if saying it was an accident. It had been true for a while.

The night after I tested the strand, I lay in bed and watched her breathing, blankets kicked to the floor. Light through the window glinted off her necklace, a thin herringbone pattern—some shiny new steel, Uspar-Nagoi emblem across her beautiful dark skin. I caressed the herringbone plate with my finger, such an odd interlinking of metal.

“They gave this to you?”

She fingered the necklace, still half awake. “They gave one to all of us,” she said. “Management perk. Supposed to be worth a mint.”

“The logo ruins it,” I said. “Like a tag.”

“Everything is tagged, one way or another,” she said. “I met him once.”

“Who?”

“The name on the necklace.”

“Nagoi? You met him?”

“At a facility in Brussels. He came through with his group. Shook my hand. He was taller than I thought, but his handshake was this flaccid, aqueous thing, straight fingered, like a flipper. It was obvious he loathed the Western tradition. I was prepared to like him, prepared to be impressed, or to find him merely ordinary.”

She was silent for so long I thought she might have fallen asleep. “I’ve never been one of those people who judged a person by their handshake,” she said. “But still . . . I can’t remember a handshake that gave me the creeps like that. They paid sixty-six billion for the Uspar acquisition. Can you imagine that much money? That many employees? That much power? When his daughter went through her divorce, the company stock dropped by two percent. His daughter’s divorce did that. Can you believe that? Do you know how much two percent is?”

“A lot.”

“They have billions invested in infrastructure alone. More in hard assets and research facilities, not to mention the mills themselves. Those assets are quantifiable and linked to actuarial tables that translate into real dollars. Real dollars which can be used to leverage more takeovers, and the monster keeps growing. If Nagoi’s daughter’s divorce dipped the share price by two percent, what do you think would happen if a new carbon-product competitor came to market?”

I ran a finger along her necklace. “You think they’ll try to stop it?”

“Nagoi’s money is in steel. If a legitimate alternative reached market, then each mill, each asset all across the world, would suddenly be worth less. Billions of dollars would blink out of existence.”

“So what happens?”

“We get the data. I write my report. I give my presentation. The board suddenly gets interested in buying a certain company in Europe that just happens to be working in carbon research. If they won’t sell, Uspar-Nagoi buys all the stock and owns them anyway. Then shuts them down.”

“Suppression won’t work. The Luddites never win in the long run.”

She smiled. “The three richest men in the world have as much money as the poorest forty-nine nations,” she said. “Combined.”

I watched her face.

She continued. “The yearly gross product of the planet is something like fifty-five trillion dollars, and yet there are millions of people who are still trying to live on less than three dollars a day. You trust business to do the right thing?”

“No, but I trust the market. A better product will always find its way to the consumer. Even Uspar-Nagoi can’t stop that.”

“You only say that because you don’t understand how it really works. That might have been true a long time ago. The Uspar-Nagoi board does hostile takeovers for a living, and they’re not going to release a technology that will devalue their core assets.”

Veronica was silent.

“Why did you get into steel?” I asked. “What brought you here?”

“Money,” she said. “Just money.”

“Then why haven’t you told your bosses about Voicheck?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going to tell them?”

She was silent.

“Are you going to tell them?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think I am.”

There was a long pause.

“What are you going to do?”

“Buy it,” she said. “Buy the data.”

“And then what? After you’ve bought it.”

“After I’ve bought it, I’m going to post it on the internet.”

The drive to meet Voicheck seemed to take forever. The traffic was stop and go until we reached Halsted, and it took us nearly an hour to reach downtown Chicago.

We parked in the same twenty-dollar lot and Veronica squeezed my hand again as we walked toward the restaurant.

But this time, Voicheck wasn’t standing outside looking like a bouncer. He wasn’t looking like anything, because he wasn’t there. We waited a few minutes and went inside. We asked for the same table. We didn’t speak. There was no reason to speak.

After a few moments, a man in a suit came and sat. He was a gray man in a gray suit. He wore black leather gloves. He was in his fifties, but he was in his fifties the way certain breeds of athletes enter their fifties—broad, and solid, and blocky-shouldered. He had a lantern jaw and thin, sandy hair receding from a broad forehead. The waitress came and asked if he needed anything to drink.

“Yes, please,” the man said. “Bourbon. And oh, for my friends here, a Bailey’s for him, and what was it?” He looked at Veronica. “A Coke, right?”

Veronica didn’t respond. The man’s accent was British.

“A Coke,” the man told the waitress. “Thank you.”

He smiled and turned toward us. “Did you know that bourbon was the official spirit of the U.S. by act of Congress?”

We were silent.

“That’s why I always used to make a point of drinking it when I came to the States. I wanted to enjoy the authentic American experience. I wanted to drink bourbon like American’s drink bourbon. But then I discovered an unsettling secret in my travels.” The man took something from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and set it on the table. Glasses. Voicheck’s glasses, one of the prescription lenses shattered.

The man caressed the bent frames with his finger. “I discovered that American’s don’t really drink bourbon. A great many American’s have never so much as tasted it. So then why is it the official spirit of your country?”

We had no opinion. We were without opinion.

“Would you like to hear what I think?” The man asked. He bent close and spoke low across the table. “I’ve developed a theory. I think it was a lie all along. I think someone in your Congress probably had his hand in the bourbon business all those years ago, and sales were flagging; so they came up with the idea to make bourbon the official spirit of the country as a way to line their own pockets. Would you like to hear something else I discovered in my travels? No? Well, I’ll tell you anyway. I discovered that I don’t care much, one way or the other. I discovered that I like bourbon. And I feel like I’m drinking the most American drink of them all, because your Congress said so, lie or not. The ability to believe a lie can be an important talent. You’re probably wondering who I am.”

“No,” Veronica said.

“Good, then you’re smart enough to realize it doesn’t matter. You’re smart enough to realize that if I’m here, it means that your friend isn’t coming back.”

“Where is he?” Veronica asked.

“I can’t say, but rest assured that wherever he is, he sends his regrets.”

“Are you here for the money?”

“The money? I couldn’t care less about your money.”

“Where’s the flash drive?” Veronica asked.

“You mean this?” The man held the gray flash drive between leathered finger and thumb, then returned it to the breast pocket of his neat gray suit. “This is the closest you’re going to get to it, I’m afraid. Your friend seemed to think it belonged to him. I disabused him of that misconception.”

“What do you want?” Veronica asked.

“I want what everyone wants, my dear. But what I’m here for today—what I’m being paid to do—is to tie up some loose ends. You can help me.”

Silence.

“Where is the strand?” he asked.

“He never gave it to us.”

The man’s gray eyes looked pained. Like a father with a wayward child. “I’m disappointed,” he said. “I thought we were developing some trust here. Do you know what loyalty is?”

“Yes.”

“No, I don’t think you do. Loyalty to your company. Loyalty to the cause. You have shown that you have no loyalty at all. You had some very important people who looked after you, Veronica. You had some important friends.”

“You’re from Uspar-Nagoi?”

“Who did you think?”

“I . . . “

“You have embarrassed certain people who have invested their trust in you. You have embarrassed some very important people.”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

“In my experience, it never is.” He spread his hands. “Yet here we are. What were you planning on doing with the data once you obtained it?”

Veronica was silent for a moment, then, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The pain returned to the man’s eyes. He shook his head sadly. “I’m going to ask you a question in a moment. If you lie to me again, I promise you.” He leaned forward. “I promise you that I will make you regret it. Do you believe that?”

Veronica nodded.

“Good. Do you have the strand with you?”

“No.”

“Then this is what is going to happen now,” he said. “We’re going to leave. We’re going to drive to where the strand is, and you’re going to give it to me.”

“If I did have it somewhere, and if I did give it to you, what happens then?”

“Probably you’ll have to look for another job. I can’t say for sure.” He leaned back in his chair, taking on a pleasant expression again. “That’s between you and your company. I’m just here to obtain the strand.”

The man stood. He laid a hundred-dollar bill on the table and grabbed Veronica’s arm. The way he grabbed her arm, he could have been a prom date—just a gentleman walking his lady out the door. Only I could see his fingers dug deep into her flesh.

I followed them out. Walking behind them. When we got near the front door, I picked up one of the trendy bamboo pots and brought it down on the man’s head with everything I had.

The crash was shocking. Every head in the restaurant swiveled toward us. I bent and fished the flash drive from his breast pocket. “Run,” I told her.

We hit the night air sprinting.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she screamed.

“Voicheck is dead,” I told her. “We were next.”

Veronica climbed behind the wheel and sped out of the parking lot just as the gray man stumbled out the front door of the restaurant.

The BMW was fast. Faster than anything I would have suspected. Veronica drove with the pedal to the floor, weaving in and out of traffic. Pools of light ticked past.

“They’ll still come after us,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We have to stay ahead of them.”

“How do we do that? Where do we go?”

“We get through tonight, and then we worry about the rest.”

“We can hop a flight somewhere.”

“No, what happens tonight decides everything. That strand is our only insurance. Without the strand, we’re dead.”

Her hands tightened on the steering wheel.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“I left it at the house.”

Veronica kept the accelerator floored. “I’m sorry I got you into this,” she said.

“Don’t be.”

We were almost to her house when Veronica’s forehead creased. She took the turn onto Ridge, frowning. She looked confused for a second, then surprised. Her hand went to her neck. It happened so quickly.

I had time to notice her necklace, gone flat-gray. There was an instant of recognition in her eyes before the alloy phase-changed—an instant of panic, and then the necklace shifted, writhed, herringbone plate tightening like razor wire. She gasped and let go of the wheel, clutching at her throat. I grabbed the wheel with one hand, trying to grab her necklace with the other. But already it was gone, tightened through her skin, blood spilling from her jugulars as she shrieked. Then even her shrieks changed, gurgling, as the blade cut through her voice box.

I screamed and the car spun out of control. The sound of squealing tires, and we hit the curb hard, sideways—the crunch of metal and glass, world trading places with black sky, rolling three times before coming to a stop.

Sirens. The creak of a spinning wheel. I looked over, and Veronica was dead. Dead. That look, gone forever—gears in her eyes gone silent and still. The Uspar-Nagoi logo slid from her wound as the necklace phase changed again, expanding to its original size. I thought of labs in Asia and parallel projects, Veronica saying, They gave one to all of us.

I climbed out of the wreck and stood swaying. The sirens closer now. I sprinted the remaining few blocks to her house.

When I got to her front door, I tried the knob. Locked. I stood, panting. When I caught my breath, I kicked the door in. I walked inside, up the stairs. The strand was in Veronica’s jewelry box on her dresser. I glanced around the room; it was the last time I’d stand there, I knew, the last time I’d be in her bedroom. I saw the four-poster bed where we’d lain so often, and the grief came down on me like a freight train. I did my best to push it away. Later, I thought. Later, I’d deal with it. When there was time. I closed my eyes and saw Veronica’s face.

Coming back down the stairs, I stopped. The front door was closed. I didn’t remember closing it.

I stood silent, listening.

The first blow knocked me over the chair.

The gray man came again, open hands extended, smiling. “I was going to be nice,” the man said. “I was going to be quick. But then you hit me with a pot.”

Some flash of movement, and his leg swung, connecting with the side of my head. “Now I’m going to take my time and enjoy this.”

I tried to climb to my feet, but the world swam away, off to the side. He kicked me under my armpit, and I felt ribs break.

“Come on, stand up,” he said. I tried to breathe. Another kick. Another.

I pulled myself up the side of the couch. He caught me with a chipping blow to the face. My lip split wide open, blood pouring onto Veronica’s white carpet. His leg came up, connecting with my ribs again. I felt another snap. I collapsed onto my back, writhing in agony. His leg rose and fell as I tried to curl in on myself—an instinct to protect my vital organs. He landed a solid kick to my face and my head snapped back. The world went black.

He was crouching over me when I opened my eyes. That smile.

“Come on,” he said. “Stand up.”

He dragged me to my feet and slammed me against the wall. A right hand like iron pinned me to the wall by my throat.

“Where is the strand?”

I tried to speak, but my voice pinched shut. He smiled wider, turning an ear toward me. “What’s that?” he said. “I can’t hear you.”

A flutter of movement and his other hand came up. He laid the straight razor against my cheek. Cold steel. “I’m going to ask you one more time,” he said. “And then I’m going to start cutting slices down your face. I’m going to do it slowly, so you can feel it.” He eased up on my windpipe just enough for me to draw a breath.

“Now tell me,” he said, “where is the strand?”

I looped the strand around his forearm. “Right here,” I said, and pulled.

There was little resistance, just a slight snag when it parted bone. The man’s hand came off with a thump, spurting blood in a fountain. The razor dropped to the carpet. He had time to look confused before the pain hit. Then surprised. Like Veronica. He bent for the razor, reaching to pick it up with his other hand, and this time I hooked my arm around his neck, looping the chord tight—and pulled again. Warmth. Like bathwater on my face. He slumped to the floor.

I picked up the razor and limped out the front door.

Eighty-five grand buys you a lot of distance. It’ll take you places. It’ll take you across continents, if you need it to. It will introduce you to the right people.

There is no carbon-tube industry. Not yet. No monopoly to pay or protect. And the data I downloaded onto the internet is just starting to make news. Nagoi still comes for me—in my dreams, and in my waking paranoia. A man with a razor. A man with steel in his fist.

Already Uspar-Nagoi stock has started to slide as those long thinkers in the international investment markets gaze into their crystal balls and see a future that might, just maybe, be made of different stuff. Uspar-Nagoi made a grab for that European company, but it cost them more than they ever expected to pay. And the carbon project was buried, just as Veronica said it would be. Only now the data is on the net, for anyone to see.

Carbon has this property: it bonds powerfully and promiscuously to itself. In one form, carbon is diamond. In another, it builds itself into structures we are just beginning to understand. We are not smarter than the ones who came before us—the ones who built the pyramids and navigated oceans by the stars. If we’ve done more, it’s because we’ve had better materials. What would da Vinci have done with polycarbon? Seven billion people in the world. Maybe now we find out.

I think of what I said to Veronica about alchemy. The art of turning one thing into another. That maybe it’s been alchemy all along.

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2008.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Suzanne Palmer

Suzanne Palmer is a writer and linux system administrator who lives in western Massachusetts. Her work has appeared frequently in Asimov’s and Analog, and her Clarkesworld story “The Secret Life of Bots” won the 2018 Hugo for Best Novelette. Her first novel, Finder, came out from DAW in April 2019.

Paul J. McAuley

Paul J. McAuley is the author of more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. His fiction has won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Sidewise Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His latest novel, set in post-climate change Antarctica, is Austral.

Ted Kosmatka

Ted Kosmatka’s work has been reprinted in ten Year’s Best anthologies, translated into a dozen languages, and performed on stage in Indiana and New York. He’s been nominated for both the Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and is co-winner of the 2010 Asimov’s Readers’ Choice Award. His novel The Games was nominated for a Locus Award for Best First Novel. He grew up in Chesterton, Indiana and now works as a video game writer in the Pacific Northwest.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine, and The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a seven-time Hugo Award Finalist for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His latest anthology The Eagle has Landed, was published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.