He came across a dump file labeled with random letters and numbers, the kind of thing she used to keep track of her astronomical photography. Images of asteroids waited for him in that folder, shots taken from angles he knew damn well were gained by backdoor access to Prime-operated satellites. Anaia’s photography habit had never concerned him before. As a future Keeper, her goal had been the research of likely Casimir Gate build sites. It had felt natural to him that she would wiggle her way into the very research equipment that would be hers for the taking once she had received her chip.
Now, he looked at those images through a spy’s eyes. In the brief, hot flash of their romantic relationship, she had shown him similar pictures, chatted excitedly about alternative build points. That talk had slowed when they’d realized that they were better friends than lovers—a decision she had instigated—but he could not help but wonder, and ache for the chance of ever knowing, if that decision had been born of her real wants, or her having turned to Icarion.
When was the moment? When had Anaia Lionetti gone from Prime loyal, on the fast track to Keeperdom, to a spy for the Icarion government? He wouldn’t believe it if he hadn’t personally seen her manipulating the data for General Negassi.
He frowned, reading her tight notation. Each photo was a different angle of the same asteroid, larger than many he’d seen before. According to her notes, it maintained a solitary, elliptical orbit around Ada’s star, Cronus.
A rock with appropriate mass to hold a Casimir Gate in its orbit, in the green zone of the star’s gravity well. His palms sweat as he flicked through the pictures. She’d been looking for a stable, flat surface. A place to build a hab dome. A place from which to start construction of a gate.
Reflexively, Biran put in a call to Director Olver. He picked up in seconds.
“Speaker, it is five in the morning. If you are about to stream some dramatic declaration to the populace, can it wait until after breakfast?”
“I may have found an answer to our supply problem,” he said.
“Wonderful. Bring it up at the morning briefing—”
“The data is from Keeper Lionetti.”
Olver’s face fell. “Biran, the guardcore would have found anything of value when they cleaned out her belongings.”
“Maybe. But they don’t—they can’t think like her, Director. I’m not saying I understand her motivations, it kills me that I don’t, but what looked like hobby astronomical photography to the GC looks like hope for Icarion to me.”
“I’m listening.”
Biran sent the images to Olver while explaining what he thought Anaia’s intent had been. After flicking through the images for a few moments, Olver frowned to himself. “It makes sense that she would seek a gate site. What little we recovered from The Light before its escape was enough to paint a clear picture of Icarion attempting Keeper chip reconstruction. They got nowhere, naturally, but if they cracked the chips, then they’d need a place to put the damn gate.”
Biran avoided the subject of Icarion’s chip research. “I agree with that supposition. But if we bring this to our Protectorate, not to mention the High Protectorate, Garcia and Hitton in particular will throw fits about it being data from an Icarion spy. They’ll call it a trap, or say we’re bending over backward to give Icarion what it wants. Prime has never built a gate in orbit around anything smaller than a dwarf planet, and while Anaia’s notes say that this asteroid fits the mass requirements, it does so by a slim margin.”
“They would not be wrong. Okonkwo would make the same objections.”
“Would you?”
“At this moment? Yes. However, if we looked independently into the position of this asteroid and concluded—completely removed from Lionetti’s research—that it would be suitable for gate orbit, then I would feel comfortable making the proposition.”
Biran closed his eyes briefly. “Thank you, Director.”
“This is to be a Prime operation, spurred from our Speaker’s wild idea that there might yet be another location in the system worth attaching a gate to if we think outside the box. Am I clear?”
“Completely.”
“Good. Keeper Shun is in charge of construction site scouting at the moment. I’ll arrange a meeting with the three of us before morning briefings. Does that give you enough time to prepare a statement regarding your idea?”
“Yes.”
“Very well.” A pause. “Destroy that tablet, Biran.”
“Consider it incinerated.”
Biran put the tablet in his pocket and got to work.
CHAPTER 8
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
ANOTHER CAPTURE, ANOTHER HEADACHE
She’s coming back up,” Marya said.
“I can see that,” Jules said. “I’m looking at the same data you are.”
“Then why aren’t you doing anything?”
Jules rolled her eyes and pushed away from the desk, sparing a brief glance at Dr. Liao’s vital signs. She hated all this medical shit and wished Rainier would get her hands dirty and do it herself, but every time she’d pushed, Rainier had said there wasn’t enough to go around, and laughed. Jules had learned quickly there was no swaying her once she’d made up her mind.
The last time she’d been brushed off, she snuck back around to the featureless room Rainier called her lab and saw the woman sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor with her eyes closed, taking a nap for all Jules could tell. She knew the lady—mind, whatever—didn’t have the same biological needs humans did, but still.
When she’d told Marya about it, she’d smirked and said Rainier must have been “processing,” lending a mysterious weight to the word that made Jules’s eyes roll so hard she thought they’d get stuck. To Marya, Rainier was a goddess. To Jules, she was a means to an end. And it could get real tiring spending all her time around a fanatic. Too bad the scientists couldn’t know the truth of what they were doing. Jules might like their company better.
Dr. Liao moaned softly, body wriggling beneath the thick white blanket Jules had pulled over her. It could get blisteringly cold in the lower levels of Janus, but the truth was, looking at the restraints clamped across the doctor’s torso, wrists, and ankles made Jules’s skin crawl. She didn’t like the look of the head clamp, either, but Rainier hadn’t allowed her to cover it with fluffy hats.
“Doctor, do you know where you are?” she asked for what was probably the hundredth time that day.
“I don’t know… You—you invaded our home—”
Jules sighed and pushed more sedative. Liao went limp. “It’s not working.”
“It always works,” Marya said.
“Yeah, in ten tries at the most. We’ve done this all fucking day. It’s not agreeing with her physiology or whatever.”
“Want to go tell Rainier that?”
No, no she did not want to tell Rainier that she’d failed and was giving up. “Maybe we should give her a heavier dose.”
“It’s psychological.” Marya said that word the same way she said processing, and for a moment Jules couldn’t hear what she had to say next because all she could do was think about punching her in the face. “… If we keep telling her the same story and muddling up the recent past, it’ll work eventually.”
“Eventually is not an exact enough timeline, as our overlord is fond of saying.”
Marya bristled. “She’s not an overlord. A leader, a scion from a more advanced race, but not a—a comic-book villain.”
“Hey now, comic-book villains get really complex. Have you read Sailors of Ordinal yet?”
They debated the merits of that story arc for another ten tries with the memory rollback.
“She’s coming up,” Jules said, mostly because she felt it was her turn to point out the obvious.
“So she is,” Marya said with a coy smile that said she wasn’t about to rise to Jules’s bait. The woman may have decent taste in comics, but otherwise she was no fun at all. “Your turn.”
Jule
s was tempted to say it’d been her turn the last three times, but Liao was moving her lips around and blinking her eyes open, so the petty jabs would have to wait. Too bad, they were her favorite kind of jab.
“Doctor,” Jules said in a voice so official it sounded fake even to her. “Do you know where you are?”
“I was en route to… to…”
“Janus Station.”
“Yes, that’s it.” Liao mashed her lips together. Her mouth must taste like ashes, but Jules wouldn’t help her out with that until she was sure that she wasn’t going to have to put her right back under.
“Your shuttle suffered a small debris strike, enough to cause the evac pods to deploy. Do you remember?”
She blinked. The lights in this room were cranked up to add to the disorientation, and bright tears pooled in the corners of Liao’s eyes. “No. I don’t remember anything after boarding the shuttle.”
Jules looked across Liao’s prone form and arched one eyebrow in question. Marya shrugged: good enough. Most memory rollback subjects built their own stories up around the missing memories, filling in holes with convenient falsehoods, which helped keep their heads from throbbing whenever they tried to recall the truth of their kidnapping.
“That’s all right, Doctor,” Jules said. “Don’t push too hard.”
“Yes… my head hurts…”
“That’ll pass,” she lied, and filled a tiny paper cup with ice chips as she pressed the lever to lift the bed up. “Here. Have some ice. Those evac pods can do a number on the body.”
“I’ve never been in one before.” Her voice was coming back, full and a little fast, edged with curiosity. “It’s a pity I don’t remember. I would have loved to record my observations.”
Jules smiled encouragingly as she went about undoing the straps with practiced ease. “That’s the mindset that got you hired here.”
“I’m sorry, you are…?”
“Jules Valentine.”
“Marya Page,” Marya said, swinging around to offer the startled doctor her hand. Liao shook it, hesitantly.
“You are the researchers I’m to work with? I thought the team would be larger…” She glanced around the room, taking in the distinct lack of it being a proper medical facility, and squinted. “This is Janus?”
“Oh, we’re not researchers,” Marya said in her friendly-person voice that Jules was reasonably certain was genuine. Probably one reason Rainier kept the woman around. Neither Rainier nor Jules could fake nice effectively, and that voice made Marya handy on station comms when stray ships decided to say hello.
Marya prattled on, “Your colleagues are on the upper levels. As you can tell, we have a bare-bones medical operation here. We didn’t expect any of our researchers to show up in an evac pod! But I hope you feel all right now. There’s first aid on every level of the station, every five hundred meters, all up to code, I assure you.”
Liao smiled warmly. “Thank you. I didn’t mean to malign your operation.”
“We take no offense,” Marya chirped.
“Feel up to walking?” Jules asked. She wanted to get this intro over with so she could go check on Lolla.
“I think so,” Liao said.
Jules offered her a hand, but the woman was steady enough on her feet so Jules took her hand back. She no longer tolerated touching anyone if she didn’t have to. “This way, your quarters and research facilities are all on the upper levels. These levels will be restricted to you after you leave here.”
“Really? Why?”
Jules rolled a shoulder. “Keeper orders. I’m just the administrator here.”
Liao’s smile soured. “I understand. We all must follow orders.”
“Speaking of,” Marya said. “I have a few things to see to.”
Jules waved her away, and after a quick nice-to-meet-you, Marya went trotting off to whatever task Rainier had pinned on her this time. Rainier liked to keep Marya busy. Jules didn’t mind—it kept Marya out of her hair and let Jules do the work of running Janus. The tighter she kept this station, the sooner she’d get to wake Lolla back up.
With a hand on Liao’s shoulder, she steered her toward the elevators. The second they swiped in, Jules quietly tapped on her wristpad to rescind Liao’s access to the lower levels. Nothing would twig on the doctor’s systems, not unless she tried to go below, and in that event Jules would receive a notice to come and explain that the lower levels were off-limits. It had happened only once, with Dr. Dal. The man hadn’t tried again, though he had been loath to let her stand behind him ever since.
“Shouldn’t I…” Liao’s face pinched, fingers curling and uncurling as she tried to grasp a memory that bubbled to the surface.
“Your application was extraordinary,” Jules said, a knot of guilt caught in her throat. She cleared it. There wasn’t time to put her back under. The team Rainier had selected was progressing well enough, but every minute, every second, every breath Lolla lingered in stasis the possibility of her awakening slipped further and further away. “We can’t wait to get those comms amps online.”
The task set to the scientists was the creation of a nanite-sized swarm of amplifiers. As far as the scientists were concerned, the amps would extend the range of the FTL transfer of communications through the gates. Rainier had explained to Jules that the gates, like the ascension-agent, were tech from her people. Since they shared a common origin, the amps could also be used to send a message to the nanites that made up the ascension-agent.
Jules carried guilt for a lot of the things she’d done in her life, but conning these scientists weighed low on the scale if it meant she could make Lolla healthy again. Rainier had promised that as soon as they got the amps working, she’d send the correction signal to the nanites keeping Lolla in a coma, adjusting them to play nice with the girl’s immune system in the same way they played nice with Jules’s.
Her heart ached to bring a walking, talking Lolla back to Nox and Arden. Everything she’d done in Rainier’s name would be worth it, if only she could do that. Everything.
“Oh,” Liao said, fingers stilling as she wrenched herself around to the present and the deep passion of her work. “Thank you. Though I have to admit I was nervous when I received the offer. Stations with Keeper charters aren’t clamoring for fringer scientists. I hope some of that legitimacy will rub off on my colleagues once I return home.”
Jules smiled to herself. The lie they’d told her, over and over again, during Liao’s drug-induced hazes had taken root. Already the tension of feeling at odds with her own mind was fading, her shoulders and jaw relaxing.
“We don’t discriminate here,” Jules said, leading her to the primary lab where the other researchers were already hard at work on a project they could never truly understand. “I think you’ll find your colleagues come from similar cloth.”
She swiped the door open and nudged Liao in as the heads of the other scientists popped up like gophers. “Your team lead,” Jules said, “as promised.”
A subtle vibration on her wristpad shook her attention. Jules forced herself to keep from looking and plastered on a fake smile. “I’ll send your room details to your pad. Otherwise, feel free to get acquainted with the work.”
Dal said something as Jules turned to leave, his voice raised in protest over some slight or another. He could wait. They all could wait.
That vibration meant that Marya’s ident number had entered the chamber in which Lolla’s coffin was kept. A chamber strictly off-limits to her.
CHAPTER 9
PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543
WE NEED A GARDENER
Graham found them a reasonable hotel room in the margins of the city, where the sleekness of Atrux bled over into the grit of the Grotta and no one bothered scanning ident chips after they asked for a name. Sanda poked her head into the bathroom.
“Shower here sucks.”
“And the only window is a viewscreen because in clear mode it has a view of… a gutter. Seriously, it’s tilted down at
a gutter.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Honestly? The window directly across is private, or belongs to a FleshHouse. Either way, someone doesn’t want guests taking a peek.”
“If only we could have kept on being Jacob Galvan.”
“Mr. Galvan was about to get raided by the Nazca.”
“We don’t know that.”
Graham dropped his duffel on the floor and sat on the edge of the double bed—biggest room in the building, according to the front desk AI. He had that I’m-serious-really look she hadn’t seen since she’d gotten Biran’s wristpad stuck in a loop playing an ancient remix of “I Will Survive” to get back at him for borrowing her best mag boots without asking first.
“Sanda.”
“Dad Number Two.”
“I am most definitely Dad Number One. Being the oldest has gotta count for more than creaking joints.” Their gazes locked. His Serious Face twitched, then shifted into a shaky smile. “Come here.”
She dissolved into his arms, letting her chin rest on his shoulder while she squeezed her eyes closed, shutting off this alien world that was too far away from Biran and Ilan back home on Ada, even if she was lucky enough to have Graham with her. His chest shuddered, the start of a sob.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Thought I’d lost you.”
“Likewise.”
“Twice.”
“Fine, you win.”
They giggled together and Graham kept holding on, letting her decide when she was ready to peel away. She took all the time she needed, breathing in the cheap cologne scent all of her male family members used, then eased herself back into the wheelchair.
“How are we going to do this?” she asked.
He arched one brow at her. “What? No questions, no reminisces? No how-have-you-beens? Ilan has frown lines now, you know. Deep ones.”
“So does Biran.”
“You don’t.”
“Neither do you.”
A pause. Graham asked, “Does that make us the assholes?”
She laughed. “Probably.”
“How do you want to do this?”
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