Maybe it hadn’t been born into anything at all. Maybe it was a fluctuation in the net—a Boltzmann brain of electronic impulses. The net relied upon quantum entanglement. It was possible.
But Arden didn’t think so. Whatever it was, they didn’t think there were words for it yet.
It did not think in words or images. It swelled and receded, a tidal rhythm that Arden could only guess was ascribed to some outside influence, or shifting of attention. They couldn’t really know.
The intelligence was, at this stage in its development, unknowable. But they hoped it might make that bridge, someday, as its growth spurts surged and eddied. Because it was growing, they were sure of that. Even during that brief first visit, it had not expanded, per se—space was, again, a crutch-thought—but it had increased. It was more.
Being near it soothed them. Because even though they couldn’t understand it, they got the feeling it was searching for something. For someone. Calling them home, like Arden was.
Arden let their consciousness drift into the orbit of the being, thinking of their kidnapped friend Lolla, hoping she was safe. Wondering if Jules had found her, and if the reason they weren’t calling home was because it wasn’t safe to do so yet.
And promising, with everything that they were, to bring them home again.
CHAPTER 6
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
CAN’T COUNT ON A SPY
Even the fancy fans of Hotel Stellaris weren’t strong enough to whisk away the sheer amount of steam Sanda worked up in the shower. Hot water kissed her shoulders red, brought a burgundy flush to her cheeks. By the time she dragged herself out and got snuggled up in a towel, drying herself seemed pointless. She was sitting in a sauna of her own making. It was the best morning she’d had in, well, years.
Sitting on the edge of the tub, she leaned over and turned the door handle, kicking it open to let the steam escape into the rest of the hotel room.
“Thought the fleet cured you of that habit,” Graham called out.
“I know a high-end recycler when I see one. No water restrictions on Atrux.” Sanda grinned and leaned back, bracing herself with her palms, and let all the aches of the last few days melt away on a cloud of heat. “And even if there were, Jacob Galvan’s paying for it, not me.”
“About that.” Graham rapped on the side of the doorframe. “Your boy’s gone.”
“What?” She hooked the door with her foot and slung it the rest of the way open to get eyes on Graham. He was making a very intensive study of his feet. “What do you mean, gone?”
“Left without a word. I conked out for a nap when you hopped in the shower and when I woke up, he and his duffel were gone. He left Grippy, and transferred the hotel registration to my name, which gives me every reason to believe he’s not coming back.” He licked his lips and made himself meet her gaze. “Sorry, lass.”
Sanda hunched forward, pressing the heels of her palms into her eyes. Between the open door and the humming fan, the steam had dissipated. She shook herself, loosening her joints. This was always a possibility, and the Nazca had been aggressively calling him home. Focus.
“He’s a spy, Dad, I knew he’d take off eventually.”
Back on Ada Station, Tomas had looked her dead in the eye and told her he was exactly where he wanted to be—at her side. That hadn’t been a lie. But the pain that shot through him at Udon-Voodun hadn’t been fake, either. It wasn’t so much that Tomas was a spy. It was that his masters yanked his leash.
Maybe that was a pretty lie she was telling herself.
“We can’t stay here,” Graham said, dragging her out of her own head. He was right—no argument there—if Tomas knew where she was, the Nazca would know soon enough. She trusted him not to crack her head open. She didn’t trust his organization not to try.
“Too bad. I don’t think we can afford anything this nice.”
Graham laughed and patted the wall, a steam-slick section of SynthMarble. Each tile was veined with grey to give it character, and flecked with glints of mica for realism. Hell, maybe those glints were real gold.
“True enough,” he said. “It’s too bad Ilan isn’t with us. He’d love this.”
“Have you let him know we’re all right?”
Graham’s smile wiped away and he tugged at his beard. “I left a message in a place where he’ll find it. You’re a wanted woman, remember? I poked around the net, and casuals are calling the footage of you assaulting Lavaux fake. Public opinion was already in your favor, and Lavaux was never popular with the people, but the officials have to pull that lever for you to be in the clear with the fleet.”
“And Tomas switched this room to your name, which is going to be a big red flag to anyone looking for me.”
“Fucker,” Graham grumbled.
“I’m… not so sure.” She was still fuzzy around the edges from her experience getting spaced and shoved in a NutriBath, but the shower had shaken a lot of cobwebs loose. “He was telling us to leave, that it’s not safe to stay here.”
“Could have told us that himself, instead of fucking off without a word.”
Sanda shifted from the edge of the tub to her wheelchair and traced her thumb along the cool metal of the turning wheel. “He left without a word because he knew we’d try to stop him. You saw the reaction he had at the noodle place. The Nazca don’t fuck around.”
“True. They never would have found you otherwise.”
“Luckily, neither do I.”
“What does that mean?”
“Out of the way, Pops.” She wiggled the chair at him and he stepped aside, gesturing grandly into the suite. Tomas’s duffel, which he’d dropped at the foot of the bed, was gone.
Sanda may be suffering from a little bit of shock, sure, but she wasn’t stupid. The second Tomas had doubled over at that table, she’d known he wasn’t going to stick around. The Nazca beckoned, and if he ignored that summons, then they might wonder what was so interesting about Sanda Greeve.
He knew how valuable the chip in her head would be to them. Not her. The meatsack surrounding the chip wasn’t good for much more than political bargaining. He had to go back to keep them from looking at her too hard. She wasn’t sure if it was easier, or harder, that he hadn’t said goodbye.
She was beginning to understand how Bero had felt when he’d realized the function of his body kept him removed from humanity, and didn’t like the feeling any more than he had.
“I got a feeling Tomas would bail on us once the Nazca called, so I stuck a tracker in his mag boot.”
Graham balked. “What? When? And why the boot?”
“Last night, while he was sleeping off the pain from the Nazca summons. The boots are expensive, difficult to replace onworld, and hard to break in. I figured he wouldn’t ditch them until he knew what his next mission was. Annnnd…” She tapped up the program used to follow the tracker. “There he is.”
She swiped the feed up to the screen inset in the wall so Graham could see. A little green dot that was Tomas moved through the streets of Atrux, fast enough that he must be in an autocab.
“Where is that?” she asked.
Graham stepped to the screen and crossed one arm over his chest, tugging on his scruff of a beard like he always did when he was nervous. The green blip had moved ten kilometers from the hotel, northeast through the city at a sharp, efficient diagonal. He wasn’t bothering to cover his tracks because he didn’t expect anyone to be looking at him. Not so smooth, Master Spy.
“High-end housing, mostly. The type of neighborhood where excessive security and secretive neighbors wouldn’t be noticed, let alone remarked upon.”
“Good place to hide a Nazca safe house.”
“Absolutely.”
The blip approached the end of a road and came to a stop for half a minute, then moved twenty meters west of its previous position and froze in place. Sanda held her breath. The blip wasn’t moving.
“Think he found the tracker?” she asked.
&
nbsp; Graham stopped moving, something he did only when he was thinking hard. After a beat of ten he sighed, shoulders sagging, and touched the screen, bringing up the local satellite view.
“I almost wish I could tell you he did, but I don’t think so. Look.”
He zoomed over the green dot, and though the image was grainy Sanda could make out the flat garden roof of a house. It wasn’t very wide, which meant it was very tall and possibly dug down into the stone skin of Atrux.
“I don’t think he ditched the tracker. I think he went inside this building, and we lost granularity.”
“You’re starting to sound like him.”
Graham snorted and swiped the screen back to blank. “We probably have too much in common.” He paused, gaze stuck on the blank screen. “We should go. Tomas wants us to go. There’s nothing for us in this system. We have to find out what’s so important about those coordinates in your head that Lavaux was willing to kill you to get them, and we can’t do it from here. Neither one of us has access to the equipment we’d need to pull those coords without setting off a half dozen Prime trip wires. Assuming Prime is even the one keeping watch. Tomas was our only shot at finding that location without tipping our hand.”
“We don’t know where else to go.”
“We don’t know what’s here,” he countered. “What might come for us now that Tomas is in the weeds and I’m on the grid.”
They glared at each other for a beat. Graham broke first, sitting down on the edge of the bed with his fingers laced together. He twisted his wedding ring, a plain platinum band, around and around. Realization struck Sanda hard.
“You know something you didn’t share when Tomas was around. What do you think’s going on here?”
“Nothing so specific… It’s just…”
She raised both brows and wheeled the chair over to be directly in front of him. “What?”
“Arden Wyke. Tomas didn’t look any happier to see them than I did, and I’m not convinced that Arden being tangled up in a Keeper death is a coincidence. They don’t, or didn’t, mess with Keeper business. And another thing… Keeper Nakata was murdered two years ago, right?”
“That’s what Laguna said.”
“Then why didn’t I hear about it? Why wasn’t Ada’s news network being blown up by the investigation? I get that we were in a cold war turning hot, I really do, but Keepers make the news in a huge way when they die of natural causes. A murder is unheard of. So why suppress Keeper Nakata’s murder? If they thought Valentine ran, then surely they’d want to splash her face everywhere.”
A dread pit formed in Sanda’s belly. “You think Nakata was like Kenwick? That her chip might have something other than gate schematics on it?”
“I don’t know, but it seems possible. At the very least, there was a reason the powers that be at Prime wanted her death kept under wraps, and there aren’t a lot of good reasons for that. It smells like a conspiracy to me.”
“And I bet it did to Tomas, too.”
Graham nodded. “My thoughts exactly. He took off because he wants us—mostly you—out of here before shit kicks off regarding whatever is going on with Arden’s friend and that dead Keeper.”
“It’s been two years. Why would things escalate now?”
Graham smiled slyly. “Because you’re back, kid. Two years and some change was about the time you disappeared, about the time Icarion lost control of Bero. Nakata, Kenwick, Lavaux—they’re all tangled up somehow, and Harlan and his crew crossed paths with that lot.
“When word got out that you were back, that Bero had been found? It might have kicked a hornet’s nest here, started something that initiated the fires. We have no idea who knows about Kenwick’s chip, and who might put two and two together regarding your very public confrontation with Lavaux.”
Sanda winced. “So who do we trust?”
Graham rolled his eyes to the ceiling as if he could see straight through to the stars. He let out a long sigh, cracked his knuckles, then jumped to his feet and grabbed the duffel with Grippy. “Ourselves. We start by getting out of this room before my friends come to say hello. Then we find out which shadows we need to be jumping at.”
CHAPTER 7
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
A GIFT FROM THE DEAD
Biran woke in the middle of the false night, and could not sleep again. Lying alone on the thin bed where he’d spent his student life, his body thrummed with energy he couldn’t quite name. There was an answer drumming around in the back of his subconscious, something puzzled out in a dream. Something he couldn’t quite grasp.
He laced his fingers behind his head and stared at the night-black ceiling, willing his mind to dig up what it’d realized, but the thought had slipped away upon awakening. Icarion would not capitulate. Not with Bollar at its head, and certainly not with Negassi whispering at his side.
Biran needed someone else, some ally among the Icarion advisers, but those roles were secretive at best, and actively hostile to Keepers at worst. Biran didn’t even know their names. He had no doubt Anford knew who they were, but her spies were in place to feed her information, and any attempt by Biran at soliciting an adviser to Prime’s side of things would be noted and rooted out in an instant.
He needed their names. He needed to know who he was dealing with so that he could puzzle out how to deal with them.
Well, that felt like the right thought, but it wasn’t the grand revelation he was hoping for. Biran grunted and swung his legs over the bed, the lights in his room turning on the moment his feet touched the floor. Rubbing sleep from his eyes, he tapped up an old contact list on his wristpad. He was tempted to call Callie Mera to talk out his thoughts, but the reporter was busy doing a deep story on the fallout of the revelation of general intelligence in the scientific community, and he didn’t want to bother her by miring her in his worries.
But that brief glance at his contact list gave him an idea. The Cannery was technically under lockdown, but being Speaker had its privileges. He punched in an ident number and waited.
Scalla squinted at him from a room lit by the glow of her wristpad. The old hauler pilot had let a few more wrinkles come in since the time she’d worked at Ilan’s side, but they only made her prominent cheekbones look even sharper. He knew that squint. He’d gotten it a lot when she’d caught him climbing on crates in Ilan’s warehouse as a kid.
“Well, well, I was wonderin’ who in the icy void could make calls through the lockdown, and here your face goes and answers my question. You look tired, kid. Sister all right?”
“Tucked away safe,” Biran said, and smiled at her tight nod of approval. “I have a question for you, if you don’t mind?”
“I got fuck else to do, lockdown’s got me caught on the Ada side of the gate, so we’re all sitting with our thumbs up our asses until your bosses decide The Light of Berossus has gone far enough away not to be a threat. Shoot, kid, though I doubt I know anything your people don’t.”
“What I’m about to tell you is secure information, is that all right?”
“Honey, I’m keeping secrets from you right now.”
He blinked, but smiled when she shot him a wink. “I have to ask, sorry. The thick of it is: Is there any way to shorten the trade routes between Ada and Icarion?”
She squinted and sucked on her teeth. “Don’t rightly think so. We already use all the grav assists we can get to save on fuel. Not that I would know anything about trade with Icarion, mind you. Planet’s under blockade. Haven’t traded with them for years.”
“Naturally,” Biran said, suppressing a smile. “What if you had access to all the moons around Kalcus? The ones blocked off under cordon, that is.”
“Dunno about the moons,” she said, meaning: We already use those. “But there are a lot of pointy sticks between Ada and Icarion. Taking those out of the picture might speed things up.”
“And make things cheaper.”
“In transit, faster is cheaper.”
“Cou
ld you work me up a few possible routes that demonstrate this? I need hard numbers.”
She lifted both brows. “Don’t got a Keeper nerd you can have do that for you?”
“I want data from people with hands-on experience. People that see more than simulations on a screen.”
“Good boy. Your papas didn’t fuck you up half so bad after all.”
“They’re all right,” he said, smiling.
“Well, you give ’em my love since you can make the damn call, and to your sister, too. Tell her she’s a damn bloody idiot and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Gladly.”
“Assuming the lockdown is lifted, I’ll give you a shout when I get those routes worked up. Otherwise, ping me occasionally.”
They said their goodbyes, and when the light from Biran’s wristpad cut, he found the anxiousness hadn’t yet faded. Telling himself he was doing this to see if Anaia had captured any useful pictures of Icarions, Biran pulled the photo tablet out of his nightstand drawer and booted it up.
He was not prepared for how much it hurt. The breath washed out of him, a hollow void left in his chest and mind. Anaia’s face, bright and happy, in image after image after image. Some of him, too. He knew there would be. Younger, he thought, though it wasn’t so many years ago. He looked impossibly young.
The last image slid by under his fingers as simulated daylight began to seep through his window, painting the SynthWood floors ruddy shades of rose. It wasn’t enough. Hundreds of pictures, most of them blurry or poorly lighted or of random objects that showed she’d forgotten to turn the camera off and left it on a table. Never enough.
Absently, he thumbed into the tablet’s file architecture, seeking the trashed files. Nothing was ever thrown away on a Prime drive.
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