Shuttle Solara

“Shuttle Solara, this is Io base.” The voice came across the speakers with a burst of static. “Your arrival is not scheduled. Please halt your approach and state your business.”

Inside the tiny cockpit of the cargo hauler, Sam Thorne jolted to wakefulness. The edges of the metal pilot’s seat were digging into his back. He dropped his feet down from the control panel with a thud, resting his arms on his knees and rubbing at his face with a groan.

“Shuttle Solara, this is Io base—”

“Io Base, this is Sam Thorne of the Harrick Corporation. I’m here….” Sam’s brow furrowed. He sorted through his memories. He got confused sometimes. Before he woke, he’d been thinking of endless towers of glass and steel, huge fields of waving grass. Another life. “The UN chartered my ship to bring food and water to the outer colonies.” He spoke the words by rote before he even remembered the reason for being here, but as soon as he had said it aloud, everything fell into place in his head. Food aid from the Telestine missionary groups. The aid that filled the gap between humanity’s first, fumbling attempts at farming in space, and the desperate needs of its people.

He turned a data key over and over in his fingers as he waited for their response. He remembered that there was a purpose to the key, but he could not remember what that was. So many keys, so many secrets.

A month. An entire month he’d spent in this hold, alone and shrouded in near darkness. No one to talk to, though that was fine by him—Sam never had much to talk about. There was so much of his mind that was closed off to him.

Not much to do on the ship, either. The hauler was simple by design, simple being one of the best protections against mechanical failures, and it devoted the bulk of its space to the massive cargo hold. The crew quarters were small, nominally big enough for three, and made of a lifeless grey metal grating that never quite seemed to purge heat the way it should. The ceilings were almost, but not quite, tall enough for him to stand up straight.

Seemed like he hadn’t stood up straight in years.

There was a metaphor for humanity’s current condition in there somewhere.

He looked up wearily. No windows here—a structural weakness, another thing to go wrong—and so, instead of a tiny shape silhouetted against Jupiter’s bands, Io and its base were only visible as the green indicator light showing an open comm channel.

“Shuttle Solara, do you have any credentials?” The man who spoke was trying to be measured, but Sam knew the sound in that voice. A shipment of food and water, sent as aid—free. Nothing meant as much to the people of the outer colonies as water. “We have no word of an impending shipment.”

“Emergency shipment.” Sam’s voice was level; it always was. “They’re afraid supply routes might get cut off by the Telestines after the attack on Mercury.” For a moment, he thought he felt a spike of emotion; rare for him. It was gone quickly.

There was a long pause.

“We’re sending you instructions to dock at the base. Standby.”

Sam nodded to no one and sat back in his chair. He rubbed the stubble on his face, absently stretching his cheeks down towards his jaw. He’d gotten used to shaving in the past few years, but he hadn’t had the water to do that regularly in the past few weeks. Before that….

That was one of the things he couldn’t remember.

He guided the shuttle down until the landing systems took hold, and then he got ready. His boots went back on. The disk went into a backpack, along with a heavy box.

The box. The box was another key.

He had his ID chip in case anyone needed to check: Sam Thorne, mechanic, thoroughly unremarkable in every way. He was waiting at the door when it opened.

“Mr. Thorne?” A man came up the gangway to offer a hand. “Daniel Strait. Boy, are we glad to see you!”

Sam forced a smile. “I take it stores are running dry?”

“Friend, you may be a Martian, but around here, for the next few hours, you’re a goddamn celebrity. Come on.”

A Martian. The other man assumed incorrectly. Sam looked over at him as they stepped down into the gloom of the colony. Strait’s joviality was uncomfortable, forced. They were famously reclusive, these settlers—it took a special type of person to survive here. Jupiter’s radiation lashed Io relentlessly, and the few hundred settlers lived in sweltering darkness below heavy radiation shields on the spaceward side of the moon. As with the outer colonies near Saturn and Pluto, most of the people here had pasts they were running from. They didn’t like outsiders … unless, of course, those outsiders came with shipments of food.

Strait parted a path for them through the steady stream of settlers coming to unpack the cargo hauler.

“I’m gonna go help.” He jerked his head back towards the way they’d come. “Living quarters are that way, though, case you wanna rest up before you go back out. Take any berth, anything you need.”

It was the most generous offer Sam had ever received. He had memories of sleeping on the floor of a cargo hauler, a few years back. Your kind sleep where they’re told. Beds’re for humans. Now, he bobbed his head. They wouldn’t notice his reticence, he was fairly sure. “Thanks,” he muttered.

Strait was already on his way back, but he turned to call back down the passage. “No news?” He paused. “Attacks?”

Sam shook his head.

“Did you see the Secretary General before you headed out?”

Sam shook his head. “Picked this up at one of the freighters ‘round Vesta.”

Shame. “S’pose the Old Man wouldn’t talk to pilots. If you do, though….” The man’s face split into a grin. “Tell him the surrender was shit.”

“Will do.”

Sam walked away as the man’s rough chuckle echoed behind him. He wasn’t used to having opinions on people, but he liked the ones out here. They weren’t ones to start a fight, but they didn’t back down if someone else started one either. That suited him.

His feet carried him to the living quarters and beyond, the backpack dragging down against one shoulder, the box inside like a lead weight. The cramped corridors grew quieter as he walked. A schedule on the wall told him he was four hours from a shift change.

It should be enough time.

It wasn’t hard to find the garage. He’d grown up with open space all around him, but he liked tiny settlements. There was a logic to them: no space without a purpose, and every space in a pattern. He looked around for cameras and people, but there were none of either. That was good. He wasn’t sure why he was looking, or why there shouldn’t be anyone here, but he knew it was good that he was alone.

The surface garage bay held all sorts of mining equipment he passed as he crossed towards one of the ground crawlers. The ceiling was higher here, to accommodate the massive vehicles, each one heavy with radiation shielding. He paused by a rack of radiation suits, warring with himself. The same surety that had carried him through the rest of this told him that he didn’t need one, but shouldn’t he?

His feet were already taking him away. He shrugged off the backpack and knelt to take out the heavy box. A single vial went into a large, bullet-shaped metal canister. He turned it over in his hands. Had he seen it before? He wasn’t entirely sure how he knew how to work it, but he was accustomed to knowing things that way—knowledge born of instinct. He loaded it into the mechanical arm of the ground crawler—another piece of equipment he couldn’t remember learning about—and hauled himself into the seat, closing the heavy door behind him.

The data disk fit right into the comm panel and the crawler shuddered as it started up. The crawler rolled to the big doors, out into the first radiation-shielded airlock, into the second—outer settlers were a big fan of multiple backups—and out onto the sickly yellow-green plains of Io. In the distance, the nearest volcano was belching fire and raining hell onto the plains around it.

Thankfully, he wouldn’t have to go that far.

He wished, vaguely, that he could see Jupiter. The black above him, shimmering with stars, was big, but there was no way to tell how big. If he was on the planet side of Io though he could have seen all of it, seen how massive Jupiter was—and how vast space was to dwarf even the planet. Yes, he would have liked that.

He wasn’t sure how long it took him to get where he was going. He often didn’t seem to be aware of the passage of time though, and he didn’t particularly mind waiting. When the ground crawler crested a hill to the dig site, he leaned forward in his chair to look.

It was time to start the broadcast. He pressed a button on the comm panel and guided the ground crawler down along the rim of the bowl. A massive structure loomed above, heat-and magnetic field-powered gears spinning endlessly. A new project. A secret project.

The UN thought no one knew. The Secretary General thought he could order a surrender and still keep his pet projects and no one would hear about it. The Old Man was delusional. Sam felt a moment of pure disgust, and knew somehow that it was not his own emotion—it was far more intense than what Sam felt, ever.

Alarms were going off nearby. He was not supposed to be here. He didn’t pay attention to them; they weren’t important. The ground crawlers were not fast, and the others could not reach him in time. In time for what, he was not entirely sure. But it was going to be amazing. Somehow, he was sure of that.

He pressed the button to extend the robotic arm and guided the ground crawler to one of the massive drills that hung waiting, off to the side of the open lava fields. The payload was inserted and he moved the drill over to attach it to the structure. It was easy. It had to be, without the ability to face the radiation.

He wasn’t feeling very good. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and tried to focus—maybe he should have donned a rad suit? The drill was going down, beginning to spin. It broke through the crust of the lava field and drove down still farther. Tiny jets of lava spat glowing molten rock into the air and the drill sank slowly until the lava closed over the top of it. Down, the shaft went, and further down.

Down was good. He was pretty sure of that.

The broadcast was almost over. Sam waited, loosely cradling a tiny mechanical box in his hands. He wondered what was coming next.

He would never know. The broadcast clicked to a stop, and his fingers moved of their own volition, pressing down on the button at the top of the box. The blast tore up and out, shooting through Io’s crust in a sudden burst of energy, throwing magma into space and taking half of the moon’s surface with it. There was a flare of light, brighter than anything Sam Thorne had ever seen, but he was already incinerated by the time the light died and left the erupting ruins of what had once been one of Jupiter’s largest moons drifting in cold space.

Chapter One

Ganymede

Perseverance Station

Haven’s Bar

Pike had forgotten how loud space stations were. Ships were loud enough—every creak of machinery carrying through the framework along with the endless vibrations of footsteps and murmurs—and that was just the small ships he was used to. He’d spent most of the past few years on the Aggy, rarely venturing into the stations they docked at. He had forgotten, entirely, about the unrelenting noise.

It was even worse in the bar. There was no escaping the scent of the alcohol and sweat. Bodies and stench and loud, pulsing music.

The girl, Dawn, raised in the sterile confines of the laboratory and set loose first into the wilds of the Rockies, wrinkled her nose. Her gaze was pained.

“Do you want to go back?” Pike asked her in a low undertone.

She shook her head.

He was not surprised. She had not been shackled to her bed in the med bay of the Intrepid, but she might as well have been a prisoner for all she’d been able to leave. Walker had insisted that the locked door—and the guards—were as much for the girl’s protection as anything else, but Pike saw the fear in her eyes every time she looked at the girl. Later, the isolation was replaced with slave labor, as Walker required Dawn to sift through Telestine data streams for her. There were no bars on her door, and she was given the same meals as anyone else aboard the fleet—indeed, with her own room, she might have been called pampered. But prison was prison.

“For God’s sake, she’s on our side,” he’d hissed at Walker a few days ago.

Walker had paused before speaking, uncharacteristically hesitant. “She’s done things that benefit us,” she said carefully. “In the short run.”

“You didn’t see her face when she killed Charlie.”

She had given him the look. “Do you really think bringing up a murder she committed will make me feel better?”

“He was a traitor! He betrayed us all for a promise of his wife and child, and she was furious. Say what you want—she didn’t know Tel’rabim was following us. She didn’t want to go back.” He knew his voice was shaking. “I don’t think she ever expected to wake up again. If she was a plant, she didn’t go along with it.”

And there had been no answer to that. Though the fear lingered in Walker’s eyes—and though there were two guards leaning not so subtly against the doorway of the bar—she had let the girl out of the med bay at last.

Pike would take it.

“Pike!” Rychenkov’s roar parted the crowd between them. The blond man slammed a hand down on the table by an empty chair. “Come drink!”

Pike’s face split into a grin. Rychenkov might still be limping, one arm in a sling and his usual energy halved, but he was alive. As the man hauled himself to his feet, Pike shook his head. “Don’t get up. You’re hurt.”

“You don’t….” Rychenkov steadied himself with his good arm. “You don’t know many Russians, do you? C’mere, you bastard.” The rough hug was enough to make Pike’s ribs creak. “And you!” Rychenkov clapped the girl on the shoulder. “Problem solver, this one. Think you’d make a good pilot, Lapushka. You looking for a job?” He jerked his head towards the table. “Take a seat.”

Pike grinned as the girl sat, still on the receiving end of Rychenkov’s job pitch. Her eyes went wide as he set a glass down in front of her.

“Go on.” Rychenkov downed his own in a gulp. “Put some hair on your chest.”

“I’ll take that.” Pike grabbed the glass as he sat, tossing it back and giving a hoarse wheeze. “Good god, what was that?”

The girl gave him a grateful look.

“No idea.” Rychenkov poured him another. He settled back in his chair with a grin. “So. I wasn’t kidding, you know.”

“About which part?” Pike’s voice was still hoarse. He looked down at the glass with newfound respect.

“She’d make a good pilot.” Rychenkov nodded at the girl. “And … well, we need a crew.”

Pike swallowed. James was still in the med bay. He’d been more than half-dead when they found him, and whatever his memories were of the Telestine flagship over Mercury, they clearly haunted him. He’d tried a dozen times to escape his bed before they put him in an artificial coma, and Gabriela had hardly left his side since. Pike knew Rychenkov would never leave them behind, and would never even mention it if they couldn’t help out, but a ship needed a crew.

Or rather, a crew needed a ship. The Aggy was not just half-dead, but mostly dead. With no chance of a rebuild coming any time soon.

Rychenkov cleared his throat quietly, and then gave a shake of his head, as if dispelling the dark thoughts. He patted his hand on the table in front of the girl. “But if you’re on my crew, I’ll need to know what to call you, da?”

She lifted her shoulders. She didn’t seem particularly bothered by not having a name.

“Lapushka it is.”

She looked at Pike, who shrugged. He’d long since given up trying to learn Russian, but he knew a fond nickname when he heard it. Rychenkov’s eyes went cold when he insulted someone to their face. Now, he was smiling; whatever he was saying, it was a genuine, warm endearment.

The captain leaned forward now, a secretive smile on his face. “Captain, pilot, first mate. We could … borrow a ship.”

“I assume you mean that literally, unless you’ve somehow come into a few million I don’t know about.” Pike settled back in his chair. It was a pleasant dream, enough to make him smile even when he knew it could come to nothing.

“I’ve thought about that.” Rychenkov tapped the base of his glass on the table and gave a meaningful glance at Pike’s glass, still full. He waited until Pike gathered his courage and downed it, spluttering, before he kept talking. “What’s money but ones and zeroes?”

“Not sure I … get your point.” Pike pounded on his chest with one fist.

“I’m saying someone who knows their way around software can get us what we need for a ship. Hell, what’s a registration but ones an’ zeroes?” Rychenkov reached out to pour another splash of alcohol into Pike’s glass.

“Oh god,” Pike managed faintly. He wasn’t sure if he was talking about the alcohol or the ship. Probably both. The girl was trying not to laugh and he rolled his head sideways to look at her. “Yeah, it’s real funny now, huh? What about when I throw up on you?”

She seemed to find that even funnier.

Rychenkov ignored them. “Seems to me we got a hacker at this table.”

Pike frowned. “What?”

Rychenkov nodded his head at the girl with unusual subtlety.

Pike stopped dead. “You want….” He leaned forward to whisper the words fiercely. “You want her to steal us a ship?”

“Why not?” Rychenkov looked at him blankly.

“Well, for starters, what are you planning to do with the crew?”

Rychenkov snorted. “Were you not paying attention when we were last at Mars?”

Pike tried to think back. When had they last been at Mars?

Rychenkov wasn’t intending to wait for him to remember. “You saw the UN docks. They aren’t using half those ships, huh?”

“You want to … you want to steal not just any ship, but a UN ship.” Pike stared his former captain down blankly. “You’re insane.”

“Everyone knows the UN’s got no teeth,” the other man said scornfully. He sipped at his drink. “This stuff’s growing on me.”

“Why not just drink fuel? Look….” Pike sighed. “I want to get out of here as much as you do—”

“Little less than I do. You want to make a wife out of that admiral.”

Pike stopped, his glass halfway to his mouth. “I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing.” Rychenkov held up a palm. “But you do want to go.” He looked over at the girl. “Lapushka, you tell Pike—” He broke off, a frown creasing his face.

Pike looked over, and felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The girl was looking around herself, eyes landing on each bar patron in turn. Most she assessed and moved on in a moment, but every once in a while, her eyes lingered.

“What is it?” He kept his voice low.

She looked back at him, hunching her shoulders like a cornered animal.

“Are they armed?” Pike looked around for her guards. Insulting or not, their presence was suddenly welcome. He had no doubt they’d been instructed to keep the girl in sight … and alive. As soon as Walker was sure of the girl’s motivations, she was going to want to make use of her again.

It was enough to make him wonder why he’d been trying so hard to convince her.

But the girl shook her head.

“What, then?” Pike frowned at her. He opened his mouth and closed it again. The bar was filled with people, not….

But the thought wouldn’t leave him alone.

He leaned close to murmur in her ear. “Drones?”

She nodded.

Pike looked around, as if he might find someone standing directly behind him, but no one seemed to be paying attention to them. He looked back at the girl, who was deep in thought. “Should we get back to headquarters?”

She shook her head, eyes still focused somewhere distant. Then she seemed to come to a conclusion. One hand reached out to keep him in place as she stood. She smiled to both him and Rychenkov, and squeezed Pike’s shoulder with a smile.

“Are you sure—”

She cut Pike off with a nod and a smile. She pointed to the two guards.

Pike began to laugh. She had a sense of humor about her confinement, at least. He watched her walk away, quickly nodding her head at the guards as if she were a diplomat signaling her honor guard that it was time to leave. Her head was held high, and he grinned as the guards fell into place behind her. It was hard to see through the crush, but he almost thought one of them opened the door for her to leave.

“What was that about?” Rychenkov asked, frowning.

“It’s … nothing.” A nothing he was going to have to tell Walker about, but a nothing the girl didn’t seem to think was immediately pressing, and he would go with her instinct.

“All right, then.” Rychenkov leaned back in his chair. “So. The ship.”

“Are you serious?” Pike began to laugh.

“Of course I’m serious. Aggy’s trashed. We need another ship if we want to get out of here. And I don’t know about you, but seems a cargo hauler has the best chance of surviving what’s coming. You want to protect her….” Rychenkov looked at the space where the girl had been sitting. “You’ll come with me.”

Pike considered this. “Walker—”

“Will check the cargo ships first. All the more reason to take one of the UN ones.”

Pike laughed. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m dead serious.” Rychenkov leaned in and topped Pike’s glass off. “So, listen up. I know the way in, I just don’t have the skill to do what needs to be done once I get there. She could, though. Here’s where you start—”

“Yes…?” Pike prompted, when the blond man broke off.

Rychenkov’s face had gone grey. He nodded over the top of Pike’s head as a sudden hush fell over the crowd at the bar.

The girl. Pike jerked around, scanning the crowd for her. But she had indeed left. It took what seemed like an eternity for him to realize that everyone was looking up at the bar’s video screen.

Chunks of rubble floated in the black. IO DESTROYED, the chyron read, and a white-faced reporter was struggling to contain his shock as he stammered out that a bomb had detonated eighteen hours ago, that Io Base was completely gone, and only half of the entire moon remained. The background image panned until the sight of the shattered hulk hung in the background, a smooth curve broken abruptly and surrounded by tumbling rocks which were gradually, imperceptibly falling back down onto the broken moon.

“Mother of god,” Rychenkov whispered.

The bar had gone completely silent. No one drank. No one even moved.

Pike turned his head stiffly. “But … who has bombs like that? Even a hundred nukes could never have—”

Rychenkov nodded again at the screen.

The reporter was trying to be calm. He read words off the teleprompter, and Pike could see that he was trying desperately to pretend those words meant nothing. “A manifesto was sent directly before the bomb exploded,” he told viewers. “The broadwave message should reach most settlements within the next few days. The Secretary General has already condemned the message as untrue, and we are awaiting a statement from Admiral Walker of the Exile Fleet.”

“Show the message!” someone yelled.

The news station must have had the same idea, for the image of Io and the reporter vanished, replaced by a calm, pleasant-looking man in the standard-issue blue coveralls worn by most humans. His eyes were brown, disconcertingly clear of any madness, and he was being recorded in what looked like the cockpit of a small ship. He folded his hands in front of himself and spoke without preamble. The rustle of the crowd in the bar made it too hard to hear the first part, but they soon settle down.

“… Thorne, but I’m just a common man, like you. And yet, through various acquaintances, I have been made aware of a secret weapons program on Io,” the man said seriously. “It is sanctioned by the United Nations and the Exile Fleet, and is meant to destroy the Telestines.”

Murmurs rose throughout the bar.

“We know that we do not have the technology to defeat them,” the man said fiercely. “We know that our survival depends on their goodwill. The Secretary General and Admiral Walker are gambling with all of our lives in a futile effort to start a war. So I am doing what must be done: I am destroying this weapons program, so that the Telestines can see that not all humans are committed to this violent path. I call upon all of us to speak out and hold the Secretary General and Admiral Walker accountable, and I implore each of you to come forward with any other programs you know about, so that we can purge them from our midst.”

The bar erupted into deafening shouts, people yelling to one another, and though the man’s lips kept moving, Pike could hear no more of the broadcast.

“Did she really do that?” Rychenkov was staring at him. “A secret weapons program?”

“I didn’t know of one,” Pike said, through numb lips. “But … she’s the Admiral of the Exile Fleet, what did you think her goal was?”

Rychenkov paused. He looked down at his glass, and then back at the screen, where the wreck of Io was once again visible.

“What?” Pike asked. “Go on, say it. What?”

He wanted to hear Rychenkov yell at him, tell him that the Rebellion was a foolish dream at best, and likely to cause their deaths. He wanted the man to say what he had always known, on some level: that this was a fight they couldn’t win, that it was suicide.

But when Rychenkov spoke, his voice was quiet. “I told myself I could stand for something,” he said simply. “When I drew them off so you could get the girl to Mercury. I told myself, better to die quickly than slowly.” He looked up, his blue eyes suddenly drained. He looked older than his years. “But they didn’t kill me, did they?” He nodded to the screen. “They killed someone else. That’s what happens when you start wars, isn’t it? Someone else always pays the price.”

Chapter Two

Ganymede

Perseverance Station

Command Center

“I call upon all of us to speak out and hold the Secretary General and Admiral Walker accountable for this atrocity, and I implore each of you to come forward with any other programs you know about, so that we can purge them from our midst.”

Walker struggled to breathe as she watched the broadcast.

“If these programs continue, if we continue to support the Exile Fleet, we doom ourselves to a war we cannot win,” the man said. “I am doing what must be done, to save all of us.”

The screen went black.

“Dear god.” Walker switched off the video comm channel and sank down, head in her hands as she leaned on the rickety table that served as her planning desk.

The tiny makeshift war room was suddenly, blessedly silent. For close to two hours, the reports had been trickling in, officers standing mute as the pictures appeared: the bands of Jupiter stained a sooty black by the fallout from an explosion that was near inconceivable in its violence. The Perseverance station at Ganymede was on lockdown, klaxons still blaring distantly, radiation shielding still being hauled desperately into place as Ganymede and its stations crept toward alignment with Io.

There was nothing to be done, that much was clear. The recovery efforts—already sanctioned, already sent—were wishful thinking. Nothing would have survived on the tumbling hunks of rock. The base at Io had been shielded from radiation at the top, but had relied on the bulk of the planet below to keep out the rest. What did they have to work with now?

The most that could be done was to try to find out what sort of explosive had been used, and try to duplicate it. Lord knew, they could use something like that right about now.

Of course, the Lord also knew that they were screwed, anyway—in the time it would take to reverse engineer such an explosion, the Telestines could destroy every human settlement. It had been a warning, as much in its scope as in their choice of target. Not for the first time, Walker felt a wave of contempt wash through her like acid. She was too unpredictable? She was too rash? What about the Secretary General, giving offers of surrender with one hand and holding secret weapons projects behind his back with the other? He knew that type of research was banned. He knew he was playing with fire.

And all of this after he’d had the gall to accuse her of playing fast and loose with humanity’s future, of pushing too hard against Telestine rule. It was enough to make you thinking that maybe Tel’rabim had a point about humanity being untrustworthy.

Speaking of whom….

Walker sighed. “Show the Telestine broadcast again.”

“Ma’am—” Commander Delaney sounded worried.

“I don’t like it any better than you do,” she said bluntly. It was true. She had no desire to see Tel’rabim’s self-satisfied speech another time, explaining that he commended the actions of the informant, but had no choice but to take swift action himself. “But even more than whatever the hell was going on on Io, what we need to know is what he’s going to do with—”

The door opened and Nhean slid into the room. His suit was rumpled and there was a 5 o’clock shadow on his upper lip, but he hardly seemed to notice that. Whatever one could say of the man, Walker thought, they could never accuse him of not being a hard worker. Since their flight from Mercury, he had barely slept, and she had seen on the monitors that his rooms were streaming every news feed in the past hours.

She raised her eyebrows at him. “So?”

For a moment, it was like he didn’t see her. His eyes were shadowed.

“Mr. Tang.” She had learned long ago that a formal address and an authoritative tone could snap someone out of their mood.

It worked now. “Sorry. What?”

She tried not to sigh. “How did this man get onto Io without anyone noticing? And who the hell snuck a weapons program into my future propulsion research site?” That was the second blow, of course: the loss of the research program for new propulsion systems. The more they learned, the more mobile they became, and the more mobile they became….

She closed her eyes. They had been so close.

She couldn’t think about it.

Nhean, meanwhile, hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “But I have learned one thing: it was a drone. Someone born on Earth and modified by the Telestines—just like we feared.”

She went hot, and then cold. “Are you sure?”

Nhean swallowed as he walked to the table. He laid the printouts down and beckoned her to look, raising his voice as the other officers crowded around.

“Sam Thorne, mid forties, exact age unknown. He was one of the first group of drones extracted from Earth. He showed—well, they all did—an aptitude for mechanical work.”

Walker closed her eyes briefly.

“It made sense,” Nhean reminded her. “They had been disassembling buildings. Entire cities.”

“And we just scooped them up and put them into our own settlements.”

“What else were we supposed to do?” Nhean looked at her. His voice was gentle, calm. There was a storm behind his eyes. Walker’s head tilted as she tried to make sense of it, but Nhean did not let the storm overtake him. “We had no idea a human could be embedded with latent commands—I’m assuming that’s what it was—and they were human.” His voice took on a pleading note. “They were. It made sense to try to rehabilitate them. They might have known something.”

It sounded almost as if he were pleading his own case. But….

Nhean steadied himself with a deep breath. He picked up a different piece of paper. “Whoever did this—told Sam Thorne to do this—knew what they were doing. He had a UN ID.”

“He would,” Walker pointed out. “All of them were taken under the UN’s protection.”

“Yes, but his had been upgraded to hide his past … and to give him clearance to pilot UN aid missions. That’s how he got onto Io.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure he picked up an aid shipment near Mars or one of the asteroids. I’m sure small colonies don’t let people in for just any reason. I’m sure Io could have kept him from docking if they wanted.” Nhean met her eyes. “He got in. He needed to, to get the equipment to ride out to the drilling site.”

“What the hell was the Old Man thinking? What would they mine on Io?” Her eyes narrowed. “Why not Vesta? Besides Mercury, it’s our most productive mining center.”

Nhean gave her a sharp look, and Walker closed her mouth. She always forgot how much he noticed.

Luckily, he made no mention of it. He slid a few pieces of paper into alignment to make a map and Walker leaned her elbows on the desk to peer at it.

“This is the settlement.” He tapped his fingers on it. “Over here was the drilling site. Most of them were employed by the UN—through several layers of subcontractors. To be honest with you, I’m not sure if they knew what they were doing. It wasn’t like Mercury. The equipment was just sending data. I think they’d been told they were looking to see if there were precious metals on Io. Unfortunately, sending data … is not very secure.”

Walker swore under her breath. “You think that’s how Thorne found out?” She stopped, swallowed. “Or was this all Tel’rabim? Hell! Was there even a weapons program there to start with?”

“There was something.” Nhean stared at the printouts. “But … it’s a good question. Who benefits from this? It seems, inarguably, to be Tel’rabim, doesn’t it? Now he gets to be the martyr again, playing up our betrayal to the other Telestines.”

“We need to figure out what that explosive is. Something that strong, with that much destructive potential, is something we need to know how to harness.”

Again he appraised her, his gaze frighteningly observant. “The radiation is making cleanup as useless as it is impossible. That means research, too, and you know we don’t have the time to reverse engineer a bomb, start up new mining operations, and then start building weapons. Whatever we find—” He broke off. “Not important. Also, there’s something you should know.”

Walker raised her eyebrows.

“The message should arrive by conventional broadcast in a few hours.” Nhean laced his hands behind his back and looked down at the floor. She could see it pained him to admit to the breadth of his capabilities. “And however it may seem at first, it … isn’t good news.”

Walker looked over to meet Delaney’s eyes. “Tell us. Or—who should be in the room?”

Nhean hesitated. “You two.”

Something that felt very much like fear settled in her stomach. Nevertheless, she spoke crisply. “Please wait in the officer’s lounge. I assume I need not warn you about sharing this latest information.”

There were fierce nods from her officers. They had learned long ago that sharing information got them killed. More than that, however, they knew no one could afford a panic.

Walker watched them go. Her hands were white-knuckled around the back of the chair as she looked back at Nhean. “All right, tell me.”

“There was a vote of no confidence in the Secretary General,” Nhean said flatly.

Walker felt a smile spread over her face before she could stop herself. She remembered his warning, and yet…. “Well, the Old Man had that coming.”

“Maybe.” Nhean’s voice was tight. “But from how quickly it happened, someone was primed for it.”

Her smile died. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, we got word of the explosion … what, sixteen hours ago? We’ve just started getting actual reporters on the scene, and we’re on Ganymede. Well they didn’t even wait for that. They would have seen the broadcast and the news of the explosion—watched it through a telescope, and they voted within an hour of that.”

Walked looked away, considering. “They might just have been waiting for an excuse.”

Nhean’s brows shot up. “That, I hadn’t considered. That’s a possibility. But it doesn’t fix what happened next.”

Oh, no. “What happened next?”

“They talked about who might replace him, and….” Nhean looked away.

“Out with it,” Delaney barked.

“I don’t know how he was there, or who put his name forward,” Nhean prevaricated. “I will find out, but right now….”

Walker’s fingers were aching. “Yes?”

“Essa.”

Her spine stiffened. “General Declan Essa?”

“The same. Though no longer General, I believe. Though he still calls himself Jupiter’s Sword.” Nhean’s voice was soft as he named the former leader of the Rebellion, the man Walker had as good as exiled when she wrested control of the fleet from him. They’d built it together from the ground up, but both of them knew there could ever only be one leader. And she won. She had to—he was too … impulsive. Reckless. The nickname he had adopted for himself was fitting: he slashed and cut through both people and plans without pause, without thinking about longterm consequences. “They haven’t voted on it yet, but he seems popular. He’s released a statement—on its way now—and apparently, he’s calling for open war. He’s calling on you to bring the fleet to Mars.”

Delaney whistled. “Shit’s about to get real.”

Walker eyed the expanding black bands on Jupiter’s colorful clouds. “Shit’s been real for a while now, I’m afraid.” She flipped the monitor off and her jaw clenched. When she looked up, her smile was grim. “And he’s not Secretary General yet.”

Chapter Three

Ganymede

Perseverance Station

EFS Intrepid

Med Bay

It was well over two hours later that Pike stumbled back into the wing of the station that had been set aside for the Rebellion, and from there, into the docked Intrepid. Some sort of urgent message was blaring over the loudspeakers, but he was having trouble making it out, and in any case, no one seemed to be running or screaming.

They all seemed resigned to their fate, at least.

He nodded at the two guards by the med bay, and pushed the door open.

He stopped in his tracks. The lone bed in this ward was not even rumpled. A cabinet stood ajar, a single change of clothes missing from the top of a stack. As Pike swayed, staring at the bed with a frown, the words of the announcement at last became clear.

Workers in Docking Bay H, please report to Dock Control for questions about the whereabouts of shuttlecraft Toledo.

That was when he saw the scrap of paper lying on the sheets. Pike walked to the bed to pick it up, clumsy fingers dropping it once. Had she actually written a note? He’d tried to get her to write, but it was like coaxing a tiny toddler to speak. She just couldn’t seem to transfer the words in her mind to words on a page. Or even, most of the time, to her mouth. The only halting words he’d ever heard come from her mouth was on the Aggy as she put a bullet into Charlie’s head. You … were … not … the only person who lost someone.

It was a crude picture—looked as if a child had drawn it. A stick figure girl, with a ship near a planet that looked remarkably like Jupiter, and an arrow pointing towards another planet or moon. And below it, the same planet or moon again, with the girl and a ship and an arrow pointing back towards Jupiter. And then a heart.

The message was crude, but clear: I’m leaving, but I’ll be back. I promise.

Chapter Four

Ganymede

Perseverance Station

Command Center

“Nothing, nothing, nothing….” Commander Scott Larsen threw a stack of printouts down on the desk and tipped his head back, eyes closed. “Nothing,” he added. He waved his hands, eyes still closed. He slumped back in his chair. “No one saw the shuttle go, no alarms sounded, nothing on the surveillance. Wherever that shuttlecraft went, it’s gone now.”

“All right, let’s generate a list of potential targets and draw up a search plan—“

Larsen shook his head, clearly defeated. The scope of such a search was outside their capacity at the moment, and Walker knew it. She was asking anyway.

Larsen looked like he’d rather be anywhere than at this table.

“Admiral—” he began, clearing his throat.

Voices sounded in the hallway, and Walker looked over with a frown as one of the guards stuck his head around the door.

“Ma’am, Mr. Pike is here to see you.”

“Let me in,” Pike’s slurred voice said, annoyed.

“Let him in.” Walker gestured to him to open the door.

The guard looked pained. “Ma’am, he’s—”

“I’m drunk,” Pike called. “He’s very offended by it.”

Walker and Larsen exchanged a look, and she considered for a moment.

“It’s important,” Pike called.

“Better let him in,” Larsen advised. He started studying the printouts again. “Before he starts yelling.”

“And if he gets argumentative?”

“Hit him with a chair.”

“Every day I thank my lucky stars that I have your sage advice to guide me through this.” Walker beckoned at the guard, and winced as Pike walked in. She could smell the alcohol from halfway across the room.

“I know.” Pike rubbed at his face. “But I thought you should know—about the shuttle, that is.” He swayed slightly and braced himself on the wall.

Walker felt a stab of misgiving. “What about the shuttle?”

Pike paused. When he spoke, he looked miserable. “She took it.”

“Who’s—” Walker broke off. “No. Oh, no. You’re not serious about this. Pike, tell me you’re not serious.”

“I’m serious.” He looked vaguely horrified.

“And how did that happen?” She knew her voice was like poison. “Walk me through it, Pike.”

He paused. “Why’re you angry at me?”

“As I recall, you were the one who persuaded me that it wouldn’t do any harm to let her out of the Intrepid’s med bay.” She noticed Larsen hunching his shoulders, desperately trying to pretend he wasn’t there. “That went well.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it did.” Pike leaned forward. “Funny how she didn’t escape from the bar, though, isn’t it? Funny how she went back to the Intrepid and into the med bay—your guards are still there, by the way, knocked out and stuffed into a storage closet—and disappeared from in there, huh?”

Walker stopped dead. “What? How the hell did she get out?”

“That’s the first thing you say? Not, oh, ‘sorry’?” He gave her a look. “As I recall, you were the one who wanted to keep her in that med bay, working as slave labor, followed by guards.” He spat her own words back at her. “That went well.”

“Larsen.” Her voice was even. “You’re dismissed.”

The man didn’t even stop to salute. He was gone like a shot, closing the door behind him, and Walker faced Pike down with fury beating in her blood.

“And why are you angry at me?” she asked quietly.

“Did you ever stop to wonder why she left?” Pike stepped closer. His voice was quiet now. She could still see the faint sway in his movements, but there was no cloud behind his eyes. “You think it might have something to do with sacrificing herself for us and coming out of a coma to find herself a prisoner?”

“What the hell was I supposed to do?” Walker spread her hands. “She’s said, what, ten words in the entire time you’ve known her? She was raised in the Telestine labs, she’s part Telestine, she was made to be a weapon in Tel’rabim’s war. For all I know, she’s supposed to lead a drone uprising!”

There was a sudden silence. Pike’s face had gone slack with horror, and Walker was opening her mouth to press the point when she felt the anger drain out of her.

“Good Lord, Pike, what the hell was I supposed to do?” She whispered the question again helplessly. “I am doing the best I can, I trusted her in that fight, but it’s just not that simple anymore. She’s part Telestine. She….” She cast a look at the bio on the table. “What if she’s like Thorne?”

“Thorne?”

Of course. No one knew yet but the officers. She almost didn’t want to tell him. She folded her arms and hunched her shoulders. “The drone who blew up Io.”

“That was a drone?”

“Yeah.”

Pike looked away, lost. “Why would he do that? After finally escaping, after seeing what they do to people? Why wouldn’t he be on our side?”

“He’s a drone. I don’t think … he knew what he was doing.” Walker shrugged. “That’s what Nhean says, anyway. He managed to extract some of the security footage from the last station and from—look, it’s not important. Nhean thinks it was a latent command, embedded somewhere in there, in his head. Waiting for the right time.” She hesitated. “The drone probably didn’t even know it was there.”

She had meant to reassure him, but he flared up. “So that’s what you think of her, then? You think she has something embedded in there?”

“Pike—”

“That’s what you think, isn’t it? So say it.”

“Yes!” She pushed herself away from the wall to pace. She glared at him. “Okay, yes. I think it’s pretty damned likely, actually.”

“She hasn’t done anything but help us!”

“Neither had Sam Thorne! He was flying aid missions, he was repairing outposts, he was saving lives! Pike, do you not get this? It doesn’t matter what she wants to do, it doesn’t matter what kind of person she is, it doesn’t matter if she’s stood up to him before. I don’t think Tel’rabim saw Mercury coming. I don’t think he understands humans all that well. But the more he learns, the better he’s going to be at using his tools, and I don’t think he’s stupid enough to build something like her without putting a failsafe in!”

“Then why hasn’t he activated it yet?”

“Pike….” She shook her head. “What do you think just happened? Why do you think she just left?”

His head dropped into his hands.

She waited, forcing herself to say nothing.

“She said she’d come back,” he said finally.

“She spoke to you?”

He threw her a furious glance. “She left a note.” He shrugged. “With pictures.”

“Let me see it.” She held her hand out. When he didn’t move, she sighed. “What do you want from me? Do you want to be the one to go look for her?” Delaney was going to give her hell for this. “Look, I can do that if you want.” Total hell. “I can get you some intel, a ship—you can go find her yourself.” Seriously, Delaney was going to kill her. “If you think she’ll listen to you, if you can honestly tell me that you think she’ll come back with you—” He picked his head up, her voice broke at the look in his eyes. “What?”

“You don’t get it, do you?” His voice was deathly soft. “I never wanted her to be yours.”

“She’s not … mine.” Walker shook her head. “What do you mean?”

“I never wanted you to control her. I never should have given Nhean time alone with her, he’s the reason she did what she did on the Telestine flagship!”

“Pike….” She shook her head. She could not keep having this argument with him. “She did nothing you wouldn’t have done in her place. She did what any of us would do.”

“Because you filled her head with—delusions of grandeur.” He broke off. “No more. She’s done enough for you. You can win the rest of this war on your own.”

“Not if she turns against us!” The words were ripped from her. She saw the look in his eyes and she still couldn’t stop. “Pike, she doesn’t want to hurt you. If I could have an army filled with the woman she wants to be, I would. In a heartbeat. She’s smart. She’s fierce. She wants to be human. She’s just….”

“Not?” His voice was ugly. “Forget it. I’m not helping you find her.”

“Pike—”

“You don’t understand! None of you understand!” His hand jerked, and one of the cheap metal chairs went skidding across the room to slam against the wall. “All you see is the fucking rebellion! That’s all my father saw, too, and it got my family killed! Then you dragged me back in, and you went and sacrificed her. When are you going to learn that there’s more to this?”

“Pike, calm down. This isn’t about the girl. You know that. It’s about your sister. It’s about how you lost Christina.” Walker hoped he’d listen, hoped he’d hear her mute appeal to the childhood secrets they’d shared, and the way those secrets drove them still. The number of people she could count on was already shrinking, dammit.

It didn’t work.

“How dare you.” Pike shook his head. “I’m out. I hope you never find her.” He wrenched the door open.

“Pike!”

“Oh, and by the way.” He paused at the door, looking over his shoulder. “She saw some drones in the bar. So you’d probably better look into that.”

The door slammed behind him.

She clenched her hands, breathing deeply. It took a long moment to steady herself. She walked to the door slowly and opened it, smiling her usual confident smile.

“Is everything all right, ma’am?” The guard looked as if he didn’t know quite what to say.

“Everything’s fine, thank you.” She could see Larsen leaning against the wall outside the door. Apparently he had wanted to get out of there, but then had second thoughts. Good. She could use him.

Walker waved him back in. “The situation has changed. We may want to look at Mercury.”

“What?” Larsen frowned at her.

“Not everything of theirs was destroyed. The Telestines. That’s classified, by the way. In any case, Pike says the girl took the shuttle. Hell if I know what she’s up to, but Mercury is where you’d find our tech and their tech—Lord only knows if we got everything ground down fine enough. If Tel’rabim has … activated her somehow, she might head there to retrieve his lost ships. And if this is some sentimental thing, Mercury would work for that, too.”

“If it’s sentimental, maybe it’s Earth.”

“That could be, too. I’ll alert the patrol routes near there. But in the meantime, go to Mercury, set up surveillance—”

Larsen nodded, cutting her off with a quick salute. “I’m on it.”

“Dismissed.”

He hurried out the door, and for the second time in as many minutes, the guard looked at her with questioning eyes. “Still all right, ma’am?”

Walker nodded. “If you would get Mr. Tang, please? I need to speak to him. Immediately.”

Chapter Five

Ganymede

Perseverance Station

Docking Bay 81

“Mr. Pike.” Parees, Nhean’s ever-present assistant, trailed after Pike as he strode through the humid air of the atrium and slammed his way into one of the hangar bays. Pike nodded at Rychenkov, who was sitting casually on a fuel pod while using two overturned dinged-up cargo bins as a makeshift desk.

“Mr. Tang only wants to—”

“Tell him I’m busy,” Pike said. He did not add, And when I’m done being busy, I’m going to be gone.

“Sir, I think you will find Mr. Tang’s meeting … very relevant to your present endeavors.”

“Who talks like that?” Rychenkov muttered. He looked up from his list of prospective crew members and raised an eyebrow at Pike.

If Parees heard, he said nothing. The man waited, endlessly patient. Had Pike not known better, he would have suspected the man of being an exceedingly lifelike automaton.

Pike looked at Parees. He looked at Rychenkov. He looked back to Parees. “Fine. I’ll go.”

“What?” Rychenkov looked up from his packing. He frowned. “What if we….”

“Somehow acquire a ship in the next hour before I get back?” Pike raised his eyebrows. “You should be able to send me a message if that happens, right? Hell, even send one at the start of the ship-buying process. Ganymede is just a shuttle ride away.”

Rychenkov sighed, but he waved a hand. “Go, go.”

It was an awkward journey to the Ganymede City penthouse Nhean was currently occupying. Parees seemed to feel no compunction to make conversation, and Pike had no idea what to say to the man. He considered asking why Nhean wanted to see him, but knew what the steward’s answer would be: Mr. Tang will want to discuss that with you himself. Probably more flowery than that, with words like … whatever other ten syllable words Parees tended to use. When they arrived, Parees practically melted out of the room after announcing Pike.

“This place is nice.” Pike looked around himself. It wasn’t Venus, not by a long shot, but the stark lines of Nhean’s spaceships looked somehow more purposeful in the penthouses. Someone had taken the time to paint the walls in clean colors, and someone else had spent the money to buy floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto Ganymede’s grey lunar landscape. Jupiter was just coming into view, blackened clouds still a jarring sight.

Nhean followed Pike’s gaze to the planet. “It makes you think,” the man said, uncharacteristically somber. “About what we’re up against.”

Pike, who had been taking a seat on one of the leather chairs, paused. “Did she ask you to talk to me?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, the admiral did.” Nhean took a seat as well. “I cannot say my purposes are entirely aligned with hers, however, and so I thought I would make you a slightly altered proposition than the one she asked me to make.” He waited. His smile was as composed as ever, despite the shadows under his eyes.

He wanted to stand up and walk out. Pike shook with how much he wanted that. He’d long ago learned to be practical, though, and he knew exactly what was waiting for him when he got back: a crew, perhaps, but no ship. Just a tiny apartment in the cramped residential district of Perseverance Station, and no money. He sighed. “Okay.”

If Nhean thought this was an inauspicious beginning, he did not say so. He nodded and pressed his fingertips together. “I want to give you a ship.” He waited a moment, courteously, in case Pike wanted to say anything.

Pike blinked.

“Simply put, I need to find more information about the drones.”

Pike raised an eyebrow. Something was off about that sentence.

“You need to, or the Rebellion needs to?”

Nhean’s gaze flickered. “We both need to. That is all I’m willing to say at this juncture. I am sending Parees to Carina Station above Mars. I would … hire … you to take him there, and then … you would be free to do what you wished.”

Pike felt his face settle into a scowl. “So what’s the catch?”

“There is no catch.” Nhean smiled. “I can see you do not believe me, so let me explain.” He could still hear Delany’s voice after he and Pike had returned from the battle on the Telestine flagship: There’s a price on your head now. You, specifically. He supposed it should have frightened him more, but money and information had a way of dulling such fear. And the threat lent legitimacy in the eyes of others. A useful, if unanticipated, side effect.

“I am presently a wanted man, but I still have both more money and more ships than I could possibly use at the moment. Therefore, what seems an excessively generous gift to you, is a somewhat lesser matter to me. To be honest with you….” He looked away. “I feel somewhat guilty about the events of the past weeks.”

Pike stared him down silently.

“I used you,” Nhean said simply. “I see no moral problems with what I did—my actions averted bloodshed and allowed us to mostly save the Exile Fleet’s shipyards at Mercury. However, on a personal level….” He gestured, as if the rest of the sentence should be self-explanatory.

Pike looked away.

“I have seen your face when you speak of Earth.” Nhean’s voice was soft. “You are a man who wants freedom. You want to chart your own path, and you have done more than we could have asked. I cannot give you Earth—not yet, anyway.” He smiled. “But I can give you this much.”

“And that’s all you want from me in return?” Pike narrowed his eyes at the man. “Drop Parees at Mars?”

“I would occasionally ask for your help in … certain matters. But those contracts would be voluntary, and I assure you they would pay well.” Nhean gave a small smile. When Pike said nothing, he added delicately, “Have you considered that the best way to keep the girl out of Walker’s hands is to find her yourself?”

“Unless there’s a tracking beacon on my ship,” Pike said acidly.

Nhean smiled, not at all offended by the accusation. “There isn’t.”

The lure hung, tantalizing. That it was a trap, Pike had no doubt. But as soon as Parees was gone….

Then, they could disable the tracking beacon—Pike did not trust that open, honest smile for a moment—and be on their way. And until they disabled it, he simply would not look for the girl.

And yet, all the same, something in him chafed at the idea of taking this offer. Nhean had known he would. He knew that Pike, eager to leave, could not afford not to take the offer. He knew that as soon as war broke out, a good ship would go for hundreds of millions of UN credits. The very fact that Nhean was so certain of Pike’s compliance, that he’d made an offer like this—

“Fine.” Best to accept it before his pride got the better of him. Galling or not, his other options were to stay trapped and helpless on Perseverance Station, or to move with the Rebellion. He had no intention of doing either.

“Good.” Nhean nodded. “You’ll find Captain Rychenkov and your crew mates in Docking Bay 87 on Perseverance Station.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You can be outraged that I guessed your answer in advance, or we can skip that and you can leave now, quietly, before the admiral is made aware.” Nhean pushed himself up and offered a hand to pull Pike to his feet. “I suggest the latter.”

“Right.” Asshole.

Pike shook his head at himself. He had no proof that Nhean was doing anything nefarious at all … beyond the fact that he’d known the man for a few weeks and had never once seen him do something without having at least three motives, at least one of which was hidden.

He just wouldn’t be an idiot. And if they couldn’t find a tracking beacon on the ship, they’d do whatever they could to stay away from the girl. Because Pike didn’t much care whether he smuggled or traded legally. The one thing he did care about was keeping the girl out of Walker’s hands.

And Nhean’s.

Chapter Six

Ganymede

Ganymede City

Tang penthouse

“So.” Nhean watched Pike go, and then settled into his chair, leaning on the unfamiliar desk. This room, although undoubtedly luxurious, was not his own. He was endlessly frustrated by the faulty signals and the slow data streams. He missed the array of monitors on the wall of his office on Venus, giving him a window into the state of humanity at a single glance. He missed Venus’s gravity—Ganymede’s was slight in comparison. Everything was different and unfamiliar. And soon, even Parees would be gone. “Are you prepared?”

“I am prepared.” Parees smiled.

“Good.” Nhean nodded decisively.

“What am I to do?”

“You will be finding the drones. I have reason to believe the bulk of them settled there.” Mars, having the ground already in place—not to mention gravity—was easier to expand upon than a space station in the early years of humanity’s diaspora. It, along with its attendant stations—Carina Station chief among them—and lunar outposts on Phobos and Deimos, was one of the most heavily settled areas of the Exodus, requiring technical help and labor almost constantly—perfect for the thousands of rescued drones. “Send me the names of every one of them you can find. Should be several hundred there, at least, if not thousands.”

“What if they aren’t the same names they were given after their rescue?”

“We should be able to trace them back.” Few people were clever enough to confuse the trail by continuing to use their old name for a while after the new identity was created.

On the other hand, if Tel’rabim was anything, it was clever.

“And follow them,” Nhean instructed. “As many as you can. Find out what mechanism he’s using to feed them instructions. I want to know how they receive signals.”

Parees considered this. “If I encounter UN or Rebellion members….”

“Easy enough.” Nhean frowned. “For the Rebellion, send them to me. For the UN, tell them you’re a civilian. That you’re following your brother, and looking for him. It explains enough.”

Parees nodded silently. He considered.

Nhean took a moment to examine the other man. Parees had shaved his hair in anticipation of the journey, the better to fit in with the civilians on Carina Station, and his usual sleeveless shirt had been replaced with the grey coveralls so many humans wore. Parees’s skin almost glowed against the grey. With his quiet equanimity and Venetian good health, would he ever manage to pass for a normal citizen?

They had no other choice.

Nhean sighed. “There is a second mission I would have you undertake when you have completed the survey.”

Parees raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“You remember the transmission you intercepted after the Rebellion’s first encounter on Earth? During the insertion of Pike?”

Parees nodded, frowning.

Nhean shared his discomfort. The transmission had been strange, unencrypted, broadcasted to the new Telestine cities on Earth almost crudely, breaking onto the main channels by pure force. Nhean had assumed it was a distress signal designed to rouse the Telestines to repel the humans—and the military engagement had seemed to support it.

He assumed that his paltry efforts at translation had missed subtleties within the Telestine language, and yet, the words still seemed strange to him. Dark and grim, dripping with bloody imagery, they flowed, almost like poetry….

It was enough to make him wonder: were there religious groups within the Telestines, as there had been in Europe’s colonial era, who welcomed the chance to die standing between their own people and the enslaved humans? Were they trying to recruit more to their group?

“I want you to go anywhere there are Telestine aid missionaries. It looks as if the Daughters of Ascension have absorbed some of the smaller groups, so they might be a good place to start. Or perhaps the Warriors of Mercy. Or … any of them. Find them. Speak to them, say whatever you need to say in order to allay their suspicions … and speak, then, to the ones they tend. Do what you can to find any communications they have stored.”

“Have you told Walker you’re looking for this?”

“No. She’s instructed me to look into the matter of the drones, at least. This dovetails nicely. I can always say that the Telestine aid groups might know best where there had been sudden infusions of new engineers and so on.” He smiled humorlessly.

“And Mr. Pike?” Parees asked delicately.

“I highly doubt Pike will do anything noteworthy for some time.” Now Nhean’s smile was genuine. “He’s clever enough to know that Walker will have him watched. The girl….” He sighed. He sank back into the chair, resting his mouth on his bridged fingers. “She’ll want to keep him safe. There’s a reason she didn’t take him with her when she left. If you find her—drop everything else. Keep her in sight. If necessary, you should be able to direct her by telling her where Pike will be. See if you can drive her at least into our surveillance.”

“I will do what I can.” Parees lifted his shoulders. “But it seems that the more she learns about us and our technology, she evades it naturally.”

“Yes.” Nhean considered. “Watch for my signal. I will find out if she received any sort of communication before she left, and if so.…”

“You think she’ll be on Mars?”

“I don’t know.” Nhean tried not to snap. He was not accustomed to not knowing such things. He had watched the surveillance tapes a dozen times or more, the girl walking back to the med bay almost ostentatiously, flaunting her presence to the cameras. How she had left … now that was the question. Not a single camera had seen her come out, and no amount of checking passenger manifests or security cameras had revealed her whereabouts. For all he knew, Nhean thought bitterly, she was still on Perseverance Station.

No. There was a shuttle gone, and it was clear she was looking for something. The question was simply what that was.

“Go. Be safe. And, Parees….”

“Yes, sir?” Parees looked at him with the same guileless honesty Nhean had become accustomed to over the years. Where others saw reserve, he saw simply a quiet, focused mind.

Nhean shook his head. Now was not the time for doubts and fears. Parees had never run a mission alone, but he had never been one to falter in the face of duty, either.

“Nothing,” Nhean said simply. “Just be safe.”

Chapter Seven

Ganymede

Perseverance Station

Admiral’s quarters

“I hope you know I’m taking a risk with this.” Walker looked over at Nhean, arms folded over her chest. She sighed. “I don’t like it.”

“Hasn’t Pike always been this way?” Nhean suggested. He sat at the war table, dressed once more in a clean suit and looking somewhat better rested—altogether, more composed by far than she was. While the grimy halls and rusted furniture were natural to her, with bare, flickering bulbs and unadorned metal walls, Nhean looked not only out of place, but above his surroundings.

She resented it, just as she resented the attempt at familiarity. “You aren’t an expert on my history, Mr. Tang.”

His smile suggested that he just might be, but his tone was mild when he answered. “Of course not. However, I have had some experience with Pike over the past weeks—enough to understand that he sees the world fairly simply … and thus, in a complex world, is wildly unpredictable.”

“Which is why it might well have been better not to give him such a fast ship.” She tried to keep her voice from sharpness.

“The ship can be tracked,” Nhean repeated patiently.

“He knows that.”

“Probably.” His gaze moved past her as he considered. “The question is whether he’ll have the discipline to keep believing I can watch him—particularly if he runs across whispers of the girl.”

“And you think he will?” Walker watched him carefully. The question was a test. She might not have Nhean’s network, or his skill at sifting through data, but she had learned to watch people, and she had been forming her own opinions about his knowledge. The suppressed grimace confirmed it. “After all, you have no idea where she might be.”

“Not unusual.” His voice was clipped. “I have found several places she is not.”

“Have you? Because as far as I know, she hasn’t been found either here, or on any of the shuttles leaving the station. That would mean she’s nowhere, and as we can be reasonably sure she is in fact somewhere, I find no reason to expect that our information is correct.” She paused. “Unless she threw herself out an airlock, and I find myself doubting that. I rather think that she will try to use her abilities somehow. I don’t know her well … but I think maybe she believes she can outsmart Tel’rabim’s programming.”

Nhean winced. It was fleeting, but it was there.

“Is there a problem?” She kept her voice light, almost a mocking his own refined speech.

“No. It’s nothing.” He looked down at the table. “I wish you had let me continue to study the databases in the captured Telestine fleet at Mercury.”

“We couldn’t extract them quickly, we couldn’t stay, and we couldn’t take the chance of him having those ships to use again.” She listed the reasons without raising her voice. The argument was so exhausted, even after a few weeks, that she did not even feel a flicker of anger.

Silence. For now, it seemed, he would let the matter drop.

“The question is, which skills will the girl use, and how? That should give us some clue to where she is.”

“I’ll begin rerunning the passenger manifests,” Nhean murmured.

“What good will that do?”

“Before they leave dock, the passenger freighters’ computers sync with the station. That should tell us their mass, and we might be able to find which ships are carrying marginally more than expected.” He held up a finger at her look. “Might. It depends on how well they keep records of their supplies. And whether or not they’re smuggling.”

“Everyone’s smuggling,” Walker said absently. One could live within the strictures of the Exodus Treaty … but barely. People were packed into space stations so full that there was little hope of air, let alone enough space. Being alive, humanity knew well, was not living. And so they smuggled, all of them. “If you think you can find her, well enough. If not, we need to come at this another way.”

“I know.” He looked over as footsteps sounded in the corridor outside.

Walker’s hand went to her sidearm. With open war now a possibility at any moment, she had stopped hiding the fleet, opting instead to move it regularly. The protection of human settlements was paramount, and so segments of the fleet had been moving between the stations and bases, forming plans and readying themselves to intercept Tel’rabim’s next move.

And in the meantime, Walker waited for the assassination she was sure was coming. She had been certain of the attempt even before the vote of no confidence, and with Essa putting himself forward now….

Walker rested a hand on the sidearm, steady as the footsteps approached. There was a quick knock, and she could hear Ahlstrom’s voice outside the door. “Admiral?” the deck chief called out.

“Enter,” she replied, lifting her hand back to the table.

Ahlstrom strode into the room, already talking. “Admiral, I need to talk to you about McAllister. I know he’s the best CAG option we’ve got, but—” Ahlstrom’s eyes widened as he saw Nhean seated across from her. He’d clearly thought she was alone.

“Go ahead, chief,” Walker said.

“Oh, I can come back. This isn’t as pressing as, well, whatever you have going on at the moment.”

“This?” Walker casually waved her hand toward Nhean. He did not seem to appreciate the gesture. “Mr. Tang was just leaving, weren’t you?”

“Yes. Excuse me.” Nhean had what he came for, presumably, and so he retreated out the door.

Chapter Eight

Ganymede

Perseverance Station

Admiral’s quarters

Walker sighed. The past few days had been a depressing mix of uncertainty and—though she hated to admit it—uncharacteristic loneliness. After Nhean’s news about the “glorious” rise of Jupiter’s Sword (Walker gagged slightly on the image of Essa as the benevolent military hero) within the ranks of the UN, she had rethought their current strategy. As much as she hated to do it, she knew it would be best for the fleet to make a show of military strength and support for the civilian government.

She loathed kowtowing to the illogical needs of the political elite. That’s why she didn’t ever do it. But she had sent Delaney along with a detachment of ships to Carina Station at Mars in order to partially defray the accusations she knew were coming. Admiral Walker, brilliant, but cold. She didn’t care about the lives of the civilians. She wouldn’t even place defenses at Mars.

Well, she did, and she had. But only because it made strategic sense to spread her and Delaney apart while they were uncertain where the next Telestine strike would be.

Add Delaney’s departure with Larsen’s mission to Mercury … and Pike’s own journey to Carina Station to drop off Parees and then who knew where … and the piles of paperwork and reports waiting for her on her desk … and Walker allowed herself to indulge in one brief, split second of lonely self-pity.

It was a mistake.

The moment she lowered her head, she heard the insistent buzz of her private comm link. “Walker,” she answered. “Go ahead.”

Walker strode to the door and pulled it open. “What is it?”

“He’s making his move.” Commander Ahlstrom’s face was white. “Tel’rabim. His fleet is headed for Mars.”

Her heart squeezed. She stepped back automatically to let him into the room, watching as he began to spread printouts on one of the tables. “How fast?”

He gave the only important answer. “Too fast.” He hesitated. “Delaney will intercept in time, but he’s only got a few: the Intrepid, Juno, Cairo, Washington, Samson, Carolina, and Stockholm. I called the Alabama in from Ceres, but—”

“But there’s a chance Delaney can hold out until then, and even if he can’t, we need to be there to save the rest of them.” She pushed herself away from the desk. “Send out an alert to all crew members. We leave in twenty minutes.”

“Yes ma’am!” Foster bust back out the door at a full sprint. She was going to have to give him a few lessons in protocol, she could already tell.

Walker walked at a quick clip through the hallways as she made her way to the bridge. Her earpiece began beeping before she even arrived. She nodded at the comm officer on her way through to the command center, and Nhean’s voice filled her ear.

“Hello Admiral. I think may have something for you.”

“Nhean, this is not a good time.”

“And when is it a bad time to learn that someone is giving you brand new ships to use?”

“What? Explain yourself.”

“The Venus Sovereign Fleet contains the best technology and latest programing. Let’s say that my … investors are curious as to how these improvements … work in practical, real world situations.”

Walker did not know how to reply.

“They will be at the docks as soon as they are cleared,” Nhean continued smoothly.

“Wait,” Walker interjected. “Why are we taking your ships to Mars? I thought my use of them at Mercury was a one-time thing?”

A pause. She could almost see him grin. “You’ll see,” came the reply.

Chapter Nine

Near Mars

Aggy II

Cargo bay

“Hand me that one. No, that one.” Pike jabbed with his finger. “There. Gabby—no, James, you stay where you are.” He gave his crewmate a sharp look. They’d found him on the Telestine flagship over Mercury with an ebbing heartbeat and one leg broken where a bullet had torn through the thigh bone. None of them had expected him to make it, least of all Gabriela, who’d ducked through the gunfire to reach him, pressing her fingers over the wound in his leg. Terrified by the brush with death, Gabriela tended to snap, and James, unable to work and mourning Howie, was given to black moods.

If the new crewmembers didn’t make a dent in things, it was going to be a miserable few months. Hell, the apocalypse might be a mercy. Pike accepted a crate from Katya, a stocky woman with bright green hair and a surprisingly quiet demeanor, and scanned the cargo hold for Deshawn, the other new recruit. Very tall, with wavy black hair worn long in a braid, Deshawn looked far too skinny to lift a single crate. How he managed it, Pike still did not know, but he did, and Rychenkov had liked the man on sight. Smart one, that boy, he’d said. Knows it’s better to look weak and take people by surprise.

“This is the last one,” Deshawn said now, handing the crate to Pike where he crouched at the raised cargo compartments. Deshawn looked around the now-empty cargo hold. “Are we picking up more cargo at Carina Station?”

“You never know what opportunities will crop up.” Pike closed the door of the compartment and latched it, then hopped down onto the main floor. “Always best to be prepared. Rychenkov runs a tight ship.”

The newbies, Katya and Deshawn, nodded. Their captain might be full of jokes and his characteristic drama, but he had no tolerance for anything other than first-rate work. Any ship Rychenkov commanded, however old or rickety, would be spotlessly clean, in perfect repair, with a well-organized cargo hold.

“I’ll get to the engine room,” Katya said.

“I’ll go with you,” Gabriela offered. She did not look at James where he was leaning against the wall. He was pale, beads of sweat standing out on his forehead.

“You go on,” Pike told Deshawn. He waited until the rest of the crew was gone before offering James an arm.

The man looked at it with ill humor. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not,” Pike said brutally. “Rychenkov brought you along because he knows it’d kill you to be stuck on a station, but you can’t work yet.”

“Piss off.” James pushed himself up on his own.

“If you want to play the hero, you’re gonna lose that leg,” Pike advised him. “Let it heal.”

“You go play with the Rebellion for a few days and now you want to come back and tell everyone what to do?”

That stung, as James had known it would.

“Stay here, then,” Pike said harshly. “Spend all morning getting to the stairs. Have fun with it. I’m sure we’ll all be real impressed.”

“What do you care?” James’s voice was almost a hiss. He began to limp for the stairs, not looking back. The break had been set in the med bays of Nhean’s ships, and it was as close to a miracle as any of them were going to get just now—but it wasn’t nearly ready to walk on.

He didn’t belong in the Rebellion. He didn’t belong on any station. He couldn’t go back to Earth—and now he didn’t belong here, either. The Rebellion had tainted him, James was making that clear enough, and Pike felt a dull fury rising up in him.

“What do you want from me?”

“I wanted you bastards not to start a war,” James muttered. “Wars kill people. Figured you’d get it, of all people. Guess I was wrong.”

Pike turned and left without another word. He took the stairs two at a time to get to the main level, knowing that his speed twisted the knife for James, and not caring. He nodded to Parees, who was leaving the cockpit, and dropped gracelessly into the copilot’s chair.

“What’s eating you?” Rychenkov asked. He was fiddling with the controls at the desk, more out of habit than anything else. Nhean’s ships didn’t require much in the way of guidance for a deceleration burn.

“Nothing.” Pike leaned his head back against the rest and stared out the window. It was unsettling, being able to see into the black. Normally, he didn’t fly on ships good enough for a window—good ones were damn expensive. Even with the bulk of Mars in the center of the window, it made the tiny room seem colder, somehow—or maybe that was the spotless control panel and the new chairs. This place didn’t look lived in yet. “Cargo’s set. If we get another shipment.”

“People.” Rychenkov’s voice sounded old, far older than he was. “We could ship people. They always want to move when there’s a war on. We could take them to Vesta—or back to Ganymede.”

“There’s nothing for them there,” Pike protested.

“What is there for them at Mars?”

“The money they would have spent on the fare, for one thing.” Pike’s eyes scanned over the control panel, somewhat distractedly. This ship practically flew itself. “You saw what happened at Io.”

“That’s why they want to run. Wherever they are, they want to run somewhere else. We can help. And … relieve them of some credits at the same time.”

“There’s no running from bombs that can take out a whole planet.”

“Is it so wrong to let them hope?” Rychenkov gave one of his eloquent shrugs, and frowned at the look on Pike’s face. “Are you going to look like that all the time now? What is it? You miss her?”

Pike wasn’t entirely sure which her Rychenkov meant, and he wasn’t about to make a big deal of it. “It’s fine.”

“It’ll be better when that spy is gone.” Rychenkov shot a look over his shoulder. “That man—Parees. Something is off about him.”

Pike shrugged and shook his head. “Probably picked it up from Nhean.”

“Nah, that one’s normal enough.”

“What’s normal about living on Venus and having a secret military fleet?”

“Every generation has its generals. The servant, though….” Rychenkov looked over his shoulder again, shaking his head.

“Well, you’ve got….” Pike leaned over to check the timer to Carina Station. “About forty minutes, then he’s gone.”

“Good.” Rychenkov turned his head to a blinking light and pressed the comm button. “This is Captain Rychenkov of Freighter Aggy II, who is this?”

“This is Commander Delaney of the Intrepid.” The voice was crisp. The faint sound of klaxons sounded behind it. “We have word of an inbound Telestine fleet, reaching orbit within the next few hours. Our sensors are already picking them up in deceleration burn.”

“What?”

Rychenkov shook his head at Pike. “Commander, is there time for a stop at Carina Station?”

Footsteps sounded behind them, and they turned to look. Parees had dropped his pack at the bottom of the ladder down from the living quarters and was at the cockpit door, frowning.

“We’re not stopping,” Pike said. He cut off Delaney. “Commander, thank you for the warning.” He reached out and cut the call.

“Our employer,” Rychenkov said pointedly, “asked us to drop him at Carina Station.” He jerked his head at Parees.

“There is a Telestine fleet inbound.” Pike pointed to the shimmer on the Earth-side of Mars. “And Delaney? His ships? That’s the old fleet. Exile Fleet. They don’t have backup. My guess? They’re not going to have backup. The best we can do is turn around and get out of here.”

Parees shook his head. “You can still drop me off at Carina Station—if there’s time.”

“See?” Rychenkov lifted his eyebrows. “He says he wants to keep going.”

“And I’m saying he won’t.” Pike’s tone surprised even himself. “Once they chew through that fleet, who’s to say they won’t do what they did to Io? Maybe it’ll be Mars, maybe it’ll be the stations. Phobos. Deimos. Whatever. But we’re not leaving him because we’re not stopping.” His eyes met Rychenkov’s, and his face made his meaning clear. He is on this ship. That makes him our responsibility, whether we like him or not.

There was a pause.

“Fine,” Rychenkov said. He tapped a series of coordinates into the computer. “We’ll go to Vesta.”

Pike only nodded. He dropped his head into his hands and rubbed at his forehead as the automated warning blared through the cabin. All crew, brace for acceleration burn.

“Thank you.” The voice was soft.

Pike jumped. Somehow, despite arguing over the man, he’d managed to forget that Parees was in the room. He looked over his shoulder and met black eyes under a buzz cut of black hair, now clearly visible after several days of growth.

Parees looked faintly stunned. He swallowed. “Thank you,” he said again. He ducked his head and hurried away, as if almost afraid to remain. He was eerily quiet as he grabbed his pack and climbed back to the crew quarters.

“See?” Rychenkov shook his head, “Weird man, that one.”

Pike kept his head craned, looking at the empty hallway. When he settled back in his chair at last, it was with an image of Parees’s face still in his mind. From the man’s expression, he had not expected anyone to do such a thing for him.

For some reason, that reaction bothered Pike more than it should have, though he couldn’t say why.

Chapter Ten

Mars, High Orbit

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

“One minute to contact.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Min.” Delaney laced his fingers behind his back and stood tall, staring at the view screen. The holographic readout was not yet up on the desk. He was old fashioned; he liked to see his enemies with his own eyes.

Was he ever going to get used to this? He looked around the familiar bridge and felt his fingers tighten. A new crew, new faces—so many had signed up since the attack on Mercury—and yet, it was all still the same. There was the breathless tension as they waited, outmatched and yet still fiercely proud of what they were. There was the single-minded competence that made Delaney’s throat ache every time he saw it. There were two ways to go to one’s death: like an animal, scared and helpless, lashing out but with no hope of prevailing … and with quiet acceptance, turning the simmering anger and hatred into something useful.

They were going to take as many with them as they could. His message to the old fleet had said that. They were rusty buckets of bolts, these ships—that had gotten a laugh—but the value of the ships wasn’t the metal plating or the bullets, it was the soldiers who manned them. He had held the comm unit awkwardly as he spoke those words. He was an old man, and more, he wasn’t made to give inspirational speeches. But now, at the end, they had to know they were dying for a purpose. They were keeping humanity’s most populous colony safe, giving their species a fighting chance, and with luck and blind determination, they could hold long enough for Walker to come and finish the job.

Luck favored the determined. If that wasn’t a saying, it should be, he thought.

“Coming into range, sir.” Min tapped buttons to bring up the holographic display. “We’re reading four carriers and seven destroyers.”

Delaney cast a quick glance at Min. The man had risen quickly on the late Commander King’s crew, only to be transferred not long before Mercury. Delaney wasn’t sure if Min was quiet by nature, or if his manner was due to the chance escape from death on King’s ship. Either way, the man was competent and not inclined to gossip, and Delaney liked that about him.

“Is there a big flagship? Like at Mercury?” His eyes had not wavered from the view screen. The ships were still pinpricks out in the black, only recently resolved from the shimmering backdrop of stars.

“No, sir. I don’t think they had another one of those.” Min hesitated. “Maybe we can take them all down before they can build another one. Retake Earth.”

“Maybe.” It was the best he could say to that, but then practicality warred with the need to give these men and women hope, and Delaney sighed as he made the concession to hope. They were all going to be dead soon enough—did it matter if they went to their deaths with a shining vision of the future in their heads? “We have a lot of new ships.” He made sure his voice carried. “And we found out they aren’t so good at tactics. Yes, I think we can take them down, if we put our minds to it.”

“Aye, sir.” Min’s face glowed. He didn’t know Delaney well enough yet to know the flat tone of the lie in his voice. “Your orders?”

“The Juno will stay with us. Have the other five form up in a blockade behind us.” Delaney found a cold smile from somewhere. “We’re not just going to sit here and wait for them. We’re going to meet them on the way.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Min opened the line to the rest of the fleet. “Cairo, Washington, Stockholm, Samson, Carolina, this is the Intrepid. Request you form a blockade behind us. We are going to meet the Telestine fleet. Juno, you will fly with us.”

“Launch fighters,” Delaney ordered crisply.

“Fighter bays, launch.” Min’s eyes were focused on his screens. He pressed the earpiece and looked up to meet Delaney’s eyes with a brief nod. “Fighters launching, sir. Should I start the countdown to acceleration?”

“Yes, please.”

“All hands brace. Gunnery load. We will be firing from acceleration.” Min brought a countdown up on the main screen and turned to secure a nod from the helmsman before looking back to Delaney. “Fifteen seconds, sir.”

“Excellent.” Excellent? What was he, a politician? “Thank you, Lieutenant Min.”

Acceleration sucked them down as the too-old Telestine gravity compensators struggled to adjust. Delaney watched the papers on the command desk lift slightly, and then slide sideways off the edge as the Intrepid accelerated toward the incoming ships.

They appeared out of the darkness, Telestine ships shaped like teardrops, sleek and deadly. Fighters billowed around them in a vicious cloud, still invisible to the naked eye, but an angry swirl on the holograph. How many dozens of them, he did not want to know, not when he could picture the sad fighter bays of the Intrepid, each old fighter lovingly maintained and only just spaceworthy. Of course, the more enemy fighters there were, the more they could take down. Humanity had spent the last decades watching their sons and daughters die in the black. As far as Jack Delaney was concerned, the Telestines could step up now and learn what that was like.

“Sir?” Ensign Kapoor, one of the communications officers, held up a hand to get Delaney’s attention. “We’re receiving a transmission from the Telestine fleet.”

“Ignore it,” Delaney ordered. Like hell he was going to let his crew be thrown off by a call for surrender.

“It’s coded as a government transmission, sir.”

Delaney hesitated. The content of the message would likely be the same, but an official transmission … that should be seen.

What would Walker do?

“Send it to my headset,” he ordered. He would adjust as necessary, and his crew would not have to watch their age-old enemy tell them that they were doomed, or that they were dooming the rest of humanity.

“Yes, sir.” The man tapped at a few keys and nodded to Delaney.

“Exile Fleet, this is Tel’rabim.” The voice was smooth and cultured. Why, Delaney wondered, was it so easy for the Telestines to speak human languages and so difficult for humans to learn Telestine? “In times past, I have been your ally.”

Delaney snorted. Tel’rabim had planned all of this. He had never intended to leave humanity alive. He had intended to kill them all, as if they were nothing more than a very expensive inconvenience.

“I can no longer, in good conscience, support humanity,” Tel’rabim continued. “When we arrived at Earth to find a new home, we were moved to mercy, and offered humanity a new home among the stars. I believed, as many others did, that humanity could be trusted to act in its best interest, and work with us to create a fruitful society.”

Delaney had fallen silent now. His hands were clenched so hard around the edge of the desk that his fingers ached. How dare Tel’rabim blame them for being angry when they had been forced from their homes into the dark, watched their families die, relied upon Telestine charity for their bare survival?

“It has become clear in recent weeks, however, that the spirit of rebellion is too deeply embedded in humanity for my people to trust them as allies. When we were informed of a shipyard at that produced military vessels, we attempted to disable only that installation. However, not only has humanity not condemned the actions of the Exile Fleet, we have now found ever more secret programs, including a weapons program on Io. We can no longer trust that by extinguishing the individual seeds of rebellion, we will attain harmony with humanity. Humanity will continue to rebel, and claim both Telestine and human lives. In the interests of survival for my own people, I must lead our fleet against humanity. Understand that this is not born of malice, but of necessity. I bear you no ill will, but I must protect my people.”

“Sir?” Min was staring at Delaney worriedly.

He had to pull himself together. Delaney stood up straighter and nodded crisply to Min, and then to the helmsman. “Prepare for engagement.”

“The message—”

“Nothing we haven’t heard before.” Delaney gave the small smile he’d seen Walker give when she was trying to reassure people. “It would be easier for them if we just rolled over and played dead. And we’re not going to do that, are we?”

There was a scattered cheer across the bridge and the helmsman’s hands danced over the controls. There was new energy on the bridge, a sort of shared joke. They were the species that couldn’t just conveniently die. They were the ones who refused to fade away quietly.

That was their strength.

The Juno hovered to port as they accelerated. Newer than the rest, it should by rights be the command ship of this detachment, but nothing could have taken the Intrepid’s place. Every creak was familiar to her engineers, and every strange quirk in gunnery and maneuvering had been learned over time. Delaney had made a vow to go down with the Intrepid, and like hell was he going to shift over to some new contraption with windows.

They were finally coming into range, and Delaney reached out to denote the targets on the holographic display. Destroyers, being highly dangerous and highly vulnerable in their own right, would be the first targets, and only then would they go for the carriers.

“Sir, I have a comm request from the Juno, Captain Gattina. Something about a reading on the Telestine fleet.”

“One moment.” Delaney finished denoting the targets. “Tell the fleet to make sure it stays out of the line of fire for the Telestine cannons.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, Captain Gattina—”

A bright beam cut across the view screen before the picture went a brilliant white. A mechanical whine burst across the comm lines, visible even without the headsets, and one of the officers gave a yell of pain. The Intrepid rocked and the artificial gravity failed and restarted with a groan and a bone-dragging moment of calibration, and Delaney had just a moment to see his death coming for him at last.

Just a moment, before he realized it was the Juno that had taken the brunt. The Juno, the new ship from Mercury under the command of that brilliant kid from Ganymede, Jennifer Gattina, the one Walker said reminded her of herself at that age.

The Juno, which was not crippled and scrambling to right itself, but entirely gone, only the tiniest shards of debris left to show it had been there at all.

Chapter Eleven

Near Mars

VSF Santa Maria

Bridge

The Venus Sovereign Fleet. She tried saying the phrase several times in her head, testing it, even mouthing the words over and over. Getting the feel of it.

She didn’t like it. Oh, the ship itself, she loved. Gleaming, fresh, new. The pinnacle of human ingenuity.

And it was Nhean’s. And Nhean insisted it be referred to as part of the Venus Sovereign Fleet, and not part of Walker’s home—the Exile Fleet.

“Ma’am—ma’am!” The pounding of feet caught her attention, and one of the newer officers bobbed his head nervously at Walker before snapping into a salute.

“Yes?” There were so many new recruits these days. She smiled automatically, and tried to remember his name. Cooper? Copper? Cummings? She did not let her eyes drift to his name tag.

“Message for you—on the bridge. An official Telestine transmission.” He lowered his voice on the last words.

She wavered. An official transmission was not to be ignored. The Telestines would view it as open rebellion. The consequences—

She could have laughed. What was she worried would happen? She was part of the Exile Fleet. She’d already made her allegiance clear. “I will return shortly. Have the message held for me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” There was a tumble of the same fears in the officer’s eyes. Open rebellion against the Telestines still felt risky, even when compliance also killed them.

Walker returned his salute and made her way down the hallway, trying to drown out the pound of her anger with hard footsteps on the metal grating. It shouldn’t be this way.

And soon, however this ended, it wouldn’t be.

Her feet carried her to the fighter bays, to a sight she had seen too often in recent days: Commander Theo McAllister, alone at his fighter. There was a rag in one hand and oil in the other, even though these new Venus Sovereign Fleet birds were already gleaming. The craft was clean and spaceworthy, but McAllister kept polishing.

And McAllister was, as he always was these days, alone. In the constant activity of the hangar bay—frenetic now that they were racing for Mars—he was quiet enough to fade entirely into the background.

She made her footsteps loud enough to be heard, and waited for him to look around.

He saluted. “Ma’am.” Something in his eyes said he wasn’t entirely there anymore.

She didn’t pull her punches. “You don’t look good, McAllister.”

A dull anger flared in his eyes. “I can still do my job.”

“Can you?” She stared him down. “Can you tell me a damned thing about any of your pilots right now? D’you know who’s injured, whose family is on Mars, who’s been doing well in drills? Can you even tell me a damned thing about the fighter you’ve been polishing?” He looked almost betrayed, and that told her she was on the right track. “Yeah, I know, I’m not being nice. You know who is being nice? Your fellow pilots. And how well are they getting through to you?”

McAllister swallowed hard. “Did they tell you to come talk to me?”

“They didn’t have to.” He faded into the background well enough, but no deck chief was going to miss a pilot hanging around. Ahlstrom had come to talk to Walker recently, grease-stained face tired and worried in equal measure. The deckhands were starting to get nervous and rumors were flying that McAllister’s obsessive behavior—he polished no matter where he was—meant he knew something that they weren’t aware of. “And you know you haven’t been doing your job. You’ve been going through the motions, and that gets people killed.”

“So fire me,” he spat back.

“I will, if that’s what I need to do. But you’re a damned good pilot, and you used to be a damned good CAG, too. I’m not going to throw that away without giving you a chance to pull your act together.”

“Why?” he asked her.

She frowned.

“Why do you even care?” he clarified. “We’re not going to win this. You know that.”

“I don’t,” she told him simply.

“You do,” he pressed. “You stand up there on the bridge and you tell them we can win because you think dying quickly while trying to win is a better life than dying slowly on a station. I get that. But you have to know we aren’t actually going to win … right?”

She tilted her head to the side, caught off guard by this. She knew that despair might poison any member of the crew, but she had never considered that they might think she was knowingly lying about their odds.

“You didn’t know,” he said slowly.

“No. I don’t know.” She smiled at him. “How did we even survive, McAllister? How did we make it all the way to here? Every single step of this has been so damned unlikely, but here we are, and you have to wonder—was it ever really unlikely at all? This is who we are. We’re scrappers. We’re fighters. We refuse to die, and we’re smart. We’ve started winning battles, and we’re going to win more. We’ll probably lose a few too. It happens in war. So, no. I don’t think it’s inevitable that we’ll lose.”

His mouth was hanging open. “You think—” His voice was high and he broke off, cleared his throat. “You actually think we could take back Earth?”

“I think we can win this,” she told him honestly, only slightly evading the question. “I believe that.”

There was so much more she wanted to say: that the late Arianna King wasn’t the only reason to keep hoping for more, that there were other people who still needed him, that if he wanted to curl up and die, the Telestines would welcome it, and he should just have stayed on the stations. But she didn’t need to say any of that, because he knew it all.

She had chosen her crew well.

She watched him pull himself up. “If we die—”

“Others will take our place.” She cut him off. “And they will start with the gains we have made. None of this is useless, McAllister. None of it. I promise.”

He nodded decisively. “Right. Right.” He looked around himself at the oil, the rag, the fighter. It was as if he wasn’t quite sure how he’d gotten here. “Right,” he said again. “I’ll go, ah….”

“Prepare for battle?”

“Are we going to get there in time?” He blinked at her.

“Our resident computer whizz thinks it’s possible, and I think you can agree it’d be an awful shame to get there in time and not have any of our fighters ready. So get your ass in gear and your pilots ready, soldier.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He snapped a salute.

She returned it, and then she turned and left for the bridge, to hear a transmission she could already anticipate. And to reject it utterly.

And to fight.

Chapter Twelve

Mars, High Orbit

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

The ship rocked, and Delaney nearly lost his footing.

“Commander!” His helmsman was pale with fear, eyes darting to the sensor arrays. “If we—”

“Hold course!” His voice was a bellow. This was a war—had his crew thought they’d be out of danger in the fleet? They should know better, especially after Mercury. Delaney straightened and swept his eyes over the room. “No matter where they move, no matter how they try to get to the surface, we will be a thorn in their side.” He jabbed his finger at the holographic display, stalking around the room. The red shapes of the Telestine fleet were swinging out to flank, and the Intrepid plunged down in the center, reforming with the remaining ships to form a new blockade. “They will pay for every single thing they try to take from us, am I being clear? Mars is the single largest colony we have. Millions of people are down there.”

The bridge crew said nothing. He could feel their fear, and for a moment, he almost pitied them. The ship shuddered and they flinched.

They could not win this. There were not enough ships, and the ones they did have were the oldest ships of the fleet now, half-broken and scarred from battle. There was no winning against the attackers.

But every ship they downed was one that could not come for the other colonies. Every Telestine fighter pilot and scientist and gunner they killed—if the Telestines even had those things—was another blow to the invaders that held Earth. Let them lose their sons and daughters out in the black. Let them see how they liked it.

They will pay for every single thing they try to take from us. Jack Delaney had never spoken words he believed in more than those.

“So what are we going to do?” he asked his bridge crew.

“Make them pay.” It was a scant whisper from one or two of them. The rest were frozen.

They were young to die, the ones surrounding him. He allowed himself a moment a pity. A moment, and no more. “Make them pay,” he agreed. “Make them pay.” A little louder this time.

“Make them pay,” came the response from his bridge crew, nearly lost in the groan of the ship as the Intrepid swung into position. It shuddered as it absorbed the impact of the debris from the Juno that hung throughout the battle in a cloud.

Was it too much to hope for that the Telestines might be getting desperate?

He didn’t have time for hope right now, any more than he had time for fear.

“Cairo and Washington, flank.” They were going to play by the book. “Washington, hide your fighters behind the Intrepid. Stockholm, swing outside Cairo and harry them. God willing, we can hold them until—”

“Sir, we’re getting a reading!” shouted Yeng, one of his communications officers. She swallowed and had to try to speak twice before she got the sound out. “What look like … Telestine ships inbound from Jupiter. Oh God.”

The bridge went dead silent. Delaney clutched the edge of the desk until his fingers ached. “What?”

“We have another fleet inbound.”

“And you’re sure it’s Telestine?”

“None of our ships can handle that rate of deceleration, sir. Only Telestines can do that.”

“How did they get a fleet in between Mars and Jupiter without us knowing?” He was yelling at her and he could not stop himself.

“I don’t know, sir.” Her face was white.

“Well, figure it out!”

He looked at the display, as if he might somehow find more ships there, but there was nothing new, there was no way out. The smaller ships stood no chance. The Samson had been blown to pieces in the first few seconds after the Juno, and the Carolina was a smoking wreck on the surface of Mars; they had watched it tumble away, end over end, while the crew struggled to right it, and in the end went full burn to keep it from smashing into the main colony, itself.

And now another fleet. They were lost.

“Cairo and Washington, full burn for the new fleet. Start shooting before you have a lock, see what you can do.” Make them pay. He watched them begin to turn on the display. “Stockholm, close the flank.”

There was only a moment’s hesitation. “Yes, sir.” The answer from both captains was crisp.

They were going to die here. He saw in his mind’s eye, in a flash, Commander King’s ship streaking overhead and into the line of fire over Mercury. This was how it was going to end, not dying to liberate Earth, but to protect the very god-forsaken colonies that were choking the life from his people. His mouth tasted bitter. “Helmsman, full burn. Make for the carrier.”

“Yes, sir.” The helmsman’s voice was quiet. The ship creaked, and they were pressed sideways as it began its acceleration.

This was it.

“Delaney!” The voice burst across the speakers. “Call off your ships, it’s us!”

That voice. It couldn’t be…. “Admiral?!”

“It’s us!”

“Cairo, Washington, break off attack and circle around. Stockholm, swing wide.” His own helmsman, anticipating the order, had slowed acceleration, though the batteries were still firing full bore. “Walker, how the hell—”

“Our resident know-it-all stole some very nice tech during the brief time he had access to those Telestine ships over Mercury.” Without her own fleet’s guns trained on her, Walker sounded almost jovial. “And from the size of the fleet you’re facing down, looks like they weren’t anticipating backup.”

“Right.” Delaney wiped his brow with a trembling hand. No one had been expecting backup.

“So let’s give ‘em a little surprise, huh?” The new fleet moved onto the holograph in a blur and resolved into a full formation of carriers. “Let’s let that bastard wonder where his ships went. I’m not in a very forgiving mood today.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Delaney’s face flashed a smile. “Legacy formation, fall back and split to flank. Good hunting.”

Chapter Thirteen

Mars, High Orbit

Fighters

The chutes opened on the Santa Maria and the fighters were flung out into the black. McAllister heard Tocks give a low whistle as the ships guided themselves into formation, accounting for their pilot’s spinning heads. They had never been ejected from a landing bay at this speed before, just like they’d never come into a battle on such a hard deceleration burn—or been ejected into the middle of a raging battle either for that matter.

But there was no time to do anything other than call the order for an attack. The ships wove up through the retreating bulk of the older ships and toward the cloud of Telestine fighters that had suddenly billowed from the enemy carrier ships.

“What’s our target?” one of the new pilots called.

McAllister gave a scowl at the comm unit. “Hit the weak points on the rear carrier.” It wasn’t inspiring. Hell, it wasn’t even all that helpful, but he didn’t have it in him to be helpful anymore.

He was supposed to be dead. With Arianna.

Maybe by the end of this, he would be.

“You heard the admiral.” Tocks picked up for him. Her voice was crisp. “We are to make sure none of these ships can run home and tell Mama about what we got for tech now. Try to take out the guns, those are weak points on the hull. Any windows you see, go for it. Any seams, likewise. And make sure those fighters don’t get a lock on you.” A stream of bullets erupted from her ship and one of the oncoming fighters burst into a cloud of silver. She gave a whoop. “Like that, right? I love these new targeting systems! Venetians can build, I’ll give ‘em that.”

McAllister said nothing. He listened to the chatter start, and then flipped off his comm unit. He was in the black, in the silence.

And here … he could hear her. Commander King. Arianna.

You have to fight, she murmured in his ear. He could feel her arms around him.

“For what?” he asked out loud.

For Earth. Every one of them you take out—

“It won’t bring you back.”

Nothing will bring me back. But, Theo—

“CAG!” Tocks’s voice burst across his personal channel. “CAG!”

McAllister swore and pulled out of the way barely in time as a Telestine fighter shot up from below him. He guided the new plane in a dizzying arc—the ships could go harder than he was used to, and faster, and his head swam with the g-forces—and caught his opponent unawares. It tried to turn, but it wasn’t fast enough and it exploded before it could get a lock on him. McAllister turned back into formation, heart pounding. “Thanks, Tocks.”

“Get your head in the game, sir,” was all she said before she cut the line.

From her silence, the ghost of King agreed. He swallowed, and switched the main comm channel back on.

“Boom, boom, boom!” Princess was yelling. McAllister heard his cackle. “That’ll show you. Think you can come here and kill civvies, huh? Didn’t your mothers teach you manners?” His tone changed. “Newbie Three, you got one on your tail.”

“Thanks!” In the corner of McAllister’s vision, one of the newbies swerved out of the way just in time. “They’re fucking everywhere!”

“Well, you know how to fix that, right?” Tocks was shouting with the adrenaline of battle. “Take ‘em down. CAG, little present for you, gonna send him sideways.” She was coming in diagonally to a Telestine fighter, who swerved into McAllister’s path.

A burst of gunfire, and the ship split nearly in two. McAllister caught a glimpse of an all-white cockpit as his ship hurtled through the debris and tried to summon the ghost of who he’d been before, the man who’d died in orbit around Mercury along with his love. “All right, form up, take the bulk of them down fast. The legacy fighters’ll take out the dregs. We need to get to the carriers.”

“Yes, sir.” He could hear the approval in Tocks’s voice. “Newbie Eight, what the hell are you up to? You’re gonna turn into shrapnel, you keep flying like that. You wanna be shrapnel?

“Copy that, Newbie Eight is now known as Shrapnel.” Princess cut through a formation of Telestine fighters in a tight spiral, laughing maniacally.

“I don’t want to be Shrapnel,” a plaintive voice said.

“Shut up and shoot, Shrapnel.”

“I want a name!” It was the newbie in fighter Six who spoke up. He turned his plane straight up and arced around to catch the Telestines in the crossfire as they made for the human carriers.

“You don’t die, we’ll give you one.” Princess sounded like he was grinning. “Cap, I like these newbies. They’re our kind of crazy.”

“Yeah, yeah.” But McAllister felt himself smiling. How long since he’d smiled like this?

“All ships, focus fire on the main carrier.” The voice was new, and not on the standard comm channel. McAllister frowned. “This is Secretary General Jacob Essa. Repeat, all ships focus fire on the main carrier.”

Secretary General Essa? What the hell?

They were spread out, but McAllister saw Princess turn in his cockpit to give him a look.

“All ships, this is Admiral Walker.” The admiral’s voice was crisp and clipped, but agitated. “Hold formation, and follow original orders.”

McAllister suppressed the urge to whistle. He’d never heard the admiral’s voice sound so hard.

Essa’s voice thundered over the line. “Walker, that ship is breaking your blockade and making for the colony.”

“I am well aware of the situation.” She was furious. “All ships, continue as directed.”

“Uh, CAG?” said Tocks. The fighters had stopped firing. They wove through the battle, marking targets but taking no shots.

What would she have done? What would Arianna have said?

He knew the answer before he finished asking the question. “Follow the admiral’s orders. She’s not going to let the colony be destroyed, you know that. All of you, continue on original path. Leave the rest of these for the Intrepid’s fighters, we’re on the rear carrier. Remember, keep them between you and our carriers. One of those big rounds is gonna ruin your day real quick.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Tocks and Princess answered in unison, and the others picked up from their example.

“Come on, look alive.” McAllister slammed his fighter into full acceleration. “Admiral’s counting on us to take these bastards down. Quicker we get done here, the quicker we get some of Tocks’s moonshine. Yeah, Tocks, I know you’re brewing in the engine room.”

“It’s shit vino,” Tocks called back, using an ironically fancy term for their ethanol. “Gunnery chief’s a hell of a cannon master, not so much with the brewing.”

“Vino is vino,” Newbie Five called back. “Gets you drunk. What more could you want?”

“Careful, Newbie, or you’re gonna get Drinking Problem as your call sign,” said Tocks. “Or better yet, Borracho. That’s Spanish for drunk, right? Don’t you speak el Spanish?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Newbie Five. “But your accento is terible,” he replied, in a smarmy version of his own slight accent.

Something unknotted in McAllister’s chest and he heard a rusty laugh break through. “Borracho, Shrapnel, form up! We’re gonna take this bastard down. For moonshine! For vino!”

Chapter Fourteen

Mercury, High Orbit

Eden

Bridge

The Eden was sleek and fast, one of the newest scout ships from Nhean’s fleet.

Unfortunately, all that meant was that Larsen and his crew had arrived at Mercury in plenty of time to watch nothing at all happen. They’d taken their time selecting a hunk of debris to hide behind, set up surveillance Walker had requested, and had been floating in bored silence since then.

He drummed his fingers on the command desk and tried not to sigh. In a supporting role, he’d always been busy with paperwork, communications, tracking formations. In his first command role, something he felt he should relish, he was bored. He had nothing to do.

He also felt like everyone was staring at him.

Probably just his imagination. He hadn’t spent a lot of time staring at Walker and Delaney, after all.

“Sir, unidentified ships approaching.” One of the crew members raised a hand.

“Project the map up on the screens,” Larsen ordered. He linked his hands behind his back and looked up with interest. At least something was happening.

His heart seemed to flip over a moment later. This wasn’t a stolen shuttle, or even a cargo ship they could hail and demand to search for the missing girl. The formation—for it was certainly a formation—was coming in fast, and pointed directly at the ruins of one of the rolling cities. Only a fraction of the original buildings had remained operational, but that wasn’t common knowledge. So who was heading there now?

A moment later, there was a stricken silence as the reading came in: Telestine. Old-style feather fighters, and a frigate.

He had watched Walker commanding the fleet for long enough to know that there was only one choice he could make.

“Hold course,” he said simply. “Send an FTL message to Walker with what we’re seeing.” He nodded to the helmsman. “Be ready for full burn if they begin arming weapons, or if they look like they’ve seen us.”

“We’re … running?” The communications officer looked like he wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or not.

“Five ships against us,” Larsen told him brutally. “We’re not going to win this if it comes to a fight.”

But they didn’t seem to want a fight. As the Eden’s watched, the ships streaked down through Mercury’s atmosphere and landed near a remote hangar.

Larsen narrowed his eyes at the satellite projection. “What the hell are they doing?”

Nobody answered. No one knew what was happening.

The minutes ticked by. Then a full hour. No distress calls from the surface. If they were under attack, they were being awfully quite about it.

Then, before Larsen could decide whether it was worth risking communications with the surface, the blotchy, half-focused images from the damaged satellites, showed the ships lifting off and racing away, still in their tight, Telestine formation.

Larsen hesitated.

“Open a channel to that hangar bay and see if you can lock onto a signal.”

“Yes, sir.” It took longer than usual, but at last the comm officer gave Larsen a thumbs up.

“Hangar bay, this is the Eden, currently in orbit. Is everyone down there okay?”

Silence.

They tried again. The channel hissed and popped, but there was no answer.

“High alert!” Larsen barked. “We’re going in there, and we don’t know what they’ve left behind!”

The bridge bustled with activity, when suddenly the comm officer shouted “Sir!”

“What is it?”

“I’m receiving verified fleet code from the surface. They indicate that they are ok, that there was no damage, and that they are not in need of assistance. The Telestines just came and stole some equipment, and then took off in a hurry once they faced defender gunfire. Their audio link must be damaged, but this code is unmistakeable.”

“Stand down. Repeat, stand down throughout the ship” Larsen said. He looked around at the crew. Every one of them looked as confused as he felt.

What the hell had they just witnessed?

Chapter Fifteen

Mars, High Orbit

VFS Santa Maria

Bridge

“Ma’am, our fighters are taking the rear starboard carrier.”

“Excellent, thank you.” Walker’s fingers dragged one of the mostly-automated carriers into place on the display. The bridge of Nhean’s ship was humming with activity, officers at sleek new desks, voices low as they relayed orders and information within the ship and the fleet. Everything was new, gleaming, and the officers themselves seemed to sit straighter and work all the faster for it.

“Also….” Her new communications officer swallowed. He pitched his voice to carry only to her as he leaned in across the display. “The Secretary General is on the line. Essa ma’am.”

She could not deal with this right now. Especially as he’d just tried to order her own fighters off their target.

“Tell him I’m busy,” Walker said grimly. She felt the anger simmer higher, a wash of acid in her stomach, and she welcomed it. Rage had gotten her through this life, and she could use it now, too.

She studied the Telestine fleet for a moment, tumbling in disarray. The carrier Essa was so worried about was still moving forward, sliding between two of the new human ships, but four destroyers waited behind her, ready to catch it in their crossfire.

The communications officer was still hovering. Suppressing a sigh, Walker looked up at him. “I’ll deal with Essa when this is done.”

His hands twisted. “Ma’am—”

“Just say the first bit.” Lord give her patience. “About me being busy.”

“Yes, ma’am.” His hands began to move, typing out the message, but he bit his lip as he did so.

“Good.” When this was over, before she dealt with Essa, she was going to relay some new orders to the officers—a reminder of just where their loyalties lay. Her eyes caught a flash of movement on the display: a ship was breaking out of formation. She tapped her commlink to the Intrepid. “Delaney. Where are you going?”

“I’ve been ordered to intercept the carrier, ma’am.”

Pure rage drenched her, making her skin flush. He was ordering her fleet ship by ship? “We’ve got the carrier under control.” How she managed to keep her voice even, she was not sure. “Hold formation. McAllister, report.”

“Making a noticeable dent, ma’am.” The fighter pilot sounded pleased with himself. “Newbies doing well, new ships doing well, we’ll be moving on to another carrier soon.” His voice dropped slightly. “We are following your orders, ma’am.”

A cold smile touched her lips. “Carry on, McAllister.”

She watched the battle unfolding. The Telestines were wavering, their ranks split. One of the enemy carriers was coming about to try to run, and her destroyers were moving to intercept it. It was chaos, but the sort of chaos she knew well.

The sort of chaos Essa should understand.

“Private call from Commander Delaney, ma’am.” An officer pressed a headset into her hand.

She pressed her lips together tightly as she took the call from Delaney. “Hold position. I’ll be speaking to the Secretary General when this is over.”

“Ma’am.” Delaney’s voice, and his formality, both screamed danger. “He’s threatening us with court martial. My bridge crew is—”

“The Exile Fleet does not answer to the United Nations.” She snapped the words sharply enough that half of her own bridge crew looked around. “That ship is a decoy and we both know it. We have an appropriate force moving to intercept it. The moment we focus fire on it, the rest of the fleet will flank and take the colony. We can’t split our forces right now. Commander, I need you to hold position.” He knew that. He knew all of it, and she closed her eyes for a moment. “I will stand between Essa and your crew, Jack, you know that. I’ll take the heat.”

When he spoke, he sounded grateful beyond measure. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You.” She snapped her fingers at the communications officer and squinted at his name badge. “Sanderson, open a channel to the fleet for me.”

Sanderson’s fingers danced over the keys and he nodded.

“All ships, this is Admiral Walker.” Her own voice echoed eerily back at her. “You have trained for today. You have learned to fight with what you have, you have learned to see through the traps the Telestines would scatter in our path.” She hesitated, and then the rage welled up inside her once more and she twisted the knife. She knew he was listening. “The Secretary General, being a civilian, is of course worried about the outcome of this battle. However, as a civilian, he is not trained in our formations. Hold your present course.” She did not wait for an answer before motioning to Sanderson to cut the main line.

“He’s going to make you pay for that,” Delaney murmured in her ear.

“Let him try.” She felt her lip curl, and gave a tiny sound of satisfaction as one of the enemy carriers disappeared on the screen. Good job, Theo. “Sanderson will keep him off your comm channels. In the meantime … we have some stragglers to kill. That carrier will be in range of our destroyers in just a moment.”

Indeed, the bulk of the Telestine forces—three carriers, and two smaller ships—was trying to pull up and turn. The detachment of destroyers she had sent after them were almost in range of the first fleeing ship, accelerating even as their guns came online. One of them winked out of existence and she flinched, but the others continued onward without pause. Where once they might have broken off, they would never do so now. Tel’rabim had raised the stakes, and humanity was answering.

Had he anticipated this when he sent that taunting broadcast from Io? Surely he had known humanity would answer, but had he known they would answer like this? She swallowed and looked away from the battle for the fleeing ships, watching as the destroyers behind her began to fire on the carrier that made for the colony. It began to list to one side, port side engines gone, and then she watched it go dead, tumbling.

“Ion cannons online, burn as much of it as you can—that thin atmosphere won’t take care of much, and we can’t risk it hitting the main colony. McAllister, what’s the word?”

His voice scratched over the comm. “Taking down their destroyers, ma’am. They got some lively guns, but we got some lively ships. Shrapnel, look out, bogey at your six. Borracho, help him out!”

“Shrapnel?”

“Sorry, ma’am. Shrapnel’s a callsign. All under control here. Looks like the other two carriers are about to go down in flames, stand by.”

There was no time even to get a view screen up before the ships began to wink out, and for a moment, Walker felt envious of McAllister and his fighters. They could see everything as it happened—what was that like? They could see the Telestine ships falling over themselves to try to escape. They could watch their victory unfold.

Someday, she would like to see a battle that way.

But today was not that day and, as she had known it would, the comm channel lit up. Sanderson tapped his ear to indicate he was turning on her headset.

She took a deep breath. “Walker.”

“You will meet us on the surface.” Essa didn’t bother with etiquette or pleasantries. “I expect a good explanation for your questionable choices.”

The line cut, and Walker’s hands clenched. She took a moment before looking up to meet Sanderson’s eyes. He was worried; she was not.

If Essa wanted a fight … that was what he was going to get.

Chapter Sixteen

Asteroid Belt

Vesta Station

“Finally here.”

“Finally.” Pike smiled as the hatchway of the Aggy II came down and the familiar corridors of Vesta came into sight. He waved to the miners waiting beyond, and gestured for the crew to begin unloading the crates of food.

The miners did not complain about helping. There were civilians, cargo haulers liked to say, and then there were civilians—those who inhabited the far-flung mining stations were quite a different breed from the ones who crowded the residential stations. Down-to-earth, foul-mouthed, and endlessly practical, the miners of the outer stations had only contempt for those who didn’t do their part to keep humanity alive.

Seeing them offering drinks of water and unasked-for help seemed to confuse the new crew.

“Are they always this friendly?” Katya asked suspiciously.

Pike only smiled and nodded. She would learn in time, if she stayed. The miners’ alliance with the cargo haulers was unspoken, unknown to most, and perhaps unlikely. The miners had a healthy respect for the cargo haulers, seeing trade as one of the three pillars of humanity’s Exodus; the other two, of course, were food and fuel, the latter of which the miners provided.

It had been an easy choice for Rychenkov and Pike, picking a mining outpost for their first run out of the gates. Any cargo hauler worth his salt had a dozen contacts on Vesta, and having heard that the asteroid was awaiting a shipment of food, Rychenkov had offered to bring it. Good place to get back into the game, he’d said. Get a contract that doesn’t come with strings attached.

That last had been said with a tiny head jerk in the direction of Parees. Rychenkov had made his dissatisfaction with their guest clear, but Pike could not bring himself to care too much. Rychenkov’s base state was grumpiness, and Pike had come to suspect that the man was happiest when he was grumbling about something. Parees was an inconvenience, but not a large one, all told. The ship was well-stocked, and big enough for more crew than they had, and Parees himself had decided to stay on Vesta. Why—what he could do on either Carina Station or Vesta—no one knew. He didn’t seem to be in the habit of sharing secrets.

At least he worked. Without prompting or complaint, he’d joined in unloading the cargo, and was handing crates off to Deshawn and Gabriela while Katya haggled with a merchant on the side of the docking bay, waving a broken piece of equipment under his nose.

“I’d missed this place.” Pike leaned back against the edge of the Aggy II’s port and watched the crates being loaded onto a makeshift cart, which was really just a pallet on rickety, reclaimed wheels. Even here—especially here—no one used fuel without a good reason.

“Really?” Rychenkov looked over in genuine interest. “An Earther like you?” He’d made a show of not asking Pike about his childhood before this, but something in his tone said he’d long been curious.

Pike shrugged. Vesta was no place humanity would have called home unless it was forced to do so. Still, he liked it. Situated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, it was in an ideal location for both trade with the colonies and mining on the nearby asteroids—“nearby” being a relative term—for the fuel to supply the cargo haulers. Vesta was a large asteroid, with a familiar round shape. The colony had been built over time in what Pike found to be an endearing patchwork, stations built around stations in order to accommodate the growing population of miners.

His throat tightened at that thought. As one of the major fuel centers, it was likely to be hit by the Telestine fleet before too long.

Rychenkov didn’t need to be told what was worrying Pike. The man leaned closer to speak quietly. “Word is, they’ve been preparing. They’re scattering, more and more. There’s not as many here anymore.”

He was right. Normally, the hallways were bustling with activity, but this time, there were only a few off-shift miners to help them, and the usual hum of activity was muted.

“At least they have somewhere to go,” Pike murmured. It would be a long time before the Telestines found all of them—the Telestines didn’t seem to understand humanity’s desire to spread out—but then, in the long run, the miners would run out of supplies. Had they been stockpiling?

He realized he’d lost Rychenkov’s attention. The man’s pale blue eyes were focused on the end of the docking bay, where Parees was earnestly bargaining with one of the miners. Rychenkov, for his part, looked grimly amused. “This oughtta be good.”

But as they watched, Parees and the other man shook hands, and the man gestured into the corridors that led to Vesta’s heart. He was clearly giving directions, and seemed eager to have Parees follow them.

Parees stopped to look back before he set off. If he was surprised to see Pike and Rychenkov watching him, he gave no sign of it. He nodded to Rychenkov, and more deeply to Pike, and then he set off without another glance.

“Huh,” Rychenkov said, and Pike thought that about summed it up. “Any chance the boy was a miner in a past life?”

“I suppose.” Pike shook his head. “Nhean never mentioned where he came from. I assumed he was born on Venus, but….” But if he was born on a mining colony, he might well have found it worth bowing and scraping to Nhean in order to stay out of a near-zero-g mine for the rest of his life. It wasn’t out of the question. Pike turned the thought over and over in his head as the miner approached them.

“Joshua Avramson,” he introduced himself. He shook hands with both of them. “I tell you, this shipment is more than welcome. We’ve been running uncomfortably low.”

“Sounds like you haven’t had much lately,” Rychenkov said neutrally.

“Fishing for another contract?” Avramson laughed. “You don’t need to ask—anything you’ve got, we’ll take. We’ve been out of orbital alignment for long enough that we’d be looking for help even without the troubles, and with them … well, I’ve tried to find contracts and I can’t. If you come back with food, I won’t ask where it came from.” He pressed the credit chip into Rychenkov’s hand. “We’ve got money enough set aside for times like these,” he said meaningfully.

Rychenkov only nodded. “I’ll find you what I can.” It was a promise, Pike knew him well enough for that. Rychenkov might pretend to be a conscienceless bastard, but his personal code wouldn’t allow for leaving miners to starve. The Russian frowned, then nodded his head at the rest of the station. “So why take on another mouth, then?” He nodded in the direction Parees had left.

“Oh, the new one?” Avramson tossed a glance over his shoulder and smiled. “We’ve got a fuel extraction drill we can’t get to work. He says he can do something with it. Says he knew our old mechanic, guy by the name of Thorne. Sam Thorne.”

Chapter Seventeen

Mars

Elysium Planitia City

United Nations Headquarters

Council Chamber

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Delaney’s voice was quiet. He stood tall and unbowed in his dress uniform, but Walker did not think she had ever seen him so worried. He had faced death with more equanimity than this.

She tried to choose her words, but in the end there was only one thing to say: “The Exile Fleet is not commanded by the United Nations.”

“They control the flow of food.”

“And we have the ships to take it if we need.” The words came out before she thought them through, and the sentiment shocked even her. “I will not let him set humanity against itself.”

Delaney hesitated. She could see what it cost him to think of this—of politics—after the battle he had witnessed. He had taken it upon himself to clean up after the fight. He always did things like that. It was just part of his personality to finish the job—he had started out as an engineer in his youth, and he still felt an enormous amount of personal responsibility to get things right, whatever the situation. But there was no mistaking the shock and horror still lingering in his gaze. They had not had time yet for a proper report; all she knew was that ships were gone—the Juno and the Carolina at least. At last he warned quietly, simply: “Then it may be you that bends.”

She wished he hadn’t said that, but there was no more time. The door ahead of them swung upon, and they walked into the corridor that led to the UN council chambers.

Everything on Mars was made, if not for luxury, at least to distinguish itself from the dark metal of the space stations. A truly ostentatious number of windows showed the pale sky above, and the floors, the walls, the limited stretches of ceiling, were all white. It had a surprisingly dizzying effect—there was no way to place oneself within the space. Essa might not have been Secretary General long enough to have planned the effect himself, but he’d probably be looking forward to seeing her thrown off balance.

There was really no way to be ready for this—and that meant Walker would go into this the way she went into everything, with her head down and without looking at the odds of success. She’d survived an awful lot of things she shouldn’t have, and she doubted Essa would pull out a gun and shoot her.

She had to admit it was a possibility, though. He made a good show of being too large for any room, the lone soldier from the old westerns, ready to shoot first and ask questions later, but he had a surprising, quiet streak of both patience and practicality, and she had the sense to fear that more. When the crowds were gone, when no one was looking, that quietness manifested with startling viciousness. “Ugly” did not begin to describe the fight that had led to her control of the fleet. She swallowed hard, and admitted to herself that she was afraid.

The doors of the council chamber opened, and she had to hide a snort of laughter. The setup of the UN chambers was completely ridiculous. She had never met Solokov herself in person when he was Secretary General, and so she had never seen this place. When it was full, the councilors would sit behind the horseshoe curve of the white desk placed a few feet above the white floor, with more and more tiers of white leading up in steps to the Secretary General’s desk.

A desk it might be, but it looked more like a throne. Any reasonable person, Walker thought, would be too embarrassed to sit at that chair, and Delaney’s stunned expression said that he thought the same. Essa, however, sat in it as though it were his divine right, leaning slightly on one elbow.

She inclined her head to him. It was more deferential a gesture than she would have preferred, but she didn’t trust her voice if she spoke—she might easily start laughing. Did he honestly think he could intimidate her by making her look up? After Mercury, that was nothing.

“Admiral.” He pitched his voice to carry throughout the room, warm and genial, and he pushed himself up to come down the steps with a smile, adjusting his cuffs.

Her small smile died. Over the years, her memory of their fight for control had made her think of him as cold and calculating, as vicious as the fight had been. But he had never been like that—or, at least, he had never behaved like that. Essa was a man who smiled. He was your father, your grandfather, dispensing hard-won wisdom with a smile that never wavered. He collected followers with ease.

It was the smile that made all of this so jarring. Everything in you wanted to like Essa.

“I am glad you could come see me privately,” he said, as he drew closer. There seemed to be regret in his voice.

There was a pause, in which she did not look at Delaney.

“Oh?” she said finally.

“Yes, there’s … no need for this to be public.” He let his breath out as he looked down at the floor.

If you did not know Essa, you might think that he was genuinely uncomfortable with the possibility of a confrontation. It had taken her many long years to understand that his outward manner was not an indication of true kindness—and no matter how much she told herself that she knew who he truly was, she always doubted it. He seemed so nice. So fair.

He looked up at her now with a sad smile. “Please understand that I have nothing but admiration for your service in the Exile Fleet.”

Bullshit. Her lips tightened. She kept her voice as level as she could. “But you’d like me to go away now?”

“No, no.” He looked genuinely shocked. “Of course not. You are capable in command, you understand the fleet and the ships, and I am given to understand that many are loyal to you. If you were to leave the fleet, it would be … a loss.” Did she hear the faintest touch of sarcasm in his voice, or was she imagining it? “Please understand that my present concerns do not mean I wish you gone.” He echoed her words back at her incredulously, as if she had brought a tank to a fistfight.

So much for trying to speak plainly. She linked her hands behind her back and waited, brows raised. If he wanted to play it this way, she would simply wait for him to say what he wanted to say. She was not going to play along.

Even in this, he managed to make her look the fool. He tilted his head, waiting for her to speak, and shook his head in consternation when she said nothing.

“I am giving you command of the Cairo,” he suggested.

“The….” She struggled to speak. One of the new additions from Mercury—a fine ship, to be certain, but a scout ship. A tiny frigate made to fade into the background, barely equipped with weapons at all.

And instead of commanding the fleet, she would have a ship that was designed to take her away from it.

“I want to keep your expertise within the fleet,” Essa said earnestly. “It is important to do that.”

“Bullshit.” She spat the word at him. “If you wanted my expertise, you would want me in command, not off scouting.”

“Your knowledge is unsurpassed.” Essa spoke calmly, as if lecturing a two-year-old who was having a tantrum. “It is simply your tactics that worry me. That is why I have taken this action.”

“What action?” Now she stared him down. The blood was beating in her ears. “You do not command the Exile Fleet any longer. The UN does not command it.”

“Ah, yes.” Again the flash of regret in his eyes—false, surely, but so very convincing. “The UN has … assumed control of the Exile Fleet.”

“You can’t do that.” She cast a look at Delaney, and back to Essa again. “An organization can’t unilaterally decide it commands another organization. That’s not how it works.”

“The Exile Fleet serves humanity, does it not?” Essa allowed his brow to furrow slightly at her. “As does the UN. For too long, humanity has been served by two organizations, military and political, with different aims. But I have been elected because humanity no longer wants that. It is plain that we are now in alignment with the goal of retaking Earth. There is no longer any reason for the Exile Fleet and the United Nations to be separate. Working in concert, we will be more powerful.”

“You think you represent everyone with that goal?” Walker gave a bark of laughter. “Because I have news for you. Solokoff was in power for so long because there are a lot of people who still think we should knuckle under.”

Essa did not seem at all troubled by this fact. “Their numbers dwindle, and you and I both know that defeating the Telestines is our only true path to survival. In the end, even for those who do not support us, we are doing the only thing we can.”

Had he orchestrated this? Had he led her into the verbal trap of pointing out the opposition so that he could paint her as being on his side? You and I both know….

She took a deep breath to steady herself. “Be that as it may, the Exile Fleet is not under your command.”

“But it is.” He spoke the words with a small smile, artfully devoid of any smugness. “The vote was unanimous, and Morgan has already been installed as Admiral.”

“Morgan?” She wanted to laugh. Morgan had never had his own ideas. He had followed Essa out of the fleet, and had not commanded in years. “Morgan won’t sneeze without your approval, is that what you want in an admiral?” Of course it was. Essa had always demanded complete loyalty—even when a plain speaker, not a yes man, was what you wanted in a military leader.

“Mistakes are … human.” Essa linked his hands behind his back and chose his words carefully. “In this battle against enemies that far outstrip us in terms of resources, we must of course innovate. Humanity is indebted to you, Admiral Walker. I mean that sincerely. However….” He paused. “Your tactics lately are worrisome. Your disregard for the Mars settlements, in particular. If I am to tell humanity that I and the fleet act in their best interests, I cannot let colonies be lost. I cannot make myself a liar.”

“Colonies will be lost,” Walker said flatly. “Morgan can’t prevent that any more than I can. We don’t have enough ships to prevent that. Tel’rabim will try to distract us by hitting our colonies.” Her voice was rising, and she knew she would never get him to agree to this, not with the persona he had so carefully cultivated. But he had to understand. “The only way for us to win this is to ignore his distractions and hit him where he’s vulnerable.”

“Admiral.” Essa’s voice was smooth. “Please.”

“Please what? Please stand aside while you put a trained monkey in my place? I won’t do it.”

“It is already done.” Essa held out his hands. “Please, try to be calm.”

“It is not already done.” She gritted the words out. “The fleet—”

“Is on its way to Ceres to respond to a new threat from Tel’rabim,” Essa explained.

“What?” She went hot, then cold.

“The Cairo has remained behind for you to assume command. We would like you to investigate reports of a Telestine attack on Mercury.”

“It was a distraction,” Walker said impatiently. She shook her head. The truth of this was settling in, cold. Of course they had allowed Delaney to come with her. He would have backed her up. The rest of the captains would have listened to him and resisted Morgan’s appointment. She looked up at Essa, cold fury beating in her heart. “You cannot do this. The fleet is not yours to command.”

“This was necessary,” Essa told her gently. “Please understand. When any one of us is given too much power, we begin to become overly sure of our abilities.” He looked over at her, the concerned father. “This is entirely human, unavoidable.”

How kind. She did not spit the words at him, but it took effort. She could taste blood in her mouth where she’d bitten the side of the cheek.

“You have shown a talent for tactics in the past,” Essa told her, his voice still gentle, still making her want to scream, “but we cannot trust a high-risk strategy for the protection of our colonists. I hope you can understand this—understand that I have only the greatest respect for your abilities. Command must change to adapt to our new situation, however. This is better for everyone, Laura. I hope that you can put aside your pride and believe that.”

Believe him? Not for a single goddamned second. But she knew when she was beaten, for now. Nothing more could be won here. She turned on her heel and made for the door.

“Walker.” His voice stopped her, her hand already on the knob. “When a commander can no longer lead in the best interests of the fleet and humanity, they must step aside.”

Words she had spoken to him, years ago, in front of everyone.

She could find no words in the sea of rage that had kindled in her chest. She wrenched the door open and left, fighting the urge to slam her fist into the wall outside, the urge to scream, the urge to promise Essa that this was not over.

It wasn’t over. She promised herself that, at least.

But, for now, she had been outplayed.

She had lost.

Chapter Eighteen

Near Ceres

Aggy II

Bridge

They left Vesta. No reason to stay. Avramson, the miner, had mentioned Parees knowing another Vestan miner called Sam Thorne—the name rang a bell, but he couldn’t place it. Besides, they’d completed the mission Nhean had given them, they’d delivered Parees to his destination—not Carina Station as originally intended, but Parees insisted that Vesta would do. And so they finished offloading the food, refueled the Aggy II, and left, bound for one of the farm facilities on Ceres to restock for another shipping contract.

It was the middle of a midnight watch when the comm channel lit up. Pike, his head dropped back against the headrest, considered the light for a long moment before doing anything about it. This was likely to be the only interesting thing that happened all shift. He should make the most of it. He took his time dropping his feet to the floor and stretching, before opening the comm channel. A message. Text only.

Come back to Vesta. Something you need to see. -P

Pike blinked at it. He wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that, beyond a mild annoyance. Thankfully, the sound of Rychenkov’s footsteps meant he didn’t have to make any decisions.

“What’s that?” Rychenkov asked. He handed Pike a bowl of something vaguely food-like, and shook his head when Pike tried to stand and move to the copilot’s seat. “Sit. Eat.”

Pike settled back in his chair with a faint smile. This was one of the things he liked most about Rychenkov. Out in the black, surrounded by stars and empty space that didn’t give a damn about anyone, a lot of captains went a bit crazy, insisting that no one sit in their chair, that everyone call them “sir” or “ma’am.” Rychenkov was the type of captain, on the other hand, who brought you food on a late shift, said something poetic and profoundly unsettling about the vastness of space, and went away again.

Now, however, the Russian was staring at the message. “Who’s that from?”

“Parees.” Pike had thought that much was obvious. “I thought.”

“You sure?”

“I suppose not. Says it’s from “P”. Why, what are you thinking?”

“That we have a real nice ship stocked with some real nice food,” Rychenkov said succinctly. “And that we’re supposed to be out getting food for them.”

“Nhean wouldn’t care about that.” Pike lifted his eyebrows. “You know I’m right.”

“That one gives me the creeps.” Rychenkov took a bite. “Doesn’t matter what he thinks, either—you help people first, not … go get information.” He waved one hand and blew on another spoonful of soup to cool it.

That, paradoxically, was what changed Pike’s mind. He’d been told a hundred times at least that he was hopelessly contrarian, and it was true. While stationed with the Rebellion, he’d been able to see only the harm they were doing. Now, his view expanded, dizzyingly, until he could see Nhean’s point. If he looked at all of humanity, at the future of the species, everything seemed simple. He saw that information was the lifeblood that might help them defeat the Telestines.

The Telestines and their human-looking drones. Pike swallowed.

“I think we should go back.”

Rychenkov only flicked his eyes sideways, as if Pike’s opinion was to be expected. There was a sigh. “You’re not going to shut up until you’ve tried to convince me, so go on.” He gave Pike a full-on glare. “I miss Lapushka. She had her head on straight.”

“How d’you know? She never talked.”

“Not out loud,” Rychenkov said, as if that explained everything. “But go on. Go on, William.”

Pike rolled his eyes at the name. “Parees works for Nhean, and Nhean is looking for more information to help us defeat Tel’rabim. He puts things together, makes connections. Things like the virus that crippled Tel’rabim’s flagship at Mercury. That was as good as food in its own way, right?”

Rychenkov sank into grumpy silence.

Pike pressed the advantage. “Whatever Parees was supposed to get at Carina Station, he either found on Vesta—or he found something more important.” And then it slotted into place in his mind, and he swallowed hard. “The drones.”

“What about the drones?” Rychenkov asked, with a tone of deep misgiving.

“You remember when we first figured out what they were? Years ago?” Pike thought back. “The UN tried to hush it up, didn’t they?”

“Too late. Everyone knew.” Rychenkov shook his head. “You ask me, though, I don’t think it was right, how they got treated. I’ve met some of ‘em. They’re a bit off, I guess, but not too strange. They’re fine.”

Pike swallowed, and tried to ignore the sense of dread settling in his stomach. “Yeah, they’re….” How to say it? He’d never been good at delicate words. “If Laura’s scientists are right, they’re part Telestine.” Lapushka, too. But he did not say that.

Rychenkov put his spoon down slowly.

“They’re trying to find them all now. Nhean and Walker.” Pike said. “That’s all I know.” Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “But a lot of them were mechanics, weren’t they? So if Parees was looking for them, that’s what he’d have pretended to do.”

The captain snorted at that. “If that one’s pretending to be a mechanic, we’ll be lucky if Vesta’s still floating when we get back. We should go for that reason alone—warn ‘em.” He sobered quickly, put the soup on the desk, dropped his face into his hands. “You know, this was exactly what I didn’t want to do when I got this ship. I wanted to make some cash. Not rejoin your girlfriend’s cause.”

“You don’t have to,” Pike said, a bit desperately, and ignoring the bait. He could feel the pull of his former life, the voice telling him that the Rebellion was futile, that the only thing there was, was a grab at freedom and a chance for basic survival. If anyone could rescue him from this strange world where he was a revolutionary in disguise, it would be Rychenkov.

Rychenkov, who proceeded to disappoint him. “I do have to,” he said flatly. He nodded at the desk curtly. “Set a course for Vesta. Finish your soup. I’ll take these bowls to the galley.”

Pike had drained the soup bowl, and had to swallow before he could answer. “Why?”

“Because dirty dishes stink up a ship.”

“Pyotr….”

Rychenkov hesitated in the doorway. He did not look back. “Maybe I got a taste for being a revolutionary, huh? Maybe you turned me into one with your little ship chase.”

And then he was gone, his voice fading, and Pike knew that was the best answer he was going to get.

*****

It took a while to get back to Vesta. James, sunk in miserable silence, refused to come out of his bunk, knowing that they were heading back for one of Pike’s damn-fool missions. Gabriela, in deference to James, barely spoke to Pike, and the newbies were too new to feel comfortable asking why they’d reversed course. By the time the Aggy II reached Vesta once more, Pike was more than happy to get off the ship.

A young woman was waiting for them in the hangar bay when they landed. Her hair was in the standard miner buzz cut, so short one could hardly see the reddish glint of it, but from the lack of dust under her nails and the clean coveralls, she was clearly no miner. She stuck out a hand to Pike, unerringly, and gave a surprising smile, like a ray of sunshine breaking in the dim bay.

Pike clasped her hand, brought up short by the look. He heard Rychenkov snigger and ignored it, clearing his throat. “Uh. Bill Pike. Did you … send a message?”

“No, but I was sent to bring you.” She kept smiling up at him; she was tall, but Pike was almost always taller than anyone he met. “You are just like you were described. I’m Felicia Atchley. UN relief ops.”

Pike fought the urge to ask how he’d been described. “It’s nice to meet you. This is Pyotr Rychenkov, captain of the Aggy II.”

Felicia favored him with a brief, assessing look. She gave a tiny shrug. “Come on, then.”

Pike and Rychenkov exchanged a brief glance, but followed the woman down the hallway and into the depths of the asteroid.

“So … what do you do here?” Pike was not good at making small talk, but he wanted to see that smile again.

He was not disappointed. “I’m an aid worker. UN. I make sure the shipments get distributed and send request lists back to Mars and Earth.”

“You’re in contact with the Telestine government?” Pike raised his eyebrows.

She shook her head at that. “That’s all through the Daughters of Ascension.”

“They’re here?” Pike frowned.

“Where have you been, the last few months?” She looked at him quizzically.

Pike thought back over his last few months, tried to come up with the words to describe them, and ended up settling for, “Busy.”

“Huh. Well, they’re the only aid group on Vesta now. They got all the others behind them. We got a new Telestine rep here—Ka’sagra. They’re sympathetic. I talk to Ka’sagra, and she sends back to Earth for anything we ask her for. And we get it—fast. I don’t like to rely on them, but.…” She sighed. “We need them.” The admission was grudging. “A few months ago, everyone got sick, and—”

But Pike was no longer listening. They had come around a corner and into a small room. Parees sat awkwardly in the middle of the room. But Pike scarcely saw him. All he could see was the girl in the corner, whose dark eyes held a desperate plea.

Chapter Nineteen

Mars, Low Orbit

Koh Rong

In a rare moment of all-consuming frustration, Nhean wanted to bash his data display with a fist and just end it all. End the constant stream of bad news, of incomplete news, of resupply line failures and logistical nightmares, of intel streams that looked to be compromised one moment and non-existent the next.

And the latest rumor, which he could still not confirm since he couldn’t even raise Walker on any comm-line, was her loss of command.

Impossible. Not even Essa could be so stupid.

The people loved him. Slightly more than half, at least. He was a ball-buster. A take-no-prisoners blustering loud-mouthed hero.

And a fool.

Nhean was in the business of knowing when a rumor was just that. There was no conceivable line of logic in which removing Walker made sense. But it was time to spend his efforts elsewhere rather than continuing to waste them here.

A red flashing indicator caught his attention on one of his many computer consoles. A message. Top priority level. He glanced over the meta-data and saw it was from his secretary on Venus.

Schroeder urgently wants to meet. Unrest in the Funder’s Circle. Threatening to take fleet away for “lack of attention to funder’s interests.” Please advise.

Unrest in the Funder’s Circle. Dammit. Two years ago, when he’d secretly proposed to the elites on Venus the construction of their own fleet—apart from the Exile Fleet and commanded separately from it—the funders had jumped at the idea. With strings, of course. Money always came with strings—even as Nhean managed to reduce those strings and increase the amount of forthcoming financial support due to the vast trove of information he had on various members of the Funder’s Circle. Not exactly blackmail, but … incentivized cooperation.

He scratched his chin in frustration, and tapped out a quick reply.

Unable to come at the moment. Please arrange for Schroeder himself to attend meeting of the Funder’s Circle. Have him placate them. Stall. Perhaps play off the tension between the Mormon and the Baptist faction. Or remind the Pope of the late payment by Rothschild Banking Coalition. Just get me enough time to get a handle on the situation here at Mars, and I’ll return shortly for cat-herding duties.

Cat-herding. That’s exactly what it was. Managing the competing interests of the rich Venetian bankers, manufacturing companies, religious leaders who seemed to have far more wealth than their charitable work would imply, and all the people of wealth and influence he’d managed to corral together to build his fleet.

The fleet now supposedly in the command of an Admiral on the outs with the UN.

Dammit. Perhaps he’d miscalculated.

He rarely miscalculated—it simply wasn’t in his nature. Nhean, at his core, was not just careful, he was conservative, and had built contingency after firewall after backup. But these were people he was dealing with, not systems. Not equipment. People with competing interests, hopes, dreams, and plans of their own.

And, worst of all, people with everything to lose. The rich society on Venus would stop at nothing to prevent a loss of power. Or influence. Even if it meant shooting themselves in the foot by taking away his crown jewel—his fleet. Perhaps he’d better leave for Venus at once….

He glanced at the inner solar system map to his right to get a sense of how long the reply would take. He hadn’t set his executive secretary up with FTL comm yet, so they’d have to rely on sub-light messaging. Good—Venus was nearing conjunction with Mars. Seven or so minutes. Plus time to compose, and the return trip for the reply. He checked his timer—it had been nearly twenty minutes.

A beep, and the red indicator light. He read her reply with growing chagrin.

Schroeder will represent you at the meeting, but urges you to hurry. I’ll send a few messages to the various factions on the Funder’s Circle as you suggested, but I’m not sure how much longer we can play them off each other, sir. Please come ASAP.

He sighed. Walker had gone radio silent. Pike was chasing the most important military asset in the solar system, who’d seemed to have gone rogue. His chief lieutenant was gone, investigating the drone situation, and those same drones, at the command of Tel’rabim, were blowing up human colonies—not just colonies, entire moons. And the UN General Assembly had just elected an ignorant chest thumper as its leader, who was now threatening to blow up everything they’d gained over the last year in the name of “taking the fight to the enemy.”

And in the midst of all that, he could be undone by investors, of all things. Dammit all.

His comm came to life. “Sir, receiving word that Secretary General Essa is ordering the Exile Fleet to engage with a Telestine fleet approaching Ceres.”

He tapped the comm in response. “Please take us there. I don’t want that man scratching my ships—at least, not without me there to watch.”

The ship’s engines droned and he felt the subtle shift of the acceleration running ahead of the stolen Telestine inertial dampeners. He glanced at the clock.

Time to Ceres: eight hours.

Barely enough time for him to devise his strategy for reigning in the uppity members of the Funder’s Circle, and to analyze the movement of drones throughout the solar system during the last twenty years. And to figure out where the hell Walker went. And to figure out what the hell Tel’rabim could possibly gain by slagging Io.

And possibly, just possibly, enough time to actually sleep.

Chapter Twenty

Asteroid Belt

Vesta Station

Lower Level 3B

“You?” Pike stared open-mouthed at the girl. It was all he could think of to say.

Her hopeful smile faded, and she bit her lip.

“No, it’s not—” Pike shook his head. He crossed the room to her, mindful of Felicia’s stare, of the sudden assessment in her eyes. He remembered Charlie all too well. He didn’t want anyone else to know how important the girl was. “It’s not that I don’t want to see you,” he explained. “I was trying not to lead them to you. Our ship is being tracked.”

Her face softened. She reached out to squeeze his hand and gave a little shrug. Nothing for it, her expression said. Whatever had made her call him here, it was more important than being brought back to the fleet.

Rychenkov, for his part, was delighted. He pushed Pike aside unceremoniously and clasped the girl’s hand, clapping her shoulder. “Lapushka! What’re you doing in this hellhole?”

She smiled. It was genuine, Pike thought; she seemed to like the gregarious captain and his nicknames.

But her smile faded quickly, and she looked over at Parees.

The man hesitated. He looked deeply out of his element, sweating in the heat of the tunnels. His hair was slowly growing out, and the miner’s coveralls could not be more different from the soft, tailored clothing he’d worn at Nhean’s estate. He spoke only when the girl frowned at him.

“We’ve found something.” He hunched his shoulders. “She found something.” He stood and took a roll of papers from behind a nearby rock.

At the girl’s look, Felicia drifted away to keep watch at the door. Pike watched her go, conscious of Rychenkov’s amused glance. The woman was a breath of fresh air after the insular world of the Exile Fleet. She was practical, willing to work with humanity’s enemies if it meant that her people would be safe and well-fed. Pike had known of the Telestine aid groups for years, and had even received food from them on occasion, but this was the first time he had wondered if that connection could be used for something more.

Not all Telestines, clearly, thought the same way Tel’rabim did—and despite Tel’rabim’s control, and hatred of humanity, the Daughters of Ascension were powerful enough—or had enough political sway—to keep sending aid to the human outposts. There was a chance, however small, that Tel’rabim’s hatred could drive more Telestines to support humanity. If they cultivated the connection with this Ka’sagra….

He had to tell Walker.

… And she was going to reject the idea out of hand. He sighed.

Parees cleared his throat softly to bring Pike’s attention back to the group.

“I’m sorry.” He came to look at the documents. “Shipping manifests?”

“And production logs. Vesta is one of the largest mining facilities for heavy metals. Gold, platinum, rhodium, tungsten, iridium. And uranium—they send some of it to the space stations. It’s very carefully controlled by the Telestines, for obvious reasons.”

“Such as…?” Pike raised an eyebrow.

“I thought your ship was a cargo hauler.” Parees frowned.

“That doesn’t mean I know everything about everything.” Pike crossed his arms over his chest and looked over at Rychenkov, who shrugged.

“Okay, well, uranium is used for all sorts of things, but one of them is obvious.” Parees gave a look that said he thought everything had been satisfactorily explained.

“Still not following you.”

“Radioactive material.”

“Next time, lead with that,” Rychenkov advised him.

Parees rolled his eyes.

“Okay, so they mine uranium here.” Pike shrugged. “What about it? Is this where Tel’rabim is getting his super-weapons?”

Parees considered this. “Quite possibly, although … well, it’s something to consider. Uranium weapons are powerful, to be sure, but the Io blast was, shall we say, in a league of its own. But that’s not what she found.”

The girl stabbed her finger at one line in particular.

Pike traced his eyes back to the edge of the sheet. “Exports to Earth.” He looked through the numbers as the girl nodded eagerly. “They seem … normal. The amounts seem stable. A regular supply of tungsten, iridium, platinum—”

“They are.” Parees pointed to another line. “As is the amount going to the human settlements, at least, according to the shipping manifests maintained here. And they pay the miners quite well for it. But the shipping manifests here don’t line up with the manifests on the stations. They’re receiving less, specifically less iridium, and neither the cargo haulers nor the station administrators have put up a fuss, which means they think there’s a good reason.” The man looked between Pike and Rychenkov.

“So there’s extra iridium going somewhere, and we don’t know where.” Pike stared at the sheet, his mind racing ahead. “The question is, is it disappearing from here … or at the stations? And, correct me if I’m wrong, but iridium is pretty damn harmless, right?”

Parees shrugged. “Harmless enough, I suppose. Used mainly for tools, cutting blades, some types of CO2 scrubbers use it. Mr. Tang mentioned that a computer production company on Venus uses it as a dopant in their semiconductors—”

Get to the point, thought Pike, and interrupted, “but nothing lethal, right? Nothing insidious or … explosive?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then why do we care?”

Parees pointed at the girl, who still hunched, crouched on the floor. “Because she cares.”

She stared at him intensely. Her eyes burned, and they were filled with meaning: she knew this was important, but possibly wasn’t quite sure why.

“That’s not even all of it,” Parees said grimly. The girl started gesturing, and he waved a hand at her to hold off for a moment. “I’ve looked at the numbers. They’re very carefully obscured, obviously, but that’s not all. They’re being masked even further by instation rumors, believe it or not. You ask anyone here, and they’ll tell you that production has declined, and the official numbers support this. But if you do some creative math and look at the amount of energy the plant is running to purify the iridium ore … you’ll see that production has likely increased. For an ore that, as far as I know, is a niche metal. Someone wants a lot of this stuff, and is going to great lengths to hide it.”

Rychenkov gave a low whistle.

“Wait.” Pike ignored the girl’s continued gestures. “Is there a chance this is for the new Exile Fleet shipyards? Walker’s good at covering her tracks. Hell, so’s your boss. Could this be for the Venus fleet?”

“No.” There was no doubt in Parees’ voice. “I know what materials were going to the shipyards, and where they came from. We buy from Vesta, but only titanium, aluminum, iron. The basics.”

The girl yanked on Pike’s arm.

“I’m sorry.” Pike looked down at her, and followed to where she was pointing: a new slip of paper she’d put down on the table. He picked it up, and swallowed hard when he saw the information.

“What is it?” Rychenkov asked quietly.

“It’s the official UN report from Io.” Pike forced himself to look at the number of casualties. This was what the war cost, he reminded himself. This was why humanity needed to be freed from its hell. He looked to where the girl pointed. “High radiation signatures, from … huh. They claim it was just a regular nuclear weapon. Uranium.” He looked up at Parees.

The other man shook his head slowly. “I’m no expert, but that bomb was not a simple nuclear warhead. It was small enough to be carried by a man. Sam Thorne. And it was powerful enough to destroy a moon.”

The implications were starting to dawn in Pike. “So … not only was that bomb something far more powerful than your standard nuclear warhead, but the official reports are lying about it. Why?”

Rychenkov shrugged. “Perhaps it’s as simple as them not wanting to cause panic.”

“By claiming Tel’rabim destroyed Io with a nuclear weapon via some idealistic terrorist? A drone?”

“But they’re not saying that publicly, are they? That he’s a drone?” Rychenkov chuckled. “Public opinion and perception is a funny thing, Pike. People don’t think rationally. Tell them that Io was destroyed by a terrifying new super weapon whose composition we can only guess, and the world is coming to an end in the eyes of the public. Tell them instead that the weapon was a regular old nuclear bomb? Business as usual. We’re used to that. Same with the drone. They don’t dare go public about his droniness, because it would cause pandemonium. Just imagine. Anyone, anyone, could be the enemy. Your neighbor. The guy sitting across from you in the mess hall. The janitor. Any one of them ready to blow you to hell in an instant. That’s terrifying.”

His words met silence for several seconds, before Parees spoke again.

“We need to find out who received the missing iridium ore,” he said quietly. “I wouldn’t be surprised that if we find that out, we simultaneously discover who bombed Io.”

“It was Tel’rabim,” Pike said at once. He looked around. “Wasn’t it?”

Parees looked shifty, and the girl looked frustrated.

“I can’t say,” Parees said miserably. He nodded to Rychenkov. “Not with him here.”

“For the love of—we’re on Nhean’s payroll now. He hired us.”

“Nhean hires a lot of people. You think he tells his janitors classified information?”

“His janitors weren’t called here to look at this!” Pike slammed his hands down on the desk, pointing to the ore production and shipping logs. “If we’re going to make this into useful intel for Walker, we need to know who’s doing this.”

Parees looked away, and Pike went cold.

“No. No. Tell me it wasn’t her.”

Parees looked like he was going to respond, then he clamped his lips shut and looked away.

Pike was opening his mouth to yell when the girl’s hands closed around his face. She dragged him down, a palm on each temple, and stared fiercely into his eyes.

“I don’t understa—”

And then he was somewhere else. Blurry images were forced into his mind, making his head ache fiercely. He saw the corridors, shadowed and dirty. He saw miners in their uniforms, and the machinery working endlessly below the surface. A map blazed in his head for a single moment, locations picked out in red—the mines, perhaps? He saw a hand, typing carefully as numbers were changed. He heard whispering.

It wasn’t making sense. He was trapped in someone else’s head and he couldn’t get out. Distantly, Pike felt his body jerk as he tried to escape, but the girl’s fingertips were digging into his scalp and she hung on with a grim determination.

The whisper was everywhere, inescapable. He couldn’t understand the words, but it was commanding him to take action—he knew that much. He watched as a nondescript bag closed over the top of a bomb. He saw hands at the controls of a spaceship, and the approach to Io’s distinctive surface. The whispering was louder, though the memory was clean, far more sterile than the images of the hallways and computer screens. Pike found that he wanted to live that approach. He wanted to put the bomb in the bag, board the Aggy II, and fly to a place that no longer existed.

Thorne. The man from the video.

Sam Thorne. The same man Avramson the miner said Parees claimed he knew.

And everything snapped into place. He felt the impact on his knees as the girl released him and he came down hard on the floor.

“Hey, now.” Rychenkov was at his side for a moment before Parees pushed him away.

“What did she do?” The man’s eyes were intent. He shot a glare at the girl. “What did she do to you?”

“Sam Thorne was a drone, all right,” Pike said thickly. “Io. But he got the orders here. And there’s another one close … who has similar orders to Thorne.”

Parees was staring at him, eyes wide and horrified.

“He went to Io with the bomb. Thorne was here, at least at some point. He got the bomb here. There are more of them here—a lot of bombs.” He swallowed hard. “And a lot of drones. And they’re all getting orders.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Asteroid Belt

Vesta Station

Lower Level 3C

“Drink this.” Parees handed over a small canteen of water.

Pike reached up for it with shaking hands and grimaced when some of the precious liquid spilled over the neck of the bottle. An hour after the girl’s revelation, he was still shaking and sick to his stomach. Felicia and Rychenkov had gotten him to a small bedroom, where he sat now, back braced against the rock wall of Vesta’s interior, a thin pallet under him.

He drank a few sips of water and willed himself not to throw up, then looked over in surprise as Parees settled down next to him on the ground. The man brushed his palm contemplatively over the short bristles of his hair before wrapping his arms around his knees. When he saw Pike watching him, his face closed off immediately.

“How are you doing?” Pike’s voice broke on the words, and opening his mouth seemed to give his stomach ideas. He held the back of one fist over his mouth as Parees considered the question. Had he really known Sam Thorne? Or was that just his “in” with the miners? Trying to draw information out of them as to Thorne’s origins?

His companion was silent for so long that Pike began to wonder if he’d actually asked the question, or just imagined it. The world still seemed wrong at the edges. He had seen things he never saw with his own eyes, and heard words he’d never heard with his own ears. He wasn’t sure what was real anymore. Everything in him told him to run back to the world he knew: small contracts with Rychenkov, an unremarkable existence untroubled by dreams or rebellions.

His stomach heaved again, and Pike was just letting his breath out slowly when Parees whispered, “I hate this place.”

Grateful for the distraction, Pike looked over at him. His eyes traced over the pallor of the skin, the shadows under Parees’s eyes. The man’s hands had blisters that were only just starting to become calluses, and he’d clearly lost weight on the diet of unappealing rations the miners ate. He was dirty, too. Everyone on Vesta was dirty. Even with the best air purification system scientists could build, there was no escaping the dust.

Those who stayed on Vesta were a strange breed, oddly content with a life few others would choose. It was, otherwise, untenable.

Parees met Pike’s eyes. “I do,” the man said again. “I hate it.” His voice trembled.

“So leave,” Pike suggested.

“I can’t!” The cry was ripped out of him.

“We could take you on the Aggy.” Pike could hear the wistfulness in his own voice. “You don’t understand what it’s like out there. It’s not Venus, sure, but you’re free. You could come with us.”

“I can’t leave!”

It was nothing. It was something. Pike narrowed his eyes speculatively. “You could,” he pointed out, stressing the fault line he saw running through Parees’ mind.

Parees gave him a look. You think you’re clever? the look said. I work for Nhean.

Pike gave a shrug and took a sip of his water. “You don’t have to work for him. All I’m saying is, there’s always a choice.”

“Not for me,” Parees said at once. He tipped his head back against the wall. With the lost weight and the exhaustion making purplish bruises on the soft skin under his eyes, the effect was unexpectedly ghoulish. He looked half-dead.

“Why did Nhean send you?”

Parees looked at him sharply.

“Look, you don’t have to tell me anything.” Pike’s temper flared at last. “Everyone’s got their secrets. I get that. Walker doesn’t want to tell me half of what she does and Delaney doesn’t want her to tell me the other half. And Nhean, Mr. Secret-dealer, doesn’t want to tell anyone anything, and you’re loyal to him. I get that. Look, I know you’re here investigating that drone. Sam Thorne.” A thought occurred to him, and he frowned. “How did you start working for him? Nhean?”

Parees looked away, shifting uncomfortably.

“He found me on Zetian Station.”

Pike resisted the urge to whistle. Zetian station was crowded, dingy, and miserable—as well as being one of the furthest outposts from the sun, orbiting Pluto exactly opposite from Charon. Parees clearly did not have good memories of that life, if his discomfort was anything to go by.

“I’m sorry,” Pike murmured.

“You couldn’t have known.” Parees spoke the polite words with a distant smile. He looked down at his hands. “And Nhean sent me to find the drones. Not just investigate Thorne. That’s why I’m here—find them all, and find out who controlled Thorne.”

“Why send you?” Pike frowned.

“Who else could he trust?” Parees countered. “He has other assistants, and people who owe him favors, but you should never trust someone who owes you something—that’s what Nhean always says. And any member of the resistance would be more loyal to Walker than to him—and they’re too unpredictable.”

Pike surprised even himself with a bark of laughter. “Can’t argue with you there.” He was still chuckling as he took a sip of water. “Fanatics, the lot of them. Cultish.”

“And yet you still support Walker,” Parees accused. He gave Pike a look.

“She’s not just….” Pike sighed. “She’s more than what she seems now. You just see the choices she makes that are different from Nhean’s, but that’s not all she is. She cares about humanity. She wants what’s best for humanity. And in the end, the only way we’re going to win is with a fight. With Walker leading that fight.”

“And you’re sure you know what she’s fighting for?” The question was quiet, oddly calm. Parees was watching Pike.

“What the hell does that mean?” He was beginning to be truly angry—not least of all because he had no answer.

“Nothing.” Parees lifted his brows and looked away. “If you trust her, you trust her.” He looked sad, suddenly. “As you said, I only see a piece of her. Just like you only see a piece of Nhean.” He hesitated. “And you haven’t forgiven him for using the girl the way he did. Aboard the flagship above Mercury. Even though she told him to do it. Using her as the transmission vector for that virus. It could have killed her.”

Pike set the canteen down. His heart was hammering suddenly, and he could hear the whispers again, pressing against his mind…. “He used her like she was just a tool.”

“In the end, what else are we?”

“What?”

Parees started to laugh. His eyes squeezed shut and he rocked slightly. “The world is falling apart. What else are we except tools to try to stop it? Everything is falling into chaos, humanity is tearing itself apart, and everyone struggles against it—for what? What hope do we have?”

Pike watched him, wide-eyed. He’d never seen the man like this, but he’d seen enough people choking on their own despair in the stations. He knew what it looked like when the futility of everything snapped something inside a person.

“If we don’t have hope, what else is there?”

“Nothing!” Parees looked up at him, wild. “There’s nothing.”

“Exactly,” Pike told him. “You’ll die whether you have hope or not. You’d die even if you were on Earth and the Telestines had never come. You can look at everything and say nothing matters and there’s no sense in fighting, or you can try to hope for something, and struggle to make it real.”

Parees stared at him silently.

“I ran from it,” Pike told him brutally. “Because the people I wanted to save were already dead. Now I do what I can. I don’t like some of what Walker did. I don’t … I don’t always trust her, any more than I always trust Nhean. I don’t even always trust … the girl.” He let out his breath. “But I trust that doing something, doing anything, is better than doing nothing.”

Still, Parees did not speak.

“Giving big, dramatic speeches is not exactly my thing. I’m not very good at it.” Pike tried to smile, and the smile fell away when Parees turned his head, eyes closed. “Look. You didn’t like remembering where you came from. Zetian Station has a reputation as the … hellholiest hellhole in the solar system. You tried to forget, and now that you’re here, and you can’t. I get that. I feel the same way about Earth now. I wanted to go back so bad. But once I was there, all it brought back was … terrible memories. Terrible pain. Now Earth is the last place I want to be. But I guess … if there’s no hope, then why not try? If you’re sure you’re going to fail, what’s the harm in doing something? We’re dying out here. You can’t make it worse.”

Parees flinched.

“And if you want to find the drones,” Pike suggested, “I’d ask Felicia to get you to the Daughters of Ascension. Tell her to introduce you to Ka’sagra. She seems to trust her. If you’re a drone, if you’re still looking for orders, where do you go? To a Telestine. At the very least, it seems Ka’sagra is one of the good Telestines. If … there is such a thing.”

Parees lifted his brows, clearly skeptical.

“She’s not on Tel’rabim’s side, anyway,” Pike said.

“We didn’t know what side Tel’rabim was on until recently,” Parees pointed out.

“This is different,” Pike argued. “Tel’rabim just said he supported aid and ‘helped’ arrange it.” His fingers formed some air quotes around helped. “She’s actually here, working with us. Always has been. Always makes sure we get those food and medicine shipments, according to Felicia.”

Parees considered this. “Why doesn’t Tel’rabim shut her down?”

“Nhean doesn’t have an answer to that?”

“He didn’t explain it. That means he thinks I should be able to figure it out.” Parees lifted his thin shoulders helplessly. “But I can’t.”

“I guess she’s … I don’t know, she represents a lot of people in their society, I think. They haven’t killed us all, which would probably have been a hell of a lot easier.” Pike shrugged. “So there have to be people who back her—”

He broke off as he looked over. Parees looked stricken at the thought of genocide.

“I’m sorry,” Pike said awkwardly.

He waited for Parees to say something, anything, but the man did not speak, and at last, Pike pushed his trembling body up and hobbled out of the room. He did not look back. He wanted to give Parees what little privacy he could. Pike had run from his father’s memory and now from any route that took him close to Earth, but he had never escaped the reality of how humanity lived. Parees had, and now he was sinking into despair.

All of humanity was.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Near Ceres

Koh Rong

Nhean frowned at the screen and tapped a command.

The screen fuzzed white.

He dropped his head onto one hand, fingers kneading over one of his temples. Away from his estates on Venus, he was relegated to the Koh Rong, a ship he’d made little mention of to the members of the Exile Fleet. Walker was just as happy not to have him wandering around on her ships, and the rest were too absorbed by the new technology of Nhean’s fleet to care much where he was.

In this case, ‘where he was’ lay at a point between the humans and Telestine fleets as they advanced on one another, but above the plane of contact. He’d closed the viewscreen, finding that the distances that looked so manageable on his maps were dizzying to the naked eye.

He felt safer here in space than on the surface of a planet, helpless as the Telestine fleet advanced. Safer was better, he told himself. Careful was better. Still, the suite of technology he’d developed to make his ship almost invisible to detection was also interfering with the signals he was able to obtain from his network. He had to be at least somewhat close to see what was happening.

The picture finally cleared on his screen and he sat up straighter.

“Finally.” But his brow furrowed and he leaned closer, eyes tracing over the formation of the ships near Ceres. The Telestine fleet curved up and over like a giant hand, smaller ships making claws ready to close around the Exile Fleet. But where the Exile Fleet normally clustered, ready to burst away from one another and attack the Telestine fleet from the inside, now they hung in what appeared to be no formation at all. There was no backup and no shelter, and veins of older ships ran through the mass of the fleet like fault lines.

Did Walker not see what was happening? Was she unaware of how quickly the Telestine fleet was approaching?

Nhean stabbed at the comm screen and gave a hiss of annoyance when the channel wouldn’t open. Without speaking to her, he wouldn’t know if she’d received the message at all. He recorded the Telestine fleet’s position and sent it unencrypted. They couldn’t spare the time for the encryption on his end or the decryption on the other. The fleet was heading into disaster.

He leaned back and drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair.

“Sir?” The pilot turned to look at him. “Should I begin altering our course?”

“Circle above the two fleets—above those fingers, but on our side of the battlefield.”

“Sir?”

Nhean took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Not for the first time, he wished he hadn’t sent Parees away. Parees would have understood this necessity.

“Something appears to be wrong with the sensor arrays on the fleet,” he said shortly. “If we have to intervene and serve as their eyes and ears, we need to be closer. Circle up, but bring us in. We’ll be out of the line of direct fire, with enough time to maneuver in the case of stray projectiles.”

Hopefully.

The woman’s face was pale, but she complied.

An FTL comm channel buzzed, but if Nhean hoped for a message from Walker, he was disappointed. It was Parees who was on the screen.

“I may cut out,” Nhean told him. “The fleets are engaging near Ceres.” At least Parees was safe enough, well on the other side of the sun from this battle. “What is it?”

“You need to come to Vesta.”

“What?” Nhean was, for a moment, completely diverted from the battle.

“Should I change course, sir?” The pilot looked hopeful.

“Not yet.” Nhean enunciated the words clearly and held her gaze for a long moment. Only when she nodded did he turn back to Parees. “Why should I come to Vesta?” Parees rarely asked for help, and even more rarely admitted defeat. If he was deviating from his mission to retrieve information and come back, there must be a reason.

“There’s a woman here you should meet.” The comm channel fuzzed out, and Parees disappeared for a moment. When the picture cleared, Nhean could see how exhausted the man looked. “She’s Telestine; her name is Ka’sagra. She’s the Daughters of Ascension representative on Vesta.”

“She’s not just a representative.” Nhean shook his head. “She runs the Daughters of Ascension.”

“I don’t think so,” Parees argued. His voice was distorted through the solar interference. “It must be someone with the same name. Why would she be someplace like this?”

“Why would a Telestine run an aid organization for the humans instead of letting us die out here?” Nhean asked. “She probably thinks the suffering of humanity is a good reminder of her divine mission, or however it is that Telestines think about their religion.” That was an interesting thought. “Has she told you anything about their religious beliefs? I know they’re a sect of some sort, but it’s—”

“I haven’t talked to her.”

“Then why am I supposed to go out there?” His temper was fraying rapidly. “Well?”

“There’s … a lot happening on Vesta. It’s important. I’ve found something out.” Parees looked around himself before leaning forward to speak. “The orders are coming from here.” He swallowed, almost a gulp.

“What? How do you know that?”

“I can’t—I can’t say here. It’s not safe in a transmission. You have to come here.”

Nhean was about to snap a response when Parees turned his head to look at something beyond the videoscreen. His jaw was far too sharp, and his eyes were set in bruised hollows.

And Parees had never asked something like this before.

“You think it’s important that I meet Ka’sagra,” Nhean said simply.

“Yes.” Parees was actually shivering, though sweat stood out on his skin. “She’s….” His voice fuzzed out. “—opposition to Tel’rabim,” Nhean made out.

He leaned forward, a useless gesture but an instinctive one as he strained to hear.

“—sympathetic to—”

“The signal is breaking up. Parees?”

“—new technology they shouldn’t give—”

“Parees?”

The picture appeared a moment later. Parees was stabbing at the controls desperately. “Just come out here.” He looked at the screen. “And let me go back to Venus. Please.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can be.” Nhean tried to keep his voice smooth, but he was genuinely worried. He had never seen Parees so distraught. “Stay there. Tel’rabim knows who I am now. If he has found the estate, Venus may not be safe any longer. I will meet you on Vesta.”

Parees’s shoulders sagged. “Please,” he said again. Just that. Just the one word.

“Stay there,” Nhean told him. “Stay on Vesta.” He tried to soften his tone. “It’s only for a few more weeks.” Nhean considered the brusque utilitarianism transparent in this response. “I can’t afford to lose you, Parees,” he added, hoping to convey the concern behind his decision.

Parees looked down. He nodded jerkily.

Another comm line buzzed—the Santa Maria. Finally.

Nhean gave a sigh of relief. “I have to talk to Walker. Stay on Vesta. I will be there as soon as I can.”

Parees only nodded.

That would have to be enough. Nhean cut the transmission with a brief shake of his head and brought up the call from the Santa Maria. He frowned at the unfamiliar face. “Who is this?”

“Admiral Morgan.” The man staring back at him had sandy brows shot with white, and suspicious brown eyes. “You are Nhean Tang, yes?”

Nhean didn’t bother to respond to that. He raised an eyebrow. “Admiral Morgan?” The man must be in charge of the older ships now, though why he was on the Santa Maria Nhean had no idea. Had Essa forced Walker to demote Delaney?

Not his problem, and not relevant just now.

“Congratulations on your promotion. I need to speak to Admiral Walker.”

“Captain Walker is on the Cairo.”

“The Cairo is a scout ship, what’s she doing there?”

“She commands it.”

“I know that,” Nhean said, annoyed. “She controls the whole damned fleet, or at least the ships I’ve given her, which is why you need to put me through to her, your formation—”

“Captain Walker no longer commands the Exile Fleet.” Admiral Morgan’s lips curved in a satisfied smile. “I do. And if you’ll excuse me, Mr. Tang, I have a battle to prepare for.”

The call cut, and Nhean stared at the blank screen, dumbstruck.

Essa didn’t just take the Exile Fleet away. He took Nhean’s ships.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Ceres

Fighters

“Form up, and stay close.” McAllister resisted the urge to look around himself at the other fighters. They were all trained, he told himself.

They were also only a day off the adrenaline high of their first battle, and had never flown with the fleet packed so tightly before. Distances that looked big to the naked eye closed quickly in a battle, and it was easy even for a veteran to swing too close to another ship.

Why wasn’t the fleet spreading out? He clenched his hands and breathed slowly. His heart rate was too fast. He needed to calm down before the adrenaline got the better of him.

“Swing to port, Wing 3 to the outside.” He tapped the comm channel for the lead ship. “Santa Maria, this is McAllister. We need more specs to avoid friendlies. Which firing pattern will be used, Alpha or Sigma? What do we need to avoid?”

“McAllister, this is the Santa Maria. All ships will be firing full battery.”

McAllister muted himself as he swore. He couldn’t let himself get upset. Admiral Morgan was new. He didn’t understand battle dynamics the same way Walker did.

So why the hell couldn’t they have done a soft handoff of the fleet and let her command this one? His fighters were going to be relegated to the fringes of the battle, entirely unprotected.

“All wings, go to the outside of the formation and swing wide.” He tried to keep his voice steady and non-accusatory. “All ships will be firing full bore, do not get in the way.”

“Theo?” A private line. Tocks wove through the ranks of the other fighters to bring her ship alongside his. “Are you going to tell Morgan this is batshit crazy?”

“You know I can’t.” The words felt heavy as he spoke them, though. “There’s no time to talk tactics in the middle of a battle. The dice are just going to have to fall as they—”

The fleetwide channel lit up. “All ships, this is Admiral Morgan. Heading sent, advance on my mark. All batteries fire.”

They weren’t going to get out of the way in time. “Everyone pull up, hard!”

The fighters screamed into top speed as a beam of light shot underneath them as the Santa Maria fired.

“Son of a bitch!” Tocks screamed. To judge by her tone, she was about ten seconds away from ripping Morgan to shreds. Her private channel opened. “That almost took out Wing Five.”

He felt the relentless surge of anger as well, but he knew he could not give into it. Not now. They needed to stay sharp. “We all got out of it,” he told her simply.

“Those were fucking nukes, Theo!”

That chilled him. Why the hell were they firing nukes this early in the battle? They didn’t have many of those.

But he couldn’t give into it. “We’re good enough to get out of this. Let’s just make sure all this newbies get home too, okay?”

They were too far apart now for him to see her expression, but he saw the gleam of her mask. After a moment, she nodded silently.

Good enough.

They were still shooting up into nowhere, toward the tip of one of the massive, finger formations, and that gave him an idea.

“All right, everyone. Straight up.”

A swarm of Feathers was bearing down on them, spiraling like flower petals from the center of the Telestine formation.

“Get ready! Keep swinging hard, we’ll try to get them to catch their fighters in their own crossfire and—ah, shit.” A Telestine destroyer had emerged from the center of the cloud, arrowing down out of the tip of the formation. “Stay out of that carrier’s line of fire, whatever you do. You can not take a hit from that thing!”

They needed cover. The destroyer began to fire as it charged at them, and McAllister sent his ship into a tight spiral, arrowing toward one of the arms of the Telestine fleet. He righted the ship just long enough to lock onto a Feather and fire, and gave a whoop when his shot caught it on the wing. It jerked sideways and into another ship, and both of them tumbled back toward the Telestine fleet.

“If anyone has ideas about getting some cover, now would be a stellar time to air them!”

“Sir!” It was Newbie Thirteen. “The Cairo is breaking ranks to join us!”

A scout ship, a frigate that had swung late into formation for some reason, but a frigate was better than nothing.

“All right, ladies and gents, we have some cover fire. Form up around the Cairo and wave at the bridge, they’re saving our asses!” Theo directed his fighter to open a channel. “Cairo, this is McAllister. Thanks a million.”

“You’re welcome, McAllister.” The familiar voice was colored with equal parts amusement and annoyance. “Less talking and more flying, though. This is going to be a shitshow.”

They’d put Walker on a scout frigate? On a goddamned frigate? McAllister’s jaw clenched. “Aye, ma’am! Fighters, you take as many of those damned Feathers down as you can before they reach the Cairo, and then get ready for a new target.”

He jerked back on the targeting matrix and watched a stream of bullets streak out into the darkness. Almost all of the shots were hitting—which would be fantastic if it didn’t show him just how many of the fighters there were.

“There are too many!” Newbie Seven called.

“Then take them down! For the next hour, you find a target, you shoot it, and then you find another target and repeat the process. Do you understand me, fighters?”

“Aye, sir!”

A yell broke off suddenly on the comms as one of the newest ships blew apart. The destroyer’s beam shot into the darkness behind them and then cut off, the cannon glowing red like a malevolent eye.

“All the hells….” Princess breathed, his voice broken. “Why spend that shot on a fighter?”

“To make us stop fighting,” McAllister said grimly. “To break us. Same reason they do everything they do. We’re not going to let them win.”

“Fighters, regroup behind the Cairo,” Walker ordered. “We’ll give you an opening soon, but stay hidden for now.”

“Yes, ma’am. You heard her, pilots, hightail it behind the Cairo and get ready to come out firing!”

As his ship banked back over the sleek hull of the Cairo, he spared a glance for the battle below. Though the Telestine formation had spread and changed, the Exile Fleet was still firing full bore. Tiny bursts of light skittered across his screen as shots met hulls, and every once in a while came the flare as a pocket of air ignited on one of the ships. Fire blazed momentarily against the dark and ships tumbled out of position. This was one of the most dangerous parts of any battle, as the sheer amount of uncontrolled debris deflected shots and turned the area into a minefield.

And then he saw it: the streaking fire of a nuke, shot by the Santa Maria. As if grabbed by an invisible hand none of them could see, it began a slow arc back around….

Toward the Exile Fleet.

“Walker?!”

“Jesus Christ.” Her voice was broken. “Oh, God. Swing wide! Swing!”

He saw it, too—the Alabama swinging out of formation, trying to avoid the nuke that was now coming directly at it. But there wasn’t anywhere to go without crashing into another human ship, and a second later, the nuke hit the upper decks.

McAllister tried to keep breathing. Whatever the hell he had just seen, he had to keep doing something. Anything.

He just couldn’t think of what to do. His mind was completely blank.

“All right.” Walker’s voice was crisp in his ear. “We need to end this, and we need to end it now. We’re going straight for that destroyer. You keep the Feathers off us. We need to keep their formation from closing around ours, or it’s all over.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He relayed the orders to the team and was pleased to see them swing into action at once. The Cairo’s cannons fired and the Feathers failed to scatter quickly enough. As they struggled to regroup, the cannons kept their target and fired again. Walker was battering a hole through the swarm of enemy fighters to get to the hull of the destroyer. The cannons fired again and again, and McAllister saw an opening.

“Cairo, stand by, we’ll make you a hole for the starboard cannons. Fighters, throw everything you got into that path. Get those Feathers out of the way!”

The fighters swung into a tight formation, a diamond advancing forward with McAllister’s fighter at the center, and he tried not to grin at the practiced perfection of their formation. If they all got out of this alive, then would be the time for a round of drinks and some congratulations.

Their rounds tore through the last cover and the Cairo’s batteries began to fire full bore. The ship shuddered on its trajectory, its aging stabilizers no match for the not-quite symmetrical set of its cannons. When they demoted Walker, however, they’d demoted the core of her crew on the Santa Maria as well, and whoever was targeting those cannons was adjusting them to the spin of the ship perfectly. A full-throated roar of approval echoed from a score of fighters at once as the destroyer’s hull buckled and their cannon array went dark.

“Ready for a new target, McAllister?” He knew that tone. Walker would be wearing a savage grin right about now.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Straight over to the next finger, then.” There was a pause. “Tentacle? Arm? Whatever. And since you’re wondering—yes, we’re all going to get reamed out by Morgan when this is done. But think of that as a consequence of still being alive to get reamed out.”

McAllister was laughing as his fighter came up in a smooth arc. “Aye, ma’am. All right, everyone. We’re in about as much trouble as we’re going to be, let’s kill some of these fuggers while we’re at it.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Ceres

EFS Cairo

Bridge

“Head for the destroyer at the tip of the arm.” Walker studied the battle readout. “Main battery, get ready to fire. Fighters, are we clear behind?”

“Not yet.” McAllister’s voice was half-laughing. “But we’ll fix that, ma’am. Tocks, you take 17-32 and circle back around. Come back to join us when you’re done.”

“Aye, sir. Cairo, this is Tocks. We got your six.”

“Thank you, Simpson.” Walker smiled. She watched as fighters broke away from the main pack, streaking up toward the Cairo. “I do believe they know where we’re going. McAllister, one wing needs to keep us clear from the side, and let’s get that carrier down before it does any real damage. What the hell are they waiting for?”

The Telestine formation was hanging in space, not advancing, simply holding.

“Hold your position.” Admiral Morgan’s voice was tinny through the speakers. “Cairo, return to the fleet.”

“Turn that off,” Walker said simply.

“Yes, ma’am.” Sanderson switched off the comm channel.

“Ma’am, the destroyer is preparing to fire.” The helmsman did not look around as he guided the ship into an arc. “Taking evasive maneuvers. Starboard side battery will be open to fire for the next five seconds before course correction.”

“All batteries fire,” Walker said crisply. She clenched her hands, running the calculus in her head. They had lost so many nukes already, and they hadn’t had many to begin with…. But that was where the battle was now. “Use the nukes.” She laced her hands behind her to stop them from trembling. She was committing mutiny, but she had no time to absorb that fact. Right now, she had only one goal: keep her tiny frigate safe while it tried to take down a destroyer. She consoled herself with the fact that it wasn’t any riskier a plan than staying in a giant bloc with the rest of the fleet, but mutiny was mutiny. She was going to be thrown out of the fleet after this battle.

And she didn’t know what she was without the fleet.

The missiles streaked away and the ship groaned as the stabilizers tried to adjust. The Cairo had been only nominally retrofitted, and its guidance systems could not keep up with either the pilots or the weaponry. The floor shook, and Walker stumbled. She gripped the main desk with a curse, eyes still locked on the missiles. Closing, closing—

“Five hits, two hull breaches,” Sanderson reported.

“Yes.” Walker gave a tiny punch. She could feel her face split into a feral smile, and realized there was little reason to hold it back now. She was gone after this. There was no need for decorum anymore. “Get ready to fire—not nukes, but widen those breaches. Fighters, swing wide and get in there, too. Helmsman, bring us around for another pass. Keep us level—they’re going to have a hard enough time in the fleet without any stray projectiles coming from us. I want you firing parallel.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ma’am?” It was McAllister. “I think I see what they were waiting for.”

Walker drew in her breath sharply. He was right. In the few seconds it had taken to open fire on the destroyer, the lead Telestine ship was moving out of the center of the claw, making directly for the Exile Fleet.

Finally, the claw itself made sense.

“They’ve set it up to shred anyone who goes for the main carrier. And I’ll bet you anything that the carrier has one of the beams we saw at—” She broke off as the screen fuzzed white. The laser array carved through the center of the Exile Fleet. “Mercury,” she finished, through numb lips.

“All ships hold position,” Morgan ordered.

Walker felt the wind go out of her. She gripped the table.

“Ma’am, do I—”

“Fire.” She didn’t know how she was speaking, but she heard her own voice. “Take the destroyer down, stick to the plan. We can’t get at that carrier as things stand. And get me on the fleetwide channel!”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sanderson held on as the ship shuddered and rolled. “Ma’am, you’re live.”

“Exile Fleet, this is Walker. Do not engage the main ship, break and target the arms of their formation. If you can, get their destroyers between you and the carrier. Climb!”

“Hold formation!” Essa’s yell was deep and furious. “Go at that carrier with everything you’ve got!”

“Exile Fleet, you cannot match that carrier. Get out of its way!”

“Walker, so help me—”

“How many more ships do you want to lose?” She talked over him without a thought. Fury was making her vision go red. She hardly noticed as the destroyer began to list to the side and the helmsman adjusted course for the next arm. Her eyes tracked the ships as they broke away from the wreckage at the center of the formation and fear settled deep in her gut. “Sanderson, give me the status of the Santa Maria.” And Delaney.

She didn’t need to say it. Everyone knew that Delaney served under Morgan now; Essa had made sure of that.

“The Santa Maria is still flying, ma’am.” Sanderson’s face was pale. “We only lost two entirely, though three more are reporting in as too heavily damaged to fight.”

Thank God for small mercies.

“Then let’s take the rest of them down. Get me … is Geshalt commanding anything anymore?”

“He’s still on the Stockholm, ma’am.”

“Get him on the line.” She pressed down onto the desk, trying to let her anger flow out of her palms and into the metal. “Batteries, you know your job. Fire when ready. Helmsman, do anything except get us between the carrier and the destroyers.”

Heads nodded, and it was only a few seconds later that the line from the Stockholm lit up. Walker looped a headset over her bun. “Where are you?”

“Nowhere.” Geshalt sounded furious. “We dropped down as soon as that thing got ready to fire, and now we’ve got the rest of the fleet between us and—”

“Perfect,” Walker interrupted.

“What?”

“They want us to go in to take out that carrier so their destroyers can catch us in the cross fire. We need to go around back.”

“I’ll get right on it, ma’am.”

“Cut your engines,” Walker advised. “Go into a drift, and then shut down communications. Try to run dark. If they write you off as debris and you don’t transmit, they may not pick you up again. Meet you there?”

“See you in a few.” He cut the channel and she watched on the main screen as the Stockholm went dark.

“Helmsman, cut engines.” Walker raised her voice. “Batteries, start loading the rest of the nukes but go to radio silence and get ready to cut the engines as soon as we’re on the right heading. We’re circling around, but we need at least ten seconds of drift for them to write us off. Let’s hope Tel’rabim’s fleet has the same targeting failures as their old one.” For years, human ships had been making use of the algorithm in Telestine targeting systems that read unguided movement as debris.

“Ma’am, this destroyer is close to finished.”

“Then let the rest of the fleet pick it off. Looks like we’ve got two ships on their way to join us—they can handle cleanup.” Walker nodded to the helmsman.

Her lunch nearly came up when the engines cut. The gravity systems shuddered, decoupling from their usual adjustment to the acceleration, and a few coffee cups lifted slightly off the desks. Officers grabbed for printouts and locked their feet under their chairs.

…six, five, four….

“Walker!” It was Delaney, broadcasting wide. “Cairo, come in!”

Her heart squeezed, but she shook her head at Sanderson when he reached out to open the channel.

…two, one….

Their helmsman was good—very good. He barely twitched the engines to send the Cairo into a slow tumble over the top of the battle. They watched in the viewscreen as the Exile Fleet wove desperately out of the way of the main carrier’s laser array and toward the rest of the formation.

“Accelerate down to the back of the carrier at my mark.” Walker tracked their progress on the screen, dizzyingly aware that they were twisting, the battle above them and then below, above, and the below as the frigate spiraled…. “Go.”

The engines roared and for one terrifying moment, she thought the ship would split in two. It gave an almighty screech as it shot downward along the back of the Telestine formation.

“Ma’am, the Stockholm is beginning its approach.”

“Thank you, Sanderson. Batteries, ready on the nukes?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Geshalt, report.”

“Fourteen seconds, two destroyers coming around to face us.”

“Noted.” There was nothing to do about that now, no time for the human fleet to adjust course, and no better chance to take out the carrier. Walker focused on the readout of the battle, on the slow advance of her ship—in reality, hurtling through thousands of miles of darkness.

They swung wide and came around with another screech, and Walker saw one of the officers make the sign of the cross with a whispered prayer.

“Fire!”

The ship rolled into a spin and hurtled away again in a tight circle, twisting as it went to give the other batteries a clear shot.

“Fire.”

“Ma’am, they’ll need fifteen seconds to load another set of little boys, and that’s the last we—”

“Carrier is losing navigation!” Geshalt’s voice broke through the room. “One more round and—yes! Chain reaction! Get out!”

Warning lights lit up on the battle array and the helmsman swore. They were gone a moment later, the Telestine fleet scattering with them, as the Cairo’s bombs found what must be the weapons cache of the carrier, and the ship ripped itself apart from the inside.

“Telestine fleet is not regrouping. Say again, Telestine fleet is not regrouping. Exile Fleet, Retreat to Mars. Rendezvous at Carina Station.” The Santa Maria’s communications officer was almost crying with relief.

Walker smiled as the crew of the Cairo broke into ragged cheers.

Another comm line lit up, however, and she felt her heart drop.

There was no point in putting this off. She picked up. “Yes, Mr. Secretary?”

“Report to Mars.” Essa’s voice was tight with an unmistakable fury. The distance between the Cairo and the UN Headquarters on Mars did nothing to disguise the Secretary General’s rage. “I warned you, Walker. What is coming will not be quick and you will not get off lightly. And if you even think of running, I will make you sorry you were ever born.”

***

On the bridge of the Koh Rong, Nhean settled back in his chair as the captured transmission ended. Heat swept through him and he forced himself not to act, not to speak, until the haze of anger cleared. Then he sat up and looked down at his pilot.

“Set a course for Mars, and inform the United Nations that I will be arriving shortly to meet with the Secretary General.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Asteroid Belt

Vesta Station

Hangar bay C

“You told him to come here?” Pike dropped his end of the cargo crate and stopped dead in the middle of the hallway. Rychenkov had insisted they restock basic medical supplies. And by that he meant “medicinal” forms of alcohol.

A buzzer blared. Ten minutes to shift 2, a mechanical voice announced over the loudspeakers. Miners jostled past him on their way to the elevators. The hallways were full, a carefully choreographed chaotic dance, and the miners threw contemptuous glances at the two tourists clogging up the tunnels.

“Come on.” Parees pulled at his end of the crate.

“No. Wait just a second. You told Nhean to come here?”

“Yes. Come on.” Parees waited obstinately until Pike picked up his end of the crate again. “He needs to meet Ka’sagra. And he’ll be better at all of this than I am, anyway.”

“Oh, for the love of—if you want to leave, just leave.” Pike swung wide in a gap between a group of miners and shouldered open the door to the docking bays. He shifted his grip with a curse at the ever-present dust and hauled the crate up to set it on an ever-growing stack. “It’ll take him a few days to get here, though. That’s good. That’s enough time.”

“Enough time for what?”

“To get out of here.” Pike waved a hand at the cargo hold of the Aggy II. “To pack the ship up and get Dawn—Lapushka off Vesta before Nhean arrives.” Or Walker. But he did not say that out loud. It felt disloyal somehow.

“He isn’t going to hurt her, you know,” Parees said. He didn’t question the girl’s nickname. In the two days since the Aggy II had come back everyone had started using Rychenkov’s name for the girl, except Pike himself—he preferred Dawn. No one had thought to ask her thoughts on the matter. No one knew enough Russian to know what Lapushka meant, but she, for her part, didn’t seem to mind it.

“I am not having this discussion with you.” Pike wondered vaguely when he had started sounding so much like his father, and decided not to think about that.

He looked around the near-empty cargo hold. James was skulking in the back, trying to take as much time as he could with the crates he had so he wouldn’t have to come out and see Pike.

“Gabby. Where’s Rychenkov?”

Gabriela brushed her hair out of her eyes and looked around herself. “I … don’t know. He was here.” She shook her head. She was clearly exhausted; she had taken over James’s duties as well as her own, and was working herself to death. She snapped at anyone who suggested she rest, and where Pike would have snapped back at her, Rychenkov was inclined to let both her and James exhaust themselves out of their bad moods.

Pike chose not to point out that humanity was handily proving that exhaustion broke spirits rather than mended them.

“Well, if you see him—”

The door burst open behind him. Rychenkov and the girl were both heaving, panting for breath, and the girl was looking over her shoulder as if she expected pursuit.

“What—”

“Bridge. Now.” Rychenkov took off at a run again, leaving the rest of them to scramble after him. “Gabby, stall anyone who tries to get in!”

Parees and Pike exchanged a look as Pike ushered the girl in front of them. The doors to the docking bay remained closed, and Rychenkov was not one to panic needlessly … but he was one to make rash decisions on occasion.

What the hell had they gotten themselves into?

When they reached the bridge, Rychenkov was spreading printouts on the desk, weighted with wrenches and coffee mugs. He beckoned Pike in and shot an unfriendly look at Parees.

“There’s no use trying to keep this from Parees,” Pike pointed out. “If you found out about whatever this is, Nhean’s hardly going to have trouble.”

Rychenkov accepted that with an elaborate shrug. “So Lapushka, here, found the missing iridium. And it happens to be in the care of, you guessed it, a drone.”

“On Io?” Pike looked at her curiously.

“On Earth,” Rychenkov said grimly. “Or at least, soon to be on Earth.”

With a sinking feeling of dread, Pike leaned forward to look. For a while, he couldn’t understand what he was seeing, from the production logs to the transfers between mining and refinery sites, and the shipping manifests. But Parees, leaning over his shoulder, put out a finger to trace the story: a small skim from the top of each mining site, an amount of refined ore far too low for the fuel expended in the refineries, and a ship leaving Vesta two hours earlier, bound for Earth—with no declared cargo.

“How do you know it’s a drone?” said Pike.

Rychenkov only pointed to the girl in answer. She simply tapped her head with a finger.

“Oh. Right.” Pike’s stomach turned uneasily at the reminder of her apparent ability to forge mental links with other drones.

And with him.

“Who’s using that much fuel without any cargo?” Parees asked. He was shaking his head. “And why all the secrecy for such a benign metal? We just need to figure out what type of contracts are lucrative enough for him to go back like that.”

“None of them are,” Rychenkov said flatly. “He’d bring something and swing past one of the other colonies, if nothing else. You can’t make your living in cargo hauling if you only carry things on half your journeys.”

Parees swallowed. “And that’s why … that’s why you think he’s also got a bomb. That he’s a drone.”

“Yes,” Rychenkov patted a side beam and stared meaningfully at Pike. “And the fact that she thinks—feels, rather—that he’s got a bomb. We should be able to catch them in the Aggy II, but the ship we’re following has diplomatic clearance through the Daughters of Ascension.”

“They’re delivering a bomb—”

“Their ship is delivering a bomb.” Rychenkov held his hands up. “No way to know who controls that drone. If anyone. Or if he’s even planning on detonating it, or just delivering it. Either way, the drone gave the proper flight clearance requests to the Telestine authorities.”

Pike nodded. Any ship cleared for Earth had to submit a destination and a flight path through Earth’s air space. “And?”

“Supposedly, it’s refueling somewhere in Europe—I think that’s what these coordinates mean—and then it’s picking up a shipment.”

“Or not, of course.” Pike leaned his elbows on the table and squeezed his eyes shut. He had to think. “Why the hell would the Daughters of Ascension send a bomb?”

“I don’t think they are,” Rychenkov argued.

“It’s their ship! How can they not know?”

“Why would you assume they would? Tel’rabim took over the whole damned Telestine government with a secret navy. And they couldn’t even find the Exile Fleet until they attacked Earth. Clearly, Telestines are not so good at figuring out who has weapons.”

“Okay, riddle me this.” Pike shot him a glare. “If he’s got another Io-type bomb, and when that bomb explodes, it’s not going to take very long for the Telestines to figure out it was a Daughters of Ascension ship that delivered it. But they’re an aid group. They don’t have a fleet to protect themselves with—so who would really think it was them, trying to start something?”

“Did your mother mate with one of those cows you talk about? Or a chicken, maybe?” Rychenkov gestured wildly. “It doesn’t have to hold together if you really think about it, it just has to hit the Telestines where they’re weak and make them hate humans. It is a human pilot. The Daughters of Ascension have been giving us all kinds of shit the Telestines didn’t want us to have for years. They give us medicine, they give us technology, they clear humans to fly their ships to Earth, they come and live with us on the stations. The Telestine government has never liked them, and now one of their ships with a human pilot is possibly about to detonate a bomb over a Telestine settlement. Who does that help?”

Pike stood up suddenly. “Oh, my God.”

The girl nodded.

“He waltzed in with a fleet and took over,” Rychenkov said quietly. “But he knows if everyone starts questioning him, he can’t hold on to power very long. Maybe Telestines think differently than humans do, but I haven’t seen any evidence that says they’re more honest or more honorable than we are. And I can tell you that if I were Tel’rabim, right about now I’d be wanting the humans to do something heinous so the rest of the Telestines would think they needed to take some strong action. Getting them all to hate humans is a lot easier than getting them all to love him.”

“They’ll shut down the aid groups,” Pike whispered. His chest felt cold. If the aid groups were shut down, humanity would run out of food within months—more likely, within weeks. Filtration systems would break down, illnesses would take down whole stations. Humanity was far from self-sufficient, and it would take so little simply to relegate them to death in the cold black.

And how little would it take for the Telestines to regard humanity simply as a drain on their resources, an unnecessary expense that made renegade fleets and launched terrorist attacks?

“We have to take down that ship.”

“We have to take down that ship,” Rychenkov agreed. “Or at least intercept it and let Lapushka interrogate the poor soul. And you should tell Felicia to warn Ka’sagra.”

“I’ll do it.” Parees’s voice was quiet.

Pike looked over at him and frowned. Parees looked resolute, but was trembling slightly.

He swallowed hard when he saw Pike watching him. “We can’t wait for Nhean.” His hands clenched. “I’ll go talk to Ka’sagra. We need to find out who programmed that drone. She’ll get us close to figuring it out.”

Pike nodded. “You do that. We’ll take down the ship.” He looked at the girl. “And since Nhean is coming here, you’re coming with us.” He shook his head at her look. “Nope. No discussion. I’m not trusting him in the same room as you. Parees will find the done, you’ll help us with the tech at Earth—maybe talk to this guy’s ship the way you talked to some of the other ships before, remember? No one on Rychenkov’s crew can do that.”

She looked as if she might protest, but she couldn’t argue his point. She assented with a weary nod.

“Good.” Rychenkov rolled the documents back up and stowed them behind a wall panel. “None of you saw these, and we sure as hell don’t have them. And get the cargo off the ship. Our Aggy’s fast, but not fast enough for us to wait through a customs inspection.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Mars

Elysium Planitia City

United Nations Headquarters

Nhean adjusted his cuffs as he strode through the all-white hallways of the UN headquarters. He spared barely a glance for the Martian sky above. He’d become accustomed to the acidic yellow of Venus, and everything about Mars made him feel cold—and trapped. He resented this necessity—as well as the extensive weapons scans and ID checks he’d endured in the main building—but the yelling from the council chamber ahead told him just how important it was that he be here.

The guards tracked his progress down the long hall, eyes passing over the badge on his chest and examining his clothing for the distortions of weapons underneath. When they reached out to open the main doors for him, however, he held up a hand for them to pause. He was not going to walk into this confrontation unprepared, and from the volume of the voices inside, the conversation was past the point of any easy resolution.

“It was suicide!”

Nhean had never heard Walker’s voice like this. She was beyond furious at being outflanked, outplayed, outnumbered, and well beyond her usual simmering anger at the situation in which humanity found itself. He realized now that he had never seen her so overcome. In her long years on the stations, she had learned to control her anger lest it destroy her, the way it destroyed so many others.

“No—it was a strong, united front!” That would be Essa. Nhean recognized that voice from the broadcasts he’d played, trying to get a read on the man.

“How strong can it be when there was no cover, no adaptation to their plan, and you used our most powerful weapons recklessly?” Walker’s voice was still rising. “It took us years to build up that cache of nukes, and you threw them out there with no strategy!”

“You use the tools you have at hand!”

The guards, Nhean noticed, looked deeply uncomfortable with this. The last Secretary General had been so weak and ineffective that it was doubtful they had ever heard much more than a murmur from beyond these doors. No one had prepared them for Essa and Walker’s rivalry. Now they looked fixedly at the floor rather than acknowledge, either to each other or to Nhean, that they were hearing this confrontation.

“And if you use them poorly, sometimes they get turned around on you! You lost us three ships—three crews! Good men and women who didn’t deserve to die this way!”

He’d heard enough. Nhean raised a hand and the guards swung the doors open.

Three heads swung his way. Nhean saw confusion in Essa’s face, a muted relief in Walker’s, and open dislike from Morgan.

“Hello,” Nhean said pleasantly. He adjusted his cuffs again and gave both Essa and Morgan a once-over. He’d learned long ago that an impersonal, assessing glance tended to set his opponents off-balance—and that off-balance opponents tended to cave without as much of a fight.

Essa, however, was not cowed. A big, burly man with his greying hair cut short, he wore a military dress uniform with ease. He matched Nhean’s pleasant tone with ease. “Welcome. Who the hell are you?”

“This is Nhean Tang,” Morgan said, before Nhean could speak. “He provides … information.” The words dripped with condescension.

“I also,” Nhean said, “provided you the new fleet.” He allowed annoyance to creep into his tone.

Both men looked at him with renewed interest.

“Now. To get all of the early points of contention out of the way, it is obvious to all four people in this room that the last battle went very poorly, that the original Fleet formation was inefficient, and that Captain Walker has significantly more experience with Telestine tactics and fleet utilization than Admiral Morgan.” Nhean held up a hand as Essa opened his mouth. “No. You know that’s true. This man is in charge because you still hold a grudge about her taking the Exile Fleet from you. You know damned well that he’s not as experienced as she is, and you also know damned well that you wanted to humiliate her and you’re unhappy that her tactics resulted in a victory over Ceres.” Nhean stared Essa down. “So let’s make a deal. There aren’t any cameras on. There isn’t anyone to see this confrontation. You will lose precisely zero credibility if you reinstate Walker as Admiral of the fleet, with—of course—a slap on the wrist for disobeying Admiral Morgan during the battle. You and Walker will put out a joint statement addressing the rumors of infighting in the Exile Fleet and showing that you have resolved your differences, and you will allow Walker to choose the tactics of the fleet from here on out. Walker, meanwhile, will publicly support you.”

There was a long silence. Walker’s lips were pressed together in a thin line, but she did not protest. She’d come in here expecting to be thrown out of the fleet for good, Nhean was sure of that, and she knew she was never going to talk Essa down on her own. Morgan looked furious, but he, too, knew that protesting would not help his case. Nhean raised his eyebrows at Essa. It all came down to this man, then—bull-headed and prone to tedious displays.

“She disobeyed my orders,” Essa said flatly. “Not once, but twice. Her tactics are too reckless. If she loses the fleet, she leaves our settlements undefended—and when she has the fleet under her control, she does the same. She has not ordered the fleet split to protect all of our locations. In fact, she has refused to do so. She cannot be trusted.”

“Split the fleet,” Nhean murmured. “So your position, then, is that not a single human settlement can be lost, and we should divide our forces to protect every one of them?”

“Of course!” Essa’s genial expression hardened. “If you do not feel the same way, Mr. Tang, you should leave this room right now. I will not accept defeat—unlike some here today.” He shot a venomous glance at Walker.

“I see. And your goal for humanity is…?” Nhean raised a single eyebrow.

“To retake Earth,” Essa spat. “To kill every last one of the bastards that took it from us.”

“A fine plan,” Nhean agreed. He sighed at the look on Essa’s face. “That was serious. I agree with you. However … a plan like that, with a fleet like ours, and an enemy like Tel’rabim, will result in human casualties—and not just within the fleet. Tel’rabim’s plan is to kill us all. He is already attacking, claiming self defense because many of his own kind will not accept the totality of his plan, but that stage is close to over—he is gathering support within Telestine society for a full extermination, and when he has it, he will not hold back. His attacks will exceed what we can defend. Our victory will be as costly as our Exodus, if not more so. The only way we will win is by striking our enemy where he is weakest, and that means letting human settlements die if we have to.” He nodded his head to Walker. “She understands that. Do you?”

“You’re wrong. We will meet this Tel’rabim on every battlefield he names, and we will defeat him.”

“A fine sentiment, but one on which we cannot deliver.” Nhean spoke the words with weary pain. “And I think you know that—you once commanded the Exile Fleet. We are outnumbered and outgunned. What would splitting our fleet do for us? What could a single ship do to protect a settlement? Do you think that Walker chooses not to split the fleet because she wants human lives lost? Do you think I advocate her strategy for the same reasons? No. We do so because Tel’rabim has a larger fleet than humanity will ever have, with weaponry we cannot hope to match. The only way we will win is tactics, and those, Walker has in abundance. Reinstate her, or humanity falls.”

“No,” Essa said simply. “She’s always thought she was invincible, that her way was the only way to bring humanity forward—but, tell me, are we better off than when I commanded the Exile Fleet? No.” His eyes were locked on Nhean’s—regretful, implacable. “We have been dragged into a war too early for us to win.”

“We had to get the Dawning.” Walker’s voice was tight.

Essa talked over her without a flicker. “We have a Telestine planning our full extermination. This is not a game to be won like chess, with one important piece. We cannot afford to see humanity all but exterminated, even if that wins us Earth. It is not one battle. It is all of them.” He spoke slowly, each word enunciated clearly. “I will win every battle, for every settlement. I will not accept defeat.”

“No.” Nhean shook his head. “You won’t. Let me be clear, Mr. Secretary. Your fleet is composed of four aging carriers made from retrofitted cargo haulers, thirty-odd destroyers and frigates, and fifteen state of the art new carriers with full carrier groups—that I built at my own expense. I will determine who commands those fifteen ships.”

There was a silence. Essa’s head turned stiffly. “What?” he asked softly.

“They are complex,” Nhean observed. “My employees have been necessary to keep them functioning, did you know that? Or were you unaware that a significant portion of the manpower of your fleet was composed of my workers? It appears you were. I will be clear, therefore: Walker commands the Exile Fleet, whether under your name and with those legacy ships in tow, or under my name and without them. Make your choice.”

Essa was shaking with rage. One hand curled into a meaty fist before the man forced himself to smile. It was not a friendly smile.

“Fine,” he said, through clenched teeth. “I will put her in command. But you say you are a man of logic, so watch carefully. Understand what you are seeing. This is not a numbers game. Every settlement we lose is a piece of ourself that can never be replaced.”

Nhean nodded. He did not trust himself to speak. There would be no meeting of minds here, nothing more would be accomplished by staying. He nodded to Walker, and then to Essa. “I understand all too well, Mr. Secretary. Admiral Walker, I need to speak to you privately. I’ve received word of a potential attack on Earth.”

He left without waiting to see if she would follow him. He could not spend another minute looking at Essa’s face. Could the man not see that by attempting to save everything, he would instead clear the way for it all to be destroyed?

But Nhean also knew how seductive Essa’s logic would be when the settlements started falling. When there were bodies on the news feeds, when reports came of humans killed without a hope of defending themselves and Essa was making speeches about how he would have protected them all … who would listen to Walker and her plans for a larger strategy? Who would stop to acknowledge that letting some settlements fall was the only way to survive?

For the first time, Nhean was truly scared—not of the Telestines, but of his own people.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Mars

Elysium Planitia City

United Nations Headquarters

Walker did not speak as they walked through the corridors to Nhean’s shuttle. It was not for fear of being overheard. She did not know what to say. A distant part of her thought that she should have had the presence of mind to threaten the same thing as Nhean: follow her, or lose the new fleet. Another part of her disliked that he had done so. Open confrontation with Essa was easy. It was when things devolved into threats and quiet grudges that it all went wrong.

The UN compound at Mars was surprisingly sparsely staffed. Whether seeking safety or fleeing Essa, the council of representatives had scattered, and so there were no news cameras, no aides rushing to and fro with documents. Indeed, there was no real purpose to the compound at all without the council in it. It occurred to Walker that this was one of the most shockingly wasteful things she had ever seen. People lived crushed together on the stations, and here there was almost a station’s worth of space, entirely unused, not even growing its own food or producing technology.

The hangar bay was similarly empty, with only Nhean’s shuttle waiting on an expanse of empty floor. They ducked into the surprisingly small interior and buckled themselves into the seats.

“He didn’t call Delaney down?” was all Nhean said. His voice was still mild, the tone she had always known not to trust. Now, however, she had seen why.

She snorted. “Essa likes to look good. He likes to play everyone’s wise old grandpa. Jack would’ve given him a piece of his mind, and there’s no looking good when Jack Delaney is giving you a piece of his mind. He’s everyone’s gruff old grandpa.”

Nhean laughed as the craft shuddered into the air. He settled back in his seat, gaze sliding into the middle distance.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

He didn’t bother to pretend. His black eyes focused on her, clear and sharp. “I didn’t do it for you.”

“I know that, but even if you only helped because our goals are aligned—”

“Are they?” Nhean murmured.

“—thank you, anyway.” She met his eyes. “They would have destroyed the fleet.”

He only looked at her.

“For no purpose,” she clarified. “Believe me, I know what’s coming.”

He considered that. The shuttle banked and he gave a glance at the receding gleam of the UN headquarters. “Does the rest of the fleet know it, do you think?”

“Yes and no.” She’d thought about this at length. “We shouldn’t have made it at Mercury. They know it’s an accident that we’re alive, and they know the Telestines can make ships faster than we can—better ships, too. They know the odds. But since we haven’t all died yet … they hope.”

“And you don’t worry about that? About them realizing the truth in the middle of a battle?” He was watching her closely. “Don’t you worry about them realizing that they’ll never see Earth?” His voice was far, far too quiet.

“I do. In the end, though, they aren’t fighting for their families or for Earth—that’s the thing you have to realize about battles. About wars. A soldier doesn’t fight for all the things they should fight for, the things they make speeches out. They fight for the buddy next to them. That’s what keeps armies together when the odds are overwhelming. Not ideals. Each other.”

She had surprised him, she could see. He did not speak as the sky outside darkened to black and Mars faded away beneath them. He was lost in thought.

“We need to go to Vesta,” he said finally. The Koh Rong came into view as the shuttle made for the docking bay.

“Beg pardon?” She was sure, for a moment, that she had misheard. He couldn’t possibly know what was at Vesta … could he? She hoped she had kept her expression clear, but panic was beginning to speed her pulse.

“Parees made contact with the … well, a Telestine named Ka’sagra.”

Walker tried to keep herself from sagging with relief. She was so distracted that she missed the rest of what he said. “Hmm?”

Nhean frowned. “I said, she runs the Daughters of Ascension, and she’s on Vesta overseeing their operations there. I think they call her a Head Priestess, if the term translates at all.”

“At least she leads by example.” The thought of giving up the well-ordered, luxurious floating cities of Telestine-occupied Earth for the dank tunnels of Vesta seemed an extreme way to do so, however. “But why should I meet her? If I’m Admiral of the fleet again—”

“Put Delaney in charge while you’re gone.”

“I’m not saying they’ll be lost without me, I’m asking why I’m needed. You’re our spymaster, and she’s … is she important?”

“Not the term I would have chosen for myself, but it will do.” Nhean looked like he wasn’t sure whether to be amused or vaguely annoyed. “And she is important, though I didn’t realize how important until recently.” He looked uncomfortable with this admission of his failure. “Whether Tel’rabim has intimidated the rest of the groups into silence, or whether they joined with her for some other reason, she is now—as far as I can tell—the main dissenting voice against Tel’rabim in Telestine society. Others may not agree with him, but they don’t speak against him, either. She does.”

Walker gave a grudging nod.

“And we need you there to help us work out what Tel’rabim’s plan is. You’ve interacted with his fleet and the old Telestine fleet more than anyone else. You have a tactical mind. Between you, me, and Ka’sagra, we might have a shot at heading off Tel’rabim. Especially if she’s willing to let me into some of their communications networks.”

“You think she would?” Walker raised an eyebrow. “I’d say your chances of that are better if I’m not there. She’ll know who I am.”

“Remember who she is. Groups like the Daughters of Ascension are the main reason we’re still alive. They were the ones who interceded on our behalf so that we had an Exodus rather than a massacre. They haven’t fallen in line with Tel’rabim, and they’re clearly not prepared to be sidelined. I want to learn where Tel’rabim’s weakest points are … but I’d rather erode his support, make his strong points weak and his weak points weaker. If we can make his soldiers doubt the cause….”

Walker raised her eyebrows. This, she had not considered.

“Ka’sagra would make a valuable asset to our cause. And if that’s not enough to entice you to Vesta … let me also say that it seems a certain military asset of ours might have ended up there.”

“The girl,” Walker said instantly.

Nhean nodded silently.

She let her head fall back. “Good. As long as we can keep Pike out of there until we—”

“I’m given to understand he just left. With her.”

“I should have known.” She rubbed at her forehead.

“No, what you should know is that they left following a ship bound for Earth, potentially with a bomb on board.”

“Pike’s bombing Earth?”

“No, the ship they’re following is. Maybe. It’s what I was talking about earlier, as we left the council chambers. It looks as if a Daughters of Ascension aid ship was hijacked by one of Tel’rabim’s drones … who potentially smuggled a bomb onto Vesta and subsequently onto a shuttle bound for Earth.” He lifted his brows. “Which should give us leverage with Ka’sagra. Could be someone’s framing her, and if she thinks it’s Tel’rabim, I could see her being induced to help us.”

A bomb from Vesta. Walker tried to breathe.

Clarity emerged from the swirl of thoughts: she needed to see her people on Vesta. If there was a bomb missing, then it was missing. Until then, she could do nothing to affect the outcome of this either way.

She was very aware of Nhean watching her.

“He’s bombing Earth to gain support,” Walker murmured. She shook her head fiercely. “False flag attack to whip up fervor for his cause. Why aren’t we following?”

“Because we won’t beat them, and the girl was our best shot at stopping them in any case.” Nhean did not look the least bit troubled. “I meant what I said to Essa. We can’t head off every attack. Plus, this isn’t exactly an attack on us. At least, not directly.”

“That’s one thing, but this is always being one step behind! I don’t want to be reacting for the entirety of this war.”

“We won’t be.” He gave her a look. “If we can get a way into their systems. If Telestines will join with us to take Tel’rabim down. And right now we have a terrorist that might be heading for their food production or their power infrastructure. I say let them go hungry. Let them live with the fallout. Nothing strains a leader’s credibility so fast.”

“While they hate us because they think we did it.”

“Oh? And has their indifference ever done you any good?”

She had nothing to say to that.

The docking clamps came down and screeching sound reverberated through the hull. The shuttle was drawn into the docking bay, stars replaced by the shadowed interior of the Koh Rong, and Walker turned her head to watch the airlock doors close. Red lights flashed while the shuttle made a lock with the door into the ship and the artificial gravity settled over them like a blanket.

“I don’t like leaving,” she said again.

“I know.”

She unhooked her seatbelt and stood, waiting to let him precede her out the door.

“I’ll want you to put automated flags in the system,” she said finally. “Recruitment is ramping up in a big way for the Exile Fleet—I’ll give Essa that, at least. He’s the magnanimous, popular war hero. But he’s not being as careful with background checks as we were. I want your people watching, and I want them to move on their own if the system flags someone suspicious.”

Nhean lifted his brows. She got the sense that he was pleased. “I’ll do it.”

“Thank you. And I want people on the Santa Maria to watch out for Delaney.”

“They already are.”

She swallowed. What she had really wanted was for him to tell her she was crazy, and Delaney wasn’t at risk.

“And for you?” Nhean asked her.

“What about me?”

“Don’t you want bodyguards? Aren’t you worried you’ll end up dead in an airlock somewhere?”

“If I’m on the Koh Rong, I’d better not.” She kept her voice tart. “But, no. You made a good point, as much as Essa will hate you for it. He knows the UN will face scrutiny if there’s a public fight between him and me.”

“He won’t forgive you,” Nhean warned. He strode through the hallway. “If that’s what you’re hoping.”

“Not in the least,” she said crisply. “I am not a child. And I have the good sense to worry about how he’s planning to get the fleet back—because he is. But he got here on a platform of unity and victory, and he won’t endanger that for the sake of quick revenge. There are very few other people who could be suspects if I end up dead. I’m not saying we’re going to be making friendship bracelets anytime soon, but he’s not gone far enough off the deep end yet to have me assassinated.”

“You don’t think so? That’s good, I suppose.”

Walker smiled grimly. “Quick might be better. He’d rather see me publicly humiliated, and my reputation ruined, and if we give him enough time, he’ll find a way to do it, too.” She blew out a long breath and then lifted a shoulder. “So let’s win this before he has a chance.”

Nhean only laughed as he ducked into a small open room lined with couches. “Take a seat. We’ll be accelerating fast.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Between Earth and Vesta

Aggy II

What the rest of Rychenkov’s crew thought about this mission, Pike couldn’t be sure. James and Gabriela were locked in sullen silence, and the three new crew members were still not quite sure where their opinions fit into things.

Did they think it was futile, as he sometimes did while staring at the ceiling of his bunk? Did they tell themselves that the Telestines did what they wanted, and humanity was just a thorn in the aliens’ side?

Because in the darker moments, the quiet midnight watches, it did seem futile to Pike. It seemed like there was nothing left to fight for because there was no chance of winning, and what was happening now was just an instinctive struggle against death, the way a bug would try to right itself when it was flicked onto its back.

Sometimes, Pike had a bitter clarity of purpose: that if the Telestines were going to exterminate humanity, he was going to make damned sure that they didn’t have any excuses to lean on. This “terrorist” attack wasn’t going to serve as the tipping point in Telestine society if he had any say in it.

The rest of the time, he wandered the halls and tried not to think of the possibility that they wouldn’t catch the shuttle, wouldn’t reach Earth in time to do anything except watch the Telestine fleets leave, hellbent on revenge.

It was on the third day that Rychenkov came pounding down the hallway from the bridge. He stuck his blond head into the mess and gestured to Pike.

“Come see this.”

Pike took his food with him, offering a thank you to the new woman with the spiked hair; he’d already forgotten her name. Katie? Katya? Katya. She blushed a fiery red and stammered a thank you, but he was already gone, eating as he walked with Rychenkov.

“Problem?”

“Not sure.” Rychenkov looked over his shoulder as a clank sounded behind them. “Yes, Lapushka. You too.”

She’d hesitated when they turned, and smiled to be asked along. As she passed Pike, she dipped the bread she still carried into his bowl of soup with a grin.

In the cockpit, she clambered up to perch on one of the cabinets that ran along the sides of the room. She chewed, swinging her feet as Rychenkov and Pike took the chairs.

“So?” Pike took a bite of soup. When the girl leaned over his shoulder to dip a piece of bread in it, he gave her a look and she shrugged.

“He’s changing course.” Rychenkov pointed to the heading, now a few small but significant degrees off from their target. He looked at Pike and the girl. “So do we follow? If he’s not going to Earth?”

There was a long silence. Pike realized he’d forgotten to chew. The girl hugged her knees to her chest.

“Maybe he’s breaking orders,” Pike said at last. He gave the girl a questioning look. “Is that possible?”

Her expression was troubled. She hunched her shoulders, unsure.

“Or he wants to see if we’re following him,” Rychenkov suggested. “And he’ll leave us be if we’re just a cargo ship on a supply run, but he’ll shoot if we change course to follow him.”

“Their aid ships have guns?” It ran entirely against regulations.

“Ours do. Rudimentary, at least. What do you want to bet theirs do, too?”

Pike gave up that point with a shrug. “How would he know we’re here? We have the best tech to be able to track him, and we’re only managing because we already knew he was there. If he weren’t expecting to be followed….”

Rychenkov shook his head. “We have the best human technology. Who knows what those bastards have? That big one, Tel Robbie, or whatever his name is, even made himself a whole damned fleet, different from their normal ships. Who knows what he added?”

Pike put down the bowl and sank his chin into one hand. What would Walker say? He closed his eyes. “Either he knows we’re here, or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, then he’s either breaking orders, or we don’t know all his orders. If he does, he’s either trying to evade us or trap us. What do we do in each of those four scenarios?”

“If it’s a trap, we stay clear,” Rychenkov said flatly. “We assume he can outgun us and we stay on this course until we can detour away from Earth. We’re not exactly cleared to go there, after all. If he’s trying to evade us … same. You don’t back an animal into a corner if it can outfight you, and he’s already on a suicide mission. He’s not afraid to die.”

Pike crossed his arms over his chest.

“If he’s breaking orders….” Rychenkov looked unaccountably sad all of a sudden. “He’s going to die alone. He’ll detonate the bomb and go out with it, somewhere he thinks no one will be hurt.”

“How do you know?”

“Call it a hunch. I’ve heard stories of this. When you’re ordered to do something you can’t, and there’s no way to run, you end it yourself. That’s the only choice you have, the only you can control. He might have broken free of the orders and he wants to do the right thing. Who knows? But it’s dangerous to follow him, if so.”

“And if he has some other orders, the best thing to do would be not change course, establish that we aren’t a threat, and arrive at Earth first to head him off. We were barely going to catch him as it was.”

Pike chewed his lip. “So what I’m hearing is, ‘don’t follow.’”

“That’s about the way of it. What d’you think, Lapushka?” Rychenkov caught Pike’s look. “What?”

“That’s the first time I’ve seen you invite a referendum after giving your opinion, is all.” Pike found a smile from somewhere. “I’d say our girl has you wrapped around her little finger.”

Rychenkov snorted. “Bah. My people have hearts of ice.”

“That is the biggest lie I have ever heard.” But Pike turned to look up at the girl. “What do you think? Do we follow?”

She considered, her face lit by the glow of the screens, eyes focused on the trajectory but her mind clearly far away. At last, she nodded.

“Go after him?” Rychenkov’s surprise was evident. “A cornered animal?”

She nodded.

“But … why?”

She tapped at her chest, then pressed her fingertips to her temples, before pointing out the port window towards Earth.

“You want to give him new orders?” Pike frowned.

She nodded.

“You can—why did you not mention you could do that?”

She gave him a look.

Rychenkov wasn’t diverted, however. He sat back in his chair with the air of someone who would be stroking his beard if he had one. “It’s a dangerous game, Lapushka.” He looked up at her. “What’s your range? A handshake? A kilometer?”

She shifted uncomfortably, but she was honest, at least: she held up her thumb and forefinger, close together.

“So, smaller than the range of that bomb.”

Pike and the girl looked at one another.

“Put yourself in Tel Robbie’s shoes for a moment.” Rychenkov leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Y’make yourself a nice little toy, right? A human girl with all sorts of powers, able to play with your enemies’ technology. And then she runs off and helps someone else destroy your flagship. You might want to kill her in revenge, or you might realize something else: she’s just dangerous, revenge or not. Is it so unlikely that you’d have found ways to track her? On a station like Vesta, might someone have sent back word? How do we know all of Ka’sagra’s people are loyal to her, after all?”

Pike looked away. He didn’t want to hear this.

But Rychenkov’s voice went on, softly. “And so you send a decoy ship. A ship with a bomb. Lapushka’s going to know it’s dangerous, but she’s outsmarted him before. She thinks she can do it again. She can’t just let innocent people die, after all—even Telestines. And of course she’s not going to lose the opportunity to help another former slave, is she? And then she’s gone, and you don’t have anyone standing in your way.”

Pike looked to the girl, where she was sitting still and scared on the cabinet. She wasn’t kicking her feet now; she seemed to have curled in on herself.

“So do you still want to go?” Rychenkov was gentle. “Because men like that—even if they’re aliens—they don’t forget someone who slips out from under their thumb. He’s coming for you. Do you still want to risk it?”

She looked at him, eyes dark and horrified.

And then her shoulders went down, her chin came up, and she nodded.

Rychenkov, improbably, began to laugh. “Ah, Lapushka, you are a wonder. I hope to God I get to watch you take that son of a bitch down.” He looked at Pike. “So, if you have no objections?”

“Just one.” Pike frowned at him. “Where the hell did my captain go? What have you done with Pyotr Rychenkov?”

“You killed him, remember?” Rychenkov clapped him on the shoulder and swiveled to start making the course corrections. “Now you have a revolutionary, my friend.”

“And … you’re not afraid of dying?”

“We’re all dying. Some more quickly than others.”

“You’re impossible when you get like this, you know that?” But Pike left the cockpit whistling.

***

Two days. It took two days to catch up with their target, swinging wide away from Earth and into the empty black, the sun out the starboard window as they drew ever closer on the maps. Two days to get to the point where they could look through the viewscreens to see it, out in the black.

But there was nothing there.

Rychenkov, for his part, understood first. His hand came down on his leg with an oath.

“What?” Pike looked over at him.

“Transponder.” Rychenkov gave a grim smile. “He removed the transponder. It’s just drifting all by itself.” He looked at Pike and the girl. “Guess we forgot there could be a third option, huh? That they were trying to keep us from catching up. They were expecting to be followed. Pulled out the shuttle’s transponder, shot it out into the black and led us on a wild goose chase, and now they’re sitting pretty, aren’t they? Because we won’t make it to Earth in time now.”

The girl swayed. She was looking out into the black with eyes that had a sheen of tears.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Pike told her, but she shrugged away from his touch on her shoulder.

“At least you know one thing,” Rychenkov said thoughtfully.

“What?” Though he hardly cared.

Rychenkov jerked his head at the girl. “Way I see it, whoever did this either doesn’t know she’s involved, or they don’t want her dead. Just out of the way. I’d guess the former. She’s one of the single biggest assets anyone could have in this war—bigger to them than to us, I’d think. What’s-his-face can do a fake terrorist attack any day of the week, he’s not going to prioritize that over grabbing her when he has the chance. I’d think most other people would do the same. So they didn’t realize who was following them—and that’s interesting, don’t you think?”

Neither Pike nor the girl spoke. They weren’t going to make it. They knew it.

“What’s the point?” Pike asked, as Rychenkov plugged in the coordinates for Earth.

“The point?” Rychenkov gave him a look. “Same as it always was. Stop it if we can.”

“We can’t,” Pike said flatly. “Nothing goes right for us there. You know that. They’ve won this race.”

Rychenkov stared at him for a long moment, and then pressed the START button on the coordinates. He lifted his shoulders. “All we can do is try.”

And die, uselessly. Pike closed his mouth on the bitter words and left the cockpit, hating Rychenkov for taking them back, hating the girl for not taking his side, and, most of all, hating himself for not doing more to stop this.

Earth was a trap. Open skies and the sharp cut of mountains against the horizon were pretty nothings, and still he could not break their hold.

Earth would only break their hearts again. He knew it more surely than he had ever known anything.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Asteroid Belt

Vesta Station

“This way.” Parees walked slantways through shift-end crush in the corridors, hugging the right wall with one shoulder leading, the way the miners did. Where Walker and Nhean tried to count the branches of the passageways to remember their path, Parees clearly knew it by heart now. He lowered his voice. “The priestess is waiting for you. She was informed when your ship landed, and sent me.”

Walker shot a quick look at Nhean, and found him studying Parees closely.

“You’re looking better,” he said.

“I feel better.” Parees gave him a quick glance and a small smile. “It was difficult at first, to see how humanity lives, after having lived so long on Venus. I have hope now, though.”

Nhean frowned. “After speaking to Ka’sagra?”

“She’s….” Parees had a small smile on his face as he chose his words. “She’s not like Tel’rabim at all,” he said finally. “She sees something greater than all of us. The pain you see here, the suffering—she sees a world where all of that is gone.”

She had never considered that possibility. Walker sank into silence as they made their way through the crush of people. She had been fighting for humanity’s bare survival for so long that she could not begin to imagine a world like the one Parees was describing, the one Ka’sagra envisioned. Perhaps it was different if one had lived in the Telestine cities—if there was the chance to go back to that. If one had ever even seen that.

She had never even had the chance to imagine what Ka’sagra hoped for.

Her brow was still furrowed as they came into a series of caves. Humans, streaked in dust and all wearing coveralls, turned to watch as their small party passed. When Walker met their eyes, she wished she had not. Her uniform was too distinctive, and her failure to protect them was too evident when she looked at their thin bodies. The sound of coughing reverberated against the stone walls.

A small child dropped an old ball, and it rolled towards Walkers feet. She stooped to pick it up, and crouched to hand it back to the girl. The child, thin and wiry, eyed her warily before snatching it back and scurrying away to her waiting mother.

Walker remembered agreeing as Nhean argued that humanity would not win the war without losing human colonies. It was simple in the hallways of the UN, and on the bridge of a carrier. It was simple when the battlefield was a holographic readout. It was simple to say.

It was infinitely harder to see. She eyed another small, dirty child playing with a pile of tiny rocks in the corner. This one a boy, small enough to be four or five but likely a little older—malnourishment tended to stunt growth. He expertly juggled a handful of rocks into the air. Rocks for toys.

If Ka’sagra had given Parees hope, however … was it worth hearing her out? She watched him as he led them unerringly through smaller corridors and past storerooms full of crates and infirmaries with pallets laid on the floor. There was no security to speak of. The Daughters of Ascension did not bother to guard their crates of supplies, nor did they seem to fear that the humans on the station would turn on them. It was a level of trust that was almost ostentatious. Telestines moved to and fro, wearing simple robes so like nuns’ habits that Walker blinked in surprise. Their skin looked unnatural in the dim light and a few of them smiled at Parees and raised their hands in greeting. Was smiling a Telestine expression, or was it learned?

Ka’sagra waited for them in a converted storeroom at the end of the corridor. The rough walls had been draped in hangings, and thin carpets covered the floors and hung on the ceilings to reduce the noise of voices echoing off the stone.

The Telestine was composed, long-fingered hands clasped in front of her, strange eyes watchful. She smiled at Parees as well, and laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. “Thank you, child.”

She had clearly studied human mannerisms and was attempting to use them now, but the hiss in her voice, the inhuman pallor of her skin, the set of her face, all lent a horrifying tinge to the performance.

Unnatural, Walker’s instincts screamed. She had never liked the aid workers and missionaries in the stations—aliens passing out scraps of home to humans too poor to refuse. They seemed to expect politeness for their generosity, when what they were giving should never have been theirs to start with. Even as a child, she had thought that. She had done anything to avoid standing in the food lines with her mother and sisters, always running off to hide with Pike—who had also been hiding, of course.

Now she told herself to behave, like every adult had told her child-self to do. Allies were allies. Food was food.

Revenge would come later, when they saw everything they loved burned to the ground and knew what it was to be without a home. She knew their greatest weakness, because she had watched what they did to humanity. She knew what to take to destroy them.

And they would never see it coming.

“You are Nhean Tang.” Ka’sagra took a moment to look Nhean over. Her gaze flicked sideways to Walker. “And you are the admiral.” She was smiling, incongruously. “You are both very welcome here.”

“Really.” For all her planning, Walker could not keep the skepticism from her voice.

“You are my ally,” Ka’sagra explained. “I believe your people have a saying: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You stand against Tel’rabim, so you are my friend—and as I stand against him, I am yours.”

Are you? Walker kept her mouth closed on the question.

“Why do you oppose Tel’rabim?” Nhean linked his hands behind his back. His tone was carefully neutral. He shot Walker a look. I talk, it said. You listen.

Ka’sagra looked between the two of them for a moment. “He opposes the ascension,” she said finally.

“The, ah … and what is that, exactly?”

“It is, I think, your … ‘heaven’? It is total peace. Quiet. Nirvana. Ascension.” Ka’sagra was smiling. “Many speak of it, but too few think to achieve it. They would rather concern themselves with wealth and power. They do not understand that it is to gain infinitely more than any luxury, and it is not achieved when we crush humanity, but when we lift them up with us.”

Walker refrained from pointing out that it was the Telestines that had cast humanity down in the first place.

“And so you oppose him because he interferes with the spiritual health of the Telestines?” Nhean asked carefully. “Forgive me, I know very little of your religion.”

“Religion.” Ka’sagra smiled. “Such a human notion. You adopt ideas and cast them aside again as if they were clothes, as if there can be disagreement over the truth. For a Telestine, what you call ‘religion’ has a very different place. I would say that your religion, Mr. Tang, is to know. And yours, Admiral Walker—it is to fight. It is not a job. It is not a thought experiment. It is a way of being that is the deepest expression of what you are.”

Walker and Nhean looked at one another.

“And the ascension is a … heaven for all,” Ka’sagra corrected Nhean. “Humans as well. Your souls shall also rise. I believe this, for you are essential to it. Only by harmony can it be achieved.”

Walker was unable to suppress her snort, and Nhean’s lips tightened as Ka’sagra looked over at her.

“I do not doubt your sincerity,” Walker said carefully. “Nor do I oppose your goal. I see that you live your religion as you tell us we live ours. But the rest of your kind have not moved to help humanity. The Daughters of Ascension are very few compared to the others.”

“I do not deny it.” Ka’sagra did not seem offended. “My priestesses and I are slowly changing the minds of the people to bring about the ascension. It is possible for us to do so, even when others have a different … religion … than we do. To our own, we say that this is greater than human or Telestine. It is beyond us all.”

Walker forced herself to focus on the Telestine’s alien eyes.

“Our people had been a long time in the bellies of their ships, Admiral Walker, wandering from star system to empty star system.” Ka’sagra’s eyes were clear. “Their desperation for a home had grown greater than they could bear, so great that they would justify any cruelty to escape their hell. That is why they would tell you that it is only natural to put your own kind before others—it is one of the half-truths they tell themselves to justify an act that would otherwise seem monstrous. Judge my kind for what we have done, that is your right.”

Ka’sagra paused.

“But I ask you … what would you sacrifice not to live on these stations any longer?”

Chapter Thirty

Asteroid Belt

Vesta Station

Daughters of Ascension headquarters

Walker’s lips pressed together, and her nose flared. There was a sudden tension in the set of her head, and guilt behind her eyes as she broke eye contact with Ka’sagra. It was only a moment before her face cleared, however. Someone would have had to be watching very carefully to see it.

Nhean had been watching very carefully. He marked the way Walker marshaled her thoughts, and he reminded himself that emotion was very different from motivation. So she felt guilty and tense when asked that question. It might only mean that she wanted Ka’sagra and all of her kind dead, and did not want to say as much out loud. It might still mean nothing.

His fears might be entirely unfounded.

“I only want humanity to be free,” she said finally. She would meet no one’s eyes, focusing instead on a point above Ka’sagra’s head.

Ka’sagra waited for a long moment, clearly expecting more, but Walker said nothing else.

“And what does ‘free’ mean?” Ka’sagra asked finally. She did not prompt the admiral. She offered nothing but the question.

“It means we will no longer be caged by despair and poverty.”

Nhean looked over in new interest. There was hope in these words. It was almost a match for Ka’sagra’s language.

“The Daughters of Ascension strive for the same,” Ka’sagra remarked.

Walker’s eyes flared with anger at that. “We will never be free while we rely on you.”

Parees cast a worried glance at Nhean. She’s ruining everything, his gaze said.

Nhean gave a tiny shake of his head. Don’t interrupt. He did not want to remind either Walker or Ka’sagra that they were being watched.

If Parees was worried that Ka’sagra would send them away, he need not have been. The priestess went to a chair behind the altar and sat, eyes fixed on Walker. There was a small smile on her lips.

“An interesting sentiment.” She considered it. “We would say … that my kind cannot be free, either, while we bind you to this life. We, too, are caged.”

“What do you know of being caged?” Walker whispered. “You grew up on Earth. You had food to eat and air to breathe, and you needed to rely on no one for that. You kept humans within sight of the planet, binding their hopes into the shape of what they had lost. You made Earth … the prize they could never win.” Her voice was thick with hatred.

Nhean looked away, fighting for calm.

“Grew up on Earth? My sweet child.” Ka’sagra smiled. “I am over three hundred of your solar years old.”

“I watched my kind begging for scraps.” Walker interrupted, ignoring the alien’s explanation. She was shaking now, her tiny frame rigid. “You handed them food, and they asked you about Earth. They asked what the sky was like. They asked about sunlight. That was the torture you inflicted on them by your very presence. We were locked here, we were denied anything that might have given us a better life and you tried to half-fill our bellies and call it a kindness.”

Ka’sagra said nothing. Her hands were folded in her lap, and her strange eyes were alight with something Nhean could not name. What would a Telestine think when they heard such a thing? What did it feel like, to have a lifetime of work thrown back in one’s face?

“When this is over, I want a new future,” Walker told her. “We can’t survive by looking back. It’s killing us. We can only look forward. We can only strive for something that has never been, that is what the future holds for us. And you—you’re just dangling the past in front of us because you know people would do anything, say anything, behave however you want, if you promise them Earth.”

Parees clenched his hands. “The Daughters of Ascension—”

“Peace.” Ka’sagra’s voice was kind. She looked at Parees. “I have spent many years seeing humans swallow their pride for no purpose. She is right that my priestesses have not brought peace to your kind. But that is because peace is beyond us. The peace we strive for can only come when humanity is united, and the Telestines are also united, and it cannot come while humanity accepts the way the world is now. She is right.”

Walker’s lips parted in confusion. She looked at Nhean’s face, and looked away again hurriedly when she saw the expression in his eyes.

“I would speak with Nhean alone,” Ka’sagra said. She waited while Parees ushered Walker from the room, and then she stood, sweeping close enough that Nhean could smell the alien scent of her. “You are afraid,” Ka’sagra told him.

Nhean said nothing. For the first time in a very long time, he felt entirely out of his depth.

“You fear your own kind,” the priestess murmured. “What is that like?”

Nhean swallowed before he could stop himself, and tried to recover. “Telestines do not fear one another?”

“Some do, perhaps. I never have. My religion, as you call it—” she appeared to find the word amusing “—provides with a clarity others might not feel. I know that others disagree with me. I know that perhaps they believe they work against me.”

“But it’s all part of your grand plan?” Nhean joked. His smile faded when she did not laugh.

“There is only one plan,” she said simply. “The fate of the world, of the universe, of reality itself, has already been determined. You know this. We must simply live in the moments that lead to it.” She studied him. “That does not comfort you?”

“No,” Nhean said shortly.

“Hmm. You are a puzzle, as other humans would say.”

“Why do you do this?” He shook his head at her. “All of it. You learn our words. You give us … she was right, you give us scraps. Is it because this is all you can give?”

“What else would I give?” She tilted her head, a human gesture that looked freakish on her alien body.

“You could have told your kind not to accept Tel’rabim as the new leader,” Nhean said harshly. “With the goodwill you use to secure us donations, you could have argued for more than just supplies. He does more harm to us than you could possibly undo with comfort and food. If your goal is to save us from death, then he is your enemy.”

To his surprise, she laughed at that. “None of us in this world are enemies, no matter how much we might think we are. We are all players in a greater game. Tel’rabim has his purpose, and it is important. Even if it were in my power to do such a thing as unseat him, I would no more destroy him than I would destroy your Admiral Walker. And, as you know, my purpose is as a missionary. An emissary of peace. I distribute food and I urge my kind to be merciful. That is all.”

Nhean stared at her.

“There is a war coming. Nothing can stop that now.” She approached the altar and spread out a map, weighting it with chips of rock. It was the solar system, shown as if the planets lay in alignment, human settlements dotted in red throughout. Her eyes traced over the lines. “You fear your Admiral Walker for the same reason you need her—she sees clearly. She understands the game the way few others ever could. The way Tel’rabim does.”

“One miscalculation is all it would take.” Nhean’s lips felt numb. “She could sign our future away with one wrong choice.” He looked at Ka’sagra’s peaceful face and felt fury and panic well up in himself in equal measure. “She hates you. She hates all of your kind, how can you not see that? That hatred will drive her to—”

“Exactly where she needs to be.” The priestess cut him off. “Do not fear, human. Every choice you make is as vital as the choices she makes.”

“Vital? You said it was all set in stone already.”

“A curious saying, given where we are.” She made the expression he had come to think of as a smile. “The path to peace holds pain, Nhean. It will require you to lose everything you have and everything you have wanted. But heaven requires no less from us all. You were sent to Walker just as she was sent to you—together, you will give humanity the strength it needs to bring peace to us all. Do not fear what she is. Aid her. The battle to come needs you both.”

Nhean was used to dizzying his business prospects, ushering them through presentations and out the door without giving them so much as a chance to ask questions. Yet somehow, it was now he who found himself outside the temple, blinking in the corridor, with the words of Ka’sagra’s ceremonial farewell still in his ears: May you not waver from the path, and may the ascension come by your hand.

He looked back at the door, considering.

Ka’sagra, an alien woman who prayed for peace between the humans and the Telestines, had no fear of Walker or Tel’rabim. She did not think either of them could keep the world from peace—and from prosperity and a new home for humanity. Surely that should reassure him.

It did not. Behind all the flowery words and beyond her encouragement, one truth remained: Ka’sagra did not intend to help them with their immediate goals.

And Nhean was not about to accept that.

Chapter Thirty-One

Vesta, Low Orbit

VFS Santa Maria

Hangar bay

McAllister took a pull of Princess’s home-brewed alcohol and nearly spat it onto the metal floor as laughter echoed off the metal beams. They were tucked away in the corner of the hangar bay, Tocks draped over one of the folding chairs, swinging a leg idly, while Princess perched on a ladder. They hadn’t taken these sorts of liberties in the first days they were here, but Santa Maria was now beginning to acquire the scratches and dents necessary to resemble a real ship and not a spotless Venetian luxury liner.

And real ships, as Princess said, had secret brewing operations in the hangar bay.

McAllister took another swig from the repurposed canteen jar and, again, resisted the urge to spit it out on the deck. It was nasty stuff, and he was fairly sure he tasted a hint of engine grease, but it worked to take the edge off.

Right now, that was all he wanted. Keeping the edge off meant he could smile at his crew and say all the stupid, meaningless things that made them laugh and got them fired up. That kept them alert and alive. Keeping the edge off meant that he could push through another day, get one step closer to winning the future the rest of them wanted.

Then he could be done. He could rest.

They turned to look as footsteps approached. The sound slowed, hesitant, and McAllister looked over to see one of the newbies hovering a few yards away.

“Hey, there.” He tried to remember her number in the roster. “Eight, was it?”

“My name’s Niya,” she offered. She’d let her tight dark curls free of their bun and they hung around her head like a mahogany lion’s mane. Her rich brown skin was offset by the blue coveralls they’d all been given for off duty. “Woodson,” she added. “If you prefer the last name.”

“No one goes by their name except this guy,” Tocks informed her, jerking her head at McAllister. “First or last. Everyone gets a call sign. We just got too many of you at once to name you all.”

“Didn’t want to spend too much time on it until we saw which ones of you were going to die in the first battle,” Princess agreed. He caught McAllister’s sharp look and shrugged. “What? It’s true.”

Tocks snickered softly.

Niya gave him a look. “Well, I survived.”

“That you did.” Tocks stared her up and down speculatively. “You were the one flying spirals to stay out of the line of fire on your targets, weren’t you? I liked that. Don’t get too many people who want to try that one.” She looked around at McAllister and Princess. “Whaddya think of Twister for her?”

“Twister.” McAllister thought back to the battle. “Not bad.”

“I like it,” Princess agreed. “So. Twister. What can we do for you?”

“The bunks are full of new people. I just wanted to get out of the crush.” She shrugged.

“Well, have a drink.” McAllister handed over the canteen jar. “The rule is if you spit it out on the floor, you have to clean it up.”

She took the jar and sniffed hesitantly at the mixture before jerking her head away.

“Don’t smell it,” Princess said. “Lord.”

Twister managed a small sip before handing it back.

“So the new crew members are freaking you out?” McAllister gestured to one of the chairs and watched her as she sat. “You’re pretty new.”

“I know that. But—was it like this on the older ships? This one was half-full when I came on. Now it feels like it’s got too many people.” Twister looked out at the hangar bay as the deck crews and pilots hurried back and forth. “Where are they getting them all?”

“Well, we kind of blew the lid off the secret fleet thing when we attacked Earth.” McAllister took another gulp and handed the canteen to Princess with a wince. Despite the taste, he’d drink it all if he kept holding it. He’d been drinking a lot more since Mercury. He shrugged at the newbie. “So it’s not like we can’t recruit anymore. I guess Essa’s making a big deal about it. Better than … What’s-his-face. The guy we had before. Dude who wanted us to surrender.”

“Solokoff.” Tocks had her eyes closed and her face turned up to the light.

“Yeah. Him.” McAllister shrugged.

They’d had an endless stream of spineless Secretary Generals, practically identical with their hopeless eyes and their eerily similar speeches. Hell, for all McAllister knew, there was just one speech, and they all left it in the top desk drawer for the next Secretary General who came along.

He looked at the newbie. “So I’d say it’s going well, all things considered.”

“Still. Are we going to be able to feed them all? Do we actually have enough bunks?”

“I … hadn’t thought of that.” He shrugged. “I assume so.”

“I wouldn’t assume anything where that dipshit is concerned,” Princess muttered.

“Essa?” McAllister looked at him. He was beginning to feel a pleasant warmth spreading through his body. “I dunno, he seems all right.”

Essa had taken a flight from Mars after the last battle to greet the crew of the flagship. With salt and pepper hair, a barrel chest, and a booming laugh, he brought life to the whole place. He’d shaken McAllister’s hand and commended him on his quick thinking, led the pilots in a rousing cheer, and left the ship with the crew in high spirits.

“He’s all right,” Princess agreed. “I meant Morgan. Glad we got Walker back.”

“We got her back, but all these new recruits were his idea.” Tocks raised an eyebrow at the rest of the group. “Or so I hear. And are we background checking all of them? Used to be if someone got all the way here, you knew they were serious. You came from God knew where on whatever transport you could get. You knew those people had to learn to do deck work. You knew they cared. These people, though—how do we know they’ll be any good?”

“I heard a few of the ones they got into the pilot program haven’t ever flown anything,” Princess agreed. “C’mon, Theo, that’s gotta worry you. Could just be to make Walker look bad.”

“They wouldn’t do that.” Twister’s voice was surprisingly indignant. “And it’s not like she needs their help, anyway. She’s a loose cannon.”

There was a stony silence.

Twister’s chin jutted out and she stared fiercely at them. “It’s true.”

“Who told you that?” McAllister wished he were holding the jar again. “One of Essa’s puppies? Was it in the UN recruitment video?”

“No! Everyone knows what she’s like. It’s why I signed up—I knew I couldn’t change anything unless I was here. I saw what she was doing with Earth, and it felt too risky. I thought she was playing with fire.” She leaned forward. “You saw what happened in the last battle.”

“What, when she saved our asses?” McAllister gave a pull of the home-brew. “We followed what she did for a reason—didn’t hear you complaining then.”

“Morgan gave a bad order, I know that.” She looked desperately uncomfortable to be saying it, but she admitted it with a grimace. She sat up straighter, laser focused. “And that’s the point. When he gave a bad order, he had someone to talk him out of it. She never accepted anyone doing that with her.” She gave a shake of her head. “And she could have talked to him on a private channel instead of just breaking formation.”

“I just broke formation.” McAllister shrugged.

“Because you were trained by Walker,” the newbie insisted. “She didn’t tolerate dissent, and you’re used to following her.”

“Jesus Christ.” Tocks was laughing. “Is Essa printing out pamphlets? Where do you get this shit?”

“Humanity can’t afford someone taking risks like this!” Twister was genuinely offended, her face screwed up, her hands clenched. She perched on the edge of her chair, looking between all of them.

“Okay, let me break it down for you.” Princess sat up. “I mean, unless the CAG wants to have a go?” He looked at McAllister.

“Go ahead.” McAllister waved the bottle inelegantly. “Your beer is rotting my brain.”

“Right, here’s the deal, Twister. You know how Walker got the fleet?”

“She committed mutiny,” Twister said flatly.

“She watched Essa’s tactics, she knew he wasn’t going to do anything useful for the fleet, and she took it over—by forcing a vote among the commanders. What battles did you hear about before Earth?”

Twister looked uncomfortable now. “None.”

“She’d had the fleet for five years at that point. D’you know why we were at Earth?”

She shook her head.

“To get the Dawning. You know what that is?”

Another shake.

“It’s what stopped that big-ass Telestine fleet at Mercury,” Princess told her bluntly. “Walker has good reasons for what she does. The only reason Essa had for putting Morgan in charge was that he was a warm, breathing body that hated Walker. Essa wants us to go all in anytime the Fuggers show up somewhere. Walker? She sees the big picture. You want to stay here, you don’t gotta agree with everything she does—but you sure as hell gotta stop believing everything Essa says, and you gotta stop believing that he’s somehow less risky than she is.”

“He’s right,” McAllister chimed in. “Essa is—”

“Let her be.” Tocks undraped herself from the chair and stood, stretching. “You gave her plenty to think about for now, and it’s food time.” She slapped her stomach. “And I’ll tell you another thing—the new deck hands? The mechanics? They’re good.”

“That’s true. At least one thing Essa’s done has worked out ok.” McAllister jerked his head. “Coming, Twister?”

The woman nodded silently. She hung back as they left, uncertain as to why she’d been dressed down one moment and invited along for dinner the next. She’d learn soon enough that no disagreement changed the most important thing: whatever happened, your next shift put you out in the black against your enemies, and you had to have each other’s backs.

“Wonder where they were all hiding,” Tocks was saying to Princess when McAllister tuned back in. She snapped her fingers at a passing mechanic. “Hey. You’re new, right?”

The deck hand nodded.

“You like it here?” Tocks shoved her hands in her pockets as she watched him.

He smiled cautiously. “Yeah.”

“Good. Where you from?”

His smile broadened. “I’m from Vesta.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Asteroid Belt

Vesta Station

Koh Rong

Parees was stowing supplies when Nhean shut the door of the common area carefully behind him. He had sent the rest of the crew into the hallways of Vesta and the Koh Rong was silent. Once, he would have said he could trust all of his crew. He was beginning to doubt that on principle. The war was making him paranoid. He sighed as he opened up one of the supply crates stacked in the center of the room, and looked over at Parees.

“So.”

“Where’s the Admiral?” Parees scowled as he looked up from where he was placing supplies under the seats. He did not bother to hide his dislike.

“Not here right now.” In fact, he didn’t know where she was. Nhean left that question for later. He still wasn’t sure what to do about Walker, and the obsessive circling of his mind was getting him nowhere. “Tell me about Ka’sagra.”

Parees frowned. “You just met her.”

Nhean stared at him silently. He’d been glad to find Parees looking healthier than he had been two weeks ago, but his aide seemed to have turned idealistic in that same time. It was, in his experience with Parees, an unexpected turn of events. And Nhean had no time for idealism. Idealism was a black hole where logic went to die.

Parees noticed the silence. He hunched his shoulders and kept packing, a thin figure in borrowed clothes, no different from any one of the miners in the halls.

“You saw her,” he said finally. “That’s how she is.”

Nhean did not believe that for a moment. “You’re telling me that in two weeks, you haven’t seen any other side to her than that?”

More than anything else, he was annoyed. What had Parees been doing this whole time? Whenever Nhean studied someone, the aim was to see beneath the surface. Parees knew that. In two weeks, he should have ingratiated himself to Ka’sagra and played the role of an ardent supporter while he waited for the mask to slip.

Because it was a mask, Nhean was certain of that. It could be that Ka’sagra’s equanimity hid nothing more than a fear that life was not as smooth and preordained as she claimed to believe it was. But if that were the case, Nhean needed to know it. Whatever was behind the mask, that was where his leverage lay.

Something flickered in Parees’s eyes, but it was gone a moment later and the younger man’s jaw set. “No.” His cheek twitched.

Nhean drew in a breath slowly and prayed for patience. “You’re sure there’s not anything you can think of?”

Parees pushed himself up abruptly. His slim form wove between the crates and he tossed a glance over his shoulder as he started stocking the cupboards above the seats. The rigid set of his shoulders said that he knew he was being watched, and that he knew Nhean was displeased with his results.

“I was alone here,” he said defensively. “I was on my own, and I’ve never done this before.”

Nhean blinked. “I know,” he said carefully. “And surely you know that I would not have asked you to stay if I did not feel it was necessary.”

“You shouldn’t have.” There had been a time when Parees had barely spoken a word to Nhean. Everything had been bows and whispers: yes, sir; of course, sir. It was only in the past months that Parees had become confident enough to speak aloud, and then it was only when there was no one else to hear. His deference had become normal. This, in turn, was jarring.

“I know it was asking more of you than I generally do.” Nhean hefted a block of protein gel in one hand and stole another glance at Parees before stowing the food. “Asking different things of you,” he corrected himself. “You have been invaluable to me.”

Parees said nothing to that.

“But I cannot be everywhere,” Nhean explained, “and there are pieces of the world into which I have no access. Telestine society is one of those places. We could not afford to wait two weeks to begin seeking an audience with Ka’sagra.”

“She would have seen you as soon as you arrived.” Parees’s voice was barely a mutter. “She knew who you were. She knew who I was.” His hands had slowed. “You shouldn’t have asked me to do this alone,” he repeated. “I wasn’t ready.”

“Parees. Enough.” Nhean slid the last item into the cupboard and collapsed the crate. “So what do you think her aim is?”

“To bring about the ascension. She told you that.” Parees sounded frustrated.

Nhean considered this as he pulled another crate close. The Koh Rong was a small enough ship that every piece of space had to be utilized. Even the shuttle was used for storing supplies, and was unloaded only when it would be taking a trip onto a planet. These aspects of life—efficient space, double checking pressure seals, triple checking valves, the endless rituals of staying alive in space—had fallen away over the years as he climbed the ranks of human society and landed, at last, on Venus. Returning to them felt strangely comfortable. He wondered why Parees did not feel the same.

Perhaps because Parees had not been playing at normal station life, but instead living as a miner here. Mining was comfortable for no one.

“And you think Ka’sagra truly believes all of that?” Nhean asked finally. He could not contain his skepticism. Religious zealots, in his experience, wore their unlikely beliefs like an ill-fitting coat, and—aware on some level of how shaky their ideas were—they were eager to turn any disagreement into a fight. Ka’sagra, however, seemed to welcome other points of view. In fact, she welcomed them to a disturbing degree. She embraced both Walker and Tel’rabim as being essential to peace, when both wanted only war and destruction.

“She believes it,” Parees said. “She’s not worried what happens tomorrow or next year or even in five years. She wants the ascension.” He seemed desperate now. “Don’t you see?”

“I see,” Nhean said impatiently. “I just don’t believe it.”

“I didn’t believe it, either.” Parees had dropped onto one of the seats. His eyes were focused faraway. “Now I do.”

“You believe in the ascension?”

“Yes. No.”

“Which is it?”

“Both.” A whisper. “It is peace. I believe in peace.”

“And so you want to believe the person who claims they can give it to you,” Nhean said. He tried to keep his voice gentle. “Parees … she can’t create peace. If there was a way to do that, someone would have done it by now.”

“No. That’s not true.” Parees shook his head. “It takes a long time. They’ve been trying since before they left their own system.”

Nhean blinked. “Really?” He had simply assumed that the Daughters of Ascension had arisen after the conquest of Earth—or at the very least, in the aftermath of the Telestine disaster in their home system.

“Yes.”

“Huh. Guess they’re not very good at it, then.” Nhean pulled another protein block out.

Parees was staring at him, dark eyed and silent. “They’re better than you know.”

He’d gone off the deep end. Nhean sighed. He shouldn’t have sent Parees to Vesta, that much was clear. He wasn’t even sure he could undo the damage that had been done, but he would give it a shot.

“I want you to go to Bollard Station.”

“What?”

“I want to know more about the Daughters of Ascension.”

“So ask Ka’sagra!”

“I’m not going to ask her anything I want a straight answer to,” Nhean said patiently. “Ka’sagra is not a priestess, she’s a politician.”

“So sic Essa on her if that’s what you think,” Parees muttered.

Nhean stifled a snort. “Or sic her on him.” He watched the corners of Parees’s mouth twitch. “My point is that she’s spent a long time rehearsing her answers to things. She has a way to make everything they do sound good.”

“And you think that just because you’ve never seen anything that was all good, it couldn’t be real?”

“Yes,” Nhean said flatly. “I think that no sentient being is like that. I think that no religion is that simple. And you know how you find the rough edges of a religion? You ask its newest clerics. So you are going to go somewhere that Ka’sagra will have sent the least trained among her number. You will ask questions until they show you where the logic doesn’t add up, because it is there somewhere.”

“And if it’s really nothing?” Parees challenged him.

“Then we’ll know that. I don’t deny that it’s a possibility. Their flaws might be harmless.”

“Then why waste our time searching for them?”

“Because I like to know people before I make them my allies,” Nhean said flatly. “And she’ll make a powerful ally. She’s stronger than she claims to be, or she’d be in prison—she’s openly defying Tel’rabim’s dictates, and even with his own fleet, he doesn’t want to attack her. I don’t know exactly what leverage she has in their society, but it’s more than she says.

“The question I have to ask first, though, is whether or not I want to help her in the first place—because someone who’s been around that long and still believes Tel’rabim is a necessary part of a peaceful world? She’s either crazy, or she sees something I don’t.”

“She’s telling you everything,” Parees said simply. His eyes were locked on Nhean’s.

“We’ll see,” Nhean said grimly.

Parees did not answer that, but his head turned. “Oh. There’s a message for you from Herbert Schroeder.”

Nhean stopped, halfway out of the room. “Schroeder? What did he say?”

A fellow denizen of Venus, Schroeder earned his money through industry instead of information. The man owned more tiny-but-essential factories than Nhean could count, producing everything from graphene filters to intercom systems. And at the moment, he was the best hope he had of placating the Funder’s Circle while Nhean himself was away from Venus.

The Funder’s Circle. The richest of the rich, the organization that had funded his little fleet. And they still had the power to take it away from him.

“He said he could only speak to you,” Parees said, with a shrug. “I told him you would be in contact.”

Nhean took the stairs to his cabin two at a time, opening an FTL comm channel and encrypting it with practiced movements.

“Tang,” Schroeder said genially, when he answered.

“Schroeder. How did the meeting go with the Funder’s Circle?”

“Poorly,” he replied, with an annoyed wave of a hand. “The Mormons are threatening to pull out if we don’t supply them with a few ships to settle Mimas, the Pope wants us to head up another drone rescue mission to Earth, the Baptists are mad we aren’t proclaiming the Venus fleet as an explicitly Christian fleet and send a contingent off to protect Neptune of all places, and the Rothschilds are demanding a higher interest rate. You know. The usual.”

“Did you buy me some time?”

“Enough. They’re going to hold off on the vote to pull the fleet away from you for, oh, a week. But that’s not why I called.” His eyes focused behind Nhean, checking the cabin. “You’re alone?”

“I am.” Nhean frowned. “Why?”

“I can’t explain over this channel,” Schroeder said carefully, “but you should come to Venus. There’s something you should see. I can’t explain it. But no matter what the explanation is, it is not good.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Asteroid Belt

Vesta Station

Lower level 2F

“I didn’t expect to see you here for a while. You’re sure you weren’t followed?” Dr. Sargent’s eyes met Walker’s for a split second as they made their way through the halls.

“I’m sure,” Walker said tightly. Now that she was here, in the sweltering back corridors of Vesta, the panic she’d been repressing for days was beginning to break loose.

It had taken the better part of two hours to get free of Nhean after the meeting with Ka’sagra. She had stayed glued to his side as if by choice until he finally excused himself to see to Parees. Even then, she’d dawdled, making a show of introducing herself to workers and inspecting the defenses of the facility. When she finally disappeared into the back corridors, she kept a sharp lookout for any members of Nhean’s crew. He didn’t hire fools. They’d mention it to him if they saw her disappearing into the mining facilities.

But she couldn’t wait any longer. She had to know what was going on.

“It’s going well,” Sargent offered, once they were through another set of doors and farther into the hidden corridors.

“Nothing … missing?” Walker heard the too-casual tone of her own voice and could have kicked herself for it.

But from Sargent’s evident surprise, he hadn’t been expecting the question, and so he hadn’t been guarding himself against it. He stopped in the middle of opening a door to stare at her. “Missing? Like what?”

“Material,” Walker said bluntly. “A ship left Vesta not long ago. Possibly carrying a bomb. Maybe a nuke, or maybe something like what took out Io. Honestly, we don’t know.” She stepped forward, trapping him against the locked door. She was short, and he outweighed her by a significant amount, but she did not let herself waver. Her eyes bored into his and she raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure nothing has left here without you knowing about it? The only shipments are to the Exile Fleet?”

The possibility had been itching at her since Nhean first spoke of the ship. A bomb from Vesta. Surely that bomb could have come from only one place—from the secret weapons program that hadn’t been destroyed on Io, because it had never been on Io.

It had been on Vesta.

But if someone had stolen a bomb from her facilities, surely they would have made a big deal about it. Surely they would have stolen an Exile Fleet ship to deliver it. That was what had kept her sane.

And Sargent, much to her relief, was shaking his head. “It’s not possible,” he said simply. “There isn’t a way into or out of the holding chamber without suffering irreparable damage, and the procedures to bring material out could not have been accomplished without me knowing. They take too long, and an override would have damaged the machinery. It would be obvious—not to mention, there would be less material now. We’ve produced enriched uranium at a very steady rate.”

“I heard you’ve been skimming off the production of the main mining facilities. Things like iridium for your detonator tips.” She gave him a smile which was not at all pleasant. “I didn’t authorize that. It’s risky.”

“We haven’t.” He held up his hands. “Look, I’ll show you everything. The refinement numbers, the material, the weights, the progress. We’ve had a few streaks of low-quality ore, and a few streaks of higher than expected quality, but I can point those out to you. All of what we have is coming from this.”

He unlocked the door, hands shaking, and ushered her into a pleasant waiting area. A laboratory could be seen beyond, airlocked for contaminants—a standard procedure in space, where even the smallest cloud of poison could be sucked into the air systems and be all over a station before there was time to react.

A desk clerk nodded to Sargent, and to Walker, and Walker looked around herself appreciatively, momentarily distracted from her worries. The refinery was hidden behind a front of illicit research into ore properties and the creation of better air filtration techniques. While it was technically forbidden by the Telestines, no human was going to turn them in, and would become complicit in hiding the facility if they ever stumbled across it. From the laboratories to the waiting room, Sargent had committed to the deception admirably. A uranium enrichment plant, hiding in plain sight.

He smiled when he saw Walker’s appreciation. “We ask people if they have any talents we could use,” he confided. “And they get even more invested in helping to shield us.”

Walker smiled as he led her through the airlocks and alongside the laboratory.

“They’re doing real work,” he explained. “But all of it can be tied easily to the filtration systems or power generation.”

“Any progress on yield?” Walker laced her hands behind her back and tried to keep her tone light.

“Nothing good yet.” Sargent grimaced. His quick look took in her disappointment. “I’m sorry. We have reason to believe we’re approaching—or perhaps exceeding—what we were capable of on Earth, but it’s nothing extraordinary. Would be wonderful if we could switch tracks to plutonium. That’s where we’ll get into the megaton explosive yield range. But implosion is so much more complicated than gun-type uranium designs. It would take a modern Manhattan Project to figure it all out again.”

“It’s not your fault.” Walker gave a sigh. “It’s just that after Io….”

“I know.” Sargent shook his head. “It’s frustrating enough not to have something that powerful ourselves, but for them to have it….” He shook his head.

“Who is ‘them’?” Walker asked.

“Ah.” He shrugged. “I guess I assumed it was a set up. I haven’t told anyone that,” he assured her quickly. “But if we’re your only weapons research facility, then there’s no way that bomb was of human design. I don’t know how a human got roped into it, mind, but he had to have Telestine help.”

Walker only nodded. “No gossip about that, though?”

“If you’re looking to stop people from gossiping, you’re going to be disappointed. This is one of the biggest events since the exodus. Moses’s exodus, mind you, not just ours. And I wish I could tell you that everyone’s on your side, but they’re not.” He shook his head. “There are a lot of people who think you’re bringing Tel’rabim’s anger down on all of us, even the ones following the rules. Of course, there are plenty more who point out that we didn’t have it great when the Telestines were happy, but people are scared. They’re helpless. For them, following the rules seems safest.”

Walker only shook her head at that. It was the sort of defeatist thinking she had been fighting for years, and she had no idea how to get people to stop believing it. Humanity was dying because the Telestines had forced them into space stations, and because the Telestines didn’t care to make sure they had enough food and medical supplies, but the second any human tried to change things for the better, there was an outcry, with people yelling about how everything had been fine. They were content to die slowly, it seemed.

Well, she wasn’t.

Walker pressed her lips together in a thin line as Sargent led her into his private laboratory and toward a dimly lit desk. A few other scientists looked up in vague interest, and then back to their desks with perfunctory smiles at Walker. None of them seemed to know or care who she was, as long as she was with Sargent.

“This is one of our latest designs.” He pointed to a dusty server, chugging at high speed and throwing off incredible heat. “Running simulations on that. It looks promising, but again, it’s just incremental change. A few more kilotons at best.”

Walker scanned the documents, and then hurried away to follow as Sargent led her across the room to a dry erase board. A button on one of the nearby desks raised the board to reveal a window into a room beyond, and Walker stepped forward with Sargent to look.

He was correct that it would be nearly impossible to remove the refined uranium ore without anyone knowing. The chamber with the ore itself clearly displayed dangerous readings of radiation, and she picked out no less than five stages of checks in the outer chambers to move portions of the ore into a shielded container and out through multiple airlocks with their own radiation meters. Not only that, the current amount of ore—presently shown on a monitor to the right of the window—matched with her own calculations of their progress based on Sargent’s updates.

Walker leaned on the windowsill and narrowed her eyes at the container.

So the material for the bomb hadn’t come from this facility. And that was assuming the Io blast was nuclear, which … just didn’t seem right.

“I need you to do something for me.”

Dr. Sargent sat down and kicked his feet up onto the desk. Scientists, she thought. So informal. No sense of military protocol.

“Name it.”

With a marker, she started drawing on the whiteboard. A circle. A moon. Io. She fashioned an explosion with a scribble of lines lancing out from the surface. “The official UN report claims this was a nuclear blast. That’s bullshit.”

“Agreed.”

She tapped the pen against the number written at the top of the whiteboard. Forty-two. “The best we’ve got is forty-two kilotons. The bomb that took out Io would have had to be, what … a hundred megatons?”

“A gigaton. At least. Probably ten or a hundred gigs.” said Sargent.

“Get me some answers. I want to know what could do that. Look at the blast profile. Look at everything. We need to know what the hell that was.”

Sargent nodded. “I’m on it. I’ll pull my top scientists and have answers to you asap.”

“Good.” She turned back to the board, eyeing her crude drawing of Io exploding. “If we fail, I’m afraid Io’s fate awaits us all.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

Near Earth

Aggy II

They started their deceleration a day in advance, and so for nearly twenty four long hours, Pike fretted about the time they were losing and how much quicker they might have pushed the deceleration. Rychenkov remarked once on how ironic it was that they could be traveling so quickly, and yet have the chase move so slowly.

Whatever he saw on Pike’s face, he didn’t repeat the comment.

The girl was silent, as she always was, but also absent—which was new. She locked herself in her room and only emerged to take food and disappear again. When Pike went to speak to her, he found her hunched over a tablet, reading. She shielded the tablet from his eyes and waited for him to leave.

“It’s been a long time since she’s been able to have her own thoughts,” Rychenkov said, when Pike asked him about it. The Russian gave an eloquent shrug. “First in that lab, then Walker got her hands on the kid. Let her read dirty books if she wants.”

“It’s not dirty books,” Pike said, annoyed. “She’s worried about something. I can tell.”

“Maybe she’s worried about whether the guy gets the girl in the end.”

Pike threw up his hands and left.

He steered clear of the cockpit as much as he could. The tracking program had some kind of bug, and couldn’t keep up with the engines Nhean had put on their ship, so the distance reading between them and their target flickered and jumped as the computer tried to make sense of things. Pike knew that staring at it would only make him go mad.

Accordingly, he was sitting in the mess and trying to read when the proximity alerts sounded and a pleasant female voice announced, You are approaching: Earth.

He got up so fast the chair tipped over. He didn’t stick around to pick it up, just pushed his long legs into a full-on sprint through the halls, ducking his tall frame under doorways and turning sideways to avoid crew members.

He was laughing with what little breath he had left. Trust Nhean to flout conventions even with his proximity alerts. Telestine law mandated that every human cargo ship had a series of preprogrammed alerts, increasingly stern and threatening sanctions, set to go off as the ship came too close to Earth—and alert the Telestines as well. Pike had guessed that Nhean would disable any data sent to the Telestine satellites, but the proximity alert was unexpected, and almost jarringly pleasant.

He found Rychenkov stabbing at the screen in frustration while the girl took the copilot’s seat. Her hands were splayed over the computers, as they so often were, and Pike had the unsettling feeling that she had learned to interface with human computers in almost the same way she could with Telestine machines. Her eyes were locked on the viewscreen, where Earth was suddenly, shockingly large. The arc of the planet was clear, and the blaze of blue and green could not be mistaken.

“Son of a….”

Pike turned. He had not realized that James had followed him. Now he saw his former crewmate stripped of his anger and resentment for the first time in weeks. James braced himself in the doorway, still unsteady on his bad leg, but Pike knew he wasn’t feeling the pain anymore. He was dumbstruck, jaw hanging open. There were tears in his eyes when he looked at Pike.

“That’s what Earth looks like?” His voice shook.

“Yes.” Pike heard his own voice broke on the word.

“It’s so much more … green than I imagined.” James was shaking his head. He was trembling. “It’s so beautiful.”

Pike stole a glance at him, digging his nails into his palm to keep back his own tears. He had grown up here, he knew this planet more intimately than any dreamer. He knew that the blue of the water was rare in the high desert near the Rockies. He knew that the big, stationary-looking swirls of clouds could be whistling in a gale over the land. He knew the flight of birds across the sky.

He had forgotten to wonder what this homecoming might mean to someone who had never seen the planet. What was it, Pike wondered suddenly, to see the planet you were made for, for the first time? To return after years of exile, to a home you had never known? People asked him for stories sometimes, but he knew that no story he’d ever told could match this sight.

James had dropped his face into his hands. His shoulders were shaking and he was rocking back and forth with silent tears.

“You’re home,” Pike told him softly, and James gripped his hand.

“I never thought I would see this.” His voice was broken. “I thought—we’re never going to get Earth back. I’ll never see it in my life.” He looked up again. “I never thought I would see this,” he whispered again.

Pike caught sight of Rychenkov watching them. He knew Rychenkov had buzzed the proximity to Earth more than once. This sight wasn’t new to him. In the stories the captain told, he was just a dumb teenager trying to piss off the fuggers. Only now did it occur to Pike that Rychenkov had always been a bit of an idealist at heart—and a bit of a rebel. Even now, coming in hot on the trail of a suicide bomber, Rychenkov’s face softened as he watch James.

He remembered their situation quickly enough, and jerked his head at Pike.

“I’m trying to get a lock on him, but damned if I can. I can’t see where he is.”

Pike felt his stomach drop strangely. “We’ll … just keep trying.”

“We should be able to spot him by now.” Rychenkov’s tone was grim. “We should be able to figure out his heading.”

“Europe,” Pike said. “Focus the search there. What were the cities they actually settled over? Madrid, Paris, London—”

“I don’t know! Tell her, have her see if she can get into the tracking systems.” He jabbed a finger at the girl.

She nodded. For a moment she considered, and then she spread her hands again on the computer terminal and bowed her head. Her eyes drifted closed, but tension ran through every line of her body.

Locked out of a world he could neither sense nor understand, Pike paced in the tiny space behind the chairs. What was she doing? Was she talking to the Telestine satellites? Did she have a receiver somewhere in her body to tune into the transmissions bouncing around the planet? He had thought of her as locked in her own head, unable to speak, unable to communicate with the outside world. Only now did he wonder how she saw him: human, a dumb animal, surrounded by technology he had learned to use like a monkey with a typewriter, but understanding none of the life that pulsed through the ship, seeing none of the commands that flowed from the computers.

Her eyes snapped open and she began jabbing at the computer. The map came up, focused—

“No,” Pike told her impatiently. “Europe. He’s going somewhere in Europe. Other continent.”

Her head shook once, emphatically. She jabbed at the screen.

And Pike’s heart sank.

“Denver,” he said quietly.

“Well, turn the ship!” Rychenkov had been pacing as well. Now he shoved Pike out of the way and checked the coordinates, plugging in the numbers on the other screen by rote. Denver, Pike realized, meant nothing to him. Even Europe meant nothing to him. They were places that, for all intents and purposes, didn’t exist in the captain’s world.

The ship groaned as it righted itself and began to accelerate again. It was traveling lower, shuddering as gravity began to ramp up, and Pike could see the North American continent rising up in his view.

The impact came without warning. No proximity alert sounded before whatever it was slammed into the side of the Aggy II and they tumbled with a shriek of agonized machinery. The artificial gravity kicked off, but not before Pike slammed into the side wall, James hitting him a moment later. The curve of the Earth spun dizzily on the viewscreen and Rychenkov was roaring commands as he slammed his hands down on the screens. Heavy thuds sounded as airlocks closed around the ship, the cockpit door slamming them into a tiny, claustrophobic space.

“Hull breach in the galley!”

“Gabriela!” James threw himself at the cockpit door.

Pike caught him and dragged him back. His logical brain knew there was no way that James could pull the door open, but his animal mind was terrified of what would happen if he somehow succeeded. Sucked into the black, dying without air, tumbling and tumbling, never found—

“There’s a patrol coming!” Rychenkov’s voice pulled them back to reality. He was shaking the girl’s shoulder, trying to break her trance. “Do something!”

But there was no time to do anything. The second impact sent them spiraling twice over. They hovered, off their feet as the secondary systems turned off, and, in a burst of horror, Pike realized that they were tumbling toward Earth.

“Pull up!” Someone screamed the words. Maybe him, maybe James.

Whoever it was, their words didn’t come soon enough. Rychenkov hauled at the yoke, face white, and Pike lent his strength, but there was no coming out of their spin before the atmosphere began to buffet around the ship. They were in a dive, and they weren’t going to make it back up in time. Their only hope was to get out of their spin and decelerate enough to land without turning into a smear on the ground.

Pike jerked his head up desperately, trying to make sense of the images before his eyes—and gave a savage laugh.

“North! North-northeast! Go!”

“What?” Rychenkov yelled back.

“That’s the Grand Canyon, it means the Rockies are north of us!”

“Why the hell are we trying to land in the Rockies!”

Because it’s home. But a moment later, Pike had another thought. “There’s a crashed Telestine lab somewhere along the mountains, and human settlements. We might find scraps to repair the hull.”

Rychenkov spared him one look. He was struggling to keep the craft steady as the wind whistled around them, tearing at the rippled hull over the galley. Is it even worth trying to survive this? his eyes asked.

Pike looked at the girl, at James. He nodded. Always. He wouldn’t have said so a few short weeks past, but then, Rychenkov wouldn’t even have asked a few weeks ago. He would have accepted his fate stoically. Now he only nodded, took a deep breath, and began trying to land a ship that very much wanted to crash.

The girl didn’t even seem to notice the wild shaking in the cabin, or the alarms. Her hands were locked down on the console as if they were glued in place, and her eyes were locked on the land ahead of them. Pike could almost feel her reaching out, trying desperately to influence the drone across thousands of miles. He saw her lips part and the half-smile as she made contact.

And he saw her lose that contact. He saw the sudden flare of panic in her eyes….

Mirrored by a sudden, blinding flash on the surface. Rychenkov yelled, shielding his eyes with one hand as the other tried to keep control of the yoke, and Pike felt the flash searing into his brain. He closed his eyes against the spike of pain in his skull and pressed the heels of his palms over his aching eyes.

But even with his eyes closed, he could see the imprint behind the flash—the mushroom cloud rising over what had once been Denver, engulfing both the old city, and the sleek Telestine city floating above it.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Between Mars and Vesta

Koh Rong

Walker’s quarters

“What is it?” Walker sat back with her arms over her chest, eyebrows raised at the image of Essa on her screen. Her rooms on the Koh Rong were small but comfortable and well-appointed, which was a good thing since she had been avoiding Nhean’s crew.

It had been a long journey back. Nhean himself had sent a message announcing that he would rejoin Walker and the fleet in due course, and the Koh Rong could be used to bring her back. After checking—repeatedly—that he was not, in fact, abducted or dead, Walker had started back on her own.

She was unsettled by his sudden absence, and more unsettled by the fact that she wasn’t sure exactly where he was going. Now, only a few hours out from the fleet, she was in no particular mood to indulge Essa’s need for a fight.

“We need to discuss the protection of the human settlements.” In the video feed, Essa settled back in his chair. “Unless that’s too much of an inconvenience for you. Although, of course, it is your job.”

“Defeating the Telestines is my job,” Walker said simply. She held up a hand when he opened his mouth to retort. “Don’t. We don’t have time. What do you want me to do with the fleet? Tell me that, and I’ll tell you if it’s possible.”

Essa’s lips tightened. “We need protection at every settlement.”

“Can’t be done,” Walker told him promptly. “As Nhean told you, it’s so impractical as to be useless.”

“Why am I not surprised to hear you say that?”

“Because you also know it’s a terrible plan, tactically speaking?” She lifted her shoulders. “We don’t even have as many ships as we have settlements, unless you would count a single fighter as protection enough.”

“If that is what we have to do—”

“No.” Something in her had changed at Vesta, she realized. She no longer felt any urge to rise to Essa’s bait. Things were at work under the surface, and she had no patience for old fights. “We determine which settlements we need, and position ourselves to defend any of them if need be.”

“Determine which we need?” His voice was rising. “We need all of them.”

“We need to destroy the Telestines before we die,” Walker snapped back. She had the sudden thought that Nhean was undoubtedly watching this—or would, at some point—and felt a surge of anger. “We are dying out here. Every year we get weaker. We accept how things are a little more. We only survived in the first place because the Telestine aid groups and missionaries begged enough food for us, sent us enough material that darkness and cold and disease didn’t kill us before childbearing age. We do not have long before Tel’rabim convinces the rest of the Telestines that we are nothing more than a drain on resources, do you understand me? Because that is what we are to them. We are dangerous. We are costly. They should never have allowed us to live when they threw us off Earth, and we have to destroy them before they figure it out.”

He said nothing, and she was so surprised that she faltered for a moment rather than pressing the attack. For the first time in their years as friends, as adversaries, as mortal enemies, she had never seen Essa struck dumb.

But now, while he was off guard and unsure—now was the time to convince him. “They know that we want to save every human life,” she told him. “That is our weakness. Do you know what they used to say in the American army? That a dead soldier is better than a wounded one. A dead soldier can be left. A wounded soldier, though, will drag the whole unit down. They will go back to carry their friend, help them. Their resources are sapped, they are made vulnerable.”

“Right now, every human settlement is a wounded comrade to us. Every instinct we have tells us to save them. We want to defy the odds. Tel’rabim knows that. Maybe Telestines are the same way, I don’t know, but he knows that the best way to force us to betray ourselves is by making us despair, making us run to save every settlement as he attacks it.”

“There are settlements we need: settlements that produce food and ammunition. Repair depots. The rest….” She took a breath and spoke the words calmly. “The rest may be lost. Some of them will be. He will make us pay.”

“Then we find another way,” Essa said gruffly. “There’s always a better way.”

“D’you have one now?” God help her, but she wanted him to. She had never wanted so badly to be wrong. She wanted Essa to tell her that he had a way to defy the odds, save everyone.

No matter that the odds were stacked against them, that the Telestines would be the ones to destroy humans lives—no matter that she had to sacrifice some of them to save the rest, she knew she would live the remainder of her life with a guilt that nothing could wash away.

But Essa did not speak.

Her heart sank, and she bowed her head. Of course, he didn’t have another plan. There was no other plan.

“So we protect what we can,” Essa said at last, harshly. “That is your proposal, yes? Limit what attacks we will respond to.”

“Yes.” There was nothing more to say. “A list has been drawn up. I will send it to you when I rejoin the fleet.”

“Ah, yes. When you rejoin the fleet.” He pretended to recall that, as if he had not called her on the Koh Rong. “And where did you flit off to, Admiral?”

She hesitated before replying. Her urge was to tell him nothing—for she knew full well that she had built her case against him, so many years ago, with incidents just like this. Where was he when you needed him? What are his priorities?

And yet, she had never expected him to agree that some settlements must be sacrificed. If she answered his question honestly, not cagily, perhaps it would serve as an olive branch of sorts. It would be better for everyone if they truly were allies for the coming fight, after all—not just pretending.

“Vesta,” she said finally. “Trying to forge an alliance with the Daughters of Ascension. They could put pressure on Tel’rabim within Telestine society.”

Essa’s brows rose. She knew this wasn’t his normal way of thinking. He preferred to attack a problem from the front, directly, strength of arms against strength of arms.

“And you think that could work?” he asked finally.

“I think that we aren’t all dead right now.” She raised her eyebrows right back. “And I think the smart thing to do would have been for them to kill us outright. Now, after so much time, it could be easy for them to realize that there’s no good way for this to continue. But it could also be easy to persuade them to do nothing—to keep things the way they are. Ka’sagra—the head priestess of the Daughters of Ascension—has consolidated the aid groups. By the sheer size of the operation she’s running, she must have some clout. If she would only speak on our behalf….”

“On behalf of the fleet trying to take back Earth?” The derision in his voice was unmistakable.

She didn’t rise to that. “You know what I mean. They wouldn’t be able to offer us food and supplies unless there was support for it in Telestine society. There are clearly those who think genocide is wrong. Thankfully for us. Though….” Her voice trailed off.

“Though what?” His heavy brows had drawn together.

The memory came in a flash. New Beginnings station, mugs of tepid coffee on a rickety table. The station was always, always too hot, Walker’s hair escaping its bun in wild curls and even Essa’s thick grey hair curling a little in the heat. The first refuge of the Exile Fleet had been in a constant state of breakdown, the air stale, the pipes leaking, the airlocks rusted in place. It was a death trap, but it was there that Walker had found, for the first time, a group of people who might fight with her. It was there, for the first time, that she had tasted something other than despair.

And it had been Essa who sat late over dinner with her as she argued passionately for them to turn from defense to offense. He’d argued against her, helping her hone her tactics. It had been two years before that difference in belief turned sour.

“Walker.” His voice called her back.

“Something’s coming,” she said quietly.

“What?” He was alert at once.

“I don’t know, I don’t … it’s not that we have intelligence. It’s just something wrong in the pattern. We’re in a lull and there’s no reason for it. Tel’rabim hit our shipyards at Mercury, and what’s really happened since then?”

“Io. Mars. Ceres.” Essa sounded impatient. “And that ridiculous feint attack on Mercury that Larsen keeps making reports about.”

“Distractions,” she shot back. “We won them far too easily. They’re a set-up.”

“For what, Walker?”

“I don’t know!” She looked away. Her jaw clenched. “But it’s something. I know that.”

And he started to laugh.

“The one thing I didn’t miss in my exile on Vesta was you. You, and your theories.” Finally, his smile was poisonous. “You always thought you were so clever. But you’re no genius, Walker. The thing they were setting up already happened a few hours ago. A terrorist took out Denver with a bomb. So here’s a question: what’s Tel’rabim going to do with that attack? Do you think you can figure it out, when you didn’t even have the first idea of what was coming?”

A red light flashed on her console. An urgent message from Dr. Sargent.

Found something. Call me immediately.

Essa continued. “Well, Admiral? Have I stunned you into silence? It’s a bloody miracle, ladies and g—”

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Secretary General, something has come up that requires my immediate attention. I’ll see you soon.”

She cut the line before he had a chance to scoff or protest, and immediately initiated a connection with Sargent. She checked the distance. Good—a time lag of only a few seconds. FTL comm wouldn’t be needed.

His face appeared on her screen. “Are you sitting down?”

Chapter Thirty-Six

Saturn system

Titan

Bollard Station

Bollard Station in orbit of Titan was a miserable place. On approach, it gleamed dully with distant sunlight, more a blot against the barred and ringed planet behind it than anything. It looked like a toy, a child’s plaything abandoned far out into space—a reminder that humans were never made to be out here. The idea that such a place could sustain life was pure folly.

Parees might, at any other time, have welcomed it. To avoid being tracked, Nhean had booked him passage on a cargo freighter. It was fully loaded on the trip out, leaving him with about enough space to stand up in and little else, and by the end of the journey, he was about ready to claw his skin off from sheer boredom.

But he regretted his relative freedom the moment he stepped off the ship. The place stank of chemicals and death. He would have taken a dozen cramped journeys like the one that brought him here, just to avoid it.

He helped them unload the crates—it seemed he was always doing that these days—and made his way into the processing station. What the purpose of the inspection was, he could not say. He would think they could hardly afford to be picky. The station barely scraped by, making a living by refining chemicals on the planet, and so the people who came here were those with little other options—and their children, hungry and feral-eyed. Aside from drones, Ringers—the denizens of Saturn’s stations—were the most widely mocked across the human diaspora. Uncultured, reclusive, and with a dialect that was nearly impenetrable to outsiders, they seemed to embrace the stereotype.

“Purpose of your visit?” the woman behind the desk asked, as if this were some sort of vacation. A twisting scar on the right side of her face forced her expression into a perpetual look of suspicion. Parees could see a few isolated scars separated from the rest. Acid burn, most likely. The refineries were notoriously dangerous.

Parees took a moment to pick the meaning out of the slurred mess of syllables. “Came to find a job in the refineries.”

The woman gave a snort. “You’re gonna work in that? And where’s your gear?”

“I didn’t know I needed gear.”

“Everyone needs gear. It look to you like we have some big warehouse full of coveralls for you to pick?” She shook her head. “Go home, Rocker.”

Parees scrambled for something to say. “I don’t have money for the trip back.”

“Not my problem.” She shoved his ID papers back at him. “Get lost, kid, the refineries would kill you.”

Just because you were too stupid to survive there doesn’t mean I would be. But he bit the words back.

“Look, please—just let me talk to the rep from the Daughters of Ascension. They might have the money for me to get passage back, right?” He didn’t need to feign fear. He had the money for the trip back, of course, but the idea of what would happen to him if he didn’t was truly scary. That was how you became a slave, locked on one cargo ship for the rest of your life, working off a debt of a few credits, starving by slow inches. Parees leaned forward, his eyes wide and desperate. “Please,” he repeated.

She tried to stay strong, but she broke easily. She knew as well as he did that sending him back was a death sentence, and if someone was motivated to come to Saturn, well … it was clear that they were desperate. “Fine.” Her voice was rough. “But I’m taking you to talk to them, and no wandering into the refineries. You think what they’ll do to you on the cargo ships is bad? Try falling into a vat of acid when there’s no doctor to help you. I spent five weeks begging them to kill me.”

Parees swallowed hard. “I won’t go to the refineries.” It was an easy promise to make.

“Eh, maybe you got some sense after all.” She lifted a shoulder. “But you ain’t got gear, unless you can get the Daughters to buy you some. Maybe they will. Come on.” She pushed herself up heavily and limped to the doorway. A buzz of the keycard and she waved Parees through. “Why’d you come here, anyway?” Her voice was curious. “I don’t see a record for you. Who comes out to live with the Ringers unless they got the law on ‘em?”

“Long story,” Parees murmured.

“Aren’t they all? You might as well tell me. Come on, tell Old Marisa. I won’t tell anyone else.” Her eyes gleamed.

“My dad’s crazy,” Parees said shortly. “Well … my mom’s husband.” He’d come up with any number of stories in his pacing aboard the cargo ship. It didn’t really matter which he used.

Marisa gave a snort. “Ain’t it always the way? How’d he find out?”

“Ah….” Parees hadn’t thought of this part. “I looked kinda like him, so he didn’t think anything of it. I look a lot more like the guy she made it with, though—and one day we saw him. Couldn’t be more obvious.”

“And it was just you he wanted gone, huh?” Marisa gave him a look that had a surprising amount of genuine pity. “Kept your mom, threw out the bastard?”

“I said crazy. My mom’s dead.”

Marisa shut up.

Finally.

The Daughters of Ascension occupied a whole wing of the station, albeit a small one. Marisa knocked, and, when there was no answer, used her keycard to get the door open. She looked around the tiny antechamber with a sigh.

“Must’ve been another accident at the refineries. They go to read last rites. Read ‘em to me, too. Didn’t make me feel better.” She glanced around the room with contempt, though the look faded when she saw crates of food stacked in the corner. “You stay here, right? I won’t let the ship leave without you, but don’t make me sorry I let you in, huh?” She paused in the doorway, biting her lip. “And … I’m sorry about your mom.”

She was gone a second later, while Parees stared after her with his brow furrowed. Of all the things he’d expected here, kindness wasn’t one of them.

He paced while he waited. The floor was carpeted; Telestine missionaries always made their waiting rooms and chapels as comfortable as possible. Metal walls were shrouded with hangings depicting—Parees could only assume—different deities, gears and pipes were usually hung with ribbons, and there were low, pillowed seats to use. The air seemed warmer here, scented with something elusive.

The hangings kept catching at the corners of his vision. No missionaries came to the floating estates above Venus—aid workers only went where aid was needed—and so it had been years since he had seen these. He did not want to look, and yet they drew him in. Even though his feet dragged, he found himself looking over the rows of them as they fluttered in the breeze from the air filters.

The hangings were mirrored along the axis of the room. He started to the right of the door, and saw an arrow, streaking up through the air. Or—wait, that was a stylized Telestine figure. She wore a pointed headdress. Her head was tipped back and arms outstretched upward to a shimmering globe above her, bright and shining and warm.

The ascension. Parees stared at it for a long time before he shivered and moved on.

The next hanging was more complicated. Castles and ships, perhaps. A whole floating city, thriving. This would be their home system, but something about the composition seemed dark and twisted. The figure from the first hanging, her headdress marking her as different from the other Telestines in the image, watched from one corner. Parees frowned and moved on.

The third hanging appeared to be a meeting of some kind. Now there were many who wore the headdress, and they gathered in concentric circles, looking toward heaven. They were swaying, each circle leaning slightly to one side. He could almost see their yearning for the ascension. Of all the hangings, this should be the happiest—the ascension of the whole congregation. And yet, of course, the story was not over. The ascension had not been granted to these priestesses.

The next hanging was almost shocking in its familiarity. Humans and Telestines, after all, were not so different in their physiology. Still, it was strange to see the stylized image of two cupped hands held out. A cylinder lay there, tapered at the ends. A gift? Their holy books? On this point, Parees could not be sure.

A sun blazed in the fifth hanging. Its rays shone down, echoing the light of the first image. Parees stared at it for a long time and moved on to the sixth: the explosion of the sun. He flinched away from heat that was long gone. The sun was stripping away the very matter of the Telestine home planet, chunks of rock flying away. It would be easy for them to hide this away, and yet they did not shy away from it. The Daughters of Ascension had found purpose in their own exodus, it seemed.

Darkness. The seventh panel was only darkness. A simple black tapestry.

And then, in the eighth, a fleet, traveling amongst the stars, and at long last, Telestine and human meeting. They were happy in this picture, the Telestine in the headdress giving goods to the human, who smiled. No reference to humanity’s forced expulsion from Earth, however—like all religions, the Daughters clearly preferred white-washing their people’s history.

Parees looked at the hangings. His heart was twisting.

Quickly, before the priestesses could return and stop him, he took out a small camera and took pictures of each hanging. He sent them to Nhean, lingering over what to write, and sending them, at last, with no words.

Then he sat, and waited for the priestesses to return.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Earth

North America

Northwest of Denver

“Toss me that tarp.” Pike held out his hand, and banged it on the hull in frustration when Katya didn’t seem to hear him. She was staring off at the golden light from sunrise passing over the ridge, lips parted in wonder. Even the still-dissipating mushroom cloud could not hold her attention against the vista. It would be very touching, Pike thought acidly, if they had not just crashed their ship and were stranded in enemy territory. “Katya. Katya.”

She jerked back to look at him guiltily, her bright hair catching in the light as she turned. She jumped as she threw the weighted end of the tarp toward Pike and held her end while he jerked his tight. She stared fixedly at her hands, as if she had to physically restrain herself from looking around.

“Go help the captain with the stern,” Pike told her shortly. “I’ll get more scrub brush.”

He left before she could answer, savoring the burn in his legs and his lungs while he headed up the slope in long strides.

He turned, a few feet up, to look at the ship. The landing had been hard, but not so hard that they did more damage beyond the hull breach. Defense satellite, Rychenkov had said, staring at the impact mark. Grudgingly, he’d patted his hand on the hull. She’s well built. Most ships don’t survive that kind of impact.

It was clear he was in no mood to talk about how he knew that.

The morning sun sent shadows slanting over the edge of the valley. The captain had followed Pike’s instructions to land in the tiny dip between two foothills, and the crew were now hurrying to and fro, camouflaging the hull to protect it from the ever-present Telestine patrols. It had been a few hours since they had seen any, and Pike was on edge. A gap this big was unusual. Were they cloaked somehow? Did they have different surveillance?

Or … had they finally killed off all the humans who once called these mountains home, conveniently ending their need to patrol along this lonely stretch? While the others had been gasping and smiling, laughing in delight at the blue of the sky, Pike could take no joy in it all. He had been unable to think of anything but burned bodies and bombed out buildings.

Of his sister Christina’s charred corpse.

He shook his head clear and focused his thoughts.

The darkness of his thoughts was entirely lost on the crew. Rychenkov was as inscrutable as ever, and the girl was lost in her own world, as pensive as Pike was and as disinclined to talk about it. Katya and Deshawn had spent their time staring up at the sky, running up the short incline to see the horizon, and losing their breath easily in the thin mountain air. They gawped openly at a distant storm until Pike snapped at them that they weren’t going to want to do their work with everything soaked in rain. They complied then, but they kept sneaking glances. Rain was something entirely outside their lived experience.

James was useless again, sitting by Gabriela’s side and squeezing her limp hands, trying to get her to wake up. How she was still alive, no one knew, and Pike doubted she could recover after so many minutes in the airless cold. He only hoped her passing would be painless, and that her last conscious moments had not been filled with fear, but he had no expectation that she would survive. This planet was a death trap, he wanted to tell them. He kept telling people that and they never believed him.

He was tired of losing things to this planet.

In the meantime, they had to hide the ship. Just because there hadn’t been a patrol yet, didn’t mean there wouldn’t be one—and if a patrol found them, they were never getting off-planet again. Pike stomped into the underbrush and began clearing branches as best he could. A pocket knife was no substitute for a machete, however, and he found himself swearing, missing as many cuts as he made, and cutting his hands on thorns.

When he came back with the first armful, however, it was to find the shuttle already out of the ship and Rychenkov giving commands to the rest of the crew. He’d thrust a welding torch into James’s hand, and was waving for Katya and Deshawn to hurry up their work of piling branches over the green-grey tarps.

“They’ll finish,” he told Pike. “We’re going to go get something to fix her up. Sooner we start looking, sooner we find it, eh?”

“Fair enough.” Pike dumped the armful of sticks, and thought better of mentioning that they might very well not find what they needed. Ship-grade scrap metal wasn’t easy to come by out here. “Come on, Dawn. Lapushka.” The name almost sounded normal to him now.

In the cabin of the shuttle, he brought up a map and stared at it. It took a moment to make out familiar landmarks in the ridges of the mountains, but eventually the ripples resolved into something he recognized. They were slightly south of where they’d been when he’d last been here. Pike fought the urge to ask the girl if she remembered. His memories were of fever-sickness and pain, falling asleep in a ruined shuttle under her silent watch.

North would bring him to where he knew there were camps, or at least, where there had been camps only months ago. And it would bring him to….

The laboratory.

The girl pointed to the map, her finger lingering over the patch of land where they had both seen the laboratory crashed, smoking and destroyed on the foothills.

Pike swallowed. What would it be like for her to return to a place like that? He looked over at her. “You’re sure?” he asked her quietly.

She nodded.

“What is it?” Rychenkov looked uneasy.

“The laboratory,” Pike said uneasily. “Where we, uh … met.” He blew a breath out, crossing his arms.

The girl tugged at his arm. She jabbed at the screen again, and then slapped her hand against the metal beams of the shuttle.

“What? Oh. Their shuttles?”

She nodded.

“Would they have the metal to repair the Aggy?” Rychenkov asked. He looked between them.

Pike only nodded. The conversation was all wrong, just one or two degrees off, and unsettling. None of them were mentioning why they had come here in the first place. Those dreams had evaporated the moment the first projectile caught their ship. They’d never even had a chance to see their opponent’s trajectory.

And Earth had given them accidents and death, as it always did. Because that was what Earth was, Pike remembered: a perfect prize, but far too dangerous for them to capture. Earth was a forbidden paradise, the trap that kept drawing humans back to it to die, turning life on the stations into a morass of depression as humans measured the reality of their lives against some imagined perfect life on Earth. None of them had the first idea what Earth was like.

He wondered what Walker would think of that sentiment.

Still, he wanted to survive, and so when Rychenkov closed the shuttle doors, Pike guided it up and into the air, closely hugging the ridges and hills to evade Telestine surveillance. They would repair, escape … and come back to be shot down again. That was always how it happened.

It was a short journey. Rychenkov hung back to let Pike and the girl pilot the craft. Only now did Pike catch a glimpse of awe in Rychenkov’s face. The man had kept himself busy since they landed, eager to keep them all alive, but now, with nothing to do, he was staring out at the landscape in wonder.

Twice, he pointed. First it was to a flock of starlings in flight, swirling like a cloud of black, silhouetted against sky. The second time, it was to a glittering dome that caught the morning light. He pointed, and there was a question in his eyes.

“Denver,” Pike said shortly. “There’s a viewscreen back there. You can zoom in if you want.”

He didn’t look back to see if Rychenkov did. He knew he didn’t want to see it. He’d gone close enough, once, to see the ruined remains of humanity’s Denver. They lay in constant shadow below the Telestine city, crude next to the sleek lines of the alien architecture, and their destruction made all of it too real.

Had anyone stopped to think what life would be like when they returned to Earth? When they had to rebuild?

He wasn’t himself. Pike shook his head impatiently and guided the shuttle down along the recommended path. He only saw the laboratory when they were close. No longer flaming, its windows pitted by blown dust, it appeared common. Like every other ruined building on the planet, it was covered in dirt and mud, holes gaping in its sides. It looked oddly vulnerable.

Pike exchanged one last look with the girl. Her jaw was tight, but she nodded.

They landed the shuttle under the leaning edge of the laboratory. It was risky, but cover was worth a little risk. A short scramble brought them up the side of the hill against which the structure had collapsed, each hole in its side a potential entry point. A spot of red in the broken earth caught Pike’s eye—he bent down and loosened an ancient, crushed Coke can of all things. Humanity’s original presence on the planet was still, after all this time, making itself known.

Pike tossed the can aside and shifted his gaze to the first of the two gaping black holes. He peered into the dark, and then, as the familiar drone sounded in the sky above him, he gave up on caution and ushered Rychenkov and the girl in, following them and crouching in the shadows. He watched as the formation of feathers soared overhead, then angled off to the north.

Good. They hadn’t been seen.

He turned and followed the girl’s already receding shape into the darkness of the crashed laboratory.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Between Mars and Vesta

Koh Rong

Walker’s quarters

Walker repeated the words slowly, trying to wrap her head around them. She was no scientist, and getting an actual scientist to dumb it down from the technobabble and jargon was a feat all by itself.

“So you looked at the actual spectrum of the Io blast, and saw a nuclear profile consistent with hydrogen fusion. But you looked closer, and saw a signature that suggested a slightly higher concentration of iridium than normal, except it wasn’t … normal iridium? I’m not sure I understand, Dr. Sargent.”

He shrugged. “To be honest, I’m not sure I do either. It matches the spectrum of iridium all right, except … it’s off a bit. When we looked closer we realized that it was an issue of isotopics. Iridium comes in two main flavors. Iridium 191 and iridium 193. Meaning, one has two more neutrons than the other. What we’re seeing is that the blast contained an unusual concentration of only one of those isotopes of iridium. Just like how we enrich uranium to end up with more uranium 235 instead of the more common 238, someone has done the same to some iridium, and it somehow ended up on Io before the blast.”

Walker scratched her forehead. “But, correct me if I’m wrong, doctor, but iridium is not a nuclear fuel. You can’t make a bomb out of it. Why in the world would someone bother to separate those isotopes?”

“I can’t say for sure. But we have a hypothesis. One of my theorists ran some simulations, and there’s a chance … a very small chance, that this particular isotope of iridium might have an interesting property that no one has noticed before. This is still very preliminary, but the electron structure of iridium 191 is such that it might be able to capture exactly four hydrogen atoms from a surrounding medium, and if it gets hot enough, allows them to fuse into helium. It’s acting like a … like a nuclear catalyst, if that’s even a thing.”

Walker was getting impatient. “Spell it out for me doc.”

Sargent gave her a surly look, before taking a breath and slowing down. “What I’m saying is, it might be possible that someone is enriching iridium 191, packing it into an explosive, and then if that packaged iridium is placed in a hydrogen-rich medium like say rock or water, it turns the medium itself into a nuclear source that fuels a chain reaction. Boom.”

She considered this, trying to put the pieces together with what she knew. Which was not enough. “And the Denver blast?”

He nodded. “Similar blast signature, but much lower yield. Probably because it occurred in the atmosphere where the concentration of hydrogen atoms is much lower than, for example, under the crust of Io.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Earth

North America

Northwest of Denver

As they climbed through the hallways, Pike struggled to make sense of where they were. The ground was tilted steeply, and occasionally the whole structure had warped, sending them scrambling over broken beams and up onto what must once have been the walls. The emergency lights had long since burned out, and the only light came from a flashlight Rychenkov carried, though the girl didn’t seem at all bothered. She continued on ahead, just close enough to be found, just far enough ahead that if her pale skin winked out of sight, they wouldn’t know how to find her again.

It took Pike several minutes in the claustrophobic darkness, the air still around him, to realize what felt so wrong about all of this: no animals had come here since the laboratory crashed. In his childhood home, it had been a constant struggle to keep rodents and larger animals alike out of the house. Mice and squirrels came to steal grain, mountain cats prowled at night, looking for food, and raccoons and badgers occasionally raided the pantries as well—the former being fairly easily run off, and the latter sending everyone scrambling out of the house. Even when they were mostly kept away, the house smelled earthy, of crushed leaves and the faint scent of animal droppings.

This place smelled like nothing but metal and chemicals, and the fact that animals had shunned it made the hair on Pike’s arms stand up on end. In the dark, crouching to go through warped passageways, there seemed no end to this unnatural place.

When they burst into the hangar bay, hauling each other up an improbable incline, Pike at least felt that he could breathe a bit better. A faint touch of sunlight spilled in through the cracked side of the building. He pulled himself along the wall to the hulking shape of a shuttle, and Rychenkov came to shine the flashlight over its hull.

“Good stuff here,” the captain said approvingly. “I can work with this.” He nodded over to the corner of the hangar bay. “You going to go after her?”

“What?” Pike looked round just in time to see the girl vanish into a hallway. “Goddammit.”

“Go.” Rychenkov waved a hand. “I’m good here. Here. Take the flashlight, I’ve got enough to work with. Go make sure she’s not getting into anything she shouldn’t.” From his tone, he worried about the same thing Pike did: that the girl was going to find the labs where Tel’rabim had changed her from human into something else.

He set off into the darkness with a few stubbed toes, and a hearty oath. Where had he found her before? He remembered a staircase….

The laboratory creaked around him as he walked. The winds that battered the plains were hurling themselves at the hull, and the whole building swayed—with the wind or their footsteps, he wasn’t sure, but either way, it was far from comforting. Every once in a while, the scent of charred plastic and scorched metal caught his nose. It was quickly gone. There had been little for the flames to catch on here.

He found the girl by chance along a side corridor, and though the beam of his flashlight was bright in the darkness, she did not turn to look at him. She moved with purpose, sometimes stopping to peer into rooms, sometimes walking past without a glance.

Pike could find no rhyme or reason to why she stopped or didn’t. Some rooms were entirely bare, as far as he could tell—though he wondered if some of those smooth walls were interfaces for the computers. Some were clearly operating rooms, with metal tables and strange instruments meant to fit in Telestine hands all crashed together against the side wall. He shuddered and hurried on.

She stopped once at a smear of blood on the wall, but stepped over human bodies in the hallway with hardly a look. Pike whispered half-remembered prayers as he walked past them, and hoped he would not remember the sight of them. They hadn’t decayed, he realized a few turns later, and then he both did and didn’t want to go back and examine them.

When the hallway ended at last, it was in a large room with a single beam of sunlight slanting down across it. Pike switched off the flashlight and watched as the girl walked unerringly to an entirely blank section of wall and pressed her hand against it.

“Wait.” His voice seemed unnaturally loud in the stillness.

She turned her head slowly, eyes downcast. There was no surprise, she had known he was following her. But she was wary.

“Are you—are you sure?”

She looked at him then, silent. Her eyes were pools of black in her pale face.

“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Pike said awkwardly. “I just know … sometimes the truth hurts more than the wondering.” As he said it, the thought of his sister’s charred body lying in a field resurfaced—he had no idea if that’s how she’d ended up, and, in a way, he didn’t want to know.

Her face softened at that. She nodded to him, one orphan of Earth to another. But still she turned back, hands splayed.

And then the pictures started, images scrolling past so quickly that at first Pike could hardly make sense of them. Then the pictures become bodies and faces, and the blocks of text gradually resolved into an unfamiliar alphabet. Snatches of sound came from somewhere—the start of audio tracks, hastily cut off. A slow suspicion dawned on him as he watched faces scroll by, and when they stopped, he understood.

The girl’s face stared out at him from the wall. Information about her scrolled down one side, facts about her that Pike couldn’t read in Telestine, and didn’t want to know for fear of what he might learn about the experiments.

Still images came up, hovering over the main entry: videos, he guessed. She scrolled through them, going back, and back farther….

“You want to know where you came from,” Pike said softly.

She did not look at him as she pressed play, but there was a tear running down her cheek.

The video showed an empty room. No sound, no movement. The girl hunched her shoulders as she watched, and she flinched when a figure came onscreen: a Telestine wearing nondescript robes, carrying a naked human body. Pale brown hair had been cut unevenly, and the skin showed bruises and burns.

“Turn it off,” Pike said desperately.

She shook her head. There were tears streaming down her face now, but she pressed her hands into the wall desperately. She had to see, that much was clear. She had to know.

The body was deposited on a table, limp, head lolling, and Pike flinched at the too-sharp turn of the head. It wasn’t natural, even in a sleeping human. In fact—he walked closed, eyes narrowed—there was no rise and fall in the chest, and not even the faintest movement in the fingers and toes. The Telestine dictated, turning its face partway toward the camera so its voice would be caught.

“Is she…?” It was too strange a question to ask. Pike looked at the girl, at the life in her now, and back to the still form. The child was younger, but the resemblance was clear. He didn’t want to ask, but he had to know. “Were you dead?”

She only looked at him. She hadn’t known this, he could see, and he went to wrap his arms around her shoulders. For a moment, she leaned her head against his arm and her tears soaked through the fabric. The video cut off.

“We should go,” Pike told her.

But a new video started. She wasn’t done watching how she had been made.

She was just getting started.

Chapter Forty

Venus

Constantine City

Constantine Gardens

Nhean had only just disembarked at his private landing pad on the upper level of the Constantine Gardens when he caught sight of them. The emissaries from the Funder’s Circle. Priests, cardinals, pastors, bankers, secretaries … he even glimpsed a man in flowing crimson robes, an indication the Dalai Lama himself had sent a representative. His secretary held them all at bay, and grimaced as he sidled up behind her.

“I’m afraid you have a welcoming committee, sir,” she said.

“Indeed.” He eyed them over, and several tried to speak at once. He held up a silencing hand. “Please tell your superiors that I’ll be with them shortly. I assume the meeting has already started?”

The one nearest him, a cardinal, gave a curt nod. “It has, Mr. Tang. Your presence is required immediately.”

Nhean hit him with an icy glare. “I will be there shortly. After I’ve attended to some urgent business.”

The cardinal’s eyebrow shot up. “More urgent than meeting with His Holiness?”

Nhean struggled to suppress any facial expression that might betray his annoyance. “Absolutely.” He started walking towards the other side of the bay. “Unless His Holiness wishes that I delay my brief visit to the lavatory?”

The cardinal actually went slightly red. Nhean gave a non-verbal signal to his secretary, indicating that she usher the crowd out of the bay while he exited through a different door that led to his private estate. He walked right past the lavatory—that urgency had already been satisfied aboard his ship—and straight to his operations center, monitor screens all displaying their streams of data, news broadcasts, intercepted communications—both Telestine and human.

He flipped to a private comm channel, and called Schroeder.

“Yes? Are you here?”

Nhean nodded to the empty room. “I am. You have urgent news for me? Does it have to do with—”

“Not now. You need to come to this meeting. Now.”

Nhean sighed. Another meeting. Meeting after meeting after meeting. His life was an endless series of meetings, occasionally interrupted by something of note. Like, say, a Telestine invasion of Mercury, or a bomb destroying Io. Sometimes it seemed the only events that could interrupt his meetings were catastrophes.

“I’ll be right there. Afterwards, let’s talk.”

“Agreed. That is, if you still have a fleet afterwards. If not, I may have to just go to the Admiral herself with this information.”

Schroeder cut the line.

Strange. That he would think of going to her with any information was itself surprising. Walker and the Exile Fleet weren’t exactly popular with the Venetian oligarchs. Hence the creation of his own private fleet. That he would go to her directly with important information only heightened Nhean’s own anticipation of what it could be.

What had he missed?

The Funder’s Circle was meeting right there at Constantine, it being the crown jewel of the Venetian floating cities. The lavish marbled conference room was packed to the brim, each tier of seating full of representatives from the richest, most influential groups on Venus and beyond. How he’d managed to keep his fleet’s construction a secret for as long as he did was nothing short of a miracle, given how many oligarchs and religious leaders knew about it, and paid out the nose for it.

A harsh yellow storm raged overhead on the other side of the glass ceiling, mirroring the mood of those at the center of the room, seated around a central table.

The Pope. The Mormon Prophet. The President of the Solar Baptist Convention. The President of the Rothschild Banking Company. The Dalai Lama. Grand Imam Mohammed Ibn Al-Abadi. And Herbert Schroeder, who alone had to be the third or fourth richest person in the solar system, depending on his various companies’ stock prices.

“My apologies for keeping you all waiting.” Nhean stood behind the empty seat at the central dais, but did not sit. “As the guardian of the Funder’s Circle’s fleet, I assure you, my tardiness was only because of my duties in the service of—”

“Please,” interrupted Ted Ricketts, a member of the baptist cohort. “Spare us the excuses, Tang. And just to be clear, you’re no longer the guardian of the fleet.”

Nhean raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Has the vote taken place?”

The Grand Imam raised a finger. “Not yet. But the Circle is … not pleased with your progress. I doubt your guardianship will survive the day, Mr. Tang.”

“We feel you’ve mismanaged your stewardship,” said Worthlin, the Mormon Prophet. “To whom much is given, Mr. Tang, much is required. To you, our dear brother, an exceedingly vast sum of money has been given. And we feel your performance thus far has been … underwhelming.”

Pope Celestine, nodded, but raised a hand. “Underwhelming, yes. But by God’s grace I’m sure he will not fail us.” He turned to Nhean. “Will you, Mr. Tang?”

It was showtime. He needed to do some serious convincing. Play them off each other. Maneuver them into competing coalitions and positions, and leverage their infighting to his benefit.

Humanity’s future depended on it.

“I will not fail. All my models show that success across all of your various interests is nearly … guaranteed.”

A general murmur of disbelief and disapproval washed through the room. Over three dozen men and women sat around the various tiers of the seating looking down at them. A woman near the back shouted out, “Your models say we have guaranteed success? What did your fucking models say about Io exploding?”

The room erupted in jeers and shouts and cheers. Several of the leaders at the center held up quieting hands, pleading for silence.

“Please. Bridle your profanity,” said President Worthlin.

“Fuck you!” The woman shouted back. Nhean recognized her as the Vice President of the Cargo Guild. A firebrand if there ever was one.

Pope Celestine stood up, hands raised. “Please, please. We must have order, or we will accomplish nothing here.” He turned to Nhean. “We hear that you’ve given the fleet over to Walker’s command. Is this true?”

“It is. Mostly. Allow me to explain—”

“That’s all the explanation I need,” said Ricketts. “I vote no confidence. If you can’t even spare a detachment to guard the colonies at Neptune—”

“I as well,” said the Grand Imam. “No confidence. Walker and her antics are why we agreed to fund the creation of the new fleet in the first place. To have given it over to her without consulting us is … a betrayal. I vote no confidence.”

Schroeder thumped the table with a palm. “Now wait, wait, wait. We haven’t agreed to vote yet. We haven’t even heard Mr. Tang’s explanation.”

Ricketts rolled his eyes. “What else is there to explain? What reason could he possibly give that would justify this?” He turned to the Dalai Lama. “Have you made up your mind yet?”

All eyes turned to the Dalai Lama. He heaved a reluctant sigh. “I vote … no confidence.”

Cheers went up throughout the room, met by a few scattered protests. Pope Celestine raised his hands again. “Please!”

It took the room nearly half a minute to come to order again, before Celestine turned to the other side of the table. “Mr. Rothschild?”

The old, shriveled white-haired man shrugged. “I see no reason to change course now. Too much has been invested to switch horses. I vote for Mr. Tang. He has not failed us before, and I do not believe he will in the future.”

A roar through the crowd. Another silencing hand from Celestine.

“Imam Al-Abadi?”

The cleric shrugged. “I vote yes. Mr. Tang has my full confidence. He’s protected Mars and the Jupiter colonies, where most of my people are.”

Nhean smiled inwardly at himself. He was absolutely sure the Imam’s full confidence was encouraged by the steep discount on personal computers through Schroeder’s company that the two had arranged. But whatever he needed to do….

“Bullshit,” said Ricketts. “Just last week you were a no. What changed, Mohammed?”

“My mind,” replied the cleric, with a smile. “And the fact that the Telestines seem able to destroy entire moons on a whim means we need to step up our efforts, and changing leadership now will only set us back.”

“We don’t know that was Tel’rabim.” Ricketts scoffed. “The terrorist, Sam Thorne, claimed he was acting alone. Against Walker and her secret weapons program, I might add. Against her reckless behavior. Behavior that he,” Rickett’s swung an arm and a finger towards Nhean, “is enabling and encouraging. And now empowering, with his insane decision to entrust that woman with a state-of-the-art war fleet.”

Nhean shook his head. “No. It was Tel’rabim. Of that I am sure.”

“How can you be sure? He spent decades protecting our interests. Arguing for us in their parliament. He even helped me start up our first colony at Neptune ten years ago. A colony which you still refuse to protect with the fleet we’ve provided you with—”

“Who the hell cares about the Netties? They charge my people triple docking fees and don’t provide shit for food or resupply.” The Cargo Guild would be heard at this meeting, she was ensuring that.

Ricketts didn’t back down. “The good folks at Triton City paid for all our scrubbers and catalysts, Vice President Mora. It’s how officers manning the fleet even breathe.”

More arguing and murmuring through the crowd, before Celestine again managed to silence the room. He turned to President Worthlin. “Parley?”

For a moment, from the frown on his face, Nhean could have sworn the man would say no. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.” He looked around the room at the dozens of people hanging on his decision. He was the deciding vote, since Pope Celestine had long been one of Nhean’s greatest champions, and the count was now three to three. “I need to speak with Mr. Tang in private.”

A jeer went up from the room. Some people stood up and waved their arms, shouting profanities.

“What, so you can cut another ass-wiping backroom deal? Cut us out of the loop and steal the fleet for yourself? No thanks!” yelled Mora.

“Nothing of the sort,” said Worthlin, when the din had died down. “I just feel that Mr. Tang might be more…” he glanced at Nhean with a searching eye, “forthcoming, more frank, if we were to briefly chat in private, without every single interest on the Circle listening in.” He turned to Celestine. “Your Holiness?”

Pope Celestine shrugged. “I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind, President Worthlin. And perhaps if we bring a representative of the no vote. Oliver?” He glanced at the Dalai Lama. “Would it please the body if Mr. Pemba accompanied us?”

A murmur of approval rustled through the crowd. The Dalai Lama didn’t so much bring cash to the table as he brought moral authority, and the ears of some of the richest men and women on Venus. Having him along would go far to placate the rest, Nhean thought. In spite of his no vote….

President Worthlin stood up and motioned them towards the door. Nhean fell into step behind him, followed by Celestine, and Oliver Pemba, the nineteenth Dalai Lama. The Mormon prophet, making small talk, led them through a maze of marble hallways, most of which branched off to the front entrances to the estates of the richest of the rich in Constantine Gardens, and finally keyed a door open that led into a section of the Constantine Gardens where even Nhean had never set foot.

A vast, manicured formal garden, under reinforced glass overhead and nearly half the circumference of the room, lent the lush garden a commanding view of the yellow acidic storm raging outside, and of Constantine city proper, which hovered just a few kilometers away, floating like a bulky, awkward inverted teardrop—like a cheap bastardization of the sleek Telestine cities floating over Earth.

“Welcome to the garden of New Adam-ondi-Ahman, Brother Tang,” he said, switching to a less formal, or more formal, title—Nhean wasn’t sure. “Aside from the temples on Mars, and here on Venus, this is the holiest site in Mormondom. It is where many of us believe that Jesus himself will visit before he comes in glory to rid the Earth of our enemies and usher in the fullness of times.”

Nhean, ignoring the crazy-talk, bent down and smelled a rose bush in full bloom, its red petals still glistening with the drops from that morning’s watering. A rose bush—even he felt sick at the expense. Garden space was at a premium, and even the most extravagant oligarchs only used their extra space for luxuries like strawberries and blueberries. To use it on a rose bush was almost an affront against humanity, given its current plight.

He continued, “You’re probably wondering what the heck we’re doing using precious space on things like roses and azaleas and rhododendrons and all the beautiful flowers you see around you,” he swept his hand around the expansive gardens, which could have rivaled the most extravagant on Earth before the Exodus. “It’s the same reason we build our temples with the most precious materials, even as half of our people are a shipment away from starvation or a faulty CO2 scrubber from asphyxiation. It’s a dedication to the Lord. To his holiness. To remind ourselves that it is through his grace that we are even alive at all.”

Celestine nodded. “A worthy expression of faith. Our Lady of Valles Marineris Basilica on Mars serves the same purpose for us.”

The Dalai Lama said nothing.

Nhean glanced at his watch. Was he about to get a sermon? Jesus.

Worthlin must have caught the glance. “Don’t worry. I won’t keep you. You’re a busy, busy man, and carry the hopes of us all.”

The meaning was not lost on Nhean. “Are you saying…?”

Worthlin shook his head. “My vote? No. At least, not automatically. I want to hear it from you first. Why? Why Laura Walker? Why did you entrust the hopes and dreams and, possibly more importantly, the investment of us all in the Circle in such a … reckless woman?”

Right out of Essa’s mouth. He wondered how many on the general assembly were influenced by the three men in front of him.

“On the contrary, I find Admiral Walker to be very, very careful, President Worthlin. Far more careful than our new Secretary General, for example.”

Worthlin swiped a hand as if batting the argument aside. “But how can you be sure about her motives, Brother Tang? Are her goals aligned with ours? With yours? With His Holiness’s? With Mr. Pemba’s?”

Honestly, I have no idea. But he couldn’t actually say that. And in fact, Walker had inadvertently dropped enough hints lately that he wasn’t entirely sure what her endgame was, beyond the complete destruction of the Telestine race. “They align … enough. She’s intelligent. She’s daring. She’s … honestly, quite brilliant. And her people love her and trust her. Frankly, I trust her officers to run our ships more than my own people, at least in terms of their capabilities and instincts for battle. Trust in Walker is another issue, but with regards to capabilities, well, I assure you, the fleet is in good hands.”

“And what about trust, Brother Tang?”

I wish he’d stop calling me that.

Nhean shrugged. “When it comes to trust, I trust that the backdoors I’ve built into the Venus Sovereign Fleet ships’ systems will come in handy should the time ever come when that trust is broken.”

“And you trust Walker?”

“Enough.”

“And if political winds shift and Essa manages to sideline her like she sidelined him years ago, where will that leave our fleet?”

“I’m confident that will not happen. I’ve buffered our political fortunes with a healthy portion of information and intelligence.”

Worthlin chuckled. “Fortunes change, Brother Nhean. Consider us Mormons. We used to be called a cult, and arguably for good reason. Now, thanks to the Telestines and the Exodus, we’re the third largest religion. Funny how life works.”

Pemba broke his silence and stood up from where he was squatting next to a hydrangea bush. “I think you’re conflating religion with denomination.”

Celestine rolled his eyes and nodded. “He does that a lot.”

But the mention of the word cult stirred something in Nhean that he couldn’t place. Something just out of reach. It felt important.

But it was gone. “I trust her,” he repeated. “She won’t fail us.”

Worthlin stooped to pick a lily from a nearby garden bed. “Trust, Brother Tang, is a valuable commodity. In short supply these days, it seems. I commend you for having it.” He considered the lily. “Brother Tang, you by any chance don’t know the origins of the word Telestine, do you?”

Nhean was caught off guard by the sudden change of subject. His eyes glancing to his watch again, he replied. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

A disapproving look from Worthlin suggested the other man thought that a dealer in information would know something so basic about their enemy. “My people coined it. It’s a Mormon word. We call the highest heaven the Celestial. Below that is the Terrestrial heaven. And below them both, the Telestial. The place where murderers and people of malice go after they’ve … paid the price. We compare them to the brightness of the sun, the moon, and the stars, to give a sense of comparative glory for each. One of my flock, sixty some odd years ago during the Exodus, made the connection between stars and beings of malice and coined the term for our new alien overlords.”

Nhean’s eyes strayed to his watch yet again. Schroeder had supposedly critical information, and here he was being forced to listen to a lecture on post-apocalyptic religious etymology.

Celestine noticed. “Parley, can we get to the point, please? Apurate, por favor,” he added in his native Spanish. “Please hurry. Mr. Tang has urgent business, I’m sure.”

Worthlin nodded. “Getting there, your Holiness, getting there. Just a bit more history for you, Brother Tang, before I make my point, and decide my vote. Here’s the thing. Telestial. It’s not a biblical word. It doesn’t appear until the eighteen hundreds. Some think it’s a neologism—a new word coined from two existing words. Some scholars think it comes from the Greek word telos, and therefore implies the end. Assuming that origin, the Telestines can be thought of as our end. The end of humanity, embodied in the Telestines themselves.”

Nhean stroked his chin. “That’s … frightening, to be sure.”

“Others believe that it comes from the Latin word tellus, or ground, which, in the context of certain scriptures, would imply under the ground. Or rather, hell. In this sense, the Telestines can be thought of as literal demons. Beings from the underworld, sent to bring us down to hell with them for eternity.”

“Also frightening,” said Nhean. “President Worthlin, may I cut to the chase here? Do I have your vote of confidence? Can I get back to saving humanity as we know it?”

The prophet continued as if Nhean had said nothing. “A third possibility brings us back to Greek. Tele. Far away. Distant. Like telescope. In this context, the Telestines are simply … far from us. Not human, and so far removed from our daily experience that we can’t understand them. They are other. And that brings me back to trust, Brother Nhean.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. “Interesting, President Worthlin. Are you suggesting that I … trust the Telestines?”

“Good heavens, no. At least, not as a people. You know the old saying, Brother Tang. You don’t make peace with your friends. And there’s never a need to consciously trust that which is already trustworthy by nature. But to trust the other, to trust an enemy, especially when our interests align … now that takes real faith.”

Faith? “Took the words right out of my mouth, sir. But, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll leave matters of faith to your graces, and concern myself with saving our people’s civilization, rather than their souls.”

What exactly was the old man getting at? He seemed to think it important, given the time constraints they were all under. Worthlin presented the lily to Nhean, who accepted it, tentatively. “You have my vote, Brother Tang, on one condition. When the immediate threat at Mars and the inner solar system is dealt with, send a force to safeguard our people at Neptune. I’m sure Mr. Ricketts would agree—not that it would earn you his vote.”

“But Neptune simply isn’t in the crosshairs of the Telestines, Mr.—”

“I’m aware. I’m granting you latitude in your interpretation of when the threat is dealt with, just as I grant myself latitude in interpreting the origin of the word Telestine.”

Nhean considered, and, given the alternative, nodded his agreement. “Done.”

“And my second condition—you didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?” he added with a wink. “Is that you trust, even when the target of trust is … the other. I have it on good authority that not all Telestines are evil. They don’t all seek our destruction. If we as a people are to survive, we will need all the allies we can get, and in this case, I think the enemy of our enemy is, at the very least, someone we should trust.”

Was he talking about Ka’sagra? Or the other aid groups?

Nhean smiled again, a tight pain spreading from his jaw and down the back of his neck. “I’ll take that under advisement.” Dammit, dealing in information wasn’t about trust. It was about secrecy, source validation, blackmail, arm-twisting, ego-stroking, backroom-dealing, cigar smoking, subtle-threatening, actual threatening, and data scraping. Trust had nothing to do with it. “I promise. Where I can, I will trust those in whom trust is deserving.”

A diplomatic answer if he ever heard one. Luckily, Worthlin seemed to agree. “Good luck, Brother Tang. You have my vote of confidence.” He turned to the Dalai Lama, who had seemed to tune out the conversation, focusing instead on the flock of songbirds perched in a tree nearby. “Oliver? You changing your vote?”

Nhean could have sworn the Dalai Lama looked smug. “Not a chance, Parley. But I knew you would. I’m just here to keep the rest of the Circle happy. Or rather, not up in arms.”

Pope Celestine looked relieved, and put an arm around Nhean’s shoulder, leading him out of the garden. “Come, my child. You’ve been harangued long enough. Mr. Schroeder wanted a word before you left.” He turned to bid farewell to Worthlin. “Thank you, Parley. For the linguistics lesson, and for your support.”

And for your trust, Nhean almost added, before stopping himself. He wasn’t sure that what the other man had shown was trust, but rather opportunism, since Nhean had come to Venus with the expectation to never have to send the fleet all the way out to Neptune where it wouldn’t be needed, and here he was promising to do just that.

How many more empty promises would he have to make before this was all over?

Chapter Forty-One

Earth

North America

Northwest of Denver

The girl hunched back against Pike, shrinking away from the picture on the screen: her own body, lying on a metal table next to another girl who looked startlingly like her, if a bit younger. Her lips parted and she mouthed something. A name? A prayer?

A rush of anger startled Pike. He had never been one to want children. He’d never wanted to bring a child into this world, into the mess of the stations, and in any case, he’d only fallen in love once. Cargo haulers, as a rule, rarely married and even more rarely had children. They were a solitary bunch. Children had been part of a life that he wanted no part of.

Now, he began to understand the scattered anecdotes he’d heard. Snatches of voices rose in his mind: like walking around with your heart outside your body … you’d kill gladly if anyone ever hurt your child … you want to protect them more than anything, and you can’t….

He struggled not to let his hands clench around the girl’s arms. He wanted to yank her away from the wall, away from this place, and take her back into the sunshine. He wanted to give her a ship and let her fly away from all of this. He wanted her—he almost gave a bark of laughter—to have a normal life. What that would even mean, he wasn’t sure, but he wanted it all the same. He wanted her far away from here.

He watched as the cutting began. Chips and metal struts, all sorts of machinery inserted delicately beneath the skin.

Un-bruised skin. Her body in the last frame had been dead—and damaged. This body looked untouched. He realized this and looked at her sharply—she’d made the same connection.

“You don’t have to watch it,” Pike told her again.

I do, her dark eyes said.

And so they watched. They watched the jolt that ran through her, and the sudden flare of life on the machines behind her. They watched her sit up, groggy, and stumble into the waiting arms of a Telestine researcher. She was given a physical, tracking movement, answering questions.

“You could talk then,” Pike murmured.

She didn’t respond. Perhaps she did not even notice him speaking. Her eyes were locked on the screen, and Pike had the unsettling realization that she might not remember this at all.

The other girl came awake in a rush, with a yell. She clawed the Telestines with her hands and tried to run, and Pike found himself wanting her to win and break free, even though he knew how this was going to end. Tel’rabim wasn’t one to tolerate disobedience, after all. He looked away while the Telestine scientists surrounded the small figure on the screen. When he looked back, a limp body was being wheeled away on a cart.

The girl looked down at the floor—both in the video and now, in Pike’s arms. Pike held her closer, shaking.

The clips became a blur after that. Some weren’t bad—at least a dozen were of her learning to use the white cubes they called computers—but Pike turned away and pressed his hands over his eyes for some of them. In some, she gave orders. In others, she took them and performed tasks with a perfect calm that reminded Pike of the estates on Venus, everything polite and well-mannered, Parees in his elegant clothing, bowing and murmuring. He watched the girl talk, walk, hack technology that was clearly from the Telestine military. He watched her meet Tel’rabim. At some point, she seemed to stop talking, though he could find no indication of why—no seminal experiment, no big moment of change. It had been gradual.

And then the videos were done, and her hands moved, gathering the videos together, typing in what looked like an encryption.

“What are you doing? Are you sending them somewhere?” Pike asked her. A pit developed in his stomach. “Nhean?”

She nodded.

“I don’t trust him.”

She gave a small smile that said she knew.

“I mean it, think about this for a moment before—”

“Pike?” Nhean’s voice was sudden and sharp, bursting across his comm unit.

“Damn, how fast does that thing send?” Pike looked at her and switched on the unit. “What is it?”

“Parees said you were headed for Earth. Did you make it?”

Pike considered how to answer that. “Yes.”

“Do you have a lock on that ship? Because it’s not where it’s supposed to be. As far as I can tell from my tap into the Telestine’s traffic control system, it just crossed into Pacific airspace, and it has diplomatic clearance. They’ll question it, but odds are they aren’t going to stop it before it’s too late. The closest target is a Telestine mega-city. New Tokyo.”

The drone had more than one bomb. The shock of the realization stopped Pike cold.

“Pike!” Nhean’s voice cut through Pike’s stunned silence. “Pike! You must stop him.”

“How do we—”

“You know how,” was all Nhean said.

The line cut out, and Pike and the girl stared at one another for a moment, frozen. Then:

“Run,” Pike said, and he took off through the hallways, yelling for Rychenkov. The girl snatched a piece of machinery off the floor and ran after him.

Chapter Forty-Two

Mars

Carina Station

VFS Santa Maria

Walker was running. Fast. Her trip on the Koh Rong following Sargent’s disclosure had seemed to last forever, and once she’d made it back to the fleet at Carina Station, she’d jumped right in, commanding the Santa Maria as if she’d never been away, ordering repairs, reviewing tactical vids from the Ceres battle, and trying to wrap her head around the juggernaut that was the logistical organization of the flood of new recruit’s Essa’s efforts had brought in. Things were already moving quickly when Nhean had sent her an urgent link to a private channel.

She’d tapped into the channel expecting a conversation, and was greeted by chaos.

Nhean was yelling into the comm unit, and Pike was yelling back. She let the words flow over her. She tried to keep her mind free of anything, unfocused, no expectations, nothing but the truth. Only in this state could she respond tactically. One had to see the battlefield, not the shadow of it that one feared or the shining version one hoped for. Satisfaction, fear, surety—these only clouded the picture.

It occurred to her to wonder now about the drone strike on Io. Tel’rabim had made sure that humanity knew how close they were to annihilation, but what of the Telestines? Had they seen carefully curated snippets of the human news reports and heard only that it was a human who had done this? Had the bombing served to reinforce Tel’rabim’s lies that humans could not be trusted, that they were so illogical as to bomb one another in protest over the occupation of Earth? The thought was fleeting. Surely they weren’t stupid enough to believe that. Nhean could find out.

Now, they had the imminent bombing of Tokyo to worry about—a Telestine mega-city. Much better propaganda for Tel’rabim. Twice—no—likely triple the population of Telestine Denver.

Delaney greeted them on the bridge with a crisp salute. Relief ran off him in waves, and when Walker saw his company, she understood why: Morgan and Essa, both seeming to take up more space than any one human should, both watching the satellite projections from Earth like hawks. Essa gave Walker a sardonic smile, and Morgan’s lip curled in dislike.

Essa wasted no time. “It appears our enemies are not waiting anymore, Admiral.”

She did not bother to respond. The crew on the bridge was loyal to her. It did her no good to tangle words with Essa. Instead, she looked to Delaney. “Tell me.”

“The ship entered orbit near Europe, as it was expected to, and held its course for approximately thirty minutes—including its entry into the atmosphere—before deviating. Whether that was done with some specific knowledge of their Earth-side defenses, we aren’t sure. We know it deviated from its projected course and made for Denver, where we assumed it was lost in that bombing.” Delaney shook his head. “Again, it’s hard to know if its trajectory tells us anything about how they find rogue ships.”

She wanted to shake him. Those facts would be useful later—not now, especially not with Morgan and Essa watching their every move, ready to pounce and say they’d simply sat back and allowed the Telestines to do what they wanted. “And our crew?”

“They crashed.” He shook his head. “Well—they landed hard in the mountains. There’s no mention on the Telestine channels of an engagement, as far as we can tell, so it was either debris in orbit that got them, or the drone knew they were being pursued.”

“Probably the latter. Tel’rabim’s methodical to a fault.” She paced around the chart, studying the readout of Earth with a frown. “The blue is them? What are they doing?”

“They said that in the shuttle, there was no chance of intercepting the Telestine craft in time. They’re breaking up out of the atmosphere and coming back down directly over Tokyo.”

Walker nodded. Despair was threatening. The responses Nhean was getting were few and far between, and between the delay on the video feed and the delay on the comm unit, she was helpless, watching an engagement that was already close to complete. She laid her palms flat on the desk as she considered her options.

“I want the reserve communications officers called in. Scan every frequency, check with every outpost, do a sweep of all our satellites in the asteroid belt. I want to know if there is a Telestine fleet inbound anywhere. The rest of you, stand down from battle stations.”

“What?” Essa looked furious.

“Either Pike will intercept this bomber, or he won’t,” Walker told him simply. “Likely, he won’t. This attack was designed as a provocation. It was designed as anti-human propaganda. It is an excuse, and it is one Tel’rabim hardly needs at this point. If we thwart this, he will come up with something else, and quickly. We can’t possibly stop all of those. Our goal now should be to head off whatever Tel’rabim planned to come after this.”

“Ma’am?” It was Min, the lieutenant Delaney had recommended. “Showing pursuit of the craft by feathers.”

“Make sure they’re aware.” Walker swallowed. “Tell Pike that it’s more important to get out alive than take this ship down.”

“Not Pike’s ship, ma’am.” Min shook his head. “The drone ship.”

Walker frowned. She took two quick steps back to the desk, eyes narrowing as she made out the pursuit. Three full wings of feathers were inbound on the drone ship’s trajectory as it raced for Tokyo.

“A decoy?” Delaney murmured.

“It must be.” She exchanged a quick look with him.

“Will someone please explain what is going on and why we are not disturbed by it?” Essa’s voice was ominous.

Walker prayed for patience and tore her eyes from the drama unfolding on the readout. “Who benefits when this attack is completed?”

Essa frowned.

Walker tried not to sigh. “Tel’rabim faces dissent. The Daughters of Ascension are not only continuing aid work, they’re increasing it. This means they’re getting increasing resources from somewhere, and the only place that makes sense is from other Telestines lending their support. And this is after Tel’rabim promised to kill all humans. They and their backers clearly don’t think he will, or they don’t think it’s right. So he has to tip the balance and push them back toward his side. He’s giving them a push.”

“That much was obvious,” Essa said icily.

Then why did you ask? “Indeed. So now Tel’rabim has to pretend that he didn’t know the attack was coming. He has to mobilize attackers who will just barely fail to take the ship down.”

Essa snorted. “A fine military strategy. Recommending we stand back and let the Telestines make bad press about us—brilliant, Walker. I always knew you had it in you.”

“At its core, it is an excuse.” She spat the words at him. “If we were to cut the ship off, what then? Would he not recover it from the ocean, find the bomb aboard, and say that his feathers shot it down? Taking Telestine Tokyo down will make a bigger impression, I don’t deny it—but forgive me if I’m not expending every effort in an attempt to save Telestine lives. I will expend my effort when Tel’rabim sends his fleet—as he will. As he has already promised to do.”

“And where will you send your fleet then?” Essa asked hatefully. “Which human settlements will you deem worth saving?”

Walker looked up. The bridge had gone silent. Delaney was staring at her, horrified. A faint whirr proclaimed that there was likely video of this being streamed across the fleet.

A strange calm came over her.

“How about this?” She met Essa’s eyes. “I swear here and now that I will do everything in my power to cripple Tel’rabim, defeat the Telestines, and free humanity. That is my goal. I will not be led into battles I cannot win, and I will not send our fleet out in a tangle that puts our ships in each other’s line of fire.” She shot a blazing look at Morgan. “I will give us a chance for the future. And when all of this is over, if I am still alive, you can hold a referendum to see if humanity thinks I did enough. If not, hang me. Deal?”

There was total silence on the bridge. The officers looked away, trying desperately to pretend they weren’t there.

“Deal,” Essa said finally.

Chapter Forty-Three

Venus

Constantine City

Constantine Gardens

Landing level

“Schroeder.” Nhean strolled down the gangway of the transport vessel to clasp his friend’s hand. The oligarch was on his way back to Mercury, where his rolling city was almost certainly turning a tidy profit, now that his company’s stock price had risen in response to Nhean and Walker saving the human settlements there last month. Most of them, anyway.

“Ever the eccentric.” Schroeder, a short man with pale brown hair and dark brown eyes, looked delightfully scandalized. “Don’t you have your own ships anymore?”

Nhean only smiled. He had left the Koh Rong for Walker, as much as it pained him not to have his own well-shielded and agile ship, for fear that his movements were being tracked. He did not want to be noticed coming back to Venus. As the fleet made for Mercury weeks ago, he had remotely wiped every computer in his house and moved the bulk of his money into shell corporations. There was no way for Tel’rabim to recover the information Nhean had collected—a great deal of which centered around the capabilities of the Exile Fleet—but that didn’t change the fact that Tel’rabim knew Nhean was involved.

His home could no longer be considered safe. Herbert Schroeder’s was hardly better, but Nhean had learned to trust the man’s instincts. If Schroeder said he had important information to share, then he did.

Schroeder jerked his head down the crowded hallway and Nhean followed.

“So?” he asked, as soon as they were lost in the crowd.

“Installed a new garden,” Schroeder said heartily. “Wife was getting on my case. ‘The garden’s boring, the house is boring, why can’t we refinish everything?’” He laughed. “The garden was less expensive than tearing the whole place apart.”

Nhean smiled. His body went through the motions of talking weather-shielding, heat management, and garden arrangements, but his mind was in overdrive. There would be little to no chance of being overheard here in these halls, but Schroeder was still worried enough not to discuss the reason for Nhean’s visit.

What had he found?

The shuttle flight through the acid-yellow clouds was jarringly familiar. Schroeder kept up a pleasant chatter about the prettiness of plants compared to their CO2 processing capabilities, and Nhean stared out at the clouds and wondered if he had missed this place.

He had not, he decided. The illusion of simplicity in that time—no attacks, no fleets massing—had been undermined by the knowledge that all of the open unpleasantness was coming. It had been inevitable. He could feel only relief that it had begun.

A brief walk from Schroeder’s shuttle bay led them up to a garden that, Nhean had to admit, was exquisite. Curved paths led between explosions of green and clusters of flowers, and a few broad-leafed trees provided surprisingly welcome patches of shade under the glass ceiling.

It was in one of these shady alcoves that Schroeder took a tablet out of his pocket and pulled up a video. He handed the tablet to Nhean without comment.

Nhean watched, his brow furrowed with concentration. “Mercury?”

Schroeder nodded silently.

Nhean watched as the ships descended and swarmed the hangar. Rovers were extracted and loaded, and the ships were gone again within minutes.

He slowed down the feed and watched again. Old style Telestine fighters were accompanying the ships. Feathers. Larsen had made that clear in his reports to Walker and Morgan, but the fleet’s surveillance of the incident—having been in orbit—had been minimal, and the hangar’s own security feeds seemed to have been wiped. This was the first suggestion Nhean had received that there was a tape at all.

He pushed away the thought that he was slipping and looked speculatively at Schroeder. “Where’d you get this?”

Schroeder smiled. “I have many interests on Mercury. I like to make sure they’re doing well when I’m not there.”

Nhean sighed. “You know I have to share this with the fleet.”

“I know,” Schroeder said peaceably. He shrugged when Nhean raised an eyebrow. “End of the world and all that. Can’t afford to be picky about who knows my business.”

“I thought we were keeping the end of the world part under wraps,” Nhean murmured.

“Not for the ones with contacts in multiple stations.” Schroeder shrugged. “Here’s the strange part, though. I have some interests on Vesta as well, and guess where those rovers ended up?”

“…Vesta?”

“I should have said, guess who ended up owning them.”

“Ah.” Nhean frowned. “Now that you mention it, that is a good question.”

“And a strange answer.” Schroeder looked oddly troubled. “It’s the Daughters of Ascension.”

Nhean froze. “You’re kidding me.”

“Not at all. I even confirmed serial numbers. On the one hand, you know religious orders—all about greater morals, but not so scrupulous about how their goals get carried out, eh?” Schroeder shook his head. “There’s some like that on the main hub. They keep sending us pamphlets—disturbing stuff.” He shook his head. “Anyway, what makes me wonder is this. Say the Telestine military stole those rovers. Why? Why bother? And why sell them? And why sell them to the Daughters of Ascension, of all people? Why do they need them?”

Nhean sank down onto a nearby bench, rubbing his forehead in a useless attempt to jostle the answer free from his mind.

Nothing was coming to him though.

“What the hell does a religious organization need with mining rovers?”

“I was hoping you would know.” Schroeder joined him on the bench. “Hell, ask the cult here. Maybe they’d know, eh?” He laughed, but sobered quickly. “I hope I haven’t sent you on a wild goose chase.”

“I don’t think so.” Nhean stared at the tablet, and then sighed. “Yes, point me in the direction of that cult.”

“You’re serious?” Schroeder frowned at him.

“Why not? I’m here.” Nhean shrugged. “And maybe they just want to make sure they can get to their bunkers when the apocalypse hits?”

Schroeder laughed and pulled him up. “Come on, then. Let’s get you some lunch and I’ll get you over to the main hub. Want me to snag you a place on one of my transports, back toward the fleet?”

“We’ll see.” Nhean followed his friend through the winding paths and toward the main house. “And thank you for this.”

“You think it’s worth something, then?” Schroeder looked heartened. “That’s good.”

“I do.” Nhean thought back to Ka’sagra’s almost supernatural calm, her total self assurance. Almost like Oliver Pemba’s smug confidence that he knew Worthlin would change his vote. “Information is always leverage, don’t you think?”

Schroeder paused near the house to pick several fresh strawberries hanging out from a gilded pot on the deck.

“Yes, especially when one knows how to use it, no?”

Nhean didn’t reply. He didn’t know how to use this information. Schroeder shrugged, and went inside.

But he would know how, soon. Somehow, I will see the pattern in their plans. He was so close. He had to find the connective thread, not just for his own interests, but for survival of the human race. Nhean clenched his fists, then stretched his fingers out in anticipation of the data he would soon be sifting during his flight back to the fleet.

If he failed, he might as well stay and enjoy the strawberries before the literal end of all worlds.

Chapter Forty-Four

Earth, Low Orbit

Aggy II Shuttle

They weren’t going to make it. That was Pike’s only thought as the shuttle screamed up into the atmosphere, the comm units buzzing as Rychenkov tersely told James to get the ship up and out if they weren’t back within a certain time frame and then ignoring their questions—are you leaving us here?!—as he cut the transmission. He was hardly focusing on anything but the screens. Everyone’s eyes were locked on the trajectory Nhean had sent, tracking now against their own. They weren’t going to make it.

They weren’t going to make it, but not a single one of them suggested the possibility of turning back. Rychenkov’s hands were steady on the controls as he guided the shuttle up, sky blue fading ever deeper and at last, showing black above the shining light of the Earth below them.

They skipped along the atmosphere, each rise sending objects floating gently in the cabin, to fall partway down again with the descent and the skip. The girl’s hair was a lion’s mane of gold around her pale face, her eyes as black as the night outside. The tears were dried now, and it was hard to tell if she even remembered what she had seen in the laboratories. Her eyes were intent on the screen, one hand clenched over the back of the chair.

They weren’t going to make it.

The comm units crackled. “Santa Maria to the Aggy II, Nhean has advised us that there are three detachments of feathers inbound on the drone vessel’s trajectory.” A pause, and Pike could almost see Walker giving orders. “Admiral Walker orders you to break off your attack if, at any time, you believe that completing it will bring you into the blast radius or otherwise endanger your lives.”

“Orders received and acknowledged.” It was Rychenkov who responded. “Please advise on the expected size of the blast radius.”

In the pause, they could do nothing more than imagine the waves racing outward, fizzing past the sun and its interference.

“Come on, come on, come on.” Pike drummed his fingers on his leg. His stomach heaved as they made one last bounce. The drone ship was only fifty kilometers from Tokyo, they didn’t have time to wait for this.

“Aggy II, you are advised to remain twelve kilometers at least from the city.”

“Twelve kilometers?” Pike reached for the comm unit.

“Sit,” Rychenkov snapped. He pushed Pike away. “Sit, and buckle yourself in. Lapushka, you take the copilot’s chair. Start working your magic.” He turned to give Pike a look over his shoulder. “We’ll do what we can, but there’s no use running ourselves into a nuke, or whatever that blasted thing is.”

They descended hard enough that Pike saw stars and the girl gave a little cry of pain. She gasped for breath as she dragged the piece of Telestine technology from the lab onto her lap, wrapped her hands around it, and closed her eyes.

She missed their view of the Pacific, glinting with early morning sun and scattered with clouds. A curved chain of islands were briefly visible to the south before Rychenkov banked toward Japan. The clouds were coming up fast, and there was no way to see anything with their bare eyes at this distance.

The viewscreen zoomed in, picture shaking wildly as the shuttle shuddered on re-entry. The drone ship swam into view. It was coming up on a small spur of land. One side of a bay. On the other side gleamed New Tokyo—Telestine Tokyo. A Telestine mega-city. If it hadn’t been for the ocean, and for the massive size of the city itself, it might have looked like Denver all over again: a half destroyed city, picked apart by drones and machines, lying in the shadow of a gleaming technological masterpiece floating above.

The engines on the drone ship blazed suddenly. It was in full burn, even in the atmosphere.

“Jesus Christ, is he doing interplanetary acceleration?” Pike’s fingers clenched around the straps that held him to his chair.

“Yes,” Rychenkov said grimly. “He is.”

And then the drone ship dipped sharply, turning nose down toward the water. The girl made a tiny sound. She grit her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut with the effort. She gasped in pain and frustration as the nose of the vessel came up again, and her eyes opened to focus on the viewscreen.

“You were trying to make him crash,” Pike said softly. “Weren’t you?”

“Better him than all of us,” Rychenkov snapped.

“Yes, but if we could recover the bomb—”

The girl only shook her head.

The first shots from the feathers hit it as they closed in. Zooming out, they could see that the first of the feather wings had come close enough to fire—and they were, all out.

“Committing to the bit,” Rychenkov said softly. He shook his head.

“Huh?” Pike looked over at him, momentarily distracted.

“Tel’rabim.” Rychenkov nodded at the feathers. “Sending in the defenders. He has them shooting, but notice how they’re not doing much damage? Or maybe they will take it down—but I bet you the bomb will still go if they do. He has it all planned out. He’s good, that one. A sociopath, mind you—but good.” He looked over at the girl. “What do you say, Lapushka? Another try, or get the hell out of here?”

The girl didn’t hesitate. She stabbed a finger forward at the screen.

“Another try it is.” Rychenkov kept them diving, coming down hard toward the plane of battle as gravity threw them against their harnesses. The girl’s face was twisted in anguish. She gripped the shard of the computer so hard that the plastic was cutting into her palms, but she did not seem to notice. Whether she was making any headway at all, Pike could not say, and he felt oddly panicked at the thought of the drone, flying calmly to its death with the girl’s orders battering at its mind. Did it fear its fate? Did it fear her?

“Bring us closer,” he said urgently, but the girl opened her eyes and gripped his hand. She shook her head fiercely.

“She’s right,” Rychenkov said quietly. “And so’s your Admiral. They planned it well—no use killing ourselves to try to stop it.” He shrugged. “Anyway, the feathers are making quick work of it.”

The ship was barely flying now, dropping altitude fast. It wasn’t going to make it to the edge of that shining city, but the feathers kept firing all the same, bullets tearing into the hull to send the drone ship careening sideways, struggling to right itself.

Dropping, dropping, and still they fired. The feathers circled, a cone of death, reminding Pike of nothing so much as a pack of wild dogs around a kill. He had time to wonder if the desire for revenge ran as strongly in Telestine’s as humans, and if they would spit on the pilot’s body when it was recovered.

Rychenkov had time to ask, quietly, “Did they make it in time?”

They both had time, just barely, to see the girl shake her head.

And then the city, the shining, hovering citadel over the ruins of Human Tokyo, disappeared in a blaze of white. Rychenkov yelled, Pike flinched away from the blast, and all too quickly, the shock wave caught them. It rippled through the air to tumble them over, and the sides of the shuttle creaked. They tumbled end over end, and Pike gripped the straps of his chair for dear life and watched the girl’s hair rise over her shoulders and drop down again as Rychenkov piloted the craft out of the spin and turned away to climb once more into the atmosphere.

In the silence, still cursing as the pain in his eyes faded, Rychenkov brought up the feed from rear-facing cameras on the viewscreen.

A mushroom cloud rose over Tokyo, with a ring of smoke already dissipating as it spread away. Below it all in the early morning light hung what was left of the city. Huge chunks of it had been torn away to smash the human city below, and white-capped waves showed where pieces had been flung miles out to sea. Metal was fading from white to a dull red, and what remained hung awkwardly, a floating fragment of a city with its windows blown away and its metal twisted. Extinguished. Broken.

“He took an entire mega-city,” Pike whispered. “He killed that many—just for the excuse to take us down. And if he did that to them, what in the name of God is he planning to do to us?”

Chapter Forty-Five

Mars

Carina Station

Koh Rong

Nhean slipped into the silent halls of the Koh Rong with a sigh of relief. He savored the quiet as he walked. No one watching him, no one to take note of where he was, no one he had to smile at. He’d told himself that he hated his estates on Venus, and that he was glad to leave behind the political posturing of the rich and powerful there and head back join up with the fleet at Mars. But being among the fleet made him long for the quiet. The problems plaguing humanity had seemed simpler when he hadn’t had to meet any of them. He didn’t like remembering faces, knowing that some would be lost and others saved.

The door to his state room was open and he frowned. It was too late to hide the fact that he was in the ship, as his footfalls would have been impossible to miss, but he still moved cautiously as he pushed the door open. Mars cast a reddish glow through the room from the side window, and there was a smudge in the darkness, a shape in one shadow. The figure shifted as he opened the door, and he had the sense of an animal seeking its burrow. The movement was so unfamiliar that it took him a moment to realize what he was seeing.

“Parees?”

His first though was that this was impossible. Parees had been at Bollard Station. With the Ringers. He’d sent photographs, but nothing else. Nhean had thought he was still there, still learning.

He hadn’t sent word that he was coming back.

But he was here.

Parees moved again, though he did not step into the light. He hunched his thin shoulders. Bruises speckled arms that had grown pale in the closeted darkness of the cargo ships.

“Are you….” Nhean found his throat tight with fear. “What did they do to you?”

Parees started laughing at that, a high, wild sound. “Nothing. Nothing that matters.”

“Parees, what happened?” His voice urgent, Nhean drew the other man to the bed and pressed him down to sit. “Stay there. Do you need food? Water? … Pills?” He could hear the fear in his own voice.

“No.” Parees looked around himself.

“You have to tell me who did this.” Nhean crouched down. “I told them on the ship that they weren’t to touch you—I said you were part of the Karenov clan.” One of the first cargo families, the Karenovs had spread until they had contacts in almost every station. They were always looking for more advantage, and had eagerly accepted Nhean’s payment to carry messages, offer protection for his informants, and pass along any information of note. No one in their right minds would hurt one of their operatives.

“It doesn’t matter. I got back.”

“Parees.” Nhean crouched, searching the other man’s gaze. Something was not right there. The man wasn’t all there any longer. “Start at the beginning. How was the trip out to Bollard Station?”

“Fine.” A breath of a word.

The questions needed to be more specific, Nhean reminded himself. Parees had clearly endured some trauma on the journey. Broad questions would invite panic.

“Did any of the crew hurt you on the journey out?” He kept his voice light, impersonal.

“No.”

“Did any of the crew hurt you on the journey back?” He hadn’t even known that Parees was on his way back yet. Nhean swallowed. Had he missed a message? What was going on?

Parees hesitated.

“Parees, nothing’s going to happen if you tell me. I just want to know. Did anyone hurt you on the way back?”

“No.”

“So these bruises happened on the station, then.”

“I can’t talk about it!”

Cold certainty settled in the pit of Nhean’s stomach. Parees had been younger than he said he was when he escaped Pluto’s Zetian Station, and he’d refused to discuss why he left.

“Parees, did someone you know do this to you?”

Parees shook his head wildly. He scrambled away over the covers.

“Parees. Parees. You don’t have to answer. You’re all right. You’re here. You’re safe.” Nhean stretched his hands out, fingers splayed. “You’re safe here,” he repeated. “You don’t have to tell me what happened.”

The fight went out of Parees in an instant and he hunched over, hands shielding his face. His shoulders shook.

“And the pictures you sent arrived a few days ago,” Nhean told him. “I’ve cross-referenced them.”

Parees quieted at that. “They were nice,” he said. He rubbed at his short hair.

“The missionaries? The Daughters?”

Parees flinched, but his face quickly returned to calm. “The pictures. I thought they were nice.”

Nhean felt a prickling on the back of his neck. “They were nice,” he said. He had the sense that he was walking forward in the dark with his hands outstretched, not sure what was there, half-expecting a monster. Parees was calm now, but how could Nhean know what might make him upset again? “Are they the same in every temple?”

“Not always.” Parees lifted one shoulder. He was looking around himself like a child, intrigued by the room. “But the same story. The vision. The reckoning. Exile.”

“I see.” What the hell was he supposed to say now? “Did they have anything else … nice … there?” He just had to keep Parees calm until he could get a tranquilizer into him.

“Yes. I liked the books.”

“Books?” Nhean began edging toward the bathroom. “I’m just getting you a drink of water.”

“Okay.” Parees shrugged. “The books like their bible. The holy books.”

“They let you see those?” That was good news. His mind started spinning. “Did you take pictures?”

“Yes.”

“That’s very, very good.” Nhean reminded himself to be careful. He could get the pictures later. For now, he just had to keep Parees talking, and calm. He turned on the tap and let water flow into a crystal glass. “What did you like about them?”

“Everything was so simple.” Parees was staring into the middle distance with a smile. “It’s a pretty story.”

The one about their sun blowing up? Or the one about them exiling humanity from Earth? “Sure.” Nhean shook a pill out of a bottle of tranquilizers and replaced the cap carefully.

“It really is.” Parees leaned forward. “We just see war and living in ships, but they lived in ships, too. They had to, to come here.”

Nhean paused, not sure where this was going. He came out of the bathroom silently to look at Parees.

“And now that they’re here, we’ll help one another ascend.” Parees was staring at him. “No more war. They’ll help us and we’ll help them. They needed to come here. Do you see? Our people need each other. They need us. We need them.”

“Yes.” Parees was so earnest that the word just came out in Nhean’s desire to reassure him. Nhean searched for a follow-up. “Like in the paintings.”

It was a gamble, but it paid off. Parees smiled. “So you see now.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re not afraid anymore? We’ll help Walker and everything will be okay?”

What in the name of God was going on? Parees forced himself to smile, hoping that none of his confusion showed on his face.

“We will,” he agreed. “And Parees—you should rest now. There’s plenty of time to … help Walker. You should rest. Just for a bit.” He held out the pill and the water.

“I don’t want that.” Parees hunched his shoulders. His eyes were wild. “I don’t want that, don’t make me take it.”

“It’s just to help you sleep.” Nhean held his eyes. He made no sudden movements. “Just some sleep. It will help your bruises heal, and when you wake up, we can help Walker. Would you like that?”

Parees looked as if he were poised to run. “If I sleep on my own, can I not take it?”

He was going to run if Nhean pressed him on this, that much was clear, and who knew how he would respond to the exertion….

“You don’t need to take it.” Nhean shook his head and put the pill aside. “I just thought you might like to. Do you want to eat some food before you sleep?”

“I don’t need food.” Parees edged toward the door. “I’ll go sleep.”

He vanished around the corner a moment later, leaving Nhean staring after him in consternation.

Ethics warred with practicality, and practicality won. Nhean was at the desk a moment later, the video feeds blinking up on his screen. He watched as Parees made his way through the galley—he didn’t grab a knife, that was good—and down the corridors to the crew bedrooms at the other end of the ship. He seemed to remember where he was going, which was good. He seemed to be walking normally.

Nhean sat back in his chair with a frown. He hadn’t expected the man to come back for days, if not weeks, more. Winning the trust of the missionaries could be expected to take longer than … he counted. How long could Parees possibly have stayed? The travel time alone out to Saturn was significant. He couldn’t have been there more than a day.

Had Parees stolen the pictures? Had they thrown him off the station? It was possible. It would explain the bruises. Then again, he’d seemed to be taken in by their propaganda. Surely the missionaries wouldn’t have hurt him.

Nhean hesitated, and then brought up a video feed inside the bedroom itself. What was Parees doing now? Resting, as he’d said he would? Praying? The thought was unsettling.

His stomach flip-flopped when he saw the feed of the room. It was empty. The man had vanished.

Or … not vanished. No. There he was, the curve of his back just visible as he sat in the shower, hugging his knees. His clothes were still on, and he was rocking faintly from side to side as the water rained down on him.

Something was very, very wrong.

Nhean opened a comm channel with a tap of his fingers.

“What is it?” Walker’s voice, genuinely curious.

“Do you have any … psychiatrists … in the fleet?” In his head, he heard how ridiculous it sounded. The fleet had only just managed to start wearing uniforms. They hardly had enough scrap metal to patch their ships.

“Yes.” She sounded cautious. “I mean, it’s not their whole job, but some of the doctors are trained that way.”

“One of my crew is not feeling well. I don’t suppose I could see about—”

“Of course. I’ll send them to the Koh Rong.”

“Not … just now. I’ll let you know. Thank you.” He hung up.

His eyes were drawn to another screen, and he let himself be drawn. He’d put the pictures of the hangings aside when Parees first sent them. Pretty, Parees had said. Nhean hadn’t even thought they qualified as that. They were propaganda, nothing more.

But Parees had liked them. Parees, who was frightened to the point of a breakdown, had calmed when he remembered them. We’ll help Walker, he told Nhean, and everything will be okay.

Nhean sat late into the night, staring at the hangings, scrolling through them time after time until his eyes crossed. He was missing something. There was some piece of the Daughters of Ascension that he didn’t understand.

She’s telling you everything. The echo of Parees’s voice came across days and hundreds of thousands of miles. That’s when this had all started. When Parees met Ka’sagra, and then insisted Nhean meet her too.

The answer was here somewhere, he knew it.

He just didn’t know what the question was.

Chapter Forty-Six

Mars

Carina Station

VFS Santa Maria

The Aggy II docked with the Santa Maria five days later. The return to the Rockies, the second trip out to the lab to obtain the materials necessary for the repair, and the escape from Earth itself were all undertaken under a blanket of numb mechanical necessity. Luckily, the lab had been well stocked, and the repair itself proved relatively simple. With minimal remaining hull damage and acceleration capabilities to match any ship in the new fleet, the ship had made almost unnaturally good time.

It had also been an unnaturally quiet journey, untroubled by Telestine patrols. Pike was certain the girl had something to do with that. She spent the flight huddled in her bunk, clutching the piece of Telestine computer to her chest, but he didn’t talk to her about it. The one time he’d tried to assure her that Tokyo wasn’t her fault, she had ushered him out of the room and shut the door in his face.

Walker was the first thing Pike saw as the airlock doors opened. They locked eyes and Pike’s heart seemed to turn over in his chest. She stood back to let the medics onto the ship, where they loaded Gabriela’s unconscious body onto a stretcher and wheeled her away. When she caught sight of James limping after the stretcher, Walker turned away from Pike with obvious effort to speak to James.

“I was sorry to hear about Gabriela,” she said seriously. “She’ll have the best care, I promise. We haven’t forgotten the service you did us at Mercury.”

James gripped her hand in thanks, and Pike was reminded just how Walker had taken this fleet: not only with passion and tactical expertise, but with a politician’s memory for faces and facts, and the ability to make anyone feel as if they were the only target of her attention.

She called forward a young enlisted soldier with a wave. “Show Mr. Marquez to the infirmary and make sure to have him briefed on Gabriela’s care.” She watched as James limped away, and then waved them all into the hallway, her eyes lingering on the girl before she forced a smile at the crew. “All of you should feel free to take some refreshment in the mess hall, and I’m given to understand there’s a secret bar somewhere in the fighter bay. Pike, a word?”

“You allow secret bars?” The humor was strained. He’d rather banter with her than talk about Earth, and they both knew it.

“There’s a fine line between courting sloppiness … and bad morale.” She shook her head, but a smile was playing around her lips. “And it’s fun to watch them all hide their flasks when I show up unannounced.”

Pike snorted as they made their way into a side corridor.

“I’m sorry about Earth.” She switched topics without missing a beat. “I should have called you back as soon as Parees told us where you were.”

“Of course he told you,” Pike muttered.

She swung to face him, anger simmering in her gaze. “You took one of our strongest tactical assets with you. Of course he would tell us.”

The relief at seeing her crystallized into anger in a split-second. “She isn’t an asset.” Pike heard his voice rising.

“You need to get your head on straight,” she told him brutally. “McAllister and his team can fly, so that’s how we use them. I can plan battles, so that’s how we use me. She can manipulate Telestine equipment. Use all the pretty language you want, but don’t pretend that makes her any less of an asset than anyone in this fleet.”

“Fine.” His chest was heaving. “Can I go?” If he stayed, he wasn’t sure what he would do. Punching the admiral would probably be frowned upon. Taking her by the shoulders and kissing her wasn’t much better.

He shook his head to clear his mind of the thought. “I need to go,” he said, a bit more carefully.

“In a minute.” She jerked her head for him to keep walking. “I need your insight.”

He closed his eyes briefly. He really shouldn’t stay here. “On what? What do I know about?”

“The Telestines. Don’t pretend cargo haulers don’t know their patrol patterns and their sensor distances, and you saw them on Earth, too.” She broke off when she saw the look on his face. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

His eyes traced over the familiar shape of her brows, the shadowed eyes, the small nose. Full lips, sparking the memory of one drunken night.

She took an unsteady breath, and he had the sense she was remembering the same thing. “Pike. The patrols.”

“Yeah, I’ll have Rychenkov send you what he has.” Pike looked down rather than meet her eyes. He could practically see his hands reaching out to her.

“And on Earth?”

She was all business. That was all she was anymore. He surrendered to anger gratefully. “On Earth, my camp got destroyed. Are you sure I’m the one you want to ask about this?”

“I didn’t ask you back to fight.” She snapped the words at him. “If you want to fight about all of it, just leave. It will be easier for everyone. Go live on a cargo ship, see if you can outrun this.”

“I think you’ve pretty well assured that’s never going to happen.”

“Ah, yes. It was all me.” Her eyes were like chips of stone. “I always forget that part.”

One of his hands clenched into a fist.

She took a step back from him. It was almost a sign of weakness, of desire. But only almost. Her face settled into a grim smile. “So which do you want to do? Leave, or help?”

“Jesus.” He blew out his breath. “Help.”

A tiny settling in her shoulders was the only sign of relief. Her voice stayed crisp. “Good. I need your read on the situation. Since you left Earth, there have been various warlike noises made on the official Telestine channels.”

“Warlike noises? What the hell does that mean?” He continued without waiting for an answer. “And?” They’d started walking again, and Pike frowned down at her.

“And that’s all.” She looked over at him. Her nostrils were flared. She pressed her lips into a tight line and clenched her fingers behind her back. “If they have a fleet they’re sending somewhere, and it’s not the one they used at Ceres, then no one has seen it. And nothing should be able to get through the asteroid belt without us knowing.”

“Isn’t that good?”

“Is it?” she shot back.

“I … fail to see how it couldn’t be.” Pike shook his head in frustration. “Okay, we were worried they were going to come down on us with everything they had. They haven’t. What’s wrong with that?”

“What’s wrong with it is that they should have.” She kept her voice to a fierce whisper. “This was his damned plan, wasn’t it? So why wasn’t he ready to capitalize on it? At Mercury he threatened hellfire and ruin on us, and now? Nothing. Something’s wrong.”

“He’s letting it play out,” Pike said soothingly. “He’s just letting the rest of the Telestines think they’re making their own decision. They’ll call for us all to be murdered in due time, I’m sure, and he’ll pretend to be reluctant before trying to blow us to smithereens—and can I just say how weird it is that I’m trying to reassure you by saying that?”

She hesitated. Not even a hint of humor showed in her eyes.

“What? What is it?”

“Nhean knows something,” she said finally. “I don’t know what. I think he knows why nothing’s happening, but he won’t tell anyone.” She frowned. “And he called me about having our doctors see to one of his crew, but as far as I know, he hasn’t followed up. He undocked and now he’s just holed up on the Koh Rong, not talking to anyone.”

“Can you blame the man? He lived in a mansion all to himself, with about eighty computer screens of data and no one talking to him. The fleet’s not for everyone. He’s probably just trying to figure out the same thing you are.”

“I’m telling you, he knows what’s going on.”

“Listen.” Pike leaned against the wall and craned to look into her eyes. “He doesn’t like you. Right?”

The stiffness in her shoulders disappeared. She shook her head with a genuine laugh. “I hope you’re going somewhere good with this.”

“My point is, you and he don’t always see eye-to-eye, but he helped you at Mercury. He gave you intel. He gave you his whole fleet, for God’s sake. He would never hold back information that would keep you from winning this.” For a moment, he thought she looked evasive. “Would he?”

“No.” She looked away, rubbing at her forehead. “You’re right. He wouldn’t do that. I must have … been wrong.”

“Not necessarily, but Nhean is always dealing with more information than most people know what to do with.” Pike shrugged. “He knows that if you jump at the wrong shadows right now, it could destroy the fleet. He’ll want to make sure he has proof of any theory before he brings it to you.”

“I suppose you’re right.” She bit her lip and smiled up at him.

Pike felt himself lean forward.

They caught themselves at the same moment and she looked away, cleared her throat. “And how are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Earth, Pike. You’ve been shot at. You’ve probably lost a crewmate, and you saw a city blown to pieces.”

“Two. We saw Denver go before Tokyo.”

“Two cities.” She corrected herself softly. “So how are you?”

“Oh.” He rubbed at his eyes. What to tell her? That the girl had seen where she came from, and now knew she’d been essentially resurrected? That Pike had had nightmares of the knives and the computer chips under her skin? “I … don’t know. The Aggy’s going to need some work. That hull held on by a prayer when we broke atmo.”

“We’ll get it fixed.”

There was an uncomfortable silence as an officer hurried by with a salute for Walker.

“How’s Essa?” Pike asked finally.

“A bitch.” Walker leaned her head back against the wall with a thump. She smiled wearily at Pike’s chuckle. “He is. He thinks it’s nothing that we don’t have anyone attacking us right now. He thinks I’m being crazy and eventually the fleet will rebel and beg for him to reinstate Morgan. Hell, he probably thinks if he just wanders around in a dress uniform enough, people will start asking for him to come back.”

Pike snorted.

“He manages to show up at least once a day. The cost of those shuttle rides has to be getting prohibitive but they never seem to run out of fuel.”

“Maybe the UN’s been stockpiling. Like how the fuggers seem to be stockpiling iridium.”

Her face went cold.

“What … did you say?”

“What? Nothing. Just that the UN is probably hoarding fuel—you know those corrupt bureaucrats always—”

“No. No! After that!”

Her face was … crazed. Like she was a woman possessed. What the hell was going on?

“The iridium?”

“Yes! The iridium! God, Pike, have you known this whole damn time?”

“That’s what flagged Dawn’s attention to that drone heading towards Earth. She noticed that there were discrepancies in the amounts of declared metal produced on Vesta, and the amounts that actually showed up after shipment. She dug deeper and saw that it was usually iridium going missing. She tracked it to that ship, and discovered it was a drone piloting it, and so off we went because she had this … feeling he was going to … do something awful.”

“Oh my God.” She held her head in her hands. “He was right.”

“Who?”

She couldn’t tell him about her secret weapons lab. That would not go over well with Pike.

“Doesn’t matter. What matters is that we find out exactly how much went missing, and more importantly, where the hell it all is.”

He studied her face. “I get the feeling there’s an or else in there somewhere….”

She stood up and started walking towards the door. “Or else … hell, Pike, do I need to actually say it? Or else we’re all dead.”

Her comm unit buzzed while they were halfway to the bridge. “Admiral?”

“Yes, Larsen?”

“I have a call for you from Nhean. He says it’s urgent.”

Her footsteps quickened. “Patch him through.”

She was just rounding the last turn to the bridge, boots clanging as she hurried up the metal steps, when Nhean’s voice filtered through the comm unit: “I’ve found your missing rovers. The ones you lost on Mercury.”

One thing after another, she thought. Nhean had only just reported the missing mining rovers a few days ago. “Oh?” Her brows rose and her footsteps slowed again. “That’s good.”

“Not really.” His voice was unusually tense. “You’re not going to like where I found them.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

Mars

Carina Station

Koh Rong

Data Center

“So.” Ka’sagra was as serene as always, a gentle smile on her alien lips. “I’ve admired your restraint in the past days.”

“Have you.” Tel’rabim’s face was a mask. An empty room stretched behind him in the video feed. No windows. No landmarks.

“Yes.” Ka’sagra’s smile widened. She spread her hands, palm up. “You’re truly learning mercy, after all these years. The virtues of—”

“You’ll forgive me if I’m not in the mood to listen to one of your sermons.” Tel’rabim bit the words off. “Why did you call?”

“To hear about your plans, of course.” The High Priestess smiled. “When I heard about the attack, I feared the worst. Indeed, I heard a great many citizens were calling on you to end the human exile permanently. I thought you might, perhaps, strike at Mars…?”

“Oh? And where did you hear that from?” Tel’rabim had relaxed slightly.

“I may not be on Earth any longer, but—”

“The planet is no longer called ‘Earth.’”

There was a long pause, even longer than the time difference would allow. Nhean’s fingers clenched around the arms of the chair. The girl had provided the pathway for him, showing him frequencies and encryption markers. Now she knelt by his chair, as if afraid that the two Telestines could see through the screens and find her.

Nhean’s only regret in having her here was that she was seeing his anger. It was rare that he showed anything more than serenity to the outside world, but now—to hear his home planet renamed, and his extermination debated coolly—he wanted to yell his fury at the screens. He forced himself to say nothing.

Ka’sagra did not belabor the point. “I may not be on the planet, but I am hardly ignorant of what happens there.”

“Yes. You always seem to know a great deal about everything. How many spies do you have in parliament, I wonder?”

“I have no spies.” She soothed him as one might soothe a toddler. “I have only friends, those who speak to me because we share common concerns. Some are in parliament, yes.”

“Their names.” Tel’rabim spat out the demand. “Give me their names.”

“So you may label them as what?”

“Traitors!” The word was almost hysterical.

“This language is unbecoming of you, Tel’rabim. You know we are allies, you and I.”

“I know nothing of the sort.” Tel’rabim looked as if he very much wanted to end the call. “You undermine my every suggestion. You offer succor to our mortal enemies.”

“I have told you that the humans are necessary instruments of our ascension.”

“You have told me sentimental drivel.”

Nhean snorted. If Ka’sagra weren’t on the side of humanity, he would never have allied with her. The too-smooth platitudes and impossible reassurances she offered made his skin crawl. It appeared that on this point, at least, he and Tel’rabim were aligned. Even the girl was nodding in agreement with Tel’rabim’s words.

And Tel’rabim was clearly not in the mood to wait for more of Ka’sagra’s peaceful sentiments. “Let me tell you about humans. They are fundamentally untrustworthy. It is what makes them so very difficult to exterminate.”

Ka’sagra said nothing. Her mouth was twisted.

“A human can be trusted to do only one thing: believe in elreghan te’ssar.”

Nhean paused the video. “What does that mean?” he murmured to the girl. It had been fairly easy to develop a translation mechanism after so many years spent translating by hand, but neither he nor his program understood that phrase. He paused the video feed.

She frowned for a moment. She gestured around them, indicating the room, and sighed deeply, giving a shrug. Then she pointed, flapped her hand to show the world far away, and smiled.

“’The grass is always greener?’” Nhean suggested.

She looked at him blankly.

“Hopefully that’s close enough. It tracks with what he was saying, anyway.” He switched the feed back on.

“And so you would exterminate them,” Ka’sagra said flatly. “You would kill them, simply because you find it untrustworthy that they yearn for their home back.”

“They would kill us in a moment if they had the chance!” Tel’rabim’s face flushed. “How can you possibly doubt that? How have you managed to turn so many to your cause, how do they still funnel you money and food that should go to our people? Humans should have been killed when we reached Earth, it was the only sensible option. You don’t leave an enemy alive. You don’t feed them. You don’t give them technology.”

“They are not our enemies,” Ka’sagra argued. “They are—”

“The necessary instruments of our ascension. Yes. I know. You have told me so many times I have the entire speech memorized. You have told me to stop building ships. You have told me to meet with their soldiers. What you should have done is let the stations fail. Let them die, one by one, out in the black. How do they move you to such pity? When did humanity become the pet cause of the Daughters of Ascension?”

“Who should know better than we what it is to lose their home?” Ka’sagra pointed out. “We fled. We lived in the ships as we crossed the great deep. It nearly killed us.”

“Which means we know very well how easy it would be to kill all of them. The fact that they are still alive—”

“Is a miracle.”

“Is due to your interference! If you hadn’t insisted on sending mechanics for their stations, or sending them food, medicine, water, they all would have been dead within months after their exile.”

Nhean made a strangled sound. Of the first stations, dozens had failed. The inhabitants had suffocated, or died in agony as the temperatures climbed out of control. Airlocks had vented without failsafes coming online, and between the mold and the riots over food, it was a wonder any of the rest of them had survived, either. He’d heard the bitter words spoken by the survivors of the Exodus: they must have hoped we would die.

He didn’t think anyone had really believed it, though. They all knew that the Telestines hardly cared about a single dead human, but it seemed too much trouble to get them all off Earth if they were only going to be killed anyway.

But had that been the plan all along? Offer a new home to funnel humanity off Earth, knowing they would take a slow death over a quick, certain one—there were still stories told of the firing squads used on the humans who would not accept exile—and then simply let them die, knowing that they did not have the technology to survive for long.

Though expensive, it was clever. With such similar mineral and nutrient needs, any attempt at poison might backfire on the Telestines, and it wasn’t out of the question that a manufactured illness might jump species. Not to mention, there was the issue of bodies. If the stations failed, however, they would be nice, floating mausoleums. Humanity gone, Earth preserved. No property damage. No protracted war required to end humanity. Just the slow, inevitable demise in inhospitable space.

Never had Nhean so violently wished someone dead.

“I strive for something greater,” Ka’sagra said simply. “You are afraid, Tel’rabim.”

“Of course I am afraid! And it is not some childish fear—I know that there is a very real possibility of them doing significant damage to us before I get the support in parliament to kill them all!”

“There are things for which it is worth enduring fear. To bring about the Ascension, dangerous paths must be walked.”

“No.” Tel’rabim managed a smile at last. “If this affected only you, I would let you do what you wished—but it does not, and I will no longer allow you to walk a path that endangers our entire species.”

“Thousands agree with me! They walk the path willingly!” There was a strange evasiveness in her manner. “Members of parliament. The rich, the poor. It is a truth all can see. They know the values of charity and kindness.”

“And I know those values will kill them. If you will not cease your work with the humans, I will have no choice but to consider you their ally and not our own.”

“Do what you will,” she said softly. “I am not afraid of your violence, as I am not afraid of theirs. All are working to bring about the Ascension. It is inevitable now.”

The feed switched off, and Nhean exchanged a glance with the girl. She was frowning, deeply troubled.

“We need her to believe it’s in doubt,” Nhean said finally. “If she believes nothing can stop it, she will not do anything extraordinary to help us. She will tell us not to worry, either.”

The girl was still frowning. Without even looking at him, she pushed herself up and made for the door, stopping only when a series of trills announced incoming alerts.

Nhean glanced over at the screens, half distracted as he rewound the tape of Ka’sagra and Tel’rabim. He was still thinking he had missed something when he realized what, exactly, he was seeing on the screens nearby.

His eyes focused on the image for a long moment before his fingers were moving frantically, jabbing at the comm buttons.

“Get me Walker.”

His eyes fixated on the image on the screen, and Schroeder’s cryptic information regarding the stolen mining rovers suddenly seemed relevant.

He sat, not moving, head still turned, until Larsen’s voice told him to go ahead.

“I’ve found your missing rovers. The ones you lost on Mercury.”

“Oh?” Walker sounded pleased. “That’s good.”

“Not really.” His fingers clenched on the arm of the chair. “You’re not going to like where I found them.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’re heading for Mars, in twelve ships. Why, I don’t know, but you should know that—”

“Oh, my God.” Her voice was hollow. “We need to talk. All of us.” There was the sudden clang of footsteps; she was running now. “I know what he’s planning.”

Chapter Forty-Eight

Mars

Carina Station

VFS Santa Maria

“What the hell is going on?” Pike slid into the conference room with a confused look at the guard outside. He’d been almost to the crew quarters when a junior officer came sprinting down the hallway in a panic, yelling for him to get back to Walker.

But there were no alarms. No one else seemed panicked.

And here was Walker, alone, cradling both elbows as she studied a grainy video projected on the wall. He hadn’t expected to see her again so soon. He let his breath out slowly.

Thankfully, she didn’t notice. She nodded to the video without looking at him. “I know what Tel’rabim is planning now.”

“Is Pike there?” Nhean’s voice filtered out of a comm unit on the table, making Pike jump.

“Yes.”

“What about Delaney?”

“I left him on the bridge.” Walker shook her head. Her eyes were locked on the video, not straying either to Pike or to the comm unit. “This won’t be the only part of Tel’rabim’s plan, and I need someone competent there when the rest hits, if we’re not done here yet.”

“So let us speak quickly: what is Tel’rabim planning?” Nhean sounded equal parts curious, and annoyed to have been waiting for Pike.

Pike could not make much sense of it either. He leaned back against the wall and stared at the image. Ships, an indeterminate number of them—ten? Eleven? No, twelve dots swimming into view in the picture. They weren’t large, he was fairly sure of that. He marked the trajectory and the coordinates at the bottom of the image. They would be heading for Mars, most likely.

“There are twelve mining rovers on those ships,” Walker said quietly. “What we must ask ourselves is, what did Tel’rabim use a rover for last time?”

Pike lifted his shoulders in a shrug—and then froze. “Oh my God. Io.”

“Exactly,” Walker said quietly.

“You think the missing material from Vesta is on those ships as bombs?” Nhean’s voice was carefully neutral.

“It fits.” Walker sounded offended at his tone. “I had my science team analyze it, and around fourteen bombs’ worth of material, we thought, went missing. And here are twelve rovers.”

Pike shook his head. “How can we be sure this isn’t coincidence?”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” she said. “Besides. Think about it. Fourteen bombs’ worth of material. Two bombs just exploded on Earth. That leaves twelve. Now there are twelve mysterious shuttles with stolen mining rovers strapped to them, heading for our most populous settlement. You do the math.”

“He can’t mean to take out all of Mars, though.” It was, in many ways, a useless point. Nhean did not often speak that way.

But Pike shared the sentiment. Mars? All of Mars? Surely Tel’rabim couldn’t—

“No?” Walker challenged them both quietly. “Couldn’t he? Mars is our largest settlement. It’s the seat of our government. And it’s a statement of incredible power, to destroy an entire planet. Io was smaller, yes, but you could make Mars uninhabitable by spreading out the charges. My team tells me that the bombs get more powerful at higher pressures. But these mining rovers wouldn’t have to even dig that deep before they reach pressures far greater than what Sam Thorne dug down to on Io.”

Nhean said nothing for a long time. Pike was picturing the man with his chin sunk into his palm, eyes focused on something far away.

“Do you agree?” Walker said finally. Her eyes swept from the comm unit, to Pike. She began to pace around the table, hands linked behind her back.

“It’s a lot to spend on one settlement,” Pike said finally.

That point, oddly, seemed to mollify her. She nodded. “I thought so as well. But twelve rovers, twelve bombs. Why else would he do it?”

“It may not be him,” Nhean said quietly. “Those rovers were last seen before this on Vesta, in the possession of the Daughters of Ascension. I think … Tel’rabim’s Ceres attack may have either been his feint to distract us from the rovers being transferred or loaded at Vesta, or someone else knew about his plans to attack Ceres and used it as a distraction. Either way, Essa was played.”

Pike’s head swiveled to stare at the comm unit. “What?”

“I hate to defend Essa, but there was no way for him to know that.” She paused again, her head in a hand, thinking. “Tel’rabim’s trying to frame her again,” Walker said impatiently. “This will be the first part of his plan, he clearly didn’t get enough support from parliament to silence her, and so he’s shifted to implicating her in … terrorism. Bombing Earth. Bombing their own people, in addition to ours.”

A long pause, and then: “That’s quite possible. But I disagree.” Nhean’s voice was not flippant.

“You really think it could be Ka’sagra?”

“I think it would be unwise to trust any faction of Telestine society.” His answer was instant. “Tel’rabim demonstrated what we already should have known: that someone who spoke well of us, who seemed to support us, might also not be our ally. Ka’sagra now speaks well of us and seems to support us, and I will not let myself trust her any more than I trust him.”

There was a silence.

“And what would be her purpose in destroying Mars?” Walker asked finally. It was an empty courtesy, she clearly did not believe him in the slightest, but she was making the effort.

“Does it matter?” Nhean asked cryptically. “We need to stop it. Mobilize the fleet.”

“Or look for something in the opposite direction,” Walker hissed. “What if this is the distraction, what if this is how he lures us into the open and then attacks elsewhere?”

“It would take a dozen stations to match Mars for population, and we haven’t found anything else.” Nhean’s voice was patient. “We have to stop this.”

Walker shot Pike a look, but he could only shake his head. This was beyond him: surveillance programs and the tactics of Mars versus stations. He squeezed his eyes shut.

“If he takes the stations and leaves Mars, our population will all be grounded.” It was all he could think of.

There was a silence.

“I had not considered that,” Nhean murmured. A sigh made its way down the line. “At least send a few ships. You have time to intercept them.”

“That in itself is suspicious,” Walker murmured. Her eyes narrowed. “Save Mars, or wait?”

A pounding at the door jolted them to awareness. “Admiral!”

Walker strode to the door to pull it open. “What is it?”

“Larsen says—to come to the bridge. No alarms yet, but….” The officer gulped air. “fleet. Telestine fleet. Inbound for Vesta.”

“Goddammit. Tell him I’ll be right there.” Walker turned her head sharply as she swung the door closed. “Now do you believe me? This is the feint, and the blow. So which is which? Which do we save?”

It wasn’t even a question, it was pure despair cloaked in fury.

“Both,” Nhean said finally. “Give me the girl, send her and Pike to the Koh Rong, and we can take down the ships at Mars. We’ll go now. You meet Tel’rabim at Vesta. Match forces, not underlying populations.”

Walker’s shoulders slumped, and a moment later she nodded. “Yes,” she added, when she remembered that Nhean could not see her.

“I’ll send a shuttle from the Koh Rong. And I will be coming as well. I have something to discuss with you before we leave.”

That, for some reason, seemed to snap Walker back to her usual self. “You’d best make it quick. We’ll be out of here within the hour.” She strode to the table to retrieve the comm button and nodded to him curtly. “Pike—get the girl.”

Pike hesitated, fists clenched.

“Tell her what is happening,” Walker told him. Her eyes were clear. “Tell her the truth. See what she does. You can’t shield her from this, Pike. Promise me you will at least give her the choice.”

He hated her completely in that moment. And yet….

He ducked his head. He could not bring himself to say anything, but he nodded, at least. And then he left without looking back, without saying goodbye.

He would remember that later.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Mars

Carina Station

VFS Santa Maria

The lift shuddered to a stop and Nhean stepped out as Walker ran past with an urgent gesture for him to follow her.

“Wait!” he called after her.

“There is no waiting.” Though she slowed, and turned. “Unless he’s not actually going to Vesta. I need you to get to Mars. The girl needs to get there now.”

“I know, but … one thing first.” He gestured for her to keep walking, and fell into step beside her. “I know this is … an inconvenient time, and I wouldn’t ask unless it was urgent. My crew member, Parees. His situation is deteriorating. You mentioned a psychiatrist on one of the ships, I believe?”

“The Anchor.” She shook her head as they forged through a knot of personnel. “He’s … just a doctor, we don’t have that kind of staff, but the crew speaks well of him for that sort of thing.” Walker felt some of the tension go out of her. “It’s Morgan’s ship. Trying to make a transfer now would be tricky, if not outright impossible.”

“I think we need to.” Nhean fell silent as they made their way through a a crowd directly under the speakers. “I sent him on another mission after Vesta, and I do not believe I should have done so. I think at Vesta, he began to lose his sense of purpose.”

“Do I need to know this right now?” She was speeding up.

“No, but he does need to be transferred. I would give him more time, but I’m afraid he’ll do harm to himself.”

“Send him on your shuttle, and be prepared to accelerate as soon as it’s docked on the Anchor. We’ll sort out getting it back when this is all over. And if he doesn’t make it, he’s going to have to cope. One life is not worth the fleet, you hear me?” She tapped her comm unit. “Larsen, tell the Anchor to expect a shuttle from the Koh Rong, and they’re to accelerate as soon as it’s on board. They have ten minutes to get it secured or they are to leave without it.”

“Thank you.” Nhean dipped his head to the comm unit on his wrist. “Take Parees to the Anchor. Walker will radio for them to be expecting Parees. He should be admitted by Dr. ….” He paused, looking to Walker.

“Ah … can’t remember right now, they’ll figure it out. Now go!”

He nodded and hurried away as Walker broke into a run, heading for the bridge. She was pleased to see that there was no inefficiency. New crews or not, everyone here moved with a purpose, and etiquette made the process smooth. There was no hesitation as officers and enlisted split off to their posts. Gunnery chiefs with their perpetually stained fingertips were given first priority over everyone but Walker as they made their way toward the batteries on the middle decks. She passed a crowd of network techs she had hired and clapped a few of them on the back.

The bridge was an oasis of calm. Delaney nodded to Walker and slid out of her way.

“All right.” Walker pulled up a map of Vesta and tapped a button. An image of their fleet appeared in a honeycomb pattern, but surprisingly far out from the surface. She saw Delaney’s surprise and gave a terse shake of her head. “This is just a projection—a guess based on his prior formations. We’re probably not going to beat him there. What we need is a formation that will catch his attention, batter holes through his, and force him to turn away from Vesta and face us. The combat will be extraordinarily close. We’re going to start firing while we’re still decelerating—they need to be convinced we’re actually on the offense in this one.”

“If you come through close, it will be nearly impossible to dodge that beam on their capital ship,” Delaney warned. He pressed himself against the desk as an officer hurried past behind him. The din of the room was oddly comforting. Acceleration began as a slight compression in his bones.

“I know.” Walker shook her head. “But if he’s determined to take Vesta out, we have almost no way to stop him other than getting through there as fast as possible.”

“You could center firepower not on making holes, but on the stem of each carrier.” Delaney waited for her to bring up a diagram and pointed to the place where the upside-down teardrop began to narrow into a long, curved points. “If you cut off that part of each ship, you cut off its ability to use that beam.” He shrugged. “Well, we can hope. No saying what that bastard’s come up with.”

“No, it’s a good thought.” Walker considered. “My first plan was to make ourselves enough of a nuisance that they would have to face us, but based on the explosives they used on Io and Tokyo, he only needs enough time for one bomb.”

There was a silence, and Delaney let out his breath. “So the question is—”

“No.” They needed Vesta. They needed that weapons program. She wasn’t going to let him ask whether it was possible to save the settlement.

“Yes.” His voice was adamant. “Can we make it? Is it worth engaging, or do we go—if we do—with the sole purpose of taking their fleet out while they’re occupied?”

“What other option do we have than to save them?” Walker hissed at him. “It’s one thing to pick targets and let the rest fall, but we can only stand back and say, ‘we can’t do it, he got the jump on us’ so many times before there’s nothing left. Sooner or later, we have to stand and fight. Every victory we win is impossible. Percentage wise? This isn’t noticeably more impossible than usual.”

She straightened her shoulders.

“Nhean can handle Mars. And we must save Vesta.”

***

Many decks away, Nhean was smiling as he stepped onto his shuttle. The comm unit in his ear carried very clear audio of the conversation from the bridge, and he was glad he was listening. In the past days and weeks, he’d forgotten this passion in Walker. She was devoted to humanity, beyond almost anyone he knew. She cared deeply, desperately. Here was a woman who would use every tool and tactic at her disposal until there was no hope of either retreat or victory, and then she would devote everything she had to making the victory hurt for the Telestines. If humanity was to end here, Walker would go out trying to ensure that the Telestines ended as well.

Something caught in Nhean’s mind, but the thought was gone the next moment.

“There’s only ever the best option,” he said quietly. He’d heard her say the same any number of times in their early acquaintance.

A moment later, sparking a chill in him, her voice filtered across the comms: “There’s only ever the best option. So which is it now?”

***

“Ma’am?” Larsen’s voice cut across everything. “We have a message from Tel’rabim. A video, not live.”

The bridge went unusually quiet.

Walker looked at no one but Larsen. “Have it projected on the table, sound to our earpieces.”

He could almost hear her words: I’m not going to give this bastard a chance to throw off my crew.

Walker hooked a headset over her ear as the message flickered up. Tel’rabim’s face was flat, displeased. It seemed he was finding leadership less pleasant than he’d expected, though it was hard to take any joy in that thought right now.

“I request a meeting with the leaders of the Exile Fleet.” The Telestine spoke slowly, in English rather than in Telestine. “I ask you not to interfere in the operation at Vesta. It is in your interests as well as mine to stand aside. To be frank, your fleet cannot continue to match mine, and I will destroy you if you stand in my way. I will send word as soon as my operation there is complete. Hold your position for now.”

The message flickered out and Walker looked up to see a frown on Delaney’s face.

“What the hell,” she asked, “was that?” She found she was running the pads of her thumbs over her nails, over and over again. Think, think.

“Easiest explanation: he doesn’t want to take the chance of losses at Vesta, after which he will kill all of us at the meeting.” Delaney kept his voice low. “Most likely explanation, too.”

“Are you actually suggesting that preserving our fleet is worth enough to let him destroy Vesta?”

Delaney folded his arms over his barrel chest and considered. “If he’s willing to go all in, maybe. He can’t match you tactically. He puts his stock in one capital ship, every time. But say he’s learned….”

“Why would he telegraph that to us?”

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “Why would it be to our benefit to lose Vesta?” he asked quietly, almost to himself.

“No, it’s to our benefit not to lose the fleet, that’s what he said.”

“There are always different meanings with him.” It was clear from Delaney’s tone what he thought of that. “He could mean that not only would our fleet sustain heavy losses, it is also not to our benefit to interfere. And before you ask me why that would be, I don’t have an answer—but ask yourself what the benefit would be to him of keeping our fleet intact, because if we follow his advice, that’s what will happen.”

She frowned at him.

“If he’s sure that he can defeat us over multiple engagements….” Delaney shrugged. “Why not let us come in hot? We lose ships faster than our Mercury shipyards can produce them. He should want to engage us as often as possible.”

“You’re taking what he says at face value,” Walker said flatly. “You’re assuming any of it is the truth. This is someone who has lied to us for the bulk of the time we have known him. He pretended to be our friend—to be aligned with Ka’sagra and the aid workers. He may simply know that by telling us not to interfere, he’ll spur us to do just that.”

“Possibly,” Delaney agreed. “But it’s worth wondering, isn’t it?”

“No!” She pounded one fist on the desk softly, a tight gesture so as not to draw the attention of the rest of the crew. He had never been one to think like this, and it infuriated her now. Tel’rabim was in their heads. She leaned in. “You want to know why he sent this? The same reason I didn’t let the crew see it. He sent it to throw us off. It is always what he does. He knows that humanity is best controlled psychologically, because that is always what has kept us from defeating them: the belief of our own helplessness. If we had begun this rebellion at the start of the Exodus, if we had made a concerted effort to develop technology, resist, convert ships, we would be free of them by now. Instead, we listened when they told us they had such good technology that we could never match it. We sank into despair. No more. Larsen, send a message to Ka’sagra on Vesta to warn her. If he’s hoping to kill his political rivals, let’s at least give them a fighting chance.”

Delaney’s brows rose. “Admiral Walker warning Telestines to get out? Now I’ve seen everything.”

“No, you haven’t, and the day’s not over yet.” She nodded to the desk, and then opened a channel to Nhean. “Are you there? One more thing … try not to destroy the ships, if at all possible. We have a limited supply of nukes. Bombs like the one they used at Io could be useful to us.”

There was a pause, but a moment later, Nhean’s voice filtered back. “I will try. Good hunting.”

“Good hunting.” She cut the call.

Chapter Fifty

Mars

Carina Station

Koh Rong

Data Center

“Exile Fleet, this is Admiral Walker.”

The girl did not look at the comm unit. Her eyes were on the flickering projection on the wall: a small child, with the absolute stillness of death. Burns. Bruises. It was a death mercifully forgotten, and a life cruelly wiped away.

Somewhere nearby, the engines of the Koh Rong blazed to life and the ship shuddered as it began acceleration.

What was my name?

Her head bowed briefly, eyes squeezed together.

Walker’s voice continued. “Since humanity was forced into Exodus, all of us have known that this cannot continue. Living chained to a planet that is no longer ours, scrabbling each day merely to survive and often not achieving that, relying upon the fading goodwill of an invading species, has weakened us. We have known, every one of us, that we must escape this hell or die.”

Behind her closed eyelids, the girl saw blue skies and rocks bathed in sunlight. Mice skittered beneath the scrub brush and birds wheeled overhead. This tiny room had only the breeze of the air purifiers, no live winds to tear at her hair and carry her soul along with them up into the skies.

I was born on a table, in a lab. I am only the shadow of that girl. I carry their imprint in my blood.

She could remember a voice, so long gone as to echo beyond recognition, telling her that to choose no path was to let the world shape you. Whether you moved forward or back, diverged from the beaten path or held it, you must choose—or you would be swallowed without a trace.

“For years, we knew that the Telestine promises of peace were nothing more than words—and today, they have shown that. They want us to stand back and allow them to take Vesta. They tell us that we cannot match them in technology, and so we should sit back and watch as they cut us down, one station at a time.”

“I do not believe that humanity ends here. I do not believe they outmatch us so much as they would have us think. I believe that we can cost them dearly, and I mean to try. So today, let them know that when they come for us, we will make them pay. Let them know that we will steal their victory and leave them with nothing but ashes. If there is one thing we have always known how to do, it is fight. Walker out.”

In the darkness, the girl’s eyes opened. She looked up at the video feed, seeing the body she now lived in laid down next to the body it had been based on. Was she in any way the same girl she had been, the girl that had died in a Telestine raid, the girl whose genome had been used to make her? She would never know. She could see only the face. Perhaps there was a bit of difference around the cheekbones. The hands, maybe, longer fingered like a Telestine’s. If she cut herself open, how would her organs look?

How had they changed her? What more had they intended her to be?

Behind her, a door hissed. Pike; she could smell him. He stopped when he saw the video.

She turned to look over her shoulder and saw his face turned away.

“Are you ready?” he asked her quietly. “Have you heard what they want you to do with Mars?”

She nodded. She had failed on Earth, and she did not intend to fail again. She had been made to be a weapon—if she truly embraced that, surely this time would be different.

She had to believe that.

Chapter Fifty-One

Near Vesta

VFS Santa Maria

Bridge

The problem with space, Walker reflected, was that it was so much vaster than any distance found on Earth. There was a fundamental strangeness about engaging over hundreds of thousands of kilometers, and there was always a jarring moment at the start of a battle when she remembered just how large the battlefield shown in the holograph truly was.

There was also the unfortunate fact that the time it took to reach a battlefield allowed far too much space for resolve to falter and doubts to creep in. New shifts arrived at their battle stations and the others would go back to lie in their bunks and stare at the ceiling sleeplessly. Walker spent hours in her rooms, building tactical readouts and receiving reports from the tech crews. So little broke on the new ships that she had very few things to occupy her time. She paced. She considered the maps. She conferred with McAllister. She considered calling Nhean, or Pike, and decided against it.

The final approach alert was a relief. She took one last look at herself in the mirror, straightened her jacket, and stepped out into the main passageways. She bent her head to her wrist to speak carefully into the comm unit.

“Larsen, any read on their formation?” Is Vesta still there?

His reply came back at once. “Ships are still coming in. No way to know how they’ll be set up when it’s all said and done.”

An alert blared for the fighter pilots to get to their stations. Delaney appeared from a side hallway.

“All fighters prepped. Gunnery is all hands on, ready to prime nukes at your order.”

The crew they had left anyway. Although by the end of today—assuming they weren’t all dead—they might have something far, far better than the nukes that lay in their caches now.

Her pulse sped slightly at the thought.

“Thank you.” Walker preceded him onto the bridge and saluted to the crew. “Is everyone ready to make Tel’rabim very, very sorry he tried to attack Vesta?”

A nervous laugh rippled through the group, a release of tension—she hoped. A few people saluted her again.

“Larsen, give me a status report on our formation.”

“All ships decelerating according to schedule,” Larsen reported. He looked glad to be back here in a supporting role. His brief experience with command had been bizarre, after all. “No, wait. We’re missing the Anchor? Morgan reported in ready to launch before departure, but I’m not seeing it here.”

Walker grimaced. She couldn’t believe Morgan would choose this moment to play political revenge. Well, yes she could. The man truly was an idiot, incapable of seeing the big picture.

“Never mind,” she replied. “We will sort out the Admiral’s, ahem, issues when this is over. We need to stay focused. Continue.”

“We are at ninety-seven percent deceleration for all ships except the Pele, the Intrepid, the Stockholm, the Washington, and their destroyer escorts. Pincer formations, all batteries ready to fire.”

“Any ships on their side facing our way?”

“At present, yes, ma’am—but some are still turning. It’s hard to know if any of their formation will stay put.”

“Message to all helmsman, stay sharp, gunnery is to keep firing at their target while the ships maneuver.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Larsen frowned and pressed his headset to his ear. His voice was very low, and came only to her headset. “Another message from Tel’rabim, ma’am. Shall I bring it up on the table again?”

“No.” Walker met his eyes across the room. “I’m not giving him the chance to get into our heads again.”

“Yes, ma’am. Start the countdown?”

Walker gave one more look over the Telestine formation, and dragged lines from the human ships to their Telestine targets. “Send that, and then yes.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He switched back to the loudspeaker. “Batteries to commence firing in thirty seconds. All ships acknowledge targets.”

Hands rose along the communications desks, heads nodding at Larsen, who kept count.

He turned back to Walker. “Targets acknowledged, all ships checked in. Countdown stands at eighteen seconds. Seventeen. Sixteen.”

Walker looked over at Delaney. “Here we go again.”

“Here we go again.” He nodded. “D’you think he’s on one of those ships?”

“We should be so lucky.” She managed a real smile at that.

“Five.” Larsen’s voice came on the loudspeaker. “Four, three….”

The comm channel blinked. Tel’rabim was trying to contact them again. Walker shut down the channel wordlessly, feeling the low pulse of anger at her temples. Channel it. Lord knows, you’ve used anger before.

Dimly, she heard Larsen’s voice. “Ninety-nine-point-five percent deceleration, all batteries fire.”

The screen burst to life. Communications officers yelled back and forth as the Telestine fleet swam into focus at last.

All facing Vesta.

Had Tel’rabim truly expected them to listen to his warnings?

One of the Telestine destroyers was gone within seconds, a second disappeared in a flicker even as it disgorged a swarm of fighters, and explosions lit along the stem of the capital ship.

“My God,” Delaney murmured. “This is going to be a slaughter.”

“We’re owed one,” Walker said grimly.

“Four points clear, spear advance.” Larsen tried to keep his voice smooth, but it was shaking with excitement.

The four carriers shot through the holes in the Telestine formation, screaming into hard deceleration. The pilots of all four ships had been drilling this move in the simulators since the plan was finalized. Get in front of the Telestine fleet, and don’t smash yourself into Vesta. Walker had seen any number of gruesome simulations before Delaney chased her away, saying she was making the helmsmen nervous by watching.

What if battles make the helmsmen nervous, too?

Too late to worry about that.

“Ships turning,” Larsen called. “Two carriers to port, one to starboard.”

“He likes his capital ships,” Walker murmured. “All ships hold evasive maneuvers until the last moment, we know it takes their cannons a long time to charge. Don’t get sloppy. Larsen—where are their fighters?”

“Everywhere. No pattern we can see yet.”

“Launch ours, then.”

“All fighters launch. Primary target is the destroyers. Ma’am, gunneries are requesting guidance. Should they start prepping nukes?”

Walker considered. “Yes. Arm them in the air, tell the fighters to stay clear.”

“Nukes already?” Delaney’s eyebrows rose.

“Fights don’t have a rhythm.” It was something she’d never said to him out loud before. It sounded too childish. “The way you win is by kicking them in the balls before they can aim.” She raised her voice again. “Larsen, fleetwide message, turn on viewscreens.”

Delaney frowned at her, but she paid no attention. Her gaze was locked on the glitter of the Telestine carriers. The cannons were just coming into view, and the glow on the holograph told her that they were already arming.

So the Telestines were beginning to learn tactics, were they? That was a shame.

“Eight seconds to impact on nukes,” Larsen reported.

The dots on the screen tracked their way toward their targets. Two flares lit, sudden and unexpected.

“Two intercepted by fighters. Five seconds. All little boys armed. Three, two, one.”

Blue-white circles burst across the hulls of the Telestine carriers. Filaments curled into space as they spread, and in the blank space left behind, debris caught the light and tumbled in a shimmering cloud. The fleet held its breath, waiting, waiting—

The tail of the largest carrier wrenched sideways and tore free of the ship, sending the top into a spin as the air vented out of it. The cannons went dark. Two more showed as severed, and one stem was no longer even visible; it had been blown to rubble.

There was a moment of pure silence, and then the bridge erupted into cheers. Walker shook her fist in silent exultation. Her eyes passed over the crowd slapping one another on the back, and met Delaney’s again.

“Another thing about fights? Momentum is key.” She picked up the comm unit again. “All right, Exile Fleet. Let’s do some clean up. Stay sharp, they’re going to be out for blood now.”

Delaney didn’t answer, and a few seconds later, she noticed his unusual silence. She looked up with a question in her eyes, and saw worry there.

“Don’t you think,” he asked quietly, “that that was a bit too easy?”

A chill hit her, and she shook her head. “No.”

“Well, I do.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “He really didn’t expect us to do it. He was focusing fire on Vesta. Who focuses that many carriers’ worth of fire on Vesta and doesn’t even cover their tail?”

“Someone who’s not good at tactics,” Walker said impatiently. “Jack, now is not the—”

He interrupted her. “What did you tell me right before Denver went up? That something was coming. That it didn’t add up. Well, what we just saw wasn’t right. It doesn’t add up. Something else is going on.”

She was very aware of the crew watching covertly.

“Fine,” she said quietly. Goddammit, he was right. “But I’m not going to tell them to stop cleaning up what’s left. The more Telestine ships as we can take out now, the better. And while the rest of the captains take care of that, we’ll try to figure out what’s going on.”

Chapter Fifty-Two

Near Mars

Koh Rong

Twelve ships raced toward the dusty red curve of Mars, the light from the planet gleaming over smooth metal hulls. Behind them, a bare shimmer amongst the black and the stars, darted the Koh Rong, drawing closer, shielded as best it could be from the ships it pursued. Whether or not they were aware of their pursuer, the twelve ships never wavered. They were locked onto their trajectories, beginning to spread. That one would go for the UN compound was a certainty. Where the others would go, no one could be sure.

On the bridge of the Koh Rong, Nhean looked over at the girl. She had dropped out of her seat near the pale, smooth bulk of a Telestine computer terminal, and knelt on the floor with her head down and her palms pressed to the slick surface.

“Is it working?” Pike asked softly.

“As far as I can tell, yes. They’re not making evasive maneuvers. That means they’re either fighting to get her out of their thoughts, or she’s taken automated systems offline.” Nhean shrugged. “Hopefully both.”

“Wait. You think she can give orders to Telestines?”

“Why do you think they gave the drones parts of their DNA?” Nhean could not help but laugh at the expression on Pike’s face. “That’s one of the reasons it’s difficult to find their transmissions: they’re telepathic.”

“You’re … kidding. So why are there any transmissions at all?”

“If I had to guess, I would say it’s partially etiquette and partially distance.” Nhean raised his voice slightly. “Do what you can to bring us closer. It can only help.”

There was no way to see inside the girl’s mind, and so they watched the ships. They watched as the formation drifted a little more and then stopped and held steady.

And then one of the ships wobbled.

Pike’s head turned sharply to watch the girl. Her fingers were going white where they dug into the plastic and her lips twisted around clenched teeth. He looked back just in time to see another wobble—a different ship this time. Their helmsmen seemed to be tempted to draw them off course, but still there was no visible change in trajectory.

There was an anguished cry from behind the two men, but even as they turned to look, the helmsman gave a shout, pointing.

Two ships bashed into one another, closing the kilometers between them with eerie speed and disappearing in a shower of twisted metal. Another pair followed suit a moment later, sending a hunk of wreckage tumbling toward the Koh Rong.

The helmsman jerked the controls to guide them under, swearing under her breath, but Pike and Nhean were not even watching. Their eyes were still fixed on the ships ahead.

A third pair went down. Their noses wavered as they plunged toward one another, but the girl’s commands were too strong for them to ignore. The ships died, going dark on the scanners and shattering out of their way.

Eight left, and the drone helmsmen were desperate to escape the girl. They scattered, each trying to evade her in their own way. The first warm tints of light were showing around them as they descended into the atmosphere.

But landing was dangerous. Atmosphere was dangerous. Even thin Martian atmosphere. Pike watched as one of the ships vented itself and spun out of control, airlocks open, bodies and equipment flying. Another turned nose down to the surface and burned up as its pilot struggled to right it. A third shot down a fourth, and then—in its desperate attempts to regain control—spun out into the airless wreck that was plunging past it to the surface.

Four left. Pike’s fingers were digging into the back of Nhean’s chair, his mouth stretched in a terrible smile. He should not revel in death, he knew that, but the images of Io had never left him, and there were so many more settlements on Mars. How many lives would have been taken by these ships?

Four left. So close.

What jerked the girl out of her reverie, Pike did not know, but he looked back to see her black eyes open and fixed on the screen. She grimaced as she pressed her palms onto the machinery, but nothing was happening.

The remaining ships had formed up and were arrowing down toward the distant shape of the UN compound. At this distance, it was a delicate tracery of metal, a good reminder of just how fragile the settlements were. A tiny city, adhered to the outer crust of a near-dead planet.

Tiny, but holding thousands—millions—of lives.

“Get it back,” Pike whispered, before he could stop himself.

She shook her head in fear. It wasn’t working, whatever she was doing, and she didn’t know why.

Closer, the four ships went, and closer.

Pike was at her side, hands cupping her face. “You have to do this,” he told her. “I can’t. Nhean can’t. You have to do it, Lapushka.”

Tears welled up in her eyes and one broke from between her lashes at the sound of Rychenkov’s nickname. She bent her head against Pike’s chest for a second, and the slump of her shoulders proclaimed her exhaustion.

For the first time, he wondered what it must be like to be connected to another’s mind as they committed suicide at your instruction. What was he asking her to do? The only thing there was to do, his mind insisted. Now he knew how Walker felt most of the time.

It was not a comforting thought.

A quick glance showed the crafts beginning to slow. Landing gear was coming down.

Her fingers were moving, even as she leaned against him, sliding over the smooth surface of the computer fragment. She was searching for some other way to talk to the ships, that much was clear, and it was draining her energy slowly but surely.

“You can do it,” Pike murmured into her hair. He tried to keep his voice light. He did not dare look at the screen to see how close to the settlement the ships were. He shut his eyes. “You are the stubbornest, most resourceful person I know. You can do this.”

Her shoulders shook with something that might have been a laugh and might have been a sob.

Nhean gave a tiny sound. His fist was up at his mouth, his face twisted. The ships were coming in for a landing.

And then her fists clenched and the crafts, as one, turned nose down. The engines flared and all four dashed themselves against the rocks.

The helmsman gave a whoop and clapped her hand over her mouth a moment later, but Nhean was laughing, head tipped back against his head rest. The girl peeked out from behind Pike’s shoulder, staring at the wreckage of the ships on the ground. Her eyes closed and she swayed, and then she started laughing, too.

“Told you,” Pike murmured. For some reason, he was laughing, too. He rubbed her arm and pointed at the screen. “You’re stubborn as hell, little one.”

Nhean gave her a smile and began tapping buttons on the screens. “Well, let’s get these bombs extracted and we’ll get on our way.” He brought up a map and tapped a rock outcropping near the wreckage, then nodded to the helmsman. “Set us down there.”

She was just obeying, and Pike was helping the girl to her feet, when Nhean frowned.

“Can you scan wreckage on that thing?” He nodded to the piece of Telestine technology that the girl clutched against her side.

She nodded worriedly.

Nhean hesitated. “Tell me how many bombs you see,” he said finally.

She sat promptly, legs crossed, and bent her head over the white shard. She looked for all the world like a musician tuning a stringed instrument, listening to the notes. Her frown deepened and she breathed slowly. Her eyes were focused on a different point. Her hand moved in a smooth arc, then lifted and repeated the motion. She bit her lip as she repeated it one more time, and then looked up at Nhean. She held up one finger.

“Are you certain?” Nhean insisted with an intense look. “My scan reported the same, but I assumed it must be wrong.”

The girl shook her head, and raised one finger into the air emphatically.

“That can’t be—this, this doesn’t—where?!” Nhean’s increasing frustration worried Pike, but the girl was sure. “There was material for twelve,” Nhean murmured. “But only one bomb was on those ships? Where are the other bombs?!”

The world seemed to drop out from under Pike.

“Call Walker,” he said urgently. “Now.”

Chapter Fifty-Three

Vesta

Exile Fleet Fighters

“Eat it, ya bastards!” McAllister thumped the side of his windshield with one hand. “You regret coming to this system now? Huh?”

He was going half-deaf with the cheers echoing through the pilots’ channel. Tocks had unleashed one of the single most profane speeches he had ever heard, Twister was yelling something incoherent, her voice gone hoarse, and the sound was clipping so much that he had to lift his headphones off. Even floating next to his head, he could hear the full-throated yells clearly.

“All right, Exile Fleet.” He could hear the smile in Walker’s voice as he pulled the headset back on hastily. “Let’s do some clean up. Stay sharp, they’re going to be out for blood now.”

“Oh, hell yes.” McAllister was still smiling as he looked up at the rapidly-approaching debris field that was the center of the Telestine fleet. “Let’s….”

His voice trailed off. The view was familiar—far too much so. With sudden, jarring clarity he saw King’s ship diving for the Telestine carrier. His own screams were echoing in his memory. Not her, it shouldn’t have been Ari. It should have been anyone else.

“Chief?” Princess brought his fighter alongside McAllister’s. “You okay?”

He wasn’t. He was suddenly furious. This wasn’t an isolated moment, a victory they should celebrate in the absence of any other factors. This was the absolute smallest sliver of payback they were owed, and everyone was cheering over it like it was damn Mardi Gras.

“You sound happy, fighters.”

A cheer came back at him.

“Well, cut it the fuck out.”

That did it. There was a sudden silence.

“Get mad. Remember the way you grew up. Remember what it was like to see Earth and have to leave again. Remember every single person they took from us, and get mad. You see that destroyer hiding back there? We’re its worst goddamned nightmare. They came to take our planet, send our kids to die in the stations. Hell, our generation is dying to take back Earth. You think for a second we should have had to do that? It was our goddamned planet!”

Silence echoed down the line at him.

“Well, they’ve just learned how hard it is to watch their ships cut down like they’re nothing, and I say we teach them a few more lessons right now. You heard Walker. We took out their capital ships, and now we’re going to take down the rest so there’s nothing left of theirs to make it back to Earth. So if you’re with me, get out there and hunt them down—and do it for the people you lost, do it because the owe us this fucking much, not because it’s some sort of victory. This day should never have happened.”

He pushed the yoke forward without even waiting for a response, and his craft leapt forward like it was a part of him. These new ships were works of art, almost a seamless piece of the pilot. It seemed to obey his very wishes as it ducked a spiraling piece of debris, shot under a vented chunk of the Telestine carrier, rooms gaping open into the black, and came up in an arc over the twisting, severed stem of the carrier, nose down, to fire along the top of the destroyer. Bullets streaked away in tiny bursts of light and lit up the hull as they drilled down. A quick glance showed Princess at his side, repeating the maneuver with a whoop.

Tocks came next, and she didn’t hold back: her cannons shuddered and a guided missile launched toward the bridge of the destroyer. “For Woof!”

One of the first lost at Jupiter. McAllister remembered his careless smile, the way he’d had a thing for one of the mechanics. Lost without a goodbye.

“For the Juno,” McAllister echoed as he flipped his ship nose up and began to climb toward the next target.

“For Whiskey,” Princess added.

A barrage from one of the Exile carriers hit home on a nearby destroyer, and a hoarse cheer told him that the Telestine ship was crippled, but the remembrances did not stop as they made for their next target.

“For Mama.” Whose voice it was, he didn’t know, but it broke on the words. He finally recognized it as Twister.

“For Jeremy.” Boracho let loose a stream of bullets to take out the one of the fighters as it came back in.

“For Beatriz.”

The hair was standing up on McAllister’s arms when the proximity alerts lit up red. He snapped out of the daze of the whispered requiem. “You want payback for them? We have fighters inbound. Everyone to starboard.”

They were laser focused now, his crew. The whispers continued, mostly indistinguishable as Telestine fighters burst apart.

But he had never seen their fighters like this, either. They had an edge to them now, they were swerving desperately as they fired, and something he could have sworn was a nuke missed McAllister’s fighter by scant meters.

“Jesus!”

What the hell was going on here? A few seconds before, the Telestine fleet had been caught unawares, it had been crippled. Now they were sending in nukes?

And then he understood. “Listen up, fighters—these bastards have nowhere to go home to, they know this is the end and they want to make us hurt. Well, screw them. They came to our home. Be careful, stay frosty, and take them out.”

“Anyone want to start up a count?” Princess had a way of rallying newbies. He gave a satisfied laugh. “I’m at four.”

“Three,” Twister chimed in. She stayed true to her name by spiraling around a Telestine fighter’s stream of bullets as she arrowed in, and she shot through the cloud of debris with a triumphant yell. “Four now. You gonna let me break away?”

“You got yourself a bet, newbie. You lose, you drink a whole mug of my beer and compliment it when you’re done.”

“I wouldn’t worry about the compliment,” Tocks chimed in. “Four. Five. Six. Get in the game! Anyway, she’ll be dead by the time she’s done with that swill.”

“Hey! It doesn’t count if you knock one into another,” said Boracho.

“That absolutely counts,” Princess weighed in. “Chief?”

“I’ll allow it.” McAllister squinted as one of their fighters kept dancing out of his line of sight. “Come on, fugger, come on.” It darted around a piece of debris and he was right on its tail. The second time, he was ready for it, spinning his ship at the same time that he turned. It was blown into another chunk of the carrier as it tried to right itself and make another turn, and he gave a little hiss of pleasure. “One.”

“Late to the game, chief.” Princess waggled his wings.

“If anyone can make it up, it’s the CAG,” Tocks argued. “Seven. Although all of you are falling behind as we speak. Eight.”

“Look at the Santa Maria!” Twister’s voice was awestruck.

McAllister took his next target down before turning end over end to look, and his jaw dropped open. The Santa Maria was forging through the battlefield, all batteries firing. A ship that big should not be so nimble, but the helmsmen of the Exile Fleet had trained on shoddy cargo haulers and fuel tankers, and watching them maneuver new ships was a thing of beauty. As McAllister watched, the Exile Fleet pierced through the wall of the broken Telestine formation, blowing a cloud of debris before it. The sight took the breath from his lungs.

Victory. He’d never thought he would live to see something like that.

His radio crackled. “—man ships—down—human sh—”

“Does anyone else hear that?” Newbie Four.

“I’ve got it,” Tocks called.

“Less listening to the radios, more revenge,” McAllister called. A guided missile took out one of the fighters banking back toward the Intrepid, and he flipped to direct a stream of bullets at one of the ones trying to take the underside of the Santa Maria. He was turning again when he realized that the fighters seemed to be turning en masse to head back through the field of debris, and only after he’d taken another down did he notice the unusual silence on the channel.

He’d been so focused on the crippled hulk of the capital ship that he’d failed to notice anything beyond it, and he hadn’t paid any attention to the red dot on his map, but when he glimpsed it his stomach flipped so hard he thought he might be sick.

A new Telestine carrier, a massive ship that brought to mind the desperate fight at Mercury. How it was here so suddenly, he did not know. All he knew was that it was there, and it was broadcasting in a tinny mechanical voice.

“Human ships stand down. Move out of the line of fire. Human ships stand down. Move out of the line of fire.”

Chapter Fifty-Four

Vesta

VFS Santa Maria

Bridge

“Human ships stand down. Move out of the line of fire. Human ships stand down. Move out of the line of fire.”

“And there’s the missing puzzle piece,” Delaney murmured. The whole bridge was staring at the screens in horror.

The carrier was so big that it did not even fit in their field of view. It glided through the outer edge of the wreckage cloud, broadcasting its strange message. Its cannons were heating, Walker saw—and with a strange clarity, she saw that they were not pointing at any ship in the fleet. They were pointing at Vesta.

“Get ready to take this one down,” she murmured to Delaney.

“Don’t you think we should wait—”

“No. Until further notice, a Telestine warship is fair game.” She picked up the comm unit, and stopped dead as another voice came over the main channels.

“Exile Fleet, this is Secretary General Essa, broadcasting from the Anchor. Good evening to all of you in the fleet.” The carrier disappeared from the viewscreens, and was replaced by a different image: Essa on the bridge of the Anchor, smiling beatifically on the screen. He was in full Jupiter’s Sword mode: his old fleet sash tied across his chest, bars clearly displayed atop his UN uniform. He wasn’t letting them forget where he started.

A murmur rose up around the room, and Walker experienced the strong urge to put her fist through the viewscreen. The hand holding her comm unit dropped slowly away from her mouth.

“He can’t leave well enough alone, can he?” Delaney asked in a murmur.

“Apparently not.”

“You are all no doubt wondering why I have decided to join the fleet at Vesta.” Essa smiled.

Behind him, Morgan and the rest of the crew pretended to be very busy planning a battle. Their movements were wooden, and Walker could perfectly imagine the scene that must have played out earlier that day, Essa’s voice directing a practice run of the current pantomime: you should definitely move some models around on the table. Morgan, pretend to explain something. Feinstein, look as if you’re thinking.

“The morale of our fleet has been low, and so it is important for me to show my trust in you by coming here tonight to oversee this battle and shift the tides of war in our favor.”

“If he can do that,” Walker whispered to Delaney, “I’m fine having him along for the ride. Think he can manage it?”

His shoulders shook in a silent laugh.

“You have won the first stage of this battle,” Essa told them, “and I applaud your effort. You have ever stood ready to protect humanity. Vesta holds nearly a million inhabitants, and is indispensable to the stations.”

“However, I must ask something different of you now.” Essa’s hands were folded in his lap. “I have just now finished speaking with Tel’rabim, the commander of the Telestine forces.”

Walker gripped the table, her mouth falling open in horror.

No. It was impossible. She shook her head, trying to banish this nightmare from the screen.

But Essa’s voice did not stop. “It is becoming clear that certain factions in Telestine society may be a threat not only to the Telestine government, but to all humanity. For this urgent purpose, Tel’rabim and I will meet soon to discuss a joint effort against these common enemies. For now, I must ask you all to stand down.”

“What the hell is he talking about?” Walker stared at Delaney. “Get him off the comms, I don’t care what you have to do, call their communications officer—”

She broke off as something caught her eye in the back of the shot: a man moving purposefully, too thin and wearing an ill-fitting uniform, but with a deferential sense of calm that would almost certainly cause people’s eyes to skip over him. In point of fact, she could not tell why she’d noticed him at all.

Delaney had paused with the comm unit up to his ear. “What is it?”

“Jack, do you know that man?” She pointed.

“Can’t say I do.” Delaney shrugged. “Why?”

And then she remembered, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach.

Larsen appeared at her shoulder a moment later. “Ma’am, there’s a private call for you from Mr. Tang, he says it’s an urgent matter about the ships on Mars.”

She took the headset, fumbling with suddenly-clammy hands.

“Walker?”

“Nhean, I need to speak with Parees. Now.”

“Parees? What—Walker, please. The bombs are gone. They were never here. Only one bomb was sent to Mars. And I think the rest are headed your way.”

“No. No. … No.” Her lips were numb. “Something is wrong on the Anchor.”

Chapter Fifty-Five

Mars, High Orbit

Koh Rong

“Something is wrong on the Anchor.”

Nhean saw it in the same moment she spoke the words, and he sat bolt upright. It wasn’t Parees, he told himself. It couldn’t possibly be Parees, because Parees was being treated in an infirmary.

Walker must have relayed the video feed through the FTL comm right then, because the image appeared on his screen.

There he was, Parees, passing behind the communications officers and circling closer. The girl was frozen, one hand over her mouth, and Pike’s mouth had dropped open in shock.

“Jesus Christ. Get someone to stop him! Now!”

The girl scrambled up. Her hands were on the board. They clenched the jagged edges so tightly that blood began to seep across the slick white surface. Her eyes are locked on Parees and her lips were moving.

“He’s human,” Pike told her urgently. “He isn’t—”

She shook her head. Once, only once.

“He’s not human?” Pike asked. His mouth opened, and then closed, and with a rush of absolute terror, Nhean realized what he was about to say.

No. No, don’t say those words.

“Parees is a drone?” Pike asked. He looked at Nhean.

There was a moment of utter silence.

“Oh, my God.” The voice that came out of him didn’t sound like his. Nhean stared back up at the screen.

“What’s going on?” Walker’s voice.

“He’s a drone.” He heard his own voice as if from very far away. “Parees is a drone.”

“What?”

“You have to stop him.” He sounded far, far too calm.

And it was too late, in any case. Whatever was happening, they were never going to make it in time. He watched in horror as Parees leaned down to place a hand on Essa’s shoulder.

“Excuse me, sir.” His voice was as low and smooth as always, pleasant on the ear. “I have a message I need to deliver on this videocast.”

“Oh, no,” Nhean murmured.

“Who sent you? Walker?” Essa shook his head. “Tell her that now is neither the time nor the place for her grandstanding.”

Run, goddammit, run! The words were a silent scream across the distance.

The girl’s eyes were closed tight as she tried to force her will across millions of miles.

Parees was not deterred in the slightest by Essa’s icy politeness. “Sir, I really must insist.”

“No,” Essa said flatly. He gestured to the bridge. “Morgan. Get this man out of here.”

“I must be allowed to speak!” Parees looked panicked now.

“Security,” Essa growled.

Everything happened so fast that even Nhean didn’t catch it all. Morgan turned to gesture to the two military police at the doorway. The XO, quicker than the rest of the group, reached out to grab Parees by the arm; then there was yelling; and then there was a gun with the muzzle at the side of Essa’s head and Parees was white faced, shaking with effort as the crew on the bridge of the Anchor froze in horror. They had been ready for a battle, and then just before they left there had been a flurry of activity and the UN Secretary General boarded their ship, delaying their arrival. When they arrived at Vesta, the battle was well underway, and in the chaos, no one had thought to lock the bridge doors. No one had thought to account for a civilian aboard the carrier.

“I must be allowed to speak!” Parees was crying now. He gestured with the gun.

Essa, at least, did not descend into hysterics. He sat stoically, hands wrapped around the arms of the chair.

There was a stricken silence. Morgan was frozen with one hand on the comm, as if the problem with this situation was that not enough people knew about it. His XO still had her hands up, as if to assure Parees that he didn’t need to get spooked. The communications officers weren’t speaking, though Nhean imagined their headsets must be full of increasingly hysterical questions from the other ships.

Parees gave a shudder and his finger began to squeeze on the trigger. A yell burst out of him as he stared Essa down. He was panting now; Essa remained as still as a statue.

“I must be allowed to speak,” Parees gritted out. He did not look at the camera. “People have to know this. The fleet is … full of drones. Mechanics from Vesta. Some pilots. They’re—ah!” Pain seemed to wrack him. He forced the words out. “They’re—everywhere. Taking orders. If humans falter … drones take over. Sabotage. Drive us to war.”

Nhean’s eyes narrowed. He looked over at the girl. Was it her?

“They have orders. Ways to take down the stations. Ways to kill the cities. They have the orders, maybe don’t even know they have them. They wait—and then the trigger comes and they act. Airlock overrides. Assassinations.” His finger trembled on the trigger. “You’ll never know them. They learned. They integrated.”

Essa came to life for the first time. He turned his head very slowly to look up at Parees. He spoke gently, as a proud grandfather to a crying child. “You came to warn us about the drones?”

“Yes,” Parees whispered.

“You say there’s no way to know them, but surely there must be. We have to be able to find them. Do you think you can help me do that … what is your name?”

“Parees.” One lip had cracked, and was bleeding. Tears were starting again in Parees’s eyes. “I didn’t want to do it,” he pleaded.

“Do what, Parees?” The power behind Essa’s persona had never been more apparent. Even Nhean, watching in horror, felt the urge to spill his secrets to this man, seek his approval.

“Kill you. I had to come kill you. Got the orders—weeks ago.” He shuddered, and his entire body twisted under the strain.

With a rising horror, Nhean remembered his first interview with Parees. Then, Parees had been a skinny bundle of too-long teenaged limbs, shrugging his shoulders: Don’t know what a birth certificate is. Never got one.

And your father and mother?

He remembered the fear in Parees’s eyes. And he, Nhean, had been too young and stupid to realize that that could mean any number of things. He remembered the stations. He remembered the terror in some children’s eyes.

And, of course, like everyone, he’d known that drones were stupid and suggestible and not really human at all.

All these years…. Scrawny teenager to young man, miner’s brat to capable assistant. And Nhean had never once suspected the truth.

“You don’t have to kill me,” Essa told Parees. In a room with Walker, he was all malice; now, he was calm and gentle. “You can put the gun down if you want, Parees. Would you feel better if you did that?”

Parees hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“You said you don’t want to kill me.”

“I don’t. I—don’t! I don’t. Don’t want to do this.”

“Parees.” Essa’s voice was calm. “Who ordered you to kill me?”

That was his fatal mistake, because that was something Parees had apparently been forbidden from answering. Nhean watched as he fought the pain, face contorting, bending toward the gun, putting both hands on it as if a feat of strength would be necessary to drag it out of place. He opened his mouth to speak, his body went rigid, and the blast of the shot reverberated through the videocast. Blood splattered onto the screen and there was screaming, shouting. Nhean just had time to see Parees face the center console.

“You have to destroy all of them! Destroy the heart of it or it will consume you!”

Parees reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, grey cylinder. The gun clattered to the deck as he held the cylinder out in front and then raised it up, above the frantic fray of officers and military police that swarmed around him and Essa.

“No!” Nhean was up out of his chair and yelling, and the girl was staring at the screen in horror.

She threw out her bleeding hands, her mouth opening in a silent scream, but it was too late.

With a calm, fluid movement, Parees looked up even as he began to be pulled down to the ground. Arm still raised, he pressed the button as he disappeared into the struggle surrounding him. The video cut off abruptly as a flash of light burst across the monitors.

And the settlement at Vesta was entirely gone. Vesta itself almost entirely gone, as not one, but a handful of explosions erupted from the surface, blasting rock and molten metal out into space.

“No,” Nhean whispered again.

His helmsman had jammed her hand into her mouth to stop the sound that was coming from her, a high sort of animal wailing, and she curled her legs up to her chest as the picture cleared on debris: rocks tumbling, chunks of the ships that had been docked, the mining operations belching out flame and going abruptly quiet.

Nhean sank back into his chair, shuddering.

Parees. Parees had been a drone, Parees had gotten orders from Tel’rabim.

He stopped.

And then his world seemed to turn upside down.

Because he knew.

She’s telling you everything. There had been a pleading note in Parees’s voice that day. And then, in a panic: You have to destroy all of them! Destroy the heart of it or it will consume you!

In horror, Nhean felt his fingers move to bring up the pictures he had spent days staring at. There’s a saint, and she clearly doesn’t like what’s going on in that city. A cult. Someone blew something up.

“They blew up the sun.” The words fell out of his mouth and they were wrong, they had to be wrong because they were ridiculous—but he had never been so sure of anything in his life. “They blew up their own sun,” he repeated, numb.

She had told them everything. Ka’sagra had told them everything, right down to why she liked Walker and Tel’rabim so damned much.

After all, two opposing and highly capable strategists could help quite a lot of people ascend to heaven. They could help everyone ascend, human and Telestine, both. And heaven wasn’t a future abstraction. It was here. It was now.

He suddenly remembered Worthlin’s mention of the word cult, and why it had struck him at the time.

“Son of a bitch,” Nhean said, with feeling. “It’s goddamned death cult.”

With Ka’sagra at the helm.

Suddenly, Tel’rabim’s warning to stay away from Vesta made sense. Suddenly, the silence from Earth didn’t seem so strange. Tel’rabim hadn’t reacted to the attack because he hadn’t known it was coming—and, then, because he’d had the good sense to be suspicious about who might have done it.

And Parees … Parees had tried desperately to keep from carrying out his orders.

There was no way he could have known, Nhean told himself. There was no way he could have known any of it.

But that still left one million dead.

“What?” Pike looked at him like he was crazy.

Behind him, the girl was rocking back and forth. To Nhean’s shock, he heard a whisper break loose from her lips: “No.”

“What did you say?” Pike repeated.

“Sir, the fleet is turning to disperse.”

“No time,” Nhean said to Pike. He turned to the helmsman. “Get us to one of the dark points. Any of them. Lagrange Two at Jupiter. Go there. And don’t tell anyone where we’re going, except … send one message.” Nhean opened his mouth and hesitated. “To Tel’rabim. Tell him that I believe him. Tell him that I want to help him find Ka’sagra and kill her.”

Chapter Fifty-Six

Vesta

VFS Santa Maria

Bridge

They stared at the rubble, open-mouthed. At the blank screens. There was a vivid memory of blood and gore, and Parees screaming as he was dragged away from the desk far too late.

Vesta was gone. One million lives, snuffed out. And how many ships—

Too many.

Walker shuddered, and felt herself split in two: the first part open-mouthed, blank with horror; the second part cold and calculating. She listened to the second part, as she always did, and it told her now that this was no time for grief. It told her that what they had wanted to protect was gone. It told her to run before their ships were snuffed out one by one by the cannons that were starting to glow.

“Larsen, message to the helmsmen. Get us out. Fighters dock within one minute or hide in the asteroid belt and we’ll be back in a few days. Split the fleet according to….” Her finger traced down a list she kept always at hand. “Plan Mu.” The fleet would split, each traveling to seven assigned points, one group rejoining the flagship at each point. “Broadcast. Now.”

“But—” Delaney looked sick. “The survivors—”

“Wounded is worse than dead,” she told him brutally. “If we stop to help them, we all die and there will be no fleet.”

The image of the child juggling the small pile of rocks in a hallway on Vesta reared into her mind. And the other child, the girl with the old, worn ball. Could they be alive? Was there a chance anyone was alive?

“We can’t just—”

She wanted to slap him. Instead, she grabbed the front of his uniform and pulled him close. “How many ships do you think Mercury can produce?” She spat the question at him. “We have nothing in the pipeline. We have lost the mines at Vesta. We … cannot … rebuild. These ships are all we have left, and I am getting them to safety. There will be time for grieving later.”

That, and time to find out who the hell had planned this assassination attempt.

Which reminded her of one more thing. She gestured to Larsen, who hurried close. She pulled him down so his ear was a hairsbreadth from her mouth.

“Tell the new engineers to lock Nhean out of the server rooms, and begin changing the authorization codes. Do it now. And do what you can to get into his systems. He’ll have bombs that were left on Mars. We need them.”

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Jupiter’s L2 Lagrange Point

Koh Rong

The bridge was quiet. The helmsman had been dismissed, although the proximity map had been stretched to cover three walls, so that Nhean would not miss any approaching ships.

He could not be too careful until the fleet was back under his control.

Nearby, the girl sat quietly. She still had no name that she would divulge, but she spoke of other things in hoarse words that sometimes did not quite fit together. She spoke of the feel of Tel’rabim’s computer systems, life in the laboratories, escaping the Intrepid in search of Ka’sagra. That Parees was a drone, and that even she had not realized until she saw the way he was moving onscreen.

She spoke.

“There were no … thoughts,” she said simply. Quietly, she added: “Fear of Ka’sagra. He and I. Should know—have known.” She shook her head and took a moment to try to put the thought into a sentence. “He was the only other one … who feared Ka’sagra. He did not want to meet her. I should have known.” She spoke carefully, as if English were a foreign language to her.

They said no more, and Nhean could not bear to think of Parees now.

The buzz of the comms recalled him. The girl sat up, out of sight but alert.

Tel’rabim’s face swam into focus on the viewscreen, and he allowed Nhean no time to speak. “I sent you a message!”

So this was how it was going to be. Nhean bit back a sigh. “In the future, if you want a group of your enemies to stand back while you destroy their allies and their own settlements, I would suggest telling them why.”

Tel’rabim stopped in the middle of a retort, his mouth open. “I told you it was for your own good.”

“Yes,” Nhean said patiently. “And what evidence have you provided that we can trust you?”

There was a long silence. Tel’rabim looked away.

At the table out of sight, the girl scribbled a note and passed it to Nhean. His eyebrows rose as he read it.

“You didn’t think when you sent that message, did you?” he asked quietly. “You sent it the way it would have been sent to another Telestine. The words were only part of it. It didn’t occur to you that we would think it was a lie.”

Tel’rabim had dropped his forehead into one hand. Now his head came up. “I sent you a message,” he said again, quietly. “I tried to get you out of the way. It was the only way to get rid of her, and now I can’t even be sure we’ve done that. She destroyed the moon herself—I doubt she did so while she was still there.”

“Yes,” Nhean said softly. “That is true. Out of curiosity … when did you realize? Have the Telestines always known what the Daughters of Ascension were?”

“We knew what they had been in our home system.” Tel’rabim shook his head. “That they believed the ascension could only be achieved by violence … no. We did not know that. Our journey from our system must have changed them more than we knew.”

Nhean stopped. “You don’t know.”

“I do not know what?”

Nhean exchanged a quick look with the girl.

You have to tell him, her eyes insisted.

“I do not know what?” Tel’rabim’s inflections were innately Other, and he was struggling with the human language.

“The Daughters of Ascension destroyed your star,” Nhean told him.

Tel’rabim’s face went entirely blank. “That is a lie. A human lie. You lie like you breathe.”

“It is not a lie!” Nhean’s hand clenched.

“You are saying that our disaster was not … natural?”

“Yes. I am saying that.”

“You are saying that a group that preaches about the ascension, that brings food and medicine to all, somehow destroyed a star and took billions of lives.” Tel’rabim was clearly struggling between his innate desire to believe, and his disbelief that any part of this could be true.

“Yes, I will find proof for you.”

“You are telling me that my family was murdered.” Tel’rabim was beginning to rock back and forth. His tone was not so angry as before, but lost. Could he, too, see the tiny hints slotting into place in a larger pattern? “That the bad luck of the Telestines, the justice on which I based the seizure of your planet, all of it was a lie? That our planet was destroyed by a willful act and our own people were murdered?”

“Yes,” Nhean said quietly.

Tel’rabim stared him down. The strange pupils were dilating and shrinking by turns. A flutter in the gills by his throat seemed to indicate distress, though Nhean did not know enough to know if he was interpreting that correctly.

“They came with us,” Tel’rabim said simply. “As we journeyed across the stars. They gained followers, they spoke of the trials of the living and the heaven that awaited us. I knew that they planned to make us kill one another, I learned that … recently.” His face twisted. “But now you tell me that they had done it before. This was just planning to do it again, another way.”

“Yes.” There was nothing else to say. What could you say to someone who learned that the suffering of their species had been entirely unnecessary? This was not a small terrorist attack. It was genocide.

“I will … speak to you again.” Tel’rabim cut the connection.

Nhean tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair for a moment. He exchanged one look with the girl. “What do you think?” he asked her.

“You think—” She broke off. “I think,” she corrected herself. “Ka’sagra is not problem.”

Nhean blinked at her. “I beg your pardon?”

She held up two fingers. “Humans and Telestines.” One finger came down. “One planet.” She lifted her shoulders. “He kills Ka’sagra. What then?”

It took him a moment to parse it. “You mean, the enemy of my enemy is not always a friend,” he said quietly.

“Yes.” She spoke even that small word with care. “And….” She looked around, eyes traveling over the room as if to see who might be listening. “Walker.”

Nhean looked down at his lap, eyes drifting closed. “I….”

“You know,” she said softly.

“How do you know?” He picked his head up to look at her. He wanted to be wrong about this, but if she had seen the same thing he did….

He was not wrong.

“People who can talk do not listen. I listen.” Her eyes were calm. “Maybe wrong.”

“Maybe. You know we’re not wrong, but maybe.” Nhean reached for a button on the comm unit and paused, finger hovering just above it. “So do you think you’ll be going back to being a mute, if it helps you see things so clearly?”

Anything to distract himself.

“No.” One shoulder lifted. Her eyes were far away. “A little. I want to learn to talk.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Humans talk. I was not … human.” She did not flinch from it. There was a sudden clarity in her eyes as she raised her head. “I am not human.”

Nhean said nothing. He would have reassured her, but there was no pain in her words.

“I failed.” She said the words in a strange staccato rhythm. “Parees. The orders. I failed. I … tried … to change them. To reach him. Maybe if I finished—if Tel’rabim finished … me. Maybe I could succeed.”

Nhean looked away. “Finish you? I think you know we can’t let Tel’rabim get his hands on you again.”

She nodded once, but the next moment, a data disk appeared in her hand. “You could do it.”

Nhean stared at the disk, and then back at her face. “I…”

She walked to him, feet placed carefully on the metal floors. Her fingers pressed the disk into his palm. “You need me.” It was a fact. “All of me. The completed me.”

He took the disk. He did not know what to say to that.

He would find something to say later. He reached out to press the button for a call to Walker. “First things first. Shall we learn the truth about Walker?”

She settled down next to his chair on the floor. “Maybe wrong,” she said simply. She looked up at him. “Not wrong. But maybe.”

He managed half a smile. “Maybe,” he agreed. He paused, and dropped his hand away from the button. “Wait. Pike should see this.”

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Mars

Carina Station

VFS Santa Maria

Bridge

“Hello.” Walker kept her eyes locked on the screen as the techs began a trace on the message. Scattered on the desk were the blueprints from the bombs. Nhean’s ship had left so quickly from Mars that the bomb itself had been left behind. Now aboard the Anchor, it was being deconstructed very, very carefully. She moved the papers out of sight and smiled at Nhean. “Are you planning to rendezvous with the fleet again? We’re nearing the final meet-up.”

“Perhaps.” Nhean looked calm. Far too calm. “I think it depends on how this conversation goes. After all, you’ve made it quite clear that I am not welcome there.”

“It was only proper to have our own techs overseeing the control of the fleet,” Walker told him. She had been ready for this. “Control by civilians is not acceptable. I assume you had always intended us to control the ships at some point. We can hardly have two fleets on two different administration and command systems.”

“Indeed. And what of your plans for Earth?” The question was swift and unexpected.

Walker went cold. For four weeks now she had seen Nhean watching her. The little turns of phrase she used with the rest of the fleet, the tiny evasions, had never been noticed. Until now.

She reacted on autopilot. A jab of her finger cut Nhean’s audio and her eyes went around the room. “Dismissed, all of you.”

She was silent until they were gone. Her heart was pounding.

There was no point in evasion. He knew the truth. That much was clear.

“What do you want?” she asked him when they were alone. “A post in the fleet? My head on a platter?” She had to find out what he wanted, and give it to him. “Why have you said nothing until now?”

“Because I could not believe it,” he said simply. “Even when I heard you speak to Ka’sagra, I could not understand your choice. Have you ever been to Earth, Laura?”

“No.” She said the world coldly. “I have seen it, and that is enough.”

“Do you not find it beautiful?”

“Of course I find it beautiful. Death traps are always beautiful. Otherwise they would not be traps.” She should not say this out loud, but she was so tired of lying. All of the years of not screaming her fury at them, shaking every last one of the fools who claimed they could get Earth back.

They could never get Earth back.

Earth was lost. Earth was a dream. A siren. A mirage.

“How do you tie a race to slavery?” she asked him. “You put them in the very shadow of the thing they want most and you make it impossible to reclaim. How many years have we lost? We could be gone by now, out there, amongst the stars. We could have the life we one day dreamed of having, but there are those who will keep looking backwards as long as they are able. I would free us from those shackles.”

“By destroying Earth.” He spoke the words wonderingly, as if he still could not believe it.

“It cannot be reclaimed!” The words burst out of her. “The Telestines won’t just be defeated and leave Earth unscathed for us to claim. They’ll never, ever do that. They must be defeated permanently, or they will always be a danger to us. What is the greatest danger in this world? Someone else with the same needs. There are few enough planets, and now there are two races who want the same ones. If we cannot have Earth back—and we cannot—then I will destroy it if I must, to take our enemy and our shackles in one blow. Do you understand me?”

“I understand.” His face was a mask. “But how do you think we will survive that?”

“The way we survive everything,” she said wearily. “By willpower and ingenuity. The reason we are not surviving it now is that we see no need. We tell ourselves fairy tales of reclaiming Earth. There is no hope of that.” She waved a hand towards the wall and the stars beyond. “There’s a whole galaxy out there, Nhean. Limitless potential. And we chain ourselves to the false hope of getting our home back.”

She was trying to persuade him, she realized now. All she had ever wanted was to have someone else understand this. Pike … could never understand. Could he? She wanted him to, so badly. For a long time, she had hoped that he of all people might come to see Earth for the trap it was, but the truth was that he never would. He had been born under those skies. He still remembered fresh air in his lungs. She had faced that, now.

“So what do you want?” she asked him again.

“My fleet back,” Nhean said promptly.

“We need that.” She did not flicker.

“You want to destroy a planet with it. That was not its purpose.”

“You wanted to save humanity with it, and that, I will do.”

There was a silence, and then he reached forward and cut the call, and in the silence of her room, Laura Walker clenched her hands and tried to remember how to breathe.

***

In the Koh Rong, in a ship hidden by the cluster of asteroids and debris caught up in the exact cancellation of Jupiter’s and the Sun’s gravity, Pike doubled over and threw up on the floor.

“She wants to destroy Earth,” he whispered. He had to say it, or he wouldn’t believe it. “She wants to destroy Earth.” He looked up at them, Nhean and the girl, two pairs of black eyes watching him calmly, and anger came in a rush. “Why the hell did you make me watch that?”

Nhean’s face was implacable. “You would never have believed it unless you saw it with your own eyes, and you had to believe it.”

“I could have mourned her if she was dead,” Pike said thickly. “I could have … if she’d died in battle, I could have mourned her. But now….” Now she was just as gone as if she’d been dead, and he could not even mourn. How could you mourn a person like that?

“I don’t need you to mourn her,” Nhean said simply. “I need you to change her mind. We need her as an ally when Tel’rabim realizes we are still at odds, and you are the only one she will let close enough. You are also the only one who can get close enough to do what must be done if her mind cannot be changed.”

Pike looked up at him in horror.

“Laura Walker,” Nhean explained, “is one of the greatest tacticians we have, perhaps the greatest, and certainly the best positioned to act. If she sets her mind to destroying Earth, do you think for a moment that she will fail?”

Slowly, Pike shook his head.

“Then make your peace with that fact,” Nhean told him flatly. “And decide what you will do if you cannot persuade her.”

Pike shuddered, rolled over, and began to heave again. The girl walked towards him, carefully, with delicate steps. She placed the back of her small hand lightly against his spasming shoulder, and cupped her fingers.

It was an odd gesture, Nhean thought. Not human. But then, she wasn’t truly human, was she? She was something else. An other.

But that didn’t mean she couldn’t show compassion. It didn’t mean she wasn’t, in some fundamental way, true. And it didn’t mean that he didn’t trust her.

Nhean’s thoughts flickered back to the conversation he’d been in a rush to leave back in the Constantine Gardens. “To trust the other, to trust an enemy, especially when our interests align … now that takes real faith,” Worthlin had said.

So. It did not matter then. The Telestines could be the end of humanity, or underground demons, or simply unimaginably distant. Whatever they were, they were other. And the girl, too, was other. And he, Nhean—the human who had built his life by seeing through webs of information built to hide deceit and deception—he was going to need faith.

He was going to trust this other.

Thank you for reading Jupiter’s Sword, book 2 of the Earth Dawning Series. If you enjoyed this book, would you please leave a review?

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