“How long have you been working at Keeler station? You’re qualified, right?”
“I got my papers three years ago.” His tone was defensive.
That put him in his late twenties, right where I had pegged him. He was a newt.
“Then you’ve been working at the station for ten years at least,” I said, and pushed warmth into my voice. “You’ve outlasted the spineless ones that creep home after a few years, then.”
He glanced up at me, startled. He pulled his gaze away once more.
“What I don’t understand, Sauli, is why you’re in such an all-fired rush to get back to Keeler again.”
He met my gaze again.
I shrugged. “You wanted to see what it was like in space.” I leaned forward. “Look around, Sauli. You’re in space. Right in it. Not parked on the edge, on a geostationary body.”
He blinked.
“We’re in the hole right now. We’ll be emerging…actually, I’m not exactly sure where we’re heading. Lyth?”
An emitted screen displayed in the air over the table, showing a system with a blue sun and four planets. The one circling farthest from the blue giant had a tag over it. Androkles Prime.
Sauli looked around for Lyth, then back to the map, frowning.
“Have you been to Androkles Prime?” I asked Sauli, as the map cleared.
He frowned. “You know I haven’t.”
“It’s a commercial hub. A whole city floating in space, built up around one of the largest space stations in the Empire. A million people live there. Permanently. Another ten million pass through the station every year.”
Sauli’s frown was one of deep thought. He reached out to the plate in front of him and scooped up a piece of bacon and bit the end off and chewed, all while thinking. “I’ve seen videos of Androkles.”
“We may not stop there for long.”
“Because the Rangers are after you,” he added, around his mouthful of bacon.
I nodded. “That, too. I’m not entirely sure where we’ll go next, but it will be somewhere else in the Empire. Three days ago, we were at Polyxene.”
He finished that piece of bacon and reached for another, completely unaware of what he was doing. “It doesn’t bother you, not knowing where you’re going to be next? That people are chasing you?”
“The chasing bit bothers me,” I admitted freely, as he scooped up a handful of hash browns. “Here.” I held out the knife and fork to him, and he took them, his gaze on my face. “The not knowing where I’m going…no, that doesn’t bother me at all. I was in the Rangers for decades. I often didn’t find out where I was going next until I read my orders as we shipped out. You get used to it. It’s part of a spacer’s life.”
He absorbed that, as he cut into the waffle and ate a mouthful. “You’re not what I thought you would be like.”
“What did you think I would be like?”
“A criminal.” He shrugged.
“I am a criminal—at least, I’m wanted for crimes people think I committed.”
“Did you?”
I wavered. “Sort of. It’s a long story,” I assured him. “Look, Sauli, I’ll give you a choice. If you really want to be square jawed and obstinate, I can lock you into an inertia shell until we pop out at some place, somewhere, and offload you. I’m not sure where that would be, but I would give you enough money to get back home on a crawler.”
His nose wrinkled at that option. He might have spent ten years on a geo-stationary structure, but he’d still absorbed the spacers’ prejudice against commercial space travel.
“Or I can lock you in a stateroom here, and not let you out, which means you can move freely around the room, but with no outside communication. Or…” I paused. “You can move freely around the ship, and see some of the places that we go, and what we’re doing. Then, when I have finished my business with the…with the Rangers, then I will fly you right back to Keeler.”
Sauli chewed, considering. “If I don’t ask you to lock me up in some way, then won’t I become a criminal like you?”
“I’m not a criminal yet,” I pointed out. “Nothing has been proved and I haven’t been tried. There have been a lot of misunderstandings…but you don’t need to worry about any of that. When we drop you off on Keeler, you can tell everyone that we did keep you locked up. I won’t dispute it, even under oath.”
He took a huge mouthful of hash browns and chewed.
“So,” I said. “Inertia shell, locked room, or work for your passage?”
“Work?” he said, sounding alarmed.
“You have to pay for your food and accommodations, and I could use a good engineer.” I smiled. “You won’t be able to sabotage the ship anymore. Lyth will monitor everything you do.”
“Lyth…is he…a hologram, one that can manipulate objects?”
“Lyth is the ship. This is the Supreme Lythion and Lyth is Lythion’s avatar. Lyth?”
Lyth rose up from the floor and gave Sauli a polite smile. “Captain?” he asked me.
“Sauli?” I said.
Sauli grimaced. “I don’t know how to do anything but my job.”
“That’s all you have to do,” I assured him. “We’ll keep you out of everything else. You have my word on it.”
Sauli pushed the nearly empty plate away from him. “Then I guess…I’m your engineer. For now.”
“Thank you,” I told him…and meant it. “Lyth, has Juliyana finished replacing the relay nexus?”
Lyth said with a straight face, “She is having trouble with the torque wrench.”
Sauli snorted.
“Go with Lyth, please, Sauli, and replace the nexus. Remember that Lyth knows exactly what you are doing and will be watching, even if he is not physically looking over your shoulder.”
“As you will be working upon what is essentially me, I must supervise,” Lyth told him.
Sauli took a large spoonful of melting ice cream, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and got to his feet. “I just follow you, then?” he asked Lyth hesitantly.
“You know the way to the engine room,” Lyth said. He stood aside.
I watched Sauli leave. “Can you ask Dalton and Juliyana to come and speak to me, Lyth?”
He nodded and followed Sauli’s slender figure out of the galley.
20
While I was waiting, the waitress came and cleared the table. “Well, he made short work of that, didn’t he?” she said cheerfully. “You want something to eat, hun?”
“Sure,” I said. “A very hot bowl of hindebeast chili, lots of cayenne pepper, and corn bread.”
She raised her brow. “You got it.”
“And coffee!” I called out to her back.
“Gotcha!” she called back.
I had to figure that one out, and finally realized it was two words in one.
Dalton arrived before Juliyana. He wore new clothes I’d never seen before. I guessed he’d printed them just now. He slid onto the bench, read the menu and prodded it, ordering silently.
“Hungry?”
“Like a black hole.”
“Good.”
“Good?” His gaze met mine.
“I was going to ask how you felt. But if you’re hungry and irritable, then I know you’re fine.”
The corner of his mouth quirked and his mood lightened. “I’ve been thinking.”
“So have I. Wait for Juliyana,” I replied.
Juliyana arrived a few minutes later. Her trousers were stained with the black slimy smudge that engines seemed to produce the way humans exhaled carbon, but her hands were clean. She had stopped to wash them on the way to the galley.
She slid onto the bench next to Dalton, who moved over without complaining.
“You may as well eat,” I told her. “We are.”
“Lythion asked me what I wanted, on the way here. I’ve ordered,” Juliyana said. “I passed the newt on the way up here. He’s joined the crew now?”
“Not exactly.” I outlined th
e terms of Sauli’s stay onboard. “We can’t keep him locked up while we take care of this business. He’s too smart for that,” I finished. “I just had to bring him to a point where he thought it reasonable to not try to murder us while our backs were turned. We’ll offload him when we have time.”
“You really will send him home with money in his pocket?” Dalton asked.
“Yes. And he’ll consider the whole thing an adventure,” I replied. “Something to remember for years to come.”
“He’ll tell everyone what he sees,” Juliyana pointed out. “He won’t be able to resist boasting.”
“By the time we let him loose, it won’t matter if he does,” I replied. “Or he might consider keeping our bargain—tell everyone we kept him locked up and he saw nothing, and I get to perjure myself in trial if it comes to that.”
Our meals arrived. “Perfect timing,” Dalton murmured, reaching eagerly for his plate of fries and gravy and cheese curds.
Juliyana had a soup bowl which steamed with a fragrant aroma that made my mouth water much as the chili bowl did. For a few moments, we ate hungrily.
Then I stirred the chili with my spoon. “Have you noticed how many convenient coincidences we’ve experienced lately? The food turning up just as we move on in the conversation.”
“That’s just Lyth being considerate,” Juliyana pointed out.
“Dalton tripping over the Lythion in the first place, which delivered a superior ship right into our hands,” I added.
“And the ship coincidentally diving into a gate and popping me out at Badelt City, in time to see you,” Dalton added, a fry in his fingers dripping gravy back onto the plate. His eyes were narrowed.
I nodded.
Juliyana frowned. “We’ve had plenty of bad luck,” she pointed out. “As much as the good luck. So what?”
“The family dividends just happened to be sent to me—a clerical error after years of the dividends being sent to Farhan for dispersal, as they should be,” I said.
Dalton looked interested. “That’s how you came by the money. I thought you’d actually stolen it.”
“It’s a matter of degree. I just failed to give it back,” I said. “Although Farhan quite rightly still considers that theft, even though I do intend to give it back one day.”
“I can’t believe you’re complaining because you’d had a few lucky breaks,” Juliyana said.
“How did you come by the fake transfer orders, anyway?” I asked her. “You never did say.”
Even Dalton paused with another fry in his fingers to look at her, his brow lifted. Then he wolfed the fry down.
Juliyana looked suddenly coy. Her gaze dropped to the soup bowl and she blew on the stock.
“Juli?” I prompted.
“I just found it,” she said, sounding defensive.
“You faked it?” Dalton said, sounding both impressed and peeved.
“No,” she said quickly. “I didn’t fake it. I found it. I don’t know where it came from. It was just there in my files on Noam one day. It wasn’t there the last time I had worked in the files. I would have remembered it.”
“It was just there,” I repeated. I didn’t feel any surprise at all.
“Yes,” Juliyana said heavily, glaring at me, daring me to laugh at her.
I didn’t. “Then there are the dreams I used to have of Noam.”
“What of it?” Dalton said, puzzled.
“I used to have dreams. And my implants were killing me. Then I got new implants, and instead of dreams and seizures, I had waking seizures and saw Noam, who happened to tell me about Moroder, something I didn’t know, that no one but you knew about, Dalton. Which makes seeing Noam and talking to him something other than a mother’s desperate delusions.”
Juliyana sat back, her soup forgotten. “You never did retrieve his remains.”
Dalton squeezed his temples with one hand. “You think he’s still alive.”
I nodded. “Alive, and trying to reach out to me, to all of us, to guide us.”
“Why would he do that?” Dalton asked simply.
“Because he needs our help,” Juliyana said, her eyes shining.
“Help with what?” Dalton demanded. “If he is alive—and that’s a long shot, given the disaster he caused and that he was right in the middle of—then he has wisely stayed hidden for decades. He should probably stay hidden for another thousand years.”
“He needs our help to bring down the Emperor,” Juliyana breathed. “So he can come home.”
I should have expected Dalton to buck accepting the inevitable. He’d been fighting off the odds for too long. He wanted facts, relied on what his own senses told him, and we could offer nothing right now, except for a handful of coincidences.
Noam had only ever appeared to me when I was alone and had gone away the moment he sensed we were about to be interrupted, so I left Juliyana and Dalton arguing in the galley and locked myself in my room to think. I turned it over and over in my mind, fitting together odd coincidences, strange events and happenings, and how everything we had done since Juliyana socked me in the jaw had led us inexorably toward the Emperor.
But still…
Dalton’s doubt was a powerful factor that made me pause, because there was a tiny seed of doubt in me, too.
“Noam, if you can hear me now, I really need to talk to you,” I said into the air, feeling like a fool.
No answer.
Not long after that, the concierge pinged for my attention. “It’s Dalton,” Dalton said from the other side of the door, his voice sounding strained through the speaker. “We should talk.”
“Let him in,” I said tiredly.
The door opened and Dalton stepped through, carrying a pad. “I told Lyth to give the kid a room. He’s decorating.” His mouth turned down.
“That’s why we need to talk?”
He shook his head and moved closer to the bed. He looked around the featureless walls. “Cozy,” he remarked.
I waited.
Dalton gripped the pad between his hands. “I got Lyth to help me dig for the Emperor’s upcoming itinerary. The real one, not that public bullshit.” His jaw flexed. “The Noam thing…it doesn’t really matter what’s true. We still need to figure out what the fuck happened to him, and what the Emperor had to do with it, right? If we’re to get our lives back, we have to solve it.”
“Bottom line, yes,” I said. “Did you find where he’d be? One of his fake IDs?”
“Nope. Tracking the IDs only works for events that have already happened—all the documentation that they generate. Can’t do it for the future.” He paused. “But there’s one thing happening next week that is a rock-solid certainty.”
I sat up, jolted as Dalton had wanted me to be. “Birthday Honors,” I breathed. “He’s always at them. Always. Why have them if he’s not?”
Dalton nodded. “It’ll be a security nightmare, Danny. The Rangers, all the cadres—military, support and law enforcement—they’ll all be in the Imperial City that week. They’ll be the city, that week. And the Imperial Shield headquarters and training center are there, too. The Shield will be at full force.”
“It would be complete and utter madness to go anywhere near there,” I added.
“Exactly,” Dalton said. “They won’t expect us to try. Only…” He paused again. His gaze, I realized, was measuring me.
“What?” I prompted.
He held out the pad. “Moroder’s murder. They’ve pinned it on us.”
I didn’t take the pad. I didn’t need the corroboration. “Of course, they did,” I murmured, with a sigh.
“That’s going to make the Shield and the Rangers all the more determined to find us,” he pointed out. “They think we killed one of theirs.”
Both of us had been on the other side of that equation. We had not spared energy, time or resources finding those who unjustly injured one of our own. Even though we had once been among their ranks, the Rangers would not hesitate now. It might even m
ake them angrier, because they would feel betrayed, into the bargain.
Alarm filtered through me as I considered the full implication of this news. I stood up. “Where did you get this, Dalton?” I demanded. “How? It’s new. We shouldn’t have caught up with this news until we emerged…Lythion, get your ass in here, now!”
Lyth assembled immediately.
“You’re pulling newsfeeds through the gates!” I raged. “Exactly what I told you not to do!”
Lyth held up both hands. “I did not—I have not, I swear.”
I pointed to the pad in Dalton’s hand. “Then how is he accessing fresh news?” I demanded.
Lyth glanced at Dalton. “I don’t know.”
“You’re lying!”
“I am not.”
“Is this when you tell us you’re incapable of lying?” Dalton asked, sounding weary.
“He can lie,” I snarled. “His waitress construct fooled Sauli with bullshit about my usual order.”
Lyth nodded. “In the hierarchy of priorities, you outrank Sauli, so I lied to assist you. But no one outranks you,” he added, his tone intense.
“Not even me?” Dalton asked. I couldn’t tell if he was faking the wounded tone or not.
“No,” Lyth said, his voice flat and sincere. “Sorry,” he added.
“Well, that’s a perspective altering confession,” Dalton said dryly. “Guess I know my place.”
I held up my hand. “Wait. If Lyth isn’t pulling from newsfeeds, then how did you get the news update? It isn’t possible.”
Dalton looked startled. Then his eyes narrowed. “Another impossible coincidence?” he asked.
“You can’t argue with physics,” I replied. “Ask Sauli—he’ll tell you with graphs and mathematics why it isn’t possible to break natural laws. If Lyth didn’t pull in that feed—”
“I didn’t,” Lyth added, his voice low and firm.
“—then who did? We, the humans on the ship, can’t.”
“That’s not all that dropped onto my pad,” Dalton said. He turned up the pad and swiped. “I found this, too. I wasn’t going to say anything—not just yet. But now…” He swiped a last time, then turned the pad around and pushed it toward me. “Read it,” he said softly.
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