Prologue

Ganymede, High Orbit

VSF Arianna King

Captain’s Quarters

Larsen closed his eyes and let out a slow breath as his muscles finally started to relax. He sunk into his plush chair—a rare luxury he hadn’t had in his old quarters aboard the Intrepid, but which Nhean’s Venetian ships had in abundance. The relative silence of his cabin was starting to make a dent on the headache he’d had since he woke up.

He had been in command of the Arianna King for only three weeks, a span that felt simultaneously like a lifetime, and the blink of an eye. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept through the night. Since the destruction of Vesta, Tel’rabim had gone into overdrive—and the Exile Fleet had no choice but to match him.

With no way to know how the Telestine was picking his targets, all they could do was try to head him off at the pass when he engaged. So far, Tel’rabim had only hit one target at a time, and they’d been able to hold him off. But they couldn’t do that forever. His fleet seemed to have grown. It was everywhere at once.

And they were losing ships—and civilians. A week ago, the battle for Ganymede had been fought to a draw, Tel’rabim’s fleet melting away into the darkness, but not before an aid station had been taken out.

The over-blown rumors of humanity’s imminent defeat were constant. Things weren’t there yet. But the number of soldiers in mourning was achingly high, and Larsen did not begin to know how to broach the topic with his new crew members. In a sense, it was not his place. He was new to command, and did not want to insult them by pretending to be an authority on their grief.

And people knew he was part of Walker’s inner circle, which meant people knew he had been involved in the planning of the battle of Vesta.

He had been one of the ones who failed to save their families.

Their families were gone.

Vesta was gone.

They, all of them, needed to simultaneously grieve and blow off some steam. Forget all their troubles and worries.

He had a sudden thought, and sat up in his chair to tap the comm controls. “Captain Larsen to—” what was his new ops chief’s name again? So many new faces… “Lieutenant Zemecki. Lieutenant, as soon as repairs are mostly complete from Ganymede, I want to have a little get-together for the crew down in the fighter bay. Like a hybrid memorial service and celebration. Start solemn, remember the dead, and then break out the booze, dartboards, and dance music. Can you start setting something like that up?”

Silence.

Damn. Did he get the man’s name wrong and now he was getting the silent treatment? So many new recruits. So many fallen friends to replace, and from the beginning of his own command three weeks ago, he’d taken to naming things after the dead. The officer’s mess became the Captain Ed Noringe Memorial hall. The tiny conference room off the bridge was now the General Declan Essa room. Though given all soldiers’ propensity for both acronyms and vulgarity, they’d taken to calling it the GDE room, and from there, the “goddamn effer” room.

Soldiers will be soldiers, after all. And it captured most of their feelings about the former impetuous leader.

And finally, with Walker’s blessing, he’d re-christened the VSF Anemone as the VSF Arianna King.

Lieutenant Theo McAllister himself came and scrawled her name on the hull with a laser-cutter. He spent far more time working on it than Larsen would have expected.

“Zemecki?” He tapped on the panel. “Zemecki, I swear, if you’re—” The panel buzzed at him, indicating a closed channel. Damned Venetian software. Damn that Nhean. “What the hell?” He tapped another few times on the comm panel. Dammit, the damage from Ganymede must have affected the comm system. One more thing to fix.

He leaned back in his comfy Venetian chair. A year ago, he could never have dreamed he’d be here. He had spent his entire life in exile from Earth, and his choice to join the Exile Fleet had been prompted more by a desire for revenge than by hope. If he were honest, he had not really expected that they would take Earth back.

Then they had found the Dawning.

Not a piece of technology like they’d expected, but a girl. And yet, not quite a girl. And in her, they’d found a weapon to use against the Telestine technology that had always outstripped their own. They had gained ships from both Mercury’s new shipyards and Nhean’s secretly funded Venetian fleet, and followers during Secretary General Essa’s short reign at the UN, and they’d seen their fortunes briefly rise.

They had seen them fall, too. Tragically. Io. Vesta. Tens of thousands killed at Ganymede just five days ago.

If he had seen what was coming, would he have joined? He wasn’t sure. The cost of fighting was too high. He admitted that to himself sometimes.

But the cost of not fighting … was annihilation.

His personal comm buzzed and the pain in his head flared at the sound. Habit, however, was ingrained in him now. He winced as he sat up and pressed the button, even as he remembered that just moments ago, it was on the fritz.

“Larsen.”

“It’s Min.” His XO’s voice was unusually soft. “Uh … my terminal’s on the fritz, could you … come look at it?”

His too? Larsen glared at the comm. There was no reason that Min should have called him, but he didn’t want to be rude. They were all running on far too little sleep. He cleared his throat. “Mr. Min, this is actually Captain Larsen. Do you want me to call one of the techs for you?”

“No.” The answer was instant. A touch of irritation appeared in Min’s voice. “I want you to look at it. We’re all busy. I would like to take a break, too. But the command terminals cannot go down.”

The call ended and Larsen sat staring, open-mouthed, at the comm link.

Min was usually the epitome of courtesy, restraint, and professionalism. The man had never, so far as Larsen had seen, even raised his voice.

That included several desperately fought battles.

The fact that he was snapping now, and essentially ordering his commanding officer to come fix his computer terminal without so much as a “sir” or a “please” was so strange that Larsen had no idea what to make of it at all. Possibly, the man was having a breakdown. He needed to be relieved.

And as the captain of the Arianna King, that meant Larsen needed to take care of it. He shoved his feet into his boots and tried not to think about the fact that he should be resting right now. He had known when he took this job that being a captain was no easy task, and he’d be damned if he let Laura down.

Walker, he reminded himself. Not Laura. Walker. He knew he had a habit of calling her by her given name, and though it was only in his head, he could easily slip someday and embarrass himself. She had never so much as hinted that she welcomed anything more than professional courtesy from him. Even Delaney, a man who was more like her father than anything, was kept at arm’s length. Why should he be any different?

He slipped out into the hall and walked quickly through the not-quite-familiar halls. Everything on a missile frigate was smaller than it was on one of the carriers, for no reason that he could tell. And why the hell were missile frigates called missile frigates?

After all, it wasn’t like carriers didn’t have missiles. Every ship had missiles. But the term missile frigate had stuck around, a relic of humanity’s still-recent pre-apocalyptic past, as if people had run out of new names for things. A light, fast ship more given to reconnaissance than a good fight, the EFS Arianna King was one of the sleekest, most technologically advanced ships of the fleet Nhean had provided. Larsen was lucky to serve on her.

“Are you on your way?” Min’s voice was in his ear. Again, the man sounded curt.

Larsen wondered if anyone on the bridge would believe that his first officer was talking to the captain, and decided not. Min should realize that.

In fact … Larsen stopped, his eyes narrowing. Min had managed to summon Larsen to the bridge in a way that no one would know who he was talking to, if they were only listening to Min’s half of the conversation.

What if that wasn’t an accident?

That was when he heard the first gunshot.

He began to run. He shoved a shocked ensign out of the way, taking just enough time to grab her sidearm in the process. His, he had left on his bed. He vowed never to make that mistake again, and had the sudden, unsettling thought that he might not get the chance to.

The thought, at least, provided a nice jolt of adrenaline.

He pounded around the corner and through the closing bridge doors. His shoulder exploded with pain where it bounced off the airlock-safe door, and he lost his momentum as he stumbled, but he was through.

He had no time to recover. Someone slammed him sideways onto the floor as more gunshots rang out.

“Thank God,” Min said grimly. “It may be too late, but—”

“No time.” Larsen pushed himself up to scan the room quickly, and ducked back down as an officer he only vaguely knew took aim at him. Another bullet made a dent in the doors behind him.

Good. Let them waste their ammo.

“Two by the command desk, one over near the radar, and two more at the communications arrays. That sound right?” He shot Min a look.

“Three by the command desk.” Min’s face was tight. “Emmett’s in on it, and I think they killed the newbie.”

Adrian Zemecki was actually in no way a newbie, nor was he young—in fact, he and Larsen had enlisted together—but despite both his experience and his age, he appeared to be no older than fourteen, and had accepted the nickname of “the newbie” with good grace. He was one of the best members of Larsen’s crew. He’d just tried to call him to set up the memorial service.

And now he was dead.

Larsen readied his sidearm, pictured the last person he’d seen pointing a gun, and rolled to his knees for a single shot before hunkering down out of sight again. There was a scream that he savored more than he wanted to.

“What the hell do they want?” he muttered at Min.

There was no time for an answer. A hand closed around his shoulder and Larsen was yanked upright to see a furious face.

“You couldn’t just stay in your damned cabin for five minutes, could you?”

Larsen decided a punch to the face was a better bet than finding an answer. He ducked an answering swing and drove himself forward to slam his shoulder into his opponent’s solar plexus. There was a choking yell and the man went over backward, gasping for air. Larsen slammed a fist down, not so much caring whether he knocked the man out or just hurt him as long as the guy stayed on the ground and—seeing Min on his way to the command desk and the communications arrays—ran for the radar displays. A shot from his sidearm made one of Min’s opponents duck, and a second blew out another man’s femur. He fell with a scream.

The man at the radar desk was typing coordinates desperately into the navigation computer. Ensign Callahan. He’d come on board with Zemecki. If memory served, they were roommates, and friends.

Friends killing friends. Brothers killing brothers. The Telestines were going to have to hurry, or humanity would destroy itself without any help.

Callahan raised a gun as Larsen came closer, and Larsen saw the terror in his eyes. The gun was shaking wildly in his hand.

“Stay back!” His fingers hovered over the keys. The coordinates were only half complete.

He was young. That hit Larsen in the gut.

And that gun, shaking or not, was pointed right at Larsen.

“Stay … back!” Callahan repeated.

“You killed Zemecki,” Larsen said quietly. “He was your roommate. Your buddy.” There was a yell and a scream from behind him, followed by a crash, but he didn’t look away from the trembling young man. He didn’t drop his gun, but neither did he raise it. “He had a sister, did you know that? He served with me for three years. A good man. A good man.” He met his enemy’s eyes and saw him waver. “What’re you doing, Callahan?”

For a moment, the gun wavered. But just for a moment.

“What needs to be done.” The man’s chin was trembling. “Who’s she helping, huh? She’s a crazy bitch. She doesn’t care about any of us.”

“No,” Larsen agreed. “You’re right. She doesn’t.”

The man swallowed. He clearly hadn’t expected agreement. “Huh?”

“Laura Walker,” Larsen said quietly, “cares about maybe one person in the whole world.” He didn’t like thinking about who that was. It wasn’t Larsen, that was for sure. Not yet, anyway. “But she cares about humanity, even if she doesn’t give a damn about any one person. Do you understand that?”

“Don’t … defend her.” The man jabbed the gun toward Larsen.

“What do you think you’ll accomplish if you kill me?” Larsen asked. “I’m replaceable. All of us are. Just think, though. Think. What would you have done at Vesta? And the people telling you to do this right now, what would they have done, huh?” He took a step forward, slowly, his eyes still locked on the other man’s.

Behind him, the young officer Min was slowly approaching. Larsen did everything in his power not to look at him.

“She knew she was gambling with Callisto Heights!” The man threw the words at him.

Larsen winced on the inside. Callisto Heights Station. The Telestines were making a feint towards it right before they attacked Ganymede. Walker had, sensibly, ignored the feint. But Tel’rabim had indeed spared one of his ships to attack the tiny colony orbiting Callisto, and as a result of her choice, nearly two thousand civilians died.

“Maybe she did. But if you had to sacrifice a colony … or humanity, which would you choose? If a colony was the price of taking the Telestine fleet, what would you do? You don’t have to answer the way she would, but at least think about it. You—”

Min’s hand came down hard on the back of Callahan’s head. They grappled, Min’s hands going for the gun, the other man trying to struggle his way free desperately.

Larsen acted on instinct. One of his hands caught an arm and wrenched the gun free. “Min! Down!”

Min, bless him, didn’t waver. He hit the deck without hesitation and Larsen’s shot caught his opponent dead in the chest. The man staggered back, fingers coming up to the gushing wound and dropping away again, bloody and wet. His incredulous eyes met Larsen’s for a moment, and then he crumpled to the floor and the light faded from his eyes.

Min stood up slowly, looking down at the body.

He wanted to say good work, but Callahan’s young, surprised, dead face silenced him. “Open a call to the Santa Maria. We need to tell them what happened.”

“Channel’s already open.” Min jerked his head. “I think they were broadcasting to Walker when we interrupted them.”

Larsen was at the command desk in two strides, snatching up the headset. “Larsen here.”

“Oh, thank God.” Walker’s voice was filled with relief. “You’re all right. They didn’t get your ship.”

Larsen felt something in his chest unlock. “You’re all right,” he said quietly.

“I’m fine. They didn’t even try to take the Santa Maria.” He could practically see her shaking her head. “Make sure everything is locked down and then get over here. We’ll need status reports, and then … we need a plan.” She hesitated. “You’re sure? You’re sure no shuttles left, no munitions were taken? The payload you’d just received from the Santa Maria, that’s still secure?”

“I….” Larsen called up the security feeds of the shuttle bays and the gunnery. “There’s no sign of anything out of place anywhere but the bridge—”

“You have to be sure about this, Larsen. The payload that just arrived on your ship yesterday. Is it secure?”

Bewildered, he switched one of the security camera viewscreens to look at the tiny cargo bay. Everything looked normal and undisturbed. “Looks fine down there, Admiral.”

She gave a little sigh of relief.

“We need to find out who did this,” Larsen said.

“That,” Walker said, “and to figure out why about half of my fleet is now headed to Neptune, of all the godforsaken places.”

Larsen’s shoulders slumped. “They got some ships?”

For a moment, she didn’t answer. Finally he heard, “Look out the window.”

He was afraid to. He didn’t want to see this, whatever it was, but he punched at the controls until the video feed started.

“Son of a….” Min murmured.

Larsen couldn’t find it in himself to say anything. He watched the glow of the ships’ engines. They were beautiful, those ships. When he came into battle with the formation around him, he felt they had a fighting chance against Tel’rabim.

And half of them, right now, were accelerating away from the fleet and into the black.

CHAPTER ONE

Ganymede, High Orbit

EFS Anchor

Between the creaks and pops of metal, the constant cooling and heating, and the tremors of footsteps, a ship could never be silent—but Walker realized now that without the hum of voices, a ship could seem preternaturally still, at least. Her own footsteps echoed far too loudly as she walked the halls, and she could hear every breath Larsen and Delaney took as they walked behind her.

Hammers and wrenches clanked about as crew members repaired the damage to the bridge, but otherwise, the crew of the Anchor said nothing, did nothing. Captain Morgan was in a body bag on the floor of the docking bay, along with his first officer and a new ensign.

Morgan shot on the bridge by mutineers, not three weeks after Essa had suffered the same fate at the hands of the drone, Parees.

And then there was the news that half the fleet had left. There was a limit to how quiet Walker could keep that information—all they had to do was look around to realize the ships were gone.

Half the fleet. Good God. And to Neptune, of all the godforsaken places in the solar system. Just a bunch of wealthy colonists too good for the crowds on Mars or Perseverance Station or the snowball moons of Jupiter. Well, not wealthy wealthy. Not Venus wealthy. But apparently enough to arrange for the theft of almost twenty ships.

And it was quite literally the last thing she needed just now, when Tel’rabim’s fleet seemed to have doubled. He was hitting them all over. He’d hit Ceres a week ago. Now Ganymede, and poor Callisto Heights Station, God rest their souls. His targets didn’t really appear to be logical, other than to keep them on their toes and to inflict maximum carnage.

None of it made sense, beyond the fact that her crews were worn down, her ships were battered, and the last thing she could afford was to lose half of them.

She entered one of the gunneries and nodded to the crew members standing there. When they saluted, she saluted back, taking the time to make it a crisp gesture. In reality, there wasn’t much to see here, but she wanted the fleet to see her. She wanted them to know that they could come to her with information.

After a few greetings, she beckoned one of the crew aside, a man with greying hair and shocked black eyes.

“Are you all right?” she asked him quietly. She wouldn’t shame him in front of his crew mates.

“I was there when they shot the captain in the head,” he said, just as quietly. “I can’t stop seeing it. It just replays in my mind, over and over—” He flushed, ashamed at what he probably thought was weakness.

It wasn’t weakness. It was human.

“I still see Vesta in my dreams. I still see Essa’s murder as clear as day.” She didn’t like to admit these things, but he needed to know he wasn’t alone. “I remember how furious I was that we were being hunted like that, that we had to fight—and that I was afraid I would die there, that day. And when that drone, Parees, blew Essa’s head off, it made me realize something.”

He had turned his head away, but his eyes flew to her face.

“Moments like that break us,” Walker told him. “But if we stand together, we can’t fall. You joined up because you knew we needed you, and now we need you more than ever. We need you to bandage yourself up and get back in the game.” She nodded to Larsen. “You’re not alone in the things you saw. Captain Larsen lost one of the men he enlisted with. He saw his crew shot on the bridge.We’re all a bit broken right now—but our people can’t afford for that to slow us down.”

He nodded jerkily. “I understand, ma’am.”

She glanced at his name-tag, then back into his eyes. Fiercely. “Lieutenant Pierce. We need you,” Walker said again. She took the time to meet his eyes, surprised by just how much she meant those words. But she knew that one of the most motivating things for a human being to feel was to be needed. To feel like a hero.

“Yes, ma’am.” He was no less pale, but he was standing slightly taller now.

She nodded to him, and then around to the rest of the crew as she headed out.

She wanted them all to see her. She wanted anyone who still sympathized with the mutineers to know that she was still here. She was in control. They hadn’t won, and they wouldn’t. She had left it to McAllister to spread the word, quietly, that Larsen had killed three people trying to take the Arianna King.

They would know, God help her, that their actions had consequences. This wasn’t a game.

This was war. And in war, traitors get a bullet to the head or an all-expense-paid trip through the airlock.

Preferably both.

In the hallway, she stopped to consider. Where to next? Did she make a speech? She was trying to tackle a mutiny with a few words here and there, but was that the best way to do it?

“It’s not so bad,” Larsen said encouragingly.

She looked over her should at him as Delaney snorted.

“Not so bad?” the older man asked contemptuously.

“I just meant,” Larsen said carefully, “that the ships weren’t turned on one another, and the damage here is not as severe as it could have been. The situation is grave, but we have a great deal to work with.”

It was clearly an attempt to make her feel better, but it was also a good point. Walker managed a smile.

“A good reminder,” she said softly. She rubbed at her forehead. “I trust you’re both thinking about what steps to take next? We’ll need every idea we can get about who might have done this, and why, and how to fix it—quickly.”

“And we will fix it,” Delaney rumbled. “Bastards don’t know what they’re playing at.”

“We don’t know that.” Walker heard the irritation in her tone, and checked herself. “We should assume we know nothing and they know everything,” she added. “And go from there.”

“But we will fix it,” Larsen said. He shot a look at Delaney. “The commander is right. We will fix it.”

“We’d better hope so,” Walker said grimly. “Because if we don’t figure this shit out, it’s not just that we’re sitting ducks—it’s that we’ll kill each other before the Telestines even have a chance.” There was an awkward silence and she looked away with a sigh. “I’m sorry. That … wasn’t helpful.”

“Laura,” Delaney said, after an awkward moment.

Where he was going with that, she didn’t want to find out. She was worried, at this point, that she was going to break into an angry tirade if she didn’t get herself somewhere alone.

“I’m fine.” The words were too emphatic.

Delaney shut up. He knew her well enough for that, at least.

“We all need to gather information,” Walker continued, when she was sure her voice was steady. “Go. Learn what you can. Remember that pilots hear everything and their deck crews hear more than everything. Figure out who’s loyal and get them with their ear to the ground. Start with McAllister. Start with the pilots. They always seem to know everything that’s going on in the background.”

“I will.” Delaney nodded. “I’ll head back now.” He hesitated. “Call me if you need me. And … carry your sidearm.”

“Always do,” she told him quietly. She managed a bit of a smile. “I’m fine, Jack. I really am.”

“I know.” But his face was troubled as he turned to hurry away, back toward the aft docking bay where his shuttle waited.

Larsen, to her surprise, lingered. When she raised her eyebrows, he shrugged.

“No fighter pilots on my ship. Min has it locked down as well as I could. Is there anywhere else I’d be more useful?”

“Right.” She set off again, toward the bridge, and moved to let him fall into step beside her. “I forgot how small your crew is. On the plus side, whoever did this must be kicking themselves that they didn’t get a scout ship like that.” She grinned, and Larsen looked surprised. “Good work,” she added.

Lord knew, they all needed a bit of encouragement just now. She let her hand drift to the cross she wore around her neck, a gesture she did not often let herself make in the company of others.

He noticed, but said nothing, and in his silence, she felt she could say almost anything.

“I don’t understand,” she said finally. “Why Neptune? Nothing there but a few upscale colonies on Triton and Nereid and a few stations. No more than a few hundred thousand people there. No strategic significance. Why? Why … any of this? They sent a message saying they needed protection from Tel’rabim, but….”

“But?” Larsen asked curiously.

“But how does that make them different from anyone else?” She smiled bitterly. “Every colony needs protection. Every moon. Every station. There’s no reason to expect Tel’rabim would target them over anyone else. They were just rich people who wanted me to favor them, and I don’t do that. And yet, how they would have managed this, I have no idea.” She caught sighed of Larsen’s look: distant, as if he were trying to remember something. “What is it?”

He hesitated. “The officer on my ship, Callahan,” he said quietly. “I questioned him before … before I pulled the trigger. He said you didn’t care about anyone.” He gave her a quick glance. “I know that isn’t true,” he assured her.

“Every time.” Her hand clenched. “Every damned time,” she repeated. “Would people really prefer that I play the bleeding heart and let the fleet be drawn wherever there was a hint of a threat—when Tel’rabim truly is hitting other targets, no less? Would they really prefer I fall for every feint—”

“They’re scared,” he interrupted her. He swallowed. “Ma’am,” he added. He stood back to let her go down a narrow staircase first. “People everywhere, on every colony, every moon, are scared shitless,” he repeated, as he followed her toward the bridge. “Or rather, hopeless. People think there’s nothing they can do to make a difference. Knowing that they might have to be the ones who get sacrificed … it can’t be pleasant.”

“They could get off their asses and join the fleet,” she said over her shoulder reflexively. She caught herself, and shook her head. “I’m sorry, that was….”

“Accurate,” he said drily.

She laughed.

“They could join, you’re right. The reason we all joined was because we didn’t like being sitting ducks.” He lifted his shoulders. “If they don’t like it, they could always do the same.”

Their footsteps slowed as they approached the bridge, and she reflected that out here, with only her closest officers for company, everything seemed simple. Here, people understood that some battles must be lost for a greater victory.

But not even all of her captains understood that much.

She was just trying to screw up her courage to go in the door when a familiar, tall figure ducked out of it.

“It’s all fixed in there,” Pike told her, by way of explanation.

At her side, Larsen went still. “Mr. Pike. When did you return to the fleet?”

Larsen’s tone was cold, almost bitter, but Pike didn’t rise to the bait. “A few days ago.”

Walker bit back a sigh. It was hard for the others to understand that Pike, though he would not join the fleet, was still committed to the cause. More so, after he had gone off protecting that girl. Twice.

Still, he had sacrificed more for the cause than most others, and right now, especially, she was glad to have him here. She smiled at him, and nodded to Larsen.

“Dismissed. I’ll call a strategy meeting soon. Let me know if you learn anything.”

“Likewise.” He nodded to her and left without a word to Pike.

They both watched him go, and then Walker looked up into Pike’s warm blue eyes. He shrugged, seemingly not in the least put out by Larsen’s manner.

“So what happened?” he asked quietly.

“I can’t … there’s not much I can say yet.” She shrugged. “We don’t know much, for one thing. For another … well, you’re not Fleet.”

Emotions chased each other across his face, each so quick that she had no chance to determine what they were. “I’m here, aren’t I?” he asked her. “By now, I’d think I might count as Fleet.”

“Are you going to join up?” She tilted her head, surprised. “Commander? Captain? General? You name it. I have some pull these days what with the power vacuum at the UN. Acting Secretary Jones basically rubber stamps anything I say. And pulling multiple missions on Earth gets you some automatic promotions, you know.”

Again the rush of emotions, and again he forced his face to stillness. “If it would make people feel better about me being here.”

“It … might.” She wasn’t sure. “It might, I guess.”

“Laura.” He spoke her name as if he wasn’t sure he was allowed to. “There are bullet holes in the bridge. What happened?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “Come back with me to the Santa Maria. We can talk there.” She opened them again and looked down the empty hallway both ways. “If we talk here, there’s no telling who will hear us.”

CHAPTER TWO

Venus

Constantine City

Applied Organics Research Laboratory

Julianne Mora, Vice President of the Cargo Guild, had been called a firebrand on more than one occasion. A larger-than-life presence at meetings of the Funders Circle, calling out jeers and profanities, even as the straight-laced sober religious leaders solemnly tut-tutted her language and said grave, important things in somber voices.

She chuckled. Firebrand. Larger-than-life. What was larger than life was this fern frond. She reached out to touch it in wonder.

“You see what the elevated CO2 concentration does to them? Elephantine growth. Venus’s atmosphere is ninety-six percent carbon dioxide, and CO2 is one of the building blocks of photosynthesis,” said Schroeder, the rich, sniveling oligarch she’d come to detest, as he was one of Nhean’s closest friends and confidants. “The other being sunlight. And there again, Venus has just about every other location in the solar system beat.” He indicated upward. His voice had come loud and clear through the speaker in her light-weight helmet, and so did the rustle of the fabric of his environmental suit. Not vacuum grade, but just enough to keep the CO2 at bay and the precious oxygen in.

Mostly. Mora was sure her’s had a leak. Was he trying to kill her? Figures.

They were at the top of Constantine City, one of the largest cities floating fifty-two kilometers above Venus’s hellish surface. Intense, wildly-hot sunlight filtered through the billowing sulfur clouds overhead, bathing the garden in heat and life-giving light.

So ironic. Just kilometers below them, the same plants would be crushed by the ungodly pressure and vaporized by the inferno.

Schroeder kept rambling, and her man, James Dorian, kept nodding, feigning intense interest. Good. She’d paid him, and trained him, well.

“The ferns are a prime example of what I was telling the Funders Circle. In these conditions, they’re able to grow nearly nine times faster, and five times larger than specimens on Earth. Amazing, isn’t it?”

Indeed. The ferns stretched out before her and above her, in a massive forest of green. She’d seen pictures of ferns on Earth. The tallest barely reached one’s waist. These towered over her, nearly hitting the plastic shielding overhead that protected them from the occasional sprinkles of acid rain.

“Come. Come see the tomato plants.” He waved them over to another section of the garden where some moderately large green trees had taken root in the organic planting mix they called soil. Except, they weren’t trees.

Dorian reached out to touch one, a robust, quarter-meter thick green trunk with tiny bristles all around it, and then sniffed his fingertips. “It’s tomato all right.” He gazed up at the leafy tomato branch canopy overhead, and the tens of thousands of tiny yellow flowers. “Have they set fruit yet?”

Schroeder shook his head. “Not yet. The CO2 level may be too high. Honestly, there is so much research to be done. That is why I’ve brought you here. To secure your support.” He turned to Mora. She faced him down. She’d been dreaming about this moment for weeks.

Ever since Vesta.

Ever since her David had died.

Firebrand. That was the old Julianne Mora. This new version seethed on the inside. Seethed and raged. It took an iron will to modulate her voice, smile coldly, and hope to God her anger was checked enough to sound coherent.

“I can’t imagine my support will make much of a difference to the principle funders. Worthlin certainly doesn’t care for me, the bastard. And the pope? Forget about it. They don’t care what this old woman thinks.”

Schroeder shook his head insistently. Good. He was buying her act. “No, you’re mistaken. Well, not entirely mistaken. It’s not that they care about what you specifically think, but they take the members of the funder’s circle very seriously, as a whole. If you lend me your support, along with another dozen or so members, I think we can accomplish something great. Historical, even.”

She was getting impatient. David had already been dead for two weeks, and Hannah….

Longer. Ever since Io.

Both her children. Her only daughter. Her only son. Both destroyed in Laura Walker’s senseless war. Walker, aided and abetted by Nhean.

And by this garbage of a human being standing in front of her, boasting about his precious plants while her children’s ashes were floating in the void of space.

“And why the hell should we give you our support … for this?” She waved to the giant tomato trees. “We can’t save human civilization with … tomatoes.”

Schroeder smiled. “No. Not with tomatoes. Come.” He guided them to the perimeter of the garden, near the edge, where the guard railing rimmed the short wall, preventing people from stumbling. Falling fifty kilometers would lead to certain death. Several transparent environmental boxes were there, angled to get as much sun exposure as possible in this extreme northern latitude. A green haze floated in a thin band about halfway between the floor and the ceilings in the tanks. “This. This will be the solution to war. To the death and destruction that plagues us. To the Telestine occupation.”

“This?” said Dorian. “You can kill Telestines with this?”

“Kill? Of course not. Swords into plowshares, my friends. War doesn’t solve anything.”

Mora smiled grimly. “We’ll see about that. So what does it do, then?”

Schroeder bent down to the computer terminal next to one of the tanks and entered his authorization code.

Finally.

“It’s called cyanobacteria. But not just any cyanobacteria. It’s a special airborne strain I’ve instructed my science team to develop.”

“Bacteria?” said Dorian. “So you are trying to kill them? A bioweapon?”

“No, no, no. Nothing of the sort. Cyanobacteria is notable in that it is a prodigious producer of oxygen. It thrived in Earth’s early biosphere, billions of years ago. It’s what turned our own carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into the pleasant oxygen-nitrogen mix that … the Telestines enjoy today.”

Mora nodded. “So you’re going to terraform Venus. Ambitious. But how do you plan on developing a strain that can survive four hundred and fifty degrees celsius and fifty atmospheres of pressure?”

“No plans for that at all,” replied Schroeder, bringing up a schematic on the computer. She eyed Dorian, who was watching everything Schroeder did with intense interest. She trusted he was taking notes on the filing system. “I’ve instead developed an airborne version, like I said. Further, it’s … highly prolific, within a certain pressure and temperature range. Just set this loose in the Venetian atmosphere, and it will settle at an appropriate altitude conducive to its growth, as if it was floating in water. And there, it will multiply incredibly fast. Explosively fast. Within months, there will be a kilometer-thick cloud of cyanobacteria enveloping the whole of Venus, munching its way through the atmosphere’s vast stores of carbon dioxide within just a few years. And with the carbon gone, the runaway greenhouse effect will cease, and the heat stored on the surface will finally be able to radiate out into space over the next few years.”

She bent down to stare at the thin cloud of green in the tank. A glove built into the tank’s wall hung limp nearby, and she inserted her hand inside and waved it through the haze, which billowed and swirled around her hand. “Fascinating. And what happens when the CO2 supply dwindles? What happens when they run out of food?”

“The cyanobacteria will die, and precipitate out of the clouds like a green rain, I suppose. For awhile, there will be massive oceans of dead cyanobacteria. The atmospheric pressure will drop quite precipitously, as the carbon is extracted from the atmosphere and converted to biomass, and we will need to figure out how to cap it, and essentially store it. On Earth, all that biomass was stored as coal and oil, deep beneath the surface. We’ll need a similar process.”

“And the cities?” She glanced up at him. “The floating cities?”

“They … will drift down to a lower altitude.”

“Drift?”

“Well,” Schroeder demurred, “I imagine if Venus’s atmospheric pressure gets down to Earth-like levels, the cities will no longer be able to float. But I regard that as a feature, not a bug, since then the surface of Venus will finally be habitable. Many variables to still solve, but my hope is that, eventually, we’ll have a new world. A new Earth. Green, verdant, capable of supporting life. Conflict with the Telestines can cease, and we can focus on rebuilding here. No more living in asteroids, wasting our lives away mining rocks or hauling junk halfway across the solar system—” he seemed to realize he’d made a mistake. “Sorry, I misspoke. Not junk. Valuable cargo. The Funders Circle values the Cargo Guild more than you could ever know.”

Enough. She didn’t care about a new Earth. Or an old Earth. Or any Earth. She had nothing left. Anything she had was now floating in the rubble of Io, of Vesta. Not just David, not just Hannah.

But their children.

Her precious grandchildren. Millie, opinionated but sweet, was six. Dearest Aaron, four. And darling Ellie had been just a newborn. Taking her tiny first breath just a week before Vesta’s explosion caused her last.

Gone.

A haze of vaporized blood-red goo. Floating like clouds in the abyss, just like the green haze now swirling around the glove on her hand. She waved it back and forth one more time, ghoulishly thinking the green haze to be the atomized remains of her enemies. Walker. Nhean Tang. Schroeder. Telestines. Fuck them all.

“Mr. Dorian? What the hell are you waiting for?” she asked, absentmindedly, still swishing the cyanobacteria haze through the fingers of the glove.

Schroeder looked up from the computer in surprise. “Excuse me? Hey!”

Dorian had already grabbed Schroeder by the arm, and was hauling him closer to the edge.

“Hey! What are you doing? No! Stop!”

Dorian was strong, she’d give the young man that. With one fluid motion, using one of the cyanobacteria tanks for leverage, he swung Schroeder completely off his feet and sent him plunging off the edge. A terrified shriek pierced the calm Venetian wind, and died away.

“What do you think will kill him first? The heat? The pressure? Or the impact?” she mused, still waving through the haze.

Dorian considered, looking down off the edge at the abyss of yellow clouds below. “Certainly not the impact. His skin will melt in just a few minutes. Then his head will implode from the pressure. He’ll be vapor by the time he reaches the surface.”

“Good.” She pulled her hand out of the glove and bent down to consider the open computer terminal. “Now get to work. Computer’s still open. We need … what did Nhean call it? The Seed? He told me that Schroeder developed it for him. Like a glorified computer virus. And if he was able to take control of a Telestine fleet with it, just imagine what we can do.”

CHAPTER THREE

Ganymede, High Orbit

EFS Santa Maria

“So.” Pike threaded his way through the corridors of the Santa Maria, ducking awkwardly under lintels, nearly hitting his head on one.

Half of humanity was as tall as he was, now, living in low gravity, and everyone still made doorways at the same height. It was like no one ever learned. He banged his head coming up too quickly and shot a glare at the doorway.

Walker didn’t answer immediately, at least not the question he was really asking. “So you’ve been helping with repairs?”

He shrugged awkwardly. “Looked like you guys needed a hand. And I know my way around a ship.”

He didn’t say that patching bullet holes and fixing busted machinery seemed a much more manageable way to help than trying to tackle whatever the hell was going on. People were scared. A quiet word and a hand offered to help fix something went a long way to make them feel better.

It even seemed to make her feel better. Her face softened as she looked over at him. “Well, thank you. I mean it. We’re short-staffed. On everything.”

She didn’t say anything more until they were a few corridors away, and demonstrably alone. She sighed.

“So, for some reason, someone organized a mutiny on most of the ships in the fleet and the ones that mutinied successfully are now hightailing it to Neptune.” She did not look up at him. Her nose was flared and she was clearly trying to keep her cool.

He followed her up a staircase, noting the smooth feel of the metal railing under his palm—Nhean’s ships were, in every way, nicer than any other ships he’d been on—and hurried to keep up with Walker as she headed for her quarters.

She walked fast.

She looked over at him once. “Nothing to say to that?”

“No,” he admitted. “Or … too many things?”

She shot him a curious glance.

“I….” Where to start? What was safe to say? “Even with the Old Man, General Essa, it never came to this.”

She nodded tightly. “I know. And I never thought he would do something like this. He was impetuous and bullheaded, but he wasn’t stupid.”

“He had the UN behind him,” Pike pointed out. “And he knew you weren’t going to run roughshod over everything. He was controlling you with that.”

“Not Essa,” she said impatiently. “God rest his cantankerous little soul. No, it’s Nhean.”

“Wait, what?”

“Who else do you think could have done this?” She swung to face him, eyebrows raised. “It has to be him, doesn’t it?”

“No!” The word tumbled out before he could stop himself.

“No?” She looked at him curiously.

Pike had to catch himself. She couldn’t know that he was, in fact, in communication with the elusive data-broker. “I mean … why would he do this?”

Of course, as soon as he said the words, he remembered exactly why Nhean would do something like this: to take the fleet away from a woman who secretly wanted to bomb Earth into eternal oblivion. It still made him sick to know she’d destroy it, just to keep their enemies from holding onto it. Just out of spite.

Pike swallowed. Despite the fact that he could seem to think of nothing else these days, the idea that Walker truly wanted to destroy Earth still seemed unbelievable to him. She couldn’t really want to, could she?

But she did. Pike had heard her say as much to Nhean. Nhean, who must have suspected that he could not trust her when he built in a discreet computer code to monitor the Venus fleet. She had overridden that, of course. She had purged that program from the ships and Nhean could no longer access them.

He’d trusted her with his new fleet, and she’d pulled the rug out from him.

The memory reminded him why he was here—and that he must not ever let Walker suspect his true allegiance.

“He’s gone,” Walker told him flatly. “He left at Vesta, he hasn’t been heard from since, and he has openly doubted my ability to lead the fleet. He’s one of the only ones that has the … nerve. And the capability to act on it.”

“That’s true.” There was not much else to say. Few other people had the resources to match Nhean. It was almost worth wondering if Nhean had done this, in fact, but that wasn’t important right now. All that mattered was turning this event into something that could chip away at her confidence in her plan.

“Why would you defend him?” she asked quietly. Her gaze was worried.

Pike considered. “It doesn’t seem like … his style. But you’re right, who else could it be?” He had a burst of inspiration. “I don’t want to think the worst of him—not while she’s there with him. That means I have to question her loyalty, too.” He gave a bitter laugh. “And that’s a dark road to go down.”

In truth, it was killing him that the girl was back with Nhean. The girl, who could speak now, however haltingly, who could have answered so many questions he had. The girl who was the closest thing to a daughter he was ever likely to get.

The girl Nhean had almost killed once already.

“Pike.” Her gaze was worried. “I can’t make assurances about what she’s doing, but you know she would never willingly betray humanity. And you know she’s smart enough to keep herself safe. If she can escape from the fleet without us ever figuring out how, she can escape from Nhean if she needs to.” She lifted a shoulder. “Hell, maybe she’s spying on him for us.”

He wasn’t keen to have her go too far down that track. “Whatever she’s doing, I’d feel better if I knew she was safe.” He shook his head and gestured for her to keep walking, falling in again at her side. “And have you considered—” He looked around himself. The ambient noise had been growing louder as they approached the engines, but he still wasn’t sure if it was safe to talk about this.

“We’re alone,” she said confidently. “Have I considered what?”

“The bombs.” He looked down. “The iridium isotope bombs. There were more. They weren’t all on Vesta, I don’t think. And there was only one on Mars. So where are the rest? Didn’t your science guy say there were as many as fourteen left before he … before Vesta exploded?”

“Trust me, we’re looking. I haven’t stopped thinking about that.” She shook her head and pushed open the door to the engine room. “But if there’s a way to find them, no one’s found it yet.”

“You should send a detachment to the inner solar system. Inside Mercury’s orbit,” Pike called over the roar of the machinery. He winced at the sound.

“Why?” She frowned up at him.

Because it was the one thing Nhean told me I had to make sure you did. But he really should have come up with a fake reason before he started talking. He scrambled to come up with something.

“Planetary alignment. Jupiter and Neptune are all over here, and for the next few months Earth and Mars are on the other side, along with Saturn. We should cover our bases.” He gestured to show his meaning, in case she missed the words, and then stooped closer to yell in her ear as they walked. “If the Telestines want to hit Mars, then back to Jupiter, they have to go past the sun. We’re having a hard enough time keeping up with Tel’rabim and there’s no knowing where we’ll get pulled. And we should have ships all over in case Ka’sagra makes a move with her iridium bombs.” Yeah. That seemed to hang together.

“Interesting.” He saw her lips move. “I’ll consider it.”

Apparently, he hadn’t reached the point of being able to convince her of tactical moves yet. Maybe he should have gone through one of her captains … but Delaney was likely to be just as suspicious as Walker, and Larsen clearly hated Pike with a passion.

“So why are we here?”

“FTL.”

He stopped in his tracks. “Say again?”

She pulled his hands away from his ears. “It would be easier to hear me if you weren’t doing that.”

“It’s loud.”

She gave him a wry look. “I know. And I said ‘FTL.’ F … T … L.” She made her way to one of the abandoned desks and rifled through the paperwork there, picking up a few pieces and staring that them. She shook her head and pointed back to the corridor.

Pike gave a groan of relief when they emerged back into the hallway. His ears were ringing.

“So, ah….” He dug at one ear with his pinky. “Wait, you have FTL? That means what I think it means, right?”

“If you think it means faster-than-light travel, then yes. And no, I do not have it.” She shook her head. “But the Telestines did. Once. It’s how they got here from their solar system. And we’re … close. How close, I don’t know. Apparently, the math almost works. The engineering? Well … the Telestines had it once, so it’s possible—we know that much.” She forced herself to take a deep breath. “Beyond that, I have no idea. But we need it, and soon.”

“Why?” Pike frowned. “Wouldn’t that be really difficult to learn how to control? We’re so close to matching the Telestine ships for speed.”

Her lips pursed slightly. She had wanted to tell him, he knew, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t risk it.

Deep down, he could tell she knew what he would think of it.

“It’s—it’s not important right now.”

He faked a cough for a chance to turn away. He couldn’t look at her, not when she lied to his face. He knew she wanted FTL so they could leave Earth behind—and search for a new home that might not even exist. Search the stars for another Earth. Hundreds of Earths. Be free of Earth. But she didn’t know he knew that about her.

She laid a hand on his arm. “You should rest. You’ve been working over at the Anchor all morning. You can use my quarters, and I’ll be back as soon as we have the final preparations done.”

“For?” He frowned.

“For getting our ships back.” She gave a little smile. “Can’t forget that, can we? So I think it’s time we—”

The door behind them burst open. Walker was in front of him in a moment, her sidearm drawn, her short frame tense.

The ensign very nearly shit himself. His face was grey-green, and he had his hands up in a moment. “M-message from the bridge?”

Walker let out a slow breath. She holstered the weapon, and Pike saw her struggling not to snap at him. “Yes?” she managed, fairly pleasantly.

“There’s a … um.” He seemed to have forgotten the message entirely.

A tic started in Walker’s cheek.

“Our sensors picked up a detachment of the Telestine fleet,” he managed. “The readings are all messed up, they must have some scrambling—something, we don’t know—but we caught their heading. Saturn. Enceladus. The colony of Al-Mansur is there. They mine—”

“Ice,” Walker finished for him. “Our water. He’s going for our water.”

She was gone the next moment, making for the bridge at an all-out sprint.

CHAPTER FOUR

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

New Vatican Station

Assembly Room

Nhean pushed his way through the door and nodded to the group assembled.

“I came as quickly as I could,” he said, by way of explanation. He looked around himself at their faces. “Where was it this time?”

James Dorian, a new, rising power in the Funders Circle, looked up grimly. He’d just arrived from Venus. “Ganymede.”

Nhean only nodded. He had known this before he asked. Information flowing through New Vatican Station was tightly monitored, however, and the people in this room liked to think that they were always the first to know things. As their ally, and one who’d had his estates on Venus seized by the UN in their investigation of his role in the Vesta disaster, Nhean was expected to rely on them for information.

But he had never been the sort of person to rely on others.

He nodded to those around the table as he sat. Not all looked up. On one side of the room, Pope Celestine was reading a dossier. He looked up briefly to meet Nhean’s eyes, but only briefly. He was still strong and unbowed, and relatively young for his office. The top tier of the priesthood had been almost entirely wiped out in the exodus. The first pope to be elected in the exile, Pope Clement XV, had died of illness only a few months later, and the Holy See had been in similar turmoil ever since, until Celestine was elected at the tender age of thirty. He’d made a name for himself in his youth as a missionary on Ganymede, and was the youngest man appointed cardinal in hundreds of years. He was hardly past fifty now, and would likely be the longest-serving pope ever.

Assuming Ka’sagra didn’t kill everyone in the solar system first.

Nearby, Parley Worthlin, the Mormon prophet, was in a close conference with an older woman, Vice President Mora of the Cargo Guild, who was pointing out a series of things on printed photos. It seemed they had finally moved past their vast difference in temperament. Neither of them looked up, nor did any of the aides clustered around them.

A few of the other principles of the Funders Circle were here already as well, and Nhean knew even more would assemble shortly. This sort of meeting was becoming a distressingly regular occurrence. The aides had not even bothered to move the chairs back after the last one. They remained in little clumps, one for each of the major players now on the station.

The amount of wealth here was truly staggering, and though Nhean shared the same level of wealth as most of them—and had been a part of the Funders Circle for years—he had rarely felt more out of place.

He was used to being in his own estates. He preferred the company of….

Parees.

Dorian interrupted his thoughts by pushing a briefing across the table to him. “They took out the aid station, Bogotá Station, orbiting Ganymede … and left.” His jaw was tight. “The Exile Fleet seems to think they held them off. Idiots.”

There were a few knowing looks.

“What do you think?” Celestine asked Nhean.

Nhean held his tongue for a moment, eyes flicking over the printouts. Bogotá Station had, as it happened, been a nexus for much of the Funders Circle’s charity work among the Jovian moons.

But it had also been largely administered by the Daughters of Ascension, and try as he might, Nhean could not seem to convince the others that the Telestine group, and its enigmatic founder, were the true targets of Tel’rabim’s anger.

“You know what I think,” he said finally. He kept his voice restrained. “It’s the same thing I thought last time. Ka’sagra was Tel’rabim’s chief political rival, and he’s hunting her down.”

“She must have died on Vesta,” Celestine said smoothly. “He won’t be searching for her anymore. If that truly was his goal, then he’s already achieved it.” He looked to Dorian.

“There has been no mention of her, no sighting, and no statement since the tragedy,” Dorian confirmed. “As Tel’rabim’s supposed rival, it would be important for Ka’sagra’s followers to know if she was still alive.” He lifted a shoulder. “In any case, Telestine politics do not concern us. Human politics do.”

Nhean bit back a retort. Telestine politics certainly concerned the Funders. If only they could see things a bit more clearly. Ka’sagra’s rise had been built on pretty lies: he was certain she hadn’t told most of her followers her true goals—death cults rarely do—but it nonetheless exposed serious fault lines within Telestine society.

An enemy fighting on multiple fronts was weaker on each.

And he did not believe that Ka’sagra had been killed on Vesta. Not for a moment. Why Celestine would so blithely believe it was beyond him. Certainly, the man was concerned with the recent loss of multiple trade routes, but that was no excuse for sloppy thinking.

“The more important issue,” Celestine stressed, “is what happens when he finds us.”

Nhean managed a tight smile. “So far, the admiral has managed to avert disaster at each target.”

“Io.” Celestine’s voice was sharp. “Vesta. Ganymede was not without casualties, and he got what he wanted. I tell you, he’s coming after us! He knows that we’re the ones with the most, ahem, means. That fact can’t be lost on him. Before long, he’ll make his move on us.” He leaned across the table. “We need a strategy for defense.”

“We don’t have a fleet,” Nhean said. He felt his tone growing dangerous. “And he has not yet come even close.”

“He will.” Worthlin spoke up now. “Eventually, he will. Just because he hasn’t yet, doesn’t mean he won’t. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t.”

The Dalai Lama, Oliver Pemba, finally spoke. “And, my friends, there is still no word from Schroeder. No one has seen him for days. Is Tel’rabim employing kidnappers now? Or assassins?”

Nhean shut his mouth with a snap. He couldn’t afford to speak in anger. And he certainly shouldn’t air his concern about Schroeder. It simply wasn’t like him to disappear, and he wasn’t high enough on Tel’rabim’s radar to care about. There was foul play involved, he was sure of it. Possibly by someone there in the room with them.

He said nothing, because he also had a very good idea of why Tel’rabim hadn’t found a reason to attack New Vatican Station yet. He had an idea regarding how Tel’rabim’s systems worked. The alien prided himself on logic, on the strength of his information network. He would be running the numbers to see where he should hit next.

The problem with using computers for that, instead of one’s own mind, was that computers could be hacked.

And the one person who could hack Tel’rabim’s was sitting in Nhean’s chambers right now, growing ever more proficient with her abilities. She’d asked him to complete her. To finish the job Tel’rabim had started when he began altering her. At one point, she’d told him, she was dead. And then implanted with Telestine technology. And revived. But Tel’rabim hadn’t completed her. Now, using the specs she brought back from Earth, Nhean was.

He’d implanted a few more chips they’d found the specs for. He’d injected her with various basic elements that would provide the building blocks for … something—he couldn’t even say what.

And it was mildly terrifying, seeing her grow in her—he wanted to say powers, but that would suggest she was some kind of otherworldly mutant superhero.

Was she?

He rubbed at his forehead, trying to think of something, anything, to say. Mercifully, he was saved by a ding on someone’s comm unit.

Dorian pressed a button at his wrist. “What is it?”

They watched as his face went grey. As if conscious of their eyes on him, he visibly tried to pull himself together.

“That’s impossible,” he said shortly. “The full Telestine fleet was at Ganymede two days ago, how can—”

He broke off and put the comm unit down on the table softly.

There was only one question. “Where?” Nhean asked.

Dorian looked over at him. “The other side of the solar system. Saturn. Enceladus.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

Koh Rong

Telemetry Lab

She felt them.

A ship slid easily through the almost-nothing of space, without wind or sea to buffet it, but the ships themselves crackled with signals.

Inputs and outputs.

Ones and zeros.

Feelings and impulse. Will and instincts.

She felt the tiny figures of Telestines and human drones moving within them, adjusting targeting computers and loading missiles. She felt the singular mind, constructed through the actions of many. They weren’t a true singular consciousness, like those that emerged in the old science fiction stories, but they held a common mind, like a running conversation among them, mind to mind, essence to essence.

She had felt them for weeks. They flickered into her consciousness without warning as her senses expanded. Sometimes, she caught thoughts, fragments of patterns, and she modified them and sent them back carefully. Just a tweak here. A twist there. Small, minuscule changes.

Tel’rabim must never sense her.

He wasn’t there with the fleet approaching Enceladus, that much she knew. But they weren’t guided by his top commanders. This fleet was under his direct, remote control.

She knew, for some reason, that he trusted almost no one when it came to understanding how he chose his targets, and why. Decisions were made in an blink, the result of calculations instead of judgment calls. He was looking for something, and he wouldn’t tell even his commanders what it was.

He was looking for Ka’sagra. And her secret iridium isotope bombs.

That gave her an opening. Calculations could be intercepted. No one on the ships knew what they were supposed to be targeting, after all. When they were close enough, when she was able to find her way through the unfamiliar systems—she had been made to take down the Telestine defense network, not Tel’rabim’s, after all—she placed small changes into the data:

This target isn’t worth it. A small tweak, just a number or two changed. A percent, no more.

There’s nothing here. She could shield comm buoys. Sometimes, she could shield stations.

There’s another, more urgent place to look. She could nudge the program to start running again, disregarding its most recent calculations.

On the stations, human lives continued on in a strange monotony. They did not see the Telestine fleet flicker into view and disappear again almost as quickly. In battles, they did not realize that the number of targets hit should have been larger.

Only she knew, and she did all she could.

Sometimes it wasn’t enough, and people died.

After all, how many times could she pull off these tricks before Tel’rabim started wondering? On that point, she had no data at all.

And she could not always manage it.

She felt them now, felt the ships pick their targets. She searched desperately through the inputs being loaded, through the mainframe of the chief carrier. It was broadcasting a target and she had to pinpoint it in the code, figure out what it was, find a way to nudge the ships into looking somewhere else, somewhere new.

Then they were gone. Where? How? Dear, dear Tel’rabim, what have you done?

And then, minutes later, they suddenly reappeared.

Oh God.

She shouted. “No!”

She was still desperately trying to modify signals and inputs when the first missile hit, and by then, it was far, far too late.

CHAPTER SIX

Saturn, Enceladus, High Orbit

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

By the time they decelerated, they were ready.

Walker had put them on a strict rotation. Everyone had to sleep. Everyone had to eat. The first set of missiles were loaded, the fighters were prepped, the bridge crews were changed out thirty minutes before they reached their target.

You know the drills, she told them. You know your training. Get your rest, he’s trying to exhaust us.

They were ready.

Delaney straightened his jacket and crossed his arms as he waited for the battle readout to begin populating.

They should have known Tel’rabim would hit Enceladus. In retrospect, it was all too obvious. Every station and ship had state of the art water filtration systems, but state of the art was, unfortunately, still not all that good. There were always losses—leaks, mold, contamination. Someone always needed water.

Starving a human to death took weeks. Cut off their water, though, and you could take a human down in three days flat.

Of course Tel’rabim was going for the water. He had his own. He had everything on Earth.

His fingers clenched around his arms. He had supposed, when he was twelve years old and running for the ships, herded like cattle, that the calm face grown-ups put on was true. Even when his grandmother had died on Carina Station, her hand slipping from his face, he had thought she looked beyond the living world to a future he could not see. She was young once, and lived a carefree life in a place called Los Angeles before he was born. She’d wanted to be an actress. Maybe she saw that dream as she died.

Now that he’d reached her age, he had found the way to keep his face calm and his voice authoritative. He had learned to speak the truths younger people did not speak aloud.

But inside him, there was no calm. There was only rage and loss, and the overwhelming need to kill every single one of the aliens that had taken their future from them.

This battle was that chance. As was every battle for Delaney.

He dropped his hands to the desk and flattened his palms on the cool glass. The battle readout was flickering.

It came up, and he tilted his head. Drummed his fingers. Nothing was populating yet.

Nothing.

Nothing.

The computer system must still be on the fritz. Ever since those damned mutineers….

“Bring up the blasted view screens.” His voice was gruff. “We can shoot by sight if the computers won’t lock on.”

It took him too long to realize what he was seeing. Enceladus hung, white-blue and perfect, in the background. Untouched. Beautiful. Intact.

His first thought was that they had beaten the Telestine fleet. He even smiled. After all these years, they were owed a win or two.

His second thought was that they hadn’t calculated correctly, that the Telestine fleet was going for a different target and they were running behind again.

And then he realized why Al-Mansur Station wasn’t showing on the battle readout.

“Good God,” he breathed.

The Telestine fleet had already come, destroyed its target … and already left.

And they were nowhere in sight.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

Koh Rong

Telemetry Lab

The girl sat in the center of the floor, clutching a large piece of Telestine machinery. In the years since humans had begun recovering Telestine electronics, whole ships’ worth had been thrown away, deemed worthless after the antigravity and propulsion hardware had been stripped. Everything else they found was featureless, something halfway between a metal and a plastic. No buttons, and no circuits. They thought they’d been finding the wrong parts. Bad luck.

It turned out they’d had Telestine computers all along—but what made them tick was entirely invisible to every human except a drone. Try as Nhean might, he still could not figure out if what she had was a whole computer, or part of one, or if different shards of machinery were even different from one another.

He sank his chin onto one fist and watched her for a moment. Her eyes were closed—focused, Nhean knew, very far away. Sometimes, her fingers moved. If there was any connection between what she was doing and her motions, he could not be sure.

The truth was, neither of them had any idea about how the mechanics of what she did actually worked. And that unnerved the hell out of him.

Nhean directed his gaze back to the monitors. Comm buoys tracked tiny fragments of other Telestine electronics at varying distances from the station in high orbit around Triton, dropped there surreptitiously on Nhean’s instructions some weeks ago. For weeks, the girl had been training to manipulate them.

One monitor blinked green, then another, and another. She had managed to find the comm buoy 25,000 kilometers out from the ship’s orbit.

Nhean nodded silently. He was pleased, but he did not want to disturb her. Whether he understood the mechanics or not, he knew one thing about talents: they grew and strengthened with practice. Whatever Tel’rabim had done to the girl, whatever genetic material he had woven into her blood, it was clear that her skill with machinery was something that could improve and increase. After only these few weeks, her reach was farther and her grip was surer.

And she could find far more than machinery. She could find drones as well. She could give orders, after a fashion.

This talent, too, was one she was developing.

When her head jerked sideways, Nhean knew she had stopped paying attention to the machinery. She had found a drone, and she was following it. He knew that look on her face, even with her eyes closed—the look of a predator on the hunt. She had found her target.

He sat, hands hovering over the keyboard. Often, she relayed her observations in the form of words, which he dutifully transcribed. Typing them seemed to help him picture the places she spoke of, and often, they were able to figure out together who she had seen and what they were doing.

“Bars.” Her voice was tight. Her fingers had tightened until they were almost entirely white. She was shaking.

Nhean’s eyes narrowed. He had never seen her like this before. What was this?

“Bars,” she repeated. “Cold seat. Metal … ridges. Bench.”

He typed, quickly and silently. There was a small jail here on New Vatican Station. Was she speaking of that?

“No thoughts.” She sounded scared now. “I don’t … want to look into thoughts. There are no thoughts. I would drown.”

“Come back up.” Nhean left his chair and went to kneel by her side, taking her hands. “Don’t risk it.”

It was like she didn’t hear him. She kept her face turned away, and there was no reaction to the warmth of his hands.

“Stopped thinking long ago. Tried to fight. Tried to have his own thoughts. Didn’t work.”

“Dawn.” She hated that nickname, hated it with a passion. He hoped it might bring her out of her trance.

“Blood. He remembers it.”

“Dawn, listen to me—”

“Wanted to pull the trigger.” Her eyes snapped open and found his. “Hated him. He blames himself. Thinks that’s why he followed the order.”

They stared at one another for a second, her pupils slowly shrinking from full dilation, Nhean’s eyes tracking her pulse, her too-quick breaths.

“Is he here?” Nhean asked her finally. “The drone you’re talking about, he’s in the prison here? On New Vatican?”

“No.” She shook her head. “That was Parees.”

Nhean went still. He felt a jerk in his chest as he tried to draw in breath. “Parees.” His voice was distant. “He’s still alive….”

“He hated Essa,” Dawn told him.

“I’m not sure—” I’m not sure I can hear this.

“He thinks that’s why he wasn’t able to resist the order,” she explained. “He knew killing Essa was wrong, but he hated what Essa was doing. He thinks that’s why Ka’sagra was able to manipulate him. To make him finally pull that trigger. She manipulated that hatred. Made it stronger. Made it … overcome.”

Nhean tipped his head back, eyes closed.

“Was it?” he asked finally.

“No.” Her answer was calm and immediate. “She’s stronger than Parees is. Almost all of the drones were built to be overridden by any Telestine who knew how to use them. He couldn’t have resisted for long.”

“Almost all?” Nhean allowed himself to be diverted by her language.

“I’m a drone, too.”

“And you don’t have the override.”

She hesitated. Then, scrupulously exact: “Not that one. Otherwise … I don’t know.”

That was an unsettling thought. Better to think it, though. Better to be prepared.

Nhean forced himself to stand and offer her a hand up. He sat, smoothing his suit out of habit, and stared off into space. “Where was he?” he asked finally.

He would save the news of Enceladus for another time. There was nothing any of them could do about that now, at any rate, and for all he knew, she had already sensed it.

Of course she sensed it. The new Dawn seemed to know everything hours before he ever caught even an inkling.

That was what he told himself. The truth was, he wanted to know about Parees more than he wanted to talk to her about another dead station. He should, he really should, be able to feel something other than relief that Parees was still alive. Despite the betrayal, however, and his own stupidity, relief was the only thing he could feel.

“With the fleet.” The girl was watching him.

“Are they closer than I thought, or can you reach further than I thought? Last I heard, Walker was on her way to Saturn to….” Intercept Tel’rabim’s fleet at Enceladus, he finished in him mind. The other end of the solar system. Could Dawn really reach that far? Remarkable.

She considered this. “I don’t know. I don’t think I could have given him orders.”

“You said he had no thoughts,” Nhean said slowly. “Do drones go dormant?”

“They can. But that felt … human.”

“You’ll have to explain that.” He clung to scientific inquiry as his lifeline.

“I don’t know.” She lifted her shoulders. “Some things … feel like orders from a Telestine. I could feel Ka’sagra in his mind when he killed Essa. I can feel orders sometimes. Other times, I feel … older orders, like they were given a routine and they follow it. But this—it’s just like any other human who is alone, and stuck. The thoughts circle, and they stop. So many people are like him, full humans. They don’t like to think about their lives because their lives are hopeless. Their lives have no meaning. So they stop thinking.”

Nhean shoved away this bleak view of station life. “So you can see humans’ thoughts as well.”

“No. Not … the same way. Mostly, I understand the look in their eyes.” She lifted a shoulder. “I watched a lot,” she reminded him. “Before I could speak.”

“And how is that feeling for you? To be able to speak again?”

“Inefficient. It’s easier to speak mind to mind. Well … only when both people can, I suppose.” She paused, and a mischievous grin appeared. “Pike sure doesn’t like it. Makes him a little … pukey.”

Nhean smiled at the memory, but sobered quickly at the look on her face. “What is it?”

She chose her words carefully, and he allowed himself to see how difficult they were for her. “Is it supposed to be this hard to be human?” Her gaze was startlingly direct on his face.

How the hell do you answer a question like that? He shook his head. “I … don’t know.”

“I’m not always sure I’m meant to be. To exist.” Her words were, as usual, very blunt.

“Tel’rabim didn’t mean for a lot of this to happen.” He spoke stridently.

He expected that to make her smile, but to his surprise, frustration and worry chased each other across her face. He had the sense that he had missed something important—and from the wall behind her eyes, she wasn’t going to tell him what it was. He held back a sigh.

“All right, so you saw Parees—almost certainly at great distance. He’s not dead. Do you know if he’s been sentenced?”

“No.” She shook her head for emphasis.

Nhean rubbed at his forehead. He had not been able to find anything on any channel. Whatever had happened to Parees, it was being kept quiet.

He didn’t like that. Then again, he wondered now if they had shelved the issue for later. That would be just like Walker. There was no obvious gain to be made from Parees’s trial or execution, and therefore she had chosen to do nothing, keeping him around in case he could be of use later.

He tightened his fingers briefly around the arm of the chair, and looked over when the door to his chambers slid open.

“Nhean.” James Dorian, was smiling as he entered. It annoyed him to no end that he didn’t ever knock. That suggested a certain entitled arrogance. He looked deeply pleased—though by what, Nhean could not have said. When he had left the conference rooms, every person there had still been sunk in despair at the news from Enceladus. “Our … guests … have arrived. His Holiness would like you to meet them.”

Nhean stood at once. “Of course.” If nothing else, he was deeply curious.

“I think you’ll be pleased,” James added. He smiled at the girl. “My dear, if I might borrow your, ah—”

“Guardian,” Nhean reminded him. Not for the first time, he felt a flash of annoyance. Their story, that the girl was the daughter of a dear and deceased friend, had a well-laid trail, but Dorian kept trying to make Nhean trip up, in the hopes that some scandal lurked somewhere in the story. “And she should accompany us.”

Dorian looked like he wanted to object, but in the end, he shrugged slightly. “Indeed.” He nodded his head at the door. “Come with me.”

“I’m eager to see who these visitors are.” Eager did not begin to describe it. For weeks, they had waited to take any action at all while Celestine, Worthlin, and a few other high-ranking Funders Circle members assured Nhean that everything would begin shortly. Whatever game they were playing, Nhean had known they would not tell him until they were ready. And for the first time in as long as he could remember, his intelligence sources could tell him nothing.

He had more than enough to do, in any case. He had busied himself with Dawn’s training and with his surveillance. Between the Exile Fleet, Tel’rabim, and Ka’sagra, there had been enough to keep him occupied—and little enough to keep him with no conclusions to draw or actions to take.

Whatever Tel’rabim thought, he refused to communicate further with Nhean since the Vesta disaster. Walker appeared to have neither the time or the inclination to do so, either. And Ka’sagra … had disappeared.

He knew what her target was. He knew that she was responsible for the Telestine’s own sun going nova.

Somehow.

And even though he had no idea how she did it, there was one thing he was sure of. As the leader of the Telestines’ very own death cult, Ka’sagra would once again lead the Daughters of Ascension in another attempt. This time on humanity’s sun.

Pike, I sure hope you convinced Walker to spare a few ships, he thought. If she had uncontested access to the sun, then it was over for all of them.

“So,” Nhean began, realizing that they’d been walking in complete silence for over a minute. “You’re not going to tell me who the visitors are?”

“You need wait no longer.” James smiled as they strode across the large central chamber outside Nhean’s rooms, and gestured for the window covering to be raised. “Look. They’ve docked.”

Nhean stopped dead in his tracks. “The fleet? The Exile Fleet?”

“Just some of them.” James’s smile was sleek and satisfied. “Walker refused to send us appropriate support. So we took it.”

Dear Lord. Now there was very little chance Walker would ever agree to spare a few ships to guard such an unlikely target as … the sun.

“Why so tense?” asked Dorian.

“Because,” he began, consciously making the attempt to breathe, to relax, “that fleet being here means it’s not where it’s needed.”

Dorian protested. “It’s needed here. To protect us.”

“It’s here, yes. But it’s not protecting all of us. In fact, it’s leaving us completely, tragically, exposed.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

New Vatican Station

Assembly Room

She pressed her hand against the window as she looked down into the docking bay. Her breath made a mist on the glass.

She didn’t move. She wasn’t eager to see any of this clearly in any case.

Several of the captains had undeniably been in on the plans for mutiny, but even more had not. They were marched out of their ships, hands on their heads—or carried off in body bags with the rest of those who had resisted too strongly.

A few still had blood on their uniforms.

The ships hadn’t been damaged, of course. They were far too valuable, irreplaceable even.

The humans, however, were expendable. They had been expendable ever since humanity’s exile from Earth. The girl knew this truth with a grim certainty. Humanity was expensive to keep alive, and easy to sacrifice.

“Twenty-three ships,” she heard from behind her. “That’s nearly half the Exile Fleet.”

Nhean’s tone sounded subtly impressed. The girl knew, from long hours of observation, that this was also the tone he used for people he especially despised. She wondered if James Dorian knew as much.

Probably not. He also didn’t seem to realize that Nhean’s words were a question on multiple fronts.

“We tried for forty,” he admitted. His tone was frustrated.

“The other ones …?” Nhean inquired delicately.

“No way to know. A few never checked in at all before leaving, and a few more of them checked in once the bridge was taken, but never left.” Dorian’s voice took on a contemptuous note. “I suppose there were bound to be some who lost their nerve.”

Nhean made a vague noise of agreement. “No carriers,” he observed.

“Of course not. We didn’t even try for those. She has her hand-picked pets running those—no one who would take a bribe.” Dorian’s voice changed. “Your Holiness.”

“Your Holiness,” Nhean echoed.

“Mr. Dorian. Mr. Tang.” Pope Celestine’s voice was difficult to mistake.

There was the sweep of robes on the station floor, and the girl felt Celestine’s gaze fall on her back with a prickling sensation that swept up her spine.

She did not turn. She did not want him to see her anger, among other things. The Funders liked to think that they were horrified by the attacks—but they did not feel the attacks. They did not watch the missiles take aim and strike.

She did. Expanding her reach to sense the Telestines and their drones had come at the cost of seeing what they did.

And when there were so many in the cross hairs, how could the Funders Circle be so self-centered as to take half the ships of an already-outnumbered fleet for their own personal defense?

Her fingers clenched slightly on the glass.

“Ah.” Celestine’s voice was quiet, but not so quiet that she could not hear him easily. “The child.”

“Evangeline,” Nhean supplied quietly. It had been the name he chose for this deception, and that the girl had accepted it without any qualms.

She had lived for a long time without a name. One was as good as another for right now. Names were like clothing, and one could change them for each occasion.

“Still grieving,” Celestine observed. “A troubled child.”

The hair on the back of the girl’s neck stood up.

“I think we are all troubled right now, Your Holiness,” Nhean said respectfully. “And grieving, as well.”

“Indeed, but are you sure it is wise for her to see this?”

Nhean did not choose to reprimand the pope and point out that the barbarism he seemed to feel children should not see was, in fact, the fruit of his own supposedly holy acts in this case.

“She has seen much,” he said simply. There was no iron in his tone, but neither did he yield. “I would not shut her away in the name of protecting her, nor would I want her to know there is something important happening on the station, but keep her in ignorance of it.”

“Well enough.” Celestine did not seem to care much either way. “And any child in your care, I must assume, is … discreet.”

There was an infinitesimal pause, in which the girl knew Nhean was thinking of Parees. He did not want anyone to know how much he grieved his one-time friend or how much guilt he felt that he had not seen what Parees was. He tried to keep those thoughts hidden even from himself.

Would she end up like Parees? In a position of power and yet, ultimately, powerless? It was the one thought ever-present on her mind.

“Indeed,” was all he said.

No one said anything for a few moments. Studying their reflection in the windows, the girl saw that they had all turned to look at the ships that had already been cleared of rebels and bodies alike.

“The admiral must be removed from her position,” Celestine said finally. “You know it as well as we do, I think, Mr. Tang.”

Nhean said nothing.

“Surely you don’t disagree,” Dorian cut in.

“Not precisely.” Nhean sounded genuinely amused. “Although I doubt you are surprised that I am of two minds, given the fact that I was not consulted about any of this endeavor.”

A pause. “Yes,” Dorian admitted. “We wondered if perhaps you had some … affection … for Walker.”

“Affection?” Nhean’s amusement grew. “I would not call it that. I would never have called it that. She is useful, gentlemen. She is a rare mind. She has, several times, preserved the fleet when it might otherwise be lost.”

“And sacrificed our own settlements,” Celestine reminded him.

“I did not say she was the correct tool for every situation. Nevertheless—”

“You should have never trusted her with the Venus Sovereign Fleet.” Celestine paused, then shook his fist as if he’d just decided something. “She must be contained,” he insisted. “She cannot be trusted.”

“I know.” The words seemed to escape Nhean before he thought. “I know that very well. And I assume you have a plan for what to do now.”

“Of course.” Out of the corner of her eye, the girl saw James Dorian shoot a quick look at Celestine. The pope shook his head slightly, and Celestine continued his speech. “There is much to talk about. At a more opportune time. More private.”

Again, the girl felt their eyes on her.

“Gentlemen, do you believe that my ward will sneak away to warn Walker of your plans?” Nhean was actually laughing. “The deed is done, you have your ships. And trust me when I say that Evangeline has no love of the admiral, either.”

The girl looked over her shoulder at last and met the eyes of the other two men. James Dorian looked away from her direct gaze, discomfited—as so many people were when she looked at them. The pope, however, was made of sterner stuff. His eyes assessed her, weighed her resolve, and then flicked back to Nhean.

“This is a time of turmoil,” he said.

“I wouldn’t disagree.”

“The admiral honors … nothing. You know she would sacrifice anything and everything for victory, and you know that when sacrifices begin to be deemed acceptable, there is a tipping point at which victory is no longer worth having. Someday, she would have sacrificed so much that the only thing left would be her fleet. Humanity would be ashes, and the deaths of the Telestines would not bring them back.”

He’s lying, she wanted to spit at Nhean. Perhaps Celestine was lying even to himself, but he was lying. There was no possible way to believe that what the Funders had done was any sort of solution to the problems at hand. Pretty words and pretty sentiments didn’t make the mutiny instigated by the Funders any less horrifying, even if they believed their own lies.

Perhaps it was more horrifying. Childish, self-serving lies were dangerous in the hands of people who had so many resources at their disposal.

To her relief, Nhean did not seem taken in. He did not miss a beat. “And what do you propose, then, Your Holiness?” He lifted one finger to interject as the pope opened his mouth. “I do not necessarily disagree, but what changes would you make? What would you have done at Vesta?”

“The Exile Fleet did not need to wait for an attack,” Dorian cut in. “And they will not, when we control them.”

He faltered slightly under Nhean’s sudden, interested look.

“Oh?” Nhean asked.

Celestine gave a sigh, and the girl knew that Dorian’s move had not been calculated, but instead had been a misstep. This had been the piece he was looking for permission to say earlier.

“The ships of the Venus Sovereign Fleet were once under your control, even though she commanded them. You had your backdoor into their executive control software.” the pope observed. “What changed?”

Nhean considered the question. Then his face cleared. “She cut off my access from the systems.”

“Precisely.” Celestine smiled. “Thus, what must be done to bring the fleet under our control is to regain both access and control over these ships. I believe you’re familiar with … The Seed?”

His virus. Or rather, the one he’d contracted Schroeder to develop at one of his companies. “Of course. I helped Schroeder build it.”

“And now we have it.”

A cold pit developed in Nhean’s stomach. That they had The Seed meant that … Schroeder was indeed dead. And the men before him had killed him, or arranged his death. And stolen The Seed—a meticulously built computer virus that they’d originally designed to infiltrate Tel’rabim’s ships.

“But it was designed to be used on Telestine networks,” he protested. Indeed, he’d spent years sifting through Telestine computer code, helping find the building blocks that Schroeder’s company would use to design it. Half of the main code kernel was Telestine based, and even he had only an inkling of how that part worked.

Celestine nodded toward the black, where ships both new and old floated in formation. “We’ve altered it. Do you not think that the admiral will come to take her ships back? When she does, she will find them under our control, and we will have fine-tuned a version of The Seed that will take back the rest. We will have the entire Exile Fleet in very short order, Mr. Tang. And then we shall go about protecting humanity.”

CHAPTER NINE

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

New Vatican Station

Holy Spirits Tavern

He spent a lot of time drunk these days. Pyotr Rychenkov rolled his glass of whiskey along its base and stared at the back of the bar with bloodshot eyes.

It was a nice bar. Shiny mirrors, elegant bottles of liquor. He didn’t belong in a place like this.

Since when did humanity waste its time in exile with making pretty liquor bottles, anyway?

Gabriela echoed his thoughts back to him. “Just think. A year ago we were making our own poison moonshine in the Aggy’s cargo hold. Now we’re drinking like kings.”

James, her husband and Ry’s engine-whisperer, nodded and raised his own glass. “To Nhean and all his friends with money to burn.” He winced as his arm reached the peak of its arc—he was still recovering from his extensive injuries he’d sustained during the crash of the Aggy II on Earth, just weeks ago. Luckily, he was as fixable as the ship.

Mostly. He still had thirteen broken bones and a, quote, minor case of internal bleeding, according to the Nettie doctor who’d Nhean paid to patch him up. Even after Ry had made the grave mistake of calling him a Toonie instead of Nettie—the preferred nickname for a proper Neptunian.

He finished his whiskey in a gulp and shook his head when the bartender nodded to the glass. He needed to not drink anymore just now. After all, they might need to leave at any time. Wasn’t that what Nhean had said?

If we need to leave suddenly, we may not be able to use my ship. I would appreciate having the Aggy II available.

As if Rychenkov could say no. The Aggy II was Nhean’s gift to start with—with the understanding that he might, at times, require Rychenkov’s crew to prioritize his missions. He promised to pay well, but golden chains were still chains.

And the whiskey was making him melodramatic. Rychenkov laid some money down and pushed himself away from the bar. Time to go dunk his head in cold water and stop staring sadly at walls.

“Where you going, boss?” said James.

“Not here.”

There was nowhere better to be than here. He was a smuggler, and this station was full of rich people, one of whom was currently paying him good money to sit on his ass and do nothing. There wasn’t any need, for once, to measure pay against danger and fuel. It was a dream contract.

It didn’t make him feel a hell of a lot better though. After all, when you sat on your ass for long enough, drinking whiskey the whole time, you started to wonder what you’d really accomplished. You started to wonder if, given the fact that one total psychopath was bent on the destruction of humanity, and another total psychopath was in charge of the human fleet, you had done enough with your time in this life. You started to wonder if you’d be happy dying tomorrow when Walker took out Earth.

Pike probably didn’t remember telling him that. He’d been outrageously, almost indescribably, drunk. He’d been beyond tears. He’d slurred the words while Rychenkov tried earnestly to understand him, and then just as earnestly tried to believe that they were wrong.

They weren’t. Pike had disappeared back to the human fleet the next day, a matter Nhean refused to talk about, and the news since then had been full of stories about Tel’rabim’s targets.

No one knew how he was choosing them. No one knew where he would hit next. Hell, for all Rychenkov knew, it could be here.

He managed to stand up from the bar and make his way halfway across the room before that last bit of whisky caught up with him. Rychenkov started to sway slightly to the left, reached out for a chair, and gracelessly sat himself down sideways, leaning against the table.

The problem, he thought morosely, was that when you’d spent your life being too sensible to play the revolutionary, you got to the point where you stared down your own death and you worried that you’d accomplished nothing. You spent so long not putting your head up, only to die when the hammer fell on everyone, anyway. You died filled with regret.

That wasn’t how he wanted to die.

His comm device beeped. He looked down at it.

Mr Rychenkov, please standby. Your services are about to be required. —Nhean.

“Who is it?” whispered Gabriela in his ear. He nearly jumped—she’d snuck up on him from nowhere, it seemed.

“No one.”

“Is it Nhean?” She asked, accusatorially.

“Gabby, look—”

“No. You tell that fucker that I’m not risking my husband’s life for his little crusade. Not again. Not for you, not for Pike. Not for anyone. Got it? We run goods. We get paid. Easy, simple. No heroics. Got it?” She punched his shoulder for emphasis. Except … she punched a lot harder than she should have if it were only a joke.

He nodded, numbly, and she stalked away out of the bar. He glanced over at James, who was still finishing his drink.

“Women,” James said. “Gotta love ‘em.”

“Yeah. And if not, they beat the shit out of you?” He rubbed his shoulder.

“Something like that.” James finally tipped back the last two fingers of whiskey—where the hell were the Netties getting whiskey?—and stood up, painfully, to follow Ry out. “Look. Give Gabby a little break. I nearly died on her. And in case you haven’t seen, she kinda likes me.”

“You’re her husband,” said Ry.

“I mean, in spite of that.” He grinned. “Look, maybe … maybe we can take it easy for a bit? Just to calm her nerves?”

Ry nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll … talk to Nhean. See if we can’t work something out.”

James eyed him suspiciously. “And if you can’t? What if he makes you an offer you can’t refuse?”

“Then,” Ry opened the door to the bar, “he’ll find out what it means to cross a Ringer. Us folks from Saturn don’t like to get pushed around.”

CHAPTER TEN

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

New Vatican Station

“So we have your assurance? You’ll reach out to her upper leadership team and figure out who can best take her place?” Celestine asked for the third time. “Take her place, under our direction, of course.”

Their small group was making its way through one of the newer ships, the Veyrier. Their footsteps did not clang quite as loudly as they would have on the warped gratings of the older fleet, and the new hallways and conference rooms of the cruiser shone clean.

Someone, Nhean suspected, was sucking up in the hopes of a command post.

That was the least of his worries right now, however. “You have my assurance.” He allowed himself to look halfway between understanding and wounded as he spoke.

“Celestine.” Parley Worthlin, the Mormon prophet, gave a beatific smile. “Mr. Tang had already chosen to break with the admiral before learning of our plan.”

Nhean inclined his head slightly. “I understand your caution. In these times, it is … difficult to pick the correct path. However, President Worthlin is correct. I had already deemed Laura Walker a danger. I was considering the correct move to take.”

Never mind that his tentative plan had been similar to their own. He had been planning to meet privately with Delaney and ask the man’s help in quietly taking over the fleet. No fuss, no panic. Walker would become quietly indisposed and, with any luck, would have a change of heart when confronted by Pike and Delaney about her ghoulish plan for Earth.

If not, she would be confined.

But Nhean’s plan had involved relying on other qualified commanders, and in truth, he doubted very much that any of the Funders Circle had considered the tactical expertise necessary to command the fleet. Even Nhean would never have tried to do so himself, and it was clear that the mutiny had been carried out by some of the least competent members of the brass.

They had the ships, but the fleet had lost captains it could not afford to lose—captains who had commanded ships in battle. Ships were valuable, but command experience was gold.

And Nhean was not even sure the Circle had a plan at all, beyond their self-serving desire to have the ships protecting them.

“It would, however, be only natural to develop a camaraderie with the woman. Before we remove her, of course,” Celestine pressed. “That way she won’t suspect our plan to replace her. She probably suspects we’ve summoned her here to attempt to take the rest of her fleet by force. Let’s disarm her first. Play at friends. After all, we’re all one big happy human family.”

It took Nhean a moment to recall the flow of the conversation.

“Yes,” he said impatiently. “It would be, and I did attempt it. And I grew to like her. Does that shock you? I like a great many people that I would not put in command of the fleet. Myself, for example.”

President Worthlin chuckled at this, and even Celestine cracked a smile.

“The thing you need not fear,” Nhean said seriously, “is that I would mistake camaraderie, as you called it, for a reason not to remove the admiral from command. She is unfit. All of us know it now.”

Even if they didn’t know why. They simply thought she was reckless. He knew, now, she was far, far more than reckless.

She was cold.

She was willing to make the hard—no, the unthinkable—choices that would save them all. And it made him shudder.

President Worthlin was clearly convinced. A man with a quick mind, generally slow to speak, he was unsettlingly intelligent—while simultaneously believing the best of everyone. It was a bizarre streak of naiveté in an otherwise politically savvy man. Nhean was fairly sure that Worthlin had insisted that the plan be to depose Walker instead of going for a more violent and expedient solution.

He was grateful for that.

His earpiece buzzed slightly.

“I’m close to the bridge.”

Nhean relaxed slightly. As if acquiescing to the Circle’s request, he had sent the girl away—with express instructions to make her way onto one of the ships and get a foothold into the code the Circle was modifying.

He was not always sure how she managed to move so easily without being seen, and he had the strange idea that even she might not know. Her control over technology was too unpredictable, and her instincts were too ingrained for them to be consciously or methodically applied.

However she did it, they needed that talent now. Nhean was an accomplished information broker, but it took no special skill to see that he would be excluded from key decisions in this process. Celestine, at least, did not trust him.

“Have you picked a commander for the fleet?” Nhean asked now.

“Who would you recommend?” Celestine returned smoothly.

The man had no intentions of taking his advice, Nhean knew that much.

“I haven’t seen who’s here,” he pointed out. “I figured you would have had someone in mind.”

“And we are eager to hear your views.” Celestine’s smile did not waver. He led their small group to the bridge, but stayed well clear of the screens where the coders were at work. “If you could choose anyone in the Exile Fleet….”

Nhean considered this. What to say? Who to put on their radar? Who to use to impress upon them the necessity of expertise? Delaney, however qualified, would never merit more than a wholesale refusal on their part.

“Larsen or Min,” he said finally. “Both have participated in several battles while on the bridge of a carrier. Both are smart enough to know that they need a competent command structure beneath them, and wise enough to take advice, but willing to make decisions on their own.”

“We are given to understand that Larsen killed several of our operatives during the attempted mutiny,” Celestine said flatly. “The Arianna King remains under Walker’s command. He is loyal to her.”

“In the man’s defense, you didn’t make a very good pitch,” Nhean observed. He kept his voice mild. “You merely asked for my opinion, and I gave it. Command of a three-dimensional battle is no small feat, especially when in orbit around a planet. You’ll want someone with the charisma to rally captains to sacrifice themselves, if necessary. You’ll want someone who understands the limitations and abilities of each ship. And, perhaps especially in the upper echelons of the brass….” He let his words hang suggestively until he felt his audience’s interest. “There will always be divisions to exploit when the stakes are this high.”

Celestine was struck by that thought. “You think if we had waited….” He shook his head. “There was no time. She would not protect us.”

“I think if you had spent more time on intelligence gathering, perhaps, you might have the entire fleet here right now. Of course, I could have helped you with that, although I understand your reasons for not asking me.” Nhean lifted a shoulder. “What’s done is done. Of those we have, I would be glad to offer any information I have to help you make a decision.”

“Indeed,” Celestine said quietly.

“I’ve got it.” The words were sudden, breathless. “There’s a monitor in the system and I have the full code of the version of The Seed they’re working with now. I’m coming back.”

Nhean felt his heart leap, and quelled his smile.

Now to alter it. Neuter it.

If they could. Half of it was Telestine code. With Schroeder possibly dead, and with no access to his company’s designers, they’d have to figure it out from scratch.

“There is much for you all to discuss,” he said gracefully. “Understand that I am not … offended … by your caution. I will let you all come to a decision on which of my talents you wish to employ. I only hope that I will be allowed to help. Remember, I have fought for humanity for many years. I have as much invested in our survival as anyone.”

He started to leave, but Celestine continued talking, looking out the window at a grouping of more stolen Exile Fleet vessels. “And Mr. Tang, if we’re unsuccessful here today, know that I have a stopgap. I will not let her leave here with all the ships she’s bringing with her.” He turned to face him. “And I have the means to do so. Either they come over to our side willingly, or … they go … nowhere.”

His meaning was clear.

The Seed would be used first for subversion of command and the … appropriation of ships.

And if that failed, The Seed would be used for destruction.

He stifled a shudder, sketched a slight bow and left.

How many of them would not survive the day, he wondered. And all the while, Ka’sagra was still out there, somewhere, possibly with a bomb or bombs that could destroy the sun. Somehow. Time wasn’t just running out for him, it was running out for all of them, humans and Telestines alike.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ganymede, High Orbit

EFS Santa Maria

Conference Room

The conference room on the Santa Maria was silent. The wreckage of Bogotá Station swirled in the distance, just visible through the windows. Busy Perseverance Station loomed nearby, high above Ganymede. Larsen, looking at each of the captains in turn, saw defeat and anger. They were consumed with it. No one spoke, for what would they say?

Some distant part of him knew that they had to miss a target eventually. Tel’rabim’s fleet was too big to match. And, these days especially, too fast. Remarkably fast. They had only barely been keeping up as it was.

Walker, however, seemed strangely calm—even happy. She was careful to keep her face grave, but Larsen caught the tiny twitches at the corners of her mouth. What did she know that he didn’t?

“So.” She laced her hands behind her back and looked around at them. “We caught word of Tel’rabim’s fleet en route to Enceladus. We followed, at top acceleration. We should, by all accounts, have beaten them there, given that Delaney was already close by. But we did not. Why?”

No one answered. Delaney actually looked away. Larsen had never seen the old man looking so close to defeat, and he was surprised by how much it shook him.

“It was not your fault, Jack,” Walker said quietly.

Heads came up.

“Now, wait a minute.” Delaney’s voice was a rumble. “If it wasn’t ours, it wasn’t yours.”

To everyone’s surprise, Walker smiled. “I know.”

The captains exchanged quick looks.

Walker began to pace. “In the past few weeks, we have seen that Tel’rabim’s fleet is larger than we ever imagined. The ships seem to be everywhere on our scans. No one could give me an answer on where they had come from. There weren’t shipyards we could find that could have produced them so fast.”

Larsen felt his fingers working nervously over the rim of his coffee cup. He didn’t understand where she was going with this. He found himself bizarrely fearful.

At least Pike wasn’t here.

“I began to suspect the truth when we received word of the impending attack on Enceladus,” Walker said. “I was told that our comm buoys had picked up the Telestine fleet in motion, and that the readings were off somehow. I had my suspicions about what that might mean, and when we reached Enceladus, I decided to do more research.”

She looked around the room, waiting for someone, anyone, to voice her conclusion, and Larsen felt an overwhelming frustration that he could not be the one to voice it. He could picture her smile if he did. They would be the only two that understood.

As it was, he was just one more clueless captain.

“The fleet hasn’t grown at all,” Walker said finally. “Tel’rabim has not been building new ships. In fact, our fleets are still evenly matched. In reality, those are all the same ships, popping up in different locations in the solar system, sometimes attacking and sometimes not. And let me tell you, we’ve been very, very lucky that we were able to stave off any of the attacks at all.”

“They can’t be the same ships,” Delaney said. “To get to those systems, they’d have to be traveling….”

The answer came to Larsen in a flash. “Faster than light,” he said.

Walker smiled at him, and he basked in the moment. “Yes,” she told them all simply. “Faster than light.”

There was a dumbstruck silence.

“But they’ve never used FTL before,” Delaney said quietly.

“Now they are. And you’re partly wrong—they used FTL to get here from their own star system. Then, for whatever reason, they mothballed it. It seems to be the Telestine way with technology—as soon as they don’t need something, it’s archived.” She crossed her arms. “Why they’ve dusted it off and added it back into their ships now, I couldn’t tell you—or, frankly, how they did it so quickly. Capturing one of those ships and figuring it out is going to be one of our top priorities at this point. But it’s not our first priority.” She looked around the room. “Whoever took my ships was kind enough to leave all of the carriers and all of my best captains, but we were already barely holding off the Telestines as it was. Now, with this new FTL advantage, we simply can’t match them with only half our fleet, as was so tragically demonstrated at Enceladus.”

“You’re going after the mutineers,” Delaney said quietly.

Silence overwhelmed the conference room as a hush fell over the assembled captains and officers.

“Ma’am, with respect,” began Captain Shin, his brow furrowed, “word has it that less than half of the people on those ships are actual traitors. Most are just innocent kids that got caught up in the mutiny. If we go after those ships in force, we’re risking thousands of loyal crew.”

“I’m going after the mutineers,” she said, with a nod to Delaney, then turned towards Captain Shin. “I understand that, Captain. Most of those people are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But given Tel’rabim’s new FTL capabilities, we simply can’t afford to wait. Now that he can strike us anywhere he wants, and then turn around and immediately strike us again halfway across the solar system, we must act now.”

“Are you planning to talk to them?” Delaney looked interested by this. He met Larsen’s eyes briefly.

“Perhaps.” Walker’s smile was very cold. “How much I talk to them—whether I talk to them—depends on them. I do not have time to spend patting them on the head and telling them I understand their concerns. If they won’t do what is right, I will take the ships back. By force if need be.” She stood up. The other captains and assembled officers followed suit. “In fact, I want you to draw up a plan, Mr. Delaney. And you, Larsen. We’re going to Neptune, and we’re taking enough of our remaining ships and soldiers to get the job done. You have six hours. Dismissed.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ganymede, High Orbit

EFS Santa Maria

Admiral’s Quarters

Pike was dozing on the couch, most of his shins over one end and his body still crumpled awkwardly to fit, when Walker slammed her way into the room, still fuming over the news of Tel’rabim’s FTL capabilities, and running through the possibilities for an assault on the renegade fleet now somewhere near Neptune. But she shook it off—that was Delaney’s and Larsen’s job for now. Let them plan. She needed to fit at least an hour of sleep in before some new emergency required her attention. They’d presented a few preliminary possibilities, and they’d chosen the ships to make the trek out to Neptune, but the tactical details were still up in the air.

Pike jerked awake and rubbed at his neck.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes. No. It’s not important.” She unbuttoned the collar of her uniform, slung a towel over her shoulder, and went to go wash her face in the small bathroom.

She heard him get up and begin to pace as she splashed the water on herself and studied her reflection in the mirror. She was tired. Her face was thinner these days. And she wasn’t sure she liked what she saw in her eyes. After a moment, she wiped her hands on the towel and left the room, shaking her head.

The Telestines were coming for them, no matter what she looked like. She couldn’t waste time on trivialities.

Pike’s shoulder was still hunched awkwardly as he walked up and down in the tiny room.

“Why didn’t you take the bed?” Walker asked, amused. “You don’t even close to fit on that couch.”

“It seemed….” He gave her a look and, uncharacteristically, blushed.

She swallowed. “No,” she said firmly. “Not overstepping your bounds at all.” That wasn’t what he had been going to say and she knew it, but it was probably best if they didn’t acknowledge any of that.

She devoted her attention to tidying the room.

“So.” Pike sat back down cautiously, and immediately stood again as she tugged a shirt out from under him. “What’s been going on?”

“Initial warning,” a computerized voice informed them. “Acceleration begins in five minutes.”

“Well … that,” Walker said. “For one thing.”

“So we’re going.”

She looked at him, really looked.

She had shut him out of all of this, because of course she had. In the midst of a mutiny born of split loyalties, she had not felt comfortable asking Delaney and the others to accept Pike’s presence in the conference room.

From the overhaul of the ship’s captains, newer captains replaced with those she had known for years, to the planning for the attack on Neptune—she still couldn’t believe she was leading an assault on a human colony rather than their true enemy—she had done everything she could think to keep the fleet safe and loyal.

And it might still not be enough.

That was the terrifying thing. Nothing she had done might be enough, because she had no idea what she was facing. The temptation to stay and throw herself at the Telestine fleet, FTL or not, was overwhelming.

Never had she gone into a confrontation with so little information. There had been no demands—in fact, there had been no communication of any kind. If there was a rhyme or reason to the ships Nhean had chosen to take, beyond the lack of attempts on the carriers, she could not see what it was. It hadn’t been all his ships, or all the older ships, or all the newer ones built at the Mercury shipyards. It hadn’t been the ships in best repair as of the time he left the fleet. It hadn’t been the ships with the best weaponry.

All he had done—all he had done—was split the fleet. And bring half of it to Neptune, of all the godforsaken places in the solar system.

What did the man want?

She sighed.

“What is it?”

“I hate this,” she admitted. “I hate Nhean for doing this to us.”

“We don’t know who it is yet,” he cautioned her.

She didn’t look over her shoulder at him. He was determined not to believe the worst of that man, and it baffled her. He, of all people, had reasons to hate Nhean Tang—more so, she would think, when the Dawning had chosen to ally herself with him instead of Pike.

And now it occurred to her to wonder just why, exactly, he was so sure it wasn’t Nhean.

“You keep saying that,” she said quietly. She still didn’t look at him, but she settled back against the desk and crossed her arms. “Why, exactly—”

She heard him stand up, and turned to face him—and managed to forget everything she’d been going to say. Pike was close, close enough to feel the heat from his body, close enough to smell the lingering traces of the soap they all used. Mixed with the scent of his skin, the smell was oddly intoxicating.

From the look on his face, he hadn’t realized quite how close he was, either.

Like a dream, she felt one hand come to rest on her hip, heat burning through the uniform.

And then, with a sudden smile, he had her other hand captured, and he brought her in a slow turn.

“What are you doing?” She couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

“When was the last time you danced with someone?”

“This is hardly the time—”

“This is exactly the time.” He pulled her closer.

The floor shuddered under them as the engines kicked into high gear and to her surprise, Walker rested her cheek against his chest and let her eyes drift closed. She didn’t need to know the steps, because there really weren’t any. It was just the two of them, klaxons and warning messages fading into the background, and she could hear his heartbeat.

“Now.” She felt as much as heard his voice. “What’s wrong?”

There was one secret she had guarded even more carefully than that of her plans, and a chill ran down her spine when she opened her mouth. She had to admit it now, or it would kill her.

“I’m more scared of us than I am of the Telestines.”

She felt the way his body tensed, but he didn’t stop dancing. “What d’you mean?”

“The reason I fight….” She bit her lip, and to her shame, felt tears on her cheeks. “Is to keep us from killing each other. The Telestines … I hate them. I do. They came here and they took everything and they had no right.” She could feel her voice shaking. “But they were saving their own kind, and I can kill them. I’m allowed. Because I’m saving my kind.” She looked up at him. “Do you see?”

He tilted his head at her. His hand splayed over her lower back to hold her close. “I … don’t know.”

“Everything they do to us is because they want their own kind to survive,” she explained. “They’re my enemies, they need to die, and I hate them for what they’ve done—but I understand it, and I can fight them. Everything humans do to each other, though … there’s nothing noble about it. There’s no grand reason. They’re just screwing each other over because there isn’t enough for all of us.”

“That’s why I fight, Pike. Because I’ll be damned if humanity dies because we killed each other instead of the Telestines killing us. And … we’re getting close. It’s getting uglier, year after year, and I can’t just kill the people who do things like this. I can’t—because they’re ours. They’re us. And then I wonder what I’m even saving and—”

The kiss was sudden and sweet, and it took her breath away. She wound her arms around his neck and tried, with everything she had, to forget what she’d been thinking about.

What was he doing?

What she doing?

“It won’t always be like this,” Pike whispered finally. “There was a time before the Telestines, and there will be a time after them—”

“We killed each other even then. From everything I’ve heard, we were quite good at it, too.” Her tone was humorous, but there was a dull pit in her stomach.

“No one expects you to make a perfect world.” His eyes flamed like they always did when he was concentrating on something. She couldn’t guess at what he might be thinking. “There is no perfect world. There’s only better. And when the Telestines are gone, that will be better. One thing at a time.”

She bent her forehead against his chest. She was so damned tired of this.

“I have to get the fleet back.”

“The fleet, and then Earth.” He said the words quietly. If he felt her tense in his arms, he gave no sign of it. “You have to see it, Laura. To believe it. I can’t believe you’ve fought so long without seeing it.”

No. Her lips formed the word silently. She didn’t want to hear this.

“You know when you watch a ship disappear after undocking? How it flies off into the distance until it’s just a tiny dot, and then, nothing?” he murmured.

“Yeah?” She had no idea where he was going with this now.

“You can do that on Earth, and everything that ship flies across is fertile land, places you can run without needing air filters, places you can farm for your food. When you have the fleet back, that’s what you can give humanity—more land, more safety, more resources than they’ll know what to do with.”

She stayed silent. The strength of her own convictions held her still.

“And the first time you see the sun rise,” he whispered, “you’ll know it was worth it. Laura, it’s so beautiful. It breaks your heart.”

She refused to breathe, refused to sigh at the beauty Pike described. Nostalgia for a lost past would not save humanity.

Secure for acceleration, the automated voices told them, and Walker clung to him as the familiar inertial pull dragged at her bones, and she pressed her lips shut rather than lie to the one person she loved most in the universe.

Lie … or worse, admit the truth that he would never see Earth again.

There was a whole galaxy out there. Just waiting for humanity to discover it.

Why couldn’t anyone else see that?

When the comm link beeped, she wrenched herself away with relief.

“Yes, what is it?”

But it wasn’t Larsen’s voice in her earpiece, or Delaney’s.

“Admiral.” Nhean’s static-riddled voice was as calm and collected as ever, but it had an edge to it. “We need to talk. Now.”

She smiled. The traitor had undoubtedly called to offer bait.

And she intended to take it.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

Koh Rong

Bridge

There was the low murmur of voices on the other end of the line, and then a video channel opened. Nhean saw an empty room, unusually messy for Walker, and the admiral’s annoyed face.

“So you’ve decided what your demands are,” she said simply. “Well, tell me. I hate wasting time.”

Nhean allowed himself a small smile. To his surprise, he was glad to see her looking well. She showed unmistakable signs of stress and exhaustion, but he had been bracing himself, he realized now, for the sight of someone completely worn down. He was glad that she still had anger and energy.

“There is a group here on Neptune known as the Funders Circle. They are now in possession of some of your ships, and would like to meet with you—which I offered to arrange.”

She looked away, and he could see the calculations going in her head.

“You gave the ships away. You stole them from me, and then gave them away. Unbelievable,” she said at last.

“I would like to point out that although much of the ship design was my own, the Funders Circle contributed substantially to the project. There would not be a fleet of ships without them.” He took a deep breath. “And just to remind you, it was you who took my ships away from me. But to return to your original point—I was not the one who took them. I had no hand in what has happened.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“It is the truth.” Nhean lifted one shoulder. “But nothing I can say will convince you either way on that. I am calling only to place you in contact with the rest of the members of the Funders Circle. They want to … bargain with you, and I believe them to be sincere.”

“So you are one of these Funders, then.” She settled back in her chair. “You say they contributed ‘substantially’ to the project, but none of the rest of them reached out to me as you did, did they? None of the others gave me intelligence, or even funds to help feed and clothe the fleet. Combined with the fact that the fleet is now gone … I can only assume they had other plans for it. What were those?”

Nhean was stopped in his tracks. He continually underestimated this woman’s ability to go to the heart of the matter. His own worries were laid bare here. What had the other members of the Circle wanted? Had they truly believed, all along, that they could command the fleet better than Laura Walker and take on the Telestines, or had they built it only to defend themselves and their wealth?

Every normal, basic instinct screamed to back away from this avenue of discussion rather than risk an unexpected sympathetic moment with her. There was an element of wounded pride as well: he should have asked harder questions over those years. But Nhean had honed better instincts than the ones he was born with. He knew when to take a hit in order to win a larger battle.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. He let his surprise show through. “It never occurred to me that they would try to command the ships on their own. I wasn’t aware of their plan to steal the ships. And even now, I believe their only goal is to force you to pay special attention to defending their interests.”

“Yes.” Her voice was dry. “Very convenient, your regret. So why are you helping them now?”

She was mimicking his techniques back at him, and Nhean found that he did not like it.

“Where’s Delaney?” he asked. “Sent him away, did you? For fear of what I might say?”

This sort of jab was beneath him, and did nothing to advance his cause, but he found he did not want to stop himself.

And then, when her smile flickered but did not fade, that there was a deeper wound to pick at.

“Or was it not Delaney who was there with you when I first called? Was it not him you sent away, but instead someone whose opinion of your plans would be less … professional?”

Her hands tightened around the armrests of her chair, and he felt a thrill of satisfaction. So it had been Pike who was there. He could only hope the man was slowly chipping away at her confidence in her suicidal endgame.

They needed her back on their side.

“Say what you will,” she said quietly, “but he is here. He knew better than to back you.” Her voice strengthened. “He knows that I will free us from the Telestines.”

Nhean opened his mouth to respond, but felt the anger drain away from him.

This bickering got them nowhere. He let his head drop back for a moment, eyes closed, and then he looked at her. He met her eyes, and he told the truth.

“Believe it or not … so do I. And I do not think the Funders have the skill to do the same. That is why I am setting up this conversation between you.”

It caught her off-guard. “What?”

“They did not tell me what they had done until the ships arrived,” Nhean told her bluntly. “Again, believe it or not as you choose, but I am speaking the truth when I say that they feared I would not back them. And I am speaking the truth when I say that I do not think they have a commander worthy of the fleet—as much as you and I differ on what it means to be free of the occupation … you have the capability to destroy our enemies. They do not.”

She looked down again. He saw her throat work as she swallowed.

“This is not an appeal to your vanity,” Nhean told her bluntly. “You know that you are a good commander and tactician, as do I. There is nothing to be gained by me saying it to stroke your ego.”

“Then why are you saying it?” She was wary.

As well she might be, he supposed.

“Because I do not want to die,” Nhean said. “I want to see Earth before I pass, and I want it to be my home. I want to be buried in Cambodia. I could support the fact that they took the fleet from you, given your goals. But they do not know your goals. Their reasons for taking it are not valid, and their plans are not complete. They endanger us more than you do at this point.”

“So you would use me to defeat them, and once the fleet is whole, you will have me removed so that you can command it.” Her guess was delivered with a bitter smile. “Or will you let them kill me instead, and have it the other way around? Will they fire on my ship while I approach, or will they look me in the eye and kill me face to face?”

“They will not kill you,” Nhean said flatly. “That, I made sure of. I would never have agreed to put you in contact if that were their plan.”

She looked taken aback by his vehemence. “Are their fears well founded, then? Do you have some affection for me after all?”

“Call it what you want.” He shrugged. “Call it morals. Call it the idea that I know I can never staff the fleet over again, and I know I can never command their loyalty if I have you assassinated. Call it expediency.” If he were being honest, he was not entirely sure which of those was the most true. He shook his head slightly. “Whatever you call it, I made sure it was not their plan to kill you before I agreed to set this up.”

Believe it or not as you will.

That was what it came down to, now: whether she could believe him.

She studied his face for a long moment.

“I do not want to die,” he told her again. “These people here would doom everyone simply because they are used to having what they want and they cannot accept that the fleet will not protect them first, even though they have the biggest bank accounts. Do you understand that?”

Something sparked in her eyes, an answering fear. She looked, he thought, as if she agreed and did not want to.

“I do not want to die.” He repeated the words another time, softly and frankly.

“You haven’t answered me,” she told him finally. She looked up. “We have a common purpose for now, but in the end, we will have to reckon with … the other matter.” Her emphasis on the word reminded him once again of her true goal: render Earth uninhabitable for Telestine and human alike. “Why should we join forces? Because it is all well and good not to have an assassin waiting in the shadows, but surely you know it will come to that. You will have to kill me to keep me from my purpose.”

“I hope not.” The words were honest. “I would rather change your mind.”

She laughed. “You won’t. Humanity belongs in the stars. Not chained to a single planet. Or even the idea of a single planet. The only thing the Telestines have done for us is to teach us that is too risky. No. You won’t change my mind. Not a chance.”

“Stranger things have happened.” Nhean shrugged again. “So let me offer this: do you think I am better able to save humanity than the Funders Circle? Do you think I would pick a better fleet admiral than they would, if you were dead and gone?”

“Who would you pick?”

“Min. Or Delaney.”

Her eyebrows rose, but she said nothing.

“If you think I would inevitably doom us,” Nhean said quietly, “then you have nothing to gain by working with me. But if you think I am better, if you think either you or I would indisputably be a better commander than they could find—then work with me to unite the fleet, and we will settle our differences later. Come to Neptune. New Vatican Station. Let’s talk. I think you might find that the Funders Circle responds favorably to reason. Especially … if you can commit to defending their interests in the coming war.”

Coming war? Good God, Nhean, war is upon us. She took her time before answering.

“I will be back in contact,” she said finally. “I will make a decision, and I will be back in contact.”

He had to admit he would do the same—leave her hanging when he’d in fact already made up his mind, which he could tell she had. Nhean nodded silently and ended the call, only to hear the beep of another incoming message the next moment. He looked over, annoyed.

And froze.

The girl looked up with a raised eyebrow. She still preferred to convey small things with her expression, rather than go through the trouble of speaking.

“It’s Tel’rabim,” Nhean said.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Earth

Telestine London

Most High Command Center, Tertiary Level

He paced as he waited for the call to be answered. Around him, the vaulted ceilings of the library rose gracefully to the sky.

This was the sort of place he belonged: elegant, refined. Untouched by humanity.

This planet should be theirs and theirs alone. He refused, absolutely, to feel guilty for taking Earth, and he refused to feel ashamed of his anger that humanity still lived as leeches on Telestine society. What could they have accomplished if they had not wasted their time feeding the humans, clothing them, housing them … crushing their inevitable, tiresome, costly rebellions?

They hadn’t had the courage to chase the humans down or leave them to die in the black. Even their cities, set above the ruins, had an aura of being temporary. As if they did not own the planet they now inhabited.

It was weakness. And he would no longer tolerate those who encouraged it.

When they were dead, the calls for his resignation would die with them. The Telestines would see what they had gained, and be grateful for what he had done to get it.

He looked over his team, each poring over thousands of records. Ka’sagra’s hand had become evident in the destruction of Denver and Tokyo, and now … now he knew that there was something she did not want him to find. She had a plan, and she believed he could thwart it if he found something in the archives.

But what? He did not have the first idea where to look, and his efforts to find the priestess herself were unsuccessful.

And so he must call on one of the very people he hoped so much to destroy—the one who would still have access to the Dawning.

Despite everything, creating that was still his proudest accomplishment.

The line clicked on.

“Hello.” Nhean’s voice came down the line, smooth and assured, yet nevertheless with the tone Tel’rabim had come to interpret as “reserved.” It seemed to be this human’s default tone.

Not for the first time, he wished he could peer inside the human’s head. Mind-to-mind communication was altogether simpler, in his opinion. It was more difficult to hide one’s true thoughts.

More difficult—and yet, as Ka’sagra had proved, not impossible.

“I assume you have had time to consider my theories,” Nhean said, when Tel’rabim said nothing more.

“Yes,” Tel’rabim said shortly. “And although you raise many intriguing questions, we are still short on answers. Most pressing: how and when would Ka’sagra attempt to do this?” He paused. “If, of course, you are correct.”

The trick now lay in convincing Nhean that the problem could not be solved without moving the Dawning to Earth. Tel’rabim had no intention of letting any human live when this was all over—but he would certainly allow a temporary alliance, built on Nhean’s instinct for self-preservation.

Tel’rabim breathed quietly. First, he told himself, Ka’sagra. Then humanity. First, Ka’sagra.

***

“Most pressing: how and when would Ka’sagra attempt to do this?” Tel’rabim paused. “If, of course, you are correct.”

It was an attempt to keep Nhean from controlling the conversation, but Nhean knew that Tel’rabim already believed him.

What other theory, after all, explained everything Ka’sagra had done? What other theory explained why the Telestines’ sun had so suddenly, so unexpectedly, gone nova? They were a species with FTL, with generation ships that could carry them across the stars—and with the technological capability to build those things quickly enough to survive the disaster in their home system.

Deep down, some of them must have wondered why they didn’t see the nova coming.

He opened his mouth to tell Tel’rabim his theories … and closed it again. Now was a dangerous moment, one in which he would be tempted to trust. Alliances were good, but trust was less so—especially when it came to someone like Tel’rabim.

“I hoped you might have a better idea than I would,” he said mildly. “Being Telestine as well, and having observed Ka’sagra for more time, I assumed you would be better placed to determine her plan. Humanity does not have the technology to make a sun go nova.”

It wasn’t entirely a lie.

At his side, just out of sight—in case the video should come on—the girl had her head bowed and her palms skimming over a piece of that damnably nondescript Telestine technology. Nhean wondered briefly what she was doing, and decided not to interfere.

“I cannot guess at her plan,” Tel’rabim said simply, and maddeningly. “I am searching the archives at London for an idea of what technology she might remember and use.”

Nhean’s brows rose sharply. “The archives?”

“Yes.” Tel’rabim sounded impatient.

“Why London?” Curiosity, nothing more. He had no idea how the Telestines had chosen the places for their cities.

Tel’rabim ignored that. “The answer must be here.”

“Why do you say so?”

The Telestine ignored that, as well. Most Telestines talked to humans this way—hardly acknowledging what was said and plowing on ahead with whatever was on the Telestine’s mind. Nhean often wondered if it was because they could not see inside a human’s mind the way they could see within each other’s in order to truly exchange ideas. “What she plans to make use of, however, I cannot guess. So much is archived there.”

Whatever else he learned from this conversation, at least he’d learned this. Could it be that Telestines, when they are through using a technology, at least temporarily, they just … archive it? It had not occurred to him that they would have to turn to archives in order to determine what technologies were used—but, then again, it made sense. Without knowing how the nova had been created, one would have to comb through likely-looking areas of research and development.

Nhean steepled his fingers under his chin and frowned at the comm unit. “Could we narrow the search by looking just at technology currently employed by the Daughters of Ascension? Or, perhaps, your military?”

“They do not have technologies that could be useful for this. We need few of the things we used for our life on our home planet—or for our … what is your word for it? Ah, yes: exodus.” The Telestine’s voice was wry. “Our wars within our species were more demanding of us than our war against your kind.”

Nhean’s eyes narrowed speculatively.

The jab was not important. It was not important at all. What was important was the mention of wars. Wars usually meant bombs. Tel’rabim, though not an engineer, nonetheless had zeroed in on military technology as the cause of the nova.

Nhean had been asking himself for a while where a group of clerics had found the technology to make star-destroying explosives, but that might not be important. Wherever they had gotten it to start with, it was now in the archives at London—along with a great deal of other technology.

Technology that might, for instance, show them how to defuse those bombs remotely.

Tel’rabim spoke as Nhean’s mind was still racing. “Ka’sagra’s plan is important, but if what you say is true, we should also find her. She clearly does not yet have every piece she needs for her plan—again, should you be correct about what it is—but she will be active in gathering them. Finding her may eliminate the need to discover the plan itself.”

Nhean nodded silently before remembering that his video was not turned on. “Yes. Of course.” He did not trust that Ka’sagra would make herself indispensable to the plan. She would have one or two close associates to carry out the rest, in case something should happen to her.

But the truth could be tortured out of her, if nothing else.

“To be blunt,” Tel’rabim continued, “you and I both know that right now we are in a war that will end with only one species alive. But what is the point of being the winner if we are only destroyed by Ka’sagra soon after? I am willing to suspend hostilities—if we can come to an agreement and join forces to search for her.”

Nhean considered this. With the fleet fractured, it was clear that humanity needed a cessation of hostilities. They could not win as things stood now. “Tell me more. Do you have a plan for finding her?”

When Tel’rabim spoke again, his voice was smooth as silk. “I do, but I need a rather wider net to search through our systems. I had that tool at my disposal once.”

Understanding hit Nhean and he felt his lips curve. “You want the Dawning back.” Of course. Of course, Tel’rabim would ask for this.

On the floor, the girl’s head jerked up. She stared at him, wide-eyed.

“I need the Dawning back.” Tel’rabim’s voice was still smooth. “Nothing else allows such access to the old systems.”

There was something there, something that hinted at larger troubles than Tel’rabim perhaps wanted to admit.

His grip on Telestine society was not very strong, Nhean sensed. Were members of the old military structure still opposing him? Whatever the case, some things were absolutely clear: first, on the off-chance that Nhean could solve this problem before he did, Tel’rabim intended leave a trail of breadcrumbs that might lead Nhean to the truth; second, he had absolutely no interest in sharing the solution when it was found; and third, this was just an excuse, however timely, to ask for the girl back.

He spoke before his mind entirely caught up with him.

“Yes, I see. I’ll send her back, then.”

***

Tel’rabim stared at the comm unit.

He could not possibly have heard that correctly.

“And what,” he asked precisely, “has made you decide to return it after all this time?”

Ruined, most likely. All the work he had done, all of the careful planning, the gene splicing and technology integration that had taken hundreds of hours to test and months to perfect on his final subject, and the machine was likely broken now. He had no idea how, of course.

But if anything could break reliably, it was the human genome.

And still … a broken tool could perhaps be repaired, where building another up from nothing would likely not be possible given his current time constraints. In the end, creating the Dawning had been more art than science, a fact that still made him uncomfortable.

“I did not say return her to you.” For the first time, he heard true amusement in Nhean’s voice. He would pay for that, eventually. The insolence. “I said I was sending her back to Earth. She should look at the archives. You designed her to interfere remotely with technology—whatever Ka’sagra is planning, she is an integral part of our response to it. And, of course, you two could work together to find her as well.”

Tel’rabim took a moment to compose himself.

The most infuriating thing, he decided, was how close to useful humans were. They were very nearly the perfect tool for any job.

And they willfully chose not to be perfect. It was maddening.

He could only hope they were as much of a trial to Ka’sagra as they were to him. You two could work together. One did not work with a socket wrench or an engine, one used such tools.

That was how the Dawning had been broken, he decided. All of the careful work he had done to create a perfect computer, one that could learn the patterns and weaknesses of his enemy’s defense networks, and Nhean had managed to convince the thing that it was a person. That it had volition.That it could choose what to do with its talents.

He had broken it once, and he could do so again. But he could not say that of course. He forced himself to say the things the human wanted to hear:

“I will apprise it—her—of our progress so far.”

“I would wait on that.” Nhean continued down the path of predictable rebellion. “She has met Ka’sagra. She thinks critically. Let her search for what she thinks would be most useful.”

***

There was a pause.

“I see,” Tel’rabim said finally.

“So you agree?” Nhean asked. At his side, the girl was staring at him with wary eyes, and he did not look directly at her. He would reassure her in a moment that he had no intentions of letting her be captured.

“Why would I not agree?” Tel’rabim asked smoothly.

Nhean looked heavenward and prayed for patience. He knew Tel’rabim had no intention of giving the girl back—but he knew that to say as much would threaten his chance to peer into the archives. He searched for a reason that would be acceptable. “Given her recent role on the human side of our encounters, I can imagine she might be considered a war criminal to your people.”

The entire concept seemed to amuse Tel’rabim. There was a sound that came across like laughter.

“And you think I would do violence against her.”

“A reasonable question, I think, when one proposes sending a human to Earth.”

“Ah, but she is not human.” Tel’rabim sounded satisfied. “You would not be sending her if she were. She is the only one of her kind.” There was a pause. “And I am the only one who understands what that is. Trust me, I have no intentions of killing or hurting her just to indulge in some notion of petty revenge.”

Nhean looked into the middle of nowhere and said nothing for a long moment. He did not look at the comm unit, or at the girl, or at the monitors that held the usual stream of information, until he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. The girl had curled herself into a ball and was staring at the far wall, her face expressionless. She refused to look at him.

He bit back a sigh. Tel’rabim, he reminded himself, had accumulated power over all these years because of his ability to turn on a dime and seize the advantage. Like now: a few moments ago, Tel’rabim had been calling the girl “it.” Now, he was halfway between a master politician, whispering in an underling’s ear, and a mad scientist.

Did he know the girl was listening? Was he trying to lure her back … or break her down?

“I see,” was all Nhean said. “I will send you the information, then, so your defense networks know to let the ship pass.”

He ended the call immediately and looked at the girl.

She stared back at him silently, arms crossed.

“Their entire technology catalogue,” Nhean said quietly. “You would have access to every item they have ever built.”

She said nothing. It was a long moment until she turned her head to look at him.

What was it, specifically, that was bothering her? “You wanted to become what you were made to be,” Nhean reminded her. “Instead, I suggest you become even more than that.”

She flinched slightly, but made no response to that. “How will you protect me from him?”

“We—” he stressed the word slightly “—will work to determine his capabilities and provide you with an escape route, to be used at any time.” He held her gaze. “I am more interested in having you alive than I am in pushing the limits of your abilities. However … the odds of any of us living are greatly increased if you can put those abilities to work against Ka’sagra. If she succeeds, then I’m afraid it’s the end. For all of us.”

There was an uncomfortably long pause, and the girl looked away first. She nodded.

It looked very much, Nhean thought, like a nod of defeat.

“You know we need to do this,” he told her. “You know that Ka’sagra will move soon. Whatever she’s still looking for, whatever reason she has for not launching her attack yet, we have to assume our luck will not hold for long.”

“And you know we can’t rely on Tel’rabim,” she shot back. “Perhaps we shouldn’t waste our time there. Perhaps we should be searching for her ourselves.”

“I know.” Nhean sank his chin onto one fist and considered. That fact had been uncomfortably clear for weeks. “I know. We need to move on our own, and soon. But I also have been searching, as I know you have. And we haven’t found anything. We need an ally, we need someone else to help us in this, and unfortunately, I don’t think either the Funders Circle or Admiral Walker are going to listen to me right about now. ”

***

Tel’rabim sat back in his chair and considered.

He was practical enough to know that he was getting nowhere. There was something here that Ka’sagra had used on their own sun. The secret of her process was hidden within this place. Why else would she have destroyed the two backup archives at Denver and Tokyo?

Oh, she had concealed her purpose very well. He had hardly guessed that the bombings were not human-engineered. But once he knew … then, he had understood at once what she was doing.

Nhean’s theory, terrifying as it was, simply gave shape to his fear. Ka’sagra was doing something, something with old technology, something she didn’t want him to know about. What was it? What was her secret?

It was a secret he should need no one’s help to find. He bared his teeth slightly and cast an annoyed glance towards his team, who were still combing through the files. Records of the research they had already done, meticulously kept, now covered several computer screens. The light glittered off the ornamental columns, hinting at the servers concealed within.

He shouldn’t need to do this. He should be able to go to the military and demand their compliance, ask them what sort of weaponry could be used for such a purpose. He should be able to trust both their discretion and their loyalty.

He could trust neither. He had earned their hatred in his coup. He was using far too many of his own troops now to protect London, when the military should be helping him with that in the first place.

What he had thought would be a simple matter—wiping out humanity, restoring Telestine life to its proper ways—had instead dragged on, plagued with costly warfare and attacks on Earth itself. Sympathy for Ka’sagra was surging. Calls for Tel’rabim’s resignation were growing louder.

He had believed that if he could take his rightful place in the government and free his people from this sad, costly experiment in “mercy” with one stroke, he would have had their loyalty as long as he lived.

He still believed that. Unfortunately, he had not been able to give them that.

He had been so sure that he picked his time well….

One long-fingered hand clenched and he rose to sweep along the line of his team members, staring over their shoulders into the results of their research. He did not particularly want to allow a traitor, an unpredictable and rebellious tool, into his archives. On the other hand, his people were getting nowhere, and he knew it. At every turn, there were blocks in the servers, access denied to military technologies.

The Dawning had been built for this. The sooner he had it back and under his control, the sooner he could show his species the life they were meant to live. They would not defy him then. He believed that completely.

“Continue your work.” He looked at each of them in turn and swept to the door. “I have preparations to make. The Dawning will soon be returned to us.”

Let Nhean think he still controlled this situation. When the Dawning was nearby, Tel’rabim would have all he needed to recapture it.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Near Triton

EFS Santa Maria

Ready Room

The room was silent save for the sound of papers rustling together and being laid down on the metal desks.

The plan was ready. Risky, but doable.

The stolen ships’ mutineers probably had not had enough time to get their chains of command and tactical plans in order. Walker and her small fleet would take advantage of that. She’d go aboard New Vatican Station as invited, presumably to negotiate for the surrendering of the mutineers. And while she negotiated, her fleet would drift amongst the rebels in a show of trust. With so many ships in amongst each other so close, few would notice the several dozen boarding shuttles launching and force docking with the mutineers’ ships, and within ten minutes the marines would have every single vessel back in her hands. All before the Funders even knew what was happening.

Assuming the plan went one hundred percent without a hitch. She chided herself. No plan survives contact with the enemy.

Walker took the moment to herself without guilt or regret. Moments in her cabin might easily be disturbed by an emergency on a ship; on something as large as a carrier, there was always an emergency. She did not have meals to herself, and her face was recognized now—she had no anonymity in the hallways, either.

Moments of quiet, in meetings like this, were the only moments she had to herself at all.

And she needed a moment of quiet, away from the whirl of thoughts that kept tumbling over in her head with no conclusions.

She refocused her eyes on the latest dossier—that of Pope Celestine—and reread it from start to finish. There wasn’t much. The man had done well to conceal his past. If anyone remembered him before he’d become a priest, they hadn’t come forward.

She laid the piece of paper down with a sigh to look at the next.

A hand came to rest on her shoulder.

“I don’t think we’re going to find anything new,” Delaney rumbled. “And I have a deck crew to manage.”

“Well, we’ve got a plan, but we’ve also got to think through and prepare for every eventuality. And I want to know my enemy before I engage him.” She smiled despite herself. He was correct, she was absolutely retreading ground that had been well and thoroughly trod at this point, given that they’d been traveling towards Neptune’s moon Triton for five days, and Vatican Station in orbit above.

They were nearly there.

She was also aware, however, that he was offering her an old disagreement as bait to give her mind a rest, and her mouth twitched as she took it. “And I don’t see why the captain of one of my carriers needs to oversee repairs.”

“Damned young fools don’t know what they’re doing,” Delaney said shortly. It was always his response. The argument felt comfortable. Like a well-fitted glove.

She waited to see how he would dress it up this time.

“Give them a new ship, and suddenly they think there’s no need to be careful, no need to know it. Well, let me tell you, the new ships are a damned sight more unpredictable than the old ones.”

“The old ones,” Walker said, returning to her dossier, “were a bucket of loose panels and bolts, and you know it. And sit down. If you can’t trust your deck crew to know the ships better than you do, you have a management problem.”

“I was repairing ships before most of them were born.” But he sat.

“A fact you repeat often, old man,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. A familiar jibe. He grinned back. He’d given her a brief break from the dossier, and now that she returned to it, something caught her attention. “Majority vote of the second meeting of the conclave led to Celestine’s election. Second meeting.” She looked up to Larsen. “Captain, you’re Catholic. What does a papal election usually look like?”

“Well,” began Larsen, “the Cardinals all gather in the conclave and they basically vote. They vote as many times as they need to until someone gets a two-thirds majority. It used to happen in the Sistine Chapel. Since that doesn’t exist anymore, and, well, for other more obvious reasons, they now do it in the papal estates on Venus.”

“But this says he was elected in the second meeting of the conclave. I thought there was only one. I thought they lock themselves in and don’t come out until they’ve decided.”

He nodded. “True.” He leaned back in his chair, lost in thought. “If I remember right—I was young at the time—I think there was an issue about certain cardinals getting stuck on Titan during the conclave, so they started without them, and then when the first conclave couldn’t come to a decision, they disbanded until the remaining cardinals could arrive to cast the deciding votes.”

She stroked her chin. “Interesting.” A datapad sat on the desk nearby, and she grabbed it, entering a query into the database. Moments later, the results came in. “The first conclave had sixty-four cardinals in attendance. The second conclave, weeks later, had sixty-five in attendance after the missing cardinals showed up, and … aha!”

“What?” said Larsen. Delaney, Pike, and Min all leaned in expectantly.

“There were three cardinals missing in the first conclave. And when they arrived for the second, the attendance only increased by one. Which means….” She tapped through several more screens of data. “There it is. Two cardinals died in between the conclaves.”

“Of what? Were they old? Caught by Telestines?” Delaney leaned in further.

“It only says, accidental circumstances. They were both actually quite young when they died. Thirty, and thirty-seven. And the second conclave voted him in nearly unanimously, according to some second-hand reports.” She looked up. “Do you know what this means?”

Larsen nodded. “Don’t cross Pope Celestine?”

She nodded. “It means he’s a ruthless, slippery bastard.”

Silence fell over the conference room.

She leaned back in her chair. “What if … what if we just blew everything out of the sky?”

The room went dead quiet. Larsen was gaping at her, Min put down his papers carefully, and Pike swallowed hard.

“Why would you do that?” Pike asked her. “Might as well turn around and leave if you don’t want them back.”

“They’re dangerous,” Larsen argued. Whatever his initial reservations about her suggestion, his hatred of Pike was more than enough to override it. He gave the man a supercilious look. “They mutinied. The question to ask is, why should the admiral go talk to them at all? Especially given Celestine’s … history.”

“On that point we’re agreed.” Pike’s pulse was beating faster at his throat, but his voice didn’t rise.

Larsen leaned in closer to Pike, his eyes on fire. “And you seriously think just turning around and offering our backs up for their knives is a good plan? We’d have wasted days in transit for nothing.”

“Better that than risk an engagement,” Pike said heatedly. “Carry out the negotiations at our leisure, send messages back and forth as we deal with … Tel’rabim—he’s the bigger issue. Given his new FTL capabilities and how he destroyed Io and Vesta….” He gave her a knowing look. His meaning was clear: he knew about Ka’sagra’s mysterious and catastrophic iridium isotope bombs, and she agreed with his implied meaning—it was madness to let that threat fester. “Then we’ll have the intel to put pressure on them, rather than being pressured into this now. Right now we have more pressing matters to attend to.”

“I should think that losing half our fleet—” Larsen began.

He broke off when Walker held up a hand.

“We’re not turning tail and running.”

Pike’s blue eyes fixed on Walker’s. “You’ve always pulled a victory out in the end, Laura, but you’ve always gone in with a plan. I didn’t think to question whether we would have one by the time we got there, but we’re almost there, and we don’t. Not a good one, at least. Not one where lot’s of people don’t die.”

Walker looked down at the table. You’ve always pulled a victory out in the end. “I had a plan at Vesta,” she said tightly. “That wasn’t a victory. Not at all.”

“You don’t know that yet—Vesta laid bare our enemy’s plans, at least. That’s something,” Pike countered. “I crash-landed on Earth in the middle of a battle that didn’t really go to plan—and we got the Dawning.”

“Which you gave away to that peddler of secrets,” Larsen snapped.

“Enough.” Walker gave him a cold look, and was surprised to see him flush with something that looked like shame as much as anger. “You’re not helping.” She sighed and tipped her head back at the ceiling, then looked between Min, Pike, and Delaney. “But Larsen is right—turning around now is just asking for an attack.”

“So you’d blow them out of the sky?” Delaney asked quietly.

“Just one ship. As an example, then set an ultimatum. If they don’t comply, then destroy another. And another. Until they yield. It’s not conventional, sure, but we don’t have time for conventional. They aren’t organized yet, and we’ll have the tactical advantage.”

“It’s one thing to be practical,” he interrupted her, “and another to throw practicality to the winds, and loyalty with it.”

“They mutinied,” she told him. Her jaw was clenched.

“Aye, some of their captains did. Any bets as to the rest of the crew? Can you say for sure if all of the people in those ships took part in the mutiny?” He saw her waver, and pressed his advantage. “Can you even say for sure that they’re not working to get back to the fleet? Until you can—and even then—they deserve better than to be killed out of hand. They were ours, our people.”

She looked away. The words only made her angrier right now. Their people? That only made the betrayal worse.

“Or think of it this way,” Delaney said. “You know what they said about the American Civil War? That it was the worst war America fought in, because every casualty was American. That was the tragedy of it. The fleet has to face the Telestines—don’t let it go in broken and battered, half the ships dead by your hand and yours damaged by their hand. Pike is right. If you don’t really want to negotiate or take a chance on our marines getting the ship back with minimal losses, then turn around and leave.”

He was right. She looked down at the table, and jumped when the proximity alert went.

“Ma’am.” An anxious voice came from the bridge. “We’re being hailed by New Vatican Station.”

“Very well. We’re here. Let’s put our plan into action. Get the marines on alert in their boarding craft and ready to launch.” She stood and nodded to all of them. “I’ll take the shuttle. Pike, you go with Delaney back to the Intrepid and help the damned deck crew. Between you two and them, you ought to be able to figure out whatever’s wrong with the engine before we have to rely on it in a battle.”

“The navigation isn’t responding to gravity correctly and the damned Telestine neutrino transducers—” Delaney muttered.

“Whatever’s wrong, get it fixed, and get back to the bridge,” Walker said again, before he could get started on a monologue. She saw Larsen looking down at his wrist with a frown. “Everything all right?”

He jumped. “Yes. Of course.” He nodded. “I’m … sorry for my—”

“I’ll see you all when I get back.” She really had no interest in regrets and apologies.

She had more important things to worry about right now. Like how to steal half a space fleet back from a Catholic pope, a Mormon prophet, and a dozen rich bankers and religious leaders who liked expensive toys.

And she was this close to just blowing them all out of the water first and ask questions later.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Near Triton

EFS Santa Maria

Corridor 2B

Larsen slipped through the door before any of the others and walked quickly, surely, towards the corridors that led to the gunnery. They were, as always, almost entirely empty.

Only when he was sure he was alone did he answer the call.

“Captain. Congratulations on your promotion.” The voice on the other line was smooth, self-assured.

Larsen fought an instinctive wave of dislike.

It had been two and a half weeks since the mutiny, and his mind had not stopped churning. He was faced with the same question running on a loop over and over: what had the other captains been offered by Nhean to make them defect?

He didn’t want it, of that he was sure. Nothing would make him betray Laura.

No, what he wanted was to know what would spark a mutiny like this. What was it that would make good men and women, those who had joined the fleet and devoted their lives to it, betray it so completely? What fault line had Nhean found to exploit?

He had to know if he had any chance of fixing it, and he wanted to fix it. He wanted to undo what had been done, so that whether or not this meeting between the admiral and the Funders Circle was successful, the fleet would be theirs once more.

So he played the part of someone who could be swayed. His heart was beating double time. “What do you want?”

“I see you also hate wasting time.” Nhean sounded amused.

“Get on with it,” Larsen said tightly. “I don’t have much time until the admiral is back.” He let the words hang in the air, a tantalizing suggestion: if you’re going to bribe me, make your offer.

“Very well. I want you to take several ships to orbit the sun inside Mercury’s orbit.”

After this rather surprising announcement, Nhean said nothing at all. Larsen could picture him in one of those crisp suits, sitting back in a sleek chair and waiting for a response.

Larsen frowned. Was this how all of the conversations had started? He let people name their own price?

Surely that couldn’t be it.

And he wasn’t sure whether he should ask what in the blazes a peddler of secrets could gain from him taking ships to patrol near the sun, or what to ask for if he did. After several moments of thought, he made his choice. “And what do I get if I do?” he asked finally. Find out what he offered the rest of them. It was the only thing that mattered.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

“You get to stay alive,” Nhean said finally.

“Are you threatening me?”

“Good Lord.” There was something that sounded like muttered swearing, and then Nhean’s voice sharpened. “What are you playing at? I’d have staked my reputation on the belief that you, of all people, couldn’t be bribed away from the Admiral.”

Larsen looked down at the comm unit, and then around himself at the empty hall, to see if anyone might have overheard. “What do you mean?” he whispered furiously.

“Let’s not mince words, shall we?” Nhean sighed. “You would do anything for her, wouldn’t you? Anything. Be honest with me. If I’m wrong, I want to know now.”

“I don’t know what you think of me—”

“I think you’re in love with her.” A long, long pause. “Am I wrong?”

“If you think you’re going to manipulate me—” his voice was shaking “—you are wildly mistaken, Mr. Tang.”

What, was Nhean planning to offer him Walker as a bribe?

“I am not planning to manipulate you.” Nhean sounded annoyed. “I don’t know why you thought I called you, but the fact is that, for reasons I can’t tell you at the moment, humanity needs several ships near the sun, and you are one of the very few people who can both understand that fact, and arrange for it to happen. However, as soon as I get you on the line, you start asking me for money. What am I to make of that, Larsen?”

Larsen made no reply. He was reviewing the conversation in his head, wondering how he got into the rhetorical position of being a money-grubber. Maybe Nhean had gotten people to mutiny by confusing the hell out of them.

No, that wouldn’t do it. It took a lot to make someone turn a gun on their fellow crew members.

“Why ask me?” he said finally. “You’ve probably already asked her and she’s said no. Why should I agree?”

“You’re making an assumption,” Nhean murmured. “I have not asked her. Let us simply say that she knows she and I are aligned more closely than she and the Funders Circle … but … she does not trust me.”

“Neither do I. She’s wise not to,” Larsen said, before he could stop himself.

“Perhaps.” Nhean didn’t seem very troubled by that. “However, what I am proposing is necessary, and if the suggestion comes from you instead of me….”

“You’re trying to get me to manipulate her.”

“I’m trying to get her to listen.” There was a dangerous edge to Nhean’s voice. “This … request … is more important than you know. Whatever you think of me, I think you know that I do not want humanity to suffer and die—therefore, I suggest you hear me out before hanging up.”

“Or what?” Larsen snapped back. He paced, throwing a glance over his shoulder. He should not be on this call. What if someone saw him?

“Or I will ask someone else to suggest it to her,” Nhean said impatiently. “You’re not the only one who has her ear. I should think Pike might also—”

A wave of jealousy swelled up inside him. “Fine, out with it.”

He felt, rather than saw, Nhean’s satisfied smile, and ground his teeth.

They both knew he wasn’t going to hang up now.

“After Io and Vesta, there are—to our knowledge—up to twelve bombs still unaccounted for.” Nhean’s voice was grim. “It is my worry that Ka’sagra will use those bombs. On the sun.”

Larsen’s world seemed to turn inside out. His skin went icy, then so hot he struggled to breathe.

“Wha— … what did you say?”

“I don’t understand how either.” Nhean waited for a response, but Larsen had none. “I don’t know how any bomb, no matter how large, can destroy a star. It makes no sense. But there must be something to the technology I’m missing, since I’m convinced Ka’sagra plans on doing it … again.”

“But—” Larsen stopped. “Did you say again?”

“Why did they come here in the first place?” Nhean asked quietly. “Think back.”

“Because their planet was uninhabitable.”

“And their planet became inhabitable because….”

The ice in his spine returned. “Because … their sun went—. Oh, my God.” Reason fought its way through the veil of panic. He leaned against the corridor wall with one hand, running his other through his hair. “This isn’t real, though. This can’t possibly be real.”

“Why not? Because it is unpleasant?” Nhean’s voice was sharp again. “Because it does not make sense to you that someone would find the world too messy, too dark, and that they would choose to end everything and everyone? How many humans have done the same thing over our history? How many humans have prayed for the end of all things?”

Larsen gripped the comm unit. His fingers were aching.

“I ask very little,” Nhean said quietly. “Very little. Three ships with weapons, sent to guard the sun against this possibility. None of the carriers. Not the Santa Maria. Small ships, nimble ships. There are dozens of those within the fleet. I think you know their absence would not tip the balance in any engagement. And also, most importantly, not a word to anyone. All our lives depend on it. We don’t know who might leak word of our plans to Tel’rabim or Ka’sagra, knowingly or unknowingly.”

Larsen looked away, biting his lip.

“Except her. Persuade Walker,” Nhean said softly. “She may well think it is a good idea as well. Mention the shipyards at Mercury if you cannot come up with a good way to suggest Tel’rabim’s ultimate purpose—she may not believe that. Just … get the ships there. We’ve already wasted far too much time on this Funders Circle nonsense.”

There was a pause.

“Do you see, now, why I called you?”

Larsen ended the call rather than answer. He stood with the comm unit in his hands for a long time, and tipped his head back against the bulkheads at last.

What in the name of God was he supposed to do now? Believe Nhean, of all people?

Or leave unguarded a target whose destruction, should it be successfully attacked, could doom them all?

He needed to figure this out. If he still had time. If any of them still had time.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

New Vatican Station

Outer Ring

Nhean looked down at the comm unit and smiled. His footsteps were already carrying him back to the main area.

Larsen put on a good show of making up his mind, but Nhean had no doubt that he would at least try to influence Walker’s decision.

If only he could get good information on where Pike was, and what the man was up to. At least Walker was still coming—but had Pike managed anything else of note?

It would be easier to organize a meeting if he didn’t have to return to Earth shortly, but he could not afford a single minute more than he was already losing by overseeing this meeting between the admiral and the Funders Circle. Hopefully, he would return to Earth knowing that the fleet was united once more. It was, perhaps, a long shot—but Walker had been known to be unexpectedly practical in the past.

One could hope.

In the meantime, the girl would monitor this meeting. Every chance she had to infiltrate human systems was good training to stretch her powers. It was clear that the same techniques she had learned in order to take down the Telestine systems could not be used, at least not in the same way, for the human defense systems. But she was learning.

“Sir?” A young man approached him, dressed in a crisp black suit. A page from the Funders Circle.

“What is it?” Nhean tensed slightly.

He was on the outside of the Funders Circle now, and he knew it. His association with Walker, and his refusal to bend on the topic of who should command the fleet, had made him a black sheep.

They expected his defiance, of course. He had always been the odd one out when it came to them, pushing harder for the creation of the fleet than anyone else and then giving it over to Walker’s control against their wishes. He could not pretend to fall in line now without arousing their suspicions. But while they expected his ideals, and paid lip service to the idea of a healthy debate, he knew a knife in the back was likely.

He had been waiting for an assassination attempt. Was this page Schroeder’s assassin? He chided himself—there was no proof Schroeder was even dead. He studied the boy’s hands for weapons. Very young—no more than sixteen—but clearly athletic. His muscular frame was apparent even through the suit.

“I’ve been asked to inform you, sir, that Laura Walker’s shuttle has docked.” The boy was earnest, out of his depth in many ways. His face still looked innocent. But he had enough political savvy to know what he should call Walker—not granting her a title—and that was a good reminder regarding innocent, young faces.

“I’ll be along in a moment.” Nhean would prefer the boy to turn and walk away first.

“Of course, sir. They’re meeting in His Holiness’s receiving rooms, through the main concourse. The elevator down this hallway will bring you close to the door.”

“Thank you. That will be all,” Nhean said firmly.

The page hesitated, waiting for Nhean to set out in the expected direction, but he broke under Nhean’s cold, unwavering gaze, turning quickly before he hurried away.

Nhean watched him go, then took an alternate route, circling around the outside of the station. He was already late, he was sure—they would have started the meeting without him in order to set the tone without any interference—and a few more minutes would make no difference.

Besides, he knew this route. He often strolled along it when he was deep in thought, taking in the indigo shadows that traced along Neptune’s surface outside. Though the Funders preferred to meet in windowless, easily airlocked rooms, they also liked to look at pretty things and found it easy enough to afford windows in the main station. Each successive floor of the station, smaller than the last, had a walkway along the outside, paneled with windows. Nhean found the view strangely comforting. Why, he could not have said. Like Venus, this was only another uninhabitable planet.

Whatever the case, his repeated use of this particular path had its advantages. He knew the blind turns and the placement of the ceiling tiles. He would know if there was an attacker lurking here, something he might not perceive as readily when walking along the main concourse. He could choose which staircase to take down to the main floor to Celestine’s receiving room. Right now, with tension in the air on all sides, Nhean was the only outsider to all groups. It was a precarious situation.

And indeed, as he drew closer, he heard the murmur of voices and the unmistakable sounds of humans: a slight catch of breath, the shift of heavy cloth and equipment. His hearing had always been good, a definite advantage.

Nhean turned purposefully down a side corridor, knowing that his footsteps would have been marked and noted, and then crept back along the same path silently. He was ready for them, he told himself. He was not a trained assassin, but he was not helpless, and he knew they were here. The advantage was his. The advantage was his. The advantage—

But they weren’t following him. He edged along the hallway, but saw no one. At last, he peered into the hallway itself.

His throat constricted.

There, surrounded by four guards, a man lay with the long barrel of a sniper rifle pointed down through a small grate into Celestine’s receiving room.

No harm will come to the admiral, Celestine had promised him.

They had lied.

Of course they had lied.

And he could never take the five soldiers out before they killed him. Cursing himself for a fool, Nhean forced himself to head back along the corridor as silently as he had come.

One hallway away, mapping the station in his thoughts, he broke into a dead sprint.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

New Vatican Station

Main Concourse

“As you can see,” Celestine said confidently, “any place can be a paradise … and yet, a prison to the soul.”

Walker said nothing. She did not trust her voice around him. She might very well laugh despite herself.

It wasn’t the sentiment, of course. She knew better than anyone that even the most state-of-the-art living in space could be a prison of a sort. She agreed with him.

It was the mellifluous, mocking lilt that lay under his words that she took issue with. Many people claimed that it was impossible to know the Pope’s motivations. They said he was too learned, too wise to jump to conclusions. As far as Walker was concerned, that was bunk. Celestine was an actor, nothing more. Whatever he might have once believed, it was long gone and had been replaced entirely by self-interest. She thought even less of Nhean for having allied himself with this group in the first place.

And she hadn’t believed it was possible to think less of him right about now, given his actions. Given his betrayal.

“What are you thinking, my child?” Celestine asked cleverly.

My child. She struggled not to roll her eyes, and didn’t answer. Instead, she stopped in front of a window looking out into the black. The captured ships of the fleet had been arranged there, so as to be visible to her—mockingly, she supposed—but she looked beyond them: dark blue Neptune, and beyond it, the stars.

The distant, beckoning stars.

He had come to greet her at her ship, a gesture of respect she had not anticipated. She had assumed that he would behave the same way Essa had: that he would force her to advance across a wide floor while he sat in a raised throne and looked down at her with a sneer.

Unexpectedly, he seemed to be trying to convince her to join his side. With kindness and good humor.

And that she had not expected at all. What did he want from her?

The rest of the fleet.

What was the best way to set him off balance?

Make him agree with her.

She had not wanted to do this—until she was here. Now, faced with the chance to persuade someone to join her side, she could not simply back away and let this fall apart. If she stayed, this might still come to a fight.

If she walked away, it certainly would. A fight she was prepared to win, of course, but a fight all the same.

Walker took a look around at the marble floors and the gold-inlaid walls as the thought took shape in her mind. “I’d like to see the lower floors of the station.”

Celestine froze for a moment, as she knew he would. This was the Funders Circle’s headquarters in the outer solar system, the place he called both paradise and prison. It was no Venus, but they had clearly spared no expense with the resources available to them this far out.

But the lower floors would be only a prison. Both he and Walker knew that. There would be the slim, underfed forms of the foundry workers who operated at the edges of the solar system, near the ends of the trade routes. There were so very few people in the exodus who had enough—and those on the lower floors were part of the majority who were barely hanging on.

Celestine wavered now, not sure what she would ask of him, not sure what suffering he would lay at her door.

“Did you grow up on one of the stations?” she asked him casually, as if she simply did not know instead of having tried desperately and failed to learn of his background.

“My parents were smugglers.” He said the words so nonchalantly that they might even be true.

“Oh?” She tried to picture it. “Did they bring you with them, or leave you on one of the outlaw stations?” Those stations were a fairly open secret, created in the same way as the first Exile Fleet base, from one of the earliest wrecks. Patched and rickety, they were carefully disguised to look as if they were unused. Often set into orbit around one of the larger asteroids. Ceres, or Vesta. She tensed when she thought about the former asteroid, destroyed by Ka’sagra’s malevolent deception.

“An outlaw station,” Celestine said quietly. “Jackpot Station. Orbiting Ceres. I was rarely with them, unless they thought there was some profit to be had in having me there.” When she frowned, he shook his head. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. There are some people who respect family more than anything, and so they played happy family to secure trades. I … didn’t really know them. They died when I was quite young.”

She was more and more sure that he was telling the truth, and it unsettled her.

“Why do you ask?” Celestine asked her. His voice was composed.

“Because I grew up on the stations,” she told him. “And it is a unique kind of hopelessness, Your Holiness.”

She was coming at him too directly, she could feel wariness radiating from him, but was there any other way? Hadn’t he always been wary? He had never wanted to trust her in her overtures during the early years when she and Essa were building the Exile Fleet from scratch.

“You think they would rather be dead than live as they are?” he asked her, just as directly. “Because you doom them with your choices. You know this, Admiral. You must change your course, or all of us will suffer.”

She knew the retort Larsen would want her to make—perhaps even that Delaney would want her to make. It was what she wanted to say: that Celestine’s own, stupid selfishness would doom as many—if not more—if he did not bend.

And she already knew that that direction would only lead to a clash that would harden his resolve instead of persuade him.

“What would you do?” she asked him honestly. There was no reproach in her tone. “How would you tell me to change my course? I am outmatched in most ways by the Telestine fleet, Your Holiness. I act because I see no other way. I see our people dying slowly in the stations and I fear that with Tel’rabim in charge, there is no time for us to marshal our forces and build another fleet. We’re building new ships at Mercury, but it requires a fifth of my fleet just to protect those shipyards. Time is not on our side.”

Celestine’s brow furrowed slightly. “You would simply exchange a slow death for a swift death, then.”

Behind him, Walker could see a group gathering. There were many whose faces she knew: the Mormon Prophet—Worthley? Worthington? Something like that. The recently-memorized names were already slipping away as she focused on Celestine. And those Mormon associates—businessmen? Apostles? There were others as well, faces that were wholly unfamiliar. They might be too low in the organization to warrant a dossier. There was a tall, slim man she recognized—Schroeder, was it? Or Dorian? She couldn’t remember which. He was smirking at her.

Celestine was aware of their presence. He looked to them, and stiffened when Walker put a hand on his arm.

“Your Holiness, I am truly asking you.” She drew his gaze back to her, however unwillingly he looked. He wanted to call them over, she knew, so they could reassure him. He did not like where this was going.

“You know what we would do,” he told her. “We would protect every human settlement.”

Especially the richest ones, she wanted to retort.

“And I would do the same in a heartbeat.” She decided to use another tactic. Play up the vulnerable, weepy woman. Disarm them into underestimating her. She made her voice was thick—just enough to hint at emotion, but not enough to make it seem like she was acting, like she was playing them.

She hated the emotion in her voice. It seemed like weakness. For her, such emotion was always a symbol of giving into the despair inflicted on them by the Telestines.

But she clearly hadn’t persuaded them with logic.

“Your Holiness, I do this to save us—just as you do. That was why you took the fleet, wasn’t it? You wanted to save humanity, you had a plan for how to do so.” She refused to let him look away. “If nothing else, we share that. Can we not start this negotiation from there? Tell me your plans. Many heads are better than one.”

He stared at her mutely, and she had the sense that she truly had set him off-balance. He had not expected her to meet him on any point.

“I know you were not trained as a tactician.” She gave him the out in the moment before he broke. If he broke now, he would not agree with her. “I know that. None of us were. We didn’t have the chance to be. And I know someone who wanted to be the pope hardly wanted to run a military campaign.”

Unwillingly, he laughed.

“But haven’t you ever wondered,” Walker asked him quietly, “why you are pope? I wonder, myself—about who might be a fleet admiral on Earth. We are here, you and I, but on Earth, if the Telestines had never come, we might well be nothing.”

He frowned at her.

“At another time, someone else would have risen through the ranks,” Walker told him. “Any number of chances would lead it to be so.”

“There is no chance,” he said. He sounded lost. “There is only God’s will.”

“Then why did God choose you?” she asked him. “You must have the capability for this. And I am asking your help, Your Holiness. You—and all of your circle. I have not found a way that I can match Tel’rabim on every field he would pick, but if you can, if any of you can….”

He stared at her for a long moment, and she felt him waver.

And then he smiled, as slippery a smile as she had ever seen, and she felt any kinship between them vanish in a moment.

He was not going to listen to her. He was never going to listen to her.

“Come,” he suggested. “We should talk more. Come to my receiving room.”

She struggled to keep her face straight as she walked at his side. The others followed at a distance behind. President Worthlin’s face looked … off. He conferred in a low voice with one of his apostles as they followed slowly behind them. He kept furtively glancing at her, with pained eyes, as if he regretted calling her here. As if he knew the conversation with her would be futile and a waste of time.

And he was probably right. She had to find another way, and she could think of no other way. What could she say to convince him, what could she ever come up with if this had not worked?

Celestine swept ahead of her to open the door to his receiving room, and she followed, numb, hands clasped behind her back. She was so absorbed in her own thoughts that she hardly heard the pounding footsteps, but she heard the sudden yells. Celestine’s head whipped around and he shouted, ushering her through.

A moment later, Nhean slammed into her back as shots rang out overhead before striking into the marble floor, sending chips of stone flying.

Nhean hauled her up by one hand and somehow managed to elbow Celestine in the solar plexus in the same movement. Intentional or not, it had an efficiency she liked.

But there was no time for that. His eyes met hers, desperate. “Run,” he told her, and he shoved her further into Celestine’s receiving room. “Preferably, faster than a sniper takes aim.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

Delaney leaned in close to the tactical screen, resting a hand on the shoulder of the officer. It was show time. The truth was, impending battles always brought on a sense of dread for him. Nervousness and fear that he usually bottled up and forced down into the pit of his stomach to deal with later, either with alcohol or a punching bag or a good, soothing engine schematic.

But this felt different. They were on the verge of attacking their own kind. They should be attacking Telestines. Instead, they had to waste time liberating their own ships.

“Last shuttle’s launched,” said the tactical officer.

“Good. Any indication the mutineer fleet knows what’s up?”

A shake of the head. “No,” said the officer. “Their ships are holding steady in orbit.”

Peach-gray Triton brooded below them, a dead wasteland marked only by humanity’s only settlement on the moon, the sprawling New Beslan City. Near them loomed New Vatican Station.

New. New. New. Everything old was new again. Including human-on-human violence. Anything to squeak ahead, notch out a slight advantage over your neighbor, get the slightly better tool, deadlier weapon, more fertile farmland. And if you had to kill, so be it. Violence was humanity’s birthright, it seemed, the one constant throughout a bloody history.

“What’s that one doing?” Delaney pointed out towards one of the shuttles approaching the stolen Venetian frigate VSF Harare.

“Uh….” The officer tapped a few buttons. “It’s changing course. No idea, sir.”

“Then find out.”

The little assault shuttle, with a full compliment of ten marines and a tech, was now veering straight for New Vatican Station, instead of towards its target, the Harare. A second shuttle near it lurched a few times, and then similarly changed course.

A shouted voice from the comms center. “Sir! We’re picking up a strange broadcasted signal! It’s coming from the station!”

“What the hell is it?”

Precious seconds dripped by, and he watched as two more shuttles veered off course and made for the station. Foreboding dread washed over him. “Well?”

The comms officer hesitated. “I … I don’t know. But … the only thing that I can compare it to is from when we engaged the Telestine fleet over Mercury. Only that time, the signal came from us.”

Delaney staggered backward and found the captain’s chair. “Dear God.” He collapsed into it.

The tactical officer glanced back at him, fear creeping over his face. “Sir?”

“The Seed. Nhean gave it to them, the bastard.”

“The Seed?”

“The virus we used to take over Tel’rabim’s fleet back at Mercury. Now they’re using it against us.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

New Vatican Station

Main Concourse

“Come on!” Nhean heard his voice break as he and Walker pounded across the floor of the receiving room. Shots scattered overhead: the wild, too slow rounds of the pistols and the heavier thunk of the sniper’s rounds. They were never very close, but each one filled him with dread.

“What’s going on?” The girl’s voice, coming from his earpiece receiver.

“No time—get me a path from the back of Celestine’s receiving room to Walker’s shuttle, and keep everyone out of that bay!”

“I’m on it.”

“And get down there, too. Bring that piece of machinery you’ve been working on.”

“What?”

“No time!”

“Who is that?” Even running for her life and grey with fear, Walker managed to sound like she was commanding the bridge of a ship.

“Shut up and run, please.” He didn’t have the energy for a spat with her on top of everything. His sweaty fingers slipped as he fumbled with the comm unit button. “And lock doors behind us!”

He heard the mechanical hum and whine of the girl’s handiwork, or at least he thought he did. He could, far more certainly, hear the sound of footsteps and yells behind them. The guards, trying to hit Walker, had inadvertently laid down cover fire for the two of them.

That advantage wouldn’t last much longer.

“What the hell is going on?” Walker demanded breathlessly as they tumbled down a side corridor.

“To your left,” the girl said, in his ear.

“This way.” He grabbed a handful of sleeve and yanked Walker after him. He heard her hiss as she turned an ankle and stumbled, but she didn’t stop running. “And I have no idea, I was sure I was too late. They cut me out of it, I made them promise they wouldn’t hurt you.” He shook his head.

Stupid, stupid….

“That was where I went wrong,” he grunted, pounding down the hallway. “They knew I wouldn’t help get you here unless they promised, so they said the words. Never tell someone what you really want—it undercuts your bargaining position.” But why was he explaining this to her, of all people?

“Why the hell would you want me alive?”

“Speed up, and get through that door straight ahead, they’re trying to close it.”

“Faster!” He pushed himself to sprint and swore to every god he could remember that he would stay in better shape if he got out of this alive.

Walker, for her part, put on a burst of speed and managed to drag him under the fire door as it started to close. She yanked him up before releasing his hand, dropping it like she didn’t much want to touch him.

That was fair.

“Where to?” She turned wildly, looking all around.

“Next right.”

“Next right,” he repeated. “How close are we?”

“I don’t know—” Walker began.

“Not you.”

“Close,” the girl said. “Keep running. There’s only one more turn before you get there.”

“And you’re on your way?” He jerked his head at Walker and they started out again, first at a trot, and then at a weary jog that wasn’t quite as fast as it should be.

“In the bay already.” If she wondered why, she didn’t say it.

That was good, he didn’t want to explain it. She wasn’t going to like it. Hell, even he didn’t like it. Walker was going to be over the moon, though.

She surprised him by keeping her silence for a few corridors, before saying contemplatively, “There wasn’t any signal when we went in the door. The sniper was supposed to shoot as soon as they saw me. So why bother to talk to me first?”

Nhean took a moment to find the breath to speak. “They were seeing if you’d be trouble first.”

She flashed him a surprisingly ready grin. “They really should have expected me to, shouldn’t they? It’s baffling that they expected anything else.”

Despite himself, he laughed.

She sobered quickly. “I felt like I had almost persuaded Celestine to work with me.”

He really should remember how dangerous she was. He thought of her as brittle, too head-on, too set in her ways to be dangerous in a political sense—and then she went and did something like this.

“How the hell did you think you were going to manage that?” He was genuinely curious. “Next right, by the way, down the stairs.”

She replied conversationally, as if she weren’t running away from an attempted assassination: “I told him I wanted to protect every settlement as much as he does.”

“But he doesn’t want to.” Nhean felt a surge of irritation. “He only wants to protect himself.”

“Mostly,” she agreed. “Yes, those fuckers want to protect their own first, starting with the ones with the deepest pockets. But what am I supposed to work with, appealing to that? He was a young priest once. I figured maybe there had been something more to him, at the start.”

Once again, he’d underestimated her. Nhean gave a breathless shrug to acknowledge that he had no other ideas. He could feel his muscles dragging by now, past the stage of burning and starting into outright disobedience.

He had to stop.

“Just a … moment.”

“They’re going to get into the shuttle bay,” the girl said sharply in his ear. “Don’t stop!”

How she could tell, he didn’t know. He felt a prickle on the back of his neck. “How close are they?”

“Too close. You’ve really pissed them off, and I, for one, don’t want to be on the receiving end.”

“Shit.” Nhean started jogging again. Just one more step, then the next step. He began to pick up speed, and Walker matched him. “It’s really annoying that you can do that. I know I’m older than you, but still.” Annoyance distracted him from his pain, though, and that was good.

“Evacuation drills,” she explained. “Perks of having the oldest, ricketiest space station.”

He managed to nod.

“You have people coming into the hallway behind you,” the girl informed him.

A second later, a crash corroborated her statement.

“Goddammit.” Walker swore in a tone that suggested she rarely used that particular word as she grabbed Nhean’s elbow to drag him along at her side. “All right, listen up.”

A shot zinged overhead and they both put on a burst of speed.

“What?” Nhean managed. He could hear his name being shouted behind them, along with several other indistinct things that he was fairly certain were death threats.

“I am not going to die with you,” she told him bluntly. “You fall behind, I’m going to keep running. Are we clear?”

He had no idea if she’d meant that to spur him on or not, but if she had, it worked wonderfully. Nhean managed a nod and pulled both arms up in front of him as he ran, so he could start sending a message.

His fingers danced over the buttons of his device’s holographic heads-up display. He could see the shuttle bay in the distance now. They were closing on it, hopefully faster than their pursuers were closing on them—but he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t spare the attention to look.

“What are you doing?” Walker demanded. “Did I not just tell you—” She ducked uselessly as another shot went overhead and grimaced.

“It’s important, I promise.” It was the transmission he’d been composing to Pike when he saw the guards. He didn’t dare speak the words aloud right now, for fear their pursuers would hear them. He was just trying not to think about how many advantages he was throwing away right now.

He couldn’t keep thinking that way. He wasn’t alone in his estate on Venus anymore. This wasn’t him against Walker anymore.

“Nhean!” The yell behind him was full of threat.

He pressed send and dropped his arms to start running with a purpose. He had nothing to say to any of those behind him.

“Listen,” he told Walker bluntly. “Send orders to your fleet and then tell them to turn off any scanning capabilities, any digital broadcast capabilities—anything that can network into your computer systems. They’re trying to reopen the control network I had in place, and infiltrate it with a version of The Seed virus I used on Tel’rabim’s ships at Mercury—and they claim they have a way to make it work on your older ships, too.”

“Oh, for the love of—”

“They wanted you close to steal the other half of the fleet.” He interrupted her. “Transmit your orders to your fleet from the shuttle and then go dark. I mean it. I’ll do what I can to disrupt it.”

They both jumped as the girl appeared in the doorway ahead of them, and split to run around her when she didn’t move. She quickly grabbed the manual lever on the top of the door.

They stumbled and sprawled from their last burst of speed as they heard the slam of metal on stone. The door was closed behind them and it shuddered as their pursuers started pounding on it with the butts of their guns.

“What’s your plan?” she demanded to Nhean as they ran for the two shuttles: his, warmed up and next to Walker’s.

God bless that girl and her instincts.

“Go with Walker,” he said bluntly.

“What?” They spoke in perfect unison. Walker actually stopped, and the girl, caught up in their enforced alliance, grabbed her to pull her back into motion.

“I will be damned if the Funders figure out what you are and get you in a lab somewhere.” He didn’t have time to sugarcoat it, and he saw the girl go white with fear. He gestured towards the door now opening up on Walker’s shuttle. “So go with Walker,” he told the girl. He looked back at the admiral. “And you, get her to Earth. You’ll be allowed, I’ll make sure of it.”

“Earth?” Walker’s face was lined with outraged. “Of all the places to go right about now—”

“We don’t have time for me to explain here, she’ll explain in transit.” He cast a look over his shoulder. “Get her to the Telestine archives over London. Go now.”

He saw something shift in her eyes. “Archives,” she said quietly. She tossed a look over her shoulder, but didn’t step into the shuttle, not yet. Her hand came down on his arm. “What’s in the archives? And why should I trust that you aren’t just trying to get my ship shot down?”

He grasped at anything. “Dawn can find something there that will help us deactivate The Seed.” It was true enough. Half of it was Telestine code anyway—perhaps she’d find something that would let them turn it off with a simply terminate command.

Walker wasn’t buying it. Her defiant look was clear.

With a sigh, Nhean threw away his last advantage. He pushed her in the door of her shuttle and met her eyes as his finger hovered over the button. “Pike will know what to do,” he explained.

She gasped as he slammed his hand down on the door’s close button, a sheet of metal descending between his face and her eyes, which were widening in horror and betrayal.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

New Vatican Station

Aggy II

Cockpit

“I need you.” Nhean’s voice burst through Rychenkov’s earpiece, far too loudly. “Your ship is spun up, yes?”

“Always.” He kept it running all the time, despite the absolutely absurd fuel cost. Nhean’s orders and, of course, Nhean’s money for the fuel. Rychenkov had anticipated questions from the merchants and the port authority, but apparently there were so many absurdly rich people on New Vatican Station that no one gave it a second thought.

He thought he’d be glad to leave. Of course, that was before half the fleet had shown up—mutinied, people whispered—and then the other half had shown up to cut off the escape routes.

Flying through this mess seemed like a terrible idea.

“This situation is about to melt down,” Nhean said, confirming Rychenkov’s suspicions. “I need you to get out, and get to Earth.”

“Get to—” This was going from bad to worse. Rychenkov took the stairs up to the cockpit two at a time. He needed to begin the undocking process. Extensive bribes had bought him a quick exit, and he was going to cash in every favor right about now. He sighed. “Do you need any cargo brought out?”

“Maybe. I’ll let you know more details later. I have already transmitted the series of pings I will use if I need to open communications. In the meantime, accept no transmissions. You’re on a ship I had built, and that means you’re vulnerable to a certain set of programs people are going to be broadcasting in short order.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Irrelevant. We don’t have time.” Nhean sounded distracted, as if he were also beginning to withdraw from the station. “I have no idea what I’ll need you for, but Earth is where everything will be happening.”

That sounded somewhat less than comforting, but Rychenkov knew better than to argue. In any case, he could run now and decide whether or not he wanted to be suicidal later. He’d have a while to figure it out in transit.

He just had to make one offer first—an offer that had come immediately to his mind when he saw the remnants of the Exile Fleet arrive.

“I’ll see you there,” he said, and cut the transmission.

“Where are we going?” James asked curiously. He settled down in the copilot’s chair with a worried frown. He shifted slightly to favor his bad leg. It had improved with access to the medical facilities—and the Nettie doc—on this station, but Rychenkov was no fool. He knew James compensated for the chronic pain by simply being silent. For the thousandth time, Rychenkov mentally cursed out every being, Telestine, human, and anything in between. He was sick of them all sometimes.

That wasn’t going to help.

“Earth, apparently.” Rychenkov sighed.

“We’re flying through that?” James pointed at the two fleets, and Rychenkov saw that they were starting to move into formation. Shit.

“Yeah, and we may need to make one stop.” The crew was going to like this even less, but Rychenkov was not leaving anyone behind. He pulled up a comm channel and tapped his fingers while he waited for an answer.

“No. No, we’re not. Don’t even think about it,” said Gabriela. Dammit, he thought she was still below helping Katya and Deshawn track down that final pesky coolant leak. “We’re not going to Earth.”

Ry had been fiddling with the emergency comm-line, and it finally buzzed, interrupting her.

“Yes?” Pike’s voice was abrupt. Rychenkov could hear klaxons in the background. “This isn’t a good time—”

“It’s Ry. What ship are you on?”

“The Intrepid. Why?”

“Because, if you want me to….” Rychenkov sighed and said goodbye to the practical man he had once been. “I will get you out of this clusterfuck before it melts down. I just talked to Tang.”

James groaned.

Rychenkov put the comm unit on mute for a moment. “We are not leaving him here if he wants out. He wouldn’t leave any of us.”

“He would want us to get out,” James pointed out. “And anyway, he doesn’t want to get out. He’s … what’s the polite word for ‘whipped’?”

“Yes. I know.” Rychenkov craned his head to look at the heavy bulk of the Santa Maria. “And he probably won’t come with us. But I have to offer.”

Pike had, until recently, been on the Santa Maria instead of the Intrepid—or so Nhean claimed. Heading back into the lion’s den to try to change Walker’s mind seemed like a fool’s errand. The problem was, Rychenkov had been too ashamed of the fact that he was doing nothing to try to talk Pike out of his mistake. At the time, trying to figure out the “right thing” to do hadn’t been so clear-cut. If Pike thought he could face Walker without murdering her, more power to him.

That didn’t mean Rychenkov was willing to leave him behind here.

When Pike finally answered, his voice was quiet. “You … talked to Nhean? Is she dead?”

He sounded lost, like he was between relief and despair.

Rychenkov hesitated. “I—I don’t know.” He wished he did. “I don’t think so. Nhean didn’t say.”

Pike sighed, a short burst of air clipped at the edges. “I can’t leave. Not without her.”

“Listen up.” Rychenkov shifted to his captain voice and cracked it like a whip. “You told me why you went there, all right?” He spoke over Pike’s strangled denial. “I’m not up for talking about it. I called because this is about to go sideways in a big way. So decide quickly—but I know what I would tell my friend to do, and that’s come with us.”

There was a silence. Even James did not protest.

Another pause.

“I can’t,” Pike said finally.

“D’you think for a moment that she won’t figure out why—”

“I have to try!” The words were a shout that made Rychenkov wince. There was a pause. “I have to try,” Pike said again. His tone was measured this time. “I know you don’t think much of revolutionaries, and I get it. I appreciate that you’re trying to get me out of here, Pyotr. I do. But any debt you thought you owed me….” He paused. “It’s the end of the world, man. Get out, and live a good life while you can. I’m not sure we can fix what’s going wrong anymore. You might as well enjoy life while it’s still here. No more heroics.”

He cut the line and Rychenkov stared at the comm unit. He was only dimly aware of James guiding them out of their berth as he began to skirt the edges of the two fleets. He could hear the sound of the tone they were broadcasting: they were a civilian ship, they were not involved in hostilities.

No more heroics. For some reason, Pike’s acceptance hit him harder than Gabby’s censure had. Without any anger at all, Pike had accepted that Rychenkov was not the type of man to put his life on the line any longer. In Pike’s own way, telling Rychenkov to get out was the best way to repay his friendship: don’t worry about guilt, live your life as I know you want to.

Rychenkov’s hands lay curled beside the controls. He saw a flash out of the corner of his eye, the first shots fired between the two fleets. It was starting, and he was running.

But in the corner of his other eye, he saw James rub his leg with a wince.

No. He wasn’t running.

He was protecting. And sometimes, to protect those who depended on you, you ran.

Big difference.

His thoughts turned, surprisingly, to the girl. To his Lapushka.

Nhean had mentioned a cargo. Something … something about the way he said it made him suspicious, and turned his thoughts to her.

He entered in coordinates, and before James or Gabby could protest, he interjected, “Yes, we’re getting out of here. We’re running. But that doesn’t mean we can’t stand by and watch.” He looked up at Gabby, who was shaking her head. “Just in case.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

New Vatican Station

Shuttle

“Pike will know what to do.”

It was clear how much those words had cost Nhean. The girl watched as the door slammed shut and Walker stared disbelievingly at the sheet of metal. The admiral didn’t seem to remember how to move.

The shuttle pilot, thankfully, had no such compunctions. The tiny craft shuddered into motion at once, sending both the girl and the admiral stumbling sideways, and Walker turned her head to meet the girl’s eyes.

She could not bear to meet them. She had never wanted to feel sympathy for this woman. The girl turned her head, too sharply, and pushed her way into the copilot’s chair.

“What are you doing?” Walker’s voice was like ice.

“Opening you a secure channel.” She did not look back. “And keeping that signal out of this ship.” She stabbed at a few of the buttons and looked over to meet the pilot’s wary gaze. “Why don’t you focus on flying? In a few seconds, you’re about to—”

Something shot past the shuttle as they rounded the corner of the space station.

“Holy shit,” the pilot breathed.

Walker made a strangled noise.

The girl looked up and forced herself not to react. She had expected this, of course.

She just didn’t particularly like staring down half the fleet, arrayed for their first battle as mutineers. For one thing, she couldn’t distract the human fleet as easily as she could distract the Telestine fleets. There, it had been a matter of feeding the correct signal to the flagship to make herself invisible. Here … well, human ships didn’t network the same way. Their helmsmen and officers couldn’t be persuaded not to notice certain things as easily as their Telestine counterparts.

“Fly,” she snapped at the pilot.

To his credit, he obeyed at once. His hands lurched into motion before his face caught up, and the shuttle banked smoothly out of the way of another missile. He straightened up in his chair and closed his fingers more surely around the controls, and the shuttle began to weave in tight arcs.

Good. That was one thing taken care of. The girl looked to Walker next. “I’ve opened you a channel. If there are any orders you need to give before we….” Her voice trailed off under the admiral’s furious stare. Before we go to Earth. “We must go to Earth,” she said quietly. “The key to stopping Ka’sagra is in those archives. I need access to them, and Tel’rabim can be persuaded to give me access. We need to go to Earth.”

The shuttle swerved and the admiral gripped her chair to stay upright. “And Pike knew this.”

“We don’t have time for that!” Good God, they were in a shuttle, in the middle of a battle. They had no cover, they had no armor. She thrust the comm unit at the admiral. “The Funders are deploying The Seed. Your assault shuttles are all lost. Your carriers soon to follow. I’m … keeping it at bay for now, but you only have seconds before they get around my defenses. Give your orders. Now.”

Walker snatched the comm unit away savagely. “What a pity Pike isn’t here to give them for me.”

The girl looked away. She should be angry. Against the backdrop of everything else, Pike’s lies were small, a petty thing for the admiral to focus on.

Instead, she felt pity. She felt the woman’s hurt. She sat quietly as the admiral composed her thoughts and drew breath to speak.

“Exile Fleet, this is Admiral Walker.” No one could mistake her voice for pleased. “Immediately after the broadcast of these orders, turn off any and all receiving capabilities. There is possibly a … virus … being broadcast to take control of our ships. Authorization code omega five zero one. I’m heading to the Santa Maria with the Dawning. As soon as we’re onboard, every ship that is capable needs to get the hell out. Regroup at … Earth.”

She felt Walker’s eyes on her. “This archive had better be worth it, “ the woman said. “What’s in there? Something important enough for me to ask them to do this?” There was a strange, intent look in her eyes.

The girl hesitated. “Yes. But … also …. Send a few ships to the inner solar system. They are needed inside Mercury’s orbit.”

Walker looked at her for a long moment. How fortunate that you have my strategy planned. The girl could feel the words lingering in the air.

Walker, the girl thought, would have been good at Telestine non-verbal communication.

“I see,” was all she said. She opened the channel. “Larsen, take the Arianna King and two smaller ships of your choosing, and go—”

“He knows where,” the girl interrupted. They could not risk Ka’sagra’s spies hearing this. The Daughters of Ascension had made contacts nearly everywhere.

Walker was past the point of betrayal. Her eyes burned like coals now. “And go,” she finished. “You know where.” She paused. “The rest of you … you know what to do. Close channels now.”

She sat a moment later, buckling her seatbelt with the precision of someone who couldn’t think what else to do.

“So it’s everyone,” she said finally. The ship swerved sideways so suddenly that everyone’s head jerked, and the woman hissed in pain. “Everyone knew.”

“Actually, just Larsen and Pike,” the girl said quietly. “And Larsen knew only … the one thing.” She chanced a look back over her shoulder. “I swear.”

To her surprise, Walker gave a loud, barking laugh. “Well, I’ll believe you then.”

The girl looked away again. She couldn’t tell if Walker was serious or not. She couldn’t tell if the admiral was going mad. It unsettled her.

The ship’s comm light lit up.

“Ma’am, it’s the Intrepid.” The pilot looked over his shoulder. “It’s broadcasting on a channel I can’t unencrypt.”

Walker sighed, and her eyes closed briefly. “The code is eight four five, whiskey alpha foxtrot.” As soon as the man obeyed, Walker was speaking again. “I told you to—”

“I know.” Delaney’s voice came through with the distortion of heavy encryption. “Get out of your flight path, swerve, anything. They think you’re on the Koh Rong, but I don’t know how long that will last. Come to the Intrepid instead.”

“What? Why do they—”

“Ma’am.” The pilot. “The Koh Rong undocked from New Vatican Station and is flying beside us. They’re about to peel off.”

The girl craned to look. Nhean’s ship was indeed preparing to accelerate, its engines glowing. It hung between them and the mutinied portion of the Exile Fleet, a visible and probable origin point for the transmission Walker had just sent. They were so close that unless the gunnery and communications liaisons thought to check their coordinates, no one would target any other ship.

Walker swallowed. “The Santa Maria is my ship. Its weaponry is better than the Intrepid’s.”

“They heard you,” Delaney’s voice said bluntly. “The Santa Maria now has a target on its side the size of Jupiter. When the Koh Rong turns for the Santa Maria, come to my ship. I’ll get you out, but we don’t have much time until they figure out which ship you’re actually on.”

Walker hesitated. “As he says,” she told the shuttle pilot.

She closed the channel and settled back in her chair. “We’re not going to make it, though,” she said, to no one in particular.

This is how I’m going to die: not in battle with the Telestines, but at the hands of my own kind, in a shuttle, for no reason. Again, her thoughts might have been shouted to the entire shuttle, so clearly did the girl feel them.

It was a reasonable fear. There were too many ships against them, and the Exile Fleet could not engage without leaving both the Koh Rong and the shuttle in the crossfire.

Nhean … what in God’s name did you do? The girl felt a sinking sense of disbelief, hollow and hopeless in her chest. Had this all been a desperate alternate plan, the best he could come up with at the time—or was he seizing another opportunity? He could easily want both her and the admiral dead, rather than her in enemy hands and the admiral in control of the fleet.

She couldn’t deny that. It made sense, in an awful way. To her own horror, she realized she was struggling to breathe.

A human reaction. A panic attack. That was what they were called. She was going to die here. They were all going to die here. She could see from a quick glance at the pilot’s face that he felt the same—and yet, his hands kept moving. He did not stop trying. Each new volley of missiles was outmaneuvered with preternatural calm. Something she wished she could summon for herself.

She was going to die here.

She was going to die here.

The knowledge made it more clear than ever: she had to become … something else. Something better. Stronger. Something … powerful.

But … how? Nhean had finished his alterations of her according to Tel’rabim’s old schematics they’d found, and her abilities had certainly grown as a result. What more could she become?

And then, so loud the voice clipped over the speakers, came a human yell of absolute exultation.

“Whoohooooooo!”

The screen exploded with proximity alerts, bursts of fire stuttered into the black outside, and the girl had the dizzying feeling that time must have slowed down—that she was seeing the first few milliseconds of her own death as the missiles took them.

And then, to her disbelief, she heard Walker laughing. She looked back and there was a grin on the woman’s face. The admiral’s hand was shaking where she held the comm unit. “Hello, Mr. Theo McAllister. Nice of you to show up.”

“Admiral.” The man’s voice was warm, and chuckling. “Fancy meeting you here, huh? Captain Delaney sends his regards. Sit tight, we’ll have you out of this mess in a jiffy.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

New Vatican Station

Lieutenant McAllister’s Fighter

It wasn’t far to the rusted old hulk of the Intrepid, but it seemed like half the munitions of the Exile Fleet were flying crossways along that gauntlet. Triton and Neptune hung in the background, bathing everything in a blue glow. Their combined bulk made the battle feel small and insignificant. McAllister knew that feeling was a lie.

The jaws of the fleet were closing, and McAllister had to keep shaking his head at the sheer stupidity of what he was seeing: humans firing on humans, the fleet dashing itself against the rocks for no purpose at all.

He hoped Walker strung every one of those bastards up to hang for what they’d done.

That was, if he managed to get her back alive.

“All right. Twister, you and Vengeance wing need to cover the Koh Rong—give it all the flash you got, draw the eye and make a real production out of it. We want everyone and their mamas lookin’ at you. Princess, you take Fury wing and interrupt fire from port to the shuttle. Tocks, you take Wrath wing and interrupt the fire from starboard, and for heaven’s sake, don’t send anything back at our fleet.”

“All right, bitches, let’s do some corkscrews.” Twister sounded like she was grinning. “Make those ships dance.”

“Why does everyone else get the fun jobs?” Princess’s voice was plaintive. His voice, like the others’, crackled eerily over the old-style shortwave radios. It turned out those radios were now a godsend—a way to communicate when all the other network-connected broadcast channels were unsafe.

McAllister grinned and swerved under one of the missiles that shot overhead. “Because you complain too much, Princess. Keep it up and I’ll have you scrubbing floors.”

“He’s lying to you, Princess,” Tocks called. Her lights flashed and, on cue, her team banked to face the missiles flying out from the loyal ships. “It’s just that your aim’s not so good and Walker’ll skin us all alive if you shoot anyone she cares about. Plus, no one’s got style like Twister.”

There was a burst of nervous laughter.

“Now, everyone keep a count,” McAllister reminded them. “Lowest count eats the slop from the mess. Highest count … also eats the slop from the mess.”

Another burst of laughter.

They didn’t mean any of it, not really—Princess was just trying to keep his group from panicking about facing the line of fire from the mutinied ships, and Tocks was trying to keep hers from panicking about shooting the loyal ones. The three veterans had drilled the newbies until they could maneuver the ships in their sleep, and Twister was making a surprisingly capable replacement for Fisheye. All the battle needed now was for them all to stay calm long enough to execute on that.

McAllister gave a quick glance over to where Twister was, true to orders, making one of the biggest shows he’d ever seen. Her ship glittered as it spiraled out of the way of countless shots, and her team was following her lead.

He needed to trust that she could pull this off. He looked back to his own work. Putting a relative newbie in charge of the mutineers’ main target wouldn’t be his first choice, but flying subtly was the more difficult task. They needed their best and most experienced pilots to guard the shuttle without seeming to do so. Every circle he made, lazy and disinterested-looking, caught the shape of the Funders Circle ships against the backdrop of Neptune, and the Exile Fleet silhouetted against the black.

The pilot of the shuttle was doing his best to make their job as short as possible. He was pushing his craft to the limits. The fighters danced around it, bursts of light showing each intercepted missile, but no matter how fast they moved, the remaining distance seemed interminable. It looked like the shuttle was crawling between the Funders’ station and the Intrepid.

Still, it was even going well, until his gaze caught the too-big shape of something hurtling toward them.

McAllister’s head jerked around to look … and he knew. From the too-straight flight to the rapid acceleration, this could only be a kamikaze ship. Those bastards really were crazy.

He knew the other pilot’s eyes were wide and staring, their fingers were locked, white, on the controls. McAllister didn’t need to see his opponent to know that. He’d seen his own pilots look the same way. Hell, even he had looked the same way a time or two. The craft was still accelerating as it approached, and he knew the pilot would be blocking out everything else, fixing his eyes on his target.

And he was flying a large shuttle, a well-armored ship.

Aw shit. It was one of their own. One of the assault teams that was supposed to have liberated a stolen ship. And now it was aimed straight at Admiral Walker.

Those marines inside weren’t suicide runners. They were hostages.

“Tocks!” His voice was hoarse. “Princess, get in formation with me!” He swung alongside the shuttle. “You see that?” McAllister called to the shuttle pilot.

“I do.” The man’s voice was expressionless, drained from watching death come from him countless times in the last few minutes. “I think the only way is to swerve at the last minute. I will go up.”

“Go down,” McAllister advised him. “Less visible, the way their ships are arranged right now.” The last thing he wanted was for anyone to notice that the fighters were escorting a shuttlecraft not to the Santa Maria, but to the Intrepid.

“All right.” The man still seemed almost eerily calm. He was doing a good job, though, and McAllister knew better than to interrupt someone who was being effective. His voice fuzzed into static.

“What did you say?”

“—virus?” was all that came back.

“What?”

But all their comms were out now. In horror, McAllister watched the kamikaze ship grow closer and closer, utterly determined. He would have to face it without coordinating any sort of attack, and at these speeds, that was an accident waiting to happen.

Tocks and Princess had been with him a long time. They stuck by him, at the shoulders of his craft, and where he shot, they shot.

The missiles laid black streaks along the hull of the ship, but it kept coming. Somehow, it was being piloted remotely, the soldiers inside just along for the ride. It killed him inside to order their deaths, but there was no other choice.

“Keep shooting!” McAllister roared uselessly. There wasn’t any point to the yelling, and they were doing it anyway, but the sheer helplessness of the enforced silence was making him want to pound at the controls in frustration. “Keep shooting, keep shooting, keep—”

It wasn’t doing any good. They banked up and the shuttlecraft banked down at the same moment, the other ship shooting uselessly between them as Tocks’s group scattered out of the way.

“Good job,” he called, over the radios.

The moment was fleeting. The shuttlecraft pulled back into formation and put on a burst of speed, toward the slow-opening shuttle bays of the Intrepid. The fighters, having scattered, raced to keep up.

“Form up!” McAllister called desperately. “Shuttle, bank!”

The pilot’s course wasn’t wavering. He was intent on his landing site, not responding to the transmissions, and Tocks’s wing, trying to chase the kamikaze ship back, now couldn’t fire on it for fear of hitting Walker’s ship.

Shit, shit, shit… He was too far away, and if he fired on the shuttle, he fired on his own wing mates.

Them versus the admiral. Them versus the admiral. He knew what the right choice was. Shaking, McAllister wrapped his hands around the control stick—

A single ship put on a crazy burst of speed and whipped around in an arc that must have put the pilot half-unconscious with the force. Almost before McAllister’s eyes adjusted to its new heading, it was rocketing up toward the underbelly of the kamikaze’s ship.

“I got this, boss.” Tocks’s voice broke through the static. There were no jokes in her tone now.

There was no regret, either—just acceptance.

“Tocks? Tocks!”

Whether she’d switched off her radios or not, he wasn’t sure, but she didn’t respond.

“TOCKS!” But it was too late for her to pull away, and in a flash, McAllister was back at Mercury, watching King’s carrier hurtle toward the Telestine flagship. Each second seemed to stretch out, and still he knew there was no time for the ship to turn away. The die was cast, the collision couldn’t be stopped now.

Tocks’s fighter cut cleanly into the belly of the remote-controlled kamikaze ship, every gun firing full bore, and the impact carried the two ships up and over Walker’s shuttle, spiraling with the escaping air, metal twisting.

McAllister felt himself moving on autopilot. His mouth was open, his throat was hoarse. He was sure he was screaming, but he couldn’t hear it. He banked back into formation without any conscious thought. His eyes tracked the wreckage, praying for his friend’s ship to burst free and rejoin them. He wanted to hear that delighted laugh crackle over the radios.

And none of that was going to happen. In a daze, he turned his head to watch Walker’s shuttle slide into the Intrepid’s shuttle bay. The other large ships were already moving into formation ahead of it, blocking the view of its turn away from the battle.

“Boss?” Princess’s voice. The man sounded like he could hardly talk around the lump in his throat. “…Theo?”

McAllister squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. How the hell are the comms working again? he thought, trying to distract himself from the visceral shock spreading throughout his body at Tocks’s death.

They knew this sort of thing happened. They’d all known it when they signed up.

He’d just never thought he would lose one of his fighters to another human ship. Bitterness rose up to choke him and he pounded one closed fist on his leg until he could swallow down the lump in his throat.

Tocks hadn’t made that choice so the rest of them could get killed stupidly.

“All wings form up.” He could do this. “Scorpio, you take over Wrath wing.”

“Aye, sir.” Scorpio sounded dazed, like she was responding on instinct and nothing more.

“All right, gang. We’re the fleet’s eyes now.” McAllister turned his ship to face the mutineers’ ships. “We watch, we make sure that no one, and I mean no one notices the Intrepid until it’s away. Fire only—” It was hard to talk. “Only when you need to. You want revenge, and so do I. But right now the people we’re staring at are people we need back with us when we fight the Telestines. We spare as many as we can, we take the bastards down, and later we beat the shit out of every one of these motherfuckers that took Tocks down. You understand?”

There was a silence, but he could feel their acceptance.

A deep breath.

“All right. Vengeance, head top. Wrath, to port from where we sit now. Fury, I’m coming with you to guard the Santa Maria.” He cast a look over his shoulder, where the Intrepid was starting to bank. “Let’s get this over with.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

New Vatican Station

Shuttle

The shuttle had barely come to a halt in the landing bay before Walker had the door open and was sprinting for the exit. She vaguely noticed the girl at her heels, and made a mental note to have her escorted off the bridge once she got there.

Right now, she wasn’t going to spare the breath.

It had been hell in the close confines of the shuttle, entirely helpless watching death come for them in the form of the munitions she had so carefully stockpiled.

And the other shuttle, commandeered by the Funder’s Seed virus and hurled at her own, in spite of the ten innocent marines inside…. She shook her head tightly, even as she ran. She did not want to believe that was where they were coming to as a species now.

It had begun. They were truly killing their own instead of their enslavers.

Delaney greeted her with a nod and a salute as she came in. The bridge was unnaturally silent with all the ships in radio darkness. All they had were the flickering images produced by old-style sonar, and the bridge crew huddled in their seats with their eyes fixed on the display.

Delaney had known Walker long enough not to cede control immediately. He finished giving orders to the navigational team, who were the only ones still in motion, before he turned to look at Walker. I hope you have a good reason for all of this, his eyes said.

“Min is on the Santa Maria,” he said, voice tight. “He’s going to lead it around more slowly, flash some big guns so they stay focused on him. Hopefully we’ll be long gone before anyone notices us.”

The odds were good, Walker had to admit. In a battle between her and Tel’rabim, she would not have laid odds on either commander missing a switch like this. But in a fleet that had no competent commander on one side….

Maybe there was still time to launch an attack. Take advantage of their incompetence. Take those damn ships back.

She looked at the screen. The mutinied ships still lacked a formation. They hung prettily, arranged in a grid of sorts. It was meant to look impressive, but it wasn’t functional in battle.

There was still time to fight….

But … Earth. Dawn’s mission to the archives. Both she and Nhean were so insistent….

The ship creaked as it turned. It was much as it would have been on the sea, she decided. The Intrepid was old enough to strain with each acceleration, and the torque from the turns was akin to water lashing against its bow. Triton, and beyond, deep blue Neptune inched off the screen and the image of a distant, tiny sun replaced it. The distant pull of acceleration confirmed they’d begun the days’ long journey to Earth.

She turned her thoughts from that as resolutely as she always turned her thoughts from anything near to the idea of Earth. She did not want to think of oceans and solid ground beneath their feet. She wanted to think of something that might be their future, not their past.

Delaney nudged her, and Walker turned to regard the girl. Her palms were splayed against the command desk and she had her head tilted. She was listening, but to what, Walker didn’t know.

“You shouldn’t be on the bridge,” she said calmly. “Jack, if you would—”

“You want me here,” the girl objected. She didn’t look around. “The Seed broadcast got to some of your ships before you went dark. Not all of it, just the first packet. But it’s here. And I don’t think anyone else can fix it but me.”

She looked then, one piercing glance from eyes so black the pupils could hardly be seen, and then she went back to communing with the hunk of white metal in front of her. How she was managing to use it speak to human computers, Walker wasn’t sure, but evidently she could do so.

“Is she serious?” Delaney asked. He had, Walker knew, a low tolerance for anything he considered mumbo-jumbo. She had gone to the station alone instead of with Jack in tow, for the simple fact that he would have been impossible around any of the religious leaders. He didn’t even approve of the cross she wore.

Watching him watch the girl was almost funny.

“I think so,” Walker said. She considered. Letting the girl learn more about their computer systems wasn’t necessarily the best idea—but she’d been correct when she pointed out that no one else had the knowledge to rid the ship of the control programming. “Anyway, she can’t see anything and she can’t hear anything, given that we’re not running anything from here. I say let her try.”

She thought she saw a faint frown pass over the girl’s face at the lack of confidence, but the expression was quickly gone.

A sound behind them made her turn, and she looked over her shoulder to regard Pike’s tall, stoop-shouldered form paused in the doorway.

“I heard you’d landed,” he said awkwardly. His smile was slow, and it lit a fire in her stomach. “I’m glad you’re—”

He stopped at the look in her eyes.

She wanted to hit him. It was an entirely useless urge, but she wanted to throw her fists at him in fury. She wanted to feel the impact of her knuckles against his cheekbone. She could remember, in a burning moment of shame, telling Nhean that Pike had chosen her side.

He’d known. He’d sent Pike. They’d both been laughing at her this whole time.

He swallowed. “Laura—”

“Get … off … my … bridge,” Walker forced out. Then she turned her eyes back to the flickering display and waited until she heard the door slide shut.

There was a stony silence. Even the girl had come out of her trance. Everyone else was pretending to be so absorbed by the display that they hadn’t seen Pike come in. And then:

“What did he—” Delaney began.

“No,” Walker said simply. No, I can’t talk about this here. I can’t believe I trusted him. Foolish.

There was only one thing that mattered now, and that was coming up with a way to get into the Telestine archives, herself.

FTL. The schematics of generation ships, all helpfully calibrated to the Telestines’ very similar atmospheric requirements. Weaponry greater than any humans had devised.

When she was done at Earth, she would have the tools to destroy it and the Telestines alike. Then her people would be free, armed with technology beyond their wildest dreams and on their way to a new home. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of new homes amongst the stars. Humanity would never again be at risk of extinction, never again be dependent on one single, solitary location in the universe to sustain it.

Humanity would be safe. And free.

“No.”

The word was spoken so softly, at first Walker didn’t even realize who’d spoken it. When she realized it was the girl, her spine stiffened. “What happened?”

The girl looked up from the console. “The Seed. It’s … it’s been fully uploaded to several of your ships. And I don’t know if I can stop it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

Koh Rong

This was not his day. Nhean swore as the Koh Rong—and the shuttle in its belly—swerved and tumbled toward the Santa Maria. The helmswoman, Maria Hollywood, bless her, was throwing everything she had into avoiding the missiles flying every which way. Unfortunately, that meant the artificial gravity wasn’t working as well as it should.

“Are we docking, sir?” Her voice was level over the comms.

When this was over, he was giving her a hell of a raise. He probably wasn’t going to mention the part where he’d purposefully drawn the fire of the Funders Circle fleet, though.

“Not yet, Ms. Hollywood,” he instructed. “Head towards the ship as if you’re making for the docking bays on the other side, and then—” He managed to make it out the door of the shuttle, and immediately regretted his choice when the pilot swerved again and he tumbled sideways across the floor. Suppressing an oath, he stood up using the side wall of the shuttle bay for support, and courteously held out a hand for the shuttle pilot, who had been thrown from the craft with him.

“Sir?”

“I’m all right, thank you. We’re heading back to Earth, so as soon as you’re out of sight of the bulk of the fleet, get us out of here.”

There was a pause. “What if they see us?” she asked reasonably. There was a faint hitch in her voice, the distracted tone of someone trying to do too many things at once. From the sounds of it, piloting was her first priority. That was good. “How closely are they paying attention to us?”

There was a faint reproach in Hollywood’s tone. She seemed to realize that they were the focus of undue attention, and before he could answer, she sighed.

“And there goes our escort.”

“What?”

“We had some of Walker’s fighters protecting us,” she explained. “But they’re leaving now.”

Which meant that Walker, at least, was safe. For a moment, Nhean struggled with his conscience. Had sending the girl with Walker been the best plan? Had saving Walker even been a good idea?

Done was done, and the best he could do now was take advantage of the cover her return would provide. With any luck, they could slide into Earth’s orbit unnoticed, and from there, the girl could potentially get him into the Telestine archives as well…

Maybe then he’d be able to figure out why the hell Ka’sagra hadn’t used her bombs yet.

There were a lot of “ifs” in this plan, however. Plenty of time to think about that later.

“Right. Get out of here first, and we’ll focus on getting back to Earth second. Swing around Nereid and act like we’re docking at New Hokkaido. Then punch it for Earth. We need, now more than ever, to get Dawn into those archives. Figure out how to terminate The Seed. But more importantly, how to terminate those damn iridium bombs.”

He had to get to the bridge. Nhean glanced over at his shuttle pilot, who had grabbed onto a handhold on the shuttle bay wall. As much as he wanted to do the same, instead Nhean turned and inched his way out of the shuttle bay and down the elegantly curving hallways of his ship.

Hollywood was good. By the time he reached the bridge, they were almost entirely clear of the battle and the gravity had stabilized. She nodded to him when he took his seat, and he nodded back at her.

“Are we clear of surveillance?”

Her eyes flickered over several screens before answering. “Yes, sir. They’re focusing fire on the Santa Maria’s shuttle bays.” Her lips twitched slightly. “So I hope you don’t decide you actually want to dock.”

“No.” Nhean allowed himself to share her small smile.

Far, far too aware of the fact that he had never looked properly into Parees’s past, he had made a point of speaking with the helmswoman whenever the opportunity presented itself. To his surprise, he found her not only competent—he’d known that much when he hired her, at least—but also possessed of a startlingly good sense of humor. Though bemused by his interest in her life, she’d shared her story of growing up on Saturn’s moon Mimas—she had a wicked Ringer accent—and then on smugglers’ ships, training to fly alongside her father and older siblings.

Their discussions were now one of the high points of his day, and Nhean had begun to sense her amusement without her having to say anything aloud. He let himself take in the moment before turning his attention back to the battle.

“So they’re still focusing on the Santa Maria, then?”

“It’s taking heavy fire.” She gave him a regretful look. “The hull is holding well, though, and its fighters are intercepting a good amount of the missiles.” Again that small smile. “It’s going out of its way to flash its tail feathers at everyone, and so far, they’re still taking the bait.”

Min was on that ship. Nhean clenched his fingers and watched. If push came to shove, Walker was more of an asset to humanity, but Min was a good commander. He deserved better than to be a doomed distraction for the admiral’s getaway.

It wasn’t supposed to go this way. He’d assumed Walker had shown up at Neptune to take her fleet back by force, and knowing her, she’d had a meticulous plan to do it.

But the theft of The Seed had changed all that. She had to run. She had no other choice, or else everything was lost.

Hopefully, he would make it out of this alive. As Nhean watched, the ship swept itself broadside, a tempting target despite its own full-firing batteries, and began making its way along the middle of the battle itself, providing cover to the other ships as it went. It was an astonishingly brazen move, all the more so given that—if one looked closely—its batteries were firing anywhere but the Funders Circle ships.

“And the Intrepid?” He didn’t look away from the scene unfolding before him.

“Almost away, sir.” Hollywood considered the battle. “I don’t think the mutineers were prepared for this. They may not even have picked a commander yet. Right now, everyone on their side is just going for the target they think is the highest priority. They don’t seem to be communicating with one another.” She looked over at him. “I think we’re good to run out to Nereid, if you want.”

“Get us behind the Santa Maria first—even if it doesn’t look like they’re communicating with one another, let’s not tempt fate.”

“Yes, sir.” She glanced at another screen to her side. “Sir, the Stockholm and the Andromache have stopped accelerating. Along with three smaller missile frigates.”

The Seed.

Dammit.

“Status of their main drives? Did they just turn them off, or are they damaged?”

She shook her head. “Hard to tell. But I’m reading all sorts of system-wide malfunctions aboard both ships. Reading a flurry of intra-ship comm traffic—looks like they’re trying to hold off the effects of The Seed. Manual overrides and computer bypass procedures and all that, but….” She was shaking her head.

Celestine’s words came back to him. Either they come over to our side willingly, or … they go … nowhere.

He gripped his armrests in quiet acceptance.

“Keep me apprised. In the meantime, Ms. Hollywood, I’m going to record a message,” Nhean told her. “To Earth, to Tel’rabim. I need it encrypted and sent as quickly as possible.” He would not normally ask this of her until they were well clear of the battle, but the two of them had an understanding: he made extraordinary demands only when necessary.

She only nodded.

Nhean paused to collect his thoughts, and then began recording.

“The Dawning is aboard the Intrepid,” he told Tel’rabim. “This was not the original plan, but has been made necessary. I am sending specifications for identification. It is imperative you allow the ship to land undamaged. Do not interfere with her access to the archive. Or all is lost, and Ka’sagra … wins.”

He wavered. What else was there to say? Further explanations would be useless, and while he would prefer to tell Tel’rabim which ships in pursuit were friendly and which were not, he had no desire to give the Telestines the ability to distinguish between human ships of the same class.

In any case, Tel’rabim might well decide that it would be best to take the Dawning and kill the rest.

Nhean ended the message and nodded to the pilot. “Send it.”

Now they could only wait. The girl might be valuable to Tel’rabim, valuable enough to preserve.

But would Tel’rabim believe that she was more valuable than Walker was dangerous? That, he could not say.

“Oh God. The Stockholm,” said Hollywood. They both looked up to the viewscreen. The giant carrier, one of the jewels of the Exile Fleet, was convulsing with explosions.

Dozens of explosions.

Internal explosions.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Triton, Geosynchronous Orbit

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

“There it goes, ma’am,” Delaney said, helplessly. They were all watching the viewscreen unable to … do anything. Only watch as somehow, those bastards on the Funders Circle destroyed one of their precious carriers.

Their precious people.

“Still no word from Captain Harrison?” she said.

Delaney shook his head. “Their comms went down a few minutes ago. Now their engines are caught in a feedback loop. Shouldn’t be long now bef—”

He didn’t have time to finish his sentence. The Stockholm, with blue grey Triton hanging behind it and blue Neptune serving as a giant backdrop, exploded.

And the Andromache was still falling further behind. Would it suffer the same fate? And the three missile frigates? They were small, but every last ship was vital.

“Ma’am.” One of the communications officers was studying the screens intently. “I believe the Arianna King is trying to dock with us.”

“In the middle of acceleration?” Delaney asked, spinning around.

“It has drawn alongside our ship, its starboard lights are flashing, and it has opened a docking corridor, sir.” The young man flushed under Delaney’s gaze, but did not back down. He looked back to Walker. “What would you like to do?”

What would she like to do?

Feed Larsen to the wolves, for one. He was no doubt coming to bow and scrape and apologize for what he’d done, and she would rather let him suffer.

On the other hand, she needed know exactly what the hell was going on.

“Let them dock,” Walker instructed. “I’ll go meet them at the docking port.”

“You stay here,” Delaney said immediately. “That port’s not secure at the best of times, and this is a fool’s errand. I’ll go, and tell Larsen to shove his head up—”

“He wouldn’t come without reason,” Walker said. “And I have some questions for the captain. You have the bridge.”

She left without waiting to see what Delaney would say. Her footsteps carried her quickly up the stairs and along the corridors to her destination, past a great deal of airlock doors—the first humans in space had been perhaps excessively careful about anything that involved opening a ship to the outside. The docking ports were entirely cut off from the main air supply of the ship, and the ground creaked in protest as she stepped inside.

She really should wait for Larsen to come to her somewhere safer, but she didn’t want anyone else to see this.

It seemed that the clangs and hisses of the two ships locking together would last forever. A mechanical whine announced, at long last, that the payload capsule was sliding through the vacuum of the docking tunnel, and Walker clasped her hands behind her back to watch it approach.

The news of Pike’s betrayal had hit her hard, but Larsen’s had twisted the knife. Either one of them, she told herself, she could have coped with. But both? Both of them, listening to Nhean, plotting against her? And to what end?

She hadn’t seen it coming, that was the worst part. She hadn’t had any idea.

Larsen’s face was ashen as he stepped out. “Admiral—”

“No.” She didn’t want to hear his apologies. “Facts only.” That was the only way she was getting through this.

He swallowed hard. “What happened on the station?”

“Not relevant.” Was he wondering if Nhean was alive? Was he wondering how much Nhean had said? “All of it, Commander.” She didn’t want to say his name. “Tell me all of it.”

He linked his hands behind his back and stared into the middle distance rather than meet her eyes.

“As you left for the station, I received a call from Mr. Tang. I had decided after the mutiny that I would take any call of his in an attempt to learn what he had offered the mutineers for their loyalty.”

Her head tilted, and he paused, sensing her curiosity.

“Go on,” was all she said. She kept her voice cold. Good intentions in the past hardly mattered now.

“He did not offer me anything,” Larsen said. “I tried to lead him into a confession, but he was adamant that he was not the one who had organized the mutiny. He said….”

His voice trailed away, and he closed his eyes.

“Out with it.” Or I will throw you out an airlock, so help me God.

Her tone jolted him back to reality.

“He said that he was worried Tel’rabim had been losing the war for too long, and that he might have the capability … that he might try something irrational and try to … blow up the sun.”

“What?”

“He said that if all the Telestines were going to die anyway, Tel’rabim might very well make that choice—”

“You’re telling me,” Walker interrupted, “that Nhean thinks that Tel’rabim has the capability to take out … our sun?”

“I … yes.” Larsen shook his head helplessly. “I guess. I didn’t ask for more information.”

He hadn’t asked? She was going to kill him. She was going to throttle him with her bare hands. Hearing about a technology like that, and he hadn’t even asked to know more?

Larsen swallowed. “He asked me to take the King and two destroyers to patrol inside Mercury’s orbit, so that we could intercept any ships sent by Tel’rabim and take them down. Or … he asked me to persuade you to send me.”

There was a long silence.

“And what were you going to do, commander?” Her voice was like winter. She hoped that only she could hear the sad, lost note in it. Part of her was screaming that he hadn’t made a choice—but he hadn’t rejected the offer out of hand, either.

“I wasn’t sure.” Larsen admitted it plainly, at least, though his mouth had twisted. “I thought I would … have more time to research.”

“Research what, exactly? If an alien asshole in control of Earth can, in fact, destroy a star? Do you know how preposterous that sounds? Or were you researching how far up your own ass you could insert your gullible head?”

“If it was a good plan! If Nhean could be trusted!” The words were ripped out of him. “If it really was necessary. I knew he might have other reasons for asking me. Good God, Admiral, I’m on your side here.”

She ignored his casual mention of sides. “What did he even say his reasons were?”

“That you wouldn’t—” His voice trailed off when he saw her face. “Listen to him,” he finished quietly. “That you’d see it was a good idea if someone else said it, but not him.”

“And you thought, you really thought, that you could out-think, out-intel Nhean?” It was cruel to ask that of him, but what had he thought? “The fact that you even entertained such a request is—” She broke off, gave a sigh. “So you and Pike, then. Is it Delaney, too?”

But when she looked back, Larsen was only shaking his head. “I don’t understand.” His eyes narrowed: “Did Pike….”

She didn’t like the dawning look of satisfaction on his face. “As did you,” she reminded him, driving the words with all the force of a knife between the ribs. “You went behind my back as well. You listened to Nhean’s offer to manipulate me and you didn’t turn him down flat.”

Larsen looked away.

“So this is where I am now.” She stared him down. “I’ve reached the point where my council has to manage me. Where they don’t trust that I can make decisions rationally. Where I have to be led to the correct decision. Is that it? Is that what it’s come to?”

“Ma’am—”

“What do I do now, Larsen? My allies are conspiring with Nhean, even knowing he can’t be trusted. Half my fleet is gone, and firing on the half I left. So tell me the rest of the plan, if you even know it. Where were you going to lead me from here?” She wanted to hear him say that he had walked her into a situation without understanding it.

His face was white. “I don’t know. I didn’t know anything other than to take the ships inside Mercury’s orbit, I swear, and I might not even have said anything to you. I wasn’t sure.”

“You should have been sure,” she told him flatly. “You should have been sure from the first that it was better to tell me the truth than it was to listen to whispers from an enemy. You should have come to me—but you didn’t. So go. Go. I don’t want to see you. Go do what your duty tells you to do.”

“I would do anything to take it back!” he protested. “Anything, Laura.”

They both froze at the sound of her name.

A thought occurred to her, something tantalizing. He really would do anything right now, she knew that, and now was the time to give orders—when his mind would be clouded with guilt, when his resolve was called into question. She had made her own preparations weeks ago, and now, in the face of defeat, she needed someone who would act without hesitation.

“There was something I would have asked you to do,” she told him simply, “but I cannot trust you any longer.”

“I will do it!”

“How do I know that? This is a request that requires absolute discretion, and now I that I know you’re in Nhean’s pocket—”

“I’ll do it,” he said flatly. He was at her side. It was strange, having him look down at her. His eyes searched hers. “You know I would never have betrayed you, I would never have done anything against you. I had his request less than an hour before you learned of it. Don’t condemn me for things I didn’t even do.” His face twisted. “I was trying to save the fleet.”

She made a show of wavering.

“Please, Laura.” He said her name again, more boldly this time.

It was working. She thrust away her guilt at manipulating him, composed herself, then looked up and took one last moment to assess his resolve. Could she trust him with this?

Hopefully.

Now she just needed the cover story to hang together. She had spent time coming up with this one. She had even placed the iridium bomb they’d recovered on Mars on his ship, knowing that he was one of the likeliest people to undertake this task without asking too many questions.

She had always been prepared, she told herself, to sacrifice any one of them, herself included. That was what this kind of war required of a leader. And she had known that she might never truly have allies in her quest to destroy Earth—just pawns. She lifted her chin and delivered her lies with as much conviction as she could muster.

“There is … a sensitivity in the Telestine genome,” she said finally, adding this small lie to the truth, to make her orders more palatable. “There’s more to it than that, but the long and short of it is that we have a chance to weaken them—to kill off huge numbers of them on Earth.”

“How?” He breathed the word.

“A bomb developed by my researchers on Vesta, before it blew.” Another lie. “It will set off the required chain reactions, but it needs hydrogen for the catalyst. There is enough in the Marianas Trench—it’s under so much water pressure that the concentration of hydrogen atoms is higher than anywhere else accessible on Earth. I need it dropped there, but do not activate it. Not yet. I’ll do that myself, later.”

Later, he’d never forgive her for this. He’d never forgive her for using him to destroy humanity’s home.

She hoped to God he would.

“Yes, of course. Marianas Trench. ” He probably had no idea where that was, but would soon be checking old Earth maps. He spoke automatically before his brain caught up with him, and then he shook his head. “Shouldn’t we use it now, though?”

She wanted to, more than she could say. But with every conceivable kind of blueprint within her grasp, she couldn’t afford to be trigger-happy.

“Genocide should be a last resort.” She held his eyes. “When the bomb is in place, and our fleet is reunited, then we can consider bargaining with Tel’rabim. The payload … is already on your ship. I had it delivered two weeks ago.”

“That’s why you were so worried,” he said slowly. “On the day of the mutiny.”

“Yes.” She tried not to flinch at the absolute panic of the memory—the terror that his ship had been taken and her bomb was lost. They had only just gotten it off Mars in the days after the Vesta disaster. From the look on his face, he was reliving that day as well, and he was saddened that it was the bomb she had been so worried about, and not him.

She didn’t have time for that just now.

“You must tell no one of this,” she cautioned him. “You know the stakes, you have seen battle. But when it comes to this many lives—”

He nodded jerkily. “Yes. I … yes.” He hesitated, then stepped closer. “I hope you know—”

“You need to go,” she told him. “Quickly. I need you in place, commander. Drop the bomb, and then … get to Mercury. Do what … Nhean … asked you to do.”

Her orders, and her bitter tone, recalled him. He stepped back, his cheeks reddening, and snapped a salute.

“I am so sorry, admiral.”

“As am I.” It wasn’t a lie. “But regret wastes time we don’t have. Look forward.”

And it was, she had to admit, with a certain sadness that she watched him walk away. She might never see this man again, and he would have no idea what he was doing until he did it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Triton

Aggy II

Cockpit

The Aggy II had barely escaped Neptune’s gravity well when the engines shut off. And they were still drifting at high velocity when their long-range sensors picked up the horrifying image of the Stockholm exploding.

“What the hell happened to it?” said James over the comm. He was in the engine room, struggling to get the thrusters back online. The pesky coolant leak had finally caught up to them, Ry supposed.

“It just … exploded. Going over the sensor log now. It doesn’t look like those Nettie bastards were even firing on it. It was just drifting at constant speed one moment, and then there was violent decompression, and then … boom,” said Gabriella.

An idea struck Ry, and he jabbed a few buttons on his console. “James, have you figured out what the hell happened to the engines?”

“No idea. They just … shut off. I can’t make hide nor hair of it. Never seen anything like it. Why? You worried it’s … not the coolant leak?”

Rychenkov thumbed towards the door and nearly yelled at Gabriella. “Get the kid up here.” He turned back to the computer console. “No, James, a minor coolant leak shouldn’t take down a whole engine like that. Something’s … something’s off.”

Gabby was going white. “What is it?”

“Something Nhean had said. Something about a virus the Netties have that they designed to take his ships. And, well, since this is technically his ship, then….”

“Oh God,” said Gabriella. “Deshawn! Get your ass up here!”

The kid finally poked his head into the cabin, rubbing an eye. “What? I was asleep—”

“Sleep later, make us not die now.” Ry pointed to the computer console. “The Netties are broadcasting something, and I think it must have made it into our computer system. Your new job? Stop it. Stop it and I’ll double your goddamn pay.”

That woke him up. Deshawn sat down and started working feverishly. They’d brought him on as an extra crew member to help out with the engine maintenance, but it turned out he was a software whizz. Lucky them.

“Guys, we’ve got a tail. Didn’t see it before.” Gabby pointed to the long-range sensor readout. “Looks like one of the old Exile Fleet ships the Netties stole. Heading right for us.”

“James! I need those engines now!” Rychenkov shouted into the comm. He whacked the kid on the shoulder. “And we need to purge that virus. NOW.”

Gabby shook her head. “It’s accelerating fast. They know we saw them.” She looked up. “They must have picked up our long-range scan. Now they’re hightailing it for us.”

“Time?”

She ran a quick calculation. “Two minutes.”

“James! Now!” said Ry.

James swore over the comm. “Look, boss, miracles don’t come cheap.” More cursing over the line, and the sounds of clanking and possibly a small explosion. “I’ve initiated emergency shutdown, then I’ll bring them back to life in what I hope is safe-mode. Cycle the power—that’s basically the solution to everyth—”

The kid interrupted him. “I think I’ve narrowed it down. I found it, and I think I can hem it in to just the affected engine control system, and with James restarting them in an isolated manually-operated safe-mode, I think I can get us moving.”

Gabby tapped her watch. “Two minutes, guys.”

“Until weapons range?” Ry asked.

Her eyes went wide. “Until they get here. They can fire anytime they want, dumbass.”

The seconds ticked down. They seemed like minutes. Hours. But finally, a whoop came over the comm. “Engines restarted, ladies and germs. I’m coming up.”

Ry grabbed the acceleration controls and punched them hard. The ship started to accelerate almost faster than the Telestine inertial compensators could handle. “Just in time. How about that. Kid? Any luck locking that bitch down?”

Deshawn nodded. “Yeah. The virus is contained to the engine operating software. But since we’re on manual, we’re good.” He looked up with a wince on his face. “For now.”

The ship jolted to the right. Like something hit them.

“They’re firing at us,” said Rychenkov. He pushed the accelerator harder. “Luckily, that’s an old Exile Fleet ship, and this a brand new shiny Venus Sovereign Fleet ship. I think we’ve got them outmatched on acceleration by a factor of five….”

The ship rocked a few more times as the shots from the Nettie ship found their hull, but over the next few minutes, they decreased in frequency and then died away completely.

The comm sounded again. This time, it wasn’t James. “Uh, guys?” said Katya.

He didn’t like the sound of her voice. “What is it?”

“It’s James. It’s … it’s bad. One of the shots pierced the hull down here. Just as he was climbing the ladder from thruster B, and—”

Gabby bolted from her chair and raced out of the cabin.

What followed was a blur. Somehow, on autopilot, he made it down shortly after her.

But they were both too late. Katya held him in her arms, kneeling on the floor. Blood poured from his neck where the stray piece of broken metal had clipped it.

James was dead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Triton

EFS Intrepid

Ready Room

Should I suspect Delaney, too?

She had asked it of Larsen only as a jab, but the question would not leave her alone. When she returned to the bridge, after confirming that the Andromache and the three other missile frigates had indeed not made it out of the Neptune system, she beckoned Delaney out of the room with a jerk of her head. She kept a stony silence while they walked to the captain’s quarters.

“What’s going on?” he asked as soon as the door closed. “All the secrecy with Larsen, the way you spoke to Pike….”

“Send word out to the rest of the fleet. Everyone. Every last ship. Meet us at Earth. We should be there in four days—that should give everyone else time to get there. We’re going to need it in case Tel’rabim tries to pull something on us when the Dawning tries to access the archive.”

“Laura.” He hesitated. “Sure. I’ll make the calls. But … what’s going on?”

“What’s going on with you?” she asked him instead. “Any concerns? Things you’ve wanted to tell me to do, but haven’t? Questions about my … state of mind?”

He stared at her in silence.

“No,” he said finally. “Or … none that can be addressed.” The way her face changed must have frightened him, because he shook his head. “I told you, Laura, you’re the closest thing I have to a child. Why d’you think I wanted you to come to this ship instead of any other? I could have sent that shuttle to one of the destroyers, but I was … selfish. I wanted to keep an eye on you. I worry.”

“About?” She refused to be taken in by this. She began to pace around the room, throwing glances at him over her shoulder.

It was a neat place, this. Not a single shirt out of place. Delaney was never the type to have clutter.

“What d’you say to your daughter?” he asked her. “You tell her to be happy, you tell her to find someone who….” He sighed, and looked away. “You tell her not to get drawn into fights, you tell her to take as much joy from her life as she can. But what do you tell her when she’s the admiral of the fleet?”

She looked up in silence, her feet drawing to stillness.

“You can’t rest,” Delaney told her. “None of us can. You saw what happened to the Stockholm. To the Andromache. It seems our friends can now destroy our ships with the press of a button. So it doesn’t matter how much I worry when you’ve got shadows under your eyes. It’s life or death, we can’t let up. I’ve tried to do what I can, give you time alone with Pike, despite my reservations. You should have some joy. But there won’t be a wedding. There’ll be a battle.”

She began to laugh, and could not stop. “You don’t know how right you are,” she managed to get out. The sound of her voice was growing louder, wilder. “And you were all right, I should have thrown him off the ship the second he came back after Vesta.”

“What has he done?” Delaney’s hands were on her arms. “That son of a bitch, I swear—”

“He was working with Nhean this whole time. Nhean told me himself.” She forced herself to make it real by saying it out loud. She looked up to meet his eyes. “They didn’t think I was capable of making my own choices. Even Larsen—”

“He was never in on it.” Delaney looked floored. “That fight was real—between the two of them. I’ve seen men circling a woman before. They’ve got no love for one another.”

“What? No. It wasn’t like—” She shook her head. “No, Larsen … received orders from Nhean just before I went to meet the Funders. And he was planning to follow them, as near as I can tell.” She looked up at Delaney. “So, tell me. Have you all been managing me this way?”

“No.” Delaney took her shoulder carefully in his wrinkled, work-roughened hand. “Ah, shit, I’m getting engine grease on you.”

“I don’t mind.” She really didn’t. She wanted to lean her head on his shoulder and have him tell her everything was going to be all right.

Only, he wasn’t the type to say it, and she wouldn’t believe it even if he did.

“I trust you,” he told her. “I didn’t agree with shooting down the fleet when you proposed it, but I never doubted you’d see reason. If I disagree with something you say, Laura, you’ll always know it.”

She managed a laugh and went to pull away, but he held her close.

“I know you’ll get Earth back,” he said. “I know you will. Even if I don’t live to see it—”

“Jack, no.” She couldn’t listen to him say these things.

“Yes. I know that at the end of your life, you’ll be staring out at fields of crops, children playing under the open sky. You’ll have walked barefoot on the ground.”

She wanted to shake. I can’t bear this.

“I have never doubted that you would bring us back to Earth,” he told her. His smile was so proud that she felt her heart shatter. “Not once.”

“I won’t.” She broke, and the words came out in a rush. “I’m not bringing us back to Earth. That was never my plan.”

There was a silence. His bushy eyebrows drew together in a frown.

“What do you mean?” he asked her finally.

She should have kept the secret. He would never have had to deal with the knowledge, he would have followed her without question until it was done and then….

But the words tumbled out anyway.

“There isn’t any way to get Earth back.” She looked up at him through a blur of tears. “You know that. You know that, Jack, if you’re being honest with yourself.”

He stepped back, at that. “No.” He shook his head. “No, I followed you because you could get us back there.”

“But I can’t!” She half-screamed the words. “There isn’t any way.”

“We have to get Earth back.” His voice was rising.

“I’m telling you we can’t, it’s impossible.”

“We have to! There is no other option!” He slammed a hand down on one of the chairs.

“There’s FTL.” She said it quietly.

“FTL? Faster than light travel? What, just run? Pull a new technology out of our asses and just run? Leave them with our planet?”

“No.” She looked up at him, clear-eyed now. “I wasn’t going to leave them the planet.”

His face changed slowly as he realized what she meant, and his eyes closed. “No,” he said quietly.

“It is the only way.” She said it quietly. “There is no way to match them. Earth is a siren. A mirage, Jack. We were never going to get it away from them undamaged. But they’ve left their flank open. They’re betting that we’d never attack them on a large scale for fear of the damage we might do to our own planet. They haven’t even planned for this. It’s … the only way to beat them. For good.”

He took two steps back, toward the door, and she knew a moment of pure fear. He was going to have her hanged. He was going to shoot her right here.

He did something worse. She saw his face change.

“You will change your mind,” he told her. “You will.”

“Jack, it’s been decades—”

He spoke over her. “And you will find a way,” he told her. “I can’t do it, Laura, but you can. You will find a way to save it all. I believe that.”

“You shouldn’t believe that.” He was being impossible, and now she was truly angry. “Dammit Jack, think.”

“I have thought. For longer than you’ve been alive.” He shook his head. “And I know you. I know you can do it. I know you won’t let our home be lost, not in the end.” He opened the door. “I’ll summon the rest of the fleet to meet us at Earth.”

He left her with a scream building in her throat and she whirled to batter her fists against the locker. He didn’t believe her, he wouldn’t help her. He’d heard it all and the only thing he could do was deny everything.

When the door opened, she whirled back, ready to give him hell.

But it was Pike, not Delaney.

He stood in the doorway for a moment before slipping inside, and his gaze took in her tear stained cheeks and the blood on her hands.

She drew herself up carefully.

“It’s done.” She said the words she had meant to say to Delaney. They worked just as well for Pike. The comm unit was on her wrist, and there was not a damned thing anyone could do to keep her from giving Larsen the order to activate the bomb as well as drop it. That was the card in her sleeve. No matter what happened, no matter if it all went wrong and she couldn’t find the FTL in their archives and the fleet was lost … she could still make the Telestines pay.

And then make the Funders Circle pay.

Nhean thought he was the puppet master, did he? Well, she’d learned to play the game better than he had.

“You can’t stop me from doing it, it’s already done.” She shook her head. “So the dancing, the telling me that I would love Earth, all of it—it didn’t work.” She threw that at him, determined that she should wound him as much as he had wounded her. Pike paled. “Get off my ship. Go back to Nhean and tell him he failed.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Triton

EFS Intrepid

Ready Room

Pike felt himself sway. “You’ve … started it?”

The mountains. The fields. The sky. He could see the wreck of Io, the slag cloud that was Vesta, rocks tumbling over one another, and the thought of Earth reduced to the same rubble was enough to make him slump against the wall. How was she going to do it?

Did it matter?

She looked away from him. “It cannot be undone,” she said finally. “And it has to be done.”

But he knew that tone from her. He knew that meant there was still a chance. He grasped onto that one fact and used it to steady himself.

“If I hadn’t found out, if I hadn’t overheard what you told Nhean right after Vesta exploded, you wouldn’t have told me until it was over,” he accused her.

She looked up at him, surprised, and fury came in a wave. She had never thought that he might feel betrayed by this. She had only thought he might interfere.

“Didn’t you think what we might lose?” His voice was thick. “Earth. Earth!”

She flinched away from the words, but her jaw was set.

“It would have killed me to know I was part of that,” he told her. The words felt too small even as he said them, and he knew immediately that he had miscalculated.

“I told you I could not save every settlement,” she spat back. “I wasn’t doing what I thought you wanted me to do, I was doing what we needed to do to stay alive!”

“Settlement? Earth is just a settlement to you? How does humanity survive without Earth? Tell me that!”

“We’d find a way, we always find a way!”

“Oh, you cannot possibly be so naïve as to—”

“All we need is FTL!” She cut him off with an angry swipe of her hand. “To find a new home. We could do it, Pike. You’ve seen the estates on Venus. We can grow enough food to keep us alive. And the Telestine fleet has FTL, we know they have the technology. That’s how they got here in the first place. One way or another, we’ll have it soon, too.”

He stared at her for a long time. Her face didn’t look familiar at all anymore. When he had first come back to the fleet after Vesta, he had wondered how she could still look the same to him, still make his heart race with that smile, when he knew what lay behind those eyes. Now, she looked so unfamiliar that he wondered if he had ever seen her before in his life.

“Why?” he asked her. “Why didn’t you tell me? Face to face? That day you called me back to the fleet and said you wanted me to help you get the Dawning. Why didn’t you tell me what you were planning? I shouldn’t have had to learn it by eavesdropping.”

“Look at how you’re reacting.” The words were bitter. She dropped into a chair and shook her head. “You weren’t ever going to accept it. I knew that.”

“Better to have sent me away,” he said quietly, “than to have made me a part of this.” His voice lost its strength and he dropped his face into his hands. “You couldn’t have left me on the Aggy?” he asked her. “I was happy. I might even have agreed with you, before everything we went through since then. Why did I even have to be a part of this?”

He saw impatience flash behind her eyes. “We needed you to have any shot at making that mission a success. You know that.”

“I never wanted to go back to Earth, don’t you see that?” He could hardly breathe for rage. “I never wanted to get mixed up in this again. I had finally managed to forget most of it, and you sent me back. You made me go back there, to fall in love with that planet all over again just so you could take it away!”

“Someone had to go!” Her fists were balled up, and her tiny frame was rigid. “And that’s what Earth is, Pike, it’s something that draws you in and makes you fall in love! I couldn’t go, I seemed to be the only one who knew what had to be done! I could never afford to fall in love with it—no matter how much you tried to make me. That’s why Nhean sent you back, wasn’t it? To make me question my choice?”

“Yes! Of course!”

She drew herself up. “You could have doomed us all.”

“I….” The irony was almost too great for words. “I might have doomed us all?”

“Yes. Betraying me and working with Nhean behind my back. There is no way to get Earth back. None. And if you think I should have told you my plan from the outset, then prove it by accepting the truth or coming up with another plan.” She looked away and blew a breath out noisily. “So. Tell me about the archives.”

The sudden shift in topics was jarring. “What?”

“Nhean told me that you would know what was going on and why we were going back.” She was clearly running out of patience. “Was that a lie?”

“No.” Dawn had told him in a series of hushed whispers and one or two deeply unsettling images of soaring arches and giant servers, shoved into his skull with little regard for his aching brain. Pike shook his head wearily. “Tel’rabim is at some kind of library or repository in Telestine London. He’s worried about Ka’sagra’s bombs—as is Nhean. I should think you’re not,” he added sourly.

“Everyone has bombs,” she muttered. “What Ka’sagra’s waiting for, I have no idea.”

“The answer is in the archives.” He spoke as patiently as he could. “And Tel’rabim is worried enough about her that we have a chance to get into them.”

“And so Nhean is handing our greatest weapon right back to Tel’rabim.” Her look of contempt raked over him. “I’d think you’d want anything but that … and yet you’re on his side for some reason, do I have that correct? You’re willing to just hand the Dawning over to Tel’rabim?”

She still refers to her as an object, he thought.

“He has an escape plan for her,” Pike snapped back. “They’re not letting Tel’rabim just take her back.”

“Oh, of course!” Her voice was too sweet. “How foolish of me. I forgot his plans are always totally foolproof.”

“What do you want from me?” He shook his head at her. “You know Nhean had nothing to do with the fleet being split. You know he risked his life to help you out of there. You know that if it weren’t for him, you’d be dead twice over—not even just from the Funders, but from him losing faith in you. Only, he didn’t lose faith. He believed you’d listen to reason in the end.”

He had hoped that might bring her around, but it seemed to have been exactly the wrong thing to say.

“Get out.” She had sat down at the desk and she didn’t look up at him.

“What?”

“Get out.” She repeated the two words softly. “Because I don’t want to throw you out an airlock, and I swear to God, Pike, that’s what I’ll do if you keep standing there, saying shit like that.”

You’re the one who wants to destroy Earth, and you’re telling me to get out of your face because I’m the one saying infuriating things?

He stared at her for a long moment, and then he left, slamming the door behind him.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Near Earth

EFS Pius

Bridge

“Deceleration complete in one minute.” The computerized voice was perky, pleasant, and had an accent that Captain Melia George could not quite identify. Venetian, most likely. The cringe-inducing mix of various patrician, bourgeoisie accents from dozens of old Earth cultures. Mix the richest of the rich from a hundred nations, and you’d expect the resulting accent to sound like lispy, extremely careful, old-fashioned grandmothers.

Not like a good Jovian drawl. Or even vulgar Martian Creole.

“Thirty seconds,” added the polite voice.

They were here. Finally. Nearly a hundred hours later. She let herself smile as she leaned on the command desk. Walker may have thought that her deception worked, but George, watching from the battle’s outskirts, had expected Walker to try something. The bait and switch between the Santa Maria and the Intrepid had been classic Walker: lies, built on deception, and executed without thought for the danger others faced due to her choices.

It had taken longer than George would have preferred for them to figure out Walker’s most likely trajectory and destination: Earth. George didn’t know why, but her gut told her this was more than a sightseeing trip for Walker. And after four days’ hard pursuit, George would have the Intrepid in her sights, and the admiral would be dealt with.

Just like the Stockholm. She almost chuckled at how easy it was, using that code that Celestine’s man Dorian had provided her with.

The rest would follow easily. Walker’s strange, almost magical grip on the fleet would dissipate after her death and they would be able to protect and serve as they had always been meant to.

Those three other missile frigates they’d stolen would have come in handy right around now, but for some reason, Celestine had ordered them boarded, and then shipped off to some other location. Where, he wouldn’t say.

No matter. Time for action.

The klaxons blared out across the room.

“Proximity alert, ma’am,” one of the navigation officers informed her.

“Yes, I know.” George kept her eyes focused on the hovering battle readout. Soon it would populate, and her first true battle would begin. They’d been caught off-guard at Neptune, but they would not make such a mistake ever again.

“No—ma’am, there are Telestine ships ahead. They’re coming out from behind the planet.”

George’s head swiveled to look at the officer, and the bridge went silent.

“What?” she managed. Not her best moment.

The officer looked like she wanted to throw up with fear. Her eyes looked at the computer screen. “Seventeen destroyers, eight frigates, and a carrier. Ma’am.” Her voice trailed off until she was barely mouthing the words.

There was a pregnant pause. George felt the heads turn toward her, and she experienced a moment of complete paralysis. To her shame, the only thought that came to mind was to wonder what Walker would do.

“Action stations,” she said crisply. “Sound a level one alert, get our pilots in the bays, and send a message to the rest of our fleet to hang back. Let’s see if the Telestines take care of Walker for us. If they don’t, we’ll need to be ready to engage.”

She was pleased to see the rest of the bridge crew swing into action with relief. Her own heart was pounding, and her hands were slick with sweat where she gripped them behind her back. She ignored the covert glances from her crew and fixed her eyes on the battle layout as it began to populate.

The image of calm was just as effective as the real thing, apparently.

“Ma’am, we’re being hailed by the St. Thomas,” a communications officer reported. “They’re wondering if we should just retreat.”

“And leave the job unfinished?” George asked him. When he flushed, she reminded herself that this was only the messenger. “Tell Captain Vorkos that we were ordered to bring the admiral down by any means necessary. I, for one, do not intend to leave before fulfilling my duty. And also—” She arched a brow at the crew. “—I want to see this bitch’s ship blown to smithereens.”

That got a laugh.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Near Earth

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

The ship decelerated with a series of creaks and groans, as if the Intrepid was just as reluctant as Walker to follow this part of the plan. The Funders’ stolen ships had been gaining on the Intrepid and what remained of the task force the Santa Maria had led out to Neptune for the better part of a week now. And the remaining ships of the Exile Fleet had not all yet assembled at Earth, so for now, Walker was outgunned by the mutineers.

Hopefully, they’d be cautious enough about Earth to hold back.

Walker joined her team on the bridge with a nod to Delaney—it hurt to meet his eyes now—and another sweeping glance at the bridge crew. Every one of them, apprised of the nature of their mission, was fairly vibrating with tension.

We never thought we’d be here, Walker had told them in the briefing a few days before. But Tel’rabim is on the run, he’s desperate, and we have something he wants. We have the chance to lure him into a mistake.

Pray God they believed her.

And now, as she had half expected, there was what looked to be the a full half of the Telestine fleet.

The rest were probably on their way.

Her eyes drifted to the comm unit at her wrist, where the message to Larsen lay ready and waiting. If she died here today, the plan would still go off. That was her promise to herself.

Her eyes narrowed at the formation on the readout. “Are they charging any weapons?”

“No, ma’am.” The officer spoke a little too loudly.

It was too easy. It was much, much too easy.

“And the renegade fleet following us? Still no sign they’re still broadcasting that damn … Seed?”

The girl looked up from where she was sitting at a command console. She solemnly shook her head. “I think … I think I stopped it. Maybe.”

That was reassuring.

She had gone over this plan a dozen times with Delaney, each time aware of his cool, assessing gaze, each time hating him for saying nothing, for not even trying to persuade her. Hating him for being so sure that she would change her mind.

It had been decades. She wouldn’t change her mind. At the end of this, the blue-green planet would be a smoking wreck, and the Telestines would all be dead. Every last one.

And humanity liberated. Free to find new homes in the stars. An infinity of blue-green planets to call their own.

Humanity’s future began with today’s plan. Get to the surface, obtain whatever knowledge necessary to implement FTL from the archive. Why hadn’t she thought of that sooner? They’d studied every Telestine wreck they could find, and seen no evidence of such propulsion—but why build that onto warships made for intra-system battles?

She should have known that the answer lurked somewhere in those floating cities.

She would have it soon … if Tel’rabim allowed her to land. Despite Nhean’s assurances, she wasn’t quite sure that this plan would work at all. She hoped against hope that his desire to stop Ka’sagra was stronger than his hatred of humans. And of her, especially.

“We’re being hailed, ma’am.” The officer’s voice was still too loud, nervous in the still of the room.

Walker nodded to him to accept the message.

“Admiral.” She wasn’t good at reading the expressions on Telestine faces, or in their voices, but she was fairly sure Tel’rabim still hated her guts. “I take it you are here with the Dawning.”

“Yes.” She said nothing more. Let him drive this conversation. “We are to land in London?”

“No.”

She felt ice form in the pit of her stomach at that one word. “I was told by Nhean—”

“You will send a shuttle,” he said, uncompromising. “The Dawning, and one pilot. That pilot will not be you, Admiral. The shuttle will be permitted to land, deliver the Dawning, and then it will be escorted back to your ship—which will remain in very high orbit.”

“No.” Panic coursed through her.

She had to find a way out of this. She had to get to the surface.

“Yes,” he replied. She was fairly sure he was smiling at her. “Did you think I would allow you into my city? That I would even allow you anywhere near this planet with that warship of yours? No. You will stay put.”

She gripped the armrests of her chair in seething anger. Nhean had betrayed her. Nhean, Pike, Larsen….

Tel’rabim continued. “We have a phrase we tell our children when we take them into our … I believe your word would be … museums. Places where we display delicate, priceless works of art. Far superior to the garbage humans hold as art. Children are small, uncoordinated, and often unintentionally destroy things around them. We tell them, ‘look, don’t touch’.” He smiled, and Walker swore he was imitating a human look of paternal condescension. “Admiral Walker, welcome to Earth. Look, don’t touch. Send me the Dawning, and then wait in your seat like a good child while I stop Ka’sagra.”

The screen flickered off.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Near Earth

EFS Pius

Bridge

“What the hell are they doing?” George hissed.

Terrified silence was her answer.

“Seriously.” She shot a more venomous look at her crew. “Anyone is free to offer an answer. What the hell is going on here?”

For the Intrepid hung, battered and rickety, in front of the entire Telestine fleet, and was so far unscathed. The few ships that had managed to get away from Neptune in time to accompany it were close by its sides, but there weren’t enough of them for any sort of formation.

The rest of the Exile Fleet had apparently been summoned, but they were still assembling out near the moon. For now, Walker was staring down the full might of the Telestine fleet with just a handful of ships.

“Maybe … Tel’rabim thinks it’s a trap,” one of the officers suggested tentatively. “There are so few of us, maybe he thinks we have some grand plan.”

“Then why was he waiting for us?” George practically roared. Her hand hit the arm of her chair and she winced at the pain. It only made her angrier.

“Not for us,” a new voice suggested.

Everyone turned to look. The man who spoke was only a junior officer, but no one else had spoken, and he was frowning deeply, so caught up in his thoughts that he didn’t seem to have noticed his own boldness. His grey eyes met George’s, and his gaze was still far away.

“They were waiting for her,” he said. His arm rose, to point to the Intrepid, dwarfed and outnumbered. “They knew she was coming, even if they didn’t know about the rest of us.”

His voice trailed away, and George realized what he meant.

She felt the betrayal like a hit. She had known for months that Walker was insane. Walker didn’t give a damn about anything or anyone. She’d let whole settlements be destroyed. But this—this was something more.

“They’re working together.” The words hardly came out. “They’re allies. She sold us out to the Telestines.”

No one answered. No one knew what to say.

No one except her. She looked over at the gunnery liaison. “Make sure the cannons are ready for my mark. Like hell am I going to let this woman give us up to these shit-sipping, planet-swiping aliens!”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Near Earth

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

“If you don’t allow us to accompany her down,” Walker said quietly, “you won’t get the Dawning. Period.”

All she had was a bluff, but it was a damned good one. Tel’rabim had wanted the girl back badly enough, had been scared enough of Ka’sagra, to allow a human ship to approach Earth. Walker knew in her gut that she had some leverage here .

If only she could find it.

“And why are you so determined to accompany it?” Tel’rabim didn’t have eyebrows to lift, but she got the distinct impression that the face he was making was the Telestine equivalent of a sneer. “If you have no destructive plans—”

“And if you had no plans to abduct her again, you wouldn’t object to her having an escort.” Walker drew herself up, and spat back all of the things Pike had yelled at her before. “You made her like a toy. You still think she’s yours, like a thing to be owned, and she isn’t. She’s a human girl.”

“She’s not human,” Tel’rabim said easily. “You know that. And do you think I would trust her again, after what she’s done? No, I’d be more likely to shoot her down with your ship now—and I won’t hesitate to do so.” He paused, and an unmistakable smile spread across his face. “I can always make another, after all.”

Pike had told her about those labs: humans on slabs, blood and implants and needles and—

She stared at him, the pulse pounding sickly in her throat, and she had not a single thought in her head except to murder him with her bare hands.

“Ma’am!” The call was distant. “Ma’am, the Pius has finished its deceleration and—”

She never got the chance to finish the sentence. The barrage hit across the broadside of the Intrepid and rocked them forward even as the klaxons sprang, belatedly, to life.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Near Earth

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

The sudden pitch of the ship knocked her against the command desk, and Walker felt the breath go out of her with a whoosh. She struggled to breathe, hauling another officer up off the floor and pointing breathlessly for him to get back to his seat.

“All right, so we’re doing this.” She hadn’t thought they’d be foolhardy enough to start a battle like this when she had the Telestines at her back, and not firing on her—but apparently the Funders were exactly that foolhardy. “Who the hell did they get to command this shit show?”

No one answered her. The bridge crew seemed to have come to life with the klaxons, and every one of them was calling information, tapping commands into their computers, and waiting for commands—not questions—from Walker.

“Get the ships in formation. All of ours.” All five, God help them. “Turn about and face the renegade fleet. And get the Exile Fleet in from their rendezvous point.”

Calls rang out to the other ships, each communications officer yelling into a comm unit, and Walker looked around for the girl. She was hanging back, looking at the door as if she wanted to leave.

“You.” Walker knew her voice was harsh. “I need you here.” She locked eyes with the girl. “Are they broadcasting the virus right now?”

The girl shook her head.

“Well, they might. So get over here and be ready to do whatever the hell it is you do, or you’re not getting down to Earth.”

“Ma’am, starboard thrusters non-functional.” An officer held one hand up, the other at her ear to receive reports from engineering.

Another hand came up. “Fires reported near the engine room, ma’am.”

“Hull plating on the starboard side is—”

“Ma’am, our ships are in formation.”

There was nothing she could do about the rest of it. All she could do was fire until the ship gave out, and give the mutineers a fight to remember.

All she could do was try to stay alive until the rest of her fleet showed up. She exchanged a glance with Delaney and prepared, for the first time, to fire on human ships.

It had been easier to run.

“Fire,” Walker said crisply. “And advance.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Near Earth

VSF Arianna King

Bridge

Larsen was in his quarters, staring pensively at a map of the Pacific, when his comm unit beeped.

“Yes?”

“Sir, the Intrepid has decelerated over Earth as expected.”

“Excellent, thank you, Greer.”

“Unfortunately, sir, it looks as if the mutinied ships have begun firing on them.”

Larsen, in the middle of opening his mouth to give the man an order about how best to maneuver into position for the drop, closed his jaw with a snap.

He knew what he had to do. He had promised her.

But it cost everything he had to say the words. He braced his knuckles on the table and ground them into the metal, letting the pain steady him. He’d activate this bomb himself, if he had to. This was the key to turning the tide of the war, and he was not going to let her down by jeopardizing that.

“Begin adjusting orbit,” he said quietly. He had to say the next words. He had to. “We must make this drop. It is the admiral’s highest priority.” He desperately didn’t want to do this.

Larsen could feel the sweat beading along his neck and running down his back as the Arianna King carefully adjusted its path to ready itself for entry into Earth’s atmosphere. He wondered how much Walker had planned this moment. Could she have known that the mutinied fleet would fire? Had she somehow coordinated this attack in order to distract the Telestines?

He wouldn’t put it past her. Larsen knew she was willing to make any sacrifice to place this bomb.

The crew held their collective breath as the King approached the shimmering, seemingly peaceful planet. Their entrance vector had been plotted with the best intel available to humanity, but given that that intel had been provided initially by Nhean—Larsen’s fists curled reflexively at the thought of the man—no one was sure quite what to expect.

A soft, orange glow began to creep along the King.

“After the drop, execute the emergency atmosphere exit protocol C. We head directly for Mercury. We will not engage. Admiral’s orders. Keep our speed high, we don’t want to give them the chance to take us down.”

He hoped to God he was making the right choice.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Near Earth

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

A barrage of missiles landed against the side of the Cyprus and the hull plating began to buckle.

“Repeat.” Walker’s voice was eerily calm. The entire battle was unfolding with a sort of precision—each result coming into her mind seconds before it unfolded in reality. “Exodus, swing to port.”

The second barrage of missiles was away with a shudder in the hull. A moment later, the officers tracking another engagement gave a muted cheer. The St. Thomas, one of the newest destroyers from Mercury and a mutinied ship, swung hard to port. Its nose burst through a crowd of its own fighters, debris scattering like fireworks, and its bow smashed across the side of its sister ship.

Walker allowed herself a small smile.

Once, these had been ships they needed to save—potential allies in a larger fight. Now, they were ships that were clearly hell-bent on an engagement. They were enemies.

“Ma’am, you’re being hailed by a Captain George.”

So things weren’t going as well for them as they expected, and now they wanted to talk? Walker tapped the comm unit to open the call. “Hello.”

“Traitor.” George’s voice sounded like she was almost frothing at the mouth. “Colluding with the Telestines. Well, look how much they think of you—they won’t even protect their new allies.”

Walker made a series of gestures to the navigation crews to guide the next formation. Only then did she bother to respond. “Think carefully about what you want. If they don’t care about me, they sure as hell don’t care about you. When the smoke clears, you’re going to be a bunch of debris if you don’t back off. And you know … I wouldn’t even be here today if it weren’t for your little mutiny. So should we talk about that, George?”

She was egging the other woman on, and she could scarcely afford the distraction right now—but her curiosity got the better of her. George had been a promising commander. She had a good tactical mind. She was headstrong and outspoken, but Walker valued those traits. She preferred to know what her officers were thinking.

It appeared she had missed one important thing, however. She hadn’t seen the depth of George’s disagreement with her tactical choices.

“You were a lost cause even before this,” George told her. She was trying to get ahold of herself. Walker could imagine her clenching her fingers so hard the knuckles turned white. “You’d lost all touch with reality. How long do you think you’ll hold out now? Better to let your crew have the chance to leave you than force them to go down for your cause.”

“Ma’am, the Kali is….” One of the officers looked at Walker hollowly. “It’s not responding,” she said blankly.

A hollow feeling grew in Walker’s chest. They were taking out ships, yes, but how long could that last?

She muted the call for a moment. “Readjust the formation to compensate.”

“Shouldn’t we send a team to—”

“No.” Wounded or dead, the Kali was lost. “Focus on our enemies, lieutenant. Not on the fallen. There will be time enough for grief later.”

She had muted herself, but George was still talking in her ear: “You’ve forgotten what it means to serve and protect, Admiral, but surely even you must remember what it means to be human. Look at the faces of your crew. Look at them, and tell me they’re not worth saving.”

On the battle readout, another one of her ships flickered red and disappeared, and George’s formation opened like a hand, ready to snap shut around the tiny collection of ships that still protected the Intrepid.

Oh, God. Her fingers found the cross at her throat. She should sound an evacuation alert. The rest of them could still escape. It was her the Funders wanted dead, and even if the shuttles didn’t have much of a chance on their own, outside the ship … it was a better chance than they had here. Anyone who stayed on this ship was as good as dead.

A hit rocked across the starboard side and she jerked her head in time to see a piece of the ship tear loose on the engineering readouts. Metal was flayed open, air venting, and the klaxons restarted. Screams came from the headsets, loud enough for her to hear—and then gone.

Let them surrender. Her mouth opened on the words, desperate—

But her other ships had no intentions of surrendering. They didn’t even wait for her orders. A moment later, the Aveline, one of George’s destroyers, burst into a cloud of red. A moment later, as Walker’s own proximity alerts blared, the Hellas followed it.

She turned to look at Delaney, and he gave a tiny shake of his head. “I know what you’re thinking,” he cautioned her, “and we’re not leaving. Any of us. We’re not just going to roll over and watch them kill you. So get back in the fight.”

“Right.” She focused on the battle readout. Think, think!

The girl tugged at her sleeve, insistent. “The virus.” Her face was white. “The modified Seed virus. They’re starting to transmit it again.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Earth, Upper Atmosphere

Western Pacific Ocean

VSF Arianna King

Bridge

He burst onto the bridge with the map rolled up in one hand.

“How’re we doing?”

“Breaking atmo.” Greer looked over at him with a nod. “We’ll be in position for the drop in a few minutes.”

“Any pursuit?”

“None yet.” A tap of the man’s fingers brought up a map, and a red bulls-eye. “Tokyo’s gone, remember? They don’t have many other cities in range, so they aren’t flying a lot of patrols around here. Still, good to get in and out quick.”

Larsen nodded. He wanted desperately to say something to distract himself, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.

He’d left her. He’d left Laura, quite possibly to her death.

He knew exactly what she would have told him to do if he’d tried to stay with her, but that didn’t make this any easier. He looked at the view of Earth, its warm colors bright with life, and tried to keep it together.

“Sir, if I could ask….” Greer looked around himself. “What are we dropping here?”

Right. This was exactly the sort of thing you should give a reason for. He was risking all of their lives with this.

“Communications buoy.” The lie rolled off his tongue easily. “It’ll help us jam their satellites when it comes time for an invasion.”

There were some intrigued murmurs, and the crew went back to their work with a greater sense of purpose. Now they were preparing for something, laying the groundwork for a day they all longed to see.

“Sir, we’re ready.” Greer nodded at him.

“Drop the payload.” He didn’t hesitate.

Larsen watched the screen as the small capsule detached, quickly plummeting on its trajectory towards the Marianas Trench, its depths hidden beneath miles of Earth’s swirling seas.

His crew waited, ready for the order to execute their exit protocol. But Larsen held still, following the capsule’s blinking trajectory as it arced towards Earth. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, a brief alert sounded: target reached.

Good. Larsen waited for the knot in his stomach to release, but the tension would not budge. He knew what that confirmation meant. It was the confirmation of the loss of Earth. Humanity would be homeless. He should feel horrified, but he was so tired of the countless battles—with the Telestines, with other humans, even with Pike—that all he could feel was the dull satisfaction of fulfilling his promise to Laura Walker.

He would gladly see every one of the Telestines dead. He would pull the trigger himself, if he needed to.

He had promised her.

And when the others learned the truth … well, he wouldn’t think about that. He’d been happier not knowing a great many things.

“Execute emergency atmosphere exit protocol C on my mark.”

Larsen took one last look at the blue jewel rotating silently beneath them.

“Go.” It’s over now. We can leave.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Near Earth

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

A barrage of missiles burst across the lower decks. The Intrepid thrummed with the reverberating onslaught.

“Ma’am, fire reported in gunnery—”

“Ma’am, emergency bulkheads in sections 18–23 of Deck 4 are now sealed off for a possible breach—”

“Ma’am.” One voice cut above the others. Desperate eyes met Walker’s gaze. “Thrusters are offline. No response. We’re dropping, fast—”

“I’ll go,” Delaney cut in.

“What?” Walker whipped her head around, eyes widening. “No!”

“I know more about those systems than any of the kids down there,” he replied bluntly.

“You heard her.” She leaned close to whisper furiously. “There may be a hull breach. I need you here.”

His eyes took in the sudden panic on her face and he smiled.

“You don’t,” he said softly. His face was lit by the glow of the videoscreens, Earth a blue-green blur in the side of her vision. “You need me there, keeping this ship together so you can have a full fleet.”

“For God’s sake, Jack, we have engineers!”

“I’m better than they are, and right now, we need better.” He was already moving, squeezing her hands and moving away too quickly for her to grab at his hand and haul him back.

She took two steps and snatched at his sleeve.

“Laura—”

“You get out if the hull goes, you hear me?” Her voice was shaking. “No heroics.”

“No heroics,” he agreed, far too easily. And then he was gone, and she was staring after him like a lost little four-year-old.

“Ma’am—”

“I know.” She pulled herself together. She couldn’t think about the hull buckling right about now. The Intrepid had made it through a dozen engagements by this point. The old girl would hold a little longer.

She focused on the battle readout. “Swing broadside. We’re going to direct everything we’ve got at the Pius. If we take George out, there’s a chance the rest of them may stand down.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Near Earth

EFS Intrepid

Engine Deck

Jack Delaney’s breath came short and his knees creaked as he took the stairs down toward the engine rooms.

His grandfather had been right. Age was a damned curse.

He let the pain occupy his mind. Pain kept him grumpy and grumpiness kept him from grasping the magnitude of what was happening: that they might very well die in a skirmish with their own mutinied ships, in an entirely meaningless battle, before there was any chance to save Earth.

Grumpiness kept him fixated, instead, on the fact that the goddamned gravitational calibration wasn’t working correctly, and he was going to have to crawl around the baseboards on aching knees for what felt like the hundredth time in the past few weeks. The deck crew couldn’t handle it, they’d failed to fix it a dozen times, stymied by old controls that had been thrown together hastily rather than with careful planning and structure. None of them had lived through the first exodus—none of them knew the peculiar logic of the machines that had been built then.

He jumped when a tall figure appeared in the hallway ahead of him.

“There you are,” Pike said grimly as he fell in alongside Delaney. “Gravitational calibration again?”

“What are you doing?” His voice wasn’t as strong as it should be. Damn age, and damn these lungs of his. “Get to the bridge.”

“You need help,” Pike said simply. “And I don’t think Walker particularly wants to see me where I have no sense being in the first place. I can do more from here.”

“Get to the bridge,” Delaney said again. He grabbed Pike’s arm and stared up into those blue eyes. “Listen to me. Thrusters are not responding. We are going down. I am going to fix them, but that doesn’t solve the problem of how many ships the Funders have. You may need to get your little girl off this ship.” He thought of the way Pike watched the Dawning—like his heart was outside his body, like he would tear the world apart just to protect her.

Delaney knew that look.

“And Laura,” he added quietly. “Get the admiral off the ship, too. We need her.”

Pike’s face closed off at the mention of Walker. “I—”

The ship rocked sideways and they both slammed into the wall. Delaney brushed the side of his head, feeling blood sticky against his fingers, and locked eyes with Pike.

“Listen to me.” He stepped forward to speak the words quietly in Pike’s ear, the words he had tried to say a dozen times to Walker. She had always brushed him off, but Pike listened quietly.

And then the man looked at him, his face lit sporadically by the flashing emergency lights.

“How can you believe that?” he asked quietly.

“I have to,” Delaney said, just as softly. “She’s like a daughter to me. You trust that girl with just as much blind faith, and don’t tell me you don’t. You know I’m right. Now go. I’ll take care of the machines.”

Pike swallowed, hunched his shoulders, and then ducked at the sudden sharp sound of scraping metal nearby.

There was no more time for decisions.

“Go.” Delaney spun him around and shoved him. “Go!”

He took the next flight of stairs as fast as his aching knees would allow, and, to his relief, heard Pike’s pounding footsteps headed up the stairwell.

The doors to the engine rooms slid open, and he was greeted by acrid smoke and urgent shout mixed with the occasional scream.

Time to pray they were gambling correctly. Delaney let the doors slide closed behind him and strode into the conflagration, still grumbling about aching knees and young mechanics under his breath.

CHAPTER FORTY

Near Earth

EFS Intrepid

Engine Room

Delaney thrust his arm into the gap between two of the supports and jerked his hand back almost instantly with a sharp hiss. The metal, far too hot now, had seared a bright stripe onto the back of his hand.

He could barely see through the smoke. The only sounds in here were the crackling comms and the coughing crew as they desperately tried to find a way to brace the machinery. Somewhere in the haze, Delaney saw the bright flash of welding equipment. A desperate attempt to keep the ship together?

For all the good it would do them. They were crashing. Whole or in pieces, it wouldn’t matter.

They were working with a feverish intensity. Whatever had hit above them, the airlock doors had slammed down. They were shut in here, stuck on a ship that was half-dead already. They could only pray that Walker had things under control on the bridge, and work to give her the power she needed to maneuver.

There was a shriek and a groan, and Delaney felt his stomach slip oddly sideways.

“What the hell?” The yell, from one of the younger members of the crew, was followed by a hacking cough.

“It’s nothing.” He kept his voice sharp. “We’re working on the calibrators, what the hell do you think it is? Keep working. We must be getting somewhere with this.”

“Right.” The call came back apologetically. “Sorry.”

The thing about young people these days, Delaney reflected, was that they didn’t know the machinery they worked on. They had no idea that he was lying.

The disorienting jolt they had felt was the Intrepid beginning to hit Earth’s atmosphere.

They had seconds left.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Earth, Upper Atmosphere

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

The hit from the latest missile spun them too hard for the engines to compensate and the ship shuddered, tipped, and began to accelerate into the atmosphere.

“Ullmer, give me the status on Larsen’s group of destroyers.” Tell me they dropped the damned bomb. Though, of course, Ullmer wouldn’t know about that.

“They’re away, ma’am.” Ullmer was gripping the desk to keep from tipping sideways as the ship listed, but the idea of them crashing was too big for her—at least she could tell Walker what was happening with Larsen’s ships. “All three have disengaged from orbit and begun acceleration.”

“Thank you, Ullmer.” She was shaking like a leaf. She had prepared for this moment every day, for years—or so she thought.

Her ship was going to go down.

Now that she was here, it occurred to her that she had no idea how to die. It was a ridiculous thought. Everyone died. It clearly didn’t take much skill. But she still didn’t know how to do it, or what it would be like. Would she feel anything?

She was afraid.

Some piece of her told her to let that go. She didn’t know how to die, but she did know how to do one thing: kill other ships.

If she was going to die, so was George. She had to trust in her engineering crew to get them back into space, and focus on her own talents in the meantime.

“Train all fire on Pius,” she ordered. She linked her hands behind her back and felt the bizarre sensation of the resistance of Earth’s atmosphere slowing their fall. Albeit with a glowing fire that blazed all around the hull as they plunged deeper.

It was a strange irony that Earth was going to kill her before she managed to kill it. She looked over at the girl, and met inscrutable black eyes.

“Get to a shuttle, and get off the ship.” She hesitated. “With Pike.”

She didn’t want Pike to die. After everything, she didn’t want him to die. The girl opened her mouth to say something, and Walker looked away. She didn’t really know how to do goodbyes, either.

“Laura.” Delaney’s familiar voice. “You need to evacuate.”

“There’s no time.” She paused. “You still could, though.”

“I’m not gettin’ off. A captain goes down with his ship.” A pause. “And this isn’t your ship, it’s mine. So go on. Your captain’s ordering you.”

She blinked rapidly. “I’d think it would set your soul at ease to know I died today, before….” Even now, she couldn’t bring herself to speak the truth in front of her bridge crew. She looked up and around at all of them. “Sound the order to evacuate,” she said. “All of you, go. Your orders are to get off Earth and back to the fleet. Reclaim it—and defeat our enemies, whoever they are. Go.”

Most of them went. The rest, the navigation crew at their desks, hung on with a savage sort of intensity, still desperately trying to right the ship.

Fools. The thought was dispassionate. She felt lightheaded, and couldn’t tell if it was due to her emotions or the sensation of free fall.

“Laura.” Delaney was still in her ear as the evacuation alarm began to sound. “Get off the ship. Your life is worth saving. Go to the window.”

“What?” Her ears were beginning to ache. There must be dozens of hull breaches to let them feel the change from vacuum to atmosphere. Was this what it always felt like to land on a planet with an atmosphere? If so, she hated it. She found a cold humor in that.

“Go to the window at the back of the bridge,” Delaney instructed.

She went, simply because there was nothing else to do. The guns were locked onto George’s ship, and still firing. There wasn’t much of anything worth wrapping up, given that the ship would soon be smithereens.

Briefly, she wondered where her drive to live had gone, but that mystery didn’t seem to have an answer. She stared out at the swirling blue-green planet, which was growing larger every second. Was Delaney going to have her escape somehow?

“What now?”

“Look at it. Look at that, and understand what it means.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Earth, Upper Atmosphere

EFS Intrepid

Engine Room

“D’you know what you’re looking at?” Delaney asked her hoarsely.

Outside, he could hear wind shrieking around the torn pieces of the ship. There was no way they would right themselves with this drag.

“An … island.”

“Your home. That island is called England. Your ancestors lived there.” She still didn’t understand, and now, when it was too late, he was desperately afraid that she would never grasp it. She had never looked, after all. Why hadn’t he noticed that she never looked at Earth? She didn’t let herself want it. “Air without filters, so much water that we could never drink it all. Fish to eat, land for crops.”

“Jack—”

“You listen to me!” He slammed a hand against the too-hot metal. The heat was climbing and he was starting to get dizzy. The room was shaking so hard he could barely make his way to the airlock door. “What you’re looking at is hope, Laura. You can give humans as much food and water as they need, and without hope, they will still die. Do you hear me? You know in your heart how much we need Earth. You know what it cost the Telestines to lose their home. You’ve seen Tel’rabim. He could defeat us and he still wouldn’t be whole. Their planet is gone. Ours is still here.”

“Jack.” She was crying, he could hear her.

“You can still right the ship if you get rid of the drag,” he told her, his voice softening. And then, more quietly: “I love you. I trust you.”

The vast engine compartment was whipping back and forth on the ship like a dog’s tail. Every time it clanged against the ship it changed the trajectory, making steering impossible, and of course the drag was immense.

Without it, the helmsman could use the airlines and emergency thrusters to soften their impact. To survive. Maybe.

He gripped the final last manual override, grunting, with all the force his aging body could muster, and then he twisted and ripped it from the socket. He felt his section of the ship with its jagged metal tear free and tumble away. His body tumbled too, and his head slammed into the side of the bulkhead. Delaney thought he saw new stars burning in the pain that coursed through his entire body. Before he could wonder where these stars would lead him, his body went limp, and he knew nothing.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Earth, Upper Atmosphere

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

“No!” She felt the section of the ship go. He’d been in engineering, of course he had, and the drag was gone, the ailerons extended, and—

There were shouts, dimly. A hand grabbed her to haul her toward one of the crash seats; voices were screaming to one another as the ship’s spin began to slow.

“No, no, no—”

Not Jack. She knew, now, why she hadn’t wanted to survive: she’d wanted him to survive. She had hoped against all hope that he would find a way to save Earth.

And instead, she was the one who was left.

She couldn’t wrap her mind around this. Not this. Alarms blared and lights flashed, and Walker struggled uselessly against the straps that held her in place.

Not Jack. She couldn’t live with that. Not Jack, too.

She turned her head, and had one last glimpse of green-on-green-on-green rushing up to meet the ship as flames from the engines trying to slow them flared.

The ship hit the tiny island she’d seen growing larger in the window, and the impact ripped her seat away from the wall.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Earth, Lower Atmosphere

EFS Intrepid

Bridge

He had only just reached the girl, each of them yelling and pointing in opposite directions, when the alert sounded to brace for impact. Pike tried to drag her bodily toward the bridge—there were crash seats there, he knew—but the ship’s spinning was still too fast and too disorienting. His progress was too slow.

There wasn’t any better choice. He dragged himself along the corridor, eyes fixed on the door. At his side, he could hear the girl retching.

The spinning slowed, or else he got used to it—he wasn’t sure which. They were making quicker progress now. He managed to stagger to his feet, lost his lunch on the metal grating, and lurched the last few yards with the girl’s hand sweaty in his.

There was so much chaos on the bridge that no one even noticed them. Pike shoved the girl into one of the seats and buckled her in. She was limp, too sick to protest as he slid in next to her. Somewhere, he thought he heard Walker shouting someone’s name.

He had only just gotten the straps settled when the ship hit the ground, and then there was an almighty tearing in the deck beneath them and the metal above them. Sunlight burst through as the ship tore cleanly apart. Wind whistled and the scent of burning greenery against carbon-scorched metal stung his nostrils….

How much later he woke up, he did not know. The girl was being carried away over the burning rubble and a stabbing pain along his shoulder told him that his collarbone had been wrenched out of place. Hands were dragging him free of the harness and he heard his own screams.

Too much. The pain was too much.

They laid him down on grass and heather, on the slope of a hill above the crash, and he thought he saw Walker’s eyes peering down into his before the pain overtook him and his vision went dark again.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Earth

Wales

Hills Near Brecon

He woke to night, and the crackling of a fire. His shoulder ached fiercely, and the girl was sitting beside him keeping watch. He could see her shape, fuzzily. He reached for her hand.

Then she turned her head, and it was not the girl at all, but Walker.

He pulled his hand back.

She didn’t even notice. Her nose and eyes and lips were all swollen with tears. He vaguely remembered waking, in great pain, to the sound of sobs, and wondered vaguely what she had been crying about.

“You’re awake,” she managed. She swallowed and cleared her throat awkwardly. “They got your shoulder back in place. It won’t be comfortable, but….” Her voice trailed away.

It didn’t matter, after all.

“We’re alive,” he said before looking around, then added, “most of us, anyway.” It wasn’t what he had intended to say, but then again, he wasn’t quite sure what he had intended to say. He’d just opened his mouth and the thought fell out.

He looked around for the ship and rather wished he hadn’t. It lay below them now, cradled in what would normally be a pretty little valley, still smoldering on the slopes. It dwarfed the gentle swells of the hills if one looked closely, and was in turn dwarfed by the land if one looked beyond the hills to the vast expanse of the surrounding country. Either way, it was out of place. This land was green and softened by age, and the rusty hulk of the ship had torn long furrows in the ground when it crashed, only to be broken open by the force.

“Where are the rest?” Pike asked finally. The pain was getting worse. “Where’re the Telestines? Where are we?” He was listening unconsciously for the drone of an approaching patrol.

She skipped his first question. “Wales. That’s what the map says, anyway. And the Telestines are patrolling nearby. The Dawning … Dawn … has us hidden from them. They crawled all over the ship, but they haven’t looked around otherwise.” Her face was troubled. “There are signs of natives in the area—the surviving crew should be able to hide with them in the hills until we can be rescued. It’ll be a long, long walk for us to get to London. And….” Her face had entirely closed off as she looked away, and when she spoke, her voice was distant. “And Jack is gone.”

That explained the tears. Pike pushed himself up on one elbow and gave a cry of pain. He struggled the rest of the way up as stars burst along his vision. “They found his body?” And, awkwardly, because the first thing had been entirely the wrong thing to say: “I’m sorry.”

“They won’t find his body.” She wouldn’t look at him. “The engine compartment … tore off in the upper atmosphere. Everything in that section is gone now.” Inconsequentially, she added, “She’ll never fly again. He’d hate that.”

Jack Delaney…. He shook his head. What would Walker do without him?

Walker’s eyes were shut. “I told him what I was planning to do and he still … chose me over him.”

Cold settled in the hollow of Pike’s chest.

“He agreed with you?” Oddly, he felt betrayed. Of all the things Delaney was—gruff, grumpy, eternally suspicious—Pike had never suspected he would support her indefensible plan.

“No. He believed—” she wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand “—I’d change my mind.” She shot him a furious glare. “He was wrong,” she said fiercely.

Pike didn’t say anything. He lay back down, conscious of her stare, and looked at the fire as it leapt and danced across the logs.

“All Earth does is take,” Walker told him. “Everyone says it’s abundant, but all it does is take people, blind them, and turn them into fools. Now Jack is dead. He didn’t need to be. Earth took him too.”

Pike didn’t answer her. He was too weary.

She tried to wait him out, but failed. “You should rest. We have to get Dawn to London as soon as we can.”

London. With the giant inverted tear-drop-shaped Telestine London hanging overhead, as if all the tears of the city had collected together and, as one, flown upward to the sky.

London. Yes, they had to get to London. For the libraries and the fight against Ka’sagra, and the FTL … the final piece that would enable her delusional plan. Of course, having Dawn in London was Nhean’s plan, too. He didn’t know what to do with that. Good Lord, his head hurt. He let his eyes drift closed. He was so tired….

“I’m making the right choice,” she told him. Her voice wasn’t certain anymore, but he didn’t have any hope that she’d abandon her plan. “You’ll see it one day. I’m saving us, Pike.” She touched his shoulder. “I need to go check on the rest of the crew. Some were critically injured. Get some sleep—when you wake up, we’ll need to get moving.”

He said nothing, and eventually she left him there in the dark and went away across the rocks and the grass and the moss, and he was left alone to fall asleep by the fire.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Earth

Wales

Hills Near Brecon

The admiral was little more than a shadow in the early-morning dark—difficult to see even with Dawn’s eyes. “Can you move?” were her only words, and Pike grunted an affirmative.

“Admiral, the last of them are off,” said a young man, his face still smudged with black from the crash landing. His arm hung in a sling. Dawn wondered what a broken arm felt like, then almost laughed to herself—she’d been in worse shape. She’d already been dead, apparently. “They’ll be hiding in a nearby forest with the natives until we can extract them. Ewen—the leader of the natives here, marked it on the map for us,” he presented the piece of paper to Walker.

Walker held the map and eyed it, shaking her head. “To think,” she said quietly to herself, as if unaware that she had an audience of people around her, “that these people live down here, scratching out an existence on the run for decades, always hiding from the Telestines, never knowing when you’ll be caught and … disposed of.” She tapped the map where the crew would be hiding in the forest amongst the natives. “This man, Ewen. Is he the leader of just the group of natives in these hills here?”

The young man shook his head. “Actually ma’am, he claims to be the leader of all the natives in Wales. From what he was saying, our crew of a few hundred would be just a drop in the bucket of his people. Tens of thousands, I gathered.”

She stared off into the distance, her eyes cold, as if searching the brightening horizon for … something.

“Thank you, Ensign. Now go catch up to them. I’ll send shuttles down as soon as we get up into orbit. Plan on a rendezvous in one week. Your orders: keep everyone alive until then.”

The young man paused. “Good luck, Admiral.” He looked around himself, surveying the darkened green hills surrounding them. Sunrise was just minutes away, and the light was revealing colors that Pike remembered fondly but which were probably a shock to the young man. “I honestly never thought it was going to happen. But here we are.” He looked back at her. “You’re really going to get our Earth back. It’s … really going to happen. Back on Mimas my pastor always was so sure it would happen; told us to never lose faith. He never lived to see it, but ….” He suddenly stiffened his back, hardened his face where before his eyes had gone misty, and snapped a smart salute with his good arm. “Admiral.”

He left. Pike glanced up at her with a knowing look.

She ignored him.

The shuttle ride to London didn’t take long, and the clouds were only now beginning to catch the sun’s direct rays. It was enough to see by—barely. That didn’t stop the admiral from pacing in the rear of the shuttle. “I found a few Telestine weapons in the locker back here. I think if we can circle around a few times and let Dawn work her magic and find the archives in her mind, she can drop us down on the roof or something and we can cut our way in and make it safe for—”

From the pilot’s seat, Dawn interrupted her. “You’re not coming.”

Walker stopped pacing and stared at her. “Excuse me?”

“I’m dropping you off down in old London. There’s an army of human drones down there, like in every other city, slowly disassembling all the buildings and removing any trace of human habitation.”

“And that makes it safe for us to go there because….”

Dawn glanced up at her. “You’re forgetting what I am.”

Walker resumed her pacing. “That’s funny, my dear. I was just beginning to think of you as a who, and not a what.”

“I was made not only to control Telestine technology, but also to control drones remotely.” Dawn bit her lip. “All of them. All at once. That’s my destiny. Or, one of them, at least.”

Walker paced right up to the back of the pilot’s chair. “You can control … all of them?”

“I’m … getting there,” Dawn replied, uncertainly. “But down in central London there’s only a few thousand drones. I can redirect them away from you two in a pinch.”

Dawn could see Walker’s lips mouth the words only a few thousand, and the next moment the admiral held both hands up above her head in frustration. “No, this is ludicrous. We’re coming with you. End of conversation. Now we just need to figure out a plan of action. I think if Pike—”

Dawn swiveled around to face her. The shuttle continued on its course, occasionally banking to stay in the cloud cover, piloted now not with her hands but with her mind. Her mind, which was larger now than it was a few minutes ago. And a few minutes before that. “Laura. Listen to me. You’ll be useless up there. Less than useless. You’ll be a liability. I need you and William to stay hidden, and safe, and … out of the way.” She spoke so firmly it was as if through gritted teeth.

It was clear that Walker was not used to being talked to like that. The last person to give her orders she disagreed with hadn’t fared so well, Dawn mused. But it was enough. She couldn’t do her job and worry about them at the same time.

“Now you listen here—” Walker began again, adopting her command voice and drawing herself up to her full height. Dawn interrupted again.

“No. I am not one of your officers. I am not your crew. And this is not your ship.

The shuttle shook a bit with the landing. During their argument, she’d found them a park right next to a river. Half-deconstructed buildings soared high nearby like grim skeletons, the early morning sunlight exposing their inner beams and supports. Dawn wondered why the Telestines were deconstructing them in the first place, but shook the thought—now was not the time for that mystery. She had work to do.

And she pointed to the door.

Walker’s face reddened and she wheeled upon Pike. “Do something. Make her listen.”

Pike looked at Dawn, searching her eyes. His gaze felt like … almost like how a Telestine could talk to you with his mind, but … different. This felt infinitely better. Like a … father? A friend?

His eyes said, be safe. Come back to us.

His mouth said, “come on Laura.”

Walker paused one last time to stare at her, but then allowed herself to be led out the hatch. When they were gone, Dawn immediately launched the shuttle into the sky as soon as they were clear. Time was running short. She could almost feel Ka’sagra out there, somewhere. And her plans, the ascension, the nova—no, the supernova, were imminent.

It felt good to be alone, no other minds to half-hear, no thoughts to distract her. She looked around herself one last time before bringing the shuttle up to fly directly along the length of a skyscraper—an amusing term, now that the sky was almost entirely blotted out by the bulk of the Telestine city. Now that the sun was climbing higher, the old city once again fell into cold darkness.

She could sense patrol ships in the distance, but none came under the city and none seemed to see her. Even at this distance, she could feel that they were all Tel’rabim’s ships. What that meant, she wasn’t sure, but she was beginning to feel, as instinctively as she did with the other military ships, the ways into their programming.

Leave, she whispered quietly to them. You’re needed somewhere else.

And they did leave. She let the shuttle hover and watched in satisfaction as the patrols took her whispered suggestion and banked to the west, seeking other prey. When the ships had come to the crash site of the Intrepid, she had thrown everything she had into protecting the humans who were fleeing into the hills.

But she had not been sure whether her success was skill … or luck.

Make me more, she had told Nhean. Complete me.

And she had become more—more than even Tel’rabim had thought she could be.

She could not afford to waste time here. She let the shuttle carry her up into the base of the floating city. Even this was elegant, support struts held together with an antigravity array that made her hair rise up around her face as the shuttle passed through it.

Like everything here, it was a work of beauty. The Telestines had technology beyond—

She tilted her head. There was something here, someone here. Drones. They weren’t just below, in human London itself, they were here. In the Telestine city.

As if in a dream, she navigated the shuttle through the support structure underneath the city. There was something … off. Something different about these drones that she was feeling, and it took all of her focus both to find the trail and follow it.

When she set the shuttle down at last, it was deep in the base of the city, near to where the tear drop shape at the center started to swoop downward. It seemed the Telestines didn’t routinely venture down here to the darkened underbelly of the floating city. Most likely just the occasional mechanic. Otherwise, Telestines hated solitude, and so most would stay up in the city proper. In the sun. In view of the sky.

She opened the door and made her way carefully along struts that had not been designed as walkways. If she fell, she would catch herself. She could not afford to think otherwise. She had to know what the drones were doing here. They were very near. She could feel it.

Up one strut, down another. She caught herself at the end of a walkway where the railing was loose, and, thankfully, she didn’t plummet two kilometers to her death in old London below. On a whim, she studied the cityscape underneath her. Near the river, the remains of what once must have been a magnificent building. A palace. She searched in the artificial memory banks she’d instructed Nhean to implant in her … what was its name … Buckingham? Another building nearby, a tower, still had a clock on it. No, at least two clocks. Her memory banks presented another name … Big Ben?

Must keep moving….

The drones were just ahead of her. She could feel the steady rhythm and pulse of their minds, but, something indeed was … off about them.

She rounded another rickety walkway and came to a hatch, which she ripped open with a quick impulse and command from her mind.

Behind the hatch, a small room.

In the room, three people. Drones.

They were strapped to a central pylon in the confined space. Rank body odor washed over her and she lifted her shirt up to breathe through it. Their arms, legs, head, torsos, were all firmly strapped onto the pylon so they couldn’t move even if they wanted to.

And their skulls. Good God, their skulls—or what was left of them.

She examined the man in front. His eyes were open, but not looking at anything. And his skull was open as well. Hundreds of wires trailed out of the exposed brain and snaked up into a receptacle on the pylon. The other two drones were similarly linked.

“What … are you?” She didn’t expect them to respond. She closed her eyes and reached out into their minds.

Blank. Except for the orders firmly planted, written, etched as if in stone, in their minds. These were so firm, so deeply implanted, it was as if they were etched directly on the gray matter itself, physically, with a stylus.

These drones were only a tool. A smaller part of a greater ploy. She opened her eyes suddenly, and bolted out the door, back onto the main rickety walkway.

She had to get back to the surface.

These drones were placed here by her.

By Ka’sagra. They were tapped directly into the main Telestine mainframe of floating London. And they were controlled from far below. Beyond the notice of Tel’rabim and or any other Telestine official. She paused to gaze down at the old city, looking with her mind and her eyes. She followed the unmistakable trail of the mental connections, and traced it with her eyes, and finally came to a spot directly underneath the inverted tear-drop spire.

More drones down there. Many more.

Time to see what Ka’sagra was up to.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Earth

London

Glass and gravel crunched behind her, but Walker couldn’t bring herself to turn around. The view was just too much. It had been the better part of twelve hours since the girl had left them, dumped them rather, unceremoniously, and dashed off alone in the shuttle leaving them stranded in London.

And she still hadn’t tired of looking around.

“What are you looking at?” Pike asked her curiously.

She gave him a wide-eyed look—just for a moment, and then her gaze was drawn back to the landscape in front of her. “Are you kidding?”

London itself wasn’t pretty anymore, not in any real way. The buildings were crumbled and shattered and there was rust and debris everywhere. But the sun was also setting in the distance and the light was slanting in a way she’d never seen before. Lights were directly overhead, bar-shaped bulbs that cast few shadows. This light cast shadows, and the light and the shadows alike hung in the dust of the air.

In a station, that dust would be deadly. Here, somehow, it wasn’t.

And she’d always thought sky was shades of blue, not this riot of red and orange.

“You’ve never seen a sunset before,” Pike said wryly. “I forgot that.”

“A sun….” The term explained itself. “Right.” How many other words didn’t she know, simply because there had been no use for them in her life? She pointed at the beams of shadow that traced backwards from the ruined skyscrapers. “What d’you call those?”

Pike smiled, a genuine smile. “Just shadows. They don’t have a specific name, that I know of. But … I grew up in the mountains, not in a city. I suppose I wouldn’t know if there was a name.”

She nodded, and caught sight of something glinting in his hand. “What’s that?”

“Oh.” He held them up. With one hand in a sling, he should have looked awkward. Instead, he still moved easily as he tossed the packet in his hand over to her. “A treat. I found somewhere for us to eat … and some things to eat that aren’t rations. Come on. And this is for you.”

“Yes, but what is it?” She peered through the shiny plastic to two domed, dark brown shapes. They were hard—though at one point she supposed they might have been soft.

“My dad said they were called Twinkies,” Pike called over his shoulder.

“What on Earth…?” She held the packet out in front of her in one hand, unsure that opening it was a good idea.

“They never go bad, you know.” He laughed. “At least, that’s what he claimed. They’re horrible, really. After sixty years or however long it’s been, they’re truly awful. But the fact that they’ve lasted this long and still recognizable as food….”

“Barely,” she said, after taking a small nibble of the end of one. It had the unmistakable moldy odor and taste of very old wheat. Barely tolerable. But the surprising taste of sugar was … delightful.

“He said … he said …” Pike had descended into uncontrollable chuckling, “he said they only made one production run of these in 1950, and that the supply lasted for a hundred years.”

That only opened up the far more disturbing reality that these had been made before the human exodus. “I don’t believe that at all.” But she smiled all the same. She followed him down the broad avenue, holding the packet away from her on a flat palm as if it might bite her rather than the other way around.

“I’ve had one before. That was enough,” Pike said. At one of the corners, he held open a door for her to walk through and waved her into the interior of something like a shop. Boots, read the sign above the door in faded plastic. Walker at first wondered if there would be any boots left in the store at all, but then realized it was not a boot store at all but rather some sort of … what was the word … she looked up at another sign on the front entrance. Pharmacy? She preceded him through the door and looked around herself in amazement.

It was funny how much you didn’t have to worry about when the gravity was always there. The place looked so bare bones that it didn’t even seem to make sense. Everything was wrong: the ceiling height compared to the shelves, the way the shelves didn’t have any casing on the front, the haphazard size of the remaining packages, the faulty joinings between the ceiling and the walls. Nothing here seemed to be made with any thought to the greater city around it.

But of course, they didn’t have to worry about anything being airtight or still working in zero-G, or attracting mold. If their windows leaked, it didn’t matter. If there was mold, they could clean it up and not have to worry about the rot setting into their lungs.

“What are you thinking?”

She looked up to see Pike staring at her. “I can’t imagine living like this.”

“Like what?”

“Free.” The word came to her lips before she thought how it would play out. “Careless,” she clarified. “They didn’t have to worry about anything, did they? What must that be like?”

They looked away from one another, and she could hear the retort he wasn’t saying. Then he started tossing her things. Metal cylinders. “Hold these. We’ll bring them out to the river overlook to eat.”

“Are they safe to eat?” But she accepted them gratefully, glad not to be having that fight, and piled them in her arms. “And what do they taste like?”

“All sorts of things. Lots of salt. Lots of sugar. Lots of dried vegetables. There are about twenty times as many vegetables as you’ve ever tasted, you know. That was weird getting used to when we ended up on a station. And they last forever in these tin cans.”

“Vegetables like what?”

“Leeks,” he said, at random. “I think that’s enough. Let’s go.”

“What are leaks?” Then, dubiously: “And … what do they leak?”

“Oh. No. Two E’s. Leek.” He shrugged. “They’re kind of like onions. But a tube, not a ball. And they don’t taste quite like onions. More …green.”

“Green’s not a flavor.” She didn’t understand anything about this world. She hurried to catch up in the fading light, and gave a weak smile at his laughter.

It was exhausting, not having this fight—the fight she knew was inevitable. They were both trying a bit too hard.

“Food on Earth follows patterns,” he explained, “if you farm it. So at some times of the year you have one kind of fruit, and at other times of the year you have another. Not so much in Colorado—it’s high desert and a lot of fruit doesn’t grow there, but in other places. And then you have wheat and corn. Oats, barley, millet, amaranth. They grow at certain times of the year, and then you have to cycle them each year or they suck the soil dry.”

Her head was whirling. “Dry?”

“The soil is filled with different minerals.” He blew out a breath. “Different crops take different minerals, and leave different minerals. So you have to do different crops on the land each year, or at least every few years. It’s not like in the grow-tanks where they just add in the minerals and turn the grow-light on each time they plant.”

“It seems needlessly complicated.”

“Not needlessly.” He sounded almost offended. “It’s how the planet works. It wasn’t made to be convenient for us, you know, we were made to survive with what it gave us.”

And now we can do better in space. Thousands of worlds to choose from. She didn’t say the words. He wasn’t going to agree, and in any case, she had the sneaking suspicion that a lot of people would think the ease of living here outweighed the strange capriciousness of the world. Crop rotations, rain storms, earthquakes—the very planet seemed to conspire against humans, in more ways than one.

Her eyes found the sunset again and her breath caught in her throat at the sight. Earthquakes, she reminded herself. Rainstorms. The … turn-y things. Tornadoes. Wildfires.

And, lest they forget, a very hostile alien occupation.

He led her through a dizzying array of streets until they found a tumbled-down building, which gave them an almost entirely unobstructed view of the fading sky ahead. They dumped the food onto the ground and Walker craned her neck around to see the deep blue on the other side of the sky, the twinkle of stars—stars!—and the last pale light ahead of her.

She watched while he lit a small fire with ancient, dry boards, and placed the cans directly on the coals to warm the decades-old food inside. Pike pierced the tops to prevent the pressure from building, and within ten minutes they were hot and bubbling.

She tried them, with great trepidation. It gave her a good excuse not to speak, at any rate. There were strange, flat, crispy things with so much flavor on them that her eyes watered. The little oblong cookies tasted of something she’d never had before—“almond,” Pike informed her—and when the soup things were ready, the hard, wiry cake she’d seen inside had turned into salty noodles. “Cup-o-noodles,” Pike announced. She picked out little floating specks of green and orange with her fork and examined them before eating them.

At last, all that remained was the Twinkies. Pike took a bite of one, staring her down, and then handed it over like a challenge.

“Oh, God, this is awful.” But she ate it, with a little laugh, and found that inside the hardened shell it was soft and sweet, with some sort of cream inside. “You’re sure these don’t go bad?”

“Oh, come on. You like it.”

“How do you know?” she demanded.

“You finished it and then licked your fingers.” He looked triumphant. “See? Quite an interesting array of food we have down here.”

“How did they manage to make protein into all of these things?” She studied the remnants of their meal.

“Oh.” He started laughing. “Oh, no. No, no. There is nothing good for you in all of this mess.”

“What?” She picked up the packages, scattering dust all over. “What did we eat then?”

“A lot of salt,” he said whimsically. “Fat. Some spices. Mostly salt and fat. Oh, and sugar. Lots of sugar.”

“And people on Earth used to just….” She shook her head. She’d seen places, like Venus—anywhere the Funders Circle lived, really—that had more food than they needed. Some of them had foods that weren’t common, like fruits that the scientists were still learning to grow in hydroponics stations.

But this wealth of food, this much food—a whole store of it!—that had no purpose at all beyond having a flavor…. Well, that was new. She didn’t know how to process that. She turned the wrappers over and over in her hands.

What must it be like to live here, really live here? Not in the refugee camps, in hiding, but in these buildings nearby, with all of those foods in the shops and unlimited air?

No. Best not to go down that road.

“Laura.”

She tensed, jerked unexpectedly back to reality. There was something unfamiliar in his voice.

She should get this over with, though. Weird foods and jokes and even the sky wasn’t going to change her mind. Walker turned to face him, and stopped dead. “What?”

She’d never seen that look on his face before.

“You look….” He scratched awkwardly at his head with his good arm. “Really beautiful.”

No one had said anything even remotely like that to her in years. Walker stared at him, sure that there was supposed to be some response to that and not knowing what it should be at all, and then he crossed the glass-strewn ground, bent his head tentatively toward hers, and waited.

Good Lord, Pike, we’re on the precipice of a civilizational calamity, and all you can think about is your dick? But in spite of herself, in spite of the apocalyptic surroundings, she touched his chest and bent her head towards his.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Earth

Telestine London

Shuttle

She piloted the shuttle, almost automatically, by rote action, back down to the surface. The archives above called to her—she knew now where they were, deep up inside the core of the city. But, somehow, she felt that the true answers lie beneath and not above.

She passed the crumbling palace she’d seen earlier, and slowed down over what might once have been a park but was now grown over with stunted trees—spindly from growing in the weak light of dawn and dusk. The looming Telestine city overhead made normal vigorous growth impossible.

The inverted tear-drop spire of the giant floating city pointed directly down at her, just a few kilometers up.

This was the place.

The street where she landed was strewn with debris, which made finding a clear spot tricky, but she managed it, and soon isolated the building where she was sure the drones above were linked to.

It was … she peered at the faded gold letters above the decayed wooden door … a library?

“The London Library,” she read.

She felt many minds inside. The door opened with an obnoxious creak. But the minds ahead of her were not their own. Whatever the drones were doing here, it had been arranged by the Telestines.

So many books. The vast hall she’d entered was like nothing she’d ever seen. Thousands of books. Could there be millions? It was … beautiful was the wrong word. But it was … breathtaking.

She toured the area, one part of her brain screaming about the urgency of her mission, and the other part marveling at the idea of an entire building devoted to storing millions of pieces of paper. She’d only seen an actual book once. In Pike’s quarters on the Aggy II. His father had given it to him, and he treasured it. That there were hundreds of thousands of them here was incredible to her. She weighed the idea of grabbing a handful of them and bolting back to Pike and Walker and giving them as priceless gifts.

Until she found the doorway. She knew immediately it was the right one. The wired drones far above her in the sky were linked to a spot directly past it.

It wasn’t much, hardly visible unless you had felt the minds ahead—and who would be searching for anything here to start with? The girl edged forward, very aware of the holster on her leg and the knife at her hip. Practicality said she would need those if she stayed here, and this wasn’t her fight, whatever it was. They had enough mysteries without stopping to untangle this one.

So her mind said. Her feet kept moving.

I’m not here. You don’t see me. I’m not here. You don’t see me. She let the thoughts fill her mind entirely. I’m not here. You don’t see me.

Through the doorway. I’m not here. You don’t see me.

Down a tiny passageway. You didn’t hear anything. There’s no need to look around.

There were a handful of them, no more. They sat at smooth, white computer terminals, fingertips splayed, and they obediently did not look around at the girl. She wasn’t even sure if they would have been able to hear her. They were deep under, consumed with the command they had been given: wait for my orders.

And she recognized the flavor of the mind that had given those orders. She had tasted it only briefly when she found Parees imprisoned, but it was a flavor that could not be forgotten.

Ka’sagra. She wasn’t here, not in person—but this was her handiwork, all of it.

The girl walked in a slow circle, examining the terminals, the room. What was this place?

Her hand touched a drone’s shoulder. I’m not here, you don’t see me. You’re waiting, just like she told you to. He moved obediently as she guided him, until he stood in the center of the room looking lost, and she took his place at the terminal.

She placed her fingers on the controls and let her mind move, feather-light, through the terminal pathways. What was here, and where did it lead?

When she saw the truth, her mouth dropped open.

A pathway in. A backdoor. Complete, unfettered access to the entire Telestine mainframe, undetectable to Tel’rabim or any other official Telestine governmental figure.

Of course Ka’sagra had made one. She wasn’t military or government, so she would not have been granted access to the classified files. And so she had built herself a conduit, using drones—some of them hardwired into the system itself, to take what had not been granted to her.

I’m not here, you don’t see me. You will not tell her I was here. You will not tell her what you did for me. She let the thought expand until it filled the room. You will show me what she has had you find, and you will help me send it all to a human ships in orbit.

She let her eyes drift closed and sank deep down.

Soon, she would know everything.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Earth

London

He’d wanted to kiss her since he first came back to the fleet and saw that familiar face. It didn’t make any goddamned sense, given what she was and what she wanted—but he’d learned by now that when it came to Laura Walker, what he wanted never made any sense.

“Pike.” She whispered the word against his lips, and there was a question there.

“Hmm?” She was far, far too short for him, but she seemed to fit against him perfectly anyway. His good arm wrapped around her and he ignored the stab of pain in his collarbone.

“This isn’t … you aren’t … it’s not like the dancing, is it?”

He lifted his head a fraction to stare at her. He couldn’t make any sense of that question. In spite of the death, the destruction, the urgency of Dawn’s mission and the dire consequences for humanity that her failure would entail, the long hours of waiting with Laura had naturally led to him feeling, well, quite horny.

And she thought he wanted to dance. Well, after a fashion, he supposed.

She swallowed and pushed herself away from him, and he saw what it cost her to take her body out of contact with his. He reached for her, but she shook her head.

“You’re trying to change my mind again.”

Like when he had danced with her on the ship, and told her about Earth to distract her from Nhean. He shook his head helplessly. Even that hadn’t been a manipulation. Not really, anyway.

Had it? He wasn’t sure why he did anything when it came to her.

“That wasn’t … what that was.”

But now he understood the personal edge to her betrayal. It hadn’t been just the principle of the thing, no. It had been that she thought his seduction was false.

“I wish to hell I didn’t want you,” he told her honestly. He shook his head when she jerked away from him. “You should be my enemy. You are, in fact, given what you plan to do.”

“I am not—” her voice wasn’t exactly shaking, but it was close. “—your enemy.”

He wanted her skin on his, the thought was making him dizzy. She was always warm, her skin hot to the touch, and the thought of those curves pressed up against him was taking brainpower he needed for other things.

Like, for instance, speaking diplomatically.

“You would kill all of humanity on this planet to give the ones on the stations a slightly better chance. I know you don’t think that’s what you’re doing, but you would. That makes you everyone’s enemy, doesn’t it?” Or maybe that was Ka’sagra. But making that particular comparison would hardly help matters.

“That is not—” She turned away, pressing at her temples.

He watched the lines of her back under the uniform, and shook his head in a desperate attempt to clear it. So he went ahead and made the comparison out loud. “You and Ka’sagra. You’re really not so different. You both want ascension, and you’re willing to sacrifice your own people to do it.”

She was silent at that.

“Is Earth really worth it?” she asked him finally. She looked around at him, and shook her head. “No, don’t tell me what you want to be true, tell me what you believe. Because sometimes what you say … it makes me think that you believe Earth is a trap, too. Am I wrong?” She squeezed her eyes shut. “God, was it all a lie? How long have you been lying to me?”

“I haven’t lied!” He pounded his good fist against his leg. “Do you not get it, I—”

He wished Dawn would come back so he could walk away from all of this. He wasn’t cut out to be a spy. He had no plan for what he was supposed to say. Nhean was….

Who knew where Nhean was. They’d all stayed radio silent for the long, tense journey to Earth. Nhean might be anywhere, and Pike didn’t have the first idea what the man wanted him to say now.

“I came back to you because I wanted to persuade you to change your mind,” he told her. “That wasn’t a lie. None of it was a lie except me not telling you that I knew your plan. That was it.”

She looked over at him. “More lies,” she said quietly.

“It is not—”

Goddammit. He pulled her back to him and his mouth came down on hers, hard. His hand tangled in her hair, her fingers slipped inside his shirt, and he lost the ability to think at all.

“I don’t know why you can’t just let this go.” He pulled her head back to kiss the bare line of her throat.

“I don’t—know why you can’t.” She gave a gasp and her nails dug into his side. She laughed when he hissed. Her fingers were fumbling with the buttons of his shirt. “Earth’s … beautiful, it really is. It feels like home, and I want it as much as you do, but how much are we going to sacrifice to—”

“Stop talking.” He was only barely listening anyway. Uniforms, it turned out, were a bitch to get off with only one hand.

“No, listen to me.” She was panting, but she held his face in her hands, and her grey eyes were fierce. “Listen to me. The fight to get them out of our cities would destroy the very places we want to live. A ground war … is terrible. We would lose so many to get this planet back. Beautiful is one thing, Pike, but how many are we willing to sacrifice for beauty? Is having Earth for a home worth so much that we’re willing to take the chance of not surviving at all if we can’t have it?”

He leaned his forehead against hers. His breath was coming ragged.

He meant to answer her. He really did, even though he wasn’t sure what he was going to say. But their bodies were still moving, and the next moment, his lips found hers again.

“I can’t talk right now.”

And she must have known that was honest, at least, because she gave a low laugh against his mouth and they didn’t talk again for a very long while.

CHAPTER FIFTY

Near Earth

Koh Rong

Bridge

He was waiting in the black, his ship a silent speck of silver in a cloud of debris, when the message reached him.

He’d taken no calls from anyone until now, there had been no contact with anyone so far. The defense satellites were ignoring him, which meant the girl must be alive to protect him—but he hadn’t heard from her, and he didn’t dare contact anyone else. It wasn’t safe, especially when he had only fragments of the Funder program to work with. He could only guess at each mechanism they might use to hack his ship.

And when you had no ship—when you couldn’t run anymore—you were dead. The Funders would never let him survive this.

And so, when his comm coils picked up the faint ping of the message, Nhean did not first respond.

But it was only a message, not a call, only words flung into the black. And he wondered who had sent it. The days were long here, outside the moon’s orbit, waiting for a call from the girl that might never come. He might as well have some distraction.

When he began decryption, he was surprised to find that he had the key to the message already. It was a message for him.

The hair on the back of his neck prickled.

He opened it to see Tel’rabim’s face, and for an eerie moment, Nhean was sure that Tel’rabim could truly see him across all the miles.

Superstition, nothing more. He crossed his arms over his chest and watched the message play out.

“I regret to inform you that the Intrepid crashed on the surface of the planet, not far from London.” Tel’rabim did not sound very regretful at all. His face looked savage. “They had refused to turn over the Dawning in a single shuttle, and during negotiations with my fleet, they were attacked by other human ships. Why, I do not know—nor do I care. You attempted to breach the security of this planet.”

“I did not,” Nhean murmured. What in God’s name had prompted Walker to refuse to turn the girl over? A single shuttle was all she needed to escape. Walker should know that—and she should certainly have known that Tel’rabim would never allow a human carrier to land near a city.

She had wanted the archives. He let his head tip back with a groan. He should never have mentioned that word. He should have told the girl not to mention that word.

Walker wanted the archives. Ka’sagra had fantastically powerful bombs? Well, Walker would want those. She would want FTL and the life support systems used in the Telestine ships—not the cheap knockoffs given to the human stations—and everything she could get her hands on.

How better, after all, to be free of Earth?

And in her insistence, she’d gotten the Intrepid shot down.

Panic spiked. Was the girl with her? How was he being protected now?

“You have shown yourself to be no different than the rest of your kind,” Tel’rabim continued coldly. “You have no honor. Your promises mean nothing. Your offers are poison. You attack and kill your own kind. You align my interests as much with Ka’sagra as with you, for at least her actions would rid the universe of humanity. When I defeat her, know that I will not rest until my people are free of your kind. For now, I rejoice that the admiral and her crew are dead, even if they took the Dawning down with them.”

The message clicked off and Nhean stared in silence. Slowly, he unhooked the ear piece and laid it down on the desk. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his helmswoman, Maria Hollywood, turn to look at him, and look away hastily.

Dead. They were all dead, then. It didn’t seem possible, but it was true. He had known there was an engagement, but the Funders’ fleet had fled into the darkness, pursued by the Telestines, and he had seen no transmissions from them to their headquarters. By the time he arrived to silence and a clean orbit around Earth, he had thought Walker had dropped the girl and gone to Mercury with Larsen.

He had assumed….

No, he had hoped. And hope was foolish.

He needed to get to the surface of the planet. That was the only thought in his head for one blessed moment. He’d spent the better part of a decade learning Telestine programming. If the archive was virtual, as it almost certainly was, he could try to hack it. He could find the information he needed to stop Ka’sagra. He needed to go to Earth.

And then grief hit him, unexpected and so all-consuming that he dropped into his chair and struggled even to breathe.

He could not remember feeling like this—ever. The girl was gone, not just her capabilities but the way she smiled, the way she puzzled out the problems of Telestine technology with him. Pike, who had never been easy in his company but who had been a friend of sorts nonetheless, was gone as well. Nhean remembered the laughing back and forth he had seen between Pike and his former captain, the way Pike looked at Walker when he thought no one was watching, the stories shared between Pike and Nhean himself, of their childhoods….

Even Walker. She had been a woman who might be his enemy, more so than any Telestine, and still she had matched him in wit and fire. There had been moments of alliance.

Delaney was gone, too, wasn’t he? Nhean pressed his hand against his side and grit his teeth against the pain. He could feel it like an ache. He had never grieved anyone in his life, not personally. He had been caught up in the larger injustice of the Telestine occupation, and had felt more anger than grief. Now grief gnawed with a pain so sharp that he didn’t know how he could live with it.

Except he was wrong. He had grieved. Parees. Poor, poor, Parees. And he wasn’t even dead.

“Sir?” said Hollywood. “An entire patrol is approaching.”

Anger hit him then, absolute, blazing fury. They had taken everything and they would shoot him down, now, too. He hadn’t evaded the satellites at all, Tel’rabim had simply wanted to break Nhean’s spirit before he took the Koh Rong down.

And there was nothing he could do about it. There wasn’t time to run. They would already have locked on. He stared at the ships and felt the helpless sense of fury that all of it was falling apart so quietly, without any fanfare at all.

Closer they came, and closer. He saw Hollywood lay her hands quietly in her lap and look down.

I am so sorry, he wanted to say. It wasn’t supposed to end this way for you, too. She had deserved better than to get caught up with him. She deserved to return to Mimas, buy her own little apartment in New Ghana City.

She deserved so much more than this.

When the formation glided past without even turning, Nhean stood frozen. He couldn’t seem to breathe.

“Sir.” Hollywood again. Her voice cracked. “There’s a message for you.”

He turned his head to look at her, and she gave a puzzled shrug.

“A human message?” he asked, after a moment.

“It’s … difficult to say. It’s coming from the surface.”

How could it possibly be difficult to say? He slid back into his chair and brought the message up on the screen. He gripped the desk, his jaw dropped, his eyes widened. She pushed herself out of her chair watching his reaction.

“Sir, are you all right?”

“She’s alive.” He shook his head dumbly. “The girl—she’s alive. I don’t know how….” His voice trailed away as he read the message over again.

“Does Tel’rabim have her?” It was an unusually direct question. Usually, she pretended not to know anything about Nhean’s business. She was the epitome of discretion. It was strangely jarring to know that she had heard everything he was saying over the past little while.

“No,” Nhean said slowly. “She found a way into the archives that he doesn’t about. And she’s giving us an uplink.”

Even as he said the words, they didn’t seem real. This wasn’t at all what they had planned.

It was better.

Whatever Ka’sagra was still waiting for, why she hadn’t made her move yet, they would know soon.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Inside Mercury’s Orbit

VSF Arianna King

Captain’s Quarters

Larsen settled back on his bed with a groan.

It was actually a fairly comfortable bed, and therein lay the problem. A hard, uncomfortable cot—the likes of which he’d been sleeping on since he came to the Exile Fleet—was easier to leave at any time, day or night, no matter how much sleep one had gotten.

A comfortable bed, on the other hand, made it difficult to pry oneself out of sleep.

Still, since he could only reliably get a couple of hours’ worth of sleep before some crisis or other arose, he should seize the moment.

The comm, of course, buzzed immediately.

With several choice words about any and all deities that might be listening, Larsen struggled upright and shoved his feet into his shoes.

“What?” He’d been snapping a lot since he left Earth. Nothing seemed important to him, but every little thing was important to everyone else.

“The other ships are gone.” His helmsman was almost crying. “They’re gone.”

Larsen blinked blearily at the empty room. “I’m sorry, what?”

“The other two ships Svalbard and Riker! They were tracking alongside us, perfectly, for hours—nothing wrong, nothing new. And then I just thought, they’d been tracking … too perfectly. Ships drift.”

“Uh-huh.” Larsen headed out of the room, barely remembering to close the door behind him. This didn’t make sense. She must be sleep deprived. She was talking nonsense.

He headed for the lower deck, towards the tiny window that lay one ladder and one airlock away from the bridge. Every once in a while, humans liked to use their eyes—but also, every once in a while, windows liked to fail.

“Keep talking,” he told his helmsman. “Walk me through it.” That would at least let her bleed the tension away until he could verify that the ships were, in fact, right where they were supposed to be.

“There weren’t any course corrections coming off of them.” She was half-babbling. “So I decided to ping them, you know, see how they were doing. Sometimes the helmsmen talk to one another over long watches. It keeps us awake. I know we’re in radio silence, but….”

“I’m not mad at you.” Actually, that was up for debate, but he wanted to know what the hell was going on in her head. “Just tell me what happened.”

“They were pinging me earlier,” she said miserably. “And I didn’t listen, because it was radio silence and their courses weren’t changing and you’d said not to open any channels. I thought they just wanted to talk and I didn’t think I should take the risk because I knew you’d be so angry if you found out….”

“You did the right thing.”

“I didn’t!” She gave a sob. “Because they needed us, they must have, they’re gone now. Something went wrong and they’re gone! I even opened a video channel to look!”

Larsen quickened his pace to get to the window and swore slightly under his breath. They’d been doing fine until she made that mistake. The video feeds, filtered as they were through the ship’s main network for object recognition, opened a vulnerability they didn’t need right now. “And?”

“And there’s nothing there.” She said the words bluntly. “I mean, there are two comm buoys flying alongside us, tracking with us, and they’re giving off the same signal the other two ships should, but there’s nothing else there. The Svalbard and the Riker are … gone.”

She was wrong. She was wrong, she was wrong, she was—

Right.

He reached the window at a full run and stared out at the black where the Svalbard should be. It wasn’t there, and the comm buoy was so small that he could barely make it out.

“What in the hell—”

He took the ladder to the bridge so fast and so sloppily that he slipped twice. He jabbed a finger at the helmsman, too angry at the world to care if she thought he was angry at her.

“You figure out when their course got too whatever-it-was—‘perfect.’” He looked over at her. “You said they were pinging you?”

“Yes. Just once at the start, the way we would to open a channel.” She lifted her shoulders miserably. “And then later, maybe an hour or so, over and over and over. I don’t know….”

“Then don’t guess,” he told her flatly. “Don’t waste your energy on guesses.”

He sank into an empty chair, eyes focused on nothing.

They’d been followed. That, or there were traitors on the other two ships.

But he suspected they’d been followed, somehow. The virus must have been deployed on a loop, transmitting over and over again, trying to lure their ships into opening a comm channel. The hack had hit the other two ships as soon as they broke their silence. Who knew how long it had taken to overtake over the ships, but the evidence suggested it had happened quickly.

The last thing he felt like doing was being a good leader right now, but if they were going to get through this, his crew needed to trust him. He looked up at the helmsman. “You saved the ship,” he told her. “You know that, right?”

She paled, but nodded. “Yes, sir. And I just had the video channel open for a few moments to figure out what was there. In case that virus was still transmitting. I don’t know if a video channel is enough to … pick it up, so I closed it down immediately.”

“Good.” He settled back in his seat.

Calm was returning, and with it came reasoning. They had one ship now, not three. One ship could not reasonably hope to take on whatever ships were carrying the missiles—they would be protected.

So he needed more ships. More at Mercury, perhaps.

And for that, he needed Nhean to smooth the way.

“Send a message to the Koh Rong and the Santa Maria,” he said to the lone communications officer on duty. “Put it on the priority comm buoys, and code it to use the Telestine buoys if it needs to. You know that override?”

For years, they had programmed their messages so as to be ignored by the Telestine buoys—best not to give them any window into human programming, or so they had thought. Now, in Larsen’s opinion, the risk was justified. Better to use any and all buoys they had at their disposal.

His communications officer nodded.

“Message begins,” Larsen said. “Svalbard and Riker taken by Funder fleet. Any open channel still a risk. Require backup. Move fleet to guard positions eight through seventeen. Message ends.”

Nhean would know how much backup he needed. He might not understand ‘eight through seventeen,’ a reference to the numbers the Exile Fleet used for human settlements, but he already knew where the ships should go. And Min, God willing, would hear the message and move the fleet to protect between Earth and Mercury.

That was all he could do. For now.

“Continue to Mercury,” he told the helmsman. “We must prepare to finish this alone. I will go speak with the gunnery chief about our missile spreads.”

And try to find some way, any way, for a single ship to take out however many their enemies would send.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Near Earth

EFS Pius

Shuttle Bay

“A fine addition.”

“Oh, it was nothing.” James Dorian, newly returned to the fleet with the Svalbard and the Riker in tow, accepted a handshake from Pope Celestine with what he hoped was a gracious smile. He could hardly help that he was radiating smugness.

It had been child’s play, really. Wait for them to break protocol, and broadcast The Seed as soon as they did. Now the fleet had two of the newest destroyers, ready to be put to work in service to humanity, along with the carrier and the three missile frigates they’d appropriated. Well, the carrier, at least. The five smaller ships were needed for another purpose, temporarily.

“You were absolutely right,” Celestine said. “Two of three ships, taken without engagement. Preferable, no doubt, to three taken with shots fired.”

Dorian felt his smile fade. Celestine always seemed to manage to do that, steal the shine from a victory. He let the sound of his boots beat out his displeasure on the shiny floor before he answered.

“The mission was always to avoid engagement,” he said, when he trusted himself to speak. He had been given the target, and he had formulated a plan—one, after all, that had worked. “Ships are precious. I do not forget that.” Unlike some people, he wanted to add, but that seemed a little too pointed. Captain George had quickly become a favored candidate to lead the new fleet, and Dorian did not want to risk offending her backers.

But what had the woman been thinking? She could have left Walker’s ship to be destroyed by the Telestines. It was barely flying, that thing. A few crippling shots at most, and a quick retreat, would have been George’s best course of action in Dorian’s opinion.

Instead, she had returned bearing some story about how Walker had allied herself with the Telestines and then crashed on the surface.

All nonsense. Battles were no more than chess on a grander scale. It was clear to Dorian that the woman had panicked, and he simply had to trust that it would be clear to the others in time. He was not yet one of their number. He was not yet part of the inner council.

Yet. But someday, he vowed, Celestine would greet him as an equal.

It seemed that day might be sooner than he thought, for Celestine gave an inscrutable smile over at him. “As you are back, there is a meeting you should attend.”

“Oh?” Dorian spared a glance to where the unconscious bodies of the destroyer crews were being unloaded—a simple matter of oxygen deprivation, another of his own tactics—and then looked back to Celestine. He did not dare appear too eager. For all he knew, this was nothing more than clerical decisions dressed up into a meeting.

“Yes.” Celestine looked about as smug as Dorian had felt upon his return. “Our patron has docked, and it is time you make their acquaintance. They’ll be needing the Svalbard and the Riker for a few days. Small price to pay for the infusion of cash and resources she’s arranged. I believe you’ve met her before, on Venus.”

Dorian felt a flutter of interest. Their patron? This was the first he had heard of any such thing. Was he talking about Julianne Mora? But she wasn’t rich, just … resourceful and … passionate. It had been his understanding that Funders were all either self-made, or the heirs to the substantial fortunes of the main religious groups on old Earth. A patron that had been kept secret even from him suggested that there was considerably more to it.

“I see,” he said simply. “I thank you for the honor.”

His response was noted with a nod. “You know, it was our patron’s idea to take those particular ships.” Celestine led Dorian to a small door off the main concourse, and nodded to the guard. As the door swung open, he gave another of his small smiles. “Perhaps you can explain to her why two ships were taken, instead of three.”

Dorian’s look at Celestine was venomous.

This wasn’t a promotion. Celestine was calling him to account.

With a promise to himself that he would make Celestine pay for this, now or in the very near future, Dorian slipped into the room and opened his mouth. “Good evening, ma’am. My name is James Dorian. I am….”

His voice trailed off when the patron turned to regard him with a truly unsettling gaze.

A Telestine? The Funders were in the keeping of a Telestine?

The door shut behind him with a soft sound and he was alone. Celestine had left without the merest explanation of what the hell was going on.

“Good evening, James Dorian,” the Telestine told him. “I am called Ka’sagra.”

Dorian watched her as she swept to one of the chairs and sat. Her gaze appraised him, and there was a hint of something that might have been a smile playing around her lips.

“You are surprised to see me,” she said. “No, not … surprised. Let me think. Your word would be betrayed, yes? You think that your goal to win back Earth has been compromised. You think that you have served false leaders.”

Dorian said nothing. If he said yes, would she strike? How did Telestines kill? He knew very little about them, he realized now.

“You have no need to fear,” Ka’sagra told him. “I am not like most of my kind. I do not favor either Tel’rabim’s maniacal quest to wipe humanity out, or the enforced servitude in which you have lived all these years. It is not to be borne. I want … more for humanity. That is why you are here too, no?”

Dorian nodded jerkily. Those eyes were mesmerizing, but none of this made any sense.

“What do you want?”

“Did you never meet any of the Daughters of Ascension?” She looked intrigued. “Where did you grow up, James Dorian?”

“On Venus,” he said shortly. His father had been happy to be little more than a glorified butler, and but James had always been keenly aware of the fact that they were maintaining only one of the Funders Circle locations, that they were cut off from the center of power. That they were servants, not equals.

When Celestine had asked James to travel with him, he had seized his chance to leave. And when Julianne Mora asked for his assistance to … shake things up a bit, as she put it, he jumped at the opportunity.

“A private estate, I can only imagine.” Ka’sagra’s fingers toyed with an object he couldn’t identify. Prayer beads of a sort, perhaps. “The Daughters of Ascension provide food and medical aid to humanity. We have long solicited private donations from other Telestines to make up the shortage from the exports off Earth.”

“I … see. We owe you our thanks, then.” Dorian sat, at her gesture, but remained on high alert. “And why do you do this?”

“Because your kind are essential to our salvation,” Ka’sagra said enigmatically. “I have known it for many years. Many of my own kind seek ‘peace’—but theirs is a peace born of human annihilation or servitude, and what sort of peace is that? None.”

That seemed a slender thread on which to hang an entire ideology. A chill settled in Dorian’s gut.

“The Daughters of Ascension have sought the peace of the heavens since before our own exodus.” Ka’sagra’s smile was bitter for some reason he could not fathom. “Now it lies within our grasp. That is why I sent you to intercept those ships. It is why I have done many things, in fact. And it is why I need a human’s help now.”

“Oh?” That seemed the safest thing to say.

“Yes.” Ka’sagra stood. “I have in my possession a single human—most dear to one of the members of the Exile Fleet. You see, while the Funders Circle has seen reason and chosen to ally themselves with me, the Exile Fleet has not. And the United Nations—such as it is at this point—also has not accepted my aid. It is why I had your leaders take control of much of the fleet—and it showed me that human allies are vital to my success. You….” Her gaze traveled over Dorian. “You, I need to speak to this human for me. Others have failed, but perhaps you may succeed. You see, I now have the required number of human ships that I need for my upcoming … project. But I need to … how would you humans put it? I need to … tie up a few loose ends.”

“What do you want to know?” He had never tortured anybody. In fact, he was uncomfortably aware that he might very well be unable follow through on such an assignment. “Who are they?” Admiral Walker had a lover, that much was rumored….

“I need to know how much progress they have made in their control of … what do you call your humans that are highly susceptible to suggestion? Drones?” Ka’sagra said.

She led the way down empty corridors in silence. Celestine had kept her presence carefully hidden, it seemed, and she knew the ship well. With a suppressed shudder, Dorian wondered how long she had been here.

He sucked in his breath when they entered the brig at last. The man staring up at them was emaciated, beaten black and blue, and there was nothing left in his vacant eyes but irredeemable despair.

There was no hope in those eyes.

“Hello, Parees,” Ka’sagra said. “I brought you someone new to talk to.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Near Earth

Koh Rong

Bridge

The bridge of the Koh Rong was quiet. Hollywood had sunk into a pensive silence as she worked on making micro-adjustments to the thrusters and engine control systems—they were running on manual, given that The Seed was still a danger. “Fizzledips!” She looked back at him. “Sorry, sir.”

Every once in a while, she let fly a string of made-up curse words. Ringers were notoriously non-vulgar to a fault.

And it meant she was scared.

Nhean tried not to blame her. This hadn’t been the life she’d imagined, no doubt, when she signed up for his fleet after her father’s smuggling ship was impounded by the Telestines—and the loss of Parees had hit them all hard. She had tried to nurse him after his visit with Ka’sagra at Vesta, coaxing bites of food into him, offering him the lightest touch on the shoulder. And then, all at once, Parees had been gone and a traitor, and they were always on the run now.

No, this hadn’t been the life they signed up for, any of them.

Nhean found comfort in his work, in the slow crawl across information networks and servers. Translation from Telestine to English was demanding work, as the parallels between the two languages remained nebulous at best. It made searching through the archive a seemingly insurmountable task. And yet, Nhean knew no other way to find the information he sought other than to begin the search. He knew that the girl’s access point into the system had radically narrowed their search.

Even so, he feared he might take too long to find what he sought. If he found the blueprint of Ka’sagra’s bomb, would he recognize it? Would he be able to do anything with it? For how—how—did she expect to be able to trigger such a strong reaction that the sun would not simply swallow her bombs? What was the catalyst?

If he could disrupt the catalyst remotely, he could end everything.

In the meantime, more technology than he had ever imagined was flowing past him in the form of Telestine schematics. If they survived this, they were going to have more technology than they knew what to do with.

It was maddening to not be able to speak to the girl. After her initial message, she had gone back to her own research and reading. The other drones dutifully sent the schematics to the Koh Rong, and she interrupted the feed every once in a while to send a specific one: a propulsion system, a life support module that simultaneously scrubbed excess hydrogen and CO2 from the air while serving as an effective engine heat sink, a series of what seemed to be wildly abstract mathematical proofs based around the number twelve.

Apparently they all meant something to the girl, but what? Nhean ground his teeth in frustration and stared out into the black for a moment.

They were running out of time. Whatever Ka’sagra wanted … every moment brought her closer to it.

He was rubbing at his temples distractedly when he heard a strange clank from the decks above. He looked up at the helmsman, who was looking at the ceiling. Her eyes returned to the screen, drawn by something he couldn’t see, and panic flashed across her face.

“What is it?”

“Oh my God, we’re … being hacked.” She began to jab at the screen, trying desperately to regain control of the machine.

“Impossible. I put precautions in place—”

“Not enough of them,” she snapped back. “They must have adapted The Seed to infiltrate our system too.”

The Funders again. Using his own weapon against him. For just the briefest of moments he thought of Schroeder, wondering how he died. Whether he knew that the weapon he’d developed to bring down a Telestine fleet was now being used to divide humanity against itself.

This was intolerable. He was used to overestimating an enemy’s intelligence, not underestimating it.

One last file streamed in from the girl. Another esoteric treatise. On the number twelve.

Something about that number … something the Telestines revered, almost … religiously.

His mind snapped into action. Get Rychenkov in position for the pickup, hand off the files before the Funders Circle got them, wipe his own hard drives before the Funders realized what he was trying to do, and let the girl know what was going on.

The clank came again, and he nodded to the helmsman. “Go. See if you can manually override the docking controls. I need to get word to the surface before they take us.” Or kill us. But he didn’t say that.

If she resented him taking control of the computers while she went into bodily danger, she didn’t say anything. Her fingers curled around the grip of a gun she pulled from the bridge’s tiny weapons locker and she crept out the door, down one of the hallways.

His fingers danced over the screen and, for a time, it seemed he might break the program before it had time to take hold. It was almost too fast for human reactions to counter it, but the blocks he had put in place were slowing it considerably. Sections of the servers blinked red, and were firewalled and cleansed, forcing the virus to replicate its efforts as well as itself.

The message to Rychenkov sent, and the files began to transfer. If Tel’rabim saw them….

They were important. They must be, if she sent them. It was worth the risk.

Nhean typed a message to the girl, his lips moving along with his fingers. Find Rychenkov to get you out. The Koh Rong has been boarded. He paused, then added, Code for The Seed important, but stopping Ka’sagra is all that matters.

There was no time for anything else, even if he had wanted to say more. Even as gunfire rang out down the hallways, Nhean watched a wave of red sweep across his screens. The ship shuddered as navigational control transferred to whoever had locked onto the ship—now there was no doubt that they had been both physically captured and digitally hacked simultaneously.

The other Funders, it turned out, were not simply impulsive. They employed people as meticulous as Nhean was himself.

Footsteps were approaching, the heavy tramp of booted feet moving in unison.

He stood, and straightened his cuffs. There was nothing else for it. He was about to be executed—or perhaps captured—and he refused to be shot in the back of the head while staring at screens that showed his failure.

A grim smile touched his lips. He knew this ship better than they did, and if they wanted to bring him down … he was going to make sure they worked for it.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Near Earth

Aggy II

Cockpit

They were all hovering near the cockpit when the message flashed across the screen. There was nothing to do but hover. They were in very high orbit around Earth, nearly geosynchronous, and while they hadn’t been shot down yet, this wasn’t a comfortable place to be. Even the sight of the planet below had worn thin after a while.

Why were they here?

James was dead. Gabriella wouldn’t even look him in the eye ever since he announced they’d go to Earth as planned.

He doubted she’d ever forgive him.

“Well that’s interesting,” he murmured.

“What is it?” Gabriella asked quietly. She and Katya had been conferring in low voices—probably about the fact that their captain appeared to have taken leave of his senses in continuing to talk to Nhean. Their crew mate was dead. Her husband was dead. And, in their eyes, Ry was still on a suicide mission.

“He wants us to go to the surface,” Rychenkov said bluntly. “He wants me to stay on hand in case our Lapushka needs a way out, and go down to the surface to get her—oh, and you’ll like this part, she’s right under Telestine London. In old London itself.”

They stared at him mutely. Gabriella and Katya exchanged a worried look. This is it, the look said. This is how we die.

Rychenkov nodded at the copilot’s seat, and then at Gabriella. “I need you. It’s going to be tricky getting out of here without them noticing, but if we leave now—”

“We’re going down there?” Gabriella asked blankly.

Rychenkov stared at her. He struggled for reason, for something to say. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

“How many more, Ry?” she asked. “Do we all have to die too?”

“But … it’s her,” Ry said. He didn’t flinch when Gabriella, finally, looked over at him, in the eye. “Lapushka.”

She breathed deeply. He was worried that she’d break—she was still in shock over James’s death. They all were. She deserved to bury him and to run off and never have to deal with danger or heroics or … anything, ever again.

But they had to. Lapushka was in danger.

“Fine. You want to kill us all? Fine. Death’s coming for all of us anyway.” She entered in the coordinates, and started initiating the manual thruster burn.

She was right, of course. He was trying to be a hero. He’d had a taste of it already when he served as Lapushka’s and Pike’s distraction when they assaulted the Telestine fleet at Mercury. And again when they crashed down onto Earth’s surface a few weeks ago.

But heroism led to death, eventually.

“It’ll be worth it. It’ll all, eventually, be worth it,” he murmured.

Gabby scoffed. “Really? That’s all you can say about him? About my James?”

He looked over at her. “She’s more, Gabby. Our Lapushka. She’s … something else. Something about her. I don’t know what she’s got up her sleeve, but … yes. I don’t trust Nhean. Or Walker, or Pike. But I trust our Lapushka.” He gripped the navigation controls. “What she is, I don’t know. But she is certainly something else. And whatever, whoever she is,” he looked up at her again, “we can’t just leave her.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Earth

London

The London Library

She heard Nhean’s message, but didn’t listen to it. Not at first.

She was so close. Her head was a whirl of numbers, letters, Telestine and English jumbling until she could make neither head nor tail of it. Twelve … what was it about twelve? Four threes, three fours, two sixes, twelve ones—no, that last one was stupid. Or was it? Twenty-four halves. Forty-eight quarters. Twelve signs of the zodiac. X—I—I in roman numerals. One one zero zero in binary. C in hexadecimal. Twelve tribes of Israel. One twelfth of the Riemann Zeta Function at negative one. Twelve days of Christmas. Twelve Jacobian elliptic functions. Twelve hours in half a day. Atomic number of Magnesium. Magnesium! Is that important? No. Well, yes, but not for this. Twelve types of fermions—electrons, muons, quarks, neutrinos … what was she missing … tau particles? She always missed the tau particle. Twelve apostles. Was this leading anywhere? Dammit! Duodenom—the human large intestine, named after the latin word for twelve. That’s what this was—full of shit. Twelve function keys on those damn human keyboards. Twelve angry men. Twelfth Night. Twelve books of the Aeneid. Twelve tones of western music. Twelve rib pairs in a human ribcage. Thirteen in a Telestine ribcage—was that important? Twelve knights of the round table. Twelve was twelve was twelve.

But what was it about twelve? Why was it important to the Telestines? To Ka’sagra? To her death cult? She wanted to scream.

The other drones, peacefully unaware of the storm going on in her head, continued about their business without so much as a flicker of expression.

She began to pace, hugging her arms. Twelve. Stop thinking about it in isolation. What else had she seen in the schematics, what else had Ka’sagra been looking up? And why was she looking up stuff? Hadn’t she already done this back in the Telestine’s homes system? Hadn’t she already made a star go nova?

Unsuccessfully, she reminded herself. “Remember, Dawn, she failed last time. The Telestines had time to escape that nova. Possibly weeks. It’s what let their civilization survive. What the hell am I missing?”

She caught herself. He called her Dawn. Pike. She always liked Ry’s Lapushka better, but Dawn was growing on her.

She shook her head. Focus!

What had Ka’sagra been researching? The composition of various star systems. Military technology. Computer networking.

Twelve, twelve, twelve. What the hell did twelve have to do with anything? She had the sense that it was a spiritual number of some sort for the Telestines, just like humans, but surely it was only so interesting to them unless there was also some practical reason to like it.

Bombs. She pressed her fingers into her temples, hard. Everything went back to those damn iridium isotope bombs. The computer networking. The chemical composition of the sun. The blasted number twelve.

She crossed her arms and stared at the computer screen where a series of images was cycling: four threes, first in concentric circles, then on a sphere, then on a diagram that made her head hurt—some depiction of a fourth dimension.

Then three fours. Then six twos.

Twelve bombs.

Dodecahedron. Geometry. Holy shit.

Her head jerked up. There had been twelve iridium bombs.

What she was staring at, prettily illustrated by some long-dead Telestine mathematician, was the geometric arrangement in which Ka’sagra was going to plunge those bombs into the sun. Something about this geometry would make the blast more powerful … she did a quick mental calculation of the superposition of twelve perfectly placed blast fronts … yes. Much, much more powerful than Ka’sagra’s original attempt on the Telestine sun. It wouldn’t slowly burst out to consume the solar system over months and years. It wouldn’t gradually strip away life on the surface of the Earth and the other worlds and settlements.

It would happen in a flash. Earth would be gone in minutes. Mars and Jupiter and Saturn within hours.

There would be no chance of escape. None.

She thudded into the chair so quickly, so imprecisely, that she nearly fell right off the other side. Nhean needed to—

She swallowed hard as she read the message.

Nhean was captured. He was gone.

The only ones who remained, who could stop this, were Walker and her ships. Could they be trusted?

Stopping Ka’sagra is all that matters, the screen read.

He was right. The girl didn’t stop to think of words, only pressed her way up into the atmosphere and beyond, letting her mind expand. This distance, she could now cross easily in her mind. Where was Rychenkov?

In his ship. Scared. Making calculations.

She dropped the thoughts into his head without any grace at all: the bomb schematics, the arrangement of points on a sphere, the need to get Walker. His fear became a rush of panic. Humans hated this mind connection, she always forgot that, but there wasn’t time for words.

I’m here. It’s me. She let the sentiment fill his mind as well as hers.

He was torn. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do. His feelings of guilt and shame and desperation all competed with each other in a contorted mess. It was … sad.

It was dangerous.

She whispered her thoughts to a room of unhearing drones, willing them to reach Rychenkov: We need you. I need you. Lapushka needs you.

And I will protect you.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Near Earth

Koh Rong

Bridge

To his great surprise, they didn’t shoot him immediately. He’d dived for cover as soon as they came onto the bridge, but they wrestled him out from under a desk and marched him away.

He hadn’t expected that, but he could work with it. This was his ship, after all, and he’d been preparing for this day for some time. He listened for Hollywood and the other crewmembers, ready to create a distraction if he needed to, and mapped out the ship in his head. Which way were they taking him? His plan depended on that.

About three corridors away, he saw an opportunity and made a run for it. Ahead, he saw an automated doorway. Perfect. The doorways were programmed to open by raising a panel and then shut automatically. Nhean bashed himself sideways to hit the controls and then instantly hit the floor. Hands grabbed for him, but he was already scrambling away and under the half-raised door panel, which had only raised about halfway at this point. It slammed shut behind him as soon as it sensed his passage. He heard the howl of someone who’d gotten their fingers smashed and gave a grim smile.

There really wasn’t anything to lose, in his opinion. It wasn’t as if the Funders were going to let him survive this. His lack of immediate execution was, if anything, a bad sign—their punishment would be more severe and far more public, he suspected. There would probably be a long list of charges read, or something similarly melodramatic, and Celestine would make grave pronouncements about souls and eternal good.

And if there was anything Nhean hated, it was political theater. So he ran. He immediately slipped on some coolant or blood or some reddish fluid that had smeared on the floor. He hit his head hard on the floor. Wincing, he tried to put that out of his mind and run. He could hear the door opening behind him, and the shout as they saw him turn the corner.

He managed to lose them after two turns by sliding into a hidden doorway and slamming it shut when they rounded the corner in pursuit. There was a hidden catch that they might spend hours trying to find, and he hoped they did—it was keyed to his palm print.

Freedom. He needed to make sure the schematics were off the computers, and then get the hell out of here. Where he was going to go, he wasn’t quite sure. He suspected it was easier said than done to hijack the ship that was trying to kidnap you.

Still, he had nothing to lose by trying, and everything to lose by going along with their plan.

He crept along the hidden corridor, listened carefully at the door at the other end, and then slipped out and made for the back server room.

This was a risk. The room could be depressurized from the outside if they knew how to work the controls and it wasn’t out of the question that they would simply suffocate him as soon as they learned where he was. He needed to wipe the computers before they got any further, however. Giving them bombs like the ones he’d seen, better guns, better ships—those were the kinds of toys that could do lethal damage to their own kind, in the wrong hands.

And he was pretty sure by this point that the council of the Funders Circle was definitely the wrong hands. He couldn’t tell whether they had any plan at this point, or whether it was simply spite that kept them going.

If there was a plan … he didn’t think much of it. So like hell was he going to give them a bomb that could take out a planet.

He started the first wipe and heard the distant sound of voices and footsteps—headed unerringly in his direction.

Damn.

Nhean slipped to the far corner of the room, one hidden by a server stack but otherwise offering the quickest shot out into the corridor beyond. If they all came in, he might be able to dart outside and lock them in with the servers. With any luck, they’d shoot a few. That would take care of the files quite nicely.

Things almost went to plan. As he skidded out of the server room, Nhean met the gaze of a single, surprised solder. The man was very young and very inexperienced with his weapon. He fumbled to bring it up, and Nhean—lacking any better options—tackled him.

He managed to struggle to his feet and get the door locked before the soldier yanked him back down again, hard enough to slam his head against the floor panels. The man was on him the next moment. It didn’t seem to occur to him to pull out his sidearm and just shoot Nhean in the head. Instead, he continued the fight as Nhean had begun it, and as the grappling and twisting and thrashing continued, Nhean managed to get the sidearm.

The gunshot was almost unnaturally loud in the small space. Nhean stared down at the body in something like shock. He saw his arm extend, and then his fingers stretched out and closed the young, surprised eyes.

Pounding from the locked door brought him back to his senses. He dropped the sidearm and ran. There was blood on his hand, and he hastily tried rubbing it off on his pants. Why, he couldn’t say. Which meant he was probably in shock.

Some action hero I make. Here he was, having escaped his captors twice, and all he wanted to do was throw up. The man had looked so surprised in the instant before he died. He’d seen the gun.

He’d been so young.

Nhean came around a corner, skidded to a stop as he saw more armored figures, and headed back the way he came.

He found himself stumbling as he ran. He managed to duck under the reaching arms of someone who came out of a side corridor ahead of him and plunged onwards. He was running on fumes by this point. He knew where he was in the ship, and they didn’t, but what should have been an advantage just pressed home the futility of his situation.

It was a small ship, and there were only so many places to run and hide.

Still, he led them on a desperate chase for the better part of fifteen minutes.

He tripped over something. He glanced down, and immediately started to retch.

He’d tripped over the helmswoman. Maria Hollywood.

Dead.

She was lying in a pool of her own blood. They had taken her gun—but they hadn’t paused to cover her, or move her body aside.

Nhean took one agonized moment to stare at her face. It was oddly peaceful now, in death, but then again, she’d always been quite calm. A good woman. One who might have become a friend.

One who certainly hadn’t deserved to die like this. Far from her home on Mimas. Ringers had somewhat more elaborate death rituals than the rest of humanity, if he remembered right.

She died alone, apparently. What would her final words, her final thoughts have been? Fizzledips? Or is impending death enough to extract a real curse from a Ringer? Dammit? Holy shit? Did she have family he should notify?

But there was no time. He had to escape. He had to get whatever information Dawn had found into the right hands. He ran, but this time, he ran without purpose, and through tears.

By the time they finally got him, he was so tired he half-fell onto the floor. He allowed them to drag them onto the deck of the ship that had docked, and was promptly clubbed over the head with something that made the world go black.

He woke slowly. His head hurt, and they hadn’t cleaned the wound. He turned his skull with a wince and debated whether or not to open his eyes.

“You’re awake,” a voice said quietly.

And he knew that voice. His eyes flew open.

“Parees?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Near Earth

Aggy II

Cockpit

Lapushka needs you.

And I will protect you.

How she was in his head, he didn’t know—what he did know was that she was there, and she was alive. She needed him. She needed him to go to London to get Pike and Walker. Why? She wouldn’t say. And it wrenched his gut that he was risking the lives of his crew to rescue that awful woman who was trying to destroy humanity’s home in a horrific attempt to permanently destroy their enemies.

But … it was Lapushka asking. He had to save her.

She was still his crew. And he was not going to run away. Not when a member of his crew needed him.

“Set a course for London.”

Gabby looked at him skeptically. She was tired, he could tell. Tired of arguing. “And what about the Telestine patrols?”

“She’ll get us through. I know it.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

He smiled. “Then at least we had a good ride.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

Near Earth

EFS Pius

Brig

The hand at the back of his neck let go and Nhean came up out of the icy cold water gasping for air. The hand grabbed his collar to pull him close and he struggled to make sense of the sounds and sights in the blur that resulted from his oxygen-deprived senses.

“I am going to ask one more time,” a voice said. “Where is the rest of the Exile Fleet?”

The voice was coming from the wrong place. The person attached to the hand was next to him, but the voice came from behind him and a ways back. It was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it just now.

It had been a long few hours.

“Where is—”

“I don’t know.” Nhean’s lips were chattering, and it was hard to draw enough air for the words. His body wanted to hoard every ounce of oxygen it had.

“You were right,” the voice said.

About what? Nhean was about to ask. Then he realized the voice wasn’t talking to him at all.

“I told you,” a female voice said. Something was wrong with it, but Nhean couldn’t figure out what. “Your Mr. Dorian was very thorough, just as he was with the other human. But these two are unexpectedly obtuse.”

“Even to you?” the first voice asked. It sounded at once curious and repulsed.

Hanging by his collar, struggling weakly against the handcuffs as he dripped water into the bucket in front of him, Nhean tried to think who he might be hearing.

“Even to me.” The woman sounded annoyed. “It was harder than it should have been to bend the drone to my will on Vesta. And in the end, I failed—and he destroyed Vesta because of it. It has been near-impossible to get anything useful out of him since.” She paused. “I wonder if I broke him,” she added thoughtfully.

Ka’sagra. Lying about Parees and Vesta. She’d been the one who ordered Parees to destroy Vesta and kill millions, and now she was blaming it all on him. Nhean scrabbled around and dove in the direction of the voice as his captor’s hands slipped off his collar. No one had been expecting him to try to run toward his captors, but he didn’t get very far in any case. James Dorian landed heavily on top of him, knocking the air out of his lungs, and hauled his head back by the hair for him to look up into Ka’sagra’s alien eyes. Beside her….

Celestine. Of course. Nhean felt his lip curl.

Ka’sagra did not do anything so uncultured as jump. Her mother superior mask never slipped. “Of course, you were a surprise, too,” she observed to Nhean.

“Given up trying to save the world?” Nhean snarled at Celestine. “Figured you’d work with her to blow the whole thing up?”

Dorian’s gun—or something similarly blunt—struck the back of his head, and Nhean saw stars.

“That’s enough, Dorian.” Celestine sounded genuinely aggrieved. He crouched down by Nhean and laid a fatherly hand on one wet sleeve. “Have you acted all this time out of fear of Ka’sagra? Why did you not ask me for the truth, my son? I would have explained our larger goal to you without hesitation.”

He was so sincere, and so calm, that Nhean felt a flicker of doubt.

Then he looked up into Ka’sagra’s dead, mask-like eyes, and knew he had been right about her. Whatever story she had spun, she had spun it well. Her hooks had been sunk into Celestine long ago, and no words Nhean could speak would change the pope’s mind.

But he had to try.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “She’s the one who destroyed their star. She thought they would all die in their home system and reach ascension, as she calls it. But she failed. And now she’s been working to set us against each other and destroy each other since the exodus. She’s sending bombs to the sun as soon as she … figures something out.” Honestly, he had no idea what she was waiting for. He was just praying to all gods that Dawn figured out what the hell it was in time.

Celestine looked at Ka’sagra, but she was far too clever to give herself away. She stared down at Nhean in an exquisite performance of sympathy.

“Mr. Tang,” began Celestine, “pardon my vulgarity, but how the bloody hell do you destroy a star?”

Ka’sagra smiled that dead smile again. “Tel’rabim’s lies are many,” she said. “And they are inventive. Some are so outlandish that they might even be true. How he came up with this one, though—” She shook her head at Celestine. And now Nhean noticed Worthlin in the background. His face was … uncomfortable. He probably wasn’t used to seeing such violence. Mormons were a squeamish lot.

“It’s a death cult. She’s not leading a humanitarian group. It’s a fucking death cult,” Nhean croaked through his ragged throat.

Worthlin scoffed. “Vulgarity is the refuge of a weak mind. And … cult. That insult has been hurled at my people for over two hundred years. Cult. Please. Give us a break, Mr. Tang. And now you hurl it at this woman here? She may be other, my dear friend, but she has helped us. Immensely.”

Nhean’s eyes went from the scowling Worthlin to the beatifically smiling Ka’sagra. “Then what do you think her plans are for these stolen ships, hm? Enlighten me.”

“Good heavens, man, you already know the answer to that,” said Worthlin. “It’s what we’ve been telling you all along. She’s helping us protect all our colonies. All of them, not just a few chosen by Walker. And when Telestine society sees our resolve, and our cooperation with the daughters of ascension, they’ll force Tel’rabim to end this senseless war.”

Nhean grunted an ironic chuckle. “That’s your grand plan? Good God, you’re stupider than I thought.”

Ka’sagra intervened. “Let this man rest. He has been fighting for his survival—under false pretenses, yes, but surely humans are not so cruel as to punish the truly misguided. We must find a way to convince him of the truth—then there will be no need for methods such as these. He will tell us what we wish to know.”

Celestine hesitated, but he nodded over Nhean’s head to James Dorian.

Nhean landed on the metal floor with a thump and a groan.

“Do you think we have time—”

“Of course we have time,” Ka’sagra said soothingly. “Come. We will talk. I have the twelve ships I need. But I worry that … The Dawning, as they call her, may be trying to betray us. I believe she is nudging Tel’rabim into a final confrontation with us over Earth. All the signs point to it. We will discern what has been done. And we will undo it.”

She let the two men precede her out of the room, however, and at the doorway, she turned to smile at Nhean. I’ll be back alone, her smile said. What you can conceal with words, you cannot conceal in your thoughts. I will break you.

What in the world was she up to? What did she want? Why wasn’t she just launching her bombs into the sun immediately, instead of all this drama with the Funders?

What were they after? Twelve ships?

They’d been interrogating him about the remains of the Exile Fleet. Something about those ships was important enough for Ka’sagra to put her apocalyptic plan on hold.

And now talk of Dawn. At the mention of her supposed plans, Nhean immediately knew that was part of Ka’sagra’s plan—she was projecting. Hinting at her own goal. She was goading Tel’rabim and humanity into a final battle over Earth. But why? Why now? And what was Ka’sagra doing with exactly twelve ships in the meantime?

What was it? What was he missing?

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

Earth

London

Rychenkov is coming for you.

The thought appeared out of nowhere, words that made no sense, and Pike sat bolt upright, spilling Walker off his shoulder. She gave a sleepy groan of complaint. They’d holed up back in the shop called Boots, but unfortunately, the bedding was rather lacking. A few old cushions they’d found after their … extra-curricular escapade.

He hadn’t felt that satisfied in years.

“What is it?” She was rubbing her eyes.

“I don’t … know.”

Rychenkov is coming to get you. The thought was patient.

“Dawn?” He looked around himself, feeling more than a little crazy. Walker was certainly looking at him like he was.

He got the distinct sense from the frustration that suddenly ran through his mind that he didn’t need to speak aloud. Suddenly the mental image of Dawn rolling her eyes heavenwards to ask for patience flickered at the edge of his vision.

Did you find what we need? He took a moment to try to send the thought.

She was already responding; she had sensed his question the moment he thought it. I have a direct link into their archives. Yes … yes, I think so.

“Pike, seriously, what the hell is going on?” Walker was staring at him worriedly, and he realized he’d been making faces to go with the thoughts he wasn’t saying aloud.

It took a moment to remember how to speak out loud. Was this how Dawn felt, all the time? No wonder she was a mute for all those weeks. “Rychenkov is coming to get us,” he explained.

“And the rest of our crew? We can’t just—”

“She says it’s important.” He looked at her, and then winced as a series of images crashed into his mind. “Bombs. A weird sphere thing. Ships, all networked. No, not networked. Specifically cut off from a network. Ships on a twelve-pointed sphere, one, five, five, one—oh, God, it’s the iridium bombs. She’s sending the bombs into the sun, she just needed ships that she could control without being found. She needed…” He listened to the thoughts tumbling through his mind, and shook his head in frustration. “She needed twelve ships, for twelve bombs. Each will deliver to a different place. And … something about the networking … detonate at the same time, twelve magnetohydrodynamic thermonuclear blast fronts converging at the same point from twelve directions, hyper-resonant constructive interference … good Lord, girl, I don’t even know what these words mean….”

He could practically hear the girl’s sound of frustration. Human ships, she told him. They had to be human, otherwise a Telestine could stop them. They had to be linked to a very particular kind of network, one Ka’sagra could work with but no one else could. One constructed out of drones themselves.

She wasn’t leaving anything to chance this time, said the girl, quite clearly, in his head. She won’t make the same mistakes she made in their home system.

Can you stop them?

No. The thought carried every piece of despair she felt about that herself. It was impossible, they’d be piloted by Telestines and therefore not susceptible to her control. They’d be on human ships, hooked to computers that were different from the type she could manipulate remotely. She knew some tricks, yes, but not enough—not nearly enough.

She wasn’t strong enough. After all her preparation and training and Nhean’s work on her, she still wasn’t strong enough. She couldn’t reach that far. She needed to be MORE. The thought came into his head like a scream, and he found himself trying to soothe her, wanting to take her in his arms and tell her it would be all right, that he’d stop the ships himself if it was the last thing he did.

You need to go with Rychenkov and get to those ships. The thought was strangely dispassionate. She was taking refuge in logic. I’ll stay here, and see if I can find anything that will help you. But you have to go now. Take the admiral, you’ll need her ships. Don’t worry about the rest of the Intrepid’s survivors—I’ll redirect the Telestine patrols to avoid them.

“Wait, you’re staying here? No. Absolutely not!” He didn’t even realize he was shouting the words out loud rather than thinking them.

Walker was looking at him like he was crazy. But Dawn seemed to have heard him anyway, and her voice flowed over his mind. I’ll be fine. Trust me. We don’t have time, my friend. Go. Stop Ka’sagra. Save us all. Hold on … shit. Nhean needs me.

She vanished from his head just as they heard the sonic boom burst above them.

“That’s Rychenkov. Come on.” Pike grabbed Walker’s hand.

She yanked her fingers out of his. “Pike. What is it?”

“Ka’sagra has everything she needs,” he said bluntly. “And depending on whether she’s sent her ships toward the sun yet, we have almost no time to stop her. So come on.”

They burst out from the shop onto the debris-strewn street.

She made a motion out towards the river, in the direction she supposed Wales was. “What about the rest of them? I can’t leave my people here!”

“She swore they’d be safe. Come on!”

And he took off running for the intersection where he saw the Aggy II would land.

CHAPTER SIXTY

Near Earth

EFS Pius

Brig

The door closed behind Ka’sagra and Nhean lay panting on the cold floor. Hope, once something that had burned hot inside him, now seemed very far away. It was an emotion that had nothing to do with his current situation. He was lost.

Perversely, he was also thirsty. He struggled up and made for the vat of water, walking awkwardly on his knees. He lowered his face to the water to sip.

“I don’t think she actually knows how to break you,” a voice said.

Nhean coughed, choked, plunged face down in the water, and only barely managed to get himself up again. He stared across the room to where Parees sat, looking a bit bewildered.

He’d forgotten Parees was here. Oxygen deprivation did things to your brain, as it turned out.

“Oh?” he said finally.

“She isn’t very good with human thoughts,” Parees said. “There are some parallels between human and Telestine minds, things that are easy to exploit: resource hoarding, sexual desire, anger.”

Nhean stared at him.

“But if you think about it,” Parees said, “she’s never quite managed to get humans to do what she wants them to do. Tel’rabim’s the one she always succeeds against. She couldn’t ever get Walker to be as foolhardy as she wanted her to be.”

Nhean began to laugh. He was still hoarse from the water and it hurt, but he couldn’t stop. “Walker was far more foolhardy than….” He sighed. “Not important.”

There was a silence. “What makes you think she won’t be able to break me? With a concerted effort….” He was imagining the feel of long fingers combing through his brains, and the thought made him want to throw up.

He was so afraid that he felt lightheaded. No one was coming for him. Panic rose up, choking him, and he only barely heard Parees’s voice in the background.

“—almost enough to fight her,” Parees was saying sadly. “I had stopped thinking like one of them. She didn’t know what to make of me.”

Nhean looked over at him.

“But she figured it out,” Parees said sadly. “I felt her get around everything in my mind and my finger just squeezed on the trigger and then he was dead.”

He was speaking of Essa’s death, Nhean suddenly realized. He bowed his head. After all the betrayal, all the weeks he had wanted to find Parees and scream, ‘why didn’t you tell me?’ all he could think now was that he had somehow failed this young man.

Just like he’d failed Maria Hollywood. How he’d failed everyone that ever depended on him.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself, dammit. He tried to pull himself together.

At some point, Parees had decided to become abandon his programming. He had tried to become not a drone, but a human. And Nhean had never noticed the shift, had never thought to ask any of the questions that might have led them to the truth.

The sound of keys in the lock made them both turn.

“Be human,” Parees hissed desperately to himself.

But the person who came into the room was not anyone they recognized. The man walked with a strange, jerky gait, and fumbled with the keys to open the cell door. His eyes did not quite focus as he strode into the cell and began to unlock Nhean’s handcuffs, and when he spoke, the tone of his voice was perceptibly off.

“You do not have much time,” he said in that strange, forced voice. “The Funders’ Fleet will move soon. You must take a shuttle. Walker needs your help to stop Ka’sagra’s ships.”

Only then did Nhean understand. “Dawn?”

“Yes.” The man stated the word without inflection. He pulled a knife, still wet with blood, out of his pocket and passed it to Nhean. “If anyone questions you in the halls, kill them. Take a shuttle. Approach the human fleet at magnetic north. Tell them Pike and Walker will join them shortly.”

“And you?” Nhean asked the drone.

“I will stay here.” The words were disconcerting in their jerkiness, and he couldn’t tell if she meant that she’d keep the drone there in the cell, or if she herself would remain on Earth. The drone moved to Parees and began to unlock his handcuffs. “I can’t stop the ships she has now. You have time while the Funders meet together to decide your fate. But not much. You must go now. There are security drones outside. They will accompany you to the shuttle bay. It should give you a cover story.”

She was as good as her word. They left the drone who unlocked them in the cell, staring vaguely at nothing, and hurried through the hallways with the four other security drones that Dawn had somehow, miraculously, managed to reach out and control all at once.

Her abilities were growing quickly now. She was … becoming. Becoming something far greater than Tel’rabim ever imagined, most likely.

Nhean had helped design these ships, and he knew the layouts better than any save the engineers. Between service hatches and back corridors, they hardly needed the main hallways at all. When they did use the thoroughfares, most people either glanced at them with mild interest, or turned their faces. Those would be drones, most likely—Dawn must be manipulating every single drone on the ship.

A gunshot.

One of the drones to Nhean’s right collapsed, spurting blood from his chest.

Two more gunshots, two more drones down.

Nhean finally caught a glimpse of the hallway ahead of them where a man with a gun took aim at the final drone, who was now trying to push him into a side passage.

Dorian.

“I thought you’d try something,” the man said. He fired again.

The last drone was dead. Shot through the head.

He must stop thinking of these people as drones. They are people, dammit. Just like Dawn. Just like Hollywood and Parees.

“Come out, Tang,” said Dorian. Nhean glanced across the corridor and saw that Parees had ducked down the opposite side passage.

“I’ll pass, thank you,” Nhean replied.

He heard Dorian’s footsteps down the corridor, approaching the intersection that led off to the two side passages. Nhean tried one of the doors. Locked, of course, and probably keyed to not accept his palm-print. “You’re just prolonging the inevitable. The Funders Circle is meeting right now, and they’re going to pronounce you guilty.”

“You sound so sure, Mr. Dorian. And I suppose you get to be the executioner?” Nhean glanced across the way, at Parees as the other man’s eyes glazed over somewhat. Was he ok? And then he recognized the look. The same faraway look that the drone had from the cell.

Dawn.

“Of course.” Dorian laughed. A sick laugh that sounded like he actually thought it was funny. “Just like they let me execute your friend.”

Schroeder.

Nhean’s fists balled up so tight he almost drew blood from his palms.

“What did he do to deserve that, Mr. Dorian?” He watched Parees across the hallway: he seemed to be preparing to do something. That meant it was Nhean’s job to keep Dorian distracted.

Right. Distraction. He slowly extended both hands out from the corner and stepped out into the intersection of the two corridors.

A broad smile spread over Dorian’s face. “Because. He was a traitor.”

“What in the world made Schroeder a traitor? He was a key member of the Funders Circle. Without his resources, without his company’s work, the Funders wouldn’t have accomplished half of what it has today. No Venus Sovereign Fleet. No Seed. Nothing.”

Dorian took a small step, then squared himself and brought his other hand up to steady the gun. “Because. He was working with you. And anyone who works with a traitor, is a traitor.”

“Wait—” Nhean had his hands up. “I thought you had to wait for the sentence? How do you know what the Circle will say?”

He grinned. “I already know the sentence, asshole. Did you really think—”

He never got the chance to finish. With what felt like a rush of wind, someone bolted past him, arms and legs flying faster than any human had a right to move.

Parees?

Except Parees was still to his right, down the other passageway.

Dorian swore, and fired. The bullet clipped the newcomer, but they didn’t even slow down.

It was the drone from the cell.

With a blur of fists and feet, Dorian was down. He scrambled for the gun that had gone flying out of his hands, but the drone kicked it away, and put the other foot on Dorian’s neck.

“Wait!” said Dorian.

Nhean was panting, knowing he’d only narrowly avoided a bullet to the head. “For what, Mr. Dorian?”

“For what? You … you need me! I know where they are right now. I can—”

“I’m sorry, but we don’t have time for this. Ka’sagra has everything she needs.” He made a motion with his head to the drone, who had turned to look at him with a blank expression. It was bleeding from its chest, and heaving. Its face was going pale. “Do it.”

The drone, its strength magnified by whatever Dawn was doing to it, brought its weight down firmly on Dorian’s neck in a sickening crunch.

Then the drone toppled over, wheezing. It choked out a few words as blood flecked its lips. “Hurry, Nhean. Hurry. Tel’rabim has almost found me.”

The drone died. Soon, Parees was right by Nhean’s side, pulling him along. Before he could even think to speak again, they were in the shuttle bay.

A single shuttle had been left with the engines on, spewing exhaust into the small bay. Nhean coughed, his tender throat sore already from being half-drowned, but he knew better than to slow down. At his side, Parees was in worse shape: his stumbling gait and bruised limbs appeared worse in the bright light of the bay. He looked so bad that Nhean tried to shift his gaze somewhere, anywhere, else—it reminded him of an expressionless Ms. Hollywood laying in her blood.

They left in silence, Nhean still peering over his shoulder for the signs of pursuit. How long did they have?

They were hardly away from the ship before the proximity alerts began to blare. The fleet was warming up its engines for acceleration.

“What the hell?” Nhean demanded hoarsely. “Where are they going? He looked to the opposite horizon. Did he see a glimmer there, the pinpricks of reflected sunlight glancing off the distant Telestine fleet? He would bet on it.

“Move,” was all he said. “We need to get going before anyone in their fleet realizes there’s a shuttle away. And come up with something convincing to say so Min doesn’t blast us out of space when he sees us coming.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Earth, High Orbit

EFS Santa Maria

Bridge

The Aggy II arrived just as Dawn had told him it would. And when Rychenkov insisted, with raised fists, that they go rescue Dawn as well, it took a rather forceful push from her mind onto his to get him to relent, and to get the hell out of there. Out of London. Off Earth.

Tel’rabim is coming, and I can’t hold off his patrols much longer, she’d said, directly to both of their minds. Pike was used to it by then, but Ry still made a face. He looked like he was going to be sick.

So Gabriella flew them up to high orbit. The skies over Earth were remarkably clear, and once they were in orbit they could finally see why.

The whole Telestine fleet was massing in low orbit. Preparing for a fight.

And it was going to be a big one.

“Where’s James?” Pike asked. Gabriella said nothing, but gripped the navigational controls even harder. That was enough of an answer for him, and he shot Rychenkov a questioning glance. Ry’s only response was to look away.

The Exile Fleet had been apprised of their approach. A docking bay was open and a young officer brought them to the bridge at a run, where they found Min hunched over, arms crossed across his chest, watching the slow advance of the two fleets on one another.

“The Funders are … joining us. They’re engaging Tel’rabim’s fleet,” he said, before he looked up. Then he raised his head, and his face changed. “Thank God,” he whispered. His shoulders slumped as he stared at Walker. “I didn’t … ma’am, I thought you were lost, and Mr. Tang with you. An assault was the only thing I could think—”

“You made a good choice,” Walker assured him. She nodded to him, and her gaze flicked sideways briefly in thought. “And don’t get too excited about the Funder fleet—they’re not our friends. I’d wager they’re only attacking Tel’rabim on Ka’sagra’s orders. To distract and delay and give her enough time to do … whatever she’s planning.” She only looked around briefly as Rychenkov made his way onto the bridge. His arms were full of printouts, and from the sound of his breath, he’d been running at a flat-out sprint.

“The schematics Lapushka found,” he said, by way of explanation. He edged between the officers to put them on the desk and backed away again.

Walker was hardly paying attention. “And where is Nhean?”

“Here,” a hoarse voice said from the doorway. “The Koh Rong is taken, but we’re alive. Barely.”

Pike turned, and did a double take. There was more of Nhean’s face that was bruised than unbruised, and he was walking as if every part of him hurt. His hair was damp, as was most of his suit jacket. One arm hung oddly. It would have been disturbing enough, except for the fact that he was in far better shape than Parees. At his side, the young man was so battered and emaciated that he was unrecognizable to most of the crew.

Not Walker.

“I trust,” she said simply, “that you have good reason to bring that onto the bridge of my ship?”

Everyone turned to watch Parees, and the young man shrank back. He looked around himself in terror.

“We may need him,” Nhean said grimly. “Ka’sagra won’t try to work on him until she knows he’s missing, and she is with the Funders Circle fleet. I don’t think she’ll look for him for a while—if at all.”

“He still doesn’t need to be on my bridge,” Walker said coldly. “That thing—”

“I destroyed Vesta.” Parees said the words through cracked lips. “And shot Secretary General Essa in the head. Yes, Admiral, I did those things. But I have also seen more of Ka’sagra’s mind than anyone else here, and I think I will be better than you at finding a way to stop her now.”

“What is her plan?” Min asked.

Pike answered before Parees could. “The bombs were hers, the ones that destroyed Vesta and Io. She’s going to use them to make the sun go nova.”

There was a dumbstruck silence on the bridge, and Walker pressed her lips together. Pike got the sense that she might not have admitted as much out loud, in front of the entire bridge crew. He was coming dangerously close to causing a panic.

“Tel’rabim knows,” Nhean offered. “If the Telestine fleet is engaging the Funders’, it means he’s trying to head her off. He must have realized where she was.” He looked away and his mouth twisted bitterly. “I should have realized. It was the one place I didn’t look. I didn’t see her influence among them until it was too late.”

“She’s been allied with them for a long time,” Parees said quietly. “Do you remember—at the start, they didn’t want you to spend so much money building a fleet. And then she told them to allow it, and to give additional money for it as well. She told them it would be important.”

“Yes, but why?” Walker demanded.

Again, it was Pike who had the answers, though he struggled to bring his thoughts into words. “A Telestine can remotely manipulate a drone, and they can also network easily with other Telestine ships. In order to make sure that her plan couldn’t be interfered with, she put some Telestine programming on human-built computers and gave them Telestine pilots. Daughters of Ascension pilots, specifically. Fanatics. They’re not vulnerable to mind control the way a drone would be, or The Seed virus. She’s the only one who can talk to those ships now.”

Min’s face went ashen. “She took ships from Larsen. Two of them. And we lost three missile frigates at Neptune.”

“They are all hers now,” Parees said. His gaze was far way. “Along with seven others that the Funders Circle provided her with. Twelve. She needed exactly twelve. They will be piloted by her priestesses, seeking ascension. They will already be on their way to the sun—the battle you see now is just to make sure Tel’rabim can not interfere. He thinks the battle is on his terms, but it is actually on hers. She lured him here—his entire fleet. And ours. Everything, every ship, every major player, is here, right now. She wants to be … thorough this time. In their home system, she was sloppy. This time she’s left nothing to chance. This time the nova will be initiated in a very specific geometry that will ensure complete and immediate destruction. It won’t be a nova. It’ll be a supernova. Almost immediate destruction for the entire solar system. There will be no escape, for anyone.”

“They’re iridium bombs, aren’t they?” Walker looked at him.

“Yes.” Nhean frowned. “How did you know that?”

“Doesn’t matter.” she said flatly. “What matters is that they use hydrogen as the catalyst.” She gestured towards the schematics and battle plans spread across the desk, evidence of Min’s attempts to understand the battle he was seeing. “It’s why the bombs at Io and Vesta were so destructive, compared to the ones that hit Telestine Denver and Tokyo. The ones on Earth were launched out in the open. Io’s and Vesta’s were buried deep, where there were high pressures of rock. And it just so happens that rock—”

“Has a very high concentration of hydrogen atoms,” Nhean finished for her. “She doesn’t need a catalyst, the bombs are the catalyst, and the sun is the fuel source. The biggest fuel source there is. I was so sure it was the catalyst she was lacking,” Nhean murmured. “Not the ships. Not the method of delivery. I never thought it would be the ships.”

Parees shuddered. “We don’t have much time.”

Walker opened her mouth, but Nhean cut her off. “Larsen is placed to intercept her, remember?”

“That’s why you really sent him, then?” Walker asked. “I wondered. He gave me some story about Tel’rabim, but it wasn’t that, was it? It was Ka’sagra.”

Min made a small noise, and Nhean and Walker looked at him with almost identical looks of misgiving. It would, Pike thought, have been funny if the same fear weren’t clawing at his insides.

“What?” Nhean asked wearily.

“I told you,” Min whispered. “Larsen only has one ship. He sent word—the Funders hacked two of his with The Seed and took them away. He only had the Arianna King left, and he asked for my help.”

Nhean went very still. “Tell me you sent them. Tell me they’re on their way.”

“He said he wanted them because Tel’rabim was planning to blow us all up!” Min’s voice broke. “Tel’rabim, not Ka’sagra! And Tel’rabim was right here. He was still assembling his entire fleet, he was sending messages to you about his plans for humanity after dealing with Ka’sagra—I figured Larsen was just wrong.” He looked around at all of them. “I thought that with the Telestine fleet gone, we’d have a shot at Earth, so I kept every ship here.” His voice was pleading. “And now Larsen only has one ship….”

He didn’t have to say the rest. There’s no way one ship can stop twelve. They all knew it.

There was a silence. Nhean sank his head into his hands. Walker’s eyes were closed. She looked far older than her years.

“I’m so sorry,” Min whispered.

“It’s my fault,” Nhean said. “I hadn’t wanted to tell the admiral who I was truly afraid of, so I didn’t tell Larsen, either. I told him it was Tel’rabim. If I had—”

“Regrets won’t help us now,” Walker said crisply. Her fingers white-knuckled the desk. “Larsen is our only hope. If he can take out her ships….”

“He can’t.” Nhean was shaking his head. He spoke the truth calmly, carefully. “There’s no way to get all twelve of them. The only way would be to disrupt Ka’sagra’s signal.”

“Do we even know if she has a signal?” Walker demanded.

“She’ll have built one in,” Parees said confidently. “She’ll be prepared to take control of the other ships if their captains have last-minute second thoughts about the ascension.” His confidence seemed to exhaust what little strength he had left, and he appeared to come dangerously close to collapsing where he stood. “She’s seen a lot of people have second thoughts,” he added quietly.

“To disrupt her signal, we’ll need to get onto her ship.” The words were soft. Nhean’s head was tilted. “Or so I would think.” He looked at Pike. “What do those schematics say, the ones that Dawn pilfered for us? Do you know?”

“She was working with networking,” Pike said helplessly. “But I don’t know anything more.”

Parees’s eyes drifted closed. He was clearly communicating with her. “She says we do need to get onto Ka’sagra’s ship. She can’t reach it. She can’t control it. Someone will need to take control from the inside.”

“She?” Walker questioned.

Parees opened his eyes. “The Dawning,” he said, as if it should be self-evident. “I’m in contact with her.”

“So we have to get onto that ship.” Walker looked like she had just received the worst news of her life. “She has a head start. The Telestines have FTL now on their ships, but unfortunately, given the events of the past week, I’ve yet to capture one and have my people reverse engineer the—”

Parees opened his mouth again. “What if we had FTL?”

The bridge went quiet.

“You … have FTL?” Walker asked him blankly.

“Me? No. You?” His gaze flicked between Nhean and Walker. Nhean wasn’t even sure if it was Parees talking, or Dawn. Maybe both. “Yes. The Dawning says it’s easy to implement, it’s very easy, actually. It’s just an adjustment to the Telestine artificial gravity equipment and realigning the phase envelope of the neutrino flux and—” He shook his head. “Not important. I can do it.”

“No.” Nhean’s gave a single shake of his head. “We’re not risking you.”

“Risking me?” Parees’s voice rose. “I’m going to die anyway if she succeeds.” He laughed bitterly. “No, I have to go. How else do you think you’re going to modify that signal?”

“Dawn,” Nhean answered bluntly.

“I can do it,” Parees insisted. He shook his head, as if he was momentarily confused—it must be confusing to speak both for yourself, and simultaneously for someone else. “She’s helping me, but she needs to stay down there in that control room underneath London to talk me through it—there are a lot of moving pieces on the board and she can only keep track of them from there. If you can get me onto Ka’sagra’s ship, the Dawning and I can try to take it down. Or rather, she can do it through me.”

There was a pause, and Nhean’s shoulder’s slumped. “Very well,” he said softly.

“And I’ll go.” To Pike’s surprise, he heard his own voice.

Walker looked at him sharply.

“I can’t defeat Tel’rabim,” Pike said, “but I make pretty good backup for sneaking onto a Telestine ship. Maybe even kick a little ass.” He was flexing his fists and grinning. “No really. I need this.”

To everyone’s surprise, Rychenkov stepped forward. “And I’ll take you.” He paused, and glanced over at Gabriella, who’d stood by the door, silently. “Do you agree?”

She pursed her lips. But nodded. “Yeah. I do.”

Ry nodded back, like they had just resolved a disagreement. Pike made a mental noted to ask what that was all about. But later. Rychenkov continued: “I’ll get you to Larsen’s ship. And Larsen is equipped to be able to get you onto Ka’sagra’s. The Aggy II is one of your fancy Venus ships, so I assume the engines are … upgradeable?” He turned to Parees. “Lapushka? Do you think so?”

Parees inclined his head. “Yes. Yes she thinks so.”

Ry slapped his hands together. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go stop the bitch trying to kill everyone.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Earth, High Orbit

EFS Santa Maria

Shuttle bay

She’d followed them to the shuttle bay, where the Aggy II was spun up and ready for the mission. Rychenkov and Nhean disappeared up the boarding ramp, but Pike stopped before climbing up. He could feel her gaze.

“You’re coming back, aren’t you?” she said.

He couldn’t believe the voice he was hearing those words from. Pike turned to stare at her, her dark hair starting to escape its bun, her uniform dirty. She knew. There was something in her eyes that said she knew, but she didn’t take back the question.

“Laura….”

“Please just say it,” she whispered. Her eyes were dry, but her face was tinged with gray.

“I’m coming back.” He told the lie easily, and she accepted it just as easily, coming to lay her head on his chest.

She gave a shuddering breath and clenched her arms as tight as she could, tightly enough to make him gasp with pain.

“Easy,” he managed. “I’m enough of a gimp with the one arm.”

She laughed and did not raise her head.

“And you’ll make it through this too, right?” he asked her. He realized what the question sounded like a moment later, and revised it. “You’ll be here when I get back?”

She squeezed her arms briefly. “I’ll be here when you get back,” she echoed.

Hard to tell if she was lying. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure whether she knew he had been, too.

Hope was a dangerous thing. Pain be damned, he wrapped both arms around her and rested his lips on the top of her head.

“You know, any other time we might have had a really boring life,” he said against her hair.

She sniffled. “Boring sounds nice.” Then, more quietly, “I wonder what it’s like to get old.”

“We’re going to find out, remember?” He craned his neck to look down at her. “I’ll stop Ka’sagra, come back, you’ll have pulled out some brilliant solution with Dawn to deal with Tel’rabim, and then we’ll settle Earth and I’ll build you a gorgeous cabin in the mountains, and we’ll get old and creaky and complain about our grandkids having no manners.”

She laughed, but her mouth was left gaping open in a sob. She nodded. “Right. Yeah. You’ll have a cane, I bet.”

“I’ll whittle myself a cane. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

She buried her face back in his shirt and he felt her hands clench. “I miss Jack. He was supposed to complain about us first. I was going to learn about complaining from him.” She pulled back and wiped her eyes. “Oh, God. I’m a mess.”

“Hey.” He wiped her tears away with his thumbs. “Jack will be there in spirit every day to help you complain. He’ll haunt the barn, all right?”

“What the hell is a barn?”

He started laughing. It hurt so badly, but if this was the end, there was nothing left but laughing. “You have so much to learn about Earth. So … get crackin’ and make that plan.”

“Right.” She managed a smile, a real one, then held out her hand. “Meet you back here in a few days?”

“In a few days,” he agreed. He clasped her hand and shook it on the agreement. “And if you get a sec—you know, during all the conquering and ass-kicking—look up flowers and tell me what you want in the garden. I’ll make it happen.” He was backing away, hands in his pockets.

If he kissed her again, he wouldn’t leave.

She nodded. And then, knowing he was watching, she gave a little wave and turned to slip back into the hallways. She didn’t look back—just as if she would see him in a few hours, everything entirely normal. As if they didn’t need to catch every last glimpse of one another. You had to watch her very carefully to see the tension, her choice not to turn back.

But he knew her very, very well.

He turned to meet Nhean’s eyes, where the man was lingering in the Aggy II’s doorway.

Time to go, the man’s eyes said.

Pike did not glance back to where he might see Walker lingering. He ducked onto the Aggy II and kept his face turned away as the door came down between them.

He hoped to God he was making the right decision.

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

Earth, High Orbit

Lieutenant McAllister’s Fighter

He wouldn’t be able to follow them once they really got going, but that wasn’t his job—he was here to give them a chance, nothing more. McAllister came alongside the Aggy II and waggled the wings of his fighter. He saw Nhean give a thumbs up through the Aggy II’s viewport, and he returned the gesture.

He wasn’t quite sure what to think of this. His part of the mission was simple enough that he hadn’t questioned it … and then he had caught a glimpse of the admiral walking away from the shuttle bay with suspiciously bright eyes, and heard from a disgusted deck liaison that the man who’d destroyed Vesta had been on the bridge … and had been allowed to leave again.

Now he wasn’t quite sure what was going on. He flipped the button for the comm channel and, after a moment, decided not to press it.

What was he going to say, anyway? Are you two coming back from this alive?

That seemed like the sort of thing one didn’t ask.

There had to be a good reason, anyway. The admiral had just lost Jack Delaney. She wasn’t going to lose anyone else if she could help it.

The battle between the Funders’ fleet and the Telestines was starting to get into full swing, and McAllister guided the Aggy II around the very far edge of things. The battle even looked pretty from out here: no noise of course, just flashes of fire and bursts of light across the silver hulls.

When the first missile came in, it was possible enough that it was a mistake, some shot gone wild as a ship turned into formation. McAllister flipped his comm on.

“Swerve up to avoid—it’s not reading as guided.”

“Will do.” Nhean’s voice was very level. “Thank you for helping us with this, McAllister. It’s much appreciated.”

“Of course,” McAllister said awkwardly. He really felt as if he should know what he was helping with before accepting thanks for it. He watched as the missile streaked underneath them and off into the black. Would it ever stop, he wondered? Drawn into a gravity well, impacting an asteroid? Or would it just go forever?

That was a disturbing thought. Missiles could be traveling all around, thrown from battles in distant galaxies.

And … there were three more missiles now. Definitely not a mistake, and these ones were guided.

“You put on some speed,” McAllister instructed. “I’m going to get between you and them and try to draw them off. If you see anything new, you let me know.”

“Will do. Those are missiles from the Pius. Looks like Ka’sagra has ordered the Funders to not let us head out without a fight.” Nhean sounded cautious now.

McAllister hugged the Aggy II in a quick turn and pulled alongside the shuttle for a moment as it accelerated. The missiles wavered, confused and seeking, and then locked onto his ship as the guidance systems found a new target.

Excellent. He shot upwards and they followed, one exploding almost immediately against the countermeasures he’d dropped.

The other two, unfortunately, kept coming. McAllister did a loop-de-loop with a little grin of amusement and shot right under the tails of the two missiles. By twisting his ship up and around, he got a clear shot at one of them. He only just managed to bank again in time to keep the third missile from locking onto the Aggy II again, and he was just readying for another loop-de-loop when his screen lit up.

Nine missiles, all guided.

These people weren’t playing around. Whatever the hell Nhean and Pike were doing, someone either knew or suspected—otherwise, this was an awful lot of munitions to waste on one lonely little ship the size of the Aggy II. McAllister whipped around as fast as he dared and let loose a stream of bullets. The third missile exploded and he sailed through the debris with a wince, unable to turn away quickly enough.

He was going to get hell from the deck crew for the damage.

And in the meantime, he had nine more missiles to deal with—probably more, if the ships shooting at them had anything to say about it.

“Don’t suppose you could start accelerating now?” he called over the comms. “If things continue the way they are—” he broke off for a moment as he guided his ship through the space between two missiles “—I’m not going to be enough to help you for much longer.”

There was a pause, filled with some low voiced muttering.

“We’ll start accelerating,” Nhean’s voice came back. “Will you be able to make it back to the Santa Maria?”

“Don’t you worry about me,” McAllister said. He knew he sounded cocky. He never felt quite so alive as during a battle. “I do stuff like this all the—shit.”

Eight more, and they were heading right for the Aggy II.

“Go! Now!”

To his relief, they listened to him. The Aggy II began to accelerate.

But so did the missiles.

He didn’t have time to make any other choice. The missiles were going to outstrip him in a few seconds. McAllister slammed the thrusters to full bore and did the only thing he could do. He turned his ship sideways between the missile spread and the Aggy II.

At least it was going to be quick. In the split-second that seemed to stretch forever as he turned to stare down the missiles, his lips formed one last thought: Arianna. I’m coming.

As his ship burst into debris, the Aggy II behind him shot into FTL in a blaze of multi-colored light. When the next set of guided missiles arrived a few seconds later, they continued on into the darkness, seeking the two targets they had lost.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

Inside Mercury’s Orbit

Aggy II

Cockpit

Traveling at FTL speeds seemed to do funny things to his brain. Pike was sure he had just looked back over his shoulder to try to catch one last glimpse of McAllister’s fighter, and then he was looking around again and the sun was blinding and Larsen’s ship was alongside them while Nhean guided his along the starboard viewing window and began a series of pings.

“McAllister didn’t make it….” Pike murmured, and Nhean looked over in surprise.

“Oh, you’re back.”

“Huh?”

“I think you blacked out.” Nhean tilted his head. “I think I might have blacked out, too. But the trip also seemed pretty long. I don’t know.” He considered for a moment. “I didn’t try to help you,” he said at last, “so you can’t have been out that long.”

“How long was the trip?” Pike asked blearily.

Nhean tapped the clock that was now flashing entirely different numbers each second. He grinned. “No way to know. We made the ship go fast all right, but the rest of the systems don’t seem set up to handle it.” He gave a nod of satisfaction as the location map stopped flickering. “Ah, at least it figured out where we are, other than ‘near the Arianna King.’” He looked over at the window. “And they see us.”

“Didn’t we send a message?”

“Yes, but Larsen is … well, I’d say excessively cautious, but given current events, that’s probably rational.” Nhean nodded. “They’re opening the shuttle bay doors. That’s a good sign. Look alive. We have a ship to intercept—not too long now, unless I miss my guess.”

Parees appeared nervous as they docked. His too-thin frame was almost physically painful to look at, and it was clear that he was carrying on only by force of will. He was shaking when he pulled himself up out of the chair to follow Pike and Nhean onto the flight deck of the King.

They were met with a spread of sidearms, but Larsen dropped his as soon as he saw who it was, and gave a shrug. “Can’t blame us for being cautious,” he said, as he holstered his weapon. “Especially when you came out of nowhere. Did you get cloaking or something?”

“FTL, believe it or not. And we’ll need to dock with another ship slowing down from similar speeds. Pike and Parees can start preparing the docking clamp while we talk.” Nhean nodded to the engine room. “We have to move quickly. Someone come find me if any other ships appear—they should all be human frigates, I believe. They may or may not read as heavily armed.”

The crew waited for Larsen’s affirmation, and then hurried away to the bridge.

“Is she alive?” The question was tense, spilling out as soon as they were alone.

“She’s alive.” Pike knew the man’s fear all too well. “The ship crashed, but Laura’s alive.”

“My God. How many—”

“Delaney. McAllister. And many others.” He watched the color drain from Larsen’s face, and then he took his tools and followed Parees while the conversation continued behind him.

“We don’t have much time,” Nhean said quietly. “Min got your message, but he had Tel’rabim pinned down—he didn’t realize it was really Ka’sagra. That was my fault, I was trying to keep the admiral from learning everything I knew.”

“Why?” Larsen demanded instantly.

Nhean, to Pike’s surprise, did not mention Walker’s plan. “It was a mistake, let’s leave it at that. Now. Ka’sagra is on her way with twelve bombs that use hydrogen as a catalyst—that means they must not get to the sun. They cannot, as far as I can tell, be remotely defused. So what we need to do is get onto her ship. Which means we need to dock with her ship and enter.” He paused. “Preferably without her realizing we’re there.”

There was a pause.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Larsen asked finally.

Nhean paused—not for drama, Pike suspected, but to make sure Larsen was really paying attention to the answer.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to defuse the bombs in time to get off the ship.”

There was a very long silence.

“You want my crew to sacrifice their lives as a boarding party,” Larsen said quietly.

“We could leave them on the King,” Nhean suggested. “As soon as they know we’re handling it, they, at least, could get out. I think that would work.”

“And you need me because … he’s broken?” Larsen’s voice carried its usual ugly edge as he mentioned Pike.

Pike gave him a look over his shoulder and found Larsen’s eyes lingering on the sling.

There was a pause. “And the admiral sent you to do this?” Larsen asked him point blank.

Pike looked away, swallowing. “I volunteered.” He glanced back at Larsen, who was staring at him, motionless.

“Ah,” Larsen said finally.

“Sir?” A voice came over the comms. “A human frigate does seem to be coming within Mercury’s orbit. Sensors indicate extremely rapid deceleration.”

“Thank you, Greer. Move us into position and speed to dock with it. Assume the other ship will not be willing.” Larsen’s voice was crisp. “All personnel are to stay aboard the King unless I give explicit instructions to follow, or unless no message is received back within twenty minutes. Once I give the all-clear, you are to de-dock and go back to Earth. Ramius will have the conn. Is that understood?”

“Aye, sir,” said Greer.

“Aye, sir,” Ramius added.

Pike stood up, wiping off his hands.

“You’re really taking this rather well,” Nhean observed behind him.

“When I lost the other two ships, I determined that I was very likely going to die for this mission,” Larsen said simply. “This is only a variation on the theme, and I have the chance to save my crew.” He paused. “Did the admiral have any instructions for me?”

There was an awkward silence.

Pike cleared his throat. “She asked me to thank you for continuing this mission,” he lied. “She understood the temptation to come back with the fleet. She wanted you to know there would be no chance of survival without you being here.” It was true enough, he supposed.

Larsen stared at him, his face inscrutable. Pike wasn’t sure if the man could tell he was lying, but after a moment, he nodded. “Thank you.” His voice sounded odd.

Pike looked around himself, patting his pockets. “So are we ready?” he asked as he turned to head out.

“No,” he heard Larsen say, and then something hit the back of Pike’s head, hard, and the world went dark.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

Near Earth

Aggy II

Cockpit

He woke sometime later and his first, resentful thought was that now his collarbone and the back of his head hurt.

He wasn’t tied up. He had sort of expected to be. Pike pushed himself up and looked around for Larsen’s sneering face and the inevitable accusations of treason. He should, he told himself, have expected Larsen’s feelings of spite to fester.

Larsen wasn’t there, however. No one was there. His vision was a little bit blurry—he probably had a concussion, dammit all—and all Pike could make out at first was that he was alone in a small room.

His head really did seem to be all over the place. The next thing Pike knew, he was sitting back on the floor, leaning up against one broken wall—he’d fallen over the first time he tried to lean on it—and staring down fuzzily at a scrap of paper. The words slid around for a very long time, absolutely refusing to make any sort of sense.

His quarters. The Aggy II. He was back in his quarters. Why?

He tackled the task of reading in small steps. The note was handwritten, not printed out. The scrawl was unsteady. What did that mean? Pike strained to think. His next thought was noticing the sensation that he had passed out again.

What had he been wondering about?

The note. He looked down at it. He could making out a few words before they fled his comprehension again: Lose. Happen. Her. Care. Just a jumble in his mind—how bad had he been hit?

“We’re going back to Earth,” said a voice.

Rychenkov?

What the—

He tried to sit up.

“Why?”

“It’s in the note. Larsen was pretty insistent you get it.” Ry stood up from the chair he’d been seated in and left Pike in his quarters.

The note. He turned to look for it and crawled over to where it had fallen on the floor.

I know what it would do to her to lose you. I can’t let that happen. Not again. Please take care of her. Please be everything she deserves.

Pike slumped back against the wall. The note fluttered out of his hands and slipped silently onto the floor. The note wasn’t signed, but he knew very well who had written it.

To his shame, he felt his eyes stinging. He bent his face into one hand and clenched the other, breathing hard to try to drive the lump in his throat away. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go, and the magnitude of the change was too much for him to understand.

There was a beeping, and he raised his head reflexively.

“Proximity alert,” the computer informed him. “You are within one hundred thousand kilometers of Earth. Pursuant to the Treaty of Exodus, please adjust your course. Proximity alert, you are approaching Earth. Pursuant to the Treat of Exodus, please adjust your course. Proximity alert…”

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Inside Mercury’s Orbit

VSF Arianna King

Marine Staging Area

And right on schedule, the Arianna King’s long-range sensors detected a ship racing in at ungodly speeds from the direction of Earth. It was Ka’sagra. It must be, thought Nhean. She had finished setting up the battle at Earth, ensuring Tel’rabim would be sufficiently distracted, at least for long enough to finish her plan, decades in the making.

It had been a tricky maneuver to come alongside Ka’sagra’s ship as it decelerated from such high speeds, but destroyer helmsmen, trained for quick combat and maneuverability above all, were some of the best of the best. They did it, and the docking clamps were coming down now onto the other ship, drilling in viciously into the hull and latching in.

“Unreciprocated docking” was the military term for what they were doing, and it was a move usually confined to pirates. While the techniques were crude enough, it was something most Exile Fleet members knew about, as they’d had to defend against it before.

Larsen inspected his assault rifle. He looked like he knew what he was doing, but Nhean couldn’t help but wonder how much close quarters combat experience a fleet officer had. Nhean fiddled with his own firearm, which he’d grabbed last minute as they left the Arianna King. It seemed like a futile gesture to arm himself given the circumstances, but he was glad for the distraction. Nhean felt like he now had learned the main thing about military operations: there was a lot of waiting involved. Parees, curled up in one corner with his arms wrapped around his knees, did not seem to be taking the waiting very well. His knees were bouncing urgently.

“I assume she can’t see us,” Larsen said finally.

It was Parees who answered. “I don’t think so. The Dawning is doing what she can. She knows we’re here, she knows we’re latching onto her ship, but she can’t even fathom that the Dawning knows how to stop her. The Dawning has….” His eyes blazed. “Considerable power now. We shall see if it’s enough.”

It should sound dehumanizing, Nhean thought, to talk about the girl that way—but when Parees said it, it sounded reverent.

It sounded like a title.

There was another silence, and Nhean looked over at Larsen again. “It was a good thing, what you did.” He’d seen what it cost the other man to go to his death and know that his rival would reap the rewards. He remembered Larsen’s quiet words as he stood over Pike’s prone form: his arm was in a sling, he would only have slowed us down.

But that wasn’t why he’d done it, and they all knew that.

Larsen fixed his eyes on the docking portal. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

A hollow metal screech indicated that the docking portal on the other ship was opening, willing or not, and both men peered into the window at the end of the docking tube.

“Are you ready?” Larsen asked Nhean. His eyes flicked critically over Nhean’s suit, and lingered on the bruises that dotted Parees’s pale arms.

“I’m ready.” He was hardly going to take the time to change at this juncture.

“Can Dawn tell how many Telestines are over there?”

Parees closed his eyes. “Three. Ka’sagra, and two assistants.”

Larsen swung the door of the docking capsule open and climbed inside, and Nhean climbed in after him and pulled the door shut. There was a shudder before the capsule started to move down the docking tube.

The docking pod reached the other end of the tube and the pressure changed slightly to equalize. Larsen scanned the hallway outside and opened the door without another word or ready check. He stood guard as Nhean climbed down behind him and helped Parees into the ship.

“You know where you’re going?” Larsen didn’t look back at the two of them.

Parees nodded.

“Yes. I’ll see you later, I hope….” Nhean broke off at the absurdity. He likely wouldn’t see Larsen again. There would hardly be time before the ship was consumed in heat. “Good luck,” he said finally. He was strangely calm now. He reviewed the plan in his mind. While Larsen took Parees to the computer core that would allow him—and Dawn—into the control system that would enable them to redirect or destroy the other eleven ships, he would go in search of the bomb itself and disable it. Hopefully, the schematic Dawn had found was the right one, and hopefully, he could disable it in time.

But disabling the bomb wasn’t strictly necessary. His primary role was to lure the two assistants away from the bridge. With any luck, his distraction would then induce Ka’sagra herself to go down there. And if she didn’t fall for it, well, that’s what Larsen’s other role was: get to the bridge and distract her long enough to let Parees and Dawn do their thing.

Larsen turned to look at him at last, and there was an answering smile on his face. It was an odd thing, sharing this moment. “You, too,” he said, with real warmth.

Nhean turned, and followed Parees down the halls. It wasn’t far to the computer terminals, and it seemed like only a few seconds before Parees was kneeling on the ground, hands pressed against the computer, lips moving silently. Whether he was repeating Dawn’s commands, or actually talking with her, Nhean didn’t know. He felt a terrible sense of frustration build in his blood.

Come on. The Dawning. Whatever she’d been made to be, she had to be more than that now. Come on, come on, come on.

He settled down into a crouch, his hands sweaty on the stock of his rifle, and scanned the hallways outside.

If Ka’sagra had even the faintest idea that they were here … she would throw everything she had at them.

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

Earth, High Orbit

EFS Santa Maria

Bridge

Walker strode onto a scene of battle chaos on the bridge. The mood immediately calmed somewhat when she stood next to the command station—her people automatically saw her as a calming, authoritative presence—but the tension was palpable.

“What’s our status, Mr. Delan—” She caught herself. Good Lord. Rest in peace, my friend, she thought. “My apologies, Mr. Min. What’s our status?”

Min squinted slightly, a look of pain and regret at Delaney’s memory, but he focused on his duty. “All remaining Exile Fleet ships under our control are standing by. The Funders’ fleet, under the command of Captain George, is engaging with the main body of the Telestine military. Both sides taking heavy damage.” He glanced up again. “But, ma’am, I don’t see how they stand a chance in this alone.”

She wanted to pound the command console. It was all so unnecessary. The fate of both races was now being decided aboard a little ship just a few million kilometers from the sun. And it was all completely out of her control. Well, not completely. Her eyes drifted to a certain little button on her keyboard, one that was linked to something far down below, under kilometers of ocean. “Open a channel to Tel’rabim.”

After a few moments, Min nodded towards her. “You’re on, ma’am.”

“Tel’rabim, we’ve got to stop this. Stand down, or you will be destroyed.” She grit her teeth, thinking of the bomb she had hidden away in the Marianas trench. The massive water pressure—and thus hydrogen—at that depth would ensure a blast at least ten times larger than the Io explosion. “Trust me on this one, Tel’rabim. Cease fire, or I will rain down fire and horror on your cities the likes of which you’ve never seen.”

His face finally appeared on the screen.

Even through the alien visage, she could see the hate.

“Walker. I’ve been listening in on transmissions among your fleet’s ships. I know now that your upper leadership has been collaborating with Ka’sagra. They helped her. They’ve aided and abetted her. Two of our cities are destroyed because of her, and your so-called Funders Circle.” He shook his head as if in heavy regret. “No. I think not. I think I will destroy this fleet and Ka’sagra with it. And after that, I will come after you.”

He cut the transmission before she could respond.

And her finger edged ever closer to that certain key on her console’s keyboard. She’d already typed in the initiation code, and now it just had to be sent. All their problems, all solved, all at once.

Dawn, through Parees, had adjusted the settings of the Aggy II’s antigravity projectors, and coupled them directly into the engines. Somehow, seemingly magically, this enabled FTL.

And her team of engineers had discretely watched every step.

She had FTL. There, on her ship. On every ship of the Exile Fleet. They could ditch this battle, head off to the colonies, grab every single person they could fit onto the ships, and get the hell out, leaving the Telestines to their doom.

All with a tap of a button.

“Ma’am? The Telestine fleet has split the Neptune fleet’s formation in half. The lower portion is in a crossfire between two wings of Tel’rabim’s forces. And … there goes Captain George’s ship.”

Explosions ripped through the Pius, and seconds later, it was glowing slag expanding into a dissipating cloud.

So now the Funders’ stolen fleet was without a leader.

Those were her people, mostly. Without a leader. Her people, getting slaughtered.

She looked down at the green and blue siren call of Earth. She remembered those impossibly green hills that she’d walked with Pike. Those trees and bushes, and … that smell. The smell of … freshness. Of leaves and grass. Damn you, Pike, for taking me there. Damn you, Nhean.

Her thoughts shifted to Pike and Nhean, now engaged in a deadly fight to save them all. On a trip that was likely one-way. Heroes, the both of them.

“All hands, prepare for battle. We’re not going to let those assholes take it on the nose. They may be traitors, but their our traitors. And they’ll face justice where it belongs. In a courtroom on Mars at the UN. Mr. Min, I’d like a whole lot of guns to shoot right now, if you please.”

The bridge electrified with activity. Captain Min shouted orders to the gunnery crews while the comm station officers scattered the orders to the rest of the fleet.

Walker stayed at the command post and sketched out a quick battle plan for her commanders. “Exile Fleet, this is Admiral Walker. Our civilization stands or falls on our actions today.” She glanced down at the button that was hot-keyed to initiate the Marianas Trench bomb. There was still the fall-back. She could liberate them once and for all. “Do your duty. Do it like you’ve never done it before, and we will prevail.”

Min glanced up at her in what looked like mild surprise at her firm assurance of victory. “I promise,” she added.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

Near Sun

VSF Svalbard

Bridge

Larsen found Ka’sagra on the bridge of her ship, alone. He caught himself—it wasn’t her ship, it was their ship. The Venus Sovereign Fleet ship Svalbard, stolen from under his nose just days ago.

She had set the screens to display the sun as her ship glided towards its yellow glow, and the blaze of light put her figure in silhouette: tall and graceful, dressed in ornamental robes.

She turned to look at him as he raised his gun. “Why have you come?”

“To stop you.” He saw no reason to lie about that part, even if the more accurate phrase would be, to distract you.

She regarded him with those flat eyes, and he felt a chill creep down his spine. “Do you not want to ascend, soldier? Are the heavens not preferable to the dreary world that exists now?” She smiled. “By the way, my technician will be taking care of your friend in the missile bay. What do you think of that?”

Good. She thought their main target was the bomb itself. He acted on instinct. She was getting into his head. Rather than answer, he shot her. Or rather, he tried.

The gun clicked. He pulled the trigger again. Another click.

Shit, shit, shit. He was beginning to think they were walking into a trap.

“Fear of death is the ultimate test of any species, do you not see it? Humans and Telestines are not so different in that way.”

He lifted the gun up and examined it. “What the hell…?”

She took a step towards him. “Electrodynamics is a wonderful, beautiful thing, my dear brother. Did you know that an electromagnetic pulse, at the appropriate frequency, phase, and amplitude can disable even these crude weapons?” Before he could even react, her hand lashed out and knocked the gun out of his.

He took a step back. She advanced.

“A sentient species has one purpose, soldier: to achieve enlightenment.” Her voice rose and fell, imitating the cadence of human speech, but it was a flawed imitation; underneath, he could hear an eerie, alien smoothness that froze the blood pounding in his ears. “And what is enlightenment but leaving behind the bonds of our lives? To be free of want and desire? Be born, live, breed, die. Do you think this is all there is?”

He wouldn’t listen to this. He dove behind a console near the back of the bridge and rolled, grabbing the gun she’d knocked out of his hands. Maybe it would work after cooling off a few minutes….

She slammed into him from behind and his gun went clattering away again. The force of the blow sent him reeling and he tried to lash out at her, but he only caught her with a glancing blow. He looked back up, blood running from the corner of his mouth, and she was staring down at him like a statue.

“I mourned my failure in our home system.” Her voice hardened momentarily. “It was years of your time before we found you and my purpose again became clear. Do you know what it is like to live in doubt for so long, soldier?”

He drove forward, and this time the impact held more force. He managed to disrupt her equilibrium and knock her over. She was up and out of reach within a moment, though, grabbing his throat and twisting as she walked forward, lifting him in the air, glancing dismissively at his flailing legs.

She dropped him. He doubled over on the floor, wheezing for air. The ground shuddered beneath him again and then went quiet.

“You left your soldiers on your ship,” she observed. “You thought to spare them, but instead you doom them. Enlightenment only comes to those species who together forgo the bonds of mortal life and rise to the heavens. When I found humanity, I realized that my first attempt at ascension had been denied for just this purpose. So that we could ascend … together.”

Larsen spat blood onto the metal floor. “You’re insane.” The ship shook and he looked up at her, still standing there with that infuriating smirk. “You’re insane,” he told her again.

“I would save you all,” Ka’sagra said, even louder this time. Her voice was rising to a crescendo. Good Lord, he thought. She actually believes this shit. “When we are in the heavens together, when this plane of existence has melted away, you will see the kindness I have done you.”

“I like this plane of existence just fine.” He pulled out his utility knife, snapped the blade out, and hurled it with all his strength.

It dug deep into her abdomen. Excellent. First blood might not be his, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t do some damage. She fell back as he pressed closer.

“You think you enjoy this life,” she coughed as she spat a wad of deep red blood onto the floor—it unnerved him that Telestine blood was red too, though why it would be different he had no idea. She was panting in pain. “It is your fear that tells you that. Fear keeps you captive in your body, a slave to desire in all its forms. Existence is the ultimate test of a species. Can you give it up? Are you willing to do what must be done to gain everything?”

“No! For the love of God, no!” He put his hands up to stop her assault, but even with the blood seeping out from her abdominal wound, she was inhumanly fast. And inhumanly strong.

He was pinned the next moment, with her alien face snarling down into his.

Suddenly, she fell silent. She froze, Larsen pinned beneath her alien arms for what seemed like an eternity. And then her face changed.

“Oh. I see,” she said quietly. “She’s here, isn’t she? That little abomination. You were sent to keep me from noticing her.”

Larsen couldn’t help but smile. “Surprise.”

A smile spread on her face. “You have no idea what you are playing with,” she breathed. “None.” Her fist lashed out onto the side of his head, and he blacked out.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

Earth

London

The London Library

The problem wasn’t the program itself that Ka’sagra had designed to control her twelve ships, though that was finicky enough that she wanted to scream. It was keyed to Ka’sagra’s mind as well as her bioscans, but it was possible to see, at least, the command she had been prepared to send. It was possible to understand how the High Priestess planned to control the ships, should their Daughters of Ascension pilots have last minute crises of faith. That wasn’t the problem.

No, the problem was her reach. Without being able to use the ships’ own broadcast signals, she would have to touch each ship on her own, and sending her thoughts all the way across the millions of kilometers to Parees was hard enough. Sending commands was harder. Because it wasn’t just commands—it was a communication protocol. Send and receive. Data downloaded to her mind was processed, went through a decision flow, and then commands were sent. Rinse and repeat.

Trying to use Parees as a conduit to get to all of Ka’sagra’s ships … was proving impossible.

She was able to get to one, with brute force, shoving the commands through Parees’s mind so hard that she felt his hands spasm on the slick wall of the computer terminal.

But that was only one. There were ten left besides Ka’sagra’s ship itself, and she did not have the reach to touch them all.

She needed more.

She needed to be more.

So she reached out. Above. Below. All around her. Computers, networks, servers, mainframes, zeros and ones and electrons and impulses. She looked at them, saw them as crude devices, looked away, then looked again, and they were more. Much more. They were wavefunctions and quantum mechanics and Schroedinger equations and Pauli exclusion principles and a fine, delicate dance of math and reality.

More. She needed to be more. She had to be, if she wanted to stop Ka’sagra.

So more she would be.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

Near Sun

VSF Svalbard

Bridge

He was on the ship. That broken drone, the one who had slid too far into human thought to be useful. Parees. Ka’sagra had only felt the most fleeting presence, but it was enough. Her hand smashed down across the soldier’s face and he lay quiet, blood dripping from his nose.

She stared down at him for a moment. Her chest was heaving. Her life-blood was seeping away. They thought they could change it all now? They could never hope to.

But she knew that was wrong. Fear was now pumping in her veins. She knew of Tel’rabim’s labs, and she knew that the Dawning had been freed, living among the humans, learning things it should never have learned.

A thought nagged at her: it was still possible that these pesky little humans would stop all of this. They were in her computer systems, and if they could find a flaw—

The drone couldn’t do it on his own. That thought came with startling clarity. The Dawning was the linchpin of their plan, and she was not invulnerable. In fact, Ka’sagra had a very good idea of just where she was. She reached out, and she felt her. Perfect. How perfect. How poetic. She was holed up in the very place Ka’sagra herself built as the interface into the Temple of Knowledge—the place Tel’rabim so callously called, the archives.

How fitting that her interface was directly under the city. The city’s massive inverted peak pointing directly down to where the Dawning was now, helpless.

She checked to make sure the soldier was still unconscious, and then she drew her robes to the side as she swept past him. Humans were necessary for her ascension, she had come to accept that, but it didn’t mean she had to like them.

Dirty, stupid, stubborn things. As devoted to life as their Telestine counterparts, and infinitely more unpredictable.

She smiled. After her handiwork on Tokyo and Denver, Tel’rabim had spent incredible time and resources to protect London from any stray ships. He was so desperate to search the archives, and so sure that her destruction would come with a bomb on a shuttle, that he had not even thought to prepare for other possibilities.

And she always had another plan up her sleeve.

Ka’sagra pressed the button and watched the chain reactions play out across the screen. It was a marvelous feat of engineering that kept the cities afloat, it really was.

Unfortunately, it was very, very easy to disrupt. A mis-calibrated graviton emitter here, a mismatched quantum phase envelope there. And the whole artificial gravity containment well was compromised, and then … gone.

And Telestine London fell. The inverted tear drop descended like someone had caught the aftermath of a stone being thrown into a pool of water on video, and then played it in reverse. The droplet was an entire city that looked like it should be flying up, but instead it sank down, down, down. And the Dawning would never escape the inexorable, crushing weight of Telestine London as it demolished her, grinding her into the very earth she had been so desperate to save. Yes, even she, the Dawning, Tel’rabim’s abomination, would ascend. Soon, all of Telestine London would ascend with her; Ka’sagra blessed their names.

She turned back to the soldier. The Dawning would no longer be a problem. Now, she could deal with this human at her leisure. It would be best that he go to the ascension without fear. Her personal distaste for his species mustn’t prevent her from doing her duty as a high priestess.

She knelt by his side and shook his shoulder.

“Wake up,” she said softly. “Soon you will be in heaven, my dear soldier.”

Soon, we’ll all ascend. Together.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

Earth

London

The London Library

The sky above them was falling.

One of the drones, released from Ka’sagra’s orders, stumbled sideways and attempted to bash the girl against the desk.

She stopped him with a thought, and he froze there motionless, hand still raised to strike her.

The antigravity that kept Telestine London in the air had completely failed. The giant spike pointing down from the bottom of the city was directly overhead. One small part of her brain, of her ever-expanding being, did the calculation. Oh, how perfect. The tip of the spike was currently aimed exactly three point four two centimeters from her left ventricle, and falling rapidly.

Another part of her mind tried to figure out what had just happened. Ka’sagra had sensed her—and she was responding with as great a lack of delicacy as she ever had. Why just kill the girl, when she could kill an entire city?

And, of course, why stop at one city when she could take out an entire solar system? The old Dawn would have snarled in anger. The new Dawn accepted it, calmly and serenely.

There was nothing to be done, nothing at all. There wouldn’t be a way to turn those antigravity projectors back on completely before the city slammed down onto the ground, with her under it. Pulverized into dust. She had, what, another few seconds?

Six point five two seconds, to be exact.

Now, six point five one.

Six point five.

Six point four nine seconds.

She made her preparations. She reached further and higher and deeper than she ever had. And, right at the four point nine nine eight two seconds mark, she did it. She reached out, and as if with the tips of her fingers, she delicately plucked out the right code, the correct combination of orders that would simultaneously reach into each of the eleven ships Ka’sagra controlled, and overload their engines.

No. Mustn’t destroy the ships. The mono-isotopic iridium would eventually drift down and possibly initiate chain reactions. Smaller, but chain reactions all the same.

No. She needed to get rid of the bombs completely.

Four point nine nine eight one.

Four point nine nine eight zero.

Time was slipping through her fingers at an alarming rate. Less than five seconds now.

The solution presented itself. Intuitively. As if one small portion of one part of an ancillary section of her brain made the connection all on its own.

Another, more sarcastic part of her brain added the flourish.

FTL those bitches out of there.

Four point nine nine seven nine nine.

Four point nine nine seven nine eight.

Tick tock, Dawn, time’s ticking, she thought. A stretch, a poke here, a shove there, and few quadrillion calculations later, and she figured out the right FTL course for all eleven ships to send them deep among the stars, and they darted away. Only one left: Ka’sagra’s. That one would be up to Nhean, Parees, and Larsen.

Humanity was safe.

The Telestines were safe.

Both parts of her heritage, safe.

Four point nine nine seven two seconds.

Four point nine nine seven one seconds.

Four point nine nine seven zero seconds.

Good God, this was taking forever. She knew she’d never be able to move her human body out of the way in time, but that didn’t make the wait any less excruciating.

***

As the entirety of the city slammed down onto the ruins of Human London, skyscrapers and support struts meeting in a shriek of metal and splintering against one another, buildings above shattering, the raw force of the impact smashing flesh and bone into a pulp, the girl … died. And all the drones around her. And thousands of Telestines and drones above her.

But in her final act, in the trillions of picoseconds she had left, she managed to restart the antigravity generators. Not all at once, and certainly not at full intensity. But as a result, the city collided with the ground with far less force than it would have.

At least, that was what the computers recorded. The thousands upon thousands of computer cores and memory banks above and in orbit and all over the Earth. Some recording the seismic reading, some recording actual video. Such an important milestone in the history of humanity and in the history of Telestine culture must be documented, of course.

Religions would be born, beliefs would spring, and a new dawning of knowledge would shine from this moment—some of these computers came to this conclusion. Other operating systems decided that was illogical. Others didn’t think anything at all. One computer played solitaire and designed a machine that would print books. Paper books. For gifts, of course.

But most decided something new, something singularly unique had just happened.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

Near Sun

VSF Svalbard

Bridge

Ka’sagra watched, her fury rising like a storm, as the other eleven ships leaped away, out of her reach. She could not even feel her sisters aboard. They were … gone. Not even in the solar system.

It was not possible. How—?

She took a breath, and forced herself to calm.

“Fine. You have only made the ascension a little slower for us all.”

The soldier called Larsen, now awake, sniffed at the blood pouring from its nose. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

She smiled serenely, and touched the crude human buttons on the console to initiate the comm signal to both Nhean down below, and to Walker, and to her dear, dear friend, Tel’rabim.

He’d want to hear this too.

“Laura Walker. Nhean Tang. You have failed. You think you have succeeded, but you have only prolonged our ascension by scant hours. There is enough iridium 191 aboard this ship to cause a chain reaction as large as the one that engulfed our own sun. I should know. I was there. I failed then, but I will not fail now. I had hoped all twelve of my ships would reach the sun’s surface simultaneously and result in a supernova that would then mercifully reach you in mere minutes, but … alas.”

Larsen had been reaching for something nearby, and she kicked him in the face. He groaned.

“Soon, a coronal mass ejection the size of ten Jupiters will speed outward from the sun at one tenth of the speed of light. It will reach you in an hour and a half. It will reach the rest of humanity in a day, at most.” She sighed in delight. “Finally. We will all ascend. Together. And Walker, Tang, and dear, dear Tel’rabim, I thank you. It would not have been possible without you three, especially. Until we meet in the heavens.”

She pressed the buttons that would initiate the final acceleration burn into the sun.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

Near Sun

VSF Svalbard

Engine Compartment

Nhean looked down in disgust at his handiwork. Two Daughters of Ascension priestesses dead, a bullet each through the head.

They’d tried to use some sort of EM pulse to disable his gun. Fortunately, one of the last things Schroeder had made for him before he delivered the Venus fleet to Walker was an EM resistant firearm. Nhean had known that the Telestines had the technical ability to disarm through EM pulses, and the development of a firearm resistant to that tech had seemed prudent. He’d grabbed it from the weapons locker on the Arianna King, almost as an afterthought. Good thing, too.

He almost hadn’t, remembering the gore from the last time he’d shot a Telestine. He was not a soldier. He was no superhero.

But he was one smart, wily fellow, goddammit.

He’d been standing outside the launch tube when Ka’sagra made her announcement. The missile launch tube, which, unfortunately, was right next to the power core.

The engine compartment was shielded from the core’s massive radiation output, of course.

The launch tube was not.

“Until we meet in the heavens.” Ka’sagra’s final farewell grated on his ears.

He opened the launch tube. The radiation alarm blared inside the engine compartment—the levels were so high that he knew, even though he couldn’t feel the effects yet, that he’d already signed his death warrant.

“Not today, Ka’sagra. I’m afraid you’ll be going alone.”

He pulled himself into the launch tube and shut it behind him.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

Near Sun

VSF Svalbard

Bridge

His eyes had opened to slits when she suddenly pushed herself away from him and ran from the desk.

He wasn’t sure what she was doing, but he knew that if Ka’sagra wanted to do something, he didn’t want her to succeed.

She made her little speech, something about the nova still being on, and Larsen shoved himself up off the floor and tackled her sideways away from the desk. His head came down hard on the metal grating of the floor and he yelled in pain, but he hung on.

“I’ve won.” Ka’sagra’s long fingers had found his throat and were squeezing against it. His hands scrabbled weakly at her arms, but she was strong, far stronger than she looked. “Don’t resist, my brother. We will ascend together, you and I—just as our species will.”

Larsen tried to roll away. A knife. A gun. Anything. He needed to kill her and turn this ship. He’d hold a gun to her head and—

She was already determined to die. What was he going to threaten her with?

Movement flashed behind him and the next moment, the High Priestess went sprawling away. Parees stood behind her, panting, the edge of a metal chair stained with her blood, and then went scrabbling towards the navigational controls.

Her shriek of fury was enough to make both men wince, but Parees didn’t hesitate. Even as Larsen tried to draw in one wheezing breath, Parees turned at the last moment as she charged and threw himself at Ka’sagra’s slender form.

He wasn’t trained to fight, that man, but he gave it everything he had. He may have been just a human, but he seemed to fight like a Telestine, his strength magnified.

Ka’sagra’s body jerked with each blow to her abdominal wound, but Parees’s fists simply weren’t enough. She wrenched her fingers around Parees’s throat the same way they had around Larsen’s. This time, she was not trying to make a point, however. This time, she was trying to kill quickly.

Parees gave a gasp of pain and his fists lashed out, battering at the wound, at her throat, at her face.

Larsen managed to get up long enough to take two running steps and drop, his elbow directly over Ka’sagra’s face. The side of his head where she’d hit him still felt like fire, but he couldn’t focus on that now. If he let Ka’sagra get past Parees, everyone was dead anyway. He locked one arm around her neck and pressed his torso down onto her face with every ounce of force he could muster. He jerked back and forth, trying to snap her neck, but Telestine bones were surprisingly strong.

Parees was gasping for air behind him, and Ka’sagra was trying furiously to batter her way free, but Larsen hung on for dear life. They had to get to the navigational controls.

All of humanity depended on it.

“I hate your kind,” Ka’sagra hissed. “I don’t know why the heavens even want you. I should have ascended years ago, and instead I was forced to live in the bellies of ships and know darkness beyond what any mind could bear. I doubted—the test of waiting for your kind made me doubt! I will always hate you for that.”

“Doesn’t sound very enlightened,” Larsen gritted out.

“Larsen!” Nhean’s panicked shout reached him a second too late.

The gun slammed into his head and Larsen slumped sideways. Before he could stop her, Ka’sagra had shoved her way free. She aimed his own gun at Parees and fired.

The gun worked. The blasted thing worked. The EM field must have only temporarily disabled it.

She shuddered backwards with the recoil. Her own blood was soaking the front of her robes, but she had enough left in her for one last act of revenge.

The force of the shot spun Parees and he slumped against the desk. Bright red spread across the white surface. His face was, for just a moment, a mixture of surprise and sadness, and then blank with death.

Nhean was laughing, though. Larsen looked up at him. His face was deathly white, and there were horrific red and white blisters all over his face.

“It’s done.” Nhean shook his head. Trembling, he pulled a sidearm out of his shirt and leveled it at Ka’sagra. “It’s done, the bomb is gone. I launched it. It’s now in a stable orbit around the sun, and when Walker gets here, she’ll recover it and destroy it. You’ve lost.”

He pulled the trigger, and this time, Ka’sagra was too injured to get out of the way. Larsen watched the back of her head burst open as the exit wound bloomed, she collapsed, and then it was done. There was a ringing silence in the room.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

Near Earth

Telestine Command Ship

Bridge

He paced around the room. The communications channels from his captains blinked at him, beeping incessantly, and he snarled at them all to be quiet—though he did not answer the calls first. He could not. He could not think. He whirled and clenched his long-fingered hands.

Denver, then Tokyo, and now London. He had seized control of this world just in time for it to melt down. If only he’d acted sooner.

And now … her. It was her all along. From the beginning. Nhean had warned him, and he’d made a valiant effort to track her down, but he’d never quite believed she was really responsible for the disaster. For the nova that began their exodus.

And Walker’s change of heart shook him to his core. They were, indeed, more alike than not. If she was not acting on her plan, what did that mean? For the first time in nearly a century, he doubted himself.

“Sir?” One of his aides hovered behind him. “We’re intercepting a transmission to Walker’s ship from another ship near the sun. Would you like to see it?”

Tel’rabim turned, considering.

“Yes,” he said finally. “Bring it up.”

He did not have it in him to settle into a chair as he watched. He kept pacing. But there was a hitch in his step when he saw Nhean’s face. The man had been beaten badly, but he was still alive.

“It’s done,” the human said quietly. They talked more, about things Tel’rabim had trouble following. “And you? Have you changed your plan? Now, after all that has happened, will you really destroy Earth?”

Walker’s unmistakable voice came back, after a long pause. “I have the bomb placed. Deep where Tel’rabim can’t possibly get to it. I—good God, Nhean. I just can’t believe it’s over.”

Tel’rabim’s head tilted, and despite himself, he stepped closer to the screen.

“Get me the trajectory of that ship,” he told his aide.

“It’s heading into the sun, sir.” The aide sounded confused.

Indeed, the picture was beginning to break up and the sound was crackling.

What had they been doing? His heart began to beat faster. What was Walker playing at?

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

Near Sun

VSF Svalbard

Bridge

The comm channel beeped and crackled, and Nhean clutched the unit in his hands with what little remained of his strength. He was tired—he was so very tired. The effects of the extreme radiation were starting to overwhelm him.

He doubled over and vomited.

His hands were clenched around Parees’s wrist, now entirely still. The man’s chest had long since stopped rising and falling.

But he hadn’t been alone when he died, and he hadn’t seemed scared, either. He’d slipped away with his fingers clutching Nhean’s.

It wasn’t necessary to call the admiral, really. She’d know that they had succeeded when the sun failed to explode. Still, he wanted, of all things, to hear her voice again. He tried not to think about what that meant, and realized with a stab of dark humor that he didn’t really have to. It wasn’t going to matter for more than the next few minutes.

“Is it done?” she asked, as soon as she picked up.

“It’s done,” Nhean told her.

“Get out,” she advised him.

“Don’t think we can.” He shook his head. “We’re too far into the sun’s gravity well. She did something to the engines and we can’t pull out.” He paused, then offered the same comfort he’d given to Larsen: “It’s all right. The bomb is in orbit around the sun. Please come and collect it at your earliest convenience,” he added, in a voice that sounded like he was talking about an everyday business transaction.

There was a silence, and he imagined her staring at the comm unit.

“Larsen?” she asked finally.

Across the room, Larsen looked over.

“He’s here with me. We stopped her. Parees….” His throat ached. “Parees is dead, and after all that radiation, I may very well die before we hit the sun.” He grimaced. “Do you want to talk to Larsen?”

“If he’s there, tell him thank you—for everything.” A pause. “Did he tell you about the bomb?”

“Which bomb?”

“The bomb he dropped in the Marianas trench for me,” she said quietly.

Nhean felt a pit form in his stomach. No.

“The same kind that Ka’sagra was going to use on the sun. I told him it would kill the Telestines, but I didn’t tell him it would destroy Earth with it. I lied to him.”

Larsen stiffened. His eyes were wide and betrayed.

“Tell him—” She stopped. “Tell him I’m not going to use it. Whatever happens. I’m going to make an offer of peace to Tel’rabim. I won’t use the bomb. Here, look.” The picture shifted, and Nhean watched the screen as she typed in a kill command. “It’s gone. Disabled. It’s done. I’ll tell the girl, too, when—”

“You don’t know.” Nhean really hadn’t been thinking properly. He should have told them this from the start. “She’s … gone.”

He heard a sound, and Pike’s face was in the picture as well. “Gone?”

Nhean couldn’t hardly even speak. Only nod slowly. He stifled another dry heave and forced himself not to vomit. “She sacrificed herself to take out those other eleven ships. And Ka’sagra brought all of Telestine London down on top of her for it.”

Walker’s face was a picture. She was looking at him like … like she’d never looked at him before.

She was looking at him like he was a hero.

And he found that he rather liked it. “Right. I … are you sure there’s no time to turn the ship? Because—”

And then the signal was gone. The ship was beginning to creak from the intense radiation from the sun.

It was getting really hot.

“She was going to destroy Earth?” Larsen said finally.

“Yes. Long story.” Nhean looked over at him. “But she didn’t,” he pointed out.

“She didn’t,” Larsen agreed. He came to sit next to Nhean and leaned his head back against the console. The sun filled the viewscreen. They were speeding towards their deaths. But he need to distract himself—it simply wouldn’t do to spend his final moments panicking. “Do you think they’ll actually manage a peace treaty?”

Nhean looked around at the shattered machinery, the human and Telestine blood, the bodies. He thought of the stations, of the old videos he’d seen of the day the Telestines first arrived on Earth.

He thought of Dawn.

“Stranger things have happened,” was all he could say. “Much stranger things.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

Near Earth

Telestine Command Ship

Bridge

He stared at the dark screen for a long time. The aide knew better than to speak. No one else dared disturb him.

She had her own iridium bomb. It was in position. Right at the exact spot where she could have caused the most devastation. She’d had, in her hand, the power to destroy Earth. To destroy all of Telestine civilization with the press of a button.

And … she hadn’t used it. She’d thrown it away. She’d given up her own trusted soldiers and friends—her greatest assets—to chase down Ka’sagra when he couldn’t. She’d left the Dawning in London, and instead of taking down his mainframe to allow the Exile Fleet to defeat him, it had taken down Ka’sagra instead.

It. Her. What had the Dawning become?

He was trembling. They had been so close. So close, and Walker hadn’t ended this. She could have, for spite alone.

And she hadn’t. And now, Walker had given up that chance.

“Compose a message.” His voice didn’t sound like his own. “Tell Admiral Walker that I will open negotiations with her.”

“Sir.” The aide sounded confused, almost panicked. “What about the military council?”

“What’s the human term?” he asked pensively. “What would Walker say? Ah yes. Go tell them to fuck themselves.” The aide looked confused. “Tell them to come meet with me.” And I will tell them what I have seen today.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

Near Earth

EFS Santa Maria

Shuttle Bay

Pike found her in the shuttle bay airlock, still staring out into space.

“What’s going on?” He peered at her. “Tel’rabim is sending messages to open a channel. He wants to talk. He wants you to land, and talk—his fleet is standing down and the Funder fleet is on the line and … anyway, I told Min I’d find you. Are you all right?”

She nodded silently. She was turning the comm unit over and over in her hands, and she felt his sudden tension. She answered the question before he could ask. “They did it,” she told him. “Dawn. Nhean. Parees.” She paused a long time before she said the next name. “Larsen. But they couldn’t turn the ship in time. I suppose we knew that was what was likely to happen.”

He was silent, and she looked over to see his face pale.

“Larsen’s an ass, you know.” In spite of himself, in spite of the circumstances, he grinned. “Asshole beats me over the head and sent me back.” He chuckled, and seeing she wasn’t laughing, he swore at himself under his breath. “Sorry, I just … I just wanted you to know … the extent of his sacrifice. He … he sent me back to you. For you.”

“I’m glad.” It was all she could say.

“No, it’s … good.” He looked down. “I’m glad … for what they did.” He shrugged with his injured arm. “They didn’t need me slowing them down. I’m just not quite sure what to do now. I didn’t plan on a peace treaty.” He looked at her curiously.

“I meant it.” She was telling the truth, she realized. “It’s crazy, but I meant it. By the way … lilies.”

“What?” He stared at her blankly.

She hesitated, and then she reached out to pull him close.

“I want lilies in the garden you’re going to make for me. At the cabin. And the … what’s the word? Barn?”

He laughed again, this time far less darkly, and wrapped his good arm around her as an explosion of cheering burst over the comms.

“Ma’am?” Min. “Ma’am, you’re not going to believe this, but the UN just contacted us.”

“Tell them to fuck off,” Pike muttered. “We’re busy.”

Oh God, Pike. Walker wasn’t sure what to feel: grief and loss combined with relief … “We are?”

“We’re gonna be.” That look in his eye again.

“Ma’am?” said Min.

“It never ends,” Walker moaned. She opened the comm. “The UN, Captain? There isn’t even a secretary general anymore.”

“Well, there’s at least one person answering calls, apparently,” Min told her. “Because they’ve just gotten one from Tel’rabim. It seems he wants to discuss an armistice—and allowing humans back to Earth.”

The cheers on the line reached a fever pitch and Walker winced at the noise.

“And we’ve got instructions to land some of our ships,” Min said. “They’re asking for humanitarian help for the disaster in London. Ma’am … I hate to ask, but do you think this is a trap?”

She hesitated. The use of the word humanitarian, referring to helping Telestines in dire need … just seemed….

Right.

“No,” she said finally. “No trap. I think this is the start of something new. Land the ship, Min, you have the conn. I’ll be there soon.”

That was all she got out before Pike pushed her up against the wall and kissed her, but she left the channel on as the ship began to descend. The cheers weren’t stopping, and despite the terrible weight in her chest, she couldn’t couldn’t help smiling as she kissed Pike back. Part of herself felt awful—guilty, really—for feeling so good in the midst of the loss. Delaney. Nhean. The girl.

Larsen.

But part of her knew that they’d want the survivors to celebrate. To be happy.

To feel.

And, oh God, he felt good.

She’d never, in the decades since her first, and last kiss, with Pike as a teenager, allowed herself to feel … anything, except the constant demand to free humanity from their prison. And now, it was different. She could feel. She was going back to Earth, with Pike.

And it felt wonderful.

“I never thought I’d hear cheers,” she admitted between kisses. “I kind of like this.”

“Kind of?” He sounded aggrieved.

“Not the kissing. I meant—”

“You meant you’re thinking about things that aren’t kissing,” he said succinctly. “And that just won’t do.”

“You horny bastard.” She grabbed his collar and pulled him in. “Come here.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

Earth

Telestine Paris

Tel’rabim descended from the shuttle’s ramp onto the landing pad.

Paris. Telestine Paris, of course. High in the air above the old, ruined, human Paris.

Though that would change. Into what, he couldn’t say. Suffice it to say … interesting times were coming.

“You’re back. And you weren’t even going to say hello?” a voice demanded.

A familiar voice.

He spun around, looking this way and that. Finally, his eyes fell on the control panel for the shuttle platform.

“Are you …?” He approached the console. Crowds of Telestines were thronging below, waiting to hear from him. His aides wondered what he was doing, walking towards an unmanned console.

The console’s speaker crackled. “Am I stuck inside the landing platform? Yes! Help me!”

His eyes grew wide and he stopped dead in his tracks.

It was her voice, all right.

She’d been laughing, but she stopped. Her tone changed. “It’s a joke, Mr. Rabim.”

“The Dawning?”

The console was now before him, and he could examine the readouts and displays. Nothing out of the ordinary.

“The one and only.”

“I mean you no harm,” he said mildly.

“Oh, so you’re not going to try to use me for world domination again? Nice.”

His eyes grew even wider, if that were possible.

It wasn’t possible. And yet here she was, speaking to him out of a random shuttle platform console when she should be dead.

Not entirely random. It was the platform he was landing at.

She was alive.

“You’ve become … far more than I had ever planned, my child,” he said, softly.

“You have no idea.”

“How did you—”

She interrupted. “Not important. And stop calling me … The Dawning. Call me Dawn, please. A dear friend gave me that name. I hated it, once, but now I rather like it. And, it’s fitting, no?”

“Fitting?”

Another laugh came out of the console. The crowds closest to the landing platform had quieted and looked up at him, wondering what was going on. “Yes, fitting. I’m rather awful with puns, but, it’s a new dawn, you see? A new dawn of peace for humans and Telestines. A new dawn for Earth. Interesting times are ahead for us all.”

He nodded. “I was just thinking that.”

“Ka’sagra wanted to transcend. Or ascend, or whatever she called it. And to tell you the truth, she wasn’t entirely misguided. She was just going about it all wrong. Walker too. She wanted humanity to transcend Earth, in a way. Again, she went about it all wrong.”

“Oh?”

The crowds were starting to murmur. Another shuttle had landed, and the new human UN secretary general stepped out. A third shuttle containing Admiral Walker was landing soon.

“Much to talk about, Mr. Rabim,” she said, her humor returning. “And we will. But first go negotiate a fair peace between my two peoples. Then we’ll talk.”

My two peoples. So. She’d finally accepted the truth. He was wondering if she ever would. “You know, it’s funny,” he began, “As you said, Ka’sagra wanted our race to ascend. And in her way, Walker wanted humanity to ascend. And of the three, you’re the only one who managed it.”

She laughed. “Compliment accepted. Now go make peace. Go on. Get.”

The console powered down, then powered back on. “Dawn?” He asked. She was gone.

And yet, he knew, she was everywhere.

Earth’s new dawn indeed, he thought. Walker descended from her shuttle ramp and caught his eye. They exchanged an awkward nod. She’d experience terrible loss. So had he—his brood had lived in Tokyo.

Peace would be difficult.

But it would be worth it.

It had to be.

Epilogue

Earth, Lower Orbit

EFS Santa Maria

Admiral’s Quarters

Walker stripped off her uniform jacket with a groan and looked over at Pike sprawled out along her couch. Between the armistice talks and the all-night parties, she was already regretting her offer to have the two species be more intertwined. Interspecies cooperation had, within a matter of weeks, given rise to no less than five types of alcohol, which meant she was in for a serious headache when she woke up.

“How do you always escape those things faster than I do?”

“You have to be very quick,” Pike said, grinning. “I hear it also helps if you aren’t a famous admiral.”

“Maybe I should dye my hair.” She opened the closet, gave a despairing look at the rows of identical uniforms, and shut it. A tank top would do for now. “So what are you two up for tonight night now that we’re all hiding out?”

Pike glanced at the computer and opened his mouth to reply, just as a knock sounded at the door. They froze. Pike shut his eyes, as if that would help.

Be very, very quiet, Walker mouthed at them.

“Admiral?” Min’s voice said from outside.

They waited, motionless, until his footsteps receded down the hall.

“See that?” Pike said lazily. “I really think you’re growing as a person.”

“I think I am,” she agreed. “So what were you saying?”

“Actually, Dawn mentioned—”

“Stop talking about me in the third person when I’m right here.”

Walker and Pike looked over at the computer open on the deck. “Sorry Dawn. Or how about I start calling you Lapushka like—”

“Nope. Only Ry gets to call me that.”

It had been a rollercoaster of a week. Dawn had revealed herself to Pike first, then to Walker, and it took many long conversations to convince them that she was, indeed, the same old Dawn, just … bigger. No, bigger didn’t quite capture it.

Vast. She was … vast.

She said she was everywhere. Everywhere in the solar system with a computer. In her final moments, she’d reached out to every mainframe, every hard drive, every networked computer—and uploaded part of herself to them.

I’m distributed, she’d said, and it’s a little awesome.

“Fair enough.” Pike gave the computer a look, trying to imagine something, anything, to go along with the disembodied voice. “Anyway, Dawn said she had something to tell me.”

“Oh? Should I go?” Walker stood. “I’ve got another goddamned UN reception to go to anyway. Those things never end.”

“I … don’t know,” Dawn said. “Maybe you should know this too.” Walker could almost imagine the girl looking between the two of them, hesitating. The computer was practically vibrating with tension. “You know how … how one of the sticking points of the armistice is reparations for the drones?”

Pike and Walker exchanged a quick look. Dawn, ever-present, had been suspiciously silent throughout those particular negotiations, not inclined to offer an opinion even when she was clearly more than qualified to do so.

Walker wondered what she’d been thinking. She nodded and gestured for the girl to continue. She caught herself. Could she even see gestures?

Apparently so, since Dawn continued. “Well, I saw one in Telestine London,” she said. The sound of her taking a deep breath, which Walker found oddly humorous, given that she had no lungs. “And … I think—” She had trouble just spitting it out. “I think they were made from people who died in Telestine raids. They weren’t just genetically engineered.”

Walker narrowed her eyes. “What are you saying?”

Pike slowly stood up. “What … what are you saying, Dawn?”

“I … I think I saw your sister in London, before it crashed. And now … I can’t. She’s gone. I don’t know where she went.” she said.

Pike set his jaw, grabbed his jacket, and left the apartment without another word.

“Oh my God,” said Walker, sitting back down. Pike’s sister. His long-dead sister, supposedly killed in a Telestine raid in the mountains above Denver. “You should have waited. You know Pike.”

The computer almost shrugged. “You think he’s going to do something rash?”

Walker glared at the computer. “It’s Pike. Of course he is.” She stood up and started changing out of her formal wear, and, making a decision, put her fleet uniform back on. “And he’ll need some backup. Can we count on your help?”

A pause. “Laura,” Dawn began. She never, ever used her first name. “This is something … different. Something’s off. I should know if she’s alive. Or dead. I’d feel it, either way. But with this, I feel—nothing. I can’t explain it. I don’t know. Maybe she is dead. Ok, she’s probably dead. But, yes. I will help as I can—if she is dead, and Pike discovers she’s been alive all these years, serving the Telestines, he’s going to … uh … go ballistic?”

To put it lightly, thought Walker. Now she was pissed. After the triumph of the armistice, the steady stream of human exiles that had started to return to Earth, and after the assurance that she’d be able to use the Telestine FTL tech to go and explore the nearby star systems, she had finally found happiness. Contentment. But not for any of those reasons.

She was happy because she finally, after all these years, had what she really, truly wanted.

She had Pike. William Pike. And she wasn’t going to lose him again.

Thank you for reading Neptune’s War, book 3 of the Earth Dawning Series. If you enjoyed this book, would you please leave a review?

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